GreenMetalSun posted:

Something else is that I think on some level, Mookie understands that 'rich white woman attempts to frame poor black man for rape' and 'bullying disabled and/or gay people' are bad things for a person to do, he just lacks the ability to approach the topic with nuance, respect for the victim(s), or tact. I truly feel that no one should have to censor themselves, but the dude needs to have a critical eye for what topics are going to land gracefully in a gag-a-day comic.

You know how there's a small group of sycophants who never clued in how bad the comic was? My best friend in late middle/early high school was one of them. I keenly remember the 'Bumper is black!' reveal, because I remember her trying to frame it to me in social justice terms and ranting about 'Hey, did you know that there are a whole bunch of people online who are mad that Bumper is black?' and 'Hey, did you know that there are a ton of stupid people who didn't know from the beginning that Bumper is black?'.

Girl, how could anyone have figured that out? All the characters have the exact same face/body.

I sort of regret sitting her down and trying to explain to her why people didn't like how it was handled (though I'm sure there were people being racist about it, that was not the majority opinion by far), because she stopped talking about the comic to me after that. Which was fine at the time, because it meant I no longer had to read it so she could talk to me about it. Now, I sort of want to know how all of this was filtered through the lens of a superfan.

TheHan posted:

No we’re both wrong, even less is happening.



Ok, the whole legacy has been like this but it’s so annoying how the Wednesday update is always just a transition page between Monday and Friday. We already saw him take an ink dive on Monday, he’ll presumedly talk to the Ink Witch on Friday, what is the Wednesday page for! We haven’t learned anything new, it isn’t showing us anything we haven’t already seen, it’s just a whole page dedicated to one panel of content.

I know it’s just Mookie being lazy, but it makes reading the comic—especially at only 3 pages a week—excruciating.

Invisible Clergy posted:

That sounds like a fun game. I think that in the next comic, red vines will have teleported back to the ground so Mookie doesn't have to show her climbing down that tree since it is rankly impossible, there will be no trace of this creepy puppeteer mouth looking-rear end fruit, they will look at each other for a panel after she says something Snout can't hear and she will kiss Snout's mouth.

The Little Death posted:

E: ^^^Gross.



Teaching her to read. You'd think Mookie would have a little self-awareness and try not steer directly into these cliches. But yeah, she's a child in a (dead?) adult's body.

Also, yeah, still naked, and the fruit husk is on the ground, so no time or distance has passed since the tree incident. They just spontaneously decided to sit down for a lesson.

PoptartsNinja posted:

There's a common trap that new or inexperienced writers fall into, that's obvious in hindsight or once it's pointed out: you can only write a character who's as intelligent as you yourself are. This isn't an issue with most characters, but becomes a huge problem if you're writing That Power Fantasy Character who's the Smartest Most Clever Genius in a Room Full of Other Supposed Geniuses who Don't Recognize that He's a Genius and who Earn Their Comeuppance Through Antagonizing the Real Genius.

In order for that character to prove they're the smartest, everyone else has to be dumber. I'm going to pretend I call this the Dunning-Sueger effect.

That's not necessarily even a problem in young adult fiction (at least, in terms of reader enjoyment, it's still a huge issue for other reasons). If the reader is cleverer than the main character they get a positive feeling for being smarter than a super-genius; and if they aren't they still get to vicariously enjoy the main character's supposed brilliance because they're (usually) privy to his thoughts.

Obviously this is loving awful for developing mental health because the reader constantly gets to feel like they're also the smartest person in the room (rather than the likely truth: that they either matched or outwitted an author of moderate intelligence). Even this isn't a problem if they're consuming other media. I love my trash fiction, it's cathartic, but it's not the only thing I read.


From a writer's perspective, there's also an incredibly easy technique that anyone can use to avoid falling into the Dunning-Sueger hole:

Don't claim your main character is a genius. There's a reason all the Sherlock Holmes novels were from Watson's perspective.

Invisible Clergy posted:

That's pretty terrible, all right.

If I didn't already know how this shook out, I'd guess that Brakkis uses an obscure legal precedent to challenge Deegan and the Deegans to a battle of the bands and if his team wins they get all the money. He then ingeniously uses another law that he's allowed to use proxies and hires a boy band to sing crowd-pleasing pop music and perform highly choreographed dance routines. The judges like Brakkis's band more and give them a better score but then when the Deegans play, Dominic scream-sings the band's number one hit "gently caress You See the Truth" into the mic and it shoots truth lasers into the eyes of the judges and gives them a vision that Brakkis had his singers enchanted by a magician to be good at singing which is against the rules for some reason and they are disqualified despite having scored higher then the crowd carries Dominic on their shoulders like Rudy.

That would be terrible too, but man, I wish that was all that was to come.

Regalingualius posted:

And WRT the reread: yet a-loving-gain, Dominic fails to respect his loved ones’ boundaries and doesn’t get called out on it, despite this being his biggest breach of privacy yet. In any other story, Luna would be more than within her rights to be beyond furious with him for doing something this gross; like, imagine if she had walked in while it was still in the middle of showing her having sex?

And yet, she’s still a total pushover for him even after that, which really just highlights the total power imbalance in their relationship.

Cloacamazing! posted:

With that said, my new prediction is that by the end of the week, Corpse Bride will write "SNOUT IS FRIEND. I LIKE SNOUT." in Snout's journal. They will then cuddle naked and she will show up in his dreamvisionthing. Bonus prediction: When they wake up, Corpse Bride will write something else in Snout's journal. He'll look and it will say "IT'S BEEN 200 YEARS SINCE DOMINIC DEEGAN BEGAN HIS"

GrossMurpel posted:

I love this society that has very strict laws but also just allows the challengee to make demands in duels?
"You challenged my client to a duel, I'm his proxy."
"Did I? Oh yeah I guess I did, whoops."
"Okay the stakes are if I win you have to stop your concert."
"gently caress off."

TheHan posted:

Somebody say flacid?



Oh what a clever little boy. See, we all thought it was the Ink Witch talking when really it was Arudak! That means...hmm, well...I don't know what this means for anything. I am actually surprised, though. Mookie had the self-awareness to throw in that line about Snout forgiving him one more time, it's a small admittance to all the uncool poo poo he had the Ink Witch do.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

Yeah this is literally what is happening. Imagine this story with the genders flipped - Snout is no longer a noble Good Guy, it's a dark look into a toxic abusive relationship and how we can't let them go.

RandomPauI posted:

Does this mean corpse wife is a book binding witch?

amigolupus posted:

One thing I'm not sure of is whether Corpsemomwife has only lost her memories and is disoriented from it or if she's supposed to have the mental faculties of a small child.

super sweet best pal posted:

Think the next update will be the alleged gate or will we do another cycle of teaching corpsemom to read, followed by a dream and then some more walking?

GrossMurpel posted:

WHY DOES NOTHING EVER HAPPEN

Kavak posted:

If it's a legitimate feminist rape, the comic has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

GreenMetalSun posted:

Wait a second, why would you even your bring your wife and underage daughter to the RapeClan Meeting run by RapeClan on the RapeClan territory where anyone is allowed to rape women if they murder their husbands and also they sanction the rape of female children?

Would it not have been feminist enough for him to say, 'idk honey, maybe sit this one out? and maybe lets not bring our daughter?'

Wasn't he one of the great tribal chiefs of his generation? I get that he couldn't bring an army onto someone else's lands, but wouldn't he have had at least a few bodyguards/warriors to look after his kid?

Mx. posted:

Regalingualius posted:

IIRC, isn’t this also the last time that the rape comes up for a long, long time?