By Marigold K.
Hi everyone. I wanna have a talk.
Today we learned that Alison Rapp has had her employment terminated. It sucks 'cause this comes after months of harassment being sent her way as a result of a bunch of people (largely from reactionary hate-group "GamerGate") deciding they wanted to blame her for changes--ones that should be noted, she did not make herself--they found to be objectionable. Y'know, like not sexualizing minors.
Nintendo just let it all happen. And then fired her.
This, of course, gives off the impression that Nintendo is made-up of a do-nothing, useless bunch of cowardly fools that are too afraid of losing even the smallest amount of sales by taking any sort of meaningful stance with regards to the morally repugnant harassment perpetuated by a number of people who would barely leave a dent in sales if they were to be "alienated" by taking a common-sense stance against easy-to-condemn crap like harassment!
And if you, Nintendo (who I'm sure is definitely reading this article posted on this site run by just two lesbians), thought for a moment that this was some cool save like you up at the top making decisions like this think you're all collectively LeBron James and this is all just a game of flipping Basketball, I'm very sorry I'll never get to see the sorry look on your faces when you see the backlash you've gotten from this decision if you haven't already. Fact is, implicitly siding with a bunch of losers throwing a tantrum at a world that's leaving them behind, shock of all shocks, isn't the best business decision! Because a lot of people are now saying they won't be supporting Nintendo after this confounding, foolish decision, even after Alison Rapp herself said she'd rather we kept supporting you!
And of course, the only statement we've gotten is just an excuse-y piece of garbage with them saying they fired her because of some mythical, unspecified second job. That's really pathetic, Nintendo, you know that? I get that it's easier to say you didn't just fire someone because you didn't have the integrity to stand by her amidst this garbage fire, but it's hardly going to stop what you've only brought on yourselves. You've hardly even denounced the harassment, you just mentioned she was a "subject of criticism" and vaguely denounced the idea of someone being harassed. That is some pathetic crap, Nintendo, some ridiculously pathetic crap.
In the end Nintendo just comes out of this looking greedy, cowardly, and pathetic. They can't bear the thought of losing even one sale so they try to save them all by pulling some noncommital bullcrap like this, and, in doing so, have lost the faith and trust of a large number of fans that greatly outnumber the comparatively-small number of people who find it necessary to terrorize Alison Rapp for existing within the vicinity of localization efforts they take issue with and falsely deem "censorship" like Obama came in with the United States Secret Service and forced Mr. Miyamoto to personally take out the "boob-size slider" from Xenoblade Chronicles X.
With all of this said, the question remains: What happens next? I can't speak for everyone, but I'm not about to hold my breath and wait for Nintendo to re-hire Alison Rapp. They seem pretty committed to being uncommitted and cowardly. So what can we do? Offering support to Alison Rapp is absolutely a good use of your time. Some have even decided they'll stop buying Nintendo products, which certainly has a chance of being noticed by Nintendo, since money seems to be one of the few things they care about.
Me and Alayna started this site with the goal of offering a less-garbage-fire-y alternative to the kind of bile you see the games industry spew today, to push back against all the bigotry and such, because video games are so much better than that, and, I believe, most of us (terrorists, harassers, and bigots aside) are better than that as well. You, reader, feel free to do what you feel is right. If you can't buy Nintendo games in good conscience anymore, I'm sorry, and I wish you well in this decision. If you still buy Nintendo products, I wish you well and hope nobody hassles you on it. No matter what, though, we cannot allow for incidents like this to go the way cowards like the people at Nintendo want them to. We cannot accept that this is "just the way things are gonna be," because what hope do video games have as an art form if it's got all this crap dragging it down?
What I want us to remember is not to turn against each other or Alison Rapp over this. Alison Rapp didn't ask to be fired, she didn't ask to go through months of harassment and defamation, that was GamerGate and like-minded fools along with them. They are the worst of us, and we can do better than them. We must.
For us, and for people like Alison Rapp.