The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (And don’t worry that the PayPal page says Man Boobz.) Thanks!
#MetalGate, we hardly knew ye! Despite the earnest effort of a small army of opportunists to stoke the fire – some of them #GamerGaters, others “dark enlightenment” neoreactionarires – the contrived controversy that was #MetalGate has already lost most of its steam. All you need to do is take a look at Topsy to see how quickly the hashtag burned itself out.
This is hardly surprising, given that the alleged controversy was little more than an utterly transparent attempt by ideological hacks to breathe life into the decaying corpse of #GamerGate and to drive traffic to terrible “dark enlightenment” blogs.
So before #MetalGate becomes a fading memory, I’d like to take a moment to highlight the efforts of one notable neoreactionary to turn the faux controversy into a war against “Social Justice Warriors” – and pump up the traffic to his struggling video game blog.
I’m talking, of course, about werewolf impersonator and woman-hating pickup guru Roosh Valizadeh. Roosh was late out of the gates in his attempt to capitalize on #GamerGate by launching his hilariously clueless video game blog Reaxxion. But with #MetalGate he moved more quickly, publishing three rabble-rousing posts on the subject in three days.
I mentioned one of them in my last post. But it’s the two he’s published on Reaxxion that are the real winners.
Yesterday, Reaxxion’s “ethics officer” Sam Roberts – yes, that is a thing – delivered an over-the-top rant warning metalheads that “enemies of metal are upon us.”
These alleged enemies? Social Justice Warriors, the all-purpose boogeyman that strikes terror in the hearts of #GamerGaters, Men’s Rights Activsts and neoreactionary werewolf PUAs alike. Roberts defined SJWs as
far-left weirdos with nothing going on in their life, who try to inject their toxic, tiresome political ideology into every field imaginable. They’ve taken over Atheism, Science Fiction Books, and they were poised to take over video games until #Gamergate started roundly thrashing them. Now, with what’s being called #Metalgate, we’re finding out that they want to take over heavy metal too. …
If these people get their way heavy metal will be neutered to the point where you could play it on a school bus
The horror!
After attacking two critics of metalhead douchebros – one of whom he describes as a “preening sissy” – Roberts ends with this rather comical call-to-arms:
If metalheads don’t want to end up neutralized and pussified, they’ll have to fight back. Gamergate shows the way here: if the media starts pushing a lousy band because its bassist has a vagina, mock them relentlessly. If a magazine starts hassling you like a schoolteacher for using naughty language, boycott them. Spread the word: if you’ve got twitter, use the hashtag #Metalgate. Don’t think [sic] The worst thing you can do is assume that somebody else will do your fighting for you. The enemies of metal have arisen, and it’s time to cut them down like dogs.
Appended to the article we find this embarrassing correction:
Update: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Kerry King as the frontman for Slayer. He is a guitarist. Reaxxion regrets the error.
Oops. Totally not metal, dude.
Reaxxion followed up this post with one today from irate #GamerGater Steve Alexander, who fantasized about a mythical alliance between gamers and metalheads that will defeat the SJW menace once and for all:
GamerGate is actively uniting liberals with conservatives under the umbrella of freedom of expression. But SJW’s don’t realize this, and have now attacked the metal crowd. They’ll soon find out that all their strategy will accomplish is to unite hardcore gamers and the metal crowd into a righteous mob.
We will learn from each other—gamers will bring their knowledge of leveraging social media and e-mail, and the metal crowd will bring their extreme energy and uninhibited expression. Together, marching in step, some wearing Converse while others wear steel toe boots, we will crush this censorship of our favorite mediums.
Huh. I guess gamers who are also metalheads will wear Converse on one foot and a steel-toed boot on the other?
Let me know how that goes.
Yuuuuuuuuup.
hey – how’d you know?
@Falconer “@GrumpyOldMan: “The last 50 years” is lately when one of our political parties hasn’t let go of the 60s yet.”
I think you mean “the 50s”. Conservatives have never forgiven the 60s for existing.
There is if you spend your time on blogs rather than writing the blasted thing.
Most novels are failures, but writing a failed novel is a noble failure.
@POM, @thebe: One of the great measures of skill in storytelling is how gracefully and seamlessly you can work the things you pull out of your ass into the story. Writers who do it well actually get character development out of the things they need to do to set up the story.
My complaint about Sci-fi is that all too often bad Sci-fi refuses to wrestle with the scientific issues and just arm-waves itself through. The science is sort of neglected, and it becomes ordinary fiction but without most of the constraints reality imposes on the “serious writer.”
Agreed, as far as TNG goes. I still love it dearly, but the following were definitely things:
Deux Ex Geordi
Deux Ex Data
They never quite figured out how to work in Deux ex Worf, though. That would have been awesome.
I imagine Deux Ex Worf would involve some growling and maybe a ripped uniform. 🙂 What? Stop looking at me!
I have a rec for you: Moving Mars, by Greg Bear. Science fiction authors are “serious writers” just as much as any other writer. A writer working in a completely contemporary or historical context can write total drek, and a writer working in a science fiction context can write a fantastic story. I don’t think it’s at all fair to classify sci-fi as non-serious.
Star Trek envisions a post-scarcity society, with essentially unlimited free energy that can be transformed into any object anyone needs. People work because they want to work, at whatever job is most fulfilling to them, not because they have to in order to survive. Of course someone like Owen is going to hate that, and probably even recognize it as Marxist.
I’m imagining more of a shades-wearing cyborg Worf growling “I never asked for this.”
I may or may not play too many video games.
I can’t wait until he discovers Iain Banks!
You may be a terribly lazy writer, but that’s not the same thing. You have to actually try something before you can fail at it. In any case, you’re not a failure until you’re dead, and even then there’s flexibility.
What, pray tell, is your metric for failure? If you accomplished something, which includes learning, you ipso facto did not fail. You sound like one of those entitled writers who wants to immediately be perfect and gives up when zie isn’t.
Why the hell does science fiction have to be about the science? Speaking as a non-failed writer of “serious” fiction, I’m not digging your attitude of superiority here.
This is sounding less like “failed novelist” and more like “not a novelist”, as in “didn’t actually write anything”.
I somehow read that entire pompous rant, and a couple things came to mind:
1. Dude talks a LOT about Manowar. I’m probably what this clown would consider a legbeard feminazi SJW shill and you know what? I fucking love Manowar. I blasted “Hail and Kill” (the song he insists would make people like me fetch the smelling salts) during my workout today. Also, two of my friends, a married couple, love them too – the husband has a Manowar logo tattoo. They’re both feminists, and the husband works at a local feminist-run sex toy store.
I mean, they’re not a band with hugely progressive gender politics (they have a song based on the Gor novels), but I don’t listen to them for their incisive social commentary.
2. Yes, please tell me more about how “outsiders” are ruining metal with their FEMINISSMS and then misidentify Kerry King’s role in Slayer. Really solidifies your credentials there, champ. (BTW, Slayer is my favorite band in the world – I’m getting a Slayer tattoo, ferchrissakes – and I still think King sounds like a moron when he calls people “faggots.” Because I’m over the age of 12 and I have no beef with the gays. This shit isn’t hard.)
I wrote a novel when I was 19. It was about as fantastically bad as one would anticipate a 19-year-old’s magnum opus to be. I wonder, by GOM’s metric, does that make me a failed novelist, because it was horrendous, or a successful one, because it was novel-length and had a beginning, middle and end?
I made a post on Twitter mentioning Metalgate and how it was a reaction to something completely imaginary, and got a tweet back from an @amerika_blog that sincerely said:
https://twitter.com/amerika_blog/status/545005148926251008
Unfortunately when I mentioned the slightly backward nature of this comment, he said I had problems with basic logic, that I had a desire to retreat and then blocked me apparently without seeing the irony – however, this does mean he was a self-solving problem.
I caught a look at his site, though, which has articles like http://www.amerika.org/politics/legalize-rape/ . Classy!
19 is an excellent age to write a bad novel.
So, by Mr Unabomber Rapist’s unlogic, 9/11 really was masterminded by Reptillian Bush, Kenyan Obama, the Jewish Illuminati and the Reverse Vampires. I knew it.
“I’m not digging your attitude of superiority here.”
Actually it’s an attitude of inferiority — having never had the ability OR discipline to actually write anything substantial, I hold anyone who has ever managed to complete a novel, however bad, almost in awe. I don’t want to be a complete downer about this — I ended up rewriting and revising an existing guide to White Mountain hiking trails for 25 years and several editions, a book that sold half-a-million copies during the time I was in charge of it. I even got a piece into an anthology of writings about the Appalachian Trail. So whatever ability I have was not wasted. But I never came close to having whatever it takes to create a plausible world populated with plausible people — I have nothing but respect for people who can do it.
I didn’t mean to make my comments about me, just about some of the problems I have with (bad) sci-fi. It seems to me that sci-fi is an ideal genre for developing creativity and imagination, but too many sci-fi writers seem to shrink from the challenges. And if science isn’t a very significant part of sci-fi, then why write sci-fi in the first place?
Heh – I dunno, I’d call “painting myself into a plot corner, having no idea how to get out of it and giving the whole thing up” being a failed novelist. 😛
That, too. 😀
katz, <3 !
I'm not reading GOM's comments as being some sort of superiority thing – just that science fiction, as I'd always understood it, ideally had at least plausible science, or some understanding of science, rather than being essentially science fantasy, and the pulled-out-of-arse solutions don't really match that. But I might be thinking of older distinctions that don't really apply to writing now, given I haven't read any current works (as in, written less than about four decades ago!)
“I didn’t mean to make my comments about me,” by which I meant to say, rather clumsily, that I didn’t mean to make my own story a subject in this thread.
There are plenty of reasons to write sci-fi that have nothing in particular to do with science. The idea that hard science must be a part of it is associated with all sorts of unsavory attempts to keep women out of the genre and to invalidate the ones who are part of it.
(And also, imo, with some very boring books. Turns out that knowing a lot about science doesn’t necessarily make you a good writer.)
Unless they’re a sci-fi writer and you notice a plot hole, apparently. Your attitude of superiority is evident in the derision you have expressed towards writers who do things you don’t like.
Why is one’s choice to write sci-fi in need of defense? Why are they expected to default to a different genre unless they can provide a sufficiently good reason to write sci-fi?
Pff, I doubt there’s a writer alive who hasn’t shelved something after walking into an insurmountable plot hole. I did it once on the very last chapter, right before the captain of the guard was set to spontaneously behead the baron.
“There are plenty of reasons to write sci-fi that have nothing in particular to do with science. The idea that hard science must be a part of it is associated with all sorts of unsavory attempts to keep women out of the genre and to invalidate the ones who are part of it.”
I’d make two points, one general and one personal.
(1) I would say that in my view a novel about the future without much basing in science is not really sci-fi but something else — though quite legitimate in its own right — say, futuristic fantasy. But this is a quibble, and I don’t see the value of making this quibble at greater length,
(2) Your point about gender issues is probably correct to a large extent, but since in my world it is my wife who is the science major and the sci-fi fan, it’s hard for me to see that. I’ve been in a role-reversed marriage for over 30 years, and sometimes I forget what the conventional world looks like.
My particular favorite was an original Star Trek episode (if I remember correctly) that featured human-like beings that were half blue, some on the right half and some on the left. At first you don’t see them as separate races. But then it turns out that people who are blue on one side feel they are enormously superior to those who are blue on the other side, although other than that one aspect there is no perceptible difference. I thought it was a very effective take on racism — if we were the half-blue people visiting Earth, would we see any real difference in humans who were merely different shades of brown?
I’m not at all sure why someone who doesn’t even read sci-fi would think that they get to decide what is and isn’t sci-fi. Can you really not see why this is rubbing people the wrong way? Ditto with the “you’re probably correct about this thing that I know nothing about, but my marriage is special so I can’t see that”.
Well, if they ever complain about feminists in my industry, we’ll be dealing with #gatevalvegate.
And then they’ll start making bad castration analogies and it’ll become #knifegatevalvegate
Since this seems to be related to the Star Trek randomness of earlier:
Either Star Trek is sci fi, with the science being softer than butter but the stories being sometimes absolutely amazing, or it’s not and it’s something else like “science fantasy.” It seems like the term “sci fi” is being used different ways in different sentences.
Star Trek doesn’t fuss about the science because the science isn’t actually that important. The science is the way to move the stories away from the usual complications of normal contemporary Earth. The ep that GOM is thinking of, they were actually half-black, half-white, and it was transparent racial commentary. It was making a comment about race relations that could not have been made on prime-time TV in 1969 if the setting had been Earth in 1969 and the characters had been black and white instead of weird aliens. Star Trek TOS did that kind of thing a lot. And then you sometimes had an episode about Spock’s brain, or about a salt vampire, and that’s the price you pay for having the ability to tell the other stories.
TNG etc. tell stories that could not be told if the setting was Earth. The shows are not about science and, when they are bad, the technobabble is both the problem and the solution, but those bad episodes are not the whole of it. Focusing on “well, how do we get people into outer space, and why does everyone speak vernacular English?” is an unnecessary complication that need not be addressed in order to get to the “racism is kind of irrational” message.
The hard vs soft categories of real true SF are a dispute that has been going on since the thirties. Smart publishers still publish good writing and let the purists waily waily waily.