Annotated 22-11
I don’t think this idea really worked the way it was supposed to.
Phil’s intent was to go after career pick-up artists, the sort who publish ebooks with titles like Win Any Woman into Your Bed with These 10 Simple Tricks! or I’ve Slept with 500 Women and You Can Too! This shit tends to be naive at best and creepy misogynistic rape culture at worst, and it’s “worst” a lot more often than it is “best.” Apart from their overall toxicity, the authors’ claims about their own love lives often ring false, though if they actually pressured/tricked/emotionally abused the full 500 women into sex with them, it wouldn’t be very different, morally, from training other guys to do that for profit.
(Notwithstanding that there are some titles to help men seeking women that are a bit more grounded in respect for humanity. I learned a lot, ultimately, from How to Win Friends and Influence People and–despite its imperfections, more evident with time–Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. I’m sure there are more modern examples.)
Unfortunately, I think the soul patch and the eyeliner are not really sufficient as signifiers here, and neither Phil nor I could come up with better ones to ask John to put in. It is evident from this page that Brody the Elf is pretending to sexual experience he doesn’t have, but that’s a far more minor offense than what we had in mind. I mean, two-thirds of us, male, female, and otherwise, told that same basic lie in junior high or high school.
Maybe this moment would look a bit more like justice if we’d done an earlier scene with Brody offering to coach E-Merl on how to win Rachel’s attention, showing E-Merl briefly tempted but quickly realizing he didn’t want anything to do with such a sleazy “mentor.” But who needs justice here, anyway? It’s Armagedda-Con.
Yeah, it never occurred to me that this was supposed to be a pick-up artist, and therefore someone we would … feel HAPPY about them dying(?!). It just seemed like a silly virgin joke. As is, I could appreciate the joke and also feel bad for the guy. It never seemed like the point of this chapter was to make me sympathize with the cultists.
“Feel happy?” More like, “acceptable target.” Like Indy shooting nazis.
This whole cultist human sacrifice sequence is reminding me of the Caprica pilot.
Yes, T spelled that out pretty explicitly–but I can isolate the most relevant passage, here:
‘creepy misogynistic rape culture at worst, and it’s “worst” a lot more often than it is “best.”’
That said, I didn’t really get that the guy was supposed to be anything but a random virgin trying desperately to lie his way out of being murdered, either, I’m afraid.
Yeah, the joke didn’t land at all.
Oh, well…nobody’s got a 100% hit rate.
‘and it’s “worst” a lot more often than it is “best.”’
Especially when it’s Best.
This guy has a name? Was he around before?
Nah. We named a lot of characters whose names you never learned, because we weren’t always sure who was going to become more interesting to us later. We could’ve just called Brother Tom “Cultist Seer” when we first used him, but thinking of him as a named guy helped us develop him.
Brother Tom is way more creepy for some reason. If I was writing “Cultist Seer” it would be hard not to just create a sketch of a person. Brother Tom though, just that name tells me this dude’s got a story and it involves some heinous stuff.
Honestly the best, most universally-applicable advice I’ve ever received on relationships is “if you like the same foods, you’re practically halfway there already”.
PUAs and the like really have nothing to contribute to society, virgins or not – their entire purpose is self-gratification, generally at others’ expense. This joke simply wasn’t going to land as written; Brody did nothing wrong, as far as we know.
Does that make them acceptable targets? I don’t know, but slasher flicks are equally gratuitous with their violence and murder, and they deliver less than half the plot you guys did, so looking for justification seems at least mildly redundant.
Yeah that never occurred to me either. I just thought it was about the cultists being universally uncaring about pleas for mercy, and about turning the “virgin female sacrifice” trope on it’s head by using a virgin of the male persuasion instead. Which I actually thought was great little twist (being female myself).
I’m actually far more disturbed by the annotation text than the original comic. Is it better if he’s a wannabe pickup artist? As in, does that justify him being murdered? I think the comic was better off when I thought this was *supposed* to come off as an innocent victim of monsters.