Doing that thing again. Some people are being dickheads, therefore nobody can call anything they do at any point into question. Two morons made a dud of a doc therefore anyone taking more than a minute and a half to point out some contradictions is a foaming at the mouth /pol/lock.
It's not just two guys making The Sarkeesian Effect. The Anita Sarkeesian deal goes back to her starting a kickstarter wanting to raise six grand to do a women in tropes in gaming video series. Ever since then, there has been some subset of people who have made it their personal duty to undermine everything involved, again, to the point of obsession. Frankly, Feminist Frequency and the Tropes videos are elementary feminist articulations and readings in mediums that haven't had that kind of critique done in them.
And this was going to happen regardless, because video games as a medium are being considerate academically valid avenues to study from a social and artistic standpoint. It's entertainment. It's culture. The same thing happened with film in the early part of the last century.
As far as it goes into 'calling things into question', I have to ask, why? Seriously, why? I understand the notion of a victim economy, but the 'quest for the truth' thing where every bit of data is scrutinized isnt something I can understand unless it is done by independent sources with no skin in the game. And that's the thing; the people involved with this already have a preconceived expectation and agenda going in. It's why the topic has become a culture war battleground for twenty-somethings. The information that is actually out there is literally funneled to fuel whichever fire you choose.
And that isn't false equivalency. I don't understand the general concept that making a tropes on video games webseries is remotely divisive. I don't understand how people can give so much of a shit about this to go to the lengths they do. Hell, I don't even understand this craving for a truth. Yeah, some want to posit that Anita and Zoe Quinn created the scenarios for their harassment, or that they utilized harassment to grow their profile, or that they completely fabricated their abuse in some Machavellian ploy...but if that were truly the case, I imagine there would be information to decide this that was more concrete and not subjective in its nature.
Holy fuck, I used tropes in a porn game and based it off someone people would be familiar with?! Holy shit, damning! ... unless you didn't see the character who was a right-wing hillbilly moonshiner blockading herself in the mountains that sends you off to steal "indoctrination" textbooks from the school. Forget that part? Or maybe did you think that was my genderbent self insert character and that's what I actually think? You know that game had an actual devil in it, too. What part of my psyche got exposed with that gem?
I'm not doing a Lacanian analysis about you based on the game you created. I've seen you talk about this subject matter elsewhere. That's the elaboration. Now, for whatever reason, you want to pull that part of a sentence out and make a paragraph out of it, trying to bludgeon me over all these other things inside the game to deflect from the fact that I've read your thoughts on this thing. I'm not asking you to answer for them. What I am saying, though, is that you've relinquished objective credibility because of it when you have the thesis that you do yet try to act like a diseffected outsider.
And just so we're clear, I contributed to the fund raising for that game, and enjoyed it, so it's not like I even remotely found the material to be offensive, so, Jesus, pump the brakes.
You're doing the exact same thing everyone else is; they're unable to be criticized in any form for any reason because other people are fuckheads. Nothing they say can be called into question because some other people are psychos, therefore anyone who would ever think negatively of them, to any extent, must actually think they're conniving cunts that should be murder. Afraid of them and wanting desperately to be harmed and/or murdered.
No.
I don't understand why
you care to
this extent about criticizing them. You talked about how Zoe Quinn was distancing herself from the UN appearance weeks ago, but you framed it under the context that the whole thing was universally derided so even she had the common sense to do the same. That's not the frame or the proper context of the event at all. They appeared before the UN the same day as a UN report on cyberbilling dropped that Quinn and Sarkeesian signed. However, when the report was released, it was clear it was flawed and shit.
It cited a source that pokemon games are sucking the souls out of children and turning them into mass murderers, and the only way to stop this was by electing whatever dipshit stated this president as credible.
Quinn was disappointed with the report, especially given how serious a problem cyberbulling is, in her mind. And most folks looked at said UN report as a disaster. That's the context here.
I think there is enough evidence to suggest that Anita and Zoe are credible with regards to the harassment they faced. Mind you, I'm saying them, not, say, Brianna Wu or Sarah Nyberg, who are ancillary trans figures who have tried to whisk away entire past behaviors like zoophilia or pedophilia under the guise of harassment.
