The Maevaris Tilani Discussion Thread

BF: So in general, do you think that it is possible that we might one day see a romanceable transgender character in a Bioware game?

PW: Absolutely. I see no reason why we wouldn't do that. The kicker for us would be twofold; first, we would of course want to... we would workshop that ruthlessly to make sure that we did that in a context of respect, sensitivity, making sure it was presented in a positive light. When I did some writing on Krem, I showed early passes of Krem to some trans-gender-queer-intersex fans who were under NDA, and got really good feedback. Figured out many, many place where I, as a cis white dude was completely screwing up, and gratefully had the chance to address those. And even after doing that I've still heard things from fans, that like, okay so next time you write a trans character I'm gonna do this differently, next time hearing that, I'm gonna do that differently. So it would definitely be something we'd have to handle sensitively and it would be much like the experience of just having Krem as a character was, it does take more time, it does take more work, it's absolutely worth doing. The only other qualifier I would put on that is... when we think about doing things like this, they cannot just go into the game for no reason. So if we have a transgender romance in some future game the hook cannot be 'this is the transgender romance'. It has to be... Tali was not 'this is the Quarian romance', Tali in Mass 2 and then in Mass 3, or at least in Mass 2, the hook was 'this is the shy, awkward, crush romance'. Garrus was 'this is the friendship romance'. They have to have a hook. And we could not have the hook be 'this is the transgender romance', because if you do that there's not enough other interesting emotions that makes them human beyond that. So, we would be looking for that. So like I said - absolutely no reason we couldn't do it, just those are things we'd bear in mind if and when we'd try to do that.