By David Futrelle
Is Stardew Valley just a miniature version of the infamous Harper Valley of Jeannie C. Riley’s classic song, a hotbed of debauched infidelity in which the residents secretly swap a lot more than yams?
Players of the popular farming role-playing game have been wondering aloud about the secret lives of some of the inhabitants of their little valley for some time. Questions have been raised about the real father of one of the main characters, and one seemingly innocent female character has been discovered climbing another man’s tree, wink wink, nidge nudge, knowwhatImean?
A couple of years back, one poor player turned to the Stardew Valley subreddit for relationship advice, fearing that his beloved game waifu was cheating on him. (I’ve removed her name so as not to spoil anything.)
I married [Waifu] and everything seemed fine at first.
But after a few days, she would be in the kitchen every morning. I’d talk to her and she’d say “I’m going to town! Eat a healthy lunch! Bye!”
That’s all fine and good. She deserves to get out and have some fun. But what worries me is she doesn’t come home at night.
Uh oh.
I’ve stayed up until midnight waiting for her. Most nights she just never comes home. And when I go into town, I never see her. I’ve been in the museum and Pam’s trailer many times; I’ve looked under the tree where she read books when we were dating. No sign of [her].
Oof. Not looking good for you, my man, not looking good.
[She’s] at full hearts and I hug her and give her a blueberry every day.
Dude. Someone else is giving her something other than a blueberry every night.
And not even the arrival of a baby was enough to change her ways.
Sometimes when I talk to her, she says “Everything is different now that we have a baby,” but nothing is different. I come home around 6:00, [she] is nowhere to be found, and the baby is in his crib completely unsupervised. I go to bed alone most nights.
I think there is another man. To be completely honest, I’m not even sure the baby is mine. What should I do?
Well, now one mod-maker has a solution, of sorts, for every player who feels there’s just too much of this sort of cuckery going on in and around their little farm.
The “Stardew Valley Cuckoldry Removal Service” mod, uploaded on NexusMods earlier today, changes some of the dialogue in the game to remove several subtle hints of infidelity.
“[T]his game is hella cucked,” the mod-maker, Havitner, writes in the game’s description, noting that his own enjoyment of the game had been tarnished one day when,
while casually browsing the wiki, I found out that it’s heavily implied that [a female character] cheated on her husband and tricked him into raising another man’s kid for ~20 years. My comfiness levels suffered a catastrophic decline.
Not knowing [Stardew Valley developer] ConcernedApe’s home address or how to rig a goat carcass to explode, I had to settle for making a mod.
The new dialogue is designed to match the tone of the original, without the depressing cuckshit.
And while he was at it, he also removed some hints that another female character regrets not boning more dudes in her younger years. Because to some dudes this somehow also counts as cuckolding.
In vanilla, [she] casually tells the player that she regrets marrying young, because she didn’t get to enjoy her youth and freedom.
Protip: When a woman talks about ‘enjoying her youth and freedom’, that means exactly one thing.
Playing Stardew Valley until 3 AM? Nah. Riding the pixelated cock carousel.
I suspect that this mod might turn out to be quite popular with the sorts of dudes I write about regularly on this blog, who think that every time any woman has sex with someone other than them they’re being cuckolded, and that this somehow also applies to imaginary pixel ladies in video games.
H/T — Thanks to longtime WHTM commenter @pecunium for pointing me to this amazing mod.
BONUS: Here’s the original Harper Valley PTA song, in case you wanted some reminders of what was going on in THAT little Peyton Place.
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He’s been watching too many DF vids.
Honestly surprised he didn’t change Demitrius’s colour while he were at it – considering that’s the interracial marriage in Pelican Town.
Also, WTF is he doing giving Penny blueberries? Sandfish, emeralds, or poppies are the gifts of choice there.
(Yes, I may have played several hundred hours and gotten over invested in these pixellated lives to an unhealthy degree)
MRAs: Creators should focus on creating high-quality work people will love, not on pandering to aggrieved culture warriors. Art, not identity politics!
Also MRAs: This high-quality work people love doesn’t pander to me, an aggrieved culture warrior, enough. I’m going to fix it so it conforms with my identity politics!
Makes me think of the mod for Stellaris that made all your advisers and ministers white men.
You forgot to censor [waifu’s] name in one of those quotes!
I should pick up Stardew again. It’s been a while.
@MrsObedMarsh
Indeed, and I think it’s an understatement to say that the video game industry has a problem with women. I’ve already made a lengthy post on why even Dragon Age, a franchise that actively tries to be as progressive and inclusive as possible, still unintentionally play into horrible misogynist and fascist fantasies, and when that’s the standard for companies that try to be welcoming to women, it really doesn’t paint a good picture for the rest that doesn’t.
I think a huge reason that the discussion on video games have become so virulent is that a large number of video game companies in the mid 00’s, having already been marketing their games to boys in the 90’s, decided to actively cultivate the impulsive manbaby persona in their customers through marketing since the higher their entitlement and the lower their impulse control, the more likely they are to buy useless fad garbage on a whim.
However, the last few years several big game companies have realized that they’ve shot themselves in the foot by actively shutting women (50% of all potential customers) and minorities (or really just anyone not a WASP) out, and thereby missing out on a huge market share. But when they’ve tried to course correct by doing controversial things like including black people, optional gay romances and featuring women who aren’t going dressed like dominatrices into battle or reduce them to damsels in refrigerators, the entitled manbabies sees this as an attack on their very identity, and thus respond by turning into paranoid monsters that treat even the slightest hint of game developers respecting women and minorities, or even just want to experiment with more nuanced storytelling than “good man defeats bad guys” as an insidious agenda being forced upon them.
Oh, great bleeding shit… holy laminated, bifurcated, oscillated Mother of PEARL….
“I never saw the like”, one cop said, softly…
Sweet shit in a bucket…
I do not understand these people
Ok, let’s be fair… at least he just modded it and didn’t go with the goat-carcass.
Though I can’t really complain without being a hypocrite. I spent many a nights with Crusader Kings 2, spreading my gynocratic monarchy over all of England.
@ TheKND:
I don’t think it “took”…. It hasn’t seemed to have helped…
I don’t play games like this. Please explain. Is there a woman gamer somewhere playing the role of the wife to this guy or is he playing by himself and she is just a character in the game?
@susan
Just a character in the game. in Stardew valley there are several characters both male and female you can romance and marry. the really cool thing is the players gender and the gender of the other character does not matter so gay marriage is totally a thing.
Dolly Parton’s version is better.
Weird Eddie,
Thank you for this shining example of artistry!
@Weird . . . Eddie
It’s in exile. I thought you knew.
@Susan:
Stardew Valley is a heartwarming, mostly peaceful (there is a cave with fightable monsters in it, but you can ignore it), not-at-all-partisan game. You play a person who inherits a rundown farm from their grandfather and becomes a part of the close-knit local community. You can grow crops and flowers, forage, chop down trees, fish, dig up treasures, raise animals, craft items, cook, mine, fight cave monsters, develop relationships (romantic or friendly) with non-player character townsfolk, build up your property, get friendly woodland spirits to fix the abandoned community center (or give the building up to the big box corporation stretching its tentacles into the town) – the Valley’s your oyster! I highly endorse it.
@Susan
Adding one thing to MrsObedMarsh’s very accurate summary:
It’s incredibly charming (Abigail’s 4 heart event is the one as makes me start a new character so I can see it again) and very, very, very peaceful. Think Bob Ross levels of peaceful.
I have sunk about 500 hours in Stardew Valley. I have two farms, one wholesome, the other a Farm of Evil. The Farm of Evil sold out to Jojamart which was very cathartic after all the effort I put into fulfilling the Juminoes requests for the wholesome farm. The Farm of Evil also was the one that netted me my achievement for earning 10million. Now Evil Glen (he wears a fedora) spends all day gambling and neglects his family, mwahahahahah.
Damn, I think maybe it’s time to revisit the farm, I still have to make all the recipes and catch all the fish and finish exploring the mines and.. and..
I missed the edit window but I want to back up what Shadowplay said. It is truly a peaceful game to play. I suffer mental health issues and I found it very calming through some stressful times. With the clusterfuck that is Brexit going on I think maybe starting a new farm is in order.
Adding to the Stardew love. In answer to your question about the wife, she’s not played by another human. You can do multiplayer, but it’s just around helping out on another player’s farm.
It sounds like Harvest Moon. I love Harvest Moon.
@Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie
I kinda understand why it didn’t “take”. Without the mods, I had to start with a Cathar Heresy character, fire my entire council, get a new one, convert my home province, get constantly holy-war’d by everyone around me, survive the Normans raiding me and when I finally got All of Britain, the pope started considering me a threat…
(Though it WAS awesome when I got that one lady general who kept winning deciding duels and only retired to leadership after her arm got cut off)
LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO DAVID, I STARTED A NEW FARM DAMMIT!!
Also shamefully I realised it’s been way more than 500 hours sunk into the game, actually more like 700.
Anyway, I’m creating a new character, I’m calling him “Chad” and he’s gonna romance all the romance options, all 8 of them, men and women alike cos Chad just has so much loving that needs doing. Oh and some farming will probably happen as well. Ahem.
@Susan, thanks for asking so I didn’t have to. I’d have thought no one could get so butthurt about a computer character potentially cheating on him. Especially as these types of men also refer to real people as NPCs. The logic has so many angles that loop back on themselves recursively I’m surprised it hasn’t split open the walls between worlds and allowed entry to an entity that is inimical to human life. Then they’d elect it to the highest office in the land.
Anyway, on more important matters:
I’ve done neither but I imagine stuffing a goat carcass full of fireworks would be easier and, looking on his works and despairing, I think it’d also make less of a mess and not stink as badly.
@Yutolia:
Yes! The developer, Eric Barone (AKA ConcernedApe) originally conceived of Stardew Valley as a Harvest Moon fan game. Here is a video interview with him and Harvest Moon dev Yasuhiro Wada where they play each other’s games:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ceFR8–6Obo
Thanks, everyone, for the clear explanations.
Stardew is awesome fun!
Also, Abi is best!