Undertale made me realized years ago exactly how easy it is to include gay characters in videogames and I haven’t been the same since then
Trans characters too cause switching pronouns for characters? Explicitely using they/them for some of them? Having transgender ghosts and using them inhabiting a new body as a metaphor for transitioning? It was brilliant, and it was something that while it wasn’t the main focus of the story, it was well handled and a nice addition to the plot.
And again, gay characters that express their attraction towards the same gender explicitely! The fact that the only way to get the true happy ending in the story can be achieved by getting together Alphys and Undyne and making Alphys face her mistakes and accept herself so she wouldn’t be so miserable!! It’s good, it’s refreshing, and it makes me so mad that not many games (or any media, really) reaxhes Undertale’s level on this matter. I’m not calling Undertale a paragon of LGBT rep, it’s not! I’m saying it created a standard and that many much bigger videogames don’t even get close to it.
Writing LGBT characters that aren’t miserable for being who they are, caricatures or victims of homo/transphobic violence is EASY. Deciding to let LGBT people be happy in your content is EASY.
Basically what I’m saying is “thing that moves like a distorted gif, but in meatspace” works much better than “thing with tons of tentacles” as a visual representation of cosmic horror, IMHO.
Nowadays, sure, but human depictions of cosmic ineffability are always informed by time and place. In the early days of deep-sea exploration, “thing with tons of tentacles” was the very pinnacle of “holy shit what is that”; it’s just that the symbol has aged in a way that the substance has not.
CEPHALOPODS IN 1918: horrors from the unknowable depths of blackness only made only the more horrific by animate motions suggesting a flicker of intelligence within their shapeless, fleshy coils
Don0303 