T w e n t y S i d e d
I can theoretically see where the ‘all elves are women’ joke comes from with them all being smooth in some form. But it’s never really gotten a laugh out of me. I always assumed when I was a kid it was just ‘grown-up humor’ that i’d get when I was older but even now that i’m an adult, unlike a lot of jokes that confused me when I was a kid (the Finger-prints bit in animaniacs comes to mind), it’s never struck.
If you’ll pardon the brief reference to my identity, maybe it’s just a cultural difference. As a trans person my idea of a funny gender joke is apparently pretty different than what a cis person thinks is a funny gender joke. In part because our perceptions of gender as a whole are often fundamentally different*.
*this is a vaugue generalization for the purpose of simplification. Not all cis people percieve gender in the same way there’s lots of factors ect ect. But if I walked up to my coworker and told him I was going to the gender store for a return he’d look at me like I’d just lost my mind. So that’s what i’m going off of here.
Artless in Alderaan
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
Crysis 2
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
Batman: Arkham Origins
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Batman v. Superman Wasn't All Bad
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
I choose to interpret this as the analog of “all dwarves are men” joke – the character can’t tell the difference is being role played accordingly.
Mostly I choose this interpretation because the alternative of it being a genuine attempt at humour in 2024 is very Yikes.
Nah, I’m extremely cis and I’m with you on the gender jokes. They’re not super creative.
Also, I think the general joke of “players treat super important NPCs whose diplomatic support they desperately need like dirt” was run into the ground by that point in the comic. Darth and Droids did better things with it.
Thinking back, I suspect Shamus was… not that good at subversive jokes? Like, the guy could be really funny, don’t get me wrong, but political jokes require a level of comfort in your beliefs and comfort in engaging people with strong ideological oppositions that Shamus kinda… didn’t have?
I don’t know, it feels rude to speculate too much.
Being trans probably has something to do with it. I’m only just now discovering this comic and these jokes got a big laugh out of me lol! Or maybe you just don’t like that kind of humour. What’s really cool about this comic is that there’s a lot of different types of jokes. So if you don’t like one type, there’s bound to be something you like later on :)
“Well the GENDER Store called, they’re running out of BOOBS!”
Over on Order of the Stick, Rich Burlew had a similar running gag of similar vintage with his elf character Vaarsuvius being androgynous, though of the “nobody’s certain of their gender” variety rather than “male character mistaken for female”. In the time since, he’s kept the lack of gender signifiers for V consistent and stopped using it as a punchline. That seems like the right call, and it means that the comic retroactively has had nonbinary rep from panel 1, which is kind of hilarious given how the demographics for D&D have shifted since it debuted.
I was also thinking about the order of the stick when reading the comment for this strip…. On reflection I believe that where GM of the rings falls flat on the “elves as girls”, the order of the stick has more success because it also plays on the nature of stick figures as inherently androgynous.
As such, rich burlew isn’t just making a worn out joke but he is also playing on the unique advantage offered to him by the artistic style, which makes the joke land a bit better for me
Shamus wrote this comic in 2007. I am sure that if he had focused on comics to the exclusion of other pursuits and had continued to this day that his humor palate would be a lot more sophisticated too (although comparing him to Rich Burlew is a really, really high bar).
I personally wish he had spent more time on comics like this and less time on Spoiler Warning.
c’est la vie
And by “comics like this” I mean DM of the Rings in general, not today’s episode.
For me, I think whether or not the jokes land come down largely to “intent” and on “who is the butt of the joke meant to be?” When I was younger, trans people were basically unheard of and I basically knew nothing at all about them. (I mean, obviously they existed, but they were never talked about or shown in media.) We had cross-dressers (and interestingly, women wearing men’s clothes barely rated a mention, but men wearing women’s clothes was usually a huge deal), but I usually put them down to “men who just liked wearing women’s clothing” or “gay men trying to embrace a feminine role to a larger degree.” It wasn’t until maybe about a decade or two ago, and after making some friends who turned out to be trans, that I began to really understand their struggles and came to the realization that there are in fact more than two genders.
But anyway, to get back to the original point, I think the joke in this strip mainly has Aragorn as the butt of the joke, being the insanely dense person who can’t seem to look past surface details and stubbornly continues to stick to his view despite multiple people correcting him. (As opposed to the “OMG look at Haldir, something’s wrong with that guy” punchline, which doesn’t seem to be the case here.) So, while this strip does touch upon some sensitive matters, it still passes the test for me. (Though I understand if the subject matter does hit a bit too close to home for some.)
I always thought of this as another joke on the theme of: “All of these players are dumb and also bad people.” Which is why we are supposed to be laughing at them rather than with them. Shamus could be very kind an empathetic to real people he didn’t like, but a lot of his comic characters seemed intentionally unlikable. If we tried to treat them as actual heroes instead of Konasuba style ‘heros in name only’ then the strips take a really dark turn.
A lot of it comes down to verbal tone, which doesn’t really come across in a text (plus pictures) medium. With probably, as Adam says above, an aspect of “(my headcanon says) that group’s cultural baseline happens to look rather like one side of a dichotomy in our group’s baseline”. I’ve known people who’d manage to play it sort-of classy in the longish term without pushing too far and/or pulling back if they do, I’ve known people who’d play it even worse than Aragorn’s player; I’ve known people who’d do it in an honest attempt to play a character with that misconception, I’ve known people who are themselves the one with the misconception.
I don’t really care for the joke either. I think in this case it’s intended to be more of a joke about Aragon’s player than any actual resemblance between elves and women.
I don’t remember how this hit me back in 2007, but it probably felt off (I know it did earlier in the series when he was “joking” about how pretty the elf was). The “at least it wasn’t directed at me” reminded me of the shame I felt when thinking that. In high school (the early 80s) I had a female friend who started shaving before me, another friend who was very effeminate. This was years before I knew anyone who was out as gay and decades before I understood trans was (for some people) about more than clothing. I could see it was wrong to miss gender people because they weren’t “normal”. Even not knowing the right terms it is still possible to treat people who are different with respect, because EVERYONE is different in some way.
The game encourages players to cooperate, as each character has unique abilities and weaknesses that complement the other.