Sinfest: A critical takedown

[Kaldrak]

I would first like to point out that I really don't want to be doing this.

It requires a lot of effort on my part, and the creator of the comic I'm reviewing has already been shit all over by so many other people that it feels rather redundant...nevertheless, I feel there are some things that need to be said.

First up, if you aren't familiar with Sinfest, then I'll explain it rather simply. It was once a simple gag-a-day webcomic that poked fun at its central characters, some political and religious issues and figures, and didn't seem to take itself too seriously. It was fairly amusing and occasionally profound, and over the years the artwork got better and better, culminating in the artsy style the comic has today, which is just about all the good that remains within the comic itself.

Everything else is gone.

For a while you could see the central characters develop and grow. You could see them change as their storylines merged and they were altered by their circumstances, forming relationships with one another and trying to deal with their strange world that reflected ours in many ways.

And then it all stopped.

No further real character development was allowed. A lot of the main characters were sidelined for new ones. Relationships between characters were sanitized, the characters themselves were infantilized, and just about every SINGLE THING that didn't fit Tatsuya Ishida's new personal politics was thrown overboard with a speed that is honestly breathtaking, considering how slow the storytelling in the comic usually goes anyway.

As of this date I'm totally caught up, but now...now I'm done reading it. I am absolutely fucking done. I'm hurt by this. I'm angry. I'm sad, and I feel pretty mixed up about a lot of things involving this comic. I used to love Sinfest and I stuck with it for way, way longer than most other fans of the series...but I can't follow where the author has gone.

I just can't.

So, what happened? How did a silly comic grow, develop, and change over the years into something pretty damn good, and then tangle itself into a flaming ball of twisted wreckage, lost/discarded storylines, characters warped so much they no longer even remotely resemble who they were originally, and relentlessly hammering a political message that's so extreme, only a splinter group of a splinter group would ever support it?

Well, as far as I can tell, Tatsuya radicalized himself.

Are you familiar with what radical feminism is?

From the Wikipedia page:

"Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical reordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts."
This is the start, but not where he eventually ended up, oh no. 

You might think I'll go on to criticize him as a feminist, myself, but I'm not going to go there just yet. You see, there's something fundamentally far worse going on here that I need to address first.

As a storyteller, as a writer, and as a wordsmith, there is one cardinal sin you must not commit, if you want your work to be even halfway decent.

Do you know what it is?

The work itself must come first. Your story is more important than you. Being true to your story is more important than your own personal politics. The characters you create absolutely must be separate entities from you. They cannot simply parrot your own beliefs, unless they are so similar to you that you've utterly failed in the character creation process.

If you don't do this, If you allow your own politics and biases to so infest your work that you have to change the characters and the story to be more 'acceptable' to you, then somewhere along the way, you've failed. And if you are so utterly convinced that you are right about absolutely everything, and incapable of taking any sort of criticism from anyone who reads your work, then not only have you failed as a storyteller, you'll never be able to fix the problem, because you'll be unable to admit that there even is one.

I have no problem with political art and stories.

I read an online magazine called The Nib, and every single comic in there is political, and has a political message. But if I'm writing a story about fictional people that I made up out of whole cloth, they sure as shit aren't going to agree with me on my politics. It's my job not to punish them for this, but to let them fully realize themselves through the course of the story. They change, as we all do, or they can stubbornly cling to their convictions, but I have no prerogative to punish them for wrongthink. I would prefer my work to reflect reality, and have any consequences of the characters actions flow naturally from the story itself.

I am a hands off god, if you will.

The first thing I feel I need to do in order to create believably complex characters, is remove me from the equation. Getting into the mindset of someone else who is fundamentally different from you is hard, and most writers honestly aren't very good at doing this.

Tatsuya is fundamentally unable to accomplish this at all.

No one in Sinfest is their own person anymore. They are all sock puppets parroting Tatsuya's politics to what remains of his audience, or they are vilified and scorned, empty caricatures of their former selves, dangling limply from the strings of their creator while he smugly sits back and strokes his own ego.

And us? His fanbase?

He portrays us as mindless zombies, drooling and shambling along, making unreasonable demands of him, the benevolent and all knowing creator of the comic.

I'm not exaggerating here. Tatsuya himself exists as a character within Sinfest, and there is a comic strip where the zombies surround his house and smash his window, demanding that he does what they say.

You see, we're just not able to appreciate the genius of his work. The rest of us are all under the control of the Patriarchy. Tatsuya's political crusade is against men, (except him, of course) anyone who isn't him who considers themselves 'woke,' (other than his female characters) pornography and prostitution, and most recently...

Most recently....

*sigh*

Are you familiar with the term TERF?

From Wikipedia:

"TERF is an acronym for "trans-exclusionary radical feminist". Coined in 2008, the term is applied to a transphobic minority of feminists who exclude trans women from women's spaces or do not consider trans women to be women."

Congratulations Tatsuya, you radicalized yourself beyond even the annoying SJW's. The TERF view of feminism is such a tiny splinter group that they are viewed, rightly so, as a bigoted hate group by the majority of the rest of us feminists, even the other radfems.

I stuck with Sinfest for so long.

I was willing to overlook the bastardization of most of the characters, because I enjoyed the art and style of his storylines. I was even willing to overlook the glacially slow pacing issues, wherein months are spent on saying goodbye to the previous year and ushering in the next one. True to form, Tatsuya started depicting the new years as female, btw. Usually his Death character violently kills off the previous year, but now he just walks off with them into the next world. Cause he had to sanitize his own work, see?

I can see now all the comics where he was responding directly to his critics by mocking them and making stupid looking straw man caricatures of them for his sock puppet parrots to knock over.

He has absolute contempt for most of his audience, even having a character proclaim that they would "rather die a thousand deaths than serve them."

I probably don't have to explain why having contempt for your fans and audience is a bad thing, but I think I will anyway, cause Tatsuya obviously doesn't get it.

It's not that you need them. It's not that I or anybody else are demanding anything from you, or rather, not exactly that.

I'll put it in plain English so you can understand.

You aren't good enough at this to have that sort of contempt for your audience.

George Carlin, for instance, was a fantastic comedian. He routinely excoriated different groups in his audience, but they kept coming back. Why? Because he was just that good.

You're not.

I would be very surprised if your actual fanbase is over a hundred people now, not including anyone who hate-reads it. Of course, I don't know for sure, due to not having access to your website's traffic, but all I can say is, enjoy the tail end of your long slide into obscurity.

You really suck, dude.

And I hate the fact that you took something that I once loved and turned it into this self involved naval gazing pity party, that's constantly calling the rest of us assholes since we don't agree with you.

It's your work, so you can do whatever the hell you want with it, but just don't expect the rest of us to bother looking at it anymore. You're the one who ruined it, so you can just fuck right off.

Like I said before, I'm done.

Just...done.

[Anastasia]

I'm going to step lightly around some of the political aspects here. I prefer to keep my politics off of SR as a matter of personal preference to how SR's meant to be (friendly, and so often politics aren't any more).

So, what happened? How did a silly comic grow, develop, and change over the years into something pretty damn good, and then tangle itself into a flaming ball of twisted wreckage, lost/discarded storylines, characters warped so much they no longer even remotely resemble who they were originally, and relentlessly hammering a political message that's so extreme, only a splinter group of a splinter group would ever support it?

Well, as far as I can tell, Tatsuya radicalized himself.

Uh oh. Oh no. No matter which direction this goes in, it's not good.

As a storyteller, as a writer, and as a wordsmith, there is one cardinal sin you must not commit, if you want your work to be even halfway decent.

Do you know what it is?

The work itself must come first. Your story is more important than you. Being true to your story is more important than your own personal politics. The characters you create absolutely must be separate entities from you. They cannot simply parrot your own beliefs, unless they are so similar to you that you've utterly failed in the character creation process.

If you don't do this, If you allow your own politics and biases to so infest your work that you have to change the characters and the story to be more 'acceptable' to you, then somewhere along the way, you've failed. And if you are so utterly convinced that you are right about absolutely everything, and incapable of taking any sort of criticism from anyone who reads your work, then not only have you failed as a storyteller, you'll never be able to fix the problem, because you'll be unable to admit that there even is one.

It sounds like he wrote what he knows, but leans much too heavily in it and lost all perspective.

But yeah, agreed completely with what you're saying here. No one wants to read polemics in place of entertainment.

You see, we're just not able to appreciate the genius of his work. The rest of us are all under the control of the Patriarchy. Tatsuya's political crusade is against men, (except him, of course) anyone who isn't him who considers themselves 'woke,' (other than his female characters) pornography and prostitution, and most recently...

Most recently....

*sigh*

Are you familiar with the term TERF?

Aaaaawwwww shit. As a matter of fact I am.

Like I said before, I'm done.

Just...done.

I feel for you, I really do. I've seen media go downhill for bunches of reasons, and no matter what it is, it's so frustrating to see something you care about fall apart. Doubly so when it's a case of the author being unable to keep his axes to grind out of the story.

I see this particular slant to it in alternate history a lot, as more recent alternate history stories (the time period the alternate history deals with recent, not was it written recently recent) tend to be political by their nature. Some authors can keep it balanced and stick to the story, but others can't help but betray themselves, usually by writing about what they wish happened in politics. It always rips the core out of the story (unless you strongly agree with the author's politics and don't mind that).

There's not much to do but move on and cherish the good and try and forget the bad that followed the good.

[Dracos]

Left years ago.  Was the better call.  When the devil can't be the devil is ...a really odd place to be telling a story.

[Merc]

I stopped reading ages ago as well, and had seen some hints of what you said came eventually, but not to the point where I realized it would become as big a deal as your post makes out. It had mostly just faded out of my radar somewhere I can't really pinpoint honestly. Definitely unfortunate that you stuck it out so long and just saw it get worse.