Quote Originally Posted by The Giant View Post
Yes, of course the point of her mentioning that she had an ex-girlfriend is so that you know she is gay. That is part of how including gay people in your comic happens, short of me showing her having sex with another woman. I already waited 38 strips from her first appearance to mention it. How many more strips do I need to wait before including LGBT representation in the comic? 100? 200? How subtle do I have to be to make you, personally, comfortable? This is the first comic that explores Bandana as a character, so this is when it shows up. The alternative is deliberately keeping her "in the closet" to satisfy some arbitrary standard of "narrative smoothness." Not acceptable.

If it seems awkward to you…oh well. Sometimes, correcting a past mistake is awkward. Sometimes, in order to move forward, we have to stop waiting for the moment to be right, or the situation to arise organically, or whatever euphemism you want to put on the idea of maintaining the status quo because it's easier, and just do it. If it's "forced" now, that's only because I failed to include any obviously gay characters for 900+ strips and that is so completely uncool that I need to fix it NOW, not later. If that produces some rough edges, well, I guess we'll all just have to put on our adult pants and learn to live with that one solitary flaw in this otherwise pristine work of art* for the sake of inclusion.



No. Stories exist primarily for the purpose of delivering messages to one another, whether about human nature, or the world around us, or what have you. They are how humans have communicated life lessons since the dawn of language, and probably before. Whether or not that is why you read them, that is definitely why people write them. If the story is incapable of delivering the message that the author is trying to send about how they see the world, then that is a failure of the story, and the story needs to change. The author should not leave out his or her message so as not to disrupt the delicate story. That's the cart leading the horse.

*This is sarcastic. No one quote me saying that I think OOTS is a pristine work of art. It is not.
Between this and some of your previous statements, I have to ask: is there something inherently wrong with escapism? By being entratained by a story that might give you something emotionally while not being directly tied to real life issues?