If we go back to TLoU, we have Ellie a young girl as one of the main characters (albeit limited playability). In this post apocalyptic world along her way with Joel, they meet Marlene (a female black leader of the firely resistance), Bill (a gay resistance smuggler), Henry (a black male looking for the fireflies), Sam (a black male, Henry's brother), David (a white creepy molester), Riley (black female, love interest for Ellie), Tommy (white male, Joel's brother), Maria (Tommy's wife and leader of the settlement, inherited).
It wasn't pushed in your face, each character was just in the game and we discovered them as we played through. There was no drama and no hate. No over reaction. People just didn't care. Which is a healthy viewpoint. People playing the game looked beyond all these things and liked the characters for who they were.
Naughty Dog did a good job of providing diversity and culturally relevant characters. However, it seems it's gone beyond that now, it's not enough to just create these characters. It's switched into chasing acknowledgment for doing so. Someone made a comparison to art above. And I think it can be used as an example actually.
TLoU is like a painting hanging in a gallery. People walk up to it and appreciate it for its nuance and subtlety. You can drink in the gorgeous visuals and linger over each character in the frame, appreciating their placement and representation without it ever being overbearing or detracting from the overall canvas.
So far, TLoU2 is like a follow up piece of work with an out of context political message shoehorned into the foreground, with ND running round pushing it under everyone's nose and demanding it be liked and acknowledged.
Ironically, I feel the studio is losing a bit of its own identity. It's like the leads have looked into the stagnant puddle of the internet and discovered the pool of Narcissus.
I'm still going to buy the game because I liked TLoU and when you look past the eye rolling fan service there will undoubtedly be another solid game underneath. The main problem with all of this is that most people just don't care, and the studio are chasing the cheers from a very small demographic of their overall audience. What RobinGaming and the middle of the ground people are saying in this thread, is that it's obvious and it being placed front and centre is turning people away. Not because of the sexuality, sex or ethnicity of the characters but because it's not honest and when you do this, it leads to subpar work. Like the trailer itself. It was a really poor splice of two completely different themes tied together with a juxtaposition that had the strength of cotton. The amateur and cliche transition from face to face in environments with the dramatic sentence probably summing up the entire piece the best, as they boxed themself into a creative corner.
And to be honest the real talking point here isn't eved the ND agenda, the most pertinent talking point from the trailer was how Ellie's sexuality was completely taken out of her hands. In the DLC she kissed Riley, so it an active decision. This new trailer is like (from Dina) 'err, you're a lesbian. I'm a female, that means it is totally OK for me to just approach and kiss you, because there is no way you wouldn't want me to'. And that's what happens when you shoehorn actions onto characters. A supposedly straight female (insinuated by the trailer), suddenly wants to start kissing the lesbian. Could you honestly get any more cliche and worse than that? And if there is some subplot where Dina is bisexual then the context has been completely removed from the scene, which again begs the question why was it in there? For the vanity of applause.