GamerGate, so depressing and destructive and … inadvertently hilarious?
Like the MRAs I write about so often here, GamerGaters have a certain fondness for the propaganda of the meme, attempting to win hearts and minds with elaborate infographics, repurposed propaganda, and basically any sort of graphic they can pull together in a few minutes with Photoshop or MSPaint.
They are, unfortunately for them, terrible at it. It’s not just that the amateur graphic designers of GamerGate lack a basic understanding of good design. They are also so completely lacking in self-awareness that they are unable to see when their graphics completely undercut the messages they are intended to convey.
So today, let’s take a look at the The Top Five Most Ridiculously Ironic #Gamergate Memes that I’ve found posted recently on 8chan and Twitter.
1) Vivian James, the Real Woman of Gaming
Why it’s ironic: Uh, because #GamerGate mascot Vivian James is … imaginary? GamerGaters, if you want to convince us that you represent “real women” in gaming, you probably shouldn’t use a cartoon girl who always agrees with you to make your case.
2) Gaming is as diverse as you are!
Why it’s ironic: Look a little closer at this colorful crowd of video game heroes — you can see a larger version here. The overwhelming majority of these heroes are white dudes, with much smaller numbers of women and people of color. There are as many dragons as there are black people, and more anthropomorphic foxes than either of those groups.
3) Anita Sarkeesian, feminazi
Why it’s ironic: Because when GamerGaters aren’t depicting Sarkeesian as a Nazi, they’re repurposing neo-Nazi propaganda in order to depict her as a greedy, scheming Jewish stereotype. Remember this picture from the other day? And there are a lot more where that came from.
4) Fat, Ugly and Slutty
Why it’s ironic: Project much? I’ve been following GamerGate since it started, and I’ve never seen any anti-GGers ever try to slut- or body-shame GamerGater women. But GamerGaters love to present the women they’ve dubbed their “Literally Whos” — Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu — as sexually voracious monsters.
Here’s a detail from one cartoon I found on 8chan, featuring GamerGate critic Arthur Chu as a virtual puppet controlled by monstrous incarnations of the the Literally Who three.
Even when they’re not depicting the Literally Whos as monsters, GamerGaters uglify them in nasty caricatures:
As for slut-shaming, #GamerGate began as #BurgersAndFries, the very name of the “movement” a reference to a crude meme designed to humiliate Zoe Quinn as a supposed slut. The internet is awash in shitty sexualized caricatures of Quinn; I’m not going to post any of them here.
5) Journalists versus publicists
Why it’s ironic: Yep, I actually found this on 8chan. New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm has written brilliantly about some of the central tensions of journalism. I’m a bit stunned that any GamerGaters have even heard of her.
What’s ironic here is that it’s GamerGaters, not their opponents, who want to turn game journalists into publicists. GamerGaters lash out at journalists who challenge their “blind self-absorption” while celebrating pseudo-journalists and ideological hacks who swallow and regurgitate their bullshit whole. Indeed, if the GamerGaters have their way, all games journalists will be reduced to little more than publicists for GamerGaters’ particular prejudices.
@ pallygirl:
It’s astounding, isn’t it, how quickly they went from “LOL five guys!” to “WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!”.
I saw an article somewhere (I’ve lost the link, will try to find it) that posits GG deliberately provoked negative sentiment against itself in order to foster a siege mentality – Us Against The World and all that garbage. Seems to be a plausible theory at this point.
I knew I’d find it after I hit post (yay google-fu!). Alex Epstein’s take on the “GamerGate versus the world” mindset. Choice quote:
The lovecraftian-esque one was fascinating. It reveals way, way too much about how these people see women. Strange alien beings that infect mens brains and turn them against us, aieeee…
Heads up David: https://archive.today/IU8Ls
Seriously dude. This site’s a goldmine!
About him:
About him: https://archive.today/utwGd
Which itself is ironic, as they like to accuse very real victims of their harassment and threats of just “making it up.” But, then again, the whole “controversy” was manufactured from the beginning…
As far as the memes themselves:
#1 – uh, no, an imaginary character does not count as “real.”
#2 – “Diversity.” ‘Cause, as we all know, that means a token black guy and a lot of furries. Women, too, of course…but they have to be at least physically attract when not outright sexualized. DEEVURSOOTY!
#3 – God, these assholes can’t be consistent. So is Sarkeesian a Nazi or a scheming Jewess? She can’t be both unless you believe insane conspiracy theories like…oh wait, nevermind…
#4 – I’ve yet to hear anyone who doesn’t like GamerGate call women who do “fat-ugly sluts.” In fact, the only slut-shaming and body-shaming I’ve heard is from the GGers themselves…
#5 – Well, yes, that quote is correct…but none of it applies to what GamerGate stands for as a group. “Ethics in journalism” is basically like “but what about the men?!” but less deflective and more co-opting a legitimate issue (which they didn’t give a shit about until this year, rather than years ago when reviewers like Jeff Gerstmann was fired from his job for making a negative review for a game – as its publicists were giving ad revenues to the publication he wrote for).
@NickNameNick:
The best offense is a good defense. So it’s no surprise that GGers are accusing their detractors of the very things they’re doing.
“Leave us alone, we just want to play games!” While they are the ones who started this whole mess by harassing women in gaming.
“Stop slut shaming us!” Literally calls Zoe Quinn a wh-re.
“Nazis!” Gets support from actual neonazis.
“Not your shield! Stop attacking women!” Attacks women to the point that they have to leave their homes.
“We support real women in gaming!” Their poster child is a cartoon woman, while they attack “real” human women in gaming.
Yeah, it’s definitely easier to project your own faults onto a perceived enemy and act innocent – than to recognize one’s own behavior and fix it.
The fact they take mockery to be more offensive than any of the harassment or threats they commit, or at least enable, is telling. Then again, it always seemed like the most privileged members of society have been the most thin-skinned. Simply pointing out they are, in fact, privileged for one reason or another causes them to foam from the mouth with steam coming out of their ears. They’re like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas: whenever they put someone on edge or talk shit about another person, they expect others to laugh and simply validate them – but the moment anyone has the gall to talk back and rightfully point out their bullshit, their instant reaction is to be as aggressive and abusive as possible.
I’m surprised these turd waffles even acknowledge Arthur Chu. His articles have probably been the most informed, and the most damning, on the Gamergate issue.
@A. Noyd
…yeah, I figured there where longer ones. But that was the longest one for me until you showed me your example. 🙂
@katz
+1 for your observation. And agreed.
http://guardianlv.com/2014/11/gamergate-in-review/
This is his discussion of Quinn:
“Zoe Quinn’s saga of earning enmity online apparently was the catalyst which broke the story. There was jealousy, perhaps, over how her simplistic text-based game could garner the coverage that hers did. When Gjoni’s bitter breakup post got around, COMPLETE with names of current gaming journalists who Quinn was allegedly sleeping with, it was blood in the water. Although shortly into the media life cycle of the GamerGate story, gamers would abandon Quinn from being part of their narrative, this is basically where it became a story to begin with.”
Thank god they stopped talking about Zoe before they said anything really bad and moved on to threatening to kill Anita Sarkeesian, which is obviously horrible if it really happened though you can’t help but wonder.
And the whole Gamergate thing has apparently been part of the democrat’s political campaign. Shame on those evil people for taking advantage of naive gamers like that.
The whole piece is a giant WTF?.
BTW, I especially love his use of the word “narrative”. The IRC log where they actively exchanged her personal information and talked about how to get her to kill herself is also the same place where they talked about the innocent narrative they would present to the public as cover. It was the same god-damned people doing both. But let’s pretend the public “narrative” is the only real part of Gamergate and none of the evil shit had anything to do with it.
There is no way he doesn’t know this., He’s just hoping his readers don’t. Asshole.
Something I’ve just realised, I haven’t heard GamerGate people actually talk about the content of video games like, ever.
I think my favourite part about the ‘diversity in games’ picture is the fact that they’ve chosen a style of drawing caricature that makes some characters look whiter than they are. Like, compare their version of Chell from Portal to how she looks in-game: http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100622180010/half-life/en/images/6/63/Chell_grey_hair.jpg
There’s some little moments of unintentional humour as well. I like how it looks like Alice is actively recoiling from Bayonetta.
Of course not! Their whole objective is to get people to stop talking about the content of video games so they don’t need to reflect about the corporate swill they shove down their own throats. Ignorance is bliss, and fuck people who don’t have the luxury of being ignorant.
@Ellie,
I had the misfortune of seeing both sites, especially the latter one. And yes, they are a gold mine of lunacy.
These right wingers remind me a lot of VenomfangX, the super YouTube creationist back in the day. Their spiel is such a thick concentration of wrong it would take days to disentangle all the fallacies and false information they use.
Ellie – wow. That’s some good old fashioned nightmare fuel. I can imagine Mencius Moldbug looking at that guy and thinking, ‘whoa, thought I was a putz, but you are King Putz’.
There’s a link at the second site to a book titled “The Homo and the Negro”. You can’t make this stuff up, not that you’d want to.
Don’t forget that the “literally who” codenames were given because those three people are not an important part of their cause
Not important, therefore codename? Kinda ironic.
It’s difficult to write convincing villains. The real life ones are often so outrageously over the top and utterly buffoonish that no one would ever accept them as fictional characters.
In other words, you can’t make this crap up.
So much butthurt from one article. LOL thank god for ad block. And these comments gave me cancer
Bahahaha, omg, this article is hilarious, and so are the sheep in the comment section. You attacked a couple image macros and memes, you know what that sounds like fools? Straw man.
>Says Vivian is created to agree with our opinions.
>These sjws flock to pro-antiGG articles that agree with their opinions.
How bout y’all get out your high throne of feces and actually refute our arguments instead of going to things like these and saying: “Yeah, mhm, I agree with this” or “Lol, we totes beatem, luik at de ironee”.
I don’t sit in a feces throne.
I sit on this throne.
http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140910204436/real-life-villains/images/c/c9/Sansa-misandry.gif
Bad, LayGesbian, bad, no necroing.
http://31.media.tumblr.com/b06d80db94f4d37e106cf080e6fc908b/tumblr_inline_na26muRah41r8p6gq.gif
Proposition: It’ll be hard to tell when GamerGate actually ends (or ended), because it takes them three months to think of a reply to anything.
And when they do, they don’t know what a straw man is.