Developer Apologises for Injustice 2 Mobile Pride Event That Rewarded Players for Beating up a Bi Character

Through what can only be assumed as stemming from a terribly bad call of judgment, Injustice 2 Mobile has apologized for encouraging players to beat up canonically bisexual woman Poison Ivy as part of its Pride Month celebrations. And not just once, either. To trigger all of the available Injustice 2 Mobile Pride Month rewards, the game's playerbase was instructed to knock her down a whopping total of 450,000 times. That's quite the beating during a month all about love and respect.

As noted by Don Parsons over at Techraptor, the popular mobile fighting game made a big push for the Pride Global Challenge event over on its social media platforms at the start of the month. Players were commended for collectively wailing on Poison Ivy 175,000 times as of June 2 and encouraged to beat her up 225,000 more times to unlock the first of three cumulative rewards. At of today, that particular part of the event has been taken offline and an apology has been posted on Twitter.

Though it's unlikely the event was designed with any real malicious intent in mind, it does go a long way in showing how out of touch corporations can be during a time like Pride Month. The tie-in story simply stated the destruction left behind by big-bad Darkseid sent Entangling Poison Ivy on a rampage and that players were to "...help Heartbreaker Harley Quinn show that Friendship and Love con conquer all."

It was a simple enough comic-book premise with the right sort of message, but when one of the biggest fears of the LGBTQIA+ community is getting physically attacked (or even killed) for something as simple as their sexual orientation, "celebrating" it by beating the snot out of someone who falls under that umbrella is sure to raise concerns.

Highlighting a queer character for Pride Month is all well and good, but not when it encourages and rewards violence against the character you're attempting to champion for diversity brownie points. Violence against the LGBTQIA+ community is a very serious and very real problem, and showcasing it for the sake of Pride Month can go a long way in bringing up some memories some members of the community would rather not be reminded of.