Assassins Creed Shadows DEI Consultant Calls Gamers "White Supremacists" For Criticizing The Game 
Another "faction" who claimed to be upset by Assassin's Creed Shadows' reveal was the group Schmidt-Hori lumps together under "general anti-DEI people". These, she says, "just seized the opportunity and utilised the lament of the Asian men" - another textbook tactic.
"It's white supremacist, nationalist ideology couched as being sympathetic. White supremacists tend to use Asians or Asian Americans as a tool to oppress Black people, Latinos," she continues, saying this was often by attempting to contrast racial stereotypes. "It's very, very typical. And it's unfortunate that some Asian Americans also become sympathetic to white supremacy [through this]."
While Schmidt-Hori messaged some of this faction sending abuse at her too, she notes that she did not engage with those warring over whether Black historical figure Yasuke was a samurai or not - or those trying to argue whether he ever existed.
"I could make a perfect argument to prove something is correct, and they will still use something else to complain about the game or society," she says. "The reasoning doesn't matter, they're unhappy and need to blame it on someone else."
Alongside general abuse and death threats, Schmidt-Hori says she was personally targeted due to her published work as "someone who promotes child molestation".
"I wrote a research book about trans-generational male-male love in medieval Buddhist monasteries, and they must have felt like they just dug up a gold mine," she says. "In the US, a favourite denouncement of the far-right is that the left, including people like Hilary Clinton, run child molestation rings. And here I was, this woke so-called academic who wrote this book."
While Schmidt-Hori felt able to contact those sending her abuse, she was also not naive. She recalls emailing a particular right-wing influencer with a large online following who wrote an article about her, sending hate in her direction.
"He is a professional troll," Schmidt-Hori acknowledges. "He has a media company dedicated to anti-DEI activities. So I emailed him and said 'you wrote an article about me, and because of that I've been receiving threats, my life is inconvenienced, it's very difficult to attend to my family, my students, my courses, and what do you think of what you did?' I requested a Zoom conversation, but then he said 'oh, we can do it on my platform'. I said, 'no, no, I don't want your fans to be there cheering for you. This is just between you and me as two individuals. And I just want you to realise what you did was so much more than you probably intended. Imagine your wife receiving hundreds of death threats and her picture is all over the internet. You'd be worried about her, right? Well, that's my husband.'
"He didn't reply," she says of the troll, "but he took it down, so that was good enough for me. I was like, good job, white supremacist."
