I've noticed a lot of people who have reacted to this controversy have seemed to miss the fungi joke and that having the same letter in a series of words is a form of rhyming.

That's silly and missing the point of why the joke is even there to begin with.

Here's the thing: No one would be talking about the "Fungi" thing if the premise of this "joke" was anything other than "Sufflegate: Exposed", and unless the Watergate scandal had been about Nixon smuggling biological weapons out of a hotel room (it wasn't), then this crappy pun simply didn't even gel with its supposed context. What's more: Why Watergate? Are we in the 70s? Is Paper Mario secretly a Futurama spin-off that I am not aware of? No, of course it's a #gamergate reference! C'mon now!

I just don't see how it relates to gamer gate in anyway unless you just look only at the screenshots she uses and you have been up to date with gamergate

Considering 1) how inherently jarring it is to have a Watergate reference in a game like this (as NoA is unlikely aiming to appease the Baby Boomer demographics), 2) how NoA has recently reacted to the #gamergate lynch mob and to the subsequent backlash from critics over Alison Repp's firing and 3) how #gamergate has been troublesome enough in the industry that even this has happened, the room for benefit of the doubt is no more than razor thin at this point. More likely, as someone else has already pointed out in another thread, the "joke" is indeed a #gamergate dog whistle worded to be (barely) interpretable as a Watergate reference just to maintain a layer of deniability. We have been dealing with the same misogynistic dung heap for almost two years now, so why is it still so hard for some people here to see through such elementary level of coyness?