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.
@TreePerson@Paradoxical, so just a pretentious way of referring to Halloween. Can imagine the white-supremacist gamergate element loving that.
These GGs really need to just realise that they are totally decimated now. This is the best they can do, and it will only get more desperate from here on.
@ Samhain discussion
Not sure what the incorrect pronunciation has to do with anything. Until now I’ve been pronouncing it incorrectly- ‘fuck them’ to me too?
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
Thanks for the video!
BTW, i just found that the book can be downloaded for free in english thanks to the UNESCO. Hoorey for free education!
Coincidentally, it was just earlier today that I wondered to myself… what had become of Gamergate.
Like, can it still be considered a “movement”? Or is it just reduced to a stalwart handful of dudes kvetching over the same things endlessly in forums, until they grow old and die?
That dead horse must be pretty stale by now. Does Eron Gjoni even give a shit about it any more?
Are Anita, Zoe & Brianna still receiving the same volume of harassment, unabated?
Who still cares about GG is what I wanna know? Is it many people?
The people they’re still harassing and getting fired from their jobs care. The people who would like to work in games but don’t want to be targets of one of their harassment campaigns care.
@ Paradox
I know! I know!! I KNOW!! IknowIknowIknow!!
A woman made a vid about a woman who wrote a book which was the first example of an overwhelmingly popular genre…. They can’t handle that….
These fools don’t give a rat’s ass about cultural appropriation, OR about any culture that isn’t theirs. And by “theirs”, I don’t mean western European (which in it’s “generic” form would include Celtic), either. Their culture is “western MY-opean”!!
No, no, little GamerGits. Just because you occasionally wank over an anime character or two (okay, you CONSTANTLY wank over ’em), doesn’t mean you own the last thousand years of Japanese culture. You don’t even own the last 30 years of Japanese cartoons, seeing as most of them are older than most of you.
Anyhow, I’m pretty sure Anita’s tribute to Lady Murasaki is a lot more tasteful than any of yours would be. Because, you see, you’re wankers, and she’s not.
Speaking as an AFAB individual who fully intends on attempting to enter the video games industry, the fact that these guys are still around is quite…disconcerting, to say the least.
Yeah, that’s the problem with basing a big chunk of your own identity around the hatred of a handful of people. Recalibrating one’s own sense of self is a hard thing to do, so in order to avoid having to make a difficult self-appraisal and take a hard, sober look at your own choices, you just have to keep on hating the people you’ve been hating for so long. I feel like some GGers would end up writing message-board screeds about Zoe Quinn on their deathbeds, rather than admit that maybe they were a bit misguided about the whole thing.
(And yes I know this is just very broad armchair psychology here, but I think it’s pretty appropriate.)
@ nparker
Then is no judgement when a person mispronounces a word they don’t hear often, or one they have only read; especially in a different language.
When you use it intentionally to impress someone but don’t know how to actually pronounce it*? Yeah, not so much.
So, it would be so like these fools to mispronounce it as well since they already pepper their language with ‘smrt’ words used incorrectly.
*Anecdote! Reminds me of a man I once knew who liked to say ‘rhetoric’ – “that’s irresponsible rhetoric” – but would pronounce it like ‘rhetorical’ without the ‘al’. His ‘ruh-tore-ick’ was rightly mocked – especially when he would try and argue that he was actually right .
Couple of things, GGers;
First, she is not “Armenian”. She is Canadian-American. Bringing up her ethnicity when she herself rarely brings it up is some blood-libel nonsense. You are trying to place her an scary other when in all reality she probably had a pretty standard Western upbringing, if tinged a bit by her being a second-generation immigrant. We don’t know for sure because a) she doesn’t talk about it, mainly because b) you are all a bunch of creeps who would harass the shit out of her parents, so of course she keeps her past a secret.
Second, she released this video two-and-a-half weeks ago, i.e., nowhere close to Halloween. Where the hell were you? For obsessives, you sure don’t pay a lot of attention to people you dislike. How about just go all the way and ignore her alone entirely? The world would be better for it.
You know how Audre Lorde said, ““For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
This can be applied in a positive way. They try to dismantle our house with claims like these of cultural appropriation, but because they don’t know what it really means, the blows do not land and damage is superficial at best.
Is that…is that not how it’s pronounced?
@Handsome Jack
It’s prononuced more like
‘rederik’/
http://66.media.tumblr.com/a4eb9740ee170d02480519dfb8ed7952/tumblr_mj3tc9QlF81rafdwyo1_500.gif
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
TreePerson:
It’s not for the impatient, that’s for sure. It’s over a thousand pages!
Also, who writes “30,000$”? Dude, if you’re gonna flaunt your education, at least learn how to write money.
I wonder if any of the GGers were the slightest bit interested in 10th century Japanese literature before this? I quite liked Genji, but for an utterly charming (and much shorter) read, it’s the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagan for me every time. Plus there is a crater on Mercury named after her!
The funny thing is they’d probably like The Tale of Genji if they actually read it. The main character is a huge prick to women.
Samantha Bee did a piece on the alt-right plus a piece on Russian trolling. (In case the videos don’t embed, the first two are about the alt-right while the last is the Russian thing.)
It’s nothing really knew but the Russian trolling thing is interesting.
https://youtu.be/XQ8swY06eRU
https://youtu.be/QGn-C0G6xcw
https://youtu.be/OauLuWXD_RI
the way they complain about her supposedly “scamming” people is mind boggling. I’ve tried to argue/discuss the topic with people on Twitter once or twice, and had them focus on how she supposedly hadn’t produced as much content as she promised she would in her various crowd funding campaigns.
It boggles my mind because THEY certainly didn’t give her any money! *I* did! I backed Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and I’ve been completely satisfied with her work there. I haven’t really heard of anyone who said they backed her and were dissatisfied.
This pretense of being angry *on behalf of allegedly dissatisfied customers* is such bullshit. i hate it. a lot.
@Paradoxical Intention — oooo! Can I get a tiny Applejack, please? Back in 80s, in 1st generation of ponies, Applejack was my first pony. Italian, head-turned pose.
Also, about Buttcoins:
http://www.buttcoinfoundation.org/ — Bitcoins mocked (worth checking the tag “captains of industry“, there’s an interesting overlap with trilbykin MRAs), new site after the mess with Butterfly Labs.
Also in Twitter and most of the action is now in Reddit.
Regarding Samhain it is actually an event that is still celebrated. When i went to the uk on holiday i met a man at Stonehenge called King Arther Pendragon (that’s his real name he is allegedly the rebirth of king arthur) and he is a druid. He and other pagans celebrate all the old holidays. Though what they dont do is go on the internet and harass people for making too short videos about Japanese authors. If anything these morons have appropriate Samhain.
@feartheminotaur
Mispronunciation is NOT a trait to mock, it is a trait to politely correct.
I’m not sure what’s happening, but I’ve been noticing a frustrating trend for people in progressive movements starting to loudly add in things to their critique of say, manopherians, that are not anything to do with their deplorableness. Whatsoever.
Why do it? What possible reason is there for being horrible about someone’s pronunciation of words? It is not justified.
Valentine
Its quite odd that druids go to Stonehenge for things like that- apparently it was made many, many years before druids existed in the area.
These GG people don’t seem to realise that when they try to use social justice language, they come across as even more pathetic than they already did, because it makes it ever more clearer that their objections to social justice are based in hate and prejudice rather than any actual understanding.