Interesting reading in the thread about the whole gay Mii marriage thing and I'm glad it's mostly been a reasonable discussion so far on both sides. Gonna ramble here, so excuse length in advance (har) and if you think this is derailing the thread from talking about the game, well, this seems to be a major talking point about the game and until more information comes from Nintendo all the other topics seem to be covered as well.
I think we're at a watershed point now where Nintendo being a family-friendly company doesn't matter, and the fact that kids might be playing doesn't matter, to the argument of whether or not to include Miis of the same gender dating in a game. Those being reasons to keep gay content out of things are from a time when the concept of being gay was diametrically opposed to the concept of family life. It's 2014. There are gay couples and gay families everywhere in the two main markets we're talking about here, North America and Europe, and despite it being an uncomfortable line of thought for some people, children are not inherently straight, nor a separate species from the gay adults in our societies. Some kids are or will be gay. They have a right to see media that tells them they are not freaks and that what they feel is a part of the broader human experience as well as what they see all the time with hetero couples.
The more games come out that let you simulate your life, or let you play as a character with enough agency given to you in the area of relationships that many people will treat them as an avatar of themselves and want to make the same decisions they themselves would (e.g. Mass Effect), the less of a niche discussion this becomes. As an earlier poster said, my existence as a gay person and my desire to reflect my real life (my male partner) in a game like this is not social commentary or being PC or being political. It's my life. Don't put "your life" on the box if there's gonna be a honking great implied asterisk that says your life in some corporate-conservative filtered version of what that means.
Some people have asked for perspective on what Japanese people think about all this. I lived in Japan for some years and had a reasonably fulfilling gay life there. I would say that Japan is a place where a (what one might call) conservative view on society and the role of the family prevails. Your role in Japanese society is to get married and have children. Not fulfilling this role, be it because you're a woman who wants a career, a gay person, or a person of any gender who isn't interested in making that life for yourself, positions you as something of an outsider. In that sense gay people are not singled out as a destructive force against society in the same way (some) conservative demagogues do in the west. You don't get that "think of the children" attitude.
However, the vast majority of gay people keep their sexuality to themselves. Being out at the office is almost unheard of. It may sound horrible but I don't think most gay people necessarily feel oppressed by this on a day to day basis. Japan is not a country shaped by a history of organised religion, and the associated repression of sex and sexuality in all its forms, in the same way many Western countries are. There is no real concept of homosexuality as a sin or something you're going to hell for, and most people would be hard pressed to tell you what was wrong with it other than the fact that you aren't like most people (conformity is a virtue there) and you won't have a family, which is a shame. Many people view it as something you do rather than something you are, which was the prevailing attitude in the west as well until relatively recently. I found people in Japan would say things like "I didn't know you were into that", as if it was someone confessing a fetish or a sexual peccadillo rather than their entire orientation, but they would also say "does that mean you want to be a woman?".
There is a prevailing template of gender roles in Japan and being gay puts you outside that system (just as being a working mother does, or an at-home dad), hence the tendency to try to understand homosexuality in those terms: man loves men does not compute, man must somehow deep down be like a woman, or aspire to being one on some level. I'd say this is why there is also a huge tendency to conflate homosexuality with transgenderism and transvestism, which leads us to one of the key points: being gay may be a political hot topic in the west sometimes, but in Japan it's usually the focus of comedy. A man liking men is just weird and something to laugh at.
Anyway to get back to some kind of point, I honestly think the time has come to ask Nintendo why this isn't in their game. Not in some belligerent hostile campaign, but in plain and simple terms that are honestly asking for an answer to the question. Not because we'll like the answer - chances are a truly honest answer would come down to social conservatism in the Japanese Nintendo office and fiscal/public relations concerns in the western ones - but because making them think about the question is one way for the audience to force an internal conversation that might start us down a path to a positive resolution on this issue.
'Nintendo' is not a monolithic entity. We can be 100% sure that producers, translators, testers and others at both NOA and NOE (and let's be fair, some at NCL as well) were aware, upset and vocal (perhaps not at NCL) about the heteronormative version of life portrayed in this game, and those would not just have been LGBT people but straight people (what some call allies) who think equal representation of a diverse spectrum of sexuality in media is a right for everyone, whether or not they're personally affected.
Let's not lash out and blame just yet, but instead question and engage. The #Miiquality hashtag might be a good place to start, as public campaigns are harder to ignore than private letter-writing or effort-free petition website clicking. But to come back to my opening statement, I feel this is a watershed moment. It's one of those times when you finally say, actually, no, I won't be told this is a non-issue or that I should be happy I can find a crappy workaround in the game, or it's the inevitable product of the intersection of Japanese and big-company thinking, or I should be satisfied being gay isn't making me worse off in my life in other ways anymore and complaining about representation in a game is a first-world problem (which it surely is). The time for straight-talking (as it were) on this issue is now.
