![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
webcomic reviews that no one asked for
because of Reasons TM i decided to read all of Minna Sundberg's back catalog, enjoy
A Redtail's Dream
The premise: Due to Finnish Pantheon Shenanigans TM, wrought by one of said pantheon's youngest/naughtiest/trickster-iest members, a whole village and all of its people have been spirited into the dream world, with no way home. Our lil' trickster diety doesn't have the ability to intervene in the dream world himself (at least, not without tipping off the other gods/spirits about exactly what bullshit he's been getting up to), but luckily, a mortal dude (Hannu) and his dog (Ville) happened to be wandering just outside the village when the spiriting happened, and thus, trickster!diety press-gangs Hannu and Ville into traveling the dream world to save the villagers.
The art is gorgeous, and the primary reason I wanted to read. I'm also really into mythological shenanigans, but the handling of that rich source material is a little disappointing here. Finnish gods and mythic creatures are dropped into the narrative by name, but their powers/backstories/connections-to-the-world are rarely actually elaborated on, and usually only serve a role in a fetch quest sort of thing ("kill this monster so we can save these villagers," "catch this mythic fish so we can save these other villagers", etc).
There is however, a fantastically weird tension between Hannu and Ville—this part in particular is just exquisite. Hannu's been a bit of a selfish brat throughout the narrative, but here we see him reflecting on a childhood incident with a callousness that suggests something really quite twisted in him—and Ville, his loyal and faithful dog, is hearing about this all for the very first time (due to his dreamworld-capacity for speaking human language). Ville's obvious horror—and his fierce determination to never think of it again—is such a raw, awful thing, given the texture of their relationship and the power dynamic there. That theme is developed a little more, but not quite resolved, in a way that feels weird and uncomfortable but also... interesting? Is it's as if it borrowed some aspect of the weird, timeless, capricious cruelty of the gods that we see in some pagan myth, and put a sliver of it in Hannu—and just... let it sit. No particular judgment either way; Hannu is just this kind of guy and that's that.
I dug it. It helps that, while some of the narrative beats are meh, the ending really does come together in a satisfying way.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
The premise: Ninety years ago, a ghastly (and distinctly weird) pandemic swept the world. All mammals aside from cats were vulnerable, and those infected either died horribly or transformed into unsettlingly disfigured beasts and trolls. Iceland, with her cold winters and easily-defensible borders, was able to survive, and is now the largest and most populated country in the world. There's also small pockets of humanity surviving in Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden—either in small cities that have managed to secure themselves via strict quarantine procedures and vigilant border patrols, or else scattered tiny little archipelagoes throughout the lakes and the oceans—each settlement small enough it can be wiped away in a week by ill luck, but also isolated enough that ill luck won't afflict their neighbors.
All the rest of the world is—silent. No sign of human life in decades.
And thus a small, Louis-and-Clark-esque expedition is arranged, to venture out and see what remains.
It's a haunting, haunted world, and Sundberg draws it with haunting beauty. Her art has leveled up noticeably since A Redtail's Dream, and continues to level up over the course of the comic. I tend to read comics more for the writing and the vibes than the art, but I kept pausing on various pages to admire a beautiful landscape here, or a beautiful visual turn-of-phrase there.
The story attempts to have an ensemble cast, but really, Lalli is the story's beating heart. A talented mage and night-scout from rural Finland, Lalli has the stolid dutifulness of a military veteran (when it comes to his job), mixed with a strangely-tween-ish aloof/bratty streak (when it comes to any other interpersonal interactions), all overlaid with a sort of daydreamer-forgetfulness and general naivete. (A night-scout with his unique skills, after all, can act as weird as he wants, so long as he's doing good work—it would be easy to write the AU where this guy's a sysadmin, haha.)
He's also on the aloof side for a more practical reason—while all the other member of the expedition speak languages that are at least moderately-mutually-intelligible, Lalli only speaks Finnish, and thus can only speak with/through his trilingual cousin, Tuuri.
(The way the language stuff is handled is fantastic, by the way. Their speech bubbles are labeled with little flags, when understanding which language is being spoken matters, so you'll have delightful complicated scenes where everyone's struggling to understand the Dane, or Tuuri's fibbing a bit while translating for Lalli, and so on... it's a really fun and fluid way to handle it.)
And, ah, the tension between these two cousins is exquisite. Tuuri leapt at the expedition the first chance she got, having dreamt about this kind of adventure her whole life. Lalli was indifferent. Tuuri doesn't mean to use Lalli, but she kind of does; one gets the sense that she was chosen partially because she can bring a Finnish mage along. Lalli is difficult to read on that front—is he just a very passive get-along go-along guy in this way? or (what I personally think), does he know he's being used a bit, and just decides he's fine with it? Because, damn, that's the good messy narrative stuff. Sometimes someone uses you, someone you love very much, and you just decide it's fine. And you have to keep deciding, and keep deciding, until...
SPOILERS BEGIN HERE.
I figured Tuuri was doomed from the moment we're told that (1) she's not immune to the illness, and (2) she's the only one who speaks Lalli's language, because, like, c'mon, that's How To Set Up A Tragedy 101. And in a catharsis-y kind of way, I was really looking forward to seeing that play out—not out of any lack of love for Tuuri, but because it seemed like such a perfectly awful thing to happen to Lalli in particular. The way the death of someone close to you can sever your connection to others as well, reflected in such a painfully material way. The way you learn the difference between solitude and loneliness, once the person who made you feel not-lonely disappears—compounded with learning that in the loneliest place in the world, out in the middle of this silent world.
Those final pages of chapter 15 are the most transcendent in the entire comic. And while I'm a little disappointed Lalli's solitude wasn't more absolute (his insistence on staying with Tuuri's body until he could be sure her soul had passed on was perfect, but there's a plot contrivance that lets him communicate in natural language with Emil too quickly), I'm glad I read the comic for that bit alone.
SPOILERS END HERE.
The story's also in good form when it's focusing on smaller arcs and slight details. The first glimpse of Lalli's magic, a simple prayer for a moonlit night, is beautiful. And then there's the quiet sputtering of Lalli's luonto (animal spirit), after a different spell of his is spent. And there's a lovely mini-arc around chapters 7 and 8 which feature Lalli and Emil taking on a dog-beast, rich with wordless communication (because, of course, there can be no words between them).
Overall, though—these lovely parts aside, gorgeous art and ambitious worldbuilding aside—the thing overall doesn't quite hold together. It tries to mix slice-of-life charming-adventurer vibes alongside environmental-horror-and-postapocalypse vibes, with limited success—it reminded me a bit of Dark Lord of Derkholm in that respect, a book so tonally strange it put me off Diana Wynne Jones entirely for like a decade. And the characters, outside of Lalli and maybe Emil, aren't deep or textured enough to hold interest on their own. There's so much potential there, the pieces are all in place—which is probably why, skimming the top SSSS fanfics, I was immediately able to find a wonderfully vivid, dynamic character who was recognizable as Sigrun, but she was so much more interesting than anything we get from the Sigrun in the source material. It really makes you wish Sundberg had a beta reader or an editor, someone with an eye for writing—as-is, the story's often dropping revelatory details about characters at the last minute, throwing out inconsistent/contradictory details that make it hard to read their personalities, and generally having voices that sound a little too similar. But it's close! Gah, I can see why fanfic writers got hyped about this one.
And these inconsistencies pile up in the larger plot as well. I'm willing to let a lot of worldbuilding inconsistencies slide, for the sake of a good time, but by the end of Adventure 1 I was scratching my head about how some of the setups—which I assumed would be big, deliberately-planned out things!—were fizzling in ways that didn't make sense. Initially, there's tremendous ambiguity about whether magery is even real or not; by the end of Adventure 1, we've seen so many flashy, obvious instances of magic that Sweden's staunch atheism starts to look like nonsensical flat-eartherness. Whether the adventure is meant to be seen as a suicide mission (and thus all these people are a little unhinged for wanting to go), or some very official and cool and cutting-edge thing (and thus these people got a great honor by getting picked to go), seems to flip-flop frequently. Stuff like that tends to dilute one's faith that the story knows where it's going.
Which—I don't mind a story that meanders; some of my favorite bits involved the really unconventional kind of pacing you can get in webcomic form, with a creator just following their whims. But there's a difference between meandering and walking in circles, and by the time I was a little ways into Adventure 2, I decided I'd probably seen all the best stuff and parted ways.
Lovely People
This is the first comic Sundberg published after her conversion to Christianity.
The whole Black-Mirror-does-a-social-credit-system thing is a fine enough concept for a comic, and the art's super-cute, but man does the execution ever not work here. The main problem is not the shoehorned Christian themes (though that is a problem; I was kind of lmao'ing at the elaborate Peter-denying-Christ speech coming from the mouth of some guy who had... allegedly read the entirety of the Bible... during the length of a single commute home...???), so much as the lack of psychological/sociological depth. We know that reading the Bible deducts points from your social credit score in this world. But the Bible may as well be a Macguffin; at no point do we see why or how it's a threat to the existing order. And it's not even clear what the existing order wants. Like, it's some kind of totalitarian government, sure, but what is it doing all this oppression for? "Crass consumerism" seems to be the comic's answer, and like, sure, but... why this method? how is dissent handled? how is stuff decided? It's just incoherent and shallow.
The one bit of the narrative that was resonant (this author seems to always manage at least one really nice bit in her stories) is Peony's utter loneliness at the end, when she's pushed all her friends away for the sake of keeping her precious status, and she's sitting in her home filled with very nice things, fires off a sadpost about how hard it is to go through a friend breakup—and a stampede of internet commenters come in to reassure her. Oh you're perfect. Oh it's their loss. They are all doing the perfectly "nice" thing, they are doing exactly what she expected they were, and it is exactly wrong. Not a new story, sure, but you really feel the horror of her alienation in that moment, the horror of always knowing exactly what people will say before they say it. One could imagine a story, a Christian story even, that grounds its power and interest in people's unpredictability and fallen nature. The social credit system enforces "niceness" at scale, with the result that society is perfectly pleasant for anyone who isn't marked as undesirable. And the denouement could be a resounding counterexample to that—a demonstration that any effort at such vast, inhuman engineering will pale compared to the genuine connection one gets from an authentic relationship with God, and by proxy, other humans, who, even with their foibles and cringe moments, their social-credit-killing vices, even with their very real sins, can do something no credit score can do: see you. In the real, no-kidding way that makes life worth living. Something like that could've worked, I think, beautiful in its own right and decidedly Evangelical in its themes.
(And, haha, now that I'm typing that out I'm actually kind of angry, because I'm realizing that not one of the people in the story with a shitty social credit score do anything that could be described as a real sin. They say mean things about the government, or else they read the Bible, and that's... literally it! What the hell! The problem with this dystopia should be that it has no place for mercy or forgiveness or sincere feeling, and Christianity at its best is a screeching rebuttal to that line of thinking: God loves even the most wretched among us; thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, he that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone. But the problem, as presented, seems to suggest that the only problem is which specific items the credit system overlords choose to condemn. And man, fuck that entirely, religion or no.)
Alternatively, if Sundberg's committed to a new Christian direction for her comics, I think it'd be easy to play to her strengths. There's plenty of stories from the Bible that would be rendered beautifully in her art style, plenty touches of the mythic that she could evoke—do the 1956 Ten Commandments thing in comic form.
But, uh, that's not we got here, sigh. I'll admit the part of me that still feels some tenderness for my Baptist childhood was really curious to see how Sundberg tackled this brand new world of hers; there's nothing in sincere religious feeling that's fundamentally incompatible with good art and storytelling. But this is more in the spirit of Tim LaHaye's Left Behind, haha.
A Redtail's Dream
The premise: Due to Finnish Pantheon Shenanigans TM, wrought by one of said pantheon's youngest/naughtiest/trickster-iest members, a whole village and all of its people have been spirited into the dream world, with no way home. Our lil' trickster diety doesn't have the ability to intervene in the dream world himself (at least, not without tipping off the other gods/spirits about exactly what bullshit he's been getting up to), but luckily, a mortal dude (Hannu) and his dog (Ville) happened to be wandering just outside the village when the spiriting happened, and thus, trickster!diety press-gangs Hannu and Ville into traveling the dream world to save the villagers.
The art is gorgeous, and the primary reason I wanted to read. I'm also really into mythological shenanigans, but the handling of that rich source material is a little disappointing here. Finnish gods and mythic creatures are dropped into the narrative by name, but their powers/backstories/connections-to-the-world are rarely actually elaborated on, and usually only serve a role in a fetch quest sort of thing ("kill this monster so we can save these villagers," "catch this mythic fish so we can save these other villagers", etc).
There is however, a fantastically weird tension between Hannu and Ville—this part in particular is just exquisite. Hannu's been a bit of a selfish brat throughout the narrative, but here we see him reflecting on a childhood incident with a callousness that suggests something really quite twisted in him—and Ville, his loyal and faithful dog, is hearing about this all for the very first time (due to his dreamworld-capacity for speaking human language). Ville's obvious horror—and his fierce determination to never think of it again—is such a raw, awful thing, given the texture of their relationship and the power dynamic there. That theme is developed a little more, but not quite resolved, in a way that feels weird and uncomfortable but also... interesting? Is it's as if it borrowed some aspect of the weird, timeless, capricious cruelty of the gods that we see in some pagan myth, and put a sliver of it in Hannu—and just... let it sit. No particular judgment either way; Hannu is just this kind of guy and that's that.
I dug it. It helps that, while some of the narrative beats are meh, the ending really does come together in a satisfying way.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
The premise: Ninety years ago, a ghastly (and distinctly weird) pandemic swept the world. All mammals aside from cats were vulnerable, and those infected either died horribly or transformed into unsettlingly disfigured beasts and trolls. Iceland, with her cold winters and easily-defensible borders, was able to survive, and is now the largest and most populated country in the world. There's also small pockets of humanity surviving in Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden—either in small cities that have managed to secure themselves via strict quarantine procedures and vigilant border patrols, or else scattered tiny little archipelagoes throughout the lakes and the oceans—each settlement small enough it can be wiped away in a week by ill luck, but also isolated enough that ill luck won't afflict their neighbors.
All the rest of the world is—silent. No sign of human life in decades.
And thus a small, Louis-and-Clark-esque expedition is arranged, to venture out and see what remains.
It's a haunting, haunted world, and Sundberg draws it with haunting beauty. Her art has leveled up noticeably since A Redtail's Dream, and continues to level up over the course of the comic. I tend to read comics more for the writing and the vibes than the art, but I kept pausing on various pages to admire a beautiful landscape here, or a beautiful visual turn-of-phrase there.
The story attempts to have an ensemble cast, but really, Lalli is the story's beating heart. A talented mage and night-scout from rural Finland, Lalli has the stolid dutifulness of a military veteran (when it comes to his job), mixed with a strangely-tween-ish aloof/bratty streak (when it comes to any other interpersonal interactions), all overlaid with a sort of daydreamer-forgetfulness and general naivete. (A night-scout with his unique skills, after all, can act as weird as he wants, so long as he's doing good work—it would be easy to write the AU where this guy's a sysadmin, haha.)
He's also on the aloof side for a more practical reason—while all the other member of the expedition speak languages that are at least moderately-mutually-intelligible, Lalli only speaks Finnish, and thus can only speak with/through his trilingual cousin, Tuuri.
(The way the language stuff is handled is fantastic, by the way. Their speech bubbles are labeled with little flags, when understanding which language is being spoken matters, so you'll have delightful complicated scenes where everyone's struggling to understand the Dane, or Tuuri's fibbing a bit while translating for Lalli, and so on... it's a really fun and fluid way to handle it.)
And, ah, the tension between these two cousins is exquisite. Tuuri leapt at the expedition the first chance she got, having dreamt about this kind of adventure her whole life. Lalli was indifferent. Tuuri doesn't mean to use Lalli, but she kind of does; one gets the sense that she was chosen partially because she can bring a Finnish mage along. Lalli is difficult to read on that front—is he just a very passive get-along go-along guy in this way? or (what I personally think), does he know he's being used a bit, and just decides he's fine with it? Because, damn, that's the good messy narrative stuff. Sometimes someone uses you, someone you love very much, and you just decide it's fine. And you have to keep deciding, and keep deciding, until...
SPOILERS BEGIN HERE.
I figured Tuuri was doomed from the moment we're told that (1) she's not immune to the illness, and (2) she's the only one who speaks Lalli's language, because, like, c'mon, that's How To Set Up A Tragedy 101. And in a catharsis-y kind of way, I was really looking forward to seeing that play out—not out of any lack of love for Tuuri, but because it seemed like such a perfectly awful thing to happen to Lalli in particular. The way the death of someone close to you can sever your connection to others as well, reflected in such a painfully material way. The way you learn the difference between solitude and loneliness, once the person who made you feel not-lonely disappears—compounded with learning that in the loneliest place in the world, out in the middle of this silent world.
Those final pages of chapter 15 are the most transcendent in the entire comic. And while I'm a little disappointed Lalli's solitude wasn't more absolute (his insistence on staying with Tuuri's body until he could be sure her soul had passed on was perfect, but there's a plot contrivance that lets him communicate in natural language with Emil too quickly), I'm glad I read the comic for that bit alone.
SPOILERS END HERE.
The story's also in good form when it's focusing on smaller arcs and slight details. The first glimpse of Lalli's magic, a simple prayer for a moonlit night, is beautiful. And then there's the quiet sputtering of Lalli's luonto (animal spirit), after a different spell of his is spent. And there's a lovely mini-arc around chapters 7 and 8 which feature Lalli and Emil taking on a dog-beast, rich with wordless communication (because, of course, there can be no words between them).
Overall, though—these lovely parts aside, gorgeous art and ambitious worldbuilding aside—the thing overall doesn't quite hold together. It tries to mix slice-of-life charming-adventurer vibes alongside environmental-horror-and-postapocalypse vibes, with limited success—it reminded me a bit of Dark Lord of Derkholm in that respect, a book so tonally strange it put me off Diana Wynne Jones entirely for like a decade. And the characters, outside of Lalli and maybe Emil, aren't deep or textured enough to hold interest on their own. There's so much potential there, the pieces are all in place—which is probably why, skimming the top SSSS fanfics, I was immediately able to find a wonderfully vivid, dynamic character who was recognizable as Sigrun, but she was so much more interesting than anything we get from the Sigrun in the source material. It really makes you wish Sundberg had a beta reader or an editor, someone with an eye for writing—as-is, the story's often dropping revelatory details about characters at the last minute, throwing out inconsistent/contradictory details that make it hard to read their personalities, and generally having voices that sound a little too similar. But it's close! Gah, I can see why fanfic writers got hyped about this one.
And these inconsistencies pile up in the larger plot as well. I'm willing to let a lot of worldbuilding inconsistencies slide, for the sake of a good time, but by the end of Adventure 1 I was scratching my head about how some of the setups—which I assumed would be big, deliberately-planned out things!—were fizzling in ways that didn't make sense. Initially, there's tremendous ambiguity about whether magery is even real or not; by the end of Adventure 1, we've seen so many flashy, obvious instances of magic that Sweden's staunch atheism starts to look like nonsensical flat-eartherness. Whether the adventure is meant to be seen as a suicide mission (and thus all these people are a little unhinged for wanting to go), or some very official and cool and cutting-edge thing (and thus these people got a great honor by getting picked to go), seems to flip-flop frequently. Stuff like that tends to dilute one's faith that the story knows where it's going.
Which—I don't mind a story that meanders; some of my favorite bits involved the really unconventional kind of pacing you can get in webcomic form, with a creator just following their whims. But there's a difference between meandering and walking in circles, and by the time I was a little ways into Adventure 2, I decided I'd probably seen all the best stuff and parted ways.
Lovely People
This is the first comic Sundberg published after her conversion to Christianity.
The whole Black-Mirror-does-a-social-credit-system thing is a fine enough concept for a comic, and the art's super-cute, but man does the execution ever not work here. The main problem is not the shoehorned Christian themes (though that is a problem; I was kind of lmao'ing at the elaborate Peter-denying-Christ speech coming from the mouth of some guy who had... allegedly read the entirety of the Bible... during the length of a single commute home...???), so much as the lack of psychological/sociological depth. We know that reading the Bible deducts points from your social credit score in this world. But the Bible may as well be a Macguffin; at no point do we see why or how it's a threat to the existing order. And it's not even clear what the existing order wants. Like, it's some kind of totalitarian government, sure, but what is it doing all this oppression for? "Crass consumerism" seems to be the comic's answer, and like, sure, but... why this method? how is dissent handled? how is stuff decided? It's just incoherent and shallow.
The one bit of the narrative that was resonant (this author seems to always manage at least one really nice bit in her stories) is Peony's utter loneliness at the end, when she's pushed all her friends away for the sake of keeping her precious status, and she's sitting in her home filled with very nice things, fires off a sadpost about how hard it is to go through a friend breakup—and a stampede of internet commenters come in to reassure her. Oh you're perfect. Oh it's their loss. They are all doing the perfectly "nice" thing, they are doing exactly what she expected they were, and it is exactly wrong. Not a new story, sure, but you really feel the horror of her alienation in that moment, the horror of always knowing exactly what people will say before they say it. One could imagine a story, a Christian story even, that grounds its power and interest in people's unpredictability and fallen nature. The social credit system enforces "niceness" at scale, with the result that society is perfectly pleasant for anyone who isn't marked as undesirable. And the denouement could be a resounding counterexample to that—a demonstration that any effort at such vast, inhuman engineering will pale compared to the genuine connection one gets from an authentic relationship with God, and by proxy, other humans, who, even with their foibles and cringe moments, their social-credit-killing vices, even with their very real sins, can do something no credit score can do: see you. In the real, no-kidding way that makes life worth living. Something like that could've worked, I think, beautiful in its own right and decidedly Evangelical in its themes.
(And, haha, now that I'm typing that out I'm actually kind of angry, because I'm realizing that not one of the people in the story with a shitty social credit score do anything that could be described as a real sin. They say mean things about the government, or else they read the Bible, and that's... literally it! What the hell! The problem with this dystopia should be that it has no place for mercy or forgiveness or sincere feeling, and Christianity at its best is a screeching rebuttal to that line of thinking: God loves even the most wretched among us; thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, he that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone. But the problem, as presented, seems to suggest that the only problem is which specific items the credit system overlords choose to condemn. And man, fuck that entirely, religion or no.)
Alternatively, if Sundberg's committed to a new Christian direction for her comics, I think it'd be easy to play to her strengths. There's plenty of stories from the Bible that would be rendered beautifully in her art style, plenty touches of the mythic that she could evoke—do the 1956 Ten Commandments thing in comic form.
But, uh, that's not we got here, sigh. I'll admit the part of me that still feels some tenderness for my Baptist childhood was really curious to see how Sundberg tackled this brand new world of hers; there's nothing in sincere religious feeling that's fundamentally incompatible with good art and storytelling. But this is more in the spirit of Tim LaHaye's Left Behind, haha.
Tuuri, SSSS fanfic, Dark Lord of Derkholm etc
Personally (and this is very much agree to disagree, lol) Tuuri's death was a bigger blow to me than the other things you point out. Though I agree about a lot of stuff fizzling out toward the end of Book 1. I think while you (and tbh most of the fandom) find Lalli the most interesting character, I was really invested in Tuuri and her story. And while, as you point out, it was the perfect set up for tragedy, I just feel robbed of the rest of her story!! She had so much more to do.
What was the fanfic you saw? I browsed the tag a few years ago but don't remember anything catching my eye. I should give it another look though.
Finally -- I think I know what you mean about tonal inconsistency in DWJ, i found it offputting in *Archer's Goon* and *The Homeword Bounders*. Sometimes she's just weird. (I think this weirdness was *perfectly balanced* in *Deep Secret* though, it's my favorite of her books for this and several other reasons!) I don't remember having issues with it in Darklord of Derkholm?? TBH I don't remember the book well as a whole, but what I do remember was a parodic tone that worked for me pretty consistently, along with a family adventure story that I really liked.
But different strokes for different folks and all that. Again, thanks! I really appreciate your reviews here.
Re: Tuuri, SSSS fanfic, Dark Lord of Derkholm etc
being bummed about Tuuri's death is totally legitimate. while i knew it was coming, i was pretty surprised it happened so *early*, narratively-speaking—i liked what effect it had on Lalli, but it could've have had even greater impact if it had happened much later, after we'd gotten to know her better. she really could've had a lot more happening in her own right! (except for the part where, it couldn't have happened too much later, since there only ended up being 2 adventures instead of the initial plan that sounded like maybe ~8 adventures?)
i actually just went to ao3, sorted SSSS by # of bookmarks, and skimmed the top few there! (this is my usual trick for diving into a new fandom—i think it gets a little better results than sorting by kudos—though it will still be a bit skewed. still, totally good for quick sampling) the one with sigrun i liked is this one :) (i'm definitely planning to dig in more over the next few weeks; let me know if you find anything yourself!)
Dark Lord of Derkholm is an odd one because (1) i read it in my young teens, (2) i had NO IDEA who this dianna wynne jones person was, and (3) i don’t think it’d entirely clicked for me yet that books could be… funny? (i know that sounds weird but i mostly read edgelord stuff in my early teens, lol)
so it’s been a while, but from what i remember, it took me a while to pick up “oh this is supposed to be kind of goofy/parody,” and even once that part clicked for me i was still kind of confused because it seemed to be taking its premise really seriously at times, so i couldn’t quite tell what level of seriousness i was supposed to be treating things with (and that all could just be teen-me being bad at reading comprehension or whatever)… but then there’s this one scene that’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, but there's a scene where one of the female protags is definitely implied to have been gang raped (or some kind of group sexual assault?), and she's super-traumatized in the aftermath, and then a dragon sort of does a mind-magic thing to make her feel less traumatized, and then… that's it! new chapter, and it’s back to D&D shenanigans on the next page (???)
so yeah, everything before that was merely "meh" but that one part really threw me. not because i’m generally triggered by that sort of thing, but because it was so weird to switch so quickly from “oh shit what the fuck” back to hijinks that i was like, ok i can’t figure out what this is doing, i’m gonna finish this book because i’m a completionist but i’m not a fan lol
then an entire decade later i FINALLY read Howl’s Moving Castle and was like, ok, Derkholm just clearly was her having an off day, this person DOES know how to write, lol. but i actually haven’t ventured very far past that! i really should read more of her stuff someday, just so many books and so little time, ALAS
no subject
I loved "A Red Tail's Dream". Nice art, interesting story - a boy and his dog! And demi gods at play.
SSSS was cool at first but sort of lagged at the end for me. I found the art was a bit inconsistent - beautiful landscapes, horrifyingly detailed monsters, then cartoonishly drawn people. And oh my god the Rash *things* - even the dead ones - nightmare fuel.
"Lovely People" - I mean, I get it: she's a fresh and bouncy convert but it reads like a Chick Tract with cute bunnies. Ugh. Pretty but I don't want to be preached to.
Honestly, I liked Red Tail the best. I should check to see if Minna will reprint some hard copies.
-m
no subject
no subject
Tuuri's death was a big enough bummer that I drifted away from Stand Still Stay Silent after that. It didn't help that the author had previously said something (can't recall what exactly) that a lot of readers (mis)interpreted as her saying she wouldn't kill any main characters. So I ended up in the camp that spent most of that sequence going "Tuuri looks super doomed... but Minna said she wouldn't? so this will definitely work out somehow?". And then it didn't.
no subject
Also Dark Lord of Derkholm is actually one of my favorite DWJ books, though the weird blink-and-you'll-miss-it sexual assault thing that is never picked up again is a real moment of DWJ WHY!!!
no subject
I followed Minna to SSSS, despite the fact that I don't tend to like post-apocalyptic stories or zombie stories, because I liked her art and writing so much and found the initial stuff she shared intriguing. But between hiatuses and the story being kind of boring (it came out over ~9 years), and my life stuff, I dropped it multiple times (I feel you on bowing out lol). I did love Tuuri and felt so bad for her story, and loved Lalli. Honestly my favorite character was Emil lol I just found him fascinating (I like fun dicks lol), and enjoyed his dynamic with Lalli. I wanted to write fanfic of them for years.
TLDR sorry this got long, feel free to delete/ignore, but since you're curious about folks who followed her for some time, and some of this is vague because I wasn't following the fandom that closely at the time, here's some things I can recall: Minna, for many years, had a deep love of video games, and wanted to make one of her own, similar to the premise of SSSS (with like a disease outbreak, survival horror, zombies, it'd all be hand-drawn art as far as I was aware), and also I think in the vein of Dead Space. She actually shared bits of stuff she was working on while making SSSS at the same time - she did twitch streams where she worked on various projects - including art, maps, etc.
I think Minna started talking about what at least became LP ~year or so before she released the comic in March 2021. I started watching her streams during the pandemic, and saw her and fans talking about her "anthropomorphic bunny comic" (I don't think it yet had a title), and no one really knew what the plot was so far as I was aware, other than it dealt with technology somehow. I think she might have dropped the phrase "social credit system" but she didn't really explain what it was. All I could recall were these cute drawings of bunny rabbits she'd sometimes share and/or work on.
The pandemic and life got away from me, and I finally went back to SSSS to "again" catch up on it in June 2021, and saw LP was out. I went in hopeful, since I loved Redtail, liked her work generally, and hey, it was free, that's awesome! I stayed confident (if increasingly confused) up until that ending page, where I legit thought it was maybe a really gross joke?? Or just something I didn't understand?? Like to each their own, but Minna was an atheist until her conversation, at least leaned leftist in her talks and streams over the years (might have been a centrist at worst from what I could tell, but well), and this was deeply confusing (I do agree it was incoherent and shallow, I think because the goal WAS a gotcha focus on religion. But maybe I'm just biased in that reading; I also wonder if this wasn't the original premise of the story, and it became a mess in redrafting as she converted but that's a pet theory and maybe wrong because I have no evidence for it). For a lot of people it was the shoehorned in Christianity that was the main problem :/ (though plenty of folks also love it for that), but I do think it would have been acceptable if that wasn't the entire focus or if there was a substantial story in some form, even short, to support it, rather than falling apart for shoehorning. Didn't help that the author ends it by literally telling you that you're a sinner and you need to repent, in a community that included and otherwise welcomed people of many different belief systems.
But anyway, Minna kept Disqus and an active forum for many many years, so I went back and looked to see what I'd missed.
Part of her conversion was her dropping the video game. Which is quite sad, honestly, since she cared so much about it (none of my... deep reaction to LP or her comes from my personal upset about the video game, I had no stake in it, but it was clear SHE loved it). Pandemic isolation so deeply got to her and it not only took her joy but also one of her great loves. I know religion is deeply personal, and I'm glad it seemingly brought her some comfort, and obviously I cannot as a non-Christian person understand it, and of course projects get picked up and dropped as we age, it happens, but honestly, this whole thing is even more tragic to me, particularly with the self-hatred evidenced in her essays about this. It doesn't help that the comic's premise is based in racism and anti-vax conspiracy theories. The social credit system is taken from racist conspiracy theories about Chinese world takeovers.
There was a complete fandom schism: people shocked at the egregious... Evangelicism of it all. Christians welcoming her into the fold. People upset that SSSS might now become very overtly Christian and particularly Evangelical - Minna promised she was not changing it that way, but that she was ending it earlier than planned so that she could move on to other things. There were arguments about religion... it was a mess. But so far as I'm aware it's all still there if you're interested in it. Some interesting discussions anyway, and plenty of very Christian folks on all sides.
One thing that stuck out to me was a comment someone made (on her site) about the marketing for this, and how it's essentially designed as Christian propaganda and that it was intentionally marketed to teenagers on Facebook. Like that was the age demographic and based on how Facebook did ads, it's something she would have had to choose herself. There is nothing on its face that explains this is overtly religious (and I wouldn't realistically expect it to, honestly, considering, but it's just... all in all kind of gross at best that it's being marketed to children).
I don't know if you've stuck around this long, and I'm sorry if this is just not something you wanted to see on your post (and I'll delete if you wish). Feel free to unfriend me if so. I love Redtail and I'm glad you enjoyed it! I also do agree that you can do sincere religious stuff with good art, particularly in a comic style. I've seen lots of it. This was just... no.
no subject
And I don't mind the long comment at all; I really like hearing histories around internet communities & stuff like this, haha. I actually went in knowing that Lovely People was a very explicitly Christian comic (I think it's labeled more clearly on her website now), so I was braced for whatever that entailed—if I had been following her work for a long time, and I hadn't been braced for that, then I can definitely see being (understandably!) disappointed.
Coming in late to the game, without a personal stake in the matter, I was mostly just curious about the effect the conversion had had on her writing & art. I grew up in an evangelical community (though I haven't personally been any variety of Christian for a very very long time), and I'm sort of perennially obsessed with the question of, "why does so much evangelical art/literature/etc suck?" And there's a lot of reasons for that, but there's no inherent reason it couldn't be good. And I was curious if Sundberg would lean into the could-make-for-excellent-art elements of the faith, particularly since many adult converts I know have really interesting/unconventional ways of thinking about their faith. (Like, in terms of material: you basically have this trickster-god right here who shows up from nowhere, flexes on & bamboozles all the local authorities, cheats death, and disappears! You have all these beautifully-wrought passages where this all-powerful being is stanning for the most wretched, despised, and just plain broken people in this society—not just that but promising to make them mighty—that's so cool and interesting and radical, imho.) And these are all things that could resonate far more powerfully than the default "let's derail this plot with an instruction manual for salvation" thing that happened in Lovely People, and also in, like 99.9% of Christian bookstore output, haha. Like, I'm not inherently opposed to proselytization (people can peddle their religions if they want so long as I can ignore them, whatever), but at least don't go for it in such a boring, predictable, hackneyed way. (I guess it's a bit like leaving a fandom and still being salty that no one writes your fave properly, lol.)
But yeah, based on what I read, I'm unsurprised it caused a big schism in her fanbase, heh.
no subject
no subject