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FE16 Same-Sex Relationship Discussion


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I hope the reason this hasn't been getting much attention is because most people haven't gotten to the S supports. I wonder if it'll blow up when people start S ranking and getting those lame endings. I don't expect IS or Nintendo to fix it with DLC which is a shame, and if the next game is a remake of FE4 as is most likely I don't expect them to address it there either. But I'd love to be proven wrong

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16 minutes ago, Book Bro said:

I hope the reason this hasn't been getting much attention is because most people haven't gotten to the S supports. I wonder if it'll blow up when people start S ranking and getting those lame endings. I don't expect IS or Nintendo to fix it with DLC which is a shame, and if the next game is a remake of FE4 as is most likely I don't expect them to address it there either. But I'd love to be proven wrong

I'm guessing you're referring to Alois and Gilbert when you say "lame endings" since all of the f/f options actually end in romance. In which case I'd doubt we'd see much blow up because I assume most people won't go for Gilbert (especially since he's only available for Blue Lions) which leaves us with Alois as the only option that some people might S support but I still think most prefer Linhardt and Linhardt's S support isn't problematic.

EDIT: oh, and it appears Alois isn't available for Black Eagles so he also has availability issues but not as bad as Gilbert.

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

I'm guessing you're referring to Alois and Gilbert when you say "lame endings" since all of the f/f options actually end in romance. In which case I'd doubt we'd see much blow up because I assume most people won't go for Gilbert (especially since he's only available for Blue Lions) which leaves us with Alois as the only option that some people might S support but I still think most prefer Linhardt and Linhardt's S support isn't problematic.

out of curiosity I just read through Gilbert and Byleth's supports. There's not really a hint of any kind of romantic tone coming from them whatsoever.  I agree that only a small fraction of players playing as M!Byleth will try to S rank Alois or Gilbert, so there might not be a lot of vocal backlash to come. At this point, any back lash will come from the lack of M/M choices

I know I saw a handful of folks here and on reddit, who were excited about being able to S support Alois and Gilbert. I'm sure there will be other players who have gone into this game blind and may try to S support them. Trying to put myself into the mindset of a player who hasn't spoiled themselves like I have, I'd like to think these players would catch on by the time they get to the A rank that it's going nowhere romantically, so they don't get duped by the bait and switch ending, especially with Alois.

I know there's gonna be a lot of people playing the GD route who are gonna be mad that the house is 100% straight, but I guess they'll just go as F!Byleth and recruit one of the bi female students to S support, or recruit Linhardt as M!Byleth, and just settle with it. I'm on the GD route and plan to recruit Linhardt to S support him. I'm only on ch.2 so I haven't had the chance to start the process of recruiting yet. I'm still not 100% happy he's my only choice, but at the same time I'd still like to experience the only M/M choice the game gave us.

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37 minutes ago, Book Bro said:

I hope the reason this hasn't been getting much attention is because most people haven't gotten to the S supports. I wonder if it'll blow up when people start S ranking and getting those lame endings. I don't expect IS or Nintendo to fix it with DLC which is a shame, and if the next game is a remake of FE4 as is most likely I don't expect them to address it there either. But I'd love to be proven wrong

I don't expect it either, but they have said that they plan on adding more characters via DLC, so another bi male is a possibility. Not one I expect, but It's important to get our voices heard that it's something we want to see. 

As for the lack of attention, to be honest I don't think the platonic S support thing is that bad. Once its clear the S rank isn't romantic in the slightest you can just revert your save, after all. And I support more diverse S supports, I think that having every S support with every character end in marriage was a poor choice (though I'd rather platonic S supports were simply called A+). The real issue is that there is only a single token MLM relationship, and I've seen a fair amount of people expressing disappointment about that. 

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2 hours ago, SimplyUnknown said:

Apparently this is starting to get some magazine articles about it. There are a couple of spoilers for certain supports in the one I found so I'll be putting the link in spoiler tags for safety.

  Hide contents

I think this article hit some of the major points that people are talking about, and hopefully other articles like this will help get Nintendo's attention. 

Wonderful news! I hope more game news media talk about this controversial aspect of the game.

As for the new characters that three houses are going to introduce... I am HOPING that this isn't another one of those new crossover characters from previous games. I really disliked those Nohr and Hoshido characters appearing out of nowhere in Echoes: Shadows of Valentia.

 

 

Edited by magenero29
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22 hours ago, EJ107 said:

It's difficult to say how many LGBT people work there. It's quite possible that many do, but they simply don't have the go-ahead, ability or desire to expand upon the M/M supports. 

I'm quite fortunate in the company I work in, since there's a large LGBT group there including some of the quest writers (one of whom happens to be my line manager!). I've mentioned that I'd like to write some LGBT characters in the future and they seem really cool with that, so I like to think that I'd be contributing in my own small way ☺️

One of the reasons Bioware's Mass Effect games had a lot of diverse rep is because their head writer was gay.

I can 100% assure you that there are no gay or even bi men working on Fire Emblem at Int Sys. Only 14 people from Int Sys actually worked on the game, and all in producer/director roles. They would have been the ones responsible for the writing. The highest ranking women involved were only in art/graphics positions.

--

5 hours ago, NegativeExponents- said:

I'm guessing you're referring to Alois and Gilbert when you say "lame endings" since all of the f/f options actually end in romance.

Meh, I honestly don't count Sothis or Rhea because why the hell would anyone want to romance them? And there's no way Byleth actually gets married to either of them in the end, despite the "romantic" nature of their conversations.

mod edit don't double post

Edited by Parrhesia
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5 minutes ago, bufkus said:

Meh, I honestly don't count Sothis or Rhea because why the hell would anyone want to romance them? And there's no way Byleth actually gets married to either of them in the end, despite the "romantic" nature of their conversations.

"why would anyone romance them" is a terrible blanket statement to make for the whole fandom. you might not want to but plenty of other people see some appeal in dating the fantasy pope.

 

Also, implying that they have to get married for it to be a real romance is kinda iffy as well. It'd be nice from a representation standpoint to have two girls (or two guys) definitively stated to have gotten married, but you don't have to be married for it to be a romantic relationship.

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1 hour ago, bufkus said:

Meh, I honestly don't count Sothis or Rhea because why the hell would anyone want to romance them? And there's no way Byleth actually gets married to either of them in the end, despite the "romantic" nature of their conversations.

You exchange rings, same as all the other romantic supports. It's pretty clear cut.

Also: it's hip to smooch the pope

Edited by Arachnofiend
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3 hours ago, bufkus said:

Meh, I honestly don't count Sothis or Rhea because why the hell would anyone want to romance them? And there's no way Byleth actually gets married to either of them in the end, despite the "romantic" nature of their conversations.

Hahaha, hey, I want to romance Rhea. 

She's scary, I like that.

 Edit: Also Mass Effect's head writer wasn't gay, Dragon Age's was.

Edited by Llorona
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Since Female and male Byleth are included in certain confession CG artwork, it would require new artwork if their S-supports were opened up to both genders for those characters. 

Here's a list of characters whose CG artwork doesn't show Byleth's gender in it.

Spoiler

List:

-Hubert

-Bernadetta

-Ingrid

-Ashe

-Annette

-Hilda

-Lorenz

-Marianne

-Ignatz

-Leonie

 

Current Same-Sex S-Supports:

-Eldegard

-Dorothea

-Linhardt

-Mercedes

-Sothis

-Rhea

-Alois

-Gilbert

Many of these characters' supports are gender neutral as well. It seems that these S-support options above could be opened up to both genders in a future patch with relatively little production cost for Intelligent Systems. (Copy the S-support to the other gender, change cutscene models, change color of hand/glove in the CG, etc).

Edited by Bell-kun
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On 7/30/2019 at 9:44 AM, SimplyUnknown said:

Apparently this is starting to get some magazine articles about it. There are a couple of spoilers for certain supports in the one I found so I'll be putting the link in spoiler tags for safety.

  Reveal hidden contents

I think this article hit some of the major points that people are talking about, and hopefully other articles like this will help get Nintendo's attention. 

That's so awesome!
I just saw Kotaku made an article about it as well! I would post a link but I'm super rusty regarding forums and I'd make everything a horrendous mess.

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23 minutes ago, PersonWithTime said:

That's so awesome!
I just saw Kotaku made an article about it as well! I would post a link but I'm super rusty regarding forums and I'd make everything a horrendous mess.

Here's the link

They called out Nintendo only slightly, which I suppose is fine (infinitely better than nothing!), and it was well-written.

I personally would have preferred more scathing, but I'm a bit fiery about the topic and know that that would be a different article and a different direction. Either way, I hope this trend continues where people write more on this. Kotaku's obviously the big dog in the situation, but there are others who could speak up and now more people are reaching points in the game where this is coming up.

Edited by Death
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I think it's fine that they were light on the calling out. The quality and quantity of the female options is decent, and Linhardt is better written than Niles. So focusing the criticism on how progress is being made but it's very, very slow is the fairest approach for them IMO. 

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At the end of the day Kotaku still needs to maintain a good relationship with Nintendo. The fact that the writer focused on the issues with mlm before praising wlw is a pretty good approach. I also like the fact that she also reminded the readers about the issues with mlm options with the very last sentence of the article. I hope Nintendo sees it and really reflect on how they can approach LGBT representation in the future (whether it's DLC for this game or a future game of the series). The fact that they stayed quiet even after all the tweets and a notable game review site reached out to them makes me wonder whether they're discussing the issue or not.

Hopefully, more companies will start doing small 'call outs' before the buzz for this game dies down.

Edited by zuibangde
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On 7/30/2019 at 5:52 PM, NegativeExponents- said:

EDIT: oh, and it appears Alois isn't available for Black Eagles so he also has availability issues but not as bad as Gilbert.

This isn't true btw, I definitely had Alois on Board on the full on BE route.

EDIT: Also it turned out that Alois, regardless of strange beard is a pretty good character. Well there is that, I am still not calling people things that end with phobic over that but yeah, even Linhardt turned out to be great, even though he still looks way too feminine for my tastes.

Edited by Lord of Riva
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20 hours ago, Lord of Riva said:

This isn't true btw, I definitely had Alois on Board on the full on BE route.

EDIT: Also it turned out that Alois, regardless of strange beard is a pretty good character. Well there is that, I am still not calling people things that end with phobic over that but yeah, even Linhardt turned out to be great, even though he still looks way too feminine for my tastes.

Alois is a good character, but he's not in any way LGBT so I don't understand why he is still being brought up in talks about LGBT representation in the game? He is a straight, married man with a daughter who can take Byleth under his wing as a father figure. Nothing more, nothing less. 

Edited by EJ107
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@Bell-kunWhile you aren't wrong here, we also have to take into account that it's actually more expensive and tedius for the company to have new voice lines for certain supports (especially if they decide to patch it for most if not all localizations) than it is for new/edited CGs (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not the brightest bulb).That means that the list actually comes down to: 

Spoiler

*Ashe, Hubert, Annette, Ingrid, Leonie, Marianne, and Hilda.

This is because Lorenz, Ignatz and Bernadetta actually refer to Byleth's gender in their voice lines and epilogues (Also for Bernie you'd have to either make an entirely new CG or add F!Byleth's massive chest)

The other characters that would only require a CG change (with the other programming tidbits that come with adding those S supports) are:

Spoiler

Catherine, Shamir, Petra, Lysithea (also a case of having to change the entire CG), Dimitri, Claude, Raphael, Dedue, Caspar, and Cyril.  

These characters don't refer to Byleth with gendered pronouns of any kind, so it would actually be more cost effective and much less tedius for these and the first list to be the ones included in a future patch. 

The characters that I absolutely think wouldn't  be considered by IntSys as same-sex S supports for various reasons are: 

Spoiler

Felix, Sylvain, Lorenz, Ferdinand, Hanneman, Ignatz, Seteth, Flayn, Bernadetta, and Manuela.

You'll notice most on that list are dudes, which is the unfortunate reality of the situation, especially  for two of these cause I can totally see a bunch of straight players hoping on the anti lgbt bandwagon for making explicitly straight characters same-sex options. Plus you'd have to change their voice lines a bit. Again feel free to correct me if I'm wrong or debate these lists, I've spent too much thinking time on this Hahaha XD 

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If they were to add any options in a patch, Caspar would be my first pick. His supports are already gender-neutral and his paired ending with Linhardt has strong romantic subtext, so it's not like it would be coming out of nowhere. 

That being said, I think the chances of that happening are near 0, and I have mixed feelings about character romances being opened up to different sexes post-release. The only real chance in my eyes is if they add new DLC characters in the future, or in the next main-series FE game, of course. But my hopes aren't particularly high for either of those at the moment either. 

Edited by EJ107
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On 7/30/2019 at 2:56 PM, EJ107 said:

I played a great Skyrim mod "Interesting NPC's", that adds a bunch of Marriage options with more involved dialogue. What it did was make ~80% of the new marriage options bisexual, with the remaining 20% being split evenly between gay, lesbian and straight characters. It's by far the best way of doing things IMO

The "realism" argument is stupid from the get-go, because how is it realistic that literally every playable female character in the game wants to get in M!Byleths pants?  People don't seem to care about "realism" when the unrealistic features are pandering to them. It's only when games are trying to appeal to a demographic they aren't a part of that it's suddenly a big issue. 

2

this!

 

--------------

 

Anyway i am disgusted! instead of making the logical option and make claude Bi (as it would to make sylas in fates) they gave us one option and its below average.... why cant we have a hot dude! 🤣

Edited by Pegasus Knight
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@GiveMeCuteness Good post! You're right, VA is expensive and Lorenz, Ignatz and Bernadetta, refer to Byleth's gender in both Japanese and English. On a side note, based on what I've listened to, it seems that the English localization is a pretty direct translation of the Japanese for the most part. (It seems well done!) Wonder about all the other localizations and languages as well and whether they preserved the largely gender neutral speech of the Japanese and the English dialogue.  And there's a lot on the production side I'm ignorant of. Thanks for the lists and thoughts on possibly feasible same-sex additions!

On 8/4/2019 at 11:46 AM, GiveMeCuteness said:

Voice Acting Gender Neutral + Easy CG Fix:

  Hide contents

*Ashe, Hubert, Annette, Ingrid, Leonie, Marianne, and Hilda.

Voice Acting Gender Neutral + New CG:

  Hide contents

Catherine, Shamir, Petra, Lysithea (also a case of having to change the entire CG), Dimitri, Claude, Raphael, Dedue, Caspar, and Cyril.  

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Linhardt was wonderful (I had my Male Byleth have an S Support with him) I had dragged him into Blue Lions House 🙂 and he really grew on me a lot after discovering more about him....I had Byleth talk to him after every event xD along with getting Linhardt to have supports with others (To learn even more about Linhardt and etc). It is very frustrating there is only one romantic Male S Support for Male Byleth.... 

After completing Blue Lions route I have to say...

Spoiler

Dimitri should have been able to have S Support with Male Byleth! (The words Dimitri says to Byleth outside of Support and everything T.T I do not want to spoil it 🤐 too much and I'm rather emotional about it. Why is there no S Support with Male Byleth.... Dimitri S Support with Female Byleth did not mention any gender pronouns and the mention of Warm Hands which btw Dimitri mentions that in-game to Byleth *regardless of gender of said Byleth* in Blue Lions Route.)

At this point of time can only make fanfics of those two being together....I really hope that they patch in more Male S Support for Male Byleth (although sadly highly unlikely that they will patch it in).

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On 7/30/2019 at 12:39 PM, bufkus said:

One of the reasons Bioware's Mass Effect games had a lot of diverse rep is because their head writer was gay.

I can 100% assure you that there are no gay or even bi men working on Fire Emblem at Int Sys. Only 14 people from Int Sys actually worked on the game, and all in producer/director roles. They would have been the ones responsible for the writing. The highest ranking women involved were only in art/graphics positions.

--

Meh, I honestly don't count Sothis or Rhea because why the hell would anyone want to romance them? And there's no way Byleth actually gets married to either of them in the end, despite the "romantic" nature of their conversations.

mod edit don't double post

I dunno, I pretty much only go for Sothis because voice in my head > real girls any day. xd

Anyway, it's a shame for those who got their hopes up that Gilbert and Alois weren't what they expected. I'm not a fan of diversity for diversity's sake I'd rather have characters be organic in whatever relationship preferences they prefer. It doesn't make sense to me for the A relationships between two same gender characters to be extremely platonic but when between two different genders their feelings are considerably less platonic. If they make the character consistent where it's less straight forward platonic with their other A ranks too or at least some semblance that they're actually gay/bisexual rather than just Byleth sexual then that would be great. Unfortunately I know they'd never do that in this title at least because it would require considerable effort to rework support convos to do so. But that's just my two cents.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 8/6/2019 at 8:33 PM, EntireInternet said:

I dunno, I pretty much only go for Sothis because voice in my head > real girls any day. xd

Anyway, it's a shame for those who got their hopes up that Gilbert and Alois weren't what they expected. I'm not a fan of diversity for diversity's sake I'd rather have characters be organic in whatever relationship preferences they prefer. It doesn't make sense to me for the A relationships between two same gender characters to be extremely platonic but when between two different genders their feelings are considerably less platonic. If they make the character consistent where it's less straight forward platonic with their other A ranks too or at least some semblance that they're actually gay/bisexual rather than just Byleth sexual then that would be great. Unfortunately I know they'd never do that in this title at least because it would require considerable effort to rework support convos to do so. But that's just my two cents.

Is there any way we can contact nintendo to at least try and implement some more S supports for male byleth?

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Nintendo sent a survey for Three Houses to my email since I registered my copy to my Nintendo account. Had the typical "what were you disappointed at/what do you want for the game" and I wrote more m/m please and

Spoiler

a golden route where all three main lords live please :((

as my response. Hopefully they sent you one as well! 

If you can't find it or haven't received it, someone linked a reddit post that had contact options to Nintendo and IntSys in this thread a page or two back. Hope that helps! 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Nudging this topic forward since the splinter threads apparently keep dying off, and this has been buried.

Reiterating that anyone who comes here just to troll should be narced without hesitation so that I can destroy them.

Edited by Parrhesia
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