"We're the people that decided posting toxic bullcrap is activism" (Something Awful vs Jessica Price)

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Remember Cozy?

Bad nerds have been arguing over cozy things again.

To review, the cozy story is a story of comfort, without alarming, disturbing or controversial elements. The game Ryuutama is supposed to be cozy. There's a lot of meal breaks, I hear. If art is suppose to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, it supposedly does the first thing.

That is all well and good. They heyday of cozy games was in the early days of the pandemic when Animal Crossing was like the second-most discussed topic after Tiger King. Undeniably, the players were afflicted and in need of comfort--we all were.

Like most purportedly wholesome things, cozy has an extremely online fandom bent on making it the most catastrophically toxic subject possible, and they have extended the Theory of Cozy far beyond simply sustainable statements like "Some people like it". Our story begins there.

The Worst Theory of Cozy 

For most of history, cozy was untheorized. People enjoyed cozy mysteries in drawing rooms by Agatha Christie, they watched cozy sitcoms where people slightly richer than them had low-stakes adventures with people they wish they knew, they put put cozy pictures of children with big eyes swinging on swings on the fake-wood-panelled walls of their trailers.

The closest thing to a theory of cozy at that time was more just outraged, Christian and openly conservative opposition to non-cozy things like horror and violence in movies. In other words, cozy only approached intellectual heft when wielded against something and then only barely. Nobody argued for the superiority of cozy--their entertainment was so cozy all the time they didn't realize it until Stephen King or Elvis or John Waters came along and made something Not Cozy.

Then came the Internet. Cozy wasn't just for lazy Sundays or Reagan moms anymore. Cozy was rebranded as a revolutionary aesthetic pitting femme-coded softness and reasonableness against boycoded grit and propensity for violence. This theory wasn't articulated by intelligent people (there'd been no new social science backing up any connection between games and violence in the intervening years), but it was articulated.

In our neck of the woods, in role-playing games, a Theory of Cozy was used by most of the worst nerds against the OSR and all other interesting games. Lots of that played out around the least cozy games, like LotFP. The idea was: the extremely online worst nerds liked wholesome things, not things that referred to any kind of harsh reality or imaginative reflection thereof.

The actual objective truth is even if we view art as there to Comfort The Afflicted, the Afflicted deal with bad stuff in a variety of ways. Elizabeth Sandifer has described this as "hugboxing vs scab-picking". In other words, every marginalized artist from Kenneth Anger to 50 Cent and whatever the latest trans catgirl making harsh-noise metal is on your social media timeline right now has as much reason to make or like  painful, not-comforting art as anyone else. There is (again) no research in social science suggesting otherwise.

Also, for what its worth, everyone I'm aware of who advocated a Theory of Cozy in the RPG space also lied about rape. Seems uncozy.

for example, Ken Russel's deeply uncozy 'The Devils' was recently re-released to basically universal acclaim from everyone smart because nobody really believes cozy theory

Cozy Theory Isn't Real

So all this has put worst nerds, despite the fact that they love games with swords in them, in the position of having to be pro-cozy, because to be otherwise would be to go back on attacks that they've been making since at least 2009.

Here's UK-based harasser Zach Cox (aka Jellymuppet, of the really ugly-looking Greek-themed game Atrapos*) and RPGnet moderator/Something Awful goon Kai Tave, who did a Lancer thing*  rapping some game I never heard of over the knuckles with the Theory of Cozy just this past week:

The point is thousands of Internet-hours have been expended by cozy nerds attacking creators for daring to suggest to consumers they'll be attacked by cozy nerds for what they created.

Of course all this hullabaloo and all these attempts at social superiority are, yes, caused by people who, repeat, play games where you kill things with swords. There are various verbal gymnastics where someone tries to show how their killing things with swords is less toxic than your killing things with swords, but ask any difficult questions and they all disintegrate into a pool of tears and Steven Universe DVDs.

(Doubt me? If you are a cozy theorist named here I will pay you 1000$ right now to show up in the comments and answer all the questions put to you about why liking cozy games shows you're better in some way than the rest of us. If you're so afflicted, you're gonna want that 1000$.)

But really: none of these ideas are real, people don't say them because they thought them through, they say them to socially signal to each other that they are on the same team and whatever.

A good example is Kingdom Death. Both the Something Awful goons* and Fred Hicks* of cozy-favorite RPG Fate attacked Kingdom Death as the worst then the cozy-even-more-favorite Matt Mercer* was like "Oh Kindom Death is cool!" and visited the Kingdom Death factory and that created so much cognitive dissonance everyone just shut up and pretended it didn't happen.

Point being: aside from a few genuine sacred crackpots, this advocacy for cozy was all an elaborate social signalling mechanism that was bound to fall apart eventually, just like the "boobs in games are bad" rhetoric fell apart the second Lady Dimitrescu showed up.

So This Week

Someone wrote an essay expressing skepticism of the concept of Cozy Horror. This was attacked by bad nerd, former Paizo employee, and cryptoconservative Jessica Price* (aka Delafina777). Her response to this essay was classic Cozy Theory:

...and then something wild happened that has rarely happened before: the other bad nerds* from Something Awful actually disagreed. Tuxedo Catfish* for example:

Now the reason they dared to disagree with a fellow scold (and a well-known woman, no less) was not a good one--it was because this time the target of their attack was on Team Something Awful.

What's remarkable is that it features the Something Awful goons basically deconstructing all of the tactics they've been using on everyone else for years:

Like, goons admitting someone's using social justice language dishonestly AND that the only reason they had sympathy for someone was tribal allegiance? Could this be...self-awareness? 

"...we're the people that decided posting toxic bullcrap is activism"

I would write something here but this sociopathic goon just said it for me. Yes, Travis, you're the people that decided posting toxic bullcrap is activism. 

"We're the problem."

Yes, you fucking are.

"There's got to be a better way to live than reading EVERYTHING as uncharitably as possible". 

And, to top it all off--here's a whole articulate theory of why these people act like this--from one of the chuds who acts like this. It's so reasonable I have nothing to add. Click to enlarge:

Now, I know this is naïve to even ask but, if they understand that they're the problem and they've been attacking artists for stupid reasons for over a decade: when are they going to apologize to us?

Full documentation of this internet fight here.

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*who helped all the other asterisked people here lie about rape . Here's the audio.

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