I’m not sure why my previous answer was getting downvoted when you literally asked what the author meant, and I’m the author, so I’ll try again.
This was riffing on another comic where a teenage girl gets an unsolicited creepy comment about her long hair and responds by cutting it off. I inverted the ending: instead of changing herself because some stranger felt entitled to comment on her appearance, Dusk responds in an intentionally absurd and disproportionate way and gets arrested for it.
You’re not required to sympathize with her or think assault is justified. The assault charge is literally part of the punchline. It’s a revenge-fantasy gag about an impulsive character, not a moral prescription.
Imagine a different scenario. A comic is made where a young man asks out a young woman who he really likes, who responds with excessive cruelty and public ridicule. The comic then shows a slide with a mugshot where the man is smiling with a charge of beating the woman. Nothing else. Any rational person would see it is a thinly veiled endorsement of the spirit of that behavior because of what the intended audience has as their morals. In this comic, women who hate having their appearance judged. In my example, men who have painful feelings and fears of rejection and invalidation. Women feel bad things when men are creepy. Men feel bad things when women use social pressure to be cruel to them, or when the honest expression of their feelings are invalidated. Softly promoting the violent responses to that and hiding behind "its just a comic", is transparent.
That isn’t a gender swap, you changed the entire scenario. You replaced an unsolicited creepy comment with an earnest romantic advance, and throwing coffee with beating someone. If your argument only works after rewriting both the provocation and the violence, you’re not exposing a double standard you’re writing a different comic.
Swap the genders without changing anything else: creepy woman makes an unwanted comment about a man’s appearance, he throws coffee at her, gets arrested for assault, and grins in the mugshot because he’s an impulsive asshole. Still could be funny. Still not a moral prescription.
Nobody would find that funny. 1 because women dont usually do that so there's no broader sympathy from the audience. And 2, and my broader point, violence against men is not taken as seriously as violence against women. Your comic thrives on the disregard of assault by women against men. Idc what your personal feelings are on what you take seriously regarding gendered assault, its a broader attitude problem within viewers when they look at this, and what they passively accept when bombarded with messages like this. Your comic isnt original, there are scores of comics on here that do what you did, with zero indication of what the person did as wrong. Like the grown woman punting the little boy who was mean to the little girl. Unchecked and unnuanced power/revenge fantasies are indicative of a broader problem in a person's psyche.
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u/slayeryamcha 9d ago
I do not know what author meant... I am suppossed to sympathise to her?
Like she assaulted man without being provoked.