This
Also when people complain about a game protag being a normal looking woman
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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Never liked this lumping of everyone into oversimplified "gamers" as if it's anything different besides conservatives who happen to play games.
It is always conservatives. In any hobby.
There’s a reason that particular cohort is mockingly referred to as capital-G Gamers^TM^.
Exactly.
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That's nothing, I was forced to play a snake that was eating small dots and getting longer and longer.
What's a straight character?
In Skyrim you can romance any of a wide variety of characters marked as "marriageable" in the game's files. That really just means the voice actor was willing to record the marriage ceremony lines. Since voice actors were reused, if a voice actor recorded their lines, most if not all of their characters would be marriageable. To marry a character, you complete a task for them that makes them call you a friend (typically a quest they give you when you first meet them). You then wear an amulet of Mara (the game's goddess of love) and speak to them. They ask if you fancy them, you say yes. They propose marriage, you go to the temple of Mara and be there the next day. During the ceremony you can say yes or no. And the game does not give two shits what your gender is. If you're a male character, you can freely marry any marriageable male character, and vice versa for females. I play female characters because I like to look at them. I'd rather look at a female than a male. And I always marry Mjoll the Lioness because she's trying to tear down the most fun guild in the game, so I move her out of town and make her a housewife. (Her quest is a lot of fun, too.)
In Fallout 4 you can romance maybe half a dozen characters? All of your companions who are not robotic or animal. One of the robots can be converted into an android you can hook up with. You can't marry any of them, and you can romance all of them. None of them care what your gender is. Many have quests you have to do, but even beyond that, you have to push up their approval rating of you, by doing things they approve of (e.g. Matt Mercer's character loves when you pick locks and steal) and by not doing things they don't like (e.g. there's a junkie girl who loves when you do drugs, until you cure her addiction, then she hates when you do drugs). Once they're romanced, you can take them to any bed for a fade-to-black sex scene (neither heard nor seen).
In Cyberpunk 2077, there are four characters you can romance and hook up with, but no marriage. Each one has a genital preference and a voice preference. So you can absolutely be trans in the game. You choose a body type (fem or masc) and a voice type (fem or masc). Depending on your choice, you get 2 people you can romance. The other two will not reach the romance stage with you no matter what.
I guess the characters in GTA are straight? I don't play bro shooters and such. Not my thing. Tomb Raider? Up in the air what Lara Croft prefers. You could take that either way. I love the Life is Strange games and those lean gay/lesbian. In the first one, Max can kiss both a girl and a guy, and it seems equal, but if you read her diary, she has no attraction to the guy, but she absolutely crushes on the girl. In the second one, the guy is absolutely gay, but the focus is on his little brother who is too young to have a sexual orientation (I think he's 8?). It's less obvious in the third one, but that girl definitely has lesbian vibes. And the fourth one is Max again.
What you are describing is a concept of the mechanically bisexual. The options as given often allow players to choose in a sandbox game whether they experience the game as a completely non-queer experience or not. It sometimes creates queerness as an option rather than a core part of an experience which rep wise is considered a step better than when all romance options in games were mandatorily heterosexual but also kind of a cop out where player choice means all characters are often Shrodinger's bi. If you want to experience say Skyrim as an almost entirely queer free experience - you can. Your choices flip that representation on and off like a lightswitch so if you have queerphobic tendencies the game doth not offend much. No one ever hits on you first.
Rep wise Gay characters are ones specifically ones where the queerness isn't optional, it's a part of the canon of the character. Straight characters often are so in fixed story narratives where they have hetero relationships and if they have brushes that look like same sex romance it's played for laughs and treated as not really an option. Since culture still sort of assumes straightness as a default if the character only ever is coded romantically by the frame of the game to be attracted to the opposite sex they can be termed a "straight character" because as a player the game's interfacing with that character's sexuality is mandatory. An example is the Prince of Persia games or the Final Fantasy series which have a romantically coded opposite sex paramours that you don't have an option not to interface with the character's sexuallity.
This is way more common in older games and fixed story franchises.
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I remember when I actually met Nazi’s in Kotakuinaction over on Reddit. And the mods banned me for pointing it out.
Anytime I see anything from that sub in Google results I immediately skip it.
I mean they worship Asmongold as some hero of masculinity, among others.
I mean. They are all losers. You can smell it in the way they talk. None of them have ever had their dicks touched without over paying.
Most games don't bring the characters sexuality into it at all so I wouldn't consider 99.99% to be particularly accurate. That said I'd prefer if they left romance out of it all together. I'm equally annoyed by having to deal with it in a game regardless of which end of the spectrum it is. Just let me fight/build/solve puzzles/whatever. If I wanted to date someone I'd be doing it in real life.
Bloodborne has the greatest romance story, even a lovely wedding ceremony.
I'm dissapointed because video game romances are dull as fuck. You hit the correct dialogue choices, have sex, and then they're just nice to you for the rest of the game. Give me romances that go sideways - maybe they're so disgusted by you hitting on them they leave the party and re-emerge as a minor antagonist later on, maybe another party member gets jealous and straight on challenges you to a duel, maybe they're already boinking another party member, anything but the pansexual protagonist that everyone wants to fuck.
I'm even less interested in dealing with "interesting" relationship stuff in a video game. Had more than enough of that in real life. I want escapism, not reminders of trauma.
with the state of the gaming industry rn, that's gotta be the one stupidest things chuds complain about in games.
there are surprising amount of incels in many games, and its the one that are trumpers or at least suppor tthem.
they do the same thing with movies and shows, constant complaining about race swapping, genders swapping, "traditional roles" not being adhered to.
Some of the negative reviews for Eternal Strands over on Steam are hilarious. Because the guys that don't outright hate being forced to play as a woman take issue with the lack of het romance options. Specifically with having to choose between the "bishie elf" or a "giant blue walrus-bear".
And they also feel that the walrus-bear romance is less emotionally impactful than the other options.
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