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Because the coding to make marriages check for opposite sex before allowing children is hard
Surely not THAT hard if the game already manages to check for sex in a lovers relationship and allows out-of-wedlock children if it's the opposite, but doesn't if it's the same? People already experimented in this thread and determined that a hardcoded restriction is the only thing making it impossible.
You can always take a woman as your lover
Bah. There is a reason why people living in countries that ban gay marriage ask for a legal acknowledgment of their union (and all the legal benefits to it), even though they can always take a lover and call it a day.
 
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I had a bit to say about this, but this forum is telling me that my post contains inappropriate content for some reason? So I'll just say this:

Until the developers accommodate this request, I will no longer be playing this game.
 
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I had a bit to say about this, but this forum is telling me that my post contains inappropriate content for some reason? So I'll just say this:

Until the developers accommodate this request, I will no longer be playing this game.
With how user numbers have dropped I think most whom gay marriage is a strikeable issue have already stopped playing
 
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With how user numbers have dropped I think most whom gay marriage is a strikeable issue have already stopped playing
My case, and my husband's. We check every now and then to see if there's been any update, but it's just tiring the whole be straight or die. And not being able to take gay interactions any further than casual secret hook-ups is kinda frustrating, so close yet so far
 
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As with every other new capability given to modders, the OP suggestions have full merit.
Now personally I think there are much, much more important moddable stuff to be implemented before implementing "gay modding".
 
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As with every other new capability given to modders, the OP suggestions have full merit.
Now personally I think there are much, much more important moddable stuff to be implemented before implementing "gay modding".
Not to mention, that gay marriage can still be implemented, but no one gonna do it, cause once it is done paradoxians will implement that themselves. That's how it had happened with ruler designer for lot of people, who had made mods with that feature
 
I honestly don't see why it wasn't a toggleable option in the first place. It's not historically accurate isn't a good reason because neither is a Hellenistic empire out of India taking over the known world in 1307.
 
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Not to mention, that gay marriage can still be implemented, but no one gonna do it, cause once it is done paradoxians will implement that themselves. That's how it had happened with ruler designer for lot of people, who had made mods with that feature
The problem is that gay marriage can't be implemented. The game is hard-coded to prevent it, even if you change the files. There are some conceivable workarounds, but they're much more difficult to implement.
 
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The problem is that gay marriage can't be implemented. The game is hard-coded to prevent it, even if you change the files. There are some conceivable workarounds, but they're much more difficult to implement.
They're not difficult, but if someone gonna try that, paradox will immediately release update with gay marriages
 
There are some conceivable workarounds, but they're much more difficult to implement.

It's not particularly difficult, just idiotically tedious. You have to touch the majority of event files, lots of interactions, decisions, etc. And once there's an update for the game, you have to start all over. Also say goodbye to the chance of ever playing with any other sufficiently complex mod
 
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It's not particularly difficult, just idiotically tedious. You have to touch the majority of event files, lots of interactions, decisions, etc. And once there's an update for the game, you have to start all over. Also say goodbye to the chance of ever playing with any other sufficiently complex mod
Yeah this is the true problem. When I started down the road and got a grasp of how much work it'd be it made my brain hurt. I do still mess around with it from time to time still though.
 
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They're not difficult, but if someone gonna try that, paradox will immediately release update with gay marriages

I don't really understand your point? There's no guarantee of it happening right away aside from mere supposition, and even if it ended up happening, that someone was industrious enough to get a workaround to work... it would be a good thing anyway? We'd get what we were asking for either way, except it wouldn't be trying to get viable solutions by modifying a million things anymore, just a simple toggle.

It's not historically accurate isn't a good reason because neither is a Hellenistic empire out of India taking over the known world in 1307.

If anything, the game skips over a few things in favour of a more contemporary, nuclear view of marriage and social relationships. I can only recommend reading, for the medieval Christian world, Same‐Sex Couples Creating Households in Old Regime France: The Uses of the Affrèrement by Allan A. Tulchin; and Same-Sex Unions In Premodern Europe by John Boswell. I'm still gathering documentation on the Islamic World: I gather lesbian unions were a thing in 17th to early 20th century Iran, but I'd like to see when exactly was the practice established, and if there was more than just that one. I'd like to check for India and Tibet too.

Something to take into account when considering romantic relationships in Medieval Times, especially in the Christian world, is the fact it was not the way people thought of it at that time. As Karma Lochrie states in The Cambridge Companion To Lesbian Litterature,

"The sexual landscape within which same-sex desire – male and female – was understood in the Middle Ages was not defined by heterosexuality, that is, the prevailing “normative organization of the world” in which love and sex between men and women serves as the standard and ideal of sociosexual relations, as well as the principle of cultural organization, law, and citizenship."

Instead, she says, sex was organized on what she calls a "continuum", with virginity considered the best thing, sex within an opposite-sex marriage good, and various practices within said marriage shunned or criminalized. What was considered the basis of an ideal relationship was instead friendship, and indeed it is the most represented form in late medieval literature (see Percival embracing Gawain passionately in Le Conte du Graal, for instance). What people did in bed was not that important to Middle Age people; those passionate frienships were instead the basis of social relationships between two people.

This brings me to the concept of Affrèrement: it is not unlike modern-day Pacs in France, i.e. a legal union between two people (or more at the time, which lead to a lot of non-nuclear family structures) that allows them to live under the same roof and share the same resources, along with inheriting what the other(s) possessed at time of their death - and sometimes being buried alongside each other. It was common in the late Middle Age and mid-Renaissance in Provence, Midi and Italy. In the Orthodox world, adelphopoesis was of a similar nature. When two single men from different families did it, was it what we would call "gay marriage"? No, simply because they hadn't invented the term yet. Was it at least sexual? Not always, but at least sometimes. And that sometimes is more than enough for our purposes.

Why? Because Crusader Kings 3's concept of marriage is not merely representing sexual relationships between spouses, but also working ones. Your spouse, in the game, is not merely the person you make babies with. They are a fully fledged member of your council; they give you bonuses to stats, to prestige and piety. They share your life in more ways than one. The issue with a lot of responses in this thread account to the idea that marriage has to be sexual, but we've established that in the Christian world, marriage-like unions between men -- and less often women in the case of Affrèrement -- were somewhat common; and passionate relationships between men and between women were dime a dozen. Most of the time they weren't what we would call "homosexual relationships" or even "gay marriages", but that's alright, because for our intent and purposes, it does not matter.

It would be anachronistic to call them that, but hey, lo and behold, the game does not care. It already has the mechanics to justify such a union. Should it be integrated in another way than modding? Maybe not, at least not with the way cultures and religions work right now: there are too many different practices on a long span of time (and don't get me started on the modern day gender binary implemented in there -- hello southern Asia~). But it wouldn't necessarily be ahistorical.

So uh, sorry for the overly long post, gonna go find more stuff about the Islamic world, sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia now~
 
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[...]

So uh, sorry for the overly long post, gonna go find more stuff about the Islamic world, sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia now~
I thought it was quite informative. It also highlights one of the reasons I'm interested in getting these tools in the hands of modders specifically. I think that while it should be fairly straight-forward to implement same-sex marriage, it will be fairly difficult to implement it well. Even if Paradox was to add this to the base game, I suspect it would be a fairly restranied rendering. But there is a lot of nuance and regional variance in how same-sex unions can be treated from both a historical and game-play perspective. I expect that a variety of modders will attempt to express that in differing and interesting ways. There have been several people proposing different solutions in this very thread, and I'm excited to see the array of lenses that people decide to capture this with once they are given the opportunity.
 
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