I can only laugh at how some people in here behave.
Now I admit that one of the things I love about writing is that I love playing mind games. I consider many of my stories to be "Erotica, as O'Henry would have written". Setting up a story, making it seem like it goes one way, then taking it off into a completely different direction.
To me it is somewhat of a challenge, to see how far I can take it. In my latest long series, I was even able to stretch it out for 26 chapters before the cock of the narration character finally entered his girlfriend (who was in every previous chapter as his love interest).
Yes, it was a deliberate mind game. I wanted to see how long I could drag out the action, without actually having any "action".
Let's just say it was also my own kind of protest, against most stories in here where boy meets girl, boy fucks girl, all within 6 paragraphs.
I know I set it up in Bohica to seem that the narration character was male. He was a big guy who beats up criminals. And in his memories I purposefully set "him" up as giving a blowjob to a guy, and wearing a dress the night "he" got his powers. I even had the chapter close with him masturbating and thinking such things.
Only at the start of the second chapter to drop the other shoe. I revealed that one of the powers is shape shifting, and that Bohica (which I purposefully gave the real life androgynous name of "Chris") was born a girl. And could move back and forth almost at will, one of the "powers" the character has. All flashback scenes were from the point of view of Chris as a girl, not Bohica as a guy.
Yes, I did this on purpose. So sue me.
Was I fucking with the reader? Yes, but not with a mean intent. One thing I commonly try to do is to set up one idea in the readers mind, then purposefully break it. In one story I had started and never finished, I purposefully named a character "Tom". And this background character was always called Tom, until in the afterward (narrated by the daughter of the original narrator) finally let the shoe drop that the "Tom" a character had followed was not a dude, but it was correctly spelled "Thom", and she was a girl born in Vietnam. Shoe drop.
To me, it is a way to try and get people to be mentally flexible, and to cast aside preconceptions. And for the angry person who has both accused me of stealing my idea from George R. R. Martin, I had never heard of Wild Cards before this. Although I admit to being a lover of the Silver Age comics which I grew up reading.
And also of the Arrowverse. Typical in my writing, I pull concepts from a great many sources. For this one, some of the basic ideas did come from Arrowverse I admit. But also from more generic DC-Marvel sources, as well as such sources as Lawrence Watt-Evans (who wrote a book called "Night of Madness" a fantasy novel written in 2000 involving random people getting magical powers), and from playing games like "Champions" many decades ago.
Ironically, Bohica was based on a character I created for such a game 30 years ago. A slew of low level powers but no secret weakness. But no, that character did not shape shift.
All I can say is that if somebody writes a story you do not like (or do not like where YOU THINK it is going), do not get pissed off at them, just stop reading it. Especially do not blast them if you are mad because you THINK it is going to be some (as they put it) "Hidden gay story", and screaming that it should be in the story code.
Well, there is no story code in that posting for gay sex, because there is no gay sex. Do not get mad that "I fooled you", because ultimately you only fooled yourself.
And if you are mad and upset, that is not my fault. You are the one that is mad, that is your upset not mine. You need to control your own feelings and emotions, because ultimately they are yours. Not mine.
And if you do not want somebody to respond to an angry letter you write, then simply do not write anything. Lashing out at an explanation and demanding to "not write again" is childish.
Most of us authors live for feedback, good and bad. I write for myself, but also for the readers. And I believe a world without at least some "mind games" is very dull. It is the "mind game" of Gaius Baltar that kept the newest Battlestar Galactica so interesting. Is he a Cylon? Who knows, they kept us guessing through most of the series and dropped clues he could have been (but he was not). And I love how the responder directly accused me of stealing George R. R. Martin's work, yet did not seem to consider that Jon Snow is one of the biggest "mind games" of current pop culture.