Hello,
I'm new to this forum, and I am jettisoning a number of thoughts about Ms. Sundberg's work, if only because I see no better place than this thread.
Unlike the average member of the forum, I discovered Sundberg's work through Lovely People when it was linked in a Discord server (of all places) sometime in 2021. I'm a Christian (and have been for all my life), and my initial thought was that LP was a beautifully illustrated but imperfect work. I also thought to myself that the author may have been a recent convert to Christianity (which, as I later found, was true).
Since LP was intentionally fanciful, I see no reason to criticize LP for its art-style or world-building, but as others have pointed out, its plot was flawed due to its shift towards Christianity as the only victim of "Not Amazon's" dystopia. It seems that Sundberg had several main ideas that she attempted to express: firstly, that blind escapism through consumerism and online attention-seeking is empty; secondly, that certain groups would seek to exploit the tendency towards consumerism for their own gain; and thirdly, that the Christian faith is the best solution to the problem of human meaninglessness.
Due to my view of the world, I agree with all three of those statements, but their presentation in LP is, unfortunately, cluttered. Perhaps a greater number of pages might have allowed for those themes to be more coherent; however, I appreciated the "core" message of holding fast to one's beliefs, even to the point of personal loss.
All that being said, I was intrigued enough by LP that I might have gone through the rabbit-trail of Sundberg's works then, had the page which hosted LP contained any more information about its author. At the time, it didn't, so I mostly forgot about Lovely People altogether, though some of its examples of consumerism remained with me.
Recently, I came across A Meandering Line in much the same way as before, but I now recognized its author as the person who "drew that interesting comic with the rabbits." Contrary to many of the posters here, I enjoyed that comic quite a lot! My viewpoint was surely different that that of the long-time readers of Sundberg's previous work; since I was merely perusing what remained after the fact, my opinion was not colored by prior experience with aRTD or SSSS. Nonetheless, I appreciated Sundberg's tendency for honesty in A Meandering Line, since it honestly dealt with problems that were actually relevant to human beings (not to mention that *anyone* would need courage to write about their own thoughts in that much detail with their own name attached). I still think that the art is lovely; even though the level of detail is lower than in Sundberg's previous works, her art is cleaner (in my opinion) and very expressive.
To summarize that soup of words, I unashamedly like A Meandering Line, though I wouldn't hand it to a child to read.
After reading those two works, I discovered and read Journey Upstream, aRTD, and SSSS, in that order. To briefly summarize my thoughts:
Journey Upstream is a nice allegorical work, although it makes little to no sense outside of that context. Due to its nature, I think that as the story progresses, the characters will indeed turn out to be "shallow," but unlike certain posters here, I am not bothered by this. It's a fair tactic in metaphorical writing to make characters into archetypes; unlike more "novel-like" works, their entire purpose is to be recognized and extrapolated into the real world. Since JU's character page names quite a few characters that haven't seen any dialogue, I expect Sundberg to represent simplified "archetypes" of people through the different animals. It is still too early, I think, to judge the work, but I expect that I will cherish it, if it is written well to the end.
aRTD is lovely and cozily paced. Its usage of Finnish folklore intrigued me, and I enjoyed the cast of characters in the story. I loved the art, the story, the length, and most everything about it.
SSSS contains my favorite work of world-building by anyone not named Tolkien. Its cast of characters was fantastic, its plot was meticulous, and its story hooks were fascinating. I do understand why readers would be disappointed in its abridged ending, though. Even though the story feels incomplete, it is to Sundberg's credit that she did not cripple the setting in an attempt to hastily conclude the series. It's as if it left off in a good place, so to speak, and while I don't want to needlessly speculate, I would not mind seeing Sundberg revisit the setting someday.
The above post is probably a horrid mess of formatting and a grotesque patch-work of ideas, and I have not said all that I wanted to say, but I am posting anyways because I want to contribute my own thoughts into the discussion of Sundberg's work. My impression of certain opinions here (and please note that I am not trying to attack anyone) was that "Minna was a good writer, and then she 'picked up' christianity and trashed everything," and that doesn't seem fair to the merit that I see in her work.
Please correct me if there are any glaring holes in my thinking.
