Well my idea would be to have it be more than a dating game, but to also have a universe around that feels developed and alive…as too many dating games neglect to provide much of that, or go for the “lazy” route of just setting it in the modern (American or Japanese most often) world at the time it was written, which obviates the need for too much world-building, which is a major resource saver but also more often than not a huge, limiting factor.
My over-ambitious idea would be to have it be a series set in a Starfleet-esque quasi military organisation with the whole “seek out new life and new civilisations”, plus the occasional bit of colonial defence, maybe even full-on space warfare should I dare tackle that. Plus the liberal amounts of social and political commentary that entails.
But following the player all the way from a wet-behind the ears cadet to an old-admiral (which conveniently would allow me tackle some relationship stages that hardly get explored as most relationship games limit themselves to the dating phase only. ).
Meh, in any case it would be over-ambitious, I’d need to be retired to even start it and even if I did that I probably wouldn’t get more than 1-2 books actually finished before shuffling off the mortal coil.
Game design is hard…
Well Atlantis in that world is kinda the “evil empire”, even if much of that is also propaganda due to how different they are from the rest of the world (being, if a recall correctly, a slightly different strain of human who didn’t die out but survived to compete with modern homo sapiens) matriarchy or no.
Anyway, seems to be on indefinite hiatus as far as I can tell, which is a bit of a bummer.
I think you’re really missing my point there are few women rulers, in times of war and crisis. The women who ruled by themselves had to limit the ways in which they dressed to avoid critique, and more or less the point was the crique on female rules are far harsher in records. I am not saying female rulers are incompetent, in saying records record them that way. Queen Victoria was said to be a tyrant, theodora a harlot as examples . and I mean there have been more shitty women rulers than men, purely because due to their gender huge swaths of their rule become quashing opposition largely around their legitimacy to rule as a woman and that limits their rule unfortunately. But I dont mean that they are empirically bad, just limited by their time, and there is no questions that there have been powerful historic women like Cleopatra and Catherine the great. Literally my entire post was about how sucky it is that great people but women especially that even if you do great stuff, you’re gonna be limited by your gender and recorded badly because no matter how much you help the people they wont really like you or record you well.
It’s entirely possible that I’m just extremely behind the times, but when you read a book, all the characters are predetermined. I think that the authors of these various WIPs and stories have that right reserved if they want to story to unfold in a certain way. I don’t encourage it, but I’m not going to force anyone to not lock the characters.
I appreciate your clarification of your point, but I believe you are oversimplifying an incredible amount of historical variation.
For my list, I specifically picked “women rulers during times of crisis or great women rulers,” not just any women rulers. I think all of them had major flaws? But I can’t think of any men rulers in history who haven’t had major flaws too.
I am not saying that your points are always wrong, but rather that it is more complicated than that, historical societies vary, and women have been significant shapers of history since the beginning. Some societies have been more restrictive than others. The nature of these restrictions have varied too. Shulü Ping (also known as Yingtian) overcame an expectation that she was supposed to be buried with her dead husband, but she also belonged to a society in which women regularly participated in battle and held positions of power.
If you’re talking war specifically, well, that’s quite a bit of the list, some more actively than others, but, well, Zenobia led a war against Rome, Olympias fought for her grandson’s claim to the throne, Nzinga fought to repel the Portuguese… and let’s add Amanishakheto, who successfully repelled the Romans, Matilda of Tuscany who went in armor into battle, Trưng Trắc and Nhị who repelled the Chinese… women have done all these things “in times of war and crisis.” They are not few.
These examples varied significantly in how they dressed, from completely masculine (Hatshepsut) to “extravagantly feminine by the standards of her society.”
Oh, often, yes, and often far more than when they were alive, but that’s not always the case. Cleopatra, say, got slandered abysmally. But I wouldn’t say that, for example, Queen Elizabeth I got that kind of treatment. Might have something to do with who wrote the history books…
Queen Victoria is… complicated, given that she did preside over the height of British imperialism and also that she reigned as the power of the British monarch was substantially decreasing.
Theodora did come from an impoverished background as an actress, which in that society was considered roughly equivalent to a harlot, and she may well have actually been a prostitute at a tragically young age, though there’s not really any way to know for certain. As far as her negative historical record, a big issue here is that the main historical source on Theodora is Procopius’s Secret History, which is just as damning to her husband and co-ruler, Justinian, as he basically makes them both out to be agents of the devil.
Like everything, it depends! Razia Sultana is a particularly sad example of the kind of thing you’re talking about. Her father named her heir above all her brothers because she was the most intelligent and capable, but the rest of the ruling elite wouldn’t accept her, and she lost the struggle for her throne in the following years, even though by the sound of it she’d have been a much more competent leader had she gotten the chance.
But it doesn’t always go that way. Zenobia lost to Rome, but she ended up doing fine, retired to a countryside villa. She wasn’t notably limited by gender; she was limited by the Roman legions. Cleopatra was well-liked by the Egyptian people (less so by the Greek-speaking elites), and her tarnished reputation came from Roman accounts that also hated her for being foreign. The Trưng sisters are heroes in Vietnamese accounts.
So I’ll say that I agree that women in power have frequently faced these sorts of issues throughout history. The fact that someone can think that there were few women rulers in times of war and crisis is a testament to how misrepresented the historical record can get. But the situations are not the same, and you can’t describe them as if the same principles applied to all of them. And this really goes to show that women have been in all of these positions, have frequently altered the course of history, and have been capable of just the same range of positive and negative leadership as men have.
In the context of a choice game, the main point here is that if you can put a man in that kind of ruling position, you can have a woman there too, even if you are going for a historical piece, which most choice games aren’t. So, if by saying “there are few women rulers in times of war and crisis,” you’re implying that this is a reason to leave out the option to play a women in such roles in a historical piece, I would conclude that this is based on faulty premises. (If that’s not what you’re saying, then I’m unsure what your point is.)
Just been reading some histories of Renaissance Italy, and if you want an example of someone who was decidedly feminine but capably governed city-states and repeatedly led troops into battle while pregnant, I offer:
Had her standoff against the Borgias ended differently–had Cesare been a little slower jumping off the Forli drawbridge–Caterina might have stopped the Borgia expansion in Italy before Pope Alexander’s death did. She was regardless depicted by her contemporaries as both hero and villain, vulgar and glorious, depending on the political bent of the writer. (Needless to say, the same was true in spades of her male counterparts like Cesare Borgia.)
She also, according to the history I read, wore a breastplate designed to highlight her breasts. And if you believe Machiavelli, she flashed her vagina at her enemies to intimidate them with her shamelessness and fearlessness. Not a lot of “dressing to avoid critique” in this case. And she got the critique, but it didn’t prevent her from being an admired and effective leader and battle commander.
Sure, but overall (once you got past the struggles of her early years) Victoria was immensely respected in her time and afterward. You’d be hard pressed to find a monarch of either sex who wasn’t criticized at some point as either a tyrant or a weakling; there’s no sweet spot between the two where everyone will be happy with your rule. But England’s ruling queens were never called weaklings (once they’d consolidated their rule), and their contemporaries who admired them greatly outnumbered those who would have called Elizabeth and Victoria “shitty rulers.” I’d say Victoria’s achievements stand up well compared to those of her vastly less memorable immediate predecessors and successors.
Similarly, you’d have to dig hard to find a comparison of Elizabeth I to her successor James I/VI that favors the latter–including those by their sexist contemporaries. For every condemnation of her as a whore or tyrant, you’d find a dozen of him as a vulgar, conniving, extravagant, paranoid, pedantic, goggle-eyed Scot.
So I don’t think that
even taken proportionally. My own mental list has a lot of stars on it. If anything, the patriarchal opposition to women rulers meant that the incompetents were more likely to be weeded out, and the ones whose names we remember are more likely to have been effective.
Except in this analogy, WalMart is COG, and, as previously stated, COG only publishes games that are pitched to them. That means the writers are the ones deciding which genders are getting represented, not the company that publishes these stories. Your analogy related to the M/F genderlocks is like suggesting that the people making red shirts should be making blue shirts as well, when the reality is that the people making the red shirts are free to make any color shirt they want and chose to make red shirts.
And this whole analogy is warped when you consider that COG’s entire catalog of games is one of the few in the world that are not predominantly focused on heterosexual male protagonists. As far as I and anyone else in the community is concerned, heterosexual men have enough media to satisfy their desires of being the protagonist, and women and the LGBTQ+ community do not. What you’re essentially asking of this community is that they put aside their own desires to see themselves represented in the stories they write when other media won’t represent them, all for the sake of writing for a group that has endless representation.
Whilst I totally understand and agree with your argument, I have to admit that it would be silly if we didn’t ensure things were fair both ways. Remember a lot of that media is quite different in style and format unless we’re talking about other interactive fiction. And one only has to look at something like reader inserts where the medium is wholly female driven and trying to find Male Reader fiction on websites like AOOO is almost impossible since the two types aren’t distinguished properly.
Except the majority of entertainment media is already unfair to women and the LGBTQ+ community. It lacks widespread representation of both. There’s already an imbalance, and making forms of media that are predominantly LGBTQ+ and women-centric counters that and evens the scale. Insisting that heterocentric media have a place in women- and LGBTQ±centric media only worsens the problem
That literally means nothing. There is nothing preventing women and LGBTQ+ protagonists in any form of media other than the people making it not including them.
That is a drop in a bucket compared to mainstream media and entertainment. Mass entertainment is still largely focused on heterocentric narratives with straight men for protagonists. In fact, most of self-insert fiction is women-centric in response to the lack of women protagonists in popular media.
And, again, regardless of how you feel, you are always welcome to create your own forms of media that represent straight men, even though I strongly recommend against adding to that already-huge pile. The ability to create games with representation is one thing that draws women and LGBTQ+ writers to COG in the first place.
If the mall as a whole has twenty blue shirts but just five red shirts, and there’s one store in the mall that has three red shirts and no blue shirts, telling that one store that it should start stocking blue shirts too isn’t going to make things more fair and balanced.
Do not tone police me. I’m not upset. I’m just having a normal conversation, and nothing I said was an attack.
No, because, again, the LGBTQ+ community and women lack representation. You’re painting it so that it seems that those two groups have equal representation as straight men in media and that we’re demanding more than the other, but the reality is that straight men have waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more representation and the underrepresented groups are demanding representation to make it equal to what straight men have.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s fair to ask authors in an underrepresented group to write about an overrepresented group. Why should I? Why would I do that when I can contribute to equalizing the amount of representation my community gets instead? Why would I create an imbalance against my own community? How does that benefit me?
I think it’s fair to say that female centred representation in popular culture is increasing immensely. Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, DC, Horizon Zero Dawn and Last Of Us to name a few. LBGT representation certainly has a bit longer to go though.
As a straight male though I am naturally going to want to write and read stuff with characters like myself. Not exclusively of course, but it is increasingly unfortunate that wider media today seems to demonise straight males at time and be surprised when they don’t always take that the right way. I can definitely sympathise with wanting respect and representation when I experience that, mind!
It is, but it’s still very little compared to what straight men have and probably will be for a long time. EDIT: I also want to add that while there is certainly female and LGBTQ+ representation in every series you listed, the MAIN protagonist of nearly all those movies/games are still straight men. (Even TLOU, which I love dearly - Joel is the main protagonist in the first game and he is a straight man.)
And that’s exactly what women and LGBTQ+ readers feel. But straight men can actually fulfill that desire through multiple avenues, whereas we cannot.
1.) Not true. This “demonization” that many people who’ve made your argument before you is usually just straight men getting represented slightly less or made into antagonists the way women and LGBTQ+ characters were.
2.) Women and LGBTQ+ characters were (and sometimes still are) portrayed as either objects or stereotypes. I promise you, any issue straight men face from being represented negatively pales in comparison to how women and LGBTQ+ people are represented.
That is not at all what I’m asking. What I’m saying is that women and the LGBTQ+ community have significantly less representation than straight men, and therefore need more to match the representation of straight men.
Except a straight author writing about the LGBTQ+ community isn’t creating an imbalance because, as I stated, straight men have a mountain of representation, whereas women and the LGBTQ+ community have an anthill.
There has been an increase, though it’s been a bit up and down at times, but an increase doesn’t mean we’ve reached parity yet.
Proportionately less than they currently have, but only because the current proportion is cornering most of the market.
Heterosexuals are… not too likely to become a minority. Heterosexual males are already less than half the people, so the fact that they’re far above half the characters is something that is a significant imbalance and could stand to be redressed.
Heterosexual authors writing about LGBT characters won’t be creating an imbalance because the numbers are nowhere near close enough for this to cause an imbalance. Making things more balanced is the opposite of imbalance!
Is the percentage of Homosexuals in society supposed to be about 6% or 7% or so? Forgive me if I am wrong, that’s just a polite enquiry from something I have heard previously.
Irrelevant. We are talking about two groups - women and the LGBTQ+ community - whose combined percentages are more than the number of straight men. Also, gay men and lesbians are two identities of a broader community.
It’s a bit of an unknown, honestly. Early polling tended to come up with about 4-5% of people being gay or bi, but the total numbers have been climbing in more recent polls, particularly ones that survey millennials specifically. Probably, more people are becoming comfortable with acknowledging being gay or bi… plus there does seem to be a significant proportion of people who may have a heterosexual preference but be to some degree bi, in more of a gray area. So we’re sometimes seeing 10 or 20% in some of these more recent polls. It’s hard to say exactly where things will settle, given that we’re still in a society that doesn’t treat all orientations equally, so there’s still some bias in self-reporting. My guess is that there will be a whole lot of bisexuals, many of them with a heterosexual preference, and a substantial minority who are gay, maybe several percent, but it’s really hard to know.
True, though one shouldn’t assume that detracts from female characters in those universes. Birds of Prey is impending, A-Force will almost certainly be made into a movie by Marvel, Rey is still the core protagonist of the sequel trilogy and Michael and Tilly remain the most important characters in Star Trek: Discovery. And Ms America and Wiccan and Hulkling are pretty inevitable LBGT characters in the future MCU.
You are certainly right about probably not having the perspective some groups might have as a straight male compared to the feeling of being demonised. I just wish there were a better way of achieving equality for everyone!
Thanks! I think in the next few decades we’ll likely start to see a more equal divide between those who consider themselves exclusively straight and those who are somewhere on the Kingsley Spectrum (if that thing still exists). So you’re probably right.
How on earth is saying, to use that extended metaphor, “we like our store with red shirts and we want more red shirts now that there’s finally a good venue for red shirts” anything like “the army of red shirts is now going out and burning down all the blue shirts and chopping off the heads of everyone wearing blue shirts”? That is quite the leap!
Wanting lots and lots of female and LGBT representation so that we can redress a major imbalance isn’t going to destroy all the stuff that heterosexual males already have and isn’t even preventing heterosexual males from writing and consuming more stuff. Acting like us being protective of our representation is a slippery slope to the guillotine is frankly demeaning.
).
And she got the critique, but it didn’t prevent her from being an admired and effective leader and battle commander.
I can definitely sympathise with wanting respect and representation when I experience that, mind! 
