Posted By John Sears on February 4, 2011
This post is to try and get a lot of the stuff that’s been buzzing around my head in the context of the Dickwolves discussion down onto the blog so I can get back to our core mission of Zombie Rights agitation.
1) On ‘Trigger Warnings’
Having never heard of the term before the discussion on the Dickwolves post, I grabbed the wrong end of the stick and assumed that people were advocating the general, socially-mandated adoption of these ‘warnings’ on any and all blog posts discussing unpleasant topics. That doesn’t seem to be the case; it just seems to be a tool used by certain blogs and communities within their own policies.
Fine. However, I still think putting warning labels up before you discuss a topic infantilizes your audience. Here at the ZRC we believe in discussing even unpleasant topics, like, say, Capcom, while assuming our readers can handle it. I have, on occasion, put things behind cuts. Mostly just to keep the front page of the blog free of clutter, but on occasion, because the material was particularly disturbing. Isn’t that comparable?
Well.. slightly. I would maintain that there is a difference between displaying a primary, disturbing source or actual recording and a discussion of that source. There are grey areas here, so, again, feel free, Internet denizens, to use these warnings. It’s not like I have any authority to stop you. But we won’t be doing so here at the ZRC. I still feel, as I discussed with exhominem, that there are an infinite number of potentially offensive things within any discussion of absolutely anything, and so, an infinite number of these ‘triggers’ to warn against.
Perhaps that’s where the real objection comes in, for me: this idea that people who’ve lived through trauma are somehow roboticized, that if you press button A they cannot help but react method B. I agree with Amanda Marcotte that treating whole groups of people this way reinforces the notion that they are ‘ruined and broken’ by their negative experiences.
The whole terminology just reeks of Skinnerian Radical Behaviorist garbage anyway, and that sort of thing always appalled me.
2) Debacle.tumblr.com
These fine individuals linked to us in the context of a very long timeline relating to the Dickwolves affair that is, shall we say, pretty obviously slanted against the Penny Arcade guys, to the point where they try to read significance into Gabe’s iPod playlist.
(And yes, you did do that, people. You elevated trivia, the background music from an mp3 player during a Ustream session, to the level of relevant information to the discussion. Don’t try to pretend that that isn’t a selection bias, and that the bias isn’t relevant to your point of view. You didn’t mention what drawing tools he used or what room he drew in; those were also trivia, and you ignored them. You mentioned his music because you thought it gave insight into his mind, and was another example of him ‘mocking’ rape. Only, there was no evidence to support that belief.)
That being said, the ZRC would like to note a slight clarification. We didn’t just ‘take issue’ with the Penny Arcade decision, we tried to leverage it for our own Cause and clients. We’re far too proactive to settle for taking ‘issue’ with something like this.
We’d also like to thank you for the traffic.
3) Ratings systems
In the extended discussion with Exhominem, we drifted gradually on to the topic of ratings systems. I ranted as I often have against the ESRB and MPAA systems as censorship. The Comics Code too, but no one I’ve ever read seriously argues that it wasn’t censorship; a handy hint is that they published strict guidelines on what was, and was not, allowed to be published within their industry. Kind of gives the game away.
What, then is the difference between their systems and ours?
Primarily I think it’s this: we explain our criteria openly, discuss each reviewed piece extensively, and above all else, do not control the possibilities for distributing your work to a wider audience. If you don’t get an MPAA rating, or get the wrong one, you cannot get a major theatrical release in America. Period. The theatre chains working in concert with the MPAA are a cartel, function as a near-monopsony. The ESRB is even worse. In both cases, their control over the markets is fading fast, and hopefully they will become irrelevant, and then historical oddities, sooner rather than later.
The day that Gamestop or Amazon cease stocking works based on ZRC ratings is the day I retire the system. Period. We provide our guides to help shape conversation and encourage good behavior, as well as to help deter bad behavior; we neither want, nor will accept, the responsibilities of a censor. There are times when you really do need to watch The Birth of a Nation or The Night of the Living Dead. We don’t want to stop you, we just want to provide context.
You know, on the Romero movie. Birth of a Nation is odious but not our field.
4) Arguing with strawmen
I generally like this Amanda Marcotte piece, which I quoted from above, about the Penny Arcade thing, but I disagree with her analysis of the second comic in the Dickwolves series, where Tycho and Gabe facetiously apologize for the Dickwolf comic in the first place.
Her take:
3) That said, the guys at Penny Arcade responded in officially the worst possible way to respond. As Melissa correctly notes, they attacked strawmen, and this time they really did make light of rape. Jokes where you condemn rape in a sardonic tone really do imply that rape isn’t a big deal. In the time it took them to write the response, there were probably like 10 rapes in the U.S. alone. The cartoon implied that rape is less common than it is, that rape culture isn’t real, and that the whole subject is beneath you. This was tone deaf, sexist, and stupid.
The logical flaw here is that she thinks it’s significant that Penny Arcade attacked a strawman. That, in fact, is 90% of what they *do* in the comic.
This is a comic strip where they routinely draw the ‘CEO’ of a major gaming firm plotting Machiavellian treachery against their customers, or where they decided that Divx players were such an affront that theirs comes to life so it can belittle and harass its owners.
This is also a comic strip where they have Jesus as a major character so they can have the god-figure of the world’s largest religion endorse Mario Kart.
Gabe and Tycho are themselves straw-men, extreme caricatures of the duo behind the strip. Tycho’s rabid atheism (despite, as noted, being friends with Jesus), Gabe’s ignorance and impulse control problems, their proclivity for violence and amoral, sociopathic disregard for human suffering? None of that is realistic. No one would ever want, in real life, to associate with Tycho or Gabe. It’s not healthy.
Given that, yes, they responded to people who criticized a comic strip in an over the top fashion with their own over the top response. Considering that it’s Penny Arcade we’re lucky Jesus didn’t chime in at the last panel mentioning that there’s a special place in Hell for people who don’t like PA, or something. In other words, they were playing with kid gloves.
Now hopefully we can all get back to talking about Zombies.
Category: Zombie Media, ZRC News |
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Tags: Comics, Social Justice, ZRC Reviews
