fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6017 ]

[ SECRET POST #6017 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6017 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

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03. https://i.imgur.com/hAkpoqA.png

Yeah, gotta wonder at people bitching about 'realism' while also playing a fantasy game.

Yes. Dragons, magic and demons are all fine, but if the straight-to-gay ratio isn't exactly 6:1 it'll break the immersion and ruin the entire game.

I didn't mind everybody being bi in DA2 because there were only 4 possible romances at all* and every hole in the "realism" of the game's narrative has long been handwaved as "oh well Varric's an unreliable narrator so it doesn't matter".

DAI had twice as many possible options, and I preferred the romances being species/gender locked the way they were. Every possible combination of Inquisitor still had at least four to choose from. If Dreadwolf is going to only have two or three possible romances, fine, make them bi. But if there's going to be eight or more like in DAI, I don't see a problem with them being gender or species locked again.

*not counting paying for the token straight guy that didn't even get a full romance scene

The problem with DAI (and DAO before it) is that it takes away a part of player choice. In DA2 I could play Hawke just as I wanted to and I could still go for the the LI of my choice. In DAI that can be impossible. Want a butch warrior girlfriend? Hope you're playing a dude. A hairy bear of a boyfriend? Women only.

If the LI that you're interested in is genderlocked there's three options for you: 1.play the specified gender (but not everyone is comfortable playing the gender they don't identify as, especially with how self-insert-y the DA protagonists are), 2.use mods (unavailable to console players) or 3.settle for someone else or don't romance at all (not exactly fun).

Nayrt
I was playing a male character and really wanted to romance a dude but since the only m/m options were so far away from my taste I just had to roleplay a forever alone Inquisitor who is pining for one of the options that weren't possible. And yeah, I tried the mods and while it was okay, it was actually salt in the wound how you actually got some of the voicelines and then they just ... cut out at some point.
And that was actually the reason I hated this hypocritical "Oh well they just have their sexualities, it's totes realistic and was tooootally planned from the start and you're an asshole if you don't like it" by the devs so much. Because no, actually, this is not what happened.
What happened was: They actually intended several of the romances to be accessible to both genders and just ran out of time before release and decided to scrap the gay options in favour of the straight ones plus and extra het one for Blackwall that was shoehorned in at the last minute. And then they pretended it was all planned from the start. Funny how over half of the whole same-sex romance dialogue was still recorded and made it to the game files if this was all planned from the start, huh.

In general, I felt like they had this one "proper" way to play the game in their minds for DAI and that was a straight female elf.

I don't know about that. A character's sexuality can add to them as a character. A gay character's perspective won't be the same as a straight character's, and neither of those will be the same as a bi character's, or an ace character's. You can't just replace any of them with another without impacting everything else; that only works if your design philosophy is that the characters only exist for the sake of the player. Which is true, of course, but the point of the story and characters is to make a convincing illusion that the world exists with or without you, and you're just getting a peek.

In DA I the sexualities took away from the characters though. What could have been an interesting character got basically reduced to a fantasy version of "my fundie dad hates me for coming out as gay", you were locked out of the more dramatic version of another character's betrayal if you didnt play a female character who could romance him, the romance with the male bi character was kinda just an awkward BDSM 101 PSA and the only fully lesbian option was a character that was so grating a lot of people didn't even recruit her. And the gender (and race) locks on all the straight characters just sucked and didn't add anything to the characters at all.

You sound like the kind of person who can't pay attention to anything about a gay character except for the fact that they're gay, so you can never tell when they already are the interesting character you wish they had been.

It's not that he wasn't an interesting character without his gayness, it's that he was very painfully obviously a self-insert/proxy for his writer who really wanted to write a Gay character first and foremost and that overshadowed a lot of his other character traits. And honestly, all his other character traits/backstory(blood mage from Tevinter who goes against/diagrees with his much more conservatively evil countrymen) was just kind of an echo of his sexuality plot/a thinly veiled metaphor for a queer person growing up in a conservative right wing environment. Which is perfectly fine but that's basically what his character was.
Sera was just an asshole imo, her sexuality was kinda irrelevant.

On the other hand, the airt is of the opinion that the sexuality of a character is what makes them truly unique and realistic first and foremost and... yeah, nah, disagree.

There's more to a character than their sexuality and with Thedas being a setting where homophobia doesn't exist there really isn't a difference between a gay or straight perspective. If you use an "Equal Love" mod this becomes especially evident as everything about the characters still makes sense (except Dorian but he was specifically designed to be the gayest gay who ever gayed).

Also, there are non romanceable companions and other important NPCs in these games. Why take away options from players when there are more than plenty of choices for all the straight and gay stories.

Fully agreed. I hated the romance system/locked options in DAI and especially how unfairly the options were distributed. You had so many more options as a bi female human or elf character than anyone else. And options for a gay male character sucked in my eyes.

I love it when characters are bi/pan but I also appreciate it when characters are monosexual. I like it when NPCs have personalities and sometimes that means the developers make choices. But maybe I'm a little softer on the topic because I can so easily switch my character's gender in the games I play.

I can't play these kinds of characters as a gender that doesn't match mine. I can handle characters that are already fully fleshed out at the start of the game, but DA protagonists are way too blank and encourage too much self inserting. I tried once with Origins and couldn't even make halfway through Ostagar.

Also, asides from Dorian who's gay almost to the point of parody, none of the Dragon Age LI's sexualities affect their personalities. The only reason said sexualities exist is to save on voice lines.

I haven't played DA. I cant comment about its characters so im just thinking in general.

Or specifically about about a game where a male characters angst is that his species has a short lifespan due to a curse. He has a ton of trauma about his mom giving birth to his brothers and them either dying immediately or in utero. he wants to have kids and a family and love but he is terrified of passing on this curse. If he hooked up with a dude that wouldn't be a plot point.

Another npc is a sweet Lil cinnamonbun of a guy exclusively romancable by guys. If the pc doesn't go for him he'll fall for another npc. I think this is good because otherwise the only explicitly queer rep would be an evil depraved-bisexual type. (Who is my favorite, but still.)

Another is a lady who has been throughly sexualy harrased

I mean... sure, those are particular cases but let's not pretend that writers HAVE to give character's backstories that hinge strongly on their sexuality.

Whoops, sorry I got cut off and then distracted. The lady who was sexually harassed by men in her training camp so she left, changed jobs, and told all those jerks to fuck off. But she's still attracted only to men. Thus conflict! As a male PC you can romance her by by setting yourself apart from the jerks but still being the sort of squishy romantic she wants. It's kind of a tightrope and I remember loving it.

There are other reasons to lock a romance behind certain traits, mainly replay-ability, but it can also inform world building as well as character building.

So there's 3 instances where a character's specific sexuality helps create story.
Do they *have* to give them such traits? No. But they don't *have* to be fleshed out characters, they can be the sort of thin, stereotypical NPCs you seem to dislike about DA.

I guess ideally, in my perfect world, the majority of romanceable NPCs would be open to any gender but have other preferences. Lets see characters who only want to date a specific species or character type or magic user or ethnicity. Let's lock a romance behind hair color. Make an elf who's only interested in half-elves and a wizard who will NEVER bump pretties with a charisma based caster. Make all the gnomes and dwarves datable inside their height range is what I'm saying. Give NPCs reasons to turn me down besides not putting enough friendship tokens in yet.

Several of the romances in DA were in fact race locked because they couldn't figure out/couldn't be arsed to figure out the logistics of animating/programming the same cookie cutter romance scenes with drwaves (too short) and Qunari (too tall).

Your perfect world sounds like the ultimate dick move against the players. So I could slay dragons, gain confidence of rulers and accomplish all kinds of epic deeds regardless of who my character is, but if I want to have a romance I'd have to make a very specific character? Why even have options if you can't pick them? Why let players customize a character when that'll screw them over later in the game?

Dangling romance options in front of the players only to lock them behind bullshit is idiotic. Especially when everything else in the game is accomplishable regardless of gender/race/what-have-you.

Meanwhile I'm tired of the protagsexual bullshit. It doesn't feel as gay, because the gay always feels like an afterthought.

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[ SECRET POST #6017 ]

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