Actually, this is something I’ve been considering for my next project (for when I finally finish my current project). I have six ROs in mind: two male, two female, one non-binary, and one who would be gender-selectable. This would let me have a slightly smaller cast than usual, and still give most people at least three options. (And yes, you’d be able to choose for them to be non-binary, too.)
From my perspective as a reader, I hate when authors force me to decide on each individual cast member’s gender.
Especially if I am reading the story for the first time, I have no clue as to what gender I want a particular cast member to be, and I feel it unfair to force such a choice unto me.
I don’t read IF games for harem situations (not even harem genre games), and until I get to know a cast npc member, I feel it might as well be a crap-shoot.
More often than not, in games that force me to choose, unless I get lucky, I feel forced to restart (if it is a game worthwhile to restart) or drop the game because of a poor selection made by my uneducated and (most of the time) undirected self.
In my experience this works more or less okay if it’s option is provided when the character is met for the first time. Maybe especially when playing for the first time, because not knowing much about the character makes it easier to just roll with a first/gut impression for them, given the context and whatnot.
It’s the ones which ask you to decide about everyone at once at the start that are problematic to me, because it’s sudden decision overload. Although i guess this may be preferable for people on subsequent playthroughs. Even then, i think the former approach is less intrusive.
For gender-selectable cast/ro’s I just flip a coin or play eeny meeny miny moe . I do prefer them being set unless the author is going to make differences between genders for the character. The only one who has done that well so far is Malin with Ortega. I do understand when it done with a major ro but for all of them it’s a bit annoying.
I personally would prefer they are bi if gender locked characters.
Leliana was my only romance for my Warden, in each race/class combo. Never romanced any other lady because shut off. She isn’t that favored.
Judy is awesome. Romanced her several times. Actually she is exciting as the first time. So, yeah. Panam will never be romanced. I am fine with that. Look, no touchie. Pretty much reality all around.
Andromeda introduced another I can’t get enough of either.
I prefer DA2 and soon DA:VG setup.
But it depends on people.
For certain WIPs, when so infatuated with someone, couldn’t make them what I don’t prefer.
I think its easier to convey my thougts using certain game titles for my point on this subject.
The Captain would be a woman if an unset RO. I wouldn’t think of romance if set as man. There are personality types that also don’t consider. She smokes? Yeah, nope! Auto nope on smokers.
That’s something I have planned for my future isekai project. Three of the set-gender ROs are set because of the specific roles they play in the story (the female lead and two male leads of a romance novel), and the fourth was just a set supporting character, before I decided players should be allowed to romance her. The other two ROs fill common positions you might see in the genre/setting, a royal advisor and a knight, but their gender isn’t really that important in their roles, in my opinion, and I was undecided on how to set it, so I’m leaving them to be selectable between male/female/nonbinary. Maybe I’ll actually end up setting them later, but maybe not.
I think it depends a lot on what the author wants to say with the character.
For example, both Ortega and Dr. Mortum are pretty much the same character regardless of gender in my head. For Mortum there’s almost no difference, while for Ortega there are some between Ricardo and Julia, mainly about their relationship to their family, sexuality and some other small things. Easy enough to write in some variables for. Ortega will be seen differently depending on the gender, and it is interesting to see how the players view them despite 99% of the dialogue and actions being the same. They both end up different people due to gender preconceptions.
When I introduced Argent and Daniel as RO’s I was toying with the idea of making them gender selectable and do a Rebirth bug fix. I choose not to, as there were gendered things there I wanted to explore. Had Daniel been gender selectable from the start, I bet many would have said it was obvious he was written to be a woman. I wanted to explore him without risking that, because I felt that it was important to the character not to be dismissed like that just because he had softer sides as a man. Argent would have been easier, but exploring her pitfalls as a self-created perfect woman had a very different feel than if she had been a man. And Chen, well, yeah. He would have been easy enough to switch, but I didn’t think it was worth the effort at that point.
I do find it interesting that we’ve had one comment saying the example character “reads as fairly masculine” and another referring to the character as “feminine coded.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like that happen with a flipper character.
I notice that adds up to 10% homosexual, twice as much as the 5% heterosexual
On the other hand it means 10% is attracted to men, and 10% to women meaning it’s all balanced. Statistics: the way to tailor your lie is in how you choose to present your data. /s
No, you’re right – i’m too sleepy and forgot that “straight” would have to be split by gender. Although it still results in equal numbers (whether you include bisexual part of the population or not) so the point kind of stands :v
Ugh, please don’t.
Why would you think “joking” about anyone’s sexual identity by putting it in question is a good idea, especially on this forum of all places?
Sorry, why the ugh? I’d not thought a joke on straights and Freud would offend. Good to understand why so I don’t make the mistake again.
…because I’m straight, and we have no good reason to be offended by jokes about our sexual identity?
I appreciate the even-handedness of the principle that if you can’t joke about something for somebody, you shouldn’t joke about it for anybody. I don’t share that principle. But I’m sorry to have given offense.
I believe it’s less about the character’s own gender (non)conformity and more how the narrative and narration treat the character. Which can be subtle and difficult to discuss, but that doesn’t mean the readers won’t pick up on it.
Take the vocabulary. If I were to write a static story featuring a masculine female warrior, I’d still constantly acknowledge her gender even without meaning to. I’d probably use “huntress” and “knightess” rather than gender-neutral terms like “hunter” or “knight” even though both variants are technically correct. I’d definitely use “girlfriend” over “partner” and “beautiful” over “handsome” unless there was good reason to do otherwise. Meanwhile, an IF writer would be tempted to take the easy route and just make everything but pronouns as gender-neutral as possible and might even forget to implement variable pronouns once or twice. It’s all little stuff, almost irrelevant individually, but it adds up over time.
Which leads me to…
I recently began writing a game with a single gender-variable RO because it lets me experiment with this concept on a small scale. It definitely has its benefits, but I think it takes some extra effort and attention to really get right. Some people may be satisfied with how Affairs of the Court executes the trope, but I’d like all of my ROs to feel natural rather than simply justified, and that’s far easier to do with a single character rather than five.
I’m actually considering something like that myself; A world where people reincarnate and inherit some likes/dislikes from their previous lives, making bisexuality a norm rather than an exception. But even then, I’d give most characters preferences for one gender over the other, because that’s how most bi people are in real life; Treating “bisexual” as synonymous with “player-sexual” isn’t something I particularly vibe with, even if I understand why it’s done.
Personally, I don’t think it was that good of a joke. It requires prior knowledge of Fraud’s wackiness to land at all, otherwise it’s just a weird statement about people’s sexuality. I’d sooner laugh at some wordplay with the word “straight” the same way I’d laugh at a joke about asexual people having a secret nation of ace pilots in the clouds.
This is interesting to me as well. I find that sometimes people have a very strong sense of which gender a character is in their mind, and more often than not, those senses vary a lot from player to player. (From my very unscientific observation, characters being noted as tall in their descriptions often goes with players thinking of them as male, which is fascinating to me given how many short men and tall women I know.)
I see this very often too.
I realised that upthread I casually said “I’m interested in why authors make some romanceable characters selectable and others not” and entirely forgot that I did that for Honor Bound. So, in Honor Bound I made Denario non-selectable because he has less screen time than the others and I didn’t want to imply that he would have similar screentime/storyline involvement to the other romanceable characters. Also, he has other traits that are responsive to the PC - age and family background - and having that on top of being gender-selectable would be a bit too many aspects to hold in my head when writing him.
A lot of these words mean different things, though. “Girlfriend” and “partner” have different overtones, not just gendered ones (in the UK, for instance, “partner” often implies a more settled/serious relationship, whatever the genders involved). So do “beautiful” and “handsome” - a “beautiful woman” feels a different descriptor than a “handsome woman”, and I’d picture a different image off the top of my head for each word.
So if there’s a gender-selectable character who’s attractive, it seems off to automatically call the female version “beautiful” based on her gender - it’s more evocative to see more specifics, especially if she’s supposed to be a masculine or butch woman. (To be fair I enjoy seeing specifics anyway, rather than being told a character is attractive, so perhaps that’s another way of doing it.)
I was going to comment something like this. But it’s not technically a problem that bisexuals are almost always there for romance because before that became trendy there would be no bi’s anywhere. On the opposite, it sometimes feels like monosexuals need a special permit to be a romance option for the player without somehow including the opposite sex because ‘genderlocking’ is so passe.