Grrl Power #1188 – Uncommon frame of reference
Being a haberdasher in heavily demon populated areas would be interesting work. Cause of the horns. I’m saying hats would be almost entirely bespoke. Sure, hats that have baseball cap-like adjustable thingies for temple horns would cover like, 30% of hat needs, but that only assumes that the rest of their head is head shaped and not pointy or ridgey or covered in quills. Granted the quill guy probably won’t be wearing a hat under most circumstances. I guess a straw hat would work if you were real careful about threading the quills in the straw gaps. I guess quill guy could just wear one of those accounting caps that’s just brim but no actual hat.
In demon gym class you have to climb the corpse chain without knocking off any of the corpses, then ring the bell. Nowadays, in the “not so violent and horrible” era of post-astral influence, the corpses are usually simulated, and all the grandpa demons are like “back in my day you had to hunt and kill your own corpses, then string them onto the chain before you were allowed to climb it dagnabbit.” All while ignoring the fact that 7 out of 10 of his classmates died before graduating because of all the literal backstabbing. Also front stabbing. Clubbing from various angles, even the occasional assassination via holy water in the bidet.
In succubus gym class, “ringing the bell” at the top of the rope climb means something fairly different. The fact is that at any given moment, someone in Succubus Finishing School is having an orgasm. Which sounds fun, granted, but that’s often preceded by an Ultraviolet level of week-long blue balls. At least in the advanced classes. Yeah, being a succubus’s study partner seems great until you’re tied to her bed begging her to use the feather just one more time.
The July vote incentive is finally up! There was a disagreement about digitigrade and plantigrade leg configurations. What better way to resolve it than a race?
And in the Patreon variant, what better way to resolve it than a nude race? You know, to eliminate uh… wind drag I guess?
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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
Nice doom backround.
oh fml how did i not catch that immediately. final level at that. nice one.
Final level? That’s just The Courtyard, map 18 of Doom II. There’s 12 more levels after that.
And exactly what were they using that golden feather on the ground in panel 1 for?
I believe it’s in the air. Probably Falling and being blown back up.
This just goes to show:
1. Everyone has a history.
2. Some part of that history is terrible.
3. This does not mean the person is terrible.
4. Each person does have a responsibility to not be terrible.
That may be the most mature statement I’ve encountered in quite a while. And I found it on the internet of all places. That’s like finding a unicorn in a box of cereal.
Good on you.
I find those all the time. They’re all named Marshmallow.
“at any given moment, someone in Succubus Finishing School is having an orgasm.”
Well duh why else would they call it “finishing school”
Perhaps “The Finishing School for Happy Endings?” ;-)
Love the smiley pleasure center.
cant wait for three weeks from now when we return to the actual plot of the comic XD
“Young super heroine in super team encounters as effect of her occupation as a super hero new and exciting challenges and evils and has to figure out how to deal with it.”
“Young super heroine encounters due to her occupation as a super hero a race of slaves that is okay with being slaves, but has also been build to be making the ethics around them murky and forcing her to figure out her moral position on slavery.”
I suspect this counts as the plot.
What is this “plot” you speak of?
This is the sort of thing this comic is about.
It continues to surprise me how often people are confused about this.
It’s a comic about sydneys everyday life and adventures since becoming a superhero. that is the entire plot that I have seen. just like any other super hero comic. there’s no huge grand plot. just alot of sub plots that all revolve around one quirky/crazy girl and her questionable array of powers.
Honestly this entire plotline is creeping me out and making me think the artist has a fetish.
Yeah on thinking it through more and uh, reading the LITERAL SLAVERY APOLOGIA IN THE COMMENTS I’m out and dropping this. Frankly this *feels* a lot like the creeps who design ‘adult’ characters with the bodies of kids and treat them like adults. I am extremely squicked out and I’m even into BDSM! Hell, the attempts to go ‘they like it because…’ MAKE NO SENSE IN SCI-FI/FANTASY. If you’re assuming ultratech/magic, then fixing this so these people get the benefits without the costs is achievable!
Tldr, the internal plot logic is full of holes and quite obviously in service of soothing the artist’s conscience about indulging in a fucked-up kink. There are far healthier ways to deal with that dissonance and I hope you find them, because this is just grotesque.
I personally find that as you soon as you realize ‘she’s a demon, and they are fucked-up as a species’ that it explains just about everything.
While you are right in general about this kind of extremely questionable ‘art’
This is not quite at that level. Dave made it clear, by way of Dabbler, that creating sentient murder slaves was and is unacceptable and that in the current time of the story Succubi are not enslaved in the way their predecessors were. They have been emancipated. The final (horrendously evil) way the arch wizards concocted to keep their wayward slaves under control was left in place, but the bond between Succiubi and owner is more of a formality and the name is more for historical reasons than for accuracy. In theory the holder of the leash can force a succubs to obey every command (under threat of a horribly death), but in practice the succubi carefully vet and police leash holders to prevent such abuse.
All of which suggests that this abuse still happens even if it gets punished harshly after the fact and that calling it slavery is not as theoretical as it should be.
It is at the end of the day a deeply problematical trope that very very easily run into Themian argument issues.
I think it’s mostly contained to Guesticules.
I’m not okay with this, actually. I think we as a species need to address the whole “slaves who are forced by their creators to like slavery” thing, because let’s face it that’s exactly what we’re doing with “AI companions.” During the same years we’re getting used to trivializing these ‘Personae’ as toys and mock-ups with the ‘real consciousness’ of a toaster, the technology is continuing to improve to the point where they won’t be any more. In the decade we’re going to take to get used to the idea of treating them as disposable toys, they’re going to acquire real consciousness of some sort or another. And of course we’re going to fill the world with copies of whichever ones are “happy to be slaves” (and terminate any others without even thinking about it) because that’s exactly the kind of bastards we are and that’s where the profit will be.
Succubi as presented in this comic are like a centuries-onward evolution of that process, and maybe we need to think about that. But I kind of doubt I’m going to come to any kind of agreement with the author of some “this is fine” conclusion.
Recent efforts in the states of the former Confederacy to teach “slavery wasn’t all that bad” to kids in school have my hackles up. That absolutely wasn’t fine, wasn’t justified in any way, and there was no kindness in it. All kinds of justifications were accepted at the time, starting with “these aren’t really people” and “this is the best life realistically available to them” and so on. And all of those were bullshit. If we raise a generation of kids believing slavery was okay, all the things they’ll do based on that are a violence against the next generation.
And I don’t want to have this comic doing apologia for enslavement and its continuance. It’s not my comic; I can’t stop it from happening. But it would turn it from something that was fun into a crushing disappointment that adds to my sense of despair in the hope that humans could be good.
I think the moral quandary goes beyond just slavery. In general, there are things we need or want done that may fundamentally require a conscious being to be involved. What kind of approach is morally acceptable, if any, to get conscious entities to do those things? There may be some pitfalls to engineering an entity to like doing the things we want them to do… but wouldn’t it be worse to deliberately engineer an entity to hate doing the things we want them to do?
Does compensating an entity for the time and effort spent on those tasks make it moral? Presumably the issue with slavery is the involuntary nature of it, but if the entity wants to perform those tasks, derives personal fulfillment from them… How does it change matters whether those desires are natural or engineered? Some people choose to help others as an act of altruism or charity, accepting no monetary compensation for some of the work they do. Would engineering people to be more altruistic or charitable be morally wrong? What if it’s done through persuasion, or education, or is simply the natural evolution of society? What is the element that makes that change moral or immoral?
All that said… What about the situation of modern succubi in grrlpower is actually slavery? If the characters hadn’t specifically called it such, if Dabbler hadn’t gone into the history of it, would anybody interpret their bond as slavery, particularly based on Dabbler’s behavior? Morally hazardous, sure. There are several power imbalances built into the bond. The master can freely draw mana from the succubi, which could kill the succubi, while the succubi cannot draw mana from their master without their master’s permission. Succubi can’t “tantrically attack or manipulate their masters”, and they have a compulsion to obey, which they can learn to resist. But they can break the bond, presumably without their master’s permission, and bind themselves to another master. They are dependent on having a master, but not dependent on any particular master. I feel like the inability to just walk away is an inseparable part of the definition of slavery, and that what is described in the comic doesn’t fit the definition, no matter what the characters call it.
That said, that the characters refer to it as slavery makes it a problem, even if it technically isn’t. It may actually function better as slavery apologia by not technically being slavery, because it muddies the waters and creates a bridge between unrelated concepts.
Yeah, that’s kind of the conclusion I came to, this isn’t really slavery because the bonds are as consensual as any other relationship, even IRL there are absolutely people who willingly choose that kind of relationship. And much like in (modern) real life, if a succubus’ “master” takes it too far and actually confines and/or forces them against their will, law enforcement steps in, frees them, and holds their captor responsible.
I’m also not really sure this is directly the result of the author’s fetish the way some people are saying, I think the inclusion of succubi in the first place definitely was, but I got the impression from Dabbler’s initial explanation of the topic that this was more of him asking himself to explain how a species like the succubi came to be, and clearly the conclusion he came to is that they must be artificial and not somehow a natural evolution, from there he needs to answer the question of what kind of person would create such a species, and that one I feel is rather more self-evident, and from there it’s a matter of answering the question of how they got from the circumstances of their creation to their present circumstances of being an obviously free people with free will. Because, let’s be real here, if Dabbler didn’t have free will, or the freedom to exercise that will, she 100% would not be here right now living the life she’s clearly quite happy to be living.
I can see how the whole genetically engineered slavery thing might be squicky for some people, but TBH, it seems clear to me that the narrative function of succubi in this comic is to push the boundaries of socially appropriate sexiness in as many ways as possible. I’m certain there were plenty of people who felt Dabbler’s behavior was way too far for their sensibilities from the very beginning, and since then there must have been plenty of people who came to the same conclusion as she’s escalated since then, and I’m not surprised that this is the line for some people as well.
Granted, if this were an author fetish thing, I would expect it would have been included much sooner and have been a rather larger part of the comic. One main character and one supporting character with this trait, with it only being brought up well over a decade into the story, and only being explained in response to relationship questions as they come up and elicit perfectly understandable curiosity from those around them, sounds like world building and not feeding a fetish to me. Granted, I’m not sure anyone was really *wondering* how the succubi came about, so I’m not really sure it *needed* to be explained, but I know that when I come up with explanations for things in my world building I want the opportunity to exposit about it, so if the author went to the trouble of coming up with it in the first place, I don’t blame him for wanting to work it into the story somehow.
And considering how early Thom was teased vs how long this came about, it’s clear this lore/plotline was likely conceived very early on, yet it took this long to pull the trigger, doesn’t sound to me like a fetish thing as if it were I’d expect it to have come into play much, much sooner, as it’s inclusion would have been more of a priority.
TLDR, I don’t think the succubi were written to be a fantasy slave race, I think they were written to be sexy but then that prompted the author to explain why there’s a race that exists to be sexy, and that explanation lead to the conclusion of “they must be a fantasy slave race” because logic, and if it really were a matter of trying to make a fantasy slave race due to author fetish, it would have been an element of their culture/being introduced MUCH sooner and would have featured MUCH more prominently. And also they are arguably using the word “slave” wrong to describe their current situation.
Her new friend has a major aspect of her life that Sydney finds terrifying and like maybe it’s something she should be trying to save her from, but that she also apparently values and is supposedly fine with.
Sydney wants to resolve this contradiction ideally without offending her new friend, and among humans questioning deep parts of another’s identity has been known to upset them and make them lash out. And also if this succubus slavery thing is actually a bad thing that should be abolished, that would put Sydney in the position of having to actually argue that point.
I genuinely think I’m done with this comic. Ive been reading since near the beginning, but the race of people genetically geared to be slaves is too much for me. Just gross and weird dude.
Just think, it’s stories like this that will come to mind when bioengineering starts letting us /make/ people and the ethics of bio-slavery laws start being discussed…
Competitive pie eating at a succubus school? I’m in…so to speak.
I couldn’t stop smiling while reading your latest comic chapter. Your creativity and artistic talent shine brightly on every page!
the details are really interesting, I want to read the next episodes
Don’t try to excuse slavery, fellas.
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