Lol. You might as well say the Fire Emblem devs need to do better considering 90% of the mentions of sexuality/romance in Nintendo games come from that series and the other 10% are....Kafei and Anju in Majora's Mask, the Lover's Pond sidequest in BOTW, and the wedding at the end of Mario Odyssey
Oh, to be sure, i don't think there needs to be any kind of romance in Nintendo games, straight or queer.
but if there is gonna be any it should be explicitly inclusive whenever possible.
and as a personal side note, i would happily remove ALL the relationship shit from Fire Emblem. I just want to strategize battles, god damn it!
And it still happens all the time. I've heard plenty a gay/lesbian/bi person introduce their partner as their "roommate" in contexts where they don't want to draw attention to themselves or risk making waves, such as at work or with unfamiliar people.
CJ rapturously describing how much he looooves Flick's amazing art doesn't exactly seem like platonic roommate behavior to me, but I'm sure there's expert Game Understanders on the internet who will tell me that I'm wrong.
I think it's weird that people can't genuinely love the things their platonic friends do?
like, that's a whole other issue when it comes to straight male/male friendships and openly expressing love and appreciation for each other in our culture
why can't people just really love their friends, regardless of the configuration of genders and sexualities? Why does everything gotta be a god damn dime store romance novel?
i also think it's weird to believe that NOA's idea of representation in this case would be to write the character so ambiguous it could imply they feel the need to hide the true nature of their relationship in a game where acceptance and support are such big themes
People are gonna be reeeeaal disappointed that a book embracing a platonic interpretation that we already knew was at least present in other localizations won't shut up the queers who have already embraced the idea of them being romantic partners and will take to the roommate thing like catnip
I think it's a fine reading and if people want to headcanon that shit then more power to them
what we shouldn't do is be giving Nintendo any kind of credit at all