Representation is always important.
Blacks don't play games, Women don't play games. Queers don't play games, Gender-fluid don't play games.
Every time a game offers a "new" choice for protaganist it turns out that those people do play games and are very glad to be seen, and there are always others would like to explore those options.
This is a small step. I'm not cross about that, because thats how all journeys begin. There is much more to explore, much more to be addressed. Just admitting that enbys exist and are worthy of consideration is a fantastic start, one that wouldn't have happened as little as a decade ago.
It doesn't affect me directly, but the progression of freedom and equipability is something I have always felt strongly about. So, cheers Larian! I'm looking forward to the next steps.
Is it really freedom when all the supposed "expression" amounts to is basically yet another set of stereotypes coded as "not conforming to stereotypes"? And as fringe an opinion as it may seem, lumping race, sex and sexual orientation together with gender identity is downright wrong. And black (which to most oh-so-progressive people just means specifically African American) people are not the only non-white ethnicity out there, but it sure seems to be the only one because apparently the whole world needs to feel as guilty as US for enslaving people based on ethnicity (in which case, I guess, Norse cultures should be constantly apologizing to just about everyone else...).
The first three (race, sex, sexual orientation) are innate and immutable, and arguing against representing them in media (unless, again, it's done in a very ham-fisted, pandering way rather than a natural, matter-of-factly one) is kind of pointless. GI, though, is not only a psychological/social phenomenon, in many ways conformative as it stems from gender stereotypes integrated into the society (hence the existence of the gender critical movement which rejects the concept, rather justly pointing out how regressive and self-destructive it is for people engaging in it), but is also NOT innate and immutable (otherwise the concept of "gender-fluid" would not exist, no?), and one can raise cases as to why its existence in the setting would either not make much sense at all or should probably take nuances of perception into account (which I painstakingly described in the opening post and in one later on).
And to address a, perhaps, misinterpreted point of mine from the previous post: what I meant is that specifically accessibility options should most certainly be there, because they allow for an ability to experience the game in the first place for people that would otherwise be unable to. My point was that it's unfair to compare that to something that, in itself, is not something that removes an actual barrier that would otherwise be there for a percentage of people. To put it more simply - I don't think accessiblity options is something that people would want to mod out of the game on purpose. And while one can make a point about how people would want to "whitewash" characters or something to that extent - I've already made a point on that in the previous paragraph.
While I may come across as spiteful, my opinion on the whole debacle is that it's really unfortunate that people would so easily let the society's values and antiquated views dictate how they should act, dress, and express themselves while thinking that it's their "authentic" identity all the while. It's dowright unjust that instead of letting somebody actually explore their personality and not ascribe traits and interests to either gender or lack thereof, there is instead a chimeric construct in place that forces one to conform in some way or another (when there's a tailored "non-binary look" when it's supposed to imply the lack of conformity, it says a lot...) and to police their own behaviour and that of others. It's a culture that's both insidiously cruel and stuffed full of safety coushions, which results in people fighting over who is the biggest victim and the most oppressed while spiraling downwards into turning the concept of "identity" into a lifestyle rather than simply a set of traits.
That is something that only a modern, Internet-equipped and consumerist-centric cultural landscape could have conceived, as far as my take goes. Where people are so obsessed with being different that they all end up circling back to looking and behaving the same, and seek to either undo anything "conservative" just for the sake of undoing it without really questioning why it's there in the first place, or hang onto whatever values they consider sacred to them like there's nothing else for them existing in life.
Well, that was a hell of a tangent.
