Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

always

2024-07-14 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
always
Votey panel for always
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 is about things you can always convince people of, structured as a list. The panels present several examples of beliefs that are easy to sell to people regardless of evidence.

One panel references how "Old English" in popular understanding always refers to something that sounds vaguely Shakespearean or King James-ish, rather than actual Old English (which is essentially a different language, incomprehensible to modern English speakers). Another shows how people are easily convinced about nature being pure and harmless ("Nature is so beautiful"). A panel discusses how people readily believe that punishments in the past were more severe ("Back then, the punishment for stealing a hen was being set on fire with coal from a sacred fire") -- playing on the widespread assumption that historical justice was uniformly brutal, which people will accept without question. There is also a reference to "Mary Had a Little Lamb" having dark origins that people readily believe.

The humor comes from the recognition that humans have predictable credulity about certain categories of claims -- historical brutality, the dark origins of nursery rhymes, and romanticized views of nature. The comic satirizes how easily people accept "fun facts" in these categories without skepticism, because the claims align with pre-existing narrative templates people carry in their heads. The final panel's "So many ways to go, princess" suggests the list could go on indefinitely.

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