man, no one got this.

I liked your joke, misterbuns.

Yeah. This is the first time I've been happy to see comments disabled.

I kinda love how, in the effort to portray this woman as some sort of horrible, professional-victim, uber-anti-man-feminazi, the gross internet community that tried to beat her into submission about how THERE IS NO PROBLEM WITH SEXISM IN VIDEO GAMES basically just proved her entire point and made into far more of an icon for a cause than she would have been if they had just kept their neckbeardy, Cheetos stained mouths shut in the first place.

The Amazing Atheist is whining about it. Video in the hopper.

I'm not going to watch this right now, because I don't like video games, but five stars for disabling the comments. Disabling comments shows integrity. It means she's not trying to exploit the controversy (unlike the Amazing Assclown) and that she really cares about these ideas. There's no fucking way youtube clown car comments are going to add anything worthwhile to this debate, but allmost no one does disables because faggots getting into a faggoty flame war is a great revenue builder. Isn't it, TJ?

Is there a way to disable comments here too? Fucking christ.

OH NO, NOONE CARES ABOUT MY WHITE MALE POWER FANTASY REQUIREMENTS LIKE THEY USED TO!

To steal from Brad Neely, "I was once like you, then I grew a brain, a heart, and a dick."

That money was well spent. This video was quality, I'll be looking forward to the others along with CN's predictably buttpained one-starring.

You disappoint me, uncle Caminate.

Well, now you know how I feel about all of you every second of my life.

Miyamoto is an unimaginative storyteller. It's a very long leap of faith to claim he's sexist.

And yeah, the hubbub is she's giving people like you the idea that Miyamoto is sexist simply because he's aping the same monomyth that countless works of popular media have used without complaint.

I mean, god, that Django Unchained movie where the guy is trying to save his wife? What a sexist piece of trash.

he's a japanese man in his sixties. its a leap of faith to think he is not sexist.

Wall-E is nothing more than sexist trash. Same for Star Wars: A New Hope.

Miyamoto doesn't really see himself as a storyteller. He's a designer, primarily of environments and levels, then of characters. He's on record as saying he doesn't really care about plotlines in video games. He's not opposed to them, but they're not what his games are about.

Which means he's perfectly fine repeating the same plot in Mario and Zelda forever and ever.

I don't know if he's sexist as much as he might just be looking for the quickest possible excuse to motivate the good guy to go do stuff. Could be either, could be both.

Alright, I'll give you that, very unimaginative. But I want you to consider JUST what he did to Dinosaur Planet. Now, I know she's only telling us half the story, and the other main character RARE had planned for the game was a male of the same species as Crystal. Not making it the unabashed female empowerment tool that she is making it out to be, But when Miyamoto came in and suggested "This should be the next Star Fox game." and then made it so, it makes me think that the dude is just stealing a game out from under someone else, which makes him an asshole first and foremost.

Regarding sexism? I only called him "A bit of a sexist." in the way that he operated. He took something of merit in writing with a female protagonist and tore it apart to suit his ambitions, removing her as a main character and making her a romance/sex object. Turning her just into a plot device for the male lead to love/fight for. Even giving her weapon to him to use, because he'll use it better because he's a man, amirite?

It's fine if you ape classical literature, but have alittle creativity, for fucks sake.

We have absolutely no evidence of Miyamoto making any meaningful contribution to Dinosaur Planet's plot, other than a single interview quote where he mentioned "this would probably make a good StarFox game." If someone from Rare comes forward and says "Miyamoto made us make Krystal into a minor character" fine, but until then stop making baseless accusations regarding one of gaming's most groundbreaking creators.

I'm really sorry your personal hero used simple sexist tropes to make some great games.

Are you going to be okay?

Miyamoto is far from my personal hero. I just don't like seeing a man's legacy rewritten to fit an agenda.

Well, let's be honest. The original Dinosaur Planet looked pretty boring.

It certainly wasn't improved by the Star Fox makeover, but I suspect that nothing of value was lost.

The entire medium is held back when we recklessly brand some of its most important works as morally lacking, especially on the basis of the one dimensional cartoon plots which barely factor into the totality of the work.

What is being rewritten? His secret history of releasing games with themes and characters that ran a rebours to the status quo? Nothing is being rewritten. Video games are sexist like pretty much all media.

Why is this a surprise to you.

If you think Super Mario Bros is anything close to the "adolescent male power fantasy" Sakeesian describes, I wonder how you're able to enjoy any media.

Because when I played Super Mario Bros., it was mostly about jumping on bad guys and shit, not demeaning women.

In this thread alone you've put alot of words into other people's mouths and reframed their arguments to fit your fantasy that this woman is 'recklessly' 'branding' 'the whole medium' as 'sexist trash'

what you don't seem to be able to do is imagine what it would be like to be a little girl who wants to play video games, and is constantly, thoroughly told by those games that women are helpless sex objects.

you don't see anything worth talking about here?

really?

In what era? Because we've pretty much gotten away from that sort of thing as an industry. I can't think of the last game to feature women as nothing more than helpless sex objects.

"Sexism doesn't exist because I am not offended by it."

In fact, a large portion of the games I've recently played have had very strong female leads. Getting bogged down in the myth that Mario needs a female protagonist in order to not be sexist is a huge step in the wrong direction. Mario can continue being Mario, without preventing us from making other games starring women.

Or hell, make Peach playable. Again, the Mario games don't have plots anyway, so it's not like it'll be progressive in any meaningful way.

Sexism exists. It does not exist in either Mario or Zelda, despite Sarkeesian's claims.

Be honest. How many pictures of your dick did you send to this woman.

A HUNDRED

attn: endlesschris

"Remember that it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it’s more problematic or pernicious aspects."

"Remember that it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it’s more problematic or pernicious aspects."

"Remember that it is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of it’s more problematic or pernicious aspects."

ad infuckingfinitum, you dorklord.

Again, tell me how Mario / Zelda is demeaning towards women (see: sexist), without referencing shitty American ad campaigns.

The mere fact that a piece of media features a male lead rescuing a female is not enough to be considered sexist, unless the universe gives the illusion that this interaction occurred only because women are entirely helpless unless aided by men. This is something I don't remember the game about flying around with a raccoon tail touching upon.

so, mario/zelda games can't be sexist because they are depicting an entirely different universe from ours, and all media is created within a vacuum, devoid of any sort of social context?

you can't bring yourself to imagine how mario is reproducing sexist cultural norms (the man as the default hero rescuing some othered, victimized woman) because part of the gameplay mechanic involves flying around with a raccoon tail?

Mario and Zelda were two examples in an exhaustive list of games she compiled to demonstrate a persistence of an archetype that has existed throughout history and presents women as objects.

Her criticism is of culture at large, not specifically games you really really like.

Did you not watch the video? She was pretty thorough.

Because rescuing a loved one is a wholly disgusting narrative in which the rescued is represented as a fetishized object of sexual inferiority.

You guys see that movie Taken? Fucking gross how she needed her dad to save her.

You should be able to be critical of works you love while still enjoying it. Some of the thinkers I cherish were far from perfect. Frank Herbert was a homophobe, Carl Sagan was a Jew.

If you can't understand the things you love as products of fallible human beings just like you, and who, just like you, can be wrong about some things you're not going to be able to really understand the world you're living in.

Yeah, I'm a little confused by how misterbuns considers Peach a "helpless sex object."

And exhaustive means something completely seperate from what you seem to think it means.

That's how the word is used, exactly. It's okay! Hookers aren't known for their vocabulary.

So every sexist video game was in this video? 'Cause I've played a few that I thought were pretty sexist and she didn't even mention.

Back to the main point, wasn't the entire Mushroom Kingdom kidnapped by Bowser? Didn't Mario rescue a bunch of Toad characters, who were all male, before finally getting to Peach? I guess they're don't count.

Did her dad want to fuck her? No, So we thought it was alittle more noble, I hated that movie anyway, it was fucking retarded dad "don't touch my daughter" fantasies that people over 30 get.

Your defense is "Video Games shouldn't attempt to change themselves to welcome in new gamers because.... WE LIKE IT ORIENTED TOWARD MEN LIKE ME, AND ONLY ME." Which is not a good defense.

Don't worry, there will always be a market for your bouncing boob simulators and jRPGs with little girls in tight clothes. You'll always be there, and people like you will always be there.


Sorry dude, not to put you in a box, but you're really coming off like one of these guys who bitch about women finally standing up for themselves and saying "Well, maybe I don't want to be these characters you've presented for me to be."

Flip it around, man. Imagine you're in a world where the ONLY male characters are constantly running around in tiny armors that accentuate his sexual aspects (his dick and balls), and by running around, I mean standing around, because they're considered too... "whatever" to participate except when they get kidnapped. What would you do? Want to play video games? Want to make your stake in a world filled with THAT shit going on? You wouldn't like it, would you?

You've never experienced that, and neither have I unless I attempted to subject myself to it, which has very few avenues open. You're just mad because people want to change something so they don't feel like they're on the outside of it looking in when they attempt to join in.

Hooker is correct. In Super Mario Bros, all the mushroom folk were either kidnapped by Bowser or turned into blocks. And then Mario smashed those blocks for 50 points each. I like to imagine that Super Mario Bros actually takes place after all the other ones. In it Bowser found a way to use Mario's block-smashing obsession to make him inadvertently responsible for the Mushroom Holocaust. Faced with the full horror of what he has done, Mario drowns himself in a giant barrel of garlic sauce while "No, Pagliaccio non son" plays on a scratchy phonograph.

Press A to try again.

"So every sexist video game was in this video? 'Cause I've played a few that I thought were pretty sexist and she didn't even mention those." hooker

I'm going to go ahead and call you out for not watching the video (at least any significant part of it). or completely dismiss you as not worth paying attention to if you missed the part where she said "I'll be talking more about the damsel in distress trope in my next video".

Although it does give me a smile to imagine that you did watch the whole thing and by the point in the video where she mentioned discussing it further you were to busy frothing at the mouth in impotent rage to notice it.

The Super Mario chronology is completely out of order and should be heavily debated among fans. There should be flowcharts made and arguments over the validity of those charts.

CLEARLY Mario Kart takes place before the core games. That was before Bowser and Donkey Kong turncoated and usurped the Mushroom Kingdom with the Power Star Source. The Power Star Source's manipulation also created parallel universes that resulted in "Mario is Missing" and "Mario Teaches Typing." "Super Mario Bros. 2" (the U.S version) is also a prequel because Wart escaped from Mario's nightmare and merged with Bowser to manipulate him into becoming a turncoat.

I'm not the slightest big angry about this. I think the sexist garbage in video games is awful (the most ludicrious to me being the woman that shows up in Mass Effect 2 with an absurd skin-tight outfit and clown breasts). I think this is a good project that's bogged down by taking a huge amount of people's money and making a vlog with it.

If I'm angry at anything, it's the people who on principle I agree with attacking endlesschris's completely reasonable comments with a ton of bullshit.

it's not even that endlesschris is being particularly unreasonable, it's that he's being completely uncritical.

Given the thesis of this entire video series, that we are allowed to enjoy a piece of art or media or whatever while still paying a bare minimum of attention to the oppressive cultural institutions that might have informed it, endlesschris is really missing the point.

you hear it all the time, "but this game/movie/book was so awesome, and since it didn't explicitly say anything problematic, it can't possibly be racist/sexist"

it's fucking lazy is what it is, you can't just always look at something through the same privileged white dude lens and expect to have anything meaningful to say about whether something is contentious or not.

lol

A woman said it, I'm not sexist everybody!

-dairyqueenlatifah

Repeal the voting rights act!

-Clarence Thomas

"Mas'r Legree, as ye bought me, I'll be a true and faithful servant to ye" -Uncle Tom

Yeah, I used to side with the boys for brownie points, too.

Does Katie brag about not liking other girls? Oh, I'll betcha she does.

Katie's a good egg

-- attributed to Hitler

"Fuck this cunt."

- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Were you expecting a musical on ice?

AND the giant stack of video games to pose next to for a promo shoot, following the Angry Video Game Nerd trend of impressive collection = hits

she used the rest of the money to erect a baroque shrine to the Diana The Huntress festooned with the dried scrotums of everyone who was in line at the local gamestop for the release of Bayonetta.

People who still shop at Gamestop deserve that though.

That may be, FABIO, but there's no need to turn vigilante castration into a gender issue.

That's very patriarchal of you, associating scrotums with a specific gender. Check your privilege.

HAHA BECAUSE SHE'S ASKING FOR SOME REALLY IRRATIONAL THINGS HERE AND WE'RE MEN AND SHE'S NOT AND


This circle jerk is fucking boring, give it a rest.

Thinly-veiled moral masturbation.

Also she is not very attractive and she has nobody but herself to blame for that.

At this point? The Bo-news levels of righteous indignation she's inspiring in the comments here. Everyone has turned into John Holmes to her Boxxy.

Honest question for everyone: What if a religious figure had started a campaign to get God and Christian values back into movies and was met with a 4chan art campaign of him being gangraped by Satan and alter boys? Would you be just as outraged?

Here's my favorite take someone wrote back in December:

"Let's get this out of the way up front: I get sent loads of free money all the time, I've never released any videos, and everything I know about feminist theory could fit in an A-cup. In every respect that matters, I am Anita Sarkeesian. I guess that's why I have so much trouble understanding what anyone could possibly have against this woman. I mean, who is more deserving of scorn: the thieving gypsy who scams 150 G's to address the crippling lack of videos on Youtube and comes back with nothing, or the anonymous developer - let's call him "American M." - who scams God knows how many G's, probably at least 50 judging by the screenshots, to produce a playable computer game and comes back with American McGee's Alice: Madness Returns? Before you make up your mind, remember that you could conceivably get drunk enough to accidentally torrent the computer game (a possibility made frighteningly real by American McGee having the porn directoriest name outside of Jonathan Blow and "Returns" just being a fancy English word for "Cums Again"); meanwhile, no one is ever going to be unwittingly exposed to Anita Sarkeesian's videos because they don't exist."

Short answer: Nothing legitimate.

Long answer: Petulant manchildren obsessed with the male privilege they simultaneously rabidly enforce and refuse to acknowledge wet their collective Pull-Ups when a woman made 4th-rate e-famous for her feminist media criticism YT channel, Anita Sarkeesian, proposes a series wherein she picks apart video games. A Kickstarter is launched to fund it, with a goal of 00.

4chan, reddit, and other strongholds of frustrated, sulky, testosterone-fueled wangst propose to Teach The Bitch A Lesson by flagging her YT vids as hate speech, comment-bombing rape and death threats, and filing baseless complaints with Kickstarter, trying to get the project pulled. Decent People respond by superfunding Anita to 6 figures and making her a modern feminist mini-icon, just for a taste of those delicious MRA rage tears.

Appalled that Sarkeesian didn't immediately crumble to dust under pressure like she's supposed to and the rest of the internet flipped them a collective 0,000+ bird, MRAers launch their own laughable little project, "Tropes vs Men," on IndieGogo, Kickstarter's poor country relation. It makes about 00. It dawns on a precious few of them that threatening to rape and murder a woman who publicly points out sexism just kind of makes her fucking point FOR her, and a halfhearted attempt is made to reel in the trolls. Needless to say, horse was out of the barn on that one.

In the following months, reddit and 4chan are so desperate to discredit Sarkeesian that they invent rumors of her vacationing in Barbados on the proceeds, and even go so far as to fake a Twitter screencap of Sarkeesian buying ,000 shoes. Really. Google it.

FAST-FORWARD ONE YEAR: After a year of updates, the first episode is out, and it's pretty fucking goodm thoughfully made, and thorough. "Tropes vs. Men," meanwhile, hasn't updated in 6 months, and hasn't donated the money it received as it claimed. Criticism of Sarkeesian has shifted to the hilarious, but just as petulant and telling "That doesn't look like a six-figure video!" and "I refuse to watch this until someone makes a response video pointing out the faults."

And that's where we are now.

Do people really care about vaudeville damsel tied to the railroad track game plots though?

Remember all the Metroid: Other M videos submitted here? Half the comments were disgust in turning the protagonist into a subservient ditz, the other half asking who cares about story in video games. Either they're dishonestly jumping on the anti-4chan bandwagon (not a bad goal by itself) or nobody really realized that Zelda needed saving before this amazing video showed them the way.

Gamers deserve every bit of scorn it is possible to heap upon them. And I play video games.

Hahaha. Nobody gives a shit about her more than FABIO, and now he's trying to turn the gaze on everyone else?

Classic stuff.

Caminantes second argument why this and Target Women sucks:

They're not very hot!

Christianity is not value netural, Fabio. Feminist values aren't evil. Christian values are.

Yes, "Christian values" = basic gender equality, FABIO you dumbshit.

That's a lot of vitrol for asking basic questions about this woman's point. I notice Hooker can never mention me without usin the word "classic", do you keep some journal on me? Maybe one of you can make a game about murdering me at some point.

Strike the Christian values analogy. What about Jack Thompson's call to end murder in games? How was that any less valid than Anita's goal? Did any of you care about the tons of Flash murder games made about him?

Me and a Friend were figuring out how to make Zelda a main character and still remain in plot or atleast in the same idea. We decided it would be neat to have the game start out like every Zelda game. Link is driven into the wide world at the start of the game by forces bigger than himself, so big in fact that he must travel to another continent. Well, while he's away, Gannon makes a power play for the triforce, or crown or whatever. Knowing Link is away on a mission of importance, Zelda gets strapped to defend her own people. The game could switch between the characters on opposite sides of the globe, maybe on the fly, and most assuredly their worlds would interact, requiring them to send items or information to one another to find a way to defeat Gannon from two different places in the world


This took 5 minutes, and sounds like an awesome game.

This is still a thing that the Internet says?

Video games have grown up, but not very much. They're still a really young medium. They were in their infancy during the Donkey Kong years, and now they're in that teenage phase where you first start realizing how screwed up the world is but you don't know what to do about it. And part of you still wants to be an asshole like most of your friends.

WWD, you fucking nailed it right on the head.

I am dumb.

Gamers want videogames to get the recognition of being Art without any of the actual critical thought that Art is held up to.

Ok, let's try this again:

WWD, you nailed it right on the head.

Also everybody complaining that she didn't just watch Youtube videos instead of buying games can just fuck off. If she had just based her opinion on Youtube videos, you'd be rightly criticizing her for doing that. People that don't play games and criticize them based on Youtube videos are fucking stupid.

Remember when people were talking about how in GTA games you can hire prostitutes and then murder them to get your money back? Is that really a part of the game, or just something that the game doesn't actively prevent you from doing? The difference has nothing to do with specific content; It's a matter of how the game mechanics are tuned. I found prostitutes to be an inefficient way to regain health and the money dropped not sufficiently valuable to justify getting out of the car to pick it up past the first few missions. More prostitutes and more valuable money could easily change that.

Same here. Floating over things was awesome.

Based on her argument, the damsel in distress becomes an objectified thing, robbed of her own agency. She's simply a belonging for men to fight over. Since this started with Anita taking action by requesting funding to start a web series that addresses sexism in video games, the answer is 'no'. That's simply collaboration.

I'm not suggesting that there weren't guys who donated out of a white knight motivation. Their behavior was a reaction to her action, though.

Well that's what I mean by "filling the role". I imagine there were a lot of people (men and women) who believed that they were coming to her rescue.

Nah dude, she's got her own story arc in this one, didn't you watch the video?!?

Well, since you're asking SERIOUS QUESTIONS and all, here:

1: I think the portrayal of women and girls in popular media is a perfectly legitimate topic of discussion regardless of what 4chan thinks. The reactions of frightened men defending their privilege added another dimension to it but was never the only thing worth talking about here.

2: I was never aware of any Jack Thompson murder simulators, but that sounds petty and obnoxious. It's also worth noting though that Thompson was a litigious troll who was deliberately trying to stir up an angry response and got himself disbarred in the process while Sarkeesian was not.

2.2: This is not a serious question. It's a dumb attempt to change the subject, like when gun nuts try to derail conversations about gun control by pointing out that car accidents kill a lot of people every year too. Sarkeesian is not arguing that one issue is "greater" than another. She's simply picked one issue that she is interested in and presented some arguments on it, sans any judgement of relative severity versus other media critiques.

3: I do not agree with your caveat that I should consider Jack Thompson in answering this question. I am not willing to take it for granted that people form their opinions on violence and gender roles in the same way, and as I pointed out above Thompson was at least half-trolling while I don't think Sarkeesian was. I'd also like to know why you think the images young men and boys are shown of women in popular media is somehow different from "real life" influences. Is popular media not a part of your real life?

Not to point out the glaringly obvious or anything but murder and sexism are different. Anyone can get murdered. Sexism is more complicated in that it can be oppressive towards men or women depending on the circumstances. It's not the same as murder - it's specific to gender.

A "neckbeard" making the same points would be just as interesting, the only substantial difference is that people wouldn't be bombarding him with rape threats etc... well, maybe some people. There would still be cynical people declaring "first world problems"; people are doing it for this one too. A lot more people would call him a faggot though.

Jack Thompson is an individual with ideas people disagree with. In short, people weren't making games that involved killing him BECAUSE he is a man, they presumably did it because they wanted to create a game which depicted what he was speaking out against, or to be a dick, or whatever.

Sexism in video games being a greater issue is largely dependent on who you talk to but, this video - hell, the ideas that were the precursors to this video - proved that people obviously have more issues with how women are portrayed in video games than they do with ultra-violence. And that's interesting. Violence, cartoon or otherwise, is more endemic than sexism in games; it's in all media everywhere, it's even on the evening news. Sexism can be addressed much more feasibly, and I bet if you asked most people if they think media, or video games, are too violent, most would answer yes. If you look around there are people speaking out against violence in games, it's just that society as a whole apparently isn't that worried about it. But by all means, join with Jack Thompson if you really feel strongly about it. However, don't expect people to be able to protest what you think is most important.

Also when you're sexist to people in video games you're sexist to them IN REAL LIFE!

As opposed to violence in video games. Whatever, I'm tired and I'm going to bed.

Blue: What would the real life crossover be for killing hookers in GTA then?

Thanks for the 2 actual thought out replies.

I brought up violence vs sexism because of the weird direction people seem to want to take this in. The new Tomb Raider is being hailed as empowering to women characters thanks to its blood caked I Spit on Your Grave approach (and Laura's "more realistic" E cup on a 110 lb. frame). I don't remember anyone hailing Space Channel 5 as a step forward despite having a capable female protagonist,and it was no sillier a game than a lot of Anita's example. Is it because she wasn't charged with acts of violence and wore a skimpy outfit? The majority of opinion seems to be that a female protagonist has to engage in the same murder spree as men, but you better make it extra bloody and gorey to compensate? That doesn't seem like a healthier approach.

Double Dragon is misogynistic crap when, in a game where hundreds are beaten to death, a woman gets punched in the stomach? What does she think is going to happen to the female action game protagonists she keeps calling for? This goes back to the Tomb Raider thing; she's against showing violence against women yet wants them to be the star in said violence.

I guess wait till part 2 when she talks about more modern stuff, but her claim that it's a rampant problem is hard to support when almost all of her examples are 10-30 years old. Do we really need to worry about retro digital downloads? Do young impressionable kids spend on SNES games or is it just nostalgia for adults?

I can't recall a mario game in the past decade where the kidnapping wasn't treated as a self-aware parody. I remember kids making fun of the roteness of the whole rescue the princess/girlfriend cliche all the way back in the early 90s. I think everyone already recognizes it for the archaic lazy device it is. Everyone hated Metroid Other M for making Samus subservient. Dante's Inferno was regarded as derivative crap. The one complaint I constantly heard about New Super Mario Bros was generic toads instead of the princess.

As an aside, where is she getting sexist from Twilight Princess? They made the villain out to be powerful by making the entire army helpless against him. Zelda just happened to be the ruler and nothing would have changed if she was a man. At no point is she a trophy or love interest. Then you have Midna who was a well realized character without condescendingly putting her on a pedestal or making her a model swap of a man. In fact she was an inverse of the whole trope because she only gained the ability to do anything when the male protagonist was disempowered.

Oh god I miss those smokeout threads on P_N

join me

You should be looking at who is upset by it. Watch the audience, see who starts screaming because THAT BITCH. That's how smokeouts work.