Well its not always about the game itself. Its about the people behind it. If a developer or a consultant on a game has said on social media that they dont like white dudes or just white people in general(which happens way too often), then why should I as a white person support that game? And developers who say shit like that is not going to have a straight white male as their hero. Because that would go against their woke agenda. White people are either evil or bumbling comic relief in these games.

I'm with you in spirit on the topic of political censorship and attempts to pursue it. But on the flip side though, what say you to the now infinite number of "Bud Light moments" conservatives threaten every company and group promoting a concept of diversity on any level today or to the sheer volume of books they're getting banned from school libraries across the country today because of their "LGBT" content? (My favorite example being a book that was briefly flagged by a school library as "sexually explicit" because the author's last name was "Gay" last year. Now that is what I call giving away the game.) What say you to the cancellation of that trans sports episode of the Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur right after Trump's recent election win?

If there's one thing this last decade has taught me it's that nobody is innocent of trying to police the thoughts of people they disagree with...and those of their kids. The political skew of cancel culture at any given juncture just reflects who's ideas are more popular at that time, it seems. Of late it's been mostly conservatives who've been the purveyors thereof, capturing the fact that we're in a more conservative moment culturally right now.

Your argument is ironic.
Because the right wing also try and "cancel" games (I.E. Dragon Age) and also protest and shut down discussions/debates. See: Musk with Twitter.
See: Trump refusing to debate Kamala.

Have you ever thought that both sides are simply as bad as each other? Try and take a step back from it all and have a more comprehensive look at both sides, you might be surprised by it all. Or not. I don't care either way what someones political affiliation is, I'll just debate the points they present.

The further left or right you go, the more they are the same.

The best place to be is in the center where you don't have a bias.

I mean, Stellar Blade literally just happened, though it was the Left that ironically tried to cancel the game.  Unless Koreans don't qualify as PoC.  It's hard to keep up.  I actually just watched a video where a Chinese woman talked about someone telling her that she needed to recognize her "white privilege."  Seems that Asian people are a new target because they are successful so I dunno.

Regardless, I think it's obvious that most people don't care about the race of the protagonist.  There is no doubt in my mind that a really good Blade or Black Panther game would be a hit.  What people care about more is game developers weaponizing games to further their political agenda.  Developers themselves have created an environment where many previous fans actively distrust them, mostly because they seem to like preaching on social media.

Now, on a personal level, I find it pretty darn amusing.  Both the Left and the Right attack games because of the race and gender of the main character but both get upset when the other side does it.  Both do their best to cancel the games that offend them.  Seriously, how funny is that?

As an aside, I almost never use ambiguous terms like "woke" but the intense hang-wringing of the Left over their own word has me thinking about using it more.  I mean, people throwing around "chud" and "nazi" all over the place are upset about "woke"?  I mean, for real?

As an artist, my goal is to create my story, my vision. Whether people buy it or not, that is for the suits to figure out. Of course, I am not owned by a publisher etc, but then again, I never would allow myself to be owned by one. If I want to tell a story about a straight white male, I will. If I want to tell a story about a black lesbian, I will. But what I won't do is create worlds with some sort of diversity checklist in mind. Doing that is the antithesis or art, imo. I refuse.

As to your last point, I completely disagree. Why? Because you can not choose one without also inherently excluding the other, and isn't that how we got in this mess to begin with? Excluding groups because of their identity?

Again, merit is the only ethical way to choose the right person. Anything else is wrong and exclusionary.  

RE: Stellar Blade

There was no left wing mob trying to cancel it. A lot of these supposed left wing outrages are just hallucinations by the anti-woke crowd or extrapolations based on a few random twitter posts.

And Druckmann is creating his own vision of what he wants to see. That you don’t like his vision does not mean he is utilizing some “diversity checklist.” That’s you projecting your own bias onto him. 

I mean, welcome to capitalism. Art with a budget is made for an audience. I am all for people making what they want to make, but we're just fooling ourselves if we want to pretend that a game that a publisher is dropping hundreds of millions of dollars on is being made purely to fit an artistic vision. And again, there is nothing inherently wrong with appealing to an audience. Art can be made to appeal and still be made well. Since the beginning, games have been made for an audience in one way or another and that is fine.

Maybe a game is designed to really focus on the zen of travel as the artistic vision of the creator, like Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, however, the players largely ended up frustrated with how much filler time was spent getting from point A to point B. Because of this, the artists made their game more fit to the audience in the remake by adding a swift sail feature and trimming down some of the more tedious exploration quests like the triforce hunt. From what I recall, there was no outrage here about Nintendo compromising the artistic vision of the creators. People were instead happy that Nintendo listened to the fans and adapted the remake to better fit the desires of the audience....

I also just want to say, if someone makes a game with a black lesbian protagonist just because they truly want to, do you have any doubt that there would be tons of people saying it is woke, DEI trash?  

As for your point about exclusion, I don't think that makes any sense. I am arguing in favor of diversity, which means we aren't excluding straight white men, we are just including more groups in the room. If you think hiring a black person to help reflect the black culture that a game is attempting to portray is comparable to segregation, I don't think I can help you...

That's why I specifically took the entries that weren't about mythology. 

>In pre-colonial Andean culture, the Incas worshipped the chuqui chinchay, a dual-gendered god. Third-gender ritual attendants or shamans performed sacred rituals to honor this god.

This specifically talks about ritual attendants/shamans, not just the god itself.

It makes very little sense to recognize that there are people outside of a strict binary, and then dismiss it. Calling them genetic problems, doesn't change the fact that those people exist. 

Nonbinary people are also "rare", that doesn't change the fact that they exist and plenty of old cultures talked about them. 

You've misread. It isn't 100 genders. It's 100 different cases of Native Americans having a third gender.

Native Americans aren't a single group, there are several hundred different Native American cultures. 

A gender is a social role. Not a biological role. 

Sex is a biological spectrum, where most people generally fit in a binary. 

Gender is about the social role that comes with it.

"hand-wringing"? I feel like most left wingers I see are more so just laughing about the word "woke". 

I don't really see many people that are actually upset about the word usage. 

To me, it feels like if someone was throwing around "goody two shoes" as an insult, constantly. I would generally find it comical, maybe slightly annoying at times that it gets used so much. And also wondering how it's supposed to be an insult.

It's generally annoying when people are trying to insult someone/something based off nothing - this is an issue I often have with the left too. As they frequently interpret something to be the worst possible version that it could be.