Jim Sterling (The Jimquisition)

Claims to support someone who claims to support the black community but willingly donates to bigots? Hmm. What a surprise. That's the distinct tang of a liar.

I'm quite confident in my shitposting you know

Cawthon apparently also brought up donating to Tulsi Gabbard, of all people, like that's some kind of defense.

Nevermind that Tulsi Gabbard is probably one of the Trumpiest people the Democratic Party has right now - she's a bigot with ties to ultra-nationalist (and probably fascist) groups, not to mention a literal cult.

Also, did Jim describing Cawthon as nice remind anyone else of the "polite Nazi"?

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jun 14th 2021 at 4:24:57 PM

Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.

Tulsi Gabbard also supports anti-trans legislation IIRC.

I absolutely got those vibes from Cawthorne yeah.

Yeah. The guy's a chud, I'm not supporting his shit in any way. Don't wanna give him the satisfaction.

Shame this seems to be the generation of "People showing their whole ass and letting their scum show because its trendy now"

I'm quite confident in my shitposting you know

First Notch, now Scott. Apparently mainstream indie creators are cursed to devolve into wingnuts.

I associate chuds more with dudebros and other more countercultural elements of the Alt-Right. This guy is an evangelical ideologue, it's a different brand of badness.

Anyway, just as Cawthon has the right to spend his money as he wishes, I and everyone else equally have the right to not buy his games and give him money as a result of it.

On that note about personal freedom, likewise I won't begrudge anyone who still wants to consume the media by creators who are problematic, and neither will I for those who try to do so without paying him any money for it. Creators having bad views is one thing, and it should never, ever extend to harassing and threatening their family over it, but at the same time, any money that gets sent Cawthon's way is is being funneled to hate groups directly. Not to mention that he exercises a particularly large amount of creative influence over the work that supporting the work supports mostly him, as opposed to a team of various other creators of which he is just the highest-profile.

Edited by AlleyOop on Jun 14th 2021 at 11:06:13 AM

Cawthon is kind of worse than the people who are just openly and bluntly bigoted. Like, he clearly and obviously knows that Fnaf has a huge LGBT+ fanbase and doesn't want to alienate them, but he also doesn't want to admit the harm he's contributing to. So he came up with the "it's actually better for me to donate to the openly hateful people than to the people who want to make things better for queer people!" excuse to try and paper over it, despite it making literally no sense.

It's sort of like that time Ben Carson tried to argue that civil rights stole "an essential dignity" from black people, apparently because it required help from non-black people and accepting any help is bad?

It's a really bad spur of the moment defense of something awful that tries to dress it up as good but isn't able to because it's not really possible to make that argument in a legitimate manner. And yeah, the Tulsi Gabbard link is a bad argument. The woman claims to be pro-LGBT+ but votes against us whenever she gets the chance and her response to Trump's impeachment was that punishing him would make him more likely to win so telling him off in a strongly worded letter would have a stronger effect. It's the same kind of logic to try and dress up obvious bad actions in a nearly transparent veneer of respectability.

Not Three Laws compliant.

OK,why does Five Nights have a huge LGBT fanbase?

New theme music also a box

My guess is that the franchise is fairly vague and open to interpretation when it comes to characterization, making it easy for LGBTQ+ people to apply such themes into their fan projects without clashing with canon too much.

Most weird little indie projects that explode in popularity tend to have huge LGBT+ fanbases. They're actually usually the ones that maintain the popularity long-term. There's been a few attempts by...well, bigots to avert this with their weird little indie projects, but it turns out that the differences in fan culture mean the stuff deliberately designed to appeal to straight white men tends to sink pretty quickly in the cultural consciousness.

Turns out that women and queer people are way more likely to write fanfiction and do fan art and stuff that extends the life of a fandom. This is less because of anything inherent and more that properties actually acknowledging that women, queer people and people of colour actually exist and are worth telling stories about and too were very rare until recently (and they're still too rare) so people in those categories tend to turn to fanfic/fanart to make the representation they want to see.

Edited by Zendervai on Jun 14th 2021 at 11:44:52 AM

Not Three Laws compliant.

Because lobbying is actually legalized bribery and they're saying "hey, games aren't that bad, my best friend Abe Lincoln thinks so himself. If you don't agree with him, maybe his thousands of friends, also conveniently named Abe Lincoln, could convince you."

... I just noticed someone else explained it, but I am proud of my joke.

that said I wouldn't be surprised if people turned to piracy or outright boycotting FNAF (or at least vowing to never buy FNAF games again) over this. And I think people should let their friends know about Calhorn's allegiances and how buying the games might mean indirectly funding hate groups, especially if the friends are LGBTQ.

Also, Calhorn has joined a list of people that also includes Orson Scott Card and JK Rowing. A list of creators of influential works that have bigoted views.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jun 14th 2021 at 9:20:13 AM

I don't have huge investment in FNAF(only ever tried out the first one and didn't buy the rest since I learned I hit my teeth together from jumpscares :P)but its still somehow more depressing in case of prolific indie devs turning out to have horrible horrible views than big company stuff

I can see why. That whole scenario reeks of "You were the chosen one!"-like betrayal since indies tend to skew towards the counter-cultural, the left wing and the anti-big-business. Thus it stings worse when people who make famous indie works turn out to have views not dissimialr to the heads of big businesses (which are in turn right wing)

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jun 14th 2021 at 9:22:53 AM

Except that, as we see with JK Rowling, people aren't going to just settle with just pirating works. They will be all "so long as this guy is behind FNAF, we can't enjoy it even if we don't even pay for it!"

Hopefully they won't have that weird mentality where they implicitly believe that the only thing that could enable their enjoyment of the work again is if the creator just disappeared.

Edited by Psyga315 on Jun 14th 2021 at 9:28:57 AM

Though as I pointed out, EA and Activision don't even do the same shit as Cawthon — they donate more money to the Democratic Party these days.

Disgusted, but not surprised

JK Rowling is a really specific situation though. She's actively using her platform to make things worse for trans people, including the many, many, many trans fans of her works, she's tied in so closely to the franchise that she makes money from every single iteration of it (yes, including the theme park stuff, she's never once given up complete rights to anything) and pirating her stuff still results in her maintaining her cultural platform even if she didn't directly get money from it.

If you pirate Harry Potter and enjoy it, but accidentally inspire someone else to buy something from Harry Potter, you haven't actually done anything to deal with the problem, the problem being that Rowling is kind of an awful person with a lot of bigoted hang-ups who has an enormous cultural platform that she uses to attack people for no good reason.

Cawthon is unfortunately in a similar boat, because he works almost on his own. Buying anything he puts out goes pretty directly to him. He doesn't have the same cultural platform as Rowling so piracy doesn't have the same problem there, but any level of financial support is clearly and transparently going to some pretty awful purposes. There's also the element of LGBT+ people who bought and enjoyed the games but are now realizing that they helped directly fund legislative attacks against themselves without knowing about it. That's a pretty horrible feeling.

Edited by Zendervai on Jun 14th 2021 at 12:37:01 PM

Not Three Laws compliant.

I mean, that's pretty much the issue with "separating a work from its creator" - it only really works if the creator doesn't profit from it in any way anymore.

People can read and enjoy (some of) Lovecraft's work because the guy's been dead as a doornail for ages and his work's public domain. People can play and enjoy Minecraft because it's been created by Hatsune Miku.

You get the idea. Heck, it doesn't even matter if a creator has an active input (see Rowling and Harry Potter video games), as long as they're still financially benefiting from the product.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jun 14th 2021 at 6:39:17 PM

Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.

LGBT and furries(NOT zoophiliacs) factually have a huge overlap.

That makes quite a bit of sense actually

New theme music also a box

It would if FNAF was popular with Furries, which it really isn't.

As it's been explained to me a lot of Furries really don't like FNAF specifically because non-Furries assume they must love FNAF because of the anthropomorphic animal animatronics (which ignores that said animatronics are meant to be scary and off putting).

Angry gets shit done.

People assume anything involving vaguely animal-ish characters is popular with furries.

Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.

I never said it was POPULAR with the furry fandom, just that furries and the LGBT community overlapped enough that crossover was inevitable.

Huh. As a furry myself, I seen quite a bit of fanart of the animatronics.

Remember, these idiots drive, fuck, and vote. Not always in that order.

That still implies that it was popular with furries, though.

that said I wouldn't be surprised if there was a small contingent of them that liked the game but were driven out because of the assumption and associated stereotypes that came with it. Using the game as a vector to bully them regardless of whether of not they actually liked it. Or to rephrase, that jerks assumed that all FNAF players were furries and that by extension, want to screw animals (despite the likelyhood that most furries aren't bestialitists) driving out both those fans and actual furries.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jun 14th 2021 at 2:31:42 AM