Gaming

I agree with this sentiment in respect to the idea that you're actually trying to learn something from what you're looking at. I agree, because I felt the same way when I watched censored WWII cartoons. If you're willing to learn from them, that's great, but here's the thing.

Not everybody is taking away the same things.

What you take away from it isn't what everyone takes from it. While you might rightfully not be a giant piece of shit yourself, there's a lot of people who are.

My personal example is growing up with the Grand Theft Auto series. As a youth, I thought concerns with it were more or less overblown, and I was more or less right, for the most part.

However, after the torture scene in GTA 5 and talking to a wider community about it, I started to realize a lot of people weren't learning anything good from that scene other than how to torture people, and a perverted glee in being able to do so.

And that's where I begin to worry, because while like, I'm in the middle of an Evil playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, like... It's hard to feel real "glee" at being evil. Many of the decisions I make tend to make me go "awwww" inside, but I tell myself "I can't get caught up in that if it's an evil playthrough." And in that sense is where I agree, because like, yeah, I should be allowed to play evil if I want.

But the reality also is that a lot of people don't care about the nuance and are looking for reasons to be pieces of shit, looking for dark things to make fun of, and are generally going to take horrible justifications from what they do learn, and yes, that does worry me a bit.

while everyone else only gets the PC mush of the moment.

You realize that while there might be some hamfisted attempts at this, that not all of them are so hamfisted, right? This statement doesn't inspire confidence that you see that.