223: Valentine's Day
| Valentine's Day |
 Title text: One of these days me and Joey Comeau will get around to subverting the hetero-normative paradigm and fixing all this. |
Explanation
As mentioned in the comic, love is already pretty complicated, even more so on Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day makes it more complicated by introducing all kinds of questions. Is our relationship such that it should be acknowledged on Valentine's Day? If so, how? If by a card, what kind of card would be best? If by something more than a card, what? Candy? Flowers? A Date? What does the Valentine I received really mean? Friendship? Love? A covert request for sex? (see 63: Valentine - Heart). As an example of the kinds of dilemmas that can arise, see also 1016: Valentine Dilemma.
The phrase "Because love isn't quite complicated enough as it is" is an obvious use of sarcasm, as love is really complicated, according to Randall (see above).
Referenced in the title text, Joey Comeau is the author of the webcomic A Softer World. It is a queer comic whose work also discusses love in various forms, so between them, Randall Munroe and he are a good team to consider working on "subverting the hetero-normative paradigm." Heteronormativity is the body of lifestyle norms holding that people fall into two distinct genders with natural and complementary roles in life. Whether or not anything that cartoons can do would fix the Valentine's Day problem is another issue. Among other things, ditching the hetero-normative paradigm presumably complicates things in terms of potential love relationships, which now include more possibilities than male-female, as is shown in 216: Romantic Drama Equation. All of these might face the Valentine's Day issues in various ways.
Transcript
- Valentine's Day
- [There is a large, shaded, red heart.]
- Because love isn't quite complicated enough as it is.
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I though the titletext joke was Randall wanting to *personally* subvert heteronormativity with Joey Comeau172.69.34.148 05:12, 29 June 2020 (UTC)
Should we remove the "incomplete" tag? I don't see how this could be improved or fleshed out any more. 108.162.237.166 13:56, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
I removed the "incomplete" tag because the reason for it was stated as "References to previous comics?", and the explanation includes reference(s) to other comics. Caeleste Alarum (talk)
If Saint Valentine's Day makes love more complicated for you, then either you or your mate has made a bad choice. Or both. — Kazvorpal (talk) 04:18, 21 October 2019 (UTC)
