Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

Dickwolves

No doubt, this is your first stop on the internet when you want a nuanced discussion of the controversies, new and old. This is definitely an old controversy that just won't go away. It's a three-year old unending debate that I just caught up with today. I'm not really a fan of Penny Arcade, so it may be understandable if this slipped under my radar. I maybe read two Penny Arcade strips a year, I never read any of their articles, I don't follow any of their personalities on Twitter. I may have heard the term dickwolf in the last three years, but was obviously not interested to dig in to the reference, learn more. Until today, that is.

Edit: Someone pointed me to this excellent timeline of the entire controversy after I wrote this post:
Part 1 (Aug 2011 - Sep 2013) and Part 2 (Sep 2013 to present)

The strip itself is a commentary on the the questing systems in themepark MMOs, how players perceive quests as nothing more than a number they must achieve. Any backstory that the quest might have is superfluous, ignorable. Collect X number of items. Rescue X number of NPCs. That's all players see. All of the flavour text is meaningless. They complete the quests and move on to the next. It's assembly line gaming. Players take an amoral stance to quest completion in games such as World of Warcraft (which is the game this strip seems to be parodying, given the Tauren player character), because that's the easiest and quickest way to be successful at the game. To take a moral stance on quests is a waste of time, because you can't save the slaves. There will always be five more to save, they are infinite.

The quest in question seems to be the rescue of five slaves from their terrible servitude. A sixth slave presents himself to the Tauren character, asking to be freed. The Tauren responds that he's saved his five, that is all he was tasked to do, he does not need to save a sixth. It doesn't matter that the slaves has been living a hellish life. Slavery, for one. Beatings every morning. And apparently raped every night by something called dickwolves.

The use of rape in this context wasn't to poke fun at rape, to belittle rape victims, it was used to raise the moral stakes for the situation at hand. To make the slave's situation all the more dire. This is not only a slave asking to be freed, but it's a slave who is beaten and raped regularly. And yet the player is unconcerned. No amount of backstory can make players care for quests beyond the numbers at their core.

That should have been the end of it. Yet, controversy bloomed. All because the artist/writer used the word rape. And that's all the discussion has been about these last three years. That Penny Arcade, by even mentioning the word rape, was condoning, tolerating, excusing, trivializing rape.

Strangely, nobody has commented on the use of slavery. Nobody is accusing the artist/writer of condoning, tolerating, excusing, trivializing slavery. So why accuse them of the same with rape? What makes rape more heinous than slavery?

This would not be a controversy three years later if Penny Arcade had decided not to respond to the few holier-than-thou commentators that took umbrage with the strip for reasons well-beyond the actual message of the strip. Unfortunately, Penny Arcade did respond, and they did so in the most petulant manner possible.

Whereas the strip itself makes no commentary on rape culture, has nothing at all to do with rape culture, the Penny Arcade response very much trivialized, tolerated, excused rape. Their response was to release dickwolf t-shirts, for god's sake. Seriously. Jesus Christ. There was no better way to give ammo to those who really had no ammo to begin with. Now they're seen to be fully trivializing, condoning, tolerating rape.

A collection of geniuses over at Penny Arcade. Don't be offended with the strip. Be offended at the continued ignorance in the responses from Penny Arcade.
Source: Dickwolves