Quote from: TristramEvans;811100Is Final Fight the one where the mayor of the city decided to help fight gang violence by taking off his shirt and grabbing a 2x4?

Now if mayor de Blasio really wants to win over the cops...

It never comes up, so I don't specify.

Though it does bring up an interesting conundrum. In the name of "gender equality" is it ok to casually kill female opponents in the mook role? What would auntie Anita say?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i_RPr9DwMA

Generally speaking, yes. Specifically speaking, it depends. The games that I'm currently running are L5R, Shadows of Esteren, and using the Anima system to run a Weapons of the Gods game. In both L5R and Weapons of the Gods, there have been 'mooks' - be they enemies faced in mass battles, or a horde of members of the Hell Clan. In both of those cases, there have been specifically mentioned female opponents. However, I've played D&D in the past where most of the ork minis that I own are Games Workshop plastics, so every time the PCs fought orks, they were represented by minis that were pretty much all male.

Quote from: TristramEvans;811100Is Final Fight the one where the mayor of the city decided to help fight gang violence by taking off his shirt and grabbing a 2x4?

That's a man I'd vote for!

//Panjumanju

In most typical fantasy games I usually have mixed groups of mooks. If the game world is gender neutral with regard to adventurer types then I treat the opposition in a similar fashion, featuring a mixture of male & female villains, henchmen, and even mooks. Of course everyone in the world is somebodyand I generally name my mooks.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;811078Final Fight? Ooh, there's a can of worms.

Final Fight had the female goon Poison, but it's interesting to note that for US releases it was considered too shocking to have red blooded American boys punching out a woman so they changed her... to a transgendered person.

Or something, it's actually quite complicated. You can read up about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_%28Final_Fight%29

That was for the American console port, very specifically the Nintendo ports, the arcade had women mooks. The Sega CD port had female mooks too, but Capcom just drew in more modest clothes, which is ridiculous given how Golden Axe and Streets of Rage were already out by that port. But whatever, Sega obviously had more guts and was the more authentic port publisher.


SNK also had similar guts, adding way more female fighters than Capcom with Street Fighter on average. And SNK had female mooks all over the place since the beginning like Ninja Combat. But America is a strange place filled with a self-tortured puritanism.

Women had been kicking ass and taking names, as heroes and mooks, long since the early days of video games. If anyone doesn't have that sense of history they are either poorly informed or willfully ignorant. (I realize this might be more applicable to a tangential topic I don't feel would be fruitful to pursue here, but it is still related.)

Quote from: Opaopajr;811263That was for the American console port, very specifically the Nintendo ports, the arcade had women mooks. The Sega CD port had female mooks too, but Capcom just drew in more modest clothes, which is ridiculous given how Golden Axe and Streets of Rage were already out by that port. But whatever, Sega obviously had more guts and was the more authentic port publisher.

Its actually even more complicated than that. It was a real clusterfuck involving cultural assumptions, mistranslations and mixed messages that's flared back up since Poison was a playable Street Fighter character especially in the fanart community. It's all kind of silly but fun to watch.

Nothing all that crazy, though. It's just a legacy localization screw up. In Japan there's no confusion, and nowhere near as confusing as anything else they have recently put out on the market. Japan's cultural difference perhaps nudged some archaic slices of America to catch up faster in the market, but 80's & 90's video games have been very gender diverse since the beginning.

Quote from: Opaopajr;811279Nothing all that crazy, though.

I don't agree based on what I've seen about it but thus isn't the thread to hash it out (and being the internet it would never be settled anyway

Hope I don't get allot of heat for this but I do think there is definitely a difference in how violence even fictional violence against women and violence against men is taken.

At least in general and in the general public. Role players as a community probably have more outliers (open minded or whatever you want to call them) but I think its definitely there so speaking in general more people are uncomfortable with men inflicting violence on women than vice versa in the US/West

I couldn't begin to recount the number of culture clashes I've seen between different standards of treating women. Though women can be handled very badly in Asia, often I would see a Westerner (often drunk) try to "correct" someone on "how to treat a lady" and start fights over it. Even though there were cases where the woman was genuinely in danger, what I often saw was usually patronizing post-colonial bullshit. Often the women and their friends would try to de-escalate, but there was no use when there was a Western "knight in shining armor to the rescue."

Asia was no picnic, but the West was really not much better. Men and women have different body space and interaction norms around the world; what you think is universal really very much isn't. And for all the white knighting, I came to think a pox on all houses.

In the end I just boiled it down now to a simple rule: don't touch me without permission, strike me and I'll strike you back. I don't play fight, I don't affectionately hit, I don't "just take it," you get one warning ever. Unless you are incapable of being cognizant of your behavior, I could care less your status. Equal equals equal.

edit: I should add that I was born and raised as a Westerner and indoctrinated into its mores and religious world views. I just lived and traveled overseas more than average. Nothing special and very much like your average American neighbor, who happens to eat "ethnic food," like pimento cheese sandwiches, baked beans, and braised tofu.

Wait...pimento cheese sandwiches are "Ethnic food"?!? :confused:

Quote from: Novastar;811447Wait...pimento cheese sandwiches are "Ethnic food"?!? :confused:

Likely in the same way as pizza and fortune cookies

Of course! Just like BBQ potato chips and cheesy stuffed crust pizza. Americanized Regional Whitey (North, South, Central, Mountain, California, etc.) is an ethnicity, too.


Mmmm... artichoke hearts and sun dried tomatoes on cheesy stuffed crust pizza.

The different tone and atmosphere between this thread and its sister thread over on the other place is a perfect example of why I like this board better despite 90 percent of the gaming talk being about things I have no idea about. For example, I think the current discussion of movie depictions is either incredibly disingenuous or coming from an angle that's slightly perpendicular to the general world.

But it really is a no one win situation. If fiction depicts a fight between a man and woman has if they're own equal terms with nothing held back then they're glorifying violence against women. If she's beaten then they'll be complaints of the former and that they're depicting women as weaker/less capable. If they don't use females as direct combatants they're being sexists. Basically you have to choose if you want to be shot or stabbed at that point. There's no win (except maybe to constantly script things so men fight men, women fight women and if men fight men they win handily with little apparent effort or risk).

As for men that do feel uncomfortable with the depiction of men fighting women its not really fair to ignore the fact (that unless I've been living in some odd cultural bubble for 40 yrs) that men have it drilled into them from an early age that you don't hit girls/women. Ever. Even if they are hitting you. Call it sexist, call its backwards, whatever you like it is an aspect of being raised as a "civilized" man for most of us. So most of the men, even the most open minded even feminist among them to feel uncomfortable seeing men strike women even in fiction. So do many of the women.. to the point I find it almost unbelievable when some say they'd feel no different about scenes where Tony Jaa is snapping backs, twisting necks and dislocating limbs willy nilly if he was doing it to 20 women in a row as opposed to 20 men.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhAjhoOFgoI

I think this scene would make many people much more uncomfortable if the thugs were all or significantly women. Yes, it probably make some people uncomfortable now but those would be people that either think its over the top to begin with or just dislike violence overall.