Lol, wtf? I started reading the article, thinking maybe it was a sweet story, but it was just ridiculous word drivel.
I spot the predictable: "Made me feel included", "Representation", "Nonbinary", "cis", "aged badly", "myself", "toxic" etc. I swear, you could get an AI to write articles like this. How many jumps do you need to take? How hard is it to not fall along a diatribe when you're writing? Why has games media turned into big self-masturbating monologues? Imagine if they had actual discussions like real media, what's left of it in the US - whether right-wing or left-wing or center. Imagine if they were thought provoking and interesting.
Who are all these narcissistic people obsessing about "seeing myself" in a video game? I've never seen a single video game character that looks like me and when I make characters I don't make them to look like me. I've broken tons of gender stereotypes through my life, but I've never gone on out looking for attention for it nor have I felt any sort of elation in doing it. I'm more worried about these people and how fragile their sense of self-worth must be to go crazy over something like that. 75% of the shows I watched in my early teens were almost exclusively black shows, with the exception of a few white guest stars. So did I go into a big speech about inclusivity and how it touched me to identify myself in some white guy showing up? No. Because not only am I not looking at things to find "me" in them, but I am also not "a white guy". I can't relate anymore to some white guy showing, any more than I could to any black guy showing up. I am not them and none of them are like me.
Part of me feels like this is all a product of social media and how it has funneled attention seeking behavior. Before you had to star in a reality show to get any noteworthy attention, usually making a fool of yourself. That meant there was a limit in your outreach and everything was funneled through limited means. Perhaps you could get a bit of attention through the local newspaper during the slow months every summer. With the normalization of Internet and social media, it seems we have hit a point where people are no longer restricted. I constantly see this kind of behavior on social media and on newspapers. Heck, newspapers, who've often self-aggrandize themselves as virtuous defenders of all good, have monetized this. Seeing parents showing off their dying sick child, using vague scaremongering headlines and hiding it all behind a paywall, has made me utterly cynical about the future of humanity. Perhaps this attention seeking behavior is part of most of humanity and that I'm just an outlier, a defect, and that social media just made it go haywire. It's not even a pure "right wing" or "left wing" thing. You'll see the same behavior on the right when given the chance, usually in their own arenas. It's not even an "age" thing, as boomer generation can be equally into doing it.
Also, wtf, "tween"? Who actually says that?
Ugh, feels disgusting going on a small rant about a random article on the web, but it just shows my own frustration with how society overall has developed. I find it funny how utterly misplaced Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club was in how he formulated a possible spiritual crisis for the modern Man.
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