Maybe he wasn't there from the start because none of the squadmates were gay.KAPTAINmORGANnWo4life said:
Don't romance anyone in Mass 1 & 2 and then have a gay romance in 3.
It's Cortez the shuttle pilot...Fappy said:
Jimquisition: Mass Effect 3 And The Case For A Gay Shepard
- Thread starter Jimothy Sterling
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Don't romance anyone in Mass 1 & 2 and then have a gay romance in 3.
OK, broadly speaking there are eight typical sexualities; forgetting the asexuals and those attracted to the androgynous, as well as the entire trans community (complex fuckers that they are).kingpocky said:
(a) Male, straight and dominant;(b) male, straight and submissive;(c) male, gay and dominant;(d) male, gay and submissive.(e) Female, straight and dominant;(f) female, straight and submissive; (g) female, gay and dominant;(h) female, gay and submissive.
Shepherd, the character, can naturally be played by: a, c, e and g. The dominants, not the submissives.
a is the default male. e and g are females that are more masculine than they are feminine, they also conform to the idea of the "different" female that being a butch woman immediately conjures up. c is legitimate but runs counter to the gut response of what that "different" gay man is, so runs into ill advised opposition.
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My point is that playing a butch lesbian is entirely comfortable for the male psyche. It's actually preferable to playing a sexually dominant straight woman, because there the player either has to identify with a bloke being boned by the woman or a woman boning a bloke; neither of which comes naturally to the majority of men (or playing a submissive woman, of either sexuality). Any of those others are, of course, completely normal but they aren't catered for by this game.
The game is for the masculine, whether they be male or female.
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I'm not saying that femshep isn't female because she has male traits, I'm saying that the story was just not written for a female (implying feminine) character.
You may as well say that King Arthur was Queen Arthur. A woman could do all that but if the story doesn't acknowledge how completely counter to the vast majority of women Queen Arthur is then it's all just bollocks really.
Except that Tali and Garrus opening as romance options made sense in ME2, and almost precisely because it wouldn't have in ME1.goliath6711 said:
In the first game, Tali is an engineer you saved from hitmen and took into your motley crüe for the purposes of fighting an ultimate evil. Garrus was a cop who knew that something big was going down, but couldn't fight it within the constraints of the law. As such, neither are romance options.
Come the events of Mass Effect 2? Tali already sees you as the person who took her in when most of the galaxy considers quarians to be thieving space gypsies, and you were one of the only friendly faces she knew aboard the rebuilt Normandy. Between that and the relationship (general, that is) that built over the course of ME1 and the events between the games, her becoming a romance option made sense.
As for Garrus...when you find him, he's in the process of committing suicide by mercenary. Virtually every person he cared about in his new life on Omega was dead, and he held himself responsible. He was ready to die on a mountain of corpses when you, a forgotten friend from what must have seemed a lifetime ago, arrives, effectively stopping his suicide attempt, and then saving his life in the process. And, like Tali, you're virtually the best friend he has aboard the SR2, etc, etc.
A man with muscles that look like they were carved in marble, and a woman who was genetically engineered to be hot and fit...and all we know is that the relationship didn't work out, and that neither of them likes to discuss it.Jinxey said:
I'm not going to tiptoe around it: that's a pretty easy point for Bioware to leverage if they want Jacob to be a romance option for men.
In DA2, the class you picked determines which of your siblings dies in the tutorial. See the similarity? You're using meta-knowledge of the game that would have no bearing on your first playthrough. You might as well be complaining about how predictable the plot is once you know how the story plays out.Jinxey said:
I'm a bit confused by the distinction you're making here. How does "switch[ing]...sexuality at the drop of the hat" differ from being bisexual?Jinxey said:
Mass Effect presents a situation that can't possible be replicated in the real world: you have the chance to approach the same situation twice, each time as a different gender. If you hooked up with Jacob as a male Shepard, would your character accuse him of faking it because, in a parallel universe/alternate save file, you did the same thing as a female Shepard?
That's the thing about being bisexual: a lot of the time, it just means that the person's gender doesn't matter to you. If Jacob was attracted to Shepard when the latter was a male, how is it so impossible that the same couldn't be true for a female Shepard? And in both situations, the opposite could still be true, but is ultimately as irrelevant as a hypothetical scenario.
As I mentioned earlier, meta-knowledge from multiple playthroughs. In theory, you'd have one, maybe two romantic partners during the game. You likely won't know what most characters' orientation will be during a single playthrough. I played DA2 as a male first, and I thought that Anders was gay. Second playthrough as female, and I discover that he swings both ways. In my first run, I never knew that, and I had no way of knowing it. I didn't retroactively get the knowledge that he was bisexual from by second playthrough, and it didn't sour the experience of the first at all.FedericoV said:
So why does it matter if other characters are, theoretically, bisexual? Unless you plan to interrogate each member of the crew, you won't find out, and by then I think you've got a few more problems to deal with.
No. Nor would I likely find out, because I wouldn't be pursuing a romance with each of them. That's the crucial thing here: I wouldn't know, nor would I really care to know, if person #5 was bisexual if I already hit it off with person #2. That's what's supposed to characterize romance: happiness where you are, not where you think you could've been.goliath6711 said:
No. No it wouldn't. Not in the slightest. In fact, that's one of the most caustic things I've heard about romance in recent memory.goliath6711 said:
Imagine out of those seven people, five were heterosexual (and of your gender), one was bisexual, and one was gay. Now, imagine that upon meeting one of the seven, the two of your hit it off immediately. You seem perfect for one another...and then it turns out that's one of the heterosexual ones. Then eventually you discover that you don't really share much in common interest-wise with the gay person, and you and the bisexual outright hate one another. I'll let you pick the specifics.
Your scenario only does one thing: it gives players the opportunity to experience the crushing reality that actual homosexuals face where gender and orientation can destroy a relationship before it even exists. It doesn't "mean so much more" to find out that the only people in a group that you like will never like you in the same way, nor is it "that much more special" to be faced with going to bed alone or hooking up with someone you don't like as a person.
Do we really still need to discuss this bull crap? Why are people so ignorant!
A dragged out episode this week I felt, but points were argued well. Thank you for you.
A dragged out episode this week I felt, but points were argued well. Thank you for you.
I'm not seeing the particular statistic you cite; would be happy to look at a link. Will note, however, that the article here:maxben said:
[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orientation[/link]
across various surveys and studies tends to list bisexuality as topping out around 10%, and in most cases much lower. Even San Francisco, famously gay-friendly, is listed as having a Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual population of only 15.4% as of a 2006 estimate.
Now, of course, I certainly recognize there are any number of ways to skew such results, that different polling pools and different means of questioning are quite likely to provide different results, and even that the communities in which LGBT people find themselves may affect the way they self-self report. The singer Boy George long claimed to be bisexual because he didn't want to admit that he was simply homosexual.
Still, available evidence suggests the likelihood of Shepherd having multiple human crew-members who self-identify as bisexual to the point of being willing to proposition their commanding officer of either gender to engage in a quasi-illicit sexual relationship... would seem to me relatively small. At least, as I've said, without some explanation of how things have changed since our era.
Yes. Just, yes. I don't think I can say anything that anyone else hasn't already brought up, but I just have to agree so strongly with this video.
Absolutely. There is no need for complaints about the romance options in ME3 with regards to sexuality, it's just a waste of time and air to complain.Alrocsmash said:
I'm still dumfounded by the fact that people are pissed off about same sex romances in Mass Effect 3. Out of all the complaints that people have been flinging out, that is without a doubt the worst.
And to the dude/dudette that said homosexuality it's a mental illness.
And to the dude/dudette that said homosexuality it's a mental illness.
True, although that's probably a necessity given how the whole thing works. The writers can only put so much content into the game, and only fit so many choices into the dialogue wheel. It's a good idea for Shepard to have the same choices regardless of gender. Thus, they concentrate the choice into how Shepard goes about doing things. There's not really much space for feminine or masculine, so Shepard acts in ways that are more stereotypically male, because it fits better with the special forces military operative protagonist that s/he canonically is.kurupt87 said:
Interestingly, I notice you try and sidestep a lot of the points I was raising before my responses to the last article got derailed by someone asking me to explain my own thoughts on homosexuality... and things pretty much went in a totally differant direction.
Not to mention in the course of making your own arguement you entirely overlooked Kelly from Mass Effect 2, which is a FAR better counterpoint than trying to pick on people's arguements about Liara since there isn't anything even remotely ambigious about what you can get up to with Kelly. Lesbianism has been a part of Mass Effect... period, it can't be argued at this point, and no amount of semantics about Liara can change that.
That said, I notice the following points, probably should have been addressed before dismissing everything as being small minded:
The issue of writing in general, and forcing writers to include groups of people on demand or be considered a group of bigots. Forcing representation of minority groups in the media virtually never ends well, whether the minority is defined socially, ethically, sexually, or anything else. Indeed I'd go so far as to say everyone on these forums can probably point a finger at at least ONE property that was ruined, or greatly diminished, by forced political correctness.
Bioware can in no way be considered bigoted or homophobic, they have lesbians in Mass Effect, and they have had gay men in other titles ranging from "Jade Empire" to "Dragon Age: Origins" nobody raised this big a stink, because those characters were not being written in against the intentions of the writers due to demand.
Basically, a creator should have the right to create what they want, not be pressured because they decide to include a couple forms of sexuality but not all of them.
In your response you go on about homosexuality not being tied directly to pedophillia. That's great, but your point is greatly diminished by the simple fact that it doesn't touch on central issue of this being a matter of political demand, or of the other sexual deviations (deviation as other than the norm) that by the same logic could demand equal or superior entitlement. I raised questions like those that are into scat, extreme BDSM, or other assorted things, many of which probably have heterosexuals involved in numbers globally that outnumber the entire population of homosexuals of both genders. If you start saying you HAVE to do this, which is what this comes down to, because Bioware made it pretty clear they didn't want to, it opens the door for any group that wants to make similar demands to come forward and do the same exact thing.
The basic point here being that everything else I said unrelated to the issue of Mass Effect 3 aside, there isn't anything fundementally wrong with Bioware choosing to include male homosexual options, the thing that has made this an issue is the massive protests to FORCE them to put this kind of thing into the game, simply because they chose to do so before with other games.
Had these disputes never happened, and Bioware chose to put a gay male option into ME3 on their own because it fit a character they wanted to write, you wouldn't be seeing this as an issue. I for example wouldn't have a whole lot to say about it, my entire stance aside, any more than I did when "Dragon Age: Origins" and "Jade Empire" came out (both of which are games I've played, and "Origins" happens to be one of my favorite RPGs of the current generation).
The point here is that your schtick aside, there are valid points your not choosing to address, and which I think dilute the impact of your statements. I'd also say that I'd be careful in what position you take, when your forming yourself up to be a critic. This issue is MUCH bigger than homosexuality, and down the road if you decide to make complaints about extraneous characters or politics ruining something... anything, what your saying here could come back to haunt you. Being stuck in a position of trying to explain how forced inclusion in something else is a problem, when your saying it's okay with homosexuality isn't going to be easy to argue your way out of as once you start saying it's okay for one group it's hard to say it about others.
Unrelated to homosexuality, think back to the fight between Joss Whedon and the networks that ended with his name winding up being mud for a while. According to some things I read a lot of that revolved around the lack of minority characters outside of bit, supporting roles in the series. The executives wound up telling him flat out he needed to start writing in minority characters with meaningful roles. The last, and perhaps weakest season was allegedly the result of politics with a lot of the sub plots like the demon-fighting principal, and the occasional shift in focus to a young, black girl slayer who had little to do with much of anything, all being the result of forced compromise and additions that he had to make to the plot to satisfy network executives, which eventually lead to a falling out over creative control.
The point being that Joss Whedon isn't a racist as you can see by his casting of things like Firefly where he used the people he wanted to use for the show (but problems with networks, are problems with networks).
The nature of the dispute is one that means it's hard to find referances to with a net search, but it seemed to be mentioned all over the place when it was happening. The point not having anything to do with the ethnicity of the characters, but rather what happens when someone other than a writer/creator forces the writer to make unintended additions to a plotline, fill quotas, and so on. You wind up with hanging or go-nowhere plotlines that lead to things like an otherwise extraneous character having a fist fight with Spike, and then otherwise largely being written (as ineffective, not present, or whatever else) with the major plot events.
I could say more, but I figure this right here presents some perfectly reasonable criticisms on the subject, and really I don't want people to drag things increasingly off subject.
Not to mention in the course of making your own arguement you entirely overlooked Kelly from Mass Effect 2, which is a FAR better counterpoint than trying to pick on people's arguements about Liara since there isn't anything even remotely ambigious about what you can get up to with Kelly. Lesbianism has been a part of Mass Effect... period, it can't be argued at this point, and no amount of semantics about Liara can change that.
That said, I notice the following points, probably should have been addressed before dismissing everything as being small minded:
The issue of writing in general, and forcing writers to include groups of people on demand or be considered a group of bigots. Forcing representation of minority groups in the media virtually never ends well, whether the minority is defined socially, ethically, sexually, or anything else. Indeed I'd go so far as to say everyone on these forums can probably point a finger at at least ONE property that was ruined, or greatly diminished, by forced political correctness.
Bioware can in no way be considered bigoted or homophobic, they have lesbians in Mass Effect, and they have had gay men in other titles ranging from "Jade Empire" to "Dragon Age: Origins" nobody raised this big a stink, because those characters were not being written in against the intentions of the writers due to demand.
Basically, a creator should have the right to create what they want, not be pressured because they decide to include a couple forms of sexuality but not all of them.
In your response you go on about homosexuality not being tied directly to pedophillia. That's great, but your point is greatly diminished by the simple fact that it doesn't touch on central issue of this being a matter of political demand, or of the other sexual deviations (deviation as other than the norm) that by the same logic could demand equal or superior entitlement. I raised questions like those that are into scat, extreme BDSM, or other assorted things, many of which probably have heterosexuals involved in numbers globally that outnumber the entire population of homosexuals of both genders. If you start saying you HAVE to do this, which is what this comes down to, because Bioware made it pretty clear they didn't want to, it opens the door for any group that wants to make similar demands to come forward and do the same exact thing.
The basic point here being that everything else I said unrelated to the issue of Mass Effect 3 aside, there isn't anything fundementally wrong with Bioware choosing to include male homosexual options, the thing that has made this an issue is the massive protests to FORCE them to put this kind of thing into the game, simply because they chose to do so before with other games.
Had these disputes never happened, and Bioware chose to put a gay male option into ME3 on their own because it fit a character they wanted to write, you wouldn't be seeing this as an issue. I for example wouldn't have a whole lot to say about it, my entire stance aside, any more than I did when "Dragon Age: Origins" and "Jade Empire" came out (both of which are games I've played, and "Origins" happens to be one of my favorite RPGs of the current generation).
The point here is that your schtick aside, there are valid points your not choosing to address, and which I think dilute the impact of your statements. I'd also say that I'd be careful in what position you take, when your forming yourself up to be a critic. This issue is MUCH bigger than homosexuality, and down the road if you decide to make complaints about extraneous characters or politics ruining something... anything, what your saying here could come back to haunt you. Being stuck in a position of trying to explain how forced inclusion in something else is a problem, when your saying it's okay with homosexuality isn't going to be easy to argue your way out of as once you start saying it's okay for one group it's hard to say it about others.
Unrelated to homosexuality, think back to the fight between Joss Whedon and the networks that ended with his name winding up being mud for a while. According to some things I read a lot of that revolved around the lack of minority characters outside of bit, supporting roles in the series. The executives wound up telling him flat out he needed to start writing in minority characters with meaningful roles. The last, and perhaps weakest season was allegedly the result of politics with a lot of the sub plots like the demon-fighting principal, and the occasional shift in focus to a young, black girl slayer who had little to do with much of anything, all being the result of forced compromise and additions that he had to make to the plot to satisfy network executives, which eventually lead to a falling out over creative control.
The point being that Joss Whedon isn't a racist as you can see by his casting of things like Firefly where he used the people he wanted to use for the show (but problems with networks, are problems with networks).
The nature of the dispute is one that means it's hard to find referances to with a net search, but it seemed to be mentioned all over the place when it was happening. The point not having anything to do with the ethnicity of the characters, but rather what happens when someone other than a writer/creator forces the writer to make unintended additions to a plotline, fill quotas, and so on. You wind up with hanging or go-nowhere plotlines that lead to things like an otherwise extraneous character having a fist fight with Spike, and then otherwise largely being written (as ineffective, not present, or whatever else) with the major plot events.
I could say more, but I figure this right here presents some perfectly reasonable criticisms on the subject, and really I don't want people to drag things increasingly off subject.
Well yeah, that's my point. The story is about a masculine character. Most people that are masculine are male, females that are masculine require characterisation because they differ from the norm. The story does not provide that, which is why Shepard is male. Or, if you insist on putting square shaped femshep into the round shaped masculine hole, you make her as male as you can.kingpocky said:
But, what about demands of being inclusive of other sexual deviations... "deviation" as something other than the norm. Things that aren't nessicarly criminal.Father Time said:
Once you say that homosexuals are ENTITLED to representation, what about people who are wired for other things that is normal and perfectly natural for them? People who are into the whole "adult baby" thing and can't get aroused otherwise, or scat, or bondage, or numerous other things. You get enough people into one or more of those things to organize, and next thing you know you have it in the games, because Bioware can't very well say "well, the gays are entitled but you aren't". Arguements that it's "differant" with homosexuals don't really apply here, because overall one minority is the same as another.
I think the point being made is that this is about entitlement, even someone with my overall viewpoints (which I will not go into again) couldn't give a crap about the homosexuality present in "Dragon Age: Origins" or "Jade Empire", but that was planned from the beginning and the way the developers wanted to write the story and the characters. In this case they envisioned Mass Effect without any male homosexuality or male homosexuals playing a major role, it's just how the story turned out, and flowed best. This entire arguement is that because Bioware included gay male options in other games, they should have to include them in every product they release with any type of romantic elements at all.
See, had nobody said anything, and Bioware quietly released a gay male addition to the crew in ME3 as a result of their own creative process, nobody would have cared. The problem here is that this all revolves around demands being made by a minority group that they have to be included in the game.
Whether it's sexual, ethnic, religious, or anything else, once you start saying that writers HAVE to include certain groups it's down hill. I very much doubt there is anyone here who can say that they have never seen something they liked ruined by political correctness. It's the same issue as it's always been, it's just gay men are the current focus.
In the end let creators create, when you start creating quotas and corperate checklists, you wind up with exactly the mentality that has been destroying things like video games. Every group is an exception to someone. In the end the creative process has to be a politics and political correctness free zone.
You mean to say that people seriously brought up that "Pedophilia" argument?
In the 21st century? In an website based on rational, RATIONAL thinking?
To those people who honestly still think that pedophilia is part of homosexuality: I hope to whatever high power may exist that you are just fucking removed from this world
Progress does not need your retarded, redundant, and ridiculous ideals in this day and age. People don't need them, Civilization doesn't need them, and Humanity certainly doesn't need them.
Most of all, Society. Doesn't. Fucking. Need you.
Fucking goodness...
In the 21st century? In an website based on rational, RATIONAL thinking?
To those people who honestly still think that pedophilia is part of homosexuality: I hope to whatever high power may exist that you are just fucking removed from this world
Progress does not need your retarded, redundant, and ridiculous ideals in this day and age. People don't need them, Civilization doesn't need them, and Humanity certainly doesn't need them.
Most of all, Society. Doesn't. Fucking. Need you.
Fucking goodness...
Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for Jim Sterling indeed, one of the best columnist on the Escapist. Give this young man a raise.
Your personal opinion is based on unfounded medical and scientific facts; normal you say? Beating your wife in the 40's was normal, or perhaps I should go back? The romans and the greek were pretty homosexual and that was normal. Saying, I will give my opinion does not excent you of following the rules, this is not an opinion, this a homophobic comment and it is terrible.Lord_Gremlin said:
OP: I don't really think Bioware are open and mature to be quite honest, let me give you 2 clear examples. First, you can go Lesbian in Mass Effect 1 and 2 but not gay. Also, the demo
Wrex refers to the queen as "Women". First of all, SEXIST? ANYONE? Also this is inconsistent. For fucks sake! Wrex has always wanted to save the Krogan, this could be one of the last fertile females, and Wrex is the first one to want to fight the genophage, he would have utmost respect for this female, it may be his race's last hope.
Two things, which I'm repeating here:Therumancer said:
1: The difference between the genders involved in a relationship makes a huge difference to whether the audience can relate to a romance. We must agree with that, because if we don't then you must think that the entire subject is meaningless anyway. Thus homosexuality is a bigger difference than personal turn-ons or fetishes which are less about relating to the characters and more about getting off on it, which you constantly presume is the reason for the romance being there in the first place.
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2: I don't remember there ever being huge drives for Bioware to put gay romance options into Mass Effect. Certainly not ones crawling all over the Escapist like the people saying that the options should be gone now. In fact, it's been demonstrated again and again that they were going to put them into the first game before people even cared about the series at all, but for whatever reason, couldn't. Therefore, there was no minority ever forcing them to put it into the game, but plenty of people are trying to force them not to.
I mean, I've never seen a large group demanding a gay romance in Mass Effect outside of the Bioware forums, which let's be honest, don't count. Maybe a few people did, yeah, but not enough for you to argue that the entire homosexual community has been up in arms and entitled about it.
I think Jim is quite possibly the only crush I have in the videogame journalism profession. Awesome. Not even the guys at GayGamer are as attractive to me as Jim. Watching him talk about this subject is rather a liberating experience.
...I'm not joking either. :|
...I'm not joking either. :|
People couldn't understand the subtlety in the last video? Wow... And just when my faith in humanity was starting to be restored.
Other than that, 100% accurate points Jim. Homosexuality ftw.
Other than that, 100% accurate points Jim. Homosexuality ftw.