"And so here I am again feeling like an old-school liberal at odds with the new politics of the far left, because it wasn't so long ago when liberals thought shooting people who don't share your politics was bad! Or at least a microaggression."
Real Time with Bill Maher: Eat the Rich
With most of the webcomic field having succumbed to terminal snowflake navel-gazing over the past decade, older material has been looking better and better by comparison. Well, maybe not in image quality. Indefensible Positions was apparently created on a drawing tablet from the very start, a technology which in 2005 had not suffered much public testing. It shows. At least at first. It did improve, if not to modern glossy, shaded, curve-smoothed, consistently proportioned, colorful standards. Don't worry, the story's much better.
A youth ditches his plans for college, meets (sort of-) Lee and Grant the avatars of Chaos and Order and learns the true meaning of deviance. Until it deviates. That was the normal-sounding part. The rest involves witches, teleporting zombies, pigfuckery, mosquitos, a traffic light, political commentary on post-9/11 curtailment of personal freedom, and a veritable chorus-line of tulpas.
Its strongest part as a work of fiction would have to be the unique characters, each with wildly different origin stories, personalities, motivations, ethics, powers and fates. But it rose past freak-show appeal (and has retained lasting relevance) by returning repeatedly to the conflicts between freedom and destruction, continuity and suffocating control, personal meaning and personal sacrifice, common ground and mass psychosis, and most importantly the extent to which anyone may make able, informed, responsible and driven in choices impacting self, others or society as a whole. It landed at a strange time in retrospect, shortly before libertarianism devolved to a moral umbrella for simpleminded greed, or liberalism a crutch for narcissistic power games in the name of make-work minorities.
As urban fantasy yarns go, sadly underappreciated and just as relevant now as twenty years ago, albeit for different reasons.
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