AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Am I some sort of freak when I have no trouble playing a character of either gender?

You are an abomination

I prefer to play as non-human females if I have the choice.

Or robots.

Robots are mostly genderless and entirely about being awesome in every regard so they're cool too.

Oh no pandering to the target demographic.

I don't even know what my answer to the non-diverse game protagonist argument is.
Like, yeah, not every protagonist should be a white guy with brown hair and semi-muscular body tone but like

I have no problem playing as a female character. Heck, in most games, I tend to like female characters more than male characters because it feels like a lot of games go into more detail with the female's character dynamics than the male's. More often than not, the male characters are nothing more than I FIGHT FOR HONOR AND JUSTICE AND I AM THE HERO. Female characters tend to have more varied back stories and personalities, which makes them more compelling and interesting, in my opinion.

I like female characters for that reason, too.

It seems like most games which create female protagonists do a lot of extra work to make sure they're interesting, so that they'll be invested in by the player. There's that notion that guys won't play as girls, so it takes twice as much effort to get them to like a girl character. It's dumb, but it churns out good characters in the end, so it's not all bad I guess...?

That said, I can play as both equally. Whoever grabs my attention gets my controller.

This is almost exactly what happened to me.

I think it's less about what gender of character you like to play and more about the message it sends. If there's a whole lot of dudebros dudebroing it up, it seems like it's more "for" men, just like a game with a primarily female cast seems like it's more "for" women. If it seems like the game was made "for" one gender over another, people of the opposite gender will be less likely to play it unless it's something where the women in the game are pretty much just wank material.

(also maybe not the right place to discuss this??)

This just in: Metroid was made for women.

I kid.

firewall

making the computer hot

I can't even say that's just stupid people being stupid because I know doctors, top in their fields, who display similar "knowledge" of technology.