No Sam on Frodo sex in Middle Earth Online

What will NOT be happening in Middle Earth Online
(Image from Salon.com)

In a decision sure to negatively impact their subscriber numbers, Turbine, makers of Middle Earth Online, have decided not to allow gay marriage in their game. Indeed, due to the gay marriage controversey the marriage feature has been cut from the game entirely:

Nik Davidson is a game designer at Turbine, the Westwood, Mass., company producing "The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar." The game has been in beta (a test version) since September, and during discussions of new features for the game, which was officially released Tuesday, the design team wound up in a heated discussion over what restrictions should be placed on marriage. They debated not only gay marriage but also marriage between members of different species. Finally, the game's executive producer settled the matter by pulling the entire marriage feature.

(HT: GamePolitics.com) In fairness to Turbine, gay marriage is not a part of Tolkein's world:

"The rule that we tried to follow across the board was: if there's an example of it in the book, the door is open to explore it," Nik says. "Very rarely will you see an elf and a human hook up, but it does happen; the door is open. Dwarves don't intermarry with hobbits; that door is shut ... Did two male hobbits ever hook up in the shire and have little hobbit civil unions? No. The door is shut."

More than that, Nik says, it seemed as if same-sex marriage would simply not have fit with Tolkien's vision for the worlds he created.

Indeed, Middle Earth is one of the most sexless fantasy worlds ever envisioned. The folks who made the movies had to play up the Aragorn-Arwen thing in a huge way to get any romance in there at all. Of course, we all know the who real romantic couple in those movies was:

Image from here.