Board 8 > schrodinger's gay box: gay men in video gaming. coincidence, or conspiracy?

(+) Yeah! (+)

last night, i had the profound thought. gay men are still not normalized into video gaming. the only instances of gay men being very directly gay are secondary/tertiary characters. there have been gay women (ellie, most probably recently) (i've been playing tlou), but men? it's a no go.

"but, bossman, shepard could be gay! and that guy, from bully, he could kiss other boys."

i postulate that there is the phenomenon of a schrodinger's gay box at work here. they can be gay, while not being gay, all residing in your own personal fantasy.

thank you for your time.

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i think lesbianism is more celebrated in culture generally than male homosexuality

Evillordexdeath posted...

i think lesbianism is more celebrated in culture generally than male homosexuality

Because the straight guys think it's hot.

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that is definitely a factor.

solid snake and big boss are gay as hell and you can't tell me otherwise

checkmate atheists

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Well, I can't think of a counterexample.

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well males outweight women by alot in general, and a far smaller subset of the demographic are gay

i mean it'd be kinda cool if at least a deuteragonist broke the glass ceiling

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it's easy to speculate that ike from the Fire Emblem series is gay because most other Fire Emblem leads have paired romantic endings with girls, and no paired endings with the same sex, but ike's only paired endings are with dudes, but I still don't think he counts because it's left at the level of implication.

Yeah, companies are afraid a gay male protagonist would turn away the majority of straight men who purchase video games. And sadly, they are probably right. You can get away with a lesbian main character, because enough straight guys will think 'that's hot'.

Then you get cases of "the character could be gay" that then canonically make the character straight, like Assassin's Creed Odyssey forcing your character to have a child no matter who you flirted with throughout the game (although to be fair they did that to the female character too)

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Gregg and Angus

Go play Night in the Woods yall

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ACO was a weird situation. I think the notion of sexuality in Greece was more fluid in some sectors of ancient culture though, so the idea of characters being bisexual and not hewing strictly to a specific gender is understandable.

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Baba is You

because I'm gay and if Baba is me, he's gay too

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Bane_Of_Despair posted...

Gregg and Angus

Go play Night in the Woods yall

This was my first thought but the TC is restricting it to main characters only which is a lot harder

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The rule is that if they are not explicitly gay then they're not, because of the excuse you described. It doesn't count if it's "left to interpretation".

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well there's been examples of women leads (ellie and the girls in life is strange (maybe? i didnt play it)), but no men, it's a little disappointing

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I feel like a lot of media hasn't gotten to the point of gay leads - most of the time, works seem to only include gay characters if romance is at the forefront of the work, so it feels like it will be especially uncommon in most video games which focus on action.

At the same time, a lot or characters are amorphous enough that they aren't really confirmed straight either. Though it would certainly be nice to have a gay character here and there who are simply too busy killing demons to bother searching for love...

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Double standards rule our society. Straight guys think lesbians are hot, but not gay dudes. I'm not sure what girls think of gay guys

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Does Dream Daddy not count?

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WhiteLens posted...

Does Dream Daddy not count?

it counts

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someone was talking to me about this recently- it's historically true in movies, books, etc. as well. at least in genres consumed by men

their take was that because, in a male-dominated medium, being similar to men is cooler (or easier to empathize with) than being similar to women. and in common society, masculine perspective is more defined by being into women than actually being physically male

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banananor posted...

and in common society, masculine perspective is more defined by being into women than actually being physically male

And thus we get waifus everywhere.

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