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Every time you think they can’t go any lower, they go lower. This morning game designer and #GamerGate target Zoe Quinn discovered that someone was selling, er, “erotic fiction” about her on Amazon. Which is to say: a Kindle eBook apparently filled with explicit descriptions of her being gang-raped by five “upset” gamers trying to “teach her a lesson.”
Here’s the author’s blurb for the book:
Zada Quinby is a controversial video game designer who may have stepped the line…
When her latest game offends the nation, five upset players decide to teach her a lesson. This gang of gamers decides to give Zada of piece of their mind, and much more!
Things are about to get incredibly rough when these five men unleash their pent up anger on poor Zada. It’s an experience that she’ll never forget.
As Quinn, a rape survivor, put it:
having your trauma be fetishized and sold to people who wish they could revictimize you is not an occupational hazard I signed up for.
— zoë “Baddie Proctor” quinn (@UnburntWitch) December 19, 2014
Apparently I was a character in the “book” as well.
I say apparently because I haven’t read it. Few people have. In the one silver lining to all this: Amazon took it down shortly after a reporter for Raw Story called them to ask about it. But you can see an archived version of the page here.
Unfortunately, not everyone on Twitter thought the book was a bad thing. Here’s how one terrible person responded when #GamerGate opponent Ian Miles Cheong posted about the book being on Amazon.
.@stillgray @PixieJenni Hahaha, that's brilliant xD Sad, but brilliant.
— MilesVork (@MilesVork) December 19, 2014
@MilesVork has complained that this tweet was taken out of context, but that is the entirety of the exchange, and he has since refused to apologize for it. He also, for what it’s worth, claims not to be a #GamerGater, though if you scroll back through his tweets you will see a number of nasty attacks on another of #GamerGate’s main targets, whom he describes as an “absolute cumbucket” and “a bigger bucket of crazy than all the stupidity in GG combined.”
When @PixieJenni posted a screenshot of the above exchange on Twitter, this conversation ensued. Some highlights:
I think it’s safe to say that @DieHardDante is a #GamerGater, if his dozens if not hundreds of Tweets on the subject are any indication. He also seems to think anti-Semitic cartoons are hilarious.
There is no bottom to this barrel.
H/T — r/GamerGhazi for some of the links above; thanks as well to those who alerted me to this on Twitter
Probably good to mention how DieHardDante told me, knowing I am Hindu, to suck off a cow. 😀 He’s a really pleasant man!
A person being upset when someone writes and sells fiction about them being raped is proof that it was necessary to write and sell fiction about them being raped. That is a truly repellent belief.
Kay P, I’m sorry about what he said to you. What a prize of a person.
I dropped Amazon when they published the child rape instruction book.. I see they have not changed their ways.
That is not a two dot ellipsis I will have you know. It is a two dot period cuz I wanted to stop, full stop. Emphatically.
Gamergate is just bursting with ethics!
What. The. Heck. How is it necessary to publish a fetishistic rape fic? How does the backlash justify it? How is it justified at all? DiehardDante even implied that people, including his loved ones, could do something to deserve it. His logic does not follow any Earth logic. It doesn’t even follow alien logic. It’s exists in some void where logic does not really exist except in some warped parody of itself.
Hey David, you probably saw Jimmy Wales’ response to GamerGate?
https://twitter.com/freebsdgirl/status/545767924779061248
My favorite part is where he suggests that if they want to get taken seriously, they should form a board of directors.
Oh god, can you imagine them trying to make Robert’s Rules work?
The idea that objecting to the degradation/shaming/harassment of somebody means that the objector thinks that the person is “sacred and untouchable” seriously bugs me. What’s so hard to believe about a worldview that nobody deserves to be treated like that? With a corollary that treating anybody in such a meanspirited and malicious way is something that a person ought to be ashamed of doing, unless they want other people to regard them as repellent and to be avoided?
I agree, tigtog. I don’t think people realize what they are saying about themselves when they make that argument.
In before someone tries to make this about kink.
“The reaction shows that this is NEEDED”? For WHAT? What fucking purpose does a rape novella of eleven fucking pages of stupid serve? Ethics? In game journalism? Seriously???
Somebody get on the phone to Beijing and let them know that trolls are about to break through the Earth’s crust somewhere in their general vicinity.
I’d rather like the trolls to break the surface to a welcoming committee of the People’s Liberation Army …
I know I’m probably not the first person to say this but…”Actually it’s about ethics in rape fiction.”
@Katz, thank you so much for posting Jimmy Whale’s response. That was pure gold that should be framed and hung on a wall. The best response to GG I have seen yet.
Just so long as it wasn’t liquid gold.
Looks like someone claiming to be the author is posting on /r/KotakuInAction:
http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2pt5f8/ama_i_wrote_the_gamergate_erotica_and_im_not_a/
Yeah, I’m just gonna go take a bleach bath now. There just aren’t enough kitties.
Wow, that Reddit thread is a whole new level of clueless. Is it really that hard to understand that writing “dubcon erotica” about a real person who was driven out of her home by rape threats was a terrible thing to do? Are they seriously surprised that people reacted poorly to this?
Miss Andry:
From the page:
If everybody in the world simultaneously did a facepalm right now… It still wouldn’t be enough.
@Tessa:
Maybe this will help?
http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2011/122/8/0/fractal_facepalm_by_jon11888-d3fgwlv.jpg
That’s unsettling. So it wasn’t a GamerGrate thing but they knew who you are and about your coverage. That’s less believable than the trolls we get claiming to not be MRAs and those trolls are not remotely believable.
So, the woman is a game developer called Zada Quinby, they meet in a burger joint (no fries involved?) and the book is titled “GamerGape”?
Yep, no relationship with GamerGate at all…
I actually called Amazon customer service ..and they just kept saying “we don’t understand”
It’s sad that these idiots need to fantasize about rape to feel big. These guys are probably the saddest human being on the planet. When you can only prop yourself up by imagining hurting others, you’re truly dead on the inside. These guys are truly dead inside. Hell, they’re so cowardly they can only do any of this shit anonymously, in a one on one fight Zoe Quinn could probably have these idiots bleeding on the ground and spitting up teeth.
Newsflash, cowardice is not synonymous with harmless. Quite the opposite if this is anything to go by.