Dear Diary,

This week starts out upsetting, and doesn’t get much better! Even with a holiday! Well, it’s not all bad. Although I had the bright idea to take the alpine furniture in my house and bring it to Re-Tail to have Cyrus combine it with a ruby so I can have the same furniture design but in shiny pink! Unfortunately, I find out that all he can do is change the wood grain color and the pattern. Boring! So I asked around and found out that only certain types of furniture can be combined with certain types of gems to create that effect. Lame! So now I have to decide whether or not I want to go through that much effort. Although I should probably pull out my spooky furniture for Halloween before it actually arrives and I miss my opportunity!

Read on for this week’s drama!

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During New York Comic Con, I had the opportunity to visit the DC Comics booth to check out the upcoming LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham from Traveler’s Tales/Warner Bros. Interactive. And while this game in the franchise one-ups the last one by expanding from an explorable Gotham to explorable planets, it was the level I sampled on the show floor that really had me pumped up to play this one.

There is an entire level based off the classic ’60s Batman TV series! With Adam West doing the voiceover and everything! Batgirl in her purple outfit! Robin in his short shorts! Julie Newmar’s Catwoman! It’s epic, and I would play an entire game based in this universe. Sadly, it’s just a bonus level, but the rest of the game is still looking to be pretty epic!

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Well, I’m pretty much exhausted after New York Comic Con, but I’ve still got enough energy to give you a quick rundown of the highlights as well as a rant about Alien: Isolation before finishing with the delightful Fantasy Life on the Nintendo 3DS! Make the jump for this week’s episode!

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Dear Diary,

It was a relatively quiet week in Geneva, thank goodness. I just can’t deal with any more drama right now. So even though my boyfriend gave me a shock, it was okay, and then there was a party! Woo hoo! Oh, but wait until I tell you about the weird experience I had for the first time this week! Read on!

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There is a problem in videogames of LGBTQIA+ characters whose queerness is silent.

This isn’t to say that all LGBTQIA+ characters whose gender or sexual identity is only mentioned in-passing are inherently bad, or are examples of bad writing; sometimes, the most interesting, effective and emotionally-engaging way to state something about a character is to understate it.

The problem is that “invisible queerness” – queerness that is effectively absent in a text except for authors stating it outside of the text (e.g., Dumbledore in Harry Potter), single lines ad-libbed at the end of the text as an afterthought (e.g., Gobber in How To Your Train Your Dragon 2), or going utterly unspoken but hinted at through vague allusions, nudge-wink stereotypes and plausibly-deniable overtones (e.g, most queer characters during the first and second millenium CE).

So long as their queerness isn’t intrusive, or doesn’t require players to talk or think about queerness in any but the most basic terms, they’re lauded as being exemplars of the entire LGBTQIA+ spectrum.

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We first got to know Bayonetta through her vagina.

“You want to touch me?” was the key question asked during the 2008 TGS trailer for Platinum Games and Hideki Kamiya’s rapid-fire action game. We had only seen glimpses of this tall, lithe, tight black suit-wearing amazon in the debut teaser for her self-titled adventure before then. She had only a few seconds of feline-esque combat acrobatics before bending backward and allowing the camera to sweep luxuriously through her legs for an extreme crotch close up.

The perpetually offended reactionary element of the game community launched into a predictable campaign of outrage that lasted about as long as the game’s media campaign. The game, its developers, and the character were decried as the latest example of a sexist caricature created to pander the juvenile fantasies of the lowest common denominator. When the game launched, however, and people got their hands on it, many of the voices quieted. There was something about this ass-kicking goddess with the librarian glasses that made her somehow immune to the same criticisms of your Mai Shiranuis and your Ivy Valentines.

The years since have only been kinder to Bayonetta’s special status among salacious video game heroines. The gay community in particular has adopted the character as a sort of icon. So what is it about this near hedonistic woman in gunboots that has made her largely exempt from vocal sexist critique, in spite of her exhibitionist love affair with any nearby cameras?

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Even though I have no interest in buying the game, I went over to the Nintendo World Store for the launch of Super Smash Bros. on the 3DS. Which was nice, because it meant that I could go, take some pictures and video and then go home without actually having to wait in the line that wrapped around the block!

In other news, while I’m enjoying Dance Central Spotlight, there’s a glitch that Harmonix still hasn’t been able to work out. Hopefully Sony doesn’t have the same problem when the new SingStar launches at the end of October…

Make the jump to watch this week’s episode and I’ll explain everything!

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