A far-leftist bigot working for the game developer company The Initiative got recently some flak for several completely unhinged tweets that he has posted attacking "gamers", in other words, his very core audience, the people he is helping to develop games for. Among several other such tweets he has posted these:
They repeat the same strange narrative and lie that far-leftist bigots have been repeating for well over ten years now: That "gamers" hate female main characters in video games, and whenever a game is announced or published that has one, the "gamers" throw a hissy-fit and temper tantrum and start furiously attacking the game online.
This is such an obvious untruth, such an obvious lie, that it's just incomprehensible why they just keep repeating it over and over and over. This very thing has been going on for over ten years now, and is not showing any sign of stopping, no matter how obviously false it is.
Where was the backlash and anger when the various Tomb Raider games were published over the last thirty years? Every time a new game in the franchise is published, starring the very female protagonist Lara Croft, where's the backlash, where are the angry "gamers" attacking the game and declaring that the game is ruined and that they will never, ever buy it?
Where was the anger when, for example, the video game Alien: Isolation was published, with a very female main playable character? Where were the gamers horrified at this prospect? Where were the angry gamers horrified at, say, Bayonetta, or Life is Strange, had female protagonists? Where were the gamers declaring Stellar Blade to be the death of video games and how they would never, ever play that game, because it has a female playable protagonist? And I could just list more and more examples of the same.
Where are they even getting the notion? What examples do they have to give where a game having a female protagonist caused a huge backlash, only and solely because it had a female protagonist? I seriously don't remember them showing any examples.
Sure, there might be examples where a female playable character was shoved into a setting where that was extremely unrealistic and unbelievable, quite clearly done for the purposes of political activism and social engineering, and that might have gotten some backlash. I can't name any example off the top of my head, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there are a couple of such examples in existence. But even in those cases the problem was not that the protagonist was a woman, but how artificially shoved she felt. Gamers do not hate female protagonists, they hate unrealistic depictions of characters that break immersion and willing suspension of disbelief, and they hate political activism and transparent attempts at social engineering.
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