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A Wizard of Goatse posted:You're reading it as a literal dissertation on comparative My issue is that the other planets aren't hypotheses we can "test" - they're about bizarre aliens from other planets who have evolved in highly, ridiculously specific ways - so you can enjoy the story and take the exposition about how these creatures evolved to do this or that as relatively credible within its universe. When it then showcases as its climax a highly testable, easily falsifiable hypothesis about human nature, the curtain is pulled away and it loses some of its interest as speculative fiction. Plus, I'm not sure he is perfectly aware of that? I wouldn't suggest that he is or isn't, but the story takes a pretty definite stance on the reality of evolutionary biology. It has frequent interludes about how evolution mediates art, beauty, romance, etc, that amount to little thesis statements on evo-psych. The conclusion is even, "evolution guides us to be a certain way, but we can temper it with logic and free will when we want to, people aren't evolutionary robots", which is an odd thing to land on if your story actually had no moral and was just a fantasy thought experiment with no interest in its scientific inspiration. Like, stuff like "the god gene" is a real theory that has appeared in academic hypotheses. Thorsby's line of inspiration there is obvious - it's not his own whole cloth invention, he's looking at evo-psych theories and using them as a jumping off point for fiction. Margaret Atwood writes about the exact same idea in Oryx & Crake.
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Jan 21, 2019 19:15
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, like it is seriously proposing that if women are able to choose who they get pregnant by this will inevitably lead to prisonlike harem houses and this is a persuasive argument, when in fact it is a silly satire about how the crazy places people end up when they operate from unexamined biases, and the silly part comes from how none of the biases are our own and all the aliens are doing totally ridiculous nonsense things that vaguely resemble dumb things people actually do.
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The tiny rear end in a top hat people are a metaphor for the Whigs in parliament! Not at all comparable. Gulliver's Travels isn't even slightly interested in scientific grounding, it's just a political satire with some moral philosophy. Accidental Space Spy's whole raison d'etre is wonky evolutionary sci-fi.
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Jan 21, 2019 21:15
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Like, we aren't meant to think that the natives of the Castration Planet or the Living Notebooks are metaphors for human behaviour, because they're not. They're purely cod-scientific thought experiments expanded to a ludicrous degree, which Thorsby is very good at. This casts a mirror back on us and makes us wonder, "ah, which of our funny behaviours are motivated by evolutionary prerogatives! Makes you think!", which of course instantly falls apart when it stops being a reflexive suggestion, and starts being text that espouses dubious science about human beings.
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Jan 21, 2019 21:20
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Otherkinsey Scale posted:To get a little Roland Barthes, I don't think it's useful to debate the author's intent. I just think it's less enjoyable to read "tall thin candles are considered prettier than short fat ones, because they have a higher chance of falling over and killing everyone" as strictly a factual claim. It's perverse, but it's hard to intuitively disprove. That's why it's funny - it forces you to question your assumptions. Yes, it's not at all scientific, but it's just obtuse enough to make you laugh and ask, "could that be true?". "Humans go to war because male leaders want to kill off male members of their own society so they can reduce their reproductive competition, and this would be solved if all leaders were given multiple wives to reduce their reproductive anxiety," doesn't really hit that benchmark. One can instantly think of leaders from actual world history who started wars despite having multiple wives. One can think of woman leaders who started wars. To top it off, it gets into some weirdly sexist territory for Thorsby, where the ultimate secret of his fictional world is that women are a war-reducing token that must be apportioned to men for the good of society, and men are solely responsible for political decisions such that satisfying their needs in this way is a total solution. Yes, it's fiction, but it's an uncomfortable conclusion for your sci-fi to land on. For what it's worth, I'm not talking about the author's intent either, that's a dead end. I'm talking about what's there in the work and how it presents itself for interpretation.
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Jan 22, 2019 09:37
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Cat Mattress posted:While it's not accurate as a necessary and sufficient reason for war, you can easily find in human history cultures that practiced polygyny and had a strong tradition of war and raids. And wars have been fought over a tribe's women often enough, e.g. rapt of the Sabines. So the idea isn't absurd, even if it doesn't resist scrutiny. No, it is absurd for precisely that reason, in that the hypothesis being posited by the comic is not, "war is practised to raid other tribes for their women," but that, "war could be avoided in many cases if male leaders were allowed to practise polygyny, because declaring war is a subconscious reaction to reproductive anxiety that would be alleviated if the leader's biological imperative was satisfied".
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Jan 22, 2019 11:51
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It doesn't actually make any claim about kidnapping women from other tribes or countries, which while distasteful would have a bit more historical grounding. Rather, the claim is that war kills off male competition within the leader's own society, allowing them to monopolise the remaining women for reproduction - and as such, that they wouldn't feel the need to declare it if they already had plenty of women to reproduce with. This instantly runs into absurdity thanks to the very cases you mention.
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Jan 22, 2019 11:55
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Actually, amend that: there is a single panel mention of kidnapping other tribes for their women, but it's not the main thrust of the "Evolution of War" comics (it's given as a reason why male soldiers might agree to war, rather than a reason for a tribal leader to declare it), and in fact is explicitly called out as something that's no longer relevant in the modern world.
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Jan 22, 2019 12:09
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:You seem to be having a tremendous amount of trouble with this one very specific interpretation that is the only one you're willing to consider, and I don't think anyone can help you with that. If you need it to be a comic about how valid the skull-calipers wing of sociology is, and there's nothing else going on there, you're just going to have to accept that's going to inevitably be Problematic and also kinda Stupid. If you accept that something can sound sorta sciencey and also not be being advocated as the literal truth (say, the wife-stealing stuff is a pulp sci-fi play on the old "war is not between nations but perpetrated by the rich against the poor" position), your options open up. I'm having no trouble at all with it! Nor do I need someone to "help me" with it. It's a pretty simple objection. It's a speculative fiction story, set on a variety of fantastical imagined planets, that uses as its climax a "revelation" about the nature of the real world. The revelation in question is so spurious and obviously incorrect as to break your suspension of disbelief if you take it at face value. It's not the end of days or anything, but it's not a very satisfying ending to an otherwise great comic. Does Thorsby think that "polygyny = fewer wars" is true? I don't know, probably not. Does the comic say that that's true within its universe? Yes, and that is very stupid and pretty unsatisfying, especially when it's teased throughout the comic as a grand mystery that nations are willing to kill to suppress. The only way you can take it at its face value without doing a fair amount of contortion into metaphor is to assume that it's meant to be a ridiculous joke - all this drama over something so patently stupid. The comic doesn't really sell it that way, though. Instead it's self-serious about the revelation, and uses it to deliver a moral about human nature. In my reckoning that makes the ending pretty weak. It's also below the par for Thorsby's other work, which is often genuinely very perceptive. His sub-plot about the anthropic principle in Brain Chip is genuinely amazing. In my view, "it's meant to be a metaphor for how the true war is rich against poor," is a pretty tortured interpretation. The comic literally features a panel of Hitler giving a speech while a narration box attributes his declaration of war to his lack of reproductive success. There's no support for "actually it's not about biology but class" in the text unless you're willing to go so far as to say all the exposition about evolutionary biology is in fact a complex symbol for, say, market capitalism and intrasocial class dynamics. (There's support for this in literature. Moby Dick uses chapter on chapter of nonsensical whale facts to get across its point about how whales represent the unknowable.) You find my reading too literal. That's fine! I get that. But then what's your actual counter-point to it, beyond this kind of flippant, "ah, it's just a story, it could mean any number of things, when it says something that sounds bad, that's probably just a metaphor"? I'm down to have the discussion. Like, what's the alternative reading?
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Jan 22, 2019 19:41
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Libluini posted:The alternative reading was already presented to you, and you rejected it. At this point a discussion seems fruitless, if you counter every argument with "NO" and then just repeating your earlier statements. It super wasn't, this is a very disingenuous reading of the conversation. Not changing your mind the instant someone disagrees with you isn't the same as just stonewalling them. Actually I think this is a pretty interesting discussion - there are lots of smart people sharing their thoughts on the subject matter. A Wizard of Goatse posted:the alternative reading is this This is coherent, and it makes sense to me. Like, the whole thing being a bait-and-switch about how evolutionary psychology only appears to explain things when we take a simplified outside view of the situation, and once it enters into a situation we're familiar with it instantly becomes ridiculous, thus showing off its main flaw as a discipline? It's not the most natural reading from my perspective, but this is a good argument for it. The only sticking point I'd point out is like - even with that conversation at the end about how evolution isn't destiny, Shim and Athena are still morally determined to warn other societies about The Secret of War, because knowing it would make them more able to avoid their evolutionary destiny of starting wars over reproductive anxiety. The final conclusion of the comic is that we can fight our instincts, not that they don't guide us - and it's text in the comic that a bunch of societies, including possibly Earth, could usher in permanent peace through the power of giving men multiple sexual partners. It still has some credence within the setting, and there's nothing in particular that questions or undermines the "polygyny prevents war" thing other than its own apparent ridiculousness. You have to rely on the audience's perception to go, "oh, actually, despite the amount of mental real estate the text devotes to this idea, it's silly enough that it can't possibly be at all sincere." Like, I guess that lines up with your Gulliver's Travels reading, where Swift asserts that the only cure for the human condition is to become a horse, but the level of satire that's happening in the comic doesn't really seem to go to that length. Instead, it's quite maudlin about the injustice of hiding the Secret of War from the world. But! That's a matter of perspective, and I guess if you find the other thought experiments more ridiculous than I do, you're primed to read the Secret of War as ridiculous satire too. All fair from my viewpoint. Thank you for engaging. Genuinely appreciate it. Otherkinsey Scale posted:I agree with you on this much--rear end was really uncomfortable to read in places because of that, actually, since practically speaking the effect of a lot of the evopsych stuff was to justify why the women in a given storyline had no agency or anything. It was unusual for Thorsby, since in his other comics (especially this one) so many of his protagonists are women, and that's not something that's treated as unusual within the text. I'm glad we agree on this. It is very uncharacteristic for Thorsby, and while it's generally presented as an unjust consequence of cruel biology, it's notably not presented as unjust that multiple women should be apportioned to male leaders to prevent wars, which is a weird slip. I feel like that's something that should be treated with the same dystopian tone as the Woman Houses on the Best loving Planet Ever, rather than just a dramatic plot beat/low key gag. And you're right: even when it is presented as an unpleasant reality that women are sidelined by biology on some of the other planets, the way the story chooses to frame that is often a little concerning. A lot of the societies shown are ones where women are passive objects and men are active subjects by biological nature, which is a narrative choice in itself. Android Blues fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Jan 22, 2019 |
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Jan 22, 2019 21:04
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We still don't know where Trixie is. Maybe she's on a quest for the Hairpins of Time Reversal!
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Mar 15, 2019 09:56
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This is so cool. So the sceptre works by appearing to do nothing, waiting until the moment of your death, harvesting a vision of it, then creating an alternate timeline by sending the vision of your death back in time to you at the moment you touched the sceptre? That's bonkers, terrifying, and also makes perfect sense.
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Mar 22, 2019 12:07
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I suspect this timeline will be erased from history when Lyndon dies (because the vision of his death that's sent back by the sceptre will change history), and the Skyggemyrians, who know the grisly details of how the sceptre works, are therefore trying to keep him alive indefinitely. Also, this implies that every time someone has previously touched the sceptre, the initial "true" timeline was it appearing not to work and then the universe continuing as normal up to the moment of their death, at which time that entire timeline was erased and everyone in it consigned to oblivion. Grim!
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Mar 22, 2019 12:11
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Dragonatrix posted:Nah, if that was the case then there'd have been a lot more that would've surprised Trixie than that she was dating Klara The person who gets the vision only sees the moments of their death - not all the incidents leading up to it. The running theory here is that events have to unfold as normal so that the sceptre can find out how the person who touched it will die. It can't just pull the knowledge of their death from thin air - it needs to get the data by experiencing history as it will currently unfold, then sending the vision backwards in time, so that the vision of death is received instantaneously from the perspective of the user in the "new" timeline. The sceptre always worked like this, but we'd only seen it from the "Timeline B" perspective before - never the initial, exploratory timeline that is erased by the sending of the vision. I mean, I could be totally wrong, but that's my guess.
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Mar 22, 2019 12:35
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I wouldn't be surprised if Skyggemyr is currently hunting up other magical artifacts that might help them extend Lyndon's lifespan.
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Mar 22, 2019 16:54
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This rules. I was expecting some kind of depraved hunt for the Immortality Jewel or whatever, and instead they're just making sure Lyndon exercises regularly and eats plenty of vegetables. Hilarious.
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Apr 12, 2019 08:28
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Pistol_Pete posted:Looks like it: In retrospect, Audrey killed so many iterations of herself and her friends on this page: http://trixie.thecomicseries.com/comics/79/
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May 27, 2019 14:38
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super sweet best pal posted:The stars going out in the simulation means that unless the death happens before they go out, it will affect the simulation's outcome significantly, so it's unreliable. Once the Sceptre's secret is out, it becomes totally unreliable in general. If it's widely known that someone who touches it and doesn't experience a vision has plunged the world into a simulation, it changes the decision-making process not just for that person, but for all the people who know that they're in a simulation contingent on the life of the sceptre-toucher. I really like it. The magic has limits, it's not infallible, and its limits are things that wouldn't ever arise if you used the Sceptre without doing vigorous testing on just how it's delivering your death predictions to you.
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May 30, 2019 15:59
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The gay uncles thing is pretty concordant with what we know about the genetics of being gay. Insofar as there's a biological component, it's likely something that happens in the womb, so it being due to genes carried by the mother makes more sense than it being due to genes carried by the gay person themselves. We don't know enough to say for sure of course, it could well be due to genes from both parties interacting, but he has clearly read existing science on the issue and is extrapolating based on that. It was still uncomfortable to read just because you're constantly expecting the terrible opinion hammer drop, but it never really comes. Thorsby good.
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May 31, 2019 23:41
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The suicide thing, way more of a shot in the dark, and has less scientific grounding. I suspect that suicidal tendencies are too complex a social phenomenon to be explained by spitballing genetics in isolation. Still, they almost certainly do have a genetic component, so it's not an unreasonable thing to theorise about.
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May 31, 2019 23:43
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:He literally says it's culturally constructed right up front, it's called a thought experiment Actually, he has the character say, "let's assume it isn't just a stereotype, or a cultural construct. Here are the what the evolutionary reasons for it might be." He doesn't take a position on whether masculinity and femininity are cultural constructs or genetically determined - rather, he allows that he doesn't know, and then proposes a theory for what an evolutionary basis for social gender constructs might look like. I think it's pretty daft, though harmless, but you're misrepresenting what's said in the comic here.
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Jun 1, 2019 15:04
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Leroy Dennui posted:Lyndon went all Magical Realism on us. Without clicking, I know which strip this is, because it's exactly the one I was about to post. Strong Achewood vibes.
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Jun 7, 2019 08:12
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xiw posted:Oh my god those are anti-sleep-spell devices on their wrists This is such a good catch, that's hilarious.
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Jul 12, 2019 08:10
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I think Lyndon and Audrey just got really lucky. The snakes are hanging from the ceiling such that two people standing up, teleporting into the room at random, would have been overwhelmingly likely to intersect with at least one of them.
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Jul 15, 2019 16:04
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Eeevil posted:But to say it's a duplicate would imply that both it and the original can exist simultaneously, which isn't the case. The people of the simulated world aren't actually going to cease to exist when it ends; they'll just go back to living their original lives. Really, nothing about the way the sceptre works seems to imply that the simulated world exists anywhere except inside the sceptre toucher's mind. It seems very much as though the opposite is true. The original world is "waiting" for the result of the simulation, but the simulated people will absolutely cease to exist once the simulation ends, along with everything in their reality. They won't go back to being those other people - they're separate entities who exist with the parameters and memories of those other people. When the simulation ends, they'll die. That said, the ambassador is totally insincere here. He's right, but he's evil as hell. He doesn't exclusively care about preserving the lives of the simulated people - he also wants to make sure that Lyndon will be a mindless, thoughtless tree when he dies, and therefore unable to pass information about Skyggemyr back to the original universe.
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Aug 27, 2019 09:00
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But it's not a dream - these are people simulated to within an absurd degree of accuracy. They're effectively perfect copies, and they exist independently of Lyndon's perception.
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Aug 27, 2019 09:18
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Also, Lyndon isn't dreaming, and there's no continuity between the Lyndon we're currently following and the one who touched the sceptre. They're different individuals. Original Lyndon will see a vision of this Lyndon's death, but that's it.
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Aug 27, 2019 09:19
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Right, but these simulated people will, and they're effectively alive. They certainly are separate entities: we have every reason to believe they're as real as the people from the original universe.
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Aug 27, 2019 09:29
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Lyndon has a giant guilt complex and, arguably, he's sort of right. He has the opportunity to save a lot of lives by letting the ambassador win. Of course, he could also save a lot of lives by sending information that would prevent war and plague back to the original universe.
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Aug 30, 2019 10:00
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Mr. Steak posted:Hey so I clicked on this thread out of curiosity, went and started Lies Sisters And Wives assuming this was a hate-thread, but then absolutely fell in love with everything about this dude's work (I've now finished Lies and read Hitmen through the end of the living portals fiasco). It's the perfect marriage of dubious writing quality, actually genius writing, and way too much dialogue. It's literally mspa but better. It's very, very good. Hitmen for Destiny is ridiculously good. Transdimensional Brain Chip too!
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Sep 24, 2019 08:19
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It's been so long since we've seen Klara do something. I missed her competence.
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Oct 21, 2019 09:06
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Of course Klara knows about Torgeir Lykke's slime ducts.
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Oct 25, 2019 08:48
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I forgot/love how psyched Audrey was about being a human scarf.
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Nov 5, 2019 16:58
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habituallyred posted:I can't believe lying about a contagious disease was worth warning about. The fact that the ambassador's reporting it to his minions means that, for real, it came off without a hitch and Audrey killed him. The snout elves must have felt really bad about that reality.
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Nov 13, 2019 23:13
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Trixie's enthusiasm for civic history pays off yet again.
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Nov 15, 2019 10:40
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I think the idea is that the spell works like, "give me the weapon nearest to the one I'm aiming at", and tricking her into thinking there's a weapon to aim at when there isn't caused it to default to the most similar object in Trixie's vicinity.
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Nov 15, 2019 12:39
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Len posted:Pretty sure this is the only Thorsby thread so gently caress it y'all get to read my thoughts here. I just finished Accidental Space Spy and it was good up until that last alien planet where it just really fumbled the landing. Yeah agreed, Space Spy's final arc isn't as interesting or funny as what comes before. It's still great taken as a whole, though. The Castration Planet alone is worth the price of entry.
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Nov 26, 2019 09:17
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Brain Chip is a perfect thesis statement on Thorsby's mastery of absurd escalation of stakes from a simple, transformative premise. You start out with "a man is capable of sharing information with minutely different versions of himself in parallel universes" and end up with an authoritarian utopia established after a hard-fought struggle to prevent toxic religious memes propagated by a handful of instances from establishing a theocratic technological dystopia as the sole political entity in all known realities.
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Nov 26, 2019 22:58
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Yeah man, I'd absolutely choose to live in Aisha's benevolent dictatorship. It's not perfect, but it's a lot closer than we are ever likely to achieve on actual Earth.
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Nov 27, 2019 16:46
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Although, point of order: there is death. Aisha has the technology to make everyone immortal, but she refuses to share it widely among the population unless birth rates fall significantly, because she's worried about long term overpopulation. There's no more death from war or famine though, and almost none from violence. People essentially just die of old age and that's it.
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Nov 27, 2019 16:50
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Terror Sweat posted:This is a rare miss from thorsby's thought experiments I think, why is overpopulation a problem when humanity is already going to other planets and easily terraforming them I re-read the ending, just to make sure my memory of it was correct, and it's actually not the case that humanity has totally wrapped up terraforming other planets. Ulf's new girlfriend is a scientist specifically working on making the planet they're on habitable for animal life. Presumably they're in a small, protected area of it, or have some kind of hazmat tech integrated into their bodies? It's implied that full terraforming is coming soon though, which yeah, would probably allow Aisha to advance further life extension to her subjects.
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Nov 27, 2019 17:34
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