The Character Romance thread (Official)

I'm really just lurking now and have been catching up on the last few pages. But having read through the past 20 pages or so, I find the bolded a little ironic. The drama started because an obvious troll account told LGBT players that we are a minority and we should be grateful for what we received. So...it doesn't feel good, does it?

I know that you and the other moderators do a lot of work, all unpaid and probably a lot of unrewarding work to keep this place up. Kudos go to you all for that. But it's also your choice to be a moderator and if you feel like some of your points have gone unheard or you are wrongly being attacked for misunderstanding your views, you can very easily walk away and never have to deal with it again. If an out LGBT person wants to avoid feeling like this in the real world it can be a lot harder. Not in all cases and things are getting better overall, though from an American perspective LGBT rights have been backsliding the past...100 days or so. And in Chechnya right now gay men are being rounded up and killed.

So I think it's because the concept of "heterophobia" suggests that heterosexuals can face discrimination because of their sexuality that using that term in a discussion is not helpful. It's similar IMO to people saying if black people get a month for history, why can't white people? Or if there's a gay pride parade, why not a straight pride? It completely trivializes prejudice and discrimination that minority groups have had for years and are still facing. White people don't need white history month, 11 months out of the year is white history month. And straight people don't need a pride parade, no straight person ever has felt ashamed of their sexuality.

Of course heterosexuals can be attacked on the basis of their sexuality and that still sucks. No one should be attacked or discriminated against for sexuality of any kind or any other inherent quality of a person. But one person on a board calling someone a breeder is not in the same ball park as going to any YouTube comments section, reddit thread, Twitter, whatever and consistently seeing remarks against fags. 

I also think it was just unfortunate timing when mods stepped into the discussion. Just from reading through the recent posts, the "you should be grateful you 2% 'ers" account posted multiple inflammatory things which rightly should have just been ignored. People responded, things didn't seem to be reaching critical mass. Then we see a mod step in and say they deleted a post and everyone play nice. We didn't see what the content of the deleted post was (later learning it was a personal attack which is bad) but at that moment in time it looked like the mods only got involved when enough people had "ganged up" on this person who was clearly fishing for a reaction. And by telling everyone across the board to "play nice" and be respectful felt like a slap in the face when the majority of people were standing up for their basic rights as humans. It feels like the mods are willing to look the other way if troll accounts are telling LGBT people to shut up, but as soon as we speak back mods intervene. I know that is not the intention but that feels to me how many on this thread have felt it played out. Just something to think on.

you just embraced your true self

So true.

Yeah, it shows how much gender and sexuality is intertwined. These things are upsetting to gay men, but straight/gay/bi women, too.

I actually wouldn't say jaal's romance is particularly sexist. In general I think bioware have fared quite well with f/m romances where the protagonist is female (though there have been noticable exceptions.) Ryder, Shepard and Hawke were all written with men in mind and gender swapped after the fact, often with little changes, so especially in the bi romances there tends to be a more even footing than most media where the writers clearly feed their unconscious sexist biases into how they write women in love. That said, straight femshep is still expected to downplay her own skill to stoke garrus' ego in a romance scene, an obviously sexist idea, f!inq is buck naked for an extended period of time while you never even see Blackwall shirtless, etc etc. So they are not in the clear there either. showing Jaal going down on Sara and being incredibly openly affectionate with her however was definitely pretty good I think. Deeply unrelatable and alienating to me personally as a lesbian, but still having some positive representation value for straight women, who suffer from their gender in a way that interacts with sexuality even if they don't suffer for their orientation itself.

Loll it took me a moment as well.

Knight in Furry Armor. Although, it helps knowing Davrin's boobs wants a hot werewolf dude.

ahahahha, of course, seeing as it's nick and dirk i should have sussed it out.

FINGERS CROSSED FOR WEREWOLF DICK 4 U GUYS

I admit being able to change Garrus was a turn off for me. We could make him more Paragon or Renegade instead of just support what he wanted to be. I felt more like a mentor than lover.

Yeah that's why those comments baffled me. It seems Jaal being emotionally open (as is his species) made them feel he was not to be trusted and only after sex. For me, he was refreshing since he even states in an email that while he is lost in the moment of his time with Sara, it doesn't make him desire her body only. He sees her as a woman and leader and doesn't belittle her abilities in any way, nor does she have to downplay her skills to please him.

#StillBitterAboutBlackwall2K17

Really, his character wouldn't change if he was gay or bi. I'm just bitter about Dragon Age And Mass Effect in general.
I guess I can go be gay in Fallout, and super gay with the gay family mod
Oh Gage my handsome murder husband.
How I love you.
Huzzah for mods that let you destroy the raiders but still keep him.
I don't care what anyone says, yeah FO4's writing is bad, but at least everyone has equal content and Bethesda didn't give us the "It has to make sense" crap.

That was my first thought. He's doing it wrong. She's not innocent. She's had sex, so this is only an issue if he didn't get her to the right point. That's not a male point of view though, so it likely wouldn't count.

For me, I like playing a woman because in my younger days it was nearly impossible in video games. I'm also a writer, so I like writing characters that match each other, so if I make my PC a certain way, I then look at her options, and whoever fits is who I go for. It's backfired a few times. My PC sometimes takes over and I find her acting in a way less suited to my original choice. Sort of like characters in a story. They sometimes start writing themselves.

Debatable.


Anyway, I'm gay and tired and this is all that I will ever be if people like the ME:A team stay in charge of making gay romances (Although the Dragon Age team isn't that much better tbh, but at least they kinda try...kinda, attempts are made) I hope that the DA team at least goes away from the promiscuous bi trope because Bull's romance was just horrible. Then I checked in Gaider's recent work in the new Balder's gate enhanced and, well the male romances available to gay men are still bad. Promiscuous evil half Orc who you kill in the end if you romance in the epilogue.
So yeah I don't trust him writing M\M romances either.

Really at this moment I like SWTOR and Betheda's (even if they are badly written, but like I mentioned before, everyone gets equal content, there's no BS tropes either) and indie games to write M\M romances.
Mostly Indie games.

That's interesting. I often choose men in the character creator because I kind of like to go as far from my own self as possible; I'm already a woman in real life, so I don't really feel the need to replicate that. However, when I started roleplaying on computer (relatively late, at 16 or 17), the first two games I picked up where Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and some generic Hack&Slash thing with a character creator, both of which allowed me to play women, so I guess I never had a formative experience of it being denied to me in the realm of computer RPGs.

Whether guys or girls, I tend to roleplay like I am writing a character, too, though. I like to create a consistent personality that doesn't have too many "OOC" moments. I think that's why I'm also always first in line to whine and moan about Ryder's personality choices because I think the only really consistently different playthroughs are "all left side" and "all right side" (obviously you could still play a Ryder whose a professional to the leadership and emotional/jokey with their team, but because they are not tonally that different it doesn't quite pack the same punch as playing a 90% aggressive Hawke who jokes around with Varric and goes good-mushy on their LI, or a Renegon Shepard who puts the fear of God into the outside world while always giving their crew leeway).

Romance-wise, I usually decide on the sexuality of the character I want to roleplay before I start out, just like I decide beforehand what personality and opinions they will have (for example in DA:I, do they think they are really chosen by Andraste or not?). I mean, most of the time that's how it works, anyway. My Sara was supposed to be interested in men, but then Vetra came along.