The Famous Loony Dot Toony

quick and quiet

Not ready

Coffee shop AUs are, like... fine. They're not my thing, but they're hardly going to end the world. We don't need to have a moral panic about people enjoying coffee shop AUs. I'm also not about to come for anyone seeking escapism in the current hellscape.

However, I do think it's interesting to examine the tendency within these AUs to project a sort of idyll onto the coffee shop: here is a whimsical place where you can spend time with your friends and potentially meet your true love; here is a world where the greatest dilemma you may face is choosing the right coffee syrup for a new beverage or sneaking your number onto that to-go cup without being obvious.

The fantasy of the coffee shop AU is divorced almost entirely from the reality of an actual coffee shop. There are no abusive, creepy customers or bosses; there is no mention of the barista's wages; we don't see the dishwasher sweating at their station, the cashiers' aching feet; the person whose job it is to clean the (customer-only?) toilets. These topics are Political and Depressing and Must Be Avoided, because Political and Depressing things are antithetical to this kind of escapism.

The coffee shop AU exists, not in a world without capitalism (because this is a setting where commerce is actively happening) but in a world where capitalism has no teeth: a world where capitalism somehow works. In order to be convinced and soothed by this fantasy, you must suspend your disbelief and avert your eyes. You must filter the coffee shop through a neopastoralist lens.

comics is a storytelling medium, which means that it's also a medium for conveying information. you are conveying information about the scene to me.

what information is your shading conveying, and what does that contribute to the scene? i mean, ideally you're telling me where the light is coming from, but...do i actually have to care about that? if the lighting isn't key to the mood of the scene...does it need to be there?

we're outside. things would have shadows, because there's a light source (The Sun) but don't you understand that just from the fact the characters are clearly drawn outside? does putting soft shadows under their arms and at the bottoms of their shirts convey that better? or is it already clear without that?

we're inside. there's probably some light coming in from the window, or maybe from a bulb in the ceiling. is there a mood you want to convey with the scene? is the light source contributing to the mood? is the light only coming in from the window, to remind us the room is dark? is there a spotlight on someone? is the lighting significant? if it's not, what is the shading telling me that i couldn't otherwise guess?

and in the same realm of that previous comic example i just used, and this one i will be explicitly prescriptivist about--if you MUST include shading, please don't put it on the panels where the characters are doing the big cartoonish expressions. it doesn't look good. it Just doesn't look good. you're turning a 2 dimensional shape into a 3 dimensional object for no reason other than 'well i did it to the rest of the comic' and it looks bad. it draws attention to itself, it makes everything stiff and constructed, you lose the animation inherent to the gesture. you are doing disney vhs cover shit to me.

but this all isn't to say that you should never ever involve shading in your comics. but it's more that you need to use it intelligently, not just because you think it 'would' be there. there 'would' be one million more wrinkles in everybody's shirts than we ever want to draw and nobody's advising you to do that in comics. but if there should be one million wrinkles in a shirt, to draw attention to the fact that it's wrinkled, that's a different story.

and comics are about telling a story.

it is notable that all of the other unaffected come from collectivist countries; given the unanimity of their lackadaisical attitude towards the situation, this has to be purposeful. if this is meant to be a commentary on carol's american individualism, it does not accomplish this at all because the situation is so obviously bad and absurd that it is ridiculous that no other person cares. you cannot gloss over the "clueless, unreasonable foreigner" trope at play; even if you reason that it's for the narrative purpose of setting carol up as the sole voice of reason / lone hero, surely there was some way to circumvent this kind of otherizing portrayal. they could have done so many more interesting things with these characters and provided actually compelling reasons for why they want to work with the hivemind; it seems lazy to me just to relegate them to the sidelines. if this is what was going to be done, it was pointless to bother having this many unaffected in the first place.

Like you’ve correctly identified that the show is using these characters as narrative foils to Carol, but then you just make stuff up about how we’ll probably never see them again and they’re just completely unreasonable props to set up Carol as the lone hero. The show has four episodes, and the promo for the next one already shows Laxmi will come back in some way. And the characters already serve a lot more purpose than you give them credit for! The whole reason they all accept the goodness and inevitability of the hivemind (save for Diabete lol) is because they all had families. Every one of the other survivors got to experience the comfort and reassurance of the people they love most in the world, seeming unchanged and only happier than ever, telling them they are going to be okay, and then continuing to talk with them and act just like their old selves. The only person Carol cared about died before she could try and convert her, of course she has nothing to lose by raging against the machine. Can you really not empathize with these people? Do you really think they’re childishly naive? That’s the exact viewpoint Carol has, and the show does not necessarily think she’s 100% in the right to think that. Every attempt at diplomacy that she makes she fails, because she is incapable of not being aggressive towards these people. I at least was pretty certain that we are supposed to simultaneously feel for her and agree with her while also cringing at her refusal to do anything that would actually help. That’s what depression does to you. It can make you inconsiderate and blind to your own faults. It’s one of the things that makes Carol so likable and relatable as a protagonist.