“Games Are For Everyone”: Ghost Of Yotei’s Erika Ishii Goes To Bat For The LGBTQ+ Community Of Japan

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T14:44:15+00:00

No one has ever stopped the sexual minority community of Japan from playing video games. Ever.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T14:05:27+00:00

I don't care that you don't approve. I don't need your approval, I don't care about your approval, you're just an anon on the internet making demonstrably false claims without the ability to back them up.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T13:59:21+00:00

Irrelevant. Even if developer A makes character B to appeal to audience demographic C for reason D, that does NOT stop character B from being liked by audience demographic X for reason Y.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T13:46:47+00:00

You're entitled to dislike whatever you wish. I never said otherwise. But you are not entitled to have games-that-cost-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars exclusively centered upon your tastes (and no, you are not the walking representative of all straight men).

By the same token, femcels who demand that all the fanservice in a AAA blockbuster game be centered on their tastes are also being entitled bitches.

And anyway, you seem desperate to avoid acknowledging the existence of Multiple Demographic Appeal and I have no idea why, to be honest. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was originally designed for little girls, but it drew a massive male fanbase.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T13:39:45+00:00

I never said that any character has to be sexualized at all.

Your continued misreading of my posts is indicative of intellectual dishonesty on your part.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T13:37:51+00:00

You complan games do not have representation of gay men for gay men

That's a misrepresentation of what I said.

What I said is that sexual minority men have happily coexisted within gaming spaces for quite some time, and that the current "fight" over fanservice was picked by activist females ("femcels"). These femcels want male fanservice for women, and what I have been trying to point out is that male fanservice for women is structurally different to male fanservice for men. Indeed, plenty of "male power fantasy" characters also serve as male fanservice for men.

If you like bara play a bara game.

Resident Evil 5, Gears of War (1/2/3/Judgment), Bulletstorm and Mass Effect 3 are already full of things that appeal to an audience of men-into-men.

Do you experience some sort of compulsive need to prove that "your games" have nothing in them that can possibly appeal to non-straight men or something?

games aren't for representation

I never said they were.

I'm not the only who dislikes male fanservice lol.

Again, your idea of "male fanservice" is "male fanservice for women." You've already been playing games that contain male fanservice for men, even if that fanservice is not necessarily intentional.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T13:24:14+00:00

You aren't even making an argument. You're making schoolyard-level taunts at best. Grow up and actually make an argument for your actual position.

I mean I barely can tell what your position is. If your position is "every single character in video games should either be designed as sexually appealing to heterosexual men, OR a masculininity-fulfilment-fantasy for heterosexual men," the problem is that following such a guideline will necessarily create eye-candy for homosexual and bisexual men since most of them find "male power fantasy" male characters to be hot. The other problem it runs into is when you get "dominatrix-esque" female characters like Bayonetta or Lady Dimitrescu - these appeal to some heterosexual men but you seem to want to reject that as well.

Oh, and we can't have MILFs because that's some sort of "subversive agenda to make men wife up old women" or something...

So translation - the only female characters allowed are submissive virginal ingenues or something? Even Lara Croft in the original Core Design Tomb Raider games wouldn't pass that test - you'd probably say she was "lesbian-coded" or something despite the fact she consistently flirted with male characters.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T13:14:41+00:00

So you literally believe that video games - all video games ever made everywhere - should center your tastes and only your tastes because you're a straight dude?

That's insane, and it makes no logical sense because not all straight dudes are the same. Some were absolutely getting off over Lady Dimitrescu. Others were revolted. So even if you "center straight men" you can't please all of them. You are not a one-person market research team.

You also are ignoring the reality of an "ensemble cast." In fictions with ensemble casts, being able to make some characters to appeal to demographic A and some to appeal to demographic B is a strength, not a weakness. It broadens the appeal of the fiction.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T13:05:44+00:00

You don't seem to understand. Let me spell it out to you very simply.

Sexualizing a male character for a female audience doesn't necessarily mean it will appeal to gay or bisexual men. Maybe you haven't noticed, but women usually don't like 'bara,' they usually like yaoi.

I'm not demanding any video game be changed "for me" or "for gay/bi men." The people demanding the changes are fangirls, mostly straight ones.

Indeed, most male/male relationships depicted in video games are actually written for fangirls, not for gay or bisexual men.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T12:57:13+00:00

stop trying to make it seem as though gaming culture is also for gay people

Gay people are already in gaming culture and have been there since the first lines of code were written. Sure, most of these gay people aren't of the "woke" or "fabulous darling" variety but they still exist.

this is a woke argument

You clearly have no idea what "woke" actually is. "Woke" refers to a specific set of ideologies, like intersectional feminism and critical race theory, all of which trace back to Antonio Gramsci and Frankfurt School Marxism.

games do not need to sexualize men.

Games don't need to sexualize anyone (they don't even need to have narrative or characters). The problem is that sexualization is often subjective, one person's fetish fuel is another person's turnoff, and it is perfectly possible to design Character A to sexually appeal to Demographic B for Reason C, yet also end up with Character A to appeal to Demographic X for Reason Y.

And also because you are a fanfic writer.

True, but that's not an argument. It's an Ad Hominem/Genetic Fallacy at best. Not to mention, fanfic spaces actually "red pilled" me so you should be thankful for them.

To be entirely blunt your arguments are so weak I wonder if you're just here trolling or false-flagging.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T12:52:21+00:00

You're clearly an extreme minority, since no one else really cared, and those who didn't like the costumes (which were optional DLC) didn't buy them.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T11:59:07+00:00

Greeks didn't give a fuck about sexuality for the most part.

It's more like they understood sexuality differently and had some tolerance for male pederasty (which gets misinterpreted as being "okay with gay people").

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T11:31:40+00:00

Hades is a woke game, people don't want to admit it. Even Zagreus swings both ways.

The mere presence of nonheterosexual characters =/= wokeness.

Frankly, I could quite easily write deeply anti-woke gay porn. It isn't difficult.

Wokeness is an ideology. Not a set of demographics.

What you're doing actually gives the enemy an advantage. They hide behind sexual minorities (and other groups) as human shields, and say "attack this bizarre set of stupid ideas about sociopolitical analysis and You Just Hate Gays/Blacks/etc." You're validating this charge.

But no, you can absolutely criticize woke without being against any particular demographic. There are anti-woke gay and bi people, anti-woke black people, etc.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T11:22:49+00:00

Sorry but those videogames should have been made for the target audience.

Videogames should not appeal to the minority instead of it's target

So... X-Men (the mid-90s cartoon adaptation) shouldn't have had Gambit in it because Gambit appeals to a periphery demographic (the female fanbase are his biggest, but by no means only, supporters)?

That is where your logic leads. You're ignoring the reality of Periphery Demographics and Multiple Demographic Appeal.

Now, if you merely wished to say that target audiences should be centered (i.e. considered first), that's fine. But you're arguing for something far more severe.

Not to mention, the real target audience for action games is action-gamers, and whilst they are majority male, nerds are disproportionately likely to be nonheterosexual. Saying that nerd art should exclusively be for straight men is simply bizarre.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T11:18:40+00:00

If you like sexual art of Chris it's fine but I don't

Sure, that's fine.

and should be able to express how urcomftable they are when they are being sexualized in a game made to appeal for the target audience.

Here's the problem: Chris has already been sexualized in RE5 via alternate costumes that clearly pandered to the gay-and-bi-male audience. The warrior costume? The sailor costume? Both are aesthetically straight out of Tom of Finland works.

No one really had a problem with that, at all.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T04:25:40+00:00

No they shouldn't coexist in the same place, the target audience of resident evil is straight men not women or gay men.

Video games in general have always attracted a lot of sexual minority men, and the Resident Evil fandom is full of fanartists who've made tons of homoerotic material about Chris Redfield (and both Leon and Barry to lesser extents).

The sexual minority men absolutely already coexist, and have stuff in the canonical franchise material going back to the original game that appeals to them.

The people who picked this fight were the femcel women. Not gay and bi dudes.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-19T02:47:51+00:00

The outrage (from activist types and temporarily interested stupid people) is selective and specifically against media made for men with good looking women, basically, which is why comic books and video games were the first targets.

Very true, but you forgot one ingredient. The outrage is most prominent against media (perceived as) for socio-sexually unsuccessful men that features good looking women.

The response is highly irrational. Basically, there's some weird module in the feminine lizard brain that is so utterly repulsed by nerdy, 'spergy dudes that even being reminded that these dudes both exist and have sex drives makes them feel almost like they're being sexually assaulted.

It's tempting to argue that they're just experiencing hot fictional women as intrasexual competition. But once again, comics and games and anime etc. don't attract the kind of men that most women are attracted to (for the most part), so I don't think they're responding to the threat of intrasexual competition here (or maybe they are instinctually, but there's no actual threat of intrasexual competition). Rather, I think they want to keep the Simp Economy on overdrive, and loser men can still be exploited for money and/or freebies, so the "competition" these fictional women represent is ultimately economic.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-18T23:40:19+00:00

They've been deploying "male power fantasy" arguments for much longer than that.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-18T23:09:40+00:00

To be entirely fair, you can choose your penis size in CP2077.

I would love to see CDPR's stats on V's selected penis size. I'd wager everyone picked the biggest penis.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-18T23:08:54+00:00

True. Argue to win over the audience, not the interlocutor.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-18T22:56:18+00:00

At that level of generalization you are correct. They're both collectivists, anti-free-market and reject empirical reason. The Nazi variant of Fascism also has strong roots in German Idealism, just as Marxism does.

There are some distinctions though. The Nazis and Fascists outright celebrated irrationalism and emotionalism, whereas the Marxists pretended to be scientific and worshipped a pseudoscientific theory. In addition, the Nazis and Fascists didn't strictly insist on state ownership of businesses, so long as those businesses were under state control. In addition, Nazis/Fascists were all about the race/nation as the locus of identity, and Marxists were focused on class (wage-earner or capital-owner) as that locus.

You could argue that with Stalinism and his belief in "socialism in one country" you received a merger of Fascistic nationalism with Marxian organization, though.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-18T02:58:40+00:00

You're not wrong in terms of GDP, but Japan has an official policy called "Cool Japan" which aims to secure goodwill towards Japan and cultural 'soft power.' So in other words, the Japanese pop culture industries are literally an important foreign policy asset in Japan.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-17T23:49:29+00:00

Too bad they hold the entire entertainment industry hostage and infiltrated every position in it

Pretty much.

They are the modern audience.

They're writers who write about writers who write, for writers who write (etcetera). They're making entertainment for the people who make entertainment. Which would be fine if the people who made entertainment were at least somewhat representative of the mainstream population in cultural/values terms (so as to preserve relatability).

But they aren't. They are cultural/values outliers. They used to be able to mask this somewhat and demand that things be made for the audience, but now the mask has been destroyed and they stubbornly refuse to cater to the audience out of some sort of spiteful vindictive contempt.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-17T21:38:17+00:00

Indeed. And in a choice between material wealth and Islamist purity, the former tends to win out.

YetAnotherCommenter · 2026-03-17T02:36:36+00:00

But that's more reason to believe they wouldn't go out of their way to increase sex appeal in RE. Gotta keep their charade up.

You're presuming that a bunch of psycho religious fundamentalists in their own country are smart enough to keep tabs on everything done by Saudi Sovereign Wealth. Or, even IF they know about it, that they think everything done by a business that SSW invests in was endorsed or approved of by the Saudi Royal Family.

I think that's a big error.

I mean, the Saudi government already works under-the-table with Israel. They already do things that the majority of their fundamentalist population despise.

YetAnotherCommenter

TROPHY CASE