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It’s amazing how in sync Robin and Becky’s brains are, when they are practically on opposite ends of the “people I would want to hang out with” spectrum.
First, Becky is in a fight for her life, and knows it. She was jollying Robin along while pwning Robin online. It’s impressive, but not amazing, how well Becky could make Robin (and many of the readers) think they were in sync.
Second, Robin’s hijinks come from having no sense of consequence or reality. Becky’s hijinks come from having her back to the wall, nothing to lose but her life, and no sense of moral or social constraint toward the world that disinherited her, made her homeless, tried to torture her, and came close to killing her with a gun and a car wreck… and killed her mother and forced her to live with her mother’s killer for a year or so.
Becky is basically a child soldier. Somehow, her heart is still in the right place, and she is still sane and can enjoy life. But we should never make the mistake of thinking she is innocent, or feckless, or that she will ever forget who her enemies are and what they can do.
Having your pupil take your philosophy after your death, twist it, and then use it as the base for the “theoretically best state” which is actually a proto-Fascist caste system?
…
What do you mean I’m not allowed to bring up Socrates and Plato anymore? I thought Aristotle was the only guy who too mainstream to be mentioned in philosophy discussions?
hahaah we started this discussion with diogenes and terry pratchett; i don’t think there are any limits to the potential nerdiness this thread may unleash
“The Republic” is goddamn horrifying. I mean, I get that Plato didn’t trust democracy because a jury sentenced his teacher to death for a crime he didn’t really commit but holy shit he went off the deep end. And his idea for what makes a good leader? “No family. Heavy indoctrination into the cult of state loyalty. Raised ‘the Spartan way’. Have as much knowledge as possible crammed into the head. Yep, you meet all the requirements, now share power in a council made entirely of people like you.” No wonder the ideas of ‘The Civilizing of the primitive natives’, Eugenics, Social-Darwinism, and ‘the Ubermensch’ got started.
Raised “the Spartan way” is always interesting to me. I think Sparta is really the central model for the Republic.
Sparta is in a certain sense perfect. At least when it was working, almost every aspect of the state, the laws, and people’s lives were all made to complement each other, almost as if it were one body. But it was awful for the people, and managed to give nothing of value to the world, not art, science, or philosophy. Just a few victories over Persia that they then reversed in jealousy of Athens’s empire, which they couldn’t manage to keep.
It seems like Greek philosophers and historians were very quickly able to pick up on the perfection, and not on the pointlessness. I guess it never occurred to anyone to wonder why there never was a Spartan Socrates to be executed.
i vaguely remember The Republic but like i remember that training kids by their aptitudes seemed cool
but like also now thinking about it critically it seems…really difficult to be able to figure out what a person’s goals should be in life by, like, six years of age
@3oranges And “perfection” comes on the back of a massive slave population and ever dwindling manpower. I respect the Spartan society for only two things: 1. Their far superior treatment of women compared to the rest of Classical Greek civilization. 2. Their dry, sardonic wit that led to the creation of the one-liner. My personal favorite of the latter, “Aye, one emissary for one king” in response to a the Macedonian king Demetrius. Tied closely with the response to Philip II of Macedonia, “If”. That one is up there with the infamous WW2 Bastogne message, “To the German Commander: Nuts. The American Commander.”
See, um, the last time I brought up Plato and Socrates was to write a comical debate between “Socrates” and Zarathustra from Friedrich Nietzsche’s work.
Including a joke about the “Socrates” who was taking part of the debate being a literal handpuppet for Plato who was hidden under the table.
@Krys Brynhildr Aye. Aye it is. I mean, the truth will out and all that. Also, is that Futaba from Persona 5 as a gravatar? If so, how do you like the game?
Yeah, I cropped up a picture of her being all smirky even before it had a US release. The game is super great though. I mean its kind of like this in that its mostly a story of kids trying to deal with a whole bunch of selfish shitty adults, but the characters are pretty great and it feels really good when the social links really start kicking in and you feel like you’ve really made a difference.
That and Futaba is amazing, even if I identify with a lot of her personality traits to much to not feel super weird about the option to date her. I’ve put 224:29 hours into the game with two playthroughs already though give or take a few weekends where I passed out for 8 hour stretches without turning the game off on the first playthrough, so yeah, pretty great. Probably my favorite Persona game so far with the two fighting games and DAN right below it…and then Golden which I still need to beat.
@Krys Cool. I haven’t gotten the game yet, hopefully I’ll buy it sometime during the summer as a little reward for getting my teaching job, but I’ve been watching some let’s plays. It can be…cringe inducing at times. Especially when the player won’t make or use the coffee and end up leaving palaces early because of it. Seriously!! Why won’t they just make the coffee?!?
I don’t know if you read Squirrel Girl’s comic book, but the first page of every issue is her twitter account, and it’s uncanny how much she sounds/writes/thinks exactly like Becky.
I still haven’t read it, but I know I’ll love it. It’s one of those things that start awesome (“Erica Henderson is making a new comic, I have to check it out”) and then just keep piling up awesome until it gets ridiculous.
So you telling me Squirrel Girl is basically Becky is perfectly in line with my non-reading experience of the comic so far.
I like how the header image ,almost lines up, so it looks like an endless sea of supporters is cheering on a parade of Robins. That’s the sort of thing a low-level national politician would do.
Becky is a sneaky, sneaky cyyyyyyyber ninja. Remind me to never get on her OR Joyce’s bad side. At least I will see where Joyce is coming from, for all good that will do me.
But please don’t commit cyber crimes against public figures, Becky. We don’t want you united with your father.
Heh, it’s such a teacher’s moment. “This is the lesson I want you to take.” “NOPE, learnt a completely different lesson that you didn’t even think of, while fooling around on my phone. LOL, YOU MAD, TEACHER?”
i respect your different opinion but feel like the emotionalness of Robin’s choosing to leave (of her own accord) would lend a different tenor to the likelihood of Leslie pushing her out vs. letting her leave
idk if Leslie had stopped to protest anything it probably would have been Robin acting like they’d had anything worth calling a relationship after Robin refused to leave the first time. and being all tragic like she’s off to fight the skeleton war or something
My debit card was compromised a couple of days ago; someone ordered something online and it showed up on my online bank statement. I’ve already cancelled and replaced it, but if Becky turns up in a GAP V-neck T-shirt, I think I will have found my suspect!
Probably best to treat it as the price of getting rid of Robin. She strikes me as the sort of person who’d hear “Get back here and give me back my property!” as “Get back here and blah blah transparent excuse to make out!”
Sometimes you get lucky and when you manage to kick the assholes out of your life they end up leaving something nice behind that they never come back for.
So um, in this case its a trade off between a pair of shoes and a lamp presumably.
Well, if we bring type of shoe, whether or not they’re Leslie’s size, and what brand they are, Leslie may have come out ahead monetarily wise in the lamp/shoe exchange.
Funny, I usually collect the Asshole Tax. Just as an example, and totally not something I really, actually did:
When stealthily moving out of the home of a registered sex offender who has been financially, verbally, mentally, and emotionally abusing you, play a fun game with yourself and see how many of his video games you can fit in your bags, to replace the ones you were forced to sell so he could get things he wanted. Then, go ahead and shut off all the utilities he and his equally-horrible wife opened up in your name under threat of kicking you out and then ran up over a thousand dollars worth of late fees on.
Y’know, make ’em squirm a little. Again, I will neither confirm nor deny any such actions and stand by their hypothetical nature.
The thing is, when you’re being actively held back from getting a job so you can be used for your SNAP card, video games can become a large portion of your day, as well as your primary means of coping with the reality of your situation. Being forced to sell them actively reduces the number of options you have in that regard, which also reduces the only incentive you even have to put up with the nonsense being shoved at you daily. So, once all but your very favorite games and the few you couldn’t sell have vanished, you’re suddenly faced with either leaving by any means necessary before your most precious possessions are taken away, or letting it happen and being left with nothing.
Yep, just like I thought. If it was about Robin’s bisexuality, they would have helped her cover it up (probably by calling Leslie a dirty-dirty liar) or used her as a prop to show they’re not REALLY homophobic. My guess? I bet Becky called for a investigation against President Head Alien’s Russian ties.
Remember when Becky first came back to IU, then borrowed Joyce’s phone? Sarah was concerned Becky was monkeying with the phone, hiding something, and trying to hurt Joyce.
Yeah, and I think it shows her actions when someone means her harm and when someone doesn’t mean her harm.
When someone doesn’t mean her harm, she’s super respectful of the phone and the trust given her, even if she may do things to check on her own safety (see if her dad is hunting for her) or look up stuff that interests her (DINOS!).
When someone does mean her harm, whether directly or indirectly with the power of Congress, Becky cuts like a knife, getting her dad to incriminate himself over the phone with his whole violent kidnapping plan or very nonviolently making it seem like Robin had a change of heart likely to earn the ire of her party and make it so the path of least resistance would be completing her internal journey and stop trying to force homophobic politician Robin to happen.
I think what’s amazing is that her actions even when she’s being slick tend to lack a mean-spirited edge. Like, she’s not draining a bank account or picking a nasty fight or outing Robin. She does very low-key and passive actions that have huge effect (calling 911 leaving it on or posting a mildly pro-LGBT statement and intention on Robin’s twitter).
And I think that speaks to her overall goodness and what lines she’s unwilling to cross even with regards to her personal protection.
the fun part about Becky posting on Robin’s twitter is that like. she’s not even subtle about it. she’s just messing around and it’s really obvious what she’s doing if you give it two seconds’ critical thought
but Robin’s party, at that point, was just looking for an excuse
Unfortunately, I perceive Robin getting Toedad out of jail and defending Ryan as potential ways to win the election. She will not be destroyed by this. No, she will come back with the power of Hell and Breitbart behind her. In the end, Robin will run for President and…lose…lose to President Dorothy and her VP Becky.
I think of the most comically evil things she can do and assume they will win the leadership of her party over. It worked in RL. Really, we’re well past puppy kicking territory. If there’s a beloved drive in or pizza joint, she’ll probably try to get it shut down or outlaw dancing.
@SgtWadeyWilson see, I completely forgot that there was just recently an American Sherlock Holmes show, so I was looking entirely at Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr (remember those two movies he did with Jude Law as Watson? Anyone? Anyone at all?). Now, Benedict is not legally allowed to be president, being himself a Brit. Even in the far off space future he will not be allowed. And Robert Downey Jr…well he’s Robert Downey Jr. Don’t get me wrong I like his work, but…well, considering all he has to do when playing Tony Stark is just be himself, not filled with confidence on his ability to run a country. Also, the fact that his son has been in and out of rehab for the past couple of years would probably be an impediment to any campaign he would attempt to run, because all the mud flingers would come out and he would get very defensive.
…
I would however, love to see Robert Downey Jr as a US Ambassador to Russia just to see how Putin would deal with his snark.
Oh. Holy shit. Just googled “Sherlock Holmes” and “22nd century”. I had no idea there was a cartoon out there with that as the basis. Well, the more know.
You know I never disliked Becky even during the weird hate train that was going on, but for a while I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d feel about her as a new recurring character, only really warming up to her when Dina came into the mix and steadily growing more fond over time as her writing got better as well.
Now fuck that shit Becky’s a national goddamn hero. I would die a thousand deaths for Becky.
I like Becky as a character. I love that she would annoy the shit out of me but I still see her as a person who I would respect and want to help. I can’t just dismiss her as “silly comic character”. She’s, for me, an example of the skill Willis has to create real characters.
I also like her a lot more after this. Before she felt like a loudmouth and it was only her really sad backstory that gave her substance. The whole “I love science! yay dinosaurs!” seemed a little fake to me… But maybe because such religious based ignorance is basically unheard of in the UK so it just doesn’t come across as believable to me personally. However, this seems like a real choice and shows her as smart and capable.
I promise you that Becky and Joyce’s ignorance on science is disgustingly accurate to certain parts of the US. PROMISE. It’s not even a tiny bit exaggerated.
“Between 48 and 52 percent of Americans don’t believe in evolution, which is like… half. On top of that, a further 38 to 40 percent believe that biological evolution has occurred, but that it was initiated by and has since been administered by God. Which leaves a very small percentage of Americans who are right.”
So yes, that kind of ignorance is frighteningly real among the Beckys and Joyces of America. For further illustration, Google Kent Hovind and prepare to be very sad.
I mean
how do ‘Americans who are right’ know for a fact that God isn’t overseeing evolution
this isn’t the kind of thing you can possibly prove or disprove and the atheistic assumption is not actually more valid than the theistic one
like that FUCKING HALF is terrifying but on an entirely differnet topic you’re being an asshole
Like, we know exactly how evolution works. We can watch it happen in real time. There’s no problematic portion of evolution for which we would require magic to help it along. God’s share of the work would seem to be zero.
So in the respect that God is at all having a hand in evolution itself, then that, yeah, that would be an incorrect assertion, and a disprovable one. If God exists, he’s existing adjacent to evolution and keeping his hands off it entirely. The idea that he “oversees” it in any meaningful capacity is a wrong one. Maybe, like, watching it through the blinds of his front window from across the street, at most.
Yeah I live in the South of the US and I never even questioned Becky’s new interest in science. I had a friend who didn’t believe in evolution in high school and now is a park ranger. It happens.
You know what, of Becky wasn’t on the side of good she would be a very effective super villain. And be one of those super villains you secretly like better than the main hero to boot.
If guessing you’re not referring to plan to have Robin grow as a person on her own volition after meeting Leslie that plan might not have worked but it was worth a shot.
If you’re referring to what Roz cheered actually happening, 1. Becky’s didn’t hurt Leslie, 2. Something something sisters, 3. Becky is a gay person herself, 4. Becky wasn’t targeting Robin for apparently being gay but for apparently pandering to gay people transparently and badly, 5. Becky was responding to not just Robin’s policies but also the fact that Leslie’s house was infested with congress people.
I personally claim 1 and 5.
This is why I was convinced that in this case Becky was better than a smart bomb, she would get her trust in five seconds and mess up stuff in the name of good in a little bit more
Becky’s just like: Oh, we’re not using the fact she foolishly foisted her phone on me that probably has her email, twitter, facebook and all other accounts open on it, hijacking them, changing all the passwords and saying things that would make her party drop her in a way that sounds just like her so that she would leave your house? My bad.
Ha Becky was only able to do this because Robin just had to offer up her phone to avoid a real conversation with Becky. Like what politician just offers up their phone????
Becky manipulated Robin into doing that. Go back and look at the strip. Becky introduces phones to the conversation in the first panel. Second and third panel, sympathy play focused on lack of phone. Fourth panel, gets the phone. Fifth panel, gets near-explicit permission to try to hack Robin’s reputation.
Becky had a plan for that phone the moment she sat down. Probably more than one plan, depending on how stupid Robin was. As I said at the time, if Robin had ever said “Hey stop, give that back” Becky could have run out of the house with the phone, forcing Robin to follow.
Yep, Robin would love being a democrat! Imagine all that time arguing against people doing evil and doing NOTHING about it! Plus, all the perks of being a Republican!
Eh, we all are in America right now. Really starting to feel like we slipped on a banana peel right before Vietnam and lost half our IQ points as a result. Well, if America were distilled down to a person.
Yeah. And then we got dumber. We’re basically the stereotype of the evil jock at this point. Dumb as bricks, always angry, nasty personality, a complete bully, but has a posse anyways because he’s got the biggest muscles. I’m honestly wondering which country is going to be the nerd that pulls a come from behind victory through superior intelligence and basic human decency. Anyone have any ideas on that front?
It’ll be tough to adjust to never winning or having any real grand scale effect and only small victories (that can be swiftly removed by the opposition in power) but at least Robin can tell herself she has the moral high ground.
One of the benefits is Robin wouldn’t care what was on the bills to begin with so it would be good too. Just imagine all the sweet-sweet speech money she’d be rolling in too! Albeit, this turn of events would also mean she could try to stalk Leslie again. :ugh:
People love a redemption story. If she finds a good pr person she could definitely easily spin this in her favor and considering she has no actual beliefs or stakes in this there’s no real reason not to switch to the other side.
Well I don’t know if less than three months is enough time for her to switch parties and the dems already have their nominee right? So considering loss is probably inevitable now she’ll have two years to rebrand and claw her way back.
It really mega bothers me that we’re trying to combine the tropes “those that would rule you” with someone who is also a wlw. I get we’re going for a subverted trope, but it’s just uncomfortably written when its “lol the gays are the REAL OPPRESSORS” esp since Willis isn’t a gay woman.
Not going to demonize any writing or plot or say it’s all stink poop bad, I mean sometimes when you create you miss a swing. I’m not saying this as an overly enthusiastic ally who creates problems where there is none, just an uncomfortable queer over here who honestly this entire plot line has made me uncomfortable for months. Would appreciate it if people didn’t jump up in an army as if I just called Willis the devil but I respect it if you disagree, esp if you’re another queer person.
i’m confused. what is the trope “those that would rule you”? i feel like i would understand what you are saying much better if i understood what that meant
While I understand your position, Kole, I should point out we have plenty of homophobes who are heterosexual monsters. Mary, Toedad, JoyceMom, EthanMom, and probably others I’m missing. Robin being a closeted hypocrite who oppresses fellow gays isn’t new to reality, sadly, as forced outings of several showed.
I also think Robin’s “redemption” would have had a nasty message by itself. In storytelling terms, I think her being evil in this reality while good and a main character in the Walkyverse is a nice bit of storytelling subversion–all the more powerful as she was so popular there.
I read it more as the forces of institutionalized homophobia. Sort of like how people fighting the machinations of Roy Cohn and all the evil he did to prosecute and persecute his fellow queer folks were fighting those who would rule them as well even though he was secretly gay.
But I can see your trepidation and acknowledge it.
I dunno, the whole complexity of it reminds me a lot of Caitlin Jenner, who supported something that will kill hundreds, if not thousands of trans folks over the next how ever many years, all while believing her wealth and skin color would protect her from the direct fallout of that institutional transphobia.
And then only belatedly turning away from it once it became undeniably clear that she was not going to receive special dispensation from a fundraising arm powering itself on hatred towards trans people because of that support.
And that’s sort of the central tragedy of every closeted bigot who hopes that their performance as a useful minority will be enough slowly realizing that the bigots they joined view them as just the same as those they collectively bash.
Or for a more direct example, there’s Robert Oscar Lopez. Just like Robin, he’s latino, he says he’s bisexual, he’s deeply in denial about his attractions to the same gender that are still deeply apparent.
But his actions do amazingly intense harm. He’s been on the lead in promoting anti-gay laws in various countries, he’s argued in federal court against the right of gays to adopt or be able to bury their partners, he’s a major player in the whole anti-trans bus bullshit.
He is a key figure in the anti-gay movement despite that sexuality and race and is a force that would rule folks if allowed the dispensation of hating those like him as hard as he hates himself.
I kind of agree? My only two comments are — one, that this storyline started years ago, and earlier was sort of more nuanced than the other homophobia storylines going on — like it was really clear that Joyce, Joyce’s mom, Toedad, the pastor, etc. were entirely in the wrong because of their religious bigotry. But we knew in advance that Robin wasn’t straight or actually religious, so it was more of a look at how queer people can get caught up in political homophobia and get stuck in the closet/denial/self-loathing. that kind of went off the rails after Robin’s second class visit though, because Robin became the major homophobic villain in the cast at the same time she came out to herself.
and two, that I suspect this ending has been somewhat influenced by the strong backlash Willis got during the bar and break-in parts of the storyline. Not certain what the alternative would have been, but…
Its an ugly subject so probably no good answer. At the end, Robin was either going to be Winston “Do it to Julia!” from 1984 or Darth Vader and get a pass on all her previous crimes.
While I understand what you are trying to get at, to me the point is not really ‘the oppression of LGBT+ people comes from LGBT+ people themselves’ so much as internal homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, panphobia, polyphobia, acephobia etc. instilled into people, particularly politicians, leads to the disgustingly uncomfortable position where queer people let themselves become weapons against other queer people because they think that is how things should be or they think that by being a useful minority they’ll be excused from the awful policies they help enact.
And it just feels like a pointed statement about how hypocritical politicians can be as we know Robin’s platform was built on homophobia etc., plus racism (Sal and Amazi-Girl’s stuff at the rally implied it), and there is likely sexism in there too since Ryan was one of her free interns so something about it must appeal to him. Which would make her a bisexual latino woman, potentially try to oppress three major parts of her core identity for votes.
I feel that is something that makes sense to bring up in this story because politicians have done that. Politicians still do that. And it would have affected a fair number of the cast if Robin had been reelected, likely negatively. It is an ugly thing to talk about and acknowledge though.
I do offer sympathy for the fact it has made you uncomfortable though because while I can see the point I think Willis was going for, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will appeal to or work well for everyone.
I’m another queer person. Specifically a bi queer person.
I have to say, I disagree. And I don’t know if you were using it as an umbrella term or not, but I would actually be less comfortable with this storyline from a lesbian creator.
Because the “evil bi woman who plays with your heart before running back to Straightsville” stereotype is not a stereotype straight men have. Straight men aren’t the ones who view bi women as bihets, as traitors, as secret oppressors, as completely immoral (reflected by our — gasp — willingness to enter relationships with more than one gender). And Robin’s storyline would be worse to me if it came from a creator I expected to be aware of the intracommunity problems, especially if she was a lesbian. “I would say that [NAME WITHHELD FOR SPOILERS] is not a lesbian character. [She] was, if anything, an opportunist, which is quite different from being a lesbian. If anything, the lesbians should wish for a character like [her] to be killed off since she just preyed on a powerful lesbian in order to fulfill her heterosexual ambitions,” was a load of biphobic garbage said by a lesbian creator.
As it is, I know Robin’s storyline actually comes because of the character’s evolution through the Walkyverse; I can see the dots he connected to take her political career there to a darker place, and the many, many real-life examples of a closeted anti-LGB+ politician betraying the rest of us.
I think there’s unfortunate implications here, mitigated by the rest of the cast, but I also like that the strip has a lot of very flawed LGBTQ+ characters, and for my money Willis is in the vanishingly rare position of being able to do something like this with Robin because he has so many other queer characters.
My comfort doesn’t negate your discomfort, though, and mostly what I wanted to say here was not “you’re wrong for feeling uncomfortable with Willis’s story arc” and much more “for me personally, this would be worse from someone within the community”.
We step on and hurt each other all the time, unfortunately. Respectability politics. When we fall for them, we are all equally prone to attacking each other in an ultimately futile effort to save ourselves. :\
footnote: I misspoke up there, and accidentally implied that the Depraved Bisexual trope is uniquely intracommunity. THAT ONE IS NOT, NOPE. Straight people 100% also do that particular thing. It didn’t belong in the same list as bihets and traitors who break lesbians’ hearts and then run back to Straightsville.
It’s just another negative stereotype that Robin can be uncharitably seen as filling, and which I would not be more surprised or happier to see from someone within the community.
It is incredibly depressing to realize how many works would be covered by your “name withheld by spoilers” statement.
And yeah I can also see the discomfort on Kole’s part. It’s kinda like jokes about how all homophobes are secretly queer, which conveniently removes straight people from the group enacting this hateful legislation.
So I can see Kole’s wariness about it here because of how it’s been used by folks in the past.
I can absolutely see how we got from SP!Robin to here. Robin’s bisexuality, like Mike’s, was something Willis felt he really needed to make more explicit this time around. Neither of them are the sort of person you would point to and say, “This is an ideal character to create as bi,” but that’s largely because they weren’t created to be bi representation — they were just created, and their sexualities became relevant much later on, when they were already very flawed human beings.
I’m not at all opposed to creating characters specifically as representation, to approaching a work and saying, “OK I need an absolute minimum of x percent of these characters to be Y representation,” and I know that Willis too is not opposed to this. He’s not a creator who turns his nose up at “diversity for diversity’s sake”. Because he knows that diversity is worthwhile in and of itself. (If the concept of diversity just to have diversity offends, I find it’s worthwhile to reframe it as diversity for reality’s sake; that disabled queer Muslim woman exists in reality, nobody needs an excuse to put her in fiction.)
But I also know that that’s NOT what happened here. I know that Robin becoming Trump and Robin becoming explicitly bi were extremely unrelated things, that came together very naturally to tell a story about Robin being a closeted conservative politician.
Similarly I know that this is context not everyone has! So I really want to acknowledge how bad it sounds on paper to say “the queer Latina character is a stand-in for Trump and has been written as the oppressor of a white queer woman.” THAT SOUNDS REALLY BAD.
I have instead a weird appreciation for how this comic and its odd iterated development process has given us so many very different and sometimes very very flawed queer characters. (The exceptions are Becky and Carla who are almost inhumanly perfect*, and whose flaws are more minor things like a slightly abrasive personality or foot in mouth syndrome.)
* I kid! I kid!!!
I also know that Willis is very conscious of the unfortunate implications of his comic, which is why we’re unlikely to get explicit confirmation that Amber has DID or that Dina is autistic. He knows that representation through flawed characters is very dicey.
Especially when they are the sole representation, which is why we get more explicit flawed problematic stuff here where there’s a lot of positive representation as well rather than the stuff where there’s only one.
Another queer person who is so goddamn relieved that any Republican in any universe making decisions like the ones in ours do has gotten thrown to the fucking wolves at last because I stopped giving her the benefit of the doubt before any of this started for what she put Roz through.
I’m sorry that you had to feel uncomfortable, that is legit.
For me, this had the opposite impact. A lot of stories are about, if only the oppressed person was nice and understanding and made the bridge and behaved perfectly, then, the bigot would come around! The bigot was good inside all along and it’s the oppressed person’s responsibility to bring it out for them. I think Leslie was kind of a victim of this message, even though she knew it was causing her pain, so I like that Robin didn’t play into it.
Robin isn’t an oppressor because she loves women, she’s an oppressor in spite of it, and right now, she is too committed to her bigotry for us to change her path in any way. She’s gonna have to do that, herself, or not at all.
Words can hardly express how much I want to tell Robin to eff off in that first panel, stop trying to pretend you’re cute housewife; you’re a creepy stalker home invader
*bows slowly in Chris Phoenix’s direction* That is damn well called!
Also, Becky might be the slickest person ever with regards to phones. Heck, she even telegraphed it early on jumping immediately into the emails.
Panel 1: I’m terrified to think of where that laundry’s drying or what Robin thought the “washer” was. Also I suspect Leslie will now be unable to find her anti-anxiety medication for a week (not actually canon).
And the sad part is that Robin still hasn’t abandoned her dream idea of what Leslie and her had. Still these last touches of domesticity as if she’s a dutiful 1950s stereotype wife making sure all the chores are done before heading away for the weekend, all the time worrying if her stereotype husband will be able to feed himself and take care of base needs (which not even knowing how to dress or feed yourself makes you totes inherently smarter, right? 1950s stereotypes are a trip).
Like, even in this tragic moment she doesn’t at all internalize what real harm she did to Leslie in all of this trying to force her into the mold of her fantasy. Especially as it was a fantasy part of Leslie yearned for even knowing how unbelievably awful and toxic it was for her.
Panel 2: Oh, Robin…
Like part of me can empathize with her here. She’s a confused queer person unsure how to handle her newfound attraction to a woman and handling that extremely poorly because she’s absolutely terrified of openly talking about what she’s feeling in a mutual way that makes it real.
But at the end of the day, Robin nuked any chance of this becoming something and damn were there a lot of ways in which she could have salvaged this early on before violating an escalating amount of boundaries and essentially kidnapping Leslie into a fantasy queer but never acknowledging it domestic love affair.
And well… given the current state of the country, it’s hard not to feel petty in awful ways about this and think “good, one less person voting in service to the complete destruction of the rights of everyone I care about”. I dunno, I’m not nearly as good and forgiving as parts of me want to be and honestly, given what I’ve forgiven in the past being done to me, it’s probably a good thing that part of me isn’t always the one running the show.
Robins little fantasy housewife life is a perfect example of her TRYING to be a cute manic pixie dreamgirl, but failing, and hurting the people around her in the process. Frankly, you don’t have to have read shortpacked to be uneasy about her poking around in your medical cabinet.
Thank you! To be fair, I thought she was going to do something else with the phone – that is, physically leave with it after convincing Robin she was a threat as long as she had it.
This is pretty different. Robin never did fully realize how dangerous Becky was with the phone (though she had every chance to). I still think that, if Robin had realized and tried to take it back, Becky could have used the run-away-with-phone tactic. Becky is seriously sharp, and smart enough to usually have fallback/alternate plans.
But when Robin left Becky with the phone for many minutes, not even worrying about getting it back, Becky opted for the chance to do more permanent damage.
And, in hindsight (I didn’t see this until just now), it’s foreshadowed or at least echoed by Ryan accessing Amber’s phone.
(In real life, this kind of thing should make people worry about the TSA demanding their social media passwords as they cross the border. And while I’m thinking of it, WTF is ICE doing going after U.S. gangs? Not that gangs aren’t a problem, but ICE is too used to being unaccountable. And this predates Trump.)
Anyway, let’s not forget that Becky has lived through horrible stuff, and become strong and dangerous – even ruthless – as a result. I’m now wondering about her nuking her own closet from orbit. Was that just youthful hijinks and high spirits, or was it a giant blast of “FUCK YOU” to the world that killed her mother?
I’m also thinking about how manipulative she was willing to be toward her own girlfriend.
Given what she’s been through, and what she has shown so far, I’m wondering if the best model for her motivations and capabilities… might be Ender from Ender’s Game. She has survived life-or-death situations. She has learned to crush wasps with her fingers. She owes NOTHING to large portions of the world, and she knows it. The world does not have her back, and she knows that too.
She could easily become the most powerful / destructive character in this comic. It’s a good thing her heart is in the right place.
Panel 3: Welp, that career is nuked from orbit like a Becky closet. Like, she’s existing pantless, wearing what I’m pretty sure is Leslie’s shirt and nothing else, with a stunned look on her face, no shoes, and a lamp with “aide” scribbled on it and then crossed out. Like this rivals Sean Spicer’s press conference hiding in the bushes for desperate sign of a complete stress collapse and it’s a visual you definitely don’t want blasted out on local media for the next month straight right before election.
Like, she’s still going to be okay financially. No one lets the rich falter too much and there is always easy work at various think tanks for failed political types. Which, yeah, it can get depressing at times to know that even a complete self-imploding immoral fuck like Pat McCrory will land softer and more protected than any of the queer folks living in his state.
Panel 4-5: Oh Leslie… *tries to hug fictional character* And yeah, this must hit hard to a lot of things important to her. Like, she believes so hard in the power of empathy. That if you reach out with your humanity, eventually people have to be able to see it and stop swinging their fists. And this, like her parents, hammers on that faith.
Trying to be empathetic, trying to minimize the nuclear fallout of Robin’s career implosion, trying to make herself seen as a full human being rather than a prop in an internal movie? That was her whole plan and it was one that took basically a full breakdown to stop trying in ever more desperate fashion. And what actually got her out was the actions she found herself unable to do (outing Robin, throwing her to the wolves of the media).
And it’s a thing that sits hard of late as we see a tidal wave of complete intentional lack of empathy dominating politics, exploiting people’s desires to be fair, to want to cooperate, to not want to fully acknowledge that something truly horrendous has occurred. Begging for our humanity is what we have, but in the current political climate, that’s not exactly a winner.
Her lesson here is not to Becky, it’s to her self and her optimism and that’s what makes this a tragedy. She really did want to believe the best of the world and that somehow, someway she’d be able to get through to Robin and get her to see the harm in what she was doing both politically and directly with regards to her. And part of her, a part that longed for her when she knew her politics were poison, wanted to believe that she’d be able to break through, reach Robin, redeem her.
Letting go of that once and for all for Leslie is intensely painful.
Poor Leslie. It hurts so much that she has taken the high ground throughout this entire mess (with one or two hickups, such as bringing Becky), and it has given her so little.
In the end of the day, very little would have been different, and most would have been better if she had just tiptoped out of the apartment when Robin first appeared and crashed on Vivian’s couch until the entire thing had blown over. That lack of agency plain hurts.
Yeah. And it sucks to take the high ground and then have that exploited against you, especially as it frequently builds an unfair dynamic where you’re expected to take the high ground as you’re being cut with knives.
There was so much cost to her, possibly cost that may even cost her her job or put her in considerable risk of losing her job or her home. And it’s only in hind-sight how much better just standing up and walking away when Robin first tried to check in with her or walking out and staying on Vivian’s couch would have been.
But it’s hard to tell the right place to give up and do what’s right for oneself and one’s health when one is trying to do the “right thing”.
I also like that Leslie got the lesson that was so hard for her to learn — it’s folly to appeal to the empathy of oppressors (even those you really want to like).
Becky didn’t need this lesson. Her dad had already shown her it very, very clearly, back in the hospital. So, Becky was free to fight, and to mess up Robin’s twitter.
Very little different *now* perhaps. What Leslie has done to Robin will have very different long-term ramifications for the latter, and I suspect we’ll be seeing some of those effects in later strips. Leslie’s empathy didn’t pay off the way she wanted it to, and it wasn’t worth it, but Robin is nowhere near as unaffected as she was determined to be.
Damnit Becky, first rule of system breaking… never use yer real name nor an identity which can be directly traced to yer real name in connection to an operation. Sending those tweets, while they’d potentially open you to civil liability wouldn’t likely be prosecutable as a crime, changing her authentication may open you up to potential prosecution under 18USC1030 or the like.
She’s barely 18, fairly sheltered, she’s probably only broken into friends and classmates’ phones before (with the much lower, non-criminal level of consequences that implies, if she’s caught)… really, I’m not at all surprised.
Honestly I just want to say “meh, I just needed to get it out of my system” but I can’t because actual people that young have been prosecuted and done time for more or less that level of crime. That said, it’ll likely never be something she has to deal with in this story.
Robin’s been in Leslie’s medicine cabinet. The last time she had been in someone’s medicine cabinet unexpected things had happened. Was Becky doing it intentionally? Did she know what the result might be?
Panel 6: Don’t fuck with Becky. But again, seriously, major kudos to Chris Phoenix for spotting and suspecting this, because yeah, Becky is majorly slick with phones as we saw with Toedad and it was majorly suspicious that she didn’t seem to pick up on the intentional condescension from Robin.
And the impressive part is she was able to do all this, hijack her twitter account and create the circumstances of Robin’s rejection from the party, while Robin was sitting right next to her, trying to co-opt her into her latest round of arguments with Leslie. Like, that’s some stone cold awesome right there and a righteous blow.
Like, Robin was spending how long basically dismissing the very real struggles Becky has faced, using her own strength as a weapon to dismiss Becky and make it seem like she wasn’t at all disadvantaged. And this is after doing the same to Leslie regarding her own painful past. So to have that underestimated homeless girl be the final straw in her political downfall feels oddly poetic.
And it makes you wonder how long Becky had been planning this, especially as she was so slick in getting more and more control over the phone.
Also, this whole thing is tragic, because if you follow the alt-text and go to “Robin’s” twitter account, you see all it took: “I know I’ve probably said some wrong and ignorant things about gay folks, but I DISAGREE NOW, for defs!!! LGBTQ 5EVAH!!!!!!” “An’ I hope you all can find it in your heart to forgive me once I def totes change my behavior to reflect this evolution, for realsies”
That’s it. That’s all it took for the bigots of the party to cut her loose. Not any of the bigotry, the rants to murder random twitter strangers, the various scandals and blunders. But her being made to seem to have had a genuine change of heart about her views towards queer folks.
And what makes that hit home hard is that that is the most realistic part of this whole arc. The Republican Party in its current treasonous incarnation has made itself abundantly clear that it stands for harming and “showing” the liberals and nothing else.
No empathy, for empathy is weakness. No regard for humanity, because humanity is weakness. So Robin DeSanto appearing “weak” is all it took for them to write her off as an easy casualty assuming the next exploitable bigot will better serve their interests.
… I do not like this darkest timeline. I want to go back to the one where President Clinton is trying to fight for marginal improvements in the rights and lives of trans people.
Becky is a sneaky, sneeeeeeaky ninja. And I love how she was all “Oh, sure, I have an hour before my shift starts. I can do a commando raid. That’s what you asked me to do, right?”
Those twitter comments could’ve been trivially brushed off as just some rando hack if it weren’t for the titanic pile of other missteps Robin has accumulated.
For that matter I really doubt that the decision to dump her came about as a result of Becky’s hijack in any case; the timeframe is too short. I’d peg this as a reaction to yesterday’s news, I think.
I would not be at all surprised, though, if this sequence is borrowing from what happened to Milo Yiannopoulos, which would’ve been topical at about the time these strips were being created.
Other than being a queer darling of the right losing their support, I don’t see the similarity.
Milo was out (which let them use him as ‘proof’ they weren’t really homophobic, leading to most of his popularity), Robin was closested. Milo lost support for supporting pedophilia, Robin for supporting LGBT folk. That latter, particularly, makes me very wary to compare the two.
A pile of missteps, starting with being a single woman, which already had led to rumors about her being lesbian.
But yes, out of the blue, these tweets would have done little. They played very nicely on top of her other missteps and confirmed her apostasy. The timeline’s a little short, but if the Powers That Be were already wondering if they needed to do something about her, these could easily have pushed them over the edge.
I’ll bet you this plan was not even a plan but just a natural change in course by a steep fucking degree once Robin inadvertently insulted precious Dina.
“That’s it. That’s all it took for the bigots of the party to cut her loose. Not any of the bigotry, the rants to murder random twitter strangers, the various scandals and blunders. But her being made to seem to have had a genuine change of heart about her views towards queer folks.”
Patton Oswalt has several times commented on the curious observation he’s made that what pisses people off the most is not when he’s tweeting something mean or sarcastic, but when instead he’s trying to be straightforward uplifting and nice. Like, he’ll put up a link to a story of someone who’s struggling, and certain people will be all “Yeah, but what have -you- done for them? I demand seeing your donation receipts for charity, you ego-ridden prick!”
Of course, that’s seldom a wise move, because Patton has a black belt in Shutting You Down…
Not feeling empathy for people in hard situations doesn’t mean you’re necessarily a horrible person. But I’m sure Leslie is indeed feeling more than she means to for Robin in terms of sympathy than she’d admit to.
Am I the only one uncomfortable with the alignment of Robin as straight up “evil” in the comments? Like some of ya’ll are talking like she’s a supervillain. Sure she’s a terrible and terribly immature person, but she’s hardly evil. Evil usually at least has convictions, direction, a plan, something. Robin barely even has goals, she’s a part of evil at best. Which is still not great.
You don’t have to be supervillain-evil to be doing serious harm, as Robin is on both a personal and national level. Well, was. Since now she’s out of Leslie’s house and likely out of the House.
“It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously. It’s always the good men who do the most harm in the world.” – Henry Adams, on Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
Not to say that applies to Robin as is. I was just reminded of it, as an example of how people conduct themselves in person and what harm they do to other people don’t always line up the way you might guess.
She contributes to/was, until very VERY recently, a part of a banal sort of evil, one that nevertheless has and continues to ruin many many lives.
Consider the regime that gave us the phrase “just following orders”. Were they evil, all of them? Most of them? Did it matter to those who went into the showers?
And then there’s her actions towards Leslie, which are more the innocent/ignorant sort of evil. :/ I think part of why she trampled all over Leslie’s boundaries is she hasn’t the faintest clue boundaries are even a thing.
It’s kinda like how kids can do cruel things, like pulling the legs off bugs, or repeating awful insults without thinking about what they mean. Robin doesn’t have evil intentions, she just sorta does evil things, blissfully unaware of the consequences. …until now, maybe, partly. We hope.
Being indifferent and being willing to carry out evil actions for the sake of power is close enough to real evil for me to feel very comfortable calling her that until she changes. From the outside it makes no real difference whether or not she actually has hate in her heart. Like I don’t care what potential for goodness Paul Ryan may have deep down (very little if any I’m sure) I care about results.
I quote the Darkness 2 video game, which is not, admittedly, a source of great wisdom. “Evil is evil. There’s no diet coke version. A little bit of it is almost as bad as a lot because it spoils the whole person.” Robin has no convictions, so it means she threw people under the bus for pure gain–which is every bit as bad since her motivations don’t matter. She’s not Mary but her actions are the same.
* Breaking and entering x 2
* Theft
* Voting consistently against queer protections
* Using her sister as a prop to try to get anti-her politics legislation passed
* Fantastic rudeness to Becky and her situation
* Trying to keep Becky from having a couch to sleep on
* Threatening to have a Kylo Ren fan (2nd best part of TFA) and his family killed
I mean Adam Driver did a fine job but Kylo Ren’s gonna need some major character development for me to give a shit next time when we have Rey and Finn/Poe.
I meant Rey but I like Kylo Ren as embodying the people who admire absolutely awful people while missing even said awful people often hated themselves. He’s a great villain for the new millennium.
When someone comes to burn down the village, it doesn’t matter whether they’re burning it down to kill us, because they need the land for a golf course, or because they’re too dim to understand how fire works. We’re all dead or homeless either way.
Evil is not something you are. It is something you do.
I don’t care the difference between the first two, the third one depends on if they chose to be ignorant. If a lightning bolt burned down the village the villagers would still be dead but declaring war on the clouds would insane.
There is this. The whole… context of working against human rights but in a shallow narcissistic sort of way changed pretty violently in this last election as far as that thing goes.
I dunno, I don’t see Robin as evil though, more toxic for Leslie which is why Leslie needed to escape.
Intention only matters because in theory, those who do not mean to hurt you will change your ways. To the people Robin is hurting, there is no difference between her destroying lives because she hates them and destroying lives because she can’t pull her head out of her ass, because she refuses to change her ways.
I’ve disliked Robin because ever since Shortpacked: her favourite thing to do was to butt in to other people’s lives and mess with them, and then skip away with a grin and a “wacky” line without consequences.
Seriously, the last time I was this angry at Robin was in Shortpacked when she freaking sabotaged Amber’s birth control.
Misteline you said “Evil usually at least has convictions, direction, a plan, something.”
What? Where are you getting your definition of evil? DND? were you looking under lawful evil?
People who wish to spread evil throughout the world like a cartoon super villain are the exception among evil people. I’m not going to say they don’t exist but they are rare.
Ever seen Megamind its a story about a cartoon supervillain who has plans convictions… but you know took steps to make sure only his childhood bully actually got hurt. And his creation of Tighten who he meant to be the hero in their epic battle. Yea it turns out a lazy slacker who doesn’t care about others feelings and if he hurts others is more evil when given power.
My point is you’re describing the minimum to qualify as an actual adult but choosing not to grow up does not mean you’re not evil.
Gods this is painful to watch: not so much Robin’s political self destruct but Leslie’s reaction to it. She wanted so much to believe that Robin was worth reaching out to. She earnestly believed that even someone as toxic as Robin could change of she could just see someone else’s humanity. That’s a beautiful thing. I want to believe that, too. But this episode is shaking that belief hard and it hurts to see it.
As much as I want to think that people can change (and sometimes they can ), not everyone can or will. And even if they could change, nobody owes them that chance. No one owed it to Robin to put up with her hurtful toxic bullshit until she had her epiphany. She’s not entitled to treat people like they’re less than human until they find the magical argument to prove to her that they deserve better. As much as I want to believe that there are enough Hanks out there to make it worthwhile to try, there are far too many Robins and Marys out there and we just don’t have the time to wait and hope they come around.
Yeah, it captures that moment well. When you reach out and hold all the hope that someone will come around with just a little more, that you were right on the edge of it, but that never happens and trying to hold true to that is just doing more harm than good to your well-being.
It’s hard to throw in the towel on someone you care about, especially someone who is so good at teasing being right on the cusp of finally getting it. But at a certain point, the costs are not worth the dehumanization.
I worry about this in Steven Universe too… He keeps taking that risk, and he probably has plot armor but I’m not entirely certain. I’d hate to see him get seriously hurt, but another part of me doesn’t want the show to set up unrealistically optimistic expectations that our reality can’t meet.
I kinda wish humans could be bubbled. That would probably not work as well in reality as in Steven Universe though.
I think everyone in Steven Universe with the possible exception of Keven and Navy will at least have a moment where you feel for them and want them to be redeemed I mean the did it for Blue and Yellow Diamond.
Leslie didn’t think Robin “could change”. She thought that she could change her. That’s a very different (and slightly creepy) thing. And also tends to be doomed to failure, unsurprisingly.
I’m kind of liking how the “you have to deal with / accept people for who they are, not who you want them to be” is playing out in both directions in the story so far. Sometimes as an uplifting or positive moral (Hank learning to deal with gay people existing and so on) and sometimes as a negative moral / reality check (Robin is still a narcissistic asshat despite being revealed to have a more complex sexuality than you’d expect from a fundie politician). Characters change, but only when they want to, and the other characters just kind of have to learn to roll with it.
Well I’m gonna go then! And I don’t need any of this. I don’t need this stuff, and I don’t need *you*. I don’t need anything. Except this.
And that’s the only thing I need is *this*. I don’t need this or this. Just this lamp… And these pants. – The lamp and these pants and that’s all I need.
Oh, definitely. (I was mostly calling back to the nuking-closets-from-orbit meme. More silly than accurate)
But my concern is that she’s still a very visible target in online media following a major scandal which certain people could get angry over and seek someone to lash out at. It took far less than that to produce, for example, Gamergate.
The key lesson everyone, even the idealistic, should take away from that scene? Debates, particularly in terms of politics, aren’t about trying to convince the other side. They’re fighting over the audience.
The reason to shout and scream and demand representatives pay attention to you is… well, hey, there’s a chance they’ll change their mind, or at least decide that going against you is politically inconvenient.
But it’s about dragging them into the mud. It’s about them publicly having to deal with you.
So keep on trying. Just make sure there’s a camera or recorder on when you take the other side to task.
The moral is, “Try to win over bigots because maybe they can change. However, when they don’t and break into your house to make you their sex slave, don’t call the cops. Call Batman….or in Becky’s case, Oracle.”
But yeah, for the OP, I don’t think it’s about a universal rule about trying to reach out so much as it’s about realizing sunk costs and toxic situations when dealing with some.
Like, yeah, reaching out can be good and we’ve seen it pay off in comic (Hank and Joyce being the more prominent examples), but it can also be used against the person trying to do that, especially if they are exploiting social niceties like Robin frequently was (albeit often subconsciously).
And it is easy to get locked into this idea that if you reach out a little more, be a little more fair, and so on that maybe this person creating a toxic situation for you can change. And maybe they even can change, but you’re not the person to do that, because it’s hurting you to be locked in this.
And that’s a more interpersonal issue than a political one, but there are also parallels with like say, trying to reach out with bad faith arguers or people whose careers or standing depends on actively not getting a concept.
And it’s sadly an important note, because it’s easy for well-meaning emotionally vulnerable folks to try and reach out and have that come with some nasty consequences to themselves or get locked into toxic situations. And that’s especially the case in the situation of relationships or crushes like this.
The urge to see it out, find the good in someone you like for other reasons is strong and frequently dangerously toxic and we see some of that with Robin’s actions here.
How does Robin not deserve that? She has torn people’s lives to pieces for a few easy and low-work votes. She has committed “shenanigans” that are certainly 100% press-worthy.
Robin literally deserves everything bad that’s going to happen to her. Losing her job. Being misrepresented. Being accurately represented but badly spun. Having people think she’s some kind of weirdo. These are all things she has done to thousands of people.
And the difference is that Robin is, in fact, some kind of weirdo – the kind who breaks into people’s houses for sex-related motives. By contrast, the people she has hurt are, in general, just ordinary people who happen to not be cis/het.
Yes, Robin deserves all of what’s going to happen.
You’re right; she’ll probably have to go sulk in one of her houses for a while. Then look for something else to do. Does FOX news allow dark-haired correspondents?
There are plenty of opportunities for disgraced GOP politicians, but only if they’re disgraced in the right ways. If their fall from grace is specifically a fall from Republican orthodoxy, they’re not going to fare as well.
Who called that we should watch what Becky’s doing with that mobile?
Wow. If that account is by Willis – and it looks like it – than Becky made her lose her job real fast.
There might be repercussions down the line for mentioning her own name – but then, the press probably already is going after it anyways. Joyce might face another explosion from her mum if her name reaches the media in connection to this.
When you are debating in public, you try to win the audience, not the person your dabating with/against. True. This is what often makes those things incredibly boring and stupid.
If you want to convince someone to a mayor change in stance, don’t do it in public. Remember that they need to be able to save face when they do a public turn-around. So be well prepared. Consider which emotion, which argument has a potential to make sense to the other person. How would this change in stance improved their outlook. Reduce risks or (emotional) debt. Made them look better than whoever it’s important for than to look better. If we are talking about people in positions of power, that’s the way to go.
This is playing politics to make the world a safer place for yourself and others.
When this is about people who are not in a position of power, they are your coworkers, neighbors, family members, the situation is slightly different. You usually don’t end up in arguing with them because you planned to do so, but because something came up and suddenly it’s a thing. So you are unprepared. You are heated. Still. Don’t make them lose face. If you want someone to change, create a situation that allows for it. And even if they might end up feeling like a asshole for what they did before: Telling them they are an asshole is not conductive to them changing their stance. Making they come to the conclusion they acted like an asshole by themselves is a different story.
That said: No, it’s not anybody’s task in life to always reach out to people who are acting like assholes. Even though most of them probably don’t intend to be assholes, reaching out takes time and energy, so you need a good reason and a good benefit for doing so.
Harvey Milk did stuff like that. Reaching out to people who intended to vote for that Section 23 or however it was named. And he moved a lot of them.
Yeah, it’s emotional labor. It has prices. It can be useful, it can move mountains and it’s very possible that these seeds here from Leslie will eventually get through to Robin and certainly made a bigger crack than Roz ever was able to manage for her various hours spent trying to argue for what she believed in.
But it’s also hard vulnerable work and it’s work that can leave you open to a very specific type of deep pain if you encounter someone toxic for you and so when you do that work, whether as a job, a form of activism, or in your personal relationships, it can be useful to know when to bail when needed.
And Chris Phoenix was the one who brought up the watching the phone thing.
I’m so glad Becky indeed did stop taking Robin’s shit the moment Robin made the mistake of insulting Becky’s girlfriend and then fuckin’ WASTED her instead.
My view on the subject is it’s important to educate and talk with people about subjects but also respect (or lack of respect) that they might not change their opinions or dig in their heels. Then the best thing to do is move on. It’s a bit like Discworld and Cohan the Barbarian. Cohan would often ask people to surrender and they’d posture before saying, “I’d rather die than betray my Emperor.” It took him slaughtering the guys who said to get it in their heads that, in fact, you probably didn’t want to die before betraying your Emperor and he was taking you at your word.
Am I the only one who thinks this won’t go well for Becky? Identity theft is a crime, she’s signed her name to the evidence, and she just helped cost the GOP a federal House seat. Like, they probably spent $50 million on Robin. In real life, it would be pretty much guaranteed that they’d make an example of her.
We have the character that runs around a college campus physically assaulting students and the police have taken no interest, and we have an RA getting caught doing something that in most states would result in jail time and a spot on the sex offender registry and not even get fired from her job. When a guy was wandering around campus with a rifle for the better part of half an hour, the cops were only barely getting on the scene when he finally literally kidnapped a student in front of witnesses and was driving away.
Law enforcement in this corner of the Walkyverse is not exactly on the ball, is what I’m getting at here. I wouldn’t put a lot of money on the repercussions hitting real-world levels. Probably something side comment about Robin not pressing charges, and that’ll be it. (Doesn’t actually matter in real life crimes, but in 99% of fiction the victim not pressing charges is a shorthand for getting away with things).
The police HAVE taken an interest in Amazi-girl, they want to ask her questions at the very least.
Uh….why would Ruth be arrested and put on a sex offended registry for having sex with Billie? Billie is not a minor and Ruth a fellow student. Ruth has very likely violated the terms of her WORK contract, but she didn’t break any laws.
Signing her name to the evidence is pretty incidental – she was sitting right next to Robin using her phone. It was already obvious it was her.
And it’s still Robin’s word against hers who wrote those. They could have been sitting on the couch giggling together as Robin posted about the rad new lesbian she’d just met. No less likely than Robin giving her the phone still logged in.
Posting stuff using someone else’s Twitter using their phone which they allowed you to use is nowhere near identity theft.
Even if the GOP wanted to press charges, they would have no legal standing to do so. Even if Robin found out about the tweets and denied writing them, I doubt they’d even be able to get a civil suit off the ground. Hell, given her own tweets, I doubt the GOP would even believe her
The best thing is that Becky basically almost got consent from Robin to do so as well.
What with them “joking around” about Becky sending emails to her colleagues about “What sound a cow makes”.
She basically said “Hey, we’re super great buddies, so I’m going to joke around on your social media, because thats what friends do, lol!” and Robin didn’t catch on, try to stop her after giving her permission to use the phone, or at least tell her not to mess with stuff despite the blatant hint. Just not like it’s identity theft if you specifically tell someone to borrow your credit card to pay for something.
Although fortunately they didn’t spend anything near $50 million dollars on her either. John Rogers (of Leverage fame) has often pointed out just how little it takes to fund a campaign (yeah, a lot from an ordinary working person’s point of view, but a lot less than what you’d think a PAC needs to spend).
I wish I had the numbers in front of me. He’s used it in a couple of Leverage scripts, although of course we’re now seven years in the future and the numbers have changed, I’m sure.
She’s also a house-breaker-intoer. And a loiterer and she’s even breaking campus rules by overstaying her allowed visit time.
But more seriously, the way our system is designed it is remarkably difficult when one is homeless to not break any laws in America because a lot of US locations have a lot of laws that are specifically designed to be easy for homeless people to break in order to justify harassing and arresting them to hide away the homeless problem from the “proper” citizens who are put off by seeing the tragic product of their economic system.
If I understand correctly: around here, back in the day, we stored mentally ill people in terrible asylums so that proper ladies and gentlemen wouldn’t have to see them. Then the asylums were closed, which is great because they were horrible, but they weren’t replaced with anything else, which is bad because the mentally ill people became suddenly homeless. Many many homeless people. We had to figure out what to do with all of them, so we made some laws, and jailed them. Now we can store all the homeless people in prisons, so that proper ladies and gentlemen won’t have to see them. Did I get that right?
You missed the part where you made those prisons a private business, so that corporations could make a profit and giving them both a vested interest in keeping the status quo and the financial means to bribe politicians to make sure the status quo is kept.
Oh yes, indeed you are correct. Isn’t it great that prisons successfully lobby for harsher laws, so that they’ll never run out of chattel off whom to make money? And how they look at the reading scores of third graders to decide how many cells they want to build? No, wait, the opposite of great. Horrifically unjust. Yes, that one.
they seem to be starting that in canada too. gotta arrest as many cannabis users as they can to fill up Harper’s prisons before it’s legalized… *if* it’s legalized, at this rate…
Becky Macintire TO DO LIST: (after getting kicked out of school)
✓ Go find Joyce Must find Joyce (Painful realization Joyce loves you but doesn’t feel that way)
✓ Escape from butthole dad with help of awesome friends
✓ Find temporary housing
✓ Find girlfriend & be awesome together
✓ Begin learning forbidden science
✓ Get papers with help of aforementioned awesome friends
✓ Get job
✓ Learn about phones
✓ Meet rad professor, find less problem temp housing
✓ Sink a US congresswoman
_ Get to Galasso’s it’s time for work!
_ Lesbian-rule the WORLD (at this rate it won’t take long)
And those are just some highlights. Her TO DO LIST also includes
X Get rad haircut (note: Must be rad).
X Meet cool superhero
X Make sneaky break-in into old school
X Follow Joyce to horrible hometown. Make sure she is safe from all evils her family can throw at her.
X Make sneaky break-in into old home.
X Show chipmunks who’s the boss
X Visit old church
X Make a tactful and discrete statement about opinions on church policy vis-à-vis the gays
X Save Billie from suicide
X Find new, better dad.
…
and counting.
Since I can’t find anyone else who pointed this out: Don’t know if spelling mistake or Becky pronouncing things strangely. Authentication is spelled with an ‘F’ as if juxtaposing authentication and identification.
And we have our happy confirmation that Becky is learning quite a lot from Dina in that shit, people will let you get away with quite a lot if they don’t think you are capable of more!
Also I hope Robin spends the rest of her life living down the fact that her worst public moment as a politician came pantsless and in the newspapers just because she was being a dope.
Sorry, Leslie, but sad as it is to say it, I’m pretty sure Becky already learned that lesson back in the hospital when Toedad rejected her last attempt to reach out to him after he failed to kidnap her at gunpoint.
The moral of this story: Pick your battles – specifically, pick winnable ones. Long shots are acceptable, but unwinnable fights? Cut your losses, brace for impact, and wait for the winnable one.
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QUICK SHITPOSTING TIME
Hopefully not about dinosaurs
hopefully always about dinosaurs forever
Someone said dinosaur shitposting? ’cause I know a page entirely dedicated to that
https://www.facebook.com/FreshPaleomemes/photos/a.165774877125985.1073741828.165770167126456/410732522630218/?type=3&theater
Dinosaur shit is fascinating, just ask Dr. Grant.
(that was quick)
It’s amazing how in sync Robin and Becky’s brains are, when they are practically on opposite ends of the “people I would want to hang out with” spectrum.
No. They’re not in sync.
First, Becky is in a fight for her life, and knows it. She was jollying Robin along while pwning Robin online. It’s impressive, but not amazing, how well Becky could make Robin (and many of the readers) think they were in sync.
Second, Robin’s hijinks come from having no sense of consequence or reality. Becky’s hijinks come from having her back to the wall, nothing to lose but her life, and no sense of moral or social constraint toward the world that disinherited her, made her homeless, tried to torture her, and came close to killing her with a gun and a car wreck… and killed her mother and forced her to live with her mother’s killer for a year or so.
Becky is basically a child soldier. Somehow, her heart is still in the right place, and she is still sane and can enjoy life. But we should never make the mistake of thinking she is innocent, or feckless, or that she will ever forget who her enemies are and what they can do.
ouch and i love this meta
Nicely put.
She’s not a popular as I thought she’d be.
How the hell did no one find this until now?
skillz
also it was entirely untied to any other DoA media i imagine
This….this is amazing
That link is delightful.
WELP
And thus the world learns of the torrid love affair between Representative DeSanto and a sexy floor lamp.
Robin/Lamp OTP. Focus of the next Slipshine.
“oh lampy!!!”
the best part is the note with
AIDEyouShe loves lamp. Who are we to stand in the way?
It’s a major award!
She uses the lamp the way a drunk uses a lamppost … more for support than for illumination.
Suggestion for the hacked muzak:
The lamp lies down on braidway!
THE SLEEPER HAS AWAKENED
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES
also, the twitter account is fucking magical
i guess that’s robin’s lamp now. goodbye lamp.
What does that note on it say, I wonder?
“Aide”. She doesn’t own it. She just employ it… well, it’s a bit of an unpaid intern-ship… I guess she owns it.
Does she treat that lamp better than her “you” (former human aide)?
‘Aide’, crossed out and replaced with ‘You’.
You need a lamp if you’re looking for an honest man.
++++++1 Diogenes
I prefer Didactylos, personally, who put his lamp to rather more productive use…
but ok if the most productive use of being a philosopher isn’t making fun of people what is the point of being a philosopher in the first place
Killing tyrants at the same time.
pfft that’s hero and philosopher-king stuff
Having your pupil take your philosophy after your death, twist it, and then use it as the base for the “theoretically best state” which is actually a proto-Fascist caste system?
…
What do you mean I’m not allowed to bring up Socrates and Plato anymore? I thought Aristotle was the only guy who too mainstream to be mentioned in philosophy discussions?
oh man oh man who doesn’t love that!!!!!
hahaah we started this discussion with diogenes and terry pratchett; i don’t think there are any limits to the potential nerdiness this thread may unleash
Man, fuck Plato.
(And kudos to you! I’ve been saying that /forever/, and never met someone else who agreed!)
“The Republic” is goddamn horrifying. I mean, I get that Plato didn’t trust democracy because a jury sentenced his teacher to death for a crime he didn’t really commit but holy shit he went off the deep end. And his idea for what makes a good leader? “No family. Heavy indoctrination into the cult of state loyalty. Raised ‘the Spartan way’. Have as much knowledge as possible crammed into the head. Yep, you meet all the requirements, now share power in a council made entirely of people like you.” No wonder the ideas of ‘The Civilizing of the primitive natives’, Eugenics, Social-Darwinism, and ‘the Ubermensch’ got started.
Raised “the Spartan way” is always interesting to me. I think Sparta is really the central model for the Republic.
Sparta is in a certain sense perfect. At least when it was working, almost every aspect of the state, the laws, and people’s lives were all made to complement each other, almost as if it were one body. But it was awful for the people, and managed to give nothing of value to the world, not art, science, or philosophy. Just a few victories over Persia that they then reversed in jealousy of Athens’s empire, which they couldn’t manage to keep.
It seems like Greek philosophers and historians were very quickly able to pick up on the perfection, and not on the pointlessness. I guess it never occurred to anyone to wonder why there never was a Spartan Socrates to be executed.
i vaguely remember The Republic but like i remember that training kids by their aptitudes seemed cool
but like also now thinking about it critically it seems…really difficult to be able to figure out what a person’s goals should be in life by, like, six years of age
@3oranges And “perfection” comes on the back of a massive slave population and ever dwindling manpower. I respect the Spartan society for only two things: 1. Their far superior treatment of women compared to the rest of Classical Greek civilization. 2. Their dry, sardonic wit that led to the creation of the one-liner. My personal favorite of the latter, “Aye, one emissary for one king” in response to a the Macedonian king Demetrius. Tied closely with the response to Philip II of Macedonia, “If”. That one is up there with the infamous WW2 Bastogne message, “To the German Commander: Nuts. The American Commander.”
See, um, the last time I brought up Plato and Socrates was to write a comical debate between “Socrates” and Zarathustra from Friedrich Nietzsche’s work.
Including a joke about the “Socrates” who was taking part of the debate being a literal handpuppet for Plato who was hidden under the table.
Ok, I find that hilarious and awesome on a lot of levels.
Well, I mean, when you can get a good grade on a paper where you slip in a joke about Plato having his hand up Socrates’ butt for “moral support”…
Pretty sure that counts as a win.
@Krys Brynhildr Aye. Aye it is. I mean, the truth will out and all that. Also, is that Futaba from Persona 5 as a gravatar? If so, how do you like the game?
Yeah, I cropped up a picture of her being all smirky even before it had a US release. The game is super great though. I mean its kind of like this in that its mostly a story of kids trying to deal with a whole bunch of selfish shitty adults, but the characters are pretty great and it feels really good when the social links really start kicking in and you feel like you’ve really made a difference.
That and Futaba is amazing, even if I identify with a lot of her personality traits to much to not feel super weird about the option to date her. I’ve put 224:29 hours into the game with two playthroughs already though give or take a few weekends where I passed out for 8 hour stretches without turning the game off on the first playthrough, so yeah, pretty great. Probably my favorite Persona game so far with the two fighting games and DAN right below it…and then Golden which I still need to beat.
@Krys Cool. I haven’t gotten the game yet, hopefully I’ll buy it sometime during the summer as a little reward for getting my teaching job, but I’ve been watching some let’s plays. It can be…cringe inducing at times. Especially when the player won’t make or use the coffee and end up leaving palaces early because of it. Seriously!! Why won’t they just make the coffee?!?
A lamp in exchange for eviction is acceptable losses.
I really like Becky you guys. I’m not sure if you knew this about me
gee
no
really?
You don’t seem like the type, really.
Can I tell you a crazy secret? SO DO I!!!!!
You two are blowing my fool mind!
Blowing minds and nuking closets. Two great tastes, together at last.
This legit sounds like a marketing slogan for a new soda flavor.
Me too. But I’m more sneaky about it.
what a
clever
…person
Remember when Dina was having a small crisis on whether or not Ross’ “Clever girl,” was a reference to Jurassic Park?
Good times.
idk i thought you were becky
If only I were that rad
Are You Sure
I cannot be blamed to miss such a well-kept secret.
I need that to be a real twitter account about dinosaurs.
You know what…
https://twitter.com/search?q=%40repdesanto&src=typd
Oh, wow
Reading these, yeah, I can see the damage Becky just did
Sure, unless you look at the older ones.
“ZOOMER, HOW DO I DELETE TWEETS”
“ZOOMER YOU PIECE OF SHIT”
“Yo guess who’s a sweet-ass lesbian, everybody! BECKY MACINTYRE.”
“She’s TOTES rad and has the best dinosaur girlfriend ever. She makes her heart go RARRR.”
“anyway everyone should acknowledge that becky macintire is BEST LESBIAN, as evidenced by everything about her, fo’ rizzle”
#BestTweets
I don’t know if you read Squirrel Girl’s comic book, but the first page of every issue is her twitter account, and it’s uncanny how much she sounds/writes/thinks exactly like Becky.
In fact…could it be?…Nah.
I still haven’t read it, but I know I’ll love it. It’s one of those things that start awesome (“Erica Henderson is making a new comic, I have to check it out”) and then just keep piling up awesome until it gets ridiculous.
So you telling me Squirrel Girl is basically Becky is perfectly in line with my non-reading experience of the comic so far.
We DID joke about Becky living in trees back here
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/stash/
Oh my God. It all makes sense!!!!
Hello, new headcanon.
https://twitter.com/repdesanto It is. Well, needs more dinosaurs, but still.
…soooo… is that Willis, or is that one of us?
Wait, “Senator”? :v
Becky took over the twitter feed and doesn’t care that Robin’s a rep, not a senator.
Yes thank you I know :p
(Although I would’ve imagined the pants-correction to have been pretty memorable :v)
Probably Willis. The first post is from November.
I like how the header image ,almost lines up, so it looks like an endless sea of supporters is cheering on a parade of Robins. That’s the sort of thing a low-level national politician would do.
Low level? I’m surprised I can’t think of an example of that from the president.
That would mean sharing the spotlight. Even with fictional clones of himself that will never happen.
Couldn’t even put on pants
I love that she thought to bring them with her, but not actually put them on
I mean, she gives so little of a shit normally, I’m not surprised her “don’t give a shit anymore” mode involves ignoring things like wardrobe.
I love how Leslie’s all like, “Yup. We did the right thing. Feeling kinda shitty, now…”
And Becky’s like “You mean YOU did the right thing, I Did what had to be done.”
Wh-why didn’t you get dressed, Robin??
I could see myself not caring after something like that.
Oh snap.
Becky is a sneaky, sneaky cyyyyyyyber ninja. Remind me to never get on her OR Joyce’s bad side. At least I will see where Joyce is coming from, for all good that will do me.
But please don’t commit cyber crimes against public figures, Becky. We don’t want you united with your father.
Heh, it’s such a teacher’s moment. “This is the lesson I want you to take.” “NOPE, learnt a completely different lesson that you didn’t even think of, while fooling around on my phone. LOL, YOU MAD, TEACHER?”
Robin, put on pants and leave the lamp.
i just. leslie would not have stopped her from putting pants on before she left the house. this is all robin’s doing
I’m not sure of that. May have just shoved them at her and pushed her out the door.
ok
i respect your different opinion but feel like the emotionalness of Robin’s choosing to leave (of her own accord) would lend a different tenor to the likelihood of Leslie pushing her out vs. letting her leave
idk if Leslie had stopped to protest anything it probably would have been Robin acting like they’d had anything worth calling a relationship after Robin refused to leave the first time. and being all tragic like she’s off to fight the skeleton war or something
Becky + phones = Nomi from Sense8
Called it!
Sure did! I underestimated her, which is of course always an extremely foolish thing to do with Becky Macintire.
I hear she’s the BEST LESBIAN.
She’s TOTES rad!
My debit card was compromised a couple of days ago; someone ordered something online and it showed up on my online bank statement. I’ve already cancelled and replaced it, but if Becky turns up in a GAP V-neck T-shirt, I think I will have found my suspect!
you too? mine got used to hire netflix…
Less ambitious, but far less stupid (and pain-in-the-ass) than the person who stole my identity a decade or so ago.
They tried to use my account to steal 10 grand from my bank. (Deposited a bad check, withdrew the cash.)
Unfortunately, it took the bank a week to clear me, and they never did unlock my account.
…she left her shoes. (At least I don’t think she’s holding them with the rest of her clothes.)
She took the lamp and left her shoes.
priorities!! who needs shoes
She was fooling around on Robin’s phone.
And she outright told Robin she was doing it, too.
I’m a little embarassed that I never considered that Becky was just playing nice.
Becky is smarter than Leslie. She knows monsters like her father and Robin need to be dealt with like a superhero. In this case, Oracle.
TBF, ‘being smarter than Leslie’ is kind of insult by faint praise; Becky is well smarter than that.
To be fair, it seems like Leslie has been rolling well on intelligence, just low on wisdom.
Not sure ‘smarter’ is the right term. Cleverer?
…she took Leslie’s lamp.
Also, knew Becky was doing something sneaky.
Probably best to treat it as the price of getting rid of Robin. She strikes me as the sort of person who’d hear “Get back here and give me back my property!” as “Get back here and blah blah transparent excuse to make out!”
it was fifteen bucks at walmart, it’s fine
Yes, this is sometimes called the ‘asshole tax’, as in, the price you pay so you don’t have to deal with that terrible person anymore.
Sometimes you get lucky and when you manage to kick the assholes out of your life they end up leaving something nice behind that they never come back for.
So um, in this case its a trade off between a pair of shoes and a lamp presumably.
Well, if we bring type of shoe, whether or not they’re Leslie’s size, and what brand they are, Leslie may have come out ahead monetarily wise in the lamp/shoe exchange.
Funny, I usually collect the Asshole Tax. Just as an example, and totally not something I really, actually did:
When stealthily moving out of the home of a registered sex offender who has been financially, verbally, mentally, and emotionally abusing you, play a fun game with yourself and see how many of his video games you can fit in your bags, to replace the ones you were forced to sell so he could get things he wanted. Then, go ahead and shut off all the utilities he and his equally-horrible wife opened up in your name under threat of kicking you out and then ran up over a thousand dollars worth of late fees on.
Y’know, make ’em squirm a little. Again, I will neither confirm nor deny any such actions and stand by their hypothetical nature.
Sounds like a real horrible situation, and anyone who would have been forced through it deserves some sympathy and a hug.
Being forced to sell video games? What kind of sick fuck forces you into that Sophie’s Choice?
(that was comedic hyperbole. Glad you’re out of there)
The thing is, when you’re being actively held back from getting a job so you can be used for your SNAP card, video games can become a large portion of your day, as well as your primary means of coping with the reality of your situation. Being forced to sell them actively reduces the number of options you have in that regard, which also reduces the only incentive you even have to put up with the nonsense being shoved at you daily. So, once all but your very favorite games and the few you couldn’t sell have vanished, you’re suddenly faced with either leaving by any means necessary before your most precious possessions are taken away, or letting it happen and being left with nothing.
You know, hypothetically.
As long as Leslie got rid of Robin she could care less about the lamp. Also when did Becky learn to hack accounts?
It’s a skill that’s bundled free with coming out of the closet. Becky came SO out of the closet that she’s the very best at it.
Robin was logged in when she handed Becky the phone.
90% of hacking is social engineering. The next 9% is physical access, which Robin happily handed over.
this, right here.
Her password is probably “desantohugeknockers” which Becky could guess by reading her tweets.
How much you wanna bet that was Leslie’s favorite lamp too?
The best part about this is that it implies Robin already talked about dinosaurs on her twitter.
OH SHIT.
Yep, just like I thought. If it was about Robin’s bisexuality, they would have helped her cover it up (probably by calling Leslie a dirty-dirty liar) or used her as a prop to show they’re not REALLY homophobic. My guess? I bet Becky called for a investigation against President Head Alien’s Russian ties.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%40repdesanto&src=typd According to this, Becky more made Robin out to have done a 180
It’s kinda sad that Robin only has 35 twitter followers.
I mean, like her identification would be that hard to crack. Becky probably used rizzle or sugar or just password.
but what if she used the strange internet ling of l33tsp3ak
Stage one: Cadbury.
Stage two: Eggs.
You misspelled cereal.
That’s what makes it secure.
Remember when Becky first came back to IU, then borrowed Joyce’s phone? Sarah was concerned Becky was monkeying with the phone, hiding something, and trying to hurt Joyce.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/screening-2/
Just a dusting of an idea, sorta overshadowed by that storyline, but now a version of it is real. Well-played, Willis.
(Ugh. I seriously thought I put this as a standalone comment.)
Yeah, and I think it shows her actions when someone means her harm and when someone doesn’t mean her harm.
When someone doesn’t mean her harm, she’s super respectful of the phone and the trust given her, even if she may do things to check on her own safety (see if her dad is hunting for her) or look up stuff that interests her (DINOS!).
When someone does mean her harm, whether directly or indirectly with the power of Congress, Becky cuts like a knife, getting her dad to incriminate himself over the phone with his whole violent kidnapping plan or very nonviolently making it seem like Robin had a change of heart likely to earn the ire of her party and make it so the path of least resistance would be completing her internal journey and stop trying to force homophobic politician Robin to happen.
I think what’s amazing is that her actions even when she’s being slick tend to lack a mean-spirited edge. Like, she’s not draining a bank account or picking a nasty fight or outing Robin. She does very low-key and passive actions that have huge effect (calling 911 leaving it on or posting a mildly pro-LGBT statement and intention on Robin’s twitter).
And I think that speaks to her overall goodness and what lines she’s unwilling to cross even with regards to her personal protection.
Though if I recall, there was at least speculation that she was using the phone to screen calls to Joyce looking for her.
the fun part about Becky posting on Robin’s twitter is that like. she’s not even subtle about it. she’s just messing around and it’s really obvious what she’s doing if you give it two seconds’ critical thought
but Robin’s party, at that point, was just looking for an excuse
WELP. omg becky.
I guess you don’t need pants when you’ve hit rock bottom.
So turns out there is an actual twitter account for Robin. And Becky put her name in the tweets
Woo boy, she’s in for a hell of a time
Unfortunately, I perceive Robin getting Toedad out of jail and defending Ryan as potential ways to win the election. She will not be destroyed by this. No, she will come back with the power of Hell and Breitbart behind her. In the end, Robin will run for President and…lose…lose to President Dorothy and her VP Becky.
wait how would either of those things help win her the election.
I think of the most comically evil things she can do and assume they will win the leadership of her party over. It worked in RL. Really, we’re well past puppy kicking territory. If there’s a beloved drive in or pizza joint, she’ll probably try to get it shut down or outlaw dancing.
Galasso will not stand for that.
Galasso for President?
…
Galasso for President!
Unfortunately, the next election he could register to run in isn’t for two years, which in real time would be sometime in the 22nd century.
Sherlock Holmes then?
Which one?…Wait, only one is actually legally allowed to even run. And, well, I don’t quite trust him to run a country.
Elementary? My dear @Rukduk, cesium123 said a key phrase that led me to Holmes, perhaps you can deduce which one I mean.
@SgtWadeyWilson see, I completely forgot that there was just recently an American Sherlock Holmes show, so I was looking entirely at Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr (remember those two movies he did with Jude Law as Watson? Anyone? Anyone at all?). Now, Benedict is not legally allowed to be president, being himself a Brit. Even in the far off space future he will not be allowed. And Robert Downey Jr…well he’s Robert Downey Jr. Don’t get me wrong I like his work, but…well, considering all he has to do when playing Tony Stark is just be himself, not filled with confidence on his ability to run a country. Also, the fact that his son has been in and out of rehab for the past couple of years would probably be an impediment to any campaign he would attempt to run, because all the mud flingers would come out and he would get very defensive.
…
I would however, love to see Robert Downey Jr as a US Ambassador to Russia just to see how Putin would deal with his snark.
Oh. Holy shit. Just googled “Sherlock Holmes” and “22nd century”. I had no idea there was a cartoon out there with that as the basis. Well, the more know.
Huh… yeah, kinda slipped my mind, which sucks ’cause I love the score for those two films. Sorry I assumed, but the pun was right there, so…
On the other hand, you got there. Nice detective work, Holmes would be pr… no, not quite proud… less dissapointed, maybe?
Anyway, Sherlock Holmes and Sci-fi? What’s not to love?
I wasn’t (knowingly) referring to Sherlock Holmes, but I’m amused by the coincidence.
(At the comic’s average rate of 1 in-universe week per year, two years from now would literally be in the 22nd century).
…
I approve of this possible range of events – it would make for interesting drama.
You know I never disliked Becky even during the weird hate train that was going on, but for a while I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d feel about her as a new recurring character, only really warming up to her when Dina came into the mix and steadily growing more fond over time as her writing got better as well.
Now fuck that shit Becky’s a national goddamn hero. I would die a thousand deaths for Becky.
I like Becky as a character. I love that she would annoy the shit out of me but I still see her as a person who I would respect and want to help. I can’t just dismiss her as “silly comic character”. She’s, for me, an example of the skill Willis has to create real characters.
I also like her a lot more after this. Before she felt like a loudmouth and it was only her really sad backstory that gave her substance. The whole “I love science! yay dinosaurs!” seemed a little fake to me… But maybe because such religious based ignorance is basically unheard of in the UK so it just doesn’t come across as believable to me personally. However, this seems like a real choice and shows her as smart and capable.
I promise you that Becky and Joyce’s ignorance on science is disgustingly accurate to certain parts of the US. PROMISE. It’s not even a tiny bit exaggerated.
Borrowing and paraphrasing from Tim Minchin;
“Between 48 and 52 percent of Americans don’t believe in evolution, which is like… half. On top of that, a further 38 to 40 percent believe that biological evolution has occurred, but that it was initiated by and has since been administered by God. Which leaves a very small percentage of Americans who are right.”
So yes, that kind of ignorance is frighteningly real among the Beckys and Joyces of America. For further illustration, Google Kent Hovind and prepare to be very sad.
I mean
how do ‘Americans who are right’ know for a fact that God isn’t overseeing evolution
this isn’t the kind of thing you can possibly prove or disprove and the atheistic assumption is not actually more valid than the theistic one
like that FUCKING HALF is terrifying but on an entirely differnet topic you’re being an asshole
What does “overseeing” evolution mean?
Like, we know exactly how evolution works. We can watch it happen in real time. There’s no problematic portion of evolution for which we would require magic to help it along. God’s share of the work would seem to be zero.
So in the respect that God is at all having a hand in evolution itself, then that, yeah, that would be an incorrect assertion, and a disprovable one. If God exists, he’s existing adjacent to evolution and keeping his hands off it entirely. The idea that he “oversees” it in any meaningful capacity is a wrong one. Maybe, like, watching it through the blinds of his front window from across the street, at most.
Yeah I live in the South of the US and I never even questioned Becky’s new interest in science. I had a friend who didn’t believe in evolution in high school and now is a park ranger. It happens.
I don’t think the writing got better for Becky? I think we just saw more of her and that naturally made her portrayal more nuanced and stuff.
Welp, there goes that lamp I guess…
Leslie like “…shit that was a MUCH better idea than mine”
Took her five minutes too.
You know what, of Becky wasn’t on the side of good she would be a very effective super villain. And be one of those super villains you secretly like better than the main hero to boot.
And here we see what Becky used to sink DeSanto:
https://twitter.com/repdesanto
Yup, it really was signaling support for the humanity of queer folks. :/
One the one hand: Go Becky.
On the other hand: Fffffuuuuucccckkkkk you RP!!!!
Good girl Becky.
I approve of Becky’s plan and disapprove of Roz’s. Don’t know what I think about that.
If guessing you’re not referring to plan to have Robin grow as a person on her own volition after meeting Leslie that plan might not have worked but it was worth a shot.
If you’re referring to what Roz cheered actually happening, 1. Becky’s didn’t hurt Leslie, 2. Something something sisters, 3. Becky is a gay person herself, 4. Becky wasn’t targeting Robin for apparently being gay but for apparently pandering to gay people transparently and badly, 5. Becky was responding to not just Robin’s policies but also the fact that Leslie’s house was infested with congress people.
I personally claim 1 and 5.
I’m wondering if we’re ever going to reach Peak Willis Tone-Deafness and I’m worried that we never will.
FYI, whatever this is meant to mean, I don’t think you’re going to get agreement from anyone in this thread.
I’m letting you know because your approach seems like you think you’re saying something in agreement with the chain but you are not.
Ha! The speculators were correct. I wonder what Becky posted?
….Also Robin stole Leslie’s lamp.
This is why I was convinced that in this case Becky was better than a smart bomb, she would get her trust in five seconds and mess up stuff in the name of good in a little bit more
You did good Becky, you did good.
Becky’s just like: Oh, we’re not using the fact she foolishly foisted her phone on me that probably has her email, twitter, facebook and all other accounts open on it, hijacking them, changing all the passwords and saying things that would make her party drop her in a way that sounds just like her so that she would leave your house? My bad.
I don’t know how, but I keep forgetting how much of badass Becky is.
Am I the only one who thought of The Jerk? “…and this lamp, that’s all I need.”
I guess when you’re having a few days like that, getting photographed in your underwear probably isn’t going to make your time any worse
If that isn’t a real twitter feed, I’m going to be disapoi… HOLY SMOKES! https://twitter.com/repdesanto
I suppose I’m the only one here who feels sorry for Robin.
I mean, criminy, she did the laundry. What more do you animals want??
This is the sarcasm, yes?
Yes.
more like wrecked Leslie’s clothes without apology
we are the true monsters here :'(
BECKY YOU ARE AMAZING
Ha Becky was only able to do this because Robin just had to offer up her phone to avoid a real conversation with Becky. Like what politician just offers up their phone????
Becky manipulated Robin into doing that. Go back and look at the strip. Becky introduces phones to the conversation in the first panel. Second and third panel, sympathy play focused on lack of phone. Fourth panel, gets the phone. Fifth panel, gets near-explicit permission to try to hack Robin’s reputation.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/digitalage/
Becky had a plan for that phone the moment she sat down. Probably more than one plan, depending on how stupid Robin was. As I said at the time, if Robin had ever said “Hey stop, give that back” Becky could have run out of the house with the phone, forcing Robin to follow.
An exceptionally stupid one, thank god.
And this is how Becky begins to learn how to be a spy, right? She’s got the right mentality for a successful career.
Ya know…Becky did kind of pave the way for Robin to re brand herself as a democrat.
Yep, Robin would love being a democrat! Imagine all that time arguing against people doing evil and doing NOTHING about it! Plus, all the perks of being a Republican!
*pause*
Wow, I’m bitter.
Hey I feel you.
Eh, we all are in America right now. Really starting to feel like we slipped on a banana peel right before Vietnam and lost half our IQ points as a result. Well, if America were distilled down to a person.
Oh no, we were stupid before then too.
Yeah. And then we got dumber. We’re basically the stereotype of the evil jock at this point. Dumb as bricks, always angry, nasty personality, a complete bully, but has a posse anyways because he’s got the biggest muscles. I’m honestly wondering which country is going to be the nerd that pulls a come from behind victory through superior intelligence and basic human decency. Anyone have any ideas on that front?
Not mine, due to a lack of basic human decency wrt locking up people who haven’t broken the law in offshore detention centres.
Maybe it was around the time Nixon kept the Vietnam War going in order to get elected.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/opinion/sunday/nixons-vietnam-treachery.html?_r=0
It’ll be tough to adjust to never winning or having any real grand scale effect and only small victories (that can be swiftly removed by the opposition in power) but at least Robin can tell herself she has the moral high ground.
One of the benefits is Robin wouldn’t care what was on the bills to begin with so it would be good too. Just imagine all the sweet-sweet speech money she’d be rolling in too! Albeit, this turn of events would also mean she could try to stalk Leslie again. :ugh:
People love a redemption story. If she finds a good pr person she could definitely easily spin this in her favor and considering she has no actual beliefs or stakes in this there’s no real reason not to switch to the other side.
Though if she does want to win a seat again she’ll likely have to relocate which would be great for Leslie.
It’s a swing area! All she has to destroy is her opponent somehow.
Get Becky to hack his e-mails!
Well I don’t know if less than three months is enough time for her to switch parties and the dems already have their nominee right? So considering loss is probably inevitable now she’ll have two years to rebrand and claw her way back.
In-universe, we’re in about mid-October of an election year, right?
That’d be a big change, if it really is a swing district. (I’ll leave to others the real logistics; I don’t know IN law.)
I would fucking give her my vote if I thought she’d win.
It really mega bothers me that we’re trying to combine the tropes “those that would rule you” with someone who is also a wlw. I get we’re going for a subverted trope, but it’s just uncomfortably written when its “lol the gays are the REAL OPPRESSORS” esp since Willis isn’t a gay woman.
Not going to demonize any writing or plot or say it’s all stink poop bad, I mean sometimes when you create you miss a swing. I’m not saying this as an overly enthusiastic ally who creates problems where there is none, just an uncomfortable queer over here who honestly this entire plot line has made me uncomfortable for months. Would appreciate it if people didn’t jump up in an army as if I just called Willis the devil but I respect it if you disagree, esp if you’re another queer person.
i’m confused. what is the trope “those that would rule you”? i feel like i would understand what you are saying much better if i understood what that meant
in retrospect, “those that would rule you” is the name of an arc in this webcomic
this would probably be why i couldn’t find it on tv tropes
While I understand your position, Kole, I should point out we have plenty of homophobes who are heterosexual monsters. Mary, Toedad, JoyceMom, EthanMom, and probably others I’m missing. Robin being a closeted hypocrite who oppresses fellow gays isn’t new to reality, sadly, as forced outings of several showed.
I also think Robin’s “redemption” would have had a nasty message by itself. In storytelling terms, I think her being evil in this reality while good and a main character in the Walkyverse is a nice bit of storytelling subversion–all the more powerful as she was so popular there.
And yes, I say this as a straight dude so feel free to ignore me.
*hugs*
I read it more as the forces of institutionalized homophobia. Sort of like how people fighting the machinations of Roy Cohn and all the evil he did to prosecute and persecute his fellow queer folks were fighting those who would rule them as well even though he was secretly gay.
But I can see your trepidation and acknowledge it.
I dunno, the whole complexity of it reminds me a lot of Caitlin Jenner, who supported something that will kill hundreds, if not thousands of trans folks over the next how ever many years, all while believing her wealth and skin color would protect her from the direct fallout of that institutional transphobia.
And then only belatedly turning away from it once it became undeniably clear that she was not going to receive special dispensation from a fundraising arm powering itself on hatred towards trans people because of that support.
And that’s sort of the central tragedy of every closeted bigot who hopes that their performance as a useful minority will be enough slowly realizing that the bigots they joined view them as just the same as those they collectively bash.
Or for a more direct example, there’s Robert Oscar Lopez. Just like Robin, he’s latino, he says he’s bisexual, he’s deeply in denial about his attractions to the same gender that are still deeply apparent.
But his actions do amazingly intense harm. He’s been on the lead in promoting anti-gay laws in various countries, he’s argued in federal court against the right of gays to adopt or be able to bury their partners, he’s a major player in the whole anti-trans bus bullshit.
He is a key figure in the anti-gay movement despite that sexuality and race and is a force that would rule folks if allowed the dispensation of hating those like him as hard as he hates himself.
Also, extra *hugs*. You deserve them!
Yes you do. *gives apple and puts it on desk* You did raise points I hadn’t thought about.
Don’tTry very hard to forget Milo, the right wing’s favourite gay guy.I kind of agree? My only two comments are — one, that this storyline started years ago, and earlier was sort of more nuanced than the other homophobia storylines going on — like it was really clear that Joyce, Joyce’s mom, Toedad, the pastor, etc. were entirely in the wrong because of their religious bigotry. But we knew in advance that Robin wasn’t straight or actually religious, so it was more of a look at how queer people can get caught up in political homophobia and get stuck in the closet/denial/self-loathing. that kind of went off the rails after Robin’s second class visit though, because Robin became the major homophobic villain in the cast at the same time she came out to herself.
and two, that I suspect this ending has been somewhat influenced by the strong backlash Willis got during the bar and break-in parts of the storyline. Not certain what the alternative would have been, but…
Its an ugly subject so probably no good answer. At the end, Robin was either going to be Winston “Do it to Julia!” from 1984 or Darth Vader and get a pass on all her previous crimes.
I’ll just say that Robin’s role in the story is very unlikely to be over now. She’ll be back.
And I suspect that in the long run it won’t be as simple as “she’s the villain”.
Why? She’s far more interesting as a villain then anything else. Far more realistic rendering of the personality type, too.
Because Willis.
Because narrative structure.
Because she’s so clearly set up to change.
While I understand what you are trying to get at, to me the point is not really ‘the oppression of LGBT+ people comes from LGBT+ people themselves’ so much as internal homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, panphobia, polyphobia, acephobia etc. instilled into people, particularly politicians, leads to the disgustingly uncomfortable position where queer people let themselves become weapons against other queer people because they think that is how things should be or they think that by being a useful minority they’ll be excused from the awful policies they help enact.
And it just feels like a pointed statement about how hypocritical politicians can be as we know Robin’s platform was built on homophobia etc., plus racism (Sal and Amazi-Girl’s stuff at the rally implied it), and there is likely sexism in there too since Ryan was one of her free interns so something about it must appeal to him. Which would make her a bisexual latino woman, potentially try to oppress three major parts of her core identity for votes.
I feel that is something that makes sense to bring up in this story because politicians have done that. Politicians still do that. And it would have affected a fair number of the cast if Robin had been reelected, likely negatively. It is an ugly thing to talk about and acknowledge though.
I do offer sympathy for the fact it has made you uncomfortable though because while I can see the point I think Willis was going for, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will appeal to or work well for everyone.
I’m another queer person. Specifically a bi queer person.
I have to say, I disagree. And I don’t know if you were using it as an umbrella term or not, but I would actually be less comfortable with this storyline from a lesbian creator.
Because the “evil bi woman who plays with your heart before running back to Straightsville” stereotype is not a stereotype straight men have. Straight men aren’t the ones who view bi women as bihets, as traitors, as secret oppressors, as completely immoral (reflected by our — gasp — willingness to enter relationships with more than one gender). And Robin’s storyline would be worse to me if it came from a creator I expected to be aware of the intracommunity problems, especially if she was a lesbian. “I would say that [NAME WITHHELD FOR SPOILERS] is not a lesbian character. [She] was, if anything, an opportunist, which is quite different from being a lesbian. If anything, the lesbians should wish for a character like [her] to be killed off since she just preyed on a powerful lesbian in order to fulfill her heterosexual ambitions,” was a load of biphobic garbage said by a lesbian creator.
As it is, I know Robin’s storyline actually comes because of the character’s evolution through the Walkyverse; I can see the dots he connected to take her political career there to a darker place, and the many, many real-life examples of a closeted anti-LGB+ politician betraying the rest of us.
I think there’s unfortunate implications here, mitigated by the rest of the cast, but I also like that the strip has a lot of very flawed LGBTQ+ characters, and for my money Willis is in the vanishingly rare position of being able to do something like this with Robin because he has so many other queer characters.
My comfort doesn’t negate your discomfort, though, and mostly what I wanted to say here was not “you’re wrong for feeling uncomfortable with Willis’s story arc” and much more “for me personally, this would be worse from someone within the community”.
We step on and hurt each other all the time, unfortunately. Respectability politics. When we fall for them, we are all equally prone to attacking each other in an ultimately futile effort to save ourselves. :\
footnote: I misspoke up there, and accidentally implied that the Depraved Bisexual trope is uniquely intracommunity. THAT ONE IS NOT, NOPE. Straight people 100% also do that particular thing. It didn’t belong in the same list as bihets and traitors who break lesbians’ hearts and then run back to Straightsville.
It’s just another negative stereotype that Robin can be uncharitably seen as filling, and which I would not be more surprised or happier to see from someone within the community.
It is incredibly depressing to realize how many works would be covered by your “name withheld by spoilers” statement.
And yeah I can also see the discomfort on Kole’s part. It’s kinda like jokes about how all homophobes are secretly queer, which conveniently removes straight people from the group enacting this hateful legislation.
So I can see Kole’s wariness about it here because of how it’s been used by folks in the past.
Yeah, I do get it, for sure. I don’t agree but I get it.
(SPOILERS: the specific quote is about Empire and Camilla, by the same awful lady who helmed the L Word and killed off its lone bi woman too.)
Ilene Chaiken is a menace who must be stopped.
Yeah, sigh
agreed.
Also a lot of my feelings are about the context.
I can absolutely see how we got from SP!Robin to here. Robin’s bisexuality, like Mike’s, was something Willis felt he really needed to make more explicit this time around. Neither of them are the sort of person you would point to and say, “This is an ideal character to create as bi,” but that’s largely because they weren’t created to be bi representation — they were just created, and their sexualities became relevant much later on, when they were already very flawed human beings.
I’m not at all opposed to creating characters specifically as representation, to approaching a work and saying, “OK I need an absolute minimum of x percent of these characters to be Y representation,” and I know that Willis too is not opposed to this. He’s not a creator who turns his nose up at “diversity for diversity’s sake”. Because he knows that diversity is worthwhile in and of itself. (If the concept of diversity just to have diversity offends, I find it’s worthwhile to reframe it as diversity for reality’s sake; that disabled queer Muslim woman exists in reality, nobody needs an excuse to put her in fiction.)
But I also know that that’s NOT what happened here. I know that Robin becoming Trump and Robin becoming explicitly bi were extremely unrelated things, that came together very naturally to tell a story about Robin being a closeted conservative politician.
Similarly I know that this is context not everyone has! So I really want to acknowledge how bad it sounds on paper to say “the queer Latina character is a stand-in for Trump and has been written as the oppressor of a white queer woman.” THAT SOUNDS REALLY BAD.
I have instead a weird appreciation for how this comic and its odd iterated development process has given us so many very different and sometimes very very flawed queer characters. (The exceptions are Becky and Carla who are almost inhumanly perfect*, and whose flaws are more minor things like a slightly abrasive personality or foot in mouth syndrome.)
* I kid! I kid!!!
I also know that Willis is very conscious of the unfortunate implications of his comic, which is why we’re unlikely to get explicit confirmation that Amber has DID or that Dina is autistic. He knows that representation through flawed characters is very dicey.
Especially when they are the sole representation, which is why we get more explicit flawed problematic stuff here where there’s a lot of positive representation as well rather than the stuff where there’s only one.
Yep exactly!
Another queer person who is so goddamn relieved that any Republican in any universe making decisions like the ones in ours do has gotten thrown to the fucking wolves at last because I stopped giving her the benefit of the doubt before any of this started for what she put Roz through.
That’s a very interesting perspective.
I’m sorry that you had to feel uncomfortable, that is legit.
For me, this had the opposite impact. A lot of stories are about, if only the oppressed person was nice and understanding and made the bridge and behaved perfectly, then, the bigot would come around! The bigot was good inside all along and it’s the oppressed person’s responsibility to bring it out for them. I think Leslie was kind of a victim of this message, even though she knew it was causing her pain, so I like that Robin didn’t play into it.
Robin isn’t an oppressor because she loves women, she’s an oppressor in spite of it, and right now, she is too committed to her bigotry for us to change her path in any way. She’s gonna have to do that, herself, or not at all.
….and in the meantime Becky will mess her up.
(ps. since you invited comments especially from queer people, I’m a bi cis-woman, as is Robin, probably.)
Well, this looks like two or three meanings “getting caught with your pants down” mashed into one…
Words can hardly express how much I want to tell Robin to eff off in that first panel, stop trying to pretend you’re cute housewife; you’re a creepy stalker home invader
Oh I forgot.
Narrator: And then Robin left. And there was much rejoicing.
Main Cast: *Tired* Yay.
Comic Reactions:
*bows slowly in Chris Phoenix’s direction* That is damn well called!
Also, Becky might be the slickest person ever with regards to phones. Heck, she even telegraphed it early on jumping immediately into the emails.
Panel 1: I’m terrified to think of where that laundry’s drying or what Robin thought the “washer” was. Also I suspect Leslie will now be unable to find her anti-anxiety medication for a week (not actually canon).
And the sad part is that Robin still hasn’t abandoned her dream idea of what Leslie and her had. Still these last touches of domesticity as if she’s a dutiful 1950s stereotype wife making sure all the chores are done before heading away for the weekend, all the time worrying if her stereotype husband will be able to feed himself and take care of base needs (which not even knowing how to dress or feed yourself makes you totes inherently smarter, right? 1950s stereotypes are a trip).
Like, even in this tragic moment she doesn’t at all internalize what real harm she did to Leslie in all of this trying to force her into the mold of her fantasy. Especially as it was a fantasy part of Leslie yearned for even knowing how unbelievably awful and toxic it was for her.
Panel 2: Oh, Robin…
Like part of me can empathize with her here. She’s a confused queer person unsure how to handle her newfound attraction to a woman and handling that extremely poorly because she’s absolutely terrified of openly talking about what she’s feeling in a mutual way that makes it real.
But at the end of the day, Robin nuked any chance of this becoming something and damn were there a lot of ways in which she could have salvaged this early on before violating an escalating amount of boundaries and essentially kidnapping Leslie into a fantasy queer but never acknowledging it domestic love affair.
And well… given the current state of the country, it’s hard not to feel petty in awful ways about this and think “good, one less person voting in service to the complete destruction of the rights of everyone I care about”. I dunno, I’m not nearly as good and forgiving as parts of me want to be and honestly, given what I’ve forgiven in the past being done to me, it’s probably a good thing that part of me isn’t always the one running the show.
Robins little fantasy housewife life is a perfect example of her TRYING to be a cute manic pixie dreamgirl, but failing, and hurting the people around her in the process. Frankly, you don’t have to have read shortpacked to be uneasy about her poking around in your medical cabinet.
Thank you! To be fair, I thought she was going to do something else with the phone – that is, physically leave with it after convincing Robin she was a threat as long as she had it.
This is pretty different. Robin never did fully realize how dangerous Becky was with the phone (though she had every chance to). I still think that, if Robin had realized and tried to take it back, Becky could have used the run-away-with-phone tactic. Becky is seriously sharp, and smart enough to usually have fallback/alternate plans.
But when Robin left Becky with the phone for many minutes, not even worrying about getting it back, Becky opted for the chance to do more permanent damage.
And, in hindsight (I didn’t see this until just now), it’s foreshadowed or at least echoed by Ryan accessing Amber’s phone.
(In real life, this kind of thing should make people worry about the TSA demanding their social media passwords as they cross the border. And while I’m thinking of it, WTF is ICE doing going after U.S. gangs? Not that gangs aren’t a problem, but ICE is too used to being unaccountable. And this predates Trump.)
Anyway, let’s not forget that Becky has lived through horrible stuff, and become strong and dangerous – even ruthless – as a result. I’m now wondering about her nuking her own closet from orbit. Was that just youthful hijinks and high spirits, or was it a giant blast of “FUCK YOU” to the world that killed her mother?
I’m also thinking about how manipulative she was willing to be toward her own girlfriend.
Given what she’s been through, and what she has shown so far, I’m wondering if the best model for her motivations and capabilities… might be Ender from Ender’s Game. She has survived life-or-death situations. She has learned to crush wasps with her fingers. She owes NOTHING to large portions of the world, and she knows it. The world does not have her back, and she knows that too.
She could easily become the most powerful / destructive character in this comic. It’s a good thing her heart is in the right place.
Panel 3: Welp, that career is nuked from orbit like a Becky closet. Like, she’s existing pantless, wearing what I’m pretty sure is Leslie’s shirt and nothing else, with a stunned look on her face, no shoes, and a lamp with “aide” scribbled on it and then crossed out. Like this rivals Sean Spicer’s press conference hiding in the bushes for desperate sign of a complete stress collapse and it’s a visual you definitely don’t want blasted out on local media for the next month straight right before election.
Like, she’s still going to be okay financially. No one lets the rich falter too much and there is always easy work at various think tanks for failed political types. Which, yeah, it can get depressing at times to know that even a complete self-imploding immoral fuck like Pat McCrory will land softer and more protected than any of the queer folks living in his state.
Panel 4-5: Oh Leslie… *tries to hug fictional character* And yeah, this must hit hard to a lot of things important to her. Like, she believes so hard in the power of empathy. That if you reach out with your humanity, eventually people have to be able to see it and stop swinging their fists. And this, like her parents, hammers on that faith.
Trying to be empathetic, trying to minimize the nuclear fallout of Robin’s career implosion, trying to make herself seen as a full human being rather than a prop in an internal movie? That was her whole plan and it was one that took basically a full breakdown to stop trying in ever more desperate fashion. And what actually got her out was the actions she found herself unable to do (outing Robin, throwing her to the wolves of the media).
And it’s a thing that sits hard of late as we see a tidal wave of complete intentional lack of empathy dominating politics, exploiting people’s desires to be fair, to want to cooperate, to not want to fully acknowledge that something truly horrendous has occurred. Begging for our humanity is what we have, but in the current political climate, that’s not exactly a winner.
Her lesson here is not to Becky, it’s to her self and her optimism and that’s what makes this a tragedy. She really did want to believe the best of the world and that somehow, someway she’d be able to get through to Robin and get her to see the harm in what she was doing both politically and directly with regards to her. And part of her, a part that longed for her when she knew her politics were poison, wanted to believe that she’d be able to break through, reach Robin, redeem her.
Letting go of that once and for all for Leslie is intensely painful.
Poor Leslie. It hurts so much that she has taken the high ground throughout this entire mess (with one or two hickups, such as bringing Becky), and it has given her so little.
In the end of the day, very little would have been different, and most would have been better if she had just tiptoped out of the apartment when Robin first appeared and crashed on Vivian’s couch until the entire thing had blown over. That lack of agency plain hurts.
Yeah. And it sucks to take the high ground and then have that exploited against you, especially as it frequently builds an unfair dynamic where you’re expected to take the high ground as you’re being cut with knives.
There was so much cost to her, possibly cost that may even cost her her job or put her in considerable risk of losing her job or her home. And it’s only in hind-sight how much better just standing up and walking away when Robin first tried to check in with her or walking out and staying on Vivian’s couch would have been.
But it’s hard to tell the right place to give up and do what’s right for oneself and one’s health when one is trying to do the “right thing”.
I also like that Leslie got the lesson that was so hard for her to learn — it’s folly to appeal to the empathy of oppressors (even those you really want to like).
Becky didn’t need this lesson. Her dad had already shown her it very, very clearly, back in the hospital. So, Becky was free to fight, and to mess up Robin’s twitter.
Very little different *now* perhaps. What Leslie has done to Robin will have very different long-term ramifications for the latter, and I suspect we’ll be seeing some of those effects in later strips. Leslie’s empathy didn’t pay off the way she wanted it to, and it wasn’t worth it, but Robin is nowhere near as unaffected as she was determined to be.
That’s a good point, and I hope we will see some of those effects, in due time.
Damnit Becky, first rule of system breaking… never use yer real name nor an identity which can be directly traced to yer real name in connection to an operation. Sending those tweets, while they’d potentially open you to civil liability wouldn’t likely be prosecutable as a crime, changing her authentication may open you up to potential prosecution under 18USC1030 or the like.
She’s barely 18, fairly sheltered, she’s probably only broken into friends and classmates’ phones before (with the much lower, non-criminal level of consequences that implies, if she’s caught)… really, I’m not at all surprised.
(wish I could edit)
Oh, right, her dad too.
Still, this is a girl/young woman winging it, not a hardened criminal. Even if some would treat her as such for who she is and what she feels.
Honestly I just want to say “meh, I just needed to get it out of my system” but I can’t because actual people that young have been prosecuted and done time for more or less that level of crime. That said, it’ll likely never be something she has to deal with in this story.
Robin’s been in Leslie’s medicine cabinet. The last time she had been in someone’s medicine cabinet unexpected things had happened. Was Becky doing it intentionally? Did she know what the result might be?
Panel 6: Don’t fuck with Becky. But again, seriously, major kudos to Chris Phoenix for spotting and suspecting this, because yeah, Becky is majorly slick with phones as we saw with Toedad and it was majorly suspicious that she didn’t seem to pick up on the intentional condescension from Robin.
And the impressive part is she was able to do all this, hijack her twitter account and create the circumstances of Robin’s rejection from the party, while Robin was sitting right next to her, trying to co-opt her into her latest round of arguments with Leslie. Like, that’s some stone cold awesome right there and a righteous blow.
Like, Robin was spending how long basically dismissing the very real struggles Becky has faced, using her own strength as a weapon to dismiss Becky and make it seem like she wasn’t at all disadvantaged. And this is after doing the same to Leslie regarding her own painful past. So to have that underestimated homeless girl be the final straw in her political downfall feels oddly poetic.
And it makes you wonder how long Becky had been planning this, especially as she was so slick in getting more and more control over the phone.
Also, this whole thing is tragic, because if you follow the alt-text and go to “Robin’s” twitter account, you see all it took: “I know I’ve probably said some wrong and ignorant things about gay folks, but I DISAGREE NOW, for defs!!! LGBTQ 5EVAH!!!!!!” “An’ I hope you all can find it in your heart to forgive me once I def totes change my behavior to reflect this evolution, for realsies”
That’s it. That’s all it took for the bigots of the party to cut her loose. Not any of the bigotry, the rants to murder random twitter strangers, the various scandals and blunders. But her being made to seem to have had a genuine change of heart about her views towards queer folks.
And what makes that hit home hard is that that is the most realistic part of this whole arc. The Republican Party in its current treasonous incarnation has made itself abundantly clear that it stands for harming and “showing” the liberals and nothing else.
No empathy, for empathy is weakness. No regard for humanity, because humanity is weakness. So Robin DeSanto appearing “weak” is all it took for them to write her off as an easy casualty assuming the next exploitable bigot will better serve their interests.
… I do not like this darkest timeline. I want to go back to the one where President Clinton is trying to fight for marginal improvements in the rights and lives of trans people.
We didn’t get our President Organa but maybe we’ll get our General Clinton.
Becky is a sneaky, sneeeeeeaky ninja. And I love how she was all “Oh, sure, I have an hour before my shift starts. I can do a commando raid. That’s what you asked me to do, right?”
don’t fuck with becky. don’t get between becky and a legal, stable couch
Those twitter comments could’ve been trivially brushed off as just some rando hack if it weren’t for the titanic pile of other missteps Robin has accumulated.
For that matter I really doubt that the decision to dump her came about as a result of Becky’s hijack in any case; the timeframe is too short. I’d peg this as a reaction to yesterday’s news, I think.
I would not be at all surprised, though, if this sequence is borrowing from what happened to Milo Yiannopoulos, which would’ve been topical at about the time these strips were being created.
Other than being a queer darling of the right losing their support, I don’t see the similarity.
Milo was out (which let them use him as ‘proof’ they weren’t really homophobic, leading to most of his popularity), Robin was closested. Milo lost support for supporting pedophilia, Robin for supporting LGBT folk. That latter, particularly, makes me very wary to compare the two.
A pile of missteps, starting with being a single woman, which already had led to rumors about her being lesbian.
But yes, out of the blue, these tweets would have done little. They played very nicely on top of her other missteps and confirmed her apostasy. The timeline’s a little short, but if the Powers That Be were already wondering if they needed to do something about her, these could easily have pushed them over the edge.
We’re talking a turn-around time of maybe ten minutes. Political parties don’t make that decisions that fast.
I’ll bet you this plan was not even a plan but just a natural change in course by a steep fucking degree once Robin inadvertently insulted precious Dina.
“That’s it. That’s all it took for the bigots of the party to cut her loose. Not any of the bigotry, the rants to murder random twitter strangers, the various scandals and blunders. But her being made to seem to have had a genuine change of heart about her views towards queer folks.”
Patton Oswalt has several times commented on the curious observation he’s made that what pisses people off the most is not when he’s tweeting something mean or sarcastic, but when instead he’s trying to be straightforward uplifting and nice. Like, he’ll put up a link to a story of someone who’s struggling, and certain people will be all “Yeah, but what have -you- done for them? I demand seeing your donation receipts for charity, you ego-ridden prick!”
Of course, that’s seldom a wise move, because Patton has a black belt in Shutting You Down…
After everything Robin’s done (to her), Leslie is surely feeling no empathy for her in this moment.
Nope.
None at all.
(stupid empathy)
(stupid ‘not being a horrible person’)
Not feeling empathy for people in hard situations doesn’t mean you’re necessarily a horrible person. But I’m sure Leslie is indeed feeling more than she means to for Robin in terms of sympathy than she’d admit to.
Did she just fucking steal Leslie’s lamp?
>F3 “lamp”
>20 results
Guess I was late to the party.
No, it’s her aide, don’t you see the label?
Am I the only one uncomfortable with the alignment of Robin as straight up “evil” in the comments? Like some of ya’ll are talking like she’s a supervillain. Sure she’s a terrible and terribly immature person, but she’s hardly evil. Evil usually at least has convictions, direction, a plan, something. Robin barely even has goals, she’s a part of evil at best. Which is still not great.
You don’t have to be supervillain-evil to be doing serious harm, as Robin is on both a personal and national level. Well, was. Since now she’s out of Leslie’s house and likely out of the House.
“It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously. It’s always the good men who do the most harm in the world.” – Henry Adams, on Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
Not to say that applies to Robin as is. I was just reminded of it, as an example of how people conduct themselves in person and what harm they do to other people don’t always line up the way you might guess.
She contributes to/was, until very VERY recently, a part of a banal sort of evil, one that nevertheless has and continues to ruin many many lives.
Consider the regime that gave us the phrase “just following orders”. Were they evil, all of them? Most of them? Did it matter to those who went into the showers?
And then there’s her actions towards Leslie, which are more the innocent/ignorant sort of evil. :/ I think part of why she trampled all over Leslie’s boundaries is she hasn’t the faintest clue boundaries are even a thing.
It’s kinda like how kids can do cruel things, like pulling the legs off bugs, or repeating awful insults without thinking about what they mean. Robin doesn’t have evil intentions, she just sorta does evil things, blissfully unaware of the consequences. …until now, maybe, partly. We hope.
Being indifferent and being willing to carry out evil actions for the sake of power is close enough to real evil for me to feel very comfortable calling her that until she changes. From the outside it makes no real difference whether or not she actually has hate in her heart. Like I don’t care what potential for goodness Paul Ryan may have deep down (very little if any I’m sure) I care about results.
I quote the Darkness 2 video game, which is not, admittedly, a source of great wisdom. “Evil is evil. There’s no diet coke version. A little bit of it is almost as bad as a lot because it spoils the whole person.” Robin has no convictions, so it means she threw people under the bus for pure gain–which is every bit as bad since her motivations don’t matter. She’s not Mary but her actions are the same.
A list of Robin’s crimes are:
* Breaking and entering x 2
* Theft
* Voting consistently against queer protections
* Using her sister as a prop to try to get anti-her politics legislation passed
* Fantastic rudeness to Becky and her situation
* Trying to keep Becky from having a couch to sleep on
* Threatening to have a Kylo Ren fan (2nd best part of TFA) and his family killed
Was the first best part literally everything else in the movie?
I mean Adam Driver did a fine job but Kylo Ren’s gonna need some major character development for me to give a shit next time when we have Rey and Finn/Poe.
I meant Rey but I like Kylo Ren as embodying the people who admire absolutely awful people while missing even said awful people often hated themselves. He’s a great villain for the new millennium.
Strictly speaking, only the first two and the last items are criminal. The others are simply things you wish were criminal.
When someone comes to burn down the village, it doesn’t matter whether they’re burning it down to kill us, because they need the land for a golf course, or because they’re too dim to understand how fire works. We’re all dead or homeless either way.
Evil is not something you are. It is something you do.
I don’t care the difference between the first two, the third one depends on if they chose to be ignorant. If a lightning bolt burned down the village the villagers would still be dead but declaring war on the clouds would insane.
I imagine Willis was going to portray Robin a bit softer… seven months ago.
Things have changed somewhat.
Sarah Palin Robin was funny because there was no chance she’d be President. Trump Robin is our daily Lex Luthor combined with the Joker.
There is this. The whole… context of working against human rights but in a shallow narcissistic sort of way changed pretty violently in this last election as far as that thing goes.
I dunno, I don’t see Robin as evil though, more toxic for Leslie which is why Leslie needed to escape.
Intention only matters because in theory, those who do not mean to hurt you will change your ways. To the people Robin is hurting, there is no difference between her destroying lives because she hates them and destroying lives because she can’t pull her head out of her ass, because she refuses to change her ways.
I’ve disliked Robin because ever since Shortpacked: her favourite thing to do was to butt in to other people’s lives and mess with them, and then skip away with a grin and a “wacky” line without consequences.
Seriously, the last time I was this angry at Robin was in Shortpacked when she freaking sabotaged Amber’s birth control.
Misteline you said “Evil usually at least has convictions, direction, a plan, something.”
What? Where are you getting your definition of evil? DND? were you looking under lawful evil?
People who wish to spread evil throughout the world like a cartoon super villain are the exception among evil people. I’m not going to say they don’t exist but they are rare.
Ever seen Megamind its a story about a cartoon supervillain who has plans convictions… but you know took steps to make sure only his childhood bully actually got hurt. And his creation of Tighten who he meant to be the hero in their epic battle. Yea it turns out a lazy slacker who doesn’t care about others feelings and if he hurts others is more evil when given power.
My point is you’re describing the minimum to qualify as an actual adult but choosing not to grow up does not mean you’re not evil.
Gods this is painful to watch: not so much Robin’s political self destruct but Leslie’s reaction to it. She wanted so much to believe that Robin was worth reaching out to. She earnestly believed that even someone as toxic as Robin could change of she could just see someone else’s humanity. That’s a beautiful thing. I want to believe that, too. But this episode is shaking that belief hard and it hurts to see it.
As much as I want to think that people can change (and sometimes they can ), not everyone can or will. And even if they could change, nobody owes them that chance. No one owed it to Robin to put up with her hurtful toxic bullshit until she had her epiphany. She’s not entitled to treat people like they’re less than human until they find the magical argument to prove to her that they deserve better. As much as I want to believe that there are enough Hanks out there to make it worthwhile to try, there are far too many Robins and Marys out there and we just don’t have the time to wait and hope they come around.
Yeah, it captures that moment well. When you reach out and hold all the hope that someone will come around with just a little more, that you were right on the edge of it, but that never happens and trying to hold true to that is just doing more harm than good to your well-being.
It’s hard to throw in the towel on someone you care about, especially someone who is so good at teasing being right on the cusp of finally getting it. But at a certain point, the costs are not worth the dehumanization.
Your post reminds me of the Captain Awkward concept of “Darth Vader boyfriend.”
https://captainawkward.com/2011/01/17/reader-question-4-my-friend-is-dating-someone-terrible-or-secrets-of-the-darth-vader-boyfriend/
“He blew up a planet to make a point!”
“But there is good in him! I’ve felt it!”
Ha, you’re right! Also: beeeeeeees!!1! :/
I worry about this in Steven Universe too… He keeps taking that risk, and he probably has plot armor but I’m not entirely certain. I’d hate to see him get seriously hurt, but another part of me doesn’t want the show to set up unrealistically optimistic expectations that our reality can’t meet.
I kinda wish humans could be bubbled. That would probably not work as well in reality as in Steven Universe though.
I think everyone in Steven Universe with the possible exception of Keven and Navy will at least have a moment where you feel for them and want them to be redeemed I mean the did it for Blue and Yellow Diamond.
Well shit, I … Think I need to rot13 my spoilers for s4e4.
Fb Fgrira jnf univat srryvatf nsgre nyy, nobhg gur crbcyr ur pbhyqa’g ernpu, naq gur cvax qvnzbaq guvat, naq ubyl shpx fb znal srryf. V’z tbaan unir gung fbat fghpx va zl urnq n juvyr… Rira gubhtu vg’f cnvashy, vg… Tnearg znxrf vg bxnl. Vg’f ovggrefjrrg. Gurl’er bxnl, naq abg bxnl, nyy ng gur fnzr gvzr naq.. Ratyvfu ernyyl fhpxf sbe ibpnohynel urer. Ohg gur zvaqshyarff guvat, Tnearg ernyyl trgf vg, naq gura Pbaavr qbrf gbb, naq V ubcr guvf rcvfbqr yrnqf gb zber crbcyr trggvat vg, orpnhfr vg’f fb cbjreshy, fhpu na vzcbegnag urnyvat gbby… Rdhnavzvgl naq pbzcnffvba naq rzcngul… Bu, ohg guvf vf ebg13’q…
And I forgot about dinner. Um. Oops.
Leslie didn’t think Robin “could change”. She thought that she could change her. That’s a very different (and slightly creepy) thing. And also tends to be doomed to failure, unsurprisingly.
I’m kind of liking how the “you have to deal with / accept people for who they are, not who you want them to be” is playing out in both directions in the story so far. Sometimes as an uplifting or positive moral (Hank learning to deal with gay people existing and so on) and sometimes as a negative moral / reality check (Robin is still a narcissistic asshat despite being revealed to have a more complex sexuality than you’d expect from a fundie politician). Characters change, but only when they want to, and the other characters just kind of have to learn to roll with it.
Well I’m gonna go then! And I don’t need any of this. I don’t need this stuff, and I don’t need *you*. I don’t need anything. Except this.
And that’s the only thing I need is *this*. I don’t need this or this. Just this lamp… And these pants. – The lamp and these pants and that’s all I need.
I don’t need anything el–I need THIS!
Omg I knew I had seen that stunned pantsless shuffle before. She forgot her Thermos.
Good call!
Okay, so here’s the bad news.
When Becky was hijacking Robin’s twitter and nuking her career from orbit?
Becky dropped her own name.
….. this could be very very bad.
BECKYYYYYYYYY DX
Robin nuked her own career by forcing herself into Leslie’s house for a couple days. Becky just put the candles on Robin’s ‘you’re fired’ cake.
Oh, definitely. (I was mostly calling back to the nuking-closets-from-orbit meme. More silly than accurate)
But my concern is that she’s still a very visible target in online media following a major scandal which certain people could get angry over and seek someone to lash out at. It took far less than that to produce, for example, Gamergate.
my favourite from the twitter: “She’s TOTES rad and has the best dinosaur girlfriend ever. She makes her heart go RARRR.” this is adorable.
So, the moral of the story is… never try?
I’m reminded of the classic “Ice Cream Debate” scene from “Thank you for Smoking”. Watch it here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo
The key lesson everyone, even the idealistic, should take away from that scene? Debates, particularly in terms of politics, aren’t about trying to convince the other side. They’re fighting over the audience.
The reason to shout and scream and demand representatives pay attention to you is… well, hey, there’s a chance they’ll change their mind, or at least decide that going against you is politically inconvenient.
But it’s about dragging them into the mud. It’s about them publicly having to deal with you.
So keep on trying. Just make sure there’s a camera or recorder on when you take the other side to task.
The moral is, “Try to win over bigots because maybe they can change. However, when they don’t and break into your house to make you their sex slave, don’t call the cops. Call Batman….or in Becky’s case, Oracle.”
I know you’re joking but omg the number of people who really thought the cops would help in this situation
Heh, I love this.
But yeah, for the OP, I don’t think it’s about a universal rule about trying to reach out so much as it’s about realizing sunk costs and toxic situations when dealing with some.
Like, yeah, reaching out can be good and we’ve seen it pay off in comic (Hank and Joyce being the more prominent examples), but it can also be used against the person trying to do that, especially if they are exploiting social niceties like Robin frequently was (albeit often subconsciously).
And it is easy to get locked into this idea that if you reach out a little more, be a little more fair, and so on that maybe this person creating a toxic situation for you can change. And maybe they even can change, but you’re not the person to do that, because it’s hurting you to be locked in this.
And that’s a more interpersonal issue than a political one, but there are also parallels with like say, trying to reach out with bad faith arguers or people whose careers or standing depends on actively not getting a concept.
And it’s sadly an important note, because it’s easy for well-meaning emotionally vulnerable folks to try and reach out and have that come with some nasty consequences to themselves or get locked into toxic situations. And that’s especially the case in the situation of relationships or crushes like this.
The urge to see it out, find the good in someone you like for other reasons is strong and frequently dangerously toxic and we see some of that with Robin’s actions here.
Becky is both the hero we need & the one we deserve.
When you’re cunning and crafty but, at the same time, just really… really proud to be out and a lesbian… 6/10, Becky, stay safe!
I think that the press pack are going to tear Robin to pieces for a few easy and low-work headlines. No-one deserves that at all.
How does Robin not deserve that? She has torn people’s lives to pieces for a few easy and low-work votes. She has committed “shenanigans” that are certainly 100% press-worthy.
Robin literally deserves everything bad that’s going to happen to her. Losing her job. Being misrepresented. Being accurately represented but badly spun. Having people think she’s some kind of weirdo. These are all things she has done to thousands of people.
And the difference is that Robin is, in fact, some kind of weirdo – the kind who breaks into people’s houses for sex-related motives. By contrast, the people she has hurt are, in general, just ordinary people who happen to not be cis/het.
Yes, Robin deserves all of what’s going to happen.
You’re right; she’ll probably have to go sulk in one of her houses for a while. Then look for something else to do. Does FOX news allow dark-haired correspondents?
Not queer ones.
There are plenty of opportunities for disgraced GOP politicians, but only if they’re disgraced in the right ways. If their fall from grace is specifically a fall from Republican orthodoxy, they’re not going to fare as well.
Nah, Robin totes does. Totes def.
robins finally out of the house!
As much as I hate Robin, that panel of her just standing there, with no pants, but a lamp, is effing hilarious.
Who called that we should watch what Becky’s doing with that mobile?
Wow. If that account is by Willis – and it looks like it – than Becky made her lose her job real fast.
There might be repercussions down the line for mentioning her own name – but then, the press probably already is going after it anyways. Joyce might face another explosion from her mum if her name reaches the media in connection to this.
When you are debating in public, you try to win the audience, not the person your dabating with/against. True. This is what often makes those things incredibly boring and stupid.
If you want to convince someone to a mayor change in stance, don’t do it in public. Remember that they need to be able to save face when they do a public turn-around. So be well prepared. Consider which emotion, which argument has a potential to make sense to the other person. How would this change in stance improved their outlook. Reduce risks or (emotional) debt. Made them look better than whoever it’s important for than to look better. If we are talking about people in positions of power, that’s the way to go.
This is playing politics to make the world a safer place for yourself and others.
When this is about people who are not in a position of power, they are your coworkers, neighbors, family members, the situation is slightly different. You usually don’t end up in arguing with them because you planned to do so, but because something came up and suddenly it’s a thing. So you are unprepared. You are heated. Still. Don’t make them lose face. If you want someone to change, create a situation that allows for it. And even if they might end up feeling like a asshole for what they did before: Telling them they are an asshole is not conductive to them changing their stance. Making they come to the conclusion they acted like an asshole by themselves is a different story.
That said: No, it’s not anybody’s task in life to always reach out to people who are acting like assholes. Even though most of them probably don’t intend to be assholes, reaching out takes time and energy, so you need a good reason and a good benefit for doing so.
Harvey Milk did stuff like that. Reaching out to people who intended to vote for that Section 23 or however it was named. And he moved a lot of them.
Yeah, it’s emotional labor. It has prices. It can be useful, it can move mountains and it’s very possible that these seeds here from Leslie will eventually get through to Robin and certainly made a bigger crack than Roz ever was able to manage for her various hours spent trying to argue for what she believed in.
But it’s also hard vulnerable work and it’s work that can leave you open to a very specific type of deep pain if you encounter someone toxic for you and so when you do that work, whether as a job, a form of activism, or in your personal relationships, it can be useful to know when to bail when needed.
And Chris Phoenix was the one who brought up the watching the phone thing.
I’m so glad Becky indeed did stop taking Robin’s shit the moment Robin made the mistake of insulting Becky’s girlfriend and then fuckin’ WASTED her instead.
My view on the subject is it’s important to educate and talk with people about subjects but also respect (or lack of respect) that they might not change their opinions or dig in their heels. Then the best thing to do is move on. It’s a bit like Discworld and Cohan the Barbarian. Cohan would often ask people to surrender and they’d posture before saying, “I’d rather die than betray my Emperor.” It took him slaughtering the guys who said to get it in their heads that, in fact, you probably didn’t want to die before betraying your Emperor and he was taking you at your word.
Okay, that metaphor got away from me.
Am I the only one who thinks this won’t go well for Becky? Identity theft is a crime, she’s signed her name to the evidence, and she just helped cost the GOP a federal House seat. Like, they probably spent $50 million on Robin. In real life, it would be pretty much guaranteed that they’d make an example of her.
We have the character that runs around a college campus physically assaulting students and the police have taken no interest, and we have an RA getting caught doing something that in most states would result in jail time and a spot on the sex offender registry and not even get fired from her job. When a guy was wandering around campus with a rifle for the better part of half an hour, the cops were only barely getting on the scene when he finally literally kidnapped a student in front of witnesses and was driving away.
Law enforcement in this corner of the Walkyverse is not exactly on the ball, is what I’m getting at here. I wouldn’t put a lot of money on the repercussions hitting real-world levels. Probably something side comment about Robin not pressing charges, and that’ll be it. (Doesn’t actually matter in real life crimes, but in 99% of fiction the victim not pressing charges is a shorthand for getting away with things).
The police HAVE taken an interest in Amazi-girl, they want to ask her questions at the very least.
Uh….why would Ruth be arrested and put on a sex offended registry for having sex with Billie? Billie is not a minor and Ruth a fellow student. Ruth has very likely violated the terms of her WORK contract, but she didn’t break any laws.
Signing her name to the evidence is pretty incidental – she was sitting right next to Robin using her phone. It was already obvious it was her.
And it’s still Robin’s word against hers who wrote those. They could have been sitting on the couch giggling together as Robin posted about the rad new lesbian she’d just met. No less likely than Robin giving her the phone still logged in.
Eh, Robin’s not a politician anymore so anything that happens to Becky ain’t going to be the Republican party’s prerogative and that’s the best part.
Identity theft IS a crime.
Posting stuff using someone else’s Twitter using their phone which they allowed you to use is nowhere near identity theft.
Even if the GOP wanted to press charges, they would have no legal standing to do so. Even if Robin found out about the tweets and denied writing them, I doubt they’d even be able to get a civil suit off the ground. Hell, given her own tweets, I doubt the GOP would even believe her
The best thing is that Becky basically almost got consent from Robin to do so as well.
What with them “joking around” about Becky sending emails to her colleagues about “What sound a cow makes”.
She basically said “Hey, we’re super great buddies, so I’m going to joke around on your social media, because thats what friends do, lol!” and Robin didn’t catch on, try to stop her after giving her permission to use the phone, or at least tell her not to mess with stuff despite the blatant hint. Just not like it’s identity theft if you specifically tell someone to borrow your credit card to pay for something.
Although fortunately they didn’t spend anything near $50 million dollars on her either. John Rogers (of Leverage fame) has often pointed out just how little it takes to fund a campaign (yeah, a lot from an ordinary working person’s point of view, but a lot less than what you’d think a PAC needs to spend).
I wish I had the numbers in front of me. He’s used it in a couple of Leverage scripts, although of course we’re now seven years in the future and the numbers have changed, I’m sure.
Hmm, a tweet of his touches on it slightly: https://twitter.com/jonrog1/status/829026067306262528
I love you Becky.
aaaaw noooooooo
Wait, the only homeless person in the comic is a criminal, then? Way to stereotype, Willis.
(Mostly kidding)
She’s also a house-breaker-intoer. And a loiterer and she’s even breaking campus rules by overstaying her allowed visit time.
But more seriously, the way our system is designed it is remarkably difficult when one is homeless to not break any laws in America because a lot of US locations have a lot of laws that are specifically designed to be easy for homeless people to break in order to justify harassing and arresting them to hide away the homeless problem from the “proper” citizens who are put off by seeing the tragic product of their economic system.
“The majestic equality of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges and stealing bread.” -Anatole France
+1.
If I understand correctly: around here, back in the day, we stored mentally ill people in terrible asylums so that proper ladies and gentlemen wouldn’t have to see them. Then the asylums were closed, which is great because they were horrible, but they weren’t replaced with anything else, which is bad because the mentally ill people became suddenly homeless. Many many homeless people. We had to figure out what to do with all of them, so we made some laws, and jailed them. Now we can store all the homeless people in prisons, so that proper ladies and gentlemen won’t have to see them. Did I get that right?
You missed the part where you made those prisons a private business, so that corporations could make a profit and giving them both a vested interest in keeping the status quo and the financial means to bribe politicians to make sure the status quo is kept.
Oh, and also the part where the amendment that illegalised slavery does not apply to inmates.
Oh yes, indeed you are correct. Isn’t it great that prisons successfully lobby for harsher laws, so that they’ll never run out of chattel off whom to make money? And how they look at the reading scores of third graders to decide how many cells they want to build? No, wait, the opposite of great. Horrifically unjust. Yes, that one.
they seem to be starting that in canada too.
gotta arrest as many cannabis users as they can to fill up Harper’s prisons before it’s legalized… *if* it’s legalized, at this rate…
Being a criminal if Becky’s done anything worthy of the title shouldn’t be a bad thing in and of itself just for breaking the law.
The laws themselves are kind of, a lot of the time, pretty fucking bad.
Becky Macintire TO DO LIST: (after getting kicked out of school)
✓ Go find Joyce Must find Joyce (Painful realization Joyce loves you but doesn’t feel that way)
✓ Escape from butthole dad with help of awesome friends
✓ Find temporary housing
✓ Find girlfriend & be awesome together
✓ Begin learning forbidden science
✓ Get papers with help of aforementioned awesome friends
✓ Get job
✓ Learn about phones
✓ Meet rad professor, find less problem temp housing
✓ Sink a US congresswoman
_ Get to Galasso’s it’s time for work!
_ Lesbian-rule the WORLD (at this rate it won’t take long)
And those are just some highlights. Her TO DO LIST also includes
X Get rad haircut (note: Must be rad).
X Meet cool superhero
X Make sneaky break-in into old school
X Follow Joyce to horrible hometown. Make sure she is safe from all evils her family can throw at her.
X Make sneaky break-in into old home.
X Show chipmunks who’s the boss
X Visit old church
X Make a tactful and discrete statement about opinions on church policy vis-à-vis the gays
X Save Billie from suicide
X Find new, better dad.
…
and counting.
^^^ You want something done right, ask a busy person!
Since I can’t find anyone else who pointed this out: Don’t know if spelling mistake or Becky pronouncing things strangely. Authentication is spelled with an ‘F’ as if juxtaposing authentication and identification.
Pretty sure that’s just a Becky-ism. She’s all about the non-standard pronuncimacations.
And we have our happy confirmation that Becky is learning quite a lot from Dina in that shit, people will let you get away with quite a lot if they don’t think you are capable of more!
Also dinosaur facts.
Iunno, she probably messed with Dad’s phone a lot. Girl has a lot of practice manipulating homophobic authority figures.
Also I hope Robin spends the rest of her life living down the fact that her worst public moment as a politician came pantsless and in the newspapers just because she was being a dope.
Sorry, Leslie, but sad as it is to say it, I’m pretty sure Becky already learned that lesson back in the hospital when Toedad rejected her last attempt to reach out to him after he failed to kidnap her at gunpoint.
The moral of this story: Pick your battles – specifically, pick winnable ones. Long shots are acceptable, but unwinnable fights? Cut your losses, brace for impact, and wait for the winnable one.
… I mean I get that this is emotional and all but mainly I’m wondering if she was really so emotional she didn’t have time for pants.
So…how long between this strip and yesterday’s. Was Robin doing chores the whole time?
I think she was doing all that while Leslie was away at work, not just now.
At least put your trousers on first.