LGBTQ + Game Week 2021
(Image credit: LaComparacion / R Healey Art)
Welcome to TechRadar's LGBTQ+ Gaming Week 2021. During this week-long celebration, we highlight issues and voices within the LGBTQ+ gaming community.
Learn more here.
No matter who you are, whatever your gender or sexuality,
you can experience your own lesbian love story through the magic of games. Whether you mixed your beans with Sera in Dragon Age: Inquisition, stuck your tongue out at Samantha Traynor in Mass Effect 3, or danced with one of the bisexual women from Fable, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, or Fallout. 4, many of us take the opportunity to flirt with a woman. However,
we often think that explicit sexual relations between women presented in the media were deliberately produced for an alleged male gaze. While it may be, it does the great lesbian architects no favors, who paved the way for their stories and portrayals in modern media.
Make the invisible visible
Yumeutsutsu Re: Master (Image credit: KOGADO STUDIO)
In 1919, the Japanese novelist Nobuko Yoshiya published her semi-autobiographical novel Two Virgins in the Attic, a story about a woman who experiences her sexual awakening when she falls in love with her roommate. While lesbian attraction or sexual experiences in adolescence were known and in the Japanese mainstream as ""' class experiences, the Japanese name for what we in the West see as a "phase", it was often expected that women they will mature overcome these and lead a traditional life.
Yoshiya was letting the women know, for the first time, that this was not the only result they had. In An Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures, Jennifer E. Robertson commented:
"Yoshiya's shoujo fiction, which was based on passionate friendship and a world without dominant males, inspired the rise of a thoughtful subculture."
"Sensible people can curb and control the impulses they want to express. But they cannot become artists who capture people's hearts."
Ryouko Yamagishi
The genre came to be known as Yuri, and finally broke into novels and pop culture in the 1970s, when Ryoko Yamagishi, an author who
"she's always been fascinated by things queer", created this sleeve,
Our White Room, about a Japanese girl forced to go to a Catholic boarding school for girls in France. Whereas in Yoshiya's work the romantic relationship and even the same-sex infatuation the couple shared had only connotations, Yamagishi's work was much more open and frankly depicted her own homosexual experiences. Although this practice was still taboo in a largely conservative Japanese society, she wanted to bring these occult practices to the fore. In an interview written for Bungeishunju Books, Yamagishi says, “I'm certainly not afraid of taboos. It may sound perverted, but it's more about wanting to surprise the reader with these topics. Sensible people can step on the brakes and control the impulses they want to express. But they cannot become artists who capture people's hearts. I tell young people that only those who can expose their shame can become manga." Yamagishi and Yoshida's first expressions of lesbian love were written by women for women. This meant that, in addition to explicit declarations of love between people of the same-sex, although examples of these were also present, there was a greater variety of implicit types of female affection and romance in the genre.The reader must fill in the gaps for himself, a process called "making the invisible lesbian visible".
Go west
Love Addiction Nurse (Image Credit: KOGADO STUDIO) Since these early works,
Japan has made progress in its portrayal of same-sex relationships. In the 1990s, when these relationships still drew disapproval in Japanese society, queer themes were commonly explored in pop culture. Gay couples could openly appear in anime and manga in their country of origin, though they were often heteronormalized in the American version.
"Lesbian romance was slowly becoming an accepted part of mainstream gaming, but developers were, and still are, all about making games for female audiences only."
Western audiences likely experienced their first Yuri story when the third season of the Sailor Moon animated series featured the gay romance between Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune in 1994. It was at a time when sapphic relationships were rare in the media. Western and almost non-existent. in children's programs; in fact, the couple first identified as cousins rather than lovers. However, Sailor Moon and her creator, Naoko Takeuchi, made young girls around the world realize for the first time that falling in love with their girlfriends was nothing out of the ordinary. yes
Ailor Uranus, a woman with masculine characteristics, or otokoyaku, a Japanese theatrical term for women playing male roles, was adored and adored by female fans and critics alike.
It didn't take long for parties to follow suit, bringing women's homoerotic experiences to the fore. The SaGa series, known for having several different stories based on the player's choice of protagonist, featured its first lesbian narrative,
written by Miwa Shoda, in 1997. Players who choose Asellus in SaGa Frontier will experience the heartwarming assistance between her and Princess White Rose, who helps Asellus escape from her castle by mocking her status as the only emigrant in existence. The players chose the new protagonist and
SaGa Frontier became the 29th best-selling PlayStation game of all time in Japan (according to Game Data Library).
Lesbian romance was slowly becoming an accepted part of mainstream gaming, but the developers were, and still are, when it came to making games for female audiences only. This is potentially due to the commonly perceived notion that women simply don't buy games, and developing games for a subset of women, an all-gay female audience, remains a somewhat alien concept to many. developers. Women who love women can be happily accommodated as an option, but stories are rarely made exclusively for us.
Maybe gay but why not bi?
VA-11 Hall-A (Image credit: Ysbyrd Games) Since the turn of the millennium,
there have been a lot of games with different genders for the protagonist and, as a result, opportunities for same-sex relationships, though there are different levels of lesbian business inclusion in these titles. We've seen it in games like Skyrim, Summon Night, and Persona 3 Portable, where romance is the same with characters regardless of the protagonist's gender, in titles like Stardew Valley and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, where some NPCs are romantic only for female characters. Then there are titles like Mirror's Edge, Bayonetta 2, and Rule of Rose, where only female intimacy is apparent, but outward expressions of sexuality remain a secret. While many of these games border on the erotic or downright pornographic realm, with many series aimed primarily at a male audience, a small number of women's Yuri games have begun to emerge that focus more on intimacy and sex. The key to these games is that,
While these girls' relationships are fun to explore, there's something for the straight male gamer as well.. Not just the thrill of seeing two women go there - these games are very tame in terms of lewd content - but the fact that the relationship the player may or may not choose to participate in is not at the core of the game. Even in games like Life is Strange: Before the Storm and The Last of Us Part II, where the female lead is exclusively interested in homoerotic relationships, these features are simply part of a larger story, with a variety of different game styles. to the core that they can appeal to a diverse audience. This is where Yuri's storytelling games come in, where the story focuses solely on these lesbian fantasies. While many of these games border on the erotic or downright pornographic realm, with many series aimed primarily at a male audience, h
A small number of Yuri games for women have started to emerge that focus more on intimacy and acceptance of a woman's own sex.. Awakening: Series like Nurse Love and Yumeutsutsu follow a female protagonist who may fall in love with one of her co-workers. The popularity of this visual novel style has sparked growing interest in the West with releases like VA-11 HALL-A, where you play as Jill, a lesbian bartender in love with her boss, or Gone Home telling the story of discovery by a woman. of his sister's homosexual relationship. So the next time you spend your time courting two of your girls,
take a moment to reflect on the long history of lesbians and talented women in the arts; women like Nobuko Yoshiya and Ryoko Yamagishi, whose life and storytelling skills have led to the popularization and inclusion of sapphic themes in today's mainstream media.
Georgina Young is a part-time freelance writer and PlayStation Vita enthusiast who lived in Japan. You can find her on Twitter or on her Vita Paradisa blog.