ConCONcon 2020 – page 18
Well THIS sure is a cheerful, uplifting comic, isn’t it? Usually when a comic turns out to not be all that funny, it’s because I messed something up. In this case, though, I actually felt the need to deliberately avoid squeezing gags in, because there’s a point where “this community has an endemic problem with protecting and enabling really horrible people” really SHOULDN’T be funny. Even though, you know, that’s kind of the whole point of this comic. It’s a tough balance to figure out, and I doubt I nailed it here. Heck, even this commentary went through about a dozen drafts to try and make it something other than “EVERYBODY LISTEN TO ME GET PREACHY ABOUT HOW ANIME FANDOM NEEDS TO REEXAMINE WHAT IT CONSIDERS TO BE OKAY AND ITS OWN ROLE IN FACILITATING THESE THINGS IT CONDEMNS SINCE THOSE THINGS JUST KEEP ON HAPPENING.” because that would get really frickin’ old really frickin’ fast. In fact, I’ve actually had some draft of a comic like this on the backburner for AGES now, but kept putting it off because there’d always be some Real World version of this exact thing going on and the timing felt wrong. But the very fact that this IS always happening is sort of the whole point. And besides, half of the reason for doing ConCONcon material in the first place was so I could use the veil of fiction to make comics less about specific Real Life people and events. So yeah, in the purely imaginary and non-real world of the ConCONcon universe, the ConCONcon staff have a history of being really naïve and overly-permissive regarding who they associate themselves with, and need to ask some hard questions about whether they’re really the good guys they think they are. Any resemblance to real events living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Oh, and speaking of fiction, don’t bother squinting to try and find any in jokes in those huge blocks of names. That’s one of the things I made a point of NOT letting myself have “fun” with. Instead, it turns out there’s actual websites out there that’ll just generate big lists of names at random, so if there’s anything in there you recognize, that actually IS a coincidence.
In the ConCONcon staff’s defense, they could just allow any person with 5 minutes of fame who isn’t asking for a paycheck and has yet to openly display themselves as horrific examples of humanity to be associated with them. Particularly if they’re willing to give a paycheck that helps keep the Con running without any strings attached (or, at least, major strings, so long as the paycheck’s big enough).
Yeah, that sounds about right.