Jessica Bellucci

I think this comic finally helped me understand the Abuse Goblin. I imagine the Patient as a desperate, lonely, sad man who is convinced that everyone is just as desperate and lonely and sad as he is. He stumbles onto a Goblin in the wild, and is angered at how happy it is, because that means that something must be wrong with him. To avoid this conclusion, he concludes instead that the reason why the Goblin is so happy is because he has happy circumstances. And so, he captures it and seeks to break the Goblin to prove to himself that happiness is simply a product of external circumstances, and that it is not his responsibility to find happiness within himself. However, he soon finds that it is impossible to break this Goblin’s spirit. This only makes him angrier and more desperate, and he continues to lash out at the Goblin. It is so kind, though. And immune to these torture devices that the Patient constructs. And so, in moments of sympathy, the Patient attempts to learn from his Goblin to find his happiness, to learn how to be happy in spite of the world around it. It is a sick sense of irony that the Patient keeps the Goblin in his basement *because* he is so happy, and so for the Goblin, his kind attitude is both the reason he is tortured and simultaneously the reason he is immune to it. And so we yearn for the Goblin to become angrier, as it will allow it to break from its chains, but we know that if it does, it will truly be broken.