The Gamergate crowd has an important lesson to learn from this and that is the concept of a martyr. If somebody is a public face of a movement that you disagree with you DO NOT fight the movement by attacking the face as you will just prove yourself to be all the more bad in the eyes of your opponents. Opposition will grow towards you as a result and the ideals that you oppose will advance.

Gamergate likely had nothing to do with the firing of Alison, but Nintendo has to now treat their decision to fire this lady as though it were a show of partisan support towards the Gamergate crowd thanks to the petty attacks that preceded her firing. As a result, Nintendo is going to have to be more lenient to the feminists in the future in order for the company to restore a balanced public image.  This could mean letting things in like a female Link in Zelda U which I feel would be a far bigger loss for us than if we had just left Alison alone as a Nintendo employee who really didn't hold any sway on the content in games.

In short, the real losers here is the pro-Gamergate crowd: we have now made a martyr out of Alison and we will suffer the consequences. In the future, we need to attack the ideas of our opponents but show respect toward the people with whom we disagree: this will add legitimacy to the Gamergate movement.

No they don't.  All you have to do is show people the fact that she was moonlighting as a lewd model and used her twitter account (which said plain as day that she worked for family friendly NIntendo) to advertise it.  She even posed with a 3DS is some of them -- I mean, my god, she's not the sharpest knife in the drawer if that's any indication of her intelligence.  In fact, I think NOA knows that if they bend to  SJWs, feminists and the games media even once, then those groups own their asses -- you can see examples popping up everyday from Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft and so on.  You kowtow to them once and you'll be doing it forever because they cannot and won't be appeased or satisfied. 

In reality, the Allison Rapp defense is just a show of force by these groups.  They don't give a crap about Rapp; they just want to make an example out of Nintendo so that all the other companies don't oppose social justice and feminism  -- the problem is that this is a horrible way to attack Nintendo considering all the facts are on Nintendo's side.  And even if NOA does kneel before them, NCL doesn't give a crap what westerners want.  It's one of the few blessings of being a fan of a Japanese company led by stubborn people who don't give a damn about what the west wants.

Also, the hypocrisy of the people bitching about Nintendo firing Rapp for NSFW modeling is laughable considering a lot of those same people also whined and bitched about dancers at Microsoft's GDC party and Tracer's butt pose in Overwatch eariler this month.  I guess lewd stuff is only okay to them if you subscribe to the 'right' politics -- then it turns into 'empowering' or some other crap.

You're absolutely right about feminists and social justice warriors wanting to make an example out of Nintendo. You are also right about the importance of standing up against their attacks:  if you give them an inch they will take the full country mile.  Hopefully, NCL is as stubborn as you say.

BTW, upon reading some more of the posts on this thread I see now that my previous post was very ill-informed.  I had listened to a certain podcast this evening that made Alison out to be fairly innocent in this whole affair but I realize now that they under-emphasized some pretty important details.  I apologize.

Especially Nintendo who are very family-friendly and conservative.

This story actually continues to get more interesting.  I'll preface this with saying I could care less what she chooses to do (though I may feel bad for her husband), I don't think it's unreasonable for Nintendo to not want an employee who did this as a 2nd job:

http://www.gamezone.com/news/it-seems-former-nintendo-pr-employee-alison-rapp-was-a-prostitute-3435712

From what I read, she was for Japan keeping their fictional pornography views as they were. Western pressure on Japan's anti child pornography laws would affect that part as well. She did however want Japan to strengthen their laws against real child pornography.
She never said anything to support pedophelia from what I understand, but it was spun that way by someone and people jumped on the bandwagon.

This is what I read in the linked article: "Rapp, clearly a respectful fan of Japanese culture, distinguishes between exploiting real-life children and the creation of fictionalized sexual material. At no point does she defend or advocate for the abuse of children, and in fact argues for stronger laws against child exploitation."
http://kotaku.com/the-ugly-new-front-in-the-neverending-video-game-cultur-1762942381#_ga=1.135394866.2031715201.1447537439

I personally haven't analyzed her thesis, but from someone who did, that's how they interprited it.

You provided one quote, and you added "at times it's unclear what she means", and "give the impression".
How do you then go on to claim that one doesn't need to analyze the thesis in order to understand her viewpoint?
Often times you can't find clarity of someone's stance from a single paragraph because it is written with the assumption that you've read the entierty of it.
I'm not looking at a synopsis over what she wrote. I'm looking at it in addition to it. That person has a better understanding of her thesis than I do, and that's the conclusion he reached.
At some point she "distinguishes between exploiting real-life children and the creation of fictionalized sexual material". And that she supposedly argues for stronger laws against child exploitation seems to contradict the notion that she would support real child pornography. So reading the full thesis may indeed be neccesary to be clear about when she's talking about real life and fiction.