By David Futrelle
Fans of the well-loved postapocalyptic video game The Last of Us are reeling over a massive leak of information about the game’s upcoming sequel that suggests the story will be taking an exceedingly dark turn that highlights the futility of a cycle of revenge and retribution.
You’ll have to look up the spoilers yourself; I don’t want to give any more plot details.
While many fans are upset with the new direction, an angry minority has decided to blame the game’s apparently much darker plot — and everything else they think is wrong with the still-unreleased sequel — on evil SJWs for “shoving as much diversity and woke agenda at the player as possible,” as the One Angry Gamer site awkwardly put it.
In particular, they’re targeting unnamed and possibly imaginary trans activists at Naughty Dog, the developer of the game, for making it (allegedly) too trans-friendly for the true fans.
Much of the ire centers around a new character named Abby, whom 4channers and others have decided is trans — or at least “trans-gendered-looking,” as One Angry Gamer has described her — because she’s small-breasted and a bit butch.
A writer at the right-wing culture war site Sausage Roll takes this argument further, arguing that the allegedly less-feminine character design in The Last of Us 2 is part of a devious plan to make the game “trans-friendly.”
“It seems … that the inclusion of gay and lesbian characters in the last three Naughty Dog games was not enough to appease the activists who are reportedly working at Naughty Dog,” wrote Sausage Roll’s Dianne Anders.
The Last of Us Part II gameplay footage leak confirms that the plot has some extreme trans rights ideologies, too. ….
Abby is the leader of [a] little gang; and, according to 4chan leaks, she is also a trans woman.
Has there ever been a less-credible source than “4chan leaks?”
The characters in The Last of Us Part II are designed in such a way to not make trans people feel uncomfortable. Every single new character introduced in the sequel does not have definitive feminine or masculine qualities.
Ellie and Dina, specifically, have been remodelled to look less feminine … .
According to an unnamed video game artist interviewed by Anders, it’s all the fault of trans women that the game’s characters don’t have massive, male-pleasing boobs. (Because what’s an apocalypse without boobs?)
“A trans woman can’t naturally grow large breasts, and not all trans people can afford implants,” the anonymous artist told Anders.
If you see a game where the women are a little less curvy, it’s not … because the game designers are worried about receiving backlash for sexualising women, it’s because they are worried about offending the trans community. …
That’s why you will see a lot of designers ‘nerfing the female form’ so to speak so that the difference between trans women and cis women is a little less noticeable.
Anders herself continues:
That might explain exactly what happened to the cis female characters in TheLast of Us Part II.
We can practically hear the gutteral cries from offended gamer dudes from around the world: TRANS WOMEN TOOK MUH BOOBIES!
This would ring true especially if one of the new protagonists is a trans woman because it would blur the line between cis and trans so people would perceive Abby simply as a female hero.
Given that she’s already seen as trans despite no evidence that she is actually trans, that seems a tad unlikely.
It’s striking how easy it is for people like Anders — and her 4chan “sources” — to conjure up a trans demon out of nothing. Because transphobia runs deep.
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@Moon Custafer
I just looked it up and apparently people are shaving their heads now for the covhead-19 challenge while in lockdown, which is in some way connected to the NHS. I’ve never shaved my head and haven’t cut my hair in several years, so I don’t plan to partake in this.
We’re going to see a lot of varied home haircuts for a good while after this.
So, in a post-apocalyptic world, no one is starving enough to be really thin…got it.
And no one would shave their head so their hair doesn’t get caught on things as they fight or flee for their lives…seems legit.
Therefore, trans women are destroying civilization…logic!
…why am I not grifting the Rethuglican masses for all that sweet, sweet hate cash, again? It obviously doesn’t take intelligence or skill or talent.
Yeah, “trans people exist” is a suuuuper extreme trans agenda, guys. Suuuuuure.
Post-apocalyptic chic would be likely less “curvy” and more “scurvy”.
The more I think about this post, the more I’m reminded about all those jerks who fetishise trans women and say that they’re much more feminine than cis women and whatnot. Only now they’re taking away someone’s boobs or something when a woman is not aesthetically pleasing. It’s hard to keep track of.
@Moon Custafer
I’ve been growing (part of) my hair for five years now, and I sure would try to shear it off with a blunt knife if I was living under constant stress because, if I’m doing anything important, it gets horribly annoying and totally distracting the moment it starts falling out of a bun. I realise other people feel differently, but this is also the reason I’m puzzled why so many female super heroes wear their long hair loose while fighting crime.
@Lumipuna
You’re my hero now.
I know I’m not the first person to say this, but …
How exactly is having another playable character – THAT YOU NEVER HAVE TO OPT TO PLAY – oppression?!
@Jarnsaxa
I think a lot of transphobes do actually think this is extreme. They believe that trans* people do not exist and so anyone who claims to be trans* is doing so in bad faith and must have evil intentions. Therefore, to them claiming our existence is seen as an extreme agenda.
OT: now Alex Jones is threatening cannibalism:
https://twitter.com/RealKellyJones/status/1256222688495927304
I must say, things must be worse in the US than I thought. I was under the impression that you could still easily get food.
@WWTH : I believe it’s toxic masculinity at it again. To be a worthy trophy, a women need a huge rack, so they feel obligated to require all fictional women to be worthy trophy. I believe toxic masculinity to be hugely performative, which is why they both don’t understand and don’t care if other disagree or find that strange : for them, showing their virility is required, and they care more about properly showing their virility than the actual message they give
I wonder if they would found that one good enough, given that she have a big rack :
@Moggie
That’s really disturbing. Reminds me why I don’t usually subject myself to that.
Also, his question “Do you think I like sizing up my neighbour?”
… I mean, it’s starting sound like you do?
Alex Jones, like most rabid conservatives, has been looking for an excuse to murder his neighbors for years. Not anything in particular about the neighbors, he just wants to murder people and get away with it. It’s why they all have a dozen long rifles “for home protection “.
There’s been essays written about the popularity of zombie media correlating to this murder-your-neighbor fantasy…
As an Angry Gamer I would like to say Fuck this article
I don’t care If I get banned from this site
@Ohlmann
Toxic masculinity also includes the idea that one is never wrong, so if other men disagree with a man who things women need massive breasts, he will probably assume he is right and that it must be the other men who are not manly enough.
@Masse_mysteria
Every right winger has a very thinly veiled fantasy of an apocalypse when everyone they don’t like will die and/or be forced into slavery. They also tend to fantasize about killing those they don’t like, as shown by Anglin’s screed last week.
O/T:
TERFs now think that body-positive movements are bad for telling women they are beautiful the way they are. Somehow I’m not surprised.
These guys are going to have an aneurysm if they ever find out straight men without a breast fetish exist. I don’t think it even exists as a possibility in their worldview.
@impudentinfidel
Or that asexual men exist (though really I imagine they don’t really recognize the existence of non-cishet men at all).
@Naglfar
That’s … a reductive way to characterize that message.
Naglfar, that thread includes a gratuitous swipe at Jazz Jennings for having participated in the design of a bra.
When I’m not skiving on walks, I’m using the lockdown to brush up on art law. Whilst so I came across this; which might be of interest to some peeps here.
Uh… I hate to be the one to tell them this really obvious fact, but skinny cis women generally don’t grow large natural breasts either. Sure, there are exceptions (including me), but by & large you need body fat to have larger breasts. & I’m sure they’d be howling just as loudly about their dying erections if the female characters were busty, & also not thin.
@Weasel-Rah:
Zombie stuff also tends to give me a strong racism/anti-immigration vibe. I think it reflects how right-wingers think of the Mexicans, or eastern Europeans, or other ethnically-distinct group of poor people massed just on the other side of some border. It plays to the right-wing bourgeois fear that the people who have been screwed over for so long will come pouring across borders and out of the inner cities and overthrow them and take and redistribute all their stuff.
Zombies, in other words, are often a stand-in for racial invasion and/or socialist revolution. And by extension a zombie virus stands in for any feared influence that could spread such a thing, e.g. Marxism or other leftist teachings.
Note too how survivor enclaves in these settings so often end up as authoritarian states with very rightwing politics. Many of the stories set in or around such enclaves seem to be a “we were right all along and one day circumstances will prove it!” fantasy for right wingers.
@Naglfar
Skimming through that conversation, I took the point to be that body positivity still reduces a woman’s worth to her looks. Am I missing something?
Note that I didn’t read very far, since naturally there was ll sorts of TERF horribleness and fat shaming and what have you.
@Dalailah
Oh yes, can you imagine the tantrums if the characters were fat?
@Surplus
Sometimes it isn’t even veiled. Right now preppers are freaking out because they expected the apocalypse to give them a wasteland, but instead they are seeing people work together and set up support systems, which is antithetical to conservative beliefs.
@Masse_mysteria
It does say that, but it also seems like TERFs are somewhat reductive of what the concept is. They also are notorious for fatphobia like you mentioned, which could be another reason they oppose it. And that’s before getting into the fact that being body-positive should mean accepting women who deviate from their norm, which they don’t want to do. It would mean that they’d have to stop shaming any woman who displays features that they think make her trans*, even if she is cis.
@Naglfar
The problem with TERFs is not the RF part, but the TE part. While I have no doubt there is TE in the comments, I didn’t read them (mostly because I’m not interested in encountering that). There’s nothing TE in the post itself.
Consider two statements: “Every woman is beautiful, and you’re beautiful just the way you are. You don’t have to change to be beautiful.” And, “You’re not required to be beautiful. It’s okay to not be beautiful. You don’t have to change to be a worthy human being.”
Both of these statements are positive, but the first one is positive within the framework of lookism, accepting that the male gaze is the focal point around which women should orient themselves. It says that the male gaze is equal opportunity and all women are subject to it, that conventional attractiveness is not the only attractiveness, and that attractiveness is still important.
It’s also kind of silly, because women who aren’t conventionally attractive fucking know it, and saying “You’re beautiful, too!” doesn’t pierce their knowledge about their own reality.
The second statement is positive by rejecting lookism, by saying that lookism is bad and you don’t need to conform to the male gaze in order to be a valuable person. It doesn’t matter that men don’t find you attractive; you don’t have to orient yourself around pleasing their penises.
One of these statements is radical, but neither are trans-exclusionary, so I don’t see an issue with the second one.
When I still did armored combat I had DD tits. I wore a very tight sports bra to minimize their movement.
Big breasts get in the way, and it hurts to get hit there. I’d expect women fighting zombies to wrap up as well as possible, cis or trans.