Cpt.Obvious wrote:The problem with the 2014 Aprils joke was that it was dragged out over something like 3 or 4 strips, and it during the buildup it wasn't clear it was supposed to be a joke.
The way Tom made it look like he was going to throw away a lot of the story so far ... I remember thinking it looked as if Tom had lost his mind with these strips
My two cents on the 2014 april fool's thing...
I personally fall on the side of not really liking this 'holiday' to start with, mostly because it seems that a lot of people take it as a license to act like jerks in the name of so-called comedy. I'm not saying Tom was being a jerk, mind you, but that's background for my attitudes.
As for the particular events in question, as I said at the time, I would have had no problem with it at all if it had consisted of only the first two strips that were actually posted on the day in question, particularly if it had ended (
as the 2013 one did) with an acknowledgement of the joke. In fact, the 2013 one is a good example of the sort of april fool's joke that I don't mind - not just in the context of twokinds/webcomics, but in general. It was a lighthearted, funny aside that basically just used the day as an excuse to be silly and make a joke, and didn't attempt to screw with people, inconvenience them, interrupt their day, or break their stuff or cause them harm. (Seriously, I have no idea how some people can think that it being april 1 can excuse the sort of malicious harmful 'pranks' that ought to get someone arrested.)
The problem came with the subsequent follow-ups, posted well after the date in question, carrying explicit assurances from the author that they were not jokes, and continuing a plotline that would have been harmless as a joke into something that seemed to threaten to seriously derail the comic's story to its detriment. It's the continued attempt to seriously deceive the readers into believing that a joke whose consequences they found distasteful was true, particularly by flat-out stating
after the date had passed that they were not april fools jokes, that breaks it for me.
Going a bit beyond the event itself, though, I have issues with the apparent viewpoint that nobody is allowed to dislike something Tom does because 'it's his comic' or similar. Yes, of course, it's his comic and he can do whatever he wants with it. Nobody disputes that. However, that doesn't mean people aren't allowed to have opinions! And if they think that something Tom is doing would represent a detriment to the comic and its story, they are allowed to say so. And while he is, of course, under no obligation to do everything the readers tell him to, acting as if they are somehow not allowed to have a reaction to what they read is silly.
Twokinds is a story that many of us love dearly. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be here spending so much time and effort discussing it! People get emotionally invested in the characters and events of this tale and world that Tom's spinning for us. It doesn't give us ownership of those characters and events (which is where fans of a property can go too far), but we still feel like we have a stake in what happens - not because we own them, but because we enjoy experiencing them and don't want to lose that. And so, when something happens that seems like it threatens to change a thing we enjoy into a thing we wouldn't, it's a perfectly legitimate reaction to be distressed at the prospect. It's *that* that's at the root of the unhappiness people felt. It's not "grr how dare this author do something I don't like, this is MY story!", it's "I like this story, and I would be very sad if it changed into something I wouldn't like anymore". It's not that we think we own Twokinds and should dictate what happens, it's that we *love* Twokinds and don't want to lose it.
Tom would, of course, have been completely within his rights to continue on with that storyline if he chose do to so. But the readers would equally have been completely within their rights to think it was a bad storyline that grabbed a story they enjoyed and took it in a direction they didn't. It doesn't give them the right to forbid it from occurring, but telling people that they're not allowed to feel unhappy at the prospect of losing something they enjoyed is... off-putting, to say the least.