Censorship? There is no censorship!

Well Sander, again I tell you that if you believe male characters are never completely stripped of agency in multitude of works, then you need to read more books, movies, etc. much more. Here, a list of examples in a form Anita Sarkeesian would understand then immediately ignore in her video:
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DistressedDude.
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DamselOutOfDistress?from=Main.BadassDamsel
Yes character are treated differently according to gender, and it sucks. But here is the thing Sarkeesian ignores, this also affects men negatively. Have you ever heard of the disposable gender? Male death is usually seen as less powerfull. Anita Sarkeesian is not making any real in depth analysis or critique of literature or narrative archetypes and their reflection of the culture, she is cherrypicking instances of women getting victimized and treating it like it only happens to them and offering no real deep argument. I can point out that Colombian characters are usually drug lords and mules in stories, o what? Those exist, they are actually a problem, in fact some of my beloved compatriots in other countries just love to put out name down, I can bitch about the drug mule and durg lord shit for ages, but I am not offering anything of value or any meaty discussion, I am just whining.

NPCs are by virtue non important background tools, Oh the female got dissempowered in a mission where a dude kills a woman? guess what? there is probably a mission where a male character also gets killed as background, in that case it will probably played as a lesser tragedy too. You know conflict and violence are usually very important elements of a lot of settings, or do you want to have a Serial Killer mission where he just trips over his feet and doesn't kill anybody? Or worse yet, are you implying we can never EVER show anything bad happen to women? Would it be better if that particular mission only had male victims? can't we never show a misogynist character at all even if the work condemns them? Maybe have a version of Gotham with only petty crime with no shocking elements? Are you objecting against the idea of conflict in a story? Because the problem with Sarkeesian types is that they distort discussion into bitching about any form of conflict in a story because a woman happened to get caught in the crosshair.
 
Once again, Walpknut, I am not contending that damseling of male characters never happens, nor is Sarkeesian. The argument is that it happens far more frequently to female than to male characters. That's all. And yes, Sarkeesian's analysis is very basic and surface-level -- she's not trying to create an in-depth critique, after all, but a popular video series that serves as a kind of introduction to these arguments.

Sarkeesian does not talk about the ways in which gendered character treatment disadvantages male representation in games because that was not the subject of her previous videos. Female characters being treated poorly does not imply that this does not happen to male characters. But you should be happy to know that she will talk about some of the ways in which male characters and masculinity are treated poorly in an upcoming series.

As for your point about the serial killer, the point is how often this happens. It's about frequency and the ways in which games use these tropes. Why do you keep trying to misrepresent her and my position as implying that this should never happen and we can only have certain representations? I have now explicitly stated that this is not my nor her argument in each of the past three posts I've made. She states it in at least one video, too (and I think in all of them). The argument is not "this can never happen." It's "this happens far too frequently." Those are different arguments.
 
Anita Sakreesian offers shallow observations and dishonest manipulation of facts. That to me is like the epitome of garbage pop critique. And she doesn't want to make an introduction to people and the discussion, her very demeanor is geared towards her having a moral higher ground and calling people and things she doesn't like "gross". Hell she will often instruct people to literally not watch things and just take her word on it as fact. Her tweets are usually also simplistic whining like in the example on Dying Light. Hell her series is called "Tropes Vs Women" which not only shows her lack of understanding on what a trope is, but it also sets the stage tropes being this IBOL thing that seek to diminish women. And before you say that that's not her intention, the word trope has now become the prefered word used by people when expressing their disgust at the fate of a female character, because they don't even look to have a basis in actual narrative semiotic, they just stick trope to the end of a phrase. Again my Semiology teacher would probably weep to herself seeing that level of butchering to the term.

How often do males get killed off in AssCreed? I don't know if you know, but that game's premise is literally killing dudes, a lot of the times it's killing generic dudes or guards doing their job, a lot of those times is also killing them before they even realize they are being killed. Do people bitch about getting dis-empowered because a punch clock guard gets killed just doing his job without being able to put up a fight? Some of those guards would realistically not just be evil background but they would have families hopes and dreams of their own, do we need to give every single guard and generic drunkard npc a backstory? Men are usually the preferred gender for the faceless unimportant mooks of the villain that only exist there to get killed, so as far as "dis-empowerment" goes I'll say it's pretty even in that respect.
 
Is it even possible to create stories without tropes? I mean seriously. Almost every story falls back on those. And that for a reason. Just saying.
 
Precisely, Narrative Tropes are tools, important tools, even when you decide to subvert one you are still using the trope as a tool for your story.
 
Though if we agree on that part you also have at least somewhat to agree that certain tropes are overrepresented, this is true for male and female roles. I won't even go into sexism, but if I am honest I am somewhat bored lately by a lot of stories and games. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Tropes are tools, but they can become pretty old and sometimes they even feel completely uneeded, you know like females wearing armored thongs ...

I am really missing more complexity in general. Or lets say not even so much complexity but motivation. Particularly when it comes to villains or role playing games. I have yet to find a role playing game or a game in general that really allows you to play a villain, not any villain, but the villain you chose to play. Or beeing good having serious consequences.
 
Is not the trope becoming tired, is the usage of it becoming tired, tropes are patterns, images and expectations build upon a common lexicon by a culture, they exist everywhere, they are always present even when you are actively avoiding them. When a pattern, image or idea grows in frequency a new trope is born. They are neutral non sentient.
I am also bored by a lot of archetypes and narrative tropes, I too do find the chainmail bikini to be rather tacky and usually the sign of a work being kind of dumb. But it can be used properly like in Kill la Kill and others. Same way a woman getting kidnapped can be used in a story to actually elevate the importance of the kidnapped character as much as it can just be a lazy way of establishing a simple conflict. Saving the world is a trite and almost childish set up for a story, and some stories even manage to make them Work (Like 20th Century Boys).

The same way a work can exist simply to titlate, and that is not a bad thing, I would just probably not read it unless I am in the mood for some self abuse, even when I don't like those panty shots galore fighting shows, I wouldn't try to take them out of them, same way I wouldn't try to prevent a woman from reading an erotic novel.
 
Yes, male characters are also treated poorly in specific ways -- but in different ways from those of women, which is why that's not the subject of her videos so far, although she has made a few small comments about the way male characters are treated. Her complaining about the treatment of female characters does not imply she thinks the treatment of male characters is just fine. And she will discuss the treatment of male characters and masculinity an upcoming series. You should be happy about that, right?

However, and this is important, male characters are also often heroes, are also often given agency, and in far greater frequency than are female characters. So while the indiscriminate slaughter of faceless male henchmen is a fairly messed-up treatment of specifically male characters, it is at least counterbalanced by the fact that the slaughtering is often done by male characters who have agency. This is more balanced than what we see with female characters. It should also be noted that she explicitly and repeatedly states that these tropes are not inherently terrible, but that they are used too often and that that overuse and the gender imbalance is the problem. Perhaps her presentation on that subject is not ideal, but that and your tone arguments are pretty damn weak criticisms and don't, in my opinion, warrant the kinds of reactions she engenders.

As for your other criticisms, you really should stop watching Thunderf00t's videos (or those of her other YouTube "critics") -- they tend to consistently misrepresents Sarkeesian's arguments and presentations, especially Thunderf00t. For instance, "shewill often instruct people to literally not watch things" is a particularly dishonest representation of what Sarkeesian does. There is one instance where she advises viewers not to watch a music video she's critiquing, because she found it very distressing to watch -- not because she doesn't want people to form their own opinions, but because she wants to warn them about distressing content. This is not "often instruct[ing] people to literally not watch things." In fact, she does no such thing in her video game criticism so far (but I wouldn't be bothered by her warning people of distressing content).

Similarly, I've found no real instances of "dishonest manipulation of facts" in her videos. The example everyone seems to parrot is of Hitman: Absolution's stripper level, where she supposedly misrepresents it by saying the killing of strippers is incentivized when there's actually a score hit for doing so. Thus it cannot be incentivized, or so the argument goes. Leave aside the fact that you can avoid this score hit by hiding the body and aside from the fact that she doesn't even mention Hitman: Absolution explicitly, only using it as background footage for a small part of this segment. She simply explains why she says this in the preceding two minutes, which Thunderf00t and everyone else conveniently ignore: she argues that games are designed to be explored, and the boundaries tested by the mechanics the developers set up. As she says, "the play comes from figuring out the boundaries and possibilities within the gamespace." You can watch that segment starting here, by the way.

Now you can certainly disagree with her argument that that is a form of incentivizing. But that is not a "dishonest manipulation of facts": it is her presenting an argument you may or may not disagree with.

It's fairly telling that the only example people seem to know is that Hitman: Absolution bit when there are hours of her video game criticism to go through. And even that one example is misrepresented by those critics. If that's the sum total of her "dishonest manipulation of facts" (and I'll note that you yourself have not given a single example of her doing so) then that's an incredibly weak blow to her overall argument.

Is her games criticism a little shallow? Sure. Is the trope-based analysis ideal? Probably not. Does she sometimes make mistakes? Probably. She's not perfect. Does this make her a "dumb intellectually dishonest hack that gives feminism a bad name," as you put it? No.


Note that Sarkeesian would fully agree with your last two posts. She does not argue that tropes are inherently bad, she explicitly notes that they are tools, just that they are overused and applied badly. That's all.
 
Who the fuck is Thunderf00t? And why do you assume I watch him? Strawmanning much?

She claimed that Star Fox Adventures was intitially about Crystal as the main character and she was replaced by Fox McCloud because she is a woman. When in reality the one who got replaced was the original MALE FOX character that was the actual protagonist of dinosaur planet, Crystal was always a side character, in fact she was the only one that survived the retool. So what actually happened there was an original character squashed in favor of brand recognition on the side of Rare and Nintendo. She also conventionaly forgets about counter points with same game in favor of framing specific examples as only happening to women to make them seem more offensive and agressive they actually are.
 
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Because your arguments bear more than a passing resemblance to his, and he's probably Sarkeesian's most-watched critic. Perhaps that's a coincidence and you came to these same criticisms yourself, or perhaps you absorbed those criticism elsewhere (he's certainly not the only one making those points).

But maybe you'd like to address the actual arguments I make?
 
Sorry but you are literally trying to pass off outright lying as an acceptable practice by a so called critic. Only thing you use to counter my arguments is that you heard them from another person and because "that's not her intention" that they are weak. Framing of an element to ignore sections of it is a manipulation of the facts.
 
I'm trying to explain why I think what she does is not lying, at least in the example of Hitman: Absolution. What part of my argument do you disagree with?

You've yet to actually present an example of her lying, by the way. This is the example I explained because that's the one people often bring up, but if you have another one please go for it.
 
I edited my previous post as you were replying to it.
She literaly lied about dinosaur planet's origins, saying that it was originally "Crystal's story" when i nreality the main character of that game was a male fox, who then got replaced by Fox McCloud. Two explanations for that, either she was willfully lying and expecting none of her viewers to bother researching, or she didn't put any effort in researching an example she is using, which makes you wonder why the fuck did she ask for money for research if she is gonna do such a sloppy job? She also claims to have been a gamer her whole life while older videos show her denying liking games. Which, makes one of those two things LYING.
Also she constantly equates "appealing to male" with bad, so she obviously has a huge bias.

And I disagree with the part where you say that manipulating facts and framing to make things seem more offensive is not lying. That's like the definition of crocked journalism.
 
Sorry, I didn't see the edit before.

Sarkeesian notes that Krystal is "one of two playable protagonists," which is correct. Your contention that the main character was a male fox is not -- he was one of two main characters. Her point was that Nintendo turned her from a playable character into a damsel in distress, which (not having played the game) is also correct as far as I can tell. That is not lying, nor is it not putting efffort in research.

Walpknut said:
She also claims to have been a gamer her whole life while older videos show her denying liking games. Which, makes one of those two things LYING.
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This is not true. There's a single video (not multiple) where she says that she's "not a fan of video games." Note that she does not say she doesn't play them, nor does she say she's never played them. And she was making that statement in the context of specifically violent video games that dominated gaming (and still do) that don't appeal to her: "I would love to play video games, but I don't want to go around shooting people and ripping off their heads, it's just gross." And all of this was, of course, part of a situation where she was speaking off the top of her head -- a situation where people often misspeak. There's also a picture of her playing games as a child (from here). There are plenty of pictures of her with a massive video game collection, and she has a history of talking about video games as well.

So, perhaps she doesn't consider herself a "fan" but does consider herself a gamer. Perhaps she misspoke. Perhaps she has played games her whole life but doesn't like most of the games on offer. Instead of trying to figure out whether there's a reasonable explanation, though, you just call her a liar.

This kind of critique is part of a common demonizing of Sarkeesian as anything other than simply a cultural critique. Those critiques work to create excuses not to take her seriously -- like the accusations that she's a con artist, or that she doesn't believe what she presents. She talked about that at XOXO festival, and addresses your specific complaint in that video. And none of that is relevant to her critique: whether or not she's been a gamer forever does not matter to the content of what she says. Nor does whether or not she believes it. Nor do any of those other conspiracy theories.
Walpknut said:
Also she constantly equates "appealing to male" with bad, so she obviously has a huge bias.
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This is once again misrepresenting her statements. While she talks about female characters being designed to appeal to male viewers, this is in the context of a common feminist critique of cultural products: that female characters are designed for the benefit and titillation of (heterosexual) male consumers, and never to appeal to female consumers. The point is not that appealing to male consumers is inherently bad, it's that it happens to the exclusion of appealing to female consumers and that appealing to male consumers often means objectifying female characters. She probably doesn't state these things outright (although she might), but that would be because these are incredibly basic feminist points that have been around for at least a century.

Walpknut said:
And I disagree with the part where you say that manipulating facts and framing to make things seem more offensive is not lying. That's like the definition of crocked journalism.
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I do not believe she is manipulating facts and "framing to make things seem more offensive." What she is doing is showing examples of specific tropes. She is not presenting fully contextualized examinations of games, but rather a large amount of different examples. Because her points are not about the full context of specific games, but about the overall frequency and use of these tropes in video games. And she does all this explicitly: there is no deception involved.

I don't want to be an asshole, but I'm going to be now. You have over the past two pages consistently misrepresented her views, misrepresented her arguments, misrepresented my arguments and made factually incorrect statements about what she says, and about the games she critiques. And yet you are the one accusing her of intellectual dishonesty.
 
Krystal is playable in SatrFox Adventures, altho only for a small portion of the game, you would know this if, well, you had actually play it.
The main character was always Sabre the fox (Before that the main character was one of Rare's furry characters Timber the tiger), with Krystal havign a supporting role and occasional playable segments. You know, like in the finalized game. You know how long getting that information took me? 5 minutes. and I did it for free. She also failed to mention Saber the fox at all.

She does equate "appealing to men" with bad. She also seems to believe that a mangled corpse with a dress on in Bioshock is a sexualized corpse despite being presented in a rather gruesome way. She also says that porn ads on torrent tracker are trying to discriminate women, this ignoring the fact that porn ads is all torrent trackers can get because of the nubolous legality of them. Says that men singing romance songs is demeaning among other things.

She also states that Bayonetta's only character traits is that she is a single mother, which is so hilariously wrong she had to be putting effort into getting it so wrong, she seems to think that because Bayonetta is a sexual character that means she is nothing more than that, and that she was made by men to pleasure themselves (psst, Bayonetta was designed by a woman and the character is rather strong, independent and dominant)

"She is not presenting fully contextualized examinations of games, but rather a large amount of different examples."
So she is manipulating facts and framing to get a reaction by trying to make it more offensive. Which is dishonest, and by extension lying. That's like saying "Oh I didn't steal it, I just borrowed it". If I go and take one of your phrases out of context and plaster it on twitter and people get offended and call you names then I wouldn't be lying or manipulating according to you. Is funny how unethical things can be rendered innocent by wording.
Man that's some rather impressive mental acrobatics.

Well I am tried of this. have fun defending crooked journalists and shallow "activists" spreading misinformation that actually hurt the movement, while straw maning the opposition. This is what people deserve anyway.
 
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I'm not even going to touch those misrepresentations of her statements. None of them correspond to what she's actually said, in the contexts of which she's said those things. I would advise you to approach her critiques with less of an adversarial stance, because you are taking the worst possible interpretation of tiny fragments of her entire critiques and often misrepresenting her actual, contextualized arguments in the process. This is not a particularly useful way of approaching anyone's arguments, and it's particularly galling that you do that and then accuse her of being dishonest.

I do want to (again) address your final point. Her argument is that specific tropes are overused. She shows this by showing a lot of examples of games using those tropes. And you think this is "manipulating facts" because she doesn't also show other things in those games. How else do you think people show frequency of use of aspects of cultural products? Her point was never "these specific games are horrible because of this" but "these specific elements are used far too frequently in games as a whole." Adding extra context and saying "but these games also do xxxx" does nothing to change the fact that those tropes are still present in those games, which is her only point.

Your argument would carry weight if she was attacking specific games in their entirety for being sexist. That would require a full contextualization. But she doesn't: every single video contains a statement to the effect that she's only critiquing specific elements, and that this does not mean those games are bad or not enjoyable or worthless.

EDIT: Re: Star Fox Adventures, please read the 2001 IGN preview I linked above. It states that in the original game (as it existed when they previewed it when it was still called Dinosaur Planet), Krystal was a fully playable character, not a supporting character. She was one of two equal protagonists, and you could switch between them by approaching a "giant rock monster." While Sarkeesian does not call Sabre by name, she does note that Krystal is one of two playable characters. And everything she says is confirmed by that IGN preview. You are factually wrong, here. As you have been, consistently, over the past two pages.

EDIT 2: None of that is to say that I think she's perfect and none of her critiques are off base. I certainly think much of her critique is fairly shallow, and her argument would be more useful if she were more analytic and offered more solutions or alternatives, rather than primarily listing the ways in which these tropes are abused -- that's also necessary, but it lacks some depth. I am also sure she got a few examples wrong or iffy -- that's almost inevitable when you produce that much footage. I can agree with much of Kristin Bezio's criticism of her videos (there are six articles by Bezio on Sarkeesian on that site -- they're pretty good reading).

The point is that none of this makes her a liar, or dishonest, or a dumb hack.
 
I'm reminded of the fanboy panel at the inaugural Escapist Expo, where the panelists spent an hour explaining and philosophizing about what constitutes a fanboy versus a fan.

Anyone should be able to see why I'm reminded of that.
 
Yeah, vats. Because that ended so well before. It won't spawn another exactly the same topic saying 'Ha! So there is censorship!' or whatever. No, sir.

Here's some advice: read this, have a laugh at how deliciously dreadful it is, understand that this topic has absolutely no way of being dumber and by that understand how irrelevant and meaningless it is.

Transcendence through exposure to hardcore bullshit is the lesson for today.
 
What gets me is that people get so rilled up at his Anita gal, for little reason as I see it. I mean, sure, I watched some of her videos and several of her statements are contentious at best, ill-researched at worst. While she sometimes raises good questions about how some games and gamers treat women, just as often I found that she just stirs up the controversy pot for no real reason (the Bayonetta thing being a prime example, if there ever was a strong female character it's her for pete's sake).

The thing is, let's not act if this shit is new to Youtube. If I threw a hissy fit everytime someone made a video that I didn't like and/or inserted faulty research in them, I'd probably drink myself to death within a week. If you don't like it, don't watch it, problem freaking solved. Endlessly bitching about it like some people do only gives the videos they don't like publicity, which means views, which means $ for the creator, which means more videos. So you know, just stop talking about it if it offends you so much. The world won't end because some women has the gall (the gall, I say!) to put shit you dislike on Youtube.
 
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