By David Futrelle
On February 10, Twitter was filled with gloating tweets from assorted amateur and professional far-right culture warriors, all happily celebrating the poor showing of the film Birds of Prey, which they had collectively decided was a terrible insult to comic book fans and men in general because Harley Quinn’s outfit in the film wasn’t as sexy as theoretically possible. This is the state of the culture war now.
Then someone on Twitter, for some reason, decided to stir the pot a little bit, trollishly trying to gin up some sort of phony conflict between Birds of Prey and the not-yet-released Sonic the Hedgehog movie.
Then a couple others retweeted this tweet as if it were their own. Then a couple more did the same, and so on and so forth, and before long the #Birds of Prey was filled with dozens of identical tweets.
People began riffing on the original, with the riffs getting more and more absurd with each new incarnation.
It was obvious from the start that this whole “campaign” against Sonic was what is commonly known as “a joke,” and not intended to be taken seriously by anyone.
Indeed, the first Tweets were tweeted out four days before the Sonic movie even opened, and anyone who took a second to look at the original tweeter’s account would have seen that she’s a hardcore Animal Crossing stan who mostly posts jokes and who (as far as I can tell from scrolling through several days of tweets) never posts anything having to do with feminism.
But the right-wing outrage merchants took one look at the tweets and saw a great opportunity. And so the videos began the appear, loudly and indignantly decrying this supposed feminist campaign to destroy the Sonic Movie with evil feminist lies.
There were a lot of these videos, with the most popular, from the (literally) Nazi-adjacent Tim Pool, boasting nearly 190,000 views (so far); several others have seen tens of thousands of views.
I have not, god forbid, watched all of these videos. (I watched all 27 minutes of Tim Pool’s and portions of a bunch of the others.) But the ones I sampled were indignant in their tone, seemingly taking for granted (without bothering to do more than ten seconds of research on the subject) that the anti-Sonic tweets were indeed some sort of serious feminist campaign to take down a movie that I doubt most feminists are even aware of. They’re fighting a straw man (or straw woman) that they seem to be truly convinced is real.
But maybe I’m not giving them enough credit. Surely they’re not all as gullible as that. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say not that they don’t know they’re fighting an imaginary enemy but that they simply don’t care that they are — at least so long as the clicks keep coming.
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(smirks) and they call us outrage merchants… Pot, meet Kettle indeed.
This is the thing about when far right trolls try to imitate feminists: usually they only end up fooling their own kind. The same thing happened with free bleeding a few years ago.
I can’t speak for other feminists, but since I have no personal stake in either of the films, haven’t seen them, and don’t really plan on it, I don’t really care if one does better than the other.
@KindaSortaHarmless
As always, it’s the projection with these types. Also, they seem to have taken Goebbel’s advice about accusing the enemy of that which you are guilty.
Shorter these dudes: Oh noes, female antiheroes are justifiably angry at men! We MUST make their movies fail!
Meanwhile, for a perfect example of WHY female antiheroes are justifiably angry at men, see above.
Off topic, but some (sort of?) good news from Portland today:
https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/02/jeremy-christian-guilty-on-all-counts-in-max-stabbings-trial.html
On topic: I probably will see Birds of Prey purposely because of the fact that it pisses anti-feminists off (and has done reasonably well with critics). Sonic isn’t marketed towards me but notice I didn’t complain about it on the internet because I don’t like shitting on things just because they weren’t made for me. Also I have nothing against 10 year old boys?
Uh, what? What did well? And I’m supposed to be furious? Sheesh. I’m always out of the loop.
https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/qjdzwb/sophie-lewis-feminist-abolishing-the-family-full-surrogacy-now
Found this because rightwingers on Facebook were melting down over it. 🙂
All the sonic movie success tells us is that box-office tanking revenge for Jim Carrey comments about Trump didn’t amount to much.
All BOP tells us is that being a R-rated quasi-sequel to a movie with an even lower metacritic score (both in professional and general public) than BvS Dawn of Justice and Justice League isn’t a surefire bet…who knew?
CURIOUS? This feminist certainly is. I’m CURIOUS to know what it would be like to live in a world without patriarchal whining, idiocy, trolling, and violence.
@Jamesworkshop
Well, conservatives have a short memory and many angry moments, you can’t expect them to remember everything they get upset about.
@Kat
I’m curious myself. Anyone know where I can find that world?
These yutzes can’t remember that women play games, too, can they? AND we watch cartoons. We’ve even been known to read comic books. And we have money to spend on those things.
*lovingly pats the 15th anniversary SteelBook edition of A:TLA she and Mr. Parasol bought last night as a first-week-of-new-job celebration*
@Victorious Parasol
I think the conservatives know this, but they ignore it because it makes them very upset (see: GamerGate, ComicsGate, AnimeGate, every other related reactionary movement).
How did your first week go?
@Naglfar
As far as first weeks go, this was a good one. I like the teammates I’ve met so far. They have a good structure in place for getting newbies up to speed. As someone who’s designed similar programs in the past, I am impressed.
The actual problem with the Sonic movie is that the studio crunched the hell out of their animators to fix the original design and then fired them all as soon as it was done.
My kids went to see Sonic with some friends yesterday. I stayed home and napped in the other room and had a much better experience. (For the record, the f-bombs and Satanic rituals didn’t bother them. Paw Patrol turned them antifa when they were 3.)
That constellation of response videos…wow. Invented feminist outrage is catnip to real right-wing outrage.
@Victorious Parasol: glad to hear it’s going well so far!
@Buttercup
I’m not really familiar with contemporary children’s television so I could be way off, but isn’t Paw Patrol about law enforcement? So wouldn’t that encourage children to support police?
It seems that their thought process goes something like this:
[imaginary straw feminists do something in the fevered imaginations of the right]
Conservatives: “Those feminist snowflakes get so upset, let’s own the libs for all the lulz.”
Actual feminists: “We don’t really care.”
Conservatives: “No you totally do, see this definitely real tweet and you all think the same because we do.”
As far as I understand these things BoP didn’t actually flop at the box office. It just didn’t perform according the over inflated expectations of its creators. Everyone i spoke to who has seen the movie, liked it just fine. Hell, I liked it just fine. I had a ball! I was mildly interested in going to see Sonic, which looks really cute, but two movies in one month is an outrageous amount of money to be spending for me, so I chose one film, and BoP was it.
Its interesting to watch all the reactionary silliness white men are having towards genre movies these days. Ever since Black Panther, white fanboys have been, mad as hell about that movie, trying to tear down any other genre movies that came after it, that starred poc and women, all while championing their next “Great White Hope” movie. They championed Ready Player One, then the next Star Wars movie, then Joker, and now this, as if they are looking for some movie that will defeat the existence of Black Panther, so they can smugly turn to us and go “gotcha!”, I guess.
Never mind that movie watching isn’t a kind of game that a group of people win. All they’re doing is making sure Hollywood makes more genre films. Beyond making more movies, Iddont think Hollywood is paying that close attention. I know the general mainstream public isn’t even remotely aware of whats going on, because its concerned with other issues.
@Naglfar – I know, I was kidding :). Paw Patrol has as much antifa content as Sonic does homophobic slurs.
Although the airplane pilot puppy is a (whispers) girl, which no doubt would enrage the gamer bros who demand 100% realism in their talking canine rescue team cartoons.
@Lakitha
Once again, reactionaries have a very inflated idea of how much everyone else cares what they think. Every time they try to do a boycott of a movie or product, it always fails to make a dent.
@Buttercup
As I figured. It just reminded me of this meme I saw the other day that said “ACAB and that includes the Paw Patrol.”
Thanks, Buttercup! I’m sure the manosphere would have a collective cranial explosion if they knew Mr. Parasol was glad to hear I’m happy with the new job.
Good. 😉
The only reason that I, as a feminist, am upset about the Sonic movie doing well is because a bunch of people were forced to crunch to redo the animation because of the poor reception, and then the studio that did that work was shut down and everyone laid off before the movie was even released.
@Naglfar ??? Love it.
For a second I thought ACAB meant “assigned cat at birth” and wondered if Paw Patrol was more subversive than I thought. I really dislike the way cats are the villains in that show (and just about every other TV show and movie). They’re always depicted as scheming and creepy.
Just once, I’d like to see a hero cat who saves the day by playfully knocking the evil world domination plans off a table and then batting them under the couch.
@Victorious Parasol – That’s icing on the cake! Hope your first few days continue to go well.
The VFX industry is stupidly brutal. The pay is not great, the hours are long with lots of unpaid overtime, and much of the staff only have a contract to the end of the show. A studio will staff up to 500, then down to 50 when a couple shows end. The margins are so thin that a studio can’t keep many people in between shows. There’s little loyalty in either direction: companies don’t invest in their workers, and thus workers don’t stick with their employer.
It’s labour-intensive, so there’s lots of competition from poorer countries where labour is cheaper; rich-country governments combat that by offering huge tax credits. In Quebec, it can amount to 30% of salaries, which means the country essentially isn’t taxing income in the multimedia industry (and Quebec is transferring money to the fed).
OMG Mr Fluffybutt, what have you done!? You knocked my hand-held death-ray off the counter and broke it, and then you pee’d on the schematic, so I can’t even fix it!
Sigh Screw this, I’ll just get a normal job.
@ buttercup
Have you seen this cartoon series? Cat staff may find it relatable.
I wonder how many of these people will change their tune and start bashing the Sonic movie as SJW trash because the main human character, a white guy, is married to a black woman and some of her relatives show up, but none of his. “OMG FORCED DIVERSITYYYY!!!1!!” Perhaps many already have, but I haven’t bothered to check.