Call me a geek, but the highlight of my Christmas season was seeing Daisy Ridley as Rey in The Force Awakens, grasping Luke’s old lightsaber, with the John Williams epic score swirling behind her, before beating seven shades out of one of cinema's most creepy-yet-terrifying villains.As one commenter noted: "Yes, a movie that started back in 2012 has a character based on a movement almost three years in the future. Is this what passes for journalism? "
If Rey and other kick-ass heroines are icons of geek feminism, Kylo Ren seems like a portrait of geek masculinity at its worst. Twitter has declared the black-helmeted Kylo a “Ren’s Rights Activist”, and that's not the only way the nerd knight reminds us of the most atrocious geek male behaviour of 2015.
Kylo Ren impotently thrashing a computer with his big red sword is the perfect portrait of Gamergate, the online hate campaign that continued its crusade against feminist video game reviewers in 2015. If Kylo Ren’s buddies in the First Order have a manifesto, don't be surprised if point one is "actually it's about ethics in galactic domination".
Whether it was the attempt to push women and writers of colour out of the 2015 Hugo awards, OpalGate and other incidents around the open source software movement, or the backlash against female comic book characters, the same pattern repeated across geek culture in 2015 - angry men acting like bigots because they believed something only they should be entitled to was being taken away.
There's an unfortunate overlap between geek culture and the “manosphere”. Men who still harbour the low self-esteem often associated with geek culture can be easily sucked in by "meninist" rhetoric, absurd ideas of Alpha and Gamma maleness, pick-up training, and a toxic attitude to women that has enthroned feminism as its enemy.
SJW journalism, anyhow.