Blog post: Kin's story is kind of true

[Jochi]

Thing is, Goblins is a blend of different elements: Adventure, fantasy, silliness, RPG humor, situation comedy, action, drama, a dash of romance, and what TvTropes used to refer to as "Crowning Moments of Awesome".

As such, it's impossible to deal with this dark and serious subject in a fully realistic manner without ruining (contrasting in a failed way) the feel of a comic like this.

I respectfully disagree. IMO, several CMoAs have come from this subject, starting with the spectacle of Dellyn being hurled through that window. It's the first time I ever LIKED Minmax. I knew he was going to die for it, and so did he. But he finally became a Hero.

The only speech which should be retracted or apologized for is threatening speech. Saying "I will hurt you" is wrong, just about anything else isn't.

I hear you, but there is also nothing wrong with retracting something you find is false. I don't mean being persuaded to a different opinion or viewpoint; I mean finding out you were misinformed and something you said is manifestly untrue. This warrants a retraction, apology optional depending on circumstances. Failing to do so doesn't 'give them power over' your thoughts or speech; it makes you a dink.

Kore murders an innocent child.

Okay I stand corrected. Kore doubtlessly views this as execution rather than as murder, but it would pretty much qualify to anyone but him. He did sort of explain the act to the child beforehand and give him a moment to prepare himself, so you probably would call it second or third degree murder rather than first (I forget what exactly the legal meanings are for those distinctions), but murder nonetheless.

Case in point. (I forgot about this one, too, and I WAS thinking about the other deaths in that hideout/tavern -- all of whom COULD be considered 'combatants'.)
But, the child's death was premeditated, deliberate, not in the heat of passion or in self defense and in a situation created by Kore. I'm pretty sure it qualifies as first-degree murder in most places, even if it was sufficiently quick and 'merciful' enough for modern courts to sentence him to Life and not Death. Probably MORE merciful than leaving him to starve to death, but that's a different issue.

If something being superior doesn't mean that something else is inferior, then you are not communicating anything by making the contrast.

I think it's funny you two started out all but agreeing and are diverging as you discuss this.
There is a difference between feeling superior and feeling 'better than' someone else, and this may be part of the issue between you.
If I stand up in a bar and shout "The United States is the greatest nation in the world!" I would EXPECT the Bolivian a few stools down to stand up and shout "Bolivia is the greatest nation in the world!" and I would cheer him on. If he instead says, "Yeah, Bolivia sucks," my response would be "Dude, you should move."

[willpell]

No, it's first-degree murder.
The differences in the different types of murder have to do with how deliberate/planned they are. There is nothing in Kore's mental state or the circumstances to knock it down from cold-blooded, fully deliberate, premeditated murder - it's murder in the first degree.

So the degree of cruelty or viciousness displayed in the killing doesn't enter into it?

[Jochi]

No, it's first-degree murder.
The differences in the different types of murder have to do with how deliberate/planned they are. There is nothing in Kore's mental state or the circumstances to knock it down from cold-blooded, fully deliberate, premeditated murder - it's murder in the first degree.

So the degree of cruelty or viciousness displayed in the killing doesn't enter into it?

It enters into the severity of the sentence, not (or at least less so) the specifics of the charge.

[seawied]

I think Thunt's blogpost really exposes the absurdity and counter-productiveness of the vast majority of "feminist" bloggers. They openly attacked Thunt's comic with no consideration of him as an artist or a person. I have no complaints about the one response he posted the entire length of, but to the person who "hate-read" Goblins comic, I have to ask:

Do you think these internet "feminist" would have attacked Thunt so viciously if he were a woman?

So many tumblr feminist these days investing an absurd amount of time antagonizing people and groups and races rather than doing anything to actually fix any of their perceived problems. No, its much more fun to be hateful and spiteful of the world rather than spend time and energy actually trying to improve it or bring people together.


On the letter that Thunt posted from the rape victim. I agree with Thunt that its a good letter, and the issues he or she brings up are worth discussing. However, on her criticism of Kin/Minmax's relationship she ignores one of the most key factors to the human condition: no one experiences tragedy quite the same. I'm sad to say that many of my close friends have been raped (both men and women.) One of them, I even dated. The way they handled moving on (or being unable to move on) from the experience was different in every one of their case. One of them has continued to live her life and has had emotionally stable relationships, and other than her fiery passion on women's rights issues, she is about the same as any other person you would run into on the street. Other friends have remained secretive of their experience and refuse to talk about it, even to their closest friends. One has a constant need to be in a relationship with quickest thing that comes along. Another was so emotionally damaged by her experience that she was completely unable to handle any sort of sexual contact whatsoever, even though the incidents occurred 30 years ago.

Even if you experienced an assault or a situation similar to Kins (or Thunt's mother,) you cannot expect all people or all fiction to mirror your experiences. I think the maze of many did a great job outlining how unlikely the 156 Kin/Minmax relationship was.

[13Swords]

No, it's first-degree murder.
The differences in the different types of murder have to do with how deliberate/planned they are. There is nothing in Kore's mental state or the circumstances to knock it down from cold-blooded, fully deliberate, premeditated murder - it's murder in the first degree.

So the degree of cruelty or viciousness displayed in the killing doesn't enter into it?

It enters into the severity of the sentence, not (or at least less so) the specifics of the charge.

Pardon my memory (I store it in a squishy blob of grey), but I seem to recall murdering being the unlawful killing of another individual. If it isn't unlawful for him to kill the child, then it's not murder.

Of course, if it's not one of his god's laws, and it is one of the town's laws, or vice versa, then it's murder to one, and not the other.

I doubt we have to worry about that, though. If there is no law there, or rather, if no law would punish him for it, technically not murder.

Though you can absolutely call it intentional and unprovoked homicide. Whether or not a society considers it murder is up to them, though.

The word you're groping for is "versimilitude", as in a story that seems to take place in Sugar-Plum Fairlyand, where realistic problems never occur, lacks this quality. It is best defined as "perceived semblance of realism"; it's not the same thing as actual realism, because it is itself a crafted artwork, and so is carefully calculated to seem normal in ways that actual normality is not. Dumb coincidences happen in real life, but they aren't capable of happening in a book, because the writer is choosing everything (unless he uses an absurdly sophisticated randomizer to simulate the breadth of happenstance that's possible in reality). Thusly, a real person might move into an apartment building and find out that three other people with his exact name just happen to have all moved in right before him (in a short enough timeframe that they couldn't have seen each other's identical names on the mailboxes and reconsidered their choice of homes, nor deliberately chosen to move in with their namesakes). That reality isn't contrived, but in a book, it would seem so, and thus it would lack versimilitude, at least unless the author took great pains to acknolwedge how odd it seems, both in and out of "character".

Huh. Never heard that word; thanks for the vocab.

[endikux]

It's called growing up. Being "offended" is a part of life, deal with it.

You could just as easily say that getting mugged, raped or murdered are parts of life, and people should just deal with those. If enough people agreed, they'd dissolve the government (through bloody insurrection if necessary) and institute a functional anarchy. Strangely, though, very few people seem interested in trying this anymore.

No. No you can't.

I don't mean to single you out, I'm not interested in a argument for argument's sake, but I must point out that your response is exactly what I am talking about. It is the heart of the problem.

Offending someone is NOT the same thing as physically assaulting them. Being mugged, raped, or murdered are physical assaults to a person. They are detrimental mentally, physically, and spiritually. You have the right to your life and your physical safety; another person cannot take those from you; this is a general Western norm. You do not have the right not to have your feelings hurt. This is a clear and important distinction.

When you make that leap and place "offense" in the same realm as malicious acts of bodily injury then you are making the case against freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

"Sticks and stones" is not a trite saying that no longer has meaning because we have "moved beyond it." It is a timeless saying that was relevant 200 years ago and will be just as relevant 200,000 years in the future.

When I say the "offended lobby" it is a phrase I choose with specific purpose. There are very many people who desire to equate "offense" with physical assault, the reason they do so is exactly because they want to weaken freedom of speech and thought.

If you were to mug me there would be a very definite result to your action. The police would be involved and you would be charged with assault. You could then have your money or your freedom taken from you because of your actions.

If you tell me that my life is worthless, my mother is trash, and that you hope I die because I'm so ugly; what is my recourse? What *should* be my recourse? Do I get to call the police or some authority and have you fined or imprisoned for hurting my feelings? Perhaps you say yes? Then what if you say that you think Goblins is the worst web comic ever made and *that* hurts my feelings? What if it hurts my feelings so much that I decide to commit suicide. Are you responsible for my actions, even as un-plausibly unbelievable as they might seem?

Where does the line end at which statements are culpable and which are not? Mentioning rape is worthy of apology because someone cries out loud, but what if someone is crying silently because of some other mentioned slight?

Freedom of expression is no casual matter, especially for an artist with an audience.

[willpell]

Offending someone is NOT the same thing as physically assaulting them. Being mugged, raped, or murdered are physical assaults to a person. They are detrimental mentally, physically, and spiritually. You have the right to your life and your physical safety; another person cannot take those from you; this is a general Western norm. You do not have the right not to have your feelings hurt. This is a clear and important distinction.

This can be argued as indicating that Western society places its norms in the wrong place. The body is just what we happen to be; our minds and ideas are what we actually ARE, IMO. While it's true that being physically harmed is damaging to mental well-being, it is also true that it is possible for a strictly mental "attack" to do much deeper and more lasting harm than any but the most severe of physical injuries. If someone sticks a knife in your arm, a couple months later there'll be no more than maybe a scar, possibly not even that much sign that anything ever happened. But a truly stinging and grevious insult could affect the core of your entire personality for years afterward; call someone a coward, and they may become suicidally bold, or they may be spitefully driven to prove that others are just as fearful as them.

"Offending" someone is attacking their mental integrity, and that CAN be a very severe form of harm. Whether it's COMMONLY so is another story of course, and has a lot to do with the way we're socialized. But don't pretend that it's human nature to care about one's own life and limb above all other concerns. Many of what we call "primitive" tribal societies have a deeply spiritualistic worldview, in which the individual cares little for his own life because he knows that he is just a small piece of the world; his life is only borrowed from Nature, and is not his to keep when his time has come. Likewise, warrior cultures place higher importance on a great many factors than upon the avoidance of injury. The so called "Western norm" is a fairly recent innovation, and we should not make the mistake of assuming it's the only valid way to live. (Although it certainly can be argued that it produces far better results, assuming you actually consider the current state of global civilization to be preferable to the old agrarian, tribal ways. There are points to be made both for and against.)

When you make that leap and place "offense" in the same realm as malicious acts of bodily injury then you are making the case against freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

We constantly surrender our freedom of speech, if not of thought, every day we function in society. When you post on this forum, you agree not to post things like hate speech that the community has deemed unacceptible. If you disagree, the admins happily gag you and boot you out. You don't have freedom if it can be taken away by the whim of some enforcer. Furthermore, there is some question in my head as to whether any real degree of freedom is even desireable. Should you be free to stab yourself in the foot? Should you be free to eat unhealthy foods? Should you be free to speak about your own country in ways that may inflame nationalistic hatred in your nation's enemies? There are lot of murky issues that we like to just pretend are obvious. America claims to be all about freedom, but we have a lot of policies in place which trade freedom for security, or for the interests of entrenched power structures (such as the laws which protect corporations from libel).

"Sticks and stones" is not a trite saying that no longer has meaning because we have "moved beyond it." It is a timeless saying that was relevant 200 years ago and will be just as relevant 200,000 years in the future.

I happen to agree with this, but you'll get a lot of flack from certain segments of the population (feminist and GLBT lobbies, for instance) for suggesting that people's feelings are not supremely important. "Sucking it up" was valued highly in the '50s and earlier, and our society has been backlashing hard against that entire concept ever since Vietnam, which seemed to be the ultimate failure of that ideology and the moment that the pendulum began to swing toward our current attitude of hyper-PC tolerance.

Then what if you say that you think Goblins is the worst web comic ever made and *that* hurts my feelings? What if it hurts my feelings so much that I decide to commit suicide. Are you responsible for my actions, even as un-plausibly unbelievable as they might seem?

Consider the case of the girl who was raped by like half the football team at her school, and then committed suicide after the video got out; it was all over the news several months ago (although a somewhat disgraceful amount of the talk focused on how the lives of these promising young athletes were ruined by the charges that had been filed against them). There was no real physical harm inflicted on her; she got drunk and passed out, and the boys had a little fun with her zonked-out body, which she might never even have known about if they hadn't distributed video of the whole thing happening. Solely because of mental trauma and social stigma, she took her life, and the boys were held legally responsible. Should they have been?

Where does the line end at which statements are culpable and which are not? Mentioning rape is worthy of apology because someone cries out loud, but what if someone is crying silently because of some other mentioned slight?

Between silence and being compelled to speak up...seems like a pretty logical place for a line.

[Aurora Moon]

I think Thunt's blogpost really exposes the absurdity and counter-productiveness of the vast majority of "feminist" bloggers. They openly attacked Thunt's comic with no consideration of him as an artist or a person. I have no complaints about the one response he posted the entire length of, but to the person who "hate-read" Goblins comic, I have to ask:

Do you think these internet "feminist" would have attacked Thunt so viciously if he were a woman?

Yes, they can and have... it happened to me. and almost for the exact same reasons that they used when attacking Thunt about Kin.
I wrote my own sexual assault experiences as being the background story for one of my own characters in a scifi novella story. The character was basically like a mirror image of myself... a completely stoic woman who always remained calm in the worse of situations, yet had a very bad habit of trying to handle things by herself instead of seeking help when she really needed it. She had feelings, but often tried to hide them from the public and even from the people closest to her. I didn't turn her into a tough "Mary sue" self-insert, I gave her plenty of flaws and made it clear that her way of coping with things weren't exactly healthy.

Yet, despite the fact that I pretty much copy and pasted my own background story for this character and put a great deal of effort into ensuring that she was a realistic human who wouldn't turn into a Mary sue....
they attacked me saying this character was utterly unrealistic. Not because of the stoicism thing, but because of how calm she stayed throughout the "attempted rape" ordeal and waited for an opening to attack the sex offender just like I did in real life. They clearly didn't read much of the story, because they wouldn't had said that if they saw how the character dealt with it afterwards. They would had discovered that deep inside she had been frightened just like any other woman, but put up a calm facade out of self-preservation. And that she continued to be somewhat stunned by the events afterwards.

The problem with human beings in general, is that the large majority of us often likes to categorize people and other things into groups for easy identification, etc. and as an result even the best of us falls into this trap... the idea that all of us have to react a certain way in many situations or else it won't be "realistic". or worse, that any artists/writers who dared to portray women who were sexually assaulted as being women first instead of being a perpetual victim after the event itself, were somehow trivializing rape.

so even though I'm a feminist myself and those bloggers say they are feminists too.... we can still disagree on a lot of topics and the like. Feminism isn't a monolith entity, there's like dozens of branches shooting off from the oringal "tree" which was planted by Susan B. Antony and other women like her. So you could say feminism is like a tree, with us ladies (AND MEN) being very particular about WHICH branch we choose to roost on. And in a way this is a huge problem for us. This writer summed it up best: http://www.policymic.com/articles/59657 ... ism/808799

[xpace]

Thing is, Goblins is a blend of different elements: Adventure, fantasy, silliness, RPG humor, situation comedy, action, drama, a dash of romance, and what TvTropes used to refer to as "Crowning Moments of Awesome".

As such, it's impossible to deal with this dark and serious subject in a fully realistic manner without ruining (contrasting in a failed way) the feel of a comic like this.

I respectfully disagree. IMO, several CMoAs have come from this subject, starting with the spectacle of Dellyn being hurled through that window. It's the first time I ever LIKED Minmax. I knew he was going to die for it, and so did he. But he finally became a Hero.

I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that the subject of abuse and rape in Kin's background did not at all detract from the feel or flow of this comic? If that is the case, then I must have failed in my wording to convey what I was trying to say. What I wrote was not in opposition. I do not disagree with you. Indeed, I thought the way this subject was presented added a good deal to the story, as you pointed out.

My point revolves around this:

To really do a story about abuse justice would probably have to sound a lot like that blog. And, being the gut-wrenching naked truth that it is, that's not entertaining.

Myself: I do not think it makes light of the subject. It treats it respectfully, without going into too much detail. It focuses on how Kin deals with the psychological trauma. THunt did some of this by way of contrast, through showing how different versions of Kin dealt with it.

What I tried to convey is that, while I do not agree with the detractors, I can see why some might claim it "makes light" of the subject. Any sort of work of fiction would have to be a lot more serious to stop such arguments cold. Most likely, it would have be all drama and devoid humor (or very nearly). But such an approach would ruin the entertainment value of this type of webcomic. After all, this is not a slice-of-life drama.

As I said, it's a delicate balance between gut-wrenching realism and webcomic entertainment. And Goblins balanced it well without sacrificing the feel of the comic.

Yes, Kin's recovery rate does seem rather fast. A bit superhuman, even. But this is understandable, given the nature of this medium and the target audience. And, as others pointed out: Kin was processing and coping with her torture long before the day she escaped. And some victims will have a much longer path to recovery than others.

[xpace]

Another observation about THunt's blog:

I was a bit surprised by the suggestion of Kin having quote, "sexually responsive thoughts" toward MinMax. I do not see that, myself, and I doubt that is what's on Kin's mind. (Not yet, anyway.) And from Kin's description of her people's mating practice, it seems unlikely that will ever happen.

MinMax is Kin's hero, her savior, someone she could begin to re-learn trust with. And while - in the heat of the moment - she has given in to an occasional hug and even been tempted to kiss, that's... not necessarily the same thing as sexual thoughts. (Sometimes there are distinctions between romance and a sexually intimate relationship. A relationship can be one without the other.)

Though, I will say that Kin is clearly in some form denial about her feelings.

[RocketScientist]

I think Thunt's blogpost really exposes the absurdity and counter-productiveness of the vast majority of "feminist" bloggers.

You know what we're not going to do? We're not going to attack feminists, the "PC Police" or anyone else. So don't do it.

[mod="RocketScientist"]If you want to discuss anti-feminism, please take it to the Controversy forum.[/mod]

[korovan]

Dear Thunt,

"Amor Vincent Omnia"

I see you understand, and thank you.

[mortissimus]

I read something the other day that I think belongs here. It was an interview with a researcher who had summed up what is known about rape victims reactions and recovery.

In the short run, victims react in all kinds of ways. It is beneficial to the victim if there are people she (or he) can talk to that will listen (it is not so important what the listener says, mainly that they listen to what the victim wants to say (if anything)). In the long run, professional therapy and such has been shown to decrease the risk of mental trauma. And the rest is individual.

[RedwoodElf]

Dear Thunt,

"Amor Vincent Omnia"

I see you understand, and thank you.

I think you meant "Omnia vincit amor" - Vincent is a name..."Amor Vincent Omnia" means "Everybody Loves Vincent" - which sounds like a roman Sitcom.