Disco Elysium is so fucking wild. It’s the most empathetic game I’ve ever played. I am someone who has an easy time putting myself in other people’s shoes. The character is an alcoholic mess, on the brink of a depression so deep he has totally fractured his own memory and sense of self. He’s a genius. He’s also an idiot. And he’s a cop/detective in a world that really despises cops. It’s what I would call the idealistic cop: the one that would put themself between a group of armed men and a group of innocent people with nothing but a dinky pistol and say stand down.
Anyway, I love how it makes me feel about everything in its place. The ideologies that drive us. The youth we waste on fooling around. The insanity and, somehow, the humor of racism. The mistakes that make us who we are. The idealistic pursuits that are so high they can never be achieved. How heartbreak never goes away.
Most importantly, I played a game with an internal monologue built-in as the RPG system, and it nearly exactly matches how I think and feel. My mind is also fractured as identifiable pieces of myself. I gave some parts of them names because it made it easier to separate the thoughts from how I truly felt. I have nearly all the same psyches just with different names from Volition, Half-light, etc. And it floored me. I have never played a game that was as introspective as I was. Right down to the simultaneously protective and self destructive thoughts clashing within and one winning out. It gave me a third person perspective of my own self destructive and unhealthy thought processes. And it helped me love myself a little bit more. I feel like I’ll never be able to play anything like it again for the rest of my life.
I do think there is some element of gender disillusionment if not dysphoria in very insecure men. I don’t think calling them some stage of trans has the right implications though. They are men that want to stay men. But their internal views of men are constantly challenged by their culture and environment.
Nothing says women can’t have muscular bodies or else they must be men or being a woman wrong in some way. But that dissonance obviously irritates the type of guy that unironically wants to be an alpha gigachad. So they impose their own standards on others, unknowingly outing their insecurities.
If I’m being really honest though even if I thought all of that was likely, it’s way more likely that people on the Internet just love to start flame wars about anything if they’re bored enough. Especially when the target is a woman.