I guess this page wasn't enough for people to see that the knife was a visual metaphor. Mayu is not actually threatening to murder her girlfriend; the danger here is making her sad, which is being exaggerated for comedic effect.
She tracked down the baker. That is insane.
And even with the knife being just in the girl's head, that her mental state defaults to that imagery points to a huge issue with the relationship. A crippling fear of disappointing your girlfriend based on it happening it before isn't good.
Like, I get this is supposed to be played up for comedy, but I just don't find it funny. It's the same as me not finding abuse played up as slapstick funny.
Matter of taste I guess. My taste agrees with yours in this case--I didn't find it particularly funny. But I don't know if it's because I don't generally like that style of comedy or if this particular example wasn't very funny.
I don't think we can say the knife was JUST in the girl's head. We can say the girlfriend was PROBABLY not actually planning to use it. But she was certainly using it as a prop, holding it up meaningfully when nervous girl said the wrong thing. You don't brandish a knife like that by accident just as a byproduct of having it to cut cake. So in assessing just how over the top the not-very-funny comedy was, I'd say it was over the top enough for the knife to genuinely represent an implicit threat, just not one very likely to be carried out.
I do feel that particularly edgy comedy often cuts corners in the "actually being funny" department. Like it's possible for really dark humour to be really, really funny . . . but a lot of the time it's just phoned in. Like they get to be lazy with the actual comedy part because they can assume anyone not liking it is only not finding it funny because it's too dark for them and they're being PC or whatever. So they sort of lean on the shock factor but get lazy about the punch lines. In extreme cases you get stuff that's supposed to be taken as funny JUST BECAUSE it's transgressive and would offend someone, without any actual joke at all.
last edited at Jan 4, 2023 1:37PM