Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem

[A Black Falcon]

Well, I won't say that the new FE games are well written -- I know a lot of people agree that they aren't -- I just wonder how well-written the GBA ones actually were. I mean, the Fire Emblem series has always had anime influences. That's always been a part of the series, for good and bad. Those thousand-year-old-little-girl-dragon characters have been in the series since early on, for example. And as much as I love the GBA FE games, SS's story has some creepy-anime elements, with the ambiguously-incestuous relationship the twin main character has as one of the prime examples of that. So yeah, the writing has probably gotten even worse and more anime since, but some of those themes have always been there.

And yes, spiking an unwilling person's drink to make them "straight" is entirely out of line. Heck, very little needs to change to take it back to respectibility. Just, I dunno, change the dialog to make that person WILLING to try a drug to alter their sexuality. However, even that is rife with problems if they don't work extra carefully to make it absolutely clear this is an individual's experimental choice and not a way to "fix" someone. As it is in the Japanese version, it comes off as males just seeing a female that they can't obtain, which is unacceptable, so they need to "fix" that.

... Oh right, that. Should have remembered to mention that too... ah well. The people defending that plotline claim that she actually always was bi so she isn't really having her sexuality changed, but I think your last thought here is the right one -- regardless of the bad in-story explanation, the real reason for it is to keep her open as a remanceable option for a male protagonist, because it's anime so the lead has to be able to romance all people of the opposite sex, that's just how it works! A character NOT interested in the protagonist? That'd be crazy talk... how can the buyer imagine themselves in a relationship with an anime character who doesn't care about them?

Seriously, it's so dumb that people actually write based on trying to live up to stereotype such as that one, but they do. One of the side-effects of otakus being such big consumers; they may not be large in number in Japan, but they've got a lot of influence in the fields they support due to how much they spend. And Nintendo makes its games for Japan first. Hopefully after enough of these controversies Nintendo will realize that having creepily sexualized things in their games is a mistake, and gay and lesbian people actually exist.