Regardless of how good your point is, how gently phrased, or how close you feel to a person having reading their comments or consumed their work for years, having hundreds of people telling you that you did poorly is going to drain you. This goes for Minna, but also for Minnions who enjoyed LP, but now have 40+ pages of comments telling them that if they like this content, they are bad people. All of these individual posts perfectly civil, and making valid points about people's experiences and the context of the comic, but they can add up to a pretty negative message overall.
My post was intended mostly to highlight how a cumulative message can read very differently to a single message and to be mindful that this might be why others are getting more upset than you might consider appropriate for the content here.
Let me make a caricature of this argument (yes, caricatures are
by definition exaggerated) to show you why I'm not readily accepting its inherent logic as valid:
Hmmm, I (creator) should try out this Interwebz thing.
Ooooh, a
hundred times as many people patting me on the back! I'm famous now!
Umh, wait, there's a hundred times as many people pecking on me now, too.
Bad people! Leave my corner of the Interwebz!
Yes, I'm aware that communicating in the Internet is
not always just a ceteris paribus hundredfold of your RL social circle, that there
are amplification effects and that the percentage of "bad eggs" is not
necessarily exactly the same on both sides, but that doesn't make it reasonable to expect something along the lines of "multiplied yay but not more nay (in absolute numbers) than before". (Not to forget that
if something like that were to happen, the addressee would quite likely go "you're
so in the minority with that negative opinion" next.)
You want to tell people that they're worse persons online than in RL? Go ahead, but they'll put
more burden of proof on you than "just look
how many you are [here in the Place Of Many]" is going to fulfill.
To be clear: in my case, I've been commenting here specifically because, as far as she said, Minna is not reading the forum. I'm sure that having this space to vent is keeping a lot of the criticism off disqus (and by extension, Minna's face).
I guess I'm middle ground there, then. I've
always accepted that even if Minna says she doesn't (usually) read the forum, and verifiably doesn't openly have an account here, doesn't mean she'll
never have a single look at what is
publicly readable. (For all I know, Finnish culture could totally have a Leave Your Comfort Zone Day.) Not to mention her family. Or just
anyone supporting and informing her. In real time,
or after the fact. Minna will
likely never learn what I write here, and I can reasonably claim that by putting it here, I'm
not shoving things into her face, but no guarantees.
I rather doubt the conversation would have gone anywhere useful.
I've tried several times to draft a reaction to his post here; but that also tends to go nowhere useful.
After having pinpointed (on Disqus, through several rounds of clarification) that page 72
does make part of what he calls "the comic" that he believes to "stand on its own" as Minna claimed, the
logical thing for me to do would be to re-raise the question of who the
in-comic speaker uttering the text on that page supposedly is.
But, frankly, if he's been seeing that wall of text all the time
and took it as part of "the comic",
and were willing to let me challenge the claim of "it's all a self-contained story independent of Minna's soapbox", shouldn't he have gotten that reference
without the painstaking discussion of "does your browser really show something other than mine?"
LOL yes, it's an excellent drawing! The bunny comic, distilled to its simplest theme (minus christianity).
If a
tad oversimplified. (Both "I cannot make myself a better person quite as fast as I can throw" and "we established that Alizongle is BAD nonetheless" would be valid reasons to get rid of that phone. It's the going "my, I'm
such a good person now!" immediately afterwards that seals the lack of self-reflection.)
Honestly, even if he did understand - and maybe he does - what could he say to his daughter to get *her* to understand?
Well, he
would be in a position to point out to her the times in their common past when she was No True
Scot Christian herself and did
not get the "off to hell with you, then, nothing I can do about that" treatment. Or maybe that
is what she got, in which case I'd guess that she probably did
not like it. But as you say, that's up to him and other family members to work out.
