Internet Culture Enthusiast

Before Dragon Age 2 came out there was a developer video on the game regarding the story. Featured in the video was one of the writers for the game, Jennifer Hepler. This is about when the hate train for Bioware in general started rolling and Dragon Age 2 was the catalyst for it. /v/ for the most part absolutely loathed the game for numerous reasons, and they attributed a lot of the problems with the writing in the game to Hepler, even though she wasn’t really responsible for a lot of it. Regardless, she was hate on a lot at the time and there were numerous Photoshops of her like having her name tag in the video changed to “Hamburger Helper”, poking fun at her last name and for her being large.

Eventually the game came out and it garnered just as much hate as the weeks leading up to it and then /v/ started talking about other games. Hepler from then on always just kind of cropped up whenever Bioware was mentioned, such as when The Old Republic started getting hate on /v/ or when more Mass Effect 3 news started popping up. Hepler was mentioned and featured in some of the categories during the Vidya Gaem Awards and that’s pretty much how it went until very recently.

Up until this point, most of the hate being sent in Hepler’s direction was containted within /v/ or other small communities and barely anything if at all was actually sent to her directly. However, within the last couple of days someone had made a post about her on Reddit and called her something to the effect of “the cancer killing Bioware / gaming”, which is something /v/ had been saying from the start. This caused a shitstorm on Reddit and eventually the post was taken down because it was just a big flame war and many users on Reddit were actually sending hateful e-mails and messages on Twitter directly to her. Other Bioware employees were coming to her defense and were backing her up, as she was being seriously emotionally affected by it all in real life. Bioware issued a statement regarding it and donated $1000 to an anti-bullying charity in Canada because of the incident.

I think the real kicker of it all is that this is happening now, nearly a year after it originally started on /v/, and it was Reddit who stirred the pot this time. Almost every single tech and gaming blog I’ve seen that have covered this incident has attributed the hate to originating from Reddit. Even though I go to Reddit myself to peruse for content, any instances where Reddit is cast in a bad light, I’m all for. That site is just one big circle jerk.

tl:dr; /v/ makes fun of Hepler for nearly a year. Someone on Reddit decides to make a post making fun of her. Reddit starts shitstorm online. Reddit gets blamed and /v/ gets off scot-free.