By David Futrelle
Last week I wrote about the wave of transphobia that followed the leaks that revealed one of the new characters in the upcoming postapocalyptic survival game The Last of Us 2 would be the woman above, a buff, butch badass named Abby who is apparently very effective at beating other characters up.
With her small breasts and muscular arms, some gamers have decided that she couldn’t possibly be a cis woman; she has to be trans. Cue a million “that’s a man, baby” jokes and, the internet being the internet, much worse. Meanwhile, more “serious” critics accused the game developer, Naughty Dog, of kowtowing to evil SJWs and trans activists pushing a cis-hating agenda.
I took a look at the Last of Us 2 subreddit today to see if the angry gamers were still at it. They were, posting bad transphobic jokes, ineptly-drawn cartoons and a photoshopped picture of Abby sporting a beard.
But I also ran across an argument I hadn’t seen before, accusing the game developers of “erasing women’s bodies” by featuring a butch woman in their game. This “misogyny” would not stand, a Redditor called Ralmoren declared.
“Funny,” she wrote, doing her best to sound like a feminist,
I bet SJWs like Neil [Druckmann, the director of the game] and Anita [Sarkeesian] think that making women ugly is only punishing male gamers. By doing this they openly admit their bigotry: that they think the female body only exist through the male gaze.
Abby isn’t ugly; she’s butch. And making a character butch is hardly a proclamation that one believes “the female body only exist[s] through the male gaze.” I mean, what? This is cargo cult feminism, adopting the language of feminism without understanding the theory behind it.
“No female gamer would feel empowered by playing with a pretty female avatar, right ? Female gamers need to identify with our characters, so let’s make them ugly (gee, thanks)! Women are only pretty for men, if it weren’t for men they would certainly look like baboons !”
Spoken like a true straw SJW.
I’m a woman, I play videogames and when the game gives me the opportunity I like to play with a female avatar. So now I should be penalised with an ugly avatar because some male gamers are attracted to overtly sexualised female characters (like it’s a bad thing? )? I mean, translate that to the real world, it’s like telling me “When you get out of your house you should keep your hair covered because some men may look at you a certain way.”
It’s really not like that at all.
F*ck this misogynistic bigotry.
Can we get creative game developers who have sane relashionships and views of women or is that to much to ask for ? Like not I-do-stealth-missions-in-panties-because-I-breathe-through-my-skin sexy, nor Mass Effect Andromeda ugly, but something in the middle ? Please ?
Here’s an idea: how about a range of female characters that in some small way reflect the diversity of women in the real world?
In a later comment, Ralmoren cites Bayonetta as an example of the sort of woman she’d like to see more of in video games. Here’s the totally-not-sexualized Bayonetta, who I’m sure would have fit in perfectly in the gritty postapocalyptic world of The Last of Us.
As Ralmoren explained,
Feminine, elegant, and kicks ass. Bayonetta is a much happier and empowering female representation than the austere, masculine woman trope we’re getting recently.
Ralmoren insists that, as far as she’s concerned, “there’s nothing wrong with being a masculine woman (I’m not especially feminine myself).” Never mind that she spent much of her previous comment attacking Abby as “ugly”
She continues:
but I dislike that this trope shows that female characters can only be strong if they emulate men, meaning that by opposition anything feminine is weak and needs to be shunned.
If all female video game characters looked like Abby, this argument might have some merit. But having one butch character in a game is hardly the same as declaring that “female characters can only be strong if they emulate men” (my emphasis). Again, if games actually depicted women more as they are in the real world, with a variety of body shapes and sizes, this wouldn’t even be an issue. In the real world, moreover, there are a lot more women walking around looking like Abby than there are women looking like Bayonetta (except at game conventions).
Elsewhere on the Last of Us 2 subreddit, others offered up even dopier objections to Abby’s looks. Like the dude who insists that she’s simply too buff to live in postapocalyptic times.
Abby is literally the only human, male or female, with that sort of muscle mass. In a post-apocalyptic dystopia. With no commercial protein supplies. Or working steroid/supplement factories.
The calorie and protein requirements alone are prohibitive in a context within which there is food and resource scarcity. But even granting that they gather enough food through hunting and they have this amazing gym that auto-produces steroids, why is she the only person in her group with that sort of build?
She’s either taking a disproportionate share of the group’s food, or she eats any members of the group that exceed her in size to both maintain her gains and insure that she is the only person with that degree of musculature.
So Abby’s not just trans, she’s an actual cannibal?
This game sounds better and better all the time.
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> TacticalProgressive
Yes, you are right, i think. As i am more “paper” than “video”, i have only a few magical girl animes in my memory (never had a problem to watch them, even if it was not considered as “manly” enough at school). Indeed, it was often an easy filler, the same sequence being repeated (and this kind of repetition, combined with a number of frames less important than in bigger productions, was one of the points “anti-japanese animes” were complaining in the 80 and 90).
And i think it could also be some mark of the author, sometimes. I mean, if you watch Cutey Honey, from Nagai Gô (who also made Devilman series and Mazinger/Grendizer series), you can easily guess that it was designed by a man (he is quite a borderline mangaka, to say it smoothly).
As for magical boys… There may be a funny variation with this one ? Have not seen it, though. Oh, and i remember one episode of Galaxy Angels where all the main characters become magical girls, including the middle-aged mustache male captain. He is the one who seems to enjoy it the more. Of course, it is played for laughs. But in general, rather than magical boys, it is more kind of super heroes that boys tend to become in anime, not unlikely like spiderman or batman and the american heroes stuff.
> Cyborgette
Ah, i know the first but not the second. Never played the first in ascii, though. Have you test a version with graphics ? Was the ascii version also renamed “Tales of Maj’Eyal” due to copyrights on “Tales of Middle Earth” ?
I never delve into the community, but this is sad for Angband. For such a free and open world, it is sad for them to have such a narrow mind ! Is this visible in the game itself ? I do not remember something problematic in Zangband.
I had tried Nethack a few times, but never get the like of it. And have you tried Dwarf Fortress ? It is more a management game than a pure rogue game, but, well, Ascii. But as far i have no problem with a RPG in Ascii, a management game with this kind of interface is a bit too much for me. Guess i am too old for that.
@occasional reader
Nah version 2 is still “Tales of Middle Earth”, and someone has been porting it to object-functional C++17. (Seriously.) ToME 4 is a whole other deal, and one I’m not very interested in because of a horrifying side plot that got removed a while ago.
Never tried Dwarf Fortress! Some day, maybe.
Re the Angband community, it’s not like… as brutally terrible as a lot of other gaming communities I think, but there’s a general level of tolerance for grossness that eventually pushed me away. Also it’s just a very, very overwhelmingly male space for the most part.
@occasional reader:
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Sort of reminds me of the guy who cosplays as Sailor Freddie Mercury:
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Dwarf Fortress has practical implementation problems in fortress mode that the coder has no intention of ever fixing. I used to play generation forts, with no or limited immigration, because children in DF are generally viewed as annoyances because they eat and drink and can’t work, and that’s not how children would be viewed IRL in the same situation. When children are the only way your fort can increase in population, they become much more valuable and management of children becomes much more realistic.
Said practical implementation problem is that the fortress slooooooooooooooooows dooooooooooooown so much over time that it becomes annoying to play. I don’t think Toady thinks it’s an issue because he plays short-term fortresses in his testing mode, he doesn’t invest weeks into a fortress or play a fortress for decades of in-game time. And he’s waaaay more interested in adventure mode. So fortress mode is critically broken in a way that I think is unlikely to ever be fixed.
@occasional reader:
Of course, *western* animation *never* did *that*! *cough*HannaBarbera*cough*
@Cyborgette:
That’s disappointing. I was tangentially connected with it for a while a decade or more ago and it didn’t seem like that then. There was even at least one female variant developer active (Ingeborg Somebody, working on a Norse-themed variant) and so far as I was aware she was not treated with any discernible disdain due to gender … at least not in the Usenet newsgroup where most of the community hung out at that time. That newsgroup seems to be moribund these days, so they must have migrated elsewhere (likely Facebook), and even then they had other channels (IRC, and I think at least one variant’s web site had commenting functionality) where perhaps there was bad behavior that I didn’t see.
But it sounds like it might have developed some toxicity over the intervening time, which is … disappointing.
@Policy of Madness:
the (male) game developer
@Surplus
Nah the toxicity was always there I think. Just less visible to me when I was young, male, and ignorant.
Oh, I remember ISNorden, yeah I don’t think she’s been involved for a while. And I know there’s at least one other trans fem active in the community. But at this point I kind of just can’t be bothered. (Also can’t be bothered dealing with so much C and C++ TBH, doing stuff in Rust has absolutely spoiled me rotten.)
> Moon Custafer
Ah, well, there is always a kind of magic about Freddy Mercury…
> Cyborgette
Hu, since i work in Java, i have lost the count of C++ versions, sorry. And i do not know Rust. Is it a good one ?
Hmm, you were not interested because of the side plot or because the side plot have been removed ?
> Policy of Madness
It seems that they are going on Steam with graphic tiles rather than Ascii, though. Maybe the amelioration of the fortress mode is not their priority right now ?
> Surplus to Requirements
Ah, well, other french commenters can correct me if i am wrong, but i think Hanna Barbera cartoons arrived after japanese animes in France (first anime in 78, if i am not wrong, can not remember for Hanna Barbera). Before that, it was a mix of Disney (the short ones, i do not speak about the annual big Disney), Looney Toons and Lantz cartoons. And at this time (80/90), there also was this “Yellow peril” shit (and being half, damn i know what it is), so they were just jumping on another occasion to disparage another “invading asiatic stuff”. To be honest, the choices of the diffused animes, at this time, were not the best too…
To note, Disney culture was so present at this time that “mickey” even became a common word in French (in old generations. I do not know if it is still used by more recent ones). “Regarder des mickeys” means “watch cartoons” and “dessiner des (petits) mickeys” means “draw (small) cartoons”, even if it is not the famous mouse.
Ah, well, sorry. I am going back to work on Tuesday, i will not bother you longer from this day.
@occasional reader
Re Rust: oh I hecking love it. It’s imperative, strongly typed, has an astonishing set of compile time and runtime safety features, and performs comparably to C++. (Usually compiles faster too, though not as fast as C.) It also supports unsafe code (in cordoned of blocks) for when that’s actually needed, hardware drivers or interfacing with C APIs or such. And it has package management better than most scripting languages, its own build system, a compiler that produces actually helpful messages… It’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a programming language designed for human beings TBH.
Re the ToME4 side plot in question. CN: SF misogyny and body horror, I guess? I can’t go into too much detail because that would also be triggery for a lot of people I think.
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The side plot I’m referring to is the “orc breeding pits” quest, which is basically the worst part of the later Dune books, on anabolic steroids.
I was bullshit when I found out about that; the guy who wrote the quest just pulled all kinds of “I can’t possibly not be a feminist” and “actually this is edgy and progressive” stuff out of his ass, and I couldn’t argue effectively because I was male at the time. (My fave: “all the women I’ve talked to say this is actually feminist, it’s only men who are complaining.”) I pretty quickly decided to walk away because fuck even dealing with that, esp. as forced birth, lobotomy, enslavement of women, pregnancy horror, and all the related stuff has always been and continues to be a huge trigger for me. Cis dudes just don’t understand why this stuff gets to me so much and act like it’s a sign of immaturity or something, it is incredibly frustrating TBH.
@Cyborgette
Not familiar with the game in question, but a lot of that stuff is triggering for me as well. And I hate the “edgy progressive” defense. Especially right now, since the “edgy progressive” defense now seems to be the default modus operandi for a lot of online leftists unfortunately, who use it as an excuse to use slurs and bash marginalized people (part of why I strongly dislike Breadtube). And they have a few token PoC, LGBT folx, and women to allow them to claim that those groups okayed it.
Oh hey, there’s a name I didn’t expect to see around here. (Mostly because involved political discussions aren’t really her bag), I didn’t know she’d ever done any coding, I met her through TTRPGS.
@Cyborgette:
s/Rust/Clojure/ and you’d have me. I haven’t used Rust, mind you, but upon reading a bit about it I find that apparently it’s what they’ve been rewriting Firefox in.
That’d be the browser that has become increasingly balky and unstable in recent years, rarely crashing outright but displaying a huge panoply of annoying symptoms:
1. Being unable to switch to a tab properly. Instead of the page that you left that tab on, you get some different page that appears to be some web site’s loading graphic, a small spinning grey wheel by itself horizontally centered. Switching away and back sometimes fixes it, sometimes not until you’ve done it half a dozen times or more. The tab doesn’t seem to have actually spontaneously navigated to a different page, but rather the browser seems to have switched to the wrong tab, except for the fact that none of the tabs you had open resembled this wrong-tab.
2. Sometimes a browser tab seems to just ignore commands, or act like the network stack is hung. This usually happens either with a tab that was not foregrounded for a while — you switch to it and hit reload, or go to navigate it, and nothing happens — or with a new tab produced via right-click “open in new tab”. The tab throbber does its thing, but there’s no network activity and no status line notification of same (“looking up foo.tld”, “looked up foo.tld”, “connecting to foo.tld”, and so on). It just doesn’t even initiate the hostname lookup for some reason. It just sits there. Sometimes it starts going spontaneously after a few seconds but usually it takes hammering reload or closing and recreating the tab (sometimes multiple times) to coax it into actually trying to look up and contact the server.
3. Often sluggish performance, esp. when switching tabs (noticing a pattern here? If you stick with a single tab and it’s working OK it tends to stay working OK).
4. For a year or two, the “Mozilla Crash Reporter” always pops up when Firefox exits, even if you exited it by clicking the little red X in the top right corner rather than it having actually crashed. Apparently whatever bit of code is supposed to distinguish between an abnormal termination and a user-initiated exit isn’t distinguishing anymore. And nobody’s bothered to fix it. In dozens of months.
OK, some of this might be poor programming or outright neglect by the developers, but it certainly does not give one the impression that Rust is “as performant as C++”, and the memory and concurrency safety, as is so often the case, didn’t really eliminate errors in such things, but just commuted their sentences: instead of corrupted data or a crash (or worse, malware executing) you just get runtime errors, deadlocks, and livelocks. In Firefox’s case, it looks like livelocks are the most common result, with a tab’s networking component spending long periods unresponsive or the tab switcher itself flaking out.
Mind you, for a major network-facing thing like a browser, locking out the possibility of malware exploiting buffer overruns and similar exploits is a major win. But pushing something as “crashproof” that has just traded crashes for hangs that can fairly often force the user to exit and restart it is a bit overblown IMO.
One might wonder why I haven’t switched to Chrome. In a nutshell, the answer is “NoScript”: being able to whitelist scripts eliminates 99.9% of the malware threat, and in a way that synergizes with any under the hood memory safety enhancements in the browser. So far as I am aware there is no equivalent of NoScript for Chrome.
@Surplus
I use Firefox regularly and haven’t noticed most of those bugs. What OS are you running it on?
This has happened to me before on my older laptop. That computer had a myriad of other issues, but usually just waiting cleared this one up.
Here you go.
@Dalillama
IDK if she was involved in coding or how much, she was mostly before my time.
@Naglfar
Yeah, that kind of “dark and edgy” complex is a bit of a calling card for awful politics and awful people IME. Not that I’m opposed to darkness in itself – hi, I read people like NK Jemisin and Caitlin Kiernan, I’m cool with having tragedy and horror in my fiction. What I’m not cool with is when it’s just there for shock value, and abused women are treated as story props.
At a certain point it starts reflecting badly on the author to write stuff like that, and on the community to stay silent about it.
BTW you’re not the first other trans woman I’ve encountered who mentioned having those same triggers. It’s a thing I feel weirdly about TBH. Like, as people without wombs we’re exempt from a lot of those horrors IRL, and therefore privileged in a way, but the body awareness and the fear and anger that go with it clearly cut very deep.
@Naglfar:
Windoze 7. And before anyone asks, I don’t have excessively many tabs open; maybe a dozen or fewer much of the time. One parked on Facebook, one here, three more at other sites, typically one to run searches and do miscellaneous stuff in (since creating new tabs sometimes runs afoul of the “network doesn’t even try to do anything” problem), and a few that are basically to-do items in the form of browser tabs.
Oh, wait, is there now a NoScript for Chrome? Excellent. I should check that out sometime.
REPOST (first got eaten)
@Naglfar:
Windoze 7. And before anyone asks, I don’t have excessively many tabs open; maybe a dozen or fewer much of the time. One parked on Facebook, one here, three more at other sites, typically one to run searches and do miscellaneous stuff in (since creating new tabs sometimes runs afoul of the “network doesn’t even try to do anything” problem), and a few that are basically to-do items in the form of browser tabs.
Oh, wait, is there now a NoScript for Chrome? Excellent. I should check that out sometime.
Have I been put on moderation for some reason? My posts are no longer appearing.
@Surplus
Clojure is a JVM language with all the JVM’s issues. I’m sure it’s an excellent language for certain niches, but those are not the same ones as Rust.
I never said anything about Rust being “crashproof”. It is quite capable of generating runtime errors; a Turing-complete language with no runtime errors at all is literally impossible. Don’t put words into my mouth.
A browser is not a language benchmark. IME Firefox was a lot less performant when it was written in C++, but we’re clearly on different platforms and/or hardware so IDK.
If you want Javascript blocking across different browsers, use uBlock Origin. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm
And FTR while I’m not as deep in computers as some people here – just a couple years as a sysadmin and a bunch of hobby projects, I’m nothing special – I don’t appreciate being talked down to by a random Internet dude about a language said dude has not even bothered using. Check yourself, please.
Edit: ah I missed that you’re on Windows 7. Congrats, you’re running an unsupported OS – Win7 was EOL’d in January. That may explain some of your problems.
@Surplus
Your posts seem to be appearing normally, maybe it has to do with the comments general bugs.
Re: Windows 7
I had my old laptop running that, I upgraded a few months before the end of service. Haven’t used it since, so I can’t attest to how to make FF work better on it, but YMMV for Chrome seeing as, like Cyborgette said, it’s no longer supported.
Addendum to my last: turns out Firefox isn’t even close to being fully ported to Rust yet. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Within_Firefox
If you look at the current source tree ( https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev ) you’ll see that the huge majority of compiled code is still C++, though I can’t definitively say that your problems aren’t with Rust parts.
Bayonetta’s kind of a mixed bag who I’d say on the whole leans more positive. On one hand, she is sexualized to the point of absolute absurdity and that is very questionable, but on the other it kind of is pushed so far with her that it feels like parody, particularly when you consider she actually has a pretty clear, developed personality that goes beyond that and is portrayed as a highly competent character.
I think it’d be easier to argue Princess Peach is a sex object than Bayonetta honestly; while she does have her stronger portrayals (mostly some of the RPGs, SMB2, and 3D World, debatably Odyssey given at least she has more agency than usual), by and large the character exists as a reward for a man and little else.
@Lizuka
So like YMMV because I couldn’t make it past the intro video and all, but “Incredibly competent female character who still exists mostly for the titillation of male viewers” is still a hugely sexist trope. See also Lara Croft.
None of this is mutually exclusive with characters like Princess Peach being objectified, either. (The latter more as romance objects than sex objects IMO but yeah).
Re: Windoze 7 — what alternatives would you suggest? Windoze 8 has a mobile-focused UI, pushing toward single-tasking: apps like to be fullscreen, no start menu, etc.; Windoze 10 is loaded with ads and spyware, has forced updates, and the forced updates are used to steal away functionality and then spam you with ads offering to rent it back to you (e.g. replacing “previous versions” via volume shadow copies and Windoze Backup with in-Explorer ads pushing the OneDrive subscription service); and non-Windoze operating systems won’t run many of the applications I use. I also have doubts about how well Win10 would run on my current hardware, and obvious expense issues with replacing said hardware, plus logistical problems (no credit card to order it shipped; won’t fit in a backpack; COVID lockdown; etc.) as well as a general lack of desire to replace a mostly well-functioning OS with one deliberately made more hostile to squeeze more money out of people (money I don’t have — no OneDrive subscription for me, so no replacing “previous versions” for me).
And then there are the horror stories: updates bricking machines, machines just suddenly shutting down and rendering themselves unusable for hours or even days at Microsoft’s whim because TPTB decided it was time for those machines to update Win10, etc. … I, for one, cannot afford to have that lack of control over my machine. I can’t have it suddenly go out of commission for hours or days without warning and without recourse. I suppose this could be prevented by pulling the network plug so it can never receive any signal from M$ to initiate such a lockout-for-hours-and-update process, but these days it is absolutely crippling to not have an internet connection.
The Win7 monthly patching process was bad enough, thanks to occasional glitchy patches and a bad habit TrustedInstaller.exe has of sometimes hogging the CPU and of returning itself eventually to normal priority if you lower its task priority to force it to play nicer with multitasking. And its updating process typically took 10-15 minutes, plus 5 for a reboot.
As soon as I heard that Win10 updating takes hours, not minutes, takes the computer over fully rather than multitasking even poorly with you going on about your own work, and can’t be switched off or even easily deferred to a more convenient time, I shook my head no.
And that was before I heard that M$ uses the inability any more to delay a patch, and then skip it outright if it gets a bad reputation, to use patches to do hostile things like rip out features to sell back to you as separate, extra-charge new products and services, and to add adware and telemetry, and even to install crapware (which you used to get only once, with the initial purchase of the machine) and delete rival applications. I can only imagine how crammed with ads and crapware Win10 is now, after years of such abusive patches by Microsoft. And how bloated and slow all that user-hostile cruft has made it unless you get extra-beefy (= extra-expensive) hardware to run it on.
Oh, and don’t get me started on the very sleazy and deceptive methods M$ used to try to push Win10 on Win7 users when it was new. That alone was a big red flag for me.
@Surplus
I am no fan of Windows 10 for this reasons and more. Have you considered Linux?
The Bayonetta conversation kind of makes me wonder what game concepts like that might look like if more LGBT people and racially diverse teams were in the industry, and women weren’t constantly relegated to the same handful of roles designed to placate the egos of cis het men.
@Surplus
I don’t want to defend Windows 10 too much, but some of what you’re describing with respect to updates is the same as before; they’re just not called Service Packs anymore. Windows 10 came out five years ago; five years before that, Windows 7 was rolling out a beta of Service Pack 1. These larger updates have always required that the OS wasn’t running, since they’re basically reinstalling the OS itself. It would be more or less the same thing if you were upgrading a Linux-based or BSD-based OS.
Ultimately, we can’t expect software to just stay frozen in place forever and work just fine. Various security fixes and quality-of-life changes are essential to maintaining software, and at some point that will require other software to update to maintain compatibility. So you say you’re sticking with Windows 7 to run certain applications. That eventually won’t even be the case anymore, as sad as that is.
I think it would be best to look into switching to a different OS or upgrading to 10. FWIW, I think 10 was never as bad as some critics were saying, and isn’t nearly as bad as it was five years ago.