in reference to the m! inquisitor cullen romance being cut because of time restraint, what would be your opinion if bioware just continued to work on it til launch and released a day one patch for m! Inquisitor romance? since he was already coded as a bi character til late in development , do you think this would have challenged the canon/legitimacy of it? (sorry for poor language it is 6am)
Well first, I do think Bioware did right abandoning it.
They would have been using time and effort to finish up a part of them game only a percentage (12.5% | 1 of 8 romances) of a percentage (10% | 8 romances, 1 optional: Scout, No Romance) would actually use. When they could have been working on polishing out other things and parts of the game, as they did.
What more putting it out as a patch would never have worked. Bioware said when they started they couldn’t add additional companions/romances/ scenes to the base game, due to how tight their first code on Frostbite is (i.e. changing one code means changing so many other lines of codes).
I don’t think it would have challenged the legitimacy of it though. I mean there will always be people who think Cullen is just a fan service character and that’s bad, anyways. But it’s honestly not? And ultimately that’s what the argument would have been “well he was added last minute, so obviously this is bisexual fanservice.” Who cares, he isn’t for you then. Basically no different than the people who try to illegitimize the Sebastian romance, because it was DLC and not shipped in-game.
Also he was a romance added late in development, even for F!Inquisitor. So it’s not like a patch would have been a big deviation of the original plan (to get out his romance last minute). Just by the way, Cullen is not only a romance, but bisexual too and here is a romance for M!Inquisitors to indulge in to explore that.
That all said. I am more mad that Bioware decided to hand-wave his bisexuality away. Instead of being upfront and having a character who is bisexual, but just not interested in men or even just a M!Inquisitor at the time. Instead they decided to duck out as “NOPE HE IS TOTALLY STRAIGHT.”
That’s what made me mad and ultimately what started the wrongful fandom wide uproar of people saying he was never meant to be bisexual or queer-coded, which is wrong. He still has his bisexual writing, his dialogue (other than the addition of the rejection line) is the same, and he remains queer-coded Confirmed.