The real crime is that there is a female cleric of Tempus who is not Branwen. Of all of the BG1 NPCs, Branwen was one of the most legit. Besides, we could have discovered that she was actually Tranwen all along.
Branwen never gets enough love. Cool idea, though. Branwen being a transgendered character would have worked well.
The other clerics had too much baggage: Anomen, Viconia, Quayle, and Tiax. Branwen was super chill and down for adventure.
Yeslick was pretty cool, though being a fighter/cleric was kind of a hindrance. He's tons of fun with the BG1:NPC Project though. Seriously, playing this game without that mod feels like I took the wheels of the car out for a drive and forgot the car. It's spoiled me.
The real crime is that there is a female cleric of Tempus who is not Branwen. Of all of the BG1 NPCs, Branwen was one of the most legit. Besides, we could have discovered that she was actually Tranwen all along.
Regardless of what comes out of the rework of Mizhena's dialogue, I do hope someone will take this idea and make a mod out of it. Seems like a cool idea.
I've been going through the thread using the find-tool to try to determine what you're talking about.
And you didn't determine what I was talking about, since the find-tool wasn't asking questions of me it was seeking solutions to fit how you conceived of what I was saying, which had nothing to do with specificity of language and everything to do with broad strokes of argumentation.
Because there are many fans that have been angered. Simple enough. I didn't say that she angered all the fans, nor most of the fans, nor a minority of fans but that she angered fans.
No, you said she angered/insulted "the fanbase", you're going back on that here to make a different rhetorical point, but when your rhetoric wants to, it swings to an inclusive picture of who Amber Scott/Beamdog/SoD has managed to upset. That's all I was calling out, you pointing out you can hit Ctrl+F on "gaming culture" in this thread isn't what I was talking about, I was talking about the tendency to do the thing you're doing right here, where you flip flop back and forth between "Amber Scott is insulting the fanbase" and, when you're pressed on it, flipping back to "some fans were angered", it's a slippery rhetorical move and I was putting a spotlight on it. You've put it back onto it yourself here.
You may not have directly claimed a majority, but you're misusing general terms like "the fanbase" if you don't think it refers to a majority. Or, to put it more gently, we were talking past each other because we had different conceptions of the rhetorical implications of the word "fanbase", and now (hopefully) you can see where your definition of "some fans" as constituting "the fanbase" is different from my definition of "most fans" as constituting "the fanbase", and with that clarification of terms we can see where our disagreement stemmed from. I also don't know why you used the find-tool on the term "gaming culture" based on the post that I made, since I don't use that phrase in it, but I imagine it's because you meant to search for where you talk about "the community" or "gaming community" in this thread? idk I'm not about to comb through the thread hunting for it, I'm talking about broad trends in rhetoric not incidents of specific phrasing.
And maybe I missed it in the pages before I joined the thread, but did you ever actually outline the common complaints? What are they? Oster's statement is kept intentionally vague because there were so many different things said, many of them I feel completely unfounded and in fact provably so based on the content of the game (like the people complaining Mizhena wasn't fleshed out, for example, which she actually is moreso than most of the merchant/service provider NPCs, or that her character focused on her transness over and above every other facet, or that it only focused on that, both of which are also provably false from her content in SoD, etc, etc) so I wanted to see what the common complaints were so I could respond to them. Instead you posted a quote from the statement, and the statement doesn't go into what the common complaints are.
And neither did you, unless it was before I joined the thread. What are the common complaints? In my first post on this thread I already dismantled all the complaints of the Steam poster, so if those are the common ones then I don't think any of them are valid. I also went into the common bugs complaints that I've seen earlier in the thread. I didn't go back before I popped into the thread, and skimming back just now I didn't see you link to "common complaints" at any point, so I'm not sure what they are specifically outside of ones I've already rebutted.
So what are they? What are the common complaints? I don't know how to respond to you saying they exist without knowing what you think they are.
fanbase /ˈfænˌbeɪs/ noun 1. the body of admirers of a particular pop singer, football team, etc
Is synonymous with "fans". As I noted before, if you're insulting the quality and integrity of the thing that fans are a fan of, you are insulting the fans by proxy. How many fans were offended by the insult is to be determined, but she definitely insulted the fanbase.
you're going back on that here to make a different rhetorical point, but when your rhetoric wants to, it swings to an inclusive picture of who Amber Scott/Beamdog/SoD has managed to upset.
I disagree, and I don't see where you have established that as true, because from what I've seen, you are the only one intentionally misinforming by making claims of things I haven't said, or didn't do, and thus with each claim, the value of your word diminishes.
That's all I was calling out, you pointing out you can hit Ctrl+F on "gaming culture" in this thread isn't what I was talking about
I actually searched for gaming, sans the culture part, so that I'd catch any post I so much as mentioned gaming. Just to be sure. I never made the claims you said, simple as that.
I was talking about the tendency to do the thing you're doing right here, where you flip flop back and forth between "Amber Scott is insulting the fanbase" and, when you're pressed on it, flipping back to "some fans were angered"
No, I didn't flip anything. In my last post on the subject, I clarified exactly what I meant and it didn't change. I said what I said and I meant what I meant. Specifically to dispel this false narrative. I've made no false claims, but you have.
it's a slippery rhetorical move and I was putting a spotlight on it. You've put it back onto it yourself here.
It's funny. You literally misrepresent and lie about things I've said, create a strawman, claim you're putting the spotlight on it, and I put that down. I showed what I actually said, and made it painfully clear as to what I was talking about. Yet you accuse me of using a slippery rhetorical move when you're actually outright lying about what was said.
Smooth. Real smooth.
Or, to put it more gently, we were talking past each other because we had different conceptions of the rhetorical implications of the word "fanbase", and now (hopefully) you can see where your definition of "some fans" as constituting "the fanbase" is different from my definition of "most fans" as constituting "the fanbase", and with that clarification of terms we can see where our disagreement stemmed from.
Okay, I can understand this. Which is why I clarified. After the clarification, to address what I thought was confusion, you then accuse me of flip flopping, when my position never changed nor did I change anything that I had said. Which signifies you weren't looking for the truth, or clarification, but rather a moment to shout "gotcha" and failed...miserably.
And maybe I missed it in the pages before I joined the thread, but did you ever actually outline the common complaints? What are they? Oster's statement is kept intentionally vague because there were so many different things said, many of them I feel completely unfounded and in fact provably so based on the content of the game
While the majority of the thread has focused on Mizhena because the thread is about the reaction of some tg people to Mizhena's inclusion in this kerfuffle, Oster points out a few of the most common feedback complaints in the post I sourced, which include but are not limited to...
1. Making Mizhena seem less token. 2. Removing the GG joke from Minsc. 3. Fixing a lot of gamebreaking bugs. 4. Fixing the super broken multiplayer.
So these are some of the most common complaints. Other common complaints include the attitude and disrespect by Amber Scott for the franchise and those who play it, the perceived theme of pushing a political ideology through the game, changes to established characters (to which the common counter argument I've seen tends to be "But they weren't great when you liked them" or something paraphrasing this answer), the requesting people who were underwhelmed with the game not review it and those who were enjoying it review it, the way response was met with accusations of bigotry, or attempting to undermine points by trying to - without evidence - leash those points to the invisible boogeyman somewhere (which is an ad hominem, last I checked).
However, my interest has and continues to be centralized around the very scandal itself, and how it affects people like me as a whole. That, primarily, is based around people's perceptions of Mizhena and the attitude of Amber Scott, and the perceived agenda mongering that she has (probably unintentionally linked us to by association).
Generally speaking, it is only natural for people to be offended when something that they enjoy is insulted, especially when it is insulted on moral or ethical grounds, as that strongly implies moral or ethical approval of the fanbase.
In no way, shape, or form does saying "Baldur's Gate has some sexist elements" imply the moral and ethical approval of same by the fanbase. Saying "Baldur's Gate is a sexist game" could be argued to (it could also be argued not to imply it even then), but she did not say that.
By your line of reasoning, Amber Scott called herself a sexist by saying there were sexist elements in Baldur's Gate, as she is a member of the fanbase.
While you, may have been unoffended, the insult was quite clearly placed and I'd dare say unsubstantiated.
The existence of quite a few sexist elements in Baldur's Gate is only disputable because of the existence of a group of people who refuse to acknowledge that sexism exists in any popular media.
Transgendered people are often being publicized for many of the wrong reasons, often stupid reasons, often controversial reasons, that pit them as the boogeyman against normal people. This is one such case, where we've been associated with the political ideology of someone who has made it abundantly clear that she has a plan of action (an agenda) to change the BG franchise because she deems it sexist and cisgendered, and statements that she doesn't want strait cisgendered characters to be the norm (which in reality, they actually are the norm, we are the minority).
An example of this in action is the North Carolina toilet thing, which I discussed earlier in this thread briefly. However, yesterday, I was remarking to someone I knew about this thread, and how I had been discussing the issues surrounding Transgendered people.
Their response was, immediately, "Oh, that's so stupid," - blah blah blah, and he immediately started talking about how dumb the controversy was, and most importantly, had an opinion of how stupid transgendered people were because of it. I listened to him, and when he remarked that one of his coworkers were talking about legislated bigotry, I looked him in the face and was like "Tell her, I'm transgendered and I think it's stupid too", which caused him to pause. He was surprised but nonhostile, and I explained my position on that subject. And his response was that I wasn't what he expected, and he felt a bit silly feeling as he did. We're friends.
The controversy, and how the media and activist groups framed it, gave him a preconceived notion about transgendered people and their issues. I dispelled those preconceived notions, but it'd be cool if I didn't have to re-validate us as rational human beings to people who aren't aware of any tg people in their daily lives.
This is one such case, where we've been associated with the political ideology of someone who has made it abundantly clear that she has a plan of action (an agenda) to change the BG franchise because she deems it sexist and cisgendered, and statements that she doesn't want strait cisgendered characters to be the norm (which in reality, they actually are the norm, we are the minority).
Is there, like, anything, that will make you stop lying through your teeth about what Amber Scott actually said?
She never said it was sexist.
She never said it was cisgendered.
She did not say she didn't want straight/cisgendered characters to not be the norm.
Saying "I write this way because it's how I want to" is neither a plan of action nor a goddamn agenda.
The controversy, and how the media and activist groups framed it, gave him a preconceived notion about transgendered people and their issues. I dispelled those preconceived notions, but it'd be cool if I didn't have to re-validate us as rational human beings to people who aren't aware of any tg people in their daily lives.
It'd also be cool if you had remotely as much respect for people who support transgendered rights as you do for people who express bigoted opinions about transgendered people for utterly unjustifiable reasons.
Someone talks about how stupid transgendered people are, and you are there to join with their sorrows. Somebody talks about how they don't like writing only white/straight/cisgendered people because it's boring and not a reflection of the real world, and they gain nothing but your contempt and spiteful twisting of their words.
You love those who would strike you down, and scorn those who would help you up.
That's your right, of course. It may well work for you, in whatever way you define it, in your current situation. But the history of civil rights doesn't suggest that it works on a wider scale.
fanbase /ˈfænˌbeɪs/ noun 1. the body of admirers of a particular pop singer, football team, etc
Is synonymous with "fans". As I noted before, if you're insulting the quality and integrity of the thing that fans are a fan of, you are insulting the fans by proxy. How many fans were offended by the insult is to be determined, but she definitely insulted the fanbase.
The body of admirers is made up of admirers. So if you don't know how many admirers were offended, you can't claim the body of admirers was offended. Your definition quoting just reinforces my earlier argument, although I don't know why you decided to quote a dictionary definition when you respond below that you can understand that we were coming at it from different definitions. I don't care that the dictionary reinforces my argument, and that's why I didn't pull it out even though I knew it would reinforce my argument. I wasn't talking about dictionaries, I was talking about how you were using it vs. how I was using it. I was using it to mean "the body of fans", you were using it to mean "a portion of the body of fans" and again it's weird to, in the same reply, say "yeah I get that" and whip out the dictionary definition. I wouldn't go around sarcastically calling people smooth when your replies are as rough and disjointed as this. Not saying mine aren't lmao just saying yours aren't exactly silk.
And for the record, she didn't insult the quality and integrity of the thing that I'm a fan of, she was (constructively) critical of media she loves which I found very respectful and not at all insulting. Not only am I also critical of media that I love, but I consider someone being critical of media they love, especially in a constructive and intelligent way, to be fans after my own heart. They are part of the fanbase, and I don't think you can say that she insulted that part of the fanbase. You can say that the BG fanbase is mostly made up of mindless uncritical people who hold up what they're a fan of as a sacred cow rather than an evolving piece of media, but the discussions that predate this controversy about the comparative merits of BG1 and BG2 put the lie to that notion, so I doubt those folks (many of whom have made posts on this very forum about the sexism in the original Baldur's Gate games) would consider themselves insulted by constructively critical assessments of media they themselves engage in lengthy criticism of on the internet.
So again, the fanbase is not insulted. The fanbase is not offended. Some fans decided they were personally insulted, but that's their problem and not a function of the fanbase as a whole. I'll concede that with your use of the term to mean "some fans" that "the fanbase" was insulted, since I do agree some fans felt insulted. I also think the reasons they felt insulted are much like yours, where you state things that Amber Scott never said and get offended by them. That's fine, it's just not Amber Scott's fault. A world that is purely white and straight and cis is boring and not representative of the real world, but she never claimed Baldur's Gate was only those things. A world that is purely sexist is boring and also not representative of the real world, but she also never claimed Baldur's Gate was only those things. She presented as nuanced a critical view as she could in the format of an interview, and I for one was thrilled about hearing that someone working on the game shared my views both on where Baldur's Gate could improve and what kinds of things to focus on as a writer in the 21st century. I felt, in fact, deeply respected by what she had to say as someone who is bi and trans, rather than insulted. I felt like someone had my back, and I will always be grateful for that.
And by your definition of the fanbase (i.e. "some fans") I'd say the fanbase felt respected and grateful because of the totally responsible comments Amber Scott made.
you're going back on that here to make a different rhetorical point, but when your rhetoric wants to, it swings to an inclusive picture of who Amber Scott/Beamdog/SoD has managed to upset.
I disagree, and I don't see where you have established that as true, because from what I've seen, you are the only one intentionally misinforming by making claims of things I haven't said, or didn't do, and thus with each claim, the value of your word diminishes.
Funny how you agree that what I said makes sense when you get to that part, and it's no different a point made than the one you're disagreeing with here. Which is it? You get that our definitions of "fanbase" were different, or you don't? Because if you get it, then you can see that I wasn't making claims of things you haven't said, I was pointing out the inconsistency in things you were saying with a definition that you just quoted above which is more common, i.e. a fanbase as a body of fans rather than some of that body. You made claims regarding a fanbase/community that was upset, I didn't understand you were using a definition of those things that means "a portion of the fanbase"/"a portion of the community" and you said you got that, so I don't know why you keep saying I falsely accused you of stuff if you understand the difference in term use that was happening.
That's all I was calling out, you pointing out you can hit Ctrl+F on "gaming culture" in this thread isn't what I was talking about
I actually searched for gaming, sans the culture part, so that I'd catch any post I so much as mentioned gaming. Just to be sure. I never made the claims you said, simple as that.
I was talking about the tendency to do the thing you're doing right here, where you flip flop back and forth between "Amber Scott is insulting the fanbase" and, when you're pressed on it, flipping back to "some fans were angered"
No, I didn't flip anything. In my last post on the subject, I clarified exactly what I meant and it didn't change. I said what I said and I meant what I meant. Specifically to dispel this false narrative. I've made no false claims, but you have.
it's a slippery rhetorical move and I was putting a spotlight on it. You've put it back onto it yourself here.
It's funny. You literally misrepresent and lie about things I've said, create a strawman, claim you're putting the spotlight on it, and I put that down. I showed what I actually said, and made it painfully clear as to what I was talking about. Yet you accuse me of using a slippery rhetorical move when you're actually outright lying about what was said.
Or, to put it more gently, we were talking past each other because we had different conceptions of the rhetorical implications of the word "fanbase", and now (hopefully) you can see where your definition of "some fans" as constituting "the fanbase" is different from my definition of "most fans" as constituting "the fanbase", and with that clarification of terms we can see where our disagreement stemmed from.
Okay, I can understand this. Which is why I clarified. After the clarification, to address what I thought was confusion, you then accuse me of flip flopping, when my position never changed nor did I change anything that I had said. Which signifies you weren't looking for the truth, or clarification, but rather a moment to shout "gotcha" and failed...miserably.
And maybe I missed it in the pages before I joined the thread, but did you ever actually outline the common complaints? What are they? Oster's statement is kept intentionally vague because there were so many different things said, many of them I feel completely unfounded and in fact provably so based on the content of the game
While the majority of the thread has focused on Mizhena because the thread is about the reaction of some tg people to Mizhena's inclusion in this kerfuffle, Oster points out a few of the most common feedback complaints in the post I sourced, which include but are not limited to...
1. Making Mizhena seem less token. 2. Removing the GG joke from Minsc. 3. Fixing a lot of gamebreaking bugs. 4. Fixing the super broken multiplayer.
So these are some of the most common complaints. Other common complaints include the attitude and disrespect by Amber Scott for the franchise and those who play it, the perceived theme of pushing a political ideology through the game, changes to established characters (to which the common counter argument I've seen tends to be "But they weren't great when you liked them" or something paraphrasing this answer), the requesting people who were underwhelmed with the game not review it and those who were enjoying it review it, the way response was met with accusations of bigotry, or attempting to undermine points by trying to - without evidence - leash those points to the invisible boogeyman somewhere (which is an ad hominem, last I checked).
However, my interest has and continues to be centralized around the very scandal itself, and how it affects people like me as a whole. That, primarily, is based around people's perceptions of Mizhena and the attitude of Amber Scott, and the perceived agenda mongering that she has (probably unintentionally linked us to by association).
So I asked for something to back this up, and once again you just assert stuff like it's true. But assuming these are the complaints, I'll break it down for you.
1. Mizhena was not a token inclusion as written at launch. She is one of the most, if not the most, fleshed out NPC that provides you with services, she has multiple quests and none of them have to do with or even reference her being trans. But considering most of the people I've seen parroting this lie on Steam reviews have almost no time in-game (certainly not enough to have met her NPC, much less progressed enough to have done all the quests she's involved in) I don't take this criticism at all seriously. It's based on provably false assertions.
2. Clicking a companion 10 times in a row to hear one soundbite isn't something to give a game a negative review of an entire game over, no matter how bad the soundbite is, but this is probably another case of the soundbite being the only thing the person complaining knows about (i.e. they haven't actually played the game and so their "review" is based on the only things they have exposure to, which makes this soundbite between 50 and 75% of the gameplay they're aware of lmao). This wasn't a bad joke, hell given the subsequent controversy it was actually a prescient joke that was made funnier by GG's unethical lying about Mizhena being token based, clearly, on not having played the game enough to know she wasn't tokenized in any way shape or form. Like, I think that makes the Minsc line hilarious, and I haven't applied the update because I want to hear Minsc saying it, and I'll be using a mod when I patch SoD later to restore it. It's perfectly in line with previous BG 4th wall breaking nods to the player, and this one made it's own gravy at launch. Once again, if we're using your definition of fanbase to mean "some fans", the fanbase LOVED this one! They might not have loved GG's reaction to it, but that says nothing about the line and everything about GG. I know all the fans I know sure thought it was hilarious, and that's "some fans", so that's the fanbase yukkin' it up and the fanbase feeling insulted by GG getting the joke taken out!
3. What are the common complaints of gamebreaking bugs that haven't been fixed? I've already addressed this complaint earlier in the thread. Personally I had a bug-free run of SoD up to where I stopped to restart from Candlekeep as I mentioned in the post where I addressed the vagueness of people claiming bugs without citing what bugs they encountered as probably the same as the Mizhena complaints: people who didn't play parroting what other people who didn't play said (or parroting what people who lied said) without actually having seen whether it was the case themselves. I'm sure some people laid out the bugs they encountered, but most of the people I've seen doing that are people who gave generally positive reviews of the game overall, whereas the people who go hardest against the "bugginess" of the game on here have been people who don't say what bugs they encountered (and often have less than a dozen posts to their name on here...hmmmmmm I wonder why that would be). Many of the bugs I've seen complained about seem to have been fixed. If you want to link to someone talking about specific bugs the patch hasn't corrected to me, feel free, otherwise I don't know which bugs are considered common complaints to be able to say "patch notes says that was fixed" or not.
4. Aside from multiplayer that is, this is basically the only point I think any criticism has got right, multiplayer was basically unworkable from the word go. It's since been fixed according to patch notes, but I haven't tested that personally so I can't comment.
5 (the Amber Scott point). This complaint is based on falsifying/misrepresenting/adding on to what Amber Scott said, you yourself did it in this thread and have been called out for it by @Ayiekie and I don't consider it a valid complaint as a result. It's not very ethical of GG to lie about an interview, given their stance on ethics in games journalism, if you ask me. But again, a lot of these "common complaints" are common in the sense of an urban legend being common...they're not true, but some people are really devout believers in them anyway. Common complaints aren't valid complaints if they're urban legends, and the GG/tg urban legends about Amber Scott aren't complaints about Siege of Dragonspear or even really about Amber, they're just people wanting to be upset about something and working themselves up with fictions they tell themselves. That's weird but fine, it's just nothing to do with Amber or with SoD.
6. The perceived them of pushing a political ideology says it all. Once again, nothing to do with what is being perceived and everything to do with the lens slotted over the mind's eye of those hallucinating this perception. Given the willingness of the people with most if not all of these "common complaints" to outright lie about Amber or SoD, it might not be fair to say they misperceive things, but I'm trying to be generous here. Some may have just heard a lie and not bothered checking, and those people don't deserve scorn (although they do deserve to be ignored until they check for themselves instead of relying on fictitious complaints that colour their perception).
7 (the "changes to established characters" point). No changes were made to BG1 or BG2, and the SoD linkage between the two is actually perfectly consistent. If you want to cite exactly what changes were made with references to lines from SoD, I'll be glad to point out where in the canon of the originals those lines have precedent. Seriously, I'm fine with spoilers in the context of shooting down these ridiculous complaints in terms of what I haven't come across yet. Go for it! But be specific, cite what lines people don't like. Otherwise it's just more "haven't played it, but I'll assert something about the content anyway!" b.s. and those aren't valid complaints.
8 (requesting people who were underwhelmed with the game not review it). [citation needed]
9 (requesting those who were enjoying it review it). This was in response to people literally lying about the game's content, so I'm not surprised they wanted a counterbalance from people who actually played the game, since this request was made when over three quarters of the negative reviews on Steam were from people with less than 2 hours of gameplay and the reviews on sites where you didn't have to own the game were overwhelmingly negative amidst a bunch of lies about the content of the game. I'd do the same as Beamdog in that situation, but it bears mentioning that no one put a gun to anyone's head. They requested that people do so, and they did, because those fans (or "the fanbase" in your definition) responded to the call in order to balance out the review-bombing that had nothing to do with legitimate complaints about the game.
10. (the way response was met with accusations of bigotry) I don't know what else to call the vicious and disgusting harassment of Amber Scott on twitter, or the horrifying transmisogynistic/transphobic statements being made, etc, etc. Other than those responses, I don't know which ones were being met with those accusations, you'll have to link me to the reasonable responses and the accusations that specifically reference those responses. Otherwise we're just talking about your opinion here.
11. (or attempting to undermine points by trying to - without evidence - leash those points to the invisible boogeyman somewhere). This was a common complaint? I don't even know what this complaint is. Give me some examples, link me elsewhere so I can understand what this complaint is. It can't have been common, this is literally the first time I'm seeing it articulated and the meaning is obscure and vague.
12. Your final point in this dirty dozen is near and dear to my own hear too. We see things differently though. Being trans, I am also incredibly concerned. But Amber Scott's comments did not concern me. Siege of Dragonspear did not concern me. What concerned me was the response by right-wing gamers. Not all of them were in the conservative tradition of liberalism, some of them were out and out liberals (although I hesitate to call them "left liberals" given how they framed their transphobia), and certainly some of them were much further to the right than people in the conservative tradition. But these gamers were the ones I was concerned with. How this scandal affects people like me is not the fault of Beamdog, or Amber Scott, or Siege of Dragonspear, or Mizhena.
It is the fault of people who spew vitriol on the internet, and no one is responsible for their vitriol but them. I am disgusted with them, I fear some of them and I want them to stop. But I in no way hold anyone but them responsible for their hateful b.s. It's not based around the attitude of Amber Scott, it's based around the attitudes and perceptions of small-minded, hateful people. The onus is not on trans people, or on people trying to speak up for us or include us. The onus is always on the hateful people themselves, not on something that hateful people blame as "provoking them", and the people who link agenda mongering to us by association are not Beamdog employees. The only people who make those linkages are the only people I hold responsible, and those are the people intentionally linking Amber Scott and agenda mongering together. Those people are responsible because they are choosing to make false equivalences. They make those mistakes, they make those internal choices, they intend to link things together and so fill in a backstory about it that doesn't have overlap with reality.
As a trans person, I am not going to hold Amber Scott responsible for hate generated in minds not her own. I am not going to hold Beamdog responsible for lies and paranoid thinking that don't originate in the brains of their employees. I am not going to hold Siege of Dragonspear responsible for the controversy that people who didn't bother to play the game are trying to shove down our throats along with their poorly concealed agenda (or their projection issues that have them blaming everyone else for engaging in the agenda pushing that they themselves are doing).
"There's been a few negative reviews but, most of the response has been positive. Obviously if you don't feel strongly about the game, there's no overwhelming need to post a review. If you do feel strongly, though, it can only help to post it -- both for us (we like to feel good too, sometimes), and for people browsing the store who want to know more about the game before they buy it." - Source.
Attempting to persuade people who don't like the game to not review it, but encouraging those who do to review it.
“If there was something for the original Baldur’s Gate that just doesn’t mesh for modern day gamers like the sexism,” said writer Amber Scott. “In the original there’s a lot of jokes at women’s expense. Or if not a lot, there’s a couple, like Safana was just a sex object in BG 1, and Jaheira was the nagging wife and that was played for comedy. We were able to say like, ‘No, that’s not really the kind of story we want to make.’ In Siege of Dragonspear, Safana gets her own little storyline, she got a way better personality upgrade. If people don’t like that, then too bad.” - Source.
Amber Scott remarks that there is a lot of sexism and jokes at womens' expense, then admits that it's more like a couple, but then focuses on Jaheira and Safana as if there were something wrong with them and needed to be rewritten. Lack of content in BG I or not, people still enjoyed those characters as they were. She then says "if people don't like that, then too bad", which is the most damning thing in the quote because it shows a level of careless contempt for the original fans who liked them better how they were.
"I don't like writing about strait, white, cis people all the time. It's not reflective the real world, it sets up s/w/c as the "normal" baseline from which "other" characters must be added, and its boring.
I consciously add as much diversity as I can to my writing and I don't care if people think that's forced or fake. I find choosing to write from a strait default just as artificial. I'm happy to be a SJW and I hope to write many social justice games in the future that reach as many different people as possible. Everyone should get to see themselves in pop culture.Source.
Amber admits to being a SJW (which kind of shoots the idea that they "don't exist" in the knee), and strait up says she consciously adds as much "diversity" as she can for its own sake. She's also, for better or worse, completely wrong on two counts of what she describes as the "default". Statistically, most people actually are both strait and cisgendered, though not white.
According to LGBT demographics for the united states, it's estimated at about a 3.8% average for the populace, but pretty much assured to be less than 10%, and that's including both homosexuals, bisexuals, and transgendered people, with transgendered people being less than 1% (about 0.3%).
Hence why it comes off as an agenda, because you're identifying as an SJW, and adding people with certain traits just to include additional diversity (which is literally Tokenism by definition).
This wasn't a bad joke, hell given the subsequent controversy it was actually a prescient joke that was made funnier by GG's unethical lying about Mizhena being token based, clearly, on not having played the game enough to know she wasn't tokenized in any way shape or form.
I think Liana K. explains the outrage better than I. I share her sentiments. This is, interestingly, why I don't think an antagonistic approach to social interaction is a good idea. If you tease the dog, as it were.
Being trans, I am also incredibly concerned. But Amber Scott's comments did not concern me. Siege of Dragonspear did not concern me. What concerned me was the response by right-wing gamers...
Sincerely, thank you for this. I just got home and I need to get ready to take a nap after work so I can be awake some of today (night shift->day off->day shift following day, don't want to waste all of my off-day), but I'm going to think about what you've said. I'm still concerned that after the dust settles, people are going to associate this kerfuffle with us.
I still don't think the reaction to this game would have been as explosive if not for the perfect storm of circumstances (since there are lots of other games with non-cisgendered non-strait non-white characters that aren't generating the outrage), but I see where you're coming from. I also apologize for getting angry earlier in the thread. This is something I've been putting up with a lot lately from sources outside of gaming, and so it's pretty touchy for me, and I very well may be letting my emotions get the better of me. If so, my sincere apologies.
@Ashiel I really appreciate the more cordial tone in this most recent reply, and given your explanation I do get why you might've been testy (given that I, too, can find myself inordinately upset at all and sundry when people have been contemptuous of me for reasons of my gender/sexual differences from the statistical norms).
But on that point, one of the reasons fantasy (and sci fi and other speculative fiction) is so great is because you can introduce a level higher than what statistics show in the real world because a) it's not the real world and b) unlike in the real world, there might be less violent reactions to difference, which in turn would reflect the % we'd see in real world statistics if people felt free to answer surveys honestly. Many don't. I know many people in the closet who simply do not answer surveys, and if they do, fill certain aspects of them out differently than who they are, and those are because of real world factors. In a fantasy game, we can add diversity to balance out those people hidden by very real fears based in very real reactions which can prevent them from gaining a job, or cause harassment up to and including violent harassment. I don't trust statistics on how many of us there are for one because depending on where you grab your numbers from they say wildly different things (including quite a few which suggest national or global % in the double digits that have come out in the last decade for several different countries including the U.S., altho some surveys continue to report sub-5% numbers alongside those), and for another because even in the cases where the % is substantially higher than other surveys that still doesn't reflect people who simply will not fill out surveys that force them to identify those aspects of themselves nor does it reflect people who fill them out falsely out of fear of who is going to see the information on it and potentially associate them with it (often a paranoid fear, given privacy of information that most surveys promise, but then again minority demographics who face discrimination and violence from majority demographics include a disproportionate amount of people with intense paranoia problems, and given the reality they have to live in I don't blame them for being over-paranoid about surveys).
So to point a) above, we can ignore what % exist in the real world and add in more diversity so that people who are currently living in sub-optimal conditions socially and interpersonally, if not also materially, can see themselves in a universe where they are presented as strong, or as normal, or as accepted, etc, etc. And to point b) above, even if we wanted (and I don't know why we would want) to keep things close to real world % we simply can't know what they are even by trying to infer something from a sampling of different surveys about the same issues. Statistics are, like eye-witness testimony, notoriously unreliable (and statistics classes teach you as much, which I always found funny about my into stats course in college).
1) But on to your first example, the wording there that you highlight in green seems pretty clear to me. If you feel strongly, either negatively or positively, they are not wanting to discourage you from posting a review. But since there seemed to be a heavy influx of negative reviews (and I've already discussed the reasons why that was the case, in short because people who hadn't bothered playing the game at all chose to parrot complaints by others who hadn't played the game long enough and began a chain of review-bombs filled with false information) Beamdog was wanting the people still giving the game it's due time and consideration because they liked it and were mid-playthrough at that point to maybe take a moment to add their voices to the choir. And they did, so clearly those fans understood why that needed to be done and agreed, considering it swung the Steam reviews from Mixed status during the brief era of less than 2 hour playtime reviews to the current 70%+ Mostly Positive status now that people who took their time to beat the game have weighed in and created a counter-balance to the no-play crowd. So I don't think your first example is a sourced example of them asking people who hated it not to review it. On the contrary, they seem to want people who feel strongly about it to review it, including those who don't like it. I think the "if you don't feel strongly about the game" felt more like a veiled jab at people who couldn't possibly have felt strongly one way or another about the game itself, like the ones on metacritic who clearly hadn't played the game at all and felt strongly about something that had nothing to do with the game that they'd heard second or third or fourth hand. But that's just my take on that part of the statement, what doesn't seem as open to interpretation is them wanting people with strong opinions on the game to leave reviews one way or the other. They don't say "don't leave a review if you hate it" anywhere in there. It's true that, in context, they're saying they'd "feel good" about strongly felt reviews, which implies that they want people who feel positively about the game to review, but even if that's the case I still don't think they're trying to say "don't leave a review if you feel strongly in a negative way", just trying to say that some people leaving negative reviews don't feel strongly about the game, but instead about the controversy (which was largely not about the game, as I went over in my last reply to you).
2) As to your second example, you claim that the Amber Scott quote resulted in characters being rewritten, which is not the case. Characters were expanded upon in Siege of Dragonspear, but nothing in Baldur's Gate 1 or 2 was rewritten. Safana got "a personality upgrade", and I agree with that. We get to see a piece of her personality that only comes out in one moment of BG1 that becomes a focal point of her character in BG2 expanded upon. Namely, in BG1 when you meet her, she's all seductive language and suggestive implications, but as soon as you actually let her join the party, she immediately comments that the group needs better leadership...namely her! In BG2, she expands on this aspect of her personality (also a piece of her personality that is gone into in the BG1 bio) of using and discarding people in her life for her own purposes and for her own advantage, and it seems quite extreme to see the jump from the one line in BG1 to the expanded cruelty and disdain she has in BG2.
Amber Scott and the other writers wrote a linkage in SoD which is a perfect link between the personality of BG1 and BG2 by having her be crueller to CHARNAME now that she knows him well, letting slip a bit of her seductive mask to reveal the contempt behind it. I think this is flawless characterization perfectly in line with BG1 and BG2, and in fact it serves to explain something that would otherwise have only been explained with her BG1 bio and that one line upon joining, which is to say, something left relatively unexplained. Instead, we get to see the progression from seductress trying to stay in your good books, to seductress so confident she's in your good books that she stops trying so hard, to the outright betrayal in BG2. It's a perfect bridge and really good writing, and not at all a revision of her character. It's an expansion of pre-existing facets of Safana that elevates her from the one dimensionality of BG1's characterization using content from BG1 and BG2 as inspiration. It's perfect, and I don't see why anyone who has actually played the original games would think the SoD content was a "rewrite" in any way.
Similarly, anyone who has played BG2 knows that the way Jaheira is handled in SoD is not a "rewrite" of Jaheira but instead an expansion of who we discover she is in BG2, so that there is a preview of that characterization in SoD to link BG1 to BG2 more fluidly than what had previously been the case. So again, for people who actually are part of the Baldur's Gate fanbase, it's no surprise that Jaheira was written that way in Siege of Dragonspear, and in fact it's a welcome fleshing out of pre-existing personality traits we were exposed to in BG2 if we had her in our party and especially if we romanced her. But some "common complaints" about Jaheira are clearly from people who didn't care about Jaheira's depiction in BG2 at all, and just wanted the one-note depiction of Baldur's Gate to be what we saw...but that doesn't make sense if your goal is to write an expansion that bridges BG1 and BG2. Amber Scott and Beamdog were doing their job, and doing it well. People who didn't bother to play all the way through SoD (or BG2, it seems) have had problems with SoD that don't exist for anyone in the fanbase who actually played all of these games many many times over the past few decades, because we know who these characters are and we can understand these linkages perfectly well. That lends even more credence to the idea that a lot of these common complaints are only common because it's quite common for people who haven't played the original games to not understand what's going on, and apparently quite common for them to feel like that makes them an authority on the game enough to speak on it. Which is b.s. Amber Scott's comments were not insulting to the fanbase, although the common complaints about her comments are definitely insulting to our intelligence as fans of the game who know they're not based on anything except a false perception of these characters (or, charitably, on a perception of these characters based only on BG1, but even then they're ignoring the clues in Safana's characterization that existed even then).
And if those people don't like that, too bad. They didn't play the games anyway, or they don't remember them very well. That's not Amber's problem, that's their problem.
3) Your third example is Amber saying she is proud to be a Social Justice Warrior, which I'll admit I find cringe-worthy even as someone who considers social justice just as important as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass did, as important as MLK or James Baldwin or Malcolm X did, I think there is a long tradition of social justice that already exists to the extent that no one needs to claim a dismissive right-wing slur against people who care about social justice for their own like Amber did there. But I don't think it was offensive that she aligned herself with social justice, just a little misplaced to self-identify as 4chan/GamerGate slur. But the fault in that, honestly, falls in its coiners, not in Amber Scott. I don't care what right-wing channers and GG folks want to say about people who care about social justice, I know it's a tradition that stretches back not just into recent history, but into ancient history. There have been people concerned about justice for the poor since before Jesus Christ, and while I personally think J.C. was a fiction given that there's zero contemporary historical attestation of him or his movement from when he was alive, it bears mentioning that early Christians (who all existed well after the 70s C.E. so fully 40+ years after he supposedly died) were very concerned with social justice, and that influence extended through the early Church via the monastic orders well into the present, as just one example from the ancient world with continued relevance today. Social justice is not new, people have wanted the abolition of slavery since Grecco-Roman times, and we have some of their writings preserved. That is an issue of justice which affects society as a whole, or social justice. I think it's ridiculous that channers and GG types ridicule people with sarcastic labels like "SJW" for caring about social justice, and so I do find it a bit facepalmy to have seen Amber self-identify with the slur, but aside from that there is zero things wrong with the post she made that you used for your third example.
Writing about straight, white and cis characters "all the time" would indeed be not representative of the real world. Then she makes a separate point, which is that it is also boring. I agree with both sentiments. Media is saturated with whiteness, and I'm glad she is challenging that so other people can see themselves in media. And I've already addressed the statistics/% argument you made above, so I won't rehash it here, but I also agree that in speculative fiction-related media in particular, especially fantasy or far-distant from the present sci-fi, it's important to add diversity. Those that think it's forcing it to do so are people who don't understand what speculative fiction are, or who wish to impose their (false) understanding of real world numbers on speculative fiction that, even if their understanding wasn't false, is fiction that has no logical reason to have anything to do with Earth numbers of any era. Even the sci fi (which this isn't, so the argument is even LESS relevant) that is far distant can be influenced by any number of historical events leading up to the fictive present that make any historical figures irrelevant, just as people in 17th century Europe couldn't know that looking at statistics of horse ownership from the beginning of history until then wouldn't be able to tell you anything about horse ownership in the 21st century. So adding diversity over and above what we see around us is a) fantastic, because it lets people see themselves in media no matter who they are and b) is perfectly in-line with the statistics of that world because that world is speculative fiction, complete with speculative statistics.
And finally, it's not tokenism because Mizhena isn't only in the game as a trans character, she's a fleshed out character that has multiple quests she's involved in which don't mention it at all. As a trans person, I do not feel she's a token character at all, and if someone's intent in a fantasy or sci fi setting is to add diversity so people feel represented, and then manage to write a character that isn't tokenized, then by definition all they've done is show us something about this universe that expands on its diversity (not tokenization) and did it via a character who is not only about that one aspect (also not tokenization). Again, people who've actually played SoD would know Mizhena isn't a token character, and Amber's statements would only be seen as an attempt to tokenize difference if they knew absolutely nothing about speculative fiction or how it differs from reality.
4) As to Liana K, I disagree completely because a crucial part of her argument says that "the most important thing a game can do is to absorb someone so much that it takes them out of themselves" and that therefore there shouldn't be fourth wall breaking elements...except BG1 and BG2 are full of 4th wall breaking elements which constitutes part of their charm. In fact, one of my chief complaints about SoD is that they don't have enough of them so it's slightly too serious in tone unless you have a silly-leaning party. Not that it's lacking in them completely, but it could've done with a few more silly moments that don't rely on who your party members are. As such, I'm sad they took out the line because it was much needed 4th wall breaking in an expansion that didn't have quite enough (altho that was just in the first few hours of gameplay, when I fully get into it after clearing BG1 this week I'll be able to see if there's more 4th wall breaking bits than meet the eye in SoD). Once again, it sounds more like someone who is misremebering the originals, or relying on hearsay from people who misremember (or haven't played) the originals. I know that's not her only point, but I'm not going to point by point break down her entire argument here, especially since of all the things that have been complained about or changed, I care the least about the removal of this line, especially since I can easily add it back in (and will be doing so).
But again, I just want to reiterate that I totally get that Very Trans Feel of being bombarded with stuff no cis person has to deal with and getting weighed down by it, and I'm sorry you've been going through that! I appreciate your engagement on this, even where we disagree, as it helps me to illuminate some things for other people on this forum to show where two trans people can disagree on this and what the arguments for different perspectives on it can be. I hope this week is better than your last few in terms of dealing with that kinda stuff!
"There's been a few negative reviews but, most of the response has been positive. Obviously if you don't feel strongly about the game, there's no overwhelming need to post a review. If you do feel strongly, though, it can only help to post it -- both for us (we like to feel good too, sometimes), and for people browsing the store who want to know more about the game before they buy it." - Source.
Attempting to persuade people who don't like the game to not review it, but encouraging those who do to review it.
What the actual F.
I'm not even going to say you're deliberately lying here, I'm just baffled.
You have disproven your own point.
"If you don't feel strongly about it, there's no need to post a review" is literally saying "Don't post a review about the game just to help us, only do it if you really liked (or disliked) SoD." It not only proves you wrong, it proves wrong the BS lie parroted by the usual suspects that Beamdog was begging for their own positive review bomb.
I have no idea why you don't know what "feel strongly" means, but flip it around: it means "have strong feelings". They didn't say anything about negative feelings. Not one word. In no way, shape, or form did they "attempt to persuade people who don't like the game not to review it".
I'm tired of fighting about exact wording and your consistently malicious interpretation of everything Amber Scott said, but the above is just mind-boggling. Your take on it barely even resembles what was actually said.
"There's been a few negative reviews but, most of the response has been positive. Obviously if you don't feel strongly about the game, there's no overwhelming need to post a review. If you do feel strongly, though, it can only help to post it -- both for us (we like to feel good too, sometimes), and for people browsing the store who want to know more about the game before they buy it." - Source.
Attempting to persuade people who don't like the game to not review it, but encouraging those who do to review it.
What the actual F.
I'm not even going to say you're deliberately lying here, I'm just baffled.
You have disproven your own point.
"If you don't feel strongly about it, there's no need to post a review" is literally saying "Don't post a review about the game just to help us, only do it if you really liked (or disliked) SoD." It not only proves you wrong, it proves wrong the BS lie parroted by the usual suspects that Beamdog was begging for their own positive review bomb.
I have no idea why you don't know what "feel strongly" means, but flip it around: it means "have strong feelings". They didn't say anything about negative feelings. Not one word. In no way, shape, or form did they "attempt to persuade people who don't like the game not to review it".
I'm tired of fighting about exact wording and your consistently malicious interpretation of everything Amber Scott said, but the above is just mind-boggling. Your take on it barely even resembles what was actually said.
To be fair, in context you could read it as "we like to feel good, hence we mean strongly felt positive reviews" although that assumes they wouldn't feel good reading a strong opinion about the game which is negative, which I don't know would be the case but it's a fair read of it. I think more likely they were just feeling down because of all the strong opinions that had nothing to do with the game. But a case can be made for Ashiel's read here, I think, even if I think the intent is more illuminated by focusing on their use of "the game" than about their use of "strongly held" and "feel good" one way or the other. I went into this in my reply above, but my post is a bit of a slog lol
To be fair, in context you could read it as "we like to feel good, hence we mean strongly felt positive reviews" although that assumes they wouldn't feel good reading a strong opinion about the game which is negative, which I don't know would be the case but it's a fair read of it. I think more likely they were just feeling down because of all the strong opinions that had nothing to do with the game. But a case can be made for Ashiel's read here, I think, even if I think the intent is more illuminated by focusing on their use of "the game" than about their use of "strongly held" and "feel good" one way or the other. I went into this in my reply above, but my post is a bit of a slog lol
Sure, I can get that (although the "for people browsing the store who want to know more about the game before they buy it" part argues that any strongly felt honest reviews would be welcome), but Ashiel herself highlighted the line "Obviously if you don't feel strongly about the game, there's no overwhelming need to post a review. If you do feel strongly, though, it can only help to post it", and in no sense can you interpret "don't feel strongly" to mean "feel negatively". They just aren't the same thing.
Like, I could see the argument that they were ONLY encouraging people who felt strongly positive about SoD to post reviews. But even in that, it's clear they were only encouraging people who had actually played it and genuinely felt positive about it, and that there is nothing at all to suggest they were discouraging posting genuine negative reviews.
Maybe this is some gaming community-specific thing, but even if Trent had said "If you like the game, then please write a positive review!" (which he absolutely didn't), I would have zero problem with that. It's something that happens with everything from podcasts (iTunes reviews) to YouTube videos (thumbs-ups) to politics (votes). Reminding people to honestly speak out, even if you explicitly want them to speak out in your favor, isn't remotely dishonest. It's just proactive.
P.S. I've seen some people explain their indignation about this by mentioning Steam's terms of service, and oh wow do I not care.
@joluv I couldn't agree more, but it's worth it to take the fight to the arguments on the arguments' own terms to show how even by their own terms the arguments don't hold water
@GenderNihilismGirdle Regarding Amber Scott referring to herself as an SJW, I believe that was in the context of her (or at least of BG:EE writers) being called SJWs, and her response was something like, "well if that's what I am, great." That is she was taking a slur that was being used against the EE writers because of dislike of Hexxat as a lesbian character and turning it around to say that there's nothing wrong with wanting to write diverse characters, and if that makes her an SJW then so be it.
@BelleSorciere No, I get it, it's just on a personal level I find that people who unironically self-identify as SJW, despite usually having better politics (by miles and miles and miles) than people who unironically self-identify as anti-SJW, are missing the point by increasing the acceptability of reactionary terminology, even for the purpose of throwing it back in anti-SJW faces. There's baggage attached to that term (such as that SJWs are pushing agendas, a thing clung to in online discussions here that is definitely part of the original coinage by right-wing internet teenagers) that makes taking back the slur a bit of a messy thing to do (especially given the online-exclusive hunting grounds of the people who coined it and how saying such a thing online can give the unthinking, single-minded, naive weirdos who coined it a chance to apply all the negative connotations they intended to go with that coinage and say that the person meant that since they know better than anyone all that's contained therein).
Might just be a personal preference, but as someone who has been involved in social justice causes since the 90s (i.e. well before the coinage of SJW) I just find tacitly endorsing the term, even as a "taking it back" kind of thing, very nearly as groan-worthy as spiteful deployment of it, just for a different set of reasons.
But as my posts in this thread make clear, I am nonetheless unequivocal in my support of the sentiment she was expressing there, and not only have absolutely zero problem with anything I've seen @Amber_Scott say anywhere else on the net, but in fact feel very respected and encouraged by those things as a bi trans person (and as a human being and fan of Baldur's Gate in general, since I always appreciate someone being constructively critical of media they love in ways similar to my own critical consumption of media, in particular media I love like BG).
@GenderNihilismGirdle To your point above about %'s, I have been thinking about it and I am thinking the percentage could be potentially fairly high given the number of mixed offspring between different actual races in FR. Humans, orcs, elves, more, given many generations and magic and interfering (and procreating!) deities, who knows what exactly going on biologically inside people in the realms?
Also, I am not trans, but it seems from reading posts here that it is physical and mental and emotional. I keep reading that magic can "fix" anything, but I don't believe and don't get the sense you believe that being trans is "broken", so how could a minor magic spell like polymorph bring all that into tune? Likewise with a girdle of sex change. Physical only. Maybe a Wish, but with carefully worded wishes still getting twisted by the grantor, who would take such an expensive risk?
Well, being transgendered isn't not broken. I'm pretty sure that if all it took were a little bibbity bobbity boo, there'd be far fewer trans people in the world, simply because they would now just be normal men an woman. Our abnormal state is in fact what sets us apart from the norm, and if we didn't have that distinction, we'd just be normal.
Put another way, you are not blind if you can see fine. Without the distinction, the label has no place. The very term transgendered means someone's gender identity doesn't correspond to their actual sex. So if you have a man, whose gender identity corresponds to being female, and then their sex is changed to female, they're not transgendered anymore. They're cured.
It is fairly attractive in a fantastic sort of sense to imagine a world where gender disphoria could be treated and cured as readily as blindness, by a simple casting of a spell, in the same way that remove blindness/deafness can restore hearing and sight to the deaf and blind, or how regeneration can restore missing limbs and appendages.
I know it's an attractive fantasy for me, at least.
@mf2112 and @Ashiel my thoughts (I'm on a roll with rants lately, a rantroll if you will)
Trans embodiment is a complicated thing, as is dysphoria. I definitely know some trans women who both don't feel genital dysphoria and also don't want GRS, but do want hormones or top surgery to grant them breasts and have dysphoria about that, and more than a few trans people of all sorts who have dysphoria about their junk but don't consider current medical advances to have gotten to the place they're yearning for. I'm personally someone who feels intense dysphoria of basically every kind you can think of, to the extent that even though I am basically of the opinion that surgery isn't there yet, for my own mental health I need to access GRS as soon as I can despite it not being at that level. Which is one reason (among many) I'm very much against the common system of making you wait so that professionals are sure that you're sure, which is always framed as "making sure that YOU are sure, not me!" but that's a lie because lots of trans people have been sure since a very young age and now they have to wait what seems like an arbitrary amount of time for gatekeepers to be sure of how sure they are...ugh, but that's another rant entirely. In any event, hormones will grant me breasts, and unlike a lot of trans women I know I'm a huge fan of the aesthetics of asymmetry as well as someone who wouldn't mind if hormones ever grow me "just" a B cup (and lots of people I know on hormones have grown Cs and up) because I like 'em in all shapes and sizes and imagine it'd be the same for me. I know some girls with DDs from hormones alone who still want to have surgery though, some because of asymmetry in their growth, some because they actually want a reduction to just a D because DD is too big for them aesthetically/too much of a strain on their back, etc.
The point I'm meandering trying to get to is that there are definitely trans people who have an embodiment which falls neither neatly into "man" nor neatly into "woman", as well as a broad diversity of trans embodiments even within those who do strongly identify as "man" or "woman", and so there are definitely people who choose to only take hormones and never undergo surgery, or who choose to not take hormones or undergo surgery, or to only undergo one surgery and not the other (like me, aiming for GRS but not planning on top surgery or facial feminization surgery...unless hormones don't soften my face enough after a few years, then I might do FFS but it remains to be seen).
To apply these things to a fantasy setting, and more specifically to Forgotten Realms/Dungeons and Dragons, it's worthwhile to note the above (that there may be people who don't want to transition, or who don't want a "gender/sex reversal" because it does too much), but also that there are still loads of people who live in poverty. To use 3rd ed/3.5 as an example, Eberron, as a campaign setting for D&D, tries to imagine what would happen at the dawn of a magical industrial revolution, and Keith Baker thinks through a lot of the implications of the DMG's distribution by population of PC class individuals and what levels they would be using the tables in the 3.5 DMG. I highly recommend people check out the 3.5 Eberron Campaign Setting book for some really great insights in this direction. There are really very few PC class people in the world, and VERY few high level PC class people in the world, and most of the write-ups of iconic high level characters in the setting make up those few people (Elminster, Drizzt, etc, and usually there's enough of them to go over the amount you'd expect there'd be going by the DMG tables for some nations lol), and we know what they're doing and why they can't be helping everyone all the time, even though if they all got together for mechanical reasons there'd be no reason they couldn't eradicate poverty nation by nation, one at a time until global utopia was achieved, then start working on making sure there are no disabilities or infirmities (that people don't want, Oedipus gouged out his own eyes and would've definitely turned down an Ancient Greek Elminster offering to fix that for him, and there are people today who identify strongly with their identity as a blind person or a deaf person to the extent that they actually don't want it "fixed" and consider themselves already whole, I'm sure people like that would exist in the Realms as well).
But for starters, not all of them are Good or even if they are Good some of them are very loyal to a particular person rather than to a nation, or to one nation or organization rather than to all of the world, so story reasons and plot reasons and personality/character reasons prevent a lot of rules-allowable Utopian Ideas from happening. That's part of what makes playing PCs in these worlds worthwhile: the high-level iconic NPCs of the setting are busy doing the stuff your characters can't do yet, and usually isolated to a particular kind of crisis (or in Elminster's case, a particular scale of crisis) and/or to a particular section of geography, to say nothing of what isolates their actions strictly because of who they are as a person (i.e. a good aligned high level NPC dwarf mage or cleric who dislikes elves and HATES orcs might not be pre-disposed to handing out gender confirmation boons to desperate elves or orcs seeking him our since he's one of the few with the power to do so). Meanwhile, you start with the low level threats as a PC, and work your way up to being toe-to-toe with the iconic NPCs of the setting so you can do what you wish they would be doing, but can't or don't for a complicated interlocking mess of reasons. That's the fun of long running D&D campaigns to me, characters with grand goals finally getting to accomplish them after arc after arc of dealing with monumental threats teaching them WHY it is that the other high level NPCs can't stop to take a breath long enough to rest, much less implement utopias...but of course the PCs implement the utopian ideals against all odds if the DM is good at knowing what's fun about players getting to achieve goals they set out no matter how big they dream! That's part of the fun of collaborative storytelling, it's everyone collaborating on a novel instead of one author that makes you go "BUT WHY DON'T THEY JUST DO THIS?!" the DM is the answer to the why, and the other players are the writing and editing team who overcome that why while the DM cooks up the next few chapter outlines with an evil grin.
So it's not such a simple thing to get access to even mid-level spells, much less high-level ones, even if you have the money. I can't remember the exact figures that Baker worked out, but it's something along the lines of 15 silver for high paying work a week for commoners IIRC, and at 15 silver a week, even with both parents and the eldest kids all pulling in work, there's no hope for them to pay thousands and thousands of gold (on top of living expenses over the time needed to save) to pay for access to high level magic for their daughter who was unfortunately born otherwise than her soul and mind are aligned. This is even more true in FR than it is in Eberron, and it's worth noting that not only does poverty still exist in literally every nation of Abeir-Toril (in some the divide between the wealth of small groups of powerful people and the slums of their cities is more striking than almost anywhere on pre-capitalist Earth), but the reason Good-aligned spellcasters can't do much to alleviate the plight of so many millions in poverty with needs ranging from physical health to mental health to food to shelter, etc, etc. is partly because there's not that many of the kinds of casters who can cast the spells that would help with that, or that many high level NPCs to stop the deprivations of a ruling class who themselves employ high level PC-class NPCs to defend their kingdoms and their power and their wealth! Most of the NPCs in the world are NPC class individuals, it's only the rare exceptional person who even makes it to 1st level in a PC class, much less advances through the levels and becomes powerful enough to challenge the wrongs of the world.
But that's what a D&D campaign is for! So I do hope we see quests related to transition in future D&D computer and console games, no matter what company makes them, in part because there's space for them to exist in the world without it being a tokenized thing, it's perfectly explainable even just from the resources available in the world to help those in need! Think about stumbling across that farmer whose cow is being slaughtered by xvarts in BG1...xvarts are weak little things to an adventurer, but even to an equal number of commoners they'd get SAVAGED, and it was just one guy out there desperately in need of your help! And because they all focus on the cow, unless people in your party have access to HEALING MAGIC and USE IT ON THE COW those xvarts are going to make short work of it even before you can manage to slaughter them all. Imagine if just six of his neighbours wandered through instead of CHARNAME and Co., and he called out to them for help...a bunch of them would have died going up against the xvarts and the cow would've died too! Hell, sometimes the cow dies when I roll up with magic blasting out of my fingertips!
And that's just one poor farmer! Imagine expanding that to the plight of everyone in the realms!
So while it is a "simple matter of casting a spell" to give sight to the blind, give plentiful food to the starving (a high level Druid spamming Goodberries would be giving poor people food to eat as well as a cure for any wounds suffered, and that's to say nothing of spells like Hero's Feast) give bodies they feel are more in line with who they are to those who want them, etc, etc, it's not as simple as that. Rarity of magic and economics come into play. I mean, it's just not the case that most people staffing most temples are going to be clerics! A lot of them would be (in 3.5 parlance) commoners or experts, or maybe the odd aristocrat or warrior with adepts making up the bulk of the spellcaster priests out there. Clerics are rare! Same with armies, it's not an army of fighters, it's an army of warriors that even a mid-level fighter could probably mop up solo, much less an army of fighter-class people! An army of fighters would be conquering the world, sweeping aside the warrior NPC class national armies of the various countries like they were nothing!
In the context of a CRPG though, they tend to ramp up the access to magic and magic items, but encountering all sorts of PC-class individuals is normal in pen and paper too, that's a narrative thing though. Statistically you wouldn't encounter them that often according to the DMG, but you are Heroes and you Do Important Things and are Fated To Continue Doing Them and you get to Save The World and Thwart Massively Powerful Evil! And that's just as true in CRPGs as it is in pen and paper, but it leaves some people with the impression that the world is stocked full of these high level NPCs you go head-to-head with, but really it's more like the DM is putting challenges in front of you that suit your level, since the rules are always meant to bend in the direction of making the PCs into Important Heroes doing Big Things (and of course they're always meant to bend in terms of giving players A Fun Time). So with that in mind, I think it's perfectly fine to add diversity, and even add quests and so on that pertain to that diversity. People can cry foul and say "but it's so unlikely!" but so is encountering a bunch of mages and clerics who can cast spells at you everywhere you go. It's just that the unlikely and the unusual is exactly what those destined to be more than just a commoner encounter in the world. Maybe it's the will of Deific Forces At Work, maybe it's simply Fate, maybe even Fate Which Bindeth Even The Pantheons Of The World (which explains mortal heroes getting to do battle with demon lords and deities and so on), but whatever the reason, ultimately behind it all is DM Fiat In Service Of a Fun Time For Players (the most powerful force in the multiverse, berks, and that's the True Cant).
I'm a transgender person and I totaly don't feel broken. I'm perfectly fine with my body, i'm bad with the way society see it and the way people think I must be because of my genitals (So we talk about gender here). I'm clearly not alone, trans experience are really many but clearly not all is about being broken or needed to fix. If there's something that need to be fix in my experience it's society not my body.
Don't know what is the english definition for transness but in my country it's not the one cited here. Are trans people for whom their gender identity is not the gender identity which given to them at birth. That's pretty different. Because it include more experience, like nobinary people (for whom the "sexual identity matching" thing is... a total nonsense), like the fact that even after the full surgery thing you still will have a lot of problem in my country to make the change on your official ID, and the fact you still have to face a lot of transphobia from peoples and institutions which still considere you like a "false man/woman". And you still have to take hormones all your life if you decide to do all the hormones/surgery thing in my knowledge.
So there's no way that can be "cured". Cause even if we can magicaly change ours body we can't change our past and the bad-assignation at birth. It's maybe one of the few thing all trans experience have in share. (And funnily that's the only thing that are in the game, and that's why I found Mizhena very well-written).
I am not sure what you're getting at re: "nonbinary people (for whom the sexual identity matching thing is...a total nonsense)" - are you saying nonbinary transgender people don't ever need to transition or are you saying something else that I am missing?
Comments
You may not have directly claimed a majority, but you're misusing general terms like "the fanbase" if you don't think it refers to a majority. Or, to put it more gently, we were talking past each other because we had different conceptions of the rhetorical implications of the word "fanbase", and now (hopefully) you can see where your definition of "some fans" as constituting "the fanbase" is different from my definition of "most fans" as constituting "the fanbase", and with that clarification of terms we can see where our disagreement stemmed from. I also don't know why you used the find-tool on the term "gaming culture" based on the post that I made, since I don't use that phrase in it, but I imagine it's because you meant to search for where you talk about "the community" or "gaming community" in this thread? idk I'm not about to comb through the thread hunting for it, I'm talking about broad trends in rhetoric not incidents of specific phrasing.
And maybe I missed it in the pages before I joined the thread, but did you ever actually outline the common complaints? What are they? Oster's statement is kept intentionally vague because there were so many different things said, many of them I feel completely unfounded and in fact provably so based on the content of the game (like the people complaining Mizhena wasn't fleshed out, for example, which she actually is moreso than most of the merchant/service provider NPCs, or that her character focused on her transness over and above every other facet, or that it only focused on that, both of which are also provably false from her content in SoD, etc, etc) so I wanted to see what the common complaints were so I could respond to them. Instead you posted a quote from the statement, and the statement doesn't go into what the common complaints are.
And neither did you, unless it was before I joined the thread. What are the common complaints? In my first post on this thread I already dismantled all the complaints of the Steam poster, so if those are the common ones then I don't think any of them are valid. I also went into the common bugs complaints that I've seen earlier in the thread. I didn't go back before I popped into the thread, and skimming back just now I didn't see you link to "common complaints" at any point, so I'm not sure what they are specifically outside of ones I've already rebutted.
So what are they? What are the common complaints? I don't know how to respond to you saying they exist without knowing what you think they are.
Smooth. Real smooth. Okay, I can understand this. Which is why I clarified. After the clarification, to address what I thought was confusion, you then accuse me of flip flopping, when my position never changed nor did I change anything that I had said. Which signifies you weren't looking for the truth, or clarification, but rather a moment to shout "gotcha" and failed...miserably.
1. Making Mizhena seem less token.
2. Removing the GG joke from Minsc.
3. Fixing a lot of gamebreaking bugs.
4. Fixing the super broken multiplayer.
So these are some of the most common complaints. Other common complaints include the attitude and disrespect by Amber Scott for the franchise and those who play it, the perceived theme of pushing a political ideology through the game, changes to established characters (to which the common counter argument I've seen tends to be "But they weren't great when you liked them" or something paraphrasing this answer), the requesting people who were underwhelmed with the game not review it and those who were enjoying it review it, the way response was met with accusations of bigotry, or attempting to undermine points by trying to - without evidence - leash those points to the invisible boogeyman somewhere (which is an ad hominem, last I checked).
However, my interest has and continues to be centralized around the very scandal itself, and how it affects people like me as a whole. That, primarily, is based around people's perceptions of Mizhena and the attitude of Amber Scott, and the perceived agenda mongering that she has (probably unintentionally linked us to by association).
By your line of reasoning, Amber Scott called herself a sexist by saying there were sexist elements in Baldur's Gate, as she is a member of the fanbase.
Your argument is pure sophistry. The existence of quite a few sexist elements in Baldur's Gate is only disputable because of the existence of a group of people who refuse to acknowledge that sexism exists in any popular media.
Transgendered people are often being publicized for many of the wrong reasons, often stupid reasons, often controversial reasons, that pit them as the boogeyman against normal people. This is one such case, where we've been associated with the political ideology of someone who has made it abundantly clear that she has a plan of action (an agenda) to change the BG franchise because she deems it sexist and cisgendered, and statements that she doesn't want strait cisgendered characters to be the norm (which in reality, they actually are the norm, we are the minority).
An example of this in action is the North Carolina toilet thing, which I discussed earlier in this thread briefly. However, yesterday, I was remarking to someone I knew about this thread, and how I had been discussing the issues surrounding Transgendered people.
Their response was, immediately, "Oh, that's so stupid," - blah blah blah, and he immediately started talking about how dumb the controversy was, and most importantly, had an opinion of how stupid transgendered people were because of it. I listened to him, and when he remarked that one of his coworkers were talking about legislated bigotry, I looked him in the face and was like "Tell her, I'm transgendered and I think it's stupid too", which caused him to pause. He was surprised but nonhostile, and I explained my position on that subject. And his response was that I wasn't what he expected, and he felt a bit silly feeling as he did. We're friends.
The controversy, and how the media and activist groups framed it, gave him a preconceived notion about transgendered people and their issues. I dispelled those preconceived notions, but it'd be cool if I didn't have to re-validate us as rational human beings to people who aren't aware of any tg people in their daily lives.
She never said it was sexist.
She never said it was cisgendered.
She did not say she didn't want straight/cisgendered characters to not be the norm.
Saying "I write this way because it's how I want to" is neither a plan of action nor a goddamn agenda. It'd also be cool if you had remotely as much respect for people who support transgendered rights as you do for people who express bigoted opinions about transgendered people for utterly unjustifiable reasons.
Someone talks about how stupid transgendered people are, and you are there to join with their sorrows. Somebody talks about how they don't like writing only white/straight/cisgendered people because it's boring and not a reflection of the real world, and they gain nothing but your contempt and spiteful twisting of their words.
You love those who would strike you down, and scorn those who would help you up.
That's your right, of course. It may well work for you, in whatever way you define it, in your current situation. But the history of civil rights doesn't suggest that it works on a wider scale.
And for the record, she didn't insult the quality and integrity of the thing that I'm a fan of, she was (constructively) critical of media she loves which I found very respectful and not at all insulting. Not only am I also critical of media that I love, but I consider someone being critical of media they love, especially in a constructive and intelligent way, to be fans after my own heart. They are part of the fanbase, and I don't think you can say that she insulted that part of the fanbase. You can say that the BG fanbase is mostly made up of mindless uncritical people who hold up what they're a fan of as a sacred cow rather than an evolving piece of media, but the discussions that predate this controversy about the comparative merits of BG1 and BG2 put the lie to that notion, so I doubt those folks (many of whom have made posts on this very forum about the sexism in the original Baldur's Gate games) would consider themselves insulted by constructively critical assessments of media they themselves engage in lengthy criticism of on the internet.
So again, the fanbase is not insulted. The fanbase is not offended. Some fans decided they were personally insulted, but that's their problem and not a function of the fanbase as a whole. I'll concede that with your use of the term to mean "some fans" that "the fanbase" was insulted, since I do agree some fans felt insulted. I also think the reasons they felt insulted are much like yours, where you state things that Amber Scott never said and get offended by them. That's fine, it's just not Amber Scott's fault. A world that is purely white and straight and cis is boring and not representative of the real world, but she never claimed Baldur's Gate was only those things. A world that is purely sexist is boring and also not representative of the real world, but she also never claimed Baldur's Gate was only those things. She presented as nuanced a critical view as she could in the format of an interview, and I for one was thrilled about hearing that someone working on the game shared my views both on where Baldur's Gate could improve and what kinds of things to focus on as a writer in the 21st century. I felt, in fact, deeply respected by what she had to say as someone who is bi and trans, rather than insulted. I felt like someone had my back, and I will always be grateful for that.
And by your definition of the fanbase (i.e. "some fans") I'd say the fanbase felt respected and grateful because of the totally responsible comments Amber Scott made. Funny how you agree that what I said makes sense when you get to that part, and it's no different a point made than the one you're disagreeing with here. Which is it? You get that our definitions of "fanbase" were different, or you don't? Because if you get it, then you can see that I wasn't making claims of things you haven't said, I was pointing out the inconsistency in things you were saying with a definition that you just quoted above which is more common, i.e. a fanbase as a body of fans rather than some of that body. You made claims regarding a fanbase/community that was upset, I didn't understand you were using a definition of those things that means "a portion of the fanbase"/"a portion of the community" and you said you got that, so I don't know why you keep saying I falsely accused you of stuff if you understand the difference in term use that was happening. Already addressed this. Already addressed this. Already addressed this. *sigh* Already addressed this. So I asked for something to back this up, and once again you just assert stuff like it's true. But assuming these are the complaints, I'll break it down for you.
1. Mizhena was not a token inclusion as written at launch. She is one of the most, if not the most, fleshed out NPC that provides you with services, she has multiple quests and none of them have to do with or even reference her being trans. But considering most of the people I've seen parroting this lie on Steam reviews have almost no time in-game (certainly not enough to have met her NPC, much less progressed enough to have done all the quests she's involved in) I don't take this criticism at all seriously. It's based on provably false assertions.
2. Clicking a companion 10 times in a row to hear one soundbite isn't something to give a game a negative review of an entire game over, no matter how bad the soundbite is, but this is probably another case of the soundbite being the only thing the person complaining knows about (i.e. they haven't actually played the game and so their "review" is based on the only things they have exposure to, which makes this soundbite between 50 and 75% of the gameplay they're aware of lmao). This wasn't a bad joke, hell given the subsequent controversy it was actually a prescient joke that was made funnier by GG's unethical lying about Mizhena being token based, clearly, on not having played the game enough to know she wasn't tokenized in any way shape or form. Like, I think that makes the Minsc line hilarious, and I haven't applied the update because I want to hear Minsc saying it, and I'll be using a mod when I patch SoD later to restore it. It's perfectly in line with previous BG 4th wall breaking nods to the player, and this one made it's own gravy at launch. Once again, if we're using your definition of fanbase to mean "some fans", the fanbase LOVED this one! They might not have loved GG's reaction to it, but that says nothing about the line and everything about GG. I know all the fans I know sure thought it was hilarious, and that's "some fans", so that's the fanbase yukkin' it up and the fanbase feeling insulted by GG getting the joke taken out!
3. What are the common complaints of gamebreaking bugs that haven't been fixed? I've already addressed this complaint earlier in the thread. Personally I had a bug-free run of SoD up to where I stopped to restart from Candlekeep as I mentioned in the post where I addressed the vagueness of people claiming bugs without citing what bugs they encountered as probably the same as the Mizhena complaints: people who didn't play parroting what other people who didn't play said (or parroting what people who lied said) without actually having seen whether it was the case themselves. I'm sure some people laid out the bugs they encountered, but most of the people I've seen doing that are people who gave generally positive reviews of the game overall, whereas the people who go hardest against the "bugginess" of the game on here have been people who don't say what bugs they encountered (and often have less than a dozen posts to their name on here...hmmmmmm I wonder why that would be). Many of the bugs I've seen complained about seem to have been fixed. If you want to link to someone talking about specific bugs the patch hasn't corrected to me, feel free, otherwise I don't know which bugs are considered common complaints to be able to say "patch notes says that was fixed" or not.
4. Aside from multiplayer that is, this is basically the only point I think any criticism has got right, multiplayer was basically unworkable from the word go. It's since been fixed according to patch notes, but I haven't tested that personally so I can't comment.
5 (the Amber Scott point). This complaint is based on falsifying/misrepresenting/adding on to what Amber Scott said, you yourself did it in this thread and have been called out for it by @Ayiekie and I don't consider it a valid complaint as a result. It's not very ethical of GG to lie about an interview, given their stance on ethics in games journalism, if you ask me. But again, a lot of these "common complaints" are common in the sense of an urban legend being common...they're not true, but some people are really devout believers in them anyway. Common complaints aren't valid complaints if they're urban legends, and the GG/tg urban legends about Amber Scott aren't complaints about Siege of Dragonspear or even really about Amber, they're just people wanting to be upset about something and working themselves up with fictions they tell themselves. That's weird but fine, it's just nothing to do with Amber or with SoD.
6. The perceived them of pushing a political ideology says it all. Once again, nothing to do with what is being perceived and everything to do with the lens slotted over the mind's eye of those hallucinating this perception. Given the willingness of the people with most if not all of these "common complaints" to outright lie about Amber or SoD, it might not be fair to say they misperceive things, but I'm trying to be generous here. Some may have just heard a lie and not bothered checking, and those people don't deserve scorn (although they do deserve to be ignored until they check for themselves instead of relying on fictitious complaints that colour their perception).
7 (the "changes to established characters" point). No changes were made to BG1 or BG2, and the SoD linkage between the two is actually perfectly consistent. If you want to cite exactly what changes were made with references to lines from SoD, I'll be glad to point out where in the canon of the originals those lines have precedent. Seriously, I'm fine with spoilers in the context of shooting down these ridiculous complaints in terms of what I haven't come across yet. Go for it! But be specific, cite what lines people don't like. Otherwise it's just more "haven't played it, but I'll assert something about the content anyway!" b.s. and those aren't valid complaints.
8 (requesting people who were underwhelmed with the game not review it). [citation needed]
9 (requesting those who were enjoying it review it). This was in response to people literally lying about the game's content, so I'm not surprised they wanted a counterbalance from people who actually played the game, since this request was made when over three quarters of the negative reviews on Steam were from people with less than 2 hours of gameplay and the reviews on sites where you didn't have to own the game were overwhelmingly negative amidst a bunch of lies about the content of the game. I'd do the same as Beamdog in that situation, but it bears mentioning that no one put a gun to anyone's head. They requested that people do so, and they did, because those fans (or "the fanbase" in your definition) responded to the call in order to balance out the review-bombing that had nothing to do with legitimate complaints about the game.
10. (the way response was met with accusations of bigotry) I don't know what else to call the vicious and disgusting harassment of Amber Scott on twitter, or the horrifying transmisogynistic/transphobic statements being made, etc, etc. Other than those responses, I don't know which ones were being met with those accusations, you'll have to link me to the reasonable responses and the accusations that specifically reference those responses. Otherwise we're just talking about your opinion here.
11. (or attempting to undermine points by trying to - without evidence - leash those points to the invisible boogeyman somewhere). This was a common complaint? I don't even know what this complaint is. Give me some examples, link me elsewhere so I can understand what this complaint is. It can't have been common, this is literally the first time I'm seeing it articulated and the meaning is obscure and vague.
12. Your final point in this dirty dozen is near and dear to my own hear too. We see things differently though. Being trans, I am also incredibly concerned. But Amber Scott's comments did not concern me. Siege of Dragonspear did not concern me. What concerned me was the response by right-wing gamers. Not all of them were in the conservative tradition of liberalism, some of them were out and out liberals (although I hesitate to call them "left liberals" given how they framed their transphobia), and certainly some of them were much further to the right than people in the conservative tradition. But these gamers were the ones I was concerned with. How this scandal affects people like me is not the fault of Beamdog, or Amber Scott, or Siege of Dragonspear, or Mizhena.
It is the fault of people who spew vitriol on the internet, and no one is responsible for their vitriol but them. I am disgusted with them, I fear some of them and I want them to stop. But I in no way hold anyone but them responsible for their hateful b.s. It's not based around the attitude of Amber Scott, it's based around the attitudes and perceptions of small-minded, hateful people. The onus is not on trans people, or on people trying to speak up for us or include us. The onus is always on the hateful people themselves, not on something that hateful people blame as "provoking them", and the people who link agenda mongering to us by association are not Beamdog employees. The only people who make those linkages are the only people I hold responsible, and those are the people intentionally linking Amber Scott and agenda mongering together. Those people are responsible because they are choosing to make false equivalences. They make those mistakes, they make those internal choices, they intend to link things together and so fill in a backstory about it that doesn't have overlap with reality.
As a trans person, I am not going to hold Amber Scott responsible for hate generated in minds not her own. I am not going to hold Beamdog responsible for lies and paranoid thinking that don't originate in the brains of their employees. I am not going to hold Siege of Dragonspear responsible for the controversy that people who didn't bother to play the game are trying to shove down our throats along with their poorly concealed agenda (or their projection issues that have them blaming everyone else for engaging in the agenda pushing that they themselves are doing).
According to LGBT demographics for the united states, it's estimated at about a 3.8% average for the populace, but pretty much assured to be less than 10%, and that's including both homosexuals, bisexuals, and transgendered people, with transgendered people being less than 1% (about 0.3%).
Hence why it comes off as an agenda, because you're identifying as an SJW, and adding people with certain traits just to include additional diversity (which is literally Tokenism by definition). I think Liana K. explains the outrage better than I. I share her sentiments. This is, interestingly, why I don't think an antagonistic approach to social interaction is a good idea. If you tease the dog, as it were. Sincerely, thank you for this. I just got home and I need to get ready to take a nap after work so I can be awake some of today (night shift->day off->day shift following day, don't want to waste all of my off-day), but I'm going to think about what you've said. I'm still concerned that after the dust settles, people are going to associate this kerfuffle with us.
I still don't think the reaction to this game would have been as explosive if not for the perfect storm of circumstances (since there are lots of other games with non-cisgendered non-strait non-white characters that aren't generating the outrage), but I see where you're coming from. I also apologize for getting angry earlier in the thread. This is something I've been putting up with a lot lately from sources outside of gaming, and so it's pretty touchy for me, and I very well may be letting my emotions get the better of me. If so, my sincere apologies.
PS: I shared some music earlier in the thread, so here I'll continue that tradition.
But on that point, one of the reasons fantasy (and sci fi and other speculative fiction) is so great is because you can introduce a level higher than what statistics show in the real world because a) it's not the real world and b) unlike in the real world, there might be less violent reactions to difference, which in turn would reflect the % we'd see in real world statistics if people felt free to answer surveys honestly. Many don't. I know many people in the closet who simply do not answer surveys, and if they do, fill certain aspects of them out differently than who they are, and those are because of real world factors. In a fantasy game, we can add diversity to balance out those people hidden by very real fears based in very real reactions which can prevent them from gaining a job, or cause harassment up to and including violent harassment. I don't trust statistics on how many of us there are for one because depending on where you grab your numbers from they say wildly different things (including quite a few which suggest national or global % in the double digits that have come out in the last decade for several different countries including the U.S., altho some surveys continue to report sub-5% numbers alongside those), and for another because even in the cases where the % is substantially higher than other surveys that still doesn't reflect people who simply will not fill out surveys that force them to identify those aspects of themselves nor does it reflect people who fill them out falsely out of fear of who is going to see the information on it and potentially associate them with it (often a paranoid fear, given privacy of information that most surveys promise, but then again minority demographics who face discrimination and violence from majority demographics include a disproportionate amount of people with intense paranoia problems, and given the reality they have to live in I don't blame them for being over-paranoid about surveys).
So to point a) above, we can ignore what % exist in the real world and add in more diversity so that people who are currently living in sub-optimal conditions socially and interpersonally, if not also materially, can see themselves in a universe where they are presented as strong, or as normal, or as accepted, etc, etc. And to point b) above, even if we wanted (and I don't know why we would want) to keep things close to real world % we simply can't know what they are even by trying to infer something from a sampling of different surveys about the same issues. Statistics are, like eye-witness testimony, notoriously unreliable (and statistics classes teach you as much, which I always found funny about my into stats course in college).
1) But on to your first example, the wording there that you highlight in green seems pretty clear to me. If you feel strongly, either negatively or positively, they are not wanting to discourage you from posting a review. But since there seemed to be a heavy influx of negative reviews (and I've already discussed the reasons why that was the case, in short because people who hadn't bothered playing the game at all chose to parrot complaints by others who hadn't played the game long enough and began a chain of review-bombs filled with false information) Beamdog was wanting the people still giving the game it's due time and consideration because they liked it and were mid-playthrough at that point to maybe take a moment to add their voices to the choir. And they did, so clearly those fans understood why that needed to be done and agreed, considering it swung the Steam reviews from Mixed status during the brief era of less than 2 hour playtime reviews to the current 70%+ Mostly Positive status now that people who took their time to beat the game have weighed in and created a counter-balance to the no-play crowd. So I don't think your first example is a sourced example of them asking people who hated it not to review it. On the contrary, they seem to want people who feel strongly about it to review it, including those who don't like it. I think the "if you don't feel strongly about the game" felt more like a veiled jab at people who couldn't possibly have felt strongly one way or another about the game itself, like the ones on metacritic who clearly hadn't played the game at all and felt strongly about something that had nothing to do with the game that they'd heard second or third or fourth hand. But that's just my take on that part of the statement, what doesn't seem as open to interpretation is them wanting people with strong opinions on the game to leave reviews one way or the other. They don't say "don't leave a review if you hate it" anywhere in there. It's true that, in context, they're saying they'd "feel good" about strongly felt reviews, which implies that they want people who feel positively about the game to review, but even if that's the case I still don't think they're trying to say "don't leave a review if you feel strongly in a negative way", just trying to say that some people leaving negative reviews don't feel strongly about the game, but instead about the controversy (which was largely not about the game, as I went over in my last reply to you).
2) As to your second example, you claim that the Amber Scott quote resulted in characters being rewritten, which is not the case. Characters were expanded upon in Siege of Dragonspear, but nothing in Baldur's Gate 1 or 2 was rewritten. Safana got "a personality upgrade", and I agree with that. We get to see a piece of her personality that only comes out in one moment of BG1 that becomes a focal point of her character in BG2 expanded upon. Namely, in BG1 when you meet her, she's all seductive language and suggestive implications, but as soon as you actually let her join the party, she immediately comments that the group needs better leadership...namely her! In BG2, she expands on this aspect of her personality (also a piece of her personality that is gone into in the BG1 bio) of using and discarding people in her life for her own purposes and for her own advantage, and it seems quite extreme to see the jump from the one line in BG1 to the expanded cruelty and disdain she has in BG2.
Amber Scott and the other writers wrote a linkage in SoD which is a perfect link between the personality of BG1 and BG2 by having her be crueller to CHARNAME now that she knows him well, letting slip a bit of her seductive mask to reveal the contempt behind it. I think this is flawless characterization perfectly in line with BG1 and BG2, and in fact it serves to explain something that would otherwise have only been explained with her BG1 bio and that one line upon joining, which is to say, something left relatively unexplained. Instead, we get to see the progression from seductress trying to stay in your good books, to seductress so confident she's in your good books that she stops trying so hard, to the outright betrayal in BG2. It's a perfect bridge and really good writing, and not at all a revision of her character. It's an expansion of pre-existing facets of Safana that elevates her from the one dimensionality of BG1's characterization using content from BG1 and BG2 as inspiration. It's perfect, and I don't see why anyone who has actually played the original games would think the SoD content was a "rewrite" in any way.
Similarly, anyone who has played BG2 knows that the way Jaheira is handled in SoD is not a "rewrite" of Jaheira but instead an expansion of who we discover she is in BG2, so that there is a preview of that characterization in SoD to link BG1 to BG2 more fluidly than what had previously been the case. So again, for people who actually are part of the Baldur's Gate fanbase, it's no surprise that Jaheira was written that way in Siege of Dragonspear, and in fact it's a welcome fleshing out of pre-existing personality traits we were exposed to in BG2 if we had her in our party and especially if we romanced her. But some "common complaints" about Jaheira are clearly from people who didn't care about Jaheira's depiction in BG2 at all, and just wanted the one-note depiction of Baldur's Gate to be what we saw...but that doesn't make sense if your goal is to write an expansion that bridges BG1 and BG2. Amber Scott and Beamdog were doing their job, and doing it well. People who didn't bother to play all the way through SoD (or BG2, it seems) have had problems with SoD that don't exist for anyone in the fanbase who actually played all of these games many many times over the past few decades, because we know who these characters are and we can understand these linkages perfectly well. That lends even more credence to the idea that a lot of these common complaints are only common because it's quite common for people who haven't played the original games to not understand what's going on, and apparently quite common for them to feel like that makes them an authority on the game enough to speak on it. Which is b.s. Amber Scott's comments were not insulting to the fanbase, although the common complaints about her comments are definitely insulting to our intelligence as fans of the game who know they're not based on anything except a false perception of these characters (or, charitably, on a perception of these characters based only on BG1, but even then they're ignoring the clues in Safana's characterization that existed even then).
And if those people don't like that, too bad. They didn't play the games anyway, or they don't remember them very well. That's not Amber's problem, that's their problem.
3) Your third example is Amber saying she is proud to be a Social Justice Warrior, which I'll admit I find cringe-worthy even as someone who considers social justice just as important as Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass did, as important as MLK or James Baldwin or Malcolm X did, I think there is a long tradition of social justice that already exists to the extent that no one needs to claim a dismissive right-wing slur against people who care about social justice for their own like Amber did there. But I don't think it was offensive that she aligned herself with social justice, just a little misplaced to self-identify as 4chan/GamerGate slur. But the fault in that, honestly, falls in its coiners, not in Amber Scott. I don't care what right-wing channers and GG folks want to say about people who care about social justice, I know it's a tradition that stretches back not just into recent history, but into ancient history. There have been people concerned about justice for the poor since before Jesus Christ, and while I personally think J.C. was a fiction given that there's zero contemporary historical attestation of him or his movement from when he was alive, it bears mentioning that early Christians (who all existed well after the 70s C.E. so fully 40+ years after he supposedly died) were very concerned with social justice, and that influence extended through the early Church via the monastic orders well into the present, as just one example from the ancient world with continued relevance today. Social justice is not new, people have wanted the abolition of slavery since Grecco-Roman times, and we have some of their writings preserved. That is an issue of justice which affects society as a whole, or social justice. I think it's ridiculous that channers and GG types ridicule people with sarcastic labels like "SJW" for caring about social justice, and so I do find it a bit facepalmy to have seen Amber self-identify with the slur, but aside from that there is zero things wrong with the post she made that you used for your third example.
Writing about straight, white and cis characters "all the time" would indeed be not representative of the real world. Then she makes a separate point, which is that it is also boring. I agree with both sentiments. Media is saturated with whiteness, and I'm glad she is challenging that so other people can see themselves in media. And I've already addressed the statistics/% argument you made above, so I won't rehash it here, but I also agree that in speculative fiction-related media in particular, especially fantasy or far-distant from the present sci-fi, it's important to add diversity. Those that think it's forcing it to do so are people who don't understand what speculative fiction are, or who wish to impose their (false) understanding of real world numbers on speculative fiction that, even if their understanding wasn't false, is fiction that has no logical reason to have anything to do with Earth numbers of any era. Even the sci fi (which this isn't, so the argument is even LESS relevant) that is far distant can be influenced by any number of historical events leading up to the fictive present that make any historical figures irrelevant, just as people in 17th century Europe couldn't know that looking at statistics of horse ownership from the beginning of history until then wouldn't be able to tell you anything about horse ownership in the 21st century. So adding diversity over and above what we see around us is a) fantastic, because it lets people see themselves in media no matter who they are and b) is perfectly in-line with the statistics of that world because that world is speculative fiction, complete with speculative statistics.
And finally, it's not tokenism because Mizhena isn't only in the game as a trans character, she's a fleshed out character that has multiple quests she's involved in which don't mention it at all. As a trans person, I do not feel she's a token character at all, and if someone's intent in a fantasy or sci fi setting is to add diversity so people feel represented, and then manage to write a character that isn't tokenized, then by definition all they've done is show us something about this universe that expands on its diversity (not tokenization) and did it via a character who is not only about that one aspect (also not tokenization). Again, people who've actually played SoD would know Mizhena isn't a token character, and Amber's statements would only be seen as an attempt to tokenize difference if they knew absolutely nothing about speculative fiction or how it differs from reality.
4) As to Liana K, I disagree completely because a crucial part of her argument says that "the most important thing a game can do is to absorb someone so much that it takes them out of themselves" and that therefore there shouldn't be fourth wall breaking elements...except BG1 and BG2 are full of 4th wall breaking elements which constitutes part of their charm. In fact, one of my chief complaints about SoD is that they don't have enough of them so it's slightly too serious in tone unless you have a silly-leaning party. Not that it's lacking in them completely, but it could've done with a few more silly moments that don't rely on who your party members are. As such, I'm sad they took out the line because it was much needed 4th wall breaking in an expansion that didn't have quite enough (altho that was just in the first few hours of gameplay, when I fully get into it after clearing BG1 this week I'll be able to see if there's more 4th wall breaking bits than meet the eye in SoD). Once again, it sounds more like someone who is misremebering the originals, or relying on hearsay from people who misremember (or haven't played) the originals. I know that's not her only point, but I'm not going to point by point break down her entire argument here, especially since of all the things that have been complained about or changed, I care the least about the removal of this line, especially since I can easily add it back in (and will be doing so).
But again, I just want to reiterate that I totally get that Very Trans Feel of being bombarded with stuff no cis person has to deal with and getting weighed down by it, and I'm sorry you've been going through that! I appreciate your engagement on this, even where we disagree, as it helps me to illuminate some things for other people on this forum to show where two trans people can disagree on this and what the arguments for different perspectives on it can be. I hope this week is better than your last few in terms of dealing with that kinda stuff!
I'm not even going to say you're deliberately lying here, I'm just baffled.
You have disproven your own point.
"If you don't feel strongly about it, there's no need to post a review" is literally saying "Don't post a review about the game just to help us, only do it if you really liked (or disliked) SoD." It not only proves you wrong, it proves wrong the BS lie parroted by the usual suspects that Beamdog was begging for their own positive review bomb.
I have no idea why you don't know what "feel strongly" means, but flip it around: it means "have strong feelings". They didn't say anything about negative feelings. Not one word. In no way, shape, or form did they "attempt to persuade people who don't like the game not to review it".
I'm tired of fighting about exact wording and your consistently malicious interpretation of everything Amber Scott said, but the above is just mind-boggling. Your take on it barely even resembles what was actually said.
Like, I could see the argument that they were ONLY encouraging people who felt strongly positive about SoD to post reviews. But even in that, it's clear they were only encouraging people who had actually played it and genuinely felt positive about it, and that there is nothing at all to suggest they were discouraging posting genuine negative reviews.
P.S. I've seen some people explain their indignation about this by mentioning Steam's terms of service, and oh wow do I not care.
I hope that made sense.
Might just be a personal preference, but as someone who has been involved in social justice causes since the 90s (i.e. well before the coinage of SJW) I just find tacitly endorsing the term, even as a "taking it back" kind of thing, very nearly as groan-worthy as spiteful deployment of it, just for a different set of reasons.
Also, I am not trans, but it seems from reading posts here that it is physical and mental and emotional. I keep reading that magic can "fix" anything, but I don't believe and don't get the sense you believe that being trans is "broken", so how could a minor magic spell like polymorph bring all that into tune? Likewise with a girdle of sex change. Physical only. Maybe a Wish, but with carefully worded wishes still getting twisted by the grantor, who would take such an expensive risk?
Thanks for your insightful posts, good reading!
I know it's an attractive fantasy for me, at least.
Trans embodiment is a complicated thing, as is dysphoria. I definitely know some trans women who both don't feel genital dysphoria and also don't want GRS, but do want hormones or top surgery to grant them breasts and have dysphoria about that, and more than a few trans people of all sorts who have dysphoria about their junk but don't consider current medical advances to have gotten to the place they're yearning for. I'm personally someone who feels intense dysphoria of basically every kind you can think of, to the extent that even though I am basically of the opinion that surgery isn't there yet, for my own mental health I need to access GRS as soon as I can despite it not being at that level. Which is one reason (among many) I'm very much against the common system of making you wait so that professionals are sure that you're sure, which is always framed as "making sure that YOU are sure, not me!" but that's a lie because lots of trans people have been sure since a very young age and now they have to wait what seems like an arbitrary amount of time for gatekeepers to be sure of how sure they are...ugh, but that's another rant entirely. In any event, hormones will grant me breasts, and unlike a lot of trans women I know I'm a huge fan of the aesthetics of asymmetry as well as someone who wouldn't mind if hormones ever grow me "just" a B cup (and lots of people I know on hormones have grown Cs and up) because I like 'em in all shapes and sizes and imagine it'd be the same for me. I know some girls with DDs from hormones alone who still want to have surgery though, some because of asymmetry in their growth, some because they actually want a reduction to just a D because DD is too big for them aesthetically/too much of a strain on their back, etc.
The point I'm meandering trying to get to is that there are definitely trans people who have an embodiment which falls neither neatly into "man" nor neatly into "woman", as well as a broad diversity of trans embodiments even within those who do strongly identify as "man" or "woman", and so there are definitely people who choose to only take hormones and never undergo surgery, or who choose to not take hormones or undergo surgery, or to only undergo one surgery and not the other (like me, aiming for GRS but not planning on top surgery or facial feminization surgery...unless hormones don't soften my face enough after a few years, then I might do FFS but it remains to be seen).
To apply these things to a fantasy setting, and more specifically to Forgotten Realms/Dungeons and Dragons, it's worthwhile to note the above (that there may be people who don't want to transition, or who don't want a "gender/sex reversal" because it does too much), but also that there are still loads of people who live in poverty. To use 3rd ed/3.5 as an example, Eberron, as a campaign setting for D&D, tries to imagine what would happen at the dawn of a magical industrial revolution, and Keith Baker thinks through a lot of the implications of the DMG's distribution by population of PC class individuals and what levels they would be using the tables in the 3.5 DMG. I highly recommend people check out the 3.5 Eberron Campaign Setting book for some really great insights in this direction. There are really very few PC class people in the world, and VERY few high level PC class people in the world, and most of the write-ups of iconic high level characters in the setting make up those few people (Elminster, Drizzt, etc, and usually there's enough of them to go over the amount you'd expect there'd be going by the DMG tables for some nations lol), and we know what they're doing and why they can't be helping everyone all the time, even though if they all got together for mechanical reasons there'd be no reason they couldn't eradicate poverty nation by nation, one at a time until global utopia was achieved, then start working on making sure there are no disabilities or infirmities (that people don't want, Oedipus gouged out his own eyes and would've definitely turned down an Ancient Greek Elminster offering to fix that for him, and there are people today who identify strongly with their identity as a blind person or a deaf person to the extent that they actually don't want it "fixed" and consider themselves already whole, I'm sure people like that would exist in the Realms as well).
But for starters, not all of them are Good or even if they are Good some of them are very loyal to a particular person rather than to a nation, or to one nation or organization rather than to all of the world, so story reasons and plot reasons and personality/character reasons prevent a lot of rules-allowable Utopian Ideas from happening. That's part of what makes playing PCs in these worlds worthwhile: the high-level iconic NPCs of the setting are busy doing the stuff your characters can't do yet, and usually isolated to a particular kind of crisis (or in Elminster's case, a particular scale of crisis) and/or to a particular section of geography, to say nothing of what isolates their actions strictly because of who they are as a person (i.e. a good aligned high level NPC dwarf mage or cleric who dislikes elves and HATES orcs might not be pre-disposed to handing out gender confirmation boons to desperate elves or orcs seeking him our since he's one of the few with the power to do so). Meanwhile, you start with the low level threats as a PC, and work your way up to being toe-to-toe with the iconic NPCs of the setting so you can do what you wish they would be doing, but can't or don't for a complicated interlocking mess of reasons. That's the fun of long running D&D campaigns to me, characters with grand goals finally getting to accomplish them after arc after arc of dealing with monumental threats teaching them WHY it is that the other high level NPCs can't stop to take a breath long enough to rest, much less implement utopias...but of course the PCs implement the utopian ideals against all odds if the DM is good at knowing what's fun about players getting to achieve goals they set out no matter how big they dream! That's part of the fun of collaborative storytelling, it's everyone collaborating on a novel instead of one author that makes you go "BUT WHY DON'T THEY JUST DO THIS?!" the DM is the answer to the why, and the other players are the writing and editing team who overcome that why while the DM cooks up the next few chapter outlines with an evil grin.
So it's not such a simple thing to get access to even mid-level spells, much less high-level ones, even if you have the money. I can't remember the exact figures that Baker worked out, but it's something along the lines of 15 silver for high paying work a week for commoners IIRC, and at 15 silver a week, even with both parents and the eldest kids all pulling in work, there's no hope for them to pay thousands and thousands of gold (on top of living expenses over the time needed to save) to pay for access to high level magic for their daughter who was unfortunately born otherwise than her soul and mind are aligned. This is even more true in FR than it is in Eberron, and it's worth noting that not only does poverty still exist in literally every nation of Abeir-Toril (in some the divide between the wealth of small groups of powerful people and the slums of their cities is more striking than almost anywhere on pre-capitalist Earth), but the reason Good-aligned spellcasters can't do much to alleviate the plight of so many millions in poverty with needs ranging from physical health to mental health to food to shelter, etc, etc. is partly because there's not that many of the kinds of casters who can cast the spells that would help with that, or that many high level NPCs to stop the deprivations of a ruling class who themselves employ high level PC-class NPCs to defend their kingdoms and their power and their wealth! Most of the NPCs in the world are NPC class individuals, it's only the rare exceptional person who even makes it to 1st level in a PC class, much less advances through the levels and becomes powerful enough to challenge the wrongs of the world.
But that's what a D&D campaign is for! So I do hope we see quests related to transition in future D&D computer and console games, no matter what company makes them, in part because there's space for them to exist in the world without it being a tokenized thing, it's perfectly explainable even just from the resources available in the world to help those in need! Think about stumbling across that farmer whose cow is being slaughtered by xvarts in BG1...xvarts are weak little things to an adventurer, but even to an equal number of commoners they'd get SAVAGED, and it was just one guy out there desperately in need of your help! And because they all focus on the cow, unless people in your party have access to HEALING MAGIC and USE IT ON THE COW those xvarts are going to make short work of it even before you can manage to slaughter them all. Imagine if just six of his neighbours wandered through instead of CHARNAME and Co., and he called out to them for help...a bunch of them would have died going up against the xvarts and the cow would've died too! Hell, sometimes the cow dies when I roll up with magic blasting out of my fingertips!
And that's just one poor farmer! Imagine expanding that to the plight of everyone in the realms!
So while it is a "simple matter of casting a spell" to give sight to the blind, give plentiful food to the starving (a high level Druid spamming Goodberries would be giving poor people food to eat as well as a cure for any wounds suffered, and that's to say nothing of spells like Hero's Feast) give bodies they feel are more in line with who they are to those who want them, etc, etc, it's not as simple as that. Rarity of magic and economics come into play. I mean, it's just not the case that most people staffing most temples are going to be clerics! A lot of them would be (in 3.5 parlance) commoners or experts, or maybe the odd aristocrat or warrior with adepts making up the bulk of the spellcaster priests out there. Clerics are rare! Same with armies, it's not an army of fighters, it's an army of warriors that even a mid-level fighter could probably mop up solo, much less an army of fighter-class people! An army of fighters would be conquering the world, sweeping aside the warrior NPC class national armies of the various countries like they were nothing!
In the context of a CRPG though, they tend to ramp up the access to magic and magic items, but encountering all sorts of PC-class individuals is normal in pen and paper too, that's a narrative thing though. Statistically you wouldn't encounter them that often according to the DMG, but you are Heroes and you Do Important Things and are Fated To Continue Doing Them and you get to Save The World and Thwart Massively Powerful Evil! And that's just as true in CRPGs as it is in pen and paper, but it leaves some people with the impression that the world is stocked full of these high level NPCs you go head-to-head with, but really it's more like the DM is putting challenges in front of you that suit your level, since the rules are always meant to bend in the direction of making the PCs into Important Heroes doing Big Things (and of course they're always meant to bend in terms of giving players A Fun Time). So with that in mind, I think it's perfectly fine to add diversity, and even add quests and so on that pertain to that diversity. People can cry foul and say "but it's so unlikely!" but so is encountering a bunch of mages and clerics who can cast spells at you everywhere you go. It's just that the unlikely and the unusual is exactly what those destined to be more than just a commoner encounter in the world. Maybe it's the will of Deific Forces At Work, maybe it's simply Fate, maybe even Fate Which Bindeth Even The Pantheons Of The World (which explains mortal heroes getting to do battle with demon lords and deities and so on), but whatever the reason, ultimately behind it all is DM Fiat In Service Of a Fun Time For Players (the most powerful force in the multiverse, berks, and that's the True Cant).
I'm a transgender person and I totaly don't feel broken. I'm perfectly fine with my body, i'm bad with the way society see it and the way people think I must be because of my genitals (So we talk about gender here). I'm clearly not alone, trans experience are really many but clearly not all is about being broken or needed to fix. If there's something that need to be fix in my experience it's society not my body.
Don't know what is the english definition for transness but in my country it's not the one cited here. Are trans people for whom their gender identity is not the gender identity which given to them at birth. That's pretty different. Because it include more experience, like nobinary people (for whom the "sexual identity matching" thing is... a total nonsense), like the fact that even after the full surgery thing you still will have a lot of problem in my country to make the change on your official ID, and the fact you still have to face a lot of transphobia from peoples and institutions which still considere you like a "false man/woman". And you still have to take hormones all your life if you decide to do all the hormones/surgery thing in my knowledge.
So there's no way that can be "cured". Cause even if we can magicaly change ours body we can't change our past and the bad-assignation at birth. It's maybe one of the few thing all trans experience have in share. (And funnily that's the only thing that are in the game, and that's why I found Mizhena very well-written).