#restoring Jaal's bisexuality was a start

[blue-slates]

I think, ultimately, I’m gonna pass on the mass effect remaster. Like, I’m not gonna pay upwards of R/P500 just to experience the background homophobia of apparently 0 mlm in the entire galaxy for the first 2 games while BW gives me mega sad eyes for turning down every other woman they throw at shepard, but in 4k graphics

Sure, I’m ready to be hurt again, but there’s a new Mass Effect for that!

[dgcatanisiri]

Just got some #MakeJaalBi related salt I need to vent out of my system, and I’m putting it here since I know how futile actually arguing the point is. Free to reblog, but I’m not responding to anything.

What do straight women lose in Jaal being made bi? The most they’ve lost is exclusivity to a character. That’s it. Anyone saying that ‘he’s perfect as is’ is implying that him being bisexual, that there would be people rolling male Ryders and romancing him with them would somehow have an effect on them and how they play. That restoring a character’s bisexuality which was cut for whatever reason matters less to them than the fact that they are able to keep exclusive rights to romancing this character.

Why aren’t we asking for more content for the other characters? Oh, believe me, we are. I’d love it if Gil’s character arc were rebuilt from the ground up and expanded to be more than the homophobic afterthought it is now. Hell, if Reyes were better incorporated to the whole game’s story, I’d be on board with romancing him, despite not caring for him as a romance as he is now. BUT there’s a practical component – Jaal’s romance as it is currently, to my understanding, is done in such a way that he rarely if ever uses gender pronouns, and at least some lines were recorded of BroRyder’s voice actor voicing lines for it. So if it comes down to writing entirely new scenes and conversations, dragging the actors back into the studio, and programming all of that into a patch, versus unlocking already recorded dialogue and editing the game files to offer BroRyder, guess what we expect to happen?

Believe me, I’d love it if they’d give Gil new and better content and offer more content for Reyes. Hell, I’d love some new companion included to get that squadmate romance. But that is likely only going to matter for DLC. A lot of us have no interest in paying extra for content that we were led to believe we were getting in the base game. If the only fixes come through DLC – meaning we have to pay an additional fee to get the things advertised as existing in the base game – then there are a lot of people, and not just gay/bi guys but gay/bi women and a lot of our straight allies, who will refuse to do so on principle, on the grounds that they do not want to reward this behavior with their money.

Because this is a shitty way to treat the customer base that they actively court. And BioWare DOES actively court queer players. They have claimed repeatedly that they care about diversity. That they want to offer games for everyone, not just straight male players. But their money was nowhere in the vicinity of their mouth here. It was an active and conscious decision of everyone making the decisions for this game to not have a M/M romanceable squadmate – knowing that these are the characters who get the most content because they are venturing out in the field with the player character – and it was an active and conscious decision to give the least content of all the romances to the male characters romanceable by male PCs. It was a choice to remove/not implement Jaal’s bisexuality.

And BioWare has a history of not implementing male characters’ bisexuality. Kaidan. Thane. Cullen. Solas. All of these characters were at some point intended to be bisexual options and had that cut, for whatever reason. Kaidan at least was able to have it restored later, but the fact that this has happened in a third (out of four!) Mass Effect game says that there’s a pattern of treating M/M romances as something shameful, something that they don’t want to actually implement. From male Shepard not getting to even flirt with another man until ME3, while FemShep had Liara as an option from day one, to Shepard speaking to Kaidan as if the date on the Citadel in ME3 was the first time he’d thought of a relationship with Kaidan, despite flirt options intended and accepted as flirts by Kaidan, to here and now with Ryder, the actions BioWare has taken have completed undermined their words.

The problem is in the broken trust BioWare has left us with. We are an audience who feel betrayed by the people we thought were working to treat us right. And a campaign like #MakeJaalBi is a matter of saying where reparations can be started. We want more and better treatment, to be sure, but this is a start. It’s an apology we believe is both showing an understanding of what was wrong and how to make amends while remaining feasible for the production and development teams.

This isn’t asking that Jaal’s straight romance be removed. Just that it’s available to men and women. If Jaal’s so perfect as he is, why can’t BroRyder get to experience that perfection? What is the harm in there being more to share in the love? I mean, sharing the love seems perfectly in character for the angara. Why would they restrict their love by such arbitrary means? We have the asari openly offering their love for anyone interested, regardless of gender, why shouldn’t the angara be the same?

And, on another note, anyone saying that the saltiness on the part of those asking for this ‘isn’t helping’ clearly doesn’t get it. This is a hurt and burned group of people who want to love this series coming to terms with the fact that it doesn’t love them back. We’re hurt and in pain because we care so much about this franchise, but the way it’s treated us has been lackluster at best, malicious at worst. Of course we’re going to be salty about this. We want to know that we’re being heard and listened to, not just dismissing our words – our expressions of how much this hurt us, the fact that BioWare games are for many of us our primary, even our only source of representation in a world that actively hates us – being just a bunch of whining.