video games are so incredibly hostile and unwelcoming to mlm and im really feeling this more than ever after Watch_dogs 2 decided to continue to queerbait its audience with Wrench and Marcus w/o ever confirming their relationship as anything other than a joke, and after Mass Effect: Andromeda decided to not include gay men in major roles out of fear of backlash from the straight male audience, and Persona 5 preferred teacher/student relationships to relationships between two boys of the same age and etc etc etc
like these are all on varying levels of being overtly homophobic but the theme is fucking unignorable; video games dont want to have gay or bi men and its undeniably because theyre scared of upsetting the core straight male demographic by confronting them with things like gay and bi men.
like right now im desperately waiting for blizzard to reveal who the gay characters in Overwatch are because if any of these men are gay theyre going to be the only male player characters who are canonically gay or bisexual (and not just player choice) that i know of who havent just been “confirmed gay” on twitter. and even the characters that do fall into the latter category add up to a grand total of two (and i hate including Axton from Borderlands 2 because i will never forget that his one off line flirting with guys was originally a fucking programming glitch gearbox chose not to fix. the other guy in question is Jacob Frye from Assassins Creed if anyone is curious)
im sick and tired of this like its exhausting just not existing to anyone. its not like the situation in film or television or any other media is that much fucking better right now, but at least i can name movies and tv shows that have gay men in them. its so unendingly depressing being a gay man and trying to enjoy video games because unless im willing to build them for myself they just dont fucking exist.
god id give anything for people to stop adding “hey theres this one game with this one (generally a minor npc or a joke character or Dorian from Dragon Age) character that exists” to this like ignoring the fact that i said in the post i was talking about player characters in specific, it isnt actually any much comfort to me that you can name like, three games that acknowledge gay people exist.
like i appreciate the sentiment but i mean, first of all, the fact that i can still count all the games people have listed on this post on the fingers of one hand says a lot, but additionally being one minor npc or one side character out of a cast of dozens and dozens does nothing for me. i dont want to continually have to see gay and bi men as background characters and jokes. i want to see gay and bi men be the leads, i want to see them be the heroes. like there is such a wealth of fucking difference between being even a prominent secondary character and being the fucking hero of the story and gay and bi men just dont ever get to be the latter.
and like yeah maybe there two or three or four games where there might be one gay or bi male lead (i notice also that there tends to only be a gay or bi male lead in games where you have a choice of which character you want to play, and sometimes are able to avoid playing that character entirely) but there are hundreds of AAA games released every year. this isnt an issue thats going to be solved with half a dozen games. this is a massive, industry-wide problem.
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Lady Jace Of The Fae 