Going ham on the important discussions.
Why can’t they be both? It’s a game. I can jump back and forth, skip through whatever I want, reload whenever I make a mistake, and reach an ending that will never progress further… But I am playing this game in real life. I can hit a bad end, reload the game, and fix my mistakes - The bad end still happened though. Once I have read it, it is part of my reality. It’s part of a game within my reality, but reality nonetheless. A made-up story can be as real as any other story.
I once wrote about a very similar topic for a series of online Newspaper articles a few years ago, in which I would ask the readers a series of questions about various subjects. I was young when I wrote them, so it’s not amazingly well written, but the meaning still stands~ http://pastebin.com/6Te7Adcb
Oh, and there’s a great VN by Nitroplus called ‘Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi’ that really hammers this home. It’s not translated in english, but here is the translated clip. Spoilers for the VN of course.
You can experience what the protagonist experiences as much as any other character. My experience as a protagonist will be different to another’s. They are the same story, but we are different people stepping into the shoes of that protagonist. Our past experiences will have an effect on what the protagonist experiences, because the protagonist’s experiences only exist when we acknowledge them. We all acknowledge things in our own ways.
