Nashimura wrote...
I would like to see them go back to having two straight romances and two bi romances. I know people think this is restricting it for our gay/bi members, but as a straight male i have played both Origins romancing Zevran as a man and DA2 romancing Anders as a male and isabela as a female.
Try to put yourself in the place of growing up a straight guy forced to play gay characters in every single RPG you ever play your whole life. Always looking at the girls in the game, always liking their friendship with your male character and thinking they'd make a great couple, and always wishing you could romance them with your char. But you can't, because you're only allowed to romance guys. This is how a large number of us grew up. The love stories we wanted to see were never there. They only existed in our headcanon, and only with big mental gymnastics to contradict the canon where the guy always got the girl/the girl always got the guy, despite that same-sex best friend over there who could've been the love of their lives, if only the game had allowed it. Then one day games start giving you the option to play the stories you've always wanted to play? You're going to take that choice like a blessing from the skies and never ever ever let it go.
Maybe you don't feel it's a big deal to romance Zev as a male Warden (and that's great), but to some of us it is a huge deal that we can't romance Morrigan unless we settle for playing through yet another cookie-cutter straight romance, like we've had to all our lives.
Nashimura wrote...
Is having restrictions really a bad thing?
Yes it is. Putting specifically LGBT players aside, because it doesn't affect just us, restricting romances is a cheap way to restrict gameplay itself. What, honestly speaking, is the point in barring Morrigan from being romanced by female Wardens, when we know she has a very open-minded view of the world and is fully in control of her sexuality? Or Sebastian by male Hawkes, when we know he was very open to all kinds of experiences and could just as well have had male lovers in his youth without any detriment to his discovery of faith later on in life, or his duty to family? What is gained, storytelling-wise, from that barrier?
The LIs in these games are written to fulfill romance tropes, and not everyone gets ticked by the same trope. It's a simple matter of personal preference, and ideally, nobody should be restricted from experiencing the romances the way they feel right. I believe that the Zevran, Anders, Fenris, Leliana, Isabela and Merrill romances all work a thousand times better with same-sex partners. I'm sure there are thousands of fans out there who would vehemently disagree and think any of those romances work much better with opposite gender partners. So who's right? Should I restrict those fans from experiencing these romances the way they like it? Should they restrict me? And who gains anything from that? I don't benefit in the slighest from restricting the way people play their games, and they don't benefit from restricting the way I play mine.
The only way gender restrictions can be justified is through the old "realism" adage, which yeah, you may not like to admit to it, but in a world where dragons, griffons, wyverns, ogres, broodmothers, demons and magic exist, is really just a roundabout way of saying that you find it easier to deal with the existence of fictional monsters than with being in the company of people who may or not be gay or bisexual in someone else's game, and that's a slippery slope of an argument that no one wants to start down.
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