BattleTech community closes ranks to support the creators of an LGBTQ fanzine

polygon.com:

A crisis of conscience compelled the original creator of the BattleTech subreddit to clean house over the weekend. That creator, Reddit user ddevil63, returned with a vengeance, removing every single moderator of the 15-year-old, nearly 50,000-member message board after those mods had repeatedly banned any mention of a fan-made BattleTech-themed zine written by queer authors. Representatives of BattleTech publisher Catalyst Game Labs tell Polygon they are now in contact with ddevil63 and working on a new way forward for the at times toxic online community of big stompy robot fans.

BattleTech Pride Anthology 2023: Queer Tales from the Inner Sphere is a fan-made zine with five short stories produced by queer authors. The zine features a forward with contributions by author Michael A. Stackpole and a short story by Russell Zimmerman, both authors of officially licensed BattleTech content. But when the BattleTech Pride Anthology was initially mentioned on the BattleTech subreddit, it was repeatedly taken down by moderators for violating what they said were several longstanding rules against injecting politics into the message board. But users pushed back, noting among other things that the existence of queer people is not a political issue at all — their erasure, however, is.

That’s when ddevil63 rolled in, called bullshit on the entire moderation process, hit a few buttons, and started over from scratch.

“I originally created r/battletech 15 years ago because I wanted a place to talk about Battletech on Reddit,” ddevil63 wrote on Sunday. “I have not been active as a moderator or contributor but I regularly read posts and comments. Yesterday was when I became aware of the removal of the Pride Anthology post and the