Aria T'Loak says the word "patriarch" doesn't exist for her people.

Definitely didn't say MEA should, if anything it needs more freedom for the creators. David Gaider said himself that he wished he didn't have to write in so much romance into games.

O we definitely wouldn't lol...

The romance side of ME has never been big for me. I'm more for the return of old school renegade choices if anything. Some called it choices that went too far but i always enjoyed the ruthless / fearless hero style.

Which one, I wonder?
But yeah, I agree. I think sometimes when you go all out rage-mode on the SJW-topics people assume it's because you must hate diversity or live under a rock or that you are a really right-winged idiot or whatever, but it really comes down to one thing: I want to be immersed and I don't want to be patronized. I know there's a lot of infighting over the rights of LGBT+ and race equality right now and so-called "white-supremacy" that indeed does plague games because of how big corporates like EA have set a precedent that pretty much (in the past at least) locked out black protagonists from a "limited marketing potential" or what have you, but you can tell when peer-pressure or pandering takes over as the no. 1 reason why people inside the games are suddenly making points that sound like your everyday social media babble.

It's that simple. Just don't make it patronizing and don't pick one side of a political standpoint and try to force it down over your players. I know people hate Trump and they're desperate right now, but when I'm playing a video game I'm specifically not thinking about those things, and also I'm not american so it all looks like a big puppet show from where I live which only makes it extra annoying and america-centric when issues related are brought up too heavy-handedly.

I recall him saying political correctness. Whether PC is itself a political statement is debatable.

I totally agree.

One issue that I do take though when people do go rage-mode on SJW topics like this is that their first allegation is usually 'Bioware is pandering to SJWs' and 'forcing it down my throat', when for me my first allegation is simply 'this is awful writing,' on a par with forced exposition, cringe-worthy dialogue etc. Bioware have shown with characters like Krem that they can represent minority groups in a more meaningful way that actually contributes to our understanding of the world and the lore. MEA drops the ball there, as it does in pretty much every other area.

I don't think trying to be inclusive and representative is pandering. Doing it lazily for the sake of a box-ticking exercise is. Just look at Hainly on Eos, which was handled so borderline offensively it ended up upsetting the very group it was trying to represent. 

The same thing happened in Dragon Age with the Qun. The idea of demons falling out of the sky and killing everyone was believable but the idea of a civilization of males that put women in secondary roles was unthinkable. So they retconned the Qun to make them more PC which is just ridiculous when you realize that the Qun thinks that cutting out the tounges of mages so they can't talk is a good idea. They used to be Kilingon-lite but now they're just totally inconsistent.

I would assert that ALL statements are political, regardless of intention, and that being silent on an issue is itself a statement.

The ME games were not an apolitical utopia when they lacked LGBT characters. Keeping LGBT characters out of media is a policy espoused by many.

When people say something is "non-political", all they really mean is that it didn't offend them personally. Maybe the ME OT didn't offend you, or anyone else in this thread. But seeing a company almost completely ignore its LGBT audience while going deliberately out of its way to craft extra content that will appeal to heterosexual players is offensive to me, and to many other posters on this forum.

Well I mean no but why wouldn't you? Is it realistic to expect people to just decide not see this part of the game because it's framed badly? Unless you're sure that the convo is going to lead to something concrete like a change in a relationship or something I don't see why anyone would just avoid it.