It also works very well in Evertree Inn with Dandy/Daisy, which is proof it can at least be done well in fantasy contexts.
The runner-up here would, imho, be @Havenstone 's XoR with Simon/Suzanne, which is currently slated for publication in the near future.
True, both Evertree Inn and XoR do not strongly segregate what one can accomplish in society by gender.
You mean Villains? Sweet! Although my mc would take being flirted with by girls (once we grow up in-game that is) simply as nice comments as he still wouldn’t be into them that way. So I guess that makes him a gay outlier in a mostly bi world.
I don’t know. In a world with no prejudice against same-sex relationships, most people would probably still be more attracted to people of the opposite sex, but I imagine people would be more open to the idea of a same sex relationship if they knew that no one would judge them for it.
Going by the proclivity for homosexual encounters among the ancient Greeks and Romans I’d tend to agree. Lack of a religious doctrine outlawing homosexual practices led to less of a stigma and thus more occurrences. Now, this is not necessarily saying that people were more inclined towards homosexuality by nature but that there was no dogma in place making people deny their urges.
Especially in Rome were people married out of duty then slept around with people they were attracted to. It was a completely different structure of societal mores most people raised against a Judeo-Christian backdrop have a hard time getting into.
That said, in a fantastical world of your own design you can just decree that people are more inclined towards certain sexualities by nature. Or cause of something in the water. Though you’ll probably earn some ire regardless of how you swing that explanation. Inclination towards bisexuality is probably the best you can get without summoning the pitchforks.
Course, that wasn’t a world without religion – far from it. And a number of the anti-religious regimes of the 20th century were homophobic. Which is to say there’s no necessary correlation between religion and anti-LGBT prejudice.
But if Avery wants to write a world that’s both religionless and prejudiceless rather than one whose religion is LGBT-affirming, that’s authorly prerogative.
Yeah, don’t say that. This would imply that sexuality is not innate, but is based on external influences, and is thus curable, which is very insulting, and your comment about pitchforks makes it sound like we’re the ones in the wrong for being insulted.
Even in non-Christian society, heteros were the majority.
I don’t think people would be more open to same sex relationship, I think people who aren’t straight wouldn’t hide it like some do in our world.
The pitchfork bit was directed in all directions to be honest. Like religion, sexuality is just a very personal topic to a lot of people and both creating a world without homosexuality or without heterosexuality would get a lot of people worked up. Unless the lack of either is somehow integral to the world being built it’s probably not worth going there.
The other bit was just that really. When creating a world that is not our own you establish its rules as you see fit. If within the confines of that imaginary place you want X to cause Y you are free to establish it.
Until recently, pretty much every world created by authors was one without homosexuality. I think we can have a few exclusively bisexual worlds without upsetting the balance.
And if Y is homophobic, then it’s still a homophobic world, whether you have an explanation for it or not.
Yes, actually, at least among the WiPs. Well, there’s @ParrotWatcher’s own Totem Force. There’s Keeper of the Sun and Moon. There’s Monsters of New Haven High (aided by a little genderflipping, but the numbers would come out pretty high even without that). There’s the partly-published Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven (though a lot of the romances aren’t very far along yet). As far as completely published games go, there’s Creatures Such as We. Also Sixth Grade Detective, although some of those are less romance and more “possible person to go to the dance with.” I’m, hmm, I’m not thinking of any other published ones with that many love interests, but if we count gender flips, then there are quite a few that have at least three options.
I’ll also note that each individual RO doesn’t have to have, like, exactly the same amount of material as all the others… as long as one doesn’t get into a lopsided situation where, say, all the straight ROs have huge plot importance and big scenes, while the gay ones only get tacked on material
Well, it can be nice to have gay characters represented as full-fledged romances… representing bi/pan characters is good too (which isn’t exactly the same as playersexual, either), but it is nice to be included.
What he said
Gay people are already way underrepresented in media as a whole, and when it comes to games it’s much harder to find options of a good quality. It’s not that uncommon for games to be hetero-only, or to have a single gay option tacked alongside a whole bunch of hetero ones. And when you give heterosexual plays a whole bunch of extra material, without giving any unique material for gay players, that really makes it seem like we’re being picked on, excluded, second rate, etc. If you’re looking to do unique orientations, it’s not particularly constructive to do it in a way that disenfranchises the people who are already the most disenfranchised.
I mean… it’s really difficult to get any kind of reliable statistic on that kind of thing. There’s… there’s a lot of shrugging involved
It’s pretty noticeable that recent surveys of millennials report way higher rates of LGBTness… homosexuality included, but especially bisexuality. And, well, even if people answer the survey to the best of their knowledge, it does tend to get underreported, because a lot of people are in denial. It’s, ah, difficult to tell where the trend will stop. Denial’s already super-common, and it’s pretty well impossible to get numbers on that.
As far as gauging from historical societies, that’s also difficult, because they generally didn’t conceive of the identities in the same ways. One useful distinction to consider is sexual orientation, sexual preference, sexual behavior, and identity. Pretty well all of these except probably orientation are very culturally dependent. Orientation would refer to who you’re actually attracted to, preference would be who you personally prefer to go for (which homophobia often causes not to match, though there are other possible reasons too!), behavior would be who you actually do go for. (We could probably frame these as “romantic” rather than or in addition to “sexual,” depending on context.) Throughout most of history, people have generally focused on the behavior side of things, rather than orientation… and behavior is the most variable of them all! I mean, someone could go for someone they wouldn’t normally be attracted to because that’s who’s available, because of social pressures, whatever reason… which makes it a lot harder to determine their orientation in the absence of any such pressures. Plus it gets difficult to disentangle things when someone may have a preference, but some exceptions, or whatever.
Anyway, I don’t think anybody really knows the answer
Creatures Such As We cheats a bit by having the romance options all share the same scenes and dialogue outside of their initial unique conversations. You do make a good point that you can have less than 6 by genderswapping characters. If you do that, then you can get away with having only 3 romance options and still meet your criterion.
That’s because most often we still are, at least in the AAA gaming industry. On the other hand so are women and people of colour.
Way higher may be an overstatement as far as the (semi) official surveys go, at least here in the Netherlands. Among millennials I think self-reported bisexuality was up by about 11% on average with only a 4% increase in reported homosexuality. Still denial is a massively huge problem so the real rates are likely to be (far) higher still.
Curiously over here female bi and homosexuality was up a bit more then male, though I suspect it is still harder for guys to come out in this man’s world.
Probably true, pick any survey and someone will come with a counter survey. All I dare say for certain that as society gets more tolerant and less dangerous for gay, bi and pan people more of them will become visible and dare to self-report as such. I don’t have any answers on where the ceiling, if indeed there is one would really be.
Hmm then I might need to ask help from a friend, I don’t want to make a romance I know nothing about, and except my own experience as bi, and there are no romance there, I have no experience with gay romances, and I don’t want to write something who would offend anybody, so I will try and make two gay people too, the worst there can happens is that it sucks and somebody will have to help my write a decent romance
Fair point… I do think several games do too much reusing of character dialog between different characters, which can make them feel more generic. But there are at least a few examples of games that lack genderflips and still have that many ROs without overloading them
Ah, that’s about the kind of numbers I was thinking of… I’d call them “way higher” by comparison with previous numbers, which often reported, like, 5% total LGBT which now appears to be far too low to be accurate.
Agreed. That, and people who are heterosexual-leaning, but not 100%, would be more likely to express their same-gender desires, which could be what was going on in Ancient Greece and to a lesser extent Rome
For the most part, you can write them pretty much as you would write other romances, just with the same genders if you want to bring in social issues, that could be more complicated, but you don’t have to, and that would depend on the setting anyway. Other than that, differences are mostly just things like the possibility of more complex love triangles (true for bisexuality as well!), and things like an increased chance (I imagine it can still happen for heterosexuals as well?) of being attracted to and jealous of the same person at the same time (it’s happened to me…).
But getting help is not a bad idea either and if you’re interested in sharing your work on this forum, there’s lots of us around who would be happy to help/advise too
I think if you lump gay, bi, pan and lesbian together it is now around 20-25 % of the total population among millennials and post-millennials. With the lion’s share of those self-reporting as bi. Which is indeed better than our abysmal 3% combined total of “divergent” orientations for our “boomers” and about 10 or so percent for gen-X. So if you’re looking in terms of that then, yes, it may be way up among today’s youth compared to their predecessors.
I’d suggest just keeping them all bi; I’ve seen more people fail at making unique gay romances than succeed, while with bi characters, if you just write it as an ordinary romance, then there shouldn’t be any real problem. But, as @TSSL says, if you have any issues, you can always ask for help on the forums, and we’ll be glad to help.
Well, I’ve seen a British survey which suggested up to 50% among millennials (mainly type 1’s, which is still not completely straight), but I have no idea how accurate it is.
I mean, I would like to see more people try I see too much of the attitude where people don’t write any representation because they worry that they’ll mess up, which just ends up meaning less representation at all. And if you write the romance as you would write another romance, while avoiding making the heterosexual romances clearly better than the gay ones, that in itself will avoid the big pitfalls.
But yeah, it also depends on how many romances you can handle writing
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if type 1 turns out to actually be the most common
(For anyone unfamiliar… the Kinsey scale runs from 0=exclusively hetero, 1=mostly hetero, 2=hetero-leaning, 3=equal-bi, 4=gay-leaning, 5=mostly gay, 6=exclusively gay. Plus X=asexual.)
But… yeah, I feel like overall percentages could plausibly be all over the place, which at least gives authors some leeway
(Plus, especially if you’re writing about characters of fantasy species or a far future where humans aren’t exactly the same anyway… you get even more leeway to decide how you want the proportions to be for your creations )
True, but this is bi representation, which is needed, too. And I’d certainly love to see more exclusively gay characters (I have a thread about it, even), but I feel that, especially for such a small cast, it might be better to stick to making them all bi.
This would imply that sexuality is not innate, but is based on external influences, and is thus curable, which is very insulting, and your comment about pitchforks makes it sound like we’re the ones in the wrong for being insulted.
On the other hand so are women and people of colour.
which now appears to be far too low to be accurate.
I see too much of the attitude where people don’t write any representation because they worry that they’ll mess up, which just ends up meaning less representation at all. And if you write the romance as you would write another romance, while avoiding making the heterosexual romances clearly better than the gay ones, that in itself will avoid the big pitfalls.