NPC Burn Her!: The Eerie Similarity Between Online Feminism and the Early Modern Witch-Hunts

5 Feb

In my other life (the one where I’m a Shakespeare scholar), I’ve been doing research on early modern witchcraft, and–this week–on the witch-hunts which ran roughshod over Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the process, I came to the realization that a lot of the behaviors I see regularly online relating to feminism and women in gaming have deeply disturbing resonances with the prosecutions of women for witchcraft five hundred years ago.

Naturally, I wrote up my thoughts about it for this Friday’s NPC Gamer post.