That’s an excellent strawman you’ve built there, but you appear to have either missed my actual point, or have deemed it too difficult to refute and chosen to deliberately ignore it. So this time I’m going to put my most important words in bold, to ensure that neither you nor anyone reading this will miss them.
Unlike many on the internet, I don’t base my definition of “political themes vs. political propaganda” off of whether or not I agree with it - that’s a false assumption that you made. I base it off of whether or not the writing respects my intelligence enough to allow me to come to my own conclusions instead of trying to decide those conclusions for me. (I have repeatedly stated this elsewhere.) In other words, your responses are founded on an outright lie, and even if I give you the benefit of the doubt by applying them to what I actually said, you’re attempting to paint me as a “non-thinker” for disagreeing with the practice of writers trying to get viewers to unthinkingly agree with their opinion. Which is not just patently absurd, it’s also a disservice to your own position because it makes you come across as a hypocrite.
Moral superiority is not something you just have. It needs to be backed up with facts. And the fact is, you do not know me, you have never met me, and you do not have the authority to tell me what I am saying, much less to call my premise wrong on the basis of words you put into my mouth. So you can either debate me for real or you can agree to disagree and get on with your own life, but you will not half-ass your discourse with logical fallacies or personal attacks and then expect me to take you seriously.
Tell you what, I’ll concede that yes, that was an unfair thing to ask. I asked it specifically because those sorts of games are the ones that people complain about the most and I was feeling irritable that day. Instead, I’ll simply ask you to consider that, in the same vein, it’s equally unfair to demand specific examples of games being “political” (which, I will reiterate, is not the same thing as a game being about politics).
I believe this for two reasons. First, because bigoted sentiment doesn’t have to be overt to be noticeable - or, alternatively, game developers at least believe that to be the case, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t feel the need to make public statements about microaggressions. Second, because when people notice something that they consider prejudiced against them or their way of life, due to the way cognitive dissonance works, their brain will have a tendency to block out that memory unless it’s something so exceptionally angering as to be worth ranting about online. Combined, these cause a situation where a person will eventually feel discriminated against at an institutional level, but will not be able to articulate why, because the only examples they can name are the especially bad ones that get dismissed as outliers (Spider-Man 2’s “no removing the pride flags” controversy, Suicide Squad’s female-on-male sexual harassment, Starfield’s “FUCKIN’ PRONOUNS”, etc.)
By now you’re probably already thinking, “yeah, that happens with racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia too, what’s the difference?” Which is a fair point. The difference is that when someone says those specific forms of bigotry are happening to them, people on the internet will typically take their word for it. When a straight white cisgender man says he’s being discriminated against, it gets dismissed as whining, or worse, as deserved on the grounds of “white privilege” or something else of that sort. I don’t even need to give examples of it, you can see it in this very thread. But what those people fail to understand is, anyone who bases their opinions on the belief that white people are inherently advantaged in society is, by definition, a white supremacist.
My post kind of trailed off, but my point is, I believe that the reason the “gamers are all a bunch of racist white boys” angle being spread online by the likes of Sweet Baby is offensive is not because it’s racist against white people (which it is, but that’s beside the point), but because, the longer you think about it, the more apparent it becomes that it’s even more racist against everyone else. It actively works to tear people apart instead of bringing them together, and actively works to undermine the agency of marginalized groups by encouraging them to think of themselves as outcasts or victims of society instead of members of it. No matter how you slice it, the so-called DEI agenda is anti-diversity, anti-equity, and anti-inclusion.