Imagine you were a nerd in the 90s. You were wedgied at lunch, ignored at prom, forced to do your bullies' homework. But then you found our own pocket universe. You linked up with fellow nerds over Star Wars, D&D all nighters in the garage, biblical arguments about Warhammer 40k lore, LAN parties, traded dog eared Marvel/DC issues, etc etc. Everyone said "lulz check out ts nerd and his vidya gamez" but this was YOUR HOME. YOU were the excluded ones, so YOU created your safe space around the things you loved.
And yeah, it was a straight male space by design, because that’s who SHOWED UP. These IPs catered to straight men because that audience was actually there. Women didn't WANT to be around nerds and looked down on the whole thing. They KEPT THEMSELVES OUT. Nerds actually WANTED women to share their hobbies so they could get cool nerd girlfriends. Yet big urinalism claimed that evil straight white male toxicity kept women from getting into Star Wars and gaming. That was steaming bullshit to begin with.
Cuz one: fandoms were a minority of consumers anyway, I can't use my power of muh soggy knees to stop you from playing single player games. Two: women are STILL uninterested in nerd hobbies. Action packed Transformers battles, Xwing dogfights, dragon slaying, superhero power fantasies simply don't jive with female interest. If they watched Star Wars or Avengers, it's usually because their boyfriends made them.
But these "penis envy" female journalists who also bullied nerds in high school couldn't stand that men got so many cool stories we enjoyed. They put social pressure on every IP to "course correct" by making everything girlboss and gay. And companies being greedy mfs thought bringing in the female audience could double their market, since men will remain loyal to the brand anyway. So they put women in charge and made everything lame and gay.
Gatekeeping is just having standards. You want to enjoy the same hobby as us, and actually care about the subject matter? You're welcome!
You want to attach yourself to the hobby and change it to suit your own tastes? Or all you do is make fun of the hobby instead of taking it seriously? Fuck off.
Yeah take me back to when fandoms were debating the important shit. Imperial coward or Stormcloak turncoat. Team Cap vs Team Tony. Is Batman responsible for Joker's victims.
No Becky I don't think Leia's slave outfit was unnecessary.
Leia is wearing her slave outfit in possibly her most badass moment. She fucking strangled Jabba to death with the chains of her imprisonment.
Yeah. Sadly, even moments like that get twisted around for "agenda purposes".
Even moments where in Aladdin (the original), for example, when Jasmine was using her smarts to outwit Jafar, we can't even have that as a badass moment. She has a whole string of them in the tv series, too. 🥲
40K fan here... I miss the days of 40K when propaganda in the fandom was Matt Ward glazing the Ultramarines into being the Emperor's second coming.
Now we get Femstodes and We Wuz Vikangz on Fenris...
The Salamanders are safe for now?
They made a white Salamander for SM2
"unnecessary" GOD that "criticism" is used so much and means so little.
Its just pseudo intellectuals trying to mask their juvenile uncomfort by making the issue seem deeper than just "i don't like sexy women"
Can we go back to the skyrim age, like you can marry whoever you want despite having nobody suddenly goes "soooo... im [redacted]", and neither imperials nor stormcloaks were portrayed as jokes as both sides can raise valid points? A simpler time
Replaying Skyrim and ong the Reachmen vs Nord issue was so refreshing even though it was literally bare minimum: yes the Nords were foreign invaders but these were actual brutal savages who practiced human sacrifice and pillaged and raped lol. Every race in Tamriel did evil shit, they aren't real life lazy parallels.
If only the Forgotten City modders got the memo...
Here’s a fun animated video I found of a Gen X celebrity here in the UK talking to his young daughter about Star Wars and being shocked she likes Leia’s outfit despite him clearly considering it problematic.
Everyone knows the Empire is the correct side. Ulfric's a Thalmor asset
Preach
It’s actually a lot worse and more evil than that. They are using the IPs as weapons to maliciously attack and bully the fans, not just change it for their own enjoyment. Those same people who said “Star Wars is a stupid IP about space wizards and laser swords for children” are now the same people in control. And they intend to make the franchise into slop to make themselves right about hating it and its fans.
And they are using every event and opportunity not to celebrate fans, but to slander and hurt them and bring worse attacks on them. What fan of nerd culture would say that nerds were in power, when nerds were bullied by others for so long? What fan would say fans excluded other people, when it was others excluding fans? What fan would say comics are for stupid people? What fan would say the lore is not important? What fan would say you should skip playing the game or skip watching the movie? What fan would promote and praise companies for cheating fans of their money? What fan would falsely call authors like JRR Tolkien racist?
These false accusations prove these are the same bullies who hated nerd culture past. The same people, the same insults, the same playbook.
It’s all so tiresome.
Yep. The people who wormed theur way into the Fandom are the bullies. They are the ones who hated these franchises when they were young, and they hated us too. Still do in fact. They were and are concerned with whatever is culturally considered to be "cool" and "in" at the moment, but they aren't above punishing us because they perceive us as lower on the social totem pole. Its all some sort of game to them.
If anything, it was the oposite. Nerds were so excited to get more people into their hobbies they'd welcome about everyone, that's why some bad actors could infiltrate so easily. Ie. Radical feminists: nerds had goodwill and were socially akward, so when a feminist presented a list of grievances nerds did everything possible to cater to them
Having standards is oppression. I wish I were being facetious, but you read the Marxist literature and boil it down, and it really goes back to Rousseau and the idea that having any kind of structure or hierarchy or holding people to some standard is where oppression comes from.
In the 90s, a friend converted an old garage into a nerd cave. Plenty of networked PCs, a bar, leather couches. comic collection. We'd get together, play video games, drink, smoke pipes or cigars. It was Nerd Central in a small town. All men. But we didn't exclude women, heck we'd have been delighted to have some show up since most of us didn't even have a girlfriend.
But yeah, women weren't interested in computers, video games, comic books, drinking and tobacco.
Same but if ts is what women in gaming looks like, no thanks. Let them enjoy their kdramas and romance novels, we'll enjoy our video games.
To be fair, there are and were women like that even back then. The problem is most of them weren't exactly lockers or into dating... which was absolutely fine. I wasn't playing D&D or Duke Nukem to get laid.
For a side that screams cultural appropriation whenever white people do something cool, progressives really love to appropriate other cultures, they act like the colonizers they constantly complain but they convinced themselfes they are the "good guys" fighting the "evil facist chuds"
Not only was no one really excluded, but we could get generally band together as one with shared experiences no matter what video games you played. Or cartoons you liked. One band, one sound.
I remember growing up in the 90's and not being able to really fit in with girls, despite being one myself.
Boys, to me, had the better toys. I felt more at home with video games than barbie dolls. The girls who did play video games when I was coming up were a minority, and that hadn't been an issue. But that didn't matter to me; The Lion King on Genesis/SNES didn't care about gender. Tears for the Lion God, Broken Controllers for the Agony Throne, so to say. 🤣
If you got past the Barrel of Doom in Sonic 3, we REJOICED! Skin color was not a factor!
"Could you keep your palm flesh unscathed when you played MarioParty? Can you find the secret rooms in DK64's multi-player maps with the homing ammo? Wait, how'd you get that score in NiGHTS Into Dreams? Whoa! Can you teach me?!"
That was what we cared about. And the bonds that came as a result of failures and success when we played the games! Now, of course, we have jerks. Every community does. That's a humanity thing.
When in Rome, you did as the Romans did. That was applicable to fandoms. I came up before the booth babes, but I remember watching a video on how Liana K (for better or worse) was lamenting the impact that Anita Sarkeesian and her ilk put an end to booth babies and the like.
Booth babes who genuinely enjoyed their jobs had the chance to talk to other people about hobbies they enjoyed, and the feminists who shut that down never considered that--or did, and just did not care. It may have been the latter for power and social clout, I think. If a woman cosplayed as Ivy from Soul Calibur, or say, Jenny from Bloody Roar, there was a reasonable expectation that they were fans of those franchises, too.
I'm at a point now where if someone decides to do some purity testing about whether I'm a Resident Evil fan, I can give them a verbal dissertation about my favorite villains (William and Annette Birkin) and how their decisions impacted their family life and the franchise as a whole.
They don't look like me. They don't share my sexuality, but goddammit, I just wanna enjoy a good game. That's where it's at. Gaming! That kind of shit was hardly important to gaming as a whole. 😒
The feminists who shut down booth babes were first and foremost mad that these women were hot and desirable (unlike them), getting all the attention, and most importantly catering to straight geek guys as the primary audience. Any other reason they claim is nothing more than an excuse.
"Social justice" is borne out of pure envy and hatred. It, like any other far left ideology just knows how to market itself as something "good" very well
Yknow Hollywood loooooves to write paeans about female sexuality and how it's viewed as dirty while the very thought of nerd males having sexualities repulses them lmao
Please and thank you!
Back in the 90s and early 2000s, things felt simpler. If you liked a geeky hobby, you were welcomed as long as you weren’t a mooch, a know‑it‑all, or a bossy jerk. Women were part of those spaces too, which were part of the video game and anime clubs I joined in the late 90s and again in college. There were plenty of girls who enjoyed the media without expecting the hobby to be catered to them or filtered through weird shipping wars and fan‑fiction drama.
Today’s fandom culture feels very different. The rise of “media literacy” discourse where everything is labeled coded, problematic, or toxic has made it harder to just enjoy things without being pulled into unnecessary debates. I tend to avoid fandom now because of that atmosphere. Cries of exclusion often are a way to pressure changes to the things we love. Maybe it sounds cliché, but I miss when it all felt more relaxed and fun back in those days.
This. Right here. So much. 😭👍
I used to belong to a Haunting Ground server. It's a survival horror game. It got to a point where I left because people were calling the (optional, mind you) BDSM outfit you could unlock "problematic" and contributing to women's issues. Granted, there's some context behind the outfit that would a bit distasteful given how the plot goes.
But it was common at the time for the female protagonists to get silly or sexy outfits as rewards back then when the game was made. And that continued to some extent with Resident Evil. Chris had that Mad Max Dom outfit in RE5, for example.
Man-bashing was as easy to them as it was to hate women who just liked the sexy outfits.
I can't wait for this era to end. I hope it comes soon
I've been waiting a entire decade straight (technically longer 11 years getting close to 12 years) waiting for things to get back to normal like they were before gamergate happened in 2014
i found the solution to one of the puzzles of that game on an ancient piece of paper coming from a school diary just the other day.
i'm so glad the game isn't being talked about, i don't want current society to ever come in contact with it
It's amazing to me how the same people who looked down on our hobbies and made fun of us for liking them are now the same people who want to claim they know more about those same hobbies than we do. Now they want to claim those hobbies are their's, those hobbies were always their's, they're not for us anymore, and that we should lay down and let them roll right over us because of some bullshit moral superiority that they pulled out of their asses.
I get so close to calling them the very colonizers they claim they're against.
They/them invented the term so they could immediately deflect an accuse people of harassment if their ideological ideas were ever opposed.
It was a way to crybully their ideology and create a cult within the gaming society in which they were slwoly able to overtake AAA corporate developement...
Now gatekeeping is necessary to defend the entertainment that we loved and help build the industry that it is today.
We cannot let they/them turn gaming into a political soapbox and continue ruining the games that we loved by bastardizing then with phony ethics of government financed organizatiins like COLLECTIVE SHOUT or SWEET BABY INC.
"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing" ~Alucard
Actually, The Phantom said it 1st!
Spot on.
These people excluded themselves. No one kept them out. But at the end of the day, they absolutely love playing the victim, so here's another chance for them to do it. I've never seen anyone get off on being the "poor, oppressed victim" the way these people do.
"Gatekeeping" as per what is commonly pushed by the establishment makes zero sense anyway.
The narrative is that there's the effort to exclude [insert demographic here], but even if that were true, why would that demographic even want to associate with people who supposedly hate them? The answer obviously is that nobody hated them. You know that. I know that. They know that. The truth is they were excluded for who they were, not what they were. They chose to be assholes and got kicked out.
Anyone that bitches about gatekeeping is absolutely the fucking loser that should be kept out. I've yet to find any exceptions to this rule.
On a logistic level, I can't imagine really any hobby where someone is fully excluded from participating in some way: Either from engaging in a group online or in person, or watching stuff from various content creators.
I just never found the term "gatekeeping" in regards to gaming, comics, etc to have any merit.
Thing is, imagine you find a group that actually "gatekeeps" you. Why would anyone want to then hang out with those people knowing you're not welcome? Would you have fun in that environment? Would you enjoy that?
Because I cannot imagine a normal person enjoying anything while with a group of people forced to tolerate them.
There's also that. I wouldn't want to deal with people who hated my existence unless I fit some arbitrary guideline that I wouldn't want to.
Granted, I understand some people are solitary with their habits; single-player games, keeps their comic collection to themselves, don't talk about the anime they watched, etc. So even with a hostile community that forces them out, they can still engage with the content.
It's just craziness all around.
Gatekeeping was just the natural way of things without being disrespectful, by trying to be more open by letting people in... things ended up how they are now. A bit of gatekeeping is never bad as it excluded those that just wanted to disrupt or change things. But by things becoming more mainstream we ended up with hobbies and men's spaces dead.
No more can a man just go out and have space away from women, no... we have to be inclusive and let women in, despite the opposite not being true.
This reminds me of a situation in the mid 2000's when we first got our hands on the 3.5 ruleset of D&D. D&D was pretty obscure in Germany, at least in the parts where I lived back then, so our group was just 5 white nerds (Rural German Town - even these days you will mostly find white folks in rural towns)
A friend of mine heard about it and approached us to join us mid-session. We were ecstatic of course, not because it was a girl, but because we would get another player in our small group.
Well, she did not arrive at the game the next week, and when we asked her at school (we were all 14-15 years old), it turned out that she just did this as a prank and that she would never play something silly like that. That one basically broke apart my friendship with her which was a genuine shame because we knew each other since we were toddler.
Now the important reason why I remember this so well is because she is my neighbor and our parents still play cards together at weekends, so I am somewhat exposed to her. She recently tried to approach me about joining the Pathfinder 2e session that I am playing currently, but I told her that this was not going to happen because the DM said no mid-session joining.
She of course took that as me "gatekeeping her from a hobby that should be for everyone", despite the fact that she mocked us in the mid 2000's for it and that the reason was not because she is a woman but because our DM just does not want people joining in a run that is already going on.
I guess the point that I am trying to make is that yes, Gatekeeping does exist and can exist, people can be excluded... but the majority of D&D Players both in the 80's, 90's and 2000's just wanted people to game with, people who gave it a genuine try and chance.
Now that Hobby has been taken over by blue-haired freaks that want to tear it all down and reshape it in their perfect image.
We did gatekeep, you had to have a degree of skill to join or be willing to gain that skill or be vouched for.
There was a degree of understanding with our activities, the rules were the rules and everyone followed them.
If we played a level 1 d&d game and your buddy wanted to be a level 20 Undead Lich. We told him "No!"
If you didn't mesh with a group, you moved on. Or were told to leave.
I remember a great D&D group we had the ran for 3 years. One guy joined and loved trying to disrupt the game, killing shopkeepers, attacking questgivers, he was spoken to many times. Ultimately, he was killed off and shown the door.
But, now, we let everyone in and let them dominate our hobbies, they started using Marxist thinking to remove us from our groups and hobbies. Suddenly, you not letting them play a Undead Lich is problematic. Orcs are problematic, half-elves can change sex at will, nobody is evil, they are all just misunderstood. [I hate that Demon Slayer does this! ]
So, now we need to create new hobbies, I personally love the 3d printing. The fakers and derailers come in and they can't put the actual work in so their models all look like shit or they have 100 different flavors of butt plug
Bro I'm actually in a tabletop club in my city and bro and I are lowk regarded in understanding the rules 😭 somehow I manage to win or at least get a high score tho (humble flex)
Well, you want to play Warhammer, but I've come to play Werewolf: The Apocalypse!
10 people showed up for Warhammer and only I showed up for Werewolf. I guess we are playing Werewolf!
See, gatekeeping rules would make me the asshole and the venue, shop, house would tell me off.
But, today, people would say, "Guess we are playing Werewolf because Aronacus has a pegleg and whether it's fashionable in the progressive stack
I would honestly be okay with going back to days like that. But these days, I think it might be harder to do.
On one hand, I can get being curious and wanting to know more about a thing. That's where it starts. You have to prove yourself by eagerness or skill. Maybe both in some cases.
No, it's easy to do. You need to stick to your beliefs. Accept that you're beliefs aren't evil.
Warhammer is not a "Nazi" game!
DnD 3.5 is not heresy!
It's ok if you don't want to play an entire campaign with everyone in wheelchairs. "The idea of a dungeon being wheelchair accessible blows my mind"
Dirty jokes don't make you a rapist!
Nor do violent video games make you a murderer.
Frankly, I bet more shooters play Minecraft than CoD
That seems like the trend; they hide among the "least problematic" media and make themselves look like fandom parents.
[deleted]
That's a good point, but in my experience, they take that kind of filtering as a personal attack or a challenge even when you broadcast that what you have is not for them. I've had such an experience dealing with such sour-tempered idiots. They will force themselves in your group, so, yeh, you'll have to kick them out.
I used to belong to a Discord group from Tumblr where we observed a lot of disturbing sentiments from our respective communities. Most of us were some kind of minority, but that was just due to the law of averages; we were seeing a lot of anti-white/straight/male sentiments and we really didn't like that at all.This was back in 2017.
Nothing illegal, but just pants-on-head level of stupid at best. For example, one idea that we began to see take hold was the idea of "authentic role-playing" (or collaborative writing, for those not in the know). Basically, you had to be of the same race as the character(s) you were using.
What if you were writing for Yoshi? Or a dark elf? Well, you had to go sort yourself out. A Japanese person could only write as a Japanese person, and if your character was mixed, you had to follow the progressive stack by this logic.
Well, our server got some attention and we were about to get doxed and some so-called "brown girl" who had a blog openly declared that with the "receipts" they had from us after getting into our server. They showed our milquetoast opinions like "yanno, maybe that's a bad idea to enforce such an opinion on people because that can veer into illegal activity just for a trivial thing" and "this is a hobby, representation is optional".
And I shit you not, what ended up saving us was the fact that when other people looked at what this blog had from our server, they didn't like that this hacktivist was going to dox a self-admitted Mexican person from the who-must-not-be-named group here in this sub. And people looking at this were actually saying we weren't doing anything bad. Not the "trenders", but someone who acknowledge biology and didn't like how certain messages were being carried about their "bodily status". That hacktivist wound up with more backlash than they bargained for.
Maybe the filtering for who could have been better, but at that time, it was harder to know who was a plant and only saying enough to mask themselves.
Totally correct on all counts.
In fact, the reason that nerd and geek culture was "taken over" first is because it was so inclusive. If you were a loner and found a home there, then naturally you'd reach out to invite others in the same situation in. You never had to gatekeep because no one was trying to get in under false pretenses. It wasn't cool.
With the rise of silicon valley those nerds suddenly had money and power and so they began to shape the culture. Suddenly people wanted in and under all sorts of false pretenses and because nerds had never built up a gatekeeping skills it was easy going for the grifters. In some ways, Gamergate was an allergic reaction. A part of the anger women feel today is because it's the nerds they so despise that now have the money and power they feel compelled to marry into.
Agreed. There's something in the human lizard brain that just REALLY wants to ostracize nerdy dudes and kick them out of the tribe. That module, seeing the rise of "nerdy" things and these becoming more wealthy and popular and central-to-our-daily-life, gets aggravated (because it wants to REMOVE the presence of those things). So the bullying/ostracism intensifies.
I think they low-key (Or not) resent that nerd culture became popular because of you pursue "coolness" and mainstream approval, the fact that a group that never really sought it got it and now they're the uncool ones might have stung, more so if they're now the successful ones.
Now as to why nerdy men are ostracized... I don't know, maybe because in many cases introversion and not fitting into the mold is looked down upon, women have it somewhat easier if they're somewhat attractive (That's why I kiiinda understand where lookmaxxers come from) and I suppose some men do too, but it's like "Fiiiine, we'll allow it" than genuine acceptance.
This is a cultural thing. Most people only know their own culture and so see it as 'natural'. When I was in the far East, especially China, it was the 'nerdy' dudes that were the rockstars. And they didn't just know pop culture either, those guys were sharp.
I'm not saying they're benevolent angels. It's just that for them, bullying a kid for being smart is no different to bullying them for being fast or strong. They can't wrap their head around it.
Nerdy means more than being smart, it means a mixture of being smart but socially maladroit.
That latter thing really is the issue. If you're smart but "normal" you'll be fine. But 'spergs? They get ruthlessly targeted.
That's my point. They only act like that because they've been tyrannized and ostracised for their interests.
A dude in China who likes, say, science or history isn't going to find himself bullied or ostracised. He'll typically find himself among the most popular im his class.
Western nerds act like they have aspergers because that's how they've been socialised.
The last part is spot on. Women in tech have insane egos man, bet they only hate techbros due to the nerd stereotype. If techbros looked like the "guy in finance" they'll sing a completely different tune. Meanwhile me, a nerd in finance lmao
Remember to spend all of your money on yourself and don't let a woman have a SINGLE CENT.
Some great points, particularly regarding intrinsic preference and self-sorting by a general demographic being weaponized as extrinsic "gatekeeping" by maladapted outliers in that same demo. I actually wrote quite a bit about this topic for anyone who is interesred.
https://open.substack.com/pub/honestlyre/p/enlightened-gatekeeping-and-elon?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7y22h
In fairness, there were cases (however exaggerated the perception of frequency and degree may be) where girls/women or other groups who truly enjoyed games and the milieu were nonetheless either disuaded from joining in by the attitudes loudly advertised by "the community/industry" or by overt discrimination and attacks. (I have seen it in my personal life as a lifelong gamer and in my professional life in that industry.) That is abhorrent to me, just as I find young men being browbeaten out of that space abhorent now.
Gaming is ABSOLUTELY a large enough space to accommodate everyone, including Woke furry nonbi commie transformers fanfic visual novels IF those people stop hikacking or imploding everything else and can exist peaceably with Kratos and Leisure Suit Larry: the problem is the same Woke zealots and Omega-Wave Feminists who disingenuously cried "Gatekeeping!" are, in reality, only interested in being the gatekeepers so they can hijack and demolish existing IPs, genres, companies, entire industries to hurt their "enemies," spread their madness and misery, and futility attempt to ameliorate their own soul-corroding insecurities and existential angst.
They can't just tell their own story; they have to make Kratos also a Woke furry nonbi commie transformers fanfic visual novel, mock you for liking old Kratos, erase any evidence of old Kratos except perhaps for some Orwellian "Two Minutes Hate," and move on--cuckoo-like--to the next nest. More on that in the linked article ha
Preach.
It was always comedic to me. Anyone who actually was a nerd or in nerd spaces, knew they would bend over backwards to welcome any female into their spaces or hobbies. As you bring up the nerdy girl is the dream of most nerds.
Hollywoods problem is that nerdy guy hobbies were marketed to nerdy guys. Which, is ridiculous because women have always had romcoms, reality shows, and much more aimed at them. No one is shouting that romcoms need to appeal to guys.
We should have gatekept, but we didn't and look where it's gotten us.
When they say gate keeping they mean quality control.
It's also a matter of ontology. By necessity, defining what something "Is" also defines what it "Is Not". Which is absolutely enraging to post-modern subversives.
I wasn't even relevant enough to be bullied. Mostly, people just didn't acknowledge my existence.
Gatekeeping wasn't necessary back then, but it's what we have to do now to keep tourists from ruining everything.
I don't think it was called "gatekeeping" then. (re-reading, i don't think you meant to imply that, my bad)
It was only ever called "gatekeeping" after the left weaponized "inclusion". They never were kept out, they just weren't in charge. OH THE HORROR!
"Let us in and have full control over and dictate everything (including without a shred of irony who is and isn't allowed in the hobby) or it's GATEKEEPING!"
Oh, you mean we don't have to put up with these invaders and telling them to fuck off is actually a thing now? OH GOOD. I like to think they gave us the weapon of their own undoing.
> , it was a straight male space by design, because that’s who SHOWED UP.
Then it wasn't "by design".
"Gatekeeping" in entertainment is just a hyperbole word for "taste".
People have different taste. When more people with the same taste find the same thing appealing, a community is created. Nobody stays at the door and turns newcomer away, not in gaming, not in movie/shows, not in other hobbies. Everyone with the same taste is welcome while people with different taste do not belong there. And somehow that's what they call gatekeeping.
Nobody ever talks about how damaging cosplay was to niche communities. Cosplay before was way to show love for a character or franchise, now it’s just something normies buy off amazon or temu to have an excuse to dress provocatively or just to gain attention from fans
Go to any mainsub, and you'll see a bunch of cosplay spam to varying degrees of quality, but ultimately in a lot of cases they end up overtaking a lot of discussion posts. I'm sick of cosplay posts, and have just resorted to blocking cosplayers.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eacz1rPXgAAS04S?format=jpg&name=medium
lol
Mostly a media lie, anyway. It's not like there's never been a girl who tried to get into a nerdy hobby and was shunned by someone who didn't want their hobby invaded by the people who gatekept THEM from everything else.
But for the most part, nerds into comics and video games etc. would have been overjoyed if girls were around and shared their interests, and saw value in their nerdy interests. It just very rarely ever happened.
And when these hobbies started to go slightly more mainstream, the women participating were about 50% "yeah the Lord of the Rings movies were cool, but it's weird if someone gets way too into it and knows all the trivia" and 50% activists complaining that this over 99% male hobby doesn't cater to their interests. There weren't a lot of either one.
Over the years female nerds did slowly start to appear. There weren't many, and they just tried to fit in and enjoy things like everyone else. The more vocal ones were the activists trying to change everything, trying to insult the men for enjoying things the way they are, trying to treat these spaces as if they were intentionally created to exclude women instead of the other way around.
Queer, not gay. If it was gay then it would be hot, fun, and fashionable.
I think the term "gatekeeping" more accurately refers to jobs or clubs or things of that nature; groups that don't allow people to join unless they're preapproved by existing members. Hollywood is very much like this, for instance.
I'm a woman born in the late 90s. I never felt like I was ever excluded from nerd media until like within the past 3 years.
This reads like a fan fic.
If you wanna see what nerd culture was like back in the day go and watch the Simpsons episode “the last temptation of Homer”. Despite Bart being normally very antagonistic to Martin and his friends, but they still welcome him in without a second thought, and it’s very multicultural. Because that’s the thing we were the outcasts, the uncool and other labels. But it didn’t matter because we welcomed everyone and it didn’t matter what other people thought of us. But now these same people who bullied and made fun of us have now taken control of our spaces and are trying to push us out.
As TheActMan said like a decade ago, many games/nerds actively WANT women in their fandoms to experience these things with them, whether it be video games, table top games, anime or even just going to a convention.
But no, the "Gatekeeping" accusation was from big corporations and/or activists trying to actively change a medium to suit their wants, ONLY after it because massively popular and profitable, and the fans who have been in these mediums for 5+ Decades said no.
Act Man can’t be trusted.
Act Ma'am was playing the long game, like Angryjoe. Acting like they were for the people, but in reality were just corporate shills.
I know alot of people from different groups don't like him for different reasons, but the point still remains in his video about the whole Gamer Gate crap.
The video from 8 years ago?
Yeah, that's what I said.
Yeah, he’s changed his tune quite a bit since then. If you’ve seen anything from him in recent years since then you would know he’s a complete hack.
I haven’t watched him in a few years so I dont know sorry. But his video 8 years ago on GamerGate is what first ever exposed me to the whole “toxic men gatekeeping” BS in the first place.
No, what it was is that nerds wanted people as a whole to experience the stuff they like, not just women. Of course this backfired and pushed gaming, anime, and TTRPGs into the mainstream which let a lot of casuals that don't know better, and just want to change things into these mediums. Ultimately people need to just accept not everything is for everyone, and that's perfectly fine.
Yup, that’s how it was. That’s why I don’t believe most people who say they were excluded. Sure, there are assholes from all walks of life but I don’t believe for one second there was widespread gatekeeping against people who weren’t straight white males.
Can't believe I'm agreeing with a greenskin.
i always hated it when people were saying "gatekeeping is bad" and saying they were "being excluded" when really they were being called out for trying to change something you like and they didn't i always look out for tourists and antis and trust me its always easy to tell when they show their true colors.
As someone who grew up with nerdy interests in the 90s like anime/manga, video games, war gaming (40K and Fantand so on (Was never into superhero comics though but did do like Sonic, 2000AD, Uncle Scrooge and some others) but it’s not like there was active hostility either way it’s just it had a social stigma, much like even using the internet initially had (‘Why would you use the internet when you could be going out and talking to people instead’ kind of thing, although that was when Google wasn’t the top browser and IRC was the most popular way to chat to strangers.
But I found at the time quite a few women did like gaming and owned a gaming console, they just never really talked about at school for social reasons but you just need to look at how some female fanfic writers got obsessed over RPG characters like Cloud in the late 90’s to see female gamers were definitely out there.
Anyway what I’m getting at is unlike how it’s often framed the issue isn’t women in gaming it’s radical feminists and basically the Tumblr generation who got fixated with identity politics and trying cancel everything and everyone they consider problematic.
I mean, there is griefing and trolling noobs in online games. I consider that as a form of gatekeeping.
women were never "kept out" or "gatekeeped" from those hobbies, it was always a case of the women themselves not being interested in them
young guys who were gamers in the late 1980s and 1990s were called "nerds" and "geeks" by the women and were hated by these women
young women were instead all too busy trying to get the attention of Chad the handsome six-foot tall quarterback of the college sports team
the woke/sjws/feminists have basically lied to make it appear as if women were "kept out" and "gatekeeped" from these hobbies. and unfortunately the majority of braindead morons actually believes them
We were the ones being gatekept all along.
As a female, I want to know why you men opened the gate in the first place. This space is so much worse now that women have been let in.
You are right. Serious collective Gatekeeping in geek subcultures never existed.
Untill 2025. Blue Archive just showed us they way it's supposed to be done.
We should have gatekept more.
If we were actually gatekeeping, then we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
Mm-mmh.
I beat up the jocks, and no one dared to bother me again. Combat sports do help.
Actually, I ended up being the prom king...
Yes and no. There are a lot of nerd girls out there, but nerd guys don't even calculate them because they are most often the unattractive ones. Same as most nerds guys not being calculated by the attractive fashion girls they lust over. I had access to these girls despite being a complete nerd, so it's the age old rule of 1- be attractive, 2- don't be unattractive. Boys and girls both need to learn to look for those at their level rather than only look at the top 10%.
Although... some of the goth chicks were super attractive, and the Lord of the Rings influenced a large contingent of girls to LARP as pretty elves.
However, coming round the main topic, what I noticed is that most often women are into the vibe and community of a hobby (fan art, cosplay, whatever), whereas men are into the practical mechanics and technical details.
So even for women who are into the hobby, it is often a mistake to put them in charge of the core experience, as they are not wired for it. (Except maybe some autistic women whose thought processes are closer to men, more logical and less emotional)
The journalists are not even the nerd girls who enjoyed the hobby, they are more like the alternative (queer) attention whores, who are just co-opting hobbies to get attention, not because they actually enjoy them, but because they want to be at the center of what's popular while spitting on it to show that they are rebels against the rest of the world. And since they look poisonous, no man in his right mind commits to them, turning them even more spiteful.
this is not true because generally boys/men's standards for looks when dating women are low or next to non-existent