Hypothetical: Legacy flavour text?

In situations like this I prefer to hold off on giving my own opinion until the conversation develops a bit.

My position is very close to Antee's. I scarcely believe anyone can deny how brazenly offensive the text is, except I've seen such denials directly.

This isn't to say I don't see how it could used, or even made funny. For example, Cartman's antisemitism in South Park. We have a character from the mocked group, so they're not outsiders, and we all understand Cartman is an asshole, so it is mostly seen as a depiction of bigotry rather than an endorsement of it. For example, perhaps Firedorn spent much of his public life as a vocal opponent of homosexual behavior, claiming it to be a sin against the gods; maybe you could weave a moment of tragic irony into the story somehow, which would require establishment of hubris. In other words, no text or action is unusable in fiction, as long as we establish which speak for us and which are foils.

It's worth noting that, once you have those key contextual elements in place, you can even partially romanticize a morally reprehensible position for the purposes of concealing which side is right and having more meaningful choice the audience. Hard to explain here, but a great example of this is the Deathnote anime, which allows its audience to sympathize with both its serial killer villain and the forces attempting to stop him.

All of this woefully absent in this case.

In terms of appropriate remedy, I feel the only option would be to remove it from both new and previous drops.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

This isn't to say I don't see how it could used, or even made funny. For example, Cartman's antisemitism in South Park. We have a character from the mocked group, so they're not outsiders, and we all understand Cartman is an asshole, so it is mostly seen as a depiction of bigotry rather than an endorsement of it. For example, perhaps Firedorn spent much of his public life as a vocal opponent of homosexual behavior, claiming it to be a sin against the gods; maybe you could weave a moment of tragic irony into the story somehow, which would require establishment of hubris. In other words, no text or action is unusable in fiction, as long as we establish which speak for us and which are foils.

That's a really good point.

The concept of being offended is shitty. It mixes things like people complaining about someone mocking God with things like people complaining about slurs. If not done carefully, ignores context (normalization vs. satire). God, I would burn the word so people have to write a little more that "We can't pay attention to every offended person, because someone is always offended". That's just lazy.

That being said, it's obvious I agree with Antee and Scrotie.

This situation is similar to fat shaming, in the sense people just punch a subset of people constantly and they have no say about what bothers them. The jokes are cheap, the people that are the butt of the joke have no right to any self steem because of social factors, etc. Mocking them about their undesirability is just awful; yes, they are less desirable sexually for relatively reasonable causes, that's already awful enough, there is not need to put salt in the wound. That's being mean for the sake of being mean, and the only people that have that kind of humor are douchebags or thoughtless morons.

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rockmassif wrote:

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DirkAustin wrote:

Yeah, well its all fun and games until you yourself get offended. Tell me are you black, asian, LGBT or religous? Lets give us something we can offend you with so you know what it feels like.

I guess in this day and age people just want to be mean and offensive because being nice is just too damn hard.

25, Straight Male, Turkey

You can call me kebab terrorist, I wouldn't get offended. I'm not really religious so that's out of the window. You're free to come up with your own things by the way. I'm slightly overweight. Also can't say I'm handsome or anything. I managed to get a degree after 6 years but never really worked much thanks to my dad.

Feel free to mock me.

<Edited by support>

Here lies Rockmassif, an exile they said.
He once was alive, but now he's dead.
He lived with his dad, who forced him to bed
And crying in shame, hung himself from the shed.



Alright, that was my stab at it.. And let me just clarify you were the one who asked to be mocked..

Needless to say, it just doesn't need to be in the game.

I don't get how you can be offended by an epitaph/limerick of someone who was most likely a womanizer that died from the shame of being deceived by a man pretending to be a woman. It's just a comment on that particular person. I can't see how it's a statement of generality about anything in any way.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

My position is very close to Antee's. I scarcely believe anyone can deny how brazenly offensive the text is, except I've seen such denials directly.

Well, it is pretty simple.

Story is of a man who is a womanizer, who sleeps with somebody whom he thinks a woman, and upon discovering it isn't is ashamed and runs off a cliff and dies. And it is presented as a limerick.

What it is not, is a story mocking people who are transgender.

There is absolutely nothing in the story that enjoins the reader to sympathise with the womanizer, think that he is right to be ashamed, or think that his reaction is reasonable. There is also nothing explaining why he made the mistake of thinking the man was a woman - nor is there anything to say that his second identification was any better than his first identification of his sleeping partner.

As such, what you choose to read into it depends a lot on what you are predisposed to seeing, and it has the possibility of being offensive in a variety of different ways, none necessarily intended. Was the person he slept with ultimately a man, woman, transgender, other? To many people, that's not the point of the story.

It also has the possibility of being read as a cautionary tale about judging other people or the folly of making hasty assumptions, being a limerick that mocks people who act like the womanizer, in the good old "you do something stupid, you die ignominously" tradition of storytelling.

To take Antee's example of, "what if we changed it so he discovered the woman was black", I would read it as limerick mocking racists, though you might read something else into it, and Antee something different yet.


The main argument against including that womanizing limerick in a game is not that it is brazenly offensive, as you suggest, because to many people it won't be as it depends on how they interpret it, but how little there is to gain by including it in the first place instead of another silly limerick that is less open to interpretation.

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LoRider149 wrote:

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rockmassif wrote:

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DirkAustin wrote:

Yeah, well its all fun and games until you yourself get offended. Tell me are you black, asian, LGBT or religous? Lets give us something we can offend you with so you know what it feels like.

I guess in this day and age people just want to be mean and offensive because being nice is just too damn hard.

25, Straight Male, Turkey

You can call me kebab terrorist, I wouldn't get offended. I'm not really religious so that's out of the window. You're free to come up with your own things by the way. I'm slightly overweight. Also can't say I'm handsome or anything. I managed to get a degree after 6 years but never really worked much thanks to my dad.

Feel free to mock me.

<Edited by support>

Here lies Rockmassif, an exile they said.
He once was alive, but now he's dead.
He lived with his dad, who forced him to bed
And crying in shame, hung himself from the shed.



Alright, that was my stab at it.. And let me just clarify you were the one who asked to be mocked..

Needless to say, it just doesn't need to be in the game.

LOL, that's actually quite nice, rhyme is better than the original. Much kudos.

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Pi2rEpsilon wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

My position is very close to Antee's. I scarcely believe anyone can deny how brazenly offensive the text is, except I've seen such denials directly.

Well, it is pretty simple.

Story is of a man who is a womanizer, who sleeps with somebody whom he thinks a woman, and upon discovering it isn't is ashamed and runs off a cliff and dies. And it is presented as a limerick.

What it is not, is a story mocking people who are transgender.

There is absolutely nothing in the story that enjoins the reader to sympathise with the womanizer, think that he is right to be ashamed, or think that his reaction is reasonable. There is also nothing explaining why he made the mistake of thinking the man was a woman - nor is there anything to say that his second identification was any better than his first identification of his sleeping partner.

Emphasis mine.

You cannot possibly be serious.

Plus, I'm not concerned with transmisogyny. At all. The truly offensive part of the poem is its attitude towards the newcomer to homosexual behavior.

Under this tree in a garment of nylon,
hangs the remains of the scoundrel Epsilon,
the devil's advocate, logic's fighter,
so monstrous his victims affixed a Pi2r,
hard to offend and harder to pity,
in other words, a complete nullibity,
now he is gone and we are not,
to hell with him, it was his lot.

mmm. Could stand improvement.