[SunlightEdge]

The Last of Us Part II is a very marmite game - people either love it or hate it. Personally I didn't like the direction the story went down even if the gameplay and the graphics were amazing I was left cold. However I do respect that the story itself was pretty original and was catering to female/lgtb audiences (that's cool). Just not my thing.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

You mean that the central romantic relationship was between two women? Or that the main action characters are female?

Does that mean you'd describe 70-90% of other visual storytelling as "catering to male straight audiences" ?

[oceansky]

I mean, kinda?

[skyyler]

In what ways was the story catering to female/lgtb audiences? I haven't played it, but I played the first one.

[shikshake]

It really wasn't, it just had a lesbian protagonist. There are still many prominent sympathetic male characters with agency. Plenty of women enjoy action movies targeted towards men, I always find it confusing when men feel they can't enjoy media with a woman in it.

[SunlightEdge]

Respectfully I don't agree with you. I do think that part 2 massively changed the story to one where it catered to female/lgtb audiences. Examples: 1. Ellie and her girlfriend 2. Abby (who I really wasn't sure if they were trans or just a very butch woman (turned out to be the later) 3. Abby's male forest friend (who turns out to be a trans-man).

I have no problem with game companies creating a range of stories (in fact I fully support it) but it was very much a game for female/lgtb audiences. I do also think that the difference in tone between part 1 and 2 was quite striking.

Personally I do think it was a very bold creative direction but I know I will not play part 3 - its not a series that interests me anymore. But that's just an opinon.

[foldr]

It seems like you’re just saying that any game with female and/or LGBT characters isn’t suitable for a straight male audience.

[SunlightEdge]

Respectfully I am not saying that, you are making that claim. TLOU part 2 in my view was very different in tone to part 1. I didn't enjoy the story. This is an opinion.

[foldr]

The only examples you give of it 'catering to female and LGBT audiences' are the existence of some female and LGBT characters.

Also, Abby is just a regular cis heterosexual woman, and there is never any indication that she might be otherwise. I can't really see how the mere existence of a straight cis female character in a game could signal very much about its intended audience.

[A4ET8a8uTh0_v2]

Huh? Lara Croft, female Shepherd ( that is how I played it anyway ), Bayonetta all featured female protagonists. The difference between then and current crop and the games were enjoyable to its audience.

I personally disliked 2nd last of us, but that it is because, unlike the first one, it was missing something from the original. I absolutely disliked the 2nd act as the former antagonist despite understanding the need to include their portion of the story in the narrative.

I am lukewarm towards the end message despite it, oddly, aligning with my own personal views. It felt it was preachy.

And that, I think, some find off-putting. It is supposed to be entertainment.

Hell, Wick just released Ballerina that features strong female protagonist and.. people don't hate as much as other forced entries. I have theories as to why, but those, I think, can only derail this thread.

[spinach]

But Lara Croft and Bayonetta were made for the male audience. They were very palatable to males because that was their purpose especially visual wise. I don't think it's very representative of actual women and their experience.

[BrightHonest]

> But Lara Croft and Bayonetta were made for the male audience.

That isn't really true, well at least in not the way you are implying. In both circumstances the motivations in development of the characters were to do something a bit different.

> Lead graphic artist Toby Gard went through about five designs before arriving at the character's final appearance. He initially envisioned a male lead character with a whip and a hat. Core Design co-founder Jeremy Smith characterised Gard's initial design as derivative of Indiana Jones and asked for more originality. Gard decided that a female character would work better from a design standpoint. He also cited Virtua Fighter as an influence; Gard noticed that while watching people play the game, players selected one of the two available female characters in the game almost every match he saw. Gard expressed a desire to counter stereotypical female characters, which he has characterised as "bimbos" or "dominatrix" types. Smith was sceptical of a female lead at first because few contemporary games featured them. He came to regard a female lead as a great hook and put faith in Gard's idea. Inspired by pop artist Neneh Cherry and comic book character Tank Girl, Gard experimented with different designs, including "sociopathic blonds, muscle women, flat topped hip-hopsters and a Nazi-like militant in a baseball cap". He settled on a tough South American latina woman with a braid named Laura Cruz.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lara_Croft

Similarly with Bayonetta. The guy had made a bunch of games with Male Protagonists and fancied a change by the sounds of it.

> Given the suggestion to create another action game by producer Yusuke Hashimoto, project director Hideki Kamiya decided to create a female lead, having felt he had already done all that could be done with male protagonists. To this end, he told character designer Mari Shimazaki to create her with three traits: a female lead, a modern witch, and to use four guns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonetta_(character)

It very much "damned if you do, damned if you don't" when designing characters because someone is going to criticise you for something or other and assume the worst reasons why you did it.

[api]

There's a very loud minority of people who think anything with a female or LGBTQ character in it is "woke-washed" or whatever, and apparently have tons of time to complain about it on social media. There's apparently entire subreddits dedicated to slagging on apparently "woke" media that has a GiIIiRRlllLL in it (eEEEeeeWWW!). People need a life.

[dyauspitr]

Or we just go back to having separate media directed at boys and girls because the current paradigm doesn’t work.

[brcmthrowaway]

Reminder: You can draw a straight line from Gamergate to Trump

[akimbostrawman]

Reminder: it has been over a decade ago...

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/729/316/993...

[PintScotch]

You are misstating the complaint.

If you have a fictional series/universe it is important it is internally consistent. Most people use fantasy/science fiction as a form of escapism. They don't want to be reminded about stuff in the real world while trying to escape it.

What frequently is perceived (rightly or wrongly) by fans of a particular franchise is that Female/LGBTQ characters are inserted into places where it doesn't make sense to fill quotas. People generally don't have problems with the characters being female or LGBTQ if the character is charismatic and it doesn't break the internal consistency of the Universe.

The reason why people are vocal is because they've heavily invest their time into something and when it fundamentally changes they feel like they've had the proverbial rug pulled from under them.

[api]

> Female/LGBTQ characters are inserted into places where it doesn't make sense to fill quotas

Every case of "ruined by woke" I have seen ultimately just boils down to bad writing, with people blaming "woke" for it when, well, it's just shitty writing. If you ignore the woke stuff and look more broadly usually the whole thing is at best mediocre.

Also sci-fi, fantasy, and horror have always been "woke." Star Trek was one of the first popular shows to prominently feature black characters in important roles and has always lampooned racism and other kinds of bigotry. Night of The Living Dead is pretty easy to see as a racism allegory, or at least it contains one as a sub-plot. Star Wars had an evil empire that was transparently a mix of Nazis and arrogant condescending colonialists. Alien was one of the first huge films I can recall to have a super competent female action hero with skills like engineering who didn't need any help from a man. The Expanse depicts a society that's so post-gender-mattering you don't even notice it, it's just the way it is (probably a good example of good writing in this regard). Etc.

[PintScotch]

> Every case of "ruined by woke" I have seen ultimately just boils down to bad writing, with people blaming "woke" for it when, well, it's just shitty writing. If you ignore the woke stuff and look more broadly usually the whole thing is at best mediocre.

No not really. Claiming this is a hand waving away legit criticism. Fans/Superfans have legitimate criticism of how it breaks the in franchise universes. Constructive Criticism has been claimed to be racism/sexist/homophobia.

> Also sci-fi, fantasy, and horror have always been "woke." Star Trek was one of the first popular shows to prominently feature black characters in important roles and has always lampooned racism and other kinds of bigotry. Night of The Living Dead is pretty easy to see as a racism allegory, or at least it contains one as a sub-plot. Star Wars had an evil empire that was transparently a mix of Nazis and arrogant condescending colonialists. Alien was one of the first huge films I can recall to have a super competent female action hero with skills like engineering who didn't need any help from a man. The Expanse depicts a society that's so post-gender-mattering you don't even notice it, it's just the way it is (probably a good example of good writing in this regard). Etc.

No they haven't. It so annoying when people point to some ideas that were slightly progressive at the time being an example of it always being "woke". It is quite honestly tiresome.

None of the examples you have given are what people refer to as "woke" today anyway.

Star Trek was certainly progressive, no argument there. But progressive != woke. When people use "woke" as a pejorative they mean extreme left-wing politics that is bordering on insane. Star Trek TNG was progressive, but none of the politics were seen as extreme even at the time of release.

Alien (like Terminator) were very well done horror movies. They worked because women are seen as traditionally vulnerable. It a well known trope in horror movies.

Also there have been femme fatales and heroines in movies well before Alien. I've seen it in a silent Japanese Martial Arts movie from the 1930s where the Heroine avengers her friend who was raped after going to Samurai master (can't remember the name of the film though).

Heroines didn't just pop into existence sometime after 1960.

> The Expanse depicts a society that's so post-gender-mattering you don't even notice it, it's just the way it is (probably a good example of good writing in this regard). Etc.

Never seen it, probably won't now. If a piece of media is going to pretend that someone's sex isn't important to at least some aspect of their character, than it is bad writing. The fact that the show had to be saved by a Billionaire, tells me that it probably wasn't any good in the first place.

[koakuma-chan]

I definitely enjoyed Stellar Blade

[underlipton]

I loved the Uncharted games and have always thought that the first level of TLOU:PI is one of best set-piece intros in gaming history, up there with FFVII's "Bombing Run". If you suspect that this is me buttering you up for a takedown, you'd be correct. I have some major issues with TLOU.

Like a lot of modern zombie media, it eschews the genre's initial thrust towards satire of race/class issues to instead play them straight, presenting a survivalist power fantasy that edges a little too close to colonialist sympathies. The admitted beauty of its settings actually makes this issue worse: players are supposed to admire the despoiled wilderness, cities and towns rendered bucolic via violent depopulation. This is only broken by the continued clashing of human/formerly human fighters and soldiers; there are still too many people.

Finding out that one of PII's subplots was meant to be an allegory of the Israel/Palestine conflict made things click hard, especially remembering how PI's development difficulties (famously, Amy Hennig being forced to lead a push to force Neil Druckmann to change the original plan to make Clickers female-only) dovetailed "grossly" with the eventual story (one where almost every prominent female character is killed brutally on-screen). What was supposed to be a thoughtful exploration of human nature, as literary as it was interactive, turned out to be just another [redacted] [redacted] power fantasy along the lines of Call of Duty. Maybe worse, for the pretense.

[dgfitz]

My biggest beef with it by far was the lack of additional storytelling of the infection.

Gameplay was fun, graphics on PS5 were excellent. The infection is a character all by itself and it was basically completely neglected. This bothered me because it was such a central part of the first game.

Another game that actually did this well, Days Gone, will sadly never get a sequel.

[dyauspitr]

Yeah I generally have zero interest in anything that caters to a female audience. Usually the motivations and outcomes are the exact opposite of what I tend to look forward to in movies/games in that case.