The recent decision by the modding community to incorporate a mod that promotes cultural erasure of Japanese culture in a Japanese game that is primarily centered on the experience of a Japanese student life in a rural Japanese town has so many problems in both logic and the naked racism of such a decision. The fact that such an obviously racist mod is seen as “controversial” whereas a mod that had the removal of pronouns in Starfield was immediately removed for anti-LGBT hatred speaks to the inequality that Asian people continue to face within the online gaming community. The fact of this cultural discrimination makes for a blunter truth about Western consumer culture in general. Western gamers largely enjoy Japanese products from cars, to anime, to video game consoles, to other electronics, and to so much more; yet, when it comes to giving equal respect? Japanese and Asian people more generally are stonewalled by the narcissism of Western culture. Enjoying material benefits of Japanese culture and arts is one thing, but equal respect? Never. Because Western culture constantly needs to maintain the delusion of being superior to everything that came before, after, and even in the present moment.

In forums, in comment sections, and increasingly throughout social media; people with anime profile pictures find themselves accused of the odious claim of pedophilia for arguing in favor of Free Speech and Free Expression within fictional content. Supporting an entrenched Enlightenment value that was once the cornerstone of the Western world is now met with the most disgusting and hostile of accusations whereby the people defending a long-held right to Free Expression in defense of another culture’s right to participate in the same freedoms that the West has enjoyed. Western gamers and Twitter users making these absurd and hate-motivated accusations. Many accuse anyone who disagrees of arguing in “bad faith” as if Western society itself has never benefitted from the same values being defended when arguing in favor of Japanese games. In my own experience, when pointing out the recent decision to censor Maya’s outfit in Dragon Quest Monsters: Dark Prince was an idiotic censorship move including the manner in which the censored edit was done, I was quite obnoxiously insulted with the disgusting accusations of pedophilia by predominately White male gamers. Maya was established to be eighteen years of age back when Dragon Quest IV was first released. Maya was never presented as a minor, but as a full-fledged adult dancer and her artistic depiction was quite clearly that of an adult. Yet, increasingly, accurate lore information and facts mean less than this increasingly hostile, obnoxious, and thoroughgoing racist hatred of anything related to Asian culture. It is an anti-foreign response that arguably has elements of McCarthyism from the Western public.

The most asinine aspect of all of this is that Western gamers, the LGBT community, and increasingly, Western society in general are just regurgitating the tired and bigoted forms of censorship from back in the 1990s while claiming to be moving toward some nebulous “new standard” for media. Unfortunately, in this case, both LGBT gamers and Western gamers more generally are using the most disgusting accusations without any logic or reasoning to them. It obviously goes beyond the examples made here. It is tired old bigotry blaming “foreign influences” and “foreign people” for the problems that Western society continually refuses to grapple with. Westerners are scapegoating Japan and Asian culture for domestic social problems related to pedophile Christian priests and registered sex offenders. More crucially, the US is scapegoating Japan, by willfully ignoring domestic laws like the Oliphant vs Suquamish 1978 Supreme Court decision imposed upon Native American reservations which has given registered sex offenders carte blanche access to rape and kid Indigenous children, women, and even men for forty years because the US Supreme Court under Rehnquist stated that Native American courts could not prosecute non-Natives coming in to rape and murder them. I was mocked with comments by my fellow Americans on social media to “touch grass” when pointing out the legal fact of this Supreme Court decision that is still imposed upon vulnerable Indigenous people today. The fact is, pedophiles continue residing in and benefitting from the protection of Christian Churches across the Western world, they continue to benefit from laws that protect pedophile abusers above their victims exclusively within the Western legal context, and it seems the hatred within Abrahamic culture of consensual adults having sex is to blame for the pedophilia rampant throughout Western culture. In the context of the US, and to get a clearer understanding of this to show this is not an attempt to vilify Western culture or Christianity more specifically, the majority of traditionally Black Churches don’t show evidence of the problems of rampant pedophilia that notoriously exist within predominately White Churches throughout the Western world. Nevertheless, they continue to exist and be ignored because of this pernicious cultural narcissism that pervades every facet of the multitude of Western civilizations.

To conclude, the modding community’s new design decisions shows a growing trend of racist hostility towards Asian culture and especially Japanese culture in an attempt to ignore domestic cultural issues and serious legal problems that are the real cause of pedophilia being rampant within Western societies. This cultural McCarthyistic attitude towards Japanese game developers and Japanese culture is simply abject racism. The creator of the “cringe” mod could not even explain why they referred to cultural events celebrating Japanese culture as “cringe” to begin with. The unspoken assumption that celebratory depictions of Asian culture and specifically Japanese culture constitutes “cringe” without any real reasoning or discussion shows a predatory and amorphous hatred that is now regrettably endorsed by some of the LGBT gaming community and among Western gamers. This hatred continues to increase unabated by reason and logic because of this nonsensical argument that anyone with a counterpoint is arguing in bad faith as a way to continue this narcissistic screed of hatred toward foreign cultures.