I feel like the game should present the player with sufficient information about characters they can get into relationship with before they get to commit. Not to have to look that up outside of the game.
I think you’re talking about gender in different contexts: social vs biological. I guess using sex instead of gender for the latter would reduce the confusion, although obv. not the tension around the subject.
The word you are looking for is sex, not gender. Your not being bisexual does not have anything to do with your lack of attraction to transwomen. Trans people do not owe you a revelation that they are trans and that reflects in the story. You were not “baited”, your lack of attraction to transwomen is your own problem. Transwomen are regularly murdered because of this attitude.
People also get mad if it’s made immediately clear in whatever way that a romanceable character is trans. There’s not really one perfect or non-fraught way of treating it, so I think it’s reasonable for authors to handle it in a way that’s true to their characters and setting.
I may be remembering wrong but as far as I recall, the romantic interactions with Kay so far are mostly the PC flirting with or harbouring a crush on her and her being bashful about it in response; I wouldn’t call it a fully-fledged romance at that stage of the game. But either way, it’s OK for an author to write a trans character who feels vulnerable about coming out and does so later on.
Honestly I have zero sympathy for people who feel “tricked” by a character not being blatantly openly trans from the jump. Like, grow up? If you were already into that character nothing has actually changed beyond some base transphobia (in the literal sense) telling you it’s now ‘wrong’, get over yourself and accept it as another facet of their character. Hell, you still get stuff like this about Mortum Fallen Hero, and they’re stated to have undergone modding that’s so undetectable even a trans MC struggles to recognize what they’re looking at when naked with them.
What characteristics in particular are the problem here? TBQH I can’t name a character in the catalog off the top of my head that actually has both explicit sex scenes and their natal genitals intact (probably the most famous trans RO, Mortum Fallen Hero again, very explicitly has had effectively perfect SRS). If a character is described, and then later revealed to be trans, nothing about that initial description becomes suddenly retconned. Trans women don’t suddenly gain an extra foot once you’ve ferreted them out.
I haven’t really seen that myself but i’ll take your word for it. However, unless romance also happens immediately as soon as the character appears in the game, there’s (potentially a lot of) room to establish such things. So presenting immediate reveal as the only possible alternative can be a little misleading..?
That’s fair, the story can certainly be realistic in this regard. But then it’s also likely to create equally realistic controversy for some players, the one which causes said vulnerability in the first place.
That’s a bit disingenuous. A large part of “being into the character” is physical attraction, and that is partially based on presumptions, especially when a text-based game can be far vaguer about it than what can be normally perceived. If a person presumes certain characteristics of the RO but then it is revealed to them that those presumptions were wrong, that is a change from viewpoint of the person who made the presumption.
It’s not unlike people being into a character because of presumptions they’ve made about that character’s personality, only to eventually learn that was a mistake. (“i thought they’re nice but they’re actually not!” Or, given the common tastes of IF readers, the other way around /s) While the “fault” is with them for making the presumption in the first place, it does change quite a lot about how the character is being perceived.
I wasn’t talking about any specific character or game but in general, in response to what seemed like equally generalizing statement you’ve made. For settings where perfect SRS is not a possibility i think it’s fair to conclude that the character in such scenario hasn’t undergone such procedure.
Which is not the case here, trans women are women, nothing has changed and acting like it would is just straight up discrimination.
I get what you mean, and yes there are plenty of different ways of characters coming out to the PC and lots of middle ground, but what I remember about Kay does feel like a middle ground to me.
With Honor Bound I’ve been accused of “baiting” by letting a PC start a romance with Fiore and later blindsiding players with them coming out. In reality there are a few entirely non-romantic scenes with the character before the PC then learns about this aspect of them. I’ve also been accused of pushing a trans ““agenda”” on players and making Matia all about their gender because the PC recognises they’re trans upon meeting them; they knew each other when they were both younger and before Matia transitioned.
Some people are keen to come up with reasons why they don’t want to see trans characters in games, or at the very least not play a major role or be romanceable. One of the ways this comes up is people saying “I’d be OK with trans characters being written if it was handled this way or that way”. But in a lot of cases, like my experiences with some (happily, minor) commentary about Honor Bound, it becomes clear that the preference is for the trans characters not to exist at all.
Ultimately it’s not an author’s fault if a player thinks a character sounds hot, finds out they’re trans, makes assumptions about what their body’s like, thinks “oh I don’t find them hot then” and feels personally aggrieved.
Yes. And if the point that was brought up had been a more general ‘I dislike when something that I find hot about a character turns out not to be so, after locking into their romance’, then I would have been fully in agreement with it.
I have experienced that in games outside of ChoiceScript, where the exact vibe of the character changed, and became way more boring, after the romance had been locked in. It’s pretty annoying.
(And everyone is of course free to reload or restart, if their chosen RO turns out to not be what thay had hoped)
But that was not the point that was brought up.
It was specifically about a character turning out to have a different AGAB than was assumed.
And seperating that specific thing from the broader issue, makes it… somewhat questionable.
As the person who started this whole ordeal, I’d like to clarify that yes, I did mean sex, not gender. That’s a mistake on my part. I was under the impression that ‘Kay’, who is the character I was talking about, was a Cis female. This was in accordance to the demo post of Drink The Villain Juice, which specified her as just ‘Female’ not ‘Cis Female’ or ‘Trans Female’. This lead me to believe that she was ‘Cis’ due to the lack of distinction. Whilst Trans Women are indeed women, I cannot deny that, there should at least be something to indicate her Trans status in the description or early game. The reveal in my playthrough felt sudden, and it made me confused since she turned out to be Trans this whole time.
I have no desire to make this political. This is a preference thread, not a debate thread. I apologize if I offended anyone due to the confusion. I simply just prefer cis women over trans women as my RO, so I felt clickbaited.
what a horrible thing to say.
i’m going to try to be straightforward here. i’m assuming you prefer your ROs to be cis because you assume their biological sex will match what you want to play your PC as interested in, physically. it’s still wrong that you take issue with the way a trans character is written simply because the character didn’t reveal their being trans in a way that suited you.
you’re not inconvenienced or trapped by this character being trans and not ‘revealing’ their transness (which is already a pretty cis-centric, and i’d even venture to say discriminatory, concept). it is an imaginary character in a game, which you can stop playing or restart at any time. as harris said:
Huh.
I realize I may have worded my earlier comments poorly, with saying I felt “baited” being a bit insensitive and carried implications I didn’t intend.
I want to be clear that I respect trans women as women, and my point was only about my own attraction preferences, not about invalidating anyone’s identity.
I apologize for the phrasing and any offense caused, and I’ll step back from this topic so this thread doesn’t derail further.
Anyways, back to the original topic. I suppose another type of RO I don’t like are the ones the MC are obviously supposed to end up with, but have shallow writing at best. Specifically, from the Heroes Rise games.
I don’t understand how people manage to romance Ava/Adam in Wayhaven and I’m not even talking about their romance being the world’s slowest burn. I don’t like them as characters, an they annoy me so much that my MCs always have a bad relationship with them.
Oh, and I always shoot them 
Julian of Their Majesties’ Pleasure, Julian was a decent character until he became obsessed with the cabaret, talking about nothing else. Even on a monogamous route, he clearly would have preferred to be dating everyone. The worst part is that the idiot Rogue comes as a bonus.