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John2290 said:

Horizon ZD has a female character that works, tomb raider reboots the same, The Witcher 3 in Ciri, Yeniffer, Triss and most other female leads, A plague tale innocence if you want a character more in the age group, Detroit Bceome human in Kara, all the female characters in divinity OS 1 and 2, Sadie in RDR and to a lesser degree Remake 2 in Claire. You know why these characters work, because they are crafted to fit situationally, are well written to extremely well written, they make the player believe and keep immersion stable, they have good motivations and bad without being one sided, they are flawed and enoigh to be relatable to men or women.

The fact that people even think females, POC or LGBTQ+ characters need to be written in situationally is a huge part of the problem. You're going to run into a lot of people who are not straight white males in life and spoilers, there is not some well reasoned lore-heavy justification for it. They are just people. In the same way you don't think people who are gay shouldn't be put up on a pedestal, diverse characters also shouldn't have unreasonable expectations for why they exist in fictional works in the first place. Not wanting companies to pander to certain demographics is equally silly because it's a neverending loop of paranoia. The reality is that if companies are currently pandering now by making diverse casts, then they were probably pandering before when most characters were heterosexual masculine males. It's not like companies just learned that they can pander with characters in the last 10 years. Blaming companies for pandering for the sake of money, is perhaps one of the most useless time-wasting practices of all time, and it's particularly egregious when it's for including diverse casts. 

Ultimate, the problem is always writing. Concepts are just that, concepts. Execution is everything. And it's a problem when the first thing people blame for bad writing is a diverse cast or the very idea of diversity in a work. Maybe you could argue that writers who "force diversity" are just bad writers, but like, it's not as if most people complaining about forced diversity are going out of their way to experience diverse works that are highly beloved, or works they might like. To give credit you did mention writing, but again, if someone makes a gay one-dimensional character, and someone makes a one-dimensional heterosexual character, there is really no difference in quality. Maybe you can't be a bit mad if the gay character is used as a marketing stunt, but ultimately it is a fruitless effort and should be talked about separately from the quality of the writing, which would be the actual problem. Otherwise it just comes off as pettiness. 

Even if this part of your post was just worded poorly and it's not what you intended, I've seen these arguments purposely made so many times that I feel it needs to be said in this thread. If it doesn't apply to you feel free to ignore it, but it probably applies to a lot of people on this site, whether they want to admit it or not.