Weekly Update - 146 (Patreon)

This is an older sketch I abandoned a couple of months ago. Maybe some of us who had to string up lights this winter can relate to poor Riley here.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season thus far! This time of year gets stressful for a lot of reasons, and it's important to sit back, kick up your feet, and remind yourself what really matters. Not presents or shopping or money or long hours or trees or any of that superfluous made-up bullshit that's intended to get us to consume more.

What really matters is the people we know and the effect we can have on their lives during the time we all share together on this planet. So don't forget to take a moment to reach out and touch those people you know and give them a hug, either physically or digitally. You might just be the reason they smile today.

Comic this week? Nope! Husband and I are travelling for the holidays, heading home to see the folks and spend time with our family. For the reasons cited above!

Drawing: Sketches, mostly. Gonna be taking my sketchbook along on the trip, and I'll try to post photos of my sketchbook on Wednesday and Friday.

Reading: Heroes by Joe Abercrombie, in case I have time to read!

Playing: Possibly not much, might fire up Dwarf Fortress on the laptop, we'll see. Might bring the Switch, who knows? Gonna be a lazy holiday week.

Ye Olde Weekly Ramble:

You know, that thing where I'm supposed to write about whatever's currently on my mind? The Simpsons. The Simpsons are on my mind currently.

And I realize that people might have strong opinions about the Simpsons and similar shows, being passionate fans or otherwise. It's always dangerous to dip a toe into the frothing waters of long-running fandoms, and untold hundreds and thousands of like discussions have almost certainly existed before, touching on these points in a far deeper and more comprehensive way than I can. Remember these are just my observations that I'm trying to put into words, I could always be wrong and I could have also chosen the wrong words in my effort to explain my complex thoughts.

So I spent a good portion of my young life playing with plastic toys on the floor watching the Simpsons with the family. Loved it, great show. Always made me laugh and I loved the Treehouse of Horror episodes the most. When I got a little older and spent more time playing video games in my room, I switched over to watching Family Guy, American Dad, and whatever other shows Cartoon Network had on during Adult Swim. It made for great background noise, was always good for divided-attention entertainment.

Recently, my husband's started rewatching old Simpsons episodes on... whatever streaming service it's on now, and it's kind of rekindled my appreciation for the show. Especially when compared to the hours and hours of Family Guy and American Dad reruns I know almost by heart, there's something special about the Simpsons that was, initially, hard for me to pin down as we've been rewatching all these old episodes. Then it hit me, just recently. The Simpsons characters are really likable. They are redeemable. And not having watched the show for so long, that actually surprised me.

Now, I'm just going to assume that everyone is familiar with the Simpsons, or at the very least, any of probably thousands of memes born from the show (Steamed Hams). Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart, Maggie, even many of the side characters in the show are iconic characters that have made their way firmly into American culture, and, I presume, have been assimilated globally(?). If you're unfamiliar with Family Guy, which, I'll be honest, seems pretty unlikely, but just in case, it's a show about a family similar in nature to the Simpsons family, except it has an edgier and darker sense of humor. The characters map pretty closely to the Simpsons family archetypes. The husband and wife, the older brother, younger sister and the baby. And while certain attributes get shuffled around a bit and the characters in Family Guy are certainly not just clones of the Simpsons, it's still a pretty close match when looked at through a wide lens.

For anyone that likes that darker, edgier sense of humor (that sometimes gets real cringy,) Family Guy is a great show. I don't think it's Seth MacFarlane's best work, however, and when I compare Homer Simpson to Peter Griffin, Homer is just a much better character, altogether. They're very similar, more similar than the others, for sure. Both Homer and Peter fit the archetype of a sort of deadbeat overweight alcoholic dad. And that was always what I had remembered most about Homer, that he was a drunk fat idiot. That's what makes us laugh, because he's representing the typical American father stereotype (stereotypes, mind, are ways our brains distill information down into simple concepts for easier storage and recall, they are often not representative of reality, just as an aside.) But watching the Simpsons episodes recently, I realized that what Homer is very redeemable, and Peter is not. What I mean by that is that in almost every episode, Homer has a wholesome character arc where he causes his own problems by doing something stupid, then turns it around and, usually, he FIXES it. He usually has a point of realization that he's done something wrong and he sets out to make it right. It'll seem like he's at least learned something by the end of the episode, whether it's by reaffirming his love for his family, repairing relationships with his friends or bosses, or otherwise undoing whatever catastrophe (real or imagined) he's caused at the start. It's a narrative formula that has kept the Simpsons going for 35 years. Yes, you read that right. 1987, according to wikipedia.

Now, the "lessons" that Homer allegedly "learns" are probably illusory in the long running show. He has not grown and changed in a very big way over the last 35 years. He's never quit drinking, joined a gym, gotten a new job, or stopped physically abusing his son. Homer is still the same character that we've all come to expect and one that we like and laugh at. If he ever changed in a big way, it would be much harder for him to carry the franchise forward into the next several decades, because Homer's story would have ended and we'd be hearing a new story about a changed, reformed Homer. That could be interesting, but it could also be way less interesting than regular old Homer. It's because of these episodic micro moments of self-reflection and the affirmation of positive character traits and self-improvement, I think, that contribute to an overall more positive perception of the character.

By contrast, Family Guy fixates more on the comedy and getting laughs, not so much telling a narrative. It's very good at comedy, I think, repeatedly cutting in with flashbacks or cutaway gags. As a long-running gag, Family Guy will undermine the redeemability of its characters on purpose. For example, it's an often repeated joke that a Family Guy episode might end with Lois saying something like, "at least we all learned a valuable lesson" and then Peter or Meg or Chris will say "Nope," sometimes in tandem. Roll credits. Good for a laugh, but it reminds me every time that they're all unlikable idiots by design. Not only are they stubborn and inflexible, they don't even express a desire to change for the better.

I'm not going to write a deep, scathing critique on an obviously successful show like Family Guy, and I actually like the show. I watched it for many years, cringe episodes and all. But the one point of this already too long ramble is mostly that compared to the Simpsons, I don't actually LIKE any of the characters in Family Guy. They are regularly presented as terrible people and the writers never give them any opportunities to redeem themselves in the eyes of the viewer. Quite the opposite, they want us to be reminded that these characters are so terrible and it's used as justification for them to do terrible things to each other or to have terrible things happen to them for slapstick comedy.

And to be fair, every once in a while Family Guy will do an episode where they try to show the more redeemable qualities of their characters, but because it's so infrequent, and because it's often presented with tongue in cheek humor, it doesn't feel genuine. It often feels like it's just being done in response to criticisms of the show, where the writers are like, "no, see? they aren't completely terrible all the time." One episode that comes to mind is when Meg finally gets fed up being the family's punching bag, and because she finally stands up for herself, the family practically falls apart. So she decides at the end that she has to endure all the physical and verbal abuse in order to keep her family functional.  ... How wholesome.  It's actually an episode that was mired in controversy when it aired because it sent such a terrible message that was framed as a "lesson."

Now, Family Guy is obviously a dark comedy show intended for mature adults and nobody is arguing that it should deliver positive life lessons. One of the reasons we find it humorous is (hopefully) because of its absurdity. It's a very different style of show, for sure, from the Simpsons, which I believe is more narrative-minded and a bit more impressionable-mind-friendly. Like I said, Family Guy is great for divided attention watching by distracted college students, while Simpsons is more of a show where you put on an episode and want to watch it from start to finish with your family. As a writer that likes to focus on making my own characters as relatable as possible, it only makes sense that the Simpsons characters would appeal to me more.

So why am I rambling about this? Does this have anything to do with God Slayers?

Nope.