Laura Bailey, famous for playing the infamous Abby in the Last of Us Part 2 has recently posted on Twitter, sharing the disgusting posts she has received over her role as Abby! Brain-dead doesn’t even begin to describe anyone who actually goes out of their way to send horrific messages to people who play fictional characters they don’t like! And she isn’t the first to experience is kind of harassment! This also happens when someone plays or cosplays as a character that people happen to admire!
Whenever this types of harassment occur in the gaming and geek community, I always in my head tell myself, (it’s the small minority of people in the gaming community that’s like that), however, in light of basically everything that has happened over the past few weeks, I can no longer in good conscious hold that viewpoint. There is something inherently wrong with the gaming community as a whole, and it is something that has to be addressed very soon if we want a healthy and welcoming community.
No actor or actress should be verbally attacked, threatened, or harassed for simply PLAYING A FICTIONAL CHARACTER! It boggles the mind how people can bring themselves to track down an actor/actress and send them messages they would never say to their faces in real life. Here’s what Laura Bailey had to endure ever since playing as Abby:
Man. I try to only post positive stuff on here… but sometimes this just gets a little overwhelming. I blacked out some of the words cuz, ya know, spoilers.
— Laura Bailey (@LauraBaileyVO) July 3, 2020
Side note. Thank you to all the people sending me positive messages to balance it out. It means more than I can say.❤️ pic.twitter.com/kGyULWPpNu
I get not liking Abby, but come on! In another area of the geek community is when a character is liked or admired, but you attack the person who cosplays as them just because he/she doesn’t “look” like them. Basically policing who can or can’t cosplay as them. An inspiring model by the name @litdesu on Twitter recently shared her first cosplay of Rin Tohsaka, an anime character from the Fate/Stay series and it was and still is a pretty dope cosplay:
me vs animated me pic.twitter.com/0Z9cpNiTnX
— goku (@litdesu) June 29, 2020
However, what happened next was disgusting! People in that comment thread started sending her disgusting messages, accusing her of “ruining” the fictitious characters and using racial slurs against her. All for simply cosplaying! It got so bad that even people in Japan started coming to her defense! This is not a minor issue within the community but is rooted very deep within the geek culture.
We have to start doing better! These are human beings, and deserve respect and dignity as such! Recently the Twitch streaming community received the unfortunate news of the passing of Byron, also known as Reckful who took his own life this week! From what I was able to gather, the constant harassment he had received over the years may have led to such an unfortunate end of his life!
This is why it is no longer enough to just stand by and say nothing, or to say ” not all gamers, geeks etc”, but to take a more proactive stance against these types of behaviour in our community!
