Dragon Age Inquistion players: How do you feel Bioware handled Dorian?s sexual orientation?

[subskipper]

As a trans woman, the writing in that scene bugged the crap out of me. It's nice to see trans characters in games, without them just existing for something the player is meant to mock and laugh at, but as you said, the dialog was very heavy handed. What bugged me the most was using a cis female to play a trans character

I think the main issue was that there was a whole lot of telling and very little showing going on there. I understand they need to condense the scene, but it was at the expense of Krem's personality and Thedas and the societal attitudes in general. I just want great characters and writing in games. I don't care much for sexuality, gender, race what have you as long as the writing and story is good, and they could have done this scene much more organic and still deliver the same message.

 

[subskipper]

Of course, and I think she is all the better for it

Confession time. Although I think Sera is a fucking idiot her background is interesting to learn about.

In some ways I think she's sort of like Ashley from Mass Effect and how many people didn't bother to dig into her background because "OMG! RACISM!" despite there being somme interesting stuff there.

Agree about Sera. I found her interesting for the most part, but at times she just came across as such a caricature and essentially a walking cliché, which bothered me a bit.

 

[Cyberstrike_v1legacy]

But he's a million times better than the other "pure gay" character, Sera, who was just terrible in every single way.

Thank goodness. I thought I was going crazy or something given how many people seem to like her. I couldn't stand her for even a second. She was just grating beyond any measure I could come up with.

This. Bioware have been having real problems with party member comedy IMO; Oghren, Shale, and occasionally Morrigan from DA:O had some great party banter, but outside of Cassandra's personal quest(which is mainly funny because of her rather than Varrick, who remains an insufferable twat that thinks he's far wittier than he actually is), most of what I think is intended as humour in DA:I has fallen flat for me. Sera's insufferable "lulz I r quirky *raspberry*" routine being so bad it transcends "unfunny" to become screen-punchingly cringe-inducing.

It's a sad day when you have to include Varrick in your party because he's the less annoying and wankerish of the available ranged-Rogue party members.

Bioware is great at dry humor. Shale, Sten, Javik, etc.

Its the "wacky" characters who are not only bad, but painfully so.

I find the dry humor of Shale, Stern, Morrigan, and Javik to be jerks and/or boring snarks and I found their humor was only funny once then it's just tiresome jerk snark. Ogrhen was only funny in DA:O-Awawking because his great banter with the rest of the party members.

IMHO Sarcastic Hawke, Sarcastic Shepard, Garrus, Tali, Alistar, Traynor, Liara, Leliana, Varric, Isabela, Sera, Iron Bull, and Dorian are much funnier than any of the dry jerky. bitchy, snarky, dull characters like Morrigan, Shale, Javik, Wrex, Grunt, Stern, and DA:O Orghen.

 

[angryscotsman93]

I liked Dorian. He's a good fella born into some truly terrible circumstances, and my Inquisitor did his best to help him out when he could. People can complain all they want, I really don't mind too many of the characters in Inquisition- hell, I can even stand Sera, even if it's mainly for the conversation she has with Blackwall about his beard.

 

[Thorn14]

I stopped giving any attempt to find good pints in Sera when her operation for jar of bees involved her randomly drawing a butt for no reason on the paper.

It was that moment she was cemented as "LOL so randumb xD" the character, to me.

 

[Thorn14]

I stopped giving any attempt to find good pints in Sera when her operation for jar of bees involved her randomly drawing a butt for no reason on the paper.

It was that moment she was cemented as "LOL so randumb xD" the character, to me.

Marines are known for drawing dicks on everything they can see. Sometimes doing that kind of thing is just funny, and has nothing to do with being a horribly written randum character.

Well first of all, Sera is nothing like a marine. And I don't see how that helps her case in any way. I put that as the same juvenile "humor" as people who just draw dicks on everything in online games.

And she already was a "randum" character from the first interactions I had with her. That just cemented it. I even told her to fuck off when she asked me to do pranks.

 

[Amaror]

Personally i found it rather well done for a Bioware romance.
Even though i played a male character, dorian didn't awkwardly tried to hit on me constantly like everyone in DA 2 did. His sexual orientation wasn't paraded around the place, but came up in a situation were it made sense that it came up.
Yes, there was no gay-hate in Dragon Age before, but how i perceived it his fathers problem wasn't merely the fact that Dorian was gay, but the fact that dorian being gay meant that his family line would not go on, since he didn't have any other children to progress the family line. Think of him as Tywin Lannister with a single child that doesn't want to reproduce and you get the issue.
So no i don't think bioware pushed something into the DA lore that wasn't there to begin with with Dorian.
They did that with Iron Bull.
When we talk with Sten in Origins he clearly states that everyone in the qun has a fixed place in the society based on their birth that they can never change. Then Iron Bull says that women in the qun can just claim they want to be men and would be considered men from thereforth. Both directly contradict each other.

 

[Thorn14]

Personally i found it rather well done for a Bioware romance.
Even though i played a male character, dorian didn't awkwardly tried to hit on me constantly like everyone in DA 2 did. His sexual orientation wasn't paraded around the place, but came up in a situation were it made sense that it came up.
Yes, there was no gay-hate in Dragon Age before, but how i perceived it his fathers problem wasn't merely the fact that Dorian was gay, but the fact that dorian being gay meant that his family line would not go on, since he didn't have any other children to progress the family line. Think of him as Tywin Lannister with a single child that doesn't want to reproduce and you get the issue.
So no i don't think bioware pushed something into the DA lore that wasn't there to begin with with Dorian.
They did that with Iron Bull.
When we talk with Sten in Origins he clearly states that everyone in the qun has a fixed place in the society based on their birth that they can never change. Then Iron Bull says that women in the qun can just claim they want to be men and would be considered men from thereforth. Both directly contradict each other.

Gender is determined by the role you play in Qunari society. So its not really contradictory. If a woman goes "I want to be a man and am a soldier!" someone under the Qun would be going "Thats right."

But if you were going "I'm a man!" but were say, a house cleaner (I don't know what Qunari considered female "roles") the Qunari would go "Uh no, you're a house cleaner so you are clearly a woman."

 

[Amaror]

Gender is determined by the role you play in Qunari society. So its not really contradictory. If a woman goes "I want to be a man and am a soldier!" someone under the Qun would be going "Thats right."

But if you were going "I'm a man!" but were say, a house cleaner (I don't know what Qunari considered female "roles") the Qunari would go "Uh no, you're a house cleaner so you are clearly a woman."

Yes, but sten clearly says that people of the qun don't choose what they do, but it is determined by their birth and training. So a women would never become a warrior in the first place, if it was a profession that's considered male.
At least that was how i understood it.

 

[Thorn14]

I stopped giving any attempt to find good pints in Sera when her operation for jar of bees involved her randomly drawing a butt for no reason on the paper.

It was that moment she was cemented as "LOL so randumb xD" the character, to me.

Marines are known for drawing dicks on everything they can see. Sometimes doing that kind of thing is just funny, and has nothing to do with being a horribly written randum character.

Well first of all, Sera is nothing like a marine.

Irrelevant.

And I don't see how that helps her case in any way. I put that as the same juvenile "humor" as people who just draw dicks on everything in online games.

I assumed you were saying she was a poor character, not just one you personally disliked. I apologize for the misunderstanding.

No I still think she's a poor character who I very much dislike. The only aspect I liked of her was the whole "Red Jenny" concept of an organization working as "a friend of a friend and we don't have any leaders", sort of like a fantasy spy Anonymous.

But instead they focus on BREECHES xD and just how much she hates rich people.

Gender is determined by the role you play in Qunari society. So its not really contradictory. If a woman goes "I want to be a man and am a soldier!" someone under the Qun would be going "Thats right."

But if you were going "I'm a man!" but were say, a house cleaner (I don't know what Qunari considered female "roles") the Qunari would go "Uh no, you're a house cleaner so you are clearly a woman."

Yes, but sten clearly says that people of the qun don't choose what they do, but it is determined by their birth and training. So a women would never become a warrior in the first place, if it was a profession that's considered male.
At least that was how i understood it.

Well yes, but that doesn't change the fact they still consider people outside of the Qun based on their social role. If you play a female in DA:O Sten is like "Uh no, you kick ass, you can't be a woman, it doesn't work that way." Sten is also a lot more hardline Qun follower while Iron Bull is much more moderate. But if the trans-man in DA:I was always a soldier, Sten would have considered him a man too, regardless of what he was before.

 

[Silvanus]

More or less. I think a lot of people just don't like being confronted with this kind of thing in it's unabashed, unashamed, FABULOUS glory.

Well, that's my suspicion, but I don't want to jump to conclusions.

It's more that his entire companion story quest revolves around daddy issues about him being gay. It about as cliched as it sounds and plays out the same way.

More clichéd than, say, helping your ally perform a rite of passage so his people will welcome him (as in M.E.2)? The hero freed at the last minute from execution (as in Skyrim)? The older, guardian-type ally sacrificing himself during a climactic battle to save the day (as in GW2)?

My point being that similar formulae are used in countless RPGs, and we can make them sound clichéd if we describe them in mundane terms. As it happens, I can't think of many other instances of fathers trying to forcibly change their sons' sexuality in games... I can't think of it coming up in any other games, actually.

In real life, yes, but not games. Portraying a real-life occurrence that isn't often portrayed in media isn't fairly described as clichéd.