Not to come across as too negative, but I really didn't like this comic a lot.
Not all allegories have to be subtle but the Christian stuff was really on the nose and it didn't sit with me
I'm still trying to pinpoint what the exact message Minna
wanted to send with that is. I see a
number of possibilities for the time being, and yes,
some of those brush me in a very wrong way ...
the author's note didn't sit well with me, especially this sentence.
As Bunnies already pointed out, that's Minnas
prediction for what it'll be like in a world that has fully gone "we at Alizongle and World Council do not want you to point out flaws in our society,
or its individual members unless
we reviewed and acknowledged them as a Bad Person™".
but I've also seen some Christians says that the bible isn't against self improvement...
A religion that opposes "self improvement" but simultaneously wants people to convert to it because that's "better" for you would be a joke. However, Christians have had a time where their definition of "self improvement" boiled down to "
this world is a lost cause anyway, you need to focus on your
afterlife", which would invalidate all attempts at "self improvement" in a secular sense.
As far as I know, that strict "vale of tears" interpretation is absent from all major versions of Christianism today.
By the way, that interpretation
does have a historic connection to the
"light at the end of the tunnel" symbolism, so I
am wondering what might have given rise to the half-overgrown ventilation shafts at the end of the comic. Certainly Minna doesn't mean to imply that one can
physically walk away from a pervasive control freak society to a Shangri La that the Big Bad cannot possibly follow you to ...
actually it depicts an "if this goes on" dystopia, so it is naturally an exaggeration. But it isn't even much of an exaggeration of China's Social Credit System. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System .
+1 to that. And I'd add that
if left to their own devices, the big data miners of the West would establish a system that's not very far from it, either. They wouldn't claim to be running a proper
society or
nation, just an ever-tighter ship on their
company and its customers, but that's not much of a difference if you look at a de facto monopoly.
What, I wonder, is Minna going to do with all her pagan characters in SSSS?
She already had a Danish Lutheran pastor perform an exorcism that their own efforts pretty much pale against ...
The problem isn't with the depiction of the Social Credit System (though conflating it with having to show proof of not being infected in order to get on a crowded plane is conspiracy theory territory). It's with positing the only possible other choice as the sort of Christianity which claims that Christianity is the only moral possibility.
That's one of the
troubling possibilities I mentioned above. In the comic, The Holy Bible (1.0) seems to have
appeared out of nowhere in people's bookcases (physical and virtual); no indication of ancestors passing it on as a heirloom, preachers (or the Gideons) handing out copies, discussions of how (a-bit-less-than-)true it is to the original divine intent (apart from the one toot where a bunny opposed 2.0 with the argument that the Word of God ought to be immutable), all those opportunities where in the real world, people get told that the official gospel trumps their own attempts at interpretation. The Bible, at least when someone holds it up ready-made to the crowd in RL like Minna does with this comic and the closing remarks, is very much
not a living antithesis to "we at Alizongle
tell you what a good person should be thinking".
