Still wish gamergate would finally end already. It's dead and the anti side lost pretty dang hard.
So long as the people pushing the ideology that caused it to happen in the first place keep at it, it will never end.
It's easy to forget, especially with the likes of
@KillThemCrackasBabies (entirely justified) smacks towards Jeremy and his ilk, but the fucks pushing this ideological horse-shit into
basically everything they can view their doing so as a culture war against godless barbarians. In their worldview, you should not, and indeed,
must not ever have anything you can do to depart from the holy narrative. Escapism is an enemy in their eyes, and you can see this in any work of fiction they get their claws into regardless of medium. When you pair up the fact that many of them believe ideological conformity is much more importan than writing or productive talent, you begin to understand why any work they descend upon tends to do only three things: Suck, fail, and push propaganda.
Anything that systemically embraces Social Justice and somehow succeeds does so
in spite of the ideology - not because of it.
But it actually goes a little more nutty than this. While it often goes ignored because it's secondary to her being a money-grubbing asshole, Anita Sarkeesian
is, in fact, a true believer in the ideology she pushes. The entire viewpoint you see her shriek about - that if you somehow don't think that a piece of media you observe somehow effects you, this in fact means it effects you
more through a process she never actually gets around to elaborating upon - comes from this ideological origin-point, and, of course, Bell Hooks, the person Sarkeesian models herself after, was a fucking Marxist and hated second-wave feminists because they did not bring about glorious Socialist revolution. A humorous aspect to this that you will hear mentioned approximately
never in the mainstream is that Sarkeesian, much like Hooks, does not believe her work is about choice - that if you somehow can be not-offended, or more commonly, are a woman or dark-skinned person who somehow finds success despite her shrieks about the existence of a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, this means you have simply found a way to make the system work for you, not that her ideology is wrong.
If you want to know why Sarkeesian is at Gencon, however, let me break it down for you nice and quick: She was chosen by the cadre of brainlets currently signed on for Gencon as speakers, because they absolutely agree with her, and in many cases, have had previous work with her:
Tanya Depass is a
Rat King-associated,
Jake Alley-connected, BLM-espousing psychopath who seriously deserves a thread on this website and has more than once gone on hysterical shrieking rants about how Twitter is a vital lifeline for queer people of color and how the greatest barrier to tabletop gaming is white people. She has been an affiliate of Katherine Cross(AKA Feminist Frequency's secretary) since at least 2013.
She's still friends with Quinn years later, to boot.
Nolan T. Jones is the creator of Roll20, a damned fine website used for virtual tabletop services for strategy gaming and RPG systems. Despite being a nerd he has absolutely drank the kool-aid and has gone on multiple rants about how his platform "would not tolerate" any work that caters only to any group he personally dislikes, and has launched numerous screaming twitter-rants in which he virtue signals as hard as humanly possible. The users of Roll20 just stay quiet and hope the nutjob shuts up and goes away, as he screams about Pmurt and how
that evil Gamergate will never get a foothold in traditional gaming as long as he stands. He's done panels alongside Katherine Cross in the past.
Nicole Lindroos is the head of Green Ronin press, a former 3.0/3.5 D&D book creator that now makes stuff for Pathfinder. In addition to
pushing hard for Social Justice and policies later espoused by Jake Alley and friends, she's also a long-time buddy of Katherine Cross. She's rather infamous for an incident in which one of her IRL friends got accused of sexual harassment -
Lindroos responded by attacking his alleged victims, and, when she recieved blastback,
declared herself the true victim of the entire affair and deleted her social media accounts entirely.
So multiple people here, who all are connected to
Katherine Cross in some fashion or another, and at least one who was directly backing CON for the last few years. Strange that. It's almost like Anita knew she would have zero trouble getting on a panel and knew she'd have help to screen for anyone who could possibly criticize her or something.