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Admittedly I mostly play murderhobo games nowadays bc I consider many stories so bad that not having one is an improvement over the average in my book, but there is a large difference between catering to your audience and catering to something else. The first creates bad writing in a general sense, but as long as it's in a way your target audience wants you're fine. In the latter case - and catering to DEI is just a subtype here - you're just obliterating all goodwill for no goddamn reason. And DEI people have a particular knack for outright insulting the main userbase of beloved franchises to boot.
Though I guess we agree overall. I'm just pissed by my niche interest games always eventually getting captured by casualization in terms of game mechanics on one hand, and by wokification in terms of the story on the other, and it always seems to go this particular direction, never the other. I even agree on DE, while I think 'bordering on political propanganda' is an understatement, he tailor-made the entire setting to suit his political beliefs, but I did genuinely enjoy most of the story and he skillfully just barely dunks enough on marxists and unionists.
I don't think Kurvitz and Hindpere made it to spread leftist ideas, although they probably aren't unhappy with it doing so. I suppose it's similar to the question of whether you consider Narnia to be 'Christian propaganda'. Certainly Lewis wrote it as Christian, and deeply informed by his Christianity, and with a positive Christian message, but at the same time his commentary is pretty clear that a lot of it just came to him as an interesting story, and he didn't set out to write it teach children to become (better) Christians in a real sense, it's not pure propaganda designed to proselytize.
Yes, Narnia has always been a bit too much of an obviously christian setting with a christian message for me to really enjoy. I wouldn't feel awkward calling it "christian propaganda", I guess. I'm not full on death-of-the-author, but authorial intent is not very high in my book and so I only marginally distinguish between "explicitly intended for propaganda" and "the author is so steeped in a certain ideology that his entire writing is indistinguishable from propaganda, even if he does not intend to do that".
Yeah, I can see that for sure. There's a scale along which every writer, especially if they're a politically involved or strongly opinionated person (which most great authors are), pushes their views. I don't disagree that most art is in some way political. But I think if there is a distinction between intentional propaganda and "the author is so steeped in a certain ideology that his entire writing is indistinguishable from propaganda, even if he does not intend to do that" as you say, it's more about the fact that the author consciously employing tools to convince the audience of their politics usually translates into poor storytelling.
I actually feel like Narnia is a good example of this, in that I think that through the series, there's a very real change in it that pushes it more towards what I would consider to be propaganda, in a negative sense. Maybe that's my own tastes or whatever, but I think it makes something clear, that it's not such a cut or dry thing. It's not that certain ideas or concepts are in your book, it's how they're presented. (Although I still argue that I think it would be absurdly difficult to present the content of the last book in a way that doesn't go deep into this)
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