What did Anita Sarkeesian even do other than put up a kickstarter for a youtube series and disable comments on her videos?
Did she rally the SJWs? Did she sleep with a game developer? Did she publicly shame someone? Did she get someone people liked fired?
No one has ever really given me an answer that wasn't 'her opinions are bad.'
When the Kickstarter was first launched, people saw it as someone asking for a lot of money to cover a trivial topic that's already been done for free by tvtropes autists. It had the impression of a scam for people who couldn't see where the money was going. And for others, "Sexism in Nintendo Games" sounds like a punchline, a sign gag you'd see in a Simpsons episode to mock liberal arts majors. You might as well say "Inherent Racism in Chess Piece Design", or "A History of NeoColonialism in Scooby-Doo"
I'm not saying that the topic isn't important to a lot of people, it obviously is and that alone justifies Anita's success. But that's the
perception
Plus in the age of Youtube gaming sperglords, people refused to believe that talking over clips of video games could require any money, since people were already doing that for free every day. For every neckbeard that poured their hearts and lives into dead-end youtube channels, spending their days editing videos about the DEEP themes of their JRPGs while preteens send them death threats, it felt like a slap in the face. Again, that doesn't justify any of the backlash.
But it's similar to the anger you see from conservatives when they read stories about hipsters on food stamps. It's not that they
want welfare recipients to starve. But one of the few things that can help someone cope with the struggle is the belief that there's some inherent
honor in doing thankless work without complaint. And then the "liberal" media takes that sense of honor away, by doing stories about poverty featuring liberal-arts majors who have to serve tables in SanFran in order to get by. When those people become the new face of poverty and suffering, it sends the message that Joe Bricklayer's struggle with his meth-addict family is less important. Where's his biography in the New Yorker? Where's his media advocates?
They don't use the word, but the anti-Sarkeesian zealots are upset about
privilege. Most of them have also gotten death threats, most of them have heard male developers mention their death threats in passing, most of them have seen MMO fanboys make death threats to forum moderators over every single new balancing patch- and so they can't understand why it's headline news when it happens to a white woman.
Anita's kickstarter exploded in cash and passed her goal as a direct result of the initial media coverage of her death threats. And it created a bigger sense of jealously, because all they could see was someone getting rewarded out of sympathy for a gender rather than merit.
Again, that's not the reality, just the perception
