EmmaSkies: "The Medium & Its Incredibly Insulting Story of Trauma" (Spoiler and Trigger Warning)

Warrior of Light · Feb 4, 2021

I came across this tweet by Twitch streamer EmmaSkies earlier today. Before reading any further though, a trigger warning is in order (sharing the one that she herself wrote):

***MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNING FOR THEMES OF SEXUAL ABUSE OF A CHILD, VARIOUS FORMS OF DOMESTIC ABUSE, AND VICTIM BLAMING***

Click to expand...

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You can find a brief summary of the problematic content in The Medium in the replies:

She also posted a video on YouTube, in which she is playing through said content while rightfully commenting on how inappropriate it is.

The Medium & Its Incredibly Insulting Story of Trauma

***MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNING FOR THEMES OF SEXUAL ABUSE OF A CHILD, VARIOUS FORMS OF DOMESTIC ABUSE, AND VICTIM BLAMING***It's absolutely insane to me that no ...

www.youtube.com

What the actual fuck is this shit!? And why is no one talking about it?

Bovandy · Feb 4, 2021

That sounds dark and all but one person not getting over trauma does not equal a message that literally no one can get over trauma.

Aerial51 · Feb 4, 2021

Reviews were talking about it, the Eurogamer Review for example which was the one that made me decide not to play the Game

Son of Sparda · Feb 4, 2021

Thank you for making this thread.

I'm actually in the process of watching this and holy shit it's so bad. I'm honestly asking the same question she is asking in the video: "who is this for?"

The game tries to make you sympathize with a pedo. Like, why.

Reizzz · Feb 4, 2021

Fucking yikes

brawndolicious · Feb 4, 2021

Yeah I really didn't get that feeling from playing the game. It doesn't suggest Lilly is broken because of her trauma, but because of her supernatural abilities.

Deleted member 4494 · Feb 4, 2021

I actually thought the game had almost too light of a touch with its subject matter. I don't even think it uses a word once to describe what actually happened to any of its characters. It's basically left to inference.

BoobooGanger · Feb 4, 2021

Not surprising :

Problem is, they dont treat it seriously it seems.

Bovandy · Feb 4, 2021

I'll also just add this woman admits she didn't finish the game.

Warrior of Light · Feb 4, 2021

Bovandy said:
That sounds dark and all but one person not getting over trauma does not equal a message that literally no one can get over trauma.

brawndolicious said:
Yeah I really didn't get that feeling from playing the game. It doesn't suggest Lilly is broken because of her trauma, but because of her supernatural abilities.

There's also the part where the game tries to make you sympathise with a pedophile by giving him a tragic backstory.

Reizzz · Feb 4, 2021

Bovandy said:
I'll also just add this woman admits she didn't finish the game.

How does it play out?

PlanetSmasher · Feb 4, 2021

Bovandy said:
I'll also just add this woman admits she didn't finish the game.

You shouldn't have to finish a game that's triggering you to see if it handles sensitive material well.

pswii60 · Feb 4, 2021

Bovandy said:
I'll also just add this woman admits she didn't finish the game.

"This woman"?

Z-Beat · Feb 4, 2021

Warrior of Light said:
There's also the part where the game tries to make you sympathise with a pedophile by giving him a tragic backstory.

Don't think I'd call it sympathy so much as an explanation. No one goes "Awww" because of his past. It's an event literally being witnessed by a character on their way to effectively murder this person, then the main character's like "death is too good for you." They make it pretty clear that literally no one sympathizes with this dude.

Typhoon20 · Feb 4, 2021

Yikes !

FutureLarking · Feb 4, 2021

Warrior of Light said:
There's also the part where the game tries to make you sympathise with a pedophile by giving him a tragic backstory.

Is he not allowed too or does that offend you? There are probably some in real life who have tragic backstories too, it's the reality of life. And just like in real life, you're not meant to suddenly forgive them because of their tragic backstory or let that erase the decisions they make. Life isn't black and white, it's messy and fucked but why sugar coat it and try to paint villains as straight comic book characters?

chubigans · Feb 4, 2021

The game sounds like complete trash. The writers should be ashamed of themselves.

Great thread on the entire story.

JohnnyToonami · Feb 4, 2021

Have heard the same from other folks. Not surprising honestly, Bloober are hacks.

Deleted member 68874 · Feb 4, 2021

Warrior of Light said:
There's also the part where the game tries to make you sympathise with a pedophile by giving him a tragic backstory.

Have you played the game yourself?

BBboy20 · Feb 4, 2021

Bovandy said:
I'll also just add this woman admits she didn't finish the game.

I mean, the fact they did it the way they did to begin with is in itself damnation.

NLCPRESIDENT · Feb 4, 2021

This whole game is a mess and not worth the time.

PlanetSmasher · Feb 4, 2021

chubigans said:
The game sounds like complete trash. The writers should be ashamed of themselves.

Great thread on the entire story.

Well this is just disgusting. It also reads like a bunch of folks who think Silent Hill is really really cool but don't understand how to write a Silent Hill story. "This is super dark and uncomfortable, they'll love it!"

brawndolicious · Feb 4, 2021

Warrior of Light said:
There's also the part where the game tries to make you sympathise with a pedophile by giving him a tragic backstory.

Are you sure that was the intention? I thought the purpose of the child eater monster was to show he blames it all on something besides himself. Once the monster is destroyed, he turns into a vegetable which to me suggested that that's who he was at his core.

Deleted member 4494 · Feb 4, 2021

Warrior of Light said:
There's also the part where the game tries to make you sympathise with a pedophile by giving him a tragic backstory.

I don't think that segment of the game asks the player to sympathize with him at all. That storytelling methodology, and what it reveals about the character, are incidental (read: not in any way correlated) to the character's future (in point of fact, since it's an entirely unreliable narrator, there's no way to know for certain what is real and what isn't in that moment).

The character is not a sympathetic character in the game. Adjacent characters to him are sympathetic, he is not, and the game does a reasonably good job at making that crystal clear.

That aside, as another poster pointed out, there isn't anything wrong with writing characters that are more than just a stand-in for something purely evil. To the extent that the game does that (again, I think, without advocating for their character), I think that's more than just acceptable, it's preferable to the alternative. Characters that are designed, for instance, JUST to rape another character to inspire that character to change in some way, are awful.

SuzanoSho · Feb 4, 2021

Z-Beat said:
Don't think I'd call it sympathy so much as an explanation. No one goes "Awww" because of his past. It's an event literally being witnessed by a character on their way to effectively murder this person, then the main character's like "death is too good for you." They make it pretty clear that literally no one sympathizes with this dude.

I also think that it's important to understand things that might cause pedophilia, considering it's in the DSM-5. This can all be done without making it seem like the perp deserves some kind of redemption or sympathy. Based on your explanation, it sounds like they did just that...

APerfectOrganism · Feb 4, 2021

The games themes of trauma and cycle of abuse use pedophilia and physical abuse as an analogy to the trauma of a nation that suffered the holocaust and damages of ww2 only then to be occupied and oppressed under the soviet union.

Finally in the end of the game its revealed that the monster is not the creation of the girl who suffered sexual abuse, but of your twin sister who has been in hiding because of her own abilities. The monster is unrelated to sexual trauma. The other big monster you see in some trailers is literally the pedophile.

Now whether you consider abuse and trauma of an individual as an appropriate analogy to the abuse and trauma of a nation/people is definitely worth discussion. Personally, I didn't find it's handling offensive, but that is not to say others wouldn't. They also should have made the trigger warning bigger in the beginning of the game.

But I fully acknowledge that a game dealing with these subjects may not handle them well at all.

Kraid · Feb 4, 2021

BoobooGanger said:
Not surprising :

Problem is, they dont treat it seriously it seems.

Ah yes, the "trigger warning" which lists none of the potentially triggering content, which is more frustrating than helpful. There should be a standardized way of this being included with the game rating or something. It's the wild west today, and it's not good.

The best trigger warning I've ever seen in media was the opening scene to Assassination Nation. It's exhaustive of most of the potential triggers in the movie, and it fits with the film thematically. I was a little sketched out the first time I saw the movie, but they really fucking did do it right. I'll put a link to it in a spoiler below. It's a red band trailer, so NSFW etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qbfm7YFUs4

Warrior of Light · Feb 4, 2021

Shellshock said:
Have you played the game yourself?

I saw the video she posted. It's enough to make me not want to play this game. This is not how you handle such sensitive issues. You should question why someone would write a story arc about a pedophile in which they are being portrayed as a victim that didn't mean to cause any harm, and the gameplay objective is then to cleanse them of their inner demons? The implications of this narrative are irresponsible and disrespectful.

Gestault · Feb 4, 2021

As someone who just finished this game, I find most of this writer's interpretations of the narrative almost unintelligible compared to my takeaway. The subject matter is deeply unsettling, but ideas like the text making the player "empathize with the pedophile" ignore clear context and content in the narrative.

The character traversing that mindscape (the player) directly calls out the abuser's rationale. The whole point is that it's how he justified it to himself, and that it was vapid self-delusion. It's literally called out as "bullshit." After the image of himself as the child in those memories is destroyed, all that's left *is* the monster. And to be clear, this isn't the main monster that jumps between characters.

Brazil · Feb 4, 2021

Bovandy said:
I'll also just add this woman admits she didn't finish the game.

And yet "this woman" still accurately describes the ending as it is presented to the player who actually finishes the game.

BBboy20 · Feb 4, 2021

pswii60 said:
"This woman"?

Wow, I didn't catch that.

brawndolicious · Feb 4, 2021

Warrior of Light said:
I saw the video she posted. It's enough to make me not want to play this game. This is not how you handle such sensitive issues. You should question why someone would write a story arc about a pedophile in which they are being portrayed as a victim that didn't mean to cause any harm, and the gameplay objective is then to cleanse them of their inner demons? The implications of this narrative are irresponsible and disrespectful.

Okay look, when you kill the demon, that makes the pedophile character brain dead. That's the point.

The only reason the character you control goes into his soul to destroy the "monster" is to torture him by making him a vegetable. The spirit sequence actually happens right after your character almost beats the dude to death in real life but decides to then do something more brutal.

This thread just shows you really shouldn't comment on a story that you haven't actually experienced.

Z-Beat · Feb 4, 2021

SuzanoSho said:
I also think that it's important to understand things that might cause pedophilia, considering it's in the DSM-5. This can all be done without making it seem like the perp deserves some kind of redemption or sympathy. Based on your explanation, it sounds like they did just that...

Basically what happens is

The dude finds out that this guy abused his daughter so he has psychic projection self or whatever you call it go into the pedo's mind, which is all fucked up by the pedo part of the guy's psyche, to go track down a different part of his psyche and murder it, effectively lobotomizing the pedo. While he's looking for this part he sees the pedo's backstory and effectively says "whatever" as he walks through because it obviously doesn't justify what he did. Then he lobotomizes the dude and it cuts back to the main character in present day fighting the monster made of the remains of this dude's ghost/psyche which is basically begging for her to let him pass on and forgive him, and her response is basically "fuck you." She really only wipes him from existence because she has to, but she seemed pretty content to just let him rot, which is a contrast to every other spirit she helps where she's all like "go in peace."

So if the point was to feel bad for that dude, it definitely wasn't reflected in the reactions of everyone involved. That said, if that's gonna be the case why have that in there at all. That part could've been trimmed/cut and it wouldn't have changed a thing. The only reason I could think of was that it existed purely for the characters to tell him "nah, your tragic backstory doesn't make ANY of this shit okay"

The part of what the solution to stopping Skin Man is (I know that's not his name but we called him skin man due to his fascination with Buffalo Bill-ing the main character) is fairly bad in hindsight. In my opinion they should've gone a different way that wasn't "I gotta kill you to stop your trauma monster." I know it's a common thing to do in games and film (Lights Out, Death Stranding, etc.) but with the context of this game it's really not a good look. The fact that this game ends on a cliffhanger doesn't help it either.

I agree with everyone else that this feels like a game that people who had a passing idea of what Silent Hill was tried to make but didn't fully GET it. Yeah Silent Hill's dealt with traumatized characters as well, but some of those were handled better than this game's was. It's also deceptively linear. I think instead of leaning on the fact that this is a trauma monster they should've gone harder in the supernatural direction with the hotel being some kind of soul engine to contain/make Skin Man and he was feeding on the trauma of the residents rather than being spawned from it. That's what they seem to imply with his dialogue but the ending contradicts that

Reizzz · Feb 4, 2021

chubigans said:
The game sounds like complete trash. The writers should be ashamed of themselves.

Great thread on the entire story.

Holy shit what a garbage game. Incredibly irresponsible

Deleted member 7051 · Feb 4, 2021

I'm not going to write the game off until I've seen the offending content for myself, but I will say, from what I've played so far...

Warrior of Light said:
I saw the video she posted. It's enough to make me not want to play this game. This is not how you handle such sensitive issues. You should question why someone would write a story arc about a pedophile in which they are being portrayed as a victim that didn't mean to cause any harm, and the gameplay objective is then to cleanse them of their inner demons? The implications of this narrative are irresponsible and disrespectful.

...that the main character's whole thing is helping people move on. The game even opens up with her working at a mortuary. I thought people on this forum were all about being compassionate? If you're helping a bad person acknowledge their sins and come to terms with their inner demons so that they escape this endless punishment and move on, isn't that a good thing? Especially if their very inability to move on is hurting, if not killing, more innocent people.

You don't have to sympathise with the people you save because saving people isn't about judging whether or not they're worthy of saving.

Warrior of Light · Feb 4, 2021

brawndolicious said:
Okay look, when you kill the demon, that makes the pedophile character brain dead. That's the point.

The only reason the character you control goes into his soul to destroy the "monster" is to torture him by making him a vegetable. The spirit sequence actually happens right after your character almost beats the dude to death in real life but decides to then do something more brutal.

This thread just shows you really shouldn't comment on a story that you haven't actually experienced.

Yet here's the mission objective:

svacina · Feb 4, 2021

APerfectOrganism said:
The games themes of trauma and cycle of abuse use pedophilia and physical abuse as an analogy to the trauma of a nation that suffered the holocaust and damages of ww2 only then to be occupied and oppressed under the soviet union.

Finally in the end of the game its revealed that the monster is not the creation of the girl who suffered sexual abuse, but of your twin sister who has been in hiding because of her own abilities. The monster is unrelated to sexual trauma. The other big monster you see in some trailers is literally the pedophile.

Now whether you consider abuse and trauma of an individual as an appropriate analogy to the abuse and trauma of a nation/people is definitely worth discussion. Personally, I didn't find it's handling offensive, but that is not to say others wouldn't. They also should have made the trigger warning bigger in the beginning of the game.

But I fully acknowledge that a game dealing with these subjects may not handle them well at all.

Is the game Polish by any chance?

Son of Sparda · Feb 4, 2021

I'm sorry, I don't see how the game isn't trying to make you sympathize with said pedo character when the objective is literally "Free Richard". And then the game goes on to show the hardships that he had to deal with as a child that led to his pedophilia. That is very obviously them trying to make you sympathize with him. I don't see how you can see the execution of that narrative in the game and not see it at them trying to make you feel bad for him.

Also, framing his pedophilia as some sort of demon that is separate from him is already offensive enough. Like, no, if you don't know how to talk about this, then don't talk about it. This way of framing this issue is quite offensive.

Rodrigues solitaire · Feb 4, 2021

svacina said:
Is the game Polish by any chance?

The developers are.

Bish_Bosch · Feb 4, 2021

APerfectOrganism said:
The games themes of trauma and cycle of abuse use pedophilia and physical abuse as an analogy to the trauma of a nation that suffered the holocaust and damages of ww2 only then to be occupied and oppressed under the soviet union.

Finally in the end of the game its revealed that the monster is not the creation of the girl who suffered sexual abuse, but of your twin sister who has been in hiding because of her own abilities. The monster is unrelated to sexual trauma. The other big monster you see in some trailers is literally the pedophile.

Now whether you consider abuse and trauma of an individual as an appropriate analogy to the abuse and trauma of a nation/people is definitely worth discussion. Personally, I didn't find it's handling offensive, but that is not to say others wouldn't. They also should have made the trigger warning bigger in the beginning of the game.

But I fully acknowledge that a game dealing with these subjects may not handle them well at all.

Yeah I can see that being the intent I just dont see them being the studio to handle this sort of piece. Media that does this can work but you really gotta be skilled with the writing and direction.

Berordn · Feb 4, 2021

this thread is the thermian argument in action

there did not need to be a point where part of the tragic character's backstory is that she was molested, and then there's a deep dive into the molester's past. that is absolutely a valid point of criticism, given how carelessly it's handled. given that the main antagonist ends up having little to do with these characters... it's almost worse, because now they serve no point but to add shock value?

brawndolicious · Feb 4, 2021

Warrior of Light said:
Yet here's the mission objective:

Initially, Richard is presented as a good guy and mentor to your father. Until you find out what he did.

Honestly, I don't think you should talk about the game until you actually experience the story. Hell, just watch that segment of the game on YouTube at least, it's probably a couple hours in total.

The game does not make Richard out to be anybody nice. Just weak and undeserving.

Fisty · Feb 4, 2021

I, for one, am shocked that Bloober Team would mishandle sensitive topics in a game

Westbahnhof · Feb 4, 2021

Fisty said:
I, for one, am shocked that Bloober Team would mishandle sensitive topics in a game

Do they have a history? What happened before?

Haze · Feb 4, 2021

There are some genuinely good things about this game but it is absolutely marred by its ending, message, and the way it carelessly treats victims of trauma as cheap narrative props.

Honestly, the game's overall message that

some people should basically just commit suicide (even literally ending with the words "you can't save everyone" before a big ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED YOU CANT SAVE EVERYONE notification pops up).

is fucking repulsive.

Westbahnhof said:
Do they have a history? What happened before?

Other than The Medium, I've only played Blair Witch but they treat PTSD with such callous disdain.

HaremKing · Feb 4, 2021

Winny（๑•̀ㅂ•́）و said:
If you're helping a bad person acknowledge their sins and come to terms with their inner demons so that they escape this endless punishment and move on, isn't that a good thing?

I think the issue at hand is that it's in a sense taking the man's agency out of the picture, portraying this evil man as someone who was 'possessed by a devil' in a sense. I don't think that's the right way to portray it personally.

Bish_Bosch · Feb 4, 2021

Berordn said:
this thread is the thermian argument in action

there did not need to be a point where part of the tragic character's backstory is that she was molested, and then there's a deep dive into the molester's past. that is absolutely a valid point of criticism, given how carelessly it's handled. given that the main antagonist ends up having little to do with these characters... it's almost worse, because now they serve no point but to add shock value?

I mean it could in theory work but you have to ask is the studio doing this as deft of artists were with Pasolini and Salo. It's Bloober Team and they are not as talented as Pasolini so yeah probably a terrible idea for them to try this.

Aerial51 · Feb 4, 2021

This Game is some David Cage tier shit, and yet most reviewers glossed over that.

Deleted member 1003 · Feb 4, 2021

People shouldn't be gatekeeping valid criticism of story elements simply because one hasn't played it or finished the game.

ArchedThunder · Feb 4, 2021

HaremKing said:
I think the issue at hand is that it's in a sense taking the man's agency out of the picture, portraying this evil man as someone who was 'possessed by a devil' in a sense. I don't think that's the right way to portray it personally.

But it wasn't, the "demon" was him.

EmmaSkies: "The Medium & Its Incredibly Insulting Story of Trauma" (Spoiler and Trigger Warning)

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