Eliminate the Ninnies and the Twits

"See I'm just like you in a way [...]
I can relate to what you're saying in your songs
So when I have a shitty day I drift away and put 'em on
'Cause I don't really got shit else so that shit helps when I'm depressed"

Eminem - Stan

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Spoilerts:
If you haven't read the short and never-to-be-completed webcomic Nowhere Girl, go ahead and get in touch with your despondent adolescent social outcast. It's a lovely piece of work.
If you haven't read (not watched) The Island of Doctor Moreau... then what have you even been doing with your life?
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Fun fact: you don't have to be a soot-smeared 1830s London street urchin to enjoy Oliver Twist. Nor must you be an 1890s animal rights activist to have your mind uplifted by The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Not so fun fact: back in 1970, the United States government, in the persons of its Ohio National Guard, decided to murder some university students as punishment for protesting its ongoing mass murders in the Vietnam War. In the words of Jerry Casale:
"Until then I was a hippie. I thought that the world is essentially good. If people were evil, there was justice and that the law mattered. All of those silly naïve things. I saw the depths of the horrors and lies and the evil. In the paper that evening, the Akron Beacon Journal, said that students were running around armed and that officers had been hurt. So deputy sheriffs went out and deputized citizens. They drove around with shotguns and there was martial law for ten days. 7 PM curfew. It was open season the students. We lived in fear. Helicopters surrounding the city with hourly rotating runs out to the West Side and back downtown. All first amendment rights are suspended at the instance when the governor gives the order. All of the class action suits by the parents of the slain students were all dismissed out of court because once the governor announced martial law, they had no right to assemble."
He and another Kent State student co-founded a musical group and went on to regale audiences with subversive, astringent clowning as part of the late '70s-80s band Devo. Yes, the yellow jumpsuit, red conehead, whip-cracking crew. Whatever you think of Devo's mostly fumbling musical attempts, they remained one of the few relevant political acts in the post-hippie era of MTV glam.

On a completely unrelated topic, though I'd chuckled at an occasional PvP or Penny Arcade strip I didn't take webcomics seriously as a creative medium until in 2001 I ran across Christopher Baldwin's Bruno and Justine Shaw's Nowhere Girl. That shift in mindset is now being reversed by other such comics' descent into fatuous snowflake moral posturing. Which might sound weird because Nowhere Girl itself was after all about a gay chick and her gay imaginary boyfriend (it makes more sense in context) so why would I mind comics being totes gayballs nowadays? Because it didn't matter. Nowhere Girl was a story about solitude, false hopes, miscommunication and despair. That her race or sexual orientation may have catalyzed Jaime's ostracism by her supposed peers made it no more relevant than any other catalyst. Whatever the author's intent, that abortive first chapter successfully leveraged "prick us, do we not bleed" into a believable character inhabiting a (sadly) coherent world which does not stand or break upon the heroine's personal preferences.

But that's yesterday's news. To the social activist cartoonists of decades later, it's no longer enough for their heroines to find a few like minds. They must fabricate their own separate interpretation of reality. So, the three (all female, of course) protagonists of Title Unrelated travel to a parallel Utopian dimension: nonviolent, eco-friendly, mystical, vaguely non-Europeans who enforce gender-neutral language, dress and behavior. Never mind the improbability of such a world, given that human tribes across time and space have enforced gender roles through every single period of their growth and development. The most androgynous society in history is in fact our oh-so-decadent post-industrial hellscape. Likewise, never mind the question of how exactly an authoritarian enforcement of androgyny would be less oppressive than calmly acknowledging biological fact. I guess steamrolling the entire planet to suit San Francisco makes you an enlightened egalitarian. Of course, their perfect world is threatened by a (presumably straight) white male villain. No need to question it. We knew it was coming.

Then there are the other examples I've mentioned here: Mare Internum with its reinforcement of social justice warrior pecking order (despite its own characters' contradictory ethical comportment); No End with its inexplicably homosexualizing zombie apocalypse; Eth's Skin with its hilariously hamfisted interjection of lectures on personal pronouns, etc. Not to mention formerly more creative comics like Questionable Content or Something Positive or El Goonish Shive scrambling to re-cast decades' worth of characters as homosexuals or transvestites to keep up with current fads. The less said about Sinfest the better.

Each new case serves only to reiterate its own irrelevance. The characters in question tend to lack context, conflict or any other cause for the audience to become invested in them. They are simply molded onto the page as de novo emblems of self-righteousness: lo, here be a non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, sainthood presumed. Worship shklim. All are presumed to have been wronged by the world in some indeterminate fashion (even when said world consists entirely of others like themselves.) All are presumed to possess wisdom and moral authority far beyond the ken of mere mortals "breeders" - and luckily they're here to tell us just how evil we are for being born the wrong skin color / sex / sexuality. Pray the straight white male away, one panel at a time. Why? Just because. Beyond that, such characters lack any particular role to play in the story. They certainly cannot enter into any conflict with each other since this would mar the beatitude of at least one of them. Those added later on will predictably have no internal drives or goals or interests, no opinions on politics or religion or the course of civilized life (or at least none open to discussion, but only delivered as sermons) no plans to execute or chances for failure. All the narrative depth of Ayn Rand characters without the redeeming autonomy.

Interestingly, these grimly comical extrudates of identity politics work very hard at alienating their audience, by defining characters not by what they do or experience, but by what they *are* in some exclusive, intrinsic sense, like class/race combos in role-playing games. With no campaign to follow. They compensate by churning out endless reiterations of the same two-dimensional stock figures. Today's character's a level 12 Feminist Paladin Pakistani. Check back Thursday to see the half-Cherokee Bard! And don't forget to cast your votes for next week's spotlight: could it be a semi-bisexual Ukrainian Rogue or maybe a quarter-bipolar Korean Cleric? Only public opinion can tell! (Because we sure as hell can't grow an internal compass these days.) You too, dear reader, can be a flavor of the month. And if you're not one of those things, don't worry, you'll be given plenty of chances to roll the dice and mentally pigeonhole yourself as a speshul snowflake with every new gratuitous flavor of sooty downtrodden urchin. Please, sir... we want some more tribalism.

The denouement of The Island of Doctor Moreau had the scientifically uplifted beasts revert back to their innate sub-sentient, bloodthirsty forms. Its narrator escapes with a lingering post-traumatic impression: "I could not persuade myself that the men and women I met were not also other Beast People, animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls, and that they would presently begin to revert --"
And now? We've banished the ghost of Jack Chick only to summon up the spectre of Tatsuya Ishida. We've replaced churches with feminist rallies, the sermon on the mount with vaginal monologues, and still nowhere is the voice of the individual to be heard. The wolfe becomes the wer becomes the wolfe. Bestial nature re-asserts itself over each new ersatz social advancement, turning it into more of the same.

In 2001 the eponymous Nowhere Girl still retained the intellectual integrity to ask herself whether wanting to be around other people who are "like her" was shallow. In 1970 the students at Kent State University were murdered for protesting mass murder. What do the campus activists of today believe entitles them to attack their fellows? "Manspreading" or erotic cakes or heavy breathing? The mere existence of genitals? Of genitals of the wrong shape? Devo didn't make twenty years' worth of songs in retribution against the Ohio National Guard. They touched on the generalized underlying human desire to follow the leader, to bash the outsider, to regress into warring ape tribes at every opportunity. And, half a century later, it's so amusing to see the term "Jocko Homo" has taken on a whole new meaning.

"I see faces, keen and bright; others dull and dangerous; others, unsteady, insincere, -- none that have the calm authority of a reasonable soul. I feel as though the animal was surging up through them"
- H. G. Wells