#comicsgate is a hate movement

[sjbattleangel]

Moon Studios' Thomas Mahler supports a hate movement

As someone who adores the Ori games, this is just awful in so many ways.

"Cancel culture" DOESN'T EXIST. What you're talking about is people demanding certain figures of power and influence to be held accountable for spewing bigoted hate speech or causing a toxic environment.

"Woke culture"? You mean a culture that acknowledges the existence of marginalized communities i.e people of colour, disabled people, queer, gender-non comforming people. Yet to you, that's somehow a terrible thing.

How dare you use a powerful poem dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust-the horrific tragedy of the history of humanity-to complain about your first-world persecution complex! To whine how sad it is that cishet white men like you own-*gasp*-slightly LESS of the world! Oh woah is me! You don't deserve to utter those words. Also, wanting more diversity, representation and equality in video games, game development and games journalism ISN'T THE SAME AS NAZISM! And don't me give that "The Nazis were socialists" bullcrap! THEY WERE FAR-RIGHT FASCISTS! You should know better. You're Austrian for crying out loud!

Having a women and minorities exist in video games and development isn't an "agenda". It's called KNOWING PEOPLE OTHER THEN CISHET WHITE GUYS EXIST. Also, "Hollywood" and "west coast developers" have nothing to do with this. Society is just changing, becoming more inclusive for the better and entertaining of all mediums are reflecting that. And that's great! Unless you have a problem with that.

Your friends were never "ridiculed" because they "didn't conform". Far from that tragic martyr rubbish you claim. They were rightfully reprimanded and fired for being bigoted jerks who didn't respect the humanity of marginalized people....just like you.

If you really believe the existence of minorities are "political", then I have nothing to say but SCREW. YOU.

Overall, there's just no way of putting it: Thomas Mahler is member and supporter of Gamergate.

Despite what they might tell you, Gamergate isn't and never was about "ethics" or "wanting fun apolitical entertainment". It is, has been and always will be a white supremacist hate movement (alongside Comicsgate and The Fandom Menace) dedicated to chasing women, LGBTQ+ people and BIPOC out of gaming and fandom. Its members and ringleaders are and have always been LITERAL NEO-NAZIS. Even when boycotting certain games over the supposed diversity consultants or the inclusion of minorities, they can barely hide their hatred.

Oh, and once again, THESE PEOPLE ARE LITERAL NEO-NAZIS:

(As evidenced by the "Embrace Tradition. Reject Modernity" white supremacist slogan*.)

Remember, if you still want to play his games, that's fine. I don't have the power to stop you. Just be warned that this developer stands with a hate movement.

*Hey, Nazi-turds, Japan and Korea aren't your Aryan utopias nor are their people your precious Aryan supergods!

[lilyvalerieorchard]

Don't watch Kaiser Shounen.

He likes and follows members of the Gamergate/Comicsgate/Fandom Menace hate group like...

Literature Devil, Manga Kamen, LostChord, Critical Drinker, Just Some Guy...

and E;R, A LITERAL, HARDCORE NEO-NAZI.

These are not "critics" or "media analysists", these are vile hate mongers using "media analysis" as a trojan horse for their white supremacist, misogynist, anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech, all under the guise of "wanting better writing". Gamergate/Comicsgate/The Fandom Menace do not care about "wanting better writing", all they want is to chase women and marginalized people out of video games, comics, animation and film so they can gatekeep nerdom as an "apolitical", cishet male, whites only space.

This has been documented: https://thisiscomicsgate.wordpress.com/category/discrimination/racism/ https://angrywhitemen.org/2014/12/01/neo-nazis-for-gamergate/ https://angrywhitemen.org/2017/12/25/mike-peinovich-and-eric-striker-complain-that-feminists-and-jews-ruined-their-video-games/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180216050304/http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2017/10/06/the-5-nazi-est-moments-from-buzzfeeds-expose-of-the-milobreitbart-alt-right-sausage-factory/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221129035022/https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/08/24/weev-gamergate-is-the-biggest-siren-bringing-people-into-the-folds-of-white-nationalism/ https://rewritingripley.medium.com/in-plain-sight-how-white-supremacy-misogyny-and-hate-targeted-the-star-wars-sequel-trilogy-and-2fd0be4b242 https://thisiscomicsgate.wordpress.com/category/discrimination/transphobia/ https://thisiscomicsgate.wordpress.com/category/discrimination/sexism-misogyny/ https://thisiscomicsgate.wordpress.com/category/discrimination/homophobia/

Kaiser Shounen has fallen for their acts, spewing the very same hateful bile they propagate.

Don't give any of these ghouls a platform

P.S despite what these creeps tell you, "Mary Sue" is not and never has been a legitimate form of criticism. It is a sexist buzzword used to bash women/minority characters with agency and gatekeep marginalized creators from telling their stories.

[confused-rat]

It gets worse, TurkeyTom is member of the Gamergate/Comicsgate/Fandom Menace hate movement that wants to chase women and marginalized communities out comics, video games and other nerd media.

This is who they are (warning, it is deeply disgusting): https://web.archive.org/web/20180501050943/https://gawker.com/the-d-list-right-wingers-whove-turned-gamergate-into-th-1648410811 https://web.archive.org/web/20221129035022/https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/08/24/weev-gamergate-is-the-biggest-siren-bringing-people-into-the-folds-of-white-nationalism/ https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/11/22/vox-day-actually-its-about-keeping-women-out-of-gaming/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170625033835/http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/04/13/vox-day-says-his-totally-not-racist-comments-have-been-taken-out-of-context-in-context-theyre-even-worse/ https://thisiscomicsgate.wordpress.com/category/discrimination/ https://rewritingripley.medium.com/in-plain-sight-how-white-supremacy-misogyny-and-hate-targeted-the-star-wars-sequel-trilogy-and-2fd0be4b242

In short, Gamergate/Comicsgate/The Fandom Menace is filled to the brim with:

Neo-Nazis

Incel MRAs

Homophobes/transphobes/queerphobes

TERFs

Slavery apologists

Pedophiles

Holocaust deniers

Trump supporters

These are the people TurkeyTom aligns himself with.

Wtf kind of rabbit hole did we trip into 😭, but yeah no, I will definitely not be watching his video then.

[whoiwanttoday]

So word on the street is that The Marvels is awful. I won't know for some time because I am so far behind on MCU stuff I don't know that I will ever catch up and so who knows. Like 2 years behind at this point and I feel no compulsion to catch up. Good job I guess, you took someone who since the age of 5 couldn't get enough Marvel Comics and found a way to make me sick of Marvel Comics. In the past handful of years I went from someone who could give you a very, very thorough history of the X-Men including every member who joined chronologically to someone who can't tell you what the fuck is going on with Spider-man or Captain America now. All of this makes me sad to a degree, it turns out quality is greater than quantity but a big part of my anger comes from who I am posting today, Brie Larson. She's a very good actress, actually I like everyone in the cast and while Carol Danvers as a character in the past 20 years has shifted from someone I liked a lot to a cop I don't recognize, I love Kamala Khan with all my heart and love Brie Larson as an actress, so I was rooting for her and this movie. And the part that is upsetting is I know there is an army of unfuckable hate nerds out there cackling with glee because their entire life has been hating Brie Larson for the better part of the decade. And look, my empathy should engage at some point but these angry little losers are in many parts the core of what is ruining my country. The MAGA crowd was beta tested in things like gamergate and comicsgate, a pair of sexist incel movements that of course is what fuels the crazy hatred for Brie Larson. There are youtubers who make an entire career hating her which… I can't imagine. You shouldn't care about what strangers think about you, the existentialist in me tells me that if I am doing things right then the opinions of strangers don't matter at all but I am human so sometimes when the cashier at Krogers seems really angry at me cause they think I put something on the conveyor belt wrong I end up thinking about it and feeling bad about it for a really long time. So I can't imagine what it feels like to know that, you know rape and death threats aside, there literally millions of hours of videos on YouTube talking about what a horrible person you are. It seems like it would wear a person down. So I usually would tell people not to really care about a movie they are unlikely to watch but in this case I am a little bummed out that angry little shitheads somewhere are having a good day because of this. I don't know how I got in on all this, I guess I posted pictures because in the last 48 hours Brie Larson has been promoting the movie cause she can again but it's impossible for me to not think about the one things. If this shocks everyone and is a hit that would be good I suppose but given the predictions it's impossible not to think about the glee that no doubt exists on the shittiest corners of the intenret. Today I want to fuck Brie Larson.

[samasmith23]

SCREW ETHAN VAN SCIVER!

Content Warning: Mentions of CSA

EVS truly is a monster on so many levels! I recently just learned from comic artist Mark Brooks that EVS literally stated on one of his AWFUL livestreams that he, “wouldn’t mind p*dophiles going after Mark Brook’s children.”

Sadly though, this is not at all surprising to hear from EVS considering that when he once hired Cerebus creator Dave Sim to work on his AWFUL Cyberfrog indie comic and when people pointed out that Sim had previously openly admitted to having groomed a 14-year-old girl, EVS stated that he “didn’t care” and tried to downplay Sim’s predatory behavior by comparing it to Elvis & Priscilla. Plus, EVS and Comicsgate welcomed “SlickJimmyLove” (aka,James Randall Adams) into their movement, who was not only arrested in 2021 for possession for CP but also created a disgusting p*do comic titled “Little Girl Lethal”…

So EVS is not only a Neo-Nazi bigot and hate monger, but is also a apologist for LITERAL child predators!

I’ll let both Ms. Marvel & Chris Hansen summarize my disgust towards EVS and everything he stands for right here:

[soleminisanction]

Hey, you guys wanna see what Chuck Dixon has been writing for the last 15-20 years?

Arkhaven Comics is owned by Vox Day, described by wikipedia as a far-right white supremacist, misogynist and part of the alt-right. Wallstreet Journal called him "the most despised man in science fiction." Day was a central figure in the "Rabid Puppies" controversy that brigaded the Hugo Awards in 2015 and a prominent member of both the Gamergate and Comicsgate movements. In fact, Day originally called his publishing house Comicsgate Comics, until the other Comicsgaters protested because they didn't want to be associated with an openly known white supremacist.

In other words, Dixon willingly worked with and for a man so vile that even the Comicsgaters don't want to be associated with him. And he worked with him for years publishing dozens of comics and two volumes of Conan the Barbarian fan fiction. The Alt Hero universe? Is exactly what it sounds like. Superheroes for the Alt-Right, which Dixon was very enthusiastic about. And while they haven't published anything of his for a while, he hasn't cut ties, with his most recent video blog on their publisher's website -- titled "Why I Hate the Killing Joke by the Legend Chuck Dixon" -- being published on 6/19/24.

And you might be thinking, well, surely Chuck's done something else with his time, and you'd be right -- he's also done a few short bits for Zenescope, an indie press founded by failed screenwriters mostly known for their T&A.

He's also self-published a couple of those creepy novels they sell at army surplus stores that are basically Turner Diaries fanfiction, the ones where militia preppers fantasize about the day they get to rise up against The Guvament and kill all the Black, Jewish and gay people. He was selling them off his Facebook page the last time I had a Facebook.

So yeah, he's kinda the worst? It's really clear these days that he's gone full mask-off and feels both empowered and entitled to put his politics into his work because he thinks he's fighting A War Against the Woke in the process. Just, way, way worse vibes than dudes whose worst crime is writing some comics you didn't enjoy.

[fandomshatepeopleofcolor]

Here's a rant. I've been making posts about black representation on another web site mainly about black rep in superheroes and comics. This girl and her friends kept commenting on than that they only care about good stories. The girl and her friends didn't seem to understand what I was saying and they seemed young so I tried to explain why representation and diversity in media is important in a easy to understand way but then she said that caring about skin tones and bringing up race with stories was toxic.

At first I assume her and her friends were white, cause I've only seen white people use the whole good stories only matter excuse so I told her "you must not be a person of color cause people of color understand what I'm saying in my posts." But she and her friends said they were Native Americans.

Then it became a argument about diversity vs good stories. After politely trying to explain to them why representation and diversity matter I decided to block them and delete their comments off my posts cause it feels like they were purposely misunderstanding me, not listing to me and their comments felt like microaggressions so I didn't want to see every time I went to look at them. But the next day the girl and her friends were making posts on different accounts about me saying I hate white people and saying I'm a bully. I love white people but as a black person I was just spreading awareness about black representation in my posts and they ganged up on me.

Good stories rant anon again some things I forgot to mention in my rant is the whole good stories only matter thing is said by racist white people alot to derail talks about representation especially in the Comicsgate movement. Since I was talking about black rep in superheroes and comics them saying only good stories matter did set up some alarms but I want to give them the benefit of the doubt since they were must likely teens but them the girl said bringing race up in media was toxic was a huge red flag. After that it was like the girl and her friends were refusing to listen to me which lead to me blocking them. When they created other accounts to lie about me saying I hate white people and I was a bully it was like harassment so I reported them and block them. They seem to have stopped. I almost sorta doubt they were Native Americans cause people of color would never say things like "diversity doesn't matter only good stories matter" unless they were a pick me person of color.

_____________

First of all I'm sorry that happened to you. but honestly just because she was arguing that she wanted "good stories" doesn't mean she's not NA you know? There's plenty of POC who buy into the whole internalized racism thing and don't even realize that the "good stories" they're promoting are all by and about white men.

I cannot tell you how many POC by into white supremacist talking points just like the whole "bringing race up in media is toxic". Like honestly it takes years to become aware of the harm that white supremacist ideology does to us all. I'm glad you blocked them and reported them but honestly everyone comes to their realizations about white supremacist ideology differently. While you think it may have been a waste of time you never know if someone else reading the thread maybe noticed and is now thinking differently.

Don't be disheartened and don't give up! there's no shortcuts to unpacking our internalized bigotry and you're probably right that they are just very young teens.

here's one example of studies done about why children of color need to see themselves in cartoons. https://theconversation.com/why-its-so-important-for-kids-to-see-diverse-tv-and-movie-characters-92576

I'll try to get you more studies that exemplify why we need diverse media but atm I'm on my way out the door to get to work. *hugs* nonny I'm glad you're fighting the good fight.

mod ali

[nobody-xalidin8]

A is for Aquaman

A while back I worked for a comic book review website called Do You Even Comic Book that renamed itself Comics Horizon and lasted around a year. From my limited perspective the site was forged out of a movement of people from Twitter that wanted to combat the growing Comicsgate movement. To have a real voice amongst the hate, I mostly just wrote reviews. I made a lot of short lived but impactful relationships with those strangers on the internet. I don’t talk to any of them anymore, but that’s just because I’m an anti-social autistic person that struggles with people he knows in person. So, if I’m gonna start this blog I wanna thank them before I get started.

When I would get stressed out or overstimulated as a kid, I would say the alphabet in DC comics characters. A is for Aquaman, B is for Batman, C is for Catwoman, etcetera. Now I’m the sort of guy that loves Marvel, DC, and any other comic indie or mainstream that I think is good, but for the life of me I couldn’t do the alphabet in anything other than DC characters. At least, not on the spot. So, I thought why not do a blog about DC characters and since Twitter seems to be dying thanks to Elon Musk I thought I’d try here on Reddit. I considered Tumblr, but that never clicked for me and Reddit seems to operate in a way I can vaguely comprehend so here we are.

I also wrote some articles on that website, mostly lists and conversations between me and other wordsmiths, that was our working title by the way, which was awesome. One of these was for the upcoming Aquaman movie. I don't think it ever saw the light of day, but I wrote a little thought piece titled “Why do we laugh at a Man that talks to Fish?” Based on the notion that I thought there was no sensible reason people laughed at Aquaman. Granted, like most superheroes, he’s not sensible by design.

Aquaman was created by Mort Weisinger and Paul Nortis to imitate the Timely Comics character Namor, the Sub-Mariner. A lot of comic book characters were imitations of other comic book characters back then, in fact a lot of characters are imitations in one way or another. I don’t think that makes them unoriginal. As Aquaman would very much become.

Now as many of you may know comic book canon is an ever changing and shifting thing. What was true one story could be untrue by the next issue. That said, here’s the baseline of Aquaman’s origin in the modern age. Arthur Curry is the son of a lighthouse keeper with strange powers, in reality he is half-human half-Atlantean and heir to the throne of Atlantis. He becomes a superhero that protects the seven seas against such threats as the pirate Black Manta, his evil half-brother Ocean Master, the fifth dimensional imp Qwsp, and the deadly assassin Mera that would later become his wife and mother to his child. He was also a founding member of the Justice League where a lot of the best or at least most consistent portrayals of the character take place.

Now that’s not the whole story and there’s a lot of other versions and a lot of weirder stuff. Aquaman is a victim of this ever changing mythology of comics. His appearance, personality, and narrative have changed harshly with the shifting of creative teams over the years. This was mostly due to the fact that despite being well known, he was never a very popular character. Because people saw him as silly.

Aquaman was a joke that people saw parodied in cartoons, SNL sketches, and offhanded comments in years. The common denominator of this joke being the fact that he could talk to fish. As if commanding a shark to strike isn’t cool or terrifying, if that’s the issue why are we terrified of the movie Jaws?

The short answer is presentation, Aquaman, like a lot of Golden Age comic characters, was ridiculous. Batman was too back in the day, but he grew out of that, got a serious take that helped the character grow out of the funny. Not that there’s anything wrong with funny, Adam West’s Batman is arguably the best and even Kevin Conroy’s portrayal in the animated series had a good bit of humor. The problem was people weren’t laughing with Aquaman, they were laughing at him, for no reason.

Thankfully the success of Jason Mania’s Aquaman helped give the character some structure and the King of Atlantis got a good run in the comics starting in the ill fated New 52 relaunch, that was a mixed success. Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis, as well as other phenomenal creative teams, guided the character in the pages as James Wan guided him on the big screen. This has lead to the most consistent Aquaman to date, but this might not last because the Aquaman movie will be hurt by the Amber Heard trial, which is only her fault, and sucks. Plus he’s currently “dead” during the Dark Crisis event so who knows how the character will land is a mystery. We’ll like see more of Jackson Hyde as Aquaman, who Young Justice fans may know as Kaldur. Which would be awesome.

Well that’s the most I can ramble about Aquaman for a sec, except when I was looking into where we first started laughing at the character it was during Super Friends. People thought his swimming animation was silly, which is weird because they thought the flying was cool and it was the same thing just out of the water. He also talked to fish, but that always looked cool to me.

[hypocrisyofandrewdobson]

Dobson hated GamerGate and ComicGate but did he even know what they were trying to do and what the point of both movements was? Or did he just blindly believe what he was told and did no research and make up his own mind? Because he doesn't make up his own mind.

Well, with Comicsgate, he never had any idea what it was about, and had never even heard of it. He only started venomously hating it after one of his strawman comics about Star Wars(which Dobson himself admitted he only did for attention and popularity)got mocked and disproven in one of Ethan van Sciver’s livestreams. Dobson first tried to pull a “lol what a loser, I don’t care”(even though he clearly did) and had no idea who Ethan was, but it became very obvious when he did find out. It’s also why he started mocking and strawmanning Ethan repeatedly in later comics, though Ethan and his friends just had fun mocking Dobson more:

So that’s why Dobson hates Comicsgate: because one of its prominent members bruised his ego by critiquing Dobson’s strawman comic and continued laughing when Dobson threw a fit.

As for GamerGate, Dobson likes to pretend it was the most evil of hate movements and he knew so all along…but it’s not so clear cut coming from his opinions on it. Back when Gamergate first started gaining relevancy, Dobson was already deep into wanting to be seen as a “good male feminist” and praising both Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian in previous journals and the like, he made a certain comic….

Dobson got a lot of backlash both in calling GamerGate sexist and for protesting the “character Vivian James as overly girly and giggly when her character was the literal opposite, ironically being more sexist than the people he was claiming were. He posted a few more comics and journals in which he continued to calling GamerGate bad(mainly because Zoe and Anita were saying so at the time) but people were also contacting him privately to talk about why they were upset with the way he protrayed Vivian. And something very rare and almost unexpected happened.

Dobson actually listened to what people were saying, did his own research, and changed his mind accordingly. He came out in support of GamerGate.

Now he was still a bit wishy-washy in terms of how he supported it, but for about a week he was actually being fairly neutral or supportive of what was going on.

But, just like when he started attacking male fans of MLP despite being one himself because he wanted to be seen as a “good male feminist, once said group start to hyper-vilify GamerGate and it’s supporters and accusing them of being sexist, women-hating, ect, Dobson immediately threw any goodwill he had made under the bus in order to appear like “one of the good ones”, which might also explain why he tries to push just how much he hates GamerGate these days: to “make up” for showing some form of support towards the movement. And also because MovieBob lost his job at The Escapist(the first time) for being a jackass. That might have had something to do with it too.

So that’s why Dobson hates GamerGate: because he was told that’s what good allies do, and he has to be accepted by the ultra-progressive crowd so that’ll praise him/give him attention/ feed his ego.

I’m sure I’ve missed some details or examples, so if anyone has anything else they’d like to add, feel free. Hope this helped!

[corhore]

A few days ago, you got a question about ComicsGate, and answered with what could be paraphrased as “I only have a He-said-She-said level of knowledge, but what I’ve heard has not be flattering.” This is a recording of a stream that happened this morning, and at about the 21:20 mark, there’s a pretty accurate summarization of CG’s origin: https://youtu.be/OwOlwEBp4V0 . I won’t call it “unbiased”, but it’s more accurate than the explanations that just say “it’s a hate movement” and nothing else.

I honestly don’t enough about CG to read more about it. 

[sjbattleangel]

*Bioshock. Fallout. Metal Gear Solid. Call Of Duty. Halo. Jak II. Final Fantasy VII. Final Fantasy X. Valkyria Chronicles. Tales Of Symphonia. Tales Of Versperia. Fire Emblem. Rachet & Clank. Grand Theft Auto V exist*. Gamergate/Comicsgate/Fandom Menace chuds: YAY!

*Gone Home. Abby and Ellie from The Last Of Us Part II. Spider-Man (Miles Morales) and Hailey Cooper from Marvel's Spider-Man 2. Saga Anderson from Alan Wake II. Vinyl from Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. Mizhena from Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear. Life Is Strange: True Colors. Usual June. Dustborn exist* Gamergate/Comicsgate/Fandom Menace chuds: You Made it political.

[hellyeahheroes]

ComicsGate is a movement started by Richard C. Meyer and later co-opted by former DC-artist Ethan van Scriver. The movement stands in opposition to the “social justice-driven agenda” of mainstream comics. On the surface, the group appears to be promoting politically conservative indie comics.

But most people who have interacted with members of ComicsGate know better.

I honestly can’t say it better than Osajyefo did: “Everything about ComicsHate is based on bigotry and politics using targeted harassment. Period.”

When asked, Tim Doyle explained ComicsGate in the following terms: “ComicsGate is a hate group—it’s always been a hate group. The founding principle of ComicsGate is hate—hate of women and minorities in what was previously perceived as exclusively a straight/white/male space. And, since the people that started that movement come from the alt-right, they had a blueprint on how that hate—that false sense of victimization they feel as white men—that can be monetized very, very easily.”

[irinapaleolog]

DISCLAIMER: This article is intended for educational and research purposes only. It has been published to shed light and correct understanding on the escalating issue of hatred of women online. By extension, this article also aims to inform readers on right-leaning and left-leaning internet hive minds and their negative influence on culture, politics, and society.

T/W: This article contains mentions of sexual assault, violence against women, suicide, incest, racism, anti-semitism, sexism

If you’re a woman who is active in an online, women-dominated fandom space, then you’re well aware of everything this article is about to tell you.

You’ve read every death threat.

You’ve gone through the sometimes graphic — but always malicious — anonymous message or tweet explaining every way in which some person you’ll never know would like to harm you.

You may have been banned from a fan forum or had your messages wiped from a Discord channel by a bot or mod who decided that your thoughts and your words as a woman were not allowed around here.

You’ll probably remember all the times your sexual identity, your race, or your religious affiliation was questioned and erased.

You have read every time the latest hive mind online has labeled you a sexist. A racist. An abuse apologist. A school shooter. An inbred. A Nazi. A mental case. Inhuman.

You probably know somebody whose had their information put up on Reddit threads or 4chan forums or alt-right YouTube channels for everybody to see. The aim? To determine if maybe they could find ways to hurt that individual in person or — at the very least — make their life a little harder.

And of course, you know all too well that all the threats, lies, bullying, defamation, doxxing, and dehumanization is driven by the internet’s systemic fear over women enjoying media made for them, on their own terms, and on their own time.

We’ve experienced countless cycles of this outrage, ranging from comic book heroes to k-pop. One of the most recent iterations, however, is driven by a desire to see two fictional space wizards kiss in a galaxy far, far away.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with what it’s like to be a fan of “Reylo” in the Star Wars fandom, well, it looks a bit like this:

All of the screenshots, located above, catalog a small sample of the four years of hate sent to “Reylos:” fans who are interested in the canon romantic dynamic between Rey and Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. These fans are predominately women.

And, no, let’s get this out of the way: These hate posts, while directed towards fans of a fictional pairing, have nothing to do with fictional characters. This hate has everything to do with policing and punishing women for collectively enjoying fiction in a way deemed incorrect by various political and social agendas. The end goal is always the same — bully these women until they become silent.

Defining a “Bullying Hive Mind:” The “Alt-Right” vs “Antis”

The ways in which bullying hive minds reach this end goal are dependent on the political alignment of the cyberbully. Either they are pursuing an agenda dictated by alt-right circles or one dictated by factions of the progressive left, both of which gained internet popularity in the early to mid 2010s.

Most people — whether it’s because you’ve kept up with the aftereffects of the 2016 election or because you’ve spent anytime on YouTube as of late — are familiar with the alt-right. This group leans male and is driven mostly by insecurity, overt misogyny, and a sense of ownership over what they think are “male-dominated spaces” being overrun by women. It’s another example of extreme conservative thinking: what was mine should stay mine and anybody who thinks differently than me needs to get out of my way.

Arguably the biggest example of alt-right hate and harassment online is Gamergate, an anti-women bullying campaign that first arose on 4chan. The movement’s aim was to push women out of gaming journalism, game design, and gaming fandom by sending death threats, rape threats, stalking women, and dehumanizing women to their peers.

The event bolstered the anger, insecurity, and sexism of young men into an online hive mind that continues today, most notably in Gamergate’s successor “Comicsgate,” which orchestrated the attempted sabotage of Captain Marvel’s release.

These people are not hard to find. They parade their ideas on Reddit or, increasingly likely, on monetized YouTube channels. Their tactics often include spreading misinformation using false “evidence;” discrediting women’s interests by reducing them to “mental cases;” dogpiling; and doxxing.

In Star Wars fandom, this right-leaning group refers to themselves as “The Fandom Menace.” The group was created by former Comicsgate supporter Ethan Van Sciver, who goes by ComicArtistPro Secrets on YouTube. He frequently uploads videos — clickbait title and all — with common alt-right buzz words like “SJW.”

The Fandom Menace was formed in response to The Last Jedi — a more inclusive, forward-thinking addition to the Star Wars franchise that was inspired by the writings of Robert Bly, a leader in the mythopoetic men’s movement. The focus on feminine power and multiple women with complex character development and speaking roles within the film — in addition to the death of Luke Skywalker — powered this hate group to see Star Wars under Disney as “feminist propaganda.” They were driven by the belief that Disney was attempting to erase men from the Star Wars fan community. This led to several targeted hate campaigns including one that ran actress Kelly Marie Tran off of social media.

Where the alt-right works to monetize their hate through public YouTube channels, left-leaning circles are less well known to the general public. Reactionary left-leaning circles that operate within fandom spaces tend to skew younger (mostly generation-z and late millennial) and are predominantly women. They rose in 2015 with the onset of Tumblr and in response to the changing dynamics within “shipping” fandoms. For the uninitiated, “shippers” are groups of people within fandoms who center their attention around a specific relationship within that fandom (e.g. Rey and Kylo Ren).

In online spaces, this reactionary, left-leaning group is better known as “antis.” This name was given to this group after they became known for demonizing, demoralizing, and/or dehumanizing any individual in a shipping fandom who they deemed to be promoting “problematic” content through the fiction they consumed.

Anti harassment campaigns follow a consistent pattern where genuine concerns about real-world injustice are misinterpreted and applied to fictional properties in an attempt to create a 1:1 comparison and exert power over another (often marginalized) group. They start by leveraging performative accusations around real world issues such as sexism, racism, homophobia, sexual assault, and gendered violence against fictional characters deemed by the group to be representative of these problems. The guilt-by-association of these characters is then applied to the people who like these characters, and a general warning is issued: “stop supporting them, or else.”

When this accusation is ignored, it is then weaponized into bullying campaigns that aim to belittle and discredit women through dangerously shallow and irrational pearl clutching. The motivations and levels of participation in these harassment campaigns vary, but they tend to move from one large fandom to the next, focusing on whatever pop culture character will award them the most clout.

As one of the biggest current pop culture “ships,” Reylos have drawn the antis’ ire on both Twitter and Tumblr since the ship’s inception in 2015. The following accusations have been leveled against fans of these characters since 2015. These accusations include:

That Reylos support real life abuse by wanting a romantic pairing between two characters who begin as enemies in an epic myth.

That Reylos are racists because they support a romantic pairing between two white characters.

That Reylos are sexist because Reylos write sexually explicit fanfiction between the “pure” heroine and the “bad guy.”

The importance of these causes and people’s ability to engage with them in good faith is recklessly diminished by blaming valid, real life concerns on women who are enjoying a fictional pair of characters from a film series. It disregards the fact that the women shipping these characters are not a homogeneous group in either their identity or their background. It erases the abuse that some shippers have experienced first-hand — -abuse they should not be forced to out on the internet in order for their shipping to be seen as socially acceptable.

When the Left Leans Right

Launching targeted harassment at any group of women celebrating an enemies-to-lovers ship won’t gain antis clout among their peers. As mentioned previously, Reylo is specifically targeted because it’s arguably the biggest ship in one of the biggest franchises in the world. This means that while Emma Watson said that the enemies-to-lovers dynamic in Beauty and the Beast is about “inclusion and love,” that classic Disney film is old and it’s been done. There is no longer a large, activated community around it, and, as such, there is little incentive to bully the women who enjoy it.

Once antis do decide to bully a ship, however, one of the main accusations leveled at followers of enemies-to-lovers ships is that what they are supporting is “dangerous” to society. To antis, symbolism and subtext in fiction are bypassed in favor of literal and often severe interpretations of a story’s greater meaning. This means that, theoretical little girls and grown women who are unable to separate fiction from reality are put at risk of harming themselves and others because of what they see in fiction.

The irony of this is that a group of mainly women confidently trying to convince other women that they must be protected from complicated romantic dynamics in fairytales is taken from a page in the American conservative playbook that is still used today. For decades, American conservatives have used popular media to scapegoat real issues in society that are easier to pass off as a consequence of the media our society consumes rather than what our society actually teaches and perpetuates.

For example: In 1948, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham began to publish magazine articles and books that claimed that comic books led to juvenile delinquency. While he had no scientific evidence, his writings caused a societal outcry that led to an investigative Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Here, conservative politicians demonized comic book writers and the comic book industry, declaring that “this country cannot afford the calculated risk involved in feeding its children, through comic books, a concentrated diet of crime, horror, and violence.”

The subcommittee eventually lead to the Comic Codes Authority — a comics industry created code that put restrictions on the art their creators could produce. The code stifled the industry for almost a decade.

Around the time the subcommittee’s investigation was coming to a close in 1955, the pearl clutching continued on television in a special news report entitled “Confidential File: Horror Comic Books!”

More propaganda video than actual news report, the narrator speaks over several young boys alone in the woods reading comic books. The narrator states:

“When I was a boy and hung with the gang we did a lot of things, we roasted potatoes, we went on expeditions, we tipped over garbage cans now and then, we wrote nasty remarks about the teacher on the sidewalk, but we never spent an afternoon sitting around like this, reading.

What a wonderful thing this would be if they were reading something worth while, something that would stimulate their desires to build and to grow. But they’re not reading anything constructive…they’re reading stories devoted to adultery, to sexual perversion, to horror, to the most despicable of crimes…

One of the wonderfully appealing things about children is that they haven’t yet come to the age where reality and unreality are divorced. The emotional impact of something they read in a comic book may be much the same as a real life situation they would witness.”

The news report goes on to show young boys stabbing trees with a knife and almost killing their friend with a rock after reading horror comic books.

This same outlandish, conservative mindset is what we see today in left-leaning anti culture. The difference now, however, is that these ideals are being regurgitated and repackaged for young girls as each generation of women gains more power within a patriarchal society.

For girls, the preoccupation is not around whether or not they will commit violence, but rather, who they will have sex with and how they will be treated as they grow within a historically male-dominated culture. The idea that women will get themselves into toxic, abusive relationships because they consume hyperbolic myths and fairytales instead of the real consequences of imposter syndrome, insecurity, and the restriction of women to explore their worth in society is no different than what conservatives said about boys in 1950s America. They asserted that boys would become violent psychopaths because they consumed multi-colored panels depicting fictional, exaggerated violence instead of the real life wars our countries waged, fear mongering on the news, or the pro-gun culture surrounding them daily. Both thought processes are damaging to the growth of our societal beliefs.

In fact, the fear and discomfort of women exploring sex within their own spaces is something that is threatening to groups on both the left and the right.

John Boyega’s New Years Eve Tweet: What Caused It and Why Did it Blow Up?

All of the screenshots above were taken within 4 days following a blow up on Twitter involving Star Wars actor John Boyega, a few sock puppets, and whole load of serial anti and alt-right accounts.

If you’ve been on Twitter this year, chances are you have noticed John Boyega trending. The 27-year old actor (best known for his portrayal as Resistance hero Finn in the Star Wars sequel trilogy) gained traction on Twitter New Year’s Eve when he posted a tweet of characters Rey and Kylo Ren fighting (as they do in a movie entitled, well, Star Wars) with the caption “Star Wars Romance.”

To anybody who had never touched fandom Twitter, the tweet appears harmless enough. However, the tweet was successful in doing exactly what it intended and exactly what lurking hate accounts who successfully orchestrated the bullying barrage wanted the tweet to do. It galvanized a hoard of antis and alt-right trolls and their following to — by their own admission — bully Reylos.

This particular incident began with Twitter user @crogman, a sock puppetnow going by the name of @solo_sebes. The sock puppet account appeared on Twitter in mid December 2019 and quickly entrenched itself in a community of Reylos by retweeting and posting Reylo-positive tweets and joining in on post The Rise of Skywalker discourse. The account was also quick to energize antis of the Rey/Kylo dynamic.

Now that the sock puppet is embedded deeply enough into the Reylo community that somebody within that community would see controversy on their timeline between @crogman and Boyega, @crogman tweeted at the Star Wars actor, “bro you’re extremely disgusting and gross also fucking disrespectful…you cannot be this jealous of adam driver dude as a black woman im fucking ashamed that someone like you represented us in star wars.”

The comment was included with a screenshot of John Boyega on Instagram writing “@heyfabrice it’s not about who she kisses but who eventually lays the pipe. You are a genius.”

Boyega’s Instagram comment was in response to a fan suggesting that Rey (played by Daisy Ridley in The Rise of Skywalker) was now available after her canon romantic partner, Ben Solo (played by Adam Driver) died saving her life.

Boyega’s comments upset some fans on Instagram who found that his comments suggested that a woman’s worth in romantic relationships — fictional or not — was a prize to be won by the man who gets to have sex with her first.

The sock puppet account inflamed a situation that would likely have stayed on Instagram. While antis correctly identified that the account was fake and was indeed blackfishing, antis incorrectly claimed that the account was created by Reylos to justify a group of white women attacking Boyega on social media. Instead, the account was clearly a plant meant to goad the actor into directing hate at Reylos.

This is proven by the fact that the account under its new username attempted to instigate hate towards Boyega’s co-star Daisy Ridley in the comments of Reylos’ posts shortly after New Year’s Eve.

Additionally, @crogman was not the only account never associated with the Reylo community that was used to inflame the situation with Boyega. User @FaberLima1 tweeted at Boyega under @crogman’s tweet writing “you are paying mico and only worsening your image. Better stop (and erase while you have time).”

Boyega responded to this tweet with several laugh emojis.

The account @FaberLima1 at the time of this screenshot has 6 followers and no tweets past December 25th. Like @crogman, the account posts Reylo-positive posts utilizing popular hashtags within the fandom including #BenSoloDeservesBetter, a hashtag created by fans of Ben Solo to express their dissatisfaction with his character’s ending.

Also like @crogman, the account was created in July 2019 yet has tweets only traceable in December, signifying that the account has been nuked perhaps multiple times.

Shortly after @crogman’s tweet to Boyega, antis began to push common anti-Reylo accusations. This included accounts who had never actively bullied Reylos. For example, user @sxidey posted several tweets accusing Reylos of “sexualizing Rey,” “harassing John”, and giving “money to the military.”

The latter accusation is a common left-leaning talking point against Reylos who support Adam Driver (a former marine). This particular comment was a reference to a Gofundme started by Ben Solo fans on Reddit. The Gofundme is raising money for Driver’s charity, Arts in the Armed Forces.

The account, however, had only had one recent mention of Reylo two days earlier on December 28th. The account itself is also new, joining in October 2019.

It’s possible that the account is simply a new anti account on Twitter. Regardless, the listing of anti accusations against Reylos almost at the exact time of @crogman’s post reveals the motive of inciting hatred against members of the Reylo community.

Another account, @itsjoey56138220, was also inflaming the situation early on underneath @crogman’s tweet with accusations that Reylos were racist.

Unlike @sxidey, this account has a history of inciting hate against Reylos with outlandish conspiracy theories including one theory that Reylos were created by the alt right who caused “ex Twilight bitches” to make the ship popular. The account has also claimed that Reylos are racist because Reylo shippers want a “whites only romance.”

Boyega, in response to users including two sock puppet accounts with no association to Reylo — and encouraged by anti accounts sewing seeds of hatred across Twitter — finally took to his own Twitter account to tweet:

The tweet, which currently sits at over 190k likes, caused tens of thousands of hateful, targeted tweets towards a group of fans made up predominantly of women and girls. It also resulted in several hate videos by alt-right YouTubers totaling hundreds of thousands of views, several hacked accounts, and the suicide baiting of a teenage girl.

The New Years Incident By The Numbers: How Boyega’s Tweet Set Off The Left and Alt-Right

Following Boyega’s tweet, reactionary users on both left and alt-right Twitter felt further emboldened to hate on a group of women they had been discrediting, dehumanizing, and sending death threats to for years. For myself, the event presented an opportunity, albeit an unfortunate one, to track these groups’ behaviors and quantify them. Ultimately, I had the goal to break down how these incidents are organized to hate on women, whether for purposes of clout or their desire to purge women from fandom spaces.

For this analysis, I took a sample of tweets that contained the word “Reylo” (the search pull also included its plural form “Reylos”) from December 31, 2019 (the day of Boyega’s tweet) to January 3, 2020. After cleaning the accounts to the best of my ability of “pro-Reylo” tweets, I was left with 25,012 tweets that contained negative and neutral comments about Reylos and the Reylo dynamic. I sifted manually through about 7k of these tweets to find key themes, which I verified utilizing a text mining analysis of the tweets.

I emerged being able to quantify the following key themes:

Hate, Trolling, Cyberbullying

Abuse, Toxicity

Racism

Sex, Sexualized, Objectification

Mental, Psychotic, Unhinged

“Hate” received the most individual tweets at ~2.2k tweets and received ~31.4 likes per tweet on average. Tweets containing themes “abuse” and “racism” received a slightly higher avg like count at 38.7 avg likes and 35.4 avg likes, respectively. These themes, along with tweets dealing with “sex” were all mentioned over 1k times.

What this suggests is that a smaller number of accounts with a wider reach were posting more substantive tweets with a focused agenda, while tweets containing “hate’ keywords were more likely to be lobbed out by anyone, including accounts with very little reach.

Tweets mentioning the theme of Reylo fans being “mental” cases had less tweets at 602 total tweets. This theme was pushed strongly by the alt-right circles involved as opposed to leftist circles, which dominated the conversation on Twitter. While this analysis does not focus on the alt-right’s reaction on YouTube, Twitter was used as a place to spread YouTube reactions created by notable Fandom Menace members.

Keyword Group: Hate

The “hate” keyword group quantified tweets containing any mention of trolling, cyberbullying, or hate towards Reylos. The fact that “hate” reveals itself as a top keyword provides further evidence that this event was viewed as implicit approval to bully a group of fans consisting predominantly of women. Anybody involved in sending Reylos hate were, by their own admission, the bullies and were cheering John on for “trolling” women and “putting [women] in their place.”

“Reading Reylo hate to cheer myself up”

“I don’t like Finn’s character either, but I love how John is putting Reylos in their place.”

“Seeing John Boyega troll the Reylos is the greatest way to end 2019”

The clear agenda to send hate towards a group of women and teenage girls was further validated by the fact that the incident was received positively by all sides of the political spectrum, from “progressive” antis to members of the alt-right. The members included the Fandom Menace and alt-right leader and Pizzagate supporter Jack Posobiec.

Both groups took advantage of the situation utilizing the same tactics they typically employ. The alt-right took to YouTube and Twitter to discredit women among their followers by using buzz-words such as “SJW” and “Twilight.” “Twilight” — which was mentioned 103 times in association with “Reylo” between 12/31/2019 and 1/3/2020 — is often used to describe any piece of media enjoyed predominantly by women.

The goal is to degrade women’s interests among their peers by pushing the narrative that Reylos are silly girls consistently preoccupied with the same trivial, valueless media.

Examples of tweets from the alt right include the following:

“John Boyega ripped the Reylo’s a new asshole. You haven’t seen this many acne riddled fatty Tumblr Girls lose their shit since Twilight ended.”

“My thesis: Reylos and most of these Neo Star Wars fans are just ex Twilight fans and self hating beta male cucks who attached themselves to the franchise like parasites. Next they will glom onto whatever film series is hot and continue their rot.”

“StarWars was so great before Disney. Now its plagued by psychotic Reylo fans, Tumblr freaks, representation-screeching SJWs, radical feminism activists, ex-Twilight fans, &wine-guzzling Disney-fan mothers caked Karen. &these are the people they’re now targeting for their fandom.”

On the other side of the spectrum, long-time anti accounts spearheaded the harassment of Reylo shippers, leveraging Boyega’s tweet to bombard Reylo shippers with hate messages. This included viral tweets from accounts with a history of anti behavior across multiple fandoms, along with multiple tweets from accounts with history of targeting Reylos.

For example, Twitter user @Iovestour tweeted, “oscar isaac going off about disney’s blatant homophobia & john boyega telling reylos to fuck themselves all within two weeks i love men men are my friends.” This tweet has more than 48k likes. You’ll be hard pressed, however, to find any tweets by the account past November 2019, even though the account has been active since March 2018.

All tweets made under the account’s former name “blinkapologist” have been deleted — a trait uncharacteristic of your normal Twitter user just looking to share their opinions and maybe curate the news. Past tweets (to which blinksapologists’ tweets and replies have been deleted) reveal a pattern of anti behavior including a history of going after individuals supporting fictional characters the anti finds problematic, utilizing extremist parallels to real-life events.

A reply to @Iovestour in June 2019 reveals the user had allegedly called victims of the Holocaust Nazi supporters. The accusation appears to have been said to supporters of Marvel character Wanda Maximoff.

Along with antis with history across multiple fandoms inciting hatred against Reylos, this event also revealed itself as a targeted harassment campaign due to the frequency in which some accounts tweeted at or about Reylos.

Boyega’s tweet caused some anti accounts within this sample to tweet over 50 times about Reylos in the span of 4 days including sadgeorgelucas1, who tweeted about Reylos ~100 times, drhorotiwtzfine, who tweeted about Reylos ~75 times, and saltandrockets, who tweeted about Reylos ~65 times.

This is not abnormal. Several of these top accounts were also consistently bullying Reylos. The accounts highlighted in red in the chart below are anti-Reylo accounts that were also included as mentioning Reylo frequently between December 31, 2019 to January 3, 2020. This includes once again drhorowitzfine, who has mentioned Reylo negatively ~1,150 times between 2017 to 2019. Other top anti accounts include winniethepoe1, who tweeted about Reylo ~320 times from 2018 to 2019 and ~25 times during Boyega’s New Year’s Eve incident.

Of course no harassment campaign can be waged without finding ways to make the people being bullied look like they were worth being bullied. One of the two main “arguments” thrown against Reylos included the predictable anti accusation of Rey and Kylo’s “abusive” relationship poisoning the mind’s of women and girls. Since Reylo shippers had made the decision to create transformative works and discuss a fictional romance found to be impure by the antis, Reylos could now be cyberbullied in real life for their morally reprehensible decisions.

Reylo is also referred to as “abusive” because some still try to stretch the narrative that Rey and Kylo’s relationship is incestual, and therefore Reylo’s are promoting incest.

The idea that the relationship is incestual goes back to a 2016 fan clash over who Rey’s parents were. Many fans wanted Rey to be a Skywalker or a Solo, which would make her related to Kylo Ren, the son of Leia Organa and Han Solo. The event involved Reylos being frequently lobbed with accusations of incest, and they were at one point banned from discussing Rey and Kylo’s dynamic on a popular Star Wars forum, Jedi Council Forums.

Another common theme was that Reylos were “toxic.” This theme was mostly fed by alt-right circles and originated with a post by Fandom Menace supporter Dataracer117, who has a history of harassing Reylos.

Dataracer117 has a history of voicing his contempt for Disney and their “radical feminist propaganda.” This is most notably seen in his involvement in Comicgate’s attack on Captain Marvel. This included digging up screenshots by fans of Captain Marvel who spoke out against the sexism being aimed against the film, accusing all the accounts of being “Captain Marvel bots.”

Like the Captain Marvel incident, Dataracer117 posted a tweet with screencaps that Reylos were allegedly sending death threats to JJ around the time of Boyega’s tweet. Despite Dataracer117’s history attempting to devalue women in fandom communities and despite the screencaps being debunked by the Reylo community, the screencaps gained traction around Twitter, YouTube, and in media publications including Buzzfeed. They were further used to create the narrative that Reylos are “unhinged.”

This narrative inflamed alt-right accounts, and they began to frequently frame Reylos as mental cases. Discrediting women is nothing new (in fact you can easily read about it in this essay on Western puritanical conditioning against women in the 17th century), and is to be expected from a community who dedicates their time to driving women away from their online spaces.

The second accusation that was used to fuel harassment against Reylos was the claim that Reylos were racist against Boyega. They claimed that Reylos’ harassment of the actor led women to be upset with Boyega over his Instagram comment. This led to harassment on his Twitter — which remember, was started by a sock puppet account not associated with the Reylo community.

While racism is a prevalent concern that needs to be addressed within all fandom communities-and questions over inherent privilege due to one’s community are something to be examined-no support was given to back up these particular claims about the Reylo community during this incident.

This is not to say, however, that isolated incidents have not occurred outside of this specific accusation within the Reylo fandom, as they would within any large and global group of people. However, these incidents are statistically insignificant to the population of people who discuss Reylo positively on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis (which, according to the sample number of accounts who have discussed Reylo between 2015 to 2019, can be quantified at over 40k individuals. The true number is dependent on how many accounts — currently almost 70k — discuss Reylo negatively within the sample).

This particular accusation of racism has several layers to it and I would like to break them down separately.

“But Reylos Read Explicit Fanfiction”

The first part of this is that the nature of Boyega’s Instagram comments allowed antis and alt-right circles to attack Reylos on NSFW fanfiction and fanart written and drawn for and by women. It also allowed antis to draw more criticism around the ways in which Reylos analyzed The Last Jedi, a film with many allusions to the writings of psychoanalytics including Sigmund Freud.

After the release of The Last Jedi, the Reylo community, who had written long form meta analysis on the Star Wars saga since 2015, wrote lengthy metas about the symbolism in the film. Much of this symbolism was reflective of Rey’s sexual awakening throughout her journey in the movie.

Antis took issue with this and saw this as “sexualizing” Rey’s character. They asserted that women exploring sexuality through the lens of a fem-gaze narrative written for women was appalling, degrading, and out of line.

For anti and alt-right circles, the Reylo community’s openness to discussing sex in Star Wars through meta, fanfiction, and fanart by women (and generally for women) meant that Reylos could not take offense to Boyega’s questionable comment that suggested to some of his fans that Rey was a sexual prize to be won. The narrative antis spun was wholly unable — and unwilling — to separate women discussing sex in their own communities as different from men offering their sexual “jokes.”

This justification for bullying Reylos felt eerily similar to “she was wearing that, she asked for it.” It’s a highly socialized sexist line of reasoning women deal with daily and one that was readily accepted in this incident.

2. “But Reylos Ship Rey With The White Character”

Since 2015, Reylos have been accused of racism on the grounds that Reylos did not prefer Rey to be in a romantic relationship with the black male protagonist. This claim is presented without any evidence to back up the accusation.

Furthermore, the people who ship Rey and Finn (known as “Finnrey”) have done little to celebrate this pairing and act as a fan community. In fact, they have consistently acted more like a group that seeks to find ways to activate hate against Reylos instead of create content for their ship.

The two data visualizations below show every user in my sample who has tweeted the word “Reylo” between 2015 to 2019 vs every user in my sample who has tweeted the word “Finnrey” between 2015 to 2019. The gray in these charts represent the number of accounts who have only ever tweeted about their own ship. The purple represents the overlap — that is the accounts who have tweeted at least once about the other ship.

The first observation is that the number of users discussing “Finnrey” is small in comparison to the number of accounts discussing “Reylo.” Finnrey was mentioned by 7,780 accounts while Reylo was mentioned by 69,484 accounts.

As mentioned, gray = accounts who have only ever tweeted about their own ship. Purple = accounts who have tweeted about at least one other ship. So, in this case, out of the ~7.8k accounts that tweeted about Finnrey, ~60% of accounts mentioned “Reylo” at least once (4,665 accounts total). This number represents only ~7% of accounts who have ever talked about Reylo.

This data is supported by other statistics comparing the two ships. For example, on fanfiction website Archive of Our Own, the fic tag for Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren has ~16k fics. There are another 12k fics in the tag for Rey/Kylo Ren. The fic tag for Finn/Rey has under 2k fics.

3. “Reylos Have Bullied John Since 2015”

The most damaging false claim to come out New Year’s Eve was that Reylos had been attacking Boyega (and other Star Wars actors) with racist tweets since 2015.

It is very true that the actor has received heinous racist attacks. Most notably, the actor was attacked on social media following a #BoycottEpisodeVII hashtag that was started by two 4chan trolls in an attempt to get racist Star Wars fans to take the bait. It is well known that this hashtag was the work of racist alt-right accounts.

Since the hashtag, other attacks have been levied on Boyega. One of these attacks included a surge of outcries against him by The Fandom Menace, after a tweet posted in June 2018 stated: “If you don’t like Star Wars or the characters understand that there are decisions makers and harassing the actors/actresses will do nothing. You’re not entitled to politeness when your approach is rude. Even if you paid for a ticket!”

The Fandom Menace took the opportunity to bring their anger over Boyega’s comments to Twitter and YouTube, much like Comicsgate did when Brie Larson spoke in favor of diversity.

Reylos, however, are now being blamed for these attacks without any supporting evidence. They are also being blamed for the harassment of Kelly Marie Tran. The actress was bullied off of social media by alt-right trolls on her Instagram page, along with antis who saw her character kissing Finn as “sexual assault.”

You will not find any evidence linking the Reylos back to the targeted harassment of any Star Wars actors over the years. Predictably, however, you will find that the people who used this accusation to their advantage admitted that their own motive was bullying.

For example, Twitter user @notlipglosse tweeted “the way this man waited until he got his last star wars check so he could freely make fun of the racist stans who have bene harassing him since 2015 %@&@*!?!?!?” This tweet (at the time of the screencap) gained ~92.2k likes. A tweet posted on December 19th, however, reads “the way we’ve been bullying Reylo stans and calling them delusional and they won…,” further supports the data that this incident was about inciting hatred towards a group of fans predominately made up of women.

Another example is from user @irisckp. Shortly after Boyega’s tweet, the user tweeted “NOT THIS REYLO AND HER MUTUALS ACTING LIKE JOHN BOYEGA HAS BROUGHT SOME TYPE OF OPPRESSION WHEN HE WAS RACIALLY ABUSED BY REYLO’S FOR YEARS. HE HAD EVERY RIGHT.” Again this tweet was presented without evidence that Reylos had “racially abused” Boyega.

The tweet is referring to a livestream from a young woman in the Reylo community who candidly expressed discomfort over the false accusations and bullying. The livestream was taken by antis and used to further bully the young woman.

This bullying eventually descended into suicide baiting that resulted in the woman’s account being deleted. However, this did not stop antis from pushing the woman to kill herself. It also did not stop them from telling the teenager’s father, who had gotten involved in combating the harassment, to “live tweet your reaction when you find your daughters lifeless body dangling from her rooms ceiling fan.”

After @iriscpk’s initial tweet, the user admitted that they had “never seen Star Wars” (like a portion of antis bullying Reylos that night) and that “Reylo” is used as an umbrella term for their unsupported accusations of racism against Boyega.

The tweets again reveal that viral tweets making accusations against Reylos had no merit, and were not based in any evidence they had seen with their own eyes. These users were looking to be involved in the latest conversation despite the lack of evidence or knowledge and despite the real harm being done to the community the tweet targeted.

This supports the hive mind behavior behind this cyberbullying attack. There was no concern for any person hurt. There was no concern for the misinformation that was being spread. And there was no concern for the very real issue of racism in online spaces.

This was only ever about a group of women getting hurt and, hopefully, getting off the internet altogether.

Why This Matters and What This Means for Art and Society in The Digital Age

If you have gotten this far and you find this article absurd, you should. This much vitriolic hatred, ugliness, and anger over women analyzing and creating media for a romantic pairing in a Hollywood blockbuster is, to put it mildly, overblown. Unfortunately, it’s the reality. And it’s a reality that has even deeper repercussions if not addressed.

I wrote this article not only in a hope to correct the misinformation against a group of women in the Star Wars fandom, but also to address a larger issue of what it means when these hate campaigns are so readily accepted by the general public, by journalists, and by other fans.

The internet will continue to evolve as it already has. It will evolve into an ecosystem that will touch every single moment of our lives. It is a future that will be as brilliant as it will be terrifying and when we are so willing to demonize a group of women with no evidence but a tweet with a lot of likes, it shows that we are not prepared.

We are living in an age where art is being dictated to what a few executives read online, or what a data analyst may write up in a report. We have seen how Disney has made a movie based off of fan service easily found in Reddit threads. We have seen Paramount shift the schedule of an entire film to redesign a character after apparent outrage. We have seen Disney remove James Gunn from a major movie project following a targeted alt-right campaign to get him removed. And we have seen this with Warner Brothers choosing to green light their films using AI.

This pattern is concerning in part because we are willing to create art via algorithm. But, it’s also concerning because, unless these algorithms are properly coded and taught overtime to understand hive mind mentality, the machines that churn social listening data will be regurgitating intelligence corrupted by organized and hateful groups. These groups aim to restrict freedom of speech, diversity, and meaning in our art for the sake of political agendas laking any evidence, any substance, or any valuable goal.

I also wrote this article because it is not only our art that is at risk, but the ways in which we communicate as human beings online. The ability to see individuals — namely women — as inhuman or as less than with no second thought is something we should all understand is a problem. We have a deep inability to question what we see on our Facebook feeds, our Twitter timelines, or in our Instagram photos . We also live in an age where entire governments are being overturned by algorithms and social media ads. We are quick to blame Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and YouTube for this, and yes, while, those platforms have a responsibility of their own, we need to realize that it is our responsibility as well to always question what we see and search for evidence if it is not provided to us.

This example of bullying women in an online community is not necessarily synonymous with political elections, but it still presents yet another moment where people are failing to believe hard evidence over buzz words, sensationalized headlines, and clear, often spelled out agendas.

Until we learn not to react to everything we see, and listen to the people around us who come with facts, this type of behavior will continue, this type of behavior will get worse, and this type of behavior will impact us politically, socially, and culturally as we become more and more integrated as a digital society.

On January 10th, John Boyega posted a video to his Instagram account showing himself mocking tweets by women in the Reylo community. He did not blur out the names. These women were specifically targeted. The event created ~50k tweets continuing to bully women. Media outlets including Forbes, IGN, Cinemablend, Esquire, and The Wrap picked up the story. They all applauded the video.

In response, Reylos trended #reylolove — stories about how women in the community had positively impacted their lives.

They also created a charity event for anti-cyberbullying charity Cybersmile, which you can donate to here.

[tessatechaitea]

What do you think about the current state of comics right now and the people known as comicgate

My current take on the state of comics is that they cost far too much for what you get. I wouldn’t mind seeing comics go all digital but still selling physical copies of collected editions. I’m not a business person or care what happens on the business end; I’m just a customer who could live with the paradigm I just came up with in a few seconds because you asked me this question. I also think Image and other non-DC and non-Marvel publishers put out the best comics and have been doing so for years. It makes a difference when a writer knows they own the characters and stories they’re writing. You save your best shit for the stuff you know you’re going to own. Sure, as a comic fan and writer, you would love to do a Wolverine story or a Batman story or whatever. But if you’re a writer for hire, you’re just not going to expend your best ideas on that company. You’re going to save that shit for a company that lets you own your shit. As for comicsgaters, fuck them. They hide behind the fact that the general movement outside of their crappy philosophy isn’t a bad idea at all. Crowdfunded comic books is a great idea on the surface. But when you get right to it, who’s going to crowdfund the next Chris Ware or Warren Ellis? Probably nobody. Artists probably need publishers to get their names out there unless they’re fucking great at self-promotion and the Internet. But that’s not really what Comicsgate is about, no matter what they’d love everybody to believe. To quote Amanda Halley, “Fashion is not an island. It’s a response.” I know, I’m not talking about fashion. But fashion is art and art is the same way. If you read and study a lot of poetry, you begin to learn that poets don’t just spring up because they thought up a beautiful way to express the onset of spring or the decay of winter. They’re almost always responding to previous poets and their methods of writing. They’re responding to the ideas they disagreed with, making changes in method as rebellion, and expressing themselves in ways that differentiate them from the previous generation. Well, Comicsgate is a response to something they feel is wrong with comic books. Sure, it’s a lie of a response because they’ll say shit like, “We don’t want political stories! We just want apolitcal action stories with great plots! Like how comics used to be!” But if you read how comics used to be, the best ones were always “political.” And the problem with Comicsgate is that the “politics” they hate are just stories about people being compassionate and heroic. It’s easy to read a story about a hero stopping a bank robber because the reader can think, “I would never rob a bank. Get those baddies, Batman!” But when a reader reads about Starfire facing the horror of Apartheid, readers become uncomfortable and send in letters like, “Why did you make all the white people so unlikeable? I will not be reading this comic any more. You should be less political.” The problem with Comicsgaters isn’t that they want good stories told with compassion and heroism and maybe a good lot of punching; the problem is they want those stories with a white male heterosexual protagonist. And, to them, a story automatically isn’t good if you change any of their terms for a good protagonist. Yes, I know a lot of Comicsgaters will deny a lot of this. But the move away from everybody being white and male and cishet is verifiably the root of the problem with the movement. We’ve had indie comic books for decades that have told amazing stories that have absolutely been political with non-binary protagonists. Elfquest was the comic book that got me into my first local comic book store (Brian’s Books of Santa Clara, CA!). Now that was a great story and sure, maybe you could make an argument that the protagonist was a white heterosexual male. But I’m also pretty sure he fucked Skywise in the mouth more than once and practiced socialist or even communist ideologies! And Cerebus! High Society, Church & State, Jaka’s Story, Mothers & Daughters? You don’t get more political than those stories which makes them as fascinating and interesting as they are. And, yes, the letters pages of Cerebus really got fucking crazy but I’m not here to talk about that. Whatever your thoughts of Dave Sim’s life journey, he wrote an enthralling story that maybe took a bit of a wrong turn somewhere past Guys. Still, an achievement. And fuck me, I didn’t even mention Strangers in Paradise! It’s like the anti-Comicsgate comic but also a huge indie comic hit! Thinking on my list, Dave Sim, Wendy and Richard Pini, and Terry Brooks were the only artists I ever stood in line to have something signed before I started my New 52 blog.

Anyway, there are still tons of great comics being published and still tons of shitty comics being published. Just like it’s always been and I’ve been reading them since Crisis on Infinite Earths (and before that with Elfquest, of course).

[samasmith23]

Ms. Marvel and exposing the systemic colorism displayed by Comicsgate bigots

So I’m about to go off on a bit of a tangent here, but for the longest time, one of the things that’s constantly enraged me about Richard C. Meyer, one of the lead ringleaders of the Neo-Nazi hate movement Comicsgate, is a particular aspect of his bigotry towards the character Ms. Marvel (aka, Kamala Khan). An element of Meyer's Islamophobic attacks against Kamala that repeatedly occurs throughout all his terrible videos bashing her comics is his repeated accusation that Kamala “doesn’t even look Pakistani.”

Yes... seriously... Richard Meyer, an cis straight white male, believes that he has the authority to claim what does and does not qualify as "looking Pakistani."

It's just as cringeworthy and racist as you can possibly imagine.

So the basis of Meyer's fallacious accusation that Kamala doesn't "look Pakistani" is simply because the artists of her comics depict her as has having either dark brown or black hair along with her brown skin. Heck, Meyer has not only stated that Kamala & her family instead look “vaguely Arabic or foreign," (essentially repeating the racist talking point of all Muslim countries being culturally and ethnically monolithic), but in one of his videos he even went as far as to accuse Kamala of looking like "a white girl who spray-tanned herself to look brown."

Essentially, Meyer is accusing a Pakistani character who was created by Muslim and POC creators of engaging in literal brown face. Not only is this accusation incredibly racist, but it doesn't even made any sense whatsoever since Kamala & her family have always been depicted as being of South Asian or Desi descent. Furthermore, Kamala was explicitly modeled after her co-creator and editor Sana Amanat, who is herself a Desi Pakistani-American woman.

For the longest time I was completely dumbfounded and confused as to where Meyer was even getting these offensive ideas from. However, a few years ago I think I discovered one of the potential underlying one of the reasons as to why Meyer believes that Kamala doesn’t look “Pakistani.” And it's a reason which goes deeper than simply being a byproduct of Meyer's own ignorance and racism.

See, a lot of South Asian countries, including Pakistan, actually have a big problem in regards to issues of colorism. It's actually gotten to the point where skin-lightening creams are repeatedly advertised and marketed towards women since lighter skin is considered by some to be more 'beautiful, and this mindset can be heavily traced back to British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent.

The Ms. Marvel comics themselves even briefly commentated on the issue of colorism in Pakistan when Kamala’s older brother Aamir got engaged to Tyesha, who is a black woman, challenging his parents desire about wanting him to marry a fellow Pakistani. Even when Kamala & Aamir's parents came around to accepting and embracing Tyesha as their future daughter in-law, Aamir still expressed anxiety over whether or not his other relatives would hold anti-black attitudes towards Tyesha or any biracial children they might someday have.

Sadly, colorism is such a widespread issue in South Asian countries that if you simply search for pictures of Pakistani women on Google Images, you’re bound to find tons of photographs of Pakistani women who have used said-skin-lightening creams. So overall, considering the historical context of colorism in countries like Pakistan, combined with Richard C. Meyer's own Islamophobic biases and his inability to do basic research on other cultures and ethnicities, I think it’s fair to assume that historical and contemporary colorism could have influenced Meyer's bigoted accusations of "Kamala and her family not even looking Pakistani."

Here are a few articles written by Pakistani women which go into much greater detail about the damaging effects that colorism in particular has had in South Asian countries:

This connection between contemporary South Asian colorism and Meyer's Post-9/11 Islamophobia further reinforced by the other examples in which he openly engages in inaccurate stereotyping of all Muslim countries being culturally monolithic. The most egregious example of this is undoubtedly Meyer's open demonization of Kamala's aforementioned older brother Aamir. Meyer constantly refers to Aamir as "looking like a shepherd" simply due to him wearing traditional Islamic attire in the form of a white thobe and taqiyah cap. He even outright, and inaccurately, calls Aamir an "ISIS bomber" in one of his awful videos, even outright stating, "Yes I'm profiling.”

He has attempted to justify his Islamophobia by stating that there’s no other reason for Aamir to wear such clothing, lying to his audience that said-clothing "shows that Aamir is unwilling to integrate into American society and therefore he should be viewed with suspicion."

Where do I even begin with how racist this is?! First of all, there are plenty of Muslim Americans in the real world who wear the type of clothing Aamir wears for various religious reasons, including adhering to more orthodox beliefs or trying to emulate the Prophet Muhammad, such as the Salafi branch of Islam which Aamir adheres to. Secondly, Aamir is portrayed throughout Ms. Marvel as being a genuinely kind person despite being more traditional and conservative, someone who cares deeply for his little sister and family. Additionally, during the Last Days arc Aamir is kidnapped and forcibly given superpowers by the Inhuman extremist Kamran (aka, Kamala's evil ex-boyfriend) who's playing into Islamophobic assumptions about more traditional Muslims being more likely to engage in terrorist violence. But Aamir completely rejects the tired stereotypes that Kamran is projecting onto him, even outright stating that he doesn't want superpowers and is already happy with who and where he is in life.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Meyer stating that an individual should be profiled simply on the basis of his religious clothing is on the same level of awfulness as when Frank Miller inferred in Holy Terror that all Muslim foreign exchange students should automatically be viewed as terrorists in disguise and, therefore, are to be treated with suspicion and hatred. And Franky-Boy communicates this disgusting marriage through the scene of the foreign exchange student Amina (who just so happens to be named after the Prophet Muhummad's mother... classy...) repaying a lesbian woman's hospitality by suicide-bombing both said-lesbian and a crowded party full of dozens of other civilians:

It's blatant Islamophobia and disgusting propaganda on Miller's part.

So when Meyer not only describes Aamir as "looking like a terrorist" or "dressing and acting like a freaking Taliban" simply due to his clothing, but even outright states "yes I'm profiling" whilst making these comments, Meyer is treating Aamir's character with suspicion and hate simply because of his traditionalist Muslim clothing. Just like Frank Miller does with framing Amina the exchange student as a mass-murdering suicide bomber in Holy Terror. These are all classic racist Post-9/11 Islamophobic talking points derived from American imperialism, which are intrinsically connected to the racist promotion of colorism and skin-lightening creams in South Asian countries derived from British colonialism. Negative stereotypes which both Aamir's character and Ms. Marvel as a whole actively refuted throughout the runs by G. Willow Wilson & Saladin Ahmed:

In other words, screw Richard C. Meyer and his blatant Islamophobia. Comicsgate is a hate group, and any and all criticisms they have made against books like Ms. Marvel are simply trojan horses designed to indoctrinate their audience with far-right talking points and prejudices. Prejudices which have their roots in both modern imperialism and historical colonialism which has negatively impacted the peoples of South Asian and Middle Eastern countries.

[whiterosebrian]

Open Letter to Professor Geek

Professor Geek,

I have seen a large number of your videos on YouTube. You have commented negatively on “social agenda” within movies, TV series, and comics. Very recently I sent a direct message on Instagram inviting you to a private dialogue over representation and social justice. I did not get a response even as I kept in mind what I wanted to ask or say. Why am I making this letter public? I want to help build bridges between people, however difficult that task might be in the polarized cultural climate.

You have associated yourself with “Comicsgate”, a loose grouping of fanboys (and, yes, a handful of fangirls) opposing “Social Justice Warriors” bringing “forced diversity” and “politics” into comics and related media. “Comicsgate” is itself associated with other sects of fandom that similarly militate against “forced diversity” and “politics”. People within this overall grouping assert that they do not oppose diversity among creators and characters and stories per se, but rather diversity handled poorly. I admit that diverse characters and their distinctive stories can be poorly made and feel contrived. They assert that they do not oppose integration of real-world issues per se but rather real-world issues clumsily crammed into fantastical stories. I admit that politics and social issues can be integrated poorly.

I can even accept that, ideally, one group of people should not be pitted against another. I am male, my ethnic heritage is very much northern European, I’m sexually attracted predominantly to women, and I’ve never experienced serious gender dysphoria. I do believe in reconciliation and friendship and collaboration. That basic sentiment, however, quickly bumps into complications.

The reason why so many creators want to introduce diversity revolves around historical contexts of marginalization and erasure. In your videos, you seem to ignore the historical injustices and the current desire to correct them. Is it not true that women and various ethnic or religious groups have been depicted in stereotypical or downright demeaning ways? Is it not true that sexual minorities have been depicted as either freaks or demons? Is it not true that various groups of people have suffered at the hands of ignorant or outright prideful or scornful attitudes? Is it not true that social systems arose that perpetuated injustices, from silencing to controlling to worse?

Twitter talkers and Youtube commenters who link themselves to ComicsGate might claim that their movement is open and accepting. That may be true in some if not many cases. I still ask you to read and listen to what opponents of Comicsgate are actually saying. They bring up evidence of harassment and hate speech that is simply too strong and too voluminous to be entirely dismissed. Do you intend to dismiss or gaslight? I should hope that you do not readily dismiss the many marginalized people who experience harassment and hate speech. As I type this I’m reading of Comicsgate folks abusing Twitter’s reporting system to punish their critics.

I also ask that you take a closer look at those who comment on your videos. Some of them will directly echo extreme-right stereotypes and conspiracy theories. For example, some will repeat the talking point of Cultural Marxists eroding culture and civilization. I invite you to look into critical videos that expose “Cultural Marxism” as a half-truth or outright hoax rooted in antisemitism. Do you stand against such stereotypes and conspiracy theories?

Late last year, after nearly twenty-five years as a convert, I made the very difficult decision to defect from Catholicism (and I am still seeking a new spiritual home). I had many difficult questions about what that religion looks like in the real world. When browsing the Twitter feeds of centrist or left-leaning priests and their fellow-travelers, I would see horribly inflammatory responses that further made me question the fruits of Catholicism. The term “SJW”—which you have used multiple times in your videos—is used within this context as a means of mocking any Catholic who dares to give a thought to social justice and the uplifting of marginalized people. Apparently, “saving souls”—whatever that means in the real world—is the only thing that Catholics may engage in doing. When I hear “SJW” used as pejorative I think of mockeries of anyone who voices any concern for marginalized people and systemic injustices. I’m not entirely ready to think of you using “SJW” in exactly the same way, but I feel that it draws dangerously close.

It may very well be that characters have appeared throughout comics history coming from marginalized groups. Yes, that’s true. That wasn’t not because of conservatism, for lack of a better term. That was in spite of conservatism.

Recall that Black Panther was created in the 1960s. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby may very well have riding the wave of the Civil Rights movement, when black Americans were trying to gain more rights—and, ultimately, fuller humanity—than local and state governments afforded them. Stan Lee would later publicly state that when he created the likes of Black Panther he wanted to show different people as real, human characters. He wanted to influence young readers of the time to respect different people as real, human people. You might also recall that Jack Kirby worked with Joe Simon on Captain America comics during the Second World War. They were American Jews (like Lee) who felt a need to do their part to fight Nazism even before the U.S. government declared war on the Axis Powers. They were even threatened by domestic Nazis for making those comics! I’d also like to note a famous story arc on the Superman radio show where Superman fought against the Ku Klux Klan, with a script influenced by a government agent’s research into the Klan.

Shouldn’t a wide variety of people get to share the spotlight? That’s the fundamental question that I’m discussing. Shouldn’t a wide variety of people get to be seen as full-fledged humans who are welcomed? That is the main implication of the efforts at diversifying characters and allowing diverse creators to create.

In many of your videos you have appealed to mythology and archetypes. You’ve spoken in particular of the “iconic feminine” and “iconic masculine”. Yes, I do see value in ancient mythology and archetypes. I can draw upon them. On a side note, I can even see how the differences of male and female brains (which you’ve mentioned), plus the research into those brains and apparent mismatches with the rest of the body, have led to more understanding and acceptance of trans people.

Surely I can also draw upon modern insights and the voices of historically marginalized people who are now speaking. Surely I should be able to write complex and nuanced stories that go beyond tired formulas. Would you accept that archetypes can be degraded to hollow stereotypes? Would you accept that characters should have a chance to shine outside rigid molds? Would you accept that stories should be relevant to people’s real lives and not simply be hollow escapism or antiquated abstraction?

Among the people associated with Comicsgate and other anti-SJW fan sects, I believe that you are far from the most virulent or radical. You also seem to be a sincere seeker of truth and beauty. That is why I invited you to a dialogue then later decided to compose and post an open letter. If you ever do see this, I ask you to look carefully at all my words and trust that I mean well. You are welcome to publicly respond as long as you make an honest effort to respond to the points and concerns that I raised. I ask you to consider where you go from here as a pundit and as a member of the human family.

Blessed be,

Brian Solomon Whiterose