Why are there so many HGs genderlocked to male?

[idonotlikeusernames]

@TSSL

Well, for the record, I do almost exclusively play male characters (except dragons? ), though I’d say this is mainly because I feel very starved of stories with gay protagonists, and I really only go for male ROs, so there you go.

I think that goes for more of us, I mean I first came here because I could have nice, escapist stories with gay protagonists that didn’t end badly and/or didn’t resemble bad 1990’s sitcoms.

@TSSL

If a discriminatory society is going to be your setting, this is all the more reason for the story to really look into the people affected by the discrimination, and have a story about their experience. Yet I usually see “this society is sexist” being used to say “therefore I don’t need to write about women” rather than “therefore I shall write about women.”

Of course there’s odds that such a society is also highly sexist against gay or “effeminate”, trans or other guys who don’t exactly fall in line with its prevailing notions of “masculinity”, it may also be highly discriminating against its poor and unfortunate. So (some) guys get to experience a lot of discrimination as well.

@TSSL

Not that this is relevant to any actual points, but that description basically sounds like me

Get a better razor then TSSL. The bad shaving job wouldn’t score you much first impression points with real-life me, I like either clean-shaven or a well-groomed beard or mustache.

Then again you did once say:

@TSSL

Well, and as for me, I tend to enjoy male fashion in theory (i.e. cute guys in cute outfits) much more than in practice (which costs money and effort)

(So my MCs in CoGs tend to be much more fashionable than I am )

Mine just tend to be better looking, to the point where they can really pull of leather pants, which is a bit of a problem with my short legs, and maybe richer.

@TSSL

(Well, except I hope I’m not generic )

Aww…nobody is generic even if they don’t take very good care of themselves.

@TSSL

(Not that insecure boy- and clothes-obsessed women [or men for that matter ] are necessarily bad characters…

Thanks for that, cause that describes a lot of what I used to be aged 15-27, after that I just mostly got rid of the insecurity.

@TSSL

Yay… self-fulfilling prophecy… marketers are like “women aren’t buying this, so we’ll market it to men” and then no wonder that more men are buying them…

Except with the VN and to some extent JRPG genre it is the exact opposite, from what I’ve noticed.

@TSSL

Hmm, just thinking about solutions here, if that’s something that comes up more than once or twice, I don’t think it’d be weird to have a height choice. You could even possibly frame it using that scenario itself, like “NPC is very tall. He (towers over me since I’m so short / is still much taller than me even though I’m about average / is about the same height as me.)”

As somebody who very much likes to play cute tall-ish guys in his escapism, it depends there are some really huge women, they aren’t the norm however, unless you make a tribe of super-amazons or something.
If the setting is relatively normal I prefer the good lady to be dragging, rather than carrying my tall male out of danger, for example. Unless, again, she’s a superstrong superhero or something like that.

@TSSL

Ew, yeah, and this is also extremely aggravating if you have a male MC you want to play as gay

Agreed.

@TSSL

More subtly, I’ve also come across plenty of works that describe female characters in terms of attractiveness and male characters in terms of distinctive features, regardless of what the main character’s perspective’s supposed to be

Ideally that would depend on mc sexuality, for example just like it is in real-life for me, describe female characters by their distinctive features or accomplishments/fame (provided the mc knows of the latter) while describing male ro’s by how cute/attractive they are and mix that up for bi and straight. That is a lot of extra work though, so in a non-dating game I can forgive such transgressions rather easily.

@TSSL

But I think Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven has a good alternative approach, where it has extra descriptors for characters that will only display based on your MC’s sexual orientation.

That is a good approach, didn’t his other game “Wise use of time” also do this? Or am I getting confused here?

@TSSL

I haven’t read that game, but… yeah, this is the kind of thing I’d also object to as a gay male I’ve definitely run into imbalances elsewhere where, like, other characters would joke about shipping the main character with a female character and suchlike, and everyone would generally just act like they’re assuming you must be into women, which is a little distressingly like real life

This is highly annoying, particularly if the mc’s in-game supposed “friends” are the ones who are doing this since they should know he absolutely isn’t into women.

@TSSL

have there been any situations where it’s made sense for a game to be, say, DFAB-locked, or DMAB-locked, but the main character still gets to pick their own gender identity?

I think @iris Beauty and the Beast game came close in that I believe the main character is required to identify as female, but they can be a trans woman. Would help with disguises in certain situations, I suppose. Oh, and you can be a trans man in the “Dream Daddy” VN or romance one.

@ParrotWatcher

This is pretty much the reason I avoid male genderlocked games: I always feel that the game will be far harder to play as a gay guy (who’s looking for romance) than one which has female MCs and thus will spend more time on male ROs.

If it is a game where dating and romance is totally optional, it depends on the writer’s skill and the quality of the game for me.

@ParrotWatcher

Just once I’d like to see someone writing a male genderlocked game with only male ROs available…

Oh, I agree. Maybe write a gay dating one for the upcoming Heart’s Choice label, though I don’t know if such a restriction would fit within their guidelines.