Lovely Still Lilies

"The injection of religion

Has a coma-like effect"

Wumpscut - Wreath of Barbs

 

______________________________________

 

Webcomic spoiler alert(s):

Minor page 436 plot reveal for the young adult sword and sorcery yarn Daughter of the Lilies

The ending to Lovely People, a relatively short comic about bunny rabbit consumerism and social engineering.

______________________________________

As happens ever and anon, I'm having trouble writing this post because no matter which end of the argument serves as starting point, the various references will inevitably circle back upon themselves. I suppose I should go back to 2013, when I bemoaned the fixation of modern fantasy worlds on Tolkien and Rice, with an increasing Animesque influence, to the undue ignorance of most European mythology beyond elves and vampires.

 

Of course, it is nearly impossible to think of all that colorful paganism without necessarily acknowledging the Christian authority grudgingly tolerating what little it cannot yet pogrom, inquisit and witch-hunt out of existence. The more I read through Tolkien's early drafts in The History of Middle-Earth, the more I grow to appreciate the importance of his multifaceted grasp of folklore, including Christian mythology, not because Christian superstitions are intrinsically better or worse than competing brands of brainwashing, but because Biblical guilt and penance and redemption were intrinsic to the mentality of the folk whose lore Tolkien eventually lent a modern literary coherence. For two thousand years the same patricians and plebeians, serfs and marcher barons, monks and princesses, milkmaids and cobblers who mumbled their pater noster every night also sidestepped fairy rings, plugged their ears against siren songs and did their best to stay out of some troll or ogre's stew pot. Even ignoring Eru Iluvatar, still Hama or Beregond or Samwise Gamgee's parochialism (the counterpoint to Rivendell's otherworldly airiness) is best grasped via the angle of obedience and faith in an ordered world, a monotheistic master plan, even if it's never spelled out that way. Tolkien's ability to avoid spelling it out that way* helped set him apart and far above his friend and sounding board C.S. Lewis, the crass reactionary preachiness of Narnia being reflected in Middle-Earth mainly in the limited form of factory smoke.

I bring this up because of two and a half webcomics.

 

Daughter of the Lilies is an unnecessarily cutesy, cloyingly politically correct take on sword-and-sorcery fantasy. I should hate it. I can't hate it. Instead of attempting to subvert a particular style to its monomania like most such propaganda pieces, it displays just enough dedication to the genre, to its characters, to its cosmology to remain enjoyable. I was surprised to run into a reference to the Holy Trinity on page 436 and cringed in anticipation of sermons to come. To date, to my continued surprise, they have yet to come.

 

The sermon did make its expected appearance at the end of Lovely People, a comic dealing with corporate / state surveillance and control. Also bunnies. It's an increasingly pertinent topic, but unlike say, Buying Time which centered on economic exploitation of human socialization, Peony, Peppermint and Marigold's antics address the impossibility of staying good in a society based on toadying. It takes some excellent potshots at social media, psychological dependence on shallow social approval, consumerism and market manipulation by the likes of Amazon, etc. Ending in a self-flagellating Bible quote surprised me as the author's previous works, which I've praised before, dealt with Norse mythology almost exclusively. There's a grand total of one Christian in her magnum opus Stand Still, Stay Silent... so far. So far I say because in her comments below Lovely People, Minna Sundberg reveals she got 'er sum religion 'round 2019... which explains why the only book mentioned (repeatedly and at length) in the newer Lovely People is The Bible.

Allow me to gloat, first of all, about Sundberg numbering among the first of many who will prove my prediction true: that the snowflake generation's obsession with their own salvation from the original sin of being born the wrong race / sex / sexuality will convert seamlessly to old-school religion over the next decade or two.

More interestingly, note the discrepancy in the two's fervor. Where by the end of Lovely People Sundberg falls into a stereotypical raving proselyte attitude, Meg Syverud plays her first angelic interjection into Daughter of the Lilies so briefly as to barely cause a double-take and even admits to some apprehension as to how her audience will view it. Given she took a one-month post-pandemic vacation recently to get some fresh air, I ended up binge-reading the comic archive to date, and did something I rarely do for any cartoonist except Tailsteak: read the author's commentary below page 436. (Lesson? Never take vacations; it gives internet nerds time to nitpick.) I was pleasantly surprised by her correctly identifying the lackluster integration of Christian mythology into other fantasy tropes in contrast to the precedent set by Tolkien and Lewis, and unpleasantly by finding out she's a true believer who got nudged into doing this at (*gag*) Bible study. Still, if I don't fault Tolkien's writings  for the author actually believing those caveman superstitions, I guess I could extend the same courtesy to cartoonists. The proof, after all, is in the pudding.

Continuing that train of thought, Syverud does devote quite a bit of panel space to proselytism... of social justice activism and not Christianity, despite that she implies being a lifelong Christian. Recap: the lifelong progressive is more fanatical in pushing her newfound Christianity, and the lifelong Christian is more fanatical in pushing the current fad of idealized black lesbians.

I also find both cases interesting for their ironic blind spots. Daughter of the Lilies' obsession with fantastic racism and rainbow sprinkle sexuality are even funnier when you remember how readily religion always lends itself to genocide and that opposition to homosexuality and miscegenation vastly predominate in religious (and especially monotheistic) voting blocs, and not among atheists who even if not actively supportive tend not to give a fuck to whom you give the fuck. Let's remember that even the most infamous example of genocide, moral and ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, centered on a fundamentally religious division no matter its faux-eugenicist veneer.

It's even funnier for Lovely People to end its tragicomic warning against the dangers of a social credit system by posturing Christianity among the plucky rebel resistance, given that religion (from samsara to monotheistic damnation) was and still is the earliest, longest-lasting and still most widespread social credit system in history. As Plato said toward the end of The Republic, dude, wouldn't it be awesome if we could enslave people's minds by making their every living moment feel supervised and threatening them with an eternity of mind-shattering torture whenever they step out of the lines we draw for them?**

 

Thus, with religious repression, we come full circle to the beginning of this post. Religion creates nothing. It co-opts, plagiarizes, re-brands, subjugates, exterminates the competition, enslaves, claims credit for all of creation post-facto. I applaud attempts at better integrating Christian mythology into fantasy fiction, largely because... well, why the hell not? However, we have seen the pitfalls of attempting to build a new mythology around the new fundamentalist beliefs of social activism and have every reason to think that falling back on older, more ingrained superstitions, backpedalling from technocracy to theocracy, will entail vastly more stultifying regression.

 

True believers can make good art, but it is in spite and not because they hold a certain brand of baseless belief higher than its competing dogmas. Go the Tolkien route, not the Lewis one. You do not have to abandon your religion in order to write well about fantasy, but do have to at least momentarily pretend that you're not a special snowflake, saved while the rest of us are damned for mumbling the right poetry and crossing your fingers the correct way. And, unfortunately, both of today's examples show a decided tendency to idealize their own mouthpiece characters of the fantasy fiction they've deluded themselves into believing is real. It's an easy prediction that fanaticism will gradually consume more and more of their innate creativity, forcing every new plot element into a religious mould, à la Orson Scott Card, until burying whatever potential they might've had.

 

_______________________________________________

 

* Yes, yes, Ainulindalë, thanks, I know, I know... but for the most part...

 

** I... may be paraphrasing slightly.

 

P.S.: Both of thoday's creatrices are published by Hiveworks, and I'm amused to imagine webcomics' most virulent swarm of social justice activists might be flipping their collective switch from "Ishida" to "Chick"

P.P.S.: In light of this, it'll be interesting to see what direction Pascalle Lepas of Wilde Life (also hosted by Hiveworks) takes all her talk of the devil.

edit 2022/02/08

Why did you jackasses not tell me I'd consistently misspelled "li[l]lies" through the entire post?

Ah well, you take your comedy where you can these days I suppose.

Also, I was not aware when I wrote this that Ishida himself, the posterchild of anti-male webcomickry, had shifted his message in 2021. My take on that here.