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Last week Electronic Arts announced that it would be adding trans options to its popular Sims 4 game–allowing players to customize their characters with top-surgery scars, chest binders, and other shapewear. Naturally, the right-wing American Family Association reacted as if someone had set fire to Jesus.
The group, in a statement, denounced the game for “promot[ing] an anti-biblical worldview of creation and reality, asserting the falsehood that humans can be ‘non-binary.’”
According to the group’s executive vice president Ed Vitagliano,
the practice of bodily mutilation is merely a new expression of ancient paganism in its everlasting war against absolute truth and decency.
Vitagliano continued:
We continue to warn parents that our culture is not a place of moral neutrality. The false prophets of sexual anarchy and gender confusion are modern-day manifestations of Ahab and Jezebel –– determined to lead the nation in rebellion against God and His word.
That’s Jezebel the harlot, not Jezebel the online news and opinion site.
The Bible says we should choose this day whom we will serve. For the sake of our very souls, we should be resolute in our faithfulness to Jesus Christ.
So, yeah, that seems a temperate and reasonable response, not at all hysterical. Don’t play The Sims 4, or you will surely be going to H. E. Double-Hockey Sticks.
The male pregnancy due to alien abduction was okay and being able to do it with the Grim Reaper is okay, but this is what sets them off?
@Anonymous
that woild require them having known about the franchise at all before this moment. i even looked to see if they decried it in the past for always having had the option for same-gender and unwed woohoo but i found nothing
Quite a few Conservative outlets have reached the point where they just have people scouring the internet/social media for anything for their people to be outraged about. There’s a lot of money/donations to be made using outrage and so you need a steady supply.
I wonder what these Bible thumpers have to say about the 3 different types of ” “eunuchs” referred to in the Bible.
The body mutilation of circumcision comes to mind. The desires of the child don’t factor in.
Look, look my lesbian vampire were wolf couple have a mermaid baby. They can fuck off and let people live in fantasy.
These people have probably never played The Sims, even though it’s been out for decades.
If they have, I bet they do it secretly and have all the kinkiest or at least gayest options possible. Either than or they make families of their perceived “enemies” and cackle evilly when they deliberately drown them in the pool.
They don’t allow their kids to play any video games at all, I bet, except if there’s still crappy Bible games. Although they’d be surprised at how many of their little darlings are out there Grand Theft Auto-ing and doing TikTok, because kids.
I think the funniest and saddest part of this is that the Sims 4 has been trans inclusive since launch. The franchise has been LGBTQ+ inclusive since it’s inception. At least to the extent of visibility for the times at the launch of each iteration and expansion/stuff pack. Like in The Sims 1, Sims could be gay without judgement, but couldn’t get married, until The Sims 3. Which was over a half decade before same-sex marriage was made legal in the US. But kept up with the trend of LGBTQ+ acceptance generally for first/developed world standards.
Hello.
> GSS ex-noob
Guess they are waiting for “I am Jesus Christ“, where JC can fire lasers from his hands, like in the bible, i guess.
Funny thing, the publisher is the polish Play Way S.A., more known for whatever simulators (from any mechanic thing to.. bum. Because who never dream of playing a bum ?), but which also have two games clearly not on the religious side.
Have a nice day.
Just hoping that someday a game or media company makes a similar move towards increasing diversity, representation and inclusion in their offerings and their press release reads
“Due to a crunch in the marketing budget we can’t promote this new update properly so if all you Fox ‘news’ hosts, Republican senators and other white nationalist christian conservatives can get together and have a full on performative pant soiling pearl clutching freakout to boost the signal that would be lovely.
kthxbye”
Unrelated, but
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/09/abortion-pill-trump-judge-possible-ban-mifepristone
I am so fucking terrified right now
It’s funny to poke around the AFA website and see all the things they want banned/cancelled, and then also see them make assertions like “The Left’s disdain for free speech is at the heart of the culture war.”
Rant alert: skip if uninterested in such things. Possible tw for casual, oblivious ableism too.
I am sick of the goddamn passive-aggressiveness of the neurotypical world. Instead of just coming right out and saying it when they have a problem with me, they pretend everything is OK and then do nasty shit of some sort. Or pretend everything is OK for a short time and then blow up at me out of the blue, hours or days or more after the alleged infraction. Or pretend everything is OK and then ghost me online, or, or, or … the common factor being the refusal to be up front that something I did bothered them. I cannot learn without useful feedback! Quietly getting mad without saying anything doesn’t work. They KNOW it doesn’t work because they do that, then get more and more frustrated when I don’t magically change my behavior in line with what they want, despite their not having communicated their expectations at all. Then the frustration boils over into an out-of-the-blue blowup, or yanking my access privileges, or unfriending me, or some such bullshit that occurs too far removed from the actual provocation to serve as useful feedback at all.
And so I end up sitting there with no idea why everyone is suddenly giving me some variation on the theme of “the cold shoulder”, and no idea what I was supposed to have done differently in order to have a happy pleasant normal day with all of the things and people I was expecting behaving the way I was expecting them to.
And worst of all, whenever I have asked, in the past, I’ve rarely gotten any useful response. Usually it’s “you know darn well why I’m mad!” or such (no, I fucking don’t, or why on Earth would I even be asking?), or a simple refusal to respond at all. Once in a while it’s actually something — generally, something from days ago that no-one made a fuss about at the time, and that no-one had told me in advance not to do/to do differently (so, essentially it’s “you stepped on a land mine” … and somehow that’s my fault? Not whoever created the mine field, by deciding there were punishable rules-to-not-break that would not be communicated to everyone, but would still be enforced against everyone?)
I’ve had people seem to be friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, actually strand me in the middle of an unfamiliar neighborhood without transportation and later admit that they didn’t actually want me hanging around with them. I’ve seen neurotypicals fake-befriend each other to carry out some humiliating prank or suchlike, for that matter, but it’s much more common for them to do that shit to non-neurotypicals, or the otherwise-marginalized.
The general lesson I’ve learned from all of this is “don’t trust people. Especially the ones who seem friendly.” I’m not sure that’s the lesson they want people to learn? On the other hand, how the hell can I trust anyone when it is so goddamn common for people to lie and pretend and obfuscate? Let alone learn how to be liked when that seems to require navigating a giant unmarked minefield perfectly on the first try? Do neurotypicals have some sixth sense for where those fucking mines are or something? Is it perhaps even a test deliberately designed to weed out non-neurotypical people and other “undesirables”?
What the hell is going on with neurotypicals?
End of rant.
(Where’s the fucking Tylenol?)
@John: My neighborhood movie theater does less projecting than the AFA.
I am now wanting to start a Sims family with Sam and Kim as the parents, and all the dancers as the kids. This week’s double performative rage — could I make their heads explode?
@Natsume: It shows how little attention they’ve paid to the series over the decades, but I guess they wanted to grift a little extra money this week.
Should we tell them about the wicked whims mod?
@ Surplus to Requirements
Given that you are mostly being ignored when you rant like this because you have written entire essays to argue with people whenever they try to talk to you about these things over the course of years on this blog, that seems a bit like demanding they give you an opening to hit them in the face with a hammer. What’s in it for them when you are probably just going to give them more shit and not change?
Not even going to address the whole navigate perfectly thing when neurotypicals are literally fighting wars over the most ridiculous reasons…
Cyborgette, I can’t think of a legal reason to remove approval for mifepristone. That doesn’t mean the judge can’t revoke the approval anyway based on non-legal wanting to be a busybody, but it would be pretty easy for the FDA to approve it a second time.
@GSS ex-Noob
I’m pretty sure they let their kids play anything recommended by “Emperor” Paul Bury’s “Family Friendly Gaming”. Because, as we all know, “family friendly” means “shockingly violent and bloody but no women or gays present.” /s
These people can just fuck off forever…