In all of this, I keep thinking about Minna. It's hard to avoid speculating about her experience right now (as Maple mentioned while I was writing this), what she means by the things she says and does (or doesn't do, as Minna seems to be taking a very hands-off approach at the moment). Particularly because, as JoB mentioned just a bit ago, we do know some things about Minna's personal life from her comic page posts, art streams, and YouTube vlogs. I'm going to try not to draw any conclusions about what she's thinking and feeling, because as other people have pointed out, the bottom line is that we really just don't know her -- this is partly because she's a private person (as is her right to be), and partly because you can never really know the life of somebody you have a professional or creator-fan relationship with. But I do wonder.
When I read the afterword to Lovely People, it felt to me less like an organized argument and more like a stream of consciousness piece, as if Minna were talking to herself instead of to us. For me, that's often what the writing experience is like: I'm just talking to myself on a screen, and the words that ultimately make it out to my audience don't have the context that they did when they were swimming around in my head. If I'm very careful, if I review and revise, I might get it right, but if I were to release a stream-of-consciousness piece, I know it wouldn't be complete because I hadn't taken the time to reflect on my own arguments. I don't mean to suggest that this is actually what's going on in Lovely People, but it feels that way to me -- both the comic and the afterword feel unstructured, derailed in the middle as Minna and her characters seek out a moral foundation to help them cope with/escape from a world that has become increasingly materialistic. It brings up an interesting question for me, one that I don't think we can answer because, again, we don't know Minna: did her conversion occur in response to these dystopian trends she saw arising in the world, and that's why the story goes the way it goes? Or did she start writing the story first with a different vision for the conclusion, become convinced of her own sinfulness, and then tug the story sideways? That stream-of-consciousness feeling I get from the whole thing suggests a lack of beginning-to-end planning, which means that this comic might be an interesting artifact preserving the process of Minna's conversion to Christianity. . . .
I was raised without religion and never had a Bible thumped at me until I was an adult -- part of why I'm so grateful for everything that's been said in this thread this past week-ish. Lots of really valuable perspectives. One thing that has struck me over the past two or three years, having gained loved ones who are deeply connected to their Christian faith, is how powerful a motivator it can be to do good and to have compassion for yourself and for others (depending, you know, on what branch of Christianity you subscribe to). I'll admit I've been a little envious of that sometimes, particularly during a very low point in my life a few years ago. "Gosh, you know, it would be so convenient if I believed that somebody knew me completely and loved me unconditionally, even when I don't. It would be nice to have a reason to do good things that outweighs this feeling of futility." In my own way, I've lately and very slowly started to discover a secular version of that faith-based motivator, and one of the most helpful ways to explore it has been by writing conversational scripts between myself and the people I take inspiration from, and drawing out bits of scenes as if I were going to make a graphic novel. So when I read Lovely People, knowing that Minna had recently converted to Christianity and talked on Twitch about spending more time reading the Bible, I saw her doing something sort of similar to what I've been doing for the past few months -- speculating, exploring, sorting ourselves out through works in progress because we are works in progress. I saw Lovely People as an imperfect, incomplete story, a by-product of Minna's spiritual journey which is still actively unfolding. I still see it that way, in addition to now seeing it the way that many other people do.
I'm not saying anything about Minna's choice of words, the flavor of her faith, or how she's handled criticism of both of those things. Those are different conversations that have pretty much already been had here. But I do want to say that, to me, Minna's focus seems entirely taken up by spiritual reflection, a deeply private experience that may be filling her up so fully that she's compelled to express and explore it in her professional art. I understand that feeling of fullness, of needing to create in order to understand and clarify it. I think we all do to some extent. I think we all hope that her journey is a healthy one for her, that it gives her support when she needs it.
This is where it becomes difficult to avoid speculating, because I already know a bit about Minna's lifestyle: she's very private, she appears to prefer avoiding heated conversations, she works very hard and lives alone. I can see myself developing quite a bubble that way. If strong faith suddenly came into my life, I can also see it filling the bubble quite a lot and making it easy to set aside whatever happens outside of the bubble, including people's responses to a very personal graphic short story I felt drawn to create as an exploration of my new, powerful faith. Especially if I know that those responses are going to be heated, as they often are whenever religion is brought up, in any form and with any measure of grace or non-grace. Not making any comments about the quality of the responses -- clearly there are some very valid negative responses coming to the table in this thread -- just that I can see how somebody who doesn't like confrontation would prefer to avoid dealing with them.
Is that true for Minna? Again, I don't know for sure, I really don't. I feel a little guilty opening the floor for speculation in the first place here.
Is it important to be aware of the effect one's words and actions have on their community? Absolutely. My perspective of what I've said and your perspective of what I've said are two sides of the same coin. What is the responsibility one has to the people that are hurt by those words and actions? That's an extremely important question that different people have different answers to, and I think it's a fundamental component of the tension I've seen arise in this thread and in the comments on SSSS page 409. Interestingly, it's also fundamental to Lovely People itself -- "When somebody says something that someone else doesn't like, what should be done, and by whom?" (I'm not the first person to point that out in this thread, but I think it bears repeating.)
Anyway. Sorry to throw another wall of text into this conversation. I've read all 25 pages of it. I understand why people feel the way they feel about Minna's religious statements, the way she's handled controversy now and in the past, and even the way she portrayed the Lovely People society itself (exclusive of religion) -- I understand both sides of each of those points.
I guess the point of this is to say: thanks for being civil, guys, thanks for talking to each other. For people who are being patient with folks you don't see eye-to-eye with, thank you. We should always keep conversation open, even if it's hard -- especially when it's hard -- and strive to see the other person's humanness before we decide what's to be done. At that point the decision about the Right Thing to Do is yours.
