Another long post warning, though due in this case not to long replies but just to their being a lot of them:
In that case, there would be no point in having an actual village at all, just a killbox sufficiently far away that the main part of the society will never get to know about it.
The point would be that for some time dissidents and potential dissidents would be getting messages from their actual friends, saying 'come on in the showers are fine.' This would probably make it easier to get people into the kill box.
Could it be a reference to a Biblical times, where early Christians were actually persecuted?
In a comic depicting a society full of modern tech, where the repression works through their phones?
Faith is a choice, even Christians will tell you this.
Some of them will tell you being gay and/or trans is a choice, too. See below.
But Faith, for those that truly believe in it, is not a choice, is indissociable from their identity.
Entirely true.
But also, in the other direction (as I've said in the thread before, but it's a long thread; I'll quote a bit below): believing is also not a choice for those who don't believe. It isn't possible to just make oneself believe something that to the nonbeliever is obviously not true.
Practice is a choice, yes. The nonbeliever can show up in church and mouth the words; the believer can not show up and/or hide or not perform rituals out of fear or embarrassment or even inconvenience. But that's only a change in outward behavior, not in belief.
What I said before:
people can't just decide to believe something. I can't just decide to believe, at least without massive injury to my brain, that there are no cats that are expecting me to feed them and will be seriously upset if I don't, or that it doesn't matter how upset they are. (Fill in young children, if you've got any, instead of cats, and try it.) And I am no more capable of believing that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the one and only God of the Universe than I am of believing that Arthur of Britain is. Or that my brother-in-law is.
In this case Minna's afterwords, together with that last page, gave the story a different meaning, one of religious proselytism.
It's not just the last page and the afterword. I saw the story clearly heading in that direction when the change in version 2 of the Bible that Minna chooses to stress is the bit about Jesus being the only way to salvation.
Minna, from what we have seen, should be smart enough to know better. People don't like to get pushed.
Some humans, however, like to see other people get pushed. That afterword was clearly not intended to appeal to the portion of her audience who are being insulted and/or injured by it. It's intended to appeal to those who want those "others" to be repelled.
Whether that's a conscious decision on Minna's part, or whether it's an unconscious defensive maneuver, or whether it's been fed to her by people trying to isolate her from other opinions, I don't know.
Oof.. I can see you mean well but I think people cut her too much slack for not being American. Race and other minority issues exist everywhere in the world. There are plenty of different ethnicities in Finland, some of them with a long history of being there, others shorter, but they visibly exist (I've visited there and I saw). Besides, the internet is an invaluable teaching tool for all of us regardless of our upbringing, if we choose to use it.
Thanks for the perspective. And very good points.
Anyways, ignorance is bred from not being exposed the oppressed and their struggles.
Unfortunately, not always true. Slaveholders, for instance, must have been very much exposed to those they were oppressing and their struggles. Many of them managed nevertheless to remain ignorant of the humanity of those they were oppressing.
And in almost all cases, when women are oppressed, there are women living intimately with the oppressors.
Minna have a long career in media by now, so I think she knows how things work.
What if she made her afterword intendebly offensive (though it's still just a bit rude for me, but that's just a difference in our standards of offensiveness, I guess) to make people pay attention to her message? To make them talk about it, think about it, start a discussion?
That really doesn't work. What it's made nearly everyone do is divert from any discussion of the credit system to instead discuss the offensiveness, or claims of the lack of it.
If I'd known from the beginning what, "Lovely People," was going to be about, I wouldn't have read it. Not even out of curiosity. But there was no warning, no label about what I was about to read. She'd turned off comments so I couldn't even get a glimpse from other readers.
[ . . . ] I innocently walked into a comic and relived so much past trauma I swear I feel it physically. I heard the countless voices in my past screaming scripture and repentance at me. It's so deeply unsettling that in a space where I felt comfortable and accepted that I would be violated so thoroughly by radical religious doctrine. It has been beaten into me time and time again to the point where stewing too long in it wears down my mental health. Here, once again, I had to face it. With no warning.
And she's been told of this reaction, repeatedly, in the Discus discussion that she states she's been reading. And the comic's still being promoted on later pages, still with no warning, no label, no comments to allow other readers to post a heads-up.
Either she's lying about having read the Discus comments, or this is entirely deliberate.
sacredgrove, you are most definitely not the one who is in the wrong here. Welcome, and may this place continue to provide shelter.
