Anti-LGBTQ+ Baldur’s Gate 3 mod pulled from the game
All things considered, Baldur's Gate 3 is a pretty welcoming game for all. Larian Studios gave us a robust character creator, plenty of opportunities to romance your companions regardless of their gender, and a sense of freedom that allows you to do basically whatever you want, free of judgment.
It's a game that many have fully embraced as a means to live out their best lives. After all, you can be gay in our world, but can you be a gay gnome that has been transformed into a sentient wheel of cheese? We thought not.
Though Baldur's Gate 3 has been incredibly inclusive, a vocal minority have been trying to dissect this. They're not only disparaging the game, but have developed mods that try to make things a little less uncomfortable for the straight people without a real grip on reality. But Nexus Mods isn’t having any of it.
Nexus Mods axe anti-LGBTQ+ Baldur's Gate 3 mod
Click to enlargeA mod, titled Ser Aylin, raised eyebrows everywhere in the Baldur's Gate 3 community by trying to transform the character Dame Aylin into a man with pitch-shifted voice performances, altered NPC dialogue lines, and a changed model.
The mod comes as part of a pack called No Alphabets, designed to remove anything that haters deem too close to representation for the LGBTQ+ community. As such, many players have called for the mods in the pack to be removed, and it looks like Nexus Mods is taking steps to make that happen.
"This appears to be a throwaway account created to upload a mod that attempts to skirt our community guidelines," a takedown notice of the account that posted the mod itself reads from the platform.
"The mod in question appears to reduce diversity in Baldur's Gate 3 by taking a same-sex couple and swapping the gender of one of the partners to make them heterosexual." We're reminded of when someone created a Spider-Man mod that removed all the Pride flags.
Nexus Mods clamps down hard on Ser Aylin
Click to enlargeNexus Mods pre-empted the "free speech" fury that would come for them in light of this mod takedown, and the site closed its takedown notice with a message to those who might be angry about the removal of the mod from the site.
"We aren't the authority on what users can and cannot mod. Us removing a mod only means it cannot be found at Nexus Mods, nothing more, nothing less. As a private business, we have a right to choose what content we do and do not want to host on our platform. Respect this right the same way you want respect for your rights." Damn.
When mods are designed with hate in mind, it's important that they're approached with this kind of vigilance, so we've got massive respect to offer the Nexus Mods team for this move. The supposed 'Alphabet Mafia' won't go down without a fight, and Nexus Mods is flying its rainbow flag proudly.
