Why a Butch Lesbian Had No Real Choice in BG3

Shadowheart is the most popular romance in Baldur's Gate 3, and also the one that gets you mocked. She's conventionally attractive, stereotypically feminine, and widely considered the "basic" pick. For straight men, she's the default. For writer Caelyn Ellis, a butch trans lesbian, she was the only option left standing.

In a personal essay published during Eurogamer's Pride Week, Ellis walks through the process of elimination that led her to Shadowheart. Male companions? Out. Minthara? Too much of a domme, and incompatible for someone on the same side of that dynamic. Lae'zel? Same problem. Karlach? Ellis adores her, but sees too much of herself in the big, leather-wearing softy to find the romance anything but strange. "Who's left? Shadowheart," she writes. The romance wasn't a choice so much as a lack of alternatives.

Ellis's argument isn't that Larian Studios failed, exactly. She's clear that not every game can cater to everyone equally. Her point is sharper than that: video games broadly assume lesbian desire maps neatly onto straight male desire. The women designed to be attractive to men are the same women positioned as romantic options for women, and the result is a system where a butch lesbian player can look at a full roster of romanceable characters and find nobody who reflects how she actually experiences attraction. I think she's right, and it's a blind spot that persists even in games that are otherwise doing more for queer representation than almost anything else in the AAA space.

Separately, a Polygon piece by staff writer also took aim at BG3's romance system from a different angle, arguing that the approval-based companion relationships function more like "conquests" than real emotional arcs. The writer compared Larian's approach unfavourably to BioWare's Viconia romance in Baldur's Gate 2, where the relationship was slow, difficult, and structurally tied to the character's growth. In BG3, the argument goes, companions change regardless of whether you're romancing them.

Neither critique diminishes what Larian built. Baldur's Gate 3 remains one of the most ambitious RPGs ever shipped, and its queer representation is leagues ahead of most competitors. But Ellis's essay in particular highlights something the industry still hasn't reckoned with: representation extends beyond who you can kiss. It's about whether the game understands why you'd want to.