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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30067 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Wait, what happened to Sinfest? Jesus, I don't think I read that comic for like, 8 years. It got insufferably feminist and preachy. It took further bizarre ideological turns?

I saw random speculative comments that his hard feminist turn was a result if a relationship he got into. Maybe they broke up.

I think the evolution is:

  • Sinfest as the standard edgy gag-a-day, women-and-religion-are-stupid webcomic
  • Sinfest taking the "radicalfeminist" turn, Ishida regretting his earlier misogynist strips etc., losing fans gained during the first phrase
  • Sinfest, within that radical feminist sphere, increasingly taking a "terfy" position on issues like trans, porn etc., in the process of losing many fans gained during the second phase
  • Sinfest, within that terfy position, evolving towards a sort of a radical-feminism/conservative split that resembles what I've called "semi-terf" or "TERF 2" here, keeping the anti-porn/trans stuff and a sort of an attachment to feminism while marrying them to anti-woke/anti-degeneracy/conspiracy-theorist conservative narrative, in the process... I don't even know?

Within the last sphere, one might really go either way on Israel/Palestine issues, though from what I've read most of the semi-terf types have assumed at least mildly pro-Israel views, so I guess he might again be shedding some portion of his fan base, which at this point must be completely different from what he had when he started his webcomic.

Personally, I tuned out before the first phase really even ended, so I only encounter it occasionally, when it is discussed somewhere else, typically after one of the turns.

I still dig his art style, but he jumped a tiny little bit to far into the deep end. Anti-Vaxx-Conspiracies, Pedo-Biden ordering pizzas, trans-activists conspiring to destroy everything decent in the world. It is quite something:

https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2023-03-26

As someone who would much prefer Trump to the currently proposed alternatives, I still find there's something obscene and beyond-the-pale cringe in depicting him heroically. Like this https://i.redd.it/ruirh33uzx911.jpg (warning, reddit link, may include redditors' opinions in comments)

No kidding? So there was a light at the end of the tunnel after all.

I wasn't reading comics when Dave Sim went over the deep end during his Cerebus run. But I did see Ishida skew his views over the years. And Jon Schaffer go from "historical re-ennactment" metal to 6Jan attender. I guess if you're going to be playing with ideological tropes in your day-to-day work, you're likely to get changed by them.

I - for one - am thankful I never made a career out of being creative. Probably would have been at least as insufferable as these folk.

The only one I really saw happen was Randall Munroe.

I can't recall any way Munroe went off the deep end. Unless abandoning the What If column without explanation counts.

Oh, not to, like, Cerebus extent. But there's a lot of Blue Tribe sneering in it for the past decade or so.

Also there's a fairly-obvious explanation for the What-If column: he started putting it into paid-for books instead. There are ads for these books at the top of said column.

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