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Any nerd hobbies that you're aware of that haven't succumbed to this? I really liked Magic as a kid and was thinking of trying to get back into it, but after reading that... maybe not.
No. I thought Battletech was immune... and then things got weird there too. Battletech by HBS basically extirpated white people from the region under the reasoning that a millennia of multiculturalism basically fucked the ethnicities we have today out of existence. It'd be fine for another setting, but 4 decades of lore for Battletech really push back against that retcon. It was very much a universe of monocultural colonies, with a few multicultural imperial capitals. Or sometimes worlds with one monoculture of colonist and then a more recent monoculture of colonist from a few hundred years later. They don't get along.
Lately things got so bad Catalyst Game Labs fired a fiction and source book author they've worked with for 30 years for wrong-think. Because the usual people with obvious personality disorders (and pronouns in their twitter bios, but I repeat myself) were crying crocodile tears about his hidden... I honestly can't even keep it straight. Some sort of cryptic lost causism or nazism he was hiding inside the Battletech fiction?
I've found myself retreating to retro PC games and woodworking. They are still very white, and very male, and lack any and all of the senseless, hateful, often self loathing compulsory white male bashing you see in other hobbies. But I'm afraid to get too attached. I feel like I'll blink and suddenly "Woodworking so white" will be a nationally trending hashtag, and suddenly every youtuber I've been watching the last year will have some sort of come to Jesus upload where they make all the politically required mouth sounds about how evil white people are, and how the hobby needs to "change" to become more "diverse and welcoming". And that will establish the new baseline, and every upload I see from then on will have preambles and postambles repeating the new politically required slogans. When all I fucking want is to watch an instructional video about how to assemble the apron, legs and surface of a table. Preferably with mortise and tenon joinery, and with some advice or tips about how to account for wood movement so the whole thing doesn't crack viciously after a few seasons.
I think BattleTech isn't completely lost. Tex of the Black Pants Legion is the closest thing to the face of the current BT fandom, and between him and the rest of the Legion, there's still a contingent of the fandom that leans right-of-left. When the Blaine Lee Pardoe thing went down, Hutz Fandango, one of Tex's editors, went so far as to try reaching out in the comments section of Razorfist's YouTube interview with Pardoe (I can't link this, though, it seems to be privated now).
The HBS game thing is news to me, as someone who played through the main campaign. Like, yes, a lot of characters in that story are dark-skinned, but the Aurigan Reach is also a Periphery nation, AKA literally the boonies as far as the colonized galaxy goes. You still get cameos from notable characters from the lore, and two in particular are still white guys. I haven't tried the more free-form career mode yet, but I'm willing to bet I'll at least find some white guys if I were to journey out to Steiner or Davion space.
I think a novel from the 80's/90's did mention the "great Inner Sphere genetic melting pot" or something like that. There is precedent for multiculturalism, but it can be quite weirder than modern progressives might expect.
Tex is a gift and a gentleman. But he's also chronically depressed and easily bullied. He's been pressured into disavowing other wrong-thinking Battletech content creators before. He likely will again. He'll likely either convert fully, or be bullied out of the fandom.
I dunno, there was that thing from when he talked with Arch. I doubt that made him friendlier to the woke.
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There are lots of RPGs besides D&D. If you still have nostalgia for D&D, the Old School Revolution is a broad community that has produced a ton of retro-clones based on various versions of the original game. (There is some wokeness in the OSR community, but being mostly made up of aging white dudes who played D&D when they were 12, it is, as you might expect, much less pronounced.)
Didn't the knives come out for OSR a few weeks/months ago?
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There are, but the RPG "community" increasing has the uber progressive as default, everyone else is a child devouring witch problem. There are open racist on one side... and open racist of a different valence on the other. The extremes have eaten the middle. You must decide if you hate white people, or hate brown people. Choosing not to choose is like thinking you can not join a gang in prison. You're just gonna get corn holed by both sides.
You know you can get by in prison by being otherwise useful? A friend got by by making snacks rather than joining a gang.
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