I hope we get to the point where we have enough heroes, that we can also have amazing gay villains and amazing everything across the board.” "If you live in a small town where you're already struggling to come out, or see yourself represented, that can do a lot of damage. “All I see right now on social media is kids who are seeing themselves on television getting killed," GLAAD’s director of entertainment research and analysis Megan Townsend said last year at the Television Critics’ Association Press Tour of the Bury Your Gays trope. These cliches are rightly criticised for potentially harmful depictions of an underrepresented group, in part comprised of vulnerable youth. Critics have rallied against those cliches, like ‘Bury Your Gays’ (an epidemic of a theme most often seen in television where queer characters are killed off in order to provide dramatic motivation for their loved ones), the ‘Murderous Bisexual’ (self-explanatory), the ‘Gay Best Friend’ and the ‘Tragic Gay’’ (in which a character's sexuality is used to incite guilt and/or pity). Nineteen’s a fun age.”Įven in the increasing occurrences of LGTBQ representation in games, we have to be careful of the negative tropes that already exist in fiction. She’s also a great shot, and a great fighter.
We want to engage with her as a full character. “And to explore who she is as a teenager and as an adult, it wouldn’t be honoring her character to hide some facet of herself. “This is just who she is,” Gross continued. It felt revelatory when The Last of Us Part II co-writer Halley Gross told me that “Ellie was born gay,” but it shouldn’t have been. We haven’t yet gotten to the point where LGBTQ characters are integrated naturally enough so people understand their sexuality doesn’t need to be rationalized. Unfortunately, it’s good writing we rarely see in the mainstream video game space. There is no rulebook, it just is, and to echo this human truth in your game is good writing. Some come out late, some come out early, some prefer to keep their sexualities a secret their whole lives, some gain strength by shouting it from the rooftops as teenagers, some choose to mention it awkwardly before never mentioning it again, some are deeply sexual, some are asexual. Queer people merely exist alongside everybody else - and not to some narrative’s end. What is particularly alarming about this line of thought - that an LGBTQ character must justify their sexuality, that it must be relevant to some broader theme or narrative, or seeded early so as to be believable - is that the real world doesn’t work that way. It was revelatory to me in the way late-‘90s queer films like But I’m a Cheerleader were - my palms sweating, clutching the side of the couch and furtively glancing at the door in case my parents came in. Nothing has measured up to that experience for me since, and of course, nothing could.
The Mass Effect trilogy was the first experience I had with LGBTQ characters in a video game since my grandma bought me a Gameboy in 1990. It felt too big to laugh at.That was 2012. As it began, though, it hit me that I was watching an actual lesbian sex scene in a video game, between two characters I had grown to care about over a long period, whose relationship felt important to me.
I thought it would be a scene I cringed through, a cynical product of my calculated romance option selections set deep in the Uncanny Valley. I joked about the lesbian sex scene in Mass Effect 3 to anyone who would listen at the time, whooped about it as if it was the novelty porn my flatmates and I had watched in our first shared apartment.