Support NeoGAF

[PapiKong]

As a dude who grew up in a house hold where my dad cooked dinner and my mom taught me how to properly squat, i think its funny how people think that women should look like this and men should look like that. men and women come in all shapes and sizes some with more hormones and others with more testosterne. I thought abby was hot asf tbh and was happy that they made her look like an OX lmao. I also feel like ther muscle growth had a fair justification (She was depressed and angry that her father was murdered and was looking for revenge)

 

[PanzerAzel]

I'm maybe paraphrasing but your argument seems to be that you don't mind there being LGBT characters as long as there's no included long-winded narrative/segment about their struggles as an X whatever person that detracts from the main point of the game. I can see that. I would tend to agree. Personally would not care one bit if, say, Nate Drake was gay. If the first half of the game was him going on about how his life has been such a misery because he couldn't find the right moment to 'come out' (which I don't belittle in any way, I'm sure it is hard to do in many circumstances), I would find it tedious pretty fast.

I don't mind anything as long as it's narratively justified.

What I have trouble with is a focusing solely or predominantly on the traits of a character, and not how those traits build that character into something that conveys things such as values, motivations, regrets, ambitions, loss, love, hate, etc. Things that define multi-faceted, complex individuals. Traits should serve the character, not the other way around. When you begin from a motivation driven exclusively of things like representation, diversity, inclusion, or anything existing with the goal of doing nothing more than establishing and making note of that in furtherance of ideological capital and not the character or narrative itself, you reduce characters into nothing but empty vessels to exemplify those traits and accomplish that goal.

If you want to include someone, to represent someone of a particular demographic, to diversify, write and build them as a character first and foremost. View them as an individual, as a person. Not as a shell that you simply use to infuse respective traits into to fulfill some arbitrary ideological quota so everything can be "equal". Which frustrates me to no end, because this is a goal that, while admirable in the ideal, is defeated before it even begins in practice, and these creators (such as Druckmann) are simply too stupid (or ideologically blind) to recognize, and as such, are compromising their work for something that will never be attainable, and that they are, in fact, actively working against in their hamfisted and overt manner of inclusion.