I have never hit a search engine so fast. Thank you. 

Games like Hades, Baldur’s Gate 3, Celeste, or The Sims don’t seem to lose out on revenue with LGBTQ protagonists.

“From my perspective”

You arent LGBT, that much is certain.

I want to point out that Super Lesbian Animal RPG is a delightful game and also some of the best trans and lesbian representation I’ve seen in games recently, and there are zero articles about it on Kotaku.

The people who whine about “yellow paint” also bitch about accessibility options.

“If you’ve ever played games with romance options, features characters in relationships, or presents characters in a sexualized way, congrats, you’ve played a game that addresses gender and sexuality.”

The homophobia is absolutely brutal, and its a genre that still hews slavishly to the male gaze.

So like, as I have grown in the years since first playing Persona 5, not only is the absence and hostility towards queerness, but the idea that as a male protagonist I just have this buffet of women at my beck and call and…

The casual brutal homophobia on JRPGs that is never, ever, covered by even this media, and I am looking at some writers here who were supposed to be very concerned about representation...

Like, I feel we have pretty similar tastes in games, and I agree we are doing well in that particular niche. But its hard to ignore that every single other bit of mainstream culture is saturated in heteronormative thinking, its hard to kind of parse your way around all of it.

So it can be very frustrating to hear “Well…

You say explicit, but you need to set a standard for explicit.

And yes, games are just about as misogynistic on average as they are homophobic. So you aren’t going to see things that appeal to the feminine gaze, because the straight male demographics that tend to dominate the discourse would get upset. Because part of…

They didn’t specify LGBT options. They specialized LGBT representation.

And ‘representation’ is frequently used as an insubstantial form of appeasement, the word ruffles my feathers quite a bit. Representation is a 5 second Disney scene that can be cut for Chinese distribution.

People are like “Hey, give me a list”, but…

That’s a fair point. I was more thinking of it as explicit representation; your example of a race winner with a sexy lady is a good example, but do those games also have female racers? If so, do they pose with sexy men? If not, then it gets harder to classify.

“This actually got me thinking, and I can’t think of a single game I’ve played in the last decade that had straight representation and didn’t include some sort of LGBT representation, as well. I’m not saying there aren’t any, but I’d actually be curious to hear some recent examples.”

Did you only read the first paragraph of what they wrote?

Imagine reading this article and being like “Uhhh, what about straight people? I haven’t seen any of them lately. Lets talk about them.”

Heck, with the Persona games there’s a huge uproar over ‘censorship’ when we are removed as a cultural punching bag.

Like, if I had a nickel for how many times Atlus inserted queer people into a comic relief scene just to make them seem predatory and then removed it later I would have 2 nickels but its still…

“there’s a percentage of the gaming population–like queer and trans players–which is already playing despite being essentially uninvited, and the industry sees us as “gravy”—a nice extra but not a group worth catering to directly.”

“Do you think games are getting too realistic and, as a result, the worlds are too busy and hard to read?”

You: Other countries, including your own, put demands on you.