Abispa wrote...
@ BrianWilly -- The MASSIVE flaw in your argument is that Bioware specifically writes their characters to be as open to player's head canons as possible. They are not the robots of Fable or Skyrim, but they are HARDLY fully developed. That is why "gay mods" are almost seamless when inserted into DA and ME. Except for one or two lines and the VA, the romances and other relationships as already written play well for either gender.
It's not just about romance. There are players who SWEAR that Ashley is racist. There are those who say she is religious and probably Christian. In fact she IS insome people's head canon. Not in mine. She mentions her distrust of alien governments in a political sense. She never mentions Jesus so I say she's Jewish.
Is Garrus a really a nice guy who wants to be toughed up by Shepard, or a tough guy who wants to be saved by a heroic Shepard? He's written so you can head canon him any way you want.
In DA:O a player can choose to believe that Morrigan is a lying witch who is playing the Warden for a sucker, or a poor child raised by an abusive mother and just wants to be loved? Again, she is written so you can choose.
Bioware basically gives ups skeletons to flesh out ourselves. To insist that YOUR head canon should be sacred is to miss the point of the Bioware RPG experience.
First off, I would disagree that Bioware
specifically writes their characters to be as open to player's head canons as possible, and I've no idea why this is such a prevalent attitide. What we do in our own heads is our own business, but they are no more "specific" about character fluidity (again, other than the player character) than any other piece of fiction out there, whether it's a TV show or movie or book or game. You could "headcanon" that Harry Potter is secretly a nymphomaniacal guava juice space vampire because nothing in the book explicitly says that he
isn't, sure, but that doesn't mean Rowling is specifically writing the character out for you to do that. It doesn't make sense to me to cite this is as a specific BioWare narrative model.
For any piece of characterization that might be left open to the player's interpretation -- which, again, is unavoidable with
all works of fiction -- there is a lot more that is set into narrative stone. Our "headcanons" are limited to the scope of what BioWare presets into the storyline. You can "headcanon" that Ashley is Christian or Jewish, but you cannot headcanon that she doesn't believe in God because she explicitly tells you that she does. This isn't confined to the "Bioware RPG experience," it's just the way characterization works. BioWare games aren't true sandboxes; there are hard and fast limits to how much you can "design" these characters in your head, and even harder and faster limits when it comes to designing them canonically.
Now, yes, when we're talking about sexuality it becomes a bit more complicated, because not only does sexuality not have anything to do with a preset personality, it's also completely feasible for someone to be revealed as LGBT when you previously assumed that they were straight. And that's fine. I have always supported the notion of Ash or Kaidan or anyone else revealing that they're attracted to the opposite sex even if they've never mentioned it before.
But as responses in this thread can attest, people are really interested in the ways that Kaidan's male romance differs from his female romance; we don't want either path to feel like something that they just threw in and switched some pronouns around as a design compromise. People who are rooting for the "everyone is available for everyone!" model don't seem to understand that when they use terms like "convenient" and "head canons," that just brings up images of the hollow Skyrim/Fable method and makes the idea seem
less attractive, not more so. Not saying that we need entirely divergent romance storylines, but if a character is going to be attracted to both genders, then
more care should be taken to make sure it's engaging and relatable, not less.
And the idea that any romanceable character should be "swappable" between gay, straight, or bi depending on the whims of the player...it's just far too much for me. On top of being vaguely offensive (sexuality is not something you can choose to shut off or turn on if you don't like the one you have...again, maybe that's okay for shallow ciphers in other games but not for more realized characters that are meant to resemble real nuanced people, however dramatically), nothing in the mechanics of any of the Mass Effect games, or of any other BioWare game, suggests that this is the way their narrative operates. In fact, the opposite is true; everything indicates that the world these games take place in, along with the characters within, are predetermined across all playthroughs...with the one differentiating factor being the player character and how his/her choices cause ripple affects across the landscape. In fact, several storylines are shown to take place whether Shepard/The Warden/Hawke is aware of them or not.
We do not "choose" the predetermined traits or personalities of any of the other characters in the game in any way that affects their preexisting storyline, so why should sexuality be exempt?
Modifié par BrianWilly, 03 mars 2012 - 09:35 .
Retour en haut
and it flows better with different lines.
