Thanks for mistelling me my own opinions. Having gay characters is okay, just making a character gay is cheap. Giving them background makes depth.
If you just make them gay without background, you’re being cheap and tacky.
People rightfully get annoyed when their sexuality is just chucked onto a character for the sake of cheap social points.
Right, so? I’m not other people, and I don’t get pissed off about the good examples that are used to build character.
Retribution? Where he was staring at a picture of an unknown person whose gender you can’t even tell? Am I missing something there?
That sounds like ret-conning.
So, no until yes.
That’s just really weak. If you gave me all of that info, I wouldn’t think he’s gay at all. Unless I’m missing something, that’s what I mean about doing it in a very shallow way. There’s nothing in those three sections you said that shows that it’s built his character.
I see that as insulting because they want the good karma that comes with making someone LGBT but don’t want to put in the effort to actually make the character LGBT.
I agree that a lot of people are petty about it, but again, we’re talking about the concept not how people react to it.
In other words, a character cannot just happen to be gay. If it has no real impact on their “lives” at the point in the time the story was told, it shouldn’t be part of the story.
Like “happens to be gay” is not an acceptable state of gay for you if you think a character needs a narrative reason to be gay.
And I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about your point that people don’t just assume a character is straight, and that the backlash is just because they are mostly just badly written.
You can tell its a guy. And most people thought it was his brother or an unknown teammate. Those same people picked up on Reaper staring at his family, and assumed Sombra and McCree to be romantic. Because most of the panels dealt with romantic love. Not all of them, but most of them.
No. It’s called foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is never explicit. You only know the significance after the reveal. The only change in meaning of that line is that Soldier no longer considers women’s attraction to be a bonus. And now we know why.
No. You may not have put it together until the reveal but that’s literally how foreshadowing works. It’s out in the open and not hidden but you don’t necessarily put it together until the reveal.
This entire thread has been about how people react to gay characters…
I love when religious stuff is added to games because I enjoy learning what different religions and cultures are about. As for LGBT stuff I like that to. If characters are going to have relationships relevant to the story I’m completely on board with them being gay or whatever. With such a big roster, several characters are bound to be something other than straight. I personally want to see more variety in everything. Any kind of reveal is a tidbit of lore to help us learn about and attach to characters we relate to.
As a gay man I thought tracers reveal was done right.
For soldier I thought it was pretty typical of a character made by straight male dominated industry and felt a lot like pandering, though a lot of lgbt folk on the forums don’t agree with me and dislike that opinion
Idk if you’ve ever heard of “burying your gays” trope but basically when gay men were introduced into television, especially in media with lots of straight male writers they’d basically always be hyper masculine and filled with tragedy or soon to be killed off. It was a way of accessing LGBT money, appearing “progressive”, while also limiting potential fallout.
Soldier seems like a pretty modernized version of that trope. He’s old, he’s a lone wolf, and they never have to or even had to explore it for more than a sentence or two. Now, while I’m not saying I WANTED them to, I’m aware of the trope and that’s why I was like “aha yup they’re pandering”.
He has a very forced reveal in a desert bunker while fighting onmnics, looking through old photo albums which happen to contain an old pic of his boyfriend from like 40 years ago… which does seem a little forced. If he had even been planted into soldiers stories or in game cinematics miscellaneously, it would’ve seemed more real.
I’m not saying they didn’t have to pay it more than a passing thought. I thought Gibraltar from apex was actually done well. But I would’ve rather, idk, seen vincent when he was actually relevant to soldiers story like even just as a background character in a comic mission or even just a picture on the wall. The conversation was pretty forced and also like “see it’s past tense and soldier devoted so much of his life to overwatch he’s basically not even gay bc it will never be relevant to his development but we’re gonna throw it out there anyway”.
Idk. Thematically the Christmas comic was about intimacy, not Overwatch, and it seemed really fitting. For soldier it didn’t really reveal all that much and the setting and dialogue just didn’t feel believable. Idk.
You know what? I completely understand everything you just said, and even though I personally didn’t see it as pandering, I never thought of the “bury your gays” trope.
I thought it was Ana just acknowledging that solider literally can’t let go of the past and is still hunting what killed overwatch, still carrying a picture of his ex boyfriend (yikes, this hits close to home) and all in all is super stubborn to a fault.
I just want to say, I’m pround of you, that you are tolarate for both sides, and I’m happy that you are the one that can change world just by being nice for everyone and understand them.