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in reply to @cat-and-girl's post:

i see this comic appear all the time, but, I don't understand this at all. i just see two characters talking without their conversations merging or interacting at all. is there something i'm missing ? a play on words, are plums and baby feet somehow connected ? is it about the disconnect ? are you supposed to read it first the cat, then go read the girl's bubbles ?

english is not my first language, so maybe there's a big nuance i don't understand. i feel like a cat in frn of a movie. there's stuff on the screen, but the meaning is out of reach

No, it's roughly that disorientating to native speakers as well, don't worry. I usually read all of one character's dialogue and then the other and then it's kind of a fun "spot whether and where they were actually listening to each other" game. Beyond that I think you just have to slowly pick up on things over time, this comic is surprisingly one of the oldest webcomics, it started in 1999, and now it crossposts to cohost lol. My point being it's had a long time to build up layers of meaning in aspects as small as which characters appear and how they interact, which isn't strictly speaking essential context, but certainly helps when you get the hang of it.

It doesn't help that this comic often relies on some deep cultural reference, often literary classics, just in the last handful of comics we have Ozymandias by Percy Shelley, the Odyssey by Homer, and in this comic both "For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn." (which is basically an early 20th century meme) and This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams, and also on a second layer writings like The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker (published 2004) which claims that almost all stories are just the same 7 narratives with different subjects and details, which itself is a simplification of other works like The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations from 1895, or The Hero with a Thousand Faces from 1949, and other Jungian narrative theory along those lines. So the opening joke is "actually, despite what you may have heard, there's really only two stories, one is a short, slightly absurd poem which may not have been intended to be a poem at all, and the other is only six words long. Anything more than that is just fluff. And now we will comedically misunderstand one, only to get our comeuppance flavored like the other."

oh damn, thanks ^^ i wasn't on the internet in the early 2000s, and the classics of litterature i know are mostly it my native tongue (and even for the ones in latin or greek, we learned about them in probably ways that are different accross languages), so i'm probably going to continue not getting this comic, but that's fine ^^

It is always fascinating how even the ancient classics just naturally come across completely different when taking language and cultural barriers into account. I mean heck, Christianity would have had a completely different vibe among English speakers if the King James Bible translation was shifted in time less than a century in either direction, it's a cultural anchor to a certain era of the language, even though many many other Bible translations have occurred since then.