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Whine harder you assholes (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/gaming@lemmy.world
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[–] 26 points 1 year ago (18 children)

Honest question, can anyone actually name a mainstream game where the main playable character is canonically and explicitly portrayed as gay?

I honestly can’t even think of one.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    That's what makes it even more pathetic, literally just being given the option of a gay subplot is having it shoved down their throats.

    It's so ridiculous that I question how many of the complaints we see online are even sincere, because surely people aren't that dumb.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    A bunch of characters in Apex Legends are canonically gay, trans, nonbinary, bi, pansexual, and Mirage. As a hero shooter, I guess there’s no real “main” character as such.

    Aloy in Horizon is pretty much there if the Burning Shores DLC is any indication, although she seems to be a work in progress as a fully developed person.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I remember when dinoflask did YTPs of Overwatch's lead designer, he poked fun at how, whenever the game needed a progressive image boost, they would retcon a character to be gay at random. He sentence-mixed something like "Our fans are always wondering who's going to be gay on our next update."

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I have an example that's not gay, but trans - one of the two protagonists of Tell Me Why is a trans guy. (The other protagonist is his cisgender twin sister.)

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yuji Naka once said that NiGHTs gender was "up for interpretation", which I think makes them nonbinary. That's a pretty deep cut though.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I remember reading about that because I went on a SA2 Chao Garden binge at one point and really got into trying to get a perfect flying one, I even went and played a bit of Into Dreams and read the wiki.

    It's because they're "dream beings" and don't really truly exist so they have no gender.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    The MISSING: J J Macfield and the Island of Memories is a great one.

    EndingPsyche. Though much of the dialog and written messages could lead you, like myself, to believe Macfield is a closeted lesbian undergoing community/family abuse for her quiet obsessions with a girl...it's actually the less common form of LGBT. Macfield is a closet trans woman; much of the game's horrific bodily mutilation themes take a stand-in for the dysphoria of being uncomfortable in her own masculine body. Of course, many of the same types who'd retch at a gay protagonist would throw up at the idea of being someone they didn't identify with - which ironically is exactly what the game is teaching you.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I will ask a different question. In how many mainstream games can you actually confirm the main character is straight? Sure it may be more than the two examples of gay main characters, but still very few compared to where it just doesn't come up.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    Pretty much every GTA, Duke Nukem, the Witcher series, the God of War series, Yakuza, Unchartered, the Final Fantasy games, the Super Mario games (including Donkey Kong), even Pac-man... and that's just the ones I've played. Then you've got virtually everything featuring Disney characters, Star Wars, as well as most other TV and movie tie-in games (of which there are many).

    That's the thing about defaultism, is you can play a straight character and not even remember you've done it because it's just the default. I'll bet you didn't even notice that Pac-man was canonically straight, and yet if Ms. Pac-man was instead called "Pacman's Husband Steve", suddenly Pac-man's one defining trait would be his sexuality.

    If nothing else, you've provided an object lesson in just how true OP's meme is.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I'll bet you didn't even notice that Pac-man was canonically straight

    Well, I never played the official Pac-man so yeah, had no way to notice.

    But while you do have a point about defaultism, I still believe large majority of games just doesn't say one way or another, which is as it should be.

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