Imo his comics just reek of repression.
Like I know that not homophobes/transphobes are self hating but like
His stuff SCREAMS closeted to me. Imo it's the flowery, soft, art style and how much he obsesses over trans people. Reminds me of how I was before I came out of the closet.
Are the characters observing the scenes usually women too? The character in this scene seems like it's supposed to represent the author looking at the scene. It seems like a transona.
Tats is a bizarre character. He started out as a slightly edgy webcomic with some clear inspiration from things like Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, and South Park. Then he became like a hardcore male radical feminist, and especially railed against pornography, and now he's just a normal fascist.
Yeah, when MAGA people started showing up as heroes who were going to save the world or something, like, woah dude.
He has a male personality but it doesn't show up often these days. A lot of comics show women speaking up for "true feminism"
And just the amount of anti-trans comics is staggering. Even stonetoss takes a break from bashing trans people, Tatsuya Ishida thinks about trans people more than the average trans person.
(CW: Mild CHUD content) https://nitter.net/TatsuyaIshida9/status/1620261543991726080?cxt=HHwWgMDSzcXSqfwsAAAA
Yeah, the girl on the big wheel trike is like the main, idk, feminist resistance leader or something? God, dude was always a little off but there's nothing left in that skull but brainworms now.
I dunno I just made up that word, could already have been used by others though? I know things like anime dressup games have been a meme in traa so it kinda feels like making characters that you identify with is a thing? A lot of trans people previously used female videogame avatars before they even realised they were trans so that's kind of a "transona" if you will.
ahh ok yeah i've been there. my user name here is basically named after my "transona" which was originally an OC created by a friend of mine long long ago that i adopted and expanded on.
i guess it was both healthy and unhealthy at once because it let me distance myself from that side for a long time by basically being like "yeah there's a girl that lives in my head" not realizing "oh wait that girl is me"
“yeah there’s a girl that lives in my head” not realizing “oh wait that girl is me”
Lmaoo :yea:
His self insert character is Monique.
Now I'm cis and do occasionally like to play girls in DnD and stuff but to write a longrunning comic where the author practically screams repressed while constantly portraying himself as a woman is certainly something.
Tats needs help, and I'm not sure they're getting it, but it might help them figure stuff out.
His self insert character is Monique.
Originally, it was Slick. But over time he became obsessed with Monique and made her the focal point of a bunch of subplots. Now its Slick's foil, the radlib gang of TERF children fighting armies of zombie transgender teenagers.
Tats needs help, and I’m not sure they’re getting it, but it might help them figure stuff out.
I get the sense that the author's been churning this shit out for way too long and just needs to touch some fucking grass. If nothing else, just end the comic and start something new. The setting is far beyond its expiration date.
I read through the entire Twitter thread someone else linked, and honestly, I didn't really get that after reading through it. Even with the very eggy individual comics, the thread paints him as some porn obsessed weirdo who's ashamed about being a porn obsessed weirdo. This explains his turn from South Park-esque edgelord to radfem swerf since South Park is not actually prudish at all when it comes to sex.
The question is why does he feel ashamed for being obsessed with porn. Certainly, there are trans women who experience terrible dysphoria for ejaculating, but from the comics, his shame seems to mostly come from culturally-influenced-by-Christianity-through-cultural-osmosis-without-necessarily-being-a-religiously-observant-Christian brainworms. It's just a lot of "pursuing hedonism is bad."
This explains why he never bashes Christianity quite as hard as South Park (I keep on making comparisons to South Park because they all graduated from college at around the same time, meaning they're around the same age) and why he was so quick to jump from a terf to a Christofascist, skipping an intermediate alt-right phase. The radfem phase was just a way for him to hate on porn without the other baggage that Christianity comes with.
And yet, he can still not let go. I think there was even a Christofascist era comic from that thread where he still has grips with porn. A pathetic fifty-something year old still internally crying that he can watch porn on the Interwebs.
Porn really is his Moby Dick. From Hell's heart, he stabs at pictures of titties.
In right-winger cartoons their idea of the dystopia always ends up looking utopian lmao
"Corporate hellscape police state where all the jobs are unbelievably dangerous and pay shit"
vs
"I'm not used to this :angery:"
Well, the idea seems to be that the two are basically integrated into eachother.
In the framework of belief of somebody who would make a comic like this; the advancement of a socially inclusive public policy is inseparable from the advancement of corporate hegemony.
Which is somehow distinct from "Capitalism", whatever that happens to personally mean to the author.
grrrr i fuckin haaaaate modernity because its cucked and queer! let me depict how awful it is by drawing a fantastical cyberpunk story with thrilling action sequences
Its annoying, because there really is a kernel of a point to be had in Sinfest. Namely, the commercialization and comdification of sex is bad aktuly. Selling people identities and then hitting them up with recurring billing to maintain gender as a lifestyle brand is awful. Selling people some YouTuber's bathwater because that person is a commodified symbol is fucking horrific. Merch is a pox on society.
But then it just goes off the rails with the "Your world is fake and my world is real!" Randian Objectivism. There's no space left for anyone outside of traditionalist social norms, because he paints any deviation as Evil Corporate McDevil Man Selling You Something. The peak of the comic and its revolutionary fervor has collapsed into "Everyone's a Zombie and KILL KILL KILL!" alienated self-aggrandizing sociopathy.
Selling people identities and then hitting them up with recurring billing to maintain gender as a lifestyle brand is awful.
What do you mean by this?
I mean fashion culture as a stand in for identity effectively creates a recurring cost to that identity. If you need to shop at Hot Topic or Banana Republic and wear at least fifteen pieces of flare to feel included in your cliche, your identity has been commodified.
That's the case with some trans people just as it is with some cis people. Just because someone is trans doesn't mean they be shopping more than anyone else. Tbh the majority of my clothes are hand-me-downs from cis women I know, and a lot of the rest are from thrift stores.
That’s the case with some trans people just as it is with some cis people.
Absolutely. And the comic has plenty of criticism for fashion as a substitute for identity in the cis-het world as well.
Tbh the majority of my clothes are hand-me-downs from cis women I know, and a lot of the rest are from thrift stores.
Right. Which is where a lot of the author's critic on trans people really falls apart.
It seems like Tatsuya has never met a trans person IRL. Or, of he has, its only been in some kind of heated argument over his comic.
Man I used to read Sinfest religiously back in the day. This whole terf thing really came out of left field.
Yeah there's an amazing Twitter thread on the devolution if you want to read it.
Edit, I forgot the thread broke and here's part 2 Someone on hexbear linked this thread back in the day, if you want to see it happen (CW: early 00s toxic masculinity casual racism and other south Park edge lordy ness -> radlib terf shit and God knows what else)
https://twitter.com/bitterkarella/status/1498514531143749632
haha, remember when people thought there was liberatory potential in the fucking internet?
oh that was too much
how can one mind contain such a jumbled narrative of the world? if you told me this was the product of a committee of twelve people co-ordinating through fax machines, maybe I'd have an easier time with this comic
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMqHhJ6UYAE_5R8?format=png&name=small HMMMMM
I actually read through that entire Twitter thread, and goddamn. A lot of people in that thread are questioning his fall towards terfdom and Christofascism, but that's pretty expected for people who aren't politically illiterate. The radfem to swerf to terf to fascist pipeline is a unfortunate common pipeline.
The real wtf is how he went from some South Park-esque edgelord to a 2nd wave radfem. He's basically around the same age as the South Park guys (People tracked down Sinfest comics in some UCLA newspaper from spring 1992 while Parker/Stone graduated in 1993.), but Parker/Stone are hardly 2nd wave radfems. If anything, they're more sympathetic towards 3rd wave feminism or more accurately, the pop culture understanding of 3rd wave feminism, which boils down to "women should have the freedom to shake their titties without weird prudes judging them."
Credit where credit is due, Parker and Stone at least aren't prudes with weird views on sex and are fairly comfortable with their sexuality. You would have to be pretty comfortable with your sexuality to make out in some movie from 1998. Meanwhile, the Sinfest loser is some porn obsessed weirdo. It's so fucking weird to see so many comics of scantly clad chicks in sexually suggestive poses with constant "porn is bad acktually" preaching. There's a point where enough ecchi drawings is equivalent to a single hentai drawing. You don't get to say, "I didn't draw nips or pubes, so it doesn't count as porn" while drawing a million ecchi drawings about how hentai is bad for you. Like come the fuck on, who the fuck are you fooling?
I guess the general political trajectory of gen x dudes who aren't completely reactionary is to eventually subscribe to some form of feminism. Parker and Stone, not being sex prudes, choose (the pop cultural understanding of) 3rd wave feminism while the Sinfest guy, being a porn obsessed weirdo who's ashamed of being a porn obsessed weirdo, chooses (the pop cultural understanding of) 2nd wave feminism. And as a porn obsessed weirdo, he would naturally be drawn towards the swerfy aspects of 2nd wave feminism instead of say, 2nd wave feminism being crucial towards the fight for reproductive rights. Once he became a swerf, he's well on his way to become a Christofascist via the pipeline.
I re-read most of it last year and when you look att he whole thing knowing where it ends there were signs. He's always been obsessive about sex and drugs and profoundly uncomfortable with his own sexuality. He's always had religious brainworms tucked away somewhere. It's still pretty weird but viewing the whole thing from a distance you can kinda see how it went down.
It is weird how the conservative mind doesn't have a positive vision of the future. They have the same negative view if the future we do only they like it.
Like, most conservatives find conservative utopians as weird as we do I think.
...as a person that doesn't believe people get to pick their identity he will accept the label given to him. He is conservative, I don't care what he identifies as.
Idk what he identifies as these days, all I know is that he went from 'male feminist' to 'terf' from like 2013-2017. I stopped reading after that, it's totally possible he's full on conservative at this point, that was poor wording on my part.
He's 100% a conservative, he's full in on Trump and the Alt-right now.
There was a storyline that was pro-BLM back in the Obama Era that someone brought up in contrast to his current stance of "Its the feds" and "Black people something something progressive stack" and Tats had them banned and blocked.
There's a weird storyline in it that a "Trans Zone" similar to the "Reality Zone" (everything becomes hyperrealistic and "real") where characters would switch up genders, and created in turn a storyline about the pig character questioning their gender presentation and gender identity which eventually just...fizzled out. Its notable because the pig character (along with Slick) are supposed to be in-universe stand ins for the creator.
Theres a lot of compelling speculation that Tats might be an egg, and this Terf-mindset is self-loathing, but theres no way to tell and the "transphobe is really trans" is a harmful trope some people throw out similar to the "homophobe is a gay" trope.
Some people are just bigots.
I went & scrolled through a bunch of the panels after somebody mentioned what comic this was from, and like no this dude is very much some kind of weird neo-trad-guy.
Damn has he devolved further? Chirst. You have to go, like waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyy back, like 8 years back, and he was a prominent 'male feminist' comic.
:same-picture:
I mean, yes, i know what you're getting at, he's a sex-negative transphobic radfem, not a chud, but a terf is just a chud that's not pupated yet.
Even if I'm techno-skeptic when it comes to gender (I don't think gender abolition and liberation should be dependent on technology, but rather the other way around), I can get behind a genderless future with cool hairstyles.
This just reads like the other side of the Crypto-Fanatic coin. Inserting tech jargon everywhere to sound like you're a futurist. "Oh no! They're coming to AI your gender!" What the fuck does that even mean? Its not even Cyberpunk style coolness. Its gibberish.
This is the (very distant) inevitability right? Either all life fizzles out as capitalism devours all life on earth or FLAGSC is achieved and humanity is no longer restrained by the mere limitations of our bodies.
