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I think that you're right that the real controversy wasn't over the comic, but rather his reaction to it.

After reading the original strip (embedded in the article), I wasn't offended, and thought that it made a particularly good point about the screwed up ethics of quests. But, even though I wasn't offended, I could see how others might be and might want to express that.

But then instead of simply explaining what the point of the strip was, and leaving it alone, he went off and made a big deal of it and tried to play the victim. That's where he is clearly in the wrong. He needs to listen to people who are telling him to stop talking about it. He lost, move on.

So, did anyone actually read the comic? A slave is pleading to be rescued, and brings up that in addition to being a SLAVE he also gets raped.

There is nothing 'supporting rape' in the comic or the joke. Rape is used because it's literally the worst possible thing, that if even being a slave wasn't enough to make the hero care, maybe that would.

The joke is "The hero only cares about his quest, not the suffering of the victims". Slavery and rape were used because they were the two worst possible things the victims could be suffering from. How does anyone go from that to suggesting the artist is supporting rape?

Only a few people were hurt by the original Dickwolves comic, and I think a realistic apology for triggering bad feelings in sexual assault survivors would have made this a non-event. Like, "A number of people have written to express that they felt hurt or threatened by yesterday's strip. Please know that we had no intention of that. We wanted to express how incredulous it is that a game can use the threat of violence, death, enslavement, and implied rape as a motivation for a quest then cast aside those people you have ostensibly just been charged with helping. It was not our intention to hurt people in the real world by discussing this incongruity in games and we sincerely apologize to those of you who were hurt."

Boom, done, wouldn't have been an issue.

NOW, what happened after that was THIS strip: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/08/13 An incredibly insincere apology which makes anyone reading question whether they have their heads screwed on straight. On top of that, they make a t-shirt for Team Dickwolves. Then Mike NEVER FUCKING LETS IT GO, for damn near three years.

Only extremely recently has he even expressed that he might have been handling these sorts of situations incorrectly and considers that he may be hurting people. Well, great buddy, but you've already screwed a lot of things up. It's gonna take a lot of work to undo the damage you've done and a bunch of people will never trust you regardless.

Even the second comic I can understand. The fact that they have to go out of their way to explain that no, they don't actually think raping people is OK is pretty distressing as it should have been plainly obvious from the first comic IMHO.

What I don't understand is why you'd then go and make a shirt, and bring it up again and again. What good could possibly have come of that?

I doubt very many people thought the first joke was an exhortation or endorsement of rape. They were using it as an extreme, to skewer MMO morality. And I see what they were trying to do, but not long after that point it should've been obvious it didn't work.

So the second comic comes out and it's a straw man. "so you're saying we are pro-rape? that's absurd. look at how absurd you are." If you're trying to make people understand something, can you imagine how frustrating it must be to hear that for the eleventy-billionth time?

It's fair to call people on making light of rape. I also think it's fair to disagree, though I have a caveat: IMHO, given the quality of dialogue around the issue, most of the disagreement is reflexive and rooted around the perception of this as a niche issue, mostly germane to women (Patton Oswalt had a good bit about this).

In trying to evoke sympathy, people ask if you think it'd be OK to say such and such about your mother, sister, or daughter. An addendum which may (sadly) work better for some people could be: ask yourself if it would change your perception about, say, prison rape jokes if it happened to your father, brother, or son. Then imagine if someone's response to your feelings was to say "hey dummy I'm not pro-rape I just think rape jokes are funny." And so on.

Sorry, but I think the second comic is completely tone deaf and deeply unfunny. I remember reading it and thinking, "Jesus christ guys, way to not get it."

The shirts are just... fucking hell. Y'know, the crazy thing is that there were like 10 people in their office at that point. And I am pretty sure that about half of them could have, at some point said, "What the fuck are we doing here?"

THey made the shirt because they didn't see the first comic as offensive. They thought a "dickwolf" was a funny idea. Raping is not (to them) an essential/defining characteristic of a dickwolf any more than "mauling" is an essential/defining characteristic of a bear. Having invented this absurd (and mildly offensive) dangerous animal, they thought it was a funny idea that some sports team would choose it as a mascot.

Yes, they may have made the shirts partly to annoy their detractors, but they also just thought it was funny for reasons having nothing to do with rape. And they want the freedom to sell funny stuff to other people who like that stuff - being forced to censor themselves was difficult.

On the other side, people who think raping is an essential characteristic of dickwolves can't see any humor in the shirt and think it was just created to spite them.

There is no way to resolve this conflict because dickwolves don't exist and will never appear in another strip and the detractors have already discounted the opinions of the people who came up with the idea.

If you think this is about the comic itself, then you should get brought up to speed on the issue. It's this type of shortsightedness/inattention to detail/poor logic that sent the author down this path of scorched earth bullying.

>How does anyone go from that to suggesting the artist is supporting rape?

What are you referring to when you say that? The comic? Again, people on the other side of this issue are no longer talking about the comic. This is about the author's bullying and mobilizing others to bully victims & people sympathetic to victims that their opinions don't matter. It's about people in a position of power who would rather abuse that power than try to make something good come from it. It's about turning a deaf ear to decency & tact in the name of stubbornness (and monetizing bullying).

Also, from the article: @Teamrape wrote, “And remember, since @cwgabriel [Krahulik] will wear his dickwolves shirt, it’s okay to wear yours. We will show those that want to crush free speech"

That's from @teamrape, not @teamfreespeech. What's the issue here again?

So, I think that rape brings up some pretty unusual feelings and behaviors.

For a while, I was in a relationship with a girl who had been raped by a friend several years before.

What happened next was: essentially all of her friends told her there must have been a misunderstanding and her college threatened her with libel for accusing the guy of rape.

Of course, this girl had one of the darkest senses of humor of anyone I've ever known, and wouldn't have batted an eye at the comic in question. I didn't find it particularly offensive either.

But it's worth thinking about why jokes about rape can be particularly difficult for rape victims. The thing is, unlike crimes like robbery or murder, victims of rape very rarely find that society is "on their side." For one thing, rapists hardly ever are held criminally responsible for their actions--this is not necessarily because we are a pro-rape society, it's just that it's essentially impossible to prove that you didn't consent to sex. And that's true outside of the criminal justice system, too--many rape victims find that even close friends and family cannot know whether a rape occurred, and choose to believe that it didn't. So the rape is compounded by the abandonment that comes afterwards.

Then you have the fact that our culture, and perhaps our genetic nature, glorifies aggressive men, men who understand that women want it no matter what they say. And on the other side, we have the fact that our culture, and perhaps our genetic nature, encourages women to engage in "token resistance"--saying no when they mean yes--to avoid the appearance of "being a slut."

I honestly do not know if this situation can be improved much. Being raped is tough because you can't prove it happened--well, I don't think the answer is to weaken the presumption of innocence. Rape is more likely because we glorify aggressive men--well, I don't think those traits are going away anytime soon.

But to victims of rape, when people call rape "literally the worst possible thing," it can't help but feel hollow. Because everyone says that, it's like a cultural tic, but when you were raped, no one came running to help you, no one believed you, no one even stayed your friend. They explained it away, they left, they told you that you were just guilty about cheating on your boyfriend.

There's this painful, terrifying juxtaposition of a society that says both: "rape is the worst thing ever" and "you were raped? well, goodbye." That might explain the reactions to what, in isolation, is a pretty innocuous joke.

I read the comic. I thought it was funny enough at the time. I didn't think it had anything to do with trying to make rape itself sound funny. It was an over-the-top gag poking fun at the weird ethics of WoW-type games, Mission Accomplished.

But the comic isn't really the point anymore, and even the detractors don't seem to be focusing on the comic as much as on the reaction to the criticism by Gabe and others at PAX.

At this point the reaction is basically telling people they shouldn't feel the way they do. But I'll bet most of those people really, really wished they didn't feel the way they do, that if they could flip a switch and just see past all of it that they would.

They've at least been fair about telling Gabe this too. Whatever else Gabe thought about how people would interpret not just the comic, but the shirts and jokes and etc. around the comic, that's not how they actually are interpreting that. Given that he knows that and does it anyways, you have to ask what he's really trying to accomplish.

I think of it as a different type of dog whistle. Gabe blows on it and doesn't hear much, but there are people who hear fingernails on a chalkboard. And they are telling him that, and begging with him to stop, and then he goes selling shirts with a dog whistle on it. WTF?

Anti-pattern: individuals determining what is and isn't offensive to large, non-uniform groups of people.

I get that you posed this as a question, but if you think that people who find it offensive are just humorless and don't get the joke, you're just doing a variation on the aforementioned.

I'm kind of torn... I've lost a child to SIDS, but I would not tell people that they can't make dead baby jokes at risk of revictimizing me.

Sorry to hear that. A key difference there is that SIDS is a medical problem whose incidence is unaffected by whether people make jokes about it or not. Rape (and sexual assault in general) is a crime whose perpetrators may feel more emboldened to act if there's an atmosphere of amused tolerance around it. And unfortunately, there are a lot of people who behave poorly when in a crowd and try to excuse their poor behavior by saying it's just meant in a spirit of fun.

I wholly agree that the original comic was mildly but unintentionally offensive, but making a sticking point out of it and repeatedly reviving the issue comes off as little better than trolling.

> I'm kind of torn then, to put you at easy:

1. "making the joke": they did not even made a joke! they did made the joke several times in the past with the fruit fucker, raping oranges. nobody cared. In this particular comic, rape is described as, well, rape. A very bad thing, mentioned from the victim as 'hell'. so, no joke was made about rape. period.

2. "the response": it was never a response to rape victims. It was a fuck-you to people that monetize on rape victims and all other society victims for government and charity money. They were the ones creating the noise. They are the disease. They deserve a fuck-you.

> Any further push for 'free speech' there must come as a package with instilling a culture of rape... again, even if that's not how they mean for it to be perceived, that doesn't change the reality of how it is being perceived.

Instilling implies a real effect, not just a perception of intent. In other words, culture must become measurable more pro rape as a result for there to be real harm. I haven't seen the evidence of this anywhere: the only effect it has had as far as I can see is people who are against mentioning rape at all getting angry about their perception of it (not changing anything).

Would adding up the number of rape threats directed against his critics count as a measurement?

Should public figures be held responsible for the actions of their fanatics?

Should Obama be held responsible for the actions of his Naval officers if he declares we should pursue missile strikes in Syria?

I mean, saying something and then your fans going overboard is one thing. But everytime 'dickwolves' gets mentioned the fanatics pull out the big guns again... maybe at some point Gabe and Tycho should anticipate that women out there will be the target of those same fanatics if they push the D.W. button again?

> Should Obama be held responsible for the actions of his Naval officers if he declares we should pursue missile strikes in Syria?

Um, this is not a good analogy. There's an extra layer of kerfuffle that makes this different.

Better analogy: Should a well-known religious leader be held responsible for the actions of those who listen to him? How about a talk show host?

If I say something that offends a certain religion and those people burn down a building in response, and I knew they would do that, am I responsible for that?

I used to think so -- if I didn't do X then bad thing Y wouldn't happen, so I could stop it, right? -- but it was some liberal friends of mine who convinced me otherwise. All you can be responsible for is yourself.

Point taken, and I actually try to preach that mantra myself. But I agree with jlgreco about the greater credibility our law seems to give to public figures with regard to incitement.

Certainly it's a problem I'm glad that I don't have to worry about, and I feel bad for Gabe in that regard just like I tend to pity many celebrity figures who just want their privacy back. :-/

> All you can be responsible for is yourself.

This is a nice piece of self-help advice, but it's a self-delusory trick to reduce the level of mental insanity that comes from a full acknowledgement of responsibility.

Keep in mind that you're presuming a direct chain of cause and effect from your offensive words to the building-burning. When there isn't such a direct chain, then you have a much less direct responsibility. Which is the point. The strength of your agency in the causality is precisely what obligates you to make a meaningful decision.

If you didn't know that committing a diff would result in someone losing all their money, then it's not really your fault. But if you did, then it is.

It's liberalism's most detestable idiocy that everyone really is an island unto themselves and fuck the promontory that sinks into the sea. If you ever speak to anyone with the intent of persuading them at all, even if it's an evangelical-style "if only you'd read the Bible, you'd recognize that Jesus is your savior" except with facts and figures, you're somewhat responsible for the consequences of that persuasion.

I'm not convinced that we can map the ethics used with situations involving the military chain of command to situations involving informal mobs.

Now, we still have concepts like "inciting imminent lawless action" that are fairly non-controversial, so clearly there is at least some sense of blaming people who tell others to go make a mess, but I don't think that is nearly as clear-cut as your example.

If they are on the Other Side from me, yes.

If a substantial number of your fans are sociopaths, then you should probably do something about it.

people who are against mentioning rape at all

Do you really think that's what this is about? Do you really think that people are against any discussion of rape? It's typically the opposite.

The qualifier you're missing here is something like "non-trivializing" or "respectful" or ... It's not a joke for some people. Lest you bucket this as a women's issue (and thereby dismiss it as n/a for you), think about prison rape. Even if you personally would not find it offensive to joke about it were you a victim of same, is it really all that difficult to imagine someone else finding such jokes in poor taste?

Mm, not really sure rape is a great hill to make your stand on when it comes to freedom of speech in America. It's not like there's legislation prohibiting same, much as nakedly racist language is still legal. It's just socially unacceptable because a large class of people find it offensive.

So, again, rape seems like a really poor area to draw a line in the sand. There's a vast chasm between a pain point like "I broke my leg" and "my ex physically coerced me into having sex." Remember, people aren't upset about the mere mention of rape, but jokes that trivialize it.

As far as re-victimizing you, well, that's your choice to make. I don't think an individual ought to generalize their own experience to everyone else's, whether they're a victim or not. Some rape victims may have reached a point where they're fine with jokes about it, and some aren't. I'll bet you could find a number of people with similar experiences to your own who would not be comfortable with that flavor of humor.