Every fantasy author (except Tolkien): We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from an individual or small group who will save the world through the judicious application of violence.
As a heterosexual male, "best boy" is a topic I am unlikely to bring up of my own accord, but I would have no difficulty or discomfort engaging on the topic with ladies and/or gaybros.
That said, sometimes a male character is so compelling he gets ironically assigned the title "best girl".
Nintendo does the Nintendo Thing very well, and their fans love them for it. There is a particular niche or the gaming market that is theirs, and theirs alone. If they start trying to please everybody, they may end up pleasing nobody.
Then again, I'm a PC gamer, so it may be I have no idea what I'm talking about.
I'm not exactly a "fan", but I remember years ago really enjoying a brief comic run called "Gene Roddenberry's 'Lost Universe'", published under an almost equally brief label called "Tekno Comix". I was really disappointed when they went under.
Skyrim was a significant improvement over Oblivion, in every way I can think of. Only Oblivions quest lines were better, but that's not what I go to an open world game for (and I found the extreme mismatch between the cinematic plots and open world gameplay immersion-breaking). And while Morrowind has a much more interesting setting (and the plot weave that encompassed that setting was brilliant), Skyrim was the first entry since Daggerfall to really give me a decent first person action RPG feel.
The mid nineties to the turn of the century was a special time. We got Morrowind, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, even Ultima 8 had a pretty interesting setting (even if the gameplay was atrocious). I'm sure there were other games and fiction with interesting settings as well.
Then the LotR films came out, and that was it. Everybody started bandwagoning hard.
Back in the day, Maxis had an entire brand of "Sim" games that were exactly this. Sim Farm, Sim Earth, Sim Ant, and, most notably, Sim City. I have no idea how many titles there were, but there were a lot of them.
Back in 2014, "he" was still considered by many to double up as a gender neutral singular pronoun (which was the standard in English for at least a century). The rehabilitation of "they" as a gender neutral singular is very, very recent. I had to be actively taught not to use it that way back in the late '80s.
This, of course, was the proscriptivist position. Kids who "don't know any better" have always used a gender neutral singular "they" until their teachers told them not to.
I suppose it could have. My problem is that when I watch a show, it's mostly for the competence porn. SG1 and SGA were that, in spades. SGU wasn't that, at least in the beginning, and I don't typically last beyond three episodes when it's clear that the genre isn't even what I'm looking for.
Ultrasonic repellers don't even work on what they're designed to affect. I don't imagine they particularly like living near one, but we don't like living near railroad tracks, and yet do when we have no other choice.
Every fantasy author (except Tolkien): We're headed for some bleak imperialist nonsense, but humanity's salvation will come from an individual or small group who will save the world through the judicious application of violence.