Started playing arkham city again and I keep hearing over sexual voice lines when I play at cat woman such as "we want to see wants under that costume"and "haven't seen a woman in years" and yeah shes attractive obv but like what the fuck
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I guess it makes sense but it would also make sense to encounter thugs raping each other, yet that's not in the game because that would be weird, despite it being realistic. It was still a choice to put those lines in there and nobody would've cared or thought about that if they didn't include them. I think it's fair to criticize the fact that it's pretty weird to put these kinds of lines in a superhero game, a game which probably a lot of kids played.
I guess my point is, just because it's realistic, doesn't justify the choice to put it in the game.
In any other city I'd agree with you OP but this is Gotham City. It's like, the most crime ridden city in the history of ever with the most irredeemable POS thugs out there.
More specifically it's Arkham City. A city sized prison containing most of the worst criminals of the most crime ridden city in the history of ever with the most irredeemable POS thugs out there
But even if only every sixth criminal is an opportunistic rapist, it still makes sense to hear something like this in just about every combat encounter
But even if only every sixth criminal is an opportunistic rapist
Assuming 1 in 6 criminals are rapists is kinda crazy but even in a world like that would they really be so eager to announce it?
I know comic book characters do the whole "I'm going to punch you now" before throwing a punch thing but that's just a fun and slightly silly trope, applying it to something as serious as sexual violence feels wrong
Obviously this assumption wouldn’t apply in any real-world context, but in Gotham City’s giant supermax prison it doesn’t feel particularly far-fetched. As for why they’d just go and announce it, it makes more sense in the context of trying to get by in a gang headed by violent criminals like The Joker, Penguin, or Two-Face. The more violent of a criminal you come off as, the less likely it is for another inmate to give you trouble (which is why we see the political prisoners abused for their food and other resources). Boasting about how you’d sexually abuse a widely known figure like Catwoman is just the culture in there.
This obviously by no means excuses the behavior, these depictions are still very clearly made to help us justify beating the life out of these thugs. But it does explain it pretty well
Yeah but like I am not gonna be making crazy ass threats like that towards someone who's got connections with Batman. May be a criminal but I'm not am idiot type shit
(Do the thugs know Batman and Catwoman work together sometimes or no? Especially seeing as they work together in Arkham City)
Insanity plea perhaps. Or they just don't have the death penalty in whichever state Gotham is in (except that Arkham Origins starts with an attempted execution of Calendar Man so that's not the case)
Bro I think they‘d be offing joker off after the 10.000th kill by merit that he‘s a danger to not only society but to the existence of human life regardless of his mental capacity
Is there a reason given for his sentencing to death? I shudder to think what Calendar Man of all people could do that’s so much worse than the rest of Arkham’s finest.
While Julian Gregory Day was previously declared legally insane, albeit by questionable staff, his execution had been arranged by Loeb as a means to gain more political power, even having Harleen Quinzel do a second analysis that indicated that Day was sane to allow for an execution to commence.
It is city stories reward after solving diddler puzzle:
The Fall
Batman was wrong. He'd always been wrong about Joker. There was no madhouse qualified, no prison secure enough. Jason knew that now, after he'd seen tonight-
Little arms, little legs, little heads, crudely, mockingly stitched together.
He'd come straight from the kindergarten, followed a trail of innocent blood back to Arkham Asylum. Tracker switched off. Cowl communications disabled. He was a ghost. Batman wouldn't find him until it was done.
Weeping parents, fighting over patchwork corpses.
The sanatorium had been derelict for years. A burnt-out patch of dead earth on top, a forgotten warren of cells below. Good, Jason thought, he's already in the dirt. There was a moral line that Bruce had sworn never to cross. Jason would cross it for him.
Jason had been watching a grief-stricken mother piece her son together when the kindergarten speaker system came to life.
No, Robin, he thought. Push it down. Jason pulled back to the heavy iron doors that would have once led into a laundry chute, and dropped into the dark.
"Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall," Joker sang.
It was a net, half-way down, that caught him. It broke with his weight, sending him tumbling out of the end of chute onto the granite floor. Jason gritted his teeth breathed through the pa-
The first swing of the crowbar took out two teeth. The second broke his ankle.
"All the king's horses, and all the king's men, couldn't put Humpty together again," Joker was singing.
There are many terrible and evil and sometimes graphic things in the Arkham series pre-arkham knight (which actually got the M/Pegi 18 rating). And it's still not rated for adults only. Ratings can get away with lots of weird things. And ratings themselves are weird and illogical. As is our culture.
I think the Arkham universe is one of the most vile and horrible universes in the Batman series. From Mad hatter abducting/trafficking young girls, r***ing them into submission then deleting them after to restart the cycle again to Harley and the joker killing a bunch of children out of spite and boredom.
Yurp, if I remember correctly in Arkham city hatter kidnaps girls to be his “perfect Alice” and he r*pes them into complying and if they don’t he kills them. Sad because he kills them anyway when he loses interest.
Also, there an interrogation tape thingys in game that suggest that he’s been kidnapping girls for years.
Out of everyone I think hatter and professor pyg are the two most repulsive characters.
Tbh even without riddler stories confirming stuff he did it’s very clear that’s the type of person jervis is
Jervis is a nutcase who retreated to “wonderland” because it’s a place he feels he belongs. He abducts women he sees as “Alice” and the thing he’s most famous for is mind control. That paints a very disturbing picture in your mind
Yeah but I always felt this was the subtext with with the Jarvis mad hatter. He kidnaps young white women and brings them to his lair with a “romantical” flair. Not hard to put two and two together especially when the mind control is often used as a stand in for the real deal
I mean yeah dude, the thousands of super evil hardened criminals who haven't seen the outside world in years probably wouldn't be super respectful of an insanely attractive womans boundaries
She’s daring to interfere with their business (which that tier of criminal element WILL interpret as a threat to their authority/manhood).
Given the life choices that have led them to this point, it’s unlikely they have healthy emotional coping mechanisms in place, so it feels better to threaten or attack the source of their discomfort.
Given the rough life they live, they’re absolutely gonna go for shock factor.
Sex feels good. Humans are one of three (I think) species of mammal that are known to have sex because it feels good, not just for the sake of reproduction. So if they can get laid out of it, and they already don’t follow the laws of society…
Gotham is full of the most mentally disturbed, morally lost, inhumane, monstrous individuals to ever grace the planet. So much so that when they decide to take their asses to ANY OTHER CITY they end up putting the local superheroes of those cities into a PANIC
And especially in the Arkham verse, everyone there is nothing but pure unfiltered evil. Catwoman being threatened with that is probably just a few instances of a long time repeated occurence, and the count of criminals succeeding in doing it towards other women in Gotham is probably disgustingly high as well.
/Unaslume They are in a prison complex that is mostly men with very few women. They’d want a woman, especially a very sexy woman like Catwoman who keeps her zipper undone to show that she’s naked underneath her costume, all to themselves
Uj/ It's a tired trope that the wickedness of men is expressed by their desire to do sexual violence to female characters. Sexual violence snd the threat of it is very common irl but yeah sometimes it would be nice to have escapism from that as well.
Edit: Fixed "s tires trope" to "a tired trope", though s-tier tires are always a welcome sight
It would actually be weird if they never commented on it at all. These hardened criminals who lack boundaries and haven’t been around women in years would absolutely have something to say about Catwoman.
And that’s where the power fantasy comes in: you get to beat the shit out of them. That’s not something you get in real life.
yeah I'm tired of pretending they get a pass because they're all deranged criminals or whatever. I'm even tired of that boob window costume. She can be sexy without it, and criminals can be violent without rape threats.
Like the Arkham Asylum thugs and Joker telling them to kill their sister. That was vicious without rape involved.
It is honestly so very weird that they do this in a T game. They call catwoman, poison ivy, Harley quinn BITCH and talk about getting a turn, etc. meanwhile the worse thing they ever call Batman is… chicken?? Like what the fuck is this double standard 😭😭😂😂
Yeah, there's some pretty evident sexism in the franchise, especially asylum and city, and I feel like a lot of the community gets mad or gets very defensive when it gets brought up. I grew up with these games and they will always hold a special place in my heart but we should be able to criticize them regardless
The line you quoted "haven't seen a woman in years" already half answers your question but the other half which is much much more important is that these are very bad people, many of whom most likely got put into Arkham City because they were already displaying this kind of behaviour.
The thugs in the Arkham games are extremely stupid people, these are the same dudes that think they can take on Batman, work for people who are known to kill their employees regularly, etc
They also, like one says, haven’t seen a woman in years
There’s also a dude (I’ll call him A) in Arkham city who asks if Nora fries is hot to the guy who moved her (I’ll call him B). B is confused since she’s essentially dead, then after some prompting B says “sure I guess?” And A says “niceeee” B gets even more confused and talks about how Nora is essentially dead and A says “listen I’ve been in here for so long that I don’t mind if a pretty girl happens to be a little cold you know what I mean?” B then tells him that no, he doesn’t know what he means
People say “the thugs are evil” but you’d think there’d be at least 2 or 3 gay rapist goons in Gotham, but the writers decided they don’t exist, so the goons’ behavior is clearly not exclusively a product of the role they fill as antagonists.
Although not everybody in Arkham City is irredeemably evil, you do gotta remember it does still house the worst of the worst of Gotham City, one of the worst cities in DC.
It makes sense there'd be those types of people, plus it's entirely possible some of the thugs are making empty threats just meant to demean or get under her skin.
She's an attractive woman in a literal criminal city, and unfortunately rapists would probably end up there.
The lines being there might be an artifact of the era the game was made in, but considering how deeply messed up Gotham and Arkham City are, I could sadly believe this making sense.
The Rocksteady development team that created the earlier Arkham games was clearly talented, but what also becomes painfully clear upon subsequent playthroughs is how much the undercurrent of sexism and misogyny at the studio bleeds through into the games.
The oversexualization of characters like Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn is one of the more noticeable elements, but it's far from the only one. Literally one of the first things Batman says in Arkham Asylum is a remark about how Harley Quinn "never was very bright" (he makes similar comments in both Arkham City and Arkham Knight). It's like Rocksteady's writers selectively forgot that HQ used to be a freaking doctor with a PhD and were instead all too happy to just reduce her to the same tired "Joker's bimbo girlfriend" trope that male audiences were accoustomed to.
There are ways to make overt sexuality and sexiness empowering, but it's obvious that Rocksteady's largely male development and writing teams weren't able to clear that bar. They were too busy seeing how low they could make Catwoman's neckline go or how much of Poison Ivy's skin they could get away with showing.
People probably won’t like this answer, but it was an all male writing team and rocksteady wasn’t a very equality based company, especially back in the 2010s
In-universe, it really is "they're stupid" (as is oft joked on this sub), no joke. Same reason they all think they can take Batman.
Out-of-universe, it's because Rocksteady wanted an easy way to make sure the player didn't feel bad subjecting these simulated goons to simulated physical trauma, so having them talk about SA'ing Catwoman (and Harley) is a cheap shot to paper over the logic that kicks in when you're on the way to get a drink after playing and realize that, sure, Da Freakin' Bat and Da Freakin' Cat don't kill anyone overtly, but the medical bills will. If they're a bunch of creepy scumbags, they've got that coming, whatever, who cares.
I’m not a fan of how dismissive a lot of people are being, I don’t think just being a “bad guy” makes everyone “obviously” a rapist in waiting. That said, prison can be a famously sex starved place, there’s a reason we don’t generally put female prisoners with male ones. Mix that with her evocative outfit and flirty demeanor and im willing to give it a pass as making sense, even if it’s a little questionable as a creative choice.
iirc there's a random thug voiceline in City or Knight where a guy implies he raped and then killed a young girl, and another where a thug admitted he was so desperate he fucked a female corpse he saw.
No shit, if a crazy clown tells them they'll kill their own family, they've done it before. This is why Batman and Catwoman break their bones. Don't freely believe the thugs in Gotham are just down on their luck folks.
bro them guys have been in arkham asylum with no puh for god knows how long. imagine being cucked by the joker with harley quinn as well, all that compiled and then hearing that catwoman is on the loose
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