hello everyone,
my name is raffaella and i am a skyrim girl gamer from italy
i need your help as i have just witnessed something very offensive.

im raising two characters at the moment - a lovely destro mage (female) and a nightblade (male)
eventually my nightblade chose vilkas as "the one" to get married with (while i let my female mage living by her own, single & proud!)

so, since i live in italy, the whole game is dubbed by italian voice actors. very well done indeed, or so i thought till a few minutes ago:

during the samesix wedding, the priest celebrated my nightblade and vilkas as "husband & wife" (??)
moreover, anytime i speak with vilkas, he replies by saying "si, mia cara" ("yes, my darling" but "cara" is a female noun)

i can't help thinking that something went horribly wrong during the dubbing process.... maybe the voice actors didnt know about the same-six wedding hence they didnt even dubb properly? didnt bethesda alert them? or did they just do this on purpose because (unfortunately) gay scene in italy is quite miserable and nobody would have cared about it? or maybe this is just a minor bug, something happening only with vilkas, or only to me? can you please tell me if this happened into your english (or any other language) version of skyrim?

i loved how bethesda always stood still against any sixual discrimination in its games,
and that's why i am very shocked about how the italian dubs dealt with it.

You should hear the terrible English voice acting the script may be accurate but it is so poorly executed. I listened to the french opening and it was so much better done. I would guess that it was just a mistake or overlooked.

...ahh this made me laugh! vikas seems pretty damn gruff and manly, your just gonna have to face it hes a top

Well... it could be a mistake or it could be they didn't bother making gay marriage/interaction dialogue and just use a default one. OR, maybe they went the rout or signifying masculine and feminine rolls. Hell, my uncle is gay and he refers to his life partner as "darling" and "sweetheart" all the time.

I think the problem here is that in english, the same dialog can be used to reffer to your character regardless the gender, so when translating to italian, they would have need to add new entries, while surelly they simply received the spaces to fill with text.

You should address this to Bethesda as obviously they intended to avoid any discrimination. Should they wan't to avoid gay marriage they would have done so, the same way they avoided other mechanics.

I am amazed that this is the part of your wedding that you find offensive.

What's that supposed to mean?

Flame Bait Detected... Warning.... this MAY explode for no justifiable reason.

The short answer is they didn't bother making two gender specific versions of the marriage voice dialogue, it's one set of recordings only, one size fits all so to speak. This works better in english obviously since it lacks the same level of gender specificity as the romance languages.

I find it racist that a dark Elf is called just Elf the same as a Highborn.....Hail Xenu!

Considering how blatant and casual homophobic comments are on the net, it could easily go either way. Just like VIlkas


ba dum chhh

If we accept the premise that sixuality and gender roles are artificial cultural constructs, then we must also consider that Vilkas' dialog would be perfectly appropriate for many same six couplings. Consider the two-spirit of North America or the hijra of India. Both are a genetically male third gender that self identify as feminine. For these people, it might be the OP's viewpoint that is offensive. The shoe of bigotry would be on the other foot, so to speak.

"Stay out of trouble...ELF".

In the end what do both of these have in common........less money spent on voice acting. Razorfist does a great review on Skyrim on his youtube channel.....too much language to link here but check it out for a laugh.

hello again,

thanks for answering me. i have always been a huge supporter of the gay scene (many friends of mine are lgbt) and the moment i saw that glitch in the italian dub i was very worried it could be another sad sign on how italy is quite conservative and ignorant. neverthless, i hereby decided to write a letter to the italian bethesda, in which i explain my concerns.

i'll let you know as soon as i get an answer (hopefully i'll get one)

i also would like to know if something similar happened into your german-french-spanish or any other version of the game.

thanks for reading
raffaella

It could be that raffa but I honestly think when it comes to Bethesda they were just looking to save money on the voice acting.....that or it was just so close to finished near release(along with the entire game) they just said "Meh w/e 11-11-11 Hail Xenu" or some other Todd Howard Scientology Cthulhu style weirdness and released the game in it's broken state.

It's just Beth not giving a damn. You should hear the German dub. The whole thing is an insult, including the sound quality.

Just switch the language to English, and enjoy the dialogue as it was written.

French version sounds like a masterpiece a least to a second language student of french and in contrast to the English version.

i got an answer from the bethesda italian support.

unfortunately it's very random and doesn't help at all. they just wrote the company "absolutely" respects anyone and had no idea such a thing could happen. eventually they will "re-address" my concerns to the main office, but it's quite unlikely im gonna get a decent answer.

meh. i tried at least.

I think you were being a bit too strident in calling this issue "offensive". I think it's self evident that a company who included same-six marriage in their game is trying to be inclusive. The issue here is translation, not social agenda. Since you speak English so well, you are obviously aware of how English largely lacks the genitive declension used in the Latin derived languages, like Italian. Since "my love" works perfectly in English for any gender, NPC's were most likely only programmed with one generic response.

I think you are trying to play the activist in this issue where no problem really exists. Bethesda is not staffed by bigots.