trad
Explanation
This comic is a lengthy satire of the "trad" (traditional) movement -- people who romanticize past social norms and relationships, particularly "traditional" friendships and social interactions.
The comic begins with someone saying "Hello there, friend. I want to talk to you about going somewhere different." Their friend asks "Did we become trad-friends?" -- establishing the concept of "traditional friendship" as a parallel to "trad wife/husband" ideology.
The strip then walks through the absurd logical conclusions of applying "traditional" values to friendship. "Traditional friends" would mean going back to an earlier era's norms, so they suggest activities like "walking arm in arm" (which was common among male friends in earlier centuries), "sitting in a boat together, playing ukuleles, singing a duet." The panels show increasingly old-fashioned friend activities.
But the comic pushes further: in truly traditional (i.e., very old) friendships, the dialogue becomes archaic and formal. One friend worries about whether their friendship would "be capital" (using old-fashioned language). Another panel references "boarding school" norms where "such a spanking" was commonplace. The joke escalates as "replacing my entire household with one who bred offspring for a time that suited my needs" is presented as historically traditional friendship behavior.
The final panel shows someone happily singing the traditional friendship duet, now taken to its absurd historical extreme, with the punchline being that going "trad" with friendships, like going "trad" with marriage, means cherry-picking the aesthetically pleasing parts of history while ignoring the deeply problematic aspects (corporal punishment, treating people as property, rigid social hierarchies). The comic skewers the "trad" movement by showing that truly traditional social norms, taken to their logical conclusion, are not the wholesome nostalgic ideal that modern traditionalists imagine.