Radosh.net

There's not enough detail about the new PS3 game Fat Princess to determine if it will be any good, but it certainly looks like fun. The game is basically capture the flag in medieval setting, but the flag in this case is a cute cartoon princess. Or, at least, she starts as a cute cartoon princess. But to make it harder for your enemies to free her, you can stuff her with cake so she gets really fat and hard to move.

Shockingly, this has produced a bit of a backlash, even though no one's been able to play the game yet (not that such ignorance has stopped anyone from protesting before). The reactions range from serious criticism ("You don’t need to be a brilliant feminist scholar to realize that this kind of story, with a male hero rescuing a helpless girl, is not only a cliche but a sexist cliche that long predates the invention of Pong.") to slightly odd suggestions as to how to make the game less offensive ("So how about layering, Karamari-style, a bunch of random shit on top of the chest, like shrubbery, rocks, bison, etc, that would also weight it down. That could be cute, and silly, and not reinforce nasty stereotypes about women and the obese.") to the just plain angry ("It's not often I have the opportunity to congratulate a cutting-edge tech company on such splendiferous retrofuck jackholery.").

But the best reaction has to be from the comments section of a post on Big Fat Blog:

[W]e've got people out there who have designed video games where you score points for raping and impregnating women and 10 year-old girls, and aliens who score points for ripping clothes off women ... It's only logical that moving from sexual assault to force-feeding a captured woman would be the next step.

To suggest that a game where you force-feed a very cartoonish-looking princess is more offensive than a (probably hypothetical) game where you get points for raping children — or even something like Grand Theft Auto, where you get points for assaulting and killing fairly realistic-looking people — is ludicrous.

Since this isn't my blog, I don't want to start a debate about whether it's okay to make fun of fat people. (It is.) But if you're so pro-fat that you think criticizing obesity is worse than promoting rape, then society clearly hasn't done enough to make you feel bad about yourself.

Posted by Jesse

8:00 PM