The Ultimate Litmus Test for...

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BREAKING NEWS: Long-time rivals in geek culture satire Hard Drive and Point & Clickbait have proven it's easy to poke fun at [SPOILER].

Okay, seriously, am I allowed to actually mention the name of the online movement that spawned this meme?

i guess i don't get it. a bunch of online trolls using some avatar as a virtual piñata?

Alright, against my better judgment, I'd like to ask someone to mention my questionnaire on Reddit because I think that Wrong Planet just isn't active enough anymore. I'd do it myself, but I've had too many bad experiences scrolling through threads there to fully trust that website. I just want to add that I doubt my project can fix all the problems with gaming's fandom, but maybe it could be a springboard that gamers can use to avoid nasty mental pitfalls.

"Greetings, gamers! I've been busy supporting my favorite porn artists from anti-communist countries like Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan, because as we all should know by now, that's one of the most important things anyone can do given what's happened to our global economy, no matter how many unenlightened people claim it's anti-asexual, blasphemous, incestuous, pedophilic, racist, transmisogynistic or zoophilic... but enough about me. Soon enough, we will make sure we're the only people who get the final word on what the international video game industry does, because we alone had always been its only good, pure, right and true demographic. Let's keep up the hard work, my fellow national anarchists! By the way, anyone who questions the intentions of police officers or members of the armed forces can go DIE IN A FIRE."

It's much more complicated than that. From what I've gathered, a good number of geeks have used that character as a piñata stick as they overreacted to some obscure yet egocentric radfems and their narrow-minded apologists since a video game controversy happened all the way back in the middle of 2014. Some of them were bullied for questioning the competence of those cultural critics, so they figured that the best way to counter all the pinkwashing and purplewashing was to forge alliances with far-right cyberbullies, and now we have a bunch of people thinking that all Japanese video games are "edgy" and only exist to help reinforce Western conservative culture. These gamers (some of whom seemed too new to the fandom to truly appreciate it or to properly react to critics) often seem ignorant of important historical trends in the US, arguably the biggest market for video games, like how stuffy conservatives tended to be the biggest worrywarts when it came to video games affecting potential consumers barely a few years before, or how a good number of shooters featured Nazis as the antagonists. It would be one thing if all this arguing came and went, but the flame war has spread throughout the entire world, and there are still plenty of bad people on both sides. I started this thread because I wanted to analyze what both parties really wanted from video games and other pop culture artifacts.

Yeah, I didn't expect my list of questions to get this long, but I'm still hoping that people reading it take as much time as they need so they can answer as many questions as they can.

The best I can figure is that there's just something about US culture (or the UK culture that inspired it) that normalizes violence but discourages sex; it might have to do with living in a country where the majority of the population is Protestant, but I doubt that explains everything. On a side note, the exact opposite problem seems to be commonplace in other countries, like France, Germany and Japan, though I'm not worldly wise enough to understand why this is so.

It's extremely complicated, but to sum it up for an outsider, there are two groups of gamers in the Western world that want total control over the themes presented in video games and how they're all meant to be interpreted. I only wanted to highlight the agendas of both sides.

No, I was honestly hoping for people to answer every question to the best of their ability, no matter how many sittings it takes.

Actually, it's about... whatever you want it to be about, but I argue it's about assessing political extremism within the video game community.

In my pitiful attempt at satirizing porn-addicted incels, I neglected to mention other fetishes that might degrade their subjects, like feederism and necrophilia. Feel free to mention some other questionable kinks if you wish.

I'd like to congratulate no one for explicitly guessing that I was talking about etagremaG# this whole time. I wanted to show off what I've learned from this gigantic mess just because I'm tired of all this pointless arguing between geeks that's been happening around the world. I've been told that there's a Japanese counterpart to this debacle that occurred after the creator of 2channel did some questionable things with his fans' personal data a few years ago. Also, South Korea had to deal with TWO incidents that were a lot like the one I was uncomfortable mentioning by name; one controversy had to deal with a voice actress wearing a radfem organization's shirt at work, while the other controversy revolved around the Chinese government forcing a South Korean game about anthropomorphic guns to delete a character that was created by a radfem, even though the designer's ideology wasn't reflected in the character's appearance.

We live in a truly unfair world where people who try to make the world less miserable either die young or sell out to authoritarians. Now that the zeitgeist of the early years of the internet has ended, it seems the only way to influence society is to do something to make it much worse than before, and such an abrupt change wouldn't even be original to the relatively few worldly-wise people who bother paying attention to what's happening these days. I now know that pop culture has had several issues that I once ignored because of my privilege and lack of experience, but all these overreactions to controversies have gotten out of hand. If I can't make things more like I thought they used to be, but with a greater sense of self-awareness, I'd still like to assess social trends within geek culture that won't be leaving us anytime soon, if only because I want to reach out to others who've become so burnt out from all this pseudo-intellectual partisanship. Before I go, I want to leave you all with a few more questions I have about certain video game culture enthusiasts, because as obnoxious as pseudo-progressives are, I think we also need to spend some time critiquing the other side's behavior:

Am I the only one that thinks it's ironic that a bunch of elitist gamers who claim to be obsessed with freedom of expression seemed to have ripped off a "modest proposal" from Jack Thompson? Also, ain't it weird that some hardcore gamers wanted to cancel a Wolfenstein sequel, even though they begrudged an indie developer for trying to cancel some rival company's indie game with that generic-looking redheaded character? Speaking of which, if that female mascot is meant to be respected at all times, why is it often used by people who celebrate when women in real life are degraded? Are these anti-SJW cultists more like SWERFs who shame non-virgins to the point of censoring healthy forms of self-expression, or are they more like NAMBLA members who shame virgins to the point of enabling abusers? If it's the former, is the opposition supposedly making women hate androphilia to spite men, or is their agenda somehow about promoting androphilia to distract men? If it's wrong to act like people who label potential critics as elderly white male neocons, how is it any better to conflate communists, feminists and Muslims, especially when there's plenty of evidence that these three groups have been butting heads for decades? Is this group meant for non-ironic animé Nazis that are secretly anti-Western, or are they just personal computer addicts that are actually triggered by weeaboos? Lastly, is it just me, or did the rise of Discordianism foreshadow how the internet would inevitably go down the drain?