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FE16 Same-Sex Relationship Discussion


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1 minute ago, magenero29 said:

So nintendo just queerbaited everyone... wtf with that Alois support

As much as I'm disappointed and of all the things I want to call Nintendo and IS, queer baiting isn't one of them. You can't really be baited when you're leaking info from an unreleased game without the full context, that's our own fault.

We have every right to be upset about the lack of mlm options though.

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I mean, the F!Byleth / Alois S support is platonic too. If there's any baiting going on here it goes both ways.

It's fair to be disappointed in the options but from what I can tell Three Houses is absolutely a step in the right direction; we've come a long way from Heather and Ike, that's for sure.

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10 hours ago, CompteSecours said:

I'm so happy about this. It makes Byleth more like a real character.

FE is not an eroge game, period 😀

In what way does this make Byleth a more real character? How? He can still marry a bunch of the female characters if he is straight!! How does that make FE not an eroge?

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Just now, magenero29 said:

In what way does this make Byleth a more real character? How? He can still marry a bunch of the female characters if he is straight!! How does that make FE not an eroge?

The answer there is that straight Byleths should have their options reasonably limited too, of course. Given that straight Byleth is the sole exception in endings being limited and unique I would argue that the multitude of options is a compromise with the regrettable majority.

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10 minutes ago, Océane said:

Is it foolish to hope for more same-sex options given the gender checks in the support conversations?

I'd say don't expect anything. That looks mostly like extraneous or copy pasted data rather than an intent to include more same sex options later on. In some of the ones I've looked at, there are explicit references to gender outside of that gender check

Spoiler

such as Caspar, which has the gender check but then explicitly says her and wife later

 

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3 hours ago, Stage7_4 said:

As much as I'm disappointed and of all the things I want to call Nintendo and IS, queer baiting isn't one of them. You can't really be baited when you're leaking info from an unreleased game without the full context, that's our own fault.

We have every right to be upset about the lack of mlm options though.

Except we weren't queer baited by leakers. We were queer baited by reviewers, you know, people that were officially handed the game by the company to talk about it and hype up people, and I find hard to believe that Nintendo/IS wouldn't think that the SS supports would be talked about. That on top of implied SS romances instead of explicit, and flirtatious Claude (which yes, was mostly due to one review toying with people but that stuff is in the game) feels like queer baiting to me. All of which could easily have been avoided by minor alterations on Nintendo's/IS's part.

Edited by NegativeExponents-
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8 minutes ago, NegativeExponents- said:

Except we weren't queer baited by leakers. We were queer baited by reviewers, you know, people that were officially handed the game by the company to talk about it and hype up people, and I find hard to believe that Nintendo/IS wouldn't think that the SS supports would be talked about. That on top of implied SS romances instead of explicit and flirtatious Claude (which yes, was mostly due to one review toying with people but that stuff is in the game) feels like queer baiting to me. All of which could easily have been avoided by minor alterations on Nintendo's/IS's part.

There's also the fact that IS/Nintendo made an announcement about same sex realtionships. There was no other info there (supposedly to not spoil anything) but it seems clear to me that they made that announcement to market towards queer people and people who wanted same sex relationships for Byleth. It seems pretty obviously like queerbaiting that they would make that announcement (however small/uninformative it was) yet only have so few options for m/m. and while that reviewer clearly manipulated his article for clickbait, he still had actual evidence that showed Claude and M!Byleth being flirty, which just sours the pot even more

Edited by firewitch912
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It's unfair to blame Nintendo on IGN or other review sites mishandling their review, as by that logic then the guy that struggled with the Cuphead tutorial was right to criticize the game. The IGN reviewer made an assumption without confirming when they put up that support list.

But to recognize your point, some of Claude's dialogue does come across as a bit baited, especially that dance cutscene. I think it's rather minor (and the worst of it came from a leaker, not a sponsored reviewer) but I can see your point.

Look, I'm frustrated too but there's so many more valid criticisms to give Nintendo/IS on how they handled this that we really don't need to dip into the fringes.

Edit: What official Nintendo announcement about same-sex relationships?

Edit2: Nevermind, I found it. An interview with Automaton and Nintendo of Japan. In Fire Emblem Three Houses, it is possible for the Protagonist to have same-sex relationships with certain characters. However, we cannot explain this topic in more detail as to not ruin the excitement of all users who are looking forward to it. [read: spoilers] Regarding character raising, we have prepared a lot of options, so please kindly anticipate it.

Okay, everything I said about Nintendo not baiting anyone? I take it all back. This really suggests something much larger than what we got.

Edited by Stage7_4
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5 minutes ago, Stage7_4 said:

It's unfair to blame Nintendo on IGN or other review sites mishandling their review, as by that logic then the guy that struggled with the Cuphead tutorial was right to criticize the game. The IGN reviewer made an assumption without confirming when they put up that support list.

But to recognize your point, some of Claude's dialogue does come across as a bit baited, especially that dance cutscene. I think it's rather minor (and the worst of it came from a leaker, not a sponsored reviewer) but I can see your point.

Look, I'm frustrated too but there's so many more valid criticisms to give Nintendo/IS on how they handled this that we really don't need to dip into the fringes.

Edit: What official Nintendo announcement about same-sex relationships?

https://japanesenintendo.com/2019/07/19/nintendo-of-japan-comment-on-same-sex-relationships-in-fire-emblem-three-houses/

This one here.

Also no one is blaming IGN or the reviewers for not knowing. They posted about what they knew. However, it still seems like queerbaiting because there has been no indication that S supports are anything but romantic until now, and that was through leaks. Maybe you would have found out before, but often supports are only explicitly romantic at S support, so you'd have no way to know unless someone said so ahead of time. That Is gave no indication that S supports were suddenly able to be platonic, combined with the fact that the majority of m/m S supports are actually platonic, reads heavily as queerbaiting to me.

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Four explicit same-sex relationships could be considered disappointing; the options could be considered disappointing. But it's not a 'step backwards' for FE; it's a significant step forward (in terms of romance, so not counting Leon) if they're written even vaguely competently. A significant step forward compared to 'sadist', 'cave clone' and 'whatever the fuck Soleil is'. Just not as much as one would hope for in 2019.

S-supports not necessarily being romantic or paired is a weird one, though.

Edited by Parrhesia
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11 minutes ago, Stage7_4 said:

It's unfair to blame Nintendo on IGN or other review sites mishandling their review, as by that logic then the guy that struggled with the Cuphead tutorial was right to criticize the game. The IGN reviewer made an assumption without confirming when they put up that support list.

Off-topic but that reviewer Dean Takahashi doesn't play platformers or sidescrolling action games. It's true that reviewers do not need to know everything about a game.  But he should not blame the game for his ineptitude. That's some DarkSydePhil levels of complaining.

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Just because there are more options (and even that’s debatable when mlm still only gets 1) than the last game doesn’t mean they’re necessarily taking a step forward. The fact that there is an unequal amount of options between men and women sends a message. The fact that they hired a popular yaoi artist and announced that there are ‘many’ gay options (but in reality only 1 Male option and endings between characters are apparently arbitrary) sends a message. The fact that they’re too lazy to even change the supports between Linhardt and the two Byleths (I don’t know about the wlw side because I havent read any supports) and yet STILL refused to add more than 1 option sends a message (the Japanese game could be different but if localisation decided to keep the supports the same, it’s another problem) I don’t know what the ‘message’ is but these decisions repeatedly suggest that the gay options (specifically and especially mlm) are an afterthought. Yes, the one support can still be amazing but that’s still not really taking a step forward to me.

Edited by zuibangde
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4 hours ago, Arachnofiend said:

The answer there is that straight Byleths should have their options reasonably limited too, of course. Given that straight Byleth is the sole exception in endings being limited and unique I would argue that the multitude of options is a compromise with the regrettable majority.

I completely agree. 

Can anyone confirm to me the possibility that new updates of the game could unlock S supports between some characters?

Edited by magenero29
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Would it be reasonable to change the title at this point? Even if it is technically a datamine spoiler, what it says now is factually wrong: there are not 3 same-sex male relationships in the game.

1 hour ago, Stage7_4 said:

it is possible for the Protagonist to have same-sex relationships with certain characters. However, we cannot explain this topic in more detail as to not ruin the excitement of all users who are looking forward to it.

I feel like that second sentence makes more sense now.

1 hour ago, Stage7_4 said:

It's unfair to blame Nintendo on IGN or other review sites mishandling their review

I would disagree on some level. The last few games created a very clear expectation of what an "S support" was. Additionally, the last game created the concept of an "A+ support" to serve as a platonic counterpart to an S support. Combining these two things, there would have been zero reason for anyone stumbling upon the same-sex S supports to assume that there would not be three options. Even if one might question why they would choose Gilbert/Alois -- there exists precedent even for that (e.g. Gunter and Walhart.)

By using the "S support" term for these at all (and abandoning the previous "A+ support" functionality), they went out of their way to obfuscate the number of available options in a way that would confuse anyone looking at them without external information.

Even if no review mentioned this, it doesn't change the fact that (had the game not been datamined) there would have been people seeing the S support option, taking it, and realizing that they've made a mistake. Perhaps the other review sites messed up, but at the end of the day, it is the fault of the game for providing that impression at all.

Edited by Iridium
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12 minutes ago, magenero29 said:

I completely agree. 

Can anyone confirm to me the possibility that new updates of the game could unlock S supports between some characters?

Is it doable? Yeah, it can be done. Eg. different company and different system(s), but Bioware once had a post-release patch that made an exclusively m/f romance option also available for m/m.

Will they do it? We really have no way of knowing and, unless they pull some big thing with the future dlc characters, I honestly wouldn't hold my breath.

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2 hours ago, zuibangde said:

Just because there are more options (and even that’s debatable when mlm still only gets 1) than the last game doesn’t mean they’re necessarily taking a step forward. The fact that there is an unequal amount of options between men and women sends a message. The fact that they hired a popular yaoi artist and announced that there are ‘many’ gay options (but in reality only 1 Male option and endings between characters are apparently arbitrary) sends a message. The fact that they’re too lazy to even change the supports between Linhardt and the two Byleths (I don’t know about the wlw side because I havent read any supports) and yet STILL refused to add more than 1 option sends a message (the Japanese game could be different but if localisation decided to keep the supports the same, it’s another problem) I don’t know what the ‘message’ is but these decisions repeatedly suggest that the gay options (specifically and especially mlm) are an afterthought. Yes, the one support can still be amazing but that’s still not really taking a step forward to me.

Nintendo never specified the specifics so it's unfair to say they lied about the options. There's significantly more options this time and there's same sex romance between certain characters.

Spoiler

Edelgard and Dorothea for instance is explicitly romantic. 

So really, they didn't lie about the abundance especially when compared Fates. Chinatsu isn't a yaoi artist btw, she deals primarily in otome games so that wasn't some kind of bait either.

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11 minutes ago, ChickenBits said:

Nintendo never specified the specifics so it's unfair to say they lied about the options. There's significantly more options this time and there's same sex romance between certain characters.

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Edelgard and Dorothea for instance is explicitly romantic. 

So really, they didn't lie about the abundance especially when compared Fates. Chinatsu isn't a yaoi artist btw, she deals primarily in otome games so that wasn't some kind of bait either.

Spoiler

Also Dorothea and Petra are canon

 

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1 minute ago, Owain Dark said:
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Also Dorothea and Petra are canon

 

Spoiler

Oh nice, I didn't know about this one. I heard about Dorothea x Edelgard, Dorothea x Manuela Dorothea x girls, Caspar x Linhardt( not too sure about this since I need to read the support but others said it's romantic), and apparently Anette x Mercedes.

 

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Spoiler

 

Given her suspiciously high volume of FxF romantic endings I'm just gonna go through life believing IntSys intended Dorothea to be a lesbian and threw in the male endings to appease straight male Byleth players

The other bi characters don't even come close to how many same sex pairings they can potentially get.

 

 

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12 minutes ago, Owain Dark said:
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Also Dorothea and Petra are canon

 

Spoiler

I heard that Dimitri and Dedue get a romantic ending, or is that fake news?

 

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6 minutes ago, Leif said:
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I heard that Dimitri and Dedue get a romantic ending, or is that fake news?

 

Spoiler

Call it heavily implied. They end up being buried next to each other, it's pretty gay overall, but they don't explicitly get married or anything. Granted it could be much more explicit about it in the actual supports, which I haven't read yet. That's been the case for a lot of them.

 

Edited by Arachnofiend
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5 minutes ago, Arachnofiend said:
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Call it heavily implied. They end up being buried next to each other, it's pretty gay overall, but they don't explicitly get married or anything. Granted it could be much more explicit about it in the actual supports, which I haven't read yet. That's been the case for a lot of them.

 

Wut? Being buried next to each other doesn't make it "pretty gay overall".

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