The Last of Us: Has evil feminism ruined the zombie apocalypse?
A girl … in my video game?
So it’s true: Feminists have started ruining video games with all their feminism. At least according to some dude called pullupjumper on MGTOWforums who recently wrote a post warning his fellow red pill dudebros about a little game called The Last of Us, which is not only filled with zombies but, get this, girls.
For anyone who plays video games as one of their hobbies, The Last of Us is a pretty fun game…. but…. The feminist messages were close to ruining a game I waited a year for… The game’s setting is in a zombie apocalyptic world and the basic story (no spoilers) is that this guy has to take a 14 year old girl across the country during the zombie apocalypse. Almost as soon as the story started, I knew pretty much every female character in the game (except for the main protagonists daughter) would be portrayed as a”bad ass” character. The message was clear, women are as strong as men… Even when they are only 14.
Also, there were some adult ladies in positions of authority!
During the game , the two main characters meet different survivor groups. Every group leader was a woman. The only group leader who was a man, was a bad guy. The main protagonist even said yes ma’am, no ma’am to these women.
CAN YOU IMAGINE.
Now before you all go, but isn’t this sort of complaining a little hypocritical, given that all these video game dudes got mad when that chick Anita Sarkeesian who isn’t even a real gamer because of boobies made those videos she totally stole all that money for because IT’S ONLY A GAME, LADY JEEZ DON’T RUIN EVERYTHING WITH YOUR STUPID GENDER ANALYSIS.
Well, no, it’s not totally hypocritical because, get this, the girls in The Last of Us are portrayed as being unnaturally strong and capable.
What was pretty funny though is that the 14 year old girl is able to fire a rifle THAT IS BIGGER THAN HER and fire it accurately.
This is a clear affront to the extreme naturalism and realism of a game about a ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE.
And clearly never before in video game history has any male character been portrayed as unnaturally strong or capable.
Yeah, this dude and his gun are totally plausible.
Oh but it gets worse:
On the other hand, (not funny) another boy who was about the 14 year old girls age, was portrayed as weak, could not fight, could not shoot a gun and was just made to seem very weak. The Fems cant even leave their “girl power” out of the games.
A male character who is helpless and in need of rescue?
OH NO!
SAVE ME PRINCESS PEACH!
Happily, pullupjumper has an idea for a way to confront this creeping feminism:
Maybe, if any of you are interested, a couple of us can get together and start making our own games after these games become unbearable. What do you guys think?
Grimlock is right there with him:
I’m currently going to school for media arts and animation and am considering starting a small indy animation/film studio with a couple of guys from class. I also happen to be getting pretty good at 3d modeling … and even though i want to start with animation and film video games are my end game.
I don’t think I’d ever put an obvious message into a game, since I find pushing your belief onto others through mediums like videogames more than a little cunty, but will my games be misogynist? You better fucking believe it. Misogyny The likes of which will make duke nukem blush. I won’t need to tell you guys when I break into the industry, you’ll know it from the sheer uproar it’ll cause.
Misogyny … in video games? Now there’s a novel idea!
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Oh, by the way, for new and/or extremely literal readers, I would like to point out that this post contains
Posted on July 4, 2013, in all about the menz, antifeminism, are these guys 12 years old?, drama kings, entitled babies, evil women, I'm totally being sarcastic, men who should not ever be with women ever, MGTOW, misogyny, no girls allowed, playing the victim and tagged anti-feminism, antifeminism, mgtow, misogyny, video games. Bookmark the permalink. 560 Comments.
Just for clarification, my nym has nothing to do with the Amnesia games. I did start to watch a Let’s Play a little while back, though, and it was incredibly panic-inducing just from that. Then again, I think some of Link’s mask transformations in Majora’s Mask are ridiculously scary, so YMMV.
dire sloth – I’d read that!
On WWZ, I refuse to see that movie. The book was so good, and they killed it to make it into a summer action flick with absolutely no staying power or interesting bits. I mean, really, who wants to watch yet another grizzled white American dude save the world singlehandedly YET AGAIN. Puh-lease.
I used to really like Larry Niven until I found out what a reactionary jerk he was. I was really dismayed at that point in Lucifer’s Hammer (an otherwise quite good book) where he decides that the end of civilization will (necessarily) bring about the end of feminism, and good riddance!!
I know Larry (and Jerry).
Larry isn’t as bad as that. 1: The words of characters ought not be taken as the literal beliefs of the author (all men are rapists, should be killed, etc.).
2: Larry doesn’t believe that (Jerry, on the other hand does believe it). Larry suffers from the advantages of being exceptionally privileged, to the point of being insulated from most of the trials of life (his grandparents made a pile of money in the Teapot Dome shenannigans. Everyone in the family gets $1,000,000 on reaching their 21st birthday. They are supposed to pay it back into the trust [so as to keep it ongoing, and the rules of the trust are such that spouses can't inherit; which is why he spends an inordinate amount of money on gifts for Fuzzy, but I digress]. His family *still* gives him grief for not “having a real job”, even though he’s the only one of his cohort to have paid the money back.
Larry is a more than a little conservative on issues of money; but I don’t think he’s a racist, nor any more misogynist than the run of the mill conservative of almost 80. He’s pro-choice, for equal pay, etc.
Jerry, on the other hand is a racist, a militarist and a hypocrite (I was in a conversation with him and he opined that he wanted McCain to lose so the fuck-ups Bush was leaving in his wake would be blamed on the Democrats and so keep them out of office for the next 50 years; though he’s all about, “personal responsibility and accountability).
I don’t know how Roberta (his wife) stands him. Love, I suppose, which passeth all understanding. She’s as strong, assertive and no-nonsense from anyone, a woman as I know, and she puts up with not a lick of Jerry’s asshattery; but she also doesn’t seem to have any effect on his politics, or attitudes toward other women (and his daugther is much the same: she was in the Army, made Major [and was, in many ways, his pride and joy] then resigned after the Gulf War; on principle. Jerry wasn’t happy).
Jerry is, in many ways, never happy. I think he wishes the world were as he imagines it ought have been in the fifties. I used to cut him some slack; for his age, (and some other stuff) but even with 24 of 30 years when his political party was ascendent he only got worse.
That he thought I ought have been drowned in my teens (I gave him no more than the respect his age entitled him to) seems to me to be better than it used to be.
There is a reason Steve Barnes has written a lot more with Larry than with Jerry.
You know what I think all games should have no women. Just guys, then we would be able to get rid of this problem once and for all. Then all the characters can be big and manly and cool and won’t have vagina’s and all that yucky stuff that ruins games. Yeah……..sounds like some sort of plan……..not a good plan but it’s a plan.
Newsflash for the Manosphere: One of the things about firearms… they make “strength” a lot less important.
Heaviest rifle I’ve ever shot was about 12 lbs. I have a rifle which is about 11 lbs, fully loaded. I can haul it around all day.
Most painful to shoot was about 9 lbs. fully loaded (Marlin 1895 in 45-70). I’ve taught a lot of people to shoot. The women shoot just as well as the men; and they learn faster (from experience, and from talking to other basic firearms instructors it’s because they listen better. They aslo don’t tend to come to the class with the idea they know how to do it, and it’s only for “pointers” on improving their (already good) technique.
So with a standard (by which I mean ca.30 caliber) high-power rifle, there is no reason a 14 year old can’t shoot it, male or female. I’ve known a lot of 14 year old girls/young women who were fine with them (my sister was a dab hand with a .12 ga shotgun at 14).
When it comes to running… men and women of similar build and weight don’t run the same. Men’s hips are built differently and, in general; for a given build, men in the same level of training will be a bit faster over a given distance.
But that doesn’t mean women can’t run as far, it just means that over hours the men will go further.
gillyrosebee: He didn’t have the hand strength* to acutally pull the trigger
Was this a Double Action handgun? Because most single action revolvers/pistols have a trigger pull in the 4-6 lbs range, which is why toddlers can fire them.
My guess is he was too nervous to steel himself to the point of firing it, because he was afraid of the recoil, or looking a fool, or both.
Well, in fairness, Housemate has all his handguns calibrated for carry safety, so they are all adjusted to have a higher than average initial trigger pull weight (ca. 8 lbs, when I understand 2 to 4 is more typical). And Dave the gamerdude was soft as fresh biscuit dough.
Hermn…
Standard pull on a DA first round is between 9-12 lbs. For standard SA (when the slide has been racked/hammer is back) is generally about 4, though it can be as high as 6. Some people will have it down around 2.5 (competition triggers can be as low as about 1.5. Less than that is too light, and they go off when you don’t mean them to). Rifles tend to be between 6-8 lbs.
New York City requires a 12 lbs trigger pull (which is part of why they injured so many people in the Empire State Building Fiasco).
Also have you read Mira Grant’s zombie novels? I’m told they are great.
“I think some of these guys actually hope for the apocalypse because they think the women will die first (whereas they’ll be saved by their mad gaming skillz).” – 2-3 years back John Scalzi wrote some scathing remarks about anti-tax randites’ likelihood of ending up as “thin strips of Objectivist Jerky” in an apocalypse rather than living the good life in Galt Gulch; since then, every time I’ve encountered some group of overprivileged, uninformed twerps wallowing in apocalyptic fantasies I’ve thought “there’s some more candidates for the smokehouse.”
I also have to wonder why it’s so often the people with the least idea, let alone skills, to survive a general systems collapse are the ones most likely to be attracted to such fantasies.
It’s a misunderstanding of mathematical nature.
That is, with a 99 % mortality rate because of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, they’re the ones who are important enough to make the 1 % cut.
After all, statistics, fatalities and death have no clout when pressed against self importance.
RE: katz
I’m honestly not a big zombie fan either. I can understand the horror, in a, “creature that is dumber, slower, weaker, and in almost all ways inferior to you, BUT NEVER STOPS COMING,” way. (Though I also think it has some creepy weird disability subtext in it. Just me?)
However, I can enjoy it being done in novel ways. I found World War Z interesting because it focused more on people banding together and figuring things out, rather than the zombies themselves. The Voudon ‘zombies on strike’ comic was GREAT. (Then again, these were sapient zombies, capable of recognizing and arguing for their rights, however slowly. They weren’t sick, they didn’t eat or attack anybody, they just wanted to be paid for their labor.) As a wee preteen, we wrote about a friendly French zombie named Jacques who had no interest in biting, attacking, or eating anyone, and I STILL think some of the comedy we wrote for him was among the funniest shit we ever wrote as a kid.
But another boring-ass zombie apocalypse where only grizzled lone wolves with shotguns can save us all? Enh. Been there.
And, as a note, the rifle in the illo looks like a Winchester Model 70. Which is one of the smoothest bolt action rifles on the market. The M-21 Sniper Rifle of the US Army/USMC is basically a Model 70 with some minor tweaks (restocking to reduce already minimal barrel flex).
I own one, and it shoots better than I do. I’ve managed to shoot a sub-MOA group (an MOA is 1 minute of angle it equals a distance of once inch at 100 yards). I put three bullets into a hole .75 inch across at 100m (about 110 yards).
The heaviest versions of it (in the .30 caliber range) are about 7 lbs. Add a bit for the scope, and realise they are well balanced and there is no reason she can’t shoot it. With a recoil pad even a heavy load (say 220gr bullet, at 2800fps) is going to be fine.
But for shooting zombies, a much lighter load say, 168 gr. would be fine.
The US Army used a 150gr bullet for the M1 (which is what they used in 1906, when the cartridge was designed. They increased it to 170gr in 1926, to have compatibility with the Browning M1 Machine Gun, but the semi-auto M1 Garand couldn’t handle the pressures, and the gas-port would erode, making it a single-shot rifle; the action would fail to cycle, thus preventing a new round from being loaded).
Those heavier loads are all for really long range shooting, or for hitting larger game (elk, moose, bear). 168 will handle people/zombies/deer just fine.
Well, fair enough and I thank you for your experience. My perception was based less on the one fiction source alone (your point 1) than reading through that alongside as a wide range of other (mostly nonfiction) work, including essays, reports and notes from discussions Niven participated in (either at Niven or at Pournelle’s house, I don’t quite recall) when he and a group of other science fiction writers and scientists were discussing their advocacy on behalf of SDI (my dissertation research, let me NEVER have to return to it!!).
I loved their work when I was a young reader discovering sci fi, so maybe my dismay at some of what I read later heightened my sensitivity. And maybe I am conflating Pournelle and Niven too much. It would certainly make it easier to allow myself to love the work with fewer reservations (and I can go back to being thoroughly enchanted with the Ringworld books and the whole Known Space universe!
PS – it was double action, yes. Maybe I am not quite correct in my details. When I moved in, it was made clear to me that the guns would be here (though in the safe or otherwise under Housemate’s direct supervision) but that it was my choice to be involved or not. I am not really a gun person, but I took a couple of safety courses and learned how to clear, load and fire all of them (hopefully safely). Housemate paid for all that, and pays for the ammunition on the somewhat rare occasions that I go to the range to prove I have not forgotten how. I figured if they were here, it was a good idea for me to know how to handle them safely. He does a lot of cowboy action shooting, and I like to wear a corset and hang out with people who have a healthy appreciation for anachronism, so I tag along and pick up details sometimes…
I will definitely check out Mira Grant, thanks!
Have anyone here read the Felix Castor books? They have a fairly fun take on zombies. The “basic” supernatural entity in these books are the ghosts. Sometimes ghosts inhabit their old bodies, make them move about and stuff, and then you have a zombie. They can talk and think, but have a big problem in that their bodies decompose. There’s a zombie called Nick determined to hang on to existence for as long as he can, who lives in a freezer room and generally tries to stay as cold as possible in order to slow down decomposition. It’s generally acknowledged that ghosts and zombies exist. Exorcism is still legal, but there are people fighting for giving them legal rights. They are pretty entertaining books.
I’d say you might want to read the Known Space stuff. I might have a harder time reading Niven/Pournelle if I couldn’t tell which parts had been written by whom (I can also tell Steve and Larry apart, and I can pretty much break out each of them from the matrix in the Heorot stories, but I digress).
Ah.. you did read those. Those are much better at showing the basic Idea of Larry. SDI… oh what a mess. I recall those. They were at the Niven’s place in Tarzana. The stuff which came out of that was largely driven by Jerry/Greg Bear and some other virulent anti-Russians.
Caveat: I have not read those books. I know Seannan, and some of the reason I reccomend her is based on that; but the people I do know who have read her I have every reason to trust on the merit of her work.
I wonder if they ever got over Metroid’s hero being a girl.
RE: Dvarghundsposen
Reminds me of Hideshi Hino’s the Living Corpse. I like the idea, but I think the body horror would be too much for me.
Another thing that always bugged me about a lot of conventional zombie narratives is, how do you KNOW they’re completely dead to the world, never coming back? They usually rush it so they can just excuse lots of gore and violence, but seriously, if the zombie apocalypse happened in my back yard, I’d be really, really reluctant to just start whacking them with yard implements. I’m no biologist. How do I know they aren’t having a temporary problem? That there’s some disconnect between mind and body? Even if they did have some uber-rabies, that doesn’t give me the right to just kill them whenever I find them! (See “GIVE ME BACK MY BIKE!” zombie.)
This guy doesn’t seem to know anything about anything. First, there’s the obvious conclusion that “badass” female characters are bad, when, if we go by that definition, they’d have to be badass to survive that situation in the first place.
Also, there’s nothing unrealistic about a 14-year-old girl being able to fire a rifle accurately. A lot of hunters take their children hunting with them when they’re as young as 8 years old. They can fire one just fine. That rifle in the picture is clearly a hunting rifle, so why shouldn’t she be able to. Now, there is the differences of stress between a hostile environment and a hunting trip that may cause interference, but he’s sure as hell not talking about that.
Also, do they seriously expect to make games? Does he know the required workload and budget just to make one? I mean, they could make independent, low budget games if they’re good enough, but the implication of that comment was that he wanted to make AAA mainstream games.
Oh… and the SDI thing, was quasi-official. Jerry (by virtue of having known Reagan when Reagan was governor of Calif; and of having been involved with Newt, somehow), got that little shindig going.
Larry really does suffer from having been privileged/insulated. He understands a lot of things, on an abstract level, but not on a gut level. Which is part of why he says some really clueless things. He got a bit of Marie Antoinette’s problem. He doesn’t really understand limited options.
Jerry does. He just doesn’t care.
In the present SFWA flap, you don’t see Larry being an ass; Jerry on the other hand is hanging his out for all to see.
Thanks for the talk on “World War Z”. I’ve only heard the (excellent, abridged) audiobook, and in looking up the voice cast, I discovered that they released a “complete” edition, adding the cut chapters with new voice actors to the original recording.
I have been looking forward to getting the last of us for a while and this just makes me want it more.
The anti abortion thing in the walking dead was just ridiculous, Lori (the main characters wife) finds out she is pregnant and decides that she would rather not have a baby in a world where it would constantly be at risk of being eaten by zombies Lori’s eleven year old son. The response from her husband was to yell at her for even considering it and convince her that having the baby in a zombie apocalypse is a good idea.
My own attempt at an original take on a zombie apocalypse was a short story, I started a long time ago and will probably never finish, set in a world where the vast majority of the population is infected with a virus that causes them to focus solely on their immediate survival, satisfying basic desires in the short term and they lose their ability to empathize and understand the long term consequences of their actions. They abandon their jobs and families but aren’t particularly dangerous until food is no longer easily available and they turn to the nearest available food source.
Off topic, but since people are here I want to ask this again — if there’s anything you want to see from the survey data (questions are over here) now is the time to tell me.
Who wants to bet we never hear a squeak about this dude breaking into the gaming industry because it won’t ever happen?
Oh yeah… re rifles. I started shooting when I was 5. I was taught by (among others) my cousin; who was 12.
So this, “girls can’t shoot” shit, is shit.
My recollection is more than quasi, actually. They were given access to plenty of documents (classified and not) and to administration personnel, and had the help and support of a grateful president in the many and various ways that could be expressed.
I don’t know as much about Bear. I’ve read the books he produced for existing series I was already interested in (though his Kzin book sounded to me more like Stirling’s voice) but I just couldn’t get into his stuff. I tried but couldn’t finish either Quantico or Eon. People have told me I ought to try again with Forge of God, but there’s so much to read that it is hard to make myself go back to someone I’ve tried and disliked.
Lots of people have recommended Seanan McGuire, so I’ll have to pick up some of her work to start out with sooner rather than later!
The attempts of women to address sexism in a variety of movements (gaming, writing, take your pick) and the resultant (and usually awful) pushback by so many people whose work I really admired before… it’s killing me, really it is. So many people I just didn’t want to know were complete assholes…
Actually almost every competitive shooting team has female members. That’s the point of guns, upper body strength no longer places a limit on your ability to kill.
“I couldn’t watch “the Walking Dead” for the reason that it was so fucking sexist”
I think Walking Dead is feminist. Females make up half of the cast. In a real zombie apocalypse there would probably be less. But the writers are feminists who want to be PC.
Oooh, zombies!
1: I bailed on Walking Dead when the first attempted rape happened (Shane/Lori at the CDC). I could tell that they had looked into my skull, read my list of “Personal rules for the acceptable use of rape in fiction” and treated it as a checklist of things to avoid. From that point on, I knew, I was gonna spend half the episodes shouting at the TV screen, and I’d already done that for an entire season of Lost, so, no thanks.
2: And my own personal WTF? moment came much earlier on. You know that iconic scene where the Big Damn [White, Straight, Cis-, Male] Hero is riding into the city on horseback? The one with the haunting view of a highway where the outbound lanes have become completely jammed with cars that then needed to be abandoned, while the inbound lanes are all as deserted as a ghost-town? Yeah, everyone who died on that highway was a Darwin Award candidate, because if there’s an evacuation situation, both sides of the road should probably be used in an out-bound direction.
3: Zombies aren’t scary in and of themselves; like most monsters, they’re scary because of what they are a metaphor for. In the 60s, it was homogenization; in the 70s, consumerism. When 28 Days Later came out, it was a growing sense that anger was becoming the primary currency of our lives, so we got rage-zombies, who had the advantage of being scary because they were also faster/stronger than normal. The best zombie fiction is the stuff that focuses on the survivors and how they function–zombies are, in essence, the equivalent of a natural disaster that serves as a device to wipe out most of ‘civilized’ society and see what’s left.
What’s also really funny is that guns that handguns that are lighter are so heavy they’re impractical. Like the desert eagle. It’s about 4.4 pounds fully loaded. It has a hell of a knockback. There’s more than one video on YouTube of people getting hit in the face by a desert eagle they just fired.
And even then, who can’t lift 4 pounds? Now, holding a 4 pound object with one hand stretched in front of you may be difficult, but really, the only guns I can think of that would be too heavy for anyone would be heavier LMGs. And even then, those are meant to be mounted.
And she upchucks her PlanB’s. And then dies during a makeshift c-section. I couldn’t help thinking that this was supposed to glorify motherhood somehow, like ‘look how she suffered for her child, this is what mothers do, what a good person’ blaarg. Better for her to die and the baby be born than to terminate a very dangerous pregnancy.
In the comic she had the baby too, but it made (somewhat) more sense. I just hated how the TV show handled it.
The thing about Mass Effect is that they go out of their damn way to make it clear that DudeShepard is the real, canon, true one…. and then make it so FemmeShepard is the one that’s way, way more interesting to play as.
Part of this is Jennifer Hale’s excellent acting job, but part of it is also that the Manly Military Guy type is just less emotionally rich than his female counterpart (to the extent that it was like pulling teeth to make him gay, but she can be with any-damn-body and it works). I kind of wonder if that was at all deliberate, since it’s well known that Bioware and EA have, let’s say, competing artistic visions.
Ironically, that exact sort of double-standard is the sort of thing that MRAs would actually find it useful to talk about, if feminists weren’t talking about it already.
Insert obvious MRA joke here.
For me it wasn’t that, it was all the afterwards crap – it was barely mentioned again, and Lori just seemed to feel guilty. Lot of opportunity there for good storytelling and character development… but no.
I say quasi because they didn’t actually have standing. They were an adjunct advisory committee/brainstorming session. I think (though I don’t know, I was a little young at the time [15-18ish]) they reported to the National Security Advisor; in the form of the papers drawn up at the meetings.
But the meetings had lots of people who weren’t in any way official, so class material (if any) was really limited. They also had no (direct) access to policy formation, either in Congressional Committee, or from the side of drafting anything, “The President Sent to Congress”.
I’m also pretty sure it was, primarily, self-funded. There were (I think) some calls to come to Wash, and those might have had class access; they also may have had paid lodging, but the fare wasn’t covered.
in my complaint about the walking dead i somehow deleted half a sentence it should say that having the baby could put hers and the rest of the groups lives in even more danger including Lori’s eleven year old son.
Cthulu’s Intern: What’s also really funny is that guns that handguns that are lighter are so heavy they’re impractical. Like the desert eagle. It’s about 4.4 pounds fully loaded. It has a hell of a knockback. There’s more than one video on YouTube of people getting hit in the face by a desert eagle they just fired.
Desert Eagles are odd guns. They are very heavy for a handgun, and use a reloading system which is poorly chosen for a handgun (gas operation). It makes them really “slammy”. Apart from them it’s almost impossible to hit yourself with a handgun, because they go more up than back (esp. a revolver).
And holding 4-5 pounds at arms length is tricky. If you are trying to hold it in steady position (so you can hit something when you squeeze the trigger) there are some tricks you have to learn, or you won’t be able to do it very long.
Regarding abortion in media:
So, my hubby and I have very, very different taste in movies. There are VERY few movies we both enjoy. Case in point: his favorite movie of all time is ‘Dirty Dancing,’ and roughly once a year or two, I’ll watch it with him purely because he loves it.
Everyone agrees that Dirty Dancing is fluff, right? But I realized with surprise that this 80s movie has a character who has an abortion and is treated sympathetically. She’s on the side of good; the leading man is her dance partner and close friend.
I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a movie do that, never mind one as fluffy and braincandy as ‘Dirty Dancing.’ It’s all adoption or ‘changed my mind, want the baby,’ now. It kind of gives me the creeps.
Lately, I find myself getting the nagging sense that my country has been back-sliding in human rights and quality of life issues. But I’m young. Older Boobzers, is this just me becoming more aware of horrible things that have always been here, or has it really gotten worse over the past decade or so?
If you want an example of deeply, incredibly problematic fiction, check out this to see how bad it can truly get. *trigger warnings*
http://hradzka.livejournal.com/194753.html
My boyfriend and I have this weird obsession going with The Walking Dead. I don’t even particularly like it, and I’m not much for horror in the first place, but we still watch all of it. :p Maybe it’s masochistic; it sure as hell isn’t a great show but it pushes my comfort boundaries so that’s a little interesting to experience.
It’s obviously racist as fuck, though. The moment that they started running into other black people I literally predicted that T-Dog was going to die on account of no longer needing to be the token Black Guy. And boom, he bites it. Saving a white lady, naturally (’cause apparently the group has a shortage of those?) Thank god for Glenn and Maggie, the only saving grace of that show! If Maggie gets preggers I’m gonna have to light something on fire. Like the director.
RE: misery
OH JOHN RINGO NO!
Oddly enough, the videogame version of The Walking Dead is by far the best version of the franchise.
It also features the most diverse cast of characters. The main (player) character is an African-American man, and there are several actually competent, agency-having female characters. It also doesn’t wallow in torture porn, unlike the comic.
The main plot arc of The Walking Dead game involves a man acting as a surrogate father-figure for an abandoned young girl, so as a bonus it’ll annoy the MRAs because the main character is totally beta or something.
Ah, this justification. Someone once told me “It’s like movies about the Titanic: The zombies are just a backdrop for the rest of the story.” And I was all like “If we had as many Titanic movies as we have zombie movies, I’d have a problem with that, too.” The metaphor justification isn’t very strong, either: There are plenty of monsters that are scary in themselves, with or without any underlying message. A weak monster makes a weak metaphor.
(If y’all like zombie movies, go ahead, like them; I wouldn’t want to stop you. Obvs there’s a subjective element to what makes a good monster.)
Now I kind of want to give World War Z (the book) a try. I don’t read a lot of that kind of fiction, trying to broaden my horizons. Questions: Are there much better zombie/horror/apocalypse books I should start with or read instead? If I do read WWZ, should I read The Zombie Survival Guide first?
More questions:
WTF is up with MRAs and DOORS??!?!!!??!!!
Finally thanks to whoever it was who posted the racist zombie video; that was hilarious.
RE: cloudiah
I liked World War Z, can’t even remember if I got through the survival guide. It’s hardly necessary. And frankly, World War Z is the only zombie apocalypse book I’ve ever made it through.
It’s good to see my avoiding The Walking Dead television series was warranted – everything about it sounds terrible. As someone who loved the comics given how well-characterized the cast is and less about the zombies than it is about the details of surviving such a situation, it’s kind of awful to know it’s just filled with stereotypes (everything I hear about T-Dawg makes me grind my teeth) and may as well be Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead.
It makes sense these guys, without any sense of irony, are analyzing gender in a game while basically telling Anita Sarkeesian to “shut up”. Because her’s isn’t the “right opinion” and theirs’ – due to the powers of bullshit – somehow is. We’re talking about people from the same group who will use “free speech” as some kind of everything-proof shield, yet will silence any dissenting voice or someone who is ideologically opposite of them. They don’t give a shit about freedom of speech unless it protects them from taking responsibility for their own shitty behavior. It’s cowardly in a very insecure way and their need to be macho just further proves it.
This notion that feminism is somehow taking over the videogame industry reminds me of conservative U.S. Christians. They both assume they are oppressed and that their rights have been infringed upon, usually over something utterly benign whether it is a comedian using them as the butt of a joke or being asked to be polite to others in public, while nonetheless making absurd demands to limit the rights of others for the sake of their comfort and sense of validation. They’ll latch onto either “freedom of religion” or “freedom of speech” to self-victimize one moment – only to then demean, harass, and mock actual victims. If they were honest, whatsoever, they wouldn’t use either idea so disingenuously.
Cloudiah, the survival guide is unnecessary and IMO (and I collect these things) kinda tedious. It won’t take anything away from WWZ, but it won’t add much either. I kinda got the sense that they knew they had a hit with WWZ and wanted to try to milk it for all it was worth, so they spun out a Worst Case Scenario Handbook typed product to be able to charge another $12. Meh.
World War Z was surprisingly good, though. I wasn’t expecting all that much from it really, and maybe that’s part of why it worked so well for me, but I found it thoroughly entertaining and quite moving. Great story, well assembled, and a great use of the multiperspectival approach to storytelling. I was also pleasantly surprised at the range of fairly authentic voices portrayed, and the way that the “oral history” approach worked to tell a complex and rich story.
LBT: It’s not just your imagination. There are at least some pro-choicers who think that Roe v. Wade was a bad tactical move because it solidified a hardline defense against abortion at a time when there was a steady move towards legalization. I don’t know that I buy that, but it is definitely true that abortion has become the invisible option–people mention it briefly, then set it aside and it never appears again in the course of the fiction.
While we’re all ragging on The Walking Dead, I had a particular problem with some situation in season 1 (it’s been ages since I watched it, so the details are fuzzy) where they had gotten into a CDC building in Atlanta or something, and they were suddenly surrounded by zombies and they were going to blow up the building and one of the female characters was like, “I’m going to stay in the building and die because I just don’t want to live in this world anymore” and everyone was like “no you can’t give up! We love you! Come back with us! We won’t let you die!” So she leaves.
And some other guy is like “I want to die in the building too.” And everyone is like “OK buddy, godspeed, we’re outta here”.
This guy’s complaints would be just as ridiculous if they were accurate, but I’d like to point out that they totally aren’t:
“The only group leader who was a man, was a bad guy”
This isn’t true, the main character’s brother is the co-leader of a group of survivors with his wife.
“On the other hand, (not funny) another boy who was about the 14 year old girls age, was portrayed as weak, could not fight, could not shoot a gun and was just made to seem very weak”
This is because his overbearing older brother wouldn’t teach him how to defend himself, whereas Joel reluctantly gives Ellie a gun and allows her to take part in the fighting. The differences in their capabilities are due to how their respective protectors and authority figures relate to them, not their gender (although to be fair, Ellie is implied to be pretty badass even before the game starts).
(ps everyone go buy The Last Of Us it’s awesome)
Grimlock!? Soda almost came out the nose. One of the MOST VILE MISOGYNISTIC songs I have ever heard was by a hardcore band named Grimlock: With lyrics like “I’ll show you no mercy” and “break the bottle over your face. lay there and bleed bitch.” and “I’ll kill you…I’ll kill you…you fucking cunt.” This song is like the MGTOW’s anthem, haha.
RE: gillyrosebee
Survival Guide actually came out first. Also, the author is closely related to Mel Brooks! (Either son or nephew, forget which.)
RE: freemage
Enh, I don’t buy it either. “You’re getting your rights opposed because you FOUGHT TOO HARD for them!” sounds like HRC horseshit to me.
@ Tracy
Yep, the conversation in the car. It was just so obnoxious that it was pretty obvious where they were going from there, and I wasn’t willing to sit through any more of that crap, so we turned it off, went out to dinner, and never watched any more of it.
Pecunium: thanks for the insight into Niven/Pournelle! When I was a kid I read Niven almost obsessively, it’s neat to hear hints of the person behind the stories I still remember fondly.
I recently threw in on a kickstarter that got funded for a game called A Hat in Time, the main character is also one of these girl people. And it portrays the unreal depiction that a girl can jump like 10-15ft into the air, and even jump WHILE IN THE VERY AIR (probably an invisible and disposable man she’s jumping on), I’ve never heard of a male character depicted so unrealistically, especially with regards to jumping.
Not only that, but the main villain is called Mustache Girl, and she has a mustache! She probably stole it off of a hard working beta and is using it to pretend to be manly so that she can empower herself.
Feminism is totally ruining gaming, I mean just look at all the games out there that just tow the feminist line…
Anyone else ever play Jill of the Jungle as a kid? Jill saves the prince!
In order to make the joke work you’d have to add “no sense of ethics and an active desire to hurt other people as a way to take revenge for some imagined slights”. Which kind of kills the humor, unfortunately.
Max Brooks is Mel Brooks’ son, yes. Which may explain how he got both Carl Reiner and Rob Reiner as two of the narrators in the audiobook version.
The Zombie Survival guide did come first, but you certainly don’t need to read it to understand World War Z, which is a self-contained standalone narrative.
A lot of the power in both comes from the thoughtfulness of zombies as a form of natural disaster, like a pandemic, rather than a collection of horror movie cliches. The survival guide is clever in a personal way, encouraging people to think of disaster survival by means of zombie apocalypse. WWZ extends that thoughtfulness to society as a whole: how do people collectively deal with disaster. The interview structure makes it an intensely personal look at a global disaster.
Katz: I’m not really a zombie fan either. I liked Shaun of the Dead, that was about it.
Aaaaaaaand this is when I Officially Checked Out of TWD. I fucking hated the way Lori was handled. Mr. HK still watches it, I snark it in passing now.
The recent zombie movies that I’ve liked best (other than Shawn of the Dead, but then everything that Simon Pegg does is hilarious) were the 28 Days Later ones. Now if you were to use “rage virus” as an analogy for becoming an MRA, that would work with no real adjustments needed. It’s apparently very infectious too, if you look at what happens when confused young men are initially exposed to it. On the plus side subjects who weren’t irredeemable assholes to start with seem to outgrow it over time.
I prefer the slow zombies, since for me, the appeal zombies have is that they are pretty much weak, slow, stupid, and utterly implacable. The horror comes from the realization that it doesn’t matter how strong, smart, fast, or talented you are, THEY WILL GET YOU. It makes you realize just how small and insignificant you are. It’s also why I can’t take the lone wolf zombie-killing thing seriously. It says that actually, you CAN beat this implacable creeping foe with the power of individual badassery, which goes against the paradigm. Ditto giving the zombie actual combat skills, ability to run, think…
Also, if the zombie can think, it begs the question of WHY the “hero” is so okay with killing them right and left.
Well, if something is trying to eat you, I’d say it’s OK to kill it on the principle that you’d really rather not be eaten.
(BTW, MRAs, this only works for situations where you’re in danger of immediate bodily harm – no, the justice system is not trying to “divorce eat” you.)
I’ve never gotten into zombies. I agree with LBT though, the scary part about zombies is that it doesn’t matter how slow or weak they are, they will eventually get you. Even with yourself barricaded you have to get out eventually to get food, clean water, or whatever.
Plus the fact that you’re looking at everyone who has died too. Like if I saw a zombie that was a kid covered in bite marks, I’d think about how that kid died being bitten by corpses, and how awful that is. Also you fear seeing your friends and family in zombie form.
I am scared of smaller zombie type things though. Like The Blob.
I am surprised that pullupjumper didn’t complain that the 14 year old girl totally friendzoned grizzled protagonist.
… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v04H7_fFC90
That’s what I’m adding to this conversation.
Re: Zombies as effective monsters: I always feel that it is an oversimplification that stems from comparing zombies to other types of monsters that have fundamentally different roles in a narrative. To me, the modern flesh-eating zombies are not representative of the same kind of monster as Dracula, Wolf-Man and Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, in that the main focus isn’t on the creatures themselves. A good zombie story is never a story about zombies, nor should it be*. It’s an exploration in human social constructs and how they change in the wake of the surprising, chaotic and implausible. Zombies merely serve a dramatic role. They are not “evil” per se either.
Zombie stories are also a neat way of telling what kinds of bias the writers are holding on to. If the “state of anarchy” represented by the zombie apocalypse makes everyone (barring the noble, white male protagonist) automatically turn into a selfish asshole for no reason other than “because I can”, you may be dealing with a projecting right-wing douchebag writer with a highly authoritative personality. Also, I love how the fear of zombification betrays the inner fear of any privileged dumbass: The fear of conforming, becoming part of the masses, not being a speshul widdle butterfly. The same thing that makes people identify with vampires: “Oh, look at me, I’m so oppressed, even though I’m clearly in a superior position, but that’s because of my inherent qualities, not due to any unfairness inherent in the system working in my favor! I’m being repressed! Who is John Galt? Misandry!”
Maybe I’m just overthinking this.
*That is not to say there cannot be a good zombie story that focuses on zombies. The point I’m trying to make is that modern zombies were initially not designed to be the main focus of the story. It was about the survivors, not the things they are trying to survive.
tl;dr: Zombies are cool, as long as you don’t expect them to carry the whole story.
I always thought The Last of Us seemed interesting. After these reviews, I feel I’ll just have to pick it up.
I mean, eventually. When the price goes down. My job situation has been getting suddenly and drastically worse the last month, so I might have to quit eating by the end of the year again. Being poor sucks. Nothing new, there, though. This is roughly how any discussion concerning my video game purchases go:
Me: Hey guys, I just bought The Last of Us and it’s awesome! I really liked the characterization of…
Friend 1: Hey, we’ve talked enough about that game. Like six years ago. The whole platform is old news.
Me: I know, I know, but I couldn’t afford it back then. Anyway, what did you think of the…
Friend 2: Hey, by the way, have you guys played the new crime noir mystery, Who Let the Dogs Out?
Friend 1: Totally brilliant! The soundtrack is pure gold!
Me: *sadface*
And this is why I never talk about video games with my friends.
Actually I suspect that part of his issue with the game is that there’s a 14 year old girl and she’s not sexualized. How terribly unfair!
I’m no zombie fan. Only zombie film I’ve ever seen was I Walked With a Zombie (1943).
@auggz – I saw The Blob on telly when I was a kid. Frightened the bejezus out of me.
I think the horror in zombies is a. used to be people and b. if you get bitten you won’t be a person any more either, rather than how slow/fast they are.
Plus the whole decomposition thing when they use it – simple visual horror/disgust.
Kittehserf,
I also watched The Thing. The part that scared me was the dog kennel scene… I just felt bad for all the dogs stuck with the monster. Also the end scene scared me a lot.
I read the book(its called “who goes there?”, not The Thing). It was more about how paranoia is more dangerous than the actual monster.