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David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Joe Chouinard @joechoui.bsky.social ⋅ 8m
eeee!
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Shaenon K. Garrity @shaenon.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
TFW2005 @tfw2005.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
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mccloud
what are the odds tomorrow Mike says, “oh hey, at least you weren’t stabbed in the hand like my friend Sal”
karma is a bongo sometimes. Did Sal deserved to be stabbed? Kinda. Was Amber justified? Maybe. Is Blaine an asshole? Certainly.
Sal didn’t deserve to get stabbed. Full stop. She was disarmed and in custody, and no threat to anyone. ‘I wanted to feel powerful’ is not an excuse for assault with a deadly weapon, and Amber is in no way justified in her actions.
Hurting people because you think they deserve it when they pose no threat to you or anyone else is morally and legally indefensible. Just like nearly everything Amazi-girl does is morally and legally indefenseble, because she seeks out conflicts to resolve with violence and creates conflicts when she doesn’t find any.
She doesn’t belong in prison, probably. But she does belong in a mental institution.
I don’t think the justification is so much “because I wanted to feel powerful” as “I was having a serious mental episode and was not in control of my actions”, but you’re right that Sal didn’t deserve it in any way.
Also, everyone involved in this storyline is, like, TWELVE.
Hasn’t Amber literally just had her 13th birthday “a few days” ago? Sal wouldn’t have deserved to be stabbed even if she was still holding out her knife and squeaking. These are 7th or 8th graders. What they deserve is safety, better parenting, and therapy.
Thaaaaat was not all supposed to be bolded. I’m not nearly that angry about this. (I am not angry about this at all, just a poor proofreader.)
As the adult butterfly of a caterpillar who once needed a great deal of safety, better parenting, and therapy…it deserves to be bolded. You bold the eff out of it.
Except for Blaine. He deserves all the blame.
Blame O’Malley
Please, god, bold the ever-living fuck out of that becaue that is exactly what kids deserve. All of them. All of us.
It wasn’t about Sal. Everything we’ve seen about the flashback, it’s wasn’t about Sal. It was about Blaine. She didn’t react because of Sal- she reacted because of BLAINE. And if I had to guess, she didn’t want to stab Sal- she wanted to stab Blaine, but probably couldn’t admit that even to herself.
Not that that “justifies” it- as has been said she was not in her right mind, I would describe her as having a mental breakdown. But yeah. It was never about attacking someone rendered defenseless from how I read it.
See, that’s the kind of blatantly obvious truth that some good-ass therapy might help a person realize!
you make a lot of excellent points, but the phrase “morally and legally indefensible” is somewhere between bizarre and dishonest, and if you’ll excuse me for saying so, you need to stop conflating *intentionally* unrelated things. none of AGs antics seem legally defensible (IANAL) but if you really want to separately debate the morality? i’ll be your huckleberry. sal-shanking is *not* part of what i will try to defend, tho :/
It is unclear to me when Amazi-Girl has created conflicts when she doesn’t find any. (Other than her earlier interactions with Sal – in the parking lot and at the rally. Those weren’t randomly seeking conflict though. Pretty much everyone agrees those were wrong.)
Some of the crimes she interrupted weren’t exactly conflicts, so I guess that qualifies? I’m not sure I’m morally opposed to stopping the guy about to smash the car window though.
Sal threatned to kill Ethan because she wanted attention. Amber actions were justified. Going after her as Amazigirl was also justified. She had no reason to believe Sal had changed.
Sal was in police custody when Amber stabbed her. No longer a threat to anyone.
Attacking some one 5 years later because you don’t know they’ve changed from when they were 13 is not justified.
We all deserve to get stabbed.
Wait, is that Joyce?
She’s not tagged, for what that’s worth.
nope
Doubtful, I don’t think she went to regular school, and the kid near them is decidedly less white than pre-DOA Joyce had any experience with.
i dont think so, the face shape is different
She was homeschooled, iirc – plus, the nose is completely different. It’d be even funnier if the skinny black kid turned out to be Jacob, though.
homeschooled indeed: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/socialized/
also the teeth are different.
Nope, Joyce was homeschooled up until the beginning of DoA and was allowed to go to somewhere away from home only because she was the best socialised. So yeah.
I suspect one, or both, of Joyce’s parents are Indiana U. alumni, and that played a role in letting her go there.
Papa Joyce, at least, is indeed an alum. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/loft/
I think that was confirmed during Freshman Family Weekend? Jocelyne certainly is, at least. Also Joyce is apparently still pretty good at math, given she’s in calculus and isn’t reportedly struggling at all. Which makes sense, since it’s the one subject couldn’t be censored or mangled with Fundie Bullshit. (Lit’s out if she can’t watch Frozen, History got Bible literalismed, and Science has been covered extensively. To name just the basics.)
Disregard the math thing – I’m clearly pretty tired because my first thought on the comment was ‘Joyce getting admitted’ and not ‘The Browns allowing their children in a secular university.’
Confirmed, both. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/socialized/
Did Amber, Ethan, and Mike even grow up anywhere near La Porte? According to the wiki Sal’s from Evansville, so presumably the robbery happened somewhere around there. That looks to be at least a couple hours south…
Point is, even if Joyce went to public school, that’s definitely not her.
Evansville? Jeez, I lived right by there, this past winter. What a hole, but at least there’s a pretty decent nerd store.
Which they were opposed to, because Socialism is wrong. :rolleyes:
Sorry (not sorry) for that atrocious pun.
What do you think this is, Final Fantasy 8?
All we need is a basketball court, some absurdly large missiles, and completely climate-inappropriate dress!
Look, Squall was dressed just fine for the weather.
If it turns out that they all really did grow up together, and it was really the GFs that made them forget, and then suddenly Walky summons Bahamut when Mary releases a hoarde of Tonberries onto the floor, I will love Willis forever. But unfortunately, he’s a Transformers nerd instead of a JRPG nerd.
And as a huge JRPG/Nintendo/roleplaying nerd myself, I mean that in the best and most flattering way.
According to Walkypedia (DoA sections), Joyce is from La Porte, which is about as far north as you can be and still be in Indiana, and Ethan is from Evansville, which is about as far south as you can be and still be in Indiana. The two towns are roughly 300 miles apart. So no, that is almost certainly not Joyce.
Yes. And she starts homeschooling because she keeps pooping her pants. She thought it was over in panel 4 but it came back.
…Great, now I get to spend who knows how long imagining what happened. And my imagination is a dark and terrible place, so it’ll likely be even worse that what actually happened.
Then again, Willis’ imagination is where Faz, Mary, Blaine, and Toedad were born, so it must be pretty dark and terrible too.
Sal robbing a store happened
OHHHH. I get it now. Didn’t realize where we were in the timeline.
Time to recalibrate that control panel, huh?
Ah, scenic twelfth-century Constantinople! I do love the… wait
…we know what happened. Red panels happened.
faz isn’t thaaaat bad
Oh, tiny baby Ethan. Oh, tiny baby Amber. Oh, tiny baby Sal.
A lot can change in five years, huh?
Adjective or verb? Time will tell!”
Is this after the stabbing incident? Like, soon after?
yup
Guessing “yes” and “yes”.
Jacob is back at school after the incident, Amber still isn’t. It has been a few days.
Poor Ethan probably never got therapy for having a knife to his throat.
I dunno about Ethan but not caring about Dinobot is a warning sign not a perk.
Sal didn’t kill Ethan. I wonder how long it preyed on her that she failed in her mission.
What the fuck are you talking about?
She was on a secret mission for the sinister organization behind the Monkey Master cartoon. Keep up.
What’s more likely? That Sal was acting out and threatened him or that she was a secret child soldier for Weapon X, out to kill the Second Eaton?
Okay, but there’s this new Dinobot out…
too bad, Mike, he’s going to spend the next hour talking about dinobot now
Oh here we go.
*plays Darryl Hall and John Oates’ “She’s Gone” on the hacked Muzak*
Oh, Ethan. Honey.
He mostly seems not to hold a grudge, so it’s easier to overlook given Amber’s massive trauma, but he was held at knifepoint and then his best friend snapped while he watched. This could not have been a good period for him. And the phrasing here implies he hasn’t really been able to see Amber since. (That, or he’s understating that ‘don’t know’ from a flat no.)
Knowing she was out there, waiting, plotting, and being Catholic Schooled.
*shudder*
Yeaaahhhh.
But, how does Mike feel about THE DinobotS?!
Yay, back to probably-generally-trying-to-be-nice Mike!
And yeah, I like that last panel. It’s what Lil!Ethan needs to hear, not platitudes or comfort or heartfelt stuff… but a sharp little joke that reminds him of normal times.
It’s almost gallows humor, really. It’s a cruel little jab, but it’s a jab at something trivial that Mike and Ethan have talked about before, and Ethan knows Mike doesn’t care that much about. It’s about, as Ethan puts it here, making “things to be the way they were before”, if only in this one, small way.
It breaks the tension, gives you a chance to breathe, reminds you that the world is still going to spin on… lord knows I’ve needed that over the last two years…
Yes, that’s exactly what Mike is trying to do here. Let’s go with that.
Man I’m really not looking forward to seeing how all of this (the aftermath of the robbery) affected Mike and Sal’s psyches (especially as Mike might go a little insane trying to piece it together) which I assume that’s what we’re gonna see soon, so I guess I’m thankful for this dinobot joke before we all collapse into our own collective paddle pool of tears. That was a really long run on sentence. I’m already emotional thinking about this. Oh boy.
I’ll be honest, at first I thought that person in front was Joyce…
I thought so too until I remembered she was homeschooled. I also at first thought the other person in the front looked like a younger version of Jacob.
A number of people have seen a strong resemblance to Joyce, but I have to say that however my facial recognition system works, I’m not seeing it.
This is good and all but I want to see what happens when Joyce, Dorothy, Walky and Joe all collide in Gender Studies
Actually I want Dorothy to see the new and improved Joe to hopefully repair the friendship they might have had
New and improved? Joe gleefully jumped off the nice guy wagon to land weinus first in a congresswoman’s slutty sister
That was Malaya, not Roz, and can we nix the slut shaming?
Seconded. You want to have sex? You have sex. You want to ruin your sister’s career so she can’t make any more LGBTQ kids homeless or suicidal? You have sex.
Besides, nobody else can be called slutty in a sentence in which Joe is mentioned. I’m pretty sure that’s in the Chicago _Manual of Style_.
Well, it is now.
Absolutely. There’s an enormous difference between “I want to treat women as peoples” and “I’m never going to have sex again”. Joe was approached by someone who was openly interested and he went for it. I fail to see a problem, or a way in which he’s not improved by awareness. He didn’t objectify, nag, or get creepy. He basically went “huh yeah okay” and that’s fine.
And so is Malaya wanting to have sex by the way. And Roz since you brought her up.
(“You” referring to Mydnyt.)
But he treated it as falling off the wagon – “Lasted longer than I expected to”.
And we still haven’t seen any aftermath or fallout from that.
It was falling off the wagon because he was suppossed to be watching Faz. He no longer objectifies women but still has skewed priorities.
I don’t think so. I think it was deeper. I don’t think he sees it like that.
He thought he was safe from hurting women like his dad because he never made any emotional connection – no way to betray them if he never commits. Joyce made him see that he was hurting people even that way, but he doesn’t see a way to safely be with women so he thought he had to avoid sex entirely.
Bullshit of course, but he doesn’t see it yet. That’s likely the next step in his arc.
Like, yeah. I think it’s kind of gross and prudish how people take the logic from “Joe shouldn’t be such a goddamned fucking sex pest,” which is as justified as it gets, to “Joe shouldn’t fuck anybody, ever, because he doesn’t ever deserve it again.” If you like casual sex and somebody literally fires it at your face from a fucking trebuchet, there aren’t many more appropriate times to have some damn casual sex.
But it seemed to be Joe’s logic. He seemed to think he was failing by going with her.
Not because he had sex, because he was blowing off responsibilities he had agreed to by going to have sex.
As I said above, I don’t think so.
“lasted longer than I expected” doesn’t really make sense if he’s just talking about Faz.
Have you read the slipshine? Without a subscription, we don’t know how it went down.
Malaya wanted to have sex with him and he was open to that suggestion. No one to blame or shame for that (only that he let Faz without supervision is something we can blame him for).
It’s too bad Roz didn’t get the GOP to change their views on casual sex just to keep her sister in the running. It’s not like they don’t have casual sex right and left, they just try to hide it.
Wouldn’t it be great if who’s consensually sleeping with whom became the non-news it should be?
Having read the slipshine: No blame or shame, but damn, I wouldn’t want to have sex with Malaya.
Also, wait, isn’t Joe banging *Malaya* right now, not Roz? JoexRoz was a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time ago…or, eh, four days, strip time, probs?
At the VERY VERY least, this time he wasn’t the instigator.
I’m also curious to see the fallout from Malaya/Joe in the Sal/Marcie/Malaya/Carla group.
I’m not sure what happened with Amber, but I could sally forth and take a stab at guessing.
Eef only there wasn’t a hold up, maybe we could figure it out.
So long as no one plays the blaine game and it’s all handled cordially.
And as long as nobody sees red, we’ll be fine.
But if that DOES happen, we’ll have to arrest things before they get out of hand.
Preferably before they’re all on knife-edge. Though if that didn’t work, I guess things would become pretty scar-y.
If only someone had had their phone…
Amber nabbed Sal’s phone, which I’d say probably took some nerve.
I think we should amble this subject with kid gloves.
Look out, Joyce’s secret sister (not that one) went to school with Ethan and Mike
Yeesh, that’s rude little Mike. Oddly he doesn’t seem fazed but he hasn’t heard the whole story yet (which is kinda weird in the age of the Internet and all).
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/02-uphill-from-here/news/
I had forgotten that Sal held up two convenience stores. Now I’m wondering if the Amber/Ethan holdup was the first or second incident, and what the other one was like.
I would assume the second one, simply because she was arrested. It’s also likely she wouldn’t wanna rob another one after getting stabbed.
Yeah, that’s a good point – they were minors so the news would block out Amber, Sal, and Ethan’s names.
Nah. That’s how you friend. You stay in character, you make a joke, you give the people who need it a sense of continuity. Ethan has just expressed longing for that, and Mike is quick on his feet when it comes to being a bit of a dick.
So, hm, yes, it is pretty rude. I see what you mean. But I think it might be one of the few times in the strip when Mike Being an Asshole is exactly what’s needed.
I guess. Looking at the last panel again, I can’t tell if Ethan is sad or laughing a little.
[gif of the little hero girl]
On the contrary, Mike being Mike is always what’s needed.
Wait, is this when Sal and Blaine ruined Amber’s sanity? That is still haunting these poor teenagers. Also, screw you, Mike! Dinobot is a badass and inspired the first humans.
Yeah, sure, let’s blame Sal for Amber’s abusive dad. That’s very productive and fair.
So is passive-agressive hyperbole.
Sal holding a knife to Ethan’s throat was flearly a factor. That’s why her other personality fights crime.
Sal was a trigger.
Blaine was the root cause.
I wonder how Mike would feel if he knew the good deed he extorted out of Blaine lead to the stabbing incident.
That’s a point I’ve wondered about. I wonder if it has something to do with him becoming… how he became.
Maybe, but I’m inclined to doubt it. I suspect that over time he just became more Mike.
I’m guessing that Mike is here remembering the aftermath of the Convenience Store Job.
Yup. Except the mike in this flashback doesn’t know what happened. Oh god we are in for an emotional ride…
Fff…fff…future is not fixed, and my choices are my own…
*said in a flashback*
Technically, it’s both. The future is absolutely fixed, but your choices are also your own. They just won’t prevent the thing from arriving at the predestined time. In the meantime, though, do as you please and try not to think about it.
There are fixed points in time.
He was making a dinobot reference
Or she. Or they.
Baby Ethan, please. Calling Mike the F-Word won’t help anything.
Face?
Wait… So this was the trip where Amber snapped? So MIKE was the one who pushed Blaine into taking her and setting off the chain of events?
… Ohhhh boy. It may not be your fault, technically, but you definitely should bear some responsibility, Mike. >.<
Do you think it was a foreseeable result?
I feel like blackmailing her dad to spend time with her alone when he clearly didn’t respect or possibly even like her was pretty stupid. I think Mike should have known it was a bad idea.
Though consequences this bad weren’t very likely. Mike shouldn’t really bear responsibility for this.
The most this was likely to be was one more drip of abusive Blaine added to a lifetime’s worth, not a lifechanging trauma.
Like, seriously. “I shouldn’t encourage someone to take a car ride because their car might get hit by a meteor and they’ll die” is not the exercise of responsibility, it’s fucking clinical paranoia. That’s not a reasonable standard to hold anybody to. In doing the perceived positive thing (opportunistically getting Amber a ride to assuage her rampant anxiety upon finding out that busses trigger her rampant anxiety), for Mike to be responsible for the outcomes you are expecting Mike to reasonably be able to predict with minimal insight that:
– At some point, Amber and Ethan will stop for snacks at a gas station
– That the stress of being in public will cause Amber to have a panic attack over twinkies at this specific time
– That in that short timeframe, an armed robbery will happen at that gas station
– That during that armed robbery, a fucking hostage situation will erupt
– That Ethan, specifically, will be taken hostage while Amber watches
– Finally, that Blaine is so monumentally, unfathomably abusive to his daughter (and keep in mind, Mike has met Blaine fucking once; he’s figured out the guy cheats on his wife, not that the guy is a fucking psychopath) that his mere annoyance with the inconvenience of his daughter being the traumatized victim of an armed robbery will lead him to mentally abuse his daughter to the point that it causes her to have a psychotic break from reality and try to murder another human being.
Does anybody, anybody in this thread honestly think that is a reasonable sequence of events for a person to predict from the starting point of “yeah, you should probably take a car ride?” The probability on all of those small percentage chances converging is so minuscule it couldn’t be measured. You simply don’t hold people accountable for things like that happening to anybody. They’re just an unlucky victim. Full stop.
If only Mike had insisted Blaine be meaner to his daughter instead of nicer, none of this would have happened.
The intent wasn’t to make her dad spend time with her, it was to make sure that Amber could go on the field trip.
It was all part of young Mike’s masterplan to create Amazigirl, the only thing that could save us from what Mike knows he will someday become.
Mike was just a kid, with no experience with abusive people himself. It was a bad idea, but he really can’t be blamed for not knowing that. Plenty of adults don’t understand the dynamics of abuse enough to realize why it was a bad idea
Plus, like, he’s known Blaine for five minutes. Even as abusive people go, Blaine is a fucking unicorn. Even most abusers can generally get through a car ride with their victims without causing them to have a fucking psychotic break. At this point he has the information to figure out that Blaine is a cheater, and that he and his wife have a frosty relationship. There’s no reasonable expectation that he can immediately understand “oh, this guy is Stephen-King-Bully levels of fucking sadistic, and shouldn’t be trusted alone with literally any other human being.”
And even most car rides with Blaine don’t cause a psychotic break. I mean there’s cumulative trauma, but if it hadn’t been for the robbery, this just would have been another day in an abused childhood.
It’s adding that triggering event as an opportunity for Blaine to twist the knife deeper that made this ride so awful.
And whatever Mike could or should have known about Blaine, he couldn’t have predicted Sal.
I would like to second and underline this.
Um, NO!? You can’t be held responsible for consequences that were reasonably completely unforeseeable to you. Mike could have foreseen Blaine saying some emotionally abusive things to her. He could have foreseen a slim chance to stop for snacks. He couldn’t have remotely foreseen the armed robbery no matter how astute he is because he would have had to factor in Sal without even knowing her!
You can’t foist any responsibility for it onto a kid who decided a few rude comments from Blaine was better than repeated panic attacks on a bus which she might regard as humiliating and then further withdraw.
Yes, that’s why I said that it wasn’t Mike’s *fault* that all of this happened. He couldn’t have known that Blaine was an out and out abuser (in such scenarios, the LAST thing you want to do is force the victim to spend more time with their abuser, regardless of their relationship with the victim). But nonetheless, he DOES bear some responsibility for setting in motion the chain of events that led to Amber’s psychotic break.
I’m not saying that Mike should beat himself up, enter a monastery and vow to have nothing more to do with the world. But I would hope that he felt guilty over what happened and tried to do his best to support Amber and get her someplace safe and in therapy to deal with her issues. He MIGHT have done that off-screen (Willis has never shown us anything either way), but from the way everybody generally regards Mike (and the fact that Amber basically created Amazigirl to deal with her mental problems, still in existence today), I don’t know. He doesn’t seem like the sort. Sure, he remained friends with Amber and Ethan, but that isn’t enough to make amends.
As an example, consider a pharmaceutical company who puts out a product that turns out to have unexpected long-term side effects (like, ones that don’t show up until you’ve been taking the medication for more than a decade). Even though technically the company is not at fault because they didn’t know about and couldn’t have foreseen the long-term consequences of their product, they nonetheless bear responsibility to the patients now suffering as a result of their medication. LEGALLY, they likely wouldn’t have to compensate anyone, but morally I would hope they step up and do their social duty.
I mean, I’m not one to absolve Mike of blame for pretty much anything, but… he really did nothing wrong here (as others have already pointed out). Well, okay, blackmail is wrong objectively, but blackmailing someone into being less abusive to their child? Not so much. Mike had absolutely no way of knowing what was going to happen at the convenience store. The person to blame is Blaine, and to a much lesser extent Sal. Mike may have influenced Blaine to drive Amber that day, but that’s about it. You can’t blame a child for trying to do something legitimately nice for a classmate.
…please tell me Ethan, mom didn’t send him to de-gay therapy or some shit.
No. This is right after the convenience store robbery by Baby Sal.
Ambeeeer
You know, I always wondered if Amber got into trouble for stabbing Sal in the hand. I mean it wasn’t right to stab someone while in Police custody, but considering what she went through, I wonder if they just shrugged it off as she went thorough emotional distress or something the like.
Maybe we will find out.
Maybe Blaine will pay to send her to self-defense classes so that someday she can gain the skills to beat the crap out of him.
Is this the beginning of a flashback to when Mike realizes he’s attracted to Ethan?
I’m starting to think a lot of Mike’s actions aren’t as ‘evil’ as we think and he just likes pushing boundaries until something snaps.
Which is a little bit of a nice change from his ‘an asshole to be an asshole’ thing.
This is where Mike realizes that his best laid plans will go astray. Won’t stop him from planning.