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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   2733 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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Despite the marketing push for the female leads in RPGs like AC Odyssey, Mass Effect and Cyberpunk heavily pushing the female leads into the marketing, the actual buyer demographic heavily prefer the male lead in all the games.

As a straight, cis-by-default guy, I have a mild preference for female characters. Not sure if that makes me crypto-trans or something. Here is my reasoning:

  • For 3rd person view games: if I have to stare at the ass of my PC for 80 hours, I prefer staring at a female backside.
  • Romance-option wise, I am fine with lesbian content, but don't care for gay content. For straight content, I mildly prefer my character being the guy, but for example in BG3 'PC vs NPC party member' is pretty much a distinction without a difference. (Of course, I played a female Lolthsworn Dark Urge necromancer, which is fairly far from my real world persona. The class turned out to be a mistake, I was under the impression that I would get Finger of Death (& WotB) eventually. In 2nd and 3rd ed these were actually useful.)
  • I guess my PC gender preference inverts if there is a lot promiscuity going on, for example in Witcher 1, I would prefer playing a slutty Gerald who gets a lot of pussy to a hypothetical slutty Geraldine who gets a ton of cock, possibly with a collection of risque cards of all the guys my PC has fucked. Outside of Witcher 1 and straightforward porn games, this is rarely a dominating concern.

I think that for mainstream games like ME or Cyberpunk, there is enough demand for female main characters that it makes sense to provide both options, even if you have to cast some lines with two sets of pronouns.

I agree with your points on story-writing, though. A thinly veiled allegory for whatever the cause of the day is (no matter the political leaning) rarely makes for an engaging story.

Just sounds like you're a straight man tbh. And I've yet to be persuaded that "cis-by-default" means anything.

"Cis-by-default" is trying to motion toward the difference between the sort of straight guy who'd react to a Ranma'ing by poking his own breasts and giggling for three hours straight, and the sort who'd immediately douse their head in boiling water. (To turn back into a man, right?)

Ozy originally had a poll from somewhere saying some sizable number of men in that situation claimed that they'd go full suicidal, but I can't find it or any real references to it, so I can't look back at how well-designed it was, and even the summary had a lot of questions unanswered about how performative that claim was. But from a revealed preferences sense, you do get a lot of similar outputs: most obvious in smut where some fraction of guys get really uncomfortable with (especially but not only VR) female protagonist games even in F/F-only contexts, but also more subtly the difference between guys that are bored by and those that are outraged by having to learn about woman-specific things like traditional makeup use.

That said, yeah, I agree quiet_NaN doesn't seem crypto-trans. I've clocked people wrong before, but at minimum I'd expect a crypto-trans person to either really like the gay romance option or at least mention the lesbian option for an alternate universe Witcher 1, even crypto-trans people that don't fit Blanchard's typology.

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