[Nepsotic]

So suddenly this is an attack on TAA as opposed to the points he brings up? Ok, then.

She's lucky, but almost chiefly opportunistic. I think Anita Sarkesian found a niche to express something a lot of people who don't know better found easy to agree with, and carried that rhetoric forward to continue appealing to these same people. As such, she's trapped in this role as the great Feminist Video Gamer, an entirely meaningless role and title.

Except she completely lied about such a role. She isn't a gamer and doesn't know very much about videogames at all. She's a liar who spreads harmful misinformation about a hobby no less harmless than enjoying movies or books.

She'll be a cultural footnote at best and replaced by someone even more conniving and inflammatory at worst. I think that if she is motivating more girls into the game development industry, that's a good thing, but she hasn't done anything to actually improve how trite and tone-deaf gaming is in general. It's a leisure activity that had a necessity for ideology foisted upon it sometime in the last 20 years. It's like politicizing a fucking board game, there's only so far the literal connotations of Monopoly can be scrutinized before you realize it's just kind of a shitty game anyway.

It's not like that at all. Monopoly doesn't have much to it (of course, that doesn't mean one can't read into it) whereas many videogames do. They're an art just as filmmaking is an art. It can offer ideas, spark discussions and be pretty deep in general.

My problem with you positing Sarkesian as something harmful is that The Amazing Atheist is the exact same person. He found a niche (beleaguring simplified arguments for the good religion does with an adolescent level of condemnation) and stuck to it.

Yeah, no, this isn't the case.
He's frequently admitted that religion has been a source of good in the past but that most of its core ideas are not. His stance in the subject is surprisingly unbias and I think if you took the time to watch more of his content you'd see it. A large fraction of the internet blindly hates him, and almost sees him as this one dimensional, being of absolute evil. They tend to have only seen a few of his videos (if any), and judge hin solely based on his more fiery younger self. Usually when he gets brought up in the comments section of an unrelated video/forum, it turns into a mindless, strawman, circle jerk, on how horrible he is. They see him as an atheist Satan.

There's also the point that a vast percentage of his content isn't focused at all on religion. People tend to find the topic that he's talked about in which they disagree with him on, and flame him based on that.

Neither Anita or TAA are going to grow as people though.

TJ actually has though, and you can see it in his videos throughout the years.

One of them is trapped in a role she was never a capable enough activist to actually do something with

Implying that anything needed to be done in the first case? She's not an activist, she's a con artist. She accepts 1/4th of a million dollars worth of donations on a promise to produce content she never produced. Nothing about her content has improved after taking the money though. Odd.

and the other is just genuinely ignorant and wishes to remain so.

Of all the words used to describe TAA, "ignorant" is the most common, and aggressively untrue. He's changed his views on topics many times, and he actively debates people of the opposing position. He researches his topics well and doesn't sit inside an echo chamber. I don't think you can call that ignorant.

I think you can't be concerned about one without recognizing the same toxicity in the other; they both argue an extremely narrow and generally contrarian way of examining their culture of choice without actually contributing something to it. You really can't hate one without understanding you love the other for the same reasons

Unlike Anita Sarkeesian, he never claimed he was contributing to society. He's always openly admitted to being a fat guy raging on the internet.
Narrow and contrarian? I assume you're talking about his views on religion, which is funny because anybody who disagrees with someone will criticise the opponent as being "narrow minded" simply because they don't share the same opinion as them.
TAA is often called a misogynist for criticising feminism but then called a Tumblr SJW for calling out racism (where there is genuine racism) and defending the kid who brought a clock to school and got arrested for it.

The real problem is the culture of divisiveness we allow ourselves to become embroiled in, through no distinct individual's agency or will, people have found an infinite number of topics to shit all over each other about on the internet. Gamergate and Atheism: Two words for something that doesn't really have any meaningful presence whatsoever. Atheism is widely interpreted as an absence or erasure of god, because it's hard to comprehend the complete, inevitable silence that is no god at all. I don't believe in any god, though I could accept an infinite celestial being might exist on some combination of dimensions or another, it's not any human god and it's not in any way connected to us. It's a purely (and puerile) scientific concept in my mind, not tied to any smelly old books.

Atheism is simply the lack of belief in a god. People often misinterpret it as us making a claim that god does not exist, which is not the case.

Gamergate is a desperate attempt to make the culture surrounding games seem grown up and dramatic instead of just boring and human.

GamerGate has a bad reputation because of the widespread and untrue criticism that it is misogynist (noticing a common theme, here?). Of course, like other groups with no leader (Anonymouse, for example) anybody with bad ideas can label themselves as being part of the group and make the claim that said bad ideas are core to the group. GamerGate is simply the movement protesting the lack of ethics in videogames journalism. It has caused various sites to rethink their ethics policy and has overall been a success and a force for good.

Unfortunately, trolls labelling themselves as GamerGaters reinforce the victim complex central to the feminist ideology.

The same way that the actual construction of a game is an incredibly tedious process, especially as the projects get bigger, so too is the widening maw of 'atheism' just one big breath before a yawn. If you have nothing to say to this god who isn't there, don't proclaim how important that is. Just get on with your day

I'm sorry, but this is a terrible argument. Religion promotes ideas and what you're saying there is that we should not criticise said ideas. No idea should be immune from criticism, and the notion that it should is fascism.

It might be silly to come back at a critique of The Amazing Atheist with The Amazing Atheist, but this is the best rebuttal to your argument I can recall. Instead of spending the time to write it up in my own words I'm going to post the video because I'm on my phone here and I can't be arsed.

If you're not going to just play a video game, don't start pretending some interpersonal bullshit that has nothing to do with you is actually affecting your ability to enjoy a video game. Anyone who got upset over any side of gamergate was just wrong to get hung up on it in the first place,

I'd say that ethics in games journalism is not a bad idea to be passionate about.

and any atheist who hasn't dropped the whole 'religion is just 100% bad no question' ~one month in needs to find some new topic.

I agree with you 100%. There has been much evidence to support that religion has contributed some good to society in the past. As I've already established, TJ agrees with this, too.

I wrote a blog earlier that illustrates how this applies to the religious as well: Shut the fuck up and stop pretending what you believe isn't horrible and weird

I agree with this point, also.

My reasons for thinking The Amazing Imbecile is not only ignorant, but also dishonest and contemptuous (like Sarkesian) is based on a simple personal anecdote that has stuck with me for several years. One of the first times I was browsing reddit TAA was doing an AMA and IMO it was TMI.

Anyway, he got asked some question like 'Yo did being a fat guy who yells like a child on the internet ever get you laid?' (paraphrased)
To which the obvious response of no, of course it wouldn't, was completely avoided and Amazing Anal cyst claimed that when he was in the lineup for a movie, some random girl happened to recognize him and later that night he was having sex with her. Let me illuminate that this story reeks of bullshit. Even then I thought it was completely inexplicable and didn't make any sense, but with every year I just get annoyed with how bad of a lie it was in the first place. That kind of thing doesn't happen if you're still a fat, childish loser in real life, which TAA definitely is.

TJ has rarely been shown to be a liar. Angry egotistical arsehole? Sure. Not really a liar though.
Of course, that story could totally be bullshit, but let's be honest, it's not exactly hard to believe. And it would be pretty weird for him to lie about that when he's been honest about other things that put him in an even worse light (in some people's eyes). Bananagate, comes to mind.
From what I've come to understand, TJ is a pretty honest guy, and as you can obviously tell, doesn't particularly care for trying to make himself look cool.
Again though, of course it could be a lie, not much reason to assume it was though. And even if it was, what does it have to do with anything, and how does it make his points any less valid? It's a pretty ad hominem point to make. If you can find the Reddit thread though, I'll have a read through it.

So that kind of self-serving, masturbatory nonsense is what rules this guy's life, and I find him even more loathsome for not only being gross and hateful, but incompetent and stupid as well.

He's gross, but I don't know if I'd call him hateful. He's easily infuriated by stupid people and bad ideas.
He's definitely not incompetent or stupid, though. I'd like you to give me examples, because I've followed him for a while and from my perspective he's an intelligent individual without a doubt.