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idonotlikepeas posted:I don't think they have to be inherently contradictory. Patrick having a complicated point of view on the nature of human life and being a giant manbaby aren't mutually exclusive, for instance. But it's hard to have them show up in the same scene. If we're supposed to consider Patrick's moral argument seriously, why put it in a conversation which shits on it and him? And if we're not, why devote so much time to exploring it? I think this sums up my feelings on it. I feel like I don't know the point of this chapter, and that I can't tell what the writer is trying to tell me, what viewpoint they're trying to support. I know it's supposed to be a complicated chapter with conflicting moral viewpoints, but when you give a character a multiple-page soapbox, like Patrick's long-winded rant or the doctor's rattling off statistics like a machine, I start to assume you agree with them and you're using the story as a vehicle to get me to agree with them too. That's what stories often do, intentionally or otherwise - they try to convince you of something, or make you think critically about something. One way or another, they have a point. When you abruptly turn around and contradict everything he spent pages and pages rambling about and render it effectively pointless, I feel like I'm getting narrative whiplash. Like, who am I supposed to be agreeing with or sympathizing with? Is it Allison or Patrick? Because I don't really agree with Patrick, but I'm having trouble seeing Allison as a sympathetic character and enjoying her touching family Skype call when she, with her literal super-strength, violently pitched a gift at someone obviously not in a good mental state and then blamed them for not getting out of the way, as if that somehow justified it. (Yes, I know he just spent a ton of time verbally provoking her. That doesn't make it any better, especially when what he said that prompted the violence was NOT meant to provoke her, more of an olive branch.) I have no idea what the writer is trying to convey or who they want me to be emotionally invested in, and it is making me care progressively less and less about what happens to the characters. It feels really incoherent. Irukandji Syndrome fucked around with this message at 08:50 on May 28, 2015 |
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May 28, 2015 08:48
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Zerilan posted:I don't know enough about Something Positive to get the comparison here. 4-panel comic with lovely art written by a dude who has a compulsion to have every single strip end with a sardonic punchline, no matter whose mouth it's coming out of. Like, you would have a character who was characterized as some ~super vapid ditzy slut who fucks everything up~ until the narrative suddenly decided "wait, she's actually kind of sympathetic" and had her reply to some strawman's insult with 3 of the 4 panels filled with paragraphs of uncharacteristically well-spoken Sick Burns with no word in edgewise. Or maybe the author decided he wanted to talk about something he hated, so he'd pick some random character and have them mouthpiece about it. I did genuinely like some of the characterization in the comic, but it was so full of predictable monologues, pretentious bullshit and sarcastic "nobody would actually talk like this in real life though" comments that I quit reading it years ago. It didn't help that around that time the author teased a relationship between the protagonist and another character for years with tons of scenes devoted to genuine emotional development between the two, only to turn around and say "gotcha! that was all a joke, I was trolling my fans lol" and abruptly shoehorn in a self-insert for his IRL girlfriend for the protagonist to date instead. tl;dr: Something Positive is a bad comic with a lot of unrealistic mic-drop monologues at every opportunity. Irukandji Syndrome fucked around with this message at 01:22 on May 30, 2015 |
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May 30, 2015 01:18
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Rand Brittain posted:If I were going to criticize Something Positive, I'd probably go with "it's 90% incredibly mean-spirited humor spoken by awful, awful people, and 10% those awful people gradually dragging themselves out of the much to grow as human beings over the past ten years." Yeah, that too. It's been so long that I've forgotten how bad some of it was, but I do remember some particularly vile 'ironic' racism with them theming a porno around Native Americans.
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May 30, 2015 01:41
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mr. stefan posted:It occurs to me that this may be leading up to Alison finding Patrick dead because the US government is tapping her phone and this series of exchanges probably gave them reason to sit up and figure out who it is she just got a protected individual's address from before having her GPS signal jump several thousand feet into the air. That would be both interesting and make some sense, which means it isn't going to happen.
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Jun 1, 2015 05:26
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I'm guessing it's basically going to turn out that Iron Man Movie-style oo-rah interventions of warzones with superpowers do not really solve that much in real life (so to speak, because this is a comic) or get at the heart of the problem, so much as, you know, just kill some people and inflame the situation even worse, which in turn gets more innocent people killed as tensions rise and break than if you'd done nothing at all, as well as degrading political relations with the US because Furnace hails from there. Also possibly starting some pretty bad wildfires 
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Jun 2, 2015 11:46
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"They're going to buy all my patents, making all of my work completely pointless. All of them. ...Which is why I'm going to work twice as hard and completely forego sleep to the point of probably physically breaking down!  "What am I missing here? What motive does she have? "Money", maybe, but it sounds like she doesn't care (and judging by her fancy-dancy everything, she doesn't need money). I can understand wanting to continue to work on your projects regardless, but what is the rationale for working extra hard around the clock if she just said her work is going to amount to absolutely nothing in the long run 
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Oct 6, 2015 15:58
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Ashcans posted:Well, she's a super-genius, so maybe she is hoping that she can churn out enough insane patents that Templar will have to either start passing them over or making some of them before it runs out of money? That would certainly make more sense, but they're doing a lovely job of explaining that if so. Just like most of the things in this chapter!
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Oct 6, 2015 16:02
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so I stopped reading this comic around the smug mediocre professor presents smug mediocre philosophy dilemma bullshit last I remembered, alison was expressing vague romantic interest in the cute black robotics lady  Was this addressed literally ever again before she started batting for really boring white guys? How did we get from this to uh... *gestures to last 30 pages of thread* this?
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Aug 28, 2017 23:13
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Robotics lady turns out to be gay for Feral though Wait, that was Feral in the latest page and not just a girl who kinda looks like her? Okay I just backread a little. Let me get this straight: they undid one of the most horrifying and genuinely good plot points/fascinating ethical questions of the story because Alison strong-armed a guy into using his extremely specific and convenient superpower to make it all better?
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Aug 28, 2017 23:40
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Burkion posted:And it cannot be stressed, strong armed with heavy rape overtones. Yeah I literally do not understand the point of handling it this way when she apparently received no backlash for her actions aside from throwing up a little bit out of guilt? Has she shown any moral difficulty with it since? Like, after a chapter that did a great deal of flirting with the idea that it's okay to kill rapists + prior chapters discussing Alison's privilege and how both that and her powers make her untouchable, you'd think this isn't the kind of thing they'd leave unaddressed if we want to be sympathetic to our protagonist?
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Aug 29, 2017 02:59
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