Dev: “This man is ripped in the apocalypse”
Gamers: “Yeah that makes sense, you’d probably be more out and about”Dev: “This woman is ripped in the apocalypse”
Gamers: “what the actual fuck”Not even ripped or anything. Just “doesn’t wear makeup and get hair done professionally during a zombie apocalypse” seems to piss gamergate jackasses off.
Yeah, that doesn’t really track, tons of people fetishize so-called ‘muscle mommies’, lol.
Well, the problem is you can’t be a muscle mommy unless you’re hot. If you’ve got muscle but no titty nor a pretty face and long hair, you’ll make the losers mad. Female characters can be badass, but they also must have said ass.
A muscle mommy can be with short hairs and no titties too
I was thinking of Abby from The Last Of Us Part 2. But yeah, things have changed slightly since then.
That’s really inviting the real issue with Abby. They designed a story for people to hate her, with the expectation that she’d grow in you and you’d sympathize with her at the end. She literally looks that way through a whole game for the big reveal at the end when you see her.
It’s a post-apocalyptic setting, and she’s the only one jacked. It would have taken all of 30 seconds to show an active dairy farm, a weight gym, and other people also jacked. Bulking up muscle if you don’t have the resources is not a wise thing to do.Turns out there’s a “blink and you’ll miss it” gym. Very possible to not see it if you don’t rotate the camera to look. Still, a single person walking up looking like her (jacked), to be VERY explicit would have gone a long way.If the second game had started at the end of the first game, from the perspective of Abby (basically take the one flashback and make that the start), and then you move forward in time bouncing between Ellie and Abby, giving players time to learn about Abby, that would have changed a lot.
Instead we are forced to play Abby, who has an unnecessary sex scene with her friends (Mel) boyfriend (Owen), who immediately kills Joel, who appears to be wasting resources on a selfish revenge plot, in a game with a story was written by writers who saw Momento + GoT and thought they could pull off clever writing (they couldn’t). And at no point is the player given any agency, especially at its ending.
Abby sucked, because Naughty Dog set the character up for failure.
It would have taken all of 30 seconds to show an active dairy farm, a weight gym, and other people also jacked. Bulking up muscle if you don’t have the resources is not a wise thing to do.
I will say I’ve never played the game, but from looking at a collection of her cutscenes on YT, they literally do?
The first time they show where she lives, they show an active gym (filled with people using the equipment), a food market with meat, and a farm with cattle.
Holy crap, it is there. Ok, scratch at least that one from the list. They should have emphasized it because I missed it completely and I can’t be the only one. I nearly missed it in the video you shared. IMO, it’s important to show that there’s an active gym culture there, because it means overall the community approves of it and they do have extra. Building muscle requires a surplus of calories. If it’s just a single person, they’re an asshole. If there’s a welcomed gym with active users, or even if it’s encouraged it sets a very different tone. She still sucks as a character. But slightly less.
I suspect the people who unabashedly yell “MUSCLE MOMMY” and the ones who self-righteously cry about video game girls not being pretty anymore are two (mostly) different subsets of the gaming community. The complaint is about the latter, and I definitely have seen people cry foul about Zarya (Overwatch) or Abby (The Last of Us 2). I’m fairly confident the only reason I haven’t seen anyone complain about Karlach (Baldur’s Gate 3) is that I no longer engage with larger gaming communities nearly as much, precisely because of that subset.
The opening of Gears Of War 3 where the humans live on some boats subsisting on vegetable patches and the male soldiers are still built like they eat an entire cow a day raw.
gamers: this is a war against right handed people by the sinister lefties
I etymologically saw what you did there
This is a war against the dexterous right handed people, by the sinister lefties!
There, now it’s even better.
This is supposed to be a role playing game. I’m not left handed how are they expecting me to be immersed in this game? It totally breaks the realism!
Some people just want the complain like they’re on a crusade for justice when they’re just bitching cause they can’t figure out how to be content with life (mean don’t get me wrong things suck but have to find out own peace too and things don’t suck cause media is inclusive). Unfortunately they’re loud and obnoxious and for some reason we don’t know how to mute them as a society.
Unsure why I ended up replying to you specifically but it’s here now.
I am pan and I have played a few games where a character is revealed as gay and got the same response from me because it just felt forced. The token gay person. Or, in at least one, most of the characters are gay and it’s not strictly about gay stuff. They’re just there for brownie points and tend to also be incredibly shallow characters who are only defined as “gay.” I don’t feel that is representative of anything but some empty corporate suit saying “we want your money, fag.”
Zagreus in Hades is obviously Bi (or Pan) the whole time and no one cared, why, because it’s not forced, I think it’s kinda expected actually, so it just feels right. Same with Lucifer in the Lucifer TV show.
And sometimes a character is just gay and you find out in notes or something and it’s like, neat, and then you move on.
On the other hand you have a random trans character in Hogwarts Legacy. It’s a magical world, you have potions and spells to change not only your gender but you can even be a tiny mouse or a massive dragon, what’s the point of that?!
You had me in the first half. She was there, but she didn’t force you to listen to her story. She just existed. Like, sure, she was clocky; that’s just how it is for girls who transition later in life. She mentions that she’s been on a journey, and if you, the player, choose the appropriate dialogue option, she’ll tell you her story, which, oddly enough, might be the less realistic thing. There are a lot of trans people who would prefer not to share that, because there are a lot of not-trans people who will change their tune and use information about a person who no longer exists to hurt the person they’ve transitioned into.
Zagreus (and Melinoë presumably) on the other hand are not obviously pan until you, the player, start pursuing same-sex relationships. Given that Hades and II are based on Greek mythology, it might come as no surprise, but it’s not like there’s an aspect of facial or body shape that obviously identifies someone as being lesbian/gay/bi/pan like there tend to be for trans people (especially femmes and women, ESPECIALLY in a world without cosmetic surgery, hand-wavey magic aside). She didn’t hurt you, so be happy that some people did feel seen and move on with your life.
Don’t get me wrong, maybe I came out too strong, she doesn’t bother me, and if it makes someone happy then I’m happy. I just think it’s bad storytelling that’s all.
I don’t like it when fiction makes a minority “special” like only queer people being protagonists who can save the world, because it still singles them out. It doesn’t matter if it’s something positive. We are all one, nobody is special or less than a person because they were born with this or that characteristic.
Remember that quote from Rick and Morty? “Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch TV.”? Add “nobody is special” and we are cooking.
Then the epic protagonist can save the world even if they aren’t really special, and still happen to be queer. Not because they are queer, not despite being queer. They are simply who they are. And they are someone who saves the world.
gosh, fucking finally people are stopping to get so polarized on the topic.
I hope, this way of thought would become more popular asap, so the studios would finally realise that they should pay the fucking scenarists and let them just do their job, instead of coming up with stupid requests amid the working process about making character be x, no matter how much it breaks the initial idea, making a piece of media into some kind of caricature, misrepresenting both lgbtq+ and the talent of a given scenarist, making just a mediocre product for the first, while also polarizing bigots even more, cuz obviously, “this game sucks cuz they spent all ihe money on them damn gays”.
Fucking corpos…
Ah fucking damit, sorry for rambling
Can we stop giving attention to these people? The vast, vast, vast majority of gamers are not piece of shit bigots. There are probably Ike a few thousand of these bigots in total but they spend their entire life online and report on each other as if they are a majority and make a ton of online noise.
Ignoring them clearly hasn’t worked, because too many who actually pull the levers pay attention regardless.
These bigots don’t have impact on games sales, but they have real life impact as voters or become mass shooters.
They constantly review bomb, so I think it probably does have some impact on sales sometimes.
Gets man bro protagonists in the last 100 games:
Gets 1 female protagonist: WOKE GIRLBOSS BS!
One female protagonist that’s written exactly like a male and is basically just a skin swap*
Funny how men can’t write female characters but that’s still the woman’s fault lol
Is it actually “gamers” saying this?
I’d say a vocal minority do. A common form this takes is resentment over perceived “shoe-horning” of “politics” into games that “leads to bad games”.
The thibly-veiled bigotry becomes clear when the shortcomings of the game are attributed primarily to the diversity representation, rather than anything else, with the assumption that it would have been better without it. “The writing is bad because they wanted to make a political statement above all else.”
This becomes especially apparent when you consider that those same people would never blame bad writing in a game on making all the characters in a game heterosexual.
Some people are just straight-up haters, no veil necessary.
I can sympathize a little with people who had a romantic expectation for a character that they might have fantasized or self-inserted and feel disappointed or even betrayed by having their expectations subverted, especially if they had a strong attachment, as in franchise characters. But they also need to get over the fact that not everything has to be made for them. 95% of whats out there is already made for them.
When you’re fine with taking a quote from a subset of a group and applying it to the group itself, you can make any group of a large enough size say anything!
Gamers, posters, gaming press people, also idiots…
It covers an awful lot of people.,
“”““gamers””“”
It’s really complicated, and on per-game basis
nobody talked much about gay romances in baldur’s gate
but every bigot whined about Dragon Age Veilguard
tbh, i think lgbtq+ topic is just being used by stu#ios as a scapegoat, so the people would whine about it rather than how shallow the game is with or without “them gays”.
Yeah, people are mad about execs forcing shitty decisions into games, and are being told it’s “because woke”. When in reality it’s just that shitty checkmark-ticking games tend to have superficial progressive elements because some marketing surveys or the podcast the ceo heard last night said that people want a gay character.
Some (sadly kinda many) then also take that and start complaining about everything they perceive as woke even in otherwise fine games, when it doesn’t affect the game quality at all. Like the oblivion remaster renaming gender to body type (or sth similar).
execs forcing shitty decisions into games, and are being told it’s “because woke”. When in reality it’s just that shitty checkmark-ticking games tend to have superficial progressive elements because some marketing surveys or the podcast the ceo heard last night said that people want a gay character.
Is this even true? This always came off as gamergate BS propaganda to me.
I’m a straight, white, cis male, and I want more gay (and other underrepresented) characters in games. The more variety of experiences available to me to interact with, the better.
No one except the people involved can say for sure. But general game design of so many AAA games feels like checkbox ticking with no actual vision, and those games are also usually the ones that superficially pretend to be woke. Those games do also often sell pretty decently, because often the dev teams are still competent and can make something fun enough that is also safe enough.
It’s the same as with movies where they just get too big to fail. And then when a movie completely misses the mark, the “anti-woke” will blame it on whatever they think is woke. The vast majority of people I’ve seen talk about it said that the new ghostbusters sucked, but only the “anti-woke” crowd blamed it on the main cast being women. (I don’t watch enough movies, especially the bland safe blockbusters, to have an example i watched, so if this was some kind of right wing reviewbombing tell me - but most of my social media is fairly left biased so I’m assuming it was actually just kinda bad)
And it’s not like they’re wrong, most people will either like or not be opposed to some more diversity/some renaming of a menu option. Myself included.
And to be clear, I’m not saying that this superficial wokeness is making the games worse (or that it’s a bad thing - it’s a sign that the status quo is shifting a bit, and much like the overton window will help push it further). Just that the bland checkbox ticking games will almost always have these elements because it certainly won’t hurt sales. So it’s easy for grifters to say that’s the reason, and if they like a game that has any (superficial or not) wokeness they will ignore it or make up some reason why it’s ok here.
(Also to clarify since I sometimes refer to “anti-woke” perspective here so it might come off differently: I don’t use the term woke as a negative)
thus we may derive that
lgtv+ is a psyop
:D
btw, i fucking hate that oblivion remaster wasn’t hated into the pits of hell. One of the most lazy, mediocre, UE asset store and aigen remasters i’ve ever seen.
What can i say, corpos played up their marketing game, it’s high time users learn to see their bullshit for what it is. Consume conciously, kids
Since gamergate “gamers” in this context stands for the most vocal and bigoted group of people.
Not the majority, I’d wager
This character is ambidextrous because we just flipped the sprite
Broke: This character is ambidextrous because we just flipped the sprite
Woke: Link is right-handed because we flipped the entire game
I went out of my way to wait and play the GC version of Twilight Princess because I didn’t want to play in a mirrored world with a right-handed Link. No waggle controls was a bonus.
This gamer: chooses a female character so I can stare at her ass the whole time.
On an unrelated note, I am really enjoying Stellar Blade.
Good
“Or, we could make it a woman”
“Um, ok, wait, we need to think about this”
That response is from loud mouths
Some people play games and some people live vicariously thru games. And alot of men in the US have been conditioned to expect to be the victims of violence or social ridicule if they’re suspected of being gay. I don’t agree with their discomfort but I understand why it happens.
Spoilers ahead, BTW.
I was playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and legit didn’t realize there was a romance option with Hans Capon until the cutscene where Henry locked the door, at which point, I was quite startled, and then realized that the dialog options with a heart next to them are romance and not just being a good, supportive friend. I am not gay and did not really want to see that myself, but do applaud the inclusivity. 🙈 I can imagine gay people feel the same having to muddle through the straight romance options in other games. The fact that I wasn’t expecting it shows this is way less common than it should be.
The one thing that bugs me about cyberpunk 2077 is the main story has an unskippable (straight) sex scene, I know they’re almost a meme in gaming culture but I’m not here for that kind of content.
Yeah, I have no interest in seeing stuff like that in games, tv shows, or movies. Fade to black quickly while they’re kissing, we get it, let’s move on. If you want to watch porn then watch porn, I’m trying to game or follow the story.
Only time it should be shown is if it advances a specific plot point in some way or form but 99% of the time it’s not that.
You think that’s bad? I was playing Leisure Suit Larry and it was almost like sex was the focus of the game. I almost didn’t complete my play-through because of all that diagusting smut.
Shoving gay characters down our throats!
Go on…
Wheelbarrows of dicks
What kind of games are y’all playing? In the games I usually play the sexual orientation of the characters isn’t mentioned at all. So for all I know they could be straight, gay, bi, pan or whatever.
The last game I remember playing where the protagonists wife was mentioned (implying he’s not gay) was Max Payne, 25 years ago.
The engineer in Factorio doesn’t care for men or women, all he cares for is that the factory must grow. And afaik it’s never mentioned wether Jebediah Kerman is into Bob, Bill or Valentina. None of the thousands of enemy soldiers I have shot in various shooters ever told me whom they’re in love with. And all the Sims I might have killed by burning down the city were just numbers for all I know.
Character driven story games place at least some emphasis on sexuality and relationships in many games. Cyberpunk, The Witcher, Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate 3, The Last of Us.
To be clear, you define the sexuality of your own character in BG3. Every companion NPC, on the other hand, will have a boner for you if you take them on adventures and do stuff they like, regardless of your character’s race, sex, or religion.
Ok, maybe I just play the wrong games. I haven’t payed any of those.
It’s definitely a genre thing.
Sim games, platformers, management games, multiplayer shooters etc very rarely bring it into the equation because in those games then either:
A) There’s no named protagonist at all
B) The protagonist is ‘You’ so as little as possible is depicted about them to be unobtrusive
C) The protagonist notionally exists and has a name and depiction, yet they are so irrelevant to the story that no details about them are provided.
Narrative-driven games are a totally different beast.
Bro playing Gear Simulator wondering why gears don’t have names, feelings, gender, or sexual preference.
Bro playing Farming Simulator 21 suddenly wondered why he was farming to make all that money, who answers when he calls out, “honey, I’m home!”? When he lives on a map that has no home, just more fields.
There’s never a wrong game! Play what you want.
The Last of Us 1 & 2 are the first ones that comes to mind. And both games are really fucking good because of it, not in spite of it.
You’re talking about games that don’t have a narrative, of course the characters aren’t going to have sexuality.
„But what‘s the plot reason for them being gay? I don‘t mind gay people being in something, but if there‘s not a reason for it, then it‘s just pandering!“
Frankly I would much rather a character be gay but it have no relevance whatsoever, it’s just a random fact about them
But also what another poster said, make it come up organically, don’t just force it in for diversity points. Makes it feel cheap and tokenized
You mean, the same reason why anybody’s gay? They’re born that way?
What do they expect? “A wizard turned him gay.”
Somehow gay returned.
This is where the line gets blurry tho. On one hand, yeah, bigots exist, but on the other hand, I could see this being a clumsy attempt at complaining about poor writing.
Like, I’m pretty sure I said something like this when Rowling said Dumbledore was gay. I’m not cishet, amd it still feels like she retconned that in for points, especially now that we’re seeing exactly what she thinks about LGBT stuff.
Oh she absolutely did. Just like she did the “i never said Hermione *wasn’t * Black” thing, despite having described her cheeks as “pink” on more than one occasion.
But that’s not what the people i was quoting mean. They’re doing the “straight, white, cis, man is the default, and anything deviating from that needs an explicit in-universe explanation”.
There was a thing that did the rounds a while back which was variations on “what race are you? White or political?”, “what’s your sexuality? Straight or political?”, etc.
it’s basically that. Straight guy? Fine. Gay guy? “But what’s the *reason *he’s gay? How is it relevant to the plot?”
No, I get what you mean. I just see a lot of clumsy getting lumped in with malevolent on a regular basis, and want to call attention to it.
Edit: Like the people who say your point about Hermione is racist because black people can blush too, when that’s not what you’re trying to say at all.
If you don’t need a plot reason for a male character to have a wife, then you don’t need a plot reason for a male character to have a husband.
Note the quotation marks
Hmmm, your quotation marks are rendering as commas on my client. I thought you just put commas at the start for some random reason.
In languages like German the opening quotes start at the bottom „…“ and closing quotes go to the top. In Russian they can look like «this».
Just someone typing on English with a keyboard not directly mapped to the keyboard you are used to.
This is what your comment looks like for me on Voyager:
Okay. Note the quotation marks.
I don’t think sexual orientation needs a reason, it’s just there.
Me neither. That’s why i put it in quotes to make it clear i was aping stupid objections.
