>>135453762Well they are shoehorned in.
It goes like this in the writer's lounge: "How can we add diversity to our game?"
Helper: "Ahhhh... let's have a landwhale character!"
Other writer: "No, that'd mean we'd have to create a new model and that'd take a lot of work... oh! Let's have a gay character! And let's have Shepard be gay this entire time too!"
"Great idea! What's this gay character gonna be like?"
See, they never actually do anything difficult, either in a work sense or in a cultural sense. It's okay to be gay now. So bring on the gay characters.
How it should go is like this: a character is already established. Writer thinks about character's actions, motivations, etc. Writer realizes character is probably gay. Gayness is not central to the character, it's just something on the side.
I have a story with a homosexual character. He's more or less a military dictator. His sexuality is just something I realized about 50 pages in. It doesn't affect his decision making or personality, it's just his sexual preference. That was probably there all along, it's just at that point my conscious mind realized what my subconscious had come up with.
That's how you properly write a gay character.
It's not a fucking lightswitch either, like with Shepard.
