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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 But you can see an archived version of the page here.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
Cowards can actually be very dangerous, since they’ll always pick on someone weaker than themselves.
*Even if*—and this is requiring me to muster all sorts of unreasonable amounts of benefit of the doubt—*even if* the author was just a random onlooker who gets a kick out of rape-centered stories (ew ew ew ew), and *even if* he was simply mining GamerGate for the language and characters, without having any personal opinion on the matter—this is still a slimy, disgusting, horrible thing to write.
I mean, “Oh, no, it’s okay, because #NotAllGamerGaters” doesn’t improve this. The very best of all possible outcomes (to the point of being literally unbelievable) is that this was a thoughtless, careless, and tasteless throwaway project which was STILL disgustingly misogynistic and inappropriate. Siphoning real controversial names and events to fill up your roster puts you in the middle of said controversy, and yes, you are fully to blame if people “mistakenly” associate your work as weighing in on it, and yes, people are fully justified in being upset that you used their personal identities to do so.
So yeah, even if anyone could manage to believe a word of the AMA, sorry dude, you’re not off the hook for this one.
I tried to look this book up on amazon when I read this article, it seems they’ve removed it in response to all the complaints.
The author of the book is doing an AMA in Kotaku Inaction right now. She claims she knows nothing about GamerGate.
She also claims it’s not rape because it’s of the “dubcon” (i.e. dubious concept) genre.
Read more here:
http://np.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2pt5f8/ama_i_wrote_the_gamergate_erotica_and_im_not_a/
And now they are suggesting she write stories about other real women.
http://np.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2pt5f8/ama_i_wrote_the_gamergate_erotica_and_im_not_a/cmzx8u7
“She also claims it’s not rape because it’s of the “dubcon” (i.e. dubious concept) genre.”
The coward’s way of describing fiction with sexual assault/rape. Also I kind of doubt the author is actully a she.
“Cowards can actually be very dangerous, since they’ll always pick on someone weaker than themselves.”
Yeah.
Zoe Quinn made a game about depression which I assume is a result of her own struggles with depression. So should would be someone who has been going through a tough time already before this shit happened.
I don’t know much about Quinn. I’ve seen her being interviewed about this GG bullshit. She seems to be a sensitive young woman, who shows a lot of emotion on her face. I do absolutely not mean that in a bad way, rather, it made me feel sympathetic to her.
But cowardly bullies when they see someone like that, they think: “Perfect target”!!
Fuck those cowards.
The person who wrote that thing needs to be dropped in a bottle dungeon with legos on the bottom without their laptop in order to prevent them from the career writing made-to-order rape fic that they’re apparently about to embark on.
Oh god that AMA is so filled with stupid my head hurts from all the face-palming. The person is clearly not a woman and clearly not a writer. Their (there? wtf) grammar and syntax is all wrong. Of course, I don’t read fanfic, so maybe that’s normal? Either way, both the author of the story and the AMA (even if they are not the same person) is obviously involved in GG. It is pathetic that they are trying to pretend otherwise.
@thebewilderness (way upthread)
Amazon sold a child rape instruction book?? How are they still a business??
also, off topic, has anyone else seen this? 🙁
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/cops-snaps-kicks-door-kills-woman-shoots-daughter-receiving-protection-from-abuse-order/
And apparently law enforcement families have higher rates of domestic violence than the general population.
marci – fanfic writing quality varies hugely. I’ve been into one genre of it lately and have seen things that were “Damn, this person writes so well, this should be in print!” and “OMG this sucks so much, they can’t even string a sentence together, no, no, brain bleach, take this person’s keyboard away!”
Wow, that’s… disgusting. I don’t know whether or not I believe the author is a woman, but I’ll take that at face value FOR THE MOMENT as the RPS and Erotic fiction communities are often highly dominated by women. This is one hell of a case of internalized misogyny coming out in a horrible way if the author is a woman, though.
Rape porn about a real person who has been sexually assaulted and threatened with rape? I’m trying to work out if the author measures up to the emotional maturity of a predatory leech.
@ katz
I love it that the author of the letter to Jimmy Wales says that “Wikipedia has got me through just about all of my undergrad schooling” Most accredited courses specifically warn against that error and some Professors of other courses (PZ are you there?) will castigate a student doing that – at least I think castigate is the word.
I also love the naive optimism of “Soon I’ll be living off a software engineer’s salary”. Industry ranges vary widely depending on location, experience, and skill set, of course, but it’s a myth that all software engineers rake in the big bucks. The average entry-level code monkey fresh out of college isn’t going to start at six figures. It takes years to acquire the business knowledge to be a lead developer/architect.
And what a tool to think that his ability to donate (or not) should have any impact on Wikipedia’s policies and mission statement. “Oh, you’re planning to be rich soon? Just this once, then, we’ll make an exception and report it YOUR way.”
@ saphy No I had not seen that. I wonder why the PD was so ready to regard the allegations as “bullshit”
“What makes Zoe Quinn so sacred and untouchable?”
From the “movement” that freaked out when Gamasutra supposedly wrote an article claiming gamers are dead.
You smell the ethics from here…
Too bad you can’t burn e-books. This makes me feel like burning the whole internet though.
Calling these people the scum of the Earth would be unfair to scum.
I’m not surprised about the cops. If they can and will murder children in the street and get away with it I assume they are getting away with all sorts of acts of brutality.
I can’t believe Amazon was willing to sell this, is there nothing they won’t “publish”? I hope this hasn’t shaken Zoe too much and I hope they didn’t make Dave do anything really horrible in the story.
All in all this makes me laugh much less than Will Wheaton, Sex Machine.
“Five Guys, #burgersandfries, hurr hurr, all we have to do is claim no connection and people will totally forget THAT happened! No one can read our chatlogs, hurr hurr hurr…”
Yeah, no one except the whole fucking internet, since “Zada” (Zoe + Jada, the Texas teen rape victim whose pic got spread far and wide as #jadapose, as though she were only POSING as a victim) got hold of those #burgersandfries chatlogs and posted them as evidence that her ex was baiting 4channers to go after her. Nobody at all! Hurr, hurr.
These guys are so far up their own butts that they could stick their heads right back out their neckholes again. The only giveaway is the roll that looks like an extra chin.
(And no, I don’t believe the author is really a woman, either, because #notyourshield is no more convincing than THIS dimwitted blahblah. #notyourshield = #totallytheirshield.)
@kirbywarp
That fractal facepalm is perfect.
I propose a new hashtag for all this: #GamerRape.
I also think the tool who wrote to Jimmy Wales was neck-deep in a swamp of bullshit.
I don’t believe the engineer part OR the wikipedian part. It doesn’t sound like they understand (or care about) the neutrality policies and how they are applied.
@Bina
It sounds like it could backfire catastrophically, if we consider the type of scummiest scum we’re dealing with here :/