Dorian Pavus

In 2003, the Electronic Arts subdivision Bioware released the game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and the people playing the female protagonist discovered that they could pursue a same sex relationship with the character Juhani. In numerous Bioware games, there are romance arcs where the protagonist can romance specific characters that are coded to be romanceable. Juhani was first romanceable character written by Bioware that was queer. Since Knights of the Old Republic, Bioware has made numerous games that contain queer representation such as Jade Empire, the Baldur’s Gate Series, The Mass Effect Trilogy, and the Dragon Age Franchise. For this paper, I will be speaking only on the Mass Effect Trilogy and the Dragon Age Franchise

In the Tevinter Imperium, they nobility focus on connecting bloodlines and genetics in order to breed the ‘perfect mage’ who comes from a good family and has powerful magical abilities, so any public deviation is unacceptable socially. This attitude is what drives Dorian away from Tevinter and his family. When playing through Dorian’s personal quest, Dorian’s family wants to talk to him and the Inquisitor goes with him to speak with them. When you arrive you find his father and players discover that firstly Dorian is gay and secondly, that his father attempted to use blood mage to make Dorian stop liking men so he would get married to woman of their choice. Dorian found out what his father was going to do, so he left Tevinter in order to prevent this. This is an incredibly powerful parallel to our modern conversion therapy, which makes Dorian such an interesting example of queer representation. The encounter with Dorian’s father can end two ways, one of which is Dorian stays and speaks with his father or leaves with the Inquisitor before allowing his father to say why he’s there. If Dorian stays, he finds out that his father has come to apologize about attempting to use blood magic on him, and that he was wrong. On the other hand, if Dorian leaves, he

Of those twenty-two characters the diversities is lacking. Most of the queer characters are misfits, outsiders or pariahs of their societies. In the Mass Effect Trilogy,
Dorian, who was discussed earlier in the paper, is a pariah in society he grew up in because he openly gay

In fact, Dragon Age II had all bisexual romances and all of them are misfits in their society, albeit the overarching theme of the game is misfits rising up into heroes or villains. Anders is a mage (magic user) who is in hiding from the Circle, (an organization that protects and controls Mages), Fenris is an escaped slave, who has lost his memory and cannot remember his life before being painful tortured and enslaved, Merrill is a Dalish elf (The Dalish want to reclaim their history and live as nomads outside the rest of the world) who was formerly supposed to lead her clan and has never left them until then, and Isabela is former pirate captain who lost her ship. The fact that all the romance options were bisexual was done as a compromise to the fans so everyone had numerous options when it came to their love