I was under the impression that Vallen was aroace due to her interactions in book 1, and the comments Ana has made on the tumblr page about the character not understanding romance. To be honest, I feel disappointed that she’s a romance option, a lot in part because my aroace friends are feeling disappointed and hurt by the decision to make her a romance. I feel for aroace players, and I feel sad that they have lost what they felt was representation within this story.
I also feel a bit nervous about the already-large number of love interests expanding. I’m worried it will put more stress on Ana, and risks focus bloat or drawing resources away from the development of already planned love interests.
In regards to Neia and the Pirate, I understand for coding reasons the idea of making them bisexual instead of enforcing a genderlock, but in Neia’s case, it actively removes representation from the lesbian community, and feels weird to me to alter a character so that she can be more available for men.
Before Fallen Hero 2 came out, the author of it actually considered making Wei Chen/Steel bi instead of gay. Similarly to Neia, he was a character introduced in the first book, and was initially announced to be a love interest for only male Sidesteps. The backlash was strong enough that the decision was rescinded, leaving Wei Chen an option only for gay and masc-nb Sidesteps. Altering a gay man to be attracted to women or a lesbian to be attracted to men can carry some really bad connotations that has been shown historically to upset readers in the IF community. It also kind of feels sad to take away an aspect of representation for one community, only to substitute it for a different one. I really hope the writer reconsiders making Neia bisexual instead of a lesbian. Frankly, I feel uncomfortable with this decision, and how it’s handled going forward will be impacting the likelihood of me playing book 2.
Neia was a murderous fanatical woman with few screws loose in the head, so if we’re talking representation it’s already not a good one for lesbians either. Making her the only lesbian probably would have been a bad idea as well, and this way she’s at least not another example of, well, “psycho lesbian” trope.
Vallen didn’t strike me as aroace either, just severely overworked.
So making her a depraved bisexual is somehow better? If we’re going to discuss problematic tropes, that’s a massive one as well. Either way, she would still invoke that sort of trope to her critics.
Besides, should we not support women’s wrongs too?
It’s not coding reasons. I can’t imagine it’s in any way hard to genderlock romance paths, especially when the game ALREADY checks for your gender ina variety of situations. It’s effort-to-content-ratio reasons. You get more content for your effort if you don’t genderlock romances. Most people don’t replay games that much, and I’d bet most of those that do don’t do so with different-gender MCs, so if you make genderlocked content you’re spending time and effort in something that a good chunk of your customers will never see for little to no gain.
(for the record, I have no dog in this race - Neia was a willing murderer for the Inquisition so I have no interest in her, and Vallen liking you the bigger your mark is such a red flag that my interest in her is also now in the negatives)
She was a big supporter of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces party, until the leopards came to eat HER face.
Vallen just struck me as someone who zoned out repeatedly.
We should not support anyone’s wrongs. Because they’re, well, wrongs.
I support women’s wrongs as well, don’t get me wrong, but at least in terms of bi characters we have a pretty good palette of them.
She’s not the only bisexual character and her being a Farnese-type beat doesn’t paint her sexuality in any ill light, we have other examples of it. It makes people focus more on her personality over sexuality, I think, and it’s probably better in a long run to avoid questions like “why is your only lesbian a batshit Farnese?”
Is that a common question in terms of interactive fiction books? Generally it’s assumed that, unless it’s tied to their backstory in a major way, that all characters are bisexual unless the setting is hostile to it.
Like, I would not want to change Dorian to a bisexual man because his entire personal quest centers on it, but I see no reason not to make Blackwall or Solas bi, it would help Bioware to break from the standards of “you’re a rogue with a tragic backstory, you will be a bisexual romance option”.
We should support all wrongs if the person doing them is hot enough!
I don’t know what a Farnese is. I also think that the stated reasoning the author had that Neia’s sexuality is irrelevant to her story and that’s why she’s not making her a lesbian is problematic in and of itself, as it implies that gay/lesbian characters should only have a presence if their orientation matters directly to the story. I’m quite okay with an “evil” lesbian character, because her sexuality has nothing to do with why she is that way. As you said yourself, we have a cast with queer people in it already, so we already know that there’s characters portrayed in a positive light.
It’s not common, but there are stories that have made romances gay or straight for a variety of reasons, some story-related and some for no reason at all. I would link some examples, but I am prepping for a party at the moment, alas.
Actually, one of the reasons Solas is not bi is because Patrick Weekes cited the depraved bisexual trope as a reason not to make him queer.
Questions of representation? Yeah, they’re pretty stock. The whole “all cast is bisexual” is something of a relatively recent development. I think it’s in large part caused by the outcry over some of romances being gender-locked in Dragon Age: Origins, and before then it wasn’t uncommon for characters to be gender-exclusive.
It’s not that I’m against making her as she is, I’m arguing for more options or not bothering at all with gendelock. If Neia was the only female romance available for women, I would probably be extremely annoyed, as I usually am with most mainstream m/m romance options. It’s thankfully not the case, but still, if, according to author’s posts gender of Neia matters more than her orientation and her orientation doesn’t seem to matter much… I mean, representation is great, don’t get me wrong, but how exactly is gendelock fair to anyone if it doesn’t affect the story between the characters?
And yet most people eagerly await from them to put a Knight in Shining Armour as something available for men as well for… three games or so in Dragon Age for sure. I think it’s not the problem of Depraved Bisexual, it’s making such a small of a pool for queer romances that you have to make such choices.
It seems like that’s the reason that this happened, that the characters’ sexuality wouldn’t really come into play, plotwise, hence the change. That the pirate king, who was straight before this, is also getting the change, seems to signify that
I don’t mind setting Neia on fire, along with the rest of the Inquisition and, in fact, the entire Church.
She already says why she’s making Neia (from lesbian) and the Pirate (from straight) bi in her tumblr:
In short, their orientation affects neither the story nor their romance path in any way, so there’s far more to gain and pretty much nothing to lose in making them available to every MC.
Only an author of that character can answer this. A character is written by an author with all sorts of things in mind, and in some very important cases (ie. Tommy and Steel) these characters are written with orientation in mind.
When an author changes their character, their intentions and motivations are key to understanding why genderlock may or may not be a factor.
I have not read Anathema’s posts, but if even if they say Neia, the character places more importance on her gender identity than on orientation, that does not invalidate that orientation may still be a part of Neia’s identity of who she is.
That, right there, is the potential issue.
Everything depends on Anathema
Now I am going to bow out because I see others furiously typing, and I do not want you to feel I am dogpiling you.
Edit:
Representation is there to lose, if this is her intent and motivation, then I stand with @RedRoses on this issue. I won’t boycott the story, but I do hope Anathema does reconsider this taking loss of representation into account.
Hello hello! I made an account to comment on this, I hope that’s okay. I also posted about this on the Discord server but I figured going to the forums as well to express my opinions wouldn’t hurt.
I for one am not at all in favor of either making Vallen an RO or of making the Pirate King and Neia bisexual. I admit I have no skin in the game on the Pirate King, he doesn’t appeal to me, but I disagree with a few folks here—I think the fact that Neia is the lesbian fallen Inquisitor of a religion that does historically discriminate against queer folks is a big deal, and while it may not be a major part of her story, I do consider it a huge part of her character considering her disillusionment.
As for Vallen, I confess that I did read her as either aroace or demiromantic asexual from the way Ana wrote her and treated her in her other content, and I am not in favor of her becoming an RO. I would absolutely love to see her as a queerplatonic option for Romanus, but the fundamental change of her not getting/not being interested in romance to her suddenly being receptive in book 2 sits with me the wrong way.
Nai, don’t worry about dogpiling. Honestly, for me it’s… just the question of applied effort and how much this effort is important for the story.
Neia climbed the ranks with great issue because she was a woman in a male-dominated structure. That, to me, is the most important part of her character that is defined by something she wasn’t able to choose.
Now, to switch to my own future LI as an example of applied effort. Imagine a very… homely woman that developed crippling misanthropy from years of constant mockery and social isolation, where issues caused by her lack of beauty only served to make her conditions worse.
Said woman then developed an ability to freely change her appearance at will and saw that the same people that mocked her now worshipped her based only on the fact she was now a beauty beyond compare, and this only served to develop her cynicism and start treating people as tools in a vicious example of dog biting back. Can I make her a man? It doesn’t seem very likely, given the fact her main issue stem from lack of beauty and beauty being a very important part of woman’s social roles here. She’s a representation of how vicious said roles can be and she experienced both sides of it.
Her orientation seems to me like something of an afterthought compared to that. She can be lesbian, but I don’t see a reason to since the cast of LIs is limited in my future game and so is the case with Golden Rose (I think until the reveal there was an imbalance where male LIs prevailed over female ones in number), and I don’t see a reason to make her straight either, since her orientation isn’t something that deeply affected her, her gender and social roles based on her gender did. If I gendelock her, I’ll definitely piss people off and waste a lot of effort seeing scenes a chunk of people won’t see at all.
Neia seems to me like a similar case. Her gender largely affected her life experiences and if there’s no further expansion on how her sexuality affected it, it’s… I just wonder if it’s worth it to do this if all you get is “man, I hate genderlocked romances” if it’s not something akin to Chen, where his sexuality is woven into his experiences.
Besides, in my experience with gendelocked romances, someone always gets screwed over by them.
Eh, the vast majority of players do not go to forums or tumblrs, so the only people who would even know about Neia would MAYBE (depending on how she shut them down) be people a) playing male characters AND b) trying to romance Neia and the only people who’d know about the Pirate would be people a) playing male characters and b) trying to romance the Pirate.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of people who Neia and the Pirate would be representing would never learn of this.
Or, more to the point, someone does NOT get screwed by them.
That’s very interesting because the way I’ve interpreted Vallen’s character, her ditziness and ‘not getting’ romance was never… supposed to be genuine. Her speech was full of implied threats and references to things she was not supposed to know - in order to maybe imply Vallen is a shady, potentially villainous character.
