So Miss Pauling is now gay…

According to the head writer of the TF Comic series, which probably won’t come out for another month or so due to them having been working on other things Valve-related, there’s some actual news. As for what they’ve been working on, it’s probably Dota 2 stuff. Frankly, all of Valve’s other games are getting tired of Dota 2 getting all the attention. It’s not even a proper Valve game. Anyway, as I was saying, they announced that Miss Pauling, the action-packed assistant to the Administrator, is a lesbian.

Now, I’m not normally one to complain about these things. As far as I’m concerned, you can fuck whoever you want as long as they are 100% consenting and are of age. You can be straight, gay, bi, pansexual, whatever. I really don’t care, you should be free to do as you want and you should have the same rights as every other person on this planet. As you can tell, I am very much a everyone-gets-equal-rights person. A Tumblr feminist wannabe (not a real feminist – it’s important to make that distinction) though would still call me white cis scum or some bollocks like that.

But for some reason I’m annoyed by this. It’s not because I don’t want there to be anyone gay in TF2. Not at all. It’s because this feels 100% shoehorned in. A random bone thrown to us that makes no sense.

It’s not the first bone we’ve been thrown. A while back, we were treated to a picture from the comic, as seen here.

So yeah, Sniper looks a tad dead and for some strange reason, I look sad about it. It actually seems rather out of character, since Medic doesn’t really seem to care about the team outside of teaming with Heavy and sciencing with Engineer. Maybe it’s an experiment gone wrong. Maybe it’s guilt. Or maybe Medic does care after all.

The above is an example of a good teaser. The random announcement that Miss Pauling is gay isn’t such a good one. It just raises a load of random questions and is a tidbit that no one really asked about or even cared about. Worse, this new tidbit of information actually CAUSES more problems than it solves.

You remember Expiration Date, right? The entire plot of that story is that Scout attempts to ask Miss Pauling on a date. Really, the giant bread monster was a side plot. And in the end, Miss Pauling seemed somewhat impressed, enough to actually accept Scout’s proposal. Of course, Miss Pauling could have just been calling Scout’s bluff, but we’ve known since Miss Pauling was introduced as a character that Scout has liked her and she hasn’t been interested. All she had to do was say that 1. she wasn’t interested or 2. she already had a boyfriend or 3. she was a lesbian. While TF2 is set in the 60’s and 70’s, it’s unknown how intolerant people are of each other, but Demoman seems absolutely fine, so I’m sure Miss Pauling would be if she came out.

What makes this even stranger though is that Miss Pauling isn’t even the obvious choice for a gay character. Helen the Administrator has been alone almost all her life (apart from the odd flirt with the Hale family apparently) and keeps everything secret, so her being gay would somewhat make sense. Or what about Medic? Since we know fuck all about him outside of Meet the Medic (which only revealed that he’d lost his medical license) and everyone’s been shipping him with Heavy for years.

Or we can just make Pyro gay. Since Pyro is everything else.

Miss Pauling being a lesbian also kinda ruins the running joke of Scout trying to date her for so long. Miss Pauling blurting out that she’s a lesbian is the sort of thing that she’d say just to get Scout to shut up at a critical moment as she’s trying to concentrate, rather than being an actual real thing.

It’s worth mentioning something else though. If Miss Pauling being a lesbian had been revealed in the comic at a point that made sense, NO ONE WOULD COMPLAIN one bit. Well, no one apart from homophobic maniacs, but they deserve to be ignored.

In the end though, this tidbit means nothing. It’s just a shoehorned in bit of information to wind us up.