Grima Wormtongue uses DEI to convince God to let devils do a great replacement. Think about the thought process that went into this strip. [...] Grima Wormtongue, assistant to GOD, is called in front of the uh heaven senate (i assume?) to account for the great replacement of heaven, but his parents survived the HOBBIT HOLOCAUST. there is so much going on here
Back in 2022, we discussed a
viral tweetstorm from "genderfluid transvestite goblin" @BitterKarella (and an
accompanying write-up from Garbage Day) which recapped (with wry commentary) the bizarre history of Tatsuya Ishida's long-running webcomic
Sinfest, tracing its evolution from an edgy gag-a-day strip to playful satire with colorful characters to sudden radfem agitprop to virulently transphobic screed -- an unusual insight into the
TERF-to-alt-right pipeline.
Two years later,
she is back (on Bluesky) with an update -- and reader,
it gets *so* much worse [CW: unrolled 534-post thread discussing Sinfest's hamfisted pop culture references, 4chan memes, cartoonish transphobia, conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and
Esoteric Nazism (!)]. Karella also featured on
the Haus of Decline podcast (90min) with
recently-out trans host Alex Hood; they lament Sinfest's fall from webcomics stardom and dunk on its baffling symbology, but by the end reach a genuinely heartbreaking realization (with
some evidence) that Tats may be an
"egg" (or trans woman in denial) who fell in with a toxic crowd before being able to come to terms with some
very deep-seated gender dysphoria.
[If you're not familiar with it,
TVTropes has a great capsule summary of what Sinfest used to be and how it got to where it is today. Also, special thanks to
David "retr0id" Buchanan for the
nifty Bluesky thread reader that lets you
load the whole thread with images in one go!]
Other podcasts discussing Karella's original deep dive:
A Special Presentation, or Alf Will Not Be Seen Tonight (80 minutes) and
Drawing Controversy: Bitter Karella on the Perplexing Collapse of SINFEST - Tatsuya Ishida's Once Beloved Webcomic (46 minutes, with transcript)
Sinfest on RationalWiki (which includes such subheadings as "When it was actually good" and "What the hell happened?"):
The comic started out fairly benign as a comedy strip that would sometimes poke fun at politics and religion; however, as the years went on, the strip would become infamous for having not one but two abrupt radical changes in tone. In 2011, the comic strip changed from a comedy gag strip with occasional storylines to a tract that Ishida would use to advance his views on radical feminism, with most of the comic's earlier characters moving into the background or being forgotten about. Then, in 2019, Sinfest changed to a far-right conspiracy theory-promoting webcomic that endorsed QAnon and the anti-vaccination movement, with the transphobia, which had previously only been in the background, cranked up to ten thousand; Israel's invasion of Gaza opened the door to outright anti-Semitism and Nazi-adjacent tropes. All this resulted in Sinfest receiving a reputation on par with StoneToss and Ben Garrison, which is sad, since unlike those webcomics, Sinfest actually used to be good.
The Webcomics Review recently gave up on its more sporadic observations on the strip's decline (note: reverse chronological order)
Kleefeld on Comics:
On Tatsuya Ishida
This isn't the first time we've seen a comic creator slide into a headspace that seems at odds with reality. (I hesitate to call this type of behavior a mental illness; I think that can be a bit reductive and, barring a psychological examination, probably not accurate anyway.) What's interesting here is that, in most cases, the creator's work was published with enough distance between installments that it can be hard to pinpoint what might've triggered them to go down this path, but Ishida has been publishing daily for decades now. You can follow his work in real time and see precisely when/where turning points occur.
Bitter Karella actually did that, reading through the entirety of Sinfest in order in 2022 and offering commentary on Twitter. [...] She summed things up almost too succinctly with "it's not good." I would be curious, though, if a trained psychologist went through and tried to understand what exactly was going on and where things might have gone differently. As has been pointed out by others, Ishida seems to be in his early 50s now and has been working on (as far as anyone can tell) nothing but Sinfest for the the past 20+ years.
Note that Sinfest's forums are dead following
multiple ideological purges; after being
kicked off Patreon, it's unclear how Tats affords to continue working on the strip when it hasn't been published in print for over a dozen years.
Login
