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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?
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.
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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