Hacker News Reader

Comment by mintplant | Hacker News Reader

So, what, as an LGBTQ+ person, I'm not allowed to be represented in media? Because my existence is "political"?

I think the problem is like this:

Blizzard creates art/items/events specifically catering to LGBTQ, with the concept that in modern western countries this is not a controversial stance but the only decent stance.

Then, at an event, a tournament winner is given a chance to speak and calls for democracy and freedom in Hong Kong.

Blizzard's response to this is ban him, take his prize away, ban the tournament casters for some reason (who did nothing at all, AFAIK).

The takeaway people get from these actions is "Blizzard projects the image that they care about social issues, but in reality they will shut you down hard if those issues cost them a penny."

Add Blizzard's weibo account response to their list of actions "....We will always respect and defend the pride of our country."

https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dfkmp1/blizzards_...

When forming opinions on things like this, I think its important to see what happened in context.

This [1] is the entire, in context, video of the controversy in question. Unfortunately I've yet to find a complete translated transcript so I am left on relying on potentially unreliable online translations. From what I've read the casters say 'Go ahead and say those 8 words and we'll wrap up here. There's nothing else to talk about. Let's lower our heads.' He then screams 'Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our time.' Guess that's 8 words in [presumably?] Cantonese. This was done while wearing a gas mask. The tournament casters then laugh and clap.

This is actually the thing that most frustrates me about so many issues. How can people justify forming opinions on these things without seeing everything in context? Why isn't this entire video, alongside a professional translation, a part of every story on the topic? Of course providing in context video gets downvoted, because it makes the issues look less black and white. But that to me is the clearest example of idiocracy. We should not seek to create Hollywood villains and heroes in nuanced issues. We should consider these issues as they are, which invariably tend to be a million shades of gray as opposed to black and white.

[1] - https://youtu.be/KyxO0Ea1_kM?t=2152

Nothing in that video should change anyone's mind on the issue on anything except whether or not the casters were also involved. I don't see how any of it changes anything important about the issue - Blizzard is censoring political speech for their own financial gain.

Why would it matter if three people were involved in the political speech rather than just one?

There's no guarantee in life that everything is shades of gray. Sometimes people really are evil. They're not Hollywood villains - Hollywood can't sell the level of evil some people actually are. Go read about the Falun Gong and organ harvesting.

Ehh... I think in common usage the "LGBTQ+" designation is fairly politically loaded. It really is intertwined with specific strains of political activism (mostly progressive left). And because of that, all sorts of policy views and prescriptions on ancillary matters have coalesced under the "LGBTQ+" umbrella. It may even say more about one's political identity/grouping at this point, than it does about sexual preferences or gender identity, etc.

It’s almost as if non-majority sexual identity was a political statement of left-wingers?

Seriously: that cis, straight, unkinky people actually use the term LGBTQ+, are alive to the challenges that this group of people face every.single.day and are prepared to stand up and be counted is somehow a “progressive left” hobby or “political identity” rather than genuine human empathy and expression of civic values shows how little some people can even conceptualize the inner lives of others.

When Blizzard says "this character is gay in America but in other countries he is straight", it seems like inauthentic pandering instead of actual representation.

When did they say that?

The first time was in 2016.

Blizzard has released a series of comics delving into the backstories of the characters in the game. Feel free to play spot the difference with which comics got released in various locales:

America: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/media/#comics-section

Russia: https://playoverwatch.com/ru-ru/media#comics-section

China: https://ow.blizzard.cn/media/ (there's some weird javascript stuff that prevents me from linking directly, click the speech bubble on the right side of the page to see the list of comics)

Taiwan: https://playoverwatch.com/zh-tw/media#comics-section

Edit: The tl;dr is that one of the comics doesn't exist in Russia or mainland China. Funnily enough, it looks like their CDN actually has a zh-cn version of the missing comic which is distinct from the zh-tw one (I don't know much about the chinese language but I'm assuming it's Simplified vs Traditional characters? Some of the onomatopoeia are translated differently too) https://static.playoverwatch.com/media/comics/10/zh-cn/comic...

> zh-tw

This is just the ISO language code for "Chinese as used in Taiwan".

That's what a bunch of people have been saying in Reddit comments about Blizzard allowing "political speech" for acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ+ people.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Blizzard/comments/dgodfz/we_wont_al...

Sadly in many places it still is political isn't it? Like Russia, China, Utah... Since homophobic bigots run the places and think it's ok to oppress things they aren't comfortable with...

You name two countries and then an obscure state. What's the deal with Utah?

Well, it might be that it is effectively a theocracy because a church with a strongly enforced normative code of "morality" controls access to political levers (practically requiring membership for anyone who wants to effect political change of any kind), and that church exerts a 10-15% tax on its members?

Which it then uses (in parallel to the "official" state government) to invest in projects and consolidate its own economic and political power?

Just spitballing though. It's certainly not as bad as Russia or China, but it's not an entirely unfounded inclusion on that list.

The LDS church (Mormons) are much more accepting of LGBTQ+ members than other Christian sects from what I’ve seen. And that “tax” is called a tithe. And it’s optional.

It's only optional if you don't want to go inside the temples and don't mind being burned during the Second Coming.

The LDS church downgraded same sex marriage from apostasy to a serious transgression this year.[1] The Episcopal church ordained an openly gay bishop in 2003.[2]

[1] https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/first-presi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Robinson

I didn’t say it was the best. I said it’s better than a lot of other churches.

You said it's much better than others. Not that it's better than a lot of others. I think neither is true by American standards. Not even the Catholic church withheld baptism from the children of same sex parents.

Just wanted to point out that it's just not far-away places that have backwards politicians.

Do you think that there are groups of people that should not be allowed to be represented in the media?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com