"Clarify". Lol. Anyone who frames a dumb statement as needing to be "clarified" aren't actually sorry about making said statement. If you were, you would edit it and not be doubling down like you are.
I mean, I'm not sorry about what I said. My apology was that it was perhaps a bit too terse for some people to understand the context behind it.
But fine. One more time. We needed to have this discussion on another page after all.
- This image is bad because, while I agree that it is good to denigrate the cops, doing so by the use of gay slurs has a rotten knock-on effect because it relies on the audience agreeing that being gay is bad.
- Being gay is not bad. Being gay is cool in my book. This probably shouldn't need to be said and I felt it was an obvious statement that basically every single person with a posting history on this website would agree with.
- Aside from being flawed in its relation to the whole being gay thing, it's doubly-compounding the fact that the marginalization of gay people historically, especially in America where the game is set, has been enabled with support from police forces.
- While there are gay cops out there, there are also gay racists, gay transphobes, etc. The problem with these people is not that they are gay. The problem with them is the other behavior that they engage in -- being a cop, promoting transphobia, etc. Again, this strikes me as a rather elementary statement and one that I had no need to state, for surely we would all agree on a progressive forum like this that there is nothing wrong with being gay.
- Again, major watershed moments in gay history in America, the country where this game is set, involve opposition to police harassment, often with physical force. The Stonewall riots in particular represent a major example of this, but there is also the ACT UP movement, which was explicitly a mass mobilization of protests against the lack of action taken by the Reagan administration during the AIDS crisis, a moment in time that people often regard as an act of genocide against gay communities.
- While it is a good thing that this image was removed, it is absolutely infuriating that nobody ever gave the graphic design enough of a considered look-over that they were pro-active about it. This is just one of many moments in the game's history in which tone-deaf content was used while denying any sort of connection to real political motivation.
- This is an issue related to a lot of these Tom Clancy games, which often tap into xenophobic or right-wing authoritarian movements to make their point. Ubisoft's general marketing has been pretty lukewarm about what the actual topic of this game is, and have tried to deny that this game, set in Washington, D.C., which is the capital of the country of America, which is where this game is set, and thus where the federal government does its business, set in a period in time in which social unrest has caused the federal government to no longer be able to do its business, has any political themes or commentary whatsoever.
- For all that I might appreciate characters like Captain Hold from Brooklyn 99, that show is a work of fiction and does not at all represent the majority of municipal police forces in America, the country where this game is set.