Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/21/funny-article-about-gamers-enraged-by-everything-except-layoffs.html
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Youtuber Lil Bill had a rant about this…
He very much was a samurai, BTW…
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It is funny, but we always have to bear in mind that the silly concerns of these man-babies have been used as gateways to the manosphere and white supremacy since Gamergate. The driving force behind their whinging of these schmoes is the same one that’s the common factor in those who go MAGAt: a perceived loss of power based on skin and gender privilege.
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Like - it’s a fictional game series? I am sure they are not 100% historically accurate - but they never have been - who cares? No one made retractable wrist blades like that either. Even if the character was made up whole cloth - so?
No one seemed to burst a blood vessel when Tom Cruise played a white samurai.
Or of this masterpiece anime series. Pretty much everyone thought it was cool as fuck.
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This chocolate milk video?
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Yasuke was a real person who was in service to Nobununga…
In fact, Lil Bill covers just that point.
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Yeah that’s referenced, I think, in the article.
First there was a game journalist I’d never heard of until they wrote a couple articles that someone on Reddit said I wouldn’t like. They’ve done more damage to the industry than any corporate executive ever could! Before that journalist popped into existence fully-formed, games were all Aryan men and robot women with genetically enhanced vagina bones. Now look at games! Do we really need more games like Baldur’s Gate 3?
The paragraph right after that is … chef’s kiss
Let’s stop talking about the journalist because a squirrel ran by my window and I forgot what was making me type so hard. I just asked the guys and they told me we’re now mad at Trench Crusade. I’d never heard of it before yesterday, but hoo boy am I really mad at it now! Trench Crusade is the worst! After learning that Warhammer 40K was going to add women to the Custodes - and Googling what a “Custode” was - I was very upset and hurt. If Games Workshop wants to destroy the lore of a game I only had a passing familiarity with and still don’t understand, that’s on them!
I’m convinced that most of the people complaining the loudest about this stuff were not fans of the IP in question. Someone just told them it went woke, and then they Google just enough about it to think they can pass as actual fans of the IP. It really skews things to the media, who often can’t be bothered to consider that possibility, and they start writing articles about how the fans are all upset at that IP going woke.
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Yeah, and like other historic people featured in video games, they existed, but the story in the game is usually largely fictional/exaggerated/speculative. And that’s ok.
There is a miserable type of person who looks at any new media through a lens that if it isn’t a straight white male, it’s bad. You can’t even be a straight white woman character, because you won’t be sexualized enough, making it “woke”.
It is a dark, depressing, sad and exhausting existence making everyone else who is around them miserable as well because they are such insufferable twits.
Angry boys crying on the internet that their digital avatar or plastic miniature doesn’t perfectly perform their power fantasies. 
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Well yeah… but they’re pissed off that a person who really existed is in the game at all… because it reminds them that they’re not the only people who matter.
Pretty much sums it up. 
Probably not…
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That article was hilarious. Sadly the link behind “suboptimal vagina bones” was dead. Like I really want to know where that gem was mined from b/c holy shit.
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Wait, so Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t actually have a side gig as a Q-like gadget maker for a secret global cabal of assassins?
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Side gig? The dude had to get sued so he would finish the work he was already paid for for his main gig.
OH wait, maybe that is why he took for ever to deliver his paintings…
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I thought it interesting that Blackthorn is never mentioned by the angry guys. At first you think it’s telling, in that they’re not nitpicking the true-history samurai stuff when the guy is white. But then you realize that they haven’t even seen it, don’t even know about it. That whole tier of angry gamer guy simply isn’t anywhere near normal-people culture. It’s almost sad when you think about it, because they’ll be tickled pink when they find out about him
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Oof, this is highly accurate. I avoid angry Gamer internet like the plague, but I get exposed via the social media comments on developers I follow, who are mostly women of color. The responses are extra unhinged, but you can tell the commenters think they’re being Very Reasonable, and one can glean some information about what’s upsetting them. I can chart new invented “controversies” just based on how mild the comment that sets off the chuds, and when accounts I follow suddenly go dark, I know the chuds have organized a new harassment campaign.
The only thing I’d take issue with is that Gamers aren’t unconcerned about layoffs, they’re gleeful. Usually the stated reason is because the developers are “woke” (or the executives are, somehow), or because of anger over how they “ruined” a particular game - that they either never played, or played for 5000 hours, but they’re still upset about how one element got rebalanced at one point. But in general there’s really nothing that Gamers hate as much as game developers (with a few cis het white male exceptions). It’s weird to work in an industry where death threats are the norm, even if you’re not doing something they don’t like ideologically. Controversial filmmakers might get death threats from people who will never see their movies, but game developers get them even from their “fans.” (Unless you make “woke” games, which becomes a great filter for keeping the Gamers out of the fanbase… assuming they recognize the game as such.)
I made some effort to interrogate a Gamer Goater or two at the time, and I learned that they were motivated exactly as they appeared to be, without much effort. It literally went like:
Me: “This movement is motivated by misogyny.”
Germer Goater: “No, it’s not! It’s motivated by ethics in gaming journalism!”
[a couple questions later]
Gamer Tainter: “…and we’re upset about women having disproportionate influence in the game industry.”
Me:“But half of all gamers are girls/women, and for certain genres, more than half are. Yet women still make up a quite small minority of game developers and journalists, and an even smaller percentage of game industry executives. So if you’re upset about ‘disproportionate influence,’ you’re going to start being mad about men getting too much power instead, right?”
Germer Goater: “…”
This new stuff is Gamer Taint 2.0, except that while the first one was about misogyny and became a gateway to general right-wing issues, this one is about racism and misogyny from the get-go.
Looks at the character in question, who could be a super-model. Is it about her unexposed breasts and lack of sexy pose? That seems to set off the chuds. Gods forbid a female character isn’t super-sexualized. I can’t even imagine someone making a game with a female character that isn’t conventionally good looking - the howls of horror from Gamers would be deafening…
I think it’s a reference to much-mocked post complaining that a new iteration of Link had “vagina bones,” referring to his visible hip bones. (Because apparently only women are supposed to be thin enough to ever have visible hips?) Yeah, they are that stupid.
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Something tells me the gamers making these complaints don’t have a very thorough understanding of the female anatomy. Imagine how inept they’d be if a woman actually let one of them into her bed. “Hey baby, you like it when I stroke your vagina bones?”
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As a straight, pasty-white man myself, I’ve never been able to understand these people. Variety is fun and interesting!
“Insufferable twits” is a pretty good description of this type of an ass.
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Do people not use the word “pelvis” anymore, or is that just an incel thing?
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You assume they know what a pelvis is… or a vagina.
Or a bone.
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Part of the whole incel thing is profound and malignant ignorance of women’s anatomy.
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