this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Honestly I think this is a bad example. Guys are generally happy to play games with attractive bad-ass female leads. See Metroid/Tomb Raider/Bayonetta/Nier/etc
They complain about reboot Lara Croft's tits being too small. Regular sized boobs are woke of course.
I actually think this is a fantastic example for this reason. Gamers back in the day were PISSED when they found out Samus Aran was a fEmOiD
I heard they were surprised, but where they pissed?
I am aware of several angry letters written about Samus being a woman. But I did some digging and I think you are closer to right than I was. It seems that the average reaction was confusion. Like, someone (likely a boy named Justin Bailey) discovered a cheat code that, according to several publications such as Boy's Life, "turns Samus from a robot cyborg into a woman". It seems people just didn't know what to make of Samus taking off their suit and suddenly turning into a blond woman in a leotard. Based on my googling, it seems like many people were still confused about this when Metroid 2 came out in 91, but by the time Super Metroid came out in 94 most people understood that Samus was a woman the whole time.
Yeah, but fort that you had to finish the game. That was HARD as hell back in the days. I believe neither I nor anyone in my elementary school knew Samus was a girl because nobody managed to finish the game.
You had to finish the game within a certain time limit too. For super Metroid, you didn't get the full perfect ending unless you did it in 3 hours.
Which is impossible for a normal mortal..
I know this is coming off as tooting my own horn, but the reality is that I'm just very excited about it, because it was a big part of my younger years.
This is a very cool compliment to see, as someone who regularly tried to hit the sub 1 hour clear mark for Super Metroid.
Did some googling. Apparently the Justin Bailey cheat code, which lets you play as Zero Suit Samus, was described in many publications as "it turns Samus from a cyborg into a woman". It seems people couldn't wrap their heads around Samus being a woman the whole time, and didn't know what to make of the ending even if they got to see it. Some things never change, I guess. My googling suggests that this confusion was still prominent when Metroid 2 was released in 92 but was mostly dealt with by the time Super Metroid was released in 94
Isn't her silhouette revealed when you die?
not in the original, you're thinking of the thirdquil on the snes.
thirdquil?
Third sequel I guess? It's not a word. And Super Metroid would be the second sequel anyway.
Guess you didn't go to school with Justin Bailey.
Were they? Has there been a survey or something? Because going off letters wrote or something is a pretty bad metric to judge the opinion of any general population,because guess who would be the people most motivated to voice their opinion. Whatever fraction of the observed population they make up can’t really be derived from that. (Also holds true for social media today)
Did some googling. Seems like the average reaction at the time was confusion about how or why Samus "turned into a woman". Some people got mad, but most people just didn't comprehend what happened. Some things never change, I guess.
True enough!
The twist in the original Metroid was that you didn't find out Samus was a woman until the ending, I could totally see today's dumbass gamers calling that a bait-and-switch.
Kicker is that they have to be attractive, which is the real reason most have no hate towards them. Aloy wasn't traditionally attractive in the Horizon sequel and people lost their shit.
She wasn't? I dig tattoos
Nah, women can't have peach fuzz on their faces, or skin with spots and texture. Also Aloy didn't use machine blood to make eyeliner and eye shadow, so apparently she's not female enough for these morons.
The most obvious way these people tattle on themselves and their small dick energy is when you hear them start referring to all women as females. They aren't people, they're a caste of other lifeforms that can be boiled down to their sex.
Hearing how "woke games devs are too threatened by attractive females" is a good sign whoever is speaking slipped and landed on their head too many times.
I do know some people use 'female' in a derogatory way. I also know people who use 'men' in a derogatory way. I also know some who use 'female' and 'male' when they don't want to say that the people involved are 'men' or 'women', in the sense of being grown-ass adults.
I appreciate the attempt to be even handed here, but there is a whole manosphere subculture centered around describing and acting upon women not as equals but as "females" using that language, which really isn't mirrored in the other direction. While you may give someone the benefit of a doubt due to the above, I feel the language is an incredibly strong indicator that whoever is speaking does not speak to many women as equals, or would not be calling their entire sex "females" like one does in an anthropological study.
As for them being grown-ass adults or not, I highly suspect the context would make this abundantly clear if you were talking about people being acting foolish, rather than simply their state of being.
No need to bodyshame here. Or do you think all guys with small dicks are seething incels?
As this is the only possibly interpretation, this must be the case. You have decoded me expertly, and there exists no room for an alternative explanation. We don't exist in a world where this phrase or it's inversion have entered the lexicon of slang.
The thing is that whether that guy was trying to "decode" you or not, a person's intentions don't determine the effect that their actions have. Furthermore, just because something is a commonly used phrase doesn't mean it's good.
If you didn't mean to bodyshame people in general, then that's great. You're probably a cool person. But if someone says "hey please stop punching those innocent people" you can't say "oh don't worry, it doesn't count because I was trying to hit someone else, I'm going to keep punching them and it still won't count".
This is a lot of words to take umbrage with "small dick energy" as a piece of slang.
No comments on anyone's bodies, anymore than calling someone an ass is.
If you just called them "a dick" maybe that would be comparable, as it stands it's more like calling someone "a fatass".
And if my comments are long it's less because I take umbrage with a specific phrase and more because I take umbrage with the idea that you can somehow dictate the implications of your speech based off of your intent. If you want to argue that the phrase "small dick energy" isn't a big deal then be my guest. I honestly don't think I would disagree, at the very least there's far worse things going on right now.
But when someone points out that something you said can have unfavorable interpretations thinking "wow how dare they try to psychoanalyze me over a single internet comment, they should know that's not what I meant" isn't a good attitude to have. Once something leaves your mouth (or the tips of your fingers) it exists independently of you, and it has all sorts of implications and effects whether you want it to or not, especially when you're talking to strangers. This is something I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self.
EDIT: it's true that sometimes people can go too far in grabbing the worst interpretation of something they can, running with it, and deciding the person needs to be punished for that. But this isn't an example of that.
So because all interpretation is subjective, one should defer to language giving the least possible offense because the possibility an extreme reading of comments might hurt someone who hyperspecifically applies it to themselves?
That's some small dick energy right there.
My thinking here doesn't have to do with being polite or individual instances of hurting individual feelings. It's really easy to fall into the trap of thinking on this case-by-case basis, but the world doesn't just consist of you and the one person who has a 0.001% chance of getting their feelings hurt by one interaction.
It has more to do with the fact that when you put toxic shit out into the world you are actively making it worse. For example, every time someone who's "not a racist" makes a biggoted joke actual biggots get a little bit more bold. And every time someone conflates being considerate of the implications of their actions with having a small penis toxic masculinity gets reinforced a little bit more.
It's like littering, no single person does much harm by themselves but the cumulative effect is pretty bad. So, I'm not trying to put you down or verbally joust you. I'm trying to make sure a place that I care about, --this community-- remains a pleasant place for everyone. And since we're both here, and we both dislike misogyny, we probably have pretty similar worldviews and we probably care about this place a similar amount. I hope that means we can work together instead of fighting.
To that end I want to say that I've tried to be polite and diplomatic. If I've come across as smug or something then I'm sorry. And I realize that the person that initially replied to you was a bit of an ass, but that's no reason to take it out on me.
I legitimately respect your point of view.
But effectively if implemented as you suggest we're at a conclusion then that small dick jokes, even as a passing reference to the overwhelming societal norms of the past few decades, are a protected class?
In the 90s, many folks called stuff they didn't like or thought was lame "gay" pejorativly. I understand the perspective you are trying to hold here in not perpetuating a similar bias towards the less-well-endowed (LWE). But this is a group that ostensibly includes half the global population as possible members, and the colloquial usage of "big dick energy" has nothing to do with actual dicks. A man with a 2" Johnson can have incredible big dick energy. A lesbian who just laid down the law and owned a task can have big dick energy. Conversely someone always scared of others, or hateful just because things are different is not acting with confidence. They're giving off the opposite, small dick energy.
There's no hate here towards a protected class, or even toward LWE folks. It's about a concept rather divorced from the actual physical circumstances.
Sorry I took so long to reply
Anyway, yeah, like I said earlier I don't really have a problem with small dick jokes or the phrase as such. Like you said it doesn't really affect an underprivileged group, although I think in certain uses it definitely is toxically masculine.
I was replying to you not really because of that, but rather because I've seen the same reasoning, literally almost word for word as what you wrote in a few of your earlier comments, used to justify the use of slurs. Like I said I really wish teenaged me had been exposed to the point of view I've been trying to convey. Because of that it's a mode of thinking I really want to try to ward people away from, even if in this case it was used in regards to something fairly innocuous.
Not all squares are rectangles, but all rectangles are insecure dweebs who need to find something better to do.
There were tons of comments about her being overweight, which is just comical.
Don't even get me started about the Last of Us 2 hate
God, the fucking gamer rage around the Fable trailer was insane. They can't even take the idea of a woman not being traditionally attractive as a punchline. And to explain why woman no look good, they had to pull a story about a trans game dev being the model straight out their asses, because only one of them TRANS WOMEN could look slightly unattractive!
They act like how attractive a character is directly correlates to whether gameplay is good or a story is bad. Why can't they just appreciate the game for what it is and the character for who they are?
Tomb raider rocked... Bayonetta, not as much