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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kurotowa" data-source="post: 8527646" data-attributes="member: 27957">Indeed. Let's spin an example that's removed from the thorny tangle of race, gender, sexuality, and all that jazz.There's a style of novel that's all about strong military men and women making hard choices and taking decisive action to save the day, while the weak civilian bureaucrats can only get in the way with their corruption and pointless regulations before they're (at best) pushed aside or (at worst) suffer an ironic death or summery execution. You see it come up in Mil Sci-Fi and others.Now, that style isn't my cup on tea. I was raised on the more Doctor Who style of science fiction where the military are aggressively trigger happy and it takes the calm rational judgment of scientists and civilian leaders to sort things out without setting off needless wars. Also my brother is one of those government bureaucrats, and to my eye he goes out of his way to try and be of service to the community, so painting them all as cowards and weaklings doesn't go over well with me. But to each their own, and I accept that Mil Sci-Fi has an audience.Now, it's fine to have different works that reflect the different assumptions and biases of the authors. I'm free to pick and choose which of them I invest my time and money in. But from a business perspective, the creators have to be aware of which audience segments they attract or repel with their choices. And while "creative integrity" is a nice buzzword, it gets complicated with legacy shared worlds that have existed for decades and passed through many hands. Creators often walk a fine line between respecting the past and staying true to their own voice and reflecting cultural shifts. And it just gets messier with RPGs, where the creator's assumptions about how the world works are often made bluntly explicit in the game rules, rather than depending on the art of literary criticism to decipher the difference between character voice and authorial voice.So yes, it's very easily claim that a work is harmless escapist fantasy when it adheres to your own assumptions about how the world works. But that doesn't mean everyone else will see it the same way. People who seen an RPG's rules encoding the assumptions or attitudes that have caused them pain in real life are either going to walk away or play with gritted teeth. So both as a business and as persons empathetic to the pain of others, the creators have to make choices about what gets a pass as harmless entertainment and what's classified as decidedly harmful and needs to be cut.</blockquote>

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