Love Collector Protagonist Profile (Patreon)

Oliver 'Ollie' Chase

22 Years Old, Birthday Jan 15th

Interests: Anime, Manga, Games, Dating Sims, Visual Novels, Edibles

Personality: Starts off as a quiet, awkward, loser who is nervous around girls but will grow into a confident and determined protagonist who loves helping others.

Appearance: 5'3ft, initially scrawny, poor posture, shaggy black hair, brown eyes, wears nerdy clothes outside of work but the story will see him as he develops by hitting the gym and putting more work into his style so that he becomes more handsome.

Family: A stern mother, Lauren, who always rides his ass but means well and a hands-off father, Henry, who is chill and supportive but kind of bland in a charming way.

---

Oliver was an awkward child who always had problems communicating with others. He never really had real friends in elementary school, being the kid who the teacher always had to make sure was included. That's not to say he was disliked or even bullied, he just had trouble fitting in and talking. He became interested in Japanese media from a young age and was able to make a few casual acquaintances who played games with him, but wasn't close enough to any of them to be invited to their birthday parties or sleepovers and other things of that nature.

Being a passive person, Oliver was initially fine with what he had but when he entered middle school his friends splintered off and started doing things like sports or talking to girls. This made him feel alone, and like any child of the modern era, he turned to the internet for help. Through some Reddit post or self-help article about how to make friends, Oliver got the idea to play dating sims as a means of practicing social interaction. He was familiar with them because of a few references in anime that he watched, but had never played one.

His first was Dokidoki Remembrance, an iconic dating sim that he played via emulation. He was absorbed by the simple gameplay loop of improving his stats, talking to girls, and taking them out on dates. Oliver didn't stop playing it until he'd 100% completed the game, upon which he immediately moved on to another. It was an embarrassing hobby that he hid from his parents, but both of them knew what kind of games he was playing and secretly approved since they saw it as him trying to better himself and he didn't start playing sexually explicit ones until he was older.

Might be funny if they secretly played some of his games too without so that they could better understand him without making Oliver shy and nervous, which would lead to funny moments in his childhood where they surprised him with merchandise of games he played without him ever stating an interest in it. Like on Christmas they'd get him a poster of Dokidoki Remembrance's cast only to handwave it saying you like anime and this thing was on sale when we were looking for your other presents, anyway, so we figured why not. Just wholesome stuff like that. Oliver has very good parents.

The more he played, the more Oliver became addicted. He liked sandbox-style stat based dating games the best but he would play any type of visual novel where dating girls was the main mechanic. It developed into something of a condition where he has a wholesome love for cute girls and every little bit of progress he made and every cute scene gave him a rush of dopamine. His standards for games are very low and he can overlook almost anything as long as he gets his cuteness dopamine, same with most media in general.

His special interest ended up having an adverse effect in the long run, as in the present day Oliver now has terminal dating sim brainrot. They were supposed to help him but they made talking to girls in real life even more difficult. It makes him freeze up and stutter as he tries to think of the best thing to say as if he's plotting out multiple dialogue choices in his head. Girls often find him creepy because he subtly reacts to perceived cuteness in a wholesome way. He doesn't perv out but he spaces out and takes on a dreamy expression without meaning to.

Back to his younger years.

A common trope in his favorite forms of media was the whole 'high school debut', where an awkward character tries to reinvent themselves and start fresh. Oliver attempted this after he was done with middle school. His brainrot wasn't so severe yet and it could be argued his games had actually helped him at that point. At first, his debut didn't go so bad. He did extra chores to earn more allowance and took up multiple summer jobs mowing lawns and walking neighborhood dogs to save up for some better clothes after researching trends and fashion tips, looking at it as if it were a dating sim and he was trying to raise his charm stat.

Oliver tried to be more outspoken and for the first couple months of freshman year he built back up some casual friendships and even managed to befriend a few girls. Sadly, things came crashing down when he bit off more than he could chew. He had to stay late at school one day and he happened upon a girl getting bullied by a bitchy girl he'd known since his grade school years, Stacy Lynn. She and a couple of cronies had the girl's sketchbook and were going through it while laughing at her over its contents, which was all typical cringy weeb shit you'd draw at 13.

He saw this as a chance and intervened, only to realize immediately he was out of his depth. Stacy switched targets and tore him apart, utterly destroying his newfound confidence without batting an eye. She'd known him for a long time and was able to dig into his insecurities and make fun of his past, but Oliver still stood up to her. This annoyed Stacy and she left for now but implied this wasn't the end. The bullied girl was off the hook and got her sketchbook back but was too shy to introduce herself, only thanking him and running away.

At the time this interaction felt like a minor victory. Oliver thought he'd impressed a girl with the same interests as him and even though Stacy's attacks hurt, he held up against them. Reality hit him the next day of school, where Stacy was already hard at work spreading unflattering rumors about him as well as embarrassing, exaggerated stories from his past. All the friends he managed to made turned on him bit by bit and others started to make fun of him, too. He didn't even find the girl he'd saved again as he didn't have any classes with her.

This treatment dragged on until Oliver's parents demanded the school do something about it, but as anyone that's grown up in the American education system would know, their response was entirely performative and it only made matters worse since it gave Stacy grounds to attack him for snitching like a coward. He transferred to a different high school shortly after, but the damage had already been done and the experience really did a number on him.

Oliver stopped trying to work on his social issues and became more withdrawn for the rest of his high school years, eventually falling down the pipeline of toxic, misogynistic male influencers who gave him a convenient target for all of his frustrations- women. He blamed all of them for his problems, especially Stacy, and essentially went full incel for most of his high school years despite how hard his loving parents tried pulling him out of it.

His once pure love for dating sims became tainted during this period, and he started gravitating towards darker gal games which reinforced his shitty worldviews and let him live out his revenge fantasies against women. With the power of torrents, a locked door, and a good pair of headphones, Oliver fell further and further until dropping out of high school in the middle of his junior year. He was put into therapy by his parents and although it was a tough process they managed to unfuck his head a year and a half later by the time he turned 18.

Getting a prescription for edibles also helped a lot.

Oliver no longer holds any of his incel beliefs and he doesn't play any games with those dark things in them, or at least completely ignores those routes in the kinds of games where you have the choice of being good or bad to the girls. He spent a year getting his license and then his parents helped him get a job through a friend of a friend at a local grocery store called Payless Foods. He lived at home for a year before managing to find a really shitty studio apartment that he could afford.

Briefly running over his coworker situation,

He doesn't get along with his boss, Tessa Larson. She's a woman in her early thirties with a perennial stick up her ass thanks to a few rough divorces, which have led her to develop toxic views on men not too dissimilar from what Oliver used to suffer from. He's very intimidated by her but he still thinks she's hot, in a scary way, milfy way.

A few months after he was hired, a Hispanic girl named Mia Rosas joined the staff. She's a very quiet and seemingly disinterested girl with a distant stare. Oliver thinks she's very cute but is totally unapproachable and is a little unnerved by the way she stared at him from time to time. What he doesn't know is that she's the girl he stood up for back in freshman year and she still has a slight crush on him. She's not overly shy or anxious like he is, she just has no experience talking to guys and can't bring herself to make a move.

Complicating matters is the fact that in his second year on the job, Stacy Lynn joined Payless Foods, and Oliver certainly recognized her.

To his credit, she doesn't inspire a nervous breakdown whenever she is near but he certainly doesn't like her or like being around her. He doesn't have enough balls the start of the story to make barbed comments about their past and what she did to him, but she also doesn't openly antagonize him, either. She's bitchy but has somewhat mellowed and perhaps even regrets what she did to a minor extent, though she doesn't know he had a mental breakdown or that he went through therapy because of her. He hasn't told his parents that Stacy works at his job because he doesn't want to worry them.

Stacy and Mia also don't get along, but they don't really talk to each other all that much, either. Neither of them have ever made a comment around Oliver that would make him suspect Mia was the bullied girl. The old Stacy would've teased them about this reunion but the current one doesn't care and perhaps even knows that Mia likes him and Oliver doesn't know and considers it not her fucking problem.

I'll get into Stacy's baggage and why she's like this in her own profile but I think the context I have in mind will make her very sympathetic and will set up a very solid redemption for her.

At the beginning of the story, Oliver is in a weird place and doesn't have any ambitions. He's content to keep going without a GED and doesn't want to go to college, so his future is vague. He's lonely, though. His dating sims help, but they're not enough. Then events transpire and he unlocks his reality bending powers, turning his life into a dating sim-inspired romantic comedy.