Tell you what, I’ll concede that yes, that was an unfair thing to ask. I asked it specifically because those sorts of games are the ones that people complain about the most and I was feeling irritable that day. Instead, I’ll simply ask you to consider that, in the same vein, it’s equally unfair to demand specific examples of games being “political” (which, I will reiterate, is not the same thing as a game being about politics).

I believe this for two reasons. First, because bigoted sentiment doesn’t have to be overt to be noticeable - or, alternatively, game developers at least believe that to be the case, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t feel the need to make public statements about microaggressions. Second, because when people notice something that they consider prejudiced against them or their way of life, due to the way cognitive dissonance works, their brain will have a tendency to block out that memory unless it’s something so exceptionally angering as to be worth ranting about online. Combined, these cause a situation where a person will eventually feel discriminated against at an institutional level, but will not be able to articulate why, because the only examples they can name are the especially bad ones that get dismissed as outliers (Spider-Man 2’s “no removing the pride flags” controversy, Suicide Squad’s female-on-male sexual harassment, Starfield’s “FUCKIN’ PRONOUNS”, etc.)

By now you’re probably already thinking, “yeah, that happens with racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia too, what’s the difference?” Which is a fair point. The difference is that when someone says those specific forms of bigotry are happening to them, people on the internet will typically take their word for it. When a straight white cisgender man says he’s being discriminated against, it gets dismissed as whining, or worse, as deserved on the grounds of “white privilege” or something else of that sort. I don’t even need to give examples of it, you can see it in this very thread. But what those people fail to understand is, anyone who bases their opinions on the belief that white people are inherently advantaged in society is, by definition, a white supremacist.

My post kind of trailed off, but my point is, I believe that the reason the “gamers are all a bunch of racist white boys” angle being spread online by the likes of Sweet Baby is offensive is not because it’s racist against white people (which it is, but that’s beside the point), but because, the longer you think about it, the more apparent it becomes that it’s even more racist against everyone else. It actively works to tear people apart instead of bringing them together, and actively works to undermine the agency of marginalized groups by encouraging them to think of themselves as outcasts or victims of society instead of members of it. No matter how you slice it, the so-called DEI agenda is anti-diversity, anti-equity, and anti-inclusion.

That’s an excellent strawman you’ve built there, but you appear to have either missed my actual point, or have deemed it too difficult to refute and chosen to deliberately ignore it. So this time I’m going to put my most important words in bold, to ensure that neither you nor anyone reading this will miss them.

Unlike many on the internet, I don’t base my definition of “political themes vs. political propaganda” off of whether or not I agree with it - that’s a false assumption that you made. I base it off of whether or not the writing respects my intelligence enough to allow me to come to my own conclusions instead of trying to decide those conclusions for me. (I have repeatedly stated this elsewhere.) In other words, your responses are founded on an outright lie, and even if I give you the benefit of the doubt by applying them to what I actually said, you’re attempting to paint me as a “non-thinker” for disagreeing with the practice of writers trying to get viewers to unthinkingly agree with their opinion. Which is not just patently absurd, it’s also a disservice to your own position because it makes you come across as a hypocrite.

Moral superiority is not something you just have. It needs to be backed up with facts. And the fact is, you do not know me, you have never met me, and you do not have the authority to tell me what I am saying, much less to call my premise wrong on the basis of words you put into my mouth. So you can either debate me for real or you can agree to disagree and get on with your own life, but you will not half-ass your discourse with logical fallacies or personal attacks and then expect me to take you seriously.

Don’t you have something better to do with your time than baselessly call people white supremacists on the internet?

I know you aren’t actually interested in hearing any more examples, so I’ll keep this short and name the example that comes right off the top of my head: Timespinner. Every bad guy is a straight white man and none of the characters considered sympathetic are more than one of those three things. And its writing is the worst thing about it.

If you’d care to show me some examples of games which are recent, western-made, high-budget, and have a white male protagonist who isn’t constantly getting put down by the game’s own narrative to prop up someone more politically correct, I’d genuinely love to hear them.

Would you care to offer any examples of that or would you rather do the same? I said I want in-game diversity to feel natural instead of like the writer getting on a soapbox. That’s as far from racist as you can get. The comment above me repeating the claim that characters who aren’t straight white men are required to be saddled with real-world current-day rhetoric instead of being allowed to just exist - THAT’S what’s racist.

I tried, but apparently people would rather downvote than listen.

This is the single worst take in existence. I see it everywhere and it contributes nothing. There’s a difference between a game having politics in it and a game being political. A game with politics in it typically has a message with complexity and nuance and attempts to get people to ask questions by immersing them in an environment where philosophical ideas can be explored. A game that’s political typically has no message beyond “straight white men are inherently evil and cause all of the world’s problems”, and forgoes subtlety, nuance, and often even basic storytelling in favor of shouting that message in the viewer’s face as often and as loudly as it can, vainly attempting to tell its audience outright what the writer thinks they should believe no matter how much the end product’s quality suffers.

There are always people who will complain about black people, gay people and trans people being in a game at all. But don’t lump those people in with people who are simply sick of their entertainment trying to guilt-trip them into hating themselves for having physical traits they never asked for and can’t control, otherwise your message becomes this:

“There are
Many genders: The good ones, and male
Many races: The good ones, and white
Many orientations: The good ones, and straight”

And that’s an opinion only possessed by those narcissistic enough to consider their own prejudices more justified than anyone else’s. I don’t want to hear any of that “prejudice plus power” nonsense. Bigotry is bigotry is bigotry. And we all deserve better.

The fact that people are downvoting you for speaking an objective fact is a travesty. Diversity is only as political as the writer chooses to make it, and having characters of different races, genders and orientations without putting in the effort to make them feel three-dimensional will not magically make a badly-written game into a good one.

Didn’t this have something to do with male temple prostitutes? Something about it being a pagan ritual to ensure a good harvest? My recollection is blurry, but I swear I read that somewhere.

Then Randy Savage breaks out the steel chair, right?

With some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Wait, really? I heard that what happened is they’d decided to be sneaky by patenting the control system for a heavier-than-air flying machine since they couldn’t patent the idea of the machine itself. Do you have sources I can research?

I try not to assign a motive to opinions either, so I’ll try to explain further to ensure you can fully understand my viewpoint.

My requirement that a character’s qualities have sufficient justification applies to white characters as well, hence my Wakanda example. As you said, that would be incongruous change, and the thing that makes it incongruous is the fact that you’re dealing with an exception. It’s important to note that, in many works that take place in a version of the real world, especially modern America, white people are assumed, even by non-white viewers, to have an inbuilt justification for existing in a story by virtue of being considered the ethnic majority - not saying that’s a good thing, or a bad thing, just that that assumption exists. Since that is not the case in the context of a cloistered Sub-Saharan African nation, any white characters that appear therefore require more specific explanations for their presence. This is, needless to say, why every white character in Black Panther is a foreigner.

Thinking about it, though, I also realize now that Annie is perhaps a bad example, since the original story also takes place in the United States iirc, and any story set in an American city can automatically be reasonably assumed to have people from all walks of life living there, so no explanations are really needed. Even if you were to also make Daddy Warbucks black, and set it in a time period where a wealthy black man would be considered an unusual or exceptional thing, all you would have to do is have some visual indication of how he got his money (such as a framed business degree, for example), and suddenly his status not only makes sense, it also subtly establishes something about his character (“He defied the odds through hard work and intelligence!”) that can be built upon as the story progresses. In fact, ideally, you want that level of characterization for every character, regardless of whether they’re a minority.

Really, it’s in the more fantastical examples that things start to become muddled, since in-built justifications can’t exist in a world that is not like our own. But that also means that you can be looser with your explanations, since in fantasy settings, internal consistency is more important than realism. In my Little Mermaid example, you probably didn’t question the idea of mermaids looking like humans from the same part of the world, despite the fact that if merfolk were real, they would live underwater and thus have no need to evolve different skin pigmentations. Consistency is the reason for this. But in The Lord of the Rings, which is implied to be set in our own world’s mystical past, dark-skinned humans already exist, and since they come from a far-off continent, their complexion can be reasonably assumed to be way it is for the same reason as in real life: An adaptation to an equatorial climate. So when Rings of Power introduces black elves, and then does NOT have them also come from another part of the world, that consistency is broken unless an alternative explanation is given.

Hopefully I’ve expressed my perspective clearly and concisely. Any type of person can exist in any setting and any story, so long as any concerns about potential inconsistencies are acknowledged and addressed. At the other end of the scale, you can even dismiss those concerns entirely and deliberately tell a story with zero regard for historical accuracy. What matters is that it’s a conscious design decision and that the audience is aware of what to expect going in. Knowing those expectations is a big part of the balancing act of being a writer.

Neither does trying to apply arbitrary labels to people in an attempt to discredit them. Ad hominem is considered a logical fallacy for a reason. If you think I’m wrong about something, show me why you believe that, and I will concede if your arguments are valid. So far, you’ve instead opted to call me a sealion for suggesting that a socially-harmful blanket generalization like “men are bad and dangerous and don’t respect women” requires more proof than someone’s personal anecdotes and feelings. You’d want proof if someone on the internet was calling black people criminals or women gold-diggers or trans people child molesters, and as I’ve already had to state previously, discrimination and prejudice do not become okay based on how you personally feel about the group you’re discriminating against. If they did, then the douchebag in the comic would be morally justified.

“Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.” - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Listen. I am not angry at you, but I feel you need to understand a few things.

First of all, attempting to twist what I say to support your existing assumptions about men is not the way to engage in healthy discourse. If you go into a thread looking for something to get offended about, you’ll find it, regardless of whether it’s actually offensive, and if you go into it already totally convinced of your own moral superiority, you lose out on the opportunity to learn something.

Secondly, while I’m on the topic of assumptions, not wanting to approach someone for fear they’ll prematurely judge you is absolutely a reasonable decision. At the very least, it’s hardly more unreasonable than the notion that everyone bigger than you is going to kill you if you say the wrong thing. Yes, obviously it can happen. I’m not arguing that. But if some guy on the internet demanded that you prove to every man you talk to that you’re not going to falsely accuse them of raping you if they tell you they aren’t interested in you, you would rightfully tell him to fuck off, because A) proving intentions is impossible, B) you could just as easily just never talk to men instead of jumping through a bunch of hoops, and C) you should not have to. Besides, if women being murdered for rejecting men is really as scarily common as you claim, then by your logic, having fewer men approaching women is a good thing, and therefore, calling men fragile for giving up on dating is counter-productive to your assumed goal.

And finally, I must say, accusing other people of having “hurt fee-fees” is pretty brazen of you, considering that you’ve done nothing but respond with hostility and insults, whereas I’ve tried to be considerate of your feelings and even straight up apologized to you. Clearly something must happened to you to make you feel the way you do about men, and I sympathize with your situation, but I speak from experience when I say that having trauma does not make a person entitled to spread hatred. As you said, if a man is not a murderer, then in an ideal world, that would be the end of it. But you have made it clear through your words that whether someone is a murderer or not is less important to you than whether or not you fear they could be, and when you judge people by that metric, you become part of the problem you claim to want to solve.

Pull me into the plot with believable and relatable characters and I’ll never question why they’re the race/gender/sexual orientation they are.

That’s the right attitude to have about it. 👍 Audiences love closure and they love verisimilitude. If I’m watching a movie and I’m shown how (or can reasonably assume from context that) a character having certain traits makes sense, it doesn’t strain suspension of disbelief at all and can turn a great movie into an outstanding one. And I think that’s something that screenwriters need to pay heavy attention to, because there are no bad ideas, there’s only bad execution.

In fact, just for fun, let’s take the two movies you mentioned as examples. I haven’t watched either of them and know little about them. If you were to tell me “write scripts for adaptations of these two stories where the main characters are black”, it would be lazy, disrespectful to the viewer, and arguably even racist to just do that without giving it any forethought - they’d be as out of place as a white man in Wakanda. But if you put down, for example, “this adaptation of Annie takes place in the cultural melting pot of modern-day New York City” or “Ariel and her sisters are all different races because Triton has taken many wives from all over the world”, and then make that clear through context clues, now the idea of them being black no longer feels like an afterthought, it feels like it was a conscious decision and that time and attention was given to making them feel like they belong. And while it would frankly be better for studios to knock it off with the constant rehashing and write new stories (not everyone likes Jordan Peele’s stuff, but few would call it derivative), a remake done with care and respect is better than one done without them.

To offer a shortened version of the reply I gave to another user who asked that same question, barely at all. But many men are so afraid of becoming that one in a million example that they don’t want to take that chance. The same can be said of women who are afraid of being murdered for turning a guy down - they feel the risk isn’t worth the reward. While both of those fears are understandable, I personally feel that they are also contributing to the degradation of the dating pool, which is what leads to situations like the one in the comic, as fewer well-adjusted men choose to approach women and more poorly-adjusted men come in to take their place. The solution is obvious, but it’s also difficult: People need to be better to each other by taking more chances and giving more chances. Otherwise we’ll have more lonely people in ten years than we already do.

It’s actually not common at all. But the few examples of it happening were bad enough that it has deterred a lot of men from approaching women at all. Plus, regular, reasonable guys don’t like the idea of asking out a woman who’s immediately afraid he’ll kill her if she says no, not just because they don’t like the idea of potentially making her uncomfortable just by approaching her, but also because even if she says yes, a relationship that has that level of fear or distrust right off the bat is doomed. Which of course leads to a vicious cycle, where the only men asking women out are douchebags, and then those women’s perception of men becomes worse. Nobody likes this cycle, but the only way to fix it is for people to be better to each other.

A sharp wit is more attractive than any physical feature.