"}\n\nCan someone explain to me how we got to gamer being a sexual archetype of male golden-hearted innocence , ala \u201cgolden retriever gamer boy\u201d( 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 \u201c introverted and sorta masc?\u201c as oppose to sporty and extroverted?, is then an indirect autistic fetishization thing? Like manic pixie dream girl? I feel like I\u2019m 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\u2019m not in touch with the youth anymore enough to be picking up on this
I\u2019m also not really in touch with tiktok trends, but it does seem like \u201csweet boy next door nerd-adjacent who won\u2019t cheat on you like the popular guys\u201d is basically \u201cincel\u201d with the sign flipped
you\u2019re right but it\u2019s also \u2018sexually unadventurous/inexperienced shy girl next door\u2019 gender flipped and like
that is sorta new! it\u2019s intriguing
It is an intriguing reversal! How in-demand is that? Well, I haven\u2019t seen it in the wild, but I\u2019m not on TikTok; I\u2019m an out-of-touch old person for this purpose.
Yeah I\u2019m 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\u2019s a version of this trope that can fight, but that\u2019s pretty required of a party member, the most salient facts about him for my purposes here are that he\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u00a0and 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\u00a0\u201cbreaks\u201d in internet communities. Like Reddit wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t carry over very much.\u00a0
That leads to why the new stereotypes are far more positive and weren\u2019t 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\u2019s first-brush exposure to a\u00a0\u2018gamer\u2019 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.\n\n
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.