Gamergate wasn't just about journalistic integrity. It was a struggle for fundamental freedom in storytelling and a rebuke to SJW didacticism.
SJWs laugh at the idea of apolitical fiction and argue that "all fiction is political". While they are certainly correct that it is possible to impute political ideas and motives to just about any trope in a story, they clearly misunderstand what gamers meant by saying we wanted politics out of games. We didn't mean that we wanted no politics of any kind in storytelling because this is impossible; anyone can interpret anything as being political at any time, even a character sitting around staring at a Zen rock garden. What people actually meant by getting politics out of games was that yes, we actually did enjoy escapist fantasy, and no, we didn't want to be beaten over the head with heavy-handed moralizing all the time.
SJWs have this idiotic notion that all media should, one way or another, be instructive in nature, and that it should instruct the audience to believe in the
correct politics. That is, they believe all fiction should strive to influence the audience's beliefs in a positive manner. This is called propaganda. The intent of propaganda, unlike artistic media, is not to provide aesthetic pleasure but to cultivate specific values in the viewer. Propaganda can, admittedly, have artistic merit separate from the message. I'm sure plenty of people have looked at old American, Nazi, or Soviet propaganda posters and been moved by their striking composition or their use of bold geometric figures, but this is beside the point.
When people consume fictional media, their primary intent isn't to be dragged kicking and screaming back into reality and be lectured like a small child. Rather, they wish to experience a kind of controlled hallucination of another world and to derive aesthetic enjoyment from it. Being constantly bombarded with messages about current-year politics that quickly become dated is a recipe for destroying this illusion and forcing the viewer back into reality. In this sense, politics are anything that would break the spell and make the viewer realize they're looking at a simulation.
What we're dealing with here are actually two competing media ontologies; the SJW stance, of didactic media that exists primarily to confront the viewer and alter their belief structure, and the Gamer stance, of hypnotic media that exists to provide immersion, escape, aesthetic pleasure, and so on. Instruction versus Art.
The SJW pattern of didacticism is very rigid. In their conception of media, there are some categories of things that one must or must not depict, which are a grab bag of leftist ideology:
Must Depict:
- Uplifting portrayals of racial, gender, or sexual minorities
- Women and minorities in non-traditional roles
- Inclusive language
- Positive portrayals of socialism, collectivism, and/or communitarianism
- Circumspect and tasteful portrayals of physical, sexual, or verbal abuse that invite us to sympathize with the abused and despise the abuser
Must Not Depict:
- Genocide
- Torture
- Racism
- Sexism
- Homophobia
- Racial slurs
- Positive portrayals of settler colonialism
- Positive portrayals of police work
- Positive portrayals of capitalism
- Positive portrayals of fascist governments, even "benevolent" fascism
- Writing the Other (i.e. when an author writes extensively about a minority they don't belong to)
- Overly sexualized and attractive women
- Unrealistic body standards (this is the SJW term for good physical fitness)
- Eroticized rape or abuse
SJW didacticism creates a very narrowly defined category of what constitutes an acceptable protagonist, which looks something like a magical half-fairy, half-African woman who flies around with shimmering butterfly wings and shoots magic pixie dust from her hands and rights all the wrongs in the world with no effort and no moral conflict. SJW didacticism cannot withstand the Villain Protagonist challenge. That is to say, if I deliberately elect to write an immoral protagonist (like Walter White, or Yagami Light, or whatever), they're obviously going to have to engage in evil acts, which means they're going to end up doing one or more of the things on the naughty list.
But even with a nominally good protagonist, there are many,
many problems with SJW didacticism.
- Well-written protagonists are not perfect. They make mistakes. Sometimes, they break the law, experience friction with their allies, or do things that are blatantly immoral. If your protagonist is a racial or gender token, and you want them to be portrayed in the best possible light, then it follows that they're going to be a boringly moral goody two-shoes Lawful Good protag. As an author, one must have more options for crafting protagonists than "a minority who is also a living saint".
- People don't like reading about boringly perfect people who pull deus ex machinae out of their asses and solve problems with minimal effort. Most real people have imperfections, flaws, and shortcomings of their own and find it unrealistic to be asked to identify with someone who is literally, unattainably fucking perfect.
- Depiction is not endorsement. If you want to show brutal injustices to the viewer, you have to be willing to depict truly awful things. SJWs invite us to "imagine a better world" by sterilizing fiction of the aspects of reality that upset them the most, creating settings that are practical hugboxes.
- Constantly being on the receiving end of a moral lecture or being told that you're a terrible person for believing one thing or another is fucking exhausting and patronizing. Audiences don't like being condescended to.
- Their strict categories of acceptable content narrow the range and scope of possible stories, resulting in bland sameness rather than diversity.
Overall, the SJW project in fictional media is a project of censorship. They'll argue that it isn't censorship because it's voluntary and not government-directed, but the fact is that SJWs devote considerable time and energy to things like sensitivity reading (i.e., censorship) and taking over publishers to prevent the publication of media that contradicts their ideals. After pulling coups at Tor and Del Rey, they're perpetually outraged that publishers with a more libertarian bent like Baen exist.
This brings us to Sweet Baby. The idea of a one-stop consultancy providing not just sensitivity reading but also
doing all the worldbuilding for devs comes across as anathema to the creative process. Think about it. Why wouldn't gamedev studios rely on internal writers and designers for that? Why would they all contract with one single company to provide writing as a service? Modern gamedev honestly has way, way too much contractor work stitched together into a single product, which results in a hodgepodge mess that is aesthetically inconsistent. It really is reflected in the quality of the final product.
