StoneToss: Episode 85

Sorry for the delay, I got caught up in unexpected Father’s Day stuff. Which YOU WOULD KNOW if you FOLLOWED ME ON TWITTER. Of course you can also choose to GIVE ME YOUR MONEY to make up for it.

Comic Name: Game Over
Description: Spooky.
Mouseover: It’s literally a game about the haunted souls of abused children.
Image Name: five-nights-at-freddys-stonetoss-political-cartoon.png
Amogus: Third panel, the computer mouse.
Originally Published: 6/17/2021

What The Comic Is: A gay man enjoys his experience playing the game Five Nights at Freddy’s. His friend (also a gay man) approaches him and explains that the creator of the game is a republican, to which the first gay man reacts with panic and shock, flinching away from the game he was just previously enjoying.

What StoneToss Actually Thinks: People hate Scott Cawthon because he’s a Republican.

Why It’s Fucking Stupid: I had a feeling StoneToss was going comment on this. I was expecting StoneToss to take the direction of “people who support Trump and Mitch McConnel end up getting death threats from the (((violent left)))”. This would have inherently been stupid and bigoted due to the virtue it would be StoneToss (as a self-imposed rule, StoneToss can not make commentary on anything without trying to somehow make it bigoted), but it at least would have made a better point.

So, if you’re not in the know, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a once-time super popular series of horror-survival video games developed by a single guy named Scott Cawthon. Five Nights was your classic Cinderella story of an indie dev who made a radical change in his life (Cawthon had a typical job and prior to developing Five Nights at Freddy’s he tried his hand in several failed video games that were heavily Christian/Bible-centric) that paid off big time, and for a good four or five years it made constant waves with its near yearly-releases. After around 2016-2017ish the games sort of fell out of the spotlight (the debacle that was 2016’s “Five Nights at Freddy’s World” RPG spin-off, a game that was so unpolished and rushed that Cawthon removed it from Steam and offered to refunded every purchase, didn’t help).

In the early half of June 2021 it was revealed that Cawthon had donated to Republicans that included Mitch McConnel and Donald Trump. Considering Republicans and their incredibly long history of being anti-LGBTQ, especially figureheads such as Trump and McConnel, this was not well received by very many of Cawthon’s fans, nor the greater community as a whole. That a strong core of the Five Nights’ fanbase was comprised of members identifying with the LGBTQ+, and that Cawthon obviously had to be aware of this, should not be lost on anyone. Cawthon tried to defend his donations, claiming he donated to both Republicans and Democrats (though of 18 donations only a single, comparatively smaller, donation was made to a Democrat) and that he believed Democratic candidates would have ultimately done more harm than Republicans to people such as the gay community.

So the man was targeted. Unfortunately this always results in people taking things too far, and Cawthon (and his family and friends) started receiving threats. This is never an acceptable practice, and doxxing of personal information is never a good thing no matter who it is against, but the message was clear: people were not happy with Cawthon’s direct financial support of key Republicans.

But this is really the thing: Cawthon’s affiliation with Christianity and the Right were known for years. Any fan of the Five Nights franchise would’ve known Cawthon actually started his career in indie game development by making shitty, obscure Christian Bible games. So his political allegiance isn’t really news to many of his die hard fans. And yeah, there were certainly people who were denouncing Cawthon for his political and personal beliefs (especially pro-choice) years ago. So no, Scott Cawthon did not get cancelled because he was a Republican or even pro-choice. This was not secret information. He was cancelled because he donated to people like Trump and McConnel, and then tried to double down on why he did it by explaining “Actually, guys, the Democrats ARE THE REAL HOMOPHOBES!!! Trump and the Republicans will actually do more good for them!”. Very oddly enough, gay people don’t really like it when some Bible-thumping closet bigot tries to explain to them that the political party that has historically always been the most homophobic and harmful to gay and trans people is, in reality, “actually the good one for you”.

No one really cared that Scott Cawthon was a Republican. Some might not have liked it, but you didn’t see anyone doxxing him or trying to cancel him. But when your fanbase is comprised largely of LGBTQ individuals, and you financially support political candidates that actively harmed the LGBTQ community, what exactly were you expecting? I mean, Cawthon can support whatever candidate he wants. It’s a free country. He has no direct obligation to support politicians based on who buys his video games. But people are also free to not support you when you’re donating directly against their interests and even their actual safety.

So Cawthon can stick to his guns and believe what he wants, whatever. He can try to explain and rationalize why his support of Trump and McConnel is in the gay community’s best interest. But no one is opposed to him for being a Republican. This was never what it was about. It was about his financial backing of one of the most anti-gay and anti-Trans Presidencies of this lifetime, despite the fact he made that very money off the support of the LGBTQ community.

All of this to say that StoneToss is a fucking idiot who knows he has to distort reality by under representing the truth or else his side looks bad.

Comic Name: Gang Signs
Description: Lend a hand.
Mouseover: [coded message intensifies]
Image Name: hand-symbols-comic.png
Originally Published: 1/7/2020

What The Comic Is: A panel depicts various “racial signs”, such as the ‘WP’ symbol (otherwise known as the A-OK signal), the “black power” fist and the meme-y “Groyper fingers”. In the second panel, the anti-Semitic “Jew rubbing hands together” sign is shown.

What StoneToss Actually Thinks: That “Jews” are their own “gang”, just like white supremacists (the WP sign) other white supremacists (the Groyper hands) and black civil rights. Therefore, Jews are equal and not somehow more vulnerable or suffer from historical persecution. Otherwise simplified as: Everyone is equal.

Why It’s Fucking Stupid: Yes, StoneToss, brilliant observation. It’s possible for any type of person to be bigoted. Isn’t that strange? Wow, guess all bigotry is equal and we can stop talking about it forever. Oh, and most importantly, being anti-Semitic is fine!!

We’ll ignore that the black power fist is not (in its traditional usage) meant to be a black superiority signal, as the “OK” symbol and Groyper are. For those with lives who don’t know what the fuck a “Groyper” is, it’s a stupid online movement by people who call themselves ‘Groypers’ (or an edited fat version of Pepe the frog). What is the Groyper movement? Neo-nazis. Literally just actual neo-nazis. They consider themselves ‘better’, or more ‘based’, than other far-Right leaning personalities such as Donald Trump or Charlie Kirk (the idiot from Turning Point USA). Basically they just hate the rest of the Right for not being as anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic as they are; and considering they lump people like Mike Pence into the list of “CUCKED AND NOT BASED” says a lot. So you have a symbol of black civil rights, two symbols of mask-off white supremacy and then a racist caricature of a Jewish dude’s hands. Just because a picture is worth 1,000 words doesn’t mean they aren’t all jackshit stupid ones.

StoneToss gets a lot of rep for making comics that are, especially by political comic standards, easy to understand and contain a lot of commentary in as few words as possible (much to the contrast to your typical political comic, which is usually something heavily reliant on labels and hamfisted metaphors). And to a certain degree I can absolutely give StoneToss that credit, he just makes a more appealing (read: dogwhistley) political comic, which is why he’s found success doing it. However, I do love that in these moments where he tries to be very minimalist, he absolutely fails to convey not only any real message, but also manages to create something that is devoid of literally any meaning all together. He’s tried (and failed) at this before, with such classics as episode 53’s Digging Deep and episode 57’s Oxymoron.

Even if we account for bigoted people who happen to be black or Jewish, this does not in any way make it okay for white supremacists to exist. It’s this dishonest appeal to tribalism, this sort of “We’re ALL racist and we all just stick out for our own kinds!!” argument, that idiots like StoneToss use to try and legitimize themselves or make it seem like everyone else is really just as bad as they are. Not only this, but there’s a pretty massive power disparity (not to mention number disparity) between black people who are racist against white people and white people who are racist against black people (same goes for Jews). This isn’t to whitewash (Get it? Whitewash? lol) bigotry or racism from anyone, but if you’re going to try and side-by-side compare it, like StoneToss is doing, then it absolutely bears recognizing the vast difference between white racism and black/Jew racism. Maybe a black guy can be racist against a white person, but that black person lacks all the systematic and integrated tools for oppression that the white person has, which creates a huge power difference between the two. White racism has kept black people, on a scale of millions of individuals, out of jobs, homes and better living situations since the inception of the USA. In Germany, it was white supremacy that lead to one of the largest genocides of human history.

But yeah, StoneToss, tell us again how the Black Power fist makes you nervous, you dumb shitwad. God knows it doesn’t, really. StoneToss knows he’s perfectly safe and secure, so any discussion about racism occurring within non-whites is purely a childish game concerning ego. Do you think people like StoneToss are honestly worried about “white genocides”? Fuck no, they just want a dramatized excuse to justify stomping down other people.

Perhaps stupidest of all is StoneToss using racist comic artist Nick Bougas’ (more recognizably known by his pen name, A Wyatt Mann) caricature of a Jewish man rubbing his hands together. Yes, StoneToss, yes!! Show us that JEW POWER sign that a racist white guy came up with and that isn’t used by any Jews in real life!! No no, it’s okay, there are multiple photos out there of people who are Jewish and with their hands clasped together!!

Even if everyone else were racist, it doesn’t make racism okay. And because everyone else isn’t as racist as StoneToss wants to believe, that makes this line of thinking even fucking stupider. Oh, excuse me, I mean, it makes this line of thinking even more fucking based(tm).