Flailing While Failing, a Tale of Alyssa Mercante

Introduction

All forms of art develop their own diehard consumers over time, swathes of moderate to casual fans, and even folks who don’t indulge frequently, but when they do, they deeply appreciate what they take in. These art forms are learned, developed and practiced by peoples of all levels of skill, all levels of notoriety, and often times, with a varying degree of commercial or critical success. Each art form also eventually spawns its own reviewers, critics, and analysts, each of these with their own hierarchy of professionalism and influence on the decision-making processes of the everyday consumers of said art. Literary critics and analysts, film and television reviewers and critics, illustration and animation critics, and comic book analysts and critics, all of these folks come into the secondary ring of their chosen art forms predicated upon their love and appreciation of the art form in question.

Since the mid-1980’s, the medium of video games has gained popularity in drips and drabs (with a notable spike in popular culture saturation in the late 1990’s-early 2000’s thanks largely to the ubiquity of the Sony Playstation), and advanced in terms of complexity at a pace that almost defies normal description, particularly when compared to the other, more classically recognized forms of art partaken of and created in the world. This is doubtlessly owed primarily to this art form’s reliance on being a production of technology, which advances at a pace that is exponential rather than cumulative in affect.

But much like comic books, print and digital books, television shows and films and even classical paintings and illustrations, the art form of video games are not just an art; to be frank about it, the artistic potential and merits of video games has not been universal throughout their existence, and prior to the late stages of the 16-bit era, there weren’t a plethora of examples of video games that could be classified by most folks as examples of Art with a capital A. Prior to this, they were largely relegated to the status of kids’ toys and distractions, electronic baubles that the world’s children could distract themselves with without the need to take up a lot of physical space, since they were confined to the four sides of a television screen for interaction and play. Like those other forms of art, however, video games over time gathered not only an audience of consumers and fans, as well as studied critics, but the moment the industry behind their creation become influential and profitable, another crowd started to gather around video games: journalists specializing in that specific industry.

And this, friends and neighbors, is why we even have The Mercunte Creature in the first place.

Degrees Make a Difference, Though Not Always a Good One

Obtaining a Masters Degree of Fine Arts in Modern and Contemporary Literature in 2016 from Newcastle University, one might be forgiven for assuming that Alyssa Mercante would seem on paper to be eminently qualified to work in the field of journalism, particularly in the capacity which she deploys. That is to say, by approaching the video games that she engages with primarily with a focus on plot, character development, narrative voice and mechanics, and with an eye aimed at finding the small world-building elements and details that can craft a final product that brings players closer to a work of “Video games as Art”, as opposed to “as distraction”. Yet, let us not overlook that demonstrable and oft-remarked-upon pattern, over the course of the last 20-30 years at minimum, of Marxist/postmodernist propaganda and ideological indoctrination being plastered entirely throughout the studies collectively referred to in academia as ‘The Humanities’. Couple this with a New York native, one who was undoubtedly already liberal in attitude and inclination, pour in a dash of avarice in seeing video games as an ‘easy in’ into the broader field of journalism as a whole (which is itself steeped in fringe leftism), and ending up with Alyssa Mercante in her current form is damned near guaranteed to happen no matter how you spin the circumstances that brought us here.

‘Surely, Josh, that can’t be all it took to make her the way she is, right?’ I think you may be right; graduating with that degree in the same year that Donald Trump and his MAGA political movement turned the world of socio-political dialogue and events on its head must have been akin to Ms. Mercante stepping out of her cozy little cave in academia (steps prodded by the publication of her Graduate Thesis, itself something I am dying to read through and tear asunder), vampire that she is, and finding herself blasted by the shining light of sunrise. IT BURNS US!

Where Mercante is at as of time of this writing (May 31st, 2025) is roughly the same position she was in shortly after leaving the “Safe Spaces” of her collegiate setting, working as a freelancer for pop culture outlets. The primary difference between then and now is her portfolio padding and her general reputation, which, if Rolling Stone had any wits about them, they would look a little more carefully at. Then again, this is the same publication that assured the world that Mattress Girl was a real and true victim of oppression and sexual assault/misconduct, so perhaps in that regard they are a perfect fit for a disingenuous, lying little ‘Poor Me’ Victim Olympics medal winner like Mercante. Among her early career credits as a freelancer were outlets like Playboy, VICE Games (they seem to have a penchant for working with lying freaks too, like Ana Valenz), The Mary Sue (enter feminism joke here), and Fanbyte. These stockpiled and eventually earned her a spot working for Ceros, where she was an associate editor for their interactive content blog.

Working with them, Mercante eventually came to the attention of GamesRadar, a gaming and entertainment news and review outlet that, at the time, had a strong track record for being comprehensive in their coverage of pop culture news and events. She began producing long-form thought pieces on several prominent games released during her time with the outlet, as well as interviewing developers and executives working in the video games industry. However, after working with the outlet for approximately three years, much of her coverage published through GamesRadar started coming under scrutiny, with many gamers on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube remarking that her articles were beginning to come across more as socio-political hectoring lectures and less as actual examinations of video games currently capturing the attention of, you know, gamers, the very samesaid people who are the ostensible customers buying the games and looking for coverage about those games.

Thankfully for Mercante, the digital gaming news outlet Kotaku was searching for fresh talent, and she was able to monkey-branch her way out of GamesRadar, now finding a new home that was more than happy to have yet another fringe-left wokie on staff to produce think pieces more aimed at insisting that the very same gamers who kept the industry from crashing and burning forever in the ashpile of the 1980’s video games crash should be treated like wallets with legs who need to be punished and condescended to perpetually, because they are broadly guilty of WrongThink.

A Boulder Made of Excrement Picks Up Speed, Too

If you pack it all in tight enough, that is. Anyhow, Mercante was able to continue plying her trade at Kotaku for a couple of years, serving as a senior editor at the outlet while creating nothing of any real value for the world and yet maintaining a steady paycheck. Well, I can’t say that’s perfectly accurate, because she did clarify during her time at Kotaku that she’d had a couple of abortions, though she didn’t specify when she had them, but she did try to celebrate having her womb scraped like a Minnesota windshield in winter because she was, quote, ‘Putting [her] career first’. Much as I’m opposed to abortion on a moral level, mayhap this is one area where I can look the other way, because the only thing that could draw breath by coming into the world from twixt those diseased nethers would surely have to be the Antichrist…

Most gamers had largely returned to the tried-and-true tactic of largely ignoring this tattooed former ‘digital stripper’ (her words, not mine) when, unbeknownst to us all, a lone Steam user going by the username Kabrutus Rambo would take notice of a curiosity in the arena of video games. It seemed to him that a little-known ‘narrative consultancy group’, dubbed Sweet Baby Inc, was cropping up as having been attached to a small raft of games in the triple-A games space, each and every one of them carrying the telltale pock marks of a virulent infection known as DEI, a strain of the Woke Mind Virus all its own. Like the G-Virus variant of Umbrella Corporation’s T-Virus, this engineered infection also renders its victims into mindless automatons, feasting on the flesh of Reason, Truth and Observed Reality. Kabrutus put together a Steam Curation list in response to these observations, which is simply a way in which users on the Steam platform can assemble lists of games based on any number of criteria. Users can name these lists, and Kabrutus dubbed his, “Sweet Baby Inc Detected”, explaining on Twitter/X his rationale behind assembling this list.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, was little more than a match lit in a dark, dark space. If it had been left alone to cast its paltry light for a handful of people to take note of, things likely would have died down entirely. But thanks to Chris Kindred, a former Sweet Baby employee and one of Alyssa Mercante’s partners-in-slime, pouring metaphorical kerosene on that match, we were all caught up in the conflagration that ultimately became known to us as Gamergate 2, Electric Boogaloo (Thank you Dr. Herbert West).

If any of these references are flying over your head, I recommend you strap on a rocket pack or grab some stilts. I really want you to keep up.

Kindred accused Rambo and the curator list group of being a, quote, “targeted harassment campaign operation”, and called for his followers on X to report both the list and Kabrutus’s account itself to Steam in the hopes of getting the creator of the list banned, costing him the time and money spent on playing and purchasing those games, a fairly scumbag move by itself. It wasn’t long after this kerfuffle that Mercante did what she does best, prostrating herself in hopes of servicing someone by writing a puff piece article entitled, “Sweet Baby Inc Doesn’t Do What You Think It Does,” which is about as bad faith a statement as you can get short of declaring that perhaps the guy who just shivved you in the kidney was really just trying to help you see a doctor sooner about that rash on your arm, and hey, won’t this trip to the ER be the ideal way to ask about the rash? And let’s be fair, it would make about as much sense as, well, any of the piss-poor decisions Alyssa has made in recent history. Since the kickoff of the second Gamergate situation, Alyssa’s devolution into borderline sociopathic behavior has gained speed at every turn, and rather than taking any real time out of the public eye to engage in introspection, to perhaps examine her own role in contributing to the volatility of online video games and broader pop culture dialogue, she has instead leaned into her own harpy-like antics ever harder.

Perhaps that’s unfair to harpies. Aligheiri described them as having the faces of beautiful maidens when not loosing their bloodthirsty shrieks, and hailing from the 6th ring of Hell. Alyssa’s face is, by contrast, ‘mid’ at best, she is to ‘maidenly’ as a wolverine is to ‘cuddly’, and she hails from Brooklyn, a suburb of Hell’s 7th ring….

More Hot Air Than the Macy’s Day Parade

On a program known as Giant Bomb in mid-2024, Alyssa Mercante set herself up for long running and much deserved ridicule when she said, quote: “I want people in the industry (video games industry on the whole) to be a little bit louder about people being mean to other people, and maybe say it’s not a good thing. Maybe say we don’t want you around if you’re going to be a cunt and hateful (the lack of self-awareness is over 9000!) and the games industry naturally not because anyone is making them be diverse, because the world is diverse, you stupid motherfucker. And if you have a problem with that, come fight me, physically, bitch.” When asked if anyone had taken her up on this bit of peacocking, Alyssa said, “No, because they’re all pussies.”

This sentiment got bitch slapped harder than a Rick James girlfriend, and in short order, when YouTuber Vara Dark, YouTuber Mara Jade, and one La Reina Creole all publicly addressed Mercante’s challenge via their various social media accounts, clarifying that they would love the opportunity to square off in a physical altercation. Apparently, nobody wanted to go the Andy Kaufman route, as no men responded in a similar fashion that I’m aware of. Anyhow, Vara Dark was quite thorough in setting out expectations about how it could be done, how to promote it, and even Keemstar, a drama farmer and the operator of Happy Punch Promotions (Misfits Boxing), chirped up, saying he’d love to help set the whole thing up.

However, the Mercunte Creature ended up proving to be full of a lot of bravado and puffery, and little more. She made various excuses for not actually taking on her challengers, claiming that Vara Dark would, quote, “earn money from this, and I dislike you”. By her own logic here, the purchase of games worked on by Sweet Baby Inc would earn money for them, and LOTS of us dislike them, so, wouldn’t she be in favor of us not buying those games?

I don’t know why I’m asking for consistency of thought from an entity that probably can’t hold a position or thought in its head for longer than it takes to achieve some momentary pleasure or benefit. Well, except for doggy style, I’m sure that’s a ‘position’ she can maintain, after all, she did get knocked up at least twice that we know of…

TANGENTS, TANGENTS EVERYWHERE!

You Don’t Tumble Roll After Getting Launched From a Trebuchet

By the time the folks at Kotaku finally cut Mercante loose, a circumstance that she waffled on more rapidly than a 1990’s Republican on homosexual relationships prior to and then immediately after being caught in an airport bathroom getting freaky with a stranger of the same sex, claiming at one point that G/O Media terminated her ass and then claiming at another point that she made the decision to leave on her own (which is it, Alyssa?), that particular outlet’s roll of the die had already been cast and recorded. Their odds of sticking around for much longer are about as good as a level 1 goblin’s of hitting a paladin in full plate armor with enchantments dropping his AC to -8, so unless their THAC0 has received one hell of a blessing from the High Lord of Pie, things don’t look too good.

Alyssa hasn’t exactly responded since getting let go in the healthiest of ways, swiftly turning her attention to any and all online personalities who celebrated her removal from Kotaku with the sort of violent resentment normally reserved for revenge-themed spaghetti western films. Of note among these was SmashJT, a video games industry commentator and YouTuber. She took quick aim at him for his producing a list of his own, dubbed “Kotaku Detected”, on his own website. By and large, the list simply provided profile rundowns of many of the folks working as reporters and commentators at Kotaku, all sourced from publicly available information online, most of it provided by the staffers at Kotaku themselves. This wasn’t some kind of ‘deep dive’ or digital archeological dig on these people; the vast majority off the info that SmashJT assembled was freely shared out there to the world by the folks on the list themselves. Yet, this wasn’t acceptable to Mercante, nor to Nick Calandra, another connection in Mercante’s web of ‘Tolerant Leftist’ cat’s paws. Calandra went so far as to attempt organizing a mass reporting campaign to the host of Smash’s website, which succeeded in getting the hosting service to shut down the site.

This resulted in Alyssa and her coven dancing about and celebrating on Twitter/X, gloating over how amazing it was that they’d claimed a scalp. Sadly for them, this victory would prove short-lived, as within a few days, service was returned to Smash’s site. Ever the purveyor of sour grapes, the Mercunte Creature claimed, quote, “You can keep your website, it helps me.” This is hardly the most unhinged reaction she has had toward SmashJT, though. That honor still belongs to the time when Alyssa tracked down Smash’s wife on Facebook, and Private Messaged her in an attempt to cause tension in his marriage by inferring that Smash is some sort of terrible, woman-hating knuckle dragger, and questioning his wife’s taste in life partner.

But oh, yeah, Alyssa’s a very stable genius, folks. Holy buckets.

Every time that Alyssa is called out for these spurts of emotionally and intellectually dishonest, underhanded or plainly uncivilized behavior, she flails her arms about and howls “I’M BEING LE HARRASSED! IT’S AN ORGANIZED HATE/HARRASSMENT CAMPAIGN AGAINST ME!” No, Alyssa, you’ve been witnessed attempting to toss digital molotov cocktails at people’s heads, had them caught in lacross sticks, and tossed right back to blow up in your own face, sweetie. That’s not a hate campaign, that’s the Streisand Effect jacked up on enough steroids to kill a bull elephant. In the words of the fellow known as The Problematic White Guy, you’re just constantly stepping on rakes.

Yet, as amusing as it can be to watch this walking failure in poorly tattooed flesh flounder, she has not been entirely without her own small victories….

With Love and Thanks to the Writers of “Frasier”

Alyssa Mercante is a cancer. How precisely does one deal with cancer? Do you sit it down and try to reason with it? Do you say, “Come on, cancer, let’s see if we can’t get you to calm down,” and try negotiating with it? No, you cut. It. Out. If you’re familiar with the show “Frasier”, you’ll understand the reference here, and hopefully I’ll be able to convince you now that it is absolutely true. Ryan Roger Athay, another commentator and fascinating character now banished to the obscurity of being a Rumble-only content creator and streamer after being removed entirely from YouTube (to date, he has still received no formal explanation as to why this is), has frequently in recent weeks been pointing out that people like Alyssa cannot be simply ignored in the way that some schoolyard bullies could be ignored and made to go away, to cease their antagonism. In this regard, he’s absolutely correct about Mercante, because the motivations behind her activities, both known and merely suspected, are not those of the schoolyard bully.

The schoolyard bully is often looking to assert some form of dominance over those against whom he sets himself, reveling in his victims’ fear and capitulation to their demands. He lords this terror over them, and this often helps them feel in control of their own little worlds, grants them a sense of importance and balance in the event they are themselves being victimized at home. But this is not Alyssa’s motivation, I suspect. No, I think she’s a bit more along the lines of thinking similar to Herbert Marcuse and his philosophy of Repressive Tolerance. For those not in the know, a brief summation of this timeless classic of the communist-minded: in essence, the Tolerant Leftist must collectively enforce societal punishments against any and all comments or sentiments alluding to or outright advocating for any non-left-of-center origin or world view. These punishments must be extreme, up to and including imprisonment in some cases, and only left-leaning ideas can be allowed to ever be uttered aloud or entered into the public discourse. This must be so constant that people begin to not even want to consider privately thinking non-leftist thoughts, a form of behavior and thought control so thorough that it literally prevents people from even being human outside of the leftist mindset.

Marcuse is a darling of modern-day leftists and pseudo-intellectual communists and sympathizers thereof. Hailed as an icon of their entire movement, it would serve as no surprise to me if Mercante, like most college students since the mid-1990’s in the humanities, had a special little place in the tar black chambers of her rotten little heart for him. And she certainly seems to have taken to heart the tactics endorsed by the postmodernists like Marcuse.

You see, there’s a modest-sized little clutch of content creators on YouTube, Rumble, X/Twitter, and elsewhere in the tangential perimeter of the video games industry and userbase who have for a little while now identifying the skullduggery of people like Sweet Baby Inc and their cat’s paws in the games journalism realm, and appropriately calling out their shenanigans. Among these are a few online communities of sorts, which manage to earn themselves titles or nicknames from a place of either adoration or disparagement. For example, there is a clutch referred to as ‘The Bigotverse’, a collective of creators and their audiences who are broadly attached to the users known as Hypnotic and SmashJT. Hypnotic, by nature of being a VTuber (who started as a PNGTuber, using a still image illustration in place of appearing on screen for the benefit of maintaining anonymity), has proven elusive for Mercante and her coven members and minions to pin down and cause long term harm to in the online sphere. The best they’ve managed is to inaccurately attempt to broadcast or imply that he is based out of the New York area (said implication coming in the form of the first draft of Mercunte’s lolsuit against SmashJT), and to once get Hypnotic, who dubs himself the ‘Marginalized CEO of the Bigot Army (his fanbase)’, suspended for a week on YouTube. This didn’t end up having the effect she and her ilk hoped for, which was to harm Hypno’s capacity to earn revenue from livestreams; instead, he took his program to Rumble alone for that week, and his fans rewarded him financially to a great degree.

YouTube lost any and all money that they MIGHT have made from their cut of Superchats for that whole week. How’d that work out for you folks at Google? You listened to Mercante and her fellow ruiners of reputation, and you lost money on the deal. Seems like a dumb move, if you ask me.

Anywho, Mercante similarly danced and rejoiced on her X/Twitter and Bluesky accounts when user Toastywiththemosty69, a creator associated with this Bigotverse cast, ended up being demonetized on YouTube, an enforcement action taken against her as a direct, proven result of Mercante’s rounding up her little legion to mass report and flag Toasty. Funny, for a woman who cries foul and claims she’s being targeted for harassment and cyberbullying, she seems to have no qualms about doing the same damned thing to others. Given that Mercante once remarked that Toasty was ‘an irrelevant little channel’, one has to wonder what changed her mind to the point where she felt justified in stripping the earnings potential of a mother with two developmentally challenged children.

That last line there? Yeah, that’s there specifically because Mercante likes to present herself as some kind of champion of women and equality and the downtrodden and less powerful and influential. Doesn’t seem to line up with what she actually does when push comes to shove.

It doesn’t end there with this wretched waste of human flesh, either. Remember that Ryan Roger Athay fellow I mentioned before? Well, between you and I, folks, while there’s not trail of publicly glowing evidence that she had a hand in his complete removal from the YouTube platform, there’s enough circumstantial evidence and a marked history and pattern of behavior such that, well, one can turn to that bit of old world doggerel; ‘usually, where there is smoke, there’s fire’. Many of us suspect Mercante to be directly or tangentially responsible for Athay’s expulsion from YouTube, since he was the founder of the community referred to as ‘Reality Based’.

She and Airbagged, one of her most devoted sycophants on X/Twittter, cheered on his removal, with Airbagged laughing about it now being “Ryan Roger Away”. Yeah, these are the sorts of people Alyssa likes to associate herself with. She and her comrades haven’t quite pushed as hard on any singular person yet to the point where they terminate their own existence, like her heroes Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu and their little online army of dittoheads did during the first Gamergate situation with Alex Holowka (that was its own circus, you should look into that), but that’s okay with Alyssa. After all, she’s in the process of trying to rewrite history right now and find a way to insert herself into that whole scenario, which will be fascinating to watch her try to do, given that she hadn’t yet even graduated from college when the first Gamergate was ripping through the popular culture space. Give them time, though, she and her crew, I’m almost certain they’re going to push someone to that point.

And when/if they do, they will laugh and cheer for it, since it will mean the permanent removal of a thorn in their side from this life. These are not people who value life at all, unless it serves them and their benefactors.

The latest example of someone getting clipped by Mercante’s flailing keyboard warrior strikes is Atreus, another content creator focused on the video games industry and calling out the fringe leftist nonsense that has been infesting the games themselves and the people involved in making said games. Like Toasty and Ryan, his is a relatively ‘small’ channel on YouTube, without a great deal of influence over large viewership bases. He has been demonetized on the platform now, not quite as harsh a punishment as Ryan Roger Athay got, but still, an attempt at silencing his perspective and getting him to back off of criticism of Mercante and her crew.

The biggest fish she’s gone after thus far is SmashJT, and she’s doing so in the form of a lawsuit, as indicated above. Nobody believes her suit has a leg to stand on, which is fitting, given that she is herself rarely on either leg, but rather, on her knees or her back (bazinga!).

All Jokes Aside…

I’ve got to wrap this thing up here pretty soon, because I’m now approaching five thousand words, and I’ve written short stories that don’t even get this high a word count out of me. Not many of them, mind you, but this is much more challenging for a fellow who prefers to work in fiction. As part of my final section here, I’d like to take a moment to directly ask Alyssa the following two-part question.

Firstly, what precisely made you and your cohorts think it wise to target gamers broadly for your particular browbeating campaign? Did it never occur to you folks that gamers, whose hobby has since its early inception relied heavily upon pattern recognition for mastery, might eventually recognize your patterns of behavior in coming after and castigating them and attempting to get them removed from the various platforms that you share with them? Human beings are already wired for pattern recognition, as noted evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein have pointed out on numerous occasions, both as educators and as podcast hosts. You couple evolutionary development and adaptation with a group of people who engage in a hobby that is predicated in large part on utilizing that pattern recognition and critical thinking skills, and the result is invariably going to be a group of people against whom your typical subversive tactics are not going to be able to continue operating without being noticed and countered en masse. In short, ‘you dun goofed, kid’.

In the meantime, have fun trying to find an angle to come at me with in response to this. My YouTube channel is small, much like those of most of your targets, but it isn’t monetized, so you can’t take that from me. I already have a 4-year-old Rumble and Substack accounts, so even if you remove this from YouTube, you can’t make this disappear entirely. I’ve broken no laws for you to accuse me of, nor violated your precious bubble of safety as a public figure, which you became the moment you started writing bylines for GamesRadar as a large-scale, public-facing platform. Yeah, your whole lawsuit against SmashJT is well and truly up Shit’s Creek, Alyssa, because you are a public figure, and are not qualified to claim that you’re the underdog in any of these interactions. For God’s sake, you have a contact inside of YouTube, and just a few weeks ago, I had more subscribers than you on YouTube, so the question of ‘How does she have a rep inside YouTube already’ really isn’t one I imagine you’d want folks sniffing around at more intensely, since it kind of defeats the whole “I’m just widdle old me” cloak you try to wrap yourself in like a shawl when unpleasant attention comes your way.

You have nothing to threaten me with. Even if you were to find a way to get me taken off of Substack, I have two dozen fiction novels for sale commercially on various online booksellers. Even if you found some method of getting rid of me from Rumble, there are other venues to take my material to and continue on. And even if you were to, by some miracle granted by God Himself, get me barred from every single online outlet, it wouldn’t really matter all that much, because at the end of the day, I have some things you’ll never have, Alyssa:

I have a spouse who loves and supports me.

I have children who love and respect me, who rely upon me.

I have belief in duty, honor, accountability, and a clean conscience.

And I have faith in the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven, which I strive to be worthy of, despite falling ever short of grace.

From all indications that I can see, these things will remain forever out of your reach. And at this point, I don’t much care what becomes of you; honestly, nobody should.