inspired
Explanation
The Joke
A woman cheerfully declares: "I've always been inspired by nature!" The caption below reads: "Sally explains why she ate her young during a high stress season."
The Humor
The comic takes the common, wholesome sentiment of "being inspired by nature" and applies it with horrifying literalness. Many animals — hamsters, certain fish, some birds — do eat their offspring under stressful conditions. It's a well-documented biological phenomenon. Sally has apparently taken her nature inspiration beyond the usual scope of "I like sunsets and hiking" to include filial cannibalism.
The joke works because the two parts of the comic create maximum cognitive dissonance. The image shows a pleasant, smiling woman making what sounds like a perfectly normal statement. The caption recontextualizes it as a justification for something monstrous. The word "explains" in the caption is doing heavy lifting — it implies Sally sees this as a perfectly reasonable defense, which makes it funnier and more disturbing.
Broader Context
Weinersmith frequently plays with the "appeal to nature" fallacy — the idea that because something occurs in nature, it is therefore good or justified. Many people selectively invoke nature to support their preferences (natural foods, natural lifestyles) while ignoring the parts of nature that are brutal, indifferent, or horrifying. This comic takes that selective invocation to its logical extreme. It's a single-panel distillation of the argument that "natural" and "good" are not synonyms.