poe’s law
Poe’s Law is an axiom suggesting that it’s difficult to distinguish between parodies of religious fundamentalism (or, more generally, parodies of any crackpot or extremist belief) and genuine proponents of religious fundamentalism, since they both seem equally insane. Conversely, real fundamentalism can easily be mistaken for a parody of fundamentalism.
i have had a ton of fun making xkcd parodies. i really don’t like xkcd. it just reeks of this smarmy self-satisfaction, and seems to pander directly to an audience that feels superior to the rest of the world.
that being said, i think the best part of this has been watching the posts get reblogged and reblogged, each reblog moving them farther from the original contextual clues of “hey this is parody.” a lot of people are now reblogging these and commenting on them, and, to the best of my knowledge, a lot of them believe that these are actual xkcd comics.
there is something seriously wrong with your ‘comic’ when somebody can emulate it with the explicit goal of “replacing all humor with obvious pedantry” and accidentally fool people into thinking the parody is the original article.
i don’t have much to say about it beyond that but the whole thing is kind of amazing and just reinforces my notion that a lot of things are so inherently ridiculous that they become impossible to satirize.
