Everyone is Happy

So, Connie, the main PC in EiH, is female, brown, and can be straight, lesbian, bisexual or not-interested as the player chooses. It's very much not a dating sim, but there's one female and one male romance possibility available, both of whom should be obvious fairly early in the game. Connie can have feelings for either, neither, or both, depending on player choices.

Connie's skin colour is almost incidental in a highly regulated and homogeneous society in which caste is not race dependent and any connection to a pre-Disaster heritage is actively discouraged. (I say "almost" because I doubt racism can be legislated out of existence, and if I make another game in this world or return to it in writing, I might explore this further.) However, given the religious State and the emphasis on suitable marriage and children in the Democracy, the sexuality of a given character is far from incidental. And this is integral to the plot.

One trend I've noticed in following various gaming blogs is that while bloggers and critics tend to be all for diversity in gaming, commenters are often obviously hostile. While jrpgs often have female characters and for obvious reasons non white casts, I've seen this antagonism carried out to the extreme, with a bewildering amount of hatred aimed at the idea of, say, having a female or black character in an FPS game. Or the disbelief and homophobia regarding Bill's character in The Last of Us. Or people utterly opposed to yuri routes in otome games.

One of the accusations that gets flung around is that any inclusiveness is "tokenism"; the assumption that anything but an all-white all-male all-straight all-non-disabled all-cis cast means characters were included "just" for the sake of representation.

Leaving aside whether representation is a bad thing anyway, it kind of bewilders me that people assume that it's the only reason to have any diversity in your characters at all. These people must be honestly, truthfully not interested in anyone but a very limited section of humanity. And I really want to ask them... Is that actually more fun?

Disclaimer: I'm a white cisgendered lesbian with invisible disabilities, mother of a son in a blended race family. I'm also turning 38 soon. My perspective comes partly from a childhood growing up with only negative representations of lesbians, much worse than today, and how that affected me, and also by wanting my little boy to be able to "see" himself as he grows up. I'm also aware that I am by definition not what people refer to as a "core gamer", although gaming is by far my biggest hobby.