Relationships in Stardew Valley are simple. You give someone a gift and, depending on how much they like the gift, you get a certain number of heart points back. You can also get heart points by speaking consistently to your romantic interest, and you get more points if the gift is given to the player on their birthday. Once you’ve done this long enough, you can buy a bouquet and give it to your romantic interest, as long as they are a marriage candidate, and they become your boyfriend or girlfriend. You also have the option to just remain friends- the path to marriage and friendship are very similar from towards the beginning, something I’ll discuss later. After the bouquet is given, the maximum hearts increases from eight to ten. Once you fill those hearts, marriage can be proposed. It is a very straight forward process. If you give a bouquet to someone you can not get denied. You can give bouquets to as many characters and the only consequence is, at most, “a Group Heart event that may cause all girl/boyfriends to give you the ‘cold shoulder’ for a week.”[1] None of the marriage candidates have an obvious preference for a male or female partner. They will accept whatever the player wants. When Aimee Hart described Stardew Valley as a LGBT utopia because “[she] may be represented as a queer, white woman”[2], I was mystified. Stardew Valley can’t be an LGBT utopia because there are no real queer people shown. There are only people who evolve to the player and their whims. It’s a completely transactional process. The player controls everything, and in return they get a husband or wife who sometimes gives them gifts or does chores around the house.
Note how both Emily and Shane have bouquets and their last two hearts open and (waiting to be) filled. As of right now there are no consequences.
Relationships are as personal as something like farming or mining. The player goes to a certain location: their romantic interests’ favorite place, their farm, or the cave; they do some action: give a gift or speak, plant, water, or harvest crops, or mine minerals and kill slime; and then reap their reward: a marriage partner who gives gifts, plants to sell, or things to craft with. Just like with these other tasks there is very little reciprocity when it comes to relationships. When you reach a certain number of hearts with a player you have access to their “cutscenes” and they send you, from what I can tell, one-time gifts of food and recipes, but their reciprocity doesn’t extend beyond that.
Dialogue from one of Shane’s cutscenes. It happens after the player has four hearts with him.
There is also some aspect of them being completely detached from the situation. For example, in the game, I have ten hearts with Shane, and I’ve given him a bouquet. He still says things like “You like talking to me? I guess I believe you… maybe you’re as weird as I am.” While the game lets people explore having relationships, there is very little active participation from either partner, unless you consider canned dialogues and sporadic, one-sided gift giving active participation. I don’t. I started going to Shane at the end of the day to make sure I spoke to him at least once a day, not for my enjoyment, but because it had to be done, just like watering my crops to make sure they didn’t die. Shane’s cutscenes are also all about his suffering with depression and coping with alcohol. Despite him beginning therapy, he still is in the Saloon every night. This isn’t because he’s going back on his word, this is because relationships in the game are only affected by how I engage with Shane, not on how Shane engages with his own environment. You can also see this disjunction in the fact that relationships begin as friendships, with no mention of any romantic activities or interest, until you give them the bouquet. Then, there are only two hearts to distinguish friendship from the ability to get married. The entire relationship period is only two hearts long and can be achieved in very little time. Again, this idea of transactional relationships emerge. I want to get married, and I want to do it as quickly as possible so I can began reaping the rewards of my work. Some crops take longer to grow than my relationship takes to be ready for marriage. Only one cutscene, at least for Shane, is present in between eight to ten hearts, and no gifts have been given. Calling Stardew Valley an LGBT utopia isn’t wrong simply because the lack of racial or body type diversity, it doesn’t even have characters who have can do anything without the players permission.
This is after he’s said he’s began therapy in the next town over, and after he “stopped” drinking.
The game could offer gift-giving that scales to how many gifts you give your boyfriend or girlfriend. The game could make each character have their own love language, something that is a bit more complex than only gift giving as a tool to woo someone, but still simple enough to encompass within a pixelated screen. The game could also make characters have their own sexuality. At least that way it seems less like the player can date whoever they want regardless of their romantic interest’s own desires. There is something transactional about how one romances someone who shows no desire beyond friendship with them with gifts, and then- regardless of having no inkling of their sexual orientation, because they have no definable one- get them to date and eventually marry them. As I said, there are only two hearts separating you and your friend (now boy/girlfriend) from getting married. If the game allowed for meaningful relationships, this period would be longer so people could explore the relationship, possibly by going on dates. As far as relationships go, Stardew Valley has a long way to go in terms of creating meaningful experiences that don’t feel transactional and controlling, and an even longer way towards becoming a utopia.
[1] “Shane,” Stardew Valley Wiki (Stardew Valley Wiki, January 26, 2022), https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Shane.
[2] Aimee Hart, “Stardew Valley Is Not the LGBT Utopia I First Thought It Was,” Gayming Magazine, July 20, 2020, https://gaymingmag.com/2020/07/stardew-valley-is-not-the-lgbt-utopia-i-first-thought-it-was/.
