canmom reads webcomics

A blog for recording livereads of webcomics, especially comics with trans or lesbian themes, or comics that I read growing up. We'll see how it goes.

[comicalmomentum]

so while this archive isn’t going anywhere any time soon, you’ll probably have a more pleasant reading experience at https://canmom.github.io/livereads/ where you may enjoy them with the benefits of better organisation and navigation, nicer page layouts, and more screen reader friendly markup incl. alt text where relevant!

[comicalmomentum]

so i recently learned the dresden codak author is a commie who has somewhat recently come out as nb, which if I'd known the first thing about egg spotting back in the day would have been blatantly obvious lmao... but i couldn't even spot myself back then ><

anyway i thought that would be fun to revisit! didn't click back then but i probably have more of the right context nowadays.

also hi anyone who forgot this blog existed :p

[comicalmomentum]

OotS reread: not coming back

anyway i was actually rereading OotS not because I adore my own liveblogs (lol) or because I wanted to put together a massive post about gender but because someone on the GaLS server posted the latest one and I thought I should catch up

I don’t want to go back to liveblogging. especially since I seem to have a lot of bottled up Essay Power there huh.

but there’s too much gender crap I want to criticise! this shit begs for deconstruction or something

[canmom]

Soft, like an adulteress

cw: contains extensive discussion of transmisogyny. although it’s nominally about a comic

Two years ago I sat down to reread a webcomic called The Order of the Stick, probably the most popular D&D webcomic. At the time, I was apparently very depressed and anxious; I complain and get angry a lot about things that would hardly bother me today. I hope it’s a good thing to have chilled out a bit? But anyway…

Today I was rereading that liveblog, and I caught up to comic no. 244, about the end of my previous reread. Last time, I got very upset about the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity subplot, and its Hilarious Transmisogynist Japes, and gave up reading the comic. Now, I feel like it’s more interesting to talk about it, and using it to illustrate some things, rather than just leave it at ‘it sucks’.

The comic that led me to write again was this one, comic #244. For reasons of Hijinks, Roy is disguised as a woman using the Girdle, and Belkar, the token party member representing the much-maligned ‘murder hobo’ attitude to D&D, is sexually harassing him.

We get this exchange:

Durkon: …I can’t hold it in. Belkar, tha “hot piece o’ ass” ye found thar is really- Belkar: -is really Roy. Yeah, I know. I can tell by the scent. Durkon: Ye… ye already know? Then why… Belkar: Because it’s fun to make him that uncomfortable, and I’m secure enough in my manhood to go that far to embarass him.

So what’s worth commenting on here?

Well, we can ask, why does Belkar see it as worth noting that his ‘manhood’ is in question because he’s hitting on Roy, and why is he ultimately not bothered? And why should Roy find it especially degrading - is it just because he is being treated as women are treated (as in earlier strips), or something more?

In certain contexts - the ancient Greeks, and possibly (I struggle to remember) also the Norse - anal sex wasn’t/isn’t blanket stigmatised, but being the receiving partner as a ‘man’ was considered degrading.

This connects to a certain gendered position of ‘degraded feminised camab person’ that seems to be a common but not fully acknowledged byproduct of gender. In modern times, the word ‘faggot’ is sometimes used ( @softtrade talks a bit about this here, as does Rani Baker here); we may fit into society as women, but also as monsters, as need of patriarchy dictates, and that tension kind of defines our lives I guess.

@apophenic-ocelles​ wrote a brilliant post exploring this about a year ago, looking at how this kind of dynamic relates to the anthropological gaze and ‘third gender’ analyses:

The article also notes that there’s a word (”halekon”, in the article) for the less-masculine/bottomy partners (who were by and large the ones at risk of punishment for deviance during the Taliban regime) but it doesn’t interrogate this deeply, referring thereafter to halekon as young men and boys here, while describing the observations of halekon without really noticing they’re often talked about in terms of a distinct social group.

The USUAL response by a Western, academically-literate queer reader, would be to understand halekon in anthropological terms, as a “third gender” – that is, as some culturally-specific role, clearly delineated outside of the usual man-woman binary, neither men nor women.

I think that’s… closer in some respects? In that it captures something of how people in those societies understand a certain class within their midst. But it misses other aspects, and is also Othering, with a purpose. Both the article’s mangling of things and the anthropological reading portray a supposed deviation from a universal human norm – externalizing it, rendering it a cultural curiosity. “Some cultures understand that sex is between your legs,” says this narrative “and that gender is between your ears, and they might recognize more than two defined roles. And some cultures just make it so hard for straight men to get sex that they’ll have sex with other men/third-gender people – otherwise, they’d be like us, with our 10% of the population who Are Homosexual and the rest mostly straight.”

It’s presented as inherently foreign and exotic behavior, and also exceptional - which is rubbish, because this pattern totally occurs in the West as well, and it’s just as institutionalized, however different the inflection is. Men are not automatically rendered “gay”, even just in the eyes of society, when interacting sexually with certain other AMAB folks – a group that messily includes a lot of people we’d call trans women and femme gay men. (And, speaking personally, seems to cover in practice a lot of what gets analyzed by anthropologists as “third gender” variance in non-Western cultures.)

Rani, along with some other folks I’ve seen on here, refers to this group as “faggots” – because that’s the figure that the slur refers to.

This can be challenging – I feel like, if you’re younger than about 40 and from the US, and your queer scene exposure is recent, that word is understood as a more insulting way of saying “gay man.” Occasionally, it’s treated as a reclaimed slur by both gay men’s communities (though less so as gay assimilation grows, it seems to me) and a lot of lesbian/transmasculine communities (where it’s more like an aesthetic).

What Rani’s saying in essence, and what I feel is probably true, is that the “gender/sexuality” split and the “cis/trans straight/gay” split, mask an already-existing material reality in Western culture, one that defies our narratives: specifically, the ones that state there are biologically-rooted categories of male and female, who “Are” straight, gay or maybe bi, and who Are those things in an essential sense – oh and also, there’s some occasional rounding errors, ones that can be resolved by treating gender as something seperate from sex, rooting one in bodies and the other in behavior and identity, whatever the fuck that is.

Basically, the patterns we see (”there’s men and non-men, and non-manhood is broader and happens to more people than just those we’d understand as cis women, and socialization of non-men starts early and shares common features, as well as local differences, regardless of birth assignment”) are more comfortable to Western viewers when they’re situated outside of modernity, or firmly in the depths of our own history (see almost any academic discussion of eunuchs/gallae/etc). But they exist here too; they aren’t situational deviations from some underlying, more universal human norm (which is supposedly better reflected in how Westerners are taught to think their cultures handle gender). And they also aren’t like, a case of totally-separate cultures inventing suspiciously similar ways of constructing gender, totally independently, by nothing more than sheer coincidence. Rather, there’s something else going on here, and any attempt to account for gender relations is going to miss huge chunks of the picture if you exclude an important and revealing aspect of how the system actually works.

In this context, the European colonisers who laid the foundations for our present capitalism were fascinated by this kind of gender variance, even as they worked very hard to destroy it. For some more on that kind of thing, and (possibly contradictory) things on the coloniality of gender, check this one.

Tangentially, it occurs to me having just read Federici’s book, that this relates to broader efforts to use gendered violence to produce people as disposable in order to get that colonial extraction going. Federici, drawing on Silverblatt and Parinetto (who I haven’t read), describes how the witch hunts were not remotely just a European phenomenon, but their efficiency in destroying existing forms of power was found very useful to colonisers in the ‘New World’:

…also in the New World witch-hunting was a deliberate strategy used by the authorities to instill terror, destroy collective resistance, silence entire communities, and turn their members against each other. It was also a strategy of enclosure which, depending on the context, could be enclosure of land, bodies or social relations. Above all, as in Europe, witch-hunting was a means of dehumanization and as such the paradigmatic form of repression, serving to justify enslavement and genocide.

Witch-hunting did not destroy the resitance of the colonized. Due primarily to the sturggle of women, the connection of the American Indians with the land, the local religions and nature survived beyond the persecuation providing, for more than five hundred years, a source of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. This is extremely important for us, at a time when a renewed assault is being made on the resources and mode of existence of indigenous populations across the planet; for we need to resthink how the conquistadors strove to subdue those whom they colonized, and what enabled the latter to subvert this plan and, against the destruction of their social and physical universe, create a new historical reality.

She also talks about the intimate cross-pollination of the images and ideas of the witches’ sabbath etc. and the lurid descriptions of the ‘cannibals’ whose genocide needed to be justified. I feel like one thing I would want to know more about is how the ‘men’ and ‘women’ killed in the witch trials in Europe, and in European colonies, may have been gender variant? I remember oooold discussions about that on Tumblr.

Anyway, another, somewhat different historical example (I’m doing that “keeping it firmly in the depths of our own history” I notice), responding to a Twine I’ve been writing, Jackie @baeddel told me about the Canon of Theodore, a penitential from the 8th century…

we dont really know how ppl like us were referred to in history or how they saw themselves. ‘baedling’ is sort of interesting because its a male suffix - -ling is male gendered - but then goes 'for she is soft, like an adulturess’

…

it has like, an interesting passagewhere they talk about the different penalties a man needs to perform for different like, sexual immoralities or w/e: so it saysif a man sleeps with another man, then he must do this; if a man sleeps with livestock, then he must do this; and then,if a man sleeps with a baedling, then he must do this

and then there’s a bit where he says, if a baedling sleeps with another baedling, they must fast for a year - 'for she is soft, like an adulturess’

…

'soft’ is like, a very specific concept in saxon culture. men were 'hard’ and women were 'soft’. obviously we retain this in some sense, but thats something that was important to gender discourse for saxon people.

so like, the -ling suffix + being listed apart from men and apart from women (and apart from livestock, they were kind enough) + being called 'soft’ is like, extremely strong evidence for it referring to tw

…

oh yeah the other thing is both ‘baeddel’ and ‘baedling’ are derived from ‘baedan’, which means 'to defile’

in a different post on the same text, we find the punishment for a man sleeping with a ‘baedling’ was ten years fasting, and also gives ‘soft, like a harlot’ as another translation.

I’m sure people more familiar with ancient and medieval history could make this narrative more complex, or furnish more examples.

So like, it can probably be said, the simple, clear cut between ‘sexuality’ and ‘gender’ is really quite a modern invention, more modern even than the foundation of the colonial/modern gender system: It’s Still More Complex Than We Let Ourselves Think. For a more recent example of how things are complicated, there’s an old quote from Marsha P Johnson. She speaks to how she was treated as a ‘transvestite’ by (in modern terms, cis) gay men and lesbians:

Once in a while, I get an invitation to Daughters of Bilitis, and when I go there, they’re always warm. All the gay sisters come over and say, “Hello, we’re glad to see you,” and they start long conversations. But not the gay brothers. They’re not too friendly at all toward transvestites… . [because] A lot of gay brothers don’t like women! … And when they see a transvestite coming, she reminds them of a woman automatically, and they don’t want to get too close or too friendly with her. (Jay 1972: 115)

None of this is to say that trans women are not women; rather there’s additional dynamics that apply to ‘us’ and shape who the ‘us’ is exactly, and the ‘class dynamics’ and function of transmisogyny as a social force may be more complicated than who can immediately be recognised As An Obvious Woman. softtrade touched on this recently in a post on socialisation. (More on that.)

This all kind of raises the question of - why should this be so? Why would there need to be this class of people, why does it show up so often in so many different places, even as gender itself twists in response to the broader forces of capital?

I think @morphodyke​ had one part of the answer:

patriarchal society needs its sacrificial hypersexualized disgusting living sex-objects, and transmisogyny is how it tries to turn a human into that. i keep thinking abt this 4chan thread i read ~2013 shortly after i came out, in which a chaser talked about how he specifically liked dating trans women because “they have such low self-esteem that you can make them do anything”. he went on to talk about how he specifically looks for trans women with “dead, lifeless eyes” (aka dissociated from ptsd) because “they’re like a doll you can mold into whatever you want, then discard when you’re done, and there will always be more desperate for love”

that’s what transmisogyny is: a systematic pattern of abuse applied to a small sacrificial portion of the population to create a class of women with no claim to community or personhood, who will never be defended or avenged, who can be safely sunk into the attrition of patriarchy’s darker desires to protect the cis women, who after all could one day be mothers or some other kind of person. we are the class sacrificed to men’s violence and cis women’s violence. the socially unimportant. the weird and ugly. the punching bag. the blowup doll that talks. the mad artist that produces something great and then must burn out cause who could support that eccentric through life? the activist who makes huge steps for the better but stumbles on a community that would rather rape and abandon her than admit that it needs her. the queen of the dance who gets beaten with sticks as she’s leaving it and no one helps.

Another answer is this one by @drc4ble​, on sexual and emotional labour. Another is regulatory, to make sure men continue to act as men and the system continues to be reproduced.

So how does all that stuff relate to a silly D&D comic from more than a decade ago?

Belkar’s actions do I, on the face of them, seem to be in any way contrary to maleness - in fact he’s acting out masculinity to an extreme, exaggerated degree.

One way that things are different now is that the idea of how cis men who have relationships with trans women should be seen has become much more important to men as trans women become more prominent. You see that in so many media depicitions of trans women, of course, and murderers of trans women often appeal to the reprehensible, horrifying notion of ‘gay panic’ to justify their killing; their own manhood is under threat for having relationships with a ‘man’. (Even more appalling is that this was, and possibly in some places still is, considered a valid legal defence).

One way of viewing this, I think, is associating with the revolting figure of the ‘defiled man’; unlike the Greeks or Anglo-Saxons, this ‘defilement’ can extend also to the top (lol).

(In very recent times, look at the ‘trap’ culture on imageboards, and the way people turn themselves inside out over whether ‘traps’ are ‘gay’. To be ‘gay’ is to have that precious, precious masculinity ‘defiled’, like the ‘traps’. Part of the reason trans women are monstrous and must be destroyed is that we call into question that category of maleness.)

So Roy, by donning the Girdle, has temporarily been thrown into this monstrous, ‘defiled’ position, or at least close to ti. He’s so uncomfortable, and the other party members are taking such glee in mocking him, not just because he’s being exposed to misogyny for the first time in his life, but because there’s still that latent understanding of how absurd/disgusting/monstrous it is for a ‘man’ to appear or behave as a ‘woman’. If he did not show that exaggerated discomfort, what would that mean?

Roy is soft, like an adulturess. A soft target..

This short arc of OotS, played very much for jokes, is not yet the kind of abuse that Morphodyke describes, but that unacknowledged but crucial part of patriarchy is kind of apparent there. OK, maybe it’s not the best example I could use to illustrate this (after all there’s no shortage of wacky genderswap comedies or ‘revolting trans woman’ jokes in media) - but I was reading OotS and it occurred to me, and this has turned into an excuse to dig up a bunch of posts I think are interesting about gender.

[comicalmomentum]

Berserk: Depature to the Front, Engagement, Casca, Prepared for Death

I’m going to kind of skim over this a bit bc a lot of it is not that interesting. Huge fight things, and completely undermining Casca in a character in every possible way.

This basically sums up the tone of the whole comic lol.

This guy manages to say all of that while swinging his spear.

And he has like... shonen anime lengthy move descriptions as well.

Sadly that amusing stuff soon gives way to a whole lot of gratuitous sexual violence. I feel like the writing’s taken a huge step back towards the shallow edgelordiness of the early comics.

The exposition of how Casca feels about Griffith, and a bit of character development for Griffith himself in backstory, is probably the most interesting part. However... there’s a bunch of stuff I’m going to talk about below the cut because, eesh.

In the present day (or, closer to present, still backstory for the opening), Casca is unable to fight properly because... she’s PMSing. Yeesh. Male writers, eh. Guts saves her in a suitably manly way, they fall off a cliff, and we get some naked hurt-comfort that calls back to Casca caring for Guts after Griffiths stabbed him.

I had an interesting discussion with Jackie about he undermining of Casca. Jackie felt that they were trying for something more interesting like, dealing with sometimes like... you just can’t win. But in practice it comes out as like, heroic manly Guts must protect this pathetic woman from rape and death, lol womenamirite? Guts expresses a bunch of misogynist tripe and it’s not really addressed; Casca, who initially was drawn very similar to Berserk, is now tiny and dainty compared to Mr Muscles, constantly drawn in weak poses with like, her knees together.

This cover kind of exemplifies the problem:

Guts: manly, broad-shouldered, square. Casca: leaning seductively on her sword, tiny compared to him, etc. etc. It’s disappointing.

And the result? You get commenters bringing readings like this:

Obviously this guy is a piece of shit, but I find it uncomfortable that I can’t really confidently say he’s misreading the narrative presented to us. Guts never seems to be anything but rewarded for his ‘manly manliness’, getting endless opportunities to show off his ability to commit violence.

I appreciated it when I thought Guts’s bloodthirstiness was going to have like, honest consequences; now it’s just back to Look At The Cool Violent Man and that’s just boring.

Anyway, in the process of defending Casca (and also because he just really likes violence), Guts takes on like a hundred dudes led by that guy up there. They threaten all sorts of awful things, the underlings let greed overwhelm their fear, and Guts cuts them all down; we watch blow by gruesome blow.

For all the ‘dark fantasy’ aspects, there’s definitely a sense that like,outside of Griffith’s possible dark intentions and Guts’s frequent killing sprees, the protagonists really are a separate kind of person from the gross lascivious dudes they’re constantly fighting. Like, since I’m drawing comparisons to Drakengard, there’s never any sense of moral doubt; the violence is extreme but it doesn’t seem to say anything. Guts’s opponents never hesitate, never show even the tiniest thread of a sympathetic trait, and the bloodsplatter seems to be more there for titillation than because there’s anything to say with all this violence.

I draw comparisons with Drakengard, but Drakengard was less about like, how manly and tough its protagonist is, and more about how war is horrifying and traumatising and morally compromises all who fight it. Drakengard was bleak in a way Berserk doesn’t seem to want to be. In Berserk, it seems like there is no problem Guts cannot solve with bold ultraviolence; in Drakengard and especially Nier, that violence is instead tragic, both sides are at least somewhat sympathetic (well, not so much in original Drakengard), and its consequences are (rather clumsily) explored.

Berserk just seems to want to wallow in filth at the moment, and the meticulously rendered fight scenes swamp whatever it might be building towards. I hope that changes, and soon...

Anyway, now the elephant in the room...

Huge content warning for: sexual violence, sexual violence, csa, sexual violence, fucking hell there’s a lot of sexual violence

We get a backstory for Griffith, revealing that he did sex work for a gay pedophile lord to help raise his army and build his ‘dream’ (what the fuck is it with “dark fantasy” and that horrific ‘gay pedophile’ trope? this is like the second time Berserk has included it, I also think of the original Nier though it was handled slightly better there, and of course Drakengard’s fucking protagonist character...). We also get backstory for Casca, revealing that Griffith saved her from being raped by giving her a sword to murder the lord who attempted to rape her.

I had an interesting conversation about this with @baeddel​. She felt that like, although the actual portrayal is gratuitous and horrible, their characterisation as a bunch of CSA survivors (now like, all the main cast) is well handled. I can see that, but the comic seems to be reaching for rape as a cheap plot device (and, disturbingly, an opportunity to draw Casca’s boobs) horrifically often.

Like... it’s just, endless rape. Just about every fight, Casca gets at least verbally threatened with rape. As she runs for help, soldiers attempt to rape her. Being a woman or child in the Berserk universe is just, endless rape. And it’s... not saying anything worthwhile or speaking to survivors or anything; it feels disturbingly like it’s titillation.

A number of comments on the page suggest that in later issues, the author gets less terrible at writing women and less reliant on rape as a plot device. That can’t happen soon enough.

[comicalmomentum]

Berserk: Master of the Sword, Assassin and Precious Thing

Griffith is now schmoozing with the nobles, but one of them doesn’t like a commoner getting too big for his boots, and so tries to kill him.

There are some good panels:

Griffith: has an egg, is an egg.

He be a pretty shallow villain, but at least he has a great outfit.

Do they really have to hold their sword in the like, dick position? Regardless...

Griffith’s side of the gay subtext is just text.

The noble’s assassination attempt is foiled by, what else, the Behelit jumping in the way of the arrow underneath Griffith’s shirt. He still doesn’t seem to know it’s an artefact of incredible power or whatever. (There is, unfortunately, repeated use of a slur against Roma people in reference to the person who gave Griffith the charm.)

Anyway, Griffith asks Guts to do an assassination mission of the villainous noble who tried to assassinate him. Guts is reminded of his father figure... but goes in anyway, kills the noble, kills the noble’s son when he enters the room, kills the guards who show up, kills even more guards on his way out of the castle...

Guts is unquestionably a videogame character, and he just fucked up this stealth mission bad.

Griffith, meanwhile, while working over the princess, says that a true friend has a ‘dream’ of his own and can be seen as an equal, and heavily implies only Guts really qualifies that Guts does not qualify. So that’s nice :) I’m sure nothing terrible is going to happen! Unless you were guarding that noble, I mean. In that case, terrible things have already happened.

[comicalmomentum]

Berserk: Sword Wind & Nosferatu Zodd

These two arcs are mostly about Guts being good at soldiering but brash and somewhat alienated from Casca, but they drop some reveals about demons and stuff. There’s a love triangle brewing between Guts-Griffith-Casca that’s boiling over at the end of the last chapter.

We meet a big demon guy called Nosferatu Zodd which is hilarious. Sadly, his two forms are ‘really muscley dude’ and ‘generic horned demon’, which is rather uninspiring. Anyway, he almost kills Guts and Griffith, but stops when he sees the Behelit around Griffith’s neck, calling it the ‘Egg of the King’ and ‘Crimson Behelit’. So I guess this thing’s kind of a big deal.

Zodd gives Guts a dire warning that ‘when Griffith’s ambition collapses’, Guts will be doomed to die - which, if the prologue is anything to go by, has played out, with Griffith becoming a member of the Hand of God and Guts being branded as a sacrifice and having to fight demons for the rest of his life.

So that’s all foreshadowing. Not a whole lot to say about character interactions or gay subtext, but Griffith and Guts teaming up to fight Zodd was cute.

[comicalmomentum]

Berserk: the Golden Age

Following on from the Guardians of Desire arc, we’re onto the Golden Age arc. The first part of this post is written about halfway through the arc.

If you’re following on, serious content warning for explicit rape and child sexual abuse in this arc.

We get Guts’s backstory. It’s kind of engineered for maximum trauma: he was found under a gallows and viewed as a bad omen by the mercenary company that found him, his adoptive mother died of plague, his adoptive father was distant and callous, he was fighting in wars from a young age, at one point he’s raped by another soldier with the acceptance of his adoptive dad, his adoptive dad gets horrifically injured but is ungrateful for Guts caring for him, he finds out the truth about his dad approving the rape also wishing he was dead, he murders his adoptive dad, he gets shot by his former comrades, he gets attacked by wolves... like I feel like they were going through a list of traumatic experiences and ticking every single box.

so like, I guess that kind of goes some way to explain why he’s like that and touch-averse and all that. It’s kind of... way over the fucking top though.

However, we then get introduced to the Band of the Hawk, and as @baeddel the manga suddenly gets good. Mostly, by getting really fucking gay.

The Band of the Hawk are another mercenary company... they’re introduced by trying to kill Guts, and he responds with his usual ‘cut people in half’ approach. However, the leader of the band, Griffith, steps in and demonstrates the ability to defeat Guts with a tiny cutlass. In an interesting contrast to Guts, he’s drawn really fem, like, I would have read him as a woman if the text didn’t gender him otherwise.

There’s also a butch member of the troupe, Casca, who has some interesting gender shit going on. She’s drawn almost indistinguishable to Guts, only difference being in face shape. One of the other members of the band comments that she “gave up being a woman to become a mercenary” and became a better swordsman than most of the men (except Griffith...), but all the same she is given responsibilities in the mercenary band for ‘womens’ work’ such as keeping an injured Guts warm with body heat. I’m curious as to where it’s going with that.

Anyway Griffith is like “I want you” (literally), join my mercenary band!, but instead Guts immediately goes to get a rematch, and it’s a hilariously over the top and incredibly homoerotic fight, Griffith jumps on Gut’s sword and Guts bites Griffith’s sword and they end up wrestling and the Griffith kind of declares ownership of Guts, the subtext is so explicit that Guts even calls it out.

So that’s a thing; although I know from the last arc that Griffith is going to betray Guts and become a demon, I’m hoping we can go from gay subtext to reciprocated gay text idk. Like ‘my boyfriend betrayed me and turned into a demon’ is more interesting than ‘my war buddy who had an unreciprocated and weirdly possessive crush on me betrayed me and turned into a demon’. I guess we’ll see where it goes.

The world of Berserk is grimdark as all hell, seemingly in nonstop war for Guts’s entire life. This left me kind of wondering how there’s anyone left to fight - but @baeddel pointed out that that’s kinda not historically baseless - this coincides with battle tactics like the ‘push of pike’ or ‘bad war’, horrifying meatgrinders where, the way Jackie described it, the pike formations would ram into each other and the first couple of ranks would just die, while cannons would obliterate these tightly packed formations. As she put it, “from the pike and shot era up until the end of WW1 you could think of as just being several hundred years of unending bloodshed”.

I don’t know the survival rate of going to war in the late medieval/early renaissance period, or like what population would be likely to die in war, the average life expectancy of a soldier etc.... but while the superhuman swordsmanship and all that is obviously fantasy, the utter disposability of human life is maybe less grimdark posturing and more just like, how it was for that period of European history. Not that there isn’t a lot of grimdark posturing in this manga too.

Another angle we talked about was how the reader is expected to respond to Guts himself. At first, I reacted badly to Guts, thinking he was just an unsympathetic edgelord protagonist, but Jackie argued reasonably that, at least after the first initial bit, his unsympathetic nature is pretty deliberate and he’s a kind of deconstruction (in the tvtropes sense) of the barbarian hero; he’s evidently a broken, traumatised person who responds to everyone he meets with violence, but we’re not supposed to think he’s cool. That sort of reading does seem to be getting more established in this arc, especially with Guts’s interactions with the Band of the Hawk.

The Band themselves are kinda cool. There’s some boring ~better than all the other soldiers (but not as good as Guts/Griffith)~ stuff, but they’re a lot more likable and compellingly realised than almost anyone in this comic since Puck. They definitely seem to be here to stay.

So this is getting more interesting. I’m curious to see where it goes next...

holy shit Griffith invites Guts to an audience and when guts he’s arrived he’s naked... das;lgkj they have a water fight... then Griffith stands up naked and tells Guts he owns him and they’re going to create a kingdom? and before that Guts is actually smiling and laughing?

This is incredibly gay and actually finding a bit of a sense of humour... of course, it’s all going to end terribly bc Griffith has a Behelit, the little demon egg thing, and we know he becomes some kinda demon lord later.

[comicalmomentum]

Berserk

I’ve been reading a bit of Berserk. Damn that’s some imagery, but this is very, very silly...

The protagonist is just... like it’s ridiculous to the point of self-parody. He’s the manliest man ever, he responds to everything with aggression and Monsoon-from-Metal-Gear-style nihilistic disdain, he’ll keep fighting even when his bones are broken, he carries like five different weapons including his signature impossibly heavy sword because he’s just so strong and tough, but also his arm is a gun, he constantly has to fight demons but he can deal with that because that’s just what a badass he is, and now i’m learning he was born under a fucking gallows or something, just for extra EdgeCred(TM)...

However, the audience identification character is this little fairy twink who’s ridiculously gay-coded and I love that, it’s an interesting sort of contrast to Guts’s hypermasculinity. Mostly his role in the plot is to constantly go ‘oh no, Guts...’ and occasionally provide magical healing, but the contrast to Guts is pretty vital.

That said, in terms of portrayal of women... It’s Bad. So bad! The manga opens with Guts fucking a woman (because he’s a manly heterosexual!) who kind of immediately turns into a giant monster, and we get this truly artful dialogue:

Monster woman: You fell into my trap, fool! Guts: The only one trapped is you, bitch!

To be fair, this is a fan scanlation (I think), so the original Japanese might not be quite so hilariously bad.

After a little while we’re introduced to a second character, a waifish girl who’s been abused and trapped in her room for seven years by her dad (the arc villain, a giant demon slug) and whose main role in the plot is to get traumatised by all the magic shit. Women otherwise function to be naked or die, often both.

I’m assured Berserk does a kind of Drakengard->Nier style development in maturity from its look-how-grimdark-i-am origins, so hopefully the writing will eventually match the art, because right now all this cool imagery’s really kinda wasted lol.

Speaking of which, for the most part, the art is astonishingly detailed and has some amazing monster imagery, but with the exception of Puck, expressiveness seems to mostly be limited to manly grimaces. Everyone is like, hugely bulky and muscled and have weird shaped heads, but there’s some cool use of the stranger medieval armour with sculpted faceplates and so on. The various demons are impressively varied and gross, there are some really striking designs (turns out the snake dudes in Sen’s Fortress match a guy in the first chapter). I liked the stone covered in noses and eyes and stuff, that was a nice touch; the MC Escher dimension was cool too though they didn’t actually do a lot with it.

Honestly I’d mostly like this manga to just leave Guts behind and get a more interesting protagonist.

[comicalmomentum]

mellifluouslutrinan replied to your post “Strong Female Protagonist - up to chapter 5”

I haven't paid attention to sfp in ages but the whole thing seems so fucking liberal

yeah, this sums it up

[comicalmomentum]

Strong Female Protagonist - up to chapter 5

been reading Strong Female Protagonist with @lethargyspecialist​. At first it felt like tedious lesswrongfic, but it’s gotten a bit better in chapter 5?

lethargyspecialist: It’s trying very hard to be Watchmen. A bunch of setpiece philosophy discussions between Alyson who doesn’t say very much but ‘bluh bluh bluh I wanna help people but your solution is too extreme’ and various other characters whose solutions are obviously too extreme

me: it reminds me a fair bit of Dumbing of Age’s treatment of storylines of like, ‘specific issues’ like ‘now we’re going to talk about rape culture here’s a storyline attempting to Talk About Rape Culture in a very calculated way’ which like, it’s not that it’s saying anything particularly egregiously awful, but on some level it feels kind of artificial? :/ and also like a lot of the time it feels like it’s a blog post in comic form

also like. something something communism. like at the end of chapter 5 the protagonist reaches the epiphany that individualistic efforts to enact change are hopeless if they don’t bring about structural change and her response is... to build an app. the socially sanctioned violence of police and soldiers is brought up in the storyline where her friend goes on a killing spree against rapists, but I never get the impression that police abolition is considered.

also to elaborate on the lesswrongfic thing, the early kind of Alison-grappling-with-white-middle-class-guilt I-need-a-way-to-save-the-world-right-now strips did feel like. they reminded me of the kinds of narratives that LessWrong uses, and it got especially over the top when we introduced a character literally working on Friendly AI with rhetoric that was only a hair’s breadth from SIAI MIRI shit? admittedly played more for laughs and with the chapter’s resolution I feel like they’re not going to go down the MIRI rabbithole at least.

I found it... idk, like, interesting? how with the chapter 5 storyline, they had many characters speaking up with various pretty compelling lines of argument to defend Mary/Moonshadow’s vigilante killings of rapists, and they go out of their way to undermine the whole ‘vigilantes have no accountability and could kill innocents’ thing in this specific case, but the narrative voice - and of course Alison herself - never comes to condone it.

Anyway I guess we’ll see how the whole ‘app to connect superheroes to abuse survivors’ storyline works out in chapter 6 next time we read.

Also I don’t want to go on all about it but for fuck’s sake with the casual transmisogyny there

[comicalmomentum]

taasen - A browser implementation of the game Taasen from the webcomic Unicorn Jelly.

This is finally getting going as more than pictures!

Admittedly, currently drawing a picture is all this program does, but it’s now in a good place to add interactivity and game logic.

Mmm, html and svg in the browser and every tile is a vue.js component being fed data from the parent component.

There’s a long way to go before this is a game, but it’s starting to look like one at least.

[comicalmomentum]

Haven’t given up on this ridiculous project!

This is just an SVG mockup of the interface, but I believe I can pull this off using a reactive frontend javascript library like react, angular or vue (currently working with vue), and it should help me learn quite a bit about modern javascript development in the process!

[comicalmomentum]

@phoenixflaircomic is pretty good it turns out? to some extent it’s just another post-Madoka spin on Edgier Magical Girls but it’s pretty funny and well done and dramatic at the right moments, it doesn’t have the misogynistic overtones of Madoka, and there’s at least one trans girl main character

(the site really needs to be fixed so that the ‘next page’ button doesn’t automatically open a new tab)

[pluralthey]

drop-out updated. content warning for discussion of gender and dysphoria. http://drop-out.webcomic.ws/

[comicalmomentum]

Digger

So this isn’t so much along the usual lines of what I’ve covered here so far, but I saw a post by Ursula Vernon and that reminded me that I’ve been wanting to reread Digger for some time and it would probably be an interesting review for this blog.

Digger is a completed webcomic, that ran from 2007 to 2011. I believe I first read it somewhere in that period and followed it until it ended. It stands out as one of the only webcomics to win a Hugo award, so I guess it’s pretty big in wider SF fandom (or at least, whoever was at Worldcon that year).

content: While it’s a anthro comic, and Ursula Vernon attends furry conventions, it’s pretty distinct from most furry stuff, and it’s not sexual at any point as far as I recall.

It’s a story about an anthropomorphic wombat who goes on an adventure. There are hyenas, a statue of Ganesh, something about vampire squashes, and a ‘bandersnatch’ (a creature briefly alluded to in Jabberwocky) with two sapient heads that pulls a cart. That’s about all I can remember.

I think it will be pretty good for a readthrough, there’s some interesting stuff to talk about.

[wavecheater-deactivated20190222]

me, narrating my let’s play of the drop-out video game

alright, so here you want to let sugar make the wrong turn. it’s unintuitive to a lot of players, but since we’re going for the golden ending we need that bit of extra time to unlock critical scenes