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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6179258" data-attributes="member: 5143">Most of the rhetoric is extremely slanted.  I've read a lot about this story in the past couple of days since I hadn't heard about it until recently.I'd like to provide a bit more context from the other point of view.They wrote a comic that had nothing to do with rape.  It was about how it was funny in MMOs that you only save 5 people when there's a 6th right there waiting to be saved simply because a quest tells you to only save 5 of them.  All sorts of horrible things could be happening to the slave that you failed to save.  Rape was mentioned as one of those horrible things you COULD be preventing by saving the slave...but you don't because...your screen says to only save 5.A number of people got VERY angry about using rape as a joke, about mocking rape survivors and about triggering them.  Mike tried to explain this wasn't the joke they were making at all and they thought rape was serious.  For this, they were called Rape Apologists, that they were "encouraging a rape culture", that they were horrible human beings, people threatened them with boycotts and various articles were written on blogs saying people should stop reading their comic and stop giving them money.Mike got angry and frustrated.  I can understand why.  He was tired of reading a barrage of angry tweets when he logged into twitter and being directed to look at blog entry after blog entry on Rape Survivor and Feminist blogs talking about how horrible they were.  Especially because they couldn't understand what they had done wrong.  They didn't make any jokes about rape.  They didn't encourage or make rape sound good in any way.  People explained to them that even if they weren't using rape as a joke, just mentioning it in a comic was "creating a rape culture" where it was considered acceptable.  They thought this idea was kind of stupid, so they wrote a comic that apologized for insulting anyone and reiterated that they hate rape and rapists.  But, in their frustration, they made fun of the fact that their comic somehow encouraged anyone to rape anyone else by saying "if you are raping someone right now because of our comic, stop."Which only caused more anger, more blog posts yelling at them and even someone threatening to kill their families as a joke to see how they'd like that.  Mike got super defensive.  When someone asked him how it felt to encourage a rape culture on twitter, he sarcastically answered "Pretty good, actually".  A lot of people with no sense of humor took him literally and posted even more posts about how he just didn't get it.It mostly blew over until Mike's comments that "women have vaginas".  Which is a statement likely to be said by a LARGE portion of the population, probably even a majority of people.  I might have even been prone to say it before I read how much it pisses some people off.  The idea that someone without the sex organs of a woman would call themselves a woman is....rather foreign outside of the transgender community.So, he once again got a huge helping of insults and hatred thrown at him.  He tried to explain that he had never heard the term cis before and hadn't ever thought of the idea that a woman might not have female sexual organs.  But now that he had been told, he understood.Still, a lot of people said it was impossible for anyone to be that willfully ignorant and that he was being even more insulting by saying the idea had never occurred to him.  It was suggested by many people that it was actually IMPOSSIBLE to not understand gender identification.After that, they became real jerks.  I'll admit it.  They drew a d*ckwolf during a panel at PAX mostly because they were angry at being called names so many times that it became a point of pride to fight back.  Which they shouldn't have.  But the drawing of the d*ckwolf just caused more people to get angry which caused Mike to become more angry.  So he decided to make a shirt out of it.  Which was the worst idea EVER.The thing is, people ascribe malice to the creating of the shirt that wasn't there.  People say that they created the shirt to personally insult Rape Survivors.  This just isn't true.  Nothing I've EVER read about Mike or anyone at Penny Arcade says they hate Women, Rape Survivors, or Transgender people.  The shirt wasn't created to insult Rape Survivors.  It was created as a statement that they were tired of being harassed and told what to do.  So, they were going to do the exact thing they were being told not to out of defiance.  To them, it was a symbol of freedom from oppression.  They were extremely blinded by their frustration.But a couple of people reasonably explained to them that the shirt DID insult people.  That although they believe the dickwolf was simply a creature they made up for a small mention in a comic and held no ill will towards anyone...that other people didn't see it that way and that other people's perception is what matters, not theirs.  So, they pulled the shirt and apologized.Which many people took as a sign of "victory" over the evil villains who had been mocking them for years.  Some of them felt that they were finally being listened to and mostly let it go.  Others cried that it was a ploy to make them forget about the insults they were throwing around, that they created the shirt just so they could get rid of it and trick everyone into letting the issue drop.  Though, over time the whole controversy did start to die out.Then they went and opened their mouth about regretting having discontinued the shirt.  Which caused this new wave of complaints.  As they explain in their new apology, they only said this because they regret doing anything to engage with people.  They made one joke that people took the wrong way and it was their choice to engage that caused it to escalate out of control.  The discontinuing of the shirt was simply their most recent attempt to "engage" the people who were offended, so it was the one most recent in their memory.I think the problem is there is too much hyperbole being thrown around.  Motives are being ascribed to people that simply aren't there.  People are overreacting.  On both sides.I think "Let's never go to PAX again because it is run by horrible human beings" is an extreme overreaction.  But so is "These people disagree with our comic so let's make a t-shirt out of the thing they hate".</blockquote>

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