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I don't know what exactly is your point with this post. A lot of people presumably went through similar phases that you did, although I doubt anyone had a nearly identical path. I remember GamerGate vividly as well as New Atheism, but I never seriously watched people like Sargon of Akkad or Peter Molyneux. Is your post just to talk about that entire vague blob? Sure, OK, I'll add my 2c.
GamerGate didn't start in 2008-2013. The inciting incident was in 2014, although it's functionally irrelevant other than as a red herring for people to describe what the "movement" was "really about". I'm sure some people were genuinely concerned about ethics in video game reviews, with the reviewers being a little too cozy with the developers and not making that clear. In practice, the movement always really was primarily concerned with feminist/leftist encroachment in video games. Anita Sarkeesian's breakthrough kickstarter in 2012 ought to mentioned alongside that. There were likely smaller events as well, but Anita Sarkeesian was when I first really started noticing the culture war battle lines being drawn. In any case, there was a lot of embarrassment in polite spaces about being seen as "against feminism" in the days of proto-woke, so people liked to pretend GamerGate was about something else, but no, that was never really true in practice. I'm glad we can all just drop the guise and talk about that stuff openly now. It's perfectly valid to push back on the types of cultural changes that Feminists would want, which is mostly redesigning characters so they don't appeal to male sexual preferences, as well as accepting sectarian leftist propaganda as a passive backdrop.
Indeed I'd admit quite shamelessly I don't much care about "ethics in journalism" as much as I do about gatekeeping male hobbies ("core" gaming is still male dominated). There’s a basic principle of cultural reciprocity that seems to go only one way. If it would be unreasonable for me to enter kdrama forums and demand that it pivot toward Bayformers style hyper CGI excess and calibrate to the male gaze, then it’s equally unreasonable to expect male dominated hobby spaces to continually reorient themselves around themes that were never their core appeal.
Different subcultures form around different aesthetic and narrative preferences. Why should I pretend to be fascinated by female empowerment arcs, resistance narratives, or the deconstruction of heteronormativity, as if these tropes haven't been endlessly recycled and widely represented across mainstream media for decades? Personally, the "appeal" around "strong independent women heroes" always felt like artificially imposed social pressure rather than organic interest. Star Wars was also a fundamentally boys' IP, and feminists/woke activists seek to rewrite that. Boys loved Star Wars because it centred on what boys disproportionately enjoy: spacefaring civilisation, starcrafts, galactic battles, trench runs, lightsaber combats, training hierarchies, rivalry, sacrifice, and a classical male hero growing into responsibility and status. The latter part is being treated as a cardinal sin now.
Call it contrarian instinct, but I deliberately steer clear of works that centre on what have become fashionable ideological tropes, regardless of how critically acclaimed or “well executed” they may be. I would rather watch a badly choreographed, mid budget action film unapologetically featuring charismatic leads and glamorous, attractive women for 12 hours than engage with prestige projects framed as culturally virtuous “queer literature”. Like, I do not care how technically refined Brokeback Mountain may be or what stellar performances the leads put on or how many awards it won, it simply does not align with the thematic and narrative sensibilities I personally value.
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Did the Fable guy had some venture into the culture war I'm not aware of, or are you guys talking about Stefan?
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