https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...-just-need-gay-characters-it-needs-queer-life
Vice just posted an excellent article about the lack of quality queer options in Fire Emblem Three Houses, particularly the male options, and also goes through the failures of past FE games in regards to queer content.
I urge anyone who wants to know more about why the queer community is so upset to read this. I hope more media outlets start picking up on this as well.
Some key quotes, but I highly suggest reading the entire article.
Vice just posted an excellent article about the lack of quality queer options in Fire Emblem Three Houses, particularly the male options, and also goes through the failures of past FE games in regards to queer content.
I urge anyone who wants to know more about why the queer community is so upset to read this. I hope more media outlets start picking up on this as well.
Some key quotes, but I highly suggest reading the entire article.
Edelgard's dialogue—in fact, the text of all of the queer support dialogues—is 90% the same regardless of Byleth's gender with only a few (mostly inconsequential) lines of difference. Because that queer reading that hit me right in the gut emotionally has absolutely, positively no impact whatsoever on the actual story of Three Houses. It's not reflected in the game's world, its history, even the other characters closest to either Byleth or Edelgard. It's a lovely, touching moment, but that's all it is: a moment. And to quote Into the Woods, "Life is made of moments, even now and then a bad one, but if life were only moments, then you'd never know you had one."
Fire Emblem is a series that has a complicated history indeed with queerness. Over its history, it's done very little in terms of inclusion on that front. Taking a look at the LGBTQ Game Archive's and Queerly Represent Me's pages for Fire Emblem as a series shows that the queerness seen and experienced in these games is often found more in player queering and interpretation than explicit inclusion.
Just like in Three Houses, the actual text for the supports in Fates is the same regardless of Corrin's gender, so it's difficult to consider either option particularly explicit in terms of queerness. Never mind that there is a significant mechanical cost from either option in the form of missing playable units: Like Awakening, romantic supports in Fates between a man and a woman result in "child" units recruitable later, but a queer Corrin in a same-gender relationship doesn't have their child, Kana (and Niles doesn't father his child Nina, either).
It's not necessarily that copy/pasting Kana or Nina into a queer Corrin's game, complete with their attached child, is the better option. What's important is that no opposite-gender pairing has what effectively amounts to a queer tax in terms of playable units, though, making this another marker of how "off to the side" the same-gender options can feel. The result is… well. "Your choices matter, and your main character is designed by you, but just remember that if you choose to be queer your options are severely limited, there's no real story impact, and you're giving up minimum one playable unit in a game with permadeath" is a hell of a thing.
Comparatively, for men, Alois and Gilbert (two-thirds of the options!) are middle aged knights with existing families. And well… hoo boy. I've heard complaints about two of the S rank m/m options being "old men" compared to the third, who is a more typically young pretty boy type, and to that I say: I am 40 years old and queer ageism is super real, so shut it. I admit that aesthetically, Gilbert and Alois aren't my type and I wasn't terribly excited by them, but that's not the problem.
The problem is that the supposed S-rank romantic supports with Gilbert and Alois—said older men—simply aren't romantic supports at all. In the process of building a relationship with them, you find out both of them are married to women and have children! Now, "married to a woman" does not automatically mean "heterosexual," but I think "is in a likely monogamous relationship with someone else that is also the parent of their child" is definitely not a good look for a romantic support partner. More to the point, their S-rank support conversations do not involve expressions of romantic love or anything of the sort. Instead, both Gilbert and Alois express something akin to "Best Bros" friendship, the Final Fantasy XV kind of emotional dude friendship.
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