FUBAR'd Doing the same thing and expecting different results

Of Dickwolves

Summary: Penny Arcade had a comic that used the term "raped." The comic itself was a crack at MMORPGs and quest objectives. For example, a quest asks you to venture into a mine and free five slaves. There are dozens of slaves, so that other players on the same quest can free some without slowing you down. After freeing five of them, you cannot free any more. The game will not allow this. But the NPC slaves are still scripted and begging you to free them. So, if you were to take this seriously, you would be some callous asshole for not freeing these other poor souls because, hey, the quest won't let you. You must turn a deaf ear to the slave's complaints that they are being raped by dickwolves.

If you're already familiar with the story, you can skip down to my opinion.

Rape victims and those closely related to rape victims did not find the secondary joke amusing (and more than within their right to do so). However, they went further to call the comic pro-rape and glorifying rape.

Penny Arcade did a second comic making a joke about the reaction. Apologizing in a tongue-and-cheek manner for which they are famous, as if the comic had spawned a youthful generation of gamer rapists and that they had to make a stronger statement against rape.

Let us be fair. Penny Arcade has always been an edgy comic, rife with eerie images of what man is capable of inflicting upon his fellow man. You have an appliance that fucks fruit. You have a story where one of the main characters (inadvertently) kills his wife. You have a man in the passable image of Scott Kurtz desiring to suckle upon the lactating mammary of Gabe's wife. The comic is consistently pushing the envelope.

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So the controversy died, or was on life support, until Penny Arcade made a shirt. With a sports team type logo. About Dickwolves. No mention of rape, whatsoever. And apparently this was enough to fan the flames of war. Apparently it dignified rape and depicted rape as a sport.

So a movement cropped up against the t-shirt and what it apparently signifies. While maybe not leading the pack, one of the more outspoken people is a woman who goes by the handle KirbyBits, a rape victim. I glanced over the blog while this was occurring and noticing several references to "triggers" and PTSD. And apparently, as part of this campaign, she felt the need to put out this shirt, perhaps doing more to link the concept of "rape" to "Dickwolves" than the original shirt did. The shirt was taken down as KirbyBits found it hypocritical to leave it up after the "this glorifies rape" crowd won their victory.

Eventually, the Penny Arcade guys decided to withdraw the shirt from the store, due to a vocal part of the fanbase that felt uncomfortable with the shirts at PAX East. While Penny Arcade's comic is edgy, their public endeavors have striven to be fairly family friendly and to depict gamers in a positive light. However, this got the people who do not connect Dickwolves with the glorification of rape, and those who get upset whenever public pressure is put upon people to censor speech, to get equally angry with the "Dickwolves = Rape" crowd.

So in my opinion...

Okay, this entry was probably already dripping with something dismissive about the whole debacle, but I suppose I will spell it out. First, let me be clear. Rape is a horrible thing, in real life. I emphasize this, because we already have so much media about the concept of other atrocities man perpetuates on man. From murder, to infidelity, to torture, to imprisonment, physical, financial, emotional and mental abuse... Long is the list of things that man is capable of inflicting upon his fellow man that we "glorify" in media. I could understand a little more if this were a departure from Penny Arcade's usual style of things, but its not.

And there are thousands, if not millions, of victims of these types of atrocities. And while I am sure some of them find it in themselves to protest the glorification of the acts that victimized them, I also say that from a different perspective, I find it hypocritical. What if everyone got their way? What if we could no longer have action movies or war movies because soldiers who were rendered disabled protested them? Al Pacino movies that glorify the mafia lifestyle? What if we could no longer depict alcohol usage in media because alcoholics and those related to alcoholics found it glorified its abuse? Drugs? Sex? Where is the line? And those have far less tenuous lines than "Dickwolves" do to "rape."

So I call bullshit on the "this glorifies rape" crowd. On it and its somewhat pro-feminist roots. I'm not an anti-feminist, I think women have come a long way and still have further to go, but I also do not think that modern America is as aggressive to the independent woman as it was during the height of ultra-feminism.

And as a final thought, South Park spent years mocking Judaism, Christianity, Muslims, Mormons and every religion you can think imagine. And all those years, Isaac Hayes, the man who voiced Chef, went along with it. It was not until South Park chose to mock Scientology, the subscribed religion of Isaac Hayes, did Hayes voice objection and ended his working relationship with the creators of South Park. With everything Penny Arcade has depicted in the last decade in their comic, you have suddenly become upset with their passing use of the word "rape" then you are probably a hypocrite.