Anita attacks Witcher 3 over sexism

+
Status
Not open for further replies.
Anita attacks Witcher 3 over sexism

You all know who she is and why she's doing it, but this time I found it especially depressing. Yeah I often get depressed at stupidity. And Sarkeesian never disappoints there.

Maybe I'm biased since I am indubitably a male player when I think those kinds of concerns are irrelevant (obvious reasoning here : you're not the one getting yelled "bitch" at : Ciri is. Don't put yourself in your character's place, chances are you're not even close to being anything like her, and it's completely stupid anyway). Hence, what do you people think about it, female players especially ? Were you shocked to hear the words "whore" or "bitch" yelled around in a game with a dark fantasy setting targeted toward knowing adults ?

Writing this I'm realizing I'm playing right in that dumb crazie's hands, she obviously is only spouting bullshit of this magnitude to trigger some kind of reaction and, that way, gain the attention she seems to desperately crave. Still, without thinking about the dumbass, it still raises a relevant question, and a very interesting one with regards given to our contemporary gaming industry. The question being of course : would Sarkeesian seem more interesting if she realized her videos with two fat earth worms crawling inside her nostrils ? No, no, shit, I meant : is a coherent adult dark fantasy setting enough to explain the coherent personalities of it's coherent characters, even at the risk of them coherently shouting coherent sexist terms when they're coherent stereotypes of piss poor illiterate peasant thugs ?
 
Last edited:
Anita attacks Witcher 3 over sexism

(This is an article I wrote today for my newsletter, just thought I'd share it and ask you guys your opinion on this matter before I send it out to my publishers)
Warning Spoilers Below!

For those of you who aren't familiar with Anita, she's hell bent on shaming video games for sexism. For example her most famous attack was against the Mario franchise, where she mentioned Peach is portrayed as a damsel in distress who must always be saved by a man and apparently all she's ever good for is baking cakes. In my counter argument I brought up an issue of Nintendo Power that had a Mario comic, Mario gets captured this time and it's up to Luigi and Peach to save him. It displayed one of the most badass scenes Nintendo's Mario franchise had ever seen. Peach puts on a ninja outfit and beats wholesale ass through armies of Goombas and Koopas. We've also seen her in Smash Bros where she was a fighting character.

Anita doesn't play fair though, any attempts to prove her wrong will result in a YouTube ban. If you used clips of her video to make a point she'll claim and copyright you. If you just quoted her in your video and you go over 100k views she'll mark the video as "abusive or harassment" regardless of how polite you were, which is what happened to me.

Honestly I know for a fact she doesn't play the video games, and I'm sure she hasn't played Witcher 3. She might think it's an easy target, what with all the sex scenes and brothels. However she doesn't see the facts, brothels aren't some fiction story creation that demoralizes women... they exist in the real world. Trust me, I've be... read about one in a magazine....

Ehem anyways so lets look at these so called "sexist" characters:

Triss: A powerful magic wielder who has been in countless fights that end with her victorious and nary a scratch on her. She's has a possible romance plot in Witcher 2 which requires you to show you're a genuinely good person and care about her. But aafterwards she finds out about Yennefer naturally she's pissed off. Geralt can either try to win her back or go with Yennefer. Triss's romance is a very mature story, for example in Witcher 2 they both uncovered a romantic bath with rose petals in it. Triss never feels like she's just there for eye-candy. She's become the 2nd most well known character in this game, because the fans like her beyond her looks. She's a really awesome character.

Yennefer: She's easily one of, if not THE most badass woman in the game. She too is a sorceress and she's faced very dangerous situations and fights that would normally kill even the most strongest warriors and sorceress. It is possible to romance Yennefer, her romance is even more mature than Triss's because Geralt and Yennefer feel as if they both have a daughter together. Yennefer finds out about Triss and naturally she's pissed too, Geralt would have to win her back. That means our badass main character Geralt is the one who at the very whim will do anything for his beloved.

Ciri: If we're going based on video game logic, Ciri is more dangerous and deadly than Geralt himself. She has abilities no other people have in the world. Without completing her training and being at a very young age, she can still wonder the treacherous world of Witcher by herself and survive the most toughest enemies. She's someone who demands respect, but with a smile. She's kind hearted and very mature. She's someone so respectable not even Bloody Baron or his men try to flirt or have sex with her, they treat her like she's part of their group.

Tamara: At the heart of easily the most tragic quest in the game we meet the Bloody Baron and his family. His daughter is Tamara and the mother is Anna. The story reveals the Bloody Baron to be an abusive drunken asshole who physically harms his family. After witnessing her mom have a miss-carriage due to the Baron getting in a fight with her, Tamara and Anna leave. Tamara goes through a serious change afterwards, she not only finds religion but she becomes very skilled with a weapon. We even see her fight side by side with Geralt towards the end of the Bloody Baron quest. She vows never to return to her father and goes off down her own path.


I could go on, there are female characters in this game more badass than the male characters. They all have their own really well written stories, character arcs and do not fall into the TV tropes of sexism or stereotypes. Romance is not sexism, a lot of the romance plots deal with realistic situations and adult themes. Just because two people have sex it's sexism? Brothels cannot be an example of sexism because they exist in real life. Don't blame games for that.

So what is sexism? Well here's a real example of sexism in games: Ride to Hell Retribution... yeah that dog turd. You can save slutty women who are held as hostages by random people, if you save them the woman immediately starts having sex with the main character as a "reward" in the same damn room the dead body is laying in. Sometimes they even do it right on the dead body. But guess what? It's said to be the worst video games ever, that tells us gamers do not support that kind of thing and are much smarter than this Anita says. It may not be clear to someone who hasn't played the games, that just because you have multiple women to romance... doesn't mean you get multiple women. A lot of these games only allow you to romance one person. If you try for more than one you'll most likely end up losing them both because they'd consider it to be cheating.

Ugh... well hey thanks for reading this wall of text. Please by all means I'd love to hear what you think of this topic.
 
Let these people talk, who cares.

While I don't find the game to be overly sexist, I like to play a game story that takes place in a gritty, cruel and unfair world, with elements of racism and sexism even, that is what makes it interesting. I don't wanna play washed down modified games that desperately try to be morally correct, that's boring as hell.

I bet if you made a game that protraits life exactly how it was in medieval times some people would also call it sexist.
 
Can she just be ignored ? I mean, most people probably won't even know her if she doesn't attack Witcher 3 over sexism, so she originally doesn't even exist.
What impact could she bring ? Is she really that powerful, sounds like a witch to me, but a witch with the only negative sense of the word.
 
I'm playing a Polish version and don't even remember what were the exact insults thrown at Ciri. Probably some equivalents, but, since I can't even recall it, clearly it didn't make me feel "alienated". I would perhaps feel that way if all female characters in the game were caricatures without their own agency, props, eye candies and/or damsels in distress, but that was clearly not the case.
 
Can she just be ignored ? I mean, most people probably won't even know her if she doesn't attack Witcher 3 over sexism, so she originally doesn't even exist.
What impact could she bring ? Is she really that powerful, sounds like a witch to me, but a witch with the only negative sense of the word.

Oh I wish. She recently went after Halo and Call of Duty because she didn't like how women were being treated over online games. The thing is, there weren't that many complaints of this problem. It literally happens over anything, if you're killing someone over and over they get mad and will insult the first thing they see. Country, race, being nerdy, gender or what you sound like. I could find you hundreds of videos where women are taunting guys saying "ha you got killed by a girl" because that's how First Person Shooters are.

Not on Anita's watch, she makes Bungie create a "special" complaint box just for women and this results in a large banning spree which ended up banning a lot of innocent people because even non-female players abused this system. Even if the situation did involve a girl, it doesn't matter if the girl started it first or if she used a sexist/racist remark, she'd be fine. Telling her to "make me a sammich" as a comeback could get you a banned.
 
Last edited:
And that's a real shame, and people like you increasing her infamy are not helping.

While I agree that generally speaking, the amount of energy needed to fight bullshit is higher than the amount needed to produce it, I don't think ignoring stupidity is the way to go. The fact that she's ignored while what she is saying has a false sense of "engagement" results in her appearing in the Time, in the fucking list of the 100 most influential people. Yeah I'm not kidding.

At some point you've just got to say stop to the bullshit. And while ignoring is a pretty nice option in that sort of cases, the fact that she defines herself as a feminist makes this useless, there's always gonna be a journalist to scrape the bottom of the barrel and grab pieces of shit like her to throw her on front pages, only on the basis that she's a "courageous defender of female rights". When all she does really is try to grab money wherever she can grab it, and uses her face to do it no matter how much she's mistreated. Yeah, not far from a prostitute, so much for her being a feminist...

PS : This is literally the first time I speak about her anywhere on the internet, for real. It's just the fact that she's put in the same list as Aura Elena Farfan or Jimmy Lai shocks me a bit.
 
Last edited:
Please don't feed that trolling attention whore, she probably played the game for 90 minutes before deciding that's her next target in her ever failing self justifying crusade against men. Actual feminists and a lot of gaming women dislike her.
 
Please don't feed that trolling attention whore, she probably played the game for 90 minutes before deciding that's her next target in her ever failing self justifying crusade against men. Actual feminists and a lot of gaming women dislike her.

Is she really failing though?

She's making a fortune and getting on talk shows plus I don't think her crusade is sincere. She comes across as a charlatan.
 
Just one thing, hire a proof reader before you submit the article ;)

I have to have 5 stages as so mentioned by my publishers. Derp Draft, Rough Draft, Proofed Draft, Double Proofed Draft and Final Draft. I got my top men working on it.

Please don't feed that trolling attention whore, she probably played the game for 90 minutes before deciding that's her next target in her ever failing self justifying crusade against men. Actual feminists and a lot of gaming women dislike her.

It was either this or write an article on Rory McIlroy's PGA Tour coming out for Xbox One so yeah lol. But the thing is, she's already gotten popular. She has tons of views on YouTube and she got support from some female talk show host. If games were sexist and gamers were sexist pigs I'd sit back and let her work, but she doesn't even play the games and she knows nothing about gamers.

As a matter in fact her only experience with games was thanks to her ex-fiancee who spent more time playing games than he did with her which is obviously the reason behind her attacks. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's pulling skeletons out of closets.
 
Last edited:
Is she really failing though?

She's making a fortune and getting on talk shows plus I don't think her crusade is sincere. She comes across as a charlatan.

It depends on what her objective is;

Actually advancing women's interests? Then she failed.

Attaining infamy and making a fortune? Then she succeeded.

And yes, she is a charlatan, hence I said "self justifying crusade"
 
She doesn't deserve all the attention. Just because the villains are calling Ciri a whore or a bitch does NOT mean that the developers are condoning or promoting this type of behaviour. A writer is like a man who is in the sky and holds a mirror, mirroring the society below. A smart person will blame society for what happens in the book (since that is what it mirrors), a retard will point at the mirror.

The fact that she is incapable of this basic fact shows that she is not worthy of representing women in gaming.
 
It's her opinion. I respect it, but very much disagree with it. She, and feminist frequency, oftentimes come across as very conservative about the use violence in general in media (games and movies). Mad Max Fury Road, for example, has been hugely supported by feminists for it's portrayal of women in an action film, but Anita and feminist frequency considered the film to be sexist, and didn't like the violence in any capacity whatsoever. I'm a man, and a feminist, and even for me I find her and FF's views to often be extreme.

I also think it's worth remembering that she and FF seem to go about criticizing pieces of fiction without looking at the storytelling, looking at the writing, or providing context. I'm roughly about 90 hours into Witcher 3, and I would strongly argue that CDPR has done Andrzej Sapkowski's novels justice in many ways, including providing a pro-feminist voice by having fully fleshed out, dominate, realistic women who overcome adversity in a world where being a woman is dangerous, and can have severe repercussions because it's a society dominated by abusive, power hungry men. I think you'll just see people who only see the surface, and don't see the characterizations, the major female characters that are vital to the narrative, and how the storytelling does justice to women and feminists by showing how strong and resilient these women can be in this atmosphere.

I mean, it kinda is what it is. Some people can interpret things as they see fit, even if they're so clearly off the mark.
 
The best thing people can do is just ignore her. She is beyond reason and isn't interested in any discourse on the subject, so stop giving her comments attention and they'll stay contained to her little twitter echo chamber.
 
I just ignore her, i really hate those types of people that think they know everything and they are always right, you can't even argue with them.
 
There are things in the game that could be improved upon, like Ciri design(child design not sexualise VS adult design sexualise), the sex scenes are almost perfect but still needed work, the different ways they kill female and male characters important to "the players" and so on... overall I found this game a lot better than TW 1 or TW 2 when it comes to social issues. And of course the target audience is overall male still, there is no doubt about that.

People seem to be offended about how Anita has a different perceptive but even if they are objectivity wrong, I sure hope there is a certain maturity level to assume that not everyone gonna to enjoy the same games.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom