2833 Assimilation.
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This is an unintentionally topical section of the comic. Those of you who weren’t born two seconds ago will know that immigration has been a subject of debate BEFORE five minutes ago. I feel like I should say that as you’re reading along as the comic is coming out if the characters say something you disagree with, rather than throwing a fit and stomping off after telling me what a monster I am, you might let the comic get its entire thought out first. If you want to stomp off after that, be my guest. People have gotten into a bad habit of not hearing an entire premise before making a judgment. It takes weeks for an entire thought to work itself through the process of me making it in to pages. I feel the need to preface this since I kept getting accused of things over the squabbling lesbians, and other older pages, that were addressed in the narrative when it had a chance to get where it was going. Of course at this point if my extremely mild storytelling has you flipping your lid there’s nothing I can do to mitigate the issue anyway. For my part I grew up on the ground floor of the immigration debate in a place in the US that no one ever thinks about and I want to say my piece on things through my art, so I will. If you’re gonna be mad at me for not being on your side fine. I’m always not on anyone’s side but my own anyway.
As far as the page goes, whenever John is saying a direct quotation from Thomas he’s doing an impression of him too. Which is why he takes on Thomas’s facial expressions and stance. I almost went way further with it, but decided to pull back since people seem to have a problem understanding what’s happening when I do some sort of visual gag you can only do in something like a comic.
I’ll be entertaining guests for 3 or 4 days, but I should have the next page up on time on Monday, so I hope to see those of you who don’t abandon the comic then. Have a safe weekend. I know that’s becoming a much more difficult task recently, but I urge you to try. If not for your sake then for mine.
16 Comments
I love how John has known Thomas so long he does a very good impression of him.
Also first!!1! ?? Moment
This makes, what, three impressions so far?
Thomas as Reggie.
Brooksie aa Tommy Wiseau.
I can “hear” the characters doing it. Good stuff.
“That doesn’t sound like them.”
I agree Mike, they definitely don’t give that impression. It seems like John also realized how that sounded, and was quick to correct/explain.
Look, simple fact is: humans are different. We all got different cultures, different expectations, and different languages. Hell, just ask people what they casually call a can of Coke to see the difference.
“All humans are equal” is correct as far as morality is concerned, everyone deserves the same basic rights and all that jazz. But if ya try to say that ‘humans are the same,’ that is just wrong. Our differences should be explored instead of being pushed under the rug.
Looking forward to how this shapes out, should be a fun ride.
Yeah, just as America is a tapestry not a melting pot. You can try to workshop the melting pot idea but a lot of possible interpretations just come out anti-diversity.
That was SUPPOSED to be the point. You come to America, you BECOME an AMERICAN.
Kind of like how alloys are made.You throw iron and carbon and oxygen into the pot, you get steel. You don’t have a “tapestry” of iron and carbon. You have steel.
But even with steel, you get variations. More like Damascus metal than pure steel. Especially as you’re working with way more than just three ‘pure’ elements.
Part of the problem is you have people throwing together iron, carbon, and oxygen, and getting upset when they don’t get back gold.
Yeah, sure, and in terms of ‘everyone’s an American, everyone’s equal, everyone can achieve the American Dream’, that’s all well and good. But then- look at how identity is, nowadays, just about the most important thing to every single person out there: you have ‘proud Irish-Americans’, ‘proud Chinese-Americans’, etc etc. It’s not sufficient simply to be ‘an American’, society nowadays seems to push one to ‘speak out’ and ‘claim’ one’s identity, so… that’s what people are doing. Whether that’s inherently or necessarily good or bad, I have no real idea.
I think part of the idea, at least originally, was that you would keep the parts of your cultural identity that works well with American culture, and share that around until it becomes part of the American culture, but that you’d cast out the parts that don’t mesh well with American culture. Obviously that isn’t how things played out in the long run, but I believe that was the goal.
I do believe it is important to respect other people’s cultures, but I also think that part of respecting other people’s cultures is being aware of areas where your two cultures clash and being willing to explain your own culture, to listen to the explanation of the other, and find a compromise. Some people feel like it’s appropriate to make demands and accusations because they have a cultural thing and you must respect it as their first recourse instead of opening with a simple conversation where they demonstrate the same respect for culture that they expect from you.
I suspect this just the antics of a noisy minority who can’t manage to build an identity of their own. Most people probably couldn’t tell you where their great-great-grandfather was born, and they certainly don’t build their entire identity around it.
Every immigrant group that assimilated to the US also changed the US a little as well. Food is an obvious example (although American ethnic food is often significantly different from what people in its “native” country actually eat), but there’s also language, leisure activities, etc. I sometimes think it’s not so much that immigrants “become” American as that people who come and stay here tend to be those most likely to already have values commonly associated with the US. It’s also partly a matter of sample bias. Immigrants that don’t “fit in” often move on or return to their native countries. This was true even in periods of high immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Everybody knows about how a lot of, for example, Irish families moved to the US, but books and movies rarely mention how many eventually went back back to Ireland.
Thank you for the caution about patience and allowing the statement to reel out, Jackie. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. I find your comments about the things you put into your work fascinating, they help me appreciate it even more.
Without big agriculture a place like Marbleton would barely exist. And it was mentioned about the packing plant in town having closed not too long ago.
Looking forward to this arc and our host writing what he knows.
I’m a suburbanite, and in suburbs too many people think of agriculture as something depicted in Currier & Ives prints. It’s not the same, just as steel mills, mining, and such aren’t the same as they were for much of the last century.
People lost the media literacy to understand that sometimes characters say and do things that are incorrect as flawed individuals.
The lesbian thing gets especially harrowing because you run into the “Galbrush Threepwood” problem. Where by depicting characters that are messy, dramatic, and complicated, but also gay, becomes narrowed into “lesbians are messy, dramatic, and complicated.”
That idea is just factually inaccurate, even in the comic, but a perceived negative depiction gets treated in this weird way where it’s a representation of EVERY PERSON OF THAT GROUP which it is not.
I’d say it’s an older problem. Not sure who to point the finger at first for this, but as an example, feminists once started to complain about how women were depicted in media. And at first, it was entirely understandable; they said it was very limited how few traits women could have, and all the “good” women were quiet and demure and obedient and fell in love with the square-jawed male lead no matter what. But we are now at a point where having a singular movie where the female lead is like this is seen as a harmful message saying all women everywhere should be subservient, or alternatively, that it’s insulting to all women because one character was a manipulative and conniving mistress. Likewise with complaints that having a black male character as some gangbanger is demeaning to all black people, etc. We went from “A trope done to excess sends the wrong message” to “Every character in fiction from a minority group is to be treated as the face of that entire group and so any bad traits are insults to millions, or billions, of people.”
Seems like we can’t have two separate conversations, one about real-world political or social issues, and one about specific characters and how they work in-universe. Everything has to be a political battlefield, so we end up with movies that, ironically, are just as limited and one-note as many of those old ones, as the people making them are afraid of being digitally picketed for a cultural faux pas.
Yeah, and then you run into the issue where if you point out that a female character is poorly written for whatever reason, you need to defend yourself from allegations of sexism, when a male character written the same way would be just as much of a problem. People act like diversity or whatever makes a work immune to criticism now, because obviously if you dislike a work that prominently features strong women or minorities or whatever you must be sexist or racist or whatever and not have valid critiques of the writing quality. Like, I know that there *are* some people that will hate on a work just for featuring a female protagonist or whatever, but somehow there’s only a controversy about it when there also happens to be criticism of how that protagonist is written.
Like, I didn’t hear anybody complaining overly much about all of the sexists who hated on the first Wonder Woman movie, and I also didn’t hear anybody complaining overly much about the writing of the first Wonder Woman movie. Meanwhile I was hearing complaints about the sexists hating on the Captain Marvel movie almost nonstop, and lo and behold I also see a number of criticisms of the writing of the Captain Marvel movie. It’s almost like there were writing issues with the latter and not with the former or something and it’s easier to just call everyone who complains a sexist than it is to defend the writing.
Ultimately the priority when writing a story should be on telling a good story, rather than on winning diversity points or feminism points. Like, you can totally write a strong female protagonist and include people of color and also tell a great story, I’ve seen it happen tons of times, but if your marketing is focused on “finally a strong female protagonist” or “check out how many diversity boxes we checked” instead of “so this is what the story is about” it says a lot about what the priorities of the creators were, and if your defense to criticism is “you’re a sexist/racist/whatever” instead of “here’s what we were going for and why it makes sense in the story”, that says a lot more about your priorities than those of your haters.
Stories that are actually good don’t tend to wind up in the middle of diversity based controversy. Not that a lack of controversy necessarily means a work is good, just that bad works with white, male leads don’t call their haters bigots so we all just collectively move on, like with the Green Lantern movie, it was bad, there was a lot wrong with it, and now we’ve all moved on.
I do think this is a very interesting point that alot of folks don’t really recognize. It’s not about combativeness, it’s just a natural confusion. I live in Denver currently, and we not only have foreign immigrants, but boatloads of Americans who have moved here recently from all over the country, and it does create a situation where people just aren’t sure how to behave, regularly feeling like they are getting side-eye for perfectly normal behavior, while ironically giving the same side-eye to others for what those people consider perfectly normal behavior. Political comments, edgy jokes, the tone people speak in, all sorts of little things that are homogenized in a closed-off community, end up causing tension and confusion when you mix all sorts of people together.
I think it’s also basically the internet; small pockets of the internet remain where most of the people there communicate on the same wavelength and understand each other, but when those communities mix, say on a platform like Reddit, it can quickly escalate to a firestorm as people misread, misinterpret, assume the worst, and so on. The term “troll” has become ubiquitous as countless people struggle to wrap their heads around the idea that someone could honestly disagree with them (or if they do honestly disagree with them, then they are lizard people from the earth’s core trying to destroy humanity, as no human being could possibly think corrupt politician A is superior to corrupt politician B).