What Your Video Game Boyfriend Says About You, Part II
The Other Guys
Bioware no longer possesses a monopoly on CRPG romance. In recent years, many studios have left their mark upon the pantheon of video game beefcakes. Outside the Bioware frame, designers have found the opportunity to get a bit weirder with the beef, sprinkle a little variety onto the codified Types.
That doesn’t mean straight guy gamers aren’t cheesed off about them, though. It just means you have to go to worse and worse Reddit threads to find them whinging.
Aloth Corfiser, Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire
What He Says About You: If you romanced Aloth back in Deadfire, you’ve already forgotten him for Gale from Baldur’s Gate 3.
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: They can’t hate him: he’s Matt Mercer. Everybody loves Matt Mercer.
Tekēhu, Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire
What He Says About You: You follow Critical Role religiously, and you possess obscene feelings about the green guy that Travis Willingham plays.
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: He’s beautiful and stylish. They know they’ll never have that rocking bod without the aid of anabolic steroids. It’s not worth it, fellas. You’ll end up like a 40K Space Marine (limp-dickèd).
River Ward, Cyberpunk 2077
What He Says About You: I can’t diagnose what dating River says about you, because I can’t recall one discrete character trait of River’s. He’s…uh…serious?
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: This is unfortunately a Halsin-type case, where if the fellas hate him, they’re not entirely wrong. This is also a Wyll and Jacob case, where game writers found themselves mysteriously unable to produce a rich, compelling depiction of a man of color, or indeed to give him much of a personality at all.
Kerry Eurodyne, Cyberpunk 2077
What He Says About You: Your relationship with older men is something distinct from daddy issues and thus perhaps more perverse. If you tried cocaine even one time, you would instantly die, but you love acting hard anyway.
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: They think his relationship with Johnny Silverhand is a Just Friends thing, but there’s a seed of doubt in the back of their minds that drives them insane.
Astarion, Baldur’s Gate 3
What He Says About You: You want to date someone who’s not afraid to hit it when you’re on your period. You’re probably the person who asked Stephenie Meyer “what happens with Edward” when Bella has her period. Be honest: you already knew what you wanted to happen.
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: Straight guys aren’t thinking much about Astarion. They killed him early on for homophobic/Dracuphobic reasons. When they see a girl who’s super into Astarion, they think she has the same relationship with Astarion as their girlfriends have with their gay best friends. But, fellas, if your GF has the same relationship with her GBF as she does with Astarion, that guy’s bisexual, he’s about to steal your girl, and he’s gonna eat her several ways.
Gale, Baldur’s Gate 3
What He Says About You: You are not so much attracted to men as to harmlessness. You probably already know this. Your dream date is going to the library and sexting with your crush while the two of you sit at the same table but don’t make eye contact.
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: Gale makes them afraid they should have gotten an earring instead of growing a mustache. Boys, boys, boys: there’s time for both.
Wyll, Baldur’s Gate 3
What He Says About You: You deserve to have more options for men of color to romance in video games. But Wyll is what you’ve got. The overwhelming whiteness of the AAA game design world will prevent any improvement on this front for a loooong time.
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: Wyll is so inert, especially after Larian edited him to be less silly, that a guy would have to be both straight and racist to actively dislike him. Unfortunately if a guy is tweeting about video games, you know he is both, intensely.
Halsin, Baldur’s Gate 3
What He Says About You: You should just become a furry. It’s very popular right now and you’ll meet a lot of interesting people from real life.
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: Okay, controversial opinion, but Halsin grinds my gears. If straight guys hate him, they’re not entirely wrong. He’s so damn horny and there’s no way to talk him out of it. I’m glad he manages an orphanage happily in the game’s good ending, and I’m even gladder the orphanage is far away from Baldur’s Gate, where I live.
Lann, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
What He Says About You: You are the type of person who cries at Sarah McLaughlin animal shelter PSAs unironically. You possess an unerring instinct for heartbreak and can’t not chase it.
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: Like Alistair, he’s a funny guy, so they can’t hate him that much. He’s the only American in the world, from a game made in a time when that wasn’t so instantly hateable.
Daeran Arendae, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
What He Says About You: You would not be content to collect Astarion only in silver. You must have him in gold too. You don’t care how much of a bitch any guy is minute-to-minute, as long as he does exactly what you tell him to when it counts.
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: Daeran makes effeminacy look really good. This frustrates and torments straight guys, because if effeminacy’s so great, how can masc-maxxing be worth it?
Sosiel, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
What He Says About You: You were lucky enough to buy and play one of the only games out there which will let you have an mlm romance with a sweet, humble, well-adjusted young man who has no past of slavery, sexual degradation, or other gay-coded torture (that I recall--the game is, like, 300 hours, I haven’t seen every piece of content).
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: Please tell me no one hates Sosiel. He’s so kind and handsome. He’s perhaps the only Black character on this entire list I believe the writers put genuine care into crafting.
Marazhai Aezyrraesh, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
What He Says About You: You have not only read every installment of A Court of Thorns and Roses, you have gone so far as to read every installment of Crescent City too. Now please, I beg you, read a book without sprayed edges. No, not a Warhammer 40K novel either!
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: Has anyone played far enough into Rogue Trader to actually recruit Marazhai?
Solomorne Anthar, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
What He Says About You: You watched Luther an unsafe number of times. You watched 3000 Years of Longing more than once. You even watched Hi/Jack, a show so bad my middle-aged parents stopped watching it. What’s crazy is that there’s actually more to Solomorne than Idris-Elba-as-Judge-Dredd. What’s even crazier is that Solomorne and Sosiel, the only two well-written and well-elaborated Black characters on this list, are the products of a Russo-Cypriot writers room. The game industry is entirely cooked.
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: They already have to measure up to Idris Elba in real life, and now you’re asking them to do it in Warhammer 40K too? When will stwaight guys have a safe space of theiw vewy own?
Heinrix Van Calox, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
What He Says About You: You have frog-boiled yourself in loneliness over the last ten years, much the same way world leaders frog-boiled all of us in CO2 by doing nothing about climate change. The situation is about equally urgent and dire in both cases. If you ever have another relationship, it will be after you’re forty and so deliberate and mannerly Jane Austen would throw up her hands and say “Just fuck already!”
What He Makes Straight Guys So Mad: The crux of Heinrix’s romance storyline is the gratification of a deep-level fantasy for heterosexual women: What if, despite his flaws, the guy you’re interested in really is deep-down the good guy you think he is? Straight men, seeing this possibility, must hiss and writhe, ‘lest the threat of this idea force them to try and be the good guys they insist you think they are.
What can we take away from this listicle exercise? Well, the dubious cognitive value of the listicle is its ability to line up endless acres of content for us to examine in a concerted fashion. When we look upon these fellows, we see that the vast majority of them are buff and pretty. By their very nature as game characters, they tend to be subordinate to the will of the player, summonable and dismissable, reliable in the narrative pattern of their desires and their needs.
This is an entirely relatable fantasy for any human being, since everyone who wants intimacy wants it to be easier. But herein I believe lies the real heart of straight guy gamers’ fruitless dislike of basically any male game love interest. To be confronted by and implicitly compared to an unrealistic standard of beauty, conduct, and submission impossible to meet is a miserable feeling I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Unfortunately, it’s also the total pop cultural experience of nearly every woman for all of life, so I don’t feel that sorry for the fellas. I’ve spent very little of my lifetime online whining about how often the Mass Effect 2 camera frames solely in pursuit of Miranda’s butt. Surely you dudes can simply go ahead and say nothing too 🙂
Perhaps I’ve been too mean, wallowed too long in the weirdly intertwined well of objectification/misandry. Alas! If significant US government figures get to tweet about how my investment in pro-social causes is actually misplaced maternal instinct I should spend on white babies, I shall allow myself a few straw men to kick.
If you can correctly guess which members of this second wave of video game boyfriends were my boyfriends, I will send you a beautiful portrait of one of the fine fellows listed above, drawn by hand in sparkly gel pen.
If anyone wins both prizes from this article series, I will write a blog post revealing the correct answers and thus scalping myself with the same degree of vicious acuity I leveled against innocent dude-gamers here.
