I still think Anita is not a gamer, not interested in gaming, and conned 7000 people out of a combined total of thousands of dollars.
the woman's only 'expertise' on video game culture, gaming, or game issues is her opener for her TEDxWomen, "I am a pop culture critic. I am a feminist and I am a woman, and I am all of these things on the internet." That's all the criteria we've got from her about her to make her the expert. her older work, such as The Smurfette Principle (2011), are topics that were addressed by Lindsey at TGWTG over a year prior (2010). She acknowledged that she pirates movies by stating she "Doesn't want porn with her file sharing."
So my first point, agreeing with the title of this article, is that Anita is a media trained and internet savvy person. This is dangerous. Medical staff are media trained so as to not give the media a sound byte that causes panic. Mix this with high level technical knowledge on how to use the internet, and you've got the easy recipe for getting the internet to bend to your whims and desires.
She is obviously media trained, meaning she KNOWS that everything on camera is controlled. Not only that, but her ratings and comments are controlled on her channel. You can NOT post an idea on her channel without her approval. She controls her own language, and you find she is obsessed with misogyny, victimhood, and brutality on women. she will misuse these words and only show examples that say women are useless. But the important part in her series is her way of dress. Look back to her earlier work. Her look was undefined. We sometimes saw her play the exact cards she claims are evil, showing more chest or changing a camera angle in order to get more male viewers. Her NEW look for the TvW series is a news anchor. Huge ass earrings, pulled back and tied up hair, sharp eyebrows and make-up and lipstick. Then....there is the shirt. IT doesn't match. She's trying to look like an arcade dweller from the late 1980s. She is cosplaying for her series.
She sells the series as being 'one of us'. But she isn't. She isn't holding the joystick on the arcade right. She isn't using the Xbox 360 controller right. hell, in her promo, the controller isn't fucking ON. But that's minor compared to what I see as the big tell for not being a gamer. There is a promo picture of Anita sitting next to a stack of games. 4 columns and apparently 2 stacks deep. there are roughly 150 games there. Some of these games don't have women IN THEM. Some of them don't have stories to tell. Some games don't actually have characters IN THEM. Assuming a 10 hour average game, she would need to play for 62.5 DAYS straight to get through that stack.
Then there is is the tone of the series. She is not doing TvW to make gaming culture or game developers make better women characters. That actually is AGAINST her interests. She just wants t preach at us and have her get more money from us. She has not offered any SOLUTIONS to the problems. She simply says 'Hey, look. A problem. Give me money and I'll talk about how that is a problem and remind you about the problem.' She is not the one to talk about these issues in the first place, but if you are going to spend thousands of US dollars on a video series, you had BEST provide solutions. They don't have to actually work, but they have to be SOMETHING. Extra Credits did one six minute video on this topic once before she even was in the spotlight. They gave a couple possible solutions and did not charge thousands to do this.
I'm not sure that Anita isn't actually a large scale plagiarist, because she wrote her master's Thesis, I'll Make A Man Out of You: Strong Women in Science Fiction in 2010. The Nostalgia Chick on TGWTG covered this (and I think better) in 2009.
Remember up where I said she was internet savvy? That shows up here. I see zero reason to think she doesn't know how 4chan works. I think she or one of her fans actually posted the link to her kickstarter youtube ad on 4chan telling Anon to troll and belittle her. Her kickstarter skyrockets in popularity, and that is why we are talking about it. This video is the only video with comments enabled. Why? I think she was farming for comments to put up and say 'Look! Game culture is misogynist! I'm being abused and threatened online!' Another reason I think this is that in an earlier video of hers, she says she moderates her comments. It is VERY out of character to allow a video to be unmoderated.
As I have said before. She is not a gamer. She offers no solutions to make gaming a better place for women. She isn't addressing points which haven't been discussed in our academics already. The problems she shows are well known. However, she did make over 100000 bucks on the project. She did VERY WELL. Unlike Extra Credits, Moviebob, Jim Sterling, Angry Joe, or anyone else who talks about game culture, she isn't 'one of us'. She is a media trained leech on gaming and I think she is a danger to gaming.
I didn't do all of this research myself. It already had been compiled and addressed before I knew about it. Others have probably linked to every instance I did already in this thread, but my source comes from the following youtube video. The trail he shows checked out as far as i could follow it. http://youtu.be/8bLpUcd8-cI
], and even still you'd be stretching. And if 3 out of 52 don't emcompass the problem you're talking about, Disney's doing purdy good dontcha think?
