my_hat_stinks

Penultimate isn’t that uncommon? Just because you don’t personally hear it in your day-to-day life doesn’t mean other people don’t use it.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=penultimate%2Csecond+last%2Csecond+to+last%2Cnext+to+last&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3

They didn’t wish for food, you can see all the cans stacked in the cabinet through the glass until the last panel.

Everyone understands that, that’s a surface-level reading not some secret hidden meaning. The problem is if you take more than a second to think about it instead of just taking the story at face value you see the real relationship here.

You have one horrifically vile being ruining someone’s life even though the victim worships them. The victim continues to worship them in spite of their atrocities just because they’re powerful.

It’s touted as a story about how you should just keep blind faith in the powerful but that’s really the exact opposite of what it shows. And it’s more relevant now than ever, I’m sure it’ll take you no effort at all to think of another toxic parasocial relationship.

So what was the joke? People try to play off a lot of really horrific shit with “it’s only a joke”.

The desire path curved towards the road crossing, they paved a straight path pointing away from the crossing, new curved desire path formed by people crossing the road