I wonder if anyone else remembers this. It came to my mind because I was reading this story:
The owner of a clothing shop in Cedar Glen was shot and killed Friday night, Aug. 18, after a person made several disparaging comments about a rainbow flag displayed outside the store, authorities said.
The suspect was found nearby by arriving deputies, who shot and killed him, San Bernardino County sheriff’s officials said.
This is… horrible. I don’t even know how to describe it. For the first time in my adult life, I’m genuinely horrified and fear for my LGBT+ brothers and sisters, as well as their allies (which includes me, fuck).
2013 felt… different. Two years later in 2015 gay marriage would be legalized nationwide.
I remember thinking EA was trying to pull the wool over our eyes. I remember thinking that LGBT+ acceptance in 2013 was doing well. I remember thinking they were throwing up that people voted for them as worst company over LGBT+ inclusion as some kind of way to hand-wave away their awful business practices. Going back, though…
In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT+ characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT+ policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.
Does anyone else feel like me, and feel dumbfounded and like I just didn’t think conservatives were that organized at the time? More to the point, I just didn’t trust anything EA said and thought they were lying. I don’t think they were lying anymore. I was wrong.
I wonder, does that mean that far fewer people hated them than we thought, for their business practices? I mean, we’ve seen years of steady profits for EA, it’s not as though they’ve lost a ton of business…
I’m curious what other Lemmings thoughts are on this. I just kind of had a bit of an epiphany about it recently and came back around to thoughts on the subject because of (sigh) how awful everything is.
I’m pretty sure they were trying to use gay people as a shield. There were definitely people complaining about it, but there’s no way even 20% of the people were upset about that. Tbh I don’t know why you’d believe EA when their idea of inclusion was to trot out the freak wagon and then rattle all the bars to wake up the gays for the crowds to leer at. At least that’s how it felt at the time. They liked to make a big deal about their gay characters and if a game with gay characters was bad, they (and other publishers) had a tendency to say, “oh no, all the criticism we’re getting are bigots who hate gay people. Oh no! Please come help us, please?”