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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2147 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 31, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Do we do quotes here? I have some goodies from my commonplace; I'm skipping the Culture War stuff.

Never believe in a meritocracy in which no one is funny-looking.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, comment #209 on "Plagiarism and the mechanics of privilege", in Making Light (2010-11-16)

BELKAR: People don’t just change who they are in an instant. It doesn’t work like that. It takes time, so you don’t even know you’re changing. Until one day, you’re just a bit different than you used to be and you can’t even tell what the hell happened.

Rich Burlew, Order of the Stick #957, "Takes One to Know One" (wiki) (2014-07-04)

It’s easy to mistakenly believe that you have learned something well enough to reason and solve problems when you are not actually made to attempt those things.

For the same reason, many people mistakenly believe that they can outrun a bear.

Justin Skycak on Twitter (xcancel) (2025-04-27)

Order of the Stick

A bit sideline

The best quote from the whole thing is "Evan's spiked tentacles of forced intrusion"

I kinda lost interest in the comic when he bent the knee to the wokish crowd about it being rapey. Of course it is was rapey. That was what made it funny.

Yeah I also lost interest in the comic when he started getting political. There's the incident you mentioned, plus the comic where Haley and some other character talk about "remember how we used to hurl gendered insults at each other, that was awful". Perhaps worst of all, he inserted that stuff in the published books. In the book that covers the general Tarquin arc, the author commentary says that the reason that Tarquin flipped out on the heroes was because he couldn't handle that he, a straight white male, lost to a party with a black man, a woman, and a genderqueer elf. The author then went on to insinuate that his readers were Bad People (TM) who shared the same character flaw of being upset because the world didn't evolve around straight white men.

I kept reading the comic online for a bit after that (until that became insufferable too), but will never again give that man another dime of support. I don't give my money to artists who go out of their way to insult me for no reason.

I don't read the fora or the director's commentary, but that doesn't even make sense. Tarquin is the only white male in his party (I don't think Malack, an albino snake, counts); Laurin is female, and she and Miron and Shoulder Pads Guy are all drawn various shades of gray and brown.

Would you mind directly quoting the things which upset you? I'm curious what exactly happened there.

I do still have the book, turns out. Here's the quote (apologies for typos, I do the motte only on my phone for whatever reason):

"In this way, Tarquin is also symbolic of an older time when stories were likely to be more formulaic or clichéd--and less diverse. It's no accident that he's a wealthy old straight white man losing his marbles over the fact that the tale he is experiencing doesn't focus on the other straight white man at the expense of the black man, the woman, the genderqueer person, and even the Latino guest star. By rejecting his insistence that he take the lead, Elan is also saying that no, it's OK for not every story to have a blond white guy in the lead. It's OK for them to be the supporting character sometimes. They can still be a part of the overall tapestry of the narrative, and sometimes maybe they'll get great focus episodes. (Like this one!) As an author who is, himself, a straight white guy, it's difficult for me to always make a statement on the experiences of other demographic groups without running the risk of talking out of my ass. But I can make a statement about what I think we, the straight white men of the world, should be doing. And that's for us to recognize that it's not always about us, and that it doesn't make us weak just because someone else is the hero for a while. I'm sure the Tarquins of the real world will read this paragraph and lose their own marbles about it, but I don't see any point to writing if I can't express my own views."

At the time I read it, I had a few problems with this commentary from the author.

  • While I concede that he is the voice of God for this setting, and what he says about characters' internal motivations is by definition correct, the narrative he set down in the comic failed to communicate the ideas he claims Tarquin was following. The comic, as written, portrays Tarquin as simply prideful, not bigoted because he can't stand that minorities are getting the spotlight. His insistence that Elan take the lead appears to be motivated by self-interest (Elan, as his son, would be furthering his glory as the head of the dynasty) rather than identity politics. There is no indication at all that Tarquin would be ok with Elan not taking the lead if the party was full of blonde white men. So while Burlew has the right to tell us what he imagined the characters' thoughts to be, he didn't do a good job of showing us that in the work itself.
  • Burlew is certainly entitled to his thoughts on politics, identity or otherwise. And he is indeed entitled to write about those thoughts in his work, as he says in his last sentence. Nevertheless I find it extremely obnoxious for a lighthearted D&D comic to suddenly take a turn towards preaching and moralizing at me (even if it was in the writer commentary and not in the comic itself, at least not at this stage).
  • Burlew predicts that "the Tarquins of the world" will be upset by his paragraph of commentary. That is, he predicts that the people who have a problem with his writing here will do so because they are bigots who can't bear that the world isn't all about straight white men (since that is how the author himself conceives of Tarquin, it seems fair to draw this inference). But I wasn't annoyed by the paragraph because I have any problem with the comic having a diverse cast. I read the comic for a decade or more without ever once objecting to that. Nor do I have a problem with other stories featuring minorities - I enjoy many such stories because the identity politics are completely immaterial to me. No, I had a problem with Burlew's commentary because a) it was pushing divisive politics into what should be a fun comic strip, and b) the political angle he was taking wasn't even present in the comic until he forced it in via "word of God" commentary. And of course, I have a much bigger problem (as I already mentioned) with the author comparing me to his morality play villain just because I don't think that it was appropriate to bring politics into things.

Thank you for doing the legwork. I agree; that's a completely outside-the-text read, reminiscent of JKR retconning Dumbledore as gay, and I'd be annoyed by it as well. The comic itself is telling a good yarn about Tarquin's inflexibility and ego and being in a different story than he thinks he's in, and that's just... superfluous.

I do think it's entirely possible to talk about meaningful issues in a fun strip (here or here or here or "Colonel Xykon's secret recipe for winning" from Start of Darkness), but it has to be in service to the story, not stapled on there.

You're welcome! I agree that it's not wrong to use the story as a vehicle for serious ideas. The problem I've had with this example (and the others that @Lizzardspawn and I discussed) is not so much that they are serious issues, but that they are a) divisive, so they need to be handled with extreme care and b) Burlew doesn't handle them with care, instead getting preachy towards his readers. I can envision a well written story which has something like Haley not being taken seriously by some character because she is a woman, being hurt by it, and letting the reader ponder whether maybe Haley has a point in how she handled the situation. The sort of story which doesn't tell the reader "this is the correct opinion to hold on this divisive topic", but so gently persuades the reader to see the author's point of view that it almost doesn't feel as if the author is taking a side. But unfortunately, that isn't what we got in those instances.

Assuming I have the book still, sure. I'll have to look around to see if I kept it or got rid of it.

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