I've learned more about Quinn in the last year than is probably healthy, and while I'm nowhere near the point of doing to her what I did to Wu, I'm reasonably sure I have a grasp of what actually happened to lead us to this point now, so strap yourselves in for a longpost, boyos, because crazy uncle Jaimas has some stories to tell.
Pull up a chair, grab some appropriate music, and I'll try to keep this one under seventeen pages.
To understand how we got here with Zoe, you need to understand how we got here with Anita, because the two are fundamentally connected.
Anita and Zoe have fundamentally different reasons for what they do; Anita does her shit because she's a TRUE AND HONEST believer of Bell Hooks, with making a business out of her shit a secondary goal. How much of that is true and how much is just what she publicly believes is a matter of conjecture and, ultimately, irrelevant. Zoe does it because she wants power and influence, with any social benefit a very distant secondary. Both Zoe and Anita are, in turn, surrounded by multiple circles of secondary Autists who all have their own agendas, and all of whom believe in a confusing mishmash of communist ideology, progressive demagoguery, and gender and racial identity politics. Broadly speaking they're united in that they're all hard-left and all want power, albeit for wildly differing reasons.
To give two examples: Zoe and Anita both worked with Katherine Cross, who, until relatively recently, had major clout within transgendered identity circles. Cross being around led to the involvement of numerous other troons who could be counted on to support the upper crust, who, in turn, led to more. On other fronts, Quinn was also an IRL friend of Lindsay Ellis, which led to Team Nostalgia chick bringing a bit of the culture war to a site that by all accounts, wanted nothing to fucking do with it. What this leads to is a fucking spidernest of conflicting ideologies with Anita and Zoe at the center of it all.
All of the various sub-groups connected to Zoe and Anita had different reasons for pursuing the goal of forcing progressivism and identity politics into gaming - Anita did so because she's an ideological nutjob who legitimately believes that she's doing the right thing. People like Wu and Zoe got involved because they're cultural hegemonists. Others, like the various troon groups, saw this as a way to force what they saw as positive change to an industry, and still others (thinking of you Danny boy) did so because it was the only way that they were going to get to touch some girldick. The only problem: Gaming was having none of this shit. Gaming is extremely meritocratic (git gud or git gone, son) and has literally never cared about race or gender as long as characters are well-written,
so the usual identity politics arguments used to open the proverbial door and get a foothold just weren't working.
This was why Anita was pushed as hard as she was, she was intended to help push further in as part of a broader cultural fight. What most fail to understand about Zoe, however, is that she was
always working with Anita, albeit never in an official capacity. We know this because mutual friends and associates of both wouldn't shut the fuck up about it (let us take a moment to once more be thankful that these people are
fucking incompetent). If you'd prefer to, however,
you can prove it even more conclusively from the fact that Feminist Frequency was paying Quinn's little clique directly.
All of that leads to Quinn and why everyone and their grandmother dropped their shit to defend her when GG happened. Because they were only loosely connected, when Zoe got outed by Eron, the response was a confused and disorganized bit of stupid that inadvertently revealed far more than they ever hoped it would. Zoe had ties, after all, to dozens of different groups, as established. This led to the surreal situation where journalists who palled around with Anita previously and attempted to bill her as a some kind of monster gamers created (and not an Astroturfed Jack Thompson with a vag) were the same ones who went full Autism nuclear war defending one of their IRL friends.
In the end, what we can take home from this is that Quinn lasting as long as she has and being as endemic as she is has nothing to do with luck; it's because she knows how to manipulate and knows how to exploit trends. However, she's not as smart as she likes to pretend, and many of her schemes are flawed on some fundamental level. The fact that her attempted metoo backfired so spectacularly is evidence enough that she's not as skilled as even Wu in that particular sphere, which I believe speaks olumes.
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