One of my explicit goals in writing Tally Ho was to provide evidence to the contrary of this position. You can judge if it successfully serves that purpose, but that was one of the goals.
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what games are these? cose last time I checked , they were done half assed . As in they are done as an after though .
it’s jarring for you maybe , some peoples don’t care though . I mean , you can play in a world where you fight dragons even though it’s not rational at all to be able to take one down with a stick . It should be no different when it come to gender .
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How is what I said wrong? 
Sure, that’s another option, but it doesn’t make my point incorrect…
The ME:A that gave us no team romances, and only two side-character romances? 
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There were a (very very) few minor nomenclature changes, probably fewer than a dozen throughout the game. There was essentially no branching based on your choice of woman/nonbinary/man in chapter one. Ditto for the four gender swapping romances. Possibly a minor bit to note a different article of clothes someone is wearing, but no branching at all and very little flavor text based on gender. And thanks for your kind words about Tally Ho!
I definitely didn’t use handsome (although being called a “handsome woman” would actually be totally period!)
I don’t think anyone is arguing that men and women are the same. I think the question at stake is the word “intended.” If a character is in our minds as one gender, let’s say, and then the creator says, hey, let’s switch that to a different gender in this next iteration, that is something that I can see people responding to as jarring.
But gender flipping doesn’t necessarily have an “intended.” One can write a character without defining stuff and let the player define it. That seems less jarring to me.
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Now I think about it, Leliana’s backstory did require her to be female, didn’t it? 
But that doesn’t mean that the character would become a “non-character” by gender-bending, but that it would be a world-building problem, like with Affairs of the Court. Leliana (that is, the female version) would be exactly the same, so she could hardly be any lesser by the idea that there might be a male version in other games.
If they had been pandering, they’d have actually had gay options. And I thought that the main problem with Andromeda was that they spent more than half their time and budget trying to procedurally generate planets, before scrapping the idea, and not having the time or money to actually make anything good, combined with a mostly inexperienced team…
No offence to @Gower, but how is that less “pandering” than any other instance of genderflipping?
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What universe are you living in? Andromeda was poorly received by just about every demographic because the developers blew a big chunk of their budget and half of their development time on trying to procedurally generate planets in a bit of open world craziness in a game that really didn’t need it.
As for the gay part that was handled the most atrocious of all. Originally gay guys only got a lazily character creator generated npc as a non-squadmate romance whose story was seemingly inspired by bad 1990’s era sitcoms and a fling where they recycled female dance animations without accounting for the height differences between the male and female player models and then the male mc was called a “queen” for even taking that guy up on that dance to boot. 
Which means they were even too lazy to change a pronoun/title.
And I see I’ve been ninja’d by Parrotwatcher. But essentially Bioware and EA had a management failure of gigantic proportions with Andromeda.
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Yep, can’t agree more.
Never treat genderlock male, genderlock female, and genderflip as an interchangeable element.
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That’s true. But will the reader ever get to know the character on a personal level from the author’s initial intention? Readers can adjust but if they are just given groundwork and no real persona to place with it, I think that subtracts.
“Backstory” is a huge kicker, because a character’s gender can define the place where they are at during the timeframe. Their misfortunes. Their fortunes. The rountine they go through with everyday life and such.
I don’t want to sound sexist, And I probably will regardless. It’s a whole lot less common in the real world, Yes it can happen, and yes it does happen, But a lot of it has to do with how others treat them or respond to them rather than their sole personality. A lot of times, girls in the modern world will often be treated nicer by male figures, but if the story is set in the past then girls will probably get a whole lot of disrespect. This is not always the case as it can go both ways too, and the opposite way.
I’m all for breaking sterotypes but that subtracts realism in a way due to our common knowledge. But then again, it all depends on the story. And for this one I do think it could work. I’m just not a fan of it.
RIP
But yeah, I only used Dragonball as an excuse because I’d figure a lot of people would know more about it. Than plenty of obscure references or characters I have in stock, which… no one would get, lol.
And in a lot of situations? The author is gonna have to find a place where that will flow smoothly. And give the same outcome as if Goku was male. When it comes to backstory specifically it could take impact away depending on if the character is male or female, but that also depends on the person. I find established genders make it a lot easier to write a character without having to worry if it’d make sense or not if you flip them, also makes me connect with them more if they are… well them. That’s a me thing most likely.
Huh, I never knew that Tally Ho did that. First off, because I’d always played through as a male butler, And I still have a hard time imagining Haze as anything other than a male. But again. That’s a me thing. In CoG, yeah, Genderflips do work more.
Yep, that certainly qualifies for a redesign.
Considering you are doing this all for the sake of pleasing people would want it, yeah it qualifies, Is it such a bad thing? No. Yes, I do think it is a little lazy depending on the author, If they are willing to write a few extra scenes and work around and edit so it makes more sense. Then it could work, very much so. It’s just not my cup of tea.
For me at least, it will. Like the other people have pointed out here, regardless of gender what is important is that the NPC’s personality and how they stand out in their own regardless of gender. I am no author but as a reader, connecting with each character is important whether what gender they are. But of course,in the end, this is to the author to decide whether to genderflip or not.
This is probably because you always choose to have Haze as male so the routine stick. I have to admit that I am guilty of this at times since I always play a straight female so in all of the CoG/HG discussion all of my ROs (in my head) are their male counterparts but that doesn’t mean genderflip will not work since judging from the other people’s reaction to their female counterpart, they enjoyed it as much as I do. (eg. Ortega from Fallen Heroes, Unit Bravo from TWC)
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Yeah. Like usual. I guess it boils down to how it is handled. And preference too. insert rolling around emoji
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Here’s the thing, if it’s between including, and not, and it doesn’t completely make no sense in the sense of primary sexual characteristics (and even then, trans people are a thing you know, and if you don’t mind gender flip being “and now they’re trans too”, even that level of detail to the plot doesn’t matter in anything outside of a strict historical piece), then including is always going to be a better option because if people don’t want to see it, they don’t ever have to play it. Just pick the option that you want to see, and move on.
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You are correct 
two whom you choose, one who’s always the same as a binary MC (and whose gender is chosen by a nonbinary MC), and one who’s always female if that one is male, male if that one is female 
I want more of this guy 
Oh, yeah, I’m generally the one who’s been defending Affairs of the Court 
I mean, I feel like the social roles there are highly dependent on relative social class issues, but that’s not really explicit so I could certainly see it benefiting from clearer worldbuilding.
And I really didn’t see anything wrong with Midsummer Night’s Choice, whose MC I think has a lot in common with some of Shakespeare’s spunkier heroes and heroines 
Usually if you stick a \ before something like that it’ll display it, although that sometimes gets finicky
I’m just going to point out that “pander” in that context was pretty much just a cheap word to indicate a value judgment without saying anything substantive about what’s wrong with it 
basically just meaning “pleasing people in a way that I don’t like” which… is a paltry substitute for an argument.
Also, just gonna point out, for the record, that it’s possible to support more racial diversity in ROs as well as LGBT diversity and options they’re not mutually exclusive.
Just out of curiosity, how does her backstory require her to be female? I don’t know this game, so… I’m curious?
This is why it’ll depend a lot on the setting. Generally if you’re writing in a more egalitarian society, whether it be futuristic, fantasy, whatever, it’s not gonna have much effect. If you’re writing a society with stricter gender roles, that’ll be something to take into account—but Tally Ho managed to pull it off I suppose partly because social class and general attitudes and demeanor stood out as the main characterization features
Anyway, I don’t think gender flips are necessary if you have an otherwise balanced cast, but I do consider them preferable to situations in which some players will have noticeably more romance options than others… and generally a good idea if you’re going to have a small number of romance options. Like if there were, say, three female ROs and one male RO, including some gender flip would be the simplest solution to avoid revamping the plot.
We must have run in very different circles. Most people I’ve known are not particularly gender-conforming—nor uncomforming—they just have personality traits and interests that don’t particularly correspond with gender in any way. There’ll be some traits that you might find feminine, some you might find masculine, but mostly just neutral stuff. Like, I don’t know, people just enjoy reading or watching stuff they like, they’ll have activities they enjoy doing, and I’m being vague because there’s no real reason to ascribe those one way or the other. Say a person likes knitting and programming… that doesn’t tell you anything other than, oh, that person likes knitting and programming. Or a person likes pizza and taking walks, and… pizza and walks aren’t gendered, right? Please tell me those two aren’t gendered 
I mean, people are just people? There’s just tons of variation in general, and there’s tons of ways to characterize them that’ll be equally normal no matter what the gender. You really can just write people as people. Trying to write them as fitting some narrow gender idea turns them into caricatures. I’m just really surprised to see anyone consider it “unrealistic” to depict people’s personalities as being largely independent of their gender.
I guess you wouldn’t be a fan of a depiction of me and pretty much everyone I’ve known
I would be very hard-pressed to think of anyone I’ve known who didn’t have some trait that is stereotypically associated with another gender.
How is gender-flipping lazy?
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I’m a fan of well written genderflipping characters, like Ortega and Wakefield, though as someone mentioned above it doesn’t work quite as well in settings for which gender roles are clearly different and gender expectations are more rigid. (Which the works on COG tend not to feature; is it a policy thing?) A male Joan of Arc, with the exact same personality, would have had a different experience than his real life counterpart.
Regarding the other argument: this is just a personal feeling, but whenever I see someone refer to / discuss a character as a different gender than what I know them as, I’m abruptly reminded that they are not a person and only a piece of code/writing created for our pleasure.
Though I’m still grateful for knowing them in my preferred gender in the first place.
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Now I think about it, I’m not even sure (it’s been a while since I played)… She was certainly with (or training to be with) the Chantry, and while women are the majority (and the most powerful) of people in the Chantry, I’m sure men could be involved, too… The second female RO did have to be female as she was created by a powerful witch as a backup body/demigod mother, but pretty much every other character could be either gender without changing anything… 
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Here you go, you just need the right kind of curse to put on your enemies: http://bardmythologies.com/the-curse-of-macha/
(There’s more to this, that’s just the start.)
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Those aren’t, but surely there some activities that ARE, Pagents for example and well- You know what, I’m bad at explaining. So I’m going to just give the W to you on this one and settle for my big ass L. Only if that L is baby blue though.
But like I said, it also has to do with how others correspond with them.
Welp, I didn’t say that. I mean for a story really. I’m a pervert. No one would really connect that to my gender, As it is uncommon tbh.
Well let’s say you genderflip, and then you write a story based around hmmmm, Let’s go with a spoiled brat trope that play’s with dolls and leaches off daddy’s money and the like. Progressively you are gonna reach a point where you write about them growing up and if you can’t describe them as you would if they were another gender, Or the influences in their life such as uncles and aunts, I find it a lot less real. I like for depictions of modern scenarios to be as accurate as possible, but that does not go for everyone. Ya can write what you want.
I suppose I am too, you don’t really have to change their whole personality and deal. But with the backstory and such, it would help if you painted a better picture by adding things that would make sense or well, the reader would expect. An outgoing guy transitioning to a Tomboy would require a lot of thought, such as what they were allowed to do as a kid and how they are performing as a teen/adult IMO. Maybe I overthink things.
The blue/pink thing is very recent, by the way even in Western culture, pink used to be considered a very masculine color for baby boys (a hot vibrant color, full of vitality 
).
And yeah, a lot of these standards vary a lot. Like, the Aztecs considered it manly to cry at appropriate times. (And also considered chocolate to be masculine, even though it seems to be considered more feminine in modern culture for some reason )
I mean, you even mention pageants, but just look at Europeans courtiers in the 18th and 17th centuries (before men’s fashion got a lot more somber)… really into fancy fashions and displays, in ways that would be considered quite feminine nowadays, primping up and showing off… pageantry, really.
But the point is that it should be possible to write a story about, well, people like “me and pretty much everyone I’ve known” and for the story not to be unrealistic.
I’m just not seeing how that’s “lazy,” though? Either you write significant differences in a flip, which means extra work, which is the opposite of lazy, or you write the character about the same way, in which case, you’re still writing about the same amount of character material as you would if the character didn’t flip, so it’s not any more lazy
This is why it can depend on the setting. In a more egalitarian setting, those issues never need to come up. Even if you’re writing in the present day (far less egalitarian than it ought to be), those issues don’t need to come up—plenty of parents will respect their daughter being a tomboy, and plenty of girls and women will just keep acting and presenting as they like. They’re just as valid characters to write about as anyone else.
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As a straight woman, your story probably wouldn’t interest me. I have seen people react badly to Double/Cross because they set the LI’s to one gender and you could only be a gay man, or a straight woman.
But you know, it’s your story. I think as long as your writing is good and the story has substance, people will be forgiving. You know your story best and you should make it the way you want to make it.
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Genderflipping is something that can be done, and well, but in my opinion need some care, mostly in the interactions/description stuff. Like looking at a guy “curves” instead of muscles, for example… <_<
The fancervice is surely not a problem for me: on the contrary, I welcome some good fancervice with good looking guys.
Maybe the only difference from male ROs to female ROs in shirtless/out of the bath/etc is that usually the embarassed one is the MC, since guys have usually less problems showing skin since is considered less sexual than with girls (suuure…still believe it and give us our show, guys 
) so outside of actually self conscious/shy characters, guys would not actually get embarassed of these episodies, or even get that they are oogled, expecially in anime.
That said, I would not be interested in any kind of harem with only girls, and frankly, I would be wary of the genderflipped version because of the fact that the characters were thought as female primarily, but I know it can be done well, since I experienced it in Wayhaven Cronicles and Fallen Hero.
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You do know there are male pageants too, right?
I once tried a replica of the sort of chocolate they believe the Aztecs made and I do say you’ve got to be tough to eat that stuff in the first place and many cultures did associate toughness primarily with masculinity (even though childbirth is something I’m grateful I’m never gonna have to endure).
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