Soooo We're Finally Not Going To Dance Around Character Orentation
Saw the twitter message and I've got to say I'm pretty happy. I know a lot of people will be bothered or question why explicitly saying what orientation survivors or killers are but it means a lot to me. I grew up in one of the last generations of people where being gay wasn't ok, while im more confident in saying im bi now for a long time I thought I was exclusively gay. This meant a lot of targeted harrasment in school and even caused me to be beaten and choked out because of it on the school bus. While I had a parent who told me she was happy for me with whatever I decided would make me happy I still was in a world that mostly hated me. The world is different now, acceptance is no longer the oddity but the norm. While many people still despise and outright hate LGBTQ+ members there are many many more who don't and support us and treat us like we are people. I'm glad behavior is finally ready to do that.
Being able to see and identify with characters who are like me and share one of the most intimate aspects of my life is one of the best joys I can find. I can finally say "yeah I want to be like that character" or "that character is like me and has similar struggles."
Thank You
Comments
the idea of kate running around with a backwards maga hat on is a good meme and would be funny
As you imply in your last sentence, it boils down to "It makes me happy to see people in the things I like, who look like and otherwise reflect me." I'm a white dude, so I don't have to think hard about this, it has never occurred to me. I am validated by default. But it matters a lot to many people (even in some dumb video game about guys with chainsaws chasing the Stranger Things kids through a haunted saloon), as media is a reflection of society.
I think everyone agrees at some level, it would be good if they did the inclusive thing right cause it's very rare when companies do it. It raised a red flag to alot of people when they announced it in June which can come across as pandering to use a group for exposure and sales. I don't think anyone here cares if the characters are gay as long as it makes sense and doesn't clash with information already given about them.
That's just my understanding of what people are saying when i read this.
I'd rather not add real-world politics to the game.
Don't choose not to talk, it's important to show support. There's never going to be a scenario where people DON'T come out to exhaustively disagree, but you shouldn't be taking that as a sign that you've done something wrong. Props to you.
I hope they won't add any crazy climate breaking cosmetics 🤔
You don’t have to respond to this thread anymore if you don’t feel comfortable to do so, but please don’t let this hatred silence you completely! You have a right to express your opinion just as they have the right to do so. It’s not your fault others may get angry about that, you did nothing wrong here and you didn’t attack anyone personally (as far as I saw). That’s on themselves and it was definitely not your post alone that invoked those feelings in them.
Hurray, this or that character is gay.
I'm still going to mori you. What does it matter?
Exactly, it makes no difference, so why are some people getting all worked up about this?
I don't particularly care if they have gay, bi, transgender or non-binary (or anything else in between) characters in DBD. But I do wish that they had the foresight to make this decision from the beginning. I'm not particularly fond of the idea of a character that I've put a lot of time, bloodpoints, money or other resources into getting cosmetics for suddenly becoming gay or whatever. Again, I don't have a problem with LGBT stuff. It's just that I don't identify that way and I prefer to play characters that I do identify with. Which is why I can understand where the gay community is coming from wanting to have characters that they do identify with.
I'm very confused why'd they'd bother bringing up what the characters are sexually attracted to. Leave it up to the weird fanfics n stuff imo. Far too often characters get turned into just some stereotype where their identity is litterally just their sexuality. Unless something in particular romantic comes up it's as irrelevant as it is for 90% of everyone else you meet in life. Not even a thought that comes to mind most of the time is "what's this person want to #########?"
Then you should have never played any character at all tbh. They have stated before that there are LGBT characters but they didn’t want to explicitly state them. Do you also only play characters that have the same gender as yourself?
DbD characters always had defined backstories and were never just blank ‚insert yourself‘ characters and we always knew there was more to every character that we just did not know yet.
I mean, they mention exes in lore all the time. Never saw any complaint about those. Then again, those were all heterosexual couples...
I saw this tweet, starting reading the replies, and half of them were going crazy shipping Dwight and David as a couple lol.
I'd say the same thing to people who say, "I can play X now that I'll know I'm being represented!"
Did you just...not play anyone before?
Show me one person who's saying that.
Highly doubt you'd see complaints if it's a gay ex either. That's as previously stated an actual part of a characters history and gives a reason to bring it up if it's going into that part of the backstory. Honestly haven't seen anything about relationships at all so far but haven't gotten through all the archives yet. It's when it's brought up just because I hate.
What @Orion said.. who said that? I just read that there are people who are happy that they could have characters to play that they can identify with, but never did they say they wouldn’t play as anyone else..
I'm sorry, but if you highly doubt you'd see complaints about a gay couple, you just haven't been paying attention to this thread.
Guy over on page 3 mentioned something to the effect of how it'll be nice to have a gay survivor when they choose to play survivor.
Some people are very much prone to identifying with characters, personalities, figures, and so on. Other people aren't. No one in DbD "represents" me, regardless of color, gender, orientation, etc.
Besides, it's a pretty trivial thought process to follow. Changes like this are only made this explicitly because companies know some people look to fictional characters for representation. It's the point I was making in the first post that you dismissed.
I never said anyone said they wouldn't play someone.
That is a poor argument to make. "You should just never play any game ever in case at some point in the future they make a change you don't like." That is basically what you said. To answer your question, as a rule I do prefer to play characters that are the same gender as me. Will I play characters with different genders? Sure. Whatever. It isn't a deal breaker. I might play a survivor that is gay too. But I don't particularly like an identity being forced on a character that I've been playing for a long time. That is the point I'm making.
That's not what you said. This is what you said:
I'd say the same thing to people who say, "I can play X now that I'll know I'm being represented!"
Did you just...not play anyone before?
Show me one person who said that they can play X now that they'll know they're being represented.
Why would it matter?
They're not real. They're not real people. They're not connected to you in any way. It doesn't matter if Dwight likes pork chops or not.
Oh, yes, no one said those precise words.
Just ignore that people have said or intimated basically the same thing. But no, not those exact words.
You got me good.
I 'think' it's because of the bad rep small parts of the LGBT community have developed. Namely, the people that make their entire life revolve around their sexuality. As if being of a certain sexuality is ALL their life is about, and everybody should be the same.
Nothing against anybodies sexuality. Who you're attracted too is your business, but what hole you stick something into shouldn't be somebodies entire persona. Thus, when tweets like this pop out, it makes others worried that any characters created with a certain sexuality will be their entire backstory.
Not to say there aren't people that are homophobic, or resistant to change. I'm sure there are. Just my two cents.
But from a game play perspective it won't matter. Unless you get the toxic player that claims you moried them because they're gay.
If a company knows that some people want this, and they take steps to fulfill this wish, why is that a bad thing?
At best, a company takes steps to make its audience happy. I feel like you are trying to put this at odds with fiscal pursuits, but sometimes these two things can exist harmoniously.
But they didn’t state they would change any character. As of now, no character was given any explicit sexual orientation. But we all know that every character has some kind of sexual orientation.
if you don’t want to play a gay character then you shouldn’t play any character that could be gay, and you won’t know for sure until the creator of said character states their sexual orientation, that is not equal to changing that char.
Nobody said "basically the same thing". Some people said they would enjoy playing some characters more (meaning they already enjoyed playing those characters) if they could relate to them more. You said some people were saying they would only be able to play some characters if they could relate to them to begin with, which is blatantly false.
You made a strawman argument. Own it, apologize, get past it.
Because it's just cynical marketing and pandering.
They don't actually care, but they want credit for caring. That's why tome fragments about Dave and his boyfriend didn't just appear to fit into the character, but rather BHVR took the opportunity to have legal draft up the most corporate sounding "We like inclusion now that it's June, guys." statement ever.
Don't get me wrong, if some people are made happy by it, then that's great. But do not look to Corporate America for your heroes and role models and representation. There are plenty real, genuine, heroes out there taking real action. If you want people to look up to, look no further than them. Not some hand-crafted, sanitized, token fictional character shoved into a game for Woke Cred.
I literally never said that anyone would "ONLY" be able to play a character.
That was never said, at any point.
Good job projecting the strawman part onto me, though.
Show me one person who said they were looking to "Corporate America" (BHVR is Canadian, just so you know) for their heroes and rolemodels.
I'd say the same thing to people who say, "I can play X now that I'll know I'm being represented!"
Did you just...not play anyone before?
Sure sounds like that's what you said.
There you go again.
I never said anyone specifically was. (Even if it's pretty clear that people out there do) I simply suggested NOT to.
Dear god yes, I hate dealing with people like that and so god damn often that's the stereotype companies thrust on gay characters. Gives gays like me a bad rep for no reason. It's the reason I dislike it so much, someone's sexuality shouldn't matter and throwing a big sign that this person is this is just putting sexuality on a pedistal for people to keep giving too much importance too. The more of a spotlight being gay gets the more of a problem it becomes for actual gay people. If anything is inclusive of it it's not bringing it up at all because any of them could be anything and it's probably not important while a murder is hacking you with a machete because an extra dimensional entity scooped you up for food.
I somehow doubt that, say, David's backstory will become "One night David was at a gay bar doing gay things with other gay people and then he left and a rainbow-colored fog swept him down a very gay road to a fabulous campfire where a gay cosmic entity transported him into a gay realm where a gay killer was trying to pierce him with a gay hook." No, this is not going to happen. This is not something anyone needs to worry about (and even if it did happen this way, um, cool?).
If I had to speculate on the actual outcome of this, it would be something like "...and then Claudette's girlfriend was worried sick, because she never returned" in a lore entry somewhere.
I said this earlier in the thread, but it bears repeating, re: "single-issue personalities."
The curse of marginalized groups is that their marginalized status has to be called out in order to shine a light on the problem that exists, to acknowledge the thing that they struggle with. You aren't going to see a character bio that calls out a character's proud straight-ness because that's the "default" and is -- relatively speaking -- unremarkable. It would be amazing to live in a world where people of all colors and orientations were treated with the same social fairness and respect, and for all of this to be -- relatively speaking -- unremarkable in terms of the factors that make up our individual human identities. But that isn't the case, and you can't call attention to it without calling attention to it.
I assure you that I have a very dim view when it comes to corporate responsibility in a broad sense. But what decision could they make, which you think would check all the boxes to convince everyone that they actually care, instead of "pandering" as you put it?
Companies are made up of individuals, and I 100% believe that many of the people who work at Behaviour are supportive of this on a personal, human level.
What decision?
Like I said, just doing it. Not having legal draft up the most corporate-sounding statement ever and putting it on social media to announce, "Hey, now that it's June, we thought we'd let you know what a good company we are!!"
It's why members of the gay community are often the first to call out companies for simply "Rainbow-Washing" during the month of June rather than actually being supportive.
And yes, I'm sure every individual at BHVR is a fine person. But companies usually end up being less than the sum of it's parts when it comes to human issues.
Oddly enough me and my friend feel the same way about Claudia.
But it does matter to some degree does it not? Otherwise why make the distinction in the first place? If it just doesn't matter then there is no reason to state the characters sexual orientation at all. Going by how much of a response this thread has gotten, plenty of people have an opinion on the matter. So at the very least can we all agree on the fact that it does matter.
BHVR has made announcements before. Why is this one making you upset?
If Yui isn't a lesbian and Dwight isn't a bi bottom... i will be shocked
Well are you 2 a couple? People need answers.
Steven Universe lol
What a dumb question. I expected better.
Besides, I already explained why I find the statement disappointing. Go read up on concepts like rainbow-washing.
Well, that's the dilemma, isn't it? I guess some people do care. Maybe it's just me that doesn't think about it either way.
The show that famously had many of its scenes censored in certain countries?
There are no stupid questions.
BHVR makes public announcements all the time. Like every other company, they have someone (or multiple someones) to draft and publish them. Why are you only making a big deal out of it now?
You just made the same argument twice now. It is just as lousy of an argument the second time. It is ridiculous to expect players to not play a game in case their favorite characters are made gay at a distant point in the future. And btw, the flip side of this argument is true too. If you are gay and you've decided in your mind that a particular character identifies with you and now all of the sudden that character is given a very specific identity and backstory that is inconsistent to your worldview, wouldn't that make you upset? You've spent lots of resources getting the cosmetics you like. You've earned all the bloodpoints to get their perks all at rank 3. You've spent a lot of time playing that character. Now that character is given an identity that is 100% straight. No problem with that?
So then that stuff would would either be reacted or banned in those countries. Those countries mainly include places where a ton of stuff is banned anyways, which games like DBD wouldn't really be.