I would be more amused by a deconstruction of the term “catparty,” which I think I may have just coined, based upon this Wondermark cartoon.
Proposed usage: “Yeah, that thread started out okay, but it didn’t take long for it to go total catparty.”
My take on the comic, purely without regard to current usage, is that the sea lion makes self-evident through his own behavior the rationale for disliking sea lions. That’s the punchline, not the politeness or whatever.
It’s like when you reject a guy after a first date and they immediately insist on knowing why. It’s fair to say them asking that question points to a lack of social awareness that very well has lowered their attractiveness in the eyes of someone who values social awareness.
I honestly have no idea nor care all that much. You’re acting like “I can’t believe they got married!” or similar phrases are all that unusual or worthy of being debated into the ground.
Pardon me, but there’s a fundamental difference between “Hey there, would you go out with me?” (initiated by hypothetical sea lion) and responding to, as sea lion, to “I don’t mind other sea mammals but I do mind sea lions”.
Replace “sea lions” with a human demographic of your choice.
That still doesn’t excuse intruding in the humans’ living space to insistently continue the conversation, I acknowledge, but it does kind of render as entirely reasonable the sea lion’s behavior up through the point where the humans are shouting “Go away!!!” and stuff.
Maybe it depends on whether one sees the sealion as representing a group of humans, said group being defined by some characteristic other than their choice of the specific behavior; or as representing a type of argument, or a particular type of avoidable behavior.
Kind of like the difference between ‘I don’t mind people who are on most diets, but I could do without the ones who keep kosher’ and ‘I don’t mind most of the people who keep talking about food, but I could do without the ones who lecture everybody about what they should be eating.’
Yes, exactly. David Malki has said the said the same himself.
The sea lion doesn’t represent an any race, nationality, social, or demographic group. It represents a certain kind of behavior, i.e. pushily insisting that people explain or justify themselves, and refusing to take no for an answer. People who take the sea lion to represent some social group… whoosh…
From David Malki:
You’re comparing the wrong things.
“Thanks for asking me out. Dinner was nice and all, but…I don’t think it’s going to work out between us.”
“O rly? Well let me interrogate you for the next half hour about this in the attempt to prove to my ego and to everyone watching this scene that you are not only the shallowest, most irrational bitch this side of the equator, but you are also totally unjustified in rejecting someone as rational, polite, and even-keeled as myself. Because, you know, I am entitled to know why you dislike me even it means intruding into your personal space and embarrassing you, and thus, it’s totally unimaginable why me exercising my right to extract the truth from you (i.e. you are shallow and unjustified) could be perceived as a symptom of jerkishness that might get me rejected romantically.”
You don’t see parallels between this and the comic? “Sea lion” is not a placeholder for a demographic group. It’s a placeholder for “people who act like jerks in the manner illustrated here”.
You’re not getting the joke then. The whole story is triggered by a person saying they can’t stand sea lions. And then the sea lion, by demanding over and over why—even breaking into a house to do so—makes evident the basis for that dislike. You can’t divorce the intrusion from the rest without missing the point. You also can’t have the protagonist spelling out the rationale for their dislike without ruining the joke. The answer to the sea lion’s dogged inquiry is in the subtext.
Told you, dude. Sea lions. :rolleyes:
I suppose a passing similarity may exist pout strokes chin whiskers
That is indeed what I believe the problem is. I would argue that, absent the original context, the “group of humans” interpretation is the interpretation most people will have. It’s just a very common trope to have another sapient species stand in for some minority group of humans–particularly race. It’s an easy jump to see an animal as a stand in for another animal, rather than behavior.
Seeing one sea lion have bad behavior isn’t something where we’d think “all sea lions act this way in this universe.” What we see are some people denigrating someone for a trait they were born with (being a sea lion). We don’t focus on the behavior of breaking in, because we’re already primed to feel like the sea lion is the one being wronged.
I’ll accept that, in the context at the time, it was so obvious that the sea lion was mimicking Gamergate behavior that it overcame this natural inclination. But I can see how it can easily be misinterpreted. Sure, I might show it in a full article about the term, explaining the history and meaning, but I would never buy one myself to hang up.
And I do think making too big a deal about it makes it easy for people to score rhetorical points against the context. Hell, it wouldn’t surprise me if Gamergaters held it up as a sign they were being persecuted like the poor sea lion in the comic.
FWIW, while I’ve heard of Gamergate, it wasn’t anything I followed in detail or ran into directly, and I didn’t connect the sealion comic with Gamergate at all until recent discussions on this board brought out the connection. But I got the cartoon right off.
So at least some people are going to understand it even if they first see it out of the original context. But I do understand why others are misinterpreting it. I would think that by the time the sealion breaks into the house and shows up in the woman’s bedroom (!!), however, the unreasonableness of the behavior would at least be evident.
I believe the absurdity of the entire scenario is what keeps your interpretation from being the most predominant.
On its face, it’s absurd to have hate sea lions. Sea lions are like aquatic dogs, and who really hates dogs? So going into it, we’re presented with absurdity that invites us not to treat this thing seriously at all. And then you have a sea lion that unexpectedly appears and engages in absurdly obnoxious behavior. It’s hard to take this seriously.
Constructing the joke so that it’s PC means taking out this absurdity. Instead of a sea lion, you have someone professing their disdain for obnoxious debaters. There is nothing absurd about disliking obnoxious debaters, though, and because the rationale speaks for itself, there’s no need for clever subtext that makes the joke a joke.
I’m not saying it’s not possible without the original context. I just think the majority of people will notice the bigotry before they notice the sea lion’s behavior. In a world where sea lions are sapient and thus people, hating on them because of how they were born would be seen as bigotry. And this trope is so common that I think that’s where most people’s minds instinctively go.
And that very much muddies the waters. Instead of the sea lion being an unprovoked jerk, he’s a maligned minority who is standing up against bigotry. Sure, he’s faking the politeness to bother them, but I at least feel like it’s justified. His argument makes sense: she announced her bigotry in public, so she should have to defend it or back off with it.
It’s not that I don’t notice that the sea lion broke in, and that this is wrong. It’s that I sympathize with him. And I think that pollutes the message like, say, having the oil industry be the good guys in an environmental film.
If your message is “These guys are all dicks,” you don’t want people thinking “yeah, but I understand why he did it.”
I don’t think that works because comics are often (if not usually) set in absurd worlds. I think most people just accept the weird as normal in any comic they read. “PC” comics are just as absurd as non-PC comics. Talking animals and anti-animal racism are both normal.
As I said before, I think it’s more that people actually recognize the behavior shown. Either they stumbled upon it in a Gamergate context, or someone showed it to them in the context of explaining what “sealioning” meant. And since it coined a term, its meaning became fixed. I still think it’s more natural to notice the bigotry and assume the woman is the asshole before you even get to the sea lion’s behavior.
My generation grew up being taught with TV shows and movies which used some absurd race as the victim. My earliest memories of TV are of shows with puppets and talking cartoon animals who had to face being mistreated for being different, among other life lessons. It would be weird to find a talking animal in a comic “absurd” or to find it weird for a comic character to be bigoted towards them.
As for fixing the comic? The easiest fix that occurs to me is simple: “You know, I love most sea lions, but Jared over there is sure a jerk.” Heck, it would work better, since he’d say she hated all sea lions, while she repeatedly tried to correct him and he ignores her. That’s what really happens–the person doesn’t just say “go away.” If they didn’t defend themselves, the tactic wouldn’t work.
And I did, when I first read the first couple of panels.
But then I read the rest of the comic; and I saw what was being done with it.
It is, of course, quite possible that a whole lot of people read the first couple of panels, or the first paragraph of something, or the often-misleading headline of an article, and conclude from that where the whole thing is going. IME this is very often a mistake.
And I can’t actually think of anything that could be done with that particular cartoon that would contain its point while not being open to the same sort of misinterpretation. ‘Sealions are fine but I could do without Jared’ just doesn’t do it for me. Why would there be a sealion in there in the first place, and not just humans? And that implies that it’s Jared as an individual who’s the problem, and not the debating tactic in general.
Would you care to elaborate on that? 
I get it, and I really have to examine why I reacted as I did to your statement because you are absolutely right in that it’s not that big a deal…
The comic isn’t a great explanation of sealioning. It’s just a funny hyperbolic thing for people who already know what it is.
Sealioning is in essence a special case of JAQing off, and differs only in that the questions being asked are for cites or evidence.
In both cases, the primary goal is to derail debate, and the bonus goal is to irritate good-faith participants into breaking civility, in which case the JAQ’er/sealioner falls on the ground and converts to victim mode (extra points if you engage mod protection).
The giveaway in both cases is that the sealioner/JAQer only acknowledges questions by asking more questions, and avoids taking explicit stands of his own.
Doesn’t work if your point is about a type of obnoxious debater as opposed to an individual.
When it comes to stereotyping and prejudice, humans are routinely granted a pass with animals. “I don’t mind most insects, but I can do without fleas” isn’t going to summon the Anti Defamation League. The author, by using a sea lion as stand in for a kind of jerk, was implicitly telling the reader not to liken this to socially unacceptable bigotry.
But in formulating my thoughts in defending this comic, I came up with a fix that would eliminate your interpretation without sacrificing humor. Instead of an animal, make it an absurdly random food.
“I don’t mind most leafy greens, but I could do without swiss chard.”
Stalking, home invasion and harassment, you don’t see as unreasonable? OK.
Read farther down thread. Yeah, you’ve got a point there. I’ve already backtracked and acknowledged it when previous people pointed that out.