Metal Gear The Soild Ground Pains Zero Five Rising The Backdown

[Overcast]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

...But sticking in a bomb in her vagina?!?
That doesn't add anything to the conversation, it's just sexually degrading because "Paz is a woman, therefore let's put the bomb in her lady-parts!"
I mean, from a plot perspective the bomb could be anywhere, even outside her body, and so long as it goes off and kills her, it serves that narrative function.
I mean, imagine the narrative equivalent if Paz simply changed genders. No writer's going to put a bomb in a man's urethra. It's stupid.

I know the whole concept is a little strange on its own, but I will say that there is a great deal less room and elasticity in the male urethra to put bomb material. You'd do one better to put it in their rectum, which is also the preferred area to rape a man at.

Oh and that has actually been done, I didn't know that till you inspired me to look it up. It is actually one of the only known incidents of body cavity bomb.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_al-Asiri

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

Of course the female character who's tortured is going to be reduced to a sex object! Of course she's going to be raped! Of course we're going to explicitly reduce her to her genitals! Of course she's going to be tortured more severely than the boys!!!

Historically yeah. I mean sure male rape in war has also been considered somewhat regular as well, but women for longest time were considered one of the many spoils of war. In the hypermasculine presence of soldiery this kind of thing has kept up to the modern day even as we have written laws forbidding it. Take into account that the setting of this game is a black operations center in a prison where we extradite people whom we don't want to include under constitutional laws and is under occupation by a military force that doesn't qualify for Geneva protection you are looking at the darkest side of pseudowar. It is practically ancient times, no law but power applies here.

From what I'm getting from others since I can't personally play this game due to my lack of a system, this is all implemented in a fashion that is ultimately not done in a fashion that glorifies all this. It presents it. That is the kind of thing that I ended up getting from Spec Ops, and if the same is being done here then even if there is a small suspension of disbelief needed then what they want it is for you to digest the atrocity. Recognize it, and find your opinion.

I'd like to play it so I can get a better view of the matter, but it seems like for want of one detail you aren't even willing to do that much. Which I think is somewhat disheartening, especially considering how hard of an opinion you are setting forth.

I feel like you should go in neutral and try to give it a chance to sicken you personally. See for yourself if any of this foolishness has the value you say you want tied to something like this. Then hating it seems a lot more presentable.

[Jagos]

This just doesn't feel like Kojima's actually condemning misogyny, though.

That's not his job. All that's happening here is that he's presenting what happens on the battlefield. Female soldiers can be like Boss or they can come out mad like the members of the Beauty and the Beast unit. A battlefield isn't sunshine and roses and if you want real life stories, there are indeed ones about how the US double taps civilians while Iraqis left bombs in fecal matter.

It feels more like Kojima's relying upon the thin excuse of "War is Hell" to include degrading moments that just don't add any value.

You may not like the value there but this isn't a story that's holding back from what's been presented. It's not holding your hand and if you thought war was hell before, it's about to get worse now. The value is in presenting a game that's actually going to present some very unpleasant things and take a lot more risks with its story than what's been presented before.

Sure, we've had child prostitutes, and unlikable characters. But this is something that I doubt movies are even doing thanks to sticking to a set WWII style formula which doesn't seem to be Kojima's intent.

You can't just dismiss it simply because you don't like the premise.

I haven't played Ground Zeroes, so I don't know whether Kojima used the proper tone and tenor of conveying this information to the gamer, but if the right writers and game designers show appropriate deference while tackling the subject matter, it can be really eye-opening for a predominantly male audience to be confronted with a truly hideous side-effect of war that's rarely explored in a medium that tends to merely celebrate rampant acts of chaos.

Snake... There will never be a right tone. Art and games are subjective. There's no deference to the subject matter. He's presenting a story, he's interpreting it in his way, and you either have to accept that story, or move on. If you want to make a story yourself and avoid these issues, you can do so. But that's the way he's choosing to make this story. He decided on your spoiler there. He decided that this unmoves you as a player. That killing 500 soldiers is nothing but when you see what happens to a woman in such a manner, it shocks you and makes you think twice.

That doesn't add anything to the conversation, it's just sexually degrading because "Paz is a woman, therefore let's put the bomb in her lady-parts!"

I mean, from a plot perspective the bomb could be anywhere, even outside her body, and so long as it goes off and kills her, it serves that narrative function.

You've just defeated your argument. A bomb outside the body is easily defused and dealt with. One inside the body, with no anesthetic, in a battlefield, is not. Then to have a second bomb as a sort of "double tap" serves the purpose of showing you an unnerving truth about the enemy here.

No writer's going to put a bomb in a man's urethra.

Yes. They stick it up his ass or have a crazy person put the bomb in their stomach. Batman did one part just to show you the type of people Joker brings to him.

It's unfortunate because there's actually topics MGSV is exploring that I want more video games to explore, more games absolutely need to take lessons from Spec Ops and try to tackle the harsh, ugly realities of what war is really like as opposed to glossing it up for an audience.

And just as much, they turn down games like Fall of Fallujah to ignore an actual soldier's experiences. And if the Beauty and the Beast unit didn't clue people in, there's a lot to explore with the fragility of people in games, sex be damned.

But there's a way to do that without delving into unnecessary levels of misogynistic sexual depravity.

That's entirely subjective and no one knows "just the right amount" to avoid sensibilities and sensitivities. The point is to knock you on your ass and realize that you feel something for this character. She didn't deserve this but this is what Fate gave her and it was a bad hand. Hell, I just finished the Phoenix Wright series and it's amazing what that story has in terms of murder plots and how people react to such a thing. It's believeable, and it's a lot more than just Phoenix Wright screaming "Objection" yet it's rated T for Teen.

And the problem when the envelope is pushed too far is that you're left wondering whether a particular depraved scene or a particular discomforting plot twist is present because the writer's making an unambiguous statement against that conduct, or if the writer isn't trying to have his cake and eat it too, relying upon a generic Anti-War message to provide moments of depravity for the audience that reinforce regressive norms and tropes.

Snake, if you're taking an "anti-war" message out of this, that's on you. You're rambling about something which is an assumption of Kojima's work and not based in the reality of the world he's presenting. I'm not here to interpret Kojima's vision and think that's nonsense actually, but it's pretty apparent that you don't want to deal with these issues and this seems more like trying to sidestep it for something that is more along the lines of being the norm you're used to versus facing the fictional reality he's presenting. Yes, "War is Hell". A woman can be abused on the battlefield. A man can be raped. Bombs can be hidden inside you and if you don't find them, you can die. For every action, there's a reaction.

And a story can indeed be uncomfortable and try to elicit emotions by throwing you off-kilter and presenting unpleasant events in a fictional setting.

Of course the female character who's tortured is going to be reduced to a sex object! Of course she's going to be raped! Of course we're going to explicitly reduce her to her genitals! Of course she's going to be tortured more severely than the boys!!!

Somehow, I highly doubt that if a male character was given poison in his urethra, a bomb in his ass, or something even close to exposing how disposable men in fictional setting are, you'd care.

Maybe that's why the idea of a female soldier being mutilated 20 ways from Sunday elicits that response. Maybe that's what he was going for. Just like how using a child soldier to commit the torture makes us think twice about how screwed up this world is.

Maybe that's the reason he did this... Just a thought.

[greed]

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

It's not realistic. It's stupid. It's exploitative. And it's stupid. I don't play MGS for THE GRIM DARK GRIM DARKNESS OF THE FUTURE 1970s. I play it for goofing around and fighting giant robots and weird super humans. Kojima can go fuck himself, this game is pathetic and creepy.

It's a fucking vagina bomb and loads of gratuitous rape, don't dress it up as an intelligent statement about the horrors of war. It's hack job of a good series. The best I can think of Kojima after this is he's back to trying to force Konami to give him something else to do again. But honestly I think it's just him being creepy.


Hope nothing like this creeps into Rising 2.

honestly between this and the creepy as rat scene in Witch and 100 Knights that really interrupted my enjoyment of that game it's been a bad month for creepy sex things in games. At least all Dark Souls had in that area was the hilarious magical coffin of wonder.

[Jagos]

Originally Posted by greed

It's a fucking vagina bomb and loads of gratuitous rape, don't dress it up as an intelligent statement about the horrors of war. It's hack job of a good series. The best I can think of Kojima after this is he's back to trying to force Konami to give him something else to do again. But honestly I think it's just him being creepy.

If you read what I said as an "intelligent statement of war" you misread.

[Overcast]

I'm willing to meet you half way here greed since I haven't played it yet and am pretty open to being persuaded if you could give me a clearer image about what in the presentation is driving you off the deep end with ughs. Was it the somewhat ridiculous presence of that vagina bomb? Is the rape shown in game directly in front of you so that it is obviously in some way fetishistic and exploitative? Do you just not like it present at all in games you play? It is a pretty common line so I can get that.

My boyfriend for example says that Pixar films are exploitative because they actively chase after triggers to make you cry before moving to a happier ending as a means to garner positive acclaim. When you use exploitative are you saying that the presence of the rape and such is only in there to create the psychological response some of the other people who played the game are having?

I only ask because I really do want to know your input, and your reality check post didn't really get it across as much as I'd like and I feel like you do have something you want to say clearly about all this.

[Krylo]

I think all the 'it's making a statement' stuff would have more weight if this wasn't something Kojima did in highly sexualized ways, like, all the time.

I mean, once or twice you might go horror of war or whatever, but when he's torturing and sexualizing tortured women in pretty much every MGS game I think we can pretty much just say it's Kojima's fetish.

[BitVyper]

Literally makes bosses whose emotional trauma makes them do sexy poses and try to make out with you to death. But only after you strip off (most of) their clothes by beating them up so that they're disempowered. Gives you an easter egg that lets you look under the clothes of a 16 year old warzone survivor. Has an entire sequence of play that exists for the express purpose of letting you watch Emma squirm about in discomfort.

[Bells]

so, it's already pretty obvious we are in spoiler territory, so if anybody wants to experience this by themselves before putting their minds to rationalize this, i suggest bailing out of the thread from now on...

just to keep the conversation concise i'm going to limit my own comments to just say a few things... first on the basis of the reality of the scenario:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surgica...plosive_device

Then, @Greed and @overcast i don't think playing the game would change your opinions. Honestly. i'm pretty sure you guys would still think the same way as you do right now... albeit perhaps a bit polished. by reading your comments after playing it, to me at least, it seems you guys understand what is in there, but you lack a layer of ''polish'' to the context.... your mind if filling blanks on something you heard about. Again, i don't think that playing the game is going to change that... but if you have any curiosity of the context to the scenes i'm going to suggest you guys to NOT look at Let's Plays of it on youtube, but instead... look for the audio logs.

here is one you get when you beat the game



This is the method in wich any and all agression to any character in this game is delivered. You never see a SINGLE visual scene or mistreatment, it's all audio only and text only...

and for whatever value you make of any of Kojima's depiction of female roles in his spy and war stories... my mind always goes back to the nudget of fact that ''any women i saw suffering in any capacity in a MGS game were able, capable, and sometimes more able and more capable than some of the men you engage directly in the game'' ...i honestly can't assess on my own if this has any real weight in a larger figure, but the consistency of my perception of this stuck with me for now...

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Originally Posted by greed

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

It's not realistic. It's stupid. It's exploitative. And it's stupid. I don't play MGS for THE GRIM DARK GRIM DARKNESS OF THE FUTURE 1970s. I play it for goofing around and fighting giant robots and weird super humans. Kojima can go fuck himself, this game is pathetic and creepy.

It's a fucking vagina bomb and loads of gratuitous rape, don't dress it up as an intelligent statement about the horrors of war. It's hack job of a good series. The best I can think of Kojima after this is he's back to trying to force Konami to give him something else to do again. But honestly I think it's just him being creepy.


Hope nothing like this creeps into Rising 2.

honestly between this and the creepy as rat scene in Witch and 100 Knights that really interrupted my enjoyment of that game it's been a bad month for creepy sex things in games. At least all Dark Souls had in that area was the hilarious magical coffin of wonder.

At the end of the day, I can understand why you and many others are upset about this. there's a common miss understanding that MGS was this funny comical series that never really was suppose to be Dark. except it's was likely always meant to be a serious story. But poor execution lead to a huge miss understanding on that part for many fans.

So for fans like that, this game and a few others is a pretty big shock.

[Solid Snake]

I just don't understand why "a grim look at war" requires the inclusion of brazenly misogynistic story elements.

You can have a grim, depressing, "War Sucks" story thematically with a female character who's a living, breathing person and not just a sexualized, disempowered victim or a conventionally attractive, woefully underdressed pinup doll. Kohima achieved just that in MGS3 with The Boss, and while she wasn't implemented perfectly, her whole storyline was basically "War Sucks, my life was ruined by war, but I'm not just here as some object for men to claim and kill and fight over."

You can tell a story about war being awful -- you can even have a story where the undue consequences of war against women are gracefully explored. You can't do that in the same game where your protagonist has an inappropriate date with an underage girl. You can't do that in the same game where one of your female characters is deliberately wearing hardly any clothing and heavily advertised to an audience of predominantly teenage boys. You can't do that and simultaneously try to court the men in your audience who are attracted to your game precisely because it depicts women in sexually degrading ways. You can't try a serious, grim commentary on rape and abuse in the same series that also frequently shows **the protagonist** ogling his female costars, staring at their breasts, and viewing them as sexual conquests.

There's just basically a disconnect there that makes MGS the wrong kind of series to include rape in a storyline, because it fetishizes so much else about women and the story's so comedic and over-the-top ridiculous that the audience basically dives in anticipating more juvenile humor. If MGS always had a more consistently serious tone, like Spec Ops did, maybe it'd all feel less jarring. As is, Kojima's most respectful move would be to avoid the subject entirely, and insofar as he might actually desire a feminist commentary, the best he can do given his series' history is to write more women with agency who aren't sex objects like The Boss.

MGS is a crazy ass ludicrous narrative with bee-superpowers and mind-readers and nuclear equipped mechs and NANOMACHINES and clones. It is a fantasy series that takes a lot of fantastical liberties and it's a great place to show empowered women, not so much to explore why they're disempowered and victimized in reality.

EDIT: TLDR Version: Kojima's fucked up too many times in the past for him to be trusted handling these kinds of themes maturely, so instead of even trying if Kojima really did want to try a theme that'd have a positive impact from a social justice perspective he should've just stuck to trying to write female characters in his fantastical storylines with agency. Less of every woman in the series who wasn't The Boss, and more female characters like The Boss. Get rid of the awful costumes and awful developments in the series that sexualize women, and concentrate on making them people in a cohesive anti-war narrative.

That'd at least be a start.