Lovely People aka 'the bunny comic'

[Róisín]

No, not every religion requires you to actively proselytise. Indeed, most Pagan faiths, including my own Celtic strand of Paganism, forbid one from doing so. This is because we believe that one’s religion is an intensely personal matter between the individual soul and their god or gods, and nobody else’s business.

And forced conversion, a thing that happened to some of my ancestors, as it did to the parents of people I know and in the case of some older people I know, to them, we regard as being right up there with slavery and forced marriage. Look up the Stolen Generations as applied to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Just no.

We are allowed to share. You may notice liturgical poems I have made on the Mini Chapel thread. They are clearly labelled as what they are, and you are free to read or skip them as you please. And I will happily listen to a friend who is a songwriter and has made a number of hymns for her Christian community, because it gives me an insight into her and her folk, and I believe that it is important to learn to understand people whose beliefs are different from your own. But no, not all of us are obliged to convert other people.

Buteo, you make good points. And as for saving the comic I think that if you buy a copy as an ebook from the store it can’t be taken from you once you have paid for it? Star bought me a copy, he said it is considerably cheaper than the paper book and I can read it when I will. Anyone else know other methods? I am not very skilled at internet stuff.

[Tarnagh]

I am sorry for Minna, and hope she can grow past this phase of initial, rather blind enthusiasm, and wind up in a more mature frame of mind.

I think this is a good summation for what's happening here. Every new convert to *any* faith is very much over the top about it. Hopefully that is all this is.

That said, I escaped Christianity in my early 20s and a lot of what she said in her commentary at the end of the comic brought back all the panic fear of those times. This wasn't an "echo" of things I remember being said, some of what she said is very close to verbatim what was shoved down my throat back then. It's frightening. Reading that comic and the commentary at the end has brought back a lot of things I thought were gone. It's been decades. I'm realizing tonight that they're not gone and reading all that ripped a dried blood encrusted bandage off a scabbed over sucking chest wound.

I genuinely hope Minna either returns to a more stable frame of mind or settles down into a more mature perspective on her faith.

I hope she's all right. When people are feeling alone and vulnerable is when religious predators are known to sink their claws into them. I desperately hope that isn't what's happened here.

[Róisín]

Tarnagh, I share your hope that she will be safe and happy and not too damaged by the experience. And yeah, it is when people are sad, vulnerable, afraid or lonely that they are most at risk from religious predators. I have watched it happen to people I knew, and have often seen them destroyed by the experience, losing their friends, families, jobs, homes and money to the cult and then being discarded when they were no longer useful. Sometimes even losing their lives.

And I once knew somebody who was this kind of religious predator. I didn’t like him but we sometimes had to work together (we worked for the same research project at the time) and I always found him creepy. He never tried it on me even though I was at the time a young widow with children, because I was not vulnerable in that way and I knew my own mind. But he did entrap some other people I knew, several of whom came to bad ends. At present he is in prison for putting some of his younger, prettier victims out to prostitution, and for torturing people, but he will eventually be released. While in prison he has started a new pseudoChristian cult over the Internet, mostly based in Africa and of course painting himself as a poor persecuted victim, so he will have a fortune and a whole lot of new supporters when he comes out.

I hope Minna has not been sucked into something like that. I think and hope that she has too much sense, and I believe that she has a supportive family. Good luck to her.

[JoB]

How else is it possible to interpret that? The Council in the comic was requiring people to let their friends starve in the street if the friends' points dropped too low.

And suchlike actions and convictions of the "Alizongle/WC system" is what Minna depicts as, and Christians should (and, I hope, would) call, despisable. Though I have to agree with Dilandu that she hasn't specifically put that label on the very methods ... yet?

At the same time, can anyone here tell me how to go through and save every page of Stand Still Stay Silent, including the comments sections, so that I don't lose this story that I love, and this community that I value above any other that I belong to? I'm terrified that Minna will decide that she is required to make her living some other way, and turn iconoclast on us.

For the comic itself, there are the options of printed books, their electronic versions, or running a "crawler" or "spider" against the website (sorry, can't be more specific without knowing what kind of computing platform you have available ... and maybe not even then).

With the Disqus part being an insert from a different website, and subject to a "click here to load more" mechanism, I doubt that such software will automagically catch and record that, though.

I think this is a good summation for what's happening here. Every new convert to *any* faith is very much over the top about it. Hopefully that is all this is.

Spoiler: show

"Die größten Kritiker der Elche waren früher selber welche." - F.W. Bernstein
("The most vocal critics of the elks used to be some themselves.")

Can't really comment on that, but I am quite certain that even if so, it's a process that will usually take years ...

[Keep Looking]

If I may add to this conversation?

I'm not a Christian anymore, but I've grown up in a very Christian family, and as a preacher's kid I know my fair share of theology. Christianity is a very large and diverse religion with many different interpretations taken of it, but Annuil is right in that in the branch of Christianity I grew up in, and presumably in what Minna has turned to, it is only through faith in Jesus's death and resurrection that you can be saved and brought into God's kingdom - because every person sins and God is perfect, nobody is good enough for God, and thus only through trusting in Jesus's redemptive act of sacrifice (taking our punishment onto himself on the cross) can you be saved. Yes, this condemns everyone from any other religion. Personally, that's something I take issue with, and is one of the big reasons I left the religion - I don't believe it is fair, or just, to condemn people to hell for something in their nature that they cannot change. However, when you are looking at Minna's beliefs and the doctrine of many sects of Christianity, this is an aspect of theology that you cannot ignore. There is also the belief that scripture - the Bible - is inspired by God, and thus every book in the Bible is there because of God's will, not human decision or weird historical shenanigans (again, something I personally cannot bring myself to believe).

With this in mind, the extremely evangelistic outlook that many Christians such as Minna take starts to make sense - if everybody who doesn't put their faith in Jesus is condemned, then logically it follows that you should try and convert as many people as you can. I can understand why Minna wrote what she did in her comic, because it's shockingly similar to much of the other Christian media of questionable quality that I was fed as a child, and in many aspects it's similar to the beliefs of my family and the beliefs I myself once held.

However, even taking all this into account, if you look at the comic from an evangelistic perspective it is still fundamentally flawed. As I said earlier, it doesn't provide any good reasoning as to why Christianity is a religion you should follow - if you don't already at least nominally believe in the Christian God, then why should you care about the message Minna puts across? It's the evangelistic equivalent of whacking a starving man in the face with a sack of potatoes instead of feeding them an actual meal.

In addition, it neglects what I think are some of the most important parts of Christian doctrine - the commitment towards loving others in your society, regardless of their beliefs. Jesus didn't detach himself from the 'evils of our society. He ate with 'sinful' tax collectors and prostitutes, and acted with compassion and empathy towards marginalized people. Sitting slightly ironically beside the doctrine of original sin is the conviction within Christian theology that Jesus's sacrifice on the cross was the ultimate act of love for humanity, and the way which Christians are supposed to share Christ's message isn't by whacking people with badly paraphrased theology, it's by showing Christ's love to the people around them. The Christians I know who have done truly good things in the world have done it in the name of Christ's love. This comic is not showing love to anyone. The idea that in order to follow Christ you must detach yourself completely from the 'evil' modern culture is what leads to cult-like sects that genuinely harm the people within them - I've talked to people whose sects of Christianity treated everything about modern culture as evil, and it really, really messed them up. It certainly doesn't drive people to show love and compassion to those around them.

I also very much agree with Róisín and Azuki - fundamentalist Christianity and its extremely evangelistic attitudes have caused genuine damage to a large number of minority groups on its outside, as well as (within some sects) the people on the inside as well. I believe that people have the right to hold to whatever faith they want, but when your religion dictates that all other faiths lead to damnation, it's very easy to fall into the idea that all other cultures are inherently inferior to yours. There is a long history of Christians forcibly shoving their religion onto people from other cultures, and often forcibly shoving their entire culture along with it. I completely respect people's free choice to convert to another religion, including Christianity, but yeah. Attitudes like the ones Minna seems to be promoting have caused a lot of damage. Additionally, there are several parts in her dialogue that seem critical of modern culture becoming more inclusive of people of different beliefs, which is a yikes from me. Her story displays a pretty large persecution complex - the idea that because society is able to be critical of your religion, and other religions exist in the same space, that means you're being persecuted, which fosters an us/them dichotomy as people who hold that religion see outsiders as the enemy, and also trivializes the experiences of people who actually experience religious persecution.

As for me personally, I have to face with the fact that in less than a year's time, when I graduate high school and turn 18, I'm going to tell my parents that I'm both queer and no longer Christian, essentially damning myself to hell in their eyes (I really, really don't want to join the Christian uni groups. Attending our church makes me feel sick. And the longer I hide things, the harder it's gonna be to build the relationships back). It's gonna devastate them. I'm gonna have one hell of a summer.

[Róisín]

Keep Looking: you are still you, and I hope that parental love will conquer theological correctness. It can happen. While I am obviously no kind of Christian, I have done my best to learn about the faith out of courtesy to my Christian late stepmother and my Anglican husband, and have had quite civilised and informative interactions and discussions with both of them. And what I find alarming is the amount of cherrypicking that has gone on about which books of the bible to include in or exclude from the official text. The Councils of Nicaea have a great deal to answer for in that respect, but there has been a lot of selective editing down the years, not to mention a number of sheer mistranslations. Nowadays it is impossible to know which were genuine mistakes and which were intentional (as in parts of the King James translation), but the general trend seems to have been away from inclusiveness and kindness and heavily toward misogyny, the abuse and subjection of women and the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of men at the top of the tree.

I find it alarming how much of the rhetoric of fundamentalism is drawn from the Old Testament, since the Christ himself said that his intention was to bring a new revelation, and the emphasis of his teaching seems to have been on how humans should treat other humans, and on the love of god rather than the fire and brimstone style of the Old Testament. The Christ did not lack courage or manliness - he must have been pretty tough to be a carpenter in those days, not to mention being able to win the allegiance of a bunch of Galilaean fishermen to his cause and to whip the moneylenders out of the temple. And the leadup to his death and the death itself, while knowing and understanding exactly what was coming, demonstrates a degree of determination and courage that I find praiseworthy. He would be a god worth following, even if he is not my god.

But his life demonstrates that he also did not lack love, human decency, kindness and compassion, and this tends to vanish from the practise of old testament fundamentalism. Which is a pity, because the inhumanity of their faith disgusts and alienates people who might otherwise make good Christians. I don’t think the Christ would recognise what his new revelation of love and mercy has become in the hands of the unjust and unmerciful. It is sad.

[kit_r_writing]

Well, that was a kick in the trauma.

[Superdark33]

Honestly, this black and white thinking of whatever flavor of christianity Minna joined isnt really new to her.


Theres plenty of info in her comics and things she outright stated in the streams that show her entirely selfish and misanthropic worldviews, that center her as the smartest and most capable, cities as horrid hives of deranged and 'crazy' people, discounts the expiriences of anyone who lives a life separate from hers, treats any media as disposable crap unless she already grew up on it...


Its not that much of a change for her.

[Marvin]

I'm curious, how the irony of condemning a "social score" system while advoacting a religious system, with the same basic premise: "Here are the arbitrary values to uphold, or you will be judged!"

As for "Lovely People" itself. It was good. If the afterword had pointed out the irony, instead of not realizing it, it would have been really amazing!

[Dilandu]

I'm curious, how the irony of condemning a "social score" system while advoacting a religious system, with the same basic premise: "Here are the arbitrary values to uphold, or you will be judged!"

Yep, which essentially make the whole message fairly hypocritical. And I agree, that its afterworld which essentially ruined all effect from the comics. Without it, it would be quite good tale. With it... blatant and hypocritical religious propaganda.

[Ragnarok]

I'm going to be blunt here.

Minna's dead.
The body's still breathing, but what's running it is now the parasitic memeplex that categorizes fundamentalist Christianity. That's what happens to 'born again' Christians like this who talk about how everyone is a sinner and how they personally deserve no mercy. It's the same toxic brand of Christianity that infests much of the US.

The entire comic is borne out of that Christianity's need to invent persecution of itself. The entire spiel about how cancel culture is evil, the shrieking about a NWO, it's all borne out of the need to invent a boogeyman.

I give it a week before this forum is flooded with equally obnoxious fundamentalists, because Minna's rung the metaphorical dinner bell.

[thorny]

The problem is, that its essentially what all religions done in past (and some doing even now).

Nope.

There have been and still are plenty of religions that hold that they're the right ones for their people, but that other people have their own beliefs. Some make conversion difficult, even for those who want to do so without having been proselytized to. Some hold ceremonies forbidden to outsiders, and provide no method of conversion other than, perhaps, full adoption into the group, which is not a thing they push members of other groups to do.

I give it a week before this forum is flooded with equally obnoxious fundamentalists, because Minna's rung the metaphorical dinner bell.

This forum is under the control of its own moderators, and can be protected. That may well be what happens to the Discus discussion, though; which is why I'm going to quit reading it. (If instead there's a lively genuine discussion of this mess going on over there, somebody tell me quick so I can go look before Minna deletes it.)

I'm curious, how the irony of condemning a "social score" system while advoacting a religious system, with the same basic premise: "Here are the arbitrary values to uphold, or you will be judged!"

As for "Lovely People" itself. It was good. If the afterword had pointed out the irony, instead of not realizing it, it would have been really amazing!

This. Very much this. Especially that last line!

(I think Lovely People itself was kind of overbearing and simplistic, myself; but an afterword of that sort would have redeemed that also.)

And suchlike actions and convictions of the "Alizongle/WC system" is what Minna depicts as, and Christians should (and, I hope, would) call, despisable.

Yes, I agree with that; and I agree that the Alizongle system as depicted is despisable. What I'm objecting to is claims, by Minna and one poster here, that it's the only possible other choice to Christianity.

I genuinely hope Minna either returns to a more stable frame of mind or settles down into a more mature perspective on her faith.

I hope she's all right. When people are feeling alone and vulnerable is when religious predators are known to sink their claws into them. I desperately hope that isn't what's happened here.

Agreeing with this.

I understand that it's fairly standard Christian theology to say that all humans are worthless sinners who can only be saved by God, and that this can amount to a way of expressing the undeniable truth that we're all tiny in comparison to the universe, and/or can be useful to reduce the expressions of egotism in people inclined too far in the other direction. But I am very bothered by the combination of her saying she had been in extreme distress for some time and her saying that she's utterly worthless and can never be otherwise. It reads to me as if she's been groomed by an abuser.

Buteo, you make good points. And as for saving the comic I think that if you buy a copy as an ebook from the store it can’t be taken from you once you have paid for it? Star bought me a copy, he said it is considerably cheaper than the paper book and I can read it when I will. Anyone else know other methods? I am not very skilled at internet stuff.

It's possible that Buteo wants to save for personal use what's already been read, but not to give more money to Minna; which is what buying either hardcopies or ebooks would do. If she gets a spike in sales from people afraid she'll destroy the books online, I suspect she'd be likely to misinterpret that as support for what she's now doing.

[Kis]

Some of more recent discussions have become quite heated, but overall I think you won't regret checking on it, there are lots of interesting stances and arguments and most people are trying to keep it civil.

[Songbird]

So, hello! New poster here, and relatively new to the comic as well. It's rather selfish of me to join the fan forum now of all times when I had no intention of joining the fandom in first place, not for having anything against fandoms or you guys, who seem genuinely nice—once I caught up I developed the habit of reading comments on new pages because it's so nice to see your enthusiasm and shared love of the story. I guess this is an amount of interaction I just can't handle for the time being. But like you I was thrust into that bunny comic without warning and now I'm struggling to process the entire package, comic and end note, and I hope that at least I add to the discussion.

It's not like I'm entirely surprised. I'm stunned by the religious elements, that I didn't see coming, but I can't say the self-righteous ostracism bent did. I suspected as much already given how some elements were presented in the start of the comic and a comment by the author herself some months ago stating something along the "yet I don't antagonize the majority of you, who don't follow my beliefs" lines, it's just I hoped I was wrong. I don't see the point of rehashing what was expressed in a much more thoughtful manner by you already, suffice to say that this comic didn't sit well with me.

I'm also alarmed by the amount of self-condemnation and hatred expressed in those end notes though. I get a sense of someone who feels lost, who perhaps felt unmoored and vulnerable already before COVID hit the world, who looked at herself and didn't like what she saw. The newfound religion is a safe harbor in the midst of a frightening world. She sounds as someone very hard on herself, and this might also be why she feels so comfortable on being so hard on us as well, telling what's "our problems are" and everything else? If she can bear this pain and shame we surely should be able as well? She has no doubts she's right, after all.

I wonder if she gets the chance not being Minna Sundberg The Author very often. I mean... To make it as an artist you have to make yourself vulnerable. You're expected to use your name to both to retain control over your creation in a medium where it's so easy for someone else to take your hard work and make a buck out of it when you're barely making ends meet, and to build a relationship of trust with your audience. Some people relish in it, in getting known and recognized. The issue is when you don't. People will find you, people will follow you in the truest sense of the word. They'll keep their eyes on you and get very vocal about what you should or not do. Whether you asked for it is of little consequence. You stop being perceived as a person when you become an icon. It's incredibly arrogant of me to make such assumptions about someone who no matter for how long I've been reading I fundamentally do not know, but this is my own experience as an artist in the age of the internet and the only POV I know. You live by the unspoken rule of appearing to always be well and strong and successful all while being terrorized by the constant idea of somehow fumbling it and jeopardizing your livelihood. It could be a change of style, something you say, your very identity. It could be you need a break but you know you can't because a cornerstone of your success is being consistent. It stops being about just doing art and hoping people enjoy it and becomes about needing people to enjoy it because this is what you know to do, this is what you've been doing for years and the alternative is worse. In the midst of all this you also feel an ass—shouldn't you be grateful for your success?! What you're so upset about? You've got a roof, food on your plate, all result of your hard work. You just need to keep doing it! ...but if you fumble it, will enough people stay around? What if you want to change the direction of the story, or you don't but your long planned big twist is badly received? The stake of failure is high and there are countless ways to fail. It's frightening and just thinking of it feels horrible, as if you're using people. The strong link between your name and your work—the very same thing that helps you to be successful—increases the scrutiny and potential ways to lose your means of survival. It leaves very little shade in which to rest and just be a person. It should increase the support received too but when you're someone very private even those friendly eyes are a source of great discomfort, and if you're the kind of person who is already harsh on yourself, well... All you're left is with a long list of everything that's wrong with you, true or not, and the sensation you're being pushed and squeezed from all sides.

So while I intensely disliked that comic the way it was presented, disagreeing with the sentiment and the conclusions she came to, I emphasize with the feeling of being under bone-crushing pressure. I'm concerned. I hope she has somewhere to turn where she doesn't have to carry the responsibility of being the author and artist and the stakes attached to it, people who genuinely care for her, a place disinvested from what she can do for them and their cause. I hope she can find it in her to forgive herself for her less perfect edges, and that she can find ways to grow and enjoy her newfound religion that don't involve using it as a sacred unquestionable shield from everything that hurts her.

[Ragnarok]

It's not like I'm entirely surprised. I'm stunned by the religious elements, that I didn't see coming, but I can't say the self-righteous ostracism bent did. I suspected as much already given how some elements were presented in the start of the comic and a comment by the author herself some months ago stating something along the "yet I don't antagonize the majority of you, who don't follow my beliefs" lines, it's just I hoped I was wrong. I don't see the point of rehashing what was expressed in a much more thoughtful manner by you already, suffice to say that this comic didn't sit well with me.

I'm also alarmed by the amount of self-condemnation and hatred expressed in those end notes though. I get a sense of someone who feels lost, who perhaps felt unmoored and vulnerable already before COVID hit the world, who looked at herself and didn't like what she saw. The newfound religion is a safe harbor in the midst of a frightening world. She sounds as someone very hard on herself, and this might also be why she feels so comfortable on being so hard on us as well, telling what's "our problems are" and everything else? If she can bear this pain and shame we surely should be able as well? She has no doubts she's right, after all.

I'm more than a little worried that Minna's been recruited into a cult of sorts. The whole self-hatred thing is a big one for the nuttier sects.