The Character Romance thread (Official)

The problem with the It Has To Make Sense argument, when its not just being used to excuse not having lgbt characters, is that that's entirely subjective, and often prone to subconsciously relying on stereotypes even by the most well-meaning of people. E.g. the DA team's gotten a lot of shit for relying on the deviant bisexual stereotype: there's definitely a pattern of cheerfully shifty, possibly lying, "anything goes" type bisexuals in their games, and that hits on a lot of sore spots for many actual bisexuals irl. IIRC I think four of the bi DA companions can possibly betray you in fairly game-changing ways, some more brutally than others-Zevran, Isabela, Anders and Iron Bull. I think Solas is the only straight character that does anything similar (and Weekes, bless him, stated that he made Solas straight to avoid that exact devious bisexual trope...and yet wrote Iron Bull, the poster boy for every devious bi stereotype out there, much as I love him. Bioware has a very strange understanding of upending stereotypes in order to mitigate potential offense - see also: Cassandra.) Morrigan kind of can? I don't know if you'd include her potentially leaving with your kid, but even so, they made an entire DLC so players could reunite with her and leave through the Eluvian, if romanced, which is more than any other companion's gotten.

Now, these are all well-written characters! Their betrayals make complete sense and work well within the context of the games. But at some point you have to wonder why, exactly, these characters all just happened to "make sense" as bisexuals back when they were being written. I'm including Isabela and Anders here because they're both written as explicitly bisexual in that they mention lovers of the same/opposite gender while still being romanceable by either gender of PC, whereas Merrill and Fenris are much more ambiguous and "playersexual" if you will. Why couldn't Bull have been straight while the stuttering knight-in-shining armor who just wants to have a dog and get married could be bi? Or whoever, mix and match your preferences, lol.

But fundamentally it comes down to the fact that these characters are being written by human beings with their own biases and preconceptions (regardless of their sexuality, you can have a lot of internalized stereotypes about other people even if you're also lgbt, to be fair.) So when you say "Well, it has to make sense" what you're really meaning is "It has to make sense to me, and my preconceived notions of what this group of people are like and who fits and who doesn't." So it's a faulty metric to begin with, and what will most likely happen is that unless you're actively trying to write against type, you'll probably end up repeating the same old tropes in the same old formulations and possibly not even realize that's what you're doing. Because it just makes sense, right?

I don't know. The DA2 system has a lot of flaws and I don't want to give up having gay characters, but it was nice in the sense that you got four solid romances, two of which likely would have been straight in any other game, who were all lgbt and all well-thought out. You wanted to be gay and romance the stoic, romance novel warrior? Go ahead! You want to be in lesbians with elf!Tali? Have at it! And that was pretty nice, even if it wasn't perfect. When you're writing characters with the notion that their sexuality has to make sense for them, vs like in real life where it's just something you're born with regardless of what you turn out like in any other respect, I think the chances of getting those sorts of characters are substantially lessened. That said, I do think DAI did better than previous games, even if it stumbled with certain characters. MEA on the other hand...well, we all know how that turned out.

eta-oh my god, this a wall of text, I'm so sorry, lol

blastoandbubin , you should post more often. Only 84 posts; for shame!

Oh, well, you know, I like to leave 'em wanting more.

LOL, no, I'm just shy, but that was very sweet of you to say. I just like to lurk, silently absorbing y'alls salt through osmosis.

Of course our country should own that! We even had the Pope blessing! but for real at least the memes are strong this day.

That is beautiful!

*emerges from slumber*

ANDERS WAS RIGHT, F THE CHANTRY



*GOES BACK TO SLEEP*

That gif is amazing. LOL

Me too, and I'm a sucker for moments in stories where the whole gang is present, where they all come together to do something, whether they're fighting together or doing something fun. Movie Night in ME:A, the card game in DA:I, Citadel, or the final missions in many of the games, especially ME:A, actually.

Basically, scenes like this:

Although, for some reason Vetra and Jaal are missing, and this scene never actually happened in the game anyway. There were multiple instances of the whole gang being shown together in DA:I marketing that weren't in the actual game, either, sadly.

You know what's even more annoying? On my first playthrough, I chose the "Remain Silent" option when Leliana was discussing the traitor, since I didn't have all the information and didn't want to jump the gun by telling her to spare him or kill him. But then she just kills him anyway (which is pretty dumb of a spymaster, not getting info first), and gets hardened In the same playthrough, she slit the throats of two people (one completely innocent) despite my orders not to. I was not amused.

Too bad we couldn't craft that armour. Her Divine Guards wear it as well, so there's are male and female human models available. The helmet the Guards wear is nice, too. Oh look, in my quest to find a picture of the Guards' armour, I found yet another reason I should have a better PC


Sure there is, if he just repeatedly uses Fade Step on the way

It's pretty sad. Lesbians have also never had a human squadmate option, whereas at least gay guys had Kaidan. 4 games and not a single gay squadmate of either gender? Like... come on!

*Disgusted noise*

Boooooo!


Purple!Hawke is best Hawke.


The Archon was right all along! Exaltation is a gift to all Andromeda! It's justified because it's for your own good!


Good job, but unfortunately I don't really have a lot to say on that topic, so maybe we should talk about something else now

That's what I think of when I read it too, but I think she's referring to the TV Tropes definition, which may have happened here I know in general I tend to put way too much thought into things.

In the game where all of the options are bi... coincidence?



That's... really depressing, actually. I mean, I never got really upset about DA:I having extra options for straight ladies, since ME3, the game directly before it, totally screwed them over. But it would be awesome if we could just have things be completely even, for once. It's really not that hard at all!

And ME:A isn't even close to even. It's all over the place; not even all straight people have even content.

I certainly hope not! I could handle waiting 1.5 years between Bioware games, if they alternated DA and ME releases using 3-year dev cycles. But this is ridiculous. DA:I came out in 2014. Honestly, it coming out this year wouldn't be unreasonable, considering they're using the same engine again and have an idea of where to go, writing-wise.

5 or 6 years waiting for plot threads to be resolved is too much.

Exactly. There's no way that writing approach doesn't make use of stereotypes, whether the writer is un/intentionally using them or attempting to avoid them. Neither are great approaches in my opinion, since we've seen them both in action in Bioware games.

On one hand, you have "gay stories" like Gil's and to a lesser extent Dorian's, where their sexuality is a huge part of their arc/story.

On the other hand, you have lesbians always being femme* to avoid the butch lesbian stereotype (and other, less noble reasons), despite many wlw pining after Cass and Cora.

*Personally I like something in between super-femme and butch.

Aw, I love spooning. Spooning is great!

It's the same in the ME trilogy. Well, worse. Every prominent LGB character is a romance option, while there are hordes of straight NPCs, and that creates some issues. Aside from your point, it also means there are almost zero examples of healthy same-sex relationships in the games, because all of the LGB people have to be single for the protagonist, since they're romance options. This means their previous partners are either non-existent, dead, or ended things badly (often abusive). This is even fairly common in the tertiary LGB characters Bioware creates, for some reason.

We really need more diversity in the cast, still, because that in itself will help solve a lot of the problems we're seeing. It would allow for more stories to be told, which means more stories free of stereotypes as well as retroactively making the "gay stories" not be so annoying, since there would be other options as well. It would solve problems like Suvi failing in her meta-duty to represent lesbians, since she's the only one in the entire game and her orientation is completely invisible.

Here's an idea: If you have another large squad, why not have two of them start in a same-sex relationship, and have it last? Neither would be a romance option. That would be an interesting dynamic. Ugh, I can see it now, a Virmire decision where you have to choose which to save

Yodelling in each other's faces, a guy in a horse mask on a ladder, Australian guy mooning everyone.


Sounds like an uneventful Eurovision this year I'm still kinda trying to grasp that the naked guy singing at a wolf really happened.

You're talking about process, not product. Process is fun to talk about, but it doesn't really matter at all if the product is crap. I like giving my characters room to develop and grow organically, and sometimes they grow in ways that don't work for the story, so I edit that out and try to come at the character from a different angle, make something that works. If you can't self-edit, you don't have the maturity to be a professional writer. And if you have a specific idea that you consider too sacrosanct to change, keep it out of your professional work.

Also, not to be a dick, but your hypothetical situation builds to quite a strawman. One character being straight is generally not gonna get people up in arms - people get upset when there are patterns of behavior that end up screwing over queer gamers, not just one character they can't have. Folks might be disappointed Jaal wasn't bi, but they wouldn't have been making #MakeJaalBi hashtags if Liam was bi.

If LI options were equal, and representation were great, I think no one here would be complaining about "it has to make sense." 

Writers will never have total control in a project like this. There are too many pieces that have to fit together, so sometimes people will have have to change and compromise. That's why you need project leads to keep everyone moving in the same direction, and to push them back in line when they go off-course. And that's why I'm not interested in waving my hands around and fretting whether the writers are truly bad people, because I know for a fact that the project lead had to look over the squadmates, see that the male characters were all straight or not romanceable, and go, "Yep, looks good as is, let's work with this." Which means he either didn't care, or he was too stupid to notice. I'm not pointing out individual writers because I don't know if any of them were a problem on their own, but as a group they fucked up, and they have no excuse.