📷welee12 said: In the base game there’s even a canonically bisexual companion (tho she is only romanceable by male PCs) with Kaliyo in the Imperial Agent storyline. Although she does fall into a lot of the negative media tropes around bisexual characters.
📷welee12 said: Unless they can canonizing this remake in a way they aren’t for the other Old Republic games (such as the MMO) this is even more of a stretch calling her the “first” than the normal Disney “first LGBT+ character” stuff. In SW:TOR the MMO that takes place about 500years after KotOR there’s plenty of companions in the recent expansions that can be romanced by either gender (in game), with some older companions even gaining a romance path in those expansions.
The Old Republic with its gay for pay approach to queer romance options only exists because of the love fandom holds for Knights of the Old Republic (and its wonderful, flawed, and frustratingly heterosexual sequel), which predate the MMPORPG by 7 years.
The whole point of the article is to point out that in 2003, when the game launched, just how intensely revolutionary Juhani was for queer rep both in terms of Star Wars and for Bioware's storytelling. Just because Disney with it memetic reputation with regards to queer characters purchased the franchise a decade later, it doesn't lesson Juhani's claim of actually being the first openly queer character in SW media.
Quite the opposite, it places the onus squarely on Disney and KotOR's inheritor not to erase or minimise her presence in this remake
