Is a fanfiction depicting the murder of Randy Pitchford ok?

[EternallyBored]

I got flagged for saying that another person lacks empathy. The sad truth is we are living in a world where saying mean and vicious shit about celebrities and other people is entertainment. We really don't give a fuck about each other. People have an attitude online: "If you don't agree with me, then you must be destroyed."

Yes, this fanfic is stupid and silly. Most importantly, not a legit death threat. Yet, for people defending this as something perfectly acceptable is disgusting. When the rubber meets the road, you would feel differently if people were singing the praises of a story where someone walks up to you and kills you. That what I meant by a lack of empathy. People not caring about other people, until it happens to them.

As for Anita, if anyone taking her seriously, should be ashamed of themselves for being so gullible, or being a sucker for confirmation bias.

Example of Confirmation Bias: Videogames are sexist.
Mario Bros. is a successful videogame series.
Princess Peach gets kidnapped in every game.
That is sexist!
See! I told you videogames were sexist.

Your post is mostly reasonable but your assuming way too much about what other people think, I've known fanfiction writers who've had stories like this written about them and don't give two shits, hell Randy Pitchford's twitter was posted earlier where he said he wasn't offended by this story. Again this is a story that Anita herself didn't write and was written as a writing exercise by a blog that throws random story ideas together from reader suggestions. It's a story where Anita teams up with Spiderman to fight the Green Goblin and Duke Nukem is not only a real person but an undead lich.

I've received death threats face to face without the protection of anonymity, and I didn't accuse that person of lacking empathy, I even eventually forgave him for it. The idea that people are seeing this as no big deal, lack empathy just because they haven't experienced it themselves is a cheap appeal to emotion and it weakens every other reasonable argument you make. People react to situations differently, and expecting them to all change their tune in a similar situation is a fundamental misunderstanding of human behavior.

 

[Tanis]

The only reason why Anita Sarkeesian got so popular is because she doesn't look horrid and got bullied on.

If she was 300lbs with zits you would have NEVER heard her name.

 

[Mycroft Holmes]

If she was 300lbs with zits you would have NEVER heard her name.

Totally; I don't even know who Jennifer Hepler is.

 

[Tanis]

^I had to google her.

Again: never heard of her.

 

[Lightknight]

The only reason why Anita Sarkeesian got so popular is because she doesn't look horrid and got bullied on.

If she was 300lbs with zits you would have NEVER heard her name.

This totally explains why the media is constantly shifting its awareness that Kirstie Alley is still alive and well.

 

[Doclector]

I would really like to absolutely destroy her image based on this, but to be honest, I'd be a massive hypocrite if I did. I fantasise, sometimes publicly, about killing certain people all the goddamn time.

Though, there is a difference. I would only do that about people who pose a very real threat to either the free world or my own lifestyle. A bad videogame is just that, a bad videogame. It doesn't threaten anything, well, asides from the potential for any more aliens games anytime soon, but that's been circling the drain for quite a while now.

But still, she's a human being. We're all prone to bursts of unreasonable bloodlust from time to time. Our history is practically built on it.

So yeah. This isn't good, but it isn't really that bad either.

 

[Seydaman]

Wait, Anita, please, don't kill me. You're right, the systemic problems of sexist depictions of women in the games needs to be stopped, and Gearbox can join you.

That's for Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Who can blame her? I kinda like it too.

It's just a mildly amusing story about terrible games. She said "I think I kind like it" and for some reason you're reading "its ok to kill someone you don't like". I'm sorry, OP, but you're taking things too seriously.

+27

This doesn't sound at all like a serious thing.

I kind of like BDSM. I also kind of like Mount and Blade.

Know what else I kind of like? Ponies, ponies are wonderful.

Point being: You're reading too much into this, OP.

 

[S1leNt RIP]

Read the title as "Is Fanfiction depicting the murder of Rand(al' Thor)..." Yes, probably yes...I would read that. Probably more interesting than the actual Wheel of Time series...at least SOMETHING DIED!!!!

As for the actual topic...no, that's not "fanfiction", that seems like violent and threatening material! Sue her pants off!!!!!

 

[spartandude]

Oh fuck off. The fact that she killed him "for Aliens: Colonial Marines" should be enough to show that it was written with tongue firmly in cheek. Patton Oswalt has a bit where he says if he had a time machine he'd go back and kill George Lucas with a shovel before he could make the prequels. It's a joke. Making it specific and detailed is part of the fucking joke. I don't even like Sarkeesian, I think she's an idiot but come the fuck on guys.

But..... But... trashing Anita Sarkeesian's reputation and all that... therefore it must be an actual death threat.

 

[launchpadmcqwak]

Wait, Anita, please, don't kill me. You're right, the systemic problems of sexist depictions of women in the games needs to be stopped, and Gearbox can join you.

That's for Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Who can blame her? I kinda like it too.

It's just a mildly amusing story about terrible games. She said "I think I kind like it" and for some reason you're reading "its ok to kill someone you don't like". I'm sorry, OP, but you're taking things too seriously.

So what happens if I write a story where I shoot her, and say, "That was for your Tropes VS Women in Video games videos"

Would you still say the same thing? If not, why?

Yes, because in this world we are allowed to make up stories of whatever we want.

 

[ThatDarnCoyote]

tl;dr: It's wrong, give her a little slack, one mess up doesn't mean she's an evil person and should burn in hell forever.

Yeah, no one should consign her to hell for this.

We may, however, snort slightly more derisively the next time she tries to give us a moral lecture.

In that case you might want to think twice before discussing the ethical implications of mass murder just in case you have ever enjoyed any game ever made ever.

"Any game ever made ever?" Even Peggle?

Anyway, this isn't about fictional violence in general. It's about approvingly depicting the killing of a specific, actual living person, whose great crime was making a couple of video games people didn't like.

I'm just saying it's bad form coming from someone like Anita Sarkeesian, who has made a career out of finding subtle messaging in media enjoyed by other people, and casting judgment upon its harmfulness. And also who became somewhat famous because of repulsive people publicly fantasizing about doing her harm.

Seems like the sort of experience that would give one pause in this type of thing, no?

 

[irok]

Arg whatever, I just clicked the link and feel dirty now that I've had my mind trudge through such utter crap yeah its hypocritical and I assume killing people in fiction isn't ok with anyone... and if people are labeling each other haters and such well, ya'll are haters and she's a hater too, I'm a hater and I hate that I bothered to click on this. Fanfic, hate all of it, especially uninteresting self serving blarg, poorly written, im disappointed with everyone that this being talked about.

I don't hate her,I hate the fanfic and that this is such a big deal, I don't hate spiders either, they are equally as unimportant and they may think the world is unfair and they have about the same chance of doing anything about it, if we cant change the industry at all what chance has she got.

 

[itsthesheppy]

Talk about a mountain out of a molehill. It's really quite uncanny how Anita's detractors care so much more about what she says and does than her fans. I mean I like her videos, I watch them when she uploads them, but it seems like the people who hate her talk about her waaaaaaay more than I ever would. I mean... guys, she's not even saying anything all that fresh and new, and you're treating her like she's this megacelebrity. She's a talking head on youtube. Get over it.

In any case, the desire to burn public figures in effigy is as old as time itself and it doesn't matter how many straw facsimiles you torch, the real person isn't any further harmed and besides, if you wanna talk about harmless expressions of violence, its harder to get less harmful than a stupid fanfiction involving spider-man and self-inserted protagonists.

And for those of you comparing it to the flash game where you beat her up and the reaction there: what you're missing is that superhero teamups that involve the murder of prominent game developers are very rare occurrences in real life. A woman getting beaten bloody is something that is literally happening in more than a few places in the world right now as I type this. That's the difference.

 

[rob_simple]

I'm having a hard time getting outraged over this.

I don't particularly like Anita as a person, and I think she is possibly the worst spokesperson for women in gaming, but I don't see a tongue-in-cheek fanfic as being any way equatable to all the vulgar death and rape threats she has received, (even if they are empty, they were most certainly done from a position of malice rather than taking the piss).

This has made me wonder, though, for those saying it's not okay to write something like this and these people should be taken to court: if I write an intimately detailed fanfic about all the sexy things I would do to Katy Perry, should I be tried for rape?

 

[Smeatza]

People in this thread really need to ask themselves
"How Sarkeesian would react if somebody wrote a tongue-in-cheek, fan-fiction that involved her murder?"

Because you can guaran-damn-tee that she would take it as a legitimate death threat, and try to play it off as an example of how sexist the gaming community is.

 

[chuckdm]

Well first off it's fanfic. A LOT more disturbing shit has happened in fanfic. I literally read the stuff for about 3 hours, just one day, around 2 years ago and I now avoid basically all of it like the plague. I mean, there's some exceptions (indoc. theory is kinda fanfic. kinda.) but as a general rule professional writers get paid good money for a reason.

That said, I hated the ME3 ending, but I don't want to kill Casey what's-his-name (the ME project lead person.) In fact, I don't even want him fired. I >>DO<< wish he would be kicked off the Dragon Age 3 team as punishment (kicked off it entirely) but overall he did a goo job. In a game where he probably had to approve 300+ things per day, try to coordinate it all together, and keep EA from breathing down the whole dev team's neck, the dude had one very difficult job. He still fucked up at the end, but that shouldn't cost him a career.

More to the point, I don't hate Randy Pitchford. For one thing, I'm in freaking Alabama. I've always felt you can't hate someone unless you really know them first - otherwise you're just hating a presumptive version of them that probably isn't who they are. But even if I did, the truth is, this is the dude behind Borderlands. Anyone who is capable of EP-ing a game as epic as Borderlands deserves well-paying employment for life. If he fucks up one game? Fine, suspend him without pay for 2 or 3 months. But don't fire him, and sure as hell don't kill him.

And besides all that, XCOM is a series that has always been light on lore. I haven't played any of the reboot games, and I get the distinct impression that they're both A) trying to add lore that wasn't there, but doesn't really conflict with anything except people's assumptions, and B) people are mainly outraged by outright crashes, not any flawed mechanics or or game play. I've NEVER found this to be a valid reason to hate a game.

RAGE was plagued by constant bugs on launch, supposedly. Yanno how many I ever had, even with version 1.0? Zero. None. Notta. For a game "plagued with constant bugs and crashes" the only issue that ever effected more than 0.7% of the player base was a texture pop-in issue, which anyone with Google and Notepad could fix by adding one line to a config file in 30 seconds. Instead, everyone claimed the game was totally broken and wrote it off. Yet, RAGE is freaking awesome. It's a game with a compelling, if somewhat unoriginal story, fun vehicle combat, and some of the best gunplay I've seen in years. And it's from freaking idTech so none of that is a surprise. Yanno what else this entire description could apply to? Yep, Aliens Colonial Marines.

So instead of writing fanfic about killing people who are just desperately trying to hold a massive, difficult project together until launch day, here's a better idea.

1) Stop pre-ordering. Anything. Ever.

2) When the game launches and it's riddled with bugs, wait 3 or 4 patches, THEN buy the game.

Boom, problem solved. Now you'll never be plagued with CTDs and game-breaking bugs again.

 

[MeTheMe]

I don't really have that much of a problem with it, I don't really equate the death threats she got to her killing Randy is a fanfic someone else wrote. It's a story, she didn't threaten him, she just said she kinda liked it, and that's it, not a real big deal to me.

... however, bringing it up in tumblr, showing it off, saying she liked it, not real classy. It seems like a bit of a low brow thing for someone who wants to be taken seriously.

I don't think she should have done it, but I don't have a problem with it.