To start off, while I was unable to actually
watch the video, I was able to
read the entire transcript. If there are any differences between the two that I am making assumptions on I heavily apologize for that.
I personally find it frustrating that no matter how politely a woman expresses her opinion, she will inevitably be cited as "yelling" or "screaming" or "hysterical" if she has something unpopular to say and sticks by it.
The reason I utilized those terms was due to the fact that normally when a person conveys a strong opinion to a large number of people who disagree with them that that is the method that they usually end up resorting to. If you prefer I could go back and edit my post to include the words "soapboxing" and "preaching" instead, as they convey the same connotations that I was attempting to convey. My usage of the words would be exactly the same if a man was expressing his views in the same manner, and had nothing to do with the fact that she is a woman, rather it had to do with the way she is attempting to convey her ideals upon others. If such wording offended you I will happily edit my previous post.
A trope can most certainly be sexist - the whole point of a trope is the cultural baggage it brings with it. The history, the environment. A trope being inherently sexist is a distinct possibility BECAUSE tropes are about how things have been used. Of course, just because a piece of media uses a sexist trope, that doesn't mean the piece of media itself is sexist - but it can certainly contribute to a sexist environment.
I disagree strongly. Just because it is much easier to use something to be sexist does not automatically make something sexist. Yes it is much more difficult to utilize a trope such as the Damsel in Distress in a way that is not sexist, but it
is possible. That is exactly why the character type of Badass Damsel as I linked to exists. It is the use of things like tropes that makes them sexist in that given situation, not the tropes themselves. I would be confident in saying that there are virtually no "sexist" tropes that
cannot be used in a way that is not sexist.
As for what I say is the "problem" of her videos, I would have nothing against her if she presented her videos as a simple documentary. If she wanted to say "this is a history of gender sexism in the video game industry" I would be totally fine with that. The problem is that in her summing of the video at the end she states her belief that said examples are contributing to a current problem. This restructures the entire video from a "here is history and insight" statement to a "this is causing a problem" statement. If she had cut straight from the Double Dragon Neon clip to her "next time on" style clip I wouldn't have a thing to say about the "problem" with her videos. Instead she throws in her beliefs on current situations, though, which immediately changes her persona from that of a historian to that of a person on a soapbox.
And that is where I find she goes wrong. Historians are valued for their opinion and the fact that we can learn from our past mistakes. Soapboxers are no different from the crazy man on the corner telling you that the end of the world is coming and are just as likely ignored. So she needs to decide what she wants to be. Does she want to be a historian, one who categorizes the past
but does not provide commentary on the present? OR does she want to become a soapboxer who tells you how things of the past are effecting the present but is just ultimately another voice for us to ignore? She can't be both, and the fact that she is trying to be is my problem with her. She either needs to cut the feminist propaganda that she uses to sum up her video (regardless of how true it may be) and be a historian or she needs to face the fact that many people will ignore/hate her as just another annoying voice. She can't have her cake and eat it too, it needs to be one or the other.
If she wants to cut the propaganda from her videos then I know that I will probably watch them, after all you should never ignore history. But if she decides to keep it in and remain a soapboxer then I will be politely excusing myself from her, as biased history is worthless to learn from, since bias intrinsically prevents us from learning from it in a method to prevent it from happening again.