BlitznBurst

Are sibling S-ranks confirrmed to be explicitly romantic? Could just be "companions" or whatever Though with the existence of A+ rank supports, that's honestly still pretty bullshit. It basically screams "we don't want to deal with even the implication of homosexuality so we're just going to shove them off into separate support ranks so we don't have to deal with it. Incest is perfectly fine though guys." I don't even care about supports since they've always just been pandering wish-fulfillment, and it's not like I'm some paragon of social justice either, but this is all really dumb.

honestly not having gay marriage in the game is kind of stupid considering marriage only exists for wish fulfillment in the first place. You'll pander to the weebs by supporting almost every male/female couple imaginable, but throwing in even just a few couples for the gay players (and/or people who just think yaoi/yuri is hot) is out of the question Still, at the end of the day they're just adding marriage again because it'll sell a few more copies. And for every copy they'll sell by adding gay marriage, there are probably twice as many they'll lose because of bigots who like to boycott stupid things. So, I'm not really too surprised.

Leon's face 4 seconds in is really derpy

Don't think Elise's scene is necessarily a death scene. She could just mean it in a "maybe you'll be happier with your real family" way or whatever idk even if actually making you kill your siblings might be a good story choice, I don't really see them going down that route. Especially since Hoshido is allegedly the more "casual" of the routes. Still, if they do go down that route then I guess that does sort of finalize the whole "this is the choice you made, these are the consequences of your actions" thing. Though I'll still have to wait to see if the character writing is really strong enough to support that scene from an emotional standpoint, I think it'd be a good choice from a narrative/thematic standpoint or whatever Hopefully the story doesn't go completely grimdark edgy, though

I'll probably look up some of the earlier stuff just to get a feel for the game and what I should expect, but I'll probably avoid major spoilers and stuff

not at all besides maybe the king. Like this is supposed to be your close family, having them all be a bunch of cackling villains would kind of defeat the point of actually making you choose. Thankfully it doesn't look like they're actually going to be evil. Imouto is cute and bubbly, Marx seems to have some sort of moral code, Camillia does show worry for the Avatar, all of them seem worried for the Avatar when the confrontation between the two families happens. Other than them wearing all black they don't really seem to show any "evil" traits at all, besides the king who looks outright demonic and is implied to have killed the Avatar's father and taken him in against his will, and also to have done something to make Marx doubt him (possibly the same thing). Even then I'd hope he has some depth and isn't just Generic McBadGuy who does Evil Things because he's Evil.

I actually think it's pretty interesting that the "dark side" are your family who you've been raised with since presumably a very young age. The game clearly expects you to care about these characters, so I wouldn't really worry about it being "good vs evil" or whatever. Just look at that imouto, how could that possibly be evil? I'll admit the Nohr king (I'm assuming he's the king, at least) looks outright demonic though.