• Vespair@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      45
      ·
      3 months ago

      None of which makes sense without the context of what a enormous jackass Buckley had famously been in online spaces for YEARS. It’s not just that loss was a weirdly serious addition to a silly comic, it’s that it perfectly encapsulated the kind of sanctimonious self-important attitude Buckley espoused and instantly turned his shitty online persona into a joke.

      I don’t know if it is genuinely possible to still appreciate loss the way it was without all of the enormity of that context.

      • SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        I used to feel this way but ultimately, what happened was tragic, even if it happened years prior. He expressed it publicly and some folks probably felt “seen” at the time. That’s a good thing. Talking about/hearing stories of trauma and loss and grief can be very empowering for folks who have experienced their own.

        Like don’t get me wrong: yes he was (is?) all those things you described. No he was not a model messenger for this story. But that was a serious loss and I think at some point folks need to recognize that we’re all human and maybe we shouldn’t attack someone working through the loss of their child. Even if we feel they don’t deserve to express themselves that way.

        Maybe I’m missing elements of the story but I guess I’ve just never been able to square why it needed to be this ruthlessly mocked. It’s been like 15 years.

        • grue@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          19
          ·
          3 months ago

          Man, at this point some sociology student could probably write a dissertation just on the cultural context of this comic alone. Both the stuff you’re talking about regarding de-stigmatizing talking about trauma (and miscarriage in particular), and the way the comic itself has been meme-ified and distilled down to representations as abstract as “.:|:;

        • Vespair@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          3 months ago

          I see your point and don’t entirely disagree, I’ll just its hard to feel bad about somebody suffering the consequences of their own actions (not the miscarriage obviously, but the reaction to it).

          You don’t really get to complain about feeling alone when you’re the one that burned all the bridges that lead to your house, imo.

    • Sentient Loom@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      3 months ago

      It’s really surprising that something so obscure became a meme. What’s the first instance of the comic being represented with line segments like that? How did they come to be recognizable?

      • EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        3 months ago

        The original comic was rather popular at the time, and as a result, it became an early meme before mass-scale meme culture had really taken off besides doge memes and “I can haz cheeseburger.” So it quickly entered the cultural zeitgeist of the early internet because the kinds of people into memes and gamer culture at the time would’ve been about the size of the terminally online crowd today.