Ah yes. It was the people asking that maybe people should be more consciencous and to not be openly terrible who are to blame for it all…
Not the entitled asshats who puffed up their chests and screamed “You can’t tell me what to do!” when someone told them "You’re being kinda hurtful could you please stop? "
Here’s the thing when your life sucks because people are being regularly being awful. Not mentioning anything and being quiet and meek and accepting of other people basically being a regular impingment on your ability to flourish or be comfortable doesn’t change your circumstances. They are just gunna keep being awful and draining your batteries. Also those people flipped the fuck out over “hey maybe the way women are depicted in videogames is kind of male centric and kind of shit if you aren’t a guy” and in response went on a terror campaign to literally ruin the lives of those who decided to mention that maybe they were dreaming of a better situation. That little over-reaction was not proportionate in scope.
Fighting for empathy is a hard business. The “anti-woke” can never truly win as what they seek to suppress will always be there. They must always exert force because that dissatisfaction and misery that underlies the asks won’t go away… it can be silenced, rendered mute by fear and consequences of retaliation and stifled for another generation but the cost is that the boot must always be forced down because it’s never quite able to eliminate that final resistance of people coming into existance who realize they aren’t who society is built for and who have no option but to suffer. The people beneath the boot might be weakened temporarily as the fight ebbs and flows but the harder the boot comes down the deeper the dispair the more desperate the resistance.
Just the implications that people are unhappy does not sit well with the anti-woke crowd. They resent the idea that people’s unhappiness is directly caused by them which rubs uncomfortably against their idea of the world as an ultimately fair place. Hence why they always argue that people are lying and exaggerating their discomfort. That the facts are wrong, that the people they are causing pain to deserve it somehow. It’s all just lame dodges around the central issue. They are causing discomfort. They can choose to double down and cause more, ignore it or rationalize it or choose to believe that they as the truest form of being knows what’s best for the people experiencing it- indeed better than the people who live that experience … But they cannot end it.
The notion that what they are being asked to do won’t individually impact them very much is something that they scoff at and then just ignore spaces where these adaptations have been successful. The landscape of gaming became a little more equitable after gamergate because some developers basically just realized that yeah, maybe they were undercutting women and changing formulas a little does kind of expand their market? Gamergate threw their tantrum but most of them barely registered that gaming still continued to service their needs while expanding it’s service to others but because they were on to throwing a tantrum about something else they never really registered that what changed was… fine actually?