Trad Twitter

Obviously, everyone in the comic is meant to be viewed as a reactionary moron, but I think the Tradcath guy gets off kinda light here. Really, all we know about him is that he hates Pope Gayis.

Let’s go inside the mind of the creator for a second. Page 1— the joke here is that these reactionary weirdoes are so paranoid that they’ll create these descriptions of reality that are completely ridiculous and untrue. Right? We see this fairly often. So how do we satirize that? How do we subvert it, take the joke to the next level?

The pedestrian choice is just to exaggerate. The second panel could show some SJW stereotypes eating like, pronoun burgers and soy shakes, or maybe a bunch of vegans burning chicken nuggets at a stake, whatever, and our straight man character gets to come in and say “Hey, none of this is real!” Or something. Boring. People have made this same joke a million times.

What I tried to do is make it so the second panel— the false reality which the poster is adamant is true— be just fucking inscrutable. Take this idea they have that modern progressivism is chaotic, dirty, hooliganish-- and just tap into that instead. People aren’t just being dirty hippies here— they’ve devolved into a kind of madness so insane, that for anyone to earnestly believe it’s somehow an evolution of “brunch” is so beyond paranoia, so beyond madness, that it just becomes absurd. Does that make sense? Maintain that essential thread of fear mongering, that belief that modernity is degenerate chaos and tradition is order, but make the actual argument so bizarre and inscrutable that it surprises the reader. Comedy requires surprise, something unexpected; at some point, I think, simply exaggerating what someone is saying becomes trite. A dash of absurdism, while still staying true to the essence of what’s being mocked, makes it all funnier.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and everyone thinks the pronoun burger thing is funnier. Ah well.

There’s at least one trad guy out there who’s upset that nobody eats “supper” anymore.