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We all know Madagascar is the one place that's always guaranteed to survive any pandemic, don't we?
~So, I've gotten many questions about the comment section being closed. Fear not, comments will be back early next week once we're past this little bit. This scene, that was intended as a short humorous confirmation that there could very well be other isolated culture pockets around the world, resulted in a flood of vitriolic and aggressive messages sent to me through various channels. Some of that (thankfully milder than what was sent to me privately) also occurred in the comment section and....well, you can imagine the mess that developed.
For now I've changed Emil's made up name for the language as that was the easiest to edit, but all the demands that the whole page or the concept of the joke (the gang doesn't know what the language is called) be removed is not something I'm going to bow down to. It's not even a mean joke. If the complaining persist I'll instead change the "curious culture" of these pages and replace it with something closer to home, such as Russian or Greek. They both have alphabets that Reynir could mistake for runes and mountains that Sigrun can be suspicious of.
In the end the volume and sheer aggressiveness of the messages has instilled a notion that there's no room for honest mistakes or benefit of the doubt vis-a-vi cultures that aren't close enough to one's own, so exploring those concepts any further in this comic just doesn't seem worth it. Not when there's so many other equally interesting things to write about without the animosity. There's simply too much that's considered offensive in some anglophone countries that I'm not aware of, and it's not a minefield that I'm keen on navigating, nor am I interested in the dumbing down that results from having to walk on eggshells around every single joke or avoiding jokes all together.
So that was that story of the closed comments, they'll be back next week. Have a nice Midsummer/Juhannus weekend everyone!.