Nintendo Fires Female Staffer Alison Rapp: What Is The Real Reason?

Both employer and employee are in agreement as to why the firing occurred. But there has been speculation that Nintendo merely pulled the trigger on a gun loaded and chambered by those who despised so called 'Social Justice Warriors,' one of the tamer things Nintendo marketer Alison Rapp was called before her time with the company was cut short.

The Internet looked on as Rapp's time with Nintendo came to an end after what she says was about two and a half years with the company.

The reason she was terminated from the company was because she was found to be moonlighting in a gig that apparently conflicted with Nintendo's interests. But the reason Nintendo found out about the moonlight might have something to do with GamerGate's movement.

GamerGate Yet Lives

A controversy, with two sides talking two different points, drew battle lines in a war over the culture of video games: GamerGate. One side condemned what it believed to be a lack of ethics in videogame journalism, "Gamer Gate" or Disrespectful Nod, while the other side, branded Social Justice Warriors, and slammed what it saw to be a general oversexualization of female characters in video games.

That war has devolved into something that gets uglier and bitterer with time, from "doxing" personal information for the worldwide web to see to covertly petitioning target employers to the targeted individuals being terminated. And Alison Rapp may have been one of its latest victims.

Rapp Sheet

While the faceless and fluid movement that is GamerGate places the blame elsewhere, it is the amorphous entity that Rapp apparently believes pushed for and successfully achieved her termination from Nintendo.

Fans of Nintendo's Fire Emblem series were infuriated when controversial elements of Fire Emblems Fates, a Japanese game, were stripped when it was localized for American audiences. Particularly controversial about the Japanese version of the game was a scene that featured "gay conversion," in which a lesbian was turned straight via a potion.

Rapp was serving a spokesperson for Nintendo's Treehouse group, the team that was responsible for localizing the Japanese game to American audiences. While she was only a spokesperson for Treehouse and likely had zero say in the group's localization efforts, she was one of the more visible members of the team and she became the target of Internet trolls.

She's spoken for social justice and a change in video game culture in the past, so it might not have been hard for her attackers to paint her as a social justice warrior that helped ripped content from a game to make it politically correct.

Her attackers, who she identified as GamerGate, rooted through her personal life and used anything they could find about her to push for her termination. The highlighted items from her Amazon wish list to embarrass her and pulled quotes from a 2011 essay she had written, which called for countries to ease off of efforts to get Japan to strengthen its child pornography laws.

Rapp says Nintendo moved here laterally into a new role in the company once the heat was on her, and she attributes that to pressures from GamerGate. Rapp was eventually fired from Nintendo, though the company asserts that the decision had nothing to do with the heat she'd been taking on social media. It was because she'd been moonlighting at another company, where she used a pseudonym, and that gig conflicted with Nintendo's interests.