#HORROR. THE MOST DYSTOPIAN SHIT I'VE EVER SEEN. YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR OWN IN CASE WE FIND IT USEFUL LATER

[cakemoney]

thinking about the whole robpat!batman movie’s thesis being “shit. fuck. turns out this whole time the legacy of my rage and vengeance-fueled vigilante justice has been enabling domestic terrorism by entitled white men. all along what this city needed and what i needed was healing and extending our hands to our neighbors instead of continuing the cycle of trauma and violence” like the movie put their whole chest into that. it looked at their audience and said to their face “you guys never actually understood what batman is about. you saw the dark brooding aesthetic and the toxic masculinity and the individualistic lonewolfism and you see that as something to aspire to, when the point of batman was always Corruption And Evil Exists Within Those With Power And Money Not In Mental Illness, and by missing that and making it all about yourself you became the villain of this story.” in theaters right in front of batman stans. no wonder robpat was cast for this like i’ve never seen someone pull off self-loathing white man so naturally

[who-do-i-know-this-man]

pre-post-mortem propaganda for Lalli Hotakainen since he's losing bad! (good!!!) Lalli is from Stand Still Stay SIlent, a webcomic that takes place in a "zombie" post-apocalypse story. he's part of a party that goes into The Silent World to find lost books! there are several awesome things that set SSSS apart:

society still exists in a very optimistic way, this is not your everyone-backstabbing-everyone competing-for-safe-spaces type of zombie horror. there are new cultural norms and technology that allow people to live comfortably. it's implied that there may be other outcroppings of civilization outside where the story takes place (Scandinavia).

magic! specifically magic based on Finnish, Icelandic, and Norwegian folklore (although there's probably some Danish stuff that I missed?), and we get to see characters from different countries rely upon their own respective magic (and weird out people from other cultures lol). Lalli himself is a Finnish mage and man is it fun to watch him do his thing :D

characters who are good people with believable flaws and great chemistry. the cast of this comic is so sweet and funny, it really makes you feel for them when the world itself is Terrifying.

ridiculously cool monster designs! big on body horror and just... Good. SSSS has some of the best zombie-monster designs I've ever seen and executes them with incredible artistic skill.

in general this comic absolutely nails tonal shifts from silly character banter and deadpan humor to genuinely disturbing visuals and implications and frankly I think horror as a genre needs to take some notes on how to balance lighthearted moments with awful shit because it really makes the bad stuff hit harder.

Finally, SSSS is finished, with two adventures spanning about 1500 pages altogether! the longer and more serious first adventure is about 2/3 of that, and you can absolutely just read that one. content warnings for death (animal and human), trauma, gore, body horror, and suicide, among some others. the author also ended the comic because she converted to Christianity and she becomes very vocal about it toward the end. nonetheless I think SSSS is amazing and can still be enjoyed, but exercise caution checking out her later work if you have trauma associated with organized religion.

god i tried not to make this long because I can only bear to skim most anti-propaganda myself but tl;dr if you like post-apocalypse/dystopian future stories, SSSS is one you shouldn't miss!

^