4chan's Vivian James

SPEAKER_01:
It's the latest development in what has become known as Gamergate, an online culture war.

Tig:
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Neutral Good. I'm your host, Tig. The entire first season of Neutral Good is about hashtag Gamergate, so if you haven't gone back and listened to the previous episodes, I highly recommend them. In the last episode, we did a bit of a deep dive into the notorious image board 4chan, covering some of their escapades like inventing the Rickroll or the ubiquitous recycling of Pepe the Frog memes. We also learned about 4chan's dark side. The site's garnered some pretty bad press over the years, being linked to troll campaigns and even murders. And for several months during the height of Gamergate, 4chan users orchestrated multiple harassment campaigns against people like Zoe Quinn and their peers. I think this should serve as a good foundation for approaching this episode. If you can entertain the idea that 4chan users are both smart and often malicious trolls not caring who they hurt, then hopefully the topic of this episode will be a little easier to navigate. It's still pretty weird though. Content warning, this episode will feature discussion of a rape joke about Dragon Ball Z characters perpetuated by 4chan, and there's some pretty awful language in a few places. I apologize in advance, but I'm warning you now.

SPEAKER_01:
Have you heard the tale of V?

Tig:
ordained by gamers and TFYC, brought forth to life by Father V. If you've never heard of the quote-unquote mascot of Gamergate, Vivian James, count yourself lucky. While you may not know her name, you've probably seen her if you've spent any amount of time in gaming forums or discussion boards. Most often she's drawn as simply a young brown haired white girl in what appears to be maybe like jeans, hands in her pockets, obscured by a striped hoodie that's probably a size too big, maybe two sizes too big, a four leaf clover in her hair, and the hoodie's striped alternating color scheme are references to 4chan and the daily dose rape joke that many of the site users are so fond of retelling in new media. We'll get into that later. Vivian's average appearance is no accident. In fact, quite the opposite. She was designed to be normal. normal, to subvert the usual expectations of something you'd get from a 4chan community. She was workshopped and refined to be a palatable troll for the normies, but I think I'm getting way ahead of myself. Let's start from the beginning on this one. In August of 2014, while other events during Gamergate are playing out, an indie game dev group named the Fine Young Capitalists land themselves in a Twitter disagreement with Zoe Quinn over the terms and conditions for an upcoming game jam they were trying to fund. I really want to give the Fine Young Capitalists the benefit of the doubt, but the way they responded throughout this, I still believe to this day that their actions were misguided and not necessarily malicious. I will link to articles about that in the show notes. Unfortunately, 4chan users on multiple boards saw this as an opportunity to run cover for yet more harassment against Zoe Quinn and their peers. The fine young capitalists started an Indiegogo campaign to fund their game jam with the alleged goals of helping women get a foothold in the game dev industry. And 4chan users on the poll, politically incorrect board, realized they could leverage this against Zoe Quinn and others who were publicly against Gamergate by flipping the narrative.

SPEAKER_01:
But wait, I heard from pretty much every mainstream media ever that Gamergate is a misogynist movement to drive women out of gaming. Why is Gamergate donating to women who are developing video games? Because, well, they're not about driving women out of gaming. They're about fighting unethical journalists. You know, the same people that say that Gamergate is a misogynist hate group. In fact, the people who are against the Gamergate movement are actually the ones driving women out of gaming.

Tig:
Let's hear it from the source, a user on 4chan's politically incorrect board. Anonymous says, we will look really good if we donate to this. And there's a link to the Indiegogo campaign and they list some points. SJW game Spur Circle doesn't support this. Funded by 4chan, there will be a lot of ass hurt. And then in spoiler tags, the games don't look terrible either. Someone replies, oh, God, this idea is so delicious. Push donations to the Fine Young Capitalists on all boards. New plan. We sponsor the Fine Young Capitalists. We adopt and support it. Become its rallying cry for breaking down the merit wall for women in gaming. We get coverage on sites that are sitting up and taking attention now. Reporting on the SJW bullshit. Can you imagine 4chan attacks the cancer and simultaneously sponsors the chemo at the same time? We'd be PR untouchable. That same day, folks on the V video games board were posting this. Operation fuck the cancer, fund the chemo. It's happening, you silly bastards. Read the collage and make it happen. Disregard Zoe. Focus the effort. It will be fabulous. The linked image contains screencaps of the aforementioned politically incorrect posts and posts explaining how to donate to the Indiegogo campaign. To sum up, the idea here is that by funding this event and coordinating a PR campaign at the same time 4chan could make Zoe Quinn look hypocritical on Twitter and make themselves look good. 4chan can appear to be pro-women by donating directly, and also promote the idea that Zoe Quinn doesn't actually support women because Zoe doesn't support this particular event. The Fine Young Capitalists and 4chan go back and forth over details in email, eventually agreeing upon the following. Chan's donors would be able to donate separately to prevent Shills from destroying the operation. 4chan would also get the right to design a character at the $2,000 reward level. 4chan would choose which charity the money goes to, and they chose, via Strawpoll, the Colon Cancer Alliance, in their words, to, quote, chemo butthurt, end quote. 4chan proceeds to top the donation charts for a few days, and most importantly, raises enough money to hit the custom design character funding reward on Indiegogo. Here's a post from a user on the video games board, with a link to the campaign and a screencap of the funding goals. Alright V, as a group we've raised over $5,000 so what's our custom character gonna be? A guy who hates women but likes tits or dick butt? And the response? Just an average female gamer to troll everyone. All the blank in the media will expect some sort of pedo crap or lol so random shit and we will just give them a simple average girl. Three hours later, someone had drawn up a rough draft. The first sketch didn't have the infamous hoodie or the clover in her hair. Those were inspired by the v-board over the course of over 500 straw polls and multiple threads on the topic. You could say they were pretty obsessed with their creation, but that would still be putting it lightly. Consensus is eventually achieved and the design for V's daughter, as she's being referred to, yikes, is submitted to the fine young capitalists. Folks on the V board go on to agree on some fundamentals that they also email to the campaign. Here's the email. has finished yelling at each other. Here's what's been decided. Her name is Vivian James, jokingly close to video games. Her nickname is Clover 4chan symbol. Her online handle should it ever come up is level because LVL is like close to slash V slash, which is how the boards are represented on 4chan. So there's some sort of thing there. Plenty of excited discussion around personality was had, but that's something I think you should be free to work around. The only things we'd like you to keep in mind, should relevant situations ever come up, are the things that are obvious from her designs and our board's attitude towards the current controversy. Emphasis mine. Points. Tough loves video games. Loathes dishonesty and hypocrisy. Low affect. Grumpy. Perpetually fed up and tired. Ultimately, it's your game and the game of the ladies that pitched whatever concept wins. Finally, here's some more character art that's been generated during the yelling. I'm always amazed by how quickly 4chan grows to love things. And the images they included in the email? They were porn. Typical 4chan. The fine young capitalists would go on to post progress updates of their Game Jam campaign on Twitter, mentioning how much money had been raised by 4chan, and the amounts were not insubstantial. This would eventually draw the ire of progressive activists and victims of 4chan's Gamergate harassment campaign, questioning why the fine young capitalists would align themselves with and accept money from an organization like 4chan. Folks on Twitter rightly pointed out things like the character's purple and green striped hoodie being a direct reference to the awful Piccolo Dick rape joke. Piccolo Dick is a pretty disturbing animated gif of the Dragon Ball Z character, Piccolo, raping the character, Vegeta. And since 4chan loves shock value, it gets posted frequently. So frequently, in fact, that it's also been nicknamed Daily Dose, and there are entire memes dedicated to using simply the green and purple color scheme that the original GIF featured so heavily. For users in the know, the color scheme is immediately meant to elicit the Piccolo dick slash Daily Dose imagery. For 4chan's V-Board, this was the perfect meme to sneak into the Vivian James character, as only those in the know would understand the green and purple and the rest of the quote normies would be unknowingly perpetuating a rape joke. This is 4chan in a nutshell. Always be trolling. I think there's also an important lesson here about the paradox of tolerance. Ideally, you wouldn't align yourself with or take money from an organization rife with Nazis, not just misogynists and racists, by the way. whose sole purpose is trolling and causing chaos. Tolerating the Nazis creates an atmosphere where the Nazis dictate terms. So the paradox is that you must be intolerant of some, in this case 4chan, in order to guard against intolerance becoming the practice. The fine young capitalists were taken to task on social media for accepting aid from 4chan, and their response was this. On oppression and narrative, please, members of serious social justice movements, When you say that 4chan cannot take part in a project, you are oppressing them. By the very definition of the word, you are. You harm your own movement, and you destroy the narrative the media has created. If you wish to only destroy the narrative, then support them. If you oppress them, you only create more publicity for the project and actively harm your own. I care about the world being a better place, and there are still serious issues involved in social justice. Preventing 4chan from giving money to support butt cancer and women is the least important issue I can think of. Changing the mind of the small minority that are misogynists is far more important. And honestly, I'm not that surprised because this was the exact misguided intent I attributed to the fine young capitalists earlier in the episode. They mean well, but they don't really understand how 4chan runs operations like this all the time to achieve their goals. The fine young capitalists are, at best, useful idiots in 4chan's plan to further harass Zoe Quinn and promote 4chan-positive PR. 4chan users are definitely not victims at any point in this story. As part of my research, I tried to find a smoking gun that would demonstrate just how Vivian James became a sort of mascot for Gamergate, not just for the video games board itself. I was hoping to find something definitive that would explain why videos about Gamergate often featured Vivian James in the thumbnail. And instead, what I found was a lot of people in 2014 asking who the heck Vivian James was. And the response always included something about Zoe Quinn, GamerGate, and Ethics in Gaming Journalism. Here are some examples. This is a Reddit post titled, Who is this Vivian person 4chan keeps talking about? And thatguy381 replies, It is a character they created for a charity project for women in gaming. They donated over 2,000 to 5,000 USD to be able to create a character. I'm on mobile, so I can't link you the explanation just now. Basically, this stems from the Zoe Quinn controversy, where they want to show the world they can support women in gaming while bashing Zoe Quinn, who cheated on this charity. Oh, and the proceeds from the game go to colon cancer research to help everyone who's butthurt about it. Here's another Reddit post titled, Who is Vivian James? And Phoenix Music Man replies, Vivian James is a mascot of the Video Games Board on 4chan. Basically, there was a lot of accusations towards 4chan that they were all monsters, pedophiles, misogynists, etc. etc. during Gamergate. At this time, there was also an event being hosted by the Fine Young Capitalists, a company that Zoe Quinn had allegedly messed with a game they were developing. 4chan wanted to spite Zoe and to reject the image that they were women hating misogynists, so decided to sponsor this company as it hosted a charity event for women in gaming. All proceeds went to a charity specified by the donator. The reward for hitting a donation mark, $10,000 if I recall correctly, was having a logo designed for them. 4chan specifically, V, despite Pol organizing this raid, collectively hit this goal and donated the proceeds to Colon Cancer Alliance. Since they won, they also got to design a character to appear in a game. Again, to reject the idea that they were women hating men who sexualized women, they decided to make the character an ordinary, not-sexually-dressed gamer girl. Aspects of 4chan were incorporated into this character. The purple and green stripes represent the Daily Dose meme, and the four-leaf clover is 4chan's logo. They named her Vivian James as a play on words of video games, which of course came from video games. And thus, V's daughter was born. And the comments on these posts always devolve into straight up misogyny directed at Zoe Quinn, sometimes Anita Sarkeesian, or just feminists in general. They're still up and searchable today, almost 10 years later, and I've included the links in the show notes. I've also included a link to Ashley Lynch's archive of the propaganda of Vivian James, which may help explain the popularity of the character a bit better. It's a weird and fascinating look at 4chan's creative obsession. Thank you for listening to Episode 5 of Neutral Good, and I hope you learned something along the way. Show notes and transcripts are available on the website at www.neutralgoodpodcast.com. There is still more to come on the topic of Gamergate, so hopefully you'll come along for the next episode. And thank you again.