Man, it sometimes feels like no sooner hasone wave of toxicitystopped spewing from the mouths of a certain emotionally disregulated subsect of gamers, the next one hurls itself right in our faces. This time, it’s overgaspa gay kiss in the Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores DLC. Yep, Aloy is gay (or bi, or quite simply something other than straight), which has led to the usual slew of review-bombing, blind rage, and vitriol from the online cave-dwellers.
If you can look past the lonely, pathetic place these attacks come from, it’s kind of amusing to see how disconnected from reality and weak the reasoning is (as if written by people who don’t get enough daylight).On Metacritic, I’ve seen a couple of reviews to the tune of “not interested in gay stuff,” courtesy of coperix756 and Karogieu, as if all the many hours of the game ultimately boil down to that one intimate moment. Like, why even share such a bland irrelevant opinion? Would a straight kiss inHorizon: Forbidden Westhave made the whole game better for these people?
In the same list of review-bombing, I read “the story is just another lesbian in a video game,” or, my favourite via acidbristle: “If everyone is gay, how do you expect the human race to continue?” Gotta say that’s flawless logic right there. Indeed, traditional procreation could be a problem if literally everyone in the world was gay. Good thing that’s literally never happened in any gameeverthen, isn’t it?
So yeah, none of it is exactly scintillating discourse, which is par for the course with this kind of stuff, where nebulous, implacable anger clogs up these peoples’ limited neural pathways, leaving no cognitive room to clarify what the hell their sad spaffing of words actually means.
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The general pattern with these things goes something like this. People don’t just go ‘eww, lesbians’ and leave it at that, because it’d be hard to hide the fact that being disturbed or reviled or upset by gay romance is pretty much Homophobia-101, right? Instead, they tie it into a bigger picture, a conspiracy, a “Woke Agenda,” so that suddenly it becomes not about the fact that two women are kissing, but rather a righteous movement of people rallying against the fact that powers that be arepushing this stuff in our faces all the time.Suddenly, it become a cause, however weird it may be.
So let’s unpick that for a moment. How many mainstream triple-A games have really pushed same-sex relationships in our faces in recent years? We’re not including games where same-sex dalliances are optional, like Bioware RPGs or Assassin’s Creed, because all that stuff falls under the umbrella of RPG freedom (besides, if you have a problem where this stuff doesn’thaveto play any part in your story, then you’re a lost cause).
Off the top of my head, I could only think of two: The Last of Us, and now Horizon. There was the whole hoo-hah around Overwatch back in 2016 and 2019 with Tracer and Soldier 76, there have been queer protagonists in what I guess could be called Double-A games like Life is Strange, and some Borderlands characters (I think), but we’re talking just a handful of games over a whole bunch of years.
Let’s try to bring some data into this, and expand it to not just LGBT protagonists, but LGBT characters in games in general. According to thisWikipedia list of LGBT characters in games, in 2022 there were only eight games featuring LGBT characters.As you might’ve guessed with such a low number, this isn’t indicative of some kind of unstoppable wave of disproportional LGBT representation, as even back in 2012 there were more LGBT characters featured in games (12).
Granted, these lists might not include super-obscure indie titles in the darkest corners of Steam, but I hardly think that those games are what concerns the anti-Woke brigade. Those folks don’t want those gays anywhere near the big IPs with big followings. It’s kinda like the gaming equivalent of that whole attitude of ‘I don’t mind gay people, so long as they don’t go around kissing and holding hands in public.’
So where’s the big conspiracy? Where’s the evidence? Is this maybe just a Sony thing, given that Last of Us’ Ellie and Horizon’s Aloy are in the crosshairs? If that’s the case, then it boggles the mind how two gay protagonists across 10 years and two generations of Sony consoles (and dozens of first-party games) amounts to people dismissing Horizon’s DLC as ‘yet another lesbian love story.’ The idea that games are pounding us with this stuff is, quite simply, imagined. Yes, there are games with same-sex stories and romances out there, but the amount of them doesn’t even match up to the fact that 7% of the US population identifies as LGBT.
Maybe all this analysis is pointless though, and will do little to quell the sweaty little people getting all uppity about this. Maybe these people don’treallybelieve in a woke agenda, and maybe they’re notreallyeven homophobes, but are simply angry because their fantasies around a character they fancied have been shattered by the fact that she’s now ‘unavailable’ (aka the ‘Waifu’ phenomenon).
Well here’s a newsflash to those people: even if Aloy were straight and, y’know,real, she wouldn’t have gone for someone like you anyway. Sorry to break it to ya.
