Cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian may have moved on from videogames, but Gamergaters (yes, they still exist) haven’t gotten over their obsession with her.
Earlier this month, Sarkeesian put out a video on the legendary Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese woman who wrote the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, a thousand years ago. The four minute video, a slick production featuring elegant Japanese-art-inspired animation, is part of Sarkeesian’s Ordinary Women: Daring To Defy History series, her followup to Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games.
A video about a female writer who lived over 900 years before videogames were invented might not seem like an obvious target for the inhabitants of Kotaku In Action, the main Gamergate (or perhaps post-Gamergate?) hangout on Reddit. But it’s Sarkeesian, so the fake novel-reader boys on KiA rev up their outrage engines.
In a thread inspired by Sarkeesian’s video, a dedicated Sarkeesian-hater called SupremeReader stirs the pot with a trolly claim that Sarkeesian is guilty of “Armenian appropriation of Japanese culture around the Samhain holiday).” In a followup comment, he posts a photo of Sarkeesian in profile to show off her allegedly distinctive Armenian nose.
Others are outraged that her video, which they hated, wasn’t long enough for their tastes, a complaint that brings to mind the old joke about two diners at a restaurant grousing that “the food is terrible—and such small portions!”
“3 f*cking minutes is a joke of a historic video,” complains spatchbo.
Holy shit are people being seriously scammed by this. My professor from Tokyo Broadcasting is going to lose his shit.
Anita you are a horrible historian. Please do more work. This is so bad its a joke of itself. I can actually say I have a far better education on this than she had 30,000$ to come up with. You are a sad state of whatever you are trying to be. Besides a con-artists.
Rygar_the_Beast offers a similar, and similarly badly written, assessment.
You are trying to bring this women up to the light you think they are not in? A f*ck less than a 4 minute video isnt helping.
F*ck, for 3.50 i can give a person the wiki address to the page for this woman that probably has at least as much info about her in the introductory paragraph.
Sarkeesian’s video, while short, is in fact packed with information. It makes no pretense of being the final word on Murasaki, but rather serves as an intellectual appetizer of sorts, inviting viewers to pick up a copy of The Tale of Genji and read it for themselves.
But apparently Gamergaters find it hard to understand videos that aren’t meandering six-hour monologues over still pictures.
GG you are a broke ass joke, a stain on the community and a thousand steps back for any form of reforming the AAA industry’s incestuous and abusive practices.
MY SHIELD! MINE! Mineminemineminemineminemine! You can’t have ’em, ess jay dubyas! I got to ’em first. Neener neener!
http://i.imgur.com/3Dbc6qH.gif
This is pretty ironic considering that most gamergaters are white boys with anime avatars. And making a historical video about someone frim another culture is not appropriation. Just one more example of them trying to use social justice language and completely failing because they don’t know what it means.
What does Samhain have to with either Armenia or Japan? Did he just want to show off the vocabulary word he learned today?
Hee! These reactionaries love to try to appropriate progressive terminology and concepts. They love calling racists racist, sexists sexist; anything to try to point out hypocrisy on the left.
And in doing so, they can’t help but show that they don’t have a single clue about the things they’re talking about.
Sorta makes me wonder – is there any underlying thought or methodology or structure to right-wing concepts? Some sort of moral or logical framework that proves them? ‘Cause if you go just by observing how they use the left’s terminology, it”s nothing but buzzwords and feels.
Fun to watch at least!
The original Gamergaters were harassing Anita Sarkeesian long before Gamergate (which wasn’t even about her, but Zoe Quinn), and have been harassing a lot of other women, their families, and their supporters on the side.
They will probably continue to harass her and other women long after GG is a faded memory, and even long after she has nothing to with games anymore.
Despite what the clueless recruits whom they use as a shield may think, it was never about games. Never will be.
Japanese culture around Samhain?
Samhain is a Celtic (read: Celtic Revival) festival. As anyone who’s played Black&White 2 or any Civilisation game past the first knows, Japanese people are not Celtic. They normally don’t even start adjacent to one another.
Do these fake gamer boys not remember their classics?
And here comes Gamergate, with their newest rendition of “you care about these words I don’t understand, so I’m going to try and use them against you!”
…and while I’m still kind of fuzzy about whether or not something counts as appropriation, I’m pretty sure this isn’t it. Otherwise you couldn’t even comment on Shakespeare non-appropriatively unless you’re British.
I’m going to share a thing about The Tale of Genji before I go to bed, which is that it must have been the ‘real world’ template for ‘Darmok’ (though I don’t think I’ve ever seen this written down anywhere).
Is there nothing these guys understand?
Fuck those GG shitheads for trying to appropriate my religion. Stay the fuck out of that, Reddit. Samhain has nothing to do with Japan or Armenians. (I couldn’t make the stew I wanted, so instead I’m ordering pizza and I got pumpkin spice oreos and vanilla cream ale. I’m also doing my nails and I’m going to watch some classic zombie movies from this set I got from a store for like two bucks. I think the one from 1932 will be the best bet.)
And Anita wasn’t making a be-all, end-all authority video, just a fucking little tidbit to get people interested, since she’s making a whole series about women of history.
If y’all think she’s not doing a good enough job, then get off your asses and make a more in-depth video yourselves, for fuck’s sake.
But, as usual, these shitheads are all whine and no bite. They’ll never get off their asses and make their own video that they want, they’d rather sit around and kvetch that women aren’t doing the work for them, I suppose.
So, what, is this their version of telling spooky stories for Halloween?
http://i.imgur.com/Gs4TKAL.jpg
*lightning, thunder, screaming*
“Spatchbo” – is that a bowdlerised way of saying spatchcock? Which is also IMO, a terrible food (gamey AF) in a thankfully small portion.
@Scildfreja
I almost find it amusing when a racist/homophobic/transphobic jackass calls me a bigot when I point out that their comment(s) are racist/homophobic/transphobic. Apparently calling them out on their bigotry somehow makes me a bigot who is just trying to ‘shut them up’.
M wins everything ever for that picture.
I also like how they’re angry that the vid is only 4 minutes when Sargon refuses to watch anything longer than 5 and Aurini made a documentary about Anita but couldn’t be bothered to watch her work. If it was as long as a Ken Burns doc and contained the complete and unabridged story of the novel and its author, they’d dismiss it as ‘rambly nonsense about a subject only SJWs could possibly care about’
4 minutes is a good length for a vid trying to get a person interested in a thing they’ve never heard of before. Not sure what the complaint is, exactly.
It reminded me of the informative commercials the government of Canada put out, the Hinterland Who’s Who and the like. I went looking for a good one on the youtubes.
Then i found this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sekLEG8xsOs
Beavers put in good work up here.
Considering how rambling and tedious manosphere videos and writing usually is, I’m not surprised they think a four minute video is way too short. They’re universally terrible at writing and terrible at putting a coherent and watchable video together. Length is all they have to cling to. They can’t admit there’s any truth in the phrase “brevity is the soul of wit.” Their whole world would crumble!
@ Croquembouche of patriarchy
“Spatchcock” is a technique to cook poultry and game birds (the backbone is removed to allow the carcass to lay flat over heat and cook quicker and more evenly), not a dish in and of itself. It’s popular for game hens and grouse , although you can do it to less gamey birds like chicken or turkey.
Bonus: It sounds dirty and vaguely obscene
RE: Samhain
And these jackwagons probably pronounce it “sahm-hane” too.
Wow – I didn’t realize GGers were still out there.
re: “their whole world would crumble”
Pretty sure that the MRA economy is based on the buttcoin. It’s like a bitcoin, as in you mine for it algorithmically, but instead of mining with linalg you mine by posting youtube videos. And you can’t buy anything with them yet, but just you wait, buttcoin’s gonna take off any day now!
(I don’t know why your comment made me think of that, wwth. Maybe my brain’s haunted today)
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
There’s also the Heritage Minutes.