No love for V-day.

[Eye_Gore]

Western players are so needy and easily offended, jeez.

[KodiHivaer]

stuff
Y'know, unless you're a homophobe. In which case no one gives a crap how comfortable you are.

My wife and I may be part of a majority of heterosexual couples, but she and I are still underrepresented because we're interracial.
We would also like to be represented more as much as gays and other couples are, and it's not going to hurt anyone either.

y'know unless you're all racist and hate black/white relationships/racemixing/racetraitors. In that case no one cares about how comfortable you are.

[Moqi]

Are you trying to condescend to me without taking in the context of the initial post as well as mine which was it was a direct response to? Stop reading only what you want to read.

I read what you wrote and it was a mess. Hence the quote, and the reply. Asking for representation is a much needed reality check for the people who are still oblivious (or refuse to believe) to some people's existence and a way to make your game more inclusive for all your playerbase. Zero agendas or ideals at play, let alone guilt-tripping. But more importantly, it requires 0 effort and has no drawbacks.

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

I may be part of a majority of heterosexual, but my wife and I are still underrepresented because we're interracial.
We would also like to be represented more as much as gays and other couples are, and it's not going to hurt anyone either.

y'know unless you're all racist and hate black/white relationships/racemixing/racetraitors.

You're right, it wouldn't hurt to just have more representation overall for minorities. But this thread is specifically about (and being bashed for) homosexual representation in a valentine's event. And thus my post was directed at all the people who are bashing on the OP simply because he (and others) were disappointed there was no same-sex representation within an event dedicated to love.

[Marquiss]

Why is this even an issue? It's the players that make the event, not the quest.

The quest NPCs aren't the end-all-be-all representation of relationships in this game, and you can only do so much with them to actually represent everyone as a whole.

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

Why is this even an issue? It's the players that make the event, not the quest.

The quest NPCs aren't the end-all-be-all representation of relationships in this game, and you can only do so much with them to actually represent everyone as a whole.

The gay couple in the WP HM questline were not even major NPCs nor were we ever going to see them again afterwards (that we know of yet, anyway). Why were they able to give representation there, in what is arguably an even smaller and less noticeable role than the Valentione event, yet give absolutely no representation whatsoever for the event meant to be about love? Please don't act as if SE's hands were tied on this due to some arbitrary restraints.

[kyuven]

interracial.

I don't really think this is even close to underrepresented in the game, though. In fact I think at least one of the couples in the quest, while technically the same race while within the game's ruleset, are different subraces. It mostly just doesn't seem to matter and is never brought up as something special. Hell, in the main story alone We have Thancred's crush on F'lhammin and Moenbryda's crush on Urianger. Race only seems to matter at all to the Garleans, Ishgardians, and non-Gridanian Duskwights. And in the case of the Ishgardians it seems less to do with race, specifically, and more to do with familial lineage, which is naturally connected to race because...well, family lineage.
Mixed race couples are also something along the same cultural lines of being "foreign" to Japanese people, who I must impress upon everyone is the nationality of the people responsible for much of the development of this game, as well. They exist, it's acknowledged they exist, but %-wise there are fewer interracial couples in Japan than there are colorblind people. I think it's something like only 2% of the population of Japan isn't Japanese, and 5% of Japanese males are colorblind.
It's not out of malice that you're not recognized, it's just not something they consciously think about because it's not something that comes up regularly in a (mostly) racially homogeneous nation.

The gay couple in the WP HM questline were not even major NPCs nor were we ever going to see them again afterwards (that we know of yet, anyway). Why were they able to give representation there, in what is arguably an even smaller and less noticeable role than the Valentione event, yet give absolutely no representation whatsoever for the event meant to be about love? Please don't act as if SE's hands were tied on this due to some arbitrary restraints.

As I addressed before, the Japanese idea of Valentine's Day involves women giving things to men. The love connection is there, but the target audience for advertising in Japan on Valentine's day is women. While women giving things to women isn't unheard of, it's not where the mentality of the holiday lies for the Japanese.

[Almalexia]

Yes, because there are Duskwights (darkskinned) and Wildwoods (lightskin), Dunesfolk and plainsfolk, Seeker of the sun and seeker of the moon, etc.
Just because it might not be the common black and white doesn't mean that there isn't a form of discrimination/stereotyping, there's still a distinction via name, skin color,class,creed and they judge each other based on clans.

In fantasy worlds, racial discrimination as we understand it on earth typically occurs where the differences are at their greatest: not by clan or skin color, but by comparative anatomy.

As humans, we're going to align with Human sooner than Elf because we look more akin to Human than Elf. It's primitive and makes perfect evolutionary sense, but it doesn't matter what color the elf is. The nitpicky differences between sub-races melt away in the presence of another primary race.

eg. A Midlander, Highlander and Doman know they are superficially different from each other, but they are altogether more similar than a Duskwight and a Wildswood. If you put a sample of each clan into a box with limited resources, it's highly likely the Hyur clans and the Elezen clans would bond with their respective races first to secure them--before, naturally, turning on themselves.

Rarely do you see fantasy worlds with multiple intelligent races where conventional, real-world "intra-racial" discrimination exists. You still have other divisive factors like class, sex, religion, cultural practices, property disputes, magical curses and old-fashioned ignorance.

eg. in FFXIV, you're far more likely to see a Hyur--NPC or PC--call out a Lalafell on racial grounds than another Hyur, irrespective of their clan. And let's not forget the various Beastmen, who have even greater differences than the non-Beastmen races and are largely ostracized for it.

[Kyros]

I read what you wrote and it was a mess. Hence the quote, and the reply. Asking for representation is a much needed reality check for the people who are still oblivious (or refuse to believe) to some people's existence and a way to make your game more inclusive for all your playerbase. Zero agendas or ideals at play, let alone guilt-tripping. But more importantly, it requires 0 effort and has no drawbacks.

What is more important, good storytelling or filling equality quotas? When you tell a developer "Oh and include someone gay, trans, inter-racial, and colored people to avoid offending someone" in an already tight story you are in fact dampening with the creative process. So there is no such thing as "No drawbacks" or zero effort.

Besides, you're talking like there isn't representation anyways, which there is plenty elsewhere. Last I checked the entire LGTB community still accounted for less than 5% of the population. If you want real representation like you or so called, having 1 in 3 couples represented as gay would actually have been an over-representation.

Anyways, SE really shouldn't care about offending a very small minority over idiocy. And I'm not talking about LGBT or interracial or any other minority here, I'm talking about the easily butthurt "I'm offended by anything" minority. If you look around most people (LGBT Included) couldn't give a damn about representation. You are acting like it's some sort of big issue still.

[DracotheDragon]

i love it when this thread comes up
OMG NO GAY CHARECTERS

se throws in a gay couple for us to interact with
OMG THERES GAY CHARACTERS I"M OFFENDED

event comes up no gay characters (will agree with the missed chance on this one)
OMG NO GAY I AM SO OFFENDED


look, as much as people love to b*tch and moan about this its one of these things where if they do people will complain and if they don't people will complain, yes they should of added a gay couple or lesbian couple and it is a missed chance, but when dealing with different people with different views AROUNDS THE WORLD, it becomes a tightrope where either side will love you or wish for your head, SE has given us gay characters to interact with both a quest focus and random NPC's and even one NPC from an event (the rebirth event)

long story short here boys and girls and all you in between, people will complain weather they do it or not, and honestly you shouldn't care if say thancrid is gay or straight. or if minfillia is a lesbian or heterosexual. its a game, we need to care more about there personality's and the way they act with us, not if you have a chance with one of them in a fanfic you wrote.

i swear this is like the 30th thread about this since 2.0