Game writers like Rhianna Pratchett, who has stated that part of her would have loved Lara Croft to be gay, are instead artfully presenting these characters in a manner that is more aesthetically palatable to players (and likely their concerned parents) who might find explicit same-sex love too lurid or off-putting a subject to handle with frankness in a video game.

So narrative ellipses mute the “objectionable” in the way that the gay character Joel Cairo from the novel The Maltese Falcon was made ambiguously gay in the pre-code 1931 film version, and then, in the familiar 1941 version, simply wore fancy white gloves and smelled of lavender. (The term “gunsel” was still retained from the novel in reference to Cairo, because censors assumed it meant hired gun, and the word later adopted that meaning, but it was really slang for homosexual.)

These characters are gay, but that is not spoken to directly. It’s Hemingway’s iceberg theory of writing, except enforced upon writers by anxious suits with money at stake.

A watchful playthrough of Tomb Raider while interpreting Lara as having romantic feelings for the story’s damsel in distress, Sam, works perfectly, with nothing in the game universe that contradicts it. (Though whether or not Lara’s feelings are reciprocated is more open to interpretation.)

The character of Aveline de Grandpre, protagonist of Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, and with cameos in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, is another example of an LGBT character whose orientation is there for the keen-eyed and open-minded to interpret.

Aveline is the only playable assassin to eschew the gender-neutral robe and hood of the Assassins, instead donning a man’s tricorne hat, shirt and trousers. Indeed, in the PlayStation-exclusive Aveline mission in Black Flag the soldiers chasing her repeatedly say such things as, “He’s getting away!” “After that man!” etc.

The developers must have been aware of this incorrect use of pronoun—likely an artifact of the game’s main campaign being centered on a man—but they did not bother to correct it. It actually makes more sense like this. The soldiers would indeed think the figure they were seeing was a young man or boy, because Aveline is appareled as a man, literally from head to foot.

If one finds the hidden audio log “Subject 1 Interview” in Black Flag, it is made clear that the person who is reliving this female ancestor’s memories is, in fact, a man. The entire tenor of the interview Subject 1 has with the researcher in the audio log is thus about being transgender.

Subject 1 describes at length his experiences reliving the memories of a woman, Aveline. When the researcher asks about a possible sexual liaison with a male acquaintance of Aveline’s, Subject 1 replies: “I never experienced her…consummating anything. That would be … I think maybe she was confused.”