Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

sporting

2024-12-27 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
sporting
Votey panel for sporting
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 imagines what would happen if Godzilla -- the iconic fictional giant monster -- actually existed in a world with modern industrial technology. Two crew members on a large industrial fishing/whaling vessel remark that hunting Godzilla-sized creatures is "not even sporting" because sonar finds one, mechanical harpoons fire, and it's over. One notes that "it was better in Grandfather's time," echoing the nostalgic complaints real hunters and fishers make about how technology has taken the challenge out of their pursuits. The other cheerfully notes they can "feed a whole city."

The humor lies in the deflation of Godzilla's mythic terror. In the movies, Godzilla is an unstoppable force of nature that levels cities. But Weinersmith points out that in the real world, humanity has industrially hunted every large creature on the planet to near-extinction with ruthless efficiency. The caption -- "If Godzilla were real, we'd have made it industrialized meat by now" -- drives home the satirical point: the real monster is humanity's capacity to reduce any living thing, no matter how awe-inspiring, to a commodity. It is a darkly comic observation about how industrial capitalism and technology strip the sublime out of nature.

View History (1) Original Comic
← Previous Comic Next Comic →