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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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If the option is somebody who might know less about cool thing y you're into, but also doesn't complain there are now non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing, a lot of people are going to side with the person who knows less because they're less annoying to be around, even if you don't care one way or another.

This doesn't really track, because if you don't care one way or another, then it'd make more sense to find the annoyance in the people complaining more, more loudly, more violently, more disruptively, etc, and the amount of extraneous noise and controversy created by people complaining the exact opposite - that there aren't enough non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing - is about an order of magnitude greater. If one is less bothered by calls for this ideology than against it, then that would mean that they certainly do care one way or another.

I'd also note that the description of these types of people "complain[ing] there are now non-sexy women or non-white people in prominent places within said cool thing" is highly uncharitable at best and just downright strawmanning at worst.

I think a big thing your side doesn't get is the actual reason for the desexualization of games is actually less evil SJW's, but the fact that programmers, engineers, and actual gamers are getting older, having kids, and it's far more defensible to a wife to be playing a game on the lbig living room TV with characters that look like the modern Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, or whatever the game people have determined is full of 'ugly' people, as opposed to the polygons with boobs of the late 90's.

This also doesn't track for a few reasons. One big one is the fact that the very idea that it's more defensible to a wife to have the modern visuals versus polygons with boobs of the late 90s on the big living room TV is an ideological one. To some extent, what visceral reaction someone has is outside of ideology, but deciding whether or not to submit to that visceral reaction certainly is within ideology. This was one of the core arguments in the fight for gay marriage in the 00s - some attempt was made to convince people just not to find the idea of gay men viscerally disgusting, but the larger point was made that even if you do find them gross, this should play no part in the way you treat them. If there was some movement to get rid of gay men in media because it's just far more defensible to display non-gay men on the big TV due to people tending to just find gay men gross (whether or not this is actually true isn't relevant), most people would recognize that this would be ideologues pushing forward their ideology.

And speaking of movements, another big issue here is that we do have explicitly ideological movements that explicitly call for the kinds of changes we're talking about, with self-proclaimed examples of changes made explicitly for hewing to the ideology. This doesn't mean literally every last case of these types of changes is ideologically motivated, but it certainly points in that direction generally.

And the types of changes we see are consistent with the explicit goals of the movement and not so much with just wanting to put more defensible stuff on the big screen (which, again, would still be due to ideologues pushing their ideology). If the motivation were just that, we'd expect to see changes generally limited to taking costumes from stripper-level to, I don't know, something like dinner party-level. Maybe make some armor more properly covering. But we're not limited to just that, including androgyni-fying women and adding racial/sexual-orientation diversity. "Defensible on the TV" can somewhat track for jiggle physics on women wearing stripper outfits (again, still ideological), but really, not at all for having characters that aren't sufficiently diverse in a racial/sexual-orientation dimension. That's the kind of thing that's barely even noticeable to a typical viewer, and the ones who do notice it almost always tend to do so for ideological reasons (the very idea that there's something to notice there is, in itself, ideological, of course).

Furthermore, all this taking place in the context of the general increased accessibility of media that, in the past, used to be considered inappropriate makes it rather doubtful that this particular case of media transformation is driven by some secular desire to avoid what's inappropriate to show on the big TV. Often, the very same individuals who call for putting less-sexy women in games are also the ones who call for exposing kids, wives, and other general laypeople to media that's even more sexually provocative than a sexy woman jiggling around in a stripper outfit. So the push for these changes is primarily a push for changing what people do and don't consider appropriate to see on the big living room TV - which is almost explicitly a goal openly espoused by a massive ideological movement right now (and has been for, well, I'd guess longer than I've been alive). Given all that, the idea that these changes aren't being driven by ideologues (who have openly said that they want to cause the types of changes that we're talking about now) but rather by individuals making decisions about the type of media they themselves would feel comfortable showing to others just doesn't hold water.

The causal connection between "type of game devs would feel comfortable showing on their living room TV" and "type of game devs would want to make" is also something that seems to have greatly weakened since the 90s as well. Because of the more niche, less lucrative nature of the industry in the 90s, dev teams tended to be small enough that you could believe that the main decisionmakers in major titles were ones who actually enjoyed those games and were working towards one that they would want to play. Today, due to how much those things have changed, the executives making these decisions have other priorities they have to meet. One would normally think that the overriding priority would be profit, but other entertainment media, namely movies and TV, have shown that ideology is an even more pleasurable drug than money to plenty of executives.

Exactly so. See the press eg. lambasting Stellar Blade while being ecstatic about very detailed gay sex and fucking bears in Baldur's Gate 3. The common denominator in the whole thing is that the activists are deeply against anything pleasing to heterosexual men.

It's the same sort of thing where if you track the various forms of cultural leftism for the last few decades, the common thread in all is that normal, European men and their culture are Bad and should be done away with. You won't find a single iteration with normal white men not at the bottom of the totem pole and at blame for all of society's ills.

This is the first I’ve heard of stellar blade. I guess since I don’t own a PlayStation?

I was paying attention before BG3 came out. They’d already built up a lot of more normal hype. Sequel to a long-neglected franchise, popular AA developer, good teasers…then they had that livestream.

Which of those apply to stellar blade?