Obsidian accused of transmisogyny in Pillars of Eternity

[Pinky's Brain]

there's no real "contract" that you seem to think that there is

Hahaha ... you have never actually read the Kickstarter Terms of Use have you? If you did you'd know they contradict almost every sentence you wrote. Obsidian entered into an (implied in fact) contract with their backers, refunding is not an available option to back out of that contract.

If the backer had contracted them to do something legally obscene it would make the contract invalid, but as I said it's not obscene.

Kickstarter provides a funding platform for creative projects. When a creator posts a project on Kickstarter, they?re inviting other people to form a contract with them. Anyone who backs a project is accepting the creator?s offer, and forming that contract.

When a project is successfully funded, the creator must complete the project and fulfill each reward.

 

[BoogieManFL]

At least it rhymed nicely.. It's a game, boo hoo. Deal with it. Would I have let that through? No, because I wouldn't want to deal with someone complaining about it.


Eh.. No one cares about free speech if they can complain about it and get publicity.

Is it really Misogyny? I don't think so, not really.. I would be traumatic if you ended up getting in bed with a gender you weren't going for. So it's cool for a transgender or what have you to be deceptive and seduce someone under false pretenses? In that situation, it does NOT matter what gender you self identify as if you're presenting yourself intimately as something you technically are not. If that someone is not comfortable with that, then you're not any better than someone committing adultery or being a sexual predator.

That's more of an issue here than anything here in my opinion..

 

[Raddra]

Josh Sawyer, game designer at Obsidian, said the producers of the game are looking into the content. So this random Twitter persons opinion is actually being taken seriously, which is a shame.

I wouldn't say its a shame. twitter is a great tool for sharing information.

I think twitter posts should be taken seriously. But I do not think anything should be done in this case. This is hardly offensive, its evidently just a joke, and I say that as a pansexual man. In the words of Rowan Atkinson 'we have to be allowed to insult one another'.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Oh for fuck's sake...
Depicting something is not the same as supporting it!

Otherwise, hey look Nintendo supports animal cruelty with how many chickens Link kicks!
Valve supports cis-gender roles by having Gordon Freeman as a man!
Bungie supports violence against women when Cat/Noble 2 died!


Seriously, when did we games get such thin skin? Is this simply more of tumblr bleeding over into things?

 

[Cerebrawl]

I recognize that particular SJW from twitter, a true devotee to the church of the perpetually offended, a cultist who brooks no heresy and will block you if you say one word of disagreement.

Another frontline useful idiot in the war on gamers, and western civilization, a true champion of cultural marxism.

 

[Pr0]

I think the problem with this, all jokes aside, is that people cannot be held legally liable for slander/libel on Twitter.

And Twitter also has very few moderation rules, so unlike most internet forums where a moderator can immediately go...this person is a troll attempting to create a fight for their own benefit, nothing ever happens to people like this and its up to the internet at large to just put this person on mental ignore.

Now in 99% of cases thats easy enough to do, but here you have the perfect storm of a trolls bread and butter...you have a highly reviewed new PC game that a lot of people are playing...you have a mild piece of humor which, if you tilt your head sideways and think about it really hard...it might be offensive, if you really try, and then you have an audience.

So the troll can just say whatever, and immediately get a huge feedback loop because of all the people currently investing time in the game.

And its not the troll or the people that start the troll trending that have to bear the weight of the damage to a potential intellectual property, its Obsidian, who then either has to kowtow to this crazy asshat thats turned up one hit tweet out of nine million other laughable duds, or they have to waste time acknowledging the persons "concerns".

You should be able to sue people for shit they say on Twitter.

 

[MetalShadowChaos]

Ok, sorry to disappoint people but that isn't a trans joke. That's a cross-dressing joke. 'Turned out a man', I.E. 'turned out to be a man', that's a man dressing up as a woman to seduce a man, which is deceiving someone for sex, which is not ok.

Yes, if it WAS transphobic, and indeed if it turns out to be INTENDED as transphobic by the backer, then fuck it with a barbed rake. But, and this is a big BUT, it has nothing to do with anything transgender based on what is seen. So calm down. Ask the backer who posted about it and until then, calm the fuck down.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

If they remove it now, that's a violation of their kick starter agreement.

Does that mean such a move would be illegal? Is kick starter a contract?

Also, I find it ironic people who disagree post this tweet in forums which help make some random offended person famous so more offended people can join in, allowing this guy to become ever more powahful.

 

[Skatologist]

Oh this is fun. Turns out the twitter user who initially discovered this and kickstarted this controversy is an outright misandrist who says that men should be holocausted for... being men?

Spoiler

I dunno about you, but these comments seem a lot more inflammatory than a short poem that may or may not have been about someone transsexual.

Oh the misandry card. Haven't seen that in a while.

Seriously, ironically saying something like that is misandry? Quit propagandizing here, keep it in KiA, 8chan, or the megathread. Besides, I've see much more leveled at this person in the last hour in earnest than she's probably said ironically in her life. She didn't even "start" this, followers of her went to Obsidian with her tweet to "start" this, she just passively agreed and got dogpiled with mounds of shit.

And you're offended? So what. I don't care if you're offended and neither should obsidian. Perhaps you just WANT to be offended.

Here's the thing, no one wants to be offended by anything, no more than they want to be afraid of something or wants to find something attractive.

And Mars also never said she was offended to any large extent. Also, why shouldn't Obsidian care about any potential customers not liking content in their game? Aren't you now the one dictating what they should or should not think?

And a game dev also said they're looking it over on whether or not the want this in. And the backer, as far as I know, isn't angry right now. What if they don't even care if the joke was pulled? What you going to then Ziggy? Are you going to complain about those poor artists who actually didn't give half a fuck about an easter egg being taken out?

No, I'm pretty sure that cisplaining about trans stuff is wrong because its, you know, cisplaining.

Cisplaining is an actual word now? Lol. Yeah, I'm cis. I'm male. I'm heterosexual. Guess what, I'm white too. Does that offend you to the point I'm not entitled to an opinion now?

IDK. Have you now ever supported an argument that basically was "since these people aren't gamers/haven't played this game, their opinion on x game is irrelevant"? Seems like pretty similar logic. Are they not entitled to an opinion because they are "unaffected" by something?

 

[Silence]

Since Jim Sterling posted this:

Jim Sterling ‏@JimSterling 23 Min
So Tim Schafer makes a joke with a sock and it's an outrage, but a joke about a subject that's gotten trans people murdered is just lols.

on Twitter, I will now try to find out how many people got killed because of this joke. Or something similar.

Someone has sources?

(Btw: He retweeted it, and he has a huge audience, so he is partly responsible for the answer this tweet got. Which makes me kind of confused - he should really know what most people think of that.)

 

[Pinky's Brain]

You do know what a legal contract is, right?

If you think you know better than me that's fine, we're just retards arguing on the internet (oh noes, I'm being ableist) so if that was all your odds are pretty good ... but the text I quoted is directly from the Kickstarter Terms of Use.

Kickstarter provides a funding platform for creative projects. When a creator posts a project on Kickstarter, they're inviting other people to form a contract with them. Anyone who backs a project is accepting the creator's offer, and forming that contract.

I know Kickstarter's legal department agrees with me ... so I'm pretty sure I won this race.

 

[Redryhno]

Wait, people are actually offended by this? The joke is just as much(if not more) on the guy going around nailing everything that moves as it is on the guy he slept with. If you're going to be offended by it, then I reserve the right to be offended by everyone wanting it removed as it is slut-shaming and wanting his magnificent bedroom skills hidden from the world, and as we all know, that is the most egregious of actions in a civilized world! I mean, it's not like we're all prudes here are we?

And guess what? They could've just been really drunk and mistaken one another, it could easily have literally nothing to do with trans issues. There's nothing to suggest it's transphobic beyond somebody looking for a reason to get upset over it. I mean, the guy went and killed himself, he didn't kill the one he slept with after all, wouldn't transphobia involve the guy killing the person he slept with and then ripping off skirts to make sure for the rest of his paranoid life or something?

Also, cisplaining? Take your transplaination wannabe....I've run out of equally as silly words to use here. Just call it what it is you really want to say, someone that doesn't agree with you that you want to attack on the basis of them presumably being born different from you and not their argument or method of getting the idea across.

Oh wait...that sounds like something I've heard around here before, but I can't quite remember the word used...anyone wanna help me out?

 

[rcs619]

The name of the thread is misleading. Obsidian were not accused of transmysoginy (I'm pretty sure transphobia is the word we are looking for) but of not preventing it. Not the same thing. Also, a tweet somebody sent is not a big deal, I think. I don't know who this is, but one person being upset by a poem in a game doesn't strike me as something relevant to gaming in general.

About the complaint. The joke assumes to be speaking of a heterosexual cisgendered male, yes. I didn't think it was about transgenders though but rather about a person really drunk who thought he was with a woman but turned out to be with a man. That might make it homophobic but even that isn't explicit. The charactar described was ashamed but it isn't stated clearly of what. It's crude and the author could probably have expected somebody somewhere to respond like this, but to interpret it as transphobic is to interpret beyond what is literally said.

Now I don't know much about the game, but it seems to be some sort of fantasy medieval sorta deal. So we're talking about a relatively light-hearted bit of verse, set in a fantasy medieval world. ...Made up worlds and cultures aren't going to necessarily have the same sorts of values as ours, and a company or author having people in-setting express those sorts of views doesn't automatically mean that they share of support them. What, are we going to start getting pissed off at George R. R. Martin for all of the terrible things some of his characters say about dwarves too while we're at it?

This is just dumb. Can we save the outrage for actual issues and actual cases of discrimination or intolerance please?

 

[Uratoh]

So what does it mean if I'm trans and find that poem hillarious?

 

[kael013]

This is just complete nonsense. The current sociopolitical censorship rush reminds me alot of Soviet Russia where the people had to toe the party line or be labeled enemies.

So in that line of thinking, I've edited the poem. Maybe the extremists will like it better:

Here lies Firedorn, our levelest head
He once was alive, but now he's dead
He wrote something the mob didn't find right
and, hounded, he disappeared one night

 

[Pr0]

Apparently someone didn't read the possible side effects label on their chosen HRT dosage.

"label on their chosen HRT dosage"

Please continute tell me how much you know about trans issues when you clearly don't even know what HRT is.

Please continue to make a spectacle of yourself for the purposes of self exposure. Cause I frankly don't care what you think.

Its a medical fact that hormone therapy can have serious effects on neurological states and moods. I don't much care if I'm using the wrong acronym nor am I going to get in a fight with you about it. Call it happy pills if you want, hormone therapy affects peoples moods and it has an even broader affect on people that weren't emotionally stable in the first place...which to be fair, is a lot of people...not just transgender people.