The Five Creepiest #GamerGate Fan Art Tributes to Christina Hoff Sommers, aka Based Mom (With Bonus Annoying Gif)

@madmonk12345

It would probably be a good idea to disguise this, so that the people who really need this lesson will play the game. If you just make a game where if you choose to be a black person you face racism, the gamers who actually think racism is not a thing probably won’t play it, so they won’t get the important message.

It could be masked and presented in thin allegory, like when Star Trek attacked racism by embodying racism in two characters who were aliens. A sci-fi or fantasy setting in which, for instance, you could play different species or a human, and as a human you are hit with the same type of racism (from nonhumans) that white people routinely display toward black people. Or be treated, even if your character is male, the way men routinely treat women.

The different kinds of prejudice could be spread across multiple species, so that no matter what species you pick you are facing something unpleasant from everyone else. For maximum impact, I would not disguise the racism/sexism/etc in the slightest. Species A gets straight-up racism, Species B gets straight-up sexism, Species C gets straight-up homophobia, etc. with just the labels changed. If that were attached as flavor to a game with an otherwise-unrelated plot, it might be effective.

Oh and of course the Doritos and Mountain Dew are from an image of game journalist looking dead-eyed while surrounded by their sponsorship, which was used to mock game journalism back before ‘mocking game journalism’ became an excuse for attacking women.

That’s a pretty spare Thanksgiving, isn’t it? One turkey, a teeny dish of potatoes, a teeny gravy boat, a covered bowl of, I don’t know, rolls or something, and a cornucopia of fruit. Has the look of someone only drawing his favorite dinner items.

using “check your facts” as a catch phrase is pretty ridiculous coming from someone so in love with biotruths/biological determinism/bending statistics to fit the narrative.

Has CHS even been in the same building with an Actual Feminist in the last decade?

Vegetables exist whether she believes in them or not. Criminy!

For all Norman Rockwell has been poo-poo’ed for his nostalgic, saccharine commercial art, he could make a point or convey an emotion when he wanted to.

Anyone who does that either is being an over the top art snob or isn’t that familiar with Rockwell’s work. Thing is he was a working illustrator and the fine art world has long standing issues with illustrators and not taking them seriously as artists. Just go look at his painting The Problem We All Live With, Rockwell had serious skills.

Noadi, I didn’t know the name of the painting but that’s exactly the Rockwell work I thought of when you made that comment. He was a serious artist and had serious points to make.

Plus in this post irony age we live in it can be really refreshing to see straight up honest sentimentality.

If you go back a couple weeks on LGM one of the commenters in B Spenser’s GG threads says he used to work in the same building with CHS, back when she was in academia. I gathered this was 20 years ago or longer.

I read her book from 94 or so where she nutpicks some of the worst feminist “thought” of the 80s (it’s not Dworkin who’s the worst, so read if you enjoy trainwrecks) but her “career” has only gone downhill from there.

I also thought that Camille Paglia, as a crazy person, did a good job popularizing English literature interpretation and a certain strain of literary theory, but she jumped the shark really fast after she got published. I mean an advice column? Really? And she was such a narcissist she would flirt with all these men she had no intention of anything with because she relished the attention. Gross.

@paradoxicalintent

Whelp, this girl is my new favorite person.

It really was brilliant. 😀

GGer: “Vidya Games are art!”

People: “Okay, then we’ll critique it like art by looking at the social impact it makes on society as a whole, and we’ve found some flaws here and there.”

GGer: “Why can’t people just enjoy games?! Vidya is supposed to be MINDLESS FUN!”

You could replace that with comics and it’d still apply pretty well. It’s why I really dislike both fandoms despite loving those mediums, because – if they truly liked them – they’d want more people to enjoy them regardless of how they do so.

I don’t think these people would last five minutes in one of my old college courses. Once you get over taking critique personally, it’s all good information. :3

FFS, critique of ANYTHING isn’t a personal attack (or at least, if done properly it isn’t)! It’s simply pointing out flaws in the hopes that it’ll change for the better! I don’t critique games because I hate them (I wouldn’t spend so much time playing them if I did), I critique games because I love them and I want them to keep getting better and better!

Exactly. I point out the same thing to people who get made over negative movie reviews over some mainstream blockbuster: without those people to point out what work and doesn’t work, a lot of the other stuff you probably like wouldn’t be the way they are.

Without anyone to critique artistic works, whether it is in relation to storytelling or how it relates to social issues, there’d be no basic narrative structure and thus no need to indulge in Art – it’d just be pointless, random distractions.

Taking that shit personally, to me, shows an incapability to separate the work itself and how that work makes them feel. It makes them miss the forest for the trees.

On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying what we have now. However, that doesn’t mean we have to swallow it blindly and not question it. I can love a game and still admit it has flaws instead of blindly worshiping it.

Case in point: The Saint’s Row series. Problematic as hell, but still really fun to play. (Though, in my opinion, Saint’s Row treats sex workers way better than GTA does.)

Totally! I’ve been replaying SKYRIM and still love that game, but there’s plenty of things I take issue with it too – one quest pretty much slut-shames an NPC for sleeping with (*GASP!*) three men in one month.

[Sarcasm on]Sleeping with more than one person a month? Only men are allowed to do that![/sarcasm off]

That said, I still love the game and the fact – despite that niggle – it’s generally egalitarian in term of gender roles and the like. The fact female characters are as varied in personality as male characters make it leagues above many other games, where women are relegated to being a love interest or a damsel in distress or a castrating shrew of a villain when not sexualized eye-candy.

Another Holocene Human: Please leave aside the use of ‘crazy’ and similar terms as slurs for people who are either bad at thinking or just fucking liars (I suspect CHS falls into both categories). It’s a form of ablism and not welcome here.

Femshep didn’t deserve this.

When it comes down to it, the people who value being able to bullshit the longest about art probably prefer the abstract because it’s easier to bullshit about.

I wouldn’t say that, necessarily; as art moves away from realism, ideas become more relatively important than execution, which would make it harder to bullshit about. They’re just different styles and they appeal to different people.

I don’t get that sort of poetry that’s just random words strung together, either, except that sound and rhythm divorced from content can be fun, but some people insist that’s True Art.

Well, it’s dada. So the point is primarily to mock other artists and piss people off by allowing anyone to become a brilliant, misunderstood poet.