The personal world-shifting effects of a loved one’s death are impossible to foresee in any real way. You predict sadness, you predict hopelessness, you predict feeling lost in your loss. But you don’t predict, or even abstractly understand, how absolutely sideways everything feels for weeks or months following.

I’m 12 years old, at a friend’s house for a sleepover. We’re laughing in her bunkbeds and doing hair on her lifesize Barbie hair model, and I am just coming to terms with the fact that I will never get the hang of French braids when her mom comes in.

We can and do bend the rules of reality to improve a user experience, and we have plenty of precedent for doing that. Removing the misogyny and racism from built-in dialogue is no different, and creators need to exercise that option.