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Penny Arcade - Comic - Ethical Sourcing
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Ethical Sourcing
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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It's been ages since PA talked about a game I actually played. Did they ever make a Splatoon comic?
Yeah... I don't wanna rain on all the fun they're having, but I am also getting a bit worn out on the singular fixation on Destiny. Especially because it's not just the comics. It's the comics, and the news posts, and the podcasts... destiny, destiny, destiny. I'd like to move on.
I'm... I'm not complaining or anything, the gaming world doesn't revolve around me and my tastes of course. But I've been reading PA since the very start (well, almost) and I can't recall a single game or event ever getting as much comics dedicated to it as Destiny.
Um, WoW for sure, just off the top of my head.
Yeah, there are like 40 WoW comics<edit, the archive says 64>.
Don't get me wrong. They like what they like and I'm not saying that Destiny is a bad game and they are not allowed to talk about it or like it. I'm sure for all the people who play Destiny this is an absolute fiesta. But for people who don't like or don't play Destiny, they may feel a little excluded...?
Bah, now you guys done made me feel like I'm hatin'. I do not share their ongoing obsession with Destiny, but I love PA and what they do.
Yes, they have done a lot of WoW comics, but just searching for "wow" isn't really going to give you an accurate picture.
So that may be why you're feeling Destiny burnout more than anything.
I agree for this comic, but some of the Destiny strips have been a lot harder to pierce, like Wednesday's.
I dunno, I guess I can see how someone would feel that way, but I got a laugh out of it just from the idea of "Overly dramatic video game character who speaks only in ponderous spooky cryptic statements goes to fast food restaurant." I don't feel like you need to know who/what Oryx is to understand the joke.
I agree there seem to be a LOT of Destiny comics tho.
There isn't really much to this comic Destiny related besides the aesthetic. They might as well be talking about bafmodads.
What is a Tomb Husk and what is a "conflict" Tomb Husk? Why is it funny that he makes his own? I honestly don't understand any of this comic.
http://www.debeers.com
I feel like I'm repeatedly not being understood here. I don't care that they made *a* comic about Destiny and I never argued that there isn't humor in there that is impossible to pick up on without having played Destiny. The concern I raised was that Destiny has been talked about a lot lately, not just in this one comic, but in several recent comics, and in news, and in podcasts. It's more of an overall feeling than a this specific comic feeling.
Despite feeling a bit left out of the destiny club, I'll still come for the humor, though, for sure.
Or a Sourdough Jack.
A Tomb Husk is apparently some kind of drop, but the rest of it - the heart of the joke, IMO - is stuff that doesn't appear in the game at all, and really comes from a place that's antithetical to the "kill people/critters for their phat lewt" model. A "conflict" diamond, etc, is a resource produced by a morally unpleasant regime that engages in wars and other conflicts and bad things; certain parties will rush to assure the concerned public that their products are not tainted by (metaphorical) blood; see also "sustainable harvesting", etc etc. And of course, the most morally pure thing of all is to make the thing you need yourself, at home, where you (supposedly) know everything that goes into it and that it's 100% cruelty-free, etc.
Again, none of this applies to typical MMO loot, most of which is plucked or ripp'd from the still twitching carcass of something you just hacked/shot/blasted to bits. The joke comes from juxtaposing that sort of acquisition with the sort of business and/or consumer who pride themselves on only selling/buying "ethical" goods.
Your problem here has nothing to do with your unfamiliarity with Destiny and everything to do with the fact you've never happened to hear of people being concerned with products being ethically sourced/conflict-free/fair-trade/free-range/etc. The fact that the idea of "conflict" Tomb Husks and making Tomb Husks yourself at home doesn't make sense is the point of the comic. The humor comes from the idea of video game characters applying these concepts to mystical sci-fi video game MacGuffins.
They could have done this comic with Mario and Luigi talking about conflict mushrooms and home-grown fire flowers and you still wouldn't have gotten the joke because they're just using the trappings of a video game to parody something from the real world, and you happen to be unfamiliar with that real-world thing. That being the case I sympathize with your confusion but "Too many Destiny comics" isn't the issue.
Well, those are two completely separate issues (the later not even one brought up by me, I'm just agreeing that there have weirdly been a lot of Destiny comics)
I have never heard of a "conflict" diamond - I've certainly heard of "blood diamonds" though. I still think the whole thing is rather confusing and not really funny even knowing what they were going for. *shrug*
I know that not everywhere is like WA, where that ethical stuff runs rampant, but even in parts of Texas where we play chicken with oil rigs, we know that it's a thing. Where do you people live that this joke couldn't be grasped?
As for the use of Destiny, they're striking while the iron is hot. Maybe if Zelda was released yesterday we'd be talking about ethically sourced hearts, which, you know, they've gotta come from somewhere.
A tomb husk is just some bafmodad. The rest is just hippy talk.
I agree it's not one of their funnier comics but eh.
Here's a contrasting example from the archive link YoungFrey posted.
For the first two panels, I don't know why Gabe is interacting with this cow man, but then the punch sheds contextual light on everything: why the first two panels are Gabe and a cow man in the woods, what game they're playing, etc.
Yeah, the thing is, you need to be able to exaggerate at least a little bit for comedy and this could be pulled straight from a transcript of the kind of shit you can hear people saying to each other 100% in earnest any day of the week up here
For a funny version of the joke see this comic:
It's true if you stop thinking about the game that forms the wrapping of this comic strip, and instead read it in terms of its framework, there's nothing that can't be reasonably guessed from context! But I can certainly vouch that the feeling of "I know the thing! I'm part of the audience of this punchline!" is of no small importance. It's like, when you and your friends manage to spin some errant comment into a sprawling, elaborate in-joke. It's not even a particularly funny joke, most of the time. But somehow things are just more enjoyable when you've been steeped in its contents.
It's easy enough to get used to filtering out the game-specific flavour of a joke snowclone; that's how I've managed this whole time. But I get why being constantly locked on the other side would be a new, alienating experience for some.
I know you don't mean for it to come off this way, but my suspicion is Holkins' intention was a bit less hostile than that! I'm getting a sense the joke is more about the mundanity of it all. "Some things never change, even in intergalactic space wars" and all that. Organic paleo-fitspo young adults just happened to be a silly, convenient go-to, for an object that sounds slightly unnecessary and high-falutin'. Kale chips, celery sticks. Tomb husks.
I suppose I haven't technically disproven that a great deal of people would be laughing at these characters, though.
Sorry, let me now dispose of this joke's dissected cadavar, before we can all stand around and mourn over it.
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Roger Ebert once made a pretty compelling case (writing of Clint Eastwood) that actors who only "play themselves" needn't necessarily be considered lesser for it. As he put it, these actors (and I'd argue even someone as beloved as Morgan Freeman is one) bring a certain psychic payload to their roles. You look at Morgan Freeman or Clint Eastwood in a role, and you don't see them — you see 30+ years of film-icon, and they bring that heft to every role. Every movie Morgan Freeman is in, he's not "Morgan Freeman the actor" he's "~~~!!!!MORGAN FUCKING FREEMAN WHAT WAS IN SHAWSHANK N BATMAN N ALL!!!!!~~~"
While it's trickier to make that case for a voice actor, I think it could be done. Frank Welker, for example. I know him every time I hear him, even if he's just playing Totoro's snores or a growling bear, and while it would be easy to argue he doesn't have a lot of range and that makes him "bad"...that would be insane. He's Frank Fucking Welker. He is who he is, and his voice does what it does: carry its own legacy.
Maybe in 30 years, they'll be saying the same thing of Nolan North.