Journal of Other Forum Analysis

[HaughtyFrank]

Yeah I think it's safe to say here because it's a pinned thread about trans genocide, which is as "ignorable" as it gets on Era and will probably go under the radar.

Era has been very open about how little the majority (including people higher up in the community) actually care about trans people. It's lip service. at least until actual threads about someone's favorite author becomes an open fascist just to kill trans people, or about bills being pushed through almost unanimously to erase them from existence, where there's either no talk about it apart from the actual trans members of Era, or fucking  pushback like that Spiderverse Gwen thing, or the Cyberpunk/H*gwarts debacles, or even the post that sparked this very thread! It's not subtle, and it's tiring.

Some psychologists should study this, it's really amazing. There's no group the forum has bend over backwards more than the trans clique and yet they keep whining about how no one cares about them. That one of their examples of horrible oppression is people disagreeing that spider gwen is trans says it all.

[Besticus Maximus]

I like how they themselves aren't really posting anything in their designated threads, yet they're shaking with rage at the fact that nobody else is either.

What can they say? 

They lost the argument on trans women in women's sports, because instead of being reasonable and making accommodations they brought junk science to the table and made it a faith based position, being argued by people who have demonstrably never won at sports in their lives.

They lost the argument on female spaces when they were defending male rapists in women's prisons, sacrificing their best political ally in the process in Sturgeon.

They've lost the argument on puberty blockers for kids for the same reasons as they lost the sports argument. The science isn't on their side and they have pushed the case to the point where the science is the deciding factor.

If their own position has manifested such that their actual goal; free at the point of asking, lifelong cosmetic surgeries for adults and prepubescent children and special societal privileges for people with gender identities will now never happen all that is left is howling at the moon and demanding everyone else calls the sky green.

[Taco Bell Tower]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/trump-on-trial-episode-4-ot-the-one-with-the-missing-documents.727986/page-25#post-107061894

Trump is a toddler that refused to give back a toy he took from another toddler. "No mine!". I mean they were sitting next to the shitter, he didnt even care about them, not really.

He is facing federal crimes because he thinks he can have everything he wants and didn't want Joe Biden to have them.

And around 70 million Americans will still vote for him... Think about that and try not to get depressed.

Yet he has a Trump profile pic 

[Hap Shaughnessy]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/the-verge-summer-game-fest-featured-no-women-onstage.727782/page-3#post-107016252

User Banned (2 Weeks): Dismissing Concerns of Representation over a Series of Posts

Meh, making moutains out of molehills here but it's the Verge so not a surprise. You'll see the complete opposite on Sunday with Mircrosoft and others this SGF (especially indies), Apples event was very well repressented across the board and has been for years now. It's not at all common for an all male line up anymore and with how few people were actually on stage I'd give the event the benefit of the doubt.

[Averon]

TransERA have only themselves to blame for an intense lack of interest in trans topics on ERA. They made it abundantly clear through aggressive rhetoric and bannings that anything other than complete agreement with TransERA is unacceptable. You go into those threads to be literal drones agreeing to everything TransERA says--no matter how silly or absurd--or eat a ban. No actual discussion is allowed. They are just mad people got wise to this and would rather just avoid them all together. Which also explains why they so aggressively try to insert trans topics into threads completely unrelated in an attempt to force people they scared away to pay attention to them again.

[Hap Shaughnessy]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/would-you-be-okay-with-your-spouse-wanting-to-name-your-child-after-a-dead-relative-that-they-were-close-to.728433

That's what a middle name is for.

[Hap Shaughnessy]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/is-it-just-me-or-has-google-recaptcha-gotten-much-worse-recently.728412/

Specifically, I'm talking about this kind:



Lately I've found them nearly impossible to pass successfully, due to things like the car on the left. Any time the answer is even slightly ambiguous, it will consider my answer wrong.

If I pick all the squares containing any sliver of car? Fail

If I only pick the ones that contain significant sections? Fail

If I only pick the ones that contain large sections? Fail

At this point I've given up and I just do several (knowing they'll fail) until they give me another kind of puzzle. I can't imagine it's supposed to work like this, and there are easy ways to fix it, so I feel like I'm missing something here.

[Nintex]

To get a different puzzle click on the arrow at the bottom left. Who doesn't like a free video game with their newsletter registration form. 

[MJBarret]

HumancentiPad.gif

Edit: nvm image wont upload :/



There we go!

[Besticus Maximus]

[Nintex]

*bois that never noticed Gwen Stacy*

Trans: "GWEN STACY IS TRANS"

*bois look up Gwen Stacy to see what all the hubbub is about*

goddamn, she ain't Trans.

[DSC]

Without looking at official tracking numbers, we don't know anything for sure. This is subjective as well but (at least on the gaming side) I don't think that userbase is getting smaller as much as posting habits and the culture have changed.

For your first point, there are plenty of long time posters going to back to the old place that would make those kinds of threads that have moved on from ERA. Don't get me wrong. We still have plenty of quality thread makers here, but there are threads like the ones you mentioned that we rarely see anymore. You could argue that some of those things are because the industry isn't quite as centralized as it used to be, i.e- Everyone doesn't participate in E3 week at the same time anymore.

As for points two and three, I think it is a mixture of two reasons. Some communities like Sales-Era have left so there are less sales threads now, and the ones that do get posted have far less activity than before. Second, and most importantly, is that I think people here have gravitated more towards the community OT's like PS Studios and Xbox Games Studios. Those thread topics tend to expand beyond just first party games as people tend to do more chit chatting there (myself included).

So yea. I think that the userbase is still very large. The site activity is just skewed differently now.

this all circles back to the same underlying issue: more and more ppl are either 1. banned or 2. looking at who gets banned and why and realizing "why would i post anything of note and put crosshairs on my back?"

the "more people just post in the OTs" thought is partly right, but doesn't get to the root cause. moderation, to their credit, has gotten rid of the most egregious platform warriors, so the ones that remain are the loudninjas and space_nuts, who hang out in the OT, secure in the knowledge that if they step over the line it's highly unlikely that they'll get reported enough to get noticed. this, of course, ignores that those OTs should actually be about the topics in their name, and not just "this is the shill zone, we just don't call it that."

the real crux of the issue remains - why put effort into a thread, keep it updated with new info, and so on, when you'll make a typo in an unrelated thread and get banned because you're not "notable" enough to get the benefit of the doubt?

[HaughtyFrank]

These reactions are always funny because they will never admit what it is that they don't like about the MC.

If you press them about it they will go on to say it's the fact that he's replacing the Prince in one fucking game.

Then to go on and lament how important the Prince is for Middle Eastern/Arab representation, then to be totally fine when it's Nolan Fucking North voicing him is another thing. Like nah, ya'll don't get to do that. Sorry. How about we call out the actual racism in the thread and the fact that if the music was from [INSERT WHITE BAND HERE] or if the MC was white-passing, no one would be posting this shit.

Here's to future PoP games featuring a female POC as the MC, :P.

Fuck you and your racist ass.

The fact that I can't even raise the issue about Arab representation in the single franchise where an Arab character was always put front and center without being accused of being racist is fucking wild.
Like I'm just trying to imagine the reaction if it was the other way around, everyone would be rightfully so annoyed to have a black character removed from his own franchise. But here it's just an Arab so it's fine and I guess looking at some response I received, with the next AC the quota for Arab representation has already been met.

Putting this thread on ignore for my own sanity, but maybe it would be time for some people on Era, including mods and admin, to not treat non-black minorities like some second class citizens who deserve less instead of more.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/prince-of-persia-the-lost-crown-announcement-trailer-coming-jan-18th-switch-xbox-pc-ps.727653/post-107041860

[Hap Shaughnessy]

...but maybe it would be time for some people on Era, including mods and admin, to not treat non-black minorities like some second class citizens who deserve less instead of more.

[Besticus Maximus]

It's actually far spicier than that because the persian/Arab bar fight for regional hegemony is at the heart of most major conflicts in the Middle East since late antiquity, including the major civil wars in Islam

An Arab prince in a prince of Persia game would be a tyrannical despot holding the yoke over the Persian majority who constitute a religious minority and most probably a slave trader too of African chattel slaves, while we're on



However this stands in comparison to the crime of min min being in Smash we may never know

[Nintex]

Wtf, why are they still playing race wars over that shitty music choice for a trailer. 

[Eric Cartman]

Like I'm just trying to imagine the reaction if it was the other way around, everyone would be rightfully so annoyed to have a black character removed from his own franchise.

Okay, let's play the race reversal scenario.

Closest we get is when Min-Min was confirmed over Twintelle to be in Smash, a Chinese girl over a Black woman. We banned folks for shitting on Chinese representation in the ensuing fallout, even though people had a point that Smash is light-skinned as shit and overall has no canon Black characters playable.

So no. There is no way we'd allow people to say, in that instance:

"Prince of the Middle East."

"Fuck is this Arab music?"

"What's with his hair/look? Looks like a Fortnite character?"

And on and on without banning people for it, especially since it hasn't even been confirmed yet if the new MC is Black or not. That's the thing; in the hours this trailer has been out it has not crossed your mind that the new MC is also Persian too.

So not only have people presumed that the new MC is Black because of racial stereotyping, but they've been low-key shitting on Black people and culture in the process in general, as is typical of gamers whenever they get reminded for a second that we exist.

Ultimately, you don't get a pass to dog on one minority ethnic group in service of another. That's not how intersectionality works.

uhhhhhhhhhhhh kind of fucking is tho

[Taco Bell Tower]

Min-Min reveal thread is also why AsiaEra left.

[Eric Cartman]

Like I'm just trying to imagine the reaction if it was the other way around, everyone would be rightfully so annoyed to have a black character removed from his own franchise.

Okay, let's play the race reversal scenario.

Closest we get is when Min-Min was confirmed over Twintelle to be in Smash, a Chinese girl over a Black woman. We banned folks for shitting on Chinese representation in the ensuing fallout, even though people had a point that Smash is light-skinned as shit and overall has no canon Black characters playable.

          gaslighting?
         /



Like, thats a fucking shitty comparison in the first place, but also apart from outright lying about how that thread went down you're still dropping a "even though we were right to shit it up" qualifier

[YuYu]

These reactions are always funny because they will never admit what it is that they don't like about the MC.

If you press them about it they will go on to say it's the fact that he's replacing the Prince in one fucking game.

Then to go on and lament how important the Prince is for Middle Eastern/Arab representation, then to be totally fine when it's Nolan Fucking North voicing him is another thing. Like nah, ya'll don't get to do that. Sorry. How about we call out the actual racism in the thread and the fact that if the music was from [INSERT WHITE BAND HERE] or if the MC was white-passing, no one would be posting this shit.

Here's to future PoP games featuring a female POC as the MC, :P.

Fuck you and your racist ass.

The fact that I can't even raise the issue about Arab representation in the single franchise where an Arab character was always put front and center without being accused of being racist is fucking wild.
Like I'm just trying to imagine the reaction if it was the other way around, everyone would be rightfully so annoyed to have a black character removed from his own franchise. But here it's just an Arab so it's fine and I guess looking at some response I received, with the next AC the quota for Arab representation has already been met.

Putting this thread on ignore for my own sanity, but maybe it would be time for some people on Era, including mods and admin, to not treat non-black minorities like some second class citizens who deserve less instead of more.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/prince-of-persia-the-lost-crown-announcement-trailer-coming-jan-18th-switch-xbox-pc-ps.727653/post-107041860

He's 100% right. 

[Uncle]

How about we call out the actual racism in the thread and the fact that if the music was from [INSERT WHITE BAND HERE] or if the MC was white-passing, no one would be posting this shit.

if the music had been from a white band that played beautiful high quality middle-eastern inspired music over modern shit, fuck yes

[Eric Cartman]

Trash. Twintelle is the only character from this IP worth a damn.

Another L for black representation in Smash. Pretty disappointed by this when they had an extremely popular character they could've gone with.

Garbage. A real opportunity for diversification -- one of the only opportunities among Nintendo's brands for a black woman specifically -- totally squandered.

God damn it.

Once again they refuse to put POC representation. Twintelle was an awesome popular character as well and yet they didn't add her...

So much for that. What a waste.

1st page, none of these were bans

[BIONIC]

Persians aren’t Arabs. These dolts can’t even play the race wars right

[Eric Cartman]

1st ban in thread?

User Banned (Permanent): Dismissing and trivialising the need for Black representation; prior severe ban for excusing blackface.

"If it's not a black person, it's bad."
Is that really where we are now?

[Eric Cartman]

Only staffpost threadmark?

OFFICIAL STAFF COMMUNICATION
Apologies for the delay -- we had to wait for Asian staff to become available for some of these reports.

There are some thorny intersectional issues at play in this thread that we need to cover before reopening. Many posters are disappointed about the ARMS rep not being Twintelle, as the game doesn't have much in the way of black or brown representation, and at this point that lack is fairly egregious. We banned a number of posts dismissing the idea that black representation in a game like this is a reasonable thing to expect and we would like to make it clear: It is.

The second issue is Min Min, a character with a Chinese name who speaks her lines in Chinese, and who is clearly Chinese-themed in a way that other Asian Smash characters are not. There are gamers who identify with Min Min and feel represented by her, especially at this time of increasing xenophobia and tensions towards China. This representation has value too, and dismissing that is also not okay.

"We're banning people getting annoyed by posts saying twintelle or gtfo because thats a totally reasonable stance. Also its fine if you like min-min tho"

[Eric Cartman]

Why am I still constantly surprised and amused by just how fucking bad era moderation is?

Like, I can't imagine a bigger self own thread to pick as an example of how baby-in-pram the bct get if they have to give up a medal to someone else at the oppression olympics than min-min in smash

[Eric Cartman]

[HaughtyFrank]

Why am I still constantly surprised and amused by just how fucking bad era moderation is?

Like, I can't imagine a bigger self own thread to pick as an example of how baby-in-pram the bct get if they have to give up a medal to someone else at the oppression olympics than min-min in smash

And that's just them getting mad that their preferred character wasn't picked. Now imagine a "Prince of Ghana" game starring a light skinned dude.

I'm sure saying "Oh, you're denying light skinned Arabs in Ghana exist? (2% of the population is Arab according to Wikipedia)" would go over well.

[Hap Shaughnessy]

Like I'm just trying to imagine the reaction if it was the other way around, everyone would be rightfully so annoyed to have a black character removed from his own franchise.

Okay, let's play the race reversal scenario.

Closest we get is when Min-Min was confirmed over Twintelle to be in Smash, a Chinese girl over a Black woman. We banned folks for shitting on Chinese representation in the ensuing fallout, even though people had a point that Smash is light-skinned as shit and overall has no canon Black characters playable.

So no. There is no way we'd allow people to say, in that instance:

"Prince of the Middle East."

"Fuck is this Arab music?"

"What's with his hair/look? Looks like a Fortnite character?"

And on and on without banning people for it, especially since it hasn't even been confirmed yet if the new MC is Black or not. That's the thing; in the hours this trailer has been out it has not crossed your mind that the new MC is also Persian too.

So not only have people presumed that the new MC is Black because of racial stereotyping, but they've been low-key shitting on Black people and culture in the process in general, as is typical of gamers whenever they get reminded for a second that we exist.

Ultimately, you don't get a pass to dog on one minority ethnic group in service of another. That's not how intersectionality works.

uhhhhhhhhhhhh kind of fucking is tho

You can only dog on "White adjacent" Asians.

[Hap Shaughnessy]

How about we call out the actual racism in the thread and the fact that if the music was from [INSERT WHITE BAND HERE] or if the MC was white-passing, no one would be posting this shit.

if the music had been from a white band that played beautiful high quality middle-eastern inspired music over modern shit, fuck yes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tea_Party

Musical style
Regarded as a progressive rock band,[25] The Tea Party's style fuses "blues, industrial rock, and psych-blasted progressive rock with Middle Eastern influences."[26] The band has described their style as "Moroccan-roll".[27]