#lf-philippe

I'm playing a male Daaé, but I'm not comfortable reading my MCs bottoming 😫 will we have the option to choose whether Daaé tops or bottoms? If not, it's no problem at all! I'll just skip the spicy scenes and enjoy the rest of the game 🤗

I still have yet to determine just how detailed the spicier scenes will get (ideally I’d like very detailed but who knows what will be allowed on different platforms for posting by the time I get there). No matter what though I do want to make sure that the sex scenes will have a good degree of variety when it comes to getting to choose how they play out. Either you will get that choice of topping or bottoming, or the scene will be less detailed with more of the vibe described and certain actions implied, in which case it could be interpreted as either person bottoming depending on what the reader prefers.

Have the ROs ever fallen in love/been attracted to someone of the same gender? Since you said R has loved Daaé for a long time, if we chose it to be in a romantic sense, how did they feel about falling in love with someone of the same gender?

Sorelli has had relationships with other women before, you’re on the money about artists being queer (especially in Paris during the Belle Époque time period). The Daroga has been attracted to the same sex before - Hamida has once or twice acted on this in her youth while Ismaël has not.

The Voice is on the spectrum of demisexual - it has never felt sexual attraction towards a specific person before, though it has felt sexual desire and it’s the crush it develops on Daaé that allows it to feel sexual attraction specifically for them. It has been sexually attracted to the idea of certain characters in literature, nearly always women but that’s more due to the character tropes that it’s attracted to in literature almost always fitting the same gendered dynamic. Being attracted to a male Daaé is something that barely fazes it, as you’ll see - it’s got a lot of issues and even I’m not cruel enough to add internalised homophobia to the list!

R on a platonic route struggles a bit with attraction when it comes to Daaé, especially of the opposite gender - normalised heterosexuality combined with objectivity recognising that Daaé can be considered attractive means a platonic R has spent a lot of time prior to the story wondering if they’re in love with Daaé, simply because it’s hard for them to conceptualise that the strong love they feel for an opposite gender Daaé could be anything other than romantic. Same gender platonic R (or platonic R with a nonbinary Daaé) doesn’t struggle with this nearly as much, but they are attracted to multiple genders and when they start to explore that as they get older, they do wonder a bit about their feelings for Daaé, just not to the same extent as opposite gender platonic R.

Romantic R is Daaé-sexual for lack of a better way of phrasing it lmao. Daaé was the first person they were ever attracted to, even when they were too young to really understand what they felt, and every instance of attraction they’ve felt towards others has been because those people remind R of Daaé in some way. I think falling for a Daaé of the same gender doesn’t bother them quite as much as you’d expect, though there is an element of shame when they first start feeling attraction towards Daaé - feeling like they’re taking advantage of the friendship somehow when Daaé doesn’t know how they feel. At the end of the day though, R is expected to marry well and have children, and even a Daaé of the opposite gender is off limits because of their class difference, not to mention Daaé’s an immigrant who was raised Lutheran (regardless of how religious Daaé actually is), and later Daaé’s scandalously an opera performer. Most of what bothers R about Daaé being the same gender is that they can’t get married, but that was always going to be a problem regardless of Daaé’s gender. So the reason that falling for same gender Daaé doesn’t really bother R that much is because society is already looking down on this relationship either way, Daaé and R being queer only exacerbates a situation that already existed.