@vometia
I agree, people shouldnt be dicks to eachother. The reason I bother pointing out stuff like the UN declaration of human rights is that a lot of people these days are very fond of calling anything and everything racism. Thats a very iffy move since a lot of countries that have legal provisions for free speech also have some of their exceptions to that freedom built around racism.
I genuinely do think its a bad thing to be a dick to people, but I also recognize that things tend to get bad quickly when the state takes upon itself to prevent things that are "grossly offence".
I do broadly agree that letting governments decide what is and isn't "grossly offensive" can go bad if the government in question is allowed too much discretion on the issue, but it has to be said that if we don't want governments to be making that call, then private industries and private citizens need to do so. I refuse to accept that "doing nothing" is an adequate response. So if private bodies aren't going to address the issue (and bear in mind that sensitivity readers are an attempt to do this) then the government will ultimately have no choice but to step in.
As for sensetivity readers I suspect people are very weary about such terms based on what they have seen happening in pop culture as of late. There might be a very benine model for what a sensetivity reader is supposed to do, but then there is the thing about humans being flawed beings who do not always do what they are supposed to with the power/influence given to them.
There are for example numerous examples of popular marvel characters that have been given to someone who doesnt have the track record traditionally required to get that kind of job but do tick certain inclusivity boxes, who the proceed to do write the character in such a way that tanks the sales and insulting their readers on twitter.
People dont mind diversity in fantasy, DnD has been a diverse space for decades before it became a popular buzzword. What they mind is hamfisted diversity at the expense of story shoved into the books, movies and games they love.
You make a decent point here but I have to point out that there are even more examples of straight white men without the required track record being given those characters to work on and also ultimately tanking sales in various ways. What we're seeing now is women and people of colour and other diverse voices being given chances and inevitably some of them are failing, but their failures routinely get used as excuses to demonstrate that the attempt to integrate diversity is a flawed project from the start, whereas when a white man does it, it's just considered a failure on their own personal part. If it's considered a failure at all, given how often white men in any industry get to fail and fail over and over yet still continue to be relevant and be given more responsibility.
And as a final note, I get annoyed at how people talk about "diversity" like it's some singular thing when what it really is is acknowledging the stories and experiences of people who aren't considered societies default. Is some of that gonna be bad? Obviously, because a decent chunk of everything is bad. But people need to stop using the fact that there are bad examples of diversity being introduced into popular properties as justification that it shouldn't be there.
