Please don’t assume I don’t know what I’m talking about or that I conveniently accidentally or maliciously maligned Hippie culture while valorizing punk culture. The way Penny and the Pendog team covered the punks vs hippies update was intentionally skewed to be biased because…
Penny is not the same person as me. She is a fictional character with her own flaws and has shown in the past that she is extremely biased.Â
Please have faith this will loop back around in the season finale (it may be later) to show that writing off an entire culture is not the answer to shitty aspects of communities. This is something Penny and her friends and even Jayne Prell do and it is their biggest Achilles heel to be honest. They assume fascism and bigotry cannot happen within their own spaces and it comes back to bite them in the ass. They assume (wrongly) that the punk community didn’t have their own Nazi shit happening that has also gone unaddressed in the same way racism and conflict adverse posers have gone rampant in the Hippie community. What Hecate is…her sinister nature…her biggest weapon is that people assume she can’t exist in THEIR space because they are a good person surrounded by good moral people.Â
And speaking of posers (such as the fake punk goth Howie)…that’s the big thing with last update. Dylan Rose is NOT a real hippie! He’s on the tail end of the movement and has picked up only the aesthetics. In fact because he was so popular he retroactively tainted people’s perceptions of hippies in the Pendog universe because later generations uncritically assumed he was reflective of the typical hippie.Â
Finally, as I’ve stated multiple times while working on the funeral band update. This chapter was a canon aimed at the face of white hippies in the less savory parts of the movement/shitty posers. I do not hate hippies nor do I even dislike most of them. I hate posers, I hate white hippies that demean the culture through stripping away it’s roots and reducing it to clothing and aesthetics (another thing Hecate loves to do) Honestly I don’t think Keith hated hippies as a monolith either, he was frustrated with their appropriation of his (an Asian persons!!) culture! And again we only get Penny and RWG’s very skewed opinion on what he thought of them (notice how they never provided any quotes from him or the people who knew him? That’s not on accident)
Overall I ask that you remember archives and history sites are not free from bias, in fact that’s a major problem with them…Penny’s history articles are filled with personal opinions and biased comments. They reflect a naivety from her and I think perhaps it’s also fair to say she is a bit frustrated with the idea of peaceful resistance considering the world she lives in. But yes, I the writer know that hippies have had more importance in history than what is presented on the site. It is up to you to realize Penny and I are not the same people. Me as a writer stepping into another characters shoes when writing is not the same as me endorsing or agreeing with their actions and opinions.Â
