Another option, much harder, is you keep giving Akane wins on the physical world, the "glory and conquest" bit, while denying her wins in her emotional state. You really have to throw questors a lot of bones if you go that route. But it'd be tough.
… to be honest, I personally would absolutely hate that.
I, and probably many others are probably more interested in Akane's emotional state then the physical "glory, conquest" stuff.
I'd rather fail at conquering anything and not gain a spec of glory than have Akane not be able to make emotional strides.
Right now Akane's mental and emotional wellbeing are absolutely fundamental for me.
Heck I am all for the power loss/character development arc being proposed by Kosm, because that is what I
love about stories and the rare quest that tries to delve into it well, that type of decision and struggle is one that I enjoy in quests but almost never get to actually
do. because of course the majority never wants it even if it excites
me.
On the other hand, most people aren't really good at this type of character development and I can see some voters completely screwing up the character development arc because they don't see it as such but instead try to
win the less meaningful secondary phyiscal battle rather than score a win on the primary emotional battle. Or underestimate how much the little decisions we make would effect the character or define who they are in the future. I like subtle characterization.
It probably also complicates things that I am not of the mind frame of "needing lots of wins to stay invested". This burning feeling that this quest has given me over the last update, the utter loss of both my ideals and Akane's has probably made me more invested than ever, and rather than burnt out, the connection to the character, the frustration of the situation, and now the prospect of possibly being able to slowly build her up again, gives me a feeling that promises a future satisfaction far greater than what most people say that questers want.
In depth character stuff in quests is something I am passionate about and… it is just sad that it seems whenever it is an option the advice is "yeah don't do that".
Especially since Kosm is one of the few people that I strongly feel could make it work. I mean in her other quest, not to be linked due to nsfw nature of it, she literally has an austic and
heavily mentally abused main character that struggles with those things, turning what would potentially be a power fantasy (they have the gamer power after all), into a character piece, where despite the great dangers ahead of them (including an antagonist that is on their way to ascending to a
creator god), the greatest thing to overcome is currently themselves. That quest is nearly 600K words hasn't fallen apart, the voter base is actually less salty than Deep Red's (though they can still be pretty salty at times
).
Having this type of character development/power loss arc from a QM that can pull that off is a rare treat.
But sometimes it is best to accept that my mindset makes me a minority as a player.
Okay, in the past I've been against accusations of railroading, but I've been convinced by new evidence. Time and again in the last chapter and the end of the one before, the voters made a choice that the QM didn't like, so the QM made them pick again. And again. And again. Until finally they'd picked the exact combination of choices that the QM wanted, and only then did the QM decide that their choice was binding.
What the hell are you talking about? This chapter there is no option that was forced to be voted on again and again and again. I was there for the live.
There was a literally tied vote on going with Iroh or obeying Ozai that I am 90% convinced people were sockpuppetting to force a tie, then the tie breaker (though kosm themselves noted that having Ozai speak up there was a mistake in their last post, so they note that they consider themselves having messed up there), then gave options to back out of scarring Zuko in the Agni Kai, which people
didn't do, and where to burn him (which had an option to disobey still). If her goal was to make people back out of the scarring by giving them two additional chances to back out then the QM
failed in that regard. That would be a railroad failure. Similarily with the Azula dual and burning her. Kosm gave us a chance to back out from our refusal or to try to go for the refusal a different way, and we were ultimately the ones who failed because people voted to compare him to Azulon (Which actually was apparently a joke vote by the person who originally put it up, but then caught traction by a bunch of other people caught up in the heat of the moment). They gave us the option to go a
different route at narratively appropriate times and both times we didn't. This isn't even waiting until we make the choice that they want because the voterbase made the same choice every time.
The only other thing was the clarification on the idea on whether we'd try to keep our hands clean of Ozai's policies or not, because one of the options was unclear, and it was clear by reading chat that people didn't understand that we'd be trying to curry favor by looking for those who dislike Ozai's policies if we tried to avoid his senseless killings. The original version of that had people thinking that we wouldn't be working to curry favor to anyone with that option at all.
This is extremely different from what you describe.
