There was a discussion on that page. I asked if the hate crime comment somehow had something to do with her being asexual and uninterested in penes, which I thought was likely because Ultra Car is asexual. As it turns out, Willis had previously announced on some blog or twitter page that Carla is transgendered, which Willis decided because he considered it similar to a car taking a humanoid robot form. That seemed counterintuitive to me, but other people seemed to have jumped to that conclusion without reading Willis’s announcement.
That seems…kind of weirdly transphobic? Like it seems really close to the “woman trapped in a man’s body” rhetoric that is considered problematic and outdated.
In Shortpacked!, Carla was assumed to be male by her creators – it’s in her discussion with her mother about her relationship with Malaya (because she has no genitals).
My guess is her legs are prosthetic beginning somewhere below her knee. It’s why she always has on leg warmers of some kind, and why she likes skating. She can still use her knees, which would probably be enough mobility to skate (although possibly not enough to deftly maneuver around blindly leaping romantic). Being able to move so freely would be amazing to someone who would experience natural immobility, too.
Maybe it’s just inline skates, but from my experience, you use your ankles a lot when skating. I’d be surprised if anyone with prosthetics would have an easy time on skates.
Prosthetics generally make you shorter, not taller(much to the chagrin of my friend who was already short before she lost her legs at the shin). And she is transgender. It makes sense coupled with the “hate crime” joke in the whiteboard ding dong bandit.
Now I’m visualizing, in that scene where they’re supposed to climb that pole with the weights, that after the first dudes try, Mulan suddenly transforms into a full-sized apache helicopter, flies up, hovers above the pole, and then turns back into her fully-organic human-sized self and plops down to sit upon it. And then just repeated shots of everybody staring silently at her looping forever.
Yes. A transgendered person is not particularly similar to somebody who wears a disguise of another gender to fight in a war. One of these two is in disguise, and the other one is trying to be herself.
In the uk they actually have a trans* policy saying you’re only allowed to skate in either the guy or gal league but which league is up to you and they won’t ask but if you get shit for it they will back you until the end of time. ^_^ And they also say that they’re trying to work out more inclusive policies for gender fluid peeps.
It is actually the best.
It’s to be more inclusive, because it implies not just transwoman or transman, but transandrogynous and other non-binary genders as inclusive in the trans community. But there has bee a lot of pushback against the asterisk by the trans community, because why should people assume trans without the asterick mean non-binary in the first place, and the * implies a lot of inclusivity that might not be there (the trans community has a lot of classist and other non-inclusive problems). typing in “trans asterisk” and “trans asterisk problematic” into google; the first few sources are pretty good in people’s opinions on the debate, especially sources that talk about why people have used it for a while and then stopped, or not used it at all, or didn’t use it and then started.
It’s a wild card — fill it in as appropriate. For what it’s worth, I prefer ‘genderqueer’ instead of ‘trans*’, because it emphasizes the innateness of the gender — a transwoman didn’t ‘start male and become female,’ but rather was female from birth, although she was incorrectly assigned a male gender. Transition is a process through which a genderqueer person comes to express their true gender.
From what I have noticed, genderqueers refuse to live by strictly male or female standards instead embracing a kind of gender-otherness, a good fictional example would be BMO from Adventure Time.
The same is true in the US. The official WFTDA policy (the big dog league in derby) is that transwomen can absolutely skate, they just have to have begun living as a woman. They don’t care if you’re on hormones or what’s under your hotpants. “It would be an unfair advantage” is not really a thing in derby- there’s a ton of size differentials, coed games are common, and honestly being male isn’t necessarily an athletic advantage in the game anyway. Men are bigger and can theoretically hit harder, but men have wide shoulders and narrow hips and their center of gravity in their hips, and that is a DISadvantage in derby.
Derby in general is very queer-friendly. Local leagues almost always skate in pride parades whether the skaters themselves are straight or not, and the big game everyone looks forward to at Rollercon is the Vagine Regime vs. the Caulk Suckers. Since Vagine Regime has a hell of a lot of the star players in the sport, they so far have always won.
Aah, so that’s one of the reasons why they are sold as Chevrolets in Britain, although that doesn’t explain why they don’t use the Opel or Vauxhall brand, which are better known and trusted more here, particularly in the small car categories.
Hey, say what you want about Malaya (no, really, do) but in the other universe she likes Ultra Car as a person and doesn’t care about her original body shape. I like to think this Malaya would be similarly inclined.
Seconded. I think Malaya is way too self-absorbed to notice that Carla’s trans, but that if she was told, she wouldn’t be an extra-super-jerk about it. (Just her regular amount of jerk.)
I could see Malaya asking rude, but very blunt questions of Carla if told outright she’s trans. And all the while not really knowing, nor really caring, that they’re rude questions.
He’s teasing us with Robin/Leslie (although it’s really Leslie/Robin in DoA,) and with Ruth/Billie (canon in IW before Billie gets involved with Danny.)
Not shape. She got excited by both the purely mechanical and the human-replica arms. Don’t discount the attraction to the mind of UC as a big factor. She wouldn’t have gotten the same fulfillment with another sentient car-in-human-form. Very similar personalities, with pranking and snark and such. She’d likely get alone famously with May over at QC, yet another snarky synthetic intelligence. But not Pintesize (perv aka The Faz), or Momo (geek, everyone she pranks in).
Yeah but “word of god” is separate from in-story. While we can all be happy knowing all the representation that’s in the story from what he’s posted outside of the comic, those two hints (for anyone who doesn’t read the comments/tumblr/etc) aren’t enough in comic. The “hate crime” comment and the legs/no one cares bit could reference anything to those who don’t already know about Carla.
(Carla being trans is hella cool, but if I didn’t already know I might think it was references to rape & prosthetic legs or something instead, for example)
I didn’t understand this strip at all. I read it completely wrong. I thought when Carla said “there’s a reason for that.” she was referring to the reason why she isn’t in Derby. Then when Sal said ” ya, they wouldn’t care.” I thought that was the reason. That the girls wouldn’t care if she played or not…. It was bugging me because I kept rereading it trying to understand. Then I read the comments and they saved me lol.
The thing that makes us boys or girls is the organ between the ears, not the organ between the legs. Most of the time the organs between the legs match. Sometimes they don’t.
Nope. Talk to any biologist. Actual, scientific determination of sex is far more complicated than that, and many of the factors can get fairly blurry fairly quickly. It’s far easier to just go with what a person says they want to be called, and ask them about chromosomes, hormones, or genitals specifically if there’s a legitimate medical reason you need to know.
(To be clear, unless you are the person’s doctor, YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW)
It might have been better if they only kept their gender a secret for about 3 years or so and instead of denying them any gender-biased toys, provide ‘blue’ toys, ‘pink’ toys and plenty of purple(?) toys.
I think I’m psychologically disposed to be a horrible person, because my innate drive to categorize things in consistently definable ways shrieks in horror when a person who by all perceptible measures is clearly one things claims to be the other, and that’s somehow not wrong.
You might want to think about it as three separate classes of categories. Simplified (and “borrowed” from some old usenet group):
Gender – what’s between your ears.
Sex – what’s between your legs.
Sexuality – who’s between your legs.
Here, think of it this way. Men and women have physiologically distinct brains, right? There’s different amounts of receptors for androgens and estrogens, there’s a few size differences in certain parts (The BSTc region is a famous example, but the A E Brain blog has plenty more), each responds to certain pheromones different ways, etc.
In the case of trans people, as that blog above shows, it really does come down to having a brain that’s physiologically one way and a body that doesn’t match it. And try as we might, we’ve not yet figured out how to physically change the brain to make the two align, but we HAVE figured out how to change the body to make the two pretty darn close in alignment, and that process has an overwhelming majority (~98%) showing significant improvements in quality of life across the board, including health, stress, and emotional stability.
The only reason I care is so I don’t use the wrong pronoun until gender becomes obvious. I hate mis-gendering someone, even by mistake. And I know a lot of trans* people so keeping gender straight is a problem for me. And don’t ask why I know so many trans* people that keeping who’s what straight (and otherwise) would be a problem (and it doesn’t help that there are two with the same names only reversed, they are basically swapping their pre-transition names even though they barely know each other).
Yeah, but almost all the trans* people I know started transitioning after I met them. And before someone says anything I had nothing to do with that. I think, probably.
A fair point, but there’d probably a significant difference depending on how old Opus is. If they’re 18, then likely transitioning would have been far more difficult for people they know until pretty recently, not so much if they’re 30.
I know exactly where you’re coming from, I’m still early enough along that you’d have to know what to look for to realize that I’m not actually a guy…but Carla is pretty clearly feminine (and VERY open about it), which makes female pronouns a very safe assumption.
I kind of wonder if she sees college as her chance to rewrite herself. Be who she is. Maybe she originally is from out-of-state and intentionally picked a school where there wouldn’t be anyone from her hometown and therefore no one that knew her pre-transition.
I can see where she wouldn’t necessarily hide her gender from people, but she wouldn’t want to be known as “that trans-chick” either and especially wouldn’t want to be known as “that boy Carl [or whatever her pre-transition name was] that dresses like a girl.”
Speaking as someone that’s worked while publicly “out,” and someone that now lives stealth…
Maybe Carla is braver than me but I will shamefully do whatever I have to to keep stealth status. Even just yesterday I didn’t speak up when a classmate was denigrating trans people, and I’ve felt bad about it since, but if I could travel back in time those 24 hours I wouldn’t have done it differently.
Seems like it isn’t actually a secret, Carla initially thought the ding dong incident was an attack on her gender identity, which would imply people must know.
Unless I’m missing something obvious, that page doesn’t say anything about her gender being different in the past. The only hint is the “single room” thing at the end, and not everyone knows what that implies.
Where I went to school, that just implies you didn’t want a roommate. I spent much of my college time without roommates. Doesn’t UI give people an option to live alone?
At Indiana University, trans* students were generally assigned to single rooms until recently. (Those rooms weren’t in Read Hall, but eh, details.) http://thehawkeyeonlinenews.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/faces-of-lgbt-at-iup/
“Before then, transgender students were placed in a single-room dorm in University Towers”
There was a whole discussion about why Carla had to be in a single because of her gender identity, but I can’t find it for the life of me.
Yes, but surely, there are hundreds of IU students who live alone simply because they feel like it or because things didn’t work out with their previous roommate. Unless IU has a policy of requiring students to have a roommate unless they have an unusual situation that prevents it.
In Holland, the papers would have been RIZ LA + Blue. (RIZ LA + Red or Mascotte for cigarettes, RIZ LA + Blue for joints, because it burns more slowly and holds the ash cone together better).
Some people I knew who were really confident in their rolling skills would roll big, multi-paper joints with glueless papers, Club, I think.
Sal: “You’re pretty danged tall.”
Carla: “There’s a reason for that.”
Sal: “Ah know. They wouldn’t care.”
This is about as clear as mud. Last time I checked, a person was tall because of genetics….or use of hormones, usually HGH (human growth hormone) although testosterone has also been shown to influence height as well. So are we to assume that (in this universe) Carla is also transgender and is actually a post-op Carl?
Sal did not learn it. She always knew. She’s omniscient. (In all seriousness though, it’s safe to assume Carla told her at some point off screen. I mean the met off screen too.)
Not to mention ciswomen (cis=same, Opposite of trans, used to differentiate those whose assigned gender and actual gender align) can be tall. I’m tall (6’3), but I know a ciswoman the same height (Brienne of Tarth’s actress is my height as well).
Paternal great-grandmother 6+’, paternal grandfather 6+’, father 6+’, Male cousin 6+’ female cousin 1 5’11”, me 5’10”, sister 1 5’9″, sister 2 5’8″, paternal aunt 5’6″, female cousin 2 5’2″. The last one takes after my paternal grandmother.
Genetics definately played a big role in the family height.
I was 6’1 before my back surgery shrunk me a couple of inches. But, women my height *are* few and far between. This can especially be true regionally. And at 18 a lot of the guys I knew who ended up being my height or taller by the end of college were shorter than me at the beginning of it. And out of everyone I knew in college the only people my height or taller were men.
So, while women being quite tall happens, I can see where Carla might assume she’d have been shorter had she been born physically female.
Not to mention that having shifted garb and being on anti-androgens and on estradiol leads to a female appearance. Since Carla piles on feminine hair and a somewhat rounded face, in fact, there’s no reason to think she’s doing anything chemical or physical to change the gender she presents.
And if Carla was revealed as transgender in the past month or so, then I apologize for belaboring the obvious. It’s just that my computer was out of commission and while I was keeping up with the daily strips on my smartphone it was just too damned difficult to follow the comments.
I know Willis stated it at some point (but I forget where…sorry I can’t link.) though it’s never been explicitly stated in comic. Maybe if we yell about it enough he’ll come and settle the dispute again.
I have to admit I’m in the ‘apparently didn’t’ camp. Reading the comments, I knew what that was about, but in-strip, what we knew at that point about Carla was:
1) Kinda tall;
2) Kinda cranky.
The reaction to the ‘hate crime’ line (for those unaware) is more likely to be ‘WTF is that cranky girl on about?’ than anything else. It would probably take several mental leaps to come to the correct solution, and even then you wouldn’t be sure.
Therefore, I’m delighted that there are more hints coming out in-strip, because the dichotomy between word-of-god insisting we interpret things correctly when the strip itself hasn’t given us enough info is getting annoying. (And this is coming from someone who in other fora, rants about how the death of the author is bullshit.)
Her reaction could just as easily be because she was lesbian. Or simply because she was the sort to to refer to having a dingdong drawn on her door as a “hate crime” — I’ve run into those sorts.
I don’t think Carla is too secretive about it, for one thing, given that she was willing to announce when she thought the whiteboard dingdongs were an attack on her. Also… People just know these things. She’s got a single room while everyone else has a roommate, she’s notably tall, we don’t know what she sounds like… It’s possible they just know and no one makes a big deal out of it.
You’d be surprised. I’m 6’3″, and had assumed (when I first transitioned) that the height would be a constant giveaway. It’s not. Now that I’m away from people that knew me before, I’m almost never misgendered. I even have a coworker that recently learned I was Trans (because I was bongoing about TSA gropeage) and she had a literal jaw drop reaction with several seconds of “wait, what?”… and we’ve been working together for three months.
The presentation of Carla in this series makes me incredibly happy. In fact, I’m astonished at just how much I like Carla when she’s divested of the baggage of ever having been Ultracar, who’s tied with Malaya for ‘oh god I simply can’t stand this character.’
Joe’s dad gets around, though doesn’t he? I thought I remembered that being part of his character. His basically being Joe Sr. So maybe Carla is Joe’s half-sister.
I just love Carla’s entire outfit. And just Carla in general. And also Sal. So basically, these two need to interact more, because it just makes me really happy. Yay fab, beautiful ladies 🙂
Can’t have been that largely since she was only sent there after she knocked over the convenience store. (I don’t think it was specifically mentioned when that happened (I can’t find it if so), but it wasn’t more than 4 or 5 years ago – even if Amber, Sal, and Ethan weren’t clearly in the throes of puberty, preteens don’t often have the freedom to knock over convenience stores.)
In the flashbacks, I thought Sal looked most like an eighth-grader, which would put her in Tennessee for all of high school. However, exact age is hard to tell, especially when stylized.
The answer is clearly Dina- This is the story of how she observed a bunch of weirdos and decided she would stick to dinosaurs, because screw drama.
You may think I am kidding, but The Great Willis has clearly framed this story through her perspective- with great attention to detail, and little judgement on the characters, just curiosity as to what makes them tick.
Sorry for putting this post here- couldn’t spot anywhere more appropriate to put it.
What time is it?
PETTY COMPLAINT TIME!
Since Carla’s a transwoman and presumably on hormones, she really wouldn’t be able to smoke. Shit fucks up the effect and no decent doctor would prescribe her hormones until she quit smoking.
PETTY COMPLAINT OVER!
Yay, more Carla!
Looking around, there is disagreement on the subject, but in any case, yeah it does clearly appear to be a joint and, so long as it’s an occasional habit, it would not LIKELY cause serious problems.
I feel enlightened. I seriously thought any danger in smoking while on hormones would be the same danger, maybe more pronounced, as smoking regularly while on hormonal birth control. An increased risk of blood clots. I had no earthly idea it could reduce the effects of the hormones.
Yet people continue to smoke even knowing it is killing them. Trust me, girls on mones do a lot stupider things than smoke in some cases. People are people, trans or not, and we are all unique in our life choices.
Speaking as a transwoman who loves to skate, I feel Carla’s pain. I would like to get into roller derby, but I would be accused of having an unfair advantage due to my “male body”. Even though long-term hormone replacement therapy pretty thoroughly negates any and all testosteroney-muscleyness >.>
That’s pretty shitty that people have to be assholes like that. I’m sorry.
I’m broader and more muscley (or, was when I was younger, anyway) than my brother. Your physical gender and/or the one you had in childhood isn’t the end-all-be-all of how you’re built in adulthood.
I figured Roller Derby would be one of the more open sports about that sort of thing. I could see the Olympics or the NFL being that petty and stupid, but a small sport in a fairly small town? Seems like they’d be more welcoming. That’s really sad that that’s not always the case.
Apparently the governing body of the sport has officially defined femaleness, for their purposes, as hormonal rather than anatomical? I don’t know how binding that is on individual leagues, so I don’t know if this is good news for you, but it might be!
I’m really sorry to hear that. When did you last try it? A couple of the ladies in my friend’s league started life off as dudes and zero damns are given about it and I think this year the derby leagues came out with a policy of “you are the gender you say you are, we don’t need to know anything you don’t want to tell us”. It might be worth trying again maybe?
The derby crowd is really dang accepting. I’ve been a part of two WFTDA teams now, one who knows my trans-status and another who does not. No problems with anyone. People just want to skate. You should skate, too!
I’m confused. I thought roller derby was designed to give an advantage to female bodies. I thought that was the entire point of the game.
And aren’t tall people with high centers of gravity easier to get knocked over when they’re on skates?
Don’t feel bad, I’m right there with you. With many very tall women in my family I didn’t know where that comment was going. Guess I haven’t been paying close enough attention.
Well, yesterday Willis finally explicitly stated in-comic that Marcie was mute and not deaf, so maybe soon it will be explicitly stated in-comic what Carla’s deal is.
I tend to agree with this sentiment in general — for some reason it really bugs me when major character revelations, plot explanations, etc, take place outside the story itself.
While the author gets final say on everything about their work (I utterly reject both fan-canon, and the lit-crit New Criticism movement), absolute and total final say, I’m conversely always tempted to assert that if it doesn’t take place in the story, it doesn’t count.
To be fair, I have a low opinion of literary criticism in general… just read the damn book, and stop arguing over the best way to tear it apart.
New Criticism’s simultaneous rejection of the context in which a book was written and claim to objectivity, is laughable.
Reader response is either lost in blithering postmodernist subjectivism, or treats the reader as a “spherical chicken of uniform density”.
Marxist lit theory is just another example of Marxists treating everything like a nail because they only have the one hammer (and the sickle that goes with it).
Nice try, but your complaints often don’t make sense if you specifically mean 1950s New Criticism. I mean ‘postmodern’? Which postdates its heyday considerably? Also, even if they were better contemporaries, ‘postmodernist subjectivism’ + ‘claim to objectivity’…. yer aware of what postmodernism is nominally about, yeah?
Now if you want to say you understand the concept of the Death of the Author? Sure, I’d buy that. That’s an easy concept. But claiming to be attacking New Criticism when you’re just making generic claims common of literary critics in general? If you were being literal, brava for attacking a dead school; perhaps next you’ll go for the Mercantilists. IF you weren’t, which seems more likely, well…
I largely agree with that, but Sal’s comment and the white board comment is it taking place in the story. This is how the audience is supposed to figure out that she is Trans*.
It’s not much different from Jocelyn dropping the email address.
Dear Willis. I get it, you want to introduce characters from the entire population spectrum, but I have to warn you, the second you introduce someone who says they’re otherkin and people take them seriously I’m leaving the comic.
No. An otherkin killed his parents. As he sat alone in his mansion, trying to figure out how to strike fear into the hearts of furrydoers, a human flew threw his window. And so he became… Manman.
With the proportionate strength of ONE MAN! Able to leap low obstacles in a single bound! Capable of lifting objects of average weight with minimal strain! The hero of today!
I respect Willis too much to just leave without explaining why. As a comic book artist I like people telling me what I did wrong to turn them away from me.
Listen, is cool and all for you to have things you don’t like, but you kinda don’t have any sway at all here.
Author gonna do what they want. Drop it or don’t, but remember, no one is gonna cry if you do and Willis will probably make fun of any parting comment you make.
I hope it doesn’t come to that, because it’s not just a personal quirk or a pet hate, but a valid reason to be pissed off at people who equate transgendered people to what’s basically the only Monty Python skit that has overstayed its welcome.
I’m pretty sure Willis mentioned it… somewhere in the comments maybe?
Plus, after the whole “there’s a penis on my whiteboard, it’s discrimination! Oh wait there’s one on every whiteboard, then it’s just funny” it was kind of foregone.
Uh, did anyone else find the dialogue in this comic a little… obtuse?
I’m terrible at subtext, but I never would have made the leap between “Carla is tall” and “Carla is trans”. I get that it’s the kind of implication that a person might want to keep on the DL, but dang, man. It read panel three a dozen times, and even then I had to read the comments to figure it out.
I’m not just being thick, right?
Well, if you know Shortpacked, you would understand that’s not “Carla’s” original body. So add in “Tall for a woman” with “changed bodies in an alternate universe”, trans is the best guess.
Anyone reading this without the Shortpacked version of the character and the comments section to fill in information can definitely be excused for not putting together “offended when she thought the dingdong was directed at her alone” and “tall for a woman” and concluding that Carla is trans.
Have their been any other “clues” that I’m missing there, that would have made it more obvious?
I’ll be honest: I read this and concluded that Carla had Marfan Syndrome. Even knowing that Carla started out as Ultra-Car in SP!, even reading that transition, I still read this and interpreted the entire scenario as “Marfan Syndrome”
Willis is uses the ‘show, don’t tell’ approach to cartooning in DoA. That means he’s almost never going to *tell* us anything; he’s going to show us and let us figure it out for ourselves. Given that we live that way in real life, that’s actually ‘right’.
For instance, we know Amber’s Amazi-Girl because we see her getting into the costume or with her mask off. In-universe, he goes even further; he shows us characters in-universe completely not getting it. He doesn’t ever *say* that nobody gets that; instead, we have examples of people rejecting it. Danny is faithful to Amazi-Girl, so he turns Amber down. Sarah says really nasty things about ‘that shut-in’ to…well, that shut in. Billie doesn’t believe that Amber is Amazi-Girl when she is *told* that. The only person who really gets it is Dorothy, and even she’s totally freaked out when she figures Amazi-Girls real identity.
Carla isn’t going to say ‘Yeah, well, you know I’m trans, so they will throw me out,’ any more than Joycelyn was going to say ‘Look, Ethan, I’m really a girl.’ Willis shows us how facts about a person shape their personal narrative, and leaves us to figure out what those facts must be.
Willis is the ‘show, don’t tell’ approach
Nope, he uses the “show breadcrumbs, don’t tell”. (He used that word himself regarding the signs of racism of Walkies and Sals parents).
Which is why it’s recommend to also read the comments, especially when you feel that you are missing something when reading the comic!
I have absolutely no problem with that style of storytelling, and believe me, this kind of thing happens to me in real life all the time. I’m just glad I’m not alone.
But AmaziGirl was easy for the audience – whether you’re well versed in the tropes or just realize AmaziGirl just looks like Amber in a jumpsuit, mask, and cape, it’s very easy to conclude Amber=AmaziGirl, whether the story actually states it out or not.
Marcie’s deal feels more akin to this than Carla’s. It’s not blatantly in your face, but with a few context clues, it’s easy enough to guess.
No, this feels more like Sal and Jocelyn’s situations – Sal, being grayer if you’re not familiar with her plight (heck I’m black and wasn’t sure if Willis was going there until the Dad’s hair comment), and Jocelyn — were there any clues at all that specifically pointed to being transgendered? I believe the masses were frothing at her being gay for Ethan until the email came out.
So yeah, show, don’t tell definitely is effective, but with this medium I think some topics need to be a little more … Heavy handed? Or at least give its readers a break if they miss subtle clues the first time around. Haven’t seen ‘ZOMG how could you nooooooooot know’ comments about this, which is good though. Hate seeing ‘well in X comic by Willis..’ when he specifically says you don’t have to be well versed in those universes to know this one.
^^^^this!!
Especially the last sentence.
At the very beginning we were told that we didn’t need to read the other comics to understand this one.
And with how prolific the commenters are on this it is unrealistic to expect new readers to slog through many score of posts on each of the hundreds of comics, most of which are just hanging out talk.
And comments along the lines of “Well d’uh Willis already said that in some other comics comment section.” are elitist and off putting for new readers, and I am glad at how few of them there are but…
I don’t get what is so bad/annoying about Malaya. She seems like a good person and tried to help Sal and the others when they fought Amazi-girl, so why does everyone hate her? Does that have to do with Willis’s other comics?
Yeah, she was much more insufferable in Shortpacked when she was introduced. Though she has mellowed out over there as well, largely as a result of dating Ultra Car, that universe’s equivalent of Carla. They hate everything together, and it’s actually kind of sweet.
Hey just an idea, what if Carla is an amputee and the is why she’s so tall? If you think about it her legs are always covered from the knees down by baggy legwarmers or long socks. She could have possibly lost everything from the knees down in, say, a car accident.
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Wish I could rock Carla’s ensemble there, tbh
Don’t we all…
+1
sigh me too 🙁
wait
cosplay’s still a thing, isn’t it??
OH SNAP NOW I HAVE IDEAS
Nah, go as Amazi-girl.
Done that! 😀
THERE ARE ALREADY AMAZI-GIRLS I LIKE TO DO NEW THINGS
Go as Malaya! No one will EVER copy you!
Your Grav now makes me wonder if anyone has ever gone as Aslan at a bus stop
Oh my god alt text. I haven’t watched a Chip and Dale cartoon in forever, and all of a sudden I’m flashing back…
That’s where I learned that rhyme too. Was it exclusive to that cartoon or was it current in the U.S. when that cartoon was originally released?
It’s apparently a generic kid’s thing, like kancho [which people mistakenly think kids got from Naruto–more like the other way around!]
Okay, thanks. It’s that a number of “kid’s things” seem to have missed my part of SoCal when I was growing up.
Well, considering that cartoon was released in the 30s, I think it’s more of a generational thing than a regional thing.
This. I never understood what on earth Chip and Dale were talking about when I saw those cartoons, and yes that’s where I first heard the rhyme too.
Probably not, I’ve seen it in old Looney Tunes cartoons.
Ch-ch-ch-Chip and Dale!
Some times, some grimes.
Go slippin through the cracks
but these two, gumshoe
are pickin up the slack!
Chip and Dale’s Rescrub Rangers
I don’t want to be insufferably nitpicky, but it’s “sometimes some Crimes” and “these two gumshoeS”.
See, the words fir with the theme of the song.
Heh, Malaya needs a qualifier.
so Carla is trans? did I miss something?
Yep. Yep. lol
She’s a car.
Manual or auto though.. That’s the question.
Manual! After all “The name’s SCHTICKSHIFT!“
a TransAm LOLOLOLOL
*gets lynched*
Yeah, it was implied with her commenting that a dick drawn on her door would be a hate crime.
Ohhhhh. And here I just figured that was a throwaway line about it being kind of misogynistic. That makes much more sense.
There was a discussion on that page. I asked if the hate crime comment somehow had something to do with her being asexual and uninterested in penes, which I thought was likely because Ultra Car is asexual. As it turns out, Willis had previously announced on some blog or twitter page that Carla is transgendered, which Willis decided because he considered it similar to a car taking a humanoid robot form. That seemed counterintuitive to me, but other people seemed to have jumped to that conclusion without reading Willis’s announcement.
That seems…kind of weirdly transphobic? Like it seems really close to the “woman trapped in a man’s body” rhetoric that is considered problematic and outdated.
In Shortpacked!, Carla was assumed to be male by her creators – it’s in her discussion with her mother about her relationship with Malaya (because she has no genitals).
I just totally missed that line, somehow. I had no idea about Carla either.
My guess is her legs are prosthetic beginning somewhere below her knee. It’s why she always has on leg warmers of some kind, and why she likes skating. She can still use her knees, which would probably be enough mobility to skate (although possibly not enough to deftly maneuver around blindly leaping romantic). Being able to move so freely would be amazing to someone who would experience natural immobility, too.
Yeah I figured it was prosthetics as well, go with her whole alternate self being a robot thing
Perhaps she is trans and has prosthetic legs?
I so want to make a “third leg” joke but I wonder if it might be completely tasteless
The old “wooden leg with a kickstand” joke wouldn’t be any more tasteless than usual. Plus it’s sort of transformer-ish.
“She was already missing two legs, so excising her third was no big deal.”
There.
Maybe it’s just inline skates, but from my experience, you use your ankles a lot when skating. I’d be surprised if anyone with prosthetics would have an easy time on skates.
Prosthetics generally make you shorter, not taller(much to the chagrin of my friend who was already short before she lost her legs at the shin). And she is transgender. It makes sense coupled with the “hate crime” joke in the whiteboard ding dong bandit.
“Prosthetics generally make you shorter, not taller”
Just ask Ed Elric (from a safe distance).
Yup she is a transmision, used to be manual stick transmission though.
* I’m horrible at this *
♫ Transformers, females in disguise! ♫
I feel cheated. Mulan never turned into a helicopter!
Now I’m visualizing, in that scene where they’re supposed to climb that pole with the weights, that after the first dudes try, Mulan suddenly transforms into a full-sized apache helicopter, flies up, hovers above the pole, and then turns back into her fully-organic human-sized self and plops down to sit upon it. And then just repeated shots of everybody staring silently at her looping forever.
What does Mulan have to do with anything?
You mean the Disney Princess female-in-disguise?
Yes. A transgendered person is not particularly similar to somebody who wears a disguise of another gender to fight in a war. One of these two is in disguise, and the other one is trying to be herself.
She’s transhumanist.
More about Carla now?
I hope so!
Do you really hope so? Every time we learn more about a character it seems to always be so depressing D:
That’s the joy of Willis Brand Comic Narration.
Hence his Twitter ID being @damnyouwillis!
Dear God Yes.
Like Willis, we feed on others’ misery.
I think it can be interesting. It’s been my experience that pretty much everyone in the real world has some sort of awful past anyway.
Donald Duck: “…Me!”
(gets his with apple)
Sorry, that was one of my favorite cartoons when I was a kid, I can’t see that rhyme without thinking about it.
I gotta admit, I thought it was “apple core, food no more, who’s your friend”
I googled it once, apparently there are a few different versions of it. I think one said “not no more” or something.
We meet again.
oh shit.
*ducks behind conveniently-placed strategic cover*
Malaya isn’t Miss Popularity? Gazooks!
Hello Dum Dums!
*hehe*
Voiced by Harvey Korman.
Um……..ok….I dunno what to say
Oh Malaya, you’re so Maligned.
We could call her Malign-‘Ya.
Malaya…dy?
Maladjusted?
Malayadjusted?
Why wouldn’t they care?
Why would they?
Yeah. Derby girls are a pretty nonjudgemental lot.
Yes, that one.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a number of M2Fs in sports like Roller-Derby.
In the uk they actually have a trans* policy saying you’re only allowed to skate in either the guy or gal league but which league is up to you and they won’t ask but if you get shit for it they will back you until the end of time. ^_^ And they also say that they’re trying to work out more inclusive policies for gender fluid peeps.
It is actually the best.
That’s actually really freakin’ cool of them.
Forgive my ignorance, but what does the asterisk in trans* signify?
Anything.
It’s to be more inclusive, because it implies not just transwoman or transman, but transandrogynous and other non-binary genders as inclusive in the trans community. But there has bee a lot of pushback against the asterisk by the trans community, because why should people assume trans without the asterick mean non-binary in the first place, and the * implies a lot of inclusivity that might not be there (the trans community has a lot of classist and other non-inclusive problems). typing in “trans asterisk” and “trans asterisk problematic” into google; the first few sources are pretty good in people’s opinions on the debate, especially sources that talk about why people have used it for a while and then stopped, or not used it at all, or didn’t use it and then started.
It’s a wildcard character.
It’s a wild card — fill it in as appropriate. For what it’s worth, I prefer ‘genderqueer’ instead of ‘trans*’, because it emphasizes the innateness of the gender — a transwoman didn’t ‘start male and become female,’ but rather was female from birth, although she was incorrectly assigned a male gender. Transition is a process through which a genderqueer person comes to express their true gender.
From what I have noticed, genderqueers refuse to live by strictly male or female standards instead embracing a kind of gender-otherness, a good fictional example would be BMO from Adventure Time.
The same is true in the US. The official WFTDA policy (the big dog league in derby) is that transwomen can absolutely skate, they just have to have begun living as a woman. They don’t care if you’re on hormones or what’s under your hotpants. “It would be an unfair advantage” is not really a thing in derby- there’s a ton of size differentials, coed games are common, and honestly being male isn’t necessarily an athletic advantage in the game anyway. Men are bigger and can theoretically hit harder, but men have wide shoulders and narrow hips and their center of gravity in their hips, and that is a DISadvantage in derby.
Derby in general is very queer-friendly. Local leagues almost always skate in pride parades whether the skaters themselves are straight or not, and the big game everyone looks forward to at Rollercon is the Vagine Regime vs. the Caulk Suckers. Since Vagine Regime has a hell of a lot of the star players in the sport, they so far have always won.
This is the second webcomic I follow that features a transgirl who does roller derby. I think there is a trend.
It hasn’t been spelled out in the comics (though there have been hints), but Carla is trans.
She’s a Pontiac in this reality?
Worse, she’s a Ford.
…but I like Mustangs =<
Don’t start with that alternate timeline stuff! Impala all the way!
Could be worse. She could be a DaeWoo
You don’t see too many Daewoos on the road anymore.
With good reason, they made Hyundais look like Jaguars. Only without Lucas electrics.
Cos they went bankrupt in 1999. Daewoo Motors is owned by General Motors now.
Aah, so that’s one of the reasons why they are sold as Chevrolets in Britain, although that doesn’t explain why they don’t use the Opel or Vauxhall brand, which are better known and trusted more here, particularly in the small car categories.
Oh right. I guess comes down to whether there’s more Malyayas or more Marcies on the team. Poor Carla.
Hey, say what you want about Malaya (no, really, do) but in the other universe she likes Ultra Car as a person and doesn’t care about her original body shape. I like to think this Malaya would be similarly inclined.
I cannot say for certain but Willis isn’t likely to do the same pairing in more than one universe.
Not in terms of a pairing, though, just in terms of general worldview.
Seconded. I think Malaya is way too self-absorbed to notice that Carla’s trans, but that if she was told, she wouldn’t be an extra-super-jerk about it. (Just her regular amount of jerk.)
I could see Malaya asking rude, but very blunt questions of Carla if told outright she’s trans. And all the while not really knowing, nor really caring, that they’re rude questions.
JasonxSal happened in both tho?
And it’s a bloody disaster waiting to happen as in IW!
IIRC all he’s said is that people aren’t going to end up with the same partners.
He’s teasing us with Robin/Leslie (although it’s really Leslie/Robin in DoA,) and with Ruth/Billie (canon in IW before Billie gets involved with Danny.)
I thought the robot shape made her horny.
Not shape. She got excited by both the purely mechanical and the human-replica arms. Don’t discount the attraction to the mind of UC as a big factor. She wouldn’t have gotten the same fulfillment with another sentient car-in-human-form. Very similar personalities, with pranking and snark and such. She’d likely get alone famously with May over at QC, yet another snarky synthetic intelligence. But not Pintesize (perv aka The Faz), or Momo (geek, everyone she pranks in).
More than hints, Willis said it in the comments of at least one strip (might’ve been when she found a dick drawn on her door).
Yeah but “word of god” is separate from in-story. While we can all be happy knowing all the representation that’s in the story from what he’s posted outside of the comic, those two hints (for anyone who doesn’t read the comments/tumblr/etc) aren’t enough in comic. The “hate crime” comment and the legs/no one cares bit could reference anything to those who don’t already know about Carla.
(Carla being trans is hella cool, but if I didn’t already know I might think it was references to rape & prosthetic legs or something instead, for example)
I didn’t understand this strip at all. I read it completely wrong. I thought when Carla said “there’s a reason for that.” she was referring to the reason why she isn’t in Derby. Then when Sal said ” ya, they wouldn’t care.” I thought that was the reason. That the girls wouldn’t care if she played or not…. It was bugging me because I kept rereading it trying to understand. Then I read the comments and they saved me lol.
But what if she also has prosthetic legs as well…. O_o?
To quote a classic movie “Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina.”
Boys have poles, girls have holes.
Not always
if you get the right chromosomes, you can have both!
Only if you have more than your fair share of chromosomes….
why would you say this though :/
Everyone has holes. Some people have in front of their holes. This is unrelated to their identity and pronouns.
*poles in front of their holes
The thing that makes us boys or girls is the organ between the ears, not the organ between the legs. Most of the time the organs between the legs match. Sometimes they don’t.
Nope. Talk to any biologist. Actual, scientific determination of sex is far more complicated than that, and many of the factors can get fairly blurry fairly quickly. It’s far easier to just go with what a person says they want to be called, and ask them about chromosomes, hormones, or genitals specifically if there’s a legitimate medical reason you need to know.
(To be clear, unless you are the person’s doctor, YOU DON’T NEED TO KNOW)
This is the awesomest: Parents Keep Child’s Gender Secret for 5 Years
Those comments sure aren’t, though.
Internet comments NEVER are!
wait
I… why would they stop their kid from playing with firetrucks? Those don’t have an inherent gender association to the kid, only to the parents.
It might have been better if they only kept their gender a secret for about 3 years or so and instead of denying them any gender-biased toys, provide ‘blue’ toys, ‘pink’ toys and plenty of purple(?) toys.
I think I’m psychologically disposed to be a horrible person, because my innate drive to categorize things in consistently definable ways shrieks in horror when a person who by all perceptible measures is clearly one things claims to be the other, and that’s somehow not wrong.
I address this flaw by never going out in public.
You might want to think about it as three separate classes of categories. Simplified (and “borrowed” from some old usenet group):
Gender – what’s between your ears.
Sex – what’s between your legs.
Sexuality – who’s between your legs.
And each of those is a complex thing in itself.
Yeah, the problem there is your claim to “all perceptible measures”.
Here, think of it this way. Men and women have physiologically distinct brains, right? There’s different amounts of receptors for androgens and estrogens, there’s a few size differences in certain parts (The BSTc region is a famous example, but the A E Brain blog has plenty more), each responds to certain pheromones different ways, etc.
In the case of trans people, as that blog above shows, it really does come down to having a brain that’s physiologically one way and a body that doesn’t match it. And try as we might, we’ve not yet figured out how to physically change the brain to make the two align, but we HAVE figured out how to change the body to make the two pretty darn close in alignment, and that process has an overwhelming majority (~98%) showing significant improvements in quality of life across the board, including health, stress, and emotional stability.
Except the ones who don’t…funny how people like that became the majority of my close friends.
whyyyyy though
Yay, more Carla!
The pause that refreshes!
So Sal knows Carla is trans* ?
Knows. Doesn’t care. That’s how it should be.
The only reason I care is so I don’t use the wrong pronoun until gender becomes obvious. I hate mis-gendering someone, even by mistake. And I know a lot of trans* people so keeping gender straight is a problem for me. And don’t ask why I know so many trans* people that keeping who’s what straight (and otherwise) would be a problem (and it doesn’t help that there are two with the same names only reversed, they are basically swapping their pre-transition names even though they barely know each other).
Well here’s the thing. Everyone calls Carla by female pronouns, and she seems cool enough with it. So nothing changes.
Yeah, but almost all the trans* people I know started transitioning after I met them. And before someone says anything I had nothing to do with that. I think, probably.
Carla uses female pronouns. Therefore there should never be a reason NOT to use female pronouns unless Carla explicitly requests it.
By default, I’d assume that almost half the trans people you know started transitioning before you met them, but had no reason to tell you.
A fair point, but there’d probably a significant difference depending on how old Opus is. If they’re 18, then likely transitioning would have been far more difficult for people they know until pretty recently, not so much if they’re 30.
I know exactly where you’re coming from, I’m still early enough along that you’d have to know what to look for to realize that I’m not actually a guy…but Carla is pretty clearly feminine (and VERY open about it), which makes female pronouns a very safe assumption.
Thank you, preachy mc preachy pants.
Carla seems to be the type that wouldn’t hide this fact about herself.
I kind of wonder if she sees college as her chance to rewrite herself. Be who she is. Maybe she originally is from out-of-state and intentionally picked a school where there wouldn’t be anyone from her hometown and therefore no one that knew her pre-transition.
I can see where she wouldn’t necessarily hide her gender from people, but she wouldn’t want to be known as “that trans-chick” either and especially wouldn’t want to be known as “that boy Carl [or whatever her pre-transition name was] that dresses like a girl.”
So Carla is Ethan 2.0?
THAT BOY CARL
wait what
www
Speaking as someone that’s worked while publicly “out,” and someone that now lives stealth…
Maybe Carla is braver than me but I will shamefully do whatever I have to to keep stealth status. Even just yesterday I didn’t speak up when a classmate was denigrating trans people, and I’ve felt bad about it since, but if I could travel back in time those 24 hours I wouldn’t have done it differently.
Seems like it isn’t actually a secret, Carla initially thought the ding dong incident was an attack on her gender identity, which would imply people must know.
I read that more as a “Someone found out and is outing me by drawing a dick on my door.” Though it could easily be the way you read it.
This is how I read it too.
I got confused, “It’s already past midnight, why are there only 13 comments?” Then I realized that I’m not on the west coast anymore….
b/c there’s no Slipshining going on
[“YET LOLOLOLOL” NO SHUT UP]
Well, now I want to see Zoidberg with Fuckface sitting on his head.
…and now I want to see it too.
“Why not Zoidberg, and his little land reptile?”
I SHIP IT
Has Carla been confirmed as transgender?
Explains why the whiteboard ding-dong was a “hate crime” before being hilarious.
This might help.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/cast/attachment/2014castcarla/
Unless I’m missing something obvious, that page doesn’t say anything about her gender being different in the past. The only hint is the “single room” thing at the end, and not everyone knows what that implies.
In my experience, it implies severe roommate trouble or transferring from another institution late in the game.
Where I went to school, that just implies you didn’t want a roommate. I spent much of my college time without roommates. Doesn’t UI give people an option to live alone?
At Indiana University, trans* students were generally assigned to single rooms until recently. (Those rooms weren’t in Read Hall, but eh, details.)
http://thehawkeyeonlinenews.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/faces-of-lgbt-at-iup/
“Before then, transgender students were placed in a single-room dorm in University Towers”
There was a whole discussion about why Carla had to be in a single because of her gender identity, but I can’t find it for the life of me.
The longer I spend searching for it and coming up with nothing, the more worried I am that I may have dreamed/hallucinated the whole thing…
Yes, but surely, there are hundreds of IU students who live alone simply because they feel like it or because things didn’t work out with their previous roommate. Unless IU has a policy of requiring students to have a roommate unless they have an unusual situation that prevents it.
It hasn’t been spelled out in the comic, but Willis has said so elsewhere.
Yep, he’s said it in the comments before.
Pretty sure we have Word of Willis, but it hasn’t been spelled out.
Is it just me, or is that a joint and not a cigarette in Carla’s mouth? Am I just crazy?
Hand-rolled cigarretes are an actual thing.
Okay valid point…I’m gonna head canon it as weed though…until I’m proven wrong…
That avatar makes that comment so much better.
It is definitely a joint.
If this was in Oz, the tobacco would be Drum and the rolling paper Tally-Hos.
My step mom used Drum, actually. And that was in Montana. No Tally-Ho rolling paper here that I know off though.
In Holland, the papers would have been RIZ LA + Blue. (RIZ LA + Red or Mascotte for cigarettes, RIZ LA + Blue for joints, because it burns more slowly and holds the ash cone together better).
Some people I knew who were really confident in their rolling skills would roll big, multi-paper joints with glueless papers, Club, I think.
For me, Drum and Zig-Zags.
And Zoidberg!
Those legwarmers. Why can’t I stop staring at those legwarmers?!
I’m having Rock Lee flashbacks myself.
I am just waiting for her to take the weights off.
Pink Legwarmers of Speed!
“Da pink wuns go fastah!”
Sal: “You’re pretty danged tall.”
Carla: “There’s a reason for that.”
Sal: “Ah know. They wouldn’t care.”
This is about as clear as mud. Last time I checked, a person was tall because of genetics….or use of hormones, usually HGH (human growth hormone) although testosterone has also been shown to influence height as well. So are we to assume that (in this universe) Carla is also transgender and is actually a post-op Carl?
And if so, how would Sal have learned this?
Sal did not learn it. She always knew. She’s omniscient. (In all seriousness though, it’s safe to assume Carla told her at some point off screen. I mean the met off screen too.)
Carla doesn’t have to be a post-op anyone.
Surgery or lack thereof isn’t what makes you trans.
Not to mention ciswomen (cis=same, Opposite of trans, used to differentiate those whose assigned gender and actual gender align) can be tall. I’m tall (6’3), but I know a ciswoman the same height (Brienne of Tarth’s actress is my height as well).
Brienne of Tarth is six foot???? O.O
Gwendoline Christie is 6’3″, yeah.
She mightay mightay.
Just letting it all hang out.
Paternal great-grandmother 6+’, paternal grandfather 6+’, father 6+’, Male cousin 6+’ female cousin 1 5’11”, me 5’10”, sister 1 5’9″, sister 2 5’8″, paternal aunt 5’6″, female cousin 2 5’2″. The last one takes after my paternal grandmother.
Genetics definately played a big role in the family height.
Don’t forget the WNBA…
I was 6’1 before my back surgery shrunk me a couple of inches. But, women my height *are* few and far between. This can especially be true regionally. And at 18 a lot of the guys I knew who ended up being my height or taller by the end of college were shorter than me at the beginning of it. And out of everyone I knew in college the only people my height or taller were men.
So, while women being quite tall happens, I can see where Carla might assume she’d have been shorter had she been born physically female.
Women can be tall, but Carla is probably referring to the fact that the male average height is 6-9% taller on average worldwide.
huh, thought there was ~10% difference.
Not to mention that having shifted garb and being on anti-androgens and on estradiol leads to a female appearance. Since Carla piles on feminine hair and a somewhat rounded face, in fact, there’s no reason to think she’s doing anything chemical or physical to change the gender she presents.
And if Carla was revealed as transgender in the past month or so, then I apologize for belaboring the obvious. It’s just that my computer was out of commission and while I was keeping up with the daily strips on my smartphone it was just too damned difficult to follow the comments.
I know Willis stated it at some point (but I forget where…sorry I can’t link.) though it’s never been explicitly stated in comic. Maybe if we yell about it enough he’ll come and settle the dispute again.
He’s stated it on his tumblr, and repeatedly in the comments. And, honestly her first line in the Whiteboard Ding Dong Bandit arc should have made it pretty obvious. (Not that it apparently did.)
I have to admit I’m in the ‘apparently didn’t’ camp. Reading the comments, I knew what that was about, but in-strip, what we knew at that point about Carla was:
1) Kinda tall;
2) Kinda cranky.
The reaction to the ‘hate crime’ line (for those unaware) is more likely to be ‘WTF is that cranky girl on about?’ than anything else. It would probably take several mental leaps to come to the correct solution, and even then you wouldn’t be sure.
Therefore, I’m delighted that there are more hints coming out in-strip, because the dichotomy between word-of-god insisting we interpret things correctly when the strip itself hasn’t given us enough info is getting annoying. (And this is coming from someone who in other fora, rants about how the death of the author is bullshit.)
Bravo. Well said.
/agree wholeheartedly
Nothing about that comment makes it obvious.
Her reaction could just as easily be because she was lesbian. Or simply because she was the sort to to refer to having a dingdong drawn on her door as a “hate crime” — I’ve run into those sorts.
I don’t think Carla is too secretive about it, for one thing, given that she was willing to announce when she thought the whiteboard dingdongs were an attack on her. Also… People just know these things. She’s got a single room while everyone else has a roommate, she’s notably tall, we don’t know what she sounds like… It’s possible they just know and no one makes a big deal out of it.
It’s never been spelled out, but I think it’s fair to assume it isn’t a well-guarded secret (even if it isn’t exactly shouted from the rooftops).
So I found some word of god on this. I think I remembered this being more of an unambiguous yes, but I think it’s good enough…right?
http://dumbingofage.tumblr.com/post/91322448607/is-carla-going-to-be-acknowledged-as-canonically-trans#notes
I kinda assumed that Carla doesn’t quite “pass” for cis-female, in part due to her height.
You’d be surprised. I’m 6’3″, and had assumed (when I first transitioned) that the height would be a constant giveaway. It’s not. Now that I’m away from people that knew me before, I’m almost never misgendered. I even have a coworker that recently learned I was Trans (because I was bongoing about TSA gropeage) and she had a literal jaw drop reaction with several seconds of “wait, what?”… and we’ve been working together for three months.
Estrogen causes the long bones to stop growing sooner, which means she’s taller than she’d be if she hadn’t started male puberty.
I…have nothing to say tonight, maybe tomorrow.
The presentation of Carla in this series makes me incredibly happy. In fact, I’m astonished at just how much I like Carla when she’s divested of the baggage of ever having been Ultracar, who’s tied with Malaya for ‘oh god I simply can’t stand this character.’
Strange how much I love Carla given how much I want Ultracar to die in a fire.
A “car” fire.
I do think it’s sad Carla isn’t Joe’s sister, though. Or his other parent’s child. Either would have worked.
Joe’s dad gets around, though doesn’t he? I thought I remembered that being part of his character. His basically being Joe Sr. So maybe Carla is Joe’s half-sister.
She does live in the same building as her “mum and dad”.
I just love Carla’s entire outfit. And just Carla in general. And also Sal. So basically, these two need to interact more, because it just makes me really happy. Yay fab, beautiful ladies 🙂
Pauses help the world.
Woot! Carla! I hope this leads into a story about Carla/Heavily involving Carla.
Also love her outfit 🙂
It’s also extra-nice to see that Sal, who was largely educated in a Catholic school in Tennessee, is effortlessly not a jerk about transpeople.
Can’t have been that largely since she was only sent there after she knocked over the convenience store. (I don’t think it was specifically mentioned when that happened (I can’t find it if so), but it wasn’t more than 4 or 5 years ago – even if Amber, Sal, and Ethan weren’t clearly in the throes of puberty, preteens don’t often have the freedom to knock over convenience stores.)
In the flashbacks, I thought Sal looked most like an eighth-grader, which would put her in Tennessee for all of high school. However, exact age is hard to tell, especially when stylized.
Do we know how old Amber was then? Because they should be about same age.
I believe Willis mentioned her as being 13 at the time. Something about how difficult it was to make her both worrying and adorable.
It was indicated really early in the comic:
Walky: “I haven’t talked to you much in, like five years.“
Highschool is 4 years, which makes it only 1/3 of one’s pre-college mandatory schooling. Plus, don’t think the Catholicism “took”.
She was sent there as a punishment and took up sneaking out through windows and smoking while she was there.
Off topic, but with the poll question:
The answer is clearly Dina- This is the story of how she observed a bunch of weirdos and decided she would stick to dinosaurs, because screw drama.
You may think I am kidding, but The Great Willis has clearly framed this story through her perspective- with great attention to detail, and little judgement on the characters, just curiosity as to what makes them tick.
Sorry for putting this post here- couldn’t spot anywhere more appropriate to put it.
I like your theory.
But we all know that the Great Faz is the true hero of not just this story, but of all stories.
It is well documented that the hero of the story gets the girl, and Faz has noticed there are many girls within this story.
Faz is ready.
What time is it?
PETTY COMPLAINT TIME!
Since Carla’s a transwoman and presumably on hormones, she really wouldn’t be able to smoke. Shit fucks up the effect and no decent doctor would prescribe her hormones until she quit smoking.
PETTY COMPLAINT OVER!
Yay, more Carla!
But it looks like it might be a joint. Would 1 joint every once in a while have that big of an affect?
(I’m genuinely asking because I have no clue what-so-ever.)
Actually my doctor told me that you should not be doing Marijuana either while on hormones.
Looking around, there is disagreement on the subject, but in any case, yeah it does clearly appear to be a joint and, so long as it’s an occasional habit, it would not LIKELY cause serious problems.
To my understanding, no actually. It’s the nicotine that fucks everything up.
Here’s a forum talking about this very subject:
http://www.tgboards.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=14124
I feel enlightened. I seriously thought any danger in smoking while on hormones would be the same danger, maybe more pronounced, as smoking regularly while on hormonal birth control. An increased risk of blood clots. I had no earthly idea it could reduce the effects of the hormones.
Yet people continue to smoke even knowing it is killing them. Trust me, girls on mones do a lot stupider things than smoke in some cases. People are people, trans or not, and we are all unique in our life choices.
That’s fair.
very good to know…
Speaking as a transwoman who loves to skate, I feel Carla’s pain. I would like to get into roller derby, but I would be accused of having an unfair advantage due to my “male body”. Even though long-term hormone replacement therapy pretty thoroughly negates any and all testosteroney-muscleyness >.>
That’s pretty shitty that people have to be assholes like that. I’m sorry.
I’m broader and more muscley (or, was when I was younger, anyway) than my brother. Your physical gender and/or the one you had in childhood isn’t the end-all-be-all of how you’re built in adulthood.
I figured Roller Derby would be one of the more open sports about that sort of thing. I could see the Olympics or the NFL being that petty and stupid, but a small sport in a fairly small town? Seems like they’d be more welcoming. That’s really sad that that’s not always the case.
http://wftda.com/wftda-gender-policy
Apparently the governing body of the sport has officially defined femaleness, for their purposes, as hormonal rather than anatomical? I don’t know how binding that is on individual leagues, so I don’t know if this is good news for you, but it might be!
I’m really sorry to hear that. When did you last try it? A couple of the ladies in my friend’s league started life off as dudes and zero damns are given about it and I think this year the derby leagues came out with a policy of “you are the gender you say you are, we don’t need to know anything you don’t want to tell us”. It might be worth trying again maybe?
It has been a few years. Maybe it bears looking into again…
Good luck!
Seconded.
The derby crowd is really dang accepting. I’ve been a part of two WFTDA teams now, one who knows my trans-status and another who does not. No problems with anyone. People just want to skate. You should skate, too!
I’m confused. I thought roller derby was designed to give an advantage to female bodies. I thought that was the entire point of the game.
And aren’t tall people with high centers of gravity easier to get knocked over when they’re on skates?
If it weren’t for the comments, I would’ve had no idea what was going on. I was actually wondering if her leg warmers concealed stilts or something.
Don’t feel bad, I’m right there with you. With many very tall women in my family I didn’t know where that comment was going. Guess I haven’t been paying close enough attention.
Well, yesterday Willis finally explicitly stated in-comic that Marcie was mute and not deaf, so maybe soon it will be explicitly stated in-comic what Carla’s deal is.
He’s said it in the comments before…
Comments don’t count. Even when they’re from God the Creator, they just don’t count.
I tend to agree with this sentiment in general — for some reason it really bugs me when major character revelations, plot explanations, etc, take place outside the story itself.
While the author gets final say on everything about their work (I utterly reject both fan-canon, and the lit-crit New Criticism movement), absolute and total final say, I’m conversely always tempted to assert that if it doesn’t take place in the story, it doesn’t count.
Oh, are you going to be my unicorn who understands what ‘New Criticism’ is saying before you reject it? Because I like unicorns.
To be fair, I have a low opinion of literary criticism in general… just read the damn book, and stop arguing over the best way to tear it apart.
New Criticism’s simultaneous rejection of the context in which a book was written and claim to objectivity, is laughable.
Reader response is either lost in blithering postmodernist subjectivism, or treats the reader as a “spherical chicken of uniform density”.
Marxist lit theory is just another example of Marxists treating everything like a nail because they only have the one hammer (and the sickle that goes with it).
Etc.
Darn, I wanted a unicorn. Oh well, I guess I can pick up some MLP toys or something.
Well, since I can’t reply to Rutee’s comment… we’ll allow anyone reading this to decide if her smug vagueness is justified, or just a front.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism
http://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/new.crit.html
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/03/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author
Nice try, but your complaints often don’t make sense if you specifically mean 1950s New Criticism. I mean ‘postmodern’? Which postdates its heyday considerably? Also, even if they were better contemporaries, ‘postmodernist subjectivism’ + ‘claim to objectivity’…. yer aware of what postmodernism is nominally about, yeah?
Now if you want to say you understand the concept of the Death of the Author? Sure, I’d buy that. That’s an easy concept. But claiming to be attacking New Criticism when you’re just making generic claims common of literary critics in general? If you were being literal, brava for attacking a dead school; perhaps next you’ll go for the Mercantilists. IF you weren’t, which seems more likely, well…
I largely agree with that, but Sal’s comment and the white board comment is it taking place in the story. This is how the audience is supposed to figure out that she is Trans*.
It’s not much different from Jocelyn dropping the email address.
You’re right on those moments as the reveal happening in story.
The subject of in-story vs word-of-author is broader and relates to some other things, such as Marcie being mute not deaf, etc.
Springs. Inspector Gadget-style.
I always thought after applecore came “Roger Moore”.
Oh, so that’s Carla’s deal. Cool.
Dear Willis. I get it, you want to introduce characters from the entire population spectrum, but I have to warn you, the second you introduce someone who says they’re otherkin and people take them seriously I’m leaving the comic.
that seems like an oddly specific threat. Did an otherkin kill your puppy or something?
No. An otherkin killed his parents. As he sat alone in his mansion, trying to figure out how to strike fear into the hearts of furrydoers, a human flew threw his window. And so he became… Manman.
With the proportionate strength of ONE MAN! Able to leap low obstacles in a single bound! Capable of lifting objects of average weight with minimal strain! The hero of today!
I don’t see what any of that has to do with anything
“Warning” would imply Willis wants you to stick around…
You’re implying that a webcomic creator doesn’t care if fans stop visiting his page. You’re clearly failing to understand some things.
You should read this, item #3 in particular.
I just wanted to point out that #8a is a total strawman.
It’s a totally neon and playskool strawman. Wait, which comic am I on?
And #5 is totes double standards, as violated by the author himself many many times, especially in the alt-text!
(But maybe the rule does not apply to alt-text?)
I respect Willis too much to just leave without explaining why. As a comic book artist I like people telling me what I did wrong to turn them away from me.
Listen, is cool and all for you to have things you don’t like, but you kinda don’t have any sway at all here.
Author gonna do what they want. Drop it or don’t, but remember, no one is gonna cry if you do and Willis will probably make fun of any parting comment you make.
I hope it doesn’t come to that, because it’s not just a personal quirk or a pet hate, but a valid reason to be pissed off at people who equate transgendered people to what’s basically the only Monty Python skit that has overstayed its welcome.
Well, I’LL quit the comic if he doesn’t include otherkin!
Now we’ll see which one of us Willis really loves!
“I get it”
Somehow, I doubt this.
So you don’t want Dina to start self-identifying as a dinosaur trapped in a hominid body?
+1.
+100
Are you equating being trans to identifying as otherkin?
He clearly makes a distinction here, with only one of them being a reason for him to leave.
Oh Amazistool, only you understand me.
I was going to call it — Carla’s a Transwoman. But apparently this is already well known? Huh.
Well, ok. It makes sense given Ultra Car’s history in the other universe.
I’m pretty sure Willis mentioned it… somewhere in the comments maybe?
Plus, after the whole “there’s a penis on my whiteboard, it’s discrimination! Oh wait there’s one on every whiteboard, then it’s just funny” it was kind of foregone.
It was known long before she even showed up.
It’s nice to see that even Willis has fully embraced Malaya as the worst
Actually, I think this is just another reason he would think she’s The Best.
Uh, did anyone else find the dialogue in this comic a little… obtuse?
I’m terrible at subtext, but I never would have made the leap between “Carla is tall” and “Carla is trans”. I get that it’s the kind of implication that a person might want to keep on the DL, but dang, man. It read panel three a dozen times, and even then I had to read the comments to figure it out.
I’m not just being thick, right?
Well, if you know Shortpacked, you would understand that’s not “Carla’s” original body. So add in “Tall for a woman” with “changed bodies in an alternate universe”, trans is the best guess.
Trans am, you mean… *Yukk yukk*
So Carla was originally CARR, KITT’s evil twin? Disturbingly plausible.
No, I felt much the same way. Even with the same information that MrBurrows used, I still had no idea what they were referring to.
Anyone reading this without the Shortpacked version of the character and the comments section to fill in information can definitely be excused for not putting together “offended when she thought the dingdong was directed at her alone” and “tall for a woman” and concluding that Carla is trans.
Have their been any other “clues” that I’m missing there, that would have made it more obvious?
I’ll be honest: I read this and concluded that Carla had Marfan Syndrome. Even knowing that Carla started out as Ultra-Car in SP!, even reading that transition, I still read this and interpreted the entire scenario as “Marfan Syndrome”
yeah, see, in my mind the subtext went something like “you’re tall” “yup, I’m tall. because I grew” “ah know you are”
Willis is uses the ‘show, don’t tell’ approach to cartooning in DoA. That means he’s almost never going to *tell* us anything; he’s going to show us and let us figure it out for ourselves. Given that we live that way in real life, that’s actually ‘right’.
For instance, we know Amber’s Amazi-Girl because we see her getting into the costume or with her mask off. In-universe, he goes even further; he shows us characters in-universe completely not getting it. He doesn’t ever *say* that nobody gets that; instead, we have examples of people rejecting it. Danny is faithful to Amazi-Girl, so he turns Amber down. Sarah says really nasty things about ‘that shut-in’ to…well, that shut in. Billie doesn’t believe that Amber is Amazi-Girl when she is *told* that. The only person who really gets it is Dorothy, and even she’s totally freaked out when she figures Amazi-Girls real identity.
Carla isn’t going to say ‘Yeah, well, you know I’m trans, so they will throw me out,’ any more than Joycelyn was going to say ‘Look, Ethan, I’m really a girl.’ Willis shows us how facts about a person shape their personal narrative, and leaves us to figure out what those facts must be.
And remember how many people thought Jocelyn’s secret was that Joshua uses a pen name?
Willis is the ‘show, don’t tell’ approach
Nope, he uses the “show breadcrumbs, don’t tell”. (He used that word himself regarding the signs of racism of Walkies and Sals parents).
Which is why it’s recommend to also read the comments, especially when you feel that you are missing something when reading the comic!
I have absolutely no problem with that style of storytelling, and believe me, this kind of thing happens to me in real life all the time. I’m just glad I’m not alone.
But AmaziGirl was easy for the audience – whether you’re well versed in the tropes or just realize AmaziGirl just looks like Amber in a jumpsuit, mask, and cape, it’s very easy to conclude Amber=AmaziGirl, whether the story actually states it out or not.
Marcie’s deal feels more akin to this than Carla’s. It’s not blatantly in your face, but with a few context clues, it’s easy enough to guess.
No, this feels more like Sal and Jocelyn’s situations – Sal, being grayer if you’re not familiar with her plight (heck I’m black and wasn’t sure if Willis was going there until the Dad’s hair comment), and Jocelyn — were there any clues at all that specifically pointed to being transgendered? I believe the masses were frothing at her being gay for Ethan until the email came out.
So yeah, show, don’t tell definitely is effective, but with this medium I think some topics need to be a little more … Heavy handed? Or at least give its readers a break if they miss subtle clues the first time around. Haven’t seen ‘ZOMG how could you nooooooooot know’ comments about this, which is good though. Hate seeing ‘well in X comic by Willis..’ when he specifically says you don’t have to be well versed in those universes to know this one.
^^^^this!!
Especially the last sentence.
At the very beginning we were told that we didn’t need to read the other comics to understand this one.
And with how prolific the commenters are on this it is unrealistic to expect new readers to slog through many score of posts on each of the hundreds of comics, most of which are just hanging out talk.
And comments along the lines of “Well d’uh Willis already said that in some other comics comment section.” are elitist and off putting for new readers, and I am glad at how few of them there are but…
I wonder who else is on this derby team… *strokes beard*
It would be nice if it were in the same universe as GWS.
Since when is being tall an advantage when you’re playing derby?
uh, longer strides, maybe?
Yup, and longer reach.
I don’t get what is so bad/annoying about Malaya. She seems like a good person and tried to help Sal and the others when they fought Amazi-girl, so why does everyone hate her? Does that have to do with Willis’s other comics?
Yeah, she was much more insufferable in Shortpacked when she was introduced. Though she has mellowed out over there as well, largely as a result of dating Ultra Car, that universe’s equivalent of Carla. They hate everything together, and it’s actually kind of sweet.
Well, Ah stay up until dawn to get vengeance and sometimes to fight Amazi-whatever.
Hey just an idea, what if Carla is an amputee and the is why she’s so tall? If you think about it her legs are always covered from the knees down by baggy legwarmers or long socks. She could have possibly lost everything from the knees down in, say, a car accident.
She is probably alluding to the fact that she’s trans.
Something tells me it’s not only tobacco in that cig.
Ooooh wow I only just now understood the third panel. I’m slow that way.