I've come to see her as a prophetic figure as of late.
While reading Pastel Defender Heliotrope she grades every page of her comic with a
parody of the ESRB directly mocking christianity the same way the "Libtards destroyed with Facts and Logic" videos on youtube take shots at the regressive left. But then I have to remember that JDR spent the majority of her life away from the internet, a time when adults fixated on nerdy hobbies and children's media were truly outcasts in every sense of the word without any refuge in which to cloister one's ego. So to her, Christianity as she knows it is this omnipresent, terrible force that is the facilitator of the world's woes, judging by her anecdotes of the seriously nasty evangelicals she's known. Nowadays dunking on Christians is a trite and safe thing to do, but when she did it she thought she was some kind of edgy rebel against society. Maybe in the distant future when the pendulum of moral panic swings the opposite direction or hopefully hangs still, every mockery we've made of the trendy ideologies that plague today's social media will look like us beating a dead horse. JDR's boogeyman is an American mindset that frankly, doesn't exist in the 2020s.
While her liberal ideals don't hold up to the capricious, ever-changing rules that are alright one day and heretical the next, I've found she espouses similar ideas, in a more subtle, thought-out and sensible manner, that are blared on repeat ad nauseam in today's popular culture. I've found statements about sexuality and gender that constitute the fundaments of their ideology, albeit watered-down to a point that would make her anathema on twitter today, spoken of as though they were radical ideas. The usual pablum about "girls can do anything!" that has been drilled into our heads so long that it's become fact, said like she's a lone and independent woman in Gilead. I suppose what once constituted a conservative or a liberal were entirely different things in her time. Unicorn Jelly and Pastel Defender Heliotrope are true exemplars of yesteryear's counterculture.
There's also her
anime website. Uguu! Nyaa! You won't see that style anymore. Even when the artists of modernity try to copy 90s anime, all of them have failed to brutally deform those heads and throw those stiff proportions out the window.
She's not just the prototype insane troon. She's the prototype furry, the prototype weeaboo, the prototype otherkin. The prototype shitlord, the prototype SJW and obsessive worldbuilder as codified by reddit.
The prototype lolcow - like Chris-Chan, if he had savant-level intelligence and an obsession with more sophisticated media.
