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
LAST CALL FOR CHART REQUESTS!!
Heehee Kittehserf! I like that.
Ehhhh, close enough. lol I *really* didn’t like the different take in the second movie. I am really not a fan of religiousity in my media though, so that doesn’t help. That said, it could have been done well: it was an interesting idea. It just wasn’t pulled off, IMO. And the small logic fails from the first one are massively amped up in the second. 😛 Good for a sequel, though.
I didn’t know there was a 3rd!! I’m kind of tempted… is it a follow on from the same storyline?
Cat-lovers need to go here!
This is fun too.
Happy 4th of July to all the american Manboobzers! (Manboobzians?)
Smell. I presume that living people smell like freshly baked bread/pizza/perfectly ripe strawberries to a zombie.
Yaoi huntress earth, this might amuse you…
@Argenti: Let’s just say that I felt the alternate ending captured the spirit of the source material, if not the details.
@Hrovitnir: Yes, there definitely is an alternate ending! It was actually the original ending and stays fairly close to the source material, but then they tested it and the focus groups thought it was too depressing so they ditched it and filmed that BS ending that you see in the theatrical release. The alternate ending comes standard on the DVD in the US. Confession time: I bought the DVD just to see the alternate ending and it was worth it. Not sure where else you can see it.
AK — ok, might give it a go then.
Hrovitnir — “I didn’t know there was a 3rd!! I’m kind of tempted… is it a follow on from the same storyline?”
Ehh…sorta. That dog bit someone at the vet’s office, who then goes to a wedding. Which is where it goes from “this is different” to “zombie things in ball gowns, great”
And I liked the religious bit, in part because zombies really are just that over done, and it was unique.
I hear they’re making a fourth, that does pick up where two leaves off. Which could be, um, interesting. What with that [spoiler] thing being inside here and all.
Oh and dogs pulled a fairly close second to cats (big surprise!)
@Cassandra, Children of Men is an amazing movie in so many ways. I love the way it actually tackles racism directly (even the fact that the main cast is mostly white is shown to be a product of the racist society they live in, and the problems of a bunch of privileged revolutionaries deciding the fate of a woman of color is clearly shown). I also like how Kee starts out as a symbol (and as seen as such by so many people) but that she’s clearly more than that. Her humanity is valued more than her fertility, which is really more of a plot device than anything. It’s not perfect, but it is pretty damn good.
Oh, and I should say that between the dudepros in the OP and David, they’ve made The Last of US sound pretty good and I’ll be popping out to buy it after work today. Despite the guy at EB games raving at me about it, I hadn’t really thought about getting it, but now.. well, you made your case dudebros.
I like the zombies are humans with super contagious rabies, because then they’d be still human and armies would finally have a good reason for failing to shoot them instead of just keeping on missing REALLY SLOW TARGETS. It just makes no sense and that kind of ruins zombies for me. How the fuck are standard zombies supposed to be a threat to organized soldiers?
Also those guys whining reminds me of why I like pen & paper role playing so much. I can just scrap the pieces I don’t like and no one can force their sexist worldview on me, at least not in my group, because my fellow players are decent people (oh and male). Shadowrun and Exalted seem to be pretty decent on issues like that to begin with, though the exalted rulebook has some serious eschergirl artwork (next to badass depictions of women, the art is a bit inconsistent).
Sort of on topic, but not really: I was really excited when I heard there would be a mass effect movie… until I realised that there wouldn’t be my Femshep in there, but the standard male Shepard, who just looks like a generic action hero. So no awesome Femshep and thus probably no Garrus fan service either. Now I don’t want to see it anymore. 🙁
I may want to try The Last of Us, but I never played a horror game bevor and am kind of too sensitive too watch horror moviees, except if they’re so bad they’re only funny. So maybe not a good idea?
hrovitnir – greetings to you fellow rat person. 🙂
@ AK
It was surprisingly well done, wasn’t it? PD James wrote the original novel, so no surprises that the plot was interesting, but I think most of the credit for how well it was executed goes to Alfonso Cuarón. I was sitting there expecting it them to make a mess of it but once I remembered that he did Y Tu Mamá También too I realized that he has a good enough sense of how to talk about race and class and gender to pull it off.
OMG @ the 3rd storyline. Bizarre. And I am deeply dubious about a fourth! The religious thing could have been good but it just ended up being heavy handed. And I can’t remember all the details, but that girl was so freaking creepy but they went and ruined it by showing everything too clearly IMO.
Haha! I guess I’m a bad audience for horrors because I really like realism. Which can be super scary! But harder, I imagine. I get frustrated designing things in my head and not understanding how script writing/lighting and camera work works. (Also have a couple of videos I made in my head to music I really like that I reckon I could pull off – but not a whole movie! In fantasy land, obviously.)
And yay rat people! I’ve actually got to the point that if forced to choose (which I’m not, so there), I’d probably say I’m a rat person over a dog or cat person. I used to say I was more of a dog person, which is still probably true nominally but cats and dogs are both so different but awesome. <3
Oo, and just to drop some OT on ya’ll: rats have cost me far, far more than I’ve spent on my 3 dogs (6, 7 and 10) and 8 cats (6-16 years). They are prone to respiratory infections and tumours, and really benefit from being desexed. I’ve had two abscesses that needed meds on cats, desexing, xrays on all three dogs for different things, biopsy on my dog with demodex and treatment for that, our old dog needs prescription NSAIDs for his arthritis… actually the 6 hour surgery on our 100lb dog for an intestinal blockage probably pushes the other animals over the top. Maybe. (This is why I have to keep working as a vet nurse whilst studying… the discount.)
Never mind food and toys and stuff. 😛
hrovitnir – benefitting from desexing? How so? Unlike with mice same sex male groups are (as far as I heard, I still have my first group of ladies) possible without much problems. The german animal rights orientated rat community (the sound of it, hah) views castrations for other than health reasons and if a rat is so dominated by hormones that it can’t live with other rats, as an unessesary risk and so far I agreed with that point of view. Though I will need castrates If I’m going to transit from females to males. But I hope I’ll find already castrated boys in animal rescue.
Never mind the costs, I just couldn’t forgive myself if a little one died because of my selfishness.
And I can’t resist the opportunity to talk about rats. I totally need another rat crazed irl friend. *sighs*
http://www.noob.us/entertainment/i-am-legend-alternate-ending/
Yeah, good point on zombies and vampires, whoever pointed it out first (the thread has gotten so long since I checked it last). If you read really old vampire stories, like before they even started making movies about them, there’s usually some ambiguity as to whether they have a mental life at all, and if so, whether their mental life resembles ours, and that’s what makes them so scary. Nowadays, they’re always more or less completely human on the inside, making them less scary.
In order for me to like a vampire story, vampirism gotta present you with some moral problem. I’d be okay with a story about a devoted vegan turning into a vampire who can live off animals, because that person would still face a moral problem, but if you eat meat to start with, become a vampire and can continue to live off animals – no problem!
I wasn’t too fond of Cassidy in Preacher for that reason… he was a well-written character (like, how he gets into a completely fucked-up abusive relationship with Tulip but still regards himself as a good guy who loves her – far more realistic than the “abusive boyfriend is a mostache-twirling villain” trope), but since the writer bothered to make him a vampire, it was stupid that he could then just comfortably live off bloody steaks. Plus the idea that vampires could fly etc was laughed off as “unrealistic” – as if being immortal and able to heal any kind of dramatic injury as long as you get your steaks isn’t already as unrealistic as something can be.
I liked that the vampire protagonist in “let the right one in” had to kill humans to survive and there was no getting around it. I also liked the vampires in “being human” (the British version, haven’t seen the American one so I don’t know what that’s like). They were all-in-all pretty old-school vampires in that they, for instance, were vulnerable to religious artefacts but not to sunlight. They didn’t, however, actually need blood to stay alive (except if they’d sustained some kind of injury where they lost lots of blood in the first place), but suffered from a terribly, terribly strong urge to kill and drink. An urge that would always be there, no matter how long you manage to abstain it never goes any weaker. Meaning most vampires by far just rationalize their killings rather than fight it, and the few “good ones” who try to abstain from murdering people still slip up eventually…
But there’s gotta be a moral problem with the blood-drinking. Don’t want that? Better skip the whole vampire bit and write a super hero story instead.
Oh, forgot to mention Korean vampire movie “thirst” (which, funnily enough, is based on Therese Ranquin, although it takes place in Korea and has vampires in it). A priest becomes a vampire and desperately tries to survive in a morally acceptable way, despite needing quite a lot of human blood to survive. Eventually he just moves his own moral goalposts further and further… but that’s also a really good one.
Hate the “Oh, I’ll just live off of animals/drink this synthetic replacement blood no problem” trope!
Rodents, in general, live longer; and have fewer health problems, if they are neutered.
This is more true of male than female rodents. Neutered rabbits can live an extra three-four years.
Mice can be bred to not have problems in multi-male groups, but it requires a really intense regimen (any sign of male on male aggression means removing them from the breeding pool. The same is handy for mouse on human aggression).
It took us about five years to have mice which didn’t have problems. We also had a breeding pool of hundreds, at any given time; so the gene pool was fairly large (I don’t know how many thousands of mice we bred in the course of a decade).
European vampires in legend were basically walking, blood-drinking corpses, for sure. IIRC they seem to have had some mental capacity, but could be thwarted by weird things, like scattering poppy seeds on the road from the cemetery: the vampire would be compelled to pick up or count every seed and wouldn’t make it to the village before sunup. (Romanian legend.)
I don’t know when it started, but in England the Romantic period certainly emphasised the upper-class sophisticated (if not necessarily attractive) vampire figure – Ruthven, Varney, Camilla, Dracula, etc – characters a world away from the zombie-ish undead from village legends.
I blame Victorian sexual mores and information osmosis.
Tales of vampires, bloodthirsty feudal lords (like Vlad Tepes) and witchcraft trials against noble women* (most famously Elizabeth Báthory) getting mixed up. All this East-Europe is one exotic country anyway, right? 😉 It also connected Hungary with vampires despite vampires not even existing in Hungarian folklore.
* Actually these were mostly made up against wealthy and independent women by our rulers for monetary reasons. The male counterpart was accusations of treason against the crown.
I watch the Walking Dead but definitely recognize it’s problems. And the fandom, my god, no woman can ever make a mistake in that fandom without being ripped to shreds.
As for World War Z I’m so freaking mad that they bought the rights only to make a film that is not like the novel at all. They could’ve made that movie and called it something else and I’d be happy to see it, but instead they ruined the potential that book had to be an incredible series of films or television show. It looks sooooooo fake too. I hate obvious overuse of CGI.
Yeah, they fought a white woman to live, but just kinda shrugged their shoulder when the black woman wouldn’t go.
I didn’t realize there was one! That’s exciting because I HATED the ending. ****SPOILER****why did he have to explode? Couldn’t he have gone in the escape hatch too???****SPOILER**** That, and besides the Shrek part, I really enjoyed that movie.
Survivors has been on my queue forever, maybe I should start that up next… though Big Brother has been taking up most of my tv watching time. And Children of Men is soooooooo good. Also love Being Human, I enjoy both versions!
HHOOOMAHGAH MISANDRY!!
The third Rec……. and the American sequel to it on the plane…. ughhhh
Here’s some good old fashioned male disposability in the form of a zombie short film (lol, but seriously, prepare to tear up)
But with vampires like Dracula and Carmilla (haven’t read Varney) there’s still a lot of ambiguity regarding what their mental life really looks like, whether they have human-like emotions and so on. Are they capable of getting attached to another person, or do they merely act out the motions of attachement for instance? To what extent are they like real persons on the inside, and to what extent more like, say, these ghosts that merely echo some event from their lives over and over again? That’s never clarified, and that’s what makes them scary. Dracula in, say, Francis Ford Coppola’s movie, is far more human than he was in the book…
So even in the nineteenth century, when vampires had become posh and beautiful, they were still far from as human as they’re always portrayed nowadays.
Pecunium – Are there studies on that in rats? Because their lives are so short so then it would be really awesome if it made a significant difference. Also, how high mortality during the process actually is, I heard the risk for female rats is quite high, though around here it only gets done in case of severe uterus infections and tumours, which implies a reduced immunity system, so that might be a big part of the reason.
All standard german educational sources take this anti desexing stance. I know that for example Switzerland is different, but I never wondered why.