And the insanity doesn’t stop there. The vast majority of our legislators are experts in one thing: Law. The idea of them sensibly regulating anything other than a law firm is frankly ludicrous. They simply don’t have the knowledge base.

I loved Pulp Fiction for its brains, humor, and homage to Hitchcock’s Psycho when Butch, driving his little Honda, spots Marsellus Wallace crossing the street.

Tarantino has never been about high art, but he has voluminous knowledge of film history.

And yet.

His films make evil “cool,” to quote a long-forgotten critique by UVA’s Roger Shattuck:

“When Evil is Cool”.

Killing slavers may have been justifiable and seem to be a good thing in a film, but I’m sure that Tarantino makes the mayhem look cool. For all his talent, Tarantino cannot dodge that critique, and it’s the signature problem with a sick entertainment culture, from games to “needing” lots of guns, to FPS Russia on YouTube.

Evil is not cool unless we make it cool. We have.

Setting aside the motivations of the developers, though, by insisting that the character has the right to maintain his personal boundaries (as if he were a real person), I think you’re unfortunately participating in the erasure of actual homosexuality from public discourse. I think it’s important to read the character in light of broader media trends, and in particular, the increasing mainstream visibility of slash culture. Media creators have become increasingly aware that homoerotic overtones can sell product, even while they avoid political confrontation by creating homoerotic overtones between ostensibly straight men. Off the top of my head, I can think of House, Supernatural, Sherlock, Teen Wolf, where the creators wink at the fans by creating homoerotic subtext about the straight characters. And if you look at the recent After Elton slash tournament,(http://www.afterelton.com/people/2012/09/ultimate-slash-madness-winner-sterek) which went very public and mainstream (the actors and producers involved in many of the shows were tweeting support), the top couples were almost exclusively straight men.

I say all this as a way to suggest that our media has reached a point where we’re fetishizing homosexuality among “straight” men while maintaining the ability to say “no homo.” Taric is participating in that culture. This isn’t about gender queerness; it’s about the continued erasure of actual gay men from the public media sphere.

I don’t associate Taric with much of anything. I don’t play the game, and I have only the exposure I’ve found in reading about him over the last couple of days. It seems to me that – the increasing prominence of metrosexuality aside – the cues Riot has given Taric are those that most of Western society associates with male homosexuality. That doesn’t mean he is meant to be gay, necessarily, but if that wasn’t the message Riot meant to send, then they misjudged their audience. As I understand it, most players of the game read those cues the same way Todd and I do – again, that doesn’t make it true, but it does mean that’s the way most players read them. And I think it’s important for developers to be cognizant of the way their designs are being read in light of what they wish to say with those creations.

Ultimately, what all this boils down to is that I’m attempting to read the character in light of social expectations, not absolute truths. And while social expectations are often wrong, they are what they are, and a media development team has the responsibility as mature artists to recognize and respond to the paradigms of that audience. Should we expect our games to begin to reflect the myriad of diverse sexualities and identities that we find in culture? Yes, we should. But they’re not there yet, and pushing at the boundaries of developers’ comfort zones to force them to include more diversity – which is what Todd is trying to do – is the only way that it’s going to happen.

I think that if Taric “prefers his privacy” then that in itself implies that he has agency in his decision to keep his love life hidden from the public eye. I don’t see any evidence that he is closeted out of shame.

I don’t think this discussion is about Riot Games’s actual depiction of Taric so much as about the cultural context that we feel shadows their depiction. You and Todd associate his depiction with cultural codes that connote homosexuality. I associate his depiction with flamboyant male femininity in a culture that is rapidly shifting to accommodate a greater fluidity of identities. You and Todd associate his ‘light-lipped’ stance to repression. I associate it with having personal boundaries.

The “booth babe” thing is not a PAX issue (despite what the poster here says), but it is an issue that is relevant to gamer expectations at cons, even if the con they are at doesn’t allow it.