When are gay routes anti-gay?
When Fire Emblem: Three Houses announced the upcoming inclusion of homosexual endgame pairings, the LGBTQ community was understandably excited to play. However, the way in which Nintendo implemented gay pairings reveals a game still catered to the heterosexual male gaze.
At the start of the game, the player chooses the gender of their avatar and one of three story routes, each of which present a deurotagonist to accompany your journey. Tellingly, of the three deurotagonist options, only the woman can be romanced by both gendered avatars, with the two men being locked to the male avatar.. This is especially odd, considering that the woman is coded as a conservative empress, with one of the men being an easygoing flirt with a route that touches on social justice, discrimination, and open borders.This choice hasn’t gone unnoticed by players.
In fact, despite having five possible FxF paired endings, there’s only two MxM endings. Of them, one involves the truly baffling scenario of marrying an unnamed village girl and sustaining a lifelong platonic friendship with the man. In addition, of those FxF endings, only two of them will pair with women that aren’t the main character in a non-platonic fashion, despite their end with the main character being clearly romantic. If you were to take the stance of character agency, with the men of the game being straight and thus unable to romance men, why are there so many women who are player-sexual? Are the sexual preferences of male characters somehow more important than those of female ones? Why is this sort of agency only afforded to male characters?
Women being relegated to sexy macguffins- plot advancing eye-candy, if you will- is hardly a novel concept to gamers, but it’s especially insidious in media that plays at being diverse. It’s not the options or the ends themselves that matter- it’s the thought process behind it, and Nintendo’s thoughts have proved unfortunately lacking.
