From my understanding: a mansplanation is when someone who identifies with the male gender (from here on we’ll call them men) gives an unwarranted, yet concise response to an emotionally charged situation. Someone, a woman perhaps, finds themselves in a difficult situation and seeks out sympathy, but instead receives an apathetic response. It has devolved now to mean when a man has any opinion about anything.
So Guild Wars 2 is easily my favorite MMORPG. As someone who has tried nearly every game since finding out World of Warcraft was going to cost $15 a month on release (in 2004, that’s a lot of money for an eighth grader), Guild Wars 2 and its no subscriptions required scheme was a welcomed godsend (sixish years later mind you).
It was something completely different than any MMORPG I played. Unlike WoW, it removed the idea that you were competing with other people. You had to work together to accomplish a goal and everyone got their fair share of rewards. It nurtured fellowship and cooperation from the get-go. You succeed together, you fail together, you play together. You weren’t a cog in a vast machine of people, you were an adventurer forging your own destiny, affecting the world around you with your decisions. This was our story.
While playing WoW, on the other hand, I wasn’t deriving joy from my experiences. I was too focused on either a stupid side quest or too anxious of being attacked just because I was forced to choose a side before I took my first step in Azeroth (Blizzard Entertainment: Cultivating Racism since 1994).
But what I’ll always remember most from those early days of Guild Wars are the characters and the handling of rather controversial topics in video games at the time. After all, a few of the main characters were gay.
A homosexual character in a fantasy setting was almost unheard of at the time, let alone in a video game. But Ruben, you might be saying, there have been LGBTQLOLWTFBBQ characters in fantasy for years! Look, if you made a list of traits for a homosexual character in any form of media, and “being gay” is somewhere on that list, then that wasn’t a character. That was a plot device. That’s what was most shocking, none of the characters were gay-4-plot. And no one cared.
So not only were there multiple gay characters, but they were in stable relationships rather than the classically homophobic trope of the tragic lovers. You don’t look at straight characters and point out that he’s a boy, she’s a girl. That would be ridiculous would it not? So there’s no need to point out LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ relationships because they just were. Additionally, the introduction of a trans character wasn’t made with fanfare and wasn’t met with derision. Guild Wars 2 quietly slipped it in as an Easter egg. A detail so small, yet so progressive. Players don’t question it, because it’s not something to be questioned. That’s what is beautiful about it.
That being said…
It’s going to be six years since Guild Wars 2 launched, and its storyline has stagnated a bit. Players have been critical of the storytelling, as they rightfully should. We’re the ones playing, we’re the ones experiencing it, and we’re the reason you’re writing it. Some of the writers, developers, and artists have done us the honor of talking to the players about the process. They replied to our comments, cared about our concerns, and took our incessant bitching with grace. For a game that always touted that it would always be our story, it extended beyond that because the developers put forth the effort to make it feel like our game. Enter Jessica Price.
Price was a former project manager at Paizo Inc., known best for their Pathfinder games, from 2012 to 2017. Her resume is extensive, and her body of work speaks for itself. So when she was brought on to the narrative team for Guild Wars 2’s expansion, Path of Fire, we had reasons to be excited. Of course in this age of information, no one can just be hired without some cursory background checking from the community. And boy were the red flags raised.
Her Twitter account is a trove of radical leftism, sexism, and racism. An ouroboros line of thinking where they are so focused on ending hate, they become vitriolic themselves. Everyone is a possible adversary, and difference means dissidence. Basically, she’s the person you invite to the party when you want everyone to leave.
But no one can say Price didn’t know how to do her job. When answering a Q&A about the branching choices in video games, Price wrote an eloquent and comprehensive response on the subject. To continue the conversation, a respected member of the community known as Deroir wanted to voice his opinion on the matter. For the uninitiated, Deroir is a sponsored content creator. That means he works with Guild Wars 2 developers to create content to promote the game. He makes guides, creates videos about the lore, and even has an NPC named after him. He’s an important part of the community, to say the least. So what should have started as an open, friendly discussion about the game, the kind of conversation that he has probably had a dozen times with a handful of developers, quickly becomes anything but.
It quickly unravels. But like an adult with any child with a tantrum, Deroir does the mature thing and ignores her. But it’s just the beginning and quickly becomes a game of gender politics.
And with that, Jessica Price becomes a member of the community that we have all worked for six years not to become.
But here’s what really burns my toast
Jessica Price uses this moment to cite her gender as the reason for the drama she fomented. Not her position. Not her expertise. Not even the work she’s done on the current expansion. Her gender. She accuses people of mansplaining and belittles legitimate discourse as “manfeels.” And she did it to a player base that literally couldn’t care less about your gender or sexuality. We didn’t care in 2012, we don’t care in 2018.
At the zenith in the battle of identity politics, as a woman with prestige, don’t you think it is your responsibility to not undermine a movement that aims to benefit half the planet? I’m not saying to be submissive. I’m not saying act demure. But you should act like an adult and be aware that your actions, your job, your art are bigger than your gender.
And that’s what gets me. If you were to chart your characteristics, like a character in a video game for example, and you believed that your defining feature, the cornerstone for all reasoning and decision making, was your gender then that’s on you. You are more than the sum of your parts. Maybe it’s just my man-ignorance (it’s like regular ignorance, but this one is sexist) poking through, maybe it’s something that I’m missing that I’ll never be able to fully understand, but the more someone draws attention to their gender/sexuality/race, the more they separate themselves into those marginalized groups. Because for a lot of people, we stopped caring about what makes us different a long time ago.
I feel bad for the people who use their gender as a source of outrage for their self-affliction. The day is coming where that well runs dry. There will be that moment they can’t blame anyone else. They’ll have to come to the conclusion that the world isn’t at fault for their own insufferable behavior.
And by the way, calling it mansplaining is sexism. Calling it manfeels is sexism. Using those words in an attempt to demean, demoralize, or judge is prejudice, and that means you’re an asshole.
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