#dickwolves

[arsnof]

Webcomics in the 2000s were this amazing force with which to be reckoned. Penny "Raping Dickwolves" Arcade as a media empire has had conventions on multiple continents. We waited YEARS for Piro to update and we threw parties when it happened. The Kurtz/Straub Mafia flexed its muscle. Mae Fucking Dean either owes me TWENTY DOLLARS or a BOOK.

And they all looked like either the PNCA newspaper's Sunday funnies OR something that would have sold well at Vertigo. It was the wiki wild west and the rolling plains and endless waves of Buffalo were a sight to be seen.

I go back to my daily folder now, it's like a mountain of skulls.

The modern Webtoons drive for content over comic is creating this conglomerate smear of homogeneity unseen since a Midwest Barnes and Noble manga section in 2015. I'm not making a moral judgment; I understand having to sell art for money, but it's an influencer insidiousness infiltrating the infrastructure. This is how you draw if you want to hit this market bracket. AI isn't cheating. Your first book is a million dollar kickstarter before update 3, which is a process page for a different project you're working on. The spreadsheet that shows when you eat, sleep, shit, and draw. Bleeding out your nose at your desk because the ramen had turned.

This isn't a 'CalArts sucks' post. It's nothing against the style. It's the commodifying and the packaging and the slave driving and what it means for the end product. Old webcomics were zines made at the library and traded at the laundromat. Now you can make your smart fridge pre-order the Reincarnated in Dungeon as My Sister's <rndm4> digital box set as you cry into your oatmeal because nobody knows what Buttlord is anymore.

Please keep drawing! Do it with your heart! Pay no attention to the follower count or likes. Do it for the love of the game and you'll find happiness. Peace and love, kids.

I was writing up a post to help encourage folks who’ve always wanted to start a webcomic to dive in- and that they shouldnt have to fear ‘being perfect’ to start one And as I was going along, it made me sad to realise that.. there is an expectation now in the webcomic sphere, as much as I want to deny it (and that it should NOT stop folks from creating!!! please keep creating, no matter your level) I’m bummed out about the changes in the webcomic sphere over the past 5 years, i’m disappointed that there has been changes to this medium that was KNOWN for all of the different skill levels and flavours of so many different creators. I want to combat that. I want to see more beginner art, I want to see that excitment and embracing of growth. I want to see what made webcomics so accessible to so many creators and readers flourish again. Hopefully, if you see this post, and you’ve always wanted to make a webcomic but felt you weren’t ‘good enough’ : Make one anyways. Have fun even if you don’t know all the ‘ins and outs’ of comics. Make one because you’re obsessed with your characters and you wanna share them with the world. Make one just because you can, and not because it has to fit in some impossible standard we’ve forced onto ourselves because of the changing landscape. Start one, and have fun doing it for YOU!

[blazehedgehog]

If you’re like me and were wondering why so many people were buzzing about Penny-Arcade last night without actually saying why, here’s your clarification. I have collected it in a format that makes it easier to read in chronological order (top to bottom), because he didn’t put it in to a thread or anything.

The maximum top level explanation is that Penny-Arcade was one of the biggest webcomics of the early 2000′s. They eventually parlayed it in to a corporate empire of video shows, podcasts, books, merchandising, a series of both video games and physical board games, and more. Most importantly, they created both the Child’s Play charity and PAX, the Penny-Arcade Expo. For a period around 2007-2011, they were a serious force to be reckoned with.

They were known for their crude humor but also taking game developers and publications to task for perceived injustices both in creating games and reporting on games.

This lead to the creation of The Penny-Arcade Report, their own gaming news publication. It was pitched as a smarter media outlet, one that didn’t need to rely on clickbait or backdoor deals in order to operate. They figured that a focus on quality would sell itself. The Penny-Arcade Report lasted just over a year before it shut down. It marked a big turning point for Penny-Arcade in general, where they backed away from the empirical aspirations of being a multimedia conglomerate and simply settled for just making webcomics and podcasts for the rest of their lives.

The Penny-Arcade Report was headlined by Ben Kuchera, a name I didn’t really like at the time. Dig in to some of my oldest posts on this blog and you’ll find a few where I yell about Ben Kuchera being pathologically wrong about a lot of things. However, in the years since then, I’ve had friends transition in to the games press, and I myself spent a long time at a niche game press site, so I have a little more sympathy for that kind of stuff now.

Especially with the above, where Ben Kuchera talks about how, even though Penny-Arcade talk a big game of “justice,” they were worse than many of the publications they made their targets. It started out as Kuchera ranting about the state of politics and how openly people lie and get away with lying, and it lead to the dam bursting about his time as the sole writer for The Penny-Arcade Report.

It’s not the first and probably won’t be the last time the creators of Penny-Arcade have been taken to task. Kuchera references “Dickwolves”, which happened around the time The Penny-Arcade Report was operational. The comic side of Penny-Arcade not only made a rape joke, but even tried to turn it in to a brand they could sell on shirts. People rightfully reacted poorly, which just made Jerry (”Tycho”) and, in particular, Mike (”Gabe”) dig in their heels until they were forced to remove the merchandise, something they later admitted regretting. These sorts of “I want to be offensive but I shouldn’t have to deal with consequences from the people I’ve offended” moments happened to Penny-Arcade more than once in the years following.

But if you were wondering, now you know.

[doctorweird]

Okay, I feel like it’s time to dig this up and confess that I legimitately found this joke funny. It sparked a massive controversey, which indeed was addressed with the comic’s usual glibness in the next strip, but both this and the response employ what is known as “refuge in audacity.”

Is real rape terrible and traumatic? Yes. Is the notion of a wolf-phallus hybrid which presumably exists exclusively to rape imprisoned miners for literally no reason, and which itself cannot logically exist, amusing to see alluded to without sarcasm or mitigating framework? Yes. Incongruity is a massive part of how humor works.

Obviously, one’s receptiveness to humor will vary with mood, and various stimuli affect people’s moods differently, but it’s impossible to ensure that literally nothing will upset some people too much for them to enjoy a joke, so we’re going to need either a plateau of understanding, or a world where nobody attempts humor anymore, and one of those sounds like a dystopia.

My only request is that you not cruxify me, I’m not religious.

[who-canceled-roger-rabbit]

"AIDSwolves" sounds like an even edgier and more inane successor to Penny Arcade's "dickwolves," but it's actually a piece of worldbuilding from Joke Karen Rowling

[lyinar]

IIRC, it also originally aired around the time Purity Culture managed to start slithering out into fandoms in general instead of being stuck in its larval form of "handful of deranged idiots screeching vitriol at webcomic artists for portraying things they view as wrong, never mind that the webcomic also very blatantly presents it as wrong".

Seriously, the Penny Arcade Dickwolves controversy was a precursor for most of the horrors we've seen in fandom since, and the original comic that sparked all that outrage relies on the reader finding rape to be abhorrent to make its point about what PCs in MMOs look like to the NPCs who get left behind when the player hits the quota for the quest.

So, the people who screamed their fucking heads off about "BLARGH YOU'RE ENCOURAGING RAPE CULTURE!" about something that I would argue (and Penny Arcade DID argue) relies on the exact opposite of that to make its point were emboldened enough to start going after other things.

The people who are infested with that mindset have absolutely no understanding of context, which is why they fucking screamed their heads off about "queerbaiting" when Legend of Korra ended the show with Korra and Asami holding hands without ever bothering to find out that it was literally the absolute most the showrunners could get away with.

And then the "Context is Anathema, artists always fully believe in everything they ever portray except when it comes to queer representation!" crowd went after Steven Universe in force. And instead of actually bothering to learn the lessons it taught, they marked targets and opened fire.

people discovering steven universe in 2023 are always like "this show is really good why the hell were yall so weird about it"

[thewebcomicsreview]

Not super sure you're the guy to be dismissively rreferring to someone else's poorly executed over the top hyperbolic comedy-evil joke like "dick wolves", Mr. Villian Burns A Child To Death For Laffs.

People say stupid shit all the time, and I’m no exception. To pick a comparable example, when Claire and Martin had the infamous “You’re Beautiful” strip in Questionable Content, I tagged it as “The Trappening”, which a lot of people got upset about, because using “trap” was transphobic.

The difference here is that when people came to me and said “Hey man don’t say thinks like that it’s transphobic”,  I went “Okay yeah that’s a reasonable request”, apologized, and edited the post to remove the tag

This is not how Penny Arcade reacted when people were upset by the Dickwolves strip. First they made posts with jokey Trigger Warnings, then they made a strip making a joke out of the reaction

Then they started selling Dickwolves shirts and pennants

And when the Penny Arcade store pulled the Dickwolves merch due to the controversy, Gabe said it was a mistake and wore the shirt to Pax, and then, a few year later at a different Pax, went on stage to say he regretted pulling the merchandise to a cheering crowd.

People say stupid shit all the time, it’s part of being human and let he who has not shitposted throw the first stone. But part of being an adult is realizing when you’ve done something hurtful to someone. And then you can either go “Sorry, I’ll fix it” or at least “I realize this is hurtful but I think it’s important to the art I’m trying to make and I understand if that makes you not want to read it” and maybe throw up a content warning.

What you don’t do is spend years making fun of the people you hurt, and sell a bunch of merch making fun of them. Then you’re just being an asshole.

[cs-discourse]

Yeah it’s Breeding Season. Kalons are essentially just dickwolves in the eyes of god.

.

[gamergirlsexperience-blog]

The Dickwolves Controversy: Everything you need to know and why it’s important

Let me first start by saying that I was not initially offended by the original Dickwolves comic. The comic strip created by Penny Arcade’s, Mike "Gabe" Krahulik and Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, titled The Sixth Slave did not trigger any feelings of victimization for me, nor did I initially think someone could be hurt by this comic if it exists in a vacuum. The problem lies in that fact that Penny Arcade and their comic strip do not exist in a vacuum.  Their media is visited by over 3.5 million people per day and is absorbed by a society that does not treat rape as seriously as it ought too. Krahulik and Holkins media is constantly digested by a culture rife with jokes about rape which normalize and effectively minimize the severity of rape, thus perpetuate a rape culture. The goal of this paper is to catalogue the events of the Dickwolves controversy, in order to discuss why the comic itself is not the problem. Rather, the problem lies in the hyper-gendered atmosphere of hegemonic masculinity that permeates the digital gaming world in which the comic exists.

Before proceeding with the Dickwolves cases, which Anastasia Salter contends, "highlights how the hyper masculine discourse encourages the overt privileging of masculinity over femininity and discourages women from engaging in gendered discourse within the community," let me first present a definition of hegemonic masculinity that I believe encompasses all media:

Hegemonic masculinity is about the winning and holding of power and the formation (and destruction) of social groups in that process. In this sense, it is importantly about the ways in which the ruling class establishes and maintains its domination. The ability to impose a definition of the situation, to set the terms in which events are understood and issues discussed, to formulate ideals and define morality is an essential part of this process. Hegemony involves persuasion of the greater part of the population, particularly through the media, and the organization of social institutions in ways that appear ‘natural,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘normal.’ The state, through punishment for non-conformity, is crucially involved in this negotiation and enforcement (Donaldson, 645).

The world of digital gaming substantiates hegemonic masculinity through patterns of exclusion toward women, who are continually presented with background roles to support or deter the ultimate completion of a man's heroic quest. While the public identity of gaming originally stemmed from an outsider group mentality, "their in-group dynamics have expanded upon women-hostile concepts of masculinity within the larger social sphere. This discourse, as amplified across social networks and in public online spaces, allows for extreme and virulent lashing out against those who are perceived as others, most notably women"(Salter, 402).  When a prominent female blogger spoke up to say she found a comic strip poking fun at a commonly used gameplay mechanic which made a rape joke to be hurtful, an extreme and virulent lashing out is exactly what she received.

On August 11, 2010, the webcomic and blogging website, Penny Arcade published a comic which features a (white, male) slave begging to be rescued by another character. The slave pleads, "Hero! Please take me with you! Release me from this hell unending! Every morning, we are roused by savage blows. Every night, we are raped to sleep by the dickwolves!" The hero then reports to the slave, "I only need to save five slaves. Alright? Quest complete." The prisoner objects, "But…." Only to have the hero interrupt him to say, "Hey, pal. Don’t make this weird."

The comic which takes place in a setting that resembles World of Warcraft, drawn by Krahulik and written by Holkins was uploaded, according to Penny Arcade, to comment on the silly conundrum in games like WoW in which you often receive quests to, "kill ten of these bad people" or "save five prisoners." Because the game has millions of players, these quests are effectively undone as soon as you complete one so that other players can do their good deeds too. Additionally, the absurdity of only meeting the quota outlined by the quest does not lend itself to reality. The comic was an effort to, “point out the absurd morality of the average MMO where you are actually forced to help some people and ignore others in the same situation" (Gabe, 2013).

Immediately people began to express displeasure with the joke. The most prominent response, written by Shaker Milli A. on Shakerville, the progressive feminist blog about politics, culture, and social justice, cites a myriad of reasons the comic was inappropriate and insensitive. Specifically, Shaker called out Penny Arcade for not providing a warning they were making a joke about rape. Without any warning rape survivors who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder- and who might not necessarily feel like seeing a rape joke mixed in with their usual dose of video-game satire run the risk of being triggered (Myers, 2011). Additional problems that Shaker brings up from the comic include: 1) Rape is not part of the game, so for the slave to explicitly state that he is being raped is meant as a "humorous" exaggeration. 2) A slave being raped is a real thing that happens every day, and is not a humorous subject to joke about. 3)Because rape survivors exist among us, and after being victimized by rapists, they are revictimized by a society that treats even real rape like a joke. They are forced to live in a culture where rape victims are often doubted, mocked, and insulted openly not just in satire (Shaker, 2010).

Shaker further condones the comic because rape jokes can trigger some survivors of sexual violence. Additionally, clarifying that being triggered "does not mean "being upset" or "being offended" or "being angry," or any other euphemism people who roll their eyes long-sufferingly in the direction of trigger warnings tend to imagine it to mean. Being triggered has a very specific meaning that relates to evoking a physical and/or emotional response to a survived trauma" (Shaker, 2010).  Being triggered may forced someone to experience anything from a brief moment of dizziness, to a shortness of breath and a racing pulse, to a full-blown panic attack. Moreover, jokes that normalize and effectively minimize the severity of rape, only prove to perpetuate rape culture.

Remarkably, rather than apologize or ignore the blogs post and hand full of offended emails, the authors of the comic with the released a new comic that “reframed the argument (of the critiques), suggesting that the only possible protest to the joke was the idea that it encouraged rape, rather than any underlying message of sexual violence or hostility” (Salter, 406).

The response comic released on August 13, 2010 , featured a bemused-looking Tycho addressing the audience directly announcing that if, "It's possible you read our cartoon, and became a rapist as a direct result. If you're raping someone right now, stop. Apologize. And leave. Go, and rape no more" (Krahulik and Holkins, 2010).

The sarcastic follow-up comic attempts to use the fundamental tools of rape apologia ("you're just humorless; you're oversensitive; you just don't get it") to argue they are not a rape apologist (McEwan, 2010). In a world where the primary means in which rape is normalized is humor, I can not make sense of why Krahulik and Holkins responded in this way.

On the same day of the response comics release, Melissa McEwan added to the Shakerville blog with a post titled, Survivors are So Sensitive. In this post she outlines the strategies that defenders of rape jokes typically employ: 1.) Misrepresenting critics' primary objection as the assertion that rape jokes "create" rapists and/or "cause" rape. 2.) Summarily treating that idea as absurd. 3.) Concluding that critics are thus hypersensitive reactionaries with no legitimate critique. Her outline essentially summarizes the Penny Arcade response, but then goes further to explain why these defense strategies are ludicrous. Starting with misrepresentation of critique as, "your rape joke will directly cause someone to go out and commit a rape." McEwan proclaim that the idea is absurd, which is exactly why it's so appealing to defenders of rape jokes to deliberately misrepresent critics' arguments in such a fashion. Furthermore, "the rape culture is a collection of narratives and beliefs that service the existence of endemic sexual violence in myriad ways, from overt exhortations to commit sexual violence to subtle discouragements against prosecution and conviction for crimes of sexual violence. The rape joke, by virtue of its ubiquity, prominently serves as a tool of normalization and diminishment"(McEwan, 2010). What's more, the comic is making an explicitly hostile mockery of the readers’ right to be offended, which thus fails to foster any legitimate forum for discussion.

The duo continued to create controversy through October 2010, when Krahulik cavalierly drew a dickwolf (a wolf with veiny penises where its legs and tail should be) during their "Make-A-Strip" panel appearance at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle. Even so, what finally drove Krahulik and Holkin's PAX away from its perception as safe space for everyone, was creation and sale of Team DickWolf T-shirts on their online store. The shirts, which were designed to look like sports fans attire with the words “Penny Expo” and “Dickwolves” flanked across a growling blue wolf’s head, only served to "reinforce the hyper masculine associations of the Dickwolves by adopting a signifier of athletic masculinity"(Salter, 2015). Additionally, considering that the Dickwolves were introduced to society as rapists, the shirts implicitly suggest a team-spirit endorsement of rape as a joke, if not as an outright action (Salter, 2015).

Courtney Stanton, a project manager for Boston-based game developer DINO Interactive, a rape survivor, feminist, and advocate for marginalized groups in the game industry, critiqued the Dickwolves shirt, citing specifically that "the idea of being in a room full of mostly men, where some of those men are wearing it, feels like a threat against me. Penny Arcade has gone out of its way to make sure that the floor of PAX East is no longer a safe space for me"(Myers, 2011). Stanton suggesting that the intention of the shirts was in part to create an atmosphere of hostility at the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo declared she would be boycotting PAX East where she had been asked to speak on a panel. Just two days after Stanton's critique the T-shirts were removed from the Penny Arcade store.  Unforeseeably, after the shirts disappeared from the Penny Arcade store Stanton's post went viral and within a few days had hundreds of comments and tens of thousands of hits.

Stanton and other rape survivors were then viciously harassed repeatedly on Twitter, blogs, and forums all over the internet for their role in taking down the t-shirts. Dickwolves advocates created Twitter handles like "@teamrape, @DickWolvington, and @rapefatchicks (that last one using Krahulik's dickwolf drawing from PAX Prime as an icon), and used these accounts to post pictures of mutilated women, to demand that Stanton provide "proof" that she had been raped, and to track down a police station near her house to report her rape for her"(Myers, 2011). These fans of Dickwolves stated that their reason for wanting to wear the t-shirts was the right of free speech. In an interview, Stanton commented on the harassment noting, "it stopped being people who would have read my blog anyway and disagreed with me. It became people who thought that I should be dismembered and all of my limbs should be raped. Which was, literally, a suggestion that I got. And that's where I think the reasonable debate kind of took a dip"(Myers, 2011).

While many members of the community stood fortified behind the cartoonists, doubling down on the idea that they were not specifically trying to alienate women audiences, yet should have the right to make rape jokes, many indeed harassed those who voiced Penny Arcade critiques (Salter & Blodgett, 2012). All the while, Krahulik and Holkins remained silent.

The furthered hostile othering of Stanton and similar female activists in the male-dominated space of gaming was only finally alluded too by Krahulik and Holkins when an unfunny threat on his family convinced him to call out his alleged supporters for their behavior. A tweet comprised on Feb 2, 2011, by Twitter user, @ghostpostin, "A Funney Joke: Go to Mike Krahulik / @cwgabriel's house, Literally Murder His Wife and Child #jokes #funny #murderwolves."

Although, Stanton and similar users had been enduring far worse for months, the tweet finally caused the duo to break their long silence. In a post titled "Okay that's enough," Krahulik wrote:

We have people on both sides of this ridiculous argument making death threats and worse. Kara was certainly upset to see someone mention on Twitter last night that it would be funny to come to my house and murder my wife and children. I know there are people who see themselves as being on our side that have made equally disgusting comments in the other direction. I want to make it very clear that I do not approve of this kind of bullshit (Myers, 2011).

On that same day, Holkins wrote in a long post titled "On the matter of Dickwolves:"

If I haven’t been seen to discuss The Matter Of Dickwolves, this is the reason why.  I’m not entirely certain that a conversation is possible.  This isn’t mere cynicism - this is a fully rational assessment of the situation.  The perspectives in play, the lenses, are too different: one side believes that not according the issue of rape the proper respect fuels a kind of perverse, perpetual engine called rape culture.  There is a vast, specific lexicon and hundreds of tacit assumptions that gird it.  The other side (that’s me, but not just me) believes that when it comes to expression nothing is off the table.  It is the creator’s prerogative to create something - even something grotesque - out of anything they can find. The fact of the matter is that the strip that started all this is about how empty, amoral, and borderline vile electronic heroism actually is.  When I look at it now, it’s hard to imagine the chaos this comic stands at the center of….As I said, so much of this happened because I assumed that a genuine dialogue was impossible.  Maybe I was wrong.  It’s certainly happened before. But I am who I am, in the end; the comics I make are the result of my damage.  I can’t put it any more succinctly than that (Holkins, 2011).

The mistake I think, Holkins and Krahulik, made was that they did not provide any warning that the contents of their comic strip involved a commentary involving rape. Additionally, they were extremely insensitive to rape victims in their response comic, by essentially telling the victims the only plausible justification they could have for getting mad, is that the comic encourages rape, which of course it does not. What the comic and its response does facilitate, however, is a culture where rape is humored, effectively normalizing rape and minimizing it severity.

More specifically, Holkins and Krahulik erred when they failed to exposed/acknowledge the public dialogue created by the Dickwolves supporters. The Dickwolves supporters diminished the role of women within the discussion, by focusing more upon silencing and undermining their objections than actually addressing them. Women who spoke out against Holkins and Krahulik were belittled, verbally assaulted, and harassed from many areas within the gaming public. From the explicit creation of the T-shirt to oppose female voices, who felt threated by it connotations, to the reduction or removal of PAX and other public forums as a safe space for women to participate in public discussions around gaming. Dickwolves supports deliberately continued to reframe the discussion to avoid common ground, so that women, or feminine supporters, were made to feel ostracized and unwelcome within the bounds of spaces owned by dominant public, males. Any perceived transgressions to change the hyper masculine identity of Penny Arcade and its dominance of the space were met with hostility, from death threats to images of mutilated women in an effort to move feminists away from their space.

The rage we see expressed by the threatened individuals and groups seems to be based on at least two factors: sexism (as well as racist, homophobic and ageist) beliefs about the abilities of female players, and fears about the changing nature of the game industry. For the sexist threatened individuals, we need more documentation of the extent of those activities and analysis of what responses or actions tend to mitigate or eliminate their issues. I would call for more traditional research studies that not only document the prevalence of hate speech, but that seek out and investigate those who engage in such practices, to see how and why they do so.

For those individuals that fear the changing nature of the game industry; such as the growth of casual and social games, which are often targeted to women and fear that means that fewer budgets and development teams will be focused on traditional titles and genres such as First Person Shooters and Action games. What is needed here is more in-depth, critical research examining how players understand and utilize: how they make sense of the wider game industry universe, how they conceptualize their choices, and who is controlling those choices.

But you see, any community that is built upon commercial success and shared consumerism cannot afford to alienate members of its general audience. Hardcore gaming identity resists the incursion of casual and female gamers because sexualizing women, harassing, and objectifying them is a form of dominance, and it is a form of dominance that simultaneously shuts women out or makes them less meaningful then men. It isn’t until a greater number of individuals within the hardcore gaming public begin to address their adoption of a hyper masculine discourse that true progress will occur.

This discussion could have been started by Holkins and Krahulik. Because the issue of rape and how it is treated by feminists and non-feminist, to be a feminist issue- would be a great place to start a discourse on the gendering rape issue. Gendering rape inherently confuses the issue and I think Holkins and Krahulik knew this. The rape victim in this comic was intentionally a man, because even Holkins and Krahulik knew that if the slave in the comic was a female, no one would be able to laugh. After all a woman in distress is just meant to be saved, as video games have been teaching us for decades in games like Mario, Legend of Zelda, and so on. The comedy of the comic, however, is rooted in the image of a man in distress, begging to be saved in a world that stems from the kind of anxious, performance-based masculinity that pervades the gaming community as a whole. 

References

Consalvo, M. (2012). Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture: A Challenge for Feminist Game Studies Scholars. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 1. doi:10.7264/N33X84KH

Dill, Karen E., Brian P. Brown, and Michael A. Collins. “Effects of Exposure to Sex-stereotyped Video Game Characters on Tolerance of Sexual Harassment.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44.5 (2008) 1402-1408. EBSCO. Web. 16 Sept. 2015.

Donaldson, Mike. “What Is Hegemonic Masculinity?” Theory and Society 22.5 (1993): 643–657. Web. 7 Feb. 2013.

“GAMBIT: Hate Speech Project.” GAMBIT: Hate Speech Project. Comparative Media Studies at MIT, 10 Mar. 2011. Web. 23 Sept. 2015.

Hayes, E. TECHTRENDS TECH TRENDS (2005) 49: 23. doi:10.1007/BF02763686

Holkins, Jerry. "On the matter of Dickwolves" Penny Arcade. Web.  3 Feb. 2011. 

Johnson, Lauren. "Women and the Video Gaming Community" THE SCHOLARLY JOURNAL OF NORTH HENNEPIN COMMUNITY COLLEGE. Web. Mar. 2016.

Krahulik, Mike. "Some Clarification - Gabe" Penny Arcade. Web.  5 Sept. 2013.

McEwan, Melissa. "Survivors are So Sensitive" Shakesville. Web. 13 Aug. 2010.

Myers, Mady. "Gaming, Rape Culture, and how I stopped reading Penny Arcade" The Phoenix . Web. 7 Mar. 2011.

Salter, Anastasia, and Bridget Blodgett. “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves: The Contentious Role of Women in the New Gaming Public.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 1 September 2010. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.

Shaker, Milli A., "Rape is Hilarious, Part 53 in an ongoing series - feminist blog that called them out" Shakesville. Web. 12 Aug.  2010.

[lyinar]

"Problematic" is Purity Culture's version of all the racist morons screeching "Woke" about things they don't like.

Neither side understands the terms they freely hurl about, and neither wants the media they hate to even exist.

Think the Tribals in Fallout are problematic? Yes, that's the entire fucking point. Interplay and Bethesda and Obsidian used racist tropes on purpose in order to examine racism and paint an extremely fucking unflattering picture of pre-War America.

All the racism in The Witcher making you uncomfortable? Guess what? The point of it is to rub in your face that racism sucks and is stupid and corrodes the morals of the people who let it rule them. It is not even remotely fucking subtle about that.

The Penny Arcade Dickwolves comic make you uncomfortable? The entire joke relies on the reader viewing rape as utterly abhorrent to make a point about how horrifying it would be to be an NPC in a rescue quest with a quota in an MMO and watch your rescuer nope out without freeing you because they hit that quota.

If anything, Purity Culture's absolute refusal to even consider tackling "problematic" issues in fiction is more damaging than the idiots screeching about "woke", because how can you identify and deal with something you've never seen portrayed or even talked about? Refusing to depict racism or abuse won't fucking make them go away.

starting to hate how people use the word problematic. "don't support this person they're problematic" "dni if ur problematic" "they're literally problematic" what does problematic mean here? wtf is it supposed to convey? it's so goddamn vague and it doesn't tell me anything, it could literally mean either "has an opinion on pride flag discourse that i disagree with" or "actively grooming minors" and i wouldn't be able to tell which one was the intended meaning without asking for further information, which most of the time i'm probably not going to interact with these people more than once so i don't wanna go through the trouble of doing that, i hate it so much goddamnit.

[arcticdementor]

In college, despite everything else, I still believed the entire egalitarian line about how gender roles were obsolete and how men should act. By chance, I got a girlfriend. This was my first and last serious relationship. I did what I was told was right and this basically made her bored. When she broke up with me (by cheating on me with one of my friends), she explained that, actually, no usually meant yes and that I should have been pushing past her boundaries. This lead to me being barely functional for a year. Once I became emotionally functional again, I found alt.seduction.fast, which mostly answered my questions about what had happened. (Think of them as proto-PUA.) I think this was the earliest that I put together that a popular "truth" was not. But the real enraging thing was that this was the point where the feminist internet started playing elaborate motte and bailey games around "nice guys," which was enraging since I personally attacked for doing what was asked of me by the people who asked me to act that way. And despite all of this, life was good. This was the promise...and it was actually mostly delivered. I personally went to work for the large Silicon Valley company several other people in this thread worked for and it really was a paradise for nerds. And it didn't last. I got to watch said company get taken over from the inside. Pointing at any specific incident is probably narrativizing; I was primed to see feminism as dishonest and watched all the communities I was a part of get taken over. I can no longer imagine saying what Gabe says in the above strip; it is simply no longer true that "we run shit". All the major institutions became popularity contests. Penny Arcade itself gets dickwolved. As I see it, the actual problem is that our dispute resolution mechanism is now popularity. If you are popular, you can now break your promises, lie without consequence, etc. And nerds are very bad at popularity contests. Every promise that if I worked hard or that if I acted in socially beneficial ways, I would be rewarded has been reneged on. I don't believe I'm alone and this path doesn't lead to social stability.

“iceman-p”

[sideshowcomics]

You’ll Never Stop Webcomics

Today, I happened to catch a rerun of the Simpsons episode with the We Didnt Start the Fire parody credits, and I was reminded that years ago, I wanted to do something similar about webcomics. I ended up writing this up in about an hour, and I like it how it came out. While some of the lyrics are obvious which comics it refers to, others are a good deal more obscure. Try to figure it out.... or you can just cheat and look at the tags or the links.

Psycho Bunny, College Nerds Linux Jokes, Weirdo Furs Swedish Gamers, Largo Bails Xbox Big , Richards Fails Ethan's Baby , Kid Radd's War Sinfest Falls Really Far Black Mage Stabs, Ian Sad Robert Boyle, Bruno Bad Hat Guy Makes Jokes No One Gets Xykon, Pixels, Emo Kids T-Rex, Blastwave, Ugly Hill Goblins- And Cheap Thrills Moogle Guy, Schedule Slip Perry Bible Fellowship Dickwolves Chases Fans Away What Else Do I have to Say?! You'll Never Stop Webcomics Never Fear, We have Stories for Years Like...Tycho Bangs an Ostrich? Maybe SMBC Does More Graphs? Is Least I Could Do Over Yet? Or Maybe a Crazy Crossover... Where Something Happens, Doodoodeedidoo... Sorry For the Parody... Never Fear, We have Stories for Years

[lightningarmour]

I hope he gets fucked in hell by dickwolves

Rex Murphy is fucking dead!

[ultralaser]

the penny arcade thing is such a pavlovian response at this point but tbh i'm not sure what they expected they went long and loud on directly associating their whole brand with dickwolves, and it worked because now whenever i see someone linking them, that's all that comes to mind nice work, idiots

[drlombriz]

“the reintroduction of wolves to yellowstone caused a positive trophic cascade so why don’t you shove it and then look that up; okay” -an hour later playing The Long Dark- goddamn fucking piece of shit wolves ah fuckin’ get off, bastard shitting dicknipple dickwolves arrrrrrrggh

[thewebcomicsreview]

The Dickwolves guy is mad that a company had a corporate reshuffling and now a Star Wars game will be multiplayer. 

[siryouarebeingmocked]

assuming that's a quote;

like how much of the Gender Ideology backlash is abt chris-chan,

Very little, to the average person who's against gender ideology. More like Desmond is Amazing, Drag Queen Story Hour. Which is, y'know, an actual thing, meant to get kids to accept drag queens, for some reason.

And then a lot of pro-LGBT people decided to support a group of people who are openly and explicitly intended to be outrageous and transgressive.

The optics weren't good.

how much of the collapse of feminism was abt the decade of incredibly idiotic feministclickbait takes we were supposed to pretend everyone else cared abt

Well, there were also the decades of sexist nonsense before that. Before 'clickbait' was even a thing.

There was also things like Gamergate, when online and traditional media united to push a blatantly incorrect pro-feminist narrative, which eventually got UN attention.

Over a "harassment campaign" which allegedly harassed…three women.

Or the multiple times feminists protested and heckled talks about men's issues. Up to and including death threats.

Or the Penny Arcade 'Dickwolves' controversy, about the comic that "downplayed" rape…by portraying a character who would ignore rape victims as a bad guy.

I think the peak of stupidity in that nontroversy was when Gabe had a two-hour stream, and his random playlist had a song by a rape victim, and people said it was some sort of coded passive-aggressive message.

and most likely they'll implode when ppl learn to associate them w the sabrina rubin erdely

You mean the lady who did serious harm by being too credulous and Not Questioning Rape Victims, as mainstream feminism tells everyone to do? How about Mattress Girl, who was even more widely supported by feminists.

I find it interesting how they don't…don't actually say SocJus folks should actually DO anything about this. Just let it happen.

Let their rep get ruined by idiots, some of which cause physical harm, and hope it turns out well.

[ tumblr user ]

part of the subculture cycle is things becoming uncool bc they're merchandised in dumb ways - ruth bader ginsburg action figures, hot topic pronoun pins etc - but a lot of it is that ppl r v loudly stupid abt it. like how much of the Gender Ideology backlash is abt chris-chan, how much of the collapse of feminism was abt the decade of incredibly idiotic feministclickbait takes we were supposed to pretend everyone else cared abt etc. like the current rising faction is jack thompson ass social conservatism specifically because they're too illiterate to open their mouths online, and most likely they'll implode when ppl learn to associate them w the sabrina rubin erdely or andrea long chu of integralism writing dumbass articles abt banning contraception and bare ankles on TV

Somewhere out there, the first true master of sixth-generation warfare was just born, and will figure out how to prevent their clique from losing their cultural power to political-emotional word meaning entropy through a form of gatekeeping we can't even imagine, keeping their movement on top right up until their death.