Nexus Mods has deleted a mod that allowed players to change the gender and voice of one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s most popular minor characters, making one of the game’s canon gay relationships heterosexual. The now-deleted mod altered the angelic Dame Aylin, turning her into a man. It even used AI to alter the voicelines to make them sound more masculine. “A Reimagining of Nightsong. Meet Ser Aylin, a slightly more polite and male version of Dame Aylin,” the mod’s description read.Spoilers for the second act of Baldur’s Gate III follow. Throughout the middle of BG3, players spend a good amount of time hunting down a macguffin called Nightsong in the hopes it can help them defeat a major villain. At the end of their search they find Dam Aylin, an angelic entity who's been tortured for a century and whose presence is keeping the villain immortal. Players can free Aylin, who immediately picks up an old relationship with the cleric Isobel. They’re very gay and very cute. Unwilling to let gay women have this massive W, the mod turns Aylin into a man and uses an AI system to alter her voice. According to a post on the r/BaldursGate3 subreddit called “please don’t support the ‘ser Aylin’ mod” with nearly 16,000 upvotes, the mod is part of a larger package of mods floating around aimed at making the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 less diverse and more heterosexual. According to the mod’s description, it ensures “that the gender and sexuality of world NPCs match medieval status quo”—something that doesn’t make sense, given that BG3 takes place in a fantasy setting that bears only passing resemblance to the medieval era of our world. Other mods on the same site can change Wyll, a Black warlock whose family plays a significant role in the main story, to have white skin. Another completely changes the characters in Far Cry Primal to make them appear more “central European”—in other words, more white.The Ser Aylin mod was up for less than 24 hours on Nexus before mods removed it and banned the account that had posted it. “This appears to be a throwaway account created to upload a mod that attempts to skirt our community guidelines,” a public post about the ban said. “The mod in question appears to reduce diversity in Baldur's Gate 3 by taking a same-sex couple and swapping the gender of one of the partners to make them heterosexual.”This is far from the first time Nexus Mods has delisted content that its community found objectionable. It banned one user after they uploaded a mod that let users remove the pride flag from Spider-Man Remastered and killed a mod that allowed players to remove pronouns from Starfield. When it removed the Starfield mod, it told 404Media that it stood for “diversity and inclusion in our community and the removal of diversity, while appealing to many, does not promote a positive modding community.”“We are for inclusivity, we are for diversity. If we think someone is uploading a mod on our site with the intent to deliberately be against inclusivity and/or diversity then we will take action against it,” Nexus said in its post about the removal of the Ser Aylin mod. “The same goes for people attempting to troll other users with mods deliberately to cause a rise. We aren't the authority on what users can and cannot mod. Us removing a mod only means it cannot be found at Nexus Mods, nothing more, nothing less. As a private business, we have a right to choose what content we do and do not want to host on our platform. Respect this right the same way you want respect for your rights.”When asked about the mod directly, Nexus pointed Motherboard to its public post on the topic.
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