No one actually fucking likes him, right? None of us were excited to cast that vote or we just wanted Trump out, right. Like at the end of the day, that is the win, that Trump is no longer going to be president for another four years. But I really urge everyone to understand that we elected a old white dude that is a career politician deeply rooted in pro-war neoliberal philosophies. Not just not having Trump isn't enough.
And I'm really also tired of people being like "well we got to get a Democrat in, because we can fight, as the left we can push Democrats and get them to do the things we want them to do". Which is what you say every fucking election and it never works. - Anita Sarkeesian on the election
My favorite thing about Anita Sarkeesian besides making gamers seethe, is that her criticisms have had a positive effect on video game narrative quality. When she critiqued Dishonored for it's not so great portrayal of women, the devs took that to heart and crafted the second games narrative to address it, thus making Emily a playable character. Thanks Anita!
honestly kinda crazy how my view of her has changed after moving left. As a teenager I was a pretty left-wing but didn't like SJWs for some reason, and I thought she was a wacko. Eventually I turned 15 and my critical thinking skills started to actually develop, and now I don't really mind her work.
when I was like 13 or 14 and in the midst of my anti-SJW phase I had a seething hatred for her but I had seen literally 0 seconds of any of her content and might as well have been mad at a person someone made up. god this is actually painful to think about, what a fucking awful little gamer I was
I don't feel super bad, I don't think brains are super developed at 13. Nothing even changed about my environment to make me go leftward, I literally just hit the period of development where I could think things out better.
I think she's kind of an intellectual lightweight and most of her stuff is just fluff. I read it and watched it extensively when right wingers were obsessively dunking on her, and it was weird how much they were triggered by her, but I was left feeling very "meh" about it.
But I do think it's hilarious how much she drives incels batshit crazy.
Yeah, for how much of a shit storm she kicked up I remember going back to watch it one day and thinking that a lot of the critique just kind of... sucked?
Idk, it's still important to do this critique and I'll take it over "My 20 Hour Review of The Last Jedi" but it's not overly great.
When they first came out, I kinda assumed her videos were trying to use video games to introduce people to basic feminist critiques of media, rather than a rigorous analysis of games themselves.
Then I saw the response from g*mers and realized even that was too deep a dive for some people. Like, most of her points seemed really fucking obvious to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the medium, yet they were (and probably still are) losing their goddamn minds over it.
That's what really blew my mind, like I knew she was a gamer bogeywoman (I actually thought she was the woman from Gamergate because I couldn't be assed to keep this stuff straight) but when I read her "incredibly offensive sjw" stuff it was literally just baby's first media criticism.
No shade, it's good to make content that's digestible for people who have no experience analyzing media, but it was crazy to me how takes as inoffensive as "video games are marketed toward men and this is reflected in their content as X Y and Z" were treated as if they were these wild inflammatory statements.
And the weird thing is that guys like Sargon and Thunderfoot will even say "Yeah no shit games are marketed towards men, that's capitalism" but then still completely lose their minds over her videos.
Also playing Corvo in that game sucks because the guy they got to voice him has the vocal talents of a limp dishrag. He's a bit like Kevin Conroy's Batman if Kevin Conroy had no ability whatsoever to emote with his voice.
Though I feel like in terms of story and atmosphere a lot of Dishonored 2 was a pallid imitation of the original. Level design was better, gameplay was better, that cool time travel level was better, but I don't think it really holds a candle to the original or the Dowd DLC. Also I found the villains had a lot more personality in the first one. Except Delilah, but she's in the first one so that doesn't count.
And then Death of the Outsider was so bleh. I was so excited to play Billie but then it was just a big let down of a game. There's a little meat on the bones of her relationship to Dowd, but not enough to carry the game, and then there's so many reused assets and levels that the whole thing is very uninspired. Though a little bit of that's on me because I prefer stories where the magic is sorta lurking around the edges, mysterious and otherworldly and incomprehensible, and in DotO you
spoiler
basically go to the heaven equivalent and fuck around with the gods
so that's more or less the opposite of the thing I like.
Plus, like, I know the original voice actor for the Outsider turned out to be a massive piece of shit and they were right to not bring him back, but his delivery (and the writing around the Outsider as this otherworldly, unknowable being) was so much better in the first game than the person they got for the other two. The Outsider shrines in the first one are the highlight of the whole game for me, and they felt kinda tacked on in the others. "Strange how there's always a little more innocence left to lose."
Sorry for this long rant about a video game series I enjoyed but was mildly disappointed in. Go Karl Marx and Assata Shakur or whatever.
the guy they got to voice him has the vocal talents of a limp dishrag
Oh no, you didn't just talk shit about my man Stephen Russel
Dishonored 2 is one of my favorites so I guess thanks Anita
thought it was weird that corvo was playable tho, considering that the whole game works so much better on an emotional level when you are playing as Emily instead of Corvo
Funny enough that is exactly what happened with assassin's creed odyssey. The devs originally planned for the playable character to be a women, but execs forced them to make a male character playable as well.
She has 100% made games better. Even if she didn't directly contribute to specific developer teams to bring more inclusion into video games, she made it a part of the zeitgeist. Special thanks to her haters, for proving her point.
o7 for standing against gamers before it was popular, she always has my respect
The useful idiots podcast today had a nice discussion on exactly this. How the democrats shifted to the party of the white collar technocrats in the 80s, back when neoliberalism was 'hip'.
We need to consolidate workers party, greens, DSA and PSL. Stop all the bullshit leftist infighting and form up like voltron
Seems like Fem Freq has like 4 podcasts, but "main one" FFR is probably the one you want https://feministfrequency.com/podcasts/
Her Lorelai Gilmore vibes make it impossible for libs to hate her.
Also as someone who was vaguely anti-sjw in HS, mostly due to the crowd I hung around with, embracing the kind of games that people who hate her shat on was the best thing I ever did. Like yeah Life is Strange and Depression Quest aren't as fun as like Halo in the moment, but LiS is far and away my favorite game, and made me reflect on myself more than any dumb shooter could've. Not to say shooters are bad, per se, I still have thousands of hours across the destiny games, but I would def recommend those kinds of games to anyone who hasn't broadened their horizons yet.
