i think people have gone out of their way to make this thread as welcoming as a thread dominated by people who share a particular opinion can be to people who don’t share that opinion, as long as the latter are not hostile about it and don’t repeat their arguments to the point of tedium. i mean, people (myself included) have even acknowledged their responsibility for contributing to a hostile atmosphere in the past, and apologised for doing so, and i think most of the regulars have done a pretty good job not getting heated in most cases (though there have been a few outbursts, but staff have shut those down pretty quickly).
of course, the big overhanging issue is that, well, this forum is dominated by that particular opinion, but i don’t think that’s something that can be fixed without restricting the terms of the discussion far more than they already have been. some of this is just because few of the people who don’t share that opinion stick around long. i think maidenofwar and enthralled are the only people who are still consistently arguing it to any significant extent, though i could be forgetting a few people (i openly admit to skimming a lot of the longer posts here because, as i’ve said before, i haven’t played ff7r yet and i’m just here to play statler and waldorf). if you’re bothered by the predominance of the cloudxtifa position here, be the change you want to see in the world! people aren’t going to argue your opinion for you.
but that’s easy for me to say when i don’t feel i have any personal stakes in the discussion.
(honestly, i don’t always even get worked up about discussions that do have personal stakes to me – these days, i’ll abstain from arguing politics in places where it’s likely just to stir up ill will, even though some issues like healthcare, disability rights, and queer rights are potentially life-and-death matters for me. i do enough activism in other aspects of my life that i don’t always feel a need to persuade everyone in my life to agree with my viewpoint all the time. i pick and choose my battles a lot more than i did when i was younger.)
anyway, i mean. i get why it’s intimidating to jump into a discussion where few people are expressing your viewpoint, but it’s not as if you’ll get run out of town on a rail for expressing it here, unless you’re just obnoxious about it.