Penny-Arcade Dickwolves. (NSFW, TRIGGER, ETC.)

First things first: TRIGGER WARNING. Hello. TRIGGER WARNING. Consider this the bright, flashing red light telling you these things might set something off. This post will talk about the Penny-Arcade Dickwolves stuff, which you might imagine to be NSFW, but also if you are triggered by discussions of, a monster with penises for limbs who'se purpose is let's say, sinister, skip this one.

The background to the issue what appears to be full is available here and will only take five minutes of your time, so don't bother reading any further until you get through that page.

Don't worry, I'll wait.

...

Back? Great.

Let's get my positions out into the open first:

1. Penny-Arcade (for now, Jerry and Mike) was wrong to make the shirts and compounded that bad decision by letting those sleeping dogs lie.

2. Then, when they did talk about it, it was done haphazardly by Mike, who is no one's idea of a subtle instrument.

3. Which stoked the fire even more.

4. By the time Jerry weighed in (the member of the two who'se words carry rhetorical weight) and said “Maybe I'm wrong,” it was too late.

Rape is a pretty big blindspot for gamers. Why will take me off-track and I'll discuss it further down. And here goes my Ill Doctrine hat-tip: I'm less concerned if Penny-Arcade are rape-apologists in their hearts, I'm far more concerned that they responded this badly to an idea that's pretty clearly out of their depth. What Penny-Arcade did was make t-shirts out of a fictional monstrosity whose only purpose is rape. That was a bad idea. What Penny-Arcade is, though, is different. Rape, pretty obviously now, is their blindspot. Humans have them. You do. Shit, I do. When you add to that their poor handling of the issue, which I can understand quite easily, it compounded the problem, which was never really something they understood to begin with.

But calling them names and yelling insults at anybody within earshot doesn't fucking help the case. I think people get further keeping the focus on what they did, not what they are.

The hope is that Penny-Arcade learns from this experience, because, and let's be clear: They're not going anywhere. They're also the best of the webcomics and their work for the gaming community has paid incredible dividends. They're pretty obviously sincere in their desire to do good.

So far, they haven't acknowledged what I believe to be the core issue, and appear to believe the comic was the issue. The issue, as I see it and explained elsewhere as: "[Mike] was an asshole to people who have every right to be offended by jokes about violence that affects them every day of their lives. He doesn’t have the right to tell them otherwise. No one does."

The comic was not the issue. That's not the criticism. The problem, Jerry (if I can pretend to speak to him directly), was trying to merchandise a fictional monstrosity whose only purpose is rape (which he doesn't acknowledge) and then abdicating your responsibility to communicate (which he does.) He neatly avoid acknowledging that intent doesn't matter, once an idea is in the wild, it has a life of its own, the variety of which would surprise its author.

Jerry and Mike will get another bite at the apple on Friday, next Monday, next Wednesday and however long they choose to keep publishing. Yes, they fucked up, but this is not their only time at the plate. That's the nature of serial publishing. Make the next ones better, guys. Be more careful in the future.

(Also: I don't think I need to explicitly explain why making a tshirt out of a fictional entity whose only purpose is rape is bad.)

I think bitmob put it best when they ask for people to not wear their Dickwolves shirts at the Penny-Arcade Expo, so I'll quote them and be done:

We don't...get to decide whether someone else’s issues are valid or not. If someone says to us “Seeing these t-shirts triggers me into horrible PTSD and causes me substantial amounts of distress,” our choice is to either respect those feelings and seek not to cause that distress, or tell them “Sorry, our right to wear these shirts is more important than your not having panic attacks while walking the halls of this event you would otherwise attend.”

I listened to this song (and maybe even this version) last night approximately 30 times in a row. It's by former Bikini Kill member Kathleen Hanna (who has had a number of other projects that are far more successful, but that's the one I'm choosing) and is called I Wish I Was Him.