It finally happened and I’m using the word “finally” to express a too-long length of time.
Indiana “Frosk” Black, the social justice advocate and ultra-feminist that insulted fans and viewers of the gaming/tech network G4TV was finally fired after layoffs plagued the network due to horrifically low viewership thanks to her actions.
As I previously reported, G4TV had to terminate the jobs of 20-30 people last week. People showed up to begin the day’s work only to be led to HR and be informed that they’d been laid off. However, Frosk was not counted among them and this was confirmed by Frosk herself who posted a tone-deaf tweet bragging about how she survived the layoffs.
The tweet caused massive backlash, most of it aimed at Frosk herself for being so cavalier and selfish while her former co-workers were now without a job, while some of it was aimed at G4 itself for keeping her on.
(READ: G4TV Just Proved It Deserves to Go Under)
Now, only a few days later, it’s been announced that Frosk herself has been kicked to the curb. According to Kotaku, the reason behind Frosk’s firing may be related to her braggadocious tweet.
This is one of the first good moves G4TV has made in some time, but the question remains: why didn’t the network fire her when it was absolutely clear that Frosk was the reason people abandoned the network in the first place? Why did they think keeping her on was a good option?
To give you some context, Frosk’s rant centered around attacking G4TV’s own fans and the gaming culture in general for being sexist. She complained that previous G4TV hosts Olivia Munn and Morgan Webb, like Frosk herself, were not there to be easy on the eyes for gamers and that they should stop attacking her for not being as attractive as they are.
It’s unclear how many people were actually attacking Frosk with sexist intent but it’s likely it was a small minority. Frosk’s real intent was to continue a feminist narrative that had been ongoing from 2013-2014 that was made famous by feminist culture critics like Anita Sarkeesian, who claimed that gaming culture was rife with sexism and wasn’t welcoming to women, a demonstrably false accusation even at the time.
After Frosk’s rant, which included the suggestion that if viewers didn’t like her then they shouldn’t watch, viewers stopped watching. G4TV attempted various changes to the network to do damage control and even had booba streamer Amouranth on in a bikini to make it seem like the network wasn’t leaning too heavily into Frosk’s POV, but it didn’t help.
Firing Frosk was always going to be the move that set the network back on track, but the fact that they conducted layoffs without Frosk being among them tells us some interesting things, but chief among them is that G4TV seemed to agree with Frosk. If Kotaku’s reports are accurate then they may have let her keep her job had she not sent out that tweet.
If that’s the case it would appear that G4 is still plagued with higher-ups who believe themselves to be part activists. Had G4 fired Frosk and issued an apology to viewers they might have plugged the holes in their hull, but they didn’t.
They fired her because they had to, not because they wanted to.
With that in mind, it remains the network that labeled its own viewers as morally reprehensible people and if that’s the case then there’s no reason for viewers to return.
The network still has a chip and a chair, but at this rate, it’s unclear how the network will survive, and it’s hard to come up with a reason for why it should.