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It's one thing to say that, for example, watching MCU movies because they're "in" at the moment doesn't mean you endorse the idea of capitalism, it's quite another to say that your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are. I explicitly use mods that many others find discomforting or crude because I don't ultimately care. But I wouldn't turn it back around and ask "Why are these people criticizing me????" The criticisms are coherent, I just reject them in the end.
Stardew Valley has had mods that turn the sole canonically black character and his half-black, half-white daughter totally white. I very much doubt this is because people thought he didn't fit in organically, he explicitly has an outsider background (comes from the city to the town). It's entirely valid to ask why someone may want a mod that turns this character white.
I say this as someone who agrees with your position on such mods. I truly don't give a fuck about someone making everyone in a game white or removing LGBT flags from a game, and I think mods that allow you to do those things are ultimately fine, just as mods that do the opposite are equally fine. But I'm not going to pretend the criticisms are invalid - I just don't share the values of those critics.
Probably because there's a lot of people who seem to think this man had a valid point. But what do I know, maybe all the people making a stand against indoctrination are shaking their heads at a man complaining about the expansion of an option that he could have gotten through in seconds.
By all means, I'll march alongside you when you want to complain about "pale, male, stale" is a thing. But I'm going to look at you quizzically if you also want to defend the idea that games shouldn't even try to be inclusive to people who aren't like you.
Sure, those are two different things, but the important thing is that they're both true. Deliberate modding choices don't tell us anything about where your lines are, except strictly within the realm of deliberate modding choices. To extend any implications outward to something else, like one's political opinions or personal ethics or whatever, is something that needs actual external empirical support. One doesn't get to project one's own worldview onto others and then demand that they be held to that standard.
Sure, we can certainly discuss what it says and how we would go about proving it and so on and so forth. What I reject is that idea that it doesn't say anything about you.
Edit: to more directly address your point, I do not believe that people's modding preferences are so obviously segregated from the rest of their views. In the context of Stardew Valley, I'll afford any person who wants it charity when they say they downloaded a mod that only made the only black person white because they didn't like his art or whatever, but I'll conclude that this person is more likely to be a racist than not.
Anecdotal evidence: there are several mods for Darkest Dungeon that are lewd. I don't believe that people who use them, including me, are misogynists, but I do think people using them aren't opposed to all objectification of people.
In the literal sense, nobody takes the other side of this, though. Trivially, if I make deliberate modding choices, then that tells the world that I made those deliberate modding choices. I think so few non-schizophrenic people would disagree with this as to be irrelevant. So claiming that it says something about me is meaningless: of course it does, because every choice I make trivially tells the world that I made that choice.
The point of contention is on the specific claims about what else these choices imply about me or any other generic choice-maker. E.g. if someone modded Stardew Valley to transform some brown pixels to beige ones, it's entirely possible that such a decision was motivated by the modder's deeply held philosophical/political/personal/etc. views which are bigoted, hateful, or whatever, but that can only be supported by additional external information. And merely knowing that this person made such a mod doesn't actually add any information or give us any data from which to construct the truth about that modder's motivations or beliefs or where their lines are. Again, with the exception of the trivial truth that it tells us a lot about the modder's desire to transform certain pixels.
The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.
Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.
I will absolutely sign on that race bending established characters is a good sign you are racist. Are you sure you've thought fully through who the racist are as a result of that?
I just said context matters. Why are you trying to get me to say that it doesn't?
Depends. Does your context boil down to "It's only bad when white people do it to black characters"?
Edit: Not a rhetorical question BTW. I'm too used to people using ambiguous claims of "context" to justify blatant double standards. I'm not sure if this is what your invocation is, or if you are agreeing with me that the relentless racebending, genderbending and sexuality bending of established characters is a pretty solid sign of hatred.
My context boils down to why and where someone is doing something. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with, for example, adapting the Hindu story of how Ram and Hanuman worked to defeat Ravana and his kingdom in Lanka for a non-Hindu audience. Spreading the story while retaining the messaging isn't inherently offensive. I don't share the idea that anything capitalism touches is tainted.
If someone made a Universal Character Customizer mod that allowed for an all-white Stardew Valley, I don't see any racism in either creation or downloading. If someone makes a mod explicitly for making the only black people white in that game, I'm going to conclude that either someone is trying to facilitate the creation of an all-white rural town that exists in reality, doesn't like the art for those black characters but can't make better art in the same "race", or they're being racist.
As I said, I'll be charitable to whatever reason someone gives me if they play with an all-white town. I ultimately don't give a fuck if the reason is straight up racism - it's your game, your experience, and no one has the right to tell you how you should be allowed to play it. But I'm not going to pretend there's no coherence to criticism of the mods themselves.
Edit: to address your edit, I think that race-bending is not inherently bad. So saying its widespread means nothing to me. I am more interested in why it may be happening, as that is where judgment can be passed.
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