It's not because of her receipts that I see her vilified at all, it's her ACTIONS she took aggressively against others in the RPG community that gave her a bad rep among some. Those actions would have given ANYONE in the same position as her a bad rep, regardless of sex or gender (IMO).
I haven't heard it debunked, just people saying they don't agree with others.
Just as a side note, Snarf Zagyg is right about the all-caps. Your over-use of them makes it look like you think they enhance your argument.
What is mostly happening here is that people are recognizing that they aren't as confident as they once were that those instances are verifiably (and verified to be) true. We all took a lot of these for granted for a very long time. I, for one, would love to have a long, drawn out dissection of each supposed instance of these actions, re-examine their validity, and be prepared to come down in either direction on my new view of each one. Digging in our heals on our preconceived notions (one way or the other) will do nothing.
Gary himself believed women were biologically incapable of enjoying roleplaying games because of "a difference in brain function"....
Okay, this is a great non-Lorraine example. I've heard this before, but have no idea where (much less how believable it is, how much it represents his lifelong perspective, the context, etc.). Do you remember where you heard this?
She was running things in the online Cease & Desist harassment and undercutting of fans era of TSR.
That seems a big her era only negative.
Gary was tossing out C&Ds as early as the late 70s (ironically while at the same time stealing other IPs himself without permission). Again, Lorraine getting vilified for things Gary did as well but seems to get a free pass. that's the issue people are having. Not that Lorraine was getting vilified for things, but the clear double standard between her and the men.
There are two things I consider things (I consider potentially ethically or morally questionable or otherwise more objectionable than simply failing to save TSR) I absolutely know Lorraine did (not hearsay passed around or dispensed by sources I need to go back and re-examine) -- 1) the self-dealing with regards to Buck Rogers, and 2) the aggressive IP defensiveness online.
The first, well, I disagree with Snarf on this -- I don't care if you are majority stakeholder in a closely held corporation, as long as there is one other shareholder who doesn't have a financial interest in this other thing, it is ethically questionable to buy with your shared assets this thing only you have an interest in.
The second, well it is bad, but 1) I do not know how much of this was Lorraine's doing (again, if anyone has any evidence one way or another, I'd love to know about it); 2) I don't know if her legal, business, and technology advisors advised her to do so; 3) indeed, Gary did this (to great consternation among the fans at the time) in the 70s; and 4) TSR was not the only one to misunderstand the internet during the 90s.
#3&4 are big parts of my hesitancy on this. #3 being the whole thing about protecting the IP around RPG games and what can be protected and what had to be protected and so on was this huge moving target that lots of game developers seemed to not get right from day one. Does lots of people screwing this up mean that one amongst them shouldn't also be blamed? of course not, but they should not receive disproportionate blame. #4, well, again lots of people screwing up doesn't mean 90s TSR (under Lorraine) shouldn't receive some critique (it should, they screwed up and pissed off a lot of people), but wow was it something of the wild west on the web at the time with lots of corporations not knowing the rules. I was part of a startup at the time and we too were flying by the seat of our pants on what to do with the internet. If someone had said
'hey, Joe Blo over there has created a webpage calling itself pursuant to your product. This might be an attempt to assert themselves as representatives of your company,' I have no idea if I would make the right decision at that time. I say that meaning that I might have also screwed that up, not that what they did wasn't screwing up. Still, I think it is important to remember how things were at the time (or, for that matter, how much false representation there is on the internet now).
I have not heard of him sending out C&D letters to fans the way TSR did in the 90s.
Once again, I don't know where I saw this so it's not worth much. However I remember a story of someone making (and selling) character sheets for D&D back when it first came out (and when photocopiers were still a rare commodity). They'd hoped to maybe start a partnership with TSR, and instead got a C&D. It might have been a story from
Playing at the World.
