beanytuesday
patreon
Trying My Hand At Poety
🕑 Added 2021-03-25 17:28:03 +0000 UTCIn case you live under a rock, Rupi Kaur is in the twittersphere again for posting this nightmare fuel; there's something so viscerally uncomfortable and awful about it, something ascendant beyond simply "cringiness", some feeling which cannot be fully articulated but best described by the sensation it induces-- as if your skin is trying to pull apart from you flesh and physically walk out of the room. Awful. I could spend whole paragraphs trying to parse why its so awful-- rupi kaur almost seems like a sort of mirror image of the infamous "balloon guy" Michael James Schneider, who is also near-universally loathed, despite enjoying quite a bit of popularity. Ah well-- I won't waste your time trying to psychoanalyze the reaction to their work. Hmm... not now, anyway...
Obviously, this is a parody of rupi kaur's poetry style. What is it about a dog with human feet that is so unsettling? Does it fall under the notion of "the uncanny", almost natural but not quite right? And why is it so cute, then, for a dog to wear human sneakers? Similar things can be observed in other animals wearing human clothes or using human objects. Is cuteness a mirror image of the uncanny, juxtaposing the natural world against the clearly artificial, as opposed to the natural against the semi-natural? Ah, I'm rambling again.
The alternate text to this comic read:
one time i saw a dog with realistic human feet
and i thought
"ew, what the fuck"
but then i put some air jordans on the dog
and it looked
like a cool dog
The question, then, was do I pick an intentionally unpoetic, purely funny ending, or actually attempt to make it somewhat poetic? I went with the latter, hence the original ending; it's true, though-- try to look at a dog wearing shoes and not be captivated. The notion, though funny, is worth the attempt at romanticization!
The other reason I went with this option is that I just wasn't satisfied with the style of humor I could produce in this context-- it felt a little too "One Giant Hand" (the webcomic), with the humor mainly just coming from stating something in an intentionally flat and unclever way, which I find a little annoying and uncreative.
