The Penny Arcade rape culture debacle
Trigger warning: Post, if you couldn't guess from the title, contains a discussion of rape.
Recap
Basically, a well-known webcomic published a strip that referenced rape, a bunch of people suggested that it might be triggering and/or contribute to the normalization of rape, and then the writers were dicks about it.
I know that many of you feel strongly about this issue, so I wanted to ask: Did you find the original comic offensive? I bring this up because it seemed to me that a lot of the responses seem to have read an entirely different strip from the one I did.
I'm not debating the proposition that using rape as a punchline makes you a jerk. The problem, for me, is that the original comic doesn't seem to me to have used rape as a punchline. It referenced rape (alongside slavery) as an example of something bad on its way to an entirely different punchline (about the illogical structure of quests in RPGs). Any number of different criminal activities could have substituted for the word "rape" without changing the meaning of the comic.
Am I missing something here?
Recap
Basically, a well-known webcomic published a strip that referenced rape, a bunch of people suggested that it might be triggering and/or contribute to the normalization of rape, and then the writers were dicks about it.
I know that many of you feel strongly about this issue, so I wanted to ask: Did you find the original comic offensive? I bring this up because it seemed to me that a lot of the responses seem to have read an entirely different strip from the one I did.
I'm not debating the proposition that using rape as a punchline makes you a jerk. The problem, for me, is that the original comic doesn't seem to me to have used rape as a punchline. It referenced rape (alongside slavery) as an example of something bad on its way to an entirely different punchline (about the illogical structure of quests in RPGs). Any number of different criminal activities could have substituted for the word "rape" without changing the meaning of the comic.
Am I missing something here?