#depression is not a fucking competition and she needs to understand that

[pray4byron]

Requests are back open woo! How do you feel about platonic Alastor and male teen reader? Like he was around when Alastor was alive, same time period? And reader would sell newspapers to Al on the street. Reader could be a an orphan during the great depression hinting what Al said in the pilot. Reader is a huge fan of Alastor. When reader dies he willingly works for Alastor. And dont get me wrong! But i would kill to see Alastor and Lucifer just try to one up each other about who’s kid is better. If you don’t wish to do this i understand.

yeah, requests are back open!! huzah!!! but this is actually so cute what the flip, i’m gonna spend all my time thinking about this now KAHSBBSNSBSBAB

i’m imagining this kid to be ages like 11-14 btw so i hope that’s fine!!

Warnings: None(?)

Alastor + M!Teen!Reader

“Hey, young one!” Alastor says, you turn your head to face the much taller deer-like man, “I need you to go run a few errands for me,” Alastor says, you nod your head enthusiastically, as much as Alastor wasn’t the most sane man ever, he was the coolest person in your book — he could do anything!

“I have to stay here, at the hotel, and handle some business, so be a good lad and drop this off to Rosie, off in Cannibal Town,” Alastor explained, softly dropping a medium-sized gift box in your hands, “If anyone gives you any trouble, use that small, cellular object to contact Angel, to my dismay, he said he’d take care of it, if worst comes to worst, contact me, I’ll have it on me, but remember, I only use it when I have to, understood?” Alastor confirmed, looking down at you.

You gave him a nod with a smile as you exited the hotel lobby and left off to your adventure in Cannibal Town.

“Heh, imagine needing a child to run your errands.” Lucifer remarked with a smirk smudged on his face, Alastor snapped his neck in his direction, “A reliable and trustworthy child at that, don’t mistake him for less than he is.” Alastor said, the grin on his face tightening at the ends in annoyance.

“Mediocre, at best.” Lucifer mumbled, did he really mean it? No, the kid was actually pretty neat. But after the fued Alastor and Lucifer had about Charlie, everything became a competition.

“My kid is so much better than yours.” Lucifer said, more confidently then before, puffing his chest out.

“Prove it.” Alastor said, his static getting more noticeable.

“I bet that squirt won’t be back in 20 minutes.” Lucifer proposed, a shit eating grin on his face.

“Yes, he fucking will.” Alastor said, his eyes darting at Lucifer, his smile still on his face.

It had been two hours. Two hours, since you’d left.

Alastor was moments away from beginning to pace, his grin was strained, and Lucifer couldn’t help but grin as the clock continued to tick.

All of a sudden, a small boy, being you, burst through the door.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Angel asked from the bar, his tone unreadable, but it was obvious he wasn’t upset.

“Talking with Rosie.” You answered, eyes innocent.

Alastor felt a bit of him die on the inside, as Lucifer snorted.

“She’s a nice lady.” You started. “She gave me tea. And offered me a leg.”

#reqs open #x reader #hazbin hotel #mio’s writing ! ☆ #fanfiction #x y/n #x you #hazbin hotel x reader #hazbin hotel x y/n #hazbin hotel x you #hazbin alastor #alastor x reader #alastor the radio demon #alastor hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel alastor #alastor

[transmascutena]

For their birthday, favorite headcanons for Utena Tenjou?

late reply again, these posts always take me a while to make.. utena is my favorite so i have a Lot, but uh here are some of them

her favorite color has always been red and it still is even though it has some really bad connotations for him now

winter is her favorite time of year. (unrelated to my headcanon about her short-wearing habits, summer just reminds her of ohtori)

post-canon utena is not doing very well before anthy finds her. she feels incredibly guilty over her percieved failure to save anthy, and also just misses her all the time. sometimes she finds herself missing akio too and hates herself for it. her depression gets worse because she can't be as physically active during and after her stay in the hospital as she used to be. she went to therapy as a mandatory part of her stay at the hospital, but it didn't help all that much. it made her understand things better but she still doesn't know what to do about any of it

when she goes to school again, she doesn't have many friends due to having a hard time trusting and being close to people, and also because a lot of people find her kind of weird and off-putting. she's also failing all her classes.

when anthy does finally find her they kind of run away together and utena never goes to school (or therapy even though she still probably needs it) again

butch !!!!!!! i've obviously talked about it before and i will continue to forever and ever. he has a very long and confusing journey of figuring out gender stuff but this is the term that makes everything click. (i have many thoughts on stone butch utena in particular, and the relationship between sexual trauma and identity and stuff. maybe i'll elaborate in another post sometime, but either way, complicated as fuck relationship to both gender and sex.)

also she's genderfluid

failed his driver's license test three times in a row and then kinda gave up. anthy drives them everywhere

he has NO sense of fashion. wears only the ugliest or most boring outfits (but it's cool anyway because he's butch)

i've mentioned this one before but he eventually starts doing fencing as a hobby, because she did actually enjoy swordfighting and wants to learn it properly. he's pretty frustrated that he's not as good as he used to be though

i am also such a sucker for utena meeting juri again after ohtori. maybe it happens at a fencing tournament (utena doesn't do it competitively but he goes to watch his friends from his fencing team)

utena and anthy then go on the world's most awkward double date with juri and her wife

#revolutionary girl utena #headcanons #utena #asks #m

[deadpool15]

My girl

If I had to explain the context of my relationship, it would be complicated. Well, at least to me, it is. You see, when me and my girl and that isn't even my girl met, I was in college. I became an exchange student, and my home school does have this program where they pick a selection of students to go to different countries. I decided to throw my name in the bin to see how well my luck was.

Turns out my luck was pretty fucking good. I was able to get me a one-way ticket to Seoul National University for exactly a year. It was amazing. I got to experience so many new things, and the culture was like a change in scenery for me. But all good things must come to an end, and I started to fall behind on rent. I know what you're thinking, don't you live in a dorm? Well no I didn't, dorms are shit and I wasn't gonna take that chance I managed to find a nice job until some young fucking hideous looking bitch made a complaint about me to my boss. I'm 90% she was just being fucking racist because she kept trying to touch my hair like I was some exotic animal and caught a whole fucking attitude when I didn't allow her too. "Fucking bitch."

So, shit really hit the fan from that point. I was out of money, struggling to find a job, and my grades were starting to look like how I felt. Until I met Sayaka, a much older woman. She was approximately 38 years old at the time, while I was 20. She gave off this vibe of a confident, mature woman and I fucking loved it. She smooth talked me so fast some must say it wasn't fucking pathetic. Had a girl sitting her thinking about her every day and twirling my hair. You would think we were seeing each other after a while or at least that's what I thought.

Sayaka made it clear what she was looking for, and it wasn't a girlfriend. Sugarbaby, I believe, was the correct term. She wanted someone to spoil with gifts and affection but didn't want a relationship. Now, at first I was ok with that, I mean don't judge me I needed the money and she was hot so I was ok with it. Well, until I wasn't. People would openly flirt with her, and as much as she said she was mine, I started to realize how much she wasn't. I mean, we weren't together. She was literally paying me to "have fun" and "being pretty," and I kinda felt used.

Of course, I couldn't be mad at her, I knew what I was getting myself into, but I still had feelings. So, instead of bringing it up to her, I took the last "paycheck," she gave me, and ghosted her. I know what you're thinking, very mature of you, Stella. But the sad truth was I would rather act like she didn't exist than have her tell me she didn't like me at all. She did try to call at first, but then it all stopped I assumed she got tired of chasing after a immature fucking child. I mean, I could understand that, though as much as I understood her, a part of me wanted her to chase me. Make me feel wanted for once.

After a few months with no Sayaka, I fell into a deep state of depression. My best friend, Aubrey, had been trying to get me out of my house for a long time. But I wouldn't listen. Eventually, she randomly showed up to Korea, claiming she was entering some form of competition, meaning she would be here to help me and get my mind off of Sayaka. After a while, I felt better, I realized I had to learn how to love myself and that I was worth more than being someone's little sugarbaby. I mean, I was girlfriend material, and if she couldn't see that, then screw her. I would love to do that. Ok, maybe I wasn't entirely over her, but baby steps. I did want her back, but it was obvious she didn't feel the same, so I started to get myself back out there.

Audrey said it would be good for me. I took her advice and went on several dates, none of which worked out until I met this guy Jake. He was an exchange student from Hong Kong, he was 2 years younger than me though. But besides that, he was great. As great as it gets. The perfect gentleman. I just even kinda started to actually like him. Everything finally felt as if it had fallen into place in my life. I felt good for the first time in a long time. I was sitting at home scrolling through tiktok. I watched a video of some dude doing a mukbang. "Omg, why is this dude always eating like that. Like, do you viewer's wants to see you eat and enjoy the food or die trying. There is no way a mouth is supposed to open like that. Bro is literally not human." I was sitting there watching in disgust when my phone started ringing. Scaring the absolute shit out of me.

"Fuck," I looked at the caller ID and saw Audrey name pop up. That bitch is always scaring me. I pressed the answer and heard her yelling, more specifically Audrey's yelling in the background. "Audrey, ehat have we talked about with the yelling. I'm already hard of hearing thanks to you. Please." She ended hung up and immediately called me back on ft. I answered, "What have I said about hanging up on me like I'm one of you hoes?" I said while laughing. She started laughing again. "Hola, my beautiful bestie friend, ehat are you doing?"Minding my business what do need, Audrey?" She stared at me smiling mischievously. "So since you my bestie, I thought it would be amazing of you to like make us some pepper steak and rice."

"Wow, you called me, and the thing you wanted to talk about was me cooking. How fake of you, Ms. Lane." She looked at me with pleading eyes. "I wanna show the girls one of my best friends many qualities." I tried to glare at her, but a smile slowly started to creep up on my face. She had won me over, "Fine, I will cook your favorite meal for you. Would you like me to play delivery boy as well for you?" I stated jokingly until I saw the look on her was knowing she, in fact, did expect me to deliver the meal. "The food will be there, no get off my phone, you bitch." "Omg, I love you Stella so much." I smiled and hung up and got to cooking, it took me approximately an 1 to finish the dish. Audrey loves it ever since we were little kids. I make plates for everyone and start packing up the to-go trays. Piling all the food in my SUV, then making sure it is secure. I start to drive to the place.

Now that I think about it Audrey hasn't told me where this place is. Or anything about the show. I just assumed she didn't want to disclose too much information. But it's still weird, I mean we usually tell each other everything no matter what. A bit odd.

Stellabella🥰- Hey, babe, where exactly is the name of the competition.

Audreybunny🤡- Oo, it's called Street Women Fighter 2.

Stellabella🥰- Crazy how I had to actually ask you this stuff when you usually tell me. Isn't it?

Audreybunny🤡- Oo really..... what makes you say that?

Stellabella🥰- Why so secretive ma'am?

Audreybunny- It's just my first time in a competition like this, so I was still a bit shocked. That's all. It's weird at first. It's like crazy down here. It's wild.

Stellabella🥰- You're lying to me. You used the word it's like 3 to 4 times but it's ok I'll see when I get there send me the address.

I stared at my phone, confused. Audrey never kept secrets. Why did she care about this show so much? I guess I will actually just have to wait and find out. I use the GPS in my car. After about 49 minutes, I made it there. "I don't think I ever even watched this show, let alone heard of it. She is right. This is weird." I step outside of the car, grabbing the food carefully. "Let's stop overhinking. She is right. This is a new thing for her. I'm proud of her. My bestie is on TV shows now." I smiled softly at the thought and started walking towards the entrance.

I speak to the man at the front desk, letting him know that Jam Republic, as she texted me prior, is waiting on my arrival. He smiled at me and nodded his head down the hall, gesturing me to follow his lead. I bow towards his out of respect and a force of habit now and follow him down to the elevator. After about 5 floors go by, he shows me to a colorful hallway. "I believe you have it from here. The sign says Jam Republic on the door. It big and bright pink you can't miss it. Have a nice day, ma'am." He tells me before bowing and walking off back towards the elevator. I walk further down the hall, reading the names on the doors. "BEBE... 1MILLION... WOLF'LO... TSUBAKILL. Why does that one sound weirdly familiar. I mean, it could just be like a weirdly unique name that I find interesting."

I stare at the door for a while, completely forgetting where I am. Until a hand pulls me, I scream slightly and turn around to see Audrey smiling. "What did you get lost or something?" She says, genuinely afraid she put me through stress. "No, sorry, I was just admiring the names. Hey, have you ever heard of this one?" I ask, staring at her questionable. She looks at the names before shaking her head. "If I'm being honest, the majority of the groups are korean, so I haven't heard of anyone here, you know. Come on, everyone is waiting." Audrey scolds my hand, bouncing down the halls excited.

We walk into the door, and I greet everyone. The vibe is nice, and everyone is friendly. Which I am very thankful for, I meaning usually have a difficult time having conversations with new people. Or just meeting new people in general. I hand everyone a plate. They are sitting there thanking me before digging in. I hear Kristen on the sidelines gushing over the meal and applauding me for my "master cooking skills," or so she says. I blush slightly, thank God for my dark skin. I suddenly get the urge to pee, I grab Audrey's hand without speaking and make my way to the door. She whines because I take her away from her precious meal, but eventually get the hint and help me find the bathroom. She takes me there, letting me inside while saying she will be in the room. And if anything happens, call her. I allow her to leave, not wanting her meal to get cold, then make my way inside the stall.

I was in the process of finishing when I went to flush the toilet and hear the door sqeak open. I walk out thinking it's Audrey. "Babe, I thought you wanted to finish the meal. I literally slaved over the stove to cook. Not to mention me violating traffic laws to get it here." I stated sarcastically before not hearing her response. I continue to wash my hands before I turn around to say something else to her. Only to realize it wasn't her at all. "Sayaka?" She stares me up and down before getting close to me.

The space between us is so small that it makes me nervous. "Glad to see that I've only been gone for what, 3 months, and you have a new replacement right at the ready. Making meals for her. Aren't you just the perfect little girlfriend?" I gulp looking at her, trying to create a bit of personal space between us, and it seems she didn't like that. "You're not running away from me again. What exactly does Audrey the little fairy have that I don't, huh? Stella, you know I don't like repeating myself." I look down trying to avoid eye contact. It feels like I'm frozen, I wanted to see her so bad, but I forget the massive effect she had on me. Seems she didn't, though. "Me and Audrey aren't together. She has a boyfriend. And so do I."

I try to say that last bit with confidence, but it seems like at the moment that shit hasn't gone out the window. My voice cracks. She smiles at me, but I can tell I won't achieve anything good with rhat smile. "That's cute. My little baby got herself a boyfriend. Call him." I look at her confused, why the fuck would she want me to call the guy she is jealous of. More importantly, why is she jealous of Jake. " I don't owe you anything. We weren't in a relationship, and you made those guidelines very clear at the beginning. So you have no reason to be mad at me." I try to hide the tears falling out of my eyes by looking away until she grabs my chin.

She wiped my tears while looking at me. "Baby, I gave your money because you don't need to struggle, ok? I'm your support system, whether it's cuddling you when you're sad or gifting you shit when you're happy. In the beginning, I didn't want a relationship, I just wanted you. Labels scared me, but what scared me more was losing you. I care about you." I stared at her shockingly while she gave her confession. I didn't expect that to happen. Out of all the outcomes I planned in my head. "I care about you too, and I want to be with you. She kissed my forehead while smiling lovely at me. "My little girlfriend then." As she said that, it made me the happiest girl in the world. Experiencing true love is wild.

"Now, akachan, what do you say we give that ex-boyfriend a call and make it official." She says while leaving open-mouthed kisses down my neck, causing me to moan as she grabs my hips, pulling me flush against her body. I start to moan until she speaks up. "No, no baby, say it for the phone call. Gotta show him who you belong to, don't we?"

#street woman fighter 2 #swf2 #street woman fighter x reader #Sayaka

[mesillusionssousecstasy]

TSITP 2x04 - “Love Game” : Quotes

“- So you want to tell me what got you all worked up? Or just be bros and pretend this never happened?” (Steven)

“- He’s grown into quite the asshole.” (Jeremiah)

“- This was her favorite place in the world. (Conrad) - I understand that your family has wonderful memories here, and you will always have them. Memories are like that. (Aunt Julia) (...) - Sounded like an Aunt Julia problem to me.” (Conrad)

“- I know that you came here with the best intentions, but this is, like, their family drama. I just don’t want you to get sucked back into it.” (Taylor)

“- It’s nice to see you. I am sorry about your mom. (The real estate agent) - Well, clearly not sorry enough to pass up the opportunity to sell her house. (Conrad) - I’m just doing my job. (The real estate agent) - Well, consider this an unexpected day off.” (Conrad)

“- I want some ice cream. Nature’s aire conditioning.” (Taylor)

“- My mom was hoping it would be a chance to clear the air about all the shit from the past. You mom wanted it to be picture-perfect Christmas. You know, “nothing ever happened.” It became kind of a tradition. Call it “Shitmas”. (Skye) - I think she just wanted a fresh start. (Conrad) - Sucks our moms never got to work their shit out.” (Skye)

“- It was fun, even. (Belly) - Really? You guys can just, like, have fun together casually now?” (Taylor)

“- You used to cry every time you looked at the Tower of Terror. I’m very excited to see it happen again. (Conrad) - He made it so hard not to love him. When he was sweet like this, I remembered why I did. Used to love him, I mean.” (Belly)

“- You know, competition is the key to making Conrad happy. I mean, I know you both very well. (Belly) - Well, what’s the key to make me happy, Belly? (Jeremiah) - Cheeseburgers. Ariana Grande. (Belly) - Always. (Jeremiah) - And correcting people who say “bru-shetta.” (Belly) - ‘Cause it’s “bru-sketta”. (Jeremiah) - Yeah. (Belly) - Damn, you’re good, Belly. (Jeremiah) - What can I say?” (Belly)

“- How’s the life of a saleswoman treating you? (Cleveland) - Oh, you know, it’s soul-destroying, deeply taumatic, making me question every decision in my life I’ve made up to this point. Sounds great, you know? Nonstop bliss. (Laurel) - It’s okay for it to be hard for you, too. (Cleveland) - It’s been hard. (Laurel) - Well, you look great. (Cleveland) - Well, looks can be deceiving. (Laurel) - Look, things may have fizzled between us, but you can always talk to me. (Cleveland) - We had so long to prepare for this, and I still have no fucking idea how to process it, let alone talk about it. Belly isn’t handling it well. I don’t know how to help her. (Laurel) - Well, maybe you don’t need to help her. (Cleveland) - You’re clearly not a parent. (Laurel) - Look, something really shitty happened, and you can’t fix it. But you can let her know that you’re feeling it, too. She may just need to know that she’s not alone in her feelings. (Cleveland) - I hear you, but I can’t. I’m her mom. If she sees how big my grief really is, it’ll just scare her. (Laurel) - I had a really bad episode of depression a few years ago. And I felt like I was just sitting at the bottom of a deep hole, looking up at the world going on above me. The friends that helped me the most were not the ones who tried to get me out of the hole. It was the friends who climbed down into the hole, sat with me for a bit that really made things better. I mean, there isn’t a right way to do this, Laurel. (Cleveland) - I didn’t see your name on the author list. (Laurel) - Would it scare you off if I told you I was here for you? (Cleveland) - Depends on where you take me for dinner.” (Laurel)

“- No, we need you on the team because you lost the boardwalk games. I mean, we have a great team, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to win every game. We need somebody that’s going to, like, lead us, win or lose. (Taylor) - Or tie.” (Skye)

“- Hey, no one said you had to do this alone. I can keep you company if you want me to. Come on. You got this. You’ve done it before. (Jeremiah) - It’s now or never, I guess. (Belly) - Butterfiles.” (Jeremiah) (...) - It’s okay to be scared. (Jeremiah) - ESP tell you that? (Belly) - No, your face did. Hey, don’t worry. I’m right here with you, okay? (Jeremiah) - Jeremiah is always there when I need him. When I was 13, right before the Fourth of July, I caught a horrible summer cold. I hated being sick, but the worst part about it was feeling so left out. (Belly) - It’d be sweet of you to keep her company. (Susannah) - He stayed home with me for the rest of the week.” (Belly)

“- Interesting. (Taylor) - What? (Belly) - Nothing. It’s just interesting.” (Taylor)

“- You guys, you had a pretty tough year. (Cam) - Yeah. I don’t know. It feels, like, weird having some fun. Like, part of me feels guilty. I don’t know if that makes sense. (Belly) - Yeah, I know, I know exactly what you mean. (Cam) - Yeah, I know you know. (Belly) - Today was really important fo you guys. Fun is important. Very important.” (Cam)

“- I haven’t seen you this happy in a long time. (Steven) - It felt good to feel like a kid again. And I know that my mom only ever wanted us to be happy. It’s been hard. (Conrad) (...) - It’s just an observation, man. (Steven) Shout out Steven - I appreciate your observation.” (Conrad)

“- How come you didn’t want another Junior Mint? (Conrad) - I’m not 13 years old anymore, Conrad.” (Belly)

#the summer i turned pretty season 2 #the summer i turned pretty #the summer I turned pretty quotes #the summer I turned pretty 2x04 #tsitp #tsitp 2 #tsitp season 2 #tsitp thoughts #tsitp quotes #belly x jeremiah

[space-blue]

🤍🍭🤲

🤍what's one fic of yours you think people didn't "get"?

I don't have a fic I feel people didn't get. I've had comments that completely missed the mark on what I was doing, the characterisation I was going for, etc. But it's rare. It happens most often on my biggest fic, Fathers and Daughters. I don't think there's an issue with either the fic or the readers. It's simply that when you have a story with 130k hits, you're bound to get a few commenters who either don't gel with your style or truly don't 'get' it.

Interestingly the most blatant case of 'not getting it' always happened with people who were completely new to fandom and didn't understand the concept of AUs. I've had people argue with me with stuff that was so fucking dumb like 'Silco would never swear'.

My friend, they're trying to stick to a rating and they already have a child swearing once. Do you really want to argue with me in my comments about the crimelord from the undercity saying 'fucking' once? (yes, they did)

🍭why did you start writing?

Oh shit, you sure picked a funny one. Buckle up for some TMI.

I was on a working holiday visa to Australia, fairly depressed from having had to leave NZ against my better wishes, and I had to do some 'remote' work in order to earn the right for an extansion to my visa. I picked the wrong person. A batshit crazy lady in Grafton in horse training for races. She basically ran us (she had two people at the same time) like slaves. I was doing WAY more work than I should, entirely unpaid, and getting manipulated and gaslit into doing extra work as a photographer.

It was swelteringly hot. Most days I worked in a bikini and shorts, ankle deep in mud when it was raining, and the rain was basically good enough to be a shower. My own showers were often via garden hose. So many flies. You can see me here in front of the 'feed shed' prepping the wet meal.

As soon as you locked the doors to that container it'd be SWARMING with roaches. I was expected to go in there and spray every night. They'd fly everywhere… I was also supposed to lift the feed bags and sic the dogs on mice nest under them. And carry the 50kg bags on my back from the truck. And much the truck. And go everywhere with her. And babysit the awful kids. And spray for spiders. Killed so many redbacks, not even funny. Their dogs had a litter and we had problems (due to not feeding the bitch enough) that resulted in a ton of bacrking right outside of my flimsy little window. I would do all the physical labour and proceed to be totally unable to sleep.

It drove me to the brink of sanity. Like genuinely losing my shit. I grabbed a series and started reading the Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Highly repetitive Vampire smut. I think I read up to book 6 in a week? I can't express how mentally unwell I was lol

Oh, and I couldn't get away because I had like 50$ in my bank account.

So yeah, I spiralled and started writing, like stuff was swirling in my head and putting it down was a lifeline. I still have it… a 40 pages manuscript on shitty paper written in pencil about immortal being that live off of life-force and struggle to live alongside humans in a post apocalyptic world. It had ghouls and roof gardens. lmao.

Anyway, I eventually left (in crazy circumstances) to another horse trainer in Orange (haha).

There I lived on a mattress on the floor at the end of stables, making food on a camping stove. Ruined my mental health even more by reading The Collector by John Fowles. It was so bad, I tried to read The Exorcist as a Palate Cleanser.

I was mucking stables all day, listening to Benedict Cumberbatch reading Metamorphosis on repeat, buffing my already pretty OP shoulders… Here I am atop an enormous pile of horse shit.

So at that stage writing to myself just wasn't cutting it. Talking to horses wasn't fulfilling my basic human needs for social interactions… So I joined an oline scifi and fantasy forum. Someone suggested I join their monthly writing competition, where you were given a topic and had 1.5k words to write about it. I wrote my first one in a feverish haze that day. Then we voted on the best story, and gave each other concrit.

It was my first sserious Writer Serotonin injection. I've never looked back. I went back to civilisation (Melbourne), got a decent job, a shit room (typical East Coast gig), and I carried on writing monthly for… 7 years! Whenever I was in a bad spot it was a real life saver.

I think it's a lot to do with preventing negative thoughts from spiraling. I'm not looking at how shit MY life is, but instead this little witch is in supernatural beings jail and she has to lick the fucking walls to make a potion in that special hidden organ of her and the last ingredient is the blood of her favourite warden and---

You feel me? It's a great way to help regulate my own moods and feelings and explore ideas. I'll stop before I feel like I' m reinventing the wheel.

TL;DR : I started writing because my sanity was crumbling and my life depended on it.

🤲what do YOU get out of writing?

I think I've made my point there. Once I have a good story in mind, it practicaly begs to be written. But sometimes characters, original or not, are some of the best company you have in difficult times. And then people tell you how your story touched them and they're grateful to you, for playing with your little dolls? It's an insane thing. A communion with strangers, over something that comes right from your soggy little frog brain?

Fantastic!

#tmi #irl stuff #life shit #snips talks #writer asks #insanity lmao #anon asks #thanks anon #you got more than you bargained for didn't you?

[fireandiceland]

Because my braincells decided to stay in London, have a thought.

Either the hetalia characters put on a rendition of Heather's the musical (pls watch it if you havent)

J.d is either Arthur or Ivan bc murderous intent, depression and very over the top, and the fact that he kills a bunch of people.

Veronica is either fuckin finland or Hungary bc idk I feel like it works.

The Heather's are the BFT bc france is a fucking diva and he would pull of heather Chandler like he was born for the role.

Or the plain thought of younger nations, HK, Iceland, Lithuania etc acting like actual grandpas in front of people their physical age.

Ok HK would be mostly fine, a he uses lots of old phrases which is a bit odd but no one questions it.

But when Iceland is trying to be cool he ways brings up things from a hundred to 30 years ago, ie he has said that disco was his favourite genre to seem cool, and everyone just looked at him bc my dude actually said disco.

And Latvia is a lost cause at this point, when he goes out drinking, (perfectly legally america) the bartender always keeps a close watch kn him bc a 16 year old draining a bottle of vodka should be bad, but he never seems worse for wear and has only ever been slightly tipsy when he and Ivan had a competition, used up far too much alcohol to be normal, outdrank Russia and managed to walk out in a straight line.

Plus he gets really nostalgic when locking at certain things, he could be looking around Riga and start waffling to himself about a historical monument and someone nearby is listening and going, "what the fuck is up with this kid" his house has old grandpa like wallpaper and he still has kne of those Soviet era box TVs and his language is clear and understandable, but like in the way somones grandparents would speak.

Djfkdsndf you sent this while I was on vacation and I forgot about it until now oops

I heaven't seen Heathers! Actually I only even know it's a musical because some of the songs were on a playlist I liked on spotify. I think it's not very popular in german speaking countries?? I've meant to watch it tho! I just need to finally sit my ass down and look for a link and.. do it. You have permission to steal my kneecaps if I still haven't watched it by new years. I promise I'll get back to this part of the ask when I've watched it.

Moving on! YES TO 'YOUNG' COUNTRIES ACTING LIKE OLD PEOPLE!! I love that. Iceland's clothes when he first appeared.. look at this. grandpa style <3 and liet too (but I couldn't find good picture)

You know who Latvia reminds me of? Five from the umbrella academy. 60yo man trapped in the body of a 13yo boy. And lmao I love the idea of latvia just out-drinking Ivan like it's nothing XD also him getting asked for an ID has the same energy as Maria from shinmai mao no testament looking younger than the other's who go to school but she acts like their babysitter and deadpan got herself a driving license.

#aph iceland #aph latvia #riva.ask #hetalia

[blushroomx]

i need to rant just keep scrolling

dropped out of grad school, can’t hold down a job, can’t make or keep a friend to save my life, i’m completely broke, no health insurance, my family is not reliable for support, and i have symptoms so intense it’s actually kind of embarrassing to talk about. so when someone tells me they understand what mental illness is like bc they have trauma or anxiety or whatever, but i see them living their best life, hanging out with friends all the time, graduating, accepting prestigious fellowships, their amazing support system, traveling the world, it’s just like? do you? do you get it?

it's not a competition. it's not a competition. it's not a competition it's not a competition but i'm so unbelievably, violently jealous that i am bristling like a damn cartoon character

i know it's wrong okay i know i know i know. i'm not being very compassionate or empathetic right now. someone could appear the happiest they've ever been and the next day they're not here anymore. that happens and i know it. and it's not a competition and social media is always fake anyways but i can't shake how fucking inadequate and bitter i feel when i see people getting attention and sympathy for their mental health struggles, acting like a fucking influencer giving people mental health tips and sharing their experiences while traveling europe with friends meanwhile i'm in the corner just fucking rotting. i am rotting and i get nothing from anyone. nothing. i get nothing and i'm being selfish and dumb right now but i don't care because if you haven't heard i am rotting!!! i am literally dying! i'm dying! i'm dying and nobody cares? doctors don't care unless you have money (i don't; i am currently unmedicated and have been diagnosed with bpd, bipolar ii, ptsd, and gad who knows what else honestly i haven't done much therapy, i need medication i need it and i need therapy i am going insane i am going insane i can't live like this anymore). my parents don't care as long as i'm living my life according to their expectations (which i'm not so they won't help; tell me why it makes sense to only give money to your daughter when she has a good job and not when she's having a hard time, also they don't think mental illness is real). and we won't be able to make rent this month and the bills are piling up and my partner suffers to the extent that i do and we're trying our best but what can you do when a week before rent is due you get covid? when you get a flat tire with no money to fix it? when a cop randomly decided he didn't like you and gives you a ticket he didn't have to that you absolutely can't pay? bad luck feels like a fucking stab wound when you're already hanging on by a thread. and yet i'm supposed to sit here and nod happily and accepting as someone claims they know what it's like? when they literally never have to worry about anything???? when it doesn't seem to get in the way of their lives at all?????????>

i'm just so miserable. i have always been miserable and nobody has ever helped me. every time i used to try telling my parents how depressed or suicidal i was i would get yelled at for hours until i changed my mind ("you're right dad. i was wrong, i don't really feel that way. i'm sorry"). my childhood was fucked honestly. been thinking about it a lot recently, can't get it out of my head, it's kind of fucking me up. i look in the mirror and see my father's features and it makes me sick. anyway. now i'm an adult with no skills beyond what it takes to succeed in school, except i'm so burnt out from years of suppressing and neglecting my illnesses that i can't do anything anymore. i used to be a stone; i never showed emotion because i was punished for doing so. now it's like the dam has been broken and the smallest thing sends me into an episode that takes me out for the rest of the day. and i'm not weak, i'm not! i'm not. i'm not. i push myself until i break. to the point where if i'm not shaking and crying and physically unable to stand then i consider myself a lazy weakling and a coward. sometimes i wish all my bones were broken so everyone would know that i really can't do it. i know it's not true it's just my programming but like. i just break so easily now. i break so easily and i struggle so deeply and my partner and i are actually doing better right now, we're working more but it's not enough and that gets you down. and i don't know how it ever can be enough when we're so firmly at rock bottom. i wish we had more money. it would help so much if we could pay our bills. whatever i don't actually hate people who have mental illness and good lives i just hate my own life that's all

#i'm fine #my situation is just overwhelming to the point of being surreal #it's not hopeless it just feels that way too often

[hopefulstarfire]

I think writing Iris is some of the most fun out of my ocs. Like I love all of them with my whole heart but like.

Post Waking the Dragons its both her depression phase and her being on some Hot Girl Shit.

She understandably needs a distraction after uhhh Everything with Alister. She's heartbroken and trying to keep it from showing because she doesn't want to worry her brothers; her job has always been the one to worry about them, not the other way around.

So she does what I think several people in the Fandom do in depression spells, including myself;

Throw yourself into the card game hard-core.

She gives herself one day to lay in bed and not do anything but binge watch movies. The next day she goes to work at the card shop and then signs up for the soonest upcoming tournament. Grandpa helps her restructure her Deck a little bit more and it quickly becomes a force to be reckoned with.

She starts winning tournaments to distract herself from any sense of her emotions. Yknow, like how they handle emotions in that family (coughcoughSETOcoughcough).

Her brother knows two things. One, they need a way to recover public trust, especially with the opening of the new KaibaLand. And, two, his sister needs something to help her because yeah no he's fully aware that she is Not Okay.

So why not throw the Grand Prix? Give her the only outlet he knows of because Seto doesn't know what therapy is no one in this family goes to that psh.

And, rather than argue like she did when it came to Battle City about competing, she decides, why the fuck not? Her classes are almost over. She was gonna graduate early in December anyhow. She's caught up in all her classes and it's not like she really thinks she's gonna use her degree any time soon because AHA she's dealing with some trauma right now in her life and questioning if she should.

She gets out there and for the first time let's herself be competitive. She let's herself shoot for the stars in something she told herself she didn't really have time for. And she kicks ass.

(Meanwhile in Italy, Alister sees the tournament on TV and sees one of her matches and smiles as she wins.

That's my girl. Followed by the quick realization of; No. Nope she's not that anymore. I gotta go.)

But yeah I just. I really get excited thinking about her post season 4 just trying to reevaluate her life and deciding that Duel Monsters is actually something she's really passionate about on top of nursing and she wants to do more with it. Just like. Okay I get it now kind of thing.

#yugioh #ygo #yugioh ocs #ygo ocs #iris mcginnis

[i-dont-know-nor-care-go-away]

me: *is out of school and trying to recover from depression and ed n shit*

my (lo key bad n toxic) friends:

(friend *threatens suicide and tells me to kms too* )

🤝🤝🤝triggering me and relying on me for support I can't really give🤝🤝🤝🤝

(other friend *asks for help starving themself*)

yes I know that I should be supportive but I'm so fucking tired and more mentally ill than them. I understand it's not a competition but I'm venting shut up. like, bro no. 1 is threating suicide and then when I say "hey what about my mental health is that a reason to live?" basically says I should kms. he knows I'm also mentally ill, he meant it. ik it's because he thinks death is good for him and it would be good for me or whatever but shit still hurt. then my other friend makes it worse and then I have to tell her shut up then I have to tell her to not get an eating disorder and she's like ur a role model. BITCH IM IN THE SAME GRADE??? HOW DO YOU LOOK AT MY ED?? THEN SAY ITS A GOOD THNG?? TO MY FACE???? LIKE I HAVE ONE, YOU KNOW IT, YOU ASK ME FOR ADVICE TO STAVR URSELF AND THEN ACT LIKE ITS A GOOD THING???? AND THEN BLAME IT ON THE FACT ANOTHER DUDE IS TRYING TO KILL HIMSELF??? I UNDERSTAND UR FRUCKED UP BUT IM DEALING WITH THAT THIS COULDNT HAVE WAITED 1 FUCKNG DAY??? I KNOW YOU NEED COMFORT BUT PLEASE IM SO FUCKING TIRED I LIVE IN A ABUSIVE HOME (YOU DONT! STOP ACTING LIKE SHITTY PARENTS ARE AS BAD AS ABUSIVE ITS NOT THE SAME THNG) AND AM TRYNG TO KEEP SOMEONE ELSE ALIVE JUST WAIT A DAY PLEASE. IM SO TIRED OF HURTING SO BAD AND HAVING TO COMFORT PEOPLE THAT ARE BETTER AND DONT ACCEPT HELP AND JUST MAKE ME COMFORT THEM. I UNDERSTND THEY HAVE NO ONE ELSE BUT LET ME BE MAD 4 A MOMENT IDGAF ABOUT POLITICAL CORRECTNESS RN. I KNOW YOU WANT TO BE COMFORTED EVEN IF IT DOESNT HELP BUT IM DEALING WITH MY ABUSIVE MOM AND DADS SHIT, MY OWN VERY BAD SHIT, AND OTHER PEOPLES SHIT AND YOU GUYS CANT HAVE SOME FUCKNG DECENT TO ME?? I CANT HELP YOU IF YOU EXPECT ME TO DO ALL THE WORK IM TOO FUCKING TIRED FOR THAT EVEN IF IM WILLNG. THIS IS WHY I DONT WANT FRIENDS. I DONT RELY ON PEOPLE SO WHY DO THEY RELY ON ME?? GOD ITS SUMMER I JUST WANT TO RELAX BUT MY MOM SUCKS AND IM DYING ON THE INSIDE AND I HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF 2 OTHER MENTALLY ILL BITVHES??? AND I CALLED THE SUICIALD BITCH'S SISTER AND TRIED TO DM HER AND SHE DOESNT PICK UP OR GIVE A SHIT!! GIRL UR BROTHER IS SUICIDAL PICK UP THE GODDAMED CALL. HE HAS A FUCKNG ROPE AND PLAN. GOD UR SO STUID. EVERYONE COMES TO ME AND VENTS BC IM "WORSE THAN THEM" AND UNDERSTAND. LIKEN IF IM WORSE THEN YOU WHY DO YOU COME TO ME??? IT FUCKING SUCK IM NOT A GODDAMED THERPIST. I CANT DEAL WITH CRYNG AT THIS POINT. I CANT CRY OR BE AROUND CRYING PEOPLE BECAUSE ITS TRIGGERUNG AND I HAVE TRUAMA ABOUT IT. IM TOO TIRED TO BE NICE OR KIND AT THIS POINT, ITS JUST TOO FUCKNG MUCH. I JUST WANT TO BE ALONE I HATE THIS. HEGAGWHAGDGSGAGAGAGAGS WHY CANT PEOPLE NOT RELY ON MY FOR EVERY LITTLE PROBLEM THEY HAVE?? YES I KNOW WHAT UR GOING THRU BC IT WAS WORSE FOR ME. ITS TRIGGERINF AND I CANT HELP U BC IM TRYING TO HELP MYSELF

#vent #tw ed mention #tw sui implied #tw attempted suicide #tw sui attempt #tw suicide

[hintofelation99]

The all had multiple expulsion threats and meetings at school no question. And yet Bruce somehow is voted the best parent at the PTA.

Bruce is the best soccer dad. Also they all get expulsion threats for different reasons.

Dick

Fighting -> He does get into a few fights at first, but after becoming Robin he stops getting into fights.

'Being Disruptive' ->Then he starts to get in trouble for not paying attention, talking in class, constant fidgetting. For the most part it's from teachers who don't even try to understand or accommodate kids with ADHD. Like he's a good kid, he's not trying to be 'disruptive' or 'rude', he just struggles with ADHD and needs teachers who are understanding of that.

Reckless Behavior -> There are several teachers who are amazing and work with his ADHD rather than against it, but even with them he gets in trouble a few times because of 'reckless behavior' (jumping from high places, climbing things that shouldn't be climbed, etc). These teachers aren't rude about it or critical, they're literally just concerned for his safety and that's why they call Bruce.

Jason

Fighting -> He sometimes gets into fights with rich pretentious kids who try to bully him. They quickly learn not to fuck with him.

Reading During Class -> This is usually only done in classes where he doesn't like the teacher —which is pretty common, he likes learning but sometimes he doesn't like school because the teachers annoy him, if he likes the teacher he's a wonderful student, if he doesn't like them... well, he can be a handful— or where he's so far ahead that he gets bored.

Cheating -> Jason has gotten accused of cheating several times, mostly because some people think a kid from crime alley can't get straight A's without cheating.

Cass

'Being Disrespectful' -> There has been at least one teacher who considers Cass' selective mutism to be a form of disrespect.

Physically Attacking Another Student -> One time this guy kept harrassing a classmate of Cass' the person was clearly uncomfortable, so when the guy tried to grope them Cass flipped him.

Ditching Class -> She has at least once just walked out of class after a teacher annoyed her. No comment, no response, no explanation, just left.

Tim

Ditching Class -> He has been known to skip class on occasion. Which honestly, understandable.

Sleeping During Class -> Self explanatory tbh.

Cheating -> He kept getting 100% on tests, even after constantly sleeping during class, so the teachers assumed he was cheating.

Duke

Fighting -> After his parent's went insane he was pretty depressed and angry. Ended up getting in a few fights.

Cheating -> Much like Jason some teachers also thought Duke shouldn't be able to do well in school. So, when he did exceedingly well they assumed he cheated.

Ditching Class -> This mostly happened right after the stuff with his parents, but he still occasionally skips, usually he ends up going to the library.

Damian

Insulting Teachers and Classmates -> Self explanatory.

Physically Assualting a Student -> Usually he's good about not trying to murder others, but he did attack one or two students after they made a racist remark.

Having a Rude Tone -> This got thrown out pretty quickly but there was a teacher who reported him based solely on the tone of his voice.

Everytime one of his kids gets in trouble Bruce comes in and listens to all available perspectives. If they actually did something wrong then Bruce is fine with them facing consequences. But if they didn't actually do something, or it's something he believes they shouldn't be punished for then he will fight it. His most well known fights with the school were over:

Their response to Dick's ADHD

Teachers accusing Duke, Tim, and Jason of cheating without evidence

The teachers response to Cass' selective mutism

The racist remarks made about Damian

As a PTA member he focuses a lot on mental health education, diversity, and funding the arts. He and Alfred tend to tag team events. Alfred handles everything baking always, but other than that they split responsibilites based on Bruce's schedule. Bruce likes to be as present as possible but sometimes he's just too busy, so when that's the case Alfred steps in.

With each kid Bruce learned different areas where the school was lacking, where he could help improve. First was with Dick, he learned that the teachers didn't have the training or resources to give Dick the support needed. None of them knew how to handle ADHD and at first it resulted in poor grades and 'behavioral problems'. To fix this Bruce set up a fund to send teachers to extra training seminars on common learning disabilities and mental health issues, these covered a wide range that not only helped Dick, but also other students who had similar needs. Bruce also helped planned a yearly fundraising event that would make sure the fund was sustainable and not relient on him.

With Jason he focused on revamping the bookfair, there were a lot of other projects he could/wanted/did do, but the bookfair meant the most to Jason so it meant the most to Bruce. He turned the bookfair into a yearly two week long event where authors came to speak, writing work shops were held, and books were donated (ofc books were also sold). Basically he turned it from a bookfair to a bookcon.

For Cass his efforts in getting the teachers the training needed to help students with disabilities was doubled, this time he focused on communicative and sensory disabilities. Like selective mutism, deafness, blindness, etc. His biggest goal was making sure all teachers took at least one sign language course and encouraging them to take more with bonuses and pay raises. Eventually this monetary reward system extending to other out of work classes that could prove beneficial to students.

In a lot of ways Bruce felt like he failed Tim, this was a kid who was his neighbor for years and who eventually became his Robin. Yet it still took him much too long to realize how neglectful Tim's parents were. It really made him question a lot of things, mainly how much child abuse went unnoticed. He started a campaign to raise awareness on types of abuse and the signs to look for. It focused on all forms of abuse, not just neglect. In a way it was therapeutic, not only did it help kids like Tim, but it also helped kids like Jason who faced physical abuse. It ended up begin a popular program that expanded to other schools in the area.

Duke made Bruce think of problems closer to home, namely how Rogue attacks affected children. So for Duke, Bruce worked on creating a support network for children who were victims or were close to victims of Rogue attacks/organized crime in Gotham. Outside of the support network for Rogue victims Bruce also worked with the PTA to schedule several writing competitions, Dick often places in the top three and Bruce is always insanely proud of this.

For Damian Bruce really focused on the arts. He and the PTA started doing art shows every quarter and having students help with school beautification/mural making on campus. These programs helped Damian bond with peers and encouraged him to participate in after school activities. Dick also helped with these programs and expanded them into the community, specifically he worked combining art/beautification programs with fundraising for animal shelters.

#batfam #batman #bruce wayne #nightwing #dick grayson #jason todd #red hood #tim drake #red robin #duke thomas #the signal #damian wayne #robin #headcanon #ask #mypost

[innuendostudios]

I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube