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Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, the video series crowdfunded in 2012, has now come to a close. The series was crowdfunded through Kickstarter by Anita Sarkeesian, pictured, and published on YouTube, via her website Feminist Frequency. The final episode is called The Lady Sidekick.
Sarkeesian had previously produced a video series called Tropes vs. Women examining the portrayal of women in film and television. She garnered much more attention Kickstarting the second series when it initiated a landslide of harassment from some corners of the internet, gamers and others, who were extremely angry about the concept of her videos.
If the goal of sending Sarkeesian explicitly horrible threats was to shut down the video series, this backfired in spectacular fashion. The project was initially aiming to raise $6,000 and make five videos on the topic. The harassment Sarkeesian received greatly raised the profile of the project, so it closed with funding of $158, 922.
While it took almost five years, the full run of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games is 16 videos long, with five ‘bonus episodes’, totaling almost five hours in length. Sarkeesian discusses the process in a blog post here, where she also states that ‘This may be the end of Tropes, but it is absolutely, by no means the end of Feminist Frequency.’
