Immediately the Voydal army leapt to the defense of GangrenePete and argued that the overreaction by Nerd Girls Resist! to GangrenePete minimized the experiences of those who had actually been sexually assaulted and that maybe she’d stop with the self-righteous attitude if she were properly boned. Nerd Girls Resist! struck back with a long montage of female characters being brutalized in games, interspersed with statistics on violence against women. Then a conservative media pundit picked up the story for his “Kids These Days” segment and said that no one cared about Faith Massey, as she was a washed-up actress from the era of the dial-up modem who had put on a not-insignificant amount of weight and that this “uppity” web series hostess should shut up and determine “better things to do with that mouth.” Horrified as well as amused, we were inseparable from our electronics while we proposed a myriad of ideas, both serious and absurd, for what anything with a mouth could do with that mouth, such as sticking multiple Peeps marshmallows inside, or a big shark mouth noshing on a baby seal, et cetera. One of us went as far as to share a gif of a Voydal mouth doing its sphincteresque dance along with the question, “What if you don’t have a mouth?” Reluctantly, we were obligated to remind everyone to “Check your mouth privilege.”

Some of us also felt obligated during this GangrenePete fiasco to remind the others that not all the fans of Starship Uprising were straight white men, as evinced by Nerd Girls Resist! We hailed from every demographic, and we adored Faith Massey because, in her, we got to see ourselves on television. Yes, Commander Dinara Gorun was stunningly attractive, but her looks weren’t her defining characteristic. She was tough yet vulnerable, purple and weird and still out-of-this-world sexy; she didn’t fit into any established mold. So whenever Faith Massey was reduced to a body (or, simply, the VHS tapes of THE BODY), it made it seem like Commander Dinara Gorun—and, therefore, we—never really mattered, as though women should just be tossed out of the air lock when their twenties are over. And we knew there were those among us who griped that they would have been involuntary Celebos or in the Concupiscens slave caste but who nonetheless picked apart Faith’s appearance. Who cared about her plastic surgery or her weight or her tits? We thought we were here to celebrate a thing we loved that somehow, miraculously, got made. Shut up, we were told, everyone has moved on. We were so whiny, possibly menstruating. But those directly involved would not move on, not GangrenePete, who continued to avow that he was a good guy beneath the rotting persona, not the hostess of Nerd Girls Resist!, who had been accumulating death threats from Voydals, and especially not Faith Massey.