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!
—
Oh, by the way, for new and/or extremely literal readers, I would like to point out that this post contains
What on earth is it with gamer misogynists and their objection to female characters in video games handling rifles and other guns? This is the second dude I’ve seen spotlighted here who thinks that real women can’t pick up a rifle without dragging it on the ground, or fire it without.. I don’t know, shattering or something. If they were bitching about female characters face-punching people to death I’d sort of understand, though I’d point out male characters are treated just as absurdly, but real rifles just don’t have all that high a threshold of upper-body strength to use. A lightweight rifle with low recoil will still hit you in the face if you hold it out from your body like the beefsteaks in video games tend to, and even… oh, I don’t know, a fourteen year old girl can still shoot a .50 caliber rifle if held and fired the way it was designed to be used.
Although gilly’s story scares me. Until now the only person I’d ever encountered who was unable to handle a heavy trigger rather than merely finding it uncomfortable had cerebral palsy…
@LBT Isn’t there a tv trope that says one of the first people to die in an apocalypse is the uber-prepared, hyper military guy, because he’ll be too paranoid to accept the help of others and too convinced of his own superiority to take reasonable precautions?
I will take you up on that commission, but I can’t just now. I’m in the period between quitting my job and waiting for my new business starts bringing in money, and so I’m pinching every penny until Abe starts cussing!
RE: LabRat
One of my newspaper clippings, back when I was in high school, was of school-age Russian girls putting together AK-47s. They were obviously trained in how to use them, since I can’t fathom why you’d teach a kid to take apart and put together a weapon they couldn’t use.
But womanly muscles are so atrophied that they can’t do it. Sure.
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.
“And then they are filled with rage when others not only don’t follow those rules, but challenge the very notion of them, or of any attempt to simplify the irreducible complexity of human life…”
That’s an excellent description of *any* variety of bigot.
8 is heavier than average, yeah, but 2 would be feather-light; 4-6 is around average for a rifle, with handguns being heavier. 8’s still lighter than the last handgun I bought, and it’s a Taurus 9mm that’s so generic it might as well have just been marketed as “gun”.
Dave the gamerdude… possibly needs physical therapy.
I only got through about 15 minutes of the very first episode of The Walking Dead before giving up because the writers/producers were so obviously determined to punch the viewer in the face with their misogyny. It was there right from the opening scene, so blatant that they may as well have written NO GURLZ ALLOWED on the DVD box.
Which is a shame, because I like zombie stuff, and might have bought it rather than Nexflixing it if it was any good.
Ha, I sure as hell couldn’t pull an 8 lb trigger. Maybe gamer dude has tendonitis.
Huh, I never knew it took that much to pull a trigger.
This is not a gun-country, so I’ve never even held one, let alone fired it down at the range or someplace like that.
So glad there were no spoilers in this post. TLOU is my present to myself after I get my business website finished! I’ve been dying to play it for ages. I love story/character focused games.
Oooh! Oooh! Another good female-lead game (you can pick, male or female) is Fable 3. Fun game all around. I wish more games gave you the option – I’d have loved to play the Hitman series as a female character.
And Walking Dead? Argh. Love love love the comic. The series started ok, but I got sick of it quickly for all of the reasons that were mentioned. Gave up on Season 3 (I was really looking forward to Michonne) because I got freakin’ bored and fed up. So. Many. Terrible things happen in the comic (and I get that some of them just can’t happen on TV), and the show really goes easy on them, even though they’re incredibly dumb most of the time.
The whole pregnancy storyline drove me up the wall. Seriously, am I supposed to support the fact that both of them WANT to bring a baby into this world? And they killed T-Dog. Went downhill completely from there, though it didn’t have that far to fall.
I love love love dystopian films, books, etc, and zombies have always been my favorite… since I was, maybe 8? Now they’re so overdone, which gives me a sad.
Busband and I were going to go and see World War Z, until I saw the previews. Everyone (important) is white, everyone (important) is male, one hero saving the world, blah blah. I think the studio needs to check their focus testing because hello, women & POC like zombies too.
RE: Tracy
Busband and I were going to go and see World War Z, until I saw the previews. Everyone (important) is white, everyone (important) is male, one hero saving the world, blah blah.
What? But… that’s the exact OPPOSITE of the book! Like, no seriously, total opposite. The book is about all these different people in different parts of the world figuring things out–just off the top of my head, I remember a Chinese doctor in the boonies, a woman scientist in… Sweden? Iceland? A bunch of Israelis, some Japanese teenagers, a feral child… why the HELL would they turn that into just another one hero saving the world? World War Z was ALL ABOUT people banding together to figure shit out! (And the horrible people who took advantage of the chaos to make money.) It’s why I actually enjoyed it!
@LBT, reminds me of a plot idea I thought of a while ago, to mess with a lot of the assumptions I think are behind the popularity of zombie stories. There’s a zombie apocalypse that seems pretty standard beyond the fact that some of the zombies are capable of using weapons and rudimentary tactics. Eventually it turns out the “zombie virus” has already infected most of humanity, and is actually a family of five separate strains, each of which causes the infected to release a specific hormone pattern, and causes a perception-distorting fear response should they encounter someone with a different strain, making them see the other person as some sort of demon or monster. And nothing else. Humanity nearly falls apart because everyone is so eager to be the hero of their own apocalypse story that they never realize the truth.
Really? It’s been awhile since I watched it – you mean the conversation Rick and Shane had in the car, before they went on the shootout? I cringed but figured it was to reveal what sort of person Shane was specifically, and what they both were like (couple o’ good ol’ boys). Though – that could have been done a number of ways. Ugh, maybe you’re on to something.
What bugged me most was that Andrea, in the show, has to learn how to use a gun and just happens to be a crack shot (and then almost shoots Daryl because woman-has-to-prove-herself-to-the-guys bullshit). In the comic, she was just a good shot and one of the main defenders. Makes me wonder if the producers were like ‘no-one’s gonna buy a woman as being this skilled with a gun – but we’ll throw the comic nerds a bone and have her be naturally good at fishing.’
So much fail in that show.
(also, so happy to have finally caught up here, and be able to get in on a conversation!)
Of course, we’ve just seen the WWZ previews.
I know! Auuuggghhh! That’s what got me so angry. I read the book years ago and what I loved were all the different stories and perspectives. They totally white-washed it and turned it into the Transformers basically (or any other wham blam boom Michael Bay! blammo penisgun CGI!!eleventy! movie you care to substitute in, if you liked Transformers – I won’t judge!)
I was explaining the book to Busband and how there were millions of ways they COULD have made it into a coherent film – and that because they didn’t choose any of those other, more interesting ways and instead went with White Handsome American Guy! Saves! The World! I would pass. I usually go to the theatre to watch zomb. flicks, not this one.
BTW I love the sound of your idea – they exist bc we believe in them, the whole loop thing… that’s a really cool take on it!
RE: dire sloth
Yeah, see, I could go for that. For me, the conventional zombie apocalypse requires a suspension of disbelief I can’t always attain. How can creatures that are dumber than an armadillo tell the difference between a zombie and a person? How would they cross the road? How can they be so stupid and yet so infallible? It just doesn’t work for me.
Seriously, I try to imagine a zombie apocalypse in Texas, and i just have to laugh, because the way cities are designed, you can’t get anywhere on foot without nearly being hit by a Chevy. Animals, with actual intelligence and depth perception, get hit all the time. Why would zombies be immune to this?
My favorite zombie story is actually from a comic: Wolff and Byrd, Supernatural Law. They’re the old fashioned Voudoun zombies, and they’re made to provide sweatshop labor. So the zombies unionize and strike! (One of their little signs read “PAY THE VOUDUES.”) And of course, as zombies, they’re tireless, so the chanting and the shuffling NEVER END.
Their unscrupulous boss caves pretty quick.
It shall be known as the ‘Real-World-ocalypse’.
Lo, let there be rejoicing in the land, for I have proven my patriotism by making a double batch of Flag Bread! Basically it’s an egg bread with dried blueberries and cranberries instead of raisins and will be topped with simple icing as a dessert – cut it open and you get red, white and blue!
Anyone out there who thinks baking is a “girly” skill should come give it a try sometime. Half an hour of kneading on a regular basis and I can out arm-wrestle most of the keyboard jockeys I used to work with!
Re: WWZ, yeah, I am ambivalent about the movie. I think some of the visuals may be stunning, but the whole heroic guy kicking ass to make the world safe for his white, upper middle class family has been done to death, and the book was so much better than that.
It’s not like a multi-character drama can’t work, either. Contagion was riveting (though not perfect, granted).
Am I the only one who just doesn’t like zombies as monsters at all? They’re slow, they’re mindless, they don’t look interesting, they don’t do anything interesting, they don’t have any special abilities except biting you and turning you into another slow, boring zombie…
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.