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green_sky said: The game’s ending, a nasty little punctuation mark on a series of acts of sexual violence against the game’s only female character, felt at odds with that. It's a discordance made worse by clumsy, almost gleeful handling of the material. In one instance, rape is used as a reward in a side objective: those who are prepared to trawl through the map and collect all the hidden audio tapes will find one where they can listen to Paz being sexually assaulted before she is forced to copulate with the underage Chico. “It's like fruit,” Skull Face muses in a bad guy growl. "Does she look sweet, or sour? A man has to know these things. Time for a taste test!" The bomb scene itself is pure horror. The camera lingers deliciously on Paz’s squelching intestines; her rescuers shoving their hands into her stomach as she screams in un-anaesthetised pain. When she sacrifices herself at the end, we are not left mourning her – there was not enough character development in Ground Zeroes for that – rather we are left in dumb shock at the information she imparted with her final words. There is no interest in the broader complexities of Paz herself; she is nothing but a catalyst for the hero’s quest in Ground Zeroes’ successor, The Phantom Pain. Rather than interpreting my critique as the work of a feminazi (the insult du jour) |
