DA 4 Romances! New info for real this time!!! Zom-bangin'?

You'd imagine there'd be some people out there who would be ecstatic to work on those scenes lol. I can see the embarrassment angle, but hopefully they can get people that are able to power through the animation to create content that many players would enjoy.

Well, for what it's worth I appreciate the cautious support even more because it comes from a place of reason and skepticism rather than baldfaced tribalism masquerading as virtue. Based on how you write, I imagine you framed such issues a bit more carefully than I just have, which makes the reaction you no doubt faced even sillier and more unfair.

And to be clear, not a single word of this exchange, maybe except for the part about people learning to be too naive and immature to realistically affect society in any positive way down the line, has involved my political orientations, where I'm from, or values I hold in my personal life or any thoughts on my part about what standards men or women should or should not be held to in the moment or future.

Any and all of the stated assumptions about those are totally baseless and entirely off-mark, and just betray how much people resent even being asked to try to understand an unfamiliar viewpoint without vilifying it, pathologically "open-minded" or not, even for academic purposes. And that's as it may be. But on a personal level I want you to know that you're not throwing a bone to some conservative nutcase who doesn't value the health and happiness of the women around him.

You'd think most adults would be mature to handle working on such things without feeling uncomfortable, but whatever. If they need to sequester themselves or work late at night when no one's around to work on these scenes, then so be it. I don't mind if sex scenes are included or not, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't want them in the game (specifically a good m/m scene). CDPR seems to be okay with creating sex scenes and if DA4 won't have them because artists feel ashamed about working on them, then I'll just have to look forward to Cyberpunk 2077.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t picturing any specific political leanings. “Society always gets better over time” is an opinion that people all across the political spectrum hold, including quite a lot of progressives. For that reason, people of all backgrounds like media that reinforces the idea that RL societies are better than they could be/have been.

I generally don’t find that kind of escapism appealing, because it rings too false for me. But I can see the appeal. And I do think there’s some space for dark fantasy with regards to lack of technology — advancing technology isn’t always a good thing either, but we often forget simple advancements that had a big impact on quality of life, like microwaves and washing machines. A dark fantasy that included now-preventable diseases or poor crop rotation could be pretty compelling.

In other words, I still want to find out how the Qunari are farming enough food with only a third of their population.

I guess maturity wasn't a good word, but you'd think an animator's coworkers would know that they're doing this for work, not just for kicks, and would be more understanding. Hopefully, its something that doesn't happen much nowadays since nudity and sex are a part of nature and not something vile or shameful.

Yeah, I can see that. I think that North Americans in general are just more prudish than the rest of the world which makes nudity an embarrassing situation for them. It's also why I think CDPR is so comfortable with sex scenes since nudity, from what I've seen and experienced, is less "taboo" in many European countries compared to NA.

Well, America was started by Puritans, wasn't it? The Brits got the Puritans to get rid of their king but, after about only half a decade under their rule, figured out that maybe monarchy wasn't the worst thing ever. Smart.

Frankly, I'm sure there's always at least a few folks who are made uncomfortable by sex in any remotely public setting. But I have trouble believing it is very many people, when I consider how tame Bioware is and that, at any rate, WIP sex scenes can't possibly be all that sexy.

 My sympathies to whomever had to work on the Sara/Jaal scene in MEA. That one was just so awful...I wish I could unsee it.

I wasn't talking about you in particular, don't worry about that. And you're not the only one who's excited to learn more about how the Qunari actually function.  They have such a strange mix of imminently sensible and totally reprehensible doctrines. It's either going to be interesting as all hell or bitterly disappointing, depending on how much thought the devs have continued to put into them.

And I'd be an enormous hypocrite not to value decent escapism. That said, the stories that push us to think about how to act sensibly in the world have always been the ones with some actual meat on them, and god damn it we need at least some of those too, which is my point. The technological differences are a good example. How often have you heard the presence of magical healing in a quasi-medieval world underlined as a factor in the mage/templar debate? Rarely if ever, because we take miraculous hygiene and medical knowledge completely for granted.

But by far the most interesting stories to me are the ones about how people work under all sorts of conditions, and what kinds of behavior all-too-inevitable hardship realistically pushes us to. Refusing to think about that would be pretty damn disrespectful to the billions of people who starved and bled and suffered to get us here. My grandmother grew up in a world where the simple concept of "love" mandated the threat of domestic punishment. And her mother didn't have it any easier. And just because it's something we've somewhat escaped right now, right here in the western world doesn't mean that it hasn't otherwise been pretty universal to human life. Because surprise, it has. And abjectly refusing to reflect on that, as if it was just a tiny mistake that could easily be avoided, is insanity.

Given the choice, I'd prefer it if my granddaughters didn't grow up in a society forced to delve back into those mentalities because a bunch of spoiled and idealistic bleeding hearts couldn't be bothered to think on what they meant or how to deal realistically with them, beyond going nuts on anyone who even mentioned the reality of how widespread they were or why they may have occurred in the first place. Because blithely betting that we've suddenly achieved true wisdom and empathy and have grown beyond any particular kind of barbarous nonsense has always been a great a predictor of long-lasting and sensible behavior before. 

That's a fair point. I'd like to expand it to acknowledge that apparent orientation isn't the same thing as actual orientation. Example: Aveline was married to Ser Wesley and later married Donnic, yet there is evidence that suggests she is bi, not straight as many would assume. The only way to be certain of a character's orientation is if they (or their writers) tell you.

For my part, I have mixed feelings about representation versus availability. I acknowledge that both have some value, and would point to the mods that make characters with set sexualities romanceable by the excluded gender.

I like Steve alot.  He's a great representation of "a guy who happens to be gay" versus "a gay character".  I don't actually see his side quest as focusing on his sexuality, the way that others claim it does.  It's more about themes of loss (falling more into the "Carth Syndrome" bucket in my mind).  

I'm not sure I'd consider him having "lots of screentime", though.  It's remedied a bit in the DLC (especially the one where you are looking for the cryptid -- can't remember the name of it right now -- Leviathan?).  But in the main game, he's pretty much a throw away character.  I wouldn't consider him to be any more prominent than Kelly Chambers, who is pretty widely viewed as a throwaway quasi-romance.  But I suppose you could make an argument that he's got 2/3 of the things that I listed.  I'm more inclined to categorize him as a 1/3 character.  People remember that he's there.  But other than having a dead husband and being your pilot, that's about all that people remember him for.  In fact, I'd bet that most people can't even remember his full name.  But I DO like him as a character and wish he was more prominent.