I wonder if anyone else remembers this. It came to my mind because I was reading this story:
The owner of a clothing shop in Cedar Glen was shot and killed Friday night, Aug. 18, after a person made several disparaging comments about a rainbow flag displayed outside the store, authorities said.
The suspect was found nearby by arriving deputies, who shot and killed him, San Bernardino County sheriff’s officials said.
This is… horrible. I don’t even know how to describe it. For the first time in my adult life, I’m genuinely horrified and fear for my LGBT+ brothers and sisters, as well as their allies (which includes me, fuck).
2013 felt… different. Two years later in 2015 gay marriage would be legalized nationwide.
I remember thinking EA was trying to pull the wool over our eyes. I remember thinking that LGBT+ acceptance in 2013 was doing well. I remember thinking they were throwing up that people voted for them as worst company over LGBT+ inclusion as some kind of way to hand-wave away their awful business practices. Going back, though…
In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT+ characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT+ policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.
Does anyone else feel like me, and feel dumbfounded and like I just didn’t think conservatives were that organized at the time? More to the point, I just didn’t trust anything EA said and thought they were lying. I don’t think they were lying anymore. I was wrong.
I wonder, does that mean that far fewer people hated them than we thought, for their business practices? I mean, we’ve seen years of steady profits for EA, it’s not as though they’ve lost a ton of business…
I’m curious what other Lemmings thoughts are on this. I just kind of had a bit of an epiphany about it recently and came back around to thoughts on the subject because of (sigh) how awful everything is.
This was definitely a 4Chan thing. I frequented that pisshole quite regularly around that time, and the LGBTQ±hate was a prevalent stance when it came to characters in videogames. And since they have a history of brigading and manipulating “contests” like this, I would be very comfortable in mostly attributing this to 4Chan. I remember plenty of threads about this from back then.
“Right-wing organization” would not be the right term here exactly. 4Chan themselves would likely call it along the lines of “weaponized autism”. In less inflammatory terms, they did it because they were bored, they had the time, and simply because they could. This particular case just “happened” to be about their anti-LGBTQ±stance. A lot of their actions tended to have that particular flavor.
Sickening place. Glad to have left it for good years ago.
