omg I checked the Gunnar thing I completely forgot it did that. thank you for pointing it out, I'm now uncertain why they wouldn't show up in the relationship list. Sorry about that one.
on Viccoria that's fair, most people play this for the gay stuff and Viccoria is not the gay stuff lol, but on mentioning the nameless and her makes me wonder if that is actually a possibility, maybe we can bond with her, and she can tell us about him if he's like a famous demon or just use demonic magic to assist us if we do fight him!
also, it's definitely not going to offend anyone saying you're ok with it staying mainly gay since most people who even mention wanting more female content to get disliked to hell lol. I also agree but irrelevant lol
I use route to mean romantic path/story quests interchangeably, in this one I mean romantic path. plus, the earlier guys have actually been getting a lot of love so the take your time bit on Julian is already going on XD
on the datable or not, that is pretty much exactly what I meant just not that you can tell if they have a heart event. if they are on the list, they should EVENTUALLY have a romance path. that is what I intended to say in the beginning, but the phrasing didn't say eventually and can be misinterpreted. sorry about that.
the part about how we tell who is datable already and who isn't is that we can't. unless you read the devlogs from the beginning to the current updates, but Hyao is working on a system to alert us in the relationship tab on who can get hearts and who can't yet so that's a feature upcoming but not yet in game. you can also ask in the comments if a certain character has routes or check out the fan made guide by Ben Dover, it's REALLY large and has everything in game already in it, so if you're ok with some spoilers you can use that to check who has a heart event and who doesn't!
last thing, yeah adding in a romance route for EVERY merchant would be excessive, I was just using them as examples of characters we speak to and don't fight, but also don't add to the book or have a chance for romance as far as I'm aware. the other points are also true, it's not needed but when the game is large enough a map or something with the merchants' locations written would be useful! but later as we already can tell all the merchant's locations rather easy in the latest versions lol.