Timboli: When the bully is bigger and badder than you are, you live to fight another day in another way.
And remember, all revolutions come from within, and it often means doing that old Roman thing of, if you can't beat them join them, and change them from within.
And it's not over until it is, and the large person sings.
P.S. My problem is I am a realist, not a reactionary. I like to weigh up reality and then respond in accordance with it, making no definite claims without definite enough data ... unlike some who just let their emotions override good thought and due diligence. I might claim possibilities, but that is all I claim. GOG are a pain in the ass sometimes, but some here go overboard when they attack them.
China's making a move to secure more and more power. Realistically, this means that this is a battleground, which means there's actually hope to win it. If this wasn't a battle ground, we wouldn't be having this conversation. The bully is bigger and badder than we are, but we're not fighting in their territory, but our own. We don't exactly have much of a chance of fighting this in China. However, we have a pretty good chance of fighting this here in the west. I do thin kthe boycott route is not exactly the best avenue, but instead a grass roots PR campaign. China's mostly focused on the PR right now, and it's all about slowly creeping their censorship into the west. China clearly doesn't really care about the damn pooh jokes. No, what China is upset with is that their firewall is ineffective, and their own people are seeing this stuff, and that they can't even ban it from their own country. So, they're trying to bully with what power they do have to try to remove it from elsewhere. If, instead, people started anti-china pooh meming, china would be in trouble, especially if it was multiple platforms. Not only would their people see a resistance, without the need for translation, but they'd also see that China's powerless to prevent them from seeing it. All they can do is back off and tighten their firewall, which might also include kicking google, steam, gog, and everyone else out, too. It's like having a big bad bully that's deathly afraid of hermit crabs. This is all about china trying to play with the global market while continuing to censor their internal population.
Similarly, the same shenanigans are going on in the middle-east. I've seen arguments from muslims that the reason they need ISIS and the like is to stop the west from"spreading corruption in the land." Like, you know, romance scenes in movies, porn, LGBTQIA+, etc, which seems to be mostly what they're focused on, but they have other complaints as well.
Just make them choose between the global market and protecting their citizenry from external criticism. That's really all it takes. What are the social media platforms going to do? Block and ban all pooh related stuff? Does anyone honestly think that most people, even among the different political factions, would be cool with that? The only thing they could do to safe face is adopt the damn bear, themselves, but then they'd be showing their people that they've changable with numbers, and that chances a revolution. They cracked down way too hard and invested way too much in preventing this, that they basically created their own damn weakspot.