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Whine harder you assholes
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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Honest question, can anyone actually name a mainstream game where the main playable character is canonically and explicitly portrayed as gay?
I honestly can’t even think of one.
Yes, Life is Strange and The Last of Us. Pretty major games
In baldurs gate 3 people of the same gender certainly hit on you. Basically all romancible characters have player characters as their sexual orientation
Last of Us.
Life is Strange games.
Guild Wars 2
last of us?
The MISSING: J J Macfield and the Island of Memories is a great one.
Ending
Psyche. Though much of the dialog and written messages could lead you, like myself, to believe Macfield is a closeted lesbian undergoing community/family abuse for her quiet obsessions with a girl...it's actually the less common form of LGBT. Macfield is a closet trans woman; much of the game's horrific bodily mutilation themes take a stand-in for the dysphoria of being uncomfortable in her own masculine body. Of course, many of the same types who'd retch at a gay protagonist would throw up at the idea of being someone they didn't identify with - which ironically is exactly what the game is teaching you.Life is Strange series, Before the Storm. Not sure about the others.
That's what makes it even more pathetic, literally just being given the option of a gay subplot is having it shoved down their throats.
It's so ridiculous that I question how many of the complaints we see online are even sincere, because surely people aren't that dumb.
A bunch of characters in Apex Legends are canonically gay, trans, nonbinary, bi, pansexual, and Mirage. As a hero shooter, I guess there’s no real “main” character as such.
Aloy in Horizon is pretty much there if the Burning Shores DLC is any indication, although she seems to be a work in progress as a fully developed person.
I remember when dinoflask did YTPs of Overwatch's lead designer, he poked fun at how, whenever the game needed a progressive image boost, they would retcon a character to be gay at random. He sentence-mixed something like "Our fans are always wondering who's going to be gay on our next update."
I have an example that's not gay, but trans - one of the two protagonists of Tell Me Why is a trans guy. (The other protagonist is his cisgender twin sister.)
Yuji Naka once said that NiGHTs gender was "up for interpretation", which I think makes them nonbinary. That's a pretty deep cut though.
I remember reading about that because I went on a SA2 Chao Garden binge at one point and really got into trying to get a perfect flying one, I even went and played a bit of Into Dreams and read the wiki.
It's because they're "dream beings" and don't really truly exist so they have no gender.
Mainstream? No, but my character decided he was gay in Disco Elysium.
I will ask a different question. In how many mainstream games can you actually confirm the main character is straight? Sure it may be more than the two examples of gay main characters, but still very few compared to where it just doesn't come up.
Pretty much every GTA, Duke Nukem, the Witcher series, the God of War series, Yakuza, Unchartered, the Final Fantasy games, the Super Mario games (including Donkey Kong), even Pac-man... and that's just the ones I've played. Then you've got virtually everything featuring Disney characters, Star Wars, as well as most other TV and movie tie-in games (of which there are many).
That's the thing about defaultism, is you can play a straight character and not even remember you've done it because it's just the default. I'll bet you didn't even notice that Pac-man was canonically straight, and yet if Ms. Pac-man was instead called "Pacman's Husband Steve", suddenly Pac-man's one defining trait would be his sexuality.
If nothing else, you've provided an object lesson in just how true OP's meme is.
Well, I never played the official Pac-man so yeah, had no way to notice.
But while you do have a point about defaultism, I still believe large majority of games just doesn't say one way or another, which is as it should be.
FFXIV. Like the whole raid tier for Gia and Rynne.