T w e n t y S i d e d

A followup to the earlier post on Chainmail Bikini:

A lengthy and thoughtful post over at no cookies for me. In the post Roy states, “But now, Shamus seems quite opposed to the idea that something like a webcomic can encourage a sexist view of women or that it could, in some way, endorse rape.” I wouldn’t say that. It would be more accurate to say that I just didn’t think our comic was anywhere near doing such a thing.

Cineris takes issue with the detractors in a vigorous post over at Augary.

Mark adds his own thoughts, and expands on the idea to talk about “probing” in games. He talks about other freeform games where the player does something not because they think it’s a good idea, but simply because they want to see how the game will react. You can decide for yourself if that’s applicable to the comic, but it’s a very common drive in players for both tabletop and computer-driven games and an interesting take on this sort of behavior.

Longtime DMotR reader Rebecca has no love for the comic in general. The same thing coming from a random internet person wouldn’t bother me, but coming from someone who’s been around and had many interesting things to say in the past, it kind of stings. Still, I’m glad she cared enough to lay her thoughts out like that and I appreciate how careful she was to avoid going after me personally.

ChattyDM has his own thoughts, and talks about behavior issues at the table when dealing with an all-man lineup.

I don’t really want to open up the whole debate again, but I thought it was important to point to some other people who have taken the time to comment on it. All of the posts I linked are carefully written and thoughtful. These aren’t just people cheerleading or flaming. I’m leaving comments closed. I don’t think the thread can go anywhere good. If you have a post on this elsewhere that I’ve missed, send me an email (shamus at shamusyoung dot com) and I’ll link it here.

One final thought is that Chainmail Bikini has moved on to other subjects, which is probably more familiar territory for DMotR readers.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.