10 Overblown Video Game Controversies

Fire Emblem Fates was subject to its fair share of criticisms. It was already under fire for the barmy dialogue (replacing lines from the Japanese version like “We'll always be together, right?” with “Rawrgrr! That's dragon for 'I love you!'”), the removal of the petting mini game, and for being split into four versions.

One of the characters, Soleil, is distracted by the cute girls on the battlefield. While she is not explicitly a lesbian, and can be married by a male avatar, she asks the player for help. In the Japanese version, her drink is spiked with a magic powder so that she sees men as women, and vice versa..

Enter one very ticked off Tumblr user who took the scene out of context and wrote a scathing blog post about how Soleil is most definitely a lesbian and is portrayed as weak because of it. Of course, she had never played it and took it out of context because the game was not released in the West yet, while exclaiming people commit suicide because of forced conversions like these. Yikes.

News sites saw this at face value and joined the argument, resulting in the scene being rewritten. Instead of potions, Soleil was told to wear a blindfold on the battlefield of all places.

There were no implications of homophobia whatsoever. It was a simple case of using magic to help out Soleil in a light-hearted situation. Gay conversion does not have anything to do with magic or smacking monsters with swords on the battlefield, anyway.