[ SECRET POST #5867 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5867 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 42 secrets from Secret Submission Post #840.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

07. https://i.imgur.com/mk82a2C.png

[(Anonymous)]

Bill Watterson wasn't even an old man when he was doing Calvin and Hobbes, he was 27 when he started it and it ran for ten years

And the thing is, there are a lot of parts of modern life that actually are bullshit. It's hard to tell the difference sometimes between an old man yelling at clouds, and someone who is persnickety but basically annoyed at things that actually are bullshit. I think Watterson falls into the second category.

[(Anonymous)]

Hard agree.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, this is about my opinion, too.

[(Anonymous)]

Ditto.

[(Anonymous)]

Same

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for letting me finally put my finger on what has always annoyed me about Calvin and Hobbes. Like, I like the individual comics I've read fine enough, and some are quite nice, but overall I've never wanted to read more because I've got an overwhelming smug 'I am better than you uncultured idiots of the modern world' vibe from it, which also rubs me the wrong way.

[(Anonymous)]

Well there's probably a reason for that.

[erinptah]

...yeah, Bill Watterson, that known smug purist who thought the divide between "great culture" and "stupid modern non-culture" was a real, non-arbitrary standard, and one side was objectively better:

https://imgur.com/S35DiRs

[(Anonymous)]

I get the impression that you're assuming Bill Watterson is old and arrogant on account of being ... a cartoonist? A guy? Something like that. And I'd like to point out that I never saw him use his cartoon to habitually make fun of anyone in particular, unlike a lot of other cartoonists, who absolutely did. He doesn't like specific things that are pushed on the level of entire societies, like consumerism and the pressure to get a well-paid job and measure your self-worth by your salary. He doesn't like the sexism he grew up with and the assumption that pollution is normal. He doesn't like kids being bullied for having imaginary friends or treated like their subjective experience of life is not worth taking seriously. But most of what his comics are about is what he loves. There's so much passion and happiness and silliness and imagination and rough-and-tumble friendship and life in those strips.

Of course you're entitled to think what you think, just like the OP is, but the idea that what you take from him is that he must be judging you for being too modern or liking the wrong things (when he was drawing cartoons at a time when they were considered about as far from real art as one could possibly get) ... I don't know what to say. Because it always seemed to me that he adapted so tactfully to the fact that his ideas were deeply weird and subversive, compared to what was considered normal and patriotic in America, and at the same time he never tried to claim the moral high ground on anything in Calvin and Hobbes.

And, the way his story is set up, everyone is speaking from their point of view, and it all makes sense when you consider who they are, but no one is wholly right or wholly wrong. Humans are very foreign to Hobbes because he isn't human, and yet he has as much certainty as any human that his species is the best and the brightest that could possibly exist. As far as I know, that's not because Watterson is some sort of tiger-supremacist. His story just has a tremendous amount of room for people to be drastically different from each other, and still have hearts and depths and a lot to offer.

[(Anonymous)]

This is a particularly "Old man yelling at clouds" example you've picked, OP

[(Anonymous)]

How?

[(Anonymous)]

Nah. Calvin and Hobbes is just good stuff.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't agree with this, but this is really interesting secret and I'm glad it was posted.

[(Anonymous)]

This is a pretty ageist secret, OP.

[(Anonymous)]

Not really?

[(Anonymous)]

...............what?

[(Anonymous)]

There's a lot of Calvin & Hobbes strips that are basically Bill Watterson coming through the page and sharing his opinion about how much the modern world sucks. OP characterizes this as being like an angry crotchety old man yelling at clouds.

[(Anonymous)]

It's not yelling at clouds if it has a valid point. The modern world sucks.

[(Anonymous)]

I detect a hint of rosy retrospection in that last line.

[greghousesgf]

I liked Calvin and Hobbes but there were a few problems I had with it. I won't get into all of them but here's one: why does Calvin's father push his mother into going camping all the time if she doesn't like it any more than Calvin does? She's a grown woman and she has no say in where she goes on vacation? Isn't that kind of sexist?

[(Anonymous)]

They always end up going camping so that there can be jokes about camping, because it's a comic. It's not that deep.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, Watterson had his cranky moments to be sure (especially later in the strip's run; sometimes my husband and I would react to a strip with "Oh dear, he's In A Mood."), but I think he also used the character of Calvin's Dad to poke fun at those tendencies as well.

Tats, on the other hand, whipsawed through a few political extremes for no readily apparent reason and now seems to have settled on being a Q shit for clickbait.

[(Anonymous)]

Whoa. Yeah. Sorry, I totally don’t get this vibe off Calvin and Hobbes at all. This secret feels a lot like yelling at clouds though *shrug* Especially the part about how it’s more so than an actual tinhatter. Rock one with your hateboner, I guess.

[(Anonymous)]

>who wasn't Christian

Well, sure, if you wanna exclude the entire top 50% of the most Old Men Yelling at Clouds in one go, that'd do it :p