jokes about the prison arc are all well and good but they also tend evince a very telling discomfort with the source material.
I know the prison arc has done its job well when people who take exile dead serious are forced to laugh and make uncomfortable jokes to avoid facing the tone of the prison arc head-on
strongly agree / agree / ambivalent / disagree / strongly disagree / don’t care whatsoever
REAL AS HELL !!! it's really interesting especially for the group of people as u mention, considering that honestly most of the prison arc is played Completely straight with the only possible exception of like, prison podcast, which really didn't do anything to make the prison a joke as much as it was just c!techno being c!techno. compared to exile, where like, anywhere from 80-90% of the discduo interactions were literally just fooling around bookended by srs rp (exploding tommy's stuff and an ominous statement before c!dream dipped for the day, basically.)
it's not that jokes about either or taking either serious are wrong, but it's kind of interesting to see how the prison is treated by certain groups of fans as unpalatable Unless it's a joke. the torture can't be anything but a meme. it's perfectly fine and dandy to look at the canonical torture and say "hey what if c!quackity was just doing [x inconsequential action] to piss c!dream off" when there's bloodstains on the prime path, but somehow Wrong and going Against The Spirit Of The Server if you take the torture in the opposite direction by taking it to its logical extreme of what could have been allowed in the literal explicit torture sessions of daily torture. and yeah, it all goes to show how well the prison arc did its job, because sometimes it feels like people can't quite look at it head on. which is fascinating.