Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

accept

2024-01-10 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
accept
Votey panel for accept
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic plays on the similarity between "coming out" as having a non-mainstream identity and the reactions people give.

A character stands before a group of friends and nervously announces "I need to tell you something about myself: I'm an acceptionalist." When asked what that means, they explain "I'm sexually attracted to the presence of kindness and acceptance." The friends respond supportively: "We may not understand you, but we accept you no matter what." The final panel shows the character making an aroused face in response to this acceptance, with a "NICE" expression -- because the acceptance itself is what turns them on.

The humor is a self-referential logical loop. The joke is that the "coming out" moment is engineered to produce the exact stimulus (acceptance and kindness) that the person finds arousing. It's a wholesome-seeming scenario with a mildly transgressive undercurrent: the friends are being genuinely supportive, unaware that their supportive reaction is itself the thing that's gratifying the person in a way they didn't intend. It parodies how performative acceptance culture can become, where the ritual of acceptance becomes its own reward regardless of what's actually being accepted. The comic also plays with the proliferating taxonomy of sexual identities by inventing one that is specifically parasitic on the acceptance process itself.

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