#this is not a hate post against Anita

[omg-hellgirl]

"You could live 100 lifetimes and never deserve that boy."

#this is not a hate post against Anita #but that's my opinion and I'm not going to argue about that #I'm obsessed with my own edit and I've watched it like 50 times #keith richards #anita pallenberg #the rolling stones #classic rock #old rockstar #rockstar gf #sixties #60s music #60s rock #60s #rockstar girlfriend #rocknroll #rock n roll #rock #blues rock #r&b

[olderthannetfic]

To the NLOG anon:

I had written a long piece but lost it, so the gist of it is that bullies are social chameleons. They will always try to find a way to get away with bullying while claiming to be the victims. And many of the "bad" NLOGs were girls looking for ways to recreate the status quo with them at the top instead.

I think that NLOGs were a natural result of the post 9/11 conservative paranoia of "anyone who is not a good American™ is a Satanic Menace to Society" (where good American meant white, christian, affluent, thin, conventionally attractive, straight...and everybody else, from foreigners, fat people, anyone gender non conforming or even alternative people were "planning the downfall of civilization"). In that climate, harassment towards "the weird" was not only tolerated but encouraged as the moral thing to do.

And the thing is, if you are ostracized from society but discouraged to learn about feminism and such, then it's no wonder that your only way of defending yourself is by using the same attacks used against you!

The big change here I think came with the recession where suddenly society became fascinated with the weird, and being a hipster or a nerdy girl was "acceptable" (hence the "golden years" of Tumblr). Many of the bullies who had gained notoriety thanks to their privilege suddenly realised they couldn't get away with it as talk about discrimination and feminism was becoming more commonplace, and so many people adopted NLOG looks and attitudes to keep doing society approved bullying.

Nowadays tho you don't see many NLOGs because, like you said, we either know better now and have deconstructed ourselves or simply because in this era of "bring back bullying" most people don't need to hide behind underprivileged people to harass someone. If they want to hate on other women they can just become a tradwife/high value woman and go back to the conservative politics of the 2000s or they can pick a bit of #girlbossfeminism while going back to their hyper feminine roots to claim *throws dice* that you have to like pink or you have internalised misogyny and that you should just try to fit into the mold, for your own good, you know.

So yeah, those who want to oppress will find a way to do so under any costume, while being the loudest and sidelining the rest of us. There's nothing to do about it, unfortunately :(

--

I mean... sure...

But the actual phrase "not like the other girls" rose to prominence to point out how fucking obnoxious a class of book is for its heroine who is always like "I don't want to stay home and do needlework!" and then the book is set in some era when rich ladies are supposed to be running an entire manor house or something, not just embroider, and the author has blatantly missed all of that. Or it's some Anita Blake bullshit where the heroine hates literally every other woman, and especially all of them with blond hair because the author is insecure and bugfuck nuts.

It's a specific dumb trope in fiction and term in criticism of that dumb trope.

[disastersteps]

note: so this was in my drafts and i decided to reword it a bit- i do not remember if this was posted in full or not, but i want to write about this.

---

thinking about anita rediscovering the new details of julia's body is [clench fists]- and by that i meant, yeah sure, they were in love with how pretty she is- was- but that was seven years ago. neets remembered her being a much more athlete, lean muscles and all. just a all-round beautiful woman they ever called her, their best friend.

former best friend.

and seven years later, anita get to really see her in full. gone the braids with a short hair and a sidecut that hides behind it. but her body? its. new. different. it wasnt the one they remembered. it wasnt the one they actively tried to forget and now they get to see the new look.

she's even big. bigger than they remembered. anita, after rekindling their barely friendship once more, did they find themself look at her. she's more different. yes, there was the soft look but there was also the confident little shit smirk she throws at them. but most of all. there was this aura that feel more. wide. wilder. and less lean.

it made them feel smaller against her side, it made them want her so bad. but they wouldn't say it. they don't admit they love her. why?

simply, they had fall in love with her all over again. and they would not admit to the very words in their mind. in their heart. they wouldn't.

they used to have a crush on her almost eight years ago, and seven years ago, they could've told her they love her but then they died. and here they are, trying to bury the very love they had for her only to be resurface, a hand that comes out of the grave they buried in the first place and push through their chest, grabbing their very heart.

that they had fall in love with her again. not old julia, the new julia.

and they hate it.

(it hurts. she's bigger than them. she's more older and. cautious, and smart and a fucking asshole.)

and they still fall in love with julia ortega again.

#fhr #chargestep #julita | when will we ever be each others #...okay this almost turned into a writing of sorts #so im just gonna #mywritings #i guess??? #neets is very observant and they just want to reclaim their body. let them have it. so its why they look at julia. #sees the difference and changes and everything between these two. #AUGH!

[randomvarious]

2 Unlimited - "No Limit (Rap Version)" 1992 Eurodance / Techno / Eurohouse

If you're an American, you might think that the biggest tune that Belgian-Dutch dance project 2 Unlimited ever put out was their 1991 debut single, "Get Ready for This," which, absurdly, managed to earn its keep as the country's #1 sports anthem, and might still actually hold that same title to this very day. And maybe you don't remember how the trailer for the first Air Bud movie went exactly either, but as you're reading this and trying to piece it all together in your head right now, let me just stop you and tell you that, yes, of course, "Get Ready for This" starts playing when Buddy shows up for his first official game! I mean, it would basically be sacrilege for it not to! That's how inextricably linked that song is to American sports!

But anyway, even though "Get Ready for This" was definitely 2 Unlimited's most popular tune in the States, it was "No Limit" that was, by far, their most successful song pretty much everywhere else. And as their fifth overall single, and the first off of their 1993 sophomore LP, No Limits, it would end up topping the charts in thirty-five different countries, while not even making the Billboard Hot 100 here. And unless you were in a club-equivalent of a T.G.I. Friday's that would dare play this gaudy tune in the US, the only other place where you might've gotten a dose of it was most likely at your nearest partial portal to mainstream Euro-raveland: a sports arena.

Now, it definitely didn't happen as much in the States, but people everywhere else across the globe who were above the age of twelve really genuinely seemed to go absolutely ape over this very Belgian-and-Dutch-made tune. They really couldn't get enough of that relentlessly blaring, bouncy, and industrial synth riff that sounded like a pair of thick metal plates had been wrapped in thin coats of rubber and were forcibly being clanked against each other.

But whatever you may think of this completely insane piece of music, which was probably, really, the hardest straight-up rave tune to ever cross over into the US mainstream, the video for it that hardly ever aired on American TV was spectacular. I mean, they built the set to look like they were performing from the psychedelically rainbow-colored inside of a pinball machine, folks. The only thing that could've made it better is if they had found a way to make it look like there was a giant pinball freely entering and exiting the shot too, as Ray rapped and Anita sang. Plus, I wonder if the metal-rubber synth sound inspired the pinball machine idea in the first place, since metal balls constantly bounce off of tightly wound rubber bands inside of those things 🤔.

And here's something truly astonishing that I neglected to mention in yesterday's post about 2 Unlimited: did you know that in a bunch of the group's UK-released singles, Ray's rap verses were actually deliberately stripped out entirely? The guy who ran the label that was licensed to release the group's music there—Pete Waterman, of famed British songwriting and production trio Stock Aitken Waterman—really hated Ray's verses, to the point that he just erased them! And he particularly referred to Ray's contributions on "No Limit" as the worst rap that he'd ever heard 😂.

But he wasn't wrong! Ray's raps were nonsensical and very Eurodancy-bad! But it also made the UK versions of the videos really awkward too. For example, in "No Limit," Ray gets plenty of face-time, but his role as a vocalist is merely reduced down to the lines of "Let me hear you say 'yeah!,'" "come on!," and "TECHNO, TECHNO, TECHNO, TECHNO!" 😭

And despite the fact that he was apparently steaming mad about this, the song still reached #1 in the UK and so did the No Limits album itself, which ended up making 2 Unlimited the first Eurodance-rave group in the UK to break the cycle of having popular singles, but then those singles not translating into substantial album sales. So, Waterman may have wielded a heavy-handed axe, but the results seem to have spoken for themselves. Poor Ray! 😞

Also, I just searched "2 unlimited commercial" and "2 unlimited ad" on YouTube, and it doesn't look like any restaurant has ever licensed this song in order to advertise any kind of 'bottomless' or 'all you can eat' kind of promotion before, which, really, feels unbelievable at this point. Someone please pay me lots of money for manifesting this idea into existence 🙏🤑.

More fun videos here.

#eurodance #euro dance #dance #dance music #techno #eurohouse #euro house #house #house music #electronic #electronic music #music #90s #90s music #90's #90's music #Youtube

[elsaqueenofstress]

rewording my tags from another post because of that ask someone got regarding "west side story being about forgiveness":

west side story is NOT about "enemies to lovers" or "forgiving people for the silly little hate crimes they committed against you in the past." it isn't about redeeming racist, transphobic rapists so you don't feel bad – or more accurately, annoyed at people constantly bringing up their racism and transphobia as reasons to dislike them – for thinking they're all hot and not caring about other characters.

west side story demonstrates the societal structures that are meant to crush the hopes of and deny love toward those it deems unworthy. it ALSO shows how, in internalizing those messages, individuals – including the jets! – can further destroy hope & love for others by blaming their existence for their troubles. tony & maría's story (whether you believe they were truly in love/compatible or not) is about them trying to overcome those barriers but ultimately failing because of the hatred that has seeped into their community.

specifically regarding The Plague that is riff content in this tag: riff is complicit in purposefully denying peace to and mocking the national identity of puerto ricans. think about that then come tell me that you're a "rebel" for shipping him with anita (because it's actually giving her agency!) and that everyone else is racist for not believing that this gleefully-bigoted, foutté-turning little bitch would want to "redeem" himself by treating the sharks like human beings.

#anyway. #west side story #riff #riff x anita #riff x bernardo #riff x tony #riff x graziella #notes

[richardsondavis]

This post will NOT cover everything that took place in GamerGate. That simply isn't possible here. GamerGate wasn't one drama, it was many small and large events that unfolded and built upon each other over a period of years, and took place in every part of the internet at once. My aim here is to lay out the key figures, and give a general understanding of what happened and why. There are resources linked throughout the post which can expand on events I mentioned, but there are many more that I left out.

Come with me as we explore the dark corridors of the internet that gave birth to the modern alt-right. I'm going to try and keep this gaming related, because this isn't a political discussion board, but references to greater political movements are unavoidable.

Be warned, this post contains basically every ism and phobia that you could possible imagine. Tread with care.

Also, when I refer to 'gamers' with a lowercase G, I just mean normal gamers as a whole. When I say 'Gamers', I mean Gamergate supporters.

Anita Sarkeesian - Sexism in Gaming

This shitstorm began in 2013, though its roots trace back far earlier, and while it would come to suck in thousands of pundits, politicians and thinkers from around the world, it began with one woman: Anita Sarkeesian.

Anita is a Canadian-American media critic. She started her Youtube Channel Feminist Frequency in 2009, analysing portrayals of women in pop culture. In 2011 she worked with feminist magazine Bitch to create a series of videos titled 'Tropes vs Women', which examined the damaging cliches and stereotypes against women in film and tv. It did pretty well, but she was still a small voice in a small circle. The natural next step was to talk about games, and that's what she did in 2012. 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games' criticised the sexualisation of women in games, the way they are treated as helpless damsels in distress, or given to the player as a reward. As Sarkeesian herself points out in her first episode:

"It's both possible and necessary to simultaneously enjoy media, while also being critical of its problematic or pernicious aspects'.

The videos were pretty even handed, and never really took the 'rabid angry feminist' tone that people have come to portray. I recommend taking a look. Anita was clearly not much of a 'gamer' herself, but she saw the positives that could be drawn from them.

In order to fund the project, Anita created a Kickstarter - which was all the rage back then. The kickstarter drew attention from every corner. Some of it was positive - she asked for $6000, but ended up with almost 7000 backers and $160,000 pledged. However a lot of it was bad.

Keep in mind that this all took place at a very critical moment in the feminist movement. Tumblr and Twitter were at their height, and a lot of positive momentum was being made. The video game industry was gradually becoming more inclusive too. Games at the time were - to much controversy - including more POC, women, and LGBT characters. But at the same time, a push began against this. A lot of men were feeling alienated by the rapid change, and this negative stance on feminism tended to look past the majority (who were pretty reasonable) and focus only on the minority of feminists who were explicitly anti-male. And in time, the progressive community would make the same mistake with gamers. But for now, it was these anti-feminists who saw the premise of Sarkeesian's videos as a threat toward 'their territory' - the male oriented video game industry. Anita became the poster child for everything these men hated. There was a coordinated effort on 4chan to destroy her Kickstarter, to DDOS the site, to report her twitter accounts, and otherwise eliminate her. It got pretty nasty. At the time it was a bit of a shocker just how nasty it got, but little did we know it was just the start.

A number of articles started to surface on various sites documenting the bizarre outrage, and that only lent it more momentum. Kotaku, Polygon, and other more left-leaning gaming news sites headed the exposure.

Anita received enormous harassment on social media, including vast numbers of rape and death threats, and she was doxxed multiple times (a practice in which a person's home address is posted online). Her wikipedia articles were vandalised with racial and sexual slurs, and she was sent drawings of herself being raped. A video game was created, 'Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian', in which players cover a photo of her in blood by clicking on it. Critics who disparaged the 'game' received death threats themselves. The creator of the game, Gregory Alan Elliot, was taken to court. The case had significant implications for online freedom of speech in Canada. She was accused of being Jewish, and received enormous amounts of antisemitism dubbing her Jewkeesian, until it came to light that her heritage was actually Armenian - and the harassment switched to an Armenian theme without skipping a beat.

Anita capitalised on her infamy, and used it to speak out on sexual harassment at TEDxWomen, as well as several universities. She was scheduled to speak at the 2014 Game Developer's Choice Awards, and would receive an accolade herself, but an anonymous bomb threat was called in to try and get the event cancelled. It really is hard to overstate the sheer level of vitriol this woman had thrown at her. But she would not be the only one.

"I don't get to publicly express sadness or rage or exhaustion or anxiety or depression, I can't say that sometimes the harassment really gets to me, or conversely that the harassment has become so normal that sometimes I don't feel anything at all. I don't get to express feelings of fear or how tiring it is to be constantly vigilant of my physical or digital surroundings. How I don't go to certain events because I don't feel safe. Or how I sit in the more secluded areas of coffee shops and restaurants so the least amount of people can recognise me."

Zoe Quinn - Ethics in Journalism

Zoe Quinn is an American video game developer and writer. In 2013, she released the game 'Depression Quest', a text-based game in which the player roleplays as themselves and is taken through a number of scenarios relating to depression. The game was based on her own experiences, and was received positively by critics. It's a raw and heartfelt project, and I really recommend it. However, there was a contingent who insisted that Depression Quest couldn't really be called a game, and it's true that it blurred the lines between a book, a visual novel, and a game.

This began a broad - and still ongoing - conversation within the gaming community. What is a game? People tried to come up with a clear cut definition, but there was always something that fell outside it. Does it need a failure state? That rules out Animal Crossing, which is definitely a game. Does it need an end point? That rules out Tetris. Does it need violence? Does it need characters? Does it need interactivity? Does it need choice? Does it need goals? Does it need visuals or sound? It's easy to look at most games and say 'yes, that's a game'. It's easy to look at a book or film and say it isn't. But when projects approach the line, things get a bit confusing. There are those who looked at Depression Quest and saw a book with extra steps, and there are those who insisted it was a game, but with all the extraneous stuff taken away. This is a massive philosophical debate, but we're here for drama, so let's move on. All you need to know is - it got great reviews, and some players were unhappy.

Zoe was added to the list of persona non grata. She received her own wave of death and rape threats, but rather than backing away, she documented them and spoke out about them to the media. This earned her even more hatred, which steadily grew more and more intense, to the point where she fled her home out of fear for her own safety.

But it wasn't until August 2014 that 'GamerGate' as we know it would officially begin. And it started at the hands of a relative unknown name, even now. Zoe's former boyfriend Eron Gjoni published a long and sprawling blog post about their relationship in which he levelled a number of accusations against her, the most inflammatory of which was that she had been given positive coverage (of Depression Quest, among other things) by a Kotaku journalist with whom she was sexually involved. This was a false accusation. It later came out that this journalist, Nathan Grayson, had barely ever mentioned Quinn or her work, and when he did, they hadn't been together. But never let the truth get in the way of a good story. The letter included copies of chat logs, text messages, and emails, and for all the world appeared to be legit.

The Gamers in question accused Zoe of exchanging sexual favours for positive press and professional advancement in what they called the 'Quinnspiracy'. Of course, Zoe Quinn stood to gain nothing from the praise Depression Quest received. Contrary to the claims that she was using her status as a woman to gain money... the game was free. And always had been. But this spawned one 'debate' which would go on to define GamerGate - that of ethics in game journalism. Video game press came under enormous scrutiny, especially the left-leaning Kotaku. The idea was that if a pundit/reviewer/critic was left leaning, their views could not be relied upon, because according to GamerGate, they were biased. Large lists were created to map out the various 'SJW Journalists', which boiled down to a blacklist of public figures who spoke out against GamerGate.

But for Zoe, it just meant abuse.

A lot of this began on 4chan - because of course it did - and users leapt at the chance to renew their attacks on Zoe Quinn and Depression Quest. Adam Baldwin (yes that one) coined the term GamerGate on Twitter, and his followers sent it trending. GamerGate gradually developed into a movement which would viciously attack anyone it saw as a target, and had its base in 4chan and Reddit.

Within four months of the blog post, Quinn's record of threats had exceeded a thousand. Around that time she is quoted as saying:

"I used to go to game events and feel like I was going home [...] Now it's just like... are any of the people I'm currently in the room with ones that said they wanted to beat me to death?".

I would go into detail on the exact content of these threats but frankly, I don't want to. All you need to know is that they contain the worst possible things that some very creative people could come up with. Quinn's Tumblr, Dropbox and Skype accounts were hacked, and she once again fled to live with friends. Everyone even tangentially connected to her got showered with hatred. It was a full on witch hunt.

In a BBC interview, Zoe summed up her experience.

"To me, GamerGate will always be glorified revenge porn by my angry ex. Before it had a name, it was nothing but trying to get me to kill myself, trying to hurt me, going after my family. GamerGate will always be that to me. There was no mention of ethics in journalism at all, besides making the same accusation everybody makes toward any successful women, that clearly she got to where she is because she had sex with someone".

EDIT: There was a section here in which I covered the Alec Holowka scandal in 2019, but commenters pointed out that it isn't really relevant to GamerGate, and I agree with them, so I removed it.

Brianna Wu - Taking Action

Wu is an American video game developer and the founder of Giant Spacekat, a small game studio. In October 2014, she began monitoring 8chan (think 4chan's even worse cousin), and began tweeting about GamerGate, ridiculing them for:

"...fighting an apocalyptic future where women are 8 percent of programmers and not 3 percent".

In the process, she placed herself in the sights of the mob. Anonymous details about her, including her address, were leaked on 8chan, and of course she got the standard death and rape threats, and had to flee her home. If this seems like it's becoming a pattern, that's because it is. The pattern would repeat itself over and over going forward. A minor figure speaks out about something, right wingers try to shut them up with abuse, they use that abuse to increase their platform (thereby becoming a minor left wing celebrity), they become an even bigger target, and they soon end up plastered across the internet.

But to the fury of many Gamers everywhere, none of these women were backing down. In February 2015, Wu declared:

"By attacking me so viciously, they're helping give me the visibility to usher in the very game industry they're terrified about".

Wu created a legal defence fund for women targeted by GamerGate, offered cash for information leading to the prosecution of its worst members, and became heavily involved with the FBI. She exclusively attended events with a security detail. As of today, she and her husband continue to live under aliases.

In 2017, the FBI closed their investigation and declined to prosecute any of the men who sent threats (even though two had confessed). Wu went to the media, campaigning for dedicated FBI agents who understand and monitor the dark corners of the internet like 8chan.

While Wu, Sarkeesian and Quinn would become the three horsewomen of the GamerGate apocalypse, they were not alone. Other women who became major targets include Jenni Goodchild, Liana Kerzner, Devi Ever, Leigh Alexander, Felicia Day, and more. It simply isn't possible to cover every single victim of this movement.

At the time, most people who played video games had no idea this was even going on. And often it was getting swept up in generalisations that turned regular gamers into Gamers. There were those who felt like they were being unfairly portrayed as sexist/racist/whatever else, and responded indignantly. This became heavily involved with the #notallmen and #yesallmen movements (and then #notallgamers). But sometimes those generalisations were right. There was a lot of anger going around in general.

Vivian James - Politics in Gaming

Of course, to the 4channer, the ideal woman doesn't exist. She has to be created. And so Vivian was born. Vivian James (chosen because it sounds like Video Games) was created as a mascot for GamerGaters on 4chan, and her portrayal tells us a lot about what Gamers wanted women to be. She was an anthropomorphized avatar of the /v/ (Vidya) community on 4chan, created in response to a totally separate Zoe Quinn controversy surrounding game jams (events in which developers race to make weird and wacky games). She was used in propaganda as a champion of ‘free speech’.

You see, one of the many debates (and we must use this term loosely) that GamerGate created was that of 'politics' in gaming. Representation was increasing of LGBT people, POC and women in games, and some players insisted that these inclusions were politically motivated. They claimed that games as a medium were not meant to be 'political', and forcing 'politics' into the games was a negative thing. They wanted a return to the 'non-political' status quo - and it just so happened that the status quo was white straight American men (usually with guns). Because they themselves were mostly white straight American men, it never struck them as political for a game to feature a white straight American man, it was simply normal. The default. And any deviation from this was labelled as 'political'.

Of course, any intelligent person can see through this to its deeper meaning - these players didn't want gays, women, and non white characters in their games because they were prejudiced. All media is political in some way. Even games which try not to be political.

This is what GamerGate boils down to - a war over the status quo. One side pushing for change, the other pushing to stop that change.

Vivian never mentioned her gender, her ideas or her politics when she played a game - you could play against her and mistake her for a guy. Rather than disrupt the status quo by existing, she allowed it to absorb her. And that's what Gamers wanted from all minorities - they were welcome as long as they didn't disrupt games as a haven where everything is catered to the default player, a white straight American man. Vivian was a 'real gamer' because she embraced the default. Anyone who rejected that default was a fake gamer, whose love of games was a lie, and whose real purpose was sabotage.

This links in pretty heavily to the #NotYourShield movement, basically a platform for women, POC and LGBT Gamers who supported GamerGate and saw its opponents as exploiting them as a shield to deflect criticism. Ironically, GamerGate used these people as evidence that they were not prejudiced at all, in a very 'I'm not racist, my best friend is black' kind of way.

Penning the Playbook

GamerGate had found an effective way of tearing down its targets, and its playbook would come to include strategies like gaslighting, dogpiling, sea lioning, gish galloping, and dogwhistling - and would inform the strategies of the alt right. By creating a state of fear, where people are too scared to even speak against GamerGate, they were able to silence opposition. And unlike its opposition, who were very real and public figures, GamerGate was decentralised and anonymous, akin to a swarm with no individual leader or face, and which therefore was incredibly hard to defeat. This was never a two way street. Of course, GamerGate had its open and public supporters. Let's go through a few of these colourful characters now!

Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad)

Sargon is your standard basement dweller youtuber, the kind of guy who DESTROYS libs with FACTS and REASON. He gained a lot of traction from GamerGate, and he explains why here. You can kind of imagine him as a more extreme Ben Shapiro.

Richard Spencer

Another Nazi. Richard Spencer was a big supporter of GamerGate. You can look into himself if you like but frankly I don't want to do the research into him because that means I have to watch and read shit he has said. His main claim to fame is being the man who coined the term 'Alt Right'

John Bain (Totalbiscuit)

Totalbiscuit was a popular game critic who died of bowel cancer in 2018. He is widely credited with being the man who legitimised GamerGate. It should be pointed out that Bain was never a white supremacist or abuser or anything like that - and he is often wrongly characterised as being more extreme than he really is. He was conservative, aggressive and thin skinned, but he wasn't evil. To him, GamerGate was always about ethics in journalism, what defines a game, and politics in gaming. He had been an ethical crusader long before GamerGate, and so none of this is truly surprising. He was either incredibly naive or just wilfully ignored the fact that these online movements were just fronts. It is somewhat ironic how much he had in common with James Stephanie Sterling (once known as Jim Sterling before transitioning), another British pro-consumer activist and long-time collaborator, who was always on the total opposite end of the GamerGate spectrum. Indeed, most of John's closest associates were anti-GamerGate.

I met TB once at a convention and he seemed nice enough.

Milo Yiannopoulos

During his time working at Breitbart, Milo was an outspoken supporter of GamerGate. His big thing was that he was a gay right-winger, and he used his homosexuality to deflect criticism for his views. He has since been banned from basically every site possible. Like many others, he seemed somewhat right leaning at first, but gradually unveiled himself as a full on nazi.

Steven Jay Williams (Boogue2988)

Boogie is a youtuber who came to fame through the persona of 'Francis', in which he would put on a funny voice and rage about minor things. But gradually he became more popular just for being himself, and his own views. When GamerGate first emerged, Boogie tried to stay moderate, but his views got more and more extreme as time went on. In 2017, Boogie had a gastric bypass surgery, which made him lose weight. But after that, he revealed himself to be quite a nasty person.

Christina Hoff Sommers

Sommers is an author and philosopher of ethics, and a resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute. She is probably the most 'legit' of GamerGate's supporters, and has carved out a niche in making right wing talking points palatable to the average person, before they move on to the more extreme online figures.

EDIT: Steve Bannon

As a commenter pointed out to me, I've left out someone important. While Steve Bannon himself was not very strongly linked to GamerGate, he was the founder of the heavily right wing site Breitbart, which gave a platform to Milo Yiannopoulos and many others. Bannon would go on to play a pivotal role in the Trump presidency.

Sexism in Gaming Studios

While this is far removed from GamerGate, it's a case of 'the birds coming home to roost'. The movements that GamerGate helped to start have returned and taken many large game developers by storm in recent years. I thought I would go over some of them.

Part 1: The Fellowship of the Rats

The first big publisher to go under the magnifying glass was Ubisoft. In mid 2020 they came under fire for sexual harassment allegations.

Last month the company, one of the world’s largest video game publishers with a portfolio including Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, launched a probe after allegations of sexual misconduct were shared online. Serge Hascoet, chief creative officer and the company’s second-in-command, has resigned, as has the human resources director, Cecile Cornet, and the managing director of the Canadian branch, Yannis Mallat, Ubisoft said on Sunday.

MANY of Ubisoft's executives were forced to stand down.

This video goes into a lot of detail on exactly how much of this abuse was covered up at Ubisoft.

Unfortunately a year later, Ubisoft had made minimal changes. Luckily for them, the spotlight would soon be stolen away.

Part 2: The Two Lawsuits

This particular controversy concerns Activision Blizzard. After a two year investigation, the company was found to have extreme harassment against women and minorities, and has discrimination baked into its terms and conditions of employment. Everything from compensation, assignment, promotion and termination is affected by gender. The entire company is governed by a 'Frat Boy Culture'. California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against them..

At first, Blizzard's president Allen Brack claimed no knowledge of this. But then numerous former and current Blizzard employees spoke up to support the accusations. They insisted that almost nothing was being done within the company to fix it. On 26 June, more than 800 employees (eventually as many as 2000) signed an open letter too their leadership demanding that Blizzard recognise the seriousness and show compassion for victims. When that didn't work, employees held a meeting and on 28 July, organised the Activision Blizzard Walk Out For Equality. Turnout exceeded two hundred.

Renowned scumbag Bobby Kotick released a statement describing Blizzard's earlier statement as 'tone deaf' and promised 'swift action'.

An article by Kotaku went into more detail on the infamous 'Cosby Suite', and revealed that Ghostcrawler (one a high-up on World of Warcraft) was on the list of guests.

Numerous developers left the company, either in protest or due to allegations against them. More and more horrible stories began to emerge, far worse than the original lawsuit had uncovered. Sponsors pulled out, investors filed a class action lawsuit toward the company, and Brack stepped down.

You can read more about it here

Hilariously, Blizzard also completely neutered any remotely sexual or flirtatious lines, emotes and jokes out of WoW.

Part 3: The Return of the Gamers

Since then, numerous other companies have been accused of similar problems. Paradox Interactive, SCUF, Insomniac Games, Bethesda. In fact, it might be easier to list the gaming companies that haven't had any allegations.

It turns out that the people who worked in these companies were often just as nasty as the fans.

Luckily, the reaction has been a far cry from GamerGate. On that, at least, we seem to have made some progress. And I suppose that's something to be optimistic about.

A Troubled Legacy

So what is the legacy of GamerGate? It never really 'concluded' or 'finished'. But if we zoom out on our scope a little, we see that it was just a tributary which flowed into the greater river of the alt-right. And from that river would spill forth Donald Trump, Pizzagate, Qanon, the Manosphere, and Incels. GamerGate was arguably just a microcosm of a much greater societal movement, not its cause, but it was the moment that young online conservatives began to push back against progressivism, and collectively organise. It was the moment where their techniques for censorship, propaganda and recruitment would be rewritten for the internet era. And it was the moment when thousands of online fascists looked around and realised their views weren't that rare after all.

The positive effects have been there too, however. The push back against Gamergate has definitely helped us recognise the dark corners of the internet, and also led to widespread changes in the industry. But the consequences of GamerGate have not yet fully shown themselves.

It's hard to say where it will all lead.

#gamergate #anita #sarkeesian #brianna #wu #reddit #from rumbleskim of rddit in r/hobbydrama #I meant reddit

[whatislife1999]

Gamergate a community that was created based on classic story of love, sex and jealousy as mentioned in the book. The battle between who has the right to take control over the gaming community men or women. It all started because women were starting to get more involve creating, designing, and journaling in a male dominated industry. The ego in a man caused the outburst of gamergate on social media it got out of hand when women involved in this community started to receive threatening / harassing tweets and derogatory comments. Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian were some of the first women that experience hateful and threatening thoughts through different platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and blog posts. Depression Quest, game jam, and 4chan raised questions about the culture of gaming and the conflict of intersectionality in the gaming community. The creation of different platforms whether they were for a positive or negative gain, created a new world for gamers.

A man named Adam Baldwin was dating Zoe Quinn the creator of Depression Quest where you make decisions based on the outcome that you think will occur. This game received a lot of controversies and threatening comments and an invasion of privacy toward the creator causing her to take it down from Greenlight. Quinn later had the opportunity to be part of a new reality tv show called Game_Jam were teams would be set up to play against each other and challenged to be the first to create a new game. The show ended up being canceled and never appeared because competitors decided to leave and not participate due to the unnecessary commentary by Lesham where he questioned if it was possible for a woman to succeed in gaming. He belittled the talent of these women and thought that teams would be a disadvantage and then added sexist comments that girl gamers were just pretty ladies. The realization that gaming still needs a long way to go because it was so important to have a visible representation to question traditionally marginalized groups where women can voice their opinion free of judgment and criticism.

Doxing takes personal information from someone and uploads it to the media for everyone to see. Matthew Rappard one of the creators of The Fine Young Capitalists (TFYC) were they contacted women that were into gaming with the opportunity to get involved in a pro-feminist organization. But soon Zoe Quinn came to question this technique because they were basically asking women to work for free providing creative gaming ideas. Without recognition and were able to launch Autobotika which was solidly created games for women. Maybe the intention was good, but they were still exploiting the fact that these women want it recognition but instead gave free research and development ideas away. Therefore, Zoe and her friend released Matthew’s true intention by plastering his identity on Twitter. This led to a positive direction because a different lunch came into play After Life Empire where the character created was named Vivian James and a place where men and women(4:1 ration) could start a conversation in developing a game and women were receiving recognition and creating videos with females being game designers.

I choose a video that asks the question why do women make games? I thought this would be a great insider into the perspective of female player and why they became game designer and get so involve in the gamming community and that they should be allowed to form part of Esports without the judgment of being a woman. Women want to be able to tell their personal stories through game mechanics, and storylines allowing creative expression. This video shows how this organization is shifting to demonstrate that everyone is allowed to have a chance and show their work in a positive environment. The image included was taken from an article that mentions “the majority of female gamers hide their gender to avoid harassment”. This article come out in 2021 with the statistic that women to with day don’t feel safe playing games as themselves due to the fear of receiving unnecessary comments. Looking at this image it proves that young women can, and if they want to game, they can do it just as well or as any man and that they can make it better too.

The feminist frequency project created by Anita Sarkeesian started as a website where she it represented feminist media and media criticism covering popular culture and created a series of videos called Tropes Vs. Women in video games, etc. She did receive negative hate after her succus on this platform for creating a place where feminism could be fought. I included the website because I want to see if something changed and if the objective still aspires for the same goals. They have now included podcasts and still create content for the Tropes Vs. Women (like women as rewards in games or why are they background decoration).

Website

https://feministfrequency.com/

[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

[bikiniarmorbattledamage]

Okay, I think it's been long enough we can assume people have stopped tag searching for this and thus can contribute to the discussion without getting extra hate brigades. Also the show has rightfully jettisoned Gina Carano for being a reactionary menace.

Obviously the issue of why boobplate is (with very few exceptions) always bad has been covered extensively on this blog already, so I'm not going to go into that other than this scene was massively disappointing because for the first season - Mandalorian really committed to the whole warrior cult thing and had an amazing female character in amazing armor.

(This is why we never just "relax" after a positive example, way too many properties do this kind of back sliding as soon as they are proved successful and execs invite a certain type of devil into the decision making process)

What I wanted to talk about specifically is a rhetoric tactic I noticed with shitbagsbrodudes actively looking to undermine the message by selectively signal boosting women who frequently get left out of these conversations.

I am talking specifically about women who have large breasts and:

Are sick of being treated as hypersexual because of their bodies

Are sick of having to pay extra or buy alternatives to clothes they want because companies don't cater for their "desirable" shape

Are sick of, at events like LARPs, paintballs, kayaking etc, being given gear made for smaller chested women and having their complaints about it being uncomfortable or impractical for them go unheard, ignored or ridiculed

Because the reality is that as much as capitalism commodifies and exploits women with hefty busts, capitalist society never misses an opportunity to make women feel shitty for their bodies.

Now I said "selectively" above because I noticed that among the group I looked over there was a distinct trend of "liking" posts yelling at Anita, and not liking posts calling for people not to automatically sexualize big boobs - and a lot of liking more misogynistic posts that were very insulting to women in general.

All of this is to say that when we have these conversations, it is important to remember that the goal is to have representation and inclusion in all kinds of fantasies for all kinds of people - and assholes will never hesitate to try to play people against each other in order to try to keep a bigger their overly privileged position.

- wincenworks

#rhetoric #commentary #mandalorian #the mandalorian #boobplate #the armorer #television #positive examples #image #Bikini Armor Battle Damage #BikiniArmorBattleDamage #BABD

[hypocrisyofandrewdobson]

Hi I just read your ask post about comicgate and gamergate but... if it's alright with you, could you please explain those 2 with little words, like pre school level words please.

Comicsgate and GamerGate? I’m not really the best to describe them, as I was never really involved in them, but I’ll give it a shot. Just a heads up that this is what I understand them to be.

GamerGate was people getting fed up with professional game reviewers rating games high not because they were actually high quality, but because game companies would, in some form or fashion, pay for good reviews. It got labeled sexist due to people like Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian being called out as being involved and then accusing GamerGate of only doing so because they hated women.

Comicgate is similar, only it was indie and professional comic artists being fed up with being told or forced to follow a more “woke” agenda, and the other side accusing them of being just plain sexist/racist and that’s why they were complaining.

Both essentially come down to a group of people calling out what they considered corruption in said medium and the opposite side claiming it was just hatred against women/minorities/ect. Who you side with is dependent upon your own personal opinion and interpretation of what happened.

Hope that was more clear.

#comicsgate #gamergate #andrew dobson #tom preston #mod stuff #adobsonartworks #adobsonart #ask #anonymous

[horsesandhockeyplayers]

Fourth Line Grinder-- Part 8

Author’s Note:  This beautiful header is courtesy of @whatishockey​ and her brilliant creative mind. This part is ALL NEW NEVER BEFORE SEEN (because I just wrote it) Please see the masterlist post to see examples of the horse trailer.

Word Count: 5720

Word Count TOTAL: 51,717

Song: Dark Horse - Aaron Watson

Synopsis:  Nell Sayer, often called The Witch for her ability to heal horses that are deemed lost causes, is content with her life. With a job where she makes a good living and her two best friends, Nell is unprepared for the changes a meeting with a once-in-a-lifetime horse and his incorrigible owner brings, knocking her off her feet…literally. If only she were as good at listening to her heart as she is at listening to the animals she loves.

Tag List: @laurenairay, @danglesnipecelly, @hockeylvr59, @whatishockey, @thebookofmags, @princessphilly, @glassdanse, @tippedbykreider, @iangiemae, @kotkaniemi-caufield-mom, @marcoscandellas, @mac-blackwood, @fanficrecsby-e

Part 8

For the first time since my concussion, I woke up naturally, no alarms. I was sprawled, naked on my stomach and there was a heavy weight across my back. But I was warm and comfortable and I didn’t want to move.

It was Sunday, Grinder had won his race yesterday and I had the simulcast footage saved to my phone. I had watched it over and over last night memorizing every second and then Erik and I had spent the rest of the night naked, making love. I was sore in ways I had never experienced before and it felt indulgent.

I felt his lips tracing my spine, “good morning, Peaches.”

“Good morning,” I said smiling.

He pressed kisses along my shoulder blades before resting his chin on my back, “Am I too heavy?”

I made a noise in the negative, “Not even a little, I’m so comfortable.”

“Then I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Dick wants to meet us for breakfast in an hour to talk about Grinder and where we go from here.”

“An hour? You could have let me sleep for another 45 minutes,” I whined.

I felt the rumble in his chest more than I heard it, “Yeah, but now I have 45 minutes with you in the shower.”

I didn’t think it was possible to have another orgasm. I was wrong… it was possible to have two.

Two hours later, I had five men staring at me as I dug into a huge plate of biscuits and gravy, “What?”

Mike shoved his egg white and vegetable omelet around his plate. Erik had something similar. Dick was eating something that looked like it was going to clog his arteries immediately upon digestion.

The Guys had each gotten something but both were digging into my food. It was just how we rolled.

Dick paused from shoveling food in his face to wash it all down with some black coffee. “I want to point Grinder to the American Stakes at Santa Anita in a month. It’s a 8 furlong grade 3 on the turf. Then the Grade 2 Eddie Read at Del Mar in July, 9 furlongs on Turf and this is to prepare him for the Pacific Classic in late August. A mile and quarter on dirt and hopefully his ticket into the Breeders Cup Classic.”

A silence fell over the table and we all stopped eating. I looked over at Mikey who was pondering this plan, “Let me move some things around, but I’m in.”

Erik had stiffened next to me at Dick’s proposal and he hadn’t relaxed, “Dick… you sure?”

The trainer shrugged, “Why not? His Beyer speed figure was over 100 in shitty company. Imagine what it will look like against actual competition.”

He looked over at me, “Am I shooting for the stars?”

I had watched every second of the race yesterday 100 times. “If I can keep him healthy, I think he could be competitive.”

Erik spoke as I was lost in my thoughts, “Do you think he can go from dirt to turf and back again?”

When he nudged my shoulder I realized he was talking to me, “I don’t think the track surface will matter to him.”

Erik dropped his credit card on the table as we finished eating and we made it to the track just before noon. I gave Grinder a massage as EJ made phone calls and stared at his laptop at a picnic table a few yards away.

The horse didn’t even act like he expended any energy out of the norm and I knew I was being ridiculously over cautious with the massage, photonic red light therapy, and compression wraps, but I was leaving for a week and I wanted to make sure he stayed in tip top shape.

A few hours later, EJ leaned over the stall guard, “Have you ever thought about opening your own facility where you could have literally every equine recovery therapy you can get your hands on? Maybe hire a vet or have a contract with one for a certain amount of their time?”

I shrugged and packed the photonic equipment away, “Not really. I don’t know where I would find a facility like that, to build one would cost millions. That type of space in California would be outrageous unless I wanted in the middle bumfuck nowhere in like... Victorville.”

EJ just hummed in agreement, but I could tell the wheels in his head were turning. I had met with a business advisor he recommended and she was brilliant. I had a tiered pricing policy now, allowing me to charge the clients who could afford it through the nose and still take the clients who needed me but couldn’t pay as much. I could grandfather in existing clients and slowly raise rates on those I wanted. This approach had actually allowed me to put some money toward the massage program for Jesus and I was able to hire him full time. I had hired a bookkeeper while Carlos took some accounting classes, but he still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life.

Grinder happily munched his hay as I exited the stall and Erik helped me gather all the equipment I wanted to take with me. We were leaving on a red eye private charter flight for JFK and my week at Belmont started tomorrow.

Unlike the derby, it was just going to be us. Tyson was currently off doing whatever Tyson did in the summers and Gabe and Mel were in Sweden. Now that Grinder’s race was over I was starting to feel nervous and it was difficult to turn off the “what if” thoughts.

There was a knot in my stomach that I was trying to ignore but the closer the departure time inched, the heavier and larger that knot became. By the time all my equipment was on the plane and I was settled into the rich leather it felt like a boulder was sitting in my gut.

Erik sat next to me on the plane even though there were 6 other open seats, “Before you sleep can I show you something?”

I nodded, “sure.”

He put his tablet in my hands, there was a real estate listing on the screen.

Leaning over the armrest and he swiped through the photos, “It’s 100 acres about 20 minutes from the practice arena and the Pepsi Center. It has a 30 stall main barn and 10 breeding stall barn. There’s 10 one acre pastures for turnouts and 5 three acre pastures with sheds. There’s already an Equisizer and around the perimeter is a galloping track. It needs work, but it exists. There’s an indoor arena and a round pen, and a huge jumping field.”

I was swiping through the photos on my own now, “I mean it’s beautiful and it looks state of the art, but this seems a little excessive for a breeding operation EJ. I’m sure there are other facilities that can be converted with less money. Half of this stuff you don’t even need.”

He gave me a look that said I was dense. “There’s a large apartment over the main barn for The Guys and a small cottage near the breeding barn. The main house is pretty small, but we can add on and renovate and there’s a perfect place near the storage barn to run electrical and water hook ups for temporary housing.”

“Wait. What,” I asked, putting the tablet in my lap.

“Just look at it and think about it ok?”

Looking back down at the tablet I swiped through more of the photos. It was a beautiful facility and the listing price was a lot lower than I expected. The same facility within a 30 minute drive of a main metropolitan area of California would be 5x the asking price or more. But it was so much more than just a place to have a proper rehab facility. It was moving to Colorado, building a life with Erik, starting a business together and in some ways it would have been a lot less shocking if he had just gotten down on one knee to propose.

This was a statement. He was thinking about his future, our future and what it would look like. What was scarier was how easy it was for me to picture where I would put the different rehab therapies. 30 stalls was a lot and I had a vision of retraining retired racehorses, Erik’s specifically, to go to new homes with new careers. Those 5 acre pastures would be great for horses that were too injured to go onto new lives, or for retired broodmares.

I felt his hand on the back of my neck and he pulled me close to kiss my temple. I emailed the link to myself and handed the tablet back. I didn’t think I was going to be able to sleep on the plane, but I did and I dreamed of long legged foals running around pastures with the Rocky Mountains in the distance.

****

The week in New York was wildly successful and my savings got more than a little padded. I did manage my time and workload, but it was impossible not to because Erik handled my scheduling. I had a hard time saying no, but he didn’t and as a result I had my first headache free week since the accident. It turns out rest does actually help the body heal, who knew? I did for one. A lot of the horses I saw just needed a vacation, but like all equestrians it was impossible for me to take my own advice.

Grinder did well while I was gone. He still wouldn’t let anyone other than Mikey or I ride him, but Jesus had ponied him around the track in the afternoons to stretch his legs and keep him from stocking up. Because horses were so big with extended limbs, their hooves served as tiny little hearts pushing the blood out with every step.. When a horse exercised it helped circulate the blood in their legs. When a horse was sedentary too long in a stall their legs would swell with fluid and that was called “stocking up.”

I was sitting outside Grinder’s stall, sipping my coffee the following Monday. My mind was too full to concentrate on anything except the plan for Grinder and the property Erik showed me. He hadn’t brought it up again, but I looked at the link on my phone about 50 x a day.

The gelding took a break from his breakfast to throw the road cone out of his stall. He was better, but he still had a bite radius in case he was feeling ornery. Someone had set a cone too close and it became his personal chew toy. Now, instead of lunging and biting he would grab that cone, pin his ears and aggressively shake it if people got too close. Like an old man shaking his fist from his porch at the neighborhood children.

I had 3 weeks to prepare this goofball for his return to a graded stakes race. I snapped a photo with my phone of Grinder waving the cone around and followed that up with taking a short video. Jesus still ran my business Instagram, but the girlfriend of a professional athlete needed a personal social media outlet. I had amassed quite a following because of Grinder.

My business manager had suggested starting a blog as well, documenting different horses and their recovery journeys. Something like that would be great to start if I decided to buy that property with Erik.

I had been doing ok before Grinder and Erik landed in my life, but two months later I had more opportunities than I could shake a stick at and a boyfriend that told me I couldn’t do all of them because of my health.

Dick sat across from me, outside of Grinder Cone Shaking radius, “You look like you’re deep in thought.”

“Erik found a property in Colorado,” I said playing with the lid on my coffee tumbler.

“Well, that was bound to happen. He’s been wanting to start a breeding operation in Colorado for awhile.”

“It’s bigger than that. The breeding operation would only be 1/3 of the horses.”

The trainer shifted his bulk on the overturned bucket he was sitting on, “huh. Ok.”

“The rest is for a rehab facility.”

His eyebrows raised, “Well, that’s interesting.”

Grinder shook his cone with ferocity and I smiled at his antics while I replied, “It’s something.”

“With the two of you it was always going to be all or nothing. Anyone with eyes could see that plain as day.”

“I suppose,” I answered, picking at a hangnail.

Dick brushed some dried leaves off the table, “Are you afraid to leave Jesus and Carlos?”

I chuckled, seeing his angle immediately, “No. There’s a place for both of them.”

He swore, “Damn. I’ve had a heck of a time trying to replace them. Well if that’s the case I don’t know what the problem is.”

“Well, it’s a huge commitment for one,” I said, still picking at my finger.

Dick nodded toward Grinder, “That horse is proof of what you can accomplish when you have the resources you need. In the famous words of Ron Swanson, ‘Don’t half ass two things, whole ass one thing.’ But in this case, you can have it all, Kid. The man and the business and your friends.”

It was rare for Dick to get all philosophical with me, but it had happened a time or two. I don’t know what caused him to get all paternal sometimes, but I welcomed it. Grinder dropped his cone and went back to his hay and I turned my face to the sun. It was an unseasonably warm day in Berkley and I wanted to soak up the sunshine like it had the answers to life in its rays. “What if it doesn’t work out?” My voice was small and for a moment I didn’t think Dick heard me.

He placed a hand on my shoulder and gave it a fatherly squeeze, “Then you can always come home, but Kid… what if it does?”

I had dreams, but they were modest dreams. Dreams of Carlos and Jesus getting their citizenship, dreams of helping horses, but I didn’t have a five year plan, or even a one year plan. Since I started this adventure after high school I had just been putting one foot in front of the other, rarely looking up to see where I was going.

Dick gave my shoulder another squeeze before getting up from the table and disappearing into the barns.

Pulling out my phone I sent a quick text to Marcy, the business advisor Erik cajoled me into hiring. In just a few short weeks, she had become something of a staple in my life, her business advice bordering on therapy.

I sent her the link to the property, Erik found this.

Marcy: And?

He wants me to move my business there.

Marcy: Ah. You have a unique talent and business model. I think you need to ask yourself what you want your life to look like and how your business fits into that vision.

Leave it to Marcy to get right to the heart of the problem. My watch pinged alerting me that break time was over and it was time to get ready for my next client. I took a few more minutes letting the sunshine wash over me, grounding myself in the moment.

Later that evening, Carlos, Jesus, and I were eating pizza watching some crime show Jesus was addicted to.

I had finished my third slice and unbuttoned the top button of my jeans to give my food baby room when I picked up my laptop and brought the property listing up on the screen. “There’s something I need to show you guys.”

They both leaned over as I scrolled through the photos, “EJ wants to buy this with me. The main barn would be a rehab barn, the smaller barn the breeding barn. There’s a 2 bedroom apartment over the main barn and a small cottage over there and in this area he wants to put concrete pads with RV hookups for barn help.”

Carlos took the laptop from me to scroll through the property listing and Jesus looked at me in surprise, “You want to leave us?”

I gave a surprised laugh that sounded strained to my own ears, “Uh no. Erik and I were actually envisioning you guys living in that apartment above the barn. He has no idea how to run his own facility, nor the time. But this would allow me to invest in more equipment to help more horses. I would need a full time assistant in Jesus and I’m kind of hoping Carlos would want to be the barn manager?”

They both sat back blinking and I rushed to fill the silence, “I mean… I know it would be difficult to leave the family you have here and we’ll have to sit down with Marcy to figure out a business plan and stuff, but I don’t know if I can do this without you guys and I can’t afford a place like this in California.”

I was rubbing the thighs of my jeans obsessively with nervous energy and Jesus covered one of my hands with his own, “Hermanita. We left Mexico for a better life, for more opportunities. This that you’re offering us? Is that life.”

Carlos put the laptop on the coffee table with a shrug, “I’ve walked across the desert twice for less.”

My heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest. I couldn’t help every single person who needed it, but I could help these two men and maybe with this opportunity they could help others.

“Am I going to get a farm truck,” asked Carlos.

I blanched, “No you’re getting a used Toyota Yaris and if you don’t wreck it for a year we’ll talk.”

He stood cursing in Spanish and Jesus just laughed.

So this was it, there wasn’t much of a reason NOT to do this I just had to figure out HOW and that was something I needed to think about. What was my business going to look like? What direction did I want it to go? How was I going to entangle my life and my work with Erik’s and what would happen if it all went wrong?

We watched another episode of Jesus’ crime show and my mind was so wrapped up in these questions I couldn’t have told you the plot if my life depended on it.

****

Grinder continued to improve his speed, his stamina, his body and mind. Erik was back and forth between California and Colorado.

I was giving Grinder a massage a few days after my conversation with The Guys and EJ was sitting in a chair just inside the stall while I worked.

My hands slid down the gelding’s strong back and I let them guide me to the spots on his body that needed attention. When I spoke, he flicked an ear toward me, “I talked to The Guys about that property and you and I need to sit down with Marcy, but I think you should put an offer in.”

He looked up from his phone and I felt his eyes in my back, “Ok.”

With that he got up and disappeared from the stall, I was working on Grinder’s other side when he came back in, “We should hear something by tomorrow.”

He sat back in the folding chair and crossed his legs at the knee, “Dick thinks we should ship him down to Santa Anita about a week before the race and then just move him to Del Mar for the next two months since that’s where his races are instead of shuttling him back and forth.”

I nodded, but I realized the big horse was blocking me, “I agree. Excess travel could exacerbate his ulcers. Especially with how hot California can get in the summer.”

“You know I have a condo in Del Mar and I think you should come stay with me for those couple of months.”

A muscle under my fingertips spasmed and I adjusted my hand and held onto the muscle until it released, “Are you going to be there the whole time?”

He cleared his throat, “Um no, I have to fly back to Colorado to train, but you’re more than welcome. It’s right by the track too.”

I finished with the horse and ducked under his neck, which, because he was so big and I was not, I didn’t have to duck much. “A lot of my new clients will be going down south for the season, so I will have work down there. Jesus just finished his massage class, so he is certified and can work on his own.”

He stood and pressed a kiss to my forehead, “Just think about it ok?”

Things had been going as well as anyone could expect so. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I nodded against his lips.

****

Before I knew it, the end of June was quickly approaching and I was loading Grinder onto a huge air ride transport to drive him down to Santa Anita. Dick had asked Carlos to come as well, he was going to be managing the horses down south while Dick flew between the two tracks.

Carlos and I were driving my truck down and meeting Erik in LA. We would beat the transport by a few hours, which gave me a bit of peace of mind so I could get Grinder’s stall ready.

I was nervous and it wasn’t like I had a reason to, Grinder was a seasoned race horse long before he had come into my life. He probably had more travel miles than I did since he crisscrossed the country several times. I wondered if horses get airline points.

There was a mariachi band playing courtesy of the AUX cord Carlos had commandeered. My truck was packed with everything I was taking including a lot of rehab equipment which took two days to sort because I didn’t know what to leave behind for Jesus. On one hand I wanted to leave everything so he had access to all the tools he might need and on the other what if I needed the equipment I left?

Jesus was going to take over any clients I had remaining at Golden Gate Fields. If there was a new client or he ran into problems I could fly back up, but he was officially my assistant. I wanted him to be successful and wanted him to have everything at his disposal.

I ended up leaving everything for him and ordering the things I thought I would need, getting them shipped to EJ’s Del Mar condo. If my business had two working therapists, then I needed two sets of equipment.

I was driving somewhere down I5 and there was a whole lot of nothing on either side of the interstate when I got a call from EJ.

Carlos had long ago put headphones on and was sleeping while I listened to a lecture about equine nutrition and performance.

“Hey,” I answered after I hit the answer call button on the steering wheel.

“Do not panic. Grinder is ok. But the truck broke down near Los Banos and the trailer got side swiped as the driver was pulling off the highway. Stop Panicking. Grinder and all the other horses are fine. Does your truck have a gooseneck hitch?”

Carlos sat up in his seat, discarding his expensive headphones and my grip on the wheel turned my knuckles white. “Yes, you know it does. It’s like 100 degrees he can’t just sit in the semi Erik.”

“I know. The company is sending a mechanic and another truck, but it’s going to be a couple hours. I’m getting a new trailer delivered to the same rest stop and it will be there just about the same time you will.”

I had already taken the next exit and was turning around. “Dick has four horses on that rig.”

“That’s why you get to drive a brand new four horse gooseneck to LA and through LA traffic. Don’t say I don’t love you.” His voice sounded amused and I rolled my eyes.

“How did you even find a trailer in this amount of time?”

He sighed, “With a lot of phone calls, but it was this or having you have a coronary somewhere in the middle of California and I didn’t trust you not to try and load a racehorse into the bed of your truck to get him out of the heat.”

I wrinkled my nose not liking that I was so predictable. “I don’t like that the transport company wasn’t prepared for this. It’s so hot. Those poor horses.”

“Just get there and I trust you’ll get our horse and the other 3 down to LA safely. I gotta go.” He hung up with a click and Carlos and I were northbound again, thankfully we weren’t more than an hour in front of the transport truck because Carlos *had* to stop by Santa Nella and do the whole touristy thing. He wasn’t a fan of the Pea Soup.

When we arrived at the rest stop there was a flurry of activity around the transport truck. There was a mechanic working on the engine and he had arrived in a huge tow truck capable of towing the semi away. The air ride trailer had been unhooked and there was another pick up truck with a shiny new four horse gooseneck trying to back into a spot.

“Jesus, this is a circus.”

Carlos chuckled in the seat next to me, “Surprisingly, I don’t think my cousin had anything to do with this.”

I rolled my eyes. A 10 hour ride in a trailer was hard enough, but it was easier on the horses in spacious transports like this with air ride support. In a regular trailer without the fancy suspension in narrow divided stalls, it would take them all a bit longer to recover from the journey.

I parked my truck out of the way from all the commotion and sighed, “Ok, I’m going to talk to the trailer guy and get hooked up, can you organize the horses? Make sure they are all wrapped, let’s get some bedding in the new rig and then we’ll put the two fillies in first, Grinder, then the colt.”

Carlos wordlessly got out of the truck into the San Joaquin Valley heat. Dry brown grass and dirt stretched as far as the eye could see until it rose into dry brown foothills. There was a small grove of anemic trees by the rest stop, but that was it.

The new trailer was actually a head to head option. It was longer than a standard gooseneck, but there was a ramp that came out of the side, with two horses standing side to side at the back, and two more facing them. The area between could be used to haul a small 5th horse if necessary.

Erik had purchased the trailer in my name, which we were going to have words about later, but that was an argument for another time. I signed the necessary paperwork and opened all the roof vents and dropped all the windows making sure all the screens and bars over them were secure. There were small fans in all the corners to aid with air circulation and I turned them on. This was about as good as it was going to get without professional transport.

I wasn’t sure if it was the trailer company or EJ but there was a small wireless camera mounted in the trailer and with the download of an app, I could have a live video feed of the horses on my phone.

Within half an hour, my truck was hooked up to the new trailer and all the horses were loaded. Erik hadn’t pinched any pennies and my phone and Carlos’ phone were mounted side by side in the truck. One had a live feed of the horses from the camera and the other was monitoring the temperature inside the trailer. Outside it was over 100 degrees, but inside the trailer with the fans going it was merely a balmy 85 as we made our way back onto the interstate.

Grinder was an old hat at traveling and it seemed his nonchalance at the change in accommodations was good for the 3 much younger horses with him. The colt he was next to, was just two and starting his training, Dick was aiming for him to break his maiden down south and hopefully qualify for one of the juvenile Breeder’s Cup races. The two fillies were both 3, one having just broken her Maiden and the other had a handful of allowance races under her belt. They shifted nervously as we started our migration with the semi trucks to LA.

Carlos was busy texting with some of his contacts at Santa Anita. Since we were now the transport, we didn’t have the luxury of arriving before the horses to make sure their stalls were ready. Carlos seemed to have contacts everywhere and if he didn’t know someone personally he knew someone who did.

I called EJ, “hey we are on our way.” With a few presses of a finger I shared our gps coordinates and he was able to track our trip and ETA on his phone.

“I can see that and I got your text so I can see the horses too. Looks like they’re all taking this pretty well.”

I sighed and settled behind a big semi going 60mph, “Honestly, the young horses are doing great and I didn’t have any doubts about Grinder. We’re going to be a few hours later than planned though and I’m not going to hurry. If it looks like we are going to hit LA before rush hour, Carlos and I might stop before the Grapevine and let the horses stretch their legs and grab something to eat.”

“Sounds good, Dick is already at the track and making sure everything is set. I’m assuming you’re going to be there late making sure the horses recover?” There was amusement in his voice.

I made a face at the phone, “Well without the air ride this is going to be a bit harder on them so yeah I want to make sure they all get a liniment rub to help with any soreness or fatigue and some massage.”

He suddenly sounded a little tired, “I’ll meet you at the track, I don’t know if I will stay as late as you though. Call me if you need anything.” With that he ended the call and I frowned.

EJ wasn’t old by regular society standards but in hockey years he was approaching senior citizen status and that wasn’t celebrated by discounts at Denny’s but with nutritionists, personal trainers, chiropractors, massage therapists etc. He had mentioned once that every offseason he seemed to work harder to keep up with the rookies.

Luck seemed to be on our side as we pulled into the track as the sun was setting. It was the last time luck would be on our side that week.

****************

#erik johnson #erik johnson imagine #erik johnson fic #colorado avalanche #colorado avalanche imagine #colorado avalanche fic #avalanche fic #avalanche imagine #nhl fic #nhl imagine #hockey fic #hockey imagine

[dyke1]

i cannot find the post or if I imagined it but that that one tweet where one of the writers is like id like to think homophobia or the concept of the closet whatever doesn't exist in the future is so so strange when it comes to Bangalore's character cause she is portrayed as this person who (imo) represents a lot of the repressed nature found in a structural environments like the IMC and military in general who uphold homophobia, ableism etc..

the point im getting at is i feel the writers have gone out of their way to emphasize the expression of denial and alienation in Anita's character (not believing her brothers dead[note* this one was true but still its about conveying to the audience], liking loba, not wanting to admit the ICM’s crimes, and to some extent her friendship with wraith) as faults that developed because of personal resentment and fail to consider what that would mean for a lesbian coded character like Anita.

the reason i point this out is because a lot of that denial seems to bubble into internalized hatred for herself and hostility for people who share traits she has come to recognize as "unfavorable"

like in most obvious of ways her outright refusal to renounce the IMC which..

considering she grew up on a military operated planet she still holds like a lot of misogynistic attitudes especially towards women who express themselves in a feminine manner and like you could say it stemmed from her grievances with her brothers's gf but they are still specific to women..like she makes it clear that she is directing that weariness specifically to women . she hates men too because they are stupid and self-interested... but.... anyone can be stupid and act like that and ESPECIALLY in this character just makes her seem even more aligned with lesbianism actually... like even just her excessive use of the term ladies in squads full of men, “dont call me lady” etc..(btw like where do you think that was learned -_-) she has come to align feminine traits with weakness or a weapon to wield against authority in environments where that power is kinda expected to go to men. ASSUMING these structures are even just specific to Gridiron and not the Frontier as a whole its still funny that the writers were like homophobia is over :) but we still hate women who express themselves in this one specific way like ok lol

less obvious but even with wraith... the ableism there.. i just dont know why the writers would go down this path to show anita as like? this hateful person when Anita herself is NOT the most shining example of neurotypical behavior either..unless to continue the narrative of trying to distance herself from these traits.. but again they make her repeat those insults to a point it seems irredeemable which sucks cause i feel like people already find her unlikable and its continuing a narrative i find really gross.

anyways, ultimately it does result in a character that comes off with a ton of internalized lesbophobia in a universe where the concept doesn't...exist? like maybe if the loba/anita relationship where straight i could understand her not wanting to get attached to anyone, i could understand this coming off as her being a “private” person. WHICH. like she still can be... but even NOW with Valks introduction as woman who is unapologetically GAY ...its hard to not make the comparisons..like seriously..

theres a line im not sure theyll ever use for the halloween event or something but its directed towards anita and im not going to say what it is but like thinking abt it. HOW DO YOU EXPECT ME TO TAKE IT?

ofc this does seem like an issue of dissonance in writing with language/ perceived assumptions that dont translate well in contexts from modern life to the apex universe which i guess is also my fault so like sorry for existing in this day and age and being a lesbian but uhh ok im done whatever also i havent kept up with the lore so maybe im wrong idk

#apex legends #this was trimmed down a ton and also im probally the only one who cares but its just so weird???? like how else do you want me to take it?? #i dont want to even get into some other points about masculinity bc some people dont know how to act #anyways ultimately i hope valk and her become good friends Ok im done. #also didnt touch on the ptsd like maybe also i just am projecting too much also idk #long post

[lucindarobinsonvevo]

okay, i keep seeing you talk and post about it and i have to ask... what is eerie indiana and should i watch it? :))

what is Eerie, Indiana? Well. on a surface level Eerie Indiana is a family mystery show produced jointly by Hearst Entertainment and NBC in 1992. A show that the network was unable to properly advertise due to the 'tween' audience not yet being a thing it ended up being pit against 60 minutes (and in one case literally not even being aired at all so they could air the speech of a presidential hopeful /conspiracy theorist from jail, and another not being aired due to the network pulling it due to content, it was released by Fox in the 1998 reruns) essentially dooming it to fail. Despite this, NBC ordered a half season and a re-tooling of the show to introduce a more serialized set of storylines rather than episodic. Sadly, this wasn't enough to save the show and it was cancelled after one, single, glorious, practically perfect season in 1992, running for a mere 19 episodes.

Created by Jose Rivera and Karl Schafer (who most recently did Z Nation) the show is made up of immese talent at the very start of their career. I can't even tell you about the amount of talent on this oddball little show. Joe Dante (of Gremlins fame) directs and even acts in one episode. Bob Balaban directs some episodes, Claude Atkins plays a ghost cowboy, Anita Morris plays a sexy secret agent, Ray Walston plays an alien (i mean. duh.), René Auberjonois plays a literal devil business man named 'The Donald', Tobey Maguire (your beloved) plays a ghost who haunts Marshall and makes his family say slurs, Vincent Schiavelli plays an evil dentist, Future Scream Queen Danielle Harris plays a heart transplant recipient...The twist? The heart came from one of Marshall's best friends. and, best of all, John Astin (THEE JOHN ASTIN. GOMEZ ADDAMS) plays the mysterious owner/operator of The World 'O Stuff - the local hangout - for the final six episodes. Like the talent here is truly unreal. (did I mention John Astin?)

with a cast headed by Omri Katz (who you might know from Hocus Pocus) the plot of the show follows the adventures of Marshall Teller (Katz), his best friend/kid sidekick Simon Holmes (Justin Shenkarrow , you might know as the voice of Harold in Hey Arnold) and in the last six episodes, his homoerotic nemesis Dash X (Jason Marsden, you might know him from his many iconic voice roles - notably Max in a Goofy Movie, and also as Thackery Binx in Hocus Pocus) an alien with no memory of his past. On the surface, Eerie is a normal if slightly the Burbs esque small town, but once you look a little closer you start to see...Some cracks. A cult of housewives sealing themselves and their families in giant tupperware so they don't age. A Mayor who sends young men up to wolf mountain to ensure low taxes and they...Don't come back. A mysterious Loyal Order of Corn who...Run Things. Marshall and Simon investigate their strange hometown and are literally Just Trying to Get Through This Bestie. In one episode, Marshall goes where lost items go. In another, his friend Steve's retainer starts picking up the traitorous thoughts of the local dog population.

Eerie is a cult classic in basically every sense of the world. After you've seen it, you can see it's fingerprints all over the 'kids with bikes' genre. Stranger Things, Gravity Falls, Goosebumps (the show) all of them owe a massive debt to Eerie Indiana. The show itself is massively intertextual. It references everything from little shop of horrors, to the Howling, to the Twilight Zone to the Fly. But you don't need to have that knowledge to enjoy it, Eerie is a family show. By that I mean it was created for viewing by the whole family, not specifically teens or adults only. If you like Round the Twist (predates Eerie by 4 years), than you'll like Eerie.

in 1998 there was a controversial reboot made in Canada staring Bill Switzler and Daniel Clark. It too only lasted a season. I love TOD but many hate it. Lastly, should you watch it? YES! I recommend Eerie to everyone I know basically. It is a little dated in parts, and some of the themes are really heavy (Child abuse and neglect are very present, long running themes in many episodes - I actually agree that Broken Record should have been pulled from airing because i find the ending very upsetting) Marshall, our protagonist is a very sweet, empathetic teenage boy character who I NEVER saw on television when I was growing up in the era of the Dan Schnider mean spirited sitcom. He's sort of an asshole sometimes but hey - he's a teenager. Simon is just adorable and literally deserves the whole world. Dash X is very cool, mysterious, gay and totally unhinged. Every character on this show is written fantastically, there are no half hearted performances, everyone is selling it the entire time. I'm very fussy about television, but Eerie is a show that I think is genuinely nearly perfect. I almost am glad it was cancelled so no one had a chance to ruin it lol.

If you're interested (and I hope I've sold you) then you can buy it on youtube, basically. It was previously on Amazon Prime but isn't anymore sadly. You can pay through the nose for an expensive DVD set like I did or.....You can do the smart thing, google it and watch on like. Kisscartoon lmao. Eerie is a show I am so so passionate about so if you're interested PLEASE watch it and feel free to join in discussion here on the hellsite, or you can go to Dreamwidth (@froodlemonkey/@catschimericalcreations runs this and has a MASSIVE back catalogue of fics, art, meta, random twitter posts, scripts, even the first Eerie Fanfiction...which was published in a ZINE in the 90s! seriously if someone has ever said anything about eerie ever than Cat has catalogued it with her extensive, fantastical tagging system) or even discord but like yeah. Eerie is amazing and you should like totally watch it :)

#sonyarebecchi #eerie indiana #eeriepost #mitzianswers #longpost/

[brydeswhale]

The thing about sterek is that even tho, as I said, the show ITSELF didn’t lean on the ship, enough ppl inside and outside of fandom did use it for attention that the perception of teen wolf often was sterek.

From the idea of sterek as an actual ship on the show(more than one person in my circle expressed surprise when they started watching at how LITTLE Stiles and Derek actually interacted) to the idea that sterek would be canon if only Davis and co would stop being so cowardly.

(Denial runs deep in these ppl bc even in the godless tens and on cable, no one was going to actually make a pairing between an obnoxious teen and the man who, I will repeat this, assaulted him on more than one occasion, canon. It was never going to happen.)

It took Tyler Hoechlin leaving the show IIRC for the sterek fervour to die down.

And even then, the sterek contingency just shoved the supposed chemistry onto other white characters in Stiles’ vicinity, eg Peter(yikes), the villain of the month, or Lydia(I mean, at least they’re the same age, even if Stiles repeatedly fuckzoned her.).

Which honestly just proved what a lot of non/anti-sterek ppl had already been saying, which was that it wasn’t really about sterek. In fact it wasn’t even about Derek.

(Which had already BEEN evidenced by how sterek and stiles fans had taken Derek’s character development(he became less of an asshole) and canon love interests. They were particularly vitriolic towards Braeden, his second love interest, who happened to also be Black. Predictably.)

It was about what Stiles represented. The white lead they never got.

You might hear that TW was an ensemble show, or that it had an “unreliable narrator”(this was from one of the most racist anti-Scott ppl in fandom), but the reality was that the titular Teen Wolf of the show, Scott McCall, was the lead.

And the majority of the Stiles’ fandom couldn’t and can’t STAND this.

They absolutely writhed in agonies of racism over it, and spread their misery everywhere they could.

From harassment over anon, to fic after fic bashing Scott, to poorly researched, bad faith meta, gifs, and fan art, a highly vocal section of fandom(still active to this day) set out to do battle against the very show it claimed to be a fan of.

And this harassment didn’t stop at other fans. The actors were also targeted, to the point where Crystal Reed cited her treatment by fans as part of her incentive to exit the show.

Tyler Posey, who played Scott, was done much worse, as continues to this day. This has included ppl accusing him, a queer dude, of queer baiting, and someone who basically urged him to commit suicide when he opened up about his mental health issues post his mom’s death.

Of course, you’ll see many sterek/stiles’ fans talking about how these egregious occurrences are the work of a few “bad apples”, and “real” fans don’t do that.

Which would be easier to believe if they actually spoke out against these actions, against the racist tropes so often used in their fic and art, if they pointed out how the supposed “meta” produced by their number contains both bad takes and outright falsehoods, but, well.

They don’t.

In fact, they usually go out of their way to DENY that these ppl even exist. They say that Scott and Tyler Posey fans are the ones committing the harassment, that the call is coming from inside the house, and then they actually straight up lie about the rest of fandom.

So honestly, if any of them did speak up, we all know that the rest of them would turn on that person like the pack of starving hamsters they are.

Basically, sterek and stiles fans were not fans of the show. They were Ppl who put their fetishistic adoration of white male centred slash above the actual media they were supposedly consuming. I’m not saying that Teen Wolf was perfect. It sure as hell wasn’t. I’ve commented before on the bigoted tropes the show used and the cultural appropriation that basically made NO SENSE.

But at its heart, as explored thru Scott, it was a show about essentially rejecting the toxic masculinity pervasive in the urban fantasy/horror genre it took its inspiration from. Scott grows over the course of the show from a frightened teenager to a courageous leader, from someone willing to kill if that’s what it takes, to someone who kills as a last resort only, who relies on intelligence and diplomacy to get the job done.

He becomes someone who rejects the violence in the world he’s brutally forced to enter in favour of kindness and hope, even when things seem at their worst. A strong Latino(and yes, despite sterek denials, Scott is Latino) lead embodying the best his world had to offer, a new way forward that even the old guard and his worst enemies admired.

But when there are two white guys who exist within the same square mile on a tv show, who cares about that, amiright?

Bonus

https://twitter.com/cetotherium/status/1418570345007755267?s=21

And that was a big draw for a lot of ppl. When most urban fantasy was about EMBRACING toxic masculinity, Teen Wolf asked the Uber macho, might makes right, violently abusive Hunter/supernatural communities, “What the heck, man, are you alright?”

And Sterek fans HATED that, 😂. Their idea of a good urban fantasy horror show is one where the vicious but oh so cute white protagonist is over powered by the commanding, controlling, abusive alpha werewolf.

It would not surprise me at all if most of them were Anita Blake fans. Between the racism and the outright rejection of the core message of the show, they seem to have been saturated in LKH’s weird, bigoted nonsense.

#teen wolf fandom problems #anti stiles stans #anti stiles stilinski #did you even watch the show?

[withoutawar]

17) for sender to playfully bite the air at receiver. 

There are some press conferences where Steve is rearing to go, bursting at the seams with what he wants to say --- usually not what the organisers of the conference want to hear but that's the risk of giving Steve Rogers a platform and mic. Other times, he's on damage control --- making up for what the cameras have picked up the Avengers and other associated supers doing. Tony handles the compensation, Steve saves their public image.

While he hates doing it, he's learnt how important public portrayal is, so every now and again, he shines his shoes, slicks his hair back, and smiles into the camera and convinces the world that no, Tony Stark did not deploy half a dozen Iron Man suits to attack lower Manhattan; they were in fact Doom-bots created in the red and gold image, and no, the Winter Soldier and Falcon did not take out an entire level's worth of government personnel; they were already down when they got there and they were the ones who called first responders.

Steve can think of a dozen better ways to be spending his Saturday morning. They mainly revolve around Anita who he'd had to extract himself from in order to arrive at the conference on time. ( He hadn't. ) But at least she'd joined him, so they could make a quick getaway when it was over. It was an excuse to get out of the apartment and do something date-y --- they both tended to be more than happy to stay in but since they were jumping relationship labels, Steve figured they should be doing things to reflect that. But what does he really know? He's taking advice from the one or two romance novels he's read in his day, and deducting the hints behind Natasha's teasing which has become abundant ever since she found out about him and Anita.

' . . . guarantee that the fight witnessed on Fifth Avenue was instigated by a powerful Asgardian sorceress and there is currently no internal conflict within the Avengers team. Next question ? '

He scans the crowd, over the mics being pointed in his direction for a friendly enough looking face to pluck his next question from. That's when he spots Anita, a little removed from the crowd, leaning against a post, looking amused by the whole thing. She would have appeared dark and mysterious to anyone watching; to Steve, she's a reminder that he needs to wrap this up as quickly as possible. He smiles as their eyes lock, distracted, and reddens slightly when she snaps her teeth playfully at him. Playful, but still primal and alluring and enough incentive for Steve to cut this interview short.

' No further questions ? Okay, great. Thanks for your time everyone. Stay safe out there. ' He hops off the slightly raised platform and escapes the gaggle of reporters heading his way to get their one-on-one questions in, and makes a bee-line for Anita. Her face has propped up in the news a few times recently, a by-product of being around Captain America so much, though Steve tries to shield her from it as much as possible. He's unsure how much they know about his and Anita's relationship --- hopefully not a lot, considering he was just figuring it out himself. ' What was that ? ' he murmurs, as he reaches her, sweeping her away from the post with an arm around her shoulders, heading straight for his bike parked at the back entrance. See ? He'd planned for a quick getaway. @executiioner.

#executiioner #* replies. #interactions * executiioner.

[obsessivelollipoplalala]

Hi, lonelyasawhisper here. OP and I talked a bit about fans projecting onto the band and I can assure people that she’s not specifically targeting Roger or saying that Roger fans are “deluded for admiring him” or that it’s exclusively Roger fans that are “at fault”. Some Roger fans projecting their modern politics onto Roger is just one example, a symptom of a bigger problem.

We’ve both agreed that it’s a phenomenon in the Queen fandom that some people tend to project their own beliefs, politics and trauma onto all four of the boys, and we don’t think that’s very honest or fair. Apart from Roger, some fans project their own personal traumas and issues onto Freddie and insist to others that their perception of Freddie is the absolute, most correct representation of Freddie, and anyone who says otherwise is intentionally disrespecting him or erasing his traumas. OP has talked about people projecting their politics onto Freddie as well, although we don’t really have much information on Freddie’s political leanings, other than that he’s quite apolitical, never voted but would’ve voted Conservative if he had, according to Phoebe.

Other fans project their politics onto John in a similar way, and also their own struggles with depression, social anxiety etc., often diagnosing him with all kinds of mental illnesses that in my knowledge have never been confirmed, and then accuse others of again, erasing John’s mental issues for saying otherwise or questioning their statements. John’s lack of public statements and involvement in post-Freddie Queen projects is also often weaponised against Brian and Roger and used to moralise about their handling of Queen and Freddie’s legacy, although it’s been said that John approves of their projects.

Brian is harder to project onto, bc he’s been more open with his own personal beliefs and struggles with mental health etc. over the years. But some fans also project their own issues/experiences with infidelity onto Brian, bc of how honest and candid he has been about this topic and the problems in his love life over the years. And this could lead to some.. less than ideal behaviour that also has a lot to do with misogyny, like calling Anita a “home wrecker” and leaving snide, hateful comments about her under photos of her and Brian but saying nothing about Brian’s own involvement in their affair, or villainizing and spreading lies about Chrissy saying she tried to guilt him for being in Queen and tried to make him leave the band, just to justify him being unfaithful. Some people really would rather completely absolve him from his guilt and wrongdoings and shift the blame entirely onto the women in his life. Like the other anon said, some fans also tried to shut down any critical discussion of Brian’s more controversial comments in recent years. Some said no one should dare contradict him or challenge his words, and how anyone who does so is a fake fan who has no place in this fandom. This is going into a separate territory of unhealthy “stan” behaviour, but it also has to do with people trying to excuse all his actions and being unwilling to deal with the reality that he’s not exempt from criticism and is capable of spewing harmful rhetoric. These are just a few examples I can think of right now but none of these are isolated incidents.

I don’t wish to be a gatekeeper or to condemn people for their ways of connecting with Queen and being a Queen fan, or to lecture or condescend to anyone. We both understand that people want to relate to their faves, and it’s easier to pretend the band consists of perfectly good people that are like ourselves, than to confront the possibility that they are likely very different from us, since they are four individuals that were born in the late 40s/early 50s, and that they are likely to have different beliefs that we might disagree with. But we feel it’s dishonest and unfair to insist any of the boys are these perfect versions of good model citizens who have done no wrong or just people that we *want* them to be, just bc they are our “faves”.

This message is just me wanting to clarify a few things, it’s nothing personal and it’s just an opinion of ours based on our observation of the Queen fandom, which consists of millions of people around the world. The fans who I encounter and interact with in my tiny corner of the Internet, including Roger fans, are really really amazing people. Also, most of the things I mentioned above are really more about fans that operate on other platforms, like Quora, Youtube, Instagram etc. anyways. I’m not saying that our POV is 100% correct and we are right about everything, but it's what we've observed and this is the conclusion that we've drawn so far. Sorry about this extremely long message lol. Anyways, peace :)

Aww you didn't have to send this long message @lonelyasawhisper, but thanks for attesting to the fact that I'm not the only one who feels this way, and for bringing up other problems with stan behavior in the fandom which I've discussed on my blog and in private with you and other users. I'm not sure I have much to add since you said it all, and I agree these are all different examples of how stans of the other band members can be annoying or dishonest in their portrayals of their faves. I will emphasize your last point that these are things I/we have seen on other social media platforms, as well. I do see things which are said on other websites (or friends send these things to me to vent lol), so 99% of what I say regarding fandom behavior isn't exclusive to the tumblr fandom at all.

#long post #replies