this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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These people think evil quest givers in games are role models, not warnings.
I feel like this is a time to vouch for an element of a story I'm writing.
In this world, there's an Adventurer's Guild. It's named, and oriented, very much like the generic guild that appears in so many generic Anime-MMO medieval fantasy worlds. In it, travelers with weapons, be they swords or bows, complete missions for money.
As one would expect from that setup, the only people with money who ever hire the Adventurer's Guild are wealthy merchants with cargo to protect, or land developers with an excuse to enact aggression on innocent people, or anyone who can veil their murderous intent with some legal excuse. The first way the story introduces them is that a city has contracted with the Guild to use them as extra peacekeepers, and it's a horrible setup because they have no deescalation training. The guild itself lures in members with ideas that they'll "take down troublesome animals for troubled townfolk" and maybe even sometimes have those quests, but primarily, most of the other characters in the story just refer to it as "The Mercenary's Guild. Oh, I guess they call themselves Adventurers' Guild now."
It's my way of getting people to analyze their desire to kill things for rewards, which is fine for a simple game made for children, but shouldn't be part of your fantasies as you grow up.
I will admit to being personally aggrieved by the supposition that I'm childish for enjoying fighting things. But I believe there should be a way to interrogate the levels of critical thinking and agency people/players give away in the pursuit of an easy, "clear" target without making prescriptive, defamatory remarks about how people have fun in fiction.
I am also doing my own MMO isekai thing, where the concept is that the inhabitants are vaguely aware that they occupy an artificial world. Or more specifically, they view developers and players as gods and demigods, respectively. Things like player housing are special mechanics that the inhabitants have to work around, or guild privileges vanishing if certain NPC lineages (player "pets") die out. The world in general is falling apart, because the game has long become a museum piece - almost no one ever visits, in the hundreds of ingame years that the MMO has been running. It is a story about the NPC cultures have developed in the absence of realworld humans, in a world of game mechanics.
Anyhow, I figured that I might as well mention it to you. Way I figure, we can take each other's angles and remix them.