Treat NPCs Like Hammers

NPCs all have ideas for who the PCs should be. They don’t just withhold approval until the PCs act the way they want—they take active steps to change and reshape the PCs. It doesn’t matter if the PCs want to go into those shapes. They’re going to hammer away at the PCs anyway. Villains are great for this. They often want the PCs to either think less of themselves or adopt ideologies that match the villain’s own. The PCs won’t necessarily seek approval from those villains...but that doesn’t mean the villains won’t try to impose their own views on the PCs, to hammer them into shape.

Mechanically, this looks like telling the PCs who they are or how the world works, and thereby shifting their Labels, among other things. But so long as the NPCs are trying to reshape the PCs, for good or for ill, they’re doing their job.