Vision Design - Questions for Vision Design
Author-kun has set his flag. This will be the year that Author-kun does a harem comedy. I am still in the Vision Design stage of the whole thing; so a good way to start off is to ask myself questions. These questions came from Mark's "Drive to Work" podcast, so I thought it would be interesting to put my answers on HouseDelaroux so I can review them in the future.
The goal of this thought exercise is to produce a COHESIVE, THEMATIC AND EVOCATIVE WORLD.
Without further ado, vision design questions for unnamed harem comedy game, go!
What is the pre-existing thing that we can latch on to?
I am latching onto the harem comedy genre. Unlike /Conspiracy/ Girls, it will 100% be in the ecchi section with no regrets. (KABOOM!)
I did some research in harem comedies, and I mostly found that harem comedies can be divided into two types, the To Love-Ru style harem comedy, and the Rance style comedy.
The former To Love-Ru style of comedy usually features a passive protagonist, and much of the comedy is accidental. Think a lot of panty shots, tasteful cunny reflected in the bathroom tap, and falling on girls for no good reason at all. It's a very 90s style of comedy that's arguable inspired by Love Hina which did the same things.
These days straight harem comedies like these are a little out of date, but you can definitely see their shadow in recent works like Engage Kiss, Kaguya-sama Wants to be Confessed To.
The protagonist is usually a Rito-like whose life is intruded in on by a forward woman, who forces him to change up his daily routine due to her presence, bringing him into a completely different world from the mundane life he currently lives.
The setting of TLR style comedies is usually urban with a fantastical nature. The reason for this is that school life is usually a very big part of the slice-of-life moments. It also helps that the protagonists are usually external and not from the local town area, so when the villainous part is done, they completely disappear from the set. The urban setting is not a very strict requirement, since there are definitely harem comedies of the isekai nature like Konosuba where the setting is pure fantasy. Isekai can honestly honestly be talked about separately, so I won't go much in depth here.
The latter can be called Rance style comedies. They usually follow a strong Rance-like protagonist, which is my shorthand for the protagonist of the Rance series, a big-hearted, forward man whose mind is entirely on sex.
The Rance-like wants to conquer women, and mostly doesn't give a flying fuck about anything else. morals, power struggles, land rights or any of that crap. The Rance-like is the one who sticks his gigantic scholong into everyone, everyone and their business. If there's a beautiful woman, he's there for it. Damage to the kingdom be damned, the Rance-like wants women, and he's going to get it through strength of arms!
Unlike the Rito-like protagonist, he is overpowered from the start and oozes manliness. In short, the Rance-like protagonist is a power fantasy, but a really absurd one, so much that it strides openly into the realm of comedy. Obviously, I think of the titular Rance, but many other comedies have followed a similar formula like Tenkafuma, Redo of Healer, and Shield Hero, with various amount of revenge as a motive. In its purest form, the Rance-like does not give a fuck about anything except fucking women, but small amounts of variation help distinguish it from the other Rance-likes.
The Rance-like is almost always set in a low fantasy setting, with almost no instances of it happening in the modern realm. Which makes sense, since the collateral damage from a single Rance-like would be huge, and there would be a lot of difficulty trying to explain it away in the storyline. A pre-modern setting allows for the Rance-like to build a harem without nations all ganging up on him the minute the appears in the storyline.
The common line between the two styles of comedy is that the protagonists usually have a heart of gold/ have a personal moral code that they follow strictly. This is very important, because it can be both a flaw and weakness that enemies exploit or needs to be patched up by the protagonist's friends. It's also a natural conflict generator, so keep that in mind.
What are the tropes that people expect?
Well it honestly depends on the style of comedy. You expect more softer and ecchi "bakahentai" moments from TLR-style comedies, and harder, more aggressive no-holds-barred stuff from Rance-likes.
The thing about tropes is that it is a pretty deep subject and require further thought. And, as of writing I just finished a really quick runthrough of Eminence of Shadow which blew away all my previous conceptions of tropes in harem comedies.
A common line between both is that there are some standard tropes like breast envy, girls fighting over the main character etc that are common between both, hardcore or no hardcore.
What is the small thing you are changing to make the world unique?
I'm thinking that a hybrid between both would work. Taimanin did go from a hardcore orc gangbang series into Action Taimanin, so why can't there be a mostly ecchi focused title that has a very TLR influence? I'll have to think carefully about the protagonist's situation, but I am thinking a dual protagonist might be cool.
A Rito-like weak protagonist and a forward Lala-like woman who is constantly pushing him to become a Rance-like. The Lala-like woman already has qualities of a Rance-like, so I think the chemistry between the both would be interesting. It would probably echo shades of the Kamina/Simon relationship, except more sensual in nature, or more likely the ZeroTwo and Hiro relationship from Darling in the Franxx.
Interestingly enough, both are Gainax shows which I like. There must be something in this style of story that appeals to people. New research objective: look into Gainax anime.
There are two additional questions that I find hard to answer right now, since I don't even have a game, but I shall leave them here for the time being.
What is the target of this world and what is it trying to do?
Is the top-down theme well-connected enough so the audience knows what's going on?
Last Word
In summary, there are two types of harem comedies I have identified. The TLR-style harem comedy and the Rance-like harem comedy. I think that something that fuses the two together would be something unique and hasn't been seen before.
Note: I wrote this after I finished watching Eminence in Shadow, which upended all my expectations. This was a true harem comedy, and the special thing about it is that it fused chunni themes with a healthy dose of ironic usage of tropes with harem comedy. But the protagonist is neither a true Rance-like nor a Rito-like, he has Rance-like powers but is constantly pretending to be weak to live out his chunnibuyou fantasies. I think, that is a truly unique twist on the harem comedy genre that is genius. Obviously, I knew about this going in and watched it as a parody of the entire genre rather than a straight up cringelord anime, so I laughed the whole way. If there is a way to fuse the two major styles of harem comedy together, there needs to be an unique overriding element like the chunnibuyou theme in Eminence in Shadow.
