Editor’s Romance Month Recap

Romance Month was a suc­cess!  Over the course of April we pub­lished eight arti­cles on romance and rela­tion­ships in games!  We received a vari­ety of won­der­ful guest arti­cles, and it was a plea­sure to read and post each of them.  Here’s a recap of what we wrote about:

1. Hannah DuVoix wrote the first part of a quick sum­ma­ry of AAA queer romances, focus­ing on Fable and The Sims, show­ing how often, queer romances are sim­ply hol­low tokenism.

2. Austin Howe exam­ined the rela­tion­ship between Squall and Rinoa in Final Fantasy VIII, and explains why it’s so impor­tant to him.

3. Alex Duncan takes The Witcher to task for its misog­y­nis­tic romance mechan­ics and focus on a “com­mod­i­ty model” of sex.

4. Erin McNeil plays a romance game, Everlove: Rose, and shows how it fails by for­get­ting to be fun.  It could have learned a lot from watch­ing The Bachelor, she sug­gests.

5. Albert Hwang pro­vides an analy­sis of the romance options in Baldur’s Gate 2 and Mass Effect 3, and argues that BioWare has for­sak­en depth for breadth.

6. Sara Davis writes about how the Asari in Mass Effect 1 are essen­tial­ly objec­ti­fied “sex aliens,” despite their osten­si­bly respect­ed place in the galac­tic hier­ar­chy.

7. Hannah DuVoix returns for the sec­ond part of her series on queer romances in AAA gam­ing, this one focused exclu­sive­ly on BioWare’s out­put.

8. Finally, Lex Tyler exam­ines the way some AAA games seem to rely on implic­it queer rela­tion­ships — just enough to get fan­f­ic writ­ers going, but not enough to actu­al­ly depict same-sex rela­tion­ships on the screen.

Thank you for read­ing!  May will be a reg­u­lar “vari­ety” month.  We are always happy to accept guest arti­cles, and even though the themed month is over, we’re still quite happy to post arti­cles about romance and rela­tion­ships!

–Bill Coberly
Editor-in-Chief