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I am well aware, which is why I said it can be any sufficient blunt force trauma, not just a sucker punch. Don’t fuck around with throwing punches, especially to the head.
Just so. This is a comic strip, where superheroing on the backs of speeding cars doesn’t end up with you going under the wheels of the car behind, and a smack-down drag-out fight between Amber and Sal on a flight of concrete stairs doesn’t end up with broken ribs, concussions, and teeth knocked out. It is even worth considering the stratagem of turning into a Utahraptor.
But out here in the real world? The common belief that punching someone in the head will at worst put them to sleep for twenty minutes, the game of sucker-punching strangers outside nightclubs because it’s funny to watch them twitch, besides demonstrating large-testicled manliness? Those things get people killed, or crippled for life.
@Agemegos:
That’s a thing? People get more crazy ideas then I could ever imagine.
I always thought the ‘ oh sorry, I just punched once and now she’s dead’ trope was just one of the many lies guys tell to avoid responsibility. There are actually proven cases of that? Every story from the last ten years I can remember from German media where people died from fistfights involved more than one punch.
It happens. A couple years back in my town, guy went into a coma after being punched once in the back of the head while he was just sitting at a bar minding his own business. He hasn’t woken up and it’s increasingly looking like he just won’t ever.
All because this town has two football teams, and tribal mindsets make violence between supporters common.
@CJ Yes, it absolutely is a thing. Here is a news article about an event in Sydney some years ago. The main story is about a young man killed by a single punch and the ensuing fall. It notes that another man was in the same hospital the same night who had been punched 25 times in the head but who was discharged in the morning.
We had a case in Queensland (the state adjacent to the north of where I live) in which a fellow was charged with manslaughter after he killed his brother’s ex-wife’s father, who had come to collect his (the victim’s) grandchild after a weekend with their father. He claimed in his defence that he could not reasonably have expected one punch to kill a man, and was acquitted. So the victim’s daughter started a public awareness campaign, with the aim of making it impossible to succeed at that claim again.
The D&D model of accumulating damage is mostly wrong: people are not trees. When people are violently killed, it is usually because one of the attacks has caused a fatal injury. There is nothing to prevent the first, or the only, attack from being the one. Besides which, people who are knocked down by a punch sometimes strike their heads in their falls.
Blows to the head are especially dangerous. Even if the bones of the skull are not broken, the brain can be damaged by concussion if the head is either sharply accelerated or rapidly rotated. Also, there can be injuries to the neck, causing e.g. paraplegia or quadriplegia.
Actually, the D&D model is actually pretty accurate for that–characters in D&D really have three health descriptors: Fine (“1 or more hit points”), Incapacitated (“0 hp, or maybe some negative amount depending on edition”), and Dead. Any blow that doesn’t knock you out at least (and which has a high probability of killing you if it does) is going to leave you largely unimpaired in the long run, but may make you more vulnerable to subsequent blows because of momentary fatigue. (Essentially, hit points are less a measure of how much damage you can take, as they are a measure of your ability to cope with lesser injuries, combined with your luck in evading serious damage.)
Some what. Though it doesn’t really work as well when you’re mostly dealing with bladed weapons and things and they’re actually hurting you. And screws it all up by making non-magical healing treat them as serious wounds not just momentary fatigue.
Plus, while I haven’t been in serious fights, I’ve gotten hurt often enough to know there’s a lot of space between “Fine” and “Incapacitated”. Even minor injuries can put you at a serious handicap, without leaving you unable to act at all.
@Amazi-Stool: You are right, I had forgotten about that one.
(Just proves memory bias, I suppose, i.e. we tend to remember things that match our world view better than those not fitting in).
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who attacked someone else physically without having been attacked by that party first and it ends in the attacked person dying should be handled as murderer with at least 15 years. 3 years is a joke.
While true, look at the last panel closely – unless it got edited a bit afterward, it looks like he nailed him in the cheek, given the flush of red there. Definitely could’ve been “staged” a bit better if that’s the case, though.
Looks to me like he hit his from behind. But that doesn’t matter; a hit on the cheek that slew’s a person’s head around like that and knocks them off their feet can inflict fatal or crippling injuries to the brain or neck.
In addition, it looks like the punch threw him off balance. He appears to be falling. He is standing near steps, a low wall, and a whole bunch of concrete. If he falls and hits his head, that will cause added damage and can also result in death. Lots of solid things to impact as well as sharp edges.
Panels 4 and 6 of the last strip show him as having his back to Walky and Amber and looking over his left shoulder to address them, and that’s what I thought we had in frames 2, 4, and 5 here. And if that’s right Walky punched him in the back of the head or the neck, by surprise.
But I guess it’s possible that Asher turned back to face Amber and Walky, and then turned his head to the right while casting his eyes left to look at them sidelong. And in that case Walky might have struck him in the cheek. But that seems like a very strange thing for Asher to have done.
Asher was 3/4 back turned to Walky. Walky either hit him in the cheek from behind (over the shoulder) or Walky stepped around and hit him in the face from the front. The position of the cigarette suggests the latter.
Though usually, its not the punch that’s lethal. The punch renders a person unconscious, and then they fall head first onto concrete that causes a fatal injury.
Until he apologizes to Sal, he abso-fucking-lutely DOES deserve this and more. Walky’s sticking up for his sister rather than being this asshat’s errand boy, and hopefully getting sucker-punched will knock some sense into him.
Yeah, Sal was clearly remorseful, but you can’t very well direct an apology to someone without knowing who to give it to.
As for Asher, oof. He didn’t know Sal went to this college, I think, unless I am misreading his previous statements, so maybe he simply hasn’t had the opportunity to apologize, but he sure seems pretty blase about all this.
He never apologized to Sal. He does deserve anger. He even basically just admitted that he’s not really sorry, only sorry that thirteen year old him did something wrong. Only it’s not a normal thirteen year old blunder, it is a huge Real World Thing.
Asher is a dude that thinks it was okay to do some horrible trauma because he was young.
I didn’t take it as a smirk. I thought it was more of a self-depreciating smile. Sort of “I was a dumb kid and did a dumb thing.” This is reinforced by his admission that the outcome wasn’t funny. He didn’t think things through when he was a kid and the end result was not what he expected it to be. He didn’t mean it to be malicious. It doesn’t excuse what happened, but at least the outcome wasn’t on purpose. And the way he appears to be acting, it may have been a wake-up call for him that turned his life around. He may come off initially as a cocky jerk, but that could be a defense mechanism for his feelings of regret.
Yeah, no, you don’t get to look back on the “dumb” (malicious, pre-planned, whole reason he gave her the knife, would’ve done whether she tried to rob another store or not) thing you did and smile when SOMEONE ELSE was the one hurt by it, unless you’ve already made amends
I previously thought that she may have, but I am less sure now, especially since he’s not saying this in a way that implies to me he ever told her, and given the second panel, he was probably long gone by the time the cops got there, so the cops may have had no idea who placed the call, much less her.
He deserves a punch, maybe. I think that’s probably for Sal to decide.
Tell me, would you say that he has got his deserts now, and no longer deserves to be punched? Or do Sal, Amber, Ethan, the super-decent clerk, Linda, Charles, Blaine, and the management of the company that owned the convenience store get to line up and take their shots?
Walky is not authorised by the laws either of God or of Man to judge what Asher deserves and to inflict the punishment.
He might’ve survived had he not smiled at the memory. That’s not the face of someone who feels remorse over their actions. As is, people will take turns punching him.
I think it was a bit of a wry, “I was a dumb kid, huh?” smile, but yeah, you’re not gonna get away with a smile of any kind when you’ve got his current “audience.”
Most of us didn’t… rob convenience stores, though. Asher came from a very different experience from you and me, I’d wager.
I think him choosing to come clean at all is a pretty clear sign that he knows he fucked up and just doesn’t really know how to express that. He deserves the punch, of course. Still a jackass.
I agree I think the smile is more fondly looking how far he has come. And being somewhat amused at how dumb he was. He deserves this noggin knocking perhaps but I am surprised it isnhappening now. I would not expect walkie to have an outburst like this.
It just makes me really REALLY happy to see Walky standing up for his sister finally.
One thing I really like about Willis’ character writing is how he handles characters starting off kinda…unlikable and annoying and then growing and developing as people. Which is always my favorite kind of character writing.
Walky used to get on my gotdamn nerves, haha. I always thought he was written well, as a sort of spineless, carefree, spoiled “golden boy” type of person, but it’s really cool to see him gradually becoming a more likable character as well.
He’s stood up for her before, but yeah, it took time. His relationship with her wasn’t good, and Sal and Walky are both learning to love one another. It’s nice to see.
Even in really unrealistic settings, Willis characters tend to act pretty realistically and consistently. They are very human. It’s the first thing you notice when you start reading, and it’s basically the prime reason you keep reading. He’s actually very good at what he does, which isn’t something people tend to point out about web-cartoonists, even when it’s so clearly true.
Nah, she steps in when Asher’s response to this is to pull a phone knife on Walky.
Current most likely outcome is that she beats him down but Walky stops her from impaling his hand with the knife. This somehow turns to kissing. Asher grabs the knife, possibly hurts one or both of them and flees.
Nah, Amber spirals first, then takes it out violently later.
I was hoping it’d be Walky. After all, that’s his *sister* and he’s finally starting to understand how awful this whole ordeal was to her…and trying to be a better brother. He’s also with a girl he cares about who was hurt deeply by the same incident. He’s got plenty of reason.
I think he knows it’s indefensible, judging by how he’s spinning this. I think he’s trying to apologize and doesn’t really know how to, because he’s still a bit of a jerk, so he’s being all casual and off-hand about it.
Yup. Which, in fairness to him, he was like thirteen when he did it. So, a cruel and selfish thing but still done by a child.
Amber stabbed Sal who was completely no harm to her and was already facing punishment for what she did, so while like, goddamn it Asher, this is hardly the worst thing a kid has done in DOA.
Eh, she was still in super traumatic mode while having a knife pulled on her not long before. Not saying Amber made an A-OK great call, but it’s one I can understand how things led to that.
This is honestly still worse to me, especially given he was someone Sal considered a friend, and he sold her up the river to cover his track and get some laughs. That’s more despicable to me.
She didn’t have a knife pulled on her, Ethan did. And she did it after the danger was over and Sal was restrained. Most people would be shellshocked, not stabby.
Not saying what Asher did was good, it was a betrayal to cover his tracks, but it didn’t cause permanent body damage.
Traumatic events provokes a whole range of responses, depending on a person’s personality, trauma history, and the trigger. That’s the fight, flight, and freeze response. And the traumatic event can also be something that the person witnesses happening to the other person. In this case, Amber watched her best friend be threatened with harm, froze, and then was further traumatized by her father’s cruel, psychological provocations into that response while her stress response system was highly activated. It doesn’t excuse her behavior, but her response actually makes a lot of sense for a chronically abused adolescent who experienced, in short order, her friend being taken hostage, her shame over not being able to help, and the further pressure of her father’s psychological abuse.
Amber’s was arguably worse. And for that matter so was Sal’s robbery and threatening Ethan with a knife in the first place.
But Amber wasn’t making rational decisions. She snapped, thanks to Blaine’s abuse and the immediate trauma.
Sal was acting out of desperation.
Asher called the cops on a girl he got involved in their crimes and he apparently did it in some combination of self-interest and amusement. The action might not be so bad in itself, but the justification is much worse.
And it didn’t directly cause permanent body damage, though it led to Sal getting stabbed. And the Ethan having a knife to his throat. And could very easily have led to Sal getting shot.
I’m glad Walky had someone who outranks both him and Asher on his side when he’s throwing the first punch. I’ve done that before when I was the little fish and it does not end well.
When it comes to fiction, I disagree. I have nothing to say about this except ‘Yeah, good, that’s what you get for backstabbing your friend.’ If this were IRL, I’d be more concerned, but here? Nah.
What do you suppose Walky is protecting Sal from? She seems to me not to be in any danger.
What this looks like to me not that Walky is being protective of Sal, but that he is projecting his guilt and self-loathing in a way that will not protect or help Sal in any way and is, for all he knows, contrary to her wishes.
I mean, Sal probably wouldn’t want anything to do with Asher, and she definitely wouldn’t want her brother getting his ass absolutely handed to him up and down the street by a far stronger and tougher guy, and especially not under the premise that he’s supposedly risking his neck and his good standing in the community over her figurative honor, which at this point I don’t think she values all that much in that sense. “Contrary to her wishes” seems to be almost inevitable for this kind of thing where Walky is concerned. You gotta think she doesn’t want him to learn the sort of lessons she had to learn the way that she got stuck learning them.
For that matter, she probably doesn’t want Asher beaten up and the investigation leading back to her, either.
In fact, there is no reason to suppose that she wants Walky to do any damned thing about this at all. He is meddling, in the service of his own self-regard.
Bingo. He isn’t self-aware enough to understand that, deep down, this conviction to do better by his sister and protect her is less about absolution from her, and more about absolution from himself. He feels awful now that he understands how awful his parents were to her, and he doesn’t have any of the tools he needs to process that.
Yeah, this seems about right. For all Walky’s indignation here about sal being gone for 5 years…he didn’t really try to keep in touch with sal, so who is he really mad at?
Not big on violence, especially given he does seem to feel some guilt about it, but given how many people suffered while he skirted his responsibility completely and never even tried to apologize, the nonchalance makes it sound like not *enough* guilt. It’s pretty hard for me to say he didn’t “deserve” that particular punch in the face. It’s a small price to pay compared to long-term trauma or being sent away for five years.
He is pretty damn nonchalant about it, isn’t he.
This is a pretty casual sorry, more suited for some minor childhood spat, not a life-changing betrayal.
Yeah, but the person he has to apologise to — and who has the right to decide whether his apology is flip — isn’t even here. He might address himself very differently to Sal.
It seems to me that what he was doing here was contriving a situation in which he could confess to Walky and make it seem natural. But then, I am usually wrong about Willis’ characters.
He doesn’t have to apologize to Walky, but if we’re using his apology to guess at where he stands now, how serious he seems to take it is one of the things we’ve got to go on.
I was hoping it’d be Walky who lashed out. Of all the options, this seems the most acceptable (and least likely to spiral). Asher may even accept that he deserved it.
Maybe violence is sometimes the answer, but it wasn’t here. What Asher did was wrong, but it was something that he did five years ago as a dumb kid and had just freely confessed to and apologized for. Sal’s a great character, but she messed up. She held someone hostage at knifepoint even after the person she was trying to rob gave her a chance to get away scotfree. And Asher’s choice to call the police didn’t get a knife pulled on Ethan and give Amber PTSD – Sal did that when she chose to pull a knife instead of running away.
That’s some infuriatingly dumb reasoning that only a 13 year old would likely come up with. I guess he didn’t watch enough cop shows to realize that the first thing the cops would do when they arrested Sal was to try to get her to snitch on the rest of her gang. That and it wouldn’t take rocket science for Sal to figure out she was ratted out.
Sure, which is also how we know that Sal didn’t figure out Asher called the police at that time. It was still a stupid risk for Asher. Instead of throwing the cops off their trail, Sal’s arrest brought Asher closer to getting caught than he would have been otherwise.
But do we KNOW he wasn’t caught? If he was, he would have been let out at eighteen, like most juveniles, and his record would be at least as sealed as Sal’s, who as we know is also a student here (although she’s got the dean as family friend, so that might not be indicative)
Asher only robbed a shop. He hasn’t held a kid at knife point. If the first robbery was without violence, he probably would have gotten a shorter sentence. Maybe even probation. He was a kid, too and his crime most likely wasn’t as severe as sals
In Asher’s robbery, there were adults involved. This automatically would have made him less culpable in the eyes of the law than them.
But as Sal’s not a girl to tell tales, she didn’t set the cops on them and if he had trouble with the law, it wasn’t because of the robbery where Sal was the lookout.
Interesting. She was given the money and she was told to keep the knife. I always thought she got the knife before, as a part of her job as a lookout. It might as well be passed over though.
It’s possible, but while it might or might not be sealed, it seems like it would have been mentioned before. Sal’s never said anything about it. It’s never come up in any of the other mentions of Sal’s robberies. He doesn’t even hint at it here.
Sal didn’t seem to realise it at the time that she was ratted out at least from what we saw. She may have assumed that the police were screening stores after the first robbery and that she just got unlucky. She may have figured it out since, but we know she hadn’t figured it out right then and there as she just seemed confused by their presence.
I’m hoping Walky leaves it at this, because THIS he absolutely deserved. Anything more would be overkill coming from someone who wasn’t personally impacted.
He may have been personally impacted, but Walky sure as shit didn’t show any of that until now. As far as we know, he barely if it all kept in contact with sal after she left, because Sal was “too complicated”. And he certainly didn’t try to punch his parents for sending her away, i.e. the people who were actually responsible for sending her away.
The impact on Walky is clearly more guilt than anything else. He’s punching to cover for his own feeling of having let sal down.
No, Asher didn’t even deserve this first punch. I think it’s a good thing for Walky’s character and is probably going to make the story more interesting, but this punch was five years after the fact and immediately after Asher just apologized. It didn’t seem like Asher was being a dick, just admitting that he was a stupid 13 kid who made the right decision for awful reasons.
He admitted to it when he got away completely clean and didn’t have to, and openly admitted he was wrong (with “I didn’t say it *was* funny”). He still could’ve handled this entire thing better but I think he’s genuinely trying and he doesn’t deserve to be punched for that.
He didn’t make the ‘right’ decision, he threw his ‘friend’ under the bus for something he was also involved in and got away with no consequences for it which is entirely selfish then casually dropped it like ‘yeah, I was stupid right?’ Which is a completely tactless way to handle something that got someone sent away for 5 years and is absolutely not something you send an apology for through their sibling.
Kind of completely understandable why Walky would punch him with the way he delivered this information.
He called the cops on someone who pulled a knife and took a hostage. That’s the right decision.
His reason was because she would be a fallguy who would let the rest of them get away. That’s a garbage reason.
And yeah, it’s understandable what Walky did. But that doesn’t mean that it was the right thing to do. There’s no way the story would go that way, but in real life, Walky could easily get arrested for sucker punching someone like that.
Asher absolutely deserved to get arrested along with Sal, and I understand why Walky punched him, but I still don’t think punching him was the right thing to do. Now… calling the cops and telling them about someone of interest in a robbery case from a few years back? Yeah, Asher deserves that.
Asher didn’t call the cops on Sal for taking a hostage. She didn’t take a hostage until AFTER the cops showed up. And if Asher called the cops on Sal for robbing a place at knifepoint, all I can say is ‘you should fucking talk’.
Like I said, his reason was garbage. He had no idea he was doing the right thing, but she was already trying to commit armed robbery, and she had been given an out.
Honestly, if anyone in Sal’s life deserves a punch five years after the fact, it’s her mom.
If he had no idea she took a hostage (which he didn’t, because he called the cops before she did that) then he doesn’t get credit for calling the cops because she took a hostage. That’s just how linear time works. And as for trying to commit armed robbery, again, Asher should fucking talk.
I’m not saying he gets credit for it. Calling the cops on Sal was a good thing, but he had no way of knowing that and he did it for entirely self-serving reasons. He lucked into the right course of action, and I’d even say that while he had no way of knowing, it was even the best thing for Sal since it got her away from her parents and Asher’s crowd.
I’d compare it to some idiot trying to SWAT somebody, only for it to turn out that there was a serious crime in progress. The person who called SWAT was completely in the wrong, but it somehow ended up being the right thing to do despite their crap intentions.
Except the hostage only got taken because the cops showed up and was released before they actually could do anything, so you can’t even say Asher calling the cops accidentally saved Ethan.
Before the cops showed up, the clerk was seriously non-threatened and trying to talk Sal down. The sirens hit the parking lot, Sal grabbed Ethan, flashbacked to Leland hurting Marcie and let him go all before the police were able to interfere. At least that’s what I’ve been able to piece together from the various flashbacks.
It’s a weird argument to have. He called the cops on Sal to save his own skin and as a result escalated a situation that was otherwise handled by the clerk telling Sal to leave without issue.
The main issue people seem to have is that he smiles like his dumb mistake is some cute memory to laugh at rather than an indirect cause for one person’s personal trauma and another person’s sibling’s trauma. This is while both of the people in front of him are visibly outraged. Introspective or not that smile seems disrespectful to the weight of the conversation.
It’s fictional violence so I’m fine with cheering either way.
He called *before* a hostage was taken and gets absolutely 0 credit for it being the ‘right thing’ when he himself committed a robbery and threw Sal under the bus for it. THAT ISN’T WHAT THE RIGHT THING TO DO IS.
The right thing to do would have been NOT COMMIT ROBBERY.
The right thing to do after committing a robbery would be GIVING THE MONEY BACK AND TURNING HIMSELF IN.
The right thing to do is not BLAME MY FRIEND SO I GET NO CONSEQUENCES FOR A CRIME I WAS MORE A PART OF THAN HER.
He didn’t have a guarantee that she was even going to go ahead to try to commit a second robbery, she could have changed her damn mind and walked out. So this had absolutely nothing to do with doing the ‘right thing’, it was purely an act of selfishness so that he wouldn’t get caught himself.
Like I will admit that punching him isn’t exactly a good thing to do, but don’t try to sell me this idea that Asher was trying to be ‘good’ or ‘righteous’ by calling the police on Sal. He was being a selfish prick of a 13 year old and that has nothing to do with whether it was right or wrong, it was entirely about self-preservation.
Never said he was good or righteous. Calling the cops ended up being the right thing to do, but he had no way of knowing that and did it entirely for self-serving reasons. I’m not saying he did the right thing in a ‘oh, look at how noble 13-year-old Asher was!’, but in a ‘how does a boy make all the wrong choices and still have good things happen as a result?’. It’s like a student trying to add 2 and 2, deciding to do it by taking the square root of -19, and still somehow ending up with 4. The only credit I’ll give him is that he got lucky in that calling the cops ended up being a good thing, since it led to Sal getting away from her crappy homelife. That may not have necessarily led her into becoming the most mentally healthy person at first, but at least post-boarding school Sal isn’t the sort of person who would decide to take a random person hostage just because she’s angry at the world. I don’t blame any of Amber’s trauma on Asher calling the cops, either – that happened because Sal and then Amber both let their emotions control their actions (and because Blaine is one of the worst parents ever).
As for punching Asher, I think it’s the wrong thing because:
1) the punch was for something that happened five years ago when he was a stupid teenager
2) the potential consequences for Walky outweigh the catharsis
3) Asher had just apologized (and I didn’t interpret the smile as flippant, just thoughtful)
4) the punch was from behind.
I think this is a word argument. Most of the comment section is using “right” as in “good values” and you’re using it as “proper” in terms of his actions and “good” in terms of consequences. Which – consequentialism can go take a hike and has no bearing on morality or propriety. Two people who drive home equally drunk and one hits a jay walker does not make the second one more awful of a person. They had more awful consequences. Two people who stop to help a homeless man who is in the process of overdosing and one succeeds and the other one accidentally triggers him to commit suicide… both are proper but one did not have good consequences. It’s why we say intent matters but harm is still harm. It definitely means something to not be malicious but the road to hell is led by good intentions and people can still make lemons into lemonade.
Him doing a proper societal action to cover for the actions he implicated her in for selfish reasons that could have ended tragically for someone he KNEW was marginalized but didn’t end up with worse scenario and had some fringe benefits isn’t any definition of good. ALSo, getting away from family is tangentially good but you’re ignoring the hints we got about boarding school and the degeneration of her relationship with her brother and being taken away from her closest friend. Good would have been a welfare check, community service and WORKING therapy versus the garbage she got, ongoing contact with her brother and the community realizing the tragedy that was the catalyst for this and coming together to help Marcie regardless of other consequences. Private school/court decisions equated to her sneaking out, learning bass by herself so she wouldn’t have to learn piano, her family further ostracizing her instead of buying a clue, anger management issues, trauma around her damaged hand that never got resolved despite a plethora of therapists who were never worth a damn, no support structure we can see because all authority is still awful without exception and pretty sure most people don’t think losing virginity to apples to apples would be in most peoples highlight reel. Just because she wasn’t shot doesn’t mean it was a good ending. She’s a work in progress despite that crap sandwich. That’s just Sal! The clerk didn’t want to see her go to jail and was talking her down so the clerk didn’t like the escalation. Hell yes his actions impacted amber because they gave Sal the knife, dropped her off, and showed her the recipe for robbing. She panicked when the sirens came. Amber has a whole other identity so she could face that day and never have it happen again. Blaine did not help – but Sal was the enemy she fixated on and stalked because it was her origin story. It was the beginning of her DID as we know it due to how she internalized that stabbing. That is some serious picking and choosing of that mixed bag of results to call all that good to say what Asher can justly be held accountable for and not and laying the good on his step while side stepping every bad as not directly him. None of the good was either! If she was shot would it have been directly him? Still a consequence from his call.
Also – it’s not like getting Sal out of the house stopped Sal’s parents from abusing her. “Ah’m not gonna hear another lecture from my folks about how ah’m a failure” anyone?
Not jail. Especially since she was a juvenile. I believe the canon is that the Walkerton’s sent her away to that other school (boarding school?) for five years, much like Trump’s parents sent him off to a military academy to keep him out of serious trouble when he was thirteen.
We have no way of knowing what would have happened if the police hadn’t shown, but the cashier gave Sal a chance to get away when they heard the sirens. Sal chose to escalate. Honestly, I think that if she hadn’t taken Ethan hostage then, she would have just hurt someone else down the line. She was in a really bad state of mind, one of her parents was uninvolved and the other actively hated her, and she was desperate to do something to help Marcie.
Could it be? A “bad person” in Dumbing of Age who stops short of Blainery? Who recognizes his mistakes and shows depth and complexity to his bad behavior, who is capable of apologizing while still not *really* apologizing because life isn’t split up neatly between fully good people and fully bad people? Aside from Raidah, I mean?
I’m not dragging Willis, I actually just really like this new character. I like that quiet, half-contrite “I didn’t say it was funny.” It’s a dimensionality I enjoy in characters.
Now watch as next comic Asher gets mad and is like “I tried to apologize but I guess you forced my hand” and cuts off Walky’s arm or something, just to reassert the Toedad-Dorothy Morality Scale.
For the record, I get where Walky’s coming from here. I might’ve been the baby out of us, but if anyone hurts any of my sisters, even the evangelical bongo who thinks my fiancee will “pollute our family’s bloodline”, they should start praying to whichever god will take their soul, for their ass belongs to me.
Soo to get them off his trail, he basically gave the police his fingerprints on the money, a hint on where to look for him and a big motivation to look for him (as a possible associate in a hostage situation)?
Good job.
It is highly unlikely the police would be able to find his fingerprint on money that wasn’t freshly printed. It would be too obscured by the other fingerprints on it, including Sal’s. Money gets handled by way too many hands for fingerprints to be useful on them.
Sal stuffed it away pretty fast, so she probably didn’t smear them. She was busy admining the knife. And taking fingerprints from money is a bit tricky but possible.
Her fingerprints could have easily ended up on top of his. We don’t know if Sal fiddled with the money in her pocket during the car ride either or how many people had touched it. If 100 people have touched it, they wouldn’t be able to isolate Asher’s fingerprint, there would be too many overlapping and obscuring each other.
If it was freshly printed from an ATM right outside the store then used inside the store, that’d be a different story as then there are only 4-5 possible sets of fingerprints on it and they could get lucky in finding a clear print from Asher or his brother not overlapping with the others.
But even if they did find his fingerprints on the money – shockingly, that wouldn’t prove he stole it. It would prove he touched it. And unbelievably, money is used for purchases. So they would have to literally prove he was involved with the theft, and then present then fingerprints as FURTHER proof of that if they were able to isolate any. They wouldn’t prove he stole it by themselves because well, look at the purpose of money. Money tends to travel through a lot of hands and he could argue, even if it was complete nonsense, that he helped people pick up money they dropped a lot which would be very difficult to contest if your only proof was that he touched this money someone else had on their person.
That said, for all I know he is perfectly sincere in having left his old lief behind. Sal did, after all. We also don’t know what repercussions the robbery had for him.
Still, a punch from Walky felt like the appropriate response.
From his cavalier attitude here, I suspect none. If he left his old life behind, I suspect he sees it as some crazy stuff he did as a kid and still tells stories and laughs about.
Maybe now Asher is going to reconsider his supposition that Walky and Amber were staking him out to see whether he is still a bad guy. Perhaps now he will suppose that they were trying to ambush him and beat him up in revenge for what he did five years ago, when he was thirteen.
Yes, but I’m considering what Asher knew in the day-before-yesterday’s strip, not what he knows as a result of today’s strip.
When Asher said “you two are on stakeout, aren’t you. Checking to see if I’m still a bad guy” he didn’t know how Walky was going to react when he confessed. At that time it was an unlikely and benign supposition to make. Far the more obvious and likely would have been to suppose that Walky and Amber were intent on revenge (“punishment”), and were there to ambush him or case out his situation.
I don’t read his smile that way. I read it as wryly regretful. But probably this just puts another nail in the coffin of my track record for interpreting Willis’ situations.
You know, I can’t blame him for the way he apologized. As far as he knows, his decision to call the cops on Sal five years ago only resulted in her being sent to boarding school. He didn’t know about the hostage stuff, the knife, the stabbing, and all the trauma that one event caused.
And that’s perfectly understandable. His lax attitude about it is due to his ignorance of what that one event caused. Walky’s reaction is understandable, but punching him isn’t gonna do much. Finger’s crossed that Ash just reacts with a ‘Yeah I probably had that coming’. He doesn’t deserve an ass beating though, let’s be real.
It’s kind of good to know that, even outside of the Walkyverse, Walky still has a berserk button. God help you if you push it by hurting the ones that he loves!
Meanwhile, I’m expecting Amber to prove that she isn’t a monster by stopping Walky from killing Asher.
Indeed. Although, I’m quite curious how Asher will react to that punch. If he knows he deserves it and doesn’t retaliate… well, I guess that will prove to me that he’s really turned over a new leaf.
I have a question:
For those that feel Walky is justified in this sucker punch:
Is/would Walky have also been justified sucker-punching Amber once he learned she was the one that caused severe, permanent injury to his sister’s hand?
This is an interesting question… I think at this point it’s less about what they did five years ago, and more about their current attitude towards it. Imagine if Amber had been all “you know how your sister always wears gloves? That was me, lol”. Totally punchable.
Or if Amber had been like “So after I stabbed your sister I decided that I should dress up as a super hero and violently attack people at night! Including your sister some more!”
I have zero problems with men punching women depending on circumstance. This isn’t a Sean Connery moment or domestic violence validation. This is a – people are people and your chromosomes aren’t what determine culpability and retribution. Their chosen behavior and my own ability to parse and react rationally in the moment versus going to punchy are determining factor. (Said as a woman, who has been punched by men and has punched men and women mostly in consensual settings… a couple times in defense and once in anger as a teen and that last one is super my bad and never okay even if circumstances make it understandable.
Makes sense. Men punching women is justifiable under basically the same situations that men punching men is. Mostly, you shouldn’t be punching anyone, but men getting punched is more likely to excused.
IMO, Asher deserves this one (1) punch. After all, as much as he was a kid and he might have changed por the better, his betrayal ended severely agravating the lives of at least three other kids who were already in delicate situations while he (seemingly, as of now) left unscathed of that mess.
In the other hand, this situation is getting quickly out of control and if Amber and Walky don’t get a hold of themeselves they’ll make things more complicated than they already are for everyone.
Gonna take an unpopular position on this. That punch was unwarranted.
Is Amber and Walky going to actually blame Asher for calling the cops and stopping a robbery?
What if that clerk actually had a gun behind the counter?
Or if Sal had made a mistake and hurt herself or him with that knife?
We, the readers, know the actual reasons why Sal robbed that store and why Amber reacted the way she did. Those have very little to do with the cops showing up.
Lets not forget that there was other people in that store as well. The clerk, for example. If the cops hadn’t come, anything could have happened.
Asher, for his own weasely reasons, stopped a crime.
Granted though, the consequences of this robbery was really bad, with nobody really being helped from it.
Ah, but you see: “weasely” is the operative word here.
He didn’t do it to stop a crime. He did it because he thought it’d be funny. And he also used Sal as a decoy to stop cops from getting him caught. Such reasons do deserve anger…
There was no one else besides those three kids and the clerk and the clerk was being pretty successful talking her down. Clerk had bullet proof glass and was more worried for Sal.
Oh, bullshit. Asher doesn’t get brownie points for ‘stopping a crime’ that he was only too happy to commit himself for shits and giggles. “But what if the clerk had a gun” doesn’t work when calling the cops could very easily ALSO have gotten Sal shot. Or are we forgetting the clerk saying “Oh, hon, run. They’re not going to see YOU as a kid.”
The anger against Asher in this comment section is misplaced.
None of what happened after Asher called the cops is his fault. It was still Sal who took Ethan hostage. It was still Sal’s parents who treated her shittily, before and after. It is on the police that they didn’t actually make sure she got help. It is on Blaine for abusing Amber and not getting her psychological help after the hostage situation.
And, I mean, how do you THINK this little robbing spree would have ended?
It kind of is on Asher. I mean, did his actions stop more, possibly worse crimes? Maybe. Has Sal turned her life around? Yes. Was that Asher’s intention?
Hell NO.
He even admits it was to cover his own ass, and partly for laughs. The fact that any “good” (which I use lightly here) came out of that has nothing to do with Asher. And if he really wants to apologize to Sal, he needs to apologize to her, not ask her brother to do it for him.
I repeat: None of the bad stuff that happened (listed in the previous post) is on Asher.
You say the good stuff isn’t. That’s correct. But the bad stuff isn’t either.
I had this same thought. The gas station person told her to run and even warned her that they wouldn’t treat her like a child when they heard the sirens. Shitty thing that Asher did, but not his fault that either of those things happened. Still amber and Walky’s response is really realistic bc it’s way easier to blame this neutral third party than to feel the pain of people you love betraying your dependence on them (parents)
Sal is responsible for herself. That said – Asher is the reason Sal became apart of the robberies to begin with. He added her to the team. So yes, a lot of this is on Asher too. He’s also why she smokes.
But that wasn’t the point of contention. People were alleging that Asher calling the cops is directly responsible for the Ethan hostage situation, Amber’s trauma and Sal being sent away. None of that is true.
Actually he gave her the knife which led to her ability to execute that and he holding a hostage was a response to her hearing the sirens according to trauma flashbacks.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by “directly responsible”, but it certainly was a major factor in it happening.
Letting her keep the knife looks a lot more suspicious if he was already planning to throw her to the cops for a joke. And that did lead directly to the Ethan hostage situation.
The point wasn’t that Sal isn’t responsible for her own decisions. It was that Asher was culpable in her making them and setting up the situation because it keeps being claimed Sal did all of that on her own and Asher didn’t contribute. She didn’t come up with the ideas on her own. She didn’t even provide the weapon on her own.
We’ll leave out that it was Asher that led Sal into robberies in the first place, which is a much better reason to blame him. (And told her to keep the knife, which helped prompt her to try on her own – I wonder if there was more to his “get them off our trail” than he’s admitting?)
But Walky doesn’t know any of that.
Mostly I think it’s his attitude towards it. Yeah, he apologized, but he did so casually. He betrayed his supposed friend for his own skin and a cheap laugh and that led, admittedly indirectly, to life-changing consequences and he’s just like “oops, sorry. guess it wasn’t funny”.
Hmm, thinking a little more.
Maybe Asher didn’t have a clue Sal was going to rob the other store. Maybe he just set the cops on her for the first robbery – a tip off and she gets caught with a big wad of cash and a knife. That’s enough.
That she did try to rob the other place was just coincidence.
I have a faint reminder of the cops coming in with lights on and sirens blaring? Would they do that if it wasn’t a “robbery in progress” situation? Also, on rereading nobody is shown handing Sal a knife after the fact (unnamed dude hands her some money, but no knife), so maybe it wasn’t used in the active part of the robbery at all?
Yes, what I mean is that they might have given it to her BEFORE the robbery, not after. We specifically see unnamed dude handing her cash, but no knife being passed around.
One of my first thoughts was that Walky might get expelled for this. Then I realized that his mom used to be involved with the dean (married, even?), and that that would probably mean that he would only get a very stern talking to…
Okay – with me – Asher isn’t responsible for other people’s actions. But he is responsible for his own, including being the main factor of Sal’s slip and slide when he was the main “support” in the Marcie vs Linda struggle. He got Sal cigarettes, he invited her to be part of the robberies, he gave her the knife, and then he gave her the fall. He had a direct hand in escalating her desperation. Yes, He did this as a 13 yr old and we haven’t seen his true remorse level or unveiling of the middle years like Sal. He did dumb kid things to a shitty degree most people don’t touch and most people get a chance to prove they changed with time – but ignoring his “mentor ship” and thinking Sal would have gone that route without support and affirmation… is a bit of a stretch for a girl who focuses on justice. It also ignores the problem that just because someone changes doesn’t mean you have to forgive them. Add in sibling “righteous” rage and his delivery – yeah this interaction was going to be this explosive no matter the direction.
As soon as I saw the strip, I had a feeling today’s comments were going to be a case-study for protagonist-based morality. It’s amazing the amount of times I’m not wrong.
Good point- as someone mentioned above, would anyone accept the punch reasoning if Walky had punched Amber for stabbing Sal? Probably not, because Amber is a main character and we’ve seen a lot about her.
With Asher, all we have is speculation about his level of remorse based on a handful of strips and a possibly smug smile, which is leading to a lot of different conclusions.
Some of this might be differences in how we’re reading Asher’s facial cues, not protagonist centered morality. If you’re thinking he’s remorseful and I’m thinking he’s smug, that changes how we react to Walky’s punch.
Yeah, that definitely changes things if his tone is smug and flippant like some people here seem to think. (My main gripe against the punch in that case is just that it was a sucker punch. I honestly think calling up the cops and telling them about a person of interest in a robbery a few years ago would have been better and more just than a punch, but Walky isn’t the sort of person to do that. That’s more of a Dorothy solution.)
I’ve just re-read the comic, and it doesn’t look at all like the police have shown up at the point that Sal took a hostage. She did it in response to playing being told the cashier was behind bullet-proof glass.
They’ve got the timeline of events entirely wrong, I think.
You’ve got to piece together the flashbacks. That was the initial impression. In the flashback in Flying to the Red that shows Asher’s involvement, we see it’s actually in response to the sirens.
We also see in a couple of panels at the end of the Amber/Sal fight that she let Ethan go moments later, apparently seeing herself in Leland’s role.
Btw, since we’re revisiting the event, I’d like to send a shout-out to the convenience store clerk, who must be THE NICEST PERSON EVER. I hope they are living a long and happy life in which they won the lotto and had the money to make all of their dreams come true.
It can be both you know.
I mean, I wouldn’t really have anything against some random character calling the police on Sal for going into a store with a big knife planning to rob it.
Asher gets blame because of the hypocrisy and his motives.
Asher was being insensitive to how Walky would react to the news. (Asher has no idea about Amber’s involvement.) Walky was being impluseively violent. Both are in the wrong.
Maybe Asher deserved that punch for what he did to Sal. Yeah, it was five years ago, he was thirteen and stupid, but still… If Asher had not been punched, that would have been better and more mature, but this is DUMBING of Age and the actions are in character for both Asher and Walky.
If Asher gets up and smiles with an “I totally deserved that” (to echo Arianod’s comment above), then the immediate matter is settled. If he gets angry or violent, then he is being stupid. On the other hand, if Asher more sincerely apologizes and realizes how insensitive he was, much, though not all, can be forgiven.
If Walky escalates this any further without provocation, he is being stupid. If he stands down and listens to Asher, then the punch can be forgiven.
Oddly (or amusingly – in a positive character development way) Amber needs to be the adult and keep this from escalating further.
I think this is the best comment anyone’s written on this so far. I’ve been discussing whether or not the punch was deserved from a right or wrong point of view, but you’re right – from a story point of view, that punch was great.
Blown away by the comments here today. Asher got Sal into robbing stores, gave her a weapon, then called the cops on her* explicitly to get them off his back and for a laugh, but he can’t be held accountable for any of the consequences? Really revealing who y’all are quick to assign agency to and whom you exonerate.
*N.b., as BBCC pointed out, that Sal is a black kid and could have very easily been shot. Asher, through malice or ignorance, put her in great danger in addition to leading her into a dangerous habit.
I like how you accuse people on being iffy on agency attribution while ignoring the fact that Sal chose to rob that second convenience store and put a knife to a kid’s neck all on her own.
I don’t ignore it and neither did Sal. She was responsible for that and literally no one said it was okay for her to hold Ethan hostage. But Asher is directly responsible for endangering Sal’s life and he doesn’t seem to get that. You’re proving my point by whatabouting about Sal’s actions which have already been addressed and atoned for when I say that people here are giving Asher a pass no one (rightly) wanted to give Sal.
Literally no-one’s giving Asher a pass. Unless I’ve missed a comment, no-one is saying that calling the cops on Sal wasn’t a shitty move.
And I’m glad that we finally found the point where people don’t give Sal a pass, though I had my hopes that it would have been a weeeeee bit higher than “putting a knife to an innocent’s throat”. There were certainly a lot of Sal passes thrown around when she called Malaya saying she wanted to make nice and immediately proceeded to insult her and then physically assault her. The only thing the commentariat likes more than giving Sal passes is shitting on Roz.
lol scroll up, I just re-read the argument about how calling the cops on Sal was A Good Thing and good for her too actually except Asher did it for The Wrong Reasons
Really? So, when faced with the uncrossable barrier that is the bulletproof glass, which do you think it’s more likely, seeing as it’s SAL we’re talking about here:
a) she says, “oh well, I tried”, goes home and tosses the knife in the nearest trashbin;
b) she goes for the hostage move anyway; or
c) she tries robbing a different convenience store and instead of the cashier being Mr. Rogers they’re a second ammendment nutjob who pulls a gun from behind the counter and shoots her in the face because they got an excuse?
Out of curiosity, what good did the cops actually accomplish there?
They didn’t stop her from robbing the place – she was already pretty well stymied.
They didn’t save Ethan – she released him on her own before they could intervene.
I guess if she’d run out, she might have tried again.
I stand by that, too, though I think some people might have misunderstood my point. Separate the cops being called, what happened to Sal, and Asher’s motivations for a moment.
Asher’s motivations were garbage. Full stop. I don’t think anyone will argue this point.
The cops being called was good. Pretend this was a few days ago, when we could assume it was a random bystander who called the cops. If there is a robbery in progress, the cops being called is generally considered to be a good thing. The fact that it was a 13 year old black girl does not change things. The motives of the caller don’t change the fact that this was a situation that should have seen police involvement. Sal is one of my favorite characters, but at that point, she was a dangerous criminal. If the cops had been violent or unreasonable, I would have a different opinion, but when the cops showed up, they did nothing wrong.
What happened to Sal was a good thing. Yeah, the cops being called could have ended horribly, but it didn’t. She didn’t go to jail – she went to boarding school. When you’ve just committed armed robbery and taken a hostage, that’s a pretty positive outcome. That led to her getting away from an awful set of parents and growing into someone who has normal person levels of insecurity and issues, not criminal ragemonster levels of insecurity and issues. JBento is right – if she hadn’t been stopped then, given everything we know about her, it seems pretty likely she would have done something else that could have ended up with her or someone else dead or seriously injured.
seriously, I’m shocked. Asher deserves to get punched and then some. Full stop. He’s like, definitively a shitty dude. He’s showing no real remorse. And what the hell would cops or any other “legitimate” authority do about the situation *now*? Nothing! SO PUNCH THE BASTARD TIL HIS FACE IS PULP
so now asher is gonna hook up with Ryan and then they’ll team up with the awful alliance that’s forming between Blaine and Toedad and form the “Legion of Fuckbois”
So am I forgetting something? Or did Asher not actually know Sal was going to rob the place? Did he simply call the cops on her as a diversion after giving her the knife? I mean unless I missed something. So if Sal hadn’t decide to rob the place (which Asher had no way of knowing one way or the other) he had simply called the police and told them he saw a black girl go into a convenience store with a knife (that he gave her that she didn’t ask for) http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-9-comic/01-flyin-to-the-red/lookout-2/
Just realized Walky is channeling some serious Joyce turmoil right here. *sprains wrist on toe dad* later realizing everything going downhill: “Because I AM Angry”… they are on a parallel path even if their romantic entanglement will not be revisited.
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I saw “pow” and went oh shit is Amber gonna hit him? This wasn’t where I saw it going
Just in case anyone didn’t know:
Public service announcement
A sucker-punch can kill.
In Australia between 2010 and 2014, 91 people were killed in “one punch attacks”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucker_punch#As_a_crime
Any sufficiently hard blunt force trauma can kill, especially to the head.
Yes, and a punch, just one punch, can be sufficiently hard.
Do not do this for shits and giggles
I am well aware, which is why I said it can be any sufficient blunt force trauma, not just a sucker punch. Don’t fuck around with throwing punches, especially to the head.
I am glad that we are in vigorous agreement.
Yeah, fictional punches are fine. Real punches? Not so much.
Just so. This is a comic strip, where superheroing on the backs of speeding cars doesn’t end up with you going under the wheels of the car behind, and a smack-down drag-out fight between Amber and Sal on a flight of concrete stairs doesn’t end up with broken ribs, concussions, and teeth knocked out. It is even worth considering the stratagem of turning into a Utahraptor.
But out here in the real world? The common belief that punching someone in the head will at worst put them to sleep for twenty minutes, the game of sucker-punching strangers outside nightclubs because it’s funny to watch them twitch, besides demonstrating large-testicled manliness? Those things get people killed, or crippled for life.
Yeah, real punches are not fun.
@Agemegos:
That’s a thing? People get more crazy ideas then I could ever imagine.
I always thought the ‘ oh sorry, I just punched once and now she’s dead’ trope was just one of the many lies guys tell to avoid responsibility. There are actually proven cases of that? Every story from the last ten years I can remember from German media where people died from fistfights involved more than one punch.
@CJ
It happens. A couple years back in my town, guy went into a coma after being punched once in the back of the head while he was just sitting at a bar minding his own business. He hasn’t woken up and it’s increasingly looking like he just won’t ever.
All because this town has two football teams, and tribal mindsets make violence between supporters common.
@CJ Yes, it absolutely is a thing. Here is a news article about an event in Sydney some years ago. The main story is about a young man killed by a single punch and the ensuing fall. It notes that another man was in the same hospital the same night who had been punched 25 times in the head but who was discharged in the morning.
We had a case in Queensland (the state adjacent to the north of where I live) in which a fellow was charged with manslaughter after he killed his brother’s ex-wife’s father, who had come to collect his (the victim’s) grandchild after a weekend with their father. He claimed in his defence that he could not reasonably have expected one punch to kill a man, and was acquitted. So the victim’s daughter started a public awareness campaign, with the aim of making it impossible to succeed at that claim again.
The D&D model of accumulating damage is mostly wrong: people are not trees. When people are violently killed, it is usually because one of the attacks has caused a fatal injury. There is nothing to prevent the first, or the only, attack from being the one. Besides which, people who are knocked down by a punch sometimes strike their heads in their falls.
Blows to the head are especially dangerous. Even if the bones of the skull are not broken, the brain can be damaged by concussion if the head is either sharply accelerated or rapidly rotated. Also, there can be injuries to the neck, causing e.g. paraplegia or quadriplegia.
Actually, the D&D model is actually pretty accurate for that–characters in D&D really have three health descriptors: Fine (“1 or more hit points”), Incapacitated (“0 hp, or maybe some negative amount depending on edition”), and Dead. Any blow that doesn’t knock you out at least (and which has a high probability of killing you if it does) is going to leave you largely unimpaired in the long run, but may make you more vulnerable to subsequent blows because of momentary fatigue. (Essentially, hit points are less a measure of how much damage you can take, as they are a measure of your ability to cope with lesser injuries, combined with your luck in evading serious damage.)
Some what. Though it doesn’t really work as well when you’re mostly dealing with bladed weapons and things and they’re actually hurting you. And screws it all up by making non-magical healing treat them as serious wounds not just momentary fatigue.
Plus, while I haven’t been in serious fights, I’ve gotten hurt often enough to know there’s a lot of space between “Fine” and “Incapacitated”. Even minor injuries can put you at a serious handicap, without leaving you unable to act at all.
@CJ
Every story from the last ten years I can remember from German media where people died from fistfights involved more than one punch.
You must have somehow missed this story, which was on every media after it happened.
@Amazi-Stool: You are right, I had forgotten about that one.
(Just proves memory bias, I suppose, i.e. we tend to remember things that match our world view better than those not fitting in).
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who attacked someone else physically without having been attacked by that party first and it ends in the attacked person dying should be handled as murderer with at least 15 years. 3 years is a joke.
While true, look at the last panel closely – unless it got edited a bit afterward, it looks like he nailed him in the cheek, given the flush of red there. Definitely could’ve been “staged” a bit better if that’s the case, though.
Looks to me like he hit his from behind. But that doesn’t matter; a hit on the cheek that slew’s a person’s head around like that and knocks them off their feet can inflict fatal or crippling injuries to the brain or neck.
uggh, typos.
In addition, it looks like the punch threw him off balance. He appears to be falling. He is standing near steps, a low wall, and a whole bunch of concrete. If he falls and hits his head, that will cause added damage and can also result in death. Lots of solid things to impact as well as sharp edges.
I can’t tell which what Asher is facing.
Panels 4 and 6 of the last strip show him as having his back to Walky and Amber and looking over his left shoulder to address them, and that’s what I thought we had in frames 2, 4, and 5 here. And if that’s right Walky punched him in the back of the head or the neck, by surprise.
But I guess it’s possible that Asher turned back to face Amber and Walky, and then turned his head to the right while casting his eyes left to look at them sidelong. And in that case Walky might have struck him in the cheek. But that seems like a very strange thing for Asher to have done.
Dammit!
“which way Asher is facing”
Asher was 3/4 back turned to Walky. Walky either hit him in the cheek from behind (over the shoulder) or Walky stepped around and hit him in the face from the front. The position of the cigarette suggests the latter.
Also calling the cops on a person of color. Potential Death Sentence.
I know it’s not funny, but my mind leapt right to “One Punch Man!” as a response and now I feel like a heel.
Though usually, its not the punch that’s lethal. The punch renders a person unconscious, and then they fall head first onto concrete that causes a fatal injury.
Wow, Walky!
That’s a helluva punch
Your avatar makes that comment read VERY differently, ValdVin.
Yeah, it’s not very attuned to today’s strip. Even less so if you know the source.
DUDE
Sal, later, unironically: “good job, bro”
That is some quality sibling bonding.
Tbh I still see them reconciling somehow.
they are guys and i think asher knows what he did to deserve this so i agree
He _doesn’t_ deserve this. The incident was years ago, he was 13, and now he’s apologizing for it.
He may well turn out to be still a dickhead later in this storyline, but for now, as far as these characters know, he’s basically Sal.
Until he apologizes to Sal, he abso-fucking-lutely DOES deserve this and more. Walky’s sticking up for his sister rather than being this asshat’s errand boy, and hopefully getting sucker-punched will knock some sense into him.
I think their point is that Sal only actually apologized literally, like, last chapter.
In Sal’s defence, she only found out who Amber and Ethan were in that same chapter.
Yeah, Sal was clearly remorseful, but you can’t very well direct an apology to someone without knowing who to give it to.
As for Asher, oof. He didn’t know Sal went to this college, I think, unless I am misreading his previous statements, so maybe he simply hasn’t had the opportunity to apologize, but he sure seems pretty blase about all this.
I mean, he comes from a background where he was knocking over corner stores as a pre-teen. It probably was a blase part of his life.
He never apologized to Sal. He does deserve anger. He even basically just admitted that he’s not really sorry, only sorry that thirteen year old him did something wrong. Only it’s not a normal thirteen year old blunder, it is a huge Real World Thing.
Asher is a dude that thinks it was okay to do some horrible trauma because he was young.
I would take his apology more seriously if he weren’t smirking in panel 2.
I didn’t take it as a smirk. I thought it was more of a self-depreciating smile. Sort of “I was a dumb kid and did a dumb thing.” This is reinforced by his admission that the outcome wasn’t funny. He didn’t think things through when he was a kid and the end result was not what he expected it to be. He didn’t mean it to be malicious. It doesn’t excuse what happened, but at least the outcome wasn’t on purpose. And the way he appears to be acting, it may have been a wake-up call for him that turned his life around. He may come off initially as a cocky jerk, but that could be a defense mechanism for his feelings of regret.
Yeah, no, you don’t get to look back on the “dumb” (malicious, pre-planned, whole reason he gave her the knife, would’ve done whether she tried to rob another store or not) thing you did and smile when SOMEONE ELSE was the one hurt by it, unless you’ve already made amends
I didn’t say it was tactful, just not malicious. As I mentioned, he does come off as a cocky jerk.
If that qualifies as an apology to you, you really need to up your standards.
People have been losing teeth for less.
Oh no, Asher absolutely deserved that. there is no time limit on accountability.
WORLDSTAR!
*snicker*
I CALLED IT. I am vindicated.
Wish I’d logged my prediction that it was a troika & the wolves scenario, but yeah.
So like… I’m never a fan of violence, yadda yadda.
That being said… FUCK YEAH WALKY FUCK HIM UP. \o/
So, odds that Sal already figured this out and moved on?
I previously thought that she may have, but I am less sure now, especially since he’s not saying this in a way that implies to me he ever told her, and given the second panel, he was probably long gone by the time the cops got there, so the cops may have had no idea who placed the call, much less her.
BEAT HIS ASS WALKY!!!!!
GET HIS ASS
. . . Yeah he deserves that punch. Completely.
He deserves a punch, maybe. I think that’s probably for Sal to decide.
Tell me, would you say that he has got his deserts now, and no longer deserves to be punched? Or do Sal, Amber, Ethan, the super-decent clerk, Linda, Charles, Blaine, and the management of the company that owned the convenience store get to line up and take their shots?
Walky is not authorised by the laws either of God or of Man to judge what Asher deserves and to inflict the punishment.
Fuck the law
SNITCHES GET STITCHES, bongoES
wait oh my god is the bongo filter actually still a thing
why not
SNONGOES GET STONGOES
bongos get strong-blows, to the head, you see
I know! Soon we won’t be allowed to use any gendered slurs!
I’m curious if there are any other filters in place, but I don’t want to start spamming curses just to find out.
I think the Scongahorpe fillter is still in place.
It’s the name of a city in England, fer crying out loud.
It’s pronounced scun-thorpe for those who are wondering. Also spelled that way but without the hyphen.
He might’ve survived had he not smiled at the memory. That’s not the face of someone who feels remorse over their actions. As is, people will take turns punching him.
I think it was a bit of a wry, “I was a dumb kid, huh?” smile, but yeah, you’re not gonna get away with a smile of any kind when you’ve got his current “audience.”
We all did dumb things at that age. Nothing I did ended up getting someone in juvie, or a broken leg. Just hurt feelings.
There’s a way to break bad news (of one’s own making), and after five years of growing up this is the best he can come up with?
Most of us didn’t… rob convenience stores, though. Asher came from a very different experience from you and me, I’d wager.
I think him choosing to come clean at all is a pretty clear sign that he knows he fucked up and just doesn’t really know how to express that. He deserves the punch, of course. Still a jackass.
Yeah, I took the smile as him being introspective, not flippant.
I agree I think the smile is more fondly looking how far he has come. And being somewhat amused at how dumb he was. He deserves this noggin knocking perhaps but I am surprised it isnhappening now. I would not expect walkie to have an outburst like this.
I read it that way too, but my track record at reading Willis’ situations is less than good.
Amber: secretly aroused
It just makes me really REALLY happy to see Walky standing up for his sister finally.
One thing I really like about Willis’ character writing is how he handles characters starting off kinda…unlikable and annoying and then growing and developing as people. Which is always my favorite kind of character writing.
Walky used to get on my gotdamn nerves, haha. I always thought he was written well, as a sort of spineless, carefree, spoiled “golden boy” type of person, but it’s really cool to see him gradually becoming a more likable character as well.
He’s stood up for her before, but yeah, it took time. His relationship with her wasn’t good, and Sal and Walky are both learning to love one another. It’s nice to see.
Even in really unrealistic settings, Willis characters tend to act pretty realistically and consistently. They are very human. It’s the first thing you notice when you start reading, and it’s basically the prime reason you keep reading. He’s actually very good at what he does, which isn’t something people tend to point out about web-cartoonists, even when it’s so clearly true.
He’s Walky’s supervillian origin?
Today’s strip is sponsored by Pimple Popper on TLC network.
Walky DOES harbor resentment over what happened to Sal.
Can I haz flashback plz
That, or guilt and self-loathing because of his part in what happened to Sal.
WELP shit, turns out Sal didn’t get all the punching genes. Not bad, Walky.
Seriously though, Asher, you’re just lucky your little phone call didn’t get your friend shot. What the FUCK, baby Asher?
Well Asher and the rest of us did not see that coming. Would’ve thought Amber would be the one to throw the first punch.
Nah, she steps in when Asher’s response to this is to pull a
phoneknife on Walky.Current most likely outcome is that she beats him down but Walky stops her from impaling his hand with the knife. This somehow turns to kissing. Asher grabs the knife, possibly hurts one or both of them and flees.
Nah, Amber spirals first, then takes it out violently later.
I was hoping it’d be Walky. After all, that’s his *sister* and he’s finally starting to understand how awful this whole ordeal was to her…and trying to be a better brother. He’s also with a girl he cares about who was hurt deeply by the same incident. He’s got plenty of reason.
I… oh wow. I wasn’t expecting him to drop this so casually while the answer was so indefensible. Holy shit.
Fuck off, Asher. You may never have the Go Nagai robot now.
I think he knows it’s indefensible, judging by how he’s spinning this. I think he’s trying to apologize and doesn’t really know how to, because he’s still a bit of a jerk, so he’s being all casual and off-hand about it.
Yup. Which, in fairness to him, he was like thirteen when he did it. So, a cruel and selfish thing but still done by a child.
Amber stabbed Sal who was completely no harm to her and was already facing punishment for what she did, so while like, goddamn it Asher, this is hardly the worst thing a kid has done in DOA.
Eh, she was still in super traumatic mode while having a knife pulled on her not long before. Not saying Amber made an A-OK great call, but it’s one I can understand how things led to that.
This is honestly still worse to me, especially given he was someone Sal considered a friend, and he sold her up the river to cover his track and get some laughs. That’s more despicable to me.
She didn’t have a knife pulled on her, Ethan did. And she did it after the danger was over and Sal was restrained. Most people would be shellshocked, not stabby.
Not saying what Asher did was good, it was a betrayal to cover his tracks, but it didn’t cause permanent body damage.
“Most people would be shellshocked, not stabby.”
Traumatic events provokes a whole range of responses, depending on a person’s personality, trauma history, and the trigger. That’s the fight, flight, and freeze response. And the traumatic event can also be something that the person witnesses happening to the other person. In this case, Amber watched her best friend be threatened with harm, froze, and then was further traumatized by her father’s cruel, psychological provocations into that response while her stress response system was highly activated. It doesn’t excuse her behavior, but her response actually makes a lot of sense for a chronically abused adolescent who experienced, in short order, her friend being taken hostage, her shame over not being able to help, and the further pressure of her father’s psychological abuse.
Amber’s was arguably worse. And for that matter so was Sal’s robbery and threatening Ethan with a knife in the first place.
But Amber wasn’t making rational decisions. She snapped, thanks to Blaine’s abuse and the immediate trauma.
Sal was acting out of desperation.
Asher called the cops on a girl he got involved in their crimes and he apparently did it in some combination of self-interest and amusement. The action might not be so bad in itself, but the justification is much worse.
And it didn’t directly cause permanent body damage, though it led to Sal getting stabbed. And the Ethan having a knife to his throat. And could very easily have led to Sal getting shot.
Well this situation is deteriorating rapidly, on the bright side that Walky punch is super fucking satisfying.
I’m glad Walky had someone who outranks both him and Asher on his side when he’s throwing the first punch. I’ve done that before when I was the little fish and it does not end well.
This is about what I expected.
Well I got two out of three right. Amber didn’t freak out in the way I was expecting (color changing) but she IS angry at what he said.
On one hand… violence is bad.
On the other hand… protective sibling moments are good.
The Boulder feels… conflicted.
Surely it’s different with fictional violence against fictional assholes?
Cathartic violence is cathartic. This is not related to whether or not it’s bad.
When it comes to fiction, I disagree. I have nothing to say about this except ‘Yeah, good, that’s what you get for backstabbing your friend.’ If this were IRL, I’d be more concerned, but here? Nah.
Can’t put it much better than that.
What do you suppose Walky is protecting Sal from? She seems to me not to be in any danger.
What this looks like to me not that Walky is being protective of Sal, but that he is projecting his guilt and self-loathing in a way that will not protect or help Sal in any way and is, for all he knows, contrary to her wishes.
I mean, Sal probably wouldn’t want anything to do with Asher, and she definitely wouldn’t want her brother getting his ass absolutely handed to him up and down the street by a far stronger and tougher guy, and especially not under the premise that he’s supposedly risking his neck and his good standing in the community over her figurative honor, which at this point I don’t think she values all that much in that sense. “Contrary to her wishes” seems to be almost inevitable for this kind of thing where Walky is concerned. You gotta think she doesn’t want him to learn the sort of lessons she had to learn the way that she got stuck learning them.
For that matter, she probably doesn’t want Asher beaten up and the investigation leading back to her, either.
In fact, there is no reason to suppose that she wants Walky to do any damned thing about this at all. He is meddling, in the service of his own self-regard.
Bingo. He isn’t self-aware enough to understand that, deep down, this conviction to do better by his sister and protect her is less about absolution from her, and more about absolution from himself. He feels awful now that he understands how awful his parents were to her, and he doesn’t have any of the tools he needs to process that.
Yeah, this seems about right. For all Walky’s indignation here about sal being gone for 5 years…he didn’t really try to keep in touch with sal, so who is he really mad at?
I told you to grab him Amber.
I wonder if the guy is thinking, “Yeah, that tracks.”
Hooray, I feel vindicated. Get ‘im, Walky!
Oh my g o s h
I didn’t know Walky had it in him!
Not big on violence, especially given he does seem to feel some guilt about it, but given how many people suffered while he skirted his responsibility completely and never even tried to apologize, the nonchalance makes it sound like not *enough* guilt. It’s pretty hard for me to say he didn’t “deserve” that particular punch in the face. It’s a small price to pay compared to long-term trauma or being sent away for five years.
He is pretty damn nonchalant about it, isn’t he.
This is a pretty casual sorry, more suited for some minor childhood spat, not a life-changing betrayal.
Yeah, but the person he has to apologise to — and who has the right to decide whether his apology is flip — isn’t even here. He might address himself very differently to Sal.
It seems to me that what he was doing here was contriving a situation in which he could confess to Walky and make it seem natural. But then, I am usually wrong about Willis’ characters.
He doesn’t have to apologize to Walky, but if we’re using his apology to guess at where he stands now, how serious he seems to take it is one of the things we’ve got to go on.
I was hoping it’d be Walky who lashed out. Of all the options, this seems the most acceptable (and least likely to spiral). Asher may even accept that he deserved it.
Remember kids! Violence is *sometimes* the answer.
I mean, if violence is never the answer, you’re asking the wrong question.
The right question is, “How do I hurt you?”
Other potential questions
“What is not an appropriate way to raise a child/animal/anything?”
“How are wars fought?”
etc.
“What is the other half of the battle?”
Maybe violence is sometimes the answer, but it wasn’t here. What Asher did was wrong, but it was something that he did five years ago as a dumb kid and had just freely confessed to and apologized for. Sal’s a great character, but she messed up. She held someone hostage at knifepoint even after the person she was trying to rob gave her a chance to get away scotfree. And Asher’s choice to call the police didn’t get a knife pulled on Ethan and give Amber PTSD – Sal did that when she chose to pull a knife instead of running away.
That’s some infuriatingly dumb reasoning that only a 13 year old would likely come up with. I guess he didn’t watch enough cop shows to realize that the first thing the cops would do when they arrested Sal was to try to get her to snitch on the rest of her gang. That and it wouldn’t take rocket science for Sal to figure out she was ratted out.
Except we already know that she didn’t say anything – otherwise he’d have been caught.
Sure, which is also how we know that Sal didn’t figure out Asher called the police at that time. It was still a stupid risk for Asher. Instead of throwing the cops off their trail, Sal’s arrest brought Asher closer to getting caught than he would have been otherwise.
But do we KNOW he wasn’t caught? If he was, he would have been let out at eighteen, like most juveniles, and his record would be at least as sealed as Sal’s, who as we know is also a student here (although she’s got the dean as family friend, so that might not be indicative)
Juvenile records don’t get automatically sealed in Indiana.
I didn’t know that. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Probably both.
You have to wait until whatever parole/probation/I don’t remember what it was, just that it started with a p is over and then apply to have it sealed.
Asher only robbed a shop. He hasn’t held a kid at knife point. If the first robbery was without violence, he probably would have gotten a shorter sentence. Maybe even probation. He was a kid, too and his crime most likely wasn’t as severe as sals
They used the knife to rob the first place too. Hell, he’s the one who gave Sal that knife. They probably at the least threatened the clerk with it.
In Asher’s robbery, there were adults involved. This automatically would have made him less culpable in the eyes of the law than them.
But as Sal’s not a girl to tell tales, she didn’t set the cops on them and if he had trouble with the law, it wasn’t because of the robbery where Sal was the lookout.
What I am saying is no, the first one was not without violence.
Interesting. She was given the money and she was told to keep the knife. I always thought she got the knife before, as a part of her job as a lookout. It might as well be passed over though.
It’s possible, but while it might or might not be sealed, it seems like it would have been mentioned before. Sal’s never said anything about it. It’s never come up in any of the other mentions of Sal’s robberies. He doesn’t even hint at it here.
Sal didn’t seem to realise it at the time that she was ratted out at least from what we saw. She may have assumed that the police were screening stores after the first robbery and that she just got unlucky. She may have figured it out since, but we know she hadn’t figured it out right then and there as she just seemed confused by their presence.
I’m hoping Walky leaves it at this, because THIS he absolutely deserved. Anything more would be overkill coming from someone who wasn’t personally impacted.
She’s his sister. He was personally impacted.
He may have been personally impacted, but Walky sure as shit didn’t show any of that until now. As far as we know, he barely if it all kept in contact with sal after she left, because Sal was “too complicated”. And he certainly didn’t try to punch his parents for sending her away, i.e. the people who were actually responsible for sending her away.
The impact on Walky is clearly more guilt than anything else. He’s punching to cover for his own feeling of having let sal down.
I’m just hoping Asher leaves it at this.
No, Asher didn’t even deserve this first punch. I think it’s a good thing for Walky’s character and is probably going to make the story more interesting, but this punch was five years after the fact and immediately after Asher just apologized. It didn’t seem like Asher was being a dick, just admitting that he was a stupid 13 kid who made the right decision for awful reasons.
That wasn’t a real apology. He said the equivalent of “Lol. Ain’t I a stinker?”
Asher deserves this AND A LOT MORE.
He admitted to it when he got away completely clean and didn’t have to, and openly admitted he was wrong (with “I didn’t say it *was* funny”). He still could’ve handled this entire thing better but I think he’s genuinely trying and he doesn’t deserve to be punched for that.
He didn’t make the ‘right’ decision, he threw his ‘friend’ under the bus for something he was also involved in and got away with no consequences for it which is entirely selfish then casually dropped it like ‘yeah, I was stupid right?’ Which is a completely tactless way to handle something that got someone sent away for 5 years and is absolutely not something you send an apology for through their sibling.
Kind of completely understandable why Walky would punch him with the way he delivered this information.
He called the cops on someone who pulled a knife and took a hostage. That’s the right decision.
His reason was because she would be a fallguy who would let the rest of them get away. That’s a garbage reason.
And yeah, it’s understandable what Walky did. But that doesn’t mean that it was the right thing to do. There’s no way the story would go that way, but in real life, Walky could easily get arrested for sucker punching someone like that.
Asher absolutely deserved to get arrested along with Sal, and I understand why Walky punched him, but I still don’t think punching him was the right thing to do. Now… calling the cops and telling them about someone of interest in a robbery case from a few years back? Yeah, Asher deserves that.
Asher didn’t call the cops on Sal for taking a hostage. She didn’t take a hostage until AFTER the cops showed up. And if Asher called the cops on Sal for robbing a place at knifepoint, all I can say is ‘you should fucking talk’.
Like I said, his reason was garbage. He had no idea he was doing the right thing, but she was already trying to commit armed robbery, and she had been given an out.
Honestly, if anyone in Sal’s life deserves a punch five years after the fact, it’s her mom.
If he had no idea she took a hostage (which he didn’t, because he called the cops before she did that) then he doesn’t get credit for calling the cops because she took a hostage. That’s just how linear time works. And as for trying to commit armed robbery, again, Asher should fucking talk.
Far be it from me to disagree on Linda deserving a swift punch in the face though.
I’m not saying he gets credit for it. Calling the cops on Sal was a good thing, but he had no way of knowing that and he did it for entirely self-serving reasons. He lucked into the right course of action, and I’d even say that while he had no way of knowing, it was even the best thing for Sal since it got her away from her parents and Asher’s crowd.
I’d compare it to some idiot trying to SWAT somebody, only for it to turn out that there was a serious crime in progress. The person who called SWAT was completely in the wrong, but it somehow ended up being the right thing to do despite their crap intentions.
Except the hostage only got taken because the cops showed up and was released before they actually could do anything, so you can’t even say Asher calling the cops accidentally saved Ethan.
Before the cops showed up, the clerk was seriously non-threatened and trying to talk Sal down. The sirens hit the parking lot, Sal grabbed Ethan, flashbacked to Leland hurting Marcie and let him go all before the police were able to interfere. At least that’s what I’ve been able to piece together from the various flashbacks.
It’s a weird argument to have. He called the cops on Sal to save his own skin and as a result escalated a situation that was otherwise handled by the clerk telling Sal to leave without issue.
The main issue people seem to have is that he smiles like his dumb mistake is some cute memory to laugh at rather than an indirect cause for one person’s personal trauma and another person’s sibling’s trauma. This is while both of the people in front of him are visibly outraged. Introspective or not that smile seems disrespectful to the weight of the conversation.
It’s fictional violence so I’m fine with cheering either way.
He called *before* a hostage was taken and gets absolutely 0 credit for it being the ‘right thing’ when he himself committed a robbery and threw Sal under the bus for it. THAT ISN’T WHAT THE RIGHT THING TO DO IS.
The right thing to do would have been NOT COMMIT ROBBERY.
The right thing to do after committing a robbery would be GIVING THE MONEY BACK AND TURNING HIMSELF IN.
The right thing to do is not BLAME MY FRIEND SO I GET NO CONSEQUENCES FOR A CRIME I WAS MORE A PART OF THAN HER.
He didn’t have a guarantee that she was even going to go ahead to try to commit a second robbery, she could have changed her damn mind and walked out. So this had absolutely nothing to do with doing the ‘right thing’, it was purely an act of selfishness so that he wouldn’t get caught himself.
Like I will admit that punching him isn’t exactly a good thing to do, but don’t try to sell me this idea that Asher was trying to be ‘good’ or ‘righteous’ by calling the police on Sal. He was being a selfish prick of a 13 year old and that has nothing to do with whether it was right or wrong, it was entirely about self-preservation.
Never said he was good or righteous. Calling the cops ended up being the right thing to do, but he had no way of knowing that and did it entirely for self-serving reasons. I’m not saying he did the right thing in a ‘oh, look at how noble 13-year-old Asher was!’, but in a ‘how does a boy make all the wrong choices and still have good things happen as a result?’. It’s like a student trying to add 2 and 2, deciding to do it by taking the square root of -19, and still somehow ending up with 4. The only credit I’ll give him is that he got lucky in that calling the cops ended up being a good thing, since it led to Sal getting away from her crappy homelife. That may not have necessarily led her into becoming the most mentally healthy person at first, but at least post-boarding school Sal isn’t the sort of person who would decide to take a random person hostage just because she’s angry at the world. I don’t blame any of Amber’s trauma on Asher calling the cops, either – that happened because Sal and then Amber both let their emotions control their actions (and because Blaine is one of the worst parents ever).
As for punching Asher, I think it’s the wrong thing because:
1) the punch was for something that happened five years ago when he was a stupid teenager
2) the potential consequences for Walky outweigh the catharsis
3) Asher had just apologized (and I didn’t interpret the smile as flippant, just thoughtful)
4) the punch was from behind.
I think this is a word argument. Most of the comment section is using “right” as in “good values” and you’re using it as “proper” in terms of his actions and “good” in terms of consequences. Which – consequentialism can go take a hike and has no bearing on morality or propriety. Two people who drive home equally drunk and one hits a jay walker does not make the second one more awful of a person. They had more awful consequences. Two people who stop to help a homeless man who is in the process of overdosing and one succeeds and the other one accidentally triggers him to commit suicide… both are proper but one did not have good consequences. It’s why we say intent matters but harm is still harm. It definitely means something to not be malicious but the road to hell is led by good intentions and people can still make lemons into lemonade.
Him doing a proper societal action to cover for the actions he implicated her in for selfish reasons that could have ended tragically for someone he KNEW was marginalized but didn’t end up with worse scenario and had some fringe benefits isn’t any definition of good. ALSo, getting away from family is tangentially good but you’re ignoring the hints we got about boarding school and the degeneration of her relationship with her brother and being taken away from her closest friend. Good would have been a welfare check, community service and WORKING therapy versus the garbage she got, ongoing contact with her brother and the community realizing the tragedy that was the catalyst for this and coming together to help Marcie regardless of other consequences. Private school/court decisions equated to her sneaking out, learning bass by herself so she wouldn’t have to learn piano, her family further ostracizing her instead of buying a clue, anger management issues, trauma around her damaged hand that never got resolved despite a plethora of therapists who were never worth a damn, no support structure we can see because all authority is still awful without exception and pretty sure most people don’t think losing virginity to apples to apples would be in most peoples highlight reel. Just because she wasn’t shot doesn’t mean it was a good ending. She’s a work in progress despite that crap sandwich. That’s just Sal! The clerk didn’t want to see her go to jail and was talking her down so the clerk didn’t like the escalation. Hell yes his actions impacted amber because they gave Sal the knife, dropped her off, and showed her the recipe for robbing. She panicked when the sirens came. Amber has a whole other identity so she could face that day and never have it happen again. Blaine did not help – but Sal was the enemy she fixated on and stalked because it was her origin story. It was the beginning of her DID as we know it due to how she internalized that stabbing. That is some serious picking and choosing of that mixed bag of results to call all that good to say what Asher can justly be held accountable for and not and laying the good on his step while side stepping every bad as not directly him. None of the good was either! If she was shot would it have been directly him? Still a consequence from his call.
Also – it’s not like getting Sal out of the house stopped Sal’s parents from abusing her. “Ah’m not gonna hear another lecture from my folks about how ah’m a failure” anyone?
His sister went to jail for five years.
That’s personally affected.
Not jail. Especially since she was a juvenile. I believe the canon is that the Walkerton’s sent her away to that other school (boarding school?) for five years, much like Trump’s parents sent him off to a military academy to keep him out of serious trouble when he was thirteen.
Seems to have worked a lot better for Sal.
It was a Catholic boarding school in Tennessee. Not jail.
The Walkerton parents talked/statused Sal out of juvie (maybe into probation?). And maybe got her record sealed, I think.
I prefer Ethan’s idea of giving people what they deserve.
this was the wrong duo to track Asher down lol
Amber…that is a creative way of interpreting the situation.
Well it is true? I mean Sal only took Ethan hostage when the police were starting to arrive.
No, Sal took Ethan hostage when she couldn’t use her knife to threaten the clerk due to bullt proof glass.
My bad, that was from Amber’s point of view. In Sal’s version it was a
response to the cops.
We have no way of knowing what would have happened if the police hadn’t shown, but the cashier gave Sal a chance to get away when they heard the sirens. Sal chose to escalate. Honestly, I think that if she hadn’t taken Ethan hostage then, she would have just hurt someone else down the line. She was in a really bad state of mind, one of her parents was uninvolved and the other actively hated her, and she was desperate to do something to help Marcie.
I am sorry that I managed to call this reason. Still, that seems like a well deserved punch.
Could it be? A “bad person” in Dumbing of Age who stops short of Blainery? Who recognizes his mistakes and shows depth and complexity to his bad behavior, who is capable of apologizing while still not *really* apologizing because life isn’t split up neatly between fully good people and fully bad people? Aside from Raidah, I mean?
I’m not dragging Willis, I actually just really like this new character. I like that quiet, half-contrite “I didn’t say it was funny.” It’s a dimensionality I enjoy in characters.
Now watch as next comic Asher gets mad and is like “I tried to apologize but I guess you forced my hand” and cuts off Walky’s arm or something, just to reassert the Toedad-Dorothy Morality Scale.
Walky Performs A Punch? Yes, please!
For the record, I get where Walky’s coming from here. I might’ve been the baby out of us, but if anyone hurts any of my sisters, even the evangelical bongo who thinks my fiancee will “pollute our family’s bloodline”, they should start praying to whichever god will take their soul, for their ass belongs to me.
Soo to get them off his trail, he basically gave the police his fingerprints on the money, a hint on where to look for him and a big motivation to look for him (as a possible associate in a hostage situation)?
Good job.
Not like he expected the hostage bit.
It is highly unlikely the police would be able to find his fingerprint on money that wasn’t freshly printed. It would be too obscured by the other fingerprints on it, including Sal’s. Money gets handled by way too many hands for fingerprints to be useful on them.
Sal stuffed it away pretty fast, so she probably didn’t smear them. She was busy admining the knife. And taking fingerprints from money is a bit tricky but possible.
Her fingerprints could have easily ended up on top of his. We don’t know if Sal fiddled with the money in her pocket during the car ride either or how many people had touched it. If 100 people have touched it, they wouldn’t be able to isolate Asher’s fingerprint, there would be too many overlapping and obscuring each other.
If it was freshly printed from an ATM right outside the store then used inside the store, that’d be a different story as then there are only 4-5 possible sets of fingerprints on it and they could get lucky in finding a clear print from Asher or his brother not overlapping with the others.
But even if they did find his fingerprints on the money – shockingly, that wouldn’t prove he stole it. It would prove he touched it. And unbelievably, money is used for purchases. So they would have to literally prove he was involved with the theft, and then present then fingerprints as FURTHER proof of that if they were able to isolate any. They wouldn’t prove he stole it by themselves because well, look at the purpose of money. Money tends to travel through a lot of hands and he could argue, even if it was complete nonsense, that he helped people pick up money they dropped a lot which would be very difficult to contest if your only proof was that he touched this money someone else had on their person.
He was thirteen.
The plan to get them off his trail might have been about as good as the joke.
For what absurd reason would police check the prints on some random cash in the pocket of a teenage girl in a simple gas station robbery?
Okay, who called it?
Everyone?
I think this belongs on the satisfying punch list. Not as high as Blaine or Ross, but possibly around Mary. Thoughts?
Dang, Walky beat Amber to the punch this time.
I can’t imagine what repercussions will unravel from this.
I was right. Sal is gonna kill him.
Probably several times.
Eventually, snitches get their freaking stitches.
Yeah, I’m with Walky. That was long overdue.
Asher, you piece of shit.
That said, for all I know he is perfectly sincere in having left his old lief behind. Sal did, after all. We also don’t know what repercussions the robbery had for him.
Still, a punch from Walky felt like the appropriate response.
From his cavalier attitude here, I suspect none. If he left his old life behind, I suspect he sees it as some crazy stuff he did as a kid and still tells stories and laughs about.
Maybe now Asher is going to reconsider his supposition that Walky and Amber were staking him out to see whether he is still a bad guy. Perhaps now he will suppose that they were trying to ambush him and beat him up in revenge for what he did five years ago, when he was thirteen.
I reckon that revenge beating is a priori the more likely hypothesis, and it seems a bit strange that Asher preferred the improbably benign alternative. I wonder whether that reveals something about him?
Damn no edit. There was supposed to be a “” in there somewhere.
Damn no preview either. There’s an HTML “close italics” flag between those two quotation marks.
Nah, they were clearly caught off guard by the revelation that Asher called the cops.
Yes, but I’m considering what Asher knew in the day-before-yesterday’s strip, not what he knows as a result of today’s strip.
When Asher said “you two are on stakeout, aren’t you. Checking to see if I’m still a bad guy” he didn’t know how Walky was going to react when he confessed. At that time it was an unlikely and benign supposition to make. Far the more obvious and likely would have been to suppose that Walky and Amber were intent on revenge (“punishment”), and were there to ambush him or case out his situation.
Walky is all of us right now. Now, how long before Asher joines the league of villains led by Blaine?
Waly-throws-hands-with-asher.jpeg
*walky
I read that POW as “YOU TOOK my sister away for five years”!
Fuck ‘im. That’s a really stupid thing he just admitted, and he can’t really be surprised by the outcome.
It doesn’t help that his smile suggests that this is a good memory!
I don’t read his smile that way. I read it as wryly regretful. But probably this just puts another nail in the coffin of my track record for interpreting Willis’ situations.
I think tomorrows comic will show what sort of person he has become over the years.
Ok, Asher earned that punch.
You know, I can’t blame him for the way he apologized. As far as he knows, his decision to call the cops on Sal five years ago only resulted in her being sent to boarding school. He didn’t know about the hostage stuff, the knife, the stabbing, and all the trauma that one event caused.
And that’s perfectly understandable. His lax attitude about it is due to his ignorance of what that one event caused. Walky’s reaction is understandable, but punching him isn’t gonna do much. Finger’s crossed that Ash just reacts with a ‘Yeah I probably had that coming’. He doesn’t deserve an ass beating though, let’s be real.
It’s kind of good to know that, even outside of the Walkyverse, Walky still has a berserk button. God help you if you push it by hurting the ones that he loves!
Meanwhile, I’m expecting Amber to prove that she isn’t a monster by stopping Walky from killing Asher.
Well, that escalated quickly.
Indeed. Although, I’m quite curious how Asher will react to that punch. If he knows he deserves it and doesn’t retaliate… well, I guess that will prove to me that he’s really turned over a new leaf.
Yeah that’s justifiable.
I feel like the only thing that will keep Walky from getting into trouble here is Asher won’t press charges or escalate from this.
I have a question:
For those that feel Walky is justified in this sucker punch:
Is/would Walky have also been justified sucker-punching Amber once he learned she was the one that caused severe, permanent injury to his sister’s hand?
This is an interesting question… I think at this point it’s less about what they did five years ago, and more about their current attitude towards it. Imagine if Amber had been all “you know how your sister always wears gloves? That was me, lol”. Totally punchable.
Or if Amber had been like “So after I stabbed your sister I decided that I should dress up as a super hero and violently attack people at night! Including your sister some more!”
I wonder what would be the readers’ reaction if that happened and Walky actually punched Amber?
It’d be a case of a guy punching a woman, after all…
I have zero problems with men punching women depending on circumstance. This isn’t a Sean Connery moment or domestic violence validation. This is a – people are people and your chromosomes aren’t what determine culpability and retribution. Their chosen behavior and my own ability to parse and react rationally in the moment versus going to punchy are determining factor. (Said as a woman, who has been punched by men and has punched men and women mostly in consensual settings… a couple times in defense and once in anger as a teen and that last one is super my bad and never okay even if circumstances make it understandable.
Makes sense. Men punching women is justifiable under basically the same situations that men punching men is. Mostly, you shouldn’t be punching anyone, but men getting punched is more likely to excused.
This.
Yes, asshole move, but also, HE WAS ALSO A KID he didnt realize the consequences
He doesn’t seem too torn up about it now he’s an adult.
He still seems to have no remorse. He understands NOW. And he just smiles with an insincere sorry. Go Walky!
*puts palms together and puts the tips of my index fingers to my lips*
true…
Asher in tomorrow’s strip: “Heh. I totally deserved that.”
I, um, dunno
IMO, Asher deserves this one (1) punch. After all, as much as he was a kid and he might have changed por the better, his betrayal ended severely agravating the lives of at least three other kids who were already in delicate situations while he (seemingly, as of now) left unscathed of that mess.
In the other hand, this situation is getting quickly out of control and if Amber and Walky don’t get a hold of themeselves they’ll make things more complicated than they already are for everyone.
Gonna take an unpopular position on this. That punch was unwarranted.
Is Amber and Walky going to actually blame Asher for calling the cops and stopping a robbery?
What if that clerk actually had a gun behind the counter?
Or if Sal had made a mistake and hurt herself or him with that knife?
We, the readers, know the actual reasons why Sal robbed that store and why Amber reacted the way she did. Those have very little to do with the cops showing up.
Lets not forget that there was other people in that store as well. The clerk, for example. If the cops hadn’t come, anything could have happened.
Asher, for his own weasely reasons, stopped a crime.
Granted though, the consequences of this robbery was really bad, with nobody really being helped from it.
Ah, but you see: “weasely” is the operative word here.
He didn’t do it to stop a crime. He did it because he thought it’d be funny. And he also used Sal as a decoy to stop cops from getting him caught. Such reasons do deserve anger…
Anger, sure.
Violence though?
There was no one else besides those three kids and the clerk and the clerk was being pretty successful talking her down. Clerk had bullet proof glass and was more worried for Sal.
Oh, bullshit. Asher doesn’t get brownie points for ‘stopping a crime’ that he was only too happy to commit himself for shits and giggles. “But what if the clerk had a gun” doesn’t work when calling the cops could very easily ALSO have gotten Sal shot. Or are we forgetting the clerk saying “Oh, hon, run. They’re not going to see YOU as a kid.”
I’m even worse at reading cartoon expressions than IRL. The guy is smoking, which distorts both. My opinion: Walky’s punch is, at best, premature.
If by premature you mean five years late.
There we go…
He punched him? But that’s not his dad!
I thought that was against the rules.
It is. We’ll see if Asher presses charges.
The anger against Asher in this comment section is misplaced.
None of what happened after Asher called the cops is his fault. It was still Sal who took Ethan hostage. It was still Sal’s parents who treated her shittily, before and after. It is on the police that they didn’t actually make sure she got help. It is on Blaine for abusing Amber and not getting her psychological help after the hostage situation.
And, I mean, how do you THINK this little robbing spree would have ended?
It kind of is on Asher. I mean, did his actions stop more, possibly worse crimes? Maybe. Has Sal turned her life around? Yes. Was that Asher’s intention?
Hell NO.
He even admits it was to cover his own ass, and partly for laughs. The fact that any “good” (which I use lightly here) came out of that has nothing to do with Asher. And if he really wants to apologize to Sal, he needs to apologize to her, not ask her brother to do it for him.
I repeat: None of the bad stuff that happened (listed in the previous post) is on Asher.
You say the good stuff isn’t. That’s correct. But the bad stuff isn’t either.
I agree that this isn’t an apology to Sal, though. I don’t think he really wanted to apologise to Sal; if he did, he’d have sought her out himself.
I had this same thought. The gas station person told her to run and even warned her that they wouldn’t treat her like a child when they heard the sirens. Shitty thing that Asher did, but not his fault that either of those things happened. Still amber and Walky’s response is really realistic bc it’s way easier to blame this neutral third party than to feel the pain of people you love betraying your dependence on them (parents)
Sal is responsible for herself. That said – Asher is the reason Sal became apart of the robberies to begin with. He added her to the team. So yes, a lot of this is on Asher too. He’s also why she smokes.
But that wasn’t the point of contention. People were alleging that Asher calling the cops is directly responsible for the Ethan hostage situation, Amber’s trauma and Sal being sent away. None of that is true.
Actually he gave her the knife which led to her ability to execute that and he holding a hostage was a response to her hearing the sirens according to trauma flashbacks.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by “directly responsible”, but it certainly was a major factor in it happening.
Letting her keep the knife looks a lot more suspicious if he was already planning to throw her to the cops for a joke. And that did lead directly to the Ethan hostage situation.
The point wasn’t that Sal isn’t responsible for her own decisions. It was that Asher was culpable in her making them and setting up the situation because it keeps being claimed Sal did all of that on her own and Asher didn’t contribute. She didn’t come up with the ideas on her own. She didn’t even provide the weapon on her own.
I claimed no such thing.
The smoking was learned from her mom.
We’ll leave out that it was Asher that led Sal into robberies in the first place, which is a much better reason to blame him. (And told her to keep the knife, which helped prompt her to try on her own – I wonder if there was more to his “get them off our trail” than he’s admitting?)
But Walky doesn’t know any of that.
Mostly I think it’s his attitude towards it. Yeah, he apologized, but he did so casually. He betrayed his supposed friend for his own skin and a cheap laugh and that led, admittedly indirectly, to life-changing consequences and he’s just like “oops, sorry. guess it wasn’t funny”.
Hmm, thinking a little more.
Maybe Asher didn’t have a clue Sal was going to rob the other store. Maybe he just set the cops on her for the first robbery – a tip off and she gets caught with a big wad of cash and a knife. That’s enough.
That she did try to rob the other place was just coincidence.
I have a faint reminder of the cops coming in with lights on and sirens blaring? Would they do that if it wasn’t a “robbery in progress” situation? Also, on rereading nobody is shown handing Sal a knife after the fact (unnamed dude hands her some money, but no knife), so maybe it wasn’t used in the active part of the robbery at all?
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-9-comic/01-flyin-to-the-red/lookout-2/ They tell her to keep the knife which implies one of them gave it to her. You don’t tell people to keep their own items.
Yes, what I mean is that they might have given it to her BEFORE the robbery, not after. We specifically see unnamed dude handing her cash, but no knife being passed around.
That’s my assumption – passed out to her before the lookout job, then Asher tells her to hang onto it.
And yeah “report of suspect from armed robbery at this location” gets lights and sirens.
You can keep your opinion.
One of my first thoughts was that Walky might get expelled for this. Then I realized that his mom used to be involved with the dean (married, even?), and that that would probably mean that he would only get a very stern talking to…
…and hopefully some help with his issues…
Suddenly, Walky becomes a man!
(not saying that punching people is a sign of *productive* manhood. But, so far, I kept seeing him as a harmless boy…)
When I was twenty-five, after an incident that could have gone a lot worse, I resolved to make myself a harmless man.
I see this more as boyish idiocy than manly bravery, not least because it seems like a sneak attack sucker punch from behind.
Literally this is called committing battery. Walky could be expelled and prosecuted for this. Math class isn’t going to be easier on probation.
If anything, it’s up to Asher to decide if he wants to be the bigger man and let this one slide for the past’s sake.
Huh. My money was on Amber clocking him upside the head once she finished that logic chain. Ah well, there’s still tomorrow’s comic.
What the hell did Asher think was going to happen, though? Admitting that to her brother.
Walky, don’t continue the Cycle of Hate.
Okay – with me – Asher isn’t responsible for other people’s actions. But he is responsible for his own, including being the main factor of Sal’s slip and slide when he was the main “support” in the Marcie vs Linda struggle. He got Sal cigarettes, he invited her to be part of the robberies, he gave her the knife, and then he gave her the fall. He had a direct hand in escalating her desperation. Yes, He did this as a 13 yr old and we haven’t seen his true remorse level or unveiling of the middle years like Sal. He did dumb kid things to a shitty degree most people don’t touch and most people get a chance to prove they changed with time – but ignoring his “mentor ship” and thinking Sal would have gone that route without support and affirmation… is a bit of a stretch for a girl who focuses on justice. It also ignores the problem that just because someone changes doesn’t mean you have to forgive them. Add in sibling “righteous” rage and his delivery – yeah this interaction was going to be this explosive no matter the direction.
As soon as I saw the strip, I had a feeling today’s comments were going to be a case-study for protagonist-based morality. It’s amazing the amount of times I’m not wrong.
Good point- as someone mentioned above, would anyone accept the punch reasoning if Walky had punched Amber for stabbing Sal? Probably not, because Amber is a main character and we’ve seen a lot about her.
With Asher, all we have is speculation about his level of remorse based on a handful of strips and a possibly smug smile, which is leading to a lot of different conclusions.
Or if Ethan had beaten Sal to a pulp (haha, I know, but bear with me here) for putting a knife to his neck.
I’m not very good at reading faces, but the eyebrow position in panel 2 strikes me as making the smile sad/remorseful, not smug?
Some of this might be differences in how we’re reading Asher’s facial cues, not protagonist centered morality. If you’re thinking he’s remorseful and I’m thinking he’s smug, that changes how we react to Walky’s punch.
To go deeper down the rabbit hole, our reading of facial cues may be influenced as to how we perceive the situation in the first place.
Perhaps.
Good thing we’re likely to find out what’s actually going on relatively soon.
Very likely.
Yeah, that definitely changes things if his tone is smug and flippant like some people here seem to think. (My main gripe against the punch in that case is just that it was a sucker punch. I honestly think calling up the cops and telling them about a person of interest in a robbery a few years ago would have been better and more just than a punch, but Walky isn’t the sort of person to do that. That’s more of a Dorothy solution.)
I’ve just re-read the comic, and it doesn’t look at all like the police have shown up at the point that Sal took a hostage. She did it in response to playing being told the cashier was behind bullet-proof glass.
They’ve got the timeline of events entirely wrong, I think.
You’ve got to piece together the flashbacks. That was the initial impression. In the flashback in Flying to the Red that shows Asher’s involvement, we see it’s actually in response to the sirens.
We also see in a couple of panels at the end of the Amber/Sal fight that she let Ethan go moments later, apparently seeing herself in Leland’s role.
Totally forgot that she let Ethan go on her own. That takes a lot of the wind out of my ‘what would she have done next’ argument.
WOO HOO! Yeah!
Btw, since we’re revisiting the event, I’d like to send a shout-out to the convenience store clerk, who must be THE NICEST PERSON EVER. I hope they are living a long and happy life in which they won the lotto and had the money to make all of their dreams come true.
This campus has had a sharp rise in fistfights and car chases in the last 3 months.
Nope. IU’s always been just like this.
Their MMA team is the state champion and is (gleefully) taking on all comers.
Are there security cameras here? Never mind. They’re blind when it’s convenient to the plot.
On top of everything else, calling the police on a black person in America is basically attempted murder.
But don’t you know, Sal only has herself to blame because she had a knife and ineptly threatened to use it.
It can be both you know.
I mean, I wouldn’t really have anything against some random character calling the police on Sal for going into a store with a big knife planning to rob it.
Asher gets blame because of the hypocrisy and his motives.
Asher was being insensitive to how Walky would react to the news. (Asher has no idea about Amber’s involvement.) Walky was being impluseively violent. Both are in the wrong.
Maybe Asher deserved that punch for what he did to Sal. Yeah, it was five years ago, he was thirteen and stupid, but still… If Asher had not been punched, that would have been better and more mature, but this is DUMBING of Age and the actions are in character for both Asher and Walky.
If Asher gets up and smiles with an “I totally deserved that” (to echo Arianod’s comment above), then the immediate matter is settled. If he gets angry or violent, then he is being stupid. On the other hand, if Asher more sincerely apologizes and realizes how insensitive he was, much, though not all, can be forgiven.
If Walky escalates this any further without provocation, he is being stupid. If he stands down and listens to Asher, then the punch can be forgiven.
Oddly (or amusingly – in a positive character development way) Amber needs to be the adult and keep this from escalating further.
I think this is the best comment anyone’s written on this so far. I’ve been discussing whether or not the punch was deserved from a right or wrong point of view, but you’re right – from a story point of view, that punch was great.
I hope the cops don’t shoot this black kid when they arrest him. Somebody didn’t give him ‘the talk’ when he was younger.
Blown away by the comments here today. Asher got Sal into robbing stores, gave her a weapon, then called the cops on her* explicitly to get them off his back and for a laugh, but he can’t be held accountable for any of the consequences? Really revealing who y’all are quick to assign agency to and whom you exonerate.
*N.b., as BBCC pointed out, that Sal is a black kid and could have very easily been shot. Asher, through malice or ignorance, put her in great danger in addition to leading her into a dangerous habit.
I like how you accuse people on being iffy on agency attribution while ignoring the fact that Sal chose to rob that second convenience store and put a knife to a kid’s neck all on her own.
I don’t ignore it and neither did Sal. She was responsible for that and literally no one said it was okay for her to hold Ethan hostage. But Asher is directly responsible for endangering Sal’s life and he doesn’t seem to get that. You’re proving my point by whatabouting about Sal’s actions which have already been addressed and atoned for when I say that people here are giving Asher a pass no one (rightly) wanted to give Sal.
Literally no-one’s giving Asher a pass. Unless I’ve missed a comment, no-one is saying that calling the cops on Sal wasn’t a shitty move.
And I’m glad that we finally found the point where people don’t give Sal a pass, though I had my hopes that it would have been a weeeeee bit higher than “putting a knife to an innocent’s throat”. There were certainly a lot of Sal passes thrown around when she called Malaya saying she wanted to make nice and immediately proceeded to insult her and then physically assault her. The only thing the commentariat likes more than giving Sal passes is shitting on Roz.
lol scroll up, I just re-read the argument about how calling the cops on Sal was A Good Thing and good for her too actually except Asher did it for The Wrong Reasons
Getting the cops called on her was a good thing. Asher doing it was a shitty thing. These two things can be (and are) true at the same time.
Strenuously disagree with your first statement.
Really? So, when faced with the uncrossable barrier that is the bulletproof glass, which do you think it’s more likely, seeing as it’s SAL we’re talking about here:
a) she says, “oh well, I tried”, goes home and tosses the knife in the nearest trashbin;
b) she goes for the hostage move anyway; or
c) she tries robbing a different convenience store and instead of the cashier being Mr. Rogers they’re a second ammendment nutjob who pulls a gun from behind the counter and shoots her in the face because they got an excuse?
Because I got even money on the last two.
Out of curiosity, what good did the cops actually accomplish there?
They didn’t stop her from robbing the place – she was already pretty well stymied.
They didn’t save Ethan – she released him on her own before they could intervene.
I guess if she’d run out, she might have tried again.
Yeah, that’s my c). Sal isn’t exactly the type to give up on something after first failure.
Alternatively, calling the cops could very easily have gotten her shot as well.
I stand by that, too, though I think some people might have misunderstood my point. Separate the cops being called, what happened to Sal, and Asher’s motivations for a moment.
Asher’s motivations were garbage. Full stop. I don’t think anyone will argue this point.
The cops being called was good. Pretend this was a few days ago, when we could assume it was a random bystander who called the cops. If there is a robbery in progress, the cops being called is generally considered to be a good thing. The fact that it was a 13 year old black girl does not change things. The motives of the caller don’t change the fact that this was a situation that should have seen police involvement. Sal is one of my favorite characters, but at that point, she was a dangerous criminal. If the cops had been violent or unreasonable, I would have a different opinion, but when the cops showed up, they did nothing wrong.
What happened to Sal was a good thing. Yeah, the cops being called could have ended horribly, but it didn’t. She didn’t go to jail – she went to boarding school. When you’ve just committed armed robbery and taken a hostage, that’s a pretty positive outcome. That led to her getting away from an awful set of parents and growing into someone who has normal person levels of insecurity and issues, not criminal ragemonster levels of insecurity and issues. JBento is right – if she hadn’t been stopped then, given everything we know about her, it seems pretty likely she would have done something else that could have ended up with her or someone else dead or seriously injured.
seriously, I’m shocked. Asher deserves to get punched and then some. Full stop. He’s like, definitively a shitty dude. He’s showing no real remorse. And what the hell would cops or any other “legitimate” authority do about the situation *now*? Nothing! SO PUNCH THE BASTARD TIL HIS FACE IS PULP
holy shit, Walky.
But thinking everything would have been ok if he didn’t call the cops is so naive.
Well that escalated quickly. Course, it was really a “Sorry, not sorry”
so now asher is gonna hook up with Ryan and then they’ll team up with the awful alliance that’s forming between Blaine and Toedad and form the “Legion of Fuckbois”
Well, I thought it was funny, but then it didn’t cost me five years.
So am I forgetting something? Or did Asher not actually know Sal was going to rob the place? Did he simply call the cops on her as a diversion after giving her the knife? I mean unless I missed something. So if Sal hadn’t decide to rob the place (which Asher had no way of knowing one way or the other) he had simply called the police and told them he saw a black girl go into a convenience store with a knife (that he gave her that she didn’t ask for)
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-9-comic/01-flyin-to-the-red/lookout-2/
Yep. Asher’s action was malicious, vicious, and cruel.
Walky is still not a judge or executioner, nor an avenging angel.
Shit that is far more terrifying than I thought.
Just realized Walky is channeling some serious Joyce turmoil right here. *sprains wrist on toe dad* later realizing everything going downhill: “Because I AM Angry”… they are on a parallel path even if their romantic entanglement will not be revisited.
I’m hoping that Willis is just taking the long road to get Joyce and Walky together again.
Punch to the back of the head. Shit got real real fast.