Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

I'm still not in a place where I feel safe looking at this here website, which means I've been doing a lot more binging of youtube stuff to keep me distracted, and somewhere in doing that my better judgement lost out and I watched this here "Mask Off" video from Lindsay Ellis and

A- This felt like seriously cheating on my big break from looking at this awful website.

B- This is a very bad video that she really should not have produced and uploaded and I'm a bit compelled now to get into it, again, against my better judgement.

Apologies if I'm preaching

to the choir, and also I cannot stress enough that I am not trying to open a dialog/start crap/anything else like that here.

I would advise against watching the video for context because, again, it is very bad, and no good can come of that, and it's worth noting that I have no

context AT ALL on the events leading up to her creating said video beyond what she explains within it and my general familiarity with how stuff goes down on this site.

So from where I sit the order of events here goes something like this:
- She made some random comment comparing

the new Disney movie Raya and the Last Dragon to Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender.
- A large number of people made fun of her for this, on a general theme that the similarities she was seeing were due to both drawing on the common tropes and themes of various other things

she is not particularly familiar with (which... makes sense all around from my perspective since what both have in common is they're works of American animation setting out to recreate the overall vibe of kid-friendly stories from Southeast-Asia-in-General, as I understand it).

- Due to embarrassment as being called out as unfamiliar with a big swath of media and/or really having a big ol' mentions flood in need of stemming somehow, she elaborated starting off with "I can see where if you squint I was implying all Asian-inspired properties are the same"

- That particular choice of phrasing, put mildly, was the opposite of helpful to the cause of... literally everything she was attempting to accomplish by weighing in further on the subject. What with the association of squinting with anti-Asian racism and all.
- Fallout happened.

- She temporarily deactivated her Twitter account and set to work scripting this video.
- She released, again, a very bad video.

It opens with a summary that, again, is what I'm pulling the above from, before transitioning into just this sort of free association filmed breakdown

of her laying out and blurring the lines between literally every event wherein she has met with hostility and also an occasion where she was raped, ending off with a general declaration of hostilities towards the sources of... that whole tangle of trauma, and screenshots of a lot

of twitter posts her ire was directed at (which again, is an undifferentiated pile of people criticizing something that has the potential to come off as racist, as well as fascist harassment posts).

And I'm just going to go ahead and take it for granted that anyone highlighted

there has since been harassed to hell and back, because they were highlighted in a video that presently has close to 2 million views, on a general subject of Twitter drama, which associated them with rapists.

So obviously, if we get into Monday morning quarterbacking, when first

getting picked on for having a shallow reference pool, the thing to do would be to just completely ignore that, or if she had the bandwidth learn about some new media to maybe get into. And of course after getting yelled at for instead responding to things with something that can

be reasonably read as racist, the thing to do would be to immediately publicly apologize, clarifying that that was not her intent and that she straight up did not connect the dots on how that phrase might come across in that context. But I feel pretty justified in calling this

whole thing her having a public breakdown, and if you're rational enough to do any of those sensible things you're also rational enough to save this sort of brain dump until your next therapy session, not a professionally produced video essay.

What I CAN get into here that's at

potentially somewhat constructive is how she paints and groups various people in this video, and how there are some real serious red flags there, which I really hope some people she is on good terms with caught (or catch as a result of me getting into this) and bring up at some

appropriate future time.

In particular, while really in the thick of things in this video, she gets into this whole bit comparing and contrasting "diet Nazis on 8chan" and "wokescolds on Twitter."

These terms first off, full stop do not belong in anyone's vocabulary, and if you

EVER find yourself employing them, you need to immediately stop yourself, rephrase what you were going to say, and think real hard about who the hell you picked those up from and how much other nazi propaganda that source has been exposing you to.

"Wokescold" is an unambiguously

right-wing as all hell term, combining the inherently misogynistic "scold" (a woman who constantly nags you about things you are doing) and "woke" which as I regularly remind people was originally used as an adjective to describe "people who have had the sobering realization that

racist cops regularly straight up murder innocent people and are fully supported by existing law enforcement infrastructure when doing so" and is now used exclusively as a far-right term of derision for people who have a problem with that particular status quo and related social

issues in the field of "hey fascists should not be allowed to freely attack and antagonize the majority of humanity. If under any circumstances, you find yourself in a place where you are deriding people you dislike with a term combining those ideas, something has gone terribly

wrong, and people are within their right to consider you an existential threat by default.

Meanwhile, "diet Nazi" is one of several terms (see also "alt lite" for a more popular variation) specifically to perpetuate the myth that there exists such a thing as a "harmless Nazi."

Someone who is part of the general Nazi social scene but you know, "isn't involved in any of the really bad stuff." I could spend hours sitting here explaining how it is impossible to believe such a person can exist if you truly understand what Nazis are and how they operate, but

I don't have the time right now, so let me instead just note that I have never seen any of these terms applied to anyone who I have not personally witnessed being directly involved in "the really bad stuff." I mean, this video is explicitly referencing 8chan posters. Those people

have straight up collaboratively planned and executed mass shootings and child abductions. Nobody ever gets to imply their hands aren't dirty.

And of course, in the immediate context of this video, she is using these terms to draw a very questionable dividing line. People using

the standard fascist life-ruination tactics of collecting and weaponizing distorted versions of every possible reason anyone in history may ever have had to take issue with you ever go in the mental box she has labeled "wokescolds" along with, apparently, people getting on her

case about thinking Avatar invented villain redemption or Shitennou setups or whatever came up and people observing that she should definitely avoid any references to squinting when defending herself from criticisms from/involving Asian people.

And then she has this other mental

box labeled "diet nazis" which contains... other fascists using those exact same tactics (possibly even overlapping with those she's personally dealing with due to confusion over who runs what sock puppet account) she's incorrectly considering to be "not friends, but harmless."

And... I just straight up cannot think of any other circumstances which would cause her to be mentally grouping people in that way that isn't: Nazis are running the standard tactic on Lindsay Ellis where half of them pretend to be leftists and half lovebomb her, and it's working.

This is a very difficult observation for me to make publicly, because the natural instinct of way too many people when faced with that is to fully write her off, declare her evil, and start being super hostile towards her, which can only end in tragedy. So, yeah, please don't.

If you're one of the uh... I think literally maybe 2 people in the overlap of people who read stuff like this when I write it and actual friends of hers that she trusts, I would very much recommend some combination of consoling her through the crap she's going through and also

making a serious effort to get her to redraw the borders on those mental groupings and, seriously, interrogate how the hell "wokescold" ended up in her vocabulary.

For everyone else, I'd say... keep your distance, don't engage, kinda treat the whole situation like one of those

deals where one of the good guys definitely got some nasty bites from the zombies and is probably going to die and become one, but we're all in agreement that we're going to try just really cleaning and dressing those wounds and hoping a recovery can be made if we're careful.

Oh and of course remember that pretending to be offended leftists taking things too far is not JUST a thing that nazis do on the internet, but in fact the main thing they do, and they regularly recruit people the schtick works on, leaving you with nazis who can convincingly pull

off the act and have actually good people mistakenly vouching for them. Because this is a constant problem, and people have this weird goldfish memory going where they can watch and understand it 5 times under different banners, then totally get blindsided when they fly a 6th.