This seems to be my week to put up with the culture war. Well, it was either this, Netflix losing She-Ra being a non-issue but a good time to explain the problems, or the trailer for We Put He-Man On Earth Again Because We’re That Unimaginative. Might save the She-Ra one for a filler, and I’m not interested in live-action He-Man, but since I’ve already gone through Star Wars and Nintendo, I guess we can complete the near-trifecta since this is the only time I have to mention Kathleen Kennedy all article. At least I get to talk about Autobots tomorrow and Godzilla on Saturday. That’s more my wheelhouse.
So let’s talk about “cultural appropriation”. You know, the idea if you’re of the wrong geographic ancestry you aren’t allowed to wear a kimono or get a certain hairstyle…though nobody complains if a Japanese person wears blue jeans. (Especially if they look hot in…oh wait, now we complain about a blond in blue jeans.) It’s stupid, it’s divisive (exactly what the demographic obsessed power mongers want because we’re easier to control if we’re fighting each other and not watching them), and it defeats the whole purpose of “The Great American Melting Pot”, the idea that we can come together, share our cultures, and grow stronger and closer as a species. As I tried to state with the blue jeans reference, however, cultural appropriation is fine if the “right people” do it. You know, like the folks trying to tell Japan how to run their media.
So-called “geek culture” is fair game as well. It’s not bound by any one geographic location. Anybody of any race, creed, color, gender, and species who finds a home here is welcome. At least until it becomes popular, and then the cool kids and activists all want to claim it for themselves because heaven forbid those silly little geeks have anything that’s popular. The everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd won’t stand for it, even if they aren’t interested in it themselves. Dungeons & Dragons isn’t safe, so of course something like Star Trek isn’t. The appropriators also aren’t happy when you aren’t in lockstep with their clearly superior tastes. It’s not enough to see something popular and ask for their version. They need that Brand to be about and for them and them alone, accuse the fans of the same gatekeeping they’re now doing, and just making a mess of something they didn’t care about last Tuesday.
At issue here is a recent op-ed by The Mary Sue going off on YouTube reviewers Gary Buechler of “Nerdrotic” because he started this wave of embarrassing Starfleet Academy with a just-under one hour live stream, half of which was just a Spock action figure sitting on his computer chair, that got more views than the free full episode preview live premier of the first episode on YouTube. (I think he should have played audio clips MST3K Yule Log style with inspirational speeches from the good shows.) The thesis is basically “if you don’t like Starfleet Academy then you don’t like Star Trek and never understood it”. I like Starfleet Academy. Nog’s journey to join Starfleet, the crossover with the Dominion War…oh, the recent TV series, not the 90s Marvel/Paramount Comics thing. That show has problems. Gary’s chair stream was more interesting than the last time we discussed a chair stream because it was shorter and was part of an experiment, which it succeeded at…and that’s why writer and site founder Rachel Leisman was so upset.
For the record, Buechler doesn’t need me to defend him. His website and numerous YouTube channels get more hits than mine. (Would help if I had time to make videos again, but he does beat my articles. You don’t see me complaining.) This is about the current state of geek culture in the hands of people who spent high school ignoring geek stuff and their adulthood taking them over.
BW Media Spotlight 
Should Nintendo Fans Be Worried That Devon Pritchard Is The Next Kathleen Kennedy?
On the heels of yesterday’s discussion about Kathleen Kennedy departing Lucasfilm the website Geeks & Gamers posted an article about Nintendo Of America’s new president and Chief Operating Officer Devon Pritchard, who is taking over for Doug Bowser. (Yes, yes, everyone makes that joke, including himself.) I don’t know a whole lot about his time in the big chair so I can’t speak to it, but Pritchard’s comments have both the article’s writer, Martin Montanaro, and the website’s founder and main video contributor/stream host, Jeremy Griggs concerned in light of the direction the video game industry has gone, following Hollywood’s cultural trends. I usually stay out of the culture war stuff, but this does affect storytelling and ties in too closely to last night’s article because they and apparently other critics have used this to call Pritchard “Kathleen Kennedy 2.0”.
At issue are remarks Pritchard made in a pre-recorded speech to the New York Game Awards, an awards show I didn’t even know existed since the big Video Game Awards are usually the only one I hear of and all of the issues that have come up with that event in the last few years. Frankly, even that I only know for announcements like the long-awaited return of Mega Man. Awards shows are worthless these days. Back on topic: even the Geeks & Gamers contributors mention that it’s not the words themselves in a bubble but more like the history of what the words have been from other gaming studios and the overall storytelling industry in television/streaming, comics, and movies that raise certain red flags. We do not live in a bubble and history has made many of the geek community who have seen the alteration and bastardization of the stories and characters they love in the hands of the SEECA crowd (for newcomers, that would be Snobs, Elitists, Egotists, Corporatists, and Activists–an acronym I came up with recently).
Should they be worried, or are we skirting the walls of paranoia in seeing the baddies behind every tree? This isn’t a BW Vs article because they kind of have a point to the degree that using it would be more branding than actually arguing against the article. However, I worry about extremism as much from my side as the people who have ruined so many franchises out of self-interest and chasing the “cool kids” at the expense of the geeks they always looked down upon in high school. I don’t necessary disagree with Geeks & Gamers on this, but being a bit more “outsider” on the backstage stuff I want to approach with a cooler head and explain why people more into the “inside baseball” perspective versus BW’s usual approach of looking at the end product have understandable concerns. I have some, too.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on January 21, 2026 in Video Game Spotlight and tagged commentary, Devon Pritchard, Geeks & Gamers, Nintendo, video games.
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