Poll: So Castle Crashers was awesome -- until it forced me into being a lecherous jerkface

[Worgen]

well shit whatever you do, don't play Battle Block Theatre, you can push cats in to water. Would hate for you to go on another pointless tirade.

Dude, don't be a prick, how would you feel if after beating the last boss in gears of war you suddenly had a scene with Dom and Marco fucking each other in the butt?

What the fuck is wrong with you people? She encountered a situation that kind of came out of no where and made her uncomfortable and you shitheads are just pilling crap on her? WHY!?

You don't even seem to try and understand what is bugging her about this, you just assume she wants to take away your videogames.

Nice false equivalence. If that happened it would be really out of place. If there was foreshadowing or it fit with the themes, go ahead. But in a game where the plot has no dialogue, there is a character who's magic spell is shooting rainbows and a bow and arrow with hearts on. A lightsaber. A fish sword. Your armoury is inside a giant frog staked to the ground. Rocket faeces propelled deer. a lollipop sword. Clowns. at what point would you expect any kind of justification or deep plot?

It wouldn't be that out of place, it would be a parody of the typical macho character in movies and games, it would fit right in, or if that still doesn't do it for you, throw in in broforce, that's an over the top game. Have Brobocop and the Bronator pounding each other in the butt at the end other at the end of a level and you have to control them doing to it to determine who gets to be on top or bottom or whatever.

It's not the point that its a wacky game, the point is that it made the op uncomfortable to suddenly have to kill her teammate for a kiss from a girl when she decided to identify her character as female also, which she could do since they are fully armored. And the reason this thread pisses me off is because so many of the responses are just shit heads passive aggressively insulting her and her not liking that part. If you don't agree with her then just say you don't agree, don't fucken insult the op or try and justify it since its silly, that's a shitty defense.

 

[chadachada123]

Personally, I'm offended by your objections to lesbian characters in games and the fact that your username clearly shows your support of kidnapping and rape. Take this garbage to Jezabel and kotaku.

Dude, shut the fuck up. Have something to add, (and/or) READ THE POST, or get the fuck out.
Take YOUR garbage to your damn mom, or to 4chan.

But he's right. The OP was partially upset that her player character (who she made female, no biggie, I've done similar things to faceless characters) suddenly kissed a girl. Who...cares? You'd have to be pretty prejudiced to be offended by something not only trivial, but also really freaking unique (a female medieval lesbian knight).

Besides, if the OP knew much about medieval history, she'd know that this sort of attitude (treating women as those who must be courted by displaying your strength in battle) was quite common.

 

[Something Amyss]

Nice false equivalence. If that happened it would be really out of place. If there was foreshadowing or it fit with the themes, go ahead.

Gears of War is one of the most homoerotic games on the market. Dom and Marcus having sex made more sense than the Brokeback Mountain guys.

 

[Dalrien]

Well, people are very creative and sensitive in getting offended by a parody game...

Macarony and jesus!

 

[Bombiz]

well now I don't want to play this game. trying to stay away from stories in which the stakes are essentially a 1 dimensional character I care nothing about.

I find that games that don't have 1 dimensional characters usually have a bad/boring combat system.

OP: I think you're just reading too much into it. like right after you kill your fellow knight he appears right beside you in the next lvl.

Also I dont know what you expected from the Princess. The game wasn't setting her up yo be a perfect role model.

 

[persephone]

It's not that I object to lesbians in games. If I'd decided I was playing a lesbian or bisexual (which, for the record, I have done before, more than once, in other games), then that particular aspect wouldn't have bothered me. I almost regret bringing that part up, given it was rather secondary to the rest of the post. It wasn't about the lesbianism, anyway, it was about the game giving me a blank character then dictating that character was a lecherous, selfish person (and a man).

I hadn't thought of the scene as satire or parody, but now that enough people have pointed it out, I can sort of see their point. Yes, that attitude was common in medieval times, but ... if you play it completely straight, is it really a parody? Cause I saw no levels of parody or satire there, I just saw it being played straight. If the woman had, say, rolled her eyes before going along with it, or at least been briefly disgusted at the fighting, or there had been some kind of wink or nod in there that indicated some kind of parody, it would've been a lot easier to swallow. But it was simply a straightforward, "here is your woman, she is a mindless prize with boobs, fight over her and whoever wins gets her."

I can also see people's points about the game not being deep, but I wasn't expecting (or even wanting) anything deep, honestly. I was just expecting the game to not trivialize women. That's not about depth or a good plot, that's about basic common sense. That should be a given.

Still, it was a serious gut punch, and in my case at least, it wasn't effective as parody/satire at all. The next time my sister and I play Castle Crashers, I plan to just give up at the end and let her win, because I don't want to fight my teammates in a context like that. Or go smooch a mindless woman-prize.

 

[shintakie10]

well shit whatever you do, don't play Battle Block Theatre, you can push cats in to water. Would hate for you to go on another pointless tirade.

Dude, don't be a prick, how would you feel if after beating the last boss in gears of war you suddenly had a scene with Dom and Marco fucking each other in the butt?

What the fuck is wrong with you people? She encountered a situation that kind of came out of no where and made her uncomfortable and you shitheads are just pilling crap on her? WHY!?

You don't even seem to try and understand what is bugging her about this, you just assume she wants to take away your videogames.

If they weren't so roided up I'd actually be really down with that. Like if they looked about the size of the first Carmine? Mmmm...sexy. Totally out of place, but still sexy.

 

[Bombiz]

I can also see people's points about the game not being deep, but I wasn't expecting (or even wanting) anything deep, honestly. I was just expecting the game to not trivialize women. That's not about depth or a good plot, that's about basic common sense. That should be a given.

This isn't an excuse but when Castle Crashers was released feminism in gaming wasn't really a thing and there wasn't that much of a discussion about not trivializing women in the gaming industry.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

I'm not going to sit here and say that you aren't allowed to be upset over how this game portrays women, but I think you need to think about the context of the game before you get upset about it.

Castle Crashers is a silly/cartoony take on medieval fantasy. It's poking fun at the kind of old school medieval fantasy where women were considered prizes to be won by the big strong manly man, and where all a man had to do to prove his worth is be manly. The whole thing about the woman being a mindless prize and ready to fall in love with whoever is the winner that's meant to be a joke.

As far as the whole thing about comrades in arms being ready to kill each other over a woman at a moment's notice, that's also historically a part of medieval fantasy. If I'm remembering the King Arthur legend correctly (and there's a good chance I'm not), at one point Arthur almost kills Lancelot after finding out that Lancelot has been having an affair with Guinevere, but Lancelot escapes and that event is what begins the decline of the knights of the round table. So again, I'd say this sequence where the two castle crasher knights are fighting over a woman is just a joke about medieval fantasy.

If it is meant to be a joke, what is the joke and why is it funny?

 

[Dalrien]

Rolling your eyes in disguist is the rather modern Day approach and i doubt Many princesses act like they do in the movies when a burly man displays himself, if we are talking historical accuracy but whatever works for you.

Does diminsh the pvp part of the game, sadly.

 

[persephone]

I guess someone is missing the point of the game making a parody if the Double Dragon ending.

I can't even validate the anger, I mean, the issues you complain about is legitimate, but the place you decided to look for something to pick on is beyond logic.

It's like getting mad at Team America for its portrayal of Muslims instead of I don't know, CoD 4.

 

[Weaver]

Castle Crashes is not an RPG. I think it's entirely fallacious to just randomly allot an entire backstory, personality and even sexual identity to what is a reskinned avatar then get upset when they game fails to adhere to a narrative you literally just made up in your head.

 

[briankoontz]

Would or should this be upsetting? Does this upset other gamers, or am I just overreacting?

This has upset me for 20 years, so I'm used to it. As an apparent first-timer, I welcome you to the club.

Here's something to think about - you know the knight who goes off to kill the dragon, one of the basic impetuses for the entire RPG genre of video games? There's typically a princess being rescued in the deal, and despite these being marketed as "kids games" the underlying assumption is that the princess is not so much being rescued as being married off to whoever is "manly" enough to claim her. In this misogynistic ecosystem the dragon is a GOOD thing because it allows knights to display their manly bravery and the resultant claiming of the sexual prize. It hardly matters that countless peasants die to the dragon prior to (and also after in cases where the knight doesn't kill the dragon) the knight getting around to getting his rocks off. Peasants are expendable - the knight and princess are what matters. Mario is merely a sadistic frustrated twist on this - he rescues the princess repeatedly but never gets any sexual reward. Mario doesn't let anything get in his way, certainly not the denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom who he routinely murders en route to achieving his goal, because once again the peasants are irrelevant while Knight Mario and Princess Peach are what matters. It's even worse, because the peasants are redefined as "monsters" since they have the audacity to attempt to slow down the monomaniacal Mario for one millisecond.

What's even more disturbing is that geeks and nerds in particular are drawn to this kind of virtual fantasy - geeks and nerds being partly defined especially in prior times as having a poor physique of one kind or other (weak or fat). So human beings with poor physiques love playing as the buff knight who claims a high-class (literally) sexual prize through mostly physical prowess - they have no problem redefining peasants as monsters and then murdering those peasants in order to get better at murdering so that finally the end boss can be murdered and the sexual prize claimed. What the peasants think of being demonized and murdered in order for a sociopathic prick calling himself a "hero" to get his rocks off in a royal vagina is never considered - there's no purpose in considering it.

Those of us who have been pointing this and similar things out for many years are acutely aware that pointing it out doesn't matter, or at least it matters to the equivalent of throwing a stone in an ocean. Gamers would much rather ignore reality and proclaim their moral and intellectual superiority to the "Christian fanatics" saying "Dungeons and Dragons is satanic", Jack Thompson and his "murder simulators", and Anita Sarkeesian and her feminist buffoonery.

Why be honest with oneself, take criticism to heart, and make improvements to oneself when one can hoist up buffoons and proclaim them as WHAT MATTERS in gaming criticism? Why take the good, noble, strong route - you know, the route that supposedly *knights* routinely take when one can take the lazy, self-righteous, pathetic, back-handed, sad route of elevating buffoons?

 

[keinsignal]

It's not the point that its a wacky game, the point is that it made the op uncomfortable to suddenly have to kill her teammate for a kiss from a girl when she decided to identify her character as female also, which she could do since they are fully armored. And the reason this thread pisses me off is because so many of the responses are just shit heads passive aggressively insulting her and her not liking that part. If you don't agree with her then just say you don't agree, don't fucken insult the op or try and justify it since its silly, that's a shitty defense.

Yeah, the hostility is what I fail to understand. Mind you, it's not *surprising*. It is apparently to be assumed that when a woman says anything critical of a video game she's going to be called crazy, ignorant, shrill, overreacting, humorless, etcetera. I just can't relate to it. All that's being asked for here is that people, you know, *think* about this stuff sometimes (as opposed to, as the quote goes, "merely rearranging your prejudices".) This is not something that ought to invite outrage.

The larger point is the assumption built into so many games that the player is a straight male who is cool with the idea of treating women as prizes to be won... That this arrested-development archetype is the "default gamer", and no you don't get to change the settings. I'm happy to have more people challenging that idea, and frankly I'd be overjoyed to have more game developers thinking this stuff through and figuring out creative ways to be welcoming to all players (and by creative I mean don't do that stupid thing where you just swap the "knight" and "princess" characters and call it a day. I am looking at you, Super Meat Boy). Or, I guess they could just come out and admit that women are not, in fact, invited into the clubhouse and try to defend that position. I'll be over here with the bucket of popcorn.

I'm actually willing to give Castle Crashers a partial pass inasmuch as they're just goofing around with a well-worn trope... I wouldn't call it satire, but it certainly qualifies as over-the-top humor - it's intentionally stupid, so any message it sends can, I suppose, be treated as equally stupid. Story-wise, it doesn't want or pretend to be anything but a dumb, unquestioning repetition of cliché, lacquered over with a generous coating of anything-goes random wacky BS. But rather than falling back on intentional idiocy as a defense, I think a much more interesting conversation comes out of asking "how could this have been done *smart*?"

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

I mean, it's already a pretty silly game in a pretty silly world.

I don't think that anything there is supposed to be taken seriously, like the Panda knights or the Football Hooligan power-up.

If anything, the fight for a damsel in distress could be satirical, and since it's a game that it is intended to play with friends, it would be rather appropiate to end it with a fight to the death. Though if the prize was a hat, it'd have been more funnier(or at least, PC-specific).

 

[Asita]

I can also see people's points about the game not being deep, but I wasn't expecting (or even wanting) anything deep, honestly. I was just expecting the game to not trivialize women. That's not about depth or a good plot, that's about basic common sense. That should be a given.

Take a look at the rest of the game. The story and characters are sparse to the point that the latter are easily interchangeable with one another. Know those barbarians you beat in the first level? You can switch out your knight for them. You can also switch the knight for an alien, a bear, and a demon, among other things...and it doesn't affect anything other than your character's special attack. The characters are all trivial. It's a game built not on story, not on characters, but on combat and crass humor (One of the levels literally has a running gag of animals being so scared as to have explosive diarrhea...which even jet propels one of them). The kidnapping of the court ladies is an excuse plot and the kiss reward is an excuse for a pvp element. That's about the long and short of it.