Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 2996-3000 (6th to 10th July 2015)
CM_albion:
--- Quote from: ReindeerFlotilla on 09 Jul 2015, 17:17 ---
--- Quote from: CM_albion on 09 Jul 2015, 16:09 ---it's fine to be yourself around friends, its the best place to be yourself, but generally, you need to make the effort to overcome your flaws. you do not say, "my flaws are a part of my positives, it's a complete package, take it or leave it."
--- End quote ---
Why, exactly?
--- End quote ---
I can respect your greater degree of life experience, and your stance. rather than debate which of us is objectively right, i will state my case in answer to your question. who knows, maybe in 20 years i'll see it your way.
I take that veiw, because, in my opinion, Flaws are just that, flaws. they are wrong things, abnormalities if you will. We as humans get only one life in this world, so what other use do we have for it beyond trying to be the best person we can, and achieving the most we can? a central part of that is overcoming ones flaws. It behooves every one of us to strive to overcome any and all obstacles towards being the best you possibly can, be those in your life, or in your own head. Autism is one such obstacle, perhaps the largest in my life, but i will be damned if i allow myself to be weak enough to let it rule over me. there is No handicap it can force upon me that will not endeavor to force away from myself to be the best i possibly can. I've seen all the naive propaganda about how being Autistic makes you "special" from groups like the British NAS, and i can't bring myself to buy into it. It is nothing more complicated and a malign curse thrust on me by chance and i will not let it dictate what i am capable of. We get one singlar shot at life before it all ends forever, and i refuse to accept that MY chance, and ANYONE'S single chance should be corrupted from the very moment of birth, By any form of mental disability.
Striving with one's every waking moment to overcome is the only option.
that being said, if any of the faithful in the world are right and we meet some kind of supreme being after death, i'm punching him in the face.
Perfectly Reasonable:
Introspective Emily bends my suspension of disbelief. I mean, have we ever heard Raven talk like that?
Part of being cutely chirpy and weird is never wondering why you're cutely chirpy and weird.
ReindeerFlotilla:
--- Quote from: CM_albion on 09 Jul 2015, 17:34 ---I can respect your greater degree of life experience, and your stance. rather than debate which of us is objectively right, i will state my case in answer to your question. who knows, maybe in 20 years i'll see it your way.
I take that veiw, because, in my opinion, Flaws are just that, flaws. they are wrong things, abnormalities if you will. We as humans get only one life in this world, so what other use do we have for it beyond trying to be the best person we can, and achieving the most we can? a central part of that is overcoming ones flaws. It behooves every one of us to strive to overcome any and all obstacles towards being the best you possibly can, be those in your life, or in your own head. Autism is one such obstacle, perhaps the largest in my life, but i will be damned if i allow myself to be weak enough to let it rule over me. there is No handicap it can force upon me that will not endeavor to force away from myself to be the best i possibly can. I've seen all the naive propaganda about how being Autistic makes you "special" from groups like the British NAS, and i can't bring myself to buy into it. It is nothing more complicated and a malign curse thrust on me by chance and i will not let it dictate what i am capable of. We get one singlar shot at life before it all ends forever, and i refuse to accept that MY chance, and ANYONE'S single chance should be corrupted from the very moment of birth, By any form of mental disability.
Striving with one's every waking moment to overcome is the only option.
that being said, if any of the faithful in the world are right and we meet some kind of supreme being after death, i'm punching him in the face.
--- End quote ---
Perhaps. Perhaps.
OTOH, flaws may not be wrong things. They may, instead be value judgments. Just because the majority assigns a value to a thing, it doesn't follow that everyone should or that the value is reasonable.
Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution says I'm only .6 human. Is that flaw on my part?
We're all flawed. We're all broken in our own, beautiful, unique snowflake way. We do only get one shot, and we aren't boilogically capable of living long enough to correct all the flaws. The idea that I should improve myself, I guess it bore some fruit, but it was also the single most destructive, time wasting, and futile idea anyone ever put in my head.
Sometimes I wonder about it. I certainly benefit, even today, from some of that, but at what cost. My art method works so well that I have to continually remind people how I do it, lest they feel cheated finding out from someone else. That's the curse of excessive perfectionism. But if I'd been willing to act earlier, rather than waiting years trying to actually reach perfect, I'd probably be happier.
Too many times, I've put myself aside to accommodate friends, and it has never worked out. It just leads to them taking for granted. I had to give that up. For my sanity. Help people, sure. No problem. Stop being who I am for their comfort? No.
There are two ways to get ahead in life. Start ahead and cheat. Starting ahead is obvious. As for cheating, that starts with recognizing that one person's pleasure is another's poison. Flaws are just value judgments. It's better to look past that and figure out what you can use, what can be exploited, and what you can live with. Self-improvement is meaningless unless you've looked inward and built your own meter. Trying to use society's won't work because that goal post is always in motion.
Playing by the rules, as opposed to cheating, will only grind you down, because that is their purpose. To stifle dissent, to effect control over the masses.
Emily isn't struggling with non-function, beyond a worrying habit of summoning elder gods. She's not fighting an inner demon (unless she secretly is an elder god). I do respect your struggle. As I said before, it may be the best, most right choice for you. But, and I say this as a guy whose only qualification is "hasn't died yet," it will serve you well (especially in that capacity of social function) to keep an open mind as far as how others muddle through from birth to telomere depletion.
hedgie:
--- Quote from: amykathleen on 09 Jul 2015, 15:42 ---1. I love Emily's facial expression in the last panel. She's all sassy and it's great.
2. I'm happy to see a text-heavy strip in the new format. I've missed the text-heavy style of QC since the format change.
--- End quote ---
I think that the text needed to be rather heavy here, just for what Emily is trying to communicate. Jeph seems to always hate his art style, or other things about his work, which I think makes him a better creator in some ways, since it means that even if something "works" well, he'll question it.
The thing about this strip that I have found most interesting is the contrast betwixt Emily and Clin-ton. They both have problems dealing with social interaction, but have reacted to them in different ways.
Heranje:
--- Quote from: CM_albion on 09 Jul 2015, 16:09 ---In time, i have learned that i have my quirks and that i can accept them, and so can others. but i also learned restraint. because that's the most important thing. while the world does need to accept you, you also need to accept the world. you give a little, you play down your differences, you make the effort to act polite and respectable and with dignity, because if you don't you're like a immature child screaming that the world is not exactly how you want it. it's fine to be yourself around friends, its the best place to be yourself, but generally, you need to make the effort to overcome your flaws. you do not say, "my flaws are a part of my positives, it's a complete package, take it or leave it."
--- End quote ---
I logged in for the first time in years (just look at my av, I think I made that when I was 16 - all of 9 yrs ago) to say that I think you're right about a lot of this - but there needs to be a middle ground. And somehow I've launched into a big explanation of my life story to explain that so pls bear with me.
I've always been kind of a weird person. As a kid, I was targeted by my classmates because of that - I always refused peer pressure and never made an effort to fit in with the crowd or even compromise ("I don't want to play that game and I don't care that you all want to play it, I won't"), I would forget other kids' birthday parties because I was caught up in a book, I used "weird", "too big" vocabulary, I was the nerdy girl in class who would tell our teacher if she forgot to give us an assignment (much to the anger, of course, of the other kids). This all led to bullying, and not having many friends (actually, precisely 1 friend) - which in turn led me to take a very defensive "take me or leave me" attitude, where I basically thought "I am who I am, if people don't like me that's too bad for them, I'm just going to keep being me." And the thing is, as a kid who had anyway been singled out by my peers as "the one we don't like/bully", that was a very healthy attitude for me. It enabled me to still love and accept myself and live in my own way without worrying about how I was perceived by my peers because I'd decided their opinion didn't matter to me.
But when I went out into the other schools and contexts, it was with a defensive attitude assuming at the get-go that people weren't going to like me, still refusing to compromise or do anything to fit in/go along with the crowd which at some point became an excuse for not trying new experiences. I made friends, but was still very shut-in, and it took a friendship with social butterfly extrovert and moving to another country to finally teach me that no, everyone wasn't going to automatically dislike me the second we met, and assuming they would only led me to self-sabotage; and that it's not a terrible thing and betrayal of your own identity to make some effort to fit in, to downplay some of your eccentricities for "public consumption" and sometimes just go along with the crowd instead of always taking your own path. When I started being willing to compromise, my quality of life drastically improved - I suddenly was making lots of friends, and they liked me precisely because I had that hard core of owning and being comfortable and confident in who I was, even with a bit of "softening."
But the thing is, you can compromise and you can "soften" your oddities and flaws to make interactions with other people easier - I agree that stubbornly going your own way no matter what is not a good thing - but at the end, it is still very healthy to keep a core of "take me or leave me." Otherwise, you run the risk of basing your self-worth too much on the perception of others, and the truth is that no matter how much you try to bend and compromise, there are some people who just won't like you. The truth is that no matter how much you work on your flaws (working on your flaws is a good thing!), you're never going to eliminate them all - nobody manages to be a perfect person, everyone has flaws. And you have to be able to look at those flaws you can't eliminate, and the people that can't accept you for them, and the people that see something that you see as an asset and a part of yourself you don't want to lose as a crucial flaw, and say "hey, that's who I am, take me or leave me." You have to not let those people's opinions, or those "flaws" you can't get rid of, ruin your self-worth and make you feel like you need to keep changing until you're "perfect". Because you will never be perfect - none of us will.
This has nothing to do with QC directly I guess but I think Emily and what she's saying here are awesome. Own yourself and your weirdness, Emily. You go girl.
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