>>715925434
I'd personally define it like this:
"Woke" is a shortened form of "awoken" meant to represent a state of enlightenment.
This is a mindset and a practice where you prioritize your political and/or social agendas over your current task.
This includes but isn't limited to: writing stories, making music, convention attendence, casual conversation, etc.
For example: a person who's on a no-meat diet tries to tell you that meat is bad and you should stop eating meat (without sufficient evidence or due to underlying political motives) is a "woke" person. Similarly a person putting in a black or gay person into a fiction without a tangible benefit to the story is also "woke". To be fair, a person putting a white person into a fiction without tangible benefit is also woke, like if Mulan were a white girl. Sure she'd be pretty but it's completely non-sensical unless you make it some sort of isekai logic and the fact that she's white is essential to your story.
When you're writing a story, the coherence and entertainment value of the story should take priority. A person who's "woke" will prioritize their agenda over the story. All characters should be subserviant to the story and not the other way around, which is how you get "token" characters.
>but old games were political too!!
Correct, but people confuse the exitence of politics with the priority of the politics in said entertainment.
A good example for positive political use:
>Metal Gear Solid series
where the anti-nuclear, anti-war messages are prevalent but takes a backseat to the whole game and its story
A good example for negative political use:
>Dragon Age Veilguard
entire scenes were built around the gender political scene, not the other way around
You can see this in non-vidya too. Why did Aragorn need to be black? Did it serve a story purpose? No. It was purely to push an agenda.
