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I don't think anyone said you can't be critical or dislike a work, just the despair spiral these threads turn into. edit: also the whole Freudian "everything has a direct 1:1 parallel to the author's life" analysis is just really boring. mycot fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Apr 20, 2024 |
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Apr 20, 2024 18:02
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Says something about the state of webcomics that it’s only active when talking about comics that have been dead for years. If you want to have tedious arguments could it at least be about something new?
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Apr 20, 2024 18:12
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Apr 20, 2024 18:18
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The problem with dedicated threads for comics people don't like is that people feel like they need to post in them every time the comic updates, and no comic is really so dedicated to being bad that it gives you something new and interesting to say on every page. Only Legacy of Dominic Deegan comes close, and even it really only merits comment once every couple of weeks.
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Apr 20, 2024 18:29
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I don't think SFP has a "depiction=endorsement" issue because its problem was its creators weren't thinking through just about anything they were doing and ultimately came off as really, really stupid. They had these big "doesn't it make you think?" concepts in the early chapter but genuinely no consideration of where they were going, turning into a bizarre act of waffling as any page of the comic might occupy any conceivable political stance as they lurched about, trying to figure out what they actually were going to do with this comic. Ultimately: Clevin.
Precambrian fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Apr 20, 2024 |
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Apr 20, 2024 18:42
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I think the real problem with Strong Female Protagonist is that Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal covered all this a decade ago.
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Apr 20, 2024 18:56
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rannum posted:Yeah I eventually stopped following the DD Legacy thread, kind of meandering while it finally wrapped up and then dipped after the weird post-legacy stuff happened. Oxxidation posted:both of sfp’s creators have moved on to better things, that was just a bad project that got much worse with time
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Apr 20, 2024 18:59
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Captain Oblivious posted:Gunnerkrigg Court has committed the worst sin a webcomic can possibly do. A thread about a bad webcomic can possibly still have interesting discussion that isn’t just directionless hate. This latest arc's been strange because it's been slow, but also rushing to wrap up a ton of hanging plot threads under the contrivance of being in Zimmy's mindscape... again. It's a weird, dissonant boring. tinaun posted:Says something about the state of webcomics that it’s only active when talking about comics that have been dead for years. This thread's been dead for years because it used to be a multi-purpose place where people talked shop, posted updates of any given webcomic, and bounced poo poo back and forth. Then it slowly had all the energy sucked out of it because the webcomic-creators were moved to CC, all the webcomics that got more than 5 posts of discussion made their own barely active threads, and forcing any vaguely negative comic discussion to the CCCC thread, which I think almost all discussion positive and negative has moved to except for the few comics people never made full threads of like QC and Girl Genius because people used to be too derisive of those comics to feel confident about talking about here.
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Apr 20, 2024 19:12
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I like El Goonish Shive a lot but I never discuss it in here because I assume most people here don't read it, and also I never have much to say aside from "golly I like Susan" and also "despite having annotations under each comic that link to any relevant pages I still have barely any idea what's happening, ever".
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Apr 20, 2024 19:24
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The existence of a social space (thread, forum, whatever) which is organized around opposition to some particular entity pretty much inevitably intensifies that opposition over time, often pretty fast, without major outside intervention to disrupt the process. Individuals are basically incentivized to one-up each other in their opposition and discover new bases for stating that opposition- with opprobrium for any counterpressure. That said...Rand Brittain posted:The problem with dedicated threads for comics people don't like is that people feel like they need to post in them every time the comic updates, and no comic is really so dedicated to being bad that it gives you something new and interesting to say on every page. There needs to be a sinfest thread, if only so we can stop covering it in the politoons thread in dnd.
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Apr 20, 2024 19:33
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YggiDee posted:I like El Goonish Shive a lot but I never discuss it in here because I assume most people here don't read it, and also I never have much to say aside from "golly I like Susan" and also "despite having annotations under each comic that link to any relevant pages I still have barely any idea what's happening, ever". I've never read El Goonish Shive, but I suppose that's a challenge here, too. Like, I can't keep up with the CCCC thread for the same reason I struggle to focus on the comic strip thread. They both have really cool things posted in them, but all the image dumps can also be really hard to read or scroll past. The alternative is something like here where you link a new comic, but then if other people aren't following it they'd have to archive binge to catch up, and that's a time sink. I dunno. Being an adult with obligations and video games to play makes life hard, I guess.
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Apr 20, 2024 19:34
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A lot of webcomics readers seem to have moved to Discord servers too.
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Apr 20, 2024 19:52
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el goonish shive is spanish for the goonish shive
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Apr 20, 2024 19:59
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Discendo Vox posted:
Speaking from a place of love I can think of no more miserable a prospect than a potential Sinfest-only thread, lol.
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Apr 20, 2024 20:02
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Yeah, like EGS has been running continuously for 22 years, the start is extremely rough, and I don't know if there's a good jumping-on point.
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Apr 20, 2024 20:09
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YggiDee posted:Yeah, like EGS has been running continuously for 22 years, the start is extremely rough, and I don't know if there's a good jumping-on point. Doesn't seem like it, but the New Readers link on the website is so quaint quote:Quick Start - To begin reading EGS from the first comic click here: First EGS Comic, Published January 21, 2002. Love seeing people keep the old emoticon ways alive.
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Apr 20, 2024 20:11
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Mercury Hat posted:Speaking from a place of love I can think of no more miserable a prospect than a potential Sinfest-only thread, lol.
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Apr 20, 2024 20:13
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Discendo Vox posted:The existence of a social space (thread, forum, whatever) which is organized around opposition to some particular entity pretty much inevitably intensifies that opposition over time, often pretty fast, without major outside intervention to disrupt the process. Individuals are basically incentivized to one-up each other in their opposition and discover new bases for stating that opposition- with opprobrium for any counterpressure. That said... That some DND posters are incapable of just not posting sinfest takes is all the proof anyone should need that that turd has found its rightful toilet
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Apr 20, 2024 20:17
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I read EGS but I don't often have much to say about it; Dan Shive is kind of bad at and also not that interested in writing bad things or bad people, so it's hard for the comic to have particularly high stakes. It's just teenagers getting up to shenanigans with abnormally-horny magic. (It really needs to finish getting its cast into college because the premise and the general tone of things really want to be 18+ and have 18+ things happen, but even though it's clearly building up to that at the current pace they won't get out of high school before the 2028 election.) Maybe we should talk about Clown Corps more. I really love Clown Corps more but I'm starting to get a little iffy about the politics of this whole "clown" thing.
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Apr 20, 2024 20:21
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Mercury Hat posted:Speaking from a place of love I can think of no more miserable a prospect than a potential Sinfest-only thread, lol. Yeah I'm more of a negative thread defender than most and my only response to that was a full-body shudder of revulsion, I'm more than happy with Sinfest only coming up as a negative example to compare things to once in a blue moon. Rarely, very rarely, does even a terrible webcomic actually deserve a comparison to that dreck.
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Apr 20, 2024 20:22
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Sinfest is one of the only running webcomics that I would actually agree is both totally contemptible and consistently bizarre but Mercury Hat posted:Speaking from a place of love I can think of no more miserable a prospect than a potential Sinfest-only thread, lol. mycot fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Apr 20, 2024 |
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Apr 20, 2024 20:23
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The CCCC thread is pretty slow nowadays, and very few of the comics in the thread are posted for negativity reasons (like mainly just Lore Olympus), most of the webcomic related activity is in the PYF thread (which is also a mostly positive space)
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Apr 20, 2024 20:23
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Digamma-F-Wau posted:The CCCC thread is pretty slow nowadays, and very few of the comics in the thread are posted for negativity reasons (like mainly just Lore Olympus), most of the webcomic related activity is in the PYF thread (which is also a mostly positive space) Fair enough, I haven't looked in on a lot of stuff lately. And I'm not trying to start a hate train here because I haven't read it, but everything I've seen of Lore Olympus is so odd.
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Apr 20, 2024 20:29
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Rand Brittain posted:Maybe we should talk about Clown Corps more. I really love Clown Corps more but I'm starting to get a little iffy about the politics of this whole "clown" thing. I feel like it's being pretty explicit right now about the Clown Corps as, basically, a way to investigate questions around superheroes and cops and that idea of the sort of 'institutionalized vigilante' in a defamiliarized way. Clowns! So silly! But when we had a recent character say a kid was 'scared of clowns' it's pretty clear that part of the point is that the institution of the Clown Corps is, well, they're a government arm. They're crime-fighting, uniformed characters. Binky was always The Cop Clown, but now it's becoming pretty clear that everyone who aspires to be a clown in the comic is being asked 'ok, but are you ok being a cop?' It's an interesting move. Obviously, the Clown Corps are still a pretty idealized police-like institution, rather than American cops, but as things develop it's becoming clear that the same forces that make cops cops are at work with the clowns, and they won't go away just because the clowns put a funny face on it. That's pretty clearly the reason for juxtaposing 'we're actually an organization of firefighters that started wearing clown makeup to be more appealing to kids in bad situations' with 'she's scared of clowns.' Changing the name of the organization, changing the literal face, doesn't change the role it plays. And for the clown corps, they're increasingly aware that they are police. I don't know where that connection is going, just that the connection is being raised. So it's not trying to hide it, at minimum. And I think there's some interesting questions there, questions that maybe end up looking like 'how do you have an institution of people who can handle problems like violence and disaster without it becoming the police again?' Starting from firemen, then having the firemen handle thefts and assaults, and suddenly the firemen start looking like cops again, seems to be how the trajectory is drawn. E: I don't think this webcomic about shonen clowns is going to actually answer questions like 'what the gently caress do we do about the police' but I do think it's interested in some smaller questions in that orbit.
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Apr 20, 2024 20:29
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I found a tumblr that just polls people every day asking if they've read a webcomic, and they have a database of submissions so if you every wanted, say, a completely uncurated list of 900 webcomics to look at, here you go. there's probably something in there you haven't seen before
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Apr 20, 2024 20:31
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Vox Valentine posted:He can have his own thread when Tats stops being a Nazi. Until then he has his ghost-town forums and a place of shame in the politoon thread. Yeah I meant love for anyone who would think of posting there. Mainlining Sinfest into your brain wouldn't be healthy, lol.
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Apr 20, 2024 20:42
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I fell way behind on reading El Goonish Shive long ago, and it'd be a whole lot of reading to pick it back up again (the downside of very regular updates). I guess I'd like to hear how it's been going, but it also is one of those comics that goons will be prone to pick on, especially since its early roots is a very typical example of an early dumb webcomic made by a teen who knows nothing about anything yet, and there sure are some fetishes woven into it. I've seen some of Brian Lee Mulligan's stuff after SFP, and I didn't like it much, but being a comedy guy whose humor I don't like is a lot more forgivable than being a bad dramatic writer hedging his big epic story in delivering big messages that are ultimately bad takes. It's not like he's some horrible person though, he's just a dope at worst. I don't think it's a great shame either to have written bad stories, since it's part of growing as a person to try to do the things you want to do and try to mature from that, and it's sad when people ultimately fail at their ambitions.
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Apr 20, 2024 20:48
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I prefer Brennan Lee Mulligan's work encouraging Zac Oyama to eat imaginary spoiled deviled eggs over Strong Female Protagonist, as well meaning as that comic was.
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Apr 20, 2024 21:45
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Nuns with Guns posted:Fair enough, I haven't looked in on a lot of stuff lately. Lore Olympus doesn't deserve a hate train. Like, it's bad, no doubt about it...but it's at least kind of benignly, weirdly bad. It's fun to pick apart it's deeply strange decisions. It's ongoing efforts to girlbossify Greek Myth is some of the funniest poo poo I have ever read. Sinfest is NOT benignly bad, it's cancerously bad, but it is at least hilarious to pull out the deeply unhinged ideological underpinings of each new curveball. Japanese American Tatsuya Ishida is now advocating for a form of Esoteric Nazism that believes white people are space aliens who originally settled in Scandinavia because it is closest to the climate of their home planet! But yeah the CCCC thread is mostly "look at this fun webcomic I found" and I've found a ton of good stuff through it. Good thread. Captain Oblivious fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Apr 20, 2024 |
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Apr 20, 2024 22:01
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Captain Oblivious posted:Sinfest is NOT benignly bad, it's cancerously bad, but it is at least hilarious to pull out the deeply unhinged ideological underpinings of each new curveball. Japanese American Tatsuya Ishida is now advocating for a form of Esoteric Nazism that believes white people are space aliens who originally settled in Scandinavia because it is closest to the climate of their home planet! Case in point about how it's awful, but also, that thing where it comes up once in a blue moon means that instead of the slow but constant slide into further reactionary insanity that it is, I see it with enough time in between for these jumps to be surprising. I'm not asking for further details I just wanted to note that no matter how bad it was before, apparently it can get worse with that guy.
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Apr 20, 2024 22:13
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Captain Oblivious posted:Lore Olympus doesn't deserve a hate train. Like, it's bad, no doubt about it...but it's at least kind of benignly, weirdly bad. It's fun to pick apart it's deeply strange decisions. It's ongoing efforts to girlbossify Greek Myth is some of the funniest poo poo I have ever read. Oh yeah, I know Sinfest went completely bonkers. That's maybe the one time where I can't help going "what is even that guy's deal???" because Ishida is such a recluse and doesn't have a huge social media presence. What does he do all day? Scroll chan boards exclusively? Where's he going that's funneled into weirder and weirder nazi conspiracy poo poo?
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Apr 20, 2024 22:18
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My exposure to Sinfest is that every so often a Sinfest comic goes viral because they're just so strange, even people who don't know any Webcomics lore can WTF at them. There's a sense that the whole thing is semi-ironic, but not only is that annoying as poo poo, it kinda feels like an excuse for nothing making any sense.
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Apr 20, 2024 22:30
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Lore Olympus taught me the most important life lesson of all: never apologize for being Sicilian.
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Apr 20, 2024 22:44
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I always read that name as Laura Limpus.
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Apr 20, 2024 22:55
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mycot posted:There's a sense that the whole thing is semi-ironic, but not only is that annoying as poo poo, it kinda feels like an excuse for nothing making any sense. No it's just been precisely tracking the trajectory of someone being radicalized in real time. Like that's not speculation about his personal life, it's the trajectory of the poo poo he puts in the comics, and when you see it from a distance or compare them across time the downwards steps are striking and the epistemic closure is incredible. I couldn't resist going to see what was up and not only was it ludicrously vile Nazi poo poo, including some literal Maybe Hitler Was Right stuff about Weimar Germany, he's closed the entire forum. So even his straggling SWERF'n'TERF fans must have gotten cold feet about the literal, original flavor Nazi propaganda.
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Apr 20, 2024 23:09
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Rand Brittain posted:Maybe we should talk about Clown Corps more. I really love Clown Corps more but I'm starting to get a little iffy about the politics of this whole "clown" thing. This is, as the kids say, a Theme of the comic! You should be iffy! Binky is! Joe said very early on that he was going to look at his silly painted face people as law enforcement and what that means but, as said above, is probably not going to solve problems but it's something he's interested in exploring.
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Apr 20, 2024 23:43
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Dawgstar posted:This is, as the kids say, a Theme of the comic! You should be iffy! Binky is! Joe said very early on that he was going to look at his silly painted face people as law enforcement and what that means but, as said above, is probably not going to solve problems but it's something he's interested in exploring. Yeah, exploring the ethics of superpowered law enforcement but filtered through the lens of a literal clownshow is an inspired idea. At the very least it's unlikely to be as cowardly about it as its clearest and nearest inspiration, My Hero Academia.
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Apr 20, 2024 23:51
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Dawgstar posted:This is, as the kids say, a Theme of the comic! You should be iffy! Binky is! Joe said very early on that he was going to look at his silly painted face people as law enforcement and what that means but, as said above, is probably not going to solve problems but it's something he's interested in exploring. Yeah, I really like the aspect of defamiliarization going on - it's going a step beyond, say, Sky High or My Hero Academia (no comment on whether those are critical of cops, just, the step involved). See, normally works that make law enforcement into super heroes are still working with a body of tropes and symbols that are highly discussed already. Are cape comics inescapably authoritarian? It's been discussed endlessly! There's already a tendency in the world of comics to see 'superhero' as already a figure of authority vs. safety, of social norms, conformity, and power. In various directions. By making the capes into funny noses, Clown Corps catches readers off guard. I know I don't automatically rally my usual set of associations when the combatants are all literal clowns! So the story can build itself up without immediately facing the audience's immune system about capes and cops. E: haha MHA already getting the tomatoes above, and fairly so
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Apr 20, 2024 23:54
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There's that recent moment in Clown Corps that juxtaposes "she's a little afraid of clowns" and "are we free go go?" and it's great.
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Apr 21, 2024 00:02
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Dawgstar posted:This is, as the kids say, a Theme of the comic! You should be iffy! Binky is! Joe said very early on that he was going to look at his silly painted face people as law enforcement and what that means but, as said above, is probably not going to solve problems but it's something he's interested in exploring. I mean, I get this, but I feel like it it falls flat because there are not actually any bad clowns. Everything bad about the Clown Corps either stems from bad (civilian) leadership or from the slanderous lies spread about them by evil, jealous mimes. There are not actually any bad apples spoiling the bunch.
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Apr 21, 2024 00:22
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