I hate feeling so conflicted in relation to something I'm so passionate about.
There's a lot of thinly-veiled casual misogyny and bigotry writhing around the GFL community that I've personally witnessed being completely unchallenged in open, actively moderated spaces. Ranging from "jokingly" hating anyone who picks the female commander in GFL2 to downright conspiracy theories about LGBT "propaganda."
Although... I don't know what I expected from such a relatively small and insular fanbase that has a decent chunk of its English following most prominently on 4chan, and ESPECIALLY from a game series popularised by marketing towards gun enthusiasts, on top of being an anime gacha game. I feel it should be obvious what kind of demographic that combination naturally fosters.
But even with that obvious fact in mind, it still hurts. I really like this series and the stories it has to tell. It has helped me get through incredibly tough times in my life since I started playing it in 2018, and continues to give me a lot of joy. But seeing the casual acceptance of some of the attitudes in a lot of the community makes me feel highly uncomfortable and unwelcome, and it risks tainting my view of the franchise at times.
It wasn't helped by me re-reading the GFL manga's sole English translation only to find the scanlator inserted extra "jokes" into their scanlation, and by "jokes" I mean some intrusive unfunny memes that break immersion in the scene combined with the occasional slur and hard-R thrown in for good measure.
Or people almost ALWAYS referring to the commander as a "he" 90% of the time, combined with despising the commander being female in the manga and calling her a mary sue. And we all know that term is always used accurately and never just used because you don't like a female main character nowadays, devoid of the term's original meaning.
A lot of these people seem to fear and dread GFL2 getting popular and "ruining" the franchise's core community, whether they mean it seriously or ironically. At this point, I hope it does. More people means more diversity, more success for Mica Team, and more people who can experience GFL's tales of love and hope.
The only part of the fandom I've found that I feel safe enough around to interact with actively is here on Tumblr, and I want to say thank you to everyone who posts about GFL on here. You're awesome.
Have some sapphic T-Dolls as a palette cleanser, thank you for reading this mess of a rant.
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