I'd take this more seriously if you knew what the word "bigot" meant. The only reason why women care is because these are written and created for men. As in it's something intended for men. And yet, women are the main purchasers of harlequin novels that commonly have similar plot devices to this in them. Seems to suggest that perhaps it's not as demeaning as you're suggesting.

And yet, somehow men are evil and bad for liking it, but I don't see Anita taking women to task for liking the same sorts of stories.

Bottom line here is that this has absolutely nothing to do with equal rights and everything to do with shitting on something that men like because we like it.

And as Jef pointed out, women often times write these stories as well, but somehow it's sexist and demeaning because it's targeted at men? What about those romance novels that are targeted at women? Are those boring and demeaning?

I call Tropes a Trap for this reason. It's also easy when we start to become critical to look at just the tropes, especially for terrible characters, forgetting that if you look a bit too critically, you can fall into the trap with otherwise good characters. Hell you can do the same to reality too, not just fiction, and TV Tropes often has categories under each trope for real life examples.

Tropes are building blocks, if you look closely enough. Sure we subvert them, tweak them, and try to avoid others, but they're there. The bigger problem is if you look too closely, you start seeing the blocks, but not the way they interact, the way they come together to form unique characters and people.

I've never seen anyone suggesting that. At all. I swear.

No. I used to be afraid of that, but further understanding hasn't really impaired my enjoyment of art. As long as one makes sure to leave the ordinary world behind and enter [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Circle_(virtual_worlds)]the "magic circle" of make-believe[/url], the magic should still be there. Sure - there are things capable of breaking immersion, either pet peeves or failures by devs, but with the exception of extreme cases - it's perfectly possible to snap back in.
Some people choose to remain "outside", uninfluenced... Some titles focus so heavily on being parodies that they lack content to enjoy, merely being criticism incarnate... I try to avoid both.
I could go on about this for a while, but the gist is that it all boils down to willful suspension of disbelief. Circumstances can help or hinder it (noise, stress, tiredness...), the material can be more or less convincing, the person in question can have a mind more or less flexible... but the possibility should always be there, I think.
I've just read pages upon pages on reductive explanation (and supervenience and such)... Just because you can break something down into many simpler objects, it doesn't mean it stops being the thing you approached initially. On the contrary - the smaller things HAVE TO be possible to reassemble into the original object, or your reduction has failed.
It also works the other way around - just because you can generalize something particular into an instantiation of something more general, it doesn't change the fact that the particular thing is still there and is its own thing.
In the words of Max Payne - "nothing is a cliche when it's happening to you". When you build something fancy out of Legos, you may fixate on the Legos, but the thing build should probably be more prominent. It's a matter of seeing the forest and not just the trees...

That really is the key. Some of the anti-feminist crowd hear the discussion about tropes, the criticism of the storyline in certain games and seem to take it as a personal attack on them or their beloved games, which are an extension of them. I have never understood that.

Some of my favourite games and movies contain the tropes that Anita discusses and yet I am able to watch her videos without once having the thought that I am evil or bad...

Seems like what you definitely learned what stereotypes are, alright...

The first time I watched one of her videos I actually did get a bit annoyed about it, I think she was talking about Dishonoured, and I just thought, “I loved that game! There nothing wrong with it! The brothel was my favourite level!” But then I actually listened to what she was saying, and I think too many of her critics get stuck with being annoyed and don't actually listen. I've never seen her videos as an attack on men, or even the games themselves.

Then you're not looking very hard. The whole objective of her series is to make men look bad and chew us out for our media. The subtext isn't exactly buried under a million levels of metaphore.
Perhaps removing that feminist line from your profile and actually engaging with men without the feminist point of view would help.

Feminists earned that hatred, back in the '60s there were roughly as many male feminists as female. These days, there are basically no male feminists. You hear a lot of bullshit about how women are underpaid, but the measures of things like that are always designed to support the feminist ideology rather than accurately reflect the reality of the situation.

Things like women representing fully half of the domestic violence offenders get swept under the rug because it doesn't support the feminist narrative that women would never do anything like that.

Erm ... Anita Sarkeesian constantly fills her vids with how this and that leads to sexism, objectification, etc. Is it a big jump to make that, because millions of male gamers play these exact games daily, she implies they're sexist, etc? Because that's what she's saying. You can't say "games cause violence" and then go "oh, no, it doesn't make gamers violent, that's no what I said" - you either said it or you didn't. She DID. So she indirectly accused all gamers of being exactly what you claim she never said. Not outright, no, but anyone with half a brain can make the connection.

Indeed, and that's why Super Mario keeps being Nintendo's best selling game series, beloved by boys and girls and men and women. Be realistic, Anita's "criticisms" have no value, they are just money-making scams exploiting what's for some people a hot-button issue. Might as well get a diploma in homeopathy while you're at it, right after getting you genitals mutilated to reduce the risk of cancer.

Exactly.

That's the thing, when you sit down, when you feel engaged, when you enter that Magic Circle, you don't see the building blocks, you see the whole. When you sit down and play say, a Mario game, you don't always see the cliches, you don't see the characters that are a bit off, you're here for the show, to enjoy it. You become focused on the movement, the platforming.

It's when we get jolted out that sometimes we have issues, or when someone is looking at things a bit too critically, it becomes very easy to forget what we're looking at and just start seeing the parts instead of how it all comes together. I'm guilty of it when my family tries to control the TV to stuff I don't care for at the holidays, or when I've seen some things a bit too much. And when we're looking for something, we tend to find it to the exclusion to the rest of the stuff coming together.

That's the kind of stuff I mean when I say that Tropes are a Trap. And it's a very easy one to fall into when you don't realize you're stepping over the line of being too critical.

We do see the tropes. And we poke fun at them, have a laugh and then go on. What Anita is saying is that that's not where it stops, that these games are actually changing our perception and making us turn sexist. And that's what people take offense in.

It's a silly video game, you play it, you have fun, you laugh at its silliness and then go on with your life. Anita's rhetoric is exactly the same as that of people like Jack Thompson who say that playing violent video games will turn you into a murderous sociopath. I know that most women don't have breasts larger than their head, it's hard to miss when half of the population is female. I also know that turtles don't fly, dinosaurs don't exist anymore and you can't double-jump in mid air.

*Pouts* And I won't get my magic :(.

Ok, in all seriousness, I agree to a point. I think that a lot of people are taking critiquing games a bit farther then most intend. Seriously, we don't see discussions about the ramifications of a Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee movie on people trying to kick others in the head. Some movies and games have deeper meanings, they have better constructed plots, but most are there to tell a story and to let people relax and forget about their problems.

Or should we start doing research into how Monopoly teaches people to abuse the economy and how to dick friends over? Hell, if people are going to do it, let's overdo it for comedy!