This discourse was going around twitter today apparently and im curious takes from here.
Which is it for you?
For me i prefer playersexuality. I want to be able to romance any romance option regardless of my charachters gender. I dont want to be stuck with only Arcade Gannon if i want to do m/m
I agree that sexuality can be important to a charachter. But if you wanna do that, seems like the charachter can just not be a romance option.
That said. In RPGs devs can do what they want. You want a charachter to be monosexual and a romance option, have at it. (Unless theyre all straight, then fuck you).
I do kinda hate what The Sims did by adding monosexuality. Felt like such a virtue signal that made the game less fun. All Sims being pansexual was always more fun for me. Especially since i usually play that game as a pansexual slut. Unless i decide my player Sim is mono, but thats on the player’s end.
Monosexual townies in the Sims should at least be optional (is it? Idk havent played Sims 4 since this update).
I think it’s honestly better to view it through the lens of it being a game design tool moreso than a philosophical debate. If you want to emphasize player choice and freedom, playersexual. If you want to emphasize characterization and worldbuilding, set sexuality.
If you’re going to incorporate dating sim components into your game, it’s generally better to lean towards playersexual. Otherwise, you run into a sort of zugzwang where you can
a) lock romance options to het (e.g. Persona) and alienate queer people, even worse when you don’t have a gender option which also alienates 50% of said hets, or
b) have set sexuality and allow some queer relationships with certain characters (e.g. Fire Emblem: Three Houses) but have people annoyed about the arbitrariness of it, especially when there are no characters that cannot be romanced in a heterosexual way but limited queer options.
I think there’s space for set sexuality, especially in linear, narrative-driven RPGs (e.g. Final Fantasy, Undertale, Zelda). Set sexuality really works when you want to emphasize relationships between characters that the protagonist/player character is not party to (e.g. ) Furthermore, set sexuality, when there is a romance mechanic, best works when you establish a boundary between player and character.
Ultimately, it’s a choice of what you want to grant to the player, as well as the distance between the player and the protagonist. If you want to let the player choose between characters to romance in the game, and that’s an aspect that is a design component within the game, you’re usually better off sticking to playersexual, unless you want to take a hyperrealistic angle to it. If you don’t want to incorporate that aspect into your game, there’s genuinely no need, stick to set sexuality. If you want to establish the protagonist as a character that exists outside of the player embodying them, lean towards set sexuality.
I honestly am just tired of romance being attached as a weird afterthought to certain RPGs. It’s sterile when it’s not handled with a modicum of care, and it definitely cements the whole unease-inducing ‘escapist power fantasy’ vibe you get in RPGs that take this approach alongside emphasizing openness. If you’re gonna let me date, let me date. If not, why bother?
Now I feel weird because the discussions here are great, in depth, and nuanced, but the way I feel about this is kinda boring and uncomplicated? Am I missing something?
If I’m playing a customized character that I made, I prefer characters to be playersexual, allowing custom relationships to match my custom character.
If I’m playing as a written character and experiencing a set story, it is better for all characters to be written well, and have realistic sexualities, as part of the story presented.
As far as representation goes, I think both can have problems, but neither are inextricably problematic.
basically i want good queer characters whose queerness isn’t ignorable and is a notable facet of their lives. i think playersexual characters are often a copout, where they write a heterosexual character and then let them date the mc, but if they’re textually bi or pan or ace or something than it’s fine by me. just make sure they aren’t consistently het except for the mc i hate that shit
like i see people talking fire emblem. dorothea is into women! it’s very simple to make the playersexual thing work, just have good writing
I actually can’t even remember the last time a video game character was actually bi or pan rather than just player sexual and that sucks.
as mentioned, fire emblem three houses! dorothea openly talks about being into women and is constantly flirting with them, and has an ending where she’s explicitly in a relationship with another women that isn’t the player character (and who the player character can’t romance as a woman, but can as a man. it’s definitely not perfect!) similar things for plenty of other characters, as laid out by orannis62, where queerness is a part of the world and different places and people have different relationships with it. adrestia seems to be much more chill about it, given dorothea can openly say she’s looking to marry a woman and monica’s whole deal, whereas faerghus is incredibly restrictive and several characters in it are implied to be queer but repressing or closeted because of social pressures
this is the kind of thing i want more of in games, to acknowledge how characters’ queerness affects them and how their environments shape their queerness. and i don’t necessarily want every game to do this. in a perfect world there would be some stardew valleys as well, where it’s just everyone is bi and that’s not a big deal it just means you can choose to date anyone who’s dateable, and it wouldn’t matter because there would be plenty of games that seriously think about it.
3 Houses is also interesting in that, like, you can make a solid case that Ingrid is gay but is restricted by her society’s expectations for what it means to be a crested noble, especially a woman crested noble. The subtext with Felix and Sylvain is also pretty strong and along the same lines, as with why Gilbert left his family. Then there’s Hubert and his devotion to a queer woman who wants to tear down the system causing people to repress like this.
There’s a lot of writing just under the surface that has interesting things to say about queerness and what it means to dismantle the systems that suppress it that I wish had been much more explicit.
yeah! it’s not all explicit, but they make enough stuff explicit that i definitely believe the rest is intentional. i wish they had actually dug a little deeper though, it might have made a lot of the discussion around the game more related to the actual events of it and it would have definitely made me happier as a player
I just want to be gay with Garrus and lesbian with Tali
In Wrath of the Righteous, the one female love interest only available to male PCs is a flesh-eating serial killer, which should be the standard for romancable heterosexual characters.
