Annotated 3-21
Oh, no, it’s a butterfly’s one weakness… a giant rockslide! “Rocks fall, one specific person dies, presumably because Best has some control over his instrument.” (Image by Randy Miholland and Something Positive.)
Original SFX scripted here: “*BRAAAAAAOOOOOOOWWWWNNNG*”
This tidbit may embarrass Phil a bit: he wrote Erica that the pose on panel 2, as Frigg gets close to a kneeling position and Best remains standing, “can be as suggestive as you like.” Yyyeah, glad we didn’t go that way. For one thing, she may be attracted to Best and crude by nature, but it’s hard for me to imagine Frigg as a giver like that. For another, we were starting to move out of the South Park-led era of comedy where the rule was always “the more offensive the better.” Our calculus is more nuanced now. For instance, I briefly considered running a picture of a squashed butterfly with this commentary, then thought, “Nah.”
We come from an era of “the more offensive the better” and we’re currently on an era of “get offended by anything and everything and if you get offended first you win”.
What a 180 in, what? A decade?
That’s the way the world works and it’s nothing new. In Victorian England you would be shamed if female and you showed too much leg but before that a woman could get a divorce if she could get 3 other woman to sleep with her husband and confirm he was no good in bed.
Disclaimer – it’s been a very long time since I studied history and I this is about all I remember and it’s probably not 100% accurate but the point is society shifts quickly from one extreme to the next.
And the ones most easily offended is the people with the privilege, because they just can’t believe it’s not all about them, or that other groups can demand the same protections as they themselves take for granted.
The embodiment of white fragility is the snowflake.
And the snowflake equivalents among all the other racial groups who emphatically state that only white people can be racists and should all be punished for their skin color are good for a laugh too…
Well, except in South Africa… There it’s rapidly turning into a major snafu that’s probably going to end with everyone starving… That’s not nearly so funny…
It’s sad how humans, once they’ve temporarily solved the basic problems of food, clothing, and shelter, seem to go out of their way to try to create as many new problems as they possibly can via one method or another when the truth is that our civilization is and always has been a delicate illusion that mother nature can rip to shreds and stomp into the mud with little to no warning any time she feels like it and we really all need to be working together to have any hope of long-term survival.
Killed by the cliché.