>>281596315
I wonder if part of it is just standards getting higher as more stories get churned out. It isn't enough to just be the hero who slays the dragon and gets the princess anymore. People hate it when MC's struggle and/or show weakness, they just want their self insert to be competent and strong from the beginning. The hero just getting with a single princess is "boring and bland" now, they want a harem bare minimum, full of powerful exotic women like Dragongirls, Elven Queens, Sword Masters, etc. The hero can't have the spotlight shining off him for even a minute, so every side character has to be either incompetent or a scapegoat villain designed to make the MC look like a moral paragon by comparison. And even then, the crazy part is that all of this is just a drop in the bucket compared to gacha games, which take all these tricks and amp them up tenfold to convince players to gamble on them.