Sinfest

Oh goody, now we get to watch Squig get shamed and humiliated because he once watched porn of Sad Sally. I guess Tats is bored with punching Slick in the gut for now.

So what was supposed to be Squig's journey to change himself has devolved into another shaming plot because this lady got her feelings hurt that he happened to watch porn about her. I predict that for the next few strips we're going to see Sally and possibly Fushia go on a "how dare you!" rant towards Squig and he's probably going to break down in tears while the two just stand over him with contempt.

Edited by Overlord347 on Oct 4th 2018 at 7:50:09 AM

I keep hearing that Ishida is fairly on in years. My fondest wish is he has a long life ahead of him. I want him to live with it once his comic implodes and he spends the rest of his life in complete irrelevance with nothing but the memories of the potential he squandered, the fans he alienated, and the MASSIVE pile of idiocy he permanently burred his career under.

Dang this comic is disgusting.

"How dare you have watched me do sexy things which I was aware of them recording with the intention of selling as many copies of as possible. You monster!"

This is bad people. This is realllllly bad.

Considering squig is trying to get rid of it and clearly thinks it's had a negative impact on his life, it's like someone that used to make drugs getting mad at a addict that used their products when they were selling.

It's either victim blaming or just barely above it.

I wonder if he could just answer "I was destroying that, wasn't I?" (adding "And frankly, if you're gonna be a bitch about that, I'm SO gonna buy another copy. Seriously, you try to do right for once and the answer is a fuck you - I give up. Bitch." is strictly optional - satisfying but optional)

This is so insane. What message is he actually trying to send here? Squig is supposedly doing the right thing by destroying his porn and now he's the bad guy? Does Tat forget what's going on from strip to strip or something?

The only message I'm getting out of Sinfest lately is the Sisterhood and their allies are all nuts and no sane person wants anything to do with them.

Sad Hooker you just entered the Unintentionally Unsympathetic territory. I know you are sensitive about your past, but that's not an excuse to treat someone like crap after they are trying to turn over a new leaf.

Oh, just fuck off, Tats. Really.

Tats is treating Squig like a rapist. He collected porn DVD's, but Tats is pretending Squig has abused her personally and needs to answer for that crime.

How about her own actions and responsibility in this, Tats? What choices did she make in life that made her end up on that DVD and regretting it?

You had the chance to tell that story, but you chose to gloss over it because it would have raised some very hard questions for you to answer.

It's uncomfortable how much abuse he puts his male characters through. Either he hates himself this much or he thinks he's the only good man left.

Edited by hayate666 on Oct 5th 2018 at 10:23:30 AM

Why not both?

Squig's response should be:

"Who are you? And why should I be ashamed of buying what you were selling?"

You know Tat's, you basically have invited every artistically inclined detractors to start making rule 64 artwork of sad stripper girl to just dig at you and expand on what porn she starred in.

Edited by Rothide on Oct 5th 2018 at 7:21:54 AM

Like I said - this brand of radical feminism considers viewing of porn - of any kind, including the Jenna-Jameson-Here's-My-Porn-Career-There's-My-Rolls-Royce kind - as absolutely morally equivalent to sexual violence directed against an individual.

Moral questioning aside, what disturbs me the most in this strip, is how psychologically unrealistic it is.

Let's assume that the women is this story has been coerced into doing a porn movie against her will, and now she feels humiliation and shame for that very reason (I think that what Tats intended to tell in his last Sunday strip, but since he's a shitty storyteller, it was hard to be sure).

That's the equivalent of having a trauma. And when you listen to testimonies of women being victims of sexual abuse, remembering their trauma causes so much stress that the last thing they want is to confront their agressor or any people that were part of the event. Sure, there ARE exception, but what psychologists observe the most is a tendency to avoidant behaviors.

The trope of "Raped women seeking revenge" comes from movies written by dudes. I don't say it doesn't exist IRL, but it's clearly the exception.

Knowing that context, the idea of a traumatized porn actress who agressively confronts a random dude who happens to have watched her videos, is just plain ridiculous. That's not a realistic depiction of the experience of victims of sexual abuse, that's a silly revenge fantasy from the twisted brain of a bigoted man who is more driven by his own egotistic obsession than a real desire to understand suffering people (even if he sincerely believes the contrary).

(Maybe this post can sound a little pedantic, but please forgive me: after all, I'm a French person ).

"You're darn tootin I enjoyed it! I even came up with a few new fapping techniques for your scenes! Lemme show you!"

(Pulls out Smart Phone)

"I call this one Peanut Butter Jelly Time, and here we have..."

Seriously Tats, why should he even bother? He's trying to be a good ally, and he's STILL getting shit! For all attempting to change has done for him, he might as well just take it back home, grab some lotion and Viagra, and have a marathon. The woke ladies won't accept him either way, but at least he'd have a good time with the porn.

You know, it's comics like these that drive me to do such things as separate Monique's character into two entities, with the one who became a mouthpiece for Tats' radical feminist ideology being an impostor/parasite that has pulled a Grand Theft Me / Split-Personality Takeover on the original character.

For Prudence/Sally/however you wanna name her, I would like to suggest a similar thing: Anything that is obviously Tats co-opting her as a mouthpiece for his demented beliefs (such as this Unintentionally Unsympathetic), just ascribe to her being the unknowing victim of Mind Manipulation by The Cartoonist, with a More than Mind Control aspect explaining why she's not noticing that (that is, her trauma and issues are very real, but they're exploited by the Cartoonist to make it look like the condemnation is all her and not the product of external interference).

TL;DR do not attribute unsympatheticness to a character over something that could be adequately explained by the author's own failings.

Edited by MarqFJA on Oct 5th 2018 at 8:16:12 PM

I find it's impossible to separate the characters in New Sinfest from Tats's politics.

Especially a character like Monique. She went from likeable hippy attention whore to sociopathic misandrist political lesbian. There's so little, if any, left that is untainted by her fight for the Great Struggle.

To me it feels like Tats is doing some demented puppet show with the hollowed out corpses of his old characters.

It's something he really deserves criticism for.

Honest question: How do you manage to separate it? What's left that has nothing to do with Tats's political and feminist views?

http://www.sinfest.net/view.php?date=2018-10-06

Oh for eff's sake, are ALL the porn stars in the freaking world living in Sinfestland!?

And AGAIN, there are women who DO enjoy the work Tats! Quit trying to speak for all porn stars already!

He apologizes, still not good enough. Seriously, does he need to commit hari-kari for these assholes to get off his fucking back?

Knowing Tats, the answer is "yes."

Interesting, just double checked that now on a hunch and it's now been corrected. It sure hadn't been corrected when I first double checked

Not sure if Tats is soapboxing or just writing to the character here. Probably both

Of course, if she was unhappy with having done a porn shoot, she would probably find it easy to assume that a lot of other women in Squig's collection were in the same boat, and wouldn't be exactly in the mood to forgive him straight away either

Shrug, not brilliant writing, but not too bad. I'll take it over some of the previous recent dross, petulance and ranting. It's just a shame that you can always feel the Author Tract just lurking beneath the surface even at the best of times

Still think Tats loves his broad strokes over generalisations way too much though. He really needs to open his mind a bit and accept that some people might enjoy acting in ways in which he doesn't approve of.

Then again, how do you fit a proper balanced treatment of the subjects he usually mangles into 3 or 4 webcomic panels a day?

Sad to say, the daily comic format, while clearly making the problem WORSE, isn't the biggest reason Tats mangles just about everything he can with his messages. The fact is, he sucks at writing. Like, Twilight levels of bad here.

His heroes are sociopaths or assholes, his metaphors are streached so thin that they stand for everything and by extension nothing, he pulls out so many Deus Ex Machinas that the Greek gods would tell him to cool it, and his stories just drag on, and on, and on.

At this point I'm pretty much convinced his thing with Crim and Fuchsia was a bolt from Olympus for him. A once in a lifetime bit of brilliance that he can never replicate again.

Oh for Christ's sake, why don't you just have Squig flagellate himself with a cat-of-nine-tails Tats? How long are you going to drag this out?

Sunday's color page is going to be a real pisser.

Hmm ... The Nameless Abused Sad Teenage Prostituted Orphan Girl (NASTPOG for short) wants Squig to somehow apologize to all women in porn, apparently because if it hadn't been for him they'd all be virgins or something. But turn it around: NASTPOG saw her "sister" prostitutes being turned into alcoholics and drug addicts for the Patriarchy and the Pimpocracy to better control them. She saw them, she knew what was going on, while Squid didn't know.

Did NASTPOG try to help her "sisters"? She did not.

Edited by Hexapodia on Oct 6th 2018 at 12:17:52 PM

Ok, I understand you are not comfortable about that part of your past, but at this point you are acting like an ass for the sake of self-righteousness. Give Him A Freaking Break!!

...by now, the only thing that stops me from putting Sinfest into my "Disappointing webcomics" folder and be done with it is, well, here. Not many crappy webcomics have a fun forum ripping them a new one...

...okay, Sinfest had TWO, but Tats took out the first one.