I'd played Helldivers "back in the day", picking it up because it was a four-player couch co-op that my wife and most of our kids could all play together, but wasn't even aware that Helldivers 2 had come out until I saw clips on Twitter. I was surprised at the drastic shift in gameplay and quality, less so that it was woke due to reducing men and women to naught but a pair of body types.

I also wasn't surprised that people who merely claim to be opposed to wokism were still recommending it, as it happened many years ago with Horizon: Zero Dawn, though that wasn't as big a deal because I got it when it was on sale for something like seven bucks. Much more recently there was the live-action One Piece show: apparently blackwashing and overrepresentation are only bad when it happens in recycled Disney slop.

The excuses I tend to get, with body types at any rate, can be generally categorized as "not a big deal" or, somehow, "not woke". To address the latter: the first Helldivers game had you choose male or female. Helldivers 2 changed to body types, as did numerous other, more recent games, entirely by coincidence I'm sure. So, my question is:

How is this shift to remove the very mention of male and female not woke? If it's not to push an agenda, to socially engineer change in what is normal, to stigmatize beauty and celebrate ugliness, to "coerce behavior" as a certain company pouring fucktons of money into DEI/ESG put it, then what is the motivation behind it?