#Sinfest

[prokopetz]

As someone who follows a lot of webcomics, including some very long running ones, I'm suddenly curious: have you any thoughts on the decline and fall of Sinfest?

I was there when Sinfest went off the rails, and it's kind of hilarious because it didn't go at all the way most folks assume it did. A lot of people have only seen the comic's early days and what it's doing this week and conclude it must have been a straight line from the former to the latter – which honestly isn't a bad guess! – but it actually went through a milquetoast liberal feminist phase somewhere in the middle, if you can believe it.

The trouble is, the comic's author had this whole Grand Philosopher of the Internet shtick going, and this was back when just having a regularly updating website made you kind of a big deal, so they were accustomed to being treated as an authority on whatever subject they saw fit to shoot their mouth off about. However, when the comic took a turn from edgy T&A pop culture parody to didactic feminist allegory, practically no one was prepared to take it seriously; the comic's established readership was broadly unreceptive, and whatever new readership the comic was trying to court found the idea of suddenly treating the Calvin-and-Hobbes-with-tiddies guy as an authority on the topic of feminism laughable.

Of course, I said practically no one. There was, in fact, one notable group who were perfectly willing to kiss the Calvin-and-Hobbes-with-tiddies guy's ass. I'm sure you can guess who.

(To be 100% clear, I'm not saying "oh, Sinfest's author was forced to go down the transphobic radfem pipeline because we nasty leftists were mean to them". They're a colossally entitled twerp who voluntarily got in bed with fascists because couldn't deal with not being taken seriously as an authority figure, and they made their own choices. I'm just remarking on the particulars of that trajectory!)

[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

[hypocrisyofandrewdobson]

Seeing the progression of Sinfest was wild. I remember trying to read it in the early 2000s and it had this aura of like... "If you criticize feminism at all, you are an idiot." Very much a position which is antagonistic to the concept of the right-wing, to a degree which was notably more self-assured than the primarily anarchic and free-spirited internet of the time where dunking on christianity and bush was a shared past-time So I ignored him and when he cropped up again he was talking about antisemetic conspiracy theories and it's like... Man, what path did you walk..?

For those that are interested, I did know of a blog that went over Sinfest’s downfall(this was before the major shift of far -right ideology, mind you):

[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__

[thewebcomicsreview]

Do you notice how most recent Sinfest comic just don't have characters anymore. With the old Sinfest it had characters with clear defined personalities like Slick, Monique and Squigley while the newest comic characters don't even have names and either incredibly bland or just antisemitic stereotypes.

It's kind of poetic, the way racism replaced his comic piece by piece, illustrating how much hate consumed him. This year, he didn't have a New Year's storyline. The year 2024 just kind of stopped being in the comic and hasn't been acknowledged, and there wasn't even a "Happy New Year" strip, I waited until the first Sunday of the year and it's just literally burning a trans flag and locking up The Jew. Even the art is bad, completely devoid of all the cartoony charm it once had.

This strip is often posted as "the finale of Good Sinfest", and it's not that he doesn't make strips like this anymore, he can't. He's no longer capable. Those skills are gone, that man is dead. Sinfest as a comic hasn't existed in years, and the comic on it's web site doesn't even superficially resemble it, and the man who makes that comic doesn't even superficially resemble the man who made Sinfest. There's just nothing left of that guy any more.

[oldinterneticons]

I keel you, yarnball.

[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.