I found a lot of the sexual politics in Inquisition really took me out of the world because of how anachronistic they were. People will say that it's just fantasy, as though that can be used to explain away any kind of inconsistency, but when you're dealing with a low-fantasy European medieval setting, and add trans characters, or gay characters, you have to make an effort to incorporate those concepts into the setting or else the verisimilitude is questioned. There are plenty of gay people throughout history but that didn't change the dynamics of politics, nor does it change the realities of property rights in a highly feudal world. Just saying that gay marriage is considered normal by the fantasy catholic church isn't enough for a society that spends most of it's time and energy determining who owns what and has the best claim to this or that parcel of land. I kept thinking that during Dorian's subplot with his father, Byzantium was more permissive than Western Europe, but people still were expected to marry, and if your first-born and only son refused to, that is an issue with ramifications beyond...whatever it was Dorian's father was upset about. Not to mention how disruptive to a peasant community it could be for land to be owned by people with no generation coming up to take care of them, or stop whatever squabble over the land will inevitably come.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. For some fantasy is just a way of making allegory for their world, but I like going to a place that operates with different assumptions than my own.
I think that might be how I see the Forgotten Realms too, but because it's such a hodge-podge of settings, and genres, to a much lesser degree. Now if we're going extraplanar, that's another matter.
