Hot topics in Comics and Video Games

We, as a species, have either evolved or been trained to accept death of men.  But involve a woman?  People of both genders get up in arms.  And even worse, get a child involved, and you'll have a lynch mob ready with tar and feathers in record time.

I remember the various war crimes reporting in Bosnia, the genocidal murders they called ethnic cleansing. Horrific stuff.  But I also remember people getting upset at the womenfolk and children getting hauled away for assumptions of torture and rape, which were likely true, but very rarely did we actually consider what had happened to the male victims.  The ones the aggressors (and both sides are/were equally guilty of this) lined up, shot and then tossed into pits to rot.  Sons, Fathers, Siblings, Lovers, all dead men because the attackers thought it was better to wipe them out because they would make taking the women difficult.

Instead we focused the plight of the living women and girls.  Or if they turned up dead, we mourned them and clamoured for the heads of the monsters who were hurting them.

Why?  Because we, humanity as a whole, see women (and children) as 'weaker'.  Ironically, it's because of their height.  The majority of women are smaller than men on average.  And some of those same women are are more capable than their male counterparts, but we tend not to see this.  And so whenever someone bullies or hurts or kills someone smaller or weaker we get upset.

Now what does this have to with video gaming and/or comics?  Everything.

As a pure story device, harming a female character gets audiences worked up and angry.  It's a way of showing how 'evil' the villain is.  Especially since targeting children was a no-no in comics.  It also happens in video games.  We often kill or mow down hundreds of male foes without a second thought, but we will always remember the female kills/defeats.

So where am I going on this.  Well, there's this movement, called "Women in Refrigerators" (look it up!), which is in relation to an incident were a supervillain from DC comics (Major Force) for some reason kills and stuffs the new (at the time) Green Lantern's girlfriend into a fridge.  Pretty nasty stuff.  And it got ALL the readers upset and wanting to murder Major Force.  The movement, however, focuses on more than just that.  It picks out every single instance of a woman character that's been used and abused (There are a LOT of those, to be honest, a bit too much) and tries to shame people for...  I honestly don't know.  But there's a lot of trying to shame people.

The movement's heart is in the right place.  Don't get me wrong, hurting and killing anyone is wrong, and we should be upset when some evil person does it to a woman, but especially to a woman.

The thing that strikes me is that in 2010, Marvel released a short series, called Amazing Spider-Man Presents: Jackpot Vol 1 where in a new (well, not quite, she showed up in 2007, but was a different character -a friend to the real one- who died because of substance abuse. This was the original Jackpot first series) superheroine called Jackpot had a series of adventures.  She crossed paths with a villain named 'The Rose' and a henchman named Boomerang.

Now, in the course of the three issue series, Boomerang figures out who Jackpot is.  And comes to her house, where she's having dinner with her husband and daughter, and kills the husband in front of both girls.

Full stop.  A few things of note here, but most importantly, the husband character never got a name.  Why is this?  One could go into a myriad of reasons, but the one that matters the most is because the writers knew that it wouldn't matter.  We wouldn't care about the dead husband, we'd focus on what would happen to Jackpot and her daughter.

The things is, both Kyle Rayner's (Green Lantern) and Sara Erhet's (Jackpot) significant others exist for the sole reason of creating character tragedy, they were both meant to be killed brutally in a fashion to get us, the reader, upset.  And for the most part it works, but in different ways.

The issue remains though, that Ms. Erhet's plight is more what we focus on, instead of actually hating Boomerang.  Instead of her going and hunting down Boomer, she unmasks The Rose, but decides to retire and go into the 'Witness Relocation Program', to protect her family.

But with Mr. Rayner, we immediately get up in arms about a big bad company abusing women again.

Which also brings up a point, I understand why it's upsetting, and yes, some sort of other device should be used from time to time, but at the same time, I get a sneaky suspicion that the Women in Fridges movement assumes that the readers are giggling and masturbating whenever a woman is killed.  And I can say with reasonable confidence that...  Most of us don't.  We understand why it's there, it's to get us angry.  And it really does work.

And it really is because we've been trained as a World Society that women and children are to be protected at all costs.  Men's lives are nothing compared to a single Woman's.

So in the end, I'm left with an honest question, for a male character who has a 'tragic past' (and there's no going around it, no saying "no tragic past here"), what would 'you' use to as a device in a story?

Red Dead Redemption (Spoilers)

Straight up warning, there will be some spoilers.  If you do not want to know about them, stop RIGHT HERE:

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So I had, for about a year, Red Dead Redemption.  And I'm confused.  It's really not that solid a game.  I mean it was fun, but the horse riding controls were insanely wonky.  And frankly, I think shooting some crook in BOTH knees should prevent him from being able to escape.  I can't tell you how many times the Bounty got away because I couldn't kill his goons fast enough, or that every time I thought I was 'safe' enough to make a capture, I ate enough lead to make my dick into a pencil.

But really those are minor gripes compared to the bait and switch the game pulls on you.  I don't mind if the main character dies, but I want it to mean 'something' not be an excuse to play another character.  I didn't want to be Jake.  I couldn't stand the whiny git.  What's worse is that there's no way you could know it was coming, it felt cheap and pointless to me.  Like I said an excuse to change characters.

When it happened, and I got to play Jack, I paused the game.  Waited.  Then powered off the console, ejected the disk and gave the game back to my friend.  I normally stop playing when I realize I'm not having fun (Final Fantasy 10 was like that, at one point I realized I was just going through the motions, I wasn't actually having any fun), but RDR is the first game that made me so mad that I stopped trusting Rockstar.  I simply do not trust them not to do that again on me.

Maybe it's an overreaction, but I honestly, I rather liked the story, I could ignore the silly horse controls, or the fact that the Dead Eye controls let me kill every living thing within 30 seconds of me (my aim kinda sucks), as long as I could see more of John's story.  But the moment it stopped being his story, I was no longer interested in playing it.

I'm sure Jake isn't that bad a character, but I wasn't interested in him, there was nothing built up with him.  My emotional investment was with John, I had gone through 40 hours (total, including restarts and deaths) with him, and the ties he made to the people around him.  But Jake?  I didn't want to do that again, nor was I finished with John's story, despite his reunion with his family.

I'm also one of those people who will have his game experience ruined if the ending sucks.  Mass Effect 3, the reason I haven't picked it up is because every ending that I spoiled for myself isn't worth the time investing into the game.  It could be the awesomest game in the entire universe, but if the last 5 minutes suck dead donkey balls, the rest of the game also feels like wasted time to me, time I could have spent getting a 'better' story somewhere else.

This is just my opinion, I could be wrong.

The New Tomb Raider game

So here I am sitting and trying to figure out a topic to blog about.  And I'm surfing various gaming sites, and I come across a video review or two of the new Tomb Raider game.  Now the issue isn't the review scores, because frankly I don't care about the rating numbers, I'm more about what they show.

And what the showed was ultra violence.  Now before anyone goes off about how I'm ragging on games being the cause of...  Yada, yada, I have nothing against it.  I love the brutal finisher 'Killmoves' in Skyrim.  Sleeping Dogs is pure Hong Kong Blood Opera, and I enjoyed the demo.  I love the Wolverine game, the one based on the most recent film, which is better than the actual movie!  I have nothing against violence when it's against pixels and fictional depictions of evil monsters, human and otherwise.  This is more about ultra violence and Lara Croft, or rather her depiction.

The apparent story here is of Lara's beginnings as an explorer.  Which is fine with me, but according to the reviews, the only way to gain experience to level up her abilities and the like is through killing.  But the cut scenes, when they aren't brutal depictions of her getting injured -do we really need a death scene of her getting impaled in the throat or stomach, if you screw up on a Quick Time Event?- show her agonizing over killing an animal, or the almost rape scene -which is one of the things that turned me off on the game, rape is not a character builder- she's sobbing over killing her would be tormentor but when she's back under your control, she's this calm collected killer that can perform brutal executions with her bow, arrows, climbing pick  and whatever gun she's holding.  In fact the executions give you bonus experience if you pull them off.  When she goes exploring and raids the actual tombs that the series is famous for, she gets rather lame bits of lore or trivia that don't give her any experience.

Am I the only one seeing the irony here?

My first game for the Playstation console, the first one, was Tomb Raider, and it was a pure action adventure, in the vein of Indiana Jones.  It was campy, unrealistic and the only game at the time where you faced off against a T. Rex with a pair of .45s.

Another irony is that the original development team created this new Tomb Raider, Crystal Dynamics, and yet they seemed to have forgotten what Ms. Croft was all about.  Not sure what I was thinking there, Eidos was the creator of Tomb Raider, not Crystal Dynamics.  My apologies.

It makes me sad that the  Publishers think that the only way to sell a game is to make it as violent as possible.  Fictional Violence has it's place, it's a cathartic release mechanism for a lot of people, including me, but it shouldn't be the only thing a game has going  for it.


This is just my opinion, I could be wrong.