About
#Metalgate is a Twitter hashtag campaign deriving from the GamerGate controversy as a way of protesting against stereotypes surrounding the metal culture and being portrayed as having conservative ideas by Social Justice Bloggers. Since its inception, boosted by GamerGate supporters, articles were made to comment on this new movement’s legitimacy.
Origin
On December 12th, 2014, Death Metal Underground writer Cory Van der Pol issued an article titled #metalgate[1] which dealt with the coming of a new hashtag campaign on Twitter[2], launched by GamerGate supporters but targetting Metal culture, asserting that it started following a peculiar extract from an article by Spin about the twenty best metal albums of 2014[3] (shown below).
Metal is still dogged by the issues that arise from its deep-seated conservative values, but thanks to an increase in conversations about racism, politics, and feminism, those on the right side of history have gained solid ground.
The Death Metal Underground article offers an opinion piece on the current state of Metal culture, also quoting a Washington Post article from 2006[4] which is asserted to have been reused by activists to justify their new movement.
Spread
The next day, Youtuber and GamerGate activist Sargon of Akkad uploaded a video in favor of this new trend (shown below), analyzing different articles including the Spin and Washington Post ones but others as well such as an opinion piece from Metal Injection commenting on the increasing use of the slur “faggot” among metalhead communities[5].
The video has gathered more than 40 000 views in two days. A sub-reddit was created and subsequently banned before another one, Metal Ghazi, took its place[10].
As the trend garnered more and more tweets online, several articles were made commenting on whether the movement is a legitimate one or not, addresing its links with GamerGate. Some are in favor of the initiative, such as Servile Insurrection[6] or Return of Kings[7] while others like Medium[8] or Metal-related website Metal Sucks[9], not so.
External References
[1]Death Metal Underground – #metalgate
[2]Twitter – #metalgate
[3]Spin – It’s Where Our Demons Hide
[4]Washington Post – Heavy Metal Gets Socially Conscious
[5]Metal Injection – The Problem With Heavy Metal Is Metalheads: Stop Calling Everyone A Faggot
[6]Servile Insurrection – #MetalGate is here
[7]Return of Kings – What is #metalgate?
[8]Medium – The Brief and Silly History of #Metalgate
[9]Metal Sucks – What the F*ck is #Metalgate?
[10]Reddit – Metal Ghazi