The boys who can't share their toys.
The Witcher 4 trailer dropped yesterday and before you could say "Child of the Elder Blood" the comments were predictably swamped with variations of:
1. "I don't want to play a woman."
2. "The developer has caved to woke-ism."
3. If I have to play a woman, can't I at least play a hot one?"
The most generous version of the first comment goes along the lines "I see myself in my video game avatar and I just prefer it to be a man like me." Fine, if you've decided arbitrarily to limit yourself that way. Except you know who doesn't have the luxury of doing that? Women playing 95% of video games. And in the very, very rare game that offers up a female main playable character it's someone like Lara Croft in Tomb Raider who makes up for the sin of having brains and a personality by still being young enough and having big enough boobs to be objectified. Or Samus Aran in Metroid who looks like an androgynous robot until she takes her helmet off it the end.
If you don't want to play a woman, play those other 95% of games. Like the first three Witcher games. The gaming world is literally your fucking sausage-fest. Why the compulsion to throw your toys out of the crib at the prospect of one major game franchise letting women do what you do all the time? It's not like the universe ordained "there shall only ever be three more Witcher games and you will be forced to play a woman forevermore". If you want a prequel playing one of the other Witchers or a game where you can design your own character, then invest the money into developing it yourself.
As for "caving to woke-ism" I'll be generous again and assume this is coming from people who either didn't play the Witcher 3 or didn't understand any of the games or the books on which it is based. Ciri has always been the secondary protagonist. You actually get to play from her perspective for multiple segments of the Witcher 3. She's Geralt's child surprise, was raised with the Witchers, is the natural heir to their cultural legacy and is one of the few characters in the previous story who hasn't already had a complete character arc. There's lots to be excited about in exploring what she can actually do when her powers are fully developed and she has more control of them. The Witchers were always written as a community that was going extinct. Why not get excited and interested in the ways it which that community could possibly evolve and keep going instead?
Or, you know, you can just keep pretending that CDPR and Andrzej Sapkowski just included her for filler or to be a damsel in distress for Geralt. Except for literally everything that happens in the story.
Why is Geralt such an interesting character to play? In part, it's because he's a mensch. He's not a young hot shot - he's an older guy who adopts a girl and instead of seeing her as a delicate princess, takes her seriously and lets her train to do what he does. How do you get the best ending in Witcher 3? [Spoilers] You support Ciri and step back and let her handle her own problems.
For all the gamer bros out there who say what they enjoy it "seeing themselves in the character they are playing" why not at least try to see that character, which they claim to love, in themselves?
There are great male role-models out there for young men bemoaning the decline of masculinity. But you need to be willing to internalise the lessons they are trying to teach you instead of this knee-jerk kindergarten reaction of "ick, cooties".