Superheroes can’t get by on being big jerks all the time. Batman. Batman, stop it. You are ruining my point, Batman.

Okay, superheroes can’t get by on being big jerks all the time, unless they’re Batman. Or Cyclops. And real life “superheroes” really can’t get by if they’re going to be jerks to people. I’m not saying the Keene, New Hampshire group who went around topping up expired parking meters and calling themselves “Robin Hood and his Merry men” are necessarily real life superheroes. But I am saying that they probably should have been very careful about making sure they weren’t being jerks to the folks whose job it is to enforce parking while they were doing it.

This TED talk, delivered by Jackson Katz, Ph.D to TEDxFiDiWoman, is being called “the TED talk that might make every man a feminist” (Rebecca Eisenberg, Upworthy) If wishes were fishes, eh? Cynicism aside, Katz has a lot of good things to say about domestic abuse, sexual harassment, and other forms of gender violence, and the responsibility of men—not just those who commit it, but bystanders as well—to put an end to it. It sounds simple, but it’s something that’s often missed when gender violence as framed as a “women’s issue” (as if it’s not the behavior of the perpetrators that needs to change).

The talk took place back in February, but even though it’s a few months old I think it’s well worth a listen. I hope you think so, too.

(via: Skepchick)

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The TARDIS has awesome closets filled for any occasion. The gown was made by Redditor _queenofhearts. (via Fashionably Geek) 

We saw this fabulous trio walking in the first trailer for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire this morning but they deserved another look. Collider has one more shot of President Snow and Plutarch.

Convention harassment is just an off-shoot of regular, old harassment but seeing it invade your “safe space” can be tough to stomach. And some people have had enough. At PAX East this past weekend, a journalist (I use that term loosely) decided to interview a group of Lara Croft  cosplayers at the new Tomb Raider video game booth. What followed was not a professional interview of fans but rather a chance to treat women in costume not as people, but as sex objects. The Mary Sue spoke with one of the cosplayers involved as well as PAX management about the situation – a situation we’re hearing about far too often these days. 

Anita Sarkeesian runs a blog called Feminist Frequency and a long running, fascinating webseries of the same name where she examines the ways in which media and most often modern popular culture subtly and not-so-subtly support and perpetuate misogynistic ideas. I love her videos not because I necessarily agree with everything she’s ever said ever (you know, because we are not a single consciousness) but because when I do disagree with her, her detailed approach prompts me to calmly, privately examine why. This is not the case for 100% of human beings, however, and when she began a Kickstarter campaign to gain the means to expand her series to cover video games, it became the go-to example of overblown, vicious, flailing hate directed at a woman by self-identified members of the video game community. The net result of the harassment campaign (in numbers anyway, which is not to discount important qualitative things like personal peace of mind, or the outside perception of the video gamer community) was to encourage others to fund her campaign more than twenty-six times over what she’d initially asked for.

Naturally, the first video in her series is great: slickly edited, reaching back to Greek myths and forward to modern remakes of classic games, and she opens it with an idea that we here at The Mary Sue are all to familiar with: “Remember that it’s both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.”

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Whenever I write about in-game harassment, I hear back from folks who cite that behavior as the reason why they’ve never tried multiplayer. Understandable? Absolutely. But those comments have made me think back on how initially hesitant I was to step beyond single-player and into the realm of online gaming. I, too, had been put off by stories of harassment and toxic behavior (this would’ve been almost ten years ago now, which is a little depressing). So today, I’d like to add a counterweight to this ongoing discussion, and offer a bit of encouragement to those who are thinking about taking the plunge.

I should start with the caveat that there are plenty of legitimate reasons for choosing to fly solo. If multiplayer wasn’t a good experience for you, or if you just aren’t interested in playing with others, that’s A-okay. I myself have games that I prefer to play alone. But to those who are curious about multiplayer but feel skittish about jumping in — gather ’round.

Verbal abuse is a pandemic in the online gaming community. And while it affects all sorts of gamers, there’s a select brand of vitriol reserved for women who venture into voice chat. This is an oft-discussed issue, and we still don’t have a good understanding of the root causes, or of what we can do to alleviate it. But some recent academic research provides a interesting (and sobering) look at how persistent the problem is.

Last week, Gamasutra featured a blog post by graduate student Wai Yen Tang, who discussed a study entitled “Communication in multiplayer gaming: Examining player responses to gender cues.” The study was published online in September of last year by Jeffrey H. Kuznekoff and Lindsey M. Rose, two PhDs from Ohio University’s School of Communication Studies. The study addressed two main questions: does player gender affect the types of comments received in-game, and is player skill a factor? 245 multiplayer matches and 1660 individual players later, they had some answers.

Shortly after James Gunn issued his sincere apology for an ambiguously satirical post on his blog that was rediscovered by fans in the wake of his appointment as the director of Marvel Studio’s Guardians of the Galaxy, The Mary Sue received a letter in our inbox from a writer for another major entertainment blog. It contained what we thought were some very well put thoughts on the reaction against the reaction against Gunn’s post. We asked her if she would be comfortable publishing a form of the letter on the site, and she assented as long as she could make a few edits for the new format and she could obscure which specific site she worked for, which necessarily required the post to be published anonymously. Things were delayed a bit by the holidays and revisions, but without further ado, here’s her post.

Leonardo returns to his classical roots with this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle/René Magritte mashup by ben6835. (via Geek-Art)