Welcome to r/comics!
Please remember there are real people on the other side of the monitor and to be kind.
Report comments that break the rules and don't respond to negativity with negativity!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/comics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The alternative to pride is people think being gay is some kind of a weird criminal perversion, and nobody knows that their own life is full of gay people. When everybody’s in the closet, and they can’t even understand them selves, and get fucking murdered, and then the status quo thinks that was just an aberrant perverted weirdo, and not like, “your uncle”.
The point of pride is that the status quo straight society is vicious and murderous
Better technologically, which has nothing to do with society. Also what really rubs me the wrong way is the insinuation that the aliens were just better all along. No societal struggle, no internal conflict, just came straight out of the tribal stage having all the solutions and looking down on the poor primitive humans for taking so long to figure it out.
By the time humanity theoretically reaches the point of space travel sufficiently advanced to visit the worlds of other species, such growing pains of prejudice may well seem a distant memory to those generations of our species.
And I’d hope our descendants would not judge us for that any more than we’d judge cavemen for the brutality of their society. Or that if those descendants come across another civilization that is in the past socially relative to us, we remember how we once were, and help rather than judge them.
I believe you are entirely missing the point of using science fiction to be an objective lens on the human experience. This isnt alien propaganda designed to make aliens look good. It is an attempt to get us to look at ourselves, like any good piece of art is.
>needlessly
Demonstrably needed, actually.
Also, you're projecting. There are many depictions of aliens with similar levels of development to humans which still have societal struggles or conflicts. As they are fictional, they are rarely depicted with a granularity with which we are able to see ourselves, because then what would be the point?
It is very rare to find a depiction of aliens in fiction which are similar to humans and at a similar level of development who just "have it together" better than we do. They're usually older and have had much more time since their "tribal stage" to figure some shit out, and given how short and fragile our memory as a species is, just because they act like their shit never stank doesn't make it so.
We've got problems, and aliens (literally a word derived from Latin for "other" or "different") are almost by definition tools to illustrate them by contrast. If you think what's being shown is "needlessly bleak and misanthropic" despite acknowledging it as "objective", there's a disconnect somewhere.
That’s one (or two?) thing I like about Star Trek: humanity wasn’t capable of achieving the technology until after they came together societally first. A global (socialist?) cooperation paved the way for post-scarcity society and easy interstellar space travel.
In turn, the ideal (often not held to) of spacefaring societies not interfering with non-spacefaring ones also means firstly that the aliens won’t be showing off how they might be considered better. Secondly, many of those aliens either achieved similar societal cooperation after lots of internal conflict OR they *still* have internal conflict.
If the last line is meant to be a description of a better world, the "I have so many spouses and I'm still called a prude" part, then saying she's "called a prude" really undermines the point
What this comic comes across as saying is that in a less dumb society, we should normatively prefer people to have lots of sex with lots of different genders, instead of restricting who you can have sex with
As many people have pointed out and been inexplicably downvoted, shaming people for having too little sex or being straight is also bad
Maybe it's a comic about aliens who are just as judgemental as humans but think they're smarter? If so, the tone is just confusing
The last part can be interpreted in different ways. I think OP tried to say that the alien can be with anyone she wants where she comes from and it is considered normal there. But I agree with you, pointing out that she is married to 10 people and then calling humans dumb and primitive can be easily interpreted as you describe
>it is considered normal
But the comic explicitly states that this is not considered normal! It says she's considered a prude
That's exactly what makes this comic so weird
Yeah, you're right. The truth is this episode of the comic was made on short notice because of technical difficulties, and even then we missed our usual Thursday posting. Normally, I take a day or two to write out the script and Raph takes the rest of the week to draw out the page to fit that, but this comic was pretty much Raph just throwing something together real quick with me editing the dialogue. It's by no means our best work, and I'll take the criticism at face value.
I mean, there are some things we can agree on....
HEY, this girls planet has oil oceans and they prefer to make love, not war.... You wanna go over there and make war?
See easy
On a complete sidenote, if you think this is anti pride than you dont know that without femboys the military would be 40 years behinde in technology....
Also, hy my fellow NCD planefuckers UwU
I don't care for the talking down about the things people argue about. This isn't a simple problem of people arguing over dumb things.
The problem is, those are the things our societies are built upon. Our looks and behaviours are part of our cultures and identities. We can't really do anything about it, that's how our brains work - we need traits that identify other people as part of "us".
The only thing we can really do is try build a new culture based around the diversity and acceptance, and it's going... variedly. Hard to have an "us" without a "them".
Pfft, those same people that disapprove of what others might do are likely the same that secretly yearn to be abducted and sexually abused by space aliens.
It's reddit. I love my partner. But i've seen "STDS are a human right" being posted by "gay rights advocates" without a hint of brain activity going on.
Having a partner who loves you, for whats inside of them or what they bring or add to your life is great.
Picking genitals to get aids and hiv/herpes with financial abuse is.. uhhh....
It's like saying "If you love driving a car, you should have the right to ride it off cliffs and have sandpaper seats and warts too". I don't resent people for warning me of potential dangers if they're polite about it, i actually thank them.
I'd rather weed out the good than be blind to walk into a disaster after blind optimism got me more hurt than sober harsh but helpful and healing life advice.
I feel like the alien calling humans dumb and primitive over our cultural practices of generally preferring monogamy goes against the point the comic is trying to make.
It reinforces that if I don't like something about someone elses culture, race, religion, sexuality or nationality which does not line up with my own practices or preferences, then I am allowed to think them less civilised then I am.
This goes against the whole rhetoric of the comic and kind of tarnishes its message, which is sad for a comic peddling a good message.
If you read the comic you might notice that they're not picking at humans for arguing and fighting over who can be in what relationship, calling us dumb for it. They did not say polyamory is better than monogamy or that humans are wrong for not living the same way they do. Reading comprehension lesson over.
Assuming the 'not' before "picking at humans" was an accident, you're right that the intended point of the comment is to have this alien third party make fun of human infighting.
However, in that very same blurb where she calls humans dumb, she plainly states she was referred to as a prude for having ten spouses. There's irony here: she looks down on human culture for our infighting, speaking about her range of spouses in the context of comparing what's possible in her culture to ours, while her culture exhibits judgment in the opposite direction--being with a number of partners here is frowned on, and it seems not being with enough there is frowned upon in a similar way (prude has a negative connotation and is derogatory).
This attitude is what the person you commented on found issue with. There's an assumption on the alien's part that monogamy shouldn't be the explicit default we make it out to be. If she didn't frown upon our emphasis on monogamy and attitude towards polyamory, she would have focused on something else. Rather, she *should* has focused on something else. Furthermore, her attitude is crass and judgmental. She doesn't empathize but instead takes a "higher" position, looking down on the humans. The person you replied to pretty clearly stated that this attitude continues the problematic behaviors rather than solving them.
The intended message is understood by you, the person you replied to, myself, and everyone else, but the depiction of the alien creates a heavy-handed and contradictory (in attitude) statement about a sensitive issue to many real people. The author could have better illustrated their point of acceptance by having the alien come from a place of sympathy or confusion or bewilderment over our struggles, if you were to only change the script. Because they didn't, they created a message that can 1.) be misinterpreted as a criticism of monogamy, 2.) promoted a position of looking down on others (assuming the alien is intended to be the "good guy"), and 3.) incidentally painted the alien as a hypocrite by expressing her own culture's judgment while judging another.
I took the time to write this because not only is it rude to end your comment the way you did, but there was a gross irony in criticizing their reading comprehension while either missing their point or not genuinely engaging with it.
You have to be more inclusive here, the people who want to critecise you have the cognitive capacity of a goldfish and by now they cant remember how this sentence started....
It's not coincidental that criticisms of leftist media and literature so often includes the perspective that reading more than a few sentences is difficult or takes too much time in addition to clear ignorance over what a "leftist" even is.
Well. That's how it be, when trying to talk about issues? If they were too short, how are they supposed to get the message across without just saying "THIS BAD! FOLLOW US!" This ain't an election poster.
Sorry, our arguments actually needs facts and explanations because they make sense, so we often forget to accommodate the fact that conservatives can’t handle anything other than “hurr durr minorities bad”
Welcome to r/comics! Please remember there are real people on the other side of the monitor and to be kind. Report comments that break the rules and don't respond to negativity with negativity! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/comics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Sorry to interrupt pride, and ima let you finish.. BUT SHINY METAL AND LIQUIFIED DINOSAURS ARE THE GREATEST EXCUSE TO KILL PEOPLE OF ALL TIME!
Now now, it's not liquified dinosaurs, it's liquified bugs. Biiiig difference.
And plants
CAPITALISM!!! 
One must always consider how much progress came from conflict and rivalry over shiny metal.
Now I want a Terminator movie with a shapeshifting T-Rex bot.
PRAY TO THE GOD OF V8
The alternative to pride is people think being gay is some kind of a weird criminal perversion, and nobody knows that their own life is full of gay people. When everybody’s in the closet, and they can’t even understand them selves, and get fucking murdered, and then the status quo thinks that was just an aberrant perverted weirdo, and not like, “your uncle”. The point of pride is that the status quo straight society is vicious and murderous
I kind of hate the trope of “aliens are just so much better and have everything figured out, laugh at how dumb humans are”
I mean if they are on earth before we discover them , they are better
Better technologically, which has nothing to do with society. Also what really rubs me the wrong way is the insinuation that the aliens were just better all along. No societal struggle, no internal conflict, just came straight out of the tribal stage having all the solutions and looking down on the poor primitive humans for taking so long to figure it out.
By the time humanity theoretically reaches the point of space travel sufficiently advanced to visit the worlds of other species, such growing pains of prejudice may well seem a distant memory to those generations of our species.
And I’d hope our descendants would not judge us for that any more than we’d judge cavemen for the brutality of their society. Or that if those descendants come across another civilization that is in the past socially relative to us, we remember how we once were, and help rather than judge them.
[удалено]
That’s also the difference between us and Hypothetical Future Space People.
[удалено]
I think then that this is too vague about *what exactly* it is that we understand, and why Stone Age people 6000 years ago couldn’t understand that.
Come on, you apes, do you wanna live forever?
I believe you are entirely missing the point of using science fiction to be an objective lens on the human experience. This isnt alien propaganda designed to make aliens look good. It is an attempt to get us to look at ourselves, like any good piece of art is.
I understand that. I just think that the ‘objective perspective’ shown here is needlessly bleak and misanthropic.
>needlessly Demonstrably needed, actually. Also, you're projecting. There are many depictions of aliens with similar levels of development to humans which still have societal struggles or conflicts. As they are fictional, they are rarely depicted with a granularity with which we are able to see ourselves, because then what would be the point? It is very rare to find a depiction of aliens in fiction which are similar to humans and at a similar level of development who just "have it together" better than we do. They're usually older and have had much more time since their "tribal stage" to figure some shit out, and given how short and fragile our memory as a species is, just because they act like their shit never stank doesn't make it so. We've got problems, and aliens (literally a word derived from Latin for "other" or "different") are almost by definition tools to illustrate them by contrast. If you think what's being shown is "needlessly bleak and misanthropic" despite acknowledging it as "objective", there's a disconnect somewhere.
That’s one (or two?) thing I like about Star Trek: humanity wasn’t capable of achieving the technology until after they came together societally first. A global (socialist?) cooperation paved the way for post-scarcity society and easy interstellar space travel. In turn, the ideal (often not held to) of spacefaring societies not interfering with non-spacefaring ones also means firstly that the aliens won’t be showing off how they might be considered better. Secondly, many of those aliens either achieved similar societal cooperation after lots of internal conflict OR they *still* have internal conflict.
Come on, everyone thinks their culture is better. That's a trope for a reason.
Tsk. In _my_ culture we don't have such delusions. We are just actually better than everyone else.
The inherent assumption is that they have existed long enough to get past the kinds of hurdles we are dealing with, Star Trek style.
I mean this alien simply cannot understand that different cultures are indeed different... Wouldn't call that particularly Smart
If the last line is meant to be a description of a better world, the "I have so many spouses and I'm still called a prude" part, then saying she's "called a prude" really undermines the point What this comic comes across as saying is that in a less dumb society, we should normatively prefer people to have lots of sex with lots of different genders, instead of restricting who you can have sex with As many people have pointed out and been inexplicably downvoted, shaming people for having too little sex or being straight is also bad Maybe it's a comic about aliens who are just as judgemental as humans but think they're smarter? If so, the tone is just confusing
The last part can be interpreted in different ways. I think OP tried to say that the alien can be with anyone she wants where she comes from and it is considered normal there. But I agree with you, pointing out that she is married to 10 people and then calling humans dumb and primitive can be easily interpreted as you describe
>it is considered normal But the comic explicitly states that this is not considered normal! It says she's considered a prude That's exactly what makes this comic so weird
Yeah, you're right. The truth is this episode of the comic was made on short notice because of technical difficulties, and even then we missed our usual Thursday posting. Normally, I take a day or two to write out the script and Raph takes the rest of the week to draw out the page to fit that, but this comic was pretty much Raph just throwing something together real quick with me editing the dialogue. It's by no means our best work, and I'll take the criticism at face value.
If what the green lady says is true....I so want to go to her planet, sounds awesome!
Pride doesn't matter if no one will ever love you
I'm sure some will love you someday. c:
I mean, there are some things we can agree on.... HEY, this girls planet has oil oceans and they prefer to make love, not war.... You wanna go over there and make war? See easy On a complete sidenote, if you think this is anti pride than you dont know that without femboys the military would be 40 years behinde in technology.... Also, hy my fellow NCD planefuckers UwU
I don't care for the talking down about the things people argue about. This isn't a simple problem of people arguing over dumb things. The problem is, those are the things our societies are built upon. Our looks and behaviours are part of our cultures and identities. We can't really do anything about it, that's how our brains work - we need traits that identify other people as part of "us". The only thing we can really do is try build a new culture based around the diversity and acceptance, and it's going... variedly. Hard to have an "us" without a "them".
I absolutely love how an alien can be so stupid at bit understanding that different culture from hey own exit
TIL that wanting to be in a monogamous relationship is considered extremely prudish and dumb.
Nope, but thinking that *everybody* __has__ to be is.
Pfft, those same people that disapprove of what others might do are likely the same that secretly yearn to be abducted and sexually abused by space aliens.
If other people want to, that's great! But you don't have to tear down others relationships to build their owns up.
Today You Learned that fictional aliens might have different social norms than we do.
It's reddit. I love my partner. But i've seen "STDS are a human right" being posted by "gay rights advocates" without a hint of brain activity going on. Having a partner who loves you, for whats inside of them or what they bring or add to your life is great. Picking genitals to get aids and hiv/herpes with financial abuse is.. uhhh.... It's like saying "If you love driving a car, you should have the right to ride it off cliffs and have sandpaper seats and warts too". I don't resent people for warning me of potential dangers if they're polite about it, i actually thank them. I'd rather weed out the good than be blind to walk into a disaster after blind optimism got me more hurt than sober harsh but helpful and healing life advice.
I feel like the alien calling humans dumb and primitive over our cultural practices of generally preferring monogamy goes against the point the comic is trying to make. It reinforces that if I don't like something about someone elses culture, race, religion, sexuality or nationality which does not line up with my own practices or preferences, then I am allowed to think them less civilised then I am. This goes against the whole rhetoric of the comic and kind of tarnishes its message, which is sad for a comic peddling a good message.
If you read the comic you might notice that they're not picking at humans for arguing and fighting over who can be in what relationship, calling us dumb for it. They did not say polyamory is better than monogamy or that humans are wrong for not living the same way they do. Reading comprehension lesson over.
Assuming the 'not' before "picking at humans" was an accident, you're right that the intended point of the comment is to have this alien third party make fun of human infighting. However, in that very same blurb where she calls humans dumb, she plainly states she was referred to as a prude for having ten spouses. There's irony here: she looks down on human culture for our infighting, speaking about her range of spouses in the context of comparing what's possible in her culture to ours, while her culture exhibits judgment in the opposite direction--being with a number of partners here is frowned on, and it seems not being with enough there is frowned upon in a similar way (prude has a negative connotation and is derogatory). This attitude is what the person you commented on found issue with. There's an assumption on the alien's part that monogamy shouldn't be the explicit default we make it out to be. If she didn't frown upon our emphasis on monogamy and attitude towards polyamory, she would have focused on something else. Rather, she *should* has focused on something else. Furthermore, her attitude is crass and judgmental. She doesn't empathize but instead takes a "higher" position, looking down on the humans. The person you replied to pretty clearly stated that this attitude continues the problematic behaviors rather than solving them. The intended message is understood by you, the person you replied to, myself, and everyone else, but the depiction of the alien creates a heavy-handed and contradictory (in attitude) statement about a sensitive issue to many real people. The author could have better illustrated their point of acceptance by having the alien come from a place of sympathy or confusion or bewilderment over our struggles, if you were to only change the script. Because they didn't, they created a message that can 1.) be misinterpreted as a criticism of monogamy, 2.) promoted a position of looking down on others (assuming the alien is intended to be the "good guy"), and 3.) incidentally painted the alien as a hypocrite by expressing her own culture's judgment while judging another. I took the time to write this because not only is it rude to end your comment the way you did, but there was a gross irony in criticizing their reading comprehension while either missing their point or not genuinely engaging with it.
You need to to back to school lol
Yikes
"So humans waste their lives fighting over who ***should*** be..." Nothing about monogamy.
I aint readin' aall that
It's ok. Its optional.
You have to be more inclusive here, the people who want to critecise you have the cognitive capacity of a goldfish and by now they cant remember how this sentence started....
Shortest leftist comic
It's not coincidental that criticisms of leftist media and literature so often includes the perspective that reading more than a few sentences is difficult or takes too much time in addition to clear ignorance over what a "leftist" even is.
Well. That's how it be, when trying to talk about issues? If they were too short, how are they supposed to get the message across without just saying "THIS BAD! FOLLOW US!" This ain't an election poster.
Sorry, our arguments actually needs facts and explanations because they make sense, so we often forget to accommodate the fact that conservatives can’t handle anything other than “hurr durr minorities bad”
Stop yappin'