Gonna need a quick rundown on Felicia Day, fam. I read some of her thread but a summary of her most egregious behavior would be pretty
. Will love you long time.
I'll give you one. I'll even make it topical to this thread.
Felicia Day was, until dethroned by people who, surely by coincidence, all have productive and ongoing threads here, the poster-child for the Hipster invasion of stereotypical spaces, one of the fucking
pioneers of the "if you criticize this person, you are a sexist" defense, and a great real-time example of people who have accomplished fuck all within a given hobby suddenly being treated as if they were that hobby's sovereign. And no, I'm not exaggerating, as you'll soon see.
Whenever you're talking about assholes like Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, or Brianna Wu, you are essentially discussing someone who is walking the path paved by the likes of Felicia Day. This is especially true in the case of Coraline Ada, because
her own wiki fucking lionizes Felicia Day. She's also basically always been a gigantic pusher of feminist identity politics, to boot, so suffice to say a lot of people hated her guts.
I swear to fucking god, this ad was real. This actually happened.
Day got her start as an actress who featured prominently in several of Joss Whedon's works, including Supernatural and The Guild, as well as Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along. As an actress she ranges from great to fucking awful (depends on what she's given, really), but at some point or another, she began being pushed
hard on the internet as a self-proclaimed nerd icon. Unfortunately, her doing this came with her pulling the same
fucking hipster douche shit that every actual fucking nerd hates. You people fucking
all know the one, too: the fucking prepackaged "everyone look what a huge nerd I am lawl" nerd culture angle, which, without exception, comes from people that provably have provably
never had anything to do with a given hobby or work of fiction prior to showing an interest in it.
These jackasses and their allies consider themselves trendsetters, even if the hobby or work of fiction they're currently losing their shit over and are clearly so ahead of their time and relevant for talking about existed for years if not
decades before they were born and will continue to exist long after they've faded from relevance. All of which ties into their obsession with novelty and contrariness solely for contrariness' sake.
....All of which, in turn, should sound
awfully familiar to anyone who's been following the thread of Chucky-boy here, since he's part of the same "no work should ever gatekeep and I don't need to learn anything about what I'm writing about" movement that propped Day up (ironically, since Day actually knows quite a bit about sci-fi, but that's fodder for another thread). Would it surprise fucking
any of you to know that
he's shilled her works on multiple occasions and that they're IRL acquaintances?
Anyway.
Because Day embraces the same identity politics shit thoroughly, and was being pushed up by the usual crowd, she
immediately drew fire. Why she did should not surprise you if you know nerds: Nerd-dom is the sad byproduct of being obsessed with something you love to the point where you've let other aspects of your life flag. That's why it's such a personal affront to actual nerds to claim to be one under false pretense. It's a life born out obsessively caring way too deeply about fucking nerd shit that doesn't matter to anyone but you.
Needless to say, when saint Felicia of Day got blastback for this shit, the usual suspects
went nuclear to white knight m'lady. The result was hilariously entitled sperg-rage, and how these fucking nerds hated her because
vagina, ignoring that female nerds were taking issue with her just as hard. This was basically a dry run of the Anita Sarkeesian defense tactic. It wasn't as good back then, though, and much like
Gabby Rivera unironically referring to comics nerds as Chads, however, their doing so gave away the real reason behind it: You can't really make the argument that a bunch of people who literally do not have a single fuck to give about anything but their spergy nerd hobbies are entitled monsters who believe they have the right to dictate who is and is not allowed without a fucking ridiculous amount of projection.
Critics of Day faced pretty much constant attack on Social Media, far in excess of what many at the time saw, but which is pretty much bog-standard for the current age. Ryan Perez, of Destructoid, actually got fucking
fired for asking Day, directly, what she's accomplished that made her so fucking important. Those who called Day out for being a pretender likewise faced fucking hilarious amounts of disproportionate backlash. All of this came to a head with one of the funnier such incidents, after the Autism Holy War began, when Day posted about how she had just survived a close encounter with
EVIL GAMER BROS, perfectly encapsulating why she was so fucking hated:
Felicia Day said:
At the end of October, I flew to Vancouver to work on the TV show Supernatural. It was more than two months after the initial blog post (a decade in real-life time), and the gaming world was STILL drowning in #GamerGate. I was walking down the street on one of my days off and saw two gamer guys walking toward me in classic, black crew-neck gaming T-shirts. One Call of Duty, the other Halo.
Now, in the past, whenever I saw another gamer in public, I would feel heartened, because we belonged no matter if we stopped to chat or not. I would go out of my way to exchange a knowing glance, a supportive smile signaling, Yeah, dude. It’s cool that you game. I do, too! We were automatically compatriots in our love for something we both knew was awesome.
But as those two gamers walked toward me, for the first time in my life I didn’t have the impulse to say hello. Or smile. For some reason as I approached the corner . . . I crossed the street instead.
I sat down a few blocks later, because I couldn’t understand what I’d just done. Then I realized that because of the recent situation with #GamerGate, subconsciously I no longer assumed that a random gamer and I would be on the same page, or would connect just because of our love of gaming. There was a wedge in my world where there had been none before.
And for the first time in months . . . I got angry. I WANTED TO WRITE SOME SHIT DOWN, SON!
I pounded five espresso shots, ran back to my hotel room, and wrote a Tumblr post about my experience titled, “Crossing the Street.” And I tried to make it different from the tone of other writing on the subject. I tried to frame my argument in an empathetic way. Not condemn, but make people understand what I was feeling. How I was upset and ashamed at my impulse to avoid those anonymous gamers. How sad I was that the actions of #GamerGate had created that feeling in me, to separate myself from people whom I would have assumed were comrades before. And how the whole situation was creating the outside impression of a culture driven by misogyny and hatred, which I KNEW wasn’t true.
