Dammit, I wanted to make that joke

You know how you can tell in the morning that Kanye is going to do and/or say something stupid?

The day ends in y.

I mean, if you want pizza that’s even shittier than chain deliveries, sure, you can do that.

Let’s be real. A home oven and premade dough might be cheaper, but it ain’t good pizza.

You can get a pizza stone (or steel), or do a cast iron pizza and end up fine, that’s for sure. But if you’re using that premade dough, even Caesar’s is going to be as good. That’s not mentioning that the sauces available in jars aren’t all created equal at all, or that it’s a dice roll if the cheese is okay or not.

Even dominos and pizza hut are better than a cheap home made pie. You want a good home made pizza, you’re spending roughly the same, but now you have to learn how to hey it right. The learning curve isn’t horrible or anything, but it’s there.

Most people that want a pizza want something decent, or they’d just throw in a digiorno’s or whatever. Mind you, calling most chain pizza decent is a stretch of the term, but that’s another issue entirely since a solid pizzeria isn’t exactly a guarantee outside of cities

Normalization is a process by which the populace besides deadened to a subject. Or, that’s the usage of the word I’m using, so if you’re using something else, you gotta let me know.

This particular comic does the opposite of that. Some comics might contribute to normalization, but this one makes the matter more confrontational and less able to be pushed aside.

This is done by starting off with the usual “joke” of the young person enjoying the sexual activity, thus it must be okay that it happened. But, and this is the key to the to whole way this comic in specific and c&h in general work, the child is obviously, visibly injured.

The father, expresses shock at the broken arm, which can be taken as the father minimising the non physical harm, or that the physical takes precedence. Since physical injury should be addressed first, I don’t see a problem with the latter at all. The first seems unlikely based on the history of the comic, but I wouldn’t argue about it.

Then, and again, this is the key to it all, the injury is from inappropriate praise for being abused sexually. The child figure having a broken arm acknowledges that the child had some degree of outwardly positive reaction, i.e. high fiving, but was blind to the harm involved by way of taking that celebration so far that an external harm occurred.

If a real child were to celebrate having sexual interaction with their teacher, they would be inadvertently causing extra harm to themselves, and the reinforcement of the idea of being “lucky” to have a teacher make out with a student would deepen that harm.

So, the broken arm becomes symbolic of how destructive that idea is. The idea that because a child has a penis, or is otherwise viewed as male, they must enjoy sexual attention of any adult (though the social norm is for that to be assumed with a female abuser) because they got laid, is now subverted and shown to be as broken as the arm in the comic.

Now, you don’t have to agree with that interpretation. But, cyanide and happiness has a long history of subverting broken social norms in this exact way. They use dark, ugly humor to both shine a light on the horrors of humanity, but give us a way to release that ugliness and the trauma of it through laughter. So I would argue that it is very unlikely that would have made this comic as yet another form of diminishing the effects of abuse, or normalization of abuse. It just doesn’t match their overall ethos.

Plus, look at the final panel, at the dad. Look at his face. You kinda have to be familiar with the c&h style to pick up on it, but that facial expression isn’t making light of anything. When they use smiles and glee via facial expression, it’s hyper exaggerated. Usually when smiling or laughing would be inappropriate were it the real world.

But here, they’ve chosen to not use exaggerated happiness in that final panel. That suggests that they treated this subject matter differently than they might normally. A final panel in their normal over the top way would be the dad high fiving the other arm. The panel as out is drawn is unusual in that regard, it stands out. To me, and I’ve enjoyed their comics for a good decade or so iirc, this specific comic is exceptionally well crafted to not make light of the subject matter, or make a bad attempt at making fun of the usual “lucky kid” jokes and failing.

But listen. The use of humor around unpleasant subject matters is always a tricky thing. It is absolutely okay to make jokes about the horrors of life, and there’s really no limits to what subjects are and aren’t addressable with humor. But it’s difficult because it’s easy to fuck it up. It’s also difficult because even when you don’t fuck it up, some folks aren’t in a place where they can joke about it.

I don’t think they fucked this one up. I’d say they perfectly nailed walking up to the line on this subject, putting their toes against it, and said, “nope, that’s far enough.”

Like I said, you might not agree that they succeed in walking that line. That’s perfectly acceptable. And it’s perfectly acceptable that you have an issue with that subject being addressed with humor.

No buts. You aren’t doing anything wrong.

I would, however, request that you remember that you asked for an explanation of how making comics like this aren’t inherently normalization. I stayed with this comic as the example because look at the wall of text it takes to parse just this comic. Trying to give you an explanation for all comics/jokes would take days to work up, and be way longer than the character limit. So, if you disagree, keep all that in mind if/when you respond. If you didn’t want an actual explanation, and were just wanting to vent on the subject, it wasn’t evident enough in your comment. I’m giving you what you asked for, the the best of my ability.

Why are we talking about my mom?

A cherry version of my first car, a 76 cutlass supreme.

Barring that, a 57 bel air. It’s essentially the most beautiful car ever designed for my tastes.

Broken.

That’s an interesting term for this.

What you’re describing is a lack of empathy, to a degree that night be called narcissistic or sociopathic (though we’re talking colloquially here, so don’t be wasting time with formal usages of those terms).

But, yeah, that would mean you diverge a good bit from what’s considered normative. That’s one usage of broken. If that was caused by an external event or events, even more so.

The best definition of love I’ve come across is the feeling that another entity’s happiness and well being is central to your own happiness and well being.

But that still doesn’t really get the job done.

Love, when it’s washing thorough me, is a sense of rightness that the entity I love is in my life. A sense of completion and connection that goes beyond the practical. It’s also the feeling of recognizing that without that entity in my life, my life will be wrong.

And I say entity because love isn’t limited to humans. There’s still holes inside me shaped like dogs and cats and rats that are no longer alive. There’s even a hamster shaped hole there too.

You get enough of those holes, and there’s not enough left to be. You’re left a shredded and drifting thing, waiting for whatever final damage rends you into dust.

That’s part of what love feels like, that feeling when it’s gone.

Take that as you will.

Pfft, freehand on oil stones, or gtfo.

I was thinking about posting this one, but fell asleep.

great fucking song

Not pulling out when I was banging your mom

Kinda strange musky is taking such risks, going from one building to another. Stay in the open enough, people can track your moves and predict the next one.

Nope. Male puberty doesn’t cause changes that aren’t mitigated by transition.

Any changes to bone structure that don’t change are the ones that are present in any athlete in a given sport.

I’m not digging through studies for you, because I haven’t gotten a single paycheck from anyone ever for doing so online. That information is out there, and it’s your responsibility to do your due diligence on the matter.

If you don’t know that you’re wrong or right already, by having looked for the information needed to make a credible opinion, maybe hang back a bit, or at least ask better questions.

Dude.

Dude.

Just don’t, okay.

You don’t have the training or background to interpret the data on the subject, and have obviously not done due diligence on the matter. You are talking out of your ass based on not understanding what is going on.

Part of that is shitty writing on other people’s part; a lot of articles out there are written by people that don’t actually understand what they’re writing about, so when people read them, it gets even worse.

But there’s a bloody reason why nobody with a degree relevant to the matter of advantages or disadvantages of medical transition comes down as it being an inherent and universal advantage. It just isn’t.

I’m saying this because there’s a good chance you don’t intend to parrot bad information, that you think you’ve done enough reading on the subject to have a good grasp of it. But you haven’t. Stop trying to be some kind of free speech martyr and go back to the books. Go back and do more than just read pop science level articles.

Also, the “of equivalent size and height” part doesn’t mean what you think it means.

When two people of the same mass and height are equivalent, that means there isn’t an advantage in one of them being trans. A cis woman that’s taller and more muscled than their competitors has the same advantage as the trans woman. That’s what it means, that size matters, but transition doesn’t. There’s no contradiction in that.

Now, if you want to argue about how long after beginning hormone treatments a trans person needs to wait before competing in their sport of choice as their confirmed gender, that’s cool. But, since you don’t just change clothes and start competing as it is, you’ll find it’s a pointless argument.

The process of transition is longer and more complicated than you seem to think. People aren’t just jumping up, declaring that they’re trans and trying to compete with cis women the next day. It doesn’t work like that at all. By the time a trans woman or girl is competing against cis women, they have been undergoing hormonal treatment.

The problem with that is the author’s unawareness of risk aware kink.

If someone is doing breath play, or applying blood restriction during their play, they know damn good and well it’s never fully safe.

The problem comes in with noobs and idiots thinking that you can bypass serious effort at learning how to minimize risk with reading some random internet article on a bot written blog.

There are absolutely ways to make the risk so minimum that it has to be some kind of unknown factor driving the risk upwards and not being accounted for to cause injury or death. But those things do happen. It’s a real and unavoidable possibility.

There’s also difference between strangulation and proper breath play, but that’s another example of a writer not doing due diligence in terminology

We’re talking at cross purposes here.

You’re presenting absolutes, I’m saying it isn’t absolute. There’s no room for anything with that. I’ve said my bit, you’ve said yours. Thank you for your time.

Sure.

Yes. But a transphobe is different from a transphobic idea.

The post wasn’t about someone saying something transphobic, it was about someone being a transphobe. Those are not inherently the same, which was the entire point of my comment.

Me, motherfuckers!

Sasquatch for pres!

I’ll bring some country stank up in the Oval Office, put my giant, hairy feet up on Washington’s desk, and hit anyone that’s an asshole with my cane.

That’s my campaign platform: whacking politicians with a stick

I hereby challenge muskrat to duck hunt

I’ll put on my doggie fur suit.

We’ll affix some feathers to him, with something like, I dunno, hot tar maybe.

Then we can see what an uber leet gamer he really is as he flies across a screen and gets shot at.

You know, I actually believe this one.

Totally gay though.