Introduction: A Critical Review Nobody Asked For Of A Webcomic Nobody Asked For
Do you ever wonder if, now that our daily reality of late capitalism has fully progressed into the Wachowski-esque nightmare the minds of the previous millennium envisioned, the word ‘satire’ has completely lost its meaning?
Admittedly, I didn’t think too deeply about that idea myself, although I have mentally replayed that one scene from The Matrix where Neo awakens to find a world full of comatose humans sectioned off into isolated pods many times over the past year. But then I just so happened to read a webcomic.
A webcomic by Minna Sundberg, to be precise.
Minna Sundberg, if you’re not aware, is a Finland-based writer and illustrator who is most renowned for her highly successful and currently ongoing postapocalyptic adventure series Stand Still Stay Silent (abbreviated as SSSS), which has been continually serialised online since 2013. However, as much as I’d prefer to, we’re not really here to talk about SSSS. We’re here to talk about the one-shot comic she published in March of this year, Lovely People.
(Also, before we go any further, I might as well warn you that this post contains full spoilers for Lovely People as well as minor plot discussion of SSSS. If you’re the type that cares, both can be read for free via the links above and Lovely People, being a 72-page one-shot, can probably be skimmed in around 10 minutes. Anyway; for all those who couldn’t be bothered, here’s a synopsis that nevertheless attempts to recreate the experience I had reading it.)
Part 1: The Comic
Lovely People, being yet another addition to the genre of dystopian tales that use anthropomorphised animals as a vector for complex social issues, opens on a triad of lagomorphs enjoying themselves in a cafe. The three, namely Peony, Marigold and Peppermint, set to eagerly discussing the new ‘transparency update’ that has just been applied to their Social Credit System, allowing users for the first time to view the numerical value assigned to them by the almighty algorithm that determines their entire lot in life.
Marigold and Peppermint are aghast at their own scores but Peony, being an up-and-coming elite within the sphere of social capital, shares some of her, ahem, winning wisdom with them. And so she reveals two paths to gaming the system: praising the government on Twit- uh, Tooter, or filming endless unboxing streams of Amaz- I mean, Aizongle-approved products. However, there’s good news; even without resorting to sycophantic consumerism, Marigold and Peppermint will benefit simply by being in Peony’s orbit, as the system also takes into account the scores of one’s friends and acquaintances.
From this point, we get some snapshots into the daily lives of these three, feeding smoothly into an exposition segment in which Peppermint, a primary school teacher, is happily doing her job filling her students’ heads with propaganda. This is all going well until she realises that the parents of one of her students, Sunspot, are losing the algorithm’s favour due to their preference for worshipping Jesus over World Council. After that, Peppermint picks up her three kids and goes to meet up with Peony and Marigold again, this time on the cafe’s Semi-VIP floor, to eat carrot cake that doesn’t actually taste any better than in the non-VIP areas. What follows is a segment in which we are introduced to Lavender, Peppermint’s daughter and hands-down the best character in the entire comic.
Marigold returns home to find her husband catatonic from yet another day spent working as a wage-slave and then finds, to her absolute horror, that listening to her audio-Bible before bed will no longer net her social credit points. Meanwhile, Peppermint is out buying groceries with her kids when Lavender sneaks away to give food to a homeless woman. Peppermint immediately lashes out, despite the woman posing no physical threat, and proceeds to educate her daughter on what happens to those whose scores are so low that they become ‘unpersoned’. In other news, Peony finally achieves her dream of becoming a hashtag #Gold Verified influencer.
The next day, Marigold wakes up to discover that listening to her Bible will now actively decrease her score, and so frantically searches for a physical copy. Her search leads her to Cinnamon, an old friend whom she now discovers is on the verge of being unpersoned herself. Seeing her plight, Marigold decides to lend her the Bible indefinitely as Cinnamon no longer has the ability to access ‘disputed material’ via the Aizongle bookstore. In return, Cinnamon gives her a map leading to a rumoured Promised Land outside the government’s influence.
But that isn’t the end of it -- Marigold, having finally used Peony’s credentials to get herself into the cafe’s much-coveted Super-VIP floor, discovers while waiting for her friends that her beloved Bible is about to be updated to reflect the times. She caves and updates, in addition to blocking every account in her friends list who refused the update. What follows is an extremely uncomfortable-to-read chat show segment in which Chamomile, a liberal-minded Christian involved in the new update, explains the reasoning behind this new censorship. That same night, Lavender, on the eve of her 15th birthday, from which point she will have to manage a social credit account of her own, confidently declares her intentions.
In the meantime, Peony wakes up to her ‘Morning Consoom Box’[sic] and soon realises what has just gone down. She confronts her two doomed friends in the Garbage Section of the cafe, where Marigold invites her to come along with them to the Promised Land. Peony, however, is not ready to let go of fame just yet and so promptly unfriends the two of them -- though not without hesitation.
And so she heads home, although, still reeling from the emotions of that encounter, is unable to prevent herself from venting her true feelings on how keeping up her influencer-sona has worn her down; or, to use the Tooter lexicon, she takes her mask off. This results in her immediately getting cancelled by her fellow Gold Verified users. The algorithm prompts her to make an apology video, and she is swiftly unpersoned once, during the crescendo of her rant, she shows her bare ass to the entire Internet. Now with this final barrier obliterated, she runs off to meet up with Marigold and Peppermint.
The trio, along with their families, continue along an uncertain path, tossing their phones into the void as they go, and find that Sunspot’s family has already escaped ahead of them. There’s a final moment of apprehension but Marigold, preaching blind faith, urges them onward. Scene.
Part 2: The Take
I hope you had some measure of fun with all that, since we’re about to get to the boring part -- which is to say, my opinions. Unfiltered and sans any sarcastic hedging.
Because -- and as disappointing as it sounds -- I didn’t write this just so I could dunk on this comic, but rather to disentangle the complex feelings I had coming off of it. Good as well as bad.
Minna Sundberg is, or perhaps was, or perhaps still is but only with some very heavy caveats attached, an artist I can admire. If you’ve read any of SSSS, you’d know this already, and if not, it likely came through with the screengrabs of Lovely People shown above: she is clearly very talented at what she does. The scenery in her comics is jaw-droppingly gorgeous and immersively atmospheric, using colour, panel flow and detail to effortlessly worldbuild through visuals alone, and her characters’ often goofily exaggerated expressions make them instantly likeable and relatable. On the writing side, she excels at snappy, snarky dialogue that is only all too effective as a breath of brevity in the otherwise dark, terrifying worlds her characters inhabit.
All of these qualities are displayed at maximum power in SSSS (especially in the story’s first arc), but many are carried over into Lovely People as well, despite the differing premise and much shorter, self-contained narrative not playing as much into the strengths she built up through drawing SSSS. Suffice it to say that I went into this comic with an open mind, and despite having heard vaguely of the controversy beforehand, I went in wanting to like it.
As dystopian fiction, Lovely People has some merits. It presents a world that seems on the surface to be a utopia which explicitly values love, peace and kindness to the point that it feels saccharine and cloying -- and that’s exactly what’s so palpably sinister about it.
The classic dystopia, which came into being in the postwar era with the genre’s seminal big brother 1984, is a world structured almost entirely around fear and mistrust of others, taking clear inspiration from Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia. And while ‘Orwellian’ remains a popular buzzword, this aesthetic is at least slightly outplayed in the modern era. Authorities nowadays rely as much on manufacturing contentment to promote self-satisfied apathy among the populace as they do on brute force. And Lovely People seems to understand this; that utopia and dystopia are relative terms, dependent on one’s own social class and circumstances.
That being said, this in itself is not particularly groundbreaking. Black Mirror seems to have already used this exact same premise in the episode ‘Nosedive’ (I say ‘seems’ as I have not seen any Black Mirror since it moved to Netflix, largely out of principle) to similar effect. A lack of originality doesn’t necessarily cheapen the core message of a story, though.
In the case of Lovely People, I think one of its most resonant ideas is the fact that it actually has faith in people, unlike many others in its circuit. Peppermint does not even consider throwing out her daughter to save her own skin despite singing the glories of re-education centres a few pages prior; Peony genuinely cares for her friends and has a breakdown when she tries to abandon them. And in a story about a ruthless meritocratic system that places a premium on individual growth above all else, that much is emotionally affecting, even in spite of everything.
However. They say ugliness can hide within beauty. And considering the core themes of this comic, it seems almost hilariously apt that that should be the case on both its textual and metatextual levels.
Lovely People’s most original trait is, of course, the way it ties religion into the narrative. Now, you might be glad to know that I’m finally done with being nice to this hot mess of a comic, but I have to preface this by saying that I don’t have any inherent issue with stories that incorporate religious viewpoints, nor do I have any inherent issue with religion or religious people. I don’t even really have an issue with people who proselytise, so long as they aren’t being aggressive with it (much like with sexual consent, I feel the tea analogy applies here). The problem arises when religion is weaponised in order to make a political statement that either intentionally or unintentionally harms others.
We’ll shelve the question of intent for now, though, as this part is purely focused on what the comic itself says. And what it says is simply that, in a world that acts as a thinly veiled metaphor for the social media hell we currently live in, Christians and Christianity is under attack -- more specifically, Christians who insist on a traditional interpretation of the Bible are under attack. It also implies, by equating the in-story company Aizongle with performative spectacle and consumerism, that any Christian who practices differently is therefore just as fake.
To be clear, I don’t entirely agree with Chamomile in this segment; outright censorship is rarely the answer to anything, and I believe as with all other problematic media that simply erasing the icky parts and pretending they never existed doesn’t help anyone in the long run. What is helpful is open conversation, which should ideally be had between Christians, Bible-adherents and otherwise, and non-Christians, though by presenting this ridiculous strawman of a counterargument, any such conversation is immediately shut down.
That being said, I’m not going to deny that the co-option of faith into consumerist culture isn’t a real issue. Christians who primarily believe Christmas to be a time of reflection, hospitality and charity are understandably miffed when the ads try to turn it into a game of psychological warfare that pits people against their own families. This is something that absolutely goes far beyond Christianity, though, with the most ubiquitously egregious example perhaps being New Age-branded lifestyle marketing. The fact remains, though, that it’s pretty damn easy within a capitalist system to use God to make money, which makes me question why Aizongle, the pinnacle of consumer culture, was so eager to ban the Bible in the first place.
Sure, there was that one time Jesus used a miracle to redistribute fish to the masses, but as far as I’m aware, there’s nothing outright anti-capitalist in it, being a text that was written long before our current economic system evolved. That’s not to say that there was never any political motivation behind it. Religion has always been co-opted, for political gain as much as commercial, and it’s just downright silly to imagine that there was ever any point where it was totally pure, unfiltered ideology, or that that ideology is necessarily at odds with the dominant forces in the world today. Indeed, considering that the primary excuse European colonisers made to ensure they could legally own slaves was that ‘God made white people naturally superior’, you could argue it helped give rise to those very same forces.
Which brings us to the entrenched irony of this whole situation. As I was reading, I couldn’t help but notice that Aizongle could quite easily represent another institution that is historically known for pushing censorship, ousting nonbelievers and segregating between ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ individuals -- that is, the institution of the church. (By which I mean, for clarity’s sake, to be the superstructure that has historically held vast amounts of political power, not your friendly neighbourhood parish.)
And really this is just the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t even mention how Lovely People attempts to comment on virtue signalling, trigger warnings and all the other evil snowflakery we in the dirtbag left are so well known for. Admittedly, its take on cancel culture can be attributable to some circumstances, such as what recently happened with YouTuber Lindsay Ellis; it must needs be addressed, after all, that Twitter has an uncanny knack for duping leftists into unproductively attacking each other in order to gain a momentary personal feeling of righteous glory.
On its own, this segment is fine, but given the wider context of the narrative it’s hard to ignore that the true intended message was likely not one of simply persuading people to take a nuanced view of cancel culture; one has to wonder if Peony would have been framed similarly sympathetically if instead of complaining about consumerism, she had instead been spreading hate speech.
Outside of that, there were many points when I wondered if I had been duped into somehow reading a PragerU video in comic form, despite the fact that the visual design of those frankly butt-ugly propaganda pieces is utterly incomparable to Sundberg’s art. They both cycle through the same base assumptions and land at the same conclusions (although notably, no part of any PragerU video could ever be considered anti-capitalist); Christianity is under attack from a faceless, authoritarian organisation which masquerades as friendly and peace-loving but ultimately wants to sanitise everything and destroy all individuality, and true, good Christians must take it upon themselves to speak out against this existential threat.
This wasn’t the lens I wanted to view Lovely People through when I first read it, I’ll admit. But it is a lens you can read the entire comic through and still have it make some semblance of sense, particularly if you buy into those assumptions already. Even so, does this erase its value as a critique of late capitalism completely? I wonder about that. Ultimately, we’re left with these two readings that seem diametrically opposed, and we have to wonder from that, just what did Sundberg intend to be the takeaway message from this comic? Well. Perhaps her afterword can shed some light on the matter.
Part 3: The Afterword
An afterword can be a useful tool for an author. Often it’s a fun little extra included so that your readers may be privy to some part of your creative process. Other times, particularly in stories that include sensitive material, it can serve as a statement of intent; essential in helping clear up any potential misunderstandings, provided the author is self-aware and empathetic enough to see how their work could be differently interpreted.
For the record, I’m not trying to argue that death of the author never applies and that the creator’s word is God (though in this case, Sundberg might actually believe that); nor does an author’s note automatically clear anyone of causing potential harm. What I do understand, as a writer -- or rather as someone who is attempting to be a writer -- is that writing about this sort of thing can be tricky, to say the least. Art can be ambiguous, and what seems obvious to one person can be obscured to another; you might earnestly mean to say the opposite of what others take you to mean. And so it was with this mindset that I read Lovely People, searching always for the potential nuance, trying to understand the motivation behind it.
And then I got to the afterword.
Suffice it to say it’s a giant pile of yikes, an absolute dumpster fire of trash opinions and a hot mess virtually pulsating with spite. And I mean, I could leave it at that, but I’d like to think of myself as having some measure of integrity, so let’s go into specifics. As a treat.
Sundberg starts off by describing how she first became interested in the idea of a social credit system prior to her conversion to Christianity, but then shelved the idea for later, citing that ‘[Nothing] like that could be possibly be implemented in the “free” world without generations of brainwashing first, so it wouldn’t really be topical during my lifetime’. This already shows a bit of an iffy attitude in the assumption that non-Western countries operate like some sort of bizarre hivemind, but I digress. The next paragraph is the bit that gets truly spicy: ‘Then 2020 rolled in with its pandemic, and many people started pointing out the striking similarities between the core concepts of how a Social Credit System works and the proposed health passports.’
Oh. So that’s what it’s all about.
I shouldn’t really have to spell out exactly what is wrong with this statement; I’m hoping that anyone reading this has a decent understanding of how infectious diseases work, and of the fact that travel safety regulations can help mitigate the spread. I mean, if you’re here, there’s a good chance you’re a fan of SSSS, and in that comic, a horrifically deadly pandemic has devastated the world, leaving the remaining civilisations to impose strict regulations out of necessity on non-immune individuals who wish to travel outside safe areas… oh. Well, isn’t that ironic. Maybe the fact that Covid-19 doesn’t cause people to turn into troll-zombies made Sundberg forget that both it and SSSS’s rash illness spread in the exact same way?
Regardless, once she finishes her borderline conspiracy theory tangent in which she suggests the EU has a secret plan to place all its citizenry under indefinite house arrest (which, I mean, I don’t trust the EU much either, with many of their policies being mere lip-service to the issues at hand, but I really don’t think that’s the case here), she then goes onto the matter of Jesus. ‘Nobody will be around anymore to tell you how you sin against God. That would be offensive, hurtful and harmful, and thus not allowed!’ She then clarifies what exactly she means by ‘sin’: ‘If you one day find yourself in that future utopia, where your purpose in life is consuming product and entertainment or pursuing vain goals of ‘bettering yourself’, remember this: your problem is your sin against God.’ In other words, living in a society.
What struck me about this last statement in particular is the fact that it seems to carry an altogether different message than the comic. In Lovely People, not everyone who becomes disillusioned with the system is a Christian; Lavender being a prime example, who orchestrates her rebellion purely out of anarchic frustration. Furthermore, there is no point at which individuals are shown to be solely responsible for their own circumstances; rather, they are forced into their roles by the system. What Sundberg instead suggests, apart from the comic she created, is that the onus is on individuals to change, not society, and seems to ignore the fact that she is simply proposing another way of ‘bettering yourself’ out of hand.
Despite all this, though, I fundamentally do not believe Sundberg to be an ignorant person; she knew what she was doing here, and how it could likely cause offense, so the idea that this afterword is this bonkers due to a lack of awareness is likely not the case. Why do I feel this way? Well, when Sundberg first announced she was working on Lovely People in an SSSS update on 23rd November, she gave basically no details as to what the comic was going to be about, and remained tight-lipped right up until its publication. All she showed in regards to progress updates during that whole period were several cute panels with no additional context other than an assurance that it would be ‘very different from SSSS’.
Under other circumstances, being secretive might just be a fun way of building up hype for your latest project or playing with audience expectation, but in this case it only feels exploitative. As Sundberg knows that people won’t click on her comic if she was upfront about its religious themes. She even massively downplayed the dystopian aspects in all of her future promotional material (even now the banner at the foot of each SSSS page simply reads, “a cute and serious short story about a Social Credit System”) in what practically amounts to a bait-and-switch. SSSS is dark and postapocalyptic and heavy, so why not post some out-of-context fluffy pictures that look like they belong in a slice-of-life comedy, and then funnel your readers into engaging with your homegrown conservative Christian propaganda?
Sundberg also knows, having worked on SSSS for the better part of a decade, that she needs to deliver regularly to her readers and maintain a consistent level of quality across the board. And while she did have the grace not to put SSSS on hiatus for the duration she was working on Lovely People, she still had to reduce the frequency of regular updates. And knowing that this was the reason for it is sure to leave a bitter taste in the mouths of many.
Thirdly, she has something of a history of having to deal with fan backlash. In Chapter 11 of SSSS’s first arc, the gang find a book in an abandoned house containing Chinese scripture, leading to a sequence in which several bumpkin Scandinavians make it clear that they know far less than they think about the outside world.
Initially I read this as a joke at the expense of the characters themselves, extracting humour from dramatic irony in their presumptiveness about the lands outside the Nordic peninsula. But I am white, regrettably so, and I now understand others might not have the privilege of reading this without having to handle excess baggage. It would of course be a different story if SSSS had shown any interest in exploring the world beyond Scandinavia up until this point, but because it didn’t, this one-liner is really all it gets reduced to. And I get that that can be frustrating.
Even so, I definitely don’t think this is the sort of thing that should necessitate endless vitriol directed at the author when there was no malice intended. Plus, from her response, it seemed this event actively discouraged her from including any references to other cultures in SSSS at all, concluding that ‘it isn’t a minefield I’m keen on navigating’. Which is honestly a shame, and I think really epitomises the issues inherent in cancelling; it rarely encourages people to actually go out and educate themselves, despite that being the very thing cancellers often ostensibly demand. Plus, it seems this little episode would later solidify the attitude that Lovely People was created under. (Also, I feel the need to mention that this is the same chapter in which one of the characters gets curious about a crucifix on a wall, which seems now as though it was foreshadowing more than just the events of SSSS.)
This is all compounded by the fact that Sundberg’s interest in continuing SSSS seems to be waning in favour of her moving onto projects with a more Christian bent. And while it’s pretty understandable that she’d eventually get burned out on a project she worked on exclusively for 8 years (aside from the spinoff RPG City of Hunger that has also since been entirely discontinued, because God hates gamers I guess), I can’t help but sympathise with the fears of longtime SSSS fans. Will the second arc wrap up with the largely pagan cast converting to Christianity? Will Emil and Lalli no longer continue to have meet-cutes in vaguely gay-coded magical dreams? Will Sigrun ditch her troll-slaying career in favour of becoming a tradwife? Despite Sundberg’s repeated assurances to the contrary, it’s hard to take anything she says at face value anymore considering all of her marketing around Lovely People was essentially lying by omission. So, while I doubt that she’d risk alienating her fans even further than she has already, I can’t say I don’t understand those who remain suspicious.
So yeah. In conclusion: the afterword and the situation around Lovely People’s creation is all one huge mess, and unlike the comic itself, it doesn’t even have an inch worth defending.
Conclusion: We Live In A Society
It pains me to say this, but I feel the ultimate takeaway here is nothing really all that novel. Lovely People itself is but one iteration of a growing trend that is spreading at a worrying pace through our post-pandemic world; namely, the co-option of the language and aesthetic of dystopian stories to promote conservative propaganda and conspiracy theory.
Earlier, I mentioned 1984, which, despite what you may have been told at school, was penned by a self-identified democratic socialist in response to the postwar authoritarianism prevalent in the UK at least as much as it was based on the USSR. For more information, I highly suggest this video that frames the issue using Jordan Peterson’s rhetoric as an example, though he is far from the only right-wing pundit to recycle these tired talking points about how much George Orwell adored neoliberal conservative values. Which, for the record, he didn’t. (In a related vein, I began this post with a reference to The Matrix, which, well… we all know where that movie’s iconic imagery of the ‘red pill’ got appropriated to.)
It’s just saddening, really. I adore dystopian fiction, especially cyberpunk (which you could technically argue Lovely People fits into, thematically if not aesthetically), and while not all dystopias are created equal in their ability to reflect the social problems of the modern day, many of them have been formative in shaping my own worldview. We now live in a world in which virtually everyone understands, on an intrinsic level, that something is deeply wrong with society. The problem therefore lies in who or what we decide to blame for such ills.
Conservatives, who never want to be seen to be aligned with social progression in any way, have to spin this absurd narrative that, while seeming to critique the failings of late capitalism on the surface, never fails to equate the insidious power of megacorporations with leftists ‘pushing their agendas’. They claim the real problem is that nobody is allowed to make ‘jokes’ containing slurs anymore, or that some other cultural group is superceding what they percieve to be the righteous property of white Christians. And I’m just tired. So very tired. Not least because, if these people didn’t have to constantly fall on the hard line of defending so-called ‘traditionalism’, they’d have no reason to scapegoat, and -- I’d hope -- would see the system for what it truly is.
Honestly, you could just take the base plot of Lovely People, change up some dialogue and omit the Bible references, and it’d probably be easily considered a leftist work. Hell, I only edited two lines of text in this one page and it already works perfectly as a progressive satirical statement:
Anyway. As a final closing thought, I’d like to leave on something constructive. I know I made this piece largely just to vent, and while I have no handy solutions to the issue at hand -- I am just a single unemployed idiot who can barely read, after all -- I vent because I care. I care about comics, and I care about comics that are interested in exploring these topical themes, so whenever one ends up disappointing me, I can’t stay silent about it. Or indeed stand still. But luckily, there are always more comics to read.
So, if you’re looking for something similar to Lovely People in terms of genre and theme but without the weird Christian baggage, then I can fully recommend the indie comic Square Eyes. Similarly, it features a world heavily based in the virtual reality of social media and comments on how such technologies can be used to exploit people for profit, as well as what happens when a person is designated as a ‘non-entity’ by the system. Its world is a bit more typical cyberpunk fare, but really brings out the decaying wrongness of its setting through some truly incredible atmospheric visuals and overlapping panel composition.
That’s about it, so I hope you enjoyed my very first post about something other than anime and manga. I know it’s a complete shocker, being the disgusting weeb that I am, but there are other forms of media that I’m becoming increasingly fond of. I’m hoping to write more about comics in the future, especially as I haven’t found much discussion of stuff that lies beyond the interminable boundary of Marvel/DC; meanwhile, not anywhere near enough people have read some of the genuine modern masterpieces that can be found in the back catalogue of Image Comics. So I guess I ought to at least try to fix that.
In the meantime, I’ll see you again, same place, but probably not the same time. Hopefully a few weeks, maybe a few months. Admittedly it’s become somewhat difficult to balance essay writing with a whole-ass novel, but we’ll see how it goes. Until then, have a good one.
