Can someone explain to me how we got to gamer being a sexual archetype of male golden-hearted innocence , ala “golden retriever...
Can someone explain to me how we got to gamer being a sexual archetype of male golden-hearted innocence , ala “golden retriever gamer boy”( the new stereotypical man for a bi woman to date according to tik-tok) , like we went from gamers being childish in a violent mean spirited way to being synonymous with misogynistic nerds to this? How do streamers factor in? Are video games such a ubiquitous hobby now that all it signals is “ introverted and sorta masc?“ as oppose to sporty and extroverted?, is then an indirect autistic fetishization thing? Like manic pixie dream girl? I feel like I’m out of the loop , I feel like I missed a couple steps.
@kontextmaschine this seems like a you thing,
Thru some combination of just getting old and not making the jump to the post-text internet I’m not in touch with the youth anymore enough to be picking up on this
I’m also not really in touch with tiktok trends, but it does seem like “sweet boy next door nerd-adjacent who won’t cheat on you like the popular guys” is basically “incel” with the sign flipped
you’re right but it’s also ‘sexually unadventurous/inexperienced shy girl next door’ gender flipped and like
that is sorta new! it’s intriguing
It is an intriguing reversal! How in-demand is that? Well, I haven’t seen it in the wild, but I’m not on TikTok; I’m an out-of-touch old person for this purpose.
Yeah I’m not sure (both on the question of how in-demand and how new the concept is).
It came up in conversation with @dagny-hashtaggart yesterday that girlfan favourite Alistair from the Dragon Age games is this trope, for instance. (Okay, he’s a version of this trope that can fight, but that’s pretty required of a party member, the most salient facts about him for my purposes here are that he’s dorky, kind and iirc-explicitly sexually inexperienced.)
I mean I should point out that when I was actually a teenager it was sort of Understood that sexually experienced guys might be hot in theory, but in real life you wanted to date someone whose level of experience was not too far from your own. The sexually unthreatening boyband member is a well-established trope dating back before Paul McCartney. And Tik Tok is full of actual teenagers. So.
Hypothesis that this is less a change in what girls actually want, and more a change in the extent to which girls produce content about the attainable realistic hottie of their dreams, a once mostly-male practice (wrt stuff that got exposure)
I don’t think there is anything to explain until you show me evidence that this is a thing, and at the same time, as soon there is evidence that this is a thing, it crosses into the mainstream and will cause lasting discourse.
Its absolutely a thing; The #gamerboy tag on Tiktok has 3.4 billion net views, and gets you things like Advanced Cuddling Positions w/ Your Gamer BF and transfem gamerboy hotness clips. You can explore the tag but very apparent to see its place in the #vibe space.
As for why, well I think its two fold. One, teens have way less cultural memory, so you want to look for “breaks” in internet communities. Like Reddit wasn’t a break from its predecessors; as a venue reddit copied memes & posts from other websites and discussed them, therefore inheriting the baggage of the old internet as it evolved it. Youtube however did that much less as it grew in popularity, and Tiktok does it not at all; content on Tiktok, due to being short video ai-voiceover/text overlay content, is pretty much all unique to the platform. As such 2005 gamer stereotypes simply don’t carry over very much.
That leads to why the new stereotypes are far more positive and weren’t just re-invented like for some other groups. I would generally pin that down to the rise of streaming and e-celebrities that became everyone’s first-brush exposure to a ‘gamer’ identity, and streamer celebs are charismatic, funny, and engaging by definition. Even though the audience for streaming is majority male its still way more approachable, its 35%+ female and reaches way more people than actually playing a game ever could. E-girl rose from twitch & youtube, gamerboy is the genderswapped version, its required.
Additionally I think avenues for teen hate are way more political these days; hating nerds is cringe, hating misogynists is vogue, but I lack confidence on that last one.