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A Wizard of Goatse posted:You're reading it as a literal dissertation on comparative I think this is exacerbated by Thorsby's ability to really take on a dry "know it all nerd explains something to you" tone- some of it's just his word choice also I feel like he's got a grasp on several modes and dialects of idiomatic English that I will never have in a second language (though my media isn't inundated with foreign language content)- the part in Space Spy where he goes to The Best loving Planet Ever is almost tone-perfect for how some 21 year olds at midwest college bars sound
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Jan 21, 2019 19:40
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, like it is seriously proposing that if women are able to choose who they get pregnant by this will inevitably lead to prisonlike harem houses 
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Android Blues posted:My issue is that the other planets aren't hypotheses we can "test" - they're about bizarre aliens from other planets who have evolved in highly, ridiculously specific ways - so you can enjoy the story and take the exposition about how these creatures evolved to do this or that as relatively credible within its universe. When it then showcases as its climax a highly testable, easily falsifiable hypothesis about human nature, the curtain is pulled away and it loses some of its interest as speculative fiction. dude you are gonna get hosed up when you read Gulliver's Travels and learn about the tiny rear end in a top hat people
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Jan 21, 2019 19:53
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The tiny rear end in a top hat people are a metaphor for the Whigs in parliament! Not at all comparable. Gulliver's Travels isn't even slightly interested in scientific grounding, it's just a political satire with some moral philosophy. Accidental Space Spy's whole raison d'etre is wonky evolutionary sci-fi.
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Jan 21, 2019 21:15
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Like, we aren't meant to think that the natives of the Castration Planet or the Living Notebooks are metaphors for human behaviour, because they're not. They're purely cod-scientific thought experiments expanded to a ludicrous degree, which Thorsby is very good at. This casts a mirror back on us and makes us wonder, "ah, which of our funny behaviours are motivated by evolutionary prerogatives! Makes you think!", which of course instantly falls apart when it stops being a reflexive suggestion, and starts being text that espouses dubious science about human beings.
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Jan 21, 2019 21:20
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Android Blues posted:Like, we aren't meant to think that the natives of the Castration Planet or the Living Notebooks are metaphors for human behaviour, because they're not. They're purely cod-scientific thought experiments expanded to a ludicrous degree, which Thorsby is very good at. This casts a mirror back on us and makes us wonder, "ah, which of our funny behaviours are motivated by evolutionary prerogatives! Makes you think!", which of course instantly falls apart when it stops being a reflexive suggestion, and starts being text that espouses dubious science about human beings. Just because something has scientific grounding doesn't mean it can't also be satirical/metaphorical. The aliens in rear end are ludicrous thought experiments, but those thought experiments also serve a purpose as a literary device to deliver the message "poo poo really sucks for everyone involved when society is based on catering to our worst impulses rather than mitigating them." The importance of applying these things to humans isn't the text suggesting this is actually how human behavior works, so much as saying "hey, you can't just dismiss this message as something only weird aliens do." To get a little Roland Barthes, I don't think it's useful to debate the author's intent. I just think it's less enjoyable to read "tall thin candles are considered prettier than short fat ones, because they have a higher chance of falling over and killing everyone" as strictly a factual claim.
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Jan 21, 2019 22:59
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Bahahah the detail on the chainsaw sculpture, I love it. I should check out rear end, I read through all of Brain Chip, the Mormon cheating farce and I've been reading this but I should read more of these.
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Jan 22, 2019 00:27
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Otherkinsey Scale posted:To get a little Roland Barthes, I don't think it's useful to debate the author's intent. I just think it's less enjoyable to read "tall thin candles are considered prettier than short fat ones, because they have a higher chance of falling over and killing everyone" as strictly a factual claim. It's perverse, but it's hard to intuitively disprove. That's why it's funny - it forces you to question your assumptions. Yes, it's not at all scientific, but it's just obtuse enough to make you laugh and ask, "could that be true?". "Humans go to war because male leaders want to kill off male members of their own society so they can reduce their reproductive competition, and this would be solved if all leaders were given multiple wives to reduce their reproductive anxiety," doesn't really hit that benchmark. One can instantly think of leaders from actual world history who started wars despite having multiple wives. One can think of woman leaders who started wars. To top it off, it gets into some weirdly sexist territory for Thorsby, where the ultimate secret of his fictional world is that women are a war-reducing token that must be apportioned to men for the good of society, and men are solely responsible for political decisions such that satisfying their needs in this way is a total solution. Yes, it's fiction, but it's an uncomfortable conclusion for your sci-fi to land on. For what it's worth, I'm not talking about the author's intent either, that's a dead end. I'm talking about what's there in the work and how it presents itself for interpretation.
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Jan 22, 2019 09:37
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While it's not accurate as a necessary and sufficient reason for war, you can easily find in human history cultures that practiced polygyny and had a strong tradition of war and raids. And wars have been fought over a tribe's women often enough, e.g. rapt of the Sabines. So the idea isn't absurd, even if it doesn't resist scrutiny. We had a recent enough example with Daesh where a lot of Islamic State recruits were incels who joined the fight to kidnap women from "infidel" tribes. Cat Mattress fucked around with this message at 11:51 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 11:48
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Cat Mattress posted:While it's not accurate as a necessary and sufficient reason for war, you can easily find in human history cultures that practiced polygyny and had a strong tradition of war and raids. And wars have been fought over a tribe's women often enough, e.g. rapt of the Sabines. So the idea isn't absurd, even if it doesn't resist scrutiny. No, it is absurd for precisely that reason, in that the hypothesis being posited by the comic is not, "war is practised to raid other tribes for their women," but that, "war could be avoided in many cases if male leaders were allowed to practise polygyny, because declaring war is a subconscious reaction to reproductive anxiety that would be alleviated if the leader's biological imperative was satisfied".
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Jan 22, 2019 11:51
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It doesn't actually make any claim about kidnapping women from other tribes or countries, which while distasteful would have a bit more historical grounding. Rather, the claim is that war kills off male competition within the leader's own society, allowing them to monopolise the remaining women for reproduction - and as such, that they wouldn't feel the need to declare it if they already had plenty of women to reproduce with. This instantly runs into absurdity thanks to the very cases you mention.
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Jan 22, 2019 11:55
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Actually, amend that: there is a single panel mention of kidnapping other tribes for their women, but it's not the main thrust of the "Evolution of War" comics (it's given as a reason why male soldiers might agree to war, rather than a reason for a tribal leader to declare it), and in fact is explicitly called out as something that's no longer relevant in the modern world.
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Jan 22, 2019 12:09
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You seem to be having a tremendous amount of trouble with this one very specific interpretation that is the only one you're willing to consider, and I don't think anyone can help you with that. If you need it to be a comic about how valid the skull-calipers wing of sociology is, and there's nothing else going on there, you're just going to have to accept that's going to inevitably be Problematic and also kinda Stupid. If you accept that something can sound sorta sciencey and also not be being advocated as the literal truth (say, the wife-stealing stuff is a pulp sci-fi play on the old "war is not between nations but perpetrated by the rich against the poor" position), your options open up.
A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 17:24
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:You seem to be having a tremendous amount of trouble with this one very specific interpretation that is the only one you're willing to consider, and I don't think anyone can help you with that. If you need it to be a comic about how valid the skull-calipers wing of sociology is, and there's nothing else going on there, you're just going to have to accept that's going to inevitably be Problematic and also kinda Stupid. If you accept that something can sound sorta sciencey and also not be being advocated as the literal truth (say, the wife-stealing stuff is a pulp sci-fi play on the old "war is not between nations but perpetrated by the rich against the poor" position), your options open up. I'm having no trouble at all with it! Nor do I need someone to "help me" with it. It's a pretty simple objection. It's a speculative fiction story, set on a variety of fantastical imagined planets, that uses as its climax a "revelation" about the nature of the real world. The revelation in question is so spurious and obviously incorrect as to break your suspension of disbelief if you take it at face value. It's not the end of days or anything, but it's not a very satisfying ending to an otherwise great comic. Does Thorsby think that "polygyny = fewer wars" is true? I don't know, probably not. Does the comic say that that's true within its universe? Yes, and that is very stupid and pretty unsatisfying, especially when it's teased throughout the comic as a grand mystery that nations are willing to kill to suppress. The only way you can take it at its face value without doing a fair amount of contortion into metaphor is to assume that it's meant to be a ridiculous joke - all this drama over something so patently stupid. The comic doesn't really sell it that way, though. Instead it's self-serious about the revelation, and uses it to deliver a moral about human nature. In my reckoning that makes the ending pretty weak. It's also below the par for Thorsby's other work, which is often genuinely very perceptive. His sub-plot about the anthropic principle in Brain Chip is genuinely amazing. In my view, "it's meant to be a metaphor for how the true war is rich against poor," is a pretty tortured interpretation. The comic literally features a panel of Hitler giving a speech while a narration box attributes his declaration of war to his lack of reproductive success. There's no support for "actually it's not about biology but class" in the text unless you're willing to go so far as to say all the exposition about evolutionary biology is in fact a complex symbol for, say, market capitalism and intrasocial class dynamics. (There's support for this in literature. Moby Dick uses chapter on chapter of nonsensical whale facts to get across its point about how whales represent the unknowable.) You find my reading too literal. That's fine! I get that. But then what's your actual counter-point to it, beyond this kind of flippant, "ah, it's just a story, it could mean any number of things, when it says something that sounds bad, that's probably just a metaphor"? I'm down to have the discussion. Like, what's the alternative reading?
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Jan 22, 2019 19:41
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Android Blues posted:I'm having no trouble at all with it! Nor do I need someone to "help me" with it. The alternative reading was already presented to you, and you rejected it. At this point a discussion seems fruitless, if you counter every argument with "NO" and then just repeating your earlier statements.
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Jan 22, 2019 20:09
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Android Blues posted:
I agree with you on this much--rear end was really uncomfortable to read in places because of that, actually, since practically speaking the effect of a lot of the evopsych stuff was to justify why the women in a given storyline had no agency or anything. It was unusual for Thorsby, since in his other comics (especially this one) so many of his protagonists are women, and that's not something that's treated as unusual within the text.
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Jan 22, 2019 20:29
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the alternative reading is thisOtherkinsey Scale posted:The aliens in rear end are ludicrous thought experiments, but those thought experiments also serve a purpose as a literary device to deliver the message "poo poo really sucks for everyone involved when society is based on catering to our worst impulses rather than mitigating them." with each chapter lampooning a different behavior that really sucks. the evopsych is there to sell the idea that the people caricatured are behaving animalistically (also because Thorsby fukken loves coming up with contrived situations and then playing out how they'd develop, or coming up with absurd outcomes and then working backwards to "logical" conditions that'd cause it), not literally "people are just instinct-driven animals and society is ultimately all polygynous rutting behavior or something". It's social satire masquerading as a travelogue in the same tradition as Gulliver's Travels, or Gargantua, or Utopia, or the Divine Comedy, revolving around Thorsby's broadly socialist critiques of society. And like in a lot of those stories it's part of the joke that the narrator is kind of an idiot and comes up with pretentious pseudointellectual rationales for everything novel they see mirroring (in this case) the popular trend of pseuds in pop media promoting quack theories about why human nature says the status quo is the only true way we can be. The whole point of the big reveal is that you've been rolling along with this kind of nonsense going "yeah that checks out" about all the weird space aliens' societies being totally consumed by some throwback caveman instinct that makes their lives hell, because you're (clearly) primed to accept this kind of explanation at face value as sufficient, and then he turns around and pulls the exact same reasoning on us and suddenly it's heeeey we're more complicated than that! Except it's about something we have no more valid excuse for, it's just people at their worst and most unreasonable that we've structured much of civilization around and accepted as the natural order of things, and it makes our lives hell. I'm not a fan of the entire last chapter being Lies, Sisters, and Wives all over again, the whole thing's got much jankier pacing than his later stuff, but it's a pretty funny joke that the fate of the world really just hinges on whether president gets laid and decides maybe he doesn't feel like starting a nuclear war after all, and if he doesn't everyone's just gonna shrug and kill each other. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 20:33
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Libluini posted:The alternative reading was already presented to you, and you rejected it. At this point a discussion seems fruitless, if you counter every argument with "NO" and then just repeating your earlier statements. It super wasn't, this is a very disingenuous reading of the conversation. Not changing your mind the instant someone disagrees with you isn't the same as just stonewalling them. Actually I think this is a pretty interesting discussion - there are lots of smart people sharing their thoughts on the subject matter. A Wizard of Goatse posted:the alternative reading is this This is coherent, and it makes sense to me. Like, the whole thing being a bait-and-switch about how evolutionary psychology only appears to explain things when we take a simplified outside view of the situation, and once it enters into a situation we're familiar with it instantly becomes ridiculous, thus showing off its main flaw as a discipline? It's not the most natural reading from my perspective, but this is a good argument for it. The only sticking point I'd point out is like - even with that conversation at the end about how evolution isn't destiny, Shim and Athena are still morally determined to warn other societies about The Secret of War, because knowing it would make them more able to avoid their evolutionary destiny of starting wars over reproductive anxiety. The final conclusion of the comic is that we can fight our instincts, not that they don't guide us - and it's text in the comic that a bunch of societies, including possibly Earth, could usher in permanent peace through the power of giving men multiple sexual partners. It still has some credence within the setting, and there's nothing in particular that questions or undermines the "polygyny prevents war" thing other than its own apparent ridiculousness. You have to rely on the audience's perception to go, "oh, actually, despite the amount of mental real estate the text devotes to this idea, it's silly enough that it can't possibly be at all sincere." Like, I guess that lines up with your Gulliver's Travels reading, where Swift asserts that the only cure for the human condition is to become a horse, but the level of satire that's happening in the comic doesn't really seem to go to that length. Instead, it's quite maudlin about the injustice of hiding the Secret of War from the world. But! That's a matter of perspective, and I guess if you find the other thought experiments more ridiculous than I do, you're primed to read the Secret of War as ridiculous satire too. All fair from my viewpoint. Thank you for engaging. Genuinely appreciate it. Otherkinsey Scale posted:I agree with you on this much--rear end was really uncomfortable to read in places because of that, actually, since practically speaking the effect of a lot of the evopsych stuff was to justify why the women in a given storyline had no agency or anything. It was unusual for Thorsby, since in his other comics (especially this one) so many of his protagonists are women, and that's not something that's treated as unusual within the text. I'm glad we agree on this. It is very uncharacteristic for Thorsby, and while it's generally presented as an unjust consequence of cruel biology, it's notably not presented as unjust that multiple women should be apportioned to male leaders to prevent wars, which is a weird slip. I feel like that's something that should be treated with the same dystopian tone as the Woman Houses on the Best loving Planet Ever, rather than just a dramatic plot beat/low key gag. And you're right: even when it is presented as an unpleasant reality that women are sidelined by biology on some of the other planets, the way the story chooses to frame that is often a little concerning. A lot of the societies shown are ones where women are passive objects and men are active subjects by biological nature, which is a narrative choice in itself. Android Blues fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 21:04
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Oh my god this page suuuuuuuuucks
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Jan 22, 2019 22:46
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pathetic little tramp posted:Oh my god this page suuuuuuuuucks 
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Jan 23, 2019 01:46
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I hope president giant spider comes out of this wiser and more discerning of his cabinet selections and has a long, productive term in office with a legacy of good policy decisions and progressive social reform
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Jan 23, 2019 04:20
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RandomFerret posted:I hope president giant spider comes out of this wiser and more discerning of his cabinet selections and has a long, productive term in office with a legacy of good policy decisions and progressive social reform And still finds time to play with children.
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Jan 23, 2019 07:04
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It's been a while since I've read Space Spy, but I feel you could also draw the conclusion that men are unfit to rule from it.
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Jan 23, 2019 07:09
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Just want to weigh in and agree that Android Blues makes sense and is genuinely trying to explain their viewpoint and understand others, and that I'm glad this page went on to feature productive discussion of it instead of just calling it weird.
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Jan 23, 2019 17:23
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The Space Spy finale isn't Thorsby's best work, for several reasons already mentioned in this thread, but it's redeemed somewhat by the masterful sudden-return-of-the-ambassador gag
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Jan 23, 2019 22:25
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Android Blues posted:It still has some credence within the setting, and there's nothing in particular that questions or undermines the "polygyny prevents war" thing other than its own apparent ridiculousness. You have to rely on the audience's perception to go, "oh, actually, despite the amount of mental real estate the text devotes to this idea, it's silly enough that it can't possibly be at all sincere." the comic that opens up with a guy getting abducted by a workshy Mr. Potato Head and whisked off to The Castration Planet isn't under any illusions that getting the word out about its climax about world leaders needing more mistresses is the IRL key to ending war, it's all extremely silly. Satire generally isn't in the business of prescribing sober and reasonable social policy, and yeah I am going to draw the line at that that is a very weird thing to expect of absurdist MSPaint alien sex comedy. The serious part, inasmuch as there is one, is that all these terrible things come from people just assuming whatever they're doing is perfectly reasonable because it's what they feel like doing/what everyone's always done, and if they actually stopped to interrogate their own motivations their lives would be immensely easier. But probably they won't, so here's the ridiculously contrived Plan B for how to keep powerful people from ending the world through their dumbest and pettiest impulses (there is no plan B) A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Jan 24, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 23:08
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It's the old: "You might think things aren't perfect now, but if you try and make them better, rich people will have no choice but to take their ball and go home and then you'll have nothing! You should just be thankful that you've got anything at all  " argument!Rich people have been using this for centuries, with remarkably persistent success.
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Jan 25, 2019 10:06
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348 The real villain was supply-side economics all along!
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Jan 26, 2019 15:49
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Don't listen to her, mr. President! Trickle-down economics are an insidious myth!
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Jan 26, 2019 18:24
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Pistol_Pete posted:It's the old: "You might think things aren't perfect now, but if you try and make them better, rich people will have no choice but to take their ball and go home and then you'll have nothing! You should just be thankful that you've got anything at all For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is Barbara Everdark? This is Barbara Everdark speaking.
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Jan 27, 2019 09:05
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Ever since the election is over, I wonder how long this story will continue. For all we know this was the last page.
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Jan 27, 2019 12:48
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Nah, Thorsby usually makes such things clear, with a "The End." box on the last page and then a "This story is finished, click here to read from the start or here to see my other stories" page.
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Jan 27, 2019 16:46
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http://trixie.thecomicseries.com/comics/349 aww 
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Jan 28, 2019 04:14
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That's a heckin' good president right there.
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Jan 28, 2019 05:18
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I wonder what we've got left. Thorsby's good at these endings where things work out not quite as the characters intended, but still OK.
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Jan 28, 2019 08:06
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davidspackage posted:I wonder what we've got left. Thorsby's good at these endings where things work out not quite as the characters intended, but still OK. Hiring Trixie as a secondary advisor possibly.
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Jan 28, 2019 08:21
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All of the traditionalists severed heads on pikes lining the streets.
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Jan 28, 2019 11:05
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"How The Government Works" as a book title is making me laugh
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Jan 28, 2019 14:54
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His Divine Shadow posted:All of the traditionalists severed heads on pikes lining the streets. 
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Jan 29, 2019 00:05
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wow this really is a fantasy story (rimshot, following by me plunging the drumsticks deep into my eye sockets and impaling my brain)
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Jan 30, 2019 11:27
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http://trixie.thecomicseries.com/comics/351 getting a little worried over the future health of this spider now
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