Please, for the love of all that is decent, if anyone quotes me, edit this to cut down the size or put in a spoiler. The size of this post is TOO DAMN HIGH. Given how hard and slow breeding dwarves is already, it's hardly 'happy'
On worlds with no surviving dwarf civilisations, so no migrants, but lots of lovely reclaimable fortresses, it'd pretty much mean no game if you dwarfs didn't couple up in breeding pairs. You need alot of luck to get couples as it is without adding in the chance they'd couple the wrong way.
It also doesn't make a vast amount of sense for dwarf culture - which so far has been established as fairly conservative.
Is it really though? As far as I can tell there's already pretty much perfect gender equality. All jobs are doable by both sexes with no difference inherently in quality (of course), and as far as I can tell there aren't even masculine and feminine distinctions in names. I mean, this isn't directly related to same sex marriage in dwarf culture but it's just an example of an area where there isn't any discrimination or social rules like that.
(Really hoping this thread doesn't get super political, I'm just talking about the game)
All of which heavily implies that dwarf society has no concept of gender identity. Which would put offspring as the function of marriage.
same sex marriage is a concept of social rules about what genders are and what each gender does, Homophobia and gay marriage would both be incomprehensible to a culture which didn't even have a concept of gender roles and sexual identity.
No culture has any form of gender roles at the moment. Men wear dresses and the women fight even if they're lugging triplets around. Nobody says a word about the naked outsiders running around their settlements. In an environment like that, I suppose you could say this development was inevitable. The definition of marriage's function is up for debate as well. Let's just skirt any and all mention of religion to keep this civil and say that:
- a) you can have children without being married. Although strangely absent from DF, this has been prevalent since time out of memory and was likely omitted due to game limitations)
- b) Marriage doesn't have to solely be for children. It can be a political or financial move, and marriages have been arranged for that purpose well before the medieval time period the game attempts to simulate. It can even be about love, if you're not a soulless machine like me and capable of such things.
(*sniff* So ronery...) Conservative/Liberal doesn't come into it, those are temporary, I like the status quo v I want to change the status quo. Whats conservative in japan would be in england, why would what is in america be in a mythic age dwarf society?
What do we know about dwarf society? it's that duty to the many outweighs personal desire, except for nobles who are fishheads when it comes to mandates. But even that shows that your role is to serve the fort not be fulfilled. I.e. It's more reasonable to assume that dwarfs would see marriage as medieval and ancient people would, as a compact to fulfil the duty to have and raise children, not as the modern west does as a personal ambition or legal contract. Dwarf Fortresses, especially in dead-civ worlds (where this is a vital issue as breeding is the ONLY way to get new dwarfs) putting sexual predisposition ahead of duty would get you as heavily thumped as it would have in the dark ages.
It's not like dwarfs are so resilient that increasing the population wouldn't be a political concern. Even the whole focus of the game is go out and increase the dwarf civilisation by establishing new settlements. And yet they'd have the entirely modern attitudes towards reproduction as to see marriage in such a way as to make gay marriage conceivable, and yet NOT have modern attitudes towards the same as to make it so unmarried dwarfs could happily have kids no problem?
The fact of it is we know jack about dwarven society in DF. We players only interact with dwarven society through killing everything that looks at us funny and ordering a fortress population to do the same while churning out high-quality trade goods. Dwarves tend not to vary much between depictions, but that's no reason to assume they're carbon copies of a version from some better-understood source. We can't go by ethics either, they're just a very broad set of guidelines regarding what's worth going to war over at the moment. Eventually, even that may become fluid, so it's entirely possible no two dwarven civilizations will be alike in some far-flung release.
The behavior we invoke can be considered player contamination, we're imposing our own will on them, and can't base any concept of their society on that. If we have anything to go by for a look at their society, it's the behavior they partake in when not under your command. Taking long breaks at inconvenient times, throwing massive parties in unusual locations whenever they feel like it, not getting up off their asses to close the front gates to repel the siege because they're at such a party, demanding excessive and extravagant trinkets when in positions of power, possibly even seeking such positions for just that purpose...
That's the gist of what a dwarf does when left to its own devices. If that's anything to go by, they're hedonistic slackers, motivated only by an invisible god-thing in the sky telling them what to do, fear of getting beaten for not fulfilling the noble's mandate, and sudden onsets of spontaneous and irresistable urges to create artifacts out of random items.
In short, dwarves probably do not marry out of any sense of duty or obligation to raise a family. Relations progress from friend to lover to spouse, meaning they feel strongly enough over a long period of time until they're ready to commit to each other for the rest of their lives. In other words, they marry out of passion, not duty.
But really and back to the main problem which is mechanics, it screws the viability of generation forts and eugenics. It's a bug and it shouldn't be a feature.
If dwarfs are as likely to link up in non-reproducing matches as they are otherwise, then worlds where the dwarf civs died out will just be unplayable.
Apart form the odd world filled with nothing but necromancer towers, worlds have been genning just fine for me and civilizations don't appear to be dying out more than usual. It doesn't seem like this is affecting world populations enough to cause a problem, and I don't think same-sex marriage is going to affect the population as adversely as you think. It's not a 50/50 chance for someone to hook up with someone with the same gender, it's completely random during world gen and dependent on who someone spends enough time with after. If civilizations are dying out, it's probably less about who's marrying who and more about which generated monster made of metal and/or nation of immortal tree-jihadis are kicking their asses.
Even in the smaller scale of a fortress, this still isn't an issue if you care about it enough to do a little (extra) micromanaging. You can't do anything about same-sex couple that migrate in, but you can decide who hooks up with who by isolating couples through burrows. It's similar to how eugenics projects and isolation to avoid excessive friendships work.
If it's restricted by rare tags, maybe, it's just the game can't tell the difference when it comes to associated romances, which is what the cross-species trouble seems to heavily suggest is causing this, then it's not only a bug, but a devastating one.
Honestly, I don't see a big deal about it. It isn't a high-profile bug, even when not compared to things like blocking causing crashes or every npc being a giant wuss. For all we know, this was an intended feature that Toady didn't mention because he knew it would trigger an argument, or maybe it was supposed to be so rare almost nobody would notice. Either way, at the very most it's an interesting turn of events that I don't really care about one way or the other. It's nothing to get worked up over.
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