Anita Sarkeesian is the founder of Feminist Frequency, a video series that analyzes tropes about women in pop culture and video games from a feminist point of view1. Her name became a widely recognized internet reference point in mid-2012 after a Kickstarter campaign for a new series called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games set off one of the earliest well-documented coordinated harassment campaigns targeting a woman for talking about games3.

Her earlier videos covered television, film, and pop culture patterns like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype, and were mostly known within a smaller feminist media audience before the 2012 project pulled her into the wider gaming conversation5. The response to the Kickstarter, described by outlets like Wired and Kotaku as intense and personal, included YouTube comment floods, Wikipedia vandalism, rape and death threats, and organized flagging of her fundraising page13.

Sarkeesian is a real person rather than a template, so her name mostly appears online in two contexts. Supporters cite her as shorthand for the argument that mainstream games have a sexism problem, often linking directly to the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games episodes on the Feminist Frequency YouTube channel4. Detractors used her name as a rallying tag during the 2012 backlash and later gaming controversies, typically pointing to the Kickstarter or specific tropes videos to argue against her analysis3. The clearest way to engage with her actual work is to watch the original series on feministfrequency.com or her YouTube channel rather than the meme-ified secondhand versions4.