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Welcome to the first episode of MEME FAIL, a new series of posts in which I look at, well, memes that fail. It’s kind of all there in the name, huh?
Today, we look at a meme aimed at former Star Trek: The Next Generation star Wil Wheaton, who has apparently committed the egregious sin of expressing his opinion about #GamerGate on Twitter.
The MEME. (Click for a larger version.)
How it FAILS: There’s really no way in which this meme doesn’t fail.
Let’s start with the most obvious problem: Calling #GamerGaters stupid pieces of dog poop is not actually racist or sexist. Apparently, #GamerGaters feel that because there are some people in their little movement who aren’t straight cis white dudes, any insult directed at their little movement is therefore racist and sexist (and homophobic and transphobic)?
Yeah, that’s not how it works. It almost seems like #GamerGate is trying to use women and people of color (and GLBT folks) as, well, a way to shield themselves from criticism while being complete assholes and bigots?
Then there’s the whole “Eulogy” thing. Wheaton is not actually suggesting that #GamerGate should go die, literally or figuratively. He’s actually quoting from the lyrics of a song by Tool called, well, “Eulogy.”
The song in question, as best as anyone has been able to figure out, is a snarky takedown of a self-righteous, self-appointed martyr who “had a lot of nothing to say.” Tool’s drummer has suggested that it’s aimed at L. Ron Hubbard. But, as Wheaton notes, the song very well could have been written about #GamerGaters, if #GamerGaters had been a thing when it was written.
You sure could yell.
You took a stand on every little thing
And so loud.
Standing above the crowd
So loud. So very very loud.
BONUS IRONY: I ran across this meme being mocked on r/gamerghazi, but did a reverse image search to find a larger and more readable version of it. I found one in a thread on FunnyJunk.com in which one of the commenters refers to “Wil ‘Captain Mangina’ Wheaton” as “the gayest faggot in Fagtopia” and, well, let’s just say that the commenter also suggests that Wheaton enjoys anal sex.
Also, what is this obsession with trying to point out that your opponents are hypocrites? It has nothing to do with anything. Even if they were hypoctires, that doesn’t mean they’re not right.
It would be hilarious to start referring to #Gaters as total word salad and see how long it takes them to start insulting other people as “Aeronautic cantaloupe quoll junkets.”
Re: AlJazeera on Gamergate
The video is worth watching:
The get some stuff wrng (e.g. say that GG started as a campaign about ethics and so on, or that games until recently were predominantly played by young men), but the interview of Gaters is just funny. Great moment: journalist quotes Sarkeesians criticism about women being oversexualised and asks what is their reaction – pan to gaters in front of huge underboob on a wall. These guys are really irony-free.
Also Brianna Wu has some important stuff to say and they give her airtime for that.
@wwth:
No danger of getting classist in this case. The journalist asks them how much they spend on games. Answer: probably around 4 000 each year (!)
Oh, and that means each one 4 000 each year.
TO: tedthefed
That is the best summation of this particular facet of this particular part of this particular stupidity I’ve yet seen. The whole game seems to be about making sure that even if you’re wrong, the other guy looks worse than you so you still win.
It’s all about appearance, irony of ironies.
@tedthefed: I’ve noticed that they are totally unwilling to ascribe anything but the most sinister motives to anyone. According to them, we just want to look good. We’re not criticizing them because we actually care about what they’re doing to their victims, who in turn aren’t actually victims but just inviting harassment to gain sympathy and make money. It’s what I’d almost imagine a sociopath’s view of morality to be.
@tedthefed
No kidding. I recall reading a while back Wheaton said some actually racially insensitive things, and Joss Whedon has failed hugely as a feminist on occasion. That doesn’t mean they’re WRONG about GamerGate. It’s almost as if they think a large chunk of anti-GG sentiment is fueled by a hero-worshiping cult mentality and that if they can demonstrate hypocrisy in said heroes that it will shatter the illusion and make the masses see the light.
Which is absurd, yet the only thing I can think of that explains this meme.
So… gamergate people don’t understand self-deprecation.
“I’m a super privileged asshole, but somehow you manage to be worse” just goes right over their head.
They can’t even imagine that privileged means something different than racist. It’s like if you took people incapable of accepting that they make errors and gave them an identity to share.
Ugh. That gamer gate girl in the interview is basically high school me. I sort of want to scream at her to run, run now, before you waste years of your life standing up for the status quo and hurting all the women who haven’t been as lucky as you and then feeling awful about it for the rest of your life, but somehow I don’t think she’d listen.
I like how quickly she went from “The articles about ‘gamers are over’ offended us and that’s bad and needs to be changed by a movement!” to “Don’t change anything in video games just because they offend people!” The #1 rule of Gamer Gate will always be “We have a right not to be offended.”
And of course they cry about how death and rape threats are justified if they garner “attention” for the victims. “We don’t condone harassment, we just think it’s totally okay to do if people are paying attention to an opinion that we want silenced.”
Thanks for the video link, Bernardo. Unsurprisingly, gamergrotz are swarming it with downvotes and hostile comments. The current top-rated comment is simply an assertion that Brianna Wu is a man, therefore… something? I guess? Stay classy, gamergitz!
I have an embarrassingly large Steam library and spent a decent amount on a gaming computer and I don’t understand how those people could spend 4,000 a year on games. I guess they must be buying every AAA title at full price?
I think the lines toward the end of “Eulogy” fit pretty well too:
“Come down.
Get off your fucking cross.
We need the fucking space to nail the next fool martyr.”
Ugh. If not a shield, a sword. (*Is* there a #notyoursword?)
It’s getting harder and harder to imagine a post-GG internet. Boo.
Word.
A bit off topic-ish, but has anyone seen this storify yet? If you haven’t, you’re in for a tweet. A bot tweets a reddit post containing a hashtag from an anti-gg subreddit. Gamergaters immediately start thinking the hashtag is real and a sign of a new movement, promptly starting to mock it and the supposed participants and flood it with garbage. And then patting themselves on the back for it.
“in for a treat.” Not a bad typo, that.
Falconer:
I think you win the internetz for the day.
How is calling people stupid shits racist or misogynist? Words have meanings. They’re pretty much just proving Wil Wheaton’s assertion that they’re stupid with this meme.
@kirbywarp, that was funny. And an excellent idea. More bots posting fake anti-gator tags, just like the more paranoid thought; more enjoyment for the rest of the interwebs. I wonder how many fake hashtags they would fall for, in the end?
@DistantGlimmer
Also the idea that actors get huge royalties out of reruns. Companies like Paramount have swarms of lawyers scrutinising every contract for every show to make sure that they pay actors the minimum possible for everything that actors do. Unless they were *the* star of the show with a superpowerhouse agent who negotiated something extraordinary before they signed on to do the show in the first place, then nuh, all they will get is Equity union standard residual fees for series syndications, which won’t be nothing for a series like ST:TNG, but won’t be huge either (especially since Wheaton famously left the show at an ill-advised point and is simply not in a huge number of episodes for most of the seasons, seriously limiting the residuals to which he would be entitled).
And back to your point about the “no work at all”, yeah nah. Most people who don’t know any career performers have no idea how much work is put in every single day just to keep the performing apparatus warmed up and agile/supple, even just the voice let alone the rest of the body, and that’s before they run their actual rehearsals. Turning up for the actual performance is not the beginning of any performer’s day.
Wesley may have been the most annoying Star Trek character to ever Star Trek, but Wheaton just keeps being more awesome.
You go, young Sir.
🙂
Did you guys see this?
It makes perfect sense to me that Wil Wheaton would be against online harassment. He dealt with more than his fair share when he was on ST:TNG. alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die was a thing he had to deal with.
That was?!
Ugh, that’s awful. I hated the character (and Wheaton also kind of hated Wesley, too, if I remember correctly), but being nasty to the actor is never an appropriate response…
Isn’t it cute when the kiddos try to cargo-cult the language of grownups?
If it makes you feel better, even Randi Harper was like that once, and she had to deal with abuse from the beginning.
The “trust fund liberal” meme is a pretty persistent one that is sort of hard to understand. On the one hand, it’s an accusation of class treason; “trust fund liberals” seem to wing nuts to be self-destructive. (It’s very much the same thing as a gator accusing other nerds of supporting bullying and then turning around and implicitly or explicitly condoning harassment of those they claim to be outsiders.) On the other hand, it’s the idea that if you’re not poor and/or oppressed you haven’t any business identifying with those who are (same as “you must be gay if you’re pro-LGBT rights”).