True story. As a kid I discovered that I could work a Ouiji board by myself. I asked it how to build a time machine. It replied with a name I was unfamiliar with. In those pre-Internet days of the early 60’s I looked up the name in the encyclopedia. Turns out he was famous for writing a communist manifesto called “The Tracts of Time.” Well I certainly wasn’t going to call attention to myself by trying to get my hands on some communist propaganda, and so I never learned the secrets of time travel.
I was gonna clarify that I was talking about Danny but after re-reading the strip a few time and absorbing it’s meaning just a bit more I think it applies to both of them. Danny more though.
Clearly, Danny will realize that OTHER PEOPLE’s reactions are the problem and he just needs to be MORE like a romantic comedy stalker…err, protagonist.
I think Ethan is just lashing out, but that he explicitly says that he’d let Mike get away with bashing on a comatose Danny, that’s hurtful too. The only reason it’s not as bad as what Danny’s said here is that it’s a hypothetical.
Is it really even meaningfully hurtful considering the context? Danny was the one who brought up roles being reversed, shoving Ethan into a petty hypothetical scenario he had no desire to be in. It’s not like Ethan brought up or even entertained the idea of Danny being in a coma and Mike being a jerk about it, that was ALL Danny.
I would double down and defend my friend too, were I in this conversation.
Well I’ve defended Danny in the past but this…he had like 3 chances to get out of this situation yet he somehow managed to end it with an insult to Ethan
Honesty, while positive in most situations, is also the final refuge of the cad. I’ve seen it many times: the tactless asshole insults and injures the vulnerable, spreading tales of the target’s flaws and foibles; and then, they excuse everything with, “What can I say? I’m unconditionally honest.” How fortunate for them that their honesty does not extend to their own flaws.
Ethan totally just said he’d stand by and let Mike rip on Danny if he were comatose.
I think Danny approached this the wrong way because at this point it does sound like what he wants to do is hate on Mike instead of anything productive, but Ethan just put Danny down in a pretty harsh way.
Yeah. I wanna say Ethan kind of just got dragged into the mud cause he was feeling defensive from Danny’s comment , but he did basically just say he’s okay with Mike being an asshole just because Mike’s “his” asshole. I’m not sure how much you can take from any of this though in the heat of the moment.
Pretty sure he said that because the situation is pretty unsalvageable anyways and that’s something that’s been bugging him, but that doesn’t make it incorrect.
Danny said something that was unacceptable, but he isn’t wrong about two things: Mike would shit all over him if the roles were reversed and Ethan would tolerate it. Clearly Ethan knows both are true too. Ethan’s response was pretty shitty itself. They both owe apologies to each other. Danny owes an apology to Mike as well, but I don’t know whether Mike would be more offended by the shit-talk or the apology for said shit-talk.
Eh, Mike actually probably wouldn’t shit on Danny while he’s in a coma. As we see with Amber/Amazi-Girl when he found out he’d actually made her life worse–he attempted to sacrifice his life.
Mike was STUPID trying to be an edgelord to help people but he was trying to help people.
But much of this relies on how you see Mike. If Mike’s basically a good person who’s an asshole sometimes, Danny’s incredibly out of line. If Mike’s toxic and abusive and has been screwing up Ethan’s life for years, Danny’s tactless and his timing is bad, but he’s got a point.
And since we know that before his realization, Mike was deliberately screwing up Amber’s psyche for years, I’m leaning to the second side. Despite his sacrifice. If/when he wakes up, he might learn from that revelation and try to improve in some less dramatic and grandiose way.
It was less that he was screwing with amber, more that he realised he was behaving exactly like Blaine who he despised, making him rethink basically his whole life
As Zee says, he knew damn well he was prodding Amber’s bear, turning her into a timebomb to go off on Blaine. He says as much and it’s only later in the sequence he realizes how it parallels what Blaine says he was doing.
Eh, if I was Ethan I wouldn’t have bothered saying “No, I wouldn’t” even if it was true. Danny was being hurtful and doubled down on it. When someone is being shitty like that, you don’t owe them a nuanced and fair conversation. You don’t owe someone hurting your feelings a debate, even if they have a point- and Danny made it clear in this conversation that Danny was primarily thinking about *himself*, not Ethan.
Frankly, I think Ethan was way more patient with Danny than he deserved- I would have told Danny to shut up and go away much earlier in the conversation.
Ethan’s kind of an enabler, if people haven’t noticed. Partly because he doesn’t realize how deep some issues like Amber’s BPD run, but he’s not very good at the ‘I’m gonna cut off/confront people over things’.
Danny might just be a bit sour that Ethan isn’t enabling him.
German’s my native language and I have absolutely no idea what concept or word you’re talking about…?
Do you mean something along the lines of “being pedantic”?
If yes, then “Korinthenkacker”? (aka someone being right, but through their pedantic, uptight ways being completely annoying)
Now that’s some new information – thanks for clearing that up!
Well, theoretically, they (OP) aren’t wrong, it’s just we do not always have precise words for everything. You could create words and people would understand them, though (German does have a tendency towards the creation of compound words).
And to end with: I still want to mention that there’s a similar concept to the word I mentioned, which is “Erbsenzähler” (literally “counter of peas” – as in, person that counts peas).
Even if it’s just a running joke, someone might be interested in these words, so if anyone has questions, or would like to have something German explained to them, just ask 🙂
Actually, English has a very similar word for Erbsenzähler. In english, it would be presented as “bean counter”. I actually think that part of the confusion would be that in many cases where the German language simply sticks two words together, English inserts a space or a hyphen between the two words. ( Open and closed compound words) The idea is that people writing English aren’t supposed to create their own “closed compound words” (no space or hyphen) A number of technical terms in German are compound words that a lot of the German English dictionaries can’t handle, and it isn’t clear to an English speaker where the break between the words occur. I remember having some problems with this when I was trying to understand some German documents and the translator software simply said “unknown”. Compound German words can also be much longer than closed compound words in English which is why the names of things such as the Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll (Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
which is the long form) or the Antidisestablishmentarianism movement are frequently used as a source of amusement. The name of the Welsh town was used as a password in the movie Barbarella and a few other movies. (You have to wonder how many takes it took to film the scene.)
Well it started as a Freudian slip which could happen to anybody, but as bad as this is I think this was an important moment for Danny. Early Danny would’ve probably backed down from this to not hurt Ethan’s feelings. Even though that would’ve been the better move is this specific situation, I think it’s good Danny stood his ground here. Good for him, not really good for their ship.
As Sirksome says above!
And I would also add that I really relate to Danny in this moment; when you have a chance to drop something, but you just cant let it go
It might be closer to two months at this point. It’s the last week of October now, but Ethan and Danny didn’t meet until the day Ethan came out to Joyce.
A shittonne is a thousand shitkilos (approximately 2,204.6 shitpounds), and therefore significantly different from both the US shitton (2,000 shitpounds) and the Imperial shitton (2,240 shitpounds).
That’s true, but it still has to hurt to find out that the guy you’re majorly crushing on values you less than someone who acts as abusively and deliberately harmful as Mike.
I’ll forgive these dumb kids that they’re not thinking clearly, but there are way less instigating ways to do the ‘why are you friends with that jerk?’ conversation.
I think part of the problem for Danny is that no one has ever had this conversation about Mike. Everyone walks on eggshells with him, treats him fairly given his own actions, and right now he’s being lionized as a hero despite his years of abuse of Ethan and especially Amber.
No matter how I interpret this strip I think “Danny is jealous of Ethan’s affection for Mike” is a key part of it. That kind of puts him in the antagonistic role, but I don’t think anything he’s said has been necessarily *wrong* either.
It’s precisely because Danny is jealous that this is not a moral critique of Mike. I had more respect for him when he stood up to Mike at the party. This though? It’s a passive aggressive “why don’t you like me more than him?” directed at Ethan who deserves better than all of this right now.
Isn’t it though? Even if it’s fueled by his own feelings for Ethan, Danny’s right that Mike is an abusive person, and that Ethan would allow him to get away with what Danny himself is doing.
I guess I’m reading that wild hypothetical as Danny asking Ethan to implicitly choose between them. It’s unfortunate that he’s framing that choice as “who would you take more shit from?” But he’s comparing himself to Mike using Ethan’s loyalties as a metric and that’s purely a jealous thing to do.
Let’s set aside the first strike from two strips ago. Bad Danny.
The Alderaan metaphor was blatantly “yeah Mike did a good thing but he’s also been a consistently terrible person since anyone has known him” and that’s what Danny was trying to convey.
I don’t think Danny went into this with the explicit intent of making Ethan choose, that’s how Ethan took it and ran with it. Danny said the probably true thing; that if Danny were in a coma Mike would absolutely be laughing about it, because Mike is an asshole. Hell he did this to Billie and Ruth in front of Walky.
The problem is that Danny’s statement can be split between ‘Mike is a jerk, why are you friends with him’ and ‘why are you enabling this jerk’.
The first is a question of Ethan’s choice of friends, the second is a question of Ethan’s nature. Neither of which, to be perfectly blunt, is Danny’s business.
I don’t agree. If Danny is serious about Ethan then I think finding out exactly what kind of person he is should be normal, even if he went about it the wrong way.
And Ethan just admitted to being the kind of person who’d let Mike laugh all day about Danny being comatose.
Danny also is making this demand while Ethan is mourning his friend who is close to death. So, Danny is showing his nasty entitled side as well as controlling way.
Because, Danny says, “I don’t care what you feel. I know what’s best for you.”
It’s still a moral critique even if Danny’s underlying motives are selfish. Even if this is the worst time to have this conversation, this is still a conversation that has to happen.
While I think that Danny’s critique of Mike at the party sheds light on what he’s actually thinking here and that it’s actually more about how Mike treats Ethan and Amber than anything he did to Danny or even his own jealousy – though that certainly complicates things.
I don’t think Danny’s actually a bad dude. Like he’s really clingy and whiny but he’s also kind of one of the more compassionate characters in this comic. I can understand why Dorothy would date a guy like him in high school.
She thought he was cute and took the lead; he wasn’t assertive enough to show off his more asinine attributes, and she was too inexperienced to realize that he didn’t have much to offer.
Danny is super loyal and honest. He likes that she’s assertive. He was also probably very sweet and focused, eager to please her, and she was attracted to him. He ended up not being ambitious or assertive enough, nor did he really understand her ambition, but still, early Danny/Dorothy make sense to me.
This melodrama is awesome, believable given the intense feelings at work here, and y’all are some insufferably boring people for thinking someone is horrible for not constantly managing their social affairs to the Tumblr standard of ettiquette and emotional caretaking. Seriously. I’ve never had more respect for Danny before now.
If he’d handled his interactions with Amber/AG like this I’d have liked him sooner, because by God she had this reckoning coming too.
You’re criticizing people who criticize the Dumbing of Age character for not adhering to the Tumblr standard of etiquette?
Would you say you’re worried about them turning the ethics of this comics into… Dumblr of Age?
I still disagree though Danny’s being needlessly tactless towards someone’s old friend being in a coma.
and ultimately I do agree Danny could have more tact but I don’t think he deserves the crap he’s getting. sometimes speaking up in a bad way is better than staying silent.
They’re all kind of idiots here and emotions are running high, but Danny kind of has terrible timing.
All these are conversations that are better served at another time and place. Like even the basic premise of ‘AITA for asking a guy out when he was just kidnapped and learned his jerk friend is now in a coma’ has the obvious answer of ‘time and place, you dingus’.
Danny is saying he hopes someone stays effectively dead, to that person’s friend, outside their hospital room. If you think that sets an admirable standard for human interaction I hope to never have any with you.
No, of course the timing is horrible, and I’d never do it personally, but in fiction I have a coy regard for moments where individuals just let their feelings ride instead of playing the insufferable tsundere baiting game of months and…
The realization Danny developed as a character *just* enough to partake in one of those classic “two mutually interested people doing horrible things to each other instead of confessing their feelings” romantic plot lines I was just in the middle of bashing.
This melodrama isn’t awesome. We just had like 8 melodramas in the last three months and Danny just being an asshole isn’t something that can be defended with mocking people for disliking him.
Disliking fictional behaviors isn’t a”following tumblr standards”, it is common human behavior. When I was a kid I disliked assholish characters and wanted to punch them. That didn’t mean I hated the shows, I just disliked those specific parts. Humans have the right to like or dislike things.
It’s the first ‘fun’ drama in this strip in a while, where the antagonist wasn’t so completely evil that it’s exhausting to read about them. Unlike Blaine, I can actually enjoy watching this blow up and not worry I’m about to watch irreparable trauma and potentially murder happen to a bunch of college students.
I agree. I think people are taking this way too intensely, probably because we just came out of an intense situation. Is what Danny said great? No, but it’s barely more than insensitive. But in the comments you would have thought he went into Mike’s room, dropped his pants and shat upon Mike.
Which is definitely something Mike would do. And then he would bang Danny’s grieving mother.
Two characters are fighting! Someone has to be 100% wrong and 100% right!
i love your comment. I always need a good reminder not to take Tumblr standards seriously. In case this comment is in any way confusing, I am definitely being sincere. Although now I’m paranoid that that claim to sincerity will make this comment more likely to be read as insincere. damn.
Like I said, the big revelation of this strip set is, “Danny, you’re kind of a selfish prick. You don’t actually care about anyone but yourself in this.”
Like wow, the slightest bit of, like, savage real drama and suddenly the lot of you revert to the same level of histrionics you’d also use with Blaine, Linda and Carol. Get outta here.
I definitely could have phrased my first comment more constructively. It bothers me when people here put down other commenters– real people– for the way they respond to fictional characters, which is what you’re first two comments on this page do, and they do so in a very broad way. You’re definitely not alone in doing that, for whatever that’s worth.
I generally like this comment section, but this interaction has definitely brought out a lot of “people who feel differently than me are boring/unlikeable/stupid”-style comments. I might leave because I am bothered by these comments. You seem bothered by many comments from recent days as well. You’re also free to leave.
As some people observed yesterday, Mike hasn’t specifically done anything terrible to Danny. All he’s done is hooked up with Ethan FOR REASONS but Danny doesn’t even know that was (allegedly!) to mess with him. So pettily pointing out that Mike who is in a coma is a terrible person isn’t a moral statement so much as Danny venting his jealousy.
He’s jealous that Ethan cares about Mike more than he’s upset that Mike is a Bad Dude. I’m very willing to bet he wouldn’t have been this vindictive if he hadn’t recently found out that Mike slept with Ethan because he honestly didn’t know too much directly about Mike’s toxicity. Danny is making this about himself and his hurt feelings and honestly? It serves him right that Ethan straight up reminded him that Mike, awful though he may be, has more of a claim to his loyalty than Danny does.
Does he even KNOW they hooked up tho? I don’t recall it being mentioned to him.
Danny is always making everything about himself tho, he’s very annoying cause of it. Never did understand why people like him.
Danny has seen and heard Mike say and claim to do horrible things to others. While you may be inclined to think that because it wasn’t personally directed at Danny, it’s not okay for him to call Ethan out on enabling it, I disagree. I think it’s actually more interesting that he does.
Really, if it weren’t for the time and place, this would be a good conversation for Ethan to have with someone. Honestly, if Ethan had a bit more courage, and I get why he doesn’t, this would be an important conversation for him to have specifically with Mike.
But saying that Danny’s only reason for acting this way is jealousy is objectively incorrect. He’s also dealing with a lot of other emotions that led to this bad decision and handling them poorly. He is also not unaware of what Mike has done to others, to one degree or another and even by Ethan’s own admission, and so he is not entirely wrong in what he is saying. Simply how and when he is saying it.
Time, place, and one hell of a bad opener. ‘I hope your friend stays comatose’ automatically puts Ethan on the defensive, and while I strongly dislike Mike, wishing him dead is… a lot. And telling Ethan that is pretty much universally bad form, if Mitch McConnell died tomorrow I’d get a fucking pinata but I wouldn’t go to his grieving family and tell them how glad I was he was dead.
(There is one circumstance where I’d willingly express that sentiment to someone impacted, and have – the relative I was calling the Familial Blaine but considering changing the parent because he’s never, to our knowledge, groomed a teenager, kidnapped a bunch of people, killed anyone, or been a mob stooge. This is only because my mother, who actually has a relationship with her biological father, expresses the same sentiment. I hate him on her behalf, but if he ever stops siphoning life force from the family still in any real contact with him and dies and she’s sad – which seems likely, grief is weird – I’m going to focus on comforting her because it’s a real dick move to tell her she’s wrong to mourn him.)
That’s how Danny views it but, bluntly, we’ve had flashback strips that reveal that Mike has been running defense for Ethan and Amber for a decade against their abusers.
And while Dan has no idea about this, he also doesn’t care to find out.
Yes, he tried to help out Amber with both her teacher as well as Blaine. It’s also just one example among many. Mike was very well-intentioned but, sadly, just aggravated the problems.
Mike became the cynic he is because the adults in his friends’ lives were such assholes.
Y’know, I’ll just go ahead and say it. Despite the drama. I’m glad Mikes in a coma. I’ve never liked Mike, as a person or as a character. Never liked his insightful maliciousness. Never liked any iteration of him. Glad he’s out of the comic as long as possible. Hope he doesn’t wake up.
That being said, Danny is looking terrible but DAMN Ethan, not even a hesitant ” …N-no!” just “Yeah, i’d let him rag on you if you were in a coma, cause he’s Mike!”
Yup, because at the time he thought that what he was doing was tough love, and he did it to make her tougher, better, stronger.
Then, he talked a bit with Blaine, and he realized that Blaine had the same rhetorics, while actually being an abusive asshole. And the nickel finally dropped, that what Mike was doing was actually also abuse, even if he really, honestly thought he was trying to protect Amber.
Yeah, him grappling with how he’s wronged people and alienated himself from a lot of people permanently is a potentially actually INTERESTING plot involving him. (Granted, we do also have Ruth and Rachel with that, but Mike’s intentional edgelordiness vs Ruth’s ‘doesn’t excuse but does explain’ severe depression does make the two distinct.)
Nothing about Mikes personality so far has made me the least bit interested in how he would “deal with this revelation”. I suspect we wouldn’t see a significant amount of it because Mike, being Mike, would hide it from everybody the same way he hides everything else. It’s been shown he is probably the most effective of the cast at actually hiding his intentions and I feel it’s unlikely he would suddenly become chatty with everyone about “righting his wrongs”.
I’m kind of interested to see what a more aware repentant Mike would be like. It might very well go the way you suspect, but maybe something more interesting can come from it.
Mike treated as a hero because he died/went into a coma trying to stop Blaine without ever having to try to live with the damage he did seems worse to me.
Honestly what I’d expect at best is a bit less constant assholery and a lot more introspection from him, and maybe some honest discussion with Ethan and/or Amber about it. Which would, I suspect, continue into frustration and one or both of them going ‘well, you were a real goddamn asshole.’ But yeah, as thejeff says, a single grand heroic gesture and dying is way easier ON MIKE, and if we get any form of redemption from him I’d much prefer the hard one for him than the easy ‘I always knew he was good’ death.
He reminds me too much of my own high school friend group’s unrepentant asshole, who was also named Mike, funnily enough. I’m about as sad to see the back of fictional Mike as I was IRL Mike, which is to say, not at all.
Why is Danny making this all about him? Why are his feelings the most important right now, when Ethan was just kidnapped, and is now watching his friend possibly wither away in a coma? I can’t even fathom how he’s gotten to be this self-centered. Just a continuation of the ‘protagonist syndrome’ someone mentioned yesterday.
This honestly is more just a case of “horny, lonely, jealous and 18” than anything else. It’s Dan Lite – now with disappointment instead of resignation.
For the same reason Ethan enables Mike, who has so few rare good moments as an individual as to genuinely be not a nice dude. Because they’re kids. Factually, biologically, still developing their brains and dealing with all the hold overs of puberty including raging hormones and the poor judgement they cause.
On one hand, that is a *super* fucked up accusation to be making under these circumstances and Danny had any number of chances to get out of this conversation rather than making it, but on the other hand… that is a *terrible* response from Ethan. Time spent knowing someone should *not* be a metric you use to determine whether you’d let them get away with trashing someone in a coma right outside their hospital room.
Danny doing it is not okay, but anyone doing it should be equally not-okay.
1) How much of this is Danny lashing out jealously over Mike’s place in Ethan’s life – not necessarily romantic, but far closer than Danny’s place.
2) I really hope Danny takes something out of this other than “I’m bad at asking people out.”
3) I don’t think Danny is anywhere near the irredeemable stage at this point; he’s being a douchecanoe right now but that is a regrettably common thing in 18-year-olds. Hopefully he will soon be able to have some sort of self-reflection and realization that this relationship pattern he’s in is not okay.
3.5) I’ve spent more time thinking about Danny during this series of comics than I have while reading the entire runs of DoA, SP!, IW, and Roomies.
4) I really hope Ethan has a chance to have a breakdown soon, poor guy probably really needs it.
5) I almost started writing fanfic spinning off from this situation but I’m glad I held off because wow, I was gonna be really wrong about where this was heading.
Watching 18 year olds make foolish decisions may not be the most pleasant experience, but it kinda is what we signed up for. The comic isn’t called “Emotional Maturity of Age,” after all.
Exactly what is Danny doing now that is falls in line with a ‘pattern’ of behavior? This is the first honest to god full mistake I’ve seen him commit since his reaction to Dorothy breaking up with him. And even then he’s practically been a saint about how his exes are moving on from him. Honestly, while when he’s saying this is wrong, I really wish he’d say things like this more.
The only friend that Danny has right now that I like is Sal. Ethan was on there, but I’m not certain if Ethan thinks of them as friends right now. Amber is genuinely not a good friend, girlfriend, ex, or generally person to Danny and her failure to acknowledge that in any way but to run from it and glare at him when he points out her hypocrisy is honestly very sad. Even Sal made a mistake in doing what she warned him not to and hasn’t really apologized for it.
It’s really no wonder he’s doing this. Every time he’s held back, it’s hurt him. Every time he’s tried to be reasonable, it’s hurt him. His friends are teaching him the best way to get answers is to do something like this or challenge directly the issue at hand in his mind. What he did here was horrible in it’s timing and execution, but on a technical level everything he said are things that should be addressed with Ethan before Danny asks him out.
You can say that he should know better but I would ask how? His parents aren’t teaching him. The only other example he has is his friends. You can say he should just know the right thing but then I would ask again, how? No one just knows the right thing. I can probably find something each person who replies to me believes that is factually wrong and they can probably do it for me.
I’m just gonna shrug for most of you reply ’cause a lot of this is based on other commenters over the past couple days; Danny honestly hasn’t made enough of an impact on me before to really remember much of what he’s done.
You’re last paragraph, however, is putting a shitton of words in my mouth that I didn’t say.
Thematic tl;dr: Danny is acting like this due to a combination of jealousy, lingering hurt from and resentment towards a toxic mutual friend, anger about a double standard, impatience due to the fact the only reason they haven’t dated by now is total bullshit, and probs the cumulative transformative strain of months of being the world’s chew toy. All this came to a head. Indelicately. Destructively. But god, this is is the GOOD kind of cringe, as opposed to the kind that came from him being a total sucker (see our collective rage over his falling for AG and not Amber or the way he got dumped by Dorothy)
Those Dan goofs are just us shaking our head and going ‘Oh Dan, that boy ain’t too smart, is he’. It’s like Billie constantly thinking that Sal is Amazi-Girl.
This one just had a bit of ‘Oh Dan, you could have handled this soooo much better’.
THANK YOU. You finally put what I was feeling into words! This is a bad fuckup to be sure but Danny has improved, which is why instead of feeling like “welp guess this is just what I gotta deal with from this character”, it feels more like “oh Danny, you’re better than this and we both know it”.
Good drama can’t also be something crappy to do? I like this as a story development and I still like Danny, but it’s still a shitty thing to do. There’s nothing wrong with saying it’s a shitty thing to do.
I will be completely honest: I think both Danny and Ethan are awful people and shouldn’t be together.
Danny is a clingy jerk that is desperate to find a girlfriend/boyfriend and instead of being honest about what he wants he just keep the same performance that we have seen twice before This is a guy that can’t stop to think about the consequences of his actions.
Ethan on the other hand is a fucking pushover on the level of Asgore. He let’s other people push him, and when he finally has some agency he behaves like a libertine jerk on the level of Roz. As shown in Shoterpecked and DoA, Ethan is a condescending prick that cares more about petty things than people. He goes on a date with the same guy that Mike banged casually once, and spends the night monitoring the Transformers archive. How superficial can a person be?
These two shouldn’t be together just as Walkyverse Danny and Joyce were doomed from the beginning.
Having faults and being “an awful person” seem like significantly different things to me, and I don’t think anything either of these characters have done in this comic warrants that description. And if they have, then practically everyone in the comic is an awful person.
I mean, to an extent, I guess yeah, this comic is about watching a series of train wrecks, but I don’t know about dismissing everyone in this comic as “an awful person,” rather than a bunch of unprepared dopes with obvious personality issues struggling to deal with a transitional period in their lives… and then a few awful people on top.
Sure, but they’re also a bunch of goobers in a comic strip, which I think ends up being a stumbling block when attempting to analyze DoA, because you have to figure out where the line is between “oh, that’s just comic book shenanigans” and “what the actual fuck is this person doing?”
Willis made all this characters to be awful to each other. Joyce has said horrible stuff to her friends and is basically a homewrecker after what happened with Jacob, Amber should be getting mental therapy because of her split personality and vigilantism, Walky is a manchild that can’t accept he needs help to improve, Ruth and Billie are dangerous to be around, etc.
They are all awful people, but unlike the villains they are learning they are awful and they are trying to be better. We like this story because we see how Joyce and her friends improve over time, even if the tgitle of the story makes it seem they just get worse, but they have actually improved a lot if you compare them to their past selves.
Accepting your mistakes is part of growing up. Carol, Linda and Blaine are doomed though.
I can mostly get behind this assessment, yeah. I just feel like calling someone an “awful person” wholesale comes across as a blanket condemnation of who they are by definition. The connotation often reads as “they suck, and either it’s impossible for them not to suck, or I don’t *care* whether they have the potential to improve.”
I fundamentally agree that everyone in the comic has pretty flagrant issues that need addressing, but I think that, as you said, most of them are slowly realizing what they are and changing for the better, and the willingness to do that at *any* pace seems to me like an indication that someone’s not necessarily an awful person.
Redemption is a story. (Or a religious thing, I suppose.)
Real people don’t have “redemption arcs”. They don’t have arcs at all. It’s hard for me to even grasp what redemption would mean in real life.
Change is real. Growth is real. Becoming a better person is real. Stopping whatever horrible things you were doing is real. Even making amends can be real.
Redemption is a story.
When Rachel said that, she was implying that redemption=change, growth, becoming a better person, making amends, etc
Seeing as the overarching theme of this whole comic is kids building off the failures of their elders to become better people, and taking incremental steps to making their world a better place, that would appear to be a very shitty take.
I know this is nitpicky, but I think I’ve seen “homewrecker” used for Joyce before, and it’s like… come on. That relationship was six weeks old TOPS. Just because Raidah had their futures mapped out together as a power couple doesn’t mean that it was realistic. There was no home to wreck.
Could you clarify what you mean by the “same performance” we’ve seen before? Cause I thought one of Danny’s known flaws was that he’s too honest sometimes.
Amber dumped him because he didn’t realize that “you date Amazi-Girl” wasn’t just some roleplay thing (because he had literally no reason to suspect that she was dissociative), and Amazi-Girl shut him out of both their lifes because he talked to Sal (who he had literally no reason to suspect was ‘Mazi’s origin story) and had valid concerns about AG’s safety after that talk. But yeah, Danny was super-controlling in that relationship. RiiiiiiIIIIIIIIiiiiiight.
Anyway, I think this is good for Danny. He built up Dorothy, he built up Amber and Amazi-Girl, and he built up Ethan. It’s good that they have a genuinely cutting fight and realize his beau is also human.
Lets face it, if Danny were in the coma Mike would probably find a way to use Ethan’s grief to sleep with him and then call Ethan out for having sex while his friends in a coma.
I’ve always liked him, since the beginning. He’s got an interesting way of going about things and trying to help people, always in very subtle background ways. He’s got a certain kind of nuance.
I can certainly see why he’s NOT likeable, but idk, it’s just kind of a bummer when your fave is unpopular, you know? And now he’s in a coma. :/
Once he made the major Dan move of saying what he was thinking out loud, Danny was in a no win situation. He could have apologized, but that would be admitting he was being a major asshole and Danny clearly does not believe this about himself. The apology would have either come off as insincere, or it would have left Ethan wondering why he was fond of Danny at all since Danny was obviously a jerk. So Danny went with pointing out to Ethan that maybe Mike doesn’t deserve Ethan’s loyality (despite Mike’s recent actions.) Dan has a point, and the situation wasn’t going to get any less awkward by him not bringing it up. I think he handled it as well as he could have.
If Danny had immediately apologized and admitted that he’d blurted out the first thought that popped into his head, but he knows it was a terrible thing to say, Ethan would probably have said that he knows Mike is an asshole 95% of the time so it’s not surprising that some people might have that thought.
But like you said, that would require Danny to admit that he had done something really wrong, and he’s… uh… not good at that.
He did do that. What Ethan did was go “well he had this one moment of self-sacrifice [and implicitly that makes up for The Entirety Of Everything Else Mike Does].”
No, he said “He’s in a fucking coma because he did something good, so maybe he does deserve a little better than to be shat all over in front of the room where he is currently IN A FUCKING COMA and his parents are MOURNING HIM. Maybe give him another chance–you know, by not saying he should STAY IN SAID COMA.”
Also, somebody being a fucking jerk doesn’t mean they deserve to fucking *die*, actually??? And that it’s free season to suggest everyone would be better off if they died?!?!?!?
Maybe the whole “good egg” thing with the hat and ukulele was more to convince himself that he’s a good egg, and it’s worked. Sorta like “I can’t be an ass, that would go against my carefully cultivated good egg image!”
Or maybe a better way to put it would be that recent events had put him at risk of realizing that he too has some major character flaws, and so he tried to re-imagine himself as a good egg to try to avoid having to recognize that he’s not such a purely good egg.
I mean, Danny isn’t *wrong* that Mike is a dick. Someone being seriously ill doesn’t mean that you now have to act like they’re your favorite person in the world, but basic human empathy should have told Danny that ‘while someone is in a coma’ is not the time to tell people who care about him what a dick he is.
If he had immediately gone “I’m sorry, that was a fucked up thing to say, he may not be my friend but of course I hope he recovers quickly” or something along those lines, Ethan would probably have forgiven him just as quickly, and Danny would still at least be his friend.
But Dan just kept danning it up and digging that hole deeper trying to justify having said something thoughtless, and retroactively made it cruel.
I honestly took Ethan’s comment more as him being angry and wanting to put Danny in his place, rather than an actual admission that he’d let Mike get away with it. I mean, essentially the hypothetical question here is “Would you stick up for me to Mike?” and Ethan has already done that. He told Mike not to mess with Danny and Mike has largely stuck with that. But when someone’s hurt you and pissed you off to this level, you don’t necessarily wanna reassure them how you have / would stick up for them. You wanna hurt them back.
Yeah the beat panel definitely makes me think Ethan is lashing out more than he honestly believes that Mike should be allowed to get away with ripping on a comatose Danny, especially since the only time Ethan ever stood up to him was when he demanded Mike not “do his Mike thing” to Danny.
At which point he did his “Mike thing” to Danny by having sex with Ethan, which he intended to hurt whichever of Danny or Ethan he didn’t fuck. Face it, this is exactly what Mike wanted.
I think to some extent this applies to both of them here. Ethan’s on the defensive because he’s been hurt, and Danny’s on the defensive because he’s said something obviously indefensible under the circumstances. Both of these things tend to incline someone toward saying things they don’t mean, either in retaliation or to justify their previous actions. I don’t think either is a *good* response to the stimulus that provokes it, but I think they’re both pretty common.
Mike didn’t stick with that. Mike pretended to stick with that. He told us right then and there that he used that as an excuse to start a plot aimed at Danny – even if he did it by screwing with Ethan.
Eh, I disagree. I think while Ethan may draw a line on actively tormenting Danny, Mike making a gross or tasteless joke about comatose Danny would elicit the usual response when Mike does something shitty, which isn’t much. He’s not wrong in pointing out that Ethan enables his friend’s shitty behavior, and I think Ethan realized it and acknowledges it in this strip.
I’m not saying this makes Ethan awful or anything, but I can see why it subconsciously would bug someone and considering Danny’s last conversation to Mike (I think?) was him pointing out the effect Mike’s cruelty had on Amber and Ethan and the fact that they forgive him anyway, it probably has been sitting with him for a while. This doesn’t mean this was in any way an appropriate time for Danny to bring this topic up (Holy SHIT no), but yeah, he has a strong point. If a bit hypocritical, since Danny’s bff was Joe who he was similarly forgiving towards.
I mean, Ethan asked Mike not to mess with Danny by sleeping with him, so Mike decided to mess with Danny by sleeping with Ethan. Mike didn’t back off from messing with Danny, he just didn’t do what Ethan thought he was going to do to mess with Danny
Danny totally SHOULD say it. He just shouldn’t have said it NOW. It’s not entirely clear to me it was even worth saying while Mike was still comatose, but at the very least he should’ve held this off for few days, definitely not while Ethan was visiting Mike in the dang hospital
No, it’s not. Danny falsely equated Mike with a much worse (and fictional) person and then tried to justify his behaviour with ‘but he’d be awful to me!’ Maybe he would, but no one expects Mike to be kind because they have always known him to be an ass, while Danny is expected to be kind and this is him being an ass instead that refused to let things go TWICE then said a guilt-trippy thing before storming out as if he was the wronged party.
Expecting shitty behavior from someone can reduce its impact, but it doesn’t make it not shitty?
Like, it’s one thing when you calibrate your reactions to somebody cuz you know they have trouble expressing certain things or they express affection through playful ribbing or that kind of thing. Tolerating abuse because that’s what you expect from a person is bad. Especially if that person is a friend.
Ethan probably knows this on some level, which would likely be the real reason why he wouldn’t put up with the same behavior from Danny. He’s learned to stand up for himself somewhat since he met Mike. I strongly doubt he and Mike would’ve become friends if they’d met in college instead of when they were kids
Danny’s upset not because of how Mike treats him, but because he’s seen how Mike treats Ethan.
And while this absolutely was not the time to have this discussion (especially after Ethan made it pretty obvious it wasn’t), but Ethan really does need to hear this, just not while Mike is still in the hospital (and especially not while he’s there visiting him, less than a day after being kidnapped, jfc Danny)
Yes, Ethan was mean to Danny. Ethan is also still dealing with the trauma of being kidnapped and witnessing a murder very recently (yesterday, even maybe?), in an already stressful time of the school term, learning that one of his best friends is in a coma and the other has serious mental health issues that have led her to generate a second identity as a caped vigilante. I’m willing to give him a little more wiggle room right now on how mean he’s allowed to be compared to Danny, who marched into a hospital he has no business being at solely to ask Ethan out and ended up instead insulting his best friend, who could very well die, by suggesting it might be better if he /did/.
I’d also say that Ethan sorta has a point. If a guy I barely know made a shitty comment about my best friend, even without the coma, and had no real remorse for his actions, I’d consider that grounds to end a relationship with someone I have very limited personal investment in, lest it be the tip of a toxic ass iceberg. (In this case, at the very least it indicates a complete lack of tact, awareness, empathy, and emotional intelligence to not keep these ideas in your head until you have established enough trust in the relationship to maturely voice your concerns)
If my best friend made a shitty joke about the guy I’ve been vaguely flirting with for only a month I might be upset, but I’d continue being friends because I have spent 5 years building a relationship and establishing trust and getting to know their personality enough to know whether they are worth the continued effort, their capacity for growth, etc.
Not to make this an even LONGER comment, but I say this as someone who went all through high school with a best friend who pretty much everyone around me actively disliked, which was frequently voiced to me, and whose shitty personality led to me cutting her out of my life as an adult.
Tbh, even without the time scale of knowing them, the expectations for Mike and Danny are different. You would know Mike is an ass to people, so it wouldn’t be a shock if he was an ass, you’d tell him to knock it off. You can’t be let down by him being an ass, when you have no higher expectations for his behaviour.
But Danny is *mostly* kind and sweet on a day to day basis. You would expect consideration, kindness, tact, and understanding from him so even one bad interaction like this would be a major yikes in contrast to his previous behaviour.
i know that like outside the comic we’ve known these dudes for what five years now? (in this universe) but like yeah….in-comic they’ve known each other for like two months MAX. im with ethan on this one.
side note, what a wild fucking semester. imagine being one of the background characters writing home about this.
Danny just said 3 things at the worst posible moment, this wasn’t for him to do so, this wasn’t for him to make everything about him.
Yes Ethan has enabling flaws, but on the hospital, with a close person in a coma, right after being kidnapped is not going to do good at all. sighh
He is seldom kidnapped, held hostage, tortured, made to watch as a man is murdered, involve in a fight during an escape, and hit on by a self-centred jerk outside the hospital room where and old friend is in a coma.
You know, it’s not the fact that he Danned it up in the first place. It’s the fact that, afterwards, his mind was still on whether he won Ethan over, rather than the consequences of his words.
You really think a one-liner about how badly the conversation went off the rails doesn’t show that he cares about the consequences of what he said? He’s not saying “Dang it, Ethan isn’t going out with me”, he’s saying “Wow, I screwed that up.”
One thing I would point out is that when a person you consider at least sort of a friend, especially one that you have been intimate with, has a near death experience and might yet die… then you tend to go into mental fugues of regret about what has happened in the past, that you were not a better friend to them, possibly even including that you didn’t take the time to help them be a better person. You don’t suddenly overlook all the bad times, but you wish that you could have been more of a part in making the times better.
Thus Ethan is having an emotional crisis of wanting Mike back, to make new better times with. And so when someone else approaches and asks Ethan to give up on Mike, then Ethan is going to be in the middle of of clinging to his relationship with Mike, warts and all, and is not going to be in a state to turn away emotionally from Mike towards someone he doesn’t know at all well and who hasn’t been close. Danny is an acquaintance, not really a friend at this point.
Under the circumstances, given the timing, there was no way that Danny could have won a struggle for Ethan’s attention at this time.
What Danny could have done was along the lines of sympathized with Ethan, and asked Ethan to talk about Mike and what Mike meant to Ethan. Danny could have Been There For Ethan, listening to him, obtaining meals for him, helping him keep up with classes, and so on. Been the kind of better person than Mike.
But Danny isn’t that kind of person. He’s still processing in terms of asking Ethan out, rather than in terms of concern for Ethan’s feelings, for example.
Meanwhile… with Ethan being so distraught, one possible evolution is that Ethan becomes more dedicated to his relationship with Mike. For example if Mike wakes up and needs rehab and assistance with living, Ethan might choose to be Mike’s assistant. This could potentially be the start of a more mature adult relationship between Ethan and Mike.
Your defense of Danny is worried about Ethan is being abused in their friendship is noted but it doesn’t remotely stop Danny from being vicious, petty, and entitled. Because all of Danny’s “worry” is tainted with jealousy and vindictiveness as well as a slimy “isn’t it good he’s in a coma despite saving someone’s life.”
Yeah, my friend group had our own version of Mike. Not to Mike’s cartoonishly-exaggerated-for-comedic-effect levels, obviously, but he was a pretty damn cynical person by the time we were eighteen, and most of our guy friends were pretty sure he hung around us solely because we were mildly entertaining to him. However, me and him had developed a kinship borne of similar circumstances and he had done some rather selfless things to protect me for no reason I could see, things the rest of our friends didn’t know about. So I tended to side with him even when he was saying/doing things that weren’t very nice. Even when he was “mean” to me, he had, and sill does have, a lot of leeway with me because of those instances, and ones that have followed. But I didn’t always necessarily like him. It was more like “this is someone who knows how terrible things have been, has seen me at my worst, and still cares about me, even if he doesn’t show it the way people expect. And he might not be very nice about it, but if someone tries to hurt me again, he will defend me, whatever way he has to”. That kind of loyalty is rare in the real world, at least in my life.
After he joined the Air Force, things changed, because he was and is still, on a constant deployment rotation, and I became something very dear to him, even if, again, he didn’t display it the way people expected. I know him, and have a complicated history with him that doesn’t look very balanced from an outside perspective. When he nearly died (fully recovered now, thankfully) it devastated me in a way I couldn’t explain. It felt like everything I depended on, one of the few bits of bedrock I had, had been smashed to pieces under my feet. It felt that I couldn’t even breathe.
If someone had done to me what Danny just did to Ethan here on that day, I wouldn’t have reacted like Ethan just did. I would have backhanded the Danny in question. Danny took a horrible situation that was about /Ethan/ and something terrible happening in his life, and turned it into “Danny’s Declaration of Love (and also, I am better than everyone else in your life, and I know better about how you should run your relationships and life)”.
I mean, whatever else, the Alderaan reference was stupid and insensitive of Danny because he said it was fiction, and what Mike does is real. Mike’s terrible behavior is certainly real…but he also really did risk (and maybe even lose) his life trying to defend someone else, too. It didn’t make his bad behavior ok, but it wasn’t fiction, either. And from what we’ve seen behind the scenes, that neither of them know, is that it’s not the first time Mike has taken a risk in defense of someone else, either.
Somebody said Danny is sweet and loyal and doesn’t intend to hurt people, and I think all that seems clear. He looks at Mike and sees somebody who intends to hurt people (which is also accurate) and therefore is pissed that Ethan would defend Mike over him. But what Danny doesn’t realize is that he himself is also self-centered, in a self-loathing, self-pitying kind of way, and he revolves the world around his feelings, has never considered that he might not be the “protagonist” of everybody’s story, which ppl have also mentioned.
He hasn’t realized how to set aside his own feelings and actually try understanding others. And that that is ANOTHER way to hurt people, even when your intentions are good. That’s shitty, but it’s something that a lot of us have had to learn. I recognize the feeling. I’ve been that person. Recognizing you’re that person takes work and self-awareness, and if Danny doesn’t ever develop that or get challenged on his bad behavior, then he will just…stay a somehwat-shitty person.
Hopefully he learns something this round.
Ethan can totally be forgiven for his reaction due to the circumstances–and his reaction was, all things considered, fairly mild, but it’s good that he’s being confronted with his double standard for Mike vs Danny. And for enabling people he loves. It wasn’t even something I thought of until this conversation. Pushing back against Danny was probably good for him, even if the only person he’d push back against is typically a pushover.
And Mike, well, being a hero a couple times, and deeply caring about like maybe 2 people, doesn’t excuse him from being a dick to the other 99% of humanity as well as the people he actually likes, most of the time. Those two things don’t cancel each other out. They’re just both true. I hope he learns something too. And I hope he wakes up. T-t
TL;DR everybody’s fucked up and has things to learn which is just essentially like real life and why I love this comic so much 😀
I don’t think that read on Danny is correct, despite his thought walking away here.
Willis established with his talk with Mike at the birthday party that the root of his problem with Mike is how Mike treats Ethan and Amber. That’s not self-centered. That’s not “protagonist”.
That all came boiling out of him at the wrong time and in a really bad way, but it comes from concern for Ethan, not self-pity.
Would definitely agree that he is concerned, but, especially given that thought, I think it’s only part of his motivation. You have a good point; guess I’m thinking that both of those emotions/motivations can be happening at once.
Oh, Danny boy, you are bad at a lot of things. Chief among them currently is not being a selfish dick. Frankly, though, this an unfortunately reoccurring problem with you and people you’re interested in. You want them to do things because they’re what you want without really asking what they want. That’s why you lost Dorothy, that’s why you lost AG and Amber, who you didn’t bother to ask how she was doing at all because apparently getting the chance to swap spit with Ethan is more important than being a decent human being (I don’t care if they aren’t a thing anymore, he could still ask before asking about Ethan), and why you should probably lose Ethan because he deserves better than your needy self.
I’m sorry but I have to say this is an inaccurate take. Danny is being a selfish dick here but AG broke up with him because he was hanging out with Sal. She thought Sal was her arch enemy or something and had turned him against her. Not only that but she then started hanging out with Sal right after that. Amber also said some quite abusive stuff to him when he’d admittedly made a mistake by kissing her when she didn’t want him to, although she never actually informed him of the full extent of her disassociation so that was a honest mistake on his part. Danny didn’t lose AG. AG broke up with him because frankly she’s kind of a messed up person who is really not ready to date anyone in a committed relationship.
As far as checking up on Amber? I think that’s splitting hairs a little. Amber has flat out ignored him at times he tried to check up on her before.
She told him to go away once, in the “I’m not your problem anymore” – “I don’t consider you a problem” – “Danny. Go.” comic strip. If I remember correctly. And he respected that, and when he was worried about her after that, I believe he sent Ethan to check on her, because he knew she didn’t want him around?
Danny is really not that selfish.
I have a slightly different take on this. She was mad about him talking to Sal, which is a problem, but Danny told Amazi-Girl he thought she should go away for awhile and that he liked Amber more. Which was perfectly reasonable from his point of view: Stop risking your life, I like you even without the superhero thing. But with Amazi-Girl as an actual separate alter it would come across to her as “I like someone else better, I don’t want you to even exist.”
Not his fault, since he didn’t have any good reason to grasp the disassociation then, but still horribly painful.
Honestly that relationship was probably doomed from the start as much as it might suck to say it. At first Danny didn’t even know Amber and AG were the same person or shared a body depending on how you define her DID. Amber never told him despite them having mutual feelings for each other and he only found out after Blaine kidnapped him and she beat the crap out of Blaine in that parking lot.
Then it got worse when he did find out, and there were these rules he had to follow because he was dating AG and not Amber, which is also very confusing because they often talked like they were dating but Danny couldn’t do things like touch Amber. Amber tried to communicate the difference between them a few times, but I don’t think she did a very good job at it and Danny didn’t understand because this is admittedly very new ground for anybody. The relationship kind of just became whatever Amber needed it to be at the time which was kind of selfish.
And then you add the Sal factor and as you said Danny valuing Amber’s safety over AG being a vigilante which is a fair take, Amber’s self esteem issues and her inability to fully define who she is in relation to AG, that she’s still struggling with and this was just never going to work out.
But someone saying Danny was somehow the reason that relationship failed is kind of messed up considering what he went through while dating her. Sorry for ranting, but this is kind of a peeve of mine. I don’t even really like Danny but he gets hate for being a bad boyfriend and that’s not the case at all. He even fricken regularly did Amber’s laundry for her! Come on!
What the others said, but also if you were referring to the Danny/Amber interaction right before he ran off to Ethan, he checked in with her and she said she was saving her energy for family, so he respected that.
There’s a lesson here, folks. Do not post comments before you go to sleep, because you’ll say things that you really should fact check.
I do notice people aren’t saying I’m wrong about the other things, so I guess I got some of it right. Heck, even when I typed it some part of me kept going “Amber/AG doesn’t fit the pattern” but did I listen to it?
Danny refusing to admit that he decided to, in a very sensitive situation, act like a complete monster, and then decided to double down with ‘I should get to do it because HE would do it to ME’ and then guilt-tripping him with ‘well if I’m so unimportant, I’m out!’ is not ‘the truth’ and ‘the truth’ is not that Mike is comparable to Darth Vader, because he’s not. Ethan doesn’t need it pointed out to him that Mike isn’t a great person either because he already knew that and admitted to that.
Danny got wrapped up in trying to win the self-righteous ‘my view of Mike is right’ award and like anyone who plays this ‘sorry… BUT I’M RIGHT’ game with conversations as if they will win a prize for being right, he got the only real prize of doing it: A damaged friendship, possibly a destroyed friendship even. Because as they say, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Danny did not do that. He immediately started apologizing. That ethan then said something that made Danny not particularly want to apologize anymore, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR NOT THAT’S RIGHT, doesn’t change that Danny immediately started apologizing.
“Starting to apologize” means literally nothing if you don’t actually follow through on said apology. Danny DIDN’T actually apologize, and him backpedaling only to then double down on the absolutely horrendous thing he said means the failed apology is less than worthless and is actually just manipulative, wishy-washy bullshit.
I really don’t think the idea is just to be right for the sake of being right, it’s more, at least in theory, to show the other person what’s right so they will change their minds and they’ll be right too, because being right is good!
… okay, I guess this isn’t great either, since it’s kinda assuming the other person isn’t smart enough to figure things out for themselves and you have to show them the way or something, but it’s still not just arguing so you can be right and be the winner. And I guess I’m mostly just speaking for myself, maybe some people legitimately are like that.
im not an entitled fan. Willis can write any story he wants
are you straight by the way?
its very different when society doesn’t cater to your representation , model it everywhere on all aspects of society. Teasing a gay ship and failing to deliver ( especially over a long term ) while winking at gay fandom raising expectation is call “Queerbaiting” . Unfortunately it happens a lot ( harry potter, teen wolf ) . This is an issue of because of the lack of regular everyday normal background representation.
Willis didnt cause that, but it creates an ethical pressure because we need more from these scraps .
imagine you are going let your dog go hungry, then eat steak in front if him, then tease him with one, when you finally give it to him, you should allow him to eat it , uncomplicated , without taking it away . because thats a shitty thing to do.
ive been led to believe for 5 years of reading this is happening. and it probably still is in some form.
but i feel a loss of faith. Maybe Willis isnt capable of writing an uncomplicated payoff to a relationship straight or gay. which makes me sad.
I could easily see how Willis could do something similar without queerbaiting.
Damn Ethan you would let Mike get away with that cuz you bonked him? not “Mike wouldn’t cuz it’s serious” but “yeah and he could get away with it” cuz he’s got tenure. What a trainwreck
I know this comic is soap opera-y as hell but at this point I will be legit mad if Danny and Ethan hook up. That entire conversation wasn’t just crossing the line it was running over it and doing a touchdown dance on the other side.
But I’ve been reading this comic too long, and I just know deep down this is gonna end with a dramatic kiss in the hallway followed by a makeout session and/or slipshine in a closet.
The problem with being a doormat is that when you finally stand up for yourself, it tends to come with a lot of repressed resentment. Obviously, not all of that resentment is the result of Mike or Ethan. Danny was selfish, and he was tactless. But he was honest.
Danny only see’s Mike as a jerk, because that’s all Mike ever showed him. The problem is Danny has a simplistic, childish understanding of other people. It doesn’t help that Mike does his best to stick to his asshole persona.
Unfortunately, Danny did have one point. Ethan DOES enable Mike’s bad behavior.
You know, I agree that Danny’s being a massive dick here – as multiple people have said, what he’s saying about Mike’s shitty behaviours and Ethan enabling them are kind of right, but this isn’t the time or place, and he’s clearly motivated by jealousy and a refusal to admit he’s being a dick, not concern for Ethan or Amber or any other people Mike hurt.
But I really don’t agree with the consensus that Danny, overall, is a bad person when, as far as I can remember, this and his break up with Dorothy were the only times he’s really been a jerk to anyone. He clearly needs to stop investing all his self worth in whether he’s in a relationship (I think he’s generally gotten better there, but his behaviour here shows he still has issues), but otherwise most of his time in the comic has seen him generally being a decent person and coming to terms with his bisexuality, which doesn’t make me see him as the terrible person a lot of this comments section seems to see him as.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that his self worth issues and the handful of crappy things he has done in the comic come at least in part to his parents spending his childhood essentially passive aggressively telling him he “Dannyed everything up” and that the only good thing he did was get together with Dorothy.
I feel relly sorry for Danny because of his lousy self esteem and how it keeps sabotaging things for him, but those time when he is the agressor, such as here, it really makes it hard to sympathise with him. Moments like this really makes it clear why he was so disliked in the beginning of the comic.
Still, he is a good egg at heart, so as soon he manages to crawl out of his own ass I’m sure he will figure out a way to make ammends.
Yeah, I kind of hope that once he has some time to cool off, he gets the core problem (‘did I just tell my friend I hoped his friend stayed in the coma he obtained saving their other best friend, who is also a friend of mine? Did I just lowkey imply it would be better if that guy died? And did I really just say that right outside the door of his hospital room where his grieving parents were? What the fuck, Danny?’) and apologizes. He’s not wrong that Mike’s an absolute asshole! He could very much try a conversation and be in the right about it that’s explicitly ‘I care about you guys and don’t like how Mike treats you.’ But expecting Ethan and Amber to be okay with their friend dying or remaining in a coma longterm for saving AG is… pretty insensitive and the most boneheaded way to try and make that point. (It’s gonna tank Amber’s survivor’s guilt even worse, for one thing.)
I don’t think that comment about Mike remaining in a coma is actually indicative of how Danny feels to that extreme, that he genuinely wants Mike to be comatose forever, but rather that it was a slip of the tongue regarding what Danny actually feels: That Mike is a toxic influence in Amber and Ethan’s lives.
As much as Dan is being a massive arse here, I will point out one thing: this is the first time I remember him not going full doormat. It’s his first time trying to stand up for himself and point out a double standard and insist others stop letting ppl metaphorically shit all over him.
Because it’s dumbing of age he picked about the worst time, place, and way, but it’s still progress. Beginning of strip Danny would have accepted that Mike would laugh about him being in a coma and would have thought he deserved it and pretended he wasn’t hurt by it.
Now he’s owning his feelings and standing up to a double standard. Because it’s Dan, he’s doing it in the wrong way, time, and place, but it’s still progress.
tbh, i can’t see this as him pointing out a double standard or trying to not be a doormat.
he literally went to mikes worrying friend and said “wouldn’t it be better if he didn’t wake up?”
When called out on it he compared mike to vader, comparing a jerk that tackled a murderer off a building to a mass murderer.
and ofcourse my least favorite “he’d be out here crapping on me”. uhhh…. no, i don’t think mike would be out there crapping on danny. and even if mike DID through a jab or 2, it would probably be something like “couldn’t he have used that asshole as a cushion?” or something like that. not “maybe Danny should stay in a coma/dead.”
Danny is starting down a bad path, what that path is called, i don’t know. Eternal victim? Niceguy? i don’t know… but i do know that it is not a good one.
Mike is a dick that is a good person when it counts, danny seems nice in the calm fair-weather times, now he is showing his colors when things are bad.
An important thing to note is that Ethan doesn’t at all refute that Mike would be a jerk if Danny was comatose. Mike as we know him totally would, and no one in the cast would have a problem with it.
I also don’t think it’s fair to let Mike get away with his actions on account of his occasional moments of humanity, but Danny’s sins are that much worse thanks to him normally being a good person.
But Danny isn’t a good person either, though. He’s just someone who thinks if he buries his own wants and dreams in support of others, ppl will like him better.
That’s not being a good person. That’s pathological levels of people pleasing. And as a recovering ppl pleaser myself, I know from experience your own wants and needs don’t disappear because you pretend they’re gone, you just end up resenting everyone around you for getting what they want when you sacrifice yet again, forever shooting yourself in the foot then wondering why it hurts until eventually all that bottled up resentment finds its way out in passive aggression or in a rage meltdown.
Danny isn’t being a good person, he’s being a nice guy as if being nice enough long enough will mean he deserves a prize, like a child being obedient for presents from Santa. No matter what his currently coveted prize thinks of the matter.
I do for the record think Danny wants to be a good person. But he needs to realize that good person and pleasing others aren’t the same thing.
I’ll clarify that I meant “being a good person” as “not deliberately going out of his way to constantly hurt people like Mike has”, but I don’t think it’s entirely fair to put Danny into the Nice Guy box as evidenced by his behaviour throughout the rest of the comic.
Mike doesn’t have friends, just people willing to stand next to him.
The idea that Mike is a good person when it counts is just mind-boggling to me. He did one dramatic good thing, because he realized how awful he’d been to one of his “friends” for years. That’s not a good person. At best it’s the start of a redemption arc.
What are you talking about? Toedad’s actions, which he felt were saving Becky, did indeed lead to his own death. He was *quite* willing to sacrifice quite a lot.
Literally the first time he showed up to kidnap Becky he didn’t get to “walk the walk” as you say because Becky decided to sacrifice her life instead. He shot the gun specifically *after* Becky told him he’d get murdered by cops.
His “love” was abusive because in his mind he was making a sacrifice and getting angry that Becky wasn’t appreciating it or accepting it.
Mike is an abusive prick who is an abusive prick 99% of the time (being a dick to ppl because he can counts). His one deed of heroism doesn’t erase the fact that he has spent the rest of the entire series to date manipulating and abusing those around him.
Danny is also a jackass much of the time, in exactly the way you described. He has all the whiny self entitled defeatism of a white male Nice Guy. And this was a genuinely dick thing to do. But he definitely is pushing back on a double standard even if he’s not saying as much in so many words. But my point is that despite this being an utter jackass move, it is still hell of a lot better than his whiny passive aggression of the early days of the strip, in that at least he is being honest about his feelings with ppl and taking ownership of his own emotions and opinions of others.
Should have had that talk last week, or a few weeks from now depending on the situation. Just not right now. Your hormones got in the way of your timing.
… Danny somehow at -least- managed to make it so both of them are at fault now. He can’t fix it since he’s Danny… but he can make the rest look bad too. (?)
I mean Danny does have a point in that regard, they would let Mike get away with that behaviour, and that’s something Ethan and Amber need to work on that…
Hooray! Danny finally said it! Ethan would forgive Mike anything he would do because he is Mike. He will never try to tell him that his behavior is bad, he will never start avoiding him, even if it would be the better thing to do. Ethan is happy to be with someone manipulative who insults him and everyone else for fun. By saying this and leaving, Danny saved himself from a possible disastrous relationship. Now I hope Mike recovers and he and Ethan can be happy together.
I for one, am absolutely ecstatic this conversation took place.
It was a horrible time and place and it was wasn’t polite or amiable, but goddam this confrontation needed to happen and better before any potential hook-up than after.
Danny’s fruedian slip was was bad and his arguments were poorly made, but otherwise I am really glad for him that he made the decision to stand his ground here instead of rolling over for the possibility of getting his dick wet.
Because let’s face it, Danny and Ethan AREN’T (really even) friends. They’re friendly aquantences who are mutually attracted to one another.
Though now that I’ve said my piece in defense of Danny…
What does Ethan do now. He’s got A LOT of heavy emotional shit going on and what kind of support network does he have?
I mean Danny still has Joe to vent to.
Ethan has… Mike who is in a coma. And Amber, who Ethan can’t vent to because she’s one of the issues he needs to vent about and venting to her makes him feel guilty anyway because she takes everything as her fault and responsibility.
He can’t go to his mother because she’ll just make it about his sexuality.
Mike’s parents or Amber’s mom could be there, but the former are dealing with their own issues right now and going to Amber’s mom feels like more of an “Amber needs an intervention” step than a “I need to talk through my own issues” step.
…Maaybe Joyce?
They’re still on friendly terms right?
Or hell, Maybe Ethan could make the adult decision and request some time with a school counselor.
Sure he’s an enabler who was recently closeted, but otherwise Ethan seems to have more of his shit together than the rest of the cast.
I totally agree that Joe is crap at support, but he will at least allow Danny to vent “at” him if nothing else. And he wouldn’t spill any of Danny’s secrets.
Danny’s necessary personalty growth is just learning to tell people he shoved his foot in his mouth and apologizing for it. Instead of doubling down on the route his rogue mouth decided they were gonna go down.
There were so many moments where you can tell he knows he’s being terrible and needs to apologize, but instead of doing that Danny just…digs a deeper hole.
An unfortunate social event! Hopefully Danny learns from this and can some day be friends with Ethan again. He should take dating off the table for a long, long time though. Gotta work on that personality growth.
Asking someone out, in a hospital, after just effectively wishing that persons friend would die, right outside the room where that persons parents are worrying isnt being “really super bad at asking asking people out”. Its being “totally insensitive towards other peoples feelings”.
Danny started this by wanting to confess his feelings because Ethan (someone he may be in love with) could have died. Then he shoved his foot in his mouth and the topic shifted towards Mike’s abuse and Ethan’s acceptance of it, whereupon Ethan tells Danny to his face that he’d let Mike get away with mocking a comatose Danny.
You call it putting Mike on a pedestal, I see it as defending him while he’s possibly dying from someone who doesn’t know him the way Ethan does and has no relationship with him.
Mike could be the worst person in the world but Ethan cares about him still. That’s all he’s telling Danny. That he cares about Mike. And Danny’s response is some version of “but you’re wrong tho”. Which is a fucked up thing to say in the moment and also a ridiculous unsympathetic way of viewing relationships.
I don’t think Ethan actually means what he’s saying here any more than I think Danny actually wished Mike were dead but he most assuredly is not *just telling* Danny that he values him more, he said, in response to the question of how Mike would act if Danny were comatose, he’d let it slide because he knows Mike.
Because Ethan is complacent to Mike’s abuse. Because Ethan is used to it. Because Mike is “not bad once you get to know him” even though he’s never proven otherwise.
Abuse victims often care about and defend their abusers.
That’s how I see much of this and why I’m more sympathetic to Danny, despite him screwing up trying to talk about it.
Danny has known Ethan for five weeks and slept with one of Ethan’s friends, now he wants to fuck Ethan. That gives his absolutely zero authority to curate Ethan’s friends list, or to diagnose and mend Ethan’s problems in general.
Danny is also not supposed to be a punching bag for Mike, or Amber, or Amazi-Girl when she’s not using him for sexual release. And yet those were seen as totally valid uses for Danny because (insert non-reason about being abused, an “asshole-sage”, or just LOL here). But now that he’s showing a bit of spine, well that’s a problem.
The lesson from this interaction if, of course, always be terrible to people. Then they excuse you for being terrible, whereas if you’re ever nice to them then they start having “standards” about your behaviour, and, honestly. who needs that hassle?
Honestly, I’m glad Danny is respecting himself. He’s completely right in the first 2 panels.
Self-respect usually starts with being a bit of an asshole before you figure out your midpoint between being a doormat and being a douche. Danny is douche right now, but he’s on his way to being just a solid dude.
I genuinely do not understand why anybody is defending Danny. It doesn’t matter if he has a point. He’s still doing this at the worst possible time, trying to make things that aren’t about him about him, and has taken things way too far.
Because things are more complicated than it just being a black and white issue. Because Mike is genuinely an abusive person and Ethan doesn’t want to own that. Because Ethan just said he’d be fine with Mike laughing about Danny being comatose.
I’m not saying it’s a black and white issue. Mike has definitely been abusive, but given that it’s been less than 24 hours since Ethan was both kidnapped and found out that Mike was in a coma (initially told that he was dead, and was both kidnapped and told by the person who was responsible for that happening), confronting the fact that Mike has been abusive isn’t something that Ethan wants or should have to do. And also, I’m pretty sure he said that because Danny’s put him on edge and pushed him into that “yeah, I’m gonna say hurtful things” place, whereas Danny said “Mike should die” with no provocation, then doubled down on it. Is it bad that Ethan said that? Of course, but that doesn’t negate that Danny is still the one in the wrong here.
Also, while it’s still not an excuse to say it, I’d also argue that Ethan actually wouldn’t say nothing if the situation was reversed. He told Mike to back off Danny way back when, after all.
Danny shoved his foot in his mouth with his initial comment, but he did immediately apologize for it and then dovetailed into a separate conversation about Mike’s abuse. I think he’s wrong to pursue it now but it’s not like they give out pointers on when to have painful and necessary conversations.
No, they don’t, but I’d like to think it’s fairly obvious that it shouldn’t be less than a day after someone’s been through an incredibly traumatic experience, and now has to deal with the further trauma of seeing someone they care about in a situation they might not recover from.
By themselves, perhaps not, but the timing, combined with the fact that he outright says that he doesn’t want Mike to wake up is what makes Danny an asshat.
That struck me as more of a reaction to Mike as a person than literally wanting Mike dead, and he did apologize for it before the topic changed to Mike’s behaviour.
I really don’t think the direction Danny is being taken as a character is “super wishes Mike were dead so he’d get out of Ethan’s way.”
Honest answer: because I don’t identify with Ethan, so I don’t care as much if he is hurt.
I care more that Danny is finally not taking peoples’ shit than whether Ethan defends his friend. Danny messed up his relationship with Ethan here, but at least he can be a stronger person elsewhere.
Because while it was a shitty conversation to bring up with Ethan (especially at this point and time), Danny handled it in a healthy matter once he did.
Far better for him stand his ground here than for him to metaphorically roll over in the hopes his crush will sleep with him. Or to run away and leave the issue completely unresolved.
What would you have preferred? He spend the entire conversation faking sympathy for Mike in the hopes Ethan would sleep with him?
Because let’s not kid ourselves. Danny’s gotten better, but he still casts himself as a potential male lead in a romcom.
An “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that”, followed by not comparing him to a character who helped commit genocide would have been good. Nobody asked him to weigh in on his opinion of Mike. Which, let’s not forget, is “I don’t like him, and because I don’t like him, I don’t want him to wake up from a coma”.
Way too many people still defending Mike. Like… Everyone seems to forget his history of abusive controlling bullshit. He wasn’t “just an asshole”. He was manipulative. Down right sociopathic.
Hilariously Dannys remark about Vader was so spot on it hurts.
Hey he did that one nice thing… Yeah?
Rereading this strip now that my initial frustration has died down, I treat panel 1 more closely. And now I’m realizing that it’s not that Danny is doubling down because he’s stuck – it’s because he decides that that’s the easier thing to do than asking Ethan out. *faaaacepalms*
I think we’re too into the redemption of scoundrels to see that Mike has been genuinely pretty awful for as long as he’s been in the strip. Danny’s in the uncomfortable position Rachel was when she told Ruth that “redemption is a story”, ie: saying painful things to a protagonist we like.
To put this in terms everyone can immediately understand: yeah it’s nice that Megatron wanted to make something better of himself but that doesn’t make Getaway and the mutineers wrong for kicking him and his sympathizers off the ship. His actions weren’t erased because of his newfound heroism.
I still think Rachel had the same issue with Ruth Danny has here – going WAY too far for the timing. (Because while I am very sympathetic to Rachel and think she’s under no obligation to forgive Ruth, ‘redemption is a story and people don’t actually change’ to someone who’s just been discharged from the hospital for suicidal ideation is… well, since I don’t think Rachel wants to spend the rest of her life knowing something she said contributed to a suicide attempt, she got damn lucky there that the splash damage was primarily in Amber’s convictions she is and always will be a monster.)
Like, neither of them are wrong that Ruth and Mike, respectively, have done absolutely terrible things. I’m actually 100% on Danny’s side in his conversation with Mike at the birthday party. (Which… does seem to have led to what was, if not a suicide attempt, an incredibly self-destructive play, but crucially Danny did not know this was at all a risk and I don’t think it actually WAS until Blaine prompted Mike’s realization. Rachel knew what Ruth was admitted for.) But generally speaking, you have to be a WAY worse person and WAY more established in that badness for me to be okay with you dying, and both those conversations either feature on an implicit ‘I’d be okay if he dies’ (Danny) or are far enough at such a vulnerable target it could have made them spiral down again (Rachel.)
(That said, I also tend to be way more ‘no this was actively not okay’ with Rachel’s speech because I’ve been in active depressive episodes more often than not since 2013 and imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.)
I really don’t think Danny actively or implicitly wants Mike to die or even be in a coma. The way that strip was framed made it come off as a slip, less “I wish you were dead” and more “with him in a coma, Mike can no longer do his Mike thing.”
And, well, that’s just way too horrible if Danny actually meant that. It feels like the kind of thing that would totally break the character for years on end, which we can see in how so many commenters today are mad at Danny for what he said. I certainly won’t say it’s an incorrect reading (because Danny still said it) but I don’t think that’s where the character is being taken.
The thing is, with how he doubled down, Ethan has no reason to think that’s not what Danny’s thinking. Hell, we don’t really have a reason beyond ‘it would make Danny completely unlikeable and this is a narrative.’
I don’t think he was thinking beyond ‘dislike of Mike’ (justified) and some jealousy/Why Can’t You See That I’m Right-ish stuff going on (rather less so) really, which is why he doubled down, but at some point I hope the implications are gonna hit him like a brick and he’ll apologize. Because Danny is generally not a bad person, but he is definitely prone to some serious foot-in-mouth moments, usually when he can’t read the room with a romantic interest because he’s trying to make a Grand Romcom Gesture like this. (OF COURSE Dorothy will choose to stay at IU out of love for me! Obviously Amber describing her dissociation – and that was one of the first frank discussions of it as ‘I was not in control of my body’ and a terrifying incident to boot – is a good opportunity to comfort her with a kiss. And now, clearly Ethan would be receptive to a confession after he’s been kidnapped, outside one of his best friend’s hospital room, and now is the BEST time to subsequently get derailed by this into a conversation about Mike. I think he has the same ‘life is not a romcom’ issue Joyce is working through, thinking on it.) Though not exclusively – sure, Joe’s gross, but he’s harmless so the List is just a distasteful quirk! And that last one’s what gives me hope, because when he DID have that pointed out to him, he changed his thinking right quick.
Dude.
Even if you said everything right, I would not want to be asked out right after being abducted, with one best friend in a coma, and the other best friend traumatized (and I guess her superhero identity has an actual will and controls her body sometimes and she’s hallucinating coma best friend) even more, and after I watched her dad kill someone.
Sorry, I was remembering how human brains look on a hammer, what did you say, Dan? Dinner and a movie?
Perspective.
For the audience it could have been years for them is less than a semester…a couple months aparently…hell too much stuff for such small amount of time..maybe the timelie is too compresed in this comic.
As someone who, if I had to choose between receiving kindness or honesty, would always choose honesty:
Danny may be a bit of an ass right now, but at no point has he been wrong. If Mike were talking trash about Danny, comatose in a hospital bed, parents only one wall away, Ethan admits it would be just fine.
He didn’t say “I want him to die” or “I want him to never wake up”, just that it wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t wake up *right away*. Because exposure to Mike takes a huge emotional toll, and he’d been especially brutal to Danny practically yesterday. Anyone would want a break from that. Sure Ethan doesn’t know the extent of Mike’s abuse on Danny but that doesn’t excuse the absurd double standard Ethan himself is comfortable with after having been inured to Mike’s behavior for so long. A break from Mike and the deliberate damge he does on a regular basis, at this point, is a fairly objectively good thing for everyone.
Danny’s not wrong. He just has really bad delivery.
How was Mike “especially brutal” to Danny? He made a couple jokes about fucking his mom. He even explicitly stated that, per an agreement, he is not “doing Mike things” to Danny. He said that to Danny’s face.
Danny’s right and he should say it. I’ve fucked up people I’ve known five years for starting shit with people I had one date with. It’s super skeezy for Ethan to tolerate Mike being virulently abusive to people in his orbit and by bringing them into his orbit while tolerating Mike’s behaviour he’s a participant. Nobody should date Ethan until he puts Mike on a damn leash.
So you’re cheering on a guy who is putting himself before the guy he supposedly has a crush on? Even though the worst thing that happened to him is some rough words, and his crush just got confined by criminals, one of which got killed in the next room?
Danny’s being an entitled mess, he doesn’t deserve Ethan.
The likelihood — in reality rather than fiction — would be that any brain injury severe enough to leave the patient in a coma for two days would leave him with serious to severe physical and cognitive disabilities and personality change.
We spent the part of the first half of this comic lamenting Danny having less spine than Ted Cruz and now that he stands up for himself its the wrong place and time. Which to be fair, yeah the venue and circumstances could be better but I’m still on his side here. Knowing someone is interested in you and letting your close friend constantly shit on them is garbage. Full stop.
And it doesn’t matter how long Mike has known Ethan vs. Danny. If one of my best friends just started being disrespectful to someone I was newly dating we would be having STRONG words about how that shit wouldn’t fly.
“Could be better”? Ethan has been kidnapped, held hostage, tortured, seen a man beaten to death, and been in a desperate fight. One of his few friends is critically injured and lying in a coma. This is absolutely not the time and place to make a pass at him. And it is absolutely, positively not the time and place to take him to task for loyalty to his injured friend.
Danny has no sense at all of Ethan’s distress. His whole concern has been that Ethan is an asset that he almost lost.
I’ve just realized… for all Danny’s accusations… he doesn’t know that Ethan TOLD Mike that Danny was off limits to serious mind-fuckery. Which, kind of makes Danny look even worse right now. I have never seen a character dig themselves so far down in just three strips.
Really? I actually view it as the opposite — the fact that Ethan had to say that shows very clearly that Ethan is fully aware of just how much of an incredibly toxic jerk Mike is, and is perfectly fine with it outside of rare exceptions. Mike has seriously contributed to how messed-up Ethan and Amber are, and he is a complete jerk to everyone else they socialize with. I am fully on Danny’s side in calling that out.
And let’s not forget, this conversation started from Danny accidentally blurting out his unfiltered thoughts, which he then apologized for. It only went further when Ethan tried to excuse Mike’s literal years of toxicity by bringing up his one good act that Ethan knows of… and, frankly, I’m with Danny on calling that out, too.
Very strange that Danny can be simultaneously so in his own head about interacting with people and conversationally impulsive. But it is a recipe for comedic missteps, and I’m sure some people are this way so it doesn’t blow my suspension of disbelief quite like a simple eyemask concealing someone’s identity.
Danny is being extremely entitled in this whole interaction. He’s talking over a guy who just went through hell and is unable to take a step back from his own emotions. It’s disappointing.
i mean, not that Danny’s innocent here, but fuck you Ethan. I’ve been thinking about this for some reason, and Ethan… you can be pissed about what Danny says without justifying Mike’s assholery. He’s still an asshole whether you’ve known him five years or five seconds. I’m sorry you’re sad, but you’re still being a dick.
But just so you know I’m not playing favorites: Danny, you showed your ass. You spoke appropriately and it was mean and being a dick. That Mike is ALSO a dick doesn’t justify you. You made a mistake, and saying “sorry” at this point would have been ok, i think. But you doubled down and blamed the guy unconscious in a hospital.
If this were r/AITA the answer would be ESH. Congrats, all three of you are assholes. You deserve each other. Maybe you can all just have some three way menage-a-hate fuck and get it all worked out that way.
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Danny: “Oh great Ouija board, what will Ethan say if I try to ask him out?”
Ouija board: “Fine”
Danny: “Great, I’m in!”
Those Ouija boards have odd senses of humor.
True story. As a kid I discovered that I could work a Ouiji board by myself. I asked it how to build a time machine. It replied with a name I was unfamiliar with. In those pre-Internet days of the early 60’s I looked up the name in the encyclopedia. Turns out he was famous for writing a communist manifesto called “The Tracts of Time.” Well I certainly wasn’t going to call attention to myself by trying to get my hands on some communist propaganda, and so I never learned the secrets of time travel.
I haven’t remembered that in years.
Wow…an Ouija board with a twisted sense of humor…
That actually sounds like a neat web comic idea…
Also, nice work digging yourself down that hole Danny.
Fucked up
Insecure
Neurotic
Emotional
shooting for 0 for 3 now?
not sure if this is an improvement on past bday strips
Happy birthday.
Happy birthday!
Also navigate just one strip back from last year…
Also, let’s be fair. Mike is probably WAY better in bed than Danny.
Most epic.
Even at this very moment.
Ask your mom.
Maybe we should ask Stacy’s mom? I hear she’s got it going on.
I mean yeah, but also you were kind of a dick even if maybe you had a point so……
I was gonna clarify that I was talking about Danny but after re-reading the strip a few time and absorbing it’s meaning just a bit more I think it applies to both of them. Danny more though.
After this, I really think Danny needs to re-evaluate his character and attitude.
And his haberdashery.
Millinery, too.
and his cobbler due to Liefeld foot syndrome.
Considering that Ethan just admitted that he wouldnt stand up to Mike being an asshole in the worst situation, they both need an attitude adjustment.
It’s Danny, he’ll just change hat and label it ‘character development’.
Wish i could do that
Should’ve brought the ukelele along.
Danny had one trick, one trick, that he knew worked. and he blowed it. I’m very dissapointed in new Danny. He is better than that.
No, I really don’t think he is.
Well, he should be
Clearly, Danny will realize that OTHER PEOPLE’s reactions are the problem and he just needs to be MORE like a romantic comedy stalker…err, protagonist.
I was honestly expecting him to make it much worse than it already was from here so this is kind of a relief
Ethan did also say his parents where on the other side of the door, Danny wasn’t worried at all about the grieving mother hearing him?
“He’s always going on about doing your mom so the least you could do is lose the top, lady.”
Danny: “They’re probably jerks like him!”
Danny, you are a dick right now.
*plays the Moonlighting theme on the hacked Muzak*
WTF, Danny. You really are a clueless dolt.
Well that went better than I thought it would.
I think Ethan is just lashing out, but that he explicitly says that he’d let Mike get away with bashing on a comatose Danny, that’s hurtful too. The only reason it’s not as bad as what Danny’s said here is that it’s a hypothetical.
Ethan got confronted on his biases and he obviously isn’t the right frame of mind to address that fairly.
I mean yes, at some point his doormat nature needed to be addressed, but really not the time and place for it.
Honestly, the whole exchange reminds me of that one scene from The BIg Lebowski.
“You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole!”
Exactly.
“You’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just nice! I’m not good, I’m not nice, I’m just right!“
So, you’re the witch?
We’re the world!
Is it really even meaningfully hurtful considering the context? Danny was the one who brought up roles being reversed, shoving Ethan into a petty hypothetical scenario he had no desire to be in. It’s not like Ethan brought up or even entertained the idea of Danny being in a coma and Mike being a jerk about it, that was ALL Danny.
I would double down and defend my friend too, were I in this conversation.
Well I’ve defended Danny in the past but this…he had like 3 chances to get out of this situation yet he somehow managed to end it with an insult to Ethan
I have to say its impressive
He’s nothing if not honest. That’s not always necessarily the correct course of action, unfortunately. Not lying, but some omission can be good.
Honesty, while positive in most situations, is also the final refuge of the cad. I’ve seen it many times: the tactless asshole insults and injures the vulnerable, spreading tales of the target’s flaws and foibles; and then, they excuse everything with, “What can I say? I’m unconditionally honest.” How fortunate for them that their honesty does not extend to their own flaws.
Ethan totally just said he’d stand by and let Mike rip on Danny if he were comatose.
I think Danny approached this the wrong way because at this point it does sound like what he wants to do is hate on Mike instead of anything productive, but Ethan just put Danny down in a pretty harsh way.
Yeah. I wanna say Ethan kind of just got dragged into the mud cause he was feeling defensive from Danny’s comment , but he did basically just say he’s okay with Mike being an asshole just because Mike’s “his” asshole. I’m not sure how much you can take from any of this though in the heat of the moment.
Pretty sure he said that because the situation is pretty unsalvageable anyways and that’s something that’s been bugging him, but that doesn’t make it incorrect.
Danny said something that was unacceptable, but he isn’t wrong about two things: Mike would shit all over him if the roles were reversed and Ethan would tolerate it. Clearly Ethan knows both are true too. Ethan’s response was pretty shitty itself. They both owe apologies to each other. Danny owes an apology to Mike as well, but I don’t know whether Mike would be more offended by the shit-talk or the apology for said shit-talk.
Probably the apology. I keep picturing him hearing about this later and going, “Yeah, that’s fair.”
Eh, Mike actually probably wouldn’t shit on Danny while he’s in a coma. As we see with Amber/Amazi-Girl when he found out he’d actually made her life worse–he attempted to sacrifice his life.
Mike was STUPID trying to be an edgelord to help people but he was trying to help people.
Ethan doesn’t deny it.
But much of this relies on how you see Mike. If Mike’s basically a good person who’s an asshole sometimes, Danny’s incredibly out of line. If Mike’s toxic and abusive and has been screwing up Ethan’s life for years, Danny’s tactless and his timing is bad, but he’s got a point.
And since we know that before his realization, Mike was deliberately screwing up Amber’s psyche for years, I’m leaning to the second side. Despite his sacrifice. If/when he wakes up, he might learn from that revelation and try to improve in some less dramatic and grandiose way.
Uh, that would be the opposite of deliberate since Mike acted in horror and suicidal sacrifice at the discovery he was screwing with Amber.
It was less that he was screwing with amber, more that he realised he was behaving exactly like Blaine who he despised, making him rethink basically his whole life
As Zee says, he knew damn well he was prodding Amber’s bear, turning her into a timebomb to go off on Blaine. He says as much and it’s only later in the sequence he realizes how it parallels what Blaine says he was doing.
Mike would be offended by the lack of skill at shit-talking.
“Really, that’s all you got? Step it up.”
Eh, if I was Ethan I wouldn’t have bothered saying “No, I wouldn’t” even if it was true. Danny was being hurtful and doubled down on it. When someone is being shitty like that, you don’t owe them a nuanced and fair conversation. You don’t owe someone hurting your feelings a debate, even if they have a point- and Danny made it clear in this conversation that Danny was primarily thinking about *himself*, not Ethan.
Frankly, I think Ethan was way more patient with Danny than he deserved- I would have told Danny to shut up and go away much earlier in the conversation.
He had so many chances to stop Danning it up, but instead he Danned it up even more.
Yeah, mess.
Danny, ya done goofed.
I do note Ethan doesn’t dispute he’d enable Mike if the positions were reversed though.
Ethan’s kind of an enabler, if people haven’t noticed. Partly because he doesn’t realize how deep some issues like Amber’s BPD run, but he’s not very good at the ‘I’m gonna cut off/confront people over things’.
Danny might just be a bit sour that Ethan isn’t enabling him.
“If you cared about me you’d let me be an asshole too!” Real nice, Dan.
I mean, a lot of arguments do boil down to that, sadly.
Why do you think he still hangs out with Mike? It’s not because he’s seen hidden depths that Danny just doesn’t appreciate.
Since when does amber have borderline? I mean, the diagnosis fits but this is the first I’m hearing of it
I’m no psychiatrist, but I’m not sure it fits.
She definitely has DID and some PTSD, but I’m not sure if there’s anything else going in.
Yeah, neither of them’s coming off well right now.
What’s the German word for having a point but presenting it in the absolute worst way possible.
Woodstock
Are you referencing the bird or the event?
Danverdreken?
Normally I’d say alcohol
National-Socialism.
German’s my native language and I have absolutely no idea what concept or word you’re talking about…?
Do you mean something along the lines of “being pedantic”?
If yes, then “Korinthenkacker”? (aka someone being right, but through their pedantic, uptight ways being completely annoying)
It’s a running joke in the US that German has a word for everything. I don’t think OP was really asking for “the word”
Now that’s some new information – thanks for clearing that up!
Well, theoretically, they (OP) aren’t wrong, it’s just we do not always have precise words for everything. You could create words and people would understand them, though (German does have a tendency towards the creation of compound words).
And to end with: I still want to mention that there’s a similar concept to the word I mentioned, which is “Erbsenzähler” (literally “counter of peas” – as in, person that counts peas).
Even if it’s just a running joke, someone might be interested in these words, so if anyone has questions, or would like to have something German explained to them, just ask 🙂
Actually, English has a very similar word for Erbsenzähler. In english, it would be presented as “bean counter”. I actually think that part of the confusion would be that in many cases where the German language simply sticks two words together, English inserts a space or a hyphen between the two words. ( Open and closed compound words) The idea is that people writing English aren’t supposed to create their own “closed compound words” (no space or hyphen) A number of technical terms in German are compound words that a lot of the German English dictionaries can’t handle, and it isn’t clear to an English speaker where the break between the words occur. I remember having some problems with this when I was trying to understand some German documents and the translator software simply said “unknown”. Compound German words can also be much longer than closed compound words in English which is why the names of things such as the Welsh town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll (Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
which is the long form) or the Antidisestablishmentarianism movement are frequently used as a source of amusement. The name of the Welsh town was used as a password in the movie Barbarella and a few other movies. (You have to wonder how many takes it took to film the scene.)
Jesus fucking christ Danny could not have approached that any worse if he tried.
What the hell even was that, why would Danny do something like this in the first place?
Well it started as a Freudian slip which could happen to anybody, but as bad as this is I think this was an important moment for Danny. Early Danny would’ve probably backed down from this to not hurt Ethan’s feelings. Even though that would’ve been the better move is this specific situation, I think it’s good Danny stood his ground here. Good for him, not really good for their ship.
He tried to dig his way back up from that one. Maybe if he took the left at Albacoikey this conversation would have had a less negative outcome.
As Sirksome says above!
And I would also add that I really relate to Danny in this moment; when you have a chance to drop something, but you just cant let it go
Well two points:
1. Danny was here to make a grand romantic gesture to Ethan, regardless of whether Ethan was in the mood. I.e. he read the room very wrong.
2. Danny seems to legitimately be okay with Mike being in a coma. I.e. he doesn’t dislike Mike, he hates him and wishes him dead.
He could have walked up singing, “If I had a hammer. . .”
Oh we weren’t asking for suggestions on how to handle it worse?
Danny, there is no defending you today, even if you had a point you approached it in the worst way possible.
Also holy crap they’ve only known each other for a month, what is time and why does it confuse me so much?
It might be closer to two months at this point. It’s the last week of October now, but Ethan and Danny didn’t meet until the day Ethan came out to Joyce.
Eh, approximately September 14 to October 21 — a little more than 5 weeks. https://walkypedia.fandom.com/wiki/Dumbing_of_Age_Timeline
Danny’s got a point, but yeah, time and place to point out that Ethan keeps toxic company and enables said toxicity.
Dilation of temporal mechanics is really messing with my head! LAST MONTH?!!
A metric shitload of stuff has happened in four weeks. Jesus.
I wish “shitload” actually was a metric unit to describe “amount of stuff”. Would be neat.
It’s the weight of one cubic kilometer (by volume) of shit.
The US and UK still use the shitton, but the UK’s is about 20% greater by volume.
Plus, the UK spells it ‘shittonne’.
A shittonne is a thousand shitkilos (approximately 2,204.6 shitpounds), and therefore significantly different from both the US shitton (2,000 shitpounds) and the Imperial shitton (2,240 shitpounds).
Yeah, this comic moves at a glacially slow pace compared to the real world.
Danny really Danned it up.
Way to continue to make a situation that isn’t! about! you! totally about you and then sulk :)))
That’s true, but it still has to hurt to find out that the guy you’re majorly crushing on values you less than someone who acts as abusively and deliberately harmful as Mike.
I’ll forgive these dumb kids that they’re not thinking clearly, but there are way less instigating ways to do the ‘why are you friends with that jerk?’ conversation.
I think part of the problem for Danny is that no one has ever had this conversation about Mike. Everyone walks on eggshells with him, treats him fairly given his own actions, and right now he’s being lionized as a hero despite his years of abuse of Ethan and especially Amber.
No matter how I interpret this strip I think “Danny is jealous of Ethan’s affection for Mike” is a key part of it. That kind of puts him in the antagonistic role, but I don’t think anything he’s said has been necessarily *wrong* either.
It’s precisely because Danny is jealous that this is not a moral critique of Mike. I had more respect for him when he stood up to Mike at the party. This though? It’s a passive aggressive “why don’t you like me more than him?” directed at Ethan who deserves better than all of this right now.
Isn’t it though? Even if it’s fueled by his own feelings for Ethan, Danny’s right that Mike is an abusive person, and that Ethan would allow him to get away with what Danny himself is doing.
I guess I’m reading that wild hypothetical as Danny asking Ethan to implicitly choose between them. It’s unfortunate that he’s framing that choice as “who would you take more shit from?” But he’s comparing himself to Mike using Ethan’s loyalties as a metric and that’s purely a jealous thing to do.
It is, but I don’t think it’s wrong either.
Let’s set aside the first strike from two strips ago. Bad Danny.
The Alderaan metaphor was blatantly “yeah Mike did a good thing but he’s also been a consistently terrible person since anyone has known him” and that’s what Danny was trying to convey.
I don’t think Danny went into this with the explicit intent of making Ethan choose, that’s how Ethan took it and ran with it. Danny said the probably true thing; that if Danny were in a coma Mike would absolutely be laughing about it, because Mike is an asshole. Hell he did this to Billie and Ruth in front of Walky.
The problem is that Danny’s statement can be split between ‘Mike is a jerk, why are you friends with him’ and ‘why are you enabling this jerk’.
The first is a question of Ethan’s choice of friends, the second is a question of Ethan’s nature. Neither of which, to be perfectly blunt, is Danny’s business.
I don’t agree. If Danny is serious about Ethan then I think finding out exactly what kind of person he is should be normal, even if he went about it the wrong way.
And Ethan just admitted to being the kind of person who’d let Mike laugh all day about Danny being comatose.
Danny also is making this demand while Ethan is mourning his friend who is close to death. So, Danny is showing his nasty entitled side as well as controlling way.
Because, Danny says, “I don’t care what you feel. I know what’s best for you.”
That’s such a deliberate misreading of the situation I have no idea how you came to it.
It’s still a moral critique even if Danny’s underlying motives are selfish. Even if this is the worst time to have this conversation, this is still a conversation that has to happen.
While I think that Danny’s critique of Mike at the party sheds light on what he’s actually thinking here and that it’s actually more about how Mike treats Ethan and Amber than anything he did to Danny or even his own jealousy – though that certainly complicates things.
This, this, THIS into the sun and maybe the Milky Way.
I’m curious how he got together with Dorothy, now.
100% chance she took the lead.
But that raises the question of WHY
I don’t think Danny’s actually a bad dude. Like he’s really clingy and whiny but he’s also kind of one of the more compassionate characters in this comic. I can understand why Dorothy would date a guy like him in high school.
I’m developing a theory now of mutual friends who knew Danny liked her and nudged Dorothy until it happened.
It’s also just possible she thought he was cute, but I’m going to be over here coming up with increasingly complex theories.
That implies Danny has more friends outside of Joe. That’s kinda dangerous thinking.
They may have been those kind of high school friends you just have when you happen to have a lot of the same classes together.
She thought he was cute and took the lead; he wasn’t assertive enough to show off his more asinine attributes, and she was too inexperienced to realize that he didn’t have much to offer.
Danny is super loyal and honest. He likes that she’s assertive. He was also probably very sweet and focused, eager to please her, and she was attracted to him. He ended up not being ambitious or assertive enough, nor did he really understand her ambition, but still, early Danny/Dorothy make sense to me.
Also ignores Dans many negative attributes….
Well, sure. But they dated in highschool. It’s not like she married him and had all his babies.
Oh my goodness is it still the first semester?
Halloween isn’t even happened yet.
At this rate they might finish this year of college by about 2100 or so.
I can’t tell if this is positive Danny self-esteem or not.
Considering that Danny never actually asked Ethan out… Danny knows that he done fucked up bad.
This melodrama is awesome, believable given the intense feelings at work here, and y’all are some insufferably boring people for thinking someone is horrible for not constantly managing their social affairs to the Tumblr standard of ettiquette and emotional caretaking. Seriously. I’ve never had more respect for Danny before now.
If he’d handled his interactions with Amber/AG like this I’d have liked him sooner, because by God she had this reckoning coming too.
You’re criticizing people who criticize the Dumbing of Age character for not adhering to the Tumblr standard of etiquette?
Would you say you’re worried about them turning the ethics of this comics into… Dumblr of Age?
I still disagree though Danny’s being needlessly tactless towards someone’s old friend being in a coma.
I appreciate Dumblr of Age. 🙂
and ultimately I do agree Danny could have more tact but I don’t think he deserves the crap he’s getting. sometimes speaking up in a bad way is better than staying silent.
They’re all kind of idiots here and emotions are running high, but Danny kind of has terrible timing.
All these are conversations that are better served at another time and place. Like even the basic premise of ‘AITA for asking a guy out when he was just kidnapped and learned his jerk friend is now in a coma’ has the obvious answer of ‘time and place, you dingus’.
Danny is saying he hopes someone stays effectively dead, to that person’s friend, outside their hospital room. If you think that sets an admirable standard for human interaction I hope to never have any with you.
No, of course the timing is horrible, and I’d never do it personally, but in fiction I have a coy regard for moments where individuals just let their feelings ride instead of playing the insufferable tsundere baiting game of months and…
Oh. Fuck.
wait what is your ‘oh fuck’ in regard to?
The realization Danny developed as a character *just* enough to partake in one of those classic “two mutually interested people doing horrible things to each other instead of confessing their feelings” romantic plot lines I was just in the middle of bashing.
This melodrama isn’t awesome. We just had like 8 melodramas in the last three months and Danny just being an asshole isn’t something that can be defended with mocking people for disliking him.
Disliking fictional behaviors isn’t a”following tumblr standards”, it is common human behavior. When I was a kid I disliked assholish characters and wanted to punch them. That didn’t mean I hated the shows, I just disliked those specific parts. Humans have the right to like or dislike things.
It’s the first ‘fun’ drama in this strip in a while, where the antagonist wasn’t so completely evil that it’s exhausting to read about them. Unlike Blaine, I can actually enjoy watching this blow up and not worry I’m about to watch irreparable trauma and potentially murder happen to a bunch of college students.
I agree. I think people are taking this way too intensely, probably because we just came out of an intense situation. Is what Danny said great? No, but it’s barely more than insensitive. But in the comments you would have thought he went into Mike’s room, dropped his pants and shat upon Mike.
Which is definitely something Mike would do. And then he would bang Danny’s grieving mother.
Two characters are fighting! Someone has to be 100% wrong and 100% right!
I can respect that, though Ruth about to suplex Carol was also kind of cathartic.
Of course humans have the right to like or dislike things.
As long as they are the things I like and dislike.
i love your comment. I always need a good reminder not to take Tumblr standards seriously. In case this comment is in any way confusing, I am definitely being sincere. Although now I’m paranoid that that claim to sincerity will make this comment more likely to be read as insincere. damn.
“It’s shitty to say something awful about someone in a coma to their upset loved one” is Tumblr etiquette and emotional caretaking now?
Yes.
“if I’m so unimportant to you”?
Danny, fuck off
I mean, that’s what Ethan directly told him.
Like I said, the big revelation of this strip set is, “Danny, you’re kind of a selfish prick. You don’t actually care about anyone but yourself in this.”
Mike would approve.
Also, that Ethan’s a blind enabler of Mike.
Seriously, Danny should treat the Mike/Amber/Amazi-Girl/Ethan clique like plague victims at this point, because it’s never really been good for him.
Like wow, the slightest bit of, like, savage real drama and suddenly the lot of you revert to the same level of histrionics you’d also use with Blaine, Linda and Carol. Get outta here.
You’re also free to leave.
Let’s not say things we can’t take back now.
I definitely could have phrased my first comment more constructively. It bothers me when people here put down other commenters– real people– for the way they respond to fictional characters, which is what you’re first two comments on this page do, and they do so in a very broad way. You’re definitely not alone in doing that, for whatever that’s worth.
I generally like this comment section, but this interaction has definitely brought out a lot of “people who feel differently than me are boring/unlikeable/stupid”-style comments. I might leave because I am bothered by these comments. You seem bothered by many comments from recent days as well. You’re also free to leave.
*your first to comments, obviously
…Goddammit…
Any conflict between non-villain characters tends to do that in the comments. It got really bad back in the Sal/amber fight.
Everyone picks one character to back and then focuses on tearing the other down.
I wasn’t saying anyone should literally leave. That was my rhetorical “I can’t take any of you as seriously as you take yourselves.”
Note that I have said nothing against Ethan’s conduct. He’s fine by me. They’re both fine. That’s what makes this fun.
Okay, now Yumi’s giving me flashbacks to The Wotch boards right before their latest “y’all’ll be back, pay us and fuck off” hiatus.
As some people observed yesterday, Mike hasn’t specifically done anything terrible to Danny. All he’s done is hooked up with Ethan FOR REASONS but Danny doesn’t even know that was (allegedly!) to mess with him. So pettily pointing out that Mike who is in a coma is a terrible person isn’t a moral statement so much as Danny venting his jealousy.
He’s jealous that Ethan cares about Mike more than he’s upset that Mike is a Bad Dude. I’m very willing to bet he wouldn’t have been this vindictive if he hadn’t recently found out that Mike slept with Ethan because he honestly didn’t know too much directly about Mike’s toxicity. Danny is making this about himself and his hurt feelings and honestly? It serves him right that Ethan straight up reminded him that Mike, awful though he may be, has more of a claim to his loyalty than Danny does.
Does he even KNOW they hooked up tho? I don’t recall it being mentioned to him.
Danny is always making everything about himself tho, he’s very annoying cause of it. Never did understand why people like him.
Yes, by Amber: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/drew/
Danny has seen and heard Mike say and claim to do horrible things to others. While you may be inclined to think that because it wasn’t personally directed at Danny, it’s not okay for him to call Ethan out on enabling it, I disagree. I think it’s actually more interesting that he does.
Really, if it weren’t for the time and place, this would be a good conversation for Ethan to have with someone. Honestly, if Ethan had a bit more courage, and I get why he doesn’t, this would be an important conversation for him to have specifically with Mike.
But saying that Danny’s only reason for acting this way is jealousy is objectively incorrect. He’s also dealing with a lot of other emotions that led to this bad decision and handling them poorly. He is also not unaware of what Mike has done to others, to one degree or another and even by Ethan’s own admission, and so he is not entirely wrong in what he is saying. Simply how and when he is saying it.
Time, place, and one hell of a bad opener. ‘I hope your friend stays comatose’ automatically puts Ethan on the defensive, and while I strongly dislike Mike, wishing him dead is… a lot. And telling Ethan that is pretty much universally bad form, if Mitch McConnell died tomorrow I’d get a fucking pinata but I wouldn’t go to his grieving family and tell them how glad I was he was dead.
(There is one circumstance where I’d willingly express that sentiment to someone impacted, and have – the relative I was calling the Familial Blaine but considering changing the parent because he’s never, to our knowledge, groomed a teenager, kidnapped a bunch of people, killed anyone, or been a mob stooge. This is only because my mother, who actually has a relationship with her biological father, expresses the same sentiment. I hate him on her behalf, but if he ever stops siphoning life force from the family still in any real contact with him and dies and she’s sad – which seems likely, grief is weird – I’m going to focus on comforting her because it’s a real dick move to tell her she’s wrong to mourn him.)
Fully agree, ArthurDB! ^^
Danny’s not upset with Mike because of things Mike did to him. He’s upset with Mike for his treatment of Ethan and Amber. And Mike’s “claim on Ethan’s loyalty” isn’t really earned, but part of Mike’s manipulation.
This is a bad time for this and Danny’s handling it horribly, but his motivations aren’t just his jealousy.
That’s how Danny views it but, bluntly, we’ve had flashback strips that reveal that Mike has been running defense for Ethan and Amber for a decade against their abusers.
And while Dan has no idea about this, he also doesn’t care to find out.
I really don’t see it. Sure as hell hasn’t done a lot of good.
And he’s torn them both down in the process, if that was his plan.
Given his “prodding Amber’s bear” bit, I think he’s done a lot more damage than good, assuming anything he’s done has really been in their defense.
Maybe his utterly failed attempt to help Amber out with her teacher?
Yes, he tried to help out Amber with both her teacher as well as Blaine. It’s also just one example among many. Mike was very well-intentioned but, sadly, just aggravated the problems.
Mike became the cynic he is because the adults in his friends’ lives were such assholes.
He wasn’t helping Amber with Blaine, he was (by his own admission, I might add) trying to make everyone miserable.
Danny’s timing and delivery is horrible, but he’s trying to make a good point.
Y’know, I’ll just go ahead and say it. Despite the drama. I’m glad Mikes in a coma. I’ve never liked Mike, as a person or as a character. Never liked his insightful maliciousness. Never liked any iteration of him. Glad he’s out of the comic as long as possible. Hope he doesn’t wake up.
That being said, Danny is looking terrible but DAMN Ethan, not even a hesitant ” …N-no!” just “Yeah, i’d let him rag on you if you were in a coma, cause he’s Mike!”
Well, it also turns out Mike himself realized he was being a huge turd, which hit him with such a weight that he tried to die with Blaine.
I think that’s an interesting way to take his character, probably the best possible route.
I think Mike has always tried looking out for Amber, though, if the various flashbacks are of any indication.
Didn’t Mike admit that he was fueling Amber’s rage and fears wrt becoming like her dad in those flashbacks?
Yup, because at the time he thought that what he was doing was tough love, and he did it to make her tougher, better, stronger.
Then, he talked a bit with Blaine, and he realized that Blaine had the same rhetorics, while actually being an abusive asshole. And the nickel finally dropped, that what Mike was doing was actually also abuse, even if he really, honestly thought he was trying to protect Amber.
I’m not sure it’s even that positive: He described her as “multiple timebombs”. That doesn’t really sound like he thought he was making her better.
I’m definitely interested in seeing Mike deal with that realization. Much more than dropping him with a “redemptive death”.
Yeah, him grappling with how he’s wronged people and alienated himself from a lot of people permanently is a potentially actually INTERESTING plot involving him. (Granted, we do also have Ruth and Rachel with that, but Mike’s intentional edgelordiness vs Ruth’s ‘doesn’t excuse but does explain’ severe depression does make the two distinct.)
Nothing about Mikes personality so far has made me the least bit interested in how he would “deal with this revelation”. I suspect we wouldn’t see a significant amount of it because Mike, being Mike, would hide it from everybody the same way he hides everything else. It’s been shown he is probably the most effective of the cast at actually hiding his intentions and I feel it’s unlikely he would suddenly become chatty with everyone about “righting his wrongs”.
I’m kind of interested to see what a more aware repentant Mike would be like. It might very well go the way you suspect, but maybe something more interesting can come from it.
Mike treated as a hero because he died/went into a coma trying to stop Blaine without ever having to try to live with the damage he did seems worse to me.
Honestly what I’d expect at best is a bit less constant assholery and a lot more introspection from him, and maybe some honest discussion with Ethan and/or Amber about it. Which would, I suspect, continue into frustration and one or both of them going ‘well, you were a real goddamn asshole.’ But yeah, as thejeff says, a single grand heroic gesture and dying is way easier ON MIKE, and if we get any form of redemption from him I’d much prefer the hard one for him than the easy ‘I always knew he was good’ death.
Honestly, this, a thousand times.
He reminds me too much of my own high school friend group’s unrepentant asshole, who was also named Mike, funnily enough. I’m about as sad to see the back of fictional Mike as I was IRL Mike, which is to say, not at all.
Why is Danny making this all about him? Why are his feelings the most important right now, when Ethan was just kidnapped, and is now watching his friend possibly wither away in a coma? I can’t even fathom how he’s gotten to be this self-centered. Just a continuation of the ‘protagonist syndrome’ someone mentioned yesterday.
This honestly is more just a case of “horny, lonely, jealous and 18” than anything else. It’s Dan Lite – now with disappointment instead of resignation.
“horny, lonely, jealous and 18” sums up so many of the characters’ interactions.
For the same reason Ethan enables Mike, who has so few rare good moments as an individual as to genuinely be not a nice dude. Because they’re kids. Factually, biologically, still developing their brains and dealing with all the hold overs of puberty including raging hormones and the poor judgement they cause.
On one hand, that is a *super* fucked up accusation to be making under these circumstances and Danny had any number of chances to get out of this conversation rather than making it, but on the other hand… that is a *terrible* response from Ethan. Time spent knowing someone should *not* be a metric you use to determine whether you’d let them get away with trashing someone in a coma right outside their hospital room.
Danny doing it is not okay, but anyone doing it should be equally not-okay.
I have… many thoughts on this comic.
1) How much of this is Danny lashing out jealously over Mike’s place in Ethan’s life – not necessarily romantic, but far closer than Danny’s place.
2) I really hope Danny takes something out of this other than “I’m bad at asking people out.”
3) I don’t think Danny is anywhere near the irredeemable stage at this point; he’s being a douchecanoe right now but that is a regrettably common thing in 18-year-olds. Hopefully he will soon be able to have some sort of self-reflection and realization that this relationship pattern he’s in is not okay.
3.5) I’ve spent more time thinking about Danny during this series of comics than I have while reading the entire runs of DoA, SP!, IW, and Roomies.
4) I really hope Ethan has a chance to have a breakdown soon, poor guy probably really needs it.
5) I almost started writing fanfic spinning off from this situation but I’m glad I held off because wow, I was gonna be really wrong about where this was heading.
Watching 18 year olds make foolish decisions may not be the most pleasant experience, but it kinda is what we signed up for. The comic isn’t called “Emotional Maturity of Age,” after all.
Look, The Cast/Emotional Maturity is my endgame ship, let me dream.
Exactly what is Danny doing now that is falls in line with a ‘pattern’ of behavior? This is the first honest to god full mistake I’ve seen him commit since his reaction to Dorothy breaking up with him. And even then he’s practically been a saint about how his exes are moving on from him. Honestly, while when he’s saying this is wrong, I really wish he’d say things like this more.
The only friend that Danny has right now that I like is Sal. Ethan was on there, but I’m not certain if Ethan thinks of them as friends right now. Amber is genuinely not a good friend, girlfriend, ex, or generally person to Danny and her failure to acknowledge that in any way but to run from it and glare at him when he points out her hypocrisy is honestly very sad. Even Sal made a mistake in doing what she warned him not to and hasn’t really apologized for it.
It’s really no wonder he’s doing this. Every time he’s held back, it’s hurt him. Every time he’s tried to be reasonable, it’s hurt him. His friends are teaching him the best way to get answers is to do something like this or challenge directly the issue at hand in his mind. What he did here was horrible in it’s timing and execution, but on a technical level everything he said are things that should be addressed with Ethan before Danny asks him out.
You can say that he should know better but I would ask how? His parents aren’t teaching him. The only other example he has is his friends. You can say he should just know the right thing but then I would ask again, how? No one just knows the right thing. I can probably find something each person who replies to me believes that is factually wrong and they can probably do it for me.
I’m just gonna shrug for most of you reply ’cause a lot of this is based on other commenters over the past couple days; Danny honestly hasn’t made enough of an impact on me before to really remember much of what he’s done.
You’re last paragraph, however, is putting a shitton of words in my mouth that I didn’t say.
Thematic tl;dr: Danny is acting like this due to a combination of jealousy, lingering hurt from and resentment towards a toxic mutual friend, anger about a double standard, impatience due to the fact the only reason they haven’t dated by now is total bullshit, and probs the cumulative transformative strain of months of being the world’s chew toy. All this came to a head. Indelicately. Destructively. But god, this is is the GOOD kind of cringe, as opposed to the kind that came from him being a total sucker (see our collective rage over his falling for AG and not Amber or the way he got dumped by Dorothy)
Those Dan goofs are just us shaking our head and going ‘Oh Dan, that boy ain’t too smart, is he’. It’s like Billie constantly thinking that Sal is Amazi-Girl.
This one just had a bit of ‘Oh Dan, you could have handled this soooo much better’.
THANK YOU. You finally put what I was feeling into words! This is a bad fuckup to be sure but Danny has improved, which is why instead of feeling like “welp guess this is just what I gotta deal with from this character”, it feels more like “oh Danny, you’re better than this and we both know it”.
Yup.
Good drama can’t also be something crappy to do? I like this as a story development and I still like Danny, but it’s still a shitty thing to do. There’s nothing wrong with saying it’s a shitty thing to do.
I will be completely honest: I think both Danny and Ethan are awful people and shouldn’t be together.
Danny is a clingy jerk that is desperate to find a girlfriend/boyfriend and instead of being honest about what he wants he just keep the same performance that we have seen twice before This is a guy that can’t stop to think about the consequences of his actions.
Ethan on the other hand is a fucking pushover on the level of Asgore. He let’s other people push him, and when he finally has some agency he behaves like a libertine jerk on the level of Roz. As shown in Shoterpecked and DoA, Ethan is a condescending prick that cares more about petty things than people. He goes on a date with the same guy that Mike banged casually once, and spends the night monitoring the Transformers archive. How superficial can a person be?
These two shouldn’t be together just as Walkyverse Danny and Joyce were doomed from the beginning.
Having faults and being “an awful person” seem like significantly different things to me, and I don’t think anything either of these characters have done in this comic warrants that description. And if they have, then practically everyone in the comic is an awful person.
“practically everyone in the comic is an awful person”
I mean…. yeah.
I mean, to an extent, I guess yeah, this comic is about watching a series of train wrecks, but I don’t know about dismissing everyone in this comic as “an awful person,” rather than a bunch of unprepared dopes with obvious personality issues struggling to deal with a transitional period in their lives… and then a few awful people on top.
They all have real flaws and I still care about all of them and like most of them. I think it’s a good way to be about real people too.
“And if they have, then practically everyone in the comic is an awful person.”
…you say that like it isn’t a perfectly valid read of this comic.
Everybody in this cast would be a literal nightmare to be friends with in real life.
Sure, but they’re also a bunch of goobers in a comic strip, which I think ends up being a stumbling block when attempting to analyze DoA, because you have to figure out where the line is between “oh, that’s just comic book shenanigans” and “what the actual fuck is this person doing?”
I didn’t find anything funny here, so the second answer is appropriate.
With a few exceptions, the main cast would be awful to meet in real life.
They’re barely 18 and several of them come from really messed-up families/upbringings.
So, yeah. See title.
Willis made all this characters to be awful to each other. Joyce has said horrible stuff to her friends and is basically a homewrecker after what happened with Jacob, Amber should be getting mental therapy because of her split personality and vigilantism, Walky is a manchild that can’t accept he needs help to improve, Ruth and Billie are dangerous to be around, etc.
They are all awful people, but unlike the villains they are learning they are awful and they are trying to be better. We like this story because we see how Joyce and her friends improve over time, even if the tgitle of the story makes it seem they just get worse, but they have actually improved a lot if you compare them to their past selves.
Accepting your mistakes is part of growing up. Carol, Linda and Blaine are doomed though.
I can mostly get behind this assessment, yeah. I just feel like calling someone an “awful person” wholesale comes across as a blanket condemnation of who they are by definition. The connotation often reads as “they suck, and either it’s impossible for them not to suck, or I don’t *care* whether they have the potential to improve.”
I fundamentally agree that everyone in the comic has pretty flagrant issues that need addressing, but I think that, as you said, most of them are slowly realizing what they are and changing for the better, and the willingness to do that at *any* pace seems to me like an indication that someone’s not necessarily an awful person.
Haven’t you heard? Redemption is a story. /s
Redemption is a story. (Or a religious thing, I suppose.)
Real people don’t have “redemption arcs”. They don’t have arcs at all. It’s hard for me to even grasp what redemption would mean in real life.
Change is real. Growth is real. Becoming a better person is real. Stopping whatever horrible things you were doing is real. Even making amends can be real.
Redemption is a story.
When Rachel said that, she was implying that redemption=change, growth, becoming a better person, making amends, etc
Seeing as the overarching theme of this whole comic is kids building off the failures of their elders to become better people, and taking incremental steps to making their world a better place, that would appear to be a very shitty take.
And Ross. Toedad the toad has been towed away.
I know this is nitpicky, but I think I’ve seen “homewrecker” used for Joyce before, and it’s like… come on. That relationship was six weeks old TOPS. Just because Raidah had their futures mapped out together as a power couple doesn’t mean that it was realistic. There was no home to wreck.
Could you clarify what you mean by the “same performance” we’ve seen before? Cause I thought one of Danny’s known flaws was that he’s too honest sometimes.
His relationships with Dorothy and Amber. He is a control freak.
Amber dumped him because he didn’t realize that “you date Amazi-Girl” wasn’t just some roleplay thing (because he had literally no reason to suspect that she was dissociative), and Amazi-Girl shut him out of both their lifes because he talked to Sal (who he had literally no reason to suspect was ‘Mazi’s origin story) and had valid concerns about AG’s safety after that talk. But yeah, Danny was super-controlling in that relationship. RiiiiiiIIIIIIIIiiiiiight.
They should both be fined for this.
Anyway, I think this is good for Danny. He built up Dorothy, he built up Amber and Amazi-Girl, and he built up Ethan. It’s good that they have a genuinely cutting fight and realize his beau is also human.
Lets face it, if Danny were in the coma Mike would probably find a way to use Ethan’s grief to sleep with him and then call Ethan out for having sex while his friends in a coma.
You’re not wrong, but are obviously a horrible person for pointing it out.
I, in contrast, am a horrible person for wanting to see Mike do it.
these are tough times to be a Mike fan
Hell I’ve never been a Mike fan (well I love him in the Walkyverse) but DoA Mike’s sacrifice took him in a direction I didn’t think could happen.
I’ve always liked him, since the beginning. He’s got an interesting way of going about things and trying to help people, always in very subtle background ways. He’s got a certain kind of nuance.
I can certainly see why he’s NOT likeable, but idk, it’s just kind of a bummer when your fave is unpopular, you know? And now he’s in a coma. :/
Well, he’s in a coma because he tried to do something genuinely altruistic to make up for years of abuse. Who knows how he’ll be when he wakes up.
Ready to mess with Amber’s mind by pretending to unable to remember any of it happened. Because head trauma.
If he does. I look forward to finding out, regardless.
Ready to help out in his uncle’s new shop and serve tea to the Earth King.
Tough time to be a Mike fan. – Nonsense. Just ask your mom.
(Or think of it as a challenge.)
It is. Where’s she going to get her nickles with him in a coma?
Once he made the major Dan move of saying what he was thinking out loud, Danny was in a no win situation. He could have apologized, but that would be admitting he was being a major asshole and Danny clearly does not believe this about himself. The apology would have either come off as insincere, or it would have left Ethan wondering why he was fond of Danny at all since Danny was obviously a jerk. So Danny went with pointing out to Ethan that maybe Mike doesn’t deserve Ethan’s loyality (despite Mike’s recent actions.) Dan has a point, and the situation wasn’t going to get any less awkward by him not bringing it up. I think he handled it as well as he could have.
If Danny had immediately apologized and admitted that he’d blurted out the first thought that popped into his head, but he knows it was a terrible thing to say, Ethan would probably have said that he knows Mike is an asshole 95% of the time so it’s not surprising that some people might have that thought.
But like you said, that would require Danny to admit that he had done something really wrong, and he’s… uh… not good at that.
Point to a big mistake Danny made that he didn’t cop to.
He did do that. What Ethan did was go “well he had this one moment of self-sacrifice [and implicitly that makes up for The Entirety Of Everything Else Mike Does].”
No, he said “He’s in a fucking coma because he did something good, so maybe he does deserve a little better than to be shat all over in front of the room where he is currently IN A FUCKING COMA and his parents are MOURNING HIM. Maybe give him another chance–you know, by not saying he should STAY IN SAID COMA.”
Also, somebody being a fucking jerk doesn’t mean they deserve to fucking *die*, actually??? And that it’s free season to suggest everyone would be better off if they died?!?!?!?
Maybe the whole “good egg” thing with the hat and ukulele was more to convince himself that he’s a good egg, and it’s worked. Sorta like “I can’t be an ass, that would go against my carefully cultivated good egg image!”
Or maybe a better way to put it would be that recent events had put him at risk of realizing that he too has some major character flaws, and so he tried to re-imagine himself as a good egg to try to avoid having to recognize that he’s not such a purely good egg.
I mean, Danny isn’t *wrong* that Mike is a dick. Someone being seriously ill doesn’t mean that you now have to act like they’re your favorite person in the world, but basic human empathy should have told Danny that ‘while someone is in a coma’ is not the time to tell people who care about him what a dick he is.
If he had immediately gone “I’m sorry, that was a fucked up thing to say, he may not be my friend but of course I hope he recovers quickly” or something along those lines, Ethan would probably have forgiven him just as quickly, and Danny would still at least be his friend.
But Dan just kept danning it up and digging that hole deeper trying to justify having said something thoughtless, and retroactively made it cruel.
As disappointed as I am in Danny, this is the first time in realtime months he has Danned it up this hard. So, two steps forward, one step back?
I honestly took Ethan’s comment more as him being angry and wanting to put Danny in his place, rather than an actual admission that he’d let Mike get away with it. I mean, essentially the hypothetical question here is “Would you stick up for me to Mike?” and Ethan has already done that. He told Mike not to mess with Danny and Mike has largely stuck with that. But when someone’s hurt you and pissed you off to this level, you don’t necessarily wanna reassure them how you have / would stick up for them. You wanna hurt them back.
Yeah the beat panel definitely makes me think Ethan is lashing out more than he honestly believes that Mike should be allowed to get away with ripping on a comatose Danny, especially since the only time Ethan ever stood up to him was when he demanded Mike not “do his Mike thing” to Danny.
At which point he did his “Mike thing” to Danny by having sex with Ethan, which he intended to hurt whichever of Danny or Ethan he didn’t fuck. Face it, this is exactly what Mike wanted.
I think to some extent this applies to both of them here. Ethan’s on the defensive because he’s been hurt, and Danny’s on the defensive because he’s said something obviously indefensible under the circumstances. Both of these things tend to incline someone toward saying things they don’t mean, either in retaliation or to justify their previous actions. I don’t think either is a *good* response to the stimulus that provokes it, but I think they’re both pretty common.
Mike didn’t stick with that. Mike pretended to stick with that. He told us right then and there that he used that as an excuse to start a plot aimed at Danny – even if he did it by screwing with Ethan.
This.
Honestly this whole conversation was the ‘it’s true, but he shouldn’t say it,’ Simpsons meme.
It’s not even actually true tho. Ethan had Mike stop messing around with Danny. Specifically asked for it so… he wouldn’t be. :C
I don’t think it’s true, but Ethan just said it was. Most likely because he’s angry, but he still said it.
Eh, I disagree. I think while Ethan may draw a line on actively tormenting Danny, Mike making a gross or tasteless joke about comatose Danny would elicit the usual response when Mike does something shitty, which isn’t much. He’s not wrong in pointing out that Ethan enables his friend’s shitty behavior, and I think Ethan realized it and acknowledges it in this strip.
I’m not saying this makes Ethan awful or anything, but I can see why it subconsciously would bug someone and considering Danny’s last conversation to Mike (I think?) was him pointing out the effect Mike’s cruelty had on Amber and Ethan and the fact that they forgive him anyway, it probably has been sitting with him for a while. This doesn’t mean this was in any way an appropriate time for Danny to bring this topic up (Holy SHIT no), but yeah, he has a strong point. If a bit hypocritical, since Danny’s bff was Joe who he was similarly forgiving towards.
I mean, Ethan asked Mike not to mess with Danny by sleeping with him, so Mike decided to mess with Danny by sleeping with Ethan. Mike didn’t back off from messing with Danny, he just didn’t do what Ethan thought he was going to do to mess with Danny
Danny totally SHOULD say it. He just shouldn’t have said it NOW. It’s not entirely clear to me it was even worth saying while Mike was still comatose, but at the very least he should’ve held this off for few days, definitely not while Ethan was visiting Mike in the dang hospital
No, it’s not. Danny falsely equated Mike with a much worse (and fictional) person and then tried to justify his behaviour with ‘but he’d be awful to me!’ Maybe he would, but no one expects Mike to be kind because they have always known him to be an ass, while Danny is expected to be kind and this is him being an ass instead that refused to let things go TWICE then said a guilt-trippy thing before storming out as if he was the wronged party.
Did you just say that it would be alright for Mike but not Danny, because Mike is always an ass but Danny is usually kind?
Expecting shitty behavior from someone can reduce its impact, but it doesn’t make it not shitty?
Like, it’s one thing when you calibrate your reactions to somebody cuz you know they have trouble expressing certain things or they express affection through playful ribbing or that kind of thing. Tolerating abuse because that’s what you expect from a person is bad. Especially if that person is a friend.
Ethan probably knows this on some level, which would likely be the real reason why he wouldn’t put up with the same behavior from Danny. He’s learned to stand up for himself somewhat since he met Mike. I strongly doubt he and Mike would’ve become friends if they’d met in college instead of when they were kids
Danny’s upset not because of how Mike treats him, but because he’s seen how Mike treats Ethan.
And while this absolutely was not the time to have this discussion (especially after Ethan made it pretty obvious it wasn’t), but Ethan really does need to hear this, just not while Mike is still in the hospital (and especially not while he’s there visiting him, less than a day after being kidnapped, jfc Danny)
Danny might be bad at asking people out, but he’s really good a Dannying a situation.
Yes, Ethan was mean to Danny. Ethan is also still dealing with the trauma of being kidnapped and witnessing a murder very recently (yesterday, even maybe?), in an already stressful time of the school term, learning that one of his best friends is in a coma and the other has serious mental health issues that have led her to generate a second identity as a caped vigilante. I’m willing to give him a little more wiggle room right now on how mean he’s allowed to be compared to Danny, who marched into a hospital he has no business being at solely to ask Ethan out and ended up instead insulting his best friend, who could very well die, by suggesting it might be better if he /did/.
I’d also say that Ethan sorta has a point. If a guy I barely know made a shitty comment about my best friend, even without the coma, and had no real remorse for his actions, I’d consider that grounds to end a relationship with someone I have very limited personal investment in, lest it be the tip of a toxic ass iceberg. (In this case, at the very least it indicates a complete lack of tact, awareness, empathy, and emotional intelligence to not keep these ideas in your head until you have established enough trust in the relationship to maturely voice your concerns)
If my best friend made a shitty joke about the guy I’ve been vaguely flirting with for only a month I might be upset, but I’d continue being friends because I have spent 5 years building a relationship and establishing trust and getting to know their personality enough to know whether they are worth the continued effort, their capacity for growth, etc.
Not to make this an even LONGER comment, but I say this as someone who went all through high school with a best friend who pretty much everyone around me actively disliked, which was frequently voiced to me, and whose shitty personality led to me cutting her out of my life as an adult.
Tbh, even without the time scale of knowing them, the expectations for Mike and Danny are different. You would know Mike is an ass to people, so it wouldn’t be a shock if he was an ass, you’d tell him to knock it off. You can’t be let down by him being an ass, when you have no higher expectations for his behaviour.
But Danny is *mostly* kind and sweet on a day to day basis. You would expect consideration, kindness, tact, and understanding from him so even one bad interaction like this would be a major yikes in contrast to his previous behaviour.
i know that like outside the comic we’ve known these dudes for what five years now? (in this universe) but like yeah….in-comic they’ve known each other for like two months MAX. im with ethan on this one.
side note, what a wild fucking semester. imagine being one of the background characters writing home about this.
Almost 10 years, buddy!
My headcanon is that asma, who sees a lot of shit from the front desk, regularley call her parents just to tell them that she loves them.
Right now I just despise Danny. I’m sure it will pass and he will do something adorkable, but right now I just despise him.
Danny just said 3 things at the worst posible moment, this wasn’t for him to do so, this wasn’t for him to make everything about him.
Yes Ethan has enabling flaws, but on the hospital, with a close person in a coma, right after being kidnapped is not going to do good at all. sighh
Has it really only been two or three months of comic time in the last 10 years?
Pretty sure we haven’t even hit Halloween yet, which blows my mind because I had convinced myself so well that it was well into November already.
Yeah it’s the last week of October.
Oops, more like October 21, according to Walkypedia. https://walkypedia.fandom.com/wiki/Dumbing_of_Age_Timeline
Now that I think about it, this is a pretty rare occurrence for Ethan too. He never lashes out at anyone.
He is seldom kidnapped, held hostage, tortured, made to watch as a man is murdered, involve in a fight during an escape, and hit on by a self-centred jerk outside the hospital room where and old friend is in a coma.
You know, it’s not the fact that he Danned it up in the first place. It’s the fact that, afterwards, his mind was still on whether he won Ethan over, rather than the consequences of his words.
You really think a one-liner about how badly the conversation went off the rails doesn’t show that he cares about the consequences of what he said? He’s not saying “Dang it, Ethan isn’t going out with me”, he’s saying “Wow, I screwed that up.”
I think that the consequences to Dan are, “Ethan doesn’t like me anymore. Which hurts my chances of boning him.”
Yeah I don’t think the punchline to the comic is that representative of much in a lot of situations, it’s mostly just supposed to be funny.
One thing I would point out is that when a person you consider at least sort of a friend, especially one that you have been intimate with, has a near death experience and might yet die… then you tend to go into mental fugues of regret about what has happened in the past, that you were not a better friend to them, possibly even including that you didn’t take the time to help them be a better person. You don’t suddenly overlook all the bad times, but you wish that you could have been more of a part in making the times better.
Thus Ethan is having an emotional crisis of wanting Mike back, to make new better times with. And so when someone else approaches and asks Ethan to give up on Mike, then Ethan is going to be in the middle of of clinging to his relationship with Mike, warts and all, and is not going to be in a state to turn away emotionally from Mike towards someone he doesn’t know at all well and who hasn’t been close. Danny is an acquaintance, not really a friend at this point.
Under the circumstances, given the timing, there was no way that Danny could have won a struggle for Ethan’s attention at this time.
What Danny could have done was along the lines of sympathized with Ethan, and asked Ethan to talk about Mike and what Mike meant to Ethan. Danny could have Been There For Ethan, listening to him, obtaining meals for him, helping him keep up with classes, and so on. Been the kind of better person than Mike.
But Danny isn’t that kind of person. He’s still processing in terms of asking Ethan out, rather than in terms of concern for Ethan’s feelings, for example.
Meanwhile… with Ethan being so distraught, one possible evolution is that Ethan becomes more dedicated to his relationship with Mike. For example if Mike wakes up and needs rehab and assistance with living, Ethan might choose to be Mike’s assistant. This could potentially be the start of a more mature adult relationship between Ethan and Mike.
Danny was there because Ethan was kidnapped.
and it made him fear losing Ethan forver and he wanted to tell him that
( all that was good )
But Willis chose to put none of that in dannys mouth
And that didn’t come out of Danny’s mouth because of his previously established feelings over Mike’s treatment of Ethan.
Or it could lead to Ethan being even more of an enabler to Mike and taking more of Mike’s abuse.
Your defense of Danny is worried about Ethan is being abused in their friendship is noted but it doesn’t remotely stop Danny from being vicious, petty, and entitled. Because all of Danny’s “worry” is tainted with jealousy and vindictiveness as well as a slimy “isn’t it good he’s in a coma despite saving someone’s life.”
Yeah, my friend group had our own version of Mike. Not to Mike’s cartoonishly-exaggerated-for-comedic-effect levels, obviously, but he was a pretty damn cynical person by the time we were eighteen, and most of our guy friends were pretty sure he hung around us solely because we were mildly entertaining to him. However, me and him had developed a kinship borne of similar circumstances and he had done some rather selfless things to protect me for no reason I could see, things the rest of our friends didn’t know about. So I tended to side with him even when he was saying/doing things that weren’t very nice. Even when he was “mean” to me, he had, and sill does have, a lot of leeway with me because of those instances, and ones that have followed. But I didn’t always necessarily like him. It was more like “this is someone who knows how terrible things have been, has seen me at my worst, and still cares about me, even if he doesn’t show it the way people expect. And he might not be very nice about it, but if someone tries to hurt me again, he will defend me, whatever way he has to”. That kind of loyalty is rare in the real world, at least in my life.
After he joined the Air Force, things changed, because he was and is still, on a constant deployment rotation, and I became something very dear to him, even if, again, he didn’t display it the way people expected. I know him, and have a complicated history with him that doesn’t look very balanced from an outside perspective. When he nearly died (fully recovered now, thankfully) it devastated me in a way I couldn’t explain. It felt like everything I depended on, one of the few bits of bedrock I had, had been smashed to pieces under my feet. It felt that I couldn’t even breathe.
If someone had done to me what Danny just did to Ethan here on that day, I wouldn’t have reacted like Ethan just did. I would have backhanded the Danny in question. Danny took a horrible situation that was about /Ethan/ and something terrible happening in his life, and turned it into “Danny’s Declaration of Love (and also, I am better than everyone else in your life, and I know better about how you should run your relationships and life)”.
Well this reminds of some cringe I was guilty of as a freshman/sophomore in undergrad… ca-ringe
I mean, whatever else, the Alderaan reference was stupid and insensitive of Danny because he said it was fiction, and what Mike does is real. Mike’s terrible behavior is certainly real…but he also really did risk (and maybe even lose) his life trying to defend someone else, too. It didn’t make his bad behavior ok, but it wasn’t fiction, either. And from what we’ve seen behind the scenes, that neither of them know, is that it’s not the first time Mike has taken a risk in defense of someone else, either.
Somebody said Danny is sweet and loyal and doesn’t intend to hurt people, and I think all that seems clear. He looks at Mike and sees somebody who intends to hurt people (which is also accurate) and therefore is pissed that Ethan would defend Mike over him. But what Danny doesn’t realize is that he himself is also self-centered, in a self-loathing, self-pitying kind of way, and he revolves the world around his feelings, has never considered that he might not be the “protagonist” of everybody’s story, which ppl have also mentioned.
He hasn’t realized how to set aside his own feelings and actually try understanding others. And that that is ANOTHER way to hurt people, even when your intentions are good. That’s shitty, but it’s something that a lot of us have had to learn. I recognize the feeling. I’ve been that person. Recognizing you’re that person takes work and self-awareness, and if Danny doesn’t ever develop that or get challenged on his bad behavior, then he will just…stay a somehwat-shitty person.
Hopefully he learns something this round.
Ethan can totally be forgiven for his reaction due to the circumstances–and his reaction was, all things considered, fairly mild, but it’s good that he’s being confronted with his double standard for Mike vs Danny. And for enabling people he loves. It wasn’t even something I thought of until this conversation. Pushing back against Danny was probably good for him, even if the only person he’d push back against is typically a pushover.
And Mike, well, being a hero a couple times, and deeply caring about like maybe 2 people, doesn’t excuse him from being a dick to the other 99% of humanity as well as the people he actually likes, most of the time. Those two things don’t cancel each other out. They’re just both true. I hope he learns something too. And I hope he wakes up. T-t
TL;DR everybody’s fucked up and has things to learn which is just essentially like real life and why I love this comic so much 😀
I don’t think that read on Danny is correct, despite his thought walking away here.
Willis established with his talk with Mike at the birthday party that the root of his problem with Mike is how Mike treats Ethan and Amber. That’s not self-centered. That’s not “protagonist”.
That all came boiling out of him at the wrong time and in a really bad way, but it comes from concern for Ethan, not self-pity.
Would definitely agree that he is concerned, but, especially given that thought, I think it’s only part of his motivation. You have a good point; guess I’m thinking that both of those emotions/motivations can be happening at once.
Oh, Danny boy, you are bad at a lot of things. Chief among them currently is not being a selfish dick. Frankly, though, this an unfortunately reoccurring problem with you and people you’re interested in. You want them to do things because they’re what you want without really asking what they want. That’s why you lost Dorothy, that’s why you lost AG and Amber, who you didn’t bother to ask how she was doing at all because apparently getting the chance to swap spit with Ethan is more important than being a decent human being (I don’t care if they aren’t a thing anymore, he could still ask before asking about Ethan), and why you should probably lose Ethan because he deserves better than your needy self.
I’m sorry but I have to say this is an inaccurate take. Danny is being a selfish dick here but AG broke up with him because he was hanging out with Sal. She thought Sal was her arch enemy or something and had turned him against her. Not only that but she then started hanging out with Sal right after that. Amber also said some quite abusive stuff to him when he’d admittedly made a mistake by kissing her when she didn’t want him to, although she never actually informed him of the full extent of her disassociation so that was a honest mistake on his part. Danny didn’t lose AG. AG broke up with him because frankly she’s kind of a messed up person who is really not ready to date anyone in a committed relationship.
As far as checking up on Amber? I think that’s splitting hairs a little. Amber has flat out ignored him at times he tried to check up on her before.
She told him to go away once, in the “I’m not your problem anymore” – “I don’t consider you a problem” – “Danny. Go.” comic strip. If I remember correctly. And he respected that, and when he was worried about her after that, I believe he sent Ethan to check on her, because he knew she didn’t want him around?
Danny is really not that selfish.
I have a slightly different take on this. She was mad about him talking to Sal, which is a problem, but Danny told Amazi-Girl he thought she should go away for awhile and that he liked Amber more. Which was perfectly reasonable from his point of view: Stop risking your life, I like you even without the superhero thing. But with Amazi-Girl as an actual separate alter it would come across to her as “I like someone else better, I don’t want you to even exist.”
Not his fault, since he didn’t have any good reason to grasp the disassociation then, but still horribly painful.
Honestly that relationship was probably doomed from the start as much as it might suck to say it. At first Danny didn’t even know Amber and AG were the same person or shared a body depending on how you define her DID. Amber never told him despite them having mutual feelings for each other and he only found out after Blaine kidnapped him and she beat the crap out of Blaine in that parking lot.
Then it got worse when he did find out, and there were these rules he had to follow because he was dating AG and not Amber, which is also very confusing because they often talked like they were dating but Danny couldn’t do things like touch Amber. Amber tried to communicate the difference between them a few times, but I don’t think she did a very good job at it and Danny didn’t understand because this is admittedly very new ground for anybody. The relationship kind of just became whatever Amber needed it to be at the time which was kind of selfish.
And then you add the Sal factor and as you said Danny valuing Amber’s safety over AG being a vigilante which is a fair take, Amber’s self esteem issues and her inability to fully define who she is in relation to AG, that she’s still struggling with and this was just never going to work out.
But someone saying Danny was somehow the reason that relationship failed is kind of messed up considering what he went through while dating her. Sorry for ranting, but this is kind of a peeve of mine. I don’t even really like Danny but he gets hate for being a bad boyfriend and that’s not the case at all. He even fricken regularly did Amber’s laundry for her! Come on!
What the others said, but also if you were referring to the Danny/Amber interaction right before he ran off to Ethan, he checked in with her and she said she was saving her energy for family, so he respected that.
There’s a lesson here, folks. Do not post comments before you go to sleep, because you’ll say things that you really should fact check.
I do notice people aren’t saying I’m wrong about the other things, so I guess I got some of it right. Heck, even when I typed it some part of me kept going “Amber/AG doesn’t fit the pattern” but did I listen to it?
People hated Danny because he spoke the truth.
(He’s an absolute dick here and Ethan is 99.99% in the right but I mean, Mike WAS an abusive creep.)
If “danny spoke the truth” he would said why he came to see ethan.
He was asked directly why he came to the hospital
Danny refusing to admit that he decided to, in a very sensitive situation, act like a complete monster, and then decided to double down with ‘I should get to do it because HE would do it to ME’ and then guilt-tripping him with ‘well if I’m so unimportant, I’m out!’ is not ‘the truth’ and ‘the truth’ is not that Mike is comparable to Darth Vader, because he’s not. Ethan doesn’t need it pointed out to him that Mike isn’t a great person either because he already knew that and admitted to that.
Danny got wrapped up in trying to win the self-righteous ‘my view of Mike is right’ award and like anyone who plays this ‘sorry… BUT I’M RIGHT’ game with conversations as if they will win a prize for being right, he got the only real prize of doing it: A damaged friendship, possibly a destroyed friendship even. Because as they say, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Danny did not do that. He immediately started apologizing. That ethan then said something that made Danny not particularly want to apologize anymore, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR NOT THAT’S RIGHT, doesn’t change that Danny immediately started apologizing.
“Starting to apologize” means literally nothing if you don’t actually follow through on said apology. Danny DIDN’T actually apologize, and him backpedaling only to then double down on the absolutely horrendous thing he said means the failed apology is less than worthless and is actually just manipulative, wishy-washy bullshit.
I really don’t think the idea is just to be right for the sake of being right, it’s more, at least in theory, to show the other person what’s right so they will change their minds and they’ll be right too, because being right is good!
… okay, I guess this isn’t great either, since it’s kinda assuming the other person isn’t smart enough to figure things out for themselves and you have to show them the way or something, but it’s still not just arguing so you can be right and be the winner. And I guess I’m mostly just speaking for myself, maybe some people legitimately are like that.
why this sucks : All of Ethans hookups are basically background characters or narratively dont count .
The one M/m ship teased as a future romance and future hook up , is shit all over after a 5 year payoff.
am i expecting too much from this comic ?
I mean, people wanted the Starks to live. Sometimes that’s just not what the writer has in store for them.
im not an entitled fan. Willis can write any story he wants
are you straight by the way?
its very different when society doesn’t cater to your representation , model it everywhere on all aspects of society. Teasing a gay ship and failing to deliver ( especially over a long term ) while winking at gay fandom raising expectation is call “Queerbaiting” . Unfortunately it happens a lot ( harry potter, teen wolf ) . This is an issue of because of the lack of regular everyday normal background representation.
Willis didnt cause that, but it creates an ethical pressure because we need more from these scraps .
imagine you are going let your dog go hungry, then eat steak in front if him, then tease him with one, when you finally give it to him, you should allow him to eat it , uncomplicated , without taking it away . because thats a shitty thing to do.
ive been led to believe for 5 years of reading this is happening. and it probably still is in some form.
but i feel a loss of faith. Maybe Willis isnt capable of writing an uncomplicated payoff to a relationship straight or gay. which makes me sad.
I could easily see how Willis could do something similar without queerbaiting.
… by waiting for danny to damn it up , after a few dates, and immediately after a slipshine.
that would have reminded us of dannys flaws, created the requisite drama and been more like Danny and Amber.
Other than Ethan’s hookup with Mike.
which would have great, if there was any intended emotional investment and payoff in it.
or wasnt done for e revenge plan. or if Ethan and Mike each really liked each other, rather than in spite of each other.
but instead danny ship was teased off the masthead including today (8/5)
Danny has a surprisingly and worrying lack of empathy. He has always been kind of an idiot, but this is different :/
I do like the return of drama without did for comically evil characters. This person-to-person drama is the best part of Dumbing of age.
You still suck, Danny. Doesn’t matter the universe.
Maximum Dan’ing right there
If it was Danny in there, Ethan probably wouldn’t have gone to visit him in the first place.
Damn Ethan you would let Mike get away with that cuz you bonked him? not “Mike wouldn’t cuz it’s serious” but “yeah and he could get away with it” cuz he’s got tenure. What a trainwreck
100% agree with Danny in the last panel
WOW JUST KEEP DIGGING THAT HOLE DAN
UP, Danny. Dig UP!
I know this comic is soap opera-y as hell but at this point I will be legit mad if Danny and Ethan hook up. That entire conversation wasn’t just crossing the line it was running over it and doing a touchdown dance on the other side.
But I’ve been reading this comic too long, and I just know deep down this is gonna end with a dramatic kiss in the hallway followed by a makeout session and/or slipshine in a closet.
Well, that’s the Danny/Ethan ship, a firm fan-favourite, neatly and totally killed!
It’s a net positive since if it’s dead that means more queer dudes in the comic.
Like Sayid.
The problem with being a doormat is that when you finally stand up for yourself, it tends to come with a lot of repressed resentment. Obviously, not all of that resentment is the result of Mike or Ethan. Danny was selfish, and he was tactless. But he was honest.
Danny only see’s Mike as a jerk, because that’s all Mike ever showed him. The problem is Danny has a simplistic, childish understanding of other people. It doesn’t help that Mike does his best to stick to his asshole persona.
Unfortunately, Danny did have one point. Ethan DOES enable Mike’s bad behavior.
I think Danny may have a better understanding of Mike than Ethan does. Ethan’s a pushover and warped by years of Mike’s bullshit.
Other than the realization that Mike had that led to his sacrifice, which neither of them know anything about.
Or maybe Danny is just a prick.
This is also a good take… When you finally push, you push too hard, to people who don’t deserve all that.
In some ways both Ethan and Danny are taking the wrong approach to not being a doormat right now. Except Ethan has a much better excuse.
Danny, I like you enough to make up for everyone else in the comments section.
You know, I agree that Danny’s being a massive dick here – as multiple people have said, what he’s saying about Mike’s shitty behaviours and Ethan enabling them are kind of right, but this isn’t the time or place, and he’s clearly motivated by jealousy and a refusal to admit he’s being a dick, not concern for Ethan or Amber or any other people Mike hurt.
But I really don’t agree with the consensus that Danny, overall, is a bad person when, as far as I can remember, this and his break up with Dorothy were the only times he’s really been a jerk to anyone. He clearly needs to stop investing all his self worth in whether he’s in a relationship (I think he’s generally gotten better there, but his behaviour here shows he still has issues), but otherwise most of his time in the comic has seen him generally being a decent person and coming to terms with his bisexuality, which doesn’t make me see him as the terrible person a lot of this comments section seems to see him as.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that his self worth issues and the handful of crappy things he has done in the comic come at least in part to his parents spending his childhood essentially passive aggressively telling him he “Dannyed everything up” and that the only good thing he did was get together with Dorothy.
I feel relly sorry for Danny because of his lousy self esteem and how it keeps sabotaging things for him, but those time when he is the agressor, such as here, it really makes it hard to sympathise with him. Moments like this really makes it clear why he was so disliked in the beginning of the comic.
Still, he is a good egg at heart, so as soon he manages to crawl out of his own ass I’m sure he will figure out a way to make ammends.
This, absolutely
Yeah, I kind of hope that once he has some time to cool off, he gets the core problem (‘did I just tell my friend I hoped his friend stayed in the coma he obtained saving their other best friend, who is also a friend of mine? Did I just lowkey imply it would be better if that guy died? And did I really just say that right outside the door of his hospital room where his grieving parents were? What the fuck, Danny?’) and apologizes. He’s not wrong that Mike’s an absolute asshole! He could very much try a conversation and be in the right about it that’s explicitly ‘I care about you guys and don’t like how Mike treats you.’ But expecting Ethan and Amber to be okay with their friend dying or remaining in a coma longterm for saving AG is… pretty insensitive and the most boneheaded way to try and make that point. (It’s gonna tank Amber’s survivor’s guilt even worse, for one thing.)
I don’t think that comment about Mike remaining in a coma is actually indicative of how Danny feels to that extreme, that he genuinely wants Mike to be comatose forever, but rather that it was a slip of the tongue regarding what Danny actually feels: That Mike is a toxic influence in Amber and Ethan’s lives.
Yeah I’d agree, although he probably should have made that more clear
Task failed successfully.
As much as Dan is being a massive arse here, I will point out one thing: this is the first time I remember him not going full doormat. It’s his first time trying to stand up for himself and point out a double standard and insist others stop letting ppl metaphorically shit all over him.
Because it’s dumbing of age he picked about the worst time, place, and way, but it’s still progress. Beginning of strip Danny would have accepted that Mike would laugh about him being in a coma and would have thought he deserved it and pretended he wasn’t hurt by it.
Now he’s owning his feelings and standing up to a double standard. Because it’s Dan, he’s doing it in the wrong way, time, and place, but it’s still progress.
tbh, i can’t see this as him pointing out a double standard or trying to not be a doormat.
he literally went to mikes worrying friend and said “wouldn’t it be better if he didn’t wake up?”
When called out on it he compared mike to vader, comparing a jerk that tackled a murderer off a building to a mass murderer.
and ofcourse my least favorite “he’d be out here crapping on me”. uhhh…. no, i don’t think mike would be out there crapping on danny. and even if mike DID through a jab or 2, it would probably be something like “couldn’t he have used that asshole as a cushion?” or something like that. not “maybe Danny should stay in a coma/dead.”
Danny is starting down a bad path, what that path is called, i don’t know. Eternal victim? Niceguy? i don’t know… but i do know that it is not a good one.
Mike is a dick that is a good person when it counts, danny seems nice in the calm fair-weather times, now he is showing his colors when things are bad.
An important thing to note is that Ethan doesn’t at all refute that Mike would be a jerk if Danny was comatose. Mike as we know him totally would, and no one in the cast would have a problem with it.
I also don’t think it’s fair to let Mike get away with his actions on account of his occasional moments of humanity, but Danny’s sins are that much worse thanks to him normally being a good person.
But Danny isn’t a good person either, though. He’s just someone who thinks if he buries his own wants and dreams in support of others, ppl will like him better.
That’s not being a good person. That’s pathological levels of people pleasing. And as a recovering ppl pleaser myself, I know from experience your own wants and needs don’t disappear because you pretend they’re gone, you just end up resenting everyone around you for getting what they want when you sacrifice yet again, forever shooting yourself in the foot then wondering why it hurts until eventually all that bottled up resentment finds its way out in passive aggression or in a rage meltdown.
Danny isn’t being a good person, he’s being a nice guy as if being nice enough long enough will mean he deserves a prize, like a child being obedient for presents from Santa. No matter what his currently coveted prize thinks of the matter.
I do for the record think Danny wants to be a good person. But he needs to realize that good person and pleasing others aren’t the same thing.
I’ll clarify that I meant “being a good person” as “not deliberately going out of his way to constantly hurt people like Mike has”, but I don’t think it’s entirely fair to put Danny into the Nice Guy box as evidenced by his behaviour throughout the rest of the comic.
Mike doesn’t have friends, just people willing to stand next to him.
The idea that Mike is a good person when it counts is just mind-boggling to me. He did one dramatic good thing, because he realized how awful he’d been to one of his “friends” for years. That’s not a good person. At best it’s the start of a redemption arc.
I dunno, what do you call people you’re willing to die for? Which Mike is?
Oh wait, that’s not friendship, that’s LOVE.
So Mike’s single act of heroism (let alone basic decency) in the whole series immediately wipes the slate clean?
Love isn’t shown with one act of self-sacrifice. Love is shown over years of kind actions. Mike did not show love to either of his closest friends.
“I’d die for you, Becky”
Given Mike actually walked the walk, yes. Because Mike showed that his personal safety and position meant less to him than protecting those he loved.
Carol and Toedad have shown no sacrifice of their happiness or position to others. In other words, they’re liars.
What are you talking about? Toedad’s actions, which he felt were saving Becky, did indeed lead to his own death. He was *quite* willing to sacrifice quite a lot.
He was still a shit person.
No, he died because Blaine murdered him and never sacrificed anything.
Literally the first time he showed up to kidnap Becky he didn’t get to “walk the walk” as you say because Becky decided to sacrifice her life instead. He shot the gun specifically *after* Becky told him he’d get murdered by cops.
His “love” was abusive because in his mind he was making a sacrifice and getting angry that Becky wasn’t appreciating it or accepting it.
Someone can care for someone enough to sacrifice themself for that person and still be abusive to them.
Narratively, Toedad and Carol. IRL, my parents.
Mike is an abusive prick who is an abusive prick 99% of the time (being a dick to ppl because he can counts). His one deed of heroism doesn’t erase the fact that he has spent the rest of the entire series to date manipulating and abusing those around him.
Danny is also a jackass much of the time, in exactly the way you described. He has all the whiny self entitled defeatism of a white male Nice Guy. And this was a genuinely dick thing to do. But he definitely is pushing back on a double standard even if he’s not saying as much in so many words. But my point is that despite this being an utter jackass move, it is still hell of a lot better than his whiny passive aggression of the early days of the strip, in that at least he is being honest about his feelings with ppl and taking ownership of his own emotions and opinions of others.
Danny, what the heck is wrong with you?!?
He reminds me of one of those people that try to get with someone by bashing their friends so they seem better.
“he’s in a coma…”
“YEAH I KNOW RIGHT, HE’S SUCH AN ASSHOLE, MAYBE IT WOULD BE BETTER IF HE STAYED IN A COMA AND YOU AND I GOT LUNCH SOMETIME.”
Should have had that talk last week, or a few weeks from now depending on the situation. Just not right now. Your hormones got in the way of your timing.
… Danny somehow at -least- managed to make it so both of them are at fault now. He can’t fix it since he’s Danny… but he can make the rest look bad too. (?)
Danny escalated directly from a single exclamation point to three.
A la A Christmans Story isn’t that a breach of etiquette?
Nah, that’d be if Danny triple-dog-dared Ethan to make out with him.
I mean Danny does have a point in that regard, they would let Mike get away with that behaviour, and that’s something Ethan and Amber need to work on that…
Doesnt make what Danny said any better though
Hooray! Danny finally said it! Ethan would forgive Mike anything he would do because he is Mike. He will never try to tell him that his behavior is bad, he will never start avoiding him, even if it would be the better thing to do. Ethan is happy to be with someone manipulative who insults him and everyone else for fun. By saying this and leaving, Danny saved himself from a possible disastrous relationship. Now I hope Mike recovers and he and Ethan can be happy together.
Three strikes and Danny’s out.
He should’ve just confessed then and there to Ethan but nope, gotta pour gasoline on this fire.
Some day, Danny will learn how to stop digging when he finds himself in a hole.
Today is not that day.
And then Danny runs into Sayid and they immediately hit it off.
(even after all this time, Sayid is still in my heart)
Somewhere in the depths of his coma, Mike pulls up his mental checklist of “shit I need to get done this month”.
Scrolls down to “seduce Ethan to make Danny cry”.
Checks that fucker OFF.
Puts list away. Descends back into coma.
I for one, am absolutely ecstatic this conversation took place.
It was a horrible time and place and it was wasn’t polite or amiable, but goddam this confrontation needed to happen and better before any potential hook-up than after.
Danny’s fruedian slip was was bad and his arguments were poorly made, but otherwise I am really glad for him that he made the decision to stand his ground here instead of rolling over for the possibility of getting his dick wet.
Because let’s face it, Danny and Ethan AREN’T (really even) friends. They’re friendly aquantences who are mutually attracted to one another.
Though now that I’ve said my piece in defense of Danny…
What does Ethan do now. He’s got A LOT of heavy emotional shit going on and what kind of support network does he have?
I mean Danny still has Joe to vent to.
Ethan has… Mike who is in a coma. And Amber, who Ethan can’t vent to because she’s one of the issues he needs to vent about and venting to her makes him feel guilty anyway because she takes everything as her fault and responsibility.
He can’t go to his mother because she’ll just make it about his sexuality.
Mike’s parents or Amber’s mom could be there, but the former are dealing with their own issues right now and going to Amber’s mom feels like more of an “Amber needs an intervention” step than a “I need to talk through my own issues” step.
…Maaybe Joyce?
They’re still on friendly terms right?
Or hell, Maybe Ethan could make the adult decision and request some time with a school counselor.
Sure he’s an enabler who was recently closeted, but otherwise Ethan seems to have more of his shit together than the rest of the cast.
Joe isn’t much for support. That’s Dan’s role in the relationship.
Danny doesn’t have anyone else. Maybe Sal?
I totally agree that Joe is crap at support, but he will at least allow Danny to vent “at” him if nothing else. And he wouldn’t spill any of Danny’s secrets.
Danny’s necessary personalty growth is just learning to tell people he shoved his foot in his mouth and apologizing for it. Instead of doubling down on the route his rogue mouth decided they were gonna go down.
There were so many moments where you can tell he knows he’s being terrible and needs to apologize, but instead of doing that Danny just…digs a deeper hole.
An unfortunate social event! Hopefully Danny learns from this and can some day be friends with Ethan again. He should take dating off the table for a long, long time though. Gotta work on that personality growth.
Asking someone out, in a hospital, after just effectively wishing that persons friend would die, right outside the room where that persons parents are worrying isnt being “really super bad at asking asking people out”. Its being “totally insensitive towards other peoples feelings”.
And dumb.
Well, that’s not really the sequence of events.
Danny started this by wanting to confess his feelings because Ethan (someone he may be in love with) could have died. Then he shoved his foot in his mouth and the topic shifted towards Mike’s abuse and Ethan’s acceptance of it, whereupon Ethan tells Danny to his face that he’d let Mike get away with mocking a comatose Danny.
That’s not what Ethan told Danny btw.
Ethan told Danny that Mike gets more leeway, more benefits of the doubt, more of Ethan’s loyalty than Danny does.
It’s on Danny that he set up this extreme hypothetical and pushed Ethan into a place of having to compare the two of them.
Ethan could have said no. He could have rejected it altogether.
Instead he decided to place Mike on a pedestal where he’s allowed more leeway, even though Mike uses that leeway exclusively to abuse his friends.
You call it putting Mike on a pedestal, I see it as defending him while he’s possibly dying from someone who doesn’t know him the way Ethan does and has no relationship with him.
Mike could be the worst person in the world but Ethan cares about him still. That’s all he’s telling Danny. That he cares about Mike. And Danny’s response is some version of “but you’re wrong tho”. Which is a fucked up thing to say in the moment and also a ridiculous unsympathetic way of viewing relationships.
I don’t think Ethan actually means what he’s saying here any more than I think Danny actually wished Mike were dead but he most assuredly is not *just telling* Danny that he values him more, he said, in response to the question of how Mike would act if Danny were comatose, he’d let it slide because he knows Mike.
Because Ethan is complacent to Mike’s abuse. Because Ethan is used to it. Because Mike is “not bad once you get to know him” even though he’s never proven otherwise.
Abuse victims often care about and defend their abusers.
That’s how I see much of this and why I’m more sympathetic to Danny, despite him screwing up trying to talk about it.
Danny is not Ethan’s therapist.
Danny has known Ethan for five weeks and slept with one of Ethan’s friends, now he wants to fuck Ethan. That gives his absolutely zero authority to curate Ethan’s friends list, or to diagnose and mend Ethan’s problems in general.
Danny is also not supposed to be a punching bag for Mike, or Amber, or Amazi-Girl when she’s not using him for sexual release. And yet those were seen as totally valid uses for Danny because (insert non-reason about being abused, an “asshole-sage”, or just LOL here). But now that he’s showing a bit of spine, well that’s a problem.
The lesson from this interaction if, of course, always be terrible to people. Then they excuse you for being terrible, whereas if you’re ever nice to them then they start having “standards” about your behaviour, and, honestly. who needs that hassle?
Honestly, I’m glad Danny is respecting himself. He’s completely right in the first 2 panels.
Self-respect usually starts with being a bit of an asshole before you figure out your midpoint between being a doormat and being a douche. Danny is douche right now, but he’s on his way to being just a solid dude.
I genuinely do not understand why anybody is defending Danny. It doesn’t matter if he has a point. He’s still doing this at the worst possible time, trying to make things that aren’t about him about him, and has taken things way too far.
Because things are more complicated than it just being a black and white issue. Because Mike is genuinely an abusive person and Ethan doesn’t want to own that. Because Ethan just said he’d be fine with Mike laughing about Danny being comatose.
I’m not saying it’s a black and white issue. Mike has definitely been abusive, but given that it’s been less than 24 hours since Ethan was both kidnapped and found out that Mike was in a coma (initially told that he was dead, and was both kidnapped and told by the person who was responsible for that happening), confronting the fact that Mike has been abusive isn’t something that Ethan wants or should have to do. And also, I’m pretty sure he said that because Danny’s put him on edge and pushed him into that “yeah, I’m gonna say hurtful things” place, whereas Danny said “Mike should die” with no provocation, then doubled down on it. Is it bad that Ethan said that? Of course, but that doesn’t negate that Danny is still the one in the wrong here.
Also, while it’s still not an excuse to say it, I’d also argue that Ethan actually wouldn’t say nothing if the situation was reversed. He told Mike to back off Danny way back when, after all.
Danny shoved his foot in his mouth with his initial comment, but he did immediately apologize for it and then dovetailed into a separate conversation about Mike’s abuse. I think he’s wrong to pursue it now but it’s not like they give out pointers on when to have painful and necessary conversations.
No, they don’t, but I’d like to think it’s fairly obvious that it shouldn’t be less than a day after someone’s been through an incredibly traumatic experience, and now has to deal with the further trauma of seeing someone they care about in a situation they might not recover from.
I agree the timing is bad but I don’t think that devalues Danny’s actual points.
By themselves, perhaps not, but the timing, combined with the fact that he outright says that he doesn’t want Mike to wake up is what makes Danny an asshat.
That struck me as more of a reaction to Mike as a person than literally wanting Mike dead, and he did apologize for it before the topic changed to Mike’s behaviour.
I really don’t think the direction Danny is being taken as a character is “super wishes Mike were dead so he’d get out of Ethan’s way.”
Honest answer: because I don’t identify with Ethan, so I don’t care as much if he is hurt.
I care more that Danny is finally not taking peoples’ shit than whether Ethan defends his friend. Danny messed up his relationship with Ethan here, but at least he can be a stronger person elsewhere.
Because while it was a shitty conversation to bring up with Ethan (especially at this point and time), Danny handled it in a healthy matter once he did.
Far better for him stand his ground here than for him to metaphorically roll over in the hopes his crush will sleep with him. Or to run away and leave the issue completely unresolved.
What would you have preferred? He spend the entire conversation faking sympathy for Mike in the hopes Ethan would sleep with him?
Because let’s not kid ourselves. Danny’s gotten better, but he still casts himself as a potential male lead in a romcom.
An “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that”, followed by not comparing him to a character who helped commit genocide would have been good. Nobody asked him to weigh in on his opinion of Mike. Which, let’s not forget, is “I don’t like him, and because I don’t like him, I don’t want him to wake up from a coma”.
“I’m sorry but I’m not sorry.”
Damn it, Danny, did nobody ever teach you the value of an “I’m sorry”?
I wanted to wait to see how this would end…and now that I have all I can say is “God…DAN IT! How can you BE this stubbornly stupid?!”
Way too many people still defending Mike. Like… Everyone seems to forget his history of abusive controlling bullshit. He wasn’t “just an asshole”. He was manipulative. Down right sociopathic.
Hilariously Dannys remark about Vader was so spot on it hurts.
Hey he did that one nice thing… Yeah?
Rereading this strip now that my initial frustration has died down, I treat panel 1 more closely. And now I’m realizing that it’s not that Danny is doubling down because he’s stuck – it’s because he decides that that’s the easier thing to do than asking Ethan out. *faaaacepalms*
And “up” was the only thing Danny fucked that day.
However, he would later be invited to go add “yourself” to the list.
I think we’re too into the redemption of scoundrels to see that Mike has been genuinely pretty awful for as long as he’s been in the strip. Danny’s in the uncomfortable position Rachel was when she told Ruth that “redemption is a story”, ie: saying painful things to a protagonist we like.
To put this in terms everyone can immediately understand: yeah it’s nice that Megatron wanted to make something better of himself but that doesn’t make Getaway and the mutineers wrong for kicking him and his sympathizers off the ship. His actions weren’t erased because of his newfound heroism.
I still think Rachel had the same issue with Ruth Danny has here – going WAY too far for the timing. (Because while I am very sympathetic to Rachel and think she’s under no obligation to forgive Ruth, ‘redemption is a story and people don’t actually change’ to someone who’s just been discharged from the hospital for suicidal ideation is… well, since I don’t think Rachel wants to spend the rest of her life knowing something she said contributed to a suicide attempt, she got damn lucky there that the splash damage was primarily in Amber’s convictions she is and always will be a monster.)
Like, neither of them are wrong that Ruth and Mike, respectively, have done absolutely terrible things. I’m actually 100% on Danny’s side in his conversation with Mike at the birthday party. (Which… does seem to have led to what was, if not a suicide attempt, an incredibly self-destructive play, but crucially Danny did not know this was at all a risk and I don’t think it actually WAS until Blaine prompted Mike’s realization. Rachel knew what Ruth was admitted for.) But generally speaking, you have to be a WAY worse person and WAY more established in that badness for me to be okay with you dying, and both those conversations either feature on an implicit ‘I’d be okay if he dies’ (Danny) or are far enough at such a vulnerable target it could have made them spiral down again (Rachel.)
(That said, I also tend to be way more ‘no this was actively not okay’ with Rachel’s speech because I’ve been in active depressive episodes more often than not since 2013 and imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.)
I really don’t think Danny actively or implicitly wants Mike to die or even be in a coma. The way that strip was framed made it come off as a slip, less “I wish you were dead” and more “with him in a coma, Mike can no longer do his Mike thing.”
And, well, that’s just way too horrible if Danny actually meant that. It feels like the kind of thing that would totally break the character for years on end, which we can see in how so many commenters today are mad at Danny for what he said. I certainly won’t say it’s an incorrect reading (because Danny still said it) but I don’t think that’s where the character is being taken.
The thing is, with how he doubled down, Ethan has no reason to think that’s not what Danny’s thinking. Hell, we don’t really have a reason beyond ‘it would make Danny completely unlikeable and this is a narrative.’
I don’t think he was thinking beyond ‘dislike of Mike’ (justified) and some jealousy/Why Can’t You See That I’m Right-ish stuff going on (rather less so) really, which is why he doubled down, but at some point I hope the implications are gonna hit him like a brick and he’ll apologize. Because Danny is generally not a bad person, but he is definitely prone to some serious foot-in-mouth moments, usually when he can’t read the room with a romantic interest because he’s trying to make a Grand Romcom Gesture like this. (OF COURSE Dorothy will choose to stay at IU out of love for me! Obviously Amber describing her dissociation – and that was one of the first frank discussions of it as ‘I was not in control of my body’ and a terrifying incident to boot – is a good opportunity to comfort her with a kiss. And now, clearly Ethan would be receptive to a confession after he’s been kidnapped, outside one of his best friend’s hospital room, and now is the BEST time to subsequently get derailed by this into a conversation about Mike. I think he has the same ‘life is not a romcom’ issue Joyce is working through, thinking on it.) Though not exclusively – sure, Joe’s gross, but he’s harmless so the List is just a distasteful quirk! And that last one’s what gives me hope, because when he DID have that pointed out to him, he changed his thinking right quick.
Dude.
Even if you said everything right, I would not want to be asked out right after being abducted, with one best friend in a coma, and the other best friend traumatized (and I guess her superhero identity has an actual will and controls her body sometimes and she’s hallucinating coma best friend) even more, and after I watched her dad kill someone.
Sorry, I was remembering how human brains look on a hammer, what did you say, Dan? Dinner and a movie?
Perspective.
For the audience it could have been years for them is less than a semester…a couple months aparently…hell too much stuff for such small amount of time..maybe the timelie is too compresed in this comic.
Regardless…yeah Danny boy you are an idiot
As someone who, if I had to choose between receiving kindness or honesty, would always choose honesty:
Danny may be a bit of an ass right now, but at no point has he been wrong. If Mike were talking trash about Danny, comatose in a hospital bed, parents only one wall away, Ethan admits it would be just fine.
He didn’t say “I want him to die” or “I want him to never wake up”, just that it wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t wake up *right away*. Because exposure to Mike takes a huge emotional toll, and he’d been especially brutal to Danny practically yesterday. Anyone would want a break from that. Sure Ethan doesn’t know the extent of Mike’s abuse on Danny but that doesn’t excuse the absurd double standard Ethan himself is comfortable with after having been inured to Mike’s behavior for so long. A break from Mike and the deliberate damge he does on a regular basis, at this point, is a fairly objectively good thing for everyone.
Danny’s not wrong. He just has really bad delivery.
Even more, I think Danny is thinking that it would be better for Ethan.
How was Mike “especially brutal” to Danny? He made a couple jokes about fucking his mom. He even explicitly stated that, per an agreement, he is not “doing Mike things” to Danny. He said that to Danny’s face.
Danny’s right and he should say it. I’ve fucked up people I’ve known five years for starting shit with people I had one date with. It’s super skeezy for Ethan to tolerate Mike being virulently abusive to people in his orbit and by bringing them into his orbit while tolerating Mike’s behaviour he’s a participant. Nobody should date Ethan until he puts Mike on a damn leash.
Danny’s realising on the spot that Ethan’s kind of an ass for this reason and he does not want to ask him out. I’m cheering him on.
is now really the time though
So you’re cheering on a guy who is putting himself before the guy he supposedly has a crush on? Even though the worst thing that happened to him is some rough words, and his crush just got confined by criminals, one of which got killed in the next room?
Danny’s being an entitled mess, he doesn’t deserve Ethan.
Had he? He made a couple of “banging your mom” jokes, but I wouldn’t call that especially brutal.
so once mike wakes up the head trauma’s gonna permanently reset his brain and asshole mike will be no more
The likelihood — in reality rather than fiction — would be that any brain injury severe enough to leave the patient in a coma for two days would leave him with serious to severe physical and cognitive disabilities and personality change.
We spent the part of the first half of this comic lamenting Danny having less spine than Ted Cruz and now that he stands up for himself its the wrong place and time. Which to be fair, yeah the venue and circumstances could be better but I’m still on his side here. Knowing someone is interested in you and letting your close friend constantly shit on them is garbage. Full stop.
And it doesn’t matter how long Mike has known Ethan vs. Danny. If one of my best friends just started being disrespectful to someone I was newly dating we would be having STRONG words about how that shit wouldn’t fly.
Er. Ethan is ‘dating’ Mike, not Danny, though, so even if we go with romance>friendship, your premise is baseless relative to the context.
Also, literally every single thing Agemegos just said. Spot on.
“Could be better”? Ethan has been kidnapped, held hostage, tortured, seen a man beaten to death, and been in a desperate fight. One of his few friends is critically injured and lying in a coma. This is absolutely not the time and place to make a pass at him. And it is absolutely, positively not the time and place to take him to task for loyalty to his injured friend.
Danny has no sense at all of Ethan’s distress. His whole concern has been that Ethan is an asset that he almost lost.
“Anyways enough about your mental health Ethan, what’s really important is my petty bullshit right now, that’s the real tea sis!”
I’ve just realized… for all Danny’s accusations… he doesn’t know that Ethan TOLD Mike that Danny was off limits to serious mind-fuckery. Which, kind of makes Danny look even worse right now. I have never seen a character dig themselves so far down in just three strips.
Really? I actually view it as the opposite — the fact that Ethan had to say that shows very clearly that Ethan is fully aware of just how much of an incredibly toxic jerk Mike is, and is perfectly fine with it outside of rare exceptions. Mike has seriously contributed to how messed-up Ethan and Amber are, and he is a complete jerk to everyone else they socialize with. I am fully on Danny’s side in calling that out.
And let’s not forget, this conversation started from Danny accidentally blurting out his unfiltered thoughts, which he then apologized for. It only went further when Ethan tried to excuse Mike’s literal years of toxicity by bringing up his one good act that Ethan knows of… and, frankly, I’m with Danny on calling that out, too.
Lol, Danny has sucked since the Clinton administration
Very strange that Danny can be simultaneously so in his own head about interacting with people and conversationally impulsive. But it is a recipe for comedic missteps, and I’m sure some people are this way so it doesn’t blow my suspension of disbelief quite like a simple eyemask concealing someone’s identity.
Danny is being extremely entitled in this whole interaction. He’s talking over a guy who just went through hell and is unable to take a step back from his own emotions. It’s disappointing.
oh come on dude the least you can do is apologize? litearlly just go like ‘im sorry that just slipped out i have no idea what came over me’ bruh
i mean, not that Danny’s innocent here, but fuck you Ethan. I’ve been thinking about this for some reason, and Ethan… you can be pissed about what Danny says without justifying Mike’s assholery. He’s still an asshole whether you’ve known him five years or five seconds. I’m sorry you’re sad, but you’re still being a dick.
But just so you know I’m not playing favorites: Danny, you showed your ass. You spoke appropriately and it was mean and being a dick. That Mike is ALSO a dick doesn’t justify you. You made a mistake, and saying “sorry” at this point would have been ok, i think. But you doubled down and blamed the guy unconscious in a hospital.
If this were r/AITA the answer would be ESH. Congrats, all three of you are assholes. You deserve each other. Maybe you can all just have some three way menage-a-hate fuck and get it all worked out that way.