I love Eric Barone! He sticks to his convictions in the way I wish more video game developers would. He’s made so much money from Stardew Valley that he never needs to work a day for the rest of his life, but he chooses to put in the time to continue releasing free content and working on new passion projects and giving back to the community. He could have monetized the hell out of Stardew, releasing DLCs and hired a huge development team to crank out new content to make him richer until the original game became unrecognizable.

So many game developers have gone down that route, or simply sold off their creation to a company that they know full well plans to do just that.

Also, I just love his mentality about things. He knows that nobody really asked for Haunted Chocolatier, and he doesn’t really care if it’s successful, he just wants to make something new for himself. I hope it is successful, but I’m glad to see that he’s not hinging his hopes on it’s success but instead just enjoying the process of making something, which is really beautiful and I think more people should focus their energies on those kinds of exploits and outcomes.

I was also kind of surprised when looking under the hood of proton that a lot of the fixes for games are pretty simple and often the same fix over and over again. Also, it’s just basically running winetricks on the prefix to install things like vcrun2022 (Visual C++ runtime) and dotnet48 (.NET runtime). It’s pretty simple stuff, really, but priceless when considering that no manual tinkering is required by the average user who would give up as soon as a game doesn’t launch once.

Oh, also I should point out that if you want proton to run non-steam games but for it to run protontricks to fix any compatibility issues, just make sure that there’s a text file called steam_appid.txt in the same directory as the game executable. The file should contain only the game’s app id which you can find on https://steamdb.info/

It will still be fringe and more inaccessible, so only people who are deeply ingrained in their bigotry and probably have no chance of opening their eyes and having empathy will seek it out, which is a huge win for everyone else.

Increasing the gayness is one thing, removing all of it is queer erasure which is bigotry. Gay people face rejection from 9 out of 10 potential partners every single day. If even one person changes their mind about gay people because they were forced to be rejected by this gay character and it opened their eyes, then that’s a huge win for civilized society and equality.

It does spread hate by erasing a queer character from a game. It spreads hate by shielding the exact people who should be exposed to queer people and learn to be empathetic towards their struggles from it.

Because rejecting hateful content and making it fringe and inaccessible is for the good of everyone. Exposure to race, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation based issues makes everyone more aware and empathetic of the issues that other people face, and that’s a good thing.

And yes, both of those mod ideas you proposed would be just as bad or worse than this one and should also be deleted from Nexus mods.

This issue isn’t really about equality, it’s about exposure and building empathy. The more people are exposed to the plight that queer people face every day, the more likely they are to build an empathetic connection to them, to care about queer issues, to see it through their eyes, and to understand and support them through it.

There have been multiple times that I’ve been friendly with women and they’ll randomly blurt out “I have a boyfriend/husband/partner”. This is a universal feeling, and it makes the game all the more realistic that it includes that. Unfortunately it had to happen with a gay character so people are able to toe the line of homophobia and say that they just didn’t like the rejection.

I would be fine with a mod that simply removed the harsh rejection. It’s not great for queer exposure and empathy building, but I wouldn’t call that outright homophobia. It’s lightyears ahead of turning the gay woman into a man.

Having to go through that hardship of rejecting someone because you’re just not into something fundamental and unchangeable about them such as their gender representation will make people learn to have empathy and understanding for queer people and the struggle they face daily where only about 1 in 10 people they’re attracted to will be attracted back.

Exposure to queer media helps build understanding and empathy. Erasing it erodes that understanding and empathy.

You still have the privilege of hitting on 90% of people you’re attracted to IRL or in games reciprocating your advances, so it’s not really that big a deal to have 1 interaction end in rejection.

Maybe having to go through that hardship of rejecting someone because you’re just not into something fundamental and unchangeable about them such as their gender representation will make you have empathy and understanding for queer people and the struggle they face daily where only about 1 in 10 people they’re attracted to will be attracted back.

Exposure to queer media helps build understanding and empathy. Erasing it erodes that understanding and empathy.

To those that are saying they don’t see a problem with this mod. Let me put it to you this way. Instead of a mod that turned one gay woman into a straight man what if it turned one black character into a white character?

There literally was a mod like that in Stardew Valley that turned Demetrius into a white character, and it was rightfully deleted from Nexus mods. If someone has that much of a problem with a character being a different race, sex, gender, or sexual identity then they’re clearly bigoted no matter what they say to the contrary.

It’s gay erasure, and it’s bigotry, plain and simple.

Ugh yeah, FF7 when Aeris is killed by Sephiroth. And the scene where Cloud carries her into the water… I was bawling. Afterwards I think I just sat there dumbfounded, staring at the empty spot in my party until after like 5 minutes I turned off the game cause I needed a break to mourn. I know the graphics don’t really hold up these days, but it was all to real to me as a child and it was one of my first experiences with death even though it was just a video game character.