This is really well put, and I feel like it’s what I see when I hear people talk about “equal opportunity mocking” as if a piece of media is making fun of straight and non-straight people and white and non-white people in the same way. When your identity is perceived as the default than people just don’t make fun of it the same way they do other identities–mainstream media doesn’t have content where the joke is that a guy is straight. Maybe once in a blue moon there’ll be a joke about how a guy is white, but I hardly ever see it, as opposed to times where the joke is that a guy is an ethnic or sexual minority. Even what was listed above–anime fans, Republicans, nerds, those things aren’t synonymous with straight and white.
And frankly even if something does have the same ratio of straight white jokes to bigoted ones, that ignores the years and years of media where bigoted jokes were normal and the norm. If media were made in a vacuum, that might work, but as is I’ve seen too many things where I and people like me were the butt of the joke to really accept that “but look I made fun of your oppressors in the same way” is enough to put us on the same level
Yeah that sounds like once in a blue moon to me. And also sounds like it’s still periphery to my point, which was that the ability to occasionally see a joke about our oppressors doesn’t cancel out their years and years of oppression, including in media.
Digging too deep into race is off-topic, so I’m gonna drop it, I just figured it should be mentioned alongside LGBTA+ stuff wrt “equal opportunity mocking”
Why bring it up if jokes can’t ever do that? Why does it need to be involved in seeing a joke? And then actually coming up with a disproportionate amount of jokes against the norm and making them funny, I mean we mostly laugh at a abnormal situation in regards to stuff like that right?
Reeeaaally late to the party here, but this is an issue that’s come up in two games I’m working on (one ChoiceScript and one visual novel).
What I’ve had difficulty with in the ChoiceScript game, which I’m solo-authoring, is that if the ROs are orientation-locked, there has to be a lot of them in order to give multiple choices for MCs with restrictive preferences. I’m working with six in this game - two male, two female, one nonbinary human and one AI who just finds the whole idea of gender odd and vaguely amusing. Players with preference for a particular binary gender have two options if both those characters are bi, but potentially only one if one or both of those characters aren’t.
Six is already a bigger number than I really wanted to go with because it matters to me to make their personalities and paths with the MC distinct; any more and that would be completely untenable. In the VN, I have a collaborator, and our cast is still probably way too large, but they’re all at least characters whose concepts were solidly fleshed-out before we decided to make a game, so the huge cast is at least vaguely reasonable, and the ROs represent a spectrum of explicit orientations.
What I’m fairly solidly decided on for my CS game is that all the ROs will be explicitly bi - I generally find “player-sexual” romances to be a cop-out and I want all MCs interested in pursuing a romantic subplot at all to have at least two options. But, I’ve been perusing this thread with interest to see how others prefer to handle this sort of thing (and what handling people prefer to encounter).
Well, there is a pretty big difference between a show made by a minority group, and one made by the majority, that just makes fun of minorities.
@Daenyx: That sounds pretty good. If you had more ROs, I might suggest trying to make some exclusively gay (or, I guess, straight), but with such a small pool, keeping them all bi is probably for the best. Good luck with the game.
Ugh, I hate that trope.
Dumbledore may be an example, though again I believe Rowling did not in fact decide he always was gay early on but only did so when her series got popular enough. In any case intentional or not he fits this trope.
The more modern romantic comedies and high school “feel-good” movies are guilty of indeed letting everyone but the lone gay or lesbian “friend” pair up in the end. On the other hand the gay friend will never flirt, unless it is used as a joke, never pursue anyone and never do so much as kiss another guy, again unless it is a joke, such In the one movie whose title I don’t recall where the mc uses said friend to pretend to be gay to get closer to the girl he wants.
I’ve never actually known those roles to be played (or written) by gay guys. I do know of one instance where an actually gay actor was rejected from playing one of them, because he appeared to be “too normal” at the auditions.
Again, you’re weird. A self-respecting villain or even anti-hero never apologizes, especially not to cute guys he fancies. Not in that messed-up world.
I’m a mess when it comes to British versus American influences, at school and university they taught British style English but I’ve let a lot of American English slip-in thanks to real life and the internet.
I fully support making hunky straight guys the comedy-relief “sidekicks”. Or just cute guys in general, cause I’m sick of always seeing those roles filled by short people, gay and lesbian people or Hollywood “nerds” or just plain looking people (at least by Hollywood standards).
With regards to “equal opportunity mocking” and all it entails… I also just really don’t much like making fun of people based on what group they belong to in the first place? It still ends up boiling down to stereotyping, and when you’re joking, for example, that “straight people are so __,” that can lead to the idea “non-straight people are not __,” and it can, oddly, end up becoming a badge of pride for straight people that they conform to these stereotypes at the same time they’re purportedly laughing at them. “Haha look at how straight men are such poor dressers” can lead to both “yeah, I’m so straight, I don’t care about my clothes because I’m not like those gay people,” and “you don’t dress well enough to be gay.”
When you get down to it, nothing defines sexual orientation other than sexual orientation itself, and there’s not much you can do with “haha, he’s so straight, hes… attracted to women and not attracted to men… lol…”
I would much rather see these people getting mocked for their bigotry itself, because that’s what the actual problem is, and it’s not going to reinforce stereotypes that ultimately harm the minorities much more than the supposedly-mocked majorities.
I think Dumbledore makes sense as written, but I’d’ve liked to have seen some gay material among the other students… even if we were adhering purely to statistics, with the amount of heterosexual goings-on we see, one would expect something. (As a side note, of the minor characters, I think Justin Finch-Fletchley is the likeliest to be gay, but this isn’t canon… I’m mostly just basing this on the fact that he’s the only male student who seemed susceptible to Gilderoy Lockhart…) I think people are sometimes unaware of just how many little references to heterosexuality there can be in the background, in terms of things like just mentioning a married couple, who takes whom to a dance, who’s giggling about whom… it’s all over the place. And, moving this to the topic of “gay representation in ChoiceScript games”… that’s another place to look when including gay representation. It’s not exactly an adequate replacement for important gay characters, but it can mean a lot, help make it seem like more of a part of the world, and just make the predominance of heterosexuality a little less overwhelming.
That sounds like a villain plot…[quote=“idonotlikeusernames, post:228, topic:20429”]
Again, you’re weird. A self-respecting villain or even anti-hero never apologizes, especially not to cute guys he fancies. Not in that messed-up world.
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But kidnapping is mean
The word that always throws me off is “exercise,” which you’d think would be spelled “exercize” in the US, but isn’t so our spelling reform actually made spelling harder
Yeah, but he’s got to make up for the that first time when my mc didn’t even properly kidnap Alex, since he was just a target of opportunity and a hostage. This time it will be a kidnap plot that’s all about kidnapping Alex since my mc cannot let that cutie get away with the impression that he’s incompetent because of that idiot “Slaughterhouse”, now can he?
There is definitely gay content in Riverdale. It actually made me slightly uncomfortable, but I don’t really like watching anyone in situations like that unless it’s personal time lmao. Not really my cuppa when I’m watching a murder mystery show. And Kevin totally isn’t sassy, imho, so we gucci on that front, too.
My mom says that no woman is truly straight, because we wouldn’t compare our boobs and butts to one another’s if we weren’t about that girl on girl action, deep in the most hidden parts of ourselves. Also, the biggest consumer of girl on girl media is straight women, iirc. So, there’s that.
Now I need to come up with a joke about this that doesn’t involve how well-endowed the guy is. I think part of the reason jokes don’t involve being straight men is because, for the last several decades, being a gay male has been equated with being a woman, which is obviously inferior to being a man. So there aren’t really jokes about straight men that don’t involve femininity. I’d like to see someone come up with one that isn’t just insulting masculinity. I want to see a joke that specifically targets straight men. I see straight women jokes, gay men, gay women, bi people. I just want a joke about straight dudes (regardless of race). Is that so much to ask?
One day, I’ll finish Ilyaaren. You guys’ll see. You’ll all see. then we’ll have exclusively gay, exclusively pan, exclusively straight, ugh it’ll be beautiful. whispers not to like super advertise, but i’ve written all the romance and friendship scenes for all characters. i just have to write the stuff that leads up to it, then everyone can try them out yaaay /whispers
To be fair, it’s sort of the “automatic” thing and has been for uncounted millennia. The amazing thing is that we’re actively trying to move past it, as a society (at least, the West is – the East still has some work to do, but that gets into the culture and conservatism of the Middle and Far East, which definitely isn’t a topic for right now). Things have gotten a lot better, but there’s still a ways to go. The fact that shows like Riverdale can be so, insanely popular and involve two men kissing on more than one occasion – and having a fantastic plotline for the two of them, to boot (ahem sorry glee but u got boring after the first season), is just such a fantastic thing to see. I’m so excited about it and will sing the praises of Riverdale forever. (Also, re: Jughead being Ace/Aro – he’s only ace in the 2015 iteration of the comics. He has always been into girls, at least moderately, for the rest of the comics. To assume he was going to be ace because of that comic, instead of being however the producers of the show saw him…was following the old to assume makes an ass out of u and me adage.)
By that measure, I’ve seen a lot more heterosexual men obsessed over talking about, comparing, and drawing a certain anatomical feature than gay men
I think it varies a lot by individual, anyway, just judging from conversations I’ve had
I’ve certainly seen lots of times when guys being gay seemed to be the joke in and of itself, nothing else to it… I still remember a production of Twelfth Night at my college, where, during the curtain call, the two lead women kissed, and the two lead men kissed. The former got a big cheer… the latter got laughter… this was… unsettling…
I got jokes about homophobic straight men…
“He’s such a homophobe that he wears a blindfold in the shower so he won’t see a naked man!”
Yay!
Oftentimes, but it does depend on the where and when. Certainly the Ancient Greeks weren’t shy about this, including background mentions. And there’s no shortage of gay content in Chinese literature before Western influence… and sometimes it’s a little hard to tell, due to pronouns not being gendered (until recently, and that only in the written language…).
I am hopeful at the signs that this may be changing for the better in more recent times, however
Hi
I’d rather give Alex a turn at kidnapping me
I’m gonna have such cute gay and bi guys with so much romance and excitement and even poly possibilities
…Hey, I’m a slow writer, that’s all
Pretty much my experience with mainstream portrayals of gay men too, unfortunately. Whenever we are featured it is either as an “informed attribute only” or a joke or both. Still I guess it is progress in that a few decades ago we weren’t featured in the mainstream media at all.
If it will get my mc out of super-school I guess that could possibly work too.
Agh…the…anticipation…is…killing…me.
If you say so. [quote=“ParrotWatcher, post:236, topic:20429”]
Well, whichever one
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I know only of the Citadel one with the separated twins.
They’re both active! The Explosion is the one with the really in-depth romances. I focus more on gameplay and gameplay mechanics with Citadel, and tbh that’s what’s taking me so long. When I get bored with one, I work on the other.
it exists! I have to double check his sexuality, but I think he’s one of my gay options. Annnnd I just double-checked, and he is.
lol at dat formatting tho.
I think it’s so important that romances be sexuality-locked. I’ve always hated player-sexual romances. They feel a little bit cheapened for me; I’ll still play them, but, to me, they feel like the character isn’t allowed to be themselves. A lot of people on the forums disagree with me on that, but, y’know, I’ll do me. I’m slowly getting this out there, and one day it’ll be done, and probably for free bc lol y’all gon’ have played the full thing anyway, so why charge.
Well, I’d say that “all ROs are bisexual” is different from (and far better than) “all ROs are playersexual”, and while I would agree with you in principle (heck, that’s why I started this thread), I do have experience of several WIPs where giving the ROs their own sexualities ended up leaving gay players with far poorer options.
A lot of that depends on opinion. There are definite cases where the author doesn’t put as much effort into the gay romances as they do into the heterosexual ones, but I think the real question here is why you feel that it’s a poorer option. Did it feel like the author didn’t actually want to write it? Did it feel like the author put less time into it? Or did you just not like the romantic option(s)?
That’s a big thing. I know it’s important to have romantic options that you like, but the reality is that not all romantic options are going to be liked by everyone. For instance, I couldn’t stand Iron Bull, Sera, Josephine, or Blackbeard (or whatever his name was) in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Two of those were for women only, one of whom was specifically lesbian-only. A lot of people liked all of those romantic options and felt fully satisfied by the storylines. I loved Dorian and was quite upset that he was male-locked, but I respected that.
So, the real question is: do you feel that the poorer options are half-assed or do you feel that they aren’t as interesting, generally speaking, because you tend to prefer the characters written as straight?
That sounds like a villain plot…[quote=“idonotlikeusernames, post:228, topic:20429”]
so our spelling reform actually made spelling harder 
no worries.
