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My context boils down to why and where someone is doing something. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with, for example, adapting the Hindu story of how Ram and Hanuman worked to defeat Ravana and his kingdom in Lanka for a non-Hindu audience. Spreading the story while retaining the messaging isn't inherently offensive. I don't share the idea that anything capitalism touches is tainted.
If someone made a Universal Character Customizer mod that allowed for an all-white Stardew Valley, I don't see any racism in either creation or downloading. If someone makes a mod explicitly for making the only black people white in that game, I'm going to conclude that either someone is trying to facilitate the creation of an all-white rural town that exists in reality, doesn't like the art for those black characters but can't make better art in the same "race", or they're being racist.
As I said, I'll be charitable to whatever reason someone gives me if they play with an all-white town. I ultimately don't give a fuck if the reason is straight up racism - it's your game, your experience, and no one has the right to tell you how you should be allowed to play it. But I'm not going to pretend there's no coherence to criticism of the mods themselves.
Edit: to address your edit, I think that race-bending is not inherently bad. So saying its widespread means nothing to me. I am more interested in why it may be happening, as that is where judgment can be passed.
Let me lay my cards fully on the table then.
I think what's good the goose is good for the gander. I've seen too many creators give nice, polite, explanation about how their choices to make cis white hetero characters anything but are driven by a affinity for diversity. Then I see their Twitter feeds, and it's obvious it's driven by a visceral hatred of cis white people with all the deranged anti-white nonsense they felt comfortable spewing when they thought nobody was looking, and nobody with any institutional power would call them to task for it.
So no, I no longer extend charity in the form of assuming gender/race/sexuality bending cis white characters is out of affinity for one rather than hatred for the other.
But I don't write the rules, and they get to launder their hatred as affinity through nearly every institutional organ. So who am I to judge the reasons why someone decides Stelaris should have a 100% European space humanity? Maybe they don't hate anybody and just really have an affinity for Europeans. They deserve at least as much charity as the overt racist I've seen in the industry on Twitter.
Yes, yes, I know that you and many others think that progressives are acting bad faith. Unless you think that I'm doing the same, which my history and my responses in this very thread clearly doesn't support, then you should address my actual arguments.
What arguments? You've given vague statements about acceptable reasons and unacceptable reasons, with a single example and a rather poor explanation of principle. You've danced around what you think of the rampant race/gender/sexuality bending in modern media such that I'm not really sure where you stand on it, but you seem to not care about diversity bending, assuming it's for "good reasons", and against white washing assuming it's for "bad reasons".
It all just seems like it's working backwards to give one group charity, and withhold it from another. I only see an object level double standard, because you believe you have some familiarity with the feeling and motivations of the people doing it. But all you have as your own biased guesses.
Nonsense. I rejected your assertion that one's modding choices would never reflect one's own politics, or just important beliefs. You didn't explain to me in the least whether any kind of positive gay representation is okay in a children's cartoon to you.
I explicitly said I supported all manner of race-bending, even making people white if necessary. Keep fighting the SJWs in your mind if you want, but don't pretend I'm taking part in your shadowboxing.
I could literally copy-paste this exact response every time you or someone else complains about a white character being made black.
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