It was sometime around the spring of 2020 that usage of the term first started picking up parlance within the gaming and anime communities online, it then grew exponentially throughout the rest of the year. Gatekeep’s inclusion in the lexicon was cemented in January 2021 when it became the central tenet of “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss”.
had both already seen significant popularity and discourse by this time. It is also because of its sandwiching between these two loaded and controversial terms that gatekeeping never stood a chance in showing us what good it could do.
Even though it is often cast as an arrogant position to take, there are plenty of examples in popular culture where going mainstream has directly led to the detriment and death of something. We see it in music with the concept of the one-hit wonder, where an act has a mainstream crossover hit but they fail to ever strike gold again, usually leading to the band’s demise .
“Unprecedented times”