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I really don’t understand anyone calling the Jadis sequence underwhelming; it’s a direct expression of the key theme of the comic, which is amor fati. Maya’s training arc is very much a restatement of that theme in a different key and, I think, suffers mostly from the fact that the comic has done such a clear job building up to it that there’s not a lot to say (and also it was conceived early on in the comic but wasn’t dropped in until the end). So much of the comic has been written with this in mind that it has become a touch redundant. It’s also not going to matter much that it’s a bit redundant reading this as a book, because it’s basically just the intro and setting up the showdown. Maya is ultimately not the primary mentor figure of the story.
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Jul 29, 2023 15:04
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Joe Slowboat posted:I really don’t understand anyone calling the Jadis sequence underwhelming; it’s a direct expression of the key theme of the comic, which is amor fati. The primary reason I find it underwhelming is that Alison manages to skate through the hazard of The Demiurge Who Infallibly Knows What Will Happen To You without ever actually finding out what is going to happen to her, which is a very easy-mode way of dealing with the notion that the future can't be changed. In a broader sense I just feel like our protagonist is arriving at some fairly basic "Philosophy 101" levels of enlightenment and is being hailed by the narrative as the super-Buddha for figuring out things a lot of her co-workers at the coffee shop probably already knew. (I don't actually think free will is a coherent concept, such that "free will exists" and "free will does not exist" are both nonsensical statements, so whenever people get into arguments about this topic there's nothing I can do but check out and start filing my nails.)
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Jul 29, 2023 15:11
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I don’t think the comic ends up being about whether “free will” exists or not, it’s about whether it’s worth doing anything. Just, period. Jadis thinks it’s not, and she has a series of powerful statements about how futile doing poo poo is: suffering is the inevitable fruit of action, your decisions are merely predetermined material actions, and death is the inevitable end of everyone. The question is how one responds to that utterly unquestionable statement, which ties into K6BD being fundamentally derived from putting Warlock Nietzsche in a Heavy Metal Buddhism universe. Allison’s reaction to being told she’ll die at age… was it 35? Was to take up chain-smoking. The comic does basically state “Jadis is materially correct about the nature of reality” (in this setting) and also “Allison is correct about how to relate to that, Jadis is not.”
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Jul 29, 2023 15:30
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Ramie posted:and hell, maybe there's an argument to be made that having all your mega-powerful goddesses have sexual assault as backstory is boring, if not outright Bad as much as i hate discussing other comics in this thread, i just need to address this one. there was a lot of people coming out of the woodwork being mad about this, but as a victim myself, i find it extremely compelling. an impossibly powerful warrior, subjugating themselves to a person they could easily destroy, because they have something that they want. it's a completely different framing from most typical stories of sexual assault. i was honestly so upset to see people saying things like "this ruins her character" or that it somehow makes her weak. things like this happen, even to the powerful. to pretend like you can become strong enough to rise above it all is the antithesis of this comic. e: also to call that "her backstory" when it's only a small portion of it, really disheartening. she is still a whole entire person.
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Jul 29, 2023 15:34
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Oh my god did I actually spark a discussion about why KSBD is bad Gonna go into the shame corner now
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Jul 29, 2023 15:39
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Rotten Red Rod posted:Oh my god did I actually spark a discussion about why KSBD is good
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Jul 29, 2023 15:43
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i think you can make arguments about k6bd's quality but it's emotional core is still holding extremely strong to me
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Jul 29, 2023 15:49
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Niavmai posted:as much as i hate discussing other comics in this thread, i just need to address this one. there was a lot of people coming out of the woodwork being mad about this, but as a victim myself, i find it extremely compelling. an impossibly powerful warrior, subjugating themselves to a person they could easily destroy, because they have something that they want. it's a completely different framing from most typical stories of sexual assault. i was honestly so upset to see people saying things like "this ruins her character" or that it somehow makes her weak. things like this happen, even to the powerful. to pretend like you can become strong enough to rise above it all is the antithesis of this comic. abaddon probably should have made that update part of a two-pager so that people didn't dwell on it so much but between this line of conversation and the constant talk of "fridging" earlier it's aggravating to me how much most people's reading comprehension seems limited to "i have seen a Trope that i Dislike." the crap with lana is bad on its own merits, make no mistake, but the stupid jargon grates Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Jul 29, 2023 |
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Jul 29, 2023 16:17
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k6bd seems to have had trouble deciding whether or not it wants to have an overarching A-plot over the years say what you will about GKC, it had momentum for more than a decade, and I would say now still that its current flaws lie more in execution than concept I daresay this comparison has been drawn before but k6bd's evolution as a webcomic reminds me most of the La Brea tarpit of the Girl Genius Castle Heterodyne arc: the writer has so much fun adding flourishes to plot originally sketched for one book - expanding unexpectedly popular side characters, adding more witty character interactions, more climactic scenes - that it drags on, and on, and on until they have to hit the reset button just so that the plot recovers from its stall. And along the way the whole "merry gang has adventures" element just gets ... lost? so that the adventures that characters call back to having don't even get to have any on-screen time
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Jul 29, 2023 17:56
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ronya posted:k6bd seems to have had trouble deciding whether or not it wants to have an overarching A-plot over the years I...don't think this criticism applies to KSBD at all? The A-plot has been very clear since the first book.
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Jul 29, 2023 18:11
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yeah i have literally never seen the girl genius comparison being made and there was never any indication that the story was meant to be only one book long, only that it was expanded to a fifth. maya's backstory was planned almost a decade ago the overall rhythm of the narrative has also been very clear, it's never had the impression of being usurped by the sort of attention-deficit tangents that gobbled up other story webcomics
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Jul 29, 2023 18:14
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the idea that GCK is more tightly plotted than K6BD is, at this moment in time, an extremely baffling one to me
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Jul 29, 2023 18:24
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These are some really bad takes and I'm so sorry for bringing it up
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Jul 29, 2023 18:31
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last few pages of this thread, more compelling than the last few pages of GKC, am I right? eh?
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Jul 29, 2023 18:59
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Ramie posted:last few pages of this thread, more compelling than the last few pages of GKC, am I right? eh? Yes but I think it’s because my brain is broken, as well as the Jerrek Conclusion being really drat bland.
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Jul 29, 2023 19:08
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Kill Six Billion Demons is trying to address a frankly pretty difficult dilemma of "how do you break the wheel" of the story? It's a hero's journey pulling on a lot of assorted mythologies of hyper-violent champions rolling in and supplanting the status quo through violence, and how that inevitably propels the world forward into more violence and doom. I'm going to throw a few more live grenades into the thread by bringing up how this is a similar issue Strong Female Protagonist raises: how do you find a new path forward without resorting to violence to get your way and "solve" every problem? It's something that clearly stymied SFP, and that whole story caved in under that structural failure. The answer to an issue like this requires a radical revision to the arrangement of society, and massive shift in ideological and ethical frameworks, that I think it's hard for us as people largely locked into Western/American/capitalist preconceptions to picture, moreover make real. It's also hard to think of a satisfying answer that's easy to integrate into a martial arts action story. Gunnerkrigg has always had a much smaller scale, but there's still some parallels there. The rigidity of the Court and what it's willing to accept in a "stable society" is leading them to defecting to a new reality, where they think they can escape magic. I'd say there's a clearer avenue forward because Annie has always been a character that could resolve problems with compassion and talking through things. Kat has similarly solved every issue with a combination of stubbornness and determination (though she has a similar blind spot as the rest of the Court about the nature of magic and its relationship to humans.) The big floating dilemma right now is whether or not Annie will actually resort to violence for once. Gunnerkrigg's breakdown to me is that I don't feel like it's properly shifted the tone as visible dangers have appeared and stakes have been raised. Those weren't present in most of the story. The Court and Forest were background tensions, with unclear goals. You can have a story structured around a lot of vignettes that sometimes thread together and sometime wind up being one-off digressions then. When some big menacing, mysterious plan is revealed like the Court's Star Ocean project, or when Loup is created and immediately starts trying to obliterate the Court, those kinds of things should cause such major shifts in the priorities of the protagonists. They can't remain aloof weirdos! Or well they can, but then why even bother having a story?
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Jul 29, 2023 19:42
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Nuns with Guns posted:Kill Six Billion Demons is trying to address a frankly pretty difficult dilemma of "how do you break the wheel" of the story? It's a hero's journey pulling on a lot of assorted mythologies of hyper-violent champions rolling in and supplanting the status quo through violence, and how that inevitably propels the world forward into more violence and doom. Ironically I suspect K6BD is going to end up in an MCU end point textually where the text will never endorse anyone with a plan to make things better, only giving accolades to trying to prevent things from getting worse, in Allison’s explicit retreat from the notion of having any kind of thesis whatsoever.
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Jul 29, 2023 19:51
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Captain Oblivious posted:Ironically I suspect K6BD is going to end up in an MCU end point textually where the text will never endorse anyone with a plan to make things better, only giving accolades to trying to prevent things from getting worse, in Allison’s explicit retreat from the notion of having any kind of thesis whatsoever. I'd be disappointed if it did that. I'm hoping it wouldn't though? Like when idiots were flipping out about how enthusiastically communist they thought LANCER was, Abbadon and the other creatives on that were like "Yes. Now, go away." I don't see why they he'd back off from committing to an ideology now.
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Jul 29, 2023 19:57
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Nuns with Guns posted:I'd be disappointed if it did that. I'm hoping it wouldn't though? Like when idiots were flipping out about how enthusiastically communist they thought LANCER was, Abbadon and the other creatives on that were like "Yes. Now, go away." I don't see why they he'd back off from committing to an ideology now. Well. That’s more of a symptom of the break up of the original core team. Lancer IS enthusiastically communist because Miguel wrote it. Now, mind you, I’m not coming at this from a standpoint of “truly Lancer would be perfect if only Miguel kept on” I think he kinda sucks rear end at writing a TTRPG book and what he actually wants is to write a book book. But basically 100% of the socialism in Lancer is Miguel. Tom is way more mild politically, which he has said outright on Pilot.NET. And Miguel bailed on Lancer ages ago. Arguably so did Tom, but he was stuck with it.
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Jul 29, 2023 20:01
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Captain Oblivious posted:Ironically I suspect K6BD is going to end up in an MCU end point textually where the text will never endorse anyone with a plan to make things better, only giving accolades to trying to prevent things from getting worse, in Allison’s explicit retreat from the notion of having any kind of thesis whatsoever. I sincerely don't know how you get that at all given all the themes and messages of the comic and supplemental materials, along with Abbadon's own politics in his other works like Lancer or that he talks about.
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Jul 29, 2023 20:02
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Captain Oblivious posted:Ironically I suspect K6BD is going to end up in an MCU end point textually where the text will never endorse anyone with a plan to make things better, only giving accolades to trying to prevent things from getting worse, in Allison’s explicit retreat from the notion of having any kind of thesis whatsoever. I think that’s kind of the opposite of what the comic has explicitly stated in Allison’s decision not to have a thesis. Solomon David said “you need an answer that solves everything forever or I won’t let you change anything” and the comic seems to have pretty resolutely said “try something new, anything, change things.” It’s responding to the inevitability of violence with “ok sure but there’s things that need to be done now, and I’ll do them, and I won’t expect to have all the answers.” It’s a direct rebuke to the idea that it’s better to not change things than change them for the worse; it’s also explicit that an unjust peace can be worse than a war. It’s aimed against the idea that anything, whether the liberal world order or a hypothetical theoretically-perfect communism, can last forever, and so therefore justifying your actions with ‘but this can just be stable like this for the rest of time’ is fundamentally foolish. If I were to compare it to GCK… there really isn’t a comparison they’re doing totally different things. But GKC has a real issue with massive status quo changes that fail to really feel like they’ve changed anything, something I don’t think can be said of K6BD. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Jul 29, 2023 |
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Jul 29, 2023 20:08
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*rubbing my chin extremely hard* "Action for action's sake", right, Allison? Now where I have heard this before... 
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Jul 29, 2023 20:09
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I think when your bugbear is the End of History, and also we’re talking about the rule of seven evil gods in a cosmic hyper-authoritarianism, simplistic illegalism looks a lot better.
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Jul 29, 2023 20:11
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To KSBD's immense credit, it has avoided having either a Loup or a Clevin enter the story.
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Jul 29, 2023 20:13
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Strong Female Protagonist really did flinch back from violence and action - it couldn’t talk itself out of “actually maybe things need to break to change this” but also couldn’t get over imagining that as if the protagonist would constantly be in control. So it flinched and went “Clevin, he’s a good model, everyone does their part and nothing major has to change and we don’t need to risk our ideology being wrong or making some kind of mistake.” Allison’s trying to improve the world in a flailing, sometimes stupid way and the comic does have opinions on the virtues of that kind of fool (and their failings), but comparing her to SFP Alison and it’s like night and day.
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Jul 29, 2023 20:17
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sfp also didn't have a coherent ideology to draw from, it anchored itself in the dominant (and strictly american) liberal political mores of the time and then the 2016 election cut its feet out from under it
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Jul 29, 2023 20:19
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maybe Gunnerkrigg's problems are a consequence of Brexit
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Jul 29, 2023 20:22
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Oxxidation posted:sfp also didn't have a coherent ideology to draw from, it anchored itself in the dominant (and strictly american) liberal political mores of the time and then the 2016 election cut its feet out from under it Oh yeah big time, it had already been flirting with a sort of liberal meritocratic authoritarianism and then got really uncomfortable with that because of 2016; I do think it ended up ‘coherent’ (in a sense) but also pretty infantile.
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Jul 29, 2023 20:22
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YaketySass posted:maybe Gunnerkrigg's problems are a consequence of Brexit We have seen the England of the interstitial chapters get more and more empty and destroyed
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Jul 29, 2023 20:23
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To double down on my searingly bad opinions: one can distinguish the tragedy of Hitball from the stagnation of Castle Heterodyne thusly - with Hitball a webcomic introduces more balls to juggle in the air than can plausibly pay off before the reader runs out of patience, whereas with Castle Heterodyne the writer instead cashes in plot coupons from earlier worldbuilding so that the current arc can continue for another few more scenes. In the former the reader is overwhelmed with new characters and motivations that they struggle to care about. In the latter the reader is instead rewarded with payoffs (if somewhat less developed than one might have hoped) but then the narrative tension ticks steadily down as each victory is only cursorily won before being swamped by the next. The euphoria cannot last. And thus King of Swords/Breaker of Infinities, where everything from the title-drop prophecy to Zoss's gambit is revealed, all the interlocking rivalries of the gods play out, White Chain finally obtains her epiphany and internal and external transformation - and the stakes are raised over and over again until it encompasses the fate of the entire universe. Then the stakes cannot be raised any higher, so it stops. (and then, weirdly, exactly the same card that Girl Genius played - seal the current hubbub in a bubble and then timeskip down to a smaller, more manageable cast. One can moan about e.g. post-kaboom K6BD explaining Meti's motivations again but this solves also a problem that GG faced, namely giving new readers an entry point rather than expecting them to pore through literal years of archives. But by the same token the narrative has also dispensed with the previous tensions. It's going to have to set up everything again.) My point is, both tendencies are gross issues with pacing. GKC has gross problems with execution - e.g., the Kat/time travel/tic-toc reveal is rather limply told, but the narrative still manages to sit on it for a decade before showing its hand at, I guess, roughly where a storyboard old enough to drink expected it to be.
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Jul 29, 2023 20:32
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Y'all should check out Unsounded.
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Jul 29, 2023 22:08
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ronya posted:My point is, both tendencies are gross issues with pacing. GKC has gross problems with execution - e.g., the Kat/time travel/tic-toc reveal is rather limply told, but the narrative still manages to sit on it for a decade before showing its hand at, I guess, roughly where a storyboard old enough to drink expected it to be. Not sure how to square this with the fact that Abaddon’s said he planned to tell Meti & Maya’s story around now since like, starting the comic. Similarly, Jadis was always planned for her role, and Solomon David for his, White Chain for hers - it seems like his problem is more wanting more and more giant splash pages. The two characters he’s said were never planned to be that important we’re Nyave and Princess, neither of whom have gotten major attention at all.
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Jul 29, 2023 22:34
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I thought the Jadis arc was cool and visually stunning. I'm glad other people are mad about Strong Female Protagonist. I remember petering out around the time that Alison's response to "here's a bunch of famous statistics about how women are structurally oppressed" was "let's build a rideshare app" or something. There were so many good loving scenes in that comic, like Cleaver and Feral, that it's incredible how badly they screwed up with toothless liberal garbage. Lmao that they also went back and said "ok Feral is fine now actually" at some point apparently.
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Jul 29, 2023 22:52
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Alison quasi-sexually assaulted a libertarian bro into magically making Feral’s healing factor many times stronger so she can fill her organ quota with only one day of vivisection in a week. It was dire.
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Jul 29, 2023 22:53
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Honestly I still feel like the main problem with Strong Female Protagonist was that things got to the point where using her powers to commit lots of targeted violence and then say "well, what are you gonna do about it; come at me, bro?" probably was the moral answer for someone in her position. The authors were not prepared for this, and floundered.
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Jul 29, 2023 22:57
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what's Gunnerkrigg Court's answer to the problem of power
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Jul 29, 2023 22:58
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YaketySass posted:what's Gunnerkrigg Court's answer to the problem of power Power is either weirdly toothless faceless functionaries or actually totally reasonable and you should recognize that it’s trying its best, alright?
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Jul 29, 2023 23:04
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Joe Slowboat posted:Alison quasi-sexually assaulted a libertarian bro into magically making Feral’s healing factor many times stronger so she can fill her organ quota with only one day of vivisection in a week.  what the gently caress dudeYaketySass posted:what's Gunnerkrigg Court's answer to the problem of power
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Jul 29, 2023 23:14
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Joe Slowboat posted:Alison quasi-sexually assaulted a libertarian bro into magically making Feral’s healing factor many times stronger so she can fill her organ quota with only one day of vivisection in a week. dont forget how she went to her ethics professor and confessed what she did and her guilt about it and he told her "actually you did the morally correct act" oh and how the author had no idea about the incredibly blatant rape overtones of the scene and got really mad when fans pointed it out in a complimentary fashion
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Jul 29, 2023 23:21
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A big flaming stink posted:dont forget how she went to her ethics professor and confessed what she did and her guilt about it and he told her "actually you did the morally correct act" this took like twenty pages
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Jul 29, 2023 23:23
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