Maybe I’m just a sicko but it’s boring when characters are too cool with being gay. Either feel weird about it or BE weird about it
get back in the closet until you’ve had your narrative arc
Trying to put into words why I feel this way. For me at least, it’s not necessarily that they’re cool with being gay, so much as that if a work just goes “oh, this guy is gay,“ gives him a boyfriend, and then does nothing else interesting regarding that, then what’s the point? It doesn’t say anything interesting about how they relate to their sexuality, or anything about sexuality more generally. Go say something interesting. If I just wanted to see gay people, I could talk to the many gay people in my computer.
me personally i want gay people to suffer but your thing is cool too
but this kind of representation is just as important. people need to know that gay people can and do just exist. them being gay doesn’t have to have a narrative arc or be important to the plot, especially if it’s not their story. queer representation that tells our stories and everything is obviously super important but so is representation where queer people are Just There.
sometimes i think about the golden record and i want to cry
there is a disk. it is 12 inches in diameter, it is made of copper, plated with gold. there is an inscription— “To the makers of music – all worlds, all times” on its surface. it lies on the space probe, Voyager 1, launched in 1977, to explore interstellar space beyond our solar system.
it contains human existence.
116 images— the sun, the location of our solar system, mathematical and physical unit definitions, and our planets, including a blue and swirling white sphere simply labelled “Home.” it contains images of human dna, of our atoms, their structure, the way they divide, our anatomy, our conception, our birth.
it does not contain an image of war. nor of disease, nor poverty, nor crime, religion, or ideology.
it does contain a father looking lovingly at his daughter. it does contain the picture of a tree toad in a gentle hand, of a woman eating a grape at a supermarket.
the remainder of the disk is audio. a 90-minute selection of music from all over the world, sounds, and greetings. there are greetings in 55 different languages, one akkadian, spoken in sumer about six thousand years ago, and one wu, a modern chinese dialect. the greetings call out to a friend. it wishes them well. it asks them if they have eaten yet.
but it contains other sounds too. it holds the sound of rain, of thunder, of a volcano and an earthquake. it holds the sound of mud pots and trains. it holds the sound of a mother kissing her child.
with little to erode it in space, the golden record would probably outlast all human creation. it will be 40,000 years before it approaches another planetary system. if it does, it cannot find intelligent life. intelligent life will have to find it, retrieve it from where it floats silent and small through space. we still don’t know if they would understand it.
in 7.5 billion years, the evolution of the sun would burn the earth up, and we would not exist any longer, but the voyager would fly on, bearing a memory.
bearing a disk with a little inscription etched by hand on its surface.
the opening recording, by Kurt Waldheim:
“I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of the immense universe that surrounds us and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.”
in Disco Elysium I was expecting there to be some kind of “addiction mechanic” that would add a long-term downside to taking drugs, and was surprised not only by the absence of any such mechanic but also that the benefits of drugs greatly outweighed the cost. anyways fast forward to the late game and I was downing three bottles of pyrholidon and smoking an entire pack of cigarettes before attempting any check, and it was only then I realized there was in fact an addiction mechanic
honestly, i think this is why i like the way the game handles substances so much. when i was looking up playthroughs of disco elysium i stumbled across one subreddit thread where someone asked “gameplay wise, is there any point to staying sober?” and just looked at it. like, yeah. yeah, exactly. we know that harry often does drugs specifically so that he can take on a superhuman caseload - as he puts it to kim, to be a “really good detective”. it was so chilling to see a player asking the same exact question that harry would probably be asking himself. without an external punishment mechanic, without being heavy handed about it, and in a way that (as OP pointed out) is so natural as to be almost unnoticeable, it manages to put the player exactly in his shoes as a recovering (or not recovering) addict. it’s a really well-designed mechanic
“Things are harder without this substance, so there’s no reason for me to abstain” being a purely Player-Driven interaction is a phenomenal addiction mechanic. Absolutely fucking gorgeous.
