HomeNews
Hard Lads is a short meditation on masculine fragility and deck chairsGuys being dudes
Guys being dudes
Hard Lads is a painstaking recreation of viral 2015 videoBritish Lads Hit Each Other With Chair- wherein one lad kisses his eventual attacker, downs his drink, smashes it on the group, lights up a cig, and is promptly clobbered with a deck chair. You’ll want to watch that first, yeah?
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
More than just a quirky physics gag, however, Hard Lads is an attempt at ripping apart the bizarre homophobia at the root of British Lads. In anartist’s statement, Yang notes that “practically everyone in this video has failed this public test of masculinity”.
“The real insult is that they think queer energy can be dispelled so easily! The video shows howstraight mate energyis actually quite fragile. It just takes one minute to utterly destroy the lad’s masculinity on video. In the end, I argue that queer love is also the force that honors masculine vulnerability, and so only we have the power to reclaim these lads.”
This time, though, there’s no nudity. No sex. Just two bros sharing a kiss, a smoke, a beer, and a little bit of physical violence. Hard Lads is free / pay-what-you-want over onItch.
Disclosure: In between making raunchy queer games and teaching game design, Robert Yang occasionally writes for us at RPS. If you’re interested at all in level design and map-making, check out histwo-part retrospective on Counter-Strike’s infamous fy_iceworld.
