The Surge in LGBT rainbow characters - AKA: The New Demographic and why its happening.

[Rebel_Raven]

We gotta get characters that shake things up in games sooner or later or else we never will, and if it's profitable for the game industry at the same time, that's great.
That's basically the point of getting the diverse dollar isn't it?

 

[The Only Gay Eskimo]

Never said that did I? I was just responding to your claim that he would just kill people who hate him for his sexuality. as pointed out fights aren't canon, canonically Kung Jin killed nobody in the game.

I never said that he would, I asked

I mean it just seems silly. In a world, where people have killed each other over far less, why wouldn't someone, who encounters people that hate him for his sexuality, just fucking kill these people and be done with it.

and I told you why he wouldn't just kill people. To which you replied

So he has no fatality?

Was that not to make some kind of point? Why did you say it?

And you said that I claimed that he would just kill people, which I never did.

 

[The Only Gay Eskimo]

Never said that did I? I was just responding to your claim that he would just kill people who hate him for his sexuality. as pointed out fights aren't canon, canonically Kung Jin killed nobody in the game.

I never said that he would, I asked

I mean it just seems silly. In a world, where people have killed each other over far less, why wouldn't someone, who encounters people that hate him for his sexuality, just fucking kill these people and be done with it.

and I told you why he wouldn't just kill people. To which you replied

So he has no fatality?

Was that not to make some kind of point? Why did you say it?

And you said that I claimed that he would just kill people, which I never did.

You asked why he wouldn't just kill people who hate him because he was gay. I told you why. You asked "So he has no fatality". Did you say that for a reason or not?

Not even that is correct. I asked "why wouldn't someone".

 

[Erttheking]

You want examples of good LGBT characters? Look to Eastern devs, sure there's tokenism and insensitivity there, but there's also better characterized ones than the best the West have given us. People say Cortez is a good character, but his entire being revolves around being gay and he's apparently been our shuttle pilot for the last two games as well but didn't get officially introduced until just now, which is a big mark against him as a character in my book.

Actually his dead husband is brought up about two or three times. He talks about being a shuttle pilot and loving ships far more, and he goes out of his way to make sure his grieving doesn't affect his work, to the extent where you have to step in to make him mention his dead husband.

He was also never your shuttle pilot in ME2. He never worked for Cerberus, so your book seemingly doesn't pay attention to characters.

I swear, I've been saying this a lot, but it needs to be said. Gay characters are always either token or shoving it down our throat. There is no in-between when it comes to criticism aside from a few exceptions.

 

[Nocturnus]

Honestly, I don't know why this even has to be a point of discussion. As a gay man, I looked at the fact that Kung Jin was gay, went "Huh. Alright. That's cool." and moved on with my life. For some reason, everyone and their grandmother has to go OMFG at the news.

Reality is: gay people exist, and they like to be represented in games. As someone who designs tabletops, and makes characters for those tabletops in stories, what people have to understand is that it takes effort to make a token ANYTHING in any game or creative setting.

This isn't token. It just is. And there's nothing wrong with that.

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

Here's something I've done many times as a writer.

I based characters I write from people I know in real life. Not all the time, but a good number of the time.

Could it possibly be that when these people were developing these characters, it might not be some giant agenda all the time... Maybe they just thought someone from their lives would fit this particular character well.

And why is there a 'surge'? Because it literally just stopped being such a criminal thing to be gay in the last 25 years. I remember the hush tones from the few gay characters on TV back in the 80's. And every time that character would have to say 'I'm just like you and everyone else. I'm not a bad person'. Maybe the surge comes from just seeing openly different people and considering it normal. Apart of the human experience.

Which it is. Just as minorities are a part of the human experience, women, white guys, and bad guys. There shouldn't just be one of those lists that are acceptable to focus on because humanity doesn't stop at just one.

 

[Redryhno]

You want examples of good LGBT characters? Look to Eastern devs, sure there's tokenism and insensitivity there, but there's also better characterized ones than the best the West have given us. People say Cortez is a good character, but his entire being revolves around being gay and he's apparently been our shuttle pilot for the last two games as well but didn't get officially introduced until just now, which is a big mark against him as a character in my book.

Actually his dead husband is brought up about two or three times. He talks about being a shuttle pilot and loving ships far more, and he goes out of his way to make sure his grieving doesn't affect his work, to the extent where you have to step in to make him mention his dead husband.

He was also never your shuttle pilot in ME2. He never worked for Cerberus, so your book seemingly doesn't pay attention to characters.

I swear, I've been saying this a lot, but it needs to be said. Gay characters are always either token or shoving it down our throat. There is no in-between when it comes to criticism aside from a few exceptions.

So which is it? Always or a few exceptions?

There are gay characters I like and are neither of those extremes you talk about, problem is there's only a handful of them that come from the West, less than a handful in fact. The majority of them are boring and honestly could be straight and nobody would care but because they're gay they get undue attention and becomes their "saving grace".

Most of my problems with so many LGBT's from the west is that many are confirmed outside of their universe. Korra/Asami I assumed to just be really close friends, we've seen much the same looks on guys that are good buddies riding into the sunset before, especially in western/samurai's. It took a blogpost of the creators talking about "hetereonormativity" for alot of people to think otherwise, and I still think it was loaded with language meant to make anyone that wasn't already shipping them feel bad for misreading it. Kung Jin was confirmed outside the game. The in-game dialogue just hints to it, but could just as easily be misinterpreted as him being into a woman he wasn't supposed to be into with what you're given.

It's like western devs either make boring sexuality-swap characters and call it a day and people are happy with it because they're simply included, or they do hints and then confirm it outside the game. Like they're too afraid to go all out on it. I want good characters in games, I want gay characters in games, I don't want them to be as exclusive of terms as they are right now.

Things can almost always be better, and at the moment, the only thing you can do worse with gay characters is to just leave them out entirely(something I see nothing wrong with in most titles, since sexuality is not really something that comes up outside of RPG's and character-focused games). At the moment, if I want solid games, I go East, if I want games without in-game currency, I go East, if I want character and story-focused games, I go East, the only thing I go to Western devs is for strategy anymore, because almost everything you can praise for from Netherrealms and Bioware, a thousand devs in Korea/China/Japan have been making for decades and therefore are far ahead through experience and honing the experience alone.

 

[Therumancer]

It's a combination of marketing and fear. At the end of the day SJWs are pretty well organized and the resistance to them is fairly new. Industries take a long time to change, so now that the SJW domination is paying off your seeing the results of their campaigns of intimidation. It will take a few years to see if GG has any real effect on the landscape given the dev time for games. That said given that as a general rule SJWs will harass you and GG for the most part only goes after SJWs but doesn't turn it's attention towards companies that cave in to a SJW agenda, right now it's easier for companies to simply do what the SJWs want. What's more given how entrenched SJWs are into the media, con circuit, etc... and that companies need that support it ads to the attitudes of appeasement.

To be honest when you get down to it minorities have been represented well in games and geek media for a very long time, which is part of why people are sick of SJWs. Minorities are just that, minorities, which means they have a minority prescence and aren't going to be in every work. The SJW movement has increasingly been about putting minorities into everything as opposed to simply letting creators do it when they want to. What's more it's increasingly about waving it in front of everyone's face, more than it simply being there. That's one of the reasons why this is an unwinnable situation, which I believe is what SJWs want on some levels so they have something to constantly fight about and feel relevant. Basically you can't have a character who just happens to be a homosexual and acts normal because then it would just be a person, rather you need to know the character is homosexual, it needs to be paraded out, and by being a normal person you need to have him jump up on a soap box and spend at least 5 minutes of game time screaming "I am GAAAAAY". What's more if a game company doesn't put as much work into a gay romance, or even doesn't have one, when there are heterosexual ones, god help them nowadays for not wanting to spend resources on something only a tiny group of people will appreciate, and mostly exists because SJWs have something to feel smug about.

To put things into a more direct perspective, not that this message is going to go over with well here anyway, we've already had LGBT fighting game characters. Of course none of them were as heavily promoted as Mortal Kombat's roof screaming "we have a gay fighter!". For example Guilty Gear has had "Bridget" famously as part of the roster for quite a while, to say nothing of "Poison" who can be defined as anything from a post-op transsexual to a guy with his junk pinned up depending on what version of the game it is, Morrigan from Dark Stalkers is infamously bi-sexual including some apparently canon sex-scenes from the artwork with Lillith who is her sister (and also part of her soul), she also hits on Etna in "Cross Edge". This is to say nothing of numerous other fighting games where apparently there have been decent numbers of gay characters where it wasn't so obvious, I think it's "King Of Fighters" where there was at one point a showdown over "Andy Bogard" between some sexy ninja who loves him and some gay guy who also wound up being in love with him and characters which have been defined as going every which way, but none of that really comes out in the games which are about you know.. fighting. The point is that while there are not a lot of them compared to the straight dudes (and dudettes) you'll see fighting games have as a general rule been about as diverse as anything, considering minorities being well... minorities. The games still have a heavy Japanese bias as a whole since most of them are developed in Japan, American involvement to the extent it is present being because of Japan's weird love/hate relationship with the west, and America in particular.

People also tend to forget that homosexuality was famously an issue in "Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle Of The Flesh", and if you dig you'll find there is more of it throughout gaming and geek media than people want to give credit to, the problem being mostly that it was understated which is supposedly what people want, but apparently do not since being understated does not count when going into discrimination by the industry.

Basically Mortal Kombat having a gay character is noteworthy only because they decided to shout it from the roof tops for the SJWs, and the odd thing is that this character's big thing seems to be simply that he's gay, as opposed to some of the other characters I've mentioned who have much more involved roles in their varies series. For example Morrigan is a HUGE part of "Dark Stalkers" (and it's various other names) and some have even argued she's the hero of the game, not Dimitri. She's a bi-sexual to the extreme if you look into her (she's a succubus, duh) and the creators did a bit of pervy artwork reinforcing this. Felicia might arguably be as well. It's just it was never "beat you over the head" obvious because in the games themselves she didn't exactly run up and yell "I'm bi-sexual" or start making out with a girl (though there is a scene of her in Llith in one of the PSP games during the closing credits that... uh well, I'm sure most have seen it nowadays). Poison's gender identity has been a topic of discussion for years, but didn't rise to the point of major spectacle so I guess it didn't count. Bridget has been around for a long time now and is another big one I mentioned for being well know but I guess doesn't count because... reasons, and that one is even well written into the game's backstory and lore.

Likewise when it comes to another "oppressed" group which is women, nowadays you see SJWs about negative portrayals of women as "simply being sex objects and goals to be obtained" but really you have to dig to find any that fit that definition. Back during the late 1980s and early 1990s there was some truth to this. However even before SJWs were a thing you saw that changing. To be honest other than going back to extreme classic characters like Zelda, Princess Peach, and others in their original games I simply can't think of many dedicated "Damsels in Distress" that aren't subverting an old trope. Many of those same classic characters also received their own games and agency within them. Princess Peach was a passive objective in "Mario" but she's also had her own games. For the most part you see people like Anita Sarkeesian bringing up games like those, or even double dragon, in many cases decades after their real relevancy. Even the artwork she stole of characters like "The Delightful Daphne" are of truly ancient games, and to be honest even at the time of "Daphne" they were making fun of the entire idea since "Dragon's Lair" and "Space Ace" were absurdist comedies. Looking back today I am hard pressed to find many female characters that have no real characterization other than to be rescued at all, and truthfully even going back as far as the mid-1990s it's not difficult to think of female video game characters that were kicking some serious butt or had a strong role in their games. Indeed the mid-1990s saw a rise of REAL feminism (Wave 1 feminism) in geek culture, as this was the time period you had tons of sexy babes kicking butt alongside the boys, being able to be strong without giving the rest of it up. Pretty much every company was working to create their own stable and video games seemed to reflect this. To make a point faux-feminism has to try and say that sexy looking women are demeaning to even begin to start making cases... of course that's never stopped SJWs, it can be hilarious at times though to see people in some cases fighting battles that were won before they were even born.

Ahh well, enough rambling. I don't expect a lot of agreement (and I'm not going to get into any major arguments over this).

 

[MrFalconfly]

Kung Jin was confirmed outside the game. The in-game dialogue just hints to it, but could just as easily be misinterpreted as him being into a woman he wasn't supposed to be into with what you're given.

Kung Jin: You could never accept me.
Liu Kang: I am aware of your proclivities.
Kung Jin: Gee, Thanks for the reassurance.

as well as Raiden's line about self loathing having always been an unfortunate part of Kung Jin's make up. Yeah they were certainly trying to be subtle about it, but there was enough in game to go on. Besides if it was about a specific woman it would be nonsensical to keep that vague. Being about his general "proclivities" makes sense even if it's vague, if it was about a specific person, as opposed to his general preference, they'd need to be at least a little more specific.

From that info he could just as easily be a masochist.

In any case, why would any of us care what he likes in the bedroom?

 

[Redryhno]

Kung Jin was confirmed outside the game. The in-game dialogue just hints to it, but could just as easily be misinterpreted as him being into a woman he wasn't supposed to be into with what you're given.

Kung Jin: You could never accept me.
Liu Kang: I am aware of your proclivities.
Kung Jin: Gee, Thanks for the reassurance.

as well as Raiden's line about self loathing having always been an unfortunate part of Kung Jin's make up. Yeah they were certainly trying to be subtle about it, but there was enough in game to go on. Besides if it was about a specific woman it would be nonsensical to keep that vague. Being about his general "proclivities" makes sense even if it's vague, if it was about a specific person, as opposed to his general preference, they'd need to be at least a little more specific.

You're now claiming gameplay can be canon, when you were arguing against the fights being canon before, make up your mind.

And that interaction honestly still says nothing, just more hints, which again can be misinterpreted to something completely different that has nothing to do with him being gay.

I didn't say that they weren't being subtle about it in-game, just that it was CONFIRMED outside the game. Something I've seen start to be a trend in the West are creators just not having the balls to say it outloud in the game, and that is what I don't care for in this instance. I don't care that Kung Jin's gay, I do care that if all you've got is hints to go on, there's a million other gay characters that have had neither confirmation or denial in the history of games.

 

[Vault101]

Honestly, who cares? Unless the game is depicting the character in a lazy, stereotypical way then who the fuck cares what the dev's motive is? Avoid tokenism and write a solid character and it's a win/win for everyone involved.

because people actually care when they say they don't

the [I/]you shouldn't have an *other character* unless its absolutely perfect via some vauge standards I've come up with[/I] is really another way of saying "I don't like *other* characters they are an aberration of what I perceive to be normal"

like there aren't quotas/limits to the amount of *other* characters you can have

Really it strikes me like why so many people want gay marriage without actually being gay them selves

you don't have to be gay to see that its probably something they should have,

[quote/]and without considering what sort of possible consequences there are for it.[/quote]
because its not like straight people make amockery of the institution of marrage...no siree

[quote/] The rest are a bunch of social/cultural warriors who demand things for smaller groups, who have no idea that by fighting someone else's fight they're undermining that fight. .[/quote]
its called being an ally and YES there are good/bad ways to go about it.

(to go on a slight tangent) It requires a little thought and not throwing a tantrum every time something comes along and doesn't validate people