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jmw23 wrote:I believe in a free discourse, and in allowing the market to decide these matters.

The thing is, the market did decide in this case.

Free Markets ≠ Free Discourse

plastictrees wrote:Not sure I have toooo much to add here, because I think the "Those politically correct prudes have ruined things for everyone, amirite!" nerds have staked their claim to this thread.
I'm impressed that people have somehow managed to turn finding the objectification of women and implied rape distasteful into "uptight puritanism". I must be super right wing if I think that establishing forced rape porn as a cultural touchstone has a negative impact, however small, on how women are perceived and treated in that society.

Before you go around white-knighting on behalf of all women everywhere, you might want to learn a thing or two about the anime fandom and how many women are involved with it.

I had several female friends at university who were into it, even the crazy tentacle rape stuff which one of them played during a presentation she made on the topic. An ex girlfriend of mine liked it, and a friend of mine met his wife at an anime convention... I only really have a passing interest in some of the artwork (which is mostly extremely well done, and non-nude), but I know enough to know that something like this would probably appeal to female anime fans rather than turn them off, especially since it is cheeky rather than explicit in theme and has a cute cuddley octopus as the tentacle monster. I was hoping to get the t-shirt as a freebie for the next pledge amount as a gift for a female friend of mine, but now that it probably won't reach that pledge level after being gutted, that might not happen.

It's based around dating sim-stye art, not hentai. This is nothing to do with hentai at all. In fact, if was called "octopus bento" I bet no-one would have got their panties in a bunch whatsoever because it wouldn't have the word "tentacle" in there, which means that the 95% of people who know precisely jack about anime other than the tired "hurr it's all about tentacle rape monsters" stereotype that everyone who dislikes anime clings to as their only opinion of the subject wouldn't have been bothered by it.

Dating sims have been around since the 90's and are generally story-based with a big appeal to female audiences due to them being games about emotions and dating etc.


I am sick and tired of people for whom it isn't enough to just ignore things they don't like, they just *have* to go and ruin it for everyone else as well.
It's like "I want to make every person on the entire planet only enjoy things that I enjoy, and if they don't comply I'll make it my life's mission to make them miserable!" was burned into their frontal lobes with a cattle brand at the age of 5.

For anyone who thinks this was a good thing...

Lets just say, you like Apple Pie, and I don't like Apple Pie. Maybe I think Apple Pie keeps women enslaved and baking away in the kitchen like it was back in the 50's?

Now, I could just not eat apple pie and let you eat it instead. I don't have to watch you, or your apple pie. Or your wife chained to the oven baking apple pie 24/7 according to my extremely insular and ignorant POV where Apple Pie = Domestic Violence.

Or, I could come over and smash up your apple pie and throw it into the river, so that you can't eat it either.

You cool with that, as well? No? Didn't think so. :p

And finally, wth is Kickstarter smoking? http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/forkingpath/the-doom-that-came-to-atlantic-city?ref=search

Screaming girl? Check. Tentacle? Check. That's more than Tentacle Bento had. Next for the chopping block, or will Kickstarter not do anything, because the conservative intarblogz don't notice it/ get a hernia over it?

Regardless of whether or not you like or hate this, the point is - are you really cool with having creative content being determined by a few idiots who happen to run popular blogs on the internet?

Remember, this kind of thing isn't just limited to ignorant conservatives kicking up a fuss, it happens with ignorant liberals kicking up a fuss, too... such as the word "Christmas" being banned because of the fear that it will offend other faiths.

If you hate seeing extremist whiny liberals ruin things, then you would do well to remember that stuff like this is simply the other side of exactly the same coin.

This meme is probably the most exposure that most people have had about tentacle rape.

lol nerdy white men explaining why it is okay to exploit women and make jokes about rape

Manchu wrote:

jmw23 wrote:I believe in a free discourse, and in allowing the market to decide these matters.

The thing is, the market did decide in this case.

Free Markets ≠ Free Discourse

It isn't over yet! I agree, Kickstarter made its decsision for purely monetarty reasons. They feared a backlash. Now the ball is in Sodapop's court. We'll see what they do with it, and, ulitmately, whether enough people buy this game to make it a success.

I'm very much in agreement with Manchu here. Kickstarter is losing a lot of its credibility as a business, with this action, whether you like the idea of the game or not.

Personally, I really don't like the idea of the game. I don't dislike it as much as I dislike the idea of the Pimp game that White Wolf put out a few years back ( http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/15064/pimp-the-backhanding ). But I'm not interested in buying or playing it, and my regard for Soda Pop is somewhat diminished, I have to admit.

All that said, if Kickstarter disliked the idea of the game, they should have said so at the start. Caving to public pressure now just makes them seem indecisive, weak, and unreliable. And yes, it makes me less likely to want to do business with them.

jmw23 wrote:

Manchu wrote:Free Markets ≠ Free Discourse

It isn't over yet!

You're right that Kickstarter is not the entirety of the space of discourse. Your initial point, however, was that Kickstarter was not allowing the market to decide. But Kickstarter is a part of the market. The hand isn't actually invisible -- it's just in a lot of places at once. In this case, the biggest and most powerful hand was Kickstarter and what it did was smack Soda Pop Miniatures down.

One thing to note about this is that Soda Pop has been able to use Kickstarter infrastructure (at least as of this morning, EST) to redirect their former investors-via-Kickstarter to their site. Of course, this is a poor substitute for being on Kickstarter. Soda Pop had made it past $30k by the time Kickstarter stomped them. Just in the last 12 hours or so, Soda Pop has been able to recoup more than $14k of that.

The big deal about Kickstarter is supposedly not having to wait on Faceless Executive Investors to decide what you might want to buy. I think this case has showed us that Kickstarter itself is just another face in that faceless crowd of people who are going to make decisions about what you might want to buy on your behalf.

Sadly, Soda Pop capturing $30k or more of investment via their own site will not demonstrate that Soda Pop didn't need Kickstarter because it had used Kickstarter post-suspension to redirect the traffic. (And that might not hold out much less draw further the support that exposure via Kickstarter could have.) So Kickstarter, the masquerading Faceless Executive, will not be undermined by the potential success of Tentacle Bento.

But that also means that no one can really dismiss or excuse Kickstarter's move here on the basis that Soda Pop has managed to get some funding since the suspension.

Also, it's interesting to note that the current set up Soda Pop is using mimics Kickstarter:

Kickstarter Page:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1189988320/tentacle-bento-by-soda-pop-miniatures

Soda Pop Page:

http://girls.sodapopminiatures.com/content/fund-tentacle-bento

And there's at least one major difference: Soda Pop as of now doesn't have a Count Down.

Ian Sturrock wrote:I'm very much in agreement with Manchu here. Kickstarter is losing a lot of its credibility as a business, with this action, whether you like the idea of the game or not.
*SNIP*
All that said, if Kickstarter disliked the idea of the game, they should have said so at the start. Caving to public pressure now just makes them seem indecisive, weak, and unreliable. And yes, it makes me less likely to want to do business with them.

I think they'll survive despite losing the respect and funding of a small portion of the tiny subset of gamers who play tabletop anime games. While I don't agree with their decision personally (despite having zero interest in buying the product in question), it's their choice. It's quite likely though that there is no manual approval of kickstarter projects but rather that the submission process is automated with maybe a check for profanity or other keywords similar to dakka's forum software. They likely "caved" to public pressure only when someone went through the trouble of manually reporting the project leading to the likely first ever glance with live eyeballs at Kickstarter HQ.

warboss wrote:They likely "caved" to public pressure only when someone went through the trouble of manually reporting the project leading to the likely first ever glance with live eyeballs at Kickstarter HQ.

We actually know that this is NOT the case.

Kickstarter listed Tentacle Bento as one of its "Staff Picks" on its own front page shortly before suspending the project funding.

The real question is when live eyeballs started reading letters equating a card game with raping girls.

Some people will pick any excuse to feel morally superior to others.

I'm seeing this gak all over twitter now... I've got a friend who is into anime, etc... and she's heard about this through friends, etc... And I'm wrong for thinking the game should be allowed to be made...

scarletsquig wrote:

plastictrees wrote:Not sure I have toooo much to add here, because I think the "Those politically correct prudes have ruined things for everyone, amirite!" nerds have staked their claim to this thread.
I'm impressed that people have somehow managed to turn finding the objectification of women and implied rape distasteful into "uptight puritanism". I must be super right wing if I think that establishing forced rape porn as a cultural touchstone has a negative impact, however small, on how women are perceived and treated in that society.

Before you go around white-knighting on behalf of all women everywhere, you might want to learn a thing or two about the anime fandom and how many women are involved with it.

I had several female friends at university who were into it, even the crazy tentacle rape stuff which one of them played during a presentation she made on the topic. An ex girlfriend of mine liked it, and a friend of mine met his wife at an anime convention... I only really have a passing interest in some of the artwork (which is mostly extremely well done, and non-nude), but I know enough to know that something like this would probably appeal to female anime fans rather than turn them off, especially since it is cheeky rather explicit in theme and has a cute cuddley octopus as the tentacle monster. I was hoping to get the t-shirt as a freebie for the next pledge amount as a gift for a female friend of mine, but now that it probably won't reach that pledge level after being gutted, that might not happen.

It's based around dating sim-stye art, not hentai. This is nothing to do with hentai at all. In fact, if was called "octopus bento" I bet no-one would have got their panties in a bunch whatsoever because it wouldn't have the word "tentacle" in there, which means that the 95% of people who know precisely jack about anime other than the tired "hurr it's all about tentacle rape monsters" stereotype that everyone who dislikes anime clings to as their only opinion of the subject.

Dating sims have been around since the 90's and are generally story-based with a big appeal to female audiences due to them being games about emotions and dating etc.


I am sick and tired of people for whom it isn't enough to just ignore things they don't like, they just *have* to go and ruin it for everyone else as well.
It's like "I want to make every person on the entire planet only enjoy things that I enjoy, and if they don't comply I'll make it my life's mission to make them miserable!" was burned into their frontal lobes with a cattle brand at the age of 5.

For anyone who thinks this was a good thing...

Lets just say, you like Apple Pie, and I don't like Apple Pie. Maybe I think Apple Pie keeps women enslaved and baking away in the kitchen like it was back in the 50's?

Now, I could just not eat apple pie and let you eat it instead. I don't have to watch you, or your apple pie. Or your wife chained to the oven baking apple pie 24/7 according to my extremely insular and ignorant POV where Apple Pie = Domestic Violence.

Or, I could come over and smash up your apple pie and throw it into the river, so that you can't eat it either.

You cool with that, as well? No? Didn't think so.

These sort of threads always bring out the terrible analogies. Holding an opinion = "white knighting" now? I'm not trying to impress the only girl at the comic book store by defending her "rights". I do believe that aspects of hentai that this game directly references (sorry not hentai, dating sims? So when the tentacle alien "snatches" the teenage girl they probably go out for bowling and pizza and have a lovely time) contribute in however a miniscule way to our view of women as objects. A view that has deep roots. Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to the GOP primary race should be pretty aware that these aren't opinions that were held fifty plus years ago.

So there are women who find this stuff amusing? Great. Please explain how that invalidates my opinion. You're edging pretty close to the "I'm not racist, I am/know a [insert minority]!" in terms of defenses there. I'm not saying that seeing these images will directly cause rape, or even be in the slightest way traumatic. I'm saying it's just another straw on the enormous historical pile that has largely directed how we percieve and treat women and how women expect to be seen and treated.

As to being a hypocrite, I don't believe that's the case. I do believe that the context surrounding violence in general and the context around how women are percieved and treated is very different. I don't think that 40k, for instance, targets a specific group of people and makes a statement about how they can be treated. Again, I'm not saying that SP-TB is making a strong statement, I'm not saying that the game would lead to rape (seems ridiculous that I have to head off this sort of hyperbole, but, oh look, too late).

The poster mentioning societies where images of rape get you killed and internet access is restricted...I have no idea what your point is? There are countries and cultures where if an unmarried women gets raped they can be jailed for adultery, or forced to marry their rapist etc. etc. I don't think that celebrating pop-culture mores that glorify rape and suggest that women/girls will be overwhelmed by sexual urges and physically enjoy that rape distinguishes us as a free society in the way you think it does.

Manchu wrote:

jmw23 wrote:

Manchu wrote:Free Markets ≠ Free Discourse

It isn't over yet!

You're right that Kickstarter is not the entirety of the space of discourse. Your initial point, however, was that Kickstarter was not allowing the market to decide. But Kickstarter is a part of the market. The hand isn't actually invisible -- it's just in a lot of places at once. In this case, the biggest and most powerful hand was Kickstarter and what it did was smack Soda Pop Miniatures down.

I am sorry to disagree, but I wrote:

Kickstarter is a privately-owned company, and of course they can do as they please. I suspect they made this choice from a purely economic standpoint. Kickstarter is seen as a darling of the creative arts community, and negative publicity/boycotts would have hurt Amazon's bottom line. That's fine, but again, I'm dissapointed...

I'm not sure how you equated that with me saying Kickstarter was not allowing the market to decide. My point was that Kickstarter, indeed, was making what it felt was a decision based on its own financial best interest. I'm sorry their decision tree resolved that way, but I am not angry about it. My hunch is that TB will be fine, funded from Sodapop's site without Kickstarter taking a 5% cut.

As for your second point about Soda Pop owing the succes of their home-launched campaign to Kickstarter, I agree. Tentacle Bento as a funding project is inextricably entwined with Kickstarter, for good or ill. I think the publicity will drive in more sales and pledges. Gamers like a little controversy, as evidenced by the popularity of this thread.

Manchu wrote:

warboss wrote:They likely "caved" to public pressure only when someone went through the trouble of manually reporting the project leading to the likely first ever glance with live eyeballs at Kickstarter HQ.

We actually know that this is NOT the case.

Kickstarter listed Tentacle Bento as one of its "Staff Picks" on its own front page shortly before suspending the project funding.

The real question is when live eyeballs started reading letters equating a card game with raping girls.

You keep saying this. I know your shtick is "no nonesense, telling it like it is", but you're being purposefully obtuse here. It's not "a card game". It's a card game directly referencing a genre that features girls being raped. Yes they are comics and cartoons. Yes, no actual girls were actually raped in the making of those comics, those cartoons, or this card game. That's ok then right? Unless the nonesense hyperbole of "won't someone think of all those poor girls being raped by aliens" is actually true then the only objections to the portrayal of that act must be hysterical political correctness, trolling, or white knighters (white knighting? Sorry, my dismissive internet vocab is rusty).

The image of one piece of straw on top of a gigantic pile of straw is misleading.

Objectification and subjugation of women is not something that we (men and women) slowly built one-straw-at-a-time over millennia. It's more like a pile of huge boulders (for example, civil codes involving marriage) and Tentacle Bento is actually not even as significant as a grain of sand by comparison.

So you can see how ridiculous it is to look for a meaningful place for this card game in that mountain of boulders. The best you're going to do is say that this grain of sand is only possible because of those boulders. But that doesn't address the grain of sand itself.

Manchu wrote:...By refusing to connect certain creators with investors, Kickstarter is exercising its right not to do business with anyone that wants to do business with them. Again, that's cool. There's no need to dream up a card game trivializing the Holocaust to make that point acceptable.

Kickstarter's right to do business with the customers it chooses is NOT at stake. What is at stake is the credibility of Kickstarter. In peddling its services, the connection of creators and investors, Kickstarter makes a lot of claims to advocating creativity. As of this post, the top banner on their homepage reads "Fund & Flow Creativity."

By exercising its right to deal with some projects and not others, Kickstarter is undermining this claim. As a customer of Kickstarter, my take away is "this business does not actually provide me with the service that it advertises."

In this case, it's not just me, Manchu, who is not being well-served as a customer. As I mentioned earlier, the message that Kickstarter has sent in this instance is that they may or may not be able to provide services to any potential customer (whether creator or investor) ... but there's really no way to know whether they will or not.

If I were a creator, I would never use Kickstarter after this because I would learn from this situation that it is not necessarily a stable connection to my potential investors. Kickstarter could step in at any time and exert the very thing that it is selling to me -- namely, freedom from third-party control of funding.

As an investor in terms of crowd sourcing, I will never use Kickstarter again because of the same reason. Kickstarter sold me the idea that they would help me establish direct contact with the content providers that I wanted to help succeed. But they have now shown that they are really a middle man, and a fickle one at that.

Just one more time for anyone who may have missed it: I don't need Kickstarter to tell me that it's okay with Tentacle Bento or that it's not okay with it. The thing that I am paying them for is for them NOT to weigh in on questions like that. So by weighing in, they have actually rendered their own service value-less to me.

The irony is that this is very likely to increase the market penetrance (zing!) of Soda Pop: the meme-makers are stepping up to the plate.

I agree with Manchu's point: the fact is, this constitutes a failure of Kickstarter's entire purpose. To have allowed the product to reach this degree of funding (let's be clear, the project had reached it's funding goals, they reasonably might have relied on the project going forward) and then pull the rug out from under them is unseemly.


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plastictrees wrote:

Manchu wrote:

warboss wrote:They likely "caved" to public pressure only when someone went through the trouble of manually reporting the project leading to the likely first ever glance with live eyeballs at Kickstarter HQ.

We actually know that this is NOT the case.

Kickstarter listed Tentacle Bento as one of its "Staff Picks" on its own front page shortly before suspending the project funding.

The real question is when live eyeballs started reading letters equating a card game with raping girls.

You keep saying this. I know your shtick is "no nonesense, telling it like it is", but you're being purposefully obtuse here. It's not "a card game". It's a card game directly referencing a genre that features girls being raped. Yes they are comics and cartoons. Yes, no actual girls were actually raped in the making of those comics, those cartoons, or this card game. That's ok then right? Unless the nonesense hyperbole of "won't someone think of all those poor girls being raped by aliens" is actually true then the only objections to the portrayal of that act must be hysterical political correctness, trolling, or white knighters (white knighting? Sorry, my dismissive internet vocab is rusty).

It's a card game, and yes, it is harmless.

Or are you of the opinion that this movie is rank bigotry? I may not respect the opinion, but at least you would be consistent.

Edit: made the point even more obvious.

Could a mod update the first post with a link to the new "kickstarter"-page for the game?

http://girls.sodapopminiatures.com/content/fund-tentacle-bento

And change the topic to indicate the restart:
Tentacle Bento - Kickstarter cancelled - Restarted on new site.
Or if that's too long:
Tentacle Bento Kickstarter - Now restarted!

$15k and growing back. Just like tentacles.

plastictrees wrote: I do believe that the context surrounding violence in general and the context around how women are percieved and treated is very different.

It might be. In real life. We're talking made up.

plastictrees wrote: I don't think that 40k, for instance, targets a specific group of people and makes a statement about how they can be treated.

Beside the point. Both tentacle rape and 40k/CoD/action movies are entertainment products using indisputably vile acts as their "pull", in varying degrees. They do so in order to, well, entertain people. What makes made up solders killing made up people better than made up monsters raping made up girls?

plastictrees wrote:Again, I'm not saying that SP-TB is making a strong statement, I'm not saying that the game would lead to rape (seems ridiculous that I have to head off this sort of hyperbole, but, oh look, too late).

And I don't see anyone make such comments, so what was that about?

plastictrees wrote:It's a card game directly referencing a genre that features girls being raped. Yes they are comics and cartoons. Yes, no actual girls were actually raped in the making of those comics, those cartoons, or this card game. That's ok then right?

Yes. Without equivocation, yes. It is okay. A thing that does not hurt anyone turns out not to hurt anyone.

I already talked about the moral panic over comic books. Maybe the one about D&D will be nearer and dearer to some people here. In the 80s, there was this idea that D&D would cause kids to kill themselves or each other. (For younger people, you've no doubt heard that video games supposedly do the same thing.) D&D was portrayed as the latest manifestation of black magic/satanism.

In the 90s, the language of identity politics became popularized. People who had never gone to anthropology or sociology classes became aware of phrases like "the objectification of women" for the first time. In those days, of course, people were extremely skeptical of the concept. Sexual harassment at the workplace? "Oh, she's just making a big deal out of nothing." Well, that "nothing" ended up costing millions in the courts. And so business started taking it seriously and they demanded that their employees take it just as seriously. But a HR policy isn't the same thing as actually understanding feminism.

In 2012, our popular culture only has a "HR policy level" of understanding feminism. Saying that Tentacle Bento is yet another facet of the oppression of women is exactly like saying that D&D is "witchcraft" or "satanism" (in the pejorative sense). People thought that D&D spoke to some kind of real immorality and they were just as serious about it as we are about women's rights. And yet all that seriousness still didn't make D&D about "satanism." It all boiled down to some simplistic associations: D&D books mention spells and demons -- sounds like satanism to me, yessir! Tentacle Bento has attractive anime girls and tentacles -- of course, it must be objectification of women!

As to tentacle hentai: even explicit images of cartoon ladies being forcibly penetrated by space monsters is NOT actually hurting anyone (assuming it's out of the reach of kids). The people who say this kind of porn or any other kind is tearing down one aspect or another of our society are laboring under an uncritical and seemingly false association. It reminds me of people who say that gun ownership necessarily leads to higher crime rates. These kind of explanations are nice in that (1) they don't require much thought to understand, (2) they make very complex problems seem very manageable, and (3) they allow us to rail against things that we don't like anyway. But none of those factors make them any more accurate.

What makes made up solders killing made up people better than made up monsters raping made up girls?

I know I'll get immediately slammed for being a dumb American, but I'd say, "plenty".

Especially when it's in a tabletop game, where the effects of firing upon a target are pretty damn abstract. Noone has ever screamed about the violence of chess, which wargames are simply a fancy chromed-up version of, where if a "guy' gets "shot' they just get removed from the board. Now... if you're talking movies and videogames with plenty of gratuitous and graphical/audible results from lethally attacking an opponent, that's an entirely different story.

Americans may see violence differently than some of the rest of the world, but I think most of it ends up being like this:

Wargames of all types generally represent two forces meeting on a battlefield, where both are carrying guns. If onlookers are surprised by what comes next, they are pretty ignorant.

Now compare that to anything representing stalking and raping women......that's right up there with material graphically simulating torture or terrorism. It's not real, and because of that its perfectly legal, too, so you are within your rights to enjoy it. But most people likely think it's damn creepy that someone gets enjoyment out of it, and if you are defending it, don't go trying to pretend to be surprised by negative reactions.

An excellent article on this:

http://thefrontlinegamer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/crowd-funding-updates.html

The backlash is starting to kick in and looks like it'll wind up bigger than those 2 original blog articles were.

Buzzsaw wrote:

plastictrees wrote:

Manchu wrote:

warboss wrote:They likely "caved" to public pressure only when someone went through the trouble of manually reporting the project leading to the likely first ever glance with live eyeballs at Kickstarter HQ.

We actually know that this is NOT the case.

Kickstarter listed Tentacle Bento as one of its "Staff Picks" on its own front page shortly before suspending the project funding.

The real question is when live eyeballs started reading letters equating a card game with raping girls.

You keep saying this. I know your shtick is "no nonesense, telling it like it is", but you're being purposefully obtuse here. It's not "a card game". It's a card game directly referencing a genre that features girls being raped. Yes they are comics and cartoons. Yes, no actual girls were actually raped in the making of those comics, those cartoons, or this card game. That's ok then right? Unless the nonesense hyperbole of "won't someone think of all those poor girls being raped by aliens" is actually true then the only objections to the portrayal of that act must be hysterical political correctness, trolling, or white knighters (white knighting? Sorry, my dismissive internet vocab is rusty).

It's a card game, and yes, it is harmless.

Or are you of the opinion that this movie is rank bigotry? I may not respect the opinion, but at least you would be consistent.

Edit: made the point even more obvious.

So your counter is to repeat that "it's a card game" and then reference a completely unrelated piece of actual parody? Yes, you have turned my world upside down.

Valhallan42nd wrote:Kickstarter is a company that answers to it's backing public, or not, as it sees fit. Weighing the pros of hosting this project vs the backlash from the public, who literally vote with their wallet on this site, it chose damage control over any high minded stance.

Which is exactly what I would have done, had I been in the same position. I'm not going to hurt my livelihood over a card game. As much as that sucks to be Soda Pop in this part of the equation, you do what needs to be done, and fix it from there.

That isn't what happened here, or what Kickstart say they are for.

Kickstarter's guidelines say if you don't like a project, don't back it.

This project was very popular, but Kickstarter canned it. There isn't any apparent reason why except for the internet complaints from people who weren't going to buy the game.

In other words Kickstarter seem to have ignored their public in favour of people who aren't their public.

So now, lets ban all wargames, tabletop and video, why stop at a tentacle cartoon? Wargames depict death, killing of innocents, mass slaughter and all that good stuff. Lets now ban Tom and Jerry Cartoons depicting cruelty to animals, sterotyping African American women as house maids (the one that yells 'Thooommmassss'). Murder and the killing of people, just like our wargames depict, carries Life Imprisonment. I'd better stop playing wargames because they'll influence me to go and kill people or 'cleanse' with fire anyone not of my religion. It's make beleive, its not real.

So what's the punishment for Aliens with large Pink Tentacles raping School Girls from an all girls university (oh and last time I checked, +18 only in university)? Anyone know the answer? No? That's because its made up from someones imagination.

The Card Game is NOT ilegal, is NOT causing any harm, is NOT infulencing Pink Tentacle Aliens to rape university students, so what's the issue. Political Correctness gone mad. What's next, I'll get arrested for having an active imagination and the thought Police will lock me up because something that could never happen (unless there actually are Pink Tentacle Aliens somewhere out there living amogst us undiscovered raping university girls).

If you don't like it, don't buy it. But please don't then bleet on about how wrong something is because you beleive it to be wrong and wreck it for the people who do.

plastictrees wrote:

You keep saying this. I know your shtick is "no nonesense, telling it like it is", but you're being purposefully obtuse here. It's not "a card game". It's a card game directly referencing a genre that features girls being raped. Yes they are comics and cartoons. Yes, no actual girls were actually raped in the making of those comics, those cartoons, or this card game. That's ok then right? Unless the nonesense hyperbole of "won't someone think of all those poor girls being raped by aliens" is actually true then the only objections to the portrayal of that act must be hysterical political correctness, trolling, or white knighters (white knighting? Sorry, my dismissive internet vocab is rusty).

I think the "hysterical political correctness" or whatever you're being accused of comes from the fact this is a game that has not even a shred of reality attached to it. The monsters aren't realistic, the anime girls aren't realistic, there is a 0.0% chance of anyone being tentacle raped irl ever. This, in my mind, puts it way above the aforementioned "Pimp: The Backhanding", as human sex trafficking and forced prostitution are real and scary things. There are a TON of games that involve people being killed at war, or murdered otherwise. Those things happen in real life. Why are we not railing against those? According to that logic, it doesn't matter if a magic missile doesn't exist, we shouldn't be playing a game of it, no? By the way, eagerly looking forward to a snide dismissal from someone (not neccessarily you) on this point without a logical refutation.)

Let's be real for a second: tentacle hentai is stupid. Most people mock it. I feel this game was mocking it. I don't understand where a parody of a well-mocked genre suddenly becomes an example of that genre. Parody has long served as a way of pointing out flaws and ridiculousness of stupid things. I would guess the percentage of people that wanted this for arousal purposes to be less than 5 percent, though I obviously don't have real figures. It just seems relentlessly SILLY. I didn't even see a single piece of art where tentacle touched flesh, every piece seemed framed in a humorous way.

There was a recent controversy in Magic The Gathering over a piece of card art. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=239962 I was actually on the side of feeling this art was in poor taste. Despite having magic in the woman's hand, he's physically dominating her, hand around her throat. He's at least 3 times as big as she is, and he has his knee between her legs in a penatrative stance. This is a pose that can and has been used to abuse women in real life. That is why I was upset with it and I can understand how it could trigger victims of sexual or domestic abuse.

NO ONE will be triggered by pictures of anime girls or lurking tentacles.

It's one thing to not like something. But to claim a clear parody of a pretty gross genre is glorifying it is pretty silly.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

plastictrees wrote:So your counter is to repeat that "it's a card game" and then reference a completely unrelated piece of actual parody? Yes, you have turned my world upside down.

"It's a card game" is a stupid argument to make, but he's not too far off with the Blazing Saddles reference. it's as clear a parody of racism as TB is of Tentai (is that a word? I claim it if not!) I doubt a black person will watch Blazing Saddles and be offended over the scene as it's clearly a spoof of actual racism.

Manchu wrote:

plastictrees wrote:It's a card game directly referencing a genre that features girls being raped. Yes they are comics and cartoons. Yes, no actual girls were actually raped in the making of those comics, those cartoons, or this card game. That's ok then right?

Yes. Without equivocation, yes. It is okay. A thing that does not hurt anyone turns out not to hurt anyone.

I already talked about the moral panic over comic books. Maybe the one about D&D will be nearer and dearer to some people here. In the 80s, there was this idea that D&D would cause kids to kill themselves or each other. (For younger people, you've no doubt heard that video games supposedly do the same thing.) D&D was portrayed as the latest manifestation of black magic/satanism.

In the 90s, the language of identity politics became popularized. People who had never gone to anthropology or sociology classes became aware of phrases like "the objectification of women" for the first time. In those days, of course, people were extremely skeptical of the concept. Sexual harassment at the workplace? "Oh, she's just making a big deal out of nothing." Well, that "nothing" ended up costing millions in the courts. And so business started taking it seriously and they demanded that their employees take it just as seriously. But a HR policy isn't the same thing as actually understanding feminism.

In 2012, our popular culture only has a "HR policy level" of understanding feminism. Saying that Tentacle Bento is yet another facet of the oppression of women is exactly like saying that D&D is "witchcraft" or "satanism" (in the pejorative sense). People thought that D&D spoke to some kind of real immorality and they were just as serious about it as we are about women's rights. And yet all that seriousness still didn't make D&D about "satanism." It all boiled down to some simplistic associations: D&D books mention spells and demons -- sounds like satanism to me, yessir! Tentacle Bento has attractive anime girls and tentacles -- of course, it must be objectification of women!

As to tentacle hentai: even explicit images of cartoon ladies being forcibly penetrated by space monsters is NOT actually hurting anyone (assuming it's out of the reach of kids). The people who say this kind of porn or any other kind is tearing down one aspect or another of our society are laboring under an uncritical and seemingly false association. It reminds me of people who say that gun ownership necessarily leads to higher crime rates. These kind of explanations are nice in that (1) they don't require much thought to understand, (2) they make very complex problems seem very manageable, and (3) they allow us to rail against things that we don't like anyway. But none of those factors make them any more accurate.

Your juggling of condescension and false equivalencies is impressive. My suggestion isn't that this card game is tearing down any aspect of our society, it's that this card game is contributing to a mind set that should be torn down. Your gun ownership analogy is more brilliant nonsense. Please explain to me how my stance makes a complex problem seem more manageable especially when set against your stance of "it doesn't cause any problems, you're wrong". That's a complex bit of thinking right there.

I just think this form of entertainment is damn creepy. Go date and/or have sex with real people, instead of simulating it.

plastictrees wrote:

Buzzsaw wrote:
It's a card game, and yes, it is harmless.

Or are you of the opinion that this movie is rank bigotry? I may not respect the opinion, but at least you would be consistent.

Edit: made the point even more obvious.

So your counter is to repeat that "it's a card game" and then reference a completely unrelated piece of actual parody? Yes, you have turned my world upside down.

Because Blazing Saddles is completely free from controversy. Always has been, of course. Everyone knows that.

I do like the intellectual bankruptcy here though: if you like it, it's a parody. If you don't it's another brick in the wall of oppression going all the way back to Eve and her apple.

Brother Gyoken wrote:

plastictrees wrote:

You keep saying this. I know your shtick is "no nonesense, telling it like it is", but you're being purposefully obtuse here. It's not "a card game". It's a card game directly referencing a genre that features girls being raped. Yes they are comics and cartoons. Yes, no actual girls were actually raped in the making of those comics, those cartoons, or this card game. That's ok then right? Unless the nonesense hyperbole of "won't someone think of all those poor girls being raped by aliens" is actually true then the only objections to the portrayal of that act must be hysterical political correctness, trolling, or white knighters (white knighting? Sorry, my dismissive internet vocab is rusty).

I think the "hysterical political correctness" or whatever you're being accused of comes from the fact this is a game that has not even a shred of reality attached to it. The monsters aren't realistic, the anime girls aren't realistic, there is a 0.0% chance of anyone being tentacle raped irl ever. This, in my mind, puts it way above the aforementioned "Pimp: The Backhanding", as human sex trafficking and forced prostitution are real and scary things. There are a TON of games that involve people being killed at war, or murdered otherwise. Those things happen in real life. Why are we not railing against those? According to that logic, it doesn't matter if a magic missile doesn't exist, we shouldn't be playing a game of it, no? By the way, eagerly looking forward to a snide dismissal from someone (not neccessarily you) on this point without a logical refutation.)

Let's be real for a second: tentacle hentai is stupid. Most people mock it. I feel this game was mocking it. I don't understand where a parody of a well-mocked genre suddenly becomes an example of that genre. Parody has long served as a way of pointing out flaws and ridiculousness of stupid things. I would guess the percentage of people that wanted this for arousal purposes to be less than 5 percent, though I obviously don't have real figures. It just seems relentlessly SILLY. I didn't even see a single piece of art where tentacle touched flesh, every piece seemed framed in a humorous way.

There was a recent controversy in Magic The Gathering over a piece of card art. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=239962 I was actually on the side of feeling this art was in poor taste. Despite having magic in the woman's hand, he's physically dominating her, hand around her throat. He's at least 3 times as big as she is, and he has his knee between her legs in a penatrative stance. This is a pose that can and has been used to abuse women in real life. That is why I was upset with it and I can understand how it could trigger victims of sexual or domestic abuse.

NO ONE will be triggered by pictures of anime girls or lurking tentacles.

It's one thing to not like something. But to claim a clear parody of a pretty gross genre is glorifying it is pretty silly.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

plastictrees wrote:So your counter is to repeat that "it's a card game" and then reference a completely unrelated piece of actual parody? Yes, you have turned my world upside down.

"It's a card game" is a stupid argument to make, but he's not too far off with the Blazing Saddles reference. it's as clear a parody of racism as TB is of Tentai (is that a word? I claim it if not!) I doubt a black person will watch Blazing Saddles and be offended over the scene as it's clearly a spoof of actual racism.

I would genuinely need someone to explain to me how TB actually constitutes a parody, other than them saying it is one and not actually showing sexual acts.

As far as the "reality" thing goes, I agree that it explains why people find complaints about it to be absurd. I don't agree that it has no impact as a result of being based on an unrealistic premise, it's just easier to dismiss.

AegisGrimm wrote:I just think this form of entertainment is damn creepy. Go date and/or have sex with real people, instead of simulating it.

I agree. But sometimes a job needs doing properly

Seriously, if someone can actually 'get off' with a cartoon of this nature then they are far too easily pleased.