>>149715617Non poltard answer is
There's been gay characters for centuries, even if the societies of the day weren't tolerant
Countercultural media had shit loads of gays
What's been happening in the past 10 years or so is the result of a very specific brand of very autistic gays and lesbians who cut their chops on Tumblr, Fanfiction.net, and LiveJournal
Those sites had a writing culture that could best be described as "juvenile, horribly insecure, and filled with delusions of competence." That's where โdon't like don't readโ came from after all, and where all feedback was pigeon holed into one of three things:
- glazing
- flaming
- trolling
Remember the overly detailed character sheets? Remember the self insert Mary Sues? A lot of writers came to see their characters as extensions of themselves rather than characters in a story because of the way fanfiction often worked (free to upload, no publishing standards, readers are other fanfiction readers, so you can have 200 chapters of edgy badass characters just living their angsty comfy lives and being gay or having the cute anime heterochromatic Hogwarts girl or Not!Shadow recolored hedgehog twink boy help evil sadistic rapist Alexander DeLarge open up and realize he just wanted someone to love him and help him realize he's actually an emo boi.
So loads of hormonal insecure teenagers developed a complex where telling them their writing was bad or needed improvement was construed as a personal attack and could written off as a flamer, and saying that good characters needed flaws that weren't "awkward and clumsy" was seen as being a hater
Fast forward 20 years later.
Studios need writers.
The chuds and jocks were too busy playing PS2 and Xbox and shitting on the geeky kids who still read and wrote books