"Fandom Is Broken" And Other Silly Ideas

About this:

1. GamerGate = "terrorist hate group"? Grow up. Your definition of "terrorist" is too broad.
2. Re: the Ghostbusters reboot, if you don't have enough funny moments to make a funny trailer, you lose. Also, it's a comedy, but neither the franchise's new masters nor its executrices have any visible skill at that art.
3. OH HAI LET'S PICK A SINGLE RANTING POST AS TYPICAL OF PEOPLE I HATE. Weak.
4. Death threats are always so much bluster. Read The Gift of Fear some time. (They do, however, have some commercial value.)
5. How dare people engage with and have an opinion about books, movies, TV shows, and videogames, and worse, have the temerity to inform their creators. I'm sure most creators would rather their output exist in a vacuum, Emily Dickinson style. Right?
6. I don't know the canon well enough, but Captain America's embrace of Hydra appears to have been a commercialized rape of the character, destroying it for no particular good reason other than sales. You do that, you will hear from the fans, and in some very unpleasant ways.
7. Funny how you failed to mention how it was the SJWs who chased Joss Whedon off Twitter. Why is that? Yes, I know, he claimed afterward that it was a new project whose time he did not wish to split with social media; fine. Nevertheless, it does not excuse the behavior of the People's Front Of Judea, nor does it absolve the author of this piece of pinning the worst excesses exclusively on people he apparently dislikes for other reasons.

Update 2016-06-02: Christopher Landauer elsewhere pointed out Devin Faraci's follow-on post that is so larded with self-contradiction it's hard to tell whether it amounts to self-parody:

Over the years I have written extensively - and with passion - about the need for more representation in our media. About the need for more actors of color in our films, about the need for more queer characters in our stories, about the need for more perspectives behind the scenes to better represent the great diversity of people who love the pop culture we all love. Nothing has changed for me. I still feel that way.

I believe that people should let the decision-makers know that they want more stories featuring underrepresented groups. I believe that the only way to get more representation is to let the suits and the bean counters know that there's an audience for this stuff, to loudly proclaim your willingness to buy tickets or comic books (and then follow up on it by actually buying tickets and comic books). Everyone should let the companies behind the stories we love know that they would like to be included in them.

But the line is crossed when you go from "Disney, I would really like to have a queer princess in one of your cartoons" to "I demand that the writers and directors of Frozen 2 make Elsa canonically queer." You can - and should! - let the higher ups know the kinds of stories you want told. You should not demand that storytellers tell their stories in the ways that you want. 

This strikes me as fundamentally an impossible demand, the idea that once a franchise is in place, it is up to the creators and the creators exclusively to set the story arcs and world. The second quoted graf above stands in stark opposition to the third.

Bullety Stuff

• She's Baaaack: Anita Sarkeesian, Jack Thompson, And The Censorious Urge: A couple today from Scott Shackford at Reason and Mytheos Holt at The Federalist about the latest Twitter kerfluffle from Anita Sarkeesian, who thinks Doom is too violent; both cite Popehat's zinger about disgraced video game critic Jack Thompson having lifted the password to her account. Hee:

  For Leftist ideologues like Sarkeesian and McIntosh, the game is a reminder that their ideology is forever cut off from human nature, and that their utopian vision of a world without urges toward violence will always ultimately be chainsawed by reality before being drowned in a storm of unapologetically humanistic gunfire.

• The Hunting Ground Documentarian Stomps Feet, Runs Up To Room: Cathy Young pointed me at Amy Ziering's pointed refusal to address her critics in an interview at Forward. Excerpt:

  There have been articles written by Emily Yoffe and Cathy Young bringing another voice to the conversation of sexual assault on campus. Does that drive the conversation because it brings another view? Does it hurt?
  
  I think there’s always gonna be people who want to make something horrible go away. I just wish those articles and analyses were better informed. Do your homework.The real issue is these crimes are happening at epidemic rates and the false reporting of sexual assault is exactly the same as any other crime and we don’t read Emily and others writing about their suspicions about false burglary claims or carjacking claims or robberies or battery allegations. It’s not statistically anomalous. 92 to 98 percent of people who report rape are telling the truth. That’s where our outrage should be. Less than 2% of criminals who commit these crimes ever see any kind of punishment. Those are the alarming statistics. There’s no debate. There’s a truth, these crimes are happening and they’re not being properly investigated. That’s what we should be talking about and worrying about.

  Of course, she doesn't feel obliged to answer the particulars raised by those journalists and their stories, merely dismissing them as uninformed. Dogma. 
• The Reductress. You're welcome.
• Update: Good piece at Reason from last December that exposes Anita Sarkeesian's hypocrisy on the subject of prostitution;  male prostitutes are "sex workers" but women in that profession are "prostituted women".

  Author, media consultant, and former sex worker Maggie McNeil cited the Burchill quote when discussing why she mistrusts Sarkeesian and her criticism of games. McNeil says that to her, Sarkeesian's position is "summed up by the fact" that she does not refer to male sex workers as "prostituted" but does refer to female sex workers as prostituted women.
  
  "What this tells us is that she sees men as creatures able to make sexual choices," McNeil says, "but she sees women as creatures who can only have sex for traditional reasons—love, or romance or whatever. But if women are [having sex] for tactical reasons, then she sees this as somehow suspect—that a man must be doing that. Hence the [term] prostituted. Someone has done this to her."