Salem Wants To Watch A Movie: Black Panther

Look, you all know I'm an unrepentant MCU fanboy. I've seen them all multiple times, with even my least favourite hitting three re-watches. Yes, even Thor: The Dark World; I make apologies for that one all the time. Despite popular opinion, Iron Man 3 is not only one of my favourite MCU films, but it's also one of my favourite movies.

As we're staying on a theme, you might remember two weeks ago I explained why I hadn't yet seen The Last Jedi, mainly because of the controversy around it. There's a similar situation brewing with Black Panther. 

Look, SyFyWire, I'm not sure where you've been for the last hundred years or so, but science fiction frequently stars people that are not just white dudes, but women and people of other ethnicities. Hell, a lot of it is people of other species, be they fantasy races such as elves, dwarves, and orcs, or alien races such as Cardassian, Gou'ould, or Turian. Since the MCU movies started hitting theatres, our main concern hasn't been "Are we going to be able to identify with the white dude in the movie?" so much as "Is this movie going to respect the source material and give us something fun and compelling?"

And the MCU has yet to disappoint (okay, except for maybe The Dark World). Literally nobody looking forward to Black Panther is mad that there's not a white dude in the lead role. Quite the opposite; anyone familiar with the source material would probably be livid were they to re-cast T'Challa as a white man. You saw the reaction to Tilda Swinton's casting as the Ancient One, right?

I'm still hyped for Black Panther. It's another addition to the MCU canon, and it's looking pretty good so far. But some of us are concerned... not that we won't, again, be unable to identify with the lead role; I'm sure I can identify with the king of a xenophobic, isolationist African country that's technologically advanced and prosperous due to extra-terrestrial mineral resources and has a super suit and cadre of female bodyguards as much as the next person. I can  possibly identify with it as much as I can identify with a woman who grew up trained as a super-assassin by elements of the Russian military, or a brilliant scientist who put himself in harm's way and was rewarded by turning into an uncontrollable green rage monster, or a demi-god who had to learn a lesson in humility before daddy would give him his powers back.

No, I'm worried because a lot of people are playing up the minority element in this movie. Not to the same extent it was played up in Ghostbusters; Feige and Disney would never release something on the same level of quality that Sony somehow managed. But I guarantee you that a lot of people who wanted to watch it won't, because you've talked them into the idea that they don't want to see it.

The same thing nearly happened to me with The Last Jedi, and it's been happening for a while. Lord knows the progressive fandom has been doing its absolute level best to convince me that I'm not at all interested and in fact am outraged at Jodie Whittaker's casting as The Doctor, when I have no idea* if she'll be good or not.

* Aside from the fact there's never been a bad Doctor. Shut up, there hasn't. Colin Baker was fantastic.

In short, knock it off. Stop propping up strawmen to try and convince yourselves that your ideological enemies are mad that something cool is coming out. Stop pretending like it's never happened before. I feel like slapping the next person that forgot that Blade had two fantastic movies (and one questionable one) before the X-Men franchise even started picking up any real steam.

Hype it up. Share the love. Celebrate it if you feel you need to. But when you start celebrating how what you love is going to piss off some monolithic and imaginary ideal of the people you hate, you're doing fandom absolutely the wrong way. It's worse than the gatekeeping that you preach against. It's sub-cultural gentrification, and it's annoying as all hell.

Regressive Progressivism: A Case of Friendly Fire

Embedded journalist on the front
lines of the secret culture war.

Oh boy, do I get to talk about Anita Sarkeesian this week? I think I doOOoo!

I need to change my byline to "embedded journalist on the frontlines of the secret culture war." That would, of course, require having a byline to begin with, but considering the crazy things I find happening and the points of view that I find on them, it'd be worth it. Plus it sounds unbelievably cool.

(Editor's Note: Done.)

My Regressive Progressivism series has highlighted cases of hypocrisy, cultural cannibalism, and some spectacular own-goals in its time, but this one has to take the cake.

It's a special time of year, apparently. It's been so long that I actually forgot, despite being one of the few that witnessed and told the tale of, the original incident. That's right, it was recently the anniversary of Gamergate, specifically the "hate screed of the jilted ex-boyfriend" which was, in reality, an airing of grievances on a personal blog by a victim of domestic abuse. That'll be relevant shortly, I promise.

Kotaku UK recently interviewed prominent gaming YouTuber TotalBiscuit, host of possibly the biggest gaming podcast, professional Starcraft announcer, and all-around consumer advocate, on the topic of 'haters', which I assume means trolls and harassers. The discussion was around moderation tools and how to use them to guide discussion in the community. Overall, this was fairly tame stuff.

However, from the progressive side of the gaming eliterati, there were two problems with this. Firstly, Totalbiscuit was allegedly "pro-Gamergate" and the article was published on the anniversary of Gamergate. To a normal, sane, uninvolved person, this wouldn't have been an issue. However...

Outrageous & irresponsible of Kotaku UK to post this puff-piece on a Gamergater on the hate movement's anniversary. https://t.co/trVmZmDXvX pic.twitter.com/4SDStFolkB

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) August 16, 2017

How many times have I said Twitter is a bad idea? 

Now, in isolation this isn't a big deal. Feminist Frequency (Anita Sarkeesian's project) disproves of an article. No big deal, right?

Wrong! Big deal. The article's author, a trans-woman named Laura Kate Dale, was met with a deluge of disapproval due to TotalBiscuit's support of  the ethics side (He disavowed any and all harassment while promoting the idea that there was a problem with videogame reporting) of the Gamergate debacle.

So, in a nutshell, what happened? A progressive trans-woman interviewed an internet personality with a solid take on moderating a community, which displeased a progressive cultural icon, which in turn resulted in harassment, threats, and (allegedly) doxing, resulting in Laura Kate Dale being chased off of Twitter. Granted, she said she wasn't leaving because of the deluge of negative attention, but that to me reads just like Joss Whedon's "I fell down some stairs" moment after Age of Ultron. 

You don't even get to explain yourself.

Kotaku all but retracted the original article. I'm surprised they even mentioned that Dale received threats. That's dangerously close to breaking the narrative. 

I'm sorry it took this long to get an appology post up. There were a lot of factors that delayed this. For that, I am sorry.

— Laura Kate Dale (@LaurakBuzz) August 17, 2017

See the replies? It will never be good enough, no matter what. 

When even fervently progressive voices like Jim Sterling and Rhianna Pratchett call out how irresponsible and wrong it is to attack someone like this, you have to take notice. A group of people harassed a trans-woman off of twitter for talking about video game stuff, and yet this isn't about "evol right-wing gamers" or Brianna Wu; this is a progressive hate mob that attacked someone on their own side for talking to the "wrong" person about a relevant topic, and it's rather sickening.

You have to take this in perspective, and by the rules that have been laid forth:

• Anita Sarkeesian is a cis-woman with over 700,000 followers who has spoken to the UN and appeared on Stephen Colbert's show. 
• Laura Kate Dale is a trans-woman with less than 50 thousand followers who runs a podcast and writes for a site that's a bit of a joke. 

By nearly any definition, there's a clear power imbalance there, and I genuinely feel, no matter how much I disagree with Dale, that Anita acted irresponsibly and fanned some pretty hefty flames in her direction.

Oh, and anyone wondering why I haven't mentioned Charlottesville? Nazis and Communists are both bad. The ground could open up and swallow both the Alt-Right and Antifa and I wouldn't shed a tear. There, that's my community service for the week.