I'm sure this would surprise exactly no one who knows me, but I've been playing SWTOR and loving every minute of it. Bioware games always engage me on a visceral, emotional level. So I truck along happily, get to 50 on my Consular and try to get a few groups for high-end content. Unfortunately, circumstances have brought me to a server that runs about six hours behind me and I've had some trouble getting into organized play. Fine, I said, I will roll my gay smuggler.
Look, I enjoy gay romances. Playing a gay smuggler is like catnip to me.
And then I realize that I have just bought myself a ticket to unhappiness. Too late to change a thing, now I'm invested, but the game keeps on pushing me into sexual situations I do not want. It gives me a companion who will be my bro but not my man, who keeps telling me he'll do anything I want in a voice that belongs in the Captain's bunk but who won't kiss me. Of course I knew same-gender romance wouldn't be in at launch, but I had never once considered that the game would push some classes to be so aggressively straight.
I love my smuggler, but holy hell am I miserable when I play him. When I log in I feel the weight of every lost opportunity, the shadow of every option that should have been there for me and the sheer difficulty of avoiding straight sex while not being an enormous cock. It's hard work playing even so much as a completely celibate and closeted gay smuggler now and that's just not *fun*.
I play a blind, fat, straight Jedi Knight dude who flirts with everything that moves just to relax. At least that one gets laid every once in a while and doesn't sit in his ship's engine room to mope. He looks like a panda and he's happy.
Honestly, the misery I feel when I play my smuggler is beginning to translate into a general feeling of hopelessness when it comes to media representation and a very specific hopelessness when it comes to this game. SWTOR may lose me yet, not because I don't love the game (I do, so much) but because playing it is bringing me down. I have to take care of myself.
SWTOR, you are on notice.
Now gimme the gay in gay smuggler. We need some happy up in here.
