This blog contains some spoilers for Far Cry 3 and arguably Tomb Raider, you have been warned.
A thread on The Escapist (that's right, I didn't notice this myself) enlightened me about a rape scene in Far Cry 3. No I'm not talking about Buck, I'm talking about Citra, and you the player. When you get accepted by the Rakyat (the natives fighting the pirates) the leader, Citra, gives the player drugs as a part of the initiation ritual and he has plenty of hallucinations. Later, as Jason (the protagonist) wakes up Citra is on top of him, they're suddenly having sex which started while Jason was drugged and had never agreed to, well since that's what they show we have to assume that's how it went. Now, this is pretty much rape, sure Jason wasn't exactly unhappy about it, and you might disagree but that's the point, kind of...
Remember all the fuss about the rape attempt in Tomb Raider? There she was very aware of it all, she resisted, and ended up killing the guy, this is controversial but actual sex is not? Look at the Far Cry 3 scene in a different way, if Jason was a woman and Citra was a man, a tribal guy drugging up the woman and then being in the middle of sex when she wakes up, still the same thing? Yes, but it's probably not seen like that. This is what our modern equal society has come to, folks, a rape attempt that's meant to show how a female crosses the line is controversial but a man being pretty much raped but doesn't resist because of drugs is fine. In fact, there's another suggested rape where a male bad guy is supposed to have raped a friend of Jason, that has also not created any big controversy.
I know it might seem like I'm protesting against the rape scene itself, I'm not, what I'm trying to protest here is the horrible double standards. The original poster who brought this to my attention was also on this, I don't mind developers in any medium using controversial themes or actions if it benefits the story, but the issue is that the mainstream simply choose to ignore other similar stuff simply because it's more acceptable, for some reason. I feel this happens a lot with modern feminism these days, a big gruff bad guy tries to rape the female protagonist, not okay since women are fragile and all that, a woman rapes a man with the use of drugs and that's okay because that's a woman and she's sexy, why complain about that? You know, a local thing here in Finland reminds me of this, connected to the Eurovision Song Contest, a Finnish contribution have questionable lyrics, note it's a pop song, it's a woman singing about wanting marriage and says among other things "You are my master, I am your slave", feminists at least were in an uproar about this because they deemed the lyrics sexist. Fair enough, that might be a bit sexist, but it's just a pop song, someone wrote an article on it that we seriously needs to get some perspective on these matters, the article opened with something like "people are being murdered, some perspective please" and went on that you shouldn't accept everything but to focusing on small things when you could be helping actually abused women and so on baffled the writer.
So yes, we shouldn't ignore controversial subjects, but nor should we focus on one thing. I got a bit carried away there for a second but the point remains, Jason in Far Cry 3 was technically raped, he was drugged and also mentally unstable at that point, his normal self would probably not be so happy about cheating on his girlfriend either. If we are to ignore that while causing a riot about that Tomb Raider bit I think that says pretty much on the modern idea of sexism. As I've said before and I want to clarify it even further, I'm not the original carrier of this message, but I felt it was important enough to spread forward, I would love to hear more views on the subject!
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