Semi-unrelated but I suspect that almost no one actually dislikes Yasuke for historical reasons. He’s a pretty well known figure associated with the most famous shogun to ever live. His existence is fairly well documented, and he shows up a lot in Japanese media too. I think most people with a passing interest in Japanese history will have heard of him at some point.
Maybe it’s just because I’m older now than I was during Gamergate, but this new drama doesn’t hold up under even gentle scrutiny.

I was 12 in 2000. There were a lot of words that were “ok” to say back then that I regret having come out of my mouth.

The important thing is to move on and learn why that was bad. Don’t beat yourself up over it.

It should have been dismissed at the start, like game journalism on the whole is just copy paste press release, 9/10 reviews, attend cons.

But some mild feminist critique somehow turns into a movement???

The best thing about the whole to me was that it showed how reactionary most g*mers are, and it soured me forever on being in any video game related online spaces unless they explicitly don’t allow reactionaries.

i was suxked up into it briefly in its heyday when i was 14-15. I think people today might underestimate how persuasive it was to tween/teen boys (I didn’t know ) in that phase after they’ve divested themselves from their parent’s opinions but before they’ve had the chance to independently develop their own (inasmuch as one can opinions can be “independent” in society).

EVERYBODY knew games journalism as an industry was a joke— 10/10 IGN, 7/10 too much water, Skyrim with Guns, and so forth — so a “movement” claiming to be concerned about ethics in games journalism was inviting as a 14 year old dweeb with nothing better to care about.

And once you’ve swallowed the hook with a few alt-lite zingers from “Based Milo” Yianopaulos and Christina Sommers it’s easy to accept the rest of the reactionary rhetoric that builds on it—if games journalism was being ruined by liberal pansy feminists, then all the other stuff they were being blamed for must be their fault, right? I watched PragerU videos of my own volition () because YouTube recommended them and they built on the GamerGate stuff by offering easy answers that demanded nothing from me.

Honestly its a miracle I wasn’t completely lost to online alt-right brainrot. I don’t even know why I stopped believing in it, I just… did? Then I spent like a year being a generic lib before finding r/cth and beginning my slow ascent to smug communist superiority

All this to say, don’t be too hard on yourself for getting sucked into something. And as someone once said, if you don’t look back at yourself and cringe, you haven’t grown

People who knew me back then tell me I should have more empathy for the incels of today because my brain was full of holes that garbage like 4chan filled. I made fun of Anita Sarkeesian and cared deeply about “ethics in games journalism” because I was a drop out and a shut in with nothing better to focus my energy on.

If anything, I have more anger than I did back then, but its directed at the groups and institutions that perpetuate this shit and keep those ‘movements’ alive. I understand what it was like to have been a reactionary teenager, but I also know that I was intelligent enough to know better and none of my behavior deserves an excuse.

It’s deeply sad and pathetic to me that other people my age are still posting on 4chan like they’re 12 and just learned some racial slurs. And have now morphed into being “anti-woke” instead of “anti-sjw” when its all the same.

At one point, I personally identified as an Anti-feminist. It was over a decade ago, of course, but it brings me great shame. I never considered myself conservative, I have genuine fascists in my family and never fully aligned with any of them, but I was a deeply reactionary liberal. I fell down that pipeline and nearly tumbled down the alt-right, but thankfully stopped at “classical liberalism.” Please, feel free to laugh at my former self, he was (and still is, albeit to a lesser extent) a supreme dumbass of the highest order of magnitude, and should be laughed at.

Unlearning the sheer amount of propaganda laid upon me from birth took effort, and a whole lot of grass touching. Talking to women, POC, marginalized people, queer people. Each layer of propaganda built over me peeled off, and with each peel came more and more shame at my former self. However, with each peel came more weight coming off my shoulders, renewed clarity, and new friends and eventual comrades.

What I am trying to say, is that we are the sums of our trajectories. It’s the Dialectic at work! We contain within ourselves the next version. Politzer puts Dialectical Materialism very beautifully in Elementary Principles of Philosophy, and I truly believe it helped me shed my self-hatred for being so reactionary for so long, as it was a necessary step considering my own personal Material Conditions that led to the me of today.

I look forward to looking at how far I have come from where I am now in the future.

I still don’t know what gamergate was and I have no interest in learning. I feel like it would just be a complete waste of time. I think it had something to do with a bunch of nerds being angry a woman was taking games seriously as art and critiquing them as such?

Self-cringe is the cost of personal growth. I am happy to pay it, and I’m glad you do too.

I was never into GG (too old for the target demo I think) but I spent entirely too much time doing the Reddit civility fetish debate bro shit back then.

Yeah, I used to be really into the g*mergate/anti-sjw side of youtube back when I was a teenager. Now I’m a queer neurodivergent communist

I remember seeing a bunch of the discourse around gamers being an ostracized identity that overlapped with nerds as a target for bullying, and sympathizing with this. I also remember thinking “how the hell does this play out by being exclusionary to women who work in the games industry”.

I forgive you.

The cool thing about being wrong is that it means you’re still growing and alive.

We should do a watch of the original Stepford Wives. It’s a really well done horror thriller that’s still pretty damn relevant. Also a good time capsule of the white middle class feminism of the 70s that was often criticized at the time by more intersectional feminisms.

I think Gamergate was what made me, a slightly reactionary “lol those crazy SJWs” type at the time, throw my hands up and say “this is dork shit, who cares”