Not about this latest Sinfest, but because I just watched this week's episode: I wonder what Tats would think about the FX show Pose. It's mostly about the hard lives of prostitutes, strippers, transwomen, and gay men, in NYC in the late 80s/early 90s. It seems like on the one hand it's all about the hardships that Tats is crusading against, but on the other hand full of the kind of people he's loved to shit on lately. I feel like it would make his head explode.
Edited by Pfhorrest on Jul 10th 2019 at 9:51:30 AM
Hermelin Graduate wrote:
Criminy becomes a Johnbie and starts voraciously reading erotic books.
It gets rid of Criminy! The reason we never get stories about Criminy and Fuschia anymore is because they're cishet scum. Stories about them means that Tats would be forced to acknowledge that some men aren't stupid, rotting perverts and can have a relationship with a woman without abusing or exploiting her.
Succinctly and accurately stated!
... and later:
Because I want more Fuschia and Tats is more likely to tell stories about her if she's a lesbian who can mope about how her (male) ex used to be so sweet, before he became porn-sick.
Redmess wrote:
You do realize that turning a male character into an evil sleezebag just so his girlfriend can justify becoming a lesbian and swearing off men is just the kind of sexist bullshit people like Tats would pull, right?
You mean, just the sort of thing that Tats has already done with both Slick and Uncle Sam?
Edited by Hexapodia on Jul 10th 2019 at 10:22:57 AM
The parents are Evil Men/Zombies and Brainwashed Hookers now.
With a bit more seriousness, it is another jab at normalizing prostitution, implying a slippery slope that if its legalized then it will pervade and pervert everything and everybody will be a hooker or a pimp. He is of course unaware that the entire point of legalizing it is to remove pimps, perhaps willfully so in order to demonize it ever more.
Edited by Adannor on Jul 10th 2019 at 9:09:02 PM
I'm not wanting Tat to do that because I would agree with him. I want Tat to do that so he makes himself more of a lolcow and alienates his audience further.
I would rather he return to his pre2011 self. Either I'm laughing with him or at him. That's where we are at the moment.
6x Super surprised by how much I enjoyed the song. Also, I could tell those characters apart and I am assuming they all have names, so that's already a double advantage over Sinfest.
Sinfest: the fever dream of reused plot devices and stories that never ends. (The kid's name is Theo)
You know who I miss? Percy and Pooch.
Edited by Gibson35 on Jul 11th 2019 at 12:51:47 PM
I just came to talk about how horrible Sinfest is.Didn't we already do this with Miko's friend "What's-His-Name" and the whole Super Captain Thunder Pimp storyline? I feel like we already did this.
On what planet would any parent allow their kid to play with a mind control pimp hat drone with actual weapons on it? Is this a disturbing look into Tats's childhood or something? Did he always want to be a pimp, but then decided he wanted to be an artist? What is going on here?
Tats is taking the "stuff that never happened" content of Sinfest to new levels. First we have prostitutes having to service the living dead and now Sad Prostitute Girl is sad because a child can play with the both metaphorical and literal tools of her oppression.
How much further is he going to take this nonsense?
I'm of the same mind as far as Tatis concerned. And it's probably just your classic Sinfest is more 2011 and mine is 2006. Nothing wrong with that.
...but I also don't think Tat meant it to be funny.
Edited by Gibson35 on Jul 11th 2019 at 3:36:37 AM
I just came to talk about how horrible Sinfest is.Do you mean like (comedy/drama) dramedy? Kind of like how those Tyler Perry movies play out? I guess I can kind of see that. It's not my kind of humor. I'm a little more about wackiness, maybe some slapstick, sarcasm, etc. In that light I could see how it could be funny for some.
Btw: I wrote it out like that because dramedy is a very specific type of genre over here. I don't know if that word is on your side of the pond.
I just came to talk about how horrible Sinfest is.Aaand now we have a kid playing with a pimp done with weapons on it.
a) Where are that little shit's parents?
b) Why does it have real weapons on it?
If the first thing he does with a new toy is start blasting craters in the street with no supervision, indoctrination into a sexist culture that he's probably too young to have any awareness of is the least of the problems involved here.
It's hilarious to me that this world posits an idea where pimps are like, the Coolest Thing to be. I sort of wonder if it's self backlash against his old work. Because most people I know have never desired to be a pimp or ever thought it was cool.
Or if they did it was uh, mired in a certain racial fetishization.
Read my stories!
He's sort of written himself into a corner. In the real world, around the mid-to-late 90's up to the mid-late 00's, "pimp" was more popular as a slang term than it is now. You can see it in the early comic where Slick calls himself/aspires to be a pimp, because "pimp" meant "a ladies' man who attracts many women through force of personality", not a literal prostitute manager.
Tats fancies himself a revolutionary but he won't just do another comic, he's determined to run this one into the ground.. which means the pre-radfem setting is forced to support stories that it really wasn't built for.
Everything is condensed in the Sinfest world, it always was. We don't get Christian fundamentalists, we get Seymour. We don't get a gay community, we get Francis. We don't get the criminal underworld of human trafficking, we get Pierced Eyebrow Victim #1 (who really needs a name; I've been calling her Chloe, after that other Chloe). Thing is, now that Tats has expanded the setting from "vague city-like place, with points of interest relative to individual characters to support jokes and story arcs" to "implicitly-major city with its own established locations, politics, and denizens" so that he can proselytize about the wider scope of social problems, encapsulating a concept and making it function as a person doesn't just shoot itself in the foot, it fires a bucket of grapeshot at everything from the knees down.
She's a trafficking victim, who represents all trafficking victims! She's just a wreck about how she did degrading porn because her boyfriend begged her with puppy dog eyes that one time, and when she was kept prisoner in an entirely normal apartment with no supervision, and how desperate she was to support the children she doesn't have or the drugs she's not addicted to, and how she was so desperate to escape the nightmare her life had become that she stopped at a booth on the street to ask about another job. If only she'd asked for a job application when she picked up her take-out dinner!
Edited by HermelinGraduate on Jul 11th 2019 at 6:43:20 AM
New thought:
A crossover comic! Sinfest x Jack
Can you imagine the radfem approach to that shit? Because when you get right down to it they hold a lot of the same views. Women are just inherently perfect unless they're "sluts", ie complicit in the patriarchy, expressed as all women appearing as either emotionally-open heroes or helpless, doe-eyed victims, sexual violence and exploitation are abhorrent and among the worst sins that can be committed, and although Sinfest's never covered it (that I recall, at least) I imagine if prompted, Tats would have a lot to say about abortion.
It's just that one of these favors a perverse male perspective and the other favors a radical feminist one. I really wanna see that clash.
https://www.sinfest.net/view.php?date=2019-07-12
Five (relatively) sane comics in a row? With a couple of metaphors not being overloaded like a donkey asked to carry a cruise liner?
Normal people ignoring the plight of our latest Lifetime Movie of the Week heroine (and actually appearing in Sinfest at all) ?
Hmmm....
This strip is passable. It's not good, it's not bad, and it's a bit cliched, but it makes a fair point without being insane in it's execution; and does so reasonably well
Edit: -
P.S. Yup, Tats tries to write his recent characters as universal metaphors. It doesn't work. The problem is (always) too much metaphor crammed into one idea and a person treated as a plot device instead of an individual. Eight Deadly Words haunts Tat's newer characters like the Grim Reaper with a grudge
Edited by NeedsAirCon on Jul 11th 2019 at 2:55:43 PM
Skynet Is Inevitable. Skynet IS...Undergoing Repairs Atm.Please re-insert plug and rebootI understand that Tatsuya probably only did surface reading into disassociation or maybe this comic doesn't have anything to do with his previous dissociation comics. The disassociation was actually portrayed (for the most part) correctly for the first few: an out-of-body type of experience is something you can experience with disassociation save a few things. You aren't smiling and giddy as he portrayed her in the comic. That just doesn't happen. You tend to be unresponsive and irritable when your attention is demanded because it brings you back to an experience you are trying to escape from. Those who are disassociating tend to have a 1,000 yard stare. Also, what you imagine isn't about getting help. It's about being as far away from the situation as possible. Her sitting outside of the room where the action is taking place on a bench, staring down at her hands would be a consistent usage of disassociation. Daydreaming about looking for help defeats the purpose of the daydream and the purpose behind disassociation: you are literally trying to be ANY where else and removed from the negative stimulus. Looking for help during disassociation is not congruent with disassociation. It WOULD be consistent if the daydream went on to imagine herself being saved and her imagining what she would do if that happened.
Granted, Tatsuya did portray a comic where they took drugs (he made them look like femininity pills but could be a lighter depiction of something much darker), but even if drugs were involved that would only excuse the smiling and that would not lead to disassociation. Your prefrontal cortex would just override your inhibition and you wouldn't care.
Granted, this is Sinfest and the author is Tats, so he will focus on what he wants and just ignore the rest of reality. But I just wanted to put this out there.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dissociative-disorders/symptoms-causes/syc-20355215
The theme here seems to be she wants out of prostitution and feels like she's invisible to normal people when she tries to ask for help
Pretty sure it's not dissociation at this precise point and this precise strip, but with Tats, who knows anymore?
Skynet Is Inevitable. Skynet IS...Undergoing Repairs Atm.Please re-insert plug and reboot

Oh no indeed.
What new depths will Tats sink now?
New page, here's a video featuring WAY better characters than what Tats has concocted.
Seriously, I'd rather read about Shalltear's exploits than watch more of Sad Hooker Lady 1. Even when she's free, she can't stop being a Sad Hooker Lady.
Edited by Metalix on Jul 10th 2019 at 9:12:02 AM