How did #GamerGate respond when former NFL player and outspoken LGBT rights activist Chris Kluwe savaged them?
They went after and doxxed Felicia Day, the darling of internet fandom and all things geeky, when she very gently and timidly suggested that maybe these dudebros shouldn’t be threatening and harassing women.
That’s because GamerGators are cowards and they’re misogynists. As far as they’re concerned, it’s open season on women who stand against them, but it took them a while to take their balls in-hand and go after a guy.
In case you’ve missed my other posts about GamerGate’s antics, here’s a few highlights:
- They think women, POC, and MOGAI gamers requesting less problematic representation in video games equates to Jim Crow laws.
- They think the mythical SJWs are oppressing them, like police are doing to the black protesters against police violence in Ferguson and elsewhere.
- They think if a woman whom they’ve been targeting for harassment happens to have a family emergency, like, say, a pet dying, it’s a great time to step up the harassment, including trying to dox her veterinarian so they can threaten their victim at the vets office.
- They think it’s clever to write and publish rape fantasies about a real-life rape victim (on top of the hundreds of rape threats they already send her, naturally.)
- They compare themselves to rape victims.
- They’re targeting transwomen for harassment in the hopes of driving them to suicide.
They’re cowards, though. So they do this shit, and then try to find ways to weasle out of the consequences.
So, honestly, I’m not sure what to make of the fact that they’ve gone after Chris Kluwe now. Does it mean they’re escalating, growing bolder and more dangerous? Or that they’re just becoming less misogynist and more diverse in their harassment?
I’ve said before and I’ll say again that if #gamergate had happened a year earlier, Player vs. Player would have been a very different book. Or rather, it would have been the same book, but the collection of real-life events that made up the inspiration for it would have been so much more informed about just how low these guys will sink and the sort of tactics they use.
For instance, in Player vs. Player, we have this incident in PvP:
“That leaves us with the final wave. Now is Niles Grace or Chino, and who is the last person?”
Payne looked from the drawings to Niles and Rosie. “After the player character, Grace is the leader of the company.”
Rosie blinked. “Me? You think I might be a target?”
Jordan laughed, though it was bitter. Nothing about this was a damn bit funny. “Rosie, when haven’t you been a target?”
“But he’s been leaving the notes for Niles.”
“Because you have a doorman and security. He can’t get to you, and if he sent them via email, they would just get lost in the thousands of other threats we file and ignore. He wanted our attention, and the emails and texts aren’t the way to get it.”
“You’re the boss,” Niles said, staring at Rosie. He had a quaver in his voice that Jordan didn’t like, as if he were moments from falling apart. “To get to the boss, you have to go through his or her lieutenants, right?”
Witnessing what GamerGate has been up to, how they’ve steered clear of going after high-profile male targets and instead concentrated their harassment on women, I wonder if I would have written that section differently now.
At any rate, my support is with Chris Kluwe, as it is with all of their targets. May 2015 be the year when sniveling, neckbearded cowards decide that hey, maybe it’s time to be decent human beings and not send rape threats and drive people from their homes and threaten college campus massacres, all because women would like to see a few less chainmail bikinis in their favorite hobby.
The fiction of Amelia C. Gormley 