El Goonish Shive

I think 32_Footsteps is just trying to insinuate that Dan is fairly innocent of his fetishes.

What I mean is goddamn, the guy draws tons of explicitly fetishistic art of his characters. Just because it doesn't feature genitalia or female nipples doesn't mean it's not sexualized.

As much of the recent discussion of Dan's aversion to sex may suggest, he may be as oblivious to that as Diane was to her situation

Edited by sgamer82 on Sep 13th 2018 at 11:55:59 AM

It's frustrating for sure when a content provider won't tell a creator exactly why it's made such a decision. T Campbell, in a two-part installment of his unfortunately now-offline webcomic Widgetitis, a satirical look at I.T. trends without any remotely racy content, told the story of how Google Ads kicked out the comic without warning, without chance of reinstatement and without giving him a proper explanation, despite his attempts to follow up.

Shive has hinted over the last few years that if he were to overcome his self-acknowledged personal hangups about depicting actual nudity, he might well start, well, depicting it in some of the pinups. Recently he said he'd even opened a Tumblr account (blank so far) for that purpose. I wonder whether this Patreon action will serve as an impetus to try what some of his readers have been urging him to do. (As for me, while I've never urged him to draw nudity because I consider that his business and he's probably tired of people bringing it up, I certainly wouldn't object to him going that path. I strongly wouldn't object. *blush* )

FuzzyBoots got the joke.

As for the reasoning, I think this case is one where you could look at the possibilities and go All of Them.

I just think Shive needs to be up front about what he does or doesn't want to draw... and to be fair, he has gotten way better about it (in his typical ham-handed way). If he wants everything to stay PG-13 forever, that's his call (and honestly, given how it sometimes looks when he draws abs, I have to admit that I could see trepidation about him drawing other body parts). I just think Shive shouldn't be at war with his own artistic impulses.

To be fair to Shive, I think his confusion is at least partially that it was flagged NOW, and not at the start. And that is, admittedly, a topic of interest.

A pervy squeaky clean comic is still pervy, Shive. I suppose that is not a line per se, but not exactly surprising.

This is especially true when fetishes are involved, since the thing (s) been fetishised aren't necessarily sexual in nature. A fetish story can be completely clean while still hitting the buttons of the intended audience.

Presumably, the flagging system has an option for users to report content violations.

In this case, I would say the real question is, does a real human person review those reports or is it strictly automated? If Patreon's system is anything like You Tube's, someone could have just flagged him out of spite because they don't like his comic.

There might not actually be an answer to the question, "What about this comic makes it Adults Only?"

EDIT: Alternately, a parent might have caught their kid perusing Dan's Patreon and had a "This is CLEARLY PORN!" overreaction. Whatever the case, I wouldn't be too quick to leap to the assumption that the sudden and unexplained "18 and Older" flag is the product of careful and rational analysis.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 13th 2018 at 12:59:23 PM

I guess I feel vaguely dissatisfied with this plot because it feels like the old Diane is being scrubbed away and an entirely new and unrelated character who happens to share a name and a face is being put in her place?

They aren’t recognizably the same character.

And this isn’t even a change going forward, where Diane is becoming an entirely different person, no, it’s that she was always this way and everything we saw and knew about her was a mistake- a trick of perception.

But you can’t do that to readers. It’s one thing to reveal a hidden side or secret that makes sense, or was foreshadowed, or adds nuance or complexity to a character. It’s another to reveal that all of their previous characterization in no way reflected their character when we would have no way of knowing.

Like, no one would have speculated, “what if Diane is really an innocent ingenue who hated guys because they bullied her, and she and a lesbian accidentally tricked each other into dating lots of men and getting them to pay for things without ever realizing it.”

That wouldn’t have happened, and yet, here we are.

And you didn't really need most of it? Like honestly just the "oh everyone thinks I'm a bitch and not a Boss Bitch like I thought I was' would have been enough to get the disappointment, imo. You didn't need all the other factors to get invalidated.

Hell, you don't even need that disconnect. Just have her realize that she doesn't want to be a Boss Bitch any more; whether she really is one is irrelevant, she's still grown past that childish desire.

I should note I don't actually have a problem with the whole virgin/slut disconnect, because high school is horrible and girls are assumed to be slutty unless they dress like nuns. But I would have preferred just some basic "I don't like who I used to be" character development.

If memory serves, part of patreons problems lately is that Paypal is doing paypals thing and being several levels of obtuse and obscure to make life harder for certain patreons. The problem with international banking is that everyone is held to the dumbest standards.

It's not like this is the first time this has happened. Dan has no problems retconning old characterization to match new directions—see Tedd, Grace, Ashley, and Pandora for some of the most obvious examples.

For starters, once an artist is "18+ flagged", Patreon won't let you subscribe to it while choosing Paypal for payment anymore: You have to enter an actual card number (though it can be an e-card). IIRC it doesn't affect existing subscriptions unless you decide to change your pledge, just like when they added VAT to the system.

New comic: http://egscomics.com/comic/tlod-012

For one thing... wow, Lucy was nicer to Rhoda for all of one comic! I mean, that'd have more impact if any meaningful reactions between the two happened before. Oh, and if Lucy's "niceness" didn't come off as really condescending. But hey, Shive said so!

I guess a huge part of the problem is that most of this "character development" is happening ex nihilo. It's not that it's unbelievable. It's that it's counter to what has been shown before and we're missing any of the intermediate steps to show how it happened (and the flashbacks, if anything, are actually making it worse, because they're just highlighting the "before" rather than show how it developed into "after").

It just kind of feels like Shive is waving arms and going "eh, none of that previous stuff before matters." Which kind of leads me to wonder, why should I think any of this matters?

Also, adding yet more chaste lesbians does not change the fact that we were promised a Justin date as well as a Susan date. If you're not going to advance the Diane/Raven plot, Shive, get to those.

EDIT: Stupid brain fart... I meant Sarah's date, with the guy we're all assuming is trans.

Edited by 32_Footsteps on Sep 14th 2018 at 10:11:26 AM

You mean Sarah, right?

And reading the linked comics pinpoints exactly the problem for me. I suppose I could say to myself, "Well little Diane simply developed into the Diane we know and like. Shive hasn't added in any Orwellian edits just yet, all those comic scenes still happened." But the fact she didn't know increasingly stretches disbelief. After emphasizing her detective skills? Carefully cultivating her public persona? She is just an innocent naive Ingenue underneath it all? I think that is probably the biggest thing.

Dang it, yes.

Comic Tlod013

Does Shive mean to have it look like Lucy is a jealous lesbian harem member who's resentful of Rhoda because she was a potential romantic rival for Diane's affections? Because that's what it looks like here.

A lot of people are taking it that way, and I'm not sure I should be expecting anything else, but I'm hoping things don't quite go that way.

In this arc, "I've been hoping things don't go that way" has long been established to be a fool's hope.

I get the feeling this is Shive being very oblivious and innocent and running into a problematic topic.

Which, for this arc, is ironically appropriate

Edited by sgamer82 on Sep 17th 2018 at 8:58:35 AM