Look. As a queer woman, I don't expect (or want) much from game developers out of pride. Maybe I'll get a little in-game badge, maybe I'll get some nice art of a queer character in the game. However, DC Punch-Up's Injustice 2 challenged players to defeat a bisexual character in order to celebrate Pride in the mobile version of the game.

That was certainly a choice, no?

For some time, Poison Ivy, the plant's supervillain, has been portrayed as canonically bisexual, and in recent years she has been paired with Harley Quinn. As a kind of far-fetched way of describing this relationship, NetherRealm (which handles both the PC/console and mobile versions of the DC fighting game) offered Injustice 2 Mobile players an amount of Quinn and Ivy costume tokens if they beat up the latter collectively. offered an increase.

As a now-deleted promotional tweet (via Kotaku) commented, it is "fucking hilarious tone deaf" to celebrate pride by committing violence against queer people. The community reportedly reached 175,000 takedowns before NetherRealm began to stop promoting it, and the studio has since apologized

for the "inappropriate and insensitive" association surrounding the challenge.

Ultimately, this whole situation is just a textbook example of pinkwashing (the practice of a company adopting activist terminology for its own benefit). In Injustice 2 Mobile, this type of challenge is made all the time. It's just that, in this case, someone decided to slap a reference to pride on the bi women without thinking about the optics of bumping them off.

Maybe next time you should just give out rainbow-colored icons.