The thing I respected the most about El Goonish Shive was that it was willing to be problematic, and the point when I stopped reading it was when I wasn’t sure it could be problematic again.
There was this one story arc about a gay man who stopped speaking to his friend after she outed him. At the end of the arc, he finally forgave her, and then she refused to forgive him for dropping her like a hot potato. So was that problematic of her? Of the author? Mu. Un-ask the question. What matters is that it was interesting, and I’d never read a story before that did something like that!
I don’t blame the author for what the comic’s turned into. When you’re constantly getting yelled at by people who think you’re sexist and transphobic, writing things they won’t call sexist or transphobic is an understandable reaction. But the characters can’t surprise me anymore if what they always do is whatever will be considered woke.
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