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Title: Fight Club. Tooltip: I'm not saying it's all bad, but that movie has not aged as well as my teenage self in 2000 was confident it would.
This "comic" is short and so too will be this review. Not "XKCDexplained" short, but simply put the problem here cannot be made more apparent by going of on an angry tangent full of angry ranting about angry problems, but that is not what I am here to do.
Why? Because this "comic" does not fill me with any sort of anger, rage, hatred, fury, scorn, or sense of mortality.
This "comic" is an opinion. Randall doesn't like talking about the Fight Club movie from 1999 starring such drop-dead gorgeous and stunningly talented actor(s) and actress(es) as Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter.
Google Image doesn't seem to be working for me right now, so in lieu of sexy pictures of the aforementioned actor(s) and actress(es) here's an image from my photobucket of the Anger I cannot invoke in response to this comic.
-Ravenzomg
Sexy stuff there! I can barely contain myself.
"But Ravenz", you argue, "The caption is parodying that other line everyone knows! That makes teh funniez"
The caption is a clear parody of the line from the film stating that the first rule about Fight Club (the club) is that you don't talk about Fight Club (the club). That is correct. But we're talking about turning around a phrase nearly 12 years old and doing nothing particularly original or particularly exceptional. This brings me back to my point: This is an opinion. It is an opinion -- and it is a good opinion -- that we should leave Fight Club in the past. It was a good film, but please, let's stop analyzing it. He has then proceeded to wrap the opinion in a comic roll, thus fulfilling his quota and gaining support through "Agreement Chuckles". I agree with him, but I am not chuckling. Not at all.
The generous among us would say that Randall is upset with people for talking about Fight Club (the film), thus violating the very first rule of Fight Club (the club), which is not to talk about Fight Club (the club, but in this case the film) but these people are idiots who don't understand that words and phrases can have more than one connotation and the confusion of reference is not clever, it's just idiocy.
I'm going to critique the tooltip with ungenerous detail, because it's a mix of "GOOMH!" and unexciting reiteration of the comic: phrasing awkward as hell. BLEH!
And to close things up, returning to my very first line: Void Creature 1 keeps saying, "But [such and such] was X, not Y!" which demands that Void Creature 2 (the narrator) brought up some suggestion that it WAS Y. But if he doesn't like being talked to about Fight Club, why bring up Fight Club in the first place???
Alternately, Void Creature 1 doesn't understand social behaviours and cues, so he makes assumptions about what other parties believe in order to rant and finish arguments no one started because to him this seems like a way that regular people regularly interact in a regular setting.
SOUND LIKE SOMEONE YOU KNOW?
I think the implication is that VC1 said something along the lines of "I just watched fight club again last night..." and VC2 interrupted him by saying something like "I don't want to talk about it" (we could imagine he said something half clever like, "isn't the first rule of fight club that we're not supposed to talk about fight club?") which VC1 took to mean that VC2 had taken issue with the film for the obvious "it was extremely violent and seemed to encourage people to engage in violence" and has decided to convince VC2 that it was an awesome movie... but really, all the text is a garbage setup for a badly formed pun in the caption... the way this should have gone is thus:
ReplyDeletePanel 1: VC1 says something elitistly critical about how awful Fight Club was, Panel 2: VC2 punches VC1 in the face and says, "don't break the first rule dumbass"... no caption. Then the tooltip is somthing clever... maybe a quote from the book that wasn't in the movie... or something interesting randy learned about making soap out of human fat.
I'd just like to say that there is nothing "interesting" about making soap from human fat that will not necessarily also be "unbelievably creepy". The aspect of the film was bizarre but well placed given the setting/characters/etc, but for Randy to just bring up THAT aspect of the film and extrapolate from there would be soooo weird, and the other xkcdsucks would probably start using fat-into-soap fetishes to replace the lactation one.
ReplyDeleteYour idea for the rest of it sound better, but it implies far more research/sources than I think he'd like for a basic strip like this. I agree that'd be better, but.... well, to incorrectly quote Ryan Learn, "Sucking is a style".
God, I haven't thought about Fight Club for years. Nobody has spoken to me about Fight Club for years. If somebody did speak to me about it, I wouldn't mind because it's not like it's a topic which gets thrashed to death in ordinary circles. So what the hell is Randall even doing? Were half of his friends adopted from the Fight Club Fan Club? Did somebody recently beat him in an argument about Fight Club but then he thought of this really clever comeback twenty minutes too late? Maybe one of the attendants of his weekly YouTube parties insists on constantly watching Fight Club clips?
ReplyDeleteI think you mean attendees... thinking about Randall having attendants is scary.
ReplyDeleteI don't think a fat-into-soap fetish would replace the lactation one. People would mix them together and create wonderful Robdall fat-soap and milking fanfics.
ReplyDeleteHmm...
Randall might have a creepy fetish for detatched heads, you never know. But I think we're missing the elephant in the room here:
ReplyDeleteSTICK. FIGURE. FETISH.
Since when did a mental image of a headless Megan smothered in breast milk and reduced to the form of a stick figure because she's had all her fat turned into soap become okay?
ReplyDeleteDO NOT WANT!
Dude, you imagined it!
ReplyDeleteAlso, she'd be writing Python and quoting Firefly, two of Randall's other fetishes.
ReplyDelete