It's definitely a very nice one.

Same, it's even harder if you ghost it.

"In the past, giving such things the benefit of the doubt has usually ended poorly. "

Yeah, because it's so much better to judge people, stamp them and insult them by calling them racists, based on your interpretation and perception.

You're one hell of a fella.

In the past, giving such things the benefit of the doubt has usually ended poorly. Racists, and indeed, bad people in general, thrive on plausible deniability, they thrive on being able to say "I didn't mean it (unless...)" so I have learned to assume the worst and act appropriately. This is a lesson I learned from harsh experience and it has left scars.

Perhaps I have allowed trauma to guide my actions here. Trauma that has left me dropping my personal rating of an FM by 2 to 3 stars on T...

I didn't really mean this to turn into an argument. In your review when you've said 'that I have since confirmed' I thought you found evidence that the author really meant it in a negative way and I was curious to see the proof. If it was confirmed you'd definitely have more of an argument on your hands and I would probably agree with you as that would put a bad taste in my mouth as well. But as it stands it feels really unfair to judge the entire FM as a whole over one word that may or may n...

The world is much larger than the anglosphere, and the same words can mean different things when translated literally to other languages. You don't know what the author meant (I assume he's Russian by his name?), probably it just was his imperfect English.

Assuming a guy from the other side of the world who knows English only as a foreign language is racist because he doesn't conform 100% to your own culture's acceptable vocabulary is honestly... kind of xenophobic, you know...

First of all, I don't aim to be entirely objective. I am a biased, fickle, person. I make sure my biases are known ("I don't like city missions") and I trust people reading my reviews to adjust their 'projected' scores up or down, as you have done yourself many times. (this is also why I state, outright, that I lowered the score, rather than doing it silently. Transparancy in where my rating is coming from is quite important to me)

That said, that overall point you are making Aemanyl, is v...

When reviewing works of art, and if one aims at being objective, it is important to take intent and context into account. For example, 19th century adventure novels of Kipling, Conrad, and Haggard contain a lot of tropes that are commonly considered problematic nowadays. Does that mean that we should rate them down for it, or dismiss them entirely? Most serious critics don't, because they understand that evaluating historical work by modern standards without accounting for context produces ab...