thank you for calling out how racist fandom is. for so long ppl didn't say anything and im glad ppl started speaking up. also, your drawings are so cute 💙
I was extremely shocked at how "nerd" communities (doll, film, cosplay, anime, gaming, etc. ) were filled with weirdos. The commercialization of nerd culture has truly brought out people's demons.
AH it's Harriyanna!! I've learned so much about the intersextionality of various fan communities from her channel! But yeahhh that commercialisation of nerdiness seemed to also invite the exclusionary and oppressive parts of commercial interest too; the pandering to status quos, the tolerating intolerance to keep people buying, fanning the egos of the most privileged members who can give corporate the most money. The efforts of various movements are improving the corporate acceptance of more intersectionality, but there's always a mob of people complaining about little steps towards representation.
I was one of these guys in college back in the gamer gate Trump election era. What's sad is that the algorithm will never show a video like this to people like these. What helped me was my older brother sending me videos different than my feed that helped slightly modify my algorithm.
As a nerdy black man I always found it strange how some nerds would embrace the same mean spirited, holier than thou elitism and brutality that our bullies gave us. You think their experience as nerds would make them more empathetic
i think some of them see it as a way to band together and hurt them back but worse. some i know are somewhere on the spectrum and just like things to be very orderly and for people to follow rules. its annoying that they even entertain the idea of facism. but thankfully im there to keep pulling them back to reality. also to be fair to the people im referencing they come from very conservative and strict parents who are all very devote in their belief that god is real. so they really are not falling far from the tree when it comes to thinking authoritarian leadership is okay. they worship a single god after all. but yeah it is weird to see these same people who were bullied to the point some had to fight back chose to support groups and ideals that are just terrible. these are just my experiences with my friends and acquaintances over the years and is by no means indicative of everyone else. i too am on the spectrum but my intolerance of injustice took me a different way. its interesting how we can take different paths (but that might be why i was the one actually fighting people or standing up to bullies if they hurt my friends)
It's like a twist on that old Paulo Freire quote, _When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor._ Rather than developing empathy and building community with their fellow downtrodden, they just want to be the Bully.
The "gatekeeping" is a "trauma check". Someone entering into a nerds safe space without having "paid and entry fee in trauma and ridicule" is someone that might trash the only thing a nerd has to define themselves.
Love how alt left don’t think they’re fascist, alt right is completely different, also love how women never realize incels are created by them, hating men thinking that won’t affect men, imaging being bullied and then suddenly your fan anime is popular because women cosplay half naked
As a nerdy Black woman that’s really into anime and video games, I only share my passions with and join spaces that are dominated by people of color and women. I’m on a discord sever for Black women who love video games and it’s the only server where I haven’t seen or been called a slur.
Thats so sad that its even a possibility to be slurred esp in a space that ure supposed to feel welcome in, im so sorry that happened i hope the fandom space will become less rancid and hostile towards marginalised people and i hope ure doing good
That’s something I want to do more often. As a queer woman of color, I know that any time I engage with a male colleague about anime they will say something sexist or homophobic/transphobic without fail.
Not a woc, but I’ve been “exotified” by nerdy men enough times and always unsolicited that I just DON’T feel safe in nerd/geek spaces that aren’t a pretty wide range of ethnicities/racial identities/cultures and queer identities, and about a 50/45/5 mix of women/other gender identities/cismen-basically, no one group is a majority, but it’s certainly NOT cichet white folk and DEFINITELY NOT cichet men. Which leaves 97.89% of my true social interaction online after vetting people out as “safe for me/safe for others (and therefore gently continuing to debug biases I’ve been raised with)
I love that we’re in a time where we can just make our own spaces and enjoy things peacefully with other people who are like us. It shouldn’t have to be like that. But I’m relieved that we have that option.
It feels like such a modern revelation to me these spaces even exist. I was very much the oddity at my school curled up in my own little corner reading some nerdy thing and was picked on, teased, and abused by other black kids (there were only black kids in my school) and then I figured out I was queer too (late bloomer in all things). In college I actually met my first fellow geeks, all white dudes and while I felt i could share my geekiness with them, I hid my queerness. Then I tried to explore my queer side, where I was the big dork again and found myself hiding my geekyness. Whenever I met a person of color or woman or fellow LGBTQ+ person who enjoyed the same geeky persuits, I felt like I found a unicorn. I was too poor to ever go to conventions, so it was random luck when I connected with fellow geeks. Now i feel the interwebs have really shown me there is so much diversity in Geekdom.
This video makes me think a lot about Harriyanna Hook's content, which primarily critiques misogynoir in Fandom and media, thank you for furthering this discussion in your video
Love how alt left don’t think they’re fascist, alt right is completely different, also love how women never realize incels are created by them, hating men thinking that won’t affect men, imaging being bullied and then suddenly your fan anime is popular because women cosplay half naked
I've always found it ironic that Star Wars has some of the most toxic fans when many of the movies feature themes about people from diverse background coming together to defeat a totalitarian regime. Even some "fans" within the Tolkien fandom moved toward more extreme ideologies and have said some really worrying and racist things about the diversity in the "Rings of Power." Despite my love for manga and high-fantasy when I was younger, I have sadly moved away form the wider world of fandom as I just do not feel comfortable in some of these spaces anymore. I hate being told I'm stupid for loving certain shows or characters the "geek overlords" deem below them. I also love playing sports as well and am tired of some rich white-male geeks saying that I'm a just a "fake geek woman."
Conservatives are famously incapable of media analysis. Full Metal Jacket is notorious for driving military registration, and American History X is very popular with neo nazis
It's such a curse* on the show/film/whatever that draws those malevolent gazes from self-declared Fandom-randoms. Like, I'm iffy on Tolkien & I can't even tell if I'd enjoy Rings of Power bc the reviews are so skewed by the frothing-mouths so bothered by "woke" --- which appears to mean anything to anyone, from "just being polite" to a dawning full-blown communal utopia (which...I wish! Yes, please!) --- they scream about "politics" without acknowledging review-bombing before the thing is even released is being way more political than any show made under capitalism could be, & I can't even get a glimpse of the aesthetic or storytelling qualities to discern if I'd find it interesting. * I'm dumb lol I just realized this is what they want --- to make it such an ordeal for the creators + audience that they never cast anyone other than dudes as the Main Character of any story that gets told, unless it's a story "for" a subgroup of the rest of us, in which case it'll get no budget or resources & will be segregated from Hero Stories, just off in a corner somewhere so the dudes don't have to look at us.
I know what you mean. I enjoyed Captain Marvel and can relate to the bad father, gaslighting and being ridiculed by people for my dreams. Every time I try to defend the movie, I get ridiculed and told there’s something wrong with me. Even when I point out the movie made a ton of money, there are still people making excuses for why. Yet Morbius, a movie that starred a white man and bombed, doesn’t get anywhere near as much hatred.
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426 I talked to someone on RUclips about that and they had a theory that seems somewhat legit. She said that, when Hollywood makes a movie starring a woman or a minority, they take a chance on nobodies in the hopes that the movie will bomb so they can say people don’t want movies starring women or minorities. Which would explain why they not only released Black Widow during COVID but took a chance on premiere access. Brie Larson says that Hollywood needs to have women writing women and, for She-Hulk, they hired women who had never seen a law show while giving them an unreasonable deadline. Even though Captain Marvel made a ton of money in the box office, the Marvel suits are using Alt right anti-Captain Marvel videos to prove she’s not liked. That way the Hollywood executives can claim that it’s not that they don’t want to be more diverse, it’s that the people don’t want it. With Black Panther, they ended up hiring people who generally cared about what they were making. So that backfired on them.
I've never seen "Rings of Power" and don't plan to, but one thing I found really disturbing was when the dwarf princess character was released, and all these LotR reddit bros wouldn't stop whining about how awful it was that she didn't have a beard, because Tolkien dwarf women canonically have beards. Honestly? There was no way they cared that much about whether or not the character had a beard. The Lord of the Rings film trilogy diverges in a number of ways from the books, and nobody ever complains about those. The dwarf princess in "Rings of Power" was portrayed by a Black woman, and "she doesn't have a beard" seemed like, well, a beard for them to complain about the show being diverse without having to look like racists or misogynists.
And then The Boys happened where there was a scene with an isolated nerd who got radicalised by a Nazi superhero until he shot a store clerk because he wanted to be part of power.
I love The Boys, but it deeply saddened me that there were apparently fans of the The Boys watching it and only realizing in Season 3 that Homelander was a bad guy the show was making fun of. Like, how do you watch the first 2 seasons of The Boys and not realize Homelander is a piece of shit?
@@kittykittybangbang9367 Sadly, that doesn't surprise me. I'm content to watch the boys knowing I can properly analyze media, and also rest easy knowing I'm not a piece of shit fascist, and stay the hell away from less savory corners of the fandom (I think the subreddit is alright last I checked, although I haven't checked recently.)
Ironically, it had an alt right following because the show was making fun of ultra liberals. They lost that following after learning the show was also making fun of ultra conservatives.
@@gregvs.theworld451 my former friend only saw season 3 of the show because he thought soldier was cool and thought that Homelander was going to be a male version of Brie Larson Captain Marvel until saw the show. He saw himself in Homelander and Blue Hawk, and didn’t realised that Soldier Boy was a villain. When he found out about Stormfront being a Nazi villain, he hates The Boys more than Disney.
As a geek who happens to be a woman, this video really hit hard. The misogyny is getting out of control to the point where the trailer for The Marvels got flooded with hate comments and anyone who has something nice to say about it gets called a bot. Though they won't admit they're being misogynists and, when they're called out on it, they'll mention movies like Alien and Kill Bill to insist that they like women-led movies. What's worse is when women and people of color join in with the alt right fascism. Is there any chance you can make a video about that? I'd really love to see your thoughts about women and people of color joining in to discriminate against themselves. Even about how they use certain movies to try to prove to people that they're not racist or sexist.
How can you blame them? Every western movie and video game now is infected with the woke mind virus, it's all about virtue signaling, blackwashing every successful past movie because they can't be creative and invent new concepts, insulting women by taking away their character growth with feminist madness (eg Mulan), censorship everywhere which censors creativity (hence why manga now outsells the entire western comic industry). And after they do all that, they still cry that they are the victims and that there's misogyny, misogynoir, anti blackness, racism, bigotry and so on and so forth.
FACTS I swear to god, if i have to hear from one white male who dropped out of film school, calling Kill Bill or Aliens as prime examples of "a strong female character" to justify their misogyny against other female-led works. It's interesting how they choose those movies, often directed by white men, that happened years ago and can't find any "good" female characters in recent movies
@ihatepower 45 what do you mean Disney hates everyone. They're attempting to appeal to a group in the worst way possible and making everyone feel shit
It's just shocking to me how certain fans of fantasy, Comic Books and Anime could hold so much anger and strife towards other groups of people. I mean, In so many series the common themes are fighting for peace, standing up against the forces of evil, getting along with others who are different, the struggles of a hero or heros who are judge by society just because they are different and so on. With all these themes and messages in basically some form or another in so many series, how can someone not pick up any of it? How can they not realise they are being the "bad guys" In all the stories they read? Are the only things they get out of these stories, flashy colors and cool fight scenes?
They see all those things, but they've totally flipped the script and made themselves to be the underdogs hated by a judgemental society, who must fight the faceless, conformist enemy. At least, when they're not just openly championing the villains.
Because the lead character is almost always a dude, and most importantly a white dude. He's the hero fighting for justice, so therefore what they do can't be wrong either, because they're the hero.
@@TheGrayMysteriouswell not really. While yes there are people in the "cis white het male nerd community" that are straight up against other genders and races that is not the reason why most nerds don't go woke. I too am one of them. I would call myself a centrist but by your standards I'm probably a fascist so whatever. Anyways I was playing one niche game that not many know and I was part of one server. It was cool and nice. First came the special pride outfits, I and most didn't mind. They were optional and rarely did anyone actually wear them. I heard that the admin team had a bit of a cut and new wave was to come. There were many changes that 1. sanitized the experience 2. destroyed fun parts of the game in name of politics. I and most didn't mind but then there came a ban on gendered "slurs". So I accidentally (you know how banter is) said the b word one too many times and bam I'm banned. I could appeal it but I didn't even want to. The server wasn't fun. It was sterile and smooth with safeties everywhere. There weren't any edges. But I found another one. Not the best one. Maybe not so popular. But it had IT. The game was fun again. Yeah there were a few r words and n words tossed around but at least I wasn't banned. What I mean by that is that the normies want things normalized and safetifized. While that is ok, instead of integrating the original community you push them out in your righteous woke conquests. The online spaces i liked all lost their charm after the SJWs came in and wanted everything catered for them and for their righteous enlightened woke ways. They came to civilize us right wing plebians on what is moral or else. And while many submit many choose else. Not out of spite or racism but because we want OUR spaces to be OURS and not everyone's.
imagine this, you've developed an IP and people love it, then a whole bunch of new people come in after scoffing at it thinking its beneath them but now its popular, those new people demand so many changes that its completely unrecognizable from the original and then those new people play the victim when the original fans want it back to how it always has been and telling the new people to just come up with their own stuff
@@bobergamer1963 But they arent your spaces in the first place, they are EVERYONES spaces, you dont get to gatekeep your niches to people, and if the comunity changes, well, that sucks but you just have to accept it, theres nothing you can really do there
I immediately thought about the time people drew one of the black Pokémon gym leaders as an ape during the release of Pokémon sword and shield just because people where excited about her design and cosplaying her /:
Yeah I remember there with cries of white genocide because there was a black Stormtrooper. And they tried to make Rose the new Jar Jar Binks, maybe they were mad because it was an Asian woman who didn't fall in love with the first white guy she saw.
I don´t think their "problem" was "oh there´s a black stormtrooper", no. The real "problem" for them was more like: "Oh, there´s a black actor playing a crucial role in the movie as one of the main actors. It´s the end of our world."
As somebody who was on this pipeline years ago back in middle school as the loner kid who desperately wanted to be seen as an intellectual, the primary reason was that i felt inferior in every way to ppl around me and directed my insecurity towards minorities (particularly queer communities). The main reason i feel that i got out of this hole before it became too deep is that somebody, who i initially felt a lot of hatred towards for making me feel insecure, befriended me and, for the first time, i felt like i had been genuinely seen for the first time in my life. I wanna be able to do the same thing to ppl like middle school me and give them the opportunity to feel worthy of being valued as a person.
JUST ADMITTING THAT TO YOURSELF AND THE WORLD (COMMENT SECTION LOL) IS SUCH A HUGE STEP!!!! I'm personally glad for you, becuz trust me, THAT is an empty path. You could open up a program near your hometown, or create an app that focuses on that problem. You are going to change ppl's lives for the better!!..........................Just like your friend changed yours...... Good luck and Godspeed on this journey.
Yeah a lot of us have fallen into the alt right pipeline, I did too in middle school, just because of cool nazi edits that made me like them. A group of friends of mine also posted right wing memes. If you told younger me I would be a leftist in 2024, he would call you a slur but here we are 😂 I still don't like this video though, I guess I'm sort of centrist then?
I used to be big into the Skeptosphere, sort of teetering right on that edge of the alt-right pipeline. Then I eventually came across HBomberguy and a lot of other more lefty video essayists and I kind of saw how weird I was being. How a lot of what I saw as just normal was baked into me as a white teen guy (at the time) living in the deep south. Right around that time, Star Trek Discovery started and boy oh boy the Trek fandom had a schism. Not as publicly messy as the Star Wars one, probably due in part to Trek's overall focus on diversity, but it was again a whole "look in the mirror" moment for me. Of getting mad because I wasn't sure how to feel about something and someone told me to be mad about a black woman. And there's a part of me that wonders if I still would hold the sociopolitical views regarding social justice and equality that I do now if I hadn't been snatched out of that gaping maw at the very last second. Part of it was leaving home, sure, that whole way the world opens up and you gain perspective, but I don't know. Maybe I'm lucky, I got out before I was irreversible.
It was so bizarre watching the "skeptic" community fall for a cheap & obvious con-man when Trump was running. & yeah, the ST Discovery backlash was awful. The racist reactions were so bad that when talking w/ friends I *still* feel compelled to clarify that I disliked the show due to bad/inconsistent writing and not because of the cast diversity, lol. (the characters were all quite likeable, I just wish the stories had been more episodic and the writing wasn't so melodramatic). 🖖
@@MiqelDotCom I know how you feel. I have to make the same clarification when I say that I don’t like The Last Jedi. Apparently it’s possible to hate even the bad stuff for the wrong reasons.
@@suburbantimewaster9620 Lol, did you dislike all 3 of the new ones or mostly TLJ? Rise Of Skywalker was so goofy it had me laughing out loud in the theater! Anyhow, the proliferation of hateful fandom content on RUclips really bugs me. Hundreds of far-right pipeline channels whose only gimmick is to HATE everything new that comes from the franchises they supposedly are fans of, and blame every perceived flaw on "wokeness". Ugggh. I can't understand how people fall for that garbage.
Man this feels bad man. I've seen personal friends just fall down the alt right pipeline. It just feels like there is nothing you can do about it. On I side note, people like this just makes it harder to criticize something in good faith. Like I actively really dislike the star wars sequel trilogy (and most of Disney star wars in general) due to the nonsensical plot, strange story beats,, and their willingness to just straight up throw away long established lore. I hate it when I try to look up discussions on it, I just get recommended people talking about SJWs and how much they dislike women and "woke" content. Its honestly pretty infuriating.
I'm a conservative, and I feel the exact same way. The star wars trilogy doesn't even feel woke at all to me, it's just like someone decided to call it that and everyone just ran with it. Don't get me wrong, they're Horrible, but I don't see a preachy leftist message being any significant part of that. They're just poorly made movies, period. Same with Rey being a Mary sue, somehow she is designated as the textbook example of that, whereas I see her as mostly just being a run of the mill, if not quite bland, protagonist archetype.
I think people criticize the wrong thing, its not diversity they hate or even race swapping for example. Its the intentions behind why they wrote the character into the story is usually what sets people off. Of course bad writing as such in the star wars sequels and a clear lack of passion for their craft also hurts media.
same or similar feeling here, being a history/linguistics/archaeology/literature guy... I can't look stuff up nowadays without the algorithm assuming I'm some kind of white guy incel who fantasizes about bringing back awful iron age shit so I can be a patrician who bangs his slave women or some garbage
@@idnyftw The other day I was trying to research Sulla, the ancient Roman dictator that murdered thousands of his political rivals and broke the republic, and found a video where he was unironically praised for his similarity to Augusto Pinochet. Any historical topic will inevitably be twisted by malcontent freaks.
I haven't made it to the end but the yugioh card section hit me cause I was that kid in high school. I loved yugioh but got mocked by everyone even my childhood best friend at the time, who also enjoyed the game but was "to cool" around others to like it. Heck, I was even mocked by magic the gathering players because they saw the game "for kids." Though I fell out of the game due to my area no longer supporting it, I still look back fondly on it, I also met my actual best friend from going to tournaments. But as an adult, I've been mocked for liking manga having people refer to it as a "picture book." Also my love of pokemon, drawing, video games and anime has also been targeted more than once. These are just a few examples of being targeted for being enthusiastic about something.
Where do you live? It seems like inclusive need culture is popular where I grew up in the PNW. My hubby grew up in Texas, and basically everything different was mocked.
Interesting. I was in elementary school at the time when the anime aired and it was VERY popular to like Yugioh, especially among boys. I loved it, too. Strange to see that in high school (and probably in middle school as well, I presume) it was something to be ashamed of.
@@kyndramb7050 I grew up in Canada, most likely this is an issue that everyone, everywhere needs to face. It's easier to mock the thing you don't understand rather than to try and understand it.
@@dianaharris7506 Agreed, though it can go both ways. I've known someone who was worried about their daughter liking anime because she has heard/seen(not sure which) the r rated stuff, then assumed all of it was. Meanwhile manga/anime is just a medium used to tell a story rather than being limited to a specific genre. Imagine if people thought the same way with musical instruments, like a guitar could only be use in country (for example) and nowhere else.
Haven't even watched this yet but, based on the title alone, I know this is gonna be a banger Edit: 25:41 "The key in keeping you inside is that you continue to think that you're at the periphery, at the tip of the iceberg, that all of this hateful rhetoric isn't hateful at all, that there's still more to discover; and that, in the grand scheme of things, this is all a perfectly normal way of seeing the world. That's how the alt right ensnares you, and how conspiracy theories work: They make you _think_ that you're in on a secret, that you have the answers, when, in fact, you're someone else's puppet." This hits SO HARD
Based on the title I knew it would be leftist brainrot and I was right. But that quote does go unbelievably hard. Except conspiracy theories are based, all my homied hate the pedophiles that control the world, we all hate the government and the powers that be 🔥
Yup. Its the core of conspirutal thinking itself. Whether its nerd-dom, fitness, crunchy cults, political cults of personality, you name it. Selling someone the idea that they are part of a select group that knows something that nobody else knows is a powerful brainwashing tool that also sets someone up to accept lies. Of course the special secret knowledge would be called false by the "sheeple", it wouldnt be special secret knowledge if everyone knew and believed in it!
I’m Latino, not white, but the way you talked about how nerds get pushed into the pipeline in part 4 of the video kinda hit me like a bus. I’m autistic and so it got me bullied a lot by both boys and girls in middle school. Since you mention how the patriarchy plays a role in this, I’ll mention that I would end up focusing on the girls that bullied me more than the boys that did because I had these ideas that girls are meant to always act kind and never question anything or act up at all. I would internalize these thoughts and it would end up making me resent the girls that bullied me more than the boys that did, so when I started to hear about feminism at around 13 years old I’d dismiss it as just “women wanting to be angry and annoying” when it wasn’t the case at all. I started to get into “anti woke” or “feminist/SJW gets owned” stuff because I thought it would make me feel better about how I was treated by girls, when in reality it only made my perception of many things warped. Fast forward to high school and some friends that I had that were girls would start to notice me acting sexist or bigoted, and so they would start to confront me and call me out for it. I got into fights and arguments several times with them because I still had the idea that these sexist beliefs were correct because I thought that I faced how all women act when it was just a group of bad people that happen to be women. This was when I started to question these beliefs and so I realized that this way of thinking was wrong the whole time. Through this I would end up realizing that I was queer and I would start feeling more positive and happier about myself. I think that it was also the fact that I found myself in a friend group of people that were also neurodivergent and queer that finally made me comfortable of realizing these things about myself and realize how wrong that things I believed in before were. I am glad I found a video like this because it really does explain what caused the alt right pipeline to get as big as it did
@@serenityssolace I had it pushed on me since childhood. By the time I reached the age of reason I could tell most of this stuff was nonsense. But around 2013-2014, the internet became really racist, and males my age were often groomed into becoming right wing. I was one of them.
Gladly that phase didn't last that long, because I like to be strong, not represent myself as some victim being put down by the blacks and jews. We are being put down, but by other white people, who demonstrably control most of the economy, politics and social clout.
I almost fell into this rabbit hole. I was the kind of kid that was watching “feminists destroyed!!” Content back when I was in my tweens. Eventually I became a similar way until I realized how bad my mother is when it comes to politics, and that she aligns with a lot of “anti-woke” rhetoric. Simply put, her being terrible at politics is what made me disassociate from the right. Now, I’m practically what you could consider to be “ultra woke Commie”😂
It stopped for me the second they started openly bashing gay and trans people. That's when I knew they didn't have my best interests in mind and that's when I gtfo'd
On the subject of the controversy surrounding Rue's casting in The Hunger Games, I just want to point out that Yhara Zayd has a very good video going further into it, as well as racism in fandom spaces
people were shocked about that threw me, I read the hunger games in high school, and how do you misunderstand satiny brown skin as a character description?
@@alorapendrak9752 I think a lot of readers don't pay attention to descriptions, especially a short one like Rue had, and just assume white. Then they get upset when their vision of the character is challenged, but for whatever reason they don't go back and check (maybe they don't own the book?). Also there are some characters who _have_ been race-swapped from white to POC, so it's not a wholly unreasonable conclusion to jump to. Why they refuse to accept direct textual proof and keep digging in their heels is beyond me, though. Probably emotional investment and the feeling that something is being stolen from them, even though it was never theirs to begin with. Being the default is one hell of a drug, and the invisible knapsack is full of syringes before it's unpacked.
7:30 - you mentioning this brings up a good point- why is it that female-targeted intrests don't get respect until boys/men get into it? I'm all for guys taking an interest in female-coded things without being ridiculed for it, but why are said things worthy of ridicule to begin with?
I am a long time nerd that is a fan of geek culture (sci-fi, fantasy videogames etc.) but everything you pointed is the reason why I have started to disassociate myself as a nerd and nerd culture. I even stopped considering myself as part of the Star Wars fanbase due to it's recent Toxicity. The sad part of your pipeline is that I was optimistic and thinking the opposite would happen. A group marginalized in their youth because of how social norms treated them. I thought with the rise of the Internet, online communities, and these nerdy properstes becoming more mainstream combined with understanding the feeling of being treated as outcast that us nerds would have been more welcoming, inclusive, and open to ideas and people of different backgrounds and cultures (I mean this is what the Star Trek franchise originally stood for). Instead the exact opposite happened where nerds are are no better, if not worse, than their past so-called oppressors.
I'm a nerd who goes way back. I'm old enough to remember when the first Star Wars movie came out. By the early 1980s, I was fully into computers and video games. I remember Revenge of the Nerds. Back then, it felt empowering to have this one piece of media that showed nerds coming out on top, and the group of outcasts of which I was a part all loved it. Now that I look back on it, it hasn't aged well, and I now see it as a festival of cringe even though I still appreciate the validation it gave me at the time. Perhaps because I'm not a cis-het white male, I have always been resistant to the nerd culture to alt-right pipeline, but my close cis-het white male friends from back then have also resisted it, and one of them, who used to lean conservative, has gone far left in recent years, as he saw the alt-right for the toxic disaster that it is. Thankfully, not all nerds have been drawn into this cesspool. A few years ago, I watched Anita Sarkeesian's videos after hearing about all the controversy surrounding her. Though I might disagree with her about some specifics, I think she made numerous valid points, and I don't understand why so many people felt so threatened by her. She merely pointed out some of the troublesome aspects in much of the media that we enjoy. It's still possible to enjoy something while understanding that elements of it might be problematic or cringeworthy. For example, I love the music of Richard Wagner, but I also understand that he was a colossal anti-Semitic jerk and that his repulsive attitudes might filter into his operas. I also love the cartoons from the Golden Age of Hollywood, but many of them are loaded with racist and sexist themes. I can still appreciate the good points and artistic quality while recognizing that they are a product of their time and will therefore include ideas that are repugnant by today's standards. It isn't a threat to my identity if someone points out something icky in a piece of media that I like. It's better to recognize the icky stuff and come to terms with it than to pretend that it isn't problematic in the first place.
Anita Sarkeesian actively lied about many of the games she criticised and spread misinformation left and right. Her claim that you would get "extra points" for murd3ring pr0stitut3s in GTA is the most well known example of something she made up. It is one thing to criticise a trend at large, and another to actively lie about the content you're covering as a way to dishonestly push your political agenda.
I would probably call myself nerd-adjecent. Many of my interests overlap with traditionally nerdy things, but I'm not into things like fantasy, coding, or superheroes. As an autistic person, i try to hide my interests and tend to mask heavily whenever I'm not at home. One of my teachers, who is a wonderful person and one of my mentors, told me I'm, "Just like Sheldon Cooper," after finding out that I'm autistic. She meant it as a compliment, but it hurt. I try to be emotionally aware, am not really interested in STEM, and do my best to cover up my 'nerdy' interests. Yet, that assholeish, entitled persona is what people associate most with nerds and autistic people.
This is a nice video, thank you. I think to an extent there was a split round about the time Gamergate happened, a similar thing happened with atheist channels which were gaining a lot of traction back then. I am a cis-het white male who stuck with my principles and remained left-wing or left leaning. But even so I found I had a lot of work to do, it became more evidently clear after the death of George Floyd when I saw so many black creators say (directed at white people) "It's good that you support us now, but in a month or two you will forget or turn on us again", and they were absolutely right. It took barely any time before BLM became a 'terrorist movement', and a lot of so called 'centrists' didn't want to associate with it all of the sudden. That was a real moment of growth for me, because I had to admit to myself that although I identified as left-wing, I did gravitate towards that centrist position from time to time. Then I realised I had to put my money where my mouth is, and remember that it's not about me, it's not good enough to simply declare my support and virtue signal, I have to do more and stop being such a coward because it's easier than standing up for marginalised people or accepting my own faults.
you have nothing to do because you are white, whites peoples are awesome and are the start of the biggest economic, medical and technologic boom who happened in history of humanity. you don't need to do anything more or less than a black or asian. just live your life and be yourself
Ironically, the movement you deem peaceful, was what ended my "liberal" phase. Getting mobbed and surrounded and being pelted by trash, it makes you think twice about who you are associating with.
I get called a nerd or geek often for the field I am in (wildlife sciences) and I will admit, it is my favorite thing to talk about. Yet, it seems so very far away from this type of community. The mindsets in my field like this at all are mostly just the old men who people are waiting to die off so we can make changes to legistlation and such... I feel like terms like geek or nerd kind of fall flat surrounding how many things it can just encompass, especially because it so heavily relies on one's community. I knew someone who was obsessed with MMA (he was a fighter) and when he talked to people in my field he was completely out of his element. By the definition of geek presented here, he could debatably even fall into that category.
Just about the video itself and not on the content, the thumbnail and title choice were excellent, very eye catching and true to what the video is actually about, nice job!
Growing up in nerd spaces in the early 00s was rouuuuugh as a half Black person. The amount of ‘it’s just a joke, lighten up’ after dude dropped the hard R I got…shit was exhausting and I only repicked up a magic deck in my 30s
I always hated this "woke propaganda" shit... Is making marginalized people and groups more accepted and included a bad and inflammatory thing??? Like what??? They can't see the irony in their own ideologies...
@Laurencsik István the minute poc is shown in media its automatically labeled as woke it could be a new character and it would still be called woke it's insane
While I agree with all your comments about why Nerd/Geek culture is such a toxic stew, I do feel that there is one aspect key to the culture that you haven't pointed out. The reason media analysis is so terrible in that subculture, despite their obsession with a product, is that for whatever reason for years, Geeks/Nerds prized minutiae over actual analysis. An example of this can be seen in the Star Wars fandom, where so many geeks pride themselves on being able to name every character that ever appears in a property, even if they just stood in the far corner for less than a minute, but when you try to explain how George Lucas intended Star Wars to be an allegory for the Vietnam War, with the Empire being the USA and the Rebels serving as the Viet Cong, either you get a lot of blank faces or they accuse you of injecting politics into the story. Never mind how all art is political to begin with. This kind of obsession with minutiae and trivia is akin to bragging about knowing the exact number of leaves on a tree but being able to say nothing about the overall structure or health of the organism. Meanwhile, if someone does come along who can talk about these things, but does the unthinkable like, say, gets the number of leaves wrong, well, that proves they're clearly a fake fan of that tree. If you can't meaningfully take apart and analyze the themes of a story, it becomes much harder to analyze and weigh out the real-world thoughts and opinions of others. Yeah, I've heard of the whole "The curtains are blue" meme, and it can be annoying when the English teacher insists that every aspect of the story is symbolic, but the truth is that every detail that winds up being mentioned is the product of authorial intent, and it's worth speculating on what is behind this intent. It could be as simple as "The writer thought it sounded really cool" with no deeper reason intended, but again, they chose to mention it for a reason, and it's worth speculating why.
I was a very popular charismatic guy in high school. I had my own peculiar interests, but was friends with everyone, and hung out with all, including many so-called "nerds". The one disconcerting thing I found about many "nerds" was their intense dislike of people. I don't know where it came from - it was not all from bullying. Some of it was just a cultivated sense of superiority. I frequently invited them socially into my wide circles of friends, and while interaction was fine and everyone was civil. But afterwards, they would sometimes take me aside and ask me why I hung out with "those people", and tried to convince me they were terrible people in some way. I never understood that. It drove them bonkers that I liked and spent time with people of all kinds of tastes & interests, and wasn't excluding x, y or z. The amount of negativity and unpleasantness towards others was very surprising.
Great video! Another interesting factor is that this mid 2000's radicalization period happened at the tail end of (ironically) a right-wing moral panic against consumers of nerdy media - starting with the satanic panic and carrying through to the early part of the school shooting era, in which many of the older generation started to associate nerdiness or video games etc with a hidden propensity for mass murder. The mainstream interest and subsequent serious media criticism came right near the end of that era. That satanic panic/mass shooter era had helped prime these people to see outside criticism of their media as that direct attack on their personality that you mentioned... Because the other stuff actually had been a deep and alarming personal attack. The nerd/video game moral panic never really developed into anything other than very very sporadic instances of state violence directed towards nerds, but it was seen by nerds as a sort of looming potential threat. It was very easy for fascists to propagandize nerds in that environment.
That's a great connection I hadn't made! Kind of like how fascists point out the evils of capitalist exploitation but then blame it on marginalized groups. The harm can be real, but the cause is a lie meant to reinforce entrenched power dynamics and systems of oppression.
Though I'm not nerd, I am aware of many who fit this description. They are definitely at risk of becoming entrapped or enticed to extremism as you have revealed here. The most dangerous of this type of extremism involves the morbid idolization and fascination with *guns*
@@GusOfTheDorks You'll have to contemplate what the last message means, also; to answer your own question, for yourself: The most dangerous of this type of extremism involves the morbid idolization and fascination with *guns*
I think there's a side of intellectual meritocracy kinda vibe there that leads you to things like objectivism, which promotes libertarians, which has become just Republican without the obvious racism.
I fell down the alt-right pipeline when i was younger; luckily Natalie Wynn saved me from being a total fascist. Nowadays i'm an anarchocommunist with egoist leanings, and i still have intrusive thoughts of fascist talking points etc when i talk with my friends (mostly Black and AFaB) about political/social topics
Always remember that the first thing you think is what you’ve been conditioned/told to think, the second thing is what you really think. That has helped me so much with intrusive thoughts, especially when they get political and I KNOW it’s the bullshit part of my brain picking up on the vast amounts of nonsense and information we’re bombarded with. The negative things stick in there harder and it’s a case of identifying them and putting them to the side. Even then, sometimes I have to talk down my thoughts and sit and try and hash them out and deconstruct them on the spot. Keep at it, friend. It’s a long road, but you can only be patient with yourself.
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426 any time, friend. It’s genuinely one of the most helpful pieces of advice I’ve ever been given. I hope it helps you gently challenge yourself in ways for the better. 🖤
Really interesting video, your points about the ableism, sexism and racism in TBBT were spot on and about how they let Sheldon get away with being as sexist (amd bigoted in general) as possible with no consequences or effort from him to learn/grow and viewers somehow started defending him and taking his side and acting like he wasn't that bad and hating on Bernadette and Penny, proving the sexism of Sheldon, the show and many of the viewers.
Yeah, I don't know how Sheldon and Howard kept their jobs (never mind all their accolades and opportunities that they didn't deserve) and didn't get arrested and why there weren't more plots about women getting restraining orders.
You do realise that that Sheldon got away with as much as he did because everyone understood that he simply doesn't understand his negative attitudes are hurting the people around him? You do understand that that's not a character failing, it's a literal disability that he gradually improves upon during the show? Do you think a blind person should be guilt tripped because they didn't see someone and walked into them? Can't defend them, being blind isn't a defence according to you.
@@Sujad The analogy about being blind isn't at all related to what I was saying though and there are so many instances in which he proved that he did know what he was doing and genuinely did view himself as superior not to mention how often he treated women as inferior and actually did want to hurt others.
@@heatherstephenson3559 Because he is superior. I'm no fan of TBBT by any stretch of the imagination but Sheldon was two or three decades ahead of his time. They even make an Elon Musk joke, about him using Sheldon's maths to launch rockets. He also viewed the men around him as inferior as well. Are you going to call him a misandrist for that?
I was in this pipeline and one of the reasons I think it’s so effective is because the right actually listens (or pretends to listen) to the problems these people are facing, while the left a lot of times acts as if you can’t have problems if you’re cis white. In these communities it sometimes sounds as if you can only get the thumbs up if you’re LGBT, or a person of color, or disabled. Even this video at times makes it sound as if 15 year olds who like nerdy shit have a macheavelian plan to allign with the ideologies where they can crush the minorities, showing (imo) that you don’t fully understand the internal problems and struggles of people like that, it sounds like you’re prescribing them malice when the cause for their actions can, in a lot of cases, be explaind by other stuff. I dont want it to sound like an attack, I agree with you on your conclusions but this is, to me, what pushes these nerds to the right. A lot of times the left doesn’t want to accept you unless you come with the answers already figured out, while the right patiently teaches you how THE JEWZ R DESTROYING THE WORLD!!1! I got off of that pipeline when I found people and communities that felt like they were actually listening to my problems and didn’t feel like reducing everything to skin color or the conditions of your birth. While at the same time pushing me to more progressive beliefs.
Great video. I think a factor other people forget in the nerd-to-fascist pipeline is the the internet leading to the effective death of in-person meetups and subculture. With the way things worked when I was a teenager, you had to actually go to stores or cons if you were into something nerdy. This brought you into contact with other people and their interests... So even if you just were into comic books, you'd run into a guy with a cool t-shirt and the next thing you know you're asking your local record store to import some South American heavy metal band's first album. Not that there weren't issues in the scenes back in the day but you were at least sort of conditioned to realize there's a degree of diversity. But when the became the main way to do everything, that eventually died. So people more or less obsessed over one thing and almost one thing alone.
I have only gotten four minutes into this video, but I, a Black Autistic Queer, have a very complicated relationship with this. It started with religious trauma, and in my rejection of Christianity, I found myself in sort of Atheist spaces. These were primarily white male dominated spaces, and, barely coming off of tweendom, I didn't have a conception of how strange that would be for me. Being who I was, I was very isolated and lonely, naturally, and so I just went along with this, desiring some sort of community. Quite naturally, this led me into Anti-SJW spaces, because that was in the cultural conciouness at the time. I had a very low self esteem, so it didn't matter much to me that the fatphobic, racist, misogynist, hateful rhetoric was punching down directly at someone who looked like me, because, shit- *I didn't even consider myself a person*. I slowly came out of this as I realized my queerness and learned more about my identity- I wasn't diagnosed with Autism until three years ago and I still haven't decided my queer identity. I still feel there is no place where I belong... but... not belonging will do shit like that to you. Trauma and loneliness can make you bitter and hateful to the point of hating yourself so much that you actively punch down on people who are just like you... I don't know how I got out of it, but I am still in need of so much healing...
I sort of... hesitate... about it. I know no media will ever be able to besides the stuff I create for myself, encapsulate the experience of being Black, autistic, and 'AFAB' nonbinary between two worlds (one of poverty on dads side and one of relative wealth on moms)... very much complicates how autism is expressed and how I fit in with others. So sure, it would be able to touch some, and probably many experiences... I dunno. I kinda have to piece together my own thing.
I can see valid arguments here, but all of this seems like a surface level insult toward people who like certain things. The issue that you even put down these individuals also does not help contribute to bringing these guys back from the right. You isolate these men and undersell their experiences. This video also feels like it is in bad faith too because you just shit on white males just because they're white. I feel it even worse because the undertone here puts other humans down for the way they react. I question the validity of some of the critics. All the critics you bring in is how you believe some of these people act but and is based in speculation. Now i also understand that you dont assume them all. But with how much the tone of this video shows. Alot of it feels like you do generally believe a majority of these people are less then you because they have things that theyve loved feel like its taken away from them. You even insulted them for their space. Which by all accounts is their space. If you believe that trans, non cis people deserve safe spaces, which they do. Why would you take away from their space? Just because theyre white is not a good enough reason as well as blaming them for having an supposed advantage. The reason it feels like they have these advantage in the first place is because it was founded on white people who built the country, but dont you think that the regular people themselves if you take race out of the consideration have suffered too? To undersell another groups issue is in itself disingenuous. Im a minority who leans right as well. But im here to have a genuine conversation on why you feel the need to insult and label certain groups only to leave out that its not only white people who has these issue here. If we take out all the race and stay objective to the conversation. Can you say without a bias that you have built for yourself that the things you're saying can be seen as genuine?
I'm still upset for KMT. Star Wars did her so dirty. I hope she rises + thrives. Thanks for raising awareness & suggesting practical steps, & esp for being trans-inclusive in a time where that needs to be explicit.
I really appreciate your video. However, there are some assumptions that I don't quite agree. First, that all geeks and nerds were bullied as kids. Second, that radicalized ppl were part of fandoms before they were popular. Part of privilege is to just enter a space and declare it their own and kick out the ppl who were there first. A cheerleader doesn't owe you a date bc you're "smart." I was a nerd and I was mocked but I also belonged to clubs and had lots of friends. I admit that I'm really, really introverted but ppl still reach and try to be friendly. So, it's kind of mean to think that Elon Musk was bullied and that's why he's a super villain while minorities get actually bullied, not for liking math but bc they're minorities.
I agree. Plus from what we know about his childhood his father was very authoritarian and not a very nice person, so he really just became like his father, which isn't all that strange when we think about it.
I think Witcher fans are a very good example of this. I am a big fan of the Witcher games and the books are incredibly special to me (I highly recommend them). I think the show is enjoyable. However, I think most Witcher fans are quite annoying. They adhere to a political neutrality (like you mentioned in this video) that makes them really miss some very obvious plot point and the over all meaning of the story. This also results in rampant racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, etc. in that community (in the subreddit, for instance). White supremacists are among them If anyone wants to learn more about this, I recommend the 4 part RUclips series by Sophie from Mars about the series, especially the episode about the fanboys.
It's really interesting that you say this about the Witcher fans, because I have had such a different experience in the fandom, though that could be due to the fact that I'm coming from the fanfiction side of the pond, so to speak. I don't read reddits or anything like that, but I have read a LOT of Witcher fanfic, and while yes the source material is still very white, I had seen more stuff written about and by neurodivergent and queer (I'm using that as the blanket term, as someone who uses it as a term for herself rather than spelling out specifics) folks and their takes on the characters than I have in many of the other fandoms I've been into. Though now I'm wondering if that's more of an era thing, as I'm seeing it more frequently in other fandoms as the years pass... I'll be checking out that series, though, thank you for mentioning it!
@@jrj5893 Not only the source material is very while. The whole origin of that material - eastern Europe - is very white. And there is nothing wrong about that. We do share history of colonialism, white guilt, slavery with USA. It is surprising that with this all race-swapping, not even single place was left for an actor of Slavic origin.
I'm not looking forward to the Netflix One Piece adaptation for part of that reason. It has a lot of themes that some of the Fandom seems to have ignored. I have a feeling that, seeing it removed from its normal cartooniness, will see it in a new light and get angry seeing social commentary in their show.
@@lonesaviorOne Piece has surprisingly pro monarchy sentiments despite it being about sea pirates but on the whole it's very ahead of its time. Any character who's coded queer doesn't die for example in one piece
I´ve been a Witcher fan for 20+ years. I remember waiting for the 5th book to be released before I started reading. No game existed back then. I was disappointed by the games (and still partially am - I hate Triss romance (Shani is even worse idea), Nilfgard bad, Avallach good, Eredin is joke in books, etc.). I think the vast majority of fans don´t understand the meaning of the story. I´m far less gatekeeping and more tolerant now, but still, the Witcher is a masterpiece of postmodernism and postmodernism is notoriously hard to understand. But it is very easy to pick parts of postmodern work you enjoy (moral ambiguity, complex characters) and avoid others (obvious feminism, Geralt being kind of boomer).
This needs to be discussed more. From video games to movies... I've never seen dudes so upset over literally nothing. I'm no nerd or geek but I have loved SW & superheroes like Batman for years...when a Black character comes about in one of this universes as a focal point, not a side character...these cats go bananas. I've distanced myself from a lot of these type of content creators though. It's not that deep to me & I'm damn near 40 years old...furthermore, I can't sit & listen to bigotry masked behind "wokeism" or "love of the source material". 🤷🏾♂️
"one of the worst aspects of nerd media going mainstream was tying your morality to what you consume" yes "but thankfully this has died down", alas, have you seen the weaselling of terf+swerf ideals into shipping fandoms? cus it's at the peak still. I do think it's a similar problem. it just targets more marginalized people for the entirety of it, both the people boosting it and the people targeted by it.
Subcultures have long been targeted by extreme right wing groups. In the west a subculture meant a body of dejected, white, males. 25-30 years ago I was getting into fights with nazi skins who insisted on showing up to placea they weren't welcome. It was so common that getting into fights with nazis was just part of being into things like crust punk and other extreme, or avant garde, music scenes. It was like this long before I got there. People in those scenes, that were my parent's age, had similar stories. I mean, the Dead Kennedys wrote a song about it more than 40 years ago. Sure, nerd isn't exactly what people think of when they think of these social spaces, but there is a cross over. Lots of people in those scenes were also into anime, comics, weird movies, fantasy, sci fi, video games, etc. So this whole wave of nerd to nazi doesn't surprise me at all.
As someone who has seen this exact thing happen to so many people, I considered friends in high school, I think you give a good understanding of how these things happen. I don't think it can be understated just how much these things were allowed to fester in nerd communities because the person espousing them is a "good guy" once you get past the fact he's a nazi.
I like “middle age white men” things (like golf, economics, etc.) so I started to look for content about that. At first it was all normal (like how to master golf or it’s rules) but it quickly began to show me very conservative staff, it’s was really scary because one moment I was watching “normal” videos and the next it’s was all about “alpha guys”, “real men”, “the left this and that”… mind you I’m a queer latina woman so it’s wasn’t something I saw or searched before. So I can confirm that the line between some innocent media and right conservative media is realllllllly fine!
As a white male nerd, I 100% used to fall into this trope and still struggle with it. Thank you for this content it helps me with mindfulness and policing my own beliefs while ensuring that my behavior reflects it as well.
I'm glad I fell down the left hand side of this pipeline in the end, I think it's one of those cases where being a Christian for so much of my teens was actually somewhat defensive. Looking back my church had (and still has) serious issues, But it also instilled this kind of aggressive discomfort with both the sceptic and 'shock humour' kinds of nerdom that kept me out of the pipe line for the embarrassingly long amount of time it took the feminist tendencies I'd picked up in brony fan spaces to turn into an actual systemic critique of things. I also think the ableism of a lot of these spaces is a lot more noticeable when you're disabled, but certainly through my teens I wouldn't have even had the words to articulate that.
as a trekkie, i have to disagree with you that fandoms _necessarily_ don't discuss interpersonal topics like politics or experiences. between the prime directive and the slashfics, sharing ideas about politics and experiences are very much at the _core_ of trek fandom. it's why none of this "infiltration" crap cracked us. we just keep telling them star trek doesn't work like that. they get mad about it, but they can live long and prosper for all we care.
I am late to the show but I am glad I came across this video. I was reminded of my own growing up and experiencing nerd culture and sports culture. I use to think that being a nerd gave one better insight into the struggles of oppressed people, hell I was one of those people. I was bullied my peers for being a nerd, and it didn't help that I looked like a stereotypical fat nerd either. Also I am a working-class Latino, though I am light skinned so I did have privilege in that department. But my experience of being bullied made me MORE understanding and empathetic towards oppressed and marginalized peoples. It just kind of made sense to me, after all heroes who I grew up with, like Superman and Spider-Man, would always stand up for the little guy. But at the same time I was a loner too, and the few times I interacted with other nerds in large groups, I gotta be honest, were mostly reactionary. Or rather, nerd culture was always more reactionary than we thought. There was a lot of them who were zealous Christians, Libertarians, right-wing technocrats, I could go on. Some were even traditionalists, confusing their idealistic view of mediaeval adventures for the real deal. Others, well, really didn't care what their favorite superheroes had to say and just fantasized about one day beating up their bullies, seeing them as their own supervillains. This whole idea of the racist bigoted nerd being a new thing is just fantasy, I think this was ALWAYS the case but we didn't see it until nerd culture finally became mainstream. Hell, I think when nerds did interact with women, POC and other groups, it was always from the mentality of, "I am the main character, I am the hero, and you all should be lucky I am with you guys." Honestly, as much as it sucked, I do feel like having not spent so much time with these nerd circles may have been what helped me not become a reactionary. That isn't to say this was ALL white nerds, and if I am being honest there should be more of a class analysis involved because working-class white nerds were always based, with some even talking about unionizing comic book writers and game devs! Of course no group is a monolith and plenty of middle-class white nerds were cool. But let's be honest, most of the fascist nerds we see are middle class white nerds. But I do have a warning: we are beginning to see POC, LGBTQ+ and women nerds also fall into this pipeline. Not in large numbers but the fact there is any growth at all is alarming.
Older generations (who used to actually get bullied for this kind of thing) can easily tell you the difference between a geek and a nerd. A geek is pop culture smart and a nerd is book smart. These days people use the terms interchangeably, and I can understand why since being either one could earn you a beat down after school in the 80s. Having actually lived through that era it's strange to see the things I enjoyed in secret go mainstream to the point of oversaturation and even used as recruiting tools for the alt right.
It bugs me that I have a hard time finding a review of the latest scifi or fantasy movie that isn't filled with references to how awful "wokeism" is. May I please hear about the fx, the set pieces, and the plot? I don't want to hear about some right-wingers' disdain of women and minorities being cast in adventure films. 🙄
I’m going to throw my 2 cents into this, speaking as someone who used to be right leaning, I think part of the reason people who like media have turned to the right is because left wing people have a reputation of going into a work forcibly changing in and using that change as a shield against criticism while insulting it’s audience. Now yes, some of those that are in media is discriminatory in many ways, the problem comes when they make a shoddy product that then attacks people who liked the originals. (I.E She hulk attorney at law for fans of she hulk, and men or Velma for scooby doo fans and white people.) TLDR: Using diversity as a shield for making a shoddy project while insulting the majority, is a good way to turn people against you and your cause even if it’s good. There’s nothing wrong with diversity and respecting cultures just that you respect ALL people.
Personally, I managed to avoid the "self-help and wellness" (that's such a wide umbrella term, I couldn't think of anything else to sum it up) to alt-right pipeline. That's an interesting deep dive as well, but it's scary how many different avenues they're utilizing to recruit
While I agree that, in ideal circumstances, one should call out injustice or inconsiderateness (is that a word?) where they see it, I do think there are also times when it would be reasonable to understand when they don't. Maybe the person being a jerk is a family member and you recognize that there's no use in arguing with them. Or maybe you're living in an environment- a house, a job- where, if you spoke up, you might be liable to face retribution. In media, those who make grandiose speeches in support of the common man are rewarded; in real life, they are often punished. In any given situation, before saying something unpopular out loud, one has to assess whether there's anyone in the room who will be willing to listen to them in the first place.
This is literally what happened to my brother. I am a Latino with strong features and my brother is white passing and very pale. He use to be funny and then he suddenly started liking nerdy stuff and eventually he became conservative. He talked about how he hated Disney remakes, our country and thinks it’s dirty, he makes fun of our indigenous people and language that he never once tried to connect with and always makes racist misogynist and ableist jokes. Not a day goes by without him saying the r word or how much he hates Mexicans. Guys if you have a family member into nerdy stuff please make sure they never get into this rabbit hole because they will never get out and you won’t even know who you’re looking at anymore. EDIT: I JUST finished the video and on that note about calling out your loved ones, you can guess why me and my sibling don’t talk to him anymore lolll
It's not too late - I check my brother for this, it's not the nerd sentiment or attribute, which is environmental and acquired. Rather some groups within fanbases. They exist everywhere. Your sibling might just require a stern talk to grow up.
Wauw, once in a while the algorithm actually DO work! So nice of you to pop into my recommendations! You got yourself a new subscriber! As a Nerd and a bit of a Geek, who’s also white cis straight - who sort of flew under the radar because I’m also a big bald fairly muscular guy who left some of my more geekish interests, (such as D&D), behind in my late teens/early twenties, replacing RPGs with looking for and neutralizing people with a very different kind of RPGs, (calling it a very different form of LARPG could be argued I assume), and didn’t rediscover it until I was in my late forties, returning to the fandom has been an unsettling experience! I’ve never understood the opposition towards seeing diverse representation in movies, games, TV, D&D, etc… So while it’s still fun rediscovering D&D, it's also frustrating to see how a lot of especially white guys, some nearly as old as me, (as having started out with BECMI rules), just constantly goes into a fit over basically everything - but if I recall correctly, Innuendo Studios actually made a video kind of explaining it, (the one with "dad saying uncomfortable cringe semi-racist shit" and "meat eaters getting angry by being reminded that maybe they should eat less meat", (which I of course got VERY offended by, because I love meat and if the gods had wanted me to eat salad, vegetables, beans, etc., they would have made me a freaking rabbit - but that aside…😜)… Sorry for the ranting - loved your video!
i know this video is 1 year old but since i got it in my recommendation i just have to say your video and the alt right playbook totally misses the 1 point for normal folks who have no leaning towards any political spectrum I think you forgot the elephant in the room that is a problem the left needs to solve (at least this video is pretty left leaning) Wich is the outward hostility towards anything that is a form of critique And i mean genuine critique not "hurr durr there is women in my show" but the "hey this show is badly written for x y and z" or "this stuff doesnt make sense for it to racial swap for X Y and Z" There is genuine critique of taking in uncountable numbers of refugees and wont get send away if they dont behave in the host nation. And if someone adresses those genuine issues like "hey these poeple dont behave can we send those specific poeple out?" the left would emmidiatly label me as "ow you nasty ass xenophobe/islamophobe" and thats it thats all it takes for someone to be pushed over the edge towards the right Or with shows like the acolyte there are actual poeple who say "hurr durr women" but there is also half of those poeple who say "this shit is badly written" As soon as this is heard some poeple that are left leaning will start saying to everyone "ow well your just a cis hetero white male so your opinion doesnt matter" This not accepting of critique is the main reason today why the right is getting more and more power. All it took is to flat out reject someones opinion and would push someone over the right since "well the left thinks im not important so why even try them" Even in this video you made the mistake of labeling white nerds as CIS white males you didnt treat him like a person you treated him like a subject in a general group how are you supposed to win over poeple if you first insult them and then dont take theire actual reasonable critism seriously? And you also labeld anything that isnt left as far right. how is that suppossed to win over poeple. for a poeple who claims to be open to everyone they exclude alot of poeple merly for critisising some issues These labels or insults in my opinion have lost its meaning overtime. it went from "no please im not a nazi/phobe/whatever it is these days" and is now just a warning label to others "hey this guy putting labels is an idiot and is not worth your time" you guys are seriously shooting yourselves in the foot by excluding poeple while preaching you guys are inclusive poeple. Wanna help out nerds to not spiral out of control into the right leaning? Take nerds seriously on his honest critiques instead of emmidiatly labeling him DO NOT PUSH HIM OUT treat him like a friend and just tell him honest opinion and stay respectfull But most important DONT LABEL HIM, DONT INSULT HIM, DONT EXCLUDE THEM. be friendly to him take him seriously and you will get him out. im not saying to take the "hurr durr black poeple in my game hurr durr" seriously but take the "hey this stuff doesnt make sense for X Y and Z" seriously a But at this very moment the best recruiters who you guys think are hidden amongst them arent exactly hidden, its you guys who label everyone as 'phobes" or "you cis white male for the mere small citisim to a badly written or cash grab or cheap idea movie with a minority in it A qoute from MLK everyone right or left but especially the left should endorse is this "I have a dream that one day my children will not be judged by the colour of theire skin but by the contents of theire character"
I'm so thankful we didn't have this webscape in the late 2000s/early '10s. Pretransition I presented as a white male, and had a fair share of bitterness and entitlement. Thankfully I've changed from the type of Warhammer player that could give the hobby a bad name to collecting a certain Necron dynasty because of their trans matriarch. 😅 I'm very pleased by the inclusivity we're starting to see in Warhammer, D&D, and Magic the Gathering. ❤
I really like nerdy stuff. I don't personally feel like I can claim any particular nerdom as I just haven't delved really deep into any particular thing. Meanwhile, I have a pretty close friend who I would 100% classify as a video game nerd. She's played a huge breadth of games and has a mond for holding onto really specific details. Early when we first met she worked at a GameStop and almost every day she had some guy with a trauma complex come in and try to quiz her as though her gender was the reason she wouldn't know about any given game. It also basically only happened with white guys her age too, teens and kids were never that bad.
A particular experience I'm always surprised with is I'm a huge X-Men fan. I've been reading the comics since I was a child ;I'm 25 now. I'm also gay and half Puerto Rican. My mother's side is where I get my Puerto Rican from and she's whom raised me so very much grew in an ethnic household. Now Xmen is a big minority allegory. They're literally persecuted regulated in contained due to how they were born. Magneto was a holocaust survivor so whatever for the second time his people were getting met with genocide that's why he snapped and became a radical. So X-Men has always been on top of like showing gay rights and minority rights and just how people suffer because of bigotry. Even on a governmental level. And yet you still have racist white Fanboys who are confused whenever most of the cast of X-Men or women or people have some corn of minority at least not American. And it's like bro obviously you've never read a comic book and if you did do you have any reading comprehension ;because Xmen is all about human rights and everyone being treated like a person. The arrogance and ego that you find within racism that somehow find their way into nerd spaces even more so spaces for the whole concept of the comic. is about minorities suffering ;and overcoming ;and getting stronger together. While maintaining peace with humans to the best of their ability.
I think it speaks volumes about the writers if an autistic character frequently blurts out racist or sexist ideas, because allistic people think that we always tell blunt truths. The subtext is “we all THINK these things, we just know better not to SAY it”
@@bellac6311 Yah so either the writers of those shows just think autistic people are disproportionately racist for some reason (least likely), or they themselves have a lot of racist thoughts they just aren't saying out loud (most likely)
I'm old. Back when, "nerd" and "geek" were insults, until we wore the terms like armor. A lot of us bled actual blood in the Nerd-Jock Wars. Seeing "nerd" culture become mainstream? To me, it means we won. It also means we have the responsibility to protect and aid the new bully-targets. "Aim here. Start with words. Get it all on camera." That sort of thing.
Got to a bit after the ten minute mark and damn... You're really gonna argue "Nerds somehow convinced themselves that just because they were mocked, bullied, robbed, socially outcast, and physically assaulted for their entire formative years they are somehow victims in life!" with a straight face? I can answer why nerds joined the "alt-right". It's because of YOU. If you charted the average quality of life of an adult nerd through the years, you would end up with a bell curve. In their formative years, they were the bottom of the barrel. The worst of the worst. Shoved in lockers, beaten up, lunch money stolen, publicly humiliated, and all for simply being "different" from how society expects people to be. Then, as it happens, the tech boom created space for nerds to become kind of cool. A tiny handful of nerds managed to become wealthy beyond measure. The rest of the nerds? The other 98% of nerds? All they got was a mild recognition of their hobbies in the mainstream. They didn't get rich. They got a tiny sliver of validation. And that was the HIGH point for them. Because next as soon as nerd culture became mainstream, what happens? The very people who ostracized the nerds in the beginning show up and go "Hey so, your nerdy stuff is cool now, but uh... It doesn't conform to OUR standards? So, you're bad people, and you should feel bad. But don't worry! We'll FIX it by changing everything you made to fit OUR standards. You're welcome." The nerds were left in a situation where there were two choices. Either self flagellate and agree that they are and have always been horrible people and throw themselves at the mercy of their lifelong bullies... Or join the group of people who were in conflict with their bullies even if their values didn't entirely align. You created this monster. Listening to this is like listening to someone trying to argue that Jigsaw never technically murdered anyone. Victim blaming an entire group of people to avoid addressing the fact that society at large created the problem to begin with by putting nerds into a situation where their only apparent choices were to falsely confess to being evil, or to join "team evil". Nerds could have been the biggest ally the left could have gotten. Nobody understands what the LGBTQ+ community suffers through today better than the group of people who literally faced exactly the same treatment twenty years ago. LITERALLY the same treatment. From the bullying, the assault, the mockery. Hell, they were even attacked by religious zealots for being "demonic". Most nerds would recognize the injustice and fight against it, remembering how it like to be victims themselves. But no. As easy as it would have been to reach out a friendly hand and offer to work together, you decided to go on the attack and act shocked that people who have been attacked their whole lives would immediately become defensive when attacked again. It really is tragic how many nerds have been lost to hate groups, but to claim it's something inherently wrong with nerds is a huge misdiagnosis of the problem. The problem is, and has always been bullying.
I dunno bud, i always was a big nerd, and still are! And yeah i was very attacked and bullied, and worst, but I always thought about my heroes in videogames, and comics, Miles Morales going and being friendly and caring after seeing everything he loved fall apart, Sonic, a franchise that I still love, having this amazing, caring hero who was all about freedom and friendship, i thought about what they would do, and so i grew up to be a better person that those who made me feel bad. And now i'm a adult, and like... I don't know, there was no monster being created, i didn't felt bad when things changed, i lived and learned, and honestly i don't agree with your point of view here. It's our responsability to change and be better, we can't be stuck on what happened in highschool man, and it's hard, and it's sucks, and It hurts, but at the end of the day, i rather be this happy, joy person who does not see himself as a victim for liking some nerdy things, i think that now is on us to make sure no one else goes trough the same stuff, LGBTQ people, women, people of color, no one should feel bad, or worse than we did, it's on us to be as good as the heroes we grew with! (Sorry, english Is not my first language.)
@@Dosborreguitosssss Miles Morales was first introduced in 2011. If you grew up with him, you completely missed the first era of nerds being bullied and oppressed. You may have endured some amount of bullying, 'cause school sucks and everyone gets bullied to some degree, but you did not experience what I am talking about. There is a huge difference between merely being bullied, and then moving on, vs being bullied, then later having your old bullies try to gaslight you about the whole thing.
@@novacorponline Hey, first of all, i'm all for having a conversation! A respectfull one, of course! Lets start by saying, yeah, Miles Morales was first introduced in 2011, and yes, in this current moment it's my favorite character of the Marvel Comics, but It was not the first that I loved, It was just an example, as i said, i'm an adult now, i've been around for a long time, and i've been a fan of comics and videogames since the first Adventure Era of Sonic The hedgehog (2002), being sort of lucky to be in for a wild ride in the first appearences of different characters in comics, and series, so, even if you don't believe It, i did went trough the things you are talking about, maybe evern worst? Because, second of all, i'm from México, and believe me buddy, what you consider bullying in USA, Is just random stuff we do with the homies here. But I don't want that to be the main point of the conversation, maybe you got It worse and i'm sorry for you, or maybe i got It, but I don't feel like comparing trauma Is a good way to iniciate a line of thinking. My point still stands. It's on us to grow! Also, gaslighting it's not a word i think you should be using in this context buddy! But I would love to continue this conversation if you want, maybe we both could learn a bit from this!
@@Dosborreguitosssss The way you phrased it made it sound like the character in particular was who you looked to for inspiration to endure at the time. Anyways, I agree that comparing trauma isn't productive; one's emotional response cannot be objectively quantified. Gaslighting is the appropriate word for this situation though, and is key to why so many geeks have sided with the bad guys in spite of the fact that they should know better. Gaslighting is not merely lying. Its been over-used to the point that many people assume it to be so, but it's actually a very specific thing, which does have a severe psychological impact on people. Its a pattern of behavior where you *deny* a person's experiences repeatedly to cause a person to start to doubt their own memories or perceptions. Gaslighting perfectly describes what is happening in the modern day to geeks. There is massive historical revisionism going on about culture in the 80s-90s. Geeks are told they were the bullies, during the time when they were the bullied and that they were exclusionary when they were the ones excluded. This gaslighting has a severe impact on people's psychological well-being. To be a "good person" today, you have to deny your own experiences and accept the lie that you were a bad person even though it contradicts your own memories. This leads to one of three possible outcomes. Either submission to the gaslighters, rejection of the premise and standing alone, or joining a coalition that supports your self perception. Joining the alt-right is a bad decision, but its to be expected that when a mass gaslighting campaign is being run against a group of people, some percent of that group will end up making a bad decision while trying to protect their self perception.
Top to bottom, this was a very, VERY good examination of the subject. I hesitate to use the phrase, “fair and balanced,” but that is exactly what this was.
I think there is one element missing from this: people being told they don't belong. What pushed a lot of people I knew in 2012 to the right wasn't the original gamergate story or anything stemming from Anita Sarkeesian herself, instead it was the universal labeling of anyone that might simply disagree with her on any point as a mustache twirling misogynistic villain or as a straight up Nazi. Same thing for the Five Guys posts for gamergate. People are were given false information, and when they tried to act on that false info in good faith they were labeled as freaks who hate women and cast out. The only people willing to take them in were the same people distributing the false information.
This was such a good video! As a cis het male, I heard about some holes I was in! I like how you pointed out that the nerd wants to be that patriarchal figure it idealizes! So much patriarchy in fandoms and it takes a lot to catch on to the nuance of it. The self victimization as well was well explained! Thanks for this!!
Dang. This video hit hard! It was such a horrible time to be online, and I was basically chronically online back then. I saw he YT atheist community turn to sludge.
I definitely fit into most of what this video is talking about (nerdy and coded CISHET SWM), except I never went down the fascist pipeline and have only gone further left as I have aged. I have also vastly changed many of the misogynistic and/or racist ideas I had internalized without realizing it. It's very difficult for a CISHET SWM to examine and break out of patriarchal and white habitus ideas. If you are into nerdy stuff and acknowledge the problematic parts of the culture, you alienate many of the other people who look like you and are into the same stuff. I can't tolerate a diatribe about how media is "too woke" or "too political" or whatever. I see the dog whistles now and don't tolerate it. However, so many marginalized groups have now just taken to excluding CISHET SWM from things, so acknowledging problematic outcomes of the patriarchy and racism endemic in these cultures leaves you socially isolated in a lot of ways. It's not just "easier" to fall into the fascist pipeline, it's personally gratifying and socially profitable if you look like me and share similar interests. At the same time, there is very little personal punishment for becoming politically disengaged and trying to enjoy this content apolitically. This is how you become a centrist who perpetuates the problematic bits and creates refuge for toxic ideas. It's also why people can unironically be a huge fan of a nerdy property and ignore or miss the political undertones at play in the content. If believing something benefits someone personally, cognitive dissonance will take care of logically justifying those ideas. I personally think things were actually much worse before nerd culture became mainstream. The right wing grifters were more subtle back then but the patriarchy, the misogyny, the racism endemic in these subcultures all went unexamined and publicly supported to an even larger extent than now.
But we wouldn't have Fashie/Nazi Kitsch to weaponize if it wasn't for the genuinely funny stuff brought with us into Internet Culture from the Old TV Culture. It went from amusing stuff like Artie Shell and Bob Crane into knowing winks about "Yeah, THOSE nuts are out there on the boards" humor until it WASN'T people being funny anymore. It became dog whistles and drawing lines in the sand. And there's no room for nostalgia about the Old Internet days because there's no going back. No use trying to talk reason or giving anyone the benefit of the doubt either. It all fails. There's nothing to do but fly right and remember to only punch UP, not down.
God, when I first graduated highschool I fit into this crowd. I can definitely agree that the pipeline is so correct. I used to be a homophobic, transphobic, sexist, white dude who thought any and all representation was woke and part of the liberal agenda. I was bullied in school for being a nerd (loving video games and anime) and would get upset with people claiming any of the things I love were problematic. It eventually got me into the alt right (along with Christianity) I watched the quartering, matt Walsh, glen beck, and many many more. All it took was a few videos and the algorithm had me down the rabbit hole. (It was to the point I remember being upset that they had a black guy in Star wars because it was "woke") While I still have a lot of growing to do (mainly getting over internalized transphobia and unlearning aspects of being a cis white dude with privilege) I still look back and laugh at how bad I was and am happy that I've changed
Before reading my wall of text below on why I disagree with your video, I just want to throw in some positive criticism and compliment you on your editing and speaking voice. This is an extremely biased video full of misinformation and lying by ommision. I know that's probably not your intention and I don't think you were doing this in bad faith but I couldn't help but point out a few things that you might not have been aware of: First off, the Star Wars sequels didn't push away Finn because of white nerds, it had to do with the Chinese market being extremely prejudiced towards black people. And the government over there will ban any foreign film if it doesn't align with what they want to push. It's messed up but the CCP has a government agency that decides what movies get released over there and censor anything they don't agree with. If anything, more "White Male Nerds" were complaining about Rey being a Mary Sue and saying Finn was underrepresented. At least in my circles. Second, in your part 2, you claim that white male nerds dominated the tech space due to their "privilege" in the 1900s. The thing is, alot of the innovation around tech within the last 60 years happened in western countries (which are mostly white). Still, there were minority groups back then who made contributions to tech that you're ignoring. The guy who invented swappable cartridges was a black guy for example. The arcade game Centipede, the Co-founder of Sierra On-line, and the creator of King's Quest/Phantasmagoria were women. Not to mention all the innovation that countries like Japan brought to the table which i could talk about all day. I know you don't see a lot of women in tech or female programmers but at the same time most women just don't have a genuine interest in tech or programming compared to men. Third, Anita Sarkesian was a cry bully. Her "Tropes vs Women in Gaming" series was full of misinformation and lies. Among many other examples, she claimed that there was a mission in a hitman game where you were encouraged to shoot sex workers in a club to complete the mission which was false. She also was supposed to have a speech at a Utah college, but she backed out over fake death threats and the local gun laws over there, instead of telling people what she believed in and risk being a martyr. Anita was a grifting coward who wasn't willing to be brave over something that she never cared that much about to begin with. It's as shrimple as that. 4. It's not that white nerds couldn't handle criticism from these radical feminists back in the early to mid 2010s, it's that the lense of feminism being shoved into the videogaming community where it wasn't necessary was really annoying. The last thing anyone wants to do after a long week of work is boot up a game or pull up a gaming review on RUclips to hear someone sprinkle in their feminist ideology so blatantly. There's a difference between including divisive issues in games like Metal Gear Solid and forced divisive issues due to bad writing like in the Saints Row reboot.
Thank you, I didn't know about the swappable cartridge. And yes, Anita had big flaws. I also recommend you watching a deep dive of gamergate by Savy writes books.
@@haruhisuzumiya6650 Inb4 not trans, so my perspective here can't fully know what it's like for trans people right now, but I can't blame things feeling a bit bleak atm. I'm worried for my trans brethren. Speaking from the US here, gay people have (generally speaking, still a lot of issues) crossed the threshold of societal acceptability among liberals and conservatives, so it's harder to conservatives to bang the anti gay drum anymore, so now they've aggressively shifted to making trans people and drag queens the new boogeyman that are the cause of all societal harms, with hateful rhetoric and anti queer laws aplenty coming along for the ride as an intended bonus feature. It's hard not to be worried things will get far worse for trans folk before they get better, and obviously I dearly hope that won't be the case.
this quote "capitalist patriarchy and toxic masculinity they begin to believe that their oppression stems" is the reason all these people are doing this, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM
thank you for calling out how racist fandom is. for so long ppl didn't say anything and im glad ppl started speaking up.
also, your drawings are so cute 💙
I was extremely shocked at how "nerd" communities (doll, film, cosplay, anime, gaming, etc. ) were filled with weirdos.
The commercialization of nerd culture has truly brought out people's demons.
@@lauren6509 frs
I love your videos!
Love your channel! I legit stopped consuming Korean media because of all the racism.
AH it's Harriyanna!! I've learned so much about the intersextionality of various fan communities from her channel!
But yeahhh that commercialisation of nerdiness seemed to also invite the exclusionary and oppressive parts of commercial interest too; the pandering to status quos, the tolerating intolerance to keep people buying, fanning the egos of the most privileged members who can give corporate the most money. The efforts of various movements are improving the corporate acceptance of more intersectionality, but there's always a mob of people complaining about little steps towards representation.
I was one of these guys in college back in the gamer gate Trump election era. What's sad is that the algorithm will never show a video like this to people like these. What helped me was my older brother sending me videos different than my feed that helped slightly modify my algorithm.
This. The main reason that I am who I am today is because I saw videos that challenged my point of view and took me out of my comfort zone
@@benjaminrichmond4227 you need to fix your algorithm this video sucks
As a nerdy black man I always found it strange how some nerds would embrace the same mean spirited, holier than thou elitism and brutality that our bullies gave us. You think their experience as nerds would make them more empathetic
i think some of them see it as a way to band together and hurt them back but worse. some i know are somewhere on the spectrum and just like things to be very orderly and for people to follow rules. its annoying that they even entertain the idea of facism. but thankfully im there to keep pulling them back to reality. also to be fair to the people im referencing they come from very conservative and strict parents who are all very devote in their belief that god is real. so they really are not falling far from the tree when it comes to thinking authoritarian leadership is okay. they worship a single god after all. but yeah it is weird to see these same people who were bullied to the point some had to fight back chose to support groups and ideals that are just terrible.
these are just my experiences with my friends and acquaintances over the years and is by no means indicative of everyone else. i too am on the spectrum but my intolerance of injustice took me a different way. its interesting how we can take different paths (but that might be why i was the one actually fighting people or standing up to bullies if they hurt my friends)
It's like a twist on that old Paulo Freire quote, _When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor._
Rather than developing empathy and building community with their fellow downtrodden, they just want to be the Bully.
If I remember anything from school, many bullies were bullied themselves.
The "gatekeeping" is a "trauma check". Someone entering into a nerds safe space without having "paid and entry fee in trauma and ridicule" is someone that might trash the only thing a nerd has to define themselves.
Love how alt left don’t think they’re fascist, alt right is completely different, also love how women never realize incels are created by them, hating men thinking that won’t affect men, imaging being bullied and then suddenly your fan anime is popular because women cosplay half naked
As a nerdy Black woman that’s really into anime and video games, I only share my passions with and join spaces that are dominated by people of color and women. I’m on a discord sever for Black women who love video games and it’s the only server where I haven’t seen or been called a slur.
Thats so sad that its even a possibility to be slurred esp in a space that ure supposed to feel welcome in, im so sorry that happened i hope the fandom space will become less rancid and hostile towards marginalised people and i hope ure doing good
That’s something I want to do more often. As a queer woman of color, I know that any time I engage with a male colleague about anime they will say something sexist or homophobic/transphobic without fail.
Not a woc, but I’ve been “exotified” by nerdy men enough times and always unsolicited that I just DON’T feel safe in nerd/geek spaces that aren’t a pretty wide range of ethnicities/racial identities/cultures and queer identities, and about a 50/45/5 mix of women/other gender identities/cismen-basically, no one group is a majority, but it’s certainly NOT cichet white folk and DEFINITELY NOT cichet men.
Which leaves 97.89% of my true social interaction online after vetting people out as “safe for me/safe for others (and therefore gently continuing to debug biases I’ve been raised with)
I love that we’re in a time where we can just make our own spaces and enjoy things peacefully with other people who are like us. It shouldn’t have to be like that. But I’m relieved that we have that option.
It feels like such a modern revelation to me these spaces even exist. I was very much the oddity at my school curled up in my own little corner reading some nerdy thing and was picked on, teased, and abused by other black kids (there were only black kids in my school) and then I figured out I was queer too (late bloomer in all things). In college I actually met my first fellow geeks, all white dudes and while I felt i could share my geekiness with them, I hid my queerness. Then I tried to explore my queer side, where I was the big dork again and found myself hiding my geekyness. Whenever I met a person of color or woman or fellow LGBTQ+ person who enjoyed the same geeky persuits, I felt like I found a unicorn. I was too poor to ever go to conventions, so it was random luck when I connected with fellow geeks. Now i feel the interwebs have really shown me there is so much diversity in Geekdom.
This video makes me think a lot about Harriyanna Hook's content, which primarily critiques misogynoir in Fandom and media, thank you for furthering this discussion in your video
Same here, Harriyanna Hook actually made a comment on this video agreeing with the same thing you said
Love how alt left don’t think they’re fascist, alt right is completely different, also love how women never realize incels are created by them, hating men thinking that won’t affect men, imaging being bullied and then suddenly your fan anime is popular because women cosplay half naked
I want to find it, but youtube comments suck so much now for finding comments.@@mysticalquilava
I've always found it ironic that Star Wars has some of the most toxic fans when many of the movies feature themes about people from diverse background coming together to defeat a totalitarian regime. Even some "fans" within the Tolkien fandom moved toward more extreme ideologies and have said some really worrying and racist things about the diversity in the "Rings of Power." Despite my love for manga and high-fantasy when I was younger, I have sadly moved away form the wider world of fandom as I just do not feel comfortable in some of these spaces anymore. I hate being told I'm stupid for loving certain shows or characters the "geek overlords" deem below them. I also love playing sports as well and am tired of some rich white-male geeks saying that I'm a just a "fake geek woman."
Conservatives are famously incapable of media analysis. Full Metal Jacket is notorious for driving military registration, and American History X is very popular with neo nazis
It's such a curse* on the show/film/whatever that draws those malevolent gazes from self-declared Fandom-randoms. Like, I'm iffy on Tolkien & I can't even tell if I'd enjoy Rings of Power bc the reviews are so skewed by the frothing-mouths so bothered by "woke" --- which appears to mean anything to anyone, from "just being polite" to a dawning full-blown communal utopia (which...I wish! Yes, please!) --- they scream about "politics" without acknowledging review-bombing before the thing is even released is being way more political than any show made under capitalism could be, & I can't even get a glimpse of the aesthetic or storytelling qualities to discern if I'd find it interesting.
* I'm dumb lol I just realized this is what they want --- to make it such an ordeal for the creators + audience that they never cast anyone other than dudes as the Main Character of any story that gets told, unless it's a story "for" a subgroup of the rest of us, in which case it'll get no budget or resources & will be segregated from Hero Stories, just off in a corner somewhere so the dudes don't have to look at us.
I know what you mean. I enjoyed Captain Marvel and can relate to the bad father, gaslighting and being ridiculed by people for my dreams. Every time I try to defend the movie, I get ridiculed and told there’s something wrong with me. Even when I point out the movie made a ton of money, there are still people making excuses for why. Yet Morbius, a movie that starred a white man and bombed, doesn’t get anywhere near as much hatred.
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426 I talked to someone on RUclips about that and they had a theory that seems somewhat legit. She said that, when Hollywood makes a movie starring a woman or a minority, they take a chance on nobodies in the hopes that the movie will bomb so they can say people don’t want movies starring women or minorities. Which would explain why they not only released Black Widow during COVID but took a chance on premiere access. Brie Larson says that Hollywood needs to have women writing women and, for She-Hulk, they hired women who had never seen a law show while giving them an unreasonable deadline. Even though Captain Marvel made a ton of money in the box office, the Marvel suits are using Alt right anti-Captain Marvel videos to prove she’s not liked. That way the Hollywood executives can claim that it’s not that they don’t want to be more diverse, it’s that the people don’t want it. With Black Panther, they ended up hiring people who generally cared about what they were making. So that backfired on them.
I've never seen "Rings of Power" and don't plan to, but one thing I found really disturbing was when the dwarf princess character was released, and all these LotR reddit bros wouldn't stop whining about how awful it was that she didn't have a beard, because Tolkien dwarf women canonically have beards.
Honestly? There was no way they cared that much about whether or not the character had a beard. The Lord of the Rings film trilogy diverges in a number of ways from the books, and nobody ever complains about those. The dwarf princess in "Rings of Power" was portrayed by a Black woman, and "she doesn't have a beard" seemed like, well, a beard for them to complain about the show being diverse without having to look like racists or misogynists.
And then The Boys happened where there was a scene with an isolated nerd who got radicalised by a Nazi superhero until he shot a store clerk because he wanted to be part of power.
I love The Boys, but it deeply saddened me that there were apparently fans of the The Boys watching it and only realizing in Season 3 that Homelander was a bad guy the show was making fun of. Like, how do you watch the first 2 seasons of The Boys and not realize Homelander is a piece of shit?
@@gregvs.theworld451 I remember watching some clips of the boys on RUclips, and oh my goodness the comments are filled with a bunch of bigots.
@@kittykittybangbang9367 Sadly, that doesn't surprise me. I'm content to watch the boys knowing I can properly analyze media, and also rest easy knowing I'm not a piece of shit fascist, and stay the hell away from less savory corners of the fandom (I think the subreddit is alright last I checked, although I haven't checked recently.)
Ironically, it had an alt right following because the show was making fun of ultra liberals. They lost that following after learning the show was also making fun of ultra conservatives.
@@gregvs.theworld451 my former friend only saw season 3 of the show because he thought soldier was cool and thought that Homelander was going to be a male version of Brie Larson Captain Marvel until saw the show. He saw himself in Homelander and Blue Hawk, and didn’t realised that Soldier Boy was a villain. When he found out about Stormfront being a Nazi villain, he hates The Boys more than Disney.
Just think how poorly Revenge of the Nerds circa 1984 aged.
I watched that movie for the first time a few months ago and I was so disgusted by the behaviour that was passedoff as romantic... yikes
Hence why I don't want to watch that film-the incellyness will trigger me!
That movie gives off hentai vibes…and shouldn’t of ever been made.
Another movie I go out of my way to avoid.
One word. Porky's
As a geek who happens to be a woman, this video really hit hard. The misogyny is getting out of control to the point where the trailer for The Marvels got flooded with hate comments and anyone who has something nice to say about it gets called a bot. Though they won't admit they're being misogynists and, when they're called out on it, they'll mention movies like Alien and Kill Bill to insist that they like women-led movies. What's worse is when women and people of color join in with the alt right fascism. Is there any chance you can make a video about that? I'd really love to see your thoughts about women and people of color joining in to discriminate against themselves. Even about how they use certain movies to try to prove to people that they're not racist or sexist.
How can you blame them? Every western movie and video game now is infected with the woke mind virus, it's all about virtue signaling, blackwashing every successful past movie because they can't be creative and invent new concepts, insulting women by taking away their character growth with feminist madness (eg Mulan), censorship everywhere which censors creativity (hence why manga now outsells the entire western comic industry). And after they do all that, they still cry that they are the victims and that there's misogyny, misogynoir, anti blackness, racism, bigotry and so on and so forth.
FACTS
I swear to god, if i have to hear from one white male who dropped out of film school, calling Kill Bill or Aliens as prime examples of "a strong female character" to justify their misogyny against other female-led works. It's interesting how they choose those movies, often directed by white men, that happened years ago and can't find any "good" female characters in recent movies
Blame that on disney and their constant hate for their fans, especially Male fans
@ihatepower 45 what do you mean Disney hates everyone. They're attempting to appeal to a group in the worst way possible and making everyone feel shit
@@ihatepower4580 Oh, like you don’t hate the women fans.
It's just shocking to me how certain fans of fantasy, Comic Books and Anime could hold so much anger and strife towards other groups of people. I mean, In so many series the common themes are fighting for peace, standing up against the forces of evil, getting along with others who are different, the struggles of a hero or heros who are judge by society just because they are different and so on. With all these themes and messages in basically some form or another in so many series, how can someone not pick up any of it? How can they not realise they are being the "bad guys" In all the stories they read? Are the only things they get out of these stories, flashy colors and cool fight scenes?
They see all those things, but they've totally flipped the script and made themselves to be the underdogs hated by a judgemental society, who must fight the faceless, conformist enemy. At least, when they're not just openly championing the villains.
Because the lead character is almost always a dude, and most importantly a white dude. He's the hero fighting for justice, so therefore what they do can't be wrong either, because they're the hero.
@@TheGrayMysteriouswell not really. While yes there are people in the "cis white het male nerd community" that are straight up against other genders and races that is not the reason why most nerds don't go woke. I too am one of them. I would call myself a centrist but by your standards I'm probably a fascist so whatever. Anyways I was playing one niche game that not many know and I was part of one server. It was cool and nice. First came the special pride outfits, I and most didn't mind. They were optional and rarely did anyone actually wear them. I heard that the admin team had a bit of a cut and new wave was to come. There were many changes that 1. sanitized the experience 2. destroyed fun parts of the game in name of politics.
I and most didn't mind but then there came a ban on gendered "slurs". So I accidentally (you know how banter is) said the b word one too many times and bam I'm banned. I could appeal it but I didn't even want to. The server wasn't fun. It was sterile and smooth with safeties everywhere. There weren't any edges. But I found another one. Not the best one. Maybe not so popular. But it had IT. The game was fun again. Yeah there were a few r words and n words tossed around but at least I wasn't banned.
What I mean by that is that the normies want things normalized and safetifized. While that is ok, instead of integrating the original community you push them out in your righteous woke conquests. The online spaces i liked all lost their charm after the SJWs came in and wanted everything catered for them and for their righteous enlightened woke ways. They came to civilize us right wing plebians on what is moral or else. And while many submit many choose else. Not out of spite or racism but because we want OUR spaces to be OURS and not everyone's.
imagine this, you've developed an IP and people love it, then a whole bunch of new people come in after scoffing at it thinking its beneath them but now its popular, those new people demand so many changes that its completely unrecognizable from the original and then those new people play the victim when the original fans want it back to how it always has been and telling the new people to just come up with their own stuff
@@bobergamer1963 But they arent your spaces in the first place, they are EVERYONES spaces, you dont get to gatekeep your niches to people, and if the comunity changes, well, that sucks but you just have to accept it, theres nothing you can really do there
Yeah I like anime, some anime but I have long noticed that there's a lot of anti-blackness in the anime community.
Flashback to those tweets complaining about African characters in anime/manga because it ruined their escapism.
@@NIHIL_EGO Yikes!!!!!!!! 😬
I immediately thought about the time people drew one of the black Pokémon gym leaders as an ape during the release of Pokémon sword and shield just because people where excited about her design and cosplaying her /:
@@Andrea-rc1gz It's not even as if we didn't already had dark-skinned gym leaders already. Black and White had Lenora, X and Y had Grant...
There’s anti blackness in every country of the world….even black ones
Yeah I remember there with cries of white genocide because there was a black Stormtrooper. And they tried to make Rose the new Jar Jar Binks, maybe they were mad because it was an Asian woman who didn't fall in love with the first white guy she saw.
100%
I don´t think their "problem" was "oh there´s a black stormtrooper", no. The real "problem" for them was more like: "Oh, there´s a black actor playing a crucial role in the movie as one of the main actors. It´s the end of our world."
I don't like Rose very much but no fuckin way was she the new Jar-Jar
@@torstensommer4319 don't excuse them, majority of the complaints had to do with race 😂
i remember when in the fallon show peoples claped when he said whites peoples are a minority in usa.
As somebody who was on this pipeline years ago back in middle school as the loner kid who desperately wanted to be seen as an intellectual, the primary reason was that i felt inferior in every way to ppl around me and directed my insecurity towards minorities (particularly queer communities).
The main reason i feel that i got out of this hole before it became too deep is that somebody, who i initially felt a lot of hatred towards for making me feel insecure, befriended me and, for the first time, i felt like i had been genuinely seen for the first time in my life.
I wanna be able to do the same thing to ppl like middle school me and give them the opportunity to feel worthy of being valued as a person.
JUST ADMITTING THAT TO YOURSELF AND THE WORLD (COMMENT SECTION LOL) IS SUCH A HUGE STEP!!!! I'm personally glad for you, becuz trust me, THAT is an empty path. You could open up a program near your hometown, or create an app that focuses on that problem. You are going to change ppl's lives for the better!!..........................Just like your friend changed yours......
Good luck and Godspeed on this journey.
Yeah a lot of us have fallen into the alt right pipeline, I did too in middle school, just because of cool nazi edits that made me like them. A group of friends of mine also posted right wing memes.
If you told younger me I would be a leftist in 2024, he would call you a slur but here we are 😂
I still don't like this video though, I guess I'm sort of centrist then?
The Left is causing this with the constant "white people bad, men bad, straight people bad" propaganda.
I used to be big into the Skeptosphere, sort of teetering right on that edge of the alt-right pipeline. Then I eventually came across HBomberguy and a lot of other more lefty video essayists and I kind of saw how weird I was being. How a lot of what I saw as just normal was baked into me as a white teen guy (at the time) living in the deep south. Right around that time, Star Trek Discovery started and boy oh boy the Trek fandom had a schism. Not as publicly messy as the Star Wars one, probably due in part to Trek's overall focus on diversity, but it was again a whole "look in the mirror" moment for me. Of getting mad because I wasn't sure how to feel about something and someone told me to be mad about a black woman. And there's a part of me that wonders if I still would hold the sociopolitical views regarding social justice and equality that I do now if I hadn't been snatched out of that gaping maw at the very last second. Part of it was leaving home, sure, that whole way the world opens up and you gain perspective, but I don't know. Maybe I'm lucky, I got out before I was irreversible.
I'm glad you came over to our side of the aisle, friend! 😊
Logicked had a fun time with atheism plus
It was so bizarre watching the "skeptic" community fall for a cheap & obvious con-man when Trump was running. & yeah, the ST Discovery backlash was awful. The racist reactions were so bad that when talking w/ friends I *still* feel compelled to clarify that I disliked the show due to bad/inconsistent writing and not because of the cast diversity, lol. (the characters were all quite likeable, I just wish the stories had been more episodic and the writing wasn't so melodramatic). 🖖
@@MiqelDotCom I know how you feel. I have to make the same clarification when I say that I don’t like The Last Jedi. Apparently it’s possible to hate even the bad stuff for the wrong reasons.
@@suburbantimewaster9620 Lol, did you dislike all 3 of the new ones or mostly TLJ? Rise Of Skywalker was so goofy it had me laughing out loud in the theater!
Anyhow, the proliferation of hateful fandom content on RUclips really bugs me. Hundreds of far-right pipeline channels whose only gimmick is to HATE everything new that comes from the franchises they supposedly are fans of, and blame every perceived flaw on "wokeness". Ugggh. I can't understand how people fall for that garbage.
Man this feels bad man. I've seen personal friends just fall down the alt right pipeline. It just feels like there is nothing you can do about it. On I side note, people like this just makes it harder to criticize something in good faith. Like I actively really dislike the star wars sequel trilogy (and most of Disney star wars in general) due to the nonsensical plot, strange story beats,, and their willingness to just straight up throw away long established lore. I hate it when I try to look up discussions on it, I just get recommended people talking about SJWs and how much they dislike women and "woke" content. Its honestly pretty infuriating.
I'm a conservative, and I feel the exact same way. The star wars trilogy doesn't even feel woke at all to me, it's just like someone decided to call it that and everyone just ran with it. Don't get me wrong, they're Horrible, but I don't see a preachy leftist message being any significant part of that. They're just poorly made movies, period. Same with Rey being a Mary sue, somehow she is designated as the textbook example of that, whereas I see her as mostly just being a run of the mill, if not quite bland, protagonist archetype.
I think people criticize the wrong thing, its not diversity they hate or even race swapping for example. Its the intentions behind why they wrote the character into the story is usually what sets people off. Of course bad writing as such in the star wars sequels and a clear lack of passion for their craft also hurts media.
same or similar feeling here, being a history/linguistics/archaeology/literature guy... I can't look stuff up nowadays without the algorithm assuming I'm some kind of white guy incel who fantasizes about bringing back awful iron age shit so I can be a patrician who bangs his slave women or some garbage
@@idnyftwyeah far leftism is pretty racist
@@idnyftw The other day I was trying to research Sulla, the ancient Roman dictator that murdered thousands of his political rivals and broke the republic, and found a video where he was unironically praised for his similarity to Augusto Pinochet.
Any historical topic will inevitably be twisted by malcontent freaks.
I haven't made it to the end but the yugioh card section hit me cause I was that kid in high school. I loved yugioh but got mocked by everyone even my childhood best friend at the time, who also enjoyed the game but was "to cool" around others to like it. Heck, I was even mocked by magic the gathering players because they saw the game "for kids."
Though I fell out of the game due to my area no longer supporting it, I still look back fondly on it, I also met my actual best friend from going to tournaments.
But as an adult, I've been mocked for liking manga having people refer to it as a "picture book." Also my love of pokemon, drawing, video games and anime has also been targeted more than once.
These are just a few examples of being targeted for being enthusiastic about something.
Where do you live? It seems like inclusive need culture is popular where I grew up in the PNW. My hubby grew up in Texas, and basically everything different was mocked.
I love how these people say it's a picture book
When a lot of these picture books are absolutely not for kids at all.
Interesting. I was in elementary school at the time when the anime aired and it was VERY popular to like Yugioh, especially among boys. I loved it, too. Strange to see that in high school (and probably in middle school as well, I presume) it was something to be ashamed of.
@@kyndramb7050 I grew up in Canada, most likely this is an issue that everyone, everywhere needs to face.
It's easier to mock the thing you don't understand rather than to try and understand it.
@@dianaharris7506 Agreed, though it can go both ways. I've known someone who was worried about their daughter liking anime because she has heard/seen(not sure which) the r rated stuff, then assumed all of it was.
Meanwhile manga/anime is just a medium used to tell a story rather than being limited to a specific genre.
Imagine if people thought the same way with musical instruments, like a guitar could only be use in country (for example) and nowhere else.
Haven't even watched this yet but, based on the title alone, I know this is gonna be a banger
Edit: 25:41 "The key in keeping you inside is that you continue to think that you're at the periphery, at the tip of the iceberg, that all of this hateful rhetoric isn't hateful at all, that there's still more to discover; and that, in the grand scheme of things, this is all a perfectly normal way of seeing the world.
That's how the alt right ensnares you, and how conspiracy theories work: They make you _think_ that you're in on a secret, that you have the answers, when, in fact, you're someone else's puppet."
This hits SO HARD
Based on the title I knew it would be leftist brainrot and I was right. But that quote does go unbelievably hard.
Except conspiracy theories are based, all my homied hate the pedophiles that control the world, we all hate the government and the powers that be 🔥
Yup. Its the core of conspirutal thinking itself. Whether its nerd-dom, fitness, crunchy cults, political cults of personality, you name it.
Selling someone the idea that they are part of a select group that knows something that nobody else knows is a powerful brainwashing tool that also sets someone up to accept lies. Of course the special secret knowledge would be called false by the "sheeple", it wouldnt be special secret knowledge if everyone knew and believed in it!
I’m Latino, not white, but the way you talked about how nerds get pushed into the pipeline in part 4 of the video kinda hit me like a bus. I’m autistic and so it got me bullied a lot by both boys and girls in middle school. Since you mention how the patriarchy plays a role in this, I’ll mention that I would end up focusing on the girls that bullied me more than the boys that did because I had these ideas that girls are meant to always act kind and never question anything or act up at all. I would internalize these thoughts and it would end up making me resent the girls that bullied me more than the boys that did, so when I started to hear about feminism at around 13 years old I’d dismiss it as just “women wanting to be angry and annoying” when it wasn’t the case at all. I started to get into “anti woke” or “feminist/SJW gets owned” stuff because I thought it would make me feel better about how I was treated by girls, when in reality it only made my perception of many things warped. Fast forward to high school and some friends that I had that were girls would start to notice me acting sexist or bigoted, and so they would start to confront me and call me out for it. I got into fights and arguments several times with them because I still had the idea that these sexist beliefs were correct because I thought that I faced how all women act when it was just a group of bad people that happen to be women. This was when I started to question these beliefs and so I realized that this way of thinking was wrong the whole time. Through this I would end up realizing that I was queer and I would start feeling more positive and happier about myself. I think that it was also the fact that I found myself in a friend group of people that were also neurodivergent and queer that finally made me comfortable of realizing these things about myself and realize how wrong that things I believed in before were.
I am glad I found a video like this because it really does explain what caused the alt right pipeline to get as big as it did
It can be a self-reinforcing meme-set.
When I was 16 I stopped being racist, sexist, and transphobic because I started weightlifting. It gave me a sense of personal strength.
Interesting. When I was young I was nothing of that. After I grew up I turned all those -ists.
@@serenityssolace I had it pushed on me since childhood. By the time I reached the age of reason I could tell most of this stuff was nonsense. But around 2013-2014, the internet became really racist, and males my age were often groomed into becoming right wing. I was one of them.
Gladly that phase didn't last that long, because I like to be strong, not represent myself as some victim being put down by the blacks and jews. We are being put down, but by other white people, who demonstrably control most of the economy, politics and social clout.
I am your demographic opposite --- a disabled older woman --- but weightlifting gave me a similar feeling of empowerment.
Thanks! I didn't know bodybuilding did that! Cool!
I almost fell into this rabbit hole. I was the kind of kid that was watching “feminists destroyed!!” Content back when I was in my tweens. Eventually I became a similar way until I realized how bad my mother is when it comes to politics, and that she aligns with a lot of “anti-woke” rhetoric. Simply put, her being terrible at politics is what made me disassociate from the right. Now, I’m practically what you could consider to be “ultra woke Commie”😂
underrated comment
Feminism actually sucks.
(Also: putting a sickle and hammer in your nickname is cringe)
It stopped for me the second they started openly bashing gay and trans people. That's when I knew they didn't have my best interests in mind and that's when I gtfo'd
bro went into a worse path
@@xnnoahPOV: You are typing with Cheeto dust fingers
On the subject of the controversy surrounding Rue's casting in The Hunger Games, I just want to point out that Yhara Zayd has a very good video going further into it, as well as racism in fandom spaces
people were shocked about that threw me, I read the hunger games in high school, and how do you misunderstand satiny brown skin as a character description?
@@alorapendrak9752 I think a lot of readers don't pay attention to descriptions, especially a short one like Rue had, and just assume white. Then they get upset when their vision of the character is challenged, but for whatever reason they don't go back and check (maybe they don't own the book?). Also there are some characters who _have_ been race-swapped from white to POC, so it's not a wholly unreasonable conclusion to jump to. Why they refuse to accept direct textual proof and keep digging in their heels is beyond me, though. Probably emotional investment and the feeling that something is being stolen from them, even though it was never theirs to begin with. Being the default is one hell of a drug, and the invisible knapsack is full of syringes before it's unpacked.
They were mad black ppl exist.I bet their nerd ass won’t say shit to me in public though
God I remember that madness. First introduction to systematic racisim I saw online.
@@falconeshield Does that mean taking white characters and making them black is systemic racism?
7:30 - you mentioning this brings up a good point- why is it that female-targeted intrests don't get respect until boys/men get into it? I'm all for guys taking an interest in female-coded things without being ridiculed for it, but why are said things worthy of ridicule to begin with?
Because they're girly: Probably them
Misogyny
homophobia and mysogyny
I am a long time nerd that is a fan of geek culture (sci-fi, fantasy videogames etc.) but everything you pointed is the reason why I have started to disassociate myself as a nerd and nerd culture. I even stopped considering myself as part of the Star Wars fanbase due to it's recent Toxicity.
The sad part of your pipeline is that I was optimistic and thinking the opposite would happen.
A group marginalized in their youth because of how social norms treated them. I thought with the rise of the Internet, online communities, and these nerdy properstes becoming more mainstream combined with understanding the feeling of being treated as outcast that us nerds would have been more welcoming, inclusive, and open to ideas and people of different backgrounds and cultures (I mean this is what the Star Trek franchise originally stood for).
Instead the exact opposite happened where nerds are are no better, if not worse, than their past so-called oppressors.
I'm a nerd who goes way back. I'm old enough to remember when the first Star Wars movie came out. By the early 1980s, I was fully into computers and video games. I remember Revenge of the Nerds. Back then, it felt empowering to have this one piece of media that showed nerds coming out on top, and the group of outcasts of which I was a part all loved it. Now that I look back on it, it hasn't aged well, and I now see it as a festival of cringe even though I still appreciate the validation it gave me at the time. Perhaps because I'm not a cis-het white male, I have always been resistant to the nerd culture to alt-right pipeline, but my close cis-het white male friends from back then have also resisted it, and one of them, who used to lean conservative, has gone far left in recent years, as he saw the alt-right for the toxic disaster that it is. Thankfully, not all nerds have been drawn into this cesspool.
A few years ago, I watched Anita Sarkeesian's videos after hearing about all the controversy surrounding her. Though I might disagree with her about some specifics, I think she made numerous valid points, and I don't understand why so many people felt so threatened by her. She merely pointed out some of the troublesome aspects in much of the media that we enjoy. It's still possible to enjoy something while understanding that elements of it might be problematic or cringeworthy. For example, I love the music of Richard Wagner, but I also understand that he was a colossal anti-Semitic jerk and that his repulsive attitudes might filter into his operas. I also love the cartoons from the Golden Age of Hollywood, but many of them are loaded with racist and sexist themes. I can still appreciate the good points and artistic quality while recognizing that they are a product of their time and will therefore include ideas that are repugnant by today's standards. It isn't a threat to my identity if someone points out something icky in a piece of media that I like. It's better to recognize the icky stuff and come to terms with it than to pretend that it isn't problematic in the first place.
Anita Sarkeesian actively lied about many of the games she criticised and spread misinformation left and right. Her claim that you would get "extra points" for murd3ring pr0stitut3s in GTA is the most well known example of something she made up.
It is one thing to criticise a trend at large, and another to actively lie about the content you're covering as a way to dishonestly push your political agenda.
They're not nerds, they're incels.
Real nerds are happy playing with their train dioramas and really don't care about ''Nerd Culture''.
It's no coincidence that most incels are white nationalists, the Nazis are the original incels.
SMH the “nO tRUe nERd” fallacy.
I would probably call myself nerd-adjecent. Many of my interests overlap with traditionally nerdy things, but I'm not into things like fantasy, coding, or superheroes. As an autistic person, i try to hide my interests and tend to mask heavily whenever I'm not at home. One of my teachers, who is a wonderful person and one of my mentors, told me I'm, "Just like Sheldon Cooper," after finding out that I'm autistic. She meant it as a compliment, but it hurt. I try to be emotionally aware, am not really interested in STEM, and do my best to cover up my 'nerdy' interests. Yet, that assholeish, entitled persona is what people associate most with nerds and autistic people.
Exactly
This is a nice video, thank you. I think to an extent there was a split round about the time Gamergate happened, a similar thing happened with atheist channels which were gaining a lot of traction back then.
I am a cis-het white male who stuck with my principles and remained left-wing or left leaning. But even so I found I had a lot of work to do, it became more evidently clear after the death of George Floyd when I saw so many black creators say (directed at white people) "It's good that you support us now, but in a month or two you will forget or turn on us again", and they were absolutely right. It took barely any time before BLM became a 'terrorist movement', and a lot of so called 'centrists' didn't want to associate with it all of the sudden.
That was a real moment of growth for me, because I had to admit to myself that although I identified as left-wing, I did gravitate towards that centrist position from time to time. Then I realised I had to put my money where my mouth is, and remember that it's not about me, it's not good enough to simply declare my support and virtue signal, I have to do more and stop being such a coward because it's easier than standing up for marginalised people or accepting my own faults.
BLM is a terrorist organization and George Floyd a criminal. Doesn't mean he deserved what he got, but the messiah-nization he got was disgusting
you have nothing to do because you are white, whites peoples are awesome and are the start of the biggest economic, medical and technologic boom who happened in history of humanity. you don't need to do anything more or less than a black or asian. just live your life and be yourself
Ironically, the movement you deem peaceful, was what ended my "liberal" phase. Getting mobbed and surrounded and being pelted by trash, it makes you think twice about who you are associating with.
@@haydricht6899 how fickle you were. The most violent people I know are all Conservative
I get called a nerd or geek often for the field I am in (wildlife sciences) and I will admit, it is my favorite thing to talk about. Yet, it seems so very far away from this type of community. The mindsets in my field like this at all are mostly just the old men who people are waiting to die off so we can make changes to legistlation and such...
I feel like terms like geek or nerd kind of fall flat surrounding how many things it can just encompass, especially because it so heavily relies on one's community. I knew someone who was obsessed with MMA (he was a fighter) and when he talked to people in my field he was completely out of his element. By the definition of geek presented here, he could debatably even fall into that category.
Just about the video itself and not on the content, the thumbnail and title choice were excellent, very eye catching and true to what the video is actually about, nice job!
Growing up in nerd spaces in the early 00s was rouuuuugh as a half Black person. The amount of ‘it’s just a joke, lighten up’ after dude dropped the hard R I got…shit was exhausting and I only repicked up a magic deck in my 30s
once womens safety is no longer your concern you start the hellscape slide into only you matter.
Huh?
that is women's fault
@@agapon2023 what?
@@FilmBucket what?
I saw it all happen in real time. They were the first built in audience for 4chan. Things went downhill very quickly.
Ugh. I’m a nerd. I need to think about this
This is especially fitting now that John Carmack (co-creator of Doom) participated in a sci-fi convention that is against "woke propaganda"
Good for him, people have been trying to ban and censor his games for decades
@@vg_grover4828 Anyone who ever worked with him also highlights how much insufferable he is to work with so it checks out.
@@vg_grover4828 ...so he goes all-in on censoring anyone who objects to reactionary indoctrination?
I always hated this "woke propaganda" shit... Is making marginalized people and groups more accepted and included a bad and inflammatory thing??? Like what??? They can't see the irony in their own ideologies...
@Laurencsik István the minute poc is shown in media its automatically labeled as woke it could be a new character and it would still be called woke it's insane
This is so well done. Also, Jesus gamergate started almost 10 years ago wtf I feel old.
You're feeling old already? Don't look back in 20 years lol
While I agree with all your comments about why Nerd/Geek culture is such a toxic stew, I do feel that there is one aspect key to the culture that you haven't pointed out.
The reason media analysis is so terrible in that subculture, despite their obsession with a product, is that for whatever reason for years, Geeks/Nerds prized minutiae over actual analysis. An example of this can be seen in the Star Wars fandom, where so many geeks pride themselves on being able to name every character that ever appears in a property, even if they just stood in the far corner for less than a minute, but when you try to explain how George Lucas intended Star Wars to be an allegory for the Vietnam War, with the Empire being the USA and the Rebels serving as the Viet Cong, either you get a lot of blank faces or they accuse you of injecting politics into the story. Never mind how all art is political to begin with.
This kind of obsession with minutiae and trivia is akin to bragging about knowing the exact number of leaves on a tree but being able to say nothing about the overall structure or health of the organism. Meanwhile, if someone does come along who can talk about these things, but does the unthinkable like, say, gets the number of leaves wrong, well, that proves they're clearly a fake fan of that tree.
If you can't meaningfully take apart and analyze the themes of a story, it becomes much harder to analyze and weigh out the real-world thoughts and opinions of others. Yeah, I've heard of the whole "The curtains are blue" meme, and it can be annoying when the English teacher insists that every aspect of the story is symbolic, but the truth is that every detail that winds up being mentioned is the product of authorial intent, and it's worth speculating on what is behind this intent. It could be as simple as "The writer thought it sounded really cool" with no deeper reason intended, but again, they chose to mention it for a reason, and it's worth speculating why.
It's dumb because one of the first and one of the most influential sci fi works, war of the world, was a critique on colonialism
media analysis is terrible in fan culture period, I don't think it has anything to do with alt-right
I was a very popular charismatic guy in high school. I had my own peculiar interests, but was friends with everyone, and hung out with all, including many so-called "nerds". The one disconcerting thing I found about many "nerds" was their intense dislike of people. I don't know where it came from - it was not all from bullying. Some of it was just a cultivated sense of superiority. I frequently invited them socially into my wide circles of friends, and while interaction was fine and everyone was civil. But afterwards, they would sometimes take me aside and ask me why I hung out with "those people", and tried to convince me they were terrible people in some way. I never understood that. It drove them bonkers that I liked and spent time with people of all kinds of tastes & interests, and wasn't excluding x, y or z. The amount of negativity and unpleasantness towards others was very surprising.
Did you ever ask why they didn't want to be around certain kinds of people?
@@RashedeGazzi Yes.
Great video! Another interesting factor is that this mid 2000's radicalization period happened at the tail end of (ironically) a right-wing moral panic against consumers of nerdy media - starting with the satanic panic and carrying through to the early part of the school shooting era, in which many of the older generation started to associate nerdiness or video games etc with a hidden propensity for mass murder. The mainstream interest and subsequent serious media criticism came right near the end of that era. That satanic panic/mass shooter era had helped prime these people to see outside criticism of their media as that direct attack on their personality that you mentioned... Because the other stuff actually had been a deep and alarming personal attack.
The nerd/video game moral panic never really developed into anything other than very very sporadic instances of state violence directed towards nerds, but it was seen by nerds as a sort of looming potential threat.
It was very easy for fascists to propagandize nerds in that environment.
That's a great connection I hadn't made! Kind of like how fascists point out the evils of capitalist exploitation but then blame it on marginalized groups. The harm can be real, but the cause is a lie meant to reinforce entrenched power dynamics and systems of oppression.
Funny how the link between games and shooters stopped when the kids of the panickers started playing video games
This is such a well put together video essay -- thank you for making this
Though I'm not nerd, I am aware of many who fit this description. They are definitely at risk of becoming entrapped or enticed to extremism as you have revealed here.
The most dangerous of this type of extremism involves the morbid idolization and fascination with *guns*
Why would liking guns make someone an extremist?
@@GusOfTheDorks
Notice my comment says: At *risk* of becoming *entrapped* or *enticed* to extremism.
@@GusOfTheDorks
You'll have to contemplate what the last message means, also; to answer your own question, for yourself:
The most dangerous of this type of extremism involves the morbid idolization and fascination with *guns*
@@SunnyIlhalike what I see in the hood?
@@usualdosage7287
Whatcha'y'all see in da hood.
Don' be playin wit no guns in da hood.
If da hood got too many guns,
getchoself out dat hood.
I think there's a side of intellectual meritocracy kinda vibe there that leads you to things like objectivism, which promotes libertarians, which has become just Republican without the obvious racism.
Crazy how female nerds go the opposite direction. For them there's a nerd to Wicca to bi-sexual pipeline.
Ugh why did you have to call me out like this? Lol
I fell down the alt-right pipeline when i was younger; luckily Natalie Wynn saved me from being a total fascist. Nowadays i'm an anarchocommunist with egoist leanings, and i still have intrusive thoughts of fascist talking points etc when i talk with my friends (mostly Black and AFaB) about political/social topics
Always remember that the first thing you think is what you’ve been conditioned/told to think, the second thing is what you really think.
That has helped me so much with intrusive thoughts, especially when they get political and I KNOW it’s the bullshit part of my brain picking up on the vast amounts of nonsense and information we’re bombarded with. The negative things stick in there harder and it’s a case of identifying them and putting them to the side. Even then, sometimes I have to talk down my thoughts and sit and try and hash them out and deconstruct them on the spot.
Keep at it, friend. It’s a long road, but you can only be patient with yourself.
To be fair, Natalie was a former alt-righter before either waking up from it or a simple rebrand. I intend to believe the former.
@@rexzs794 Thanks for the tip I can actually use, Internet Comrade!🤩
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426 any time, friend. It’s genuinely one of the most helpful pieces of advice I’ve ever been given. I hope it helps you gently challenge yourself in ways for the better. 🖤
@Lyra this you? ruclips.net/video/JJmvMyptrxo/видео.html
Really interesting video, your points about the ableism, sexism and racism in TBBT were spot on and about how they let Sheldon get away with being as sexist (amd bigoted in general) as possible with no consequences or effort from him to learn/grow and viewers somehow started defending him and taking his side and acting like he wasn't that bad and hating on Bernadette and Penny, proving the sexism of Sheldon, the show and many of the viewers.
Yeah, it's like there's no Cancel Culture on The Big Bang Theory! What is it, an alternate universe?!
Yeah, I don't know how Sheldon and Howard kept their jobs (never mind all their accolades and opportunities that they didn't deserve) and didn't get arrested and why there weren't more plots about women getting restraining orders.
You do realise that that Sheldon got away with as much as he did because everyone understood that he simply doesn't understand his negative attitudes are hurting the people around him? You do understand that that's not a character failing, it's a literal disability that he gradually improves upon during the show? Do you think a blind person should be guilt tripped because they didn't see someone and walked into them? Can't defend them, being blind isn't a defence according to you.
@@Sujad The analogy about being blind isn't at all related to what I was saying though and there are so many instances in which he proved that he did know what he was doing and genuinely did view himself as superior not to mention how often he treated women as inferior and actually did want to hurt others.
@@heatherstephenson3559 Because he is superior. I'm no fan of TBBT by any stretch of the imagination but Sheldon was two or three decades ahead of his time. They even make an Elon Musk joke, about him using Sheldon's maths to launch rockets. He also viewed the men around him as inferior as well. Are you going to call him a misandrist for that?
I was in this pipeline and one of the reasons I think it’s so effective is because the right actually listens (or pretends to listen) to the problems these people are facing, while the left a lot of times acts as if you can’t have problems if you’re cis white. In these communities it sometimes sounds as if you can only get the thumbs up if you’re LGBT, or a person of color, or disabled. Even this video at times makes it sound as if 15 year olds who like nerdy shit have a macheavelian plan to allign with the ideologies where they can crush the minorities, showing (imo) that you don’t fully understand the internal problems and struggles of people like that, it sounds like you’re prescribing them malice when the cause for their actions can, in a lot of cases, be explaind by other stuff. I dont want it to sound like an attack, I agree with you on your conclusions but this is, to me, what pushes these nerds to the right. A lot of times the left doesn’t want to accept you unless you come with the answers already figured out, while the right patiently teaches you how THE JEWZ R DESTROYING THE WORLD!!1!
I got off of that pipeline when I found people and communities that felt like they were actually listening to my problems and didn’t feel like reducing everything to skin color or the conditions of your birth. While at the same time pushing me to more progressive beliefs.
Great video.
I think a factor other people forget in the nerd-to-fascist pipeline is the the internet leading to the effective death of in-person meetups and subculture. With the way things worked when I was a teenager, you had to actually go to stores or cons if you were into something nerdy. This brought you into contact with other people and their interests... So even if you just were into comic books, you'd run into a guy with a cool t-shirt and the next thing you know you're asking your local record store to import some South American heavy metal band's first album. Not that there weren't issues in the scenes back in the day but you were at least sort of conditioned to realize there's a degree of diversity.
But when the became the main way to do everything, that eventually died. So people more or less obsessed over one thing and almost one thing alone.
Your videos are really good and I think it’s important that you directly addressed the group who might’ve needed to hear this the most
I have only gotten four minutes into this video, but I, a Black Autistic Queer, have a very complicated relationship with this. It started with religious trauma, and in my rejection of Christianity, I found myself in sort of Atheist spaces. These were primarily white male dominated spaces, and, barely coming off of tweendom, I didn't have a conception of how strange that would be for me. Being who I was, I was very isolated and lonely, naturally, and so I just went along with this, desiring some sort of community. Quite naturally, this led me into Anti-SJW spaces, because that was in the cultural conciouness at the time. I had a very low self esteem, so it didn't matter much to me that the fatphobic, racist, misogynist, hateful rhetoric was punching down directly at someone who looked like me, because, shit- *I didn't even consider myself a person*. I slowly came out of this as I realized my queerness and learned more about my identity- I wasn't diagnosed with Autism until three years ago and I still haven't decided my queer identity. I still feel there is no place where I belong... but... not belonging will do shit like that to you. Trauma and loneliness can make you bitter and hateful to the point of hating yourself so much that you actively punch down on people who are just like you... I don't know how I got out of it, but I am still in need of so much healing...
Have you read the book “Unmasking Autism” by Devon Price?
I have not, not really.
I sort of... hesitate... about it. I know no media will ever be able to besides the stuff I create for myself, encapsulate the experience of being Black, autistic, and 'AFAB' nonbinary between two worlds (one of poverty on dads side and one of relative wealth on moms)... very much complicates how autism is expressed and how I fit in with others. So sure, it would be able to touch some, and probably many experiences... I dunno. I kinda have to piece together my own thing.
I can see valid arguments here, but all of this seems like a surface level insult toward people who like certain things. The issue that you even put down these individuals also does not help contribute to bringing these guys back from the right. You isolate these men and undersell their experiences. This video also feels like it is in bad faith too because you just shit on white males just because they're white. I feel it even worse because the undertone here puts other humans down for the way they react. I question the validity of some of the critics. All the critics you bring in is how you believe some of these people act but and is based in speculation. Now i also understand that you dont assume them all. But with how much the tone of this video shows. Alot of it feels like you do generally believe a majority of these people are less then you because they have things that theyve loved feel like its taken away from them. You even insulted them for their space. Which by all accounts is their space. If you believe that trans, non cis people deserve safe spaces, which they do. Why would you take away from their space? Just because theyre white is not a good enough reason as well as blaming them for having an supposed advantage. The reason it feels like they have these advantage in the first place is because it was founded on white people who built the country, but dont you think that the regular people themselves if you take race out of the consideration have suffered too? To undersell another groups issue is in itself disingenuous. Im a minority who leans right as well. But im here to have a genuine conversation on why you feel the need to insult and label certain groups only to leave out that its not only white people who has these issue here. If we take out all the race and stay objective to the conversation. Can you say without a bias that you have built for yourself that the things you're saying can be seen as genuine?
I'm still upset for KMT. Star Wars did her so dirty. I hope she rises + thrives. Thanks for raising awareness & suggesting practical steps, & esp for being trans-inclusive in a time where that needs to be explicit.
KMT? The Kuomintang party? What?
Don't forget Daisy. She too got shafted. Not her fault her character changed in every movie
Thank you Cheyenne.🙏
It needed to be heard. Human rights are not up for debate.
What typa fent laden crack u smokin? U tryna tell white men how to run society in a society built by white men?
I really appreciate your video. However, there are some assumptions that I don't quite agree. First, that all geeks and nerds were bullied as kids. Second, that radicalized ppl were part of fandoms before they were popular. Part of privilege is to just enter a space and declare it their own and kick out the ppl who were there first. A cheerleader doesn't owe you a date bc you're "smart." I was a nerd and I was mocked but I also belonged to clubs and had lots of friends. I admit that I'm really, really introverted but ppl still reach and try to be friendly. So, it's kind of mean to think that Elon Musk was bullied and that's why he's a super villain while minorities get actually bullied, not for liking math but bc they're minorities.
I agree. Plus from what we know about his childhood his father was very authoritarian and not a very nice person, so he really just became like his father, which isn't all that strange when we think about it.
I think Witcher fans are a very good example of this. I am a big fan of the Witcher games and the books are incredibly special to me (I highly recommend them). I think the show is enjoyable. However, I think most Witcher fans are quite annoying. They adhere to a political neutrality (like you mentioned in this video) that makes them really miss some very obvious plot point and the over all meaning of the story. This also results in rampant racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, etc. in that community (in the subreddit, for instance). White supremacists are among them
If anyone wants to learn more about this, I recommend the 4 part RUclips series by Sophie from Mars about the series, especially the episode about the fanboys.
It's really interesting that you say this about the Witcher fans, because I have had such a different experience in the fandom, though that could be due to the fact that I'm coming from the fanfiction side of the pond, so to speak. I don't read reddits or anything like that, but I have read a LOT of Witcher fanfic, and while yes the source material is still very white, I had seen more stuff written about and by neurodivergent and queer (I'm using that as the blanket term, as someone who uses it as a term for herself rather than spelling out specifics) folks and their takes on the characters than I have in many of the other fandoms I've been into. Though now I'm wondering if that's more of an era thing, as I'm seeing it more frequently in other fandoms as the years pass...
I'll be checking out that series, though, thank you for mentioning it!
@@jrj5893 Not only the source material is very while. The whole origin of that material - eastern Europe - is very white. And there is nothing wrong about that. We do share history of colonialism, white guilt, slavery with USA.
It is surprising that with this all race-swapping, not even single place was left for an actor of Slavic origin.
I'm not looking forward to the Netflix One Piece adaptation for part of that reason. It has a lot of themes that some of the Fandom seems to have ignored.
I have a feeling that, seeing it removed from its normal cartooniness, will see it in a new light and get angry seeing social commentary in their show.
@@lonesaviorOne Piece has surprisingly pro monarchy sentiments despite it being about sea pirates but on the whole it's very ahead of its time. Any character who's coded queer doesn't die for example in one piece
I´ve been a Witcher fan for 20+ years. I remember waiting for the 5th book to be released before I started reading. No game existed back then. I was disappointed by the games (and still partially am - I hate Triss romance (Shani is even worse idea), Nilfgard bad, Avallach good, Eredin is joke in books, etc.). I think the vast majority of fans don´t understand the meaning of the story. I´m far less gatekeeping and more tolerant now, but still, the Witcher is a masterpiece of postmodernism and postmodernism is notoriously hard to understand. But it is very easy to pick parts of postmodern work you enjoy (moral ambiguity, complex characters) and avoid others (obvious feminism, Geralt being kind of boomer).
This needs to be discussed more. From video games to movies... I've never seen dudes so upset over literally nothing. I'm no nerd or geek but I have loved SW & superheroes like Batman for years...when a Black character comes about in one of this universes as a focal point, not a side character...these cats go bananas. I've distanced myself from a lot of these type of content creators though. It's not that deep to me & I'm damn near 40 years old...furthermore, I can't sit & listen to bigotry masked behind "wokeism" or "love of the source material". 🤷🏾♂️
"one of the worst aspects of nerd media going mainstream was tying your morality to what you consume" yes "but thankfully this has died down", alas, have you seen the weaselling of terf+swerf ideals into shipping fandoms? cus it's at the peak still. I do think it's a similar problem. it just targets more marginalized people for the entirety of it, both the people boosting it and the people targeted by it.
Subcultures have long been targeted by extreme right wing groups. In the west a subculture meant a body of dejected, white, males.
25-30 years ago I was getting into fights with nazi skins who insisted on showing up to placea they weren't welcome. It was so common that getting into fights with nazis was just part of being into things like crust punk and other extreme, or avant garde, music scenes. It was like this long before I got there. People in those scenes, that were my parent's age, had similar stories. I mean, the Dead Kennedys wrote a song about it more than 40 years ago.
Sure, nerd isn't exactly what people think of when they think of these social spaces, but there is a cross over. Lots of people in those scenes were also into anime, comics, weird movies, fantasy, sci fi, video games, etc. So this whole wave of nerd to nazi doesn't surprise me at all.
As someone who has seen this exact thing happen to so many people, I considered friends in high school, I think you give a good understanding of how these things happen. I don't think it can be understated just how much these things were allowed to fester in nerd communities because the person espousing them is a "good guy" once you get past the fact he's a nazi.
I like “middle age white men” things (like golf, economics, etc.) so I started to look for content about that.
At first it was all normal (like how to master golf or it’s rules) but it quickly began to show me very conservative staff, it’s was really scary because one moment I was watching “normal” videos and the next it’s was all about “alpha guys”, “real men”, “the left this and that”… mind you I’m a queer latina woman so it’s wasn’t something I saw or searched before.
So I can confirm that the line between some innocent media and right conservative media is realllllllly fine!
Deportin u for Christmas ❤
As a white male nerd, I 100% used to fall into this trope and still struggle with it. Thank you for this content it helps me with mindfulness and policing my own beliefs while ensuring that my behavior reflects it as well.
I'm glad I fell down the left hand side of this pipeline in the end, I think it's one of those cases where being a Christian for so much of my teens was actually somewhat defensive. Looking back my church had (and still has) serious issues, But it also instilled this kind of aggressive discomfort with both the sceptic and 'shock humour' kinds of nerdom that kept me out of the pipe line for the embarrassingly long amount of time it took the feminist tendencies I'd picked up in brony fan spaces to turn into an actual systemic critique of things.
I also think the ableism of a lot of these spaces is a lot more noticeable when you're disabled, but certainly through my teens I wouldn't have even had the words to articulate that.
Your description of "nerds" is just a description of hyperfixations in autism
that’s what i thought!
There are a lot of neurotypical people who share some traits of autism. Being diagnosed with ASD is holistic and not based on one or two traits.
And OCD
as a trekkie, i have to disagree with you that fandoms _necessarily_ don't discuss interpersonal topics like politics or experiences. between the prime directive and the slashfics, sharing ideas about politics and experiences are very much at the _core_ of trek fandom.
it's why none of this "infiltration" crap cracked us. we just keep telling them star trek doesn't work like that. they get mad about it, but they can live long and prosper for all we care.
I am late to the show but I am glad I came across this video. I was reminded of my own growing up and experiencing nerd culture and sports culture. I use to think that being a nerd gave one better insight into the struggles of oppressed people, hell I was one of those people. I was bullied my peers for being a nerd, and it didn't help that I looked like a stereotypical fat nerd either. Also I am a working-class Latino, though I am light skinned so I did have privilege in that department. But my experience of being bullied made me MORE understanding and empathetic towards oppressed and marginalized peoples. It just kind of made sense to me, after all heroes who I grew up with, like Superman and Spider-Man, would always stand up for the little guy.
But at the same time I was a loner too, and the few times I interacted with other nerds in large groups, I gotta be honest, were mostly reactionary. Or rather, nerd culture was always more reactionary than we thought. There was a lot of them who were zealous Christians, Libertarians, right-wing technocrats, I could go on. Some were even traditionalists, confusing their idealistic view of mediaeval adventures for the real deal. Others, well, really didn't care what their favorite superheroes had to say and just fantasized about one day beating up their bullies, seeing them as their own supervillains. This whole idea of the racist bigoted nerd being a new thing is just fantasy, I think this was ALWAYS the case but we didn't see it until nerd culture finally became mainstream. Hell, I think when nerds did interact with women, POC and other groups, it was always from the mentality of, "I am the main character, I am the hero, and you all should be lucky I am with you guys." Honestly, as much as it sucked, I do feel like having not spent so much time with these nerd circles may have been what helped me not become a reactionary.
That isn't to say this was ALL white nerds, and if I am being honest there should be more of a class analysis involved because working-class white nerds were always based, with some even talking about unionizing comic book writers and game devs! Of course no group is a monolith and plenty of middle-class white nerds were cool. But let's be honest, most of the fascist nerds we see are middle class white nerds. But I do have a warning: we are beginning to see POC, LGBTQ+ and women nerds also fall into this pipeline. Not in large numbers but the fact there is any growth at all is alarming.
Hahaha, at 19:01 I believe you say "Anita Sarkeesian, a video game herself" . Sorry, but I thought that was really funny! :)))
Great video btw!
Older generations (who used to actually get bullied for this kind of thing) can easily tell you the difference between a geek and a nerd. A geek is pop culture smart and a nerd is book smart. These days people use the terms interchangeably, and I can understand why since being either one could earn you a beat down after school in the 80s. Having actually lived through that era it's strange to see the things I enjoyed in secret go mainstream to the point of oversaturation and even used as recruiting tools for the alt right.
It bugs me that I have a hard time finding a review of the latest scifi or fantasy movie that isn't filled with references to how awful "wokeism" is. May I please hear about the fx, the set pieces, and the plot? I don't want to hear about some right-wingers' disdain of women and minorities being cast in adventure films. 🙄
Really? Because the internet is dominated by ether hard/soft left leaning video essayists lol
I’m going to throw my 2 cents into this, speaking as someone who used to be right leaning, I think part of the reason people who like media have turned to the right is because left wing people have a reputation of going into a work forcibly changing in and using that change as a shield against criticism while insulting it’s audience. Now yes, some of those that are in media is discriminatory in many ways, the problem comes when they make a shoddy product that then attacks people who liked the originals. (I.E She hulk attorney at law for fans of she hulk, and men or Velma for scooby doo fans and white people.)
TLDR: Using diversity as a shield for making a shoddy project while insulting the majority, is a good way to turn people against you and your cause even if it’s good. There’s nothing wrong with diversity and respecting cultures just that you respect ALL people.
Personally, I managed to avoid the "self-help and wellness" (that's such a wide umbrella term, I couldn't think of anything else to sum it up) to alt-right pipeline. That's an interesting deep dive as well, but it's scary how many different avenues they're utilizing to recruit
While I agree that, in ideal circumstances, one should call out injustice or inconsiderateness (is that a word?) where they see it, I do think there are also times when it would be reasonable to understand when they don't.
Maybe the person being a jerk is a family member and you recognize that there's no use in arguing with them. Or maybe you're living in an environment- a house, a job- where, if you spoke up, you might be liable to face retribution.
In media, those who make grandiose speeches in support of the common man are rewarded; in real life, they are often punished. In any given situation, before saying something unpopular out loud, one has to assess whether there's anyone in the room who will be willing to listen to them in the first place.
Why would there be no use in arguing with the family member if they're being racist etc? Unless you safety is not a concern.
This is literally what happened to my brother. I am a Latino with strong features and my brother is white passing and very pale. He use to be funny and then he suddenly started liking nerdy stuff and eventually he became conservative. He talked about how he hated Disney remakes, our country and thinks it’s dirty, he makes fun of our indigenous people and language that he never once tried to connect with and always makes racist misogynist and ableist jokes. Not a day goes by without him saying the r word or how much he hates Mexicans. Guys if you have a family member into nerdy stuff please make sure they never get into this rabbit hole because they will never get out and you won’t even know who you’re looking at anymore. EDIT: I JUST finished the video and on that note about calling out your loved ones, you can guess why me and my sibling don’t talk to him anymore lolll
he needs to wake tf up,did he think he would be accepted by nazis being while he is a mixed person?
It's not too late - I check my brother for this, it's not the nerd sentiment or attribute, which is environmental and acquired. Rather some groups within fanbases. They exist everywhere.
Your sibling might just require a stern talk to grow up.
But Disney remakes are bad. Not for the casting, but simply because they are blatant, soulless, and are so goddamn uncreative.
@@stevesteverson what does that have to do with the comment i made.... quickly... ur too old to care abt these kids movies anyway
Wauw, once in a while the algorithm actually DO work!
So nice of you to pop into my recommendations!
You got yourself a new subscriber!
As a Nerd and a bit of a Geek, who’s also white cis straight - who sort of flew under the radar because I’m also a big bald fairly muscular guy who left some of my more geekish interests, (such as D&D), behind in my late teens/early twenties, replacing RPGs with looking for and neutralizing people with a very different kind of RPGs, (calling it a very different form of LARPG could be argued I assume), and didn’t rediscover it until I was in my late forties, returning to the fandom has been an unsettling experience!
I’ve never understood the opposition towards seeing diverse representation in movies, games, TV, D&D, etc…
So while it’s still fun rediscovering D&D, it's also frustrating to see how a lot of especially white guys, some nearly as old as me, (as having started out with BECMI rules), just constantly goes into a fit over basically everything - but if I recall correctly, Innuendo Studios actually made a video kind of explaining it, (the one with "dad saying uncomfortable cringe semi-racist shit" and "meat eaters getting angry by being reminded that maybe they should eat less meat", (which I of course got VERY offended by, because I love meat and if the gods had wanted me to eat salad, vegetables, beans, etc., they would have made me a freaking rabbit - but that aside…😜)…
Sorry for the ranting - loved your video!
i know this video is 1 year old but since i got it in my recommendation i just have to say your video and the alt right playbook totally misses the 1 point for normal folks who have no leaning towards any political spectrum
I think you forgot the elephant in the room that is a problem the left needs to solve (at least this video is pretty left leaning)
Wich is the outward hostility towards anything that is a form of critique
And i mean genuine critique not "hurr durr there is women in my show" but the "hey this show is badly written for x y and z" or "this stuff doesnt make sense for it to racial swap for X Y and Z"
There is genuine critique of taking in uncountable numbers of refugees and wont get send away if they dont behave in the host nation. And if someone adresses those genuine issues like "hey these poeple dont behave can we send those specific poeple out?" the left would emmidiatly label me as "ow you nasty ass xenophobe/islamophobe" and thats it thats all it takes for someone to be pushed over the edge towards the right
Or with shows like the acolyte there are actual poeple who say "hurr durr women" but there is also half of those poeple who say "this shit is badly written"
As soon as this is heard some poeple that are left leaning will start saying to everyone "ow well your just a cis hetero white male so your opinion doesnt matter"
This not accepting of critique is the main reason today why the right is getting more and more power. All it took is to flat out reject someones opinion and would push someone over the right since "well the left thinks im not important so why even try them"
Even in this video you made the mistake of labeling white nerds as CIS white males you didnt treat him like a person you treated him like a subject in a general group how
are you supposed to win over poeple if you first insult them and then dont take theire actual reasonable critism seriously?
And you also labeld anything that isnt left as far right. how is that suppossed to win over poeple. for a poeple who claims to be open to everyone they exclude alot of poeple merly for critisising some issues
These labels or insults in my opinion have lost its meaning overtime. it went from "no please im not a nazi/phobe/whatever it is these days" and is now just a warning label to others "hey this guy putting labels is an idiot and is not worth your time"
you guys are seriously shooting yourselves in the foot by excluding poeple while preaching you guys are inclusive poeple.
Wanna help out nerds to not spiral out of control into the right leaning? Take nerds seriously on his honest critiques instead of emmidiatly labeling him
DO NOT PUSH HIM OUT treat him like a friend and just tell him honest opinion and stay respectfull
But most important
DONT LABEL HIM, DONT INSULT HIM, DONT EXCLUDE THEM. be friendly to him take him seriously and you will get him out. im not saying to take the "hurr durr black poeple in my game hurr durr" seriously but take the "hey this stuff doesnt make sense for X Y and Z" seriously a
But at this very moment the best recruiters who you guys think are hidden amongst them arent exactly hidden, its you guys who label everyone as 'phobes" or "you cis white male for the mere small citisim to a badly written or cash grab or cheap idea movie with a minority in it
A qoute from MLK everyone right or left but especially the left should endorse is this
"I have a dream that one day my children will not be judged by the colour of theire skin but by the contents of theire character"
I'm so thankful we didn't have this webscape in the late 2000s/early '10s. Pretransition I presented as a white male, and had a fair share of bitterness and entitlement. Thankfully I've changed from the type of Warhammer player that could give the hobby a bad name to collecting a certain Necron dynasty because of their trans matriarch. 😅 I'm very pleased by the inclusivity we're starting to see in Warhammer, D&D, and Magic the Gathering. ❤
Sometimes I wish we had RUclips back in the early 2000s but considering newgrounds, niche forums and neopets, we had enough.
Im a nerd that became a soldier and then a socialist a lot of the guys I served with went the other way after trump
Was elected.
God Bless President Trump. 🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅
@@serenityssolace cope
@@serenityssolace He lost, get over it snowflake.
I really like nerdy stuff. I don't personally feel like I can claim any particular nerdom as I just haven't delved really deep into any particular thing.
Meanwhile, I have a pretty close friend who I would 100% classify as a video game nerd. She's played a huge breadth of games and has a mond for holding onto really specific details. Early when we first met she worked at a GameStop and almost every day she had some guy with a trauma complex come in and try to quiz her as though her gender was the reason she wouldn't know about any given game. It also basically only happened with white guys her age too, teens and kids were never that bad.
A particular experience I'm always surprised with is I'm a huge X-Men fan. I've been reading the comics since I was a child ;I'm 25 now. I'm also gay and half Puerto Rican. My mother's side is where I get my Puerto Rican from and she's whom raised me so very much grew in an ethnic household. Now Xmen is a big minority allegory. They're literally persecuted regulated in contained due to how they were born. Magneto was a holocaust survivor so whatever for the second time his people were getting met with genocide that's why he snapped and became a radical. So X-Men has always been on top of like showing gay rights and minority rights and just how people suffer because of bigotry. Even on a governmental level. And yet you still have racist white Fanboys who are confused whenever most of the cast of X-Men or women or people have some corn of minority at least not American. And it's like bro obviously you've never read a comic book and if you did do you have any reading comprehension ;because Xmen is all about human rights and everyone being treated like a person. The arrogance and ego that you find within racism that somehow find their way into nerd spaces even more so spaces for the whole concept of the comic. is about minorities suffering ;and overcoming ;and getting stronger together. While maintaining peace with humans to the best of their ability.
@EthnoNationalist sight your source cause I call bs. Magneto is a whole ass Holocaust survivor
thank you for always taking up the difficult topics!
I think it speaks volumes about the writers if an autistic character frequently blurts out racist or sexist ideas, because allistic people think that we always tell blunt truths. The subtext is “we all THINK these things, we just know better not to SAY it”
oh jesus christ thats a thing??! i forgot about the racism segment of my autism assessment but yea no that is a qualifier for diagnosis /s
@@bellac6311 Yah so either the writers of those shows just think autistic people are disproportionately racist for some reason (least likely), or they themselves have a lot of racist thoughts they just aren't saying out loud (most likely)
This video seems to be another reason not to go to reunions... I love the line drawings!
this feels like you're doing a lot of assuming how cis white males think about these things without actually talking to any of them
I'm old. Back when, "nerd" and "geek" were insults, until we wore the terms like armor. A lot of us bled actual blood in the Nerd-Jock Wars. Seeing "nerd" culture become mainstream? To me, it means we won. It also means we have the responsibility to protect and aid the new bully-targets. "Aim here. Start with words. Get it all on camera." That sort of thing.
Got to a bit after the ten minute mark and damn... You're really gonna argue "Nerds somehow convinced themselves that just because they were mocked, bullied, robbed, socially outcast, and physically assaulted for their entire formative years they are somehow victims in life!" with a straight face? I can answer why nerds joined the "alt-right". It's because of YOU.
If you charted the average quality of life of an adult nerd through the years, you would end up with a bell curve. In their formative years, they were the bottom of the barrel. The worst of the worst. Shoved in lockers, beaten up, lunch money stolen, publicly humiliated, and all for simply being "different" from how society expects people to be.
Then, as it happens, the tech boom created space for nerds to become kind of cool. A tiny handful of nerds managed to become wealthy beyond measure. The rest of the nerds? The other 98% of nerds? All they got was a mild recognition of their hobbies in the mainstream. They didn't get rich. They got a tiny sliver of validation. And that was the HIGH point for them.
Because next as soon as nerd culture became mainstream, what happens? The very people who ostracized the nerds in the beginning show up and go "Hey so, your nerdy stuff is cool now, but uh... It doesn't conform to OUR standards? So, you're bad people, and you should feel bad. But don't worry! We'll FIX it by changing everything you made to fit OUR standards. You're welcome."
The nerds were left in a situation where there were two choices. Either self flagellate and agree that they are and have always been horrible people and throw themselves at the mercy of their lifelong bullies... Or join the group of people who were in conflict with their bullies even if their values didn't entirely align.
You created this monster. Listening to this is like listening to someone trying to argue that Jigsaw never technically murdered anyone. Victim blaming an entire group of people to avoid addressing the fact that society at large created the problem to begin with by putting nerds into a situation where their only apparent choices were to falsely confess to being evil, or to join "team evil".
Nerds could have been the biggest ally the left could have gotten. Nobody understands what the LGBTQ+ community suffers through today better than the group of people who literally faced exactly the same treatment twenty years ago. LITERALLY the same treatment. From the bullying, the assault, the mockery. Hell, they were even attacked by religious zealots for being "demonic". Most nerds would recognize the injustice and fight against it, remembering how it like to be victims themselves.
But no. As easy as it would have been to reach out a friendly hand and offer to work together, you decided to go on the attack and act shocked that people who have been attacked their whole lives would immediately become defensive when attacked again. It really is tragic how many nerds have been lost to hate groups, but to claim it's something inherently wrong with nerds is a huge misdiagnosis of the problem. The problem is, and has always been bullying.
What an amazing comment!
I dunno bud, i always was a big nerd, and still are! And yeah i was very attacked and bullied, and worst, but I always thought about my heroes in videogames, and comics, Miles Morales going and being friendly and caring after seeing everything he loved fall apart, Sonic, a franchise that I still love, having this amazing, caring hero who was all about freedom and friendship, i thought about what they would do, and so i grew up to be a better person that those who made me feel bad. And now i'm a adult, and like... I don't know, there was no monster being created, i didn't felt bad when things changed, i lived and learned, and honestly i don't agree with your point of view here. It's our responsability to change and be better, we can't be stuck on what happened in highschool man, and it's hard, and it's sucks, and It hurts, but at the end of the day, i rather be this happy, joy person who does not see himself as a victim for liking some nerdy things, i think that now is on us to make sure no one else goes trough the same stuff, LGBTQ people, women, people of color, no one should feel bad, or worse than we did, it's on us to be as good as the heroes we grew with! (Sorry, english Is not my first language.)
@@Dosborreguitosssss Miles Morales was first introduced in 2011. If you grew up with him, you completely missed the first era of nerds being bullied and oppressed.
You may have endured some amount of bullying, 'cause school sucks and everyone gets bullied to some degree, but you did not experience what I am talking about.
There is a huge difference between merely being bullied, and then moving on, vs being bullied, then later having your old bullies try to gaslight you about the whole thing.
@@novacorponline Hey, first of all, i'm all for having a conversation! A respectfull one, of course! Lets start by saying, yeah, Miles Morales was first introduced in 2011, and yes, in this current moment it's my favorite character of the Marvel Comics, but It was not the first that I loved, It was just an example, as i said, i'm an adult now, i've been around for a long time, and i've been a fan of comics and videogames since the first Adventure Era of Sonic The hedgehog (2002), being sort of lucky to be in for a wild ride in the first appearences of different characters in comics, and series, so, even if you don't believe It, i did went trough the things you are talking about, maybe evern worst? Because, second of all, i'm from México, and believe me buddy, what you consider bullying in USA, Is just random stuff we do with the homies here. But I don't want that to be the main point of the conversation, maybe you got It worse and i'm sorry for you, or maybe i got It, but I don't feel like comparing trauma Is a good way to iniciate a line of thinking. My point still stands. It's on us to grow! Also, gaslighting it's not a word i think you should be using in this context buddy! But I would love to continue this conversation if you want, maybe we both could learn a bit from this!
@@Dosborreguitosssss The way you phrased it made it sound like the character in particular was who you looked to for inspiration to endure at the time. Anyways, I agree that comparing trauma isn't productive; one's emotional response cannot be objectively quantified. Gaslighting is the appropriate word for this situation though, and is key to why so many geeks have sided with the bad guys in spite of the fact that they should know better.
Gaslighting is not merely lying. Its been over-used to the point that many people assume it to be so, but it's actually a very specific thing, which does have a severe psychological impact on people. Its a pattern of behavior where you *deny* a person's experiences repeatedly to cause a person to start to doubt their own memories or perceptions.
Gaslighting perfectly describes what is happening in the modern day to geeks. There is massive historical revisionism going on about culture in the 80s-90s. Geeks are told they were the bullies, during the time when they were the bullied and that they were exclusionary when they were the ones excluded. This gaslighting has a severe impact on people's psychological well-being. To be a "good person" today, you have to deny your own experiences and accept the lie that you were a bad person even though it contradicts your own memories.
This leads to one of three possible outcomes. Either submission to the gaslighters, rejection of the premise and standing alone, or joining a coalition that supports your self perception. Joining the alt-right is a bad decision, but its to be expected that when a mass gaslighting campaign is being run against a group of people, some percent of that group will end up making a bad decision while trying to protect their self perception.
Top to bottom, this was a very, VERY good examination of the subject. I hesitate to use the phrase, “fair and balanced,” but that is exactly what this was.
I think there is one element missing from this: people being told they don't belong. What pushed a lot of people I knew in 2012 to the right wasn't the original gamergate story or anything stemming from Anita Sarkeesian herself, instead it was the universal labeling of anyone that might simply disagree with her on any point as a mustache twirling misogynistic villain or as a straight up Nazi.
Same thing for the Five Guys posts for gamergate. People are were given false information, and when they tried to act on that false info in good faith they were labeled as freaks who hate women and cast out. The only people willing to take them in were the same people distributing the false information.
This was such a good video! As a cis het male, I heard about some holes I was in! I like how you pointed out that the nerd wants to be that patriarchal figure it idealizes! So much patriarchy in fandoms and it takes a lot to catch on to the nuance of it. The self victimization as well was well explained! Thanks for this!!
Dang. This video hit hard! It was such a horrible time to be online, and I was basically chronically online back then. I saw he YT atheist community turn to sludge.
I definitely fit into most of what this video is talking about (nerdy and coded CISHET SWM), except I never went down the fascist pipeline and have only gone further left as I have aged. I have also vastly changed many of the misogynistic and/or racist ideas I had internalized without realizing it.
It's very difficult for a CISHET SWM to examine and break out of patriarchal and white habitus ideas. If you are into nerdy stuff and acknowledge the problematic parts of the culture, you alienate many of the other people who look like you and are into the same stuff. I can't tolerate a diatribe about how media is "too woke" or "too political" or whatever. I see the dog whistles now and don't tolerate it. However, so many marginalized groups have now just taken to excluding CISHET SWM from things, so acknowledging problematic outcomes of the patriarchy and racism endemic in these cultures leaves you socially isolated in a lot of ways. It's not just "easier" to fall into the fascist pipeline, it's personally gratifying and socially profitable if you look like me and share similar interests.
At the same time, there is very little personal punishment for becoming politically disengaged and trying to enjoy this content apolitically. This is how you become a centrist who perpetuates the problematic bits and creates refuge for toxic ideas. It's also why people can unironically be a huge fan of a nerdy property and ignore or miss the political undertones at play in the content. If believing something benefits someone personally, cognitive dissonance will take care of logically justifying those ideas.
I personally think things were actually much worse before nerd culture became mainstream. The right wing grifters were more subtle back then but the patriarchy, the misogyny, the racism endemic in these subcultures all went unexamined and publicly supported to an even larger extent than now.
I loved the use of illustrations in this one!
I BEEM WAITING FOR THIS ONE
i hope you like it!
Katniss comes from West Virginia. My head canon as a history nerd is that she’s from the Melungeon ethnic group of the Appalachias.
Cheyenne your videos are always HITS!! A+ tier video essays every time!
How dare you call “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy” niche! It’s pretty much mainstream in the uk
But we wouldn't have Fashie/Nazi Kitsch to weaponize if it wasn't for the genuinely funny stuff brought with us into Internet Culture from the Old TV Culture. It went from amusing stuff like Artie Shell and Bob Crane into knowing winks about "Yeah, THOSE nuts are out there on the boards" humor until it WASN'T people being funny anymore. It became dog whistles and drawing lines in the sand. And there's no room for nostalgia about the Old Internet days because there's no going back. No use trying to talk reason or giving anyone the benefit of the doubt either. It all fails. There's nothing to do but fly right and remember to only punch UP, not down.
It stopped being funny when the ironic Nazis stop being ironic
i was scared the thumbnail was supposed to be andrew callaghan and i was scared i missed something lol
God, when I first graduated highschool I fit into this crowd.
I can definitely agree that the pipeline is so correct.
I used to be a homophobic, transphobic, sexist, white dude who thought any and all representation was woke and part of the liberal agenda. I was bullied in school for being a nerd (loving video games and anime) and would get upset with people claiming any of the things I love were problematic.
It eventually got me into the alt right (along with Christianity)
I watched the quartering, matt Walsh, glen beck, and many many more.
All it took was a few videos and the algorithm had me down the rabbit hole.
(It was to the point I remember being upset that they had a black guy in Star wars because it was "woke")
While I still have a lot of growing to do (mainly getting over internalized transphobia and unlearning aspects of being a cis white dude with privilege)
I still look back and laugh at how bad I was and am happy that I've changed
Before reading my wall of text below on why I disagree with your video, I just want to throw in some positive criticism and compliment you on your editing and speaking voice.
This is an extremely biased video full of misinformation and lying by ommision. I know that's probably not your intention and I don't think you were doing this in bad faith but I couldn't help but point out a few things that you might not have been aware of:
First off, the Star Wars sequels didn't push away Finn because of white nerds, it had to do with the Chinese market being extremely prejudiced towards black people. And the government over there will ban any foreign film if it doesn't align with what they want to push. It's messed up but the CCP has a government agency that decides what movies get released over there and censor anything they don't agree with. If anything, more "White Male Nerds" were complaining about Rey being a Mary Sue and saying Finn was underrepresented. At least in my circles.
Second, in your part 2, you claim that white male nerds dominated the tech space due to their "privilege" in the 1900s. The thing is, alot of the innovation around tech within the last 60 years happened in western countries (which are mostly white). Still, there were minority groups back then who made contributions to tech that you're ignoring. The guy who invented swappable cartridges was a black guy for example. The arcade game Centipede, the Co-founder of Sierra On-line, and the creator of King's Quest/Phantasmagoria were women. Not to mention all the innovation that countries like Japan brought to the table which i could talk about all day. I know you don't see a lot of women in tech or female programmers but at the same time most women just don't have a genuine interest in tech or programming compared to men.
Third, Anita Sarkesian was a cry bully. Her "Tropes vs Women in Gaming" series was full of misinformation and lies. Among many other examples, she claimed that there was a mission in a hitman game where you were encouraged to shoot sex workers in a club to complete the mission which was false. She also was supposed to have a speech at a Utah college, but she backed out over fake death threats and the local gun laws over there, instead of telling people what she believed in and risk being a martyr. Anita was a grifting coward who wasn't willing to be brave over something that she never cared that much about to begin with. It's as shrimple as that.
4. It's not that white nerds couldn't handle criticism from these radical feminists back in the early to mid 2010s, it's that the lense of feminism being shoved into the videogaming community where it wasn't necessary was really annoying. The last thing anyone wants to do after a long week of work is boot up a game or pull up a gaming review on RUclips to hear someone sprinkle in their feminist ideology so blatantly. There's a difference between including divisive issues in games like Metal Gear Solid and forced divisive issues due to bad writing like in the Saints Row reboot.
Thank you, I didn't know about the swappable cartridge. And yes, Anita had big flaws. I also recommend you watching a deep dive of gamergate by Savy writes books.
Stopped watching when you mentioned "cis het white male"
yea it should have only been "male"
@@ranitafeliz2987 it is her literally just saying straight white man just grow up
What does anybody think of Jessie Gender?I watched her videos and I think they're pretty good overall.
Some of the videos on transphobia is doomer fuel but that's just me
@@haruhisuzumiya6650 Inb4 not trans, so my perspective here can't fully know what it's like for trans people right now, but I can't blame things feeling a bit bleak atm. I'm worried for my trans brethren. Speaking from the US here, gay people have (generally speaking, still a lot of issues) crossed the threshold of societal acceptability among liberals and conservatives, so it's harder to conservatives to bang the anti gay drum anymore, so now they've aggressively shifted to making trans people and drag queens the new boogeyman that are the cause of all societal harms, with hateful rhetoric and anti queer laws aplenty coming along for the ride as an intended bonus feature. It's hard not to be worried things will get far worse for trans folk before they get better, and obviously I dearly hope that won't be the case.
you do realize that The Big Bang Theory was not created by white men, right?
look up Chuck Lorre's and Bill Prady's early life sections.
this quote "capitalist patriarchy and toxic masculinity they begin to believe that their oppression stems" is the reason all these people are doing this, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM