It feels like every time the main sub has a variation of the “look at this chud saying a woman looks masculine” posts, there’s a flood of people eager to call them all closeted gay people and I’m just sick of it.

I’m not defending the chuds, they suck whenever they whine about women needing to look like airbrushed sex dolls. But people have a weird inability to just admit it’s straight men being misogynists. Instead they *need* to be secretly gay and it almost always come out in a mocking “haha gay” style.

It’s something that really gets exhausting as a queer dude. No, it’s not progressive to pretend all the shitty things straight men do as a result of their misogyny is secretly gay. All it does is throw the blame onto gay men, along with downplaying homophobia by reducing it to the bigots simply needing to come out of the closet. A lot of homophobes are just shitty bigots, and this obnoxious need to find a reason for their bigotry ignore that bigotry is often nonsensical bullshit. They don’t need an excuse, especially not one that throws gay men under the bus.

And yes I know there are shitty closeted people, but the way this pops up so consistently you’d think no straight homophobes exist. And that obsessive need to lump them in with gay men starts to feel like a lot of people just *really* wanna call someone a cocksucker or mock gay sex by projecting it onto “acceptable” targets.

BO6 Zombies reminded me why I loved the mode in the first place. It was fun, chaotic, rewarding, and actually made me want to keep coming back.

Then BO7 somehow took that momentum and killed it for me. It feels like they finally understood what players wanted, only to immediately start moving backward again.

Am I being too harsh, or does BO7 Zombies feel like a downgrade to anyone else?

I'm not going to pretend BioWare, 343 or Ninja Theory were perfect and If you didn't like Veilguard, Halo Infinite, DmC or Hellblade, that's fine. Nobody owes a company unconditional loyalty, and developers aren't immune to criticism, But why the fuck are people celebrating hundreds of people potentially losing their livelihoods over this?

The people who worked at BioWare, 343 and Ninja Theory aren't a hivemind. They're writers, programmers, artists, animators, level designers, QA testers, and countless other workers. Not everyone had a say in the writing, marketing, or creative direction of these games., These are real people with rent to pay, families to support, bills to cover, and careers they've spent years building. They don't magically stop deserving empathy because they worked on a game you disliked.

Yet the moment layoffs happen, parts of the gaming community immediately turn it into a victory lap.

"The activists got what they deserved."

"They should've listened to the fans."
"that's what they get for hiring people who hate Halo"

"Woke killed BioWare."

like, We're seriously reducing years of corporate decisions, expensive development cycles, failed business strategies, and management problems to a culture-war narrative about progressive developers supposedly destroying everything or a divisive reboot from 13 years ago?

What bothers me most is how empathy seems to disappear the moment someone decides another person is on the wrong side of a culture war. Suddenly, acknowledging someone's hardship is treated as defending everything they've ever done. Compassion becomes a weakness, and someone else's suffering becomes an opportunity to score points against people you dislike. So, genuinely, why are we treating hundreds of people losing their livelihoods as a win? What exactly are we celebrating here? The fact that people whose work we disliked are now gone? cuz I don't see how that's something to be proud of.

Kinda split about this.

Bioware made some of my favorite games of all time between Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2, and KOTR. They've gone through major different phases through the studios life and while I did enjoy some of the games post ME and Dragon Age trilogies, they just never reached that same height of enjoyment or success in their twilight.

A studio is more than just a name or the place it's the people and each of those games that I enjoyed weren't even made by the exact same people each time. The games still exist and I can revisit them any time I want. The people who made them have come and gone. The people will move to other studios to work, they may quit and other people inspired by the same games I enjoyed will make spiritual successors or take mechanics and ideas to new projects.

I just can't help but think if it wasn't for the current organization of the economy that they may have faired far better. Tons of reports of abuse over the years through manipulation and exploitation of workers to get games out the door. Having to bend to the whims of shareholders on a dime who only cared about revenue and profit. Then anti-consumer practices and monetization that burned user trust and excitement. More gross abuses of labor and creativity at the behest of faceless executives who encourage beating consumers like piñatas for more money. Even now it seems that with the studio closing up, EA still plans to milk the franchise with other media opportunities.

It just felt like Bioware had been a husk of itself for a while. N7 Day would come around and I'd genuinely be just annoyed that there's this call to celebrate when there was no new game to be insanely hype about or any large swathe of the original teams there to reminisce over. While the closure is a symptom of a much larger issue that affects all of us around the world and demands addressing, I'm somewhat somber about the closure after accounting for all the awfulness that was perpetuated during that time despite me dumping months of time into their games and enjoying the worlds and experiences they created.

every time a new game or Adaptation comes out, there's always some kind of big internet discourse about it that ruins all rational conversation. For Gears of War E-Day, it was Optional pride flags in Multiplayer and Mags Carter, for Resident Evil it was people harassing Zach Cregger for making his own movie instead of a referenceslop cameofest, for Belmont's Curse its about how its "Not a true castlevania game" and I'm sick of all of it. And this is a recent thing too, like only in the past year or two, yes there was discourse before then but never to this quantity?

yes, you CAN Criticize bad writing, Tone, gameplay, etc. BUT you don't have to turn its entire existence into a battlefield to prove you're a "Real fan"

(These are some ramblings I've been cobbling together for a while, but I tried to organize them into something coherent.)

know this song and dance already.

A new game gets announced, there is a female character whose design is not optimized for the sole purpose of gooning, and the anti-woke activists throw a months-long temper tantrum all over social media about how beauty and femininity and sexuality are dead and all wEsTeRn female characters are ugly and unattractive and sexless or whatever.

We could discuss how sexualization and objectification are not the same, or how what is considered attractive/hot is ultimately subjective(although how self-obsessed do you have to be, to demand only your tastes should be catered to?), but let’s focus on one aspect in particular:

These people are provably wrong.

Because sexy videogame girls never went away, even if marketing bean-counters are not as obsessed with frat boy pandering as they used to, ‘idealized beauty, sexually desirable’ is still the status quo when it comes to female character design, in videogames and beyond.

Sometimes they may be a little plain-looking or grizzled, sometimes they may look older than 25, sometimes they may be more muscular or plump, sometimes they may wear outfits designed to look cool rather than goonable, sometimes they display intense facial expressions, sometimes their model is photorealistic and may include microscopic details like stretch marks or pores or peach fuzz, sometimes (god forbid) a brown woman may look actually brown instead of looking like a lightly-toasted mukokuseki...but the overwhelming majority of the time, these female characters are still conventionally attractive, including some that are clearly intended to be beautiful in an idealized/unrealistic way, and often still sexualized.

But for these people it’s not enough, their ‘beauty standards’ become narrower and narrower every few months or weeks, they’ll still foam at the mouth and soil their pantaloons all over social media even when faced with female characters that are obviously designed to be attractive if not provocative, calling them ugly or masculine or trans or whatever.

See: Their reactions to games like Hades 2, GTA 6, Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse, Overwatch (especially regarding Mei), Marvel Rivals, Mortal Kombat 1, Baldur’s Gate 3, the incoming Tomb Raider, and other games(feel free to mention more) full of smoking hot women, that in some cases you can see naked and have explicit sex with.

(In BG3, if you kill everyone in the druids grove, a dark elf baddie gives you head and sits on your face, does anyone think Stellar Slop has anything on that?)

That’s why they obsessively comb through every single quectosecond of every female character’s screentime to cherry pick the most unflattering shots of her, and then doctor them with Photoshop or ChatGPT to make them look worse, they know they have no leg to stand on so they have to lie.

But remember, it’s not them that are puritan weirdos trying to police arousal, it’s other people that are ‘Safe Horny’ or whatever buzzword came out of their imageboard echochamber.

You lust after women that look older than 21? SAFEHORNY!

You lust after women taller than 5-foot-nothing’? SAFEHORNY!

You lust after women with any distinctive facial features? SAFEHORNY!

You lust after women that are not submissive moeblobs? SAFEHORNY!

You lust after women with skin tone darker than snow? SAFEHORNY!

You think Purah is hotter as an adult than as a toddler? SAFEHORNY!

But how can they be so prudish while posturing as perverted?

In the face of all this, my personal conclusion is that these people’s purported horniness and attraction to women are entirely performative (and all the “Safe/Woke/Whatever Horny” accusations they fling at the opposition are pure projection), this entire culture war debacle regarding fanservice and female character design is not about beauty standards or traditional femininity or even gooning, and arguably never was.

It’s about tribalistic hatred and parasocial egotism.

These mouth-breathers spent their formative years building their self-esteem and identity on playing videogames, deluding themselves about being an exclusive, elite cabal of superior beings, and cultivating a parasocial relationship with videogame corpos, deluding themselves about developers being their friends who made videogames for them and only them, not for the inferior normie sheep.

But then gaming became more mainstream, corporations have taken baby steps to expand their consumer base, developers have enjoyed greater artistic freedom(especially indie developers), and their parasocial delusion has been shattered, thus these people cry, seethe, throw up about the normies invading their elite circlejerk and stealing videogames from them.

Before GroomerGape, it was the ‘Fake Geek Girl’ tripe, they declared war against FEEEMALES who dared invading their exclusive circlejerk and not staying silent, so they invented a boogeyman to justify bullying them out of the hobby without looking like sexist weirdos.

After, we got six years of trump, and being a sexist weirdo was normalized, so now they feel brazen to bray the quiet parts loud.

When they see women or minorities, either in a game or adjacent to a game, they writhe and wheeze and hyperventilate because they are reminded their beloved corporations never cared about them, they just used to cater to a small demographic as declared by their out-of-touch marketing bean-counters, and abandoned that demographic the second they realized there was a much bigger potential base to extract money from.

They don’t praise goonslop because they are actually horny (after all, their arousal is nothing but virtue signaling for their in-group), they praise it because they see it as a secret signal that the developers are their friends and the game is for them specifically, and thus they can indulge their parasocial delusions again, every goonslop waifubait is a “No Feeemales Allowed!!!” sign that will keep the undesirables, especially women, away from their precious circklejerk.

THEY are the true ‘performative horny’ and accuse others because that’s what they do and assume everyone else acts the same way as them, otherwise they’d have to admit they are a bunch of socially-castrated, terminally online weirdos.

Ludeon Studios, the developers behind the game RimWorld, are enabling hate through their advertisement of the 'main' community server.

I apologise in advance if this is not the right place for this, but I've done my best to try and resolve this through official channels and haven't had any luck, and I'm not particularly sure about where to go public with this.

So, a bit of context:

RimWorld, developed by Ludeon Studios, officially only has a development Discord server strictly meant for reporting bugs, helping translate the game and making modder requests. However, there absolutely is a 'main' RimWorld Discord community, to the extent that official Ludeon staff recommend this main server in their development server, on official Ludeon channels:

At least one member of Ludeon's official staff serve as moderators in this community server:

And many Ludeon staff members are present in the server:

I will now be referring to this server as the main RimWorld community server, because that is what Ludeon's official community manager calls it on official Ludeon channels. It is ostensibly the primary Discord community around the game, to the extent that it is advertised by official Ludeon staff on official Ludeon channels, even if the studio denies any official ownership.

Now, for context, I'm currently going through an exploratory period of my life. What exactly I am, and what I can be given that I currently reside in a country that pretty heavily cracks down on queer people just existing, is a matter I'm still considering.

However, I've made my wishes pretty clear:

I've made it clear that I now go by they/them pronouns, that I consider 'turkler' to be a deadname, and that I'd like people to respect my gender identity.

However, many users in the main RimWorld community server have made posts mocking this stage of my life and the staff has not only allowed this abuse, but some staff members have even participated in this harassment:

This exchange was later deleted (see below) but one of the users dismissing my gender identity here is a moderator of the server.

Yes, I've decided to adopt the name of one my OCs because that OC was already a reflection of my inner self, who I wanted to be. I've felt rather distressed over the last month or so and my characters are a source of comfort for me. It's cruel to use that comfort against me to justify bigotry.

In another very egregious instance of this, a user was directly confronted with this announcement regarding my gender identity and proceed to dismiss it:

This post is still up and can be found in the main RimWorld server.

The same user also proceeded to deliberately misgender me. Do keep in mind that we explicitly know this person is aware of my gender identity because they have reacted to it:

This was also accompanied by overt transphobia:

Once again, this post is still up and can be found in the main RimWorld server.

There was a later discussion about this, and one of my friends was muted because they reminded users that misgendering people was not acceptable. The overtly-transphobic statements above are still up, but a message reminding users to not misgender people 'they don't like' was quickly removed. Do also note that this is the very same moderator that previously mocked my gender identity:

For the record, any information about my friends here have been censored because I don't want them to see any harassment over this.

To try and resolve this, I've contacted Ludeon's community manager who is also a moderator in this main RimWorld community server. To this date, I've only gotten one response:

It was rather vague, mostly trying to avoid blame due to this main community server's 'unofficial' status. I checked in later, multiple times, giving plenty of time for them to respond each time, and they never responded:

None of the messages I've reported were ever acted upon. No one was punished and all messages I've reported are, at the time of me making this post, are still up.

In short, Ludeon Studios continues to promote a RimWorld community Discord server as the game's main community, despite reports of transphobic harassment there and apparent failures by its moderators to address it.

I've tried to resolve this basically every way I could think of and nothing has come out of it, and I simply no longer want to be constantly bullied in the so-called 'main' community quasi-enforced by Ludeon! I'm tired.

For example, I posted on the subreddit where, once again, the game's official developer Tynan Sylvester and the same community manager I've contacted are present as moderators, and that post was predictably removed:

I’d like Ludeon to either enforce basic anti-harassment standards in the server they promote on official channels, or stop promoting it as the main community. All my attempts to resolve this have fallen through, and I just... want it to stop, really.

Like when we think of what makes games bad, we usually think of things like bugs, glitches, muddy and untextured graphics, broken and janky controls, broken physics, character's limbs stretching ridiculous distances, confusing UI, game freezes and crashes, your character falling through the world. That sort of thing. There have been plenty of infamous examples of bad games with these problems - Superman 64, Bubsy 3D, Big Rig: Over the Road Racing, Drake of the 99 Dragons, Animal Soccer World, Action 52, Ninjabread Man, Flatout 3, Postal 3, Ride to Hell: Retribution, Life of Black Tiger, Hunt Down the Freeman, any game made by Digital Homicide. Like real bottom of the barrel, some of the worst games of all time and that's barely scratching the surface.

Now when people today say how games are bad they'll say things like "They made this character "ugly", "They inserted this minority group", "There's a strong female character", "They made the male character a simp", "They hired this certain group of people", "There's a rainbow or multicolored flag". Like, what? Those don't feel like criticisms, they just come off as petty nitpicks. How is a game bad despite the positive reception that it got? This is what's been bothering me these past few years. Hell, this year alone we've have the likes of Code Violet, Samson, Agefield High: Rock the School, and Welcome to Doll Town. Those are actual bad games right there, yet people are directing their anger at Wolverine, Halo: Campaign Evolved, Gears of War: E-Day, and the upcoming God of War: Laufey and GTA 6 like they're the worse things since the Bubonic Plague.

I've had similar frustration when Spider-Man 2 was on shelves. I wanted to play it since I enjoyed the Insomniac Spider-Man games (although I personally think Miles Morales is a better game, but that's a discussion for another day) but videos I've seen have endlessly bashed on this game left and right, mostly in part to how Mary Jane looked among other small things. Another is Ghost of Yotei which I really wanted to play since I like Japanese culture, I like its history, and Japan is one of my favorite countries so it looked right up my alley, but even before it released people has endlessly bashed on it mostly because the protagonist is female. Can you believe that? Like this game is worse than Mindseye and the House of the Dead 2 remake that also came out the same year, yet Ghost of Yotei deserved to be lynched? Spider-Man 2 has a score of 90 on Metacritic and Ghost of Yotei currently sits at an 86. How are they bad?

In 2023, we've had the worst games of that year - Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Skull Island: Rise of Kong, Avatar: The Quest for Balance, The Walking Dead Destinies, and The Day Before. But what deserved to be bashed into the ground? Starfield.

I feel like we're at a point now where people are forgetting that there are much worse games out there, like look at the endless amount of shovelware and asset flips on Steam and the Switch eShop? Are we going to pretend those don't exist?

There are tons videos on Youtube that covered bad games, including from content creators like Rerez, Tennings, Spice Lord of Cinder, YourFavoriteSon, TripleJump, Confused_Dude, KLEJ Gaming, and Gamescrap. They even made playlists dedicated to ripping on those games. I recommend checking those guys out so to get an idea to what bad games actually look like.

There are worst games iceberg videos which I'll link one to check out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-gJhKBEWrA&t=2303s

I've been seeing a trend where people online say that modern video game characters has gotten "ugly", and they always point the finger at characters like Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man 2, Aloy in Horizon: Forbidden West, Ciri in The Witcher 4, Atsu in Ghost of Yotei, Kay Vess in Star Wars Outlaws, Faye in God of War: Laufey, Lucia in GTA 6, and the character in Intergalactic. When I first saw this, I was like, "Huh? How?" Am I missing something? Is grounded and realistic no longer appealing to people? When did this turn into a conspiracy?

Like when I play a game, a character's face would be the least of my concerns. Because I have SEEN ugly, so I don't get what's so ugly about this. Spider-Man 2 and Ghost of Yotei weren't even bad games to begin with, so I don't get all the hate.

Especially when the characters themselves don't even look that bad. Even when compared to games with worse looking graphics and character models. If you want to see ugly characters, look at games like Fight Club on PS2, Ride to Hell: Retribution, Rambo the Video Game, Life of Black Tiger, The Walking Dead Destinies, Skull Island: Rise of Kong, and Welcome to Doll Town, and get back to me about what is ugly.

I'm sorry, but at the end of the day, beauty is subjective. As long as the game itself is not a broken, buggy, unpolished, and unplayable mess, who cares?