Now that FF16 will feature LGBT+ characters, can we get some rep in FF14 too?

[Melorie]

3 minutes into the western side of the forum and my head is already about to commit 9th Umbral Calamity. As someone from Southeast Asia, I don't see much of the appeal of the force representation, as some of you call it "Token". In my opinion, it doesn't matter what sexuality the character is, the good character doesn't need to show its sex/gender, but its contributions and stands in the story and world-setting in general; having the character's "gender" or color as the main and sole quality implies that, besides its gender/color, it's nothing else. Having LGBTQ+ characters is not the problem, the problem is how that character's written and cooperated into the story, world, and setting. I don't want the character to be just a "black dude" or a "gay character", I want a character that plays it part in the story and the world, regardless of what it is.

What I don't understand is that when it's a hetero white character, they are already existing. But when it's not, then you need to put them in the story with an extremely tactical way otherwise it is a "token", you are "forcing". The game is full of little romantic stories and romance is a very powerful storytelling tool. You have entire fandoms around different ships. Making a crush or something to not be hetero has nothing to do with tokenize. Or putting a character that's not a white-haired with white skin person is not "forcing" PoC in the story. Besides, we have so many characters that are quite far from overly complex people that are sooo part of the world in the story, and yet just because they aren't gay I don't see anyone crying about it.

I am from latin america and the culture of the land that I live is incredibly diverse. There are so many types of people from all sorts of queernesss. Yes, we do suffer with fundamentalist religion ideas, but that does not change the reality of the people that live here. The mythology is full of these people. Even the culture we usually consume the most in western culture like greek myths is hella gay. But if you put that in the story then you're forcing something? Actually diversifying and bringing characters of different backgrounds, cultures, skin colour, sexuality and putting it in the world building would make the history BETTER and not worse.

Besides, this whole "aww this is western culture!" is so stupid. You know what is western culture is as well? It is great at creating stereotypes of other cultures and reducing their complexities. That's what you are doing when you act like people being able to be in stories with different aspects of humanity represented is something exclusive to western culture. Conservative americans and europeans love to use other cultures as a token in other to justify their own prejudices. Don't get me wrong, I have tons of criticism to the whole marvelesque hollow way of including certain aspects of people in media, but still, buying this "old men yelling at clouds" from conservative people isn't going to help anyone.

Funny to see all this talk of "tolerance" from the same people that claims they love storytelling, but can't deal with a bunch of gays, or with a romance, or whatever. Tell me about lack of tolerance.