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Penny Arcade - Comic - Fractal Parody
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Fractal Parody
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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And he really went to town on that demon. Can't say I've ever seen a warthog demon with nipple rings.
The strips where they talk about random mundane stuff while crazy stuff goes on unremarked in the background (and sometimes foreground) are among my favorite.
People like this are convinced if they just tell you their side you'll understand without realizing their side is fucking awful.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Probably better to change your name and retain some dignity, tbh
Yes, this. That closing line where he's saying he thinks he's the nicest showrunner etc, proves he's learned fucking nothing from any of it. He knows a couple correct soundbites to say but can't help himself from letting his true bullshit seep through.
In a way its reassuring that shitty people like people who are into cypto or cross fit have to blurt it out at every opportunity
pleasepaypreacher.net
Yes, stick to the story
The boar with the niprings is pretty wild tho heyooooooo!
It's sort of the human variation on the brightly colored skin of the poison arrow frog.
For all its popularity, Firefly is pretty horribly flawed. Sex workers have leveled a number of criticisms of how Inara was depicted, and then there's the Lost Cause undercurrent in the show. It's going to be interesting to see how the proposed reboot tries to handle things.
Yeah, Jerry's post is ace
I liked Firefly, even if Whedon always put out "skeevy" vibes to me... but with no real proof back then, just seemed like a dickish thing to say. But I guess now I feel somewhat justified in feeling that.
@Lttlefoot Whedon isn't being called terrible for expressing an unpopular political view, he's been accused of being an abusive employer and a sex pest. Like, one actress (Michelle Trachtenberg) was a minor, and there was apparently a rule on the set (of Buffy) to never leave her alone in a room with him.
One, that's not what's happening here - Whedon's record of abuse has been well documented.
Two, the "difference of opinion" fallacy needs to go die in a fire. It turns out that many people "disagree" with things like misogyny because they are reprehensible positions to hold, and distilling that opposition to "disagreement" is arguing in bad faith at best.
When did we start throwing up smokescreens to try and divert attention away from terrible people?
I like apple pie better than cherry pie. I can disagree with someone about that without needing to think that they're a terrible person. This is not an apple pie vs cherry pie scenario.
Oh but everyone always criticizes the way their job is depicted in tv. It's just that most silly stereotypes are just dumb, whereas stereotypes about sex workers increase the risk of people treating them badly.
Anywho. I love Angel and Firefly. There's plenty of people that aren't Whedon that put work into them. But yeah, Whedon is shit. Just go away dude.
When your mechanic gets raped, beaten and murdered for being a mechanic, we'll have that conversation. Until then, stop being such a silly goose who pretends to not understand context.
Yeah, at least when it comes to stuff like those shows, they aren't solely created by the asshole in question, there are hundreds of artists involved in making a TV show. I have a harder time when it's a book author who made the art I love, but I can't say I throw those books out when I learn the author is a terrible person, either. I just try not to think of the author and try not to put anymore money in thier pocket (secondhand books ftw).
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
But I don't think either response is necessary, because those responses tie the quality of a creation to the decency of a creator. Obviously we wouldn't do that with other products: mass produced cars aren't less of a technological marvel because Henry Ford was a Nazi. I guess we do it with creative works because authors, by necessity, share something of themselves in their work. So if the author is a bad person, what does that say about their work? So you end up with people saying a work made by someone bad has to be bad, or the maker of a good work has to be good.
This is not to say that you have to like Firefly. If you've always felt like it was crap, or hated the portrayal of the female characters, that is totally fair. I personally still love Firefly and think all the characters, male and female, are fantastically deep and interesting and refreshing. And that doesn't clash with me seeing that Whedon, objectively, has been revealed to be a terrible person. It's a shame, of course, but no one has taken the sky from me. For one thing, Whedon is not the sole creator of Zoe and Wash. And for another, even those aspects which were definitely his brain child, can still be good even if he was being creepy and abusive even as he created them.
On the other hand, when it comes to an abusive creator, as opposed to just a creepy one, the "human cost" factor comes in. So, like, Red Dead 2 can still be a good game even though it was made via abuse. But it's not a good product because no matter how good it is, it was not worth the cost to make. What we do with the product afterwards is sort of a different question. I can definitely still enjoy Firefly (and since I have the box set no one is getting enriched by me watching it) but I don't know how I'd feel about watching a movie made with his involvement in the future (if that will ever even happen now).
All this to say that I don't see the need to go back and read Whedon's own toxicity back into his works if it wasn't there. I still love Firefly and Dr. Horrible and Avengers (and I like Age of Ultron). Whedon's attitudes make me question whether Billy from Dr. Horrible was supposed to be sympathetic (I always saw him as tragic, but only as the author of his own misery, as a quintessential toxic nice guy). But I can still keep reading it the way I had before, though I totally get if that's not the case for someone else.
But I certainly don't feel the need to dig deep to find the flaws in all the works of his I liked before. For one thing, that's way more energy than the man deserves. The other thing is that - and this is not a popular opinion - a bad person can still make great art. A completely unethical person can invent a fictional world with utopian ethics at its core. I'm not saying that Firefly falls under that definition, since I think that world was intentionally a pretty bleak one, but I'm thinking of another asshole, Orson Scott Card, who somehow created a world (the Speaker for the Dead series) where inclusiveness was treated as the most important thing in the world. I've even heard in the past that Card was/is pro-socialism. I'm never going to give him anymore money for his books, but when the new Shadow book comes out, I'll get it second-hand and read it.
I've been thinking more about how with the rise of the para-social relationship people just want to obliterate those who have committed crimes of one sort or another, in light of Lindsay Ellis withdrawing from Youtube. Not just making sure they don't get to be on TV or don't get to have Youtube views anymore, both of which are fine, but actually blasting people's emails and twitter with continuous threats and noise until that person has to just stop being on the internet. This more normally happens to women, so I don't expect Whedon has had to deal with it, but I also don't think he would deserve that if it is happening. And I genuinely hope that it's not! Take him off TV and film, don't send him an email, which becomes one among thousands upon thousands of his disappointed fans. If you want to send emails, save it for any studio that tries to give him another film, but individual humans aren't made to withstand that kind of torture and no one should have to. He doesn't need to be erased from time for what he's done, he just needs to retire. And I mean if we could get criminal charges for sexual harassment that would also be good but who knows if that's even possible, and if the victims are unwilling they deserve to be left in peace, too. Which makes me realize Gal Gadot and Charisma Carpenter are probably getting death threats for "ruining" Joss Whedon and uuuuuuugh.
Edit: Pretty great take from Charisma Carpenter:
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
not
to come off like
but
to be
theyll either leave you alone or youll get a book deal and ten million worshipers on youtube
joss whedon is not his art so separate them if youve a sieve which finely sifts dogshit
I just remember watching Angel and having him "kill" Fred and thinking.. man Joss really has a fucking problem with happy couples.
Or, you know, those incels painted him that way along with a swathe of other people they didn't like, and just managed to get lucky. But you believe what lets you get through the day, I guess.