Reading through this had me analyze and doing research on this trope, and if any video games were guilty of it. I noticed the Shopkeeper in Selatria had a lot of these qualities.
Our original vision of Shopkeeper was modeled after a close friend of mine who we casted because he could pull off a lispy voice. (At the time.) When we were thinking of characters for Selatria, we wanted to shift traditional roles to different characters. ie: Main character being a maic-user and very weak at the start, and the main heroine who is a tank and not a love interest. And we wanted to have a masculine character with feminine qualities and characteristics. So we put these all together and came up with the shopkeeper. Because my close friend was being annoying at the time, we wanted to have the Shopkeeper have this same characteristic. Then we thought what if we gave the player an opportunity to determine if they live or die throughout the game and reward them if the Shopkeeper was able to survive throughout the whole game.
It was a great idea coming from a game design standpoint, but we weren't thinking of the cultural undertones.
I don't want LGBTQ+ audiences to feel alienated from our products and feel threatened or excluded based off my own overlooking and ignorance for taking this into account on the creation of Shopkeeper, so we've decided to remove all of Shopkeeper's death scenes from Selatria with the release of the 2.0 patch in 2019, and he will be retroactively revived for players who didn't save him at the crucial points in the story. We also removed a scene in Chapter 2-4 where Mage casts a Fire spell on Shopkeeper when he says he's not paying or doesn't have enough cash.
Next time we make a story like this for the game, we will be more mindful of combining character traits to where we don't exclude groups of people in that way.
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