idonotlikepeas posted:

Alright, I'm willing to try an experiment. It's been suggested that I ask the pack of uncontrollable shitposters in here how you think Alison and Clevin's relationship will turn out. So what do you think, mm?

Typical Pubbie posted:

Who suggested, mm?

Elysiume posted:

Their relationship being ~too perfect~ is a complaint that I haven't seen. The complaints are that he's a boring, milquetoast character that just sort of drifted into a banal relationship with Allison. Also his hair is weird.

Flesh Forge posted:

Expressing displeasure at the bad parts of a sometimes-good comic is not shitposting.

idonotlikepeas posted:

Alright, I'm willing to try an experiment. It's been suggested that I ask the pack of uncontrollable shitposters in here how you think Alison and Clevin's relationship will turn out. So what do you think, mm?

Flesh Forge posted:

Are you guys ready for the most awkward love triangle ever? Allison/Clevin/Patrick cringe fodder incoming

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

idonotlikepeas posted:

Alright, I'm willing to try an experiment. It's been suggested that I ask the pack of uncontrollable shitposters in here how you think Alison and Clevin's relationship will turn out. So what do you think, mm?

Flesh Forge posted:

This should go in the OP, OP

idonotlikepeas posted:

Alright, I'm willing to try an experiment. It's been suggested that I ask the pack of uncontrollable shitposters in here how you think Alison and Clevin's relationship will turn out. So what do you think, mm?

idonotlikepeas posted:

That said, the last few pages seem to be less pestilent than I remember

ZenMasterBullshit posted:

How do you feel about Clevin's complaints that he didn't get a shout out for existing in her thank you address and her apologizing for that fact?

Personally I'm very excited to see Clevin very graciously understand why this seemingly crazy man is in his gf's apartment and help her put him to bed on the couch and nothing remotely close to a plot happening for another 40 pages.

Or at the very least well have a 3 person conversation that will go on for 40 pages when it only really need 6 or so to get it's point across.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

A bizarre, disjointed rant where Allison breaks down and admits she was never a lesbian and loves Clevin, only Clevin, and thanks him profusely for his pasta and moral support helping launch her cartooning career.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

A bizarre, disjointed rant where Allison breaks down and admits she was never a lesbian and loves Clevin, only Clevin, and thanks him profusely for his pasta and moral support helping launch her cartooning career.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

A bizarre, disjointed rant where Allison breaks down and admits she was never a lesbian and loves Clevin, only Clevin, and thanks him profusely for his pasta and moral support helping launch her cartooning career.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

A bizarre, disjointed rant where Allison breaks down and admits she was never a lesbian and loves Clevin, only Clevin, and thanks him profusely for his pasta and moral support helping launch her cartooning career.

Flesh Forge posted:

Expressing displeasure at the bad parts of a sometimes-good comic is not shitposting.

Crimpolioni posted:

Valkyries first client will be a young man who started dating a biodynamic individual, who only a few days into the relationship began using their powers to coerce and abuse him. Forced into hiding from his abuser, he now reaches out to project Valkyrie, presenting a unique case where having a support - organisation staffed by superheroes might actually be necessary to deal with the situation.

Joe Slowboat posted:

This reminded me of something the comic is, I guess, supposed to be about : Being the one with all this power and privilege and not knowing how to change the world.

Allison isn't just Superman But Ineffectual - she's always been smart, physically able, raised in a loving family, white, upper-middle-class. She finds it easy to do the right thing because she's never been in a situation where she personally would pay the price for doing so. She's a cipher of the author, and moreover, of all of us who are well-intentioned privileged types. The comic is to some degree a metaphor for how hard it can be to figure out how to actually use what you're given to make the world a better place, and how easy it is to not understand people who face harder challenges. Allison characterizes what in Sartre's Age of Reason is called a bourgeoisie spirit, a fundamentally middle-class and conventional personality even when more radical ideals are being held up. This isn't to say that middle class types can't be progressive or radical, but there are interesting tensions there, and Allison was someone trying to find a way to get beyond that (while having a massive savior complex over being a rich brilliant white person deigning to save the world, of course). She's so used to a certain kind of assumption of safety and power that it distorts her behavior.

And, because everything comes back to Clevin, like some kind of vacuous mobius strip, Clevin is the opposite of this - and so he robs the narrative of purpose.

Clevin is the 'woke boyfriend' who is safe, unchallenging, politically positive but not associated with any attempt to organize outside of his incredibly diverse band*. He is a child of privilege, or at least appears to be one, on par with Allison's background, but he has no anxiety to overcome. He's doing something politically useful (the fundraiser) without having to actually confront his own failings, he's a Nice Guy, he's the easy answer to the question of 'when life gives you so much, how do you give back?' You do it by being you, baby, by being slightly unconventional and doing some good on a personal level and being nice. That's it, that's the answer, and if you noticed that it fixes nothing but your conscience in the long run, way to go!

He's the death of this comic. Because he offers a conventional, uninteresting, unchallenging definition of Doing The Most You Can. He's bourgeoisie as all hell and has no interest in confronting its own shallowness. He is an option to just... not bother really doing anything. And of course he appears alongside Project Valkyrie, aka Uber But For Feminism. Because Valkyrie is absolutely a project that does less than it wants to think, that does something useful but can't possibly be more than a drop in the bucket, and is hugely pleased with itself to do so. Clevin running a GoFundMe party for someone's mom is precisely the same: Small projects that do, legitimately, do good, but completely ignore the systemic issues that makes the small projects necessary a thousand times over.

Of course, what's really weird about all this is that Clevin started off incredibly un-woke. Remember his now-murdered buddy, a literal rapist? Clevin remains the guy who was friends with a date rapist and never thought anything was wrong until it was on the news. He's not himself a predator, but he clearly won't recognize or oppose predators in his social circles. He was a figure of ineffective good intentions letting horrors slide. He still is. Clevin is the moral death of this comic; as long as he is at its center and not complicated in some way, it can only get worse.

*also how telling is it that he has a multiethnic group of friends in his band but none of them get any spoken lines except him? I think it's very telling. Then again I don't want to meet anyone who willingly hangs out with Clevin.