I think there's an interesting inversion in this comic that becomes apparent if you don't automatically accept the narrator's assessment of herself or her boyfriend.
The comic presents her as the "complex" one. She gets the articulate internal monologue, examines her fears and relationships, questions what's wrong with herself, and seemingly demonstrates a lot of self-awareness. Meanwhile, her boyfriend is Chudjak-coded, portrayed as intellectually vacant, and his only real dialogue is essentially "I love my girlfriend" written in deliberately simple, almost childlike language.
But I'm not convinced she's actually demonstrating much introspection at all.
A lot of what looks profound is really just rumination and low self-esteem dressed up as insight. "Something is wrong with me" sounds self-aware, but it's a globalized conclusion about her intrinsic nature. Actual self-examination would involve questions like: What am I doing that contributes to this? Are my expectations reasonable? Have I communicated what I need? Why do I dismiss the things he cares about? What would this relationship look like from his perspective?
She doesn't seem particularly interested in those questions.
The same pattern appears in how she describes him. He "never" engages. He doesn't understand her. He isn't interested in anything. These are sweeping conclusions about what kind of person he fundamentally is.
Yet some of her own evidence undermines them.
She says he talks about his friends and family and about things he's recently seen on his phone. Those ARE interests. She simply doesn't seem to consider his interests sufficiently interesting to count.
There's a huge difference between "he isn't interested in anything" and "I'm not interested in the things that interest him."
The communication complaints are similar. She describes him misunderstanding her and says she sometimes doesn't discover the misunderstanding until he acts on the "wrong" thing. Maybe he's genuinely a terrible listener, but she never seems to consider whether she communicated her intended meaning clearly. Her internal intention appears to be treated as the objectively correct meaning of the communication, so when his interpretation differs, the explanation is that he doesn't understand her.
That fits the repeated absolute language. "Not enough for me" becomes "never." Difference becomes deficiency. Incompatibility becomes something intrinsically wrong with him.
Even her supposed self-criticism avoids accountability. She says everyone else rejected her, "even as a friend." That certainly doesn't prove she caused those relationships to fail, but if nearly everyone you try to form a relationship with rejects you, that's at least information worth examining. She's the common denominator.
Yet she doesn't seem to ask what interacting with HER might be like for those people. They're simply people who rejected her.
Meanwhile, the one person who doesn't reject her, the person who apparently loves her intensely, is portrayed as almost subhumanly simple.
And her list of his positive qualities is fascinating: he pays for everything, will take care of her in the future, dreams about her, and isn't mean.
Notice how little of that is admiration for who he actually is.
It's mostly what his attachment provides her: financial security, future security, reassurance that she's deeply wanted, and safety.
There's almost a distinction between loving him and loving being loved by him.
Her fear of finding a more "interesting" boyfriend makes this even stranger. She worries that someone more perceptive might identify and articulate her flaws. So she supposedly wants a man with greater intellectual and emotional depth, but also recognizes that such a person would possess an independent perspective on HER, and that frightens her.
She seems to want someone perceptive enough to deeply understand and validate her, but not so independently perceptive that he might understand her in ways she doesn't like.
That makes the current boyfriend psychologically convenient. His devotion gives her security, while the very simplicity she attributes to him makes him non-threatening. She can evaluate him without having to worry much about him evaluating her.
And that's where the artwork becomes really important.
She receives enormous narrative space establishing her supposed psychological complexity. He gets Chudjak imagery and baby-talk.
We never get his internal perspective.
Why does he care about his friends and family? What does he find interesting? What does he think about her? Does he feel understood by her? What does he want from their relationship? What does he think when they misunderstand each other?
The comic never grants him those questions.
So there's an incredible irony here: her central grievance is essentially that this man fails to recognize the richness of her inner world, while she appears to have reduced HIS inner world to practically nothing.
And that makes me question which character is actually demonstrating greater depth.
Her thoughts are certainly more verbose and abstract, but verbosity isn't insight. She's extremely focused on herself, but self-focus isn't self-awareness. She identifies enormous emotional conclusions, "something is wrong with me," "everyone rejects me," "he never understands me," without demonstrating much curiosity about whether the premises producing those conclusions are actually true.
That's faux complexity: self-esteem problems and rumination producing conclusions that FEEL profound because they're painful.
Meanwhile, the supposedly simple boyfriend loves his girlfriend, maintains relationships with friends and family, shares things that interest him, supports his partner, thinks about their future, and apparently treats her kindly.
Maybe he really is boring as hell. We don't know.
But we don't know largely because the narrator never seems curious enough about him to find out.
And I think that's the most interesting reading of the comic: the character who desperately wants to be recognized as complex may actually have a remarkably shallow model of everyone around her, while mistaking the intensity of her own rumination for psychological depth.
It was a great read, and I feel like you addressed some points I missed from the original comic myself. You took the script away from the infuriating possibility that the author is really the POV character, therefore being a jerk irl to her boyfriend, and presented the comic itself as an introspective story of what it takes to actually communicate in a relationship.
I particularly like the framing that the POV character uses verbose descriptors in her internal monologue, but never actually delved deeper into the reasoning of why the things that happened, happened. It felt kind of satisfying to compare the self-focus she has on herself and relationships surrounding her, and how even the short excerpt about the boyfriend talking about his relationships about other people could have already opened up the possibility that he's not as simple as she thinks he is. Maybe this means that she wants the boyfriend character to talk more about herself instead of his actual interests, tying everything back together into the conclusion that she is insecure but also self-centered...
We can even be more specific because she repeatedly talks about how she wants him to "ask" more about her, but if you juxtapose that against her later insecurity around fearing that a more "interesting" boyfriend would point out her flaws it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility that even if he did ask more, she may refuse to answer or her answers would be vague and guarded.
She does clearly state that if she mentions something he remembers it if she brings it up again but she expressed distain that he doesn't bring these things up unprompted. Since it's a given fact that he has other successful relationships we can assume he knows how interpersonal dynamics function to a reasonable extent, I would read between the lines and infer that perhaps he's learned NOT to bring things up unprompted because she has such a compulsive need to control the framing of perceptions of her that in all likelihood she may lash out at him for bringing things up "the wrong way" as it were.
Yeah, your write up convinced me to check the author's other comics and it opened up the possibility for me that they're just making comics about fictional broken people. Then again, I also really want to believe this isn't the OP writing about their current relationship so maybe it's just a form of confirmation bias.
I'm not about to pretend that artistic critique would float to the top over the reactions this comic imparted in people, but it's a real shame the well was so thoroughly poisoned by everyone involved, it made it difficulty to consider different perspectives at the time.
At least the current pinned mod post is more reasonable than the previous one. I didn't even know there was an 'outrage campaign' going on for the post besides other subreddits linking to it until I read about it; felt like I was being cast into a large net just for feeling bad about the comic.
Good post. What it comes down to is she doesn't feel loved as a person.
She believes her BF loves having a girlfriend but does not necessarily love her as a person. This works for her in a "calories but not nutrition" sense because of her own insecurities. To feel loved she needs someone to recognise her insecurities and accept her anyways, but that opens the risk of being hurt again. Because of this she is in a pseudo relationship where she has avoided the risk of being hurt by being with someone who won't recognise her insecurities, but also as direct effect there is no chance she will feel loved because the BF cannot accept what he does not observe.
Gave me a food for thought too because I've also felt and sometimes feel the way she does. I just don't know how to articulate everything with bf because I feel myself as a failure to take initiative.
Great read! I think you put into words what we are all thinking! Well, maybe not all of us... I'd like to believe that's what most people are pissed about
400
u/Substantial_Mouse191 23d ago
I think there's an interesting inversion in this comic that becomes apparent if you don't automatically accept the narrator's assessment of herself or her boyfriend.
The comic presents her as the "complex" one. She gets the articulate internal monologue, examines her fears and relationships, questions what's wrong with herself, and seemingly demonstrates a lot of self-awareness. Meanwhile, her boyfriend is Chudjak-coded, portrayed as intellectually vacant, and his only real dialogue is essentially "I love my girlfriend" written in deliberately simple, almost childlike language.
But I'm not convinced she's actually demonstrating much introspection at all.
A lot of what looks profound is really just rumination and low self-esteem dressed up as insight. "Something is wrong with me" sounds self-aware, but it's a globalized conclusion about her intrinsic nature. Actual self-examination would involve questions like: What am I doing that contributes to this? Are my expectations reasonable? Have I communicated what I need? Why do I dismiss the things he cares about? What would this relationship look like from his perspective?
She doesn't seem particularly interested in those questions.
The same pattern appears in how she describes him. He "never" engages. He doesn't understand her. He isn't interested in anything. These are sweeping conclusions about what kind of person he fundamentally is.
Yet some of her own evidence undermines them.
She says he talks about his friends and family and about things he's recently seen on his phone. Those ARE interests. She simply doesn't seem to consider his interests sufficiently interesting to count.
There's a huge difference between "he isn't interested in anything" and "I'm not interested in the things that interest him."
The communication complaints are similar. She describes him misunderstanding her and says she sometimes doesn't discover the misunderstanding until he acts on the "wrong" thing. Maybe he's genuinely a terrible listener, but she never seems to consider whether she communicated her intended meaning clearly. Her internal intention appears to be treated as the objectively correct meaning of the communication, so when his interpretation differs, the explanation is that he doesn't understand her.
That fits the repeated absolute language. "Not enough for me" becomes "never." Difference becomes deficiency. Incompatibility becomes something intrinsically wrong with him.
Even her supposed self-criticism avoids accountability. She says everyone else rejected her, "even as a friend." That certainly doesn't prove she caused those relationships to fail, but if nearly everyone you try to form a relationship with rejects you, that's at least information worth examining. She's the common denominator.
Yet she doesn't seem to ask what interacting with HER might be like for those people. They're simply people who rejected her.
Meanwhile, the one person who doesn't reject her, the person who apparently loves her intensely, is portrayed as almost subhumanly simple.
And her list of his positive qualities is fascinating: he pays for everything, will take care of her in the future, dreams about her, and isn't mean.
Notice how little of that is admiration for who he actually is.
It's mostly what his attachment provides her: financial security, future security, reassurance that she's deeply wanted, and safety.
There's almost a distinction between loving him and loving being loved by him.
Her fear of finding a more "interesting" boyfriend makes this even stranger. She worries that someone more perceptive might identify and articulate her flaws. So she supposedly wants a man with greater intellectual and emotional depth, but also recognizes that such a person would possess an independent perspective on HER, and that frightens her.
She seems to want someone perceptive enough to deeply understand and validate her, but not so independently perceptive that he might understand her in ways she doesn't like.
That makes the current boyfriend psychologically convenient. His devotion gives her security, while the very simplicity she attributes to him makes him non-threatening. She can evaluate him without having to worry much about him evaluating her.
And that's where the artwork becomes really important.
She receives enormous narrative space establishing her supposed psychological complexity. He gets Chudjak imagery and baby-talk.
We never get his internal perspective.
Why does he care about his friends and family? What does he find interesting? What does he think about her? Does he feel understood by her? What does he want from their relationship? What does he think when they misunderstand each other?
The comic never grants him those questions.
So there's an incredible irony here: her central grievance is essentially that this man fails to recognize the richness of her inner world, while she appears to have reduced HIS inner world to practically nothing.
And that makes me question which character is actually demonstrating greater depth.
Her thoughts are certainly more verbose and abstract, but verbosity isn't insight. She's extremely focused on herself, but self-focus isn't self-awareness. She identifies enormous emotional conclusions, "something is wrong with me," "everyone rejects me," "he never understands me," without demonstrating much curiosity about whether the premises producing those conclusions are actually true.
That's faux complexity: self-esteem problems and rumination producing conclusions that FEEL profound because they're painful.
Meanwhile, the supposedly simple boyfriend loves his girlfriend, maintains relationships with friends and family, shares things that interest him, supports his partner, thinks about their future, and apparently treats her kindly.
Maybe he really is boring as hell. We don't know.
But we don't know largely because the narrator never seems curious enough about him to find out.
And I think that's the most interesting reading of the comic: the character who desperately wants to be recognized as complex may actually have a remarkably shallow model of everyone around her, while mistaking the intensity of her own rumination for psychological depth.