Hey, long time patreon member, and I do wanna preface this that even as I'm perplexed, I'll still be keeping my sub bc I love supporting the game itself! But I do gotta ask, why is there always a set gender for the mc's in the paid content you make, and why is it, majority of the time, male? It feels kinda alienating, honestly, for nb and female mc's to get wholly excluded from content people are paying for. Like, I love your writing and work, but it always kinda throws me off to have to mentally rework the things I'm paying to read, especially when the romances themselves aren't gender locked.
Quite frankly, I'm baffled that a long-time Patreon supporter doesn't realize that the default MC on Patreon is Nonbinary.
The MC in the mini-games is gender selectable. Of the 29 times the MC appeared in a linear drabble, it was Male MC three times (10%) to match the Female MC three appearances (also 10%). The other 80% of the time, the MC was nonbinary.
Roommates - Nonbinary
Lore Dump Extraordinaire - Nonbinary
'Platonic' Partners - Nonbinary
Soulmates - Nonbinary
Parsimonious Botanical Function - Nonbinary
Locked In - Nonbinary
Reverie - Nonbinary
Helping Hand - Nonbinary
Ambrosia - Nonbinary
Knight Terrors - Nonbinary
Awakening - Nonbinary
Lovebirds - Nonbinary
LeannƔn - Nonbinary
April Fool's Meet & Greet - Nonbinary
It's Murdering Time! - Nonbinary
Dreamwalker - Nonbinary
Love Triangle - Male
Somniloquy - Nonbinary
Real Person Slash - Nonbinary
The Price of Free Will - Nonbinary
A Good Day - Nonbinary
. . .Bliss - Nonbinary
Bug-a-boo - Female
True Name - Nonbinary
Concupiscentia - Nonbinary
ĆnliĆ n - Male
Cuckoo My Love - Female
Quarry - Female
Hiraeth - Male
I can't write a vacuous void for the MC in these scenarios (the closest is the MC of Reverie which ended up quite trippy) and thus a gender, personality, and background must be chosen for them (either as part of the original winning suggestion in the poll or I cycle through what seems to be the most dramatic fit for the specific scenario).
Even if the gender matches your MC, the personality or background chosen very easily might not. And this isn't just a matter of a simple pronoun switch.
The MC of Hiraeth is male (also a flirty Lust MC who likes guys but doesn't jump everything that moves, also manipulative, also with the naked sleepwalking habit, also with a certain Camelot background etc) to trigger the entire dissertation from Adrian that he thought them both being guys this time would nip any romance in the bud and the realization that the MC swings that way. And then the later realization that Adrian might swing that way too.
I absolutely don't have the time to write three versions of each drabble to accommodate just the genders, never mind making them into mini games to match the personality/background of the customizable MC from the main game. The priority here has always been working on the main game, not the side content.
As much as I dislike putting out private info, let me be real for a moment here.
I wake up at 3 AM every day just to get a few hours to work on One Knight Stand which needs to be split between actually working on the game, the Patreon stuff, and then keeping the CoG Forum and Tumblr up to date (not even getting into Itch.io & running my own website)
There is no more time to give. That's why there are no more stretch goals on Patreon for extra stuff. That's why I'm not on the CoG Forum as much as I'd like to be. That's why the Tumblr queue takes as long as it does to do 4 posts a day.
Patreon income will need to double at the bare minimum for me to even consider giving up one more hour of sleep and waking up at 2AM to devote more time to Patreon.
