They have pretty much given up on perpetually extending copyright. Disney now seems to be banking on Trademarks to keep Micky pure. That’s probably why they are running that short clip from Steamboat Willie as their company logo in the newer pictures.
Trademarks already never expire as long as they are in active use.
Also they have a strategy of sharing the mark. There’s not much left about film studios, but for comics for example they recently made a “by disney” collection (when it’s really “disney by someone else”).
Note, they haven’t been as aggressive in recent years. The internet has put a lot of that kind of thing in a more negative light. Disney is still maybe touchier than some companies, but they’re nothing near what they used to be.
Turns out suing a day-care for a fan-mural is a bad look. Who knew?
No standard enough definition of god that exists for anything but the abstract idea. so no way to create a specific image of a god that is both god and porn to all individuals there for no god exists.
Enough images do exist of micky mouse to justify a Consistent enough standard pic to say A micky mouse is a character and is thought of as such character in porn and does exist.
And to think this strip must have been written months ago, before the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida and Disney’s back-door support of the politicians who pushed it into law.
Eh, Disney’s been back-door supporting the “hate-our-gay-neighbors” uber-Christian politicians for a long time, and everyone’s just been shrugging their shoulders and saying “yeah, they’re a big corporation, big corporations virtue signal while simultaneously supporting evil-AF politicians, what else is new?” It might be more visible in the news this month than the baseline, and the shoulder-shruggers are starting to voice protest, but it’s no more or less relevant than it ever was.
The fact is, everybody pays all the politicians, evil and non, for access, because we have a broken-ass system that allows for legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions.
Bribery? More like protection money in many cases. And campaign contributions aren’t the half of it. Look around corporate America and you’ll see a whole lot of people in cushy jobs whose biggest qualification is being related to an influential congresscritter.
Big names at the company, particularly in TVAnimation, Lucasarts, Pixar and Marvel have come out and said that Disney barely lets them do anything regarding queer content, and most of them aren’t afraid of being fired right now because Disney can’t afford to look worse than it already does right now.
Actually, I remember the Disney Corporation being embargoed by the Baptist Church for a decade because they refused to ban Gay pride events from their park. Disney took a firm stance of, “Paying customers are paying customers!”
Don’t worry about it Dina, you were competing against the walls of your lover’s psychological imprisonment. Those walls are infinitely tall, thick and bleak. Success is yours, and you deserve to feel proud, attractive, loved and loving.
You won’t play me Freebird anymore
Y’all sold out and what for?
I’m still the fan I was before…
But you’re “too cool”
To play Freebird just once more–Todd Steed & The Suns of Phere
Exactly, it’s not a victory against a fictional character, it’s a victory against the indoctrination set instituitions with hundreds or thousands of years of practice, many aimed at controlling and even oppressing people. Well done Dina!
I used to play Mario Kart with my friends all the time and we’d usually do it while drinking. As you can imagine, driving a gokart while intoxicated is difficult to do, even more difficult when it is virtual.
Keeping score against “god” is a pointless endeavor, you can’t win. However, keeping score against stupid religious doctrine? Totally fair and highly recommended.
Nah, turns out god isn’t actually omniscient, they just poked their head in for this particular scene.
(and now I’m imagining god being gender-less and having galasso-level understanding of gender, and being like ‘what’s this gay thing my homo sapiens keep taking about’ XD)
The only part of the bible I’m really familiar with is the story of Joseph. Right after, in the bible I read, is the story of Moses.
So Joseph and the Hebrews come to Egypt, save their sorry asses from famine, everyone is living in prosperity and happiness, then God turns around for like two generations and suddenly they’re all enslaved and the pharoah is murdering babies.
My personal headcanon is that God keeps setting things up for success, looking away for two minutes, then finds a dumpster fire and is like “for fucks sake humanity”.
The new Cosmos talked about how someone invented solar power in like the 1800s – no one wanted it. I can just fully imagine god banging his head against the wall like “What the fuck? What. The. Fuck.”
That is how omnipresence works, yes. However, by the modal ontological argument, if a maximally-great God is tagged in even ONE possible strip, He is therefore automatically tagged in EVERY possible strip.
… and since He was NOT tagged in previous strips, it is impossible for Him to be tagged in this one as well. Mystery solved!
I occasionally marvel that people have been willing to kill one another over the question as to whether the omnipresent God is immanent or transcendant. How do they think they can tell?
Traditionally, you can tell who’s right by who manages to brand the other groups as heretics and kill them (or exile them if they’re wusses) over the question. Obviously the most prolific killers must be the most right with God. Why else would He bless them with so much success in their righteous crusade?
At least, that’s how early Christianity sorted out questions like Arianism, Docetism, the Trinity, and the like, thereby shaping the mainstream of Christian faith that we know today, and since few modern Christians even question the conclusions of that method they obviously believe it’s a highly reliable approach to for arriving at correct beliefs.
(/sarcasm… kinda… maybe /satire? /lampoon? /parody? None of those seem right, but it’s in that neighborhood. Kidding on the square, maybe, which I just googled and learned DIDN’T originate with Al Franken. … Oh, and some obligatory #notallchristians and #notalltheists because someone will take exception if I don’t.)
Yes, I’m sure the Crusaders and other long-dead violent extremists will be very hurt by this remark. Their feelings also matter very much and we should all be more considerate of the murderous vagabonds going forward.
As I was trying to indicate in the final paragraph, I was “kidding on the square” — making an absurdist joke out of something that was still largely true. Many modern Christians would wholeheartedly disagree that questions over abstract theology should be settled by bloodshed and persecution, and would be morally appalled if that were to occur today. (I would guess MOST modern Christians, but without hard numbers that would just be a guess.) So, no, it’s not fair to assume that a typical Christian that’s the right way to go about it — many would be explicitly opposed — and the dissonance present in framing it otherwise is the source of humor. (#dontexplainthejoke)
But it’s still true that modern Christians HAVE accepted violence and persecution as the standard for how to settle doctrinal disputes. That’s why it’s kidding on the square. To focus on just one of those items, Arianism, for purposes of illustration…
Were Arius and his followers NOT exiled, following their rhetorical defeat at the 1st Council of Nicaea, because the mainline of Christianity had deemed Arianism heretical? Were their writings not order burned? Was everyone who refused to surrender those writings for burning not ordered executed? Was this victory of the doctrine of a con-substantial Son and Father, over Arianism’s Son subordinate to Father, not then made official in the Nicene Creed? And doesn’t the modern centrality of the Nicene Creed in mainstream Christianity constitute, through willful blindness if nothing else, a tacit, implicit acceptance of those methods in practice and the orthodoxy they produced, whatever explicit objections modern Christians might express to those practices in the abstract?
I would say that most (again, guessing) modern Christians don’t understand that this shaped modern Christianity. But that is still how heresies like Arianism were suppressed, silenced, and largely forgotten by everyone save priests and religious historians, Mainstream Christianity has accepted the orthodoxy produced by winnowing out these heresies… and the brute fact of history is that this this point of Christology was settled through the (eventual) orthodox Christians managing to brand Arius and his followers as heretics and exile and/or kill them.
4 of my top 6 most played on Steam are Sports Management, I guess if you squeeze them hard you could put them in one of the first two categories in your poll.
Quick, everyone ignore the last panel and start catastrophising Dina’s definitely serious scorekeeping against Gosh. Make a long comment about it that misses the point entirely for the sake of scolding a fictional character, conveniently leaving out the part where she instantly admits it’s silly. Please, please make Dina out to be a Bad Person somehow, it’s so difficult to do and I don’t know how to function as a human being if I’m not lording my moral superiority over a pretend teenager.
I mean I personally find this degree of atheism very grating, particularly in an mixed-faith relationship. It doesn’t feel like Dina actually respects Becky’s belief in god so much as makes peace with a personal quirk she ultimately assumes Becky will grow out of.
Would I, as a loving partner, hope my partner grows out of religious ideology that seems to be based on shame, fear, and what I understand to be fairytales, which I am personally unfamiliar with, when most of my interactions with it to date have either been seeing it cause somebody I love internal conflict, or led to my partner’s father hunting us with a gun then teaming up with a mob stooge psychopath and kidnapping her and a group of our friends, his becoming an accessory to murder/manslaughter, and leading to his own violent murder, with almost their entire community blaming my partner for this..?
Becky has already moved from seeing the world as a few thousand years old to recognising science and evolution. Dina’s faith that Becky’s worldview will change as she gains more information is based on observed facts.
Honestly, I find Dina’s calm acceptance that Becky believes religion brings her comfort, hope, etc in the face of the evidence to the contrary rather surprising. Most people would – like Joyce has tried – point to all the harm religion has caused them and angrily ask how they could fail to reject it. Dina recognises that Becky is unwilling to throw out the good along with the bad, has experienced way too many traumatic changes in a short period of time, and needs love and acceptance, and time to actually analyse how much “good” she is actually holding onto.
Also, Becky’s number one in terms of her considerations. She is choosing to treat Becky placing what she views as an imaginary sky friend equal or above her in her considerations as a friendly (albeit ridiculous) competition/challenge, rather than a direct insult. Given that said figure is the reason given for the above offences, and she’s not even teasing Becky about doing this because she values Becky’s feelings above Becky acknowledging that Dina’s right, I think that shows a really amazing level of forbearance, consideration and understanding. BEFORE taking into consideration that she may not be neurotypical and only learnt a few weeks/months ago that you’re supposed to look people in the eyes rather than mouths when they talk even though that’s the part that moves.
Yes, actually I did. A relationship needs to be based around fundamental respect for the partner and their beliefs. If you don’t respect them and try and change them then you shouldn’t be together.
What “degree of atheism” are you talking about? The degree at which a person is capable of just disagreeing about the existence of Gosh with making it into a federal fuckin’ case every time it’s brought up? Because that’s where Dina’s at. Dina seeing it as a quirk Becky can grow out of, I don’t really see as a Problem. She doesn’t condescend to Becky about it, she doesn’t antagonise, and she doesn’t treat Becky as lesser for her religion. So far, it’s just something they don’t agree on and neither of them especially presses the issue. I don’t see a single problem with this setup and it’s confusing to me how many people do.
How dare an atheist jokingly declare themselves to have scored a point against a deity they think is fictional! This clearly makes Dina a horrible person somehow.
I think the most important part is the last panel, where she’s outright calling it an absurd thing to do, and thusly making the call-out for us. If she seemed to really mean it and stood by it, I could maybe see some wiggle room there.
Yeah that’s not how STD’s (now called STI’s) work at all. You don’t just magically contract them because you had sex.
(There’s a VERY small, but I suppose non-zero chance one of them has one of the STI’s you can contract from your mother at birth, but they would have known about it and it seems unlikely that it wouldn’t have been brought up at all).
UTI’s (Urinary Tract Infections) absolutely can pop up after sex, and women in particular are told to pee post-coitus to clear the urethra of any germs/dirt/whatever that might have gotten pushed up inside it during sex. This helps lower the chance of getting a UTI. Which is, again, not an STI.
I’ve been dunked on by the game, particularly undertale and the genocide final boss(being vague in case someone hasn’t played it but still plans to.) He has dunked on me at least a hundred times.
Becky has also made comments about Dina’s atheism. But I really don’t think either of those is a big deal. They know they have different beliefs and that part of that is thinking the other is wrong, and they seem to accept that. Now, it could become a point of conflict, but it’s not Dina being oh so terrible.
There is an intergalactic gap between this comic, in which Dina finds Becky’s constantly warping faith and shifting goalposts frustrating because of how badly it’s all hurt Becky, and making fun of her belief because she finds it silly.
I was going to highlight Liz, but then I realize that she and Joyce are also in Becky’s boat, they’ve all been horribly traumatized by religion and are reacting to the trauma in different ways.
That being said, if you loudly and proudly proclaim your confidence in Santa’s existence despite zero evidence for that and are actively undermining your friends’ personal growth because you’re really hurt they no longer believe in Santa, too, maybe count yourself lucky you have friends and loved ones at all at that point. If my dad told me he was pulling my grandmother out of the hospital to treat her with crystals, I’d have a lot more to say a lot more quickly than “Hoooly shit, how am I going to deal with this without hurting feelings?”
Satisfy my curiosity: did you have a similar take when becky told other people how mad Dina would be when she died and found out that god was real, or nah?
Becky’s closely held belief is that God is going to beat her because she had sex with her girlfriend and the only way out of it is to get married the next day.
Literally how. All Dina is doing is saying it’s ridiculous for HER to try and act as if god exists, because she literally doesn’t believe in god. The only way for her to feel any differently is for her to, yknow, believe in god, which she doesn’t.
Literally having a different belief from your partner is not disrespectful, jesus christ.
I’ve got no familiarity of South Park, and I’ve never seen any JoJo media outside of memes. I know the Pillar Men hate light, so they’re basically vampires, which means King Mickey would be able to take ’em pretty easy.
“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
J.R.R.Tolkien, who knew C.S. Lewis, and saw what he did there, and was trying to explain that his own stories *weren’t* supposed to put the reader in a straightjacket of the author’s intended meaning.
“Lewis, an expert on the subject of allegory[2] and the author of The Allegory of Love, maintained that the Chronicles were not allegory on the basis that there is no one-to-one correspondence between characters and events in the books, and figures and events in Christian doctrine. He preferred to call the Christian aspects of them “suppositional”. This indicates Lewis’ view of Narnia as a fictional parallel universe.”
Dina loves and respects Becky more then anything, and she sees the damage the church did to her, her wanting to slowly ease her out of the mindset of “I gotta watch every step I take or ill disappoint god” isnt a bad thing, she is just trying to make it a little more fun lol.
Besides, there are tons of couples where they are of different faiths, they work out just fine. Dina isnt trying to remove Becky’s faith, just make it less of a choke-hold on her life.
already wishing we could go back to 3 hours ago when everybody was absolutely sure that Dina was a perfect and flawless mary sue who was poorly written because she isn’t written as enough of an ableist caricature. too bad now she’s now a megalomaniacal abuser who is patronizing Becky, again, because all personal differences must be read into with the maximum implied trauma and malice and nobody can have reasonable thoughts or feelings about any topic that can emotionally impact anybody =(
Don’t know if my opinion will be at all comforting but I’m sharing in the hopes that it might be: therapy can be cost-prohibitive but comment sections are free and will do in a pinch. I think comment sections trend yikes-y because even those of us who are in both of those spaces can get more mileage on the internet, acting out Fight Club without accountability. It’s not even on purpose a lot, for me. But it does mean that we end up talking to our inner demons on here.
Stories that handle topics in a nuanced and mature way will attract people who are ultimately working through their/our own stuff, and comments trigger defensiveness acted out in stupid ways that are probably better kept private… if not for the Internet being a decent enough space to grow these skills. So who knows. It can make me feel better. I think we are helping each other, ultimately. Comment sections are the OG “standing up for oneself” practice.
It’s everyone’s responsibility to do their best in a public space not to be a donkey, but I think social mistakes on the internet, with the subject fictional characters, are the better place for them. I think this is a crucial way that long-form webcomics can affect positive change, too, is having a space for the community to process it together over the years.
Oh, I read all your comments, and I actually thought today’s was a lot less than this one, and at lot less than some of yours have been. But yeah, while I like you, Delicious Taffy, I’m not a fan of that style of comment and find it actively makes this comment section a worse place to be.
Yeah, that’s valid. Sometimes I get a little ornery here when I don’t really feel that strongly like 5 minutes after I’ve posted. It’s mostly a knee-jerk reaction to a tendency here towards scolding and a “Who’s Worse Today?” type of vibe some days.
I kinda disagree, i despise the comments that genuinely try to inflate character moments into proof of their evil. THOSE make the comments section a worse place. Comments calling it out are funny and also lets me know I’m not going crazy and they are in fact, weird insane takes.
There’s that, too. I forget who it was already (the individual is less important to my point than the question itself), but we’ve been expected to treat seriously such bizarre, left-field questions as “Is Dina a sex offender for having consensual sex with her girlfriend?” Those sorts of things make me question if I’m actually missing something serious and creepy about this story, and seeing people react so strongly to them helps ground me back in reality.
Comments calling them out when they’re coming fast and furious is one thing. Maybe I’ve been missing stuff, but lately it seems like there have been more preemptive ones, often on days when there haven’t been any such comments.
This actually creates the impression that those kinds of comments are more prevalent than they are, which seems to defeat the purpose.
For myself, I admit mine today came from a place of defensiveness, yeah. It maybe would have been more useful to say nothing and save that energy for when someone actually said something stupid about Dina.
She wants to defeat the world’s strongest fictional character, which is God.
Or, as Amber suggested, Goku. In the sense that this fictional character has an inordinate amount of cultural power, Mickey Mouse is probably more of an apt comparison.
Kingdom Hearts gets a lot of shtick for, well, being Kingdom Hearts, but turning Mickey Mouse into Wizard Paladin Yoda was pretty aces.
Imagine any piece of media in history presenting Mickey Mouse’s appearance as something to build up to. You go through the entire first game and not only is his appearance a carefully kept secret he is never called by name the whole time, he only shows up at the end wielding a magic sword wreathed in light while he traps himself in what’s essentially Hell for the foreseeable future because eh, someone’s gotta.
Kingdom hearts is great as long as you never ever attempt to verbally explain it to someone.
My boyfriend tried to explain it to me before just showing me the games. I got a migraine and cried.
An old man pissed in a cup, twenty mighty warriors arose from it, a kid skipped dinner, Yu-Gi-Oh Season 0, part-time jobs, Finny Fun, it was Naptime, then the apocalypse happened. It’s not that hard once you reduce.
…okay see, ive seen the games in chronological order up to KH2 (except the card Game bc that was a boring watch) and i still have no idea what the fuck you just said
One of two plot twists in Kingdom Hearts I like is that the funny sidekick villain turned out to be pulling a Revolver Ocelot the whole time.
The other plot twist is that Tetsuya Nomura tried to make a Final Fantasy game that he was removed from since you’re not supposed to hand like three of your biggest games to one guy at a time, and he was so mad about having it taken from him that he stuck it in Kingdom Hearts.
That’s a level of Jack Kirby vengeance I aspire to.
Hey, hey. New chapt title, in the next book: 01 – Bring Me to Life Drawing
Nice, they will bring Joyce to life drawing. hahaha. I want to be alive until there, just to see it.
Sorry, Dina, but it’s not really a 1:1 comparison. I’m pretty sure there are far, far more devout followers of Disneyism than the Jesus fandom currently has.
I asked this very question a while ago (except I added the fact that saying the Abrahamic god is real that is in fact saying all the other ones are fake), got no answer other than “because”.
I vaguely remember that, or at least one you made in regards to Jacob thinking of all religions as paths to God, which I think the comic was expressing as “all faiths are valid in that “God” is an expression of a particular individual religious belief, and so we all worship the same being that we view from different lenses and define in different terms” as opposed to a rigid “my God’s real and all these idiots are worshiping the RIGHT one without knowing.”
Like there’s A God, but that God is defined by whoever’s seeing him. Jacob viewing a higher power as the Abrahamic God is on the same level as any other faith viewing their own higher power.
I think being a member of any particular faith necessitates that you place your own above others. Of course I think God isn’t real, if I did, I wouldn’t be an atheist (or an agnostic, however you define “it’s bigger than me and thus unknowable in my lifetime, but guys from millennia ago sure didn’t figure that out”). What I don’t get is that a believer of any faith telling me such is valid, but if I say my belief is that there is nothing to believe, I’m somehow invalidating them.
Like Richard Dawkins is the ur-Edgy Atheist (a term I am slowly understanding was invented by right-wing plants to present an oppressive cultural oligarchy being even mildly criticized by its victims as Both Sides), but when he goes out and says “God isn’t real lmao” he’s not doing anything different than any particularly loud expression of a faith, since expressing a lack of belief in God is still A Belief.
“Expressing lack of belief” is not “still a belief”. This shows a fundamental lack of understanding. Atheism isn’t a religious position. It’s not a “faith”. The scientific world view isn’t an irrational superstition like religious believes. Unfortunately a religious mind seems unable to grasp the difference.
Nothing I said has anything to do with whether or not “the scientific world view isn’t an irrational superstition like religious believes” nor did I define atheism as a faith. I believe that there is no God, because I saw the same things that leads someone else to think there is, and came to a differing conclusion. I am not nearly educated enough to define my lack of belief in a higher power as “but science.”
If the question of “does a god exist, is there life after death” is being asked, then “No” is as equal an answer.
I believe there is a difference. Let’s say you are a huge Joyce fan and Steven (fictional commenter) thinks she’s the most obnoxious character in DoA. Compare you saying “Joyce is great” to Steven saying “Joyce is dumb and mean”. Don’t look the same to me.
Okay but whether or not you think God is real is a binary question as opposed to a question of subjective quality. Moreover, I do believe in the nonexistence of a God, and so the only possible way that’s comparable to going “dumb and mean” is if, by the same token, a person insisting to me that he does is also “dumb and mean.”
Absolutely. And that’s where the “Edgy Atheist” bit comes in.
Someone saying “God doesn’t exist” is indeed no different from someone saying “God does exist”.
Someone saying “God doesn’t exist, and therefore everyone who thinks otherwise is a) a moron and b) directly responsible for every evil thing done in the name of religion (well, I say everyone, but especially Muslims, somehow)” is, by the same token, equivalent to saying “God does exist, and therefore everyone who thinks otherwise is a sinner who deserves to burn for all eternity.”
I don’t think they’re really equivalent though, for the simple reason that militant atheists have never carried out the systemic execution or conversion of civilians en masse.
I guess we could say it happened in Japan, since there was that time some Catholics set up shop and the native governments sorta said “Turn those annoying whiteys into dumplings”.
That…wasn’t on behalf of atheism though, pretty sure. Japan at the time practiced mainly Shintoism and Buddhism, and the aforementioned persecution and murder of Christians in Japan was carried out on behalf of the (I believe) Shinto institution.
It’s almost always a matter of religious institutions being an arm of state control, to use people’s religious beliefs to manipulate them into obedience to the state. If you don’t adhere to the correct religion, or none at all, the state can’t control you in the same way and you are therefore inherently a threat to the current power structure and need to be stamped out post-haste.
Which, to my knowledge, has never and pretty much can never happen with atheism by its very nature. Various different religions will obviously have conflicts with various different states. But atheism is inherently at odds with the structure of state power itself, so as long as states maintain and consolidate power using any means available to them (which is just what states do), atheism will be the most universally oppressed and persecuted across the board.
I think I just plain left out part of my comment. I meant to say something between those two paragraphs about doubting that Christians have been killed in large numbers for being Christian, and the Japan incident is the only example I could think of. I’m by no means a scholar or history buff, but I’m pretty sure Christians and their various just-different-enough spinoffs are the Main Ones doing the massacres.
The Romans DID have their lions on a high-christian diet, because christians went around refusing to add their god to the Roman pantheon, and the Romans were afraid that would piss of their gods so much they’d torch the empire.
I mean Christians sure have been persecuted for being the wrong kind of christian, pretty sure. That has definitely been a thing. But it is, you’re correct, usually by other flavors of Christian.
Although I’m PRETTY sure islamic states probably do and have done their fair share of persecuting christians as well. (There’s still of course the global context of how much global power and influence western–and therefore primarily christian–states have OVER those islamic states…but yeah point still stands.)
“militant atheists have never carried out the systemic execution or conversion of civilians en masse”
As someone born in Russia, the USSR says hello. (And not just Christians either, look at how they treated their Buddhist ethnic minorities for one lesser-known example off the top of my head.)
Or for something more present-day, look at mainland China’s treatment of the Uyghurs or their ongoing efforts to force Chinese Catholics to heel.
I never learned a thing about the USSR other than it being mentioned in a Beatles song, but I’ll take your word that it sucked and contradicts my statement. I also haven’t seen the word “Uyghurs” until now, and I don’t follow Chinese politics. So in short, I’m far too ignorant to justify the level of confidence I expressed with a period earlier. So that’s my bad, pretty much.
If there is ONE demographic in the west that definitely doesn’t need their feelings coddled it’s christians, who run everything and whose vocal fraction spends the entirety of its time making life shittier for everyone else.
Also, Christian fundamentalists need to be challenged and fought at every point so that liberal and progressive Christians don’t get thrown under the bus by them or have their beliefs treated as less valid than the evangelical Fox news version.
Okay but one side of that ‘hate’ is, like, actually capable of acting on it at their leisure to the detriment of people like me. Like in Florida, as of two days ago.
Like the least a Good Christian can do is care about what it is their institution is doing to cause hate for them, and what they can do to stop it. If they don’t, then the distinction between Good and Bad Christians is meaningless because they both benefit from the same institution.
I think it’s rude and obnoxious to look someone in the face and say “your belief on the existence of this typically sensitive and personal thing is wrong actually and I’m right”. It’s like, intentionally insulting. And “god is real/fake and you’re wrong” is different from “i believe God is/isn’t real”.
I’ve been accosted by enough psycho christians like that because Jamaicans refuse to be normal, and I’m empathetic to people getting it in most scenarios.
Joking about god’s fakeness to yourself is literally harmless and Dina did nothing wrong here, and people are doing what they usually do and blowing nothing up into something.
And before someone extrapolates something else from this, this obviously doesn’t apply to harmful beliefs like faith-justified-bigotry, sexual shame, young earth creationism, cult shit, etc. I’m literally just talking about stance on which gods are real if any.
Expanding again because I really am anxious about people trying to pull words out of my ass i didn’t say
Joking about the status of gods existence, in general, is fine and no one cares as long as everyone knows everyone’s boundaries. I personally treat religious boundaries like a live wire and just don’t touch. I occasionally make mild jokes about god not being real, my boyfriend occasionally makes joke about god being real. I’d get annoyed if someone joked too much about it or started talking about the objective existence of god (tbh if someone I’m familiar with started getting in my face about Jesus at this point id probably just slap them and leave bc i am Tired).
I am not licking christian boot, I’m just an agnostic atheist and it pisses me off when people go “I’m right you’re wrong” with something as non concrete as religion
You’ve managed to say what I was trying to say just above, much more clearly and in much less confrontational terms. Dina’s alone in her room, talking to nobody but herself, and thus has nobody to offend other than the all-knowing, ever-present Michael Mouse.
It’s certainly a little bit troublesome that you felt the need to cloak your statement in so many conditionals and disclaimers. That’s what #discourse has started forcing people to do, though.
Not only will they say you hate waffles, they’ll say you hate black people because there’s a stereotype that black people are obsessed with chicken and waffles, which you must inherently be alluding to in a sideways manners because why else would you specifically name-drop pancakes, knowing full well that they’re in a zero-sum dichotomy with waffles as a breakfast pastry?
FWIW I didn’t get the impression at all that you were being a bootlicker or whatever. You’re not making any equivalence to cultural impact or power dynamics, you’re just talking about faith in a vacuum.
I think Dina trying to win Becky over from God is terrible and turns me against their relationship. It means she fundamentally does not respect Becky’s belief structure.
This is literally not what is happening, because, as you will notice, Dina made absolutely no mention of Becky’s religion in Becky’s or anyone else’s presence.
The things you say alone, to yourself, in the relative privacy of your own room, are the most #Problematic, because then not only are you hurting other people, you’re being a coward by not posting it on Tweeter and thereby opening yourself to Totally Valid Criticism.
Remarks to yourself are indistinguishable from forcibly converting another person, which you’d think Dona would be more delicate about, considering Becky’s past.
Dina doesn’t respect Becky’s beliefs in the sense that she thinks they are valid and right. But she has probably been listening when Becky said things like “Jesus was there for me when no one else was.”
(I talked to a lot of Beckys when I was staying in homeless shelters during my month on the streets of southern Texas.)
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do we now need to disprove Mickey Mouse
or, at least, FINALLY get him into public domain
Mickey Mouse will never enter public domain. Disney has way to much invested in him to let it happen, legally or not.
So what you’re saying is that delenda est Disney.
They have pretty much given up on perpetually extending copyright. Disney now seems to be banking on Trademarks to keep Micky pure. That’s probably why they are running that short clip from Steamboat Willie as their company logo in the newer pictures.
Trademarks already never expire as long as they are in active use.
Also they have a strategy of sharing the mark. There’s not much left about film studios, but for comics for example they recently made a “by disney” collection (when it’s really “disney by someone else”).
Trademarks also have to be enforced, IIRC. That’s why they have to crack down on places like daycares that illegally use licensed characters to project an air of legitimacy.
Note, they haven’t been as aggressive in recent years. The internet has put a lot of that kind of thing in a more negative light. Disney is still maybe touchier than some companies, but they’re nothing near what they used to be.
Turns out suing a day-care for a fan-mural is a bad look. Who knew?
This is why taking a victory lap around Mickey Mouse would actually be the most bad ass of victory moves.
Rule 34 if it exists there is porn of it.
No standard enough definition of god that exists for anything but the abstract idea. so no way to create a specific image of a god that is both god and porn to all individuals there for no god exists.
Enough images do exist of micky mouse to justify a Consistent enough standard pic to say A micky mouse is a character and is thought of as such character in porn and does exist.
There for micky mouse more real then god.
And to think this strip must have been written months ago, before the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida and Disney’s back-door support of the politicians who pushed it into law.
“Don’t Say Mouse”
Eh, Disney’s been back-door supporting the “hate-our-gay-neighbors” uber-Christian politicians for a long time, and everyone’s just been shrugging their shoulders and saying “yeah, they’re a big corporation, big corporations virtue signal while simultaneously supporting evil-AF politicians, what else is new?” It might be more visible in the news this month than the baseline, and the shoulder-shruggers are starting to voice protest, but it’s no more or less relevant than it ever was.
The fact is, everybody pays all the politicians, evil and non, for access, because we have a broken-ass system that allows for legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions.
Bribery? More like protection money in many cases. And campaign contributions aren’t the half of it. Look around corporate America and you’ll see a whole lot of people in cushy jobs whose biggest qualification is being related to an influential congresscritter.
Big names at the company, particularly in TVAnimation, Lucasarts, Pixar and Marvel have come out and said that Disney barely lets them do anything regarding queer content, and most of them aren’t afraid of being fired right now because Disney can’t afford to look worse than it already does right now.
Actually, I remember the Disney Corporation being embargoed by the Baptist Church for a decade because they refused to ban Gay pride events from their park. Disney took a firm stance of, “Paying customers are paying customers!”
“Don’t Say ‘Back Door'” 😛
Don’t worry about it Dina, you were competing against the walls of your lover’s psychological imprisonment. Those walls are infinitely tall, thick and bleak. Success is yours, and you deserve to feel proud, attractive, loved and loving.
I really adore Dina. She’s just the best.
Me too. My favourite character by a fair margin.
Hey now, “God” may very well just refer to the AWFUL institutions that claim to represent him.
But anyway,
You did it Dina!!! You broke Becky’s Chains of Sunday School with the Power of Science!!!!
YEAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!
🌈 🧠 🌌 🤘😆🤘 🌌 🧠 🌈
*plays “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd on Hacked Muzak*
You won’t play me Freebird anymore
Y’all sold out and what for?
I’m still the fan I was before…
But you’re “too cool”
To play Freebird just once more–Todd Steed & The Suns of Phere
Exactly, it’s not a victory against a fictional character, it’s a victory against the indoctrination set instituitions with hundreds or thousands of years of practice, many aimed at controlling and even oppressing people. Well done Dina!
When Disney eventually buys the internet and all content therein, God and Mickey will officially be the same person to Dina.
Dina was ahead until she realized how stupid competition with a fictional character was and now it’s a tie game!
I dunno, I felt pretty good throwing blue shells at the CPU in Mario Kart.
I used to play Mario Kart with my friends all the time and we’d usually do it while drinking. As you can imagine, driving a gokart while intoxicated is difficult to do, even more difficult when it is virtual.
the gays win again
The gay butts can wave flags in celebratiom, or fart the canadian anthem. Either is acceptable.
Mickey Mouse confirmed for God
I love Dina so much. xD
Keeping score against “god” is a pointless endeavor, you can’t win. However, keeping score against stupid religious doctrine? Totally fair and highly recommended.
The real question is, if you tag God in this one, would you then have to tag God in every strip?
Nah, turns out god isn’t actually omniscient, they just poked their head in for this particular scene.
(and now I’m imagining god being gender-less and having galasso-level understanding of gender, and being like ‘what’s this gay thing my homo sapiens keep taking about’ XD)
The only part of the bible I’m really familiar with is the story of Joseph. Right after, in the bible I read, is the story of Moses.
So Joseph and the Hebrews come to Egypt, save their sorry asses from famine, everyone is living in prosperity and happiness, then God turns around for like two generations and suddenly they’re all enslaved and the pharoah is murdering babies.
My personal headcanon is that God keeps setting things up for success, looking away for two minutes, then finds a dumpster fire and is like “for fucks sake humanity”.
The new Cosmos talked about how someone invented solar power in like the 1800s – no one wanted it. I can just fully imagine god banging his head against the wall like “What the fuck? What. The. Fuck.”
Don’t forget, God’s also a huge fan of Star Trek: Enterprise.
But what do they want with a spaceship?
That’s not Enterprise, that’s movie number V.
Some of y’all have never read Shortpacked! I guess
(It was a running gag there that God kept demanding for Enterprise to be un-cancelled)
That is how omnipresence works, yes. However, by the modal ontological argument, if a maximally-great God is tagged in even ONE possible strip, He is therefore automatically tagged in EVERY possible strip.
… and since He was NOT tagged in previous strips, it is impossible for Him to be tagged in this one as well. Mystery solved!
I occasionally marvel that people have been willing to kill one another over the question as to whether the omnipresent God is immanent or transcendant. How do they think they can tell?
Traditionally, you can tell who’s right by who manages to brand the other groups as heretics and kill them (or exile them if they’re wusses) over the question. Obviously the most prolific killers must be the most right with God. Why else would He bless them with so much success in their righteous crusade?
At least, that’s how early Christianity sorted out questions like Arianism, Docetism, the Trinity, and the like, thereby shaping the mainstream of Christian faith that we know today, and since few modern Christians even question the conclusions of that method they obviously believe it’s a highly reliable approach to for arriving at correct beliefs.
(/sarcasm… kinda… maybe /satire? /lampoon? /parody? None of those seem right, but it’s in that neighborhood. Kidding on the square, maybe, which I just googled and learned DIDN’T originate with Al Franken. … Oh, and some obligatory #notallchristians and #notalltheists because someone will take exception if I don’t.)
That’s horrible libel and frankly a terrible presentation of history.
Yes, I’m sure the Crusaders and other long-dead violent extremists will be very hurt by this remark. Their feelings also matter very much and we should all be more considerate of the murderous vagabonds going forward.
As I was trying to indicate in the final paragraph, I was “kidding on the square” — making an absurdist joke out of something that was still largely true. Many modern Christians would wholeheartedly disagree that questions over abstract theology should be settled by bloodshed and persecution, and would be morally appalled if that were to occur today. (I would guess MOST modern Christians, but without hard numbers that would just be a guess.) So, no, it’s not fair to assume that a typical Christian that’s the right way to go about it — many would be explicitly opposed — and the dissonance present in framing it otherwise is the source of humor. (#dontexplainthejoke)
But it’s still true that modern Christians HAVE accepted violence and persecution as the standard for how to settle doctrinal disputes. That’s why it’s kidding on the square. To focus on just one of those items, Arianism, for purposes of illustration…
Were Arius and his followers NOT exiled, following their rhetorical defeat at the 1st Council of Nicaea, because the mainline of Christianity had deemed Arianism heretical? Were their writings not order burned? Was everyone who refused to surrender those writings for burning not ordered executed? Was this victory of the doctrine of a con-substantial Son and Father, over Arianism’s Son subordinate to Father, not then made official in the Nicene Creed? And doesn’t the modern centrality of the Nicene Creed in mainstream Christianity constitute, through willful blindness if nothing else, a tacit, implicit acceptance of those methods in practice and the orthodoxy they produced, whatever explicit objections modern Christians might express to those practices in the abstract?
I would say that most (again, guessing) modern Christians don’t understand that this shaped modern Christianity. But that is still how heresies like Arianism were suppressed, silenced, and largely forgotten by everyone save priests and religious historians, Mainstream Christianity has accepted the orthodoxy produced by winnowing out these heresies… and the brute fact of history is that this this point of Christology was settled through the (eventual) orthodox Christians managing to brand Arius and his followers as heretics and exile and/or kill them.
Thank you all for filling out the survey I put here last time!
Now to get more data, so I can use the Power of Science to give a little something to all of you! 😉
Want to take your mind of things for a bit once more?
Tell me what kinds of RPGs, Strategy and Puzzle games you all like to play!!!
Take the survey here:
https://strawpoll.com/polls/w4nWD0E3dgA
Oops, I accidentally voted for 15/17 options, and the genre I play the most wasn’t even there!
Woops sorry pal! 😅
What genre do you play the most?
4 of my top 6 most played on Steam are Sports Management, I guess if you squeeze them hard you could put them in one of the first two categories in your poll.
Is it okay that I ticked off Board Games for DnD? I wasn’t sure where to classify that one.
God: I see you driving around town with the girl I love🎶
Nice Ceelo Green reference!
I aim to please.
Quick, everyone ignore the last panel and start catastrophising Dina’s definitely serious scorekeeping against Gosh. Make a long comment about it that misses the point entirely for the sake of scolding a fictional character, conveniently leaving out the part where she instantly admits it’s silly. Please, please make Dina out to be a Bad Person somehow, it’s so difficult to do and I don’t know how to function as a human being if I’m not lording my moral superiority over a pretend teenager.
Becky’s right there
No, she left the room.
Eh, her hearing isn’t NEARLY as good as Dina’s, plus her mind is in too many eurphoria-soaked pieces to notice.
But yet again, I guess there has to be SOME reason Dina looks so worried in that one April preview panel.
Turns out she just looks worried because there’s a power outage, that’s also why she’s in the dark in the preview panel
SAUCE?
Prego.
Or maybe Ragu.
Newman’s Own makes some good ones, as well.
Signature Select. Or maybe Premium, but definitely one of the Albertsons store brands.
I like Rao’s, but I only get it if it’s on sale or if I’m planning to feed my friend with allergies (Rao’s Sensitive Marinara, in that case).
Muir Glen
Hey now! It’s called analysis!
*goes on to write a 10 paragraph essay on how this will lead Dina to fight Becky on a lava planet*
i am being personally attacked
mods help
I’m on to you spencer!
I mean I personally find this degree of atheism very grating, particularly in an mixed-faith relationship. It doesn’t feel like Dina actually respects Becky’s belief in god so much as makes peace with a personal quirk she ultimately assumes Becky will grow out of.
Would I, as a loving partner, hope my partner grows out of religious ideology that seems to be based on shame, fear, and what I understand to be fairytales, which I am personally unfamiliar with, when most of my interactions with it to date have either been seeing it cause somebody I love internal conflict, or led to my partner’s father hunting us with a gun then teaming up with a mob stooge psychopath and kidnapping her and a group of our friends, his becoming an accessory to murder/manslaughter, and leading to his own violent murder, with almost their entire community blaming my partner for this..?
Becky has already moved from seeing the world as a few thousand years old to recognising science and evolution. Dina’s faith that Becky’s worldview will change as she gains more information is based on observed facts.
Honestly, I find Dina’s calm acceptance that Becky believes religion brings her comfort, hope, etc in the face of the evidence to the contrary rather surprising. Most people would – like Joyce has tried – point to all the harm religion has caused them and angrily ask how they could fail to reject it. Dina recognises that Becky is unwilling to throw out the good along with the bad, has experienced way too many traumatic changes in a short period of time, and needs love and acceptance, and time to actually analyse how much “good” she is actually holding onto.
Also, Becky’s number one in terms of her considerations. She is choosing to treat Becky placing what she views as an imaginary sky friend equal or above her in her considerations as a friendly (albeit ridiculous) competition/challenge, rather than a direct insult. Given that said figure is the reason given for the above offences, and she’s not even teasing Becky about doing this because she values Becky’s feelings above Becky acknowledging that Dina’s right, I think that shows a really amazing level of forbearance, consideration and understanding. BEFORE taking into consideration that she may not be neurotypical and only learnt a few weeks/months ago that you’re supposed to look people in the eyes rather than mouths when they talk even though that’s the part that moves.
Dina’s utterly amazing!
Gonna bet you didn’t find Becky’s christianity grating when she told other people how Dina would be upset when she died and found out god was real.
Yes, actually I did. A relationship needs to be based around fundamental respect for the partner and their beliefs. If you don’t respect them and try and change them then you shouldn’t be together.
What “degree of atheism” are you talking about? The degree at which a person is capable of just disagreeing about the existence of Gosh with making it into a federal fuckin’ case every time it’s brought up? Because that’s where Dina’s at. Dina seeing it as a quirk Becky can grow out of, I don’t really see as a Problem. She doesn’t condescend to Becky about it, she doesn’t antagonise, and she doesn’t treat Becky as lesser for her religion. So far, it’s just something they don’t agree on and neither of them especially presses the issue. I don’t see a single problem with this setup and it’s confusing to me how many people do.
How dare an atheist jokingly declare themselves to have scored a point against a deity they think is fictional! This clearly makes Dina a horrible person somehow.
I think the most important part is the last panel, where she’s outright calling it an absurd thing to do, and thusly making the call-out for us. If she seemed to really mean it and stood by it, I could maybe see some wiggle room there.
When will the Christens admit they have been following the atheist’s and lust after them and just have sex already.
Oh wait I guess they just did kind of.
The champion stood, the rest saw their better.
Mister Rogers in a blood stained sweater.
I fucking love that last panel.
Look, if we can’t gloat over our victories over fictional characters, what is even the goddamn point? 😛
Would video games even exist if we couldn’t?
I should clarify I meant that from Dina’s POV. Not trying to poop on anyone’s real life beliefs in any deity/ies of their choice.
-insert kingdom hearts ref here-
I hope they both go pee.
I realize that sounds like a sex thing but it’s good to pee after fooling around so your don’t get an UTI.
*recalls preview panel from April with worried Dina face*
OH NO! I hope neither of them caught an STD!!! 😱
How would two, until recently, virgins in an exclusive relationship manage to catch an STD?
Spontaneous imbalance of the humours.
Yeah that’s not how STD’s (now called STI’s) work at all. You don’t just magically contract them because you had sex.
(There’s a VERY small, but I suppose non-zero chance one of them has one of the STI’s you can contract from your mother at birth, but they would have known about it and it seems unlikely that it wouldn’t have been brought up at all).
UTI’s (Urinary Tract Infections) absolutely can pop up after sex, and women in particular are told to pee post-coitus to clear the urethra of any germs/dirt/whatever that might have gotten pushed up inside it during sex. This helps lower the chance of getting a UTI. Which is, again, not an STI.
God and Mickey Mouse are both known for peeing regularly
“Dina: 1
God: 0”
Yeah, but Dina had home-field advantage,
i dunno, i’d probably be more scared of mickey mouse (AKA disney)
unlike jesus they don’t forgive transgressions
Who’s that girl who saved her love from the Toe of patriarchy?
D-I-N, A-S-A-R-U-Yamaaa
Who’s that 5-foot-nothing girl who loves paleontology?
D-I-N, A-S-A-R-U-Yamaaa
Yes! YES!!! YEAH!!! 🤘😆🤘
Right up there with Sailor Moon and Son Goku, Dina’s my favorite socially-challenged hero! 🤩
*plays “Cha-La Head-Cha-La” on Hacked Muzak*
Sailor Moon was socially challenged? I thought she was just an idiot.
little bit of A, little bit of B.
No one beats Micky
I can understand Dina’s mindset here. And there was humor in the last panel.
But is it just me, or does her comments in the last panel not really sound like the type of phrasing Dina would use?
If Dina used it, then by definition it is precisely the type of phrasing Dina would use.
Don’t get tripped up in your own counterfactual.
There’s also an argument to be made that we internalize/ say things aloud to ourselves differently than we would others.
I know what I mean, so I can address things to myself far more bluntly than I would someone else, etc.
And now it is time to build a fleet of celestial dropships and an army of robot dinosaurs and BEGIN THE CONQUEST OF HEAVEN
Oh woah that would be SO COOL!!! 😍 🦖🦕🤖🛸 😈
Naw I’ve dunked on fictional characters before and felt GREAT about it.
Do tell us of your battles! My curiousity is peaked, human!
piqued
Ooo! Oregamos! Side note, care to share with me any meatball recipes you know? I’ve kinda got a craving for them! 😅
Your curiosity is piqued, but I really don’t think it has peaked yet.
Maybe you could take a peek and find out?
*plays Piquet while setting up a picket line*
Yes!
I’ve been dunked on by the game, particularly undertale and the genocide final boss(being vague in case someone hasn’t played it but still plans to.) He has dunked on me at least a hundred times.
And I just lost The Game.
But you didn’t tag ‘God’. (Responding to alt text)
Certainly he did. You just can’t see it without deleting it.
Signs your relationship is unhealthy and is going to crash and burn:
Disrespecting your girlfriend’s close-held core beliefs because you find them to be silly.
Becky has also made comments about Dina’s atheism. But I really don’t think either of those is a big deal. They know they have different beliefs and that part of that is thinking the other is wrong, and they seem to accept that. Now, it could become a point of conflict, but it’s not Dina being oh so terrible.
Could be worse. Becky could have a Hatsune Miku figurine in a jar.
Wait, why’s that so terrible? Did I miss yet another human meme?
You’re better off not knowing
God i wish that were me
There is an intergalactic gap between this comic, in which Dina finds Becky’s constantly warping faith and shifting goalposts frustrating because of how badly it’s all hurt Becky, and making fun of her belief because she finds it silly.
I was going to highlight Liz, but then I realize that she and Joyce are also in Becky’s boat, they’ve all been horribly traumatized by religion and are reacting to the trauma in different ways.
That being said, if you loudly and proudly proclaim your confidence in Santa’s existence despite zero evidence for that and are actively undermining your friends’ personal growth because you’re really hurt they no longer believe in Santa, too, maybe count yourself lucky you have friends and loved ones at all at that point. If my dad told me he was pulling my grandmother out of the hospital to treat her with crystals, I’d have a lot more to say a lot more quickly than “Hoooly shit, how am I going to deal with this without hurting feelings?”
Lmao Becky has stated that she cant wait till Dina is in Heaven and is mad about how wrong she is…
Satisfy my curiosity: did you have a similar take when becky told other people how mad Dina would be when she died and found out that god was real, or nah?
Becky’s closely held belief is that God is going to beat her because she had sex with her girlfriend and the only way out of it is to get married the next day.
Literally how. All Dina is doing is saying it’s ridiculous for HER to try and act as if god exists, because she literally doesn’t believe in god. The only way for her to feel any differently is for her to, yknow, believe in god, which she doesn’t.
Literally having a different belief from your partner is not disrespectful, jesus christ.
Hey; any victory against god. . . or the mouse, is a good thing.
Definitely worth celebrating.
ATTACK AND DETHRONE MICKEY MOUSE
That’s gonna be tough. He packs a wallop.
You’re right. For that battle, she’s gonna need some SUPER super powers.
On that note, who do you think would win in a fight — South Park Mickey Mouse or the Pillar Men from JoJo?
I’ve got no familiarity of South Park, and I’ve never seen any JoJo media outside of memes. I know the Pillar Men hate light, so they’re basically vampires, which means King Mickey would be able to take ’em pretty easy.
“Your Mick-ey Moussse is one big stupid dope!”
So how do Becky (and Joyce) feel vis-a-vis Aslan?
I doubt they were allowed to read the books or watch the movies despite the Christian allegories (is that the right word?).
Allegories are stories. The word you are looking for is “doctrine.”
Despite the Christian allegories in the Narnia stories was the intent, I think.
Not sure what the common fundie stance on Narnia is though.
“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
J.R.R.Tolkien, who knew C.S. Lewis, and saw what he did there, and was trying to explain that his own stories *weren’t* supposed to put the reader in a straightjacket of the author’s intended meaning.
Allegory is what everyone says. But:
“Lewis, an expert on the subject of allegory[2] and the author of The Allegory of Love, maintained that the Chronicles were not allegory on the basis that there is no one-to-one correspondence between characters and events in the books, and figures and events in Christian doctrine. He preferred to call the Christian aspects of them “suppositional”. This indicates Lewis’ view of Narnia as a fictional parallel universe.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_The_Chronicles_of_Narnia
Narnia books were the only fantasy things I was allowed to consume, specifically because of the allegories.
(though you could probably argue Star Wars fits into that category and slipped through somehow)
This is definitely set in Indiana and not Southern California. Here in Orange County Mickey Mouse is all too real.
I don’t see the tag for GoOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
This is very cute and golly it’ll be something if Dina ever finds out about Joyce’s new atheism.
It would be extremely funny if Dina found out in a very neutral way and then it’s just Joyce and Becky talking around Dina
Mostly because I want Dina to give some perspective to Joyce on her new place in life and I really do feel like Dina would be perfect in helping her
Absurd, but it give satisfaction, at least for some moments. Is sweet see Dina so incredibly happy♡.
Yeah, it’s wonderful, right? 🥰
Say, a thought occurs. Have we ever seen Dina laugh in the comic?
To be honest, I have a feeling that there are a lot of characters in this comic that we have never seen laughing.
That freaking mouse had it coming anyway.
I don’t know Dina framing her relationship with Becky in competition with her faith bodes well for their relationship.
Dina loves and respects Becky more then anything, and she sees the damage the church did to her, her wanting to slowly ease her out of the mindset of “I gotta watch every step I take or ill disappoint god” isnt a bad thing, she is just trying to make it a little more fun lol.
Besides, there are tons of couples where they are of different faiths, they work out just fine. Dina isnt trying to remove Becky’s faith, just make it less of a choke-hold on her life.
Dina’s happy smile gives me life.
already wishing we could go back to 3 hours ago when everybody was absolutely sure that Dina was a perfect and flawless mary sue who was poorly written because she isn’t written as enough of an ableist caricature. too bad now she’s now a megalomaniacal abuser who is patronizing Becky, again, because all personal differences must be read into with the maximum implied trauma and malice and nobody can have reasonable thoughts or feelings about any topic that can emotionally impact anybody =(
Don’t know if my opinion will be at all comforting but I’m sharing in the hopes that it might be: therapy can be cost-prohibitive but comment sections are free and will do in a pinch. I think comment sections trend yikes-y because even those of us who are in both of those spaces can get more mileage on the internet, acting out Fight Club without accountability. It’s not even on purpose a lot, for me. But it does mean that we end up talking to our inner demons on here.
Stories that handle topics in a nuanced and mature way will attract people who are ultimately working through their/our own stuff, and comments trigger defensiveness acted out in stupid ways that are probably better kept private… if not for the Internet being a decent enough space to grow these skills. So who knows. It can make me feel better. I think we are helping each other, ultimately. Comment sections are the OG “standing up for oneself” practice.
It’s everyone’s responsibility to do their best in a public space not to be a donkey, but I think social mistakes on the internet, with the subject fictional characters, are the better place for them. I think this is a crucial way that long-form webcomics can affect positive change, too, is having a space for the community to process it together over the years.
Ooo. Quite a bit of oof-dium we got here. 😮
If it’s any consolation, I’ll be here to provide other conversational venues for when things look like they’re getting to hairy! 🤗
Really starting to hate these kinds of comments.
The ones Throwatron is agitated with, or the ones like Throwatrons?
Here I was referring to the ones like Throwatrons.
Probably don’t read the one I made further up, then. 👀 It’s more or less the same thing but with higher concentrations of acid and venom.
Oh, I read all your comments, and I actually thought today’s was a lot less than this one, and at lot less than some of yours have been. But yeah, while I like you, Delicious Taffy, I’m not a fan of that style of comment and find it actively makes this comment section a worse place to be.
Yeah, that’s valid. Sometimes I get a little ornery here when I don’t really feel that strongly like 5 minutes after I’ve posted. It’s mostly a knee-jerk reaction to a tendency here towards scolding and a “Who’s Worse Today?” type of vibe some days.
I kinda disagree, i despise the comments that genuinely try to inflate character moments into proof of their evil. THOSE make the comments section a worse place. Comments calling it out are funny and also lets me know I’m not going crazy and they are in fact, weird insane takes.
There’s that, too. I forget who it was already (the individual is less important to my point than the question itself), but we’ve been expected to treat seriously such bizarre, left-field questions as “Is Dina a sex offender for having consensual sex with her girlfriend?” Those sorts of things make me question if I’m actually missing something serious and creepy about this story, and seeing people react so strongly to them helps ground me back in reality.
Comments calling them out when they’re coming fast and furious is one thing. Maybe I’ve been missing stuff, but lately it seems like there have been more preemptive ones, often on days when there haven’t been any such comments.
This actually creates the impression that those kinds of comments are more prevalent than they are, which seems to defeat the purpose.
For myself, I admit mine today came from a place of defensiveness, yeah. It maybe would have been more useful to say nothing and save that energy for when someone actually said something stupid about Dina.
I thought Dina was supposed to be Goku in this analogy. Shouldn’t Frieza be more apropos as a defeated fictional rival?
Oh yes, please! Don’t stop giving me ideas!!! 😆
She wants to defeat the world’s strongest fictional character, which is God.
Or, as Amber suggested, Goku. In the sense that this fictional character has an inordinate amount of cultural power, Mickey Mouse is probably more of an apt comparison.
The real question is: how many midichlorians does Mickey Mouse have and does he know where to find the Infinity Gauntlet?
I was gonna say Mickey Mouse has no need for such things but then I remembered that Kingdom Hearts exists
Kingdom Hearts gets a lot of shtick for, well, being Kingdom Hearts, but turning Mickey Mouse into Wizard Paladin Yoda was pretty aces.
Imagine any piece of media in history presenting Mickey Mouse’s appearance as something to build up to. You go through the entire first game and not only is his appearance a carefully kept secret he is never called by name the whole time, he only shows up at the end wielding a magic sword wreathed in light while he traps himself in what’s essentially Hell for the foreseeable future because eh, someone’s gotta.
Kingdom Hearts is good actually.
Kingdom hearts is great as long as you never ever attempt to verbally explain it to someone.
My boyfriend tried to explain it to me before just showing me the games. I got a migraine and cried.
An old man pissed in a cup, twenty mighty warriors arose from it, a kid skipped dinner, Yu-Gi-Oh Season 0, part-time jobs, Finny Fun, it was Naptime, then the apocalypse happened. It’s not that hard once you reduce.
…okay see, ive seen the games in chronological order up to KH2 (except the card Game bc that was a boring watch) and i still have no idea what the fuck you just said
Chronological order??? Release order or bust, that’s the way the information is presented and makes the most sense.
One of two plot twists in Kingdom Hearts I like is that the funny sidekick villain turned out to be pulling a Revolver Ocelot the whole time.
The other plot twist is that Tetsuya Nomura tried to make a Final Fantasy game that he was removed from since you’re not supposed to hand like three of your biggest games to one guy at a time, and he was so mad about having it taken from him that he stuck it in Kingdom Hearts.
That’s a level of Jack Kirby vengeance I aspire to.
@taffy i think it was release order? I don’t fuckin know, these games are weird and it’s been a hot minute
yeah but
did you play the interquel set at the end of KH1 that explains why Mickey Mouse didn’t have a shirt on at the end of that game???
Mickey Mouse has all the real power, anyway.
(As an extension/symbol of the Walt Disney corporation.)
So naked time’s over, then?
Becky is leaving, so she has to be dressed. That means, yes, naked time is over for at least Becky.
Thanks, I needed a good laugh.
The last panel is it.
To ne frankly, we already have a tag for God.
Hey, hey. New chapt title, in the next book: 01 – Bring Me to Life Drawing
Nice, they will bring Joyce to life drawing. hahaha. I want to be alive until there, just to see it.
Sorry, Dina, but it’s not really a 1:1 comparison. I’m pretty sure there are far, far more devout followers of Disneyism than the Jesus fandom currently has.
Some of y’all gotta square for me why “God is fake” is offensive and not the insistence that he’s totally real.
A lack of belief in the supernatural is still, y’know, a belief.
I asked this very question a while ago (except I added the fact that saying the Abrahamic god is real that is in fact saying all the other ones are fake), got no answer other than “because”.
I vaguely remember that, or at least one you made in regards to Jacob thinking of all religions as paths to God, which I think the comic was expressing as “all faiths are valid in that “God” is an expression of a particular individual religious belief, and so we all worship the same being that we view from different lenses and define in different terms” as opposed to a rigid “my God’s real and all these idiots are worshiping the RIGHT one without knowing.”
Like there’s A God, but that God is defined by whoever’s seeing him. Jacob viewing a higher power as the Abrahamic God is on the same level as any other faith viewing their own higher power.
I think being a member of any particular faith necessitates that you place your own above others. Of course I think God isn’t real, if I did, I wouldn’t be an atheist (or an agnostic, however you define “it’s bigger than me and thus unknowable in my lifetime, but guys from millennia ago sure didn’t figure that out”). What I don’t get is that a believer of any faith telling me such is valid, but if I say my belief is that there is nothing to believe, I’m somehow invalidating them.
Like Richard Dawkins is the ur-Edgy Atheist (a term I am slowly understanding was invented by right-wing plants to present an oppressive cultural oligarchy being even mildly criticized by its victims as Both Sides), but when he goes out and says “God isn’t real lmao” he’s not doing anything different than any particularly loud expression of a faith, since expressing a lack of belief in God is still A Belief.
“Expressing lack of belief” is not “still a belief”. This shows a fundamental lack of understanding. Atheism isn’t a religious position. It’s not a “faith”. The scientific world view isn’t an irrational superstition like religious believes. Unfortunately a religious mind seems unable to grasp the difference.
Nothing I said has anything to do with whether or not “the scientific world view isn’t an irrational superstition like religious believes” nor did I define atheism as a faith. I believe that there is no God, because I saw the same things that leads someone else to think there is, and came to a differing conclusion. I am not nearly educated enough to define my lack of belief in a higher power as “but science.”
If the question of “does a god exist, is there life after death” is being asked, then “No” is as equal an answer.
I believe there is a difference. Let’s say you are a huge Joyce fan and Steven (fictional commenter) thinks she’s the most obnoxious character in DoA. Compare you saying “Joyce is great” to Steven saying “Joyce is dumb and mean”. Don’t look the same to me.
Okay but whether or not you think God is real is a binary question as opposed to a question of subjective quality. Moreover, I do believe in the nonexistence of a God, and so the only possible way that’s comparable to going “dumb and mean” is if, by the same token, a person insisting to me that he does is also “dumb and mean.”
Absolutely. And that’s where the “Edgy Atheist” bit comes in.
Someone saying “God doesn’t exist” is indeed no different from someone saying “God does exist”.
Someone saying “God doesn’t exist, and therefore everyone who thinks otherwise is a) a moron and b) directly responsible for every evil thing done in the name of religion (well, I say everyone, but especially Muslims, somehow)” is, by the same token, equivalent to saying “God does exist, and therefore everyone who thinks otherwise is a sinner who deserves to burn for all eternity.”
I don’t think they’re really equivalent though, for the simple reason that militant atheists have never carried out the systemic execution or conversion of civilians en masse.
I guess we could say it happened in Japan, since there was that time some Catholics set up shop and the native governments sorta said “Turn those annoying whiteys into dumplings”.
That…wasn’t on behalf of atheism though, pretty sure. Japan at the time practiced mainly Shintoism and Buddhism, and the aforementioned persecution and murder of Christians in Japan was carried out on behalf of the (I believe) Shinto institution.
It’s almost always a matter of religious institutions being an arm of state control, to use people’s religious beliefs to manipulate them into obedience to the state. If you don’t adhere to the correct religion, or none at all, the state can’t control you in the same way and you are therefore inherently a threat to the current power structure and need to be stamped out post-haste.
Which, to my knowledge, has never and pretty much can never happen with atheism by its very nature. Various different religions will obviously have conflicts with various different states. But atheism is inherently at odds with the structure of state power itself, so as long as states maintain and consolidate power using any means available to them (which is just what states do), atheism will be the most universally oppressed and persecuted across the board.
I think I just plain left out part of my comment. I meant to say something between those two paragraphs about doubting that Christians have been killed in large numbers for being Christian, and the Japan incident is the only example I could think of. I’m by no means a scholar or history buff, but I’m pretty sure Christians and their various just-different-enough spinoffs are the Main Ones doing the massacres.
The Romans DID have their lions on a high-christian diet, because christians went around refusing to add their god to the Roman pantheon, and the Romans were afraid that would piss of their gods so much they’d torch the empire.
That does sound like a very Roman thing to do.
I mean Christians sure have been persecuted for being the wrong kind of christian, pretty sure. That has definitely been a thing. But it is, you’re correct, usually by other flavors of Christian.
Although I’m PRETTY sure islamic states probably do and have done their fair share of persecuting christians as well. (There’s still of course the global context of how much global power and influence western–and therefore primarily christian–states have OVER those islamic states…but yeah point still stands.)
I know very little about Islamic states and their predilections regarding Christian persecution, so I deliberately avoided bringing them up.
“militant atheists have never carried out the systemic execution or conversion of civilians en masse”
As someone born in Russia, the USSR says hello. (And not just Christians either, look at how they treated their Buddhist ethnic minorities for one lesser-known example off the top of my head.)
Or for something more present-day, look at mainland China’s treatment of the Uyghurs or their ongoing efforts to force Chinese Catholics to heel.
I never learned a thing about the USSR other than it being mentioned in a Beatles song, but I’ll take your word that it sucked and contradicts my statement. I also haven’t seen the word “Uyghurs” until now, and I don’t follow Chinese politics. So in short, I’m far too ignorant to justify the level of confidence I expressed with a period earlier. So that’s my bad, pretty much.
It’s more about who is offended, and what power those groups hold.
Being offended that a person doesn’t share your faith is worthless.
If there is ONE demographic in the west that definitely doesn’t need their feelings coddled it’s christians, who run everything and whose vocal fraction spends the entirety of its time making life shittier for everyone else.
Hate is hate.
Also, Christian fundamentalists need to be challenged and fought at every point so that liberal and progressive Christians don’t get thrown under the bus by them or have their beliefs treated as less valid than the evangelical Fox news version.
Okay but one side of that ‘hate’ is, like, actually capable of acting on it at their leisure to the detriment of people like me. Like in Florida, as of two days ago.
Like the least a Good Christian can do is care about what it is their institution is doing to cause hate for them, and what they can do to stop it. If they don’t, then the distinction between Good and Bad Christians is meaningless because they both benefit from the same institution.
No, it’s not. Hating Ted Cruz and Greg Abbot for being Ted Cruz and Greg Abbot is not in any way comparable to hating transfolk for being trans.
I think it’s rude and obnoxious to look someone in the face and say “your belief on the existence of this typically sensitive and personal thing is wrong actually and I’m right”. It’s like, intentionally insulting. And “god is real/fake and you’re wrong” is different from “i believe God is/isn’t real”.
I’ve been accosted by enough psycho christians like that because Jamaicans refuse to be normal, and I’m empathetic to people getting it in most scenarios.
Joking about god’s fakeness to yourself is literally harmless and Dina did nothing wrong here, and people are doing what they usually do and blowing nothing up into something.
And before someone extrapolates something else from this, this obviously doesn’t apply to harmful beliefs like faith-justified-bigotry, sexual shame, young earth creationism, cult shit, etc. I’m literally just talking about stance on which gods are real if any.
Expanding again because I really am anxious about people trying to pull words out of my ass i didn’t say
Joking about the status of gods existence, in general, is fine and no one cares as long as everyone knows everyone’s boundaries. I personally treat religious boundaries like a live wire and just don’t touch. I occasionally make mild jokes about god not being real, my boyfriend occasionally makes joke about god being real. I’d get annoyed if someone joked too much about it or started talking about the objective existence of god (tbh if someone I’m familiar with started getting in my face about Jesus at this point id probably just slap them and leave bc i am Tired).
I am not licking christian boot, I’m just an agnostic atheist and it pisses me off when people go “I’m right you’re wrong” with something as non concrete as religion
You’ve managed to say what I was trying to say just above, much more clearly and in much less confrontational terms. Dina’s alone in her room, talking to nobody but herself, and thus has nobody to offend other than the all-knowing, ever-present Michael Mouse.
I’m glad you think my explanation was clear. I’m awful with words so I’m always nervous about explaining myself poorly.
Also in all fairness, Dina SHOULD put respect on King Michaels name.
It’s certainly a little bit troublesome that you felt the need to cloak your statement in so many conditionals and disclaimers. That’s what #discourse has started forcing people to do, though.
Yep. You know how it be, if you wanna say you like pancakes people will say you hate waffels
Not only will they say you hate waffles, they’ll say you hate black people because there’s a stereotype that black people are obsessed with chicken and waffles, which you must inherently be alluding to in a sideways manners because why else would you specifically name-drop pancakes, knowing full well that they’re in a zero-sum dichotomy with waffles as a breakfast pastry?
Dammit you guys now I want Chicken and Waffles. 🤤
FWIW I didn’t get the impression at all that you were being a bootlicker or whatever. You’re not making any equivalence to cultural impact or power dynamics, you’re just talking about faith in a vacuum.
It’s not a good basis for a relationship if your religion is an important part of your values.
Also, as far as I know, the vast majority of atheists do not consider their atheism a religion or belief.
Don’t underestimate Mickey Mouse
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c9/b1/0d/c9b10dfc6e1999ab3b7ce2d2e510d328.jpg
c u r s e d m i c k e y
Is it cursed? He’s just making a silly face.
Mickey Mouse is real and he hates gay people.
Then explain how he’s best friends with Riku Kingdomhearts?
That’s offensive. If you do happen to get one over on Disney it’s completely appropriate to take a victory lap around Mickey Mouse.
I think Dina trying to win Becky over from God is terrible and turns me against their relationship. It means she fundamentally does not respect Becky’s belief structure.
And yes, I think Becky saying “Dina will find out she’s wrong when dead” is also a bad thing.
This is literally not what is happening, because, as you will notice, Dina made absolutely no mention of Becky’s religion in Becky’s or anyone else’s presence.
The things you say alone, to yourself, in the relative privacy of your own room, are the most #Problematic, because then not only are you hurting other people, you’re being a coward by not posting it on Tweeter and thereby opening yourself to Totally Valid Criticism.
Remarks to yourself are indistinguishable from forcibly converting another person, which you’d think Dona would be more delicate about, considering Becky’s past.
And for what it’s worth Becky didn’t say the “she’ll be so mad” thing in Dina’s presence either
Like I think it’s gonna eventually be a source of tension at some point but I don’t think this will be why
No, but she DID do it knowingly in front of other people. Dina is alone right now.
Dina doesn’t respect Becky’s beliefs in the sense that she thinks they are valid and right. But she has probably been listening when Becky said things like “Jesus was there for me when no one else was.”
(I talked to a lot of Beckys when I was staying in homeless shelters during my month on the streets of southern Texas.)
Looking back, that sounds very rambling. I mean to say I think Dina respects Becky’s beliefs as a thing that helps keep her alive.
What you said made sense, thank you for sharing
Tiny happy pieces, holding hands~
Tiny happy pieces, laughing
Mickey mouse has a punchable face.
Come to think of it, God could be tagged in every single strip. If one believes such things.
I figure it’s at least Dina 2 – God 0 by now. after all, she DID teach Becky about evolution.