why does the hero's party always kick out the buffer?

read a few of these back to back now. the party decides the support is dead weight, boots him, falls apart without him, and he turns out to have been carrying the whole thing. support is never useless in an actual party, so why is this the premise every single time?

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@arjun3 15d ago

it's a metaphor written by someone who lived it. wish fulfilment of getting pushed out of a job and landing somewhere that actually values you, and then watching the old place fall over without you

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@crimsonfox 15d ago

which is funny, because the one that started the whole subgenre is banished from the hero's party, and that one is much more about quietly building a life somewhere else than about revenge

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@cleoibarra 15d ago

red and rit are still one of my favourite couples in anything. i've been meaning to reread it

@dae_bro 15d ago

healthy versus unhealthy coping, basically. i liked that one and i can't stand most of the others. too many are about the people who wronged him getting hurt, not about the life he built after

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@ariademir 15d ago

still the best of them. he was strong, everyone knew he was strong, and he was the one who worked out he was falling behind. leaving was his call, which is the part the copies never keep

@arjun_cru 15d ago

there's a manga with the same shape. takes an arrow to the knee, retires, ends up adopting the fifth member of the demon lord's four heavenly kings. the strongest wizard becomes a countryside guard

@dungeonfable 15d ago

it's easy to self insert if you have ever been taken for granted at work. that's the whole appeal, it isn't really about parties at all

@ghostwren 15d ago

a sysadmin fired for doing nothing, when he was the only thing holding the patchwork together 😂

@aaravibarra 15d ago

having played a lot of mmos, this genuinely happens. people are bad at telling which part of the result was them and which part was the team around them

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@arjun3 15d ago

sure, but in these the support isn't giving a 15% buff. he's giving a 4x buff. there is no version of that where nobody notices the numbers halving the day he leaves

@crimsonfox 15d ago

unless his buffs grow as they do. they get stronger every month and quietly file it under their own training. that one i believe

@ariademir 15d ago

he's also the one tracking supplies and telling them to stop pulling more than they can handle, so he reads as the negative one right up until he's gone

@dae_bro 15d ago

they never fight a single battle without him, so they have no idea what they look like without him. do that for two years and of course you think it was all you

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