I Also Complain About Female-Led Films Disproportionately Being Romantic. I'm Never Happy.
Can anyone think of examples of videogames where the protagonist inevitably has a romance with a male character? Not games with romance options, but games in which romance with a specific male character is part of the story and every player will experience it, regardless of their choices, in the same way Nate of Uncharted or Ellie of The Last of Us or Squall of Final Fantasy VIII unavoidably have romantic storylines with specific female characters? This isn't for a project or anything; I'm just curious.
It's weirdly hard to think of examples. Abby has sex with Owen in The Last of Us, Part II. I think Jodie always has a romance with Ryan in Beyond: Two Souls (Ryan is the worst, but that's neither here nor there). There's Evie/Henry in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate (I hesitated on this one because Jacob's billed as the primary protagonist, although, to be fair, Jacob also gets kissed by a man), and there's Transistor, where you're always in love with your sword who is also a dude. Other than that, I'm drawing a bit of a blank.
I'm not counting cases like Mike/Jess in Until Dawn, where you play both halves of an M/F pairing. I suspect these cases sidestep the gaming industry's weird reluctance to have male love interests because, if you look at it from the other protagonist's perspective, it's a female love interest.
Final Fantasy X-2 and XIII-2 are both games with female protagonists who had a romance with a male character in the previous game, for which they weren't the main character. In both cases their male love interest happens to be absent for almost the entire game in which they're the protagonist, which is an interesting pattern in light of the scarcity of male love interests for game protagonists generally.
The gaming industry is definitely showing an increasing willingness to have female protagonists, which is great. (Since 2014, I've been keeping a list of the games I've played in which the protagonist is female; the number of games on the list has nearly quadrupled from ten to thirty-six, twenty of which were released in the last decade.) I wonder, though, if the industry as a whole still thinks 'but the player will obviously be male, so you can't let the character they're controlling kiss a boy; that would be gay'.
I think it's cool that a lot of female videogame protagonists either have female love interests or have stories that aren't about romance at all; I'm definitely not saying that the protagonist should have to kiss boys in every videogame. But it does feel like there's an odd absence here.
It's weirdly hard to think of examples. Abby has sex with Owen in The Last of Us, Part II. I think Jodie always has a romance with Ryan in Beyond: Two Souls (Ryan is the worst, but that's neither here nor there). There's Evie/Henry in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate (I hesitated on this one because Jacob's billed as the primary protagonist, although, to be fair, Jacob also gets kissed by a man), and there's Transistor, where you're always in love with your sword who is also a dude. Other than that, I'm drawing a bit of a blank.
I'm not counting cases like Mike/Jess in Until Dawn, where you play both halves of an M/F pairing. I suspect these cases sidestep the gaming industry's weird reluctance to have male love interests because, if you look at it from the other protagonist's perspective, it's a female love interest.
Final Fantasy X-2 and XIII-2 are both games with female protagonists who had a romance with a male character in the previous game, for which they weren't the main character. In both cases their male love interest happens to be absent for almost the entire game in which they're the protagonist, which is an interesting pattern in light of the scarcity of male love interests for game protagonists generally.
The gaming industry is definitely showing an increasing willingness to have female protagonists, which is great. (Since 2014, I've been keeping a list of the games I've played in which the protagonist is female; the number of games on the list has nearly quadrupled from ten to thirty-six, twenty of which were released in the last decade.) I wonder, though, if the industry as a whole still thinks 'but the player will obviously be male, so you can't let the character they're controlling kiss a boy; that would be gay'.
I think it's cool that a lot of female videogame protagonists either have female love interests or have stories that aren't about romance at all; I'm definitely not saying that the protagonist should have to kiss boys in every videogame. But it does feel like there's an odd absence here.