catabuca wrote...
Sorry I snipped the earlier stuff, I wanted to focus on the parts I left in in particular.
The main thing I want to say is why do you believe that if Isabela and Fenris enter into a relationship with each other that makes them straight? The very definition of bisexuality is that a person is attracted to both men and women. There is nothing about Isabela and Fenris' relationship that nullifies ther bisexuality. They merely find each other attractive. One doesn't have to be constantly engaged in a relationship with someone of the same sex in order to still be bisexual.
Except that was kind of my point with my first point. Having a single character discover that of the six or seven people he's able to convince to fight with him/her from time to time, ALL of the people who are single are ALL Bisexual is a statistical improbability.
And a Statistical improbability that breaks my suspension of disbelief a bit (though quantum sexuality hurts my brain worse to be fair).
And it's not like some stuff like this wasn't considered. I remember reading an interview for the game where someone at BioWare was talking about why many of the choices you made in DAO didn't carry over directly, and I'm paraphrasing here, because they felt the chances of Hawke running into a lot of those characters would feel a bit unnattural considering he/she didn't know any of those characters or was involved in their adventures. It's why more often than not these events are referred to vaguely or in passing.
Taking that point futher, if mHawke didn't approach Anders or Fenris in a particular playthrough, and went for Merrill instead, yet again that does not nullify anyone's sexual orientation. Merrill doesn't magically become straight, she is a bisexual in a relationship with a man. Anders and Fenris don't become straight, they are bisexuals and Fenris ends up in a relationship with Isabela. You still have Anders' discussion about Karl. However, if playing as a female Hawke, the fact he doesn't tell her about Karl again does not nullify his orientation. He merely didn't tell her. I agree with Gaider when he said it is self-serving to say "X is gay in this instance, but straight in that" -- it has no basis in the actual reality of the game, because so much is left unsaid there are no declarations of specific orientation through which you can claim to set one character or another as of a particular orientation, other than bisexual (coming from the knowledge that either gendered Hawke can romance them).
See that last line, the "knowledge that either gendered Hawke can romance them" is exactly the problem. It creates a state which unless all are explained as bisexual (again, a statistical improbability and not covered) then yes, it means that my player knowledge get's in the way. Because it means I
know that without my interference all characters are in a strange "null state" romantically. They are an imaginary number to use a mathematical term. If I choose I can romance Fenris as a male, but if I don't he goes for a lady. If I
know he's bi then there's no question. If I do not know that, then his orientation is unknown, except I do know that he's interested in me as a male, so then that means he's either gay or bi, but then he goes for a girl so maybe he's just bi, but then if I'm a girl, then that means Fenris is ALWAYS straight as he either ends up with me or Isabella.
Since I know he always goes for me, I know he has no control over his own preference in love. Since I know that, it pulls me from the game and reminds me that he is just a series of scripted flow charts on a designer's board, that he is not as an involved a character as he could be if only the developers has just said, "no Fenris is straight Anders is gay that's it". Then I don't have these questions and neither does anyone else who thinks about things too much and was ever in either a Philosophy class or ever discussed Quantum Physics with anyone.
Is it merely that you would feel happier about all of them being bisexual if there had been some sort of statement about their orientation, so you 'knew for sure'? If so, I can understand that argument, even though I don't agree with it myself. Since straight love interests in these sorts of games aren't generally required to make any statement about their orientation, my opinion is that it shouldn't be required of bisexual or gay characters either. Of course, society judges us straight until proven otherwise. Again, understandable, but wrong. The onus should not be on gay or bisexual characters to 'prove' their orientation lest they be considered straight, or otherwise 'lacking', but it should be on the player to take the situation on face value: that being that we know they are bisexual, and that is that.
By the way, you're correct in that it doesn't
have to be brought up. Nothing
has to be brought up, and BioWare doesn't
have to bring in romance options at all. But as they make more games it does seem like they're learning to create romances and relationships with more complicated webs among them. They didn't
have to allow Fenris and Isabella hook up if you go for neither of them, but it creates a new layer doesn't it?
But as they get more complex, people start asking more questions.
This entire forum thread essentially hinges on one of these questions. Currently in canon (as in what's released) ME, the question of same sex relationships, or having characters be or become bisexual isn't a question: they aren't there except in the case of FemShep/Liara (and Chambers I guess) but because a certain segment of the audience would like to see it, the question of "why can't Ashley be bi/lesbian in ME3"
IS being brought up. The question of having MaleShep pursue another man is being brought up. The question of how this would be best implemented is being brought up.
When you start bringing in a questions like these then you start begging more questions. If the designers want to limit the number of questions, they need to make
definite answers.
Making everyone bi, as far as I'm concerned, is a less than satisfactory answer for the reasons I've already brought up in the earlier post and above: statistics and quantum theory, both of which break suspension of disbelief (in me).
Also I do find this rather consistent claim that just because someone would like further characterization that justifies character actions, it means that they are immediately jumping onto some sort of Anti-gay bandwagon that demands that all homosexual characters be clarified very odd, and fairly unjustifiably angry. That argument makes no sense. You are making a rather large assumption that just because someone would rather not have their head a'splode/have to deal with fridge logic, it means they want Scarlet letters on anyone who prefers to boink people with the same genitalia.
Can't a guy just want more lucidation? Can't I like having one line of dialogue to lampshade something so I don't have a question running around in my brain that breaks me out of the story? If I'm the guy who wonders how someone can smoke a cigarette in the oxygen-rich environment on a space ship, why can't I have the "something or other device" that makes me not question that?
And your later point (your tangent) about LIs initiating romance dialogue: this is exactly what Anders does in the game, and it has met with a great deal of criticism and unease from some quarters. I don't agree with that criticism, and I think it's a positive step forward to have LIs initiate encounters like that as an attempt at verisimilitude. It was present in the game though, so to say it wasn't isn't true. However, I don't see a link between a bisexual cast of LIs, as opposed to a line up of straight, gay and bisexual characters, and the initiation of romances. Since all characters are bisexual, any of them can be written to initiate an encounter with your PC -- the only limitation on this is whether it would be in character for them to do so. I can't see Merrill doing something like that, whereas it made perfect sense for Anders to. That is something that has nothing to do with their sexual orientation, and is just about whether they are confident in matters of the heart (and pants) or not. Those 'passes' would likely be the same regardless of whether they were gay, straight or bi.
I just felt that it wasn't as far as they could go with Anders' pass at Hawke personally. I think, like you, it's an excellent step in the right direction. Also there is no link to anything else I was saying, that's why I labeled it as a tangent. It had nothing to do with gay/straight/bi sexual politics, it's just something that came to mind while typing.
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