[Warning: At this point, it’s hard to discuss the mod pack without remaining completely spoiler-free, so be especially careful beyond this point!]
This past week’s major update to the “No Alphabets” pack saw its creators make a bananas set of changes to Dame Aylin, a character who appears late in the game’s plot. Players who manage to navigate some tricky dialogue checks discover that the immortal Aylin is in love with tormented cleric Isobel, with a truly iconic reunion scene between the two that ends with Aylin abruptly dismissing the player so she can, ahem, “admire Isobel’s fulsome beauty.” (Her girlfriend, for her part, is mortified but amenable.)
For the “No Alphabets” crew, none of this was acceptable. They changed Dame Aylin into “Ser Aylin” — because evidently, the game’s actual gender-neutral honorific “saer” was too androgynous — and altered the character into a bearded man “to maintain immersion.” Ser Aylin even got new dialogue, which the modders said was generated by an “A.I.” program,, twisting the performance of Aylin’s actual voice actor Helen Keeley. The whole project is pretty grotesque, but especially so when it morphs the performances of actual actors into ammunition for their video game culture war.
By Monday, about 24 hours after the pack’s “Ser Aylin” update went live, NexusMods moderators had caught wind of the situation, removed the mod pack, and banned the burner account that uploaded it from the site entirely. (It’s not gone for good, of course; the pack is also hosted on far-right forums including RPGHQ, a site where users post similarly bigoted mods alongside sprawling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.) In a statement following its removal, moderators said the pack was an obvious attempt “to skirt our community guidelines.”
“We are for inclusivity, we are for diversity,” NexusMods staff wrote. “If we think someone is uploading a mod on our site with the intent to deliberately be against inclusivity and/or diversity then we will take action against it.”
This isn’t the first time NexusMods has taken quick action to remove anti-LGBTQ+ content from their site. Just four months ago in September, moderators took down a mod for the science fiction game Starfield that attempted to remove “they/them” pronouns from character creation, but which only succeeded in making every character be addressed as “they” instead. (Great work, team!)
Game mods generally exist to add options for players. For instance, I modded my copy of Guilty Gear Strive so best girl Bridget can wear a comfy sweater. Marginalized gamers are no stranger to making mods to broaden play experiences, like the folks who added pronoun selection to Stardew Valley and the myriad projects that provide for disabled gamers. With all the time the “No Alphabets” crew spent on creating a working mod, they could have chosen to do something that adds to the game or the world at large, if only they weren’t stuck obsessively insisting that LGBTQ+ people were invented in the 1990s to make them upset. To use a little gamer lingo, it sounds to us like a skill issue.
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