There have been many graveyard threads on Era over the last year, and I think at this point many users have been silenced from speaking their mind. ResetEra is very much a beehive where you can get banned for expressing opinions, which is why the posts you see in such threads may not necessarily reflect the community as a whole. I personally don't really post in political or moral threads on Era any more as debates here have become difficult -- opinions are silenced and thus the only people left are people who just agree with each other. It's become masturbation, not actual discussion of serious issues, as only one opinion is often allowed. Thankfully that's not the case in more lighthearted threads, which would be most threads on the gaming side.
I have to agree. A junior member got banned from the other thread for an opinion that boiled down to "I will wait and see for myself how bad it is in the localisation" and that they didn't feel it was right for them to judge Catherine, a game they haven't played, as they study law and believe in seeing evidence for themselves first. They also said that maybe Erica experienced something in her past that caused her to transition and that whatever was changed to give her a quote-unquote "better life" could have had the domino effect of never causing her to transition in the first place.
That got the junior member banned, with reasons given being both their junior account status and transphobia, but I just don't see it in that person's replies. It's daft that I have to append this by saying
I side with trans people fully and encourage everyone to seek out the best possible version of themselves but those replies didn't sound like transphobia to me at all. Sure maybe they could be seen as tone-deaf and insensitive, but not transphobic. It then opens up the entire discussion about whether or not the need for some to transition is natal or environmental, something that can still be argued either way making that person's response even more reasonable to mention on the grander scale of said discussion.
I agree completely that there just isn't a means to having proper discussion here. If someone can't reasonably state their non-aggressive opinion and say "Hey guys, here's one reason where the change could possibly logically make sense" in a decidedly non-transphobic way? At that point it stops being a discussion. People just don't engage for fear of losing their account or standing. And someone who feels that they can't contribute for fear of being punished can't be challenged on the correctness or incorrectness of their opinion, and therefore might not learn as much as they otherwise would if they felt they were able to speak freely. It then gives the illusion that there is only one correct response for a thread like this which given the poll results is
demonstrably not the case. There is a reason why the poll says one thing and the discussion under the poll says something else.
Minds that do not benefit from the otherwise top-quality discussion that can be had on a platform such as ResetERA do not cease to exist or cease to be problematic; they just move somewhere else having gained no wisdom nor self-reflection. It's one thing to be told "You are wrong because..." and another to be told "We don't even want to hear you out, just leave" in a way that will only reinforce their radical thinking and cause them to seek out a much more damaging and transphobic forum. It's the entire reason why I also think that the people who tried to get Catherine added to the ResetERA ban list are just bonkers. What did they think that would acheive? You suddenly have a game that has provoked an uproar concerning the representation of trans people which despite being truly awful in this depiction can only progress trans discussion forward... and they would rather suppress it entirely? There's a huge culture of avoidance within ResetERA and so many people would rather plug their ears than challenge opposition proactively.
And I say all of this under the assumption that this post is the kind of thing that might get me my first warning because I'm talking about a banned junior member and the topics that got them banned, I'm talking about the website in a critical (and negative on a surface level) light
and I'm being contrarian to the overall tone of this discussion not because I side with or lend any credibility to transphobia but because I believe in a much more meaningful discourse in which minds
can be changed and people with problematic tendencies
can be challenged constructively. That is how you encourage progress.
