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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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... I'm a bi furry, so I get what you're coming from. 'Ew, gay' wasn't just a joke limited to samef**s on 4chan, but a mainstay both in and outside of fandom spaces, tolerated in schools, and something I got from even my own family. I was a furry before SomethingAwful discovered The Easiest Target, and despite how much worse it got, it wasn't great before that.

But I also don't think it's terribly honest to compare that to a 'deepest worry' as the 'average bust size of the women in video games'. In tabletop, we're not just seeing people try to establish XX-phenotype'd space marines -- for screw over the lore or themes of 40k, it's not like the non-woke behavior from Games Workshop has been slow to do the same problems either. We just had a recent D&D history that couldn't hold its fire on calling its original authors every type of intentional evil under the sun, while people start reading entrails of games they've disemboweled for signs of The Dreaded Enemy. But those aren't concrete.

In literature, Correia's rant argument stands on its own, and there's been a prolonged campaign to try to get Sanderson, and then there's Mercedes Lackey. For video games, I'll point again to a guy getting driven of an open-source project he's run for more than a decade, in part by threats at his co-contributors' employment if he didn't step down, because he made rude comments about a (trans) spree shooter.

Nor are these rules that 'just' impact the big-names.

And I think that's kinda a distraction. The argument for against using 'gay' as an insult wasn't "we're gonna do it to 'straight white male', and it'll be fair, then". The argument for having options for a female character other than 'tits out McGee' or 'fridged' wasn't to make the only acceptable character archetype variations on Velma from Scooby Doo. I can (and have) made the argument that this was in part for the benefit of many of the people the LGBT and woke movements are themselves claiming to protect, jettisoned in favor of a world of bubble wrap.

But even that's a distraction: this retreat is bad not just because it hurts the subaltern, or betrays its own promises, but because it is wrong at its core, and to all it impacts.