Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

all-souls

2020-03-14 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
all-souls
Votey panel for all-souls
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

The comic takes place in Heaven, where angels are having a conversation. One angel feels like things are "really boring up here," and the others agree ("So no good"). They decide they need more souls from Earth, so they propose having "a big souls get-together." One angel enthusiastically shouts "Haha! Yeah!" -- and in the next panel, we see the result: the Earth is being flooded, a clear reference to the Biblical Great Flood. The last panel shows the angels back on their cloud, with one awkwardly asking "...butt stuff or whatever?" suggesting they are just bored celestial beings looking for entertainment.

The Humor

The comic reimagines one of the most dramatic events in Biblical mythology -- the Great Flood that destroyed nearly all life on Earth -- as the result of bored angels wanting to throw a party. Instead of divine judgment for humanity's sins, the flood was apparently just a casual plan to get more souls into Heaven because the angels had nothing to do. This deflates the gravitas of the Biblical narrative entirely. The final panel's awkward "butt stuff or whatever?" drives home that Heaven is not a place of transcendent bliss but essentially an eternal college dorm where immortal beings are desperately trying to stave off boredom, willing to commit mass extinction for a bit of social stimulation.

References

The Great Flood is described in Genesis 6-9, where God decides to destroy humanity (except Noah and his family) due to their wickedness. This comic offers an alternative, much pettier motivation for the same event.

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