“What would be considered”. Sorry
I help out with the youth group at church and one of the students is in the 10th grade and he is pretty retro (loves movies and tv shows from the 80s and 90s). He used to be a big Star Wars fan and lost interest due to "disney making it a princess product" as he puts it. He was asking me the other day how did all this happen or when did it start, and I couldn't pinpoint an exact person who started this but had some ideas.
What did start it all? I know Ghostbusters 2016 seems to be the first movie to actively be made to piss off fans (when the original director was trying to do Ghostbusters 3 and they screwed him over). With Star Wars, if they wanted to appeal to actual women who were fans they could've used Jaina Solo or Mara Jade.
Was it in gaming? I remember when gaming magazines seemed to have constant articles about women in gaming or about the "abuse" they received online as if they have never heard the language you hear where guys get together and hang out.
Comic books? I mean they literally made comics of women sitting around the table discussing feelings and as Eric July said "modern comics are made for 14 year old girls on tumblr who don't read comics"
So honestly who is patient zero or who is to blame?
Varies from hobby to hobby I'd say. As far as gaming goes, I think the infection really got going around the time of the Great Recession. Among other things Sark started up Feminist Frequency in 2009 and Tropes vs. Women in 2011, Bioware's last non-totally-pozzed games were from that time period (DAO - 2009 and ME2 - 2010), and the purge of known conservatives from gaming picked up steam not long after IIRC (ex. Martin O'Donnell, the original composer for Halo and an outspoken conservative, was drummed out around 2013-14).
Can't remember where exactly (it may have been KF) but I read a theory that Sarkeesian might've been the tip of the spear for Larry Fink et al. to sink the claws of ESG into vidya around the time of the Recession and try to puppeteer it into just another vector for prog agitprop. Knowing the results and how Feminist Frequency persisted for so long despite struggling to gain even 1k views on most of their videos for ages before finally shuttering for good only very recently (perhaps the ESG bux finally ran dry?), I'd believe it now.
I would imagine the rot must've set in much earlier with movies & comic books, if only because they were already mainstream entertainment mediums well before gaming really broke into the mainstream.
I was wondering why they dumped him.