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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29554 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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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?

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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