There’s a section in a couple of Terraria’s Wiki pages that describes events that happen during a Blood Moon cycle in the game. The Blood Moon causes enemies to get meaner, and the world to become more dangerous, and even has the females get more aggressive and surly in their responses. Well, this entry on the community-ran Wiki pages caused various SJWs to label Terraria as misogynistic and demeaning towards women.
It started with a tweet that has gained more than 3.3 thousands likes…
playing terraria today and i found this on the wiki
devs, please don’t put shit like this in your game pic.twitter.com/7NJIMzR2ex
— grace bruxner (@gracebruxner) December 10, 2017
And then it began to escalate into concerns for children, being damaging to women, being called tasteless, and then eventually being labeled as misogynistic…
it’s damaging for so many reasons eugh
— grace bruxner (@gracebruxner) December 10, 2017
It’s a pretty tasteless joke, demeaning to women. Nothing to do with being indie.
— Ken Wong (@kenwongart) December 10, 2017
Our culture that devalues women, often by passing comments off as ‘jokes’ or ‘flirting’ or ‘compliments’. They deal with this every day. Why make games that perpetuate this?
— Ken Wong (@kenwongart) December 10, 2017
I don’t think this conversation is going anywhere. Please listen to women and other marginalised groups when they critique games, unless you’re somehow happy with current gamerbro culture.
— Ken Wong (@kenwongart) December 10, 2017
Like most SJW circles, the distaste for the joke moved from mild annoyance, to outright disgust, and then eventually – like in almost all cases involving SJWs – the conversation evolved into a call for censorship.
>:(
this is one of my favourite games too !! why must this be a feature u__u
i hope they remove it— grace bruxner (@gracebruxner) December 10, 2017
Well, I know what game I’ll never play
— ❄ Kyla (RIP Lola) Elena ❄ (@kylaelena) December 11, 2017
Thankfully, there were a few calmer heads in the thread asking to tone it down. With one of the users stating that it makes the Far Left look ridiculous and delegitimizes a lot of their activism when it’s over petty things, especially calling for censorship over a game where some of the characters briefly get angry at you during a Blood Moon.
And my reaction to green could be because a man wearing it raped me as a child.
My point here is that her subjective reaction and feelings about the mechanic are not enough to elicit change in the world and force censorship (via social pressure) on other’s creative properties.— Trill Young Cuda, A.K.A. Young Horse Choker (@Ovum_Regis) December 11, 2017
For reference, the 1.1 update that features the Blood Moon effect was actually implemented six years ago.
You can check the date of the changelog over on the Gamepedia 1.1 entry.
So the outrage over the joke is six years late to the party.
The entries about how the females in Terraria respond during a Blood Moon varies per-wiki site, as pointed out by TheGG, but Wikia has a slightly more detailed entry, stating…
“As of update 1.1, the Blood Moon has been given a more noticeable effect on friendly NPCs as well, primarily the female ones. Quotes from the Nurse, Dryad, Stylist and Mechanic all seem to show hostility or annoyance and even bad stress when acknowledging the player, compared to other days/nights. This is possibly a joke using “Blood Moon” as a reference to females’ menstrual cycles.”
The thing is, the females acting a certain way towards players is an observed response from the Wiki creators from playing Terraria, and has no actual canon or comments from the developers about the matter.
However, given the complaints from the Social Justice Warrior community about the feature, don’t be surprised if Re-Logic does what Bluehole Studio did with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and goes back in and removes the six-year-old feature to appease those who were offended by it… six years later.
