Players say Middle East copies of the new PlayStation 5 exclusive Marvel’s Wolverine have quietly stripped out Mystique’s marriage to the crime boss Tyger Tiger, the latest sign that a major queer storyline was altered for regional release.
What players are showing
The claims spread on social media on September 21, with users posting screenshots and a compiled Reddit video appearing to show altered scenes between Mystique and Tyger. One version reportedly removes a wedding photo of the two in bridal gowns, leaving only an empty frame. Another allegedly shows a love letter between the characters with references to their relationship blacked out.
In my version of the game scenes mentioning Mystique and Tyger censor or cut out anything mentioning their relationship, thought it was a glitch at first but as I played through I realised it wasn’t.
Reddit post
What’s drawn particular attention is a clip where a line referencing Mystique’s “wife” appears to vanish from the dialogue track while the scene’s background audio and timing continue uninterrupted, which fans argue rules out a technical bug.
Why did you censor Mystique’s lesbian relationship in Lebanon.
A relationship years in the making
Mystique and Tyger’s romance is central to Marvel’s Wolverine, developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Some players initially assumed the storyline retconned Mystique as queer, but her sexuality has long been fluid in the comics; she and Irene Adler, known as Destiny, were married in the Earth-616 timeline and shared an on-panel kiss in 2019 after decades of subtext. The game also drew attention for narrative director Walt Williams describing a “yearning” between Wolverine and Sabretooth, later clarified as platonic.
Not the first cut
If confirmed, this wouldn’t be Sony’s first regional edit of this kind. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, also from Insomniac, had Pride flags removed from Middle East copies in 2024, along with changes to a mission centered on a young gay couple. The pattern extends beyond gaming: Disney and Pixar’s Lightyear was banned outright in several Middle Eastern countries in 2022 over a same-sex kiss.
Why It Matters
Same-sex relationships remain criminalized across much of the Gulf, with penalties in some countries including life imprisonment or worse, and LGBTQ+ content is explicit grounds for a game ban under regional media rules. Lebanon, notably, has a comparatively more permissive censorship regime than neighbors like Saudi Arabia, which makes the specific complaint about a censored Lebanese copy worth watching for more detail. None of that makes the edits any less painful for players who saw a rare, prominent queer marriage in a AAA superhero game and then watched it disappear depending on where the disc was sold.
Our Read
Publishers can frame these edits as legal compliance rather than choice, and there’s truth in that. But compliance is still a decision, made quietly and without acknowledgment, and it lands on the same players who already have the least power to push back. Sony hasn’t commented, and neither did it after Spider-Man 2. That silence is starting to look less like an oversight and more like a policy.
Poster via The Movie Database (TMDB)
