Matthew Borgard

There’s been quite a flurry of news on the Star Wars front, and since I’ve occasionally reviewed some Expanded Universe novels here on the blog, I thought I’d talk about it. Let’s start with some movie news.

The Younguns or the Olds?

A New Canon

The EU was coming to an end

The old EU isn’t disappearing

Reboots can be fun

Like many others, I’ve recently been accepted into the beta for Blizzard’s new game Hearthstone, a collectible card battling game based on their popular Warcraft series. For those not familiar, the game is similar (VERY similar) to Magic: The Gathering, with a few twists. While it can be played in single-player mode against a PC, there’s no story progression or anything, and the online ranked play is the primary draw, along with an Arena mode where you’re tasked with building a deck on the spot from random cards. It’s a lot of fun. But it could be a lot more fun. Instead of giving a huge runthrough or even a stream (there are literally thousands of those online already, if you’re interested), I thought I’d just give some quick impressions.

What I liked:

– The aesthetics. Hearthstone is a really pretty game. The art is great to look at, the music and voices are wonderful and the UI just works. I never found myself wondering how to play cards or check text. In fact, as a former Magic player, everything worked incredibly intuitively.

– It’s easy on the Pay 2 Play stuff. Card packs and entry tickets to Arena mode are available for real money, but they can also be purchased with Gold that you earn in-game. You earn gold simply by completing daily quests, and I’ve found that I can buy a pack about every two days, or enter the arena (which guarantees a pack as a reward, or more if you do well) every three. That’s not bad, as each quest can take anywhere from 3-6 battles to complete, and I don’t play any more than that anyway. The bottom line is that casual players will find no need to invest chunks of money to Keep Up With the Joneses.

– It’s very casual friendly. Aside from Blizzard’s classic ranking system that tries to ensure you win about half the games you play, the cards and decks are constructed in a way to make it very easy to construct a competitive deck even with basic cards. There are no monumentally unbeatable combinations, and while it is possible to make something that just doesn’t work, even a modicum of thought will get you a deck you can win with. This, of course, leads to the conclusion that wins are due more to player skill and luck than deck construction, and in my experience, it’s more of the latter. Depending on the type of person you are, that is a good thing or a bad thing.

– The computerized nature of the game takes a lot of headache out of playing. There’s no “Okay … does that affect apply before or after I take damage?” stuff. The game takes care of it.

I’m at the bottom, losing horribly.

What I Didn’t Like:

– It’s missing a lot of Magic — pun intended. In their efforts to make the game casual-friendly (which I support!) Blizzard has also robbed from Hearthstone a lot of what made MtG great. The primary culprit is the lack of cards, meaning that everyone’s deck is the same. Some people will point out that this is often true in competitive MtG as well, but that’s not the point. The point is that in casual MtG, there are a WIDE variety of decks to make. Heal deck, burn deck, equipment deck, goblin deck, suicide black deck, etc. The list goes on and on.

In Hearthstone, there are 8 character classes, and each class gets a set of unique cards the others can’t access. But that’s as far as customization goes. Yes, priest will have some healing cards, warlock will have some demons. But we all have the same 1-mana creatures. At turn 7, we’re all going to play the Stormwind Champion, a heavy-duty creature that increases the power and defense of all other creatures.

I have never once felt the feeling of “Oh! Wow!” when faced with a card I’ve never seen before. I’ve never been surprised by a combo or synergy or deck strategy I hadn’t thought of, because there are very few deck strategies to play around with.

Now, maybe I’m being unfair comparing a brand new card game to one that’s been around for 15 years, with all the card types that entails. And maybe a loss of diversity is worth being friendly to more casual players. But in Magic, I was constantly wanting to tinker my deck in response to things I saw played against me. I was constantly thinking up new strategies. In Hearthstone, the deck constructions for each class are pretty obvious, with only a few choices to be made. And even then, there’s a lot of luck involved. Simply put, Hearthstone is not as enthralling as MtG.

– To give you a specific point, I feel like Hearthstone’s lack of Instant cards takes a lot of strategy out of the game. In Magic, there were certain cards you could play during your opponents turn to mess with their strategy. It required complex thinking from both you (“Do I play a creature, or save my mana so I can use a counterspell?”) and your opponent (“Did he just have extra mana, or does he have a card up his sleeve?”) Hearthstone tries to compensate with Yugioh-esque trap cards, but there are so few, and they’re almost all a version of “If a creature attacks you, it dies,” they don’t seriously affect the metagame in any way.

Conclusions

Is Hearthstone ready for primetime? Well … yes, and no. As I said, it’s amazingly polished for a game in beta, and I suspect they could release it today and make a ton of money. The gameplay, however, is not currently something that I’d sink any real time or money into. A game or two a day for a little while, probably, but not something I’d seriously engage with. I suspect that won’t change. The sorts of gameplay improvements I outlined above are MAJOR changes. Even introducing Instant cards would require a complete rejiggering of deck balance, so what I’m seeing is probably what we’ll get.

If it ends up being free to play, though, it’s certainly worth trying out, especially for hardcore card game fans.

So there have been a couple of news stories in the past few days revolving DC’s movie universe, and it looks like we’re soon going to see Wonder Women herself on the big screen. Great news, right?

Nope.

Well, hold on a second. Turns out she’s not getting her own movie. Nope! She’s being thrown in as a cameo in the Superman vs. Batman film, leading to the inevitable Justice League movie. What do you think she is, the world’s most famous superheroine and one of DC’s iconic superhero trinity? Come on now!

I won’t rehash all the tired excuses over why a Wonder Woman movie won’t work. Okay, how about just one — “Her villains aren’t iconic!” Because moviegoers worldwide were OH SO FAMILIAR with Thor’s triumph over the Ice Giants of Jotunheim. Okay, I’m done.

It’s clear from this move that WB, and to some extent DC, has no faith in the Wonder Woman character. She’ll show up at the end of Bats vs Supes, shake her inevitable star-spangled panties (because you know it would betray canon to change her costume, not like we’ve ever worried about that with male superheroes!) and expect us to cheer.

And that won’t be the end. There will be no fucking Wonder Woman movie. There will be no Wonder Woman origin story. The followup to Supes vs. Bats is clearly Justice League, where Wonder Woman will be relegated to an also-ran along with Aquaman and Hawkman or who the fuck ever the put in to round out the cast, when Superman and Batman will be doing the brunt of the dramatic work.

Fuck everything about this. Fuck WB. Fuck DC. Fuck Zack Snyder. Fuck this shitty, cowardly move.

As if that wasn’t enough, look at their other announcement this week: DC has already decided to dip into their second-tier heroes to try to expand their cinematic roster. That’s right. Booster Gold and the Suicide Squad are getting movies before Wonder Woman.

Let me repeat that.

The Suicide Squad is getting a movie before Wonder Woman.

I’m probably being hyperbolic, but it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than that DC simply has no respect for its female characters. It’s shown this time and time again. It’s sad, disappointing and infuriating that such a powerful feminist icon (really, one of the few powerful feminist icons that exists in pop culture) is held back by such myopic asshats.

As for the casting itself: I’m sure Gal Gadot will be fine. Whatever. I’m not familiar with her work, but she looks the part and by all accounts she’s a pretty tough woman. But the fact that she’s not a bankable star in the same way Christian Bale, Ben Affleck or even Henry Cavill (a main actor in a long-running, popular TV show) were makes me think it’s fairly unlikely that the producers have pegged her to headline her own movie franchise.

Is it possible that I’m exaggerating this, that Wonder Woman’s cameo will be tasteful and well-received and will lead the way for a superbly-written, power, feminist Wonder Woman solo film? Uh, sure. Is it less likely than a Texas snowstorm in July? Yeah, I think so. Especially, as Charlie Anders so deftly points out, with Zack Snyder at the helm (though I’ll point out I disagree with her about Wonder Woman being substantially harder to adapt than any other hero).

All the more reason for me to finish editing that Wonder Woman script that’s been lying here on my hard drive. Not to prove how awesome I am, but to prove how goddamn easy it is to make a compelling Wonder Woman film, if people would just pull their heads out of their asses.

You can find the first half of my FenCon X panel writeups here. Now, on with the rest!

Death as a Character

Worldbuilding

Politics in Genre Fiction

Here it is! For any of you that had to miss FenCon this year, I’ve got links to authors and writeups of the panels I attended. Enjoy!

Modern Good vs. Ancient Evil

* Barbara Ann Wright (@zendragandt)
* Vivian Caethe (@VivianCaethe)
* Julia S. Mandala 

First panel of the con! And of course, HUGE expectations. Well, not really. More like tired audience and tired panelists, especially on a Friday afternoon after driving 3 hours. But thankfully, these three women overcame that and facilitated a pretty interesting discussion.

– The panelists noted that a lot of the obsession with modern good vs. ancient evil comes from modern society being impressed with itself. In my own experience as a liberal bordering on communist … yeah. This is sometimes true.

– It’s fun to have a simple, easy-to-understand evil force to defeat, compared to a modern threat like terrorism whose root causes are difficult to understand and even more difficult to remove.

– However, there have been portrayals of ancient evil against which modern forces stood no chance. Lovecraft comes to mind. Also an interesting parallel in that Lovecraft’s views on race and sex are pretty abhorrent by modern standards.

– Cabin in the Woods is a fantastic representation of modern good vs. ancient evil. Without spoiling too much, it definitely tends toward the Lovecraftian side of things.

– A great idea developed by the panelists: crowdfunded evil. A Kickstarter for a Dark Empire? I would read that story.

– Heroes used to be protective of the status quo. Think Lord of the Rings. Sauron disrupts the normal flow of life, and Frodo and friends struggle to protect it. Many modern good vs. evil stories are the opposite, featuring rebels or usurpers overthrowing evil. What does this change represent in societal views?

– One of the women in the audience made a fantastic observation that the modern good vs. ancient evil trope is mirrored in industrial vs. nature stories. Nature in these stories (think The Andromeda Strain or Alien) is often set up as an ancient force getting revenge. This is a little complicated by the fact that it’s sometimes science that provokes nature’s revenge, but this is also sometimes present in good vs. evil stories (Wheel of Time comes to mind).

Reading suggestions: Larry Correia, H.P. Lovecraft

Beastly Fans

* Barbara Ann Wright (noticing a pattern?)
* Kathryn Sullivan
* Mary Turzillo
* Rosemary Clement-Moore (@rclementmoore)

This panel was nominally about the lasting power of certain common fantasy creatures. Dragons, griffins, that sort of thing. What it really was about was dinosaur porn. Yep. Beasts led to Beauty and the Beast, which led to bestiality which led to the phenomenon of dinosaur porn. Blame Rosemary for leading us down that particular road.

Regardless of everyone’s ability to stray offtopic, it was awfully enjoyable. Sort of a “had to be there” thing. Panelists were hilarious, and I especially enjoyed hearing about Mary Turzillo’s risque escapades.

When Action Gets in the Way of Story

* Barbara Ann Wright
* Kevin Hosey
* Rob Rogers (@robcrogers3)
* Steven Brust (@StevenBrust)
* J. Kathleen Cheney

This panel was pretty much as described. When is action too much? How do you balance an awesome chase scene with, you know, actual plot and character development? As the discussion progressed, the panel lumped sex in along with action, which make complete sense as they serve pretty similar functions in most stories.

– Every scene should be worthy. This sounds obvious, but it’s so important that it’s worth stating. Steven Brust had a fantastic line here that he applied to both action scenes and sex scenes (though it works for any scene, really): Action scenes should be transformative, meaning something changes about the character. To that, I add ‘revelatory.’ That is, the character doesn’t necessarily have to change if the purpose of the scene is to teach the audience something about a character we didn’t know before. Brust’s example was the ‘fight’ scene in Temple of Doom where Indiana Jones is confronted with a giant sword wielder and ends the battle with a single bullet. That’s not particularly transformative, but it is exceedingly revelatory.

– A good trick to making action/sex scene meaningful is to focus on the dialogue. Dialogue is where character is revealed — as long as you stay away from cheesy action one-liners.

– Another Brustism: “When a fish tells me about water, I’m bored.” Avoid overexplaining, especially in things that the character would already be familiar with. It doesn’t make sense for a character to stop and think about the mechanics of a hovercar or laser gun if they use one every day.

Copyright 101

* Patrick Nielsen Hayden (@pnh)
* Cory Doctorow (@doctorow)
* Paul Herman

FenCon is attended by a lot of writers, and as such, there’s a lot of shop talk about the actual craft of writing. The copyright panel took a slightly different path. It wasn’t related to writing specifically (though writing certainly overlaps here), but with the utterly broken copyright system in the US.

– The United States Patent and Trademark Office is funded directly by patent applications. This gives the USPTO a huge incentive to affirm patents.

– Non Producing Entities (a fancy word for patent trolls) don’t produce any products, and as such, they can’t be countersued. That makes them much harder to defend against than big companies, who pretty much know they’re all infringing on each other in some way.

– What’s the metric for judging the success of an intellectual protection system? We never got a good answer to this, which is unfortunate, but it’s clear that “number of patents” makes absolutely no sense as a measurement.

– Once established, it’s very hard to take away property rights. The interests involved are too powerful. Thus, gradual reforms are far more likely than a broad revamp of copyright.

– Copyright trolling falls under the corruption problem. Stated simply, it’s hard to punish someone who benefits by hurting society, since their benefit (and thus power) is concentrated, and the harm is diffuse. Requires all the people harmed to band together, which can be difficult to manage.

– The Magnificent 7 Solution: Every year we can pay the bandits, or we can get together and hire the mercenaries. Crowdfund patent troll defense. Now, this was just a brief discussion, and my notes are sparse, so *please* don’t nitpick Doctorow’s solution on the basis of my writeup. But the gist is that people in risk of being sued (or who have been sued before) would dedicate money to a Kickstarter-like fund. Then, whenever one of the participants is sued, that money would go to legal defense to beat back the troll, which any legal fees won going back into the system. According to Doctorow, it would be self-sustaining; the more lawsuits patent trolls opened (which they’d have to ramp up, since they’d be losing money), the more money the fund would gain.

Now, the main problem I had with this problem is that it seems to assume that most (or all!) of the cases would be won by the defendants. This is a problematic assumption in a couple of ways. First, not all of the defendants are actually going to be innocent of infringement. And second, even when they are, there’s no guarantee a court will actually see it that way. Courts are notoriously overprotective of IP.

When I raised this concern, Doctorow admitted that if it went wrong, it could create some very bad precedents, and you’d have to be careful. But he didn’t really have a solution for the problem of losing cases. To be fair, his discussion was more general, rather than a fully fleshed out plan ready for production.

– “…gaping buttsex…” -Cory Doctorow. He was talking about porn and copyright, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is I want to see that quote on next year’s FenCon program.

– The panelists cited a study which said that most artistic work has a 14-year life span. That is, after 14 years, it’s not really generating money for the IP holders any longer. Now, I haven’t seen that study. I’m curious if it’s still true in the age of digital publishing, where long tails can be loooooooong indeed.

– Doctorow floated the idea of a compulsory license for fiction. In the same way that you can cover a song on a CD or a bar for a flat fee without the permission of the artist, you’d be able to write fanfiction (for profit, even? maybe) for a flat fee. You’d probably have to make sure this only applied to individuals, and not, like, WB adapting your novel into a movie without paying. This probably isn’t a workable solution, though, since authors are notoriously hardheaded about “owning” their work.

– Cory Doctorow’s Utopian Copyright Solution: separate individual users from participants in the copyright industry. Adding on to the previous point, it is absurd to treat fanfiction and a movie adaptation with the same copyright rules. Absurd to treat someone downloading a copy of Harry Potter and someone opening a multimillion dollar Harry Potter theme park based on the same per-use measurement.

Hey all!

Just got back from FenCon X, the world’s foremost furry convention. Depressingly, most of the yiffing seems to have been replaced by the equally ghastly-named filking, as well as science fiction and fantasy discussion. Sad, but I managed to have fun anyway.

Quick shout-out to some of the people who made the weekend great:

– Barbara Wright (@zendragandt), author of the fantastic Pyramid Waltz series, my chauffeur and traveling companion. Her worldbuilding tips captivated the Red Oak Room while her constant references to stabbing frightened a significant portion of it. Go forth and check out her work!

– Erin Kennemeyer (@emkennemer), my second caravan comrade and obsessive-to-the-point-of-annoyance filk fanatic. She also served as Barbara’s unofficial publicist, and managed to get a request for one of her own unpublished stories apropos nothing other than being her normal awesome self.

– Jim Reader, hometown friend and longtime convention attendee who threw a bangin’ room party Friday night and brought all the boys (and girls) to the bar on Saturday. Had us cracking up as usual, and surprisingly, I didn’t find his caramel-tasting Jack Daniels Honey to be too unappealing, which is high praise for a teetotaler like me.

– Rosemary Clement-Moore (@rclementmoore), an unbelievably charming author and apparent purveyor of dinosaur porn who hit it out of the park in her panels with her wit and improv skills. You better believe I grabbed a book from her, straight out of the trunk all classy-like. You can buy her stuff from Amazon, which is possibly more convenient but not near as awesome.

– Michele Bardsley (@michelebardsley), hilarious and prolific author of the Broken Heart and Nevermore series…es (serii? Aggregate nouns are awful). Barbara, Erin and I showed up a half-hour early for a panel about death to find Michele preparing, and far from being dour, we proceeded to laugh ourselves to death talking about ball-jointed dolls and convention grudges. And that was before Amber Benson and Rhonda Eudaly joined the conversation … you know, actual panelists, instead of we three comedy saboteurs. It was both the least educational and most enjoyable panel of the entire weekend.

– MaryJanice Davidson, who prevented me from getting a book deal by throwing Patrick Nielsen Hayden over a balcony just as he was about to make an offer.

Of course, I had many fleeting interactions with other authors and fans, including the little brother himself, Mr. Cory Doctorow. I’ll have a more in-depth writeup coming soon (likely in two parts), but I wanted to throw out a quick mini-recap before I crash and wake up tomorrow confused why I’m surrounded by my own things (video game hardware from the 1990s and collectible porcelain otters, natch) instead of by a half-eaten midnight poboy and a room service menu.

I read Shaman’s Crossing, the first book in Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son trilogy, with great anticipation. A fantasy series? With only three reasonably-sized books? That isn’t Wheel of Time or Sword of Truth? And written by a woman? SOLD!

Which is why I was disappointed when I didn’t love it as much as I’d hoped. I actually had to put it down for a few months and come back to it to make it all the way through. And while it did recover — substantially — in the second half, it wasn’t enough for me to put it on any top-ten lists.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the sequel, Forest Mage (dat title! 😉 hit all of my buttons. Powerful, emotional, affecting, and most of all, personal.

Forest Mage‘s major theme is one that was only hinted at in the previous book: fatphobia. A strange and somewhat modern idea for a fantasy novel to play with, but Hobb makes fantastic use of it. Nevare, a soldier-in-training just finishing up his first year at the academy, notices he’s put on some weight, but doesn’t think too much of it until he arrives home and finds his family, friends and fiance disgusted at his new figure. His apoplectic father forces him to diet and labor, and when Nevare fails to lose weight, he’s locked his room and nearly starved to death. And still, he fails to shed any of the excess pounds.

“Forest Mage hit all of my buttons. Powerful, emotional, affecting, and most of all, personal.”

Turns out, the weight is a magical curse. Or perhaps a blessing — the reason Nevare is now so bulky is that he’s filled with a foreign magic that he can’t control.

Listen, I’ve struggled with my weight pretty much since puberty, and I don’t think I’ve read anything that addresses the issue as truthfully and relatably as Hobb manages to. Making the weight-gain out of Nevare’s control is a stroke of genius. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt like my weight is some magical, mystical force that I’m doomed to endure no matter how hard I try. In my case, it’s not true — but Hobb does a fantastic job capturing that desperation in Nevare’s thoughts and actions.

Even better, she sticks Nevare between two worlds in regards to his body — another familiar place for me. It seems like, for me, there are two options: either be disgusted with my body and dedicate myself to changing it, or be completely content with it and have no desire to be thin. It’s like there’s no middle ground. If I accept my body, then I have to be willing to live with it. If I try to change it, then I have to put up with hating what I look like. Nevare’s in a subtly similar situation. His people view him as lazy, disgusting and immoral, and he desperately desires to change himself to please them. On the other hand, the forest people — those who cursed him — see his size as a source of immense strength, and though that imbues Nevare with a certain satisfaction, he can’t give himself completely over to it. He can’t accept himself one way or another. As he says painfully near the end of the novel, though the cultures have different reactions to his body, neither can see him for who he really is, inside the layers of fat.

I could go on for pages talking about the book, but suffice it to say that affected me greatly. If you’ve never had weight issues (which I doubt to some degree, as it’s hard not to be too fat or too skinny for our culture), you may not have the same reaction — thankfully, the story underneath the themes is captivating as well.

If, like me, you haven’t read any of Robin Hobb’s work, the Soldier Son trilogy is a great place to start. And while I can’t outright recommend skipping the first book (as I said, the last half of it is great, even if the first half is slow), you probably could do that and be okay, if you really wanted to. The second book, while following directly from the first, is somewhat standalone in plot. In any case, I can’t wait to read the conclusion; it’s got some high expectations to fufill.

A few days ago, Kotaku’s Jason Schreier posted an excellent takedown of the absurd, ridiculous, embarrassing art from Vanillaware’s newest title, Dragon’s Crown. In case you’re not familiar, here’s some of the artwork:

In response to the criticism, Vanillaware’s lead artist called him a homosexual. So, yeah. That happened.

I won’t get into what a disgusting response that is. Suffice it to say it’s killed what little, tiny interest I had in playing the game based on their previous titles. I would like to address some of the response to the criticism. Well, one response in particular.

Whenever this shit comes up, it seems like Penny-Arcade has to jump to the rescue to defend the masses of sexist, ignorant gamerbros. One might say it’s their passion.

For the record, I’m a huge fan of Penny-Arcade. I’ve supported their Kickstarter, purchased their merchandise, read their comics and watched their videos. But every time they wade into the pool of gender issues or social justice, they come out blackened, like a little person carrying a cursed ring or a wizard touching the devil-tainted source of magic in one o’ them fantasy novels. I might suggest that they just stop making fools of themselves in this regard, but of course, that would be (GASP!) censorship! And I wouldn’t want to be accused of that.

Anyhoo, PA’s Jerry Holkins posted a screed of sorts, lambasting those with the gall to find Dragon Crown distasteful. Let’s unpack this, shall we?

You probably don’t have to guess how I feel about this latest round of compulsory swaying and fainting, so much like an old timey Tent Revival, complete with its hopping devil and its perpetually put upon holy warriors.

Hooray! We start out with the classic accusation: any discussion about sexism is done by prudish, weak-tempered Maude Lovejoys who swoon at the mere thought of revealed, supple flesh. Yawn. I don’t even really need to address this, other than to say I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I haven’t been shocked by a depiction of sexuality in quite some time, possibly ever. And it’s not even about offense, really. As one of the Twitterati put it, this shit doesn’t offend me, it pisses me off. It pisses me off that this bullshit attracts legion of defenders.

You want to know why things like the attacks against Anita Sarkeesian happen? You want #1reasonwhy? Because art like this reduces women to flesh to be enjoyed by the male player. I guarantee you, I absolutely guarantee you that the character designer gave not one thought to a woman playing the game. By his response, it’s evident he gave not one thought to anyone other than a straight male playing the game.

everybody else is some fun-house exponent of strength or beauty stretched into some haunted sigil.  Iconic isn’t even the word – they don’t evoke icons, they are icons.  They’re humans as primal symbols.

Seriously, the “well, all the characters are exaggerated, so it’s okay” defense? Is there just a handbook of common, moronic defenses against sexism these people jump to? There must be, because they just keep coming up. Holkin’s half-page rant manages to hit at least half of the checkmarks on Cracked’s excellent 8 Stupidest Defenses Against Sexism Accusations article, which is, in a way, impressive.

These are not primal symbols of humanity. Or, rather, they are primal symbols reflecting a very specific human: a straight male human. The Sorceress does not reflect “beauty” — she reflects a juvenile male notion of sexuality. The Dwarf, who looks like a roided-out bodybuilder times a million, does not reflect anything a female would actually be attracted to. He represents a male idea of what power is — HUGE FUCKING MUSCLES. I don’t know what the fuck the barbarian woman is supposed to represent, with her 8-year-old-girl head/face, bodybuilder body, bikini and giant fucking tits, but whatever it is has some giant fucking problems.

It’s worth pointing out that those, like Holkins, who claim that these depictions aren’t sexist because the characters are morphed past the point of recognition are just lying through their teeth. Internet commenters galore have gleefully been waiting for the chance to play as the Sorceress. Just look at her! She’s wearing next to nothing, and her tits bounce! THEY BOUNCE!

Hell, even their comic makes this fucking point. Gabe (a thinly-veiled avatar for co-creator Mike Krahulik at this point) says he wants to play the Sorceress because she’s a big-titted, scantilly-clad object designed specifically for his lizard-brain enjoyment, but if the Dwarf had been exaggerated in the same way, with a giant, half-visible penis hanging out of his shorts, it would make him uncomfortable.

This is, of course, played for laughs. Way to almost get the point, fellas! You know how playing that Dwarf character would seem humorous at best, and strange and uncomfortable at worst? That’s exactly how a significant number of women and men feel playing as the sexed-up sorceress!

It’s very weird to pull up a story about a game with frankly visionary art and hear why it shouldn’t exist

Hahahahahaha. Yes. Visionary. Thank goodness someone is making fantasy/video game artwork featuring objectified women with giant breasts and little clothing. I was getting goddamn sick of all these copycats drawing empowered female characters.

It’s an incredible state of affairs.  They’re not censors, though – oh, no no.  You’ll understand it eventually; what you need to do is censor yourself.

This isn’t on the Cracked list, but it should be. Equating criticism with censorship is a classic rookie mistake, but not one too surprising, as we’ve heard it from these two before. Frankly, you’d think people who make part of their living criticizing games, movies, etc., would recognize the hypocrisy inherent in this. Why did you guys put down Aliens: Colonial Marines, huh? Why did you boot Contestant Y off of StripSearch? WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO CENSOR THEM?

So, no. Calling a piece of artwork terrible, sexist, lazy and juvenile (all of which fit Dragon’s Crown to a tee) is not a call for censorship. If Mike and Jerry want a second opinion on that, maybe they should ask their employee Ben Kuchera, who also criticizes the artwork (though for a different reason). Is he just a big ol’ censor, too?

I’ll end this by pointing out that not once in the newspost does Holkins mention one of the main points of this controversy, that the game designer defending himself by calling the accuser gay, as if that were both an insult and a conversation-ender. This omission is somewhat telling.