The Mog Blog

I’m not sure if I should say “interesting observation” or not, but let’s use it anyways. Keza MacDonald of IGN posted up an opinion article about the latest trailer for Hitman Absolution.

In this, we see Agent 47, riddled with scars, about to be jumped by a bunch of nuns… with guns.

Yeah, I said it.

Of course, if you have seen anything that the media world has produced, typically these nuns will probably strip away all of their religious clothing to reveal themselves in their scantily dressed attire.

I’m not really surprised it happened, but let’s skip to the point.

Agent 47 beats the living crap out of these sexy women in some very brutal scenes. Bullets are shot, faces are busted open, oh man, how am I supposed to fap to this?

Well, MacDonald does bring up a good point. Sure, sexy women are meant to grab your attention. So is horrible violence. Combined the two and now you’re in some sort of weird uncomfortable zone reminiscence of that first time you saw the movie Saw.

Yes, I said that too.

MacDonald did mention torture-porn, something that I associate Saw with. I had a short glimpse of what Hitman Absolution had in store when I viewed at CES 2012, and holy crap there’s a lot of mutilating things that you can do. This makes me wonder exactly just how far it will go when you meet up with these said Saints within the game.

Am I, the consumer, supposed to swallow this and take it as how the game will be like? Does this make me want to go out and pre-order this sucker? I don’t know. It’s a nice trailer otherwise but I am a little bit shaken, not offended or disturbed, about what I just saw. My expressions went from “ooh, cool” to “errr.. ugh.”

It’s not so much that it’s putting women in a very sexualized position (which it is) and it’s not so much that it’s too realistically violent (which it is, I guess), it’s more of the fact that it’s combining sexual elements with violence. It’s not the R-word being used here, but let me introduce you to another R-word: Ryona.

No, not Rinoa from Final Fantasy VIII.

A quick look at TV Tropes defines Ryona as:

… a kind of fetish video that features several things: the fatalities of classic and modern Fighting Games, deaths from survival horror games, assaults on women depicted in various anime, or just the beatdown or shooting of a specific character in other game types.

*looks at the trailer one more time*

Yeah… I guess people can get off to that. I think what disturbs me more is that whoever is running the marketing for Hitman Absolution is trying to say that they want to get all the people with this fetish to jump on the game by releasing this trailer.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit too far.

Perhaps it’s not all intentional. After all, it is pretty damn shocking to see beautiful women get their lives ended in some really nice trailer work. It’s something I’m sure will be talked about among people. If anything, I think they did their job right by releasing this, even if it does make some people uncomfortable… or hot and bothered.