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Maybe you know (from back when the web was still young) the comic Sinfest by Japanese-American artist Tatsuya Ishida. His turn from fun webcomic to ultra-anti-woke/anti-porn/pro-maga wingnut is maybe the most surprising heel turn in history.
What confuses me though is his unashamed hamas-freedom fighter sentiment and Jews-are-the-villains narrative:
https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2023-11-13
https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2023-11-11
https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2023-11-01
Similar to Stonetoss anti-Jew/Israel comics:
https://stonetoss.com/comic/the-great-pumpkin/
I find it surprising because they align their politics suddenly with the woke blue-haired decolonization genderfluid hipsters they are normally opposed to. Instead my guess would have been, now that israelic comedians make fun of such US-student (https://youtube.com/watch?v=rbfccVBo9tE), that right wingist would latch onto that and try to flip Jews to their side. Is it just being contrarian and being opposed to whatever the mainstream media is for? Do they secretly have a hard on for homophobic/antifeminist Islam? Or maybe, as a non-American, I simply underestimated the strong JewishWorldConspiracy-Nazism-undercurrent in some right wing circles?
I wouldn't read too much into it. Ishida isn't representative of anyone or anything other than his own particular brand of insanity. Though I remember him as psychotically feminist, it doesn't surprise me at all that he's stumbled into anti-Zionism, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if coming back in five years he was a devout libertarian or committed Islamist, or anything else.
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Basically yes.
The movement is in the opposite direction. Anti-semites have always had their home hidden under rocks on the right, and the only surprising thing is that some lefties have found a sufficiently oppressed minority that they're willing to reverse course and talk smack about Israel.
It's funny, most of the right wing people I know IRL are very pro-Israel.
Who are you talking about here?
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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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I don't see any of that. I see satire pointing out how America has a tendency to fall all over itself in supporting Israel without question, and that some people are just a little bit tired of that.
Your take on the matter kind of proves his point; Israel seems above criticism, and any negative word in their direction is taken as support for their enemies.
I can't link every comic in the last two month, but this point is hammered obsessively. While there is a deafening silence about the attack from 7th October, it is comically (ha!) one sided.
Given the examples you provided - presumably, these were supposed to be clear-cut demonstrations thereof - you'll excuse me if I'm a little skeptical.
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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:
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.
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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)
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No kidding? So there was a light at the end of the tunnel after all.
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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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Didn’t Sinfest have a radical feminist phase back in the late oughts or am I imagining things?
No it did, you can find people commenting on the change back then. I was first introduced to the comic by mockery of it on /pol/ because it was super woke and feminist etc.
Edit: See also Ian Miles Cheong for another example of an Asian in media going down the Neo-Nazi to Woke to Anti-Woke (but in a boring boomercon sort of way IIRC), kind of similar to Ishida. It's always especially weird when their ideological phases are clearly documented online by their own statements.
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