Right. So we actually mostly agree. Where we disagree, and your essential thesis, is that the simple usage of the word/concept “rape” in the joke somewhere makes it a “rape joke.”
My exegesis differs from yours as follows.
Penny Arcade is a gaming webcomic. It is written by gamers for an audience who are gamers and generally makes jokes about gaming. This particular comic is about gaming. This particular comic is about a particular type of game, the MMO.
Background for non-gamers. (Gamers may want to skip this and the next three paragraphs, as you already know this; but I welcome gamers who wish to audit my description of gaming mechanics and correct it.) An “MMO” is a game in which multiple players log on to a single set of servers which represent a world. In this world, they can communicate with each other, co-operate, and do “quests.” The quests generally follow one of two formulas: “Kill the Monster,” and “Fetch this (sometimes but not always hard-to-get) thing.”
A variation on the “fetch quest” is the “fetch me X number of the thing.” Now, in order to make the mechanics of a game with millions of players in a single world work, there has to be an infinite (or at least sufficient) number of whatever the thing is. Otherwise, only a small finite number of players out of the millions could actually acquire the thing(s). On the other hand, you can’t actually make the infinite (or sufficient) nature of the resource obvious, or the ubiquitous nature of the thing defeats the whole “hard-to-get” aspect.
To this end, what we have are “respawns.” Only some number of the thing will appear, and once claimed by one player, more will show up later on a set timer. But in order to encourage co-operative play, there are generally more of that item than there are required to meet the terms of the quest, so that a group of players at any given moment can all get the thing at once.
In order to motivate the player into feeling like something more heroic than a mailman, the “fetch quests” often get framed as something important; the rescue mission is a common way to frame this: The thing you are acquiring is a person, the difficulty comes from the evil foe guarding the person, and the place you’re taking the thing is back to its home.
(Gamers can start reading again.)
Now while framing a “fetch quest” as a “rescue mission” is a very common thing to do in games, it’s also a great example where the needs of good gameplay and the needs of good story come into conflict. And in games worth playing, the needs of gameplay usually win.
Now, getting to the comic proper. The comic features two characters in what, given the authors, expected audience and clearly fictitious circumstances (e.g., the period garb, the wolflike appearance of one of them) we can assume exist within a video game. In the first frame, one character speaks, and by the way that he addresses the other, the authors establish that within the game, one of them is a quest giver (and/or quest item), and the other is the player’s avatar in the game. (I am leaving a lot of the details out in the interest of time. I assume that most of the people reading this will understand why this is established in the first frame without me having to connect all of the dots.)
The first character then describes the horrors of his situation in grisly detail. He’s met with absolute indifference by the other, who responds, “Quest complete.”
The work is clearly satire. It takes a common problem – that of reconciling the needs of gameplay with the nuances of storytelling in games – and shows the problems with it through humorous exaggeration. Specifically, the problem of using a “rescue” as a fetch quest in an MMO, where you have more people to rescue than you’re actually called upon to do. It makes the player’s callousness to the quest-giver’s plight explicit, but this is not an accusation leveled at players; rather, it’s mocking game creators, for not giving the player any other choice.
It also fits the definition of satire in that people who missed the point attacked it; (see also: 1 2) people felt that the callous indifference of the avatar to the horrors faced by the quest-giver represented a callous indifference on the part of the authors towards people who have actually suffered the horrors described in real life.
Again, this is satire. The message within the comic, given the context and a very basic description of it that I’ve given, is that game designers need to be more sensitive to the situations they describe, lest they make supposedly heroic acts of the players into something far more self-serving. It is the same question that Richard Garriott asked himself and eventually led him to make Ultima IV; it’s the same question that Satan posed to God over Job’s good behavior: “He only does these good things because you reward him.”
The comic itself is a plea for more sensitivity, not less.
So now what happens when the very people who should be supporting that message miss the point so badly that they then decry it? Well, how would you feel? You’d feel upset, and (wrongly or rightly) lash out at those who so badly missed the point. So I find that I side with PA both in terms of the comic and the response. (I don’t necessarily agree with their response, but I find it completely understandable; moreover, I find the critics’ reaction to be more than merely ignorant, for a reason I’ll describe at the end of this post.)
You notice how I’ve gotten this far and haven’t even mentioned the one thing that is supposedly so offensive? That’s because the specific offensive act, in the context of the strip, doesn’t matter; what matters is that it be something horrible, to highlight the supposed callousness of the hero (which is actually the callousness of the game designer). While that means it doesn’t have to be the specific act given in the strip, that act is one on a very, very short list of horrors worthy of making the satire work.
If the first character in the comic were instead complaining that he had to e.g. tie his own shoes instead of having his servants do it for him, the comic might be funny, but it’s funny for an entirely different reason, and the problem that the comic is trying to address is no longer being addressed. If he were complaining that the cave mold were affecting his allergies, it’s addressing the issue, but so weakly as to have no force, and loses any semblance of being funny.
As for whether or not a given interpretation is “right” or not, I’d say this: The more of a work that is accounted for by a given interpretation, then the more valid the interpretation is. I believe that your interpretation (to some extent) is not very good, as it requires removing a single word from not just the context of the work, but from the work itself. The person who first objected to this strip on her blog went as far as to impose a completely different context onto the work which was neither accurate nor appropriate. It’s like trying to blame the Bangles for the destruction of Egyptian archaeological relics simply because they sang “Walk like an Egyptian.” (I admit it’s not a very good analogy; it only works in the sense of applying the wrong context to an event, not so much in the sense of missing the point of satire.)
So yes, my interpretation is better, significantly better, because mine accounts for the details of the work and the context of the work itself, and yours and other critics’ do not. And what is worse, I suspect that many of PA’s critics on this issue are leaving those details out not because they are ignorant of them; they are doing so deliberately, because those facts detract from their agenda.
