Opening up discussion for
the remainder of chapter 3! I'll increase the amount of pages we go through each week once we're done with chapter four, since that's the longest chapter there is.
My thoughts on it are pretty much the same as my earlier post on the chapter, so far the plot hasn't really become as apparent yet. It's still kind of a monster-of-the-chapter story. Uhhh... it's a bit lighter on the fat jokes, thankfully! There's a pretty meaningless joke about therapy there, though, and pretty much every chapter opens with fat jokes until UHHHH chapter 6?
Some moments here and there with the art strike me as just a little off and I've finally figured out that it's because the animals have very human-like faces... hmmmm... (see the seagull on page 128). But that effect basically goes away completely after this chapter.
The parts where Ville is swimming underwater has some cute illustrations (p. 121, bottom left)!
The fish part was pretty anticlimactic though, but that's fine.
Errrrrr... overall, I'm getting the sense that I was a far more insufferable (younger) teenager than I thought I was! It's a fun read, but some parts make me think, "wow, how did I enjoy this?" Not that I ever enjoyed making or hearing offensive jokes, but I sympathized with (the less intense parts of) Hannu's attitude way more than I do now... :'D
Brief warnings on the next chapter just in case:
Spoiler: warnings for chapter 4 • show
Some horror elements, but it's not too severe, and there's discussion of animal death (this one gets more severe in later chapters). There's also a part where a character is at risk of drowning.
It would be entirely possible to say "you are heavy" instead of "you are fat". But no.
It wouldn't make much difference in some cases, because for example I am heavy because I'm fat. But Ville in this chapter is heavy because he was magically transformed into a seal!
Unfortunately some jabs about fat people still happen even in the streams. Not regularly, but it's not something that was left in the 8-year-old practice comic. I am sorry to say.
I agree, especially since Ville is almost always a totally different animal. And it's not that seals don't have a lot of fat on their bodies, but they definitely could've just avoided making it about calling Ville fat in almost every instance where he's a big animal. Especially because of the degree to which he's treated as essentially a human character. Speaking of, it might even have been more appropriate to comment on practically any unique non-human non-dog trait Ville had. That'd add much more to their interactions, I think.
There were a couple in SSSS as well, especially when Emil and Reynir were in Lalli's dream, I think. I haven't seen any streams recently. But for aRTD itself, I mean I'm pretty sure that comic is set in stone and won't ever be altered. I don't even think there are ads on that site anymore, so it's probably pretty much never going to change at this point. It's sad that they're still so normal and frequent, even as people have gotten more aware of social issues.
Personally I've found that jokes about my appearance just make me too self-conscious, though it's not comments about my weight most of the time.
Generally I dislike fat jokes. I use the term joke very loosely here cause they're not really jokes but fat shaming. I'll usually give a pass to characters like Hannu or Puppy Fox though because they're terrible people. Hannu is not above making fun of people because he's a bad person, that's his personality. Awful. It's in bad taste but for bad people I can see them saying those things. Other more decent characters would not get a pass of course and if Hannu was an actual person he would absolutely get an earful for being mean. Maybe accidentally get pushed out of the boat... but alas he is only fictional.
Hmmm... yes and no. The jabs don't really add much to the setting, so even though they're just irrelevant lines said by a bunch of lines drawn on paper, it's still totally unrelated to the issues at hand (the setting, the plot, the main Problem, etc...) and usually a whole detour from the actual plot of the chapter. I've found that the richest interactions between Hannu and Ville are the ones where they're being, like, decent people to each other, but that may just be me. And uhh... yeah, Hannu's just a pretty awful guy! But that gets expressed in much more explicit terms later on than a bunch of jabs that even people who think they themselves are angels will say.
None of us know enough about Minna to comment on her own feelings about it, though, and we'll probably never know.
On an unrelated note, I visited an archived version of the page and it's been fun flipping through the older things! Interesting how aRTD was once placed on the same level of hierarchy as the rest of her portfolio, and reading the old logs is fun. Some of it is about how SSSS was developed, in much more detail than I can find elsewhere... cool!
