Look out! It’s My Ideological Agenda!

This is something I feel like I should explain.

In the last little while, a few things have popped up in Goblins that have caused some polarized reactions. It seems that some readers think that I've started pushing various ideologies on people. Some folks are unhappy or downright angry, while others are pleased or even joyful. The truth is that I'm not pushing any agenda. It's just some stuff that happened in the comic.

Okay, maybe that's not 100% true. Goblins is about bigotry and how lame it is. It's also about how anyone can find themselves thinking in prejudicial ways. Even while adamantly fighting against prejudice. It's about how no natural demographic (you know, skin colour, gender, etc) is devoid of bigotry or made up entirely of bigots. This has always been the underlying tone of the comic, but it's really the only one. There's no other ideological morals being addressed.

So what points in the comic have caused these reactions? Well, there's Big Ears' sexual orientation for starters.

Some people have condemned me or praised me for making some strong statement about homosexuality when really, I haven't.

The guy is gay. That's it. Really.

Goblins isn't a story about Ears' sexual orientation, just like it's not a story about Fumbles being asexual or Chief being a virgin. These are all just details about the characters that have shown up. I'm not trying to make any statements about my own beliefs and nobody has strong-armed me into wedging these points into the comic.

Then there's the recent discussion about Salt's gender.

This has nothing to do with gender issues or feminism or anything like that. Salt is a girl. Kind of. I mean, Kliks are genderless, but Salt is just" well she's just a girl. This was just the moment in which this detail was introduced. I wrote it this way because if I just had everyone calling Salt a "her" without covering it, I'd have readers scratching their heads, thinking "wait, it's been established that Kliks have no gender. What's the deal with Salt?". But again, I'm being both praised and scolded for making some daring statement about gender issues that isn't there.

I can understand people reacting strongly, though. These sorts of issues are very important to a lot of folks and I get that. It's just that these issues aren't here in these pages of the comic.

Thanks for reading!

-Tarol