Internet communities often fracture themselves into somewhat distinct lines. You see it a lot on Reddit and other forum type sites. Because of the up and downvote capability, if a certain type of person congregates in a community, it’s quick to drive others away. People get burnt in the flame wars. Often times those fractures heal. Often times they don’t. One would think with the way art typically operates, fan spaces would therefore be less bigoted. I haven’t found that to be the case. Fandom is and always has been home to vicious, vicious fighting. As I’ve said before, I think the passion extremely aggressive fans have for art and artists is really just a pretext for what they really enjoy: fighting. When you love fighting, when you view the takedown as the most important thing, sometimes you excuse the use of bigotry.
Anytime I’ve played a game or read a manga that has queer undertones and go googling about them, I inevitably end up on a Reddit or GameFAQs thread. When it’s Reddit, there’s a 50% chance the thread is an actual conversation and a 25% either way for either being purely supportive or purely vitriolic. I’ve never clicked on a GameFAQs thread about queerness that didn’t make me immediately regret ever playing a video game.
There can be this insistence, especially when a game doesn’t have a flat-out wedding or gay sex scene, that any reading of gay or trans themes in a piece of media is “forcing” it on other people. It’s “incorrect.” This is the result of a couple of things. 1) Bigotry. 2) A self-conscious rejection of the idea that your take-aways are not always factual. And 3) A misunderstanding of what textual analysis is.
So I’m sure this isn’t going to upset any of those morons. But Genshin Impact is a very queer game.
First Wish: The Game
Breath of the Wild–oh, oops. Genshin Impact is an action role-playing game from Chinese gaming giant Mihoyo or Hoyoverse or Cognosphere or whatever of the company’s names you want to use. In this open world of anime art, you play as one of two twins, Lumine or Aether, outsiders who travel from world to world. They get trapped in Teyvat, and, whichever twin you choose, goes on a mission to find their sibling, regain their power, and restart their journey.
Teyvat is populated by humans, gods, dragons, monsters, and creatures made out of the elements. Speaking of elements, the magics of the world are based around the elements. You might be thinking, “Oh, it’s Avatar: The Last Airbender.” Avatar is a lot sillier. So your magic options: fire, water, earth, air, electricity, ice, and plant. As you travel throughout the world, you gain the ability to use magic in whatever element governs that country. And those governing elements has a God who uses it, the Seven Archons.
Throughout your journey, you’re brought into the political struggle between four groups: normal people; the Fatui, the Russian KGB; Celestia, the sky-god illuminati; and the Abyss Order… led by your sibling. What?
As of recording, the game’s story isn’t complete yet. We’re close to being done with Fontaine. Then it’s Natlan, Schneznya, Celestia, and Khanria. You get a new country unlocked every year, so it’ll be 2026 before the game’s storyline is finished at the absolute earliest if they decide to speed run. You’re probably looking at it lasting longer than that, maybe 2028.
Genshin Impact is a cross-platform game that’s free-to-play with optional in-game purchases. Those purchases normally get you “primogems,” the in-game currency that then lets you buy wishes. Wishes are how you get new characters and weapons. So, ultimately, it’s a gacha game.You know, like one of the dispensaries at bowling alleys where you can try to win those sticky hands that your parents hated and eventually get coated in dust and gunk. There are plenty of criticisms out there of gatcha games but that’s not what this video is here to talk about. I’m suggesting you do some reading about gachas and whether or not they should count as gambling games that injure people.
A lot of people complain about the limitations the game has to put on itself due having to run on mobile alongside all the other platforms. I play it on my phone.It takes up an insane amount of memory. I probably need to switch to a different platform soon. I’ve been playing it on and off ever since 1.1, where you first meet Scaramouche, the most demon of demon twinks. Sometimes my phone can’t handle the load and the game starts getting very laggy. I tried to play on my computer, but I hate PC gaming. My current mains are Neuvelette, Lynney, and Wanderer. Previous ones include Al-Haitham, Tighnari, Ayato, and Kazuha. I’ve cleared the 12th floor of Abyss exactly once. It’s a fun game. It’s an addicting game. It’s a frustrating game. It’s an interesting game in its politics.
Second Wish: Gender
When a game gives you an option to play as either gender, there’s always a question as to whether or not they’re going to be separate characters or basically the same person in a different body. The choice between Lumine and Aether firmly falls in the second category. The differences in the narrative and the interactions you have are cosmetic. I’ve never seen a moment where the game refers to Aether’s “maleness.” So what does that say? Well regardless of the intentions of the developer, it’s clear from the meta: gender doesn’t matter.
Reminder: When queering a piece of media, you’re not saying, “This is THE ONLY WAY” to read this. It’s an examination of how gender and sexuality are presented in non-typical cisheteronormative ways. “This is A way of reading the text.”
To say gender is fundamentally unimportant flies in the face of typical cisnormative beliefs. It goes against patriarchy. In fact, showing that gender is basically a cosmetic choice, one meant only to envelop how best your want to live and feel good in the world, is inherently a pro-trans narrative choice. That’s the meta here. It’s not a “destroy gender” position either, though, because that is the choice you’re given here. “If the world has an unimportant binary, which would you like to play as? Who are you?” There isn’t necessarily nonbinary… well. Actually… We’ll get to it. Think of catgirls. I know. We’ll get there.
Following the passage of a sexist, anti-sex, and homophobic set of new media censorship standards in China, Genshin released outfits for many of its characters in order to cover up skin or remove a certain “feminity” from male characters. So lets look at some of the character designs and talk about them in context of so-called traditional masculinity.
Aether has a little crop top showing off his belly. He also has incredibly long blonde hair. In a Western context, it does add a layer of stereotypical femininity which is something you have to ponder over given the game’s popularity. Aether is a masculine femboy. That he could be the protagonist of a massively popular action video game in the United States? That’s very Link-Legend of Zelda of him. When I first started writing this, I put in a statement about Aether’s hair not necessarily being gendered feminine in China due to depiction I’ve seen of long haired Chinese heroes - but! Those were in historical pieces. I’m going to talk about China’s reactionary social policies later, but their picture of masculinity is much the same as the West’s. It’s the soldier. Muscular, stiff, short haired and strong browed.
There are big, muscular, soldier-coded men in the game. None of them are playable characters. The majority of Genshin’s playable males could be called “bishonens.” Nicolae Sfetcu says of this beautiful man character type, they’re “a young man whose beauty… transcends the boundary of sex. … Some have theorized that bishonen provides a non-tradional outlet for gender relations. Moreover, it breaks down stereotypes surrounding effete characters.” The cutesy anime artstyle of the Genshin finds its male-character design roots in a movement that specifically defies typical cishetero binaries.
Back to Aether. He’s a long haired alien femboy creature who wears a croptop. He’s not the only one in love with showing a little tum-tum. Bennett, Baizhu, and Gorou show off their bellies. Cyno and Razor do as well but in a less feminine feeling way. Perhaps being shirtless is coded as masculine whereas specifically showing off your belly is coded feminine in the west.
Gorou… also does drag. Kind of. He answers columns as “Ms. Hina.” There are cardboard cutouts of this character Gorou plays as at the direction of mischievous fox, Yae Miko. This is played for laughs, because haha man in dress, but it also plays into his character. Gorou is timid socially, but inspiring. He’s hard working. He wants to make people’s lives better, and he’s easy to manipulate. He protects and helps people as a general on the battlefield, and he helps people as a woman at a newspaper. With Gorou, we’re shown that gender does not change the core of you are. No matter the circumstances of Gorou’s birth, he would still be aiming his purpose at helping people and giving them advice.
Plant goddess Nahida is able to project her mind into other people and lightly control them for a brief period of time. Possession is inherently an exploration of what the self is. Is the self the body, is it the mind, is it a combination? Is the mind your past experiences or is it something more idealistic than that, more abstract? When she possesses a male character, she is still Nahida. Her body does not dictate her identity, except when she’s pretending to be said person. In that case, gender very much becomes performance. Nahida, who isn’t male, puts on a male costume and performs male identity.
Two of the characters I play a lot in the game are Ei, the electricity goddess, and Wanderer, AKA Scaramouche, an ex-fatui member and semi-god figure. The Wanderer is a puppet-like, robot-like creation of Ei. He was originally meant to be a body to house her body-less mind and soul while she worked on her concept of eternity. Things didn’t pan out that waym and the Wanderer slowly became his own person. But what if things had turned out the way? Well, when you eventually enter the inner plane of the robot Ei uses, you see her actual form… which is the same form as the puppet. So was the puppet modeled after her or did she model her inner form off of her puppet? If the Wanderer housed her, would she take on his form? Or would she exist in this form inside of him? When presenting as the electro archon, would Scaramouche present as male or as female? Would they claim his body was one or the other? Scaramouche doesn’t ultimately work out as a host. You could interpret that failure as a statement that a woman living in a man’s body would not work out. Ei would have to present as a version of her true self. Their backstory, then, is trans in nature.
No conversation about gender in Genshin Impact can be complete without talking about lovable drunkard Venti, wind god. Venti is originally a wind spirit. When he ascended to godhood, he took on his current form, modeled after a dead friend. Did Venti originally identify as male? Were that friend a woman, would he have just as easily adopted that form? Venti exists as an entity that can apparently constitute his form however he wants. His choice to present as a guy, a femboy specifically, is a choice. When China ruled out its new archaic rules about gender portrayal, a character they mentioned as being a problem is Venti. According to Jade King over at The Gamer, “He’s a young, boyish character who some might easily confuse for a girl purely because he doesn’t abide by cliched conventions we associate with the male body type.” His non-confirming to traditional masculinity is pointed out by the Chinese government.
The characters from Fontaine are revealed to not be “true” humans but rather water-spirits called Oceanids in human form. According to the Genshin wiki, Oceanids “are technically a genderless race who been shown as females.” But these human-Oceanids present as male and female. In this way, gender isn’t innate to the soul like some Evangelicals make you think. It’s expression and style. It gets assigned and can change.
Now you might be asking: if it’s going to speak to the trans experience, does it have anything to say about pronouns? In Fontaine, we get introduced to these cute creatures called Melusines. The head of Fontaine, Neuveillete, says, “Melusines are to be addressed using she/her pronouns, never the impersonal it/its”... That… was my personal contribution.” Through the Melusines, we see the impact using personal pronouns can have. The right ones bring an acknowledgement of humanity. Several of the adepti speak in reflexive pronouns, that’s the “One does not think oneself bound to answer” type of stuff. In the English dub, Paimon continually uses her own name in place of pronouns. It’s similar to the reflexive pronouns of the adepti, but it comes across as more childish.
The it/its moment may bring to mind… annoying discourse about that as a neopronoun. Is it wrong not to dehumanize someone who wants you to? Is it wrong to force someone to dehumanize you? One thing you’ll see a lot of in Genshin Impact is “animal people.” Nekomimi types. So… let’s dash into dangerous waters, hope we’re in Fontaine instead of anywhere else so we don’t drown, and chat about xenogenders. Non-binary writer Maverick Lumen identifies with various xenogenders and says of them that they “illustrate and express an aspect of a person’s experience of their gender identity or expression. These can be aesthetics, concepts, animals, plants, fantastical beings, achetypal, and more!” Taimi, the dating app, says on their website, “Xenogender … includes all nonbinary gender identities that cannot be related to standard forms of human genders or gender categorizations… [It] can be used to describe more complex gendered feelings.” Bun/bunself types. Have you seen the stereotype of the trans catgirl? A catgirl is a type of girl, but it signifies something more specific genderwise. As ContraPoints says in her video Twilight, “...gender expression is not just aesthetic; it’s style. And style is more than aesthetic; it’s a way of doing things.”
I was first introduced to nekomimi, the catpeople, through the manga Loveless by Yun Koga. Catboys, by which I mean adult men wearing cat ears, are very cute. There are numerous characters in Genshin with animal bodyparts, specifically ears, horns, and tails. While this is typically relayed as a racial thing in-game, uh, race in Genshin is… a different topic… polluted by people who think criticizing a game’s colorism is horrid. So let’s think about it as gender. Yae Miko has fox ears. She’s a trickster. If you consider her in light of xenogenders, the foxgirl shows a specific identification with micheviousness. Yanfei has characteristics of a xiezhi, a Chinese mythical creature of justice. The idea of justice is central to her character. Personality and animal identification become important to these character’s identities. I actually think this is a better way to view the characters with animal-features than viewing it as racial. Viewed through race, as the text literally presents it, there’s a certain racist biological essentialism. “Your race determines who you are.” That is gross. You can read it that way. I’m choosing not to. Instead, I see it as a further expression of gender and interiority.
Third Wish: Flirting Time
Let’s keep thinking about nekomimi-type characters. In an examination of Loveless, T.A. Noonan said, “Just as the Western figure of the PlayBoy Bunny juxtaposes the vulnerability of a baby animal with unbridled female sexuality, the nekomimi clothes fetish objects in the garb of innocence.” Which is coincidentally the review all my boyfriends have left of me.
Now, technically, the only catboy I can recall in the game is Diona’s non-playable father, Draff. In their book “Animation & Cartoon”, Nicolae Sfetcu says, “Rebellious boys are more often compared to dogs.” We do have several dogboys in the game. Cyno wears a dog cap reminiscent of both Anubis and the fetish gear puphoods. Tighnari is a fennec fox, a type of canine. He’s sort of rebellious in that he brushes off his superiors when he finds them annoying, but otherwise… The only other dog boy is Gorou, our crossdressing, crop-wearing, easy to trick cute puppy. He’s rebellious, too, literally, until he views you as actually over him or with his trust. Sfetcu continues, “Bishonen catboys are typically associated with Shojo and yaoi.” While none of these characters are catboys, “pup boys” is an entire gay subculture.
Beyond the animal characters, the “beautiful boy” art style itself finds origins in queer sexuality. As Sfetcu says, “The aesthetic of the bishonen began as an ideal of a young homosexual lover, likely arising from the effeminate male actors who played female characters in Kabuki theater.”
One of the things I hit at in the gendered section of the video is the choice of player character. The gender of the traveler also plays into gay-coding. There are several characters who flirt with the Traveler throughout their journey. Lisa and Kaeya heavily lean into flirtation from the start of the game, the latter as part of his information gathering job. It doesn’t matter if you’re Aether or Lumine. You still go on your date with Ayaka. Ranpo from Bungou Stray Dogs… I mean Heizou still flirts with you on your hangout. Through making the Traveler’s gender not matter, we make the sexualities of these various characters, at least when they’re being sincere, of some sort of non-heterosexual nature.
The Traveler, like many role-playing game protagonists, especially anime styled ones, is seen in fan spaces as the center of a harem. Aether specifically is shown as the harem master. Among a lot of guys he is, of course, surrounded by “waifus.” Perhaps because of his lightly feminine coding and short stature, he’s also often surrounded by “husbandos.” That “dating sim” element is likely intentional. That the formed harems can be of any gender… Well, that’s also baked into the DNA of the game.
One of the secretaries of Ninggaung goes on and on about the beauty of Ningguang’s form. As Plato and Catholics would say, beauty is the desire of love. For Plato, that’s romantic love. The ultimate yearning becomes for philosophy, the height of beauty, though before that it seeks out the beauty in the human form. For Catholics, beauty is the physical form of God’s love and creation on earth. Baishi, the secretary, talks about Ningguang’s breathtaking beauty… as she’s getting out of the bath. Take from that what you want.
YouTuber E has a bunch of videos on gay subtext in Genshin Impact. She dives into popular ships and explains where the subtext comes from with a hard focus on the Beidou Ninguang pairing. I sincerely suggest watching her videos to get details on specifics couplings. I only watched the first one, but will likely watch the rest after I finish with this video. There’s Ninguang-Beidou, Al-Haitham-Kahveh, Chongyun and Xingqiu, Kazuha and his dead buddy.
One thing I want to specifically think about is the Cyno-Tighnari relationship. The two dog boys are quite close to each other, and their animal-coding automatically gives them a sort of queer coding. But they’re also opposites in a lot of ways. Cyno is the more typical anime dogboy, the pinnacle of heavy, masculine rebellion. He’s the lone wolf. Tighnari is an intellectual, a teacher, a nurse. While he has his own rebellious tendencies, Tighnari is best understood as a nurturer. Whereas Cyno’s animalness is through fetish gear, Tighnari’s is natural. Tighnari’s being more natural makes it a stronger symbol of genderbending and sexuality. Together with Collei, they form a family unit. They raised and protected the young girl. In the stereotypes of parenting, Tighnari exhibits a lot of stereotypes of the mother - mentoring, intelligent, emotionally intelligent, inherently cuddly. Cyno is a version of an ideal father, stoic, strong, filled with terrible jokes that the mother-type hates. Emphasis on the sigh part of Cyno. Their family unit is presented with stereotypical gender roles only without the gender variation outside of Tighnari’s animal characteristics. It is therefore queer coded.
Role-playing games are often fantasy escape. That’s obvious, but it’s also important for thinking about the appeal of these types of games. Yes, the art is cute. Yes, the story can be compelling. But you also get to live the fantasy of protecting people. Of being important. Of saving the world. In this world, you’re capable of facing the scary things. You can survive the scary things. You can win. You can be praised. The point of so many characters flirting with the mostly silent Traveler is to let the player fantasize about being desired. As ContraPoints says, Desire is desire for desire. We want to be loved. In games with harems where you can play as male or female and picking doesn’t limit who flirts with you, there a sub-fantasy of desire playing out. You are not merely chased by important people of the opposite gender. You are so attractive and helpful and charismatic that everyone of every type would love to love you. We all know the stereotype of the straight guy who responds, “Just don’t hit on me,” when his gay friend comes out to him. That response can be homophobic in nature, it can be a joke, but I think it hides an actual want. They want their friend to view them as attractive, as a potential boyfriend somewhere in the multiverse. Anecdotally, comfortable straight guys love flirting with gay dudes. It’s easy to say that’s ego stroking, but I think there’s something more there. It’s a confirmation of your worthiness of love and desirability without any of the risks of possible romantic connection. All of the reward with little to no risk. There is safety in flirting with someone who can never be with you for whatever reason. So when you think of harem elements where all genders desire the protagonist, it isn’t merely fulfilling the desirability fantasy of queer audiences. It plays into the wants of straight players as well.
Desire is often for lack. We yearn for that which we aren’t. Think of Plato’s story of humans once being ball-like creatures, four legs and four arms, two faces, some balls homosexual and some heterosexual. The gods split us down the middle, and that led to love. We desire the part of us we don’t have. With Cynari, we see similarity and chemistry… but also one lacking which the other has. Cyno is a melee fighter, and Tighnari is an archer. The distant desires the close. Beidou is the rough vagrant on the sea. Ninguang is the distant sophisticate floating in a palace in the sky. We yearn for that we can’t consume…
Fourth Wish: Why It Matters
Consumption. Video game addiction. Is it real? Well… are behavioral addictions psychiatric facts? You might be quick to say, well, yes. The instinct is to then list off gambling, porn, and sex addictions. Those are real, so it makes sense for video game addiction to be a real thing. Well, the science isn’t there yet. Actually, only one of those four is currently called an addiction, and that would be gambling. There’s heavy argument over the other three. In fact, many professionals argue labeling those things as addictions could easily be stigmatizing completely normal behaviors. There are some on the Evangelical side who would say someone who watches any amount of porn on a semi-regular basis is addicted. That’s simply not the case.
Video game addiction isn’t currently included in the DSM. Mark Zastrow examined the beliefs around supposed-video game addiction for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There are some who believe it exists, and others who believe the supposed-disease is likely a symptom of other underlying mental health issues. The most commonly suggest mental health issue I saw in the article was a lack of impulse control. Some who think it does exist believe it exists at vastly smaller numbers than people assume.
To me, it seems like an attempt to pathologize normal behavior. There seems like a puritcanical attempt to paint any pleasurable activity oft-undertaken as “wrong.” Ascetics. Self-denial is holy, anything else is sin. And what concerns me with that is to turn medicalization into government restriction.
Speaking of authoritarian governments, sorry tankies, China has decided, despite the lack of evidence, that video game addiction is not only real but widespread and devastating amongst the youths. Right before they published draconian, reactionary restrictions on the industry, a state-owned newspaper compared gaming to drug abuse. The actual lack of evidence so-called behavioral addictions function the same as substance abuse is a large part of why it currently isn’t accepted in the DSM. But as a pretense to crack down on the industry and restrict the lives of its citizens, China has decided to pretend the evidence solidly backs this comparison. Of course, you have to make the comparison if you want to make heavy restrictions, because otherwise you’d have to decide whether or not it’s addiction based on the individual extreme cases where that’s a reality instead of treating it as a substance.
In this paper, they talk about a supposedly addicted teen whose grades started to suffer. “Gaming offered him a sense of achievement.” His father smashed countless phones. In protest, the kid tried to off himself. The implication is that this is the fault of the gaming. But… no. The achievement comment implies an existing mental health condition, likely a sort of existential depression. The father’s abusive reaction is more concerning. That’s not good parenting. Of course, China’s entire reaction to gaming as described in this article isn’t good parenting. “In extreme cases, teens are administered electroshock therapy to reduce their addiction to gaming.” So… medical torture.
You might be asking, what does that have to do with Genshin Impact? Well, after pushing that nonsense, China of course had to pass actual regulations severely controlling the industry and restricting the lives of its citizens. Minors are now allowed exactly 3 hours of playtime a week, precisely 8-9 Friday through Sunday. So yes, of course, most children won’t be allowed to play any sort of video game. Regardless, this isn’t really about the nonsense idea of gaming addiction being so real you have to specify the exact time of day people are allowed to do a certain thing. When they set out these time restrictions, they also put in restrictions on content. You can’t be corrupting the youths after all. You can’t be letting people think it’s okay to be themselves. Remember when I said Venti was specifically pointed at as a problem character? That comes from this censorship measure. Effiminate men and queer love are both banned.
As Jade King points out, the censorship in this massive, sexist, homophobic market could lead to a decrease in queer representation in general. Why risk cutting off the business you could get selling from China?
So. Why does it matter if people can read queer narratives into Genshin? Queering has been how we found representation before we started to actually get to see ourselves. It’s an important way to find evidence that we exist. It’s also, in this case, resistance. It’s a middle finger to an oppressive government. Gay and trans people exist. We will continue to exist. Your desire to erase us will not work. We will still see the traces of our beautiful existences. Genshin Impact is a massively successful game that functions as soft power from China. By queering it, we tell the CCP they cannot export their bigotry. The world will continue to move past them just like we will every conservative moron.
I talked about it briefly in my video on leftists who cry about “bourgeois decadence” when it comes to queer people, mostly just because they’re campist reactionaries who don’t care about politics, China shut down the Beijing LGBT Center, Shanghai pride, and LGBT Rights Advocacy China. It’s a deeply homophobic government inspired by a deep sexism.
Queering is also important in video games and anime-inspired spaces in general. Blue Flag is a manga by Kaito published in Shonen Jump. One of its leads is a gay man with a crush on the main character. The stroy tells of the relationships the MC has with the girl he likes, his best friend who likes him, and the various people in their lives. There are entire chapters talking about homophobia and sexuality and debating whether homophobes need to be respected. They don’t. In the final chapter, there’s a time leap. We’re in the future. The character relationships have changed. We’re all older. We grow apart and redefine how we related to people. The main character doesn’t end up with the girl he was pursuing… but with the gay best friend whose feelings he didn’t know how to handle. I looked at comments on MangaPlus when I first finished the manga. There were a lot of angry reactions to the gay ending. It wasn’t simply complaints about rushing things like many people have complained about now, but that it ended gay. They didn’t like that. And they made it clear they wouldn’t have liked that even if there was a longer ending that built that relationship
A later manga, Excuse Me Dentist, It’s Touching Me! By Sho Yamazaki, was pretty popular on the app. I read it as the chapters came out. It’s a silly manga. The comments loved the comedy. I didn’t see much of any homophobia. Is that because the manga reading community online evolved so quickly, or was it because the queerness was presented as a joke rather than a drama? The couple also never explicitly got together. If they were, in the end, shown to be clearly in love as a man and a man, how would they have reacted?
I don’t know. What I do know is that Reddit threads on manga and anime hate suggestions of queer ships and queer manga. Even in the chill atmosphere of Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-Kun! there’s still occasional insistence that reading Asmodeus and Iruma as potential romantic love is far outside the box. “Why can’t people be friends?” they yell, but only ever when it comes to potential queer people. I’m cognizant of the fact that sometimes this is just typical ship wars nonsense. “Here’s a post about A & B.” “You dumb bitch, it’s clearly A & C. A & B are just friends. They’re practically brothers.” You know how the internet is. It’s half need for validation and half pretending to care about art or political issues when really just desiring a pretext to fight with other people on the internet. That dynamic is at play. But it is also more prominent when it comes to queer themes. The anti-SJW types of the mid-2010s have not gone away unfortunately.
As I mentioned at the start of the video, I’ve seen threads on video game boards going apocalyptic over queer rep and queering video games. “How dare you invade our spaces?!” they yell.
So queering doesn’t only become an exercise in finding representation, seeing ourselves in worlds. It isn’t only an analytic style for examining potential readings around gender and sexuality. It becomes an act of resistance against homophobia and transphobia. It refuses to cede ground to bigotry. Video games are art. And there is no art space that exists without queer people. We are here to stay. Our stories are here to stay. Incels, Celestia, and China cannot stop us.
As Prior says at the end of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: “We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabolous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.”
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