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Sometimes, the basic concepts here are neat enough that I want to like them. A magical, mind-controlling, intelligent plant that makes a cloned plant-human when it reproduces, which then wanders into a new human settlement, and finds a good place to plant itself, tended to by its thralls while it grows into its adult form, which can easily take over a neighbourhood? That's cool. That's threatening and weird and spooky. You could do some neat things with a plant clone being deceptive about her true desire to find a suitable place to take root while making nice with people she'll turn into thralls when the time is right. You could explore trying to reason with such a bizarre and inhuman creature. You could have a flawed clone not know what she is and then have to deal with that. But Mookie won't loving do anything with these set pieces, because he's allergic to putting real stakes in his stories. I hate wasted potential.
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May 19, 2021 16:40
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I am waiting for the plot to start happening instead of yet another comic consisting of everyone standing around talking about Snout.
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May 22, 2021 16:40
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Eh, I'll say that needing to go for a walk after someone hands you an essay they wrote for some reason about useless you are is probably fair. That would gently caress me up a bit. But that's the only thing that makes sense. The art is clumsy, Snout absolutely looks like he's making GBS threads on a hill, and it still doesn't answer why anyone would write extensively on the uselessness of someone they just met in academic terms and then let them read it. If Snout is meant to read as Mookie's self insert, it does kind of read like Mookie's refutation of his critics. Except "well you're just mean because you think you're better than me" is some middle school level of insight.
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May 26, 2021 18:14
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Billy Gnosis posted:What is the point of today's comic? Does he think the past several comics were too subtle. Does he think comics need to show AND tell? This is a thing that drives me nuts. I can never tell if it's an author not confident in the ability of their art to speak for itself, or if they want to make sure you know how clever they are.
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Jun 2, 2021 16:36
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I'm struck by how much this looks like the fictional capital city I came up with for the lovely fantasy novel I wrote when I was sixteen. Also, I'm really bothered by the fact that there's no gates for the rivers.
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Jun 15, 2021 16:15
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Beelzebufo posted:Also, I didn't think about this at the time, but what were those orcs fishing for? Since they're herbivores? I've definitely caught weeds while fishing, but not on purpose, and not efficiently.
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Jun 17, 2021 02:29
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I hate Snout's one warty shoulder so much.
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Jun 22, 2021 02:50
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holy poo poo
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Jun 24, 2021 02:34
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It should not take literal years of a comic to establish your protagonist's personality.
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Jul 13, 2021 14:52
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Rotten Red Rod posted:What Mookie promised: There may even be loving, consensual sex scenes if the story calls for them. Oh yes, I, too, sleep contorted so that both my rear end and tits point towards the ceiling and any unseen voyeurs. God, that looks uncomfortable. Also, while I'm here, I'm eternally unclear on what corpsemommy's skin... texture... is meant to convey.
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Jul 28, 2021 05:53
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Rotten Red Rod posted:Scars, from the "necromantic vines". Well, it looks like tree bark or something.
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Jul 28, 2021 06:03
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Mookie is really, really proud of his traced drawing.
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Aug 2, 2021 16:26
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Mmm, that's a terrible memorial design. Trees aren't static. They grow. They are living things.  
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Aug 20, 2021 14:34
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To be fair, names having power is an old folkloric thing, particularly with fairies. You don't give a fairy your name, because that will give it power over you. In return, a fairy is unlikely to give you its true name either. Fairies in old folklore are weird, powerful, and potentially very dangerous. They steal babies, after all, and make binding bargains with unexpected costs ("your hardship and poverty will end, and in return I ask for the thing you have at home that you don't know you have" and then the dude goes home to discover his wife is pregnant and he just bargained away his unborn child), and kidnap people away to trick them into servitude at the fairy court, so names are part of the rules that are supposed to protect you from them. Probably the best known example in current culture is Rumplestiltskin, but that's not the only story about someone getting out of a bad bargain with a fairy by learning their true name, rather than an alias. That said, I don't expect Mookie to go into any sort of concrete reason for why ink witches care about this.
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Sep 1, 2021 22:07
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"Page" is cute and I would like it if it was attached to a better comic.
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Sep 8, 2021 22:44
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You know, I had to cut off a friend of mine after he texted me asking to come over and platonically cuddle in his bed with him (while he was, for complicated reasons, temporarily separated from his wife) and he couldn't understand why I was so upset by this. I don't think he's Mookie, but jesus why is there more than one dude like that.
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Sep 11, 2021 03:22
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PoptartsNinja posted:IIRC pulling out the tusks pulls out part of your soul, so if you pull out both you become soulless or something. ... Does this apply only to curse tusks or bodily integrity as a whole? Because, oooh boy does this get awful if you start overthinking it through. If removing them purposely damages your soul, does accidentally knocking your teeth out do the same? If this applies to all bodily integrity, and I feel like it should because that's the whole thing with Dominic's necromancer brother isn't it, that he's hosed up because he's damaged his soul doing terrible things, and thematically "alteration magic for cosmetic purposes is awful and the people who do it are awful" lines up with that, then what happens if you lose a limb in an accident? Even if we say that intent matters and you have to do it on purpose, what if your arm is gangrenous and you need to amputate? If amputees have damaged souls, jesus christ does that have some bad implications. If the soul is linked to bodily integrity, god forbid you're born without an arm or a leg in this world.
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Sep 12, 2021 15:54
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You know, the first stretch of this comic wasn't even terrible. The Wild Edge had some unique set pieces and Snout had a goal where it felt there was some urgency behind it, and he accordingly did things. I wouldn't say it was great art, but it was fine. It's the sort of thing that would've been good enough for me to read long enough to see if the author was going to do something interesting with. Now, Snout does nothing, there is no sense of urgency, and never any sense is danger because Mookie is too loving precious about his characters for them to experience hardship for more than ten minutes. There are no stakes. If something happens, be sure that very quickly that problem will be solved. And then there's strips like these, which accomplish nothing, advance nothing, and actively undo any good character development Snout had early on when he was running around fighting trees. But also, that mirrors my experience reading the original comic. I unironically read Dominic Deegan for a while when it was new, because I was young and had less refined taste and I was kind of blown away by free comics on the internet in general and I read a lot of crap. I'm not sure where I stopped (before a lot of the really crazy stuff that's been posted in here), maybe around a year or so into its run, but I abandoned it because it was boring. Because Dominic solved every problem, because the good guys were perfect and the bad guys were cartoonish, and it was so, so shallow, and it wasn't worth the effort to keep up on. Really, Legacy feels like the perfect successor to Dominic Deegan.
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Sep 20, 2021 20:37
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What a pretentious fuckwit. "I made it boring on purpose, I'm so clever!" I mean, it's still boring, though. E: it's possible to depict boredom without actually being boring, and that would be an achievement, but no, mr. big brain over here decided he would purposely make a boring comic and then gloat about it.
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Sep 22, 2021 15:15
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God I'm so mad I'm going to come back and comment again. Goons: "This comic is so boring." Mookie, an intellectual: "Ah, you fools, you imbeciles, you simpletons!! You've fallen for one of the classic blunders!! You see, I made it boring on purpose!!!!!" Author's intent only goes so far, but the author's intent was to be boring ON PURPOSE so that you, the reader, are ALSO BORED, and he thought this would be good and compelling fiction.
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Sep 22, 2021 15:33
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This comic is really wordy for a story with no spoken dialogue. Like, the early comic was actually halfway decent about balancing silent action and sparse written information. I can't remember if I've said this before but the early comic, maybe up until they left the Wild Edge, was mildly interesting in that "well, it's not good but it might become good so I'll give it some time to figure out where it's going." Now it's just "here's a wall of text while the characters stand around." A thing happens, Snout doesn't understand why, everything has to stop so someone can explain to him. goddammit at this point just do some sort of captioned sign language, it would be 100% less contrived and awkward and annoying to read. If you want to write a story that will necessitate large infodumps then you can't just have the characters write essays at each other all the time. That isn't natural. It isn't practical. It's not how people communicate. Writing is slow. If someone has something to write to Snout, something that cannot be communicated another way, it needs to be something that can be written down in a hurry, at least in a situation like this. God, I have barely any sense of who Kazya is, never mind that I don't have the context to know why her liking someone else is so traumatic.
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Oct 6, 2021 08:12
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I'm mentally ill and probably on the spectrum (AFAB people are terribly underdiagnosed) and I write sometimes. Sometimes it's kind of dumb, and sometimes it's a bit navel-gazey. I do not write long pointless stories about women being whores ruining the lives of the heroic men in their lives, because I am not a lovely person. Being mentally ill or neurodivergent does not directly cause you to have terrible opinions, nor does it make you exempt from criticism for them.
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Oct 8, 2021 21:41
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Douche Wolf 89 posted:Archie is currently a high school teacher, ROTC instructor, unlicensed PTSD therapist, football coach, firefighter, militia member, and a general contractor, and I'm definitely missing some occupations. He fought in WWI, was attacked by a bear, was a super hero, joined a gang, infiltrated a cult (I think 2 actually? There were 2 separate cults operating in one season), hunted a serial killer, went to prison, there are maple coated magic mushrooms, aliens, and the whole town got over a seizure-inducing, waterborne disease and quarantine between two episodes. I would love to watch this but tbh I don't want to watch the normal high school drama of the first season.
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Oct 12, 2021 00:19
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Incidentally, I'm kind of bothered about this implication, if that's what we're meant to infer, that a being who has enough sense of self to name herself and behaves in normal, socially acceptable ways, can somehow not possess a soul. Also maybe the reason the the chandak lives alone in the middle of the lake is because she only tells people terrible things they don't want to know.
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Oct 12, 2021 00:41
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I think a dialogue-free comic works best either as an interlude in a longer story, or as a story involving characters who do not talk, either because they are animals, or aliens who the audience is not meant to be able to understand, or a character going through something alone, or something along those lines. It is limiting, because it forces the author/artist to work with showing emotional beats or action rather than explicitly telling the audience, but working within a tight framework sometimes lets you do something different. It's the same idea behind haiku, or a sonnet: the rules are strict so you have to really work your artistic muscles in order to make something good. And it's very hard to keep that up for a long period of time unless your story is very narratively simple. Mookie is attempting to tell a complex (not good, mind you, but complex) story with this limitation, with a plot that is probably impossible to communicate without dialogue, even for a good writer, so he's just having everybody write their dialogue down after saying it. A story is shaped by the media you use to tell it. The rules of storytelling in a movie are different than a tv show, which are different from a novel, which are different from a video game. Mookie does not appear to understand this, and is using general comic rules without paying attention to the rules of a silent story. To continue my structured poetry comparison, he's trying to tell a novel in the form of haiku, but with footnotes between every few stanzas translating his metaphors. The result is... Bad. At best it's awkward and at worst it's incomprehensible. Even a really good writer would struggle with what he's trying to do, and he's not a good writer, so we get this disaster.
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Oct 17, 2021 23:08
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Dracula is a really great spooky book but I'm now going to forever picture everyone wearing jeans because that's hilarious. Especially Dracula.
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Oct 23, 2021 16:05
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Of course, the thing is that even before blue jeans were patented, people were wearing work pants made of coarse cloth, like canvas. That doesn't mean I'm giving Dominic a pass.
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Oct 24, 2021 00:49
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She doesn't seem to be enjoying herself.
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Nov 3, 2021 18:29
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PoptartsNinja posted:If we're getting biological about it, it doesn't make sense for any intelligent species to be a primary herbivore. They have to devote too much time and effort to digestion, AKA: the panda problem. Humans invented fire to deal with tough vegetables, we didn't grow bigger teeth. If you want an almost-human example, gorillas are mostly herbivores, and are pretty intelligent animals. They also have big bellies full of incredibly long hind guts devoted to fermenting and breaking down all that raw roughage. Cooking our food is the only reason we don't also have giant stomachs like gorillas, and this is why raw foodism IS MY loving PET PEEVE
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Nov 9, 2021 00:17
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Mx. posted:i learn a lot from the various discussions in this thread, it's very enjoyable It's true that, between us all, we have some information to make for a really rich and interesting fictional world, and that's more interesting to me than anything in the actual comic. RoboRodent fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Nov 9, 2021 |
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Nov 9, 2021 02:56
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Zereth posted:If I remember correctly the tusks are for EATING tough veggies.  Molars. They're called molars.
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Nov 9, 2021 05:15
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Hell yeah, saber tooth deer. There is a thing where a lot of plants have evolved "hey you, eat me to complete my life cycle." Plants may have defenses to keep the rest of them from being eaten, but a lot of them will then put out a tempting edible fruit full of seeds to be pooped out somewhere with a convenient supply of fertilizer. Oak forests will create massive crops of acorns, just to play the game of "if we jointly create as many acorns as we can, it's impossible for all of them to be eaten." There is definitely room for exploring a sapient plant culture that takes a slightly unexpected view of whether or not it's okay for animal races to eat their seeds. There's room to think about motile plant species and how they're constructed, how they behave, to look at plant species that move quickly in the real world and extrapolate. But, you know, Mookie is king of lazy world building and just ignores all this. It's just magic. It works because magic. It exists because I say it does.
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Nov 9, 2021 16:57
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Tesseraction posted:Yeah HDM uses a lot of more native words like Japanese people being the Nihon and kerosene lamps being naptha lamps (from Akkadian/Old Persian). It points to a world where English evolved slightly differently in terms of external influence, in line with a world that is *like* ours but different. I haven't read HDM in forever, though I did really like it when I was younger. It was a "here's a book to read while we're camping" from my parents, and they were pleased it was a hit, as I recall. I do remember that the equivalent term for "electric" was "anbaric," and I did know that the word "electricity" came from the Greek word for amber "elektron." In those pre-google days, working out that "anbar" was the Arabic root was beyond me, but it was close enough to the modern English word for me to guess. And I felt so goddamn smart when I put those together. I still have the books. Maybe it's worth a reread at some point.
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Nov 10, 2021 04:11
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Even the best possible read of this where Snout can be said to be consenting, he's still a huge rear end in a top hat for having sex with the person who he was so mad at for hurting his friends. That's the best way to read it. So much for being remembered for his kindness.
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Nov 19, 2021 16:33
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Personally, I'm very fond of this great view of how Snout's tail emerges from the middle of his spine. I think this means that it's reasonable to assume that his tail has no bones at all and is just a fleshy appendage full of erectile tissue, and I regret having this thought.
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Dec 3, 2021 07:40
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I don't know how you manage to draw a naked person looking so much like they're wearing clothes. I am not a good artist by any means, Mookie probably has some ability on me, but I don't think I've ever managed to draw skin in a way that looks like fabric or leather.
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Dec 6, 2021 16:13
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For me, I think it's partly "hosed" combined with "shared pleasure and bliss" on the same page which is so incredibly disjointed.
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Dec 7, 2021 16:20
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Are you loving KIDDING ME WITH THIS poo poo
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Dec 15, 2021 18:39
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Twelve by Pies posted:Mookie probably thinks this is sex positive but he's practically straight up said "Arudak wouldn't give a poo poo about his dead girlfriend if she wasn't so good at sucking dick." The urge to touch the poop and tweet this at him is SO STRONG
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Jan 7, 2022 02:47
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There are so many words, and none of them are good. None of them. How do you write so many words in your dialogue-free comic and have approximately zero of them be interesting or revealing? This comic is just...masturbatory, and not because of the incredibly gratuitous sex scene which added nothing except a conflict that was resolved in a single page.
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Jan 8, 2022 16:51
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