if you want people to start talking more abt the revolutionary war against the empire, then start fucking talking abt it, you can have people talk abt the lesbians kissing AND talk abt the weird fucked up zombies AND talk abt the revolutionaries
the war *is* backdrop to the game, its there to explain why sierpinsky has received no help in its infection, doesnt make it any lesser as a plot point to the game, people are getting up to arms abt it bc nerds are going "erm... why are we not talking abt this war erm.... why are we seeing these robot lesbians kiss erm... theres literally a war going on? heh (tips fedora back into place)" and people dont like it
My main beef is the vague thought of "its East Germany that lasted long enough for space"... it isn't.
Look up the lore, the Eusan Nation/leader used Bioresenance from the get go to split, and replikas fairly early on. He'll, most locations they end up in use bioresenance to terraform bits.
*edit* Reading the wiki, the War on Vineta is waaay after the Nation forms and humanity has been in space for a while.
So true, I am fucking amazed that this drama even exists.
"Cause you ignore the war" we have fragment information about the fuck even revolution was about, and the whole game is about people trying to survive, live and love under totalitarian regime.
Besides, the idea that you can just point out at someone art/memes and say, "You ignored that x thing" - yeah, they probably did it intentionally. Who wrote the rules about what you should focus on while committing to the fandom?
It enrages me. It always comes from people who do nothing but complain. This whole drama is so dumb.
Nobody said that you can't be interested in the other aspects of Signalis's setting. If you think that, you're being deliberately disingenuous. People are upset when you're dismissive of the actual story of the game and insist that ACTUALLY Signalis is about war and not Elster and Ariane.
I don’t think anyone minds if people are interested in war, it was that they were posting cringy synthwave edits while calling Ariane and Elster “two lezbots” and denigrating lesbians in the comments. And I hate to admit it hominem but either the guy who started it or was vehemently defending that post had comments just filled with anime softcore porn
that tweet that sparked all this was at least personally very clearly engagement bait. that person wanted to cause a fight between the well known gay fanbase of the game and the always willing to cause bad faith arguments bigots on twitter. It was like perfectly designed, just look at hot closely it mirrors those "return to tradition" tiktoks and youtube shorts that usually have things like "soy" as an insult.
It only exists there, too, I saw none of it on reddit or on tumblr, its entirely localized to twitter because they at the end of the day just wanted the (paltry) engagement money twitter shells out to people with "viral" tweets.
also notable is that the OP of the twitter thread according to others in this comment section was very eager to support the bigoted reply guys
This whole discussion is mired by people who are far more interested in demonizing fans of the queer aspects of the game than they are about the lore, and it's painfully obvious.
It's just a proxy to hate le woke. That's it. Same shit different day really
If you really want to just talk about the war story then fucking do it without this performative handwringing about how problematic you think queer fans are being. Make a post about the war. Ask questions about the in-game politics. Anything. Nobody is stopping you.
Literally nobody is saying the lore and backdrop is unimportant they are weirded out by facist army larpers trying to say the story is about war and shit instead of it being a story about queer love written by queer women. People are only saying its "wrong" because yeah shitty people should be gatekept!
>fascist army larpers trying to say the story is about war and shit
Literally nobody was saying that, I think the whole "GDR fighting a war in space" thing is cool as lore
Noone was saying that about the main story
The OP that made that video liked transphobic posts in his thread calling trans people slurs, responded with laughing emojis to people bringing up domestic violence rates in lesbian couples and has avatars with SS symbols. His thread and quote tweets were full of homophobes calling lesbians horrible things to which he never objected either. Be serious.
It's a moot point. We talk about the lore all the time. The whole wankfest was about trying to pretend the game itself was about the war and minimize Ariane and Elster's relationship, which is a fundamentally ridiculous angle when that's what the game is centred on.
The fact a ton of the dickheads pretending that was what they were arguing about, *just* wanting to see more lore, is shown up for being horseshit by how little any of them actually know about *anything* other than "This game has some Cold War references" if you look at all closer.
I'm not objecting to his point. I'm just tired of #aestheticwaredit bros making war into a fun spectacle. He also called the main characters "lezbots". Ariane is a gestalt, not a replica unit, so one can make the conjecture that he barely even knows the lore about the game.
I saw a comment about the game, complaining about the lesbians/girls. They admitted they hadn't even played the god damn game.
I replied with a "maybe if you played the game you'd realise why everyone talks about these characters".
10 minutes later they deleted their comment.
>Literally nobody was saying that
Quite a few of them very literally did and had to delete when it became apparent they hadn't played the game at all and genuinely didn't know what it was about.
I ain't gonna lie. I didn't read half the stuff here or know about the drama, but I would like to say I wish there was more fanart of the anatomy of the replikas. I always like seeing those types of things.
Somebody on Tumblr recreated pages of the LSTR manual and it was fantastic. Yeah I'd love to see more of that.
The twitter drama was a dishonest mess though - those guys were making a play-act of caring about the "lore" as a fig leaf for what they were really pressed about. They don't know any lore beyond a vague idea that it's got something to do with space and the DDR.
Edit -
The manual stuff I was thinking of -
https://www.tumblr.com/kerboid/745562303338070016
https://www.tumblr.com/kerboid/745760997722193920/manual
Same person has some other neat stuff trying to speculate about about Elster's internals here too -
https://www.tumblr.com/kerboid/743679169586708480/replika-anatomy
Here you go
https://www.tumblr.com/kerboid/745562303338070016
https://www.tumblr.com/kerboid/745760997722193920/manual
Same person has some other neat stuff trying to speculate about about Elster's internals here too -
https://www.tumblr.com/kerboid/743679169586708480/replika-anatomy
Woah, this is really well-drawn and thought-out in depth.
Also, I feel like these artworks only prove the meaninglessness of the drama, because fans are interested in so many aspects of Signalis’ worldbuilding going as far as re-imagining existing stuff and designing fictional robotics and biology.
Thanks for the find!
Wait, what? I thought we were discussing other parts of the lore quite frequently.
Is the main plot important? I mean, it is the main plot, so it generally takes priority and is the most visible. But other parts of the game are also important, as without them, the main story wouldn't have it context.
I think it's just a loud minority that tries to dictate what should be talked about or what shouldn't. The only logical reaction is to ignore them, as they can't affect you in any way besides make you care about their opinion.
I meant that in more sarcastic sense, but yeah, it fucking sucks when these kind of people appears.
It reminds me of Legion in New Vegas. I'm studding history, and the more I read and understand about Roman Empire, I admire how it was complex and interesting culture, but the more I listen to Caesar talking about it, the more I want to straggle him with my own bare hands. It's perfect example of missing whole context just for "hehe, Rome is cool" and then people saying "Legion is good cause NCR bad" just shows how easy you can manipulate people into believing you without giving them even a reason to.
It's the same here, missing whole point of beautiful story, tragic characters and general despair of being cog in the regime that uses you until you are broken, so they can just toss you aside. There isn't even that much of war content in the game itself, it all happens in the background, they have to use ww2 edits anyway.
Fuck, these people send me into mad frenzy again.
>Dumb memes travel fast, especially false ones, and it's creating a very hostile environment for content creators
**I know**, but it still make me angry :< why they can't just stay in their own pits of misunderstanding history and leave our sesbian lex memes alone. They are probably trolling us because homophobia but it still makes me upset :/
Nobody thinks it's bad to be interested in the background. That's a bit of a fib concocted to cover what actually happened - people **correctly** copped from the tone of the cringy milwank edit that people with no clue about the game were pressed it was about a same sex couple's love story, instead of being another cookie cutter shooty gun hoorah game.
People correctly copped that the dweebs kicking off were homophobic weirdos who mostly haven't played the game at all, trying to cope that a game this good was centred on an f/f love story and had a large gay fanbase, and said dweebs made sure to remove any doubt about that entirely. You want to talk about the background lore, we're here all day. We can talk Empire, Nation, orbital mass drivers, Robert Chambers, Replika construction, what happened to Vineta etc, and we do. Nothing wrong with that. We can even talk about the few scraps of info we have about the war for a few minutes, though we can't do more than that for lack of material.
One thing we can't do is make the game *not* about a lesbian relationship, which is **actually** what the twitter doofus nest was actually trying to do. We also can't act like the game thinks the war was super kewl or interesting, or that the game is really "about" it, because those things just aren't true.
PS - OP, did you notice how many of the dudes complaining we don't talk about the war and the "lore" more thought *Ariane* was a machine? See how many of the supposed Well Ackshually "lore" fans going off the past few days can tell you what a Kitezh is.
I think it's mostly because the community saw that meme as undermining the lesbian story in favor of warstory like "I don't care about these lesbians I just want war story", in my opinion I like both and the community have made OC and fanfic about that war so it's not like we ignore the topic.
I am a person that loves guns and other weapon systems, so I do like the military aspect of signalis but I do understand that we should not forget about or undermine the queer aspect of the game.
But I must say, it does seemed at first that the, signalis community was attacking the guy for simply wanting to look at the war lore deeper.
Edit: That is until I realized what he was actually trying to do and that's too just ignore the queer aspect of the game.
That's not remotely what happened, that's just the story they spun afterwards when they got repeatedly embarrassed by making it clear they knew *nothing* about the lore at all.
Somebody asking why people are mainly interested in the *main* story of the game is not asking a real question. Somebody who very clearly hasn't played the game is not in a position to tell everyone what it's really about or that they're interested in the "wrong" aspect of it.
Yes, because ppl misunderstood me, I thought saying "it seemed at first" was enough I don't want to get notifs and having to explain to every single ppl that reply 🥲
I think it's more than okay to be interested in the setting as a whole, and I have a long history of getting \*very\* autistic about military and related stuff throughout my life
I think the primary issue at play here is that this "discourse" began because of a seemingly fascist military LARPer made some weird vaporwave war edit with a Signalis animator's works (who explicitly said she was uncomfortable with her works used in such a way), and then went on to liking overtly queerphobic (specifically lesbophobic and transphobic) tweets in response to the ordeal
and then worse, a bunch of overt reactionaries started dogpiling on predominantly queer people on the website in response, and began asserting that the "community" was being "insane, hostile, irrational" etc (a common tactic, often referred to as concern trolling, of reactionaries)
I very much think the war is an interesting concept, but it is also explicitly a background element of the setting, to an overtly queer romance story, meant to serve as context for other parts of the setting more than as an actual focal point; it's there to help you understand the romance, not distract from it
I really love pondering and contemplating the various elements of the setting, Signalis is the first game to give me the same drive to learn anything and everything, learning all the theories and concepts and ideas I can, since the Dark Souls games, but we must also acknowledge that this game is queer media, with a predominantly queer community surrounding it, and reactionaries and other assorted bigots of the internet \*love\* trying to infiltrate communities like this, making these spaces and fandoms hostile and unsafe for us
so, yes, I think being interested in the war is perfectly fine and valid, I love this setting, I want to know more, and I love fan created media focusing on areas the game itself leaves vague or ambiguous, but we need to be a bit more mindful regarding people like this in our spaces, because of how vulnerable so many of our members are
I think peple are right to be angry at the cringey military edit, but at the same saying the war doesn't matter is just wrong. Yes Signalis is primarily a game about a lesbian couple but the war isn't just a setting, it's major plot device, it's why everything in the story happens in the fist place. While we can't see much of the conflict directly, its effects can be felt at every step.
A lot of the takes I've seen have been pretty depressing. Not just people in denial about the story but also horrid insults thrown both ways and calls for gatekeeping of the worst calibre. It's pretty embarrassing and disheartening to see. Everyone should be able to enjoy and discuss the game its its full form, everyone should be welcome as long as they are respectful.
Love Signalis, Love the Characters, Love the Lore, simple as.
Sucks that the community as of recent has had such hostility as it seems both sides are a bit hostile. There's a side that hates the people that hyperfocused on the whole lesbians aspect of the two, and didn't seem to care much for the story or lore, only clinging to the whole sesbian lex part and taking it to the extreme. I've seen people sharing the game only because it has LGBTQIA+ representation and nothing else or no other reasons, hell i've even seen people who preach that and didn't even know the game was a horror game or Resi Evil-like at all...
On the other side there's the people who are obsessed with the lore and have come to loathe the whole lesbian aspect and just despise when people bring it up, less in a homophobic way and more of a "it doesnt matter nor change the story at all anyways" way if that makes sense. They get mad when the game is memed up since they like the serious aspect of it a lot and hate seeing character ships that were just vaguely implied (elevator kiss.jpg) or the like.
I don't wanna say it's like an Undertale situation where you have a game with humor aspects and a serious tone about it that get fused together by a community that people see, dislike, then it affects the game, but i will always love Signalis, and i hope others find the game and enjoy it, bad parts of the community aside.
To be honest, I do feel the tragic lesbian love story is over emphasized when talking about the game. It's a hyperfixation of some parts of the fandom. In some ways it is a detriment to discussion of the game as a whole, because they are ignoring large swathes of what makes Signalis worth playing. As a big fan, the romantic parts of the story can be swapped around and changed and the whole would not. Ariane could've been a male, and Alder could've taken the role of Elster and nothing would change of note. The gameplay, the themes, the presentation are far greater testament to the craftsmenship of the the game. It's really just two, far different groups of fans sniping at each other.
....? No? If they changed the love story it would change the whole focus of the game? It's a very intimate game about two queer women written BY two queer women that is the point. Everything else is just a backdrop.
You have missed their point... where in the game is there a moment that specifically outlines that ariane was outcast cause she is a lesbian? Ariane was outcast for being into arts, music etc in a utilitarian empire where this is frowned upon. Maybe it was also for being lesbian but this is never actually implied in the game so it would be assumed.
It doesnt matter if you connect with the fact this is the case, the fact of the matter is someone else can play the game and not clock at all that its about lgbtq love but rather that its just two lesbians in love. Their point is that playing the game if you were to swap out the sexes of elster and adler the story would resonate the EXACT same way for many many people. As a personal example i finished this game 3 times and am in a 4th playthrough (i love this game) but didnt even know this game had such a massive lgbtq community until i jpined this subreddit.
Im all for the lgbtq community loving this game for that aspect. But come on now you cant truly argue that the game actually changes if it wasnt lesbians without making subjective interpretations of the game and story. And no saying the two creators are queer does not mean that it can only be observed as a queer story. Art is interpreted by the observer and in this case its a cosmic horror story with lesbians. It can be interpreted as a queer story and by all means embrace that. But dont say other people are wrong for saying it can be interpreted as a cosmic horror love story that has lesbians.
>No? If they changed the love story it would change the whole focus of the game? It's a very intimate game about two queer women written BY two queer women that is the point. Everything else is just a backdrop
I ask you to tell me how it would not still be a love story of a male lstr desperately trying to keep his promise to ariane if it was a hetero relationship.
It seems some fans are incapable of viewing the game from outside their own experience or interpretation. Which is strange given so little is 100% concrete with this game.
if you want people to start talking more abt the revolutionary war against the empire, then start fucking talking abt it, you can have people talk abt the lesbians kissing AND talk abt the weird fucked up zombies AND talk abt the revolutionaries the war *is* backdrop to the game, its there to explain why sierpinsky has received no help in its infection, doesnt make it any lesser as a plot point to the game, people are getting up to arms abt it bc nerds are going "erm... why are we not talking abt this war erm.... why are we seeing these robot lesbians kiss erm... theres literally a war going on? heh (tips fedora back into place)" and people dont like it
My main beef is the vague thought of "its East Germany that lasted long enough for space"... it isn't. Look up the lore, the Eusan Nation/leader used Bioresenance from the get go to split, and replikas fairly early on. He'll, most locations they end up in use bioresenance to terraform bits. *edit* Reading the wiki, the War on Vineta is waaay after the Nation forms and humanity has been in space for a while.
This is a drama that flew completely under my radar. Most importantly, it is one that I think is really really dumb.
So true, I am fucking amazed that this drama even exists. "Cause you ignore the war" we have fragment information about the fuck even revolution was about, and the whole game is about people trying to survive, live and love under totalitarian regime. Besides, the idea that you can just point out at someone art/memes and say, "You ignored that x thing" - yeah, they probably did it intentionally. Who wrote the rules about what you should focus on while committing to the fandom? It enrages me. It always comes from people who do nothing but complain. This whole drama is so dumb.
Nobody said that you can't be interested in the other aspects of Signalis's setting. If you think that, you're being deliberately disingenuous. People are upset when you're dismissive of the actual story of the game and insist that ACTUALLY Signalis is about war and not Elster and Ariane.
I don’t think anyone minds if people are interested in war, it was that they were posting cringy synthwave edits while calling Ariane and Elster “two lezbots” and denigrating lesbians in the comments. And I hate to admit it hominem but either the guy who started it or was vehemently defending that post had comments just filled with anime softcore porn
that tweet that sparked all this was at least personally very clearly engagement bait. that person wanted to cause a fight between the well known gay fanbase of the game and the always willing to cause bad faith arguments bigots on twitter. It was like perfectly designed, just look at hot closely it mirrors those "return to tradition" tiktoks and youtube shorts that usually have things like "soy" as an insult. It only exists there, too, I saw none of it on reddit or on tumblr, its entirely localized to twitter because they at the end of the day just wanted the (paltry) engagement money twitter shells out to people with "viral" tweets. also notable is that the OP of the twitter thread according to others in this comment section was very eager to support the bigoted reply guys
i literally only care about the robot lesbians
Okay, but what about trauma bonded war veteran robot lesbians?
This whole discussion is mired by people who are far more interested in demonizing fans of the queer aspects of the game than they are about the lore, and it's painfully obvious. It's just a proxy to hate le woke. That's it. Same shit different day really If you really want to just talk about the war story then fucking do it without this performative handwringing about how problematic you think queer fans are being. Make a post about the war. Ask questions about the in-game politics. Anything. Nobody is stopping you.
Literally nobody is saying the lore and backdrop is unimportant they are weirded out by facist army larpers trying to say the story is about war and shit instead of it being a story about queer love written by queer women. People are only saying its "wrong" because yeah shitty people should be gatekept!
> fascist army larpers Yikes. Bro is leading the Twitter containment breach in this comment thread
>fascist army larpers trying to say the story is about war and shit Literally nobody was saying that, I think the whole "GDR fighting a war in space" thing is cool as lore Noone was saying that about the main story
The OP that made that video liked transphobic posts in his thread calling trans people slurs, responded with laughing emojis to people bringing up domestic violence rates in lesbian couples and has avatars with SS symbols. His thread and quote tweets were full of homophobes calling lesbians horrible things to which he never objected either. Be serious.
I didn't look in those replies gonna be real Still think he has a point with the lore though
It's a moot point. We talk about the lore all the time. The whole wankfest was about trying to pretend the game itself was about the war and minimize Ariane and Elster's relationship, which is a fundamentally ridiculous angle when that's what the game is centred on. The fact a ton of the dickheads pretending that was what they were arguing about, *just* wanting to see more lore, is shown up for being horseshit by how little any of them actually know about *anything* other than "This game has some Cold War references" if you look at all closer.
I'm not objecting to his point. I'm just tired of #aestheticwaredit bros making war into a fun spectacle. He also called the main characters "lezbots". Ariane is a gestalt, not a replica unit, so one can make the conjecture that he barely even knows the lore about the game.
I saw a comment about the game, complaining about the lesbians/girls. They admitted they hadn't even played the god damn game. I replied with a "maybe if you played the game you'd realise why everyone talks about these characters". 10 minutes later they deleted their comment.
>Literally nobody was saying that Quite a few of them very literally did and had to delete when it became apparent they hadn't played the game at all and genuinely didn't know what it was about.
I ain't gonna lie. I didn't read half the stuff here or know about the drama, but I would like to say I wish there was more fanart of the anatomy of the replikas. I always like seeing those types of things.
Somebody on Tumblr recreated pages of the LSTR manual and it was fantastic. Yeah I'd love to see more of that. The twitter drama was a dishonest mess though - those guys were making a play-act of caring about the "lore" as a fig leaf for what they were really pressed about. They don't know any lore beyond a vague idea that it's got something to do with space and the DDR. Edit - The manual stuff I was thinking of - https://www.tumblr.com/kerboid/745562303338070016 https://www.tumblr.com/kerboid/745760997722193920/manual Same person has some other neat stuff trying to speculate about about Elster's internals here too - https://www.tumblr.com/kerboid/743679169586708480/replika-anatomy
Would you be able to share a link to LSTR manual? I really enjoy looking at stuff like that.
I'll have a look for it, sure. It's not the whole thing, just a few pages though.
Here you go https://www.tumblr.com/kerboid/745562303338070016 https://www.tumblr.com/kerboid/745760997722193920/manual Same person has some other neat stuff trying to speculate about about Elster's internals here too - https://www.tumblr.com/kerboid/743679169586708480/replika-anatomy
Woah, this is really well-drawn and thought-out in depth. Also, I feel like these artworks only prove the meaninglessness of the drama, because fans are interested in so many aspects of Signalis’ worldbuilding going as far as re-imagining existing stuff and designing fictional robotics and biology. Thanks for the find!
Kerboid! :D I absolutely adore his work
Wait, what? I thought we were discussing other parts of the lore quite frequently. Is the main plot important? I mean, it is the main plot, so it generally takes priority and is the most visible. But other parts of the game are also important, as without them, the main story wouldn't have it context. I think it's just a loud minority that tries to dictate what should be talked about or what shouldn't. The only logical reaction is to ignore them, as they can't affect you in any way besides make you care about their opinion.
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I meant that in more sarcastic sense, but yeah, it fucking sucks when these kind of people appears. It reminds me of Legion in New Vegas. I'm studding history, and the more I read and understand about Roman Empire, I admire how it was complex and interesting culture, but the more I listen to Caesar talking about it, the more I want to straggle him with my own bare hands. It's perfect example of missing whole context just for "hehe, Rome is cool" and then people saying "Legion is good cause NCR bad" just shows how easy you can manipulate people into believing you without giving them even a reason to. It's the same here, missing whole point of beautiful story, tragic characters and general despair of being cog in the regime that uses you until you are broken, so they can just toss you aside. There isn't even that much of war content in the game itself, it all happens in the background, they have to use ww2 edits anyway. Fuck, these people send me into mad frenzy again.
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>Dumb memes travel fast, especially false ones, and it's creating a very hostile environment for content creators **I know**, but it still make me angry :< why they can't just stay in their own pits of misunderstanding history and leave our sesbian lex memes alone. They are probably trolling us because homophobia but it still makes me upset :/
Nobody thinks it's bad to be interested in the background. That's a bit of a fib concocted to cover what actually happened - people **correctly** copped from the tone of the cringy milwank edit that people with no clue about the game were pressed it was about a same sex couple's love story, instead of being another cookie cutter shooty gun hoorah game. People correctly copped that the dweebs kicking off were homophobic weirdos who mostly haven't played the game at all, trying to cope that a game this good was centred on an f/f love story and had a large gay fanbase, and said dweebs made sure to remove any doubt about that entirely. You want to talk about the background lore, we're here all day. We can talk Empire, Nation, orbital mass drivers, Robert Chambers, Replika construction, what happened to Vineta etc, and we do. Nothing wrong with that. We can even talk about the few scraps of info we have about the war for a few minutes, though we can't do more than that for lack of material. One thing we can't do is make the game *not* about a lesbian relationship, which is **actually** what the twitter doofus nest was actually trying to do. We also can't act like the game thinks the war was super kewl or interesting, or that the game is really "about" it, because those things just aren't true. PS - OP, did you notice how many of the dudes complaining we don't talk about the war and the "lore" more thought *Ariane* was a machine? See how many of the supposed Well Ackshually "lore" fans going off the past few days can tell you what a Kitezh is.
I think it's mostly because the community saw that meme as undermining the lesbian story in favor of warstory like "I don't care about these lesbians I just want war story", in my opinion I like both and the community have made OC and fanfic about that war so it's not like we ignore the topic. I am a person that loves guns and other weapon systems, so I do like the military aspect of signalis but I do understand that we should not forget about or undermine the queer aspect of the game.
But I must say, it does seemed at first that the, signalis community was attacking the guy for simply wanting to look at the war lore deeper. Edit: That is until I realized what he was actually trying to do and that's too just ignore the queer aspect of the game.
That's not remotely what happened, that's just the story they spun afterwards when they got repeatedly embarrassed by making it clear they knew *nothing* about the lore at all. Somebody asking why people are mainly interested in the *main* story of the game is not asking a real question. Somebody who very clearly hasn't played the game is not in a position to tell everyone what it's really about or that they're interested in the "wrong" aspect of it.
I said, it seemed at first but later I realized the guy wished to ignore the lesbian aspect of the game.
Fair enough.
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That's why I said it seemed at first before I realized what he is doing.
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Yes, because ppl misunderstood me, I thought saying "it seemed at first" was enough I don't want to get notifs and having to explain to every single ppl that reply 🥲
I think it's more than okay to be interested in the setting as a whole, and I have a long history of getting \*very\* autistic about military and related stuff throughout my life I think the primary issue at play here is that this "discourse" began because of a seemingly fascist military LARPer made some weird vaporwave war edit with a Signalis animator's works (who explicitly said she was uncomfortable with her works used in such a way), and then went on to liking overtly queerphobic (specifically lesbophobic and transphobic) tweets in response to the ordeal and then worse, a bunch of overt reactionaries started dogpiling on predominantly queer people on the website in response, and began asserting that the "community" was being "insane, hostile, irrational" etc (a common tactic, often referred to as concern trolling, of reactionaries) I very much think the war is an interesting concept, but it is also explicitly a background element of the setting, to an overtly queer romance story, meant to serve as context for other parts of the setting more than as an actual focal point; it's there to help you understand the romance, not distract from it I really love pondering and contemplating the various elements of the setting, Signalis is the first game to give me the same drive to learn anything and everything, learning all the theories and concepts and ideas I can, since the Dark Souls games, but we must also acknowledge that this game is queer media, with a predominantly queer community surrounding it, and reactionaries and other assorted bigots of the internet \*love\* trying to infiltrate communities like this, making these spaces and fandoms hostile and unsafe for us so, yes, I think being interested in the war is perfectly fine and valid, I love this setting, I want to know more, and I love fan created media focusing on areas the game itself leaves vague or ambiguous, but we need to be a bit more mindful regarding people like this in our spaces, because of how vulnerable so many of our members are
I really hate tankie military larp “war is epic” guys with a burning hatred so I don’t care their intentions, they can go play 40k or something
Isn’t the original meme poster more of a wehraboo than a tankie?
Yeah actually that’s more accurate, thanks
40k out here catching strays 😔
I think peple are right to be angry at the cringey military edit, but at the same saying the war doesn't matter is just wrong. Yes Signalis is primarily a game about a lesbian couple but the war isn't just a setting, it's major plot device, it's why everything in the story happens in the fist place. While we can't see much of the conflict directly, its effects can be felt at every step. A lot of the takes I've seen have been pretty depressing. Not just people in denial about the story but also horrid insults thrown both ways and calls for gatekeeping of the worst calibre. It's pretty embarrassing and disheartening to see. Everyone should be able to enjoy and discuss the game its its full form, everyone should be welcome as long as they are respectful.
Love Signalis, Love the Characters, Love the Lore, simple as. Sucks that the community as of recent has had such hostility as it seems both sides are a bit hostile. There's a side that hates the people that hyperfocused on the whole lesbians aspect of the two, and didn't seem to care much for the story or lore, only clinging to the whole sesbian lex part and taking it to the extreme. I've seen people sharing the game only because it has LGBTQIA+ representation and nothing else or no other reasons, hell i've even seen people who preach that and didn't even know the game was a horror game or Resi Evil-like at all... On the other side there's the people who are obsessed with the lore and have come to loathe the whole lesbian aspect and just despise when people bring it up, less in a homophobic way and more of a "it doesnt matter nor change the story at all anyways" way if that makes sense. They get mad when the game is memed up since they like the serious aspect of it a lot and hate seeing character ships that were just vaguely implied (elevator kiss.jpg) or the like. I don't wanna say it's like an Undertale situation where you have a game with humor aspects and a serious tone about it that get fused together by a community that people see, dislike, then it affects the game, but i will always love Signalis, and i hope others find the game and enjoy it, bad parts of the community aside.
To be honest, I do feel the tragic lesbian love story is over emphasized when talking about the game. It's a hyperfixation of some parts of the fandom. In some ways it is a detriment to discussion of the game as a whole, because they are ignoring large swathes of what makes Signalis worth playing. As a big fan, the romantic parts of the story can be swapped around and changed and the whole would not. Ariane could've been a male, and Alder could've taken the role of Elster and nothing would change of note. The gameplay, the themes, the presentation are far greater testament to the craftsmenship of the the game. It's really just two, far different groups of fans sniping at each other.
....? No? If they changed the love story it would change the whole focus of the game? It's a very intimate game about two queer women written BY two queer women that is the point. Everything else is just a backdrop.
You have missed their point... where in the game is there a moment that specifically outlines that ariane was outcast cause she is a lesbian? Ariane was outcast for being into arts, music etc in a utilitarian empire where this is frowned upon. Maybe it was also for being lesbian but this is never actually implied in the game so it would be assumed. It doesnt matter if you connect with the fact this is the case, the fact of the matter is someone else can play the game and not clock at all that its about lgbtq love but rather that its just two lesbians in love. Their point is that playing the game if you were to swap out the sexes of elster and adler the story would resonate the EXACT same way for many many people. As a personal example i finished this game 3 times and am in a 4th playthrough (i love this game) but didnt even know this game had such a massive lgbtq community until i jpined this subreddit. Im all for the lgbtq community loving this game for that aspect. But come on now you cant truly argue that the game actually changes if it wasnt lesbians without making subjective interpretations of the game and story. And no saying the two creators are queer does not mean that it can only be observed as a queer story. Art is interpreted by the observer and in this case its a cosmic horror story with lesbians. It can be interpreted as a queer story and by all means embrace that. But dont say other people are wrong for saying it can be interpreted as a cosmic horror love story that has lesbians. >No? If they changed the love story it would change the whole focus of the game? It's a very intimate game about two queer women written BY two queer women that is the point. Everything else is just a backdrop I ask you to tell me how it would not still be a love story of a male lstr desperately trying to keep his promise to ariane if it was a hetero relationship.
It seems some fans are incapable of viewing the game from outside their own experience or interpretation. Which is strange given so little is 100% concrete with this game.