Let me tell you some things about Jala Jayaratne, the protagonist of Thirsty Suitors: she’s a mess, having left behind scores of broken hearts in Timber Hills dating back to third grade. She’s renowned back home as a sort of skating prodigy, and on top of that she’s really good at basketball. She left Timber Hills when she was about 21 with the mayor’s daughter, who was 10 years her senior. And for some reason or another, I’ve got a big old crush on her. It’s nice.
I know there are plenty of videogame crushes to go around. As a matter of fact, looking at Twitter in the wake of Baldur’s Gate 3 only confirms the intensity with which players can fall for the characters they play as or with. This comes as little surprise, since after all, I do come from the generation that came up alongside Bioware, whose games are as synonymous with their premises as they are with the notion of fleshed out romances. My first videogame romance ever was Leliana from Dragon Age: Origins, eternally cursing me to fold for any redhead who bats her eyelids my way. Then it was Morrigan after her, Isabella in Dragon Age 2, and Tali through Mass Effect 2 and 3. Jala’s different though. Thirsty Suitors is different.
To be perfectly candid, Jala’s one of the few crushes I’ve had on a videogame character who’s unambiguously brown. It’s refreshing after decades of tacit reinforcement from mainstream games that mostly white people are worthy of being protagonists and having romances. In the past, I’ve lamented the absence of brown, specifically Latin, heroes in games and it isn’t the only place we’re absent. That isn’t to suggest there have never been brown folks to crush on in games, but the options have always been few and far between—not to mention sometimes ambiguous—and until fairly recently they weren’t often the primary romances in the games that featured them. Besides Jala, I can count maybe Josephine from Dragon Age: Inquisition and Panam from Cyberpunk 2077 among the few brown girls games have expressly wanted me to see in a romantic light. Beyond them, there’s precious few mainstream representations to go around, and while it’s definitely on me to seek out non-mainstream alternatives, it’s just as much an indictment on the industry that it feels so uncommon to see brown people in this light in videogames in 2023. You ever think of how much more common it is to romance a fantasy or alien race in a AAA game than it is to romance a brown character in games? It’s fucked up.
In comes Thirsty Suitors like a much needed bolt of lightning to set things right. If games before it were shy about featuring brown characters in romantic entanglements, Thirsty Suitors is instead brazen about it; though the entirety of the main cast isn’t brown, they are non-white, and the story hinges on all of their romances, from Jala’s exes to her sister Aruni’s recent engagement. Jala’s Auntie Chandra is at one point hilariously likened to a rite of passage for lesbians in Timber Hills to crush on. Even Jala’s parents are getting in on the fun, much to her chagrin. Every brown person in sight is getting it in Thirsty Suitors!
Then there’s Jala. Thirsty Suitors frames her as explicitly flirty and cool as all hell. Among her abilities in battle is a taunt where she flips and lands seated before feigning cat-like behavior to generate thirst from her opponent. Once they’re thirsty, she can follow up with an attack that has her project a basketball and literally dunk on them. When she shocks her enemies, she can instead hit them with her skateboard. She’s the cool and alternative skater girl I dreamt up when I was younger and wondering what my type was. She’s a vision. She also eschews many of the tropes of romantic characters in games, who are sometimes flattened by the need to be appealing to players by being the multi-faceted protagonist of the story. Sometimes Jala is even unlikeable, lending her dimensions that make her feel like a real person. Rather than turn me away from her, it only solidifies the crush I’ve developed on this character who skirts the line between reality and fantasy wonderfully.
All of that is just the cherry on top of the fact that Jala and the cast of Thirsty Suitors are the kind of brown representation folks have clamored for. I love that no one in the cast is some model minority and yet they’re all deserving of love. Though we come from different cultures, I can’t help but feel a kinship with Jala explicitly because of how much of a messy and hard-headed loudmouth we’re both capable of being. That and our mutual fear of the chappal/chancla, of course. It’s why I’m so grateful for Thirsty Suitors for the new crush: she’s just like me, for real. And if there’s one thing us immigrant brown kids are good at, it’s coming together and trauma bonding over generational trauma and woes. So Jala, I’m begging you to please call me.
Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.