SOCIAL JUSTICE WAR HITS RIMWORLD

Now HERE'S somebody with good reason to be upset.

An article was recently published to esteemed game journalism website Rock, Paper, Shotgun, detailing the cisgender, heteronormative bigotry inherent in Rimworld's code, and by extension, in developer Tynan Sylvester himself... or so journalist Claudia Lo would have you believe. I won't link to the article here, as I do not endorse anything it says. I don't think it deserves the traffic. To quickly summarize, she took a look at a few lines of code in the game which determine the sexual orientation of colonists, and their romantic behaviors, and found, when taken out of context, no men in the game can be bisexual; all women in the game are bisexual; characters with the "disability" tag are not attractive; and men more frequently hit on women than vice versa. That this is a call for inflammatory politics at all just more proof that the Social Justice "War" has reached self-devouring fever pitch, ever more and more difficult to take seriously.

The article's legitimacy is further hurt by Tynan Sylvester's personal rebuttal to the article on RPS. In it, he explains that the writer had previously contacted him for an interview; but when he required that his responses be quoted word-for-word, he received no reply, no interview, and Lo's article went up shortly thereafter: clickbaity title, lack of context, misrepresentation & all. He went on to roundly debunk Lo's assertions, saying that code is not a representation of design intent - what matters is character behaviour in the game, which does not support the "All Women Are Lesbians" accusation presented by Lo. Further, he conceded that, yes, men should be coded as potentially bi, and further, that, in spite of the ideological fantasy world that the SJW community seems to insist be represented everywhere, all the time, men statistically do make more romantic advances than women.

"Justice rains from above!!"

While the inflammatory tone of the article did not affect Rimworld's intelligent fanbase, the brush of "justice" has laid its smear across the game's, and its developer's, reputation, and forced the indie developer to take precious time away from actual development to put out the fires of this idiocy. Over the last two days, Sylvester has been extremely active in the discussion that's arisen on the subject of gender & orientation representation in his game.

How insane is it that, in a game where you can cannibalize your husband, send prisoners stumbling home eyeless and legless, dress yourself in the skin of your enemies, and where gay marriage is possible, the campaign for "justice" can find issue with gender roles? If anything, Rimworld is highly progressive in its representation of the sexes and orientations, given that women and men fight and cook and clean equally well, and that gay characters exist at all. Many users on the game's subreddit are asking, "What'd Tynan do to piss this writer off?"

EDIT: We can answer that question. Sylvester was recently interviewed in-depth, covering a gamut of topics, from alpha development, to social communities, design philosophies, and mankind's innate love of story. The interview was hosted on Breitbart.com -- a right-wing and therefore irrevocably evil digital publication. It's not hard to imagine the chain of inferences from their, in the twisted mind of a writer with a degree in "Gender and Digital Media."