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Amongst the excited buzz about the new Tomodachi Life game, there was something some folks in the main Discord server I hang out in said that caught my attention in particular — one of their hopes for the next game was a button during Mii creation that would opt them out of other Miis trying to date them, for the benefit of aromantic people who want to play the game. The “aro button”, they called it. It’s something that I couldn’t stop rolling around in my brain over the next week or so, especially as I finally put my modded 3DS to good use and started playing Tomodachi Life myself for the first time. Something didn’t quite sit right with me about it, and I couldn’t figure out what.
So after thinking about it for a while, my working reason for my hesitation is this: Tomodachi Life can’t be made aro-friendly just by putting a checkbox that says “opt out of romance” because the aro-hostility in that game comes from its core progression line of “friends → dating → marriage → kids” that the Miis have.
(Disclaimer: I don’t think that was the intention of the “aro button” comment; this was just something that surfaced in my brain while ruminating on it. Incredibly scattered thoughts inbound, haha.)
Two comparison points that come to mind are the Sims 4 and dating sims in general. On one hand, the Sims 4 is a large game with so many things for you/your sims to do that if you decide “this Sim won’t get married” or “this Sim won't date” then there’s still plenty of gameplay left to partake in. And I know that relatively recently the Sims 4 put their own toggle into their Create-a-Sim process where you can determine who your Sim is sexually/romantically attracted to, if anyone, for autonomous flirting reasons and the like. And by toggle, I mean like whole entire submenus. A befitting amount of detail, I suppose, for a game like The Sims.
On the other hand, you have dating sims, where in order to make them aro-friendly you’d have to do things like have romantic and platonic variants for all routes that don’t impact which ending you get besides the obvious (The Good People (Na Daoine Maithe)) or give the player the ability to chose what kind of relationship they get to have with the person whose route they’re on as part of the route itself (The Office Type) or you can do what I Just Want To Be Single is doing and just completely flip the concept on its side by having the goal be friendship while making romance the fail state that the tropes inherent to the dating sim genre are trying to push you towards. Either way, this is the sort of thing that clearly starts in the writing room.
But regarding the core progression of Tomodachi Life, if you just say, “I’m gonna opt out/opt certain Miis out of the romance”, then you’re losing out on at least the extra money and the extra boost to the Mii’s happiness level, which are the two main resources in the game, and then half the Mii’s progression is also nuked from orbit. Especially if you’re like, “I’m gonna do an all aro island!”;Then you’re not gonna get to play a solid chunk of the game because you’re gonna get up to the dating part and then...that would be it, yeah?It’s like that one Spongebob meme, with Squidward staring out the window while everyone else is running around having fun outside. Not quite the inclusion that you’d want it to be, that’s for sure.
Anyway, one of the reasons I was thinking about all this so much was because it all reminds me of discussions surrounding Soulmate AUs, where someone makes their AU and then an aro person goes “hey, this is kinda aro hostile” and then the AU maker is like “no-no-no-no-no, I put – you can have no soulmates, sometimes! 😊” which is like. OK. By the way what’s it actually like, to navigate your world without a soulmate?
- Are you pitied for not having a soulmate? Are you derided, especially the longer you go on not having one?
- If the AU is of the soulmark variety: are the platonic soulmarks distributed among both romantic soulmark havers and non-havers? Are they given the same weight as romantic soulmarks by society? Are just the “aros” getting the platonic soulmarks, as a substitute for not having romantic ones?
- If someone decides they don’t want their soulmate because they’re repulsed or had a bad experience or whatever, and they leave, how is that treated?
- How is it treated when someone with a romantic soulmark and someone without a romantic soulmark couple up; is the “allo” person excessively wringing their hands and crises about how they’ll never know if the other person truly loves them because theirs no soulmark, blah, blah, blah…
There are a lot of questions to ask for true aro-inclusion, I find, and these questions make hearing “oh make it aro-friendly! Aro option!” not sit right. That’s why hearing “oh make it aro-friendly! Aro option!” doesn’t feel right, because it feels like that. It feels like a silly little bandaid on a stab wound where it's like no we have to go in there, and clean it out, and wrap it properly, and take care of it.
But at the same time, coming up with proper solutions that can be applied “in post”, so to speak, is rather difficult! Case in point, my first draft ideas are
- A toggle that swaps between “romance-focused” and “Career focused” options, paired with fleshing out a career track in game beyond the existing “part-time job”; and then promotions or being written up at work or what have you have the same happiness/money fluctuation as dating/marriage
- Putting a limit on how many people your Mii can befriend, and make it so that being in a romantic relationship takes up, say, 3 extra slots than otherwise, as a trade-off.
Which, like, both these ideas fall very much into the stereotypes of having a character who doesn’t experience romantic attraction “replace” it with a) a) being a career minded individual, or b) being a hyper-empathetic Best Friend To All. But that feels more like we’ve wrapped the wound in a thin layer of gauze, instead of just slapping on a band-aid and leaving, lmao. Or at least I think so.
What it comes down to, is, similar to the dating sims I mentioned earlier, good aro-inclusion’s gotta come from the ground up. So the devs would have to reshape the core progression of the game. And they’re probably not going to do that because that’s kind of ridiculous. Although there are rumors that they’ll let the Miis be gay. Perhaps that’s the opportunity to seize? My immediate first thought of how they’d do that is to “abolish gender” from the Miis entirely, which isn’t that great of a springboard for the aro thing, but we’ll see. And besides, would they make a change that impacts the game so little? What functional difference is there, between setting a toggle to “no romance” upon a Mii’s creation vs. simply dissuading every Mii that is developing feelings for or wants to confess to your aro Mii repeatedly? Miis don’t pair up like that without the player’s express permission, after all, so that default value isn’t getting much use on its own. But that’s me being super pessimistic, I know! XD
So all this rambling and all these tangents just to say: Tomodachi Life is a very aro-unfriendly game, beyond the fact that Miis can persistently ask to date characters you envision as aromantic in your personal island lore. As in, the game’s core structure is completely and stifilingly amatonormative. And unless you change that structure, you’re not gonna make an aro-friendly game. And that’s fine! It doesn’t have to be aro-friendly! But if they add that Aro Button, I don’t want people going, “Yay, hurray, we did it! Aro inclusion!”, wiping the activist dust off their hands, and fucking off into the sunset. And similarly, if you are actively nursing hopes that Tomodachi Life will be more aro-inclusive, well, we’re already in an imagination-speculation space, aren’t we? Think bigger. You can do it. I believe in you.
