This post is insufferably long, and I’m sorry for that [LONG][TW]

[Note that this is not being published as a patron-supported post, lest I be accused of “playing the victim” to attack someone.

It’s also important to note that there is A LOT of extra reading linked to from this post. Like, no really. A lot. I erred on the side of exhaustive, simply so I don’t need to revisit this again in the future.]

This is a blog post I swore I’d never write, let alone publish, since any controversy created by such a post is not ever going to help me. However, nearly four years of staying silent on this issue hasn’t done any good either, and I’m running out of cope. So here we go.

There is man in the indie TRPG community, with quite a larger following than mine, who has been determined to tell the games community at large what a terrible, awful person I am. It has been nearly four years since all of this nonsense started, and the strain of remaining silent is beginning to be a bigger burden than anything else. Remaining silent hasn’t done anything to prevent the abuse directed my way. If anything, the frequency and level of rhetoric has only continued to escalate over time. So I’m finally doing the thing I swore I would never do and naming names:

I have been the target of trolls, haters, and randos for quite a while now. But none of them have been as persistent, vitriolic, and prolific in their hatred for me as Zak S.

At first Zak confined himself to calling me an anti-porn, sex-hating, fascist uber-conservative akin to Phyllis Schafly. But at last count, according to Zak, I am now: anti-porn, anti-sex in games, homophobic/queerphobic, transphobic, fascist, legit crazy aka delusional aka should be involuntarily remanded to mental health care, a liar, a chronic attention-seeker who has fabricated harassment evidence, a chronic harasser myself, and legit evil.

…needless to say, in a post-GamerGate world this is a terrifying level of rhetoric to have reached. So what I am doing here is documenting for once and for all the substance of this thing, and yes providing sources and links and evidence – since my silence all these years has been used as ammunition against me. There are people in my own circles who have spoken about this as an issue with “sides”, as in “well there’s been bad behavior on both sides”, and just. No. There are no “sides”. There is Zak’s continued hatred versus my silence, always my silence.

But before I get started with that, an important aside:

This is fucking important

The real tragedy of this situation is that on an objective level, I have a lot of empathy and heartbreak for Zak and Mandy (his girlfriend/partner who has a serious genetic condition). And not in a condescending “I feel sorry for them for being so crazy/awful/evil” kind of way, because fuck that noise. (I hate it when people pull the “I feel sorry for you for being such a bitch” card on me, because that is 100% bullshit.)

I can’t fully imagine what Zak is going through as primary caretaker of someone with a terrifying genetic condition that is making her body cannibalize itself. Not completely. But I can have empathy for that situation; my own father died nearly four years ago from bone marrow cancer. I wasn’t even a primary caretaker – I had already made irrevocable plans to move to Canada when he was diagnosed. But watching my father grow gradually sicker as his skeleton literally tried to consume his insides, watching him fade more and more as the meds he needed to keep the pain under control grew stronger and more frequent…

Yeah, it fucking messed me up. I didn’t live with my father during his treatment (I did come home as often as I could), but I will never be able to watch Breaking Bad. Wild made me ugly cry for the whole damn movie, and any kind of media featuring parents with cancer is shit that I avoid whenever possible.

So I on an abstract level, I admire Zak for continuing to remain creative in the face of what is surely a painful struggle. And I admire Mandy for not being silent in the face of legit bullshit behavior she has faced, and for her recent hospital glam photos she’s posted. I wish that I’d tried something similar with my father, because it kills me how dead he looks in every photo taken while he was sick and how his spirit was completely broken by his diagnosis. And I hope for both their sake that her prognosis is better than my father’s. I really do.

So I am absolutely not saying that you should boycott Zak’s work if you were otherwise likely to buy it. Nor am I saying not to buy his art. And I am especially not saying you should go hurl abuse at Zak, and especially not at Mandy, because seriously it makes me fucking mad that she has been harassed for being the wrong kind of gamer and I don’t want to be part of perpetuating that kind of toxicity. Support them if you want, don’t if you don’t. Whatever. Everyone draws their line somewhere and it’s okay if you draw it differently than me or anyone else.

In writing this post, I speak for no one but myself. And what I want personally is simply to be left alone, without constantly having to feel like I have to look over my shoulder. (I know that sounds hopelessly naive, but that really is all I want.)

Okay? Okay. Aside over.

Down to business: a chronology of my interactions with Zak

Because this is a thing that has spun out over the course of 3.5 years, first I’ll provide an overview of the timeline of events from my perspective. (It’s lengthy, and I’m sorry about that.) It’s important to note that this only includes publicly available postings, as that’s all I have access to. It’s possible that there’s more in more private locations, like closed G+ threads, that I’m not aware of.

Pre-hostilities interactions on my blog

1) January 2011

Interestingly, our earliest communication was one that I had entirely forgotten about. (Whoops.) I wrote a post about how some dudes had devoted 20 minutes of their podcast to talking about why I was fat, ugly, and crazy. Zak popped into the comments to ask for responses to a survey of female gamers on his blog, as well as to contribute what I thought were actually some pretty cogent points.

2) February 2011

A month later, I wrote a post about Hyung Tae Kim in which I expressed some nuanced opinions about his art and the degree of sexual objectification it displayed. There was a spirited conversation in the comments, which Zak was pretty active in, and which I didn’t participate in very actively because I was frankly too stressed out to attempt having a nuanced conversation about something on the internet.

Looking back on the comments, there’s several of Zak’s comments that seem pretty… sea lionish. (Though of course I didn’t have the language to describe it as such then.) He also engaged in a fair bit of straw-manning other commenters by accusing them of calling HTK “pro-rape”, which got a fair amount of pushback – from myself as well as other commenters, as the opinions being expressed were complex and nuanced, not simple and black-and-white.

I ultimately tried to bow out of the conversation, because the following two things happened within a day or two of making the post:

1) I was laid off from a job that I loved and had felt secure in

2) my father’s cancer took a turn for the worse (he died just over four months later).

Still, Zak kept baiting other commenters and I wound up getting involved again before things ultimately died down. And even then, for like a year after that, my memory of Zak was “oh we disagreed that one time, but our conversation was pretty civil and respectful so that’s cool with me”.

2a) February 2011

What turns out to have been the most significant interaction with Zak actually… wasn’t… an interaction… at all? Twelve days after making my post about HTK, I wrote this post about Japanator’s then-editor who had a history of making crass rape jokes and then hiding behind his female friends and fans who told him he wasn’t sexist.

In the comments of my post, conversation turned to sexism in anime, and in the comments, I had cause to say: “That being said, harem anime is pathetic and disgusting. Fetish anime ditto. Hentai anime ditto.”

Which, sure. That is pretty harsh, and I’ll admit it could have been better phrased. But what I was trying to express is that I have yet to see a harem anime that hasn’t made me feel incredibly uncomfortable about creepy behavior by the male protagonist being played for laughs, because I have been creeped on by geeky guys and it’s really not funny. Similarly, my experiences with hentai have not been with anything depicting anything resembling consensual sexual encounters, and the lack of consent was fetishized just as much as the bodies involved. Which, uh, yuck.

The conversation moved past that point onto other things, and I didn’t realize that my lack of clarification would become such a big deal, because Zak never even posted in that thread. Not even once.

3) June 2011

Apparently, at the time Zak hadn’t thought that my post about HTK was such a big deal either? Because four months later I wrote an admittedly ham-handed post about how the shit I love about fantasy is racist.

And actually, Zak popped in again briefly with some stuff that was actually super on point about the difficulty of trying to be a critic and artist who doesn’t fall into the same traps that I criticize here on my blog. (Again, I’d entirely forgotten about this until I went searching my comment archives.) And even looking back on it now, it seems pretty pointed, but also like something that needed to be said.

So whatever the dynamic now, we had had what I had remembered as pretty civil, respectful interactions in the past.

Hostilities begin: 2012/2013

1) April 2012: It begins

I honestly couldn’t tell you when it happened now, but at some point in maybe 2009 or 2010, I moved all my gaming-related conversations to G+ and rage-quit talking on game forums, because I was done with accepting sexism, erasing, and mansplaining as the price for participating in conversations about games and game design online. (And G+ is fantastic at letting you aggressively curate your conversations to be fuckhead-free.)

So when Zak dropped into a Story-Games thread to make an attack on me in which he called me a fascist ultra-conservative akin to Phyllis Schafly (I am paraphrasing, as the link I have archived seems to be broken ETA: the thread moved! you can find it here), I didn’t even know this had happened until a few people emailed me to let me know what had happened. I wasn’t even notified that this attack had happened until after Zak had already been banned for it, but I remember being bewildered.

What had happened? I mean, where the hell had this come from? I even went back through the comment logs on that old HTK post and couldn’t find any one moment that made me say – ah. That. That is where this emnity is coming from.

I made a response on Gaming as Women in which I was careful not to mention Zak’s name or any identifying details of the incident, and I also asked that people refrain from naming Zak if they knew who I was talking about. Partly this was because I wanted to use my personal experience to highlight the visceral fear that women face when interacting on the internet. But it was also partly because I actually was scared by the anger of that attack and didn’t want to give Zak any further ammunition to use against me.

My previous experience of trolls had been that they would make one or two isolated attacks and then go back to doing… whatever. I honestly thought that would be the case this time too.

It wasn’t.

2) July 2013: AoE’d

The next time I was targeted by Zak, it was part of a shotgun-style attack against a whole host of people that he didn’t like. Rather than rehash what I’ve already written about here, go to this post and scroll down to the section called The Edgy Game Designer, in which I detail how I came to speak out against a gaming organization’s choice to lend someone with a known history of misogynist views their platform to voice those views.

I was one of a few women who spoke out, and in so doing I was careful to focus on my personal experiences and feelings and how this person’s views directly affected me as a marginalized member of the gaming community. And the other women who spoke out all pretty much stuck to that same script. However, there was also one man who spoke out with far more fervor, and far more aggressively than any of them women did.

He made one post in particular that said that the problematic game designer was responsible for rape and death threats against people who disagreed with him. Now I knew what he was talking about – that he was talking about how some nerd-famous men shut down criticism against them by riling up their followers and pointing them at a target (I’ve written about it more in depth here, under the section called “How It Works”). The person who made this post is someone who I respect, someone who got me into game design in the first place, and without whose support I would not still be making games today. I also knew that he was speaking from a place of deep personal trauma, so I plussed the post in support of what he was feeling.

…which turned out to be a huge mistake. This all happened in July of 2013, but in December 2013 Zak necro’d the whole issue to make a shotgun attack against pretty much everyone included on his enemies list. (See the screenshot included here in this post under “The Rebellious Artist”.)

Zak demanded that everyone who had plussed the post retract that plus and make a public apology. I certainly wasn’t about to apologize for talking about my personal feelings and life experiences, and I’d already gotten sick of Zak’s growing vendetta against me. Also, I still really did understand what the person making the original post had meant and agreed with it. So I didn’t un-plus, and I didn’t apologize. I just kept my mouth shut and waited for it all to go away again.

Which brings up to 2014, when things started getting really out of hand.

2014: the year things got kind of bonkers

July of 2014 is when things got weird. First there was what came to be known as ConsultancyGate – a scandal over the inclusion of Zak and another highly-controversial figure as paid consultants on the 5th edition of D&D. I kept my fucking mouth shut about this, aside from a few private conversations on G+. I knew it was going to be a shitstorm (it was) and I wanted no part of it.

My one contribution: Tom Hatfield wrote a piece about the issue for Fail Forward, and I retweeted two things said about the piece while not directly linking to it or naming any names. The first is this tweet here by Tom Hatfield which simply addresses the fact that harassment exists and it is larger than one community. The second is this tweet here about not wanting people to boycott D&D 5e. Those two re-tweets are the sum total of my involvement in ConsultancyGate. Period. (Case in point: this is a pretty thorough summary of ConsultancyGate that is also totally pro-Zak, which fails to mention me at all. ETA: Oh jeez – so the Seebs summary is actually part of a larger effort to harass a trans game developer out of the industry and off the internet. I didn’t know that and wouldn’t have linked to it if I had, so I’m very sorry for missing that.)

That didn’t stop Zak, however. He’s written 6 posts about me on his blog, and five of them are from 2014. (Number six is from this year.) One of those posts is a question-and-answer charity ransom in which he wanted people he’d previously attacked to let him ask them questions, and if their answers were “acceptable” (according to his definitions of acceptable) he would donate to charity. As the mere idea of interacting with Zak directly has become enough to trigger feelings of anxiety, I did not participate. In August, I also found out that he’d been hate-following me on Twitter, after which I blocked him but otherwise said nothing.

In November, there was a thread that was started on TheRPGSite about a promotional post I’d written highlighting the progressive design work done on V20:Dark Ages, which Zak turned into a 32-page hatefest against me. In that thread, his posts alone total over 22,000 words (although approximately half of those words are quotes from other people or sources). In a thread with a total of 311 posts, he wrote 43. (I’ve also backed up Zak’s posts in that thread in a paste on pastebin, since I’m not sure if RPGSite lets you edit/delete posts. The backup consists solely of the text of Zak’s posts along with a link to each post.)

My sole response to all of this was this vaguetweet that didn’t mention his name, the forum/venue of the thing being discussed, or any other identifying information.

2015 hasn’t been so great either

Unfortunately this year looks like it’s just going to be more of the same. On January 6th he put up what can only be described as a conspiracy theory infographic that mentions me, using my quote from a comment thread on my own personal blog (that he hadn’t even participated in) entirely out of context, to claim that I was harassing Mandy. (It’s also important to note that while I have freelanced for Onyx Path twice, I have never been an employee of Onyx Path.)

Only 3 days after that, he made this tweet that thanked the people he had attacked, or parhaps more accurately the controversy he’d used his attack to generate, for helping him sell so many books.

And on February 23rd, the official twitter for I Hit It With My Axe, Zak’s webseries about running D&D for porn actresses, made attacks against some noteable progressive game devs that also included me. (Note: the tweet boxed in red appears to have been deleted later. This screenshot was taken by someone else, whereas when I looked at the I Hit It With My Axe timeline the next day the tweet was gone.)

…so all of this brings us to now, when I am tired of feeling angry, silenced, and afraid every time he attempts to convince people what a miserable human being I am. I am running out of cope.

However, since I’m also aware that it could be said that none of the above actually addresses the substance of the charges against me…

The specific charges against me, and why they’re untrue

(I am not including every instance of every specific charge leveled at me, because that would be tiresome and this post is way too long already. However, I will provide specific links to additional material under each section.)

1) I have publicly, repeatedly attacked Zak and/or Mandy

Before we cover anything else, it’s important to realize that a lot of Zak’s accusations against me are predicated on the idea that I have been making repeated public attacks against Zak and/or Mandy. And that is simply not true.

If you use Google do even a modicum of verification, you’ll see that the only search results for his name on my blog are in the comment section of posts that he himself commented on. There is nothing attached to his name on the blogspot iteration of this blog (from before I moved to WordPress). There is nothing on my tumblr. Nothing on my twitter. And especially never, ever, ever anything public on G+. (My facebook is not public and never has been.) And as previously stated, I quit visiting games forums before I’d even met Zak.

I have from time-to-time written about Zak in an anonymized fashion, such as my original Gaming as Women post. But in each instance I attempted to file all of the serial numbers off of the incidents, and have always said when doing so that people SHOULD NOT name the person being discussed if they are aware of the circumstances being discussed. I have also taken people to task after the fact when they have done so anyway. (Seriously, people, if someone writes about a person that they want to remain nameless, linking to the post and naming them anyway is an asshole move.)

Until right now, this post, here, I have never written anything in a publicly-available space attached to Zak’s real name or any of his aliases. Ever.

However, here is what Zak has to say on the subject, for starters:

…To be clear: in any way supporting a product made by Wundergeek or people who are still supporting her is pretty fucked up considering what she’s done and the attacks she’s made. — RPGSite thread, post #80

…And no matter what you think of Anna’s position, her endorsing the attacks on me and the women in my group and claiming she was harassed by us is straight-up falsehood with no possible defense. —RPGSite thread, post #91

…Her blog entry claims the JDes controversy is “manufactured” and associates me with intentional harassment and with Elliot Rodger. —RPGSite thread, post #171

…You will continue to be causing distress (to, for example, Mandy) until you admit “Yes, Wundergeek is a liar and yes, Mandy, you are right, it isn’t good that Wundergeek lied in public about being harassed” until then, your contention that you feel contrition about causing distress (while causing it) are as hollow as Wundergeek’s contention that she is an advocate of inclusion (while her rhetoric plainly excludes people) and non-judgmental (while her rhetoric is clearly judgmental).

Furthermore, after all you just said, unless you firmly state that you know Wundergeek, David and Filamena are lying your statements here are promoting the harassment (including the death threats) that their claims caused. —RPGSite thread, post #165

…Yeah that’s maybe because you weren’t sitting in a hospital room this August watching Mandy hooked up to a heart monitor and watching her heart rate spike and the monitor begin to crazily beep as every new accusation of your (and her) alleged hate crimes rolled in day after day after day linking Wundergeek as “evidence” on more and more sites in bigger and bigger media wondering when it was all going to end, all because, you made people mad by talking about playing the games you like (which everybody else does) — RPGSite thread, post 270

…that last quote, man.

You know what? I’m sorry that Mandy has been the target of vile abuse. Anyone who attacks a woman, any woman, for not being the “right” kind of woman to play games needs to fuck off to a dark corner forever. But claiming that I’m behind any of the abuse that Mandy has received either in the past or in the present is factually incorrect. Period.

(Additional instances of this allegation: RPGSite thread, post #91, The Teachable Moment From All This (Zak’s blog), How Dungeons And Dragons Is Totally Not Endorsing The Darkest Parts The RPG Community At All Even Though There’s Some Tumblr Panic That It Is (Zak’s blog), Dear Angry Gamers, I Am Calling Your Bluff (Zak’s blog), RPGSite thread, post #94, RPGSite thread, post #98, RPGSite thread, post #108, RPGSite thread, post #153, RPGSite thread, post #154, RPGSite thread, post #161, RPGSite thread, post #175, RPGSite thread, post #177, RPGSite thread, post #188, RPGSite thread, post #229)

1a) I attacked Zak and/or Mandy by retweeting the Fail Forward article

I’ve already established previously that my only relation to the Fail Forward article which has become such a rallying cry for Zak was to retweet two tweets making commentary on the issues surrounding the article. These tweets did not actually specify who is being discussed, where, or why. However, this is a specific charge that Zak makes very often, so it’s worth addressing:

[Zak, quoting from a post by Mandy] …Re-tweeting Fail Forward article = harassment

Everyone who forwarded the attacks on us is enabling and supporting their harassment. And you need to go beyond ”Well we don’t support harassment of anybody” and stand up and admit you were wrong and you’ve been ignoring it and these are the people who have been doing it. — Mandy on the Anatomy of a Harassment Campaign

…ALSO ANOTHER WAY TO PROVE SHE’S A LIAR: She retweeted the FailForward article and claimed to agree with it. —RPGSite thread, post #141

…And, while we’re at it, let’s look at the most obvious evidence of shit-headdery: she retweeted the (known to be all false allegations) hit piece article about me. — RPGSite thread, post #108

I never retweeted the article. I never said I specifically endorsed it and all of the content therein. I especially never retweeted a link while also naming Zak as a harasser.

(Additional instances of this allegation: RPGSite thread, post #188, RPGSite thread, post #201)

1b) I don’t care if Mandy gets harassed

One of the side effects of me wanting to avoid anything to do with Zak is that it also means I haven’t commented specifically on harassment directed at Mandy. And yeah, that’s unfortunate! But I have consistently, constantly worked to end harassment of women in gaming, and I have always maintained that there is no one “right way” to be a female gamer.

Nevertheless, I get accused of either not caring or welcoming the abuse Mandy has gotten from people who are upset to see women who are in charge of their sexuality enjoying TPRGs. Which. Fuck. I feel like I just can’t win:

…So why don’t gaming gadflies and big indie designers like Fred Hicks (at Evil Hat), GeekyLyndsay, David A Hill Jr (Machine Age Productions), Ryan Macklin (Paizo), Bruce Baugh (Onyx Path), Elizabeth Sampat, Wundergeek, Christopher Allen and Shannon Appelcline (who employ Something Awful members Ettin and Kai Tave at RPG.net) and Tracy Hurley care that these attacks and the people inflicting them originated in a troll forum?

Because long ago we irritated them by playing a different game than them and refusing to let them lecture us about how we’re wrong and because we wear chainmail bikinis on Halloween and aren’t ashamed. Because, for example, Wundergeek and David Hill have real problems with tentacle hentai—and I made a live action tentacle porn because I wanted to. So who cares if I get harassed? I’m the wrong kind of feminist. — Mandy on the Anatomy of a Harassment Campaign

…because I got death threats and can prove it and unlike me you have never addressed those death threats I got and neither has Wundergeek. EXAMPLE: http://oblivionnecroninja.tumblr.com…ng-harrassment — RPGSite thread, post #141

(Please note, this is the only time I will touch directly on things said by Mandy. No I AM NOT saying that she’s a sock puppet, or invented by Zak, or that she has Stockholm Syndrome, or any of that bullshit. I just find the idea that I don’t care about the harassment of female gamers who aren’t like me very hurtful and want to provide context.)

I’ve written 17 posts about harassment in games culture and why it sucks and why it needs to fucking stop. I’ve said that fuck what other people think, you should write games you want to write. I’ve spoken out against people who doxx people they see as anti-social justice. More than once! I’ve even spoken out against people who hate on women because they play different games than the games they like to play, which is what I’m being accused of not caring about! Argh!

So yes. I care, because I am not a monster.

2) I am a liar (especially about harassment)

One of Zak’s go-to accusations against me is that I am a liar: I lie about being harassed myself, I lie about not harassing Zak and/or Mandy, and I lie about the plussing of the contentious post on G+ (previously mentioned), in that I knew that it was a lie and by endorsing it am lying myself:

…If you say she’s not a liar, you are lying and harassing me. —RPGSite thread, post #161

…So one of the people who lied about me this last week because they were sad that I was a Dungeons & Dragons consultant–Wundergeek–once wrote a list of things she was “tired of”. — The Teachable Moment From All This

…Wundergeek, the author linked in the OP publicly made false claims about harassment — RPGSite thread, post #39

…If you say Wundergeek isn’t a liar, you are lying. … So if you repudiate all those things for starters, then you might not be a liar. —RPGSite thread, post #153

…Quote: This does not confirm every detail of her blog post,  

Any detail wrong=lie. So: she is lying. —RPGSite thread, post #175

The matter of the contentious G+ post has been dealt with previously in this post, so I won’t beat a dead horse.

However, there’s also the issue of the fact that I later referred to the flap as a “manufactured controversy”. And given that the timeline that is a matter of public record, I stand by that. It had been five months, and no one was talking about it anymore before it was necro’d again.

And as for lying about my own harassment, this blog is itself an archive of some of that. I didn’t start saving records of harassing communication I’ve gotten prior to 2014, but I’ve written about it here, and here, and here (which post contains even more links). And that’s not to say anything of the occasional email that I get, like this one which dropped into my inbox shortly after the resurrected flap over DidIPlusAThingThatOneTimeGate:

To be fair, this BARELY counts as trolling.

Lastly, he also frequently accuses me of libel. How exactly I am to have committed libel when I have never previously attached commentary to his name in public before is… uh… well I’m not too sure about that, actually.

(Additional instances of this allegation: RPGSite thread, post #94, RPGSite thread, post #108, RPGSite thread, post #141, RPGSite thread, post #153, RPGSite thread, post #213)

3) I am anti-porn/anti-sex:

Zak has repeatedly claimed that I am anti-porn and anti-sex-in-games, mostly because of that conversation that wasn’t about porn, that happened in the comments of a post which was also not about porn, in which I expressed a personal opinion about my personal discomfort with harem and hentai anime.

However, the other thing he frequently brings up as proof that I am anti-porn is something I said in the comment thread for my post about Hyung Tae Kim (again, previously mentioned):

…Quote: Wundergeek is openly anti-porn

That isn’t an ok position. That’s like being anti-pictures-of-two-guys-kissing: it’s a thing only bigots are.

[…]

But being ideologically against erotic imagery itself and the people who make it is Max Nordau territory. It’s coding wanting to look at sexualized women as a “male” activity–which ten minutes outside will tell you is not a healthy or realistic assumption and one that erases LGBT experience. — RPGSite thread, post #91

 

Quote: Originally Posted by jhkim View Post

Essentially, you seem to be saying that no one can say anything bad about a sexy outfit, or else they are “slut shaming”.

Absolutely that’s what I’m saying–how is it in any universe remotely ok to tell a woman that the miniature she wants to use to represent her character is inappropriate or wrong?

We’ll come back to anti-porn = bigot in the next section. But first, Zak also characterizes his first encounter with me this way:

First Ever Contact With Wundergeek

Zak (whistles, minding own business)

Wundergeek : Hyun Tae Kim should be pushed to the margins of the industry because he paints fetishy art and hentai is disgusting!

Zak : WTF?

Wundergeek : Why are you so mean, Zak?

Did Jessica Hammer or anyone at Gaming As Women or anybody else that Wundergeek worked with or talked to never explain to Wundergeek that other peoples’ taste in porn is not her business and pin-up art is not the problem, art gatekeepers are? Why is she bothering artists with this shit?  —The Teachable Moment From All This

Which. [sigh] No.

Zak wants to characterize this as him minding his business and me somehow attacking him by expressing an opinion in the comments thread of my own blog.

Secondly, never anywhere in the history of ever have I said that I am against porn or erotica, or that I dislike sex in games, or that I think people who want sex in games are terrible people. I’ve written… uh… pretty extensively about what a fangirl I am of BioWare and their romance plotlines. Hell, I’ve even written about how sex in video games is just so fucking unsatisfying compared to sex in tabletop games, and some ways that game devs might make video game sex actually sexy.

Lastly, I have always been 100% consistent that what I write here is not about judging people for their individual tastes – that what I am doing is criticizing an industry that profits from the dehumanization of women. It’s in the damn sticky that I wrote when I went on hiatus from blogging here in November 2011.

I have only ever said that it is 100% okay to like what you like, that it is totally okay to like something other people find offensive, and that I know I like things that other people find offensive. (Like my love of pretty much anything by Joss Whedon.)

3a) I am a bigot

Zak’s reasoning behind this claim is this: by criticizing sexualized character design and game art as well as an industry that values the commodification of female body parts over depictions of actual women, I am somehow erasing the preference of female-or-nonbinary-identified queer people who are attracted to women, which makes me a bigot. Most of his argument that I am a miserable human being comes back to this idea:

Quote: Does she constantly say homophobic statements?

Yes. Absolutely and we already went over this. I laid out an example on a previous page.

A._You (unknown gender and orientation) claim that kind of speech is not homophobic

B._I (straight male) claim it is

C._Norton (bisexual male) says it is not homophobic but is insenstive

D._The women I’ve asked about this (bisexual females) say her rhetoric is unequivocally homophobic (on basically every post where she talks about scantily-clad women, which is a great many of them) whether or not she herself wants it to be (a detail you, again, keep pretending doesn’t exist). She does this through a rhetoric which (like so many RPG morons of your acquaintance so often do) fails to acknowledge the existence of people with tastes unlike her own and grants to her own taste an unwarranted moral dimension.

While you may not be inclined to grant Group 4 more moral authority than anybody else so far asked, I defer to their judgment since they’re the affected group. — RPGSite thread, post #229

So because there are women who agree with him that my feminist criticism of games is the same as queer erasure, I am homophobic and therefore a bigot. Which. Wut [1].

This also means that Zak is placing himself in a position to judge whose expression of marginalization is most valid. So the irony is that while Zak accuses me of bigotry, the very fact that he putting himself, as a white man, in a position to choose which womens’ opinions count and which do not. And how is that not erasure, which by Zak’s standard would be bigotry?

The writing I do here is not scholarly. I write about my feelings, my experiences, and how these things impact me and the women I know. Yes I bring my training as an artist and my experience in the industry to what I write. But I also bring the hurt, the unwelcome, the scorn, the feeling that my body is not enough, that it will never be enough and therefore I will never be enough.

But somehow he has decided that my expressions of marginalization don’t count, and therefore I don’t count.

…I’m saying: since she’s a liar and a bigot, supporting her in any way instantaneously makes you a shitty person that nobody else should ever deal with. Just like supporting a known homophobe would make you a shitty person. Whether you want to be a shitty person is your business, not mine. — RPGSite thread, post #98

 

…Although calling someone who is a bigoted a bigot does not constitute harassment, publicly lying about them does constitute harassment. — RPGSite thread, post #141

 

…Also: I’d willingly put it to a vote. If I gave Wundergeek’s stuff to every lesbian and bi woman on the planet, and they voted, I’d accept their verdict. As I don’t have access to that, I am deferring to people I trust — RPGSite thread, post #232

 

…So something something is sexist if you can find enough women who agree with you?? What if I can poll my bi/pan female friends and find more who agree with me than who agree with Zak? Does that mean I win? Because… I’m pretty sure that feminism doesn’t work that way.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Queer erasure is absolutely a thing, and I write a lot here about inclusive gaming with the aim of expanding our community into new demographics. I recently wrote 7500 words about self-publishing, with the express purpose of getting more not-cishet-white-dudes into game publishing. I’ve also written about barriers to diverse recruitment, what the process of trying to revise existing game lore to remove homophobia/transphobia/racism in a popular game line can look like, my hope for the future of gaming as an inclusive community, as well as nearly 10,000 words about how not to include offensive stereotypes in your work – including gender and sexuality-based stereotypes.

I’m not going to claim that I ally perfectly, because pride goeth before the fall. But I certainly put a lot of work into not erasing queer people, and getting other people to stop erasing them as well.

(Additional instances of this allegation: RPGSite thread, post #188, RPGSite thread, post #113, RPGSite thread, post #141

4) I am omniscient/I have not written about everything that needs writing about

Sometimes Zak will criticize me for never having written about a specific thing, and often seems to have the idea that I both follow everything he talks about and does and that I am aware of every game book that he has ever encountered.

I really don’t know how else to address things like this, in which he says that I am picking and choosing who to criticize because I have never written about an obscure thing featuring rape-nagas:

There are 40 naga-kin in Pralaj and about 200 villagers and revived corpses held prisoner while slowly being raped, tortured, and drowned into a susceptible state for transformation into naga-kindred. ...  From here, they prepare the coming of the Naga into her kingdom, and send naga-kin down the River to rape and drown the people into following her.

Now one reason he (I’ll call him Doc Respectable, I hope he won’t mind) has not been called out by Wundergeek or anybody else in a coterie of people that, largely gets very het up about rape in games and about what is in the world’s most popular RPG is because he is a professional. And by that I don’t mean he maintains a responsible and professional demeanor (although he does) I mean that, unlike the RPGPundit (the other consultant who pissed people off) and I, Doc Respectable’s daily bread relies on tabletop roleplaying games. — The Teachable Moment From All This

Uh, and you know what, if I’d known about that being a thing that existed before Zak decided to criticize me for never writing about it, maybe I might’ve! I’ve certainly written quite a bit about the rapey tropes inherent in D&D and other geek media before – including the rapeyness of half-orcs and the drow.

He also seems upset that I have not written about everything that could ever need writing about:

Wundergeek’s friend Vincent Baker–designer of Apocalypse World and the most important designer in a scene whose members came out in force against me and (especially) the RPGPundit, is perhaps the epitome of a Male Game Designer Who Writes About Rape (in both Seclusium of Orphone and Poison’d) And Is Praised For His Creative Vision.

But they don’t talk about it–at least not publicly. …  And so we get lots of trenchant Concerned Gamers re-posting Wundergeek’s I Am Tired litany and re-posting Vincent Baker’s latest project in the same day and there is no good public conversation about the cognitive dissonance and how to resolve it. Like: How you handle rape and why, in public, with examples from Respectable figures in the field given first-hand and input from affected groups. — The Teachable Moment From All This

Uh, okay. I do own a copy of Seclusium of Orphone, from that one time I was part of a failed IndieGoGo for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but I’ve never done anything more than skim it. I didn’t look at it any closer than – hey! Lists! And neat art! …okay these lists are neat, but there are… a lot of them.

To be honest, the collective game output of my design friends is just too damn large to ever be consumed by only one person. I only have so much time, and sometimes I can think that a designer is totally killing it with design ideas and still not really be into the end result of the thing that they made.

Now obviously I can’t claim to have never read Poison’d. That would be a little hard, since I illustrated it. But Poison’d was published in 2009, two years before I started writing this blog. So it honestly never occurred to me to write about Poison’d, because it’s an older game. Not to mention that there’s a lot of rapey stuff out there that I haven’t written about, simply because man is rape common in games and I don’t want to turn into That Blogger Who Only Writes About Rape. (…World of Darkness, tho…)

5) I am legit crazy

Last, but certainly not least, Zak has accused me of being legit crazy. As in a-danger-to-myself-and-others crazy:

But she needs to get help, not just constant random reification of whatever aggressive anti-sex delusion she’s pushing that day. —RPGSite thread, post #88

“Wait my friend is mentally ill and as someone they trust I need to intervene” . So people like Wundergeek keep doing breathtakingly evil, stupid and dishonest things because people like you, basically, let them and there is no point at which you go “This person is crazy, let’s make sure they can’t hurt anyone else”. —RPGSite thread, post #229

Wundergeek will never listen to anything I say–but if you have even a single person who is friends with her who hasn’t told her she desperately needs therapy by now, every fucking problem she causes is on their head. As it is on yours for defending her. —RPGSite thread, post #229

And let me just say that internet-diagnosing someone of a mental illness as a way of dismissing everything that they have to say, or even their worth as a human being, that is some grade-A ableist bullshit.

There’s a lot of shit I don’t talk about here, like the trauma surrounding the loss of my father and my lifelong struggle with mental illness. But I’ve also been pretty open about things in the game community that do affect my mental health, as well as things that I am doing to try to take care of myself.

So yes, I am “crazy”. But I missed the part where the details of my medical history, including treatment, medication, prognosis, or interventions are anybody’s fucking business but my husband’s.

(Additional instances of this allegation: RPGSite thread, post #232, RPGSite thread, post #232)

Jesus is anyone still even reading this?

(If you’ve made it this far, uh, congratulations? You deserve a medal or something.)

So here we are, at the end. I have laid out everything I have, as exhaustively as I could while also trying to preserve some readability and coherency. I hope I struck the right balance. I might not have. Ultimately, you, the reader, must decide how well I did.

What do I intend to do from here? To go back to what I have been doing. Blogging about the things that I’m passionate about, writing games that I want to write, and making art that makes me happy. This isn’t something I intend to write about again. The purpose of this post was to end a three-and-a-half year silence that was only growing larger, more oppressive, and more suffocating the longer it went on.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m fucking Mother Theresa about this. I have a lot of hurt, a lot of pain, and a lot of anger over this. I also have a lot of anxiety and fear. I am going to do my level best to forget this, but do I have it in me to ever forgive? I’m not sure. I hope that posting this will help me let some of that hurt go.

Do I expect or even desire anything from Zak? No. I hope he has lots more adventures with confident women and nonbinary folk who are in charge of their sexuality, and I hope they keep playing games. Me, I just want to live my life, and I want him to live his without constantly broadcasting his hatred of me. That’s all. That’s all I’ve only ever wanted.

—

[1] Zak is a professional artist with art in the MOMA. So his entire argument hinges on the idea that he is somehow completely unfamiliar with the idea of “the male gaze”, which was a concept I learned about in art school, waaaaaay before feminism was even a thing I thought worth pursuing. There is, frankly, a shitton of scholarship supporting the existence of the (heterosexual) male gaze as a major influencing force in our culture, so, I’m not going to waste time here by having an argument that is the intellectual equivalent of “should I vaccinate my kids”. (Spoiler alert: YES.)