Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

curse

2024-08-18 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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curse
Votey panel for curse
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Explanation

The comic presents a fairy-tale scenario where a witch has cursed a princess, and a prince must deliver "true love's kiss" to awaken her. But the witch has been reading scientific articles arguing that the concept of "true love" is ill-founded, and she wonders why "true love's kiss" is even a valid curse-breaking mechanism. She argues that genuine romantic attachment involves complex neurological processes, not some binary magical state.

The other characters push back, with someone pointing out that Snow White-type curses are a well-established fairy-tale convention. Another character notes that the witch herself turned a prince into a beast (a reference to Beauty and the Beast), and asks "do you know how many women are in the 'kissing a corpse' community?" -- pointing out the disturbing implications of kissing an unconscious person as a cure.

The humor comes from applying modern critical thinking -- scientific skepticism, feminist critique, and consent-based ethics -- to fairy-tale tropes. The witch is essentially doing a literature review on her own curse and finding that its underlying premises don't hold up. The joke also satirizes how over-analysis can drain the magic (literally) from stories. The references to specific fairy tales (Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty) ground the comic in well-known cultural touchstones while systematically dismantling their logic. The comic suggests that fairy tales fall apart the moment any character within them starts thinking critically about what's actually happening.

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