#tobias

They're a pair of burly older men with over-the-top designs that are tough to take too seriously, and they're always seen together. Tobias better fits the archetype since he's a frontline fighter and a generally lighthearted character from what we've seen, but the two of them have clearly been differentiated more than their predecessors who always look like (and sometimes are) identical twins. It's just that IS did so by turning them into Wario and Waluigi.

Why this interests/concerns me is that the bara bandits are usually implied to be gay...in a way that's stereotypical and mildly offensive, but gay nonetheless. To whatever extent this could have been said to work in older games was in large part because past bara bandits were one-off bosses, or at most goofy recurring obstacles and DLC slapstick in Awakening.

Bonaventure and Tobias on the other hand are fully playable characters, and core members of one of the main factions of Fortune's Weave. They're going to have support lines and activity dialogue and one-sided conversations with a magical shapeshifting bird that might get to have sex with them. That "joke" absolutely cannot sustain itself across that much material. Of course I don't expect them to be totally gay and all over each other; it would make straight male players uncomfortable, and it would remove from play the two prime targets of Lilian's penchant for older men. We can't forget the Eshmel in all this either. Monosexual gay people - or preexisting committed relationships of any kind - are just not happening in a game where Avatar romances are probably on the line.

Most likely Bonaventure and Tobias are going to get called brotherly at some point, and this will be enough to get a large chunk of the fandom to declare no homo and write them off despite how past bara bandits have been incredibly into each other even when they've been literal twin brothers. Fire Emblem just does that kind of thing. But beyond that I anticipate that sometime in the coming months I'm going to have to give a lecture or two about how "brotherzoning" in a gay context is mostly an outgrowth of the anti movement in 2010s fandom, and that historically queer people have been comfortable with describing our relationships in familial terms when borrowing the framework of heterosexual romantic/marital relationships is unfeasible or undesirable. Or, you know...maybe they're just kinky about it. That's fine too.