Long Live The Dead!

Caine and Gangle go outside and touch grass. I was thinkin too hard about their Parallels as self-destructive “failed” artists and this was the result.

Brad Bird once said that you can’t create the illusion of life if you haven’t actually lived one, and that’s a line I think about a lot around the Traumatizing Digital Circus. This comic was inspired by: the purpose of making your own art in a world where AI image generators can churn out endless content for you, the way 3D software makes it easy to create infinite spaces but hard to capture authentic hand-drawn human touches, the way all my college art teachers were skeptical of the students’ desire to make anime-inspired stylized 3D visuals right up until it became the new trend in the animation industry—- and how easy it is to get so lost in the technical aspects of art & the consequences of failure that you lose sight of what art is even supposed to be for.

There’s other instances of people randomly punching slaves that they didn’t even know because they got in their way or something. This was just normal behavior.

And slaves didn’t rebel en masse because if even one slave committed an act of violent rebellion it was common practice to kill every slave and former slave in the household.

People only took notice for posterity when these mass executions got into the hundreds of people. One of the few recorded for the history books is of over 400 people being killed because one guy stabbed his enslaver.

(Personally, Moana's, but I think he'd also look very cute in Belle's yellow dress 😌)

Truth is a god in the way that gravity or magnetism is a god. He's just a manifested force of nature. He's sapient on some level, sure, which is a neat trick, but we managed to make meat think and we're not extraordinarily special about it either. He didn't invent humans and he didn't spawn the universe the way that Rose would have expected the god of her religion to have done; he has minimal to no interest in the day to day lives of any creature and only intervenes when someone actively wanders into his grip of influence. He's not a Capital-G God. Truth is to matter what fire is to flammable objects. He's a metaphorical (and perhaps even allegorical) chemical reaction.

Ed isn't an atheist because he saw god and cussed him out irl; Ed's an atheist because he doesn't believe that the brute force of Truth qualifies as a god. Quite frankly, I think that's a hell of a lot ballsier and a much more complete understanding of the situation. This perspective insulates him against idolizing the Truth as an ultimate divine force and makes Truth something that can be reasoned around or through, rather than with, which would never have worked.