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It establishes a best-bro relationship in the first game and gives you the option to put it in his butt in the second one. I feel like that's a pretty big change in the game's central themes.
Sure, thematically.
Still the 180 spin from praise to scorn because all of a sudden their sacred ox was gored.
Yes, people praise things they like and scorn things they dislike, and if you switch from doing thing they like to things they dislike, they will stop praising and start scorning. This is not some sort of fickleness on their part.
The problem isn't praise or scorn, it's the constant stream of pretextual galaxy-brain rationalizations. It's not fickleness, it's the dishonorable business of cloaking one's likes and dislikes in bullshit justifications.
What pretextual galaxy-brain rationalizations? It seemed pretty straightforward from both ends.
I mean, on one side you had folks that had precommihted notions that games ought to have ethnic diversity and gender-equality giving half-assed rationalizations about why the first game was wrong in its setting.
On the second side the tables are turned and now it's folks with precommihted notions against the gays giving half-assed rationalizations about how the second game is wrong in its plot.
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The problem is putting stuff in the sequel that players of the earlier games clearly do not want. All the rest is your rationalizations for saying the players are somehow wrong to be upset about that.
Except the players of the first game were apparently not too chuffed for opposite-polarity culture war reasons. That was kind of the entire point eh?
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Did they at least give the player a "No homo" dialogue option?
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I don’t know, actually. There’s been at least a hint of homoeroticism between Hans and Henry before. Nothing that couldn’t be passed off as “locker room banter”, but it wouldn’t be the first time that young men going to war together and getting up to mischief might do a bit of fooling around.
The fact that social embrace of homosexuality has tinged every intimate relationship between men with ‘a hint of homoeroticism’ is one of the biggest black marks against it in my view.
Not only is every close relationship tinged with ‘Sam and Frodo must be porking’ style analysis but (innocent) touch is very good for people - it releases oxytocin, it’s how we bond. One gender is now largely deprived of it.
I'd say the flip-side of that is that it's a mistake to read modern concepts of homosexual identity into historical reports same-sex activity. There are lots of contexts - from militaries to prisons to boarding schools - where a significant proportion of men will engage in some degree of same-sex sexual experimentation. This doesn't mean that those men are socially or intrinsically homosexual or even bisexual, any more than it means that the Ancient Greeks were homosexual in the modern connotation of the term.
Agreed. The activity -> lifestyle pipeline has acted in many areas both good and bad as society diverges.
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Homophobia is just a distraction here. The social embrace of homosexuality has little to do with this other than being a convenient way to deflect blame from those actually responsible. This is the result of the social embrace of feminism. It is the natural consequence of pushing the narrative that unwanted intimacy from a man is harmful in order to give women power over men. Society has been sexualizing ever more forms of male intimacy to allow women to claim to have been victimized by it and thus be entitled to "justice". Men naturally learn to shy away from intimacy because of this.
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Sam and Frodo clearly isn’t homoerotic in the books or the Peter Jackson movies by any non-delusional standards. But the KCD example, in my opinion, is more ambiguous.
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It’s a strange story that doesn’t make all that much sense. Why do we care? Why can’t we be close friends anyway? I mean, I’m not too worried about :
appearing gay even though I’m not
turning gay by closeness with a male friend, and
even if I could somehow turn gay like a frog, it wouldn’t be the worse thing in the world. It has few costs and some advantages.
Also, you would expect that in a society with open accepted homosexuality, there would be less people in the closet. So the straights are far more likely to actually be straights than they used to be, and there should be less need to prove straightness.
Random other theories to explain the relative lack of intimate male friendships:
general atomization and screentime making friendships more difficult
male-male friendships and all-male spaces being perceived as misogynistic and discouraged by modern society
female homophobia
This is all just bog-standard androphobia though. Though, a lot of this was also sacrificed on the altar of "homosexuality is something you are, not something you do"; what I'm not sure about is which came first.
The entire incentive-based argument against male homosexuality is that you must have a woman: much like diamonds, this drives up demand and keep society working around the drive for resources to afford them.
The concept that you can just say "no", or at least not have to suffer zero close contact outside of what you buy from a woman (and by extension, her father)? Not surprised everyone else would be opposed to that.
For all I might fault the gay/furries for at least they seem to have a healthier attitude towards this- maybe it's easier when you're in a costume. Probably explains the obsession with cute anime girl avatars in VR, too.
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I don't mean 'no homo bro' or turning gay, I mean not wanting to send signals to a friend that I don't want to send. Being physically touchy with a girl my age would signal interest, and would be read that way. Due to social change, it's now similar with men. If I don't want to send that message, I can't do that thing. It's not something you decide for yourself.
I have close male friends, of course, but I'm not physically touchy with them beyond a hug on meeting.
All may be relevant. Few things in social life have only one cause.
But you know your friends, you don't have to worry about ambigous signals, like with a girl you like. He knows you're not gay, you know he's not gay, "not that there's anything wrong with that", so what is this fear? It seems paranoid. And somehow, if we recriminalized homosexuality, and then we found ourselves in a situation that resembled homosexuality, so objectively our situation would be more dangerous, that's when we could relax? It's very strange, counter-intuitive reasoning.
Bisexuality/potential homoeroticism gigantically icks most heterosexual women when they sense it in men. Therefore even allowing a bit of potential overtures towards it is generally not a great idea socially.
Also permissible homosexuality creates this weird inverse bell curve matter with physical contact with fellow men in which most guys do not want to communicate any potential homoeroticism. Whilst societies in which homosexuality is just totally outside of the overton window permit a lot more physical affection between men, since there isn't the underlying. I've spent a bunch of time in the Middle East and homosexuality being literally illegal opens the door to a lot more 'queer behavior' between platonic male friends.
Great example of this is the Khabib Nurmagomedov bathtub photo that got bandied around a lot by Conor McGregor before their fight. https://preview.redd.it/g3d6ooc3ml4e1.jpeg?width=640&auto=webp&s=b966fe8b972399f327580b3f35bf60322079e68d
To Western eyes it's staggeringly homoerotic, to Dagestani eyes homosexuality is verboten so it's not 'sus'.
Homosexuality is legal in dagestan.
Anyway, I don’t see why women would be any less icked by a photo like that in some repressive country, than by two western male friends touching that they don’t know about. The respective legal situation determines the ick?
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People aren't so simple. And who said anything about fear? Doing X would convey signal Y, and I don't want to convey Y. The kind of physical intimacy that was de rigeur a couple of centuries ago (somebody linked this) is not ambiguous these days, that's the point.
I suppose I could sit my friends down and give them a sort of autistic manifesto along the lines of, 'I'm totally straight and I know you're totally straight but I don't think men touch each other enough now so let's cuddle (no homo)', but for the entire 90's we laughed at such behaviour exactly because it was regarded as a classic sign of closeted homosexuality.
It's like selling stocks: if a founder sells a big chunk of their stocks in their successful startup, it signals that they think it's peaked. It doesn't matter what signal they want to send, that's the signal it sends, and everyone including them knows that that's the signal it sends, so they can't sell without sending that signal.
In olden times, homosexuality ('sodomy') was something that was commonly agreed to take place far off and among degenerates like sailors. The average person didn't think about it from week to week. I'm not arguing for recriminalising homosexuality, I'm arguing for vastly reducing its visibility outside select subcultures. In the last 50 years, we made a decision to prioritise visible harm to small minorities over the potential for less visible harm to 95% of the population; that was understandable at the time but I don't think it's aging well.
Sure, but there's a difference between "being physically close would convey homosexuality, and I don't want to convey homosexuality" with "homosexuality would convey faggotry, and I don't want to convey faggotry".
It may indeed be the case that some people simply do not like homosexuality- that much is true- but there are far more for whom faggotry/bottom-bitchery is the real problem. Since the 1980s (and to a point, earlier) homosexuality and faggotry have been synonymous, partially due to tokenism and artificial elevation, and partially because some of them really are that way (and being the expendable gender yet channeling every single negative female stereotype you can think of is just... not generally a recipe for success among the average man).
"Look at how oppressed these faggots are!!1!" is very much an active attempt to shit on every man who doesn't do that, much like "look at how oppressed these eunuchs are!11!" is on every ex-man or ex-woman who's keeping it on the down-low. When you start mining the commons for offense, this hollowing out is the result.
The barbell-shaped distribution strikes again; you get hypernormalization on the "nope, definitely no hint of teh gayness here" side or the "I'm going to stick my desire to suck 5000 dicks tonight right in your face, hope you like paying for my AIDS drugs" side. Sure, at least you can be in the missing middle of the barbell (gay marriage was the right call), but that requires threading a needle that we were better off not needing to thread in the first place.
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I'm not accusing you of homophobia or any other phobia, it's just that I don't see more to this theory than correlation: yes, gay pride parades are correlated with a decline in male intimate friendships. Tornado damage also increased.
The mechanism making it a causal relationship doesn't work. why do I care that my friend could think that I'm a closeted homosexual when I'm clearly not ? A closeted homosexual can perfectly provide all the duties of a friend - he would be a bad husband, but that's not the friend's problem.
I don't want to weird out my friend. You could say "No true friend would care if you're a closeted homosexual and why would you want to be friendly to such a person", but the fact of the matter is that many friendships are conditional on one not giving somebody else the ick.
And the need to not signal homosexuality is infinitely stronger when it comes to women, if for different but much more obvious reasons.
The only people who could be confused by this are a very small minority of women and asexual aspies.
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Are you a man?
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Causation is impossible to prove for history or social effects, of course. You see correlation, I see causation. I think that the vast majority of people care deeply about their friends' opinions of them, and consciously or unconsciously modify their behaviour very carefully to send the signals they want to send and not to send the signals they don't want to send.
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