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Personally, I'm frustrated because this whole conversation could have been so, so much better than it is - and the point it's arrived at is a decent one. Allison is trying to get external sanction - absolution, as the prof says. He's trying to make her see that no such sanction exists, that morality is constructed and the world cruel. So, Allison needs to decide how comfortable she is with forcing morality on the world, because it won't be moral on its own. Of course, this is poorly written because it's being used to give her sanction, actually, which is gross. If you're going to say 'human rights exist inasmuch as we fight for them, not in any other way' then turning around to say 'also, anything goes! Beat up that strawman some more for his special talents' is pretty weird. That entire argument could have taken two pages. One to say 'I'm not going to give you sanction' and one to say 'also there is no sanction' aaaaand we're done, and can move on to the interesting part (Allison's response to that). Because by the bones of the sainted Alan Moore, was that ever the most obnoxious example of the most facile argument in moral philosophy - an argument between a freshman-year philosopher's conception of consequentialism and deontology. You don't need the performance! Plus, like, no ground is broken, the entirety of Watchmen is about those two moral philosophies and how moral philosophy is degraded/transcended by power. Also, if this comic had been pitched as 'an incredibly powerful jerk goes through Moral Philosophy 101' I would have never started it. The only reason I'm reading this bit is because I've been engrossed in the trainwreck for too long, please, save me from myself
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Feb 4, 2017 20:04
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hostess with the Moltres posted:This whole "violence is good when it's used for a good reason and it's good to coerce people into doing what you want, regardless of it goes against their personal choices" bit is bugging me but I'm having difficulty putting why I don't like it into words. I mean it's worth noting, this is proactive forced-labor violence, justified via pretty spotty utilitarianism. This isn't the discourse around nazi-punching to keep them from advocating genocide (I'm for it) but instead the discourse around 'can I force a nazi to work at an understaffed soup kitchen' which is a really different question on a lot of levels. I'm pretty sure 'forced labor is the same as preventing them from doing harm!' is the kind of logic that leads pretty directly to, say, the modern prison-industrial complex's use of forced labor. Which is a topic so far beyond this comic it's not even funny. ...also, is anyone else annoyed by the use of real-world ethnic conflict or its implication to comfort an obnoxious super-powered white college student about her choices? She could be off saving people from ethnic cleansing and instead she's being comforted by a survivor of same. What grand perspective! Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 01:26
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Galvanik posted:I know this is stupid and overwrought, but come on. I don't think that's quite right. Finding the gun is framed as giving Guwara /responsibility/ to overpower others. It's not about impunity, or the way in which the capacity for violence twists one's thinking. It's about how hard it is to be powerful, to be able to hurt people. I just think it's important to keep an eye on how this comic frames doing evil things as an injury done to the doer by the world, for forcing them to be tyrannical.
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Mar 14, 2017 17:57
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quote:"enjoying contrast and letting go of culturally imprinted grudges: A beginner's guide to accepting traditional relationships." An actual comment made on this comic. I... I really hope that's some deep sarcasm. It has to be, right? Nobody could both read SFP unironically and also be that kind of smug about heterosexuality, right? (The answer is that SFP is all things to all people, if those things are poorly conceived social and political commentary) EDIT: My bad, turns out this particular commenter is just kind of incoherent and pretty openly sexist, so, that's odd I guess. Also, thank you to everyone spinning gold out of straw with these page edits.
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May 3, 2017 08:09
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Nuebot posted:It's not that odd though. Before this clevin thing started up like 90% of the topics were still about either Feral or Max and there were a lot of people genuinely arguing that the rich all deserved to be murdered and anyone who disagreed had to be rich and white and therefore was immediately a racist, sexist monster as well. That's why it's odd- this guy is expressing things like 'it's called strong female protagonist but her shirt doesn't show off her curves! How is that female' and 'feminism is just resentment of men' Not at all what I expect out of the commentariat there.
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May 4, 2017 03:10
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Falstaff posted:Probably just a troll. Yeah probably, they just also express great enjoyment of the comic and, I dunno, the actual comic is confused enough that I can see it happening.
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May 4, 2017 05:08
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It's especially unbelievable because there exist cases of people with particular unusual mutations being considered avatars of a deity in real life in India, and it's not like there's much friction with doctors explaining how that happens biologically? Like, of course there's a biological component to being an incarnation, why wouldn't there be? Especially given the way avatarana is treated in (much of the variants and tendencies of) Hinduism, it shouldn't be shocking that Ramesh here is biodynamic. Honestly the idea that the divine must not have any physical signature is a pretty modern Western tradition, one that isn't even universal in the West either. If I had to bullshit, I'd credit it to relatively recent understandings of transubstantiation - a doctrine that the metaphysical nature of a divine substance doesn't change the physical qualities at all. This is all to say, while I think it's plausible Hindu nationalists would coopt a perceived avatarana for their own politics, I'm flinching a little at the 'western science shall disprove your mysticism!' Plot line happening here. Especially since the last example of that which I'm aware of in India was a catholic statue purported to cry. But, hey, extremely white Americans writing India, this could be a lot worse. I hope the next page doesn't make this look too naive in retrospect.
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May 19, 2017 19:55
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super sweet best pal posted:I feel it's vaguely racist having India's superheroes look like Hindu gods for no reason other than shorthand identifiability in Feral's flashback. This is giving the author way too much credit, but I would accept that if biodynamism developed in part because of the individual's mindset and culture. Like... Allison was her particular self before she got power, and those powers absolutely reinforced that, including fitting her precisely into the cultural model of Superman, the comics character she absolutely thinks she is. So you could have other countries where the most mass-media popular heroes are, say, Vedic divinities - and the subconscious development of biodynamism tends towards classic iconography. It's a highly imperfect fix, but it could work! Plus we already know Allison's powers are basically psychic anyways, they should just confirm that it's all Fortean Wild Talents stuff. (this will never happen)
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May 20, 2017 18:21
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Nuebot posted:Oh those sensitive daisies of Hindustan, won't they just stop crying about people using their religion willy-nilly. Not to mention, it was a Mahadevi or Kali skin. Not Shiva. I'm going to be quite honest, as a white atheist whose interest in Hinduism is academic and philosophical - this kind of bullshit is why I feel guilty for that. The American dedication to turning everyone else's sacred symbols into hobbyist knick-knacks is something this comic ought to be aware of, but... nope.
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May 20, 2017 18:27
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Schwarzwald posted:When I first read American Gods, I thought the fact that all these various pagan and capitalist/consumerist spirits were present in America while Jesus himself was conspicuously absent was an actual point. It's expressly the case, at least in the version I read, that Jesus is doing so well in America that he can opt out of the whole war over belief. So he just gave it all a pass, while the desperate Old Gods and the soon-to-be-obsolete New Gods fight over scraps. It's not subtle, but at least it's an ethos.
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May 21, 2017 02:48
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Based on some quick reading, it's not impossible that a Sikh would be the leader of a HIndutva religious sect like this one... but it's unusual, politically. Also, given that he explicitly calls Ramesh 'God' when the Sikh conception of avatarana is not an embodiment of God but a servant (and this is just from quick research, again, not deep knowledge) it seems more likely he's just sort of generically turbaned. Still a better love story than Clevin.
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May 27, 2017 18:39
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The India story only being what we've seen makes perfect sense. It's shaped like a 'story' in the sense of being a glimpse of a setting with character conflict, a reveal, and a denouement. It's not a great story - I'd compare it to the intro fiction to a chapter in an RPG book. But it's more or less story-shaped, just bland and flat within that. They could have done more with four pages, but, you can't do a ton with four pages when you're also trying to worldbuild for an audience that just wants to know what India is like in SFP. Still undercooked, underresearched, and underengaging, but hey, I like (much of) the art. Not sure about the architecture within the temple, but, it's vague enough.
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May 29, 2017 04:41
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Fish Lady's conversation here reads like the rough storyboard version of dialogue from a timeshare ad or infomercial before the actual writers come in and make it sound less stiff.
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Jun 14, 2017 22:04
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I'd really like a textless version of the panel where a crying young woman lifts a tiny man into the air. It's just surreal enough to be uncomfortable. Ideally the next panel would be her raising him up above Pride Rock or something.
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Jun 16, 2017 22:51
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I will treasure you
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Jun 17, 2017 07:41
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ziggurat posted:everything near clevin slowly but surely morphs toward a state of perfect clevinity I think people have said this before but this entire comic would be, if not redeemed, then revitalized, if Clevin were some kind of reality-warping monstrosity. I'd greatly enjoy Randall Dowling from Planetary, but Clevin. Hell, have the slow decay in art detail be the result and sign of the Enclevining, and the rougher, sharper black and white style makes a comeback as Allison fights to free her mind and her world. Or, y'know, have ANYTHING happen. ANYTHING. I thought torturing libertarians was bad but literal freshman-level philosophy arguments about torturing libertarians was worse and now this, now THIS. Edit: Though, honestly, at this point if it became a middle-of-the-road comic rather than a hilarious trainwreck I'd probably stop reading in short order. Clevin is the opposite of love, and like love, Clevin is an attractive rather than repellent force. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Jun 21, 2017 |
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Jun 21, 2017 14:39
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Also these panel edits are the best panel edits, you are doing this thread a great service.
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Jun 21, 2017 21:15
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Typical Pubbie posted:No lol that would require work. This comic isn't about doing work. It's about self-gratification and edit: clevin This reminded me of something the comic is, I guess, supposed to be about : Being the one with all this power and privilege and not knowing how to change the world. Allison isn't just Superman But Ineffectual - she's always been smart, physically able, raised in a loving family, white, upper-middle-class. She finds it easy to do the right thing because she's never been in a situation where she personally would pay the price for doing so. She's a cipher of the author, and moreover, of all of us who are well-intentioned privileged types. The comic is to some degree a metaphor for how hard it can be to figure out how to actually use what you're given to make the world a better place, and how easy it is to not understand people who face harder challenges. Allison characterizes what in Sartre's Age of Reason is called a bourgeoisie spirit, a fundamentally middle-class and conventional personality even when more radical ideals are being held up. This isn't to say that middle class types can't be progressive or radical, but there are interesting tensions there, and Allison was someone trying to find a way to get beyond that (while having a massive savior complex over being a rich brilliant white person deigning to save the world, of course). She's so used to a certain kind of assumption of safety and power that it distorts her behavior. And, because everything comes back to Clevin, like some kind of vacuous mobius strip, Clevin is the opposite of this - and so he robs the narrative of purpose. Clevin is the 'woke boyfriend' who is safe, unchallenging, politically positive but not associated with any attempt to organize outside of his incredibly diverse band*. He is a child of privilege, or at least appears to be one, on par with Allison's background, but he has no anxiety to overcome. He's doing something politically useful (the fundraiser) without having to actually confront his own failings, he's a Nice Guy, he's the easy answer to the question of 'when life gives you so much, how do you give back?' You do it by being you, baby, by being slightly unconventional and doing some good on a personal level and being nice. That's it, that's the answer, and if you noticed that it fixes nothing but your conscience in the long run, way to go! He's the death of this comic. Because he offers a conventional, uninteresting, unchallenging definition of Doing The Most You Can. He's bourgeoisie as all hell and has no interest in confronting its own shallowness. He is an option to just... not bother really doing anything. And of course he appears alongside Project Valkyrie, aka Uber But For Feminism. Because Valkyrie is absolutely a project that does less than it wants to think, that does something useful but can't possibly be more than a drop in the bucket, and is hugely pleased with itself to do so. Clevin running a GoFundMe party for someone's mom is precisely the same: Small projects that do, legitimately, do good, but completely ignore the systemic issues that makes the small projects necessary a thousand times over. Of course, what's really weird about all this is that Clevin started off incredibly un-woke. Remember his now-murdered buddy, a literal rapist? Clevin remains the guy who was friends with a date rapist and never thought anything was wrong until it was on the news. He's not himself a predator, but he clearly won't recognize or oppose predators in his social circles. He was a figure of ineffective good intentions letting horrors slide. He still is. Clevin is the moral death of this comic; as long as he is at its center and not complicated in some way, it can only get worse. *also how telling is it that he has a multiethnic group of friends in his band but none of them get any spoken lines except him? I think it's very telling. Then again I don't want to meet anyone who willingly hangs out with Clevin.
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Jun 23, 2017 20:21
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Cat Mattress posted:Man that's better text analysis than the comic deserves. Consider it my way of justifying still reading the Clevin Comic, formerly known as Strong Female Protagonist. The text rapidly developing from being about the author's perception of his own weaknesses to being the absolute encapsulation of those selfsame weaknesses is much more interesting than the actual plot at this point. EDIT: At this point, isn't the whole 'invisible woman murders Clevin's buddy the date rapist and stabs Clevin' basically a Meet Cute for Clevin and Allison? Like, it put them on track to date, and hasn't come up again despite probably being the most horrifying moments of Clevin's life. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Jun 23, 2017 |
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Jun 23, 2017 21:44
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Skellybones posted:Allison and Clevin are useless bourgie fucks because the author writes what they know My position exactly. Except Allison was an examination of how someone develops social and radical consciousness out of a bourgie background, and how one overcomes both thinking they're better than the hoi polloi and the learned helplessness people are taught to feel about actually changing society. She had a thematic point! The comic had a purpose!The author seemed like he wanted to work out what he expects of himself and learn to be useful to humanity even without super strength, as one of the lucky middle class. Then came Clevin, the pictorial depiction of bourgeois myopia. He even wears the rose-colored heart-shaped glasses.
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Jun 24, 2017 02:17
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Hellbunny posted:"Killing is making a choice" I think the comic started off strong, in that Allison was someone who realized that punching supervillains hadn't solved world hunger or political disenfranchisement, and was coming to terms with that. She stood for your average millennial do-gooder, and her super-strength was intentionally not that relevant to the good she wanted to do. Shame about how it turned out, of course. If Allison really wanted to do good she'd go into politics, inspire mass action - she's Superman. In real life, Superman radio shows helped weaken the KKK immensely in the 50s. Mega Girl is more important than Allison; Allison can punch people, Mega Girl can inspire them. But the comic hates politics, it hates mass action; it can only conceive of solidarity on the individual level, of friendship and emotional support. The first scene with mass action, protesters are presented as 'using' Allison as a shield, and this is bad and wrong. In actual politics, white activists in the Civil Rights Movement would be strategically placed in marches to dissuade police violence (if only a little). Allison is affronted that other people might see her as someone to use, but wants to use everyone around her - literally, in the case of Magic Trolley Problem Libertarian. The comic is at its strongest when it's about Allison's failings, but it never figures out what action she should actually take to improve the world (except introducing Magical Trolley Problem Libertarian, as noted). There's also a deeply undemocratic strain, obviously, that's been present since early on. Allison's great conversation with Cleaver includes her practically quoting Nietzsche: "Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings, who think themselves good because they have crippled paws!" And she can empathize with him because of his super-strength; that similarity between them allows her to understand how his bad luck made him a miserable villain, and her good luck made her a hero. But does she try to change anything? No. She's realized something about herself, but that's it. It's all internal, it's all personal, it's never action. It's all bourgeois, it's all self-centered, it's all Clevin. (I have a lot of time on my hands this weekend and the dam finally burst, Clevin and Cleaver would literally annihilate like matter and antimatter if they touched)
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Jun 24, 2017 16:57
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...I can't say that's unfair, I just had some hope for better things. For example, the Feral chapter, and her conversation with Cleaver. I admit that I sort of assumed the author must be, like, at least a little bit of an activist, prior to things taking a hard turn into Clevinville. But maybe that was my own heart-shaped pink glasses. Maybe I'm the Clevin.
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Jun 24, 2017 20:32
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It really is amazing that this is something the comic is just letting Allison have. By all rights, her torturing a libertarian should not be responded to with a brief crisis of conscience followed by her getting a boyfriend (leaving aside whether dating Clevin is in fact a good thing outside of the author's mind) and then getting to give high-minded speeches about the Good Fight. What fight? She fought the good pinning-a-guy-to-the-floor-and-coercing-him. You're not an underdog when you do that. Unless, of course, the authors think Allison feeling bad was enough punishment already. But what's really grinding my gears is - if Allison really had this huge moral realization that power becomes morality and it is only the outcomes for her better world that matter... why is she NOT throwing all the libertarians into the sun? Why Valkyrie when she could be literally telling the government "I will throw every domestic abuser I find into the sun, so you better stop them before I do." If she's going to be copying the results-oriented Invisible Slasher, she should just go for it.
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Jul 1, 2017 00:11
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And Then Nothing Happened Again Forever
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Jul 4, 2017 15:57
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Here's a question: What purpose does this all serve? What narrative element is being set up or prepared? This is some kind of groundwork, or at least, it should be - everything's going well and it's not really an earned victory or even a denouement after a big event. It has nothing to do with the drama of the last major arc (Libertarian torture magic) unless it's being set up for a horrible fall. (Even then it's too much set-up, this comic has terrible pacing these days.) So, will they have the guts to destroy what they just patted themselves and every character on the head about for a whole eleven pages?
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Jul 4, 2017 19:24
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Zerilan posted:Starting to think they have literally no idea how to actually create a new conflict at this point and are trying to stall for as long as possible. But why would they need a new conflict. Just have someone reveal what Allison did. Her old teammates would turn on her in interesting ways, Clevin would go into shock, Feral might be really conflicted that Allison tainted her one truly good act, and her academic advisor would probably be all for it. As much as I hate the libertarian torture magic, it would do a real good job of shaking up the current scene. And yet.
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Jul 7, 2017 13:24
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I suspect Patrick's powers are getting stronger and it's making him break down, which is one of the most overused plots for telepathy in all of media.
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Aug 11, 2017 15:47
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I refuse to go back and confirm but I'm pretty sure during his whole 'actually I don't have morality, you have to SPEND lives not just save them!' speech he specifically compared people to snowflakes. It's really unfortunate that that became, like, a fulcrum of internet discourse based on a kind of mediocre movie being massively misconstrued by the worst kinds of dudes, or else it would make it utterly impossible to take Patrick's pain - wait, hold on, I'm receiving word that that was pretty drat well established long before this comic ever happened.  Also it's on a completely incoherent part of his body for something that he carved himself when he was dissociating? Like, just, imagine having a knife and giving yourself that scar, and not just ending up with a spaghetti tangle of bleeding lines. Try and draw it on with a pencil. The only way he managed that is if he has someone else watching him and he used them like a mind-reader's mirror and it utterly defeated the purpose. I'm just... I'm mad because at some point in time I found this character even a little bit interesting and this is forcing me to go back and see that actually he was an edgy and ridiculous idea the whole time. He was Lex Luthor as a teenager's self-insert anti-villain. Plus his powers have been portrayed incredibly inconsistently, because often he's portrayed as not just reading surface thoughts but literally being able to completely incorporate a person's entire memories and skillset into his own pretty much immediately. He can dig up social security numbers in seconds from an entire crowd, learn complex physics by proxy in a few hours, generally just gobble people up. Yet he clearly never loving considers how he appears and what kind of person he seems to be based on their in-depth memories of interacting with him, and doesn't seem to predict their responses to him at all. If this were well-written I'd say 'it's because he has psychological issues about regarding himself as a person rather than a hyperrational computing device, so he shies away from their image of him' but that just doesn't hold up. He's a mess and the ways he's a mess almost make sense, and I think that's literally all he is in the end: The Troubled But Intelligent Edgy Crush who exists to be a deus ex machina and a source of some vague moral messiness. Only now that we are in the age of Clevin, he has collapsed, because Clevin cannot coexist with him, because he was a sort of tool for muddying the waters and creating situations with fewer easy answers, sometimes cheaply. Clevin is an artifact of needing an Easy Answer, so Patrick (god, that name is so banal, but there's no menace left) cannot coexist with him. Neither is a great character but at least Patrick represented cheap, unearned conflict rather than cheap, unearned lack of conflict. I really enjoy how every time I think about this comic it finds new and interesting ways to frustrate the basic aims of storytelling.
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Aug 20, 2017 01:54
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Crimpolioni posted:Valkyries first client will be a young man who started dating a biodynamic individual, who only a few days into the relationship began using their powers to coerce and abuse him. Forced into hiding from his abuser, he now reaches out to project Valkyrie, presenting a unique case where having a support - organisation staffed by superheroes might actually be necessary to deal with the situation. This will never happen for a thousand reasons, but it would be perfect.
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Aug 20, 2017 14:57
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Joe Slowboat posted:This reminded me of something the comic is, I guess, supposed to be about : Being the one with all this power and privilege and not knowing how to change the world. Here's what I said a while back that I think summarizes the baneful influence of Clevin on the narrative. Other than repeatedly using 'bourgeoisie' instead of 'bourgeois' I think it holds up pretty well. Clevin and Allison's relationship will conclude with them focusing on art, culture, and personal matters as fascism rises around them; historians will call this 'internal Clevigration'
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Aug 20, 2017 15:07
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It's more that he doesn't seem to have changed in any way- there's no evidence he's rethinking the automatic 'I'm sure he wasn't doing anything wrong' he put forward when his friend stumbled out of an anti-rape PSA. He was actually a great illustration of rape culture, a decent enough guy who fails to notice his buddy's obvious predations. That was never dealt with.
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Aug 20, 2017 15:35
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Paladinus posted:I think you're trying to out-Clevin the Clevin. I knew a guy in college who was, in fact, definitely a creep and a predator and arguably a rapist. I didn't like him, but that didn't change the fact that I tried to make social space for him because he was in the same club, and I didn't look closely; I missed his really awful behavior. In the club, I was told 'actually he's fine, just awkward' and the social group we were in tried really hard to paper it over. It only ended when someone came out with accusations and there was an outpouring of 'oh yeah I saw that poo poo too.' So, yeah. That poo poo happens, and I've tried to take it as a learning experience. I'm not judging Clevin for missing that his roommate was the workd's most obvious date rapist, but to have him go on to be this anodyne Perfect Boyfriend is a weird move. I thought that his failure to see was the point of that little vignette, and it was before the chapter went off the rails. But it didn't stick at all, it informed none of his characterization, so it disappointed me.
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Aug 20, 2017 16:16
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idonotlikepeas posted:Now, see, this is a really great post. It's cogent, thoughtful, supports its points with examples from the comic, and has a solid explanation of why the poster feels the way he does about it. I mean, I disagree with it on almost every level, but that does not change the fact that it's really well done. Thank you for quoting it, since I'd never have seen it otherwise. You're very welcome, I'm actually quite proud of it. I think it's worth noting here, most negative takes on Clevin-as-character (as opposed to our shared negative take on Clevin as a person) I think assume that his introduction and his later presentation are at odds because he was picked up by the story and used for something he didn't originally fit into. At least, that's my perception of events. I don't think it's arguable that there's a shift in the tone and direction of the comic between Clevin's introduction and later events, Allison dating Max, etc. You even point out that the core theme of the Max chapter is 'Allison finds something she can solve by physically coercing somebody, and decides to do it.' I would contend that this shift included a recasting of Clevin, since the comic's framing of his behavior doesn't really line up between these events. In the party scene, him hitting on Allison is one of a number of distractions - I actually want to state how much I like that particular page for its framing, as a digression. There's Clevin, Hector is IMing her, there's a number of background details, then there's one panel in which the background betrays a guy taking advantage of a drunk woman. The underlying concept (Allison sees the thing that matters to her, the protection of the innocent, through a lot of apparently important events going on around her) underlines both her characterization (someone who is never 'off' for even a second, as a former superhero and somewhat moral obsessive, which isn't a bad thing) and the way most people overlook things. It's not a subtle move, but it's one that's decently pulled off here, since I know when I first read it I didn't catch where the comic was going on this page, being too distracted by Awkward Clevin and Hector's drama and so on. I don't think the comic has had anything like this kind of focus in a long while, whether because of an art style change or, my personal theory, because shifting to an open-ended chapter structure rather than shorter 'issues' left the creators with too much open space to write in, decompressing the comic and letting the air out of dense storytelling like this. It was never going to be Mignola-level beautiful page design, but it had its moments. Now, the pacing has decayed and the softer, less zine-feeling style of art has left me wanting, because the backgrounds are there to be pretty (and sometimes, are kind of pretty) rather than to communicate details in a harsh but effective manner. In any case, Clevin's a distraction and an obstacle here, an incredibly standard if well-intentioned guy. He later realizes how wrong he was, etc etc. But it's his later reintroduction, in contrast to Max, that really stood out to me at the time. Because Clevin basically is doing the same exact thing: "Hey I have free movie tickets, want a ticket" but it's framed much more Nice Guy-ishly by the authors. Here, he's selflessly giving Allison movies, complete with 'you can go watch them whenever, even without me' IIRC, and is being blown off because she's caught up in the web of Max, Libertarian Sleazeman. Later, she apologizes and his tickets offer is taken up, and then later, they date. It's from around that point in time that I would say my argument about Clevin As Bourgeois Ideology becomes valid, not his first appearance. To be clear, I also think that the 'torture a libertarian' turn in the plot destroyed my faith that the comic would build on subtext or context clues like it once did; that whole scene was just unbearable and the author seems consistently unable to face what was written as what it is. As such, I can only assume that the Whiny Clevin Speech is, in fact, intended to be a real emotional coming-together of the couple, rather than him being a whiny jerk to her. This position was further compounded by the author saying that 'Strong Female Protagonist' is meant to refer also to her being strong in a moral sense, i.e. she is in fact meant to be a dedicated seeker after morality. Either the comic has taken a turn for a cynical claim that Allison has never realized her own slide into moral equivocation, complacency, and blindness to her own and others' faults... or she's still supposed to be more or less a seeker after truth and justice. I just have a hard time keeping the faith about these things, though I'd like to be surprised.
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Aug 20, 2017 20:48
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idonotlikepeas posted:Deconstruction of superheroes is as old as Alan Moore's work, at minumum; it's nothing new. But even in something like Watchmen, Isn't the entire thrust of Watchmen that superheroes cannot solve the Cold War, and the megalomaniacal desire to be the one man who saves the world is what motivates the presumptive villain in the creation of monstrosity? Allison is Ozymandias is Patrick is Rorschach. In that particular respect, SFP is a modern retelling of Watchmen where the overarching threat isn't nuclear war, but the continued existence of inequality in society. I am afraid I just don't think it's living up to its ancestor in that regard. Edit: I just think that saying Watchmen presented problems superheroes could solve with punching is a pretty painful misreading of the situation, since it's less that superheroes solved anything and more that a superhero desperately trying to solve things with comic book logic lead to mass slaughter which is only ambiguously effective at creating the desired result. Also, squidding New York is a more interesting bit of hard-nosed utilitarianism than torturing a libertarian, for a comic book. Wolverine becoming an organ donor remains pretty solid in that regard. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Aug 20, 2017 |
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Aug 20, 2017 20:54
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:Allison Can't Unfind Her Gun. She is her gun. [...] That statement isn't an incitement of his or her decision, but a lament that the world is what it is that forces those choices on them. Just wanted to say, thanks for reminding me of this! I think it really gets at one of my complaints about the way the comic has gone; that Having Power went from the source of great moral responsibility to being a burden unduly thrust onto Allison. Early in the comic, you never got the sense that Allison regretted having her powers, and indeed, there was never any suggestion that she was a victim for being so powerful. This is, I think, a sea change in the narrative: Having Responsibility became a negative, a sorrow, that the authors seem to actually consider as such. Allison has power, and thus freedom, and this is something we should feel sorry for her for? This is something that deserves our applause? I know Allison feels that way - when she talks about how people should throw her a parade for not killing anyone - but that raw scene of emotion never struck me as something the comic in general agreed with, and indeed I think it's a fundamentally dangerous idea for the story. Not just morally but because it reframes the problem at hand away from what made the early chapters more interesting. It becomes a story about 'how does Allison live happily with herself?' rather than 'how does Allison try to improve the world? EDIT: This is totally irrelevant to the larger questions but, is it just me or did Clevin get shorter between his first appearance and now? I could be imagining things, but he looks meaningfully shorter than he was. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Aug 20, 2017 |
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Aug 20, 2017 21:26
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Also, a fundamental quality of Watchmen is a deep skepticism about power and the exercise of power, but it's not because 'well-intentioned people cause misery with power, by accident!' In Watchmen it's because power, as the old saw goes, corrupts. In the sense that people begin to see 'good' as 'what I can do with my power.' Power is self-reinforcing and self-serving, and violence is an appealing answer to those who are capable of great amounts of it. Power and powerlessness, of various and relative kinds, run through Watchmen, and the idea of an unaccountable power is treated as fundamentally terrifying (Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias, even the Comedian is fundamentally unaccountable American military power until he gets killed, especially given his scene in Vietnam). Also yeah if Allison wanted to do good she should go into politics. She's literally Superman, in her Mega-Girl persona. Maybe not run for office herself, but endorse (presumably progressive) political organizations, put forward a set of ideals, make use of her immense cultural power as well as her punching power to change the future. And she never will because the comic barely wraps its head around solidarity and mass action, and the closest it's gotten is an Uber-alike. Instead, Allison should clearly be getting Bob Avakian elected.
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Aug 20, 2017 21:39
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idonotlikepeas posted:I'd say that the central point of Watchmen is the failure of consequentialism as a moral system, although that's a related idea. It's riddled all throughout the work in the Black Freighter story and in the main story; Ozymandias backs himself into a corner by continually doing terrible things "for the greater good", and the end there is a coin flip that might undo everything he's done in a single stroke, rendering all those awful acts meaningless. It's a different slice than what I described above; Alison has to actually bear the burden of doing something she herself recognizes as wrong but having it improve the world. Ozymandias has convinced himself that what he's doing is right, no matter how awful it is, and we're left with an implication that all he's done is drat himself to no purpose. That theme runs throughout the work; we even have counterexamples in Rorschach, who is practically the personification of deontology, and the Comedian, who is amoral. They're two halves of the same coin, in that they both had the realization that there is no inherent morality to the universe, but have chosen to react to it in different ways; the Comedian chooses to simply do as he pleases, whereas Rorschach elects to build an absolute moral system based on his own beliefs and adhere strictly to that, instead. I think that reading Rorschach as more justifiable within the narrative than Ozymandias is a misstep; both Ozymandias and Rorschach commit brutal violence basically constantly (Ozymandias hides it better). Rorschach tried to cause World War III because he can't abide the thought of compromising with the Soviets, while Ozymandias kills more people than any of us have ever met in the pursuit of peace. I'm not even going to touch on the Comedian, because if anyone thought he was presented as anything but monstrous I don't think we speak the same language. It's telling that the viewpoint characters, the most sympathetic characters, are both basically powerless in the actual plot. Night Owl II and Silk Specter II both witness Ozymandias' plan and actions, the passing of a well-nigh literal god from the Earth, and Rorschach dying in the name of absolutism (and nuclear war). Nixon is still president; if you need a symbol of the most paranoid and underhanded exercise of power in American pop culture, perma-president Richard Nixon works well. Watchmen has as its central point the collapse of any system of morality, not because those systems are necessarily flawed, but because the people carrying them out are imperfect and the power over life and death given to them (as superheroes, as American military and political figures, as literally god) has broken them. Not in a way we pity, particularly, but in a way we fear. Moore's superheroes are the embodiment of the culture they come from, its excesses and cruelties, as well as the society they uphold. They fail the ways we fail, the ways superheroes must fail, in their particular milieu. Compare this to Promethea, Moore's most extensive and least ambiguous superhero comic. Promethea is about the power that is fundamentally imaginative, creative, and benevolent. It is about a superhero bringing about the psychic apocalypse, but in this case, that's the New Age, the occult transformation of the world into a better state. It's a weird ride, a weird read, and ultimately I certainly don't think it's perfect, but it's a great counterpoint to both V for Vendetta and Watchmen. It's also, like, so far from Strong Female Protagonist that you'd have to travel through From Hell to reach it, IMO.
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Aug 20, 2017 22:03
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See, I think we have a fundamental disagreement on Watchmen. Remember that it was written before the end of the Cold War. If I recall correctly, Moore mentioned that it loses a lot of its themes when the reader isn't currently aware of the possibility of nuclear armageddon. The threat in Watchmen, the fundamental and central threat, isn't something superheroes created. It's just the Cold War. The universe of Watchmen may be different from our own, but from the perspective of the late 80s, I'm not sure it's really worse so much as it's the same but more. So I fundamentally read it not as a comment on what such powerful figures could have done, but what they couldn't have done. Also, while Promethea is certainly a primer on modern occultism of a certain flavor, I will never forgive Moore for getting basic Shivashakti symbolism wrong during his discussion of sexual symbolism in occult practice. He wants a syncretic universal system, but has to invert the actual tradition to make it fit with European cup/wand imagery. (Tongue firmly in cheek for this paragraph, for the record). Uuuuuh to get back to the actual webcomic at hand, I think it's worth noting that I don't think we've seen any representation of mass political movements since the first few pages that weren't either Best Character BatBrad's convention or basically that one church from X-Men who hate mutants. For all that Allison's revelation was 'there are other people, we can work together!' there's still no sense of collective effort, so much as atomized and individual efforts by superhumans. Even Valkyrie isn't a mass movement, it's a matchmaking service for individual efforts.
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Aug 20, 2017 22:35
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Is it just me or is there something really off in the composition of this page? Specifically, that lightning bolt across the panels seems to turn into a sort of arrow on the left end, but the panel border sort of comes in and up and intersects with the lightning bolt panel... it just looks bad and breaks the line of the panels in a way that confuses me.
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Sep 20, 2017 15:53
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 15:37 |
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I'm pretty sure the two comics have been running since around the same time, and both have pretty young artists. Their styles are obviously very different, but both have changed and matured technically. Abaddon actively seeks out and obsessively absorbs critical feedback, is one major difference.
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Sep 26, 2017 22:59
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