Quick hit, kept short, because this is technically Beau Tanner's beat, but he's busy reviewing whatever grey armor-simulator came out this week, so it falls to me. Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women in Video Games is getting a reboot, and the internet answered exactly the way you knew it would, with the composure of a grease fire.

Some history for those who blocked out the 2010s. Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter in 2012 asking for a modest sum to make videos about how women are portrayed in games. The campaign blew past its goal almost immediately, she released a series of episodes cataloguing the "Damsel in Distress" and friends, and she spent the next several years as the most talked-about person in a hobby that claims it doesn't want to talk about anything. The videos themselves were narrated video essays, the kind a bright film student could produce in a dorm room. The war around them was Vietnam.

Now the series is coming back, and I have questions before I have opinions, though the opinions are coming, never fear. What does a reboot even mean here? Tropes vs. Women was criticism, not fiction. Remaking a documentary is like re-releasing a book review. The obvious read is that the landscape has changed since 2012, some of it because of her, and the new episodes will survey the battlefield. Studios put lectures in everything, audiences started staying home, and somebody now wants credit for noticing.

What I remember from the original run, and what its loudest defenders prefer to forget, is this. The series had a point, and the point was about forty years old by the time she made it. Feminist film criticism had covered the damsel, the disposable woman, and the Madonna-whore split decades earlier, and covered it better, because the critics doing it had actually watched the movies. Sarkeesian's sin ran in the other direction: she'd cherry-pick a game, misdescribe a scene, and collect the outrage dividend when gamers screamed. Both sides got rich on the screaming. The games mostly stayed the same.

That's the part that should humble everyone involved in the reboot. Twelve years, thousands of think pieces, whole careers built on both sides of this argument, and the games people actually play are... mostly the same games. The damsel got rescued in 2012 and she's getting rescued now, just with better lighting and a dialogue option where you can say you feel conflicted about it. If the new series wants to be honest, its first episode should be titled "We Yelled For a Decade and Changed the Writing, Not the Stories."

I watch how this story gets told, too, because the trade papers treat Sarkeesian like a historical figure now, a brave pioneer of criticism. She was a person with a webcam and a thesis, same as a hundred film students at any state school. The mythmaking is what happens when an industry would rather canonize a critic than listen to its customers.

So the reboot is coming. The takes are pre-written on both sides, the comments sections are already smoking, and somewhere a game studio is adding a Strong Female Protagonist to a spreadsheet to be safe. I'll watch the first episode the way I watch most remakes, out of loyalty to the original argument and low expectations of the new one. Beau will watch it at double speed and call it a chore. As usual, we'll both be right.