Dancing around queer romance is a problem in Japanese games as well, and it’s so very disappointing. It’s plain as day to everyone’s what’s going on but they won’t go there.

Tangentially, sanitizing romance in general is also a problem with Japanese games (and games developed abroad that borrow their concepts). Some studios are outright afraid of offending men by having a woman character express a love interest in anyone, so it’s just absent entirely from swathes of the cast, if not everyone.

With gaming having become such a big footprint in entertainment, I worry that sort of thing is going to feed back into TV.