[thewordis]

From the Penny Arcade blog on this incident, specifically Gabriel:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/09/04/some-clarification

"So let me start by saying I like the Dickwolves strip. I think it’s a strong comic and I still think the joke is funny. Would we make that strip today? Knowing what we know now and seeing how it hurt people, no. We wouldn’t. But at the time, it seemed pretty benign. With that said I absolutely regret everything we did after that comic. I regret the follow up strip, I regret making the merchandise, I regret pulling the merchandise and I regret being such an asshole on twitter to people who were upset. I don’t think any of those things were good ideas. If we had just stopped with the strip and moved on, the Dickwolf never would have become what it is today. Which is a joke at the expense of rape victims or a symbol of the dismissal of people who have suffered a sexual assault. the comic itself obviously points out the absurd morality of the average MMO where you are actually forced to help some people and ignore others in the same situation. Oddly enough, the first comic by itself is exactly the opposite of what this whole thing has turned into."

[Guvante]

His response to why he said pulling the merchandise was the mistake:

> In hindsight all this did was open the wound back up and bring on a whole new wave of debate. Any action we took at the time just dug us deeper regardless of what it was. What we needed to do was stop. just stop.

My guess would be he internally translated the message to mean "That we don't know about". Since he has previously said the whole incident was a mistake, he was probably thinking that this last bit was new to people.

And I think all the points of this blog post are why they have changed their stance on a lot of those things. They were reacting as if they were defending their free speech, and they weren't incorrect in isolation, the problem was they thus enabled other people to act out in more extreme ways. Finally when people got annoyed at them for starting the whole thing, they assumed it was for the initial strip (which was fine by most people's standards, which is why it is still up), rookie mistake, but probably one they took to heart.

[mpyne]

> They were reacting as if they were defending their free speech, and they weren't incorrect in isolation, the problem was they thus enabled other people to act out in more extreme ways.

I think this was the real issue for Gabe, and I'm glad to see that he seems to realize that himself.

In essence, the dickwolves went off-message quickly, and what he thought he was defending against wasn't really the point of contention, and what he and Tycho were trying to say with the comic itself wasn't really what all of the comic's supporters had in mind.

I suspect this is what it might feel like to learn that a favorite shirt suddenly became a polarizing insignia within a gang battle you hadn't even known was active on the streets. The shirt means one thing to you but something completely different outside your front door.