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I know of moms who’ll brandish a knife, so I’m sure moms who’ll draw a gun are out there. Some have probably shot their kids to try to purify them of queerness.
…and now I’m sad.
…this transcends my capacity for sadness or even rage. That’s just fucked up to the point that there is no appropriate response.
I hadn’t even considered kids getting hurt. I was just thinking of teens like Becky, which is horrible enough.
Yeah, that one is super fucked up. I wish I could say it transcended my rage and sadness, but working as a teacher I encounter too many damn awful things happening to all ages of kid and too many awful parents who in an ideal world would be behind bars.
lets not be blind to what is actually happening. the Twins mom thinks she loves her kids equally I’m sure. This isnt Passive Aggressiveness. She’s not trying to send a message, unlike Joyce’s mom. She doesnt understand her daughter, she doesnt know her daughter and she’s given up (probably) on her daughter. Maybe she feels Sal doesnt care about her, Maybe she doesnt know how to connect. What makes her bad in this case is her blindness to her favor of walky and how that alters her actions. If she didnt know what movies, snacks, or cloths to buy Sal she coulda tried to ask Walky or if Walky had the contact info of her friends but she didnt. Instead she probably put a few chips and a gift card in there and thats it because she doesnt realize she’s being neglectful
Trust me, parents who have favorites know damn well they have favorites. What they convince themselves of isn’t that they don’t have a favorite, it’s that either the least favorite deserves it because reasons (in this case, Sal’s criminal past) or that they manage to conceal it so well their kids don’t pick up on it (my folks, who honestly think I’ve never picked up the fact that they favor my sister over me).
say this as a least-favorite kid whose parents have in the past said shit like, “Oh, every parent has a favorite. The issue isn’t whether or not you have a favorite, it’s whether you let that affect how you treat them. I think as long as you don’t let it affect how you treat your kids, it’s okay.” I’ve spoken to other parents who have favorites, too, and they all know. They might bullshit to themselves and others about it, but they know. I find the degree of favoritism such parents exhibit is directly proportional to the frequency of their protestation that they love all their kids equally (yeah, keep telling yourself that. Sooner or later you might even believe it).
Now, having a favorite and having knowledge of their favorite might not mean that they are intentionally being malicious to the less favored. But the favorite gets doted on and the not favored is neglected. Passively, but it happens.
But my point is that Linda totally does have a favorite, and I find it very hard to believe that she is unaware that she has a favorite. That said, I am damn near certain that she has herself convinced that the bad relationship between herself and Sal is completely Sal’s fault for the convenience store stuff, and she doesn’t realize it started in her court, waay earlier.
Jury’s still out for me on whether or not she’s intentionally trying to rub her favoritism in Sal’s face or if it’s more that she dotes on Walky so much that Sal is just an afterthought and like Walky she’s too oblivious to realize that Sal knows what’s up and will take it personally. Neither option speaks well to her consideration and competence as a parent.
The observation about Linda’s lack of competence as a parent is actually part of why I still wonder if she notices. Going with the “she’s too oblivious to realise that Sal notices” theory, it’s also possible that Linda is too oblivious to notice herself. After all, it’s going to be a lot easier to notice that you treat your kids differently than that you actually like one better than the other.
And especially on how parents seek out an excuse based in the less favored kid’s actions to justify it or try and force themselves to believe they treat their kids equally.
And if the reason a kid is less favored is because of bigotry, they will also move Heaven and Earth to find a way to convince themselves that it’s totally not that, but rather that the other kid is just “doing so much better” at… something, anything (even if it’s only due to them having more advantages due to familial support and facing less direct bigotry in their life) and that’s why they’re more worthy of affection.
The justifications get way more impressively awful when the favored child is actually doing objectively worse than the non-favored child, because nothing the non-favored child accomplishes, even if it is genuinely impressive, will be enough for them to gain their parents’ esteem.
It’s actually a documented phenomenon with twins that parents will often arbitrarily pick a favorite. There was a quote in my developmental psychology textbook where a mother with identical twin sons basically says that she “knew right away that didn’t like me.” As in, from birth.
Hi do you have secret spy cameras in my place? (My sib has failed at pretty much everything ahead has tried since high school. Still the favorite. I could win the Nobel Prize in chemistry and they would be all “that’s nice dear. Your sister is going to try kinesiology this time and you should help her because she looks up to you and blah blah blah let us talk about her all conversation. Oh, and blame you for her failure because as the eldest it is your job to ensure the youngest’s success so her failure is really yours for not giving enough guidance and support and totes not hers for not doing the work or ours for bailing her out all the time.”
Yeah.
I’m at the point now where it’s almost funny. But yeah. That’s why I am pretty sure that Sal’s folks will find a way to blame her for Walky’s failure. Because nothing is ever the favorite’sites fault.
Not always, and while in this case there is a direct favourite in some cases both children think the other is the favourite as was the case with me and my sister. My sis thought I was the favourite because I was in less trouble and I felt she was the favourite because she got more attention which I now realise was due to my parents trying to support her through a bad time in her life. In that case I don’t think my parents really had favourites. However that said it does happen and I have seen it with other families and I totally see that Walky is very much the favourite in this.
That’s not really a great tagline for her…or anyone. Toedad doesn’t just set a low bar, he leaves it on the floor for people to trip over. Basically I’m saying you can actually be a better parent than him by accident.
Ayer’s rock isn’t even the highest point in Australia though. That goes to Mount Kosciuszko, a mountain so tall it stole it’s name from the shorter mountain next it.
You didn’t know? Toedad crossdresses as Linda in order to spread piety to two families. Autumn Walkerton was a tramp and unworthy to rear her children.
As the offspring of a shotgun dad and a “everything wrong in your life is totally your fault and you deserve it” rest of the family, I mark Carol as worse than Toedad. Because it’s much easier to break away from the parent that physically assaults you than the one who just makes you feel like utter sh*t. And those words stay with you. Those scars take SO MUCH longer to heal and fade. You give up on the gun-toter pretty quickly, but you spend YEARS trying to convince the commentator to rethink things, to find a middle ground, to reach a point where you can both forgive each other — as if there’s something they need to forgive you for. You lose more trying to maintain that connection than you do when the bullet comes out the gun. Getting shot hurts, and it might kill you, but living with the words of others hurts worse, for longer. So… Yeah. Votes on Carol being the second worst parent in the series, after Blaine (who used physical abuse as a tool for the emotional abuse, which made the emotional abuse even more powerful and damaging).
Given that he’s mentioned Joyce is Autobiographical, and given recent events, it’s fairly logical to conclude he doesn’t have a very good relationship with his own parents.
By giving Dorothy so much agency and instilling in her so much drive to succeed, they have given her a complex in which she almost never dares to have fun, has impossibly high goals she is almost guaranteed to be disappointed by not achieving, and frequently misses out on essentials like sleep and knowing what day it is just in order to study.
I mean, sure, Toedad kidnapped Becky. But he didn’t give her a complex!
((… and yes, that was me being silly. Hold the flames.))
Eh, I think it’s more statistics. There are a billion and a half ways to be a bad parent. I mean, look at the bad parents on showcase here. Your Toedads are startlingly different from your Carols, who are a whole different animal from your Blaines and your Lindas. Even if sometimes they echo each other. And that’s not even including the Randal/Sharons and Richards and Ruth’s grandfather and Naomi/Sauls and we can’t forget the Charles…es.
Being a good one is much harder. Jeremiah and Deborah are the only real examples. Though Haruka and Ryou seem pretty cool. Falyn, Reno and maybe Stacy? Hard to say.
And yes, I did skim through the Parents’ Weekend arc to find all those.
It’s hard to write a long story focusing on good parents. Where’s the conflict, unless you rely on easily cleared up misunderstandings?
Like, from what we’ve seen, Amber’s mom seems pretty cool, and Sierra’s parents were more than willing to help Amber out when her dad was being aggressive, so they seem nice. The Saruyamas were pleasant (or at least quiet) enough for Sarah to want to be adopted by them. Even Dorothy’s parents seem to be pretty good ones, but they only get so much screen time to serve as a foil and raise the stakes a bit when Joyce confronted her parents.
Joyce with her various traumas. Caused by Toedad AND Ryan.
Sarah and Dina with their social skills.
Sal was struggling with Malaya.
Amber with her various issues.
Danny and Ethan with their respective sexualities.
But when you have shitty parents, they are often the largest source of conflict in your life. It gets more pronounced in times like this where you both feel they still have a lot of control over your life, even though they aren’t close enough to exercise it.
“Any box in any universe has an equal chance of containing poo or containing not-poo” — This is the Bayesian doctrine of Equal Priors.
(Since when you start out, you have no idea what the actual chances are.)
But each time you open a box containing non-poo, that raises the chance that the next box will contain poo.
And the comic where Becky said that her dad took her to the Chik fil A rally years ago to shove it in the face of “the gays”, so yeah, he’s been awful for a while, with Becky’s mom at best playing the enabler role… though that might be partially because Toedad might have also been abusive. After all, he really did not have any truck with female independence in the kidnapping arc and it didn’t take very much “disobedience” for him to hunt Becky with a gun and strike her in the car.
That said, Becky-mom dying seems to have been a factor in him becoming (even more) unhinged. He might have been considerably less… extreme a year ago. There is, after all, a gap between being in a chickfila counterprotest and kidnapping people at gunpoint for… whatever he had planned.
I’ve got a headcanon that Ross took his wife’s death as a sign from God that he was being too slack and tolerant, so he doubled down. Then Becky thinking she’s gay is another sign, so time for quadrupledowning.
I think that might actually be canon-canon Especially since that is basically what Toedad was saying over and over again during his scenes. Both the ones with Dina as she was walking to the bus and the ones where he talks directly to Becky.
After all, if you are faithful and “good” then God rewards you in life according to the Prosperity Gospel. So if bad things happen, it just means you weren’t “good” enough and so must redouble your efforts until God sees your faith and makes the bad thing stop happening. And if he doesn’t, then you just weren’t “good” enough.
I mean, that moment not shooting Dina or Joyce? Clearly that weakness is what the devil exploited. Next time he will not be so careless. (yeah, I think when he is up for parole is going to be the scariest time for Becky the older scientist).
If Ross was always big into “traditional family roles”, she probably wasn’t permitted to do much more than cook, clean, and “sit there and look pretty”. Becky had to learn her unbreakable Stepford smile from somewhere…
But then again (again), Becky misses her mom. A lot. She may not have been the best mom, but considering how Becky gave her own dad the two-fingered salute in the end, I believe she misses her mom because her mom was a loving one.
I personally think that Becky’s mom was somewhat similar to Hank. But she was also married to Ross, and since Ross was the man* in this relationship, he made sure to be The Boss, in order to keep the family Perfect. Because having an ideal family that fit into the roles God had made for them was far, far more important to Ross than actual people (something Willis himself stated on Tumblr).
* As per the fundies’ designated gender roles, that is.
*cut scene to Mary’s parents sitting by the fire place reading*
Mom: “It’s a shame Mary told us she didn’t want us at that family weekend thing.”
Dad: “Yeah, I miss her. But she’s an adult now. We’ve got to give her space.”
Mom: “I just think… you think maybe we did wrong by her, giving her that much freedom?”
Dad: “It’s possible. No one can be perfect parents. But we raised her areligious and let her decide and she did, and we have to respect that. That was the better action than any agenda we might have pushed on her.”
Mom: “I just don’t get how she can … disfellowship us? If we were never in the religion to begin with.”
Dad: “I don’t think they call it disfellowshipping in her circle. And no one said religion has to make sense.”
Evil that has yet to be challenged reads more like ignorance to me. If Sal confronts her mother about this and her mom’s like “Nope.” then I’ll probably like them less. As it is it seems somewhat unintentional. At least that’s how I read it.
It’s intentional. Passive-aggressive parents love stunts like that. Was just out with a friend tonight whose mom out of the blue emailed her a text of her brother getting written about in the newspaper with the text message: “Look at how much more of a success your brother is than you.”
Not a joke, that was the literal message.
Given Linda’s deliberate ignoring of Sal’s very existence at Parent’s Weekend, deliberately sending Sal a smaller box than even the family friend would be right up her alley.
Billie isn’t as much a “family friend” as a surrogate daughter though. Which is not to say the small box isn’t an insult, but from Billie, Sal, and Willis’ comments on how Billie and Mr & Mrs Walkerton relate, treating Billie like family is fairly normal for them.
I have not yet seen enough to convince me she’s being intentionally passive aggressive (though if the gift is something that is obviously an after-thought or intended as a slap in the face – IDK an “inspirational” auto-biography of someone who came from a criminal past to be successful, or a hair straightener, or skin bleaching cream or what have you, then I’ll be unreservedly in that camp). But there is totally favoritism happening.
But passive favoritism can be pretty fucking shitty, too, and I’ve seen enough of that which looks enough like this that I’m not yet entirely convinced that Linda isn’t just massively inconsiderate and unobservant. Which is not to say that it’s any better for Sal. I’m in one of those situations and yeah my folks are not rubbing it in my face that they dote on my sister way more than me but the fact is she gets doted on way more than me, and they genuinely think they conceal it well enough that I don’t notice.
I’m thinking that might be what’s happening here – Linda bullshitting herself so well she honestly believes she’s not being explicit about her favoritism.
(which is not to say she’s not being shitty. More that she might not have the self-awareness to realize she’s being shitty. Walky got his inconsiderate jerk tendencies somewhere)
Billie’s says Jennifer, which is her given name (the nickname “Billie” coming from her last name, Billingsworth, because she came up with Walky’s nickname from Walkerton).
The problem with the boxes is that Mom Walkerton sent Walky and Billie pretty generous ones, and Billie’s not technically a Walkerton kid herself, while shipping a noticeably smaller one to Sal suggesting she sent and spent a LOT less for her than the others. It’s parental antifavoritism, basically.
That’s where this is going, from the looks of it. At this rate, Sal could win the Nobel Peace Prize and her parents will miss it just to watch cartoons with Walky, or something.
Charles might watch cartoons with Walky, but I don’t think Linda would. That’s not an acceptable thing for her golden boy to do, and he’s in college now, so it’s time for him to stop with those childish things and buckle down on becoming a doctor.
Linda’s pretty awful to Walky, too, just in a different way.
Yup. And this has been clearly going on for a long time given how nonplussed and unsurprised she looks in the comic. Like, yup, this shit again, thanks mom for the non-subtle reminder of how much less you’ve always rated me than your “perfect baby boy”.
Now that it’s late and nobody will ever read this, let me inject my obligatory bit of pedantry. Check out nonplussed in a dictionary. It’s surprised to the max. I don’t know what the negation of nonplussed is. You’d think plussed, but I’ve never been plussed myself, nor heard anybody else described that way.
I figure that they think of Billie and Walkie as unofficially engaged. Given that Billie spent the first week or two following Walkie around, loudly proclaiming that they weren’t a couple, I don’t know where they could get that idea.
It says ‘Jennifer’, her name is actually Jennifer Billingsworth! Billie is a nickname Walky made based off her last name, like how Walky comes from Walkerton.
As for the packages, there was been a subplot in the comic regarding whether there is a favoritism element between Sal and Walky. Sal insists that Walky is their favorite child, and as you can see from the packages… Walky and Billie get equally big boxes, while Sal has a smaller one. For Walky, it’s like an uncomfortable reminder of ‘oh yeah, maybe my sister was right about the favoritism’. The fact that the favoritism may come from a racist point of view also makes it very uncomfortable for Walky.
That’s what Walky said. Sal states that Walky was born looking whiter than she did, and that’s why they favored him. Given their reaction when they saw her with unstraightened hair, she may very well be right.
My personal theory is that it’s a nice juicy mashup of race and gender stereotyping – that it’s more acceptable to the Walkertons that their son be black than that their daughter be black.
Ooh! That’s one I hadn’t thought of. Thank you. That makes the most sense of anything I’ve heard–even than the hair thing. (Though I’m sure the hair also plays a part.)
It’s definitely not a looks thing. It was established back on the June 3rd, 2015, comic “tall” that the two twins are pretty much identical.
It’s actually the one thing that’s thrown me off about the whole thing. Skin color issues are things I’ve heard of. But one kid merely acting blacker than the other? That’s weird, and honestly makes me think that racism is not the only explanation. I mean, it’s been going on since they were really young.
Now, this is Willis, so I know that racism is going to be at least part of the issue, because Willis wouldn’t go there with having Sal be wrong, and come off as invalidating her perceptions. But I’m thinking there’s more to the story than we know.
(Hell, maybe even Sal actually lightens her skin. Or it lightened as she got older.)
And I’ve had that first link saved for a while, so the next time this came up, I could talk about this.
Ugh. I was gonna mention the hair thing, too! I just find it hard to believe that alone is enough. It’s not as if white people can’t have “black” hair–it’s just less common. I live in white-whitesville and I’ve seen people with hair like Sal’s.
If the hair thing is the only thing, I’m not sure how that squares with January 13, 2015‘s strip (which suggests that Walky’s hair isn’t necessarily inherently different from Sal’s). I’m wondering if it’s either a self-reinforcing cycle that started with something small (maybe even the hair, if Walky’s is less noticeable / doesn’t require as much effort to “fix”, due to being kept short), or a consequence of comparing her to herself vs comparing Walky to Charles, or simply (originally) interacting with her more (mother/daughter vs father/son – no reason to assume that they have a perfectly progressive idea of gender roles) and therefore noticing stuff (differences to herself) more with her than with Walky.
I don’t have personal knowledge of this issue, but assume that any kind of hair care is easier with short hair, so Walky might not even think of his hair as being straightened, rather there are simply chemical products that he always uses out of habit that have that effect.
And yeah bigotry is weird. I’ve known a good chunk of kids from mixed race homes where a parent has been racist to them a lot growing up despite having married someone of the race they are being racist towards.
Sal got a smaller box than Walky and even Billie, indicating a worse gift. Sal has claimed to Walky that their parents are biased against her and have been their whole lives, and Billie has urged him to take those complaints seriously, with some success.
Okay wait, now I remember. I think we learned about this during one of Amber’s flashbacks and that’s why I was confused.
Okay so, and correct me if I’m wrong here, Mother Walkerton plays favorites with Walky over Sal and this led to Sal feeling ignored most of her young life, then she tries to rob a convenience store, finds out that Amber can puncture both human bone and a police car hood in one thrust, and then she spent most of the time after that and right before the start of this comic at a boarding school, the resentment for her parents building up over time till she sees it as second nature or some bullshit I don’t know.
There’s also a bit where she calls walky out for being the recipient of favouritism, or specifically the oblivious beneficiary- which is why walky even picks up on the box sizes this fast. If this had happened a few weeks ago, he wouldn’t have even considered conclusions to jump to.
Straight up I’m just pointing out that I didn’t start reading this day by day till the middle of the Toedad saga, so I didn’t read any of the comments sections for the previous strips, nor do I keep up at all with what Willis says on his Tumblr or Twitter.
So with that said, was that whole thing with Sal claiming their parents were racist true? Because their the exact same color and I’m not seeing it. I mean, down to the hex code even.
THAT’S RIGHT! I forgot there was that whole awkward scene where she dressed up like a frickin’ girl scout and had curly hair when the parents came over.
Okay, so it’s less the skin tone and more the features then? Okay I get that.
It can be that, and it can be more than that. It can be about how interests and personality conform to stereotypes about race. The happy-go-lucky cartoon-watching Walky is less “black” in his interests and activities (meaning those conform less to society’s notions of someone who is black) than the authority-spurning, convenience-store-robbing, late-hours-parking-lot-loitering Sal.
That said, while Sal’s perceptions are certainly relevant to her experience and I fully believe that the favoritism was there, and while a few hints (Charles’s preference for her hair style) has been dropped, it hasn’t yet been confirmed yet. I’m not ruling it out at all or arguing against it, but I could still see the possibility of Linda doting on her more-dependent son simply because he’s, well, more dependent.
he happy-go-lucky cartoon-watching Walky is less “black” in his interests and activities (meaning those conform less to society’s notions of someone who is black) than the authority-spurning, convenience-store-robbing, late-hours-parking-lot-loitering Sal.
The problem with this argument is it reverses the (implied, granted), cause and effect direction between Sal-as-we-know-her and her parents favoritism toward Walky.
Sal wasn’t (from what we’ve seen) a hellion as a kid. She disrespects authority because the first major authorities in her life – her parents – proved undeserving of respect, and she knocked over convenience stores because there comes a point where ‘negative attention’ is better than ‘no attention’. A concept actually referenced directly in a flashback.
I assure you, it’s been debated to death. It seems true. Sal has naturally afro-curly hair, plus blacker self-image and mannerisms, plus, she’d know better than we do how she is treated.
From an out-of-character standpoint, it would be hugely problematic for Willis to write a story in which a young Black-identified woman is oversensitive and wrong about her experience of covert racism. It’s totally plausible in character, and even moreso from a writing standpoint.
Yup. Hair and mannerisms, leading to a lifetime of being encouraged to only embrace her “whiter” ways of being (including straightening her hair constantly to keep it from being kinky) and overall unequal treatment compared to her brother (including him being given opportunities she wasn’t like the acting gig in Joyce’s favorite kid’s show).
Pretty much every interaction has indicated that the Walkerton’s at least show favoritism to Walky over Sal, including in flashbacks that occurred before her attempted robberies (I think it was said she tried 2 or 3 times before boarding school happened?). Mr. Walkerton also specifically says how Sal’s hair looks so much nicer when it’s straight, which has been the main comment from either that directly references racial characteristics (though, I don’t think Mrs. Walkerton said anything at all to Sal and just ignored her). However, Walky himself has said something to the effect of Sal being black while he’s ‘generically beige’ before he found out how Sal felt, which is pretty telling.
Regardless of all that, we definitely have no reason to not believe Sal.
I wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out to be a worse gift, given Mrs. Walkerton’s behavior and what Sal has said, but we’re jumping to quite a conclusion by assuming a bigger gift is a better one.
Let’s not forget that we also recently saw Joyce realizing her father *wasn’t* as opposed to her as she thought he’d be, even if her mother is. Maybe Sal will be proven wrong about her mother. Maybe it’s something precious to Sal that she left behind.
Then again, maybe not. Mrs. Walkerton hasn’t impressed so far.
Hahaha, oh man, one time about ten years ago my mom and I were out for dinner and she pulled out a gift bag from her purse. “I got you something,” she said, cringing in anticipation of my reaction. It was stretch mark cream, and I was too busy laughing at the absurdity of the moment to rehash the age old argument of how I don’t actually care about my stretch marks, etc. I suppose she “had to try” but honestly considering she knew me well enough to expect a rant, she could have just saved herself the money.
-Are- we jumping to conclusions? It’s a care package. I mean, quite literally, the amount of care she is sending her daughter is like a quarter the amount she’s sending to her son and her son’s childhood friend. Note that a care package is not like a gift; care packages are generally composed of a number of various items, typically things it would be harder for the recipient to get in the area they are, or homemade items. There’s no reason Sal and Walky’s mom couldn’t use the same size box for Sal and fill it up with additional random stuff Sal likes, except as a deliberate choice to only give Sal a small box. It’s a dick move no matter what’s in it (and I doubt there’s anything in there that will be remotely pleasing to Sal. Smart money’s on it being crap that obviously shows her mother not understanding her and/or wanting to shoehorn her into a certain image).
Yup. And he’s just starting to notice that and feel awkward about what it says about how much he’s “earned” where he is and what it says about his family.
The online store I order boardgames from packs everything with those packing peanuts which is awesome for having my games not get smashed but terrible for ever getting rid of. I used to have like 6 boxes full of them in my storage.
Used to work in a bookstore way back when. In the back room, they had a vacuum for clearing peanuts out of shipments and huge plastic sucker bags for collecting the peanuts for reuse. I used to have one of the bags till my Dad decided to use it for a pickup truck tarp and it got ripped all to heck.
I know, it’s weird to want a big plastic bag. I had my reasons.
I used to work at a small business that took in far more peanuts than it needed for shipping orders. We’d bag it up in clear trash bags and bring it to the UPS store once a month. They gladly took all of it for years.
As long as they’re clean and not infested with tiny beetles (the starch-based eco peanuts tend to attract them after being in storage a long time) people buy bags of those on Craigslist like nobody’s business. People tend not to need the enormous bulk bags and hate the idea of paying $15 for the smaller bags at UPS/Staples etc.
And as Needfuldoer has said, UPS gladly accepts them! But they don’t pay you.
Nah, it’d still be separate and unequal. She just wouldn’t be rubbing it in their faces QUITE as badly, unless all three of them happened to stop at the mail desk together and saw each others’ boxes.
Yes. And there was nothing “equal” about the separate schools (or other facilities) offered to black families during segregation. That’s why I came back with “still separate and unequal.”
We devoted an entire week in my teacher ed classes to whether not schools should go back to “separate, but equal” to alleviate race-related bullying and violence in schools. Some school districts want to voluntarily do it, right now, today. I’m not a fan, which is why I take every opportunity to point out that separate is virtually never equal.
I think the passive-aggression is the point. Like, to Linda, what would be the point of sending the gifts at all if Sal doesn’t directly know that she is considered less worthy and important than her brother?
I really disagree with this interpretation. To me, the point of the Walkerton’s neglect of Sal is that they’ve allowed their unconscious racial biases to ruin their relationship with their daughter, but are still convinced they’re golden, shining, care so much parents.
Linda being aware that she treats Sal like shit, or even thinking that sending her off to a boarding school was clearly not the most moral and intelligent thing to do for their Troubled Teen, I think, kills a lot of what made this storyline so effective. You don’t need to be Ross to be a shit parent.
Seriously, I get why she’s not using Walky’s and can kind of get Billie’s by extension, but Sal’s is pretty clearly at the very least “Linda does not care enough to pay attention to her choice of name,” if not also respect it.
Why would that be the case? Like she calls Walky, David and Sal, Sally and Billie, Jennifer. She’s a mom like that. You are now imparting a desire for the decision to not call Sal Sal in a more fiendish light than it actually is because you know she has an issue with treating her the same. Like even if that is the case, the only reason you’d be led to believe that is based on our prior knowledge of their dynamic.
Walky has never objected to being called David, or Billie to Jennifer, unless I’m forgetting something, but Sal has objected to Sally.
Calling Walky a name he only uses in official documents is one thing. Calling Sal a name she actively dislikes is a whole other thing.
(Also, re ‘being a mom’ about it. My parents are among the only people in my family I DID manage to get to stop using the form of my name I object to… With everyone else I just cringe and console myself they don’t need to say it too often.)
Yup. Plus, there’s that whole thing a lot of parents do where they fight their children on preferred names even if they know that their kid really doesn’t like their given name or their given name causes them pain.
I’d say it’s a third that, a third being “proper” rich WASP asshole and so using “more professional” and “proper” names is more important than whether or not you show your possession child love, and a third just not giving a flying fuck what Sal prefers to be called.
Except that “Sally” is a less professional and “proper” name than “Sal” is, which was part of my objection to it – she’s using a name with an “ee” ending, which implies that she doesn’t see Sal as an adult.
Yes, but she gave Sal that name and so it must be inherently better, because it was the name she gave… even if Sal’s name is actually better. I get the impression from Linda’s appearances that she’s not much for admitting fault or conceding points to people who are not her.
* Short for Salvatore, Salvador, or other related names, usually. Interestingly, in Italy, Sally is apparently a common nickname for Salvatore, as well.
Billie may have started going by Billie simply to distinguish herself from the other Jennifers. Or people were calling her by her last name and it inevitably got shortened. Jennifer a pretty common name. I can think of three Jennifers in my high school class, and it was only like 110 people.
First it’s shitty dads, now it’s shitty moms. WILL THE CYCLE OF POOR PARENTING NEVER END?
(Watch as after this we get an Ethan + Danny arc where they’re dealing with their own parental issues — from both parents, no less! — just to round out the set.)
Sal is one of the few who managed to luck out and end up with 2 crappy parents.
Looks like maybe Walky actually notices this time, that what Sal said to him awhile back about favorism, is really true.
Personally, I don’t think we just used to THINK Joyce has two crappy parents. They WERE both kinda lousy, Hank’s just shown some character growth since his last appearance.
I also think it’s worth noting, Unique, that Walky HAS noticed, even acknowledging this (awkwardly and non-explicitly) to Sal. He’s just still desperately hoping it’s not as bad as it looks.
Yeah, he wants to cling to his denialism so badly, but is starting to notice more and more just how shittily his sister has been treated compared to him… and he hates it, because he’s about as allergic to examining his own privilege and what that means as Joe.
Heck, he’s just allergic to “feelings stuff” and self-insight in general.
I think the overall tragedy about Walky is that he considers himself to -be- a good person. He’s used to picking up things fast, he generally gets along with people, and so on. If any of us had just met him for the first time (without knowing him at all), we’d probably get along with him. Find him a bit goofy, probably, but that’s it. All of these things points to being good, right?
The problem is that goodness, like adulting*, isn’t really something you are, it’s something you do. And it’s something you have to keep on doing for every day. And in order to keep doing good, you have to keep examining the full consequences of what you’re doing. Which we have established he’s not used to having to do, and therefore is currently allergic to.
How would he? Even if she mentioned that she was sending the packages, he probably didn’t give it much thought. Walky needed the favoritism spelled out for him and still refused to acknowledge it until he had some time to think; I very much doubt anyone’s given Mr. Walkerton the yelled lecture Sal delivered to her brother.
Walky’s going to find it much more difficult to pretend their mother isn’t playing favorites as time goes on. I feel bad for him. Cognitive dissonance is rough.
Additional twist, Billie’s cash was from her Dad, who is paradoxically too cheap to ship things separately. (He gave Mrs walkerton a twenty for his share of the cost.)
I haven’t seen Gravity Falls, but wouldn’t that be a pretty good gift, since she could record it in pieces, stitch the recorded incantation together, and then ask Walky to send it to her?
A “I figured you forgot to get David a present for his birthday, so here’s one for him” situation would be hillariously awful, especially because they are twins.
You did it by accident, but since the thread is about coming up with worst gifts for Sal, you’ve done well. If her parents are the type to not object to legal abortion, and notice that abortion access is not guaranteed (esp. in Indiana), but still think only “sluts” need to get them…then that is, in fact, one of the worst possible gifts one could send a daughter.
There’s also the “NO MORE WIRE HANGERS!” bit from Mommie Dearest, but since I haven’t actually seen that movie I don’t know what that’s all about other than a well-known person being a bad mom.
So it’s either “Here, have an unsafe abortion for the unplanned pregnancy I’m assuming you’ll experience” or “Here, have an unsubtle threat to beat you.” Yeeep. You accidentally won the “worst present for Sal” contest. Congratulations and I’m sorry.
Nothing. The “b-word” is filtered because a few of us got carried away with using it at one point, and it can get gross and abusive in a hurry that way. I’m guilty of it! It’s kind of my go-to invective for women, and I get wound up easily sometimes.
Not really ironic. Usually when men are called bongos, it’s to associate the, with emotion, weakness, or lack of fortitude … Things associated with women. Because one of the most insulting things we can call a man is a woman.
Yes, that’s the bongo filter. :p I don’t even type about female dogs anymore, I just type about musical instruments. XD I’m cool with annoying women being bongos. LOL
Not really? If there is, I haven’t run into it, and I can get creative with profanity sometimes. (I used to take lessons from Yelling Bird, until he was retired.) Bongo got filtered because it got over-used to the point of becoming abusive at one point. (As this comic and the subsequent comments demonstrate, there are a few women in DoA who trigger excessive use of it. ^^; )
LOL! That’s great. I got over using SJW a while back because of the derailed shitstorms it always causes, but the filter almost makes it worth using again. XDD
I think Politically Correct is filtered
( the opposite name of Bill Mahers first show ) which if I remember correctly says ‘word that stigmatizes people for being nice’
I once had cause to use a four-letter c-word referring to a piece of female anatomy. It didn’t get censored… the post just vanished. MIGHT have been an unrelated bug, but I doubt it.
(Don’t look at me like that, I was trying to find a gender-appropriate variation of “cock-sure”.)
PC, not referring to Personal Computers or the now-defunct-at-the-federal-level Canadian political party does. (Or did…I doubt he’s undone it, but it’s less embarrassing to assume he might than to state he hasn’t and find out he has. In any case, I remember when he was soliciting replacements.)
‘Political correctness’. Or was it ‘politically correct’ that he filtered? Both?
For a while people weren’t allowed to say Ultra-Car, since he got sick of the “Amazi-girl is Ultra-Car” jokes from before A) Carla’s first appearance and B) The “official” Amber/Amazi-girl reveal. It just got turned into ~~~~~.
Simpler times. These days, it feels a bit wrong to make any jokes at all about Amazi-girl, now that it’s increasingly clear that this is a serious mental health issue.
Another one to check:
“For you, the day you used that sexist and abusive cuss word in the DoA comment section was the most important day of your life. But for me… it was Tuesday.”
Yeah, it took me a while to figure out what word bongo was. I thought it was asshole for a while. Before that, I thought it was just a funny word people liked to use here.
I would say the jury is out on Stacy, considering she skipped or on her daughter to get laid and then there’s no mention(that I recall) of her ever showing up again that weekend… You know, when her father traumatized her again.
Really, the only parents to consider are Dorothy’s. Dina’s have been pretty positive. And maybe Sierra’s, who really only have the one scene where her dad tried to calmly defuse the situation with Blaine and Amber. But that’s a reach.
I’d say she’s pretty damn positive even if she decided to delay (not cancel) seeing her daughter to get some much-delayed sex. After all, we know she risked death, like literal death at the hands of her violent ex, to remove her daughter fully from his reach and get her somewhere safe and raised her for awhile on her own. And that’s all despite carrying her own massive traumas from years of abuse at his hand.
That takes some amazing personal fortitude and courage, so yeah, definite one for the positive column there.
If I remember correctly, Charles himself is only half-black, which means Walky and Sal are each only one-quarter-black. This of course means Sal is technically whiter than Billie and Linda is even worse than you thought.
Also, poor Billie, she clearly comes from a dysfunctional home where they don’t even care about their own daughter! Bet you a dollar the elder Walkertons have no self-insight at all.
And yeah, totally agree with Conuly. I’m betting they pat themselves like crazy on the back for “taking in” this “poor, neglected girl” whose “parents don’t care about her”. All while tsk-tsking and shaking their head at the whole “sad state of affairs” that could lead two parents to so thoroughly neglect their child.
During parents weekend, Sal asked Billie if her folks were coming. She basically said Of course not, plus she admitted that she thinks of the Walkertons more as her parents.
We literally don’t know what’s in there. I mean, Mrs Walkerton has a history of treating her children unequally, but we don’t know yet what she sent them. Good things might come in small packages^^
I’m an optimist. Why am I still an optimist after reading this comic for years, I should know better by now lol. Watch my hopes and dreams getting crushed tomorrow xD
Something tells me that while, Billie and Walky will get very personal gifts. Comics, cheerleader stuff. etc… Sal will just get cash, showing how little Linda actually pays attention to her daughters interests.
If that was me, I’d prefer the cash, because my mom would get my interests wrong for sure and send me something she’d think I’d be into but it’d be something I was into 15 years ago xD
It’d be quite funny if Sal’s package did turn out to have a big fat roll of hundreds in it, and Walky’s some cheap junk he could have bought at whatever local store is below Walmart on the food chain.
Clearly Ms. Walkerton’s an idiot because she sent packages to the wrong people. I have no idea who Sally, David, and Jennifer are. Definitly not the three people in the room though.
Today’s Daily Dollop of Didactic Diversion — CARE Packages Division
The term “CARE”(as in the original CARE packages) is actually an acronym of the name of the original organization, the “Cooperative for American Remittances for Europe”. A $10 donation to this organization would allow the donor to send a surplus US Army “10-in-1” food ration package to friends or relatives in Europe in the immediate post WW-II era.
I found a box of dead rats in my bff’s freezer once when I was helping her move.
(Context: she had a bunch of pet rats and they tend to get sick and die pretty easily, so she kept the bodies in the freezer to donate as food to a pet store that carried snakes.)
I think Sal’s thing is she’s gotta make her grievances known. Often times with stuff like this it’s unintentional. It’s not openly malicious. In the same way black people often criticize each other’s nappy hair, big lips and big noses more so than other features.
Maybe not at first. But even planting a seed like that could help in retrospect. When she’s thinking of doing something nice for Walky, in her head she’ll associate that with Sal’s feeling of mistreatment. If she’s not just a shit mother she’d feel some innate desire to make SOME sort of connection to her daughter. I’m an optimist like that, at least.
See, that’s the thing, she pretty much does come off as just a shit mother. I’ll happily be proven wrong, but everything in the narrative so far points to that.
I see her as a shit mother convinced of her own righteousness.
I’m not so optimistic to believe that Sal telling her the truth would immediately cause her to break down in guilt, but I think Yoto’s on point, and it’s not like any of us actually expected Hank to at least attempt reevaluating some of his beliefs when he was being a dickbag to his daughter.
What do you do when you know you’re hurting your kid?
Maybe, but I think it can work in this case because the Walkertons are convinced their good parents. I ust have a hard time thinking they wouldn’t do anything if they found out they have been hurting their daughter for years.
I dunno, the idea of there never being hope, that Sal and Walky’s parents are such fuck ups that they’re doomed to forever losing their daughter comes off as too cynical for a story about how prejudice exists on unconscious, systematic levels, and is something that needs to be actively confronted.
My cousin got a couple care packages from her asshole father & asshole stepmother while she was in freshman year of college. Like, twenty bottles of shampoo. That was all. Sold shampoo to other dorm kids for a dollar each & got some cash.
This was after years of spending all her half-an-orphan government checks on beer & cigarettes, mind you – she had to force government to send the checks to her in college instead of sending them to her asshole father’s address.
The only thing that could make Sal and Walkie’s mom shittier is if Walkie’s grades fully tank and she shifts her affections entirely to the ‘winner’ or else tries to sabotage Sal. Yeah, that would be crappier too and probably more in line with her characterization.
“Sally, why didn’t you help your brother when he was struggling? Don’t you want him to succeed? I swear it’s like you’re not part of this family at all.”
Someone mentioned upthread the idea of coming up with horrible things that could be inside the box so when we see the unboxing strip it actually works out better than we hoped. So I’m gonna say that Sal’s box contains a warrant for her arrest (for reasons), as well as a note saying she’s disinherited from the family, all wrapped around a lump of coal. That’s been coated with dog shit and cat urine.
Walky’s box contains a box set of his favorite anime and keys to a new car. Billy’s box has a bottle of imported beer and Godiva truffles inside.
Yotomoe pointed out a couple threads up that this was also probably unintentional.
That’s kind of the problem. The Walkertons think they’re being good and fair to their kids.
Expecting Walky to go places and expecting nothing of Sal is not good and fair.
Telling Sal her hair looks better artificially straightened is not good and fair.
Complimenting Walky up and down for landing a girlfriend because he got a new shirt and not even noticing that Sal dressed up for them is not good and fair.
It’s all things they’re doing subconsciously. They’ve internalized the same bullshit most of the rest of the country has internalized about what “successful” people look and act like, and they’re unintentionally projecting it onto their kids. That doesn’t mean it’s not shitty just because they’re not yelling the n-word at Sal or some of the other abusive shit Blaine or Toedad would pull.
I don’t think it’s not bad. I think it’s correctable. It’s something that needs to be talked about, y’know. Make them aware of it and how it’s affecting both of their kids.
The problem with that is her mom would need to actually listen. And we saw at Parent’s Weekend that she doesn’t even extend that basic courtesy to Sal or even acknowledge her existence. Even when she is directly addressing her.
Given how (mom) Linda Walkerton ignored Sal completely, and (dad) Charles at least tried to show some interest in her, it would not surprise me if the scenario was Linda telling Charles: “I’m going to send David and Jennifer some packages — do you want to add anything for them?”, and Charles saying “David and Jennifer? . . . Ah.”, and then adding a box for Sal on his own initiative.
Possible. He had the whole ‘good hair’ thing (which I am embarrassed about defending him over…my privilege popped up at a bad time), but he at least seems more ‘clueless to his internalized racism’ than ‘actively malevolent’ like Linda.
Also this reminds me of how my grandma always used to mail me actual cash in boxes because she figured “envelopes get opened when the mailman can feel there’s money in there so he steals it” (yeesh, grandma) and to make the boxes heavier she’d put random shit in there like a toilet roll or once a Christmas ornament in the shape of a terrifying Baby Jesus.
I think the saddest part about all this is how surprised Sal is to get mail from her mother at all. Did she ever get care packages while she was in boarding school? It doesn’t seem likely, judging by her face in panel 3. She is peeking over Walky’s shoulder like a care package is some sort of rare spectacle, and not something she is super familiar with from the several years she lived away from home. Also Sal’s sad little smirk in the last panel ruins me.
I wonder if we won’t see some adult from Sal’s boarding school days show up, and Sal being utterly happy to see them because they were more parental to her than her actual parents.
The horrible thing is that I think a part of Linda, deep inside her psyche, would have silently blessed Amber if she’d put that knife through Sal’s heart rather than her hand. The very existence of her daughter is clearly an intolerable burden to her.
There are some preview panels that show the Walkertons hanging out together. I’m hoping that, possibly prompted by Walky admitting to having his own problems with calculus, there will be a renaissance of the relationship between Walky and Sal. If you can’t rely on your bro (or sis) in a time of need, then who can you rely on?
I’m seeing a shocked Danny getting extra credit for all the students that he’s been tutoring.
Possible. In part because the memory of a tragically dead daughter can be sculpted into whatever one wishes, unlike an inconveniently, embarrassingly live one.
Like, Linda and Charles are pretty shit parents, but that doesn’t make them the Worst, Most Evil and Vile people on the face of the earth. We’ve established by now that Danny’s parents are verbally abusive to him, and Ethan’s parents even more so, but they’re still convinced that they’re good parents and everything they do is either in their child’s best interests.
I think part of it as well is surprise that Walky noticed something was unequal.
That’s major progress for him. How much are you willing to bet that at the beginning of the term he would’ve been all, “WOW COOL LOOKIT WHAT I GOT?! OUR PARENTS ARE AWESOME!” and rubbing it in her face – not maliciously but because he was so damn clueless that unless Sal complained he wouldn’t even notice – (and then don’t look a gift in the mouth gosh Sal you’re so ungrateful and convenience store joke).
I think in this case, the credit goes to Billie more than Dorothy, what with her talk with him about how not all racism is white hoods and burning crosses and how being in a interracial relationship is not exactly a get out of racism free card.
Missed that Sally one when I first saw the Comic and thought Sals Mom hadn’t sent her anything. Still, it’s kinda depressing she sent one half the size.
You mean like how she was the complete and total unsung hero of the Toedad chase, and all she got from it was a bit of friendship with Joyce and a whole lot of hate from Amazi-girl?
Looks like a no on that one based on a troll through the archives. Heck, looking through for Joyce shows that Joyce hasn’t thanked her (for this) either, though she has shown the signs of their greater friendship and mutual understanding of each other. Combine that with Amber’s… unique means of “thanking” Sal and…
Yeah, poor Sal, she really was the unsung hero of the whole thing.
So Sal’s mom is probably just a douche bag but I’m gonna be optimistic and say that she sent Walky and Billy things she knew they liked but since she hasn’t seen Sal in a while she sent her cash. I’m probably wrong but optimism.
How sad is it that the optimistic scenario still had Sal’s parents not communicating with her enough (for years!) to have even a half guess at what she would actually like.
It goes beyond that because, even if you don’t know what someone likes, there’s a ton of options you can send to a dorm ensconced college student with no job. Like, that box will barely fit a tube of toothpaste.
We know Walky didn’t talk to Sal while she was at that school. Did her parents do the same thing?
I’m just wondering if Sal is going to be unfazed* by whatever it is because she always got the same thing in her care packages while at boarding school, or if she’s going to be surprised that she got one at all because she never got a care package while at boarding school.
I can’t decide which is more likely: that they have been sending her pathetic care packages for years to keep up appearances or that it didn’t even occur to them until they wanted to send one to Walky.
*By which I mean she won’t be surprised by whatever it is, not that she won’t be upset that Walky & Billie got better stuff. That’s a thing that is definitely happening. To paraphrase a comment from the Parent’s Weekend, *This isn’t going to be a story where the racism is all just in the black woman’s head.*
It also just occurred to me that this means Sal and Joyce’s have something in common: they both have moms whose beliefs are more important to them than their kids.
All of this. Personally, my guess is she got jack all at boarding school and she’s only getting something here because now her and Walky are in the same place and it’d be “rude” to only send something to one of them.
I am thinking that because parents have a big say in what kids can do or want to do, Walky’s parents were the instigating force behind Sal being frozen out from sibling contact. If his folks wanted him to, Walky would have stayed in touch. I think Linda, at least, didn’t want him to.
Just… sent them all in one big box so… what, Sal would know where she stood? Why not just send a ranked list to their phone, Linda? Call it an “I Barely Care” package…
Not just one big box, but one big box addressed to Walky.
Again, on a practical level, it makes sense. They’re all right there and 3 small packages cost more than one big one.
But if they all go to Walky, that says something. Of course we only see one, but if you only see one in a story, it’s got to be representative.
Billie was a childhood playfriend of Walky and Sal’s. I think that they’ve all known each other since… well, forever. It’s a bit like the Browns with Becky – Linda and Charles Walkerton know her so well, she’s practically a stepdaughter to them.
Even more so perhaps, since Billie’s parents are distant.
She said somewhere that she’d called the Walkerton’s Mom & Dad sometimes.
I also wouldn’t be surprised, though there’s less canon support that she became something of a substitute for their “lost” daughter when they sent her away.
Karat is a unit of gold purity, on a scale of 0 to 24. Carat is a unit of weight used for gems, and 24 doesn’t have any special meaning other than being a moderately big number (approximately “Gem is the same diameter as your finger”)
Seriously though, what I expect will happen is that the box contains some cash and a note saying something like “I don’t know what you’re into, so buy yourself something nice,” while Walky’s and Billie’s contain more personal gifts that show Linda knows them really well.
So while it’s not a bad gift, it would definitely disappoint Sal and show favoritism.
…oof. Not cool. Reminds me of the part in Harry Potter where everyone thought Hermione was seducing Harry and Ron’s mom sent them all big Easter presents but only sent Hermione a teensy little egg….that part pissed me off and so does this.
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or Walky and Billie have LARGE boxes of poop and Sal has a small box of poop
THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS
…
is this storyline about shitty moms as a switch-up from earlier =|
Moms are shitty in passive aggressive ways. At least, the ones who aren’t into poison are.
Hey, don’t box people in. Shitty dads can be passive-aggressive, too.
The avatar makes that comment.
Between Amber and Becky I think we’ve gotten our fill of shitty dads for a while.
so sal and walky as well as joyce gives us our shitty mom quota?
Hey be fair.
Walky and Sal’s dad sucks too.
I’m sure there are some moms who’d pull a gun on their kids.
I feel like I should write such a character…
I know of moms who’ll brandish a knife, so I’m sure moms who’ll draw a gun are out there. Some have probably shot their kids to try to purify them of queerness.
…and now I’m sad.
Not a shooting, but…
[SO MANY TRIGGER WARNINGS, like seriously, this story is really sad and fucked up on so many levels]:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/27/oregon-mom-gay-son-murder_n_5044807.html
…this transcends my capacity for sadness or even rage. That’s just fucked up to the point that there is no appropriate response.
I hadn’t even considered kids getting hurt. I was just thinking of teens like Becky, which is horrible enough.
Yeah, that one is super fucked up. I wish I could say it transcended my rage and sadness, but working as a teacher I encounter too many damn awful things happening to all ages of kid and too many awful parents who in an ideal world would be behind bars.
You see . . . this is why I say people in general are bags of dicks. Shit like this.
…Oh.
Now I wish I hadn’t brought it up.
I opened that link, read the first sentence, walked away from my computer, came back, closed the tab, and immediately watched video to feel better.
Well, I fucked up the HTML. But oh well, works anyway.
lets not be blind to what is actually happening. the Twins mom thinks she loves her kids equally I’m sure. This isnt Passive Aggressiveness. She’s not trying to send a message, unlike Joyce’s mom. She doesnt understand her daughter, she doesnt know her daughter and she’s given up (probably) on her daughter. Maybe she feels Sal doesnt care about her, Maybe she doesnt know how to connect. What makes her bad in this case is her blindness to her favor of walky and how that alters her actions. If she didnt know what movies, snacks, or cloths to buy Sal she coulda tried to ask Walky or if Walky had the contact info of her friends but she didnt. Instead she probably put a few chips and a gift card in there and thats it because she doesnt realize she’s being neglectful
Trust me, parents who have favorites know damn well they have favorites. What they convince themselves of isn’t that they don’t have a favorite, it’s that either the least favorite deserves it because reasons (in this case, Sal’s criminal past) or that they manage to conceal it so well their kids don’t pick up on it (my folks, who honestly think I’ve never picked up the fact that they favor my sister over me).
say this as a least-favorite kid whose parents have in the past said shit like, “Oh, every parent has a favorite. The issue isn’t whether or not you have a favorite, it’s whether you let that affect how you treat them. I think as long as you don’t let it affect how you treat your kids, it’s okay.” I’ve spoken to other parents who have favorites, too, and they all know. They might bullshit to themselves and others about it, but they know. I find the degree of favoritism such parents exhibit is directly proportional to the frequency of their protestation that they love all their kids equally (yeah, keep telling yourself that. Sooner or later you might even believe it).
Now, having a favorite and having knowledge of their favorite might not mean that they are intentionally being malicious to the less favored. But the favorite gets doted on and the not favored is neglected. Passively, but it happens.
But my point is that Linda totally does have a favorite, and I find it very hard to believe that she is unaware that she has a favorite. That said, I am damn near certain that she has herself convinced that the bad relationship between herself and Sal is completely Sal’s fault for the convenience store stuff, and she doesn’t realize it started in her court, waay earlier.
Jury’s still out for me on whether or not she’s intentionally trying to rub her favoritism in Sal’s face or if it’s more that she dotes on Walky so much that Sal is just an afterthought and like Walky she’s too oblivious to realize that Sal knows what’s up and will take it personally. Neither option speaks well to her consideration and competence as a parent.
The observation about Linda’s lack of competence as a parent is actually part of why I still wonder if she notices. Going with the “she’s too oblivious to realise that Sal notices” theory, it’s also possible that Linda is too oblivious to notice herself. After all, it’s going to be a lot easier to notice that you treat your kids differently than that you actually like one better than the other.
Alllll of this.
And especially on how parents seek out an excuse based in the less favored kid’s actions to justify it or try and force themselves to believe they treat their kids equally.
And if the reason a kid is less favored is because of bigotry, they will also move Heaven and Earth to find a way to convince themselves that it’s totally not that, but rather that the other kid is just “doing so much better” at… something, anything (even if it’s only due to them having more advantages due to familial support and facing less direct bigotry in their life) and that’s why they’re more worthy of affection.
The justifications get way more impressively awful when the favored child is actually doing objectively worse than the non-favored child, because nothing the non-favored child accomplishes, even if it is genuinely impressive, will be enough for them to gain their parents’ esteem.
It’s actually a documented phenomenon with twins that parents will often arbitrarily pick a favorite. There was a quote in my developmental psychology textbook where a mother with identical twin sons basically says that she “knew right away that didn’t like me.” As in, from birth.
Hi do you have secret spy cameras in my place? (My sib has failed at pretty much everything ahead has tried since high school. Still the favorite. I could win the Nobel Prize in chemistry and they would be all “that’s nice dear. Your sister is going to try kinesiology this time and you should help her because she looks up to you and blah blah blah let us talk about her all conversation. Oh, and blame you for her failure because as the eldest it is your job to ensure the youngest’s success so her failure is really yours for not giving enough guidance and support and totes not hers for not doing the work or ours for bailing her out all the time.”
Yeah.
I’m at the point now where it’s almost funny. But yeah. That’s why I am pretty sure that Sal’s folks will find a way to blame her for Walky’s failure. Because nothing is ever the favorite’sites fault.
Not always, and while in this case there is a direct favourite in some cases both children think the other is the favourite as was the case with me and my sister. My sis thought I was the favourite because I was in less trouble and I felt she was the favourite because she got more attention which I now realise was due to my parents trying to support her through a bad time in her life. In that case I don’t think my parents really had favourites. However that said it does happen and I have seen it with other families and I totally see that Walky is very much the favourite in this.
Dumbing of Age: Proving moms and dads can be equally awful.
Well, maybe not equal… Yet.
*hopefullynever*
Linda Walkerton: not quite as bad as toedad, yet
That’s not really a great tagline for her…or anyone. Toedad doesn’t just set a low bar, he leaves it on the floor for people to trip over. Basically I’m saying you can actually be a better parent than him by accident.
I get the feeling that someday, someone’s gonna dig right under the bar.
Blaine’s staring at a photo of Toedad and is just using it in some 80s style montage as he trains to somehow top him in the awful charts.
“I *must* set the bar lower . . . I can put the bar UNDERGROUND? GENIUS!”
Even easier – ship it to Australia – so far down under its on top of Ayers Rock.
I found an Australian bar in my apartment the other day while packing for a move. Somewhere in Australia right now there’s a kid I don’t envy.
Ayer’s rock isn’t even the highest point in Australia though. That goes to Mount Kosciuszko, a mountain so tall it stole it’s name from the shorter mountain next it.
If Jason’s father is anything like the last universe…
Blaine buried the bar ten feet underground. You have to REALLY try to be worse than him.
Hmm. Is she better or worse than Carol?
You didn’t know? Toedad crossdresses as Linda in order to spread piety to two families. Autumn Walkerton was a tramp and unworthy to rear her children.
As the offspring of a shotgun dad and a “everything wrong in your life is totally your fault and you deserve it” rest of the family, I mark Carol as worse than Toedad. Because it’s much easier to break away from the parent that physically assaults you than the one who just makes you feel like utter sh*t. And those words stay with you. Those scars take SO MUCH longer to heal and fade. You give up on the gun-toter pretty quickly, but you spend YEARS trying to convince the commentator to rethink things, to find a middle ground, to reach a point where you can both forgive each other — as if there’s something they need to forgive you for. You lose more trying to maintain that connection than you do when the bullet comes out the gun. Getting shot hurts, and it might kill you, but living with the words of others hurts worse, for longer. So… Yeah. Votes on Carol being the second worst parent in the series, after Blaine (who used physical abuse as a tool for the emotional abuse, which made the emotional abuse even more powerful and damaging).
Why do I get the weird feeling that Willis isn’t fond of parents?
Given that he’s mentioned Joyce is Autobiographical, and given recent events, it’s fairly logical to conclude he doesn’t have a very good relationship with his own parents.
Yeah, his mom & Joyce’s mom could probably be best friends.
I’d say that’s likely:
http://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/133847635397/i-dont-talk-to-my-mom-anymore-whenever-we-had
Wow, the folks those second tag was written for are SO LUCKY to be completely insulated from everything bad in the world, they don’t even know
Dysfunctional families provide more drama. Know who has great parents? Dorothy. Hence why we hardly ever see them.
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ― Tolstoy
People trying to make the former half of that true are responsible for an awful lot of the latter half.
Tolstoy Lied, by Rachel Kadish, if not the best book, nonetheless has the best title.
Nonono, Dorothy’s parents are EVIL.
By giving Dorothy so much agency and instilling in her so much drive to succeed, they have given her a complex in which she almost never dares to have fun, has impossibly high goals she is almost guaranteed to be disappointed by not achieving, and frequently misses out on essentials like sleep and knowing what day it is just in order to study.
I mean, sure, Toedad kidnapped Becky. But he didn’t give her a complex!
((… and yes, that was me being silly. Hold the flames.))
Heh. Nice.
Though, the funny thing is that while they support her dreams, they have also encouraged enjoying the fun as well and appreciating it. And Dorothy’s mom pushed back a bit against Linda’s hyper-my children must succeed no matter whatness:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/forfun/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/footforward/
Curse you Dorothy’s family and your good parentytude!
You know who has great parents Dina.
Sierra’s parents seem pretty cool. Her dad even moved to block Blaine from going after Amber.
Eh, I think it’s more statistics. There are a billion and a half ways to be a bad parent. I mean, look at the bad parents on showcase here. Your Toedads are startlingly different from your Carols, who are a whole different animal from your Blaines and your Lindas. Even if sometimes they echo each other. And that’s not even including the Randal/Sharons and Richards and Ruth’s grandfather and Naomi/Sauls and we can’t forget the Charles…es.
Being a good one is much harder. Jeremiah and Deborah are the only real examples. Though Haruka and Ryou seem pretty cool. Falyn, Reno and maybe Stacy? Hard to say.
And yes, I did skim through the Parents’ Weekend arc to find all those.
It’s hard to write a long story focusing on good parents. Where’s the conflict, unless you rely on easily cleared up misunderstandings?
Like, from what we’ve seen, Amber’s mom seems pretty cool, and Sierra’s parents were more than willing to help Amber out when her dad was being aggressive, so they seem nice. The Saruyamas were pleasant (or at least quiet) enough for Sarah to want to be adopted by them. Even Dorothy’s parents seem to be pretty good ones, but they only get so much screen time to serve as a foil and raise the stakes a bit when Joyce confronted her parents.
Not all conflict has to be with parents.
True, there is always fishing. Soooo many fishing stories *shudder*
And not all conflict has been with parents.
Walky is struggling with grades.
Ruth and Carla with Mary.
Billie and Ruth with each other.
Joyce with her various traumas. Caused by Toedad AND Ryan.
Sarah and Dina with their social skills.
Sal was struggling with Malaya.
Amber with her various issues.
Danny and Ethan with their respective sexualities.
But when you have shitty parents, they are often the largest source of conflict in your life. It gets more pronounced in times like this where you both feel they still have a lot of control over your life, even though they aren’t close enough to exercise it.
Any box in any universe has an equal chance of containing poo or containing not-poo
Um, no, it…
….
…. wait….
… does the microscopic excretions of dust mites count? If so, I think it’s MORE likely to have poo.
((PS that includes cereal boxes.))
Actually, everything EVERYWHERE has 100% chance of containing poo (yes, the human version)
“Any box in any universe has an equal chance of containing poo or containing not-poo” — This is the Bayesian doctrine of Equal Priors.
(Since when you start out, you have no idea what the actual chances are.)
But each time you open a box containing non-poo, that raises the chance that the next box will contain poo.
No it doesn’t. That is the opposite of what happens. The more observed poo boxes the more likely unknown boxes are also poo!
They didn’t even care enough to give me as much poop as you!
Walky changes majors to agronomy, uses the poop to grow prize-winning vegetables.
Becomes the first man stranded on Mars. Proceeds to use a nuclear heater to invent a hot tub and complain about bad disco.
#explainabookplotbadly
bad disco raises the question, was there any good disco or at least mediocre disco?
I’m inclined to say Graham Gouldman
We’ll know if Naomi shows up and starts haranguing Ethan about letting Joyce get away before sleeping with her.
The big ones contain sloppy manure; the small one contains Cards Against Humanity’s special edition from last Black Friday.
aaah, I saw that coming starting panel 2
At least she GOT one, I guess ?
I didn’t see Billie getting one…
Her actual name’s Jennifer, she god the big one on our right of the panels.
I thiiiink undrave meant it like “foresee” but I could be wrong.
Yup, that’s what I meant.
At least Joyce has one cool parent, and Becky had one once too. I vote Sal and Walky’s parents for worst of them all!
We don’t know anything about Becky’s mom, aside from her being dead. Maybe that’s why toedad went so fundie?
Becky’s mom has only been gone a year or so, so Ross couldn’t have gotten that religious in such a short order. Not that her death probably helped.
I’ve had more than one friend go “born again.” You’d be surprised how much a person can change overnight, let alone in a year. :p
It’s unlikely Toedad “went fundie” suddenly, considering how Hank’s kinda hated him for years.
And the comic where Becky said that her dad took her to the Chik fil A rally years ago to shove it in the face of “the gays”, so yeah, he’s been awful for a while, with Becky’s mom at best playing the enabler role… though that might be partially because Toedad might have also been abusive. After all, he really did not have any truck with female independence in the kidnapping arc and it didn’t take very much “disobedience” for him to hunt Becky with a gun and strike her in the car.
That said, Becky-mom dying seems to have been a factor in him becoming (even more) unhinged. He might have been considerably less… extreme a year ago. There is, after all, a gap between being in a chickfila counterprotest and kidnapping people at gunpoint for… whatever he had planned.
Oh definitely. He went from awful bigoted asshole to full on hunting his daughter like an animal.
I’ve got a headcanon that Ross took his wife’s death as a sign from God that he was being too slack and tolerant, so he doubled down. Then Becky thinking she’s gay is another sign, so time for quadrupledowning.
Captain Button-
I think that might actually be canon-canon Especially since that is basically what Toedad was saying over and over again during his scenes. Both the ones with Dina as she was walking to the bus and the ones where he talks directly to Becky.
After all, if you are faithful and “good” then God rewards you in life according to the Prosperity Gospel. So if bad things happen, it just means you weren’t “good” enough and so must redouble your efforts until God sees your faith and makes the bad thing stop happening. And if he doesn’t, then you just weren’t “good” enough.
I mean, that moment not shooting Dina or Joyce? Clearly that weakness is what the devil exploited. Next time he will not be so careless. (yeah, I think when he is up for parole is going to be the scariest time for Becky the older scientist).
I think Mr k is suggesting Becky’s mom was very conservative, and this contributed to Ross’s fundamentalism. And her death didn’t change that.
From how Hank talked about her, Becky’s mom was ok, if largely forgettable.
If Ross was always big into “traditional family roles”, she probably wasn’t permitted to do much more than cook, clean, and “sit there and look pretty”. Becky had to learn her unbreakable Stepford smile from somewhere…
(Just thinking about it is depressing…)
OH! ………oh.
Yyup.
This.
So… Becky’s facade, but not with Becky’s unflappable smartassery… or Joyce… or self won freedom… OUCH
Actually, Becky’s mom has been stated to be a pretty good person by Hank and lost to the Devil by Ross, so… looking pretty good.
Maybe.
Then again, Hank would probably describe Carol as a pretty good person too.
Specially if she’s dead. Never speak ill and all that.
But then again (again), Becky misses her mom. A lot. She may not have been the best mom, but considering how Becky gave her own dad the two-fingered salute in the end, I believe she misses her mom because her mom was a loving one.
I personally think that Becky’s mom was somewhat similar to Hank. But she was also married to Ross, and since Ross was the man* in this relationship, he made sure to be The Boss, in order to keep the family Perfect. Because having an ideal family that fit into the roles God had made for them was far, far more important to Ross than actual people (something Willis himself stated on Tumblr).
* As per the fundies’ designated gender roles, that is.
Worst in a non-criminal way? ‘Cause there’s some STIFF competition there… plus imagine what kind of asshole raised Mary?!
Maybe she’s just a jackass on her own? You don’t need a tragic backstory to be a bastard.
‘s true. Assholes come from all walks of life, and the asshole phylogeny is beautiful and diverse.
I mean, look at Mike – his parents are saints!
*cut scene to Mary’s parents sitting by the fire place reading*
Mom: “It’s a shame Mary told us she didn’t want us at that family weekend thing.”
Dad: “Yeah, I miss her. But she’s an adult now. We’ve got to give her space.”
Mom: “I just think… you think maybe we did wrong by her, giving her that much freedom?”
Dad: “It’s possible. No one can be perfect parents. But we raised her areligious and let her decide and she did, and we have to respect that. That was the better action than any agenda we might have pushed on her.”
Mom: “I just don’t get how she can … disfellowship us? If we were never in the religion to begin with.”
Dad: “I don’t think they call it disfellowshipping in her circle. And no one said religion has to make sense.”
+1
So a Ned Flanders with less beatnik and more Bellamy family propriety.
“We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
Oh my, that is awesome and I’m totally considering it my headcanon until they show up in the strip.
So does that make Mary the Anti-Dorothy?
Walky’s parents are honestly pretty middle of the road as far as parents in this series because so many of them are so cartoonishly evil.
Evil that can be argued away as non-evil is arguably more insidious.
Evil that has yet to be challenged reads more like ignorance to me. If Sal confronts her mother about this and her mom’s like “Nope.” then I’ll probably like them less. As it is it seems somewhat unintentional. At least that’s how I read it.
Man, you have not met enough awful parents… so jealous.
And I live in the south too. And I’m black. I’ve got a pretty great outlook on the world in general.
I have no idea why, but I had assumed you were Filipino. Way off the mark there. o.O
Less jealous.
Or smokes! Sal likes those, right?
Smokes can be used like money in prison.
So can money, believe it or not.
Are smokes worth more money than real money? Is finding a butt that isn’t smoked to the filter like finding a penny on the ground?
Talk about playing favorites
Ugh. this reminds me too much of how things were when I was growing up. Only the sibling and I aren’t twins.
Ugh, how about being the eldest with all the responsibilities and expectations but none of the perks or even support.
she got a bigger package for billie and shes not even her kid
Hey, Booze is hard to package in a small box.
Moonshine is the gift that keeps on giving.
So you’re saying it’s a big dildo?
“How did she know about my thing with Ruth?”
Hey, size isn’t everything.
It’s actually just a bra, and you know that can’t fit in a normal sized box.
It’s intentional. Passive-aggressive parents love stunts like that. Was just out with a friend tonight whose mom out of the blue emailed her a text of her brother getting written about in the newspaper with the text message: “Look at how much more of a success your brother is than you.”
Not a joke, that was the literal message.
Given Linda’s deliberate ignoring of Sal’s very existence at Parent’s Weekend, deliberately sending Sal a smaller box than even the family friend would be right up her alley.
I’m really wondering how Linda can possibly avoid realizing that she’s an asshole.
Billie isn’t as much a “family friend” as a surrogate daughter though. Which is not to say the small box isn’t an insult, but from Billie, Sal, and Willis’ comments on how Billie and Mr & Mrs Walkerton relate, treating Billie like family is fairly normal for them.
I have not yet seen enough to convince me she’s being intentionally passive aggressive (though if the gift is something that is obviously an after-thought or intended as a slap in the face – IDK an “inspirational” auto-biography of someone who came from a criminal past to be successful, or a hair straightener, or skin bleaching cream or what have you, then I’ll be unreservedly in that camp). But there is totally favoritism happening.
But passive favoritism can be pretty fucking shitty, too, and I’ve seen enough of that which looks enough like this that I’m not yet entirely convinced that Linda isn’t just massively inconsiderate and unobservant. Which is not to say that it’s any better for Sal. I’m in one of those situations and yeah my folks are not rubbing it in my face that they dote on my sister way more than me but the fact is she gets doted on way more than me, and they genuinely think they conceal it well enough that I don’t notice.
I’m thinking that might be what’s happening here – Linda bullshitting herself so well she honestly believes she’s not being explicit about her favoritism.
(which is not to say she’s not being shitty. More that she might not have the self-awareness to realize she’s being shitty. Walky got his inconsiderate jerk tendencies somewhere)
Well, she couldn’t leave out her future daughter-in-law, now, could she? Hm? And, just think, they’ll make such a beautiful multi-ethnic couple!
youre grounded
Still not understanding the problem with the boxes, somebody fill me in.
Also does Billie’s say Zanier in the last panel?
Jennifer. Billie is Jennifer Billingsworth, just like Walky is David Walkerton.
Jenifer
Billie’s says Jennifer, which is her given name (the nickname “Billie” coming from her last name, Billingsworth, because she came up with Walky’s nickname from Walkerton).
The problem with the boxes is that Mom Walkerton sent Walky and Billie pretty generous ones, and Billie’s not technically a Walkerton kid herself, while shipping a noticeably smaller one to Sal suggesting she sent and spent a LOT less for her than the others. It’s parental antifavoritism, basically.
Wait, I thought Billie was unofficially adopted into the Walkerton family?
Is this going back what Sal was talking about like three hundred strips ago about her parents favoring Walky over her?
That’s where this is going, from the looks of it. At this rate, Sal could win the Nobel Peace Prize and her parents will miss it just to watch cartoons with Walky, or something.
Yeah but cartoons are fucking awesome.
Hell yeah they are.
Charles might watch cartoons with Walky, but I don’t think Linda would. That’s not an acceptable thing for her golden boy to do, and he’s in college now, so it’s time for him to stop with those childish things and buckle down on becoming a doctor.
Linda’s pretty awful to Walky, too, just in a different way.
Yup. And this has been clearly going on for a long time given how nonplussed and unsurprised she looks in the comic. Like, yup, this shit again, thanks mom for the non-subtle reminder of how much less you’ve always rated me than your “perfect baby boy”.
Now that it’s late and nobody will ever read this, let me inject my obligatory bit of pedantry. Check out nonplussed in a dictionary. It’s surprised to the max. I don’t know what the negation of nonplussed is. You’d think plussed, but I’ve never been plussed myself, nor heard anybody else described that way.
Suppose I sent you some ‘plus fours’ — what would your reaction be?
Yow! I’d be knickerbockered!
I figure that they think of Billie and Walkie as unofficially engaged. Given that Billie spent the first week or two following Walkie around, loudly proclaiming that they weren’t a couple, I don’t know where they could get that idea.
I still operate on the theory that Billie’s tsundere for pretty much everyone, both Walkerton twins very much included.
Oh, and the problem is that Sal’s care package is about an eighth the size of Walky and Billie’s.
No, it says “Jennifer” in both panels.
It’s bad because Walky and Billie got big boxes and Sal got a little one.
Nah, it says Jennifer.
It says ‘Jennifer’, her name is actually Jennifer Billingsworth! Billie is a nickname Walky made based off her last name, like how Walky comes from Walkerton.
As for the packages, there was been a subplot in the comic regarding whether there is a favoritism element between Sal and Walky. Sal insists that Walky is their favorite child, and as you can see from the packages… Walky and Billie get equally big boxes, while Sal has a smaller one. For Walky, it’s like an uncomfortable reminder of ‘oh yeah, maybe my sister was right about the favoritism’. The fact that the favoritism may come from a racist point of view also makes it very uncomfortable for Walky.
Racist? They’re both from the same parents, how can one be racist against one of their own children?
That’s what Walky said. Sal states that Walky was born looking whiter than she did, and that’s why they favored him. Given their reaction when they saw her with unstraightened hair, she may very well be right.
I don’t know if it was a looks thing. It might have more to do with perceptions of race linked to stereotypes of attitude, personality, interests…
My personal theory is that it’s a nice juicy mashup of race and gender stereotyping – that it’s more acceptable to the Walkertons that their son be black than that their daughter be black.
Ooh! That’s one I hadn’t thought of. Thank you. That makes the most sense of anything I’ve heard–even than the hair thing. (Though I’m sure the hair also plays a part.)
Huh. That sounds more believable… for a typically screwed up Dumbiverse family, at least.
It’s definitely not a looks thing. It was established back on the June 3rd, 2015, comic “tall” that the two twins are pretty much identical.
It’s actually the one thing that’s thrown me off about the whole thing. Skin color issues are things I’ve heard of. But one kid merely acting blacker than the other? That’s weird, and honestly makes me think that racism is not the only explanation. I mean, it’s been going on since they were really young.
Now, this is Willis, so I know that racism is going to be at least part of the issue, because Willis wouldn’t go there with having Sal be wrong, and come off as invalidating her perceptions. But I’m thinking there’s more to the story than we know.
(Hell, maybe even Sal actually lightens her skin. Or it lightened as she got older.)
And I’ve had that first link saved for a while, so the next time this came up, I could talk about this.
Ugh. I was gonna mention the hair thing, too! I just find it hard to believe that alone is enough. It’s not as if white people can’t have “black” hair–it’s just less common. I live in white-whitesville and I’ve seen people with hair like Sal’s.
Lets see here, Ethan, Harry Potter, Me.
Crap that was supposed to be a reply to trlkly
I’m hitting the reply button, I swear!
If the hair thing is the only thing, I’m not sure how that squares with January 13, 2015‘s strip (which suggests that Walky’s hair isn’t necessarily inherently different from Sal’s). I’m wondering if it’s either a self-reinforcing cycle that started with something small (maybe even the hair, if Walky’s is less noticeable / doesn’t require as much effort to “fix”, due to being kept short), or a consequence of comparing her to herself vs comparing Walky to Charles, or simply (originally) interacting with her more (mother/daughter vs father/son – no reason to assume that they have a perfectly progressive idea of gender roles) and therefore noticing stuff (differences to herself) more with her than with Walky.
I don’t have personal knowledge of this issue, but assume that any kind of hair care is easier with short hair, so Walky might not even think of his hair as being straightened, rather there are simply chemical products that he always uses out of habit that have that effect.
Sexist? I married a woman! How can one be sexist against someone they married????
Well put.
This is officially my favorite comment on anything ever.
Noicccccce.
And yeah bigotry is weird. I’ve known a good chunk of kids from mixed race homes where a parent has been racist to them a lot growing up despite having married someone of the race they are being racist towards.
But what I can’t understand is the concept of being racist against only one of your two mixed-race children…
well then try harder
Sexist?! I have a mother and I love my mamma! So how could I be sexist?!
;-P
Sal got a smaller box than Walky and even Billie, indicating a worse gift. Sal has claimed to Walky that their parents are biased against her and have been their whole lives, and Billie has urged him to take those complaints seriously, with some success.
Okay wait, now I remember. I think we learned about this during one of Amber’s flashbacks and that’s why I was confused.
Okay so, and correct me if I’m wrong here, Mother Walkerton plays favorites with Walky over Sal and this led to Sal feeling ignored most of her young life, then she tries to rob a convenience store, finds out that Amber can puncture both human bone and a police car hood in one thrust, and then she spent most of the time after that and right before the start of this comic at a boarding school, the resentment for her parents building up over time till she sees it as second nature or some bullshit I don’t know.
Yeah?
There’s also a bit where she calls walky out for being the recipient of favouritism, or specifically the oblivious beneficiary- which is why walky even picks up on the box sizes this fast. If this had happened a few weeks ago, he wouldn’t have even considered conclusions to jump to.
Also also Sal believes this favouritism is rooted in race, and walky is preferred because he is whiter looking
Straight up I’m just pointing out that I didn’t start reading this day by day till the middle of the Toedad saga, so I didn’t read any of the comments sections for the previous strips, nor do I keep up at all with what Willis says on his Tumblr or Twitter.
So with that said, was that whole thing with Sal claiming their parents were racist true? Because their the exact same color and I’m not seeing it. I mean, down to the hex code even.
I always assumed it’s cuz Sal has naturally kinky hair. So she “appears” more typically black, while Walky just looks like a brown white dude.
THAT’S RIGHT! I forgot there was that whole awkward scene where she dressed up like a frickin’ girl scout and had curly hair when the parents came over.
Okay, so it’s less the skin tone and more the features then? Okay I get that.
Yep!
It can be that, and it can be more than that. It can be about how interests and personality conform to stereotypes about race. The happy-go-lucky cartoon-watching Walky is less “black” in his interests and activities (meaning those conform less to society’s notions of someone who is black) than the authority-spurning, convenience-store-robbing, late-hours-parking-lot-loitering Sal.
That said, while Sal’s perceptions are certainly relevant to her experience and I fully believe that the favoritism was there, and while a few hints (Charles’s preference for her hair style) has been dropped, it hasn’t yet been confirmed yet. I’m not ruling it out at all or arguing against it, but I could still see the possibility of Linda doting on her more-dependent son simply because he’s, well, more dependent.
Also, I believe there was talk of it having some roots in sexism as well.
The problem with this argument is it reverses the (implied, granted), cause and effect direction between Sal-as-we-know-her and her parents favoritism toward Walky.
Sal wasn’t (from what we’ve seen) a hellion as a kid. She disrespects authority because the first major authorities in her life – her parents – proved undeserving of respect, and she knocked over convenience stores because there comes a point where ‘negative attention’ is better than ‘no attention’. A concept actually referenced directly in a flashback.
Kamino: True enough, but there might have been a self-reinforcing cycle thing going on. My point was that notions of race extend beyond appearance.
I remember back in Joyce and Walky, Walky cut his hair or something and ended up looking just like his father, kinky hair and all.
I assure you, it’s been debated to death. It seems true. Sal has naturally afro-curly hair, plus blacker self-image and mannerisms, plus, she’d know better than we do how she is treated.
From an out-of-character standpoint, it would be hugely problematic for Willis to write a story in which a young Black-identified woman is oversensitive and wrong about her experience of covert racism. It’s totally plausible in character, and even moreso from a writing standpoint.
Yup. Hair and mannerisms, leading to a lifetime of being encouraged to only embrace her “whiter” ways of being (including straightening her hair constantly to keep it from being kinky) and overall unequal treatment compared to her brother (including him being given opportunities she wasn’t like the acting gig in Joyce’s favorite kid’s show).
like they said, its generally considered to be about her hair.
relevant strips:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/kinky-2/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/appointment/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/straighten/
Pretty much every interaction has indicated that the Walkerton’s at least show favoritism to Walky over Sal, including in flashbacks that occurred before her attempted robberies (I think it was said she tried 2 or 3 times before boarding school happened?). Mr. Walkerton also specifically says how Sal’s hair looks so much nicer when it’s straight, which has been the main comment from either that directly references racial characteristics (though, I don’t think Mrs. Walkerton said anything at all to Sal and just ignored her). However, Walky himself has said something to the effect of Sal being black while he’s ‘generically beige’ before he found out how Sal felt, which is pretty telling.
Regardless of all that, we definitely have no reason to not believe Sal.
#BlackReletivesMatter
#000000LivesMatter
Admit it, you’d buy a t-shirt…. what color of T-shirt? And what color of text? Would it be, say, white on black, or black on white?
Black on black, just like the real violence.
</Sarcasm> </Republicans>
I wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out to be a worse gift, given Mrs. Walkerton’s behavior and what Sal has said, but we’re jumping to quite a conclusion by assuming a bigger gift is a better one.
Let’s not forget that we also recently saw Joyce realizing her father *wasn’t* as opposed to her as she thought he’d be, even if her mother is. Maybe Sal will be proven wrong about her mother. Maybe it’s something precious to Sal that she left behind.
Then again, maybe not. Mrs. Walkerton hasn’t impressed so far.
Honestly, I’d say it’s even odds that the gift itself is even more passive-aggressive than the smaller box. Like a hair-straightener or something.
That’s what I’m expecting.
Hahaha, oh man, one time about ten years ago my mom and I were out for dinner and she pulled out a gift bag from her purse. “I got you something,” she said, cringing in anticipation of my reaction. It was stretch mark cream, and I was too busy laughing at the absurdity of the moment to rehash the age old argument of how I don’t actually care about my stretch marks, etc. I suppose she “had to try” but honestly considering she knew me well enough to expect a rant, she could have just saved herself the money.
That was my thought too.
-Are- we jumping to conclusions? It’s a care package. I mean, quite literally, the amount of care she is sending her daughter is like a quarter the amount she’s sending to her son and her son’s childhood friend. Note that a care package is not like a gift; care packages are generally composed of a number of various items, typically things it would be harder for the recipient to get in the area they are, or homemade items. There’s no reason Sal and Walky’s mom couldn’t use the same size box for Sal and fill it up with additional random stuff Sal likes, except as a deliberate choice to only give Sal a small box. It’s a dick move no matter what’s in it (and I doubt there’s anything in there that will be remotely pleasing to Sal. Smart money’s on it being crap that obviously shows her mother not understanding her and/or wanting to shoehorn her into a certain image).
I’d say it’s suggestive but not conclusive at this stage.
Well that’s just not cool.
Uncool, Linda.
Totally not cool.
“I’m still eighteen; all my mail’s good.”
Just had to say it, didn’t you, Walky?
Well, all of HIS mail is good
I dunno, it came packaged with drama. And we know how much he hates FEELINGS.
Well, in relation to this incident, I guess it’s not so good
You say that now, but just wait ’til next strip, when a wolverine jumps out of the box and bites his nose off!
https://xkcd.com/325/
Yup. And he’s just starting to notice that and feel awkward about what it says about how much he’s “earned” where he is and what it says about his family.
And it turns out that it was a mail bomb. Sal survived because hers was the smallest.
The online store I order boardgames from packs everything with those packing peanuts which is awesome for having my games not get smashed but terrible for ever getting rid of. I used to have like 6 boxes full of them in my storage.
Used to work in a bookstore way back when. In the back room, they had a vacuum for clearing peanuts out of shipments and huge plastic sucker bags for collecting the peanuts for reuse. I used to have one of the bags till my Dad decided to use it for a pickup truck tarp and it got ripped all to heck.
I know, it’s weird to want a big plastic bag. I had my reasons.
Nah, not weird at all. Those things are useful.
I used to work at a small business that took in far more peanuts than it needed for shipping orders. We’d bag it up in clear trash bags and bring it to the UPS store once a month. They gladly took all of it for years.
As long as they’re clean and not infested with tiny beetles (the starch-based eco peanuts tend to attract them after being in storage a long time) people buy bags of those on Craigslist like nobody’s business. People tend not to need the enormous bulk bags and hate the idea of paying $15 for the smaller bags at UPS/Staples etc.
And as Needfuldoer has said, UPS gladly accepts them! But they don’t pay you.
They all got the same thing, but Walky and Billie got the little present in a big box fakeout.
And Sal got the big present in a little box fakeout.
… admit it, it’s a more awesome fakeout.
I hate when parents do this. DX Just send them separately if you can’t be assed to at least pretend they’re equal gifts.
Separate but equal!
…wait…
Yeah I’m thinkin’ that needs to be the titles for this whole little mini arc between Sal and Walky.
Nah, it’d still be separate and unequal. She just wouldn’t be rubbing it in their faces QUITE as badly, unless all three of them happened to stop at the mail desk together and saw each others’ boxes.
Betty Anne, do you know what Seperate but Equal refers to?
Yes. And there was nothing “equal” about the separate schools (or other facilities) offered to black families during segregation. That’s why I came back with “still separate and unequal.”
We devoted an entire week in my teacher ed classes to whether not schools should go back to “separate, but equal” to alleviate race-related bullying and violence in schools. Some school districts want to voluntarily do it, right now, today. I’m not a fan, which is why I take every opportunity to point out that separate is virtually never equal.
Ok, I was curious because you seemed to be explaining exactly what seperate but equal implied, and I wasn’t sure if you got what I was referencing.
I think the passive-aggression is the point. Like, to Linda, what would be the point of sending the gifts at all if Sal doesn’t directly know that she is considered less worthy and important than her brother?
I really disagree with this interpretation. To me, the point of the Walkerton’s neglect of Sal is that they’ve allowed their unconscious racial biases to ruin their relationship with their daughter, but are still convinced they’re golden, shining, care so much parents.
Linda being aware that she treats Sal like shit, or even thinking that sending her off to a boarding school was clearly not the most moral and intelligent thing to do for their Troubled Teen, I think, kills a lot of what made this storyline so effective. You don’t need to be Ross to be a shit parent.
That’s actually a really good point.
“I got a rock.”
Rocks are cool.
You can use them to stone infidels.
I feel like a rock would’a been less insulting, ta be honest.
Yeah! After all, everybody wants a rock to wind a string around.
Or hit Linda with.
Or maybe prosthetic foreheads on their real heads?
*plays Twisted Sister’s “I Wanna Rock!” on the hacked Muzak*
Rock! (Rock!) Rock! (Rock!) Rock!
No, no. That”s just on Halloween. Good grief.
A rock? DAMN, that must be a hundred carats of pure ice that Sal’s holding there!
Not one of those boxes is labelled with the person’s preferred name.
Seriously, I get why she’s not using Walky’s and can kind of get Billie’s by extension, but Sal’s is pretty clearly at the very least “Linda does not care enough to pay attention to her choice of name,” if not also respect it.
Why would that be the case? Like she calls Walky, David and Sal, Sally and Billie, Jennifer. She’s a mom like that. You are now imparting a desire for the decision to not call Sal Sal in a more fiendish light than it actually is because you know she has an issue with treating her the same. Like even if that is the case, the only reason you’d be led to believe that is based on our prior knowledge of their dynamic.
Walky has never objected to being called David, or Billie to Jennifer, unless I’m forgetting something, but Sal has objected to Sally.
Calling Walky a name he only uses in official documents is one thing. Calling Sal a name she actively dislikes is a whole other thing.
(Also, re ‘being a mom’ about it. My parents are among the only people in my family I DID manage to get to stop using the form of my name I object to… With everyone else I just cringe and console myself they don’t need to say it too often.)
The linked comic doesn’t say anything about Sal’s choice of names; did you mean to reference a different one?
Oops, yes. This is the one I meant. Not sure how it did copy properly before.
Ah, yes. That is a very emphatically stated preference indeed.
Indeed. (I had a few moments like that when trying to convince people not to use the wrong form of my name, I have to admit…)
Yup. Plus, there’s that whole thing a lot of parents do where they fight their children on preferred names even if they know that their kid really doesn’t like their given name or their given name causes them pain.
I’d say it’s a third that, a third being “proper” rich WASP asshole and so using “more professional” and “proper” names is more important than whether or not you show your
possessionchild love, and a third just not giving a flying fuck what Sal prefers to be called.Except that “Sally” is a less professional and “proper” name than “Sal” is, which was part of my objection to it – she’s using a name with an “ee” ending, which implies that she doesn’t see Sal as an adult.
Yes, but she gave Sal that name and so it must be inherently better, because it was the name she gave… even if Sal’s name is actually better. I get the impression from Linda’s appearances that she’s not much for admitting fault or conceding points to people who are not her.
Except that ‘Sal’ is typically a man’s name*, and is, thus, not proper for a woman to use, and Sally is apparently the name on Sal’s birth certificate making it always the more proper name.
* Short for Salvatore, Salvador, or other related names, usually. Interestingly, in Italy, Sally is apparently a common nickname for Salvatore, as well.
Put scare quotes around all uses of ‘proper’, there. As is, it looks like I agree with the concepts I’m talking about, which isn’t true…
Walky and Billie are their usual nicknames, but it’s not clear if they’re ‘preferred’ or just ‘acclimated’.
Sal, on the other had…<Lana Kane>Yyyyuuuuup.</Lana Kane>
Billie may have started going by Billie simply to distinguish herself from the other Jennifers. Or people were calling her by her last name and it inevitably got shortened. Jennifer a pretty common name. I can think of three Jennifers in my high school class, and it was only like 110 people.
My point being that her nickname may have just been something that happened and she feels no particular way toward.
My first night in the dorms netted me the nickname Flash, but I don’t have any preference to which I’m called.
First it’s shitty dads, now it’s shitty moms. WILL THE CYCLE OF POOR PARENTING NEVER END?
(Watch as after this we get an Ethan + Danny arc where they’re dealing with their own parental issues — from both parents, no less! — just to round out the set.)
Unfortunately, it might still be a few years before Leslie becomes a parent
Hey, you don’t know. Maybe some kid on her campus is her illegitimate child.
We’re still reading a Willis comic, right?
Shit, I thought Sinfest looked different.
Nah. Andrew Hussie has secretly taken over.
Expect the cast to acquire candy-corn horns any day now.
That’s the one where they make out, right?
Sal is one of the few who managed to luck out and end up with 2 crappy parents.
Looks like maybe Walky actually notices this time, that what Sal said to him awhile back about favorism, is really true.
Yup, seems like it
We used to think Joyce had two crappy parents too. We haven’t really seen enough of Walky’s dad for me to think of him as “crappy”.
Personally, I don’t think we just used to THINK Joyce has two crappy parents. They WERE both kinda lousy, Hank’s just shown some character growth since his last appearance.
I also think it’s worth noting, Unique, that Walky HAS noticed, even acknowledging this (awkwardly and non-explicitly) to Sal. He’s just still desperately hoping it’s not as bad as it looks.
Yeah, he wants to cling to his denialism so badly, but is starting to notice more and more just how shittily his sister has been treated compared to him… and he hates it, because he’s about as allergic to examining his own privilege and what that means as Joe.
Heck, he’s just allergic to “feelings stuff” and self-insight in general.
I think the overall tragedy about Walky is that he considers himself to -be- a good person. He’s used to picking up things fast, he generally gets along with people, and so on. If any of us had just met him for the first time (without knowing him at all), we’d probably get along with him. Find him a bit goofy, probably, but that’s it. All of these things points to being good, right?
The problem is that goodness, like adulting*, isn’t really something you are, it’s something you do. And it’s something you have to keep on doing for every day. And in order to keep doing good, you have to keep examining the full consequences of what you’re doing. Which we have established he’s not used to having to do, and therefore is currently allergic to.
*Why, this looks like a perfect opportunity to link to this classic: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html
She can commiserate with Danny, both his parents are pretty awful.
Boo Linda continues being a jerk and her husband doesn’t stop her. -.-
How would he? Even if she mentioned that she was sending the packages, he probably didn’t give it much thought. Walky needed the favoritism spelled out for him and still refused to acknowledge it until he had some time to think; I very much doubt anyone’s given Mr. Walkerton the yelled lecture Sal delivered to her brother.
Eh, given the way the only conversation he made with his daughter was to criticize her hair, he probably participates in the favoritism.
Agreed. I doubt he’s aware, though.
That’s the beauty of neglect.
It happens when you don’t even try.
Walky’s going to find it much more difficult to pretend their mother isn’t playing favorites as time goes on. I feel bad for him. Cognitive dissonance is rough.
TWIST:
Walky and Billie’s boxes contain multiple wads of Cash.
Sal’s contains one wad of Dead Rats.
Additional twist, Billie’s cash was from her Dad, who is paradoxically too cheap to ship things separately. (He gave Mrs walkerton a twenty for his share of the cost.)
Ouch…..
Let’s come up with the most horrible thing the box could contain so that, no matter what happens tomorrow, it’s pleasant in comparison:
Box full of skin bleach.
There, now real Mrs. Walkerton is a saint compared to hypothetical Mrs. Walkerton.
Incest comics starring Sal and Walky. (Kind of like Dipper and Mabel).
Handwritten note saying YOU ARE TERRIBLE.
A picture of Walky’s newly bronzed and displayed baby shoes.
For sale, and never worn.
His only pair, naturally
Incantation to summon Bill Cipher.
I haven’t seen Gravity Falls, but wouldn’t that be a pretty good gift, since she could record it in pieces, stitch the recorded incantation together, and then ask Walky to send it to her?
A photo of Linda flippin’ the bird on top of a tightly packed pile of excrement of disturbingly indeterminate origin.
A new pair of gloves.
Lye hair relaxer
You kid, but… I could actually see Linda sending both of those to Sal.
That’s my real guess at what was sent. That honestly seems really likely.
Yup, that was my thought too. “I thought after our visit that’s what you wanted, dear.”
I’d suggest “nice” conformist clothes but…. box isn’t big enough.
What would Linda send Sal anyway? She’s been gone for years, Linda has no idea what she likes!
…. um, Ima gonna say “coal”.
I’d suggest “nice” conformist clothes but…. box isn’t big enough.
Gift certificate for *tries to think of whitest clothing store possible* Old Navy?
GAP?
Combines whiteness with a little side admonishment that she should dress
whiter“better”.Hmm. I’d always been under the impression that Old Navy was the more upscale of the two brands, but, checking…yeah, GAP’s better.
(Wow, how’d I have that one reversed?)
Something really nice with an attached note that says “Give this to your brother. It wouldn’t fit in his box”.
A “I figured you forgot to get David a present for his birthday, so here’s one for him” situation would be hillariously awful, especially because they are twins.
Bug-infested cookies.
She pulls a Dursley and gave Sal either a wire hanger or a few pennies.
(Only two gifts I can recall they have Harry.)
The context/implication when sending a girl, rather than a boy, a wire hanger is… somewhat different.
Is it possible to request that this be deleted? I can’t edit my comment.
No. Your shame will live forever.
Nooooo…
I think there was also a tissue one year (thankfully, unused).
Can this be deleted? Or even just the hanger bit redacted?
You did it by accident, but since the thread is about coming up with worst gifts for Sal, you’ve done well. If her parents are the type to not object to legal abortion, and notice that abortion access is not guaranteed (esp. in Indiana), but still think only “sluts” need to get them…then that is, in fact, one of the worst possible gifts one could send a daughter.
There’s also the “NO MORE WIRE HANGERS!” bit from Mommie Dearest, but since I haven’t actually seen that movie I don’t know what that’s all about other than a well-known person being a bad mom.
Something Positive went there first.
Holy carp has his drawing style ever changed!
The mom beats the daughter in that scene so…it’s still not great.
So it’s either “Here, have an unsafe abortion for the unplanned pregnancy I’m assuming you’ll experience” or “Here, have an unsubtle threat to beat you.” Yeeep. You accidentally won the “worst present for Sal” contest. Congratulations and I’m sorry.
Maybe it’s a really good vibrator bullet
Willis, don’t you have one mom in this comic who isn’t a bongo? LOL!
Deborah Keener’s pretty nice.
Mike’s mom.
Harriet Warner creeps me the hell out.
Better keep a baseball bat close to you.
Amber’s mom seems okay. Her dad, on the other hand….
Amber’s mom is a good parent in relative terms. She ditched her daughter for most of the day so she could bang Joe’s dad.
Dina’s parents seemed cool.
Well, I see my language was cleaned up for me. Bongo=b*tch
What does fuck become?
Ooh
I guess it’s rated by offensiveness, like “beeyotch” is sexist
Nothing. The “b-word” is filtered because a few of us got carried away with using it at one point, and it can get gross and abusive in a hurry that way. I’m guilty of it! It’s kind of my go-to invective for women, and I get wound up easily sometimes.
Ah.
Ironically, I use Beach much more often to refer to men than women.
Not really ironic. Usually when men are called bongos, it’s to associate the, with emotion, weakness, or lack of fortitude … Things associated with women. Because one of the most insulting things we can call a man is a woman.
Nothing, because that’s not a gendered insult that’s being overused for female characters.
Apparently nothing.
Yes, that’s the bongo filter. :p I don’t even type about female dogs anymore, I just type about musical instruments. XD I’m cool with annoying women being bongos. LOL
Anythin’ else get filtered? I’ve been away from the site awhile.
Not really? If there is, I haven’t run into it, and I can get creative with profanity sometimes. (I used to take lessons from Yelling Bird, until he was retired.) Bongo got filtered because it got over-used to the point of becoming abusive at one point. (As this comic and the subsequent comments demonstrate, there are a few women in DoA who trigger excessive use of it. ^^; )
“Social Justice Warriors” can’t be referred to by the typical acronym. The filter’s alternative is hilarious.
SJW
SJW?
Oh my goodness
Anti-SJW
I think SJWs was filtered for a while? Or is it still? We will see once I sent this comment.
Yesssssssssssss
That’s btw the filter for what Disloyal Subject said above
LOL! That’s great. I got over using SJW a while back because of the derailed shitstorms it always causes, but the filter almost makes it worth using again. XDD
I think Politically Correct is filtered
( the opposite name of Bill Mahers first show ) which if I remember correctly says ‘word that stigmatizes people for being nice’
Now I must see.
Politically incorrect?
Damn.
Political correctness?
I once had cause to use a four-letter c-word referring to a piece of female anatomy. It didn’t get censored… the post just vanished. MIGHT have been an unrelated bug, but I doubt it.
(Don’t look at me like that, I was trying to find a gender-appropriate variation of “cock-sure”.)
How about “Cword-fident”?
PC, not referring to Personal Computers or the now-defunct-at-the-federal-level Canadian political party does. (Or did…I doubt he’s undone it, but it’s less embarrassing to assume he might than to state he hasn’t and find out he has. In any case, I remember when he was soliciting replacements.)
‘Political correctness’. Or was it ‘politically correct’ that he filtered? Both?
Huh. Guess he did drop the filter? Unless the quotes screwed it up. Political Correctness.
For a while people weren’t allowed to say Ultra-Car, since he got sick of the “Amazi-girl is Ultra-Car” jokes from before A) Carla’s first appearance and B) The “official” Amber/Amazi-girl reveal. It just got turned into ~~~~~.
Simpler times. These days, it feels a bit wrong to make any jokes at all about Amazi-girl, now that it’s increasingly clear that this is a serious mental health issue.
Another one to check:
“For you, the day you used that sexist and abusive cuss word in the DoA comment section was the most important day of your life. But for me… it was Tuesday.”
Yep, it’s still there!
OMG WHAT A B*NGO
VERY annoying people are congas.
Yeah, it took me a while to figure out what word bongo was. I thought it was asshole for a while. Before that, I thought it was just a funny word people liked to use here.
Plenty*. They tend not to make their children cry so we don’t see them that often.
*Amber’s, Dina’s, Dorothy’s, Becky’s, and I may be forgetting others.
Becky’s? Hard to be a bongo when you are dead.
I would say the jury is out on Stacy, considering she skipped or on her daughter to get laid and then there’s no mention(that I recall) of her ever showing up again that weekend… You know, when her father traumatized her again.
Really, the only parents to consider are Dorothy’s. Dina’s have been pretty positive. And maybe Sierra’s, who really only have the one scene where her dad tried to calmly defuse the situation with Blaine and Amber. But that’s a reach.
I’d say she’s pretty damn positive even if she decided to delay (not cancel) seeing her daughter to get some much-delayed sex. After all, we know she risked death, like literal death at the hands of her violent ex, to remove her daughter fully from his reach and get her somewhere safe and raised her for awhile on her own. And that’s all despite carrying her own massive traumas from years of abuse at his hand.
That takes some amazing personal fortitude and courage, so yeah, definite one for the positive column there.
Sorry, I’d forgotten that she did come back later that day. And you’re right, I was neglecting her personal history.
This. The good moms are Sierra’s, Amber’s, Dina’s, Dorothy’s, Becky’s?, Mike’s?, and Ruth’s?.
Good days are Sierra’s, Dina’s, Dorothy’s, Mike’s?, Ruth’s?, and Joyce’s?.
and in true Disney fashion, how many of those are dead?
Two moms out of seven, and one dad out of six. So…not that many.
And all the dead ones are in the ‘well…probably’ box.
The cherry on top of the crap sundae that is Ross would be that Becky’s mom never died, he just told everyone (including Becky) that she did.
I really didn’t need another FMA flashback today.
Just how close to Billie are the Walkerton parents? I know Walky sees her as a honorary sister, but do they see her as a honorary daughter?
Obviously they like her better than their own kid. :/
Of course they do, Billie is whiter than Sal, in both appearance and mannerism.
Even though they’re all biracial! Mrs. Walkerton subconsciously counts white-and-Chinese as whiter than white-and-Black. Racism is weird.
Totes.
If I remember correctly, Charles himself is only half-black, which means Walky and Sal are each only one-quarter-black. This of course means Sal is technically whiter than Billie and Linda is even worse than you thought.
Pervasive subconscious racism, *and* she doesn’t understand fractions! What a jerk, no wonder her kids had trouble in calculus.
Warning: “quadroon” will get you deleted faster than “banjo”.
Also, poor Billie, she clearly comes from a dysfunctional home where they don’t even care about their own daughter! Bet you a dollar the elder Walkertons have no self-insight at all.
Just $1? Heck, go for a twenty.
“Oh, that poor dear! I’m sure she never would have started drinking and getting into accidents if her parents would just spend some time with her.”
“Hey, Mom, is Sal coming home for spring break this year?”
“David, it’s time to set the table for dinner.”
“Uh, what? Um, ok.”
Nice.
And yeah, totally agree with Conuly. I’m betting they pat themselves like crazy on the back for “taking in” this “poor, neglected girl” whose “parents don’t care about her”. All while tsk-tsking and shaking their head at the whole “sad state of affairs” that could lead two parents to so thoroughly neglect their child.
That seems to have been the implication, most blatantly here.
Walky’s Parents really just want Walky to bang Billie so they can have ultimate mixed race baby (And it’d even still be half white!)
That’s…that’s terrible. And probably true. ^^;
If Billie and Ruth stay together and decide someday to have kids, I guess it’s hypothetically possible they’d pick Walky as donor.
During parents weekend, Sal asked Billie if her folks were coming. She basically said Of course not, plus she admitted that she thinks of the Walkertons more as her parents.
God… Goddammit, Linda.
At the bottom there’s a roll of nickel with Mike’s name on it. So he can have a good time.
with your mom
Undrave’s mom is free. Get with the times.
Everyone else’s moms, however…
We literally don’t know what’s in there. I mean, Mrs Walkerton has a history of treating her children unequally, but we don’t know yet what she sent them. Good things might come in small packages^^
I’m an optimist. Why am I still an optimist after reading this comic for years, I should know better by now lol. Watch my hopes and dreams getting crushed tomorrow xD
Something tells me that while, Billie and Walky will get very personal gifts. Comics, cheerleader stuff. etc… Sal will just get cash, showing how little Linda actually pays attention to her daughters interests.
Could be worse. Sal could get something wildly inappropriate, like some hair ribbons.
Or a roll of condoms.
Then again, that would mean her mom DOES know about Sal’s interests.
If that was me, I’d prefer the cash, because my mom would get my interests wrong for sure and send me something she’d think I’d be into but it’d be something I was into 15 years ago xD
Especially since contact has been limited what with Sal being off at boarding school for years.
Hey, at least she got a random care package. Ten years in the US, Mum,ten years!
Cue box puns.
“It’s a Jack-In-The-Box!”(sorry)
“Aw man! I should be past my mom buying me underwear! She sent me a bunch of boxers!”
“I AM THE BOX GHOST! BEWARE!”
Sal’s is more of a ‘doesn’t care package’.
Speaking of Parents,
HOLY FUCK, what a Cute baby!!!
https://t.co/gLrZpVuayF
Willis you need to put that face on some swag, It will sell right out.
Let him use those good looks to earn his college fund.
Seriously , This baby maxes out the cute scale.
I hereby declare a caption contest for these pics. Caption them to indicate the kid is planning world domination, Brain-style!
((Because, you know, that finger in the frame looks like a pinkie.))
Awwww!
Adorable! 
It’d be quite funny if Sal’s package did turn out to have a big fat roll of hundreds in it, and Walky’s some cheap junk he could have bought at whatever local store is below Walmart on the food chain.
Dollar Tree.
Oh my god…some of the commenters yesterday were right! It is boxes within boxes!
Never underestimate the power of the commenters.
Yup! If we make a million guesses, occasionally one of them must be right! It’s the same principle that the lottery works on.
A thousand commenters speculating for a thousand years will eventually produce the complete works of Willis.
It’s boxes all the way down, young man!
plot twist. mom looked at the grades online and those are their study aides.
Parents don’t actually have access to college students’ grades without their permission.
Clearly Ms. Walkerton’s an idiot because she sent packages to the wrong people. I have no idea who Sally, David, and Jennifer are. Definitly not the three people in the room though.
Today’s Daily Dollop of Didactic Diversion — CARE Packages Division
The term “CARE” (as in the original CARE packages) is actually an acronym of the name of the original organization, the “Cooperative for American Remittances for Europe”. A $10 donation to this organization would allow the donor to send a surplus US Army “10-in-1” food ration package to friends or relatives in Europe in the immediate post WW-II era.
Thanks for that. I followed and read the links, thought it was interesting.
Walky has never hoped to be gifted a box of dead rats so much before.
…… or at all.
…. wait, he was an eight-year-old boy at one point, he probably DID want that gift.
“Okay, if I get it I can sneak over to the girl’s lodge during lunch and hide them in their sleeping bags. BEST SUMMER CAMP EVER!”
I’m torn between ‘8 years old? For Walky that was last month!’ and ‘Psh, yeah, like Walky has the wherewithal to sneak and plant rats.’
I found a box of dead rats in my bff’s freezer once when I was helping her move.
(Context: she had a bunch of pet rats and they tend to get sick and die pretty easily, so she kept the bodies in the freezer to donate as food to a pet store that carried snakes.)
“Dead Dove Do Not Eat”
Usually the good stuff comes in small sizes….who the heck am I kidding? The bigger the better it is!
I think Sal’s thing is she’s gotta make her grievances known. Often times with stuff like this it’s unintentional. It’s not openly malicious. In the same way black people often criticize each other’s nappy hair, big lips and big noses more so than other features.
Don’t trust them big nostrils over yonder♪ Suck up so much air that it will make you wonder♪ (That’s about all I dare to type of that song)
Don’t trust them new niggas over there is my favorite spiritual.
I’m not sure it would do a bit of good if she did. Their mother doesn’t seem the type to admit fault, and their dad seems…inept, at best.
Maybe not at first. But even planting a seed like that could help in retrospect. When she’s thinking of doing something nice for Walky, in her head she’ll associate that with Sal’s feeling of mistreatment. If she’s not just a shit mother she’d feel some innate desire to make SOME sort of connection to her daughter. I’m an optimist like that, at least.
See, that’s the thing, she pretty much does come off as just a shit mother. I’ll happily be proven wrong, but everything in the narrative so far points to that.
I see her as a shit mother convinced of her own righteousness.
I’m not so optimistic to believe that Sal telling her the truth would immediately cause her to break down in guilt, but I think Yoto’s on point, and it’s not like any of us actually expected Hank to at least attempt reevaluating some of his beliefs when he was being a dickbag to his daughter.
What do you do when you know you’re hurting your kid?
I’ve seen far too many parents turn around and blame their kids for being hurt to have any hope here.
Maybe, but I think it can work in this case because the Walkertons are convinced their good parents. I ust have a hard time thinking they wouldn’t do anything if they found out they have been hurting their daughter for years.
I dunno, the idea of there never being hope, that Sal and Walky’s parents are such fuck ups that they’re doomed to forever losing their daughter comes off as too cynical for a story about how prejudice exists on unconscious, systematic levels, and is something that needs to be actively confronted.
They wouldn’t fit in such a small box, unfortunately.
… unless they would in which case WOW.
Okay can we open the boxes before thins get hectic.
Whats in the box walky? WHAT’S IN THE BOX!?
Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head!
I’ve already called Mr. Monkey’s severed head, you can’t get worse than that.
…. okay, you CAN, because it can always get worse, but you’d have to work at it.
Clearly the box contains a scene change to where we won’t find out what was in the box until May.
May from Questionable Content will find out before us?
Well, kind of fitting, given that she currently is hiding something from us!
I wonder what would happen if Mike got a hold of all those peanuts….or would pranks like these be too low for him?
Depends. I think he’d be willing to make an bad hair day for Amber worse by way of static electricity.
My cousin got a couple care packages from her asshole father & asshole stepmother while she was in freshman year of college. Like, twenty bottles of shampoo. That was all. Sold shampoo to other dorm kids for a dollar each & got some cash.
This was after years of spending all her half-an-orphan government checks on beer & cigarettes, mind you – she had to force government to send the checks to her in college instead of sending them to her asshole father’s address.
The only thing that could make Sal and Walkie’s mom shittier is if Walkie’s grades fully tank and she shifts her affections entirely to the ‘winner’ or else tries to sabotage Sal. Yeah, that would be crappier too and probably more in line with her characterization.
“Sally, why didn’t you help your brother when he was struggling? Don’t you want him to succeed? I swear it’s like you’re not part of this family at all.”
my heart just broke
God damn it, Willis, this is just Horrific Parental Abuse Weekend Part 2 isn’t it?
Did you mean Dumbing of Age?
Part 3. Part 2 was Toedad.
Part 4. The Blainepocalypse was separate from the Freshman Family FUBAR.
…. who am I kidding, it’s probably Part 17 by now.
Part 18 will be when Joyce’s mother unleashes all her hatred towards Becky.
No, this is already happening in the current HPA-weekend!
It never ends.
alright who’s gonna be the first to mention shrodinger?
I mentioned his cat yesterday. I doubt the man himself would fit in either of those boxes tbh.
I’m sure he’d fit, it’d just take an industrial trash compactor and a few minutes.
He’s also been dead for 60+ years, so really, his ashes would fit fine. This has become a morbid thread.
The best kind!
Well, not until he’s properly deboned and dehydrated.
Either I did or I didn’t.
Willis proves once and for all that it’s not just the dads that are shitty in this comic. :/
Someone mentioned upthread the idea of coming up with horrible things that could be inside the box so when we see the unboxing strip it actually works out better than we hoped. So I’m gonna say that Sal’s box contains a warrant for her arrest (for reasons), as well as a note saying she’s disinherited from the family, all wrapped around a lump of coal. That’s been coated with dog shit and cat urine.
Walky’s box contains a box set of his favorite anime and keys to a new car. Billy’s box has a bottle of imported beer and Godiva truffles inside.
Now what follows cannot hurt me. I hope.
Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.
Actually coming up with “the most horrible thing”.
And someone up there already completed that challenge.
Ironically by accident!
Carol Brown? Naomi Siegal?
With bad moms, it’s a three-strikes-you’re-out thing. Especially when you have to contend with Ross McIntyre.
Wait, but that’s so transparently awful. I mean, so far all of their poor treatment of Sal has been mostly subconscious/accidental.
…Dammit, Walkertons.
Yotomoe pointed out a couple threads up that this was also probably unintentional.
That’s kind of the problem. The Walkertons think they’re being good and fair to their kids.
Expecting Walky to go places and expecting nothing of Sal is not good and fair.
Telling Sal her hair looks better artificially straightened is not good and fair.
Complimenting Walky up and down for landing a girlfriend because he got a new shirt and not even noticing that Sal dressed up for them is not good and fair.
It’s all things they’re doing subconsciously. They’ve internalized the same bullshit most of the rest of the country has internalized about what “successful” people look and act like, and they’re unintentionally projecting it onto their kids. That doesn’t mean it’s not shitty just because they’re not yelling the n-word at Sal or some of the other abusive shit Blaine or Toedad would pull.
I don’t think it’s not bad. I think it’s correctable. It’s something that needs to be talked about, y’know. Make them aware of it and how it’s affecting both of their kids.
Besides, robbing a convenience store as a child, years back, really shouldn’t affect parental affection.
This is part of Sal’s whole problem, her family has basically abandoned her, and even here is still giving her the cold shoulder.
The convenience store incident is just Linda’s way of rationalising it.
Her favorism began way earlier.
The problem with that is her mom would need to actually listen. And we saw at Parent’s Weekend that she doesn’t even extend that basic courtesy to Sal or even acknowledge her existence. Even when she is directly addressing her.
That’s why I think it’d be something both Sal and Walky would have to talk to her about together.
I can imagine how that would go.
Linda: “Sal, did you put your brother up to this? Why do you have to drag everyone into your messes?”
Sally. Not Sal. Linda doesn’t acknowledge Sal’s name preference.
Could still be residual disappointment from the whole “robbing a convenience store” thing, though.
It predated the convenience store, by Sal’s entire childhood.
And, ultimately, it was five damn years ago. Sal’s paid for it already.
Please let it be something and meaningful, please don’t hurt these children like this.
A box of condoms, probably.
Remember kids, use protection to avoid infection.
Life is nasty, brutish and short … then there’s DoA.
Which, though nasty and brutish, is far from short.
unless those are Godiva chocolates or a diamond I don’t think the size is a good sign… O.o
Diamond? Hopefully, she doesn’t want to marry her daughter.
Nah nah nah, that’s only if the diamond’s in a ring. What we have here is treasure.
Nonono, it’s a care package, not a carat package.
Or a carob packacke
Let’s just hope it’s not a carrion package.
Its the new iphone 7!
Ouch
Given how (mom) Linda Walkerton ignored Sal completely, and (dad) Charles at least tried to show some interest in her, it would not surprise me if the scenario was Linda telling Charles: “I’m going to send David and Jennifer some packages — do you want to add anything for them?”, and Charles saying “David and Jennifer? . . . Ah.”, and then adding a box for Sal on his own initiative.
I’m willing to buy that. I could totally see that as the origin of this package.
If so, I hope Charles had at least enough sense not to send a bottle of hair straightener.
Possible. He had the whole ‘good hair’ thing (which I am embarrassed about defending him over…my privilege popped up at a bad time), but he at least seems more ‘clueless to his internalized racism’ than ‘actively malevolent’ like Linda.
Also this reminds me of how my grandma always used to mail me actual cash in boxes because she figured “envelopes get opened when the mailman can feel there’s money in there so he steals it” (yeesh, grandma) and to make the boxes heavier she’d put random shit in there like a toilet roll or once a Christmas ornament in the shape of a terrifying Baby Jesus.
Miss ya, grandma
Your grandma rocks!
I think the saddest part about all this is how surprised Sal is to get mail from her mother at all. Did she ever get care packages while she was in boarding school? It doesn’t seem likely, judging by her face in panel 3. She is peeking over Walky’s shoulder like a care package is some sort of rare spectacle, and not something she is super familiar with from the several years she lived away from home. Also Sal’s sad little smirk in the last panel ruins me.
That seems consistent with Owlmirror’s idea above.
I’m guessing no. And yeah, that bit of surprise at getting anything is just heart-breaking.
I wonder if we won’t see some adult from Sal’s boarding school days show up, and Sal being utterly happy to see them because they were more parental to her than her actual parents.
Seems unlikely.
I think if that had happened, we’d see some sign of her softening toward authority in general, even if not being entirely trusting.
Whether nobody at the school actually tried, or Sal rejected them, since she didn’t trust them is an open question.
The horrible thing is that I think a part of Linda, deep inside her psyche, would have silently blessed Amber if she’d put that knife through Sal’s heart rather than her hand. The very existence of her daughter is clearly an intolerable burden to her.
There are some preview panels that show the Walkertons hanging out together. I’m hoping that, possibly prompted by Walky admitting to having his own problems with calculus, there will be a renaissance of the relationship between Walky and Sal. If you can’t rely on your bro (or sis) in a time of need, then who can you rely on?
I’m seeing a shocked Danny getting extra credit for all the students that he’s been tutoring.
Possible. In part because the memory of a tragically dead daughter can be sculpted into whatever one wishes, unlike an inconveniently, embarrassingly live one.
…I’m going to take a leap and say that Linda and Charles don’t want their daughter dead.
There is a big difference between ‘wanting Sal dead’ and ‘being silently and secretly relieved if a tragic incident occurs’.
Can’t say I see it, then.
Like, Linda and Charles are pretty shit parents, but that doesn’t make them the Worst, Most Evil and Vile people on the face of the earth. We’ve established by now that Danny’s parents are verbally abusive to him, and Ethan’s parents even more so, but they’re still convinced that they’re good parents and everything they do is either in their child’s best interests.
I missed your comment before I wrote mine. It is harder to tell on mobile but she definitely looks surprised. Damn it
Yeah.
I think part of it as well is surprise that Walky noticed something was unequal.
That’s major progress for him. How much are you willing to bet that at the beginning of the term he would’ve been all, “WOW COOL LOOKIT WHAT I GOT?! OUR PARENTS ARE AWESOME!” and rubbing it in her face – not maliciously but because he was so damn clueless that unless Sal complained he wouldn’t even notice – (and then don’t look a gift in the mouth gosh Sal you’re so ungrateful and convenience store joke).
Definitely agree with all of that!
Second that. Walky is getting smarter. Maybe the bony poindexter deserves some credit.
I think in this case, the credit goes to Billie more than Dorothy, what with her talk with him about how not all racism is white hoods and burning crosses and how being in a interracial relationship is not exactly a get out of racism free card.
Gee. Thanks mum. Don’t overstrain or anything.
In a webcomic full of truly horrible parents, the Walkertons do their best to stay in the race
Dear Sals Mother
FUCK YOU TOO!!!
All the upvotes!
Unless the box has the new iphone 7.
Then: GLORY TO THE GREATEST MOTHER ON HIGH!
But walky gets a midrange Android.
The Walkertons actually spent more money just to give Sal a shitty gift.
Oh!
Missed that Sally one when I first saw the Comic and thought Sals Mom hadn’t sent her anything. Still, it’s kinda depressing she sent one half the size.
Half in every dimension: one-eighth of the size!
So how much more are we going to kick the proverbial dog? Sal is due for a good redemption arc.
You mean like how she was the complete and total unsung hero of the Toedad chase, and all she got from it was a bit of friendship with Joyce and a whole lot of hate from Amazi-girl?
Now that you brought that up, did Becky even thank Sal for bringing Joyce who Falcon punched the crap out of Toedad?
Looks like a no on that one based on a troll through the archives. Heck, looking through for Joyce shows that Joyce hasn’t thanked her (for this) either, though she has shown the signs of their greater friendship and mutual understanding of each other. Combine that with Amber’s… unique means of “thanking” Sal and…
Yeah, poor Sal, she really was the unsung hero of the whole thing.
I’m really hoping you mean to type “Sal’s mother”.
It’s very nice of you to suggest that, Walky. However, I think that we all know that it isn’t very likely.
The important thing to remember is she has one. Right? Right?!?
Show me the dead rats!
Please? No? THEN WE WILL JUST HAVE TO DRAW THE BOXES FULL OF DEAD RATS OURSELVES.
The box has an Iphone 7!
Want an Iphone 7 early? Go to freescamandvirus.com
So Sal’s mom is probably just a douche bag but I’m gonna be optimistic and say that she sent Walky and Billy things she knew they liked but since she hasn’t seen Sal in a while she sent her cash. I’m probably wrong but optimism.
How sad is it that the optimistic scenario still had Sal’s parents not communicating with her enough (for years!) to have even a half guess at what she would actually like.
It goes beyond that because, even if you don’t know what someone likes, there’s a ton of options you can send to a dorm ensconced college student with no job. Like, that box will barely fit a tube of toothpaste.
I predict Sal’s box contains a very heavily loaded gas card for the motorcycle.
…Just because I know I’m wrong doesn’t mean I won’t be optimistic.
Real guess at what Sal got: hair relaxer.
We know Walky didn’t talk to Sal while she was at that school. Did her parents do the same thing?
I’m just wondering if Sal is going to be unfazed* by whatever it is because she always got the same thing in her care packages while at boarding school, or if she’s going to be surprised that she got one at all because she never got a care package while at boarding school.
I can’t decide which is more likely: that they have been sending her pathetic care packages for years to keep up appearances or that it didn’t even occur to them until they wanted to send one to Walky.
*By which I mean she won’t be surprised by whatever it is, not that she won’t be upset that Walky & Billie got better stuff. That’s a thing that is definitely happening. To paraphrase a comment from the Parent’s Weekend, *This isn’t going to be a story where the racism is all just in the black woman’s head.*
It also just occurred to me that this means Sal and Joyce’s have something in common: they both have moms whose beliefs are more important to them than their kids.
All of this. Personally, my guess is she got jack all at boarding school and she’s only getting something here because now her and Walky are in the same place and it’d be “rude” to only send something to one of them.
Yeah, someone farther up in the comments pointed out that Sal looks surprised, which strongly implies that you are right.
I am thinking that because parents have a big say in what kids can do or want to do, Walky’s parents were the instigating force behind Sal being frozen out from sibling contact. If his folks wanted him to, Walky would have stayed in touch. I think Linda, at least, didn’t want him to.
Just… sent them all in one big box so… what, Sal would know where she stood? Why not just send a ranked list to their phone, Linda? Call it an “I Barely Care” package…
Not just one big box, but one big box addressed to Walky.
Again, on a practical level, it makes sense. They’re all right there and 3 small packages cost more than one big one.
But if they all go to Walky, that says something. Of course we only see one, but if you only see one in a story, it’s got to be representative.
Why is Walky’s mom sending care packages to Billy?
Billie was a childhood playfriend of Walky and Sal’s. I think that they’ve all known each other since… well, forever. It’s a bit like the Browns with Becky – Linda and Charles Walkerton know her so well, she’s practically a stepdaughter to them.
Even more so perhaps, since Billie’s parents are distant.
She said somewhere that she’d called the Walkerton’s Mom & Dad sometimes.
I also wouldn’t be surprised, though there’s less canon support that she became something of a substitute for their “lost” daughter when they sent her away.
That makes a lot of sense.
This strip is for those of us too stupid to see the favouritism during Freshman Family Weekend.
Maybe the contents are identical and she just didn’t have three small boxes.
[turns out walky has a box of video games and sal gets 24 karat diamond earrings]
WELP
Karat is a unit of gold purity, on a scale of 0 to 24. Carat is a unit of weight used for gems, and 24 doesn’t have any special meaning other than being a moderately big number (approximately “Gem is the same diameter as your finger”)
At least Billie isnt crying.
Give it time.
It’s more styrofoam peanuts and a note that says:
Greeting, black daughter.
We hope you are.
“Love”, parents.
P.S. Share your styrofoam peanuts with your brother.
I feel so bad for laughing at this.
What would the note for Danny say? (In fact you should do notes for all the ‘unloved’ kids.
Dear son,
Please don’t screw it up this time.
Acknowledgements, parents.
Danny gets these at least once a week.
Billie’s doesn’t have a note. Just a wad of $20s.
Sent on a regular basis by her parent’s accountant.
What the fucking fuck!?
It’s sad that Linda treasures Billie more over her own biological daughter.
I am like Sally, but I’m an only child.
But .. maybe there’s diamonds inside?
Can…can I just adopt these kids? All of them? They need decent parents I can make cookies or something.
Seriously though, what I expect will happen is that the box contains some cash and a note saying something like “I don’t know what you’re into, so buy yourself something nice,” while Walky’s and Billie’s contain more personal gifts that show Linda knows them really well.
So while it’s not a bad gift, it would definitely disappoint Sal and show favoritism.
…oof. Not cool. Reminds me of the part in Harry Potter where everyone thought Hermione was seducing Harry and Ron’s mom sent them all big Easter presents but only sent Hermione a teensy little egg….that part pissed me off and so does this.