There's this visual novel that I've been obsessed with for about a year now. Katawa Shoujo is a choose your own adventure story that takes you through relationships in the character's senior year of high school. From that description it sounds like it would be a sappy collection of brooding, teen romance novels. What makes the game fantastic is the dialogue is well written and crafts gripping stories. There are five major story arcs and each of them are worthwhile, because they avoid the obvious.
I tried looking at each story based on its events to determine the emotional arc the story creates for the characters, but this varied among the stories and was often times deconstructing romance stories that are cliché's. The single aspect that is unchanged in all of the stories is that you can only reach the "good ending" once you make decisions that cause the character to think of themselves. If you try to "get the girl" by "being the hero" you end up screwing around with the character's feelings and things fall apart as the characters lose touch with each other. I thought that was a stroke of genius to force the player to realize that you can only truly support someone else by having the courage to make your own feelings clear.
I think that's why stories like "Twilight" bother me so much. They only focus on the events that "bring" people together and forget to emphasize the aspects of the characters that "keep" them together. You can't have two characters who support each other simply because they have the other person. A person can only be there for another once they have some level of personal satisfaction. You can't see what someone really needs until you can take yourself out of equation and know that you already have your own security intact.
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