8 INSANELY CUTE Child Soldiers

[Posteritatis]

19. Your reaction's probably not far off from the intent, actually

A lot of what the Onion does is straight-up satirical humor, but in the last year or so they've gotten angrier about some things as well. Every few weeks they'll bust out something like this with the intent of shocking people out of their comfort zone by reminding them of something a lot of us would rather pretend wasn't going on, or being really in-your-face about a problematic attitude or something similar that people like to euphemize.

Put another way, a lot of people are likely to just have their eyes slide over a news article about child soldiers without actually noticing much about it - in part because those articles are often pretty sanitized, unlike, say, the picture the OP included in the article. Something like that in the Onion gets noticed much more starkly - as happened in your case - and that makes the problem mentally just a bit harder to ignore.

You can tell what issues really get people at the Onion genuinely angry, as opposed to the more normal "oh, hey, satire fodder!" reaction, because they channel it into stuff like this or something similarly rain-of-anvils subtle.

A local political cartoonist whose work I follow (Bruce Mackinnon - I'd recommend him to anyone, though probably half his work is very local-relevant) has been working the same way most of his career; he'll do a steady stream of funny, sometimes cutting, sometimes downright venomous political toons around the usual jokes and satire of the field. If something comes along that makes him genuinely angry, he cuts loose in a different style, no attempts at humor (or if it's there it's the very bleakest kind), and the results stick in peoples' heads for days.

I see something very similar in more of the Onion's articles lately.