Mass Effect 2: Jack was pansexual in BioWare's original plans

After the release of Mass Effect in 2007, Fox News hosted a panel criticizing both the game's sexual content and the inclusion of a romantic option LGBT in the storyline Liara T 'Soni (despite his race being mono-gender). Most of the claims made during this segment were false, such as the allegations that Mass Effect was a "rape simulator" and the comparison to the porn movie. Debbie Does Dallas, and both it and the brief controversy it generated are now frowned upon by fans of the franchise and beyond. However, at the time it still sparked a wave of unwanted media attention for BioWare, so much so that the development team decided to change some of its plans for romance options in the sequel to 2010. In an interview with The Gamer, the writer of Mass Effect 2 Brian Kindregan revealed that Jack was originally meant to be pansexual, and thus it would have been possible to initiate a romance for both the female and male versions of Shepard. Here are what Kindregan's statements were:

I was trying to draw the arc of [Jack's] romance, and to be honest we took the route of a male / female romance very late. The Mass Effect 2 development team was quite progressive and open-minded, but I think there was a concern at quite high levels. [The first] Mass Effect only had a gay relationship, the one with Liara, which on paper was technically but in reality it wasn't since she came from a mono-genus species. Given the chaos generated, the concern was such that with Mass Effect 2 we decided to be more careful.

To support the statements of Kindregan there was the voice actress of Jack, that is Courtenay Taylor, who revealed that while reading the script for Mass Effect 2 she had the impression that her character was destined to be part of the LGBT community, but that changed along the way:

It's funny to me because I always thought he was pansexual. So I don't know if it's just something I deduced from the character or something he said that maybe it got cut. I was surprised that a female love story was not possible as I was convinced of it. I thought it was time, you know?

Apart from the characters Poem, as Liara e Samara, Kelly Chambers (who was a minor character), the Mass Effect series would work to include more LGBT romance options in the third chapter with characters like Steve Cortez, Samantha Traynor e Kaidan Alenko.