Hate to break it to ya, but we have exceptionally few statesmen here in the US. We, meanwhile, unfortunately have a plethora of pandering demagogues, dogmatic obstructionists and naive idealists.
And unfortunately, Category 1 will beat Category 3 down mercilessly until they become Category 2, because titles and whose team you’re on matter more than ideas. It’s just easier for the Third Estate to understand that way.
Well, in many cases there’s not actually a lot of difference between the “naive idealist” and the “dogmatic obstructionist” other than power and opportunity. If you’re an idealist and you’re not in a position to push your ideals through, all you can do is obstruct things that don’t live up to them.
Wow…
It’s depressing because it’s true.
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In an attempt to bring some humour to
references to politicians etc, here is a
vintage Bloom County. https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/2010/09/02
The big difference is that people don’t get upset when a demagorgon is killed by some well-meaning idealist (or even demented conspiracy theorist).
Which is okay, because that particular cure is much worse than the disease for the demagogues.
Because I tend to be a pedagogue, I am giving a correction.
Which is a silly thing to do for quotes, because it sometimes seems that every famous quote is either wrong or misattributed.
.
According to the internet (and when is it ever wrong?), a statesman (yes, he is a dead politician) by the name of Arlen Specter said it.
But I can’t find a source. Sigh. Even if he was the first person to use those exact words, he is not the first with the core idea.
.
However, Truman (the President, not the fictional character played by Jim Carrey) said the following, as recorded in the April 12, 1958 edition of The New York World Telegram & Sun: “I’m proud that I’m a politician. A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead ten or fifteen years.”
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However, Thomas Brackett Reed, a Congressman from Maine who served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1889 to 1891 and again from 1895 to 1899 wrote in a letter: “A statesman is a successful politician who is dead.”
So it seems that in every case, a ‘future statesman’ created the thought, not Groucho.
Because Groucho couldn’t have said everything… 8)
This is the story of a Mike
Who was an asshole and stole Willis’s bike
And while he looked so mad to spite a dad
I kinda liked him better when he smiles
We all tend to find a time we think he’s being literal, and sift it from the jokes, stunts, and ploys.
Like, the current one is people who think he is doing all of this to make Danny sad, for… reasons, I guess, but given that’s the sort of thing he says as a maybe-joke sometimes, it’s kinda hard to parse. I certainly don’t expect him to carry out all of the shit he says he’ll do.
Well, Mike in SP! doesn’t like his parents. If that carried over, I see the key as “Well, I can’t stop you, but I can keep you pointed at a target that will benefit me”.
I’m going to guess that we’ll never know. This arc isn’t about revealing Mike’s hidden depths as an anti-hero, or revealing why he’s a villain. It’s backstory that will preserve the status quo of Mike as an unrepentant asshole.
Does he do it to make people grow in his own direct way, because he’s learned that’s the safest/most effective way? Does he just like sowing chaos and people are weakest where they most need to grow? That’s for Willis to know(?) and for us to obsess over.
Nope. Chaotic Neutral (or more accurately, Cynical or Fatalistic), Masquerading as Neutral Evil.
He casts shitty situations to others as if he was the master manipulator creating them, when in fact he’s just being existentialist, swimming with the currents in the sewer of life.
I’m not sure quoting the bible makes you inherently lawful any more than it makes you inherently good. I’m sure Mike doesn’t consider Blaine any kind of lawful authority over his parents, in a secular or spiritual sense.
It looks like maybe also a pinch of protecting himself from being hurt by trying not to care about anyone else (or at least convincing HIMSELF of that)
Remember. Literally a few pages ago Mike confronted a teacher due to the bad grade given to Amber, I don’t know how he can spin that to mean he doesn’t care, but it’ll be a stretch. Pretty sure this is 100% a bluff. Even if Mike does or doesn’t believes it himself.
For now, I’m reading it as a bluff here, but over the years it hardened into his actual personality. Although at least now we see that there’s a good Mike buried in there that could someday be redeemed.
AFTER his shittiness costs him Ethan, of course. If stories have taught me anything, it’s that suffering is literally the only path to redemption.
Which would also be a warning about playing the asshole lest it become your entire persona. And it’s understandable thanks to Blaine why he would see it as attractive. If you don’t care, you can’t get hurt. If you hate the friends you love the most and treat them like garbage, then someone abusive can’t use your love for them and vulnerability against you.
But it makes you into the type of person who doesn’t deserve those friends.
And it makes me wonder if he can dig himself out of this bad path. I suspect he’s going to have to lose Ethan and Amber for it to happen, though.
Fairly certain that Rachel wasn’t intended to be Truth in that strip, or at least not the entire truth. She’s speaking to Ruth, who I certainly don’t think is irredeemable. I think it’s probably closer to the truth to say redemption doesn’t erase the bad things you’ve done, and you still have to live with them and their consequences.
I was already to scream ‘Damn you Ellis’ when you raise the possibility that it was a bluff.
.
As someone else posted, I’m getting emotional whiplash reading this arc.
I hope some knowledge of what Mike was, or is, or why is revealed by the end. I’m not asking for a lot, just a little nugget that I can trust is real.
.
Yeah. After re-reading the last sentence, good luck to me on that….
I have to wonder how much of that was Mike bluffing and how much of it was him actually believing that. Does Mike hate his parents? Hell he might have offered the key hoping Blaine would do something, though that doesn’t seem his style. Every one of these flashback segments raises more questions even as it answers old ones. I guess my next question is, what are Mike’s parents like?
Assuming they’re like they were in Shortpacked!, they’re super friendly, super enthusiastic, and super TMI.
And honestly? I’m pretty sure Mike is just a huge dickhead to everyone. I don’t think there’s anything deeper to it. Maybe he’s being that dickhead to teach people something, but honestly I doubt it.
Possible, but what would be the point in exploring that from Willis’ point of view? He said early on that Mike was difficult to fit into DoA as much as he did in Shortpacked because he was something of a cartoon character.
Like, I don’t really get what the payoff would be if it’s just “yeah, he’s bad to the core.” That’d be one wet fart of a climax.
well.
huh.
I wonder how truthful he’s being. like, this could be his way of protecting amber by being really convincingly not-caring about her? but maybe I just want to believe that?
also I wonder if even *blaine* is disturbed by this. seems like it.
..is that “none are righteous” thing a quote from somewhere?
Mike is trying to keep an abusive patriarch from retaliating and potentially destroying his life. Did you expect him to try to appeal to Blaine’s better nature?
I mean, sure, those times he was just being a piece of shit. He doesn’t need some grand overarching moral reason to be shitty to everyone, but that doesn’t mean he’s incapable of any sort of decency.
Yeah… When Mike first showed up at Amber’s birthday, my first thought was that he must’ve been hoping to catch some family drama, and Mike 100% meaning what he’s saying here would neatly explain how young Mike became adult Mike: by continuing to be an amoral asshole
It’s most prominently from Romans chapter 3. I had to look it up to double check, since it’s been ages. I suspect it may be something he knows for similar reasons to Jules’s Pulp Fiction line.
I want to be clear that that wasn’t a shot at the current Doctor, I stopped watching out of inertia (and lack of Netflix) sometime during Capaldi’s run. I just miss Matt Smith’s portrayal of the Doctor.
Eleven is kinda the scariest Doctor, to me. It’s like, one minute, he’s playing with a policeman’s hat, and the next, he’s screaming genocide threats at a sentient cloud. You can’t get a bead on the guy, even if you’re also him.
I mean, if you think Mike’s going to open up to Blaine of all people, and this is like, the true Mike all along, then sure, maybe he’s been on Mary’s tier of shittitude this whole time, but I’m finding that mighty dubious.
Blaine literally said he’d target who Mike cares about. Mike disavows any notion of caring about Amber. Maybe he doesn’t give a shit about her at all, but if he was going to bluff, this seems like one hell of a time to do so.
Yeah, it’s also completely unconnected to how much harm a person does and their intentions.
On top of that, it’s not even true. Both Mike and Mary are fully aware that their actions are harmful, and do them anyway. The only real difference is in how they rationalize doing that.
Mary justifies doing harm with her religious beliefs. To her, the people she hurts are going to Hell anyway, so it doesn’t matter.
Mike is justifying doing harm by saying nothing matters. It’s basically the same thing. He’s just not exempting himself from his belief that everyone is bad.
I don’t really see any moral value to that difference. The intentional harm is what matters to me.
He’s mike warner
You can’t trust him
He’s a bad guy
Even when he’s nice
Just because you’ve seen him
Show an ounce of vulnerability
Do you think that means
He has some secret heart of gold?
[Amber]
Sure there was that one scene
Where he said something honest
And by scene I mean he made a scene
Well I for one ain’t sold!
He’s mike warner
Not easily reformed by
Some quirky guy he met at school
Just because now he
Become a series regular
And by season regular I mean
He eats bran in the spring
Doesn’t mean the comic is now called
‘blonde and pompous edglord’
And by comic I mean his favorite comic
Which i dont think that he has?
Screw the mike warner
Well, ethan did that and that’s how I know
That he hasn’t changed a bit
He’s an evil sociopath who’s
Tricked you into liking him
Why else do you think that
I’m singing this reprise?
And by this reprise it means
Whatever just don’t think about it!
Boo the Mike warner!
[Amber and the others]
Hub bub hub bub!
Hub bub hub bub!
Hub bub hub bub!
Hub bub hub bub!
Props to Mike for being a badass here. Sucks that Blaine fucked over his ability to smile though. I liked it when he could too. Hopefully his potential new-found relationship with Ethan will fix that though. Ethan deserves someone who will always look out for him and I know Mike will.
Huh. Blaine. Speechless. With a glorious “…WTF?!” face in panel 3. In such a way that if he wasn’t such a horrible, horrible person I might actually feel for him.
You’re looking for trouble? You’re in the right place
Looking for trouble?–Just look in my face!
I was born standing up–and talking back
(…) I’m Evil, my middle name is Misery
I’m Evil, don’t you mess around with me–ELVIS, who has NOT left the building
Probably because he is escalating past what Blaine would find acceptable to make Blaine back off and because it is hard to parse here how much of this is Mike bluffing and putting on an uncaring persona and how much of this he honestly believes is true. We can’t say if Mike honestly thought of ordering Blaine away from Amber before… or if he is saying that now in hindsight but selling it as foresight to screw with Blaine. Mike is hard to read when he clearly WANTS you to believe that he is a monster.
This does make me curious as to how much of this he does truly believe – if he is vindictive enough, it might be true as revenge for when Amber left while he confronted the teacher because kids can be vicious about that kind of stuff.
To be fair, Mike has all reason to lie. Appealing to Blaine’s better nature won’t help, and keeping perfectly calm would probably make Blaine angrier. Though it does seem that at least SOME of what he’s saying is what he believes. And plus, this is Baby!Mike, who at this point isn’t an asshole yet.
Baby!Mike’s actions are a lot more ambiguous and seem more positive compared to present day Mike, and I don’t believe that he was always the asshole he is in present day, so I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here and assume he’s more or less bluffing and doesn’t completely believe what he’s saying right here.
Or because his subsequent actions completely support what he’s saying being true. Like, present Mike absolutely behaves like the shitty nihilist edgelord he’s claiming to be here.
I wanna get back to Walky and Amber and Joyce and Jacob.
Damn you, fleshed-out universe with your awful conflicts. This kinda shit is why I watched Dragon Ball growing up: If you weren’t a Saiyan or one of their friends you could be safely ignored. Mike and Blaine can’t be ignored.
Not asking this to be a dick or anything, but how’d you make it through the Becky/Ross arc? Because that one got probably even worse, like counting the stuff Joyce’s family pulled.
Well, Becky, Joyce, and Dina are my favorite characters (I can never read It’s Walky), and the general feel of the arc was so much more intense that it drew me in better.
I hate Mike. Whatever pretenses he hides behind, whatever infintesimal kernels of truth he does occasionally hit, he’s still a shrieking shitstain who is clearly too invested in hurting people to ever be a positive presence.
I recently spent a year living with someone who stylized themself like Mike: Smarter than and superior to everyone in the room by default, and woe be upon you if you dare cross any of their millions of invisible and unstated lines in the sand. No amount of “positive intent” will ever EVER justify the walking talking abortion of common decency that they have created in themselves.
And yeah, Blaine has long been proven to be one of the absolute fucking worst, but frankly I could deal with Amber or Ruth kicking the shit out of Blaine, physically or legally/verbally/emotionally.
I am, however, over all these fucking assholes who think their bullshit is a gift to their peers when the only good they could actually do is fuck off into a hole and die.
Sorry, emotional abuse of this particular variety fucking triggers me.
Internet gesture of support, and I can totally get that. If Mike’s the one who hits closest to home, that really sucks. And since he’s set up to continue as a supporting character, that precludes Jail And Hospital Forever (bye Toedad and Ryan!) or even status as an in-strip bogeyman like Blaine who’s used super sparingly. Which just makes him more unpleasant, particularly since commenters have tried to justify him even before the flashbacks. (And it looks like ‘he has literally always been This Awful, for the sake of being This Awful’ is still a possibility.)
No matter where the narrative goes with Mike, no matter who likes him, you should never be obligated to like or even accept him. He’s done plenty of things that are worth burning bridges with him and nobody can take that away from you or anyone else, no matter how they may try.
Um, if it helps, I was on Team “Mike is somehow good” for a while, but thanks to other commenters I’ve completely changed my mind about him! I’m frequently an insufferable optimist and/or pretty naive, but yeah Mike’s done too many shitty things for me to believe he’s good for anyone like he is now.
So, uh, Internet Hug? *Stretches arms around monitor* Just… just give me a minute to work out the mechanics of this one.
Also, I’ve had to work with a person a lot like you’ve described (“I’m always right”, “you’re trash for disagreeing w/me”, etc), and holy shit is it unbearable having to deal with an endless stream of people singing his praises because of their surface-level niceness. I hope you’ve gotten away from having to live with that shitty person!
Yeah, that really sucks. I have hope that the narrative is going to address Mike’s actions and the harm they’ve caused in a real way, whether it be redemptive or alienated. Especially as we’ve just seen the narrative do that with Ruth and Joe’s shitty behavior. But I agree it’s still awkward in the here and now.
Knowing a Mike in real life is exhausting, frustrating, and awful and I’m sorry you had to deal with that too.
Nah, that’s on Blaine. For all my distaste for Mike, you really can’t blame that on him. The worst he could have reasonably expected was one more day with Blaine in a life filled with such. Mike couldn’t have predicted the actual triggering event.
If what he’s saying here is true, you can actually blame him, because he’s saying he knew it would be harmful to Amber to SOME extent. He couldn’t have predicted the exact results, but unless “if I WAS doing get a solid, I’d have ordered you to get as far away from her as possible” was hindsight, then he knew nothing good would come of it
So what? Technically the chain of causality does lead all the way from “Blaine being forced to drive Amber for the field trip” to “Amber and Ethan get caught up in Sal’s robbery and Blaine goads Amber into stabbing her”, “those dual traumas eventually bring Amazi-Girl into existence” and finally to “Amazi-Girl helping to save Becky from her dad”,
Sure it’s a nice silver lining, but it’s one that AMBER created. It’s not relevant to Mike’s actions. The only consequence Mike could’ve foreseen was Blaine being in some way awful to Amber.
It’s not about culpability it’s about causality. Mike’s actions directly resulted in Amber being in that situation regardless of whether or not we assign blame that’s just how cause and effect work. My point is refuting the idea that Mike’s behaviour benefits Ethan or Amber when in fact ensuring Amber spent more time with her abuser shockingly did not work out in her favour.
But that would have been true even if Mike’s motives had been pure and he hadn’t known anything about Blaine being abusive. If it hadn’t been for the sheer coincidence of the robbery, the positives of the band trip might have outweighed a bit more verbal abuse from Blaine.
And with any complex event, you can point at so many things that “directly resulted” in that situation. Blaine could have not been an abuser. Sal could have robbed a different store or just hesitated a few more minutes. Blaine could have filled up on gas earlier. Amber could not have bothered with the Twinkie. Traffic could have been a little heavier or lighter.
But none of them are being portrayed as some kind of Dark Knight figure to Ethan and Amber by OP. My point is that Ethan and Amber would not be “so screwed” if Mike wasn’t an asshole because it hasn’t actually benefited them and in fact has harmed them intentionally or not.
And if Mike is lying here and wasn’t acting maliciously, if the ‘get as far away’ is hindsight, Mike still would have had a role in this and would likely have felt terribly about it. Like, I was predicting something to that effect last week. Because the moment he pressured Blaine into driving, he unwittingly set things in motion.
Now, to be clear, blame for the incident going as badly as it did goes, in order for me, Blaine followed by Sal and all of her contributing factors with the Guiding Hand of Willis, Damned Be His Name, all around it… but Mike had a role. And if Mike is telling the truth here, he knowingly put an abuse victim in a confined space with her abuser who resented being there, knowing it would go badly, hoping it would go badly. And if that is in fact true? Then Mike deserves blame for how it turned out equivalent to his malicious intent. The robbery and subsequent stabbing and dissociative break weren’t foreseeable circumstances, but he foresaw it being bad and apparently isn’t upset it went down this way.
If we gonna go about causality alone, it is Amber’s mom fault that she was born. And her grandparents’ fault too. And so on. I do not understand your point. It should mean something?
My point is that Mike’s bad action had bad consequences and trying to rationalize the dynamic so that his bad behaviour is somehow beneficial to Ethan and Amber does them a disservice because it is so very clearly not.
Amber was a person too fearful to stick up for herself even in the face of blatant injustice or outright abuse from Blaine. And when pushed too far! her anger and rage are unmanageable. Thanks to Mike’s interference she became strong, able to protect those who needed protecting, able to channel her rage and aggression in a useful manner. Should she thank Mike for this? No. Mike is an asshole. A glorious asshole as we see in this strip where young Mike forces Blaine to back down just by being Mike.
Amber’s current situation is bad and unhealthy and should not be romanticized. It’s damaged her relationships with the people she cares about and regularly endangers her and those around her. Campus vandals don’t deserve to be assaulted by an unstable vigilante.
So, if we’re to credit Mike for any of that, we have to think he not only was able to predict the robbery and the effects on her, but also identify the anger and rage that he’s seen no signs of.
Or he could have been trying to help her out (as we first thought) only to have it fail miserably or trying to mess with both her and Blaine as he says here.
Beyond that, Amber would likely be in much better shape now without Mike’s interference (or more accurately without the trauma of the robbery and her/Blaine’s reaction to it). 5 years without Blaine constantly there would have helped a great deal.
not that I give a lot of credit to Blaine, but it stretches the imagination that a child could outfox a mob stooge who is also an abuser and a good manipulator.
If kids and teens couldn’t learn how to outsmart adults or freak them out EVER, a hell of a lot more would not make it to adulthood while dealing with smarter and crueler abusers than Blaine. You’re underestimating kids and teens if you think they can’t *ever* outsmart an adult.
I mean, there’s a lot of examples, but: assuming Faz is in fact his biological son? Even FAZ knows or at least suspects it, given the repeated ‘STEP-father’ exchanges. That’s the equivalent of attempting subtlety and pointing a spotlight at whatever you want to hide, covering it in rhinestones, setting it to loud music and writing ‘SECRET HERE!’ in the sky directly overhead.
This is one of those rare times when what I assumed was pseudo-Biblical language turns out to be actual Biblical language (Romans 13:10).
Which is all the more interesting given that until now, neither Mike nor Blaine has ever been shown to have any knowledge of Biblical texts.
Not related to the above, but Romans 3:12 is the Official Biblical Verse of Garbage Roof. (“All have turned away; they have together become worthless.”)
I’ve posted before on how Willis’s characters sometimes say things that sound like biblical quotes but are in fact original dialogue that just sounds biblical. (E.g., Joyce and her sweater: “I choose to wear the tattered flesh of my vanquished enemies.”)
Tonight’s actual biblical quote was interesting on two counts: one, that Mike came up with it, and two, that Blaine apparently recognized it. Neither of those two have previously displayed any indication of religious training in any direction.
It doesn’t surprise me that Mike at least would have studied the Bible — not for religion, per se, but because of all the graphic details about punishment and retribution.
But it’s hard to imagine that Blaine would know any more about the Bible than what was forced on him as a child and/or necessary to him for survival/getting ahead in the mob.
I don’t really see any indication that Blaine recognized it as a bible quote? I mean, he might have, but he seems to be mostly responding to the tone and everything else mike is saying.
Mike has the same absurdly childish world view of like a billion other angry teenage boys. He’s not the fucking Joker, he’s an angsty 13 year old from a perfectly pleasant upper middle class background.
Honestly, Blaine’s reaction being anything other than some variation on “Careful you don’t cut yourself on that edge kid” is kind of ridiculous.
Really, Mike is the only character I hate this intensely who isn’t basically universally reviled (Toedad, Blaine, Ryan).
Like, yeah I’m kind of super unforgiving and uncompromising of fictional characters doing bad things but it’s mostly escapism from the fact that I’m basically the opposite with people in reality and it usually bites me in the ass.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I’ve generally been pretty forgiving of Baby Mike, but at the same time I’m wondering what’s up. I’m not so willing to write it off as ‘Mike’s an asshole so nobody will know he cares so people can’t hurt them (and by extension hurt him)’ because I’d think, in that scenario, the thing to do would be to cut them off and not interact with them, not continue interacting with them but being the most hurtful jackass he can manage at the moment.
I can see it either way by this point. Either Mike’s bluffing because he’s being threatened by a probable mob stooge (in which case I expect we’ll see another flashback), and maybe the act started as just a ‘ensure Blaine has nothing to work with’ and eventually became real*… Or Mike may legitimately have been playing us all the entire flashback sequence, in which case holy SHIT. Either way this kid had better be a theater major because that acting is ridiculous. (And if this strip’s the real one and Mike ends up horribly but nonlethally injured in some mishap with stage equipment and has to be permanently written out, that stage equipment’s sacrifice will be honored.)
* There is really no way to read current Mike and not conclude that some of it is real. You don’t fabricate elaborate fake web pages to make your roommate believe a show is ending so you can record him crying – not even ‘the internet at large’, just This One Dude – without actually being a legitimate asshole. And if you were intimidated into assholery by an abusive mob stooge, you don’t tell one of the last people who remembers what you were like and still tolerates you that she’s going to turn out like him. And holy shit that takes on new meaning now that there’s no way Mike DIDN’T know he was in the mob.
Incidentally, IU’s website sucks so I have no idea if they do competitive admission to certain majors. Seriously how do people spend so much money on making these college websites pretty and then make them completely unnavigable by phone?
Because it’s the basic tool you use for the website that provides responsiveness or not, not the content.
If you have a lot of coding involved in your website, moving it to a responsive base is really expensive. In bad cases, you need to invest on the scale of person years.
I’m beginning to think that he does similarly appearing things (assholeish) to different people for different reasons. Let’s face it: Walky is not the best of roommates. He’s sloppy, has bad hygiene, watches TV shows without using headphones, and farts loudly because he thinks it’s funny. Mike has plenty of motivation to mess with him because Walky pisses him off.
This does not preclude that he can also do assholeish things with the intent of producing a beneficial result. I’m beginning to see that interacting with Blaine has left Mike with one tool left for safely interacting with others. Or at least with the conviction that it’s the only tool that’s safe to use. And when all you have is a hammer…
This is the only response that keeps Blaine from devoting all of his considerable villainy to actively harming Ethan and Amber and Mike’s parents. Look how miserable Blaine is, thinking he can’t have revenge.
And. Mike is stuck.
Or is he. Are his friends and family safe from Blaine now? Can he let some love show? Will he turn into one of those annoying cutsie lovers with pet names and an obsessive need to constantly be with his boyfriend?
The difference between Mike and Heath Ledger’s Joker is the Joker enjoyed what he was doing.
And Blaine is like the mobsters who cannot comprehend not being motivated by gain. Whatever advantages Blaine might have over Mike, he’s not equipped to deal with chaos.
Funnily enough (see what I did there?), the reason I didn’t like Heath Ledger’s Joker was that he didn’t seem to enjoy himself enough. At the very least, he should have found his jokes funny. For that matter, he should have appeared to be making jokes.
This is why Mark Hamill’s Joker is the best Joker.
Joker without jokes is like The Riddler without riddles. What would be left? Some guy in a question mark suit. We already have one of those, but at least he teaches you how to get free money from the government.
I’m kind of convinced at this point that Mike’s *extreme* cynicism is at least 50% defense mechanism – here he’s being threatened by someone stronger and older than him, and what does he do? Pretty much complete personality shift into douchebag Mike mode.
I mean, I could be wrong, but if the lesson is that Mike really has always been like he is, there was no point in having the flashbacks to begin with.
Defense mechanisms generally result from needing to defend oneself. Mike’s parents are really nice. If this were a defense mechanism, it’s a well-used one which Mike has no reason to have needed before now
And if the lesson is that Mike has simply always been an amoral, cynical asshole, the point of the flashbacks was the fakeout. A reminder that sometimes people are awful and sometimes that’s all there is to it.
Seriously, teenage misanthropy is a defense mechanism far less often than it’s just teenagers aping maturity by way of heavily exaggerated cynicism. Like, I was an absurd cynic when I was 16 and it wasn’t the result of some trauma it was just me being a dumb kid.
What evidence is there that it’s “well-used” at this point, though? The notion that the logic outlined here is his his actual point-of-view at this time is completely unprecedented in the context of the flashbacks – like, why did he bother confronting the teacher earlier?
What cruelty could he inflict on anyone but himself in confronting her? It’s not as though he had any power over her, or any ability to effect any sort of great distress from the teacher, and it’s not as though HIM confronting her was going to have backlash for Amber, not to mention at that point he hardly would have had much motivation to harass her, having only barely gotten to know her.
Either there’s some other reason for Mike acting like this apparently prematurely, that interaction with the teacher seriously snapped something in him, or this plotline isn’t as well-written as it could be. “Sometimes people are awful and that’s all” is a lesson one could learn from a kids’ show, because “just being bad” with no motivation is a characteristic exhibited only by an undeveloped character.
Unless Mike’s got *severe* psychological issues – and he might, considering being manipulative and unconcerned with the emotional distress of others is kind of an attribute of some psychological disorders – it makes no sense for him to be such a cynical douche out of *nowhere* in a plot-line in which he was otherwise more even-tempered, never mind that we’ve gotten a few other flashes of humanity from Mike throughout.
I just don’t understand the point in making an entire subplot about and named after a specific character, teasing actual character development, and then taking it away just for a “gotcha!” moment in this strip, especially given some of the other stuff we’ve seen from Mike in this plotline. I mean, I guess if that’s all it is, that’s all it is, but did we need *more* proof of Mike not being nice?
The evidence is 1) he’s really good at it, implying he’s had lots of practice, and 2) that it’s a defense mechanism
The term “defense mechanism” usually refers to some behavior or skill that a person came to have because they needed it. Often something that can be hard to stop doing, because you depended on it to stay safe for so long. Like Carla being a jerk or Becky being wacky. They both have trouble turning it off sometimes, even when they WANT to. Without some reason to have NEEDED this behavior to survive, there’s no excuse for it.
What he got out of confronting the teacher could simply have been that. He enjoys confrontation, especially when he can use something he knows about a person to catch them off guard.
Physiological issues are far from the only reason to be a shitty person. Plenty of guys I knew were far shittier as teenagers than they had any reason to be. Most grew out of it on their own as they realized their edgy cynicism was bullshit.
But if you read the comments enough, you’ll see that apparently yes, we did in fact need more proof. There may never be enough proof to convince some people Mike is not some mystical for good, helping people with “tough love” and “hard truths”
… Okay, if Mike’s serious here (and that is genuinely an option, given it’s FUCKING MIKE,) then the field trip thing succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Also, holy fuck that is a new level of irredeemability if so. Like, if Mike’s perceptive enough to realize the receipts thing, he has more evidence before he entered that house for the birthday that Amber was being verbally and emotionally abused by Blaine. Which means:
– Mike knew damn well what a bad idea Blaine driving Amber was, and that he would likely take out his frustrations on Amber.
– When Mike told Amber she was destined to become her father, a significant part of this situation was INCITED BY HIM.
– Depending on how much Amazi-Girl knowledge has been shared/Mike has intuited, Mike could well be AWARE of this fact.
– Further, any friendship with either Ethan or Amber is fucked if this really was his intent and they somehow find out (and with Blaine back in the picture, that is ACTUALLY POSSIBLE.) And casts an even more negative light on Mike/Ethan – the ulterior motive is bad, but ‘I helped cause your best friend’s dissociative disorder because I like fucking with people’ is unspeakably evil.
The arc’s not over JUST yet, and that means there’s a chance we get the rug pulled out from under us again, but unless said rug-pulling occurs in this storyline? Nope, I’m done, Mike has literally always been straight-up evil. I was willing to give a 13-year-old benefit of the doubt, but the signs have been here all along and I’m taking the Edgelord at his word.
Yeah, part of me wants to believe that this was a mask he put on around this time that became his face, especially as masks and their effect/response to identity is such a heavy theme in the comic.
Plus that happens to a lot of edgelords. They put on the mask to seem mature or to avoid vulnerability they see as making them less masculine or able to be hurt and then all the “ironic” bullshit starts becoming more and more real.
It’s something I try to blunt in my students when I see it, because it’s just a bad path in general.
But yeah, you’re absolutely right that that might be giving him too much credit. And if it is, if he’s telling the truth here, yeah, he becomes the worst character who isn’t an adult in the entire comic.
I have hope that that’s not entirely the story here, because redemption and repudiation of the past are such large themes, but that might be very very misplaced.
After the initial comment I can see the mask scenario being as likely (because you know, lying to the threatening possible mob stooge, fair,) but I am going to need it pretty near unambiguously shown before I actually believe it. Like, not with another person – as this storyline has made clear, Mike’s facades are so good, and have been for SO LONG, we have no idea which if any are genuine. It has to be him alone, and it has to be him expressing genuine, clear remorse. (Actively forcing himself into a more asshole role could work, but Mike’s so good at acting I don’t think he would, and again with another person around we can’t trust it.)
Realistically what I think we’ll get is some flashback with just enough ambiguity we’ll still be arguing about it years from now unless/until something happens like Amber and Ethan have enough of his shit and he realizes what he’s become. But really, he’s gonna need an entire damn musical soliloquy before I believe that. (Like, ‘What Have I Done’ from Les Mis levels, minimum.)
Oooof. Nothing insightful to add I just. Love this. 13 year old mike scared a grown abusive mob stooge. Hell yes. Idk if he’s bluffing or a true psychopath or what I’m just here for the ride and I am LOVING it
And a 13 year old kid thinks he’s an asshole because everyone around him is and why should he be the exception. At some point over the years, this conviction becomes self-fulfilling…
I know a lot of people think Mike’s alignment got more unreadable than ever, but this is people, not D&D. He’s never been more strikingly human to me. Congratulations Willis, for this kind of writing.
It’s funny. You’ve become more convinced than ever he’s human, but he’s reconfirmed for me that he’s really more a force of nature or a weapon in humanoid form than a human being.
I often wonder to myself, what do characters in print media sound like to their creators? What is Mike’s voice? Is he high-pitched, low? Deep voiced or shrill? We may never know.
You know those morality quiz’s that have the question of pushing a fat man in front of a moving train car to save three other people? Another option is where you could pull a lever to make the train car hit one unaware person, or pull a lever to make the fat man drop in front of train car. Mike is the guy that shouts at the top of lungs that he is pulling the lever to drop the fat man in front of the train car to stop it.
I think mike’s just both
He’s a complete asshole & kinda not a complete asshole
humans are complex creatures. I do believe some of what he does is just for the evuls, some is to help his friends realize something about themselves, and some of what he does is to hurt them badly. It’s always..well not always but mostly been like this. My opinion on mike is the same as before. This is interesting though!
I feel like Amber goes beyond self-depreciation as a coping mechanism but that’s true.
I’m not really opting on whether Mike is a good person or a bad person, but I do think he thinks of himself as bad. Maybe he thinks of people as varying degrees of bad as well. I think that does differentiate him from the clear villains of the comic. Toedad thought that he was absolutely being a good person, that he was doing the work of god. Blaine blames his behavior on others, like Amber. He has to be cruel to her because she’s so hopeless in his own mind. I don’t think that these guys would be able to phrase their behavior as bad, to them, it’s right. So that Mike is able to point out his own actions as bad is interesting, and leads me to think that he does think of himself as a bad person. Whatever his intentions might be, a lot of his actions are pretty fucked up. He seems to be entirely aware of that. No idea what he considers his motivations to be though.
I no longer know if Mike is like some 90s antihero that appears as ruthless but is secretly kind, or some Joker agent of chaos that has no empathy. I don’t know anymore. What have you done, Willis?!
And that is part of his personality. Anyone could become the Joker if they had a really bad day (that is why the multiple choice thing), but they should be weak willed to be broken. Gordon and Batman had many horrible days and are still going.
Considering at that age I also had to become a Mike to escape a Blaine (not that it worked, but it’s a work in progress), I can see this Mike acting the shit outta this to scare off the larger abuser. Unfortunately, it starts off a web of fucktitude that only gets worse the longer you let the charade go on. It’s like putting on spiky armor, and then the spikes start growing inward. Leave it on long enough, and it gets exponentially harder to pry off. (0/10, would not recommend except in emergencies.)
‘None are righteous’ is also a very familiar belief system — especially if, say, one’s parents are willfully, cheerfully ignorant of abusive situations thanks to being eternally forgiving and optimistic of everything regardless of real life consequences. Like the dog sitting in the burning house saying ‘this is fine’, except the dog is your mom and your world is on fire. In that sort of situation, it’s dangerously easy to fall into a worldview of ‘nothing is fine and everyone is stupid for believing it’.
The above may or may not apply to Mike, mind! I just think it’s an option for what’s been going on. Either way, whether Mike gets redemption or comeuppance (likely a bit of both?), I’m really digging this so far.
I think it makes sense that, before Mike moved to Amber and Ethan’s school, he already knew he was queer. If he was out and getting bullied at his old school, I don’t trust his parents to offer good guidance on that.
(I don’t know that any adult has ever offered good guidance about getting bullied, though.)
“If they’re going to hit you, hit them before they hit you, and hit them hard. They might not try, then.”
Which I interpreted as “if someone is trying to demean you for the first time, just ignore it, people are wierd and sometimes do that without following up. If they try to put you down a second time, hit them hard before they know you will and before they have a chance to escelate further.”
Helped a ton. I still have issues from my youth, abuse will do that to you, but it was genuinely helpful advice. Didn’t stop everyone, but a decent chunk did.
Oh man, I wish that had worked for me. I was a scrawny wimp, so I couldn’t actually hit anyone hard enough to dissuade them. All it did was get me in trouble, and make the teachers less likely to take my side when I went to them.
Because being lifted up and slammed into a wall by a grown man when you’re 13 means you have no reason whatsoever to try to bluff your way out if you can.
On it’s own? No.
Considering it fits with everything else we’ve seen from Mike, it’s yet another piece of confirmation. If current Mike had ever been shown to be helping people before and only doing his Mike things to abusers or to protect people, then I’d be a lot more willing to buy it.
Young Mike? Maybe. Or maybe not. I’m not completely sold that he was already just a dick. But today moves me closer.
On a slightly more serious note, I’ve got an idea on how Mike works, possibly.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/guard/
We know that Mike’s parents are kind, loving, and well-meaning. We also know that his mom is pretty bad about personal space and not making strangers uncomfortable, if the way she treated Sara is any indication. It’s not much to go on, yet I think it’s enough to assume that Mike’s parents are well-meaning but a bit careless, and don’t see how their actions can go awry as long as they have a positive attitude. And that’s fine most of the time, but for a young, queer adolescent that sorta parenting fails to prepare you at all for the world you’re gonna face.
At a time when Mike would be beginning to yearn for independence, they would have continued to invade his personal space. He wouldn’t be prepared to deal with bullying (which as a queer kid basically guaranteed) and when he goes to his parents for help they likely wouldn’t have helpful advice. (“They bully you because they’re lonely/bullied themselves/jealous, be nice and don’t show them you’re bothered! As long as you’re happy they can’t bully you!” and similar common advice.) Mike would have internalized that nice=/=good and that his parents and authority figures couldn’t be depended on, so he’d have to take things into his own hands.
I think it’s worth noting that Mike was pretty cynical when he moved to the same school as Ethan and Amber, and at 8th grade that means this was basically at the end of his adolescence and the beginning of his teen years. He already knew he liked guys, he already didn’t trust authority figures, and he already tried to solve his problems in the most cynical way possible.
It’s a common perspective for kids that age to take, and probably would have been temporary if A.) Mike wasn’t so good at being an asshole & B.) Mike wasn’t so goddamn dramatic and grandiose with it.
The problem with being cynical and pessimistic as your method of problem-solving is that it doesn’t usually work for more kids. Usually they base their attitudes off of fictional characterizations and undeveloped worldviews, so being an asshole doesn’t deliver and they keep finding themselves being wrong. Thus, kids usually grow out of it. But with Mike, he has the people skills and creativity to successfully scheme, and his worldview is grounded enough that he doesn’t find himself making grand assumptions about others that are wildly off the mark. It keeps working, and so he doesn’t learn the lesson that his bullshit is a bullshit way to do things.
Usually the next way people outgrow being an asshole in middle school/high school is that they harm their friendships and relationships. With Mike he’s got two friends who are bad enough at friend-making that they can’t afford to cut him off, so he managed to get through high school without losing them.
Now that Mike is in college, I think he’s going to have to grow up. His friends can make friends now, so they’re gonna be less tolerant of his bullshit. And he’s not done much to endear himself to new people, so if his friends cut him off, or seriously threaten to, he’s not going to have any friends at all. He’s actually just going through standard teen/adolescent development, but on a bit of a delay. He’s dramatic and creative and good at being an asshole, but being an asshole isn’t tenable and all the consequences that come with a worldview built entirely around cynicism are gonna come crashing down on him pretty soon, if they haven’t been eating away at him for a while now.
tldr; Mike went through a justified cynical asshole phase, but kept it up longer than it should have because he’s good at it and his friends didn’t kick him out of the squad in high school. But that’s temporary and it’s going to have consequences soon. The only thing about Mike that’s actually unusual is that he’s good at being an asshole and he’s overly dramatic and theatrical about the whole thing. He’s not actually irredeemably awful as he tries to look, he’s just a regular asshole.
Thanks! I actually forgot to add a part, which is that the dramatic, grandiose nature of Mike’s assholery is basically a defense mechanism. If you portray a fictionalized version of yourself, people trying to get revenge on you won’t hit the mark. (As seen in today’s strip.)
Mike’s built a character for himself, and because of his people skills and dramatic flair, he’s managed to deliver on a characterization that’s far enough away from his genuine feelings that he’s able to adequately protect himself from retaliation.
The problem with this, of course, is that it gets in the way of forming genuine relationships. And we can see that with how he’s reluctant to open up to Ethan about whatever’s eating him up, and how he insists on only having hook-ups and saying that no feelings will develop on his side at all. He’s aware that forming relationships isn’t his forte, but he’s so reflexively defensive that he just pre-emptively avoids trying.
You know if there was going to be an encounter in this comic between Mike and one of the many different antagonist that ended with Mike either breaking their mind and/or will I would have preferred Mary. Though I think we need more of consistent thing where Mikes tormentshe a protagonist then goes back to tormenting another antagonist just to keep things balanced.
This is, as far as I can recall, the first time Mike’s interacted with another antagonist. And it pretty clearly didn’t end with Mike breaking Blaine, since this is a flashback and he’s still around to mess with Amber.
A person’s opinion of a character may say a lot about them without meaning they’re the same as the person if they criticize them.
In fact, I’m not sure how you get that at all. I’d assume it was the people who excuse Mike who’re likely to be more like him and those criticizing him the other way. If there’s validity to it being that direct.
Wow, you expressed my opinion way better than me, yeah.
Like, honestly, the WAY people demonstrate arriving at their opinion is MORE demonstrative than whatever the final opinion is. It’s like the list of conversation starters Chuck Klosterman rattles off in “Sex Drugs & Cocoa Puffs”- the ANSWERS don’t matter, it’s how people get themselves TO their answer that matter.
@Clif: a person expressing a good opinion of someone also tells you something about them, likely more than what they are saying about the other person.
Also, expressing a bad opinion of a bad person tells you that they recognise evil when they see it. Exactly what they find most offensive does show you something about them. Whether this amounts to more than what you learn about the person being criticised depends on how closely you are paying attention.
Uh, that the final judgement and ways people explain how they got there, especially regarding the character Mike, is very illustrative of a person’s general temperment and also their thought processes.
I gotta be honest, this whole “your opinions on fictional characters totally mean you’re this kind of person” stuff is super dubious. Especially since it can be misinterpreted and blown out of proportion on the internet very easily. And very often is. I’m wary of these kinds of statements.
We’ve gone from “I, Mike, emulate Holden Caulfield so well as to be indistinguishable” to “I, Mike, was not born but rather conjured forth in a blasphemous ritual from a first-edition copy of Catcher in the Rye”, I see.
He feels he is living in a crapsack world inhabited by either overt monsters or monsters who hide it behind masks of hypocrisy (sometimes self-delusion too). He regards it as his life’s mission to tear off all of those masks and force everyone to realise that they’re all wicked by provoking them to behave appropriately.
I think that the point is that, in Ethan, Mike has finally found one person that he wants to believe is at least somewhat good and that he cares about enough to save.
TL;DR — I don’t think Mike’s just an asshole, and may actually give a shit about people and the world.
———-
You know, it’s times like this I find myself wondering again about Mike’s psychology.
He’s not a complete and total sociopath. And he’s not just some blank canvas whitewashed in asshole. No one is that. There’s character to him, deeper than just the abrasiveness — It’s just a matter of understanding what context establishes that character.
My gut tells me that, right now, Mike is bluffing. That isn’t a key to his parents’ house; That’s just a random key. And if Blaine were to take him up on it — Which Mike knows he won’t — then I’d bet my bottom dollar that there would be something very unpleasant that would happen to Blaine upon trying to break in. It wouldn’t be the police; That’s too much closure for Blaine, and it wouldn’t serve to further things.
My gut tells me.. That.. Honestly, Mike’s probably one of the most caring people in the entire series. Like, right up there with Joyce and Ethan. His brand of caring isn’t the one which is normally espoused by society, though — His is the swift kick in the junk that makes you question your life, and why you do what you do, say what you say, and think what you think. He assaults illusions that people build around themselves with the ferocity of a junkyard dog, and makes eye contact with you while he does it.
If the concept he attacks is true, and solid, and built on a solid foundation of truth to oneself? Then honestly, he’ll probably leave you alone.
If that concept is smoke and mirrors that you show the world, he’ll make sure everyone knows it.
If it’s smoke and mirrors to YOURSELF, he’ll make damn sure YOU know it is.
I don’t think he’s completely altruistic, as such.. He isn’t doing this to “make the world a better place.” I see him doing this because he is brilliant at cold reading and has a phenomenal psychological insight into others, and can’t stand people lying to themselves — Likely because he, himself, can’t lie to himself. He probably knows, objectively, that his method is fire and destruction.. But it’s just who he -is.-
For most people, it likely doesn’t bother him all that much. He doesn’t have a particular connection to them.
For those that he sees something he likes and/or respects, and sees as being genuine to themselves.. I could see that it might bother him, some. Hard -maybe- on that one.
It might also be that he doesn’t feel remorse at all; That perhaps he views everyone else as being too willing to allow the world to be garbage, for the sake of peoples’ illusions of self and belief.
Or, y’know, he could be a total asshole and there’s nothing more to it.
That’d be super unsatisfying, though, and I wouldn’t believe it for a moment. No one is a villain in their own narrative, and there is ALWAYS a justification that is internally consistent — And Mike is too brilliant, psychologically, to NOT have a pretty damn robust and solid justification.
You know, you might not like Mike, and that’s fair, he’s an asshole. But you kind of have to respect him. Man’s got balls that drag the ground when he walks
Yes, I’m totally going to take everything a thirteen year old boy being physically threatened by an unhinged mob enforcer says at face value. Can’t imagine any reason why he wouldn’t open up here.
Can we all just agree that Mike isn’t a good and pure cinnamon roll but rather is an ass who does bad things but is also a human being with his own hang-ups and damages, and not a total black hole of evil who only exists to twirl his evil mustache evilly and do all the evil he can?
I could agree with that, but I’d actually like to see some evidence for it that doesn’t involve spinning the asshole things he does as somehow good intentioned.
(Current Mike that is. Jury’s still out on Young Mike as far as I’m concerned.)
I think that Mike’s a perceptive, cynical asshole who most of the time just does it because he can. I emphatically disagree with “Mike the asshole sage who cares for his friends and wants them to grow, but does it in the most brutal way” take on his character, in part because he’s shown to have done and said harmful things that can’t be seen as an attempt to help no matter how you look at it to even the people he considers friends.
Also, with how perceptive he is, there’s no way that Mike cannot see how his methods are harmful to his victims. Mike chooses to act the way he is. He isn’t “helping” his friends in the most harmful way just because that’s who he is. He decides to tell them in the most brutal, harmful way possible because he wants to, and there’s no way to reconcile that with the idea of him caring about his friends.
There’s an argument that could be made that he’s a cynic that wants to stop people from lying to themselves. But his choice of victims is oddly selective and strange. He does it to Ethan and Amber, his two closest friends, but also to Joyce, Dorothy and Walky, people who’re basically strangers to him, and who don’t even know him that well. If he’s interested in pointing out the lies people tell themselves, why restrict himself to these few? He’s been around Billie fairly often (due to overlapping friend groups),appearing with her far more often than he does with Amber (though with the caveat that its mostly group scenes) why not tell her about the lies she tells herself? And, alternatively, if he’s only interested in pointing out the lies of his friends, then why target Joyce and Walky and Dorothy?
So the interpretation of Mike as a cynical asshole who does things just because he can makes the most sense to me, because it fits in with his often contradictory actions, his seemingly random choice of victims, and his behaviour in general. I agree with Usayasha’s analysis on how he might’ve become this way, and I think that Mike really isn’t that complex as some people think.
I don’t understand the obsession with Mike being like extremely psychologically complex. Lots of teenage guys are embittered jerks without any particularly complicated reason behind it. Why can’t he just be a relatively perceptive guy who never grew out of that all too common teenage phase of intense misanthropy?
I agree completely, hence why I said I think Usayasha’s analysis of his character is spot on. I think its cause there really often aren’t characters who are assholes for assholery’s sake, and even the most evil and despicable villains tend to have backstories that make the audience more understanding of their actions, so maybe we’re just used to the other shoe dropping when in this case it probably won’t.
Yeah, characters like that aren’t exactly compelling but then DoA Mike has never been compelling so it wouldn’t actually change anything for the big reveal of why he is the way he is to be “because sometimes people are just immature assholes and there isn’t really much of a deeper reason for it.”
I’m okay with getting some backstory to explain why he is the way he is – assuming the backstory works for me of course.
I’m okay with getting some character growth to move him away from just being the asshole.
I’m not interested in a great revelation that explains why he never really was an asshole at all.
This is probably part of why I have zero patience for Mike: I only read Shortpacked! and I didn’t even finish that so I don’t have much in the way of preexisting Mike baggage.
I mean, he IS pretty much Walkyverse Mike. The issue is that this isn’t the Walkyverse, where everything is zany and there are drama tags. Transposing characters from a universe where everything works on different rules to one that is analogous to the real world means that we see characters differently, because they ARE in different circumstances.
For instance, Robin, for me, went from “meh, whatever” in the Wakyverse to outright “go away and stay gone” in the DoAverse. I maintain that, even competing with the likes of Blaine, Robin is the most damaging character in DoA whereas in SP! she just took up time from characters I enjoyed. Blaine (and a bunch of others) still come ahead on Evil scale, though.
Mike’s gone 10 years without being interesting and it hasn’t done the comic’s overall entertainment value any harm I see no reason he should be terribly important now.
Joe kind of did the same and now he’s on a growth arc. Problem is, so far I don’t see any such for Mike. We’re getting background, but I’m not sure yet where it’s leading us and what kind of change in current Mike we’re being prepared for, if any.
Joe at least had the “divorced parents” thing going on and also not being completely irredeemably awful in basically any interaction he had with anyone.
Not as deliberately bad, but creepy to all the women and obnoxious to his best friend.
But yeah, not as bad and there were hints at change for quite awhile before the big arc.
Yeah, I think this is it. Plus a sort of weird satisfaction seeing the fallout of his manipulations and internally being pleased the he is the one who made these things happen. It’s a feeling of power, knowing you’re making ripples in a pond, that you have the power to change people’s lives and they can’t stop you. Sure, there can be unforeseen fallout. Things could spread to unexpected people, and some people might get hurt.
It all works swimmingly as long as he avoids any attachments. That way whatever storm his actions cause can’t hurt anybody he gives a shit about.
Which is why I think it could be very interesting if he started giving a shit about Ethan. It’s a feeling he wouldn’t really know what to do with. And what does he do if Ethan inadvertently gets caught up in the fallout from one of his asshole-manipulations? What does he do if Ethan finds out how cruel he is?
Or maybe I’m overthinking it… he’s a sociopathic manipulator. I know how that works in a relationship. He just manipulates Ethan. A few layers of psychological abuse and he won’t know why he can’t live without Mike or why he’s given up all his other friends.
He targets Walky because he’s his roommate and Dorothy because she was dating Walky. I think that’s about as far as it goes.
Targets of opportunity. They’re right there where he can easily pick up weaknesses.
I don’t actually think he’s messed with Joyce that much.
That’s the point I’m getting at. The “cynical dude revealing the lies everyone tells themselves” take doesn’t work if you consider how his victims are mostly random
I think the fact that Mike does not smile at all in the present says a lot about how his interactions with Blaine affected him.
I don’t think Mike is a good person, and a lot of times he straight up does shit cuz he’s bored and thinks it’s funny, but I also think he doesn’t see literally every human being as a pawn piece on his chessboard or some Lex Luthor shit like that. He PROBABLY would get diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder if he’d ever talked to a therapist in his life.
The “None are righteous” bit does sound like something Mike would believe, but I don’t think that he realized how bad his extortion scheme would be for Amber. I think his panel 3 commentary may actually have been his hindsight after the convenience store hold up. But this is a benefit of playing the asshole – when things go wrong, you can still pretend that it was all a part of your jerkerrific plan.
The thing I find interesting about (my interpretation of Mike, based both on this and on the It’s Walky ‘verse) is that he’s pretty much the polar opposite of Joyce. She makes a lot of decisions based on optimism and on (as Dorothy said) choosing love. She’s not perfect at it, it’s not 100% (she’s only human and a pretty young one at that), but that’s her basic MO. Mike chooses cynicism.
He operates from a place of believing everyone is terrible and what differentiates him is that he doesn’t pretend. He looks at his most uncomfortable and beaten down when he tries. Every panel of him smiling in this flashback is the image of a kid who is suffering but trying anyway, and in this moment, when the smile and the mask slips off (probably for good), he seems to come into himself, to become comfortable with himself. He’s in a shitty situation being menaced by an adult twice his size who’s threatening to burn down everything he’s ever loved, and he still looks 1000% more comfortable than he did when he introduced himself to the class. Everything is awful, the gloves are off, and that’s his wheelhouse. No more masks, no more people pretending at being better than they are. (You can, of course, make arguments for whether Mike is pretending to be worse than he is or to take it him at face value.)
I know a lot of people hated this storyline and are ready to see it go, but I’ve actually really enjoyed it, in a “everything is on fire and I’ve made myself sad” sort of way. It’s been (and I’m going to guess will be), start to finish, a tragedy. Mike does try to put on a friendly people mask. He tries to make friends and he fails at it being the ideal and then lashes out at the people around him for failing to live up to the hopeful expectations he puts on them. He probably concludes the ideal is a lie, instead of something to strive for–and I’m guessing he was nearly there from unknown past events anyway. He was hit by a teacher while white-knighting for Amber, and when she wasn’t there when he left, he seemed disappointed, but not surprised.
It’s not just tragic for everyone around him–though it definitely is, because his presence is usually a net negative for those around him, whatever good he may or may not incidentally manage along the way–but also on a personal level, for him. This destructive outlook, if it crosses universes, would explain why in the It’s Walky ‘verse his “best” and most committed romantic relationships are with two women who blackmailed him into dating them, why he smiled and could say easily and with honesty “I love you” when Amber hit him, because masks were off, she wasn’t “hiding” how terrible a person she was anymore, and if everyone is awful, the best people are the ones who are upfront about it. (Also, that was hands down the most painful and upsetting time he could say it, which was probably a bonus for him.) In this ‘verse, it means his only friendships are unhealthy and with people who have pretty much said (in a completely understandable sentiment) that the only reason they’re friends with Mike is inertia and being bad at making friends. He doesn’t open up and he takes notes for future ammunition when those around him do.
The worst part is that I don’t see any of this changing. It seems he’s pretty settled into this worldview. If someone does something terrible, it’s them showing their true colors. If someone consistently acts in a kind, friendly, and optimistic manner, it’s just that their social mask is that good. Mike’s superior for not having the mask at all.
It’s just–sad. It’s really sad. And it’s great writing that I can feel strongly for a character even while being repulsed by their actions and their entire ethos.
Of course, this could just be me reading way too much into an absolute cypher of a character or even just a moment of “it’s not that deep, he’s just an asshole.” Still, I’ve very much enjoyed this storyline and everything that I’ve gotten out of it. Great writing as always, Willis.
I like that interpretation. The only big trouble with it is that it seems to just push the “why” back down a level – Mike was mostly like this already, the interaction with Blaine (and to a lesser extent Amber and the teacher) just locked it down.
We still don’t know why he defaults to see everything cynically. Why does he see everyone as terrible?
I do also see that middle part about his only relationships in the Walkyverse as a pretty good argument against him actually having fallen for Ethan here. He needs someone who can stand up to him and mess with him back, not someone like Ethan that he can so easily twist around his finger.
Mike as someone who could be a good guy but chooses not to be was always my favorite interpretation of the character.
I still wonder if he actually likes Ethan, though I doubt that would be much of a catalyst for him to start choosing otherwise. …On the other hand, it kinda-sorta did for Amber in Shortpacked, so who knows.
I would also point out that Joyce has a nasty habit of forcing things to go to her expectations, despite other people’s boundaries and protestations, whereas with Mike you generally have to say his name three times. The only exception I can IMMEDIATELY recall being making Walky cry, which has always read to me as just the general sort of dumb shit younger guys do to each other.
Joyce has been shown to be TRYING to grow out of it, which makes her a more likable character (although honestly I kinda still despise her). Maybe we’re going to see Mike trying to grow, too. Who knows?
With Mike you have to exist in his presence.
He takes notes on people’s weaknesses for later use.
As for making Walky cry – he has around 7 recordings. That’s not the general sort of dumb shit. And he’s been messing with Walky since day one. Often just dumb shit, but he’s been constant about it.
Again, you can say that’s not YOUR experience but it is very much MY experience that this is just how young men torture each other.
He takes notes on people’s weaknesses, but as I pointed out with the exception of Walkie his roommate, you generally have to take the bait for Mike to mess with you.
If either of my roommates in college had done that to me I’d be requesting a transfer the next day. Nobody should have to put up with being (in your own words) tortured in their own living environment. Like this isn’t razzing between friends because Mike and Walky are not friends. This is Mike being awful to someone he barely knows who is forced to be in proximity to him.
Who’s actually “taken the bait”, beyond not just kicking him out immediately?
I guess that would describe Ethan’s role in his current scheme. Anyone else?
When did Dorothy? Or Amber? Anyone else he’s messed with?
Joyce hiring him to chaperone their date, and persisting after he made it objectively obvious he was just there for an excuse to punch people.
Ethan continuing to lean on Mike to learn how to get physical with a person, despite repeatedly being told that it was purely physical, wouldn’t go anywhere, and was a bad idea.
Sorry, tired at work so those are the two most prominent Mike situations that I can think of other than the Walky one. I KNOW I am forgetting something, if anyone feels like reminding me.
And as for Walky – I can see some “dumb shit younger guy” recording their roommate crying and using it to make fun of them. Once, if it happened spontaneously. It’s still being a dick. And an immature one at that. Better suited to summer camp than college. Frankly a lot of Mike’s more casual
Crafting elaborate schemes to get them to cry so you can record it and save it for later use – apparently seven times? That’s just beyond the pale. That’s not normal.
Never said he was normal. Already pointed out Walky as an exception. I assume it’s just a matter of constant proximity. As I mentioned in reply above, Walky has the same option anyone else has to get on a room transfer list and I am pretty sure if he HAD, or even CONSIDERED it, we’d know. Anyone can infer what they want from that, but what I infer is that he finds Mike tolerable.
Walkyverse Amber was mostly verbally and emotionally abused as well, until her dad caught her in bed with a high school boyfriend. Blaine was out of the house by high school and hasn’t spoken to her for three years when he shows up at Family Weekend. So he probably didn’t see her much during high school.
Amber probably wasn’t physically abused in this universe (see BBCC’s comment below). Stacey certainly was – ‘that man cheated on my mom and hit her’ and it likely wasn’t just the once based off their interactions and cross-universe bleed (‘I was lucky. He only hit me once. I suspect my mom wasn’t’ or something to that effect, from the always-soothing funeral arc in Shortpacked.) Based on that behavior… I really don’t want to know the answer with regards to Faz and Yuri.
But basically I’m certain Blaine was abusive, probably physically, well before this point. Fuck Blaine.
Thankfully, it seems Stacey left the first time Blaine hit her in this universe. Blaine said in the Freshman Family weekend arc ‘touch her once and she quits’.
Good Mike with good intentions masquerading as a horrible person, or bad Mike showing through for the first time… who knows.
What this has confirmed, though, is Blaine’s true patheticness as a person. Abusive, toxic, and has caused and will still cause actual harm? Yeah… but not because he’s actually formidable in any way whatsoever.
Who does he terrorize and torment? His wife and daughter, who he has traumatized and effectively brainwashed into being fearful, submissive, and perpetually afraid. He pursued and slept with a girl who was somewhere in the realm of 14-16 when he got her pregnant, showing that his ‘romantic’ pursuits are geared towards anyone he THINKS is beneath him in intelligence and worldly experience (even though it seems she’s just as much of a manipulative psycho as he is, and has turned the tables on him in the realm of who’s ‘dominant’ in that marriage), but in general we can conclude that Blaine never tries to start anything with anyone he doesn’t think he can send into a panic, make run away, or cower in fear… which so far has only been horribly abused women and children.
Hence why he went after Mike here and is thinking his physical efforts to terrorize him will turn the boy into a simpering, begging, screaming mess as revenge for being “found out” about his underaged mistress… which perfectly explains how drastically his expression goes from prideful, violent arrogance to being surprised, and fearful. If only for that split second before it turns into dejection with him backing off when Mike shows no fear, no weakness, and that his efforts to feel powerful are utterly ineffective.
Blaine did the equivalent of trying to terrorize a baby rattlesnake. It might be tiny and weak looking, but could easily kill you and at least 50 alternate universe variations of you with minimal effort.
Blaine’s a shit that loves to break people down for fun and profit. But Mike’s better than him at it, because he doesn’t even care about the profit or fun. It’s not about setting the world on fire to see it burn, it’s about giving people matches and gasoline and not even caring enough to watch the pretty, pretty flames.
My take on Mike is pretty much in line with Usayasha and adjudicus, that being Mike is just a cynical guy who never grew out of his teenage asshole phase because he never had to.
He looked stressed when he first arrived at Ethan and Amber’s school, and immediately started analyzing the people around him. To me, that seems more like a defense mechanism than some sadistic need to hurt everyone around him. Maybe he’d dealt with bullying at his last school, either due to his sexuality or attempting to follow in his parents’ brand of happy happy joy joy to the derision of the other kids.
He might have already been attracted to Ethan when he chose to sit next to him. Or they could have struck him as safe kids who wouldn’t judge him before he realized Ethan’s crush. Maybe he stuck up for Amber to the teacher to impress Ethan, or maybe he wasn’t fully into his “the world is cruel and so am I” persona yet. Either way, he seemed genuinely shocked by the teacher’s misogyny, and his attempted good deed led to him being assaulted. He then declined to go to Amber’s party because he unfairly blamed her for what happened to him.
But then Blaine showed up being the worst of the worst, leading Mike to feel some pity for Amber and deciding to attend her party. He was probably still angry about the teacher, though, and that combined with the party being his personal idea of hell led to him lashing out to screw over Blaine and Amber in one go when the field trip came up.
That failed spectacularly and hurt Ethan too. Then it brought us to now, with Blaine physically assaulting and threatening Mike. His attempts at getting close to Amber and Ethan at this point have only led to suffering for everyone, in Mike’s mind. So fine. He doesn’t care. He’s never cared. He doesn’t care about anyone at all, and he never will. Sorry, Blaine.
The truth is, Mike isn’t some unfeeling automaton. He’s not Dr. House, who can get away with being a jerk all the time because he’s a life-saving super genius on TV with the best intentions at heart. He’s not Moriarty moving the pieces on a chessboard. He’s just a smart, intuitive jerk who never grew out of his “the world sucks and it’s every man for himself” phase because Amber and Ethan were never in any position to cut ties with him due to his behavior.
And he clearly cares for Ethan. He’s going to get a swift kick in the ass sooner or later, and either have to start atoning and acting like a decent person, or get used to being alone.
I’m on team “Mike is somewhere in between the extremes of asshole and good person, and leaning more toward asshole than good” but… no offense, but the people who are taking this page at face value probably haven’t had much experience with abusers or, if they have, aren’t thinking about it from that context.
When dealing with somebody like Blaine, you have to do what Mike’s doing here. Because they WILL rip anything they think you care about out of your hands. Sometimes pretending not to care is the best option for that. (My brother took that approach during our childhood basically from the start and turned out way better-adjusted than I did, only having picked it up when it was basically too late to be convincing to our abuser.)
I’m not saying this is true for Mike all the time, every time, because there’s some stuff that I can’t really find any good excuse for, and I refuse to try. As I said… the guy’s kind of an asshole. But here, in this scene of this flashback? Yeah, I think I get what he’s doing and why, and if I’m right, I’m completely sympathetic toward that.
I’d absolutely be heavily inclined to see this as a bluff if it being totally sincere weren’t completely in line with basically every action he’s taken in this comic since this moment. Like, Mike has never given me any reason to think this isn’t a completely accurate description of his worldview.
Mike calling out the teacher on her misogyny doesn’t seem like a “none are righteous” moment for him. He genuinely tried to help his friend, even if he was being cynical about it. I don’t think he’s incapable of doing good, and not everything he does has an evil ulterior motive. I think he just defaults to “irredeemable cartoon of a person” as his go-to persona for all occasions.
That’s probably why he’s never seen expressing genuine emotions about anything – a trait that differentiates him from most flagrant assholes. When you’re living a character to hide your vulnerabilities, everything you say is an act and everything you do is rationalized as being part of your character, even if you’re doing it for yourself.
I mean, his sexuality is described as, “attracted to anything as long as it makes someone, somewhere, angry.” That’s not how sexuality works, that’s how an edgy teen describes their sexuality. He told himself that he’s seducing Ethan to make Danny a blubbery mess, but he’s clearly got some baggage with Ethan that he wants to work through. (I’m pretty sure that comment about Ethan’s mom being what kept them apart was just Mike’s baggage about her getting out, seeing as we know it actually happened.)
Mike’s got an evil villain persona cause it lets him do what he wants without being genuine, which is why I think he’s a garden variety asshole underneath his cartoon character of a front.
I’m loving this arc. Not because I particularly like Mike (or dislike- I’m pretty indifferent towards him), but because the comment section of every single strip he’s in WILL, without fail, turn into arguing. It’s fantastic
Blaine has no fucking idea what to do with someone like Mike. He doesn’t leave any emotional attachments out in the open for Blaine to target and he’s not afraid of Blaine’s physical strength or aggression.
…What happened with Mike that he learned how to do this so early on in life?
I once worked at a facility that had a few “Mikes” in it. They were very scary and had parents who ranged from scary themselves, to the friendliest people you’ll ever meet who wanted only the best for their child. Some people just are born as sociopaths — manipulative, unfeeling, utterly fearless even in a situation that should have terrified them like being restrained and placed into a padded timeout room for attacking another child. Our goal with these kids wasn’t to “cure” them. You can’t cure that kind of sociopathy. Our goal was to teach them how to “pass” as normal people. Much as Mike appears to do much of the time. And then at age 18 state funding stopped and we kicked them out on the streets. Which explains a few things about our country (America), hmm?
I mean, ‘come get your reward’ was already too cheesy to be real from Mike, now there’s no way that he didn’t just somehow mess up Ethan’s life in present day. Unless he learned to like Amber’s mom in the interim, he did seem weirdly polite to her.
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so Present-Mike is upset b/c after HOT SEXENGS he’s thinking about Blaine, whoops
gotta admire his commitment to spite tho
Could be worse. Could be during.
*during* could make him last longer, tho? Or make him harder, idk how it works
Spite boner
HOT.
DICKINGS.
🙂
FROM A CUP
HORSE BUTTHOLES
I USED TO WONDER WHAT FRIENDSHIP COULD BE
COWBOY HAwait no this has gone into a dark and terrible place o:
SCORCHED EARTH
… Seriously, Mike, givin’ me whiplash! It still counts if it’s across a five-year time gap!
Whiplash? Step three of Mike’s masterplan to create Amazigirl is now complete.
this is
the story of a mike
who flipped me off and called me a
uh
well it wasn’t very nice
Bike? Psych? Trike?
He called you statesmanlike? That doesn’t seem too bad.
Have you SEEN our statesmen here in the US? At this point that’s about as dire an insult as you can get.
Hate to break it to ya, but we have exceptionally few statesmen here in the US. We, meanwhile, unfortunately have a plethora of pandering demagogues, dogmatic obstructionists and naive idealists.
And unfortunately, Category 1 will beat Category 3 down mercilessly until they become Category 2, because titles and whose team you’re on matter more than ideas. It’s just easier for the Third Estate to understand that way.
Well, in many cases there’s not actually a lot of difference between the “naive idealist” and the “dogmatic obstructionist” other than power and opportunity. If you’re an idealist and you’re not in a position to push your ideals through, all you can do is obstruct things that don’t live up to them.
Wow…
It’s depressing because it’s true.
.
In an attempt to bring some humour to
references to politicians etc, here is a
vintage Bloom County.
https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/2010/09/02
I first read “demagogues” as “demagorgons” which still made a lot of sense.
Demagorgon/Beholder 2018.
Better the evil you know than the evil you don’t.
The big difference is that people don’t get upset when a demagorgon is killed by some well-meaning idealist (or even demented conspiracy theorist).
Which is okay, because that particular cure is much worse than the disease for the demagogues.
Nice one.
A statesman is a dead politician. We desperately need more statesmen in this country. – quote attributed to Groucho Marx
Because I tend to be a pedagogue, I am giving a correction.
Which is a silly thing to do for quotes, because it sometimes seems that every famous quote is either wrong or misattributed.
.
According to the internet (and when is it ever wrong?), a statesman (yes, he is a dead politician) by the name of Arlen Specter said it.
But I can’t find a source. Sigh. Even if he was the first person to use those exact words, he is not the first with the core idea.
.
However, Truman (the President, not the fictional character played by Jim Carrey) said the following, as recorded in the April 12, 1958 edition of The New York World Telegram & Sun:
“I’m proud that I’m a politician. A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead ten or fifteen years.”
.
However, Thomas Brackett Reed, a Congressman from Maine who served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1889 to 1891 and again from 1895 to 1899 wrote in a letter:
“A statesman is a successful politician who is dead.”
So it seems that in every case, a ‘future statesman’ created the thought, not Groucho.
Because Groucho couldn’t have said everything… 8)
This is the story of a Mike
Who was an asshole and stole Willis’s bike
And while he looked so mad to spite a dad
I kinda liked him better when he smiles
This is the story of why Mike doesn’t smile.
This was kinda badass
PSA: do not play poker with mike.
Genuinely unsure if this is a bluff or not, just as I was genuinely unsure if he was being genuine with Ethan.
Same here… hoping it’s a bluff
This is the Mike experience.
We all tend to find a time we think he’s being literal, and sift it from the jokes, stunts, and ploys.
Like, the current one is people who think he is doing all of this to make Danny sad, for… reasons, I guess, but given that’s the sort of thing he says as a maybe-joke sometimes, it’s kinda hard to parse. I certainly don’t expect him to carry out all of the shit he says he’ll do.
Well, Mike in SP! doesn’t like his parents. If that carried over, I see the key as “Well, I can’t stop you, but I can keep you pointed at a target that will benefit me”.
To be honest, I feel foolish for thinking I ever knew anything about Mike to begin with.
I’m going to guess that we’ll never know. This arc isn’t about revealing Mike’s hidden depths as an anti-hero, or revealing why he’s a villain. It’s backstory that will preserve the status quo of Mike as an unrepentant asshole.
Does he do it to make people grow in his own direct way, because he’s learned that’s the safest/most effective way? Does he just like sowing chaos and people are weakest where they most need to grow? That’s for Willis to know(?) and for us to obsess over.
Why not all of the above?
Mike is Chaotic Evil. Confirmed. 😉
Nope. Chaotic Neutral (or more accurately, Cynical or Fatalistic), Masquerading as Neutral Evil.
He casts shitty situations to others as if he was the master manipulator creating them, when in fact he’s just being existentialist, swimming with the currents in the sewer of life.
Analyzing Mike’s alignment is futile. Mike is whatever you don’t want him to be.
Given that he’s quoting from the New Testament to justify his antipathy, I’d say he looks Lawful Evil, if he has to be framed in those terms.
I’m not sure quoting the bible makes you inherently lawful any more than it makes you inherently good. I’m sure Mike doesn’t consider Blaine any kind of lawful authority over his parents, in a secular or spiritual sense.
It looks like maybe also a pinch of protecting himself from being hurt by trying not to care about anyone else (or at least convincing HIMSELF of that)
Remember. Literally a few pages ago Mike confronted a teacher due to the bad grade given to Amber, I don’t know how he can spin that to mean he doesn’t care, but it’ll be a stretch. Pretty sure this is 100% a bluff. Even if Mike does or doesn’t believes it himself.
For now, I’m reading it as a bluff here, but over the years it hardened into his actual personality. Although at least now we see that there’s a good Mike buried in there that could someday be redeemed.
AFTER his shittiness costs him Ethan, of course. If stories have taught me anything, it’s that suffering is literally the only path to redemption.
Yeah, it feels like that.
Which would also be a warning about playing the asshole lest it become your entire persona. And it’s understandable thanks to Blaine why he would see it as attractive. If you don’t care, you can’t get hurt. If you hate the friends you love the most and treat them like garbage, then someone abusive can’t use your love for them and vulnerability against you.
But it makes you into the type of person who doesn’t deserve those friends.
And it makes me wonder if he can dig himself out of this bad path. I suspect he’s going to have to lose Ethan and Amber for it to happen, though.
“We are what we pretend to be.” — Vonnegut
110% agreed, this is totally my read on the character.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/redemption/
I can’t tell if Mike’s more of a sociopath than Blaine, or just trying to convince Blaine that he is.
Fairly certain that Rachel wasn’t intended to be Truth in that strip, or at least not the entire truth. She’s speaking to Ruth, who I certainly don’t think is irredeemable. I think it’s probably closer to the truth to say redemption doesn’t erase the bad things you’ve done, and you still have to live with them and their consequences.
Or, of course closer to the truth to say you’re going to have to face it you’re addicted to love. Maybe typing it all out will get it out of my head.
I was already to scream ‘Damn you Ellis’ when you raise the possibility that it was a bluff.
.
As someone else posted, I’m getting emotional whiplash reading this arc.
I hope some knowledge of what Mike was, or is, or why is revealed by the end. I’m not asking for a lot, just a little nugget that I can trust is real.
.
Yeah. After re-reading the last sentence, good luck to me on that….
um
holy shit
Haha nice
…huh
this sure is a mike roller coaster
Cue the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the obligatory joke about Ethan being ‘tall enough to ride’.
mike’s dicksmasher
I have to wonder how much of that was Mike bluffing and how much of it was him actually believing that. Does Mike hate his parents? Hell he might have offered the key hoping Blaine would do something, though that doesn’t seem his style. Every one of these flashback segments raises more questions even as it answers old ones. I guess my next question is, what are Mike’s parents like?
Assuming they’re like they were in Shortpacked!, they’re super friendly, super enthusiastic, and super TMI.
And honestly? I’m pretty sure Mike is just a huge dickhead to everyone. I don’t think there’s anything deeper to it. Maybe he’s being that dickhead to teach people something, but honestly I doubt it.
They were at Freshman Family Weekend too. Seem about the same as ever.
Possible, but what would be the point in exploring that from Willis’ point of view? He said early on that Mike was difficult to fit into DoA as much as he did in Shortpacked because he was something of a cartoon character.
Like, I don’t really get what the payoff would be if it’s just “yeah, he’s bad to the core.” That’d be one wet fart of a climax.
My theory is that he thinks of life as like playing a video game, and he’s doing an evil playthrough
That’s actually a really good way to put it.
I think that even if he’s not bluffing, he might know Blaine’s not going to do take him up on it, if that is really a key for his house.
We’ve seen Mike’s mom, who seems to be super nice to the point of freaking people out. Sara pulls out a baseball bat to keep her away.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/guard/
“MA’AM, I HAVE A BAT” I love it lmao
Mike is an enigma.
And sometimes also an enema.
And also sometimes an enemy!
Wait, he is Batman’s enemy?
Strictly speaking, we don’t know what the key was for.
Possibly Blaine’s mom’s house.
…for a nickel
well.
huh.
I wonder how truthful he’s being. like, this could be his way of protecting amber by being really convincingly not-caring about her? but maybe I just want to believe that?
also I wonder if even *blaine* is disturbed by this. seems like it.
..is that “none are righteous” thing a quote from somewhere?
Idk, at this point I’m going with “when someone tells you who they are, believe them”
I want to be more forgiving of child-mike, since he’s still a child… I guess time will tell.
Mike is trying to keep an abusive patriarch from retaliating and potentially destroying his life. Did you expect him to try to appeal to Blaine’s better nature?
That’s one explanation. What’s the explanation for the times he’s done it to everyone other than Amber or Ethan?
I mean, sure, those times he was just being a piece of shit. He doesn’t need some grand overarching moral reason to be shitty to everyone, but that doesn’t mean he’s incapable of any sort of decency.
Yeah… When Mike first showed up at Amber’s birthday, my first thought was that he must’ve been hoping to catch some family drama, and Mike 100% meaning what he’s saying here would neatly explain how young Mike became adult Mike: by continuing to be an amoral asshole
So what did he think he would get from comfronting the teacher?
Confirmation of his analysis.
The guilt made her feel bad, messed up her day and eventually created a mass murderer.
Romans 3:10 I believe
I just noticed that. It’s a… weird turn of phrase. Sounds vaguely Bible-ish to me. Didn’t think Mike went into that stuff.
Romans 3:10, “As it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one”
Apparently, the Bible is so quotable that it even quotes itself.
The Bible was meta before being meta was cool.
thanks!
Quoting (or paraphrasing since the texts were fluid then) Psalms. Maybe Psalm 14:1, Psalm 53:1 or Psalm 143:2.
It’s Romans 3:10.
It’s most prominently from Romans chapter 3. I had to look it up to double check, since it’s been ages. I suspect it may be something he knows for similar reasons to Jules’s Pulp Fiction line.
The reason….to sound badass?
Demons run when a good man goes to war.
Everybody runs when Mike Warner goes to war.
Hehe, I love it. Man, I miss Eleven.
I want to be clear that that wasn’t a shot at the current Doctor, I stopped watching out of inertia (and lack of Netflix) sometime during Capaldi’s run. I just miss Matt Smith’s portrayal of the Doctor.
Eleven is kinda the scariest Doctor, to me. It’s like, one minute, he’s playing with a policeman’s hat, and the next, he’s screaming genocide threats at a sentient cloud. You can’t get a bead on the guy, even if you’re also him.
Are any of the “nice Mike” mob starting to feel like Charlie Brown lining up to kick a football?
I mean, if you think Mike’s going to open up to Blaine of all people, and this is like, the true Mike all along, then sure, maybe he’s been on Mary’s tier of shittitude this whole time, but I’m finding that mighty dubious.
Blaine literally said he’d target who Mike cares about. Mike disavows any notion of caring about Amber. Maybe he doesn’t give a shit about her at all, but if he was going to bluff, this seems like one hell of a time to do so.
Mike’s never at Mary’s level because Mike does not fool himself. Mary is self-deluded.
Acknowledging you’re terrible and then doing nothing to change it is arguably worse than not thinking you’re terrible in the first place.
Morally worse, but a hell of a lot less annoying, for what that’s worth with fictional characters. (Still not much.)
Yeah, it’s also completely unconnected to how much harm a person does and their intentions.
On top of that, it’s not even true. Both Mike and Mary are fully aware that their actions are harmful, and do them anyway. The only real difference is in how they rationalize doing that.
Mary justifies doing harm with her religious beliefs. To her, the people she hurts are going to Hell anyway, so it doesn’t matter.
Mike is justifying doing harm by saying nothing matters. It’s basically the same thing. He’s just not exempting himself from his belief that everyone is bad.
I don’t really see any moral value to that difference. The intentional harm is what matters to me.
Yes.
Me, last night: So is this gonna turn out to be a jerk-has-a-secret-heart-of-gold storyline? That seems…incongruous but what can you do
Me, now: Ah yes, much better
Only if you take him at face value.
What Mike is saying would actually explain Mike’s behavior both past and present, so yeah. We probably should believe him
He’s mike warner
You can’t trust him
He’s a bad guy
Even when he’s nice
Just because you’ve seen him
Show an ounce of vulnerability
Do you think that means
He has some secret heart of gold?
Cont’d
[Amber]
Sure there was that one scene
Where he said something honest
And by scene I mean he made a scene
Well I for one ain’t sold!
He’s mike warner
Not easily reformed by
Some quirky guy he met at school
Just because now he
Become a series regular
And by season regular I mean
He eats bran in the spring
Doesn’t mean the comic is now called
‘blonde and pompous edglord’
And by comic I mean his favorite comic
Which i dont think that he has?
Screw the mike warner
Well, ethan did that and that’s how I know
That he hasn’t changed a bit
He’s an evil sociopath who’s
Tricked you into liking him
Why else do you think that
I’m singing this reprise?
And by this reprise it means
Whatever just don’t think about it!
Boo the Mike warner!
[Amber and the others]
Hub bub hub bub!
Hub bub hub bub!
Hub bub hub bub!
Hub bub hub bub!
[Danny]
Hey, what’s a reprise?
[Amber]
Danny shut up!
you’re doing the lord’s work (though I like mike more than nathaniel of cxg)
Bravo.
Props to Mike for being a badass here. Sucks that Blaine fucked over his ability to smile though. I liked it when he could too. Hopefully his potential new-found relationship with Ethan will fix that though. Ethan deserves someone who will always look out for him and I know Mike will.
*blinks*
You…you read the same comic I did, right?
No.
Huh. Blaine. Speechless. With a glorious “…WTF?!” face in panel 3. In such a way that if he wasn’t such a horrible, horrible person I might actually feel for him.
Well done, Mike.
None are respectable characters.
Not even one.
I think at this point im gonna take the “don’t think about it too hard” approach…
Though i believe there somewhere in mike there is a solid middle between monster he portrays and someone with an actual agenda.
You’re looking for trouble? You’re in the right place
Looking for trouble?–Just look in my face!
I was born standing up–and talking back
(…) I’m Evil, my middle name is Misery
I’m Evil, don’t you mess around with me–ELVIS, who has NOT left the building
Also covered by the late great Warren Zevon (used here as an intro to ‘Lawyers Guns and Money’)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1BxGded604
Confused by all the commenters who seem like they’re praising Mike for this when he’s basically admitting that what he did wasn’t praiseworthy.
If he’s telling the truth. “If” in this case being about 12 stories tall, given who he’s saying it to.
Then again, sure, he could be *that* busted. Amber’s not suuuuper far off, a lot of the time, but I’m not really convinced.
Probably because he is escalating past what Blaine would find acceptable to make Blaine back off and because it is hard to parse here how much of this is Mike bluffing and putting on an uncaring persona and how much of this he honestly believes is true. We can’t say if Mike honestly thought of ordering Blaine away from Amber before… or if he is saying that now in hindsight but selling it as foresight to screw with Blaine. Mike is hard to read when he clearly WANTS you to believe that he is a monster.
This does make me curious as to how much of this he does truly believe – if he is vindictive enough, it might be true as revenge for when Amber left while he confronted the teacher because kids can be vicious about that kind of stuff.
Well, clearly he’s lying because it doesn’t support what they want to believe about him.
To be fair, Mike has all reason to lie. Appealing to Blaine’s better nature won’t help, and keeping perfectly calm would probably make Blaine angrier. Though it does seem that at least SOME of what he’s saying is what he believes. And plus, this is Baby!Mike, who at this point isn’t an asshole yet.
Well that relies on the assumption that he’s lying here because otherwise he is in fact a colossal asshole.
Baby!Mike’s actions are a lot more ambiguous and seem more positive compared to present day Mike, and I don’t believe that he was always the asshole he is in present day, so I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here and assume he’s more or less bluffing and doesn’t completely believe what he’s saying right here.
As opposed to the people who believe what he says without question because it supports what they want to believe?
We need like buttons, and this is why.
Or because his subsequent actions completely support what he’s saying being true. Like, present Mike absolutely behaves like the shitty nihilist edgelord he’s claiming to be here.
Holy shit….and to top that off he almost made Blaine cry good God.
I think I’m firmly settled on “Fuck this arc.”
I wanna get back to Walky and Amber and Joyce and Jacob.
Damn you, fleshed-out universe with your awful conflicts. This kinda shit is why I watched Dragon Ball growing up: If you weren’t a Saiyan or one of their friends you could be safely ignored. Mike and Blaine can’t be ignored.
Not asking this to be a dick or anything, but how’d you make it through the Becky/Ross arc? Because that one got probably even worse, like counting the stuff Joyce’s family pulled.
Well, Becky, Joyce, and Dina are my favorite characters (I can never read It’s Walky), and the general feel of the arc was so much more intense that it drew me in better.
I hate Mike. Whatever pretenses he hides behind, whatever infintesimal kernels of truth he does occasionally hit, he’s still a shrieking shitstain who is clearly too invested in hurting people to ever be a positive presence.
I recently spent a year living with someone who stylized themself like Mike: Smarter than and superior to everyone in the room by default, and woe be upon you if you dare cross any of their millions of invisible and unstated lines in the sand. No amount of “positive intent” will ever EVER justify the walking talking abortion of common decency that they have created in themselves.
And yeah, Blaine has long been proven to be one of the absolute fucking worst, but frankly I could deal with Amber or Ruth kicking the shit out of Blaine, physically or legally/verbally/emotionally.
I am, however, over all these fucking assholes who think their bullshit is a gift to their peers when the only good they could actually do is fuck off into a hole and die.
Sorry, emotional abuse of this particular variety fucking triggers me.
Internet gesture of support, and I can totally get that. If Mike’s the one who hits closest to home, that really sucks. And since he’s set up to continue as a supporting character, that precludes Jail And Hospital Forever (bye Toedad and Ryan!) or even status as an in-strip bogeyman like Blaine who’s used super sparingly. Which just makes him more unpleasant, particularly since commenters have tried to justify him even before the flashbacks. (And it looks like ‘he has literally always been This Awful, for the sake of being This Awful’ is still a possibility.)
So again, *Internet gestures of support*
No matter where the narrative goes with Mike, no matter who likes him, you should never be obligated to like or even accept him. He’s done plenty of things that are worth burning bridges with him and nobody can take that away from you or anyone else, no matter how they may try.
Um, if it helps, I was on Team “Mike is somehow good” for a while, but thanks to other commenters I’ve completely changed my mind about him! I’m frequently an insufferable optimist and/or pretty naive, but yeah Mike’s done too many shitty things for me to believe he’s good for anyone like he is now.
So, uh, Internet Hug? *Stretches arms around monitor* Just… just give me a minute to work out the mechanics of this one.
Also, I’ve had to work with a person a lot like you’ve described (“I’m always right”, “you’re trash for disagreeing w/me”, etc), and holy shit is it unbearable having to deal with an endless stream of people singing his praises because of their surface-level niceness. I hope you’ve gotten away from having to live with that shitty person!
*appropriate gesture of support*
Yeah, that really sucks. I have hope that the narrative is going to address Mike’s actions and the harm they’ve caused in a real way, whether it be redemptive or alienated. Especially as we’ve just seen the narrative do that with Ruth and Joe’s shitty behavior. But I agree it’s still awkward in the here and now.
Knowing a Mike in real life is exhausting, frustrating, and awful and I’m sorry you had to deal with that too.
Ross wasn’t the POV character of that arc, he was just the obstacle Becky needed to surmount.
With a bit of hairspray or gel, Mike could have a saiyan haircut.
“And that, boys and girls, was the last day Mike ever smiled.”
On that day Mike died, but MIKE was born.
Mike was always Mike.
Well played, Mike.
If Mike is that much of an asshole, I’d be pissed.
But if Mike wasn’t? Amber and Ethan would be so screwed.
Not doing this put’s them in danger, for certain. His cruelty gave the three of them breathing room they needed.
I still don’t know how I feel about this.
This could be countering the theory I put out on the last comments. But, it plays into it, too. So I’m still not sure.
If Mike wasn’t this much of an asshole Amber wouldn’t have been horrifically traumatized to the point where her identity has literally fractured.
Nah, that’s on Blaine being a horrible excuse for a human being and terrible robbery timing.
Nah, that’s on Blaine. For all my distaste for Mike, you really can’t blame that on him. The worst he could have reasonably expected was one more day with Blaine in a life filled with such. Mike couldn’t have predicted the actual triggering event.
Agreed.
If what he’s saying here is true, you can actually blame him, because he’s saying he knew it would be harmful to Amber to SOME extent. He couldn’t have predicted the exact results, but unless “if I WAS doing get a solid, I’d have ordered you to get as far away from her as possible” was hindsight, then he knew nothing good would come of it
Something good did come out of it. Amber created something amazing out of it.
So what? Technically the chain of causality does lead all the way from “Blaine being forced to drive Amber for the field trip” to “Amber and Ethan get caught up in Sal’s robbery and Blaine goads Amber into stabbing her”, “those dual traumas eventually bring Amazi-Girl into existence” and finally to “Amazi-Girl helping to save Becky from her dad”,
Sure it’s a nice silver lining, but it’s one that AMBER created. It’s not relevant to Mike’s actions. The only consequence Mike could’ve foreseen was Blaine being in some way awful to Amber.
It’s not about culpability it’s about causality. Mike’s actions directly resulted in Amber being in that situation regardless of whether or not we assign blame that’s just how cause and effect work. My point is refuting the idea that Mike’s behaviour benefits Ethan or Amber when in fact ensuring Amber spent more time with her abuser shockingly did not work out in her favour.
But that would have been true even if Mike’s motives had been pure and he hadn’t known anything about Blaine being abusive. If it hadn’t been for the sheer coincidence of the robbery, the positives of the band trip might have outweighed a bit more verbal abuse from Blaine.
And with any complex event, you can point at so many things that “directly resulted” in that situation. Blaine could have not been an abuser. Sal could have robbed a different store or just hesitated a few more minutes. Blaine could have filled up on gas earlier. Amber could not have bothered with the Twinkie. Traffic could have been a little heavier or lighter.
But none of them are being portrayed as some kind of Dark Knight figure to Ethan and Amber by OP. My point is that Ethan and Amber would not be “so screwed” if Mike wasn’t an asshole because it hasn’t actually benefited them and in fact has harmed them intentionally or not.
And if Mike is lying here and wasn’t acting maliciously, if the ‘get as far away’ is hindsight, Mike still would have had a role in this and would likely have felt terribly about it. Like, I was predicting something to that effect last week. Because the moment he pressured Blaine into driving, he unwittingly set things in motion.
Now, to be clear, blame for the incident going as badly as it did goes, in order for me, Blaine followed by Sal and all of her contributing factors with the Guiding Hand of Willis, Damned Be His Name, all around it… but Mike had a role. And if Mike is telling the truth here, he knowingly put an abuse victim in a confined space with her abuser who resented being there, knowing it would go badly, hoping it would go badly. And if that is in fact true? Then Mike deserves blame for how it turned out equivalent to his malicious intent. The robbery and subsequent stabbing and dissociative break weren’t foreseeable circumstances, but he foresaw it being bad and apparently isn’t upset it went down this way.
If we gonna go about causality alone, it is Amber’s mom fault that she was born. And her grandparents’ fault too. And so on. I do not understand your point. It should mean something?
My point is that Mike’s bad action had bad consequences and trying to rationalize the dynamic so that his bad behaviour is somehow beneficial to Ethan and Amber does them a disservice because it is so very clearly not.
Amber was a person too fearful to stick up for herself even in the face of blatant injustice or outright abuse from Blaine. And when pushed too far! her anger and rage are unmanageable. Thanks to Mike’s interference she became strong, able to protect those who needed protecting, able to channel her rage and aggression in a useful manner. Should she thank Mike for this? No. Mike is an asshole. A glorious asshole as we see in this strip where young Mike forces Blaine to back down just by being Mike.
Amber’s current situation is bad and unhealthy and should not be romanticized. It’s damaged her relationships with the people she cares about and regularly endangers her and those around her. Campus vandals don’t deserve to be assaulted by an unstable vigilante.
So, if we’re to credit Mike for any of that, we have to think he not only was able to predict the robbery and the effects on her, but also identify the anger and rage that he’s seen no signs of.
Or he could have been trying to help her out (as we first thought) only to have it fail miserably or trying to mess with both her and Blaine as he says here.
Beyond that, Amber would likely be in much better shape now without Mike’s interference (or more accurately without the trauma of the robbery and her/Blaine’s reaction to it). 5 years without Blaine constantly there would have helped a great deal.
“Amber’s current situation is bad and unhealthy and should not be romanticized.”
this.
any strength she has is in *spite* of blaine and mike, not because of them.
to quote Brandon Sanderson, “All [he] did was identify the spear that would not break”
not that I give a lot of credit to Blaine, but it stretches the imagination that a child could outfox a mob stooge who is also an abuser and a good manipulator.
Might I remind you that the last time someone believed him, it was Old Danny?
If kids and teens couldn’t learn how to outsmart adults or freak them out EVER, a hell of a lot more would not make it to adulthood while dealing with smarter and crueler abusers than Blaine. You’re underestimating kids and teens if you think they can’t *ever* outsmart an adult.
And as pointed out, Blaine is not subtle.
I mean, there’s a lot of examples, but: assuming Faz is in fact his biological son? Even FAZ knows or at least suspects it, given the repeated ‘STEP-father’ exchanges. That’s the equivalent of attempting subtlety and pointing a spotlight at whatever you want to hide, covering it in rhinestones, setting it to loud music and writing ‘SECRET HERE!’ in the sky directly overhead.
This is one of those rare times when what I assumed was pseudo-Biblical language turns out to be actual Biblical language (Romans 13:10).
Which is all the more interesting given that until now, neither Mike nor Blaine has ever been shown to have any knowledge of Biblical texts.
Not related to the above, but Romans 3:12 is the Official Biblical Verse of Garbage Roof. (“All have turned away; they have together become worthless.”)
Romans 3:12. Talk about Biblical error!
Romans 3:10, that is. I should go to sleep now.
Wow- we both posted it’s a bible quote at the same time.
I’ve posted before on how Willis’s characters sometimes say things that sound like biblical quotes but are in fact original dialogue that just sounds biblical. (E.g., Joyce and her sweater: “I choose to wear the tattered flesh of my vanquished enemies.”)
Tonight’s actual biblical quote was interesting on two counts: one, that Mike came up with it, and two, that Blaine apparently recognized it. Neither of those two have previously displayed any indication of religious training in any direction.
It doesn’t surprise me that Mike at least would have studied the Bible — not for religion, per se, but because of all the graphic details about punishment and retribution.
But it’s hard to imagine that Blaine would know any more about the Bible than what was forced on him as a child and/or necessary to him for survival/getting ahead in the mob.
I don’t really see any indication that Blaine recognized it as a bible quote? I mean, he might have, but he seems to be mostly responding to the tone and everything else mike is saying.
You wrote: “…that just sounds biblical. (E.g., Joyce and her sweater: “I choose to wear the tattered flesh of my vanquished enemies.”)”
Uh, that sounds like something out of Conan the Barbarian. At least that’s how i took it
I guess that the Bible — say, Judges ch. 13–16 for instance — was among Robert E. Howard’s influences in writing Conan.
You tend to remember the forced bits that strike a chord.
Mike Warner quoting the Bible. … that just crashed my brain. …
…….. I think I liked how Mike became Mike in the other universes better.
Holy shit I didn’t even notice he had the key in his hand in the 4 panel how did I miss that!?
Wow. Holy shit.
Mike is so messed up, he scared the abusive criminal with ties to organized crime with just his world view.
This.
Mike has the same absurdly childish world view of like a billion other angry teenage boys. He’s not the fucking Joker, he’s an angsty 13 year old from a perfectly pleasant upper middle class background.
Honestly, Blaine’s reaction being anything other than some variation on “Careful you don’t cut yourself on that edge kid” is kind of ridiculous.
Have you ever considered changing your name to EmilyWhoHatesMike? You know, just so no one misses the point.
Pretty rich coming from ClifWhoLovesMike
That’s not quite fair. Emily hates lots of characters.
This just happens to be the one I agree on. 🙂
Really, Mike is the only character I hate this intensely who isn’t basically universally reviled (Toedad, Blaine, Ryan).
Like, yeah I’m kind of super unforgiving and uncompromising of fictional characters doing bad things but it’s mostly escapism from the fact that I’m basically the opposite with people in reality and it usually bites me in the ass.
Whereas I tend to be very forgiving – for characters that are at least trying to change and improve.
Unlike Mike.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I’ve generally been pretty forgiving of Baby Mike, but at the same time I’m wondering what’s up. I’m not so willing to write it off as ‘Mike’s an asshole so nobody will know he cares so people can’t hurt them (and by extension hurt him)’ because I’d think, in that scenario, the thing to do would be to cut them off and not interact with them, not continue interacting with them but being the most hurtful jackass he can manage at the moment.
I can see it either way by this point. Either Mike’s bluffing because he’s being threatened by a probable mob stooge (in which case I expect we’ll see another flashback), and maybe the act started as just a ‘ensure Blaine has nothing to work with’ and eventually became real*… Or Mike may legitimately have been playing us all the entire flashback sequence, in which case holy SHIT. Either way this kid had better be a theater major because that acting is ridiculous. (And if this strip’s the real one and Mike ends up horribly but nonlethally injured in some mishap with stage equipment and has to be permanently written out, that stage equipment’s sacrifice will be honored.)
* There is really no way to read current Mike and not conclude that some of it is real. You don’t fabricate elaborate fake web pages to make your roommate believe a show is ending so you can record him crying – not even ‘the internet at large’, just This One Dude – without actually being a legitimate asshole. And if you were intimidated into assholery by an abusive mob stooge, you don’t tell one of the last people who remembers what you were like and still tolerates you that she’s going to turn out like him. And holy shit that takes on new meaning now that there’s no way Mike DIDN’T know he was in the mob.
Sadly, he is not. He’s a social work major. I would like to fight whoever at that school allowed that but he is, apparently.
But yeah I’m wondering what’s up.
… never in my life have I wished more for a limited enrollment program.
Incidentally, IU’s website sucks so I have no idea if they do competitive admission to certain majors. Seriously how do people spend so much money on making these college websites pretty and then make them completely unnavigable by phone?
Because it’s the basic tool you use for the website that provides responsiveness or not, not the content.
If you have a lot of coding involved in your website, moving it to a responsive base is really expensive. In bad cases, you need to invest on the scale of person years.
They should put Mike in charge of the website. That would fix it.
I’m beginning to think that he does similarly appearing things (assholeish) to different people for different reasons. Let’s face it: Walky is not the best of roommates. He’s sloppy, has bad hygiene, watches TV shows without using headphones, and farts loudly because he thinks it’s funny. Mike has plenty of motivation to mess with him because Walky pisses him off.
This does not preclude that he can also do assholeish things with the intent of producing a beneficial result. I’m beginning to see that interacting with Blaine has left Mike with one tool left for safely interacting with others. Or at least with the conviction that it’s the only tool that’s safe to use. And when all you have is a hammer…
This is the only response that keeps Blaine from devoting all of his considerable villainy to actively harming Ethan and Amber and Mike’s parents. Look how miserable Blaine is, thinking he can’t have revenge.
And. Mike is stuck.
Or is he. Are his friends and family safe from Blaine now? Can he let some love show? Will he turn into one of those annoying cutsie lovers with pet names and an obsessive need to constantly be with his boyfriend?
The difference between Mike and Heath Ledger’s Joker is the Joker enjoyed what he was doing.
And Blaine is like the mobsters who cannot comprehend not being motivated by gain. Whatever advantages Blaine might have over Mike, he’s not equipped to deal with chaos.
You want to know how I got this scowl?
My mom was a hugger and a friendly person…
Funnily enough (see what I did there?), the reason I didn’t like Heath Ledger’s Joker was that he didn’t seem to enjoy himself enough. At the very least, he should have found his jokes funny. For that matter, he should have appeared to be making jokes.
This is why Mark Hamill’s Joker is the best Joker.
Joker without jokes is like The Riddler without riddles. What would be left? Some guy in a question mark suit. We already have one of those, but at least he teaches you how to get free money from the government.
I’m kind of convinced at this point that Mike’s *extreme* cynicism is at least 50% defense mechanism – here he’s being threatened by someone stronger and older than him, and what does he do? Pretty much complete personality shift into douchebag Mike mode.
I mean, I could be wrong, but if the lesson is that Mike really has always been like he is, there was no point in having the flashbacks to begin with.
Defense mechanisms generally result from needing to defend oneself. Mike’s parents are really nice. If this were a defense mechanism, it’s a well-used one which Mike has no reason to have needed before now
And if the lesson is that Mike has simply always been an amoral, cynical asshole, the point of the flashbacks was the fakeout. A reminder that sometimes people are awful and sometimes that’s all there is to it.
Mike parents seemed nice (but very encroaching) the one time we saw them. Well, his mother did, anyway.
Seriously, teenage misanthropy is a defense mechanism far less often than it’s just teenagers aping maturity by way of heavily exaggerated cynicism. Like, I was an absurd cynic when I was 16 and it wasn’t the result of some trauma it was just me being a dumb kid.
What evidence is there that it’s “well-used” at this point, though? The notion that the logic outlined here is his his actual point-of-view at this time is completely unprecedented in the context of the flashbacks – like, why did he bother confronting the teacher earlier?
What cruelty could he inflict on anyone but himself in confronting her? It’s not as though he had any power over her, or any ability to effect any sort of great distress from the teacher, and it’s not as though HIM confronting her was going to have backlash for Amber, not to mention at that point he hardly would have had much motivation to harass her, having only barely gotten to know her.
Either there’s some other reason for Mike acting like this apparently prematurely, that interaction with the teacher seriously snapped something in him, or this plotline isn’t as well-written as it could be. “Sometimes people are awful and that’s all” is a lesson one could learn from a kids’ show, because “just being bad” with no motivation is a characteristic exhibited only by an undeveloped character.
Unless Mike’s got *severe* psychological issues – and he might, considering being manipulative and unconcerned with the emotional distress of others is kind of an attribute of some psychological disorders – it makes no sense for him to be such a cynical douche out of *nowhere* in a plot-line in which he was otherwise more even-tempered, never mind that we’ve gotten a few other flashes of humanity from Mike throughout.
I just don’t understand the point in making an entire subplot about and named after a specific character, teasing actual character development, and then taking it away just for a “gotcha!” moment in this strip, especially given some of the other stuff we’ve seen from Mike in this plotline. I mean, I guess if that’s all it is, that’s all it is, but did we need *more* proof of Mike not being nice?
The evidence is 1) he’s really good at it, implying he’s had lots of practice, and 2) that it’s a defense mechanism
The term “defense mechanism” usually refers to some behavior or skill that a person came to have because they needed it. Often something that can be hard to stop doing, because you depended on it to stay safe for so long. Like Carla being a jerk or Becky being wacky. They both have trouble turning it off sometimes, even when they WANT to. Without some reason to have NEEDED this behavior to survive, there’s no excuse for it.
What he got out of confronting the teacher could simply have been that. He enjoys confrontation, especially when he can use something he knows about a person to catch them off guard.
Physiological issues are far from the only reason to be a shitty person. Plenty of guys I knew were far shittier as teenagers than they had any reason to be. Most grew out of it on their own as they realized their edgy cynicism was bullshit.
But if you read the comments enough, you’ll see that apparently yes, we did in fact need more proof. There may never be enough proof to convince some people Mike is not some mystical for good, helping people with “tough love” and “hard truths”
People miss the most important hard truth Mike exemplifies: some people just suck and there’s not really any good reason for it.
… Okay, if Mike’s serious here (and that is genuinely an option, given it’s FUCKING MIKE,) then the field trip thing succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Also, holy fuck that is a new level of irredeemability if so. Like, if Mike’s perceptive enough to realize the receipts thing, he has more evidence before he entered that house for the birthday that Amber was being verbally and emotionally abused by Blaine. Which means:
– Mike knew damn well what a bad idea Blaine driving Amber was, and that he would likely take out his frustrations on Amber.
– When Mike told Amber she was destined to become her father, a significant part of this situation was INCITED BY HIM.
– Depending on how much Amazi-Girl knowledge has been shared/Mike has intuited, Mike could well be AWARE of this fact.
– Further, any friendship with either Ethan or Amber is fucked if this really was his intent and they somehow find out (and with Blaine back in the picture, that is ACTUALLY POSSIBLE.) And casts an even more negative light on Mike/Ethan – the ulterior motive is bad, but ‘I helped cause your best friend’s dissociative disorder because I like fucking with people’ is unspeakably evil.
The arc’s not over JUST yet, and that means there’s a chance we get the rug pulled out from under us again, but unless said rug-pulling occurs in this storyline? Nope, I’m done, Mike has literally always been straight-up evil. I was willing to give a 13-year-old benefit of the doubt, but the signs have been here all along and I’m taking the Edgelord at his word.
Yeah, part of me wants to believe that this was a mask he put on around this time that became his face, especially as masks and their effect/response to identity is such a heavy theme in the comic.
Plus that happens to a lot of edgelords. They put on the mask to seem mature or to avoid vulnerability they see as making them less masculine or able to be hurt and then all the “ironic” bullshit starts becoming more and more real.
It’s something I try to blunt in my students when I see it, because it’s just a bad path in general.
But yeah, you’re absolutely right that that might be giving him too much credit. And if it is, if he’s telling the truth here, yeah, he becomes the worst character who isn’t an adult in the entire comic.
I have hope that that’s not entirely the story here, because redemption and repudiation of the past are such large themes, but that might be very very misplaced.
After the initial comment I can see the mask scenario being as likely (because you know, lying to the threatening possible mob stooge, fair,) but I am going to need it pretty near unambiguously shown before I actually believe it. Like, not with another person – as this storyline has made clear, Mike’s facades are so good, and have been for SO LONG, we have no idea which if any are genuine. It has to be him alone, and it has to be him expressing genuine, clear remorse. (Actively forcing himself into a more asshole role could work, but Mike’s so good at acting I don’t think he would, and again with another person around we can’t trust it.)
Realistically what I think we’ll get is some flashback with just enough ambiguity we’ll still be arguing about it years from now unless/until something happens like Amber and Ethan have enough of his shit and he realizes what he’s become. But really, he’s gonna need an entire damn musical soliloquy before I believe that. (Like, ‘What Have I Done’ from Les Mis levels, minimum.)
have I fallen so far, And is the hour so late
That nothing remains but the cry of my hate
Possibly, admitting and openly dropping the plan he’s been working on with Ethan might work, since he did spell that ought to the audience back aways.
Still don’t give a shit about Mike.
Yes, you have damage. We all do. Manipulating people, especially out of spite, even for good reasons only leads to more damage all around.
Oooof. Nothing insightful to add I just. Love this. 13 year old mike scared a grown abusive mob stooge. Hell yes. Idk if he’s bluffing or a true psychopath or what I’m just here for the ride and I am LOVING it
Mike got messed up early.
Mike is reminding me, just a little, of Humon’s character Nils.
I can see it… with my glass eye.
This arc has really put into context just how completely unreadable Mike is.
I have legitimately no idea if I’ve ever correctly read him. It’s… equal parts impressive and unsettling.
Well only one thing to do about this. Play Mike out with the evil Morty theme: https://youtu.be/4Js-XbNj6Tk
I’ve found “When someone tells you who they are, believe them” isn’t usually good advice because most people have… distorted views of who they are.
It’s true. The greatest of monsters will call themselves heroes. And the most compassionate of men will only see their failures.
And a 13 year old kid thinks he’s an asshole because everyone around him is and why should he be the exception. At some point over the years, this conviction becomes self-fulfilling…
I know a lot of people think Mike’s alignment got more unreadable than ever, but this is people, not D&D. He’s never been more strikingly human to me. Congratulations Willis, for this kind of writing.
It’s funny. You’ve become more convinced than ever he’s human, but he’s reconfirmed for me that he’s really more a force of nature or a weapon in humanoid form than a human being.
Mike’s alignment is clearly Neutral Evil. He has no regard for the Law/Chaos axis and he has negative regard for the well being of others.
This is usually only supposed to apply to when people who act like monsters tell you they’re a monster.
Yeah, it’s basically “Don’t make excuses for abusers”. Or autocrats.
There is that.
I’m assuming it’s 80% bluff 20% genuine cynicism.
He felt betrayed and angry.
And he’s still probably holding onto that a bit,
especially here.
I often wonder to myself, what do characters in print media sound like to their creators? What is Mike’s voice? Is he high-pitched, low? Deep voiced or shrill? We may never know.
You know those morality quiz’s that have the question of pushing a fat man in front of a moving train car to save three other people? Another option is where you could pull a lever to make the train car hit one unaware person, or pull a lever to make the fat man drop in front of train car. Mike is the guy that shouts at the top of lungs that he is pulling the lever to drop the fat man in front of the train car to stop it.
Perhaps Mr. Warner works for the federal government which would make even trespassing a federal crime.
Well, that was one way for Mike to one up Blaine.
I think mike’s just both
He’s a complete asshole & kinda not a complete asshole
humans are complex creatures. I do believe some of what he does is just for the evuls, some is to help his friends realize something about themselves, and some of what he does is to hurt them badly. It’s always..well not always but mostly been like this. My opinion on mike is the same as before. This is interesting though!
He’s a complete asshole & kinda not a complete asshole
So he’s Schrödinger’s Asshole?
Could be entirely true, people can contain seemingly contradictory traits and perform contradictive actions.
Well, you have to keep in practice. Can’t let those evil muscles get rusty.
You’d think I’d be less confused now, but I am not.
Mike is an onion. He has many layers. Whenever you peal off a layer, there is Mike, staring back at you.
Hm, well, I think Mike definitely sees himself as a bad person.
Many good people see themselves as bad because of self depreciation as a coping mechanism, like Amber. That, or Mike is really just a troll.
I feel like Amber goes beyond self-depreciation as a coping mechanism but that’s true.
I’m not really opting on whether Mike is a good person or a bad person, but I do think he thinks of himself as bad. Maybe he thinks of people as varying degrees of bad as well. I think that does differentiate him from the clear villains of the comic. Toedad thought that he was absolutely being a good person, that he was doing the work of god. Blaine blames his behavior on others, like Amber. He has to be cruel to her because she’s so hopeless in his own mind. I don’t think that these guys would be able to phrase their behavior as bad, to them, it’s right. So that Mike is able to point out his own actions as bad is interesting, and leads me to think that he does think of himself as a bad person. Whatever his intentions might be, a lot of his actions are pretty fucked up. He seems to be entirely aware of that. No idea what he considers his motivations to be though.
He sees everyone as being bad people. including himself. He considers it his life’s work to make them realise that.
That seems plausible.
That’s like the one thing him and I see eye to eye on then.
I don’t know when Mike’s birthday is and zodiac characterization likely isn’t real.
But Mike is a Scorpio.
That zodiac crap is going around on Twitter, again. I don’t understand any of it, but it seems like every character is every sign.
The exception is of course Homestuck, but we won’t go into that.
Homestuck is the exception for a lot of things.
I no longer know if Mike is like some 90s antihero that appears as ruthless but is secretly kind, or some Joker agent of chaos that has no empathy. I don’t know anymore. What have you done, Willis?!
Even the Joker has a tragic backstory, though.
More than one! He prefers them to be multiple choice.
I think most people stick with the one “The Killing Joke” gave him.
Joker likes to make up tragic backstories. None have ever been proven true.
And that is part of his personality. Anyone could become the Joker if they had a really bad day (that is why the multiple choice thing), but they should be weak willed to be broken. Gordon and Batman had many horrible days and are still going.
Huh, I guess this solves the ‘nurture versus nature’ debate.
And then Mike NEVER SMILED IN HIS PRESENCE AGAIN.
To be fair I feel like people usually don’t smile in Blaine’s presence. Not naturally, anyway.
“None are righteous, not even one” – I’ve long suspected that this is Mike’s perspective on the universe.
mike is kind of a monster
Considering at that age I also had to become a Mike to escape a Blaine (not that it worked, but it’s a work in progress), I can see this Mike acting the shit outta this to scare off the larger abuser. Unfortunately, it starts off a web of fucktitude that only gets worse the longer you let the charade go on. It’s like putting on spiky armor, and then the spikes start growing inward. Leave it on long enough, and it gets exponentially harder to pry off. (0/10, would not recommend except in emergencies.)
‘None are righteous’ is also a very familiar belief system — especially if, say, one’s parents are willfully, cheerfully ignorant of abusive situations thanks to being eternally forgiving and optimistic of everything regardless of real life consequences. Like the dog sitting in the burning house saying ‘this is fine’, except the dog is your mom and your world is on fire. In that sort of situation, it’s dangerously easy to fall into a worldview of ‘nothing is fine and everyone is stupid for believing it’.
The above may or may not apply to Mike, mind! I just think it’s an option for what’s been going on. Either way, whether Mike gets redemption or comeuppance (likely a bit of both?), I’m really digging this so far.
I think it makes sense that, before Mike moved to Amber and Ethan’s school, he already knew he was queer. If he was out and getting bullied at his old school, I don’t trust his parents to offer good guidance on that.
(I don’t know that any adult has ever offered good guidance about getting bullied, though.)
Mine did!
“If they’re going to hit you, hit them before they hit you, and hit them hard. They might not try, then.”
Which I interpreted as “if someone is trying to demean you for the first time, just ignore it, people are wierd and sometimes do that without following up. If they try to put you down a second time, hit them hard before they know you will and before they have a chance to escelate further.”
Helped a ton. I still have issues from my youth, abuse will do that to you, but it was genuinely helpful advice. Didn’t stop everyone, but a decent chunk did.
Oh man, I wish that had worked for me. I was a scrawny wimp, so I couldn’t actually hit anyone hard enough to dissuade them. All it did was get me in trouble, and make the teachers less likely to take my side when I went to them.
Gonna be glad when this arc is over. Mike is a dick, he’s literally stating he’s a dick, but we still have people defending his actions anyway
Because being lifted up and slammed into a wall by a grown man when you’re 13 means you have no reason whatsoever to try to bluff your way out if you can.
On it’s own? No.
Considering it fits with everything else we’ve seen from Mike, it’s yet another piece of confirmation. If current Mike had ever been shown to be helping people before and only doing his Mike things to abusers or to protect people, then I’d be a lot more willing to buy it.
Young Mike? Maybe. Or maybe not. I’m not completely sold that he was already just a dick. But today moves me closer.
On a slightly more serious note, I’ve got an idea on how Mike works, possibly.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/guard/
We know that Mike’s parents are kind, loving, and well-meaning. We also know that his mom is pretty bad about personal space and not making strangers uncomfortable, if the way she treated Sara is any indication. It’s not much to go on, yet I think it’s enough to assume that Mike’s parents are well-meaning but a bit careless, and don’t see how their actions can go awry as long as they have a positive attitude. And that’s fine most of the time, but for a young, queer adolescent that sorta parenting fails to prepare you at all for the world you’re gonna face.
At a time when Mike would be beginning to yearn for independence, they would have continued to invade his personal space. He wouldn’t be prepared to deal with bullying (which as a queer kid basically guaranteed) and when he goes to his parents for help they likely wouldn’t have helpful advice. (“They bully you because they’re lonely/bullied themselves/jealous, be nice and don’t show them you’re bothered! As long as you’re happy they can’t bully you!” and similar common advice.) Mike would have internalized that nice=/=good and that his parents and authority figures couldn’t be depended on, so he’d have to take things into his own hands.
I think it’s worth noting that Mike was pretty cynical when he moved to the same school as Ethan and Amber, and at 8th grade that means this was basically at the end of his adolescence and the beginning of his teen years. He already knew he liked guys, he already didn’t trust authority figures, and he already tried to solve his problems in the most cynical way possible.
It’s a common perspective for kids that age to take, and probably would have been temporary if A.) Mike wasn’t so good at being an asshole & B.) Mike wasn’t so goddamn dramatic and grandiose with it.
The problem with being cynical and pessimistic as your method of problem-solving is that it doesn’t usually work for more kids. Usually they base their attitudes off of fictional characterizations and undeveloped worldviews, so being an asshole doesn’t deliver and they keep finding themselves being wrong. Thus, kids usually grow out of it. But with Mike, he has the people skills and creativity to successfully scheme, and his worldview is grounded enough that he doesn’t find himself making grand assumptions about others that are wildly off the mark. It keeps working, and so he doesn’t learn the lesson that his bullshit is a bullshit way to do things.
Usually the next way people outgrow being an asshole in middle school/high school is that they harm their friendships and relationships. With Mike he’s got two friends who are bad enough at friend-making that they can’t afford to cut him off, so he managed to get through high school without losing them.
Now that Mike is in college, I think he’s going to have to grow up. His friends can make friends now, so they’re gonna be less tolerant of his bullshit. And he’s not done much to endear himself to new people, so if his friends cut him off, or seriously threaten to, he’s not going to have any friends at all. He’s actually just going through standard teen/adolescent development, but on a bit of a delay. He’s dramatic and creative and good at being an asshole, but being an asshole isn’t tenable and all the consequences that come with a worldview built entirely around cynicism are gonna come crashing down on him pretty soon, if they haven’t been eating away at him for a while now.
tldr; Mike went through a justified cynical asshole phase, but kept it up longer than it should have because he’s good at it and his friends didn’t kick him out of the squad in high school. But that’s temporary and it’s going to have consequences soon. The only thing about Mike that’s actually unusual is that he’s good at being an asshole and he’s overly dramatic and theatrical about the whole thing. He’s not actually irredeemably awful as he tries to look, he’s just a regular asshole.
Also damn, I need to be less wordy.
No this is a really good analysis
Thanks! I actually forgot to add a part, which is that the dramatic, grandiose nature of Mike’s assholery is basically a defense mechanism. If you portray a fictionalized version of yourself, people trying to get revenge on you won’t hit the mark. (As seen in today’s strip.)
Mike’s built a character for himself, and because of his people skills and dramatic flair, he’s managed to deliver on a characterization that’s far enough away from his genuine feelings that he’s able to adequately protect himself from retaliation.
The problem with this, of course, is that it gets in the way of forming genuine relationships. And we can see that with how he’s reluctant to open up to Ethan about whatever’s eating him up, and how he insists on only having hook-ups and saying that no feelings will develop on his side at all. He’s aware that forming relationships isn’t his forte, but he’s so reflexively defensive that he just pre-emptively avoids trying.
^This.
You know if there was going to be an encounter in this comic between Mike and one of the many different antagonist that ended with Mike either breaking their mind and/or will I would have preferred Mary. Though I think we need more of consistent thing where Mikes tormentshe a protagonist then goes back to tormenting another antagonist just to keep things balanced.
This is, as far as I can recall, the first time Mike’s interacted with another antagonist. And it pretty clearly didn’t end with Mike breaking Blaine, since this is a flashback and he’s still around to mess with Amber.
And he never smiled again.
Sometimes I feel like a person’s opinion on Mike says more about THEM than it does Mike’s character.
That is a universal truth that applies to anyone about anyone.
More people should know this.
So anyone who says bad things about Blaine is secretly an abuser. Not buying it.
That’s not what was said.
Perhaps not. But… A universal truth that applies to anyone about anyone. How do you interpret it to exclude Blaine and abuse?
A person’s opinion of a character may say a lot about them without meaning they’re the same as the person if they criticize them.
In fact, I’m not sure how you get that at all. I’d assume it was the people who excuse Mike who’re likely to be more like him and those criticizing him the other way. If there’s validity to it being that direct.
Wow, you expressed my opinion way better than me, yeah.
Like, honestly, the WAY people demonstrate arriving at their opinion is MORE demonstrative than whatever the final opinion is. It’s like the list of conversation starters Chuck Klosterman rattles off in “Sex Drugs & Cocoa Puffs”- the ANSWERS don’t matter, it’s how people get themselves TO their answer that matter.
@Clif: a person expressing a good opinion of someone also tells you something about them, likely more than what they are saying about the other person.
Also, expressing a bad opinion of a bad person tells you that they recognise evil when they see it. Exactly what they find most offensive does show you something about them. Whether this amounts to more than what you learn about the person being criticised depends on how closely you are paying attention.
What exactly do you mean by that?
Uh, that the final judgement and ways people explain how they got there, especially regarding the character Mike, is very illustrative of a person’s general temperment and also their thought processes.
I gotta be honest, this whole “your opinions on fictional characters totally mean you’re this kind of person” stuff is super dubious. Especially since it can be misinterpreted and blown out of proportion on the internet very easily. And very often is. I’m wary of these kinds of statements.
We’ve gone from “I, Mike, emulate Holden Caulfield so well as to be indistinguishable” to “I, Mike, was not born but rather conjured forth in a blasphemous ritual from a first-edition copy of Catcher in the Rye”, I see.
I think Mike is lying to get Blaine off his loved ones.
…wait, is Mike a fundie?
So Mike is ~~secretly~~ this world’s big bad.
He feels he is living in a crapsack world inhabited by either overt monsters or monsters who hide it behind masks of hypocrisy (sometimes self-delusion too). He regards it as his life’s mission to tear off all of those masks and force everyone to realise that they’re all wicked by provoking them to behave appropriately.
Hm. So Mike has feelings for Ethan. But he hasn’t come out yet and is currently with Amber. So Mike hates Amber and uses her dad to torture her?
Or is he?
Honestly theres so many twists and turns to Mike that I need travel sickness pills 😛
I think that the point is that, in Ethan, Mike has finally found one person that he wants to believe is at least somewhat good and that he cares about enough to save.
It’s not at all clear to me what the evidence for that is.
A couple of ambiguous looks in the last few current time strips?
No matter what Mike actually thinks, his point here should be to make Blaine think there’s no weakness to attack
Fuck.
The origins of mike revealed!
Mike is actually an asshole? Wow. Shocking.
and so, Mike was never seen smiling again
TL;DR — I don’t think Mike’s just an asshole, and may actually give a shit about people and the world.
———-
You know, it’s times like this I find myself wondering again about Mike’s psychology.
He’s not a complete and total sociopath. And he’s not just some blank canvas whitewashed in asshole. No one is that. There’s character to him, deeper than just the abrasiveness — It’s just a matter of understanding what context establishes that character.
My gut tells me that, right now, Mike is bluffing. That isn’t a key to his parents’ house; That’s just a random key. And if Blaine were to take him up on it — Which Mike knows he won’t — then I’d bet my bottom dollar that there would be something very unpleasant that would happen to Blaine upon trying to break in. It wouldn’t be the police; That’s too much closure for Blaine, and it wouldn’t serve to further things.
My gut tells me.. That.. Honestly, Mike’s probably one of the most caring people in the entire series. Like, right up there with Joyce and Ethan. His brand of caring isn’t the one which is normally espoused by society, though — His is the swift kick in the junk that makes you question your life, and why you do what you do, say what you say, and think what you think. He assaults illusions that people build around themselves with the ferocity of a junkyard dog, and makes eye contact with you while he does it.
If the concept he attacks is true, and solid, and built on a solid foundation of truth to oneself? Then honestly, he’ll probably leave you alone.
If that concept is smoke and mirrors that you show the world, he’ll make sure everyone knows it.
If it’s smoke and mirrors to YOURSELF, he’ll make damn sure YOU know it is.
I don’t think he’s completely altruistic, as such.. He isn’t doing this to “make the world a better place.” I see him doing this because he is brilliant at cold reading and has a phenomenal psychological insight into others, and can’t stand people lying to themselves — Likely because he, himself, can’t lie to himself. He probably knows, objectively, that his method is fire and destruction.. But it’s just who he -is.-
For most people, it likely doesn’t bother him all that much. He doesn’t have a particular connection to them.
For those that he sees something he likes and/or respects, and sees as being genuine to themselves.. I could see that it might bother him, some. Hard -maybe- on that one.
It might also be that he doesn’t feel remorse at all; That perhaps he views everyone else as being too willing to allow the world to be garbage, for the sake of peoples’ illusions of self and belief.
Or, y’know, he could be a total asshole and there’s nothing more to it.
That’d be super unsatisfying, though, and I wouldn’t believe it for a moment. No one is a villain in their own narrative, and there is ALWAYS a justification that is internally consistent — And Mike is too brilliant, psychologically, to NOT have a pretty damn robust and solid justification.
You know, you might not like Mike, and that’s fair, he’s an asshole. But you kind of have to respect him. Man’s got balls that drag the ground when he walks
THIS is The Bad Place! *pointing at Mike*
Today’s revelation is more surprising to me than yesterday’s.
Yes, I’m totally going to take everything a thirteen year old boy being physically threatened by an unhinged mob enforcer says at face value. Can’t imagine any reason why he wouldn’t open up here.
Can we all just agree that Mike isn’t a good and pure cinnamon roll but rather is an ass who does bad things but is also a human being with his own hang-ups and damages, and not a total black hole of evil who only exists to twirl his evil mustache evilly and do all the evil he can?
I’ll agree to that. Want to start a tea party of “people are complicated” in the counter?
Do I ever.
I could agree with that, but I’d actually like to see some evidence for it that doesn’t involve spinning the asshole things he does as somehow good intentioned.
(Current Mike that is. Jury’s still out on Young Mike as far as I’m concerned.)
^ same here
My take on Mike:
I think that Mike’s a perceptive, cynical asshole who most of the time just does it because he can. I emphatically disagree with “Mike the asshole sage who cares for his friends and wants them to grow, but does it in the most brutal way” take on his character, in part because he’s shown to have done and said harmful things that can’t be seen as an attempt to help no matter how you look at it to even the people he considers friends.
Also, with how perceptive he is, there’s no way that Mike cannot see how his methods are harmful to his victims. Mike chooses to act the way he is. He isn’t “helping” his friends in the most harmful way just because that’s who he is. He decides to tell them in the most brutal, harmful way possible because he wants to, and there’s no way to reconcile that with the idea of him caring about his friends.
There’s an argument that could be made that he’s a cynic that wants to stop people from lying to themselves. But his choice of victims is oddly selective and strange. He does it to Ethan and Amber, his two closest friends, but also to Joyce, Dorothy and Walky, people who’re basically strangers to him, and who don’t even know him that well. If he’s interested in pointing out the lies people tell themselves, why restrict himself to these few? He’s been around Billie fairly often (due to overlapping friend groups),appearing with her far more often than he does with Amber (though with the caveat that its mostly group scenes) why not tell her about the lies she tells herself? And, alternatively, if he’s only interested in pointing out the lies of his friends, then why target Joyce and Walky and Dorothy?
So the interpretation of Mike as a cynical asshole who does things just because he can makes the most sense to me, because it fits in with his often contradictory actions, his seemingly random choice of victims, and his behaviour in general. I agree with Usayasha’s analysis on how he might’ve become this way, and I think that Mike really isn’t that complex as some people think.
I don’t understand the obsession with Mike being like extremely psychologically complex. Lots of teenage guys are embittered jerks without any particularly complicated reason behind it. Why can’t he just be a relatively perceptive guy who never grew out of that all too common teenage phase of intense misanthropy?
I agree completely, hence why I said I think Usayasha’s analysis of his character is spot on. I think its cause there really often aren’t characters who are assholes for assholery’s sake, and even the most evil and despicable villains tend to have backstories that make the audience more understanding of their actions, so maybe we’re just used to the other shoe dropping when in this case it probably won’t.
Yeah, characters like that aren’t exactly compelling but then DoA Mike has never been compelling so it wouldn’t actually change anything for the big reveal of why he is the way he is to be “because sometimes people are just immature assholes and there isn’t really much of a deeper reason for it.”
I’m okay with getting some backstory to explain why he is the way he is – assuming the backstory works for me of course.
I’m okay with getting some character growth to move him away from just being the asshole.
I’m not interested in a great revelation that explains why he never really was an asshole at all.
I think it’s carryover from Walkyverse, honestly. People want to think he’s the same guy when he’s really not
This is probably part of why I have zero patience for Mike: I only read Shortpacked! and I didn’t even finish that so I don’t have much in the way of preexisting Mike baggage.
I mean, he IS pretty much Walkyverse Mike. The issue is that this isn’t the Walkyverse, where everything is zany and there are drama tags. Transposing characters from a universe where everything works on different rules to one that is analogous to the real world means that we see characters differently, because they ARE in different circumstances.
For instance, Robin, for me, went from “meh, whatever” in the Wakyverse to outright “go away and stay gone” in the DoAverse. I maintain that, even competing with the likes of Blaine, Robin is the most damaging character in DoA whereas in SP! she just took up time from characters I enjoyed. Blaine (and a bunch of others) still come ahead on Evil scale, though.
Cuz that’s not as interesting. This is a form of entertainment after all.
Mike’s gone 10 years without being interesting and it hasn’t done the comic’s overall entertainment value any harm I see no reason he should be terribly important now.
Joe kind of did the same and now he’s on a growth arc. Problem is, so far I don’t see any such for Mike. We’re getting background, but I’m not sure yet where it’s leading us and what kind of change in current Mike we’re being prepared for, if any.
Joe at least had the “divorced parents” thing going on and also not being completely irredeemably awful in basically any interaction he had with anyone.
Not as deliberately bad, but creepy to all the women and obnoxious to his best friend.
But yeah, not as bad and there were hints at change for quite awhile before the big arc.
Yeah, I think this is it. Plus a sort of weird satisfaction seeing the fallout of his manipulations and internally being pleased the he is the one who made these things happen. It’s a feeling of power, knowing you’re making ripples in a pond, that you have the power to change people’s lives and they can’t stop you. Sure, there can be unforeseen fallout. Things could spread to unexpected people, and some people might get hurt.
It all works swimmingly as long as he avoids any attachments. That way whatever storm his actions cause can’t hurt anybody he gives a shit about.
Which is why I think it could be very interesting if he started giving a shit about Ethan. It’s a feeling he wouldn’t really know what to do with. And what does he do if Ethan inadvertently gets caught up in the fallout from one of his asshole-manipulations? What does he do if Ethan finds out how cruel he is?
Or maybe I’m overthinking it… he’s a sociopathic manipulator. I know how that works in a relationship. He just manipulates Ethan. A few layers of psychological abuse and he won’t know why he can’t live without Mike or why he’s given up all his other friends.
He targets Walky because he’s his roommate and Dorothy because she was dating Walky. I think that’s about as far as it goes.
Targets of opportunity. They’re right there where he can easily pick up weaknesses.
I don’t actually think he’s messed with Joyce that much.
That’s the point I’m getting at. The “cynical dude revealing the lies everyone tells themselves” take doesn’t work if you consider how his victims are mostly random
I think the fact that Mike does not smile at all in the present says a lot about how his interactions with Blaine affected him.
I don’t think Mike is a good person, and a lot of times he straight up does shit cuz he’s bored and thinks it’s funny, but I also think he doesn’t see literally every human being as a pawn piece on his chessboard or some Lex Luthor shit like that. He PROBABLY would get diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder if he’d ever talked to a therapist in his life.
The “None are righteous” bit does sound like something Mike would believe, but I don’t think that he realized how bad his extortion scheme would be for Amber. I think his panel 3 commentary may actually have been his hindsight after the convenience store hold up. But this is a benefit of playing the asshole – when things go wrong, you can still pretend that it was all a part of your jerkerrific plan.
The thing I find interesting about (my interpretation of Mike, based both on this and on the It’s Walky ‘verse) is that he’s pretty much the polar opposite of Joyce. She makes a lot of decisions based on optimism and on (as Dorothy said) choosing love. She’s not perfect at it, it’s not 100% (she’s only human and a pretty young one at that), but that’s her basic MO. Mike chooses cynicism.
He operates from a place of believing everyone is terrible and what differentiates him is that he doesn’t pretend. He looks at his most uncomfortable and beaten down when he tries. Every panel of him smiling in this flashback is the image of a kid who is suffering but trying anyway, and in this moment, when the smile and the mask slips off (probably for good), he seems to come into himself, to become comfortable with himself. He’s in a shitty situation being menaced by an adult twice his size who’s threatening to burn down everything he’s ever loved, and he still looks 1000% more comfortable than he did when he introduced himself to the class. Everything is awful, the gloves are off, and that’s his wheelhouse. No more masks, no more people pretending at being better than they are. (You can, of course, make arguments for whether Mike is pretending to be worse than he is or to take it him at face value.)
I know a lot of people hated this storyline and are ready to see it go, but I’ve actually really enjoyed it, in a “everything is on fire and I’ve made myself sad” sort of way. It’s been (and I’m going to guess will be), start to finish, a tragedy. Mike does try to put on a friendly people mask. He tries to make friends and he fails at it being the ideal and then lashes out at the people around him for failing to live up to the hopeful expectations he puts on them. He probably concludes the ideal is a lie, instead of something to strive for–and I’m guessing he was nearly there from unknown past events anyway. He was hit by a teacher while white-knighting for Amber, and when she wasn’t there when he left, he seemed disappointed, but not surprised.
It’s not just tragic for everyone around him–though it definitely is, because his presence is usually a net negative for those around him, whatever good he may or may not incidentally manage along the way–but also on a personal level, for him. This destructive outlook, if it crosses universes, would explain why in the It’s Walky ‘verse his “best” and most committed romantic relationships are with two women who blackmailed him into dating them, why he smiled and could say easily and with honesty “I love you” when Amber hit him, because masks were off, she wasn’t “hiding” how terrible a person she was anymore, and if everyone is awful, the best people are the ones who are upfront about it. (Also, that was hands down the most painful and upsetting time he could say it, which was probably a bonus for him.) In this ‘verse, it means his only friendships are unhealthy and with people who have pretty much said (in a completely understandable sentiment) that the only reason they’re friends with Mike is inertia and being bad at making friends. He doesn’t open up and he takes notes for future ammunition when those around him do.
The worst part is that I don’t see any of this changing. It seems he’s pretty settled into this worldview. If someone does something terrible, it’s them showing their true colors. If someone consistently acts in a kind, friendly, and optimistic manner, it’s just that their social mask is that good. Mike’s superior for not having the mask at all.
It’s just–sad. It’s really sad. And it’s great writing that I can feel strongly for a character even while being repulsed by their actions and their entire ethos.
Of course, this could just be me reading way too much into an absolute cypher of a character or even just a moment of “it’s not that deep, he’s just an asshole.” Still, I’ve very much enjoyed this storyline and everything that I’ve gotten out of it. Great writing as always, Willis.
I like that interpretation. The only big trouble with it is that it seems to just push the “why” back down a level – Mike was mostly like this already, the interaction with Blaine (and to a lesser extent Amber and the teacher) just locked it down.
We still don’t know why he defaults to see everything cynically. Why does he see everyone as terrible?
I do also see that middle part about his only relationships in the Walkyverse as a pretty good argument against him actually having fallen for Ethan here. He needs someone who can stand up to him and mess with him back, not someone like Ethan that he can so easily twist around his finger.
I’m betting on the “why” being somehow connected to why he thinks his parents are also not righteous.
Mike as someone who could be a good guy but chooses not to be was always my favorite interpretation of the character.
I still wonder if he actually likes Ethan, though I doubt that would be much of a catalyst for him to start choosing otherwise. …On the other hand, it kinda-sorta did for Amber in Shortpacked, so who knows.
I would also point out that Joyce has a nasty habit of forcing things to go to her expectations, despite other people’s boundaries and protestations, whereas with Mike you generally have to say his name three times. The only exception I can IMMEDIATELY recall being making Walky cry, which has always read to me as just the general sort of dumb shit younger guys do to each other.
Joyce has been shown to be TRYING to grow out of it, which makes her a more likable character (although honestly I kinda still despise her). Maybe we’re going to see Mike trying to grow, too. Who knows?
With Mike you have to exist in his presence.
He takes notes on people’s weaknesses for later use.
As for making Walky cry – he has around 7 recordings. That’s not the general sort of dumb shit. And he’s been messing with Walky since day one. Often just dumb shit, but he’s been constant about it.
Again, you can say that’s not YOUR experience but it is very much MY experience that this is just how young men torture each other.
He takes notes on people’s weaknesses, but as I pointed out with the exception of Walkie his roommate, you generally have to take the bait for Mike to mess with you.
If either of my roommates in college had done that to me I’d be requesting a transfer the next day. Nobody should have to put up with being (in your own words) tortured in their own living environment. Like this isn’t razzing between friends because Mike and Walky are not friends. This is Mike being awful to someone he barely knows who is forced to be in proximity to him.
Walky has that option as well, and has not taken it.
Who’s actually “taken the bait”, beyond not just kicking him out immediately?
I guess that would describe Ethan’s role in his current scheme. Anyone else?
When did Dorothy? Or Amber? Anyone else he’s messed with?
Joyce hiring him to chaperone their date, and persisting after he made it objectively obvious he was just there for an excuse to punch people.
Ethan continuing to lean on Mike to learn how to get physical with a person, despite repeatedly being told that it was purely physical, wouldn’t go anywhere, and was a bad idea.
Sorry, tired at work so those are the two most prominent Mike situations that I can think of other than the Walky one. I KNOW I am forgetting something, if anyone feels like reminding me.
And as for Walky – I can see some “dumb shit younger guy” recording their roommate crying and using it to make fun of them. Once, if it happened spontaneously. It’s still being a dick. And an immature one at that. Better suited to summer camp than college. Frankly a lot of Mike’s more casual
Crafting elaborate schemes to get them to cry so you can record it and save it for later use – apparently seven times? That’s just beyond the pale. That’s not normal.
Never said he was normal. Already pointed out Walky as an exception. I assume it’s just a matter of constant proximity. As I mentioned in reply above, Walky has the same option anyone else has to get on a room transfer list and I am pretty sure if he HAD, or even CONSIDERED it, we’d know. Anyone can infer what they want from that, but what I infer is that he finds Mike tolerable.
I get Mike is younger.
I genuinely think he affected Blaine right here a lot more than Blaine ever effected him. This is an origin, it’s not Mike’s.
This is when Blaine goes from average jerk to complete sh*t.
…This is after him berating his daughter for how she acted during a robbery, and it is strongly implied he is already having an affair.
Your average jerk must be a lot worse than mine. Does anyone know the SI standard?
And a mob stooge and strongly implied to be the root cause of young Amber’s crippling withdrawal.
You want to know something deeply fucked up?
Walkyverse Amber was physically abused by Blaine.
DoA one was emotionally abused by him, but I don’t recall physical abuse coming up.
If Mike had any impact on Blaine here, it didn’t go the way you may think it did.
Walkyverse Amber was mostly verbally and emotionally abused as well, until her dad caught her in bed with a high school boyfriend. Blaine was out of the house by high school and hasn’t spoken to her for three years when he shows up at Family Weekend. So he probably didn’t see her much during high school.
Amber probably wasn’t physically abused in this universe (see BBCC’s comment below). Stacey certainly was – ‘that man cheated on my mom and hit her’ and it likely wasn’t just the once based off their interactions and cross-universe bleed (‘I was lucky. He only hit me once. I suspect my mom wasn’t’ or something to that effect, from the always-soothing funeral arc in Shortpacked.) Based on that behavior… I really don’t want to know the answer with regards to Faz and Yuri.
But basically I’m certain Blaine was abusive, probably physically, well before this point. Fuck Blaine.
Thankfully, it seems Stacey left the first time Blaine hit her in this universe. Blaine said in the Freshman Family weekend arc ‘touch her once and she quits’.
I thought Blaine meant that in any kind of disagreement “just hit her once and she quits fighting.”
Blaine stares into Mike and the Mike stares back.
Mike is showing us who he is. Believe him. He can be saved from this emptiness, but the void is real.
So… does that mean the aliens are the one that made Mike not smile anymore in Shortpacked?
Good Mike with good intentions masquerading as a horrible person, or bad Mike showing through for the first time… who knows.
What this has confirmed, though, is Blaine’s true patheticness as a person. Abusive, toxic, and has caused and will still cause actual harm? Yeah… but not because he’s actually formidable in any way whatsoever.
Who does he terrorize and torment? His wife and daughter, who he has traumatized and effectively brainwashed into being fearful, submissive, and perpetually afraid. He pursued and slept with a girl who was somewhere in the realm of 14-16 when he got her pregnant, showing that his ‘romantic’ pursuits are geared towards anyone he THINKS is beneath him in intelligence and worldly experience (even though it seems she’s just as much of a manipulative psycho as he is, and has turned the tables on him in the realm of who’s ‘dominant’ in that marriage), but in general we can conclude that Blaine never tries to start anything with anyone he doesn’t think he can send into a panic, make run away, or cower in fear… which so far has only been horribly abused women and children.
Hence why he went after Mike here and is thinking his physical efforts to terrorize him will turn the boy into a simpering, begging, screaming mess as revenge for being “found out” about his underaged mistress… which perfectly explains how drastically his expression goes from prideful, violent arrogance to being surprised, and fearful. If only for that split second before it turns into dejection with him backing off when Mike shows no fear, no weakness, and that his efforts to feel powerful are utterly ineffective.
Blaine did the equivalent of trying to terrorize a baby rattlesnake. It might be tiny and weak looking, but could easily kill you and at least 50 alternate universe variations of you with minimal effort.
Blaine’s a shit that loves to break people down for fun and profit. But Mike’s better than him at it, because he doesn’t even care about the profit or fun. It’s not about setting the world on fire to see it burn, it’s about giving people matches and gasoline and not even caring enough to watch the pretty, pretty flames.
My take on Mike is pretty much in line with Usayasha and adjudicus, that being Mike is just a cynical guy who never grew out of his teenage asshole phase because he never had to.
He looked stressed when he first arrived at Ethan and Amber’s school, and immediately started analyzing the people around him. To me, that seems more like a defense mechanism than some sadistic need to hurt everyone around him. Maybe he’d dealt with bullying at his last school, either due to his sexuality or attempting to follow in his parents’ brand of happy happy joy joy to the derision of the other kids.
He might have already been attracted to Ethan when he chose to sit next to him. Or they could have struck him as safe kids who wouldn’t judge him before he realized Ethan’s crush. Maybe he stuck up for Amber to the teacher to impress Ethan, or maybe he wasn’t fully into his “the world is cruel and so am I” persona yet. Either way, he seemed genuinely shocked by the teacher’s misogyny, and his attempted good deed led to him being assaulted. He then declined to go to Amber’s party because he unfairly blamed her for what happened to him.
But then Blaine showed up being the worst of the worst, leading Mike to feel some pity for Amber and deciding to attend her party. He was probably still angry about the teacher, though, and that combined with the party being his personal idea of hell led to him lashing out to screw over Blaine and Amber in one go when the field trip came up.
That failed spectacularly and hurt Ethan too. Then it brought us to now, with Blaine physically assaulting and threatening Mike. His attempts at getting close to Amber and Ethan at this point have only led to suffering for everyone, in Mike’s mind. So fine. He doesn’t care. He’s never cared. He doesn’t care about anyone at all, and he never will. Sorry, Blaine.
The truth is, Mike isn’t some unfeeling automaton. He’s not Dr. House, who can get away with being a jerk all the time because he’s a life-saving super genius on TV with the best intentions at heart. He’s not Moriarty moving the pieces on a chessboard. He’s just a smart, intuitive jerk who never grew out of his “the world sucks and it’s every man for himself” phase because Amber and Ethan were never in any position to cut ties with him due to his behavior.
And he clearly cares for Ethan. He’s going to get a swift kick in the ass sooner or later, and either have to start atoning and acting like a decent person, or get used to being alone.
Maybe he’s just trying his best to make everyone else as miserable as he is.
I’m on team “Mike is somewhere in between the extremes of asshole and good person, and leaning more toward asshole than good” but… no offense, but the people who are taking this page at face value probably haven’t had much experience with abusers or, if they have, aren’t thinking about it from that context.
When dealing with somebody like Blaine, you have to do what Mike’s doing here. Because they WILL rip anything they think you care about out of your hands. Sometimes pretending not to care is the best option for that. (My brother took that approach during our childhood basically from the start and turned out way better-adjusted than I did, only having picked it up when it was basically too late to be convincing to our abuser.)
I’m not saying this is true for Mike all the time, every time, because there’s some stuff that I can’t really find any good excuse for, and I refuse to try. As I said… the guy’s kind of an asshole. But here, in this scene of this flashback? Yeah, I think I get what he’s doing and why, and if I’m right, I’m completely sympathetic toward that.
I’d absolutely be heavily inclined to see this as a bluff if it being totally sincere weren’t completely in line with basically every action he’s taken in this comic since this moment. Like, Mike has never given me any reason to think this isn’t a completely accurate description of his worldview.
Mike calling out the teacher on her misogyny doesn’t seem like a “none are righteous” moment for him. He genuinely tried to help his friend, even if he was being cynical about it. I don’t think he’s incapable of doing good, and not everything he does has an evil ulterior motive. I think he just defaults to “irredeemable cartoon of a person” as his go-to persona for all occasions.
That’s probably why he’s never seen expressing genuine emotions about anything – a trait that differentiates him from most flagrant assholes. When you’re living a character to hide your vulnerabilities, everything you say is an act and everything you do is rationalized as being part of your character, even if you’re doing it for yourself.
I mean, his sexuality is described as, “attracted to anything as long as it makes someone, somewhere, angry.” That’s not how sexuality works, that’s how an edgy teen describes their sexuality. He told himself that he’s seducing Ethan to make Danny a blubbery mess, but he’s clearly got some baggage with Ethan that he wants to work through. (I’m pretty sure that comment about Ethan’s mom being what kept them apart was just Mike’s baggage about her getting out, seeing as we know it actually happened.)
Mike’s got an evil villain persona cause it lets him do what he wants without being genuine, which is why I think he’s a garden variety asshole underneath his cartoon character of a front.
The scariest enemy Blaine could ever face: someone with absolutely nothing to lose…also Mike.
I’m loving this arc. Not because I particularly like Mike (or dislike- I’m pretty indifferent towards him), but because the comment section of every single strip he’s in WILL, without fail, turn into arguing. It’s fantastic
Blaine has no fucking idea what to do with someone like Mike. He doesn’t leave any emotional attachments out in the open for Blaine to target and he’s not afraid of Blaine’s physical strength or aggression.
…What happened with Mike that he learned how to do this so early on in life?
I once worked at a facility that had a few “Mikes” in it. They were very scary and had parents who ranged from scary themselves, to the friendliest people you’ll ever meet who wanted only the best for their child. Some people just are born as sociopaths — manipulative, unfeeling, utterly fearless even in a situation that should have terrified them like being restrained and placed into a padded timeout room for attacking another child. Our goal with these kids wasn’t to “cure” them. You can’t cure that kind of sociopathy. Our goal was to teach them how to “pass” as normal people. Much as Mike appears to do much of the time. And then at age 18 state funding stopped and we kicked them out on the streets. Which explains a few things about our country (America), hmm?
Payback for leaving him behind after he got smacked up by a teacher for her sake, probably.
Oh, look, a reminder as to why I have always hated the character of Mike. Good, for a moment, he was almost looking like he might be an okay person.
(Sorry, Mike fans. But ever since his original incarnation, I just can’t stand the guy.)
I mean, ‘come get your reward’ was already too cheesy to be real from Mike, now there’s no way that he didn’t just somehow mess up Ethan’s life in present day. Unless he learned to like Amber’s mom in the interim, he did seem weirdly polite to her.