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Honestly I'm not really that surprised. It's the result of taking extremely sincere feminism and running it through the wringer that have been the last 8 years of so. Ishida went hyper-feminist during Gamergate, insufferably so; the comic went from trying (with limited success, but not entirely without success) to make an adult Calvin & Hobbes, to non-stop preaching. Then mainstream feminism was told "shut up, it's trans people's time now", and those who didn't toe the line were thrown in the TERF pit. There's essentially two reactions to being thrown in the TERF pit, with a spectrum in between them: 1) compartimentalize the trans stuff as being the only thing the mainstream liberal order is wrong on, but keep every other belief intact, or 2) question everything.
Ishida went closer to 2). I think he still compartimentalize the feminism as the one thing the liberal order is right on, but he went hard on the other side for everything else.
I think the comic is still annoyingly preachy and cringy though, just red colored cringe instead of blue colored cringe.
I would definitely analogize it to what happened to JK Rowling.
Avowed feminism encountering the trans movement and its attempts to redefine or completely replace the concept of 'female' altogether, and reading this as a threat, and deploying the same tactics as they did before. Only to find out that their years and years of 'allyship' don't count for anything, so there's now some simmering bitterness.
JK is of course fabulously wealthy, so I suspect she's more detached.
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As someone who's never heard of this guy before this morning, could you link some of his annoying hyper-feminist comics from 2014?
It's tough, because, for me, it had more to do with the character arcs he gave his characters. The comic started off with Slick and Monique both being losers. Slick went around with all the fake swagger of a guy who just took a PUA seminar, and Monique was an attention whoring social climber. A lot of the humor revolved around the fact that both these characters thought more of themselves than they were, and were often both the butt of jokes. It was a good pairing of characters with obvious flaws ripe for humor circa the 2000's. A dynamic forms where Slick is a misogynistic loser friend zoned by Monique, while Monique is a slut trying, and failing, to sleep her way to higher social status. It's a dysfunctional relationship where you can honestly say they deserve each other.
The feminist stuff creeped in slowly, and then quickly. Slick stopped being character at all, and became some sort of totem for the manifold evils of men. Monique on the other hand transformed into this good at heart, if mislead by society, icon for all the saintly aspects of womanhood. It got extremely sex negative, with even a longtime budding romance between two incredibly sweet side, relatively emotionally mature characters nixed at the last moment all sex is rape, and only platonic friendships are good and pure. This while "The Sisterhood" more or less displaced all the rest of the cast to dispense on the nose feminist talking points and try to awaken the entire rest of the cast to the patriarchal matrix.
That's about when I stopped reading. This further turn towards anti-woke, anti-trans, MAGA supporter definitely comes as a surprise to me. Skimming some, it's interesting to see his previous sex-negative views transmogrified into anti-coomer, anti-degeneracy comics. I can't say I disapprove, although I wonder if he ever softened on characterizing seemingly all sexual relationships between men and women, even emotionally healthy monogamous partnerships, as evil and wrong.
+1 to surprised by the anti-woke, anti-trans, MAGA turn about. Stopped paying attention during the feminism arc and just had it categorized in the same place it was back then. Weird.
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Well, 2013 here. https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2013-05-14 https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2013-05-22
The bad webcomics wiki has the best examples https://badwebcomicswiki.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Sinfest
This seems like a really good example too
https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2013-07-15
Just textbook feminist slogan, barely a punchline involved.
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Wow, that's pretty bad. I know two swallows don't make a summer and all that, but between this, Andrew Dobson and that awful xkcd strip, the American webcomic community really seems to attract these neurotic, male feminist "may I please have a crumb of pussy" types.
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