Holy shit,
@Secret Asshole - that analysis of Killer Quinn was just...perfection.
And if you think she really cares about the tiny, TINY place she has in the gaming industry and the comic industry....she...really doesn't.
This is the only thing I disagree with you on. Chelsea has been angling to shove her way into the upper echelon of geek spaces for quite some time, moving around North America, rubbing elbows and sucking dicks of all the right people in the indie game scene, then trying to get in good with the comics crowd after the indie gaming well ran dry. If she could finagle her way into AAA gaming she would, but AAA game companies don't suffer talentless whores gladly. If you can't produce product that sells, you'll be in the unemployment line before you know it, and Bobby Kotick can't be bribed with blowies from a 3 considering he could pay for three ways with 10s.
I also maintain, Zoe really doesn't want to go higher. Not really. She has what she wants and what she needs. Sociopaths don't stay complacent. They keep moving until they hit a stride and they stay there, because its exactly what they want. Zoe wants to be the biggest fish in the smallest pond, stacked to the gills with smaller fish she can play with.
Precisely. Chelsea tried to aim high with Notch and Brad Wardell, and they have way too much money and clout for a little fish like her to deal with. Plus they aren't afraid of her NPC attack dogs and give zero fucks. After her failed attempts to "cancel" them failed, she wised up and learned to set her sights lower.
She also tried flying high with her UN appearance, and like Icarus, she crashed and burned. She learned her lesson from that and never tried aiming for the Sun again. Indie games and one-off comics from here on out.
In time, she will be a sociopath with no victims, excepting the most weak and most pathetic.
It's ok. Jake Alley will always be there, ready to slide into her DMs.
You have to remember, at this point, Zoe was still a narcissistic, manipulative sociopath, but only to singular people. She never really had any massive backing. So all of this was all testing to see what and how she could get away with and with whom.
When Chelsea first got into the spotlight because of Eron's Zoepost, you could tell that she was as surprised as the rest of us as to how far her buddies went to close ranks and play spin doctors for her. She just let out lots and lots of sperging on Twitter and Tumblr. As gamergate went on, she saw how much others were willing to go to bat for her, and she learned to keep her spaghetti in her pockets, preferring to contain it behind closed doors like the CON logs or her private DMs to Candace Owens. She slowly realized how far she could push this, seeing that her followers were eager to cover up any mistake, ignore every lie, and even overlook her Kickstarter scam. Gawker and their sister web publications seemed to write up an article a day propping her up as The Most Victimized Woman In The World simply because she was being called a whore on Twitter. Even their sites devoted exclusively to sports and cars were lining up to canonize her as Patron Saint of Women in Gaming.
But then her comic flopped. Even her most ardent KickScam supporters were starting to ask, "Where's the game Zoe? Where did the money go?". CON was shuttered. Rebel Jam never materialized. Her Patreon was dwindling. Her book was outsold by Milo Y. Chelsea was coasting on what little notoriety and connections she still had left to a "narrative design" job for an obscure indie game and writing a story about a d-list character for Marvel.
As you said, Chelsea thought she was still Queen Shit of Fuck Mountain, and wanted to surf the MeToo wave like Rose McGowan and Asia Argento back into relevance, and rode another woman's coattails to "suddenly" remember that a guy she roped into a shitty relationship 10 years ago was now the reincarnation of Ike Turner.
Then Alec killed himself and Chelsea overestimated how far her orbiters were going to protect her. No deluge of two dozen articles on the same day. No online army scrubbing any and every site that so much as posted a single disparaging word about her. No flood of Patreon donations, just a slight uptick. No incoming book offers and movie deals. The best she got was some orbiter scraping some IPs and burner email accounts from here. Even Kotaku's coverage focused on Alec's death, and not on how Zoe is The Most Victimized Woman in the Universe.
Chelsea has now realized that her clout isn't what it was 5 years ago, and is laying low until this blows over, because she has no online armada to scorch the Earth for her anymore. Between all the bridges she burned, and how radioactive she made herself, only the most diehard of supporters give a shit while everyone else in the NPC clique gives a halfhearted, "that's a bummer" post before moving on with their lives.
Right now, there is a violin playing for her so miniscule, that even Scott Lang and Ray Palmer can't find it.
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