You have to understand. As soon as GamerGate got off the ground I saw this for what it was, as I'm sure others did. Years ago, it was very uncool to be a nerd - I should know, I was, and am, one. Being an introverted recluse who spent their time messing around with computers, playing tabletop games and RPGs, collecting old videogames, reading comics, etc was a social death sentence. The accepted form of 'alternate' culture that had some level of social cache was to be into a flavour of the month obscure-but-not-really form of 'indy' music and wear tighter-than-normal jeans. Beyond that, you were only fully acceptable if you fell into the range of the 'Jock/Stacy' archetype.
If you had any of those interests, and you wanted to be able to socialise with people, you had to hide it.
Then, something interesting happened. Those awkwardly-dressed nerds with collections of Guyver action figures, they started making money. A lot of money. Elon Musk and Paypal. The Google founders. Zuckerberg. Etc. All spergy weirdos with no dress sense or social graces. Suddenly Steve Jobs was cool. Bill 'Austismo' Gates was being paraded around as the richest man on earth. And these people, who'd devoted their adolescence and young adulthood to being 'cool' and 'socially-acceptable' and part of the 'in-crowd'? They didn't get the future of wealth and power they'd been promised. They were toiling away working for nerds made good.
What you're seeing here, is the end result of the bland, worthless, shallow, image-obsessed 'popular kids' in your school trying to jump the bandwagon. The only problem is, a real nerd/geek/whatever can smell them from a mile off. They don't wear it right. A real nerd will spend hours at a time getting good at obscure Japanese scrolling shooters from the 80's. These people have only just become aware of the existence of Mario games. A real nerd has a carefully-curated collection of exceedingly rare and obscure Japanese action figures, robot toys, Sofubis, etc. These people have Funko Pop vinyls. A real nerd has first-printing copies of Barry Windsor-Smith's Weapon X in mint condition. These people would be repulsed by the violence and confused by the panel layout.
They've tried to adapt, to wear the skin of nerds, in the hopes that by doing so they'll magically become rich nerds themselves. It never occurred to them that years of genuine interest and skill development would also be necessary. So they take what they learned in their worthless college degrees (critical theory, Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, etc) and use it to start browbeating the real nerds like they're back in high school - 'videogame coding is too, uh, oppressive and exclusionary to women and minorities, yes that will do…', 'these comics are sexist and violent and problematic and I can't hope to write or draw on this level so the industry has to change for me', etc.
And after all this, it's still not working. They're not making money being nerds. They're still falling back into their old behaviour patterns of social and cultural one-upmanship, just now with SDCC exclusive Pop Vinyls and not fashionable jeans. And most importantly, turning on those actual nerds they so desperately, utterly hate.
