A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Grindhouse

I've heard rumors of a specious schismatic somewhere out on the fringes of the internet with concerns about the content of my Grindhouse Edition box.

To clarify:

The only responsibility I have with my releases is to honestly communicate their content so you can make an informed buying decision. I don't think anyone can argue that I wasn't forthcoming about the Grindhouse box before its release.

If it has the explicit content warning on it, then I mean it and I'm pulling no punches - beware.

If it does not have the explicit content warning on it, that's not a trick either. It'll be fine for general audiences.

Read reviews. Be informed about what you're spending your money on. That's your responsibility.

And now, story time!

***

I read Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space again yesterday, to get myself in the right mindset for some writing in that mode.

Now I don't know how you guys visualize the things you're reading, and I don't know how Die Farbe showed details BECAUSE IT WAS FUCKING SOLD OUT WHEN I WANTED TO SEE IT AT THE LAST NIGHT VISIONS EVEN THOUGH IT WAS A 3AM SHOWING SON OF A BITCH, but when I read the story I get some horrific images in my brain. Read this passage, where Ammi Pierce discovers and disposes of Mrs Gardner (is she even given a name? I can't remember it and a quick scan didn't help...):

There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. I gathered that no moving thing was left in that attic room, and that to leave anything capable of motion there would have been a deed so monstrous as to damn any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyone but a stolid farmer would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through that low doorway and locked the accursed secret behind him.

It's a common lie that we tell ourselves that things we imagine are worse than the things we are shown. What did Mrs. Gardner look like at this point? Lovecraft doesn't directly say (although leaves hints throughout the story) here, and he also gives the "There is no need to speak too exactly of what they found," line when the bodies of the Gardner children are found in the well.

My mind goes into full-on overdrive when reading passages like these, and the autopsy piece from At the Mountains of Madness, or the descriptions of Pickman's paintings, or The Thing on the Doorstep. I see absolutely disgusting things whether or not its spelled out on the page, because that's what is actually being talked about.

Lovecraft's descriptions here are not likely to offend anyone, no matter how vivid their imagination. But an effective visual depiction of all of them likely would. So which then is really more effective at truly unnerving the audience?

I think the "it's more effective to not show everything and leave it up to the imagination of the reader/viewer" idea is bullshit as a blanket statement. It's truthy but not true. It's a valid stylistic choice but it's touted as some sort of universal truth. Is it a defense mechanism for those who don't actually fill in the blanks with their imagination when confronted with less graphic descriptions? Is it a lie told by those ashamed or disturbed that they can do so? An excuse by creators to act like that they're making a choice instead of being censored by an editor or studio or network?

I suspect a lot of that talk is really a handy excuse to work around shitty movie special effects. It really is better to hide the monster than to reveal it and and oh boy it's a man in a crappy rubber suit, you know? (I wish filmmakers today would have this attitude with their substandard CGI creations...)

Sometimes less is more. But sometimes, more is more.

***

Red Dragon was on Finnish prime time broadcast television Monday night, unedited. That girl putting her hand in the corpse's blown-out head was one of those sublime images that makes me all eeewwwwwww even though I'd seen the movie before some years back. It's a gross-out moment that even the worst of the worst in cinema can only hope to match, not better.

But that's Finland, you'll say, as if people here are Martians with their strange and different way of life. (OK, yeah, they eat creamed poo as an Easter treat and like to get naked a lot in groups for non-sexual purposes, but still...)

US prime time broadcast TV crime shows like CSI and House show a ton of gore. Severed heads, massive blood loss, an eye blowing out of its socket, or this one time on NCIS with this disemboweled guy in the elevator and his intestines and everything were all over the floor and...

You don't have to cite Saw or the like as something exposing what your insides might look like to the general populace.

It's all out there.

***

People have been bringing up Cannibal Corpse comparisons. It's totally fair since I hired Vince Locke to do the zombie attack because of his work with Cannibal Corpse and how it blew my mind when I was 17-18. It's being related in some quarters to the bad old days of the D&D witch-hunts.

Cannibal Corpse had their moment in the light as well. They had a cameo in Ace Ventura, Pet Detective (and Jim Carrey appearing on Arsenio talking about his love of death metal was pretty funny) and then a few years later were brought up by Bob Dole's presidential campaign as being a negative influence on youth or some such rubbish. Chris Barnes was on some news show getting questioned by a clueless reporter.

The reaction in the metal scene? Howls of laughter. Or worry that oh god the posers were going to think it's cool and they'll ruin everything - we were sick enough of people confusing "our" stuff with crap like Korn.

Nobody was concerned on any sort of moral level, or freaked about what would happen to us if people knew that we enjoyed that sort of thing. Then again, we were all glad the days of Poison and Motley Crue and Quiet Riot were over, even (especially?) if that meant metal was nowhere near the charts. Remember, metal was DEAD during this time in the eyes of the general public, and while it was frustrating in terms of product availability (mail order or nothing) and tour frequency, people carried on doing whatever they wanted to do because the commercial success was a possible byproduct of the process, not the goal. More creative experimentation happened in those dead 90s because neither the artists nor their financiers had to worry about ruining their Top 10 chances.

Challenging and upsetting common sensibilities is kind of metal's raison d'être, you know?

Look, if you don't like it, fine. Fair enough. I knew that I was not doing something to fit every taste. I appreciate the publicity you give me when you express your distaste, and you're welcome for the traffic and attention that talking about it gives to you.

If you don't like it because you assume people you don't know might think badly about the things you do just because this different other thing exists, then you are an idiot with brains made of shit. Get some goddamn confidence to make your own decisions and live your life without worrying about the approval of strangers.

***

Remember all that whinging I was doing about the violence against women in the art?

Due to recent discussions, I did some counting.

There are four women in the whole of the game who die, are in the process of dying, or have just died in the art. All adventuring types, no innocent victim types. By comparison, there are four dead men in the Rules book by page 9.

(this doesn't count the zombiethings at the front of the Tutorial or end of the Referee book since those are more monster types - you don't count the existing zombies in a horror movie as "victims" - nor the corpse at the feet of Ollam Onga because I tried to crop that out as much as I could because it was godawful in quality compared to the rest of the piece, so you can argue 5 or 7 depending on how tough you want to be with the qualifications. But if you want to count those, then you have to count the 100+ dead men in the halfling picture, and the proportions get even more lopsided)

Complaining about violence in the art? Valid. Complaining about violence against women in the art? No basis at all.

In fact, I dare you to look at my game and find any indication anywhere that women are portrayed in any way inferior than men or treated more cruelly than men. (Quick, call the Sandwich lady! Actually, if this link draws you here, I'll send you a copy of the game and you can crucify me or not or just throw the thing away without comment if you wish) There are protagonist women all over this thing. There is some cheesecake, but it's not incidental costuming, it's the whole point of the pieces where it appears, and there is just as much beefcake to match. Violence against women? There's some, but that's only because I'm putting the women in as equals, and it would be fucking lame to then decide they can't be touched.

So where does this anti-woman impression come from?

Some is my fault, as I blogged about it because I was so concerned that I was being unbalanced in my artwork. Which turns out to be a total joke, because there would have to be TONS more dead adventuring women in the art to even approach balance.

Something Awful's feature had 3 of the 4 images, which I'm sure creates a lopsided impression for those that haven't seen the whole thing.

I'm sure there are those that think violence against women is inherently worse than violence against men, even given equal contexts, but I say no way. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

But I think the women's deaths stick out in people's minds for a more important reason: Each of those pieces was carefully plotted and designed. There's a story behind each and every one of them. And that gives those illustrations far greater weight, even if the story is not known, than a lot of the other ones which may be just "Hey, this is a cool idea!"

Alice's death is the least brutal, because of the rather cartoon "electrified skeleton" effect (my idea, not the artist's). But she's in the intro as a character, and a lot of people remember Aleena's death back in the day and make some easy comparisons. It's not just some woman getting zapped, it's your adventuring companion!

Then there's the duel. It's a 7 image sequence, the only one of its type in the game so it stands out. (the header images are a different sort of thing...)

I don't think those are at all out of line. Now we get into more complicated things.

The Flame Princess getting melted by the slime served two purposes. One, I wanted to get across that the game is supposed to be deadly. What better way to emphasize that than killing the game's titular character? It also gets across the horror of oozes, slimes, jellies, etc. In traditional game play, they attack, and often just do some damage to a PC (even as it melts their equipment). I wanted something to show just what it would mean to get brought down to 0hp by one of these nasty, horrific things. Two birds, one stone.

The zombie attack? Originally this was going to be much more over the top than it was. Remember the "get me arrested" thing? There were ideas thrown around where that victim was going to be gangbanged by zombies and all sorts of awful crap, just to be obnoxious.

You know why that didn't happen? Because it wouldn't have made any sense. Sure, the mental impression of "What would it be like to have a rotting maggoty zombie dick thrusting into your mouth?" would have been suitably gross, but I can't imagine zombies really giving a shit about sexual urges. It'd be a complete joke. (it hadn't yet been decided whether the victim was to be a man or a woman at that stage, FYI)

But there had to be something a bit more or there's no point hiring Vince Locke, so the genital ripping thing came up. And at this point assigning male and female in the pic had to be done. Originally it was going to be two women adventurers, because women adventurers are cool. There was then some debate over whether it would be gnarlier to rip a cock off or do this vagina thing. In the end, I decided that a man watching his pregnant adventuring companion lover getting ripped apart because of something he did (taking the staff) was the most tragic thing we could do with the basic setup. And so it was done.

I guess I should talk about the fertility goddess pic here, even though there's no violence towards women depicted. (true story - my ex said it reminded her of her own experience giving birth... sounds like justification to throw a LOL in here)

Amos turned in a racy sketch, and I balked at it because I didn't think it really fit where it was to go. We had a conversation and he talked about doing some of the weirder stuff (I guess maybe he was seeing the fun the other artists were having while I was giving him straight-laced assignments, and he wanted in?). Well I wanted to control that sort of thing and save it for specific pieces instead of having it all over the game. And so this one was the over-the-top taking-the-piss ridiculous wink-wink pic in the game and Amos got to have his fun.

NAKED WOMEN performing HUMAN SACRIFICE while a CREATURE pops out of a GIANT VAGINA and DEMONIC NURSING is happening! And some INVISIBLE DUDE is stealing NIPPLE GEMS off the GIANT TITTY STATUE!

If you take that seriously, I suggest suicide.