FE16 Same-Sex Relationship Discussion

[firewitch912]

5 minutes ago, Owain Dark said:

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

Two bros chilling in their graves, five feet apart cause they're not gay

Spoiler

From all of the same sex paired endings I've seen, there's a high amount of ambiguity/subtext. In contrast, almost every single m/f paired ending I saw was explicitly romantic and included marriage. There were some exceptions, but they weren't the norm

As for Petra/Dorothea, unless their support suggests differently, it really didn't read as romantic (it just said Petra loved Dorothea most of all)

@Timlugia I believe you can only have one S support, as it appears to lead directly to Byleth's paired ending.

Spoiler

There's also the fact that most of the S support convos I saw involved giving your father's ring to them. No idea if that happens in platonic endings though I would guess so

Other characters don't get S supports between each other, so we don't know how those endings are chosen among the multiple A supports. I've heard two theories- one is that it's predetermined (like Chrom's list of marriage supports) and the other is based on the close allies list on their info screen

Spoiler

The one confusing/potentially doubled S support could be Sothis. She appears to be a unique case because she only has S support, so I've no idea how that may work out compared to normal supports

 

Edited July 24, 2019 by firewitch912

[Parrhesia]

The guy who wanted the topic change is right, so I made it happen.

[zuibangde]

57 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.

  Reveal hidden contents

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.

They never specified but I wouldn’t consider 4 as ‘many options’. Sure there may be many options between characters (idk personally because I didn’t look at the specifics of the supports), but at the end of the day, people also deeply care about who the avatar can develop a relationship with. It’s great wlw got more options but you literally can’t argue that there are more options for mlm. It went from 1 option to...1. 

For Chinatsu, it isn’t an either or situation. Yes she primarily deals with otome games but it’s naive to assume people won’t draw assumptions from the fact that she has some pretty popular yaoi works. 

[ChickenBits]

1 minute ago, zuibangde said:

They never specified but I wouldn’t consider 4 as ‘many options’. Sure there may be many options between characters (idk personally because I didn’t look at the specifics of the supports), but at the end of the day, people also deeply care about who the avatar can develop a relationship with. It’s great wlw got more options but you literally can’t argue that there are more options for mlm. It went from 1 option to...1. 

For Chinatsu, it isn’t an either or situation. Yes she primarily deals with otome games but it’s naive to assume people won’t draw assumptions from the fact that she has some pretty popular yaoi works. 

Spoiler

There's 6 options for Byleth overall, 5:1 gender ratio. 

There is a lot of overall options this time and that's exactly what Nintendo said. They didn't say anything like "Byleth will have a lot same sex romance options" or "There are more m|m options" so they didn't lie at all. It was just an assumption on your part that there would be more m|m. The game could have had only w|w for Byleth and it still wouldn't have been a lie on Nintendo's part. Look, I think they handled m|m poorly this time around but it had nothing to with Nintendo's marketing. It was clickbaitey articles and getting the content leaked beforehand.

Whenever someone mentions Chinatsu they automatically think of uta prince sama and her worldwide recognition comes from that series. There was zero mention of yaoi works when she was revealed, if anything it bothered people that the guys weren't hot enough despite having an otome artist.

[firewitch912]

12 minutes ago, ChickenBits said:

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There's 6 options for Byleth overall, 5:1 gender ratio. 

There is a lot of overall options this time and that's exactly what Nintendo said. They didn't say anything like "Byleth will have a lot same sex romance options" or "There are more m|m options" so they didn't lie at all. It was just an assumption on your part that there would be more m|m. The game could have had only w|w for Byleth and it still wouldn't have been a lie on Nintendo's part. Look, I think they handled m|m poorly this time around but it had nothing to with Nintendo's marketing. It was clickbaitey articles and getting the content leaked beforehand.

Nintendo was specifically talking about Byleth's same sex options. And the options themselves can't just all be clustered together: there's a fairly obvious reason we're distinguishing between f/f and m/m. It does actually have to do with their marketing, since they specifically made an announcement about it. It's clearly an attempt to draw queer people into buying the game. They didn't give anything more so that we would make those assumptions to entice us more. It's not a lie, but it's certainly framed in a particular way. The clickbait article did create an issue, but this reaction would have still been the same and is honestly separate from that reaction. Also, the content leaking beforehand only means that our reactions happen before the game comes out. This same reaction would be happening during release if this info hadn't been leaked. The context might change, but the overall argument is still there.

[zuibangde]

27 minutes ago, ChickenBits said:

  Reveal hidden contents

There's 6 options for Byleth overall, 5:1 gender ratio. 

There is a lot of overall options this time and that's exactly what Nintendo said. They didn't say anything like "Byleth will have a lot same sex romance options" or "There are more m|m options" so they didn't lie at all. It was just an assumption on your part that there would be more m|m. The game could have had only w|w for Byleth and it still wouldn't have been a lie on Nintendo's part. Look, I think they handled m|m poorly this time around but it had nothing to with Nintendo's marketing. It was clickbaitey articles and getting the content leaked beforehand.

Whenever someone mentions Chinatsu they automatically think of uta prince sama and her worldwide recognition comes from that series. There was zero mention of yaoi works when she was revealed, if anything it bothered people that the guys weren't hot enough despite having an otome artist.

If you’re arguing that even if they say ‘there are many more options’  but only included more wlw options and they would still be in the ‘right’ because they didn’t lie and it was us just making assumptions about mlm options, I don’t think you fully understanding why people are upset at Nintendo. It’s not the lying but the intentional vagueness of the wording that can lead to assumptions (which apparently is our fault for making). The leaks and click bait articles are another issue.

My whole point of Chinatsu argument is that she did yaoi works which can lead to wrong assumptions. The fact that she’s famous for otome games isn’t a factor. You can be famous for multiple things. (Even though I’d say her yaoi works came to light pretty quickly...).

Edited July 24, 2019 by zuibangde

[Nanima]

Well we all know why they made the same-sex endings so shippy at points

Spoiler

stuff like noting how Felix was more devastated by Dimitri's death than his own fucking queen..for god's sake

because they all knew at rank A and so long as they didn't use the m-word, people who don't like all "the gay" would have plausible deniability to back them up as proven in this very thread. sigh

Anyway, I still don't get how some people still try to deny LGBTQ people any right to be upset at this mess. The rest of the game can still be bloody amazing, but no one can convince me that this aspect isn't utter bull.

Edited July 24, 2019 by Nanima

[zuibangde]

I know it’s mostly my fault for being in a discussion that deals with spoilers but please use the freaking spoiler tag. Not everyone have looked at all the spoilers out there.

And with that, I think this is the time for me to leave the forums for good until I finish the game.

Edited July 24, 2019 by zuibangde

[Interdimensional Observer]

1 hour ago, firewitch912 said:

Two bros chilling in their graves, five feet apart cause they're not gay

The IRL case of J. Edgar Hoover- first and longest serving FBI Director, who blackmailed people for being gay, but might have himself been gay. It's a controversial topic though, with no clear answer.

 

As for the artist for this game doing yaoi and otome, that was other things. This is FE.

Remember, Whats-His-Name for Awakening and Fates had to go out of his comfort zone due to demands of the art director. What the upper brass wants takes precedent over personal artistic interests, unless the two work well together/the artist is told to be free.

[NegativeExponents-]

56 minutes ago, ChickenBits said:

Whenever someone mentions Chinatsu they automatically think of uta prince sama and her worldwide recognition comes from that series. There was zero mention of yaoi works when she was revealed, if anything it bothered people that the guys weren't hot enough despite having an otome artist.

This is a lie.

On 2/16/2019 at 8:02 AM, NegativeExponents- said:

Since I haven’t seen much talk going on here about this, I figured I’d be the first one to bring up that Chinatsu Kurahana is the artist for 3H.

As you can read in Twitter post, she’s most famous for her UtaPri work but I’m personally more familiar with her work with Samurai Flamenco. She’s also worked on other animes and mangas and apparently even on some Nitro+chiral stuff.

Here’s some of her non-FE related artwork:

 

Spoiler

Those are some of the first examples of her work I gave, all of these being yaoi series except for the first 3 images which are from Samurai Flamenco but the two guys end up married in the end.

Also decided to bold the part of her work with Nitro+chiral because of their abundance of BL Visual Novels. A few people even expressed their familiarity with these works and while others had no prior knowledge of any of her works and therefore nothing to associate her works with. Hell, the first comment is someone saying that Claude and Dimitri are similar looking to the two characters in Captive Prince.

Its not just here that had people discussing her previous involvement in yaoi but I've also seen quite a bit of it in other places such as reddit or twitter. So to say people did not associate or have knowledge of her yaoi work is wrong.

[Arachnofiend]

>Samurai Flamenco

Damn, if you really wanna talk about queerbaiting that's one to bring up...

[Llorona]

IIRC, she's credited as Tatana Kana for her Nitro+Chiral work, hence why not everyone might be familiar with that part.

[NegativeExponents-]

6 minutes ago, Arachnofiend said:

>Samurai Flamenco

Damn, if you really wanna talk about queerbaiting that's one to bring up...

I mean, they end up together at the end (admittedly it was a very sudden and strange proposal but then again what in Samurai Flamenco was ever normal?) so I wouldn't say its queerbait since I think queerbait always ends with no explicit romance or false promises.

 

6 minutes ago, Llorona said:

IIRC, she's credited as Tatana Kana for her Nitro+Chiral work, hence why not everyone might be familiar with that part.

Oh, I was not actually aware of that but after a quick search it seems you are right about that.

Edited July 24, 2019 by NegativeExponents-

[ChickenBits]

1 minute ago, NegativeExponents- said:

This is a lie.

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Those are some of the first examples of her work I gave, all of these being yaoi series except for the first 3 images which are from Samurai Flamenco but the two guys end up married in the end.

Also decided to bold the part of her work with Nitro+chiral because of their abundance of BL Visual Novels. A few people even expressed their familiarity with these works and while others had no prior knowledge of any of her works and therefore nothing to associate her works with. Hell, the first comment is someone saying that Claude and Dimitri are similar looking to the two characters in Captive Prince.

Its not just here that had people discussing her previous involvement in yaoi but I've also seen quite a bit of it in other places such as reddit or twitter. So to say people did not associate or have knowledge of her yaoi work is wrong.

I don't follow this person so maybe that's why I didn't see much discussion. I was using my experiences and some of my friends that are active fans of uta and none of us saw any of this. Plus I follow a lot of artists that are fan of otomes and the first thing they mentioned was uta prince. I'm familiar with her other works but the one that just screams Chinatsu to me is uta. 

help, I'm trying to make sense but serenes isn't letting me add/remove words without erasing the entire paragraph

[genagi]

4 hours 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.

About their supports:

Spoiler

It is also highly implied (From all the male non-Byleth same-sex support I have read it is the most explicit one) but always could be interpreted as brotherhood anyway.

 

[Stage7_4]

14 hours ago, Iridium said:

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.

I already recanted my stance after seeing the official Nintendo statement about homosexual options (seeming to promise more than we got, but written in a way that they're not technically lying - the worst kind of lying).

But I want to clarify that at the time I had heard that the Sothis and Rhea S-supports with F!Byleth weren't romantic too, so I thought it was all equal that S sometimes doesn't mean romance. But now that I know it's not the case and that M!Byleth is the only one with S-supports that aren't romantic, then yes I agree that this is queer-baiting.

[Lord of Riva]

So after one homophobic accusation on baseless assumption to the next we have our answer now.

In all fairness as expected most assumptions on your guys part were flatout wrong, showing again that you should rather wait before you have some facts to throw accusations around.

 

That it would end up worse though is however also not what I expected so here I am telling you guys that now there is something you can be angry about.

Edited July 24, 2019 by Lord of Riva

[Owain Dark]

Spoiler

The leaks/datamines said Claude and Raphael were options sometime, but got dummied in the final version. 

 

We still can hope, that they undummy them via updates/patches. So it would be 3/4 and not 1/4

 

[Kiran_]

5 hours ago, Lord of Riva said:

So after one homophobic accusation on baseless assumption to the next we have our answer now.

In all fairness as expected most assumptions on your guys part were flatout wrong, showing again that you should rather wait before you have some facts to throw accusations around.

 

That it would end up worse though is however also not what I expected so here I am telling you guys that now there is something you can be angry about.

You don't get to tell people when they can and cannot be angry about something. That's just an arrogant statement at its finest. There were perfectly legitimate reasons to be upset before (whether you agreed or not is a different issue), and perfectly legitimate reasons to be upset now.

We already had *some* facts beforehand and now we have even more facts, but the conclusion still boils down to the same conclusion. They could do better. 

And platonic S-supports after an A+ had been established, which is clearly misleading was just lack of caring on their parts (I'm unsure if I want to personally call that queer-baiting or them just being incredibly dumb). 

Edited July 24, 2019 by Kiran_

[Adam Revlan]

10 hours ago, Lord of Riva said:

So after one homophobic accusation on baseless assumption to the next we have our answer now.

In all fairness as expected most assumptions on your guys part were flatout wrong, showing again that you should rather wait before you have some facts to throw accusations around.

 

That it would end up worse though is however also not what I expected so here I am telling you guys that now there is something you can be angry about.

Yeah, look I kind of understand that you think people were making a big deal about this before, but there was nothing wrong with wanting some more diversity. Regardless of how it all turned out in the end.

Granted what happened now is so much more upsetting in my eyes and just sucks so much seeing how incredibly slow IS and other Japanese companies seem to be at including diversity in their games.

Yes it is their game and they can make it how they want, I just hate how they suddenly decided to change what S supports mean now and just made the whole thing a confusing mess, getting my hopes up for nothing.

 

9 hours ago, Owain Dark said:

  Reveal hidden contents

The leaks/datamines said Claude and Raphael were options sometime, but got dummied in the final version. 

 

We still can hope, that they undummy them via updates/patches. So it would be 3/4 and not 1/4

 

For real?

Why on earth would they take those options out? Just makes no sense.

This kind of adds a new layer to the scenes with Claude that were homoerotic, like the dance. They didn't intentionally mislead, he was going to be an option before, but they took that out for some reason.

 

Also I'd like to know how to use the spoiler boxes, I'm new here so I'd appreciate if anyone could help out.

[Llorona]

3 hours ago, Stage7_4 said:

I already recanted my stance after seeing the official Nintendo statement about homosexual options (seeming to promise more than we got, but written in a way that they're not technically lying - the worst kind of lying).

But I want to clarify that at the time I had heard that the Sothis and Rhea S-supports with F!Byleth weren't romantic too, so I thought it was all equal that S sometimes doesn't mean romance. But now that I know it's not the case and that M!Byleth is the only one with S-supports that aren't romantic, then yes I agree that this is queer-baiting.

Pleas don't misunderstand me, I'm not defending IS here. I think this was all a very bad decision on IS's part too. But the information we have that points at MByleth having these S Supports be platonic also points at FByleth having the very same ones be platonic. Really, my criticism here is less "why did you bait MByleth only" and more "if you made platonic S supports that were available for both Byleths, why didn't you bother with giving MByleth other romantic same-sex options," you know.

Like. Fine. You have this romantic S support for everyone, fine, I see why you made it available for both Byleths. But then why didn't you make at least one of the other romantic S supports available for both?

[Book Bro]

1 hour ago, Owain Dark said:

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The leaks/datamines said Claude and Raphael were options sometime, but got dummied in the final version. 

 

We still can hope, that they undummy them via updates/patches. So it would be 3/4 and not 1/4

 

Whaaaat? This just keeps getting worse and worse. There needs to be pressure on them to patch these back in if this is true.

[Iridium]

2 hours ago, Lord of Riva said:

In all fairness as expected most assumptions on your guys part were flatout wrong, showing again that you should rather wait before you have some facts to throw accusations around.

That it would end up worse though is however also not what I expected so here I am telling you guys that now there is something you can be angry about.

So... the moral of this story is "wait to make accusations, because reality might be even worse than you think it is?"

I guess that's not wrong but man that's an awful story

[Lord of Riva]

31 minutes ago, Iridium said:

So... the moral of this story is "wait to make accusations, because reality might be even worse than you think it is?"

I guess that's not wrong but man that's an awful story

Yes it is,

 

also feels shit regardless of arrogance that one user prescribed me (not you ) misunderstood my intention I guess.

And i was truly looking for how that Gilbert thing develops *sigh*

[xchickengirlx]

1 hour ago, Book Bro said:

Whaaaat? This just keeps getting worse and worse. There needs to be pressure on them to patch these back in if this is true.

Spoiler

Would like to see proof if that is in fact true, and if it is, yeah that sucks but I wouldn’t be surprised either. It wouldn’t be the first time a JRPG with a dating sim, removing a m/m romance option out of the final game. Persona 4 is a good example of that.

Yet for 3 Houses, I don’t see IS throwing the lgbt community a bone and giving out a patch for more m/m choices. I highly doubt they’d care enough to do the work to make that happen. Maybe a paid DLC in the future but I don’t see that happening either. I'd like to be wrong of course, but I'm not getting my hopes up by any means.

Once the game is out, I’m sure there will be more backlash from the lgbt community who have gone into this game completely blind. Yet even then, we are the vocal minority and are not the target audience for Three Houses in the eyes of IS. I had hoped IS would have done better since Fates, but nope. Not to me at least.

I also don’t buy into the justification I’ve seen from some lgbt folks that 3H is a vast improvement compared to past games because of the wlw choices. Nope, with IS screwing over the parts of the lgbt community with what they did with the mlm choices, I don’t think that’s an improvement at all. YES technically it’s “better” compared to old games because of having a larger number of choices, but that doesn’t nullify the crap IS pulled here.

I hate to sound so salty and pessimistic. I have nothing against the wlw lgbt folks either. I know some of them feel like they are being thrown under the bus for being happy about the wlw choices, because of what IS has done with the mlm choices.

I mean no ill will at all, so please don’t take it that way.

I keep trying to tell myself that once I actually start playing the game and get into it, I’ll be less upset about this whole mess. Of course I’ll likely still be slightly bitter deep down. Had to experience that when I played Persona 5. AT LEAST with 3H we get our one m/m choice, where as with Persona 5 it was 0 and a some tasteless homophobic jokes.

ill get off my soap box now 

Edited July 24, 2019 by xchickengirlx