What do you guys do when your hobbies get political for a bit?

I pretty readily abandon the aspects of my hobby that reveal themselves to be unworthy of my time. So just as an example, I play a bunch of videogames. There was a small content creator on youtube that I followed regularly and really enjoyed his reviews. I thought he was putting out some of the best most reliable game reviews on the platform.

But slowly, throughout the last couple of years . . . more and more of his political views started creeping into the videos. It became harder and harder to ignore how he would not like characters or stories because of issues around inclusion. It came to a head when reviewing a game preview called Second Extinction (a co-op class based PvE shooter) when he went off on this rant about how a black woman had no business being the character class that carried a heavy machine gun.

In a sci-fi future game about shooting dinosaurs.

It kind of didn't matter how much I otherwise thought his views on game design and ability to dig up undiscovered gems were first rate - I just . . .

I don't need people complaining about women in videogames in my ear.

Maybe that's me participating in cancel culture, but nobody told me to stop watching. It wasn't coordinated. I made a personal choice not to watch his content anymore. Thankfully "videogames" is a really broad genre with a lot of different voices and this small content creator is just one voice among many. The thing that's going to kill my enjoyment of videogames in the next 5 years is the monetization model taking over the industry if anything.

I've been playing videogames my whole life and I honestly don't see myself buying any new titles or AAA products even 2 years from now. The next gen rollout's a fuckin joke. All the new games are fuckin terrible. Everything's a monetized-through-the-nose cash grab. All the studios are getting consolidated. Crypto ruined PC gaming. All the major platforms suck. Fuck videogames right now.

The personal is political. I don’t think you can have a society and apolitical hobbies.

I really like reptiles and amphibians. I've had pet snakes, lizards, and frogs for over 2 decades now. Most people in the hobby are confederate flag waving conservatives. Breeder conventions have become hotbeds for anti-liberal sentiment, with "Let's Go Brandon" and confederate flag shirts often sold alongside cornsnakes.

So I've avoided conventions. I've avoided online reptile/amphibian forums, and I've focused a lot more on working with the 2 frogs (both rescues) that I currently have. I also seek out Youtube channels and forums full of people that aren't political about the hobby. They're out there.

If I don’t like what I’m seeing politically-speaking in that hobby, I’ll probably take a break from them for a while. It takes my mind off of those things.

The truth is that everything is political somehow, particularly if part of your hobby is reading public opinion about it.

If you participate in a hobby instead of just reading other people's opinion about it, you don't necessarily have to take breaks. Otherwise, you could just switch to another hobby temporarily.

I love gaming but the stupidity around Gamergate almost ruined the hobby for me. My suggestion is just enjoy watching the games themselves and ignore commentary or social media posts. I pretty much gave up following gaming news for nearly two years.

That being said, if you find hockey is untenable from a political standpoint then you might need to find a different sport to watch. I gave up on the NFL because I felt they came out too harshly on kneeling players while at the same time ignoring truly terrible off-field behavior. The major issue with TBI sealed the deal for me and now I’m a much bigger baseball fan.

Everything is political. I enjoy playing video games and there's almost always politics. A lot of the entertainment value comes from the politics although the politics are usually black and white.

I personally just turn my brain off and ignore it and accept it for what it is. I can't really do anything to really change the political landscape of the game I'm playing so I just play the game for fun. When politics affects the real life portion of gaming, I just ignore that too. I know gamergate is a thing but I just didn't look in to it so I know nothing about it. I know that republicans point at video game violence as the cause for mass shootings but I know that republicans are dumbfucks so I just ignore it.

There are some politics in games that I do find interesting though:

The German and Australian ratings boards refused to classify Left 4 Dead 2 when it launched in November 2009 because of its violence and gore. Eventually, Valve released a censored version of the game that ditched the dismemberment, pulled blood splatter and made zombies disappear as soon as you kill them.

I just find that really interesting. But at the end of the day, it's politics. I can choose to engage or not to engage.

I don’t really view them as separable. Everything is political. My hobbies influence the causes I care about and vice versa.

I engage in it... probably to the detriment of my mental health. But it seems like the thing to do in the moment....

That's for my hobbies in general. For individual creators or personalities, if I feel like their politics hurts my enjoyment of their product I just drop them without a second thought. Maybe I revisit after things have blown over to see if I feel any differently,.

If my hobby has become political, there's a reason for it. The whole point here is to call attention to a cause that isn't receiving enough of our attention. It would strike me as selfish, narrow-minded, and a reflection of my privilege if someone started raising awareness of a problem and my response was "omg stop messing with my sheltered existence and let me continue ignoring these problems in my ignorant bliss". Making us uncomfortable and stopping us from burying our heads in the sand IS the point and is not something we ought to strive to avoid. The question here is framed as "how do you get around having to confront uncomfortable realities about the world" and I'm just not interested in that.

I'm a huge football fan but I've been open and honest about the allegations of physical / sexual assault against players on my own team (Adrian Peterson in particular), as well as the league's involvement with racial issues and blind patriotism in general. These things are even more prominent in basketball which I also watch. The backlash against companies like Activision Blizzard because of their Bro Culture has likewise made me re-evaluate my support of companies like these.

I choose to listen.

Depends what it is and how it's handled. If Oscar Isaac starts spouting neo nazi propaganda and Marvel doesn't do shit about it, I'd probably not watch Moon Knight...but if a video resurfaced from when he was 17 years old and in black face but he says it was a dumbest teenager thing to do, I'll still watch it.

I'm in the Society for Creative Anachronism, a fairly large and established medieval reenacting group. About 5 years ago, a newly crowned king and queen in Southern California caused a stink by being crowned in outfits featuring swastikas on the trim. More recently, a prominent member posted a racist rant online and it was discovered that his SCA character name was a concentration camp reference.

As much as modern politics shouldn't matter and I just want to have sword fights with my buddies, you can't escape the real world. I've had to get more political when my hobby has gotten more political. There are two concepts I want to discuss for why this is.

The first is exclusionary inclusion: who are you excluding by being inclusive? If you're letting people with exclusionary ideas, especially racists, you're excluding people who aren't comfortable or welcome around those people. I'm a white guy and I may be able to get along great with people who have racist ideas that don't affect me directly, but a person of color might not feel nearly as welcome.

Second, we need to think about "missing stairs". Imagine there is a guy who is super friendly and well liked, but he's known to get overly handsy with women sometimes. It's a missing stair because like a broken step on a staircase, regulars know when to avoid him but new people don't and might fall victim.

I don't ever want to be political in my hobby, but I also want cool people to reenact with. If I don't exclude the racist or the creep, I'm excluding everyone else. There's no apolitical solution. This even goes as far as people knowing I don't agree with the racist member, even though he's several states away from me group. You can't be neutral when discussing discrimination.

Of course this is from the perspective of a small, organized hobby group. I understand a large corporate sports league has different realities as anyone can declare themselves a fan, but hopefully this post gives you something to discover.

The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.

For context:

I'm a hockey fan, there was an issue with a minor league hockey team and a 'racist' taunt. I say it like that because even though at the time it was treated as racist, the news coming out afterwards is enough to cast strong doubt on the intentions of the offending player. However the offending player was cut from his team, branded a racist online, and suspended indefinitely (though eligible to come back after dealing with sensitivity training).

Thing is now all I'm seeing is post after post trying to exonerate the offender, people saying intent is what matters rather than action (due to the league suspension being based on how it made a player feel, and not the intent of the offender), and "cancel culture!" It's really started eating into my enjoyment of reading up on hockey news... which is one of my de-stressors from political reading.

I'm curious, outside of obviously not going to the sub for a few days, do you guys have any other ways to enjoy your 'stuff' when it gets political and/or you disagree with what's happening? How do you take a break from a hobby or interest... especially when it's hard not to care or in my case middle of the season?

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Apart from the standard radical-lefist answer that EVERYTHING is political, I'll say...

I see this in comic books a lot. There has been an uptick in the last 15 years in the comics industry of so-called "Liberal agenda." That has brought out a lot of people on the far right, in protest, trying to make their own, either racist or reactionary comics, or simply being vocal about the supposedly "Leftist agenda" lol.

When you remind them that comics have ALWAYS been political, and the superhero genre has been related to SOCIAL JUSTICE, ever since Superman was dropping NAZIS from tall buildings in the 1930's, beating the shit out of abusive spouses, or hauling Adolph Hitler off to the Geneva Convention.... the right gets really mad when you point these things out.

I see a lot of movies, watching about 8 to 10 a week on average... there's a lot of mysogyny in movies... a lot of sexism... and also capitalist propaganda in film which angers me, the occasional racist tropes pop up, and sometimes you even see justifications for colonialism and genocide... usually when I see these things I either have to call them out to whoever is with me OR I have just ignore it.

I try not to allow my politics affect my enjoyment of the media I consume... That said, I'm not gonna run out and rent movies or read books that promote white supremacy or fascism either.

For the record, I think that if a player said something questionably racist, and I’m going to assume that there’s some genuine controversy over it (and I’m happy to explain what I mean here), and there’s a viable and relatively swift path back to play after being educated on the topic, then there’s no real harm done and it’s being handled correctly.

The reason that sensitivity training exists, is first to fill in the gaps in knowledge or awareness that someone could genuinely not have (example: an immigrant player might have an imperfect grasp of language, and might accidentally use a slur). Second, it removes any plausible deniability next time it happens.

All that aside, I think it’s highly reasonable to need spaces in your life that are apolitical, or relatively so. Politics can be exhausting, mentally and emotionally, and it is unsustainable to expend all of your energy/empathy all of the time. You could describe it as emotional labor, or an adjacent concept, if that’s what you’re into.

I don’t like people who try to shame others for engaging in self-care, and it’s absolutely valid to need a space dedicated to a topic besides politics. Frequently, and I believe in bad faith, this is painted as attacks on free speech, or else an attempt to silence one or more points of view.

There’s also people out there who have no personality or interests besides politics. It’s very okay to find those people exhausting, and need a break from them too.

I just ignore those topics. I keep visiting r/hockey and just ignore the threads about any political situation(unless it's to dumpster Bertuzzi, because, you know, fuck Bertuzzi).

Outside of social media, we don't discuss politics. When I go play beer league or my dek league, that shit stays off the rink. That's my outlet where I just want to enjoy the game and everyone else has the same idea. I think one time we had someone that tried to make the whole mask thing political and everyone basically shut that shit down. Look, the mask is barely on your face to begin with, who cares.

Everything has always been political or has involved some sort of social issue. The only difference is that different people are being challenged.

I’m Black and Gay and also a sports fan. Politics / social issues have been inseparable from my experience since the beginning. You just gotta accept that their will be disagreements and that some people are idiots.

In the increased politicization of the us, I tried to avoid politics as much as possible.

One of my main hobbies is landscaping and raising flowers. It is zen-like as I don’t have to talk to anyone and fortunately politics have not crept into it.

My other hobby is watching sports. Politicos has crept into it. I honestly just try to ignore or watch more college sports where politics is less of an issue.

Someone said something racist.

That person was removed, as they should be.

Racists on line are defending the original racist.

Where are you confused? Just ignore the racists and watch hockey. You can't do anything about them.