Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield drew some flack from the smooth-brained crowd of hate-filled gamers for its use of basic pronouns in its science fiction RPG with magical powers and universe-hopping spaceships.
Following the spiteful backlash of its basic English language skills, some modders took it to themselves to make bigoted Starfield mods that removed pronouns from the Bethesda game. However, they were quickly removed from modding website Nexus Mods.
The “No Pronouns” mod for Starfield removed the option for players to select their pronouns in the Bethesda game. Instead, players would just bypass the field entirely, something you don’t actually have to interact with in the game anyways.
In a response to an email asking whether or not mods removing pronouns and pro-LGBTQ+ parts of games were allowed, Nexus Mods confirmed that they are not. In fact, the modding website urged bigoted mod creators to delete their accounts and go elsewhere if that’s the type of content they create.
“We reserve the right to host, or not host, whatever content we want on our own site,” Nexus said. “We do not want to host mods that remove diversity from a video game. If that upsets you enough that you no longer want to use our site then, quite frankly, your presence here will not be missed. I invite you to use your account settings page's ‘Delete account’ feature.”
Nexus Mods has been fighting against anti-LGBTQ+ mods for a number of years now. The release of Insomniac’s brilliant Spider-Man game saw bigoted modders remove the game’s LGBTQ+ representation in mods that were quickly deleted on Nexus.
In the current climate, the spiteful (and ridiculous) crusade against pronouns in Starfield is depressingly unsurprising. However, it comes directly after the brilliant Baldur’s Gate 3 was heavily praised by the gaming community at large, another RPG that has pronoun selection, and is far more granular in how you can represent your character’s gender.
Starfield offers an almost-overwhelming amount of freedom to players. You can become swaddled in debt, explore the universe, study alien creatures and even get caught in quantum entanglement. However, for some people, very narrow minded people, being able to select your pronouns is just a step too far. What a sad, sad life.
Instead, Nexus Mods will continue to host the best Starfield mods and some truly weird mods for the game. And it’ll continue to do so for years to come.