Lame and gay

The episode particularly took aim at Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy — while at the same time knocking online trolls who have piled on the executive in recent years. As quick examples there is the Metroid series where the female protagonist has a power suit that significantly enhances her abilities. The intensity of her online vitriol — not just in comments, but in article after article after article after article on various sites, often speculating she’s this-close to being fired — over the past has seemed outsized, which is part of what South Park is addressing.

These are supposed to be video games and it wasn’t so long ago that characters were simply avatars to be controlled by the player. “Only this time, it wasn’t me, they were taking all my favorite people and replacing them with diverse women who complain about the patriarchy! I had forgotten that when among a youth gang known as ‘The Rats’ in the second novel, Time of Contempt that Ciri forms a “relationship” with one of the female members named Mistle.

That she will also a sodomite is all but a certain. 

The only interest I have in this title is that it could be the beginning of the end of Naughty Dog. Getting hold of exact sales figures can be difficult but The Last of Us Part Two has sold more than ten million copies which would be great if it wasn’t considerably less than the total sales of the original.

That’s why they stripped it from “Elio.” But “Elio” failed for the same reason those other films did: weak characters and lousy storytelling.

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Photo by DAVID MCNEW/AFP via Getty Images

Even the queerness in those earlier films seemed less like sincere inclusion and more like a cynical marketing ploy — a way to gin up press during peak woke culture.

“We keep making the same movie over and over and pandering to everyone, but suddenly it’s not working.” Iger replies, “Then we’ve got to pander harder!” It turns out the multiverse rip was caused by Lucasfilm’s Kennedy, who tapped into a secret Disney artifact, the “panderstone,” which the studio has been using to remake the same ideas over and over in ways that try to appeal to the largest audience possible.

The video gathered over 178,000 views in a year.

On April 3rd, 2024, Twitter / X user @MasteroftheTDS tweeted in response to news that Julia Garner will be playing a female version of the character Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four, writing, "They put a chick in it and made her lame and gay 😂," gathering over 6,000 likes in a year.

On September 29th, 2024, Redditor /u/Fuzzy_Ad7886 posted a meme to the subreddit /r/southpark about people who ignore the part of the episode in which Cartman says, "I guess ..

But instead of doing the real work, I instead turned to the panderstone. This is just taking the same old Cartman and putting a Black woman in it!”

The story then shifts to a meeting of Disney executives, where CEO Bob Iger is irate. The viewer walks in and, within moments, already knows he’s seen this film a thousand times.”

So would making Elio “lame and gay” instead of just lame have saved the movie?

Of course not.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this game ended up in development hell or even got cancelled as things are changing fast in the industry and there is less and less appetite for this forced inclusion. Maybe that premise sounded edgy in 2022, but now it just looks desperate and dumb.

If “Elio” teaches Disney anything, it’s this: Wokeness isn’t a narrative.

And it’s over.

Whatever moral high ground advocates claimed — about representation, equity, and tolerance — was always more about pandering to activists than elevating art. Including “romance options” is becoming as common as progression systems though it is generally completely irrelevant to games. Much like forced diversity, these are “features” mostly included to pander to certain audiences and are ultimately superfluous to both story and gameplay. 

It is my hope that all three of these games (and any like them), are financial failures.