Unfortunate Implications/Newspaper Comics
Important Note: Just because a work has Unfortunate Implications does not mean the author was thinking of it that way. In fact, that's the point of it being unfortunate. So, please, no Justifying Edits about "what the authors really meant." The way an author handles a trope is an important factor here; handling a trope in a clumsy manner can certainly create unintentional impressions for readers. Likewise, if a work intends the offensive message (for example, a piece of Nazi propaganda about Jews), it wouldn't count. Also, for something that may not be offensive to you personally but may offend others in a different culture or time period, see Values Dissonance.
Examples of Unfortunate Implications in Newspaper Comics include:
- 9 Chickweed Lane has Seth, a proudly Invisible to Gaydar male ballet dancer who recently has been almost harassing another character to come out of the Transparent Closet that everyone can see. He then falls madly in love with a hot South American woman...'s dance skills, skills that he never noticed before despite being said woman's ballet partner (he then sleeps with her "skills"), and a few months in advance the plot was lined up with the revelation that Seth had previously had a short but intense affair with a 65-year-old oboe-playing woman named Maxine, who was apparently not a looker, because she was such a talented musician. Apparently he is supposed to have a fetish for "art". What the author might be trying to say is that everyone is attracted to different things and it's not fair to pigeonhole people based on appearances and gut-feelings, but it's coming off as "he just needed a tango with the right leggy woman".
- This seems to be what got Cathy such ire -- Cathy and Irving's personal behaviors were read as statements on what all women and all men were like, and the two fit pretty neatly into existing stereotypes. The title character becomes much less offensive if you assume she's an Author Avatar.
- Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) comments on this in one of his collections. One story had various personal items mysteriously disappearing from people's cubicles. Eventually it turns out that the Security Guard and the Janitor are the culprits. However, this happens in a Sunday strip, and Adams does not do the coloring personally, it's added by an editor at his syndicate. As you might expect from its inclusion here, both of them are depicted with decidedly non-Caucasian skin tones. Adams says that somehow they pick the exact worst times to add diversity to the cast...
- Deliberately toyed with by Adams after he got some backlash over the character of Tina, who is offended by everything. Readers complained of her being so "brittle" because she was a woman, even though she was only female because he wanted to add some more gender diversity to the cast. In response he created the joke character "Antina", who was a deliberate reversal of every female stereotype imaginable. This time Adams was accused of mocking lesbians.
- Many of the early Dilbert cartoons take potshots at Straw Feminists and depict Dilbert as a Dogged Nice Guy who refuses to take no for an answer from women who will not date him. More recent strips, however, don't seem to have this problem.
- On the assumption that having no recurring minority characters would itself be a problem, Adams decided to add Asok to the cast. Since Adams makes pretty much all his characters extremely flawed, he was hesitant about handling an ethnic minority for fear of being accused of racism. So he made Asok a hyper-competent, naive intern whose main flaw was being unaware of the cynical workings of his company, a flaw that would implicitly go away with time. He still got complaints for that one.
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