Last night, as you may have heard, the woman known to #GamerGaters as “Literally Who 2” pulled off a bit of a media coup, appearing on The Colbert Report for a brief interview by the sympathetic Colbert, who gently satirized some of the sillier “arguments” of the Gaters with a series of deliberatly obtuse questions. You know, his regular schtick.
When Anita Sarkeesian posted the picture above (well, a non-blurry version of it) to Twitter yesterday evening, thus alerting the world to her upcoming appearance on Colbert’s show, it set off a wave of panic and despair on 8chan’s /gg/ board, one of the central organizing hubs of the GamerGate “movement.”
Some declared it a disaster, the end of GamerGate, while others tried to rally the troops with melodramatic speeches. Still others set forth bizarre conspiracy theories about the evil SJWs who allegedly control the media.
There was so much amazing stuff there that I knew I had to start screencapping like mad.
And so, without further ado, here are the Top 22 Most Ridiculous Things Said on 8Chan About Anita Sarkeesian’s Appearance on the Colbert Report.
1) One anon advised the 8chan army on how to turn this truckload of lemons into lemonade:
2) This fella was a little less optimistic. Somehow I’m guessing a lot of his conversations involve bizarrely detailed exegeses of the sinister plots of Cultural Marxism.
3) This fellow suggested that 8chan might be able to lobby Congress for some legislation that would put an end to the SJW “gang.”
4) There were a lot of posts like this. GamerGaters just can’t help talking like cartoon supervillains.
5) This guy urgently warned fellow 8channers not to even discuss the highly charged issue of misogyny, ending his little speech with a bizarre kicker not only denying that 8channers had anything to do with the threats and doxxing that have driven Sarkeesian from her home, but flatly denied that the threats and doxxing even happened at all.
6) This fella lamented Colbert’s terrible betrayal, and the effect this would have on his late-night television viewing.
7) And this charming post reminded us one of the main reasons why GamerGate increasingly appeals only to trolls and assholes. (Note to 8channers: It’s the picture, derived from an anti-Semitic caricature, that’s the real problem here.)
8) This fella reminded his comrades that media figures like Colbert “never really cared sincerely about vidya [games]” anyway.
9) And we’re back to the rising fire.
10) More fire, accompanied this time by the howling wolves of … Twitter.
11) Winston Churchill famously proclaimed that brave British soldiers “shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” This GamerGate warrior will do the same, only with email and Twitter.
12) A lot of 8channers think that Sarkeesian is little more than the brainless puppet of Feminist Frequency co-writer/producer Jonathan McIntosh.
13) This melodramatic fella declared in despair that Sarkeesian had won, “sitting in the lap of a group more powerful, tenacious, driven and sinister than you could ever hope to be.”
Huh. I thought they were supposed to be on the side of Truth and Light. Why would GamerGaters hope to be sinister. Could it be that maybe they are the baddies after all?
14) And speaking of GamerGaters monologuing like supervillains …
15) This fella offered his comrades a “waifu to encourage you along.”
Wait, what?
16) This fella might be spending just a little too much time with the vidya games.
17) This commenter thought that the fact that Sarkeesian appeared in public showed that she wasn’t really scared by all the threats she’s gotten. CHECKMATE, SARKEESIAN!
18) More conspiratorial nonsense about Colbert and his alleged ideological puppetmasters.
19) THIS IS SPARTAAAAAAAA!!
20) Uh, dude, “some newspaper” in this case was the New York Fucking Times, and it was more than a paragraph.
21) This fella hoped that this bitter loss would help to harden the resolve of “weak” GamerGaters.
22) And this guy brought a report from the far reaches of Upside Down Backwards Land.
GamerGaters, you are officially ridiculous.
*Blitzkrieg, even. Coffee required.
The melodrama is strong in this one. Geez…
#8 is really bothering me, or a specific part of it at least. Dude, no, you do not get to claim that people think you’re weird because you “still play games”. EVERYONE plays games, at EVERY age, even if they’re not video games. Even different SPECIES are known to play games. Playing and having fun are fundamental to health for many creatures. People think you’re weird and evil because you’re making threats over games, dumbass! Unless you think making threats and playing games are the same thing…
… Oh, wait…
Dark Enlightenment gits never stop with this sort of blather, as if they were participating in some kind of noble Kulturkampf. Anyone with their head screwed on straight knows a pack of entitled assholes when they see one — just be glad it wasn’t another 7000 words I guess.
These 8chumps are sooo tedious. And really over the top in their melodramatic rhetoric.
My brain is getting stuck on “all dysentery against her name”. Um… What? Did they confuse dissent and defamation and somehow come up with dysentery?
Wait. SJWs control the media? Who are these SJWs that control the media?
I notice that there are no vowels in SJW. Maybe that’s a clue? What if we put in some vowels? S… o… J… e… W… s…?
Oh my God. Those SJWs are SoJeWs! Alert the medi… oh, right.
I forgot to add “Nazi fetishism” to my list of hilarious stew ingredients. Seriously, fascism is how these idiots define “western civilization”?
I skimmed looking really hard for all the violence, hate, and misogyny that gamergate is so famous for, couldn’t find it. Weird.
Ho-lee shit. The propaganda machine is going full tilt. Seconding the people who are confused how anyone could believe Colbert wouldn’t be on the side of SJ folks (despite some of the problematic stuff on his show).
Forget the “are we the baddies” comparisons… These guys are turning 8chan into North Korea without the Dear Leader. Pretty soon they’ll have their own internal news feeds where they spin every public interaction as a win for the movement and refuse to read anything else.
This just shows, though, that any attempt at reasoning with them is pretty much hopeless. They are embroiled in conspiracy theory, thinking they are the last decent people raging against the SJ machine. Hopefully their tantrum sputters out soon, with all the vitriolic energy they’re expending, and they start living in the real world again.
So, I would be interested in knowing how someone’s development goes so far awry that when they read Superman, they start thinking “wow! I want to be Lex!!” and then grow up to try to realise just that ambition. Except they pick the most ridiculous way to do it. I guess that I should be glad they’re confining themselves to writing long-winded, self-indulgent screeds on the internet instead of going forth and actually trying to take over the world in a practical fashion. But seriously, guys, threatening someone’s life over a media review? Self-aggrandisement much?
@holytape chans don’t have avatars. They’re purposefully anonymous, no user identity attached to posts.
They images you’re seeing are ones that these users think are particularly topical to what they’re saying.
Yeah, the lack of self-awareness fascinates me.
I, personally, question whether they ever did live in the real world in the first place. I rather doubt they could find it with Google maps and a GPS.
And let that happen every time they wake for many, many months before they can pick up the shattered pieces of their brittle egos and start functioning like a halfway decent person.
Until that day, they can step on legos.
#11…
HOLD THE PHONE. When we were posting “actually its about ethics” memes a few posts back I used Churchill’s speech to mock gamergate, and this guy is mimicking said speech in all seriousness? LOL!
You just can’t parody them anymore. They do it themselves with near expertise.
@grumpyoldnurse
Some depictions of Lex Luthor are sympathetic. In some renderings he’s just a brilliant, populist xenophobe who doesn’t like the idea of his species’ morality being dictated by an alien.
If they’re a republican or off brand republican-lite, that’s almost a perfect match for how they’d think about it.
The NYT and the Colbert Report are definitely the last resort of desperate, irrelevant, regressive, reactionary, morally bankrupt ideologues. Seriously, the NYT is where you wash up when you’re so repugnant that even 4chan won’t host your bile.
Oh no, wait, that’s 8chan. My bad.
#GG is composed of the dregs of nerd culture, sub-intellectuals unwilling to understand anything they watch beyond the superficial level. Just look at their deeply ironic choice of icons – Bane, who spent the entirety of TDK lying to his audience as a cover for his destructive agenda; Leonidas, who lost his battle while the Athenians he mocked went on to win the war; the Imperium of Man, a deeply xenophobic and dictatorial organization that only looks heroic because it’s defending humanity’s survival in an unfathomably crapsacky setting…
I think anybody with enough self-awareness to get that would have left already. It’s like the whole bit about ‘evaporative cooling’ of beliefs in doomsday cults post-doomsday… the people that reason will work on have pretty much all already left and what’s left is group-reinforced delusions.
They got nothing. Zoe Quinn was interviewed by the BBC and Brianna Wu is on the Boston Globe page.
Holy carpets, the melodrama. These screencaps need some silent movie piano suspense chords to go with them.
Yes, this is an urgent matter that needs careful consideration by our nation’s lawmakers.
DEAR CONGRESSMAN, I DONT LIKE SJW GANGS PLEEZ BAN. WITH YOUR RADIOACTIVE LEGISLTATING SUPERPOWERS. THEY ARE BAD. ALSO PLS HAVE THE GOVERNMENT PROVIDE ME A GIRLFRIEND. SINCERELY.
And yet, none of the GGs are pillorying the journalist who supposedly traded a review for sex. Funny, that.
If that one ‘gator thinks GG is unstoppable because they’re the PCs and the rest of us are the NPCs… they’ve never seen a Total Party Kill, have they? NPCs even in the most casual of games can mess you up if you let yourself get just that same kind of sense of invulnerability.
Also w00t for them objectifying women (“here’s a waifu for you”) while denying that they’re at all sexist.
The sheer irony of the first poster bringing up the Streisand Effect as Sarkeesian’s possible undoing is simply amazing.
@ ikanreed – fair enough criticism. I am not very familiar with Superman arcs (obvs 🙂 ) and was thinking of the Good v. Evil comics that I would sneak from my cousins when I was a kid.
Maybe I should have said, “what makes someone want to grow up to be a caricature of the baddies?”.
Please. We’re talking to people who speak of fighting censorship in the same breath where they want laws to make disagreeing with them illegal. Everything is spin and lies.