Having read nearly everything in this post (most of what I skipped was the horse discussions) and having read TamLin's long post (I want the cookie too, I have no cookies) I have to say I think its really cool that Erfworld has really sparked such interesting and (in many places) eloquent debate.

I have to say myself, I didn't even think that much of Parson's comment when I first read it (only after reading TamLin's response did I begin to think about it). And while I'm more in the camp that tends to attribute Parson's response to simply extreme joy that their winning (not to mention "I'm gonna live!" bit), but also an expression of his own liberation from the censors. However, I can also see the merit in much of TamLin's point of view as well (though I don't find it confused genre wise, for me personally, simply because I tend to focus on it as an incomplete work at present).

So to add something new so that I'm not just making an affirmative post, and just because I wanted to:

I think this comic also creates an interesting figuration of the Other (in the literary sense of the word, by which I mean loosely in the dichotomy of Us/Them we often have different shades (places where the them can become us (usually based on levels of empathy and similarity), where Other is the extreme of Them. Monsters are the archetypal Other (but it comes in other forms, including a psychological meaning of the word which I won't delve into as deeply right now).

What I mean is, in typical D&D the Other is the monster that's simply "always evil" applied to it and is monstrously ugly by human standards (and hence is often thought of as having inhuman thought patterns too). Hence the Other is sanctioned for death, removal, and annihilation.

In Erfworld, this is played on as well, but sometimes from a nearly opposite end of the spectrum. Instead of being monstrous as ugly inhuman, its demarked as still non-human, but also not as monstrous, but rather as (I guess the best word I can find here is) "inanimate" in the sense that marbits are connected to marshmallow bits, cloth golems to stuffed animals, gwiffions are peeps, etc. So when we witness their destruction we are unphased (just as with the death of a monster).

Even our empathy for the fallen in this comic scene is run though Sizemore, rather than rooted in the suffering of marbits (who remain silenced and are spoken for by their human leaders).

hmmm. . . stuff to chew on.