They Want Us to Feel Unreal
I don’t really have a hot gaming take for my intended blogging routine right now. It feels inappropriate to post some babble about game design or TTRPGs when my heart feels like stone. Perhaps normalcy in the face of bone-tired exhaustion is important to maintain, but I just don’t have it in me today, man.
I’m going to keep specific names to a minimum, not because I feel like those involved need anonymity, but because I also don’t have the mental fortitude to risk baiting a streamer’s audience or two my way. I don’t think my reach is big enough for that to happen, but I’m also not going to inflict that kind of psychic damage on myself. I am putting this to paper because if I don’t, I might not be able to get on with the work that gives me joy.
A ‘wholesome’ streamer I’d previously liked streamed THAT wizard game out of spite. That’s not what’s got me down. What messed me up is when another streamer in the same circle took several considered, thoughtful hours to look into it and to listen to their trans audience. Now this streamer isn’t a saint by any means, but they were genuinely trying, and they came away with a better understanding than before.
That should improve my mood, shouldn’t it? Someone who isn’t exactly known for their deep consideration of issues sat down and watched Stephanie Sterling’s video (which is excellent, by the way) instead of throwing up hot takes left and right. I am glad that this happened. I am glad that a trans voice was purposefully included in yet another maddening Twitter drama about this cursed game. So why do I feel hollow inside?
This streamer had no idea. About any of it.
They didn’t know what a TERF was, they didn’t know half of what you-know-who has said, or who she has been buddy-buddy with. They didn’t know that a certain TERF was calling for cis men with guns to go into toilets. They didn’t know the insanity of it all. The stream proceeded like a horrific gobstopper, layers of revelation after revelation licked away with pauses every minute. They would ask, occasionally, if their understanding of what they’d just been told was correct. When they received a resounding yes, their jaw would drop.
It felt like a pressure valve being released. This is what trans people have been trying to tell them about the attacks on their lives. Meanwhile, us non-trans queers have been shaking people by their shoulders, yelling that we know what a gay panic looks like, that we fear for our trans cousins’ lives and that we know we’ll be next. We know where horrific section 28-style legislation leads, and that we’re stronger as a pack undivided.
I watched as that streamer, ignorant (in the literal sense of the word) and well-meaning, tried to make sense of it all. I was given confirmation that, despite our collective rage and despair and fear, not a single lick of what we’d been going through had even made it through the cloud cover into mainstream consciousness. This person just didn’t know. And I’m depressed as all hell about it.
It's no accident though, it’s part of the strategy.
Endorse horrific viewpoints under our noses. Shove hatred at our friends and loved ones. Overwhelm them with legislation. Rub shoulders with fascists. Create hateful narratives. Block inoffensive reform that would let the victims of hate crime at least have dignity in death. Do it all while maintaining the barest sliver of politeness and geniality toward the general public, and they won’t even notice.
Unless pushed by circumstance - like a perceived ‘witch hunt’ against a friend - the cis, straight stranger will never even encounter half of what queer people have been drowning in.
It's barely about the video game anymore: it’s the wider, amorphous, seething, acidic, toxic sphere surrounding this product and the people playing it. It is a straw breaking a camel’s back, a tacit admission from perceived allies that they haven’t really been paying attention. Or that they are willing to court people who do genuinely hate us just to keep their conscience intact. (For the record, I’m not talking about journalists or even developers here - I would rather people not go homeless so they can contribute in other ways. Just streamers and consumers.)
To see that gaslit strategy break in real-time with this streamer was reassuring, yes, but it also left me cold. It’s working on hundreds of others. They want people to think that we are insane, that we have lost perspective. They want us to feel that way too – unreal, dragged into a topsy-turvy world of extremist horrors so inexplicable and blatant that we feel absurd even talking about it. We have no vocabulary with which to plead with others, because they haven’t been bludgeoned over the head with the same labyrinthine, fascist cognitive hazards like we have.
When we stagger from this other world – horrible as it is very real – they can point to us speaking in tongues and say ‘see? These SJWs have completely lost it’, even though they wrote the forbidden tome that burdened us with an eldritch understanding of their blatant prejudice.
Fittingly, I don’t even know how to translate how I feel right now, writing this to the seldom few who look at these. All I can do is hope that I have something less depressing to share with you next time.