Nasty Dead Island promo statue "belongs in museum"

The publishers of Dead Island: Riptide produced this remarkable promotional item, a mangled female torso, to maximize its appeal to gaming's all-important squirrel-skinning minsogynst demographic. John Teti hopes that it ends up in a museum, not the memory hole.

The exhibit would start, of course, with the sculpture itself, because the longer you look at Double-D Decomposition, the more it has to offer. In this “grotesque take on an iconic Roman marble torso sculpture”—an actual thing said by an actual human being who works for Deep Silver—the limbs aren’t just gone. No, their gory absence suggests a struggle. This anonymous woman’s limbs and head were ripped from her, presumably amid spurts of blood and a few prerecorded voiceover-booth moans rendered in sparkling 7.1-channel surround sound. Flesh Husk (In Swimsuit) is all about the details. Note the spinal column that juts out of the neck. The way your eye is drawn to an insouciant bit of bone on the arm. These are important cues in the visual vocabulary of Modern Game Studio artworks. They symbolize worship of the deities Dark and Gritty.

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MORE: dark • Games • gritty • misogyny • objectification

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http://twitter.com/AbelUndercity Abel Undercity

I know just the place for it.
http://twitter.com/zenintrude Colin

The developer/publisher apologized for this fiasco weeks ago

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/01/15/dead-island-riptide-special-edition-apology_n_2487413.html?utm_hp_ref=uk
- http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza
  
  We covered it weeks ago, too! This post links to a clever and entertaining item reminding us why we shouldn’t just forget about this sort of thing after the perfunctory apologies.
blueelm

I honestly feel like the only person who will be happy to see the zombie trend go away. It’s just one of those cultural zeitgeists that I don’t get. (No I don’t want to argue about it with zombie genre fans who are upset that I don’t like the same things they like). In fact, quite the opposite. Each to their own. It’s just that culture is so freaking obsessed with zombies right now I feel like I have to work to find *other* things.
- Peppermint
  
  Agreed. I don’t find the zombie genre particularly appealing, realistic, or even interesting. And you do have to dig to find something that does not have zombies in it.
- http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher
  
  You’re not the only one. I admit I find some films of the zombie genre very entertaining, but every time a new one comes out I wonder when it will end. Unfortunately it probably won’t ever end. Zombie films are cheap to make and the only brains required are the ones made by Tom Savini.
  - Quiche de Resistance
    
    It’s robots. Here they come.
    - Brainspore
      
      Mummies or GTFO
  - SomeGuyNamedMark
    
    That plus the countless “zombie runs” and survival guides/tools that clutter the landscape now.
- anansi133
  
  This is what we get after too much vampire. And the next trope to follow this one? It’s even worse.
  - EvilSpirit
    
    No, this is what we get after vampires were turned into elves. Zombies are filling the vacated niche.
- SomeGuyNamedMark
  
  Our culture is based on squeezing trends until every single molecule has been extracted.
  - Brainspore
    
    The entertainment industry is to a pop culture genre as the Native Americans were to the noble Bison—nothing left to waste.
    
    (Unfortunately, we’ve reached the “OK, who wants the rectum?” part of that analogy.)
- http://theladyfingers.blogspot.com/ Ladyfingers
  
  I think people just like saying “zombie”.
  - TheMudshark
    
    Zombie, zombie, zombie-ah, hey-ah, hey-ah, hey-ah, o-ho, o-ho, o-ho, o-ho, o-ho, o-ho, o-ho, hey-yaa, yaa, yaa, yaaaaaa
    
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts
    - M Carlson
      
      Dang, I forgot what a great song that is/was!!
  - Brainspore
    
    Except for the people who are actually IN zombie movies/games/TV dramas/etc. They always say “the Dead” or “the Walkers” or “the Geeks” or “the Infected” or “Them” or “those decomposing corpses that get up and stagger around and bite you and then you turn into one of them.”
    
    Never use the “Z” word if you’re actually confronted with zombies. It’s offensive.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    I was about ten years old before I knew that a zombie was something other than a cocktail.
- jsandin
  
  I pray that someday I will live in a world where zombies and plug-in air fresheners have been forgotten.
  - blueelm
    
    I had actually forgotten plug-in air fresheners until you mentioned them. Ugh…
- Daemonworks
  
  I don’t mind zombies per se, but the stock western infection-zombie is one of the least interesting movie monsters there is for me.
slamorte

Finally something that makes the sparking vampire genre seem less sucky.

The zombie genre is now officially dead. It’s passé. Time to move on, developers, producers, and comic artists. Time to move on.
- anansi133
  
  This is what happens when a trope *tries* to jump the shark- and fails.
  - C W
    
    This is what happens when a trope.
http://twitter.com/meanidea len

Why you gotta bring anti-squirrel meat bigotry into this?
- dioptase
  
  I know several squirrel hunters. Really nice people. And a good number of them are skinning and eating squirrels to make ends meet. Other just like them. I’ve got all the respect in the world for someone willing to face reality and butcher their own meat (unlike a coward like me who would rather buy it at the store).
  
  And after a couple squirrels chewed a hole in the roof of my house, I’m all for thinning the squirrel population. Dang fancy rats.
  - http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher
    
    I’ve had the same problem with squirrels chewing through my roof. Could you send some of those squirrel hunters you know over to my place?
Cocomaan

Hard to get up in arms about something so stupid, but I guess people will try to be outraged over anything these days.
- Brainspore
  
  Hard to get up in arms about something so stupid…
  
  Particularly if your arms have been violently torn from your well-endowed, highly objectified torso.
oneswellfoop

As someone that spent four years in a quite good art school and had to come up with analysis of work I can say, with some authority, that John Teti is full of shit in his analysis. Tongue in cheek is one thing, wasting the time, breath, and energy required to write what he did is a crime against humanity.
invictus

Compare and contrast
- UnderachievingSheep
  
  Both items must be part of “The Forever Alone” line of home decor. Also known as “display when you want to make sure people only visit once”.
http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm

“squirrel-skinning misogynist” may become my new all-purpose go-to insult.
SomeGuyNamedMark

People who have this also own Hostel on HD-DVD.
http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski

Free publicity.
Donald Petersen

Initially this thing didn’t bother me as much as perhaps it should, but mostly because I used to have a couple of male counterparts packed away in my Halloween trunk, along with the severed heads and limbs I used to employ in my haunt. But I’m not going to make an argument that it’s not misogynist. If nothing else, for a corpse that purports to be the remains of the victim of a zombie attack, the head and arms are awfully cleanly missing, leaving behind what would be a conspicuously untouched torso packed with delectable meaty bits, which no ravenous ghoul would pass up. So the fact that the “sexy bits” are left in an arguably sexy condition, less the “thinking and talking bits” (i.e., the sources of annoyance for your garden-variety woman-hater) which have been removed altogether, demonstrates the mindset behind this deplorable prop.

At least my other torsos, icons of violence and depravity as they were, didn’t apparently carry this whiff of sexist subtext. And the Union Jack bikini isn’t helping matters.