Lovely People aka 'the bunny comic'

[Miragia]

I keep thinking this thread has died down, and then I take another look at it the next morning (my time) and there's another two pages. I suspect this has to do with time zones.

Let me say, first of all, that if we'd heard this from Minna I think a lot of us would be feeling a lot better about this mess. Or at least a lot better about Minna.

But let me then say: your friend, like you, apparently grew up with Christianity, and retains at least some of what I'd call the back-of-the-head assumptions of Christianity: among them that the Bible, and the Christian testaments in particular, are a source of, as you say [in a later post], wisdom and comfort.

But to a lot of other people -- it's just another book. (As far as the Christian testaments are concerned, this includes Jews; even devout Jews.)

And to yet other people, that Bible is a cudgel they've been repeatedly hit over the head with. And to make it worse, the people who were doing the cudgelling may well have defended themselves against criticism of the damage they were doing by citing the very verse that you seemed to think would comfort those who were beaten with it.

Does that help to see the problem?

Please do keep trying.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts too. Yes, it does help. I understand that I made a mistake, and I'm sorry. That was a little rude to my friend, though. I know you mean well, but please take care not to repeat my mistake by making assumptions about people you know nothing about?

Honestly, this is the perfect start. I won't offer an answer, as my upset and offense was about the polarizing attitude Minna displayed and how her toxic message disturbed my reading patterns. But asking people what you can do for them shows compassion and a willingness to try something new. We all want people to 'just know' what's right (especially if we've spent a lot of time with someone, as you have with your friend who asks for Bible quotes), but we may still choose the wrong comfort. My boyfriend and I have been friends for over a decade, and sometimes he just plops down next to me on the couch and asks, "What can I do to help you feel less bad right now?"
So thanks for the question. I think people who were truly hurt may come back to it and give you an answer.

Um, okay. Thank you for the advice and for being patient with me. Glad to hear that you have a thoughtful boyfriend. ^^

[Pessi]

I don't think I've seen anyone mention this before but I find it really funny that in the Jesus segment, every bunny is brown, except Jesus who is white... I'm afraid we might have gotten our diversity representation in the worst way possible  :'D *

In hindsight I think this segment illuminates very well what kind of Christ Minna actually has found. Gone is the humble carpenter, living and teaching among his peers. Minna's Christ is immaculately pure, shiny and well groomed, totally different from his followers by his immensely more noble looks, and extremely arrogant, condensending and judgemental by his carriage, facial expressions and whole mien.

[thorny]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts too. Yes, it does help. I understand that I made a mistake, and I'm sorry. That was a little rude to my friend, though. I know you mean well, but please take care not to repeat my mistake by making assumptions about people you know nothing about?

OK. On re-reading I see that I said your friend shared your assumptions, when what I meant to say was that your friend apparently still assumes this is true about the bible for themselves; I didn't mean to assume that they think the same way as you appeared to be thinking otherwise, and that they thought that it would be so for others.

[Sc0ut]

In hindsight I think this segment illuminates very well what kind of Christ Minna actually has found. Gone is the humble carpenter, living and teaching among his peers. Minna's Christ is immaculately pure, shiny and well groomed, totally different from his followers by his immensely more noble looks, and extremely arrogant, condensending and judgemental by his carriage, facial expressions and whole mien.

Well yeah. God is perfect and pure, people are sinful and icky, she said it herself. It's gonna be fun when she gets to the part about Jesus being both God and human in her theological studies Seems like nobody has spoiled that part for her yet.

[tzelly]

Well yeah. God is perfect and pure, people are sinful and icky, she said it herself. It's gonna be fun when she gets to the part about Jesus being both God and human in her theological studies Seems like nobody has spoiled that part for her yet.

I wander how long, if ever, it will take for her to realize how little she seems to understand about the theology she is preaching.

There is an analogy to knowledge I heard years ago that I think about regularly. Knowledge is like a circle, the area on the inside the circle is what you know and the diameter of the circle is what you dont know. At first it seems what you dont know is very little, a small diameter, so you think "oh wow, look at all I know! I must know close to everything!" So you learn more about what you dont know, increasing the area of the circle. Keep this up and slowly watch the diameter also increase, realizing over time you can never know everything. Only that you become more aware how little you truly know.

[Tarnagh]

I wander how long, if ever, it will take for her to realize how little she seems to understand about the theology she is preaching.

There is an analogy to knowledge I heard years ago that I think about regularly. Knowledge is like a circle, the area on the inside the circle is what you know and the diameter of the circle is what you dont know. At first it seems what you dont know is very little, a small diameter, so you think "oh wow, look at all I know! I must know close to everything!" So you learn more about what you dont know, increasing the area of the circle. Keep this up and slowly watch the diameter also increase, realizing over time you can never know everything. Only that you become more aware how little you truly know.

"The more I learn the more I learn there is to learn." - Me, but probably paraphrasing someone else that I've forgotten.

Or as one of my uncles used to say, "The less someone knows, the more they're gonna be sure they know everything."

And goodness yes there's so much to learn for any serious student of theology. The more I learned about religions in general (not via higher education, just personal curiosity and reading stuff), the less sense any of it made and I didn't even get that deeply into the weeds of it.

[fyrekitty7]

Wow, I haven't even scratched the surface of this thread, but it's apparent that the reaction of many of the posters is precisely why Minna wrote this story. You're all clamoring over how this story is offensive and is a problem that needs to be dealt with, isn't that the point of this sort of story, a commentary on how this society deems everything as offensive and attempts to bury it. This story is so much less provocative and controversial than, say 1984 or Animal Farm. Of course I'm sure you'd all like to see those books burned for being too bad and mean, or paranoid or whatever. Why do people these days feel the need for force others to only express ideas that conform with the warm fluffy facade of niceness that is being wrapped around everything, and that anyone and anything that doesn't go along with the status quo is a threat and offensive? Meanwhile it's okay to be completely vicious against anyone who isn't "nice" enough for "society", to the point of sending death threats or other acts of violence, and acting as if it's totally justified and even virtuous. You all are scoffing at this story, but I think it paints a pretty clear picture of the petty shallow society we live in and a direction it could go in, albeit through a cartoony lens.

Why isn't an artist allowed to express herself honestly anymore? Why is it such a problem to write anything even slightly controversial or challenging to the status quo? And if you do then be prepared for everyone to turn on you and twist and misconstrue all your words and actions against you. This mentality is going to be the downfall of us all, if people can't handle cartoon bunny 1984-lite without getting riled up and denouncing the author because you can't handle anything outside your group's way of thinking. Talk about intolerant...

[fyrekitty7]

I also think it's interesting how it's okay to mock Minna because she's Christian now, isn't that the very definition of intolerance? What if she were part of pretty much any other religion, saying anything remotely as mean or intolerant could probably be labeled as "hate speech".

[Yuuago]

Fyrekitty, you clearly did not read any of this thread if that is what you think people are saying here. I suggest reading the whole thing (yes, all of it.)

[Sc0ut]

This story is so much less provocative and controversial than, say 1984 or Animal Farm. Of course I'm sure you'd all like to see those books burned for being too bad and mean, or paranoid or whatever.

 :'D:'D:'D Ok so are you 14, are you a troll or are you Minna?

Seriously now, we've been having over 20 pages of pretty nuanced and civil discussion of what various people do and don't like about the comic. Feel free to read it before casting stones, if you're so interested in why people are upset. But for starters I'm ready to bet you real money that nobody in this thread wants Orwell's books burned, that's hilarious. And absolutely nobody is pro threats and violence towards artists, that's not funny and just honestly rude of you to assume before reading any of our comments.

[tzelly]

I also think it's interesting how it's okay to mock Minna because she's Christian now, isn't that the very definition of intolerance? What if she were part of pretty much any other religion, saying anything remotely as mean or intolerant could probably be labeled as "hate speech".

You misunderstood the point of this conversation.

It is not to mock Minna for her new found belief, it is to help one another to express the hurt we felt from her disregard for how such a heavy handed religious message could be taken.

You may not be aware of it, but alot of people have been hurt in the name of religion, especially in (but not limited to) christianity. We are here for the fact that we were fans of Minna's work. And she kept the nature of the bunny comic a secret and alot of people were blindsided by it.

There is alot of well worded analysis and evaluation of what happend in this thread. I recommend taking some time to read it a bit more before making assumptions about other people's motives.

[Mélusine]

But for starters I'm ready to bet you real money that nobody in this thread wants Orwell's books burned, that's hilarious. And absolutely nobody is pro threats and violence towards artists, that's not funny and just honestly rude of you to assume before reading any of our comments.

I came late in this thread and won't re-do everything, everyone explained, everyone has valuable reasons for her/his/their/... opinion, but I totally agree with what you wrote here Sc0ut.

[Jellyfish]

WARNING: This post contains political opinions. If you don't want to be exposed to that, feel free to move along. I won't be hurt.

Spoiler: show

I'll begin by saying that Christian fundamentalism isn't something I've had many personal experiences with. I didn't have a religious upbringing like some of you and have thankfully spent my life shielded from the worst excesses of the Christian faith. The closest I ever really got was the boy scouts. As much as I would love to talk about the fantastic character design or art style and the good commentary in the first two acts, I cannot do that with a clean conscience.
While I agree that a hypercapitalist totalitarian world government would be one of the worst fates that could befall humankind, and the idea of a social credit system goes against all of my values, I cannot agree with Minna's conclusions. It's good to look at modern culture critically, it's good to be nervous about the ramifications of new technologies, but rejecting technology and modern culture outright is a recipe for disaster. In the comic Alizongle is bad for stating that there is only one way a good person should be thinking. However, there's no material difference between that and holding up a bible while shouting "My way is the only way to salvation. You are all sinners, and nothing you do will change that. Unless, of course, you follow the instructions in my book to the letter. If you don't, you hate God and you hate me."
A religious government can be just as cruel, self-serving, and totalitarian as Alizongle and the World Council are, if not worse. The United States, my home country, is a veritable machine for pumping out bizarre fundamentalist sects. Look at the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Mormons, the Amish, the Westboro Baptist Church. Look at the dominionists, and the groups fusing fundamentalism with white nationalism. Look at what happened in Waco. And of course, there's practically the entire history of medieval and renaissance Europe.
None of this is touched on in Lovely People, because Minna seems to think that conservative Christians are the victims in our modern day society.
I don't know how to end this. I've gotten myself all worked up and now I don't have a conclusion.

[fyrekitty7]

:'D:'D:'D Ok so are you 14, are you a troll or are you Minna?

Seriously now, we've been having over 20 pages of pretty nuanced and civil discussion of what various people do and don't like about the comic. Feel free to read it before casting stones, if you're so interested in why people are upset. But for starters I'm ready to bet you real money that nobody in this thread wants Orwell's books burned, that's hilarious. And absolutely nobody is pro threats and violence towards artists, that's not funny and just honestly rude of you to assume before reading any of our comments.

I'm not saying people are threatening her. I'm saying we live in a world where that's an okay thing for people to do. And of course I read the comments, that's why I posted this. I simply didn't read all of them, just a random sampling of pages to find an average tone. Or am I expected to read an entire 20+ page thread back to back before commenting on a general atmosphere that's pretty immediately obvious? I'll admit my response was more on the severe side, but I'm tired of how quickly people turn on one another and throw people under the bus for not conforming. It's also interesting how I'm overreacting, but the backlash isn't overreacting at all, even a tiny bit, over a cutesy bunny story?

To me it almost seems like a lot of the people commenting didn't even read the story, and are just using it as an excuse to talk about how bad and intolerant they think Christianity is. I'm aware of the flaws of Christianity, but it's a big, big religion with a lot of very different groups within containing different sets of values, it's not a black and white matter of "Christian means Conservative cult mentality overly zealous weirdo". I didn't see intolerant messages in her story, it was pretty much just the classic dystopia formula but with a Christian theme mixed in. The main christian element in it was just people reading the bible, and not being able to, how is that offensive or indicative of super zealous conservative Christian behavior? Were the christian bunnies suppressing anyone, or in any way doing anything deemed offensive other than reading a book? I just find it really Ironic that a story about people being rejected from society just for reading the bible, is offending people because it has Christian themes and causing them to be "disappointed" in Minna. Well, I guess her score is gonna go down a big chunk from this story.

[catbirds]

Um, okay, aside from that recent commentor... I'd just like to say that I'm glad that this thread exists. I found the comic in the twilight zone between when it was first released and when people actually started discussing its many, many shortcomings and I got really confused because almost everyone in the instagram replies had positive feedback about it, saying that it says a lot about our society or whatever.

Anyway, any dissenting responses to her comic are going to be ignored now, just as a heads-up. Minna's stated on her twitch stream today that she has no intention of tagging it or giving a warning or even accurate description of it in the comic summary, and her youtube video said something along the lines of "it's having the effect that I was hoping it would have," so whoever it was who brought up the possibility that this reaction was what she was hoping would happen... I guess you've won the world's worst lottery?