Some stories deserve to be told reader’s enjoyment be damned.
It’s one thing to ride on the reader’s craving for subversion when SFP starts and it counteracts most of the usual superhero narrative, but this kind of unpleasantness up there creates a discomfort that can’t be sanitized by storytelling tricks.

Regardless, it is vital to confront our intentional cultural blindspots if we want to write stories that matter about those things we know but would rather keep quiet because they bring our mood down.

I’m not saying the quality of the story isn’t necessarily brought down by it (I agree with you: real life is the least competent storyteller there is) but to me the importance of bringing these things into light vastly overcasts the criticism, and judging the quality of a story by how much enjoyment it brings to its audience is one of the absolute worst.

We’re going to disagree on that. I’ve seen too many exemples of what’s been deemed “competent and engaging” narratives regarding heavy subjects that were just sanitized or worse, exoticized for easier digestion. There are so many “compelling” rape revenge storylines you can tell before it’s painfully obvious none of them actually care about the victims of these crimes.

At the end of the day, it’s just a story. It’s not worth crying over if it compromises the way it tells itself according to the familiar structure that hits all the good spots in our brains, if the alternative is the genuine damage they can perpetuate otherwise.

Not until you acknowledge the reality of the existence of the human bias toward a certain type of narratives clashing with the inherently meaninglessness absurdism of real life which necessarily colors any and all criticism of this nature! 😀

I’m not that smart, I just write complicatedly

Yeah, tell me about it. First time I pondered “I wondered what that Conspiracy is” I was a virgin, and that is /saying something/

I’m not denying that these things don’t happen in real life. I’m saying they are not presented in a way that makes for a good story.

Your complaint was that it wasn’t plausible. (Which can be a valid storytelling complaint.) But if it is plausible, then it isn’t implausible. So unless I’m missing something, your logic is missing pieces.

How would you tell it?

From your perspective, maybe not. From mine, it very thoroughly is.

When I said absurd I meant the pedo torture doctor in combination with the mother killing her child’s dog just because he ripped up her stockings.
Maybe they are both memories that are tainted by Patrick’s personal bias, but as the scenarios that are being presented to the audience they are both so dark they fall on the absurd side of the scale.
But I admit that is a matter of taste and what I find absurd does not have to be absurd for another person.

“mother killing her child’s dog just because he ripped up her stockings”
You don’t know that the mother actually did that. She could be controlled by some outside entity. Again, we don’t know.

Considering that the two scenes happening at the same time would require little Patrick to be in two places at once and live next to his doctor’s office, and given how…odd the mindscapes tend to be, I expect that this is a mashup of at least two different memories.
Unless you mean that it’s jarring, ridiculous from a purely Doylist perspective, in which case…I disagree. I don’t find it grimdark so much as trippy, which feels appropriate for a mindscape.

Uh, have you ever seen Harry Potter? Where an orphaned kid lives for years in a broom closet, then when finally at age to join school gets subjected to multiple traumatising events? And that’s a wish fulfilment book, which this comic is very much not.

[TW: fairly tales and famous stories. There’s going to be blood]

And “happily ever after” is quite rare, and plenty of fairly tales end with “and then they got eaten. Alive.” Fairly tales are scary, grim and dark, and that’s quite a bit of how they entrance people. Even cheerful happily-ever-after Cinderella involves people cutting their feet. Famous western stories? Um, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Bunch of laughs, those two. And brave knights whose brains leak out through their ears. Greek mythology is just all sorts of violence of various kinds, including flesh-eating shirts. Going back to modern, uh, Batman? Even Superman starts off with his entire planet blasted away, and that’s pretty much as cheerful as it gets (except maybe for Squirrel Girl, but maybe I just don’t know enough about her).

Yeah, grimdark is totally not compelling _at all_.

Yeah, I thought it was too much too when my ex husband butchered our son’s pet rabbit and left the body in the snow for him to find. This shit happens.

He is currently serving life in prison for murder, plus 3 years. We prefer to think of it as “the zombie clause” so he doesn’t crawl out of his grave.

I disagree. There could have been a lot more violence in this scene. Writers and artists don’t take a class on “the best and most proper way” to depict a traumatic incident as the language is psychological and emotional. If you feel you could do better, you can certainly do so yourself.

It it can and does happen in real life, it’s not that abusurd.

I think (not sure) that Jshadow is asking “Why does *Patrick* kill the dog NOW”, or more precisely “Why is Patrick showing Alison the dog’s death NOW?”. Patrick is the storyteller, currently displaying to Alison (his audience) a series of events that are likely to gain her sympathy. Which might be just a bit too convenient for him; or might just be an unhappy coincidence, as almost all of his major childhood memories could be of the sort that would easily gain sympathy.