It's a big deal when it's not a big deal

Sorry about the lack of blog yesterday, I was busy playing Pathfinder.

Pathfinder, for those who aren't familiar with it, is a tabletop game, extremely similar to Dungeons and Dragons.

A few weeks ago, Paizo, the company that created Pathfinder, re-released one of their most famous adventures, which has a small cameo of a Paladin (Someone so lawful and good, they can shoot lasers of righteousness), who happened to be in a gay relationship with someone who was transgender.

Paizo did their best to delete and ban anti-gay and anti-trans complaints and address accusations of 'pandering to the PC crowd' by saying main characters of Pathfinder were already planned to be either bi or gay, but had not yet been revealed as it was irrelevant to storylines.

The strange thing is, bigotry sees how progressive this is more than those who are progressive.  The major incitement of anger from 'oldschool' groups (their claim, not mine), was that these characters were treated as perfectly normal in their society, albeit a fantasy society.

Being gay, female, or having darker skin in the more liberal and kinder parts of the Pathfinder world is not considered strange and in most cases never was.  No party has taken a stand to be equal outside of parts of the world that tend to oppress everyone equally harshly. Paizo doesn't deny racial problems with it's creation, but it doesn't outright demand attention to these issues either. It has gone beyond taking a stand and done what stands mean to accomplish: admitting these groups exist and treating equality for them as normal, not something to be conscious of.  No one puts an effort into making sure these people are treated the same because that's not treating them the same.

Anger towards the most fantastical of genres of any medium for catering to anything other than white, heterosexual males is more powerful and prevalent than it seems on the surface.  They feel they are the only ones that should be catered to, 'as always'.  Shouldn't a message be sent that there never was an always and never will be?  Should it be 'that attitude is horrible and a stand must be taken to make these people known!', or should it be a simple 'you have no power here'?