I’m Catholic. You would be…surprised. You may be thinking, “Wouldn’t Christians like other Christians?” And you’d be right! However, to many Protestants, Catholics aren’t Christian. Apparently we worship the Pope, not Jesus, like good normal folks should.
Honestly, I think the bitterness between the different sects of Christianity stems from the awful 30 years war that took place during the Reformation. Still hasn’t healed properly.
Hell, some of the Catholics hate the Catholics. One of the protesters outside of our local Planned Parenthood is still upset that the Mass is no longer in Latin.
“Non-denominational” all too often means “One preacher + N people he’s buffaloed into thinking that he’s All That + zero oversight = reality-divergent super-sheltered bubble at best and destructive cult at worst.”
Francis came in and made drastic reforms, in policy and in attitude, to a powerful and rigid institution over a short period of time.
The Catholic Church is no longer the active crusader against same-sex marriage and abortion it was just a few years ago. The social conservatism has been put on the back burner; the roar reduced to grumbles.
Instead Francis has pivoted the Church for its original purposes: to teach love and tolerance and to fight global poverty. He has spoken in favor of evolution.
If you’re dissatisfied with Francis for not making enough changes, you have unrealistic expectations.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh so this is how Willis will break becky. not through romantic subplot, but through the trauma of seeing her father killed in front of her. well played willis. I Approve~
Before he went all Toedad, it might have been possible that he was Becky’s hero. We’re seeing him at his absolute worst, but it’s possible he was not always a religion-crazed abusive a-hole. Well… he was probably religion-crazed, but Becky’s basically a good kid. The two of ’em might have been very close before he flipped out.
Even abused kids love their parents, and look up to them. As a child, Becky may have seen Ross as her hero. Ross definitely sees himself as a champion of Becky’s soul.
Hell, I’m a pagan lesbian (well, bi leaning lesbian, but I digress) and one of my best friends is a very devout Catholic. She has zero problem with me or my wife.
To be fair, that has nothing to do with being Catholic, and everything to do with “not being a horrible person.” Plenty of Catholics might take issue with a pagan lesbian (plenty of Catholics DO take issue).
From what I can tell, fundamentalists and evangelist churches are much more likely to preach intolerance for specific groups of people. They try to make visible enemies out of actual groups in society, and have a weird psuedo militant way of teaching kids that they actually have enemies out to get them in the form of gays or whatever
Sure, but Catholicism seems to push the love and tolerance angle a lot more strongly than protestants in my experience, and the result is that even though *officially* the Church has some pretty ugly ideas about gay people, a lot of actual Catholics are pretty open-minded and tolerant.
At master of bones: Yes, but being Pope has its privileges and one of them is being able to steer the church however you please.
At LiamAldam: Really? I can’t say I’m surprised. Good on him! Has he given up absolute power over the Vatican?
That really isn’t true. The Pope is only the head of an entire college of cardinals and without the adjudication of the whole magisterium he can’t change doctrine willy-nilly, and he hasn’t. Girls like me are as dangerous as nuclear bombs to him and that’s not acceptable.
And he can’t give up absolute power over the Vatican.
Yu’Karaya wasn’t talking about the Catholic Church, she’s not disagreeing with you. “Fundamentalist and evangelical churches” refers to (some types of) Protestant churches, not the Catholic Church. The Church is not fundamentalist.
Oh, look how open-minded and tolerant the vatican has become: A senior priest at the Vatican has revealed he is gay, on the eve of a major meeting that will define the Catholic Church’s teaching on family.
(…)
The Vatican called his actions “very serious and irresponsible” and stripped him of doctrinal responsibilities.
Being gay is not the reason he got stripped of responsibilities.
The main reason is that he had a partner, breaking the rules of celibacy for priests. And the fact that he did the announcement the day prior of the meeting, trying to put pressure on the discussions.
@Gand – True though that may be, it still doesn’t make the fact that they continue to maintain the celibacy rules any less silly. And the fact that breaking celibacy was likely only the given reason.
Again I wholeheartedly disagree that love-and-tolerance level has anything to do with what sect of Christianity is being practiced. My best friend is a devout Latter-Day Saint (Mormon). Her husband-to-be is openly atheist, genderqueer (prefers male nouns and pronouns though) and way into BDSM. Another of my friends is a Baptist from the Deep South and he is a strong activist against sexism in comic books (comic books are his passion, he has written some indie ones).
Any person from any religion, or any branch of a religion, can be open-minded and tolerant. The frequency of openmindedness and tolerance among specific religions/sects is a pointless debate. Decent people are decent, and bigots are bigots, regardless of what their religion may be. No religion can truly be said to have a greater number of decent people/bigots.
I’ve found it really depends on the community mix/size. My synagogue was small enough that our denomination was “if anybody gets mad we lose a minyan” and so taught general Jewish spirituality while leaving it up to the people to choose their own flavor of how observant they wanted to be. The town was small as well so we all knew folks of different faiths, heck most of my friends were Mormon and it wasn’t until I left town that I learned those guys had a bad rep elsewhere, they were just people.
Meanwhile if you get an isolated town of all one faith, or a city big enough for people to segregate themselves, that’s when it can start getting ugly. Up in Chicago, my grandma’s family disowned my grandpa when the “wrong” rabbi oversaw her funeral.
Just saying, my nation is 80-90% catholic and we have gay marriage since 2006. We also have laws to protect laicism, and we accomodate religious minorities.
It looks like a misspelling of ‘racism’, but it’s apparently derived from ‘laity’, a word used in Catholicism to refer to secular authorities. Laicism is a principle of government that specifically excludes religious authority. It’s a simpler way of saying ‘separation of church and state’.
How is it not simpler? It’s a general concept shared and understood among all Catholic European countries (and Latin America), and it’s the same in a bunch of languages (laicism, laicismo, laïcisme, laicità). Separation of church and state is a specifically American concept based on specific wording in the US Constitution.
Having been raised catholic, the joke I like to make is that everyone who felt like they needed a church they actually agreed with left during the reformation, leaving catholicism as 90% people who don’t give a single shit what the catholic church actually says. And that includes the catholic fundamentalists, who have a surprising tendency towards literal heresy.
The thing about catholicism is that while doctrine can be strict, it also has a long history of “off course you don’t practice what you preach”. I mean, you think most of our priests (yeah, i was raised catholic in the sense described below) really live celibate? Right. In fact, celibacy has been described as a sort of funtional medieval “safe harbor” for male homosexuals, because they didn’t have to explain why they weren’t married.
Catholicism has many adherents over the world, most of them don’t really know what’s in the bible either. In parts of europe, catholicism is really more about rituals and, “well, we’ve always been catholic” than about “giving yourself to jesus”. Which to me, also goes a long way to explain why catholics are often about as liberal as the general society they live in .
This is also why catholicism is despised as next to satanic by evangelicals. It may also be what triggered the reformation.
That is not to say that “don’t practice what you preach” isn’t a big problem in and of itself, especially if you are an actual gay catholic believer if e.g.:
a) You want/need official recognition by the church
b) Against all odds, you are a DEVOUT catholic and question yourself because of doctrine
And that can be a big problem, because doctrine changes really slowly in catholic church, if at all.
So, basically, the way i see catholicism is that it’s basic mode has traditionally been hypocrisy. I admit i have a sofft spot for catholicism because to me it’s ultimately human, i prefer hypocrisy over religious fervor. But then again, i’m not directly concerned by a) or b)
Ok. It’s just i’ve heard this before, and thought it was an interesting twist, but i don’t have any sources to back it up. Do you know where the notion comes from?
The roman catholic church turning the franchise into a money source was what triggered the reformation.
Martin Luther could have been a character straight from Shortpacked!
Martin Luther had 93 points that he made about the Catholic Church to trigger the Reformation. Only like four of them were about the blatant greed of the church at the time. It’s like saying “Rosa Parks caused the civil rights movement!” when it was actually the rallying cry to vent decades or centuries of frustrations about a broken system.
It makes perfect sense, since bisexuality doesn’t mean equal levels attraction to all genders, but that one is attracted to genders besides the opposite sex. (Trying to keep this as gender inclusive as possible.) This may mean that someone is often attracted to men, but occasionally women as well.
I’m not surehow sexually fluid would fit in there.
That and its kindof rude to tell someone they’re identifying wrong. I personally don’t find there to be any significant difference between bisexual and pansexual (besides being explicit instead of implicit about other gender expressions), but I’m not going to substitute one label for the other if one gives a preference
I’m what I would call “homoflexible”, which I gather to be the same as bi-leaning homosexual. Meaning perhaps 90% homo (in my frame of reference anyway).
My boyfriend labels huimself pansexual and one of my male friends labels himself bisexual. The difference between them two is this : my boyfriend feels that gender is secondary attraction-wise (the feeling of sexiness isn’t linked to the feeling of gender), and my friend feels that gender plays a primary role in his attraction (he is attracted to different genders in different ways). I think why they interpret those words that way is because the prefix bi- suggests a distinction and the prefix pan- suggests an encompassment. But other people see it differently.
The thing about the word “bisexual” is that it was reclaimed. Originally it, just like “homosexual”, was a clinical term that attempted to pathologize non-straight orientations. The difference is that the bi community reclaimed it, while the gay community largely rejected “homosexual”.
My point is that bi’s etymology is irrelevant, because it was created by bigots. So what the prefix bi “suggests” doesn’t so much matter.
The bi community has been defining the term since the 70s as attraction to one or more genders, which can of course encompass anything from “just two” to “all”.
I personally identify as pan, but I just wanted to further hammer home your last point: that the labels are personal, and the distinction depends on the person.
The distinction that gender plays a secondary versus primary role in attraction isn’t a meaningful difference in all cases, since it is something that can vary for someone depending on circumstances.
Also, consider that bisexual comes from a time before there was really language for anything beside the two genders, so the implication fit the language of the time rather than in practice. Truthfully the difference between bisexual and pansexual, if any, is very fuzzy. There doesn’t seem to be any consensus.
And here I am wondering why you people only answered my comment to tell me stuff like that. I’m just sharing what my friend and boyfriend told me about themselves. Of course it’s different for everybody. I’m so, so tired of label policing.
1) I never said she was identifying wrong.
2) I only addressed the issue because it was literally the very first sentence of her comment, not something plucked out of the blue sky.
3) By the comments I think a lot of people here don’t really understand what sexually fluid means. It doesn’t mean equally bi, it doesn’t mean mostly straight or gay, it means you can find people attractive even if you lean more towards gay/straight. In a way, it’s one of the most all encompassing descriptions there is. If you want to understand what sexually fluid means, you should read this: http://everydayfeminism.com/2012/10/fluid-sexuality-lgbtq-spectrum/
And a lot of you really need to read this article because this is clearly a term that is still not well understood.
There whatever breed of American nondenominational fundamentalism Willis was born into. As far from Catholicism as possible while still being considered Christian.
They’re close to the breed my friend grew up in, and he was told at age 11 that the Catholic Church was so satanic, he would one day fight a beast with seven pope-heads barehanded.
Eh, Puritans weren’t really just eliminating everything fun, they just wanted to make absolutely sure no one was putting something else before God. Still kinda shitty, but ya know, it was the 15th century.
Having been raised Catholic (though not religious anymore) I’ve actually found it to be one of the least fire-and-brimstoney of common American Christian denominations. Obviously there are plenty of people who don’t exemplify that, but the churches I went to were mostly of the “judge not lest ye be judged” variety. Contrast that with some of the evangelical types on my dad’s side (born-again Assembly of God *shudder*) and Catholicism looks like flowers and butterflies and pleasant wine-drunkenness.
As someone who has had a similar experience with the Catholic Church it’s even better if you hang out with anyone from quite a few of the orders. Particularly Jesuits and Lassalians. So liberal, we (the orders and those educated by them) are sometimes called commies. Good times.
I was raised evangelical presbyterian. Not really sure what that means, but the result was be nice to everybody so that you know that you are better than them.
Ha. My family is Presbyterian and that’s pretty spot on. I’ll take it over the Baptist “everybody except us is going to hell, oh well, humanity is evil anyway” attitude any day, though.
I’m Catholic myself though from my experience, every religion ends up with different sects regardless of claiming to all be unified so invariably you end up with some real asshole groups. I will say that the churches we’ve gone to teach what basically boiled down to, “Be nice to people and don’t be an asshat.”
Yeah, the modern-day descendants of those New England Puritan churches are… well… in New England. So they’re actually some of the most liberal and hippie-ish churches in the whole country. I grew up in a Massachusetts church like that.
It’s not really a bad cause: saving his daughter from eternal damnation.
Really it comes down to the interplay of three separate positions
Position 1) Nonchristians burn forever in a fiery damnation. It is therefor your moral responsibility to save your loved ones from eternal torture.
Position 2) Nonchristians burn forever in a fiery damnation but it’s your right to choose for yourself, even if your choice directly leads you to eternal torture.
Position 3) Nonchristians do not burn forever in a fiery damnation.
If you are a father, even if you mostly fall in position 2, you are likely to have special considerations for your daughter, which push you closer to position 1. And if you are already position 1 to begin with, like Toedad, then your sole responsibility is to keep your daughter’s soul safe. Even her physical safety is less important.
Personally, I fall into position 3, but I have a hard time just writing off people who are indoctrinated into faith-based beliefs and follow those beliefs to their logical ends as “jerks.” Misguided? Maybe. Probably. Jerks… maybe not.
As for the whole lesbian equals going to hell thing… I don’t even know where it comes from, but I know that many churches teach it. And if your church teaches it, and that is your primary source of biblical interpretation… well, faith-based is not evidence-based.
I never thought that I would feel sorry for the guy. I really didn’t. I’m against what Ross is doing, and I’m against what he stands for and why he’s doing this.
Looking at panels four and six, however, actually managed to accomplish what I thought was impossible.
I don’t know where the feeling comes from, and the more I think about it, the more I don’t like it. But goddammit, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that for a brief few moments, the look on Ross’s face in those last few panels made me feel a brief moment of sadness for the man.
And then I think about what he’s doing and the sadness goes away. Even if this is something he believes in with all his heart and earnestly believes he’s trying to do good, that doesn’t change in the least what he’s doing.
I felt momentarily sorry for him, but it speaks volumes that I could only do it out of context.
The way it seems to lean is that his wife is gay, and left him, but not on pleasant terms. It left him broken, and in his grief he erroneously latched onto the wrong cause of the pain. Now he’s afraid that he’ll lose his daughter. He just doesn’t seem to be capable of understanding throughout all of this that he won’t.
Perhaps a mental substitution would be needed. In his mind you could say his likening Homosexuality to a severe heroin addiction. Would anyone consider his actions to be wrong if he tried to put her into rehab, she broke out, and was being enabled by her friend and her dealer, possibly one hit away from death? A willingness to die so that she can live her life to it’s fullest makes more sense there.
I’m not excusing his actions, but stating that they seeming come from misinformation, old doctrine, and pain. What he’s doing is wrong, but also sad.
Actually I went to exactly the same place as Orion Fury on this one. Toedad didn’t say his wife was taken away or taken by God, she was taken by the Devil. That’s a horribly specific way of saying it.
Joyce and Becky have said that Becky’s mother is dead, but we’ve established that they belong to a pretty fundamentalist community. It doesn’t seem a stretch of the imagination that if she came out to her husband, rejected the church or did anything else seen as a betrayal of the faith that she would be ‘cast out’ (think of the Last Temptation of Leslie Bean) and ‘written out’ of their lives as dead. Its all a bit Moses but fits the community.
It may also explain why both toedad and Becky’s room-mate’s family both seemed to separately behave like the room-mate was and innocent lead astray by Becky who ‘had the devil in her’. If Mrs toedad was gay it would be easy to assume the ‘evil’ passed down to the daughter.
Heck, at a stretch it may explain why Joyce’s uber religious parents allowed her to go to their alma mater instead of ‘god college’ with the gay woman’s daughter who was close to their daughter.
Daniel here. I get what Orion & Rando are saying. Becky & Joyce believe Becky’s Mum is dead because that’s what she’s been told repeatedly ever since she vanished, but what is that was a lie maintained by toedad/their Church/the local community? What if her “death” was in fact her being banished/fleeing the family home, with the “death” story used to cover the fact she’s never allowed/going to return?
That said, there IS another situation where a person can die, but still “taken by Satan”.
Suicide.
Suicide is considered a Sin by most versions of the Church I’ve heard of. To many versions, it doesn’t matter WHY they killed themselves (chemical imbalance in the brain? Doesn’t matter. Terminally ill? Nope), they kill themselves, they’re going to Hell. I’ve seen a TV show reporting the late great Robin Williams had undiagnosed Lewy Body Dementia, which slowly shuts down neural pathways 1 connection at a time, changing behavior. They loose control over themselves. And yet, some Churches don’t care.
The last option that crosses my mind for the “Satan took your Mother from me” line, though the least likely (hopefully), she did something like Orion & Rando said (came out as Bi/Lesbian/hating Church ideals) so in order to prevent his beloved Daughter being “contaminated”, Toedad killed Mrs Toedad…
I doubt it’s the last option, but it’s a possibility, he has proven himself potentially Fanatical enough…
I can’t find that reference but when a Christian’s loved one dies, it’s; usually ‘God took them’. “Satan took them’ usually means they either decided to leave to do something awful for the good Christians or they left because of not being able to take their loved ones’ lunacy to the bad Christians…
Honestly…I dunno. I get where you’re coming from. On the other hand, what he’s doing, whether it’s out of love or not, is INSANE. It’s also just…despicable. I mean…it’s your daughter, and her best friend, and you’re holding a GUN on her. I DO feel bad for Ross. But at the same time, I hate him WAY more than I did before for doing this. Seriously. Unless Willis pulls a Charles Whitman and reveals that Ross has a brain tumor on his amygdala, there is NO EXCUSE, and NO forgiving his actions.
If I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that my daughter would be eternally damned and subjected too horrendous torture for literally all of time if I didn’t save her from the path she was on, I’d pull a gun on her too.
If you knew those things beyond a shadow of a doubt, then you would not be a member of a faith based organization.
The cornerstone of faith is not knowing for certain but believing regardless.
I think there are a lot of people who somehow lose the meaningful distinctions and flip it around to “whatever I believe is fact, not faith”. Or just, my faith is fact. Which, oh /honey/.
But having been raised in nearly exactly the same circumstances as Joyce, not a single person I knew would have ever thought it appropriate to pull a gun on their child even if their very soul were on the line.
Also and mostly irrelevant, but it always bothered me how Christians gloss over their usual “power of prayer” attitude when it comes to situations like these. Getting out a gun is basically telling god, “Yeah I know I’ve been praying for her, but you’re doing jack shit. Let go of the fucking wheel. I don’t think you’re handling this right. I’m taking over from here, you fuck up.”
I went to a a nondenominational fundamentalist christian high school myself. They taught us that real faith was the belief in things unseen based on the evidence of things seen. They taught us that blind faith wasn’t real faith, that you should have evidence.
Of course.. the evidence that they provided to get to their conclusions was full of problems that I could go on all day about.. But of course it wasn’t presented that way. They believe there is real tangible evidence for their beliefs. In their minds they don’t just choose to believe these things, they know them to be fact.
If I was going to do something that drastic just subscribing to the belief wouldn’t be enough, I’d need to know for sure. But if we do assume for a moment that Ross’s horrible view of the world is true, then I think scaring Becky with a gun is definitely preferable to eternal torture don’t you think?
If what the worst elements of Christianity espoused was objective fact, then yes. Fortunately we live in a better world than that and such questions aren’t really worth asking.
I think it’s important to consider how Ross views the situation when discussing whether or not his actions are forgivable. He is kind insane right now, but he’s still genuinely looking out for Becky’s best interest, so much so that he’s willing to lay down his life for her. Compare that to Blaine, who’s just an evil jackass in general and doesn’t give a shit about his daughter.
Not really, but then I’m of the mind that any God who would torture someone forever because of what I believed or who I loved is an awful tyrant who must be stopped by any means necessary, rather than a man who must be appeased with whatever horrible actions will keep one in His good graces.
And that was pretty much a choice I came to when I was a kid and pondering about what I would believe if I was a part of the religion that surrounded me, if their view of the afterlife was real. And yeah, in that case, send me to Hell, conscript me to Lucifer’s army, because if God is that terrible of a person that he would demand such abusive action from his followers, then he’s probably lying about how bad Satan really is.
That’s honestly what pushed me away from Christianity in my youth. I saw a play at my church, put together by the sweetest people ever, and it scared the absolute shit out of me. The moral was “literally everybody except for the devout are going to Hell, it doesn’t matter how good they are.”
I personally think the concept of ANYONE going to Hell, regardless of what crimes they committed is seriously fucked up. That said the idea that we would be capable of defeating God if that was true seems unrealistic to me, I don’t blame someone for knuckling under instead of rebelling.
“I don’t know where the feeling comes from, and the more I think about it, the more I don’t like it”
There is nothing remotely wrong with having empathy or even sympathy for someone you strongly disagree with. In fact, Id say having empathy for your “enemy’s” is a trait all too often lacking in people.
I’m pretty sad and moved. The more I read over this, the more I see that Ross is really, really fucking desperate. He knew that he was risking his own life to get his daughter back. :c
Some people are still angry at Ross for what he did. That’s justifiable. I think a lot of them may just be riding on negative feelings like Ross = Bad Guy Forever, but there’s really no defending what he did.
Still…i can’t help but feel like he heard about this and felt so alone for a little while. At least for Becky things turned out okay. For Ross, this whole situation must have been a living nightmare.
This. His actions are monstrous and demonstrably harmful, but he is also a human being with working emotions. It’s just his empathy is short-circuited by his commitment to dogma. And it’s awesome when people recognize that seeing the pain and worldview that has led someone to hurt someone else deeply does not justify their actions or make them more sympathetic. It just emphasizes how human even the horrible people are.
This. Except for not making them more sympathetic? Definition says sympathy = “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune”. And I have those feelings about Ross’ “misfortune at becoming who he is and having his love for Becky so, so twisted to the dark side. Perhaps not sympathy FOR Ross, himself?. Certainly not sympathy for what he is doing. ZERO sympathy for his actions. And I see ZERO justification for what he is doing. But sorrow and pity for the situation he is in and what’s brought him to it. NOT that I think that that does anyone any good.
The way it reads makes me worry that he may have killed his wife, so I’m not getting the “sympathetic” vibe.
If she just left him for another woman, then:
1. Unless he got a kick-ass lawyer, Becky would’ve been raised by a lesbian, and, well….
2. Becky wouldn’t be asking Dad to do it for mom’s sake.
Oh- unless mom had a psychotic break or something and ended up in the hospital. 🙁 Then I would feel bad.
I don’t get the sympathy angle that’s popping up in the comments.
After we lost my mom, my dad gave everything for me and my sister. Literally. The stress of the circumstances killed him. I’ve seen what it is to lose a wife, and I’ve seen what it is to desperately love your family so much you’re willing to do anything for them.
This is not it.
He drew a weapon on his own daughter. It doesn’t matter who he lost, or believes he lost, or what he feels inside. That is utterly unforgivable.
Turning a gun on something means you are willing to see it destroyed. What kind of monster is willing to watch their child die?
What has happened to Ross Babies McIntyre is designed to explain, not excuse, his actions. As you have no doubt experienced, there are plenty of people who have gone through what Ross has and haven’t gone off the deep end in response. Also, all I feel for him is Pity. Pity that he couldn’t have held on to his sanity just a little longer. He still deserves whatever the cops dish out to him (if they come).
Really feel for poor Becky, Jesus. I want to reach in and give her a hug. Well, I want to reach in and get the gun away from Toedad and call 911, but then I want to give her a hug.
” He still deserves whatever the cops dish out to him”
Depends on the cops really.
He has drawn a gun and deserves to be arrested, not gunned down, for example.
He hasn’t actually harmed anyone at this point (physically), and while he
is being irresponsible in the extreme, it doesn’t look like he intends to use
that gun for anything but cowards show of power.
He clearly belongs to the kind of people that sincerely believe that weapons are not meant to destroy but to dissuade evildoers. A very sincere, but very mistaken belief that every other month allows a shooting to happen at schools or cinemas or whatnot as people employ weapons to destroy without being dissuaded at all.
I can think of two times in my life where my father showing a gun caused people who meant to rob and possibly harm my family to peacefully leave. A third time the appearance of having a gun (which I didn’t actually have) did the same for myself.
I have never pointed a gun at another human being. I have no desire to ever do so. My father may have done so as part of his duties as a Marine. I don’t know for sure. If so I am confident it has only happened as a Marine, not as a civilian. If you ask him he will only answer that killing is a horrible thing that does great psychological harm to the killer and you should hope never to have to do it.
I think it’s more of a sadness rather than a forgiveness of his actions, if that makes sense? Like I feel sad for him. But I also have very high emotional empathy and feel sad when pretty much anybody feels sad, no matter how much I hate them. But that doesn’t make me stop hating them.
I guess I just hate seeing suffering in general. But I definitely can’t excuse or forgive or condone his actions at all and find what he’s doing repugnant.
It’s also heartbreaking for me to see how this affects Becky.
Honestly, I’m a bit with the sympathizers at this point. The guy needs to be stopped, hard, before he hurts anyone or kidnaps Becky, and he needs to be restrained and perhaps incarcerated to keep from doing it in the future. But he’s also clearly redeemable if he can just be pulled out of the religious nutjob mindset. He’s not a hardcore inexcusable asshole like Blaine or Ryan.
Yeah but he’s so deep in it that it might be impossible for him to get out… he clearly isn’t intelligent enough to sort things out by himself, and being in jail would probably not be the greatest help on that aspect.
IIRC, the current psychological DSM explicitly exempts religious thinking and beliefs from the big catalog of crazy, even in instances when a strict reading of the literature might file it under other categories of delusion or schizophrenia. (Tried to google to confirm, but google is down atm.) So no, no insanity defense.
he’s trying to protect his daughter he just has a fucked up idea about what she needs to be protected from.
if he were trying to save her from human traffickers rather than Vagina and the “gay agenda” they’d make a movie with him played by Liam Neeson.
“I don’t know what you want. If you want money, I can tell you I don’t have any. What I do have are a certain set of beliefs, beliefs that make me a nightmare to atheist lesbians like you. If you come back now, I won’t come looking for you. But if you don’t, I will come looking for you. I will find you. And I will kill you.”
This, exactly. It’s painfully obvious he cares about her immensely, but he’s taking all the wrong actions. Unfortunately I don’t think that can really be fixed at this point, he’s in too deep, and he doesn’t know any other way to deal with it. Things aren’t so black and white, and just because he’s behaving this way now doesn’t mean he was a bad father or a bad person before.
I think Toedad’s actions are motivated by either getting Becky back or suicide by cop. Which, weirdly, means he’s far more rationale than he first appeared.
He’s fighting Satan. Either he dies fighting a great evil that has stolen his daughter, martyring himself to be greeted in Heaven by his wife (unless the reason he claims Satan took her is because she killed herself or was taken out by him for failing to “live up to Godly standards”) or his show of sacrifice and conviction is enough to pierce the lying veil of Satan and remind his wayward daughter of the path back to the light.
In his twisted view, it’s win-win as he doesn’t have the humility to admit he might not actually know best about what his idea of his God would want or what is actually best for Becky.
Sadly, a major liability for Becky here is she cares if he lives or dies. He doesn’t. Nor does he care if she lives or dies, so long as she does either free of “the sin that has consumed her”.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter for the way this unfolds, but it seems to me that he does care if she dies. He’s willing to kill her to “save” her (maybe?) but he does care. I suspect when asked for God to give him strength, it was because he doesn’t WANT to kill her, it’s because he was afraid that he wouldn’t have the determination to go through with whatever he has planned.
Yup. He’s mistaking his empathy for the deceptions of Satan trying to dissuade him from his Holy Crusade. And he’s believing that his anger and selfish stubborn bigotry are God granting him the strength to work through and remain resolute no matter what the accursed one says to try and dissuade him from his task.
His brain is screaming at him that this is wrong and he’s doing harm, but he’s trusting God and his desire to control to keep him on “the right path” and do “whatever is necessary” so that he, personally, can have a victory over Satan.
Good rule of thumb for believers: if you ever find that you have to overrule your God-given conscience to do what you think God wants, stop immediately. You’re doing it wrong.
Lord, he IS very badly messed up, ‘tricked’ into horrific, unjustifiable, unforgivable actions, by his hateful dogma and his determination not to be “tricked” into shirking his “duty”. That’s what evokes my sorrow and pity — and horror.
Er, actually, when a parent dies in a bad way, it tends to be something the kids DON’T like to talk about. Even to their friends. ESPECIALLY to their friends.
Word of Willis is she died of cancer, last year. But, this is disturbing, Ross is saying Satan took her. Isn’t the usual (when someone beloved dies) God took her early/before her time/etc?
My personal theory is that she admitted to not believing/losing her faith before she died. I remember hearing a lot of prayers as a child for elderly relatives and acquaintances to resist the “last temptation”–basically, letting the devil use your fear of death to destroy your faith in your last moments.
It could also be that they believe in prayer as the best medicine, so part of her “betrayal” could be her seeking medical intervention instead of trusting to his prayers.
I thought that was just Christian Science (my grandmother was very big with that. I went to Sunday School, but still went to doctors) We didn’t believe in the devil, though.
I’m hoping he means that Becky’s mother ran off with her new wife so he told Becky she was dead to shield Becky from the harsh reality of the situation.
The main reason I wouldn’t guess that is that Willis has referred to her as being dead. (And Ross has referred to her as dead to people other than Becky)
You seem to forget that Willis, the literal God of the DoA-verse, said she was dead. For over a year, so the grief isn’t going to be to much of drag in either case.
from my experience (through my best friend who is catholic mostly) there is a lot of disagreement in the catholic churches to the point even people in the same church has disagreements.
Last I checked, most protestant denominations don’t have a problem with suicide. As in, they of course don’t want people to kill themselves, but it’s not considered an unforgivable sin that lands you straight in Hell.
2280 Everyone is responsible for his life before God who has given it to him. It is God who remains the sovereign Master of life. We are obliged to accept life gratefully and preserve it for his honor and the salvation of our souls. We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.
2281 Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God.
2282 If suicide is committed with the intention of setting an example, especially to the young, it also takes on the gravity of scandal. Voluntary co-operation in suicide is contrary to the moral law.
Why it is not ‘a super sin’:
Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.
2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.
K Neko, I see your point. (“Super sin” was deliberate and careless; I’d forgotten the actual sin rating. I figured that “super” covered it. Mostly based on what I know of the RCCs involvement against medical suicide.)
Could also imply that he had convinced himself that their relationship was so pure and righteous that Ross could see no conceivable way even God, with all his inscrutable ways, would separate them. And thus Satan is to blame.
There are some religious sects that literally believe that illness itself comes from and is spread by Satan. So, he could very well consider death by illness/disease being “taken away by Satan” as it would have been Satan that gave them the illness in the first place.
As to your question, it depends. Some evangelical group members see illness as a major test of faith and a reminder that death comes like “a thief in the night to righteous and villain both without warning or regard for goodness”. But others genuinely believe in things like the healing power of prayer, so when cancer fails to go into remission, that becomes either a sign that their faith was not strong enough or pure enough or that Satan has especially chosen their family to do violence upon.
I’m going to guess Toedad is the latter type of dude.
Hm, I’m not convinced it’s a direct “illness = Satan” link there. I think it’s more to do with Ross’ own need for control. He’s a full-blown authoritarian, evidently, and part of that mindset is that things don’t ‘just happen’. Someone has to be in control. That means either Ross, or a higher authority he defers to.
Ross’ wife died, and his illusion of control was shaken. I’m pretty sure he’s also swallowed the fundamental attribution error (that bad things don’t happen to good people, or essentially that bad things happen because the person deserved it somehow) but can’t bring himself to believe that it was deserved, so he needs another reason. What do fundamentalist types call it when bad things happen outside their control? Satan.
I think Ross has spent the last year twisting himself around this until he’s convinced that Satan is attacking him and his family and he has to fight back. This is his test; he and only he stands in Satan’s way and he must be prepared to do anything to regain control*. In other words, I read this as a breakdown.
Guy needs therapy. Well, first he needs to put the gun down and be taken into custody so he’s no longer a danger to himself and others, but then he needs therapy.
(Seriously, some of the people baying for blood in here scare me. Look in the mirror, people.)
* There’s another ugly aspect here that I didn’t want to digress into above, and that’s that it seems to be all about Ross in his head. It’s common to the authoritarian mindset. Look at his phrasing: “Satan took your mother from me”, “How dare [Dina] try to steal my daughter away from me”. It’s not about his wife’s suffering, or his daughter trying to find her identity in life; it’s about Ross, as the authority figure in his family.
I’m not sure to what extent I think this has been his mindset all along, as opposed to something that he’s built up as a coping mechanism since his wife died (I don’t think he’s always been this bad; the commenters saying they were surprised he’d take Becky and Joyce to Six Flags were probably on to something). I think it’s clear, though, that Becky discovering her orientation was the snapping point. It would be interesting to know, not that I ever expect an answer, how things would have gone if Becky came out while her mother was still alive.
He probably feels very alone. His wife died, so he became very attached to his daughter. Unfortunately, he’s an authoritarian, so his way of expressing affection is to try to control (‘protect’) his daughter. Now she’s rebelling against that control, and he feels even lonelier, and its driven him to a pretty dark place.
Very much all of this. Things aren’t going on for his wife or for his daughter, it’s all about him and his role as moral protector and authority for his family. Bad things aren’t just bad things outside his control, they are Satan attacking him personally. Because as the man of the house, he’s the only one who really matters in the end.
Gangler above suggested that the death-by-cancer thing may have been a fiction he told Becky to cover his wife running away with a woman. From context, I’m finding that theory fairly possible.
Very random. The cast and I started college around the same time. When I took Japanese (only a semester, so I have naturally lost it all by now), a friend in the class nicknamed me the Japanese word for blue. I decided to go with that for the comments.
I’m considering photoshopping the Dina grav so her hat looks like a TARDIS and changing my name on here to DinaWho (since I make an egregious number of references already), so this was a perfectly timed question.
I had seen you commenting about here before, so nice to finally talk to my comment name twin!
The story of Taken 2 is actually based on Ross. He didn’t make a dime off of the royalties however. He’s being a dramatic asshole now so he can gather more hype for the next Taken movie, Taken Tag Tournament.
Ha, nope, this comic “day” is going to last at least until November 5th, according to Joyce’s outfit in the preview panels on Willis’ tumblr. I suspect it’ll end on or near the 10th, when he previewed a shot of a hospital…
Considering that a day of Fallout 4 will involve most of humanity being wiped out in a nuclear war, the comic will probably be fairly light in comparison.
Are you sure she died? If Satan is at works here according to toedad than its more likeley adultery, alcoholism, drug abuse…. hell maybe she discovered her own queerness or transgender self.
“So how’s satan”
“Ah you know. Busy. Him and Jesus have been arguing a lot. Occupying himself by writing speeches for Donald Trump. That kinda thing”
“That’s so like him”.
So Donald Trump is secretly a puppet being controlled by Satan, or Donald Trump is so evil that Satan’s just like “Hey, man, I wrote a speech for you! You don’t have to thank me, because you’re evil.”
Of course. To do otherwise would be moral relativism and moral relativism is the Devil trying to twist your mind and play off your empathy. The righteous stand firm even when it is hard and resist like Jesus when he underwent his temptation. After all demons will say anything to avoid being driven out by the righteous.
And I wish that last paragraph was a joke, but that’s really the worldview. Think Bush back when he was selling his “Moral Clarity” garbage. To a disturbingly large number of people, morality is defined by never changing one’s stance or mind even in the face of new information. To a pre-millennial dispensationalist rapture-believing Christian type, there’s the added wrinkle that empathy itself is a sign of the Antichrist. After all, someone without God in their heart (as defined as belonging to the right Church and believing the right things), cannot be good by definition and as such there can not be good in them to see and empathize with. So any tug of the heart-strings is an attempt by a demon to corrupt your soul.
If he’s sane enough to realize she’s telling the truth, that’s the problem. If he thinks that he’s going to die anyway, so whatever he does doesn’t matter, that’s a big problem.
Toedad is sane. His behavior is horribly irrational to us, but he’s got his sanity. To him, and the religion he’s chosen, this requires a big gesture. He has to demonstrate that he will do and risk anything to save his beloved daughter. Now in a world that works basically like ours, we all know this is colloquially ‘nuts’, but it’s not any real mental illness or breakdown. These are all rational choices based on a magical worldview. They’re really -bad- choices, because the world isn’t magical, but they’re rational ones.
I start with the idea that he has a life outside of his appearance in the comic. It’s not Toedad of Age, after all. We start with what we do know about him. He’s a jerk now, yes. His behavior is ‘nutty’ (not insane, just wrong for the society he and we live in). But Becky’s basically okay. She’s a charming lady. Sure, she’s good at hiding what’s really bothering her, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t get a basically good upbringing. So I base what I think about Toedad on his effect on characters we do know he has interacted with in the past.
Enough people have seen him, though, including people who saw his car, that he wouldn’t be able to stay hidden for long. Whether or not he actually shoots anybody, pulling out a gun on a college campus and threatening people (in this case, probably only Dina directly, although Becky definitely has a case) would be more than enough to constitute menace and possibly stalking. In Indiana, those can carry fines of up to $10,000 or 3 years in prison for the stalking charge, or up to $1,000 or 180 days in prison for the menace charge. If Becky, Dina or IU decided to call the police, Ross could wind up in some pretty deep shit– especially if he decides to keep his hands on that gun when the cops show up, which given his current emotional state is definitely plausible.
Pretty sure that since he had the gun when he threw off Dina (whose actions could be construed as self-defense), he’s got felony battery on top of that. Given that he was acting because Becky was a homosexual and Dina was her girlfriend, that tacks on a hate crime rider, which would make anything else irrelevant.
I’ve been wondering -how old are Dina, Becky and Joyce? If any of them is seventeen still, is Toedad also facing additional charges for assaulting/endangering the welfare of a minor?
Satan took her! Didn’t you Ross Babies McIntyre? He’s the authoritive source on everything!
/sarcasm
But seriously, she died. Breast cancer apparently.
Of course the “cause of death” could be “Toedad made it up to cover his wife leaving him for a woman” – until told otherwise, this is what I choose to believe.
Like I said below I can’t imagine Joyce’s parents not knowing if she simply ran off, and if they knew she ran off Joyce would know as well. It’s the kind of thing that would likely generate gossip amongst their group.
I don’t think the cancer story is fake. If Ross was faking a death, he’d want to say she had a sudden heart attack/stroke/aneurysm that killed her instantly. Breast cancer’s way too slow, she’d have to wait for the treatment, people would want to visit her in the hospital, etc.
A) If she was going to run away from a fundamentalist community, where her only friends were likely to shame her or try to “fix” her? No. No I don’t.
B) Others have said that cancer was never mentioned. Only dead somehow.
C) If I’m proven wrong tomorrow, that’s fine. I just feel that the implication from the way Toedad said that she was “taken by Satan” and then implied that Becky was also in the process of being “taken by Satan” says a lot.
Oh, and D) funerals with no body happen all the time for various reasons. It wouldn’t be that hard. Pointlessly expensive, yes, but possible. Alternatively, he could have claimed she was cremated and simply gotten some wood ashes.
**watches video**
Randy forgot the most important rule of hottub oral – have the person sit up on the edge.
Although, I have to say, I went in to that video hoping for a story about someone dying by being too gay, that being the part of your original comment that I was replying to specifically.
ROSS, NO ONE NEEDS TO DIE HERE! RIGHT NOW, MANY OF US ARE OK WITH THE IDEA OF YOU DYING, BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN ANYONE NEEDS TO! FOR BALLS SAKE YOU WALKING SACK OF CRAZY PUT THE FRIGGIN GUN DOWN!!!!!!
I don’t want him to die either. I don’t want anyone here to die. But if anyone dies here and it happens to be him i honestly don’t think I’d be extremely torn up over it. I dunno about everyone else of course, I suppose I could’ve worded that better.
Right. It wouldn’t make sense to say that Satan had taken her if she might have gone to Heaven. It’s God who takes away good people. “Satan took her” means she’s gone to Hell.
Not in Indiana. Legally he is allowed to have it secured away out of sight in his car when on school property, but waving it around like that is way, way, way out of bounds.
Regardless of laws about what you can carry where, he’s clearly threatening people with a deadly weapon. I don’t think there’s any place in America where that’s legal.
Carry laws are generally more lenient about long arms, which are hunting weapons (and I know folks for whom that’s still a survival necessity), than about handguns, which basically exist only for punching holes in targets and killing people. I haven’t actually looked it up, but someone else here said a few days ago that open carry of long arms is legal without a permit in Indiana.
But like I said below, there’s a big difference between “carry” and “assault”.
I’m pretty sure what he’s doing with it isn’t legal anywhere. I believe open carry of long arms is legal in Indiana, but what he’s doing isn’t “carry”, it has names like “brandishing”, “‘terrorizing”, “assault with a deadly weapon”, and “attempted kidnapping”, and those are crimes, at least a couple of them serious felonies.
Even in open carry situations, you aren’t allowed to make threatening gestures with it unless in defense of yourself or a third party. He is aiming it at people.
Carry in some states? Probably okay. But never ‘brandish’. That’s a crime in lots of places, and can be interpolated as a crime in all the rest. Nobody likes people who yell and hold guns in their hands ready for action.
Well, from an artist’s perspective, all of the characters in this comic are still images – technically, none of them actually move. The illusion of movement is just that.
Even images in movies are technically a fast-moving sequence of stills. In fact, the human eyeball perceives movement through a progression of still images – maybe ALL movement is illusion!
Technically, what our eyes see is all still images and specialised neurons in the brain interpret movement from cues in the information coming from our eyes. It’s actually a (rare) medical condition where someone can’t perceive movement.
I’m glad that Becky is trying to reason with him. Like I don’t know what Toedad thought would happen. You don’t bring a gun to a school. You just don’t.
I wouldn’t classify him as evil. Evil is actually knowing that what you’re doing is wrong and doing it precisely because of that. Jerkass is thinking that what you’re doing is right, without caring about others feelings. Within this framework, the spectrum goes: Galasso-Mike-Toedad.
Now, that was good to hear… now, will you please proceed to the front gate and wave that gun around a bit for good measure, then wait for the men in blue to show up and grant you your wish?
Now matter how much one has hardened one’s heart against a toxic family member who is a direct threat to you, that’s a really hard thing to go through.
and if he does indeed get SWATted, Becky will totally feel like her dad died before her eyes because she was gay. (It wouldn’t be true — his response was all his choice and not hers — but she couldn’t help but feel that it was her fault.)
There is nothing good about this scenario.
This. There’s a lot of guilt potentially at play here. Feeling like her gayness is going to get her dad killed. Feeling that her seeking out Joyce’s help may just get her shot at or further traumatized. Feeling that her allowing herself a bit of happiness with a new girlfriend may have just put said girlfriend in a potentially deadly situation.
Even if Toedad is meekly arrested and no one is shot, Becky is not getting out of this without even more of a complex about how much she “imposes” on people and how much “damage” her presence is “causing”.
Satan actually met her mother at a company picnic. They just hit it off. She spent a while trying to break it off with Ross and he took it really hard. Satan’s just a really charming gentleman with a very unfortunate name. Runs a puppy sanctuary. Occassionally bites the head off of a goat.
Can I have a source for the cause being breast cancer? Not that I don’t think it’s plausible, but I’m not sure if that might be confusing her with Dana’s mom, who I know for certain did. Either an in-comic reference or a Willis comment or Tumblr post works.
I remember Willis posting on Tumblr that she was dead, but I don’t think he’s ever revealed what the actual cause was. Ross’s comments here make me worried.
You shouldn’t feel sympathy for this guy because his wife is dead. You should feel sympathy for this guy because he is the product of a pretty warped subculture which teaches that everyone either accepts its ideas or spends the rest of eternity roasting and screaming and pleading for mercy that never comes in a lake of fire.
I don’t know about you, but if I believed with all my heart and soul that some of the family members I love most were headed for such a fate, I could imagine doing some pretty drastic things to prevent it. Examined in that light, Toedad is a figure to be pitied as much or more than hated.
I have to wonder what his projected “Best Case Scenario” is. Like “I’ll get shot in the face and that’ll make my daughter stop eating taco.” I mean to be fair, I’d probably not be intimate with anyone if it gave me the mental image of my father’s brains getting blown out whenever I make out with a lady. Those’re some extreme measures there, Ross.
In all seriousness? He shoots Becky before she can descend any further into sin, giving her at least some chance of eventually making it to heaven, and then gets martyred-by-cop.
(Actually, really best-case for him would be that she caves, gets in the car, and they go back home and None Of This Ever Happened. But I think he’d be willing to “settle” for the above.
Remember, this mortal world is but an ephemeral shadow; heaven and hell are eternal.)
You know, assuming his stupid crazy religious shit is right, it’d almost be kind of a meaningful sacrifice since the last thing he did on earth is kill his daughter. That’s gotta be a huge gamble for going to hell. Like even if he believes the Lord will grant him amnesty I’m sure it’s not a 100% Guarantee God won’t forsake you for that shit. That’s a hell of a theoretical insane sacrifice.
Except that it is 100% guaranteed in his world view. It is an act of pious devotion and self-sacrifice in the name of God. There’s nothing that gets you into heaven faster than that.
I want to just take a moment to highlight how badass each of the main women of this arc have been.
I mean, we had Dina attacking and trying to waylay an armed man who was at least double her weight just to try and protect her girlfriend.
Last comic we had Joyce moving subtly in front of Becky in order to be a physical barrier and to try and talk him down from his “crusade” and trying genuinely hard to be the voice of wisdom.
And this comic… I mean, her father has now just threatened both of them with a gun. That is a major escalation, but she makes sure to check in about her girlfriend, moves out of Joyce’s way so she won’t be shot if he chooses to fire and even though she’s scared and crying, she’s even trying to save her dad’s life and try and reason with him as best she can. Even though that action might get her shot by the man who raised her.
That’s damn heroic.
And this fucker can’t see beyond lesbians=Satan because pastor told me so.
I’m guessing Toedad is triple Dina’s weight. If she’s more than a hundred pounds in winter clothes and big heavy boots, I’ll eat a soda can (she’s built like my foster daughter, who is 60″ and 98#s). Toedad looks like he’s around three hundred. He’s very tall, heavily muscled, and it looks like he’s going to pot in the gut. My father was in similar shape and he was about 300.
It’s a common enough abuser ploy. Threaten killing yourself or threaten to kill a close loved one of the target to get them to play along and comply and do what you want. One of my ex’s abusive boyfriends pulled that card multiple times in order to prevent her from leaving him and to make her more compliant with regards to his regular sexual assaults.
Oh Crap!. So now are we supposed to ‘feel’ for Toedad? Well, I don’t. The man is a total psycho, who sees his daughter, not as a person, but as a possession.
Blow him away, and get his threat to life off the planet.
I don’t think sympathy for toedad is what he’s going for so much as Becky being very heartbroken because she knows that’s where it’s going, and to show how far gone her dad is already.
“It’s good to just kill people who are dangerous because life being valuable is actually a myth. I’m sure Becky can’t wait to see her dad fucking die. I know I’D be happy.”
The world isn’t black and white. There’s a continuum of greys in between, as well as every color in the rainbow and a few that aren’t. Willis does a pretty good job of capturing that.
Besides, just because a man is upset his wife is gone doesn’t mean we have to relate to him. All it means is he’s human. Nearly everyone has lost a loved one, and those who haven’t will soon enough.
Bullshit. Anger and hate doesn’t fix you, it eats you up. The person who’s safe, sane, and in a better life didn’t get there by hating someone, they got there by walking away.
Too provide further emphasis, President Donald Trump. This would have no chance of happening if our first response to something we don’t like or want wasn’t to hate it.
I find it sad that so many people here can’t. Toedad is simply an especially ugly product of an already ugly belief system. There is a distinction to be made between a first generation abuser and someone who has himself grown up abused and as such has developed in such a way where he can no longer understand what is acceptable behavior.
Thank you for saying this. There’s a relevant (not equivalent, though) situation in my personal life, and no one’s been able to phrase this in a way that I could really wrap my head around. This makes sense, though.
I’m referring to Toedad’s emotional blackmail of his daughter (he’s essentially threatening suicide unless she submits). Becky’s not doing anything wrong.
Becky’s Mom pops into frame: “‘STAN’, Ross! His name is ‘Stan’! No horns or cloven hooves, no cosmic evil involved, just a guy who’s not a colossal toe-shaped asshole!”
It’s nice that you’re willing to die for your daughter and all, but maybe you could rechannel that devotion to accepting her for who she is and loving her and maybe not making the news as a psycho shooter.
Not necessarily. Could be toedad if the police show up soon enough. Could be something unrelated to this story line. Heck, it could even be one of the main characters who went to the hospital not from physical injury but from emotional stress.
I doubt it. Students wouldn’t be going to the hospital to visit Ross, and it is EXCEEDINGLY rare that emotional duress would cause a physical reactions severe enough to warrant an ER visit (although I would not blame anyone who might be in shock after WHATEVER happens if they needed professional help).
Well when Becky said “Have you hurt anybody” he said no. Its certainly possible that he’s lying, but I think its unlikely. For one, he doesn’t seem smart enough, and given the fact that he’s willing to threaten his own daughter with a gun, he might think telling her “I hurt your friend… I’ll do the same for you” would help convince her to go with him.
From the last strip we saw Dina in, I got the feeling that as soon as Ross spotted Becky he went straight for his car to follow her and totally forgot about Dina. At least that’s what I’m hoping.
Satan seems to be a convenient bogeyman for some people to pin all the problems of the world upon, so that they don’t have to believe that it’s the work of God. Or something like that.
A theory that has popped up is that since Mrs. McIntyre was suffering from her illness (breast cancer), she had an assisted suicide. And as we know, suicide is a sin in Judeo-Christian ideology.
There’s room for argument that subtly assisted suicide might be sometimes acceptable in the case of impending death. But Ross isn’t much of a grey-area thinker anyway.
Ugh, please don’t say “Judeo-Christian.” It’s an inherently anti-Semitic term in that it assumes Judaism is ANYTHING like Christianity, and it’s also Islamiphobic but pretending the third Abrahamic religion is somehow radically different enough from the other two to be left out.
People really need to stop fucking saying “Judeo-Christian” when they mean CHRISTIAN. I am so fucking tired of seeing goyim say that.
Wait, why would Joyce know he had a gun over Becky? In this situation Becky should be more aware of how much possesion he has a gun, right? What are you talkin’ bout?
Joyce in this strip expresses surprise that Ross owns a gun, pretty clearly indicating that she did not know this.
Joyce then asks Becky if she knew that Ross owns a gun. Becky doesn’t answer, being pre-occupied with other aspects of this situation. It’s unclear whether or not Becky knew that Ross owns a gun since she neither expresses prior ignorance nor prior knowledge of this.
Joyce’s line here is a bit ambiguous. She could he asking Becky if she knew her dad owned a gun, or if she knew he had it with him when he confronted her on campus minutes ago.
Some of the people in the comments for the “Clever girl” comic mentioned that he was practicing proper trigger discipline while he was in the woods, and I though I remembered someone mentioning he used to be in the military before he found Jesus, though I’m not 100% sure on that last point.
Ross being ex-military has not been established. It may be canon over in the other universe, for all I know (but I don’t think he had more than a couple appearances there), but it hasn’t been shown for DoA.
Back when we got the first picture of butthole dad from the waist down, I asked if he was ex-military or just one of those guys, and didn’t get a direct answer, but something else Willis said led me to believe it was the latter.
I should say that I took a guess on Ross being more militia than military.
I should also add that I concluded that because he looks like someone I met in a Walmart parking lot that I stopped at to buy some household necessities on the way home from work a few years ago. A someone who fumbling with a half-empty beer in said parking lot, by his “DON’T TREAD ON ME” and confederate flag adorned truck, and equally adorned with at least one large tattoo of a confederate flag with some kind of battle slogan below it on his arm, who decided to swagger over to where I was loading in my stuff into my car and make a comment about how I should go bar hopping with him and he’d totally show me a good time.
Dude was also wearing camo pants, and a white shirt (though unlike Ross, it was stained with what I can only assume was beer dribblings, sweat, and maybe vomit.
I declined his offer and had never stepped foot into a walmart again until about a week ago.
he was practicing trigger discipline, but also he was pointing his gun with no intention to shoot which is also not something you’re supposed to do. so 1/2
I practice proper trigger discipline (and muzzle discipline). I’ve never had any affiliation with the military, militia groups, or any such thing (I also grew up in a rather fundamentalist household).
THere’s usually no waiting period on long arms. Almost all long arms are bought for the explicit purpose of hunting. People who want to commit crimes usually go with pistols, which is why in some jurisdictions, there are waiting periods on handguns.
Depends on the firearm your buying, and if your background check comes back clear or not. If there’s a hit on your check, the gun owner will likely have to wait for a definitive yes or no from the ATF which may take a phone call, a few hours, or days to complete. Anything can really affect that check, such as unpaid parking/traffic fines.
I think there is a more stringent process for something that qualifies as a defense weapon, such as an AR15 or a handgun, which unlike a hunting weapon, have the intention to some degree of putting holes in a human body.
Also depends on the state you get the firearm in. California has 3 day waiting period no matter the firearm. A state like Texas has minimal to none. Of all the factors that go into whether someone commits a violent crime with a purchased firearm, this one matters the least. Waiting periods don’t deter someone from killing other people, it just forces them to PLAN to kill other people and wait a little longer before actually killing people. Last I checked, the time of which a shooting takes place is never a considered factor in how bad a shooting is… and all anyone really cares about is one happened at all.
Or, at the very least, I can say I’ve never heard anyone (not even Fox News or CNN) say something like “5 people were killed at a school shooting in ____ at approximately 10AM, but at least it happened on a Thursday instead of a Monday!”.
Most states have no waiting periods and very little restriction on rifles, shotguns, and other long guns. California is the exception. Only pistols tend to be heavily regulated. I’ve bought rifles both private sale and in a store, neither required any sort of backgound check. In the store, I had to prove I was 18 and sign a card that had a few lines to the tune of “I am not a fugitive of the law”. (You don’t have to be 18 to buy a rifle, just to legally sign the card. If you’re not, you need a guardian present.) The private sale was like any other cash transaction, there were no legal requirements to report anything, sign anything, do background checks or whathaveyou.
In most of the US, private sellers normally are not required to do anything. Their liability ends at knowingly selling a gun to someone who is prohibited, which usually amounts to asking to see ID. It is the buyer’s responsibility to be truthful and follow any state law that may apply, such as registering a handgun where required, disclose felonies that would disqualify them, disclose what state they reside in, etc.
Actually, one thing it does is deter impulse “acts of passion”. Sure, you can plan to kill and wait a few days and get a gun and carry out your plan, but you can’t get mad, run down to the corner store, come back with the gun and blow someone away. You’ve at least got a few days to cool down.
That doesn’t show up on the evening news, since if the story is “Guy bought a gun with the intention of shooting up a school later in the week, but by the time the waiting period was up he’d changed his mind” no one ever finds out about it.
If you’re killed by someone else for a religious and righteous cause, it’s martyrdom.
Some cases it’s also martyrdom if you kill yourself, but you kinda have to have the whole of your heart and dedication into offing yourself for the glory and victory of God.
Also, if she doesn’t want her dad to get shot by troopers, “If you don’t put the gun away right this second, I will become so gay my hair will take on the colours of the rainbow!”.
Guess I’m just an unforgiving asshole. I wouldn’t mind a bit seeing him blown away. But…yeah not something I’d want Becky to have to witness.
So, lock him up for the next 50 years, take that long to square him away.
I just had a very bad, sad thought. Ross knows, *really* knows, that Becky is a lesbian. That it’s bone deep, and no amount of prayer is going to change her. If he thought she could really be changed, he would be backing off, trying to convince her to go with him in some other way. A way that didn’t draw the attention of people who would stop him. I think he has given up, and the only question now is whether he wants a suicide-by-cop, or a murder-suicide-by-cop.
I need to go sleep now. My head hurts all of a sudden.
Alternatively, Ross knows Becky “irredeemable,” thus he has to kill her now before she can heap even more damnation upon her soul. Not saying he’s at that stage yet, but I worry that’ll be his eventual conclusion.
At the very least, he thinks this “stand against Satan” is critical, either by martyring himself or blowing away the demon that has stolen his daughter (and I’ll leave it to the horrible bits of my brain to worry about whether that would be Becky, Joyce, Dina or all of the above).
I doubt the Becky’s mom ran away and Ross pretended she’s dead theory is viable. Surely Joyce’s parents would know if she simply disappeared, and hence Joyce would know as well. And although we don’t know anything about her it’s a reasonable guess that she wouldn’t have much more experience living by herself, if any, than Becky does. Ross doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d marry a woman who’d come from a less restrictive background than he finds acceptable.
There is the little issue of the fact that Becky was 17 at the time and probably would have noticed the distinct lack of a funeral had Ross faked her death.
I don’t like Ross. I don’t agree with Ross. I absolutely don’t condone the shit he’s doing. But after reading this strip, I’m beginning to feel like I might understand Ross.
It’s only been a year since his wife died, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t a whole lot. I doubt he’s coped in the healthiest ways. And so, when Ross finds out that Becky, his daughter, the last surviving piece of his immediate family, is (at least in Ross’ warped mind) betraying him…
The straw breaks the camel’s back. Ross MacIntyre was probably an unpleasant guy even before any of this happened, but in his attempts to “repair” things, he took the plunge and went into gun-swinging, final-gambit mode. Because if he can’t fix this, what else does he have?
Again, I don’t want any of this to seem like I’m trying to excuse Ross in any way. I mean, for God’s sake, he’s trying to take his daughter to conversion therapy by gunpoint. But I’m able to visualize where he’s coming from, and it’s an unsettling place.
Yup. In his mind, he lost the fight against cancer because his faith was not strong enough, he did not pray enough, he was not righteous enough for God to intervene. And now, less than a year later, he has been handed another major test of faith, the last of his family stolen away by demons that are in the very process of recruiting her and stealing her soul. And this time he has no intention of showing the same weakness that cost him his wife.
In short, it’s all about him in his head. His wife didn’t get an illness that was very hard for her. Instead, his wife was targeted to see if his faith was strong enough to save her. Similarly, his daughter is not just a gay person. It’s all another test by God or Satan to see how far he’d be willing to go to save his family.
One among many of his major flaws is that he really does believe that he’s the center of his own universe and everything is tests of faith, righteous rewards, or punishments for not being firm enough. And that is sadly a worldview that is promoted a lot in that particular subset of Christian ideology. That tragedy to those close to you is really about you and is about a chance to show how righteous and pious you are.
It makes me really sad to know that to this day, there are people raised in that manner of thinking. And that it has been hammered into their brains so strongly since childhood that for a lot of them, no amount of reasoning of new evidence can ever change their minds and heal them from that brainwashing. Truly a tragic reality.
The positive side of this is that I can say having grown up in that culture that it isn’t taking in this generation as well as it has before. Things like the internet means it’s way harder to shield kids from knowledge of the world and interactions with diverse individuals. As such, a lot of fundie kids I knew ended up like Joyce or Willis, either adapting their faith to accommodate the world or who have fully broken with their former faith and become strident critics of how they were raised.
The brainwashing is weakening and so more kids are being able to escape.
I suspected as much, but wasn’t sure if it was just me trying to be optimistic. Glad you can confirm it. With some luck, fifty years from now, this way to raise someone will be practically unheard of in secular countries. (Not that I’m not hoping this won’t be the case in non-secular countries, I just highly doubt it’s feasible.)
Especially because even innocent googling (that is, not trying to research to undermine your parents, but googling a question because you don’t feel like asking or it’s tangentially related to something) can bring up new information, I assume?
Related: Becky made a comment about not having had unfettered internet access before, and getting lost in googling all the stuff Dina had been talking about…
Oh very much so, Willis has talked about being on Transformer message threads and simply noticing that the back and forth about bots being awfully similar to internal Church debate and I knew a number of kids growing up who started forming very heretical (by their Church’s viewpoint) views on the treatment of gay people in society because an internet personality they liked or a clan member in their MMORPG was gay and talked about their life experiences.
None of them were intending to fall out of line with the faith they grew up with, but it’s hard to hold such cold viewpoints when you can actually see the full shape of those you’ve been trained to see as the enemy.
Would you say, Cerberus, that this also is related to the paternal themes that were discussed elsewhere, such as the continued Victorian idea that the male sphere encompasses spirituality, and the expected roles of women as wives in such communities- in short, that because he is the man, this is all based around him (and his perceived strengths and faults)? Or is it more likely just a very self centered view of God and spirituality? (or most likely, a combination thereof)
Very much so. The idea of global events just being the setpiece for the personal battle for one’s soul is a broader and more universal facet of this worldview, but it definitely gets wrapped up in those patriarchal values. He’s the man, the protector against moral corruption and he failed… twice in his viewpoint. Thus its “on him” to set it right.
So yeah, what you said with it being a combination thereof.
This struck a chord with me, particularly the responsibility aspect. When I started my therapy, I discovered that I felt responsible for everything.
I grew up in an atmosphere which was at once fundamentalist (in an English way, so no guns) but also turbulent in that my father married a Welsh Chapel-goer. My mother was not an easy mix with my grandparents. So I imbibed this sense of responsibility, even taking on a role so that my father could live vicariously through me.
It did me no good.
However, we now have a villain who is freighted with self-failure and grief. A slightly better villain than we first started with, more of a tragic figure self-figured for suicide-by-cop.
It will hit Becky hard when that happens, and I’m not sure about Joyce’s reaction.
BTW, Willis posted something on his twitter-feed about a bad father who was arrested on his way to his child’s college.
In the Old Testament “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son'” as a test of Abe. Is Ross’ view of this analagous? Does he believe that God has told him what to do OR that he’s being tested to come up with a solution, and God will be grading him? (If that makes sense….)
Of course, one strand of Jewish thinking on that one is that Abraham failed the test by not arguing with God about it. There’s also the interpretation that the story is meant as a contrast with other gods of the area, to show that Israel’s god is different: of course Abraham’s god demanded the sacrifice, that’s what gods do. But wait, this god stopped him and saved the son instead? Huh?
… AFAIK, neither of these interpretations gets much traction in evangelical / fundamentalist circles.
Can we try to feel some sympathy for Becky’s father? I mean, the dude’s actions are horrible. His methods for achieving his goal of “reclaiming” Becky’s soul are horrible. But he honestly believes that he’s protecting Becky from Satan. He isn’t using it as an excuse; he honestly believes this is what he is doing. He is responsible for his horrible, horrible, actions, but the most tragic part is that he honestly believes he’s doing the right thing. He’s not just an unstoppable rage machine. There’s still hope that he’ll come to his senses, and that no one will get killed. Becky still loves him, and he still loves her. Fundamentalist Christianity is just as much as fault for Ross’s actions as Ross is. Ross doesn’t understand lesbians, and so it’s easy for him to hate them. We don’t understand Ross, so its easy for us to hate him. Ross’s actions are unequivocally wrong. I’m just asking that we try to understand him because only understanding can lead to reconciliation. Ross is fictional, but he’s representative of a few million of the most fundamentalist Christians in America. If we can’t understand the way they see the world, we’ll never be able to find the strength and love to convince them that all deep romantic relationships are expressions of love and care independent of the genders of the couple in the relationship, and thus that all people deserve equal rights to marry whomever they choose.
Fundamentalists are defined by their hatred, and if we exhibit that hatred towards them we become what we claim to hate.
A while back I said I didn’t like Ross because his character felt too flat and this comic kind of quells that. He’s not just a robotic monster with a gun SO I’m more fine with his character’s role in this story at least.
ok im gonna need to disagree with your last sentence straight out bc that’s just not true. Hating an oppressor is not the same as hating the oppressed. That said, yeah, sure, he believes what he’s doing is right. That doesn’t mean we need to feel sympathy for a (grown-ass) man who THREATENS HIS DAUGHTER AND HER GIRLFRIEND WITH A GUN!!!! I say he and others like him have had plenty of fucking time in their lives to sort out their hate- at some point they don’t get to use the church as an excuse anymore. If he can get his shit together and somehow make amends for this (which will take YEARS, decades maybe), then yeah, fantastic. But right now, fuck him. fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck toedad
We currently hold the power. We are the majority. They oppress members of their community and their family, and we need to halt that oppression. But hatred won’t help that situation AT ALL. It’ll only turn us into oppressors ourselves because, again, as a majority we currently hold the power.
Really, we queerfolk hold all the power over Christian Dominism? Wow. That’s impressive. Cause it really has seemed that we only were just allowed to marry like people after a long and drawn out fight mostly involving the disproportionate amount of political power that particular sect has. And like we can still be fired in most states or refused housing or discriminated against simply because an employer/landlord/business decides that us existing is a violation of his moral code.
And like the landscape for the T in LGBT is still frequently targeted for murder by those who follow those religious tenets. And like we’re not really allowed to piss in peace and are demonized as child molesters in order to enrich those who’ve built a career out of hassling queer individuals for decades.
And like a huge chunk of our homeless population is queer or trans, mainly because of families like these who find disownment a casual thing and a necessary thing in order to “protect the spiritual health of the family” and the messages of hate give protection to other hateful people to see queer people as acceptable targets for abusive laws or ill treatment.
I know what you are trying to say, but the oppressed do not hold the power. Not even now that gay marriage is legal in the States. Us recognizing harm perpetuated against us and being against that is not the same as perpetrating that harm in the first place. It’s the difference between raising one’s arms as a shield against strikes and striking someone.
I was looking at this from the perspective of “A majority of americans support gay marriage, thus we’re the majority”, however I believe you offer a more nuanced view of the situation. You’re right.
Marriage is just one small aspect, homophobia and transphobia
are still bloody rampant. Repeat your statement when people
stop getting kicked out, getting murdered, etc… just for not being
cis-het.
I don’t think that’s how brainwashing works, Liahansen. If you’re brainwashed to think you’re right you’re probably not gonna easily decide “Maybe I’m wrong”. That’s why it persists in our minds well into our adulthood. People are weird.
“Brainwashing” isn’t a magical excuse that absolves people of blame. The point is, this is an adult with a gun threatening his child with kidnapping, murder, or suicide because she’s gay. To me, that’s not deserving of sympathy. I understand that he’s a human (well, a character who represents real humans) and more complex than his actions here alone, but these actions are seriously unforgivable. I can understand him without sympathizing with him
I think he’s in need of therapy. This is probably the first time his mental disconnection has come this far to light because he’s been so sheltered his whole life. I want to see him get better. Not die or just be thrown in jail with no chance of redemption. He may be a lost cause and he may never change, but I’d rather him get help than just get rid of him.
I don’t forgive him. What he’s doing is unforgivable. But, maybe I’ve absorbed “hate the sin, love the sinner” … not that I “love” Ross, and in my world he’s the sinner (NOT Becky). But I want to … pity him? (which is perhaps patronizing? ) rather than hate him. As i was taught about Greek Tragedy.
Nope. He is using emotional blackmail on his daughter in order to force her into letting him kidnap her and send her away to get “fixed”. If I knew of anyone IRL who did that I would tell that person to eat a never-ending bag of dicks.
That is a logical theory. We should still make attempts to understand fundamentalists, though. Most parents do actually love their children, even if religion warps how they “show” their love.
I’m not saying we should be accepting of the way they act, or that sort of “love”. I’m saying that we need to understand their motivations if we are to help them realize just how wrong their actions are.
But he honestly believes that he’s protecting Becky from Satan. [elaboration snipped] There’s still hope that he’ll come to his senses, and that no one will get killed.
Conclusion doesn’t follow from premise.
That he is willing to die for this shows that not only does he think he’s right, he’s not harboring any real doubts about it. Being that fully entrenched in a way of thought makes it less likely that he can be talked down.
I meant that he’ll realize that if he murdered his daughter or anyone else, that would be an act of Satan. I don’t believe in Satan; I’m just trying to use Ross’s worldview to offer a justification for putting the gun away.
But he doesn’t “want” to do this, he believes it’s his duty. That’s why he asked God to give him strength to do what he believes he must, even though he doesn’t want to, and fears that he lacks the strength for. That’s why he looks so sad in todays strip. I think. This doesn’t excuse/mitigate his actions in any way. Nor do I forgive him. Maybe I should? But my sympathy (if that’s what it is), doesn’t extend to that.
You know, even when I was Christian, one thing I always hated about the flavor of crazy fundie I grew up around (not my family, thankfully, but just in this area) was their belief that someone who was born, lived, and died without ever hearing of the existence of Christ would still go to hell for not being saved.
That kind of goes the other way around here, too. I’ve always had a bit of sympathy for people who are born and live in such a walled-off religious environment that they’re never even exposed to reality, at least not without it being shouted down as Satan’s evil secular influence by everyone around them.
It’s not enough to excuse anything Ross is doing, or not want him to get his just punishment for it. But it’s kept me softer than most towards Joyce and Becky (and to some degree the Browns).
The fact that so many of us are feeling uncomfortable slight empathy towards Ross just means that, despite him being very clearly the villain, his motivations are meaningful and understandable, as opposed to just “because evil fundie raaar” — which is a mark of great writing. Hat tip to Willis for that.
You put into words several things I’d been thinking about since this thing with Ross started.
We remember how Joyce initially reacted when Dorothy told her she was an atheist. We also know that, soon enough, she sorta made peace with it. Joyce is much younger than Ross and I think she has a more open mind thanks to that. Younger minds are more malleable, less used to thinking “this is that, period”, and therefore more prone to doubt and to changing their minds when presented with evidence.
What I’m getting at is that, as Jezi touched upon, Ross has probably spent his whole life in the same fundie bubble. He never had the opportunity to go through what Joyce is going through right now, which is to be confronted with non-believers, “sinners”, who are actually really nice people, and readjust your belief system consequently.
As such, even though Ross’s actions are horrible and I really hate him, I find myself understanding where he is coming from, and hoping that he won’t die (which would cause Becky unnecessary pain), but instead, with time (probably spent in jail, for Becky and Dina’s safety), will see how wrong he had been, reconsider his beliefs, and redeem himself by fully accepting Becky as she is.
I have very many doubts that Ross is capable of that, considering how far off the deep end he’s gone, but this is what I hope happens. For Becky’s sake as well.
Recently discovered that my boyfriend’s mom apparently thinks people who don’t believe in Jesus will go to hell. There was some sort of discussion about whether or not pets went to heaven (which I tried to joke about the movie “All Dogs Go to Heaven about, but sadly was ignored) and then there was a debate about if infants would go to hell for not believing in Jesus and I was like……..
you do realize
that the women your son is dating is a non-religious jew right?
Whelp, he’s nuts. Loves his daughter and is deeply worried about her, but still nuts. There’s something off about someone who just refuses to put down the gun in a situation like this.
But damn panels four and six are well done. Becky’s gotten through to her dad and there’s a smidgen of sympathetic person there. Ross is teetering on the edge here. I may not like him, but he’s out of my “punch his teeth in” category.
I know that David Willis has said that he has no interest in bringing her back, but I wonder whether one of the cops who responds to this will be Guns from It’s Walky!.
Okay, we know that Becky’s mom died. But how did she die? My guess she was murdered. But who murdered her? That’s easy. Who haven’t we seen yet, who was evil as hell in the last universe, that would make sense as a drug cartel or gang member? Jason’s father! Think about it Dargon is a anagram of Dragon, Ross says that the devil took her away. A dragon is a popular portrayal of the devil. This all makes so much sense!
We can say Becky’s mom is dead. Characters in the comic have stated she’s dead. The author has stated she’s dead. And red hair is a recessive gene. Even if neither of Becky’s parents had red hair, if they both have incidences of red hair in their family, it’s possible for Becky to have red hair.
Some think she died of something like cancer, which can kill you within weeks or months of it appearing, or take years.
Which personally, I think she had some kind of illness like cancer, or something else chronic, but with the added component of it going ignored/untreated.
Why? Because of something called “faith healing” where people abhor and avoid doctors, hospitals, and anything resembling modern medicine for themselves and their families, and think all illness and injury can be prayed away, and any lingering scarring, effects, or death is a direct result of “not praying and believing hard enough”.
Considering Ross said he wanted to “have us lay our hands over you” in regards to Becky’s lesbian orientation, and being gay is considered a defect or a sickness to his brand of religious-stupid, either Ross came from a faith healer upbringing, or he bought into it at some point… I’ve heard of some people diving head first into practices like that when they or a loved one is diagnosed by doctors with a major illness or medical issue, or after seeing the after effects of treatments like chemo, where they then blame the doctors and medicines for making them or their loved one sick, so they opt to reject it entirely.
Could be possible that Ross went faith healer and either convinced, or forced, his wife to not be treated for her sickness, under the promise of “praying hard and long enough will cure everything”. She dies, he assumes it’s because they didn’t try hard enough, or something else caused it.
Then… he finds out about his daughter making out with her roommate.
One can assume he blames Becky’s lesbian orientation for his wife’s death, though given his almost sympathetic representation here, he probably doesn’t blame Becky herself. She’s a target of evil forces, the same ones that foiled his intense praying to cure his wife, and he MUST save his daughter before they take her too. If it requires his death, then so be it.
Yes, Fundie, you’ll die for her, but will you live for her? Will you do what is best for your daughter, or will you cling to your dogma and try to make her conform to some archaic vision?
The latter. To change is to surrender to Satan in his worldview. And so even though that would be best for both of them. He refuses.
In this, he’s the anti-Joyce.
Joyce had a moment of either updating her faith or standing firm even though it would hurt herself and others and she went with the former, enriching both herself and those around her. Toedad has done the opposite and so has made everyone else’s life so much worse.
Well, he’s still a violent, abusive asshole of a dad, but at least his heart is in the right place… that gives him one place where he’s better than Amber’s dad… sort of… ugh damn it Willis why can’t you let us demonize Toedad? Now I feel almost bad for him despite his asshole personality… almost
Becky obviously loves him… His actions in this arc seem to be an extreme unlike anything she’s ever seen; its perfectly plausible that he never once abused her or became violent with her prior to this (outside of religious brainwashing, which is abuse).
Or that even when a parent is abusive, you still don’t want them to die. I mean, I’ve known enough people with abusive parents and I’ve spilled my own situation with my parents enough times. It’s one thing to recognize abuse and toxicity and try to move to a point where you can heal and another thing entirely to be unmoved by their illness or death.
My gf’s dad is epically physically abusive and has been so her entire life, but she was still shaking in grief and worry when he had a heart attack recently and was willing to put herself in harm’s way to try and help him. And that’s not uncommon for a number of abuse survivors.
Based on the depth of her survival strategies its very likely she put up with regular emotional abuse at least and he is currently threatening one hell of a big basket of all sorts of nasty abusive behavior. But that doesn’t mean that she’s in a place where she can sit by and watch her daddy get shot in front of her.
Becky seems surprised enough that I feel as though she hasn’t experienced ongoing abuse, but +1 on that she wouldn’t necessarily want to see him die (and even if she did want it, wouldn’t necessarily be totally okay with watching it unfold, feeling like she could somehow prevent it).
Also, because of her super confined upbringing, she might not until now be thinking of things as abuse, and therefor might not harbour the same resentment she might in a few days as she learns more about things he did not being okay (this is me, although not on a gun waving level- on a ‘mom was emotionally and verbally abusive but I didn’t resent it until I was ~17 and learned that wasn’t everyone’s family dynamic’ level).
She ran away from him because he was abusive. He used the word “escaped.”
Oh, and she went from defiant to “Run! Split up in the woods!” very suddenly, at about the same moment he went for the gun.
She did not expect the gun itself, but she still expected to be physically chased down. She saw it coming and realized that Dina was also in danger.
well, you can’t be like Fox News and call him a killer without a cause
(he just has a completely shitty one, like all of those fuckers)
alt: “WE’RE CATHOLIC! DON’T YOU KNOW THAT BEING HAPPY IS A SIN???”
(idk if they’re actually Catholic or just Puritan)
Aren’t they protestant ?
Yeah, Joyce was against Catholicism, I assume that’s because everyone in her church is too
…I don’t even remember what I was going for with that
time for bed I guess
*goes to see if Patreon decides to load or not*
CHURCH OF ST. BASTARD
I think you’ll find it’s a boarding schoo (specifically, England’s most vicious one).
St. Trinians has that distinction sewn up.
RAINBOWSSSS
St Trinians <3
Tru tru
I’m Catholic. You would be…surprised. You may be thinking, “Wouldn’t Christians like other Christians?” And you’d be right! However, to many Protestants, Catholics aren’t Christian. Apparently we worship the Pope, not Jesus, like good normal folks should.
In fairness, it’s only relatively recently that Catholics have admitted that non-Catholic Christians might qualify for heaven, too.
Honestly, I think the bitterness between the different sects of Christianity stems from the awful 30 years war that took place during the Reformation. Still hasn’t healed properly.
And, you know, everything since then mostly made it worse.
And some are bitter for the Catholic Church changing the day of worship from Saturday to Sunday.
Hell, some of the Catholics hate the Catholics. One of the protesters outside of our local Planned Parenthood is still upset that the Mass is no longer in Latin.
Just wait’ll you discover the world of sedevacantism.
according to the about page, Willis was and Joyce is “nondenominational fundamentalist (nonaligned Protestant)”
“Non-denominational” all too often means “One preacher + N people he’s buffaloed into thinking that he’s All That + zero oversight = reality-divergent super-sheltered bubble at best and destructive cult at worst.”
That just got me thinking ‘Buffalo preachers buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo…’
Yeah I’m pretty sure Toedad’s version of Christianity thinks Catholicism in general and the Pope in particular are agents of the antiChrist.
But this pope is so awesome. I love this pope and I’m agnostic-very-much-not-Christian.
Yeah, and they think this pope is extra antichristy for the same reasons you like him.
He really isn’t, though. Just the same old shit with a new veneer.
Francis came in and made drastic reforms, in policy and in attitude, to a powerful and rigid institution over a short period of time.
The Catholic Church is no longer the active crusader against same-sex marriage and abortion it was just a few years ago. The social conservatism has been put on the back burner; the roar reduced to grumbles.
Instead Francis has pivoted the Church for its original purposes: to teach love and tolerance and to fight global poverty. He has spoken in favor of evolution.
If you’re dissatisfied with Francis for not making enough changes, you have unrealistic expectations.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh so this is how Willis will break becky. not through romantic subplot, but through the trauma of seeing her father killed in front of her. well played willis. I Approve~
Toedad why
This is a bad idea on all fronts
Toedad, just went full “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
Except he’s already the villan
w-wait when was he ever considered a hero in this story
He considered himself a hero all the time.
Before he went all Toedad, it might have been possible that he was Becky’s hero. We’re seeing him at his absolute worst, but it’s possible he was not always a religion-crazed abusive a-hole. Well… he was probably religion-crazed, but Becky’s basically a good kid. The two of ’em might have been very close before he flipped out.
Even abused kids love their parents, and look up to them. As a child, Becky may have seen Ross as her hero. Ross definitely sees himself as a champion of Becky’s soul.
Way back before college when he drove them to Six Flags. That was his hero moment.
I’m thinking more Falling Down.
“I’m the bad guy?”
Yeah, very definitely a D-FENS thing going on here, I think.
Indeed.
We’re sadly missing the retirement-day cop that learns to stand up to his wife though.
It’s official, Toedad is now emulating this guy…
They are fundamentalist – that way WAY different than Catholics.
Yeah, they probably teach that Catholics are the pawns of Satan.
Shrimp are the prawns of Satan.
Hell, I’m a pagan lesbian (well, bi leaning lesbian, but I digress) and one of my best friends is a very devout Catholic. She has zero problem with me or my wife.
To be fair, that has nothing to do with being Catholic, and everything to do with “not being a horrible person.” Plenty of Catholics might take issue with a pagan lesbian (plenty of Catholics DO take issue).
From what I can tell, fundamentalists and evangelist churches are much more likely to preach intolerance for specific groups of people. They try to make visible enemies out of actual groups in society, and have a weird psuedo militant way of teaching kids that they actually have enemies out to get them in the form of gays or whatever
Sure, but Catholicism seems to push the love and tolerance angle a lot more strongly than protestants in my experience, and the result is that even though *officially* the Church has some pretty ugly ideas about gay people, a lot of actual Catholics are pretty open-minded and tolerant.
Especially since Pope Francis took the throne.
Francis really isnt teaching anything new. He is just focusing on the positive
Dude, Pope Francis took the throne and put it in a museum. The guy now sits on just a white chair.
^ He does? Very humble of him. Still not quite as badass as John Paul II was, but he’s getting there.
At master of bones: Yes, but being Pope has its privileges and one of them is being able to steer the church however you please.
At LiamAldam: Really? I can’t say I’m surprised. Good on him! Has he given up absolute power over the Vatican?
That really isn’t true. The Pope is only the head of an entire college of cardinals and without the adjudication of the whole magisterium he can’t change doctrine willy-nilly, and he hasn’t. Girls like me are as dangerous as nuclear bombs to him and that’s not acceptable.
And he can’t give up absolute power over the Vatican.
< open-minded and tolerant Catholic
Yu’Karaya wasn’t talking about the Catholic Church, she’s not disagreeing with you. “Fundamentalist and evangelical churches” refers to (some types of) Protestant churches, not the Catholic Church. The Church is not fundamentalist.
Oh, look how open-minded and tolerant the vatican has become:
A senior priest at the Vatican has revealed he is gay, on the eve of a major meeting that will define the Catholic Church’s teaching on family.
(…)
The Vatican called his actions “very serious and irresponsible” and stripped him of doctrinal responsibilities.
Being gay is not the reason he got stripped of responsibilities.
The main reason is that he had a partner, breaking the rules of celibacy for priests. And the fact that he did the announcement the day prior of the meeting, trying to put pressure on the discussions.
@Gand – True though that may be, it still doesn’t make the fact that they continue to maintain the celibacy rules any less silly. And the fact that breaking celibacy was likely only the given reason.
“Breaking News — Pope is Actually Catholic!!”
Again I wholeheartedly disagree that love-and-tolerance level has anything to do with what sect of Christianity is being practiced. My best friend is a devout Latter-Day Saint (Mormon). Her husband-to-be is openly atheist, genderqueer (prefers male nouns and pronouns though) and way into BDSM. Another of my friends is a Baptist from the Deep South and he is a strong activist against sexism in comic books (comic books are his passion, he has written some indie ones).
Any person from any religion, or any branch of a religion, can be open-minded and tolerant. The frequency of openmindedness and tolerance among specific religions/sects is a pointless debate. Decent people are decent, and bigots are bigots, regardless of what their religion may be. No religion can truly be said to have a greater number of decent people/bigots.
I’ve found it really depends on the community mix/size. My synagogue was small enough that our denomination was “if anybody gets mad we lose a minyan” and so taught general Jewish spirituality while leaving it up to the people to choose their own flavor of how observant they wanted to be. The town was small as well so we all knew folks of different faiths, heck most of my friends were Mormon and it wasn’t until I left town that I learned those guys had a bad rep elsewhere, they were just people.
Meanwhile if you get an isolated town of all one faith, or a city big enough for people to segregate themselves, that’s when it can start getting ugly. Up in Chicago, my grandma’s family disowned my grandpa when the “wrong” rabbi oversaw her funeral.
Wrong. Go stand guard for a Planned Parenthood. Maybe deal with a rally sometime. See how lax and tolerant Catholics can be.
Just saying, my nation is 80-90% catholic and we have gay marriage since 2006. We also have laws to protect laicism, and we accomodate religious minorities.
This may or may not be directly linked.
What is laicism?
The short version: French secularism.
It looks like a misspelling of ‘racism’, but it’s apparently derived from ‘laity’, a word used in Catholicism to refer to secular authorities. Laicism is a principle of government that specifically excludes religious authority. It’s a simpler way of saying ‘separation of church and state’.
I don’t know about “simpler”. Shorter, yes, but not simpler.
How is it not simpler? It’s a general concept shared and understood among all Catholic European countries (and Latin America), and it’s the same in a bunch of languages (laicism, laicismo, laïcisme, laicità). Separation of church and state is a specifically American concept based on specific wording in the US Constitution.
Having been raised catholic, the joke I like to make is that everyone who felt like they needed a church they actually agreed with left during the reformation, leaving catholicism as 90% people who don’t give a single shit what the catholic church actually says. And that includes the catholic fundamentalists, who have a surprising tendency towards literal heresy.
I think that is basically true.
The thing about catholicism is that while doctrine can be strict, it also has a long history of “off course you don’t practice what you preach”. I mean, you think most of our priests (yeah, i was raised catholic in the sense described below) really live celibate? Right. In fact, celibacy has been described as a sort of funtional medieval “safe harbor” for male homosexuals, because they didn’t have to explain why they weren’t married.
Catholicism has many adherents over the world, most of them don’t really know what’s in the bible either. In parts of europe, catholicism is really more about rituals and, “well, we’ve always been catholic” than about “giving yourself to jesus”. Which to me, also goes a long way to explain why catholics are often about as liberal as the general society they live in .
This is also why catholicism is despised as next to satanic by evangelicals. It may also be what triggered the reformation.
That is not to say that “don’t practice what you preach” isn’t a big problem in and of itself, especially if you are an actual gay catholic believer if e.g.:
a) You want/need official recognition by the church
b) Against all odds, you are a DEVOUT catholic and question yourself because of doctrine
And that can be a big problem, because doctrine changes really slowly in catholic church, if at all.
So, basically, the way i see catholicism is that it’s basic mode has traditionally been hypocrisy. I admit i have a sofft spot for catholicism because to me it’s ultimately human, i prefer hypocrisy over religious fervor. But then again, i’m not directly concerned by a) or b)
Don’t describe the priesthood as a safe haven. It wasn’t.
Ok. It’s just i’ve heard this before, and thought it was an interesting twist, but i don’t have any sources to back it up. Do you know where the notion comes from?
No that was not what triggered the reformation.
The roman catholic church turning the franchise into a money source was what triggered the reformation.
Martin Luther could have been a character straight from Shortpacked!
Martin Luther had 93 points that he made about the Catholic Church to trigger the Reformation. Only like four of them were about the blatant greed of the church at the time. It’s like saying “Rosa Parks caused the civil rights movement!” when it was actually the rallying cry to vent decades or centuries of frustrations about a broken system.
If you’re a bi-leaning lesbian, it’s probably clearer to just say you’re sexually fluid.
Actually, I find it clearer the way she sed it.
In my experience, it’s best not to tell people how to identify themselves unless specifically asked for advice on the matter.
This ^
It makes perfect sense, since bisexuality doesn’t mean equal levels attraction to all genders, but that one is attracted to genders besides the opposite sex. (Trying to keep this as gender inclusive as possible.) This may mean that someone is often attracted to men, but occasionally women as well.
I’m not surehow sexually fluid would fit in there.
That and its kindof rude to tell someone they’re identifying wrong. I personally don’t find there to be any significant difference between bisexual and pansexual (besides being explicit instead of implicit about other gender expressions), but I’m not going to substitute one label for the other if one gives a preference
I’m what I would call “homoflexible”, which I gather to be the same as bi-leaning homosexual. Meaning perhaps 90% homo (in my frame of reference anyway).
My boyfriend labels huimself pansexual and one of my male friends labels himself bisexual. The difference between them two is this : my boyfriend feels that gender is secondary attraction-wise (the feeling of sexiness isn’t linked to the feeling of gender), and my friend feels that gender plays a primary role in his attraction (he is attracted to different genders in different ways). I think why they interpret those words that way is because the prefix bi- suggests a distinction and the prefix pan- suggests an encompassment. But other people see it differently.
The thing about the word “bisexual” is that it was reclaimed. Originally it, just like “homosexual”, was a clinical term that attempted to pathologize non-straight orientations. The difference is that the bi community reclaimed it, while the gay community largely rejected “homosexual”.
My point is that bi’s etymology is irrelevant, because it was created by bigots. So what the prefix bi “suggests” doesn’t so much matter.
The bi community has been defining the term since the 70s as attraction to one or more genders, which can of course encompass anything from “just two” to “all”.
I personally identify as pan, but I just wanted to further hammer home your last point: that the labels are personal, and the distinction depends on the person.
Ugh. TWO or more genders. (Alternately, “my own and other genders”, which is a neat way of working two back in there.)
Sometimes I wish I could upvote a comment on here, thank
What the prefix suggests doesn’t so much matter… except if it does to the person using it. I said what my friend said. He’s the judge.
Nice infos, though.
The distinction that gender plays a secondary versus primary role in attraction isn’t a meaningful difference in all cases, since it is something that can vary for someone depending on circumstances.
Also, consider that bisexual comes from a time before there was really language for anything beside the two genders, so the implication fit the language of the time rather than in practice. Truthfully the difference between bisexual and pansexual, if any, is very fuzzy. There doesn’t seem to be any consensus.
And here I am wondering why you people only answered my comment to tell me stuff like that. I’m just sharing what my friend and boyfriend told me about themselves. Of course it’s different for everybody. I’m so, so tired of label policing.
1) I never said she was identifying wrong.
2) I only addressed the issue because it was literally the very first sentence of her comment, not something plucked out of the blue sky.
3) By the comments I think a lot of people here don’t really understand what sexually fluid means. It doesn’t mean equally bi, it doesn’t mean mostly straight or gay, it means you can find people attractive even if you lean more towards gay/straight. In a way, it’s one of the most all encompassing descriptions there is. If you want to understand what sexually fluid means, you should read this:
http://everydayfeminism.com/2012/10/fluid-sexuality-lgbtq-spectrum/
And a lot of you really need to read this article because this is clearly a term that is still not well understood.
But pretty much all sex involves fluids.
Be safe.
And different than a lot of Christians too.
There are fundamentalist Catholics, but yes, they’re generic fundamentalist Protestant. (Probably evangelical.)
They’re non denominational Protestant.
There whatever breed of American nondenominational fundamentalism Willis was born into. As far from Catholicism as possible while still being considered Christian.
They’re close to the breed my friend grew up in, and he was told at age 11 that the Catholic Church was so satanic, he would one day fight a beast with seven pope-heads barehanded.
Seriously? Fighting a geriatric monster? Have they no shame?
Your friend sounds like the chosen one.
He actually kinda misses being the Chosen One.
Did… Did he end up getting dismembered and left on the slopes of a volcano?
Nah, probably just has younger siblings now.
Pope Ghidorah
So……Mormon?
I’m kidding. The farthest from Catholicism you can get and still have a Christian flavor is Unitarian Universalism. Pretty sure they aren’t that.
We taste like Christians?
This I never knew.
Technically, you taste like chicken, but so do Christians.
Oh, people tasted like pigs last time I checked–though I may be wrong on that.
Go check the About page, because I’m pretty sure they’re from the same religion as Joyce.
Dexter and Monkey Masterism?
They’re not Catholic…also…that makes no sense from a Catholic POV.
I should delete any posts I start with idk =p
Puritanism – the desperate fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time
“Two spikes would be an extravagance!”
The Whiteadders’ visit: Best Blackadder episode ever. 😀 Which is saying a lot.
Eh, Puritans weren’t really just eliminating everything fun, they just wanted to make absolutely sure no one was putting something else before God. Still kinda shitty, but ya know, it was the 15th century.
Given that the Puritans did their best to eliminate Christmas, are you so sure about that.
And closed the theaters a few decades after Shakespeare.
you wouldn’t know it from the names they chose
Having been raised Catholic (though not religious anymore) I’ve actually found it to be one of the least fire-and-brimstoney of common American Christian denominations. Obviously there are plenty of people who don’t exemplify that, but the churches I went to were mostly of the “judge not lest ye be judged” variety. Contrast that with some of the evangelical types on my dad’s side (born-again Assembly of God *shudder*) and Catholicism looks like flowers and butterflies and pleasant wine-drunkenness.
As someone who has had a similar experience with the Catholic Church it’s even better if you hang out with anyone from quite a few of the orders. Particularly Jesuits and Lassalians. So liberal, we (the orders and those educated by them) are sometimes called commies. Good times.
Jesuits… *shudder*
I was raised evangelical presbyterian. Not really sure what that means, but the result was be nice to everybody so that you know that you are better than them.
Ha. My family is Presbyterian and that’s pretty spot on. I’ll take it over the Baptist “everybody except us is going to hell, oh well, humanity is evil anyway” attitude any day, though.
I’m Catholic myself though from my experience, every religion ends up with different sects regardless of claiming to all be unified so invariably you end up with some real asshole groups. I will say that the churches we’ve gone to teach what basically boiled down to, “Be nice to people and don’t be an asshat.”
Neither Catholic nor Puritan. Modern Puritans are, like, Unitarians and totally mellow.
Yeah, the modern-day descendants of those New England Puritan churches are… well… in New England. So they’re actually some of the most liberal and hippie-ish churches in the whole country. I grew up in a Massachusetts church like that.
Just wanted to stop by to say a religious Catholic reads and enjoys this strip. Is that an argument for tolerance?
If you want it to be, sure. Welcome!
yeah, tolerance is awesome!
*periodic reminder to self that religion isn’t necessarily any more a valid target than other things*
**that is I do apologize for the alt: part of the first post if anyone wanted it**
It’s not really a bad cause: saving his daughter from eternal damnation.
Really it comes down to the interplay of three separate positions
Position 1) Nonchristians burn forever in a fiery damnation. It is therefor your moral responsibility to save your loved ones from eternal torture.
Position 2) Nonchristians burn forever in a fiery damnation but it’s your right to choose for yourself, even if your choice directly leads you to eternal torture.
Position 3) Nonchristians do not burn forever in a fiery damnation.
If you are a father, even if you mostly fall in position 2, you are likely to have special considerations for your daughter, which push you closer to position 1. And if you are already position 1 to begin with, like Toedad, then your sole responsibility is to keep your daughter’s soul safe. Even her physical safety is less important.
Personally, I fall into position 3, but I have a hard time just writing off people who are indoctrinated into faith-based beliefs and follow those beliefs to their logical ends as “jerks.” Misguided? Maybe. Probably. Jerks… maybe not.
As for the whole lesbian equals going to hell thing… I don’t even know where it comes from, but I know that many churches teach it. And if your church teaches it, and that is your primary source of biblical interpretation… well, faith-based is not evidence-based.
Aw, look guys, everything’s going to be alright! He cares! /sarcasm
. . .
Fudge you Ross.
He does care actually, just in all the wrong ways.
“Good teacher. He really seems to care. About *what* I have no idea.” ~Thornton Melon
I never thought that I would feel sorry for the guy. I really didn’t. I’m against what Ross is doing, and I’m against what he stands for and why he’s doing this.
Looking at panels four and six, however, actually managed to accomplish what I thought was impossible.
I don’t know where the feeling comes from, and the more I think about it, the more I don’t like it. But goddammit, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that for a brief few moments, the look on Ross’s face in those last few panels made me feel a brief moment of sadness for the man.
And then I think about what he’s doing and the sadness goes away. Even if this is something he believes in with all his heart and earnestly believes he’s trying to do good, that doesn’t change in the least what he’s doing.
I felt momentarily sorry for him, but it speaks volumes that I could only do it out of context.
Me too. It’s totally wrong, and he’s a shitty parent, but damn Willis, that was well-played, again. This is some top notch writing and artwork.
The way it seems to lean is that his wife is gay, and left him, but not on pleasant terms. It left him broken, and in his grief he erroneously latched onto the wrong cause of the pain. Now he’s afraid that he’ll lose his daughter. He just doesn’t seem to be capable of understanding throughout all of this that he won’t.
Perhaps a mental substitution would be needed. In his mind you could say his likening Homosexuality to a severe heroin addiction. Would anyone consider his actions to be wrong if he tried to put her into rehab, she broke out, and was being enabled by her friend and her dealer, possibly one hit away from death? A willingness to die so that she can live her life to it’s fullest makes more sense there.
I’m not excusing his actions, but stating that they seeming come from misinformation, old doctrine, and pain. What he’s doing is wrong, but also sad.
I think the wife is dead. I’m almost certain Becky or Joyce mentioned this at we point.
Actually I went to exactly the same place as Orion Fury on this one. Toedad didn’t say his wife was taken away or taken by God, she was taken by the Devil. That’s a horribly specific way of saying it.
Joyce and Becky have said that Becky’s mother is dead, but we’ve established that they belong to a pretty fundamentalist community. It doesn’t seem a stretch of the imagination that if she came out to her husband, rejected the church or did anything else seen as a betrayal of the faith that she would be ‘cast out’ (think of the Last Temptation of Leslie Bean) and ‘written out’ of their lives as dead. Its all a bit Moses but fits the community.
It may also explain why both toedad and Becky’s room-mate’s family both seemed to separately behave like the room-mate was and innocent lead astray by Becky who ‘had the devil in her’. If Mrs toedad was gay it would be easy to assume the ‘evil’ passed down to the daughter.
Heck, at a stretch it may explain why Joyce’s uber religious parents allowed her to go to their alma mater instead of ‘god college’ with the gay woman’s daughter who was close to their daughter.
Does not really make sense.
If his wife is still alive, why would Becky have claimed “i have no where else to go”?
Because as far as she knows, her Mum IS dead?
Daniel here. I get what Orion & Rando are saying. Becky & Joyce believe Becky’s Mum is dead because that’s what she’s been told repeatedly ever since she vanished, but what is that was a lie maintained by toedad/their Church/the local community? What if her “death” was in fact her being banished/fleeing the family home, with the “death” story used to cover the fact she’s never allowed/going to return?
That said, there IS another situation where a person can die, but still “taken by Satan”.
Suicide.
Suicide is considered a Sin by most versions of the Church I’ve heard of. To many versions, it doesn’t matter WHY they killed themselves (chemical imbalance in the brain? Doesn’t matter. Terminally ill? Nope), they kill themselves, they’re going to Hell. I’ve seen a TV show reporting the late great Robin Williams had undiagnosed Lewy Body Dementia, which slowly shuts down neural pathways 1 connection at a time, changing behavior. They loose control over themselves. And yet, some Churches don’t care.
The last option that crosses my mind for the “Satan took your Mother from me” line, though the least likely (hopefully), she did something like Orion & Rando said (came out as Bi/Lesbian/hating Church ideals) so in order to prevent his beloved Daughter being “contaminated”, Toedad killed Mrs Toedad…
I doubt it’s the last option, but it’s a possibility, he has proven himself potentially Fanatical enough…
Because everyone told her her mom was dead.
I can’t find that reference but when a Christian’s loved one dies, it’s; usually ‘God took them’. “Satan took them’ usually means they either decided to leave to do something awful for the good Christians or they left because of not being able to take their loved ones’ lunacy to the bad Christians…
Or that they committed suicide rather than live a lie…
Pity is a perfectly natural emotion to feel for those you despise. Especially if those you despise are also human.
Honestly…I dunno. I get where you’re coming from. On the other hand, what he’s doing, whether it’s out of love or not, is INSANE. It’s also just…despicable. I mean…it’s your daughter, and her best friend, and you’re holding a GUN on her. I DO feel bad for Ross. But at the same time, I hate him WAY more than I did before for doing this. Seriously. Unless Willis pulls a Charles Whitman and reveals that Ross has a brain tumor on his amygdala, there is NO EXCUSE, and NO forgiving his actions.
If I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that my daughter would be eternally damned and subjected too horrendous torture for literally all of time if I didn’t save her from the path she was on, I’d pull a gun on her too.
…
If you knew those things beyond a shadow of a doubt, then you would not be a member of a faith based organization.
The cornerstone of faith is not knowing for certain but believing regardless.
I think there are a lot of people who somehow lose the meaningful distinctions and flip it around to “whatever I believe is fact, not faith”. Or just, my faith is fact. Which, oh /honey/.
But having been raised in nearly exactly the same circumstances as Joyce, not a single person I knew would have ever thought it appropriate to pull a gun on their child even if their very soul were on the line.
Also and mostly irrelevant, but it always bothered me how Christians gloss over their usual “power of prayer” attitude when it comes to situations like these. Getting out a gun is basically telling god, “Yeah I know I’ve been praying for her, but you’re doing jack shit. Let go of the fucking wheel. I don’t think you’re handling this right. I’m taking over from here, you fuck up.”
Also it’s really late. I shuddup.
I went to a a nondenominational fundamentalist christian high school myself. They taught us that real faith was the belief in things unseen based on the evidence of things seen. They taught us that blind faith wasn’t real faith, that you should have evidence.
Of course.. the evidence that they provided to get to their conclusions was full of problems that I could go on all day about.. But of course it wasn’t presented that way. They believe there is real tangible evidence for their beliefs. In their minds they don’t just choose to believe these things, they know them to be fact.
I’m guessing what you meant to say was “if I subscribed to these beliefs”, right?
If I was going to do something that drastic just subscribing to the belief wouldn’t be enough, I’d need to know for sure. But if we do assume for a moment that Ross’s horrible view of the world is true, then I think scaring Becky with a gun is definitely preferable to eternal torture don’t you think?
If what the worst elements of Christianity espoused was objective fact, then yes. Fortunately we live in a better world than that and such questions aren’t really worth asking.
I think it’s important to consider how Ross views the situation when discussing whether or not his actions are forgivable. He is kind insane right now, but he’s still genuinely looking out for Becky’s best interest, so much so that he’s willing to lay down his life for her. Compare that to Blaine, who’s just an evil jackass in general and doesn’t give a shit about his daughter.
Not really, but then I’m of the mind that any God who would torture someone forever because of what I believed or who I loved is an awful tyrant who must be stopped by any means necessary, rather than a man who must be appeased with whatever horrible actions will keep one in His good graces.
And that was pretty much a choice I came to when I was a kid and pondering about what I would believe if I was a part of the religion that surrounded me, if their view of the afterlife was real. And yeah, in that case, send me to Hell, conscript me to Lucifer’s army, because if God is that terrible of a person that he would demand such abusive action from his followers, then he’s probably lying about how bad Satan really is.
That’s honestly what pushed me away from Christianity in my youth. I saw a play at my church, put together by the sweetest people ever, and it scared the absolute shit out of me. The moral was “literally everybody except for the devout are going to Hell, it doesn’t matter how good they are.”
Kind of heavy for a 9-year old.
I personally think the concept of ANYONE going to Hell, regardless of what crimes they committed is seriously fucked up. That said the idea that we would be capable of defeating God if that was true seems unrealistic to me, I don’t blame someone for knuckling under instead of rebelling.
More important story wise than what any of us think about him is that Becky cares about him (pretty obviously I think).
Couldnt you be sad that he’s in the grip of his hateful religion? I think that’s at the core of what I’m feeling. Which, I think, is in context.
“I don’t know where the feeling comes from, and the more I think about it, the more I don’t like it”
There is nothing remotely wrong with having empathy or even sympathy for someone you strongly disagree with. In fact, Id say having empathy for your “enemy’s” is a trait all too often lacking in people.
I’m pretty sad and moved. The more I read over this, the more I see that Ross is really, really fucking desperate. He knew that he was risking his own life to get his daughter back. :c
Some people are still angry at Ross for what he did. That’s justifiable. I think a lot of them may just be riding on negative feelings like Ross = Bad Guy Forever, but there’s really no defending what he did.
Still…i can’t help but feel like he heard about this and felt so alone for a little while. At least for Becky things turned out okay. For Ross, this whole situation must have been a living nightmare.
This. His actions are monstrous and demonstrably harmful, but he is also a human being with working emotions. It’s just his empathy is short-circuited by his commitment to dogma. And it’s awesome when people recognize that seeing the pain and worldview that has led someone to hurt someone else deeply does not justify their actions or make them more sympathetic. It just emphasizes how human even the horrible people are.
This. Except for not making them more sympathetic? Definition says sympathy = “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune”. And I have those feelings about Ross’ “misfortune at becoming who he is and having his love for Becky so, so twisted to the dark side. Perhaps not sympathy FOR Ross, himself?. Certainly not sympathy for what he is doing. ZERO sympathy for his actions. And I see ZERO justification for what he is doing. But sorrow and pity for the situation he is in and what’s brought him to it. NOT that I think that that does anyone any good.
The way it reads makes me worry that he may have killed his wife, so I’m not getting the “sympathetic” vibe.
If she just left him for another woman, then:
1. Unless he got a kick-ass lawyer, Becky would’ve been raised by a lesbian, and, well….
2. Becky wouldn’t be asking Dad to do it for mom’s sake.
Oh- unless mom had a psychotic break or something and ended up in the hospital. 🙁 Then I would feel bad.
I don’t get the sympathy angle that’s popping up in the comments.
After we lost my mom, my dad gave everything for me and my sister. Literally. The stress of the circumstances killed him. I’ve seen what it is to lose a wife, and I’ve seen what it is to desperately love your family so much you’re willing to do anything for them.
This is not it.
He drew a weapon on his own daughter. It doesn’t matter who he lost, or believes he lost, or what he feels inside. That is utterly unforgivable.
Turning a gun on something means you are willing to see it destroyed. What kind of monster is willing to watch their child die?
What has happened to Ross Babies McIntyre is designed to explain, not excuse, his actions. As you have no doubt experienced, there are plenty of people who have gone through what Ross has and haven’t gone off the deep end in response. Also, all I feel for him is Pity. Pity that he couldn’t have held on to his sanity just a little longer. He still deserves whatever the cops dish out to him (if they come).
Yeah. Yeah, that is definitely a good point.
Really feel for poor Becky, Jesus. I want to reach in and give her a hug. Well, I want to reach in and get the gun away from Toedad and call 911, but then I want to give her a hug.
” He still deserves whatever the cops dish out to him”
Depends on the cops really.
He has drawn a gun and deserves to be arrested, not gunned down, for example.
He hasn’t actually harmed anyone at this point (physically), and while he
is being irresponsible in the extreme, it doesn’t look like he intends to use
that gun for anything but cowards show of power.
Two strips ago, he threw Dina to the ground. Sure it was self defense, but he still physically hurt her.
This and *appropriate gesture of sympathy* to Meebo for what you’ve been through.
He clearly belongs to the kind of people that sincerely believe that weapons are not meant to destroy but to dissuade evildoers. A very sincere, but very mistaken belief that every other month allows a shooting to happen at schools or cinemas or whatnot as people employ weapons to destroy without being dissuaded at all.
I can think of two times in my life where my father showing a gun caused people who meant to rob and possibly harm my family to peacefully leave. A third time the appearance of having a gun (which I didn’t actually have) did the same for myself.
I have never pointed a gun at another human being. I have no desire to ever do so. My father may have done so as part of his duties as a Marine. I don’t know for sure. If so I am confident it has only happened as a Marine, not as a civilian. If you ask him he will only answer that killing is a horrible thing that does great psychological harm to the killer and you should hope never to have to do it.
I think it’s more of a sadness rather than a forgiveness of his actions, if that makes sense? Like I feel sad for him. But I also have very high emotional empathy and feel sad when pretty much anybody feels sad, no matter how much I hate them. But that doesn’t make me stop hating them.
I guess I just hate seeing suffering in general. But I definitely can’t excuse or forgive or condone his actions at all and find what he’s doing repugnant.
It’s also heartbreaking for me to see how this affects Becky.
Exactly
No, no, you’re doing it all wrong! It’s “FUCK you, Ross.” Because that’s what he deserves.
kinky, I’m sure he’d like that quite a bit.
RAINNNBOWWSSS
Honestly, I’m a bit with the sympathizers at this point. The guy needs to be stopped, hard, before he hurts anyone or kidnaps Becky, and he needs to be restrained and perhaps incarcerated to keep from doing it in the future. But he’s also clearly redeemable if he can just be pulled out of the religious nutjob mindset. He’s not a hardcore inexcusable asshole like Blaine or Ryan.
Yeah but he’s so deep in it that it might be impossible for him to get out… he clearly isn’t intelligent enough to sort things out by himself, and being in jail would probably not be the greatest help on that aspect.
That’s what “not guilty by virtue of insanity” is for. Also, mental institutions.
Yeah, he would need one of the latter. It would be wonderful if they could teach him the simple “live and let live” principle.
IIRC, the current psychological DSM explicitly exempts religious thinking and beliefs from the big catalog of crazy, even in instances when a strict reading of the literature might file it under other categories of delusion or schizophrenia. (Tried to google to confirm, but google is down atm.) So no, no insanity defense.
Whaaaattt
he’s trying to protect his daughter he just has a fucked up idea about what she needs to be protected from.
if he were trying to save her from human traffickers rather than Vagina and the “gay agenda” they’d make a movie with him played by Liam Neeson.
I tried to think of a parody of a taken quote, but i couldn’t think of anything that didn’t make me nauseous.
Here, let me help:
“I don’t know what you want. If you want money, I can tell you I don’t have any. What I do have are a certain set of beliefs, beliefs that make me a nightmare to atheist lesbians like you. If you come back now, I won’t come looking for you. But if you don’t, I will come looking for you. I will find you. And I will kill you.”
Good lord… I see the humour in this, but it’s still more unnerving than anything else.
Do you see the humor in… RAINBOWWSSSS
Honestly-no, not really.
This, exactly. It’s painfully obvious he cares about her immensely, but he’s taking all the wrong actions. Unfortunately I don’t think that can really be fixed at this point, he’s in too deep, and he doesn’t know any other way to deal with it. Things aren’t so black and white, and just because he’s behaving this way now doesn’t mean he was a bad father or a bad person before.
Who said everything is going to turn out alright?
oh fuck.
It has hit the fan and now spinning around.
UH WHAT DOES HE MEAN BY THAT
Nothing sane. Dude’s cuckoo for cocoa puffs.
If only he liked Rice Bubbles instead, he wouldn’t be in this mess.
I think Toedad’s actions are motivated by either getting Becky back or suicide by cop. Which, weirdly, means he’s far more rationale than he first appeared.
He’s fighting Satan. Either he dies fighting a great evil that has stolen his daughter, martyring himself to be greeted in Heaven by his wife (unless the reason he claims Satan took her is because she killed herself or was taken out by him for failing to “live up to Godly standards”) or his show of sacrifice and conviction is enough to pierce the lying veil of Satan and remind his wayward daughter of the path back to the light.
In his twisted view, it’s win-win as he doesn’t have the humility to admit he might not actually know best about what his idea of his God would want or what is actually best for Becky.
Sadly, a major liability for Becky here is she cares if he lives or dies. He doesn’t. Nor does he care if she lives or dies, so long as she does either free of “the sin that has consumed her”.
Exactly what you said about liability. I’m worried that Becky will go along with him now so that his brain doesn’t get ka-spewed by state troopers.
That’s what he’s hoping
Perhaps it doesn’t matter for the way this unfolds, but it seems to me that he does care if she dies. He’s willing to kill her to “save” her (maybe?) but he does care. I suspect when asked for God to give him strength, it was because he doesn’t WANT to kill her, it’s because he was afraid that he wouldn’t have the determination to go through with whatever he has planned.
Yup. He’s mistaking his empathy for the deceptions of Satan trying to dissuade him from his Holy Crusade. And he’s believing that his anger and selfish stubborn bigotry are God granting him the strength to work through and remain resolute no matter what the accursed one says to try and dissuade him from his task.
His brain is screaming at him that this is wrong and he’s doing harm, but he’s trusting God and his desire to control to keep him on “the right path” and do “whatever is necessary” so that he, personally, can have a victory over Satan.
Good rule of thumb for believers: if you ever find that you have to overrule your God-given conscience to do what you think God wants, stop immediately. You’re doing it wrong.
That is a VERY good rule of thumb.
Lord, he IS very badly messed up, ‘tricked’ into horrific, unjustifiable, unforgivable actions, by his hateful dogma and his determination not to be “tricked” into shirking his “duty”. That’s what evokes my sorrow and pity — and horror.
Yeah, I reckon both. He’s hoping to guilt Becky straight, and if it has to be by suicide by cop then so be it. he is not exactly rational
but what about Becky’s mom? Did she like leave him or like did he… do something…? yknow?
He didn’t. No way Becky wouldn’t have mentioned it at some point if he had.
Er, actually, when a parent dies in a bad way, it tends to be something the kids DON’T like to talk about. Even to their friends. ESPECIALLY to their friends.
Word of Willis is she died of cancer, last year. But, this is disturbing, Ross is saying Satan took her. Isn’t the usual (when someone beloved dies) God took her early/before her time/etc?
My personal theory is that she admitted to not believing/losing her faith before she died. I remember hearing a lot of prayers as a child for elderly relatives and acquaintances to resist the “last temptation”–basically, letting the devil use your fear of death to destroy your faith in your last moments.
It could also be that they believe in prayer as the best medicine, so part of her “betrayal” could be her seeking medical intervention instead of trusting to his prayers.
I thought that was just Christian Science (my grandmother was very big with that. I went to Sunday School, but still went to doctors) We didn’t believe in the devil, though.
She’s dead. Precisely how she died has yet to be explained. Beyond, uh, Satan, I guess.
Which doesn’t really clarify it.
No, that would be better, because then he could bond with Dina over their shared love of Cocoa Puffs.
I’m hoping he means that Becky’s mother ran off with her new wife so he told Becky she was dead to shield Becky from the harsh reality of the situation.
That sounds like something Willis would do.
That’s my guess.
The main reason I wouldn’t guess that is that Willis has referred to her as being dead. (And Ross has referred to her as dead to people other than Becky)
If his ex-wife isn’t straight he’s probably not too eager to talk about that to every stranger he meets in Joyce’s college campus.
You seem to forget that Willis, the literal God of the DoA-verse, said she was dead. For over a year, so the grief isn’t going to be to much of drag in either case.
He could just be saying that so we don’t spoil the twist ending for ourselves
Willis already said she was dead.
but if she was “taken by Satan” doesn’t that mean that her death involved something Ross views as sin?
Well, what does his religion say about suucide, for one thing? That’s some pretty serious sin according to the Roman Catholic Church.
wouldn’t be surprised. kind of makes Becky even better if this is true, considering how cheerful/perky she is
But Becky isn’t necessarily “cheerful/perky”. Becky puts on a huge “cheerful/perky” front because she thinks no one will like her if she doesn’t. .
She was also “cheerful/perky” when she first showed up on the run and desperate. She’s very good at seeming perky when she’s actually on the verge of a breakdown.
This is not actually a sign of mental health and a good loving upbringing.
Yes. Also her reaction when Joyce told her that she didn’t reciprocate her amorous & physical attraction/desire.
The are not Roman Catholic, they are evangelical protestants. Do you have some special breed of nutjob Catholics over there or something?
from my experience (through my best friend who is catholic mostly) there is a lot of disagreement in the catholic churches to the point even people in the same church has disagreements.
That sounds like every church everywhere.
Suicide is a super sin in the RCC. I don’t know how it is in Toedads religion, which is a variety of protestant I’m not very familiar with.
Last I checked, most protestant denominations don’t have a problem with suicide. As in, they of course don’t want people to kill themselves, but it’s not considered an unforgivable sin that lands you straight in Hell.
Suicide is a super sin in the RCC.
No, it really isn’t. It is a sin, yes, but not ‘a super sin’.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church has this to say on suicide:
Why it is bad:
Why it is not ‘a super sin’:
K Neko, I see your point. (“Super sin” was deliberate and careless; I’d forgotten the actual sin rating. I figured that “super” covered it. Mostly based on what I know of the RCCs involvement against medical suicide.)
Yep. Taken by God is the actual expression for when a loved one dies…
Could also imply that he had convinced himself that their relationship was so pure and righteous that Ross could see no conceivable way even God, with all his inscrutable ways, would separate them. And thus Satan is to blame.
There are some religious sects that literally believe that illness itself comes from and is spread by Satan. So, he could very well consider death by illness/disease being “taken away by Satan” as it would have been Satan that gave them the illness in the first place.
JFC toedad just GO HOME
James Fenimore Cooper?
Jesus Fried Chicken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQf-EV8JXl0
not sure how to feel about this.
*plays the Purple One’s “I Would Die 4 U” on the hacked Muzak*
Why has the muzak suddenly become hacked? It was always just muzak before.
I hijacked it a couple days ago when I played the BeeGees. Stephen hacked into it to regain control.
So if I wanted to jam to “Sympathy for the Devil” for this strip, I would have to wipe it clean and re-install its infinite music collection?
I hate it when my wife runs away with Satan
She does that often?
I wish I could simply like this comment. I actually laughed.
about once a month
Hahaha!!!
What, she runs off with a washed up European hockey player?
Um, what’s this about Becky’s mother being taken away? Did we already know this or is it new information?
She left him for a quiet dinosaur girl too.
New info. We don’t know anything about how she died.
Becky’s mom died from breast cancer a year before the comic started (so sometime around 1989 our time).
I believe it was mentioned when ToeDad made his first appearance that Becky’s mother had passed away.
ohhhhh ok
Becky’s mother died about a year prior to the events of DoA.
Unless he thinks cancer is caused by Satan, this is new information.
He might actually think that.
I wouldn’t put that past him.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought cancer is caused by Satan, to be honest.
Oh, forgot about the cancer.
As to your question, it depends. Some evangelical group members see illness as a major test of faith and a reminder that death comes like “a thief in the night to righteous and villain both without warning or regard for goodness”. But others genuinely believe in things like the healing power of prayer, so when cancer fails to go into remission, that becomes either a sign that their faith was not strong enough or pure enough or that Satan has especially chosen their family to do violence upon.
I’m going to guess Toedad is the latter type of dude.
Ew wth people
Hm, I’m not convinced it’s a direct “illness = Satan” link there. I think it’s more to do with Ross’ own need for control. He’s a full-blown authoritarian, evidently, and part of that mindset is that things don’t ‘just happen’. Someone has to be in control. That means either Ross, or a higher authority he defers to.
Ross’ wife died, and his illusion of control was shaken. I’m pretty sure he’s also swallowed the fundamental attribution error (that bad things don’t happen to good people, or essentially that bad things happen because the person deserved it somehow) but can’t bring himself to believe that it was deserved, so he needs another reason. What do fundamentalist types call it when bad things happen outside their control? Satan.
I think Ross has spent the last year twisting himself around this until he’s convinced that Satan is attacking him and his family and he has to fight back. This is his test; he and only he stands in Satan’s way and he must be prepared to do anything to regain control*. In other words, I read this as a breakdown.
Guy needs therapy. Well, first he needs to put the gun down and be taken into custody so he’s no longer a danger to himself and others, but then he needs therapy.
(Seriously, some of the people baying for blood in here scare me. Look in the mirror, people.)
* There’s another ugly aspect here that I didn’t want to digress into above, and that’s that it seems to be all about Ross in his head. It’s common to the authoritarian mindset. Look at his phrasing: “Satan took your mother from me”, “How dare [Dina] try to steal my daughter away from me”. It’s not about his wife’s suffering, or his daughter trying to find her identity in life; it’s about Ross, as the authority figure in his family.
I’m not sure to what extent I think this has been his mindset all along, as opposed to something that he’s built up as a coping mechanism since his wife died (I don’t think he’s always been this bad; the commenters saying they were surprised he’d take Becky and Joyce to Six Flags were probably on to something). I think it’s clear, though, that Becky discovering her orientation was the snapping point. It would be interesting to know, not that I ever expect an answer, how things would have gone if Becky came out while her mother was still alive.
He probably feels very alone. His wife died, so he became very attached to his daughter. Unfortunately, he’s an authoritarian, so his way of expressing affection is to try to control (‘protect’) his daughter. Now she’s rebelling against that control, and he feels even lonelier, and its driven him to a pretty dark place.
Very much all of this. Things aren’t going on for his wife or for his daughter, it’s all about him and his role as moral protector and authority for his family. Bad things aren’t just bad things outside his control, they are Satan attacking him personally. Because as the man of the house, he’s the only one who really matters in the end.
You make this flavor of patriarchy extremely vivid and understandable.
We know she died about a year (or maybe less) before the start of the comic. We don’t know exactly what she died of.
Coming from Toedad, that could mean almost anything.
Gangler above suggested that the death-by-cancer thing may have been a fiction he told Becky to cover his wife running away with a woman. From context, I’m finding that theory fairly possible.
Sooo, why is your name “blue”? I have blue hair. Just curious.
Very random. The cast and I started college around the same time. When I took Japanese (only a semester, so I have naturally lost it all by now), a friend in the class nicknamed me the Japanese word for blue. I decided to go with that for the comments.
I’m considering photoshopping the Dina grav so her hat looks like a TARDIS and changing my name on here to DinaWho (since I make an egregious number of references already), so this was a perfectly timed question.
I had seen you commenting about here before, so nice to finally talk to my comment name twin!
Fellow Whovian here, I look forward to seeing that TARDIS hat if you do photoshop it, sounds like an awesome idea! :3
The story of Taken 2 is actually based on Ross. He didn’t make a dime off of the royalties however. He’s being a dramatic asshole now so he can gather more hype for the next Taken movie, Taken Tag Tournament.
…go stand in the corner and think about what you’ve done.
+1
I swear guys, we’re one comic away from a happy ending
All we need is for Dina to initiate instrumentality
I wish that I could turn back time~
What would a Dina-led Instrumentality be like? Probably includes dinosaurs. Scientifically accurate ones.
ka spew
I’m hoping things turn out well enough for that to be okay to repeat later on. Intended to comment with such when i’d finished reading the comments.
Ha, nope, this comic “day” is going to last at least until November 5th, according to Joyce’s outfit in the preview panels on Willis’ tumblr. I suspect it’ll end on or near the 10th, when he previewed a shot of a hospital…
Dear god. That’s a horrible way to start a day of Fallout 4!
Considering that a day of Fallout 4 will involve most of humanity being wiped out in a nuclear war, the comic will probably be fairly light in comparison.
Satan took his wife? So will we get to know how Becky’s mother died?
Satan took her, obviously.
🙂
Next story arc they travel to hell.
In a handbasket!
“If you’re goin’ to hell, take a limo!”
(Louie Anderson)
Becky’s ride to hell is very hugglable.
We don’t know that she died. Maybe she ran off.
I feel kind of bad for Ross. Look at him, he has absolutely no idea how to handle the situation he’s in.
Are you sure she died? If Satan is at works here according to toedad than its more likeley adultery, alcoholism, drug abuse…. hell maybe she discovered her own queerness or transgender self.
Satan literally came up and just grabbed her and took her to hell. He’s kind of a dick like that.
Isn’t that the story of Hades and Persephone?
So does she come back to Toedad for six months every year?
“So how’s satan”
“Ah you know. Busy. Him and Jesus have been arguing a lot. Occupying himself by writing speeches for Donald Trump. That kinda thing”
“That’s so like him”.
So Donald Trump is secretly a puppet being controlled by Satan, or Donald Trump is so evil that Satan’s just like “Hey, man, I wrote a speech for you! You don’t have to thank me, because you’re evil.”
You also don’t have to wash your hands. Because you’re evil.
Or Persephone knowing that her Mom would be pissed deliberately ate the seeds knowing she’d have to stay because she didn’t want to leave…
Only if God encouraged Satan to do it because he deserved her.
Satan took his wife?
… From behind? Did he pay a nickel?
You know Satan. The nickel was probably wooden
Wait, wait, wait. Do you mean to say that Mike is setting the example for Satan!?
That’s quite an accomplishment, Mike–Conglaturation!
jesus christ, he really believes he’s making the right choice here
Called it!
Of course. To do otherwise would be moral relativism and moral relativism is the Devil trying to twist your mind and play off your empathy. The righteous stand firm even when it is hard and resist like Jesus when he underwent his temptation. After all demons will say anything to avoid being driven out by the righteous.
And I wish that last paragraph was a joke, but that’s really the worldview. Think Bush back when he was selling his “Moral Clarity” garbage. To a disturbingly large number of people, morality is defined by never changing one’s stance or mind even in the face of new information. To a pre-millennial dispensationalist rapture-believing Christian type, there’s the added wrinkle that empathy itself is a sign of the Antichrist. After all, someone without God in their heart (as defined as belonging to the right Church and believing the right things), cannot be good by definition and as such there can not be good in them to see and empathize with. So any tug of the heart-strings is an attempt by a demon to corrupt your soul.
Fundamentalism is some scary shit, man.
That it is.
By that logic, toedad is trying to be Satan toeday.
As a rule, people generally don’t do something if they believe it to be the wrong choice.
“The villain is the hero of his own story.”
Maybe don’t make the guy feel like he has nothing to lose, Becky.
I guess she was counting on him still having a glimmer of sanity in there somewhere.
If he’s sane enough to realize she’s telling the truth, that’s the problem. If he thinks that he’s going to die anyway, so whatever he does doesn’t matter, that’s a big problem.
Depends on when the SWAT team gets here.
Toedad is sane. His behavior is horribly irrational to us, but he’s got his sanity. To him, and the religion he’s chosen, this requires a big gesture. He has to demonstrate that he will do and risk anything to save his beloved daughter. Now in a world that works basically like ours, we all know this is colloquially ‘nuts’, but it’s not any real mental illness or breakdown. These are all rational choices based on a magical worldview. They’re really -bad- choices, because the world isn’t magical, but they’re rational ones.
His actions are internally consistent, he’s just Wrong Genre Savvy.
This just seems like reading in a lot to a character who really hasn’t been developed at all beyond “jerk” and “claims to be Christian”.
I start with the idea that he has a life outside of his appearance in the comic. It’s not Toedad of Age, after all. We start with what we do know about him. He’s a jerk now, yes. His behavior is ‘nutty’ (not insane, just wrong for the society he and we live in). But Becky’s basically okay. She’s a charming lady. Sure, she’s good at hiding what’s really bothering her, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t get a basically good upbringing. So I base what I think about Toedad on his effect on characters we do know he has interacted with in the past.
Oh come on, panel 2 dude there needs a tag.
Also Ka-Spew is now the best face.
I will laugh my ass off if he becomes “Panel 2 Dude” and only ever appears in the second panel.
That would be great.
If Ross leaves now, he can probably get away before the cops show up.
Enough people have seen him, though, including people who saw his car, that he wouldn’t be able to stay hidden for long. Whether or not he actually shoots anybody, pulling out a gun on a college campus and threatening people (in this case, probably only Dina directly, although Becky definitely has a case) would be more than enough to constitute menace and possibly stalking. In Indiana, those can carry fines of up to $10,000 or 3 years in prison for the stalking charge, or up to $1,000 or 180 days in prison for the menace charge. If Becky, Dina or IU decided to call the police, Ross could wind up in some pretty deep shit– especially if he decides to keep his hands on that gun when the cops show up, which given his current emotional state is definitely plausible.
Pretty sure that since he had the gun when he threw off Dina (whose actions could be construed as self-defense), he’s got felony battery on top of that. Given that he was acting because Becky was a homosexual and Dina was her girlfriend, that tacks on a hate crime rider, which would make anything else irrelevant.
It’s Indiana. Indiana apparently has some very badly thought-out hate crime laws, which do not cover sexuality-related hate crime.
I’ve been wondering -how old are Dina, Becky and Joyce? If any of them is seventeen still, is Toedad also facing additional charges for assaulting/endangering the welfare of a minor?
“Better out than in?”
What happened to Beckys mom???
Satan took her! Didn’t you Ross Babies McIntyre? He’s the authoritive source on everything!
/sarcasm
But seriously, she died. Breast cancer apparently.
Actually, Ross is dyslexic… it’s Santa who took Becky’s mom. She’s an elf now.
I would guess we’ll find out soon.
They were just out on a walk when Satan jumped out from behind some bushes and shot her.
Oh my god OH MY GOD
What really happened to her mother. Is she really dead or did he just tell everyone that?
Well, it’s possible Becky’s mother is a lesbian or she’s recently been killed (probably not by Toedad).
She died a year or so ago. There hasn’t been a cause given in comic.
Of course the “cause of death” could be “Toedad made it up to cover his wife leaving him for a woman” – until told otherwise, this is what I choose to believe.
Like I said below I can’t imagine Joyce’s parents not knowing if she simply ran off, and if they knew she ran off Joyce would know as well. It’s the kind of thing that would likely generate gossip amongst their group.
It wouldn’t be that hard if Toeday said that to EVERYONE, not just Becky. I could see him having a funeral with an empty casket and everything.
I don’t think the cancer story is fake. If Ross was faking a death, he’d want to say she had a sudden heart attack/stroke/aneurysm that killed her instantly. Breast cancer’s way too slow, she’d have to wait for the treatment, people would want to visit her in the hospital, etc.
You don’t think she’d say anything to anyone at all? Also, the logistics of arranging such a funeral seem unlikely
A) If she was going to run away from a fundamentalist community, where her only friends were likely to shame her or try to “fix” her? No. No I don’t.
B) Others have said that cancer was never mentioned. Only dead somehow.
C) If I’m proven wrong tomorrow, that’s fine. I just feel that the implication from the way Toedad said that she was “taken by Satan” and then implied that Becky was also in the process of being “taken by Satan” says a lot.
Oh, and D) funerals with no body happen all the time for various reasons. It wouldn’t be that hard. Pointlessly expensive, yes, but possible. Alternatively, he could have claimed she was cremated and simply gotten some wood ashes.
She died from being too gay. She got suffocated in lady crotch!
I know that’s how I plan to go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zHvI3_fwQY
And my headstone will be a handprint so you can walk by and give me a high five
BUH-BAM!
**watches video**
Randy forgot the most important rule of hottub oral – have the person sit up on the edge.
Although, I have to say, I went in to that video hoping for a story about someone dying by being too gay, that being the part of your original comment that I was replying to specifically.
So what you’re saying is, is that she lived (died?) the dream?
ROSS, NO ONE NEEDS TO DIE HERE! RIGHT NOW, MANY OF US ARE OK WITH THE IDEA OF YOU DYING, BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN ANYONE NEEDS TO! FOR BALLS SAKE YOU WALKING SACK OF CRAZY PUT THE FRIGGIN GUN DOWN!!!!!!
As much as I hate him I don’t want him to die. Wanting people to die is fucked up no matter who they are
I don’t want him to die either. I don’t want anyone here to die. But if anyone dies here and it happens to be him i honestly don’t think I’d be extremely torn up over it. I dunno about everyone else of course, I suppose I could’ve worded that better.
I don’t want him to die. Death is too good for him.
Thank you, Hostage Negotiator Boomwolf.
“Satan took your mom from me”
…I *really* don’t like where this is going. She probably commited suicide.
I mean, if it was (physical) sickness, there’s no way he’d have formulated it that way.
It was mentioned above that she died from cancer, which some religious groups may consider to be the work of Satan.
hm, I didn’t remember that.
Right. It wouldn’t make sense to say that Satan had taken her if she might have gone to Heaven. It’s God who takes away good people. “Satan took her” means she’s gone to Hell.
That was my guess. I wouldn’t be surprised if he abused her, either.
I think physical sickness and stuff would still count. Satan made her sick, somehow (or made her get hit by a bus, or whatever).
But it could also be something he sees more obviously as Satan’s influence, like suicide.
Or she could have been murdered by a cult, idk.
I’m thinking the cancer caused to much suffering and she went the easy way out.
Actually, depending on the state, he’s perfectly allowed to brandish his rifle at a school.
Yeah. I wish that wasn’t true either…
Not in Indiana. Legally he is allowed to have it secured away out of sight in his car when on school property, but waving it around like that is way, way, way out of bounds.
Even if it were still technically legal, with the literal plague of school shootings going on, he’d probably be arrested or shot pretty quickly.
Regardless of laws about what you can carry where, he’s clearly threatening people with a deadly weapon. I don’t think there’s any place in America where that’s legal.
What? To my knowledge no state let’s you brandish a rifle at school. Or does open carry also apply to long guns?
Carry laws are generally more lenient about long arms, which are hunting weapons (and I know folks for whom that’s still a survival necessity), than about handguns, which basically exist only for punching holes in targets and killing people. I haven’t actually looked it up, but someone else here said a few days ago that open carry of long arms is legal without a permit in Indiana.
But like I said below, there’s a big difference between “carry” and “assault”.
I’m pretty sure what he’s doing with it isn’t legal anywhere. I believe open carry of long arms is legal in Indiana, but what he’s doing isn’t “carry”, it has names like “brandishing”, “‘terrorizing”, “assault with a deadly weapon”, and “attempted kidnapping”, and those are crimes, at least a couple of them serious felonies.
Oh, and while the carry might be legal, it is against IU rules on their campus.
Even in open carry situations, you aren’t allowed to make threatening gestures with it unless in defense of yourself or a third party. He is aiming it at people.
Carry in some states? Probably okay. But never ‘brandish’. That’s a crime in lots of places, and can be interpolated as a crime in all the rest. Nobody likes people who yell and hold guns in their hands ready for action.
My initial response: “That person diving for cover in panel two is awfully tall.” Statue. Right.
hahahahahahah XD
Sculptor, could you sculpt me diving for cover. I just have a sneaking suspicion some shit is gonna go down right here at this spot years from now.
Years ago, Toedad burst into the sculptor’s studio with a rifle while the sculpting was in progress. Dude gets around.
My first thought when I read that comment was ‘Bootstrap paradox!’
Well, from an artist’s perspective, all of the characters in this comic are still images – technically, none of them actually move. The illusion of movement is just that.
Even images in movies are technically a fast-moving sequence of stills. In fact, the human eyeball perceives movement through a progression of still images – maybe ALL movement is illusion!
*reasons himself into catatonia*
Technically, what our eyes see is all still images and specialised neurons in the brain interpret movement from cues in the information coming from our eyes. It’s actually a (rare) medical condition where someone can’t perceive movement.
So basically… you’re kind of right?
I’m glad that Becky is trying to reason with him. Like I don’t know what Toedad thought would happen. You don’t bring a gun to a school. You just don’t.
I think the hovertext is being optimistic about the contents of Ross’s head.
Oh no Willis, don’t go trying to get us to feel sympathy for him. We ain’t falling for that… hopefully.
I have a huge capacity to feel sympathy for anything. Especially evil things. Because no one else will.
Then I must commend you for your capacity to feel sympathy for him. I have none for him.
I wouldn’t classify him as evil. Evil is actually knowing that what you’re doing is wrong and doing it precisely because of that. Jerkass is thinking that what you’re doing is right, without caring about others feelings. Within this framework, the spectrum goes: Galasso-Mike-Toedad.
I’m not. I’m more worried about Dina.
well, rest easy.
Or, you know, don’t.
Yay! She survives. But she could still have horrible injuries that we can’t actually see.
Ah! Whew. Thanks, I hadn’t seen that one yet.
So Dina looks pretty much unscathed and untraumatised there, only a day or two of comic time later.
And good post title, Willis! 🙂
Now, that was good to hear… now, will you please proceed to the front gate and wave that gun around a bit for good measure, then wait for the men in blue to show up and grant you your wish?
Aren’t State Troopers usually in khaki?
No, that’s the Sheriff’s Dept. Indiana State troopers wear dark blue.
Ah, but what color do IU campus police wear?
Blue, according to Google Images.
Yeah, cream and crimson uniforms would look ridiculous, so blue it is.
Poor Becky. On top of everything, now she has to be upset about and terrified that she’s going to see her own father killed.
In front of her.
Now matter how much one has hardened one’s heart against a toxic family member who is a direct threat to you, that’s a really hard thing to go through.
and if he does indeed get SWATted, Becky will totally feel like her dad died before her eyes because she was gay. (It wouldn’t be true — his response was all his choice and not hers — but she couldn’t help but feel that it was her fault.)
There is nothing good about this scenario.
This. There’s a lot of guilt potentially at play here. Feeling like her gayness is going to get her dad killed. Feeling that her seeking out Joyce’s help may just get her shot at or further traumatized. Feeling that her allowing herself a bit of happiness with a new girlfriend may have just put said girlfriend in a potentially deadly situation.
Even if Toedad is meekly arrested and no one is shot, Becky is not getting out of this without even more of a complex about how much she “imposes” on people and how much “damage” her presence is “causing”.
Satan actually met her mother at a company picnic. They just hit it off. She spent a while trying to break it off with Ross and he took it really hard. Satan’s just a really charming gentleman with a very unfortunate name. Runs a puppy sanctuary. Occassionally bites the head off of a goat.
Girls just love a bad angel, don’t they?
You could say she’s really fallen for him.
May bad, bad angel~ You put the devil in me~
So to speak.
Perhaps he is referring to former NHL goalie Miroslav Satan, who she tried to run away with until the tragic Zamboni incident…
That is now my head canon
SOOO many Zamboni-related deaths!
WHEN WILL THEY FIND A CURE??
Well… I hope this works….
…Now i’m scared to ask how her mother died.
breast cancer about a year ago in-comic.
Can I have a source for the cause being breast cancer? Not that I don’t think it’s plausible, but I’m not sure if that might be confusing her with Dana’s mom, who I know for certain did. Either an in-comic reference or a Willis comment or Tumblr post works.
Ross only said that his wife died without giving the reason.Dana’s mother is the one who died from breast cancer. Here.
I remember Willis posting on Tumblr that she was dead, but I don’t think he’s ever revealed what the actual cause was. Ross’s comments here make me worried.
I just recently looked at his tumblr, and he is still declining to give a cause of death, but hinted that it may end up being revealed in-comic.
Damn it Willis. Do not make me feel sympathy for this guy because his wife is dead. I refuse.
You shouldn’t feel sympathy for this guy because his wife is dead. You should feel sympathy for this guy because he is the product of a pretty warped subculture which teaches that everyone either accepts its ideas or spends the rest of eternity roasting and screaming and pleading for mercy that never comes in a lake of fire.
I don’t know about you, but if I believed with all my heart and soul that some of the family members I love most were headed for such a fate, I could imagine doing some pretty drastic things to prevent it. Examined in that light, Toedad is a figure to be pitied as much or more than hated.
Why not? You can sympathize with someone sometimes even if you hate him.
So, monochromatic flashback to Becky’s mom’s passing?
Ross has now punched the ticket for the Crazy Train.
*epic guitar solo*
Dumdum. Dumdum dumdum dumdum. Aye-ay-ay-ay.
I suspect we’ll find out the gun isn’t loaded and ToeDad actually wants to die.
The gun being loaded isn’t going to prevent him from dying though, should they choose to fire.
thatsthepoint.gif
I may have worded it badly (a bit backward) but I don’t think it was that redundant. I meant that wanting to die doesn’t mean it isn’t loaded.
…Well, holy shit.
Also, how the hell did Becky’s mom die?
KA SPEW
I love how Becky can somehow stay so Becky-esque in situations like this.
Becky’s mom actually just shacked up with a guy named “Stan” and Toedad never could keep the name straight.
He has similar issues with his coworkers Lucy Furrr and Muffy Stopholes.
You two literally made me loled!
You guys crack me up. XD Glad the comment section keeps its humour no matter how serious the strip gets.
Actually it was Miroslav Satan that she shacked up with…. former NHL player who played for the Penguins, Sabres, and several other teams.
He took her to Hell. Michigan.
And on this day, Hell was freezing over. I mean, of course it was, it’s Michigan.
Was unfamiliar with Hell, Michigan. Only knew about Hell, Texas whose main claim to fame are their “I danced in Hell” T-shirts.
Is there a way to view the hovertext on mobile? If not can somebody tel me what it is?
Tap on either left or right space below comic strip
Thank you kindly.
Sure thing.
A broken man is scary. For he who has nothing to lose will do anything to get it back.
Also, I’m doing this on a PHONE! How sweet is that?!
Oh hey it’s Background Bob.
I nominate this name. Is there a second on that? Willis?
I have to wonder what his projected “Best Case Scenario” is. Like “I’ll get shot in the face and that’ll make my daughter stop eating taco.” I mean to be fair, I’d probably not be intimate with anyone if it gave me the mental image of my father’s brains getting blown out whenever I make out with a lady. Those’re some extreme measures there, Ross.
In all seriousness? He shoots Becky before she can descend any further into sin, giving her at least some chance of eventually making it to heaven, and then gets martyred-by-cop.
(Actually, really best-case for him would be that she caves, gets in the car, and they go back home and None Of This Ever Happened. But I think he’d be willing to “settle” for the above.
Remember, this mortal world is but an ephemeral shadow; heaven and hell are eternal.)
You know, assuming his stupid crazy religious shit is right, it’d almost be kind of a meaningful sacrifice since the last thing he did on earth is kill his daughter. That’s gotta be a huge gamble for going to hell. Like even if he believes the Lord will grant him amnesty I’m sure it’s not a 100% Guarantee God won’t forsake you for that shit. That’s a hell of a theoretical insane sacrifice.
Except that it is 100% guaranteed in his world view. It is an act of pious devotion and self-sacrifice in the name of God. There’s nothing that gets you into heaven faster than that.
yeah, just ask Abraham.
LORD: “hahaha no, j/k, it’s okay, you don’t really have to kill your own son, dude. It’s enough that you would because I asked.”
I want to just take a moment to highlight how badass each of the main women of this arc have been.
I mean, we had Dina attacking and trying to waylay an armed man who was at least double her weight just to try and protect her girlfriend.
Last comic we had Joyce moving subtly in front of Becky in order to be a physical barrier and to try and talk him down from his “crusade” and trying genuinely hard to be the voice of wisdom.
And this comic… I mean, her father has now just threatened both of them with a gun. That is a major escalation, but she makes sure to check in about her girlfriend, moves out of Joyce’s way so she won’t be shot if he chooses to fire and even though she’s scared and crying, she’s even trying to save her dad’s life and try and reason with him as best she can. Even though that action might get her shot by the man who raised her.
That’s damn heroic.
And this fucker can’t see beyond lesbians=Satan because pastor told me so.
+1
me also with the +1
Seconded. (Or, technically, thirded?)
They are so AWESOME. Brave and compassionate even in the face of this horror.
Heh, in the midst of everything it’s just hilarious that Joyce and Becky do the same “no, me first”-shuffle they did with the beds.
Fudge you, Ross
I’m guessing Toedad is triple Dina’s weight. If she’s more than a hundred pounds in winter clothes and big heavy boots, I’ll eat a soda can (she’s built like my foster daughter, who is 60″ and 98#s). Toedad looks like he’s around three hundred. He’s very tall, heavily muscled, and it looks like he’s going to pot in the gut. My father was in similar shape and he was about 300.
jfc panel three is gonna make me cry
I can’t deal with those tears.
Why isn’t this strip titled “Ka-spew”, that’s what I want to know.
‘Cause Willis wanted to mislead us with the title “Troopers” to expect the worst/best.
He’s saving “Ka-spew” for when it actually happens?
Uggghhhh…”If you don’t come with me, they’ll kill me and you’ll feel guilty forever!” He’s forcing a lose/lose situation.
Yup, he’s just made the classic suicide threat, making himself simultaneously the hostage-taker and hostage.
It’s a common enough abuser ploy. Threaten killing yourself or threaten to kill a close loved one of the target to get them to play along and comply and do what you want. One of my ex’s abusive boyfriends pulled that card multiple times in order to prevent her from leaving him and to make her more compliant with regards to his regular sexual assaults.
Oh Crap!. So now are we supposed to ‘feel’ for Toedad? Well, I don’t. The man is a total psycho, who sees his daughter, not as a person, but as a possession.
Blow him away, and get his threat to life off the planet.
Since this is just another layer of abuse, no, I don’t think we’re supposed to feel bad for him.
Also since he’s still aiming the gun in the direction of his daughter.
I don’t think sympathy for toedad is what he’s going for so much as Becky being very heartbroken because she knows that’s where it’s going, and to show how far gone her dad is already.
(and like smiling cat said, it is just another abuse, although one that has historically gotten sympathy)
“It’s good to just kill people who are dangerous because life being valuable is actually a myth. I’m sure Becky can’t wait to see her dad fucking die. I know I’D be happy.”
The world isn’t black and white. There’s a continuum of greys in between, as well as every color in the rainbow and a few that aren’t. Willis does a pretty good job of capturing that.
Besides, just because a man is upset his wife is gone doesn’t mean we have to relate to him. All it means is he’s human. Nearly everyone has lost a loved one, and those who haven’t will soon enough.
Darn it, wrong guy. One level up, guys.
*nod* understanding isn’t condoning. He’s disturbed, unstable, grieving, and still wrong.
the fact that becky still loves her dad doesnt mean we have to
Hate only ends one way, though.
lol no. Sometimes it ends with your safety and sanity with a better life.
Fucking hell people, watch the damn platitudes.
Bullshit. Anger and hate doesn’t fix you, it eats you up. The person who’s safe, sane, and in a better life didn’t get there by hating someone, they got there by walking away.
Too provide further emphasis, President Donald Trump. This would have no chance of happening if our first response to something we don’t like or want wasn’t to hate it.
???????
I find it sad that so many people here can’t. Toedad is simply an especially ugly product of an already ugly belief system. There is a distinction to be made between a first generation abuser and someone who has himself grown up abused and as such has developed in such a way where he can no longer understand what is acceptable behavior.
Thank you for saying this. There’s a relevant (not equivalent, though) situation in my personal life, and no one’s been able to phrase this in a way that I could really wrap my head around. This makes sense, though.
I’d really, really rather this end without anyone’s brains getting blown out. Even toedad’s.
Agreed.
I don’t think thatll happen. Im sure the no-death policy extends to the main characters’ immediate family as well
YEAH. THAT’S NOT THE TALK OF A CRAZY GUY. AT ALL!
Soo… emotional blackmail as well. I’m… not sure why I didn’t expect that.
All is fair in love and WHEN THE OTHER GUY HAS A FUCKING GUN.
I’m referring to Toedad’s emotional blackmail of his daughter (he’s essentially threatening suicide unless she submits). Becky’s not doing anything wrong.
brumagem’s point still stands.
Maybe, but it’s completely unrelated to mine.
Ah, my mistake. I took you for one of those Toedad Defenders®
What happened to his wife anyway ? We were told she died but we get so back story on that?
Becky’s Mom pops into frame: “‘STAN’, Ross! His name is ‘Stan’! No horns or cloven hooves, no cosmic evil involved, just a guy who’s not a colossal toe-shaped asshole!”
He’s finger shaped. And Fingers are so much sexier. Especially in bed.
pfff arguable
It’s nice that you’re willing to die for your daughter and all, but maybe you could rechannel that devotion to accepting her for who she is and loving her and maybe not making the news as a psycho shooter.
I suddenly have the following theme stuck on my head:
https://youtu.be/SPFJ7LhQygw
That can be arranged. 🙂
Well, at least we know that Dina (probably) isn’t hurt. (Given all the worried comments over the past few days its probably a relief for some.)
The flipside being there’s now about an 80% chance it will be Becky making a hospital visit.
Not necessarily. Could be toedad if the police show up soon enough. Could be something unrelated to this story line. Heck, it could even be one of the main characters who went to the hospital not from physical injury but from emotional stress.
Personally? I’m hoping it’s an establishing shot for a fakeout where we discover that Ruth has an appointment with her ENT doctor.
I doubt it. Students wouldn’t be going to the hospital to visit Ross, and it is EXCEEDINGLY rare that emotional duress would cause a physical reactions severe enough to warrant an ER visit (although I would not blame anyone who might be in shock after WHATEVER happens if they needed professional help).
We don’t know that, do we?
Well when Becky said “Have you hurt anybody” he said no. Its certainly possible that he’s lying, but I think its unlikely. For one, he doesn’t seem smart enough, and given the fact that he’s willing to threaten his own daughter with a gun, he might think telling her “I hurt your friend… I’ll do the same for you” would help convince her to go with him.
From the last strip we saw Dina in, I got the feeling that as soon as Ross spotted Becky he went straight for his car to follow her and totally forgot about Dina. At least that’s what I’m hoping.
Out of universe, we now have a preview panel from next chapter showing a reasonably unharmed Dina.
DAMN YOU WILLIS, MAKING ME FEEL BAD FOR A GUY WHO WAS BEATING UP DINA
So, this is good, right?
I mean, relative to the possibility of him just shooting right away.
For real though, I’m glad Ross was able to enter conversation. It stalls for time.
The conversation sounds a lot like he’s planning to get himself killed.
BUT TOEDAD if you kill her now she can’t repent her sins and find Jesus again … again (just play along til the gun’s gone).
Satan? Whatever happened to ya know “All part of God’s plan”? Isn’t that the party line?
Satan seems to be a convenient bogeyman for some people to pin all the problems of the world upon, so that they don’t have to believe that it’s the work of God. Or something like that.
A theory that has popped up is that since Mrs. McIntyre was suffering from her illness (breast cancer), she had an assisted suicide. And as we know, suicide is a sin in Judeo-Christian ideology.
There’s room for argument that subtly assisted suicide might be sometimes acceptable in the case of impending death. But Ross isn’t much of a grey-area thinker anyway.
My point precisely. Obviously, the doctor or a nurse had to do the deed, because no one in the church circle would even think of such a thing.
Ugh, please don’t say “Judeo-Christian.” It’s an inherently anti-Semitic term in that it assumes Judaism is ANYTHING like Christianity, and it’s also Islamiphobic but pretending the third Abrahamic religion is somehow radically different enough from the other two to be left out.
People really need to stop fucking saying “Judeo-Christian” when they mean CHRISTIAN. I am so fucking tired of seeing goyim say that.
Not so omnipotent after all.
‘All part of God’s plan’ is when something bad happens to someone else.
‘Satan’ is when it happens to you.
And “Lawyers” is when it happens to everybody.
lolz nice 😀
To quote Terry Pratchett, “Just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous.”
Joyce didn’t even know he had a gun. Becky may or may not have known.
Has he secretly had a gun all along, or did he just buy the thing today? Does he have any idea how to use it properly?
Wait, why would Joyce know he had a gun over Becky? In this situation Becky should be more aware of how much possesion he has a gun, right? What are you talkin’ bout?
Joyce in this strip expresses surprise that Ross owns a gun, pretty clearly indicating that she did not know this.
Joyce then asks Becky if she knew that Ross owns a gun. Becky doesn’t answer, being pre-occupied with other aspects of this situation. It’s unclear whether or not Becky knew that Ross owns a gun since she neither expresses prior ignorance nor prior knowledge of this.
earlier becky said “why did you bring that”, which implies that she already knew he owned it.
Joyce’s line here is a bit ambiguous. She could he asking Becky if she knew her dad owned a gun, or if she knew he had it with him when he confronted her on campus minutes ago.
Some of the people in the comments for the “Clever girl” comic mentioned that he was practicing proper trigger discipline while he was in the woods, and I though I remembered someone mentioning he used to be in the military before he found Jesus, though I’m not 100% sure on that last point.
Ross being ex-military has not been established. It may be canon over in the other universe, for all I know (but I don’t think he had more than a couple appearances there), but it hasn’t been shown for DoA.
Willis has stated that he’s never been in the armed forces.
Back when we got the first picture of butthole dad from the waist down, I asked if he was ex-military or just one of those guys, and didn’t get a direct answer, but something else Willis said led me to believe it was the latter.
What I said was that he got his camo pants from Walmart.
Which is a detail I wanted to drop in the strip, but never found a place to fit in. SPOILERS, I guess.
I should say that I took a guess on Ross being more militia than military.
I should also add that I concluded that because he looks like someone I met in a Walmart parking lot that I stopped at to buy some household necessities on the way home from work a few years ago. A someone who fumbling with a half-empty beer in said parking lot, by his “DON’T TREAD ON ME” and confederate flag adorned truck, and equally adorned with at least one large tattoo of a confederate flag with some kind of battle slogan below it on his arm, who decided to swagger over to where I was loading in my stuff into my car and make a comment about how I should go bar hopping with him and he’d totally show me a good time.
Dude was also wearing camo pants, and a white shirt (though unlike Ross, it was stained with what I can only assume was beer dribblings, sweat, and maybe vomit.
I declined his offer and had never stepped foot into a walmart again until about a week ago.
It could just be that he likes camo pants. Or they were on special. Or his other pants were in the laundry.
he was practicing trigger discipline, but also he was pointing his gun with no intention to shoot which is also not something you’re supposed to do. so 1/2
I practice proper trigger discipline (and muzzle discipline). I’ve never had any affiliation with the military, militia groups, or any such thing (I also grew up in a rather fundamentalist household).
Joyce could have meant “Did you know your dad brought his gun with him today?”
There’s no way he bought it today. Waiting periods are a thing, unless he bought it from the stupidest private seller this side of the Mississippi.
THere’s usually no waiting period on long arms. Almost all long arms are bought for the explicit purpose of hunting. People who want to commit crimes usually go with pistols, which is why in some jurisdictions, there are waiting periods on handguns.
Depends on the firearm your buying, and if your background check comes back clear or not. If there’s a hit on your check, the gun owner will likely have to wait for a definitive yes or no from the ATF which may take a phone call, a few hours, or days to complete. Anything can really affect that check, such as unpaid parking/traffic fines.
I think there is a more stringent process for something that qualifies as a defense weapon, such as an AR15 or a handgun, which unlike a hunting weapon, have the intention to some degree of putting holes in a human body.
Also depends on the state you get the firearm in. California has 3 day waiting period no matter the firearm. A state like Texas has minimal to none. Of all the factors that go into whether someone commits a violent crime with a purchased firearm, this one matters the least. Waiting periods don’t deter someone from killing other people, it just forces them to PLAN to kill other people and wait a little longer before actually killing people. Last I checked, the time of which a shooting takes place is never a considered factor in how bad a shooting is… and all anyone really cares about is one happened at all.
Or, at the very least, I can say I’ve never heard anyone (not even Fox News or CNN) say something like “5 people were killed at a school shooting in ____ at approximately 10AM, but at least it happened on a Thursday instead of a Monday!”.
Most states have no waiting periods and very little restriction on rifles, shotguns, and other long guns. California is the exception. Only pistols tend to be heavily regulated. I’ve bought rifles both private sale and in a store, neither required any sort of backgound check. In the store, I had to prove I was 18 and sign a card that had a few lines to the tune of “I am not a fugitive of the law”. (You don’t have to be 18 to buy a rifle, just to legally sign the card. If you’re not, you need a guardian present.) The private sale was like any other cash transaction, there were no legal requirements to report anything, sign anything, do background checks or whathaveyou.
In most of the US, private sellers normally are not required to do anything. Their liability ends at knowingly selling a gun to someone who is prohibited, which usually amounts to asking to see ID. It is the buyer’s responsibility to be truthful and follow any state law that may apply, such as registering a handgun where required, disclose felonies that would disqualify them, disclose what state they reside in, etc.
Actually, one thing it does is deter impulse “acts of passion”. Sure, you can plan to kill and wait a few days and get a gun and carry out your plan, but you can’t get mad, run down to the corner store, come back with the gun and blow someone away. You’ve at least got a few days to cool down.
That doesn’t show up on the evening news, since if the story is “Guy bought a gun with the intention of shooting up a school later in the week, but by the time the waiting period was up he’d changed his mind” no one ever finds out about it.
I’ve never had any waiting period in five states.
I’m not sure what Ross is up to here. But it sounds like he knows that this is going to end poorly for him.
Dad, if you strike me down I promise I will become more Gay than you could possibly IMAGINE!
Mmmm… THAT’S good levity. I tip my hat to you.
I now longer think know he planning on killing anyone but himself…so I guess he’s not sure if it suicide or not if he gets someone else to shoot him.
If you’re killed by someone else for a religious and righteous cause, it’s martyrdom.
Some cases it’s also martyrdom if you kill yourself, but you kinda have to have the whole of your heart and dedication into offing yourself for the glory and victory of God.
Also, if she doesn’t want her dad to get shot by troopers, “If you don’t put the gun away right this second, I will become so gay my hair will take on the colours of the rainbow!”.
Well…
That escalated quickly…
We’re well past that point already.
The drama, I meant, not the events.
An extra layer got added…
where the hell is everyone on this flippin campus!!! Someone needs to do something!!!
There’s that guy in panel two who almost walked into the line of fire. He looks like he might call 911.
Hey, I actually feel sympat- NOPE! I lied. Fuck you Toedad.
Dude obviously needs help though. But probably not as much as the girls will as a result of this.
Yeah, my sympathy for the deluded runs out the moment they pull out a gun.
I think he might actually be half right. Satan didn’t steal his wife, but he may have stolen his sanity.
Looks like Toedad is willing to go out in a blaze of glory.
Guess I’m just an unforgiving asshole. I wouldn’t mind a bit seeing him blown away. But…yeah not something I’d want Becky to have to witness.
So, lock him up for the next 50 years, take that long to square him away.
I just had a very bad, sad thought. Ross knows, *really* knows, that Becky is a lesbian. That it’s bone deep, and no amount of prayer is going to change her. If he thought she could really be changed, he would be backing off, trying to convince her to go with him in some other way. A way that didn’t draw the attention of people who would stop him. I think he has given up, and the only question now is whether he wants a suicide-by-cop, or a murder-suicide-by-cop.
I need to go sleep now. My head hurts all of a sudden.
Alternatively, Ross knows Becky “irredeemable,” thus he has to kill her now before she can heap even more damnation upon her soul. Not saying he’s at that stage yet, but I worry that’ll be his eventual conclusion.
It’s possible.
At the very least, he thinks this “stand against Satan” is critical, either by martyring himself or blowing away the demon that has stolen his daughter (and I’ll leave it to the horrible bits of my brain to worry about whether that would be Becky, Joyce, Dina or all of the above).
Well at least on the previous day he said:
I will not lose faith that she can be corrected.
(…) I will rehabilitate her through any means necessary.”
I doubt the Becky’s mom ran away and Ross pretended she’s dead theory is viable. Surely Joyce’s parents would know if she simply disappeared, and hence Joyce would know as well. And although we don’t know anything about her it’s a reasonable guess that she wouldn’t have much more experience living by herself, if any, than Becky does. Ross doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d marry a woman who’d come from a less restrictive background than he finds acceptable.
There is the little issue of the fact that Becky was 17 at the time and probably would have noticed the distinct lack of a funeral had Ross faked her death.
Yeah. Unless of course Ross is a funeral director.
I don’t like Ross. I don’t agree with Ross. I absolutely don’t condone the shit he’s doing. But after reading this strip, I’m beginning to feel like I might understand Ross.
It’s only been a year since his wife died, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t a whole lot. I doubt he’s coped in the healthiest ways. And so, when Ross finds out that Becky, his daughter, the last surviving piece of his immediate family, is (at least in Ross’ warped mind) betraying him…
The straw breaks the camel’s back. Ross MacIntyre was probably an unpleasant guy even before any of this happened, but in his attempts to “repair” things, he took the plunge and went into gun-swinging, final-gambit mode. Because if he can’t fix this, what else does he have?
Again, I don’t want any of this to seem like I’m trying to excuse Ross in any way. I mean, for God’s sake, he’s trying to take his daughter to conversion therapy by gunpoint. But I’m able to visualize where he’s coming from, and it’s an unsettling place.
Yup. In his mind, he lost the fight against cancer because his faith was not strong enough, he did not pray enough, he was not righteous enough for God to intervene. And now, less than a year later, he has been handed another major test of faith, the last of his family stolen away by demons that are in the very process of recruiting her and stealing her soul. And this time he has no intention of showing the same weakness that cost him his wife.
In short, it’s all about him in his head. His wife didn’t get an illness that was very hard for her. Instead, his wife was targeted to see if his faith was strong enough to save her. Similarly, his daughter is not just a gay person. It’s all another test by God or Satan to see how far he’d be willing to go to save his family.
One among many of his major flaws is that he really does believe that he’s the center of his own universe and everything is tests of faith, righteous rewards, or punishments for not being firm enough. And that is sadly a worldview that is promoted a lot in that particular subset of Christian ideology. That tragedy to those close to you is really about you and is about a chance to show how righteous and pious you are.
It makes me really sad to know that to this day, there are people raised in that manner of thinking. And that it has been hammered into their brains so strongly since childhood that for a lot of them, no amount of reasoning of new evidence can ever change their minds and heal them from that brainwashing. Truly a tragic reality.
The positive side of this is that I can say having grown up in that culture that it isn’t taking in this generation as well as it has before. Things like the internet means it’s way harder to shield kids from knowledge of the world and interactions with diverse individuals. As such, a lot of fundie kids I knew ended up like Joyce or Willis, either adapting their faith to accommodate the world or who have fully broken with their former faith and become strident critics of how they were raised.
The brainwashing is weakening and so more kids are being able to escape.
I suspected as much, but wasn’t sure if it was just me trying to be optimistic. Glad you can confirm it. With some luck, fifty years from now, this way to raise someone will be practically unheard of in secular countries. (Not that I’m not hoping this won’t be the case in non-secular countries, I just highly doubt it’s feasible.)
Especially because even innocent googling (that is, not trying to research to undermine your parents, but googling a question because you don’t feel like asking or it’s tangentially related to something) can bring up new information, I assume?
Related: Becky made a comment about not having had unfettered internet access before, and getting lost in googling all the stuff Dina had been talking about…
Oh very much so, Willis has talked about being on Transformer message threads and simply noticing that the back and forth about bots being awfully similar to internal Church debate and I knew a number of kids growing up who started forming very heretical (by their Church’s viewpoint) views on the treatment of gay people in society because an internet personality they liked or a clan member in their MMORPG was gay and talked about their life experiences.
None of them were intending to fall out of line with the faith they grew up with, but it’s hard to hold such cold viewpoints when you can actually see the full shape of those you’ve been trained to see as the enemy.
Would you say, Cerberus, that this also is related to the paternal themes that were discussed elsewhere, such as the continued Victorian idea that the male sphere encompasses spirituality, and the expected roles of women as wives in such communities- in short, that because he is the man, this is all based around him (and his perceived strengths and faults)? Or is it more likely just a very self centered view of God and spirituality? (or most likely, a combination thereof)
Very much so. The idea of global events just being the setpiece for the personal battle for one’s soul is a broader and more universal facet of this worldview, but it definitely gets wrapped up in those patriarchal values. He’s the man, the protector against moral corruption and he failed… twice in his viewpoint. Thus its “on him” to set it right.
So yeah, what you said with it being a combination thereof.
This struck a chord with me, particularly the responsibility aspect. When I started my therapy, I discovered that I felt responsible for everything.
I grew up in an atmosphere which was at once fundamentalist (in an English way, so no guns) but also turbulent in that my father married a Welsh Chapel-goer. My mother was not an easy mix with my grandparents. So I imbibed this sense of responsibility, even taking on a role so that my father could live vicariously through me.
It did me no good.
However, we now have a villain who is freighted with self-failure and grief. A slightly better villain than we first started with, more of a tragic figure self-figured for suicide-by-cop.
It will hit Becky hard when that happens, and I’m not sure about Joyce’s reaction.
BTW, Willis posted something on his twitter-feed about a bad father who was arrested on his way to his child’s college.
In the Old Testament “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son'” as a test of Abe. Is Ross’ view of this analagous? Does he believe that God has told him what to do OR that he’s being tested to come up with a solution, and God will be grading him? (If that makes sense….)
Of course, one strand of Jewish thinking on that one is that Abraham failed the test by not arguing with God about it. There’s also the interpretation that the story is meant as a contrast with other gods of the area, to show that Israel’s god is different: of course Abraham’s god demanded the sacrifice, that’s what gods do. But wait, this god stopped him and saved the son instead? Huh?
… AFAIK, neither of these interpretations gets much traction in evangelical / fundamentalist circles.
Willis pulled the drama tag.
Jesus, I don’t want to think about what might have happened to Becky’s mom.
Willis pulled the Drama Tag on the first strip. Although it didn’t look like it what with Becky telling a poop joke.
Can we try to feel some sympathy for Becky’s father? I mean, the dude’s actions are horrible. His methods for achieving his goal of “reclaiming” Becky’s soul are horrible. But he honestly believes that he’s protecting Becky from Satan. He isn’t using it as an excuse; he honestly believes this is what he is doing. He is responsible for his horrible, horrible, actions, but the most tragic part is that he honestly believes he’s doing the right thing. He’s not just an unstoppable rage machine. There’s still hope that he’ll come to his senses, and that no one will get killed. Becky still loves him, and he still loves her. Fundamentalist Christianity is just as much as fault for Ross’s actions as Ross is. Ross doesn’t understand lesbians, and so it’s easy for him to hate them. We don’t understand Ross, so its easy for us to hate him. Ross’s actions are unequivocally wrong. I’m just asking that we try to understand him because only understanding can lead to reconciliation. Ross is fictional, but he’s representative of a few million of the most fundamentalist Christians in America. If we can’t understand the way they see the world, we’ll never be able to find the strength and love to convince them that all deep romantic relationships are expressions of love and care independent of the genders of the couple in the relationship, and thus that all people deserve equal rights to marry whomever they choose.
Fundamentalists are defined by their hatred, and if we exhibit that hatred towards them we become what we claim to hate.
A while back I said I didn’t like Ross because his character felt too flat and this comic kind of quells that. He’s not just a robotic monster with a gun SO I’m more fine with his character’s role in this story at least.
ok im gonna need to disagree with your last sentence straight out bc that’s just not true. Hating an oppressor is not the same as hating the oppressed. That said, yeah, sure, he believes what he’s doing is right. That doesn’t mean we need to feel sympathy for a (grown-ass) man who THREATENS HIS DAUGHTER AND HER GIRLFRIEND WITH A GUN!!!! I say he and others like him have had plenty of fucking time in their lives to sort out their hate- at some point they don’t get to use the church as an excuse anymore. If he can get his shit together and somehow make amends for this (which will take YEARS, decades maybe), then yeah, fantastic. But right now, fuck him. fuck him fuck him fuck him fuck toedad
We currently hold the power. We are the majority. They oppress members of their community and their family, and we need to halt that oppression. But hatred won’t help that situation AT ALL. It’ll only turn us into oppressors ourselves because, again, as a majority we currently hold the power.
Really, we queerfolk hold all the power over Christian Dominism? Wow. That’s impressive. Cause it really has seemed that we only were just allowed to marry like people after a long and drawn out fight mostly involving the disproportionate amount of political power that particular sect has. And like we can still be fired in most states or refused housing or discriminated against simply because an employer/landlord/business decides that us existing is a violation of his moral code.
And like the landscape for the T in LGBT is still frequently targeted for murder by those who follow those religious tenets. And like we’re not really allowed to piss in peace and are demonized as child molesters in order to enrich those who’ve built a career out of hassling queer individuals for decades.
And like a huge chunk of our homeless population is queer or trans, mainly because of families like these who find disownment a casual thing and a necessary thing in order to “protect the spiritual health of the family” and the messages of hate give protection to other hateful people to see queer people as acceptable targets for abusive laws or ill treatment.
I know what you are trying to say, but the oppressed do not hold the power. Not even now that gay marriage is legal in the States. Us recognizing harm perpetuated against us and being against that is not the same as perpetrating that harm in the first place. It’s the difference between raising one’s arms as a shield against strikes and striking someone.
I was looking at this from the perspective of “A majority of americans support gay marriage, thus we’re the majority”, however I believe you offer a more nuanced view of the situation. You’re right.
Marriage is just one small aspect, homophobia and transphobia
are still bloody rampant. Repeat your statement when people
stop getting kicked out, getting murdered, etc… just for not being
cis-het.
dunno who “we” are
I don’t think that’s how brainwashing works, Liahansen. If you’re brainwashed to think you’re right you’re probably not gonna easily decide “Maybe I’m wrong”. That’s why it persists in our minds well into our adulthood. People are weird.
“Brainwashing” isn’t a magical excuse that absolves people of blame. The point is, this is an adult with a gun threatening his child with kidnapping, murder, or suicide because she’s gay. To me, that’s not deserving of sympathy. I understand that he’s a human (well, a character who represents real humans) and more complex than his actions here alone, but these actions are seriously unforgivable. I can understand him without sympathizing with him
I think he’s in need of therapy. This is probably the first time his mental disconnection has come this far to light because he’s been so sheltered his whole life. I want to see him get better. Not die or just be thrown in jail with no chance of redemption. He may be a lost cause and he may never change, but I’d rather him get help than just get rid of him.
me too. I want him to be somebody I could sympathize with. Right now he isn’t
If he doesn’t though, if he grows old and alone because of his own actions and never changes his beliefs, then I couldn’t give a care
I don’t forgive him. What he’s doing is unforgivable. But, maybe I’ve absorbed “hate the sin, love the sinner” … not that I “love” Ross, and in my world he’s the sinner (NOT Becky). But I want to … pity him? (which is perhaps patronizing? ) rather than hate him. As i was taught about Greek Tragedy.
Becky’s surely as brainwashed as he ever was and somehow she was able to come around on the subject.
Nope. He is using emotional blackmail on his daughter in order to force her into letting him kidnap her and send her away to get “fixed”. If I knew of anyone IRL who did that I would tell that person to eat a never-ending bag of dicks.
That is a logical theory. We should still make attempts to understand fundamentalists, though. Most parents do actually love their children, even if religion warps how they “show” their love.
any kind of love that involves gunpoint negotiations is not a love i want to be a part of
I’m not saying we should be accepting of the way they act, or that sort of “love”. I’m saying that we need to understand their motivations if we are to help them realize just how wrong their actions are.
That’s not a theory, it’s a description of what’s happening.
And that he does not love her is demonstrated.
Yes yes, I’m sure he’d claim he does. But the word has a meaning, and he does not.
Conclusion doesn’t follow from premise.
That he is willing to die for this shows that not only does he think he’s right, he’s not harboring any real doubts about it. Being that fully entrenched in a way of thought makes it less likely that he can be talked down.
I meant that he’ll realize that if he murdered his daughter or anyone else, that would be an act of Satan. I don’t believe in Satan; I’m just trying to use Ross’s worldview to offer a justification for putting the gun away.
But, again, his worldview does not offer such a justification.
Shooting Becky would not be an act of Satan. To condone her sin would be.
But he doesn’t “want” to do this, he believes it’s his duty. That’s why he asked God to give him strength to do what he believes he must, even though he doesn’t want to, and fears that he lacks the strength for. That’s why he looks so sad in todays strip. I think. This doesn’t excuse/mitigate his actions in any way. Nor do I forgive him. Maybe I should? But my sympathy (if that’s what it is), doesn’t extend to that.
Yeah, no. Responding to hate with “love” or something gets you shot. Not playing.
Unless you do it like this: http://www.nuklearpower.com/2004/11/27/8-bit-chronicles-3-of-3/
“He’s evil, but we should have some sympathy due to his reasons for being evil, those being that he’s really bleeping evil.”
You know, even when I was Christian, one thing I always hated about the flavor of crazy fundie I grew up around (not my family, thankfully, but just in this area) was their belief that someone who was born, lived, and died without ever hearing of the existence of Christ would still go to hell for not being saved.
That kind of goes the other way around here, too. I’ve always had a bit of sympathy for people who are born and live in such a walled-off religious environment that they’re never even exposed to reality, at least not without it being shouted down as Satan’s evil secular influence by everyone around them.
It’s not enough to excuse anything Ross is doing, or not want him to get his just punishment for it. But it’s kept me softer than most towards Joyce and Becky (and to some degree the Browns).
The fact that so many of us are feeling uncomfortable slight empathy towards Ross just means that, despite him being very clearly the villain, his motivations are meaningful and understandable, as opposed to just “because evil fundie raaar” — which is a mark of great writing. Hat tip to Willis for that.
You put into words several things I’d been thinking about since this thing with Ross started.
We remember how Joyce initially reacted when Dorothy told her she was an atheist. We also know that, soon enough, she sorta made peace with it. Joyce is much younger than Ross and I think she has a more open mind thanks to that. Younger minds are more malleable, less used to thinking “this is that, period”, and therefore more prone to doubt and to changing their minds when presented with evidence.
What I’m getting at is that, as Jezi touched upon, Ross has probably spent his whole life in the same fundie bubble. He never had the opportunity to go through what Joyce is going through right now, which is to be confronted with non-believers, “sinners”, who are actually really nice people, and readjust your belief system consequently.
As such, even though Ross’s actions are horrible and I really hate him, I find myself understanding where he is coming from, and hoping that he won’t die (which would cause Becky unnecessary pain), but instead, with time (probably spent in jail, for Becky and Dina’s safety), will see how wrong he had been, reconsider his beliefs, and redeem himself by fully accepting Becky as she is.
I have very many doubts that Ross is capable of that, considering how far off the deep end he’s gone, but this is what I hope happens. For Becky’s sake as well.
Jezi, Saki: I can’t find the up/+ button, but, yes.
Recently discovered that my boyfriend’s mom apparently thinks people who don’t believe in Jesus will go to hell. There was some sort of discussion about whether or not pets went to heaven (which I tried to joke about the movie “All Dogs Go to Heaven about, but sadly was ignored) and then there was a debate about if infants would go to hell for not believing in Jesus and I was like……..
you do realize
that the women your son is dating is a non-religious jew right?
standing right fucking here.
wonderful.
I understand why Ross is the way he is, but that still doesn’t make it any less assholish.
We are literally seconds away from a Toedad “Roy Batty” speech, comeplete with dumpy pigeons.
It’s not raining. So it’ll look really dumb, since how will tears be lost without rain to wash them away? Though Roy’s last words…
He could fall into the fountain.
Whelp, he’s nuts. Loves his daughter and is deeply worried about her, but still nuts. There’s something off about someone who just refuses to put down the gun in a situation like this.
But damn panels four and six are well done. Becky’s gotten through to her dad and there’s a smidgen of sympathetic person there. Ross is teetering on the edge here. I may not like him, but he’s out of my “punch his teeth in” category.
In comment to the brains going everywhere it’s okay he’s not really using it from the looks of things.
Hey toe head, don’t pull the trigger. Maybe this day can end in court mandated therapy for you instead of… you know the whole head explosion thing.
Which he should definitely NOT put Becky through.
I know that David Willis has said that he has no interest in bringing her back, but I wonder whether one of the cops who responds to this will be Guns from It’s Walky!.
One of the cops will just be an actual gun.
crazy theory time
Okay, we know that Becky’s mom died. But how did she die? My guess she was murdered. But who murdered her? That’s easy. Who haven’t we seen yet, who was evil as hell in the last universe, that would make sense as a drug cartel or gang member? Jason’s father! Think about it Dargon is a anagram of Dragon, Ross says that the devil took her away. A dragon is a popular portrayal of the devil. This all makes so much sense!
0/10
Didn’t involve aliens.
Some Conspiracy theory!
The audience cannot say “Becky’s mother is deceased.”
The audience just knows they aren’t together.
What the audience, and Beck, may like to find out some time is: “Does Ross color his hair?”
We can say Becky’s mom is dead. Characters in the comic have stated she’s dead. The author has stated she’s dead. And red hair is a recessive gene. Even if neither of Becky’s parents had red hair, if they both have incidences of red hair in their family, it’s possible for Becky to have red hair.
She’s dead. What killed her is speculation.
Some think she died of something like cancer, which can kill you within weeks or months of it appearing, or take years.
Which personally, I think she had some kind of illness like cancer, or something else chronic, but with the added component of it going ignored/untreated.
Why? Because of something called “faith healing” where people abhor and avoid doctors, hospitals, and anything resembling modern medicine for themselves and their families, and think all illness and injury can be prayed away, and any lingering scarring, effects, or death is a direct result of “not praying and believing hard enough”.
Considering Ross said he wanted to “have us lay our hands over you” in regards to Becky’s lesbian orientation, and being gay is considered a defect or a sickness to his brand of religious-stupid, either Ross came from a faith healer upbringing, or he bought into it at some point… I’ve heard of some people diving head first into practices like that when they or a loved one is diagnosed by doctors with a major illness or medical issue, or after seeing the after effects of treatments like chemo, where they then blame the doctors and medicines for making them or their loved one sick, so they opt to reject it entirely.
Could be possible that Ross went faith healer and either convinced, or forced, his wife to not be treated for her sickness, under the promise of “praying hard and long enough will cure everything”. She dies, he assumes it’s because they didn’t try hard enough, or something else caused it.
Then… he finds out about his daughter making out with her roommate.
One can assume he blames Becky’s lesbian orientation for his wife’s death, though given his almost sympathetic representation here, he probably doesn’t blame Becky herself. She’s a target of evil forces, the same ones that foiled his intense praying to cure his wife, and he MUST save his daughter before they take her too. If it requires his death, then so be it.
Becky uses Reason and it… might be working??? Nah, it can’t be.
Yes, Fundie, you’ll die for her, but will you live for her? Will you do what is best for your daughter, or will you cling to your dogma and try to make her conform to some archaic vision?
The latter. To change is to surrender to Satan in his worldview. And so even though that would be best for both of them. He refuses.
In this, he’s the anti-Joyce.
Joyce had a moment of either updating her faith or standing firm even though it would hurt herself and others and she went with the former, enriching both herself and those around her. Toedad has done the opposite and so has made everyone else’s life so much worse.
“Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder.”
This is just… so heavy. Wow.
Well, he’s still a violent, abusive asshole of a dad, but at least his heart is in the right place… that gives him one place where he’s better than Amber’s dad… sort of… ugh damn it Willis why can’t you let us demonize Toedad? Now I feel almost bad for him despite his asshole personality… almost
Becky obviously loves him… His actions in this arc seem to be an extreme unlike anything she’s ever seen; its perfectly plausible that he never once abused her or became violent with her prior to this (outside of religious brainwashing, which is abuse).
Or that even when a parent is abusive, you still don’t want them to die. I mean, I’ve known enough people with abusive parents and I’ve spilled my own situation with my parents enough times. It’s one thing to recognize abuse and toxicity and try to move to a point where you can heal and another thing entirely to be unmoved by their illness or death.
My gf’s dad is epically physically abusive and has been so her entire life, but she was still shaking in grief and worry when he had a heart attack recently and was willing to put herself in harm’s way to try and help him. And that’s not uncommon for a number of abuse survivors.
Based on the depth of her survival strategies its very likely she put up with regular emotional abuse at least and he is currently threatening one hell of a big basket of all sorts of nasty abusive behavior. But that doesn’t mean that she’s in a place where she can sit by and watch her daddy get shot in front of her.
Becky seems surprised enough that I feel as though she hasn’t experienced ongoing abuse, but +1 on that she wouldn’t necessarily want to see him die (and even if she did want it, wouldn’t necessarily be totally okay with watching it unfold, feeling like she could somehow prevent it).
Also, because of her super confined upbringing, she might not until now be thinking of things as abuse, and therefor might not harbour the same resentment she might in a few days as she learns more about things he did not being okay (this is me, although not on a gun waving level- on a ‘mom was emotionally and verbally abusive but I didn’t resent it until I was ~17 and learned that wasn’t everyone’s family dynamic’ level).
She ran away from him because he was abusive. He used the word “escaped.”
Oh, and she went from defiant to “Run! Split up in the woods!” very suddenly, at about the same moment he went for the gun.
She did not expect the gun itself, but she still expected to be physically chased down. She saw it coming and realized that Dina was also in danger.
He’s a moron and I mean that in the old-fashioned sense of the word.
Think about it for a second. This is what he does when he tries to help someone.
His heart could not be less in the right place.
Look at what you described. That is not “heart is in the right place.” That is “heart is two states away and partially melted.”
im ready for those state troopers now