Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
All Known Alternatives
Karolina 'Kajotko' Jankiewicz
Akane has only one way to get back home: collect the 42 keys to parallel worlds. Eri and Ben are just trying to get through the summer before university. When a magical key turns up in an old spare set, all three are forced to change their plans and fast.
Shaderunners
Alex Assan, Lin Darrow
A ragtag band of bootleggers open a speakeasy for bottled colour in the greyscale city of Ironwell.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
No End
Erli, Kromi
A queer romance about people attempting to build lives in a cold, post-apocalyptic world ravaged by hordes of undead.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Hemlock
Josceline Fenton
A witch accidentally marries a monster, and now she and her familiar has to navigate life around her monstrous husband and her even more terrifying in-laws.
Paint the Town Red
Windy, Winter Jay Kiakas
Winona runs a werewolf shelter with partner in crime, Odile in the Gothic city of Merlot. One day they take in an injured vampire, and soon unravels many of the dark secrets of Merlot.
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Crazy idea. The third storyline of season 2 is called “See you in the funny page” (you can see in the sidebar dropdown). Could that be a reference to the comics page of a newspaper? What if Joyce is going to fulfill her autobiographic destiny and become a cartoonist?
First she is her series about college life, “Cohabitants”
That’s followed by her science fiction epic, “It’s Julia Gray!”
After that she write two comics, a silly one about toys called “Understocked” (Cookie Crook and Chip the Dog may rule), and a sequel comic that recasts her previous sci-fi protagonists in a domestic comedy, “Julia Gray and Jake Cobb”.
Finally she reboots the whole universe in college again, with “Young and Stupid”.
Man, I can’t help but notice that a lot of small-minded folks tend to worry A LOT about “gateways”.
That always freaked me out.
Everything one enjoys while young (or, at the very least, open-minded) is always a “gateway” to something harmful, sinister, or, just more fun, which is invariably “BAD”.
I’m on the fence about video games, but I’m more worried about movies and TV.
I’ve about become convinced that “Walker, Texas Ranger” is part of the problem with police initiated violence. I can’t get the image of Chuck Norris putting a boot heel through a taillight to “justify” a traffic stop as “tail light out”. We ARE the stories we tell ourselves and “cowboy cop” is a popular protagonist type.
You can get off the fence.
Research has REPEATEDLY proven no realistic causal link between violent video games and violent behavior outside of games… in fact there’s a modest REDUCTION of violent behavior in people who play violent video games.
Kind of like how having a hamburger makes you less hungry. Weird how that works, huh?
It remains one of politicians’ favourite talking points, not because it’s true, but because their voters THINK it’s true, are AFRAID it’s true, which makes it the low-hanging fruit option to get votes from scared parents if you promise to do something about the “problem” (that doesn’t exist).
There was a teen murderer in the news a few years ago, and they reported how he played a lot of videogames, feeding the myth.
What do you think he was playing? What single game did they discover he spent more than 90% of his time playing? Call of Duty? Some other war-based game? Fortnight? A little Skyrim as a Kahjit Rogue sneaking up and slitting throats?
It was Candy Crush, on his damn phone. Kid had some SERIOUS problems with his home and school life, but let’s not wade into that difficult, ugly business of asking why the adults in his life weren’t helping the kid. Let’s not tackle any of the real problems. Let’s just blame it all on the made-up boogeyman that is “videogames cause violence”.
>_>
Okay, and what about movies and TV?
My whole being willing to entertain that video games might be a factor is that it certainly appears to me that movies and TV are a factor and that maybe cowboy cop shows, a perennial favorite, might be a contributing factor to the social development of future cops, such as those who have recently made headlines.
That growing up watching Chuck Norris beat up the bad guys, who we the audience and Chuck Norris both knew were up to no good, but who couldn’t be proven to be involved in criminal activities within the shows setting through much of each episode, might have influenced their ideas and expectations of what they were to do when in a similar role.
Oh, I found some reading material. I haven’t read it yet, but you might be interested in it, too. I did only the most cursory scan, thus far, focusing on the conclusions of each section. I’ll read it later; it’s most of a few hundred pages. I found it trying to track down that news article about the UN sponsored African (don’t remember which country), musical talent show. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Media/9780300228090_UPDF.pdf
And the article I WAS looking for. Finally found it. Of course, it was after erasing that section of the comment. The jist was that media is used to change what a society tolerates and views as normal. Could not teaching young boys, with a chromed plastic star pinned to their plaid shirt, and a pair of cheap plastic handcuffs clipped to their belt loop, that a cop’s intuition is sufficient grounds to prosecute, or even execute, a suspected criminal is perfectly okay be part of the problem we have today? https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/03/16/593593501/invisibilia-inspired-by-american-idol-somali-tv-show-aimed-to-change-the-world
No, but TV and movies do a lot to shape and reinforce public perception. Copaganda is a thing – it’s often a very deliberate thing. Shows that get police department cooperation in particular.
Relax. Becky’s not even in the age range to really know about that show. She probably got bored and watched it on Netflix over the break on a whim and got super horny for Venus. I don’t think she was even alive when that show started airing. Shame too because a lot of the lastest TMNT cartoons have been great.
I mean, once you get this rigid that the slightest ‘maybe I was wrong about this’ can frequently make it collapse like a house of cards? I can see that being their experience!
Of course in that case they kind of got the causation reversed, but: details!
I actually really don’t understand this mindset at all. You’d think those that have such a strong conviction to their faith wouldn’t be afraid of outside influences. If anything you’d think it would encourage further exploration of other beliefs confident in their own ideologies being the correct ones.
There’s a good argument that fundamentalists are less concerned about Jesus and actually their beliefs that maintaining control over their offspring. As we see with Becky, she’s stronger in her faith because of being shown that the hypocricies of her Church are not tolerated by other people.
Joyce was crushed because she was less into God than the community built around it.
I read an argument recently that spoke volumes: fundie groups teach their members to be preachy not as a recruitment tool, but to alienate outsiders. This reinforces the narrative feedback loop that keeps the flock from going astray by maintaining the group as their most reliable social outlet.
Of course this only radicalizes the likes of Carol…
im not in a position to say that _literally nobody anywhere_ actually believes the central supernatural claims in abrahamism, but i will say that model offers a lot, a LOT, of predictive power.
I certainly believe in the supernatural elements but came from a very fundamentalist background. There was a very nasty anti-Christian undercurrent to being righteous and lording over others.
Fits well with the Chick tracts mentioned elsewhere in the thread – There’s no way those are at all persuasive to the people they’re supposedly aimed at. No Catholic is going to read one of them and decide that parody of their religion is right and it’s really a Satanic cult, but they can certainly keep the insiders believing that the Catholics are evil. Keep them from talking to any Catholics in a sane manner and learning anything. The same for any of the other targets – Muslims, atheists, etc.
Unfortunately, this particular brand of cult (and Joyce and Becky were definitely raised in a more cultlike atmosphere, not just ‘overly restrictive but still mainstream religion’) doesn’t want people well-informed, or exercising critical thinking, or any possibility they might consider other viewpoints. It wants obedience and control over its followers, pure and simple, and so the people who stay are your Rosses and Carols. Because if you start considering that maybe people who are different from you aren’t a massive monolith of pure evil, then maybe you’ll start thinking that gays and Catholics are people too! Worse, maybe you’ll think it’s okay to be like them yourself.
If you’ve never read a Chick Tract, they are… extremely enlightening for a sense of this particular brand of Christianity. In the worst possible way. I particularly ‘recommend’ the ones that talk about how Catholics and Muslims are literally part of the same Satanic cult. Or the one where all rock music is made under the influence of Satan, including Christian rock which is a gateway to ensnare Good Christian Teenagers. And pretty much any one you care to name basically assumes that the reason none of these people are Christians already (unless they’re in on the Satanic conspiracy, like the Pope) is because they just haven’t heard about Jesus. Like, no clue whatsoever. It’s a completely alien mindset to… well, most people who’ve met someone who’s not in their particular ingroup and actually gotten to know them at all. And yet, there are actually people who believe this stuff.
Alternatively, there was a cartoon for religious fundamentalists where giant mecha crusaders battled mecha demons with lightsabers twhile quoting Bible verses that was a thing in the 00s. Joyce might have got the laser sword thing from that.
(No really, it exists. I came upon it in a bout of 3AM insomnia once and it’s either fantastic or awful depending on where your line for so bad it’s good again is.for the life of me I can’t remember what it was called but it kept me entertained riffing on it like MST3K for a few hours until I could sleep)
It’s one of Umberto Eco’s defining features of fascism, incidentally: to be invincibly strong and pathetically weak at the same time: the denigration of enemies to be dismissably weak and yet simultaneously an existential threat.
Commonly seen in conspiracy theories, where the bad guys are ultra powerful yet their plans are put at risk by a few individuals who see “the truth.” Whereas if they really existed people like Alex Jones and David Icke would have been murdered and/or discredited long ago.
Doublethink is doubleplusungood, but necessary for the narrative to hold up.
Unfortunately, conspiracy theorists start from the conclusion they want and twist facts and narratives to work their way to a starting point. In some cases, they’re gaslit into believing that when a previously held-as-true narrative has been proven false, it was “deliberate misinformation” to “throw tHeM off the trail”. There’s no walking them back out of this fantasy world through logic or reason, because their conspiracy world is self-sealing.
Yup, a good conspiracy is immune to debunking. Sometimes personal experience can break people out, but simple logical arguments can’t. There’s still value in them, since they can keep people on the fringes from getting sucked in.
Very few in Japan, 1.5% of the country. Granted, Japan’s a big country so that’s 1.8 million people, but percentage wise South Korea is a lot more Christian, at 28%… though “no religion” is at 56%, possibly making SK the least religious country in the world that doesn’t have a Communist party trying to eliminate religion. SK has 14 million Christians.
they seem to be believe that “the right things are not easy to do” but to me seems easier to demand not to educate your children about sex, sexuality, anything not cis hetero and completely lie or omit how other religions or non religions really are and say you are great parent because of that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I remember “Tycho” from Penny Arcade blogging about how his mum watched him play a demonstration D&D session at a convention. Afterwards, she said “I’m sorry, son. It’s not what they told me it was.”
Joyce was also swinging Sarah’s vibe like a lightsaber. I think her parents got more strict as she got older, and were much more mainstream when she was a kid. Her oldest brother got to go to regular school I’m pretty sure.
Yoga exercise videos though,too true, lol. My then future sister in law once said my family wasn’t Christians because we owned a yoga mat. I said it was an exercise mat.
They’re not entirely wrong about yoga though. It’s not just an exercise, though most Westerners use it as such. It’s origins are as Hindu spiritual practice and if you dig in beyond the superficial level, you’ll still into more philosophical and spiritual aspects.
It’s less silly than a lot of other things frowned on by fundie Christians as “gateways”.
*rolls up sleeves* I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW BECKY THAT THOSE 4 DUDES ARE THE RADDEST DUDES OF ALL TIME AND I WOULD GLADLY SHARE PIZZA WITH THEM I WILL FIGHT YOU, YOU FICTIONAL 19 YEAR OLD
Relax. Becky’s not even in the age range to really know about that show. She probably got bored and watched it on Netflix over the break on a whim and got super horny for Venus. I don’t think she was even alive when that show started airing.
? She’s most definitely old enough to have watched the 2012 show. She’s 18 now and so was born in 2002 (this year) so she’s probably too young to remember the 2003 though.
The girl turtle specifically though is from the Next Mutation which aired in the 90’s. The Becky of today could never have watched it when it first came out and she has no interest in the turtles beyond that because “dudes”. It is on Netflix though. They should really bring Venus back the next time they reboot the turtles!
Venus?! I thought the OP was going to be about Sailormoon, … When was a venus, oh.. wait… de Milo. Welp. Open mouth, reveal foolishness. I mean, I could still not post… but where is the integrity in that.
I know Becky has selective attention, like that Family Guy asian guy that only watches Star Trek because of Zulu, but I am deeply offended. I am straight and I like male characters a lot. Just because there’s a female version of a character doesn’t mean it’s going to be progressive and good.
On the topic of eastern religion, Joyce and Becky would be surprised about all the different religions and each version in each country of Asia. What Persona and Gaijin Goombah have taught me is like 0.01% o the religiouc culture of Asia.
I don’t think “progressive and good” is her criteria, I think her criteria is that she’s a girl who likes girls and so every aspect of the whole self-insert identification/escapism/hot character to fantasize about Thing revolves around girls. Or to put it more bluntly, she just thinks they’re neat.
The thing that confuses me is that you’d think Becky would be like my lesbian bestie who watched the show religiously….for the hotness of April O’Neil.
And also, IMHO, that she’s a girl, period. As I note below, I was one of those girls who desperately wanted to see female representation in her favourite shows. Not to say that my budding girl-crushes on some of the girl characters weren’t a part of it…
When I came out as bi/pansexual to my mom she wasn’t surprised and I believe that was primarily because of my intense obsession with She-Ra.
I believe that Scarlet, Lady Jaye, and She-Ra had a not-insignificant affect on my developing childhood. I didn’t see anything weird about women soldiers and was confused at people who were horrified by the idea of them as leaders.
Man, a few years ago I tried to watch some G.I. Joe, as an adult. I took a dip in that pool and it was so shallow I don’t think my toenails got wet.
I spent many an hour watching 30-minute commercials for toys as a child, but now I can’t stand them. I can see why so many people vilify Barney and the Telletubies. So simple, in both the modern and classical sense.
It’s one of the things Disney has consistently gotten right. Make a show for families, with elements for every age, rather than children. But then, if parents watched G.I. Joe WITH their kids, toy sales might have gone down as parents nipped the latest “need” in the bud.
I hear your point, but as a woman who grew up in the late eighties, I remember glomming onto the *only* female character in popular TV shows whether I actually liked her or not. April O’Neil, Cheetara, Teela, Gadget, Sunni Gummi, Princess Allura, etc. Some of these (and other characters I can’t remember) were progressive and good; some weren’t. But my younger self just yearned for any female characters in what felt like a sea of male characters. Once I discovered She-Ra, I became a *serious* addict of the show! My poor mom landed up shelling out for nearly every single action figure (I only had one or two from the last series) as well as a bunch of the horses and a few playsets. It was just so *cool* to see a cartoon full of @$$-kicking women and where *men* were the “sidekicks”….
Yeah, there’s still dude-based properties I enjoy, and still male characters in heavily female casts (like, Steven Universe is not my favorite member of his cast but I still adore him,) but well-written male characters are EVERYWHERE whereas series that do well by a female cast are much rarer.
I can throw a rock and get a well-executed remake of a nostalgic male-predominant property from before I was born, I don’t have the time or investment to pick them all. I’m going to focus in on the ones I’ve heard do have a bunch of well-done female characters (Ducktales 2017, for instance,) or the ones that are textually gay because that’s still such a rarity (thus, IDW Transformers Phase Two.)
Now, there are some pretty male-heavy franchises that I’M nostalgic for, because I have childhood memories with them. But if I told a random zoomer to play Kingdom Hearts, I’m pretty sure most of them would stare at me like I had two heads. Now, KH is definitely a fringe case because it’s so notoriously, utterly bonkers, but I also wouldn’t tell someone who’s never touched Pokemon before to start watching the Indigo League series. (Hell, I’m not gonna fight people who were fans of the series and didn’t like KH3, and I found the emotional payoff for the secondary trios immensely satisfying. It’s objectively a game with almost comically bad backloading of the plot, its treatment of the female characters is abysmal, the Disney worlds had started being awkward even as early as II but Arendelle is just absurdly bad, and the plot itself is so far up its own ass it actually ends up somewhere in the esophagus… but emotionally? Yeah I totally cried seeing the Sea Salt Trio’s big moment because it was exactly what I wanted for them since 3D back in 2013 or so.)
Tbh as an enby who’s largely given up finding very many examples of my particular flavor of gender in real life much less major media representation, I both understand and envy you both.
Sympathy. I get that pretty frequently with either being autistic, being ace, or both, and there’s been a veritable ocean of decent representation there lately by comparison. Some of them aren’t even robots or aliens!
I once asked a friend why it was that in the late ’90s lesbians got so excited to see TV dramas which portrayed lesbians as doomed, crazy stalkers. She said, “Well, it’s not like we got much else back then.”
re: glomming on the one female character, I recognize this so much. For me it was big in video games. In super mario 64 I always played Peach because she was The Girl One. Super Smash Brothers didn’t have any girls, but then Melee came out and whoa, there were TWO Girl Ones? I played almost exclusively as Zelda.
As I got older I started to realize how fucked up it was that boys got to pick from a whole range of boy characters to identify with based on personality, but the only personality available to me was Girl.
There was a third female character in Melee who had a distinct trait besides ‘girl’… but no one who hadn’t played a pretty niche game series that was close to a decade since its last installment at the time knew that Samus Aran was a girl, so pretty much all us eight-year-olds playing Melee for the first time assumed Orange Robot was male, and only found out differently if they either got the Prime games or saw Zero Suit Samus for the first time in Brawl… Or read the trophies but like, who does that?
It’s exhausting and makes me sad, just, in general.
I was like that too as a kid in the late 90s-early 00s. I’m still like that, though female led or awesome female action/adventure heroes are more common now.
Yeah, I feel like it’s actually pretty lucky to be a kid enjoying cartoons and media right now for the most part. Getting to see representation in cartoons I didn’t get. I’m not a woman, but as a black dude I understand some of the feels. I just finished watching Kipo and it’s everything I ever wanted in a cartoon as a kid!
I think you have to remember Becky JUST discovered she was a lesbian like 4 months ago. That what she’s felt most of her life even had an identity so I think she’s still in the honeymoon period so to speak where everything about herself revolves around that and discovering new things or rediscovering old stuff. I think she’ll eventually grow out of the whole “if a dude’s associated with it I don’t care” phase…or maybe she won’t? That’s okay too maybe? But I think the opinions she’s expressing now are very much part of the process of accepting herself.
Even then it depends on the kind of Christianity. I certainly know some “Christians” growing up that would have called Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox practitioners pagans and “Eastern”.
Which was even more odd because I grew up going to several Catholic churches, army brat so moved around a lot and to a lot of different parishes, so you’d think that a practicing CATHOLIC would know better.
Many American Christians take a deep personal pride that not only are other Christian denominations damned but that every denomination but their specific one is.
“Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion — several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.”
……Mark Twain, “The Lowest Animal”, written sometime between 1897 and 1905
I keep expecting to hear about an Orthodox clergyman being attacked because someone thinks they’re Muslim, assuming that long beard and robe means Muslim.
Orthodox is Eastern, practically by definition (The terms “Eastern culture” and “Western culture” were originally coined after the Roman Empire split, and refer to “Eastern Roman culture” and “Western Roman culture”. The terms have evolved since then).
For serious, the whole “Eastern/Western” or “Oriental/Occidental” divide started off with the assumption that Jerusalem was the literal center of the world. Israel is not in Asia nor Europe nor Africa, but rather the hub where they all meet. (Yes, they had better maps than that, but symbolically they used a sort of inverted T inside an O to represent the world, with Jerusalem where the lines of the T met.)
TMNT 2003 is still my favourite. Leonardo is my favourite turtle and they gave him lots of good angst and suffering, which is exactly what I want in my Leonardo.
TMNT 2012 had some okay moments but the Donatello/April thing was creepy and I lowkey hated how they handled Irma and then HIGHKEY hated when she turned out to be an alien voiced by Gilbert Gottfried. It was the only series I have ever seen to somehow fail the Bechdel-Wallace Test RETROACTIVELY. I burned out hard.
Haven’t watched the new one yet. It seems… frenetic?
> then HIGHKEY hated when she turned out to be an alien voiced by Gilbert Gottfried.
I’m sorry I just absolutely love this. Like the other guy I didn’t know her enough to question it from a character point…but when his voice started coming out of her head I just about died. That was about when they started producing the show while high, I’m sure of it.
I grew up with the 80’s TMNT cartoon (and the Archie comics), and will absolutely agree on that the 2003 series was the best.
I lost interest in the 2012 series after a season or two? Right after the Karai reveal I saw coming from a mile away.
Haven’t given Rise a shot yet either. I’ve found it aesthetically unappealing, but I feel like I should at least see for myself what it’s got going for it at some point.
Right after 9/11 I visited a Civil Air Patrol local and the former Air Force sergeant in charge gave the younger guys a lecture that indicated that he completely conflated Islam, Buddhism, Maoism and probably other faiths into one blob of willful ignorance and xenophobia. I’m sure that’s very VERY common.
That may be accidentally correct, actually, in certain country. In China, Japan, and a few other nations–you can be part of multiple religions simultaneously.
Contradiction isn’t such a big thing over there. Africa too.
This kind of thing is only really common with the mixture of buddhism and taoism (or shinto) in my experience, rarely any of the other religions.
Islam definitely is in the same boat as christianity on the topic of syncretism. You cannot claim to be both Muslim and Buddhist, it doesn’t work that way in most Muslim majority countries I am aware of.
Islam isn’t generally considered an “Eastern Religion” though
Essentially and loosely the distinction is “Far East” vs “Near East” – the Near East being relatively familiar to medieval Europe and thus with more influence and interconnections. East Asia, South Asia and South East Asian would be the regions where “eastern religions” come from.
My favorite part of syncretism is how you can simultaneously be a true Christian who follows the one true religion of the one true God, and also have a slew of other gods, and a shrine to your ancestors for good measure.
My sister used to have that Reader’s Digest Atlas of the World.
I remember that ‘Eastern Religion” was a yellow blob. Sunni and Shia religion were two shades of green. The centre of Australia was grey, keyed as “native religions”. Most of the rest of Australia was a sort of pale pule indicating “Protestant”, but Victoria and the southern half of eastern NSW were a mixture of Catholic and Protestant. Also, places with communist government were strewn with little red hammer-and-sickle symbols.
From what I’ve seen of practicing communists in North America (thanks mom), denoting communism as a religion isn’t entirely wrong. They’re fundamentalists, and yes, they’re willing to line you up with the rest of their political enemies when the proletariat finally throw off their bourgeoisie shackles in *violent* revolution.
Like any religion there are some good ideas, (compassionate socialism) but it’s like picking pepper out of fly shit. (and yes, I know it’s normally the other way around, but this way gets the ratio correct)
I remember my grandparents trying to prevent me from reading Harry Potter because it was “promoting witchcraft and demonic influences.” Couldn’t stop me reading it, but they certainly tried.
I would have tried because it promotes hackneyed writing, contrived plots, the Chosen One (a trope I particularly despise), and casual antisemitism in banking. I’d rather promote witchcraft with Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series.
At least the “Chosen One” thing is a bit subverted by said chosen one being directly chosen by the bad guy, and not by cosmic forces. But yeah there’s a whole lot of bad and stupid pretty much everywhere else in the franchise.
Did I mention my parents are dead yet? ‘Cause they are.
I’m not saying that grieving isn’t still a thing she is allowed, but I hope that Becky isn’t going to keep bringing up her parents being dead constantly when it isn’t relevant to the story.
I personally find this realistic. The summer before I started high school, my neighbour/friend/crush died in a small plane crash. That first semester of college I talked all the time about my dead kind-of boyfriend (my relationship to him was complicated – mostly because we were both fairly young for our chronological ages – and is too long to get into here). I have no doubt my roomate and the friends I made got sick of it. I gradually stopped bringing him up often as I went through the stages of processing my grief. And this was just a friend and maybe-boyfriend, not my parents.
Becky is now partly based on Willis’s version of Batman. She’s got “I’m a Lesbian” for “I’m Batman”, “My parents are dead” for ” My parents are dead” and soon she’ll develop her own version of “I can breathe in space”.
Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord. HAMLET: So long? Nay then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables. O heavens! die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.
They totally did. The /ancient/ egyptians had lapis lazuli, which makes a VERY vibrant blue.
Of course, some have attempted to claim himans couldn’t see/perceive ue until recently because we apparently didn’t have a distinct word for it. However, the revered use of the colour in ancient times should sink that theory.
Going by Wikipedia “Natural dye”, they would have access to both indigo and woad (associated with northern Europe but indigenous to Assyria and the Levant.)
The religions that began further west aren’t really as significant on the world stage, and the Western Hemisphere is dominated by the Abrahamic religions, so…
I LOVE the Becky&Joyce double act, and I enjoy that Booster’s reaction to them is kinda like Dorothy’s default reaction. Polite and calm, but gently probing to find a thread that would unravel the madness.
As well as ‘I am at least a little disturbed by this but polite enough not to really show that on my face.’ I feel like that’s an element of most dealings with Joyce and Becky’s upbringing that aren’t absolute horror/ridicule.
Eastern Religion = Any religion widely practiced in some part of Asia, but not widely practiced in any part of the world that medieval Europeans might regularly travel to, trade with, or declare war on following the rise of Islam.
Hey, we were attacked by the North men, so we had to attack everybody else. It just took us 2-3 hundred years to get a crusade organized. How we could organize that, and not organize our ur own countries STILL baffles me.
Partly because the Crusades weren’t particularly organized, and partly because politically they were a distraction from all the crazy going on at home.
I claim the primary purpose of the Crusades was domestic. There were too many knights and not enough land*. Possibly because knights’ families eat better than serfs, and grow faster.
So you have all these knights with no land who are going to start fighting over it. Fighting *here*. Brilliant idea: Send them away somewhere else, so the fighting and destruction is over there, not here.
Some will die, and cease to be a problem here, others will settle there, and cease to be a problem here. And some of the ones who do come back will be rich with loot…
So the Crusades worked, if you consider that the purpose was “stop all these excess knights from causing problems locally.”
* Usable land, I mean, with serfs already attached.
Which reminds me that a woman I knew said her boyfriend was „into the old religion“ and when I asked which, she was confused. Seems like some right wingers manage to sell a certain kind of Norse god worship as „the old European religion of Europe“.
We will worship dear old Isis,
She will help you in a crisis,
And she’s never raised the prices,
So it’s good enough for me,
Gimme that Olde Tyme Religion…..
my immediate family wasnt like that but some of my extended family were Like That… its interesting like my aunt “banned” pokemon, teletubbies, spongebob, like anything that had a big “controversy” amoung fundamentalists for being a “bad influence” but also let my cousins watch & play things that are probably much worse by their standards like yugioh and the power puff girls (which actually feature violence and demons) or that sesame street special where big bird helps a ancient Egyptian boy cursed to wander the earth get into the ancient Egyptian afterlife and is very Literally teaching the audience about an “eastern religion” like
Not just for you. It seems unlikely that google/youtube would register be.com with gandhi.net (since they operate their own name servers and tld’s). But gandhi didn’t list any admin info, so who knows.
What if Booster isn’t actually just extremely stupid?
Joyce: You’re right, Eastern Religion is a gross simplification of a variety of different cultures and traditions that arose in countries such as India, China, and Japan.
What the f. Is East?
Well Indiana is if yer on the west coast, which means Washington, D.C. is the center of the Eastern Religion if you’re in Indiana. If yer on the East Coast, Europe is the East and the Far East is probably the Ukraine? Unless you live in New Zealand, then the East is probably what? Chile? IDK, Argentina?
I mean, public high schools teach basic world religion primers as an elective. Knowing that, bare minimum, Buddhism and Hinduism are different even if they share some common DNA is not at all surprising for a college student in this day and age.
We love eatin’ all kinds of unclean shit, however! Pork, shrimp, un-kosher seasoning on everything, non-Sundays and Sundays alike! Don’t sacrifice any of the best stuff in thanks to God and Jesus, either. Even on Sundays!
Don’t forget the whole grandfather clause with various ancient pagan allusions in holidays and rewritten historical propaganda (Pontius Pilate, anyone?) just because prior generations didn’t know better, back then…
Don’t forget Tai-chi! Oh! And, and, Qui-gong, … gentle exercise for the obese Americans and which their doctors are Strongly recommending for COPD. No wonder the Red states hate Fauchi!
The only ‘Eastern’ Religion in the MacIntyre is *Middle* Eastern Religion!…As long as it’s Abrahamic. They probably feel little better about WESTERN Religion, like Scientology…
Sorry, kids, you’re not allowed to go to the Christmas service. The manger scene depicts three wise men from the east, which might be a gateway to eastern religion.
You joke, but when my mother went through a born-again phase, the church she dragged me to went to great lengths to explain that the wise men were scholars of God (can’t define them as Jewish or say ‘Torah’ in an evangelical church, I guess) just to make sure all the little home-schooled children did not ever think for one second that anyone who thought just the little bit different from them could in any way be good.
I think that Booster is realising how much dealing with Becky and Joyce is like being carried along by a riptide of a strange upbringing and a friendship that’s as much a sisterhood as it is anything else. I mean, listening to them talk and trying to understand their ‘in’ slang that only two women who have been together since their infancy can have…
For sanity’s sake, I consider each iteration of TMNT to be different universes and refuse to judge them compared to each other as they tend to be different things aimed for different audiences.
For those going “Israel is part of the Middle East, not Asia,” for what it’s worth the ancient Greeks defined Asia as “pretty much anything east of the Bosporus” and was commonly used to describe the Persian Empire. It’s…possible, perhaps, that seeing how Becky was raised in a religion centered around a book written originally in Greek (the Jesus part anyways) that she absorbed that definition of Asia. Though I can’t claim to be enough of a Biblical scholar to know how often the Bible references Asia
Anyways geographical constructs have always been highly arbitrary- at what point does the Middle East become Central Asia become Asia? For that matter I once had a drunken Brit tell me that he always thought of “Asia” as India, while China, Korea, and Japan were “the Far East.”
He wasn’t wrong. Asia minor was the term for Turkey+, and east of that was asia (inc persia, india) and everything past that was further east still. That was/is a common perspective for people with a nuanced/historical view of the east.
IIRC, the ancient Greek’s “Europe” didn’t originally include Greece itself or most of present day Europe – it was a label for the northern Balkans, which they considered the domain of impoverished savages.
Whenever someone refers to “Eastern” religions (or even as a region) they almost explicitly mean from India to the Pacific. Most people have grown up assuming Israel and its neighbors are “The Middle East” (which when you think about it is an absurd statement).
But yeah, like you point out, the concept of the geologic borders between the Eurasian continents is….flaky at best.
Or even at what point does Europe become Asia? Geographically speaking, it’s one continent.
But historically and culturally speaking, it does make sense. The Middle East is that part that was tied to and influenced Europe, particularly what used to be part of the Roman Empire. The Far East was anything past that, that was only known about by distant rumor.
And “Middle” East by reference to the older “Near East” concept, which was basically the region of the Ottoman Empire.
Absurd maybe. But since many people who wonder about the location of the middle east live in the mid-west, I don’t think there’s a lot of room to throw stones.
Clearly the middle east is halfway between greenwich and the east pole, and the midwest is half the otherway to the west pole.
Good point. These terms develop and calcify in a historical context.
The “midwest” in the US refers to what’s actually the north central part of the country, with some of it actually in the eastern half, but when the term stuck it made sense as the region between the well settled East and wild Western frontier territories. Before then of course, what’s now the midwest was actually the “west”.
? But they’re not mutually exclusive… The majority of the Middle East (including Israel) is in Asia. (The rest is in Africa – Egypt – and Europe – the European portion of Turkey.)
Hm, reminds me of the time I stumbled across a review of the original Avatar: the Last Airbender show on some Christian review site, and they gave it an exceptionally low grade due to it’s “unChristian values” in addition to the whole “gateway” thing.
You can reach spiritual enlightenment without depending on “our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ”. Portrayal of spirits that aren’t angels or devils. Gurus and non-Christian meditation.
I’m pretty sure that ‘Eastern Religion’ was the Browns’ and McIntyres’ attempts to be polite about ‘heathen devil worship’.
In any case, in this context, ‘Eastern Religion’ is a synonym for any religion that isn’t some flavour of evangelical Christendom and possibly orthodox Judaism.
TBH, as fundie outrages against logic go, the “Eastern religion” thing isn’t too bad. Most historians agree there’s a general “Eastern culture” to go with “Western culture,” and a lot of non-fundies think of the Middle East as distinct from Asia. So, y’know, we’re talking Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and anything else hippies pulled from the East to freak out their parents. Joyce’s parents (primarily her mom, I imagine) are even correct to recognize Eastern influence in a lot of popular culture.
But hooooo boy, that paranoia, that absolutist insistence that only your belief set is worth listening to and enjoying anything else is a threat… I wish it ended with a West-vs.-East binary.
Eastern influences:
Tea instead of coffee(The Brits fault, probably), Batik, paisley, breath work, meditation, Silk (the Italians fault, probably), lapis lazuli, Hippie (Rudraksha) beads, Meditation, Cardamom, cinnamon, gamboge, rice, macrobiotics, Zen, The Kamasutra, The Hari Krishna, Baba Rham Das, The Maharishi, Yoga, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Diary of a Yogi, Madam Blavatski, Mao-ism, Daoism, DRUGS!, it’s all from the east, …
Tobacco is american, and peyote and toad licking and coffee! (yes caffeine is available elsewhere, but not nearly like in coffee). Without the west there would be *only* tea and that would be thanks to india and the east, not britain. The brit’s just like it and popularised it to the west.
Again, silk is asian, but popular with traders, ergo the silk road, which _far_ predates Italy. Also, noodles.
Lastly, how you made that list and left out Buddha… it boggles the mind.
A girl who was a year ahead of me in high school found out my mom did yoga sometimes and dared to warn her about allowing demons into her body! Which I though was presumptuous of her and my mom thought was cute.
Seems like a pretty straightforward category. Religions from the east. East side of asia. Nobody ever bothers doing the math on those being directly closer westward pf America.
There’s definitely a bit of a divide along the asian steppe between the abrahamic religions that dominate Europe, Africa, and the levant (and I guess the americas too) and the areas dominated by Hinduism, Buddhism, Bon, Sikhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Shinto, even though there’s a lot of abrahamic bleed over.
No, actually Boster is onto samthing. We need to deduct from first principles what “Eastern Religion” is by finding the comon elements in Ninja turtles, Star Wars, Power Rangers and Yoga.
as far as I can tell, “Eastern Religions” means interpretative dance
this comic applies one of my personal internet philosophies, “if your beliefs/viewpoint/argument require you to lie, even if it’s a lie of omission, or censorship of any kind in order to keep people believing it then you have the WRONG belief/viewpoint/argument.” Unless you are going to literally imprison your kids in your home for the rest of your life they are going to talk to other people eventually and they will realize that you were lying to them for their entire lives.
Not if you’ve got them sufficiently convinced that everyone who doesn’t agree with you is part of a Satanic conspiracy. They’ll talk to other people, try to convince them of the Truth, get rejected and that will drive them deeper into the fold since they’ll only find acceptance within the fold.
I think Becky is optimistic. I wouldn’t bet anything I couldn’t afford to lose on any given xian fundamentalist knowing where Israel is. Including the ones that have been here.
Oof. Hard mood. My parents often referred to “Eastern Religion.” They have SO little idea how any of it works. That happens when your only exposure to other religions is through courses titled “X from a Christian Worldview.”
Interesting, the comments section over on Grrl Power is having a heavy discussion about pop culture because one character referred to another as “Alf” as in the dude named “Gordon Shumway” in the cartoon… I bet Becky &co. never saw “Alf” or the cartoons of same.
I had a perfectly normal upbringing and never saw Alf as more than a pop cultural reference because it was before my time. I’m close to a decade older than our cast. That’s a sucker bet.
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Crazy idea. The third storyline of season 2 is called “See you in the funny page” (you can see in the sidebar dropdown). Could that be a reference to the comics page of a newspaper? What if Joyce is going to fulfill her autobiographic destiny and become a cartoonist?
When is her toy store phase?
That’s phase three.
First she is her series about college life, “Cohabitants”
That’s followed by her science fiction epic, “It’s Julia Gray!”
After that she write two comics, a silly one about toys called “Understocked” (Cookie Crook and Chip the Dog may rule), and a sequel comic that recasts her previous sci-fi protagonists in a domestic comedy, “Julia Gray and Jake Cobb”.
Finally she reboots the whole universe in college again, with “Young and Stupid”.
Jake Cobb, lol
Then of course in Young and Stupid Jake Cobb becomes a cartoonist and goes on to make a comic series about college life…
Fearless Fosdick would approve.
Oooh, oooh! xD
Dumbing of Age Book 10: Who cares about a buncha friggin’ DUDES?
“Is that what they believe on Easter Island?”
“It’s in Texas!”
“…”
“no, wait, that’s Palestine”
This physically hurt me
Makemake it stop. Please.
Perhaps Ana was thinking of Nazareth, Texas.
You should make a point sometime to visit the Eiffel Tower in Paris Texas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower_(Paris,_Texas)
Don’t forget the steel mills in Pittsburg, which isn’t that far from Paris!
Man, I can’t help but notice that a lot of small-minded folks tend to worry A LOT about “gateways”.
That always freaked me out.
Everything one enjoys while young (or, at the very least, open-minded) is always a “gateway” to something harmful, sinister, or, just more fun, which is invariably “BAD”.
Pokemon, Dragon Ball, Halloween… I have heard a lot.
This is why you should NEVER learn about anything. /f
Also videogames.
I’m on the fence about video games, but I’m more worried about movies and TV.
I’ve about become convinced that “Walker, Texas Ranger” is part of the problem with police initiated violence. I can’t get the image of Chuck Norris putting a boot heel through a taillight to “justify” a traffic stop as “tail light out”. We ARE the stories we tell ourselves and “cowboy cop” is a popular protagonist type.
You can get off the fence.
Research has REPEATEDLY proven no realistic causal link between violent video games and violent behavior outside of games… in fact there’s a modest REDUCTION of violent behavior in people who play violent video games.
Kind of like how having a hamburger makes you less hungry. Weird how that works, huh?
It remains one of politicians’ favourite talking points, not because it’s true, but because their voters THINK it’s true, are AFRAID it’s true, which makes it the low-hanging fruit option to get votes from scared parents if you promise to do something about the “problem” (that doesn’t exist).
There was a teen murderer in the news a few years ago, and they reported how he played a lot of videogames, feeding the myth.
What do you think he was playing? What single game did they discover he spent more than 90% of his time playing? Call of Duty? Some other war-based game? Fortnight? A little Skyrim as a Kahjit Rogue sneaking up and slitting throats?
It was Candy Crush, on his damn phone. Kid had some SERIOUS problems with his home and school life, but let’s not wade into that difficult, ugly business of asking why the adults in his life weren’t helping the kid. Let’s not tackle any of the real problems. Let’s just blame it all on the made-up boogeyman that is “videogames cause violence”.
>_>
Okay, and what about movies and TV?
My whole being willing to entertain that video games might be a factor is that it certainly appears to me that movies and TV are a factor and that maybe cowboy cop shows, a perennial favorite, might be a contributing factor to the social development of future cops, such as those who have recently made headlines.
That growing up watching Chuck Norris beat up the bad guys, who we the audience and Chuck Norris both knew were up to no good, but who couldn’t be proven to be involved in criminal activities within the shows setting through much of each episode, might have influenced their ideas and expectations of what they were to do when in a similar role.
Oh, I found some reading material. I haven’t read it yet, but you might be interested in it, too. I did only the most cursory scan, thus far, focusing on the conclusions of each section. I’ll read it later; it’s most of a few hundred pages. I found it trying to track down that news article about the UN sponsored African (don’t remember which country), musical talent show.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Media/9780300228090_UPDF.pdf
And the article I WAS looking for. Finally found it. Of course, it was after erasing that section of the comment. The jist was that media is used to change what a society tolerates and views as normal. Could not teaching young boys, with a chromed plastic star pinned to their plaid shirt, and a pair of cheap plastic handcuffs clipped to their belt loop, that a cop’s intuition is sufficient grounds to prosecute, or even execute, a suspected criminal is perfectly okay be part of the problem we have today?
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/03/16/593593501/invisibilia-inspired-by-american-idol-somali-tv-show-aimed-to-change-the-world
The other article I was remembering. Somehow I thought this was part of the same article as the Somalia one.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17820571
TV and Movies didnt put the laws in place which give police broad immunity to commit crimes .Nor create guilds which protect every badged criminal .
Red Herring is a Red herring.
No, but TV and movies do a lot to shape and reinforce public perception. Copaganda is a thing – it’s often a very deliberate thing. Shows that get police department cooperation in particular.
Relax. Becky’s not even in the age range to really know about that show. She probably got bored and watched it on Netflix over the break on a whim and got super horny for Venus. I don’t think she was even alive when that show started airing. Shame too because a lot of the lastest TMNT cartoons have been great.
Ooops. I somehow replied to the wrong comment! Sorry! Copy and paste this to Jay’s comment below.
ands the show only lasted a season if it was lucky as it was a shitty power rangers rip off anyways
If the slippery slope fallacy was a religion, it would be American fundamentalism.
So the slippery slope fallacy is a gateway?
To many things…
“But what if they were to value . . . something else?”
The underlying fear of any faith based doctrine.
Basically just take all the cliches from any American produced martial arts movie and you have “Eastern religion”
Fundamentalists seem to think Christian faith is very weak to the slightest exposure.
I mean, once you get this rigid that the slightest ‘maybe I was wrong about this’ can frequently make it collapse like a house of cards? I can see that being their experience!
Of course in that case they kind of got the causation reversed, but: details!
Bruce Lee (EASTERN RELIGION ATHEIST!) said that the people who cannot bend are the most easily broken.
Maybe, but you’d have to have been allowed to watch his movies to be able to ponder that!
Benders do seem preternaturally tough.
Especially earthbenders.
I actually really don’t understand this mindset at all. You’d think those that have such a strong conviction to their faith wouldn’t be afraid of outside influences. If anything you’d think it would encourage further exploration of other beliefs confident in their own ideologies being the correct ones.
There’s a good argument that fundamentalists are less concerned about Jesus and actually their beliefs that maintaining control over their offspring. As we see with Becky, she’s stronger in her faith because of being shown that the hypocricies of her Church are not tolerated by other people.
Joyce was crushed because she was less into God than the community built around it.
I read an argument recently that spoke volumes: fundie groups teach their members to be preachy not as a recruitment tool, but to alienate outsiders. This reinforces the narrative feedback loop that keeps the flock from going astray by maintaining the group as their most reliable social outlet.
Of course this only radicalizes the likes of Carol…
im not in a position to say that _literally nobody anywhere_ actually believes the central supernatural claims in abrahamism, but i will say that model offers a lot, a LOT, of predictive power.
I certainly believe in the supernatural elements but came from a very fundamentalist background. There was a very nasty anti-Christian undercurrent to being righteous and lording over others.
Yeah, I saw that as well. Cult tactics.
Fits well with the Chick tracts mentioned elsewhere in the thread – There’s no way those are at all persuasive to the people they’re supposedly aimed at. No Catholic is going to read one of them and decide that parody of their religion is right and it’s really a Satanic cult, but they can certainly keep the insiders believing that the Catholics are evil. Keep them from talking to any Catholics in a sane manner and learning anything. The same for any of the other targets – Muslims, atheists, etc.
Unfortunately, this particular brand of cult (and Joyce and Becky were definitely raised in a more cultlike atmosphere, not just ‘overly restrictive but still mainstream religion’) doesn’t want people well-informed, or exercising critical thinking, or any possibility they might consider other viewpoints. It wants obedience and control over its followers, pure and simple, and so the people who stay are your Rosses and Carols. Because if you start considering that maybe people who are different from you aren’t a massive monolith of pure evil, then maybe you’ll start thinking that gays and Catholics are people too! Worse, maybe you’ll think it’s okay to be like them yourself.
If you’ve never read a Chick Tract, they are… extremely enlightening for a sense of this particular brand of Christianity. In the worst possible way. I particularly ‘recommend’ the ones that talk about how Catholics and Muslims are literally part of the same Satanic cult. Or the one where all rock music is made under the influence of Satan, including Christian rock which is a gateway to ensnare Good Christian Teenagers. And pretty much any one you care to name basically assumes that the reason none of these people are Christians already (unless they’re in on the Satanic conspiracy, like the Pope) is because they just haven’t heard about Jesus. Like, no clue whatsoever. It’s a completely alien mindset to… well, most people who’ve met someone who’s not in their particular ingroup and actually gotten to know them at all. And yet, there are actually people who believe this stuff.
Alternatively, there was a cartoon for religious fundamentalists where giant mecha crusaders battled mecha demons with lightsabers twhile quoting Bible verses that was a thing in the 00s. Joyce might have got the laser sword thing from that.
(No really, it exists. I came upon it in a bout of 3AM insomnia once and it’s either fantastic or awful depending on where your line for so bad it’s good again is.for the life of me I can’t remember what it was called but it kept me entertained riffing on it like MST3K for a few hours until I could sleep)
OK, now I have to know what this show is.
Okay that’s definitely not Superbook I don’t think, but now I am SUPER CURIOUS because yeah, sounds hilarious.
And since I decided ‘yes, I should look this up’: Ooh, is it this Angel Wars thing?
https://youtu.be/qClC-L_Pv4c
(I seriously hope so, I’m not sure I’m up for multiple series like this to exist.)
It’s one of Umberto Eco’s defining features of fascism, incidentally: to be invincibly strong and pathetically weak at the same time: the denigration of enemies to be dismissably weak and yet simultaneously an existential threat.
Commonly seen in conspiracy theories, where the bad guys are ultra powerful yet their plans are put at risk by a few individuals who see “the truth.” Whereas if they really existed people like Alex Jones and David Icke would have been murdered and/or discredited long ago.
I mean. They’re both pretty discredited.
Doublethink is doubleplusungood, but necessary for the narrative to hold up.
Unfortunately, conspiracy theorists start from the conclusion they want and twist facts and narratives to work their way to a starting point. In some cases, they’re gaslit into believing that when a previously held-as-true narrative has been proven false, it was “deliberate misinformation” to “throw tHeM off the trail”. There’s no walking them back out of this fantasy world through logic or reason, because their conspiracy world is self-sealing.
Yup, a good conspiracy is immune to debunking. Sometimes personal experience can break people out, but simple logical arguments can’t. There’s still value in them, since they can keep people on the fringes from getting sucked in.
That’s what they want you to think.
Why are Christians so paranoid? Do you know how many Christians there are in Korea and Japan??
Many are not of course. It’s really only a few subsets that dip into the cult mindset. They’ve just got a lot power in the US at the moment.
Very few in Japan, 1.5% of the country. Granted, Japan’s a big country so that’s 1.8 million people, but percentage wise South Korea is a lot more Christian, at 28%… though “no religion” is at 56%, possibly making SK the least religious country in the world that doesn’t have a Communist party trying to eliminate religion. SK has 14 million Christians.
China is at 2.5% and 35 million Christians.
they seem to be believe that “the right things are not easy to do” but to me seems easier to demand not to educate your children about sex, sexuality, anything not cis hetero and completely lie or omit how other religions or non religions really are and say you are great parent because of that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I remember “Tycho” from Penny Arcade blogging about how his mum watched him play a demonstration D&D session at a convention. Afterwards, she said “I’m sorry, son. It’s not what they told me it was.”
I was allowed star wars. I thought joyce was too? Didn’t she say she watched some of the prequel trilogy – like to leslie?
Joyce was also swinging Sarah’s vibe like a lightsaber. I think her parents got more strict as she got older, and were much more mainstream when she was a kid. Her oldest brother got to go to regular school I’m pretty sure.
I think willis said the vibesabre bit was something she gleaned from general cultural osmosis.
They also changed their mind about Halloween I think. So that would fit..
Because Jocelyn wanted to be wonder woman, if I remember correctly.
Iirc, the joke there was that the only parts she was allowed to watch were the parts about trade disputes.
I thought the joke was she was allowed to watch it because there were parts about trade disputes, but my memory is notoriously bad
“the parts about trade disputes”
I dunno, those trade coalition leader aliens had accents that might be a gateway to eastern religion.
Right, it’s OK to watch the parts that VILLIFY Eastern religion.
Joyce was allowed to watch the prequels to convince her the whole SW franchise was evil.
Yoga exercise videos though,too true, lol. My then future sister in law once said my family wasn’t Christians because we owned a yoga mat. I said it was an exercise mat.
That was much more conciliatory than I would have been
They’re not entirely wrong about yoga though. It’s not just an exercise, though most Westerners use it as such. It’s origins are as Hindu spiritual practice and if you dig in beyond the superficial level, you’ll still into more philosophical and spiritual aspects.
It’s less silly than a lot of other things frowned on by fundie Christians as “gateways”.
For exercising Christian values.
I see what you did there.
I’m from Israel, can confirm. Definitely Asia.
*rolls up sleeves* I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW BECKY THAT THOSE 4 DUDES ARE THE RADDEST DUDES OF ALL TIME AND I WOULD GLADLY SHARE PIZZA WITH THEM I WILL FIGHT YOU, YOU FICTIONAL 19 YEAR OLD
Four brothers that love pizza and fight ninjas, robots and aliens. Did I mention they are mutated turtles that have many shows and movies?
EXACTLY. There’s a reason even bad turtles is usually still good turtles.
There’s only one bad turtles that’s actually bad and that’s that live action show that happened
See my comments yesterday re: bad Turtles rock musical stage show.
You don’t “share” pizza with the Turtles. You BRING pizza, and if you’re lucky, you MIGHT get a slice.
You bring enough Pizza you’re sharing lmfao.
Considering they live in a sewer and kind of pizza toppings they prefer, they can have their pizzas ENTIRELY for themselves.
Clam sauce and chocolate sprinkles pizza?
Anchovies and Hot Fudge?
Granola and Liquorice?
Thats a nope. I don’t care if one of them is a party dude.
Relax. Becky’s not even in the age range to really know about that show. She probably got bored and watched it on Netflix over the break on a whim and got super horny for Venus. I don’t think she was even alive when that show started airing.
I WILL STILL FIGHT HER.
One does not calm down where one insults the turtles.
? She’s most definitely old enough to have watched the 2012 show. She’s 18 now and so was born in 2002 (this year) so she’s probably too young to remember the 2003 though.
The girl turtle specifically though is from the Next Mutation which aired in the 90’s. The Becky of today could never have watched it when it first came out and she has no interest in the turtles beyond that because “dudes”. It is on Netflix though. They should really bring Venus back the next time they reboot the turtles!
Becky is talking about Jennika, a recent character from the comics. There is no indication she knows or cares about the cartoons or movies.
The one she’s referring to is actually from the IDW books of the last year or two. Who is a way better character than Venus.
She’s not talking about Venus, though. Per yesterday’s comic, she’s talking about Jennika from the IDW comics.
Ah! That makes more sense! She even name dropped her last panel. I guess that’s what happens when you skip a day of reading.
Hrrmm. It’s really weird that my comment replied to two people? User error probably but I have no idea how.
Venus?! I thought the OP was going to be about Sailormoon, … When was a venus, oh.. wait… de Milo. Welp. Open mouth, reveal foolishness. I mean, I could still not post… but where is the integrity in that.
so this one’s autobiographical, right
“So it’s all autobiographical?”
“Always has been”
*plays Steely Dan’s “Bodhisatva” on the hacked Muzak*
*Submits a request for Vanilla Ice’s “Ninja Rap.”*
(I am apparently a horrible person.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFsTr0kGAqU
I know Becky has selective attention, like that Family Guy asian guy that only watches Star Trek because of Zulu, but I am deeply offended. I am straight and I like male characters a lot. Just because there’s a female version of a character doesn’t mean it’s going to be progressive and good.
On the topic of eastern religion, Joyce and Becky would be surprised about all the different religions and each version in each country of Asia. What Persona and Gaijin Goombah have taught me is like 0.01% o the religiouc culture of Asia.
Dude,how do you get offended by Becky liking stuff???
Because this isn’t Becky’s first time with her “if I can’t find it attractive, it’s dead to me” schtick, and it’s reductive and annoying?
Zulu?
I think they mean Sulu?
Autocorrect hates us. Autocorrect wants us to die. GPS is its evil twin. They are Gog and Magog.
Autocorrect: You just said I was God!
I don’t think “progressive and good” is her criteria, I think her criteria is that she’s a girl who likes girls and so every aspect of the whole self-insert identification/escapism/hot character to fantasize about Thing revolves around girls. Or to put it more bluntly, she just thinks they’re neat.
The thing that confuses me is that you’d think Becky would be like my lesbian bestie who watched the show religiously….for the hotness of April O’Neil.
I was about to make a joke about Becky realizing she’s a scalie, but given Dina I’m not sure that’s a joke.
This is a fantastic point.
And also, IMHO, that she’s a girl, period. As I note below, I was one of those girls who desperately wanted to see female representation in her favourite shows. Not to say that my budding girl-crushes on some of the girl characters weren’t a part of it…
When I came out as bi/pansexual to my mom she wasn’t surprised and I believe that was primarily because of my intense obsession with She-Ra.
I believe that Scarlet, Lady Jaye, and She-Ra had a not-insignificant affect on my developing childhood. I didn’t see anything weird about women soldiers and was confused at people who were horrified by the idea of them as leaders.
Man, a few years ago I tried to watch some G.I. Joe, as an adult. I took a dip in that pool and it was so shallow I don’t think my toenails got wet.
I spent many an hour watching 30-minute commercials for toys as a child, but now I can’t stand them. I can see why so many people vilify Barney and the Telletubies. So simple, in both the modern and classical sense.
It’s one of the things Disney has consistently gotten right. Make a show for families, with elements for every age, rather than children. But then, if parents watched G.I. Joe WITH their kids, toy sales might have gone down as parents nipped the latest “need” in the bud.
Have you seen the reboot? It’s great
I LOVE IT SO MUCH.
Zulu? Like Shaka Zulu? Yes, the King of the Zulu nation was my favorite character on Star Trek as well.
And his friend and fellow junior officer, former grocery-store clerk Ensign Checkout.
The guy with the speech impediment? I LOVE that guy!
They made him keep his hair in a Beatle cut and Chekhov hated it. The suits were sure the kids would like it.
I hear your point, but as a woman who grew up in the late eighties, I remember glomming onto the *only* female character in popular TV shows whether I actually liked her or not. April O’Neil, Cheetara, Teela, Gadget, Sunni Gummi, Princess Allura, etc. Some of these (and other characters I can’t remember) were progressive and good; some weren’t. But my younger self just yearned for any female characters in what felt like a sea of male characters. Once I discovered She-Ra, I became a *serious* addict of the show! My poor mom landed up shelling out for nearly every single action figure (I only had one or two from the last series) as well as a bunch of the horses and a few playsets. It was just so *cool* to see a cartoon full of @$$-kicking women and where *men* were the “sidekicks”….
Yeah, there’s still dude-based properties I enjoy, and still male characters in heavily female casts (like, Steven Universe is not my favorite member of his cast but I still adore him,) but well-written male characters are EVERYWHERE whereas series that do well by a female cast are much rarer.
I can throw a rock and get a well-executed remake of a nostalgic male-predominant property from before I was born, I don’t have the time or investment to pick them all. I’m going to focus in on the ones I’ve heard do have a bunch of well-done female characters (Ducktales 2017, for instance,) or the ones that are textually gay because that’s still such a rarity (thus, IDW Transformers Phase Two.)
Now, there are some pretty male-heavy franchises that I’M nostalgic for, because I have childhood memories with them. But if I told a random zoomer to play Kingdom Hearts, I’m pretty sure most of them would stare at me like I had two heads. Now, KH is definitely a fringe case because it’s so notoriously, utterly bonkers, but I also wouldn’t tell someone who’s never touched Pokemon before to start watching the Indigo League series. (Hell, I’m not gonna fight people who were fans of the series and didn’t like KH3, and I found the emotional payoff for the secondary trios immensely satisfying. It’s objectively a game with almost comically bad backloading of the plot, its treatment of the female characters is abysmal, the Disney worlds had started being awkward even as early as II but Arendelle is just absurdly bad, and the plot itself is so far up its own ass it actually ends up somewhere in the esophagus… but emotionally? Yeah I totally cried seeing the Sea Salt Trio’s big moment because it was exactly what I wanted for them since 3D back in 2013 or so.)
Tbh as an enby who’s largely given up finding very many examples of my particular flavor of gender in real life much less major media representation, I both understand and envy you both.
Sympathy. I get that pretty frequently with either being autistic, being ace, or both, and there’s been a veritable ocean of decent representation there lately by comparison. Some of them aren’t even robots or aliens!
Wait, there’s a bunch of ace representation in media?
Maybe I should watch more than just cartoons . . .
I once asked a friend why it was that in the late ’90s lesbians got so excited to see TV dramas which portrayed lesbians as doomed, crazy stalkers. She said, “Well, it’s not like we got much else back then.”
re: glomming on the one female character, I recognize this so much. For me it was big in video games. In super mario 64 I always played Peach because she was The Girl One. Super Smash Brothers didn’t have any girls, but then Melee came out and whoa, there were TWO Girl Ones? I played almost exclusively as Zelda.
As I got older I started to realize how fucked up it was that boys got to pick from a whole range of boy characters to identify with based on personality, but the only personality available to me was Girl.
There was a third female character in Melee who had a distinct trait besides ‘girl’… but no one who hadn’t played a pretty niche game series that was close to a decade since its last installment at the time knew that Samus Aran was a girl, so pretty much all us eight-year-olds playing Melee for the first time assumed Orange Robot was male, and only found out differently if they either got the Prime games or saw Zero Suit Samus for the first time in Brawl… Or read the trophies but like, who does that?
It’s exhausting and makes me sad, just, in general.
(I forgot to add: Me. I read the trophies. I do that.)
I was like that too as a kid in the late 90s-early 00s. I’m still like that, though female led or awesome female action/adventure heroes are more common now.
Yeah, I feel like it’s actually pretty lucky to be a kid enjoying cartoons and media right now for the most part. Getting to see representation in cartoons I didn’t get. I’m not a woman, but as a black dude I understand some of the feels. I just finished watching Kipo and it’s everything I ever wanted in a cartoon as a kid!
I LOVE Kipo – is it not a parent running their kids a Gamma World campaign?
So you were just a little to old to become a member of the Sailor Moon cult like my daughter was.
I think you have to remember Becky JUST discovered she was a lesbian like 4 months ago. That what she’s felt most of her life even had an identity so I think she’s still in the honeymoon period so to speak where everything about herself revolves around that and discovering new things or rediscovering old stuff. I think she’ll eventually grow out of the whole “if a dude’s associated with it I don’t care” phase…or maybe she won’t? That’s okay too maybe? But I think the opinions she’s expressing now are very much part of the process of accepting herself.
I’m guessing anything but Christianity, Judaism and Islam gets chucked under that umbrella, kids.
Even then it depends on the kind of Christianity. I certainly know some “Christians” growing up that would have called Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox practitioners pagans and “Eastern”.
Which was even more odd because I grew up going to several Catholic churches, army brat so moved around a lot and to a lot of different parishes, so you’d think that a practicing CATHOLIC would know better.
Okay, fair enough.
Many American Christians take a deep personal pride that not only are other Christian denominations damned but that every denomination but their specific one is.
“Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion — several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.”
……Mark Twain, “The Lowest Animal”, written sometime between 1897 and 1905
I keep expecting to hear about an Orthodox clergyman being attacked because someone thinks they’re Muslim, assuming that long beard and robe means Muslim.
Works for the Sikhs.
Orthodox is Eastern, practically by definition (The terms “Eastern culture” and “Western culture” were originally coined after the Roman Empire split, and refer to “Eastern Roman culture” and “Western Roman culture”. The terms have evolved since then).
But not an “Eastern Religion” in the sense that term is used. Nor is Islam.
For serious, the whole “Eastern/Western” or “Oriental/Occidental” divide started off with the assumption that Jerusalem was the literal center of the world. Israel is not in Asia nor Europe nor Africa, but rather the hub where they all meet. (Yes, they had better maps than that, but symbolically they used a sort of inverted T inside an O to represent the world, with Jerusalem where the lines of the T met.)
I think it may be Rome actually given that Eastern Europe and Western Europe firmly divides there.
I think you’re correct – see my blurb above.
You need a better childhood, both of you, including 80s cartoons
TMNT 2K3 was the bomb tho
TMNT 2003 is still my favourite. Leonardo is my favourite turtle and they gave him lots of good angst and suffering, which is exactly what I want in my Leonardo.
TMNT 2012 had some okay moments but the Donatello/April thing was creepy and I lowkey hated how they handled Irma and then HIGHKEY hated when she turned out to be an alien voiced by Gilbert Gottfried. It was the only series I have ever seen to somehow fail the Bechdel-Wallace Test RETROACTIVELY. I burned out hard.
Haven’t watched the new one yet. It seems… frenetic?
I love the 2012 show but if we could drop the Donatello/April plot entirely, nothing of value would be lost.
I wasn’t familiar enough about Irma to be upset about her adaptation.
> then HIGHKEY hated when she turned out to be an alien voiced by Gilbert Gottfried.
I’m sorry I just absolutely love this. Like the other guy I didn’t know her enough to question it from a character point…but when his voice started coming out of her head I just about died. That was about when they started producing the show while high, I’m sure of it.
I grew up with the 80’s TMNT cartoon (and the Archie comics), and will absolutely agree on that the 2003 series was the best.
I lost interest in the 2012 series after a season or two? Right after the Karai reveal I saw coming from a mile away.
Haven’t given Rise a shot yet either. I’ve found it aesthetically unappealing, but I feel like I should at least see for myself what it’s got going for it at some point.
No one needs 80s cartoons in their life
Comic books based on 80s cartoons on the other hand are rad.
You take that back.
‘Eastern Religon’, not ‘religionS’, singular… huh…
Right after 9/11 I visited a Civil Air Patrol local and the former Air Force sergeant in charge gave the younger guys a lecture that indicated that he completely conflated Islam, Buddhism, Maoism and probably other faiths into one blob of willful ignorance and xenophobia. I’m sure that’s very VERY common.
How did Maoism get in there?
Typo or autocorrected Taoism probably.
No, I meant Maoism. Like I said, willful ignorance and xenophobia.
I’m sure in some parts of the US they’re probably proud that all they “need” to know is their cartoonishly stereotypical mental imagery.
That may be accidentally correct, actually, in certain country. In China, Japan, and a few other nations–you can be part of multiple religions simultaneously.
Contradiction isn’t such a big thing over there. Africa too.
Islam is particularly non-accepting of syncretism with other beliefs, though. Or at least so I’ve heard.
This kind of thing is only really common with the mixture of buddhism and taoism (or shinto) in my experience, rarely any of the other religions.
Islam definitely is in the same boat as christianity on the topic of syncretism. You cannot claim to be both Muslim and Buddhist, it doesn’t work that way in most Muslim majority countries I am aware of.
Islam isn’t generally considered an “Eastern Religion” though
Essentially and loosely the distinction is “Far East” vs “Near East” – the Near East being relatively familiar to medieval Europe and thus with more influence and interconnections. East Asia, South Asia and South East Asian would be the regions where “eastern religions” come from.
Islam is not, yet sincretism of hinduism and Islam exists in some places.
My favorite part of syncretism is how you can simultaneously be a true Christian who follows the one true religion of the one true God, and also have a slew of other gods, and a shrine to your ancestors for good measure.
To a fundagelical, all the religions of Asia are one big blob called “eastern religion.”
My sister used to have that Reader’s Digest Atlas of the World.
I remember that ‘Eastern Religion” was a yellow blob. Sunni and Shia religion were two shades of green. The centre of Australia was grey, keyed as “native religions”. Most of the rest of Australia was a sort of pale pule indicating “Protestant”, but Victoria and the southern half of eastern NSW were a mixture of Catholic and Protestant. Also, places with communist government were strewn with little red hammer-and-sickle symbols.
From what I’ve seen of practicing communists in North America (thanks mom), denoting communism as a religion isn’t entirely wrong. They’re fundamentalists, and yes, they’re willing to line you up with the rest of their political enemies when the proletariat finally throw off their bourgeoisie shackles in *violent* revolution.
Like any religion there are some good ideas, (compassionate socialism) but it’s like picking pepper out of fly shit. (and yes, I know it’s normally the other way around, but this way gets the ratio correct)
East of Israel, d’oy.
East of Eden
I remember my grandparents trying to prevent me from reading Harry Potter because it was “promoting witchcraft and demonic influences.” Couldn’t stop me reading it, but they certainly tried.
I would have tried because it promotes hackneyed writing, contrived plots, the Chosen One (a trope I particularly despise), and casual antisemitism in banking. I’d rather promote witchcraft with Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series.
Great series, though it manages to have less in common with witchcraft than Harry Potter does.
At least the “Chosen One” thing is a bit subverted by said chosen one being directly chosen by the bad guy, and not by cosmic forces. But yeah there’s a whole lot of bad and stupid pretty much everywhere else in the franchise.
I do wonder what would have happened have those kinds of people found Groosham Grange.
Carol outlawing Star Wars somehow makes her even more evil.
Yes, including her material assistance to terrorists.
Maybe she just knew how easily cookies would tempt Joyce to the Dark Side.
But only if the cookies are homogeneous.
Joyce .. can’t .. have .. chocolate-chip cookies?
( dies a little inside )
Maybe if they’re chocolate chocolate-chip?
Did I mention my parents are dead yet? ‘Cause they are.
I’m not saying that grieving isn’t still a thing she is allowed, but I hope that Becky isn’t going to keep bringing up her parents being dead constantly when it isn’t relevant to the story.
But otherwise they might think they’re alive!
I personally find this realistic. The summer before I started high school, my neighbour/friend/crush died in a small plane crash. That first semester of college I talked all the time about my dead kind-of boyfriend (my relationship to him was complicated – mostly because we were both fairly young for our chronological ages – and is too long to get into here). I have no doubt my roomate and the friends I made got sick of it. I gradually stopped bringing him up often as I went through the stages of processing my grief. And this was just a friend and maybe-boyfriend, not my parents.
Ugh, sympathy.
Sudden deaths really do hit you hard, especially when it’s someone you were really close to. It feels raw for a while.
Becky is now partly based on Willis’s version of Batman. She’s got “I’m a Lesbian” for “I’m Batman”, “My parents are dead” for ” My parents are dead” and soon she’ll develop her own version of “I can breathe in space”.
So when does Robin (DeS.) become her faithful sidekick?
“Robin” is portrayed by an earlier incarnation of theropod. Namely, the Utahraptor.
Her father only very recently died. She’s going to keep bringing them up.
I’m sorry for your loss, Doc.
Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord. HAMLET: So long? Nay then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables. O heavens! die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.
It is kinda weird that the Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are often called “Western” religions when they were all founded in the Middle East.
Not really, I mean, next you’ll say Jesus wasn’t white or didn’t have a blue sash.
I could’ve sworn Jesus was brown and kinda socialisty, but maybe I was wrong.
Definitely wrong. Socialism = Satan. Haven’t you learned anything from Faux News?
Ah, yes, Democrat Jesus. Thankfully we’ve got a armed militia to stop spreading such lies.
Jesus vs. Jeezus http://thepaincomics.com/weekly050504.htm
….no blue sash? The middle east didn’t have access to blue dye 2000 years ago?
They totally did. The /ancient/ egyptians had lapis lazuli, which makes a VERY vibrant blue.
Of course, some have attempted to claim himans couldn’t see/perceive ue until recently because we apparently didn’t have a distinct word for it. However, the revered use of the colour in ancient times should sink that theory.
Ugh… typos. A distinct himan word for “ue” indeed.
In Japanese, the word ‘aoi’ means both blue and green. ‘midori’ or ‘melon’ is also used for ‘green’.
Going by Wikipedia “Natural dye”, they would have access to both indigo and woad (associated with northern Europe but indigenous to Assyria and the Levant.)
The religions that began further west aren’t really as significant on the world stage, and the Western Hemisphere is dominated by the Abrahamic religions, so…
Yeah. Everyone knows that Asatru is a WESTERN religion.
I LOVE the Becky&Joyce double act, and I enjoy that Booster’s reaction to them is kinda like Dorothy’s default reaction. Polite and calm, but gently probing to find a thread that would unravel the madness.
As well as ‘I am at least a little disturbed by this but polite enough not to really show that on my face.’ I feel like that’s an element of most dealings with Joyce and Becky’s upbringing that aren’t absolute horror/ridicule.
Eastern Religion = Any religion widely practiced in some part of Asia, but not widely practiced in any part of the world that medieval Europeans might regularly travel to, trade with, or declare war on following the rise of Islam.
Hey, we were attacked by the North men, so we had to attack everybody else. It just took us 2-3 hundred years to get a crusade organized. How we could organize that, and not organize our ur own countries STILL baffles me.
Partly because the Crusades weren’t particularly organized, and partly because politically they were a distraction from all the crazy going on at home.
Hey, a couple of the Crusades almost didn’t fail!
I claim the primary purpose of the Crusades was domestic. There were too many knights and not enough land*. Possibly because knights’ families eat better than serfs, and grow faster.
So you have all these knights with no land who are going to start fighting over it. Fighting *here*. Brilliant idea: Send them away somewhere else, so the fighting and destruction is over there, not here.
Some will die, and cease to be a problem here, others will settle there, and cease to be a problem here. And some of the ones who do come back will be rich with loot…
So the Crusades worked, if you consider that the purpose was “stop all these excess knights from causing problems locally.”
* Usable land, I mean, with serfs already attached.
… and some of the ambitious ones set themselves up as petty rulers in the Near East instead of starting trouble in their homelands.
Which reminds me that a woman I knew said her boyfriend was „into the old religion“ and when I asked which, she was confused. Seems like some right wingers manage to sell a certain kind of Norse god worship as „the old European religion of Europe“.
We will worship dear old Isis,
She will help you in a crisis,
And she’s never raised the prices,
So it’s good enough for me,
Gimme that Olde Tyme Religion…..
If you wanna worship Odin
You don’t have to have a coat on
Grab a sword and slap some woad on
And that’s good enough for me!
We will all be saved by Mithras
We will all be saved by Mithras
Slay the bull and play the zithras
On that resurrection day!
So I’m not the only one here who has filked the night away.
my immediate family wasnt like that but some of my extended family were Like That… its interesting like my aunt “banned” pokemon, teletubbies, spongebob, like anything that had a big “controversy” amoung fundamentalists for being a “bad influence” but also let my cousins watch & play things that are probably much worse by their standards like yugioh and the power puff girls (which actually feature violence and demons) or that sesame street special where big bird helps a ancient Egyptian boy cursed to wander the earth get into the ancient Egyptian afterlife and is very Literally teaching the audience about an “eastern religion” like
found it https://youtu.be.com/MUtkBzj7nvU
i think there’s even a boob on one of the greek statues
And learn from where I live, the link only works if I delete .com from it.
Not just for you. It seems unlikely that google/youtube would register be.com with gandhi.net (since they operate their own name servers and tld’s). But gandhi didn’t list any admin info, so who knows.
oh yeah sorry
https://youtu.be/MUtkBzj7nvU
I am really surprised Booster wouldn’t know what “eastern religion” means
What if Booster isn’t actually just extremely stupid?
Joyce: You’re right, Eastern Religion is a gross simplification of a variety of different cultures and traditions that arose in countries such as India, China, and Japan.
Booster: no, no I mean what the fuck is “east”?
Well this makes no sense. Amend that first sentence to “What if Booster is actually just extremely stupid?” please.
What the f. Is East?
Well Indiana is if yer on the west coast, which means Washington, D.C. is the center of the Eastern Religion if you’re in Indiana. If yer on the East Coast, Europe is the East and the Far East is probably the Ukraine? Unless you live in New Zealand, then the East is probably what? Chile? IDK, Argentina?
It’s the problem with this flat earth: you turn the late and anything is east…
I assume Booster knows enough about Eastern religions that the idea of a single “Eastern religion” is novel and strikes them as absurd.
I mean, public high schools teach basic world religion primers as an elective. Knowing that, bare minimum, Buddhism and Hinduism are different even if they share some common DNA is not at all surprising for a college student in this day and age.
I recently learned that Christians hate yoga and that depressed me deeply
In the 1980’s in mid-state New York, I knew Christians that didn’t even know what yoga was, and were freaked out by hypnosis on a religious level!
We love eatin’ all kinds of unclean shit, however! Pork, shrimp, un-kosher seasoning on everything, non-Sundays and Sundays alike! Don’t sacrifice any of the best stuff in thanks to God and Jesus, either. Even on Sundays!
Don’t forget the whole grandfather clause with various ancient pagan allusions in holidays and rewritten historical propaganda (Pontius Pilate, anyone?) just because prior generations didn’t know better, back then…
Don’t forget Tai-chi! Oh! And, and, Qui-gong, … gentle exercise for the obese Americans and which their doctors are Strongly recommending for COPD. No wonder the Red states hate Fauchi!
*some* Christians hate yoga.
Unquantified plurals are the devil’s work.
Some Christians love yoga because they aren’t afraid of OTHER PEOPLE OR THEIR BELIEFS.
GOP: Those words are blasphemy!
The only ‘Eastern’ Religion in the MacIntyre is *Middle* Eastern Religion!…As long as it’s Abrahamic. They probably feel little better about WESTERN Religion, like Scientology…
The Wild Western religions are more fun.
Is that “gun worship”?
Now conflating the 1st and 2nd Amendments.
Sorry, kids, you’re not allowed to go to the Christmas service. The manger scene depicts three wise men from the east, which might be a gateway to eastern religion.
You joke, but when my mother went through a born-again phase, the church she dragged me to went to great lengths to explain that the wise men were scholars of God (can’t define them as Jewish or say ‘Torah’ in an evangelical church, I guess) just to make sure all the little home-schooled children did not ever think for one second that anyone who thought just the little bit different from them could in any way be good.
Weren’t the Three Wise Kings supposed to be Magi of Zoroastrianism?
I think that Booster is realising how much dealing with Becky and Joyce is like being carried along by a riptide of a strange upbringing and a friendship that’s as much a sisterhood as it is anything else. I mean, listening to them talk and trying to understand their ‘in’ slang that only two women who have been together since their infancy can have…
For sanity’s sake, I consider each iteration of TMNT to be different universes and refuse to judge them compared to each other as they tend to be different things aimed for different audiences.
So, Booster, tell us about yourself
No lie, I’ve been waiting for this.
That would defeat the terms of the witness protection program.
For those going “Israel is part of the Middle East, not Asia,” for what it’s worth the ancient Greeks defined Asia as “pretty much anything east of the Bosporus” and was commonly used to describe the Persian Empire. It’s…possible, perhaps, that seeing how Becky was raised in a religion centered around a book written originally in Greek (the Jesus part anyways) that she absorbed that definition of Asia. Though I can’t claim to be enough of a Biblical scholar to know how often the Bible references Asia
Anyways geographical constructs have always been highly arbitrary- at what point does the Middle East become Central Asia become Asia? For that matter I once had a drunken Brit tell me that he always thought of “Asia” as India, while China, Korea, and Japan were “the Far East.”
He wasn’t wrong. Asia minor was the term for Turkey+, and east of that was asia (inc persia, india) and everything past that was further east still. That was/is a common perspective for people with a nuanced/historical view of the east.
IIRC, the ancient Greek’s “Europe” didn’t originally include Greece itself or most of present day Europe – it was a label for the northern Balkans, which they considered the domain of impoverished savages.
Whenever someone refers to “Eastern” religions (or even as a region) they almost explicitly mean from India to the Pacific. Most people have grown up assuming Israel and its neighbors are “The Middle East” (which when you think about it is an absurd statement).
But yeah, like you point out, the concept of the geologic borders between the Eurasian continents is….flaky at best.
Or even at what point does Europe become Asia? Geographically speaking, it’s one continent.
But historically and culturally speaking, it does make sense. The Middle East is that part that was tied to and influenced Europe, particularly what used to be part of the Roman Empire. The Far East was anything past that, that was only known about by distant rumor.
And “Middle” East by reference to the older “Near East” concept, which was basically the region of the Ottoman Empire.
Absurd maybe. But since many people who wonder about the location of the middle east live in the mid-west, I don’t think there’s a lot of room to throw stones.
Clearly the middle east is halfway between greenwich and the east pole, and the midwest is half the otherway to the west pole.
Good point. These terms develop and calcify in a historical context.
The “midwest” in the US refers to what’s actually the north central part of the country, with some of it actually in the eastern half, but when the term stuck it made sense as the region between the well settled East and wild Western frontier territories. Before then of course, what’s now the midwest was actually the “west”.
Wait. So Greenwich is opposite both the East pole and the West Pole?
? But they’re not mutually exclusive… The majority of the Middle East (including Israel) is in Asia. (The rest is in Africa – Egypt – and Europe – the European portion of Turkey.)
Booster reminds me a lot of Grant O’Brien from College Humor.
Granted, Grant isn’t non-binary (Ally Beardsly, another former CH person, is, though), but still.
That’s a good thing, means you don’t reduce this character to their gender identity!
For Becky and Joyce’s church anything from East of Indiana is “Eastern”. And if you go far East enough, that includes California.
Hm, reminds me of the time I stumbled across a review of the original Avatar: the Last Airbender show on some Christian review site, and they gave it an exceptionally low grade due to it’s “unChristian values” in addition to the whole “gateway” thing.
I know that I’m going to regret asking, but what exactly is “unChristian” about A:tLA’s “values?”
Use of geomancy and magic.
What the other guy said, plus the fact they mention chi and use written chinese for in-show printed material.
You can reach spiritual enlightenment without depending on “our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ”. Portrayal of spirits that aren’t angels or devils. Gurus and non-Christian meditation.
Don’t forget reincarnation.
Is that anything like being born again?
Zorastrianism and its peaceful ways!
Though it does sorta describe an eventual evil side win.
I’m pretty sure that ‘Eastern Religion’ was the Browns’ and McIntyres’ attempts to be polite about ‘heathen devil worship’.
In any case, in this context, ‘Eastern Religion’ is a synonym for any religion that isn’t some flavour of evangelical Christendom and possibly orthodox Judaism.
No, no. There’s also pagans and witchcraft.
It makes me wonder (idly) if Beckster is any relation of Davan’s. (yes yes, spelling’s different etc.. but y’know… idle)
that last line OUCH hahahahaha
TBH, as fundie outrages against logic go, the “Eastern religion” thing isn’t too bad. Most historians agree there’s a general “Eastern culture” to go with “Western culture,” and a lot of non-fundies think of the Middle East as distinct from Asia. So, y’know, we’re talking Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and anything else hippies pulled from the East to freak out their parents. Joyce’s parents (primarily her mom, I imagine) are even correct to recognize Eastern influence in a lot of popular culture.
But hooooo boy, that paranoia, that absolutist insistence that only your belief set is worth listening to and enjoying anything else is a threat… I wish it ended with a West-vs.-East binary.
Eastern influences:
Tea instead of coffee(The Brits fault, probably), Batik, paisley, breath work, meditation, Silk (the Italians fault, probably), lapis lazuli, Hippie (Rudraksha) beads, Meditation, Cardamom, cinnamon, gamboge, rice, macrobiotics, Zen, The Kamasutra, The Hari Krishna, Baba Rham Das, The Maharishi, Yoga, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Diary of a Yogi, Madam Blavatski, Mao-ism, Daoism, DRUGS!, it’s all from the east, …
Except cocaine, yeah, that’s from the South.
Tobacco is american, and peyote and toad licking and coffee! (yes caffeine is available elsewhere, but not nearly like in coffee). Without the west there would be *only* tea and that would be thanks to india and the east, not britain. The brit’s just like it and popularised it to the west.
Again, silk is asian, but popular with traders, ergo the silk road, which _far_ predates Italy. Also, noodles.
Lastly, how you made that list and left out Buddha… it boggles the mind.
Sugar cane, paper, gunpowder, magnetic compasses…
Coffee originated in Africa & then picked up by the Arabs before eventually spreading west.
Thank you, Africa.
Let’s not forget about anime and new age music are also some of those “gateways” to Eastern religions!
Are we talking celtic new age or oriental new age or…?
All just fronts for Satanism, doesn’t matter.
I want that last frame and share it daily on all social media
Man, some people are still not over Greek Orthodoxy!
“Hey, I heard a good joke about the Great Schism-”
“Too soon, man. Too soon.”
A girl who was a year ahead of me in high school found out my mom did yoga sometimes and dared to warn her about allowing demons into her body! Which I though was presumptuous of her and my mom thought was cute.
I’m not REALLY sure your parents knew that, Becky, I’m sorry.
Oh yeah? Well, if Israel is in Asia, how come it competes in Eurovision? Checkmate, atheists!
Your pic is *perfect* for this.
Seems like a pretty straightforward category. Religions from the east. East side of asia. Nobody ever bothers doing the math on those being directly closer westward pf America.
There’s definitely a bit of a divide along the asian steppe between the abrahamic religions that dominate Europe, Africa, and the levant (and I guess the americas too) and the areas dominated by Hinduism, Buddhism, Bon, Sikhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Shinto, even though there’s a lot of abrahamic bleed over.
No, actually Boster is onto samthing. We need to deduct from first principles what “Eastern Religion” is by finding the comon elements in Ninja turtles, Star Wars, Power Rangers and Yoga.
as far as I can tell, “Eastern Religions” means interpretative dance
I mean, you’re not wrong. All but the REALLY bonkers ones allow dancing, at least, but usually within very specific parameters of ‘dancing’.
this comic applies one of my personal internet philosophies, “if your beliefs/viewpoint/argument require you to lie, even if it’s a lie of omission, or censorship of any kind in order to keep people believing it then you have the WRONG belief/viewpoint/argument.” Unless you are going to literally imprison your kids in your home for the rest of your life they are going to talk to other people eventually and they will realize that you were lying to them for their entire lives.
Not if you’ve got them sufficiently convinced that everyone who doesn’t agree with you is part of a Satanic conspiracy. They’ll talk to other people, try to convince them of the Truth, get rejected and that will drive them deeper into the fold since they’ll only find acceptance within the fold.
Becky i dont care about your TMNT opinions anyone. that was so reductive.
I think Becky is optimistic. I wouldn’t bet anything I couldn’t afford to lose on any given xian fundamentalist knowing where Israel is. Including the ones that have been here.
Oof. Hard mood. My parents often referred to “Eastern Religion.” They have SO little idea how any of it works. That happens when your only exposure to other religions is through courses titled “X from a Christian Worldview.”
Interesting, the comments section over on Grrl Power is having a heavy discussion about pop culture because one character referred to another as “Alf” as in the dude named “Gordon Shumway” in the cartoon… I bet Becky &co. never saw “Alf” or the cartoons of same.
That implies aliens are real! Which is ANTI-FUNDIE!
I had a perfectly normal upbringing and never saw Alf as more than a pop cultural reference because it was before my time. I’m close to a decade older than our cast. That’s a sucker bet.