The importance of Colt being bisexual in Deathloop goes beyond queerness
When Arkane Studios’ latest offering Deathloop begins, protagonist Colt Vahn only knows one thing: he’s hungover.
All he has to guide him are mysterious thoughts from his past self appearing before his eyes as he takes in his surroundings.
‘Miss me, babe?‘ one of them reads, as a radio crackles to life.
Neither Colt nor the player knows it yet, but that moment is charged with meaning.
Over the course of the game, Colt’s quest to break the time loop he’s trapped in takes him all over the mysterious island of Blackreef, rife with secrets and history he’s forgotten.
The key to breaking the loop lies with the Visionaries, eight targets Colt will have to kill in one day to escape— the early game has the player investigating their schedules and lives, searching for opportunities to take them out.
Said investigation soon brings Colt to the home of Frank Spicer, and while Colt is sneaking around the house (or shooting his way through, as is par for the course with Arkane’s ‘play your way’ approach), Frank can be heard over the radio, telling tales of his life as a musician. If the player sticks around long enough, Frank eventually starts talking about Colt’s betrayal and reveals that they used to be lovers from time to time before dedicating an innuendo-filled song to him.
Depending on which Visionary the player chose to investigate first, this is a revelation that can come very early on or several hours in, but either way, it contributes to Deathloop’s carefully crafted bittersweet atmosphere; leaving the loop comes at the cost of the life Colt had built here, which you only hear about as you’re destroying it.
When I found this out in my own playthrough, it struck me that Arkane Studios aren’t known as a LGBT+ studio, but this is their fourth game with a queer protagonist— Death of the Outsider’s Billie Lurk, Prey’s Morgan Yu, and Dishonored 2’s Emily Kaldwin are all canonically queer.
But the importance of Colt being bisexual in Deathloop goes beyond just queerness. According to GLAAD’s 2020 media review, 66% of queer movie characters were white, with Black characters only making up 22%. So while queer representation is moving forward, it’s still overwhelmingly white; a protagonist like Colt is, unfortunately, a rarity.
It’s something Eliot, who has played through all of the Dishonored games, tells me he was intimately aware of while playing: “It’s not often in games that you play as a fixed character who’s bi. That’s usually relegated to RPGs, where sexuality is determined by player choice, in my experience, so I thought this was refreshing.”
Where queerness feels like an afterthought in a lot of media, Arkane weave it into the narrative, and it feels incredibly refreshing to play games where queer people not only explicitly exist but aren’t one-dimensional. Even in media properties that do feature LGBT+ characters, I’m often left with the feeling that the writers were so afraid of accidentally committing the mortal sin of writing “bad representation” that they forget to let their queer characters have flaws, and in turn they end up reading as hollow.
The queer characters that populate Arkane’s worlds feel anything but; they’re vibrant, flawed, and most of the time, murderous.
There’s also something to be said about the way identity is at the core of all these games: both Deathloop and Prey deal with a protagonist who’s lost their memory (Corvo and Colt) and must find out who they were if they want any hope of escaping their dire situation, while Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider are about rethinking your place in a world that turns out to be corrupt in ways you never even imagined. And as part of that identity, always, is queerness, which means that no matter where the story ended up taking the characters, Arkane Studios’ games have always made me feel seen.
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