Originally Posted by Niara
I'm not going to get to in detail to the real life comparisons here, but I do want to say that you aren't quite grasping what playersexuality in a game space is.

The characters aren't flipping or changing their sexual preference.

If you play a female PC, then the setting for the world is that it is full of people, and those people have many and varied preferences. Some will like one thing, some will like another, and most (this is canonically stated, in fact - the prevailing sexual orientation in the forgotten realms is bisexuality) will not actually gauge whether they have the potential to be interested in someone or not by that person's genital configuration.

If your female chooses to pursue a romance with shadowheart, then by happy coincidence, shadowheart is open to the idea of sharing intimacy with another woman - and this is the important bit - And she always was, in this version of the world space.

If you play a male character and pursue a romance with Gale, then by happy circumstance, Gale is, in fact, not adverse to interactions with another male - and unless they decide to write in dialogue and further conversation to talk about it being a new experiment for him, then he literally always was bisexual the entire time, in this version of the world space.

Nothing is being changed or flipped - this is just the world as it exists in this specific version of the game that you are playing in... and if it is a well-written world and story, then it will be believable and consistent.

Gale being interested in males that take his fancy is not contradicting anything - he hasn't spoken about any past male lovers, and his main previous love interest was Mystra - and frankly, if one of your previous lovers was a literal deity, it would be hard too bring up others instead - but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and you shouldn't assume it is. If I chat with someone about one of my female partners, does that mean I'm a lesbian? No. It doesn't. I may not have spoken about my deep and abiding love of cock as well, but that just means it hasn't come up (heh...). If that person assumes that I'm a lesbian, acts on that assumption, and later finds out I've got male partners too, are they right in accusing me of acting out of character (in real life...), or of 'flipping' my preferences? Fuck no they aren't... they made an assumption they should not have made, and that's entirely on them. If you make the assumption that his love of Mystra is the full definition of Gale's preferences, then that's on you; sadly in this game we don't have the capacity to ask the characters, so we just have to deal with their ham-fisted propositions for now, and yeah, it's pretty badly handled, but what it is not, as of yet, is self-contradicting.

Right now, we know that Gale and Wyll like women; this does not say anything about their tastes in men, and if a person feels that there is some contradiction here it is only because they made an assumption that they didn't have any right to make in the first place.

That aside, and Larian's dubious writing quality non-withstanding, the kinds of squishy bits that a person likes to play with most in the bedroom should not, generally, be a defining element of their personality and characterisation. If them liking all parts, or different parts to what was first expected, somehow unmakes, debilitates or destroys their character, then the character should probably be scrapped and rewritten anyway, because that's not the sort of thing that a character should be built around.

As far as the game goes... you talk as though the characters continue to assail you with their interest once you turn them down. They don't. I'm not sure where you're getting that idea from, or why you're phrasing your language that way. They ask, you tell them you're not interested, and they leave it be, done. It never comes up again. There's nothing wrong with asking - people shouldn't be discouraged from asking if a person is interested, or treated like they've made some kind of offence or violation just for asking. If they don't ask, they can't be clear; making assumptions and relying on circumstantial tells to make your decisions is the worse behaviour, of the two.


Well said.

So many people (especially Larian) seem to misunderstand the very nature of role playing in role playing games. Every new game is a new world/universe/reality.

LZ in your game is not the same character as LZ in mine. Not the same as LZ in another playthrough of mine. Not the same as any other anywhere else.