Antigonius said:
Gundam GP01 said:
Fuck yeah it's positive. He's a gay protagonist of an adventure story. That like NEVER happens.
Well, I can agree (althou when I say "adventure story", I usually mean stuff like Mario or Indiana Jones - those guys are pretty much asexual).
But from the other PoV - If a writer wants to write a straight protagonist that's because they know how they work. They know clichés about piracy, they studied about pirate culture, know the prices of headhunting, etc. Maybe he doesn't know how to write gay people because he doesn't know any gay (for example - in my country homosexuality are compared to mental trauma and is usually shunned and they don't have any decent work) or they only gay he knows is from porn. What is the point to a such writer to write a gay person and will it be a good one? Doubt it.
From my experience if you push a writer to make certain stuff, the end result is rarely of any value
Are we talking about books now?
Because this is not how video game writing works, there is almost never a single writer on anything other than indie games, they don't generally come up with characters by themselves and you've got the order of the conversation reversed anyway. In a big budget game like a Bioware title, the plot and characters are hashed out in group meetings, and if a character is gay or straight it will be decided long before the writers are even hired on to hammer out the actual details of the character, in order for a group of writers to work well together, they generally already have a framework (decided by both the lead developers and publishers, before they start on the details).
Your example doesn't work because that is not how a writer and publisher generally interact in projects, in which I mean that the publisher and a general writer likely aren't going to talk to each other directly at all, if they do it will be with the development and project heads, not the writers, the publisher only talks directly to the writer when it comes to books, in video games, it's much closer to:
developer: "you've been hired on to write dialogue for some of the characters and side quests in the game, we've already got the story boards from the director and lead writer based on our pitch proposals, the character you are writing for is a bisexual pirate capable of being romanced by the player character, here's the briefs decided on by the creative teams, we'll bring you any changes and details as necessary, the first draft will be expected in the next 2 months".
In a large project, the story is often decided by the leads and publisher before a single writer ever puts pen to paper, and even then, they will make hundreds of changes anyway just within the writing team, or with the art department as situations change over the course of development, oftentimes the writer is commissioned merely to fill in the holes in a story that's already been decided.
That, and if a writer falls apart because one demand is being made of them, then they are in the wrong industry, video game writers are not hired to make shit up and have it critiqued by publishers. They are hired to work in a team and be flexible about their writing, a prima donna who throws a creative hissy fit anytime someone questions their work is better suited to writing books where they can maintain sole creative control, rather than a project like a major video game where they are working with 5-10 other writers, and are generally working from a framework that's been group written long before they ever even started.
A video game writer will likely have had their writing torn apart and reassembled dozens of times before they even make it out of the rough draft phase, this is how collaborative projects work, trying to frame it like the publisher actually comes in to make terrible demands as if that's somehow not a part of the normal creative group process shows a profound misunderstanding of the role most writers play in large projects like video games.
