ZeroAX wrote:I'm just talking about a practical solution. Calling the police on them and ignoring them are the 2 best actions in this case :/.
Unfortunately, in this case, ignoring them won't make them go away. This isn't about her. This is about the trolls. The level of harassment she's facing just from making these videos (your feelings about the videos aside) is so monumental that she can't ignore it. Hell, she HAS been threatened with personal harm by people with her personal information (and my understanding is in that case she did call the cops). Most of the stuff that's sent to her on Twitter, what are the cops going to do? Sometimes, the only way to deal with a problem is to shine a spotlight on it and reveal it for what it is. Since this harassment seems to be so vehement and so constant, she has to expose it so that others will be able to come forward and talk about their own harassment (like Brianna Wu, for example, and other less-known folks).
I don't think she's doing this to make her videos more popular. I think she's doing this because she sees a genuine problem and thinks the only way to begin to deal with it is by bringing attention to it. We don't deal with cultural problems by sweeping them under the rug. We bring them out into the open repeatedly until there's finally a critical mass of people willing to do something about it.
And whether or not you intend to be victim-blaming or think you are victim-blaming, by accusing her of using the trolling to further her own career, victim-blaming is effectively what you are doing, intentional or not. You are putting some of the responsibility for this horrible, inappropriate vitriol on her. The ONLY people responsible for this harassment are the harassers. Period. There are no shades of gray in this. The harassers are fully responsible for their actions and they chose this path.
Exhuminator wrote:The issue I and others have is that context cannot be irrelevant, that is purely illogical.
Tropes are meaningless without context.
You are right, but she's providing all the context her examination of these tropes needs. It is the context of it being in video games. Discussion of tropes does not need detailed context for every situation. Discussion of tropes at the level she's taking doesn't need to examine every single instance for its full value within the greater whole. She's not digging down to that level.
Put yourself in a woman's shoes. You pick up GTA. This is a AAA title everyone is talking about, and you're a gamer so you want to play it. Your option is to play a male lead. Most of the women in the game you'll be interacting with in any level of detail are hookers (or similar). Your options are to ignore them (they are scenery, decoration), pay them (use them), or kill them (abuse them). Hitman is a popular game so maybe you wanna give that a try. In Hitman you play a dude. Most of the female characters in the game are strippers. You can ignore them (scenery) or kill them (abuse them).
You can argue that by nature of the kind of game they are that the GTA titles and Hitman have appropriate presentations of women to the tone of the game, but when you look at them as
part of the gaming landscape as a whole, they're just more games that have male leads, mostly male characters (good guys or bad guys), and in which most of the women are whorish and only used as decoration.
THIS is how you discuss tropes in an entire genre. THIS is what it means to do an overview. The context of her videos is the gaming landscape writ large, and in that larger, general context, it does not matter one whit whether this game or that game is using these stilted representations "appropriately".
When having these discussions, you have to set the level of detail, and she's doing broad and shallow for her examination. That's how you do an overview. Maybe at some later date she'll craft some videos that specifically dig down into deeper context and show how different games vary in their detailed representations, but the videos she's making now aren't intended to do that, and there's nothing wrong with that. That doesn't make these videos invalid. It doesn't necessarily invalidate her points. You have to look at fields from a broad perspective before you go digging deeper. You have to open the door to discussions first. And she's still laying the groundwork for those deeper discussions.
