Obsidian Entertainment Removes Transmisogynistic Joke From Pillars of Eternity at Gamers’ Urging

Last Sunday, Twitter user Erika Victorious spoke up after finding a transmisogynistic “joke” in some of Pillars of Eternity‘s backer-submitted content. (Although a Brianna Wu tweet originally alerted us to the issue, after being contacted by readers over Twitter we updated our original article to say the joke was discovered by a trans woman who had been harassed since speaking up and had consequently locked her account.)

In a statement to us last Tuesday, Obsidian explained “we are going to be talking with our backers about this issue in our next backer update. They are the ones that made Eternity possible, so we feel it is our duty to discuss it with them first.” According to Erika Victorious’ updates, the joke was removed as of this afternoon:

Here’s a look at the relocated and edited text, which appears to be referencing the controversy:

Here’s the text:

Here lies Firedorn, a bard, a poet/ He was also a card, but most didn’t know it / A poem he wrote in jest was misread / They asked for blood, so now he’s just dead

Erika Victorious also detailed some of the harassment she experienced after speaking up about the joke:

In a statement posted this afternoon and later emailed to us, Obsidian explained:

It’s come to our attention that a piece of backer-created content has made it into Pillars of Eternity that was not vetted. Once it was brought to our attention, it followed the same vetting process as all of our other content. Prior to release, we worked with many of our backers to iterate on content they asked to be put into the game that didn’t strike the right tone.

In the case of this specific content, we checked with the backer who wrote it and asked them about changing it. We respect our backers greatly, and felt it was our duty to include them in the process. They gave us new content which we have used to replace what is in the game. To be clear, we followed the process we would have followed had this content been vetted prior to the release of the product.

We appreciate the faith you have all given us into making Pillars of Eternity the great game that it has become, and we appreciate the strength of conviction all of you bring to every conversation we have together.

(via Not Your Mama’s Gamer)

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Carolyn Cox