Let me propose another scenario for you, as you seem to love these: You’re sitting alone at a party. You’re a straight man. Another man walks up to you and begins flirting with you. You’re flattered, but not interested. So you say, “Sorry, I’m not interested”. The other man takes this as a sign to not flirt anymore. End.
I have a feeling that the women whom you flirted with weren’t comfortable enough with you to simply tell you “no”.
LeoXII
148
Yes, that would be the point of establishing an excuse: In social situations not everyone wants to be the asshole. It’s much more preferable to let people down easy with the knowledge that they aren’t attracted to men/women/whoever, then to look at someone and go “Nope, not interested in you.”
Many social environments rather encourage the ability to not burn bridges like that. I’m actually still friends with the woman I referenced before, and we go to trivia with a group every other week, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that the precedent was established beforehand.
Basically, (most) people prefer to let others down easy. That’s why they use that tactic instead of flat out denial. It’s a courtesy most of the time, rather than a means of vilification.
I feel as though we’ve gotten off-topic. The original issue was with a game character, specifically, you - the player - interacting with a fictional gay man. Again: this is not real life.
Anyway, there should be no bridges burned in the simple response of “Sorry, I’m not interested.” Most people would not find that offensive at all.
Eiwynn
150
This discussion is becoming a circular argument. To avoid that: if you have already stated your position, please take a short break and allow others to share their perspective too. Please avoid repetitively hammering a single view without adding anything new.
Sniping back and forth will often lead to the system closing the thread down, let’s avoid this if we can.
Finally, if you see disrespectful posts please do not reply to them. Rather, please use the report feature and let forum staff deescalate friction.
The discussion on reacting to being hit on is off-topic and should be moved to its own thread or stopped.
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Speaking of the topic, I -was- annoyed at Zevran in DAO because he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Apparently Bioware screwed up his dialogue code and only shut down the flirting if you harshly rejected him the first time. If you tried to let him down easy that first time the variable to turn off his attempts to get into your pants never got set and he keeps flirting with you for the rest of the game. Predictably the overwhelming majority of complaints on Bioware’s forum were because he was hitting on male players, and not because you couldn’t tell him no or get him to stop. I ended up parking his overly horny derriere in camp for very nearly the entire game as a result.
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don’t you guys mean DAO ? Zevran only show up briefly in DAI…and you can even decide if he show up or not in the keep…
I thought the subject of being hit-on was off-topic?
LeoXII
155
Allow me to ask something that can be considered, if it hasn’t already, which is the relation between sexuality and promiscuity. Obviously there are specific stereotypes regarding this that are reflected in writing. An interesting point that Eiwynn brings up
Is the function of using sexuality and promiscuousness as a sort of critic or satire for certain characters.
What do you believe would be a good middle ground on this since it can point in either extreme quite frequently?
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LeoXII
157
The Whore of Babylon should be a considerable mention in that regard
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Is his “sexuality” creepy or his sexual advances? The implication of the former is problematic.
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Knowing that Zevran is bisexual and being bisexual myself, it’s disheartening to learn that he came across as creepy or, like I’ve touched upon earlier - predatory. This is a stereotype that plagues our already limited visibility in media.
It’s notable that Leliana - another bisexual - is also a foreigner.
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LeoXII
161
I do think this will help. I believe there is criticism regarded towards them, and the game does show that, although mostly towards his promiscuity. And also, as stated, his status as being foreign is stated.
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I’m not understanding how the London bus attack is relevant here.
LeoXII
164
I believe it’s a reference to the negativity of female sexualities seen in others and portrayed in the media, but I won’t get far into that considering it’s not an area I have advanced knowledge on.
In light of the talk of promiscuity: It’s interesting to me because my work in progress currently holds a heavily ‘flirtatious, fun-loving, risk-taker archetype’ character. I have not really received any points regarding them though, even though in a lot of topics there’s many people considering those qualities as being overbearing and negative, so I’m wondering if it’s the promiscuity and sexuality of NPCs in general, or just people not liking certain genders of NPC being overly flirtatious to a character that has no sexual attraction to that gender.
(When I think about it, it seems kinda double-standard-ish? haha)
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Guess I wouldn’t be a fan of a male character being constantly overly flirtatious with my MC, but I’d be fine with a female character acting like that even tho the chances are high that she wouldn’t be the one I choose to romance. For example in Wayhaven Chronicles I’m not interested in romancing Farah, but neither do I wish for a “punch her in the face” option. Maybe once again gender flipping is the safest way to go?
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LeoXII
166
Yeah, I think that’s why I allowed players to choose the gender of ros in my book, but i just found it interesting seeing the different reactions people have in other threads, specifically ones like “what would you look for in an RO” and the like. And I see many stating their absolute detest of having characters express their sexuality to them without player input.
I think Farah is a good example of a middle ground character that’s promiscuous/flirtatious but requires reception from the MC to fully delve through that personality.
I agree with you. Farah is a well done flirtatious character. She uses all that pick up lines and innuendos, but she still respects the MC and doesn’t come off as creepy.
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Yup, It’s been a few years so I was thinking in terms of I as in the first title, and not I as in Inquisition. I should have used DAO instead of DAI to make things less confusing. My bad.
Bioware never acknowledged that Zevran’s dialogue was broken, but this wasn’t the only time where there was only a single non-intuitive dialogue opportunity to set an important variable. Bioware also got a lot of flak about how you had to be verbally cruel to Alistair at one crucial moment in the game in order to harden him enough to make a good ruler. In Alistair’s case Bioware admitted that providing only a single non-intuitive opportunity was a problem and promised that they would make an effort to provide multiple and/or more obvious opportunities to set important plot & character variables in the future.
Had Bioware not been taken over by the bean counters over at EA I expect they’d have fixed those issues instead of only promising to do better next time. Apparently EA thinks fixing any bugs that don’t cause the game to crash to be a waste of dollars since bug-fixing sucks up valuable developer time but doesn’t generate any additional revenue. There are a lot of very real bugs in DA that never got fixed for this reason. The toolset made them obvious if you used it to poke through their code. Of course EA had them kill support for the toolset too… 
I know a lot of people here have issues with the Witcher series, but one thing I did love about CDProjektRed was their dedication to stamping out every last bug. With Bioware post-EA, if a large enough army of fans didn’t scream bloody murder (eg. the love letters not showing up bug in Awakening), Bioware pretended they didn’t exist.
I do think Zevran was intended to be a submissive male slut. The sluttiness I suspect was intended to be a reversal of the more usual trope aimed at women. I don’t think the writers considered how making him bi would cause him to fit an altogether different negative stereotype. Neither do I think they intended him to be creepy. I’ve read through all of his character notes and dialogues in the game code, and that dispelled my initial impression that he was creepy. He’s more of an extremely eager to please puppy who because of poorly thought out code…won’t stop trying to hump your leg. But if you don’t learn all that by code-digging, yeah, he can come across as creepy.
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Laguz
169
I think it’s also important to note that they learned from this and were more cautious with it - at least for DAI.
Solas was meant to be bi, but it was realised that making a bisexual character the villain, if you will, or at least a very morally dark grey character could be seen as equating an extremist with bisexuality, and the decision was made to make him straight.
Too bad they couldn’t learn anything regarding trans people, but this is fine. I’m fine. I’m okay with the events that have unfolded so far. I’m fine. It’s fine.
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It’s kind of odd/has to be tough to write anything I feel when everything you write is just boiled down to tropes, positive and negative. Seems like your going to step on toes with whatever you do. Not to mention kind of limit their work alot. I don’t envy that position.
Sorry if this comment was off topic.
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