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
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.
This is super late, but yes, I agree cooperation is a lifesaver. My point was just, if you can’t hold your own AT ALL — if you can’t fight, if you can’t use weapons effectively, if you’re physically weak — you MUST rely on others to survive. You have no choice. And if people aren’t super interested in helping other people out of the goodness of their hearts (a running theme in post-apocalyptic stories), or you just can’t find anyone, you’re probably not going to make it. That’s why them being surprised that the women and girls are physically capable makes no sense to me.
Cassandra: You don’t want to know what the internet has done with Ellie. You really don’t. A girl literally cannot exist without being hypersexualized.
I don’t really have a lot to contribute to the ‘female game protagonists’ discussion, as I haven’t played many games, but one of the first games I got as a child had a female antagonist who you could play as. Looking back, the game as a whole was hella problematic (an implied rape, or at least highly sexualized violence, everyone was either white or Japanese, and “skimpy outfits” doesn’t even begin to cover it), but the antagonist was rather progressive: she was powerful (literally the most powerful thing in the universe) without some weird “feminine” weakness, she owned the heck out of her sexuality without using it as a tool, and it was heavily implied that she was gay, but without any sort of fetishizing or demonizing of it. One of the many things I am very glad I was exposed to at a young age.
And the part where you might have to kill your lover, parent/child, best friend, etc. I couldn’t do it. I can sew by hand, from nothing, so maybe I could barter or something, but yeah, other than being a sneaky little fucker and just avoiding them, I’d be screwed.
This is why I like I am Legend though — the “hero” turns out to not be such a good guy (I refuse to watch the movie, so I have no idea how it ends). They’re totally capable of all the same functions as they had been before being infected, just not in daylight, at least in stage 1 of infection, and he’s killing them. Not cool.
Yeah, stage 1 of the infection, it has two stages in the book, hearing it doesn’t in the movie was my first “so not watching it” moment — at first they just can’t tolerate sunlight. That’s it. Totally normal humans otherwise, just have to be nocturnal.
It does a really good job of showing how society collapses though. (And yes, is entirely post-WWII middle class white America)
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4 hours of correlations later and I have fuck all. As in, one variable has anything resembling a correlation with acceptance and it isn’t a very strong correlation.
I saw both versions of The Thing. (Trivia: James Arness played the monster in the first one, before his rise to fame in Gunsmoke.) Saw the second one when I was 18 and only stuck it out because I’d paid for the ticket. It didn’t give me literal nightmares but too many of the images stayed in my head for years, and I can still remember it all too clearly. Scariest/most repugnant film I’ve ever seen, special-effects wise. I read once that it didn’t do as well as expected because of the special effects, ie. they were too horrible. Don’t know if that’s true or not.
Yes, those poor dogs! 🙁
Ugh. Yes, I’m sure that a 14 year old girl who’s in danger would be very sexy to some of the less pleasant people on the internet and that Rule 34 would apply, but what I meant is that the girl doesn’t seem to be sexualized in the game itself, and the existence of women or girls who aren’t overtly sexualized reads as anti-male to misogynists.
The existence of women or girls who are overtly sexualised is anti-male to misogynists as well, of course, whether it’s reminding them that real women and girls =/= controllable video game characters, or their virtual existence is too much of a bonertease, or whatever. Any sort of woman or girl’s existence in any way is anti-male somehow to misogynists.
“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!”
Beating eggs manually is also quite good for developing arm muscles; in fact, you have to have a good bit of strength & endurance to make a good meringue.
Oh, definitely. The game’s fine. I was more just expressing my frustration. I’ve looked forward to that game since I saw the very first trailers, but I just KNEW someone, somewhere, would find a way to ruin it. Sorry if that was unclear :/
The trigger discussion amused me because I have really strong hands, stronger than most men I know. Want a stuck jar opened? Give it to me. As a kid I broke a lot of stuff before I figured out how strong my hands were and that I had to be more careful in how I gripped things.
The people who make porn out of little girls who’re busy fleeing zombies are Why Humanity Can’t Have Nice Things.
Or make porn of little girls/boys at all, full stop.