2501 I personally share your unfavorable view of the game’s attempts at ‘representation,’ but I’m also not really sure what I think about it in TLOU2 and increasingly in other mass culture corporate products.
To go off topic for a sec: the chicago teacher’s Union has made a recent practice of trying to include among there demands, provisions for affordable housing, expanded mental health, benefits for service workers etc, because the union is one of the few organized, power-wielding bodies that can win some kind of broader social/economic victory.
If you want to be charitable, you can look at TLOU2 making a clumsy attempt at LGBT inclusion along those same lines. We have a couple hundred million bucks to make, market, and distribute this thing to an enormous audience, let’s get some social utility in there.
Of course this is simultaneously a cynical way to expand the market horizons of said mass cultural corporate product. And obviously if you have a dumb dude with an adolescent view of israel-palestine, you might want to pass on that guy’s “vision”
so I think TLOU2 sucks, and doesn’t offer much to those of us who have internalized the fact that lesbians are full human beings, or have talked to a Jewish person before, I wonder if it is due some kind of credit for the representation.