Im super proud of 4chan.
- Thread starter rbstewart7263
- Start date
I love the way that some criticism of Vivian James is that she "was made out of spite".
Well so what? Most things are. At risk of sounding like a pretentious tosser and quoting some long-dead essayist "Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal"
Hatred and spite have done a lot more for the world that we'd like to admit, and I think a lot of the hullabaloo of this character is "urgh, damn 4chan again"
Well so what? Most things are. At risk of sounding like a pretentious tosser and quoting some long-dead essayist "Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal"
Hatred and spite have done a lot more for the world that we'd like to admit, and I think a lot of the hullabaloo of this character is "urgh, damn 4chan again"
Everyone already said this I believe, but let me say it also. 4chan, even /pol/ and /v/ don't have any leadership or united voice or whatever else similar. 4chan is almost total freedom. It's embodiment of "freedom to say anything and suffer the consequences of it". They are anonymous, unfiltered and actually don't care about who or what you are. Stating your gender often is looked upon as "pulling the gender card" and treated harshly, especially if you are women since expectation is that around women one should speak more meekly. And 4chan boards are exactly opposite of speaking meekly.renegade7 said:
I'm gonna try and sum all this up as succinctly as I can so as not to balloon this thread, if you want more details on any of this, feel free to PM me and I can try to go into more detail.Verlander said:
1) Basically, Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend published a blog that outed her as an abusive girlfriend and had proof that she cheated on him with members of the game industry and the gaming press. This sparked some controversy, as Nathan Grayson, a journalist writing for Kotaku and RPS, was named and he had written a couple articles spotlighting her game, Depression Quest. People blew this way out of proportion and became convinced Quinn was trading sexual favors for coverage of her game. There's zero evidence of that and it almost certainly didn't happen, but that won't stop the internet.
The more interesting part is the other stuff that the allegations and the investigations into them revealed, namely that there's a worrying closeness between gaming journalism and the devs they cover and there are frequent undisclosed conflicts of interest behind the scenes of many articles that were published. The recent furor is mostly about that topic and journalistic integrity, with a small but extremely vocal subset on both sides repeatedly trying to drag it back onto the sex and feminism topics that everyone with sense has long since abandoned.
2) "Social Justice Warrior" is a pejorative that has come to refer to people radically/fanatically devoted to social change. It's an insult for people who push for whatever their particular social agenda is rabidly, typically to the point of lashing out at and blatantly insulting anyone who disagrees with them. You can see the kind of behavior it's meant to encapsulate by watching the twitter feeds of the more rabid defenders of Anita Sarkeesian and the like.
3) Vivian James is a character created by the 4chan image board /v/ in order to fill a role in the Fine Young Capitalists' game design competition. After TFYC original run got shut down by Zoe Quinn, they tried again and the internet found out about it. A handful of message boards, /v/, /pol/ and tumblr primarily, got together and decided they wanted to back the campaign and make it happen, if only to prove that they weren't the "Citadel of Misogyny" that they'd been called. Vivian James came out of a desire to make a character for whatever game won the competition, and because of the perceived expectations that she'd be some kind of creepy sextoy or whatever, they made her into a normal girl who likes video games.
4) Persecution mostly. Zoe Quinn got outraged by the idea for whatever reason and whipped up her twitter army to shut down TFYC's original campaign a few months ago. They tried to take it to the press, but the three major outlets they contacted all said something along the lines of "Zoe Quinn said you're sexist or transphobic or something, so we're not gonna run any stories for you". With the recent scandals come to light, TFYC came out and people latched on to them as a means of spiting Zoe Quinn while still supporting a good cause.
It's all a big case of the internet trying to glamorize the perceived victim.
5) 4chan's /v/ and /pol/ were the driving forces behind the positive response to TFYC's renewed campaign. That's about it really.
I'm not gonna comment either way about the rest of your points, as I really don't feel like debating all that, but I do feel the need to point out that the furor very much was the same with Jack Thompson at the very least. I'm reasonably confident it was for Leland Yee too, but I don't have any solid proof of that within easy reach. There was less direct media coverage for it, for what I'd hope is obvious reasons, but Thompson got the exact same kind of abuse Sarkeesian gets. Hell, you can swap the gender pronouns around and get almost the exact same thing as the bile spewed by the people attacking the other.renegade7 said:
See: http://nastythingssaidabout.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/the-terrible-misogyny-in-the-games-industry/
You are 100% correct that it shouldn't happen, and no one should be subject to abuse, regardless of their views, on anything. I'm just trying to point out that your claim that the abuse is reserved solely for the woman is not true.
You are saying we cannot have a proper discussion because there is always one guy who jumps in saying something about sexism and gamers. Well, are gamers sexist or not? Are there are gamers who are sexist? Hows is the supposed sexism of gamers at large not relevant to the conversation of misogyny, sexism, and gender representation?GabeZhul said:
How is making fun of misogynists a bad thing in the first place? Misogyny is a bad thing if I recall.
point is: You are painting a false picture of what is actually going on. Its already been established that gamers are whiny misogynistic manchildren in the popular consciousness. "How do we fix that?" should be the discussion and the question. Yet I keep seeing users like you saying something like "Oh its just them MAKING it an issue". That seems incredibly disingenuous to me. It wouldn't be an issue in the first place if it wasn't so easily lampooned or MADE to be an issue by the people BEING misogynist in the first place.
Thats another thing too, Gamers have been lampooned as creepy dorks for YEARS! And it still holds up in a lot of ways and they don't seem to wanna change. So of COURSE people are going to make fun of gamers like that. ITS heavily established that there seems to be a large contingent of gamers who are happy being very shitty people for whatever reason.
We can't have 'that discussion' because gamers are incapable of critical self-examination. They retreat into the safety of their communities as soon as someone says anything remotely along the lines of critical insight or critique. The very fact Anita Sarkessian has provoked such outrage by not even TRYING to has easily shows everyone that there is something fucked up going on. Thats just IT though, how the fuck are we suppose to have a critical discussion when conversing among like minds will offer nothing new to the conversation?! The words of outsiders must be always be taken into consideration as they do not have the myopic view, they can see the big picture of the teeming hoard, they can offer new insight!
You had me until you mentioned Dragon's Crown. There's nothing in the game - and especially the artist's reaction - to indicate the art style was any sort of parody.scotth266 said:
That's.... wow, what the fuckness?carnex said:To explain 4chan a bit to people. 4chan is plenty of boards, each with their own population which fight, constantly, with each other and within themselves. It's almost total freedom with all the conseqences. That said
You two are talking past each other.Quadocky said:
Quadocky, you're missing the point that GabeZhul is trying to make. Which is that whenever people try to rationally discuss anything involving the topics you bring up, such as asking for clarifications or pointing out errors in one of Sarkeesian's videos, at least one person jumps into the conversation and starts screaming that they're a misogynist for not immediately falling into step. At that point, the original person feels offended and insulted for being called a bigot because they're not willing to take things at face value, their hackles come up, and any chance of rational or reasonable discussion goes out the window.
I don't really agree with that point, because in my experience it's less someone screaming about misogyny and more someone screaming about whatever topic is most useful to silence a discussion they don't like, but that's the point he's making. You're not really addressing it at all by going on a rant about how everyone is incapable of self-evaluation or self-awareness.
The only people I knew in real life who admitted to using 4chan were women actually.carnex said:To explain 4chan a bit to people. 4chan is plenty of boards, each with their own population which fight, constantly, with each other and within themselves. It's almost total freedom with all the conseqences. That said
One was a random 'troller' person. The other was a legit dork person.
It makes sense to me. 4chan is like an artist colony. A lot of women tend to be artists. You see similar stats with Somethingawful.com which is like 4chan's super rich stepdad.spoonybard.hahs said:That's.... wow, what the fuckness?carnex said:To explain 4chan a bit to people. 4chan is plenty of boards, each with their own population which fight, constantly, with each other and within themselves. It's almost total freedom with all the conseqences. That said
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/jezebel.com
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com
The stats themselves though have little meaning in regard to the issue of misogyny.
I sort of got ninja'd on this response, but:spoonybard.hahs said:
The artist's reaction was incredibly childish (and he deserved to apologize for it) but the art style itself is obviously parody. The characters are by-and-large design extremes: the sorceress has enormous boobs, but the amazon, fighter and dwarf are possess absurd levels of muscles, enormous pauldrons, etc. The only two normally-proportioned characters are the elf and wizard (the elf in fact suggests that the artist was more than capable of making ordinary-looking female characters, and exaggerated the sorceress on purpose.)
However, people focused only on the sorceresses' boobs, because they weren't interested in arguing the merits of the art, but the intents of the artist. There was room in the furor surrounding Dragon's Crown to have a sensible discussion about whether the Sorceress' proportions constituted parody or pandering disguised as parody, but nobody was interested in that: it was just a lot of "ooga booga this guy sucks, game art is overly sexist, etc."
It's not entirely on topic but 4chan has loads of utterly benign projects under its' belt. The best for it is /tg/ on the whole, who basically spend their time writing stories, drawing pictures and making up new RPG supplements.Caramel Frappe said:
4chan are the group that invented Paedo Bear, am i correct? Look we all hate KKK, but when the KKK stood up against Westboro protesting Sandy Hook - they looked like the good guys (though they are still racist arseholes). 4Chan do what they want when they want - they do it for fun and can just as easily go against it next week.
As for Quinn. She fucked some people and cheated on her boyfriend. Really dont give a shit. Or is the issue that they were video game journalists thats the issue?
As for Quinn. She fucked some people and cheated on her boyfriend. Really dont give a shit. Or is the issue that they were video game journalists thats the issue?