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Obverse & Reverse Chapter 7 Page 27

Obverse & Reverse Chapter 7 Page 27 published on 43 Comments on Obverse & Reverse Chapter 7 Page 27

That’s a very good question, Michelle. A very good question indeed.

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And next time we see someone do something wrong.

That’s that. Nothing to do about that. :D

But maybe when people do something bad, they should be punished.

Now how we will make sure the punishment fits the crime, is given for the right reasons and is proportional to the actual crime committed…?

Now those be the way harder questions. And though it be mean, I’d err toward the stricter than the lax.

punishment is an incitation for the rest against doing the same thing, and reducing the ability of the culprit to do that again.
A punishment that is both excessive, hidden and done on people unable to ever commit the crime again is pointless

Now I’m not saying I’m against public stocks or even gallows, but trying to be more “humane” while also offering the perpetrators a measure of what they themselves in the selfishness have offered, I’d rather see the wrong-doers put under lock and key to somewhere where they won’t be found until their time is done and just let the knowledge of such place existing work towards discouraging wrong-doing.

But public stocks, gallows and shame-punishments would be effective even these days, I’m sure.

Kinda bold to ask for them in the moral climate we are suffering these days, I have to say. Sort of refreshing.

I am not asking for gallows, to the contrary.
execution is excessive, and prevent what is one of the main goal of justice : rehabilitation.
Hell, taken as eternal torture is even further than that: it is excessive, done on souls that could not recidive anyway, and hidden, so that even the other goal of a catharsis for the victim does no happen. It is pointless.

punishment does not have to be public (and frankly should not be in most cases), but a punishment that nobody knows about fail at the goal of inciting against crime.
On all four goals (justice, incitation, rehabilitation and catharsis ) Hell as described in religious text fails completely.

Things like public stocks, gallows and shaming were never effective. They were for only one purpose: the entertainment of the masses and to distract them from their miserable lives and who was really responsible for them. They played to the darkness in the general public is all that they did.

I am not asking for gallow nor saying they served any use.

A punishment influence the people that could be subjected to it if they know it exists.

If Hell was as described in religions, it would not influence people outside of it in any way so would not help improving society.
It would influence people in it, but not in a way that could eventually filter back to society, since it is supposed to be inescapable (and endless torture would not help sanity if it existed and was escapable)
It punishes culprit… in a way that one of the objectives of punition, reassuring the victims that justice still exists and still protect them, cannot be met either

Compare to actual, human, justice : someone fined or sent to prison knew from the start that it was a risk, is sent to be removed from society interrupting the crime spree, will be exposed to attempts at rehabilitation so that eventually he will be able to come back from it a better person, and the victims can learn about the verdict and know that their suffering had consequences and will not be repeated

Bruce. We talked about this. Joker will never repent. You need to let him go.

No, not from Arkham! Damnit, Bruce!

in this case, the problem is more that arkham is so easily escaped than that bruce is choosing to get the joker non lethally.

honestly, unless going lethal would have saved someone else (including batman himself) then going for capture and secure hand off, then let the actual justice system choose what happen next, is the right choice

…I always assumed the reason it was thought to exist is because Christians act like they’re pretty much into fetish.
Shrug.
Seems like an organised religion thing. Not my bag, but that’s what it looks like from an outside observer.

It’s more than a fetish. It’s a “superior than thou” thing and not exclusive to Christianity. “You are going to hell where the demons will punish you for all eternity but not me, because I accepted Jesus”. And they delight in making hell worse and worse so they get better and better off.

Oh and “fire and brimstone” thing is also used to scare people into doing religion. It works. Sort of.

My hometown gets an average summer temperature of 46C.

So I’ve always found the whole fire and brimstone thing to be funny. It’s like a vacation for me!

Sounds like one teacher telling us about the Opal mines that people live in. “Hell the hot place is above-ground and church is below-ground.”

The desert dwelling people usually also fancy the punishing hot sun as the evil, and the skies above the clouds to be the “hell’ that never gets a reprieve from the merciless burning orb, whereas down in the earth the cool water recides, giving life to all things pushing through the crust of earth and in turn feeding those who walk above it. Thus “heaven” is the cool and welcoming bosom of dirt.

I wonder if Michelle is still happy with her decision from Chapter 1, page 11ff https://www.skindeepcomic.com/archive/obverse-reverse-ch1-page-11/

Also that page was published on March 12, 2019 … I have to say that kind of shocked me, that is over 3 years ago.

Now I’m not saying I’m against public stocks or even gallows, but trying to be more “humane” while also offering the perpetrators a measure of what they themselves in the selfishness have offered, I’d rather see the wrong-doers put under lock and key to somewhere where they won’t be found until their time is done and just let the knowledge of such place existing work towards discouraging wrong-doing.

But public stocks, gallows and shame-punishments would be effective even these days, I’m sure.

Kinda bold to ask for them in the moral climate we are suffering these days, I have to say. Sort of refreshing.

Except studies after studies shows that punishment really doesn’t help change behavior. It’s just helpful to make people feel better about justice, and it keeps offenders out of society (the second can still be done without torturing/punishing people). Countries that have rehabilitation and healthcare in their prisons have pretty low crime rates. Of course, we’re talking about the afterlife (totally different matter), but I do agree with Michelle when it comes to needless suffering…because “punishment”—especially if those souls can simply be rebirthed/reincarnated with fresh starts. Even if you don’t see it as being cruel, it’s rather wasteful and pointless.

Heh. Got caught by the same “so… this wasn’t reply or anything…?” that my later reply got caught by as well. Had to quickly copy-paste and re-comment. XD

But what we have here is Michelle quite straight objecting against the whole concept of punishing. She also has this very glamorous picture of world that all these creatures stuck here were somehow fooled, misguided or just didn’t know any better.

Which we definitely don’t know. We don’t know what these critters were and what they did to end up here.

Sure the stereotypical Christian way says envy your neughbours goat and off to Hell you go. But I don’t think a deity of any kind would really be that childish, or even care to that extent. Some of that could easily be just people learning how others back in the day drew flat maps, so of course everyone thought world was flat before Copernicus. … Yeah, that turned out to be fact too.

Christian god being mad about you being horny was also an idea which definitely didn’t pop up somewhere along Christianity’s history.

And here we have a realm where we’re to suppose actual sinners go. As the classic saying goes, they probably deserved it.

In addition, we have zero knowledge of how this place actually functions. Is this petty eternal torment or something else? We have no answer.

And to top all of that, I think I recall it having been stated that shades aren’t even the souls itself, but some sort of leftover from it. Which would make this Michelle being angry at people for using dead human bodies for Dis or Dat. Heck, it could actually serve some rational purpose. We saw Cerberus apparently eating the stuff. Maybe it lives on souls’ corpses.

I’d say we wait for more answers before we give our own.

Granted, it could still be just classic Christian I-got-boner-and-went-to-Hell. XD

We don’t know what these critters were and what they did to end up here.

I don’t remember the Skin Deep storyverse ever indicating that dead people can not end up as shades, or that shades can end up anywhere else than Dis, other than borrowing stuff from Dante’s Inferno, which does refer back to Christian concepts. On the other hand, I seem to remember info that shades will dissolve over time, flat out contradicting the Christian “eternal soul” concept.

Vera seems to have heard (and rather poorly understood) something about the shades being in Dis because of sinning – supposedly their own, but she’s too vague for even that being taken as gospel -, but Occams razor and presumption of innocence say that we should so far work with the answer of “because they were humans and died”.

Alternatively, “because they were sapient and died.” I don’t remember if we know whether Michelle’s dad got his medallion in life and *knew* he was a sphinx, but I wouldn’t count on that changing where you go for the afterlife.

See, this is the part where we talk about how punishment is at best a wildly flawed way to improve the world or change people’s behavior. It’s mostly used as a way to vent our need to hurt someone when we are in pain, which provokes a cycle of violence that consumes us all.

Okay, the ‘shades aren’t people’ thing really, REALLY made the alarms go off in the back of my head.
How many times in history have we heard some variation of ‘_____ can’t feel pain! You have to hit them that hard just to get their attention! They aren’t like real people.’

Shades WERE people. Like how bacon WAS a live pig at one point. If the remnants of every single living thing were fully respected, regardless of state of being, then there wouldn’t be any renewal or change whatsoever.
Gasoline used to be living plants, but that doesn’t stop us from using them as fuel. No reason to see that demons don’t treat shades like that, especially when they lack the luxury of empathy. If shades cannot be turned back into living corporeal beings, they are just echoes, like the graffiti left on the walls of ruins by inhabitants long gone.

Sorry, not usually this somber.

Can you awnser that of your own world, Michelle?

How many petit crimes are punished with indefinite incarceration without a chance for release?

Also, gluttony isn’t a crime. Otherwise, think how many people would be permanently locked up for being utter lushes. Eating until they were the size of a blimp, and then keep on eating. Or sitting on a pile of cash the size of the Burj Khalifa and doing nothing with it than to make the pile bigger.

Well, if Dante’s Inferno (of which this version of Hell is clearly based off of) is to be believed… then it exists as a means of “purifying” a soul/shade from their vices before they can enter Heaven. Even the Japanese version of Hell is this way. Example: https://youtu.be/VC83ws6w6-w Although their version of Heaven can also include reincarnation, but the purification is still required.

What? I like attempting to answer questions like these.

If I recall, that was what Purgatory was for,

Hell was PERMANENT. At last judgment, Purgatory ceases to exist. Hell is locked down, and everyone in there is stuck until the end of time.

Yeah, but this is based on the Dante’s version of Hell.

Personally, I don’t believe there is such a thing as Purgatory. My mother thinks that there is and it’s basically like the waiting room for judgment day.

Housepets is currently dealing with an arch where when you die, your “person” divides into two parts. The hell parts and then heaven parts. Shades could be a version of a similar concept.

(See for yourself as it provides some context for something I’m going to be saying at the end of it all:
https://www.housepetscomic.com/comic/2022/06/07/all-tied-up-at-the-moment/
https://www.housepetscomic.com/comic/2022/06/14/the-eyes-have-it/
https://www.housepetscomic.com/comic/2022/06/17/this-magic-moment/)

Eh, Personally, this is what happens when you try to mix spiritual concepts with physical concepts. Ultimately, there is either nothing or there is something. If there is nothing, then that’s Nihilism. Of which point it doesn’t matter if evil (shades or otherwise) to be punished or not. It serves no purpose as there is no right nor wrong.

If there is something, then that means that there is also a source of which the concept of morality comes from. Ultimately evil has to be punished or there is no point in making a distinction in the first place. To essentially reward evil, would be no different than keeping a relationship with an abusive friend/relative (Narcissists are a great example of this). In a sense, the punishing of evil (especially evils that were not dealt with in life) serves the purpose of establishing what is good to begin with.

Although personally, I view all forms of “Evil” in the same way that I view “Cold”, “Dark” and “Apathy”. Namely that they all do not exist, rather they are the lack of something that does exist.

Sorry, like I said, I like trying to answer these types of questions. I don’t have to be right and who really cares if I’m wrong. It changes nothing. At the end of the day, we’ll see what Kory has planned for her world.

Yeah, but this is based on the Dante’s version of Hell.

Personally, I don’t believe there is such a thing as Purgatory. My mother thinks that there is and it’s basically like the waiting room for judgment day.

Housepets is currently dealing with an arch where when you die, your “person” divides into two parts. The hell parts and then heaven parts. Shades could be a version of a similar concept.
(See also the next three pages of this link for context of things I’m going to be saying later: https://www.housepetscomic.com/comic/2022/06/07/all-tied-up-at-the-moment/ )

Eh, Personally, this is what happens when you try to mix spiritual concepts with physical concepts. Ultimately, there is either nothing or there is something. If there is nothing, then that’s Nihilism. Of which point it doesn’t matter if evil (shades or otherwise) to be punished or not. It serves no purpose as there is no right nor wrong.

If there is something, then that means that there is also a source of which the concept of morality comes from. Ultimately evil has to be punished or there is no point in making a distinction in the first place. To essentially reward evil, would be no different than keeping a relationship with an abusive friend/relative (Narcissists are a great example of this). In a sense, the punishing of evil (especially evils that were not dealt with in life) serves the purpose of establishing what is good to begin with.

Although personally, I view all forms of “Evil” in the same way that I view “Cold”, “Dark” and “Apathy”. Namely that they all do not exist, rather they are the lack of something that does exist.

Sorry, like I said, I like trying to answer these types of questions. I don’t have to be right and who really cares if I’m wrong. It changes nothing. At the end of the day, we’ll see what Kory has planned for her world.

Yeah, I’m familiar with Housepets. It has become quite the mental exercise with how innocent (and outright clueless at times) HeavenBreel is because he had all the ‘negative’ aspects of his personality cleaved.

And I think Hell became a permanent thing in Dante’s Inferno.

Canto VI? Dante asks what happens to souls at Last Judgment, and is told that they’ll be reunited with their bodies … which, when you look into it, means that it only INCREASES the suffering.

(Housepets) Yeah, well, that’s kind of why I mentioned those three pages specifically. NegaBreel (Yeah, that’s actually his name… Moving on.) NegaBreel isn’t just HeavenBreel’s negative aspects, he’s the LACK of the good aspects. It was the perfect example of what I mean when I said, [ “evil” doesn’t exist ].

Thus all that negative Karma’s gotta go somewhere, that’s why people in Hell suffer. Although, just like with the Housepets example, by splitting up a person between the two, then you’re actually creating two new people. Which is why in the context of both Housepets and Skin Deep’s “shades”(assuming that they have a similar function to the former) : (philosophically speaking) Hell actually is kind of pointless.

(Back to Dante) Well, in case it wasn’t obvious (seriously, I never read the books myself. I’m sure you’ve heard of Overly-Sarcastic Productions) Dante is a “Self-Insert Character”. The author actually wrote these stories as a means to really dunk on the people he personally didn’t like and praise those he did.

As such, increasing the suffering, that’s kind of the point of his stories.

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