Week 8: Something Something Ashley Johnson (listen it’s been a long semester)
So last week’s reading talked a bit about imaginative play, which is where people chose to read certain characters as queer despite not having hard evidence about their sexuality (or despite having hard evidence that they are, in fact, straight and just choosing to ignore it). It’s interesting because, when I was reading this week’s article about straightwashing Undertale, at first I was thinking (in a horrified way), is this just another kind of imaginative play? But I don’t really think so.
I think the whole point of imaginative play is to give yourself representation when you feel underrepresented. And I do think that queer people are underrepresented in most forms of media these days, especially video games. So it’s not surprising that a lot of players will play a video game with no queer characters, or a single throwaway queer character, and insert more queerness. Imaginative play is a lot of people’s way of making the characters seem more normal to them, which makes sense because the archetypal straight white male character is definitely not what most people consider “normal.”
I think that’s why it’s so toxic to see people trying to push a game in the other direction. Last week I talked about how Ellie is canonically queer in The Last of Us. I was reading some commentary from around the time that that DLC came out, and it’s interesting because a lot of people made the arguments of “oh she’s too young to really understand what sexuality is” or “that was just a platonic kiss between two female friends,” and it just seems so wild to me. Like, here, and in Undertale, you have clear evidence of queer characters. Why do some people feel like they have to take away that aspect of that character in order to enjoy the game? Queer people have the “excuse” of wanting to bring more representation to extremely straight games, so what is the justification for straightwashing queer games?
