So, popping in for discussion here, but Order of the Stick is another casualty.
I can't say it has gone woke all of a sudden, or that this last comic (#1202) is the straw that broke the camel's back. It's been a long process where the comic has slowly gotten more woke and less funny.
Used to be background stuff that you could ignore, like Rich Burlew beclowning himself in the forum or in the author's notes to his books. But in the last book, it crept into the story, starting with a side character saying "by the way, I am a LESBIAN!" At the same time that Haley her past immaturity and sexualized dress "seemed like a good idea at the time." Yes, Rich Burlew was apologizing for sexualizing a stick figure.
What followed was a book that... Just wasn't funny. It had its high points, and those points were really high. It also had low points that dragged on and on. The whole subplot about flying through the mountain pass could have been cut from the story entirely, and I doubt anybody would have complained. And the main story arc is... Don't get me wrong, Durkon converting a vampire through the power of emotional turmoil and understanding was one of the best moments in the comic, and the reveal about the true nature of reality was one of the biggest curve balls this story has yet thrown. But it's wrapped up in a plodding story arc that isn't just tedious, it feels preachy. If you are a Resistance! type who thinks Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the election and that the electoral college is just an outdated legal technicality, then
Utterly Dwarfed was for you.
It's not fair to say that it was entirely humorless. There was one moment with a herd of chaos giraffes that had me laughing as hard as "Stop oppressing my culture you ethnocentric bitch!". The humor was just thinner, and the character arcs were flatter, and the characters themselves just don't have much chemistry anymore. All that was left was the Order interacting with one-off characters rather than each other, and mindnumbingly bad feminist messaging.
I guess what prompted this rant is this dialogue in the latest comic, which was probably supposed to be a joke but just made the alpha male leader of the Order look like a BuzzFeed writer with a major in gender studies:
Haley: "Wow, [Wind Walk] is amazing! We're like genies!"
Roy: "Ooo, uh, actually Celia says that word's not cool. Apparently it has its roots in the lamp-based oppression of people of vapor."