YURI AND YAOI IN ONE GAME? A QUESTION

author=unity
Real-world stories of gay individuals are powerful and great, but not everyone wants to deal with the phobia, angst, and prejudice of real world views all the time, especially when we sit down to play games. Some of us want to sit back and play a game that doesn't remind us that the real world has a lot of views on sexuality that are messed up.

Excuse me Unity, I made my point wrong. I wasn't trying to say that a game has to be realistic so that you have to put the Church, manifestants and everything that happens in real life. But if you put a game where everybody is LGBT, and everybody is pleased about it, then I consider it would be a downfall of the story. Why? The matter with LGBT is acceptance, right? So a world depicted where everybody accepts it, does it and etc may give the following message to the player: you have to accept it. Do you want to give such message with your game? Then go ahead! If you do it skillfuly people will love it, I'm sure of that.

Besides, unless you want to do a reverse world where gay is the rule and hetero is not common (or not accepted or so) that kind of world makes sense. Off course a fantasy LGBT world can be done as world filled with dragons, magic or Hi-tech evil empires. But then you'll get a game about being LGBT, not about romance (It's not the same a game in a mountain that a game about the mountain). And dragons, magic and Hi-Tech intergalactic stuff does not exist, LGBT do exist, so it can't be treated as commmon fantasy stuff.

Just my opinion here. I don't want this to become a polemics, but to comment and see which fine work will come from your hands. Looking for that romantic game you are developing.

author=unity
While you may be right that setting this sort of story in a "common" world is more powerful, I disagree about your opinion on "an unexistent world that doesn't connect." Games often have an element of escapism, where you can be a hero that does great things. Is it too escapist to want to live in a world that doesn't judge you based on the gender of the person you love?

And games and stories are full of things that "don't exist." It baffles me when someone says "Yeah, I can't this game seriously. It's not the dragons and magic and fantasy, it's the fact that so many characters are bisexual." (This is something actually said about the Dragon Age series.) What? I don't understand this mindset at all.

Getting the audience to accept a deviation from reality along one metric doesn't give you a carte blanche to get them to accept deviations along any other metric as long as they're of lesser magnitude. People are especially sensitive to differences between what people are like in the story and what they're like in real life.

If you write a story which contains humans, dragons, elves, and magic, where all humans in the world speak one language, the genre of fantasy has already clustered together an audience who're willing to accept the deviations of dragons, elves, and magic. And the conventions of console roleplaying games have clustered together an audience who're mostly willing to accept the "one world language" deviation, so most fantasy RPG players won't take issue with this. But some fantasy fans are going to see this as fundamentally selling short the diversity of human culture. To a reader who already accepts the "one world language" deviation, this might seem silly; "you've already accepted that this world contains dragons, elves and magic! It's not so unrealistic compared to that!" But these are separate issues which different audience members have different sensitivity to. If you were to write a story which contained humans, dragons, elves, magic, and ran on porno-logic, where practically all interactions between people are inevitably driven towards sex, a lot of audience members would object, and "but dragons!" would obviously be a silly excuse.

That someone isn't prepared to buy a particular deviation from reality in a story doesn't necessarily mean they would disapprove of that deviation in real life. Lots of people are put off by stories which they feel smack too strongly of wish fulfillment. And to go back to my own example from before, the one world language trope bugs me (although I generally put up with it out of necessity,) but I would totally be in favor of all humans speaking one language in real life.

author=unity
Real-world stories of gay individuals are powerful and great, but not everyone wants to deal with the phobia, angst, and prejudice of real world views all the time, especially when we sit down to play games. Some of us want to sit back and play a game that doesn't remind us that the real world has a lot of views on sexuality that are messed up.

But at the same time, some people will be happy with a story that portrays gay people in a real-world context, but not stories where everyone is totally accepting, and this doesn't mean that there's something wrong with their preferences.

If you want to write a story where there are relations between two male/female/transgendered individuals, go for it; just keep it tactful as many others have said. I think it goes without saying that throwing in, at any given moment, a scene that plays out like "glad to be back in town, let's get into bed!" is frowned upon if not just for the fact that it sounds like a fanfic gone mad. Have two people of any sexual orientation who have mutual interests in one another ponder on the hardships that they know will befall them tomorrow (a big battle or whatever) and then share a solemn night wrapped passionately in each others arms fearing that this may be their last chance to feel each others embrace is probably a good place to start.

"There's no one else in the world I'd rather be with right now than you," he said as he gazed into his lover's warm eyes, a shot of worry sending a tear down his cheek. Although he wished that he could comfort his lover's premature, grief-stricken unease and tell him that all would be alright, he knew that he could not make such a promise and instead returned his sentiment with a kiss.