#I just wanna experience cool characters without the need to romance and subsequently fuck them

[jeff-from-marketing]

Romance and videogames, certainly an... interesting topic (I think)

Upfront, I just don't really care for it. Doesn't help that I'm very much aromantic, so I'll be discussing things with that lens, but there's one thing that only just occurred to me about how romance is treated in games that I'm particularly not a fan of.

I don't like romance as the end goal of every relationship where it's a potential option.

It feels... weird. Especially when nigh every game that does that also conflates sex and romance together. There's a number of times where I do like a character and think they're interesting, but the only way to actually continue on with their personal stuff is to romance them. If you don't, then they act all sad and disappointed (which, let me tell you, does not do any favours for my "can't make the fictional virtual people upset"-ness) and you can't really do much more with them. Or other cases where you agree to something thinking "ah yeah this is something I'd just casually do with people for funsies" but apparently the game decides to take that as a romance thing for some reason.

It's almost like those games are (inadvertently or otherwise) saying that the only relationships that really matter are the romantic ones, which... I have many issues with that actually. Or that the end goal of any relationship is to end up romantically involved, which I also have issues with. Doesn't help that 98% of games that do stuff like this also only allow for monogamy, like cowards. Though (and I can't believe I'm saying this) polygamy actually has its own issues here, because then this situation applies to so many more characters at once.

Don't even get me started on the conflation of sex and romance, and how the former of those often just feels like a strange form of player reward for doing the romance.

I know games can't account for every single option or every single kind of player, fuck just even thinking about the scope of doing such a thing terrifies me. But, if you're going to heavily include romance into something that isn't predominantly a romance genre, I would very greatly appreciate the option to go "sure I'll go along with whatever, but I don't want anything romantic to come out of this." Without tanking my reputation with them, preferably. Sometimes people are cool enough without a romantic relationship, so let me keep that.