98: Fall Apart

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Fall Apart
#pugglewumper Tashari got me some ink pens! I've been experimenting with them.
Title text: #pugglewumper Tashari got me some ink pens! I've been experimenting with them.

Explanation

Despite Randall being enthusiastic about receiving ink pens, his first experiment with them has resulted in a rather bleak comic.

Instead of multiple panels, the entire comic is a single drawing, but as we travel down the page, there is an apparent passage of time or, unless a better phrase can be found, the degree of falling apart.

The comic seems to be expressing what it feels like when a relationship falls apart, and one of the implications is that the process cannot easily be reversed. At the top of the page, we see some people standing alone, apparently happy enough, and a couple. As we descend the page, we see examples of a couple split by a narrow chasm, someone isolated and alone on their own world fragment, a couple desperately trying to hang on to each other, and a single figure falling chaotically and without control.

These figures are on a comic, and the representation is of what happens when their world — the page — literally falls apart. The implication is that this matches the actual feelings of people going through relationship breakups. In short, it is catastrophic.

The identity of '#pugglewumper Tashari', the supplier of the pens, is not known. Judging by the use of the hash sign, it is someone with whom Randall communicates in IRC. In fact, 'pugglewump' appears to be an IRC channel. Although hashtags later came to be strongly associated with Twitter, this was not true at the time the comic was drawn.

Transcript

[Various people struggle as the comic disintegrates. Toward the top, people are standing calmly, some holding hands. As the parts of the comic break apart, people try to reach for each other, hold parts together, or curl up into a ball. By the bottom, a person is falling, surrounded by pieces of the comic.]


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Discussion

Randall must have been eaten some mushrooms right before doing this one.--Dgbrt (talk) 21:53, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Or perhaps he was drawing some thick, inky lines and realized that they looked like cracks, and he then extended the synecdoche. 108.162.219.58 18:21, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

How to pronounce synecdocheKazvorpal (talk) 17:26, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

This website contains a reference to the pugglewump IRC channel. 108.162.219.58 23:30, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

"404 not found"...

taken down :( An user who has no account yet (talk) 00:21, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Anyone else see a resemblance to the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? In particular the one figure crouching on the left over a falling woman looks like Indy and Elsa. ~~ 172.68.58.59 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)