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karma

2024-03-25 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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karma
Votey panel for karma
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Explanation

This comic satirizes the concept of karma and reincarnation by treating it as a transactional reward system that can be gamed.

A person in an afterlife-like setting learns that their good karma means they'll be reborn with a chance for enlightenment. But then they ask a follow-up question: can they instead be reincarnated as an animal? When told they could come back as, say, a Northern elephant seal, the person gets excited -- because male elephant seals can have up to 100 mates in a single season. The spiritual guide is appalled, noting that this is not really in the "spirit" of karma.

The punchline lands when the person says "gonna go commit goal-oriented acts of compassion so I can be a sea-cow orgy machine," completely inverting the purpose of karma. Instead of pursuing enlightenment and spiritual growth, they want to game the system to maximize hedonistic animal pleasures.

The humor works on multiple levels: it mocks the idea of karma as a cosmic point system, satirizes the human tendency to find loopholes in any rule system, and plays on the absurd contrast between spiritual aspiration and the desire to be a sexually prolific marine mammal. The Buddhist concept of escaping the cycle of rebirth is turned on its head -- this person wants to stay in the cycle specifically to enjoy it.

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