Fun interview here with Brenda and John: the latter has been a hero of mine since I was eight or nine, when "Invasion of the Vorticons" hit, while I've always thought that he finally met the perfect complimentary companion in the mature and thoughtful Brenda.

The only thing in the interview I disagreed with was her overall take on character representation in video games-- that somehow not having a protagonist who "looks like you" means you "don't belong". We don't apply that standard literally anywhere else: could she not connect with "The Grapes of Wrath" or something just because she wasn't a male farmer? Did she not like "Sonic" because she's not a blue hedgehog?

To me this is an imagined problem, just like "systemic racismus", as Vee would call it: it's just one of those "virtue signalling du jour" things which people are parroting right now, and which will probably be forgotten ten years from now.

To be fair, even as a highly hormonal teenage boy, it actually annoyed me too that all of the women were bikini clad while wielding broadswords in combat, mostly because it just didn't logically make any sense. I never detected any kind of malice, or that game designers didn't like women-- rather, the designers were just trying to sell software, and the perception-- largely based in reality, in fact-- was that the primary buyers of games were adolescent white males.

On the same note, the "every protagonist is a square-jawed white guy with stubble" phenomenon during the "naughts" was something I made fun of on this blog many times back then: even as a square-jawed white guy with stubble, I thought it was silly: again, who cares if the character looks like me (or doesn't), if it's bad art?

She remarked that "thank goodness things are better now", but in my view they've gotten worse: we've shifted from one stupid archetype, the dudebro white guy, to another stupid archetype, lesbian-looking trannies-- except this time the archetype is motivated by malice, as the designers are deliberately taking revenge on (imagined) perceived past injustices done by evil whitey men according to their hateful "Cultural Marxism" ideology.

I think I'd get along with Brenda really well overall, lots of what she said I found highly relatable-- but she would definitely need to be one of those people where discussions about politics would need to be off the table.