Misfile

[MoonCat]

So, I just started reading Misfile recently, and have been enjoying it.

What are your feelings about Misfile?

Here's the link.

[Mystic Muse]

Not sure what else to say other than I like it. The plots are usually pretty interesting and the characters are pretty cool. I like Vashiel since he's about as nice as possible while at the same time being a kick butt avenging angel.

[pffh]

For the most part I like it. The only problem I have with it are how some of the racing plotlines drag on for to long.

[Tvtyrant]

Been reading it for a long, long time. The biggest issue I have is that Ash has had a serious lack of character development; he literally had the same "I am a girl" meltdown over not getting in a fight twice, with no difference between them.

[MoonCat]

Not sure what else to say other than I like it. The plots are usually pretty interesting and the characters are pretty cool. I like Vashiel since he's about as nice as possible while at the same time being a kick butt avenging angel.

I'm personally fascinated by Vash, as he clearly has a dark history, yet has so obviously changed incredibly since then.

For the most part I like it. The only problem I have with it are how some of the racing plotlines drag on for to long.

I've only been reading in real time for one racing plot, and while I do think it could be shortened somewhat, the daily weekly strips really do give more scope to play with, as compared to a once a week webcomic that cannot afford to waste tine.

[Gamall]

the daily weekly strips

It's 4am where I live, so it's possible I'm missing something due to one of my two neurons still being fast asleep, but I feel compelled to ask... how can a strip be daily and weekly ? Especially considering that misfile is neither.

[Gez]

I think the idea was to say it's daily on weekdays (Monday-to-Friday). For some reasons, Saturday and Sunday are not weekdays even if they are days of the week.

[Gamall]

Okey Dokey Lokey. Might I suggest that it is weekdaily or workdaily, then.

More ontopically, my main gripe with Misfile at this point is the ominous "serious angels' war" subplot, the very idea of which bores me to tears and seems out of place in the overall "Misfile = cars + boy/girl jokes + sloppy angels jokes + CARS!!" formula. Fortunately it's more a vague menace looming on the horizon than anything else for now.

Also, I deplore the lack of plot development with regards to Ash's most terrible condition. 'kay, you've got boobies now. Get over it already!

[John Cribati]

'kay, you've got boobies now. Get over it already!

That's not it at all. It's not just about Ash being a girl, it's the fact that her life wasn't this good when she was a he. Is her new life worth being a girl for the rest of it? That's the main internal conflict.

[Gamall]

it's the fact that her life wasn't this good when she was a he. Is her new life worth being a girl for the rest of it? That's the main internal conflict.

Precisely. The only downside of her situation is... being a girl. Everything else is unchanged or improved. And she doesn't like being a girl because... she doesn't like being a girl, and that's it. No tangible reason is given for that -- that I recall, at least -- except maybe the racing issue, but I'd see that more as a challenge.

Perhaps I have trouble understanding the dramatic depth of this gender-centric internal conflict because, like Vaarsuvius, I fail to see what difference that makes.

Hence the summarized version : "your only real problem is having boobies... and that's not actually a problem in and of itself, so get over it".

[ninja_penguin]

I used to read it quite a bit, but I think some of the lack of Ash's character development irked me. Also, the car racing subplots fall flat with me, but that's because I'm not a car person whatsoever. I also seem to remember some sort of word of God thing where they mentioned that if the Misfile was fixed, nobody remembers anything or something to that line, and it pretty much caused me to stop caring as apparently anything that happens is irrelevant, or they never fix anything.

[pffh]

Precisely. The only downside of her situation is... being a girl. Everything else is unchanged or improved. And she doesn't like being a girl because... she doesn't like being a girl, and that's it. No tangible reason is given for that -- that I recall, at least -- except maybe the racing issue, but I'd see that more as a challenge.

Perhaps I have trouble understanding the dramatic depth of this gender-centric internal conflict because, like Vaarsuvius, I fail to see what difference that makes.

Hence the summarized version : "your only real problem is having boobies... and that's not actually a problem in and of itself, so get over it".

His problem is more that she's literally a boy stuck in a girls body and he can't go under the knife to fix that because if someone in heaven figures out the mistake then she will still have the sex change surgery on his file and will now be a boy in a girls body that had surgery to become a girl but wants to change back.

[Mystic Muse]

Precisely. The only downside of her situation is... being a girl. Everything else is unchanged or improved. And she doesn't like being a girl because... she doesn't like being a girl, and that's it. No tangible reason is given for that -- that I recall, at least -- except maybe the racing issue, but I'd see that more as a challenge.

She doesn't like it because she is literally in the wrong body. I know what that's like and it's not something that you can just "Get over."

Hence the summarized version : "your only real problem is having boobies... and that's not actually a problem in and of itself, so get over it".

This is kind of insulting to anybody who is transsexual, and there are a quite a few people on Giantitp who are.

[MoonCat]

Precisely. The only downside of her situation is... being a girl. Everything else is unchanged or improved. And she doesn't like being a girl because... she doesn't like being a girl, and that's it. No tangible reason is given for that -- that I recall, at least -- except maybe the racing issue, but I'd see that more as a challenge.

Perhaps I have trouble understanding the dramatic depth of this gender-centric internal conflict because, like Vaarsuvius, I fail to see what difference that makes.

Hence the summarized version : "your only real problem is having boobies... and that's not actually a problem in and of itself, so get over it".

Being in the wrong body, and being treated differently because of it, and being referred to in a way Ash doesn't want (to be called a girl) is in no way not actually a problem. And the difficulty that his life is better here, so he needs to choose between self identity and a world where Kate goes crazy and/or kills him, he never meets his mom, and he'll never have met Emily, even if Rumi doesn't fix her file and end up killing her.

And you've gotten V entirely wrong. V doesn't care which gender you are, it's your on personal choice to act upon. If Ash wants to be a boy he would be, in V's eyes, and he'd probably hand him a belt of gender changing on the way out.

[Fion MacCumhail]

His problem is more that she's literally a boy stuck in a girls body and he can't go under the knife to fix that because if someone in heaven figures out the mistake then she will still have the sex change surgery on his file and will now be a boy in a girls body that had surgery to become a girl but wants to change back.

also, "I have cramps, I'm wearing a tiny diaper..."

one thing i really like about this comic is that the author doesn't have his characters wallow in embarrassment all the time - unlike other members of this profession (i'm looking at you, hollywood).

[Zherog]

Overall, I like it. But there are times it feels like it moves too slowly for my tastes.

[R. Shackleford]

Misfile... my feelings on it?

The Giant updates a mere fraction of the number of times a week that Misfile does, and yet OotS's plot actually goes somewhere whereas Misfile's plot seemed to have stalled somewhere back in 2007.

I really can't stand the story. There's the whole heaven angle, and it rarely gets touched upon, and the racing and car stuff isn't all that interesting, though I appreciate the knowledge and detail. The characters have really gone nowhere, and every time something interesting develops or a philosophical quandry arises, it always ends with the Emily or Ash deciding to angst over it for a page and then sweep it under the rug for a volume. It's like Inu-Yasha, only Inu-Yasha had monsters and fighting and stuff. It's been established that Ash is torn between whether he wants to be male or female. But then we're told he won't have much choice in the matter anyway. I'm glad we at least got another Heroic BSOD out of that, at least.

I hate wasting a cool premise on a slice-of-life work. I hate slice-of-life too. Normally when I read something, I want to write fanfiction of it. In the case of Misfile, I want to tear the whole thing down and do the series in a way that doesn't seem like 6 years of nothing happening.

But, it updates every day, and it's free, so I'm compelled to keep reading.

tl;dr something important ******* happen already!

[Kurald Galain]

I used to read it quite a bit, but I think some of the lack of Ash's character development irked me.

I agree, and this is basically the reason I quit reading Misfile. I find that most of the time, the actual misfile isn't relevant to the overall plot - if you cut away the introductory pages, the story makes perfect sense if it's just about two girls who are friends and are into racing.

[Gamall]

On the theme of "it's a serious real-life problem, and you can't just get over it".

I know. We are not debating real life*. We are debating Ash, who lives in a webcomic. What's the difference? Real life has no plot. Our daily problems are under no imperative to either solve themselves in the end or evolve in interesting, entertaining, comical or surprising ways. Ash's gender issue, however, is the basic premise of the entire plot of this webcomic, which has been running for Ao knows how many years, and has more than 1000+ strips behind it.

An hypothetical real world Ash would be under no obligation to "get over it"; no dispute here. This fictional Ash, however, would be well inspired to either learn to cope with it or find a way to fix things, so we can at least pretend that Misfile, as a comic, is going somewhere. The plot, such as it is, has barely advanced since the first strip: Ash is no closer to accepting her new identity, and the pot-smoking angels are no closer to getting their head out of... wherever it is they store their heads when they are not using them. In order for the plot to move, at least one of those has to make some progress. And since the angelic head-extraction process seems very unlikely to take place anytime soon, it follows that the moving-the-plot-on duty falls on Ash's shoulders.

* (Or at least I thought we weren't. Rereading my last posts, they were less than eloquent and completely missed the point I was trying to make; so I apologize for the confusion and the unfortunate implications. Hoping this one does not add to it.)


edit: re-re-read my posts. I'm not sure anymore what point I was trying to make exactly. Morale of the story: when you get up at 2am, don't attempt to post on topics touching both complex social problems and a webcomic which you follow very distractedly. And on these wise words, I'm off to bed.

[R. Shackleford]

On the theme of "it's a serious real-life problem, and you can't just get over it".

...

* (Or at least I thought we weren't. Rereading my last posts, they were less than eloquent and completely missed the point I was trying to make; so I apologize for the confusion and the unfortunate implications. Hoping this one does not add to it.)


edit: re-re-read my posts. I'm not sure anymore what point I was trying to make exactly. Morale of the story: when you get up at 2am, don't attempt to post on topics touching both complex social problems and a webcomic which you follow very distractedly. And on these wise words, I'm off to bed.

Maybe it's because you completely agree with how I feel about it, I don't think you missed your point.

A comic's first goal is to tell an interesting story. Not to be some kind of fantastic accidental TG coping pamphlet. Yes, you need to establish the plot and characters and string along the readers before you resolve the plot, but at some point before the 13 volume is published, the story needs to have gone somewhere. The characters move the plot, and the only character that can move the plot hasn't done anything to that end in 800 strips, and the other two protagonists can't because neither of them are a Deus ex Machina.

If you're going to introduce a fantastic element and then only use it as a DEM, that's horrid writing, especially when you don't even try to make it appealing.

Metaphors and themes and symbolisms and messages all mean nothing if the story isn't worth reading.

[HappyBlanket]

She doesn't like it because she is literally in the wrong body. I know what that's like and it's not something that you can just "Get over."

This. Misfile isn't a story about someone trying to get his life back, it's about a boy trapped in a girl's body. I absolutely love it.

Anyway, the whole angel issue isn't that interesting, really. AshEm is definitely a bigger draw to the series.

[Hyudra]

This comic has been on my list of webcomics I read for a while.

I enjoy the transgender storyline. I think in our adolescence, forming a self-identity is the major hurdle we have to cross. How we do so and whether we succeed or fail is a defining factor in the adults we become. Ash and Em are dealing with this in their own ways - Ash because of being transgendered, Em because her repeating 2 years of her life (in a sense) is forcing her to re-examine the identity she had cultivated (and to a lesser degree, because of any feelings for Ash she might have).

So I like that.

I agree with others, though, that the angel storyline isn't that interesting. In fact, I find it detracts from the story overall.

And the lack of development - in art, character or plot - can grate at times.

[Peanut Gallery]

I actually kinda quit it recently. As much as I appreciate the constant updates, it feels like nothing ever happens. It's a really good webcomic, just monotonous.

The only other complaint I ever had about it was Emily and Missi and their behaviour towards each other. I stopped liking both their characters when it became clear just how big of a douchebag they could be.

[MoonCat]

This comic has been on my list of webcomics I read for a while.

I enjoy the transgender storyline. I think in our adolescence, forming a self-identity is the major hurdle we have to cross. How we do so and whether we succeed or fail is a defining factor in the adults we become. Ash and Em are dealing with this in their own ways - Ash because of being transgendered, Em because her repeating 2 years of her life (in a sense) is forcing her to re-examine the identity she had cultivated (and to a lesser degree, because of any feelings for Ash she might have).

So I like that.

I agree with others, though, that the angel storyline isn't that interesting. In fact, I find it detracts from the story overall.

And the lack of development - in art, character or plot - can grate at times.

This. Everything about the self identity, and then the whole thing about the murdered angels I don't really give a damn about as well. It just took up space, I rather wish it had been resolved or left out entirely. The anchored ship is rather annoying sometimes, as lampshaded by Casper, but I'm pretty much okay with the art, it was confusing to tell people apart at first, but I got used to it.

[Gamall]

I stopped liking both their characters when it became clear just how big of a douchebag they could be.

My other issues with this comic notwithstanding, I do not recall any blatant instance of douchebagerry besides occasional angsty/confused bickering. If anything, they are generally pretty supportive of each other.

[Hyudra]

Some of the prior discussion led me to look at the story in a new light. It's not slow or pointless overall, it's just... closer to real life than your typical work of fiction. So yeah, teenagers can be jerks (even to friends), and coming to terms with who you are is a process that takes a long long time.

So I can kind of respect that. Even if it does detract from the readability from time to time. Still, I keep reading because they update consistently and they've given me no reason to stop (or at least, the reasons to keep going outweigh such).

Just a little off topic: I'm put in mind of another long-running work of transgender fiction. Jade/Generator from the Whateley canon (a huge mass of works by a variety of authors, all writing interweaving and overlapping stories in the same universe). Again, being transgendered is a major theme - Jade is a mutant in much the same vein as the X-Men universe, with the power to animate objects with astral/telekinetic duplicates of herself, and while she desperately wants to be female, her powerset has the side effect of locking her into the body of a prepubescent boy. Thing is, I contrast it from Misfile in that Jade has a lot of character development and a lot happens in a short span of time. It forces a suspension of disbelief when you read the events as occuring in a short (one and a half semesters) time frame, and I've noticed that (especially in this instance), a series based on that kind of identity crisis really flounders when it's more or less resolved.

So in all seriousness - what happens to Misfile if Ash starts to come to terms with what s/he is? Or if s/he comes out to his/her dad as transgendered and they start looking into (belated) hormone treatment and possible surgery (disclaimer: not all transgendered seek/want surgery or hormone treatments)? It's pretty much a resolution to the driving crisis of the story. Even a serious step forward from where s/he was is probably a trick thing to handle.

[Oracle_Hunter]

I'm a long-time reader of Misfile.

It's not really a plot-based comic, so the pacing isn't really a big deal. If it hasn't always been, it rapidly became a character-based comic in which the development of the characters is really the focus.

To that end I disagree that Ash hasn't developed as a character. Compare the Ash from Book 1 to the current Book: she used to be a brash and distrustful of others; now she's working on having a real friend and relationships with everyone else. Sure she hasn't "gotten over" being transgendered but note that her relationship with her gender is changing. She is more comfortable with "girl stuff" now - even if she is disturbed by her growing comfort.

[HappyBlanket]

It rapidly became a character-based comic in which the development of the characters is really the focus.

You could say it's character-driven.

[Oracle_Hunter]

You could say it's character-driven.

Never!

[Peanut Gallery]

My other issues with this comic notwithstanding, I do not recall any blatant instance of douchebagerry besides occasional angsty/confused bickering. If anything, they are generally pretty supportive of each other.

Well off the top of my head, the back bitting about the size of Missi's breasts and Emily's weight. The ditching Missi while drunk thing, the Oh I'm not making YOU a costume thing.