I can't stand this woke-BS in fantasy-franchises anymore, whether games, movies or series. Beside that: Denying biology while glorifying a mental disorder does not mean that rainbow-farting unicorns are real.
The trans character in Inquisition was equally BS. She exsisted solely for pandering to the trasgender movement. Qunari that were very zealous in following their Qun to the point when someone diverted from the path became a pariah suddenly were telling you that "It doesn't matter bud, you can be whatever you want" was bs. It's just people in 2014 weren't that aware of the culture war that was brewing so many gave it a pass. Spoiler, they shouldn't have done that.
I didn't give it a pass. I dropped the game. The writing was on the wall with Inquisition but so many people seem to forget that. None of this is surprising.
We knew. It's why it only sold 6 million copies. That 12 million number just happens to be the number they gave for total sales of the franchise. Now they are claiming it sold 12 million by itself.
It was actually the other way around. Da4 was in development before both. They stopped veilguard ( then dreadwolf) at least 3 times, from scratch cause they had to take people off to help with andromeda and again for anthem. Which makes it even more egregious for what we got.
@@reagenlionel Y'all seem to be confused. The stories that came out afterward was that it was Anthem that killed ME:A. Anthem was supposed to be a live service endless money train so the suits were willing to kill the Mass Effect IP in order to make it happen.They wasted so much time, money and talent on Anthem that it bled over to DA:Dreadwolf also. Anthem was the infected patient zero that killed Bioware.
@@Zayphar EA made the decision to pull the more experienced staff from Andromeda and effectively left it for the Bioware B team (some were even interns) Then, they did it again mid development for Anthem and sent them all to work on Dragon Age. You're correct about the waste of time and them sinking too money into it, but it wasn't necessary Bioware messing up as it was EA screwing them over...which they have a bad habit of doing.
On veilguards steam page, the very first tag was lgbtq+. I instantly hit the ignore button. I was born in 1991, i was playing unreal tournament in 2000.
Honestly dragon age origins was so incredible I cannot believe what they did to such a fascinating series. At this point writing a fan fic will likely be more true to the other games than veilguard. Look forward to seeing what the people who made bioware great come up with next. I've heard a lot of them work at Larian now. Hopefully their next game will be even better than bg3 now that they will make games in their own setting.
The high scores have pronouns in their bios. Akillup is woke. Thats why he left out the poltical pandering in the game. He showed his ideology when he didnt review Hogwarts.
Ea has just committed one of the largest examples of review fabrication in gaming history in the same year as the largest game flop in history concord.
I do like your art pieces and appreciate that you did do additional manual work to get them just right. I think you should have kept the skirt on your She-Ra picture, it adds that extra layer of cuteness that makes She-Ra appealing to girls. Have you guys seen the other Netflix He-Man series? It is a 3D animated show for kids that reimagines He-Man for a modern audience, not in the progressive woke way but in the way that franchises like Transformers or TMNT get a new series every couple of years. It is an action adventure following a classic good vs evil story. You should give it a chance. It is clear that the creators just wanted to make a good show.
1:48:00 How do you show that a character is gay without overtness? If there is no overtness, the character just acts like a normal person and nobody will even know they are gay, but ESG forces you to have visible representation.
There’s symbolism and hinting, but that doesn’t make it empirically provable. Instead, only the people looking for it believe it. Look at the Sherlock tv show, or Supernatural, the hints and theories are there for a reason, for that niche audience (not the modern one)
People have asked the question, "If you replace all the parts of a hammer, is it still the same hammer?" The answer is "No, it's a different hammer." ...And this is a different bioware.
Just about the Dragon Age characters: Krem in Inquisition was a man and joined the Tevinter army but there he was found out as trans and had to flee the country, but he still wanted to be a warrior and thus joined up with Iron Bull (a Qunari spy acting as a mercenary) and his company, the Chargers. Iron Bull did not just accept Krem the way he was but he also had female fighting personnel in his company.
I am a fervent believer in freedom of expression. I might hate what you are saying but I will die fighting for your *right* to say it. It is only when our morals are tested that we prove whether we really hold them or merely pay them lip-service.
Oh, I have to go back and play Dragon Age: Origins again. Such a good game and I love the lore. Might be time for some magic related rambling. If you play as a mage in Origins you begin in The Tower, the Circle of Magi. Being a mage means having a very strong connection to the Fade. However, the Fade is not just the world of magic and dreams, it's also a world of demons. Until a mage has completed the Harrowing he is limited to The Tower. "You know what's more interesting than that? Apostates. Mages outside of the Tower. That's illegal, you know." - Alistair "You did not read that in a book somewhere, did you? I hope the small letters did not strain you overmuch." - Morrigan, in response The Harrowing is a test where they use lyrium to project your mind into the Fade where you are to defeat a demon. Because if you can't, you will always be at risk of being taken over and becoming an abomination. But no worries, the templars are right there to cut you down in case that happens during the Harrowing! If you do not wish to take the test, there is an alternative. You can choose to become tranquil. Cutting off your connection to the Fade. Freeing you from demonic possession, magic, dreams and emotion. A magical lobotomy, if you will. It does mean you can handle raw lyrium more safely, just like the dwarves, though. Dwarves living underground actually adapted to the lyrium rich environment. They can't became mages, can't dream (Grey Wardens and their darkspawn hive mind visions don't count) and are able to do "Enchantment? Enchantment!"
The twilight vampires are not in fact "gay". It's not heteronormative either though. I lost all respect for the series when the love triangle was resolved by the werewolf deciding he was in love with the protagonists daughter now instead of her, supernaturally explained pedbait is still pedbait. Please stop defending twilight, Shad, some of us have actually read it too. Female fantasy is almost always degenerate, even when it was explicitly written not to be.
Twilight: Instead of blood, vampires are made of crystals and break apart because we aimed this trash at the young teen market and cant show blood. The lore is that simple Shad.
I think it’s more that the Meyer vampires are frozen, so they’d be made of ice instead of crystal, but actual ice is really fragile and super-breakable monsters aren’t any fun. There are a lot of fire/ice motifs throughout the books. The vampires aren’t cold like room temperature dead bodies, but ice cold. And frozen blood doesn’t flow.
Didn't have time to make the superchat, but I did want to respond to Mike Miller's comments about gays and transgendered people in media being always subversive. Personally, I think its a bit too far to simply assume that to be the case every time. My take on it is that it comes down to the creators and their intentions with the media they're creating. Not so much the media itself (in fact I consider it irrelevant to the question of whether or not something is woke). If a woke person made something non-woke, I still don't want to give them money on account that it will be giving it to someone who hates my guts. And Woke people make it easily known who they are through the obnoxiousness of their behavior online. When it comes to people who aren't being obnoxious or making their political opinions known, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. If for example Shad includes a gay or transgendered character in his eventual sequel to Shadow of the Conqueror, I wouldn't consider it to be woke or subversive because of who the author is. Knowing what I know about Shad, he'll never do it to appeal to the woke crowd and I can trust that this inclusion will be a benefit to the story.
Remember that every word on the page is deliberately chosen and when we do literary analysis we have to treat them all like they are important and deliberate. So when we are shown a character who is completely normal, but gay, what is the purpose of showing us that? And that is a complex question because the author genuinely may not have any purpose, it was just a moments whim, or a way to make a character stand out. And yet, the message "being gay is normal" is still a political message, even if its a pretty chill one these days. In almost all fiction where it appears a character is gay for no obvious reason, the message is "in this world, we don't care about that". Which is fine, I suppose. But why is that a point that helps us to understand this world? It presupposes that we, the reader, do care about that. And in turn, it is subversive in a small way to challenge what the author perceives as our views. Think about Heinlein's views on sex, which are... Out there. Dude was a proper libertarian, and holy crap he loved to be provocative. And he created a bunch of really odd thought experiments, like if sci-fi technology could remove the risks associated with incest, is there still a reason to make incest a taboo? In another story, a character starts out as an 11 year old girls, gets magically aged up, and she hooks up with an adult guy she knew as a child. Heinlein basically asks why that's wrong since the girl is now literally of legal age, and thus surely society cannot judge them. Heinlein literally was beng subversive in all these. Not in the sense that he wanted to change the world, but he did have the view that taboos were harmful and that our arguments for them don't hold up to scrutiny. And that returns us to the start - Everything put there is there for a reason. It doesn't have to be a big overt thing that stands out and is core to the point of the work. But it's something that words were used on, a limited budget of words. When something is being dropped in just to tell us that actually this fantasy setting is unexpectedly progressive, that to me has to be subversive. Slightly, but still. Because it is just a virtue signal. Why do we need to know about someone's sexuality at all if it doesn't change anything about the story or how they act. There is an inversion of this we see in grittier works though, where the gravelly misanthrope comes across someone whose gay, and just doesn't care because it doesn't effect him. And that I don't see as subversive because it characterises the person being told. I'm thinking of Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, or Turner in Count Zero. They come across gay characters and we learn what THEY think of those people (they shrug) rather than what this society thinks. In both cases, we see characters are gay because it does matter - One has to break up with his boyfriend and flee to keep him safe from the mole, the other is talking about her daughter and partner on the night before a dangerous mission, which shows she is nervous and she's not cut from the same cloth as Turner. This IS an inversion though. Its dramatically impactful because the audience expects that the characters might be judgemental. But it turns out they are both professionals who have seen it all, and they don't care, because they (like most people today) know it makes no difference to their work. That's useful and smart writing. We show the characters something non-normative, and they react organically. And this is the thing about normative conventions in narrative and story telling. When someone says "I got married just before we left for the war..." we assume the speaker is male, that they married a female. Because that is just the normal arrangement. This doesn't challenge our understanding of this world, even if we've never spoken about it before. We don't need an explanation. Because it is normal. It doesn't really matter what we think should be "normal" or not. It matters what actually is observably normal; what most people actually do. When you take the time to write out something non-normative (ie, that we wouldn't have ever assumed was there by ourselves) then it becomes an iteration of Chekhov's Gun. You've drawn my attention to the gun hanging on the wall, so it really does need to be fired, or at least play a role in the plot. If you put it out there and don't use it to do something, it's a dangling purposeless narrative strand. So in that sense, "gay for no reason" either has to be bad writing (ie, gun not fired) or it has to be subversive in some small way (ie, it achieves a virtue signal). Now, I'm not hard line on this stuff. I like a colourful cast of characters. I like that various henchmen and women feel different. There's a reason why out of the Fellowship, the two humans have huge plot importance to set them apart from each other, but the elf and the dwarf (who look and act very differently) are kinda just bros who happened to be there at the time. The thing with the gays is that (pardon the bluntness) they look like normal people. Red Sonia looks very different to Conan, and the world will treat her differently, obviously, because she's obviously not the same type of character. But gay-Conan, who is a big beefcake bro, but who just happens to be the gay barbarian is going to be treated the same as Conan. Black Conan and Elf Conan and Old Conan are all different in meaningful ways. Gay Conan is just Conan unless we are specifically exploring his sex life. And when you are a writer who doesn't specifically want to do this stuff... Why would you put it in? Why include an extraneous element that doesn't achieve anything other than just... Because you can. That has to either be pandering or subversive. Maybe not in a huge way. But still, thats it.
I suppose with LGB, the problem is there's not really a point to include it unless you want to write about LGB plotlines, since it's an otherwise invisible trait. Trans at least you could say is a part of visual character design, but even there you can make androgynous characters that aren't trans (or not related to the movement, anyway). So much of that inclusion is just a virtue signal unless you're writing romance, or some form of sci fi or fantasy where nonbinary/non sexually dimorphic species actually exist in-world.
To be fair. It's a pattern. Most of the self insert trash we are getting is done by them. The disease is progressivism. And they entered gaming to subvert it, just like films and the rest of society.
I’m surprised Ubisoft or one of these other woke companies hasn’t reached out to Mike to hire him to be the next female lead in there game. He has the jaw line and long hair for it.
pffft twilight... A vampire from Kizumonogatari is even worse, they pretty much have instant Regeneration from being cleaved in half etc if they are well-fed
A he-man game would be so fun, it could work for so many genres, a tournament fighter, a game like Star Wars Battlefront or a hero shooter , a Soulslike or Action adventure or a full on rpg would be best tho
Still remembering when Baldur's Gate came out in 1998. Bioware was the best, their Infinity Engine was best. I remember all the games from back then. I always thought Dragon Age 1 was their last pearl. This development in gaming industry is no longer just annoying but worrying. A fantasy world is a fantasy world. It should not mirror the real world. It should not be political. I'm a tolerant person but I demand good stories and good gameplay and interesting chars and fantasy races that are not a shallow copy of some real movements. Having homosexual options in RPGs is fun. I am a hetero woman but playing a hot male char who is romancing a hot male char is entertaining for me. I know many men love hot lesbians. Why not? This should be possible in any RPGs but not forced or even obvious because many ppl like playing straight. So transgender ppl usually can relate to being male or female chars and can play whatever they like. And I suggest non-binary ppl can use their fantasy and create and relate to a fantasy char like everybody else. If developers want non-binary chars in their games they have to come up with a race of intelligent slugs to be believable. Nobody would probably mind that. I'm 40 years old and have always been a gamer girl, which was something very special when I was a teenager because there were only boys. And yet, the games were so much better.
he jokin yes ? vampires in anime not stronger than any lame vampire in movies ? ever heard of alucard ? anime hellsing ? he obviously not now anime XDXDXDXDXD that amused me thx 💗
No sword is as sharp as a razor blade. For good reason, too, Mike. A super sharp edge breaks down very easy. And He-Man does indeed have some surprisingly dark and mature episodes. They take adult themes and break them down for kids, and they always remembered there is going to be adults in the room too. Quite the opposite to the horrible Gay Ray tumbler fiction.
There are a lot of things one could say, but it is pretty telling that the first actual criticism they make of the actual game is "the player character can be trans". God forbid a role-playing game have options for role-playing. This is all just kind of pathetic, queer representation has always been part of Dragon Age, Veilguard is just an improvement on previous games in that regard. They have to tie themselves in knots trying to argue why Krem being a trans man is kind of justified but Taash being non-binary isn't, and in doing so, demonstrate that they believe trans people are pressured into their identities, which is deeply bigoted, and also forget that Krem was presenting as a man before he met the Iron Bull. This is because "wokeness" is conceptualised as the problem of today and things were "better" in some nebulous past to which we should return. When that past was is irrelevant, it never actually existed, it is actually all about being angry that minorities publicly exist.
Krem was never trans. No one is trans. Krem was a woman who wanted to fight in the military but in a role reserved for men and shave her face like her dad. These things do not make her a man. Not a single elf has facial hair and it does not make them all women by default. The whole concept was stupid, but it was forgivable because Krem was a small character.
bro these guys in ur panel ARE so BAD!!! "i have not seen jojo because a scene makes me uncomfortable" wow i can put up seeing 2 men kissing if the show is good GoT is a good example and i am not gay.... these guys are sooooo bad!
This is really overexaggerated. Weekes, Sheryl Chee, John Dombrow, Sylvia Feketekuty, all writers stretching back to Origins, some even earlier. Mary Kirby and Lukas Kristjanson were sadly laid off by EA, but their work on Veilguard was done. Only major missing name is David Gaider.
Krem in Inquisition was absolute nonsense, and one of the worst writing decisions in that entire game. In fact, basically everything involving Iron Bull and Bull's Chargers (or whatever that group was called) was trash and seemed horribly out of place. The Qunari were originally based on the Ottomans (to foil Tevinter's Byzantium) and the Qun based on the Quran (to foil the more obvious parallels between The Chantry and Catholic Church). Whether in the context of the Dragon Age universe or their real-world influences, there's no room for transgender ideology. It is worth mentioning however that Rivain (one of the alleged settings and homeland of that stupid Qunari character in Veilguard) is basically a degenerate leftist communal matriarchal demon-possessed society (none of that is hyperbolic by the way) and could easily be considered the Portland of Thedas that is handily in the realm of "society to stupid to actually exist" in the context of the world of dragon age.
They start talking about dragon age at 45:30
Bless you
He-man and She-ra - see that's why the kids of the 80's and 90's were not confused about the pronouns! It's right there in the names!
And they were hot blonde courageous, Hero/Heroine.
"I /like/ being evil, He-Man!" --Skeletor
How long has it been since we were allowed to have unrepentantly villainous villains in hero stories?
Jack Horner, Puss in Boots: Last Wish. Everybody loved him for that exact reason.
I can't stand this woke-BS in fantasy-franchises anymore, whether games, movies or series. Beside that: Denying biology while glorifying a mental disorder does not mean that rainbow-farting unicorns are real.
The trans character in Inquisition was equally BS. She exsisted solely for pandering to the trasgender movement. Qunari that were very zealous in following their Qun to the point when someone diverted from the path became a pariah suddenly were telling you that "It doesn't matter bud, you can be whatever you want" was bs. It's just people in 2014 weren't that aware of the culture war that was brewing so many gave it a pass. Spoiler, they shouldn't have done that.
I didn't give it a pass. I dropped the game. The writing was on the wall with Inquisition but so many people seem to forget that. None of this is surprising.
@@KeithJones82 Based. Myself being a massive DA:O fan I also didn't finish Inquisition.
Iron Bull was a BS character used to assassinate the Qunari. Everything that made the Qunari unique, they tried to retcon with his character.
We knew. It's why it only sold 6 million copies.
That 12 million number just happens to be the number they gave for total sales of the franchise. Now they are claiming it sold 12 million by itself.
@@thatMinifigureguyI loathed that character. Bloody creepy.
I didn't use him.
I don't spent my hard earned money to be lectured by one sided, attention seeking brats.
Old school He-Man fan here Shad. That show was one of the best cartoons of the 80s.
He-Man: the OG Magical G.I.R.L. (Guy In Real Life)
Always remember, EA threw Andromeda and Anthem under the bus for Veilgard.
They threw those games under the bus for their own sakes. Veilguard will grease it's own set of axels.
It was actually the other way around. Da4 was in development before both. They stopped veilguard ( then dreadwolf) at least 3 times, from scratch cause they had to take people off to help with andromeda and again for anthem.
Which makes it even more egregious for what we got.
Literally the opposite is true.
@@reagenlionel Y'all seem to be confused. The stories that came out afterward was that it was Anthem that killed ME:A. Anthem was supposed to be a live service endless money train so the suits were willing to kill the Mass Effect IP in order to make it happen.They wasted so much time, money and talent on Anthem that it bled over to DA:Dreadwolf also. Anthem was the infected patient zero that killed Bioware.
@@Zayphar EA made the decision to pull the more experienced staff from Andromeda and effectively left it for the Bioware B team (some were even interns) Then, they did it again mid development for Anthem and sent them all to work on Dragon Age.
You're correct about the waste of time and them sinking too money into it, but it wasn't necessary Bioware messing up as it was EA screwing them over...which they have a bad habit of doing.
On veilguards steam page, the very first tag was lgbtq+. I instantly hit the ignore button. I was born in 1991, i was playing unreal tournament in 2000.
God I miss LAN parties playing UT and UT2k4 until 4 in the morning.
the "trans kid" in One Piece was a misunderstanding, She's not Trans, she's just a japanese style tomboy. like Naoto in Persona 4.
F that thing it and wano ruined the series for years egghead saved the series ass.
Bad news Shad, our Supreme Court said you can't vote in the US election this go around, after all.
Honestly dragon age origins was so incredible I cannot believe what they did to such a fascinating series. At this point writing a fan fic will likely be more true to the other games than veilguard.
Look forward to seeing what the people who made bioware great come up with next. I've heard a lot of them work at Larian now. Hopefully their next game will be even better than bg3 now that they will make games in their own setting.
Veilguard should've been an expansion to inquisition rather than its' own game. Way to waste a decade of resources.
The high scores have pronouns in their bios.
Akillup is woke. Thats why he left out the poltical pandering in the game.
He showed his ideology when he didnt review Hogwarts.
Ea has just committed one of the largest examples of review fabrication in gaming history in the same year as the largest game flop in history concord.
Dragon Age? More like Drag Age.
I do like your art pieces and appreciate that you did do additional manual work to get them just right. I think you should have kept the skirt on your She-Ra picture, it adds that extra layer of cuteness that makes She-Ra appealing to girls.
Have you guys seen the other Netflix He-Man series? It is a 3D animated show for kids that reimagines He-Man for a modern audience, not in the progressive woke way but in the way that franchises like Transformers or TMNT get a new series every couple of years. It is an action adventure following a classic good vs evil story. You should give it a chance. It is clear that the creators just wanted to make a good show.
1:48:00 How do you show that a character is gay without overtness? If there is no overtness, the character just acts like a normal person and nobody will even know they are gay, but ESG forces you to have visible representation.
There’s symbolism and hinting, but that doesn’t make it empirically provable. Instead, only the people looking for it believe it. Look at the Sherlock tv show, or Supernatural, the hints and theories are there for a reason, for that niche audience (not the modern one)
People have asked the question, "If you replace all the parts of a hammer, is it still the same hammer?"
The answer is "No, it's a different hammer."
...And this is a different bioware.
Just about the Dragon Age characters: Krem in Inquisition was a man and joined the Tevinter army but there he was found out as trans and had to flee the country, but he still wanted to be a warrior and thus joined up with Iron Bull (a Qunari spy acting as a mercenary) and his company, the Chargers. Iron Bull did not just accept Krem the way he was but he also had female fighting personnel in his company.
Still can't understand that the twinkly twinkpire could beat my ebony edge lord 😂
He Man and Superman? Damn those were the first few favorite of mine too. Eventually I added Spiderman to that list.
I am a fervent believer in freedom of expression. I might hate what you are saying but I will die fighting for your *right* to say it. It is only when our morals are tested that we prove whether we really hold them or merely pay them lip-service.
Right at the start: "Roll initiative" 🤣😂🤣
Oh, I have to go back and play Dragon Age: Origins again. Such a good game and I love the lore. Might be time for some magic related rambling.
If you play as a mage in Origins you begin in The Tower, the Circle of Magi. Being a mage means having a very strong connection to the Fade. However, the Fade is not just the world of magic and dreams, it's also a world of demons. Until a mage has completed the Harrowing he is limited to The Tower.
"You know what's more interesting than that? Apostates. Mages outside of the Tower. That's illegal, you know." - Alistair
"You did not read that in a book somewhere, did you? I hope the small letters did not strain you overmuch." - Morrigan, in response
The Harrowing is a test where they use lyrium to project your mind into the Fade where you are to defeat a demon. Because if you can't, you will always be at risk of being taken over and becoming an abomination. But no worries, the templars are right there to cut you down in case that happens during the Harrowing! If you do not wish to take the test, there is an alternative. You can choose to become tranquil. Cutting off your connection to the Fade. Freeing you from demonic possession, magic, dreams and emotion. A magical lobotomy, if you will. It does mean you can handle raw lyrium more safely, just like the dwarves, though. Dwarves living underground actually adapted to the lyrium rich environment. They can't became mages, can't dream (Grey Wardens and their darkspawn hive mind visions don't count) and are able to do "Enchantment? Enchantment!"
En-chant-ment!
Almost 3,000 views and 411 likes
But no comments?
UA-cam is going full dystopian again
The twilight vampires are not in fact "gay". It's not heteronormative either though. I lost all respect for the series when the love triangle was resolved by the werewolf deciding he was in love with the protagonists daughter now instead of her, supernaturally explained pedbait is still pedbait. Please stop defending twilight, Shad, some of us have actually read it too. Female fantasy is almost always degenerate, even when it was explicitly written not to be.
When i think of d& d i think of forgotten realms not larpers playing a board game.
You mean the Forgettable Realms? The least of all settings.
Twilight: Instead of blood, vampires are made of crystals and break apart because we aimed this trash at the young teen market and cant show blood. The lore is that simple Shad.
I think it’s more that the Meyer vampires are frozen, so they’d be made of ice instead of crystal, but actual ice is really fragile and super-breakable monsters aren’t any fun. There are a lot of fire/ice motifs throughout the books. The vampires aren’t cold like room temperature dead bodies, but ice cold. And frozen blood doesn’t flow.
Twilight vampires are so gay they sneeze glitter
His belief in God makes him a republican. Thats why they hate him. They thought he was as soulless as them because he is rich.
Didn't have time to make the superchat, but I did want to respond to Mike Miller's comments about gays and transgendered people in media being always subversive. Personally, I think its a bit too far to simply assume that to be the case every time. My take on it is that it comes down to the creators and their intentions with the media they're creating. Not so much the media itself (in fact I consider it irrelevant to the question of whether or not something is woke). If a woke person made something non-woke, I still don't want to give them money on account that it will be giving it to someone who hates my guts. And Woke people make it easily known who they are through the obnoxiousness of their behavior online. When it comes to people who aren't being obnoxious or making their political opinions known, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
If for example Shad includes a gay or transgendered character in his eventual sequel to Shadow of the Conqueror, I wouldn't consider it to be woke or subversive because of who the author is. Knowing what I know about Shad, he'll never do it to appeal to the woke crowd and I can trust that this inclusion will be a benefit to the story.
Remember that every word on the page is deliberately chosen and when we do literary analysis we have to treat them all like they are important and deliberate. So when we are shown a character who is completely normal, but gay, what is the purpose of showing us that?
And that is a complex question because the author genuinely may not have any purpose, it was just a moments whim, or a way to make a character stand out. And yet, the message "being gay is normal" is still a political message, even if its a pretty chill one these days.
In almost all fiction where it appears a character is gay for no obvious reason, the message is "in this world, we don't care about that". Which is fine, I suppose. But why is that a point that helps us to understand this world? It presupposes that we, the reader, do care about that. And in turn, it is subversive in a small way to challenge what the author perceives as our views.
Think about Heinlein's views on sex, which are... Out there. Dude was a proper libertarian, and holy crap he loved to be provocative. And he created a bunch of really odd thought experiments, like if sci-fi technology could remove the risks associated with incest, is there still a reason to make incest a taboo?
In another story, a character starts out as an 11 year old girls, gets magically aged up, and she hooks up with an adult guy she knew as a child. Heinlein basically asks why that's wrong since the girl is now literally of legal age, and thus surely society cannot judge them.
Heinlein literally was beng subversive in all these. Not in the sense that he wanted to change the world, but he did have the view that taboos were harmful and that our arguments for them don't hold up to scrutiny.
And that returns us to the start - Everything put there is there for a reason. It doesn't have to be a big overt thing that stands out and is core to the point of the work. But it's something that words were used on, a limited budget of words.
When something is being dropped in just to tell us that actually this fantasy setting is unexpectedly progressive, that to me has to be subversive. Slightly, but still. Because it is just a virtue signal. Why do we need to know about someone's sexuality at all if it doesn't change anything about the story or how they act.
There is an inversion of this we see in grittier works though, where the gravelly misanthrope comes across someone whose gay, and just doesn't care because it doesn't effect him. And that I don't see as subversive because it characterises the person being told.
I'm thinking of Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, or Turner in Count Zero. They come across gay characters and we learn what THEY think of those people (they shrug) rather than what this society thinks. In both cases, we see characters are gay because it does matter - One has to break up with his boyfriend and flee to keep him safe from the mole, the other is talking about her daughter and partner on the night before a dangerous mission, which shows she is nervous and she's not cut from the same cloth as Turner.
This IS an inversion though. Its dramatically impactful because the audience expects that the characters might be judgemental. But it turns out they are both professionals who have seen it all, and they don't care, because they (like most people today) know it makes no difference to their work. That's useful and smart writing. We show the characters something non-normative, and they react organically.
And this is the thing about normative conventions in narrative and story telling. When someone says "I got married just before we left for the war..." we assume the speaker is male, that they married a female. Because that is just the normal arrangement. This doesn't challenge our understanding of this world, even if we've never spoken about it before. We don't need an explanation. Because it is normal.
It doesn't really matter what we think should be "normal" or not. It matters what actually is observably normal; what most people actually do.
When you take the time to write out something non-normative (ie, that we wouldn't have ever assumed was there by ourselves) then it becomes an iteration of Chekhov's Gun. You've drawn my attention to the gun hanging on the wall, so it really does need to be fired, or at least play a role in the plot. If you put it out there and don't use it to do something, it's a dangling purposeless narrative strand.
So in that sense, "gay for no reason" either has to be bad writing (ie, gun not fired) or it has to be subversive in some small way (ie, it achieves a virtue signal).
Now, I'm not hard line on this stuff. I like a colourful cast of characters. I like that various henchmen and women feel different. There's a reason why out of the Fellowship, the two humans have huge plot importance to set them apart from each other, but the elf and the dwarf (who look and act very differently) are kinda just bros who happened to be there at the time.
The thing with the gays is that (pardon the bluntness) they look like normal people. Red Sonia looks very different to Conan, and the world will treat her differently, obviously, because she's obviously not the same type of character. But gay-Conan, who is a big beefcake bro, but who just happens to be the gay barbarian is going to be treated the same as Conan. Black Conan and Elf Conan and Old Conan are all different in meaningful ways. Gay Conan is just Conan unless we are specifically exploring his sex life.
And when you are a writer who doesn't specifically want to do this stuff... Why would you put it in? Why include an extraneous element that doesn't achieve anything other than just... Because you can.
That has to either be pandering or subversive. Maybe not in a huge way. But still, thats it.
I suppose with LGB, the problem is there's not really a point to include it unless you want to write about LGB plotlines, since it's an otherwise invisible trait. Trans at least you could say is a part of visual character design, but even there you can make androgynous characters that aren't trans (or not related to the movement, anyway). So much of that inclusion is just a virtue signal unless you're writing romance, or some form of sci fi or fantasy where nonbinary/non sexually dimorphic species actually exist in-world.
To be fair. It's a pattern. Most of the self insert trash we are getting is done by them.
The disease is progressivism. And they entered gaming to subvert it, just like films and the rest of society.
I don’t usually watch reviews anymore, but SkillUp DESTROYED it.
I’m surprised Ubisoft or one of these other woke companies hasn’t reached out to Mike to hire him to be the next female lead in there game. He has the jaw line and long hair for it.
17:53 she reminds me of Denise Richards from the 90s
pffft twilight... A vampire from Kizumonogatari is even worse, they pretty much have instant Regeneration from being cleaved in half etc if they are well-fed
Bioware/EA proudly presents...
Dragon's Age: Elephant's Foot / Stunning & Brave Edition!
1st update will change it to PANDER HARDER.
A he-man game would be so fun, it could work for so many genres, a tournament fighter, a game like Star Wars Battlefront or a hero shooter , a Soulslike or Action adventure or a full on rpg would be best tho
Still remembering when Baldur's Gate came out in 1998. Bioware was the best, their Infinity Engine was best. I remember all the games from back then. I always thought Dragon Age 1 was their last pearl.
This development in gaming industry is no longer just annoying but worrying. A fantasy world is a fantasy world. It should not mirror the real world. It should not be political. I'm a tolerant person but I demand good stories and good gameplay and interesting chars and fantasy races that are not a shallow copy of some real movements.
Having homosexual options in RPGs is fun. I am a hetero woman but playing a hot male char who is romancing a hot male char is entertaining for me. I know many men love hot lesbians. Why not? This should be possible in any RPGs but not forced or even obvious because many ppl like playing straight. So transgender ppl usually can relate to being male or female chars and can play whatever they like. And I suggest non-binary ppl can use their fantasy and create and relate to a fantasy char like everybody else.
If developers want non-binary chars in their games they have to come up with a race of intelligent slugs to be believable. Nobody would probably mind that.
I'm 40 years old and have always been a gamer girl, which was something very special when I was a teenager because there were only boys. And yet, the games were so much better.
There are vampires in twilight?
he jokin yes ? vampires in anime not stronger than any lame vampire in movies ? ever heard of alucard ? anime hellsing ?
he obviously not now anime XDXDXDXDXD
that amused me thx 💗
Hellsing's dracula/alucard is basically deus ex machina personified and it's glorious.
11:41, You've clearly never seen Kamen Rider.
Japanese Spiderman from 1978 still has the best transformation scene. Ever.
What is a "Dargon"?
A mentally challenged dragon. Source: Urban Dictionary.
Hehehe. Shad is taking thumbnail lessons from TheQuartering :D
No sword is as sharp as a razor blade. For good reason, too, Mike. A super sharp edge breaks down very easy. And He-Man does indeed have some surprisingly dark and mature episodes. They take adult themes and break them down for kids, and they always remembered there is going to be adults in the room too. Quite the opposite to the horrible Gay Ray tumbler fiction.
There are a lot of things one could say, but it is pretty telling that the first actual criticism they make of the actual game is "the player character can be trans". God forbid a role-playing game have options for role-playing.
This is all just kind of pathetic, queer representation has always been part of Dragon Age, Veilguard is just an improvement on previous games in that regard.
They have to tie themselves in knots trying to argue why Krem being a trans man is kind of justified but Taash being non-binary isn't, and in doing so, demonstrate that they believe trans people are pressured into their identities, which is deeply bigoted, and also forget that Krem was presenting as a man before he met the Iron Bull.
This is because "wokeness" is conceptualised as the problem of today and things were "better" in some nebulous past to which we should return. When that past was is irrelevant, it never actually existed, it is actually all about being angry that minorities publicly exist.
Krem was never trans. No one is trans. Krem was a woman who wanted to fight in the military but in a role reserved for men and shave her face like her dad. These things do not make her a man. Not a single elf has facial hair and it does not make them all women by default. The whole concept was stupid, but it was forgivable because Krem was a small character.
it has mostly positive reviews on steam
About to have my first child! I am pretty disgusted at what's out there in gaming and media, I vow to stay on watch.
Failguard.
bro these guys in ur panel ARE so BAD!!! "i have not seen jojo because a scene makes me uncomfortable" wow i can put up seeing 2 men kissing if the show is good GoT is a good example and i am not gay.... these guys are sooooo bad!
This is really overexaggerated. Weekes, Sheryl Chee, John Dombrow, Sylvia Feketekuty, all writers stretching back to Origins, some even earlier. Mary Kirby and Lukas Kristjanson were sadly laid off by EA, but their work on Veilguard was done. Only major missing name is David Gaider.
Holy cow, how do you expect people to listen to this?! The moment Mike spoke my ears almost bled. Fix your audio please, it's unbearable..
Krem in Inquisition was absolute nonsense, and one of the worst writing decisions in that entire game. In fact, basically everything involving Iron Bull and Bull's Chargers (or whatever that group was called) was trash and seemed horribly out of place. The Qunari were originally based on the Ottomans (to foil Tevinter's Byzantium) and the Qun based on the Quran (to foil the more obvious parallels between The Chantry and Catholic Church). Whether in the context of the Dragon Age universe or their real-world influences, there's no room for transgender ideology. It is worth mentioning however that Rivain (one of the alleged settings and homeland of that stupid Qunari character in Veilguard) is basically a degenerate leftist communal matriarchal demon-possessed society (none of that is hyperbolic by the way) and could easily be considered the Portland of Thedas that is handily in the realm of "society to stupid to actually exist" in the context of the world of dragon age.
Dragon Age - The Wokeguard.
Play the game then review it
Consume!!!!!
@@mrrselfdestruction1077 consume Trump’s balls like you want to you log cabin replicant
Why though?
@@rustyshackleford1062 why play a game before reviewing it? I don’t know, maybe because you need to do that to review it?
video is too long
Troon Simulator! Not gonna buy it i did put it on my ignore list on STEAM.
Failguard.