It’s an unfortunate product of its time, and the respect I feel for Fable’s willingness to encourage discussion around LGBTQ+ issues is diluted by a portrayal that feels achingly heteronormative. I suppose when society itself wasn’t accepting of gay marriage upon the game’s initial arrival, a respectful portrayal of such concepts weren’t on the minds of a development team who were trying to create a world that felt both faithful and fantastical. Girls couldn’t play games back in 2004, I’m fairly sure it was illegal. I saw it as a joke when I first played Fable as a child, but now it just feels hurtful and outdated, like Lionhead added such inclusivity purely to paint it as a joke for its audience that likely consisted of white, straight men. When the idea of marriage between two men is brought up, NPCs will often refer to you “as just a couple of blokes being blokes” and how the concept of genuine love between two people of the same-sex is viewed as a joke, or lacks the legitimacy of its straight counterparts.
I’m pretty sure that’s how real romance works, right? Unlike the straight relationships in Fable, which often feel like they’re coming from the heart, gay romances appear to be viewed from a farcical perspective. They’ll moan about their spouses and shower praise upon me as I pass through town, and if one of them tickles my fancy, I can spoil them with chocolates and perfume until they’re down to get hitched.
Men in Fable are old-fashioned, many of them bald, working class villagers who walk about towns like Bowerstone and Oakvale spouting a generic selection of lines as they toil away in the working hours before retiring to the local pub in the evening. Having replayed the entire game earlier this month, it left a bad taste in my mouth. It was a bold step forward at the time, yet in retrospect is still lined with a surrounding homophobia that is damaging to the progression it is trying so desperately to claim as its own. Fable is a game that isn’t afraid to show that men can be attracted to our male hero, and your character can flirt with fellow boys, shower them with gifts, or even offer their hand in marriage instead of opting for a traditional heteronormative relationship. Related: What To Watch, Read, And Play Now The Owl House Is On Hiatusīut I’m not here to talk about Fable’s morality system - instead, I want to touch on the unique place it occupied in the queer zeitgeist back in 2004 and how, in many ways, it was ahead of its time. This didn’t change much with future games, which would continue to usher you down a duo of paths that would lead to the same conclusion with only a few notable consequences setting them apart. Much like the studio’s previous efforts, the definition of good and evil in Fable was laughably black and white. You couldn’t plant a tree and watch it grow throughout the course of the campaign, but you could choose to make a whole town to fall in love with you or instead murder them in cold blood. It was a groundbreaking experience, although it was also yet another victim of Peter Molyneux’s perpetual habit of broken promises and needless overhype that painted games as something they’d never be capable of being.
I was in primary school when Lionhead’s Fable arrived in 2004, an ambitious RPG that approached the concept of player morality in an RPG like few games before it ever had, especially in the mainstream console space.
Civil partnerships weren’t yet legal in the UK, let alone gay marriage, and wider acknowledgement and support for transgender people was virtually non-existent, the virtriol of the current climate repalced with ignorance and apathy. Fable was first launched in a world where LGBTQ+ representation was still in its infancy.