Merle Fussin here. If you’re offended by nudity, or by someone talking about nudity, then you should probably skip this article. Because I was raised on dick and fart jokes, Playboy magazines, and Richard Pryor. I can take a joke. Can you?
Rated M for Mature? Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language, Nudity, Use of Alcohol? Sounds like my kinda game!
I only played a small, small amount of Conan Exiles while it was in game preview, just long enough to aimlessly run my naked ass across a desert, overheat a few times, dehydrate a few more times, get mauled by an ape creature, and eaten by an alligator. By the time I figured out how to make a bed roll out of grass, my demo time was over. The game showed promise, but was pretty rough in those early days. I was interested but decided to wait and check back in on the retail release, if and when it ever happened.
Well, it did. Conan Exiles was finally released as a “final” product. Granted, games like this are never truly finished, and will continue to evolve, but the retail release at least means it’s reached a stable enough (we’ll see) version that can be given a true evaluation.
Now, I’m playing the console version on the Xbox, and due to whatever wholesome stick-in-the-ass is making the decisions, they censored the console versions from full nudity to partial topless nudity. I personally think this is a load of shit. I’m not whining because I want to watch a floppy dong smacking around for 20 or 30 hours, I’m whining because if I did, shouldn’t that be my choice? The world of Conan was a harsh and unforgiving place, where nudity was not only common but inconsequential. The men were tanned, massive, muscular and clad in wolfskin loincloth. The women were voluptuous, strong, and deadly. And not a single damn one of them cared if you could see their butt cheeks.
This is the world that the pulp magazines like The Savage Sword of Conan portrayed, and whether Robert E. Howard originally envisioned the Hyborean Age quite like this is unknown to me, but it’s the one I grew up on, and it’s the one I prefer. It’s why the developers chose to have nudity in the PC version in the first place. No one in Cimmeria cared if you saw their junk, and I’ll tell you what, anyone that can walk out of a battlefield blood-soaked and completely naked is a certain kind of badass.
Alas, the ESRB (the folks that give games the ‘M’ rating) would’ve never let Conan out of the gates without an AO rating, which is commercial suicide on consoles. So the developers took the initiative and covered up the genitalia with a loin cloth. You can still butcher humans and eat them, but at least you don’t have to look at a penis! The whole thing just seems kind of pointless, like how there’s that show where everyone’s afraid and naked, only they blur everything out. Why have a show with a bunch of naked people, if you can’t show naked people? And to those of you that say “well why do you want to see the nudity so bad, if it’s not that big a deal?” First off, it’s not about wanting to see the nudity, because let’s face it, everyone wants to see nudity. It’s in our DNA. Those of you that say you don’t are just denying your base instincts. What I’m saying is, if they want to do it, they should do it, and go all out. Censorship sucks, no matter what the medium.
After my initial hissy-fit, I created a female character, because duh. Since Conan is already an established character in this universe, it wouldn’t make sense for me to create a Conan-like character, so I did the next best thing. I created Red Sonja. Plus it gives me an excuse to run my character around in a chain mail bikini the entire time. Don’t look at me like that, if I had the body for it, I’d be running around in a chain mail bikini too. It just sounds like a fun thing to do.
Now, despite what Brigette Nielsen looks like now, back in the 80’s she was one big, sexy Danish. I fondly remember her portrayal of Red Sonja being one of my earliest crushes.
Sadly, despite the movie making Nielsen a star overnight, the Red Sonja character never really materialized into much in the way of mainstream popularity, but she still has a cult following. Mainly by guys who like metal bikinis.
Guys like this.
Yes, that’s some fan art of Sonja that I found on the internet. I’ll admit, here she’s a little bit of a mix of Red Sonja and Red Monika, hence the curves. But honestly, if Nielsen would’ve ever got to make a sequel, that’s probably what she would’ve looked like, since she got a boob job after Red Sonja rocketed her to stardom. She even wore a chain-link bikini for her Playboy shoot as kind of an homage, which honestly blew my 9-year-old freakin’ mind.
Yes, I was exposed to Playboy magazine at 9 years old. They’re called older brothers and cousins, and we had these things called clubhouses. That’s what clubhouses were for; stashing and reading the Playboy magazines you swiped from under your cousin’s mattress. These are the things boys did before internets and iPhones ruined childhood.
But I digress. As I said, I decided to create my own version of Red Sonja in the game, at least as well as I could given the options available. I look forward to documenting her progress as a survivor and her rise from Exile to… whatever the opposite of exile is.
Until then, this is Merle Fussin, signing off. May Crom watch over you.
Just kidding. Crom doesn’t give a fuck.
