Flights 'n Tights MUX

WTFE

And women, @silentsophia. I rarely feel embarrassed for my gender. Comic book shops have always made me consider just getting a straight razor and cutting off the offending bits as an apology for the contents of the shop.

TNP

@Ninjakitten said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

What I'm kind of curious about is: DO superhero games have a history of treating non-straight male heroes poorly?

I've never found that to be the case. But I suspect that part of 'poorly' might be staff not wanting them to turn straight characters gay. That's just a guess on my part having looked over the cast list on their wiki and seeing a lot of similarities to the 'gayified' straight FCs on HD way back when.

Now granted, comics in general never used to be overly gay friendly but a lot has change over the years.

ThugHeaven

I'm just curious if really fishy transgendereds are allowed?

Or how about a woman that transforms into a drag queen?

Thenomain

@WTFE said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

And women, @silentsophia. I rarely feel embarrassed for my gender. Comic book shops have always made me consider just getting a straight razor and cutting off the offending bits as an apology for the contents of the shop.

You could just, you know, boycott the shop and its contents. I, myself, am optimistic about using those bits again sometime.

Phase Face

@Ninjakitten said

What I'm kind of curious about is: DO superhero games have a history of treating non-straight male heroes poorly? "Unlike many other games that treat even established gay, bi, and queer male characters poorly" strongly suggests that, but as someone who doesn't play the genre, I don't know if that's true. If it is, I can see a non-fetish place this would come from, although given my experience in other genres I'd've thought an everyone-welcome game with strict enforcement against people being that kind of asshole would work also.

Comics absolutely do. Comic games - at least, based on my relatively limited(8 yrs, maybe 6 or 7 games) don't, really. I've never been on a game without a contingent of queer players/characters, and I'm fairly sure that I've come across numerous examples of players doing (presumably) straight characters as gay or bi without issue on every game I've played. Also two examples of the opposite, but it's not at all common.

I can't speak to any experience but my own of course, so it's entirely possible that there /have/ been people who have been harassed due to their/their character's sexuality on these games, on the DL. But I've not seen or heard of much of anything along those lines; maybe the worst is the odd, broadly intolerant or !PC player here or there, but little that's systemic, or widespread, or even particularly accepted.

JLU mux's former head admin was maybe the closest thing to a homophobic staff type I've experienced(and I take it that it was, at least before I began playing it, kind of shitty towards queer players on a policy level). But the game was eventually edged out of his grasp(not /just/ because he had some 'phobic tendencies, not that they helped any), and even before that point, the game had otherwise been plenty welcoming to queer characters once those shit old policies had been done away with.

Lithium

This is the same kind of exclusionary as not allowing someone to play SuperMan on a Dungeons & Dragons game.

Yes it is exclusionary, but almost all games are if they have a set theme they are aiming for (barring those multiverse games and talkers and such that allow anything and everything).

In fact, most games are exclusionary. Try to invent a .45 pistol on a Game of Thrones game. Try to be a sorcerer on the spaceship that contains the last vestiges of humanity as it runs from an alien menace.

It's kind of crazy that we've been saying forever that: Their game, their rules, their theme, but somehow that doesn't apply here and it has to be labelled in derogatory fashion.

I am gay, but not a guy. I only very rarely play guy characters, and have no interest in the game but the level of hypocrisy in some of these posts...

Just because a game is not for you doesn't make it 'icky' and there is absolutely no reason to slander it if they've done nothing to be deserving of it.

Thenomain

@Lithium

Is that exclusionary? Or is it reasonable theme-enforcement and defending the game so that it can continue to be a game?

I'm not picking on you here, unless you fall into this group, but I'm getting really sick and tired of people in the world who either purposefully find an alarmist term or take an otherwise reasonable term as alarmist when what we really mean is, for example in this case, "this shit won't fly". I don't think anyone should or needs to apologize for being reasonable.

Sorry, rant moment. I'm done.

I think the downvotes to the original poster (@Hushicho) come from the idea that it's said to be a perfectly open-minded game about sexuality, but the "traditional" gender normative ("cis") tropes are either secretly or openly shunned.

If this is is the case (IF), then yeah, shame on them.

This is their decision, but like all games, they should be open about the spirit of the game.

WTFE

@Thenomain said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

@WTFE said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

And women, @silentsophia. I rarely feel embarrassed for my gender. Comic book shops have always made me consider just getting a straight razor and cutting off the offending bits as an apology for the contents of the shop.

You could just, you know, boycott the shop and its contents. I, myself, am optimistic about using those bits again sometime.

Shops and contents. And I have taken up that boycott. It was triggered the day I walked into a comic-and-games shop in Ottawa whose owner was intent on being "family friendly" and "normie friendly" only to be faced with a life-size cutout of Lady Death. Well, when I say "life size" I mean "approximately the height of a human being". The breasts were not life size. Each individual one was larger than my head. The waist, too, was not life size. It was smaller than one handspan. The proverbial "broom handle with beach balls stuck to it" was made manifest here.

And this grotesque parody of the female form was standing--deliberately placed!--so it was the first thing anybody entering saw. And the "normie friendly" owner of the shop was standing to one side admiring his new shop representative intently. Waaaaaaaaaay too intently.

Lithium

@Thenomain That was the point, people were calling it exclusionary, I am just calling it a theme and setting choice. It's not really exclusionary it's just the game setting and theme.

Chime

@WTFE said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

And women, @silentsophia. I rarely feel embarrassed for my gender. Comic book shops have always made me consider just getting a straight razor and cutting off the offending bits as an apology for the contents of the shop.

Once upon a time I worked in a comic book store. Never again. Never. I would rather live in a cardboard box. They exude a lingering miasma of entitled, willful ignorance. Well, that and the paychecks started bouncing and they never sent out a W2. (yes, yes, any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice...)

@Thenomain said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

I, myself, am optimistic about using those bits again sometime.

* Wicked cackling intensifies *

@Thenomain said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

Is that exclusionary? Or is it reasonable theme-enforcement and defending the game so that it can continue to be a game?

Seems like theme-enforcement (or more politely, focus), to me.

Games centered in a city tend to require play to largely be in that city. Games focused around mortals tend to require mortals.

A collaborative storytelling project exploring the intricate dynamics of masculine power-plays and the many variations of male-love within the context of a super-hero settings could be quite a reasonable and compelling goal.

As @surreality mentioned, a lot of us don't tend to play male characters. I can do it, but I don't generally find it compelling. As a result, while I respect the coherence and unified purpose of their dream, I probably wouldn't play there.

I think the downvotes to the original poster (@Hushicho) come from the idea that it's said to be a perfectly open-minded game about sexuality, but the "traditional" gender normative ("cis") tropes are either secretly or openly shunned.

Having hosted the game for years, well, I can assert that @Hushicho is a really nice person. Glad to see them make it to the forum, and it's a damn shame people decided to downvote what they don't understand.

That said, I've never logged in.

Thenomain

@Lithium said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

@Thenomain That was the point, people were calling it exclusionary, I am just calling it a theme and setting choice. It's not really exclusionary it's just the game setting and theme.

That's fair. Maybe I got lost because you didn't quote what you were responding to, but I'm standing firm that if their theme is "gay (etc.) and not cis", then they really need to say this. It's a pretty critical distinction.

Which they do. Right here:

@Hushicho said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

Flights 'n Tights is a haven for gay, bisexual, and queer male characters

The lede is buried, but it's there. So the complaints of "I can't play a straight guy" are rendered moot.

Yes, I know this was your point, but you don't always make points very clearly.

surreality

@Thenomain I kinda see this as the same thing. Some themes are more narrowly defined than others; this is a pretty narrowly-defined one.

I mean, arguably, someone could create a game set in an all girls Catholic boarding school in the 1950s, allowing players to only play students -- in which case 'no male PCs' would be in effect. I don't imagine a game like that will ever come about, but it definitely would fit the 'the theme is narrow enough to be exclusionary by default' in ways I can't really get angry about or feel put out by.

It could be argued that it's thematically exclusionary, but I think (and I think this is agreement here) that's something of a diminishment of what 'exclusionary' really means.

Generally, I do recall a lot of grousing in the late 90s/early 00s re: "OMG why are all the straight chars from my favorite comic suddenly gay when I log into a comics game?" Which, if a game is advertising itself as true to canon, is a legit complaint, as it would be a legit complaint if someone made a canon gay character straight. (Not so shockingly, back thenabouts, I somehow doubt people groused as much about the latter as they did the former.)

So I do see where that statement comes from, partly because if I recall correctly, I've seen ads for this game on MUDconnector/etc. going back a very long time. So while this may not be so much the case now (I dunno, I don't do comics games), I would not doubt for a second that it was the environment of the time in which the game was originally made.

That it was happening often enough for there to be all the grousing in the first place also suggests there's definitely an audience for it. If that's the case, hell... making a game exclusively dedicated to that is, IMHO, pretty laudable. It gives the people looking for this specific versatility a safe space to explore it, and spares the people who hate it when people do that the grief. I mean I just cannot remotely see this as a bad thing.

Thenomain

@surreality aggressively agrees with @Thenomain.

surreality

@Thenomain I am especially wordy when sleep deprived! (And make even less sense than usual, but hopefully that isn't the case there.)

Ghost

This game sounds like fun for people who are interested in the demographic/genre. I'm not their target demographic and it's okay I wish them well.

Coin

I think it's indicative that no one had anything really bad to say about the game until they came here, advertised, and people who'll never play there and aren't interested in it decided to bash and downvote it.

I mean, sheesh, guys. I get that you feel the game doesn't have a place for you, but, uh... it doesn't have to just to be allowed to advertise here.

Arkandel

I think the crux of the issue is the same, and it's as old as gaming itself; people detest it when they don't get their own way. They want what they want, if they can't have it they consider themselves wronged and react in bizarre ways to that.

In regards to playing specific characters I personally don't get it; if I'd play Cyborg in a way that significantly departs from the original comic books - in terms of his personality, sexuality, etc - then why not play an original character instead? At some point the only thing that actually remains from that character is his looks, and it can't be that hard to get staff to approve a new PC with a similar enough appearance (there are hundreds of Cyborg depictions spanning several decades, it shouldn't be hard to find one which sufficiently departs from the traditional one), and voila! Cyberman is born.

Otherwise if the MU* is supposed to reflect regular continuity then play the damn character as per that continuity.

And get off my damn lawn.

Wolfs

Meh. People are free to design and run any type of game they want. There are no rules when it comes to theme, setting, what you want to allow and what you don't want to allow, etc.

This particular place isn't for me, but for those it does appeal to? More power to 'em. Whether it's creepy, exclusionary toward certain types of characters, too focused on the D, veers way off into unrealistic territory with characters we're used to seeing written certain ways...I don't really care. I don't think they're hurting anybody. It's easy to not pay attention to it.

Everyone is free to play or not play there based on their own preferences. Though, if you're into superhero sausage fests, this might just be your place. Bring the buns and condiments.

OrcRiot

So a game designed by gay dudes, wants to play with other gay dudes, or male dudes...and some of you have a problem with that? It's fine if they have their own game. Who the fuck cares? Don't play there. It's their game, they want it a certain way and you certainly didn't pay for it.

Arkandel

@DnvnQuinn

@Arkandel said in Flights 'n Tights MUX:

Otherwise if the MU* is supposed to reflect regular continuity then play the damn character as per that continuity.

No one is saying people can't make a game portraying anything they like. Just that if it's supposed to be based on a specific continuity then it should reflect that continuity's characters.

If it's not then of course people can play anything they want. Shang has any known variation of canon characters imaginable for instance and I see nothing wrong with that.