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.
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
LBT — excepting the Giovanni, the bites heal pretty much instantly (*that* is never explained afaik) and the puncturing…is easier than you’d think. I had an ex crunch my cartilage nibbling on my ear, and my former roommate [mega squick alert] lost the tip of his pinkie when his immediately thereafter ex bit it off.
And that’s without fangs!
“I admit to being kind of leery of the Masquerade, just because what I saw seemed to be even MORE of the hot broody amoral predators that I was so sick of.”
The books or players? Because the books…plenty of vampires trying very hard to hold onto humanity, very few hot broody ones (ok, the newly vamp’ed tend to be broody, but that’s to be expected, they either walk into sunlight or get over it)
I’ll get the core book off your way. Will take a bit as I have to transfer it off the terabyte drive first. But there’s a lot of good stuff in there (lots of explanations and examples, tiny section on combat rules, like, two pages, maybe four, and 200+ on general stats and stories).
One warning, Malkavians are the clan of the demented (has it’s perks, dementation is a very useful way to avoid combat) but their flaw is basically vampire mental illness. Multiple personalities are there in the utterly cliche born of trauma and fit a role sense (though, so is bipolar and it isn’t any better…I tend to take a weird one that doesn’t so much work in humans). That section is also short though and sums to “read psych literate, the DSM, watch things like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s nest”)
Lol, it’s too big to attach, uploading it to google docs now! I’ll email you when it’s done (which might be awhile, for <70mb this is going sloooowly.
First part (cringe), second part…um, how hard exactly was zie biting? I mean I like biting too but, um, a bit of restraint might be a good idea?
Oh whoa! Yeah, that is huge. You don’t need to take the trouble for me if you don’t want, I plan to involve combat as little as possible. It doesn’t interest me much.
Oh, my ear was totally “harder, harder, YELP”, the former roommate’s boyfriend was very drunk and very angry, nothing consensual about it.
LBT — 60%~ uploaded and maybe you misread? It’s mostly NOT combat but stuff like stats (which are, by and large, things like multiple languages, *cough*wilderness survival*cough*, research skills — generally useful things), and LOTS of stories and examples.
Idk if Smiling Jack made the core book, but he’s hilarious so I hope you get to some of his tales.
IIRC, vamps in the Masquerade could heal the wounds their bite inflicted on mortals by licking them.
And I agree, V:tM is a pretty cool RPG if combat is not your thing. It is VERY heavily biased in favor of politicking, scheming, and alliance-building; the combat rules are designed to discourage fighting by making it so damaging and costly as to not be worth the effort most of the time (of course, a lot of players missed this point, started fights anyway, and quickly found their characters mercilessly destroyed).
As far as the oWOD games go, though, my favorite was always Wraith. It came closest, I think, to achieving what White Wolf was trying to do with its Storytelling (read: NOT roleplaying) games. It even had an option for playing angsty,, “The Crow”-style walking corpses, which are kind of zombies, if you think about it.
I never played Wraith, but really liked Amenti. Writing the modern human, the ancient Egyptian and the combination of the two was a lot of fun (and I ran three of them and a pooka [two Amenti and two pookas in the end] against someone playing Lucita…I survived, her player got a blood hunt called on his ass, score one from Argenti!)
In a sense, Amenti and Wraith are similar — both spend a fair amount of time in the, um, wtf is the spirit world called again?
“IIRC, vamps in the Masquerade could heal the wounds their bite inflicted on mortals by licking them.”
Yeah, that rings bells.
Oh, biting. I could never fathom how Lucy’s wounds were so tiny, like pinpricks, when they’re supposed to have been inflicted by pointed teeth. Then there’s the bizarre bit when Mina thinks she must have “pierced a flap of skin” with the brooch of Lucy’s wrap to have caused them. How on earth could you shove a pin through someone’s throat skin and not realise???
I will read the rest of the thread in a second, belated reply to katzentier. 😀
Haha. Well I know there is at least one European country (can I remember which one? Noooope.) where lots of people keep cats and dogs entire but they *don’t* have an overpopulation problem. I wish. *sigh*
Yeah, the SPCA can only afford to do it because they have an attached vet clinic. It’s nice to be sure idiots won’t breed *more* poor quality rats (we are not allowed to import rats and of course back yard breeders outnumber good breeders about a gazillion to one), but also males are definitely less smelly and it can encourage people who would otherwise go to a petstore to go there. 🙂
Average is 2-3 here but 3 is doing really well. All my babies are between 2-3 now, only a couple are really slowing down. Not looking forward to them all dying close together though. 🙁 I did actually have one spayed girl get a vaginal infection (pus filled horribleness), which sucked.
Cultural stuff is interesting like that. From spending time on mostly-USian animal blogs, I’ve gathered it is seen as totally irresponsible to let cats outside in a lot of places. In NZ it’s really hard to convince people keeping your cat inside isn’t really cruel.
I’ve had really irritating discussions where people will not accept that I come from a very different reality to living in the US. There are no predators in NZ apart from domestic dogs; no coyotes or foxes or bears or god knows what else to hurt your cats; no rabies, no heartworm or ticks (we have ticks in a limited area but none of the hideous tick-bourne diseases) or many of the diseases in the US. So while I’m actually a fan of inside cats (or better, with an outside run) in some situations it’s not really comparable to much of the US. Main threats are cars and other cats.
But then I am totally horrified by the process of declawing (for people who don’t know, declawing cats removes the entire first joint of the phalanges so your cat can’t scratch). I had an argument where someone who works for a shelter said better to declaw for a chance of a home than put them down – and I said I’d rather we had to kill more cats than have something so horrific be an acceptable practice.
Declawing and ear cropping are illegal in NZ. Most vets, particularly new grads, won’t do tail docking of puppies any more, but there are enough that most breeders who like it get it done. Everyone at our work refused to dock the tails of some back yard breeder’s spaniels, but our boss insisted so he did it alone with no nurse, and the owner was pretty traumatised by the process. Good. 😛
I’m very glad to say that tail docking has mostly disappeared here, as far as I’ve seen. I think it’s illegal, though that’s likely at state level rather than national level, so it may just be the case in Victoria.
I happened to see the most repulsive little cooking show – went for about ten minutes – last night. The cook was chopping the ends off spring onions and said “I think of it like docking a dog’s tail: not strictly necessary but much more aesthetically pleasing.” I wanted to throw something at the telly, I was so angry. There was a disclaimer from the ABC at the end that they don’t condone tail docking, but I wondered why the HELL they showed the damn program at all, knowing that was in it. (She also joked about not answering phones or crying children while cooking: “Broken bones heal, spoiled eggs don’t.”)
Ahhh, that’s what I was thinking of. Despite the usual cat problems, Sweden still sounds amazing.
It’s interesting, that. Because despite being pretty developed, a lot of NZ is rural and we can have a bit of a rural “mindset”. Ie: NZers are so rugged, blah blah blah. Basically, it wasn’t long ago that dogs were allowed to wander, and there are still people who are bemused by the idea it’s not OK.
It frustrates me because when my partner was young he used to walk his GSD and basically pick up a big pack of dogs who’d come for a walk with him, and they’d just wander back to their homes. The nice thing about this was that dogs were dogs, and dogs getting into fights was seen as a dog thing.
Now we feed them properly (so much malnutrition before modern foods, no matter what the anti, raw-feeders say – I like raw food, I do not like the cult mentality), there is at least some expectation they should be kept under control, beating them isn’t the be all and end all of training, and most dogs hang out in the house. Great! Except dogs are expected to act like totally unreactive puppies their whole lives and people who should never have dogs are buying fluffy little things and treating them like soft toys. -_-
Yeah, in theory I’m fine with entire dogs. But reality dictates that most people are idiots, and no one thinks they’re the idiot, so I want desexing to be the default. Hence being really frustrated at having my partner’s dog be entire for so long – I felt like a massive hypocrite, even though he was fine.
That is so damn cute. And your name is so awesome now I know what it means. 😀 😀
Argh, tail docking is still a thing here, to the point this was a huge source of consternation between the former roommate and I — he wanted to dock the puppies’ tails and I would have none of that. Who the fuck even thinks of docking the tails of offspring of a cockerpoo and toy poodle anyways?! They’re <10lbs, wtf could they possibly knock over?!
And yeah, so is declawing cats, which is even crueler in my mind. A dog with a docked tail isn’t permenantly at a disadvantage, a declawed cat can’t climb or defend itself, doesn’t stand much chance if it gets outside, even against other cats.
NZ…maybe I’m wrong here but I thought indoor cats where encouraged there exactly because you have no predators and thus the native species are rather helpless against them? Considering the amount of sparrows the cat I grew up with caught, I shudder to think how kiwis would fare,
Declawing cats always fills me with rage. Friend in the US has declawed cats – just the front claws are done, apparently – but it’s so damn wrong.
:/ Did they choose to do it, or did they come that way? I was mind blown when I heard that was even a thing.
When I was at the SPCA some moron brought back a kitten for… acting like a kitten. Running around everywhere, a bit of clawing, not even really bad, didn’t destroy anything. Couldn’t handle that it *walked on her furniture*. Wanted to swap it. Naturally we told her to get stuffed – our douchebag of a boss freaking gave her a free cat. *fumes*
Also, I love the justification that ear cropping helps with ear infections. HA. (a) That makes no sense, more is going to fall into cropped ears, but more importantly (b) if that was true, why exactly do we crop super short haired dogs, and not spaniels? Hmm, maybe it’s so they can look tough. *rolls eyes*
I intensely dislike ear cropping but that’s something I let go because of the cultural difference, and it’s not as horrible as declawing. I’ve even got used to seeing pit bulls with cropped ears so I think it can look nice: dobies and great danes just look totally ridiculous to me.
P.S. The Open Thread is hugely long so I’ll say here: your cat is so cute! None of our cats play with their toys. 😛
Aww, thank you! Mads likes being cute when she knows she has an audience.
I think my friend had this cat declawed; kitty turned up as a stray. It just … argh, wall-climbing rage and frustration that people do that. Ditto tail and ear cropping.
Did you ever read Black Beauty? I’m remembering the bit when Sir Oliver is telling the others about his friend Skye the terrier, and how her pups’ ears were cropped. He says how cruel it is, all for men’s vanity, and specifically says the pups now lacked the protective flap over the delicate ears. Hell’s fucking bells, they knew that in the nineteenth century and people are STILL claiming there’s any justification for it?
Oo, that’s interesting. Never read Black Beauty: I massively internalised NO GIRLS THINGS when I was younger and that got lumped into girls things. Yet I did go through a stage where I was stubbornly unrepentant about liking baby dolls. So I dunno, my brain. 😛
The thing I hate about ear cropping is less the cutting bits off (though not great), it’s the taping and bandaging it up so the dog is itchy and uncomfortable for weeks, for no good reason. -_-
That sucks your friend did that. Just… no. There is no possible justification for that IMO. 🙁
We do have one cat who might play with his toys if I could find a good place… apparently the current positioning is not favoured. lol
Your cat would probably at least enjoy having the humans running around trying to do things for him. Messing with humans’ minds is always fun.
Message I just had from a friend: “We’re all servants to felines. It’s the Egyptians fault. If they’d never been told they were gods, there’s half a chance we could actually train them!!!!!!!!!!!”
Truth! 😀
Right, I have to go buy groceries (cat food, cat litter, more cat food, maybe human food too). Later!
Reading this thread just makes me miss having a pet. *totally missing the point* One day, some day.
Our first cat (now deceased) had his front paws declawed. Watching him “scratching” posts incessantly was heartbreaking. =[
We adopted a cat that had both its front and back claws out already. Our new cat has claws, and wrecks my furniture, but I bought couches with replaceable covers specifically because I’d rather that than declawing. And I clip her claws, despite the fact that every so often she gets really angry at me and makes noises like I’m killing her. The first time she did it my roommate came running because he thought she’d gotten hurt lol. And his cat will come to my cat’s “defence” and bat at me when my cat is distressed. It’s kinda hilarious actually.
SittieKitty — if you can get close enough to her claws to clip them, you could use Soft Paws. Note that I have no personal experience with them, but they fall off fairly quickly (couple of weeks according to the site) if she hates them.