#they're not my main pairing for this book and i actually “pair” Jax with someone else but I was too lazy to edit the name so ignore that lo

[a-cloud-for-dreams]

Yeah..you probably should leave Nikhil imao

I swear I thought he was John Somerset at first

[where-the-wind-travels]

not to be a salty little shit (and therefore revive the calico rants tag) again but

y'all remember my earlier rant? the one where i stated that even mah, one of the books with the most accurate and inclusive queer representation in the app, has its fuck ups (more details in the post itself)

well, i just remembered that perfect match, the one book where you can actually be polyamorous and have a realistic polycule dynamic instead of "oh you still have to pick a main li and they'll be the only person you can make it official with and say i love you to but at least there's still the option of flirting and hooking up with other lis if you want to slut around some more" (cough. bloodbound. why the fuck didn't pb let me say i love you to both jax and adrian and let me live my married poly fantasy w/ the provider the girlboss and the malewife) also has a pretty big fuck up in my opinion.

specifically, regarding the option to pair up sloane and khaan vs. pursuing them as love interests yourself.

i get that obviously not all people who read pm decide to play as a polyamorous character and therefore wouldn't really like their love interest having romantic feelings for someone else, but what about those who don't mind? even worse, what about the players who are polyamorous themselves and were hoping for the love interests to also have a poly route?

you can only get the option to play matchmaker for sloane and khaan if you aren't pursuing either of them. not both of them, not just one of them, only when you're dating neither. and that makes sense... from a monogamous standpoint. hell, not even from all monogamous standpoints, there are plenty of people who wouldn't be poly themselves but would be okay with their partners being poly.

and that's where i start being a salty little shit about this, because why the hell is there not an option to pair them if you're already established as poly and dating both of them? i vividly remember that during one of my pm plays (where i only dated hayden) sloane is confiding to mc about her possibly having feelings for khaan (or something, my memory is terrible) and asking them what to do.

and one of the dialogue options for that scene if you didn't flirt with khaan beforehand is "don't date him, date me instead".

and i don't know about you all, but that reads as incredibly selfish to me if your mc is poly and especially if your mc is male, i don't know why but combined with the poly thing it has more than a bit of a misogynistic undertone. i mean, they're literally telling her to stop pursuing her crush if she wants to date them, but they can pursue as many people as they want.

and for the other scenario (pairing up love interests that you pursue with other characters as a monogamous person) imo there should be a customization option for that. kinda like the sexuality option in the elementalists but it's for poly routes, either the option to allow mc to become official with multiple lis or to allow the lis themselves to have simultaneous romance routes with mc and other characters. preferably both but that'd be asking too much for "the most amount of queer we can handle right now are romances between genderlocked female mcs and goc lis that still read as a straight romance, the only thing that's left is for the f!lis to grow a dick like they did in platinum" pb.