Originally Posted by 7TeenWriters
@Hilarian Big agree to all of this, thanks for sharing your perspective.

I guess to elaborate more too on why I feel so strongly about doings something a little different than how it is now though: As much as I feel like older BG could be a little better than other games of its time, the wish fulfilment aspect still encourages a kind of toxic mentality about what flirting looks like. I blame games like Mass Effect more (which I also love, even as I'll critique it), but a lot of the wish fulfilment dating targeted at men I kind of blame for the specific breed of toxicity we can get in nerdy straight men these days. I've lost friends over people who would play out behaviors like this in real life because they got too sucked up in fantasy dating. Opening up that kind of fantasy to everyone is great, but the structure of that fantasy and the message it sends players should also be examined at the same time. One thing I liked about Mass Effect (though it definitely wasn't explored enough) was the fact that you could be too forward with Jack and actually completely fuck up that friendship by being too sexually forward with someone with trauma. Little lessons about how people have feelings and just being nice to them doesn't always get you into their pants would seriously be a positive if implemented more frequently in games like this.

Also on representation, a straight dude I can't really comment, just pass on, but one of my gay friends on FB was talking about how Astarion and Gale's romances still feel very targeted towards women even if you can technically experience them with a gay character. For all of these issues it would be really nice to have more diverse writing teams on games like this, because as you note the big issue with a lot of how token gay representation has been shoved in games is that it's still usually written from the perspective of heterosexual men (or occasionally heterosexual women).

@AvatarOfSHODAN

I don't know as much about Lae'zel but yeah, personally had zero complaints as a player about Astarion's method of approaching me. He felt believable, even if my character hates his guts at this point. The big thing is just giving players the option to skip it if they don't wanna deal. Again, if characters can just happen not to be into you based on approval, having some other hidden system or setting where you can set characters to not be into you would be cool.

You know, Fane had a wife and daughter in DOS2, so you can say that based on his tastes, he was 100% heterosexual. And yet, I was playing a male character and I was having romance with him. I never once thought about him "not enough" gay or bi. Try to stick to same position.

Astarion and Gale are not gays, so they don't need to be represented as that...

They can discuss about women, fall in love with goddesses, and dream of virgins for this very reason (cuz bi). And honestly, I don't care which gay person gets hurt by that fact.

I don't speak english well, but I try my best. Ty