It's also not an inherently sexist thing. Heck, the tropes page brings up a bunch of examples using male characters. It's not about hurting or throwing away women, it's about hurting the main character through the people he treasures most, and that usually involves a girlfriend or spouse.erttheking said:I'm not talking about her, I don't care for her, but women in refrigerators is a thing, a well documented thing.webkilla said:Friend, it has something to do with context and how you frame an issueerttheking said:She's talking about the writing in the game. The problem is not that saving people is a bad thing, it's that it's lazy writing. I heard a quote a long time ago that easily describes the problem with this. "When you want to make a woman tragic, you hurt her. When you want to make a man tragic, you hurt a woman." It's a major trend in writing to have a woman character that only exists to get killed or kidnapped to make a man sad. She isn't the one who came up with the term Women in Refrigerators.webkilla said:She tried to 'force' change by positioning herself as a moral arbiter - as a judge of what is good enough, and what not good enough. Well, she tried.
As for why her videos are bad? My favorite example is her "women in the fridge" video, where she talks about games using plot devices consisting of women getting hurt or killed, as motivations for the player character to get mad/get even/go on a quest of vengeance as a bad thing.
The trick is that she just says that's a bad thing. At no point does she stop and go "You know, wanting to save and help other people is a basic human drive - that its mainly men saving women is a bit one-sided, but ultimately wanting to help other people isn't a bad thing" - no, in her videos it is 100% a bad thing, with nothing good in it. Thats part of why her videos are so bad.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StuffedIntoTheFridge
I won't deny that the editing in her videos was sleazy, the Hitman example was a good one, but she also had a list of games where you can kill prostitutes and on it was Metro Last Light...yeah...you can't do that in Metro Last Light. But the problem is that Women in Refrigerators is a long standing problem. I don't see how her not saying "Well it's human to want to save people," has anything to do with it.
As you note yourself, she likes to frame things that aren't entirely true as fact - and indeed, most of the videos with her are just her opinions on things when you get down to it.
She thinks that games with women being the thing that a male player character have to save/avenge/whatnot is a bad thing.
She has NEVER given any kind of actual evidence to this, other than appeals to emotions. Oh she'll say that influences culture and society... but she has never given any solid proof of this.
Conversely, back in 2015 there was this lovely study that got published: A 3 year long study looking to see if playing video games made you sexist. It found that you did not become so via video games. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25844719
That's another thing about Sarkeesian's vids: They're one-sided. In her videos it is assumed from the getgo that her premise is correct. She never tries herself to demonstrate anything that might prove her wrong, indeed that deceptive video editing and whatnot is a good example of that. If they're supposed to be 'documentaries' then they MUST look at both sides of the argument.
Hell, in one of her earlier vids she straight up said, while talking about the Mario games, that she completely ignores all the non-platformer games like Smash Bros, Mario Kart and whatnot, so she can maintain a fiction that in 'all' Mario games Princess Peach is but a helpless damsel. This is so disingenuous, because if you look at sales stats for mario games, then party games like Mario Kart and Smash Bros make up a huge part of the mario games being sold today - and in those games Peach can kick just as much butt as everyone else.
But we can't mention that... nope, not at all.
When it comes to science, a very important element is fallibility. Your theory must have room for it to be wrong - a theory that cannot be proven wrong is not scientific. Gravity can proven through experiments. Theorems on how to measure the tensile strength of metals can be proven via experiments.
You must always include mention of the things that prove you wrong. Cherry picking your samples is a great way to be branded a liar and a fraud. Sarkeesian, is a fraud.
For crying out loud, the trope name doesn't even mention women anymore!