re: #132 Dangerman

amazing how much some people care about imaginary characters

Lots of people care about imaginary characters. We cannot know everyone in the world, but fictional characters can stand as proxies for people who’s qualities and struggles we will never encounter in real life.

But angry gamer guys don’t care about fictional characters in that way; they want the opposite, for characters to only be packed full of characteristics they either possess or desire to possess. That’s why characters can’t be gay, why depicting gayness is “politics”—they don’t want to relate to or interact with something that is outside their existing desires and appetites.

This has been the heart of all the various “angry bros” outrages—in comics, in scifi, in fantasy—they don’t want complexity or to be challenged, they want smooth integration into a power fantasy.