So... is Maxi gay or not?

Macaulyn

[13] Hero
People made such a noise about this when it was leaked, but I saw no reference to that anywhere after the game's release, and I didn't see it being specified in any videos I saw of the story (I don't own the game), and I didn't notice the subtle indication of Kung Jin in MKX, so I could have missed it in SC6 too. So, is it there or not?
 
Nothing explicit. Maybe implied? I forget and I just did Maxi's story mode a week or two ago. I just have a bad memory.

But here, take a look. Unless there was other implied stuff in the main chapter of Soul Chronicle.
 
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So, not only is he not gay, but he's apparently a ladies' man
 
My initial thoughts? Who really cares? Oh, don't get me wrong, I understand why the OP is raising the issue after the apparent u-turn with regard to this "leaked" detail, and I understand why there is a drive to get developers to push the envelope when it comes to inclusion in the first place. But honestly, two thoughts occur:

One, I don't think I ever anticipate Soul Calibur being the franchise to break new ground on a social issue. We're talking about a series whose writers have struggled to get two coherent thoughts in a row and whose plotting has essentially boiled down to "Big guy with giant stone axe hits a lizardman, and then a small girl, and then...somebody else...Darth Vader? Yeah that'll do!" Clearly VI represents an effort to collect all of those bizarre and internally inconsistent plot strands together and reform them in a story that at least has a continuity of sorts, but honestly that has made my eyes roll even harder this time around: so much development cost wasted on an endless series of generic cutscenes with mind-numbingly pointless and goofy character interactions (most of them with equally pointless tertiary cut-and-paste characters) which I (and I assume most other veteran players) are just going to skip through anyway, especially with Libra of Soul (aka NPC chatterbox mode)--all to assuage a vocal (but to my mind, really not getting the point) minority who insist every game must have a fully fleshed out story mode, and who will make a stink if it isn't present in a game they will buy and play for maybe twenty hours total (vs. those of us who will put hundreds, or even in some extreme cases thousands, of hours into the game in multiplayer and would rather the basic mechanics receive the bulk of dev attention). I didn't care about which evil artifact Yoshimitsu shattered in the middle of his quest for vengeance when I was reading about it in a blurb in SCII's bonus materials, and I don't care any more now that it's got twenty minutes of spoken exposition; in fact, I've got far less time for such nonsense in my life these days.

Actually, I had rather come to celebrate the cornball, threadbare, and thoroughly pointless nature of the plot and how it was presented in the SE-SCIV arc; it was like the game was encouraging you not to take any of the background story too seriously and to just fixate on...well, making your big man with an axe hit that Lizardman, frankly. And no amount of backstopping that story to try to make it into something more compelling is going to change it from anime-style melodrama into Don Quixote--and anyway, the only Cervantes I care about when I turn on my PS4 is the demon pirate with teleport skillz! And yes, I'll admit the last two paragraphs were a bit of hijack to gripe about the problem with VI's approach to story more generally, but I say it all to frame my perspective on the Maxi-as-a-gay issue: Soul Calibur was never going to be a meaningful platform to move the needle on the representation of any underserved group of people.

Second, even if Soul Calibur was going to do something along these lines, it would have been kind of predictable-bordering-on-offensive if it had to be Maxi. Of course our gay character has got to be the guy with the most ostentatious outfit and the highest voice, and the greatest level of obsession with his appearance ("My hair!"), who gets regularly mocked by the other characters for his sense of style. C'mon, if you're going to make a Soul Calibur character gay, be creative. Siegfried, or better yet, Astaroth ("It's been so hard to keep this secret, to conform to what people expect out of a giant murder machine golem, but all I've ever needed was someone who truly understood me--YOU MAGGOTS!")

Anyway, I kind of wonder how much the supposed leak was ever genuine. Of course it could be like the similar situation with that Beauty and the Beast remake a couple of years back, which as best I understand the reports, was built up in interviews only to be completely un-explicit in the movie itself. Basically, the developer wants the attention without facing the blowback, so floats the idea (so people who want to see it will see it when they experience the story) without actually devoting any effort to making it a part of the narrative (so it doesn't upset people who just can't handle something so trivial). That kind of attempt to have your cake and eat it too could be what was going on here. However, the references in the story modes (reproduced by Reprobean above) seem to suggest that (if this ever was in fact planned) the devs got completely cold feet about homosexual Maxi and removed this character detail either from the game entirely or just from the English localization. On the other hand, I do kind of like the idea that Maxi is living through the subplot for Captain Shakespeare (from Stardust), putting this lady's man persona on while his knowing crew indulgingly pretends not to see the truth in front of them. I can well imagine the scene when Maxi finally comes out: "Uh, yeah cap'n, we kind of had an idea. You bleach and starch your outfit every night in order to look like that even though you spend your life on the sea, at dodgy pirate ports, and on occasional in-land excursions to fight samurai and cyborgs. Also, you call yourself 'The Dandy of the Seas'; what I'm trying to say cap'n is that there were some clues..."
 
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Honestly, the more likely to be gay (or bi at the very least) would have to be Voldo.

Why, because he's so freaky and sexual? Ok, granted, it's pretty much a matter of established lore that Voldo's had an unsettling level of devotion to his "master", so I'll grant you, probably nobody's gonna argue with you about Voldo. But honestly, I don't understand why, if we're going to obsess about who might be gay in this silliest of stories (and probably originating as either a marketing ploy or a completely fabricated bs "leak" in this instance), why does it always have to be the gaudy/flashy guy, or the whinny emo, or the dude in bondage gear? Why not Mitsurugi?
 
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Why, because he's so freaky and sexual? Ok, granted, it's pretty much a matter of established lore that Voldo's had an unsettling level of devotion to his "master", so I'll grant you, probably nobody's gonna argue with you about Voldo. But honestly, I don't understand why, if we're going to obsess about who might be gay in this silliest of stories (and probably originating as either a marketing ploy or a completely fabricated bs "leak" in this instance), why does it always have to be the gaudy/flashy guy, or the whinny emo, or the dude in bondage gear? Why not Mitsurugi?
Look, there is no argument against Voldo being gay. We know Vercci calls him his "beloved Voldo" all the time, Voldo is overly devoted to his master, we know he dresses as a sex slave and the only reason he doesn't moan is because he gagged, otherwise, lets be real, he'd sound like he was doing sex. It may have never been said specifically, but its obvious tha the is Vercci's sex slave and his devotion (in addition to the fact that Vercci was, apparently, defenseless) indicates he always liked being what he is to his master. Also, aside from being flashy and, well, a dandy, there is nothing really effeminate regarding Maxi in any way, he likes to look good, and if you associate that with a gay stereotype, joke is on you, because many straight guys are like that.

Wow what Ive always known lol. The word dandy explains everything. Tell me something I don't know lol. I'm still laughing at the amount of people who believed the so called leaker/ rumor spreading moron.
It seems more like you were insecure over a character that, correct me if I'm wrong, is one of your favourites was "at risk" of being gay and now you're relieved its been deconfirmed. Because before SC5's story came out, in every single game in the series, there was never an indication of Maxi being straight anywhere, he was never shown to be interested in either females nor males, which means he could easily have been revealed as a gay character right now. Also, the word "dandy" doesn't explain anything, "dandy" doesn't denote whether someone is straight or gay.
 
Also, aside from being flashy and, well, a dandy, there is nothing really effeminate regarding Maxi in any way, he likes to look good, and if you associate that with a gay stereotype, joke is on you, because many straight guys are like that.

Uhh, dude, that was the entire thrust of my comments...
 
'Sup b******. I do want to point out that it is very interesting how it had to be explicitly said that he likes woman and before that confirmation it was rumored that he has the hots for men. To give a short answer is that he is not gay from what we saw in Maxi's story mode. Long answer I think this was all a marketing scheme to give this game some attention before release. Despite that he gay and always will be gay with Groh in my yaoi dreamland.
 
Gay maxi is the next DLC character.

I would genuinely slow clap Namco if they released "Gay Maxi" as DLC and simply gave him more conservative clothing and hair. Basically just calling out a gullible fan base who largely bought into the rumour because Maxi is the most ostentatious character and thus fit a stereotype.
 
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