Anita Sarkeesian brings Tropes vs. Women in Video Games to a close
"This is one of the most emotionally complicated projects I've ever created."
After five years, Anita Sarkeesian and the Feminist Frequency team have published their final video in the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series.
The show, which offered a feminist analysis of video game culture, has tackled tropes ranging from the 'Damsel in Distress', in which female characters are seen primarily as gameplay objectives, to Sarkeesian's most recent episode 'The Lady Sidekick', which examines the differences between male and female supporting characters.
With 21 episodes now published, the team is moving on from the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games format.
"This may be the end of Tropes," wrote Sarkeesian in a blog post yesterday. "But it is absolutely, by no means the end of Feminist Frequency."
Work is now underway on a new show, with Sarkeesian hoping to address the connections between popular culture and the discrimination and prejudice seen in our current political climate.
The Tropes series catapulted Sarkeesian and her not-for-profit site into the mainstream, with big profile pieces printed in The New York Times, The Guardian and New Statesman. The Canadian-American feminist critic was also invited onto American late-night talk show The Colbert Report as a guest in late 2014.
However this media spotlight has gone hand-in-hand with a campaign of misogynistic harassment, aimed squarely at Sarkeesian and those closest to her. This has meant countless death threats, waves of hate-filled messages on social media and the leaking of private information online.
Prior to her appearance on the Colbert Report, for example, Sarkeesian was forced to cancel a speech she was giving at Utah State University, after staff received an anonymous email threatening "the deadliest school shooting in American history".
"Amid the tremendous fear and trauma resulting from the harassment I was experiencing," Sarkeesian wrote in yesterday's post, "there were moments of satisfaction and solace as I saw that our videos were reaching people, players and creators of games alike, and encouraging them to think about representations of women in games in ways that they hadn't before.
"This is one of the most emotionally complicated projects I've ever created. It has been simultaneously awful and wonderful, and the journey is one which I will most certainly never forget."