Why so unnecessary?

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

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 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.
- 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.
- 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.

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

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.

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.
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

Oh it's OK. The main character is a woman.

Genuinely struggling to think of any game where you play a gay man... Like as a forced thing, not an option like Fable 2.

Hmmmm... Wasn't there a Grand Theft Auto DLC with a gay main character?
Other than that, I can't think of any either.
- If I remember correctly you work for Gay Tony, rather than playing as him.

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.
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.
Yeah, that doesn't really track, tons of people fetishize so-called 'muscle mommies', lol.
- 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.
- 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.
- I was thinking of Abby from The Last Of Us Part 2. But yeah, things have changed slightly since then.

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.
- Story-driven games are expensive, inferior books. Fite me.
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.

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.

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.
Don't worry. When we start the war against you guys it won't be via video games.

Except when they want to port the game from GameCube to Wii, so rather than modify the game, they just mirror the entire game to make everything gay so the motion controls can be straight.

I was so ticked when they changed him to be right handed just “because that’s what most people are”
- I played Twilight Princess on Wii and GameCube, and it was pretty fucking cool to feel like I was swinging the master sword. I probably would have just switched hands if they hadn't. It would have been an adjustment, but I would have gotten there.
  But I can understand not wanting to create a barrier to entry.
- Oh yeah, him. Totally. Fuck him, and his right hand.

Yeah but they were just groomed to lefty sympathies by Shigeru Miyamoto

Someone should overlay the graph showing the rise of the acceptance of left-handedness over time, with a graph of Zelda releases over time.

That response is from loud mouths

Talking about things that exist makes me uncomfortable! Stop pushing your ideology on me!

Those evil left-handers, always pushing their sinister agenda!
Sums up so much about society right now ^

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.

Is it actually "gamers" saying this?

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).
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.
- Ironically, most of the people I hear engaged in gamergate/anti gamergate noise don't actually play games. Maybe they did back in school, but now they'd rather listen to some podcast or like twitter posts for whatever team they chose.
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""""
Not the majority, I'd wager
Since gamergate "gamers" in this context stands for the most vocal and bigoted group of people.

"Or, we could make it a woman"

"Um, ok, wait, we need to think about this"

Shoving gay characters down our throats!

Go on...
- Wheelbarrows of dicks

„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
- I remember YMS calling out Onward for advertising having a gay character, and it was just a single scene with a single character who mentioned having a same sex partner at home. Something that could be easily edited out for "the international market".
  Having a casual mention that a character is gay is fine, but if it's suppose to be Casual Representation, it should be casually represented. The same emphasis that hetro relationships should be used. Not more.
  If it's a story about the Queer Experience, then it would be expected to have more representation though.
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?”
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
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.

It's breaking my immersion! /s

Alright, but I have yet to see a game character that’s left handed though

- Just checked in game and he actually does swing with his left. Never noticed until now. Apparently newer games retconned him to be right handed
- Yeah, Link surprised me, he's left handed in most games before BOTW, which is neat.
Here's a couple random ones, outside of the obvious (Link from The Legend of Zelda).
Some of the character models in Warcraft 3 were left-handed, like the Footman and the Grunt. The weird implication in this is that in the Warcraft universe, left-handed is the default, because while the common Footmen were lefties, the heroic Paladin was right-handed.
Some of the party members from early Final Fantasy games were left-handed: Leila and Leon from FF2, and Kain and Palom from FF4. Because of the 2D sprites it didn't show very well during battles, but it did affect the way their equipment was arranged in the menus.
- The necro in Diablo 4 too.
- Artorias from the Dark Souls 1 DLC is left handed.
Doomguy
- He holds the pistol with his left but holds the shotgun right-handed:
  He probably holds the weapon with stronger kickback with his dominant hand.
  Conclusion: he's right-handed but trained to hold the pistol with his left

It all starts with a grift from a bunch of illiterate idiots in the ancient near east who practice foreskin blood magic

Sheva Alomar, Mr.Zelda - that's about it, I think.

In my limited experience, it's not that

In games and movies it's usually:

This character who famously has been hetero, now suddenly bus gay and we just recon that they were always gay, you just didn't notice

Which is then followed with a "huh?"

I rarely see people having issues with characters being gay or trans or anything really, it's just when it gets shoehorned in really badly, or when everything about the show/movie/game is really bad, but my main character is gay, so now you MUST LOVE THIS PRODUCT!

Just make a good product, and I honestly don't care if your main character is straight, gay, brown black or purple

There were people shitting on FF14 because a voice actor is trans. Not an Alpha-Bit in sight and they're still crying woke DEI.
Name a single example, please
- Non game one, Dumbledore was declared gay by Rowling.
  In games, Kaiden Alenko becomes gay in ME3 if he's still alive.
- I don't have all the details but I think they did this with Ice man a while back. Could have been an alternate timeline or something though I've never read that storyline.
People lost their absolute shit when dragon age vanguard came out because of a scene many hours into the game, for a side character, during a side mission, that they didn't need to do. The clip out of context makes it seem like it's shoved in your face for no reason, but if they actually played the game that characters entire side quest was building up to that moment where they come out to their mom.
It's one game, you can't write a trans character into one game without outrage.
- You don't even need to write a trans character. Starfield merely gives you the option to change your pronouns and the anti-woke dickheads lost their minds.
- I think it’s more that “Dragon Age” Veilguard is a shit game in a beloved series. They’ve always had gay characters in that series and no one (sane, mind you) batted an eye. I think the only reason this trans character got fully blown out of proportion is because the writing is mediocre at best, and everything else wrong with the game, which means the trans issue is even more overblown because it got swept into the “bad game in general” train.
  There would’ve still been outrage, no doubt about it, but we should all be aware that 90% of that is bots spreading hate and manufactured outrage. If it was an actually good game that got the treatment it deserves as a Dragon Age game, the general populace would’ve shrugged and kept playing it because it’s good.
  This is just my opinion though.
Mind providing an example?
- Elton John in Rocket Man.
  What do you mean he was always gay?!?!
Noticed zero examples listed. Interesting.
I'm a bit out of the loop, but which ones are you even talking about? Marvel?
I don't recall any doing this.
Any examples of this?
- Star Trek Picard
  Takes the character seven (of nine) and just scrambles everything about her to the point where she doesn't resemble her own character that she played 20 years prior
  Amongst the changes they made was that hthe character was suddenly gay, even though in three years of shows she has basically been straight.
  Now let me be real clear: I have zero problems with her being gay, perse, this is star Trek and Star Trek fans aren't transphobic or any phobic or they wouldn't be fans of the show, watching each time how you should think about treating your favorite enemy better.
  I have a problem with it being abused from here to hell and back again by shit shows and movies to try and hope that the audience won't notice that the writers were the fucking worst
  And this isn't just me, basically any time I see someone pissed about a gay character, it's because of that
  The writers were too lazy to write a new gay character, so let's just take an existing one, must be pretty enough, check, so now we make her gay and just recon that it was always like that and we're just misremembering
  The writers also have no talent so instead of using a fat character for some moral dilemma, well just have them make out on screen, so much simpler.
  And of course once people have legit criticism, you just start a nice Twitter campaign where you call them *phobe, anything better than actually delivering a quality product.
  God, modern Star trek is baaaaddd
  I'm telling you all this (and hopefully you read it) because I know that most people really aren't that bad once you stop screaming and blocking and instead try to have a normal conversation. Once you do that you find out that you're mostly thinking the same.
  I'm LGBT+, I'll support almost anything left, that's why I'm on Lemmy too, I just want good movies
bus gay
wut?
- buT gay
  It's a small typo from the auto correct that went the other direction, is all. I thought it'd be obvious what was meant