Gaider: We discussed, "Let's give them arcs," and then the idea of romances came up. We initially were supposed to have six: three female, three male. We were interested in that, but what the romances would be? I don't think we [knew]. It wasn't like we had direction such as, "Make it emotionally resonate." We were just trying to write a good story. As I recall, that's all we were trying to do. It was a little weird, because romance in a video game seemed like a weird thing. We weren't sure how we would do this.
I remember when I was sitting down and trying to write romances, I was just trying to make it an interesting story. I was trying to figure out what to do with Anomen. That was actually my first romance, and I didn't know what to do with him. I didn't create his character. The first part of his character writing had been done by, I think, Rob Bartel, one of the other writers. And [the character] was kind of an asshole. I had followed up on that, here's this arrogant paladin guy, based on what Rob had started. Then at some point I remember James saying, "Okay, he's the first male romance." And I was like, "Really? Really? Anomen? You think...? Okay. Sure. I'll figure it out."
I was trying to take Anomen and figure out, okay, how would you romance this guy? I didn't give any thought, really to who the audience was or if it would be an emotional thing. I just thought, If this were a story I were writing, like a book, how would it play out? Drama is just a thing that has to happen. I didn't feel pressured to make it engaging for the player. I just thought, Well, what do I feel like? What do I think is cool?
Same thing when I wrote Aerie and Viconia [DeVir] romances. They were kind of dropped in my lap because I wasn't supposed to do the female romances at all, but Luke was falling way behind, so they said, "Why don't you do these?" So I was like, okay, they're very different from each other, so I took two different [approaches]: Aerie being the damsel in distress, Viconia being a femme fatale. When I did tabletop, I would sometimes give my players romances. If they were romancing a player in my game, how would I write that story? That's all.