Let’s take a look at a few responses…

• Wow. WOW. You guys made ANDREW HUSSIE take the Caucasian joke completely out of his comic. *slow claps* That… I don’t even know what to say. You made one of the only people who could say and do whatever they damn well please change, completely missing the point of trolling, sarcasm, irony, etc. Happy now? Isn’t censorship so much fun? Welcome to the real world, do you think it gets any better? Or are you just happy when you’re on the other side of the joke?

• Am I the only one who wasn’t a butthurt socialjusticefag about hussie’s headcannon joke and actually lolled rather than pouting

• I will simply say that this is what can happen when a webcomic gets huge like Homestuck does.  You simply draw your imaginary webcomic character as a different color, and every hypersensitive freak has a meltdown over it. This is why social justice is an inherent constraining force on all art.  Social justice is in essence a form of censorship, which is antithetical to art.

• Manning the fuck up? He did nothing wrong. He didn’t do it to start a fight, he even said so himself. It’s you, the idiot bitch who gets upset when white people are in existence (which is racism by the way) that caused him to change it. If you don’t like that, maybe you should commit suicide!

These are just a few, picked out semi-randomly, ranging from “mild, but missing the point” to “unspeakably terrible”.

Ironically, attitudes like this were much more responsible for my decision to change the joke than any form of “SJW crusading”.

In fact I didn’t even really see all that much reactionary SJ boilerplate in response to it. I did notice a lot of people expressing some reasonable opinions about it, and being met with an excessive amount of rhetoric like this.

Again, I can’t say I wasn’t expecting a mixed reaction to the joke. But stuff like this, in such high volume, is well beyond the result I wanted. It’s fine if you found the original joke funny, but if you defend it to others in this way you aren’t speaking for me. Your straw man arguments are not my own, and by making the joke I was not authorizing you to harass others. By changing the joke I’m just taking responsibility for not thinking these outcomes all the way through.

I’ve said I thought the joke was funny. But if some feel differently, and I see them being widely attacked for it; that doesn’t mean I won’t empathize with them because I’m so convinced “THEY JUST DON’T GET IT!” And seeing too many people with that exact attitude was what first got me thinking “yeah, I gotta change this.”

This is why the claim “social justice is in essence a form of censorship” is so ironic here. Because the forces of social justice aren’t actually making me change anything. In this case, it’s actually the people who OPPOSE those concerns in the ugliest manner who motivated me to “censor” myself.

Most people here would agree that some SJ enthusiasts can get pretty carried away. But if you feel convinced social justice is a crushing form of censorship, you might want to rethink that idea. Because apparently “one of the only people who could say and do whatever they damn well pleased” for the first time ever decided to redact a joke, not because of SJ bloggers, but because of the behavior of their most strident critics. And if you truly dislike censorship, and do not wish to see more self-censorship in the future, then you would be doing your part to behave in a way that doesn’t make creators feel embarrassed to be defended by you.