This past weekend saw Ada Wong actor Lily Gao delete most of her social media due to hate being sent her way by Resident Evil 4 fans. I don’t think we should brush this off by saying ‘so called’ fans. They are fans. Real fans. The type of toxic, parasocial, deeply defensive fans that gaming as a whole is keen to cultivate and cater to. So when they all blow up in someone’s face (usually a female actor or developer), it’s insulting to dismiss these people as not being true fans, as if this is a one off case nobody could have ever predicted. This is the chickens coming home to roost in the bed we made.

A note on Ada and Gao first. Ada has long been my favourite Resident Evil character, as I wrote about before the remake was released. I’ve had my eye on her the most as I’ve made my way through Leon’s wacky Eurotrip again, and have not been disappointed. Gao does a fantastic job giving Ada a sense of cool distance, something of a counterweight to the often campy and melodramatic nature of the rest of the game. She was always the best thing in it, but now Gao gives her a more active footing as the game’s coolest and most interesting character.

Related: Resident Evil 4 Has Made Me Appreciate Elden Ring

The only disappointment I had at all was that Separate Ways, the post-game reward content where you play as Ada, was absent. Every version post its original release has included Separate Ways bar the VR version, so I think it was a pretty reasonable hope to have. As it turns out, dataminers have found references to Separate Ways in the game’s files, suggesting it may be released in the future as DLC. That’s my only sore spot with Ada, and I’m not going to send her actor hate over it.

But this is tricky to talk about in isolation. The temptation is to praise Ada and Gao, to offer supporting balance for all the ignorant scorn being poured on her. But you don’t fix hate with love. You fix hate with silence. Gao is not an isolated case or even anything special - she is just the latest in a long line of women who are repeatedly hung out to dry over their involvement with video games that the worst among the fanbase deems as not good enough. Telling her she’s great is not a long term fix for the toxicity in our industry.

There have been comparisons to the hate Laura Bailey received for playing Abby in The Last of Us Part 2. While there are similarities, looking at a similar case from three years ago feels wilfully ignorant of what has come since. When God of War Ragnarok announced a minor delay, several female developers revealed they had been hit with a deluge of rape threats and dick pics. Again, they were dismissed as ‘not real fans’ and again, they definitely were real fans. These people are bigger fans than you or I. They have the tattoos, the collectibles, the encyclopaedic knowledge to prove it. They love these games, and when it all works out, devs are more than happy to cosy up to them.

via Santa Monica

When the God of War Ragnarok delay hit, I wrote an article titled Gamers Are Terrible People, And We Should Stop Being Okay With It. Some were upset by the headline alone, thinking I was accusing anyone who engaged with video games of being a bad person. Hardly. My life is engaging with video games, I know the importance that they can hold.

But self-identified gamers typically exhibit toxic traits that begin with the git gud taunts and gatekeeping, and if you venture deep enough into the worst communities, crystallise into homophobia, sexism, racism, and transphobia. Adin Ross, who only a couple of years ago was running fundraisers for the LGBT community, recently announced that his pronouns are ‘kill/them’. Sorry, recently announced kill’s pronouns.

The hate being directed at Lily Gao is not an isolated case and will not go away by a few of us loudly declaring that she’s great in an attempt to drown them out. Whether it’s CDPR joking with fans about cancelling pre-orders over vagina options in Cyberpunk 2077, Respawn dunking on Polygon for claiming an Apex Legends character was new and not a relative of a Titanfall 2 supporting cast member, or Ubisoft tweet-replying to VGC to claim the entirely correct headline about Ubi using AI writers didn’t have the full context because it didn’t mention every possible use case, studios (or at least their marketing department) are often happy to tap into the nature of these obsessive fans.

When this rabid fan support can be used to drum up hype, to shield a studio from criticism, or even sic fans on the press in retaliation, these people are emboldened to attack others. How often have we heard studios complain about critics for criticising? The Days Gone team has done it about 17 times alone. I’m not suggesting Capcom tolerates or supports the hate going Gao’s way, but I am saying that studios deliberately try to appeal to these most committed fans, and the more they’re catered to, the more likely they are to lash out.

Gaming desperately wants to be taken seriously as an art form, pointing to how much money it makes and trying always to appeal to a wider crowd who will legitimise their work with praise. But part of what holds gaming back is its audience. We might see flashes of this hate with certain types of movie (Brie Larson was a high profile victim of one such campaign), but it’s far more wide-spread in gaming. For as long as we treat each example as an individual case, and for as long as studios are happy to tap into the obsessions of the most toxic, this is what we’ve got. Lily Gao is great, but that doesn’t matter. Gaming is rotten.

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