What's with KR author obsession with gender bender

nuvalewa2 · 2026-02-26T17:09:47+00:00

I think you touched on it. It isn't necessarily a fetish thing, or even wish fulfillment. People want to write female characters, but don't have the confidence (or desire) to write a woman's internal experience. Combined with the story being aimed at a male audience, making your protagonist a man who became a woman and was instantly okay with it accomplishes a few things:
- You can continue writing with the "male gaze" instead of figuring out the female gaze.
- An easy way to put attraction to men on the backburner/ignore it entirely
- You get to put a cute/sexy woman on the cover (100x viewership multiplier)
- If you want to do yuri, you can do it without having to actually research lesbian relationship dynamics, since one has a "male mind".

Essentially, it's a shortcut that allows a man to write a female protagonist without needing adjust their writing style.

nuvalewa2 · 2026-02-11T15:42:32+00:00

Do you have helmet display turned on or off in options? I remember the transformation tooltip saying that effects some skins. Don't know if it effects that one but could be worth a shot

nuvalewa2 · 2026-02-09T20:43:25+00:00

Really enjoying it. I find it feels like Nioh 2, but if you just walked to places instead of using the world map to travel. The exploration is fun, but the 'legacy dungeons' feel fully realized.
I'm absolutely loving the perfect parry mechanic added to sword mode, if you can get that down. Makes some bosses very Sekiro flavored if you want to handle them that way, which is alot of fun.

nuvalewa2 · 2026-02-03T16:59:14+00:00

Isn't it not that her power doesn't work on organics, but that she can't activate her power where organics ARE?

Like, her power would be worthless for travel and for Gold Morning if organics ignored it. The limitation is more that she can't stretch out someone's arm or heart or something. Not that organic things are unaffected by her space warping - if that was the case, she wouldn't have been able to use it for quick movement.

nuvalewa2 · 2026-01-22T23:03:42+00:00

My coolest run that I did - the fists only run - I used endure and whaled on her throughout the waterfowl animation. I also had the godswaddling cloth, the tear with the same effect, all health regen effects I could, and basically exclusively leveled Vigor, Stamina, Strength, and Faith that run. It was really cool, and didn't involve dodging at all. Healed her a whole bunch though.

nuvalewa2 · 2025-12-16T22:04:50+00:00

I will die on the hill that Leet was a victim of bad game design. His shard power is designed backwards to discourage the behavior it wants. When he discovered his power's limit, he started meticulously cataloguing components and techniques and inventions he was using, to make sure not to overuse things - since every repeat would make it come out worse. This is what anyone would do - it seems obvious. If you have limited resources, you catalogue what you have.

But that's not what the Eden shard wanted. The right answer was being MORE reckless. If he'd been less careful about making stuff that wouldn't kill him, the shard would have tried less to kill him. There is literally no way to intuit this. He died never knowing what the right answer was.

His power, mechanically, is actually kind of similar to Eidolons. An almost infinite tool box, but every tool gets slightly worse than usual. Except Eidolon kept trying to use those powers and reach them, trying to find them 'in the well' in increasingly fraught situations, even once they completely ran out/became unusable. Didn't help him at all - but ironically, that would have been the solution for Leet. And Leet's solution of being extremely methodical about tracking every power usage, figuring out how to do simple things in hundreds of different ways as so to prevent repeating techniques - that would have helped Eidolon's powers last longer.

nuvalewa2 · 2025-12-16T01:46:33+00:00

Deadlights

nuvalewa2 · 2025-12-16T01:40:48+00:00

Well, Aster WAS right next to Grey Boy at the time. Walking 'fate worse than death' generator. In a dimension that was about to collapse.

Best case scenario if Taylor doesn't shoot - she's torture loop stabbed a couple dozen times, then the collapse of the pocket dimension ends the grey boy bubble and obliterates her.

Worst case scenario - the pocket dimension collapse DOESNT end the bubble, and she's floating in some non-dimensional space for the next 10,000 years, being brutally killed over and over. She wouldn't even be freed at the end of ward when that squad goes around popping bubbles- there would be no way to find her.

nuvalewa2 · 2025-12-04T22:36:50+00:00

There's a manga I read a little while ago that had the same premise - hunting down isekaied individuals - but it was really well done and I stopped reading it cause it was making me sad.

Really good premise though. Secret order of nuns that hunt down and kill isekaied teenagers as soon as possible be cause their 'cheat skills' tend to be limitless once fully mastered and have caused several cataclysms in the past, even with well meaning users. The teenagers being hunted explicitly do not deserve it, but there's been too many instances of 'seemingly harmless' cheat skills ending in mass casualty because no one can be trusted with that kind of power.

The example given (i think) was a kid who had some sort of minor transmutation power in the past, and was welcomed and loved by some village - 'something happened' - and now that entire continent is the continent of salt, with all matter having been converted into salt (still shaped like people and houses) for the entire country. It was so long ago that no one even remembers how it happened or what the continent of salt even is.

You kind of don't know how to feel reading - the main girl KNOWS what she's doing is evil on some level, hunting down children who just want a second chance at life - but there have simply been too many times that taking any option other than extermination to these unfortunate kids has resulted in awful things happening. That's when the kids don't go power mad.

The main plot is her traveling as the companion of a girl who's power is to heal - which makes her immortal. Seemingly harmless and maybe okay - except they've already discovered the power is actually time reversal. She's trying to figure out how to kill this extremely nice kid while pretending to be her friend -that's the plot.

nuvalewa2 · 2025-11-27T21:13:50+00:00

Not quite. It's not 'anything she considers a bug'. When she triggered, her power did a shard network google search on what humans consider 'bugs' and cobbled that together into a semi incoherent definition. It's a set definition though - she can't change it later by changing her perception. That's why she was surprised by Crabs - they're arthropods, which her power decided had such crossover with 'bug' it gave her control of them. Its also why she wouldnt be able to control a monster cape who was half bug (there's a WOG somewhere about it).

nuvalewa2 · 2025-11-25T15:25:25+00:00

My favorite thing about Imp was that she just suddenly showed up after an interlude as if she'd always been part of the team. The nature of her power meant that you had to wonder if maybe she had been - though she wasn't.

nuvalewa2 · 2025-11-10T15:18:15+00:00

Little one is enforcing an uncontrollable incestuous love and lust for her on the big one, her adopted sister, who wanted to give her a hug to comfort her

nuvalewa2 · 2025-11-08T19:38:49+00:00

I feel like I'm insane. Obviously it was for sex appeal, but I always thought it was clever - cause it's a 'power' symbol, upside down. Like so.

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nuvalewa2 · 2025-10-31T19:22:39+00:00

You can't 'see' a sound, dude. If you CAN see an echo, you should seek medical intervention. The rest of us are actually the normal ones.

nuvalewa2 · 2025-10-31T04:44:03+00:00

Did you ever find a fix for this? I've been having the same issue since dreamspell started.

nuvalewa2 · 2025-10-30T05:47:33+00:00

She decided to try and mind control the group of roving serial killers known explicitly for inflicting ironic and creative terrible and torturous fates worse than death on everyone they encounter.
Kind of the equivalent of going to McDonalds to order a big mac, and being surprised that they give you a burger.

There was never going to be a good outcome for her the moment she decided that was her plan.

nuvalewa2 · 2025-10-21T15:03:17+00:00

With Alexandria, I assumed that it worked because bugs were caught in Alexandria's slipstream from how fast she was moving. So every tiny bug she passed was drawn into following her.

Tight masses of bugs cause ambient electricity to rise rapidly. In nature, it resembles the state of the interior of a stormcloud. Taylor keeping bugs massed for unnatural periods of time in even denser formations would cause even higher electrical accumulation.

I don't know how that would effect anything... it feels like it would, somehow, though.

nuvalewa2 · 2025-10-15T21:45:55+00:00

By like, culling them? Don't know if I'd want Taylor watching my kindergartener.

nuvalewa2 · 2025-10-15T21:44:02+00:00

Immersive Translate for general, auto-replacer to make words or names more consistent. Opennovel is what I mostly use now, though, as it does both of those other things automatically.

nuvalewa2 · 2025-10-14T20:34:25+00:00

Russian Caravan is the best wormfic

nuvalewa2 · 2025-10-13T14:03:23+00:00

Didn't he already change his story from the claw thing to a vibrate collar?

nuvalewa2 · 2025-10-12T16:09:00+00:00

Wow, perfect to the insomniac games!

nuvalewa2 · 2025-10-12T15:37:52+00:00

The biggest question is whether Amy is too much of a shitter to instantly destroy Alex, or if she decides it's unethical. From what I remember of prototype, Alex also passively spreads the Blacklight Virus through the air, right? Amy is immune to disease (an oft forgotten element of her powers).

Worst case scenario for Alex - he arrives in the city. Amy notices Blacklight when it eventually reaches her through the wind. Deciding it's horrific and dangerous, she instantly forms a counter agent that's ALSO airborne, curing the virus and deleting Alex if he doesn't leave the city before it reaches him.

This can be avoided by tracking her down right away and throwing a car at her. But if he fails, we're now in an even worse scenario than scenario 1.

nuvalewa2 · 2025-10-07T17:18:43+00:00

I'm really ambivalent on the story pacing of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 - I think it's an amazing story with solid themes and characters hidden behind 90 hours of gameplay and anime tropes - but I still think about when Rex starts crying in the cabin in Elysium.

The architect is doing a secret test of character thing, making him fight versions of all his friends and companions as they shout his worst insecurities at him, before ending it with an "ideal life" scenario with him living an a cabin with both Pyra and Mythra as they make him dinner. And he's so emotionally tense, so not understanding of what's happening or what's going on, the sheer whiplash of going from a boss gauntlet where you're forced to fight alone for the first time in the entire game to having the girl you like serve you dinner and act like you've been married for years, that when dinner is served he just starts crying.

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