It should be obvious to me, but I’m always surprised at idiocy thousands of miles away. I shouldn’t be, because people exist everywhere on this spinning space rock, but I am; I suppose once you root yourself somewhere, it becomes natural to forget that there’s spaces and places where people congregate and live that aren’t exactly where you are.

Putting my musings aside, I came across this article while on Facebook. Perhaps it was futile hoping that someone, somewhere, would explain what in the hell ‘privilege’ is so I could finally stick some context onto this term that is constantly being bandied around like a bludgeon. Oh well, I’ll get over it.

Red flags deploy!

What I get from all this is that ‘privilege’ simply means that people have and lead different lives. Even if you use the working definition of the word ‘privilege’, which includes the term ‘advantage’ (which is what is being described here), it still doesn’t make sense because privileges have to be granted. They aren’t simply the causes of happenstance. I’m adopted and was raised by a white, middle-slightly upper class family without siblings. By this shitty definition, my adoption would my ‘granting’ of my ‘privilege’, despite the fact that it was an exact fifty-fifty toss up that I was going to be adopted, and that’s an optimistic look at it. I could’ve been adopted into a family of twenty kids by people who were using the children as a means to increase their government subsidies to live off of and not been properly cared for. I could have not been adopted at all and lived in my home country, likely poor and uneducated. Hell, I could’ve been adopted for a cult sacrifice or served up to some nutters who believe baby spleens are the most delicious cuisine and can’t find enough babies to murder.

These ridiculous situations aside, being born into certain circumstances that happen to be favorable to growth is not being ‘privileged’, it’s having advantages. Nobody is granted a right to be born, nor a right to be born in the best conditions possible. Ironically, the dude who wrote the comic and the people at Brightside are likely to be from extremely well-off backgrounds, considering that comics get paid fuck-all and that article aggregate sites are stupidly plentiful, plus writers are also paid fuck-all. Why these people are lecturing others when they are likely still sucking from the teat of family and safety nets is beyond me, but it’s the current year so I guess that makes it okay. Getting a lucky roll of the dice is just that; accept it and stop trying to destroy the English language because you don’t understand words or Nature.

Everything about this is unappealing.

Anyone who believes the old adage ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ is a moron. The whole point of the saying is not to highlight that ‘words have power’, as most would believe, but that a person can impart power into their writing and give themselves a voice with and through it. Unfortunately, dipshits do not understand this and believe the more common explanation of the adage, which explains why these retards have to constantly redefine words and why they are afraid of ‘hurtful words’, despite the fact words are inanimate and part of a mentally-created communication system, thus they are unable to do any sort of irreparable physical or mental damage on their own.

Also, the whole implicit idea that Toby Morris is using his pencil as a weapon to fight and protect something is stupid. Being a white knight in modern society is not something anyone should aspire to, especially since you have a higher chance of being turned into a doormat since all you’re doing is rushing to the aid and ‘protecting’ someone, likely a woman. It wouldn’t be viewed negatively if not for the fact that by doing this, you’re throwing out all context and simply ‘protecting’ a person based on their gender. People constantly forget that the reason why knighthood worked in feudal times was because knights were constantly performing dangerous work and followed an ethical and social code, which was to generally be upstanding, righteous and a good fellow to all, keyword all. When you stop being a solid dude to everyone and start attacking others to keep your ‘princess’ from harm, then you are not acting like a knight, you’re acting like a guard dog. Grow some goddamn backbone and stop being a subservient cunt; it will not get you brownie points, people will not like you for being spineless and it will not get you laid.

As a last little point to harp on, the pound sign, which is short hand for the word ‘number’ is to be used in conjunction with an actual number. Also, are you starting a hashtag movement on Twitter, or using the symbol properly? Unnecessary confusion here for the sake of trying to be ‘neato’ and ‘cool’, which makes it stupid instead of those. The plate shards also don’t line up properly, and that bugs me, so that means everything about this title graphic sucks. Good job, you nit.

These are fucking fat babies.

I hate the phrase ‘not so much’. Rather than be a useful descriptive command, it has become the calling card of the modern idiot who is too lazy to properly establish and explain the differences between two things via compare and contrast. What was so hard about saying ‘her’s are not’ instead of ‘not so much’. In fact, it’s shorter, which means more of the panel can be spent on graphics and not on trying to be a witty douchey hipster. The art is awful, too, since I can’t tell which house is damp or full of food. Instead of using words, you retard, use pictures instead. The whole point of a comic is to tell a story through small graphics and use minimal narration bubbles as possible. You are a shitty comic writer, Morris, and would likely not have a job doing that if you weren’t pandering to liberal arts shitheads.

I found the narrative!

So what, Richard’s parents don’t both work? Of course they don’t, because the whole point of this split panel is designed to get you to pity Paula and detest Richard, never mind that Paula is just watching TV, whereas Richard is doing what appears to be schoolwork. If anything, all I get out of this is that Paula doesn’t care about school whereas Richard does and his parents are praising him for giving a shit about his education. The language is also confusing, too. Are Paula’s parents both working two jobs, or are her parents each working a job? I would have to assume it’s the former since they aren’t there, but since this idiot seems content on writing rather than drawing to make his point, would adding the word ‘both’ in have been too difficult? The use of the ellipses also irks me. It’s not technically incorrect here, but it just looks stupid. Use a period and drop the ‘and’. I didn’t even go to school for language; how in the fuck am I better at it than these fools who made it the focus of their education?

Why is the same teacher at both schools?

Toby is a criminally lazy artist. Not only do these schools have the same color outfits, but the only thing that’s different is Richard has to wear a tie. Everything is some shade of blue or green, and they’re all really ugly shades. If you’re going to go with the whole rich v. poor idea, which hasn’t even been properly established so it doesn’t work, why not put parody brands on the clothing? Why not give Richard’s mom some ostentatious jewelry or fancy clothes. Better yet, why not make two different fucking moms? Go ahead, tell me how different the two kids mothers are; I’ll wait.

More importantly, what in the fuck do the parents expectations have anything to do with the kind of school? Paula’s school is a typical middle-tier public school, so her parents expect her to not get straight A’s? What kind of moronic horseshit is that? I went to an over-crowded, under-funded public school system and killed it because my parents expected me to do well. One of my best friends came from a broken family where both parents were unreliable, if nice, and his siblings were both special needs children. That dude fucking murdered me scholastically; he’s currently in the cold Northeast working on a Ph.D in Astrophysics. I was also great friend with a guy whose family lived in the extremely well-off section of town, had a three car garage, a large house and sound-proofed gaming/media room. He also killed me scholastically and is getting his Ph.D in Pharmacology. We did well because our parents expected us to do well, and that expectation didn’t change with our living conditions or where we went to school. This narrative sucks to begin with, but Morris isn’t even doing a proper job of getting us to believe this situation for the narrative. Yeah, it sucks that Paula’s schooling and living situations aren’t optimal, but that doesn’t fucking matter. If her parents want a better life for her, then they should want her to get straight As because being educated is one of the biggest correlative factors in being successful. They should not be as complacent as they are there, which in turn tells the audience that perhaps Paula is not a good student.

Also, when the hell is a ‘B’ a bad grade. By definition, that means ‘above average’. Just looking here indicates that plenty of other school systems have far more lenient grading systems. Even by New Zealand’s standards, a ‘B’ there is worse than a ‘B’ in the US. Since Toby is using the plus/minus system, which is generally found in North America, we can assume he’s writing based on the United States education grading system. With this, we can assume that Richard’s B+ might be on the lower end of the scale (87), whereas Paula’s B could be on the higher end (86). We can also assume that her parents being pleased with a B means she probably hovers around a C+/B- range, which is still above average. She would have no issue getting into college with those grades and maintaining a decent GPA.  It may seem really silly that I’m pulling apart such a small statement, but it speaks magnitudes about how poorly this narrative is being constructed and how little Morris knows about the United States and our education.

Grammar, do you use it?!

You know, I’m surprised there aren’t more sentence fragments in this piece. I guess it’s to Toby’s benefit that comics require brevity, and fragments are harder to form when you’re being purposefully brief. Still, that one is egregious as hell.

This part is where the comic starts going off the rails. There’s no point in mentioning that Richard’s parents are paying for his college tuition because the only thing that matters is how well he does. His panel is drawn to indicate that he parties and thus doesn’t completely focus on school work, which implies malaize even though there’s no way to come to this conclusion since, again, Toby sucks at writing and at art. Even worse, it’s implied that Paula is going to a less expensive school whereas Richard is not, which makes no goddamn sense because if Paula is working to pay for her education, she wouldn’t be incurring debt. Additionally, this whole situation is ridiculous because Paula’s family would’ve easily qualified for financial aid circumstances, and the only reason she’d be in debt is if she is going to an expensive private school that didn’t offer her any grant money. However, most polytechnic schools in the United States are public institutions, and since she’s close enough to family to be able to take care of them (since it’s not explained whether or not she lives far away from them), then that means she would qualify for in-state tuition. If the family couldn’t pay those drastically reduced prices, they would absolutely qualify for financial aid, which would likely be a ton of grant money. In short, Toby is a fucking tool who can’t even do minimal research to make sure his garbage cartoon is accurate for the audience he’s projecting his social awareness to.

My sides, oh lord.

I should just type ‘LOL’ for this and be done with it, but honestly, I need to address the beautiful wreck that this is. Also, two fucking fragments, are you kidding me? I don’t care if New Zealand has better educative facilities on paper, they’re still graduating a spectacular amount of idiots every year.

What kind of loan is it? How large is the loan? Why is Paula’s credit so terrible? Why is Toby assuming Richard knows how to handle money properly when he’s spent the entire comic building Richard up in such a way that Richard wouldn’t know how to handle money properly? Why do I feel like when dolts want to depict someone doing well and someone not doing well, they always use loans or the word ‘debt’? Why are people so terrified of these things?

More importantly, why wouldn’t Richard believe that he did it all himself? That statement implies that all the work Richard did was only because his parents footed the bill and not due to his own work and merits, and is the apex of retard liberal arts/social justice logic. ‘Just get your parents to pay for everything and you’ll succeed!’ No, you won’t. If that worked, none of you halfwits would be blogging online about how shitty your lives are. You wouldn’t have to resort to putting your work on gormless aggregate websites that are a dime a dozen. Yet that is exactly what you are doing, proving that merit wins over money.

What’s with the ‘deserves to be on top’ bit? Of course Richard would think that, he’s busted his ass to get a chance wherever he is. We can’t assume he hasn’t because you haven’t properly established that he hasn’t, and assuming he thinks this because his dad got him the interview (which he still had to ace to be brought on board) is ridiculous, even moreso when you consider that a few panels ago, he was studying, implying he did indeed put in the effort. Anyone who kicked ass at whatever came their way would naturally think they’re top-shelf stuff. I can only infer that you think confidence is a shitty trait, which tells me you need to stop being a beta sub-human and grow back your balls.

As for Paula, all I understand is that she can’t manage her money properly. There is no reason why someone who held down a job, paid for her own college tuition and took care of a sick family member would be denied a loan and be forced to become a server unless they could not manage their money. Hell, she might not have even been able to manage her life properly, with the fiscal side being a large aspect of that. That’d make this story much more believable and would detail the human struggle, but of course you’re not going to do that because you have to push the ‘think of teh wimmins’ agenda like all you lazy dip-heads do.

I hope you do, Toby.

The worst part about this entire ‘comic’ is the conveyance of time. Normally, an artist would be able to show this through the character’s designs, but because Morris is a fucking meat robot travesty of an artist, we can’t get a feel for how much time has passed between many of these panels. Between this set and the last set above, Richard still looks like he’s the same age, but he’s at a congratulatory banquet. Nobody throws banquets for people getting a job or getting an internship, which means he obviously did something important. Since this piece is terrible, we’re left to logically assume that whatever Richard did was important since it’s a banquet, which means it took a lot of effort for Richard to do whatever he did. Thus, his statement about ‘handouts’, which doesn’t even make any goddamn sense since Paula never asked for a handout, is perfectly valid.

I don’t get why Paula here is bothered by Richard’s comments. The only way that works is if she knows Richard is a lazy douche who got by thanks to money, but that actively goes against the history of the comic itself since these two characters don’t know each other and because Richard actually put in effort at definitive points throughout this story. It also works if she’s just upset at the situational irony here with his statement and the fact she’s carrying a plate. I would say it’s that, but Morris is clearly trying to imply that she’s pissed off because Richard had an easy life to the top, while she worked her ass off to only be at the ‘bottom’. That doesn’t mean it makes any sense or works with the short history of the comic, but that doesn’t matter when you’ve got to feed the borg new brains.

Please, quit your day job.

When shit like this is said, it’s someone attempting to be humble. I say attempting because a humble person wouldn’t go out of his or her way to postulate obscenely self-masturbatory drivel like this. Every person in this world is self-made. Every one of them, and it’s because they shape who they are out of the environments they find themselves in. George is the kind of idiot who believes people are molded by their experiences, but the truth is that you need to involve yourself in something to experience it; simply existing in or around it is not ‘experiencing’ it. By taking action, you are the one who is molding your identity and self, not the things around you. This makes people more akin to a potter, who uses his or her hands to craft their clay, rather than a stone that is worn away by Nature until it’s smooth and ultimately gone.

Additionally, I’m not giving the guy who said ‘hello’ to me on the street part of my success. Fuck you. I appreciate the gesture, but that’s all it is. If these people cared about me being successful, then they would actively go out of their way to help me achieve that success. Saying ‘hello’ or being a good person isn’t the same as sending me a check to help me pay for my house or calling me with a publishing offer or pushing for my promotion. Those people matter. Take your pussified postulations elsewhere, you cunt.