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 Strong Female Protagonist is a web comic. It is written by Brennan Lee Mulligan, drawn by Molly Ostertag, and web-curated by Griffin Johnston. It updates regularly Tuesday and Friday. It's primarily about superheroes.  Except, actually, the main character has decided that being a superhero is kind of dumb, because she's not really doing that much good for the world by just punching people.  Unfortunately, she feels like that's all she's really good at.  She's trying hard to change the world, but even if you're invincible and have super strength, changing the world isn't easy. Strong Female Protagonist is about someone whose only tool is brute force trying to find another way to make things better, while simultaneously trying to have some kind of semi-normal life.  Some dudes still get punched, though, don't worry about that.  Strong Female Protagonist is, really, a story about what it means to be a hero, what it means to try to change the world, and what it means to try to live in the world with other people, even when you don't fit in. If you want to give it a try, you should probably start at the beginning. idonotlikepeas fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 13, 2014 20:28
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Operant posted:The protagonist in this comic and my comic have the same name and it really confused me in the webcomics thread. Now no longer! If there's a super-awkward sex scene in SFP you should totally sue. thatbastardken posted:This is at least twice the comic has made me worry that Alison is going to go off the deep end though. Viscerally afraid that I'm going to open the page and she'll be sitting on a rooftop covered in blood. Yeah, keep in mind that Alison is pretty terrifying. I mean, this is someone who everyone on that roof has probably seen movies of tearing giant robots to pieces with her bare hands. She could kill everyone there with basically zero effort and it's not even clear what it would require to take her down. So when you see her waving your friend around in the air by his throat, your thought process is less likely to be "I bet he deserved that" and more likely to be "oh poo poo did she snap are we all going to die". I don't think anyone's shedding any tears for Bugsy McDaterape, but diplomacy might have helped out more with the PR problem.
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Jun 14, 2014 05:22
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Based on her fight with Cleaver, she almost certainly still needs to breathe, so you could probably use gas or something. Though it'd be tricky considering how fast she moves and the fact that she can exhale forcefully enough to literally drive a dude backward.
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Jun 14, 2014 13:09
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She definitely seemed to have a reaction to that cut. The alt text refers to it as a concussion, but blood loss might be involved as well. Hard to say. Either of those would suggest that her internal systems aren't completely invulnerable, just very, very tough. So someone might be able to use missiles or bombs on her; if nothing else, they might knock her out or otherwise immobilize her temporarily. The best bet for stopping her would probably be other superhumans, but her doctor mentions in an early page that even most other superhumans find her intimidating. In terms of one-on-one combat, there are probably only a handful of people that could have a chance of beating her. That said, I think if she went up against the entire U.S. military or something, things wouldn't go well for her. I doubt she could survive a direct hit with a nuke, although it's not likely she's going to run into that issue unless she really pisses off some state-level actor. On a completely unrelated note, the Kickstarter is just about done. It just passed the $50k mark, which means the books are getting a quality upgrade, so if you were thinking about putting in for it as a pre-order mechanism, this is probably a good time. E: Also, one of the Kickstarter stretch goals that was already hit will result in them adding commenting to their site. So if you prefer, you may offer up a prayer for their souls, instead. idonotlikepeas fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Jun 16, 2014 |
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Jun 16, 2014 15:26
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I liked the Feral thing because it's an obvious application of her power. In a standard superhero comic they would have said "transplants won't work with her biology, oh well", but the whole point of this comic is to talk about the hard choices. In today's page... Violet is actually not 100% wrong. I mean, we're obviously more on Alison's side here, and she's doing the right thing by getting the drunk girl home, but as we've seen from previous comics, Alison really does have a tendency towards knee-jerk violence that she's constantly trying to keep under wraps. I wonder what will happen next time they meet?
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Jun 17, 2014 14:27
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I think it's fair to say both of the following: 1. From a strategic point of view, Alison could have handled that better. She left the people at the party with a bunch of excuses they can make about her behavior and assaulted an innocent* civilian. She's diminishing her personal influence while simultaneously not addressing the global problem. Patrick would have solved this problem differently. 2. Alison was not thinking in a strategic way. She was thinking in a "NO WAY AM I GOING TO LET THIS GIRL GET DATERAPED WHEN I CAN STOP IT" and a "gently caress THIS GIGANTIC RAPING rear end in a top hat" way. Her actions were not to make a global point, but to save this one person, because that's often how superheroes behave. From this point of view, what she did was laudable, and it's probably a lot closer to the way most of us would behave in that situation if we had super-strength (and were not afraid to act). * In a purely legal sense. The courts cannot convict you of "I'm 99% sure he was going to try to rape that girl". The worst part of this kind of poo poo in real life is that people like Miles might genuinely not even believe he's a rapist; some people have the delusion that if the girl is not actually fighting back and hitting you, it can't be rape.
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Jun 18, 2014 12:46
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Pavlov posted:I guess I'll be honest, when I first saw Miles, I didn't notice anything off about him either. I thought Alison was storming off to respond to that one text. I mean, his face kind of looks less like a rapist's, and more like the author got lazy with his anatomy. It's kind of like it's just... melting off to the side there. If you cover up the face, they pretty much look like a normal drunk couple. I'm fairly sure this was deliberate. Despite the fact that Miles and his skeevy smile and the girl take up about a third of the panel, the focus is on Clevin and the secondary focus is the text message. Even the hover-text joke is about the text message and Clevin. I think surprising you with the next page is part of the point. Drunk people in the background! Totally normal party stuff! Except, wait, not quite. Phylodox posted:And why, by God, does this situation need to be "more complex"? We don't need more media perpetrating the myth that there's more than one side to rape. We pretty much have an entire culture dedicated to perpetrating that idea. I don't think the question of whether the dude was up to something is actually up for debate. The writer removed any ambiguity present there when he had the guy lie about whether the girl was okay and that they were on a date when he didn't know her name. The complexity in the situation is purely about what the best way was for Alison to deal with it. Brought To You By posted:I'm not defending rapists here or whatever definition of rape culture you might be using. But being perfectly honest, I'm tired of seeing every rape scenario in fiction demonize men and victimize women. I know for a fact that rape statistics are closer to 50/50 but every time I see it brought up in the news or popular fiction it's polarized to keep one group of people colored as perpetual aggressors. Is it too much to ask that every once in a while there is a situation where it isn't what it looks like? Well, they're closer to 50/50 insofar as it isn't exactly 0% of men being raped, but the vast majority of rapes are indeed male on female. Rape of males definitely does happen, but it's substantially less likely in the particular context shown in the comic. (And, sadly, the vast majority of men who are raped are ALSO raped by men.) In terms of ambiguity, we actually might have a more ambiguous situation with Jake from Kayleigh's rape - the writer and artist went out of their way to have him behave differently than the other three murdered frat boys and actually give him a name. We'll see what they're going to do with that, though. As for demonizing men, I think it's significant that Violet is the one who's mostly up in Alison's grill here. Her tolerance of Miles' behavior is part of the problem too. And the comic has already had a number of male characters who are perfectly okay and not rapists or aggressors in any way; it's not like we're falling into some weird reverse-Bechdel situation here.
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Jun 18, 2014 23:40
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Brought To You By posted:The flip side of this is that men are almost universally always guilty until proven innocent when it comes to sexual assault and rape cases. You can't deny that the media and fiction demonize males as the eternal rapist and it's sexist. False rape accusations are not as uncommon as you might think, and there is little to no legal action taken to address the people who do make them until they establish a pattern of being a repeat offender. Lives have been ruined because some people lie and it shows some of the flaws in our legal system when these cases are not properly investigated and victims testimonies are valued more than other forms of evidence. The highest estimates I've seen of false rape accusations are around 10%. Most are more in the 5-6% range, with lows around 2%. Given the social stigma that generally attaches to rape victims in most areas (including most parts of the U.S.), it's not too surprising that the rates are pretty low. You have to have some serious motivation to claim that you were raped, and the most likely motivation is that you actually were. Obviously we shouldn't be judging people in the real world guilty without a trial. But the fear of not being believed is one of the main reasons that a lot of rapes go unreported. We're not in a situation where the men are always judged guilty before the fact; on the contrary, in most cases heavy suspicion is almost always levelled at the woman reporting the assault. If anything, we need to spend more time as a culture encouraging women to report with the idea that they WILL be believed, although their stories will also be checked. I understand it can be frustrating to have your gender/ethnicity/class/age range/etc. singled out as the only perpetrators of a particular type of crime. But one thing we have to understand, as men, is that almost all rapes are in fact committed by men. (And I say this despite the fact that I have a friend who WAS sexually assaulted by a woman - pieces of anecdotal evidence aren't statistics.) It is essentially impossible to have a woman rape a man in a story without that BECOMING the entire story, just because of how rare it is. And that isn't really the story the SFP team is working on right now.
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Jun 19, 2014 05:06
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Brought To You By posted:I'm not saying they are significant, I want people to realize that this does happen and it has consequences on multiple lives. I understand that this is a rare occurrence, but when it happens it needs to be addressed and not trivialized. OK. I think we can all agree on that. People are going to be lovely to each other, and we shouldn't support that as a culture no matter who they are or what type of shittiness it was. But you're basically arguing with nobody here; nobody has said "all accusations of rape are always 100% true". When people are saying that Miles is a rapey rapehead, he's not standing in for every male in the world; in fact, the whole last couple of pages have been about how good or relatively good people enable the actions of the minority of bad people through inaction. Where this started was you complaining that SFP was doing another "man tries to rape woman" storyline when you'd like something more ambiguous or even the reverse. The point many of us have been trying to make is that this is like complaining about them doing a school shooting storyline instead of a school bombing storyline. School bombings do happen, and are absolutely terrible when they do! But school shootings are a lot more common, so it's more likely a story that wants to reach a point about school violence is going to be about a shooting unless the people telling the story want to make a particular point about bombing. Now, if that story isn't to your taste, well, that's fine. But there's nothing objectively wrong with it.
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Jun 19, 2014 05:53
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All we know at this point is that the creative team singled him out for some reason and that he seemed less horrible than his companions. I'm sure we'll find out more about it as the story progresses.
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Jun 19, 2014 13:45
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The alt-text on that page points out that her laptop is falling apart; I've been wondering if her power is involved there. It'd make sense with her name - maybe she has some kind of decay-based powers?
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Jun 19, 2014 20:24
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That is an excellent observation. He's also probably been in and out of prison, and when he's out he's mostly either cutting people up or in storage waiting to cut people up. Cleaver strikes me as the sort of dude you just kind of catapult into the middle of a bad situation to make it worse.Mercury Hat posted:It's implied he was at least on trial with his buddies meaning he probably did more than just film it. I don't know how it works in law, but if all he did was observe and send out video, wouldn't he have a separate trial? Actually, it depends. Related offenses can be tried at the same time even if they aren't the same crime. I was on a jury for a racketeering trial where a couple of people were being tried for arson, a couple of others for money laundering, etc. If Jake "only" filmed the action he might have been up on a conspiracy charge with the rest of them. (All you have to do for a conspiracy charge is reach an agreement with one or more other people to break the law in the future.) That'd be enough to put them all in the same trial. It's also possible he's just as guilty as everyone else, but has the good sense to realize he's a shithole after the fact. Tollymain posted:This isn't even a derail, this thread is going to be like this constantly This is actually true. The comic is pretty much going to keep being about heavy social issues, so as long as we're discussing it, our opinions about those issues will come out from time to time. It'd be nice if we could keep it at least kind of civil, though.
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Jun 20, 2014 00:35
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Yeah, anybody with even the slightest interest in how criminal law works should read that comic.
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Jun 20, 2014 00:57
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Nah. From the alt-text for this page: Mmm! Bubble tea! Alison doesn't drink alcohol, for public safety reasons.
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Jun 20, 2014 14:07
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Her anomaly is referred to as "autonomic somadynamism". Unpacking that: autonomic just means she doesn't have to consciously command it to happen. The root "soma-" refers to the body as a complete and distinct unit, and the "dyna" fragment means "power". The word suggest that her body has the ability to automatically make itself powerful, which ties in with the doctor's statement that it's basically under her control. Which does raise another interesting question: what exactly are the limitations on this power? The standard laws of physics already don't apply here. Is there a physical limitation at all, or is that under her control too? All that being said, we know she bleeds if you can overpower her body's systems. There's no way of knowing based on the information we have, but I'm guessing alcohol would work fine on her, and given that they've now brought it up twice we might be looking at a demonstration of that at some point in the future.
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Jun 21, 2014 04:02
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So, do we think Pintsize is being serious at this point? I was pretty sold on the previous text message, but unironically saying "life is despair" is pretty hardcore.
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Jun 26, 2014 22:30
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Especially in the setup they have him in now. Do they just, like, turn off some of the lasers? Bring in a bunch of people in special suits? Is a forklift involved?
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Jun 27, 2014 00:54
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Hmm. Are we setting up another invisible-person-throat-slitting here? That particular person/thing/whatever was on a bus to New York, but maybe there was a stopover? Or maybe this is in the past? Or maybe it's related in some other way, I guess?
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Jun 27, 2014 14:24
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The only known superheroes were in utero when the mysterious storms covered the world. It has not yet been revealed whether their specific anomalies or biodynamism in general can be passed on to their offspring.
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Jun 27, 2014 22:36
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Pavlov posted:Wait, even if the old guy was a dick, why would she kill him for being the judge at the trial? If it was a real criminal trial, the judge didn't actually decide if the boys were innocent or not, the jury did. The judge would have a say in sentencing, but that's only if they were found guilty to begin with. Otherwise the old dude probably just spent the whole trial looking stern and occasionally saying "sustained" and "overruled". He might have ruled some evidence inadmissable that the IVS disagreed with. Or it could be that the IVS just has hosed-up aim. Maybe the defense attorney is next.
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Jul 1, 2014 14:51
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It'll be a while before we find out the details, too, since the strip is on hiatus until the 11th so the creators can fulfill Kickstarter stuff.
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Jul 1, 2014 22:28
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I think it's fair to say that it's likely (but not certain) that there is some kind of anti-Alison contingency plan. That doesn't mean they've got Alison-killing poison or a team of assassins on tap or anything wacky like that, it just means in some filing cabinet in the DoD there's probably a folder with some report in it that says "here's what we do if Alison goes nuts and starts wrecking things", and most likely the plan is going to involve containment or imprisonment as a first option. This is just something governments do when there's a huge potential threat out there. It's like having a backup plan for what to do if France or Pakistan loses its collective poo poo and starts firing nuclear missiles at us or something.
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Jul 2, 2014 16:30
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I think we can accept that "absolutely certain" was a bit of hyperbole. Come on, let's practice some of that approaching-each-other-with-kindness stuff the comic is about. As for whether they managed to come up with a plan, we did have a bit of discussion on that a few pages back. Even assuming no other superheroes are involved, there are things like dropping bombs on her head that might work - right now, we don't know what the limits of her invulnerability are. We know that there are some, because Cleaver managed to hurt her, but we don't know how much conventional force would have to be generated to overwhelm them. (Is a nuclear weapon going to work? Is she immune to radiation if the force somehow doesn't do it?) That said, it's most likely that the government doesn't know what her limits are either, so if they do have a violence contingency plan, it might actually be something that wouldn't work if they tried it.
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Jul 2, 2014 17:19
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Patrick Spens posted:I can't remember, why are we assuming that Alison needs to breath/is vulnerable to tear gas? Can't speak for anyone else, but the page where Alison takes out Cleaver has a hover-text which says "Invincible or not, you still gotta breathe." Obviously it's referring to Cleaver here, but Alison has been described as having the same Tier-1 invulnerability that Cleaver has. That is definitely not certain evidence, but it's enough to suggest to me that she probably has to breathe. Hollismason posted:I really like this comic, but seriously gently caress this story line. It's like a 15 year old girl who just discovered feminism is writing it right now. Seriously, I even enjoyed the party scene but at this point it's like what issue is not being addressed. It's not that it even makes me uncomfortable just kind of feel that these are issues that could be spread out and dealt with separately. I can see what you're saying here. I'm still enjoying it, but they could have spread things out a bit more. It's possible that it'll tie back together into a single whole by the end, though; guess we'll have to see.
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Jul 2, 2014 17:47
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I feel like we're still setting up the dominoes in this chapter. The meat of things is going to be the actual conflict between Alison and the IVS (not necessarily the physical conflict, but once she realizes they're in opposition). If this issue's the same length as 3, we're only a third of the way through it, so there may still be time to flesh that out.
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Jul 3, 2014 03:53
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It's also likely a comment on the fact that the superhero, in comics, is a distinctly American phenomenon. You see them in other countries, for sure, but the industry is smaller and even in those cases they show heavy influence from American comics. Even actual British folks who make amazing comics, like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison write them for American houses. I'm not saying that people in France don't know who Superman is... but they know he's an American, too. The fact that we want heroes that dress in skintight spandex and punch down buildings... I don't know what that says about our culture, but there you are.
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Jul 11, 2014 03:19
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Yeah, I think that's where they're going with this. If you have the IVS kill people who are clearly not evil, or seem unlikely to be evil, it's a different set of moral problems. You're making a comment on the haphazard nature of vigilantism (and that may yet happen). In this case, the issue at hand is not "should you kill people you think are guilty, some of whom are not", but "should you kill people who are guilty even if the law disagrees". It narrows the questions a bit - one, whether killing people as a punishment is acceptable, two, whether doing so outside the law is acceptable, and three, if the death penalty is acceptable under what circumstances it may be applied. (i.e. Is it okay to have the death penalty for rape?) If you have the IVS killing random innocent people, it gives you an easy out there: of COURSE what she's doing is wrong, duh. If they're actually guilty you have to think about it a bit. Also, we haven't discussed the most recent comic at all. Are the Guardians shutting down? Is Brad just quitting or fired? Is there even a difference since there were only three people in the group at this point anyway?
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Jul 13, 2014 15:59
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Brad is literally loading his belongings into the back of a car here, which is what I was looking at. But yeah, the major supervillains were all done for when Alison quit:  You'll notice Brad isn't wearing his supersuit anymore, either. He definitely wears it around the Gatehouse: 
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Jul 13, 2014 21:30
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Having it be Moonshadow would tie things together nicely in some ways; it's easy to present the IVS as a parallel for Alison's behavior if she literally used to be on the same super-team with her. That parallel has been established throughout this chapter, starting with the cover page: That would leave me a bit confused as to why the IVS said she was not a "who", though. And we've seen Moonshadow talk before and she didn't have the weird font. Could be an effect of talking with the powers on, though, I suppose. Either way, I definitely think we're heading for more talk about the nature of vigilantism and the appropriate use of force.
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Jul 16, 2014 14:34
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MikeJF posted:Has there been any speculation that the weird distortion that Kaylee visited granted her powers, and that she is IVS? I wondered about that, actually, but this page suggests otherwise:  Unless there's a time cut between panels 3 and 5, we see both of them doing different things at the same time.
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Jul 16, 2014 15:04
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Since this argument has now come up a few times, I actually engaged in a little bit of poop-touching and just flat out asked Brennan Lee Mulligan what he intended with that scene. He was kind enough to respond. To summarize his response using two quotes from it:quote:The appropriate use of force is one of the central, overarching themes of SFP in total, not just the current chapter, and it is definitely one of the main things Alison wrestles with, given her superpowers! quote:As much of a cop-out as it sounds like, I as a writer try and avoid persuasion or “intending” the reader to come to a given conclusion... Writing loses all credibility and meaningfulness when it becomes propaganda, EVEN propaganda for a good cause or a point of view I hold deeply.
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Jul 18, 2014 03:55
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It's too bad rape culture got in the way of poor Clevin's attempt to score a date with Alison. I do like the implication from his little speech that Alison saved the life of every single person in Atlanta.
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Jul 19, 2014 04:54
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Hector might also be rich on his own. Maybe he shrunk real small and designed powerful microcircuitry or something.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:17
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Moonshadow has been consistently represented as overweight in the past. In the present, she's shaped up - we first see her in the present working out. I'd guess this has something to do with Alison leaving. I like the parallel between her relationship with the Guardians and this sequence:  It's also interesting that the tier classification is at least partially political. It makes sense - the Guardians seem to be the major crime-fighting organization, when they were active, so classifying them all as tier one probably increases their value as a deterrent.
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Jul 22, 2014 12:47
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Bussamove posted:Cleaver is equally as resilient to injury as Alison and can actually hurt (and presumably kill) her when nothing else seems able to. I would say he would count as equal tier to her just for the second part alone. Although the comic does bring up a good point that any real classification system is going be pretty arbitrary when you comparing wildly different things like super powers. How do you quantify the value of "punches hard" versus "gets tiny" or "is literally a bat man" in any meaningful way? Based on the way Sonar is talking about it in this page, the tiers seem to be related purely to combat abilities. He's saying he shouldn't be tier one because any idiot with a gun can kill him. If it's pure combat ability, I'd bet the only tier ones we've seen are Alison and Cleaver. Feral might be, since her regeneration ability is clearly very powerful, but apart from that she's... maybe got some enhanced senses, maybe a bit of super strength? It doesn't feel like she's quite punching in the same weight class as the other two. Patrick is probably classified as tier one politically (or because he's got an army of killer robots), but his power is much more useful in non-combat situations. His best approach to a fight is going to be to notice the fight is coming way before anyone else and not be anywhere nearby when it happens. If it's about non-combat ability as well, yeah, it's kind of ridiculously wide open. It might be more about generalized threat; that's how you get Patrick as a tier one. All he has to do is take a casual stroll through Washington (which we actually see him doing) and suddenly he's the most dangerous man in the entire country just due to the secrets he's got in his head. The Lord of Hats posted:We're going to get something more along the lines of Alison realizing how she's kind of stomped all over his dream, which fits with the theme of this chapter, that there is very much a wrong way to do the right thing. I wasn't thinking about it like that, but you are absolutely right. Edit: Also, I really really love the color for the flashback here. idonotlikepeas fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 15:12
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It seems like the power goes beyond being invisible, too, since Brad apparently couldn't catch her sneaking up on him despite the fact that he pretty much has to have super-hearing with those ears.
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Jul 30, 2014 02:39
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Probably military contractors. I assume that dealing with a biodynamic is considered outside the scope of regular police activities unless someone like Badge is around. I doubt they're going to get her, though. We don't get out of the chapter without her confronting Alison in some way.
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Sep 2, 2014 14:11
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It might be some things that, mixed together, produce smoke. That might make her visible too.
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Sep 4, 2014 01:20
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I'm thinking brutal murder. Maybe there are real guns in that box to make it more challenging.
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Sep 12, 2014 13:41
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Sometimes the hover text gets added later on - there have been a bunch of pages that didn't have it when they went up. (Don't know if it's for Drama Reasons or if Brennan just hasn't come up with one yet.) Also, against my better judgment, I looked at the comment section. ...and it's actually okay. Pretty good, even. I don't understand. I don't understand how this can happen. I'm scared.
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Sep 12, 2014 14:02
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