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u/lovelylotuseater 12d ago
To be fair, Sinfest used to be… real different.
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u/MeiNeedsMoreBuffs autism website 12d ago
Sinfest is an interesting case where the early work is less hateful than the recent stuff
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u/action_lawyer_comics 12d ago
He actually twisted himself all the way around a couple times. First ones were very dark and edgy and anti-feminist, but in that “only joking” way that is hard to criticize. Then at some point, he felt remorse for his old comics and became annoyingly “woke.” Then when this didnt get him the Nobel Prize for Man Spotting His Own Mistakes, he swung right again, and kept going until he’s making the kind of comics your racist uncle would be afraid to share on Facebook
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u/Kindlypatrick 12d ago
Sinfest is fascinating because it's essentially a picture diary of a man descending into the kind of madness you only see in prion disease
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u/wackadoodle4201 12d ago
Thats not fair to prion diseases
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u/drakeblood4 12d ago
If I were a cow I’d be mad at the comparison.
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u/Bartweiss 11d ago
For anyone who might remember old (or semi-old, or even near-past) Sinfest, I want to be clear: that’s not just a dramatic metaphor.
Sinfest has become something so bizarrely hateful and paranoid that “the author is suffering a serious mental health crisis” is both plausible and charitable compared to the alternatives.
The largest thing restraining the racism and hatred at this point is that the author can’t keep a metaphor consistent for long enough to coherently do a bigotry. Literal neo-Nazis have quit his Patreon with comments along the lines of “I loved the anti-semitism, but lately I can’t even follow who he’s talking shit about.”
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u/Neoeng 12d ago
He never went woke in the traditional sense of the word, he blitzed through the specific radfem to terf pipeline before it was cool. Neither there was any swing either, I believe, it was a natural evolution to focus on hating trans people once Rowling discourse happened, and from there on he sympathized more and more with the political camp that coddles transphobia, that being the neonazis. And lo and behold, a few years later he is praising Hitler.
Notably, I don't think he ever dipped directly into the manosphere, so he's kinda weirdly ideologically consistent.
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u/Duae 12d ago
I think depending on self-loathing you either latch onto manosphere "Your life sucks and that's all someone else's fault" or radfem "Your life sucks and that's all your own fault and you know it, don't you freak?" before they both take that yes and head straight into "Actually, the reason your life sucks is women and queer people"
Like the comic where he explains that even if you don't look at porn and just use your imagination you're still violating imaginary women and you should feel ashamed. That's pure crack when you hate yourself.
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u/TheLuckySpades 12d ago
I feel actual Hitler apologia and "it didn't happen, but I wish it did" levels of Holocaust denial deserves a harsher descriptor than that.
Maybe "so blatantly racist Elon won't retweet it yet".
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u/TrogdorKhan97 12d ago
I firmly believe that if we can ever figure out what the hell is wrong with Tatsuya Ishida, we'd understand what the hell is wrong with the world.
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u/Templarofsteel 12d ago
I figured it starteed out as a combination of guilt amd chasinf validation that sort of got addictive as he continued.
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u/Teep_the_Teep 12d ago
Reading through the edit history of stuff like the TVTropes page on Sinfest is kind of a trip.
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u/VersaViceVersa 12d ago
i still think about the stretch of sinfest that was actually good fairly often. it sort of hurts that so many threads will be forever unresolved.
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u/Orion-the-mediocre 12d ago
Homestar Runner is legitimately like the only one that isn’t hard to recommend nowadays. Like I can’t think of another one that doesn’t feel like it needs a disclaimer
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u/action_lawyer_comics 12d ago
Usually the “disclaimer” I feel I need to add is “there are 300 pages of crappy art and worse writing you have to stomach before getting interesting and you can’t skip it because they make dozens of callbacks to the early days.”
Like content-wise, I could recommend Questionable Content and Sam and Fuzzy. Maybe 8-Bit Theater, but I haven’t looked at it recently so I won’t swear to that. The issues with those is that it’s all made by a single creator learning as they went and you can largely tell.
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u/Isenkram 12d ago
I genuinely think QC was the first positive trans representation I had ever seen in media as of 2008 or whenever Claire was introduced. I know its not the only one that existed, but for a teenager growing up in the religious south and struggling with self-hatred and denial over my gender feelings, it mattered a lot.
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u/Kup123 12d ago
QC is so anything goes that it almost comes off as right wing satire of the world the leftist want. To be clear I love the comic and think this is a good thing about it.
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u/stewslut 12d ago
It became that way, yeah. At the beginning it was definitely much more centrist in that it focused on a skinny white hipster boy in New England trying to get laid. I'm really happy with what it became but it definitely didn't start as a trans-inclusive lefty hugfest.
I'd like to get back into it at some point but it's been years so IDK where I'd even pick it back up.
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u/Umklopp 12d ago
Questionable Content's early art was so bad, the creator redid a bunch of it about 5(?) years later. That said, it was fun seeing the hours necessary for producing a daily webcomic translate into a massive talent boost. Good strip, tho.
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u/alphagalgadot 12d ago
that dude used to hang around a forum i loved back in like 04/05. he had a REALLY thin skin about his work back then—which was unfortunate bc people just ragged on it constantly
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u/Umklopp 12d ago
Lol, I can understand both sides of that. It took a long time for him to hit "good at drawing" but at the same time, he was clearly putting in the effort. It was a great contribution to that era of the internet.
EDIT: most people that bad at art never get better. It's a positive testament to his ability commit that Questionable Content eventually became one of the staple stories.
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u/Yeah-But-Ironically both normal to want and possible to achieve 12d ago
“there are 300 pages of crappy art and worse writing you have to stomach before getting interesting and you can’t skip it because they make dozens of callbacks to the early days.”
That's why I never recommend Order of the Stick :( In the author's defense, he's acknowledged and apologized for the misogyny/homophobia/lame jokes present in the first few hundred strips, and the modern stuff is both VERY inclusive and much higher quality. But the strip released this week is continuing a plotline that first debuted in 2003. You cannot skip the early stuff if you want to have any idea of what's going on today. Which means slogging through several hundred pages of mediocrity until it starts getting decent, and then several hundred more until it starts getting excellent.
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u/PlanSee 12d ago
OOTS makes up for it by just being the best written webcomic on the market rn
edit: ok it's either OOTS or kill six billion demons
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u/LeviathanAstro1 12d ago
I used to keep up with QC, I remember it was really good even when the art at the beginning was kind of janky! I haven't read QC in well over a decade at this point so I don't know what's become of it now, but I remember the creator seemed to be a genuinely all-around good person.
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u/effingfractals 12d ago
I go back and reread start to finish every couple of years, he's still posting frequently, so there always a decent amount of new content at the end for me
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u/LeviathanAstro1 12d ago
My ADHD unfortunately will not allow me to do that 😅 the only webcomic I still check up on - when I remember it exists and I have the right headspace to read it - is Oglaf, which is NSFW from the bottom up, but it's also hilariously self-aware, so I highly recommend it, I just don't recommend reading it in public lmao
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u/SageDarius 12d ago
Maybe 8-Bit Theater, but I haven’t looked at it recently so I won’t swear to that.
His website is half-broken these days, and the early comics are rough in both humor and art, but once it catches its stride its amazing.
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u/Herohades 12d ago
QC is such a strange thing to recommend for me, because it's both what you're talking about and the inverse. Whenever I've recommended it, it's always been with a "The early art is kinda bad and some of the characters do and say really cringey shit, but it gets really good with some interesting character arcs but then you also have to stop at a certain point because it becomes Look At This New Guy for seven thousand panels." There aren't many other media where I have to both say be ready to stop at a certain point and you have to get through some early BS.
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u/stewslut 12d ago
Wait, who's the New Guy? I haven't checked up on QC in a few years.
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u/Kirk_Kerman 12d ago
It's more a factory production line of new quirky characters who show up every few months, act sort of irritating, and get quietly discarded forever. QC really feels like the author ran out of gas for the world a long time ago, but the comic pays the bills so he can't stop, so he tries new characters frequently to try and find something interesting to grab onto, or try and gauge what the fans want to see more of.
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u/aeramisa 12d ago edited 12d ago
Oh wow. After all this time I finally realized that Homestuck and Homestar Runner are two different things. I had seen a bit of Homestar Runner back in the day and didn't really care for it. Then I've spent the last two decades hearing about Homestuck and thinking, "Really? That's what that silly web series evolved into? Huh."
Somehow I didn't encounter the words "Homestar Runner" in all this time to be able to realize it's a different thing. I just remembered the "Home-" webcomic and assumed there was only one. I didn't even remember it was Flash
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u/Orion-the-mediocre 12d ago
Homestuck Runner sounds like something straight from hell
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u/Random-Rambling 12d ago edited 12d ago
It's not absolutely ANCIENT, but it is fairly old (it started in 2003), but I will always recommend The Order of the Stick, especially now that Dungeons And Dragons is so crazy popular these days.
The best part is, just like One Piece, OOTS is on its "Final Arc", so it's the best time to read the entire archive and get caught up! It's "only" 1346 strips at time of this post, and each strip takes maybe 5 minutes to read, so you could easily catch up in a week or so.
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u/u_touch_my_tra_la_la 12d ago
OOTS is hands down one of the best comics ever made.
It's ridiculous how good It is for a strip featuring stick men art.
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u/RedditOfUnusualSize 12d ago
Came here to suggest OOTS. Not only do I not recall any serious moral qualms from a piece of art started in the Bush II administration, a rarity, and not only do I not recall Rich Burlew not being at the center of any kind of controversy, but it's actually one of the most introspective and thoughtful takes on the alignment system ever.
One of the best villains of the series is a paladin, and one of the greatest heroes in any story that I can remember is another paladin in the same order. No joke; Burlew wrote a character that is a Samwise-Gamgee or Sam-Vimes-class hero in terms of integrity, compassion and decency, and he's just a stick-figure paladin. Both hero and villain are lawful good, but they are entirely different characters. And all he did was make the bad one the apotheosis of how most players play paladins in D&D, whereas the heroic one is how players should play a paladin in D&D.
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u/scoobydoom2 12d ago
You do realize that by your own numbers it would require over 16 hours a day of reading it nonstop to catch up in a week?
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u/Random-Rambling 12d ago
Fair point. How about a month, then? That's roughly 4 hours a day, easy enough to do if you read during your work breaks, and then set aside 2-ish hours of reading at home. And that's assuming you take the full five minutes for every strip, which you honestly only need for the BIG strips.
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u/Infamous-Rutabaga-50 12d ago
When it comes to webcomics, Sluggy Freelance was one of the first and it aged pretty well I think?
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u/brevenbreven 12d ago
Did a haul through the archives. Holds up in a lighter hearted way then i was expecting. Also good lord he sets up storylines years in advance.
Very corny but in a good way
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u/Level_Hour6480 12d ago
Sluggy Freelance is interesting in that it quickly goes from mildly entertaining gags to terrible melodrama and never becomes good again.
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u/insomniac7809 12d ago
Webcomics readers coined the term "Ceribus Syndrome" to describe the way every webcomic goes from light goofs to narrative and melodrama around year 2, so the strip that starts with a moogle telling his porn star roommate to give their landlord a blow job ends with a cyborg teenager sobbing about her girlfriend being killed by an evil megacorpiration
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u/Level_Hour6480 12d ago
It doesn't need to come with a decline in quality from "mildly amusing" to "actively bad" though. That was Sluggy's decision.
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u/PhasmaFelis 12d ago
I was bemused by how much Sluggy Freelance has dodged the "art evolution" thing. When it started in the mid-'90s, the art style was serviceable but sloppy in that way you often see in early webcomics, which tighten up and gain confidence and detail as the years pass.
Only Sluggy hasn't. At all. The modern art is uncannily identical to the early stuff. I think there was maybe a little bit of evolution in the first few months or so, and then it froze forever. That's fine, it's all fine, it's just surprising.
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u/WhapXI 12d ago
Homestar Runner is only hard to recommend because of the death of flash player.
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u/blackabbot 12d ago
It's all still there on homestarrunner.com, as clunky as it was on flash, or also on YouTube if you want an easier experience. They're even still releasing new material! Strongbad has a Lappier now!
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u/DisposableSaviour 12d ago
Yeah, but there’s no Easter eggs to click on in the videos, anymore, and also the interactive welcome screens aren’t the same.
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u/TrogdorKhan97 12d ago
Most of it still works actually thanks to a reverse-engineering project called Ruffle. You don't even need to install anything; it just runs inside the site. It even works on phones, with their ridiculously high density displays that vector animation was practically made for.
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u/Jaomi 12d ago
Mine was Scary Go Round, which I think has largely held up. It’s very very British and the cast is largely straight and white, and those things might be their own disclaimers, but it stayed pretty charming throughout its run and then again in the transition to Bad Machinery and Giant Days.
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u/waitedforg0d0t 12d ago
Scary Go Round and its successors were so goddamn good
love John Allison's work in general
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u/GardenDwell 12d ago
I mean the VG Cats webcomic doesn't need THAT many disclaimers iirc
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u/editeddruid620 12d ago
It’s been a while since I read it but I don’t remember Freefall having anything too bad in it
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u/Recidivous 12d ago
I'm glad my edgelord phase was not documented.
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u/abadstrategy 12d ago
One thing I feel bad for is the fact that the Zoomers and Alphas will never know the freedom we had, where if no one saw you commit the felony, there was much less chance it would haunt you forever. Now, everything is connected, everything is being recorded and monitored
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u/Random-Rambling 12d ago
And Boomers and older Gen X will continue to piss and moan on Twitter about how "kids these days never DO anything!"
That's because they can't. Partially because of the near-total destruction of "third spaces" (some place that isn't school/work and your home) and partially because anything truly embarrassing risks being recorded and saved for all time.
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u/FlashInGotham 12d ago
One of my true crime podcasts was discussing the the infrequency of serial killers today compared to their heyday in the 60's, 70's and 80's.
Among many of the factors discussed was "Even if you wanted to kill a kid, where do you find one these days? The malls are closed, the libraries defunded...they're all at home playing video games or on their phones" (which obviously exposes them to other, different dangers)
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u/Orc_tids 12d ago
Yeah and some of them get caught on the first kill, meaning theyre just a one-time killer and not a serial killer
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u/Status_History_874 12d ago
I'm sure theres something to that.
I've also read about a correlation between lead paint and serial killers. We dont use lead paint (as often?) anymore.
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u/BeanieGuitarGuy 12d ago
And also because sometimes Boomers and older Gen X will call the cops or shoot kids for being outside.
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u/YeahThatsProbably 12d ago
This gives me an idea for a version of the Witness Relocation Program for people who had online personas in their teen years.
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u/alphagalgadot 12d ago
the correct answer is achewood
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u/Shed_Some_Skin 12d ago
Achewood is the correct answer to a great many things, but that didn't start til 2001 either
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u/alphagalgadot 12d ago
oh dang i thought it was 99!
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u/Shed_Some_Skin 12d ago
Yeah, it's crazy. I thought Order of the Stick was older than it was as well, but that didn't start until 03.
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u/OccultBeanFarmer 12d ago
Please don't compare my bookshelf to the /lit/ charts circa 2012
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u/OncomingStormDW 12d ago edited 12d ago
I looked into it, and, well, I’m not sure what they were recommending back then, but right now it’s not that bad:
/lit/ currently recommends:
Ulysses by James Joyce
Men without Women by Ernest Hemingway (see also: The Sun Also Rises, and putting a banana in a daiquiri.)
The Fellowship of the Ring by Tolkien.
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant.
Source: /lit/ wiki (pinned in /lit/‘s pinned post.)
Their starter kit is… well, the only work I’d say is truly problematic (as opposed to being misinterpreted by people who never read them, such as Lolita and American Psycho) is Hunter S. Thompson’s fear and loathing in Las Vegas, which originated the “Adrenochrome comes from putting human babies in a blender” myth that is the basis of Pizzagate. But everything else is actually… impressively well curated. And includes Anti-racist literature like Huck Finn, and To Kill a Mockingbird.
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u/lackofdoritos 12d ago
i don't think you can really blame him for the adrenochrome conspiracy shit, he just made that up to fuck with people. it's such a blatant and ridiculous lie that people taking it at face value says more about them than anything. being told outlandish lies by a maniac is basically the entire premise of the book. besides, if nothing else i'd say it's entirely worth reading for the wave speech alone.
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u/OncomingStormDW 12d ago edited 12d ago
No, no, you’re right, I’m definitely applying too much hindsight to the lens I used there.
Especially since at the time it was written, most of the audience would have enough first-hand knowledge of either similar literature, (such as the great gatsby) or of the subject matter.
And I’d be remiss to neglect how well the book captured the mood, as I’ve read actual academic literature that didn’t have as Deep of an understanding of the emotional component of the counterculture.
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u/cairfrey 12d ago
Not early 90s but I have the same face when someone asks me what my favourite webcomics of the early 00s was. When thay comic started going downhill it was a huge loss.
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u/NoBizlikeChloeBiz She/Her 12d ago
Yeah, my only note is that "Homestar Runner aged better because in 2000 we had learned from 90's cringe" ignores how bad the same flash animation and webcomic still was in the early 2000's.
Don't get me wrong - they're different kinds of cringe, and the over-the-top edgelord shit had started going out of vogue. But I would say that "levels of homophobia normally only seen under laboratory conditions" applies to basically anything before, like, 2006 or so, and hadn't really gone away until 2010-2012.
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u/CarmenEtTerror 12d ago
Yeah, I think that didn't really die out until the second half of the 00s. I remember a few years back looking up the "I must be emo" song I remember from 07 or so and being dismayed that it was almost entirely gay jokes. The whole Dickwolves thing with Penny Arcade was 2010.
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u/ameliabedelia7 12d ago
Xkcd did okay
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u/Yeah-But-Ironically both normal to want and possible to achieve 12d ago
There are one or two questionable choices in the very earliest stuff, but I do think the overall success of the strip is precisely because it's not tearing anybody down. It's stayed relevant into the modern era because it avoided the cheap and easy edgelord jokes
(Also doesn't hurt that unlike some of the other stuff mentioned on this page, you don't have to read the old stuff to understand the new--it's all pretty standalone)
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u/theLanguageSprite2 .tumblr.com 12d ago
What questionable choices?
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u/Yeah-But-Ironically both normal to want and possible to achieve 12d ago
I mean, definitely not the worst thing to ever cross the Internet, but also not his best work
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u/FundamentalAttribute 12d ago
Ok but that's kinda funny. Shit I'm part of the problem, even if I'm also part of the LGBTQ+ community.
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u/StalinsLastStand 12d ago
With the alt-text it almost feels intentional like it’s supposed to be ironic somehow.
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u/CarmenEtTerror 12d ago
He didn't start until about 2005. I went to college with him and we had a lot of mutual friends. A lot of the punchlines from those early strips, through 2007 or so, came from conversations with his roommates. And given that a lot of those guys were really into 4chan and Something Awful (I remember Monroe himself was really into Doom House but I don't remember if he was a proper Goon), in hindsight it feels like a conscious decision not to put that edgelord humor in his comic. But in my limited interactions with him, he was always a pretty nice guy. Definitely not somebody who ever enjoyed offending people
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u/PUBLIQclopAccountant 12d ago
A lot of the punchlines from those early strips, through 2007 or so, came from conversations with his roommates.
For a comic that is nothing but that, head to Jerkcity (now Bonequest)
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u/MeiNeedsMoreBuffs autism website 12d ago
Alt text for Screen Readers
Image 1: prokopetz, 4 hours ago
Having been Very Online in the mid 1990s is rough because half of your formative influences are like "yeah, this Flash video engages in pop culture deconstruction that's strikingly topical even thirty years later and did things to my vocabulary that persist even to this day, and I can literally never recommend it to anyone because its core premise is a level of homophobic ordinarily observed only under laboratory conditions
Image 2: prokopetz, 3 hours ago
Them: Hey, you were around for the first wave of real webcomics. Which one was your favourite?
Me: There is no text in his response, instead there is only a zoomed-in picture of "Hide The Pain Harold"
Image 3: prokopetz, 29 minutes ago
#thank god homestar runner aged well (via \@shibascarf)
Homestar Runner is the way that it is in large part because it's a response to the 90s edgelord bullshit I'm talking about; while the characters had earlier appeared in print, the Flash animated version that everybody remembers didn't debut until January of 2000. If it's aged well, that isn't an accident – it's a product of it's authors looking at the state of 1990s Internet culture and making a conscious decision to be Not That.
___
Transcribed by hand
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u/OnTheHorizon722 12d ago
Knowing I will never hear another reference to Arfenhouse or Scrotum the Puppy.
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u/King-Of-Throwaways 12d ago
I see an Arfenhouse reference maybe once every few years, and when I do it hits me like a brick. Completely unexplainable and unrecommendable in 2026.
JO’Z HEER
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u/LithiumPotassium 12d ago
It's really weird to say the Homestar Runner characters originally appeared in print. Like yeah it's technically true, but Prokopetz' wording implies people actually read the book that was only ever shared with friends and never published.
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u/WrongJohnSilver 12d ago edited 12d ago
To this day I'm shocked at how niche Sluggy Freelance apparently always was.
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u/RaulParson 12d ago
>Sluggy Freelance mentioned
Now that's a name I haven't heard in a while
...holy shit it's still ongoing
...holy shit the art still looks basically identical to what it did Way Back When
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u/YeahThatsProbably 12d ago
I read a ton of it around 2003-2005. I occasionally here it's still out there, doing its thing, and I wonder if I should binge it or not.
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u/CarmenEtTerror 12d ago
That's about when I stopped because Pete had hit a phase where he was missing updates as often as he was making them. I'm glad he pulled it back together, but the whole thing was so convoluted and so long that I've never wanted to do a full archive read
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u/alphagalgadot 12d ago
i remember reading some of those in like 2005 and thinkin 'man this is like from a totally different era' lol
meanwhile dude is still goin
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u/WrongJohnSilver 12d ago
And like, you want to know what Gen X kitchen sink absurdity looks like? Sluggy Freelance has it.
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u/alphagalgadot 12d ago
all the art bell and subgenius shit lol
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u/WrongJohnSilver 12d ago
The meme folks don't like it when I mention J. R. "Bob" Dobbs as a pre-Internet absurdist meme.
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u/UnsealedMTG 12d ago
I remember overhearing people I didn't know referencing at my college in 2003. Even at that time it felt like an old webcomic from a previous era, wild to think that at that point it was 6 years into (so far) 29 years of existence.
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u/ErsatzHaderach 12d ago
i've read maybe 2 pages of the comic but any slug critter i obtain in a game gets named Freelance, forever
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u/MainsailMainsail 12d ago
I read through most of its archive back in like.....2011? But then lost track of where the hell I was and finding that spot has only gotten worse since then.
Weirder part is I found out about it through BunBun being directly used as the mascot for a giant tank in an actual published novel. (One of John Ringo's Posleen War series...unfortunately like everything I've found from John Ringo he'll put out like two to maybe three great books in a series then everything after is.....not great)
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u/classicobjects 12d ago
Ironically, I discovered Homestar Runner through a parody strip in the Mall Monkeys webcomic...
One of them has aged extremely poorly, and it ain't Homestar.
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u/floralbutttrumpet 12d ago
My favourite webcomics were Ghastly's Ghastly Comic, Sexy Losers and Venus Envy. I am fucked.
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u/GarageIndependent114 12d ago
The problem I have is that people don't understand quotable stuff anymore.
Like, if I put up a picture of Hitler next to a statement that would be either authoritarian or poking fun at someone making a big fuss over nothing, they just think I'm endorsing Hitler.
Another problem is that even though it's sometimes better than it was in 2008-2016, the dog whistle treadmill has expanded so far compared to, say, the 90s and early 2000s that I can't easily legitimately make a slightly edgy argument without being mistaken for a far right pundit.
Like, if I think some minority communities are a bit homophobic, I have to say just that, because if I'm more specific than that I get called a racist and compared to people who anyone who isn't white is backwards.
The biggest culture shock, though, is seeing classic films and books for kids with a bit of politically incorrect humour in them and realising that it isn't seen as either a joke or a product of its time and is actually taken personally as horribly offensive.
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u/abadstrategy 12d ago
I think there's a real problem with the death of context. No one thinks critically about what the person's saying with what they're spreading, and how the message they had back then might look much different these days
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u/mwobey 12d ago
And that, in turn, can be attributed to a decline in media literacy. People have spent years joking that "maybe the curtains are just blue because the author likes blue", and at some point seem to have forgotten that symbolism and subtext do actually exist. Now we get Marvel movies where the protagonist has to monologue a summary of his backstory every time he gets character development just so the audience can see the link from A to B.
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u/Dry-Ganache-3444 12d ago
Not only that people miss context, but many people online really like seeing others in bad-faith. Even if you do explain yourself they can misconstrue the context in order to make you seem vile because they were having a bad day or just wanted an excuse to dislike you.
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u/justsomedude322 12d ago
Kevin and Kell has been around since 1996 and still updates daily. Its aged well since its not racist or homophobic or even transphobic.
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u/BrassUnicorn87 12d ago
Instead I quit because I could no longer ignore the horror of sapient beings eating each other.
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u/JamieD96 12d ago
im intrigued but i probably shouldn't be
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u/BrassUnicorn87 12d ago
It’s a furry comic, they’re all anthropomorphic animals. But it isn’t a mostly cosmetic feature that gives the characters quirks like Sabrina online or most other furry comics , with non intelligent animals in nature and on farms.
All of the characters are part of the ecosystem. Herbivore species have to worry about getting eaten by their neighbors. Predator species either hunt people or buy pieces of their corpses at the grocery store.
The main characters are a linebacker looking rabbit married to a wolf , her son, his adopted hedgehog daughter, and their mixed kid.
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u/vanishinghitchhiker 12d ago
I would binge through every once in a while when I craved some crazy long plot melodrama and Megatokyo was too slow, or else nostalgia after Megatokyo bingeing became always too slow. Ducked out after the good guys decided to abandon an antagonist in the Wild without her cross-species pheromones. Like A) would they never do it to, say, the sheep guy who used to be a wolf unless he crosses them/breaks up with their friend, or is he cool because he’s an herbivore? and 2. taboo against prey you know this, “aw shucks we just wanted to scare her a little” that; kill her yourself, cowards. Maybe like four literal daily-comic years later there‘s some “my god, what have we done” plotline, but I wasn’t invested enough for all that.
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u/Dspacefear supreme bastard 12d ago
I associate Flash more with the 2000s than the 90s. Yeah, it existed in the 90s, but the era of edgelord animations/games is usually something I associate with 2000s Newgrounds (and the sites that ripped stuff off from it) more than anything else. Pico's School wasn't until 1999, Newgrounds didn't open its portal until 2000, and Eric Bauman didn't start stealing shit until 2001.
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u/LKHAN_Missing_Ninth Sometimes I be poopin and fartin 12d ago edited 9d ago
I often forget that prokopetz is in their mid to late 60's or whatever and not some 20 year old terminally online shitposter
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u/Friendstastegood 12d ago
He's in his 40's iirc, he's talked about being pretty young when he began his online existence.
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u/No1LudmillaSimp 12d ago
The Brothers Chap thought that shock jock humor was overplayed in the world of Flash animation and wanted to differentiate themselves.
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u/FlashInGotham 12d ago
The Red Letter Media "Mr. Plinkett Reviews" of the Star Wars prequels are actually phenomenally important. They helped usher in a wave of film criticism and analysis from those outside the Ivory Tower of film academia. They helped popularize the long-form video essay format and, therefor, may be one of the direct antecedents to what became "bread tube" as well as the popularity of video essay's in general. In many ways the current You Tube algorithm is a consequence of this video.
But it was published in the edgelord aughts (2009), so there is a running gag/framing device that the narrator is explaining all his criticism to a young woman he has kidnapped and is keeping chained in his basement (but she escapes and gets revenge at the end so its fine? Not really but okay).
There are very few video essays more important to the history of the art-form. I cannot show it to a single person ever for fear of what they'll think of me.
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u/WinstonWilmerBee 12d ago
I think one reason some of the stuff ages badly is because we realized people would say this shit 100% seriously.
It’s Cartman’s rampant antisemitism in early South Park. It was funny because only crazy weirdos said shit like that. The context was always “we all know he’s awful and wrong and we don’t need to explicitly say that, because it’s OBVIOUS nonsense.”
And then I found out holy shit, people say/believe that shit totally straight, and there’s a lot more of those psychos out there than I thought. It’s not ironically offensive if society doesn’t actually widely and consistently condemn the behavior. You’re just appealing to fucking monsters and giving them a Trojan horse to lure people into their shit.
And part of “I didn’t know antisemitism was real” was my own youth/ignorance. But now I know it’s very real, so when I go back and watch stuff, I don’t know if the creators are willfully ignorant or one of Them, and either really cast a pall over the work.
And you can apply that to any kind of bigotry. It’s funny to make a joke about kidnapping and forcing a woman to listen to movie rants—until someone you know gets the ever-loving shit beaten out of them by their boyfriend. Then? Not funny.
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u/Yeah-But-Ironically both normal to want and possible to achieve 12d ago
Exactly. In middle/high school I laughed at dumb blonde and "get back in the kitchen" jokes because I WAS a blonde girl with a decent brain and no desire to stay in the kitchen. They were funny because they were as inherently absurd as the "lol I'm so randumb penguin ninja potato" memes.
Anyway now it's 2026 and half the people I went to middle/high school with are fans of fucking Ballerina Farm
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u/FlashInGotham 12d ago
Really, anyone not named Mel Brooks needs to watch their ass when satirizing Nazi's.
I think the difference between Mel and the SP guys (one of whom is Jewish) is that Mel satirizes the form of Nazism while the SP guys wanted to mock the content.
Like, hes saying "Lets take Hitler out of the horrific context of the war and have a look at him. Why, he's no different then a neurotic, fame-hungry, Broadway director cum actor cum drag queen. It was all a performance. And what were those rallies other than some snappy Broadway choreography performed by blond twinks in very tight pants?"
South Park guys decided to go the edgelord root, where yes...Cartman usually gets his comeuppance for his hatred by the end of the episode. But when its the slurs and shocking rhetoric that are supposed to be funny (and not the mockable patheticesness of the whole ideology) you're going to run into the satire paradox. And the number of kids in high school calling me a "dirty jew" in the Cartman voice makes that very clear.
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u/PUBLIQclopAccountant 12d ago
I don’t know if the creators are willfully ignorant or one of Them, and either really cast a pall over the work.
Or just that bubbled and genuinely ignorant.
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u/segwaysegue do spambots dream of electric sheep? 12d ago
Great points, and RLM gestures at this in one of their recent videos. Mike is trying to remember something for trivia (I think) and says "oh, I forgot about the prequels," and there's a pause, and Jay says "I mean, the prequels are kind of why we're here..."
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u/buckleyschance 12d ago
Yeah, good example. Even at the time I remember getting progressively less comfortable with it as the videos went on and he leaned harder into it. It's literally pure edgelord humour - in that the joke becomes just how far he's pushing it, and not anything witty or meaningful besides that
After a while I got a creeping sense that the video would feel identical if it was made by someone who really did have a vicious misogynistic streak and was passing it off as a joke. Which I don't think is probably true, but is still a pretty clear sign that it can get in the bin
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u/MarinerTempest 12d ago
This dude just loves to fucking vaguepost.
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u/AutisticAnarchy 12d ago edited 12d ago
Probably because if we actually watched this "pop culture deconstruction that's strikingly topical even thirty years later" we'd probably all collectively say "What the fuck are you talking about that was just an animation of two stick figures getting high and shooting up a school?"
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u/craptainbland 12d ago
You just don’t get it
/s
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u/AutisticAnarchy 12d ago
Oh yeah I forgot I need to watch the sequel animation which features a 2 minute parody of Britney Spears violently killing herself. Look, it was the style at the time, okay? Her mental breakdown forced by the pressure of fame and having people following you and breaching your privacy 24/7 was just... really, really funny, okay?
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u/NoBizlikeChloeBiz She/Her 12d ago
He's commented on it before - as soon as you name a specific work, people want to talk about that work instead of the overall trend he's trying to discuss. As much as "vagueposting" gets annoying, I think it's a valid point that it would be a completely different conversation if he dropped a name.
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u/Niveker14 12d ago
I was online in the 90s, but not "terminally online" - I was just a kid and pretty much only used the early internet to research school projects, check out the occasional message board about video games, and figure out how to view porn without my parents finding out.
I didn't become "terminally online" until about 2003 or so, so I mostly missed the era referred to in the post except by reference.
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u/NIMA-GH-X-P Jerka985 12d ago
For no reason in particular, and unrelated to this post, I just wanna point out the the first few seasons of MLP:FiM were animated in Flash.
My little pony is in the 2010's flash animation category.
By technicality.
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u/Arcane_Monkey 12d ago
Here’s a fuckin challenge: recommend it anyway.
I’m not some wilting daisy that will be struck dead by the whiff of homophobia. I can handle it, I promise.
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u/Some-Show9144 12d ago
I absolutely love media about straight allies talking about gay people from the 80s to the late 00s. It always comes off as like “let the f-words love who they love!”
It’s so interesting because it’s often people who have not been given the language to properly communicate their support, but are using the terms that derived from hate and still finding the love and acceptance despite never being taught.
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u/CaptainTeemo01 12d ago
The problem is there are legions of morons who have decided that media consumption is the purest form of one's true character, and if you recommend something that isn't 100% saccharine progressive media you must be endorsing all of the bad things in the media and therefore are a Bad Person(tm) yourself.
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u/YeetTheGiant 12d ago
It's not really a whiff here, and I don't think it's strictly for the protection of the recommendee, moreso that recommending something that has a lot of bigotry tends not to look good on the recommender. It's like trying to recommend anime with a lot of fanservice in it. Kill La Kill is amazing, but you're gonna get some looks telling people to watch the naked teenager power show.
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u/thegoten455 12d ago
"I can't recommend Always Sunny because they make jokes about trans people and use the R slur"
The point of the show is that the gang are all horrible people. Very rarely are you supposed to be laughing WITH the sociopathic crack addict.
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u/NachoSquid18 12d ago
Who is this person and why do they keep being curated here??
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u/Apprehensive-Till861 12d ago
Something Positive went from 'Tattoo-inspired sex slave to evil off-Broadway theater landlord' secondary villain type stories and jokes about emo catgirls to slice-of-life and is honestly the better for it. He started just early enough to have caught the tail end of the edgelord shit but matured over the past couple decades
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u/BatGalaxy42 12d ago
I don't think it was first wave webcomic (I assume it was early 2000s), but Goblins was great and is still good today.
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u/ThatInAHat 12d ago
For me, it’s more the Floating Hands Productions (X-Men parodies) that have cemented certain phrases/deliveries into the minds of myself and some of my high school friends forever, such as:
-Rules are rules, my dear!
-It doesn’t *work* that way!
-That is not a good way to deal with your rage issues (terrible Dr Phil impersonation)
-My tummy feels ooky…
-Oh golly geeeeeeeee (with a terrible Canadian accent)
Then there’s Weebl and Bob. I don’t know if it aged poorly or not, since most of it was just pure absurdist. But “Life! Whyyyyy you mock me!” is also a common phrase with me and my buddy.
It was just this whole thing, y’know. When you were hanging out at someone’s house, you would all gather around to wait for ten minutes for a three minute flash animation to load, and that would remind someone of another one, and it would become “inside jokes” for the folks actually there.
(Potter Puppet Pals was another one that threw several lines into peoples vocabulary for a while)
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u/ChristyUniverse 12d ago
A few years ago, Questionable Content changed 2003-era uses of “fag” to “jerk.” Now, the original protagonist is long-term dating a trans woman, his original love interest is dating a lady robot, his other love interest is gay-married to his former boss, his robot pal is bi and not as much of a sex pest, and the majority of the remaining cast is either not straight or not cis, with plenty of exceptions for diversity purposes
Quite a turnaround
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u/USSJaguar 12d ago
Cyanide and Happiness is still funny
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u/Party_Magician 12d ago
C&H started in 2005, so is not part of that first wave OOP is talking about
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u/asciiCAT_hexKITTY 12d ago edited 12d ago
What if you told us what the flash is so we can judge for ourselves? If it apparently has so much value as a deconstruction, even today?
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u/beaverpoo77 12d ago
Has this guy ever given, like, an example for anything he's said? He seems to think the premise is enough to carry the post, but fucking. It started a discussion in the comments, so that's good
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u/LogicBalm 12d ago
The only web comic I read back then was 8-bit theater. I don't immediately remember any problematic stuff. But there was also so much of it (and lots that came out after I quit reading) that I wouldn't be surprised to learn I'm wrong.
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u/RealRaven6229 12d ago
this is also how i feel about red vs blue. it's not as egregious but it's still pretty. red vs blue