https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTcYLPGoC4I
Woah! I wasn’t expecting this, but here it is. I have not yet watched it. But I imagine I will have some further thoughts when I do, because, holy crap, it’s Davis Aurini’s version of the Sarkeesian Effect!
Sorry, I mean, his version of a, no, wait, it’s not a version of anything, it’s his “separate independent work that should not be considered a ‘version’ of The Sarkeesian Effect or derivative of it,” as a title card in the “film” explains,
Even though it’s, you know, about Anita Sarkeesian and her “effect,” and even though it uses “footage originally filmed for use in The Sarkeesian Effect.”
That’s Aurini’s story and he’s sticking with it.
Anyway, I’m opening up a bag of popcorn and watching it. Join me, will you?
EDIT: Ok, I’m thirty seconds in and already tacky as hell graphics and badly recorded voiceover! This is gong to be good. By which I mean terrible.
EDIT 2: Ok, it’s not quite 4 minutes in and I’m getting bored. Damn. That’s what happened with that other totally unrelated film too.
@ msexceptiontotherule
Owen is the bathtub rambler. Aurinis is the one with the skull.
Aurini says nothing about the rape/death threats that Anita has gotten. The first time the topic is ever even mentioned is in the honeybadger interview, when Karen says (as Anita) “I get rape threats, and it’s coming from those gamers over there.”
And now I’m watching him describe Paul Elam as moderate in his views. Wow.
Just expanding on this for people who haven’t played Super Princess Peach: One of her main attacks is bursting into tears for no reason, and the area the game takes place in is called Vibe Island. … Okay, they supposedly meant “Vibe” as in “Mood,” but it wouldn’t be the first joke about Peach and dildos they’ve made. =P
I love Nintendo, but “Trainwreck” is right.
@SFHC:
Wait, really?
*grk*
*gnn*
*snrkk*
Ha.
Did anyone note that this was posted to youtube by Matt Fucking Forney, since Aurini is still suspended I guess?
@SFHC
http://tansyrr.com/tansywp/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/janeway-facepalm.jpg
I watched like 15 minutes, and as a documentary it’s already a joke. What’s the thesis? Aurini seems to state one right away: this is a documentary about a zeitgeist for which Sarkeesian is a good case study or example. But then he dips immediately into critiquing her videos, but half-asses it. “Refer to Thunderf00t for more information” is not a valid move for a documentary. Neither is, “I’m going to categorize her lies into 4 groups as if this is super-important information that is so vital it needs to be categorized, but spend less than 10 minutes on it and then drop it like a hot potato.”
He realizes nitpicking Sarkeesian’s videos is not what he really wants to do with this thing, but he’s so proud of his category system that he couldn’t bear to leave it on the cutting-room floor where it belongs. It’s a distraction from his stated thesis, and he clearly knows it, but he’s not disciplined enough to get rid of it.
I skipped ahead slightly and heard him say, “They call themselves the ‘social justice warriors'” and laughed so hard I sprained something. Keep working on deepening your voice, Aurini, because I’m sure your outstanding journalism is going to nail you a sweet gig with a fat paycheck any day now!
@Policy of Madness
Just wait till you get to Part II, when Davis decides it’s time to do a history of gaming. Sort of.
@kirby
Maybe this weekend, when I don’t have to work in the morning and can get drunk for it. For some reason it doesn’t bother me that he used Powerpoint for the first section of the video, but it bothers me a ton that he couldn’t stay on topic for even 10 minutes.
He uses the same photoshop cloud filter the *entire video*, doesn’t he…
And now, after talking about some thing about manipulation and some guy who advocated using just enough (but not too much) cognitive dissonence as someone associated with Anita…
Now he’s talking about how while learning to pick up women isn’t a bad thing, Anita is tainted by her association with a guy who is a pick up artist.
Is he really going to demonstrate every single manipulation tactic he accuses Anita of literally moments after accusing her?
Will there be fight scenes? And wooden exchanges between bickering couples? Will there be skulls?
If no to any of the above I’m not sure I should waste any time actually watching this.
Things have been surprisingly skull-free. Also unsurprisingly fact-free. Lots of people complaining about SJWs, almost no direct evidence of SJWs doing their thing.
And now I’m at the point where Davis is really pushing the Marxist thing. Apparently, Marx invented gender feminism because he was a failure of a father, who knew?
Also, he’s quoting a book written by Vox Day entitled “SJWs always lie,” saying that SJWs/marxists/feminists always lie, always project, and always double down.
I… need this break to type this out. Aurini literally is embodying every single bad thing he accuses SJWs of in this documentary in this documentary.
Hah hah, the “Wikipedia Ediotr”!
Maybe “Wikipedia ediotr” means “not a Wikipedia editor because he was banned from Wikipedia and therefore cannot edit”?
And now we have a long discussion about the maiden/mother/crone archetypes culminating in calling leftists children. And they had bad moms. And they’re lazy. And have never worked a day in their life. And they’re priveleged princesses.
Christ, Davis did not earn this sudden rhetorical deluge. Did he think that anyone who suffered this long through would be open to this crap? Did he think that this constituted a “climax” in his narrative that is still pretty much undefined?
Yikes.
Holy shit we’re in full right-wing swing now. “Why are leftists, marxists, progressives, what have you, so eager to parasitize off of what others have built? Western civilization, Christianity…”
And holy shit I just saw Aurini blame social justice warriors for Donald Trump. Go to time 1:06:20 or so. He literally just did that. I am in shock.
Davis Aurini is the last person in the world to pontificate on narcissism.
Yeahhhhh, I think I’ll wait for the parody. Even one with sockpuppets is bound to be more interesting and entertaining than the sounds of this.
I’m at 16:05 (with the webcam girl) and my BAC is 0.29‰
Well, the GG narrative on that is either “She made them all up to con more money out of people!” or “Everyone gets harassed! Suck it up and quit whining/being a professional victim!”
Of course, the idea that she’s getting these threats validates her point that women in the gaming sphere are treated, and expected to act, like non-sentient receptacles for the bitter entitlement and rage of GamerBros flies right over their heads.
(Also welcome back, I missed youuuuu.)
Aww, thanks, PI. I’m trying to show up every so often. 😛
But yeah, that’s the GG narrative. But that creates a problem; because Davis doesn’t even mention the idea that Anita is claiming threats, except in a really round-about way, or by way of a few comments from the interview subjects. It’s weird.
And now I’m watching every single interview subject say that Anita doesn’t matter and GG isn’t about her, at the end of literally an hour straight of bashing Anita. That she lies, that she’s a marxist taking over culture and censoring everyone. And yet here is every single interview subject saying that the only story is that there is a story, and the only reason GG criticizes her is because she got attention she doesn’t deserve.
When’s the ten minute long right-wing rant putting Davis in the forefront again? I’m long-since ready for this thing to wrap up now.
Here we go! I prepared this abortive attempt at a watch-through.
This came out of nowhere! Davis Aurini, the most pretentious of the Bond villains, has unexpectedly dug up The Sarkeesian Effect and posted his version up as the catchily-titled “Immersed in Subversion: Control the Culture; Control The Man (Davis Aurini’s Sarkeesian Documentary)” (with a semicolon). It isn’t actually up on his channel yet, but his slightly less comical clone Matt Forney has graciously put it up on his, saying that Davis Aurini has lost access to his channel due to “false reports by leftists”. I don’t know what those false reports were. Maybe they said he was a decent person.
The film opens with a white on green message explaining that this film shouldn’t be considered a derivative of The Sarkeesian Effect, despite featuring his partner in The Sarkeesian Effect, having the same stated purpose as The Sarkeesian Effect and being overwhelmingly composed of footage from The Sarkeesian Effect. The message is accompanied by uncomfortable scratching and popping noises and wobbles around a bit as if being displayed on an old-timey projector, but it just serves to make it look low-quality. The film needs no help in this regard.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, boing. The “Gamma Level Productions” logo appears, a name that I think was taken from someone mocking Aurini’s attempts at editing, using the redpill style of communication of organizing people into tiers by Greek letters. It shows a sense of irony but still isn’t the most confident thing to call yourself.
The prolonged Anita-praise from Jordan’s version has been sorted out – here we go right into a purple Earthbound background with X-Files music and Davis introducing Anita Sarkeesian by talking a bit too loud over it.
Wait a minute, after introducing Anita as the single awful reason that you can’t make things like this documentary any more, he says that she’s just one face in the crowd. What crowd’s that?
Oh, he doesn’t say.
“She herself isn’t that interesting”, says one of the so-called men who spent something like eight thousand dollars of gullible people’s money a month failing to make a documentary about her.
Here’s the title, Immersed in Subversion, resolving through a pixelly blur on to the wobbly purple background! It looks like the title of a secondary school maths video, I feel like I’m about to spend half an hour listening to things about surface equations.
The sound suddenly drops and the visuals cut to black, then we fade in on the laughable DVD menu of Anita’s Youtube videos that we saw previously in his now-gone forty minute “rough cut”.
A low-quality capture of a Youtube video by Thunderfoot appears, with the sound cut off at the start.
Some other Youtube videos.
Here’s his list of four problems with Anita’s videos as before. Once again, the captions stay up on the screen for the entire time he’s talking about them, which is roughly forever.
“Bayonetta is the realization of a female fantasy” because she was designed by a woman!
There are about a million years of this, and it’s all that same DVD menu with occasional clips. Finally, he stops talking long enough for Part 1 to appear in a laughable static-effect transition – it’s #Not Your Shield! No, not #notyourshield. #Not Your Shield. Don’t you know how hashtags work?
Not to let us forget his sense of style, he narrates this next bit on top of a murky green pulsating background that looks like one of the more dire levels from a Trauma Center game. He talks about Saul D. Alinksy’s book “Rules for Radicals” to start off with, saying that its “Riling up emotions, offering deceptively simple solutions to complex problems, attacking individuals rather than ideas, and creating a mob to force the establishment into negotiation”. He says that this is what the modern social justice movement is doing, but to me it sounds suspiciously like a certain laughably obvious wig with an idiot hanging off it who is currently running for president. (Oh, and in case that’s attacking an individual rather than an idea – all his ideas are shit, too.)
“Do social justice warriors truly speak for all women, all blacks…” Of course they don’t, you bald wally. (I’m bald as well, I can say that. I think that’s how it works.) That would be saying that an entire social group holds the same opinion on absolutely everything. But I think that in the case of African-Americans, for example, they’re pretty united behind not being shot by the police for going a bit too fast through a traffic light.
Christina Parreira is introduced as a PhD student with an MA in clinical psychology – I’ll give Davis this, that’s a much better introduction than Jordan gave her, where I think her caption just said “Porn star”.
Here’s the bathtub-ranting shambleheap himself – hastily zoomed out of view. Let’s keep him that way!
Christina’s speech comes on in the middle of a word! “-n when the economic need arose…” This just screams quality, doesn’t it.
She does her best to say her part while Jordan constantly nods, interjects and waves his limbs randomly in and out of shot.
She talks a lot about Gail Dines and some other people who aren’t introduced and are never explained.
Static cut again to an unannounced TED talk where I have to turn the volume up to hear what’s being said.
The word “Education” flashes on the screen in a rubbish meme-tastic style (it’s the Impact font and everything) across this speaker, then some videos of Anita. Then we go straight back to Christina wondering what just happened.
“The characters in the games are kind of like the porn stars”. I got a bit distracted and I didn’t catch the context of this statement, but I’m fairly sure that no context would make it comfortable.
Oh, we’ve finally been introduced to Gail Dines, who is the speaker in the TED talk. Thanks, that would have been useful to know earlier.
More narration on top of the view from the inside of some alien’s colon.
He’s on to 1984 or some bollocks now. It’s an all right novel and everything, but that was the worst thing to happen to discourse.
Sigh. Lots of other things, I’m only about twenty minutes through, but I’m going to have to do something more interesting for a while soon – I do, however, want to bring up the sarcastic “Male Privilege” posted that pans across the screen a bit later with “Homicide” amusingly misspelled as “homocide”.
Skipped a bit (well, hours) ahead, the aforementioned Republican frontrunner with a face like a sat-on ham sandwich actually appears in this documentary as well.
Started talking about narcissim.
oh god please make it stop
it hurts
it hurts
it hurts
I met someone recently who is very anti Sarkeesian and is very disingenuous in explaining his views.
I feel despair because he is a member of a UK political party that strongly promotes equality as one of its main policies and he is rising up the ranks in our local branch.
It is the last place for such attitudes and I fear his ‘effect’.
One bad apple and all that.
Ah ha ha ha ha, here it is. I thought I was joking. The only thing I got wrong was that he’s quoting a poem rather than his own diatribe.
“The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” by Rudyard Kipling, if you’re curious. No idea why or what the point is, but ooh it’s poetry and sounds very artistic.
To all those of you reviewing this, my hat is off. (Said hat is an actual fedora, not a trilby.)
Welp. That happened. No real credit sequence to speak of. Just a frame before the long poetry reading, and no credits for filmers, the mysterious long haired interviewer, or the interview subjects.
And now I’m left wondering what the point of it all was. And I’m not just talking about the random poetry at the end.
What a bizarre thing.
Also worth pointing out; there’s a link to Davis Aurini’s blog post about the “documentary” on the video, but the link is dead. That’s fun.