I like being freaked out. I wasn't enjoying Kaysen turning huge though. Especially since the locale of going down and then appearing on top of a tower doesn't really make any sense.
" Kaysen sure did hang out with them an awful lot. He was plotting... something. If it means they're the main characters of Deadly Premonition 2, I'm all for it. "
Edit: Also the way the voices faded out the further you got away from the speaker was amazing. It gave it a real 3d feel to everything, and made the camera feel like its own individual person. WHICH IT WAS. More games should learn this trick, it's really helps immersion.
The podcast that had the interview with SWERY mentioned that there were scenes there that was worth watching, so I'm hoping for more details if anyone can recall. Thanks.
There are so many insane hetero white male characters out there, anyway. Honestly, it wouldn't matter to me what gender, race or sexuality characters were as long as the plot wasn't always completely dependent upon that respective gender, race or sexuality.
You admit my point about... sighs I'm repeating myself... the over prevalence of the trope in media right?
it wouldn't matter to me what gender...etc
Why are you restating this again? Yes clearly it doesn't matter to you... BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT GAY. If you are gay, and you're stereotyped as insane, then yes you would care. If you are black and you are stereotyped as a criminal, you would care. If you were female, and you were stereotyped as bad at math, you would care!!! Basically, *you* not caring, is 100% irrelevant, because you are not the victim.
I didn't say anything about diseases. I don't see where you get twisting your words from. I'm talking about you not caring about the representation of minorities in media.
I haven't seen Black in America, but going by the website, I wouldn't call that a positive portrayal either. Ushah is a positive portrayal. Though it would be more positive if he wasn't single.
Let me go back to the rape thing again as an analogy....
First let me restate the crux of your point as I understand it.
You wish we live in a post-racial, post-sexuality, world where we are all colorblind and people's sexualities and racial backgrounds are about as interesting as their, i dunno, hair color, though some people could be pretty anal about that too. And things like people's sexualities, race, gender, and their representation in media should not be pointed out, criticized, because those are the things that causes race/etc/ism. And by ignoring it, it'll go away.
My analogy: Back in the day, and still the case in many countries, Japan, etc, people thought of rape and sexual abuse the same way. They made the whole thing shameful, taboo. You can't talk about it without embarrassment, without being thought of as a pervert. And if people don't discuss it, it'll go away, right? Of course it did, FOR THE MEN. Like any other issue for unaffiliated people, if it's not brought up it's not real. But for the actual victims, it's reality, and without coverage, oversight and people caring, it gets only worse.
This is true for whether a real crime or more ambiguous problems like stereotypes.
I get that the knee-jerk reaction of any group in power to the requests of any minority group is the big mental IGNORE button. But at least be rational and realize that's what you're doing.
Also to be honest, I didn't read the entire thread before posting, and I was responding to you as a smart person.
But I just read:
You know, I'm not discounting the scientific aspect of transgender studies, but the fact of the matter is that these people are born with the bodies of their true genders. Their belief that they're of the complete opposite gender doesn't negate this fact. I'm not trying to sound insensitive. I just find it very hard to believe that someone can't take their physical qualities at face value and realize that they're not the gender that they believe they are
And now I realize that I've totally wasted my time, because you're an idiot. Clearly you think your 'beliefs' are the most important, and that what you find hard to conceptualize must be false right?
You should realize that your beliefs are not only completely worthless since not only are you not an expert, you're totally ignorant about these issues!
To respond to the first part of your post, here's a reprint of my first post in this post:
One of the things that people outside of liberal circles do not get about liberal criticism is that people from minority groups usually are not arguing against a particular depiction, saying it's wrong or bad or what not, it's rarely that.
What they are arguing for... well as someone once adroitly put it to me, it's not about the conceit, but about the representation. There are far too many psycho gays as a percentage of gays appearing in the media as compared to the appearance of psycho gays as a percentage of real gays.
It's probably not inappropriate for the particular work which is being discussed, but the frequency the archetype is used is misaligned with reality, and so in the sense of a meta narrative, it's problematic; and symptomatic of prejudice. Though it's slightly annoying to hear all this whining about it. The best solution is probably to write your own stories, or generally do things to increase the attention on positive portrayals of gays rather than whine about the negative ones.
I was totally into Thomas' character, and he's clearly a fag. Love-G, remember? Now that I know Thomas the way that he is, I can't imagine him as being like anything else.
In general terms I agree with what you say, and as I said, I support Thomas' character. But you're not accepting/understanding/responding to what is actually my point, which is the over-prevalence of the trope in the meta-narrative.
On the second part of your post:
I also agree with what you're saying. But perhaps this time my point wasn't very clearly made.
You absolutely do need to state the character's sexuality if your intent is to combat the psycho gay trope. But obviously if that's not the intent, then feel free not to state the sexuality!
I couldn't care less whether a character is black or white, gay or straight, etc. All I care about is the overall experience.
I get that you don't care about how gay people are represented in the media. I get it alright. But other people do.
You might start to care if one day it starts to come into vogue to have very few hetero white male characters in games, the casts are mostly all black and female and gay, and roughly 40% of the hetero white males are insane harpies, and all the rest are supporting characters of no consequence. <- somebody should make this game. I would play it.
Obviously the person in power does not feel the need to change the status quo. They think it's a non issue, and whatever's happening now is fine, the way it should be, the natural order of the world, and so on. As a person also in a privileged position, I also don't really give a crap about these liberal issues, but the arguments of the liberals are very valid, and just because you can't 'feel' them or experience what they're talking about, doesn't make them irrelevant.
This reminds me back in the day when the laws for punishing rape/DV/gender crimes were very lax. And male lawmakers wouldn't touch those issues, because those issues are scary and sexist and they actually couldn't feel the need. Well no kidding. It took feminists to actually get those laws passed. I'm not drawing an equivalence in terms of the issues, but the attitudes of those in power are pretty much the same.
"Don't care" is not a badge of honor, it's an indication of selfishness. Yes I'm selfish and I don't care.
Edit: You can also check out my post in the SWERY's Women problems thread (page5). It's pretty much the same thing.
You don't need to delve deeply into the sexuality of a character in order to have a deeper understanding of that character.
I think your entire post hinges on this important point, and could not disagree more. This is incredibly naive, if you think that a person's sexuality does not in a great way define who a person is. And frankly this is something only a white hetero male would say. Clearly your sexuality is not relevant, because the sexuality of any person considered to be the norm is not really fuel for discussion. On the other hand, being different, being a minority in any way, hugely shapes a person's psyche, warps their experiences in a way 'normal' people find hard to comprehend, and makes him or her a very different animal.
I have a friend who is blind. In an attempt to show that I would treat her as all my other friends, I told that that her being blind "doesn't matter to me". As you can imagine, that was the wrong thing to say. Clearly it doesn't matter to me, but it matters to her. It matters a lot.
You have a second subpoint.
@kevinski said:
For a character to be considered gay, does that character's sexuality need to be exposed?
Very much so. I like this argument from a theoretical context. But it's just not reality. There are very few to no people in the world who would assume that a character, not hinted at being gay, is gay. Heterosexuality is the norm, This is not a debatable point. Even if the author intends to depict a positive non-trope gay person, if the reader does not take it that way, then it is not a depiction of a positive non-trope gay person. Despite what the author may say, when we talk about the media, we're talking about what most people in the world think. Not just the author. Though I think it would be great if the author comes out and says it.
For instance, Ushiah might be gay. But run a poll and see how many people think of him that way.
The fact of the matter is that the psycho gay trope is overused. There's no way around that.
The only way to counteract and lessen the effect of the over-prevalence of negative gay characters is to reveal and positively depict gay characters.
It is probably no coincidence that Western European/Northern American, heterosexual, middle-class white men are generally unaware of their identity: they represent the "norm" against which everything is measured.
Nice job on the massive spoilers for Psycho. It makes a lot more sense to put spoilers for things other than DP in spoiler tags than for DP in spoiler tags on the DP forum. Ugh.
On Thomas.
One of the things that people outside of liberal circles do not get about liberal criticism is that people from minority groups usually are not arguing against a particular depiction, saying it's wrong or bad or what not, it's rarely that.
What they are arguing for... well as someone once adroitly put it to me, it's not about the conceit, but about the representation. There are far too many psycho gays as a percentage of gays appearing in the media as compared to the appearance of psycho gays as a percentage of real gays.
It's probably not inappropriate for the particular work which is being discussed, but the frequency the archetype is used is misaligned with reality, and so in the sense of a meta narrative, it's problematic; and symptomatic of prejudice. Though it's slightly annoying to hear all this whining about it. The best solution is probably to write your own stories, or generally do things to increase the attention on positive portrayals of gays rather than whine about the negative ones.
I was totally into Thomas' character, and he's clearly a fag. Love-G, remember? Now that I know Thomas the way that he is, I can't imagine him as being like anything else.
I remember the podcast person talking about missed opportunities. I think those opportunities are political rather than actually story relevant. I think him being a normal victim along with the rest would've been a win for the positive depiction of gays column, but a loss for the overall drama of DP.
I think the 'problem' with Thomas is an overall lack of depth. There were no conversations with him to flesh out his back story, like we had for George. So there's no real explanation for why he acts like what he does. Being a homosexual in rural US must still be a serious trial, but we don't get into that. For a game with a fantastic, mind blowingly interesting take on gender, look no further than Persona 4's Kanji, one of the best characters in recent video games.
I can only hope in the future that more games follow along the lines of Kanji and give us more great introspection of queer characters, or gender in general.
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