The Character Romance thread (Official)

Actually, if you put it like that, tiny baby turians is a really adorable idea, I want that now.

The carapace looks pretty solid to me on the wiki, but then again, it is only concept art. They have patches of leathery skin on other parts of their bodies we've seen, these would be more flexible, or as you said, the stomach carapace might not be one solid plate. I guess until we finally get a turian LI sex scene, we won't know for sure what they look like naked.

That was one of my favorite discussions to keep checking up on in the game. 

Maker, I had to hold my stomach I laughed so hard at that image! It's also sore from working out, so there's that. Good post, too.


Sadly, it's quite possible that's what their general thought process was in regards to the romances. At least near the end, since it seems like they were hesitant to even have as much lesbian content as they did. And they still think simply swapping body-models in bi romances constitutes enough effort, regardless of if it even makes sense or works correctly (Peebee and Reyes)

Not only that, but there are a lot of young people in the Initiative. They could wait decades before having babies and still be fine. Longer if they have artificial wombs, which logically they should. Not that they were using logic. Not only that, but it's a just-plain-stupid idea for Jill to even be awake! We're still in a state of resource-deficiency to the point where only the most valuable personnel (in terms of skill-set) are woken up (not to mention the Kett situation), so it's a double whammy that Jill was not only awoken, but awoken during a time where you really, really shouldn't be repopulating! Ugh! She ruins everything.

...Really? 

Someone at Bioware must be obsessed with having kids. Autodialogue about Ryder wanting kids? Guilting gay dudes into having kids, and not letting them kiss if they don't? Forced congratulations in a quest all about stealing Initiative resources to have a kid?

Come. On.

Yeah, that makes it even more sad. You weren't alone, there was universal praise here when we first heard about it, even from people who didn't want to have kids. It was such an important move in the right direction! Except not.

Thank you! The options in that conversation were terrible! This is why you give us more than 2 dialogue options, and this is why you actually make those options different to account for a number of possible personalities.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in that regard, really.

Ugh, that quest. Between the mechanics of going through a bajillion star systems and the forced "roleplaying" options, I'm seriously considering just ignoring that quest altogether in the future.

Why does Ryder have to get just as freaked out about this as everyone else? I was like, okay, they had a kid. Whatever. Even if we didn't already see tons of couples doing that already in the game, it really isn't that big of a deal. But no. Melodramatically: "How could this happen?!"

Honestly... not much different. It would just be a poor cover-up excuse to why she's allowed to be homophobic. Plenty of unfortunate implications would still be present.

Clearly.

And I still get triggered when I read "procreation blockers". Ugh. Just no.


It's frustrating to no end. They might have been ahead of their time a few years ago, but not anymore. They've actually regressed with ME:A, when they needed to improve. And honestly, it's not that hard to be inclusive and fair if you're making any real effort to do so. Everyone gets the same number of options with the same content and effort put into them. That's apparently too much to ask, though

And yeah, lesbians may have the second-most in terms of options/placement, but I'm not going to praise them for it, because I feel like we only got what we did because of a combination of "lesbians are hawt", mandatory asari romance, and Sheryl Chee being awesome. It could have very easily been much worse. Even now, you can tell how little effort was actually put into lesbian content or representation, what with Peebee's copy-paste Scott scene and Suvi's lack of content + invisible orientation.

In terms of options, we fared better than gay men. But Bioware didn't exactly make me feel like I was important either.

Your Banshee comes with extra salt today, apparently

For what it's worth, according to the Kett, both turian males and females have a lot of flexibility :ulikeit: So I bet their plating does bend somewhat. And who knows, maybe some hormone or other changes things during pregnancy. It's alien biology, after all.

Speaking of turian plating, I could have sworn that the original trilogy codex said turian metallic skin didn't protect them from knives or bullets, but in ME:A, the Kett analysis of them says that it affords protection similar to Kett bone-armour. Confused

Oh yeah when that interview first came out, it was the first small red flag for me. It sounded like that Mac thought there had to be a reason for lgbt+ characters to exist. But I did not expect it was going to be this bad. I thought it might be that we would have a lgbt character that played a huge major role and neither hid or flaunted their sexuality and identity, and he needed to say this in the interview to curb the negative response to that character.

But when the leak started to come out, along with their utter silence regarding gay romance and characters, all hell broke loose. It's a start of all the salt and drama of this thread. And this interview was a part of it. Each time romance info came out, another salt pile happened. Each time queer baiting occurred, a drama happened.

People were assuming the worst, and unfortunately they were right. As it turns out all pieces of bad news and leaks fit into a model that they fucked up. They should have come clean at first and revealed all LI info. People would still be mad, but it would be over quickly and people would just move on to other games.

I love this GIF

Sadly, especially in the last five years or so, some of the louder parts of internet gaming culture have had an unfortunate overlap with anti-PC culture. Most of the main gaming reddits are a good example of this (with exceptions such as r/gamingcirclejerk and r/gaymer). However, I also always notice this when I'm watching gaming analysis videos on youtube on a computer where I'm not logged in. Because I watched a discussion about the construction of Zelda dungeons, the youtube recommendation algorithm now also thinks I'm deeply interested in some 21 year old straight white gamer dude explaining to me how he has figured out that feminism is and always was unnecessary, that trans people don't actually exist, and that gay people just need to like, get over it, because you're not actually being treated wrong if you're not personally being stoned on a market place this very moment.

Maybe Bioware got spooked. It's shit, and it shows an incredible lack of backbone, but it's possible they feared a backlash. It's profoundly useless as well because they were always going to get hate from the anti-SJW crowd, so now all they've managed to do is also anger the other side. And sure, the mythical shooter dudebro target audience (the ones that don't bother hanging around the internet much at all and just play the game) is probably not going to go on the barricades as full allies. However, I still think that the baseline there is usually apathy rather than active dislike. Looking at it from a purely business standpoint, the only sales you will realistically lose by including a gay male squadmate are the sales you already lost by including a gay male crewmate.

How was Inquisition marketed specifically to LGBT? 

Oh ok. I got you now! For DA4 I would like to see a in-between Inquisition and Andromeda marketing. I believed they showed too much during Inquisition, but I think fans should have known more for Andromeda. They should be more open with the romance content, because it doesn't spoil the game to know who we can romance and by which gender. It would have save some LGBT people money, because they would've known what their options were.  

I think y'all are giving the writing staff too much credit. BioWare's a big company, and not everyone who works for them is going to have the same opinion on LGBT issues. To me this just looks like a group of writers who didn't really want to spend time on gay characters, but wanted to keep the shiny Ally pin for their company and thought they could get full credit for the absolute bare minimum amount of work. You're not gonna see much in the way of logic there, unless you count post hoc rationalizations so they could feel like they were being smarter than they actually were.