Another user here mentioned Anita Sarkeesian's Damsel in Distress Tropes videos and since it appears he has not made a thread about it I figured I will and give my personal take on each of her videos where I will defend and even criticize some of her comments and actions. First though, let's get some background on Anita Sarkeesian and the controversy surrounding these videos. Anita Sarkeesian as per her wikipedia profile: Not gonna lie, the things that were said and attempted to be done to Sarkeesian and her personal web pages all because she was making these videos was pretty messed up and really did show just how sick some people are. Although she also admits that it was a small group (more than likely a small group of the same boys/men and possibly even girls/women targeting her repeatedly) in her words in the bolded. I personally missed all the outbursts and craziness when it was happening, I am not a follower Sarkeesian's videos and only heard about her and the controversy surrounding her videos well after they were made. When I looked into the ordeal though I saw plenty of problems on both sides. Clearly some people are sick (*)(*)(*)(*)s and clearly Sarkeesian is an excellent business woman at using emotional appeal to make money, because let's face it, Sarkeesian allowed these comments to make their way to her viewers eyes and she took very few preventative measures to Ok, so you got a little background on these videos so let's start off with the first video, each video is about 20-25 minutes long so bear with me. [video=youtube;X6p5AZp7r_Q]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q[/video] 1. So she starts off talking about Dinosaur Planet where Krystal, a female protagonist, was the hero of the story but then Nintendo turned around and turned her into the object of desire in the game and made Fox the protagonist instead. Ok seems like a good way to start off the video and make her point, however upon further research it is abundantly clear that Sarkeesian completely glossed over this fact: Dinosaur Planet had TWO main playable characters that the player could choose from, a sister, Krystal and a brother, Sabre. Now either she somehow missed this fact in her research or she is intentionally omitting this fact make her point/push her agenda/what-have-you. Dinosaur Planet was not a game that solely surrounded Krystal's story and she was not the only hero. Depending on the preference of the player they could choose either protagonist in this game. http://starfox.wikia.com/wiki/Dinosaur_Planet_(game) 2. So after this beginning Sarkeesian moves onto a short history lesson. Kind of interesting I guess if you didn't already know all of this (which I did so it was a bit boring for me). She goes on to explain how Nintendo started off with this damsel in distress trope in Donkey Kong and moves on to show how the hero (Jumpman) and the damsel (Pauline) were reworked and turned into Mario and Princess Toadstool (a.k.a. Peach). She quickly goes into mentioning how Peach is not a playable character in any of the core Mario games except for one and that the one she is in was originally a whole other game to begin with. I agree, this is rather irritating because by far Peach is one of my most favorite video game characters. She's blonde, cute, and spunky, she's my favorite character in the Mario series and I would love to be able to play a game with her as the protagonist where her super-power is NOT based around her mood swings (because I did play that game, I beat it, and it totally sucked.) 3. So after some more game related history and the mention of some misconceptions Sarkeesian goes on to mention my personal favorite Nintendo series, The Legend of Zelda. (I could seriously fan-gasm about this series all night and day, but I will spare you all. lol ) The Legend of Zelda, or TLoZ, or Zelda series for short, was what got me started on video games in my early years. Back when the Super Nintendo came out and the 3rd Zelda game, A Link to the Past, was released I became hooked on video games at the age of 4 years old. I used to pretend I was Link and would run around my backyard collecting things that would help me save Princess Zelda. Silly maybe, but I feel it's worth noting since the whole point of Sarkeesian's Damsels in Distress Tropes videos is to make people aware of their affects on society and social ideas of women. So again she shows just how prevalent and ingrained this trope is in video games, which it is, but thankfully it is also slowly changing, for example in highly popular PC games like the Elder Scrolls Series; Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim or in MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games); Aion, World of Warcraft, Tera, Everquest 2, etc. the player may design their own character(s) and choose everything from their race (and by race I mean human or a variety of non-human races), their skin color, hair color, body type, and even their own gender (male or female). In Skyrim the player may even get married to anyone, same gender/opposite gender and adopt children if they want to. This is just how much gaming is changing these days and how one may make it the way they want to their own preferences. In the Sims 3 (a game I play all the time) you can do just about anything and you can even install game mods that people create to hone the game even closer to your personal preferences. 4. Sarkeesian jumps around from several games after this but I want to note a very specific and important one she talks about here, Double Dragon (1987). This is important because we will in fact come back to this one in her second video. Ok so I skimmed over a lot in her video, it's a 20 minute long video and she makes lots of points so it's hard to cover it all especially in text format. Overall I think she's making a good point here. Mainly in console games the damsel in distress trope is still highly prevalent, even I have seen this in my years and years of gaming. It's a bit overused and becomes boring to see it all the time but there are plenty of games now that are also moving away from this and I think she's barely scratched the surface of this issue. With $60,000 she'd probably be better off using that to fund a real long term study and write a research paper including her findings on how these tropes really affect social views on women. One thing that we need to remember though too is that the gaming industry and it's corporate heads (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, etc.) are interested in making money. Not only is this entertainment for people but it is money for big businesses and they will continue to use the same or similar formulas to continue generating profits. This trope has not changed overnight and I am sure it will still be prevalent in games for many years to come, but as I already noted in point #3 gaming is in fact changing and we are seeing less and less of this trope especially among PC games.
Other Criticisms and Responses to Sarkeesian's Damsel in Distress Tropes Videos So I saw this response/criticism by KiteTales to Sarkeesian's videos. I think she did a fine job of explaining her perspective on this issue and makes some very good points as well so I want to share her response here. [video=youtube;HJihi5rB_Ek]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJihi5rB_Ek[/video] Another response I found to Sarkeesian's videos is a short article by J.J. McCullough who makes an extremely good argument in noting that while Sarkeesian uses a lot of Japanese video games as examples she completely fails (and I mean completely fails in ALL 3 videos) to mention the CULTURAL views Japan has about women, which when you compare their views on women with those of the US you can clearly tell the western view of women has made some far strides. http://www.filibustercartoons.com/i...ropes-vs-women-episode-1-damsels-in-distress/ There are plenty of other video responses and article responses to Sarkeesian from both sides but I thought these two were probably the best most coherent rebuttals to her first video.
*I notice I didn't finish my thought in the 4th paragraph up in the OP. Sometimes I will jump back and forth in my paragraphs and come back later and finish them especially if they are long. Didn't mean to miss that one, I usually catch all that before I post my stuff. So lemme correct that unfinished thought. lol **I personally missed all the outbursts and craziness when it was happening, I am not a follower of Sarkeesian's videos and only heard about her and the controversy surrounding her videos well after they were made. When I looked into the ordeal though I saw plenty of problems on both sides. Clearly some people are sick (*)(*)(*)(*)s and clearly Sarkeesian is an excellent business woman at using emotional appeal to make money, because let's face it, Sarkeesian allowed these comments to make their way to her viewers eyes and she took very few preventative measures to stop them from popping up. Yet on her Damsels in Distress videos she has disabled all comments disallowing anyone from openly expressing their opinion on her videos (good or bad) which clearly shows she is capable of taking preventative measures to stop potential harassment in it's tracks, yet in this instance she is also equally preventing open discussion about her videos to take place. Coincidence? I think not. --------------------------------------------- Here is a video I found that was posted a couple years ago before Sarkeesian released her DiDT videos. Bob "MovieBob" Chipman succinctly gives his thoughts on the problems with women in video games which is actually what we later saw between Sarkeesian and the mob of angry gamers that attacked her. She is a feminist trying (arguably not very well, imo) to show what is wrong with women in video games. Angry gamers, generally boys/men, respond to this sort of thing as, "You're ruining our FUN!!! Wah!" And after pointing this fact out Bob goes on to explain just exactly what some feminists take issue with when it comes to video games. It's not so much about how women are dressed or how they are used in games, but how they are made to express themselves. He amusingly explains how with male characters they have plenty of unique poses to express who they are and how they behave, but the vast majority of females in games are posed as if they are checking themselves out in a full length mirror when the reality is they are posing for the target audience and game developers are basically saying, and he puts it very well, "We assume most of our audience are teenaged heterosexual boys...so we're not going to even pretend to care about anyone else." lol I recommend watching this one, It's a little over 5 minutes long and is pretty quick and funny. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/the-big-picture/4719-Gender-Games
***One more correction, from my top OP, I thought Sarkeesian had made $60,000 from her kickstarter project but I would like to correct that as she made $150,000. I do think it is important to mention how much she made from her kickstarter project as well because I personally believe she used and perhaps even flamed the fire of the harassment she received as emotional appeal to other feminists to obtain more money for her project. (Is she just a feminist who wants to present the problems in gaming, or genius businesswoman who can turn violent sexual harassment into $$$? lol) --------------------------------------------------- Alright, onto Sarkeesian's Part 2! [video=youtube;toa_vH6xGqs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toa_vH6xGqs[/video] 1. I already have a huge problem with this intro. Sarkeesian basically spams us with nothing BUT clips of horrible things happening to women in games. You can clearly see her bias and her use of emotional fallacy at the very start of this video. We see this all the time in news media. Go ahead and turn on the news and tell me when you're not spammed with horrible images of bad things happening in the world, (maybe every once in a while with what they call a fluff piece?) The purpose of this is to make us feel afraid, helpless, angry or to promote some other agenda through fear-mongering. I am always wary of media outlets that use these kinds of tactics to generate or gain followers/viewers and Sarkeesian is doing just that in the second video of her DiDT video series. All of it is out of context and she goes on to just generalize each of these without giving us any more information about the games she just spammed very short clips of. It's ridiculous and makes for a terrible start to her argument since it's based entirely on emotional fallacy. 2. History time again, "The Woman in the Refrigerator" trope. Interesting and all but again she really just glosses over a lot, over-generalizes all of these games as though they are all the same and doesn't really prove anything but that she is extremely biased and isn't interested in giving us a real researched and factual product. 3. She declares that most of these games are now being designed to brutalize women and trick gamers into thinking their games are becoming more emotionally sophisticated, but really they are just being blatantly misogynistic...and then she decides to drop that thought and not give any real facts or evidence to back herself up. Really, it's just all opinion. *sigh* 4. Bionic Commando (his wife is part of his arm). Yeah, I agree, that is pretty stupid/funny/cheesy, but not really helping her case. Anyhow, so we go on, the hero must then kill her to save her from something horrible. Ok, this one I agree is pretty bad but again she already started this on emotional fallacy and does nothing but consistently take scenes from these games out of context and spam us with them as if that makes her point. I feel like she could have done a better job of presenting these points if she had done a real long term study and presented strong facts on each game. But that sort of thing would take a long time and would have required something more than 3 20-25 minute long videos taking things out of context and over-generalizing. 5. At 18 minutes into the video she already admits there is a very strong argument against her, how if we look at each individual game and it's story arc and how these situations are justified as per how the story dictates it, but then she dismisses this point completely and goes on to give various statistics about real world violence against women but then again completely fails to somehow link this to video games and the tropes within them. Instead she knowingly allows the viewer to remember everything she said and all they saw before (spam clips of violence against female characters) and knows that the viewer will see a correlation. However we must remember that correlation is NOT causation and she still has yet to provide strong evidence proving that video games and the tropes in them somehow perpetuate violence against women and affect social views on women. 6. Sarkeesian draws some random conclusions about what the male protagonists are really feeling after having to kill or seeing their female counterparts killed but again fails to prove it. Sarkeesian, in my opinion, did a very poor job of factually presenting her case in this video and she did herself no favors by starting off with emotional fallacy. She basically pulled one of these when making her videos: She should have done the first thing and yet she turned around and did the second one instead which KiteTales also notes in her own critique of Sarkeesian's videos. Note: Please don't turn this into a religious/non-religious debate. I used that particular comic because it clearly expresses my point, you cannot make conclusions in a Scientific study (which is what she was supposedly doing with her kickstarter program) and then try to find evidence to back it up. It just doesn't make sense and leads to nothing more than a biased and faulty study.
*siiiiggghhh* Well I think I could have made a more coherent response to her videos but I did this on the fly this morning when I woke up at 5 am and couldn't fall back asleep. I remembered a conversation I had with The Amazing Sam's Ego and he mentioned her in his response to me which prompted me to make a thread about these videos. I don't know if I want to review the third video. I only watched her last video one time and if I remember correctly, after viewing several, albeit butthurt/angry responses from gamers, her third video appears to be her own catty response to all their rebuttals. It's kind of stupid really. The 3rd video is when she gets back to point #4 in the first OP where I mentioned the game Double Dragon. In various rebuttal videos people talked about how although the female character in the beginning gets punched in the gut and kidnapped at the end of the game she literally punches one of the antagonists in the dick (thus empowering her against her kidnapper) as you can see illustrated here at about 12 minutes (BEWARE CUSSING): [video=youtube;pOb9fr_waH4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpag e&v=pOb9fr_waH4#t=692[/video] Then they fight for the damsel's affection at the end and you can hear these guys laughing about how silly it is too. They are hardly taking this seriously and know full well this is not reality. Sarkeesian, of course, dismisses this point for some reason or other. I dunno. I love video games, really all kinds of video games and some things about them bother me, obviously the typical female 'trope' who's gonna have huge bouncy boobs and be somehow kicking ass in high heels becomes annoying, but at the same time I also like making all my characters look really feminine, wearing short skirts and other cute outfits. Also I don't mind saving the princess in my games either. I saved her when I was a kid and I still save her now. I don't think I'm the only female gamer who feels like this either. One of the games Sarkeesian talks about is Dragon's Lair as though it's such a horrible atrocity against women, which I find to be extremely hilarious. Now I have actually met Don Bluth (the designer of this game and other films), he lives here in the Valley (Scottsdale, AZ) and hosts plays for his grandkids and their classmates. I went to one once with some school friends who were in the drama club at my high school. He's a really nice guy and from what I have seen in some of his films (Anastasia for example) he is hardly someone you could call a misogynist. Most of his films, with the exception of a few I can think of, depict strong-willed and very capable women. In fact I am positive that the Dragon's Lair depiction of Princess Daphne is done entirely out of satire and poking fun at games that do overuse the damsel in distress trope. [video=youtube;PKuMOoXJe6Y]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKuMOoXJe6Y&oref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube. com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DPKuMOoXJe6Y&has_verified=1[/video] Now who I feel really bad for in these games is the hero because there are so many different ways for him to DIE. Here you go, 7 minutes of death. lol [video=youtube;l464ZF5jK3Y]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l464ZF5jK3Y[/video] Anyhow that's all I really have to say about her videos. If you all want to watch the 3rd one and give your opinions on it feel free. I may be gone for a while though, (painting my dad's rental house for the next two days!) [video=youtube;LjImnqH_KwM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjImnqH_KwM&feature=c4-overview-vl&list=PLn4ob_5_ttEaA_vc8F3fjzE6 2esf9yP61[/video]
She lied. She claimed she's an avid gamer, loves games, being playing them her entire life, etc. However, footage has been released of her at speaking events in the past where she states she doesn't play games, doesn't understand them, etc. The other lie was that she needed the money so she could play the games to research them. However, it's been shown that the footage she uses in her vids comes from other youtube users' vids of their walkthroughts, let's play, etc. Why did she need $150k so she could just steal content from other youtube users and spend a year making vids she could've made in a few days? She stated that Ellie from The Last of Us is a damsel in distress. Never mind that Ellie is a 14 year old girl, but Ellie is the exact opposite of a Damsel in Distress, which Anita would have seen if she had actually played the game for longer than 20 minutes instead of just getting generic footage from youtube. She keeps using games that are almost 20 years old? Why? Because a lot of newer games have much more nuanced stories that they can fit into their 20GB rather than the kilobyes those old games were?
Haha omg please find me a video of this. (No wonder the comments are disabled on those videos. ROFL!) She doesn't want people pointing out her blatant lies. Yes. This, this, this. I found another article online of someone requesting that Anita share an itemized list of the things she used the money for as well. http://readwrite.com/2013/03/19/ani...lease-show-me-the-money#awesm=~ok8dKOp61mZJ6Z At the bottom it shows that Anita gave no comment to the article when requested for one. Figures. Precisely why I mentioned games like The Sims, The Elder Scrolls series and tons of MMOs. These are all extremely popular games, especially among girls and women. I met plenty of women in Aion when I used to play, it was great. I'm personally looking forward to The Elder Scrolls online but I need a way better gaming machine than what I have here. Maybe I should start a kickstarter project to make some easy cash, eh? lol!
She also plans on selling her vids on DVD........I guess in 2040 when she finishes the series. Since she stole footage and doesn't give credit I wonder what the law is on that?
I don't know. All the video game footage is owned by the corporations that make them so it would be up to them whether or not to pursue some legal action against her, although there are plenty of fair use laws for criticism and such.
