Just... eugh...

You know what else is disturbing?

THIS!

...

I don’t know how to imbed youtubes, so have an elegant and finely-crafted link instead. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck14LKBI9GM&NR=1

Okay, so apparently this is French.

I’m just going to dive right into this.

Starts off with an anthropmorphic deer of some sort on a swing. Simple enough.  Verdant field, lots of color (mostly green, but bright) relatively simple stuff for an add featuring apparently an animal. Then a bear shows up and goes to attack it… except no, he’s just here to steal the deer’s juice. He pours it on the ground, flowers appear… and then things start to go a bit wonky.

The flowers are apparently mandragora or something, since they’re shaped like women. The bear offers the flower, the deer gets a bit intimate, and swings back to land on a bed of the flowers (which have conveniently repositioned themselves)

Cut to… poledancing flamingos. Because, hey, why not?

Suddenly the forest is apparently a strip joint. The chairs are big oranges, there is some kind of hideous octopus lady in a bikini pouring drinks (orange juice, the product being sold). The deer gets jealous, and puts on a stipshow to prove she’s hotter, I guess. There are apparently hermaphroditic peacocks performing as background singers, since I’m pretty sure only male peacocks have the tails like that.

The bear gets up to do his only dance thing... he slides through a row of zebra’s legs…

Look, it’s a really weird commercial, okay?

And I feel dirty just having seen it. So lets analyze it. This is another example of sex sells. Pretty plain and simple. I suppose they could be trying to market to the furry crowd with this, but the way I figure it, having animals instead of real people just lets them get away with so much more due to cartoonishness. Ties into the theme of ‘natural’ness as well. Thank god they didn’t draw the link between natural and o’naturel.

But why did they go this path? What argument are they trying to construct with this… thing.

Everything in the clip screams adult. This isn’t normally something you would expect out of something with animals, but it pretty thouroughly does. What’s the association then? Well, if this is all adult, then clearly the beverage in question must be adult as well. That’s right! Orange juice isnt just for kids anymore, now its for… stripper… animal bear… people…

Well, now its for adults, anyway. They seem to use the orange juice as a standin for champaign too, so by linking it with an alcoholic beverage they further associate that its not something for kids. Though it is france, so that might not be culturally accurate.

Other ads in the campaign continue the theme of really creepily suggestive animal people using the juice as a stand in for something only adults would use, such as a mountain lion (I think), using it as aftershave. The ad ends with the lions gay lover/roommate/hilariously-naked-stranger stroking his chin seductively.

So whats the moral of the story?

Don’t drink orange juice in france.
You have no idea where it’s been.

Evony and Irony.

Okay internet. What the hell? Seriously? What the hell.
Look at this.
See this? I actually navigated away from the page accidentally after seeing this. I just couldnt believe it. I sat there trying to refresh until it showed up again for like, ten minutes before seeing the "browse all ads" link.
Seriously? What the hell?

Okay, upon further investigation, this is actually a parody. The poor spelling should have given it away. Good job, Somethingawful.com . You got me. I mean, who in their right mind would...



Ah. Right.
Okay, well. Lets talk about this shall we?
Actually, there isnt really a lot to talk about.
This is "Sex sells" plain and simple. I mean, everything about it is designed to suggest that playing this game will lead to sex one way or the other. After all, ads tend to have some sort of representation regarding their product right? So a game advertised with a with... well... /that/ is sure to feature a fair amount of it, right?
Well. Wrong. The game plays like a bad civ clone. But you're not liable to know that before giving it a shot. Also, its mostly spyware, so, yeah. Don't download it.
You'll notice how the actual name of the game is in this tiny little text up in the corner. Apparently thats where their priorities lie. They don't care at all that you know the games name. All they care about is getting you to start playing it. After all, why would they want to distract people with something like brand identity when they could just feature sex for half an ad?
The text on this one is surprisingly tame compared to some of the later ones in the campaign. "Start your journey now, my lord". Of course imediatly implies a master-servent relationship. This woman, it says, will be at your beck and call. Its actually kind of ironic that this is the closest thing to actually representing what goes on in the game, since you do play as a king or lord of some sort.
Start your journey, I'll give you, is pretty tame. Later ones say "Join the fun" which is a lot more suggestive, but it stil implies that playing this game will set you down the road to bed the pictured model.
Finally, "Unnoticeable Now" at the bottom there. I don't know whether they were trying to imply that you could run it at the office without people seeing it or what, but it seems to suggest that discresion is the sort of thing you'd want to be evoking when playing it. Perhaps you should close those blinds, get a bit more privacy. That sort of thing.
Regardless. The end result is just... uhg. Everything about this ad just says 'sex'. It barely even promotes a product. All it wants is to draw in links. Thats one of the problems with  internet advertising I suppose. In the end it doesnt really matter how much exposure an ad gets. All that really matters is how many people actually follow through.
Oh, and in case your interested, here's the evolution of the advertisment campaign. http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/07/14/evolution-of-evony-video-game-ads/
Scary stuff.

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Funny thing. There isn't any paper in the star wars canon. It’s true, look it up.

That doesn’t stop Penny Arcade artist Mike 'Gabe' Krahulik from wondering what their political cartoons might be like though.

 

Okay, granted, I don't know if this really counts as a 'proper' political cartoon. It’s a satire, after all, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t layers to it, by gum!

Let’s start out by looking at the context of the image itself. It was posted in Gabe's blog at Penny-Arcade.com on June 7th 2010. Supposedly the idea just kind hit him in the middle of the night. Gabe's a pretty big Star Wars fan, and he's more than familiar with the extended continuity, so I trust that he knows what he's talking about with regards to the politics of star wars at least.

Of course that’s not the context the image itself presents. No, it presents itself as part of the fictional Coruscant Gazette, by a droid by the name of R2N5.

Okay, so the comic itself. There are layers here. First layer, the surface. It’s the Death star blowing up a planet. The death star is labeled 'wasteful military spending', the beam is labelled 'imperial aggression' and the planet getting blown up is labeled 'galactic stability'.

So what can we take from that? Well, clearly R2N5 is trying to tell us that the death star is emblematic of how the empire's over-the-top military spending and eagerness to bring their weapons to bear is a threat to galactic stability.

But that's not what it's actually about. We need to kick the level of abstraction up a level here.

On a higher level what Gabe is trying to say here is that what we see and take for granted in a movie is not necessarily the end all be all of the situation. Yes, the Empire in star wars was evil, but it’s still a galactic empire. It has good people working for it. It has to consider politics. Darth Vader can't be everywhere, force choking everyone who disagrees with him. No matter how we, the viewers see the Empire, it still has to raise money to build its death star, it still has citizens who are unhappy with the way things are being run, writing political commentary in the newspapers.

There are two sides in every story, in other words, and just because the media portrays people a certain way, regardless of how accurate that portrayal may be, doesn’t mean that there aren't others who see things a bit differently.

What was to Luke Skywalker an evil empire, was, to the people of Coruscant, basically the bush administration.

Also, R2N5, assumedly a member of the R2 series, would be an astromech droid.  So just try to imagine R2-D2 with a paintbrush. Hilarious.