Talk:Geoff Curnow/@comment-16533050-20141022180644/@comment-6301921-20141023020200

...except the quote says nothing about that. It only mentions that his lover was a soldier from Tyvia, which usually implies that there is something wrong with at least one of the unknown lover's mentioned traits in Curnow's society.

I've already had the whole "it could've been because Curnow's lover was a foreigner" discussion on the wiki, and even though it's considered a bad thing to be a foreigner or to have foreign blood (Curnow's grandfather being Serkonan), and you can probably safely extend this to having a foreign lover, it's never conveyed in the game that it would be something to kill over.

So, then that leaves the fact that Curnow's lover was a soldier. In Dunwall society, we see very clearly-defined gender roles--ones that mirror those of (I guess Western society within the past several centuries?)--and because there is nothing in game to suggest otherwise, it makes sense for most players' minds to assume that Dunwall society is largely heteronormative, not to mention Darion and Windham give us a glimpse of how homosexuality is viewed in the Abbey ("I feared for our lives when your fellow Overseers found us"), and the Abbey has much influence over society. That being said, Curnow falling in love with a soldier (which most will assume to be a man, considering that in-game all guards, soldiers, etc. are male) would be highly taboo and probably something that would bring him dishonor or even get him killed.

But yes, not everyone simply assumes that all of the soldiers in the Empire are male, even if all of them are men in the game, and since we've gotten extra information on the world and learned that there are females in the City Watch and army, then the Heart's statement becomes a bit more open to interpretation. But if Curnow's lover were female, then that would bring us back to her being a foreigner--and back to paragraph 2...