Lovely People aka 'the bunny comic'

[dreki]

Imagine the repercussions if Christianity set out from the beginnings of the church to take a very strict stance on poisoners - and included poisoning of the air, earth, etc as well as substances that cause disease into it (starting from when the harm was first discovered), not just personally poisoning one person. We might have a different world.

I wouldn't bet on it.  Jesus is REALLY clear on the whole "don't hoard wealth, support the poor, judge not" and yet look at the world we're in.

Christianity is what I'm most familiar with so I won't say no one else does it, but too many christians are *really* adept at either twisting the bible beyond all recognition to justify their desires, or just flat out ignoring it.

[Jitter]

Flat out ignoring it, while loudly praising themselves for being very pious

[Róisín]

Sadly, Christianity and Churchianity are not the same thing. Not a Christian myself, but consider the latter to be more of a ‘power over’ thing than anything to do with religion. Then, I’m a Pagan. Consider the origin of that word - same root (no pun intended) as peasant. We belong to the land, and our obligation is to the service of the Earth our mother. Care for other life, including people, springs from that.

[Yastreb]

In one of the late George McDonald Fraser's Flashman novels, the eponymous anti-hero made a perceptive comment about "people who confuse religion with belief in God." I really think old Flashy was on to something there.

[Róisín]

I reckon, Yastreb. Dunno if you remember my stepmother, old Irene, who was the kind of Christian I can respect. She actually did the stuff that the Christ required his folk to do, and loved and served other people. So I was willing to listen to her proselytise and read her bible so I understood her better. She never succeeded in converting any of my mostly Pagan family, but her efforts were honest and her heart was in it. I can honour that.

[Turnstylus]

The English literary critic G.K. Chesterton had a real talent for quippy quotes, and he had this to say about Christianity:
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

I feel silly saying it this way, but: if a thing is difficult to do, there will be those people who are not going to succeed at it! And so no one here in the forum is surprised when a person aspires to an ideal with their speech, then fails with their actions. Some things are really hard to accomplish.

But I think what Chesterton is pointing out is that there are people who recognize the "difficult thing" right away, and they're honest enough with themselves to say "That ideal is not for me, why set myself up to fail?"

But when a person pretends to have achieved some state of rightness without actually being "good" (whatever that may mean for you), that is when we get angry, because it looks dishonest. That person is claiming the ideal without doing it, right? Those people are out there, to be sure. In our case, I don't know Minna well enough to call her one of those.

Does anybody here remember the movie The Matrix? A character named Morpheus says to the protagonist, a guy named Neo, the following: "There's a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path."

It's a great quote, but I bring it up to show a different idea than what was in the movie. Morpheus was teaching Neo that you can fulfill your destiny without even believing what that destiny is, or daring to hope for it. I hope so! But I quote it here because Christians must have the opposite situation: they know their ideal, but it's a struggle to follow it.

So when I meet a Christian who has a high tolerance for mistakes, I figure they have a clearer view of the whole picture. Because whatever you believe, none of us are going to make it for long unless we can be gracious to each other.

[Lenny]

Again, disclaimer, I'm writing this from the lens of "grew up as child of Christian minister and academic, who got traumatised by church as a whole". I haven't gotten to the "able to find genuine human interaction and care in religion" part of recovery yet, and might not ever. Even the kindest care always came with strings attached.

I dunno. Someone claiming to have achieved a state of enlightenment while not being honest with themselves is just someone I can avoid, that's alright. Other people are free to avoid their own faults if it's too much for them. It's when they hit everyone else over the head with sticks or start going "If someone else hasn't achieved this in the exact same way I have, they are not valid" where it starts getting very... icky. Hypocritical. Lovely People, for one, reads as someone's frustration with Twitter, as told by someone who mainly gets human interaction via Twitter, with cookie cutter Christian moral persecution story pasted over the top, that, well, does the hitting with sticks. And it all feels horribly fake because it's obviously frustration with Twitter Discourse and justification of personal anxieties that uses Christianity to justify the Hitting With The Sticks. And, this is key, it feels normal as a "Christian story" because that's what people use Christianity for, and have done for centuries.

Note that what I'm describing above is completely different from someone who wants to covert others because they genuinely care about them.

More personally, I don't know of a single Christian denomination that doesn't look at some, or all, other denominations and go "Well, they're doing it wrong, they're obviously not going to heaven". The biggest is obviously Catholicism that doesn't allow taking communion with any other denomination barring two Orthodox churches, with a small little nod at the Anglicans of "you can sit in but you're not us". But all the smaller little schisms also have an underlying "we're the ones doing it right (and the others aren't)" in there, if they aren't outright cults.

Sure there's Christians who recognise what Jesus says and try to meet that and actually walk that path, extending genuine grace to others. But there are far more that have grown up in that environment of "we are better than the rest", and naturally or deliberately, use the existing power structure to tell stories to get Christianity to do the Hitting With Sticks for their pet peeve, or current thing that will get them what they want, or what has been instilled in them that they must want or there will be Hitting With Sticks at them. The saddest and most confusing for me are the ones that genuinely want to follow what Jesus says, but get absolutely beat down and mired in church structures and politics, some of it age-old, that they've inadvertently stumbled into or had the misfortune to grow up in.

It just reads as continuation of abuse to me. At least we've (mostly) upgraded from fighting wars for the moment? Bad literature and art, and even the awful politics and abuse, is better than outright bloodbaths.

...not quite sure what I want to say as a point. I suppose it's that individually, yes, genuine Christianity containing love as promised does exist. But structurally that kind of Christianity is snuffed out, and very difficult to keep alive. And it's easy and very normalised to abuse that structure for other purposes.

Imagine the repercussions if Christianity set out from the beginnings of the church to take a very strict stance on poisoners - and included poisoning of the air, earth, etc as well as substances that cause disease into it (starting from when the harm was first discovered), not just personally poisoning one person. We might have a different world.

The Bible is pretty clear from the get-go that humans are the stewards of the earth and need to take care of it. But if it's possible to read things in a "feel free to exploit this!" way, you can be sure it will be. Or just ignored. Or strategically never preached on. This particular topic really gets me frustrated, because it remains one of the big points of political Christianity that makes NO sense if you... actually read the Bible. There are others that are either never mentioned at all, or ambiguously so, but this one was always pretty clear to me. I dunno. It's one of those "here's a structure, let's use it to get what's profitable to us" instances.

[dreki]

I reckon, Yastreb. Dunno if you remember my stepmother, old Irene, who was the kind of Christian I can respect. She actually did the stuff that the Christ required his folk to do, and loved and served other people. So I was willing to listen to her proselytise and read her bible so I understood her better. She never succeeded in converting any of my mostly Pagan family, but her efforts were honest and her heart was in it. I can honour that.

Reminds me of Anne from adv1.  I really like Anne.  She was a great representation of Christianity, imo.  Sincere and genuine in her faith, genuinely prioritized the wellbeing of the people she served, clearly wished Reynir and Onni would convert but ultimately respected their autonomy and was still grateful for their help.

I haven't gotten to the "able to find genuine human interaction and care in religion" part of recovery yet, and might not ever. Even the kindest care always came with strings attached.

I've found it in inter-faith places.  They can't really attach strings as much because they're so heavily based on respecting and embracing differences and encouraging autonomy.

 Pagans tend to be an umbrella group with a broad variety of different belief systems, so they tend to be good company.  Universalist Unitarian aspires to this but the one I've been to was sadly Christian Lite. There's other groups like that but it can be a bit hard to find because they aren't "organized" like churches.

I won't say that single-religion spaces can't have it, but it is harder and the strings will slip in because they're more of an echo chamber.

Circling back to what I loved about SSSS - it was interfaith. There were 3 separate religions and atheism all coexisting with respect.  They were all correct. 

I do think the atheists were correct about Sweden as well - that they don't have mages and they have accomplished without magic. And while the gods can be invoked there, it doesn't mean that Sweden isn't an overall atheistic nation that's accomplished what they have without the gods.

Which in no way invalidates the role the gods play in the other nations, or suggests anyone is wrong.

Lovely People, for one, reads as someone's frustration with Twitter, as told by someone who mainly gets human interaction via Twitter, with cookie cutter Christian moral persecution story pasted over the top, that, well, does the hitting with sticks

Also SO CLEARLY an incredibly tiny subset of Twitter.  There are so many areas of social media that are Christian circle jerks.  There are influencers whose big thing is that they're christian.

It's just more of that "War On Christmas" crap where if you aren't exclusively focusing on Christianity and are welcoming to all - then you are "attacking" Christianity.  Ugh.

[yung_chrysanthemum]

I've come to fear that Minna might eventually take SSSS or aRTD down as not aligning with her newfound beliefs, so I archived them on my computer. Then I realized that the Wayback Machine already has them fully backed up. Well, that was a wasted effort I suppose....

(when kiwisbybeat went down a lot of it was NOT archived so I kind of figured the Wayback Machine wouldn't have correctly captured SSSS and aRTD either)

[thorny]

The owner of a site can apparently prevent the Wayback Machine from including it. At any rate, the snopes message boards appeared to have been so prevented.

[Hedge]

I've come to fear that Minna might eventually take SSSS or aRTD down as not aligning with her newfound beliefs, so I archived them on my computer. Then I realized that the Wayback Machine already has them fully backed up. Well, that was a wasted effort I suppose....

(when kiwisbybeat went down a lot of it was NOT archived so I kind of figured the Wayback Machine wouldn't have correctly captured SSSS and aRTD either)

Waybackmachine is amazing but it's also tortuously slow to load, so personally archiving the comic isn't a bad idea for personal use anyway.

R.e. her hypothetically taking them down, I'm not sure how much of a risk that is but it does tie into something that I've been thinking about as I'm currently rereading (also I never actually finished it after all this went down so I'm going to see how SSSS actually ends now I guess?): Just a general sense of sadness that I suspect we'll never get some answers we could have otherwise.

Like, there were always big questions about this world that she wouldn't answer because the story was still ongoing, but the kind of thing you might be able to ask a creator after the end. Like, did she actually have an explanation for magic happening with the rash? What was the deal with the "gods" of the setting? A couple other things as well that are just...I suspect that with her new faith, particularly the rather hard line it appears to have taken, we'd never get a satisfying answer now, or core concepts may have been privately retconned because those are False Gods etc.

[thorny]

Yes. And she herself may actually remember things differently now; especially if she either hadn't made notes of what she intended to do, or has destroyed them.

And I'm not sure if she ever had a really clear idea of where she was going. I expect she had some sense of it, but may well have been working out most of it as she went along.

[Jitter]

I’m under the same impression, she didn’t have everything worked out. There were a number of things that she later said she may have put in as foreshadowing but either changed her mind or just forgot.

We also tried to ask some Important Questions in the Twitch streams around the end, and she promised to answer but it was clear she wasn’t really interested anymore. There’s some discussion about it around the Forum. A particularly chafing discussion was when I asked about the fire in Emil’s dream and whether his mom died in it. Minna seemed to come up with a somewhat silky scenario on the spot about how she died (not in the fire) so I actually gave up asking in the fear of generating canon or at least canon-adjacent responses that were not thought out at all. During those discussions it seemed she didn’t have notes of many things, and definitely not of all things.

[angsttronaut]

Yeah, I think she may have had vague future plot ideas, and may have planned a few chapters ahead in detail, but I don't think she had a big overarching outline for SSSS. Wouldn't be surprised if there was more planned for Adventure 2 that was left out so she could get to the end faster however, the pacing got weird towards the end and it's shorter than Adventure 1. I don't think I'd want to ask Minna though, lest she give us another answer similar to her one about the death of Emil's mother.

[thorny]

I wouldn't be surprised if the ending for adventure 1, in addition to being shortened, was done considerably differently than it would have otherwise worked out; because Minna was no longer comfortable writing about pagan gods being real and on at least an equal basis to the Christian version.

And I agree that asking her further risks getting answers, if any are given at all, that don't work well with previous canon. Better to leave it alone; at least, unless she switches gears again eventually later, and comes back herself to this work with a perspective that enhances rather than denigrates it. While a later switch wouldn't surprise me, it might not lead to a resurgence of this particular work, as it might be in some different direction altogether.