Struggling to see how this impacted Spiderman, Alan Wake and GoW negatively.
Don't know about Spidey and haven't gotten far into Alan Wake 2 but GOWR's writing is godawful, especially when it comes down to its characters.
Kratos is damn near unrecognizable at times and they leaned to heavily onto his newfound "empathetic side,". There's a point in the story where he tries to comfort Freya over the death of Baldur by relating it to his own struggles, something Kratos never does. He becomes so damn annoying to Freya that she straight up tells him to STFU and keep killing things to which Kratos like a manbaby replies, "don't tell me that!" as if it's supposed to remind him of when he was in service to Ares. What makes this moronic is that Kratos despite being cold and distant has great emotional maturity and understands when to shut his mouth and let someone grieve and even counseled Atreus several times in the first game over letting someone have their space and let them mourn and not interfere. There's also Atreus getting hostile towards Kratos and calling his father an asshole like a 21st century angsty teen, which again, is completely at odds with how a child raised by a Norsewoman and a Greek Spartan warrior would act. A kid with that background would never raise their voice at their parents, let alone insult them. The entire game is a disaster of writing, even ignoring the stuff that is unrelated to diversity/sensitivity/inclusivity.
As for Alan Wake II, my only gripes with the game is that Saga, a black woman, has a Nordic name and so did her mom and grandfather. From my understanding however, she is biracial and her grandfather is white so it's a bit less jarring. This is reminiscent of those new-age writers trying to shove diversity into traditionally non-diverse setting such as that Netflix TV show that has a black (biracial) woman as the Jarl of some Viking clan which is ridiculous. They even attempted to justify this obviously agenda-driven choice by claiming that Norse tribes were racially diverse. GTFO with this bullshit. This is typical of those people though, they would never make an effort to research about black/African/Caribbean culture, it's not worth their time to so they'd rather just shoehorn them into European culture and pretend it was always diverse and inclusive. If they were honest and well-intentioned, they would research history about different cultures and attempt to seamlessly integrate them into their work but nah, better blackwash/colorwash European culture instead. It's all about money, and what sells is European settings. Better try to colorwash it instead of breaking the status quo and present people more diverse settings. I've even seen on Gaf people dying for more games about Aztecs or other pre-colonial American civilizations but you never hear about them from inclusivity writers.
For instance, I would have loved for Saga to be named after a Caribbean or African deity. People know too little about them and we barely see them in media besides Haitian Voodoo which is maligned and incorrectly presented as being evil and all about black magic and curses when pretty much every Haitian voodoo faithful is also a Christian. I would love for writers to tell more about Mesoamerican, African, Caribbean, Southeast Asian, and other cultures. Throwing a bunch of different ethnicities into traditionally white settings does absolutely nothing for representation or diversity. It just gives a warped sense of history that never happened and misinforms people about what the past was like. Sorry, the world at large was never inclusive anywhere. Most cultures and civilizations were intolerant of things that disagreed with their worldviews and were suspicious of outsiders most of the time and considered them inferior. That goes for Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, Nubians, Aztetcs, and damn near every other culture out there.
And last thing, I've worked with 3 different companies over the past 6 years and had to attend those diversity training sessions. They were always led by "privileged" white women. Nothing against them but that's simply what I observed.
/endrant
