But First Let’s Talk about Parallel Universes: Gay Nintendo Twitter

The best twitter community is queer and trans individuals, who for some reason love Nintendo. This response will examine the seemingly juxtaposed sides of Gaymers who love Nintendo and how Nintendo rejects these players.  The pinnacle of this to me is Adam Moussa, he is an editor (I think?) at eater and used to be at Polygon he is notable for his appearance in Brian David Gilbert’s video creating every food item and dish in Breath of the Wild. However, I discovered him by his tweets specifically relating to video games, applying gay subculture to games like Breath of the Wild. This is an interesting community because Nintendo very very rarely attempts to reach out to this community. However, my entire life I have found many of my queer friends and myself very fond of Nintendo games. Even very recently Nintendo has flat-out denied that animal crossing characters are gay—even though they’re obviously gay. Queer people love Nintendo but Nintendo is pretty lacks any representation of gay characters. 

Instead of shunning Nintendo and playing games with queer and trans representation, gaymers have created their own culture within Nintendo games—through social media, fanfiction and reddit communities like /r/gaymers. One issue raised in the article “Why Nintendo Is So Important to Queer Folks” is the like of harassment in nintendo games.  The author writes, “When that harassment is compounded with homophobic, transphobic, racist or sexist words, it can feel impossible to play certain games. However, with the lack of voice chat in Nintendo’s online games, this problem is dramatically lessened.” So because Nintendo is less adept at online—more queer players can exist without hearing slurs directed at them while trying to play a game. Yet, to me this does not answer the question. I’ve asked many of my queer friends about this and almost all of them played Nintendo growing up, very few got into Playstation or Xbox and most started playing video games with an N64 or Gamecube or DS. Honestly I do not think there’s a true reason for this, maybe it’s coincidence. But in a world increasingly including queer characters, queer stories, and queer developers. It is interesting that a game company that is often homophobic and stays away from “forced diversity,” as douchebags on reddit call it, is one of the most treasured video game companies for queer individuals.