The interactive short story Pregnancy, released today on Steam, begins with 14-year-old Lilla Sandor purchasing a pregnancy test. It’s a painful moment for the teen. She feels ashamed and awkward. At home, waiting for the test results, she recalls the horrific act that brought her to this point.
Developer Rodrigo Silvestre holds nothing back describing Lilla’s violent rape. The music, once insightful and tinged with sorrow, is suddenly a discordant hiss, bringing to mind some dark and otherworldly thing that shouldn’t exist but somehow does. The words flash on the screen: “Don’t! Don’t! Get off me!” It’s a punch in the gut, and as the scene continues it grabs and twists.
Presented as colour saturated stills, music and text, Pregnancy is the story of a young girl dealing with discovering she is carrying a child conceived during her brutal rape. It’s a harrowing journey that countless women go through every year. The difference here is that while many women deal with such situations, Lilla is not alone. She has her aunt, her sister, her friends and, most importantly, she has the player.
The player is introduced into the story as a disembodied all-seeing voice. It’s strange and more than a bit shocking, both for Lilla and the player. A bond begins to form between once-spectator and subject, both surprised to find each other receptive to the other’s thoughts.
Is the player Lilla’s conscience? Has she suffered a mental break? As the story progresses the reasons why grow less and less important. The player is privy to her innermost thoughts and private actions. Her obsessive tooth brushing. Her taste in music and movies.
She begins asking personal questions. When was the player born? Does the player have children? Were they planned? Eventually she asks for a name, and suddenly everything feels so much more real.
While guiding Lilla through one of the most important, life-changing decisions in her life is no doubt the focal point of Pregnancy, it’s these smaller, seemingly throwaway conversations that have the most impact on the player. They’re the building blocks of a relationship that blossoms into something more than player and character.
Maybe the player is her conscience. Maybe the player is a trauma-induced hallucination. An imaginary friend. What the player ultimately becomes is a guiding voice in the life of a person they have come to care for — the sort of person a 14-year-old girl dealing with a horrible situation might turn to in her time of need.
Like any 14-year-old girl, Lilla doesn’t always listen to advice.
But it still feels right to give it.
There are choices to be made in Pregnancy, and these choices affect interactions with Lilla, but they also help players shape their own opinions of the situation. Presented with the option of calling her unwanted pregnancy “bad news” or “good news”, I opted for the negative route — obviously calling anything about this situation “good” was a mistake.
Slowly it dawned on me that I was not making the right decisions — I was only making my own decisions. Perhaps another player would try to bathe Lilla’s condition in a positive light to help lift her spirits. Was my negativity bringing her down? Was her reluctance to tell her aunt the result of my reaction? Suddenly I was second-guessing myself. Were I faced with similar choices in the real world, I’d likely do the same.
As I downloaded Pregnancy, I wondered what qualified me to tell anyone how to deal with a tragically forced conception. But Pregnancy isn’t about telling — it’s about trying to understand the plight of a person in that position well enough to be comfortable guiding them towards their own decision.
Comments
45 responses to “Pregnancy Puts Players Inside The Head Of A Teenage Rape Victim”
Video games keep getting more ‘real’ and visceral. Evolution.
Sounds like a real fun game.
I predict this is going to become the next e-sports trend.
Getting pregnant?
I don’t know why, but I couldn’t stop laughing after reading this.
That’s a very brave thing to create and put out there. I commend it, but can already imagine the type of vitriol the devs will receive :/
I think it’ll go down like this:
Lots of media sites will go “oh look at this game, it pushes the envelope, so good”
The majority of the gaming public won’t “get it” or even play it
Depending on how much press it gets, it may recieve “not a game” from a lot of people, comparable to how much Gone Home got (though Gone Home was marketed wrong, so that didn’t help)
Depending on how good a job it does, some people will be all “look this is how rape victims feel the game”
And then soon enough everyone will go back to their marios, their call of duties, their starcrafts.
And other, more mature people, will be thankfull that games are progressing to a place where the important themes discussed in games such as this or Gone Home are able to do so (despite the shrieking of soft-titted man babies), and will play those games and enjoy them.
Pretty much.
I’m skipping right to the last point, I’m going to just ignore this “game” and go back to my Marios and Starscrafts… Call of Duty not so much.
As glad as I am that games are beginning to explore this sort of territory, rather than exclusively what is more conventional or marketable I could never bring myself to play this game. I can’t even bring myself to watch the trailer. The devs are to be commended for exploring this subject matter, I hope they can raise awareness for these sorts of horrific situations and I hope that they don’t cop too much flak from the more hostile communities out there. I wish I could support it myself, but that’s way too disturbing a theme for me.
This game is TRAGIC for the following reasons: 1. A pregnant tween is more likely to die in childbirth because a tween girls body is never meant for pregnancy, 2. The heartlessness of pedophiles who forget that if they manage to impregnate a young girl, that girl is surely going to be on borrowed time if she is being raised by parents who don’t have an understanding of her. 3. Let this game become another deconstruction of the lolita genre, a genre whose fans have some pedos in their fanbase. 4. Its as almost as if YOU are the inner conscious of this girl & you have to decide the fate of this girl
No comment on your other points, but surely you don’t mean the first one? You can’t get pregnant before the body is biologically ready for it, menstruation doesn’t start until late in puberty. No question there’s higher risk involved, not to mention mental maturity, but “never meant for pregnancy” isn’t biologically true.
0_____0, *getting ready for rage mode* EXCUSE ME, BUT SOME YEARS AGO I READ A DISTURBING AN ACTUAL ARTICLE ABOUT A BLEEPING 6 YEAR OLD PREGNANT GIRL ON SNOPES.COM & IT WAS VERY SAD THAT THIS GIRL GOT PREGNANT AT THAT AGE. OH & BY THE WAY SICK B÷$=/%^_& KNOW THAT THEY CAN GET THEIR YOUNG PREY PREGNANT AS YOUNG WHEN THE FRIKKIN EVER & FYI HERE IS A DISTURBING FACT: GIRLS ARE FERTILE EVER SINCE THEIR FOETUS STAGE, YUP THEY ARE FERTILE EVEN THEN. Now excuse me whilst i get some brain bleach to get rid of some unwanted images
You’re talking about Lina Medina, the youngest birth on record. She had been having periods since she was 3. It’s a freak occurrence, the number of recorded pregnancies in girls under the age of 12 is less than 200 through recorded history. It’s not a normal thing. The ovaries don’t start releasing eggs until menstruation, and even if they did, without the blood lining there would be nowhere for the fertilised egg to attach and grow.
I don’t think anything you say will get through to this guy. Just look at his comments. That’s not a mindset that is rational.
I thought he might have been trolling but I couldn’t tell.
That’s the other possibility. Have to admit, he’s a good one if that’s true.
No, i am not trolling, but what i am telling you is the very unpleasant truth of a recent trend in female biology & that truth is that even now, tween girls are getting periods & the truth is that predators are aware of it & if my memory is correct, on a law & order svu episode, 1 of the characters stated this fact “there was 1 case in which a predator claimed parent rights of a child he got after raping an 8 year old” & man oh that fact is something that is not hidden. The truth is that evolution is going to the make very young girls fertile & the true number of children being born by children may never be known due to the fact of girls not being fully open to anyone they trust about the fact they were abused & became pregnant due to said abuse. If i am trolling you about this info, then nickname me terumi or izaya, due to them both trolling people with info
There doesn’t seem to be any statistical indication I can find that this is an increasing trend, do you have a link to evidence this has increased? Even so, menstruation is a late puberty biological change that can’t begin until prerequisite changes have taken place, and pregnancy can’t occur until menstruation begins. The relevant biological processes are unavoidably ‘meant for pregnancy’.
Law and Order is hardly a reliable source of information. There are only 12 recorded cases of pregnancy aged 8 and below, only two of which are in the past 15 years, and none of them seem to fit the description you gave. It’s likely the line was fictional.
Just so I’m clear, dinoking, rather than support your claims, you’d rather downvote my response? Should I take that to mean you’re unable to back up what you said?
Anecdotally, my daughter is 12 and has been getting her period for almost 6 months. There is no way she is physically ready to bear a child (She’s barely started growth spurts and breast growth). But it also depends on what you consider late puberty, I guess. But 11-14ish is when periods usually begin, and puberty doesn’t really end until closer to 20, if then.
I was more talking late in the list of developmental changes. Puberty seems to be one of those things that starts fast and then peters off in later years. My understanding is 20 would be quite late for girls, but wouldn’t be unusual for boys. Biology isn’t so much my area of expertise, I rely on my aunt for information in that field.
Rape is a crime, an awful crime. But I think it’s a bit much to paint it as a tragedy. Rape victims are capable of rising above the assault, the rape is hard enough to overcome without having to deal with other people seeing them as damaged, broken, defiled or beyond repair.
I think I’ll play the game before judging it (it’s only a few dollars).
Rape is a tragic thing, but victims are capable of moving past it, which isn’t tragic at all.
It’s tragic that people think they’re entitled to another person’s body without their consent and have to take it by force. It’s tragic that games like this are made so that people can better understand the rollercoaster women go on when they test positive for pregnancy (the body can’t actually shut that down).
I have zero desire to play this. I don’t think I would have a good time at all. I’m glad it exists, though.
This is a good attitude to have, and I feel the same way. If we’re to treat games as art (which we should), we need to accept that art is not constrained by the interests or sensitivities of the viewer, and shouldn’t be pressured to change on that basis. Same goes for games with scantily clad women, or swinging dick physics. We can choose the art we like and don’t like, but we can’t try to make the artist change their work because it’s not to our personal tastes.
That changes to an extent when the ‘art’ is an industry wide trend of creating the lowest-possible-effort dreck in order to cynically apply a money making formula that relies on an inherent social imbalance.
In a vacuum it works fine. Any single game no matter how tasteless, exploitative, or pointless you find it to be is fine. But we don’t live, or think, or consume in a vacuum. That’s why this art matters and should be protected, while the other ‘art’ (read: cynical cash in bullshit that relies on social problems) shouldn’t be. In my opinion.
You can’t have one without the other. Either artistic expression is worth defending, or it isn’t. We can pick which ones we like or don’t like but we can’t choose to defend the ones we like and condemn the ones we don’t, otherwise it comes across as hypocrisy.
It isn’t hypocrisy to support the things you think are worthwhile and not support the things that you don’t. Especially when the thing that you choose not to support is a huge, multinational corporation that has a history of ignoring, or even outright crushing smaller artistic projects in favour of derivative photocopy work.
Artistic expression is worth defending, but somehow I don’t see why the 50 million dollar budget, multi platinum selling “White Hero Shoot Man IIX: Extra Explosion Edition” needs defending, as much as works of a mostly non-commercial nature, like this one. Nobody is trying to ban “Square-Jawed Guy Saves the World and Gets The Girl 2”. It just doesn’t need to be defended.
As far as I can tell you’re making a reference to calls for diversity in games being unfair because art is art and etc. That comes down to culture and commercialism in a vacuum. The issues there are extremely complicated and become something of a chicken and egg problem. But rest assured, with aspirational white dude heroes acting heroic and being adored by attractive women aren’t going anywhere. Even people who care about all the underlying social, structural, and economic issues (like me) still buy them, because we all love explody action games.
No, it’s not hypocrisy to support things you think are worthwhile and not support things you don’t. It is hypocrisy to justify your support for things you like on the basis of artistic expression while denying the same justification to things you don’t like. If this game has a right to exist, to address its subject matter the way it pleases and to tell whatever story in whatever aesthetic it likes, so too are all other games, whether they’re shedding light on the emotional turmoil of rape victims, or waving giant breasts in your face.
The point of why it’s important to treat all games equally when it comes to defending their right to free artistic expression should be obvious. You can’t apply subjective views to what should stand as rights. You can say you love Hitler and black people are inferior, I won’t agree with you in the slightest but I’ll respect your right to hold that view. The same goes for games that aren’t to your tastes, whether it’s puritans getting upset about mild sex scenes in Mass Effect, or feminists complaining about objectification in Super Boobs Simulator 2015.
I don’t think calls for diversity in games are unfair, I agree that a broader diversity would be positive. What I think is unreasonable is the way people go about it. If you want more strong female leads in games, for example, you make more games with strong female leads, you don’t bitch out companies that use male leads and demand they change what they’re doing. If you want to see more realistic clothing or body proportions for women in concept art, you make more concept art of realistic clothing and body proportions, you don’t bitch out the artist who likes to draw scantily clad women with disproportional breasts and butts. The best way to fix this kind of imbalance without infringing on anyone’s rights is to create, not to destroy.
Art has no obligations, it has no duty to progressiveness or any other cause. We all have a right to criticise and to like or dislike any art, but we should never be attacking or undermining its right to exist.
I’m not suggesting you’re guilty of this here, just that the underlying principle should be as objective as possible, that art should be free to depict what it wants, whether it’s a game about a rape victim, or as you put it, “lowest-possible-effort dreck”.
You really simplify this whole idea. That’s exactly what I was going into when I said we have to start looking at culture outside of a vacuum. None of us consume culture, art, or products as blank slates and they aren’t created that way either.
The idea that if I wanted to change the entire multimedia preoccupation with reducing the female half of the human race to plot devices or sexual objects by just making my own game is intellectually disingenuous at best. It’s an incredible false assumption on culture, capitalism, and history that falls down with even the most basic study.
I’m not a huge company with purchasing power. I’m not an entire dev team. I’m not an entire advertising company. Even if I were, even if I owned several large developers, publishing houses, advertising companies and my own console manufacturing company, I still wouldn’t be able to change things easily because cultural inertia is a very strong force.
Saying the solution is to just “make stuff you want to see” is equivalent to telling the poor to “just go get a job”. It’s so insultingly simplistic and ignorant of the number of interrelated issues that it insults everyone involved. No wonder everyone comes off as angry. It rings false at a basic level. It’s either the words of someone who is palming off a major issue with a throwaway line in order to avoid engaging, or the words of someone who has made no actual care to figure out why it hasn’t changed already. Either way, it’s a minimising argument. The type used when adults don’t want to acknowledge that children are intelligent and can see how fucked up the world is sometimes. So they get told they don’t understand because they are young, or that they should get over it. It isn’t because there’s nobody who wants to change it. The fact that these conversations keep happening are testament to that. It’s not a simple solution. It’s not even a simple problem. Pretending there’s a magic bullet that everybody is just too lazy to fire isn’t a constructive way to go about it. Putting in anti-discrimination laws didn’t make racism disappear. But hopefully with open and honest discussion about it and not reducing the problems to “Well should just be better”, we can make it better.
You’re also falsely making it into a battle ground. It isn’t a zero sum game. Obama isn’t coming to take people’s guns. Feminists aren’t coming to take people’s boob games. It sounds like a stupid idea, but that’s essentially the argument here. Exposing deeply held inequalities that go to the very base of social structure is a tough game that’s going to hurt a lot of feelings, but nobody is trying to destroy anything. People saying that the pornography has some pretty terrible practices doesn’t mean they’re trying to kill pornography. Hell, a lot of the people campaigning for better practices do so because they work in the industry. What it does mean is that if something is unequal (which things are), there is going to be a necessary loss of power to one side. Of course it’s upsetting to lose power, but it isn’t being destroyed, or banned, or having your rights stolen from you. It’s evening the playing field.
Well, first off I’m going to ignore the loaded terms you’ve littered your response with. I’d prefer if you avoided using them in future, it’s not constructive.
My stance is as simple as it has to be, and no simpler. I’m not naive, I’ve got plenty of experience with looking at how cultures and societies change from within or respond to influences from outside. It was my job at an international level for several years, so you can rest assured that I’m not coming at the issue from a basis of ignorance.
There are two ways you can change a culture – constructively and destructively:
Destructive change is the idea that you can use force and negativity to achieve your goals. It includes violence, both direct and threatened; it is characterised by antagonism and battleground mentality, a false impression of “us vs them”. It seeks to change culture by forcing other people to abide by that change. It disrespects opponents by believing the false notion that there is a binary state of right and wrong when it comes to mindsets. It makes no attempt to understand the ‘enemy’ because the enemy is ‘wrong’. It is exclusive by its nature. Its effectiveness as a motivator for change is mediocre at best. It pushes people on both sides to embattled positions, it reinforces people’s mindsets rather than changing them, it lowers the tone of discourse, creates animosity and creates the illusion of change on the surface while ignoring the seething dissent beneath. In the civil rights movement in America, Malcolm X was an example of someone who used destructive actions to try to effect change.
Constructive change is the opposite. It uses positivity and acknowledges that force is a poor motivator for permanent change. It seeks dialog and discussion, it respects that everyone’s views are important. It seeks to change culture by providing options and letting people choose what they want to support. It treats people like participants, not enemies. It understands that there’s no such thing as binary states of rightness and that it’s possible for both sides to be right, or even for both sides to be wrong. It is inclusive by its nature. It is the basis of some of the most powerful actions available to us, from diplomacy to negotiation. In the civil rights movement in America, Martin Luther King was an example of someone who used constructive actions to try to effect change.
History has shown us time and again that real cultural change is achieved most effectively by constructive actions, not destructive ones. Martin Luther King accomplished more for black civil rights than Malcolm X ever did. Education and safety standards have done more to reduce the negative effects of drug and alcohol consumption than prohibition ever did. Doris Lessing did more for second wave feminism than Valerie Solanas ever did.
If I’m an apple grower, and you’re sick of seeing apples, you can come to me and demand I stop growing apples and start growing oranges, but more than likely I’m going to tell you no. You can persist and get aggressive, you can threaten or try to use force, but that’s only going to make me even more sure that I shouldn’t do what you want. Total accomplished: nothing. On the other hand, if you grow oranges yourself, or if you support those who do, you get what you want in a more diverse range of fruits available, and nobody got disrespected, nobody got antagonistic, nobody drew battle lines, nobody started a fight and nobody tried to trample on someone else’s rights to grow whatever they like.
The same goes for expressions of art. All art has a right to exist, no matter how much you personally like or dislike it. If you want to change the diversity of art, you can take destructive action and try to pressure artists into changing to suit you, which is bound to fail, or you can take constructive action and create the kind of art you want to see yourself, or support those who do make the kind of art you want to see. You can respect the rights of artists to express their art freely and the rights of other people to enjoy that art, or you can waste your time and effort trying to force them to only express art that suits your personal standards and deny other people access to what they liked because you didn’t.
It’s a no-brainer that constructive change is more effective and more long-lasting than destructive change. It really is that simple.
I’m disappointed you even believe that, pokedad. Of course there are people trying to remove art and force artists to change their work because they don’t agree with their content. Just look at the reaction to George Kamitani’s concept art for Dragon’s Crown two years ago. People who think like this absolutely do exist.
I’ll drop the loaded terms when you do.
Also when you drop the ludicrous false equivalence.
@pokedad Could you point out where I’ve used loaded terms, please? And what false equivalence are you talking about?
None in your last post, but I’ve read your previous posts on related topics. [Edit: I’m also not going to trawl old posts to find them, so apologies for saying that you did use them] I’ll stick to the post at hand.
You say you only make it as simple as you have to, but you are again ignoring the basic thing that I’ve said and boiling it down to an absurdly simplistic principle. The intersection of social, economic, cultural, political, and gender dynamics with artistic merit, economics and control over the means of production and distribution is about the most complicated thing you can possibly talk about.
Apple farming is not equivalent to systematic, culturally ingrained devaluing of a segment of society. Non-commercial, or small scale commercial passion projects are not equivalent to aggressively anti-competition international media powerhouses producing culturally saturating amounts of content specifically designed to make maximum profit from minimal effort by relying specifically on those structural elements that devalue whole segments of society.
It goes back to my point before: If you aren’t naive, then you are being intellectually disingenuous. You are using false equivalency. These things are not the same. All art is not equal. All products are not equal. All ideas are not equal. If you value the ideal of a society that treats people with respect regardless of differences in how they were born, then you must come to the conclusion that things, ideas, and products that put up barriers society and that ideal are destructive and wrong.
That’s before we even go back to the point that nobody is ever going to take away the right to make a video game with sexy girls in it. Nobody is banning anything. Nobody is taking anything of substance away. Ever. At all. This is not prohibition. Another false equivalency. There’s no book burning. There’s no Commie hunt. There’s no Think of the Children Brigade. People asked nicely why they can’t have a product they like and they were told that they don’t actually matter as anything other than a prop.
On every major social issue, people have asked nicely for open dialogue and social change and they’ve been met with silence. They got louder and were met with derision. They took exception to the derision and were met with threats. They didn’t bow to threats and were met with violence. They retaliated to the violence and were told that this violence was the reason they didn’t deserve to be heard in the first place. This happened with the civil rights movement that you simplified to the point of painting King as some sort of pacifist figure and not an antagonistic firebrand who was sick of seeing people like him be constantly seen as second class citizens. The same thing happened with ending slavery, women’s rights, Aboriginal rights, gay rights. The fact that there has been no violence yet doesn’t mean that the threats and the slander being directed at those who are sick of asking nicely to be something other than a plot device or a prize in media they consume isn’t a problem. And for what? For the right to keep something that nobody is trying to take away anyhow? To defend a massive company hellbent on churning out endless, artistically void dreck in search of your wallet? They don’t need defending for any reason. They aren’t being attacked for anything other than their monopoly on the entertainment available for consumption and their business practices based on discriminatory and predatory practices. People have a right to be angry about a whole lot of things and telling them you will deign to listen if only they will engage by your rules and at your discretion is condescending and inflammatory. Which is not constructive.
If there is anything to gain from your outrageously inapt apple analogy (and it is as outrageous and minimising as it is simplistic and not equivalent), it’s that when real orange growers controlled real people in city hall and had all of the real water diverted to the desert so they could run a real monopoly on fruit growing and distribution while simultaneously cheating real people out of basic human rights, we called it California and nobody ever got their lives un-ruined by nicely asking for the corruption to please stop now. They did that with transport in the same place to the same effect. I suppose your example is apt in that it fits to serve my argument that there is no easy way to just “make your own to fix it”, because the people in power don’t like competition and the people not in power don’t have the ability to really be effective competition most times anyway. History has shown us time and time again that real social change without violence has only come when the people holding the power to change it feel the need to care about the people asking for change. England only freed India because they grew enough of a conscience to listen to what the people who were being hurt by their practices actually asked for.
Sure, I’m bringing out massive, world changing events to compare them to video games, but honestly, the small things ARE the big things. Everything we are is based on how we filter the world around us and right now we filter a hell of a lot of the world through a very small number of viewpoints and many of them are subtle in their sickness. We don’t need to defend the chosen few on the top of the heap. We do need to defend pretty much everyone else. Pretending that this is a matter of people being unreasonable, or just not making what they want to see out of laziness and not a meticulously constructed empire built on ingrained inequality is laziness at best.
Hell, I’m not even mad at you. I can see your point, I see your logic, but your chain of logic can be flawless and you’ll still come to an illogical conclusion if your original point wasn’t sound. This whole discussion is a tangent, but now that we are here and talking about it, I have to say that your initial idea is just false. This whole thing isn’t about banning anything. It isn’t about minimising choices. It’s about giving choices to people who feel they have none. It’s about drawing attention to the million little ways that inequalities are reinforced on a social level to every single one of us every day. That doesn’t mean you can’t like something that other people don’t. Like anything you want. It means that for anything to change for people who feel powerless, we as a society need to admit that we have a problem in an area and not just keep making excuses for it. You don’t have to abstain from rock music because it was essentially stolen and repackaged slave music, but you do have to acknowledge that the thing you like came from some shitty practices and we need to address them to improve as a society. Art is free to be art in any way it chooses. But it doesn’t get a free pass for being stupid, racist, sexist, disgusting, or anything else just because it shares a medium with great art.
Edit: Oh god, Dragon’s Crown? I’ll pretend the “I’m just disappointed” dad-troll wasn’t there and ask if you are seriously defending an artist who drew that and when called out on making all the men aspirational and all the women sexual replied with “Haha! You must be a gay! Here’s a picture of a gay naked dwarf for you”? Because… wow man. He’s exactly the problem. He didn’t say “This is what I like to make” which would lead into the much larger issues of access to content creation and distribution that I talked about. That wouldn’t be his fault (because it’s a larger systemic problem) and at least he would’ve had the courage to stand by his art as a creator. But no. He just wanted everyone to know that sexualised women as the default value is the natural order and that he also thinks gay people are stupid and comical.
None of these examples are bad in and of themselves, but when you look at the big picture, there’s a serious problem here and we can’t have a grown up discussion because so many people either refuse to acknowledge that something they like has problems, or they are violently opposed to change that might make them less-than-extra-special on principle.
@pokedad
I can only assume I’m not explaining my position well enough, and I’m not keen to keep trying at the moment since I feel like I’m just rehashing things I’ve already said. So I’ll try to summarise what I think are the most essential parts.
All art has a right to exist. Nobody has the right to demand that an artist change their expression. There will always be something someone doesn’t like, and that’s perfectly normal and acceptable. Trying to suppress art someone doesn’t like isn’t. This is, in my view, a prerequisite that must be accepted before any further work can be done to increase diversity in art.
This is something it appears we disagree on. You said “that’s why this art matters and should be protected, while the other ‘art’ […] shouldn’t be”. This is incompatible with the position I hold that I described in the paragraph above, and that’s what I called you out on. All art should be protected. Increasing diversity in art can and should be accomplished without suppression or censorship.
Yes, that includes the art of George Kamitani. No, he didn’t respond to it particularly well, but that doesn’t change the fact he (the artist, not the artwork) shouldn’t have been attacked the way he was in the first place. People told him he should stop doing pictures like that. People told him he was the problem with society today. That’s bullshit. It’s not acceptable in a world where artistic expression is an essential freedom that must be protected.
We accepted a long time ago that suppressing controversial books, paintings and sculptures is harmful. The resurgence of people who want to do this, especially under the guise of fighting for social justice, is frankly alarming. They do exist, whether you believe that or not, and they’re growing in numbers and influence. Kamitani was just an example, the same mindset is behind getting GTA5 pulled from shelves, trying to get Hatred pulled from Steam (for the record I loathe this game), and other similar stories recently.
But I digress, I tend to be a bit verbose. Everything else in my arguments in this thread is built on the basis of that first stance, that all art has a right to exist and should be protected, and that it is never acceptable to suppress or demand changes to an artist’s work. If we disagree on that point, it’s only natural we’ll disagree on the rest. I don’t think your characterisations of my position are fair (“insultingly simplistic” and the like are unnecessarily hostile in my books) but you’re entitled to your view on that.
As with the Adam Baldwin topic, it seems clear that nothing I say will persuade you that there are less harmful solutions to these problems than the ones you’ve settled on, so I’m going to end my efforts here. Please don’t take that as a disinvitation to respond to anything I’ve written, of course.
I don’t care that you have conveniently ignored all the other things I said. I’m done with the discussion.
The crux of this for me is essentially that if you honestly believe that defending the media mogul status quo that shackles art the way it is now somehow enriches it, or that there is some sort of powerful force that has co-opted the human rights movement and is scheming to remove the existence of all kinds of art, you are being utterly fucking ludicrous. Pretending to take the intellectual high ground and couching your arguments in purple prose cannot change that.
I haven’t ignored anything you’ve said, but I’m not going to respond to strawmen either, which most of your posts have been loaded with. Of course it seems ludicrous when you think I’ve said something I haven’t. You’ve clearly missed the point.
I advocate the equal treatment of all art. To borrow some of your own favoured language, that you can see base equality as ‘defending the status quo’ is disingenuous at best, deluded at worst, and more likely wilfully ignorant. If your notion of equality is that far skewed from reality, I fear for the damage you’re unknowingly doing to the worthy causes you think you’re helping.
I might play it though I don’t know if I want to. Rape and other sexual crimes are one of the few things that really kind of upsets me in the world.
All the GGers go: “Look see!!! There is a *girl game*. Go and play that game and leave our games alone”
I hope it isnt something sexual predators can get off on!!!
No thanks, I play games to escape reality. To each their own, but I really can’t see the appeal of a game designed to stir up such negative emotion. We all deal with enough emotional pain on a daily basis.
Yeah, when the article itself makes me feel nauseous and anxious, this game is guaranteed not for me, but I will second the people who are glad it exists.
@zombiejesus, the reason why i downvoted you was because i couldn’t reply to your claims that only the late menstrucation change only happens late puberty further using reply, hey are some facts: once girls start getting periods, that starts the risk of pregnancy, secondly your claim that the line that i said was from law & order is false is in fact true, as the makers of law & order uses the straight from the headlines formula & they research cases in the states, thus that line about an 8 year old girl being pregnant was from a real life case that got mentioned as really happening. Now your claim that the ovaries don’t release eggs until menstuation is false, i happened to watch a doco on the body that states this, which i think is true “once a girl is born, they start losing eggs”. With my claim that a tween’s girl is not meant for pregnancy comes from these facts: the hips haven’t developed enough to support pregnancy & the resulting childbirth
which is more tragic in nasunaru, with 2 pregnant tweens with no one to support them, mentally, a tween girl hasn’t gone through puberty to know what is happening to her, also consider this: how is the tween going to support the child, your stats about the number of kids born to 8 years may be UNDER reported as pregnant rape victims have 1 in 4 chance of abadoning their child & another 1/4 chance of killing the baby to make sure non one knows about them being raped. But this game is also about the rape victim’s shame of being raped. Whether you like it or not, tween girls can get pregnant, also consider this horrific fact: in gears of war, they mention the fact that in baby farms, they are willing to use tweens to have babies, sickening is the word to use. To sum up what i mean you conservative, here is a simple word sum: periods start around tweens + sex predator= tween pregnant & wanting to hide the shame. Here is the thing, you tend to rely in stats on evidence, but i know that stats don’t tell the whole truth, stats record only a slither of info, this maybe because alot of people are hiding the truth of the real numbers, the fact is this tweens may store the fact they were raped in the short term memory, or if pregnant, they may kill the child, bury the body & promptly forget about it, abandon it or abort it. The thing is this: communities like to hide secrets especially the harsh kind like rape especially tween rapes. 1 of the worst kinds of communities to have a tween girl raped is 1 with a predator of high social standing, this type of community tend to cover up anything that may disrupt their community like rape, plus with the fragile state of a pregnant rape victim, the perp can get away with the crime.The fact about this game is this: the girl is trying to deal with the fact that she is pregnant, this isn’t the 1st type of media nor the last to talk about tween pregnant rape victims, but the fact is this we may never know the true number of children born through the rape of tweens, with the shame of the victim feeling about not living a normal teen life because of what just happened to her & the family of the victim not reporting the cops of the crime that happened because of the percieved shame by the community.
to end this comment, what i just did was a theoretical analysis of tween rape victims with facts about the subject. Now @zombiejesus show me your evidence
As I said, I can’t find a documented case matching the description you gave. If you have evidence for this case, please link it so I can read it. Law and Order isn’t anywhere near good enough, they constantly get things wrong. I need a reliable source.
You’re right about ovulation, my comment was an attempt at brevity that ended up being incorrect. Ovulation does occur before puberty, but menstruation is a requirement of pregnancy otherwise the fertilised egg has nothing to attach to and no source of nutrients to feed growth.
I never said tween girls can’t get pregnant and a lot of your response is irrelevant. I addressed one thing in your original post and I stand by my comment: excluding freak occurrences, by the time a girl is able to get pregnant she is physiologically ready for that pregnancy – at minimum risk, no, but ready, yes. That’s the natural order in our species and countless others, biology isn’t interested in mental preparedness or man-made moral codes, our base functions exist at a lower level than that and reproduction is the most essential base function of all living things.
I think it’s amusing you just called me a conservative. What are you basing that on? You have no idea what my political views are, they’re not relevant to conversations like this so I keep them out of it.
Statistics are the only fact we can rely on. No, statistics aren’t perfect, but they’re more reliable than “I know it to be true but I don’t have evidence but it’s probably true”.
You haven’t actually shown me any evidence here, you’ve just written a large block of text with no paragraphs. You’ve also asked me for evidence, I’m happy to oblige. What statement would you like me to give evidence for?