Why is the assumption by these people that there is a sexual component required in the explanation? Age appropriate explanations are easy.

“Know how some families have one mommy and one daddy? Some families have two mommies or two daddies instead.”

If the kids ask about the actual mechanics of procreation they are old enough to hear something like:

“Some couples adopt or they find someone to have a baby with who helps them make a family.”

Was there any need to mention surrogacy or donors? No. Kids don’t need to oversexualize queer people. Adults don’t need to over sexualize queer people! When people are sheltered from our existence until they are in their early teens they tend to think of gay couples as explicitly just sexual relationships rather than romantic or family building ones that are as dynamic as straight relationships because they were introduced to them as a sexual mechanics first kind of way. It’s dehumanizing.

The “right” shy of outright fascists are neoliberals. The term was coined in the eighties and describes a system that like Liberalism classic works primarily off of an idea of a protected class of citizen (as opposed to lesser protected classes of non-citizen) with a series of fundemental “rights” to basic protected freedoms from government interference and choice of “style of life” based around a personal property centric system.

Where Neo-liberalism differs is it detests the welfare state, seeks widespread government deregulation as they see it as an economic deficit, practice widespread government austerity in public programs and seeks to privatize swaths of government services to create new market sectors.

Neo doesn’t mean new in a “of the minute” kind of way. The people who came up with the distinction between liberal branches were describing the likes of Ronald Regan and Margret Thatcher.

Because I don’t find you terribly sympathetic. Yes, I would like better inclusion and more variety in games and can look at past examples and point out what worked and what didn’t from a queer perspective but you came in hot with your nose out of joint about how what is being asked is bad “for everyone” as though you are the arbitor of the everyman.

It’s worthless to conceed ground over and over again to people who always wanted us to disappear. It doesn’t work. You want to go on the woke advisory board on Steam and see how nit picky they get? This isn’t about media. This is part of an interconnected effort to get all of us to disappear from public life forever and it didn’t start, it never stopped and the point is it won’t until it all goes back to the way it used to be.

What is “in it” for the non-queer gamers is realizing they aren’t the center of the fucking universe. That they can show their support for something that isn’t explicitly for them and leave homophobic assholes with no wonderful jungle of slightly less homophobic assholes to hide behind. But no the second it costs you anything suddenly it’s the end of the fucking world. People want to feel all nice and accepting and open minded but they never want it to actually inconvenience them.

By all means keep on harping your one fucking studio you hate. I hope it keeps you warm.

Was it worth it? Coming down hard on queer and telling us we’re terrible people for daring tp ask for something better and throwing your lot in with the oppressors at the smallest hurdle?

Are these “bad things in the name of inclusion” just making a game you don’t like? The push against “inclusion” on a general scale has lead to real world harms because a bunch of babies can’t come to terms with there being pieces of media with choices they don’t like and threw a fucking tantrum. There isn’t really a side anymore where railing against the harms of “inclusion” isn’t propping up the arguement that minorities “earned” the actions against them by asking “too much”.

People will take your words as tacit endorsement that queer people “had this coming” because a bunch of businesses responded to a body of queer theory and made some fucking games. The anti-DEI crowd is the Conservative crowd and you might be on the fringe but you aren’t outside the radius.

There’s no “actual homophobes” vs " not homophobic but still unhappy that queer people and ‘forced inclusion’ are in a game people" - that’s just different degrees of homophobia.

Games changed a bit so that they aren’t all made for you specifically. Those franchises didn’t belong to you and for some people those ‘ruined games’ are their favorite games. Everyone has studios they don’t like. Not all representation is gunna be great because not all writing is going to be great but when inclusion “ruins it for everyone” in your veiw look around and ask if the people around you who are discussing it is actually a good cross section of “everyone”.

Ah yes, the two sexualities - political and non-political. You really aren’t as far along as you think.

I can accept that you are unhappy and want your games to not make you feel uncomfortable. Gods forbid they ever be like every other form of media and actually have a message they want to convey or try anything new. I can say having something tailored specifically for you is quite nice - now that more of us actually get to experience that.

By making the player make the first move, they empower the player to choose.

The problem often becomes that the entire sexuallity of mechanically bi characters or all characters in the game are often under player control. In a some circumstances games with this mechanism will have the characters who are not chosen as romantic options pair with no one ever or defer to straight behaviour. This is in deference to games wanting to have it’s cake and eat it too.

Examples of this in action :

Stardew Valley where if you don’t choose a same sex option to romance - no other characters ever have any romances ever. The one exception is Leah who has an ex who shows up late in the romance pursuit who tries to win her back. However, the ex is whatever gender the PC is so if it’s a hetero relationship, it still appears to be a hetero relationship.

Harvest Moon Mineral Town (later editions) give the player to options to romance same sex options… But everyone you don’t choose pairs up in hetero relationships and no other characters.

In both games there is no other queer rep so the player essentially opts in or out to all queer representation in the game. Blanket Heterosexuallity or bi-invisibility until given player approval is the default.

Indy games are generally the leaders for actual queer rep that isn’t optional to the game’s plot where characters sexuallities are not revealed by the player opt in.

Hey, just a heads up assuming “gender politics” don’t matter and being upset if a character is noticeably queer - makes you a part of the homophobic conservative circles. People, irl are queer, omitting queer people from settings where they would just exist as part of the world because “they shouldn’t be there” is a little queerphobic.

Conservative circles have been screaming about woke games forever just when options to have non-binary people exist at character creation or when there is one gay side character. A lot of folks in the arts, including in game development, are queer and like to make stories that didn’t exist when they were growing up. Your opinion is your own but assuming it’s universally considered “good game design” to force developers to exclude the things they are passionate to put in their games to appease a howling mob that is never happy even when they get what they say they want is a bit rich.

What you are describing is a concept of the mechanically bisexual. The options as given often allow players to choose in a sandbox game whether they experience the game as a completely non-queer experience or not. It sometimes creates queerness as an option rather than a core part of an experience which rep wise is considered a step better than when all romance options in games were mandatorily heterosexual but also kind of a cop out where player choice means all characters are often Shrodinger’s bi. If you want to experience say Skyrim as an almost entirely queer free experience - you can. Your choices flip that representation on and off like a lightswitch so if you have queerphobic tendencies the game doth not offend much. No one ever hits on you first.

Rep wise Gay characters are ones specifically ones where the queerness isn’t optional, it’s a part of the canon of the character. Straight characters often are so in fixed story narratives where they have hetero relationships and if they have brushes that look like same sex romance it’s played for laughs and treated as not really an option. Since culture still sort of assumes straightness as a default if the character only ever is coded romantically by the frame of the game to be attracted to the opposite sex they can be termed a “straight character” because as a player the game’s interfacing with that character’s sexuality is mandatory. An example is the Prince of Persia games or the Final Fantasy series which have a romantically coded opposite sex paramours that you don’t have an option not to interface with the character’s sexuallity.

This is way more common in older games and fixed story franchises.

People can dream of phones but the ability to read language while dreaming depends on where that language processing routes through the brain as it is different for different people. Most commonly people cannot read in dreams. Being able to write in dreams is even more rare.

Mostly realizing that masculinity really is what you make of it. It doesn’t need to be aspirational and probably shouldn’t be. You are a man regardless of whether you fit anyone’s expectations of that or not and the more people you find to become friends with who accept this radical fact the more comfortable you are to express masculinity without boundaries. Being able to be fully real without pretending to like or hate anything because you are “supposed to”. Being able to express a full range of emotion without fear and talk about it occasionally. Not being held to a standard of sacrifice of the self for meaningless prizes which hold no lasting value.

Secondly - sometimes comfort is a trap. We seek comfort as a natural instinct and to have it sometimes is a good thing… But to find it and expect to live in it all the time makes your world smaller. Over time you lose the functionality that allows you to make changes and do the things that you need or want to. Pushing out little by little into the uncomfortable slowly expands the space and duration in which you can be functional and comfortable. Doing things you don’t like, make you self conscious or put you temporarily in an environment that tires you out is training your mind to be tougher and more resilient. Go without comfort sometimes, treat it as exercise or nessisary medicine. Self-care is one thing but self-coddle will make whatever you tell yourself about not being able to handle things true. It is a sedentary lifestyle of the mind. Find a medium between points of comfort and vistas of discomfort to venture into and you will find less things hold you back, more stories you will have to tell and the more life you will feel like you have lived and the more rewarding your times of comfort become.

“Masculine identifying” generally opens the table to trans men and Non-binary Trans masculine people. Basically anyone who aligns themselves with and finds comfort in expressing masculinity.

Yes, but it’s a careful what you wish for situation. A lot of influencers in the trad wife space have found that while preaching the optics of the lifestyle of “submitting to a man” is lucrative to a predominantly male audience, the reality is detestable. Some of them are fully trapped by their decisions and absolutely miserable while publicly performing a form of femininity which deprives them of autonomy.

Once women have been emancipated from having this be their only choice the only way to force that happen at scale is violence. It’s not the first time this has happened. The black death decimating populations had women as business owners and guild members and fighting for that to stay a thing once the population rebounded. The witch trials rode on the backs of these same sentiments of women needing to be controlled and treated as broodmares and the mass executions of “bothersome” women forced generations into extremely narrow confines.

Progress can be undone. What keeps it from happening is understanding the horror of regression and the humanity of those effected.

Political philosophy is fascinating, please keep it in the excellent universities (sorry, “colleges”) outside of the USA and let us try and fix this goddamned mess.

How else do you think you are going to fix this mess? Revolution is great for creating change but dollars to donuts you end up with shit systems unless you have a core of political science minded people in the pocket. That really was what made the original American revolution work - you had a core of people who were HEAVILY invested in the works of political science philosophers ( Locke, Hume etc.) and the dedication to replace the outgoing regime with something other than meatheaded revolutionaries who just replicate the same system over again with some new face.

Colloquially liberal as opposed to the more strict political philosophical definition.

If you are going with the latter none of the above statements are strictly liberal as liberalism is defined by a very personal property based capitalism forward structure and a focus on personal freedoms balanced by a set of assumed privileges.

By the political philosophy definition both Republicans and Democrats are liberal. A growing number of people find the issue of the USA’s strict adhereance to old school philosophic liberalism the main problem of both parties since it does fuck all to check the accrual of personal property or provide safety nets. If you wanted to be more accurate by the change in social standard in the place you find yourself the above values in the post are safest “Progressive”. At least keeping this definition in mind helps navigate a lot of the conversation of politics in many Lemmy instances.

If you are unhappy here I assure you there are others to choose from. However I have no particular desire to delve on someone else’s behalf particularly since when so many say “freedom of speech” the term so often boils down to just wanting to say slurs or phobic commentary. Either this place is good enough to use with the design of etiquette the people who came before you set or it’s worth accepting the inconvenience of moving on and finding something better on your own.

I wish you luck in your hunt.

See I don’t think the “tribe” is the trouble when one is given the option and space to choose or abandon their tribes freely with no cost. If this particular culture isn’t your jam there’s plenty of others that do similar that might be to your taste.

Applying the trauma of racism, religious persecution and so on to a digital place that is one of many… Doesn’t feel genuine. I have a lot of feelings about places becoming toxic through allowing racist/phobic stuff to thrive but it’s not like the people booted from spaces who hold those views are shut out in the absolute cold. There are spaces where their veiws and comfort is centered it just doesn’t nessisarily overlap with where I am.

Saying we must accept absolutely everything because “tribes are bad” seems to apply some axiomatic principle to the lowest of low stakes social clubs. The Internet is a string of endless bars next to each other, if you don’t like what one place is serving there’s another one down the road.

On the topic of echo chambers - At what point did we decide that a bunch of people over a wide geographical area with similar interests and a common code of standards/preferences of civility… Is a bad thing?

It’s kind of how social clubs exist irl.

Eh, I have seen enough of what happens to places that favour so called “freedom of speech” or no moderation over valuing comfort of vulnerable users. There’s plenty of places that exist that have “freedom of speech”. Rather than making this place just like those places why not just go to a pre-existing one or start your own?