AceAngel said:
The guy is literally drenched in sarcasm and humor, so if you're easily offended or take a few things too seriously, he might be rough around the edges.
For example, many women hate him because he is sexist apparently, which is fine, we all are in someway, but he made fun of things when he wrote in his journal that certain 'figurines' must be bought because...well...they're sexy figurines.
If you read the journal entry carefully, you'll see that he was trolling and just being sarcastic, but stupidly enough, some people really pick up on that as being legit.
It really doesn't matter if he's being 'legit' or not. What matters is the jokes he told. I doubt very much the women who call Jim a sexist pig honestly think he's being legit when he says what he says, but I can assume that they really don't appreciate the subject matter of the jokes he makes in and of themselves.
For instance, Jim Sterling has made jokes about RAPE. Now I don't know about you, but I think that rape is one subject matter that should be taken a little bit more seriously then that, but apparently he decided he was being funny and made off glib remarks about it. Jokingly demanding that games have more rape in them.
I don't care if he tries to defend that as sarcasm or comedy, there are some things that CANNOT BE DEFENDED and I think that's one of them. The attitude towards it is very obnoxious and frankly, it's really, really insensitive to make jokes like that. It's one thing to make demands to see big breasted women in games but something else entirely to even pretend to be demanding rape in games.
Plus when he was doing a bit about a fighting game he decided to randomly drop a little 'humorous' and completely out of place anecdote about domestic abuse. Saying that the fact that the women's clothes fall off as they get hit should be 'great fun for fans of domestic abuse in any case'.
God, I hate it so much when people think they can just stick the word 'sarcasm' onto a joke, no matter how tasteless and think it's suddenly okay. I sometimes wonder if that guy who played Kramer on Seinfeld tried to use the 'I was being sarcastic' excuse when he called out the N word to a black man's face.
You can still try to argue that he isn't a true sexist but to me, the fact that at some point where he was writing those articles he made a conscious decision to put them in. That somewhere in that mind of his he apparently thought they were funny, or that others would percieve them as funny. That the simple act of throwing around jokes about domestic abuse and rape and violence towards women in general was something that made for excellent joke material.
And that even though in some cases they had NOTHING, I repeat NOTHING to do with the main point of his articles, they just had to be added there.
He is not a satirist or a comedian or some kind of bold politically incorrect joke writer, he's just an arsehole. Taking incredibly sensitive issues that mean a lot to people and just throwing them around and calling them jokes. Frankly I'm shocked that one of the ways people have chosen to defend this is by saying that:
"He's just trolling!"
So what? The fact that he makes insensitive and obnoxious remarks, makes articles dedicated to mocking women and in some cases making an image of glorifying the act of abuse of women is now suddenly okay because the real reason he's doing it is just to rile people up and get them angry?
That's seriously a defendable position to take? I mean one can argue that South Park does something similar but when South Park is mean and rile people up, they do it with a bit of boldness and do it in a challenging way that actually makes you think about things.
All Jim's writing does is just piss people off, if the complaints are any indication.
Plus, regardless of the articles, the insensitive jokes and the general troll-like attitude... the dude has still made some very unpleasant public remarks to people over twitter. Telling one girl that she was a Femenazi Slut and asking her if her husband knew was using the internet. Not to mention lashing out really early on in the debate with the C bomb.
Thing is, I really hate the term feminazi. Because even if there are groups of feminists out there who lash out and attack men on the basis of being men and angrily demand things be done to their standards and bully people into a double standard, it is NOT equivical to being a Nazi.
Nazi's killed millions of people all over the world, what these alleged 'feminazi's' are doing is being annoying. Not the same thing.
Anyway, the last thing I don't like is how Jim didn't really apologize for these things. After a few days of backlash he did finally respond but instead of demonstrating humility or dignity he instead returned right back to insulting people and tried to act like he was the victim.
Going as far as to try to pin the blame on the person who he insulted.
I don't like that he's on the Escapist. Much more than that I just don't like the fact that he's being considered or considering himself 'a game journalist'. Journalists shouldn't make joke articles to rile people up, journalists shouldn't troll and journalists should know better than to make such insensitive remarks.
I know I've given Movie Bob a lot of rants about his constant trolling of my beloved Halo and the fanbase associated with such but all the same I'll say this for the guy:
He would never stoop so low as to make rape jokes just to get people riled up.
Every negative thing people say about the maturity level of games, Jim's articles happily reinforce. Yes, we really are lonely horny guys who will literally buy us anything if it promises CGI boobs, yes we really do think less of women to the point of being misoginist pigs and yes we really are of an audience who will defend that kind of sense of humor by calling it 'sarcasm'.
I don't want people like Jim acting as the voice for games, not with that kind of track record and public face.
Anyway OT:
In case I hadn't made my views on Jim clear enough in the above post, I don't like him. His episodes aren't funny or informative. They've increased in production value and presentation a little bit but honestly in my opinion Yahtzee is ten times the comedian this guy will ever be and the people at Extra Credits are like a hundred times the game commentator he'll ever be.
And we already have both of them.
I've had my disagreements towards Extra Credits, Movie Bob, Shamus Young, Graham and Paul, Yahtzee, Lisa Foiles and every other internet celeb on the Escapist in the past, but Jim is just too much.
I won't protest or demand he leaves, clearly there are people on this site who like the Jimquisition and far be it from me to deprive them of that. I'm not going to mock people for liking him and I'm not going to say my opinion is gospel truth.
But at the end of the day, I can't say with a straight face that I like Jim's show and after having a look at what kind of a person he is on twitter, I have difficulty saying I have much respect for him as a person either.
If you like him, fine. I respect your right to like whatever, but I could live without the Jimquisition on the Escapist.
