Camestros Felapton

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“Comicsgate” is the crappiest “gate”

Really, as an observer of weird pop-culture rightwing backlash campaigns, I have to say the so-called “Comicsgate” is incredibly dull. I don’t want to minimise the extent of the toxic harassment and bullying [which is severe] of either Comicsgate or its predecessors such as the Puppy campaigns or Gamergate but taking a look at its other dimensions…well, it doesn’t have any.

Perhaps this is brilliantly tactical — have so little of even the remotest substance to say that there’s nothing a critic can say about the campaign other than “Wow, that’s extraordinarily toxic”. To re-cap, various rightwing people (several of whom we’ve met before) have been campaigning for more overtly rightwing comics or less “politics” in comics or just generally being obnoxious about comics.

The main focus of the campaign has actually been crowd-funding for comics by a rightwing creator, not all of whom use the term “Comicsgate” (Vox Day, for example, has been a bit more equivocal about the term because he thinks all these people should be joining his petty empire). So we have a ‘campaign’ that is just a collaboration of outrage marketing techniques following the standard Scrappy-Doo model: be as loud and as obnoxious as possible and then when people react, claim to be being persecuted.

It’s the same grift we’ve seen over and over: targetting people (particularly women) for harassment in the hope of generating clicks and sales.

This article has background from Feburary:

https://www.inverse.com/article/41132-comicsgate-explained-bigots-milkshake-marvel-dc-gamergate

 

camestrosfelapton

18 responses to ““Comicsgate” is the crappiest “gate””

  1. The worst campaign was the Heavy Metal-gate. I remember some excited tweets and one or two links… and that was it. It just died of nothing.

    I had looked forward to Ält Metäl.

    Liked by 2 people

  2. I keep on catching the edges of it on twitter, as some novelists I follow also write comics. It looks wearily familiar, but I also get the impression that comics in general has reacted more swiftly and strongly than some other *gate targets.

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    • I think there is a dilemma in terms of reacting as it is such an obvious “hate these people and buy my [comic] book” campaign that naming names feels counterproductive.

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    • No, they did not jump on it. Comicsgate has been going on for years and has horribly harassed a number of people. It’s particularly aimed at LGBTQ creators, along with healthy doses of attacks on POC creators and fans and of course general misogyny. It’s been an extension of Gamergate. Many major figures in comics refused to get involved, hoping it would just go away and not caring about the folks under attack, just like in Gamergate with the gaming companies. It’s been a money hustle for several conservative creators in both videos and comics, same as Gamergate. When a famous creator’s widow spoke up that contrary to claims that he would support Comicsgate that he would very well not have done so, they went after her to the point where she closed her Twitter account. That seems to have been an impetus lately for more people speaking out against it in the industry.

      But it’s basically just the same strategies and rhetoric circulating around. Looks like they’re going after anime next, though it’s a bit unclear. The main goal is the same — denounce the involvement of white liberal women, POC, LGBTQ, etc. in the creative/tech industry and fans of those groups celebrating their products as cultural terrorists that will/are destroying said industry with progressive politics (civil rights). Use the warnings to flog YouTube videos and other social media rants that bring them ad dollars, and their own creative products as the “underdogs” against the supposedly all powerful yet totally unpopular SJWs (civil rights.) Push around made up “facts” that are easily denounced as false and ignore the denouncements. Claim to be persecuted while using various bigoted slurs, etc. They’ve learned that on the Net, not having a lot of numbers doesn’t stop them from being a major wrecking ball in screaming their heads off, that can get a few guys to dox and stalk people irl as well. But mainly it seems to be the folks at Breibart who are using them as their little army in these things.

      Unfortunately, there’s a very real possibility of what happened in Florida this week happening at a comics con from this. So it may be boring in its repetitiveness but it is serious.

      Liked by 5 people

  3. I wouldn’t have heard about it at all if it weren’t for you, and I heard plenty about all the other -gates and kerfuffles in my daily net ramblings hither and yon. So they’re not getting much publicity, even being as toxic and yelly as they are.

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  5. They’re moving through any media they can get a handle on/offer product in. I’m guessing that the silver lining here is the fact that they’ve already gone through most. When they start going after the Futanari and Tentacle Sex crowd, I think they’ll be on their last legs.

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