There are a few words/phrases that make me instantly enraged. PC used to be one of them because people used it in a pejorative fashion. If someone was crass enough to bring up diversity issues, they were admonished for being PC. That has morphed into ‘woke’, which also makes me grind my teeth. What I said or thought when someone bleated PC was, “Oh, you don’t want to treat people who aren’t like you with even the rudimentary courtesy?”
Same with woke. I saw a video on the home page of YouTube by a gamer guy titled, “No one wants to play ‘woke’ characters”. I immediately blocked him with extreme prejeudice. It’s astounding to me that white straight cis men in gaming are STILL whining about how minorities are destroying the industry. I’m trying to think of a game that is specifically minority-focused and can’t think of any triple A game. In the last year, I mean. Granted, I mosttly play From games and indie games, so I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the gaming industry.
But, I used to play casual games. Hidden Objects, Match-3, Time Management, etc. The Hidden Objects games have morphed (pun intended because there are morphing objects in the games now) into wanting to provide storylines.
Side note: Hardcore game series are often maligned for being repetitive and just churning them out every year. Your Collar Duties, your AssCreeds, etc. Which, true. But in the casual gaming world, it’s even worse. They pump out the same damn game with just a palette swap. They can do two or three a year beacuse the mechanics are the same for the series. The first one ore two are interesting, and then it gets boring. Granted, it’s only seven bucks per game, so it’s a bit more forgiveable, but still.
Anyway. Most of the stories have a female protagonists. I would estimate 75% when I played the games on the regular, which was a decade ago. More than. I figured it out that it was because it was women who played the games, by a wide margin. I used to read the reviews every now and again. One was from a guy who complained about the protags being women. It was for a game in which you could choose male or female (only two genders acknowledged back then), and he was saying it was nice to have the choice. Which is fine. But then he went on to say how horrible it was for him as a man not to feel a connection with the protag.
Which, wah, wah, wah. I will admit that my first response was not one of sympathy, empathy, or compassion. As someone who is never the target demo, it seemed a bit precious to me for a man to go into an area that is predominately for women and demand more.
I get it, though. If those are the kinds of games that he likes to play, yeah, he would want to see himself in it. But, you see, I can have that kind of empathy beacuse I’ve been there so many times and because I can do introspection. And I have so little patience for people who don’t have the capability/desire to do this. I can frogive, barely, the former (though I want nothing to do with them), but not the latter.
I understand that for most people it’s more the former mixed in with an unhealthy dollop of the latter. Most people are not blatantly saying, “Fuck it. I want to discriminate willy and indeed nilly.” At least not out loud or to the general public. They may believe it in their heads or say it to their friends (or, sadly, to any group of people they believe agree with them), but they are mostly canny enough not to say it in mixed company.
‘Cancel culture’ is the one that drives me completely around the bend, though. It’s usually used by conservatives to push back on any kind of push for equality. In the RKG Discord, when the Hogwarts game came out, there was a discussion about it. One guy made a comment about cancel culture (and poor, poor JKR being so targeted by those mean trans people. Ok, that’s not what he said, but that was the implication), and I made a polite-ish rejoinder about how cancel culture was better known by the term, ‘capitalism’ (it’s literally the basis for capitalism. If someone doesn’t want what you’re selling, you’ll go under. This is what pro-capitalists tout as a feature of capitalism, not a bug0. I ended by saying that JKR was going to be just fine, and she hadn’t been cancelled in any way.
What I wanted to say was fuck JKR. Fuck her and the TERF trolley she rode in on. She positions hereslf as being ‘just so concerned’ for women. Which women? Why does she get to decide who is and isn’t a woman? She’s not the gatekeeper to all womanhood. She’s has unimaginable power, and she’s using it to hurt trans people. And JKR apologists are all, “Oh, don’t be so meeeeean to her.”
When marriage equality was being debated, Matt Birk, then of the Minnesota Vikings had the vapors because us queers were being SO MEAN to him for having a difference of opinions!!! Why couldn’t we just be civil???
Because his behavior was heinous, even if his words were Minnesota nice. He was being deeply uncivil by saying I was less of a human being than he was, even if he wasn’t explicitly saying it. And you can’t pretty up “I don’t think you deserve equal human rights” no matter how hard you try. And believe you me, the bigots tried so hard to make it sound reasonable. “But my religion!!” Yeah, no. In theory, America is a non-religious country so your religion don’t mean shit to me. No, you can’t be discriminated against because of your religion, but by the same token, neither can I be discriminated against because of my lack of religion.
So, yeah. Even if cancel culture were actually a thing, it’s exactly what the conservatives claim to want. Let the market decide! That’s their mantra–until the market decides it’s had enough of their shit. Then it’s cancel culture.
In the particular case of JKR, it’s ludicrous for her to claim victimhood. She is the richest woman in England (at least I think she is since the queen died), and she is still selling out her product. If anything, she is setting her followers on anyone who dares disagree with her to really negative results. And, Britain is letting their anti-queer freak flag fly high and hard. I have no patience at all for that shit.