Good Time Happy Fun GO!

CNN has been hammering on the Japanese Hentai game Rapelay for the last couple of days, a game which is particularly relevant to its readership since basically nobody outside of Japan plays it, and...wait, never mind, this story is completely irrelevant to CNN's readership.

Of course, someone got their panties twisted up over this game, so CNN has decided to twist them further by doing several cover stories about this totally new and outrageous sensation from Japan, these, these games  where you...oh god, you...are a character who ... the point of the game is sexual!

 Up-Up, Down-Down, Left-Right, Left-Right, -B-A Select Start

In the interest of fairness, Rapelay is just terrible - it is not a sex game, it is a rape game, and if you need the difference explained to you I invite you to go back to whatever primordial pit you crawled out of before learning to stand upright, hunt for food, build fire, and use a computer.  

First of all, your protagonistic character has only one mission.  The mission is rape. The only thing that sets this apart from playing as the LA Lakers in NBA Live is that you only get points for raping specific women - namely, a woman who rejected you, and that woman's family.  This includes her extremely young sister. 

 Forecast for this evening: non-consensual

The reason I know all this is that SomethingAwful covered Rapelay in 2007 (Warning - not for the faint of heart, the easily offended, or really for anyone who might consider themselves to be a halfway decent human being).  To be clear, I do not see any redeeming quality in this game, and I'm still wondering why the Japanese are allowed to export fucking anything, though naturally: not agree / defend to death / right to say / blah blah blah. 

No, the thing that's got my own panties twisted up is why CNN is picking this battle in particular - this is such total schlock, the sort of thing that int he guise of promoting cross-cultural understanding actually limits it.  Although the follow-up piece on Rapelay was reasonably thoughtful, explaining in part why hentai games (including rape games) "thrive" in Japan, though completely failing to make the distinction between different types of games, from the cutey "dating sims" like Giggle Girl Princess Magic Knight Hope! and the really gruesome stuff like Shadow Lurker Chainsaw Adventure Good Time 4.    

CNN's only goal in publishing this sort of story can only be the nuclear obliteration of Japan, and I for one am convinced.  A better cultural critic than I once asked "Are we out of atomic bombs or something? What could we possibly be waiting for?"

 

 Very bad sad time, tears of land of wind and ghosts!

Japan, I love your giant robots, your sexy schoolgirls, your ninja assassins - but you are the only modern industrialized country I know that gets to call it's sadistic misogyny "patriarchy" and it's ferocious racism "xenophobia."  Get over this shit - my very own country didn't let women vote until 1920, and didn't let minorities vote until 1964, but the point is we did, and they do, and we're still a world-class superpower.  America didn't break down into some sort of barbaric neo-feudalism, where we all ride around on motorcycles worshipping the shattered remains of our broken society and killing each other for food, though honestly, that would be pretty kick-ass. 

 Fuck yeah!

CNN, in the 1980's and 1990's you were a bastion of democratized data - you were all news, 24 hours a day.  You brought us Gulf War I, or as I call it, FUCKING AWESOME - Did you SEE that FUCKING NIGHTVISION MISSILE KABOOOOOMMM!!!!  But now you're starting to see the strain of a 24 hour news cycle - like a blogger posting 3 times a week, you're getting desperate for things to say, desperate to fill up space on the page, so you run relatively puffy or safe pieces that sound really risque - OMG on the other side of the world there's a marginalized subculture that thinks rape is fun!  

Hey, there's a marginalized subculture on THIS side of the world that thinks rape is fun - they're called rapists.  Think of the time and energy you spent on that piece about Rapelay - wouldn't all those resources be put to better use raising awareness of the causes and effects of rape in America?  

Number one cause?  Dressing like that because she wants it.