Romance

[Leeuwenhart]

Eddie Izzard always said he is male. He just like womens clothes. In his 6 stand ups he said anyway.

 

But thats besides your point.

Just saying.

[SunBroSolaire]

 

But always still man or woman.

Hahaha that's a funny joke. NB people are the best.

 

Seriously though I read Pallegina as demi or perhaps agender. She (in the absence of Pallegina speaking up on pronouns, I'll gonna use the same ones the game uses) seems to wear femininity grudingly, like an old mask she's never bothered, or dared, to try taking off.

 

 

Obsidian, please keep tumblr lunacy out of the game please please please

[jbrigsby]

Glad to hear the 3 million stretch goal. I'm looking forward to more relationships and conversations with the great NPCs of this game!

[injurai]

Just have relationships, regardless of what sort of combination of individuals it involves. Avoid trying to define what "flavor" of relationship it is. Just let things be and show how they for, why the work, or why they don't. It's not only the best way, but it's the only way. This is a post-traditional world, but unfortunately many people don't know how to write relationships without tossing around identity labels. Just let things be.

[algroth]

 

 

 

 

She's neither male nor female. No judging here - just for your information.

Legally in her republics.

 

But just bz youre not fertile doesnt mean your not female or male.

 

A lot of people on earth are infertile.

But always still man or woman.

I'm not sure she'd find it productive or relevant to think about herself in those terms, though.

If SHE thinks or not. SHE is.

 

 

I don't think one's professed gender identity is irrelevant specifically in the context of a romance, even if you personally think that the dangling fleshy bits are all there is to the issue and everything else is fiction or delusion.

 

I could agree here, but I will also point out that I don't necessarily believe genderless directly implies being asexual. Pallegina may not think of herself as a woman, but it doesn't stop her necessarily from feeling love for someone, be it man or woman. Of course that is up to the creators so I won't insist either way (my initial remark that spurred this conversation, in all honesty, was meant to be tongue-in-cheek). Not something I'd mind seeing though.

[redneckdevil]

Obsidian hasn't ever been against "all" romances, hell pillars 1 had a good love/romance story between "spoilers" and the bbeg.

I think they do decent romances between npcs and that's because it's limited to just them.

TBH I think the main reason is that if they did, they would HAVE to go the bioware route or have a massive sjw backlash. Hell look at what went down with a limerick from a backer in the first game.

 

So if they do romance, imho it's a situation where they are ****ed either way in how they did it. They don't do romance, they aren't ****ed in that area.

[Revan91]

Update isn't bad: deeper companions relationships is a good thing and that's what they promised. 

Luckily Josh isn't really a romance-supporter, so we should be save from BioWare-style retarded romances in this game and their checkbox approach to them (an option for everyone, yay! even if it makes no sense whatsoever in the setting/game, who cares about consistency aniway). 

[Micamo]

Just have relationships, regardless of what sort of combination of individuals it involves. Avoid trying to define what "flavor" of relationship it is. Just let things be and show how they for, why the work, or why they don't. It's not only the best way, but it's the only way. This is a post-traditional world, but unfortunately many people don't know how to write relationships without tossing around identity labels. Just let things be.

Problem is "just letting things be" in your writing means you create a world that reflects only your own lived experience. What comes naturally to a heterosexual cisgendered able-bodied man won't resemble my reality at all. If you don't care about anyone unlike yourself being part of your audience then that's cool I guess, but escaping this and including people unlike yourself takes deliberate, conscious effort.

[Revan91]

WTF even is a cisgendered able-bodied man? I guess you are one of those people who likes to create new labels for every meaningless thing.

I'm sorry they closed the BioWare forums, but I'm sure you can find what you want in their FB fanpage and in their terrible games and romances.

[injurai]

 

Just have relationships, regardless of what sort of combination of individuals it involves. Avoid trying to define what "flavor" of relationship it is. Just let things be and show how they for, why the work, or why they don't. It's not only the best way, but it's the only way. This is a post-traditional world, but unfortunately many people don't know how to write relationships without tossing around identity labels. Just let things be.

Problem is "just letting things be" in your writing means you create a world that reflects only your own lived experience. What comes naturally to a heterosexual cisgendered able-bodied man won't resemble my reality at all. If you don't care about anyone unlike yourself being part of your audience then that's cool I guess, but escaping this and including people unlike yourself takes deliberate, conscious effort.

 

 

The point is that the politics in game, must reflect the world that has been crafted. Only taking inspiration from our own world. When writing character relationships you don't narrate them with them with your own language. You use the language of the characters, their backgrounds, their lived experiences. Because it's hard to map that language directly from the political realm of Eora to our world it doesn't make sense to try to label what type a relationship is and what the character's identity is. It's better to show a relationship unfolding with the language that would be natural to the in-game characters.

 

It doesn't mean you can't reflect hardships, discrimination, pride in one's identity anything else that can be associated with non-traditional relationships and identities. But you can do so with language that is general. You as the writer deliberately choose to use the more powerful literary tool of describing what something is like, rather than letting labels do the heavy lifting. Or more specifically, you write the characters to describe what something is, instead of resorting to labels. The in-game characters have a very different world in which they live. This is what I mean by just let things be. Don't try to label Pallegina, it doesn't make sense. She is whatever she is. There should be an intuition, but not explicit exposition. If Obsidian wants to invoke labels they can, and I would consider it bad writing form. If the don't, it also doesn't make sense for the consumer to impose anything on the characters that isn't there. To reiterate, the player should intuit what something is instead of being told it. So this is what I mean by let things be. The relationship is what it is.

 

All of the above is just good writing sense in general, and should be applied to relationships whether they are tradition or not.

[HooAmEye]

 

Just have relationships, regardless of what sort of combination of individuals it involves. Avoid trying to define what "flavor" of relationship it is. Just let things be and show how they for, why the work, or why they don't. It's not only the best way, but it's the only way. This is a post-traditional world, but unfortunately many people don't know how to write relationships without tossing around identity labels. Just let things be.

Problem is "just letting things be" in your writing means you create a world that reflects only your own lived experience. What comes naturally to a heterosexual cisgendered able-bodied man won't resemble my reality at all. If you don't care about anyone unlike yourself being part of your audience then that's cool I guess, but escaping this and including people unlike yourself takes deliberate, conscious effort.

 

High five! I've personally always like the Bioware romances (Team Garrus/ Team Cassandra FTW). I hate it when people go all "Uh oh, heres teh SJWs". It always seems that the crowd who so despise "identity labels" are the ones to ties themselves most tightly to them. I haven't met a PoC or lesbian who made that the crux of their identity, yet have encountered way to many who demand attention to their pale masculinity. Sad really.  Some people just are happy to be represented, by media that so often either passes them by or fetishizes them to the extreme. Not too mention you dont have to necessarily have those life experiences to talk about them. Just look at Gail Simone, Neil Gaiman, and Noelle Stevenson.

[SunBroSolaire]

Micamo, 10% or less of the population is estimated to not be heterosexual. There's a kind of bizarre tendency in RPGs and some genre fiction to portray this as the 'lived experience' of a large portion of people or even a majority (see certain Bioware titles). It's insipid, unrealistic, pandering and forced. There are 7 companions in PoE2 - if they want to represent sexual orientation proportionally, they would include zero or possibly one companion who is not "cisgendered" and heterosexual. But we all know that now that they have announced "romances" they will pander and massively distort the human experience to be politically correct.

 

Even Fallout: New Vegas, which I consider to be one of the more sober-minded treatments of this subject in games, has only two out of six humanoid companions who are straight. You and people like you are the reason that so many people don't want romances in this game. Because we know you will push this garbage on the rest of us who just want realistic, well-written characters. I would hope that the new writing team will avoid this kind of tumblr fan fiction, but the quality of writing in Tyranny does not fill me with confidence.

[Nicze]

There are 7 companions in PoE2 - if they want to represent sexual orientation proportionally, they would include zero or possibly one companion who is not "cisgendered" and heterosexual. But we all know that now that they have announced "romances" they will pander and massively distort the human experience to be politically correct.

In the first game both Maneha and Iselmyr were gay and that was before they announced romances.

[injurai]

Ignoring demographics and percentages. I would not expect everyone to start shacking up in your party, just because people found themselves in the same place at the same time. Realistically in the party maybe one romantic relationship would form, the rest would be friendships or worse. I would also expect a handful of companions that would not even appreciate being "come on to" during the course of their voyage. They just want to do their job, or pursue their goals.

 

Sure allow a non-traditional relationship, I don't care. What isn't needed is a combinatorial explosion of potential romances. Most the relationships should be non-romantic. The few that are should not be written on the nose. They should avoid explicit labels in exposition. Characters should also be well defined. They should be their own person, and should be respected as such. Just as we respect people in real life. Which in doing merely that, we're already greatly limited by what sorts of relationships might get written.

Edited February 15, 2017 by injurai

[Leeuwenhart]

WTF even is a cisgendered able-bodied man? I guess you are one of those people who likes to create new labels for every meaningless thing.

I'm sorry they closed the BioWare forums, but I'm sure you can find what you want in their FB fanpage and in their terrible games and romances.

I thought it was Iron Man but then i looked it up.

Hahaha. Im so stupid.

 

Its Warmachine.

Edited February 15, 2017 by Leeuwenhart

[Micamo]

The point is that the politics in game, must reflect the world that has been crafted. Only taking inspiration from our own world. When writing character relationships you don't narrate them with them with your own language. You use the language of the characters, their backgrounds, their lived experiences. Because it's hard to map that language directly from the political realm of Eora to our world it doesn't make sense to try to label what type a relationship is and what the character's identity is. It's better to show a relationship unfolding with the language that would be natural to the in-game characters.

 

It doesn't mean you can't reflect hardships, discrimination, pride in one's identity anything else that can be associated with non-traditional relationships and identities. But you can do so with language that is general. You as the writer deliberately choose to use the more powerful literary tool of describing what something is like, rather than letting labels do the heavy lifting. Or more specifically, you write the characters to describe what something is, instead of resorting to labels. The in-game characters have a very different world in which they live. This is what I mean by just let things be. Don't try to label Pallegina, it doesn't make sense. She is whatever she is. There should be an intuition, but not explicit exposition. If Obsidian wants to invoke labels they can, and I would consider it bad writing form. If the don't, it also doesn't make sense for the consumer to impose anything on the characters that isn't there. To reiterate, the player should intuit what something is instead of being told it. So this is what I mean by let things be. The relationship is what it is.

 

All of the above is just good writing sense in general, and should be applied to relationships whether they are tradition or not.

So, it sounds to me like your problem isn't necessarily with having identities represented, it's just with those identities being explicitly named. I both agree and disagree. While "show don't tell" is generally a good idea, when dealing with marginalized identities sometimes not explicitly naming a thing can be more harmful. I'm going to use autism as an example.

You see, a thing allistic (non-autistic) writers like to do, that seems to be growing in popularity, is to give a character some autistic traits to exploit for whatever reason, but then never actually explicitly name the character as an autistic. There are several names for these characters in the autism community but I like the name "autistish."

 

Autistish characters are often used to perpetuate harmful stereotypes, and the absence of the label is deliberate. This is so the writer can say "well, it's not harmful

to autistic people, because they aren't actually autistic." (Sheldon Cooper, anyone?) The problem is allistic audiences see the coded traits and mentally categorize that person as an autistic. So, in their minds, it reinforces the harmful stereotypes. ("Autistic people have no empathy", "Autistic people aren't fully human", "Autistic people are permanent children incapable of self-determination", the list goes on.)

 

Now, some autistic people like and appreciate autistish characters sometimes, but me personally, when I encounter one I'm always immediately suspicious. Why did the author feel the need to cover their ass by not explicitly naming the character's neurodivergence? When is the shoe going to drop? How many more pages/minutes is it going to take before I'm implicitly called a monster?

 

If it's "well, this is a fantasy setting, they wouldn't even know what autism is" that you're worried about, there's actually an extremely simple solution: Explicitly state the character is autistic in out-of-world official materials, for example marketing blurbs. Done. Doing this doesn't preclude you from using narrative subtlety to explore the full depth of the autistic experience. (Not that I think allistic writers should be writing stories about the autistic experience for the consumption of allistic audiences at all, but that's an entirely different can of worms.)

 

EDIT: Furthermore, you can't avoid identity politics. If you try, it just means you're engaging in the identity politics on the side of the majority.

Edited February 15, 2017 by Micamo

[Andraste]

Micamo, 10% or less of the population is estimated to not be heterosexual. There's a kind of bizarre tendency in RPGs and some genre fiction to portray this as the 'lived experience' of a large portion of people or even a majority (see certain Bioware titles).

 

Which BioWare titles have non-heterosexual characters in the majority?

 

(Spoilers: it's none of them.)

[Revan91]

Micamo, 10% or less of the population is estimated to not be heterosexual. There's a kind of bizarre tendency in RPGs and some genre fiction to portray this as the 'lived experience' of a large portion of people or even a majority (see certain Bioware titles). It's insipid, unrealistic, pandering and forced. There are 7 companions in PoE2 - if they want to represent sexual orientation proportionally, they would include zero or possibly one companion who is not "cisgendered" and heterosexual. But we all know that now that they have announced "romances" they will pander and massively distort the human experience to be politically correct.

 

Even Fallout: New Vegas, which I consider to be one of the more sober-minded treatments of this subject in games, has only two out of six humanoid companions who are straight. You and people like you are the reason that so many people don't want romances in this game. Because we know you will push this garbage on the rest of us who just want realistic, well-written characters. I would hope that the new writing team will avoid this kind of tumblr fan fiction, but the quality of writing in Tyranny does not fill me with confidence.

Simply this. 

By the way, only Veronica and Arcade were gay in NV, iirc. Not exactly realistic that 33% of your human companions are non-straight but they never felt forced or made that way just for pandering reasons, as a lot of post-2010 BioWare characters. 

Tyranny with its cast of all-bisexual people was much worse, and it didn't help the fact that the writing itself was definetely less than stellar.

 

 

There are 7 companions in PoE2 - if they want to represent sexual orientation proportionally, they would include zero or possibly one companion who is not "cisgendered" and heterosexual. But we all know that now that they have announced "romances" they will pander and massively distort the human experience to be politically correct.

In the first game both Maneha and Iselmyr were gay and that was before they announced romances.

 

Maneha was also quite a weak character imo, although that has nothing to do with her being gay (but the banter with Kana in which she say she doesn't want to be his wing-man was pure cringe, and definetely out of place in a 16th century-inspired setting). 

I never found anything suggesting Iselmyr was gay, though. 

Edited February 15, 2017 by Revan91

[Roahin]

allistic (non-autistic)

 

Good God.  Nearly twenty years working with the autistic, but the fringe internet crowd still have new terms and labels I've never heard of before.

[SunBroSolaire]

 

Micamo, 10% or less of the population is estimated to not be heterosexual. There's a kind of bizarre tendency in RPGs and some genre fiction to portray this as the 'lived experience' of a large portion of people or even a majority (see certain Bioware titles).

 

Which BioWare titles have non-heterosexual characters in the majority?

 

(Spoilers: it's none of them.)

 

Dragon Age 2. And DA:O was 50/50.

 

 

By the way, only Veronica and Arcade were gay in NV, iirc. Not exactly realistic that 33% of your human companions are non-straight but they never felt forced or made that way just for pandering reasons, as a lot of post-2010 BioWare characters.

Only those two characters were exclusively gay, but Lily and Cass were arguably LGBT. I agree that it didn't feel as forced - part of that was good writing, but part of it was also not having player romances. It was always a background detail.

Edited February 15, 2017 by SunBroSolaire

[Baramos]

Furthermore, you can't avoid identity politics. If you try, it just means you're engaging in the identity politics on the side of the majority.

 

Then what then? Does every game have to include the ever growing spectrum of genders that pop up?

 

But anyways my question is this. What do you want exactly? In what way could Obsidian make you feel you are properly represented in the game?

[Revan91]

 

 

Micamo, 10% or less of the population is estimated to not be heterosexual. There's a kind of bizarre tendency in RPGs and some genre fiction to portray this as the 'lived experience' of a large portion of people or even a majority (see certain Bioware titles).

 

Which BioWare titles have non-heterosexual characters in the majority?

 

(Spoilers: it's none of them.)

 

In Dragon Age II they were all bisexual.

Also, Inquisition had two gays and two bisexual. The straight characters were four, just like the non-straight (three of those were only available for females PCs, though). 

That's not a correct representation of sexual orientations, since more than 95% of the world population is straight. I'll also add that having a setting based on medieval Europe where people think it's ok to kill others because of their faith or social class but somehow everyone is more open-minded than contemporary real world people about being sexual orientation/identity is also ****ty fanfiction-tier writing.

 

Only those two characters were exclusively gay, but Lily and Cass were arguably LGBT. I agree that it didn't feel as forced - part of that was good writing, but part of it was also not having player romances. It was always a background detail.

Cass seemed straight to me, you could even flirt with her if you were a guy.

Lily was a very old woman with some kind of mental illness, I wouldn't really say she was LGBT or whatever.

Edited February 15, 2017 by Revan91

[Andraste]

 

 

Micamo, 10% or less of the population is estimated to not be heterosexual. There's a kind of bizarre tendency in RPGs and some genre fiction to portray this as the 'lived experience' of a large portion of people or even a majority (see certain Bioware titles).

 

Which BioWare titles have non-heterosexual characters in the majority?

 

(Spoilers: it's none of them.)

 

Dragon Age 2. And DA:O was 50/50.

 

 

If we're only counting LOVE INTERESTS then DAO was 50/50 and DA2 was 80/20 ... but that's not what you said. There is no BioWare game in which the majority of characters you can interact with are lesbian, gay or bisexual. There are a heck of a lot of characters in Dragon Age 2 who aren't love interests, and most of the ones that have a stated preference are straight. Even a majority of the companions are heterosexual in DA2 - it's Bethany, Caver, Aveline, Varric and Sebastian vs. Anders, Fenris, Isabela and Merrill. (I guess you could count temporary companion Tallis and have it balance out at 50/50, but she's only available for one DLC.)

 

Across the whole Dragon Age franchise - counting novels, comics and The Last Court as well as all three games - there are forty-nine LGBT characters with speaking parts, including a few that aren't important enough to have names and some that are only ambiguously gay. Given that the whole franchise has well over five hundred characters, I don't think that's disproportionate at all.

 

(If anyone is wondering why I bothered to count them, it's because when people on the internet complain that there are too many LGBT Dragon Age characters I like to have some actual numbers to put things in perspective.)

[SunBroSolaire]

Of course we're only counting the love interest companions. There's usually not much reason to know side characters sexual proclivities so there would be no way to count them.

[Andraste]

 

 

Micamo, 10% or less of the population is estimated to not be heterosexual. There's a kind of bizarre tendency in RPGs and some genre fiction to portray this as the 'lived experience' of a large portion of people or even a majority (see certain Bioware titles).

 

Which BioWare titles have non-heterosexual characters in the majority?

 

(Spoilers: it's none of them.)

 

In DAII everyone was bisexual.

Inquisition had two gays and two bisexual. The straight characters were four, just like the non-straight (three of those were only available for females PCs, though). 

That's not a correct representation of sexual orientations, since more than 95% of the world population is straight. I'll also add that having a setting based on medieval Europe where people think it's ok to kill others because of their faith or social class but somehow everyone is more open-minded than contemporary real world people about being sexual orientation/identity is also ****ty fanfiction-tier writing.

 

 

 

Micamo, 10% or less of the population is estimated to not be heterosexual. There's a kind of bizarre tendency in RPGs and some genre fiction to portray this as the 'lived experience' of a large portion of people or even a majority (see certain Bioware titles).

 

Which BioWare titles have non-heterosexual characters in the majority?

 

(Spoilers: it's none of them.)

 

In Dragon Age II they were all bisexual.

Also, Inquisition had two gays and two bisexual. The straight characters were four, just like the non-straight (three of those were only available for females PCs, though). 

That's not a correct representation of sexual orientations, since more than 95% of the world population is straight. I'll also add that having a setting based on medieval Europe where people think it's ok to kill others because of their faith or social class but somehow everyone is more open-minded than contemporary real world people about being sexual orientation/identity is also ****ty fanfiction-tier writing.

 

In DA2, four out of the five love interests are bisexual and one is straight, but not a majority of your companions, let alone a majority of the characters in the world.

 

There are various reasons why there's less homophobia in Thedas than there is the real world, but my essay about that would be really off-topic.