Pharah indentifying as a harrier jet with VTOL, clearly.
Pharah indentifying as a harrier jet with VTOL, clearly.
I may not agree with what you say but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it.
No, and that is what some of you fail to comprehend adding sexuality when it's not warranted is pointless. If it's part of the character's story sure, by all means it's important then.
Otherwise it feels like it's irrelevant and too much information. It's like if I added something really personal when introducing myself to a stranger when they didn't ask. I haven't seen anyone say they have issues with the characters being gay, the issue is why are you telling us they are gay when we don't need to know.
Again, you are missing my point. Say they make a new character and they are explaining his past like he was a secret service agent who failed to save the president from a assassin or something and then spent years tracking down said assassin. Now, he is seeking to uphold justice and that is why he fights. Oh and btw he is totally gay. See how it doesn't add anything and it's just making a character gay for no reason?
Your example would be ridiculously out of place regardless of the character's sexual orientation. It'd be out of place for any character trait, really.
"oh btw this guy is totally not gay"
"oh btw this dude curses like a sailor when he gets nervous"
"oh btw this dude is afraid of old people because they smell like death"
There are more sophisticated ways to weave a narrative and to introduce your audience to new and interesting elements of a character. You just have to think for more than two seconds.
Last edited by Magicalcrab; 2016-07-19 at 09:12 AM.
To be spending years on tracking him down, I think it was more than a crush.
There are 22 Heroes now, all with their own stories and for some their inter-personal relations will be important, there will be romantic interests, families, and loved ones. Not all need them of course. I'm kind of against the whole 'give Elsa a girlfriend thing' because I don't think she needs defining by her relationship status, she's better off single as her independence is important. But that doesn't mean that should always apply to every character ever. So I am with you on the token gay for the sake of it thing; but in this case the cast is certainly more than big enough that there's no reason why not to have such Heroes.
All that said, it'd be fucking hilarious to see all the whiners refusing to play 76 or Reaper because they're gay and they don't want people to think they themselves are.
...and realize these characters don't have normal lives where sexuality would be remotely relevant. Their dreams and hopes are about saving/destroying the world, not about marriage and kids.
They're superheroes and supervillains with magic technology who fight for random objectives. Their backstories are there to build the world around them, not the world inside them.
For one, they can't be in a relationship with any other playable character because chances are they're going to be murdering each other in the game, which means only characters from outside the game are potential love interests, which makes them and their relationship are irrelevant, which means Blizzard shouldn't waste time writing about Tracer's girlfriend when they could be writing about the Omnic Crisis, Talon or any other important story element that may actually benefit the game eventually.
They're not super-heroes though, and that's kind of the point. Widowmaker very much did have a normal life with a Husband - she wasn't Overwatch, and she wasn't Talon, she was just a civilian - and Ana had a kid. They're technologically, cybernetically or genetically enhanced, but otherwise generally 'normal' and have lives away from Overwatch. Sure, 76 is a street mercenary, and that's fine. But shit, even Winston, a Gorilla from the Moon misses his father figure, and Bastion and Zenyetta have their own connections to nature and conciousness respectively, so there's clearly a lot more to them than being killing machines - the former being supposedly literally that.
That's a very narrow scope of what kind of stories you can tell with these characters. Even if that were the case, sexuality is not exclusively about settling down in a stable relationship. In a setting of heroes and villains and train robberies and terrorism, a character's sexuality can certainly still affect how they view the world around them. It can influence how they feel about the Omnic Crisis and human/robot rights, their decision-making process under pressure, or it can even make them vulnerable (or resistant) to seduction or manipulation or whatever-have-you.
That's me thinking for two seconds, and I'm awful at creative ideas. Sexuality is just another tool in a talented writer's toolbox, and its uses are pretty broad and relative. My crab-based friend on the previous page put it quite nicely:
Why do you care? Are you going to send them a late wedding gift? Oh thats right, they aren't real people so its not necessary to apply the rules for living people to them. Ahh shit, I guess you'll just have play the game instead of pretend their fictional sexuality matters.