fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2872 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2872 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 019 secrets from Secret Submission Post #410.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She's not wrong about a lot of the points she makes about the industry and the games themselves, but I too wish she'd actually play the damn games. See, you don't have to be a part of a hobby to critique an element of it - far from it, sometimes it gives you perspective - but mining games she's never played for examples of sexism weakens her arguments when anyone who's played the games knows she's distorting/misrepresenting/taking something out of context.

For example: that scene of attempted rape and (if Artyom doesn't stop it) murder of a woman by bandits is pretty awful. It stands on its own as an example of sexualized violence against women in games. But misogyny? ...If she'd played the game, she'd know that literally minutes later a man is threatened with sexualized violence by the same bandit group and, if Artyom doesn't save him, is killed. She intimates that women are being singled out by that scene for sexualized violence when in fact I was pleasantly surprised that the game showed that not only can it happen to men too, but they too sometimes need to be rescued. (Similarly, singling out the one scene of an abused minor female character in Far Cry 3 seems fucking ridiculous as an example of ill-treatment of women in particular - if you've played the game, you know that there is a whole arc dedicated to rescuing a major male character from sexual violence.)

What's worse is that Metro Last Light actually does have huge problems with sexism, and she doesn't touch on any of them - because she's too busy shoehorning an out-of-context scene in to a montage to make her point. If she'd played that, she could make much more meaningful and cogent commentary on its gender issues.

Edited 2014-11-14 01:27 (UTC)

Thank you for this comment! It's been a while since I watched any of her vids, but the couple I did watch had exactly this sort of problem, where it was clear she was focusing on 'sexist' scenes (likely scenes that her viewers told her about) without actually playing the games in question. Unfortunately it's been so long I don't even know which vids I watched to go to hunt down examples of this crap.

Context is so damn important. What I've seen of her work is the feminist equivalent of Nostalgia Critic's Sailor Moon review.

It's really sad. she comes across as the "men can't be victims of any kind of sexism" kind of school of thought.

I'm critical of her, but I find myself oddly defensive of her in this thread.

Her theme is focusing on women in games, so while I wish she'd actually play the games for reasons ariakas and others have mentioned, it does make sense she's focusing on women cause she said that was her goal from the start.

In doing so, she then ignores any context and makes actually balanced things out to be horrible when they're not. If the badguys are going to murder and rape you regardless of your sex because they don't give a shit about it, that's kind of not about sexualized violence against women, that's about the bad guys being kind of horrible human beings who'll do whatever they want regardless of sex.

It's not helping feminism at all. There are thousands of examples of what she wants, ignoring them and going for stuff that's ruined by context is a really stupid move. Her idea of sexist and sexualized violence against women seems to be a blanket "anything that is shown hurting a woman."

Great comment, that's exactly my issue with her. There are certainly problems with sexism in video games, but a lot of the time she doesn't pick them up and instead focuses on completely irrelevant things that aren't sexist at all in context. It becomes pretty apparent that she doesn't know what she's talking about, and I find myself getting offended on behalf of the great female characters she claims are merely damsels in distress or what the hell ever.

Did I just have a blackout and not realize I'd posted? That's my exact problem with her, too. When one is getting basic plot, character background or even game mechanic information wrong (looking at you Watch Dogs, Bayonetta, and Hitman: Absolution) I cannot begin to take them seriously. The footage and art theft just crystallizes that point.

I love how she keeps showing footage of games where you can kill all NPCs including men but only focuses on the female NPCs. Especially if it's one of the many games that penalize you for killing civillians.

...I know right. Artyom mass murders groups of men, not all of them hostile, and she takes issue about the one time he puts his hand roughly over a woman's mouth so that she won't give his position away with a scream and get him killed because he's hiding in her room. That shit's just patronizing.

That said, again, as much as I love the game, Metro: Last Light has huge issues with its representation of women, but she doesn't touch on any of them. She just mined it for the most "shocking" scenes and put them in a montage completely out of context.

I feel the same way about Dishonored. I love that game, but it has its issues at the sexism front. And then Anita goes and talks about the "prostituted women" and how none of them have any backstories and if she had actually played that game, she'd know that they are just about the only NPCs who all have individual backstories.

It all shows quite clearly that she has never played the games, maybe has watched a few choice scenes or a LP speedrun but nothing more. And that's kind of like someone talking about the issues in Shakespeare plays after they only watched "Shakespeare in Love".

*claps* I wish this is what this discussion always looked like.

[ SECRET POST #2872 ]

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