GamerGaters sure do love their Based Mom! Christina Hoff Sommers, as you may or may not know, is a libertarian think-tanker who’s been grinding away at feminism for two decades, while still, rather perversely, claiming to be feminist. Though not a video gamer herself, she’s jumped aboard the GamerGate train, and GamerGaters have repaid her interest in their little crusade with interest, anointing her their “Based Mom” and talking about her with weird reverence.
That is, when they’re not making creepy fan art about her. Today, five of the most disturbing examples I’ve found so far.
1) Virgin Based Mom, in which an old publicity shot of Sommers is pasted onto a picture of the Virgin Mary to very creepy effect.
2) Based Waifu, in which Sommers is reinvented as an anime character.
3) Mass Effect Mom, in which Sommers becomes a Space Marine.
4) Whatever the hell this is.
5) Perfect Mom. And last but certainly not least, this tweet. No image manipulation here, just a guy expressing his opinion about a women. His really, really creepy opinion.
https://twitter.com/ItalyGG/status/537271807326572544
BONUS: The world’s most annoying Christina Hoff Sommers animated gif. Sommers finishes her ironically titled “Factual Feminist” YouTube videos, which are neither factual nor feminist, with an annoyingly contrived tagline: “Check your facts, not your privilege.” Now you can watch her smugly repeat this phrase over and over without end. Which is, I think, the very definition of hell.
Warning: Excessive viewing of this gif may give you nightmares; its smugness is that powerful.
H/T — GamerGhazi, for pointing out the Virgin Mom
The twitter picture is actually… really weird-looking. Am I the only one that finds it very creepy, even without the tweet itself?
@saphy
Yeah, I think she/her publicist/some #Gater blur-tooled the living hell out of her. That shit always results in severe uncanny valley.
Agh, the bonus annoying gif … it burns …
“Check you facts, not your privilege!”
… This is, what, 2 steps away from Newspeak, right? I just can’t get over this line. I’m patiently waiting for her to follow it up with, “Think for yourself, not of your self-awareness!”
“Sample Text”
LOL
The Virgin Sommers one is the creepiest, though. The head/body proportions there really hit the uncanny valley straight.
At least none of those were badly photoshopped/ hand-drawn porn of her…
Oh DO NOT let my comment be an invocation of Rule 34!
What’s “based” supposed to mean?
The Mass Effect one is particularly irritating since the actual Femshep (Jennifer Hale) spoke out against these fucks.
And I just find it gross that someone put that awful woman’s face on Commander Shepard.
LordCrowstaff: “based” basically means doubleplusgood. You could also read it – in a 5-year-old’s voice, obviously – as “my favorite.”
LordCrowstaff:
“Based” is from a rap album where Lil B says “Based God” to refer to one of his friends. Then people picked up on the “Based God fucked my bitches” line, meme’d that, and it eventually evolved into “Based _____”, the blank being whatever you want, essentially.
Also straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak:
The fact that she’s been adopted as a mother figure is what’s most creepy to me. Not leader, not representative, but mummy dearest.
Is that what image 4 is about? She’s a “cool mom” who brings them their Doritos and Mountain Dew and let’s them smoke weed and play games? Or is image 4 meant to mean she is one of them (while inadvertently suggesting that GGers are in fact the stereotype they argue against)?
Speaking of image 4 what the hell is that on her neck?
It’s the pyramid eye from the back of the US $1 bill (part of the Great Seal of the United States). Don’t ask me why it’s there or why it’s upside down. There is a lot about #4 that makes it seem like a bad acid trip.
Pretty sure Jesus Sarkeesian in the GamerGhazi subreddit beats all in the creepy stakes.
Because Illuminati.
Awwww, what cute little dickenses. Making their own wank-fodder since Anita Sarkeeeeeeesian took all their vidya pr0n away!
That GIF…that’s gonna replace the homicidal clowns in my nightmares…
Wait wait! The eye represents the eye of Providence, which is to say the eye of God. It’s upside-down, meaning that the power of CHS is such that she can stop God from watching gamers masturbate.
“Paging Dr. Ed I. Puss on the green courtesy line, that’s a page for Dr. Ed I. Puss on the green courtesy line.”
@ParadoxicalIntention, Mewens
thanks, I always thought it meant something akin to “embedded”, as in “this person is with us, in our camp, in our base” so to say.
The fourth one is based on Montage parodies, which makes fun of a certain type of gamer (a type that’s not necessarily gator, I should mention). I don’t even know how to begin to describe it, so I’ll just show a video as an example:
Internet fandoms of real people, eapecially people tied to some general cause or movement, is almost inevitably the creepiest thing. Sorry to see GamerGate’s fringe majority(what else do you call a group where seemingly most of the people “don’t speak for it”?) continues that sorry tradition. I agree with sunnysomberra, the fact that Mz. Sommers is taken as a mother figure says all kinds of skeezy things. Like a lot of them.
Also that GIF file of repeating images is recording a very, very foolish thing to say.
It terrifies me to think that in like a hundred years this will probably look like the most sensible thing in the world next to the Real Internet basement that replaces the Chan culture.
Image 4 comes from the montage parody subculture. See http://www.reddit.com/r/montageparodies/ for more of this sort of thing. It is likely a parody, but also could be a serious tribute by gamergaters who have ironically adopted the iconography.
Actually, I just read a better description: they’re making fun of bad frag videos (that is, videos showing off a compilation of a player’s kills). These bad ones often put an obnoxious amount of effects and use dubstep in their videos badly. The Doritos and Mountain Dew are because they both advertise Call of Duty and try to associate themselves with it far too much as you may have noticed, the marijuana is because they often make references to smoking marijuana and use Snoop Dogg a lot in their videos when they don’t use dubstep, “Sample Text” is what most video editing programs put on their text effects before anyone inputs anything, MLG stands for “Major League Gaming,” and electronic sports organization (and people often make videos from them into frag videos), those x’s are the icon that shows whenever you hit someone else in Call of Duty, I don’t know what Gamma Labs is, but the rest of the stuff is just memes they put in.
God, I feel ridiculous explaining that.
Don’t worry, you’re not half so ridiculous as somebody who already knows that. Or would make a reference to it in random fan-art of a real person.