I hope someday Battletech's curators are able to understand Family Friendly is not a brand but a context.
Of course no one intends for a free open game that might include seven-year-olds and seventy-year-olds to represent the seamier and uglier parts of the canon. Not every sourcebook needs to drip with sleazy neon and Canopian flowers. That's tautology.
But it would be appreciated if they did more than imply by the absence of contradiction. I don't mean Grimdark or a compensatory swing to absolutes.
I just mean to acknowledge they exist. The way they handle Pride isn't really any different but it feels disingenuous all the same simply because sexual and gender identity are about the wet subjectivities of flesh and that includes often very difficult lives.
Their fantastic vicarity shouldn't have to be different.
But it's progress they've started to chase out their bastards in even more explicit terms. The Go Woke, Go Broke bromide is as vapid as that despicable reactionary invocation. The more money the better for a brand.
And if they learn there are commercial limits to openness, fine- that's something that just has to be acknowledged so long as they have a business to run.
But I'd like them to try. I know people whose lives somehow are enriched by a bleak story of humanity's incorrigible cruelty and violence among the stars
who find uplift and happiness in giant war machines and their pilots
they're devoted enough to tolerate missteps.
We forgave the Dark Age and the continued noncanonicity of the Urbanlord, after all.
