#Sinfest

[fipindustries]

the story of tatsuya ishida is truly tragic because i can believe the guy startd from a genuine place of wanting to engage with feminism

the problem is that the framing of it was inherently conspiratorial and tinged with a heavy dose of guilt and self loathing

and that is just not a good foundation upon which to build a sane ideology and understanding of the world and so inevitably went from that, though this

and it ended up leading to this:

he is like the textbook case of the radfem to fascist pipeline. because the guy has been making comics every day for decades in here we have a perfect, methodical and granular dissection of how the process happens.

it truly is a tragedy

[thewebcomicsreview]

I wanted to celebrate being an Official Source on Sinfest by checking in on it, but he's literally got a comic about "The holocaust is fake and Hitler was a good guy" and it's got to the point where even if I wanted to cover Sinfest again I'd be worried about my account getting flagged for posting it.

[oldinterneticons]

[autolenaphilia]

Sinfest by Tatsuya Ishida is so fascinating to me, like it's one person mental decline over a period of decades in a webcomic form. Like the political evolution over the years is insane. Ishida started out as a fairly normal liberal dude, who reacted to Bush-era christian conservatism with sex-positive edgelording. He depicted Obama as over-the-top cool in a way that felt only half-ironic. Ironically in light of his later politics, he also had some caricatures of man- and sex-hating feminists. It wasn't really a heavily political strip either, there were character-based stories.

And then in the 2010s Ishida had a weird conversion to radical feminism. This took over the comic, and it became extremely political in a strident and unsubtle way.

It started out with a heavy focus on SWERF and anti-porn stuff, and there are some porn addiction arcs that it's easy to read autobiographically. Like you get the impression Ishida thinks he has a porn addiction and feels really bad about it, and radical feminism felt like an easier outlet for his feelings about it than the religion he had mocked so much before. He had drawn man-hating sex negative caricatures of feminists before, and that's ironically the exact kind of feminist he decided to become.

And how it depicts male consumption of porn is telling. Like porn is bad, but men are compelled to consume it and can never stop, because men are all irredeemably horny misogynists. It feels like a expression of self-hatred. Sinfest became a vehicle for unsubtle caustic moralistic invective, but it always seem to spill back on Ishida himself.

Ishida is heavy on the performative man-hating that male radfems usually aren't. And his main mouthpiece character during this phase is a lesbian woman.

Ishida's depiction of porn and sex work also consistently feels off, like the victims of the sex trade are drawn too sexy to really work as anti-porn. The sex workers in the comic are also literally sex robots, but clearly meant to stand in for real life human sex workers. It's very condescending.

It took a few years before Ishida fully revealed his transmisogyny. And since then it has increasingly dominated the comic. Extremely transmisogynist caricatures of transfems everywhere. Like every online transmisogynist, it has become an obsession for Ishida. And it's weird, like he has this obsession with drawing girlbulge on his transmisogynist caricatures that feels downright fetishistic.

Like I'm not usually like "transmisogynists are rotten eggs", but honestly Ishida feels like that might be true. The lesbian author stand-in, the self-hatred that extends to men as a gender, the obsessive transmisogyny. Reading Sinfest there feels like there is something deeply wrong with Ishida. He is not just a bigot, but feels deeply disturbed. And a case of extreme internalized transmisogyny and repression is as good an explanation as any.

Ishida has however gotten worse, and zoomed down the terf-to-fascist pipeline. The comic has evolved from terfy to full-on MAGA fascist. His transmisogyny has guided Ishida to darker and darker territory. There is an comic where his lesbian mouthpiece character abandons the left precisely because the left accepts trans people. He is now an anti-vaxxer and covid denialist of course, and his literal in-comic reason for distrusting vaccines is that medical scientists also favor trans healthcare.

Most recently Ishida has done an anti-immigration arc, where immigrants are depicted as evil alien invaders from pop culture. And that illustrates how self-defeating and ironic his views are. He is literally condemning immigration as an American man named Tatsuya Ishida.

Lesbian radfems beset by porn culture and the tranny menace no longer play a large part in modern Sinfest. His heroes are now redneck magahats, depicted as unfairly prosecuted by far-left cancel culture. And he seems entirely okay with their social conservatism, a right-wing redneck family has a housewife, and its depicted as okay.

By now he has done a full 180 over the last 20 years. The right-wing conservatives who he mocked in the 00s, are now his heroes.

The recurring characters and the storylines based around them are barely there, it's all political commentary at this point. When the old characters appear it's usually as props in his heavy-handed commentary.

Sinfest was never a great comic even at its 00s peak, but it was a normal comic. Now it's just a sad record of one person's mental and political decline.

[velvetvexations]

Honestly? Tatsuya Ishida is an amazing artist with a really, really good sense of design, color coordination, and visual language. Like, he's so good that I, someone who is really really not up to the task of assessing the technical qualities of art and don't usually think of art that way, feel compelled to comment on how fucking good he is at drawing lines and then coloring those lines.

Unfortunately, he is, and I cannot stress enough that this isn't hyperbole meant to insult him but rather a value neutral judgement of the facts, completely checked out of reality. Tatsuya Ishida uses his immense artistic talent to make bigoted gibberish that stuns one not so much in how offensive it is but how truly bizarre it is. He's a true blue radfem from since even before transphobia was their main thing and since then has descended to QAnon levels while at the same time retaining the Michfest vibe throughout beyond merely his thoughts on trans people.

Perhaps his greatest work of art is performance, embodying a singularly unique expression of maladapted outcast.

But like, damn it, look at this design!

You can't design characters that are this much my vibe and then use them as a mouthpiece for transphobia, that's ILLEGAL.

[pronounmelon]

how would Leasebound fans feel if they knew that the guy who made this shares their ideology

The political spectrum is a fucking metronome

[aceballcomics]

whaaaat I’m not talking about sinfest what are you taallkinggg abouuutttt

[who-canceled-roger-rabbit]

So Sinfest is about a decadent urban hellscape as seen through the eyes of a mentally unstable loner with:

A savior complex toward women and girls, which in practice only makes actual women and girls uncomfortable

Simultaneous obsession and disgust toward sex trafficking, including of children, and toward pornography

Fantasies about cleansing society through heroic vigilantism against the purveyors of vice who control everything and are represented as pimps in stereotypical 1970s-style outfits with feathered hats and all

A racist and queerphobic streak a mile wide

Haven't we seen this before?

(Tagging @feotakahari, @dagny-hashtaggart, and @quasi-normalcy here; may reblog to tag others)

[maswartz]

I love how despite being the one in charge of the narrative Tats doesn't have any of the actual alien invaders do anything actually threatening. They're literally just WALKING and he's acting like it's an invasion. Also way to prove that the immigration system needs to be re-worked considering it takes years to do things the legal way. And of course Tats just can't help but include his handmaidens in there.

[samstarium]

teeny tiny trans monique icons from sinfest; fuck you tats!

[organsblackcoat]

hey so you know that really transphobic terf artist on twitter

:3 @flushotsforlesbians @creamcheezsneeze @roadkillerino @box-head @deathrampsz @theindo, @smokehalos @dezy995 and there are the people on insta gotta.regret.m8, _funni_man__

[calpalsworld]

Idk if anyone cares about sinfest but I just want to remind everyone that he is a huge antisemite obviously. If you see his recent comics supporting Palestine, don't say they're "based." Remember that he only supports Palestinians because he is a neo nazi.

[thewebcomicsreview]

tatsuya is now explicitly telling his readers to start killing jews

Obviously I'm not posting the comic, but to save you the temptation of looking it up, the final panel is a picture of a caricature of a Jewish person getting attacked with a pitchfork with the caption "Yeet the Yid", which I'm counting as a slur for the purposes of Sinfest Racism Bingo.

Which means that I think we're really truly finally done with Sinfest's descent. He banged out "slurs" and "explicit calls for violence" in the same day. I literally can not think of anything else he could do that's categorically worse than this, short of committing a crime himself.

It's so....disappointing. I wasn't really reading Sinfest back when it was "good", so I don't mourn the loss of a once-good webcomic. But even when he finally crosses the final line that I didn't initially think he could cross, he doesn't even have the decency to do it in an interesting way. Not that I want him to be a funnier nazi or anything, but there's this deep well of pathetic to it all. "Yeet the Yid", huh? That's what you got? That's the big call to violence after months of buildup?

One of my favorite reviews of anything is the RPGNet review of a deeply racist and misogynist game called FATAL that was also stupid and boring. You may have seen the review, it's savage and great (though, content warning since it directly quotes a bunch of horrific shit), but there's an analogy from it that Sinfest makes me think of.

Oh, they want to be all evil and shocking and crap. God, how pathetically they tried. I mean, imagine opening a door to find your mother and sister raping each other with pink strap-ons. And you then realize that you've never seen their bare asses before, because you're pretty sure you would have remembered the swastikas tattooed there. And upon noticing you, they grin wickedly and give you the finger in unison. It's shocking in a way that instantly blights out all rational thought, but later, you'll have to admit the finger and wicked grinning part was kinda cool. (I...guess.) That's the feeling the FATAL morons so wish they could provoke. Instead, they're more like opening that door to find your weeks-unwashed Otaku brother in his soiled underwear, masturbating furiously to - of all the goddamn things in the world - an Archie comic. And on his bare ass is a tattoo of, inexplicably, someone else's ass, and he's disgustingly fat enough for it to be a good 14 inches across. And as he goes at it, he's quietly moaning to himself about how worthless women, [LGBT People] and [black people] are and how they should all be raped or murdered. It's still disturbing on all kinds of levels. But it's the kind of stupid disturbing that ends with you having to answer questions to the satisfaction of a prosecuting attorney.

Let that be Sinfest's legacy. A tattoo on Tatsuya Ishida's ass of the Stonetoss Guy's Ass.

[oldinterneticons]

I keel you, yarnball.

[hypocrisyofandrewdobson]

It would be easy to say that, in hindsight, Dobson "went woke and went broke", right? That "trend" where the original storyline was sacificed for propaganda, which applies to So You're a Cartoonist. Of course, that silly slogan is meaningless when we know of Dobson's character and his lazyness. Besides, that motto applies more to Sinfest, which is on the opposite end of the ideology thing.

It could apply to Dobson, in a way. Although on his case, he specifically went “woke” because he thought it would get him attention and popularity. It also let him vent his odd hatred of men in general, but that’s a whole other thing. I’d like to believe that at least some of the people who actually fell to the “go woke go broke” curse actually did believe in what they were preaching, so to speak.

Sinfest has weirdly went from a comedy to hard left and has recently swung to hard right and I have no idea what’s going on with it.

[dizzying-faust]

I've been thinking of sinfest, and it is just jarring to see that the webcomic, which had a cute romance arc between a succubi and a bookworm, is the same one currently spewing radfem, transphobic, and right-wing rhetoric.