|
Ashcans posted:So, uh, did Broom Girl know that this is what was going to happen when she punted the familiar? Was it just bad luck? Because if she knew what she was setting up this is pretty hosed up on her part.
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2020 16:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 06:00 |
|
|
Likewise Rin's reaction was just mild annoyance (until she collapsed, obviously) so familiars seem to be able to get poofed and just reform in normal circumstances anyway.
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2020 21:25
|
|
|
rannum posted:Likewise Rin's reaction was just mild annoyance (until she collapsed, obviously) so familiars seem to be able to get poofed and just reform in normal circumstances anyway. Closest I can think of is that it is like Cancer, where everything is working fine until something on a low level that is not completely understood goes horribly wrong then things...aren’t. Also, I apologize for likely getting things very wrong.
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2020 21:33
|
|
|
rannum posted:Likewise Rin's reaction was just mild annoyance (until she collapsed, obviously) so familiars seem to be able to get poofed and just reform in normal circumstances anyway. That is, until she was. EDIT: Basically as much as broom girl dislikes The System Rin represents and upholds, nothing about her strikes me as being cruel enough to husk Rin on purpose.
|
|
#
?
Apr 14, 2020 18:44
|
|
|
What’s up with clevin?
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 01:06
|
|
|
thrilla in vanilla posted:What’s up with clevin? I dunno about the writer of that misbegotten comic, but Molly Ostertag and Noelle Stevenson are fostering kittens!! https://twitter.com/MollyOstertag/status/1249822570737590272
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 01:18
|
|
|
Begemot posted:I dunno about the writer of that misbegotten comic, but Molly Ostertag and Noelle Stevenson are fostering kittens!!
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 02:33
|
|
|
Like the weirdest loving thing is they both seem like pretty cool and interesting people in any context other than Strong Female Protagonist, although part of that is my positive bias towards Noelle Stevenson making me think her wife must be pretty cool. I'm not a huge follower of Dimension 20 but I listened to the first session of Tiny Heist and was like, Brennan Lee Mulligan? That one? That guy? This is the same guy? Huh.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 02:36
|
|
|
PetraCore posted:Like the weirdest loving thing is they both seem like pretty cool and interesting people in any context other than Strong Female Protagonist, although part of that is my positive bias towards Noelle Stevenson making me think her wife must be pretty cool. I'm not a huge follower of Dimension 20 but I listened to the first session of Tiny Heist and was like, Brennan Lee Mulligan? That one? That guy? This is the same guy? Huh. Molly Knox Ostertag is really cool and good, yes. Her Witch Boy series is also really good and has a strong metaphor for kids and teens that's basically "don't be afraid to be yourself if you're gay/bi/pan/trans/non-binary/whatever or if you're a boy and want to do girl stuff or a girl and want to do boy stuff," only with "magic" in the place of "being gay". I've never seen anything of SFP but this forum's weird hatebone for it has always perplexed me.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 02:43
|
|
|
nine-gear crow posted:Molly Knox Ostertag is really cool and good, yes. Her Witch Boy series is also really good and has a strong metaphor for kids and teens that's basically "don't be afraid to be yourself if you're gay/bi/pan/trans/non-binary/whatever or if you're a boy and want to do girl stuff or a girl and want to do boy stuff," only with "magic" in the place of "being gay". I've never seen anything of SFP but this forum's weird hatebone for it has always perplexed me. It's a comic that started strong and then I think they just lost interest
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 02:49
|
|
|
nine-gear crow posted:I've never seen anything of SFP but this forum's weird hatebone for it has always perplexed me. Edit: I say this as someone who loves Molly's other work, we own the Witch Boy series and have read it with my kids several times.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 02:54
|
|
|
Clevin.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 03:02
|
|
|
Ashcans posted:Understanding that goons are great for beating a horse into the ground and bandwagoning poo poo real hard, if you have never read any of SFP then you can try reading it and figure if the hate is justified (it is, although maybe not on the level it gets hit here). The premise is fine, starts out interesting, but the whole thing rapidly falls apart and then abandons all it's most engaging angles for some real terrible not-resolution because both writer and artist gave up on it. It's far from the worst comic, but I think it gets a lot of rage specifically because it showed some promise and potential and then just kind of poo poo the bed, as opposed to comics that are just terrible and doomed from the get-go. More specifically some of the ways in which SFP flopped over kinda ended up being semi-insulting, not because either person involved was a Bad Person With Bad Opinions but because the execution was weak or the follow-up was lacking, both of which make perfect sense in an exhausting project that had run its course. One example that really rubbed me the wrong way was the protagonist sitting in on a very personal support group meeting for people whose superpowers deformed their body and who suffer dysphoria due to that, a group she very much doesn't belong to, and using information gathered in that meeting to recruit people for her smartphone app that 'paired superpowered people with people who need them', like if you wanted to be able to ask for someone to help you get your stuff from an abuser you were leaving and make sure they didn't start poo poo. It just kind of left a bad taste in my mouth? But the thing is, at it's worst SFP 'kind of left a bad taste in my mouth', it wasn't actually offensive or terrible or bigoted or even bad enough to be interesting. It's something I feel a little weird having any strong feelings about because the amount of mental space it should take up for me is 0. EDIT: I just don't know why they had to have her sit in on a support group instead of talking to the ppl more casually! the support group part was the weird part! it made me feel weird as someone who's been in support groups!
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 03:07
|
|
|
It was also, weirdly enough, a comic that never acknowledged the privilege of its own main character, despite that being a theme it seemed to want to talk about early on.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 03:18
|
|
|
SFP has a few really really bad missteps. Like ‘how did you not see what this implied’ and then ‘deleting any comment criticizing the work’ bad. They really were not prepared to produce a webcomic or a superhero comic beyond the pretty great first few chapters. Fatigue coupled with the assumption that internet criticism was always in bad faith led to a cool comic spiraling out after they finished the good chapters - plus her art evolved to be less fitted to the comic. Better, but less fitted.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 03:29
|
|
|
Okay, that explains things better. Because all I saw for years was just "lol SFP bad" and "ClevinClevinClevinClevinClevin" and endless thread t-boning shitposts by now-perma'd stalker weirdos. Nice to see that both creators have grown from their missteps and become mutually better creators for it. The alternative I suppose is turning into a Tim Buckley or Fred Gallagher and either stagnating or somehow de-volving over time.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 03:37
|
|
|
I think the key issue is that neither seem to have been prepared to make the edgy superhero violence story they wanted to make. Especially since neither actually read cape comics at the time or since. The really bad moment was when the main character used threat of brutal violence to force a libertarian to use his magic power to fix her best friend, and basically had a moment of guilt and was over it, and all the blocking and art of that scene resembled a rape really painfully closely. I believe them that they didn’t do it on purpose but they basically responded with ‘we could never have done that, you’re being ridiculous’ and deleting comments. By all appearances their work since has been fine but I really hope they never go back and finish SFP because it only got worse in terms of storytelling as time went on. Oh and it had no response whatsoever to the Trump era, or to the idea of collective action, as a comic. At first it seemed promising in regards to ‘one superhero can’t change the world’ but the brilliant idea was ‘Uber for women superheroes stopping domestic abuse.’ It just didn’t have the payoff it needed. (Clevin was an annoying boyfriend character who did a benefit concert for someone’s mom’s healthcare costs? And I think the way the comic presented him as just the best and kindest guy - after introducing him as The Guy Who Didn’t Realize His Friend Was A Rapist in an earlier chapter - grated on people, less because he was actually awful and more because he epitomized a kind of Individuals Doing Charity model of doing good that really failed to understand collective action. This comic was really interesting to talk about, as it circled the drain.)
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 03:47
|
|
|
upfront: every work that has come after SFP is so much better than SFP. SFP is very, very bad. to the point where, despite it being created in 100% genuinely, unfettered sincerity, accidentally reads like a mean-spirited parody of comics about diversity
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 03:54
|
|
|
fun hater posted:upfront: every work that has come after SFP is so much better than SFP. SFP is very, very bad. to the point where, despite it being created in 100% genuinely, unfettered sincerity, accidentally reads like a mean-spirited parody of comics about diversity
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 03:59
|
|
|
Basically I had no beef with Molly as the artist but I kind of assumed Brennan was a douche based on how things came off in SFP and I was genuinely surprised and pleased to learn it was just bad, bad writing. It's hard to articulate my feelings on SFP bc they change depending on exactly how much I remember and I'm never going to go back and reread, sorry for my inconsistency.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 04:01
|
|
|
PetraCore posted:Basically I had no beef with Molly as the artist but I kind of assumed Brennan was a douche based on how things came off in SFP and I was genuinely surprised and pleased to learn it was just bad, bad writing. this pretty much it, the writer was so horrendous it was honestly kind of astounding and im glad that the artist has unhitched themselves from that wagon entirely bc they are very good
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 04:05
|
|
|
PetraCore posted:Basically I had no beef with Molly as the artist but I kind of assumed Brennan was a douche based on how things came off in SFP and I was genuinely surprised and pleased to learn it was just bad, bad writing. It's possibly a byproduct of today's internet culture. Folks seem to make the assumption that if people make bad things, then they are also bad people when actually they could be really cool and good and just kinda suck and writing and drawn, ect. I know it's bias I've fallen into once or twice myself and have gone "Oh, well, I'm actually happy to be wrong in this case." So it definitely happens.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 04:06
|
|
|
You could probably put a lot of it down to "this was not a good decade for a pair of twenty-somethings to start a long-term art project about a deeply-political subject." The ground kind of fell out from under them there.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 04:07
|
|
|
And as previously mentioned it super didn't help that the mock culture of the forums latched onto it in the way it did. There were legitimate points of criticism buried under shtick.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 04:11
|
|
|
It really did. And while I don't actually necessarily lay this at the feet of either of the author's personal views, it fell into a weird trap of faux-progressivism, and imagery that really didn't come together well--probably most notoriously when the main character threatened physically coerced a dude (who was an libertarian/objectivist rear end in a top hat, it is true) into using his powers in a scene that came off as very uncomfortably rapey.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 04:14
|
|
|
I think ‘progressive but have no actual political framework beyond being personally decent’ is a really bad perspective to use to approach subjects like ‘should a superheroine go around revenge-murdering rapists.’ Even before Trump, that framework was not up to their subject matter (and again, no cape comics background so no awareness of works that had touched on similar criticism of capes). This was the actual subject of the chapter that started the decline and honestly even beyond that land mine of a topic, that chapter dragged on forever and the art was shifting away from the hard-edged and ragged early chapters to the much softer and rounder later style. Which didn’t fit the topic shift much if at all.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 04:21
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:I think ‘progressive but have no actual political framework beyond being personally decent’ is a really bad perspective to use to approach subjects like ‘should a superheroine go around revenge-murdering rapists.’ Even before Trump, that framework was not up to their subject matter (and again, no cape comics background so no awareness of works that had touched on similar criticism of capes). (And again, it's a topic I'm sure plenty of superhero media has gone over before, which is fine, but going in completely blind to that made it come off as more, mmm... pretentious than was good?)
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 04:33
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:I think ‘progressive but have no actual political framework beyond being personally decent’ is a really bad perspective to use to approach subjects like ‘should a superheroine go around revenge-murdering rapists.’ Even before Trump, that framework was not up to their subject matter (and again, no cape comics background so no awareness of works that had touched on similar criticism of capes). honestly, regardless of whether its been done in other comics, it seemed very clear neither of them wanted to even get near the question of "is it moral for superheroes to engage in political violence", let alone try to answer it, which is a very problematic position for a comic about superheroes getting engaged in political activism to be. this is what leads to things like "mary has a perfect record of only ever murdering serial rapists and murderers and allison can't actually give any explanation as to why that's bad and oh hey time for the chapter to end" and "allison forcing the libertarian to actually use his powers for once helped countless people with literally no downside, but she felt bad about it so that's no good" and "app development? that's the big thing that's going to save everyone, right? app development? please say it's app development". as far as I could tell, the comic's abrupt ending was as much its as you say "generic personal decency" progressivism colliding with the stated end state of "there is a literal global conspiracy destroying any possible attempt at systemically threatening its power from within" and them really not wanting to have to follow that to its logical conclusion as it was anything else.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 05:23
|
|
|
That and their dedication to not just having an invincible violence-doer heroically do the violence to the bad people being... thin. They still couldn’t break away from the characters’ own paradigm of ‘some people are really important and can change the world but most people can’t’ enough to actually envision real collective action or social change that wasn’t either basically the world continuing as it is or the Authority punching bad people to death. Doing a gofundme for a friend’s cancer treatments or Superman Makes Libertarian Teen Cast Spells (With Creepily Near-Sexual Violence) and nothing in between. App development, I guess, was the in between. Nothing else was supposed to be both really changing the world AND not just heroic, righteous and unselfcritical violence. The closest thing to critique was ‘the individual doing the violence feels bad about it, isn’t she so self-sacrificing.’ Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Apr 15, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 05:42
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:That and their dedication to not just having an invincible violence-doer heroically do the violence to the bad people being... thin. They still couldn’t break away from the characters’ own paradigm of ‘some people are really important and can change the world but most people can’t’ enough to actually envision real collective action or social change that wasn’t either basically the world continuing as it is or the Authority punching bad people to death. That sort of makes the real hero of the comic Feral, and not Allison.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 05:55
|
|
|
PetraCore posted:I would argue that what Feral was doing was supposed to be really changing the world, even though even at her most self-destructive she couldn't possibly solve the demand for donor organs or anything. I mean, there's only so many people who are going to be even compatible with her. Feral's superpower made her organs 100% no problem compatible with everyone. It was great that she appeared early on to show how using a power to actually make a difference could be horrible and not at all glorious. If Allison had reflected on that and used it as inspiration to think outside of the box, that would have been great. It's a great idea for Allison to not be the real hero and to have an example of a friend who is. Instead Allison did violence heavily coded as sexual assault to make the magic libertarian make Feral's powers too strong to continue giving the organs. Then she used punching to solve the problem of crippling childhood trauma for her depressive demonic nightmare boy love interest. SFP is such an amazing example of good things going bad.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 06:21
|
|
|
SFP was great when it was setting up questions of how superheroes could actually make the world better. It did a very good job of presenting the emotional stakes of Allison realising the only things she's good at are breaking things and hurting people. It touched on how even the privilege of being famous was hurting people around her (in one chapter there was a lecturer that didn't get a long with her - standard college plot stuff - and the university fired him the moment she commented on that; the whole reason he didn't like her was that his husband was killed when she'd thrown a giant robot into the building he was in while making a quip so she'd accidentally ruined his life twice now). But it fell apart when it tried to find a positive answer to those questions. It started in the rapists chapter, which started with the simple thesis of "extrajudicial murder isn't the answer to dealing with people the legal system doesn't want to handle" but since this problem came in the form of a character who could actually ask "so what is then?" they writer (and Allison) had to find an answer but couldn't. And that led into the whole slide of trying to find some sort of way Allison could make a positive contribution when they just really didn't have any good ideas for it. Ultimately those good questions needed political answers - any story about fixing the world needs to - but they just weren't ready to engage with political writing, so they tried not to and it killed the story.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 08:28
|
|
|
There's ultimately only one comic that answered the question of how superheroes can better society as a whole.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 08:56
|
|
|
The biggest drawback really did feel like 'we have no experience with superhero comics' because you can throw a rock and hit 'how do superheroes affect the real world' especially now. Even Allison lamenting she had to hold back when she wanted to cut loose was done better with Superman and Darkseid in JLU with the 'world of cardboard' speech.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 15:16
|
|
|
Yeah SFP was pretty bad but SA mockthread culture deffo amplified it to a ludicrous degree. After a certain point every sane legit criticism was exhausted so you got people posting detailed breakdowns of how a teacup is inconsistently sized on one page with annotated diagrams and a sneering "what kind of lovely artist make this huge a mistake?!?" Attitude.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 15:33
|
|
|
Mr Phillby posted:Yeah SFP was pretty bad but SA mockthread culture deffo amplified it to a ludicrous degree. After a certain point every sane legit criticism was exhausted so you got people posting detailed breakdowns of how a teacup is inconsistently sized on one page with annotated diagrams and a sneering "what kind of lovely artist make this huge a mistake?!?" Attitude. Especially since it was an espresso cup and was meant to be that small. Eventually mockthread culture becomes performative and people start inventing criticisms instead of actually discussing what something was trying to accomplish.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 15:37
|
|
|
I won’t deny there was some pointless nitpicking but for a very long time the thread was motivated by ‘this used to be good’ and frustration that any criticism whatsoever was being blown off by the creators. That the last chapters just... didn’t look good, partially for technical reasons but mostly for an immense style and subject mismatch, made ragging on the art popular. The artist was clearly capable of much better, so either Ostertag was totally burned out on the project and phoning it in or the mismatch was critical.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 15:42
|
|
|
nine-gear crow posted:Okay, that explains things better. Because all I saw for years was just "lol SFP bad" and "ClevinClevinClevinClevinClevin" and endless thread t-boning shitposts by now-perma'd stalker weirdos. Nice to see that both creators have grown from their missteps and become mutually better creators for it. The alternative I suppose is turning into a Tim Buckley or Fred Gallagher and either stagnating or somehow de-volving over time. Inevitably, mock thread people wind up exaggerating the thing they're mocking to Great Adversary levels when it's usually just "fairly bad" or "mediocre". SFP was pretty good for a long time, and then had some lukewarm later chapters. That's boring to spend dozens of pages talking about though, so it becomes this hyper-exaggerated "this comic is the worst thing ever, and the people making it are morally compromised in ways I can interpret through the text". Mulligan and Ostertag are both immensely talented creators who've told consistently great stories in their other work. I'm happy to see them both succeeding these days.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 16:18
|
|
|
nine-gear crow posted:It's possibly a byproduct of today's internet culture. Folks seem to make the assumption that if people make bad things, then they are also bad people when actually they could be really cool and good and just kinda suck and writing and drawn, ect. I know it's bias I've fallen into once or twice myself and have gone "Oh, well, I'm actually happy to be wrong in this case." So it definitely happens. I think this happens because it is legitimately safer to do this a lot of the time on today’s internet.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 16:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 06:00 |
|
|
Mr Phillby posted:Yeah SFP was pretty bad but SA mockthread culture deffo amplified it to a ludicrous degree. After a certain point every sane legit criticism was exhausted so you got people posting detailed breakdowns of how a teacup is inconsistently sized on one page with annotated diagrams and a sneering "what kind of lovely artist make this huge a mistake?!?" Attitude. It reminds me of one of the ancient Bad Webcomics threads, where much was made of a single line of dialogue in some comic or other being completely unrealistic and no human being would ever speak like this, etc. The line in question was: "Wait here whilst I go and get some ice creams". People wrote paragraphs-long screeds on how this single line revealed the artist's utter lack of comprehension of human behaviour, how to write good dialogue, how to create sequential art, etc. Was it kind of a clunky line? Sure, yeah. But the reaction was way beyond that level. People were so fired up on finding things to hate about a comic they'd decided was a fair target that things this innocuous became the subject of disproportionate ire.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2020 16:52
|
|