quote:

im permabanned poster Tatsuya Ishida. i first started reading radfem lit when i was about 32. by 33 i got really obsessed with the concept of "feminism" and tried to channel it constantly, until my thought process got really bizarre and i would repeat things like "porn is rape" and "gender is facism" in my head for hours, and i would get really paranoid, start seeing things in the corners of my eyes etc, basically prodromal schizophrenia.

Captain Oblivious posted:

Loup who has the memories of Annie’s father figures is now developing tsundere anime boy crushes on her in the guise of a robot teenage boy.

Annie has repeatedly looked at the camera and said Tony’s abuse is excusable because social anxiety cannot be helped under any circumstances.

Mainly those two things. Hoo boy. It is a legit really bad comic.

Oh wait I forgot the elf teenagers talking like lower class english stereotypes who were about to sexually assault a naive robot girl, who needed a badass boy to rescue her from her own naïveté.

Cowcaster posted:

well i'd say that's complete horseshit but i admit i don't have a degree in armchair psychology from tumblr university

Rand Brittain posted:

Gunnerkrigg had a long and controversial arc where a bunch of characters began asking each other "should we do something about how Tony is an abusive parent and isn't doing anything to get help with the many, many issues that make him incapable of raising child?".

This arc ended with Antimony looking directly into the camera and saying "no, I love my father and therefore nobody needs to do anything about this situation", and that being pretty much the end of the matter.

Rand Brittain posted:

I feel like Siddell's take on Annie/Loup is basically:

1) Loup is not meaningfully older than Annie, even if he is a fusion of two beings who are.
2) Loup is not a father figure to Annie, even if he is a fusion of 1+ beings who are.
3) I'm not even sure why 1 or 2 would ever come up given the several thousand other, better reasons why Annie should not date Loup.

And I think you pretty much have to take that as a premise if you want to engage with the story as it's being written, rather than trying to twist it into "ugh, Annie is being pushed into dating her wolf-dad", because it seems pretty clear the author isn't writing it with that in mind.

Oxxidation posted:

no, it's just simple reading comprehension. this is not a misrepresentation:

the story debuted annie's dad as a guy who publicly humiliated her in front of her classmates, isolated her from her friends, and literally shut her into a featureless white room while divesting her of her hair and makeup. nearly his every appearance onward consisted of either justifying his behavior as the product of some tortured internal angst (which amounts to "he gets nervous around other people") or playing him for laughs, culminating in the above scene. people got hung up on this whole saga because for years the comic has been so relentlessly anodyne and meandering that it was pretty much the only regularly noteworthy aspect of it, at least until the latest chapter, in which a sexually naive robot girl flashes her tits at some elves until they go "eyyy your place or mine" and get chased off by a conveniently placed guy. and even that was just embarrassing and amateurish compared to the Tale of Tony

Cowcaster posted:

it's a YA comic. establishing that the protagonist has a hosed up little man of a dad, he's a hosed up little man of a dad because of a tragic backstory, and accepting that her dad is a hosed up little man that she can't fix or change is so boilerplate it comes on rubber stamps. not to mention the shonen-rear end anime nonsense of a bunch of bullies doing something lovely and getting chased off by someone they underestimated, there's probably a stupid tvtropes page for it. this is borderline supermechagodzilla psychoanalyzing a goofy movie to be about child molestation.

Cowcaster posted:

somehow i get the sense having an entire story arc revolving around annie's legal emancipation and estrangement from her father would not be a massive improvement to the already plodding pacing of the comic, despite it being the healthier realistic outcome, and i also get the feeling that the people who are already scrutinizing the comic in such a bizarre way wouldn't be satisfied with it anyway.

shirts and skins posted:

Can I just say that Al Columbia rules

Rand Brittain posted:

On the contrary, seeing Annie tell Tony to get out of her life, or possibly just have Donald tell him for her, was pretty much exactly what we wanted to see.

Cowcaster posted:

these sound like the takes of an absolute lunatic

Cowcaster posted:

well maybe the YA lesson here is "sometimes people keep around hosed up little mans even though they're hosed up little mans", then

edit: anyway, sorry for steamrolling the thread, i fatfingered this link trying to check up on kill six billion demons and just started flipping through it and the takes, they were simply too spicy

Nuns with Guns posted:

If we're going to have Gunnerkrigg discussion here I guess I'll try to give an earnest post and see if it can be managed without this whole "blowing past the other and firing into the hay bales in the distance" thing.

I'm going to spoiler Gunnerkrigg posting for the sake of people that don't want to see it or specifically don't want to see discussion of child abuse.

There's a difference in degrees of perceived wrong when it comes to Anthony and how readers react to him. Like sure, he can go on being a hosed up little man, but his hosed-upness isn't contained to just himself. I think to most readers who aren't really happy with how things resolved, he's an abusive parent. He's been emotionally neglectful in ways that have also hosed Annie up a lot. She was 12 in volume 1 of the comic, when he first abandoned her at the Court. She was like 13? 14? when he called her for supplies and nothing else. He used those supplies to enact a magic ritual that only didn't kill her because Zimmy cold clocked him through Annie's soul. He very suddenly reappeared six months or a year later, humiliated and isolated Annie, and upended her whole fragile little life she'd had to build for years without him.

Adults around Annie have all shrugged and gone "Well, he's just hosed up." He's gone "I'm so hosed up." Kat went "Well I guess he was hosed up to you and I used to be mad about that, but he's been cool with me so I'm over it." Annie's resigned herself to her dad being "hosed up." It's all been on his terms, accommodating his needs, he's making his just-now-16 daughter be the "adult" in the situation. And yeah, life is like that a lot. We say we'll cut ties with abusers, but they're also our family and we decide we can live with them on their terms so long as they don't drag us down with them too bad.

But if you're going to throw up "Well this is a YA story" well I think it gives kind of a lovely message to give young readers. The comic has over and over again said to Annie "Your dad is hosed up to you, no adults in your life will support you or intercede on your behalf, your friends won't have your back, resign yourself to your father who has never been there for you and love him as deeply as possible." Because I don't think most kids in even vaguely similar situations have parents whose abuses can be redeemed or pushed aside by having a deeply-buried kernel of love for their kids. Parents can be awful and lovely, but it certainly never feels like Annie is given any choice about whether or not he should be in her life. The only person who even floats something like that is Eglamore, who keeps getting dismissed in this regard as the bitter cuckold because Tony scooped his girlfriend out from under him.

I can't really address your broad "Whatever it's YA tropes!" thing more than that because that just sounds like a weak excuse and I don't think you could rattle off a case like Annie's that ends up with the same frustrating lack of catharsis. Even if you could, or whatever angle you were going for with Loup and shonen anime comparisons, saying that other media uses some dated or problematic conception of chivalry or daddy issues doesn't mean it's acceptable or appropriate.

Maybe the resolution as it stands would've been more tolerable if it wasn't the end to a constant background tension for 70% of the comic since it started in 2006? I am getting a strong feeling now that Gunnerkrigg's sedate pacing is kind of coming back to bite it in the rear end because I don't know if it's really possible to properly pay off what amounts to 20 years of buildup.


Pulling this last bit out so my post has some worthwhile contribution to the thread, but I've been back and forth on my feelings on Never Satisfied, but I certainly appreciate the writing of the numerous lovely parents and adults there a lot more. Maybe it's just how the generally disastrous nature of every person in the comic is wound more tightly to the narrative? How you can see the ways the adults loving up is impacting the kids, and how they push back against that in a big range of ways?

Cowcaster posted:

look i'm sorry to just dismiss you out of hand here because this is obviously very important to you but all i can think about is that guy who entered The Discourse a week or two ago because he was outraged that the children's movie Turning Red didn't once reference 9/11 or the traumatic impact it would've had on the children's lives. i'm running through all the possible comparisons in my mind to what this whole argument comes across as and all i can come up with is someone calling out calvin's parents from calvin and hobbes being neglectful, abusive monsters who deserve child services to come down on their asses for not paying attention to their struggling child and not just an archetypal plugin of "disinterested parent"

Cowcaster posted:

look i'm sorry to just dismiss you out of hand here because this is obviously very important to you but all i can think about is that guy who entered The Discourse a week or two ago because he was outraged that the children's movie Turning Red didn't once reference 9/11 or the traumatic impact it would've had on the children's lives. i'm running through all the possible comparisons in my mind to what this whole argument comes across as and all i can come up with is someone calling out calvin's parents from calvin and hobbes being neglectful, abusive monsters who deserve child services to come down on their asses for not paying attention to their struggling child and not just an archetypal plugin of "disinterested parent"

the holy poopacy posted:

that you think this is actually the reasonable levelheaded interpretation of GC

Cowcaster posted:

look i'm sorry to just dismiss you out of hand here because this is obviously very important to you but all i can think about is that guy who entered The Discourse a week or two ago because he was outraged that the children's movie Turning Red didn't once reference 9/11 or the traumatic impact it would've had on the children's lives. i'm running through all the possible comparisons in my mind to what this whole argument comes across as and all i can come up with is someone calling out calvin's parents from calvin and hobbes being neglectful, abusive monsters who deserve child services to come down on their asses for not paying attention to their struggling child and not just an archetypal plugin of "disinterested parent"

Nuns with Guns posted:

Okay, thanks for comparing me to the racist, COVID-19 conspiracy theorist guy, I guess. I was able to appreciate Turning Red the normal way when I saw it, but I guess we're just doing this.

the holy poopacy posted:

you, an idiot: child abuse is a complicated and delicate topic that a YA webcomic is poorly equipped to fully explore with the seriousness it deserves

me, a brain genius: anthony carver is basically calvin's dad

quote:

The sound of metal chains whipping against bare flesh hang heavy in the air, like a bird flying into a headwind. The room is damp and sparsely lit. SUPERMECHAGODZILLA’s scarred jowls are illuminated by a desk lamp laying sideways on the floor

SUPERMECHAGODZILA
Which reading is true? Which reading is true? WHICH READING IS TRUE!?

KOOS
[Spits mouthful of blood] The words are used specifically for their literal intention, the events are straightforward so as to be easily understood by an audience of children.

The beating begins again, with a furious vigour, until SUPERMECHAGODZILLA can barely stand. He rests one hand against a dirty wall, sweat marring his 1993 Nebraska Film Festival hypercolor t-shirt.

SUPERMECHAGODZILA
The opposite reading is true… The opposite reading is true. I’ve been to college.

KOOS straightens his posture, his pride and dignity unscathed by the days long assault of a fat, stupid man.

KOOS
Any perceived allusions to facism in A Goofy Movie are a wholesale invention of a misguided viewer.

SUPERMECHAGODZILLA adopts the look of a man who has been defeated. Wearily, he grabs a shotgun that had been resting in the corner, and cocks it loudly.

KOOS
Goofy simply wishes to bond with his son through fishing, a traditional pastime, as he had done with his own father. It is neither parable nor allegory. Neither dog was molested, the material does not support this.

Cowcaster posted:

i'm saying you're overanalyzing something on a level that completely doesn't match either the authorial intent nor the target audience and that's just the first example i thought of

Cowcaster posted:

Nuns with Guns posted:

I'll also say that at least since Annie stopped having a rhombus-shaped head, the characters in Gunnerkrigg have always been depicted in a more grounded, realistically human way than Calvin's cartoon parents, or Homer Simpson, or idk Batman. Annie and her dad and all the other talking things the comic are more on the level of, well hey how about Turning Red? Another story about parental abuse and generational trauma. It was very sad at points, but also very sweet and fun and even when Mei forgave her mom it felt better earned and I enjoyed it. Good movie.

Oxxidation posted:

if you read something other than YA fiction then maybe you'd have a better frame of reference than old web forum posters

Cowcaster posted:

i'm worn down, i promise i'll shut up now

Cowcaster posted:

to be completely honest i haven't actually seen turning red, just that one guy's loving galaxy brain take on it. i'll probably end up seeing it when i visit my family sometime!