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I was! Of course, a chain smoker dying young(ish) of lung cancer doesn’t take a lot of work to make convincing. It’s more like, “Yeah, that’s about right.” xD
Dina is a scientist. She observes/researches, voices a hypothesis, then acts accordingly. She recognises others are black box systems to her and this is something she actively works on because people interest her. (With the exception of Becky, not as much as dinosaurs, but she is very fond of Sarah and Amber too, and Joyce may well be growing on her (possibly like a fungus? But Joyce’s “You hit Dina! She’s Becky’s girlfriend! Grraaargh!” revenge attack was pretty endearing)…
This is another example of someone having no natural talent at something (in this case, social interaction) applying logic and analysis to understand and figure out how it works, and slowly becoming better at it than someone who simply coasts on their natural abilities. Dina’s got this!
This is why I, as an autie, still excel at customer service, because I observed my mom interact with customer service people and internalized it. (My mom can be a very low key Karen.)
I find that I’m pretty good with people too because I’ve observed a lot and absorbed a lot. I still get surprised when people call me wise or funny or intelligent or convincing though because of it.
It’s pretty much a combination of hard work and personal understanding of Amber. The issue will be when something unexpected occurs and Amber is incapable of enough awareness to answer her questions or when she’s dealing with someone new.
You would be surprised how often the same expression and tone in different people mean different things. Tiny minutia like that really throws me off.
People like Amber and Becky are willing to work with her, and help her learn how to deal with them, specifically (it helps that they’re both a bit askew from social norms, too), so it’s easier.
Wait? So Blaine hadn’t seen Amber in five years before just randomly deciding to crash freshman family weekend and starting off this whole saga’s worth of bullshit?!
Not suddenly, per-se. Likely he had been required to pay child support. However, many support orders carry to whenever the child finishes college. SOooo, had Amber not gone to college, Blaine would have been able to stop paying. Instead, by going to college she was actually increasing his obligation from basic support to plus extraordinary expenses (tuitiin books, dorm etc ….). That was likely the trigger that drove him to act.
Why the hell he had a kid he wasn’t prepared to raise (twice) is a mystery. He’s such a control nut you’d think he’d have been more on the ball.
Honestly I’d put money on Blaine having the whole ‘real men don’t use condoms’ mindset. Plus he’s such a narcissist that he can’t even IMAGINE himself failing, hence why he made so many bad moves during an already inherently-flawed kidnapping plot. I imagine he got Amb’s and Faz’s moms pregnant, respectively, and then just wasn’t available enough in their lives until it was too late to strongarm them into an abortion / the women hid their pregnancies from Blaine until it was impossible for him to force them to have abortions. Either that or both the moms were able to successfully refuse Blaine’s insistence on abortions—but tbh I doubt that, given his penchant for violence and intimidation.
We know some things have changed, but given over in Shortpacked Blaine was apparently of the ‘Amber apparently had half-siblings across the west coast’ philosophy with condoms… and given the implications Yuri was a teenager when she had Faz… yeah no he was probably way too vain and impulsive for condoms.
It could be he wanted to have kids: as a narcissistic extension of self, to ensure his legacy, as a tool to further control and abuse “his” women. Honestly, I think he’s more likely to coerce someone into going through with a pregnancy than force her to have an abortion.
I was going to comment much the same thing. There’s a certain satisfaction for either sex, when it comes to producing offspring, and that satisfaction is untempered by rationality and empathy when it comes to individuals who are obssessed with controlling others. Rather, those individuals are even more instinctual/impulsive when it comes to satisfying spontaneous desires (even going to extreme lengths for such). This differs of course from someone who is obsessed with self-control, who may actually have inclination to limit any indulgence in reproductive urges.
So no, this is entirely to form for Blaine (or any of the many, many real world counterparts I’ve come across- well, in the controlling, abusive, likely psychotic, rather unhinged sense of similarity. Fairly sure I’ve never met anyone from the Korean Mob before :P).
Blaine himself has said in the comic that he agreed to pay for college in exchange for not paying regular child support. And the only reason he did that was because he assumed Amber’s social anxiety would make her not go to college, so he thought he had found a loophole out of paying for her at all.
He might have been willing to raise her if she hadn’t been such a pathetic disappointment. Of course his methods of raising lead directly to that disappointment.
Not entirely sure how you get a strong willed tough kid who never challenges you on anything. Seems incompatible to me, but it’s what many abusers seem to want.
I just realized freshman family weekend probably lines up pretty well around the time Blaine would have to cut his first check or I don’t know get deducted from his salary or something. So dude only made one maybe two payments tops before deciding this had to stop and that kidnapping was on the table!
Either that or he’s going to turn out to be a lawyer who will try to talk Amber into letting him represent her in a claim against her mother for a share of Blaine’s estate when it goes into probate.
Since they don’t have a tag, and their hair color is different than the person in the background of panel 1, I’m guessing it’s the hospital crowd milling around.
I know that the atmosphere has been kind of dark lately but damn. I get it though She’s glad someone else was the one to take his life and not her, other than that if I was her I wouldn’t want to express any other feelings about it. Sort of in a” I will sing No eulogy for him” type of mood is what I’m saying.
I had the same situation when I found out the guy who tried to kill me with the truck died before he could be charged, by trying to move a tree with his personal vehicle via high speed impact while a multiple of times legally drunk. It has been a while but I seem to recall he was more than 3 times the 0.10% BAC limit of the time, so definitely an alcoholic.
I don’t know that we know enough about Yuri to make a final judgment call on whether she’s a jerk or not. She’s a much younger woman, and he was a manipulative abuser, even if she’s genuinely not a good person the situation probably wasn’t super black and white there.
I wouldn’t be surprised if find out that Blaine was lying to her about there not being enough money for both Amber and Faz to go to college; the real question is if she’d be contrite about blaming Amber for their “money troubles” or not.
I wonder what Stacy’s take on all this is. I’m actually fairly interested in what his wives think of this whole thing. I mean I’d like to think at least Stacy would know how horrible he was I’m still struggling to comprehend anyone actually caring for Blaine. But I guess he was actually fairly charming looking from the outside. He conned the church after all although I can’t say for sure if that was actually a challenge or not.
Blaine could play act the role of a nice, normal person, and that character is probably who she fell for in the first place. Of course his true colors had to show eventually, then there’s the years of abuse, at least one affair, messy divorce, etc… Hell, after everything he put her through, she might want a high five herself.
Stacy probably mourned the loss of the man she thought she married years ago, and her biggest remaining concern about him is probably who’s going to pay for Amber’s tuition now.
Blaine was an abuser. They tend to be good at drawing on your sympathies. We have seen his nice face with Danny and when he greeted the church and with how he initially befriended Ross. Blaine wasn’t the best and brightest, but he had people skills, a charming smile and he knew how to speak in that gentle caring doting tone that would make people want to do things for him or at least listen to his side.
It’s like, you see all the signs, but when you give them the benefit of the doubt, you let it go because you believe them when they say they’ll do better. When they say they’ll improve. But then once the blinders are off because you’ve lost trust in them, it’s very clear that all the ribbons are snakes, that they’re bringing up things unprompted, and that if they were truly regretful for anything why do you have a bucket full of excuses and not a single apology to be found when you call them out on stuff.
Heart Attack. Better than any version of Blaine deserves. (though to be fair, as far as we know, Shortpacked Blaine never murdered anyone. Was still an abusive asshole though. )
yeah that sounds way less satisfying. regardless of readers’ feelings on his actual death (and Amber believing or not), at least she got to kick the shit out of him and at the end it was clearly her, even if he still wouldn’t admit it.
Blaine was, in that universe, an incredibly minor character in terms of onscreen appearances (I think that was his third arc to actually show up in the flesh for, though of course his presence was felt with things like the Faz reveal there,) but even then the storyline included a couple digs about how colossally unfair it was he just died Like That. ( https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/in-person is the big one, but Mike gets his own ‘damn I wanted to beat the shit out of him for you with my abductee superpowers’ bit.)
God, seeing Aunt Molly’s reaction to her (apparent) brother’s total unhinged breakdown could be delightful. We know she kept in contact with Stacy post-divorce at least enough to inform her, so I’m guessing she’s not all in on making people flee their homes in fear of the mob because of his screw ups, or kidnapping and murder.
My great-aunt’s thoughts on her shitty brother were more… complicated (I don’t think she ever knew about some of the more egregious ‘what the FUCK’ moments, but she didn’t comment on the fact that no one in my generation, his grandkids or hers, really had a relationship with the man,) but her kids will probably respond to his death with jokes and relief. (We’re… mostly facetious about his vampiric nature. Mostly.)
At least in this continuity she did get to stand up to him, to show she was not afraid of him, and she knows that he knows she was not ‘nothing’. He even admitted it (this strip, and the two that follow), in what may have been the last thing he ever said to her.
Yeah, Blaine was like having pimples on your piles, so his being gone is something of a relief. Still not a good idea to let Amber’s mom see her celebrating his death with high fives.
I wonder if Amber working up to murdering Blaine was actually a serious aggravation on her condition. I mean in the sense that every day she really was plotting Blaine’s murder and planned to do it in the coming years.
It’s not inexplicable if it’s what we all know non-Brain Mike would do, too, and I think Amber does know that in her heart. (The party hat, too. And the confetti and blower.)
He’d never wear his actual outfit. The black T-shirt could be mistaken for sincere but youthful grief.
Despite her social difficulties, Dina nets another extremely successful social interaction, moving Amber off grimdark murder talk and frowns to a partial smile in one panel.
In Reddit support forums for people with crappy relatives, they often call this feeling “congradolences.”
Also, way to go, Dina! It’s a part-time autistic superpower, that’s for sure. If you make a practice of not trusting your assumptions about what’s going on, it’s sometimes easier for you to see what really is going on than it would be for a neurotypical person.
This is one of those times where I’m reminded that this entire comic takes place in literally days, and that means that, for Blaine, this wasn’t simply him deciding one day to stop paying tuiton. No. Blaine couldn’t stand the idea of his daughter GOING TO SCHOOL. So, in that sense, he’s exactly like Ross.
The difference was always pretty near hair-splitting. Ross justified things to himself for reasons that weren’t unveiled selfishness and a need to control, and some moments of (conditional) warmth and genuine grief at his wife’s death… but apart from those and ‘one of these men has some suggestion of being a statutory rapist, which is one too many’ they’re basically the same brand of terrible. (Comes in religious and mob stooge with inflated sense of self-importance flavors!) Blaine’s second plan that we can tell (I’m being generous here and calling ‘show up in Amber’s dorm room, yell at her in front of witnesses until she drops out of college, bring stepson to see this as well so he doesn’t Get Ideas’ a ‘plan’,) was another ‘kidnap her friend’ scheme, so neither of them were all that imaginative ultimately, either.
There’s a reason that Dina, lacking any real context on meeting Ross the first time, flashed back to Blaine and sent him off on a goose chase.
Oh, there is one difference: I don’t think Blaine would have given a shit about the gender anyone Amber or Faz would bring home, he’d hate them on principle so long as they represented a gap in his ability to control them. (So, always.)
Has it been established that dina is a lesbian? I thought perhaps maybe she was bisexual (or otherwise just unconcerned about gender) until she met Becky and established a relationship with her.
Word of God is that her shirt a few storylines back (the gray one with the black, white and purple stripes) was an intentional reference to asexuality, and specifically gray-ace IIRC. Where her attraction primarily is, romantic and existent-but-rare sexual, isn’t entirely clear.
We know sexualities are consistent across verses, so it’s notable that Dina’s three relationships in the Walkyverse were two guys (Walky and Mike,) one gal (Becky, after a lot of Complicated Events happened leading to the Soggies May Rule-pocalypse,) which would suggest she’s bi or pan… but that’s still ambiguous, as the lines before the Soggies poured into reality (‘I suggest we try to shoo away anymore non-white, non-heteronormative, neurodivergent people (from this reality anomaly.) Even just one more could be the metaphorical straw.’ ‘And what are you?’ ‘Uh oh.’) indicated that she’d had time to contemplate a few things while she was indisposed. (DOA!Dina hadn’t hooked up with Becky yet – I think it was before Becky’s reentry to the story – but there might have been hints she was queer, I don’t remember the timing, but Walkyverse Dina never had any indication.) And given both her relationships with men were… messy, even by IW! standards, there’s a case to be made it was compulsory heterosexuality and insecurity at play there rather than attraction.
So it’s not 100% clear but I think Dina’s talk with Amber suggested she was at least open to the idea of dating across the gender spectrum.
I believe Dina has said that gender isn’t a factor she cares about that much when it comes to her romantic partners, so lesbian is not an accurate label for her.
Amber, being Amber, is sure that her mother would be disappointed in her for not mourning Blaine. In reality, I think that Stacey would feel that Blaine earned the fact that Amber really can’t bring herself to feel anything for him or even care that he is gone by his own misdeeds.
Huh. Is it weird to totally relate to amber in this? She feels the same way about her dad that I do my mom. maybe parents should stop abusing their kids?
Well, in my day they use-ta say, “quitcher complaining, it builds character!” Of course now we know what every child knew then; it doesn’t build character, it tears you down in so many ways.
Funeral? Body will be tied up as evidence for a while. Then I don’t see a funeral at all. Unless Yuri wants one and she doesn’t seem religious. Blaine would think religion is for suckers. So finish the autopsy and find a convenient hole for him. Amber and Stacey have no need to deal with any of this.
I think that something needs to be arranged for Faz’s sake.
That aside, the mob tends to get all hypocritically generous in these circumstances. I’m sure that Asher’s grandpa will want to put on a big spread for a ‘fallen soldier’.
? What does being religious have to do with funerals? No one in my immediate family is religious, we still had a funeral for my dad. It’s just a way to be together with friends and family as a final farewell to someone who meant something to them.
Standard procedure, I’m fairly certain his death can’t even be officially ruled suicide until they have an autopsy. Now maybe his body will be “accidentally” sent to be cremated before an autopsy can be performed.
But guy steals a cops gun and shoots himself with no witnesses but a cop? You can bet there’s be an autopsy especially on a guy laying in a hospital bed who might have been incapable of taking the gun away.
The fact a cop was involved means an autopsy is REQUIRED. Which is why the cop should have said. He tried to take my gun and escape and was killed in the struggle.
Is it just me, or does Becky seem somewhat disappointed that Amber is not mourning her father’s death at all, or even has conflicting feelings over it? It’s not that I think Becky disapproves, but I think she’s feeling even more alone now.
That’s a possibility. She was internalizing her grief and perhaps saw Blaine’s death as an opportunity to share the grief with Amber, to feel better quickly.
Except she didn’t know Amber has no fucks left for her father for a long time.
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A “sorry your evil kidnapping sperm donor is dead” high 5? I think I can understand that…
It’s an impulse I can find familiar.
Down low?
Too slow!
Yeah, he didn’t duck quick enough. Too much?
I have asked at certain funerals and divorces whether congratulations or condolences were more in order.
Sometimes it’s both, and that’s okay.
Source: I’m twice divorced.
My condolulations.
My congratulences.
Imagine failing at being a dad so hard that when you die, your daughter’s response is, “Oh, good, now I don’t have to plan a murder.”
Hey, even if you get nothing in the will you saved the price of a tarp, a shovel, and some quicklime.
Always a silver lining!
Or just a chummer and a commercial lobster farm…… not like that was the plot from a murder mystery on the BBC.
As I told a few people at the time, my only regret at my adoptive father’s death was that I had absolutely nothing to do with it.
I hope you were convincing
I was! Of course, a chain smoker dying young(ish) of lung cancer doesn’t take a lot of work to make convincing. It’s more like, “Yeah, that’s about right.” xD
and here Dina thinks she doesn’t understand social interactions while she totally nails this social interaction.
Really, she’s the one doing best so far with both Amber and Becky. A+ condolancing, Deens!
The way you spelled that, I had a mental picture of a knight jousting with a townhouse.
I got the image of two rich people jousting in a high-end condo’s pool.
Meanwhile, your interpretation.. well, Eric & The Dread Gazebo, anyone? :3
Dina is really, really good with the people she knows. It’s wonderful.
Dina is a scientist. She observes/researches, voices a hypothesis, then acts accordingly. She recognises others are black box systems to her and this is something she actively works on because people interest her. (With the exception of Becky, not as much as dinosaurs, but she is very fond of Sarah and Amber too, and Joyce may well be growing on her (possibly like a fungus? But Joyce’s “You hit Dina! She’s Becky’s girlfriend! Grraaargh!” revenge attack was pretty endearing)…
This is another example of someone having no natural talent at something (in this case, social interaction) applying logic and analysis to understand and figure out how it works, and slowly becoming better at it than someone who simply coasts on their natural abilities. Dina’s got this!
This is why I, as an autie, still excel at customer service, because I observed my mom interact with customer service people and internalized it. (My mom can be a very low key Karen.)
I find that I’m pretty good with people too because I’ve observed a lot and absorbed a lot. I still get surprised when people call me wise or funny or intelligent or convincing though because of it.
In this case, unfamiliarity with the standard condolences script would be an advantage.
It’s pretty much a combination of hard work and personal understanding of Amber. The issue will be when something unexpected occurs and Amber is incapable of enough awareness to answer her questions or when she’s dealing with someone new.
You would be surprised how often the same expression and tone in different people mean different things. Tiny minutia like that really throws me off.
People like Amber and Becky are willing to work with her, and help her learn how to deal with them, specifically (it helps that they’re both a bit askew from social norms, too), so it’s easier.
The Todd approves of this grieving method.
Sad-five.
Oh dude, The Todd, I haven’t seen you in ages! Been-a-while-since-I-binge-watched-the-whole-series five!
Do it and listen to Zach Braff and Donald Faison’s rewatch podcast, “Fake Doctors, Real Friends”! It’s great!
Wait? So Blaine hadn’t seen Amber in five years before just randomly deciding to crash freshman family weekend and starting off this whole saga’s worth of bullshit?!
Probably because suddenly he had to contribute financially (court order, y’know)
Not suddenly, per-se. Likely he had been required to pay child support. However, many support orders carry to whenever the child finishes college. SOooo, had Amber not gone to college, Blaine would have been able to stop paying. Instead, by going to college she was actually increasing his obligation from basic support to plus extraordinary expenses (tuitiin books, dorm etc ….). That was likely the trigger that drove him to act.
Why the hell he had a kid he wasn’t prepared to raise (twice) is a mystery. He’s such a control nut you’d think he’d have been more on the ball.
Honestly I’d put money on Blaine having the whole ‘real men don’t use condoms’ mindset. Plus he’s such a narcissist that he can’t even IMAGINE himself failing, hence why he made so many bad moves during an already inherently-flawed kidnapping plot. I imagine he got Amb’s and Faz’s moms pregnant, respectively, and then just wasn’t available enough in their lives until it was too late to strongarm them into an abortion / the women hid their pregnancies from Blaine until it was impossible for him to force them to have abortions. Either that or both the moms were able to successfully refuse Blaine’s insistence on abortions—but tbh I doubt that, given his penchant for violence and intimidation.
He might just have a complex about abortion while being fine with murder. He wouldn’t be the only one by far.
So, a Republican?
They don’t have complexes with abortion versus murder, they just hate women. Which, hey, could be Blaine, too.
Truth.
“They don’t have complexes with abortion versus murder, they just hate women.”
That’s unfair..
..Republicans hate ALL minorities. >.>
We know some things have changed, but given over in Shortpacked Blaine was apparently of the ‘Amber apparently had half-siblings across the west coast’ philosophy with condoms… and given the implications Yuri was a teenager when she had Faz… yeah no he was probably way too vain and impulsive for condoms.
It could be he wanted to have kids: as a narcissistic extension of self, to ensure his legacy, as a tool to further control and abuse “his” women. Honestly, I think he’s more likely to coerce someone into going through with a pregnancy than force her to have an abortion.
I was going to comment much the same thing. There’s a certain satisfaction for either sex, when it comes to producing offspring, and that satisfaction is untempered by rationality and empathy when it comes to individuals who are obssessed with controlling others. Rather, those individuals are even more instinctual/impulsive when it comes to satisfying spontaneous desires (even going to extreme lengths for such). This differs of course from someone who is obsessed with self-control, who may actually have inclination to limit any indulgence in reproductive urges.
So no, this is entirely to form for Blaine (or any of the many, many real world counterparts I’ve come across- well, in the controlling, abusive, likely psychotic, rather unhinged sense of similarity. Fairly sure I’ve never met anyone from the Korean Mob before :P).
Blaine himself has said in the comic that he agreed to pay for college in exchange for not paying regular child support. And the only reason he did that was because he assumed Amber’s social anxiety would make her not go to college, so he thought he had found a loophole out of paying for her at all.
Oh, it was to replace alimony, not the child support https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-9-comic/04-vote-for-robin/money-2/
Remember the Alimo-ny!
That’s when Mick Jagger puked on a car rental place, right?
He might have been willing to raise her if she hadn’t been such a pathetic disappointment. Of course his methods of raising lead directly to that disappointment.
Not entirely sure how you get a strong willed tough kid who never challenges you on anything. Seems incompatible to me, but it’s what many abusers seem to want.
That strong-willed, tough kid just has to agree with you on everything, naturally. Because of course you’re always right. (Gag me.)
She was costing him money so he had to actively acknowledge her existence again.
oh damn. This, too.
I just realized freshman family weekend probably lines up pretty well around the time Blaine would have to cut his first check or I don’t know get deducted from his salary or something. So dude only made one maybe two payments tops before deciding this had to stop and that kidnapping was on the table!
Yeah, that Blaine went to kidnapping and murder from the get-go really says a few things.
Hadn’t seen for five and hadn’t spoke for three, according to her.
Used to make her babysit for Faz too before the robbery.
“mourning” an abusive parent? yeah sometime it be like that
I’ve seen the word “congratudolences” used for this sort of thing.
That’s a new one to me to be honest, doesn’t really role of the tongue though.
I’m going with my condolulations.
I, too, like that word.
Mourning the parent we should have had, when we finally accept that the parent we have is what they are.
Fuck yeah, Dina. Dina is a gift.
Dina is definitely in my top 3 best characters in this universe, the other 2 being Sal and Sarah.
*Throws on a new-to-me groove with the hacked Muzak*
Thank you for that.
Who’s that in the background of panel 5?
Either some random visitor/nonessential person who could be cleared out or a nasty surprise to come, I suppose.
Random passerby most likely. You can just see the hair of someone else in panel 1 between Amber and Becky.
Either that or he’s going to turn out to be a lawyer who will try to talk Amber into letting him represent her in a claim against her mother for a share of Blaine’s estate when it goes into probate.
Sorry — that should have been ‘step-mother’ (Yuri). I doubt that Blaine left any sort of provision for either Stacy or Amber.
I don’t recognize the hair colour of any characters we know, and there’s a different person in panel 1. Could be random crowd people.
That mushroom dude in Super Marioland.
Since they don’t have a tag, and their hair color is different than the person in the background of panel 1, I’m guessing it’s the hospital crowd milling around.
Who is in the background?
ITYM, Up High! on the down low.
Amber’s tiny smile!
This is the hospital, which has just been evacuated.
That’s totally Ryan in the background isn’t it.
Not in panel 5. Hair color’s wrong. Maybe in panel 1.
I thought he was basically bed-ridden?
Ryan has red hair and a mustache now?
Never rule out Zombies, Amber. That’s a rookie mistake.
Looking forward to the funeral!
I know that the atmosphere has been kind of dark lately but damn. I get it though She’s glad someone else was the one to take his life and not her, other than that if I was her I wouldn’t want to express any other feelings about it. Sort of in a” I will sing No eulogy for him” type of mood is what I’m saying.
Who is that peaking out from behind Becky and Amber’s heads? They aren’t tagged so they must be a new secret supervillain!
Good for you Amber, the day you no longer have to think about or feel any influence from your father is a good day indeed.
Also would Amber’s mom really begrudge her daughter a hi-five for her absuive dad dying?
Oh, but Blaine wasn’t abusive, he just had problems with low blood sugar D:
Oh! Was he switching his defense strategy from “She made me do it,” to “I was Hangry?”
“Low blood sugar” is what Stacy thinks makes Amber (insert mental/emotional/dissociative/et cetera issue here).
Dead Dads Day!!
*High five freeze frame*
Well… at least it’s not one of those “wants to get revenge but because the person is dead already I have an empty feeling” kind of situations.
Amber has some closure so…. Yay?
I had the same situation when I found out the guy who tried to kill me with the truck died before he could be charged, by trying to move a tree with his personal vehicle via high speed impact while a multiple of times legally drunk. It has been a while but I seem to recall he was more than 3 times the 0.10% BAC limit of the time, so definitely an alcoholic.
Was this the draw or one of the other two?
It’s good that Blaine is dead in both Walkyverse and DoA and people mock them. The only one that will probably miss Blaine is Yuri, but she is a jerk.
I don’t know that we know enough about Yuri to make a final judgment call on whether she’s a jerk or not. She’s a much younger woman, and he was a manipulative abuser, even if she’s genuinely not a good person the situation probably wasn’t super black and white there.
I wouldn’t be surprised if find out that Blaine was lying to her about there not being enough money for both Amber and Faz to go to college; the real question is if she’d be contrite about blaming Amber for their “money troubles” or not.
Amber’s Inner Hallucinatory Mike: “Phweeee!”
High-five FTW!
I wonder what Stacy’s take on all this is. I’m actually fairly interested in what his wives think of this whole thing. I mean I’d like to think at least Stacy would know how horrible he was I’m still struggling to comprehend anyone actually caring for Blaine. But I guess he was actually fairly charming looking from the outside. He conned the church after all although I can’t say for sure if that was actually a challenge or not.
Blaine could play act the role of a nice, normal person, and that character is probably who she fell for in the first place. Of course his true colors had to show eventually, then there’s the years of abuse, at least one affair, messy divorce, etc… Hell, after everything he put her through, she might want a high five herself.
Stacy probably mourned the loss of the man she thought she married years ago, and her biggest remaining concern about him is probably who’s going to pay for Amber’s tuition now.
Blaine was an abuser. They tend to be good at drawing on your sympathies. We have seen his nice face with Danny and when he greeted the church and with how he initially befriended Ross. Blaine wasn’t the best and brightest, but he had people skills, a charming smile and he knew how to speak in that gentle caring doting tone that would make people want to do things for him or at least listen to his side.
It’s like, you see all the signs, but when you give them the benefit of the doubt, you let it go because you believe them when they say they’ll do better. When they say they’ll improve. But then once the blinders are off because you’ve lost trust in them, it’s very clear that all the ribbons are snakes, that they’re bringing up things unprompted, and that if they were truly regretful for anything why do you have a bucket full of excuses and not a single apology to be found when you call them out on stuff.
Just now I had flashbacks to this.
Definitely not the only one.
I never read shortpacked and can’t seem to get into it, so, uh, how did he die?
Heart Attack. Better than any version of Blaine deserves. (though to be fair, as far as we know, Shortpacked Blaine never murdered anyone. Was still an abusive asshole though. )
yeah that sounds way less satisfying. regardless of readers’ feelings on his actual death (and Amber believing or not), at least she got to kick the shit out of him and at the end it was clearly her, even if he still wouldn’t admit it.
Blaine was, in that universe, an incredibly minor character in terms of onscreen appearances (I think that was his third arc to actually show up in the flesh for, though of course his presence was felt with things like the Faz reveal there,) but even then the storyline included a couple digs about how colossally unfair it was he just died Like That. ( https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/in-person is the big one, but Mike gets his own ‘damn I wanted to beat the shit out of him for you with my abductee superpowers’ bit.)
If we get a funeral arc, maybe we’ll finally see Aunt Molly. (Just to port over as many Walkyverse deep cuts as possible.)
God, seeing Aunt Molly’s reaction to her (apparent) brother’s total unhinged breakdown could be delightful. We know she kept in contact with Stacy post-divorce at least enough to inform her, so I’m guessing she’s not all in on making people flee their homes in fear of the mob because of his screw ups, or kidnapping and murder.
My great-aunt’s thoughts on her shitty brother were more… complicated (I don’t think she ever knew about some of the more egregious ‘what the FUCK’ moments, but she didn’t comment on the fact that no one in my generation, his grandkids or hers, really had a relationship with the man,) but her kids will probably respond to his death with jokes and relief. (We’re… mostly facetious about his vampiric nature. Mostly.)
So I’m lowkey hoping Aunt Molly’s response is more like my effective-aunt-by-age-range and cousins: ‘you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’
I accidentally clicked your name instead of the link and was wondering how a youtube campaign video related to Blaine’s death.
He watched it and seven days later he died
At least in this continuity she did get to stand up to him, to show she was not afraid of him, and she knows that he knows she was not ‘nothing’. He even admitted it (this strip, and the two that follow), in what may have been the last thing he ever said to her.
Ah, beat me to it! Yeah, that’s the Blaine O’Malley Mood.
Yeah, Blaine was like having pimples on your piles, so his being gone is something of a relief. Still not a good idea to let Amber’s mom see her celebrating his death with high fives.
I wonder if Amber working up to murdering Blaine was actually a serious aggravation on her condition. I mean in the sense that every day she really was plotting Blaine’s murder and planned to do it in the coming years.
Probably not until he injected himself back into her life.
Yeah, I don’t think she was considering it a necessity until recently.
Like, potentially only ‘well he bailed out another kidnapper and has a supervillain suit, he will never leave me alone’ recently.
The best revenge is living well, but sometimes, we have to settle for just living.
Maybe this is for the best…
Only time will tell, really
come on mike waking up we need another mike at a funeral strip
Since he’s Mike, the “Mike at a funeral” strip you get might not be the funeral you want.
That would be the ‘come on, wake up.’
If there’s ever an occasion for Mike Being Mike, Blaine’s funeral is always it.
Brain!Mike appears at the wake, inexplicably wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
It’s not inexplicable if it’s what we all know non-Brain Mike would do, too, and I think Amber does know that in her heart. (The party hat, too. And the confetti and blower.)
He’d never wear his actual outfit. The black T-shirt could be mistaken for sincere but youthful grief.
That is some high grade signal reading from Dina!
I don’t think I was that good in college myself.
Despite her social difficulties, Dina nets another extremely successful social interaction, moving Amber off grimdark murder talk and frowns to a partial smile in one panel.
In Reddit support forums for people with crappy relatives, they often call this feeling “congradolences.”
Also, way to go, Dina! It’s a part-time autistic superpower, that’s for sure. If you make a practice of not trusting your assumptions about what’s going on, it’s sometimes easier for you to see what really is going on than it would be for a neurotypical person.
Eyy Dina may not always get social cues, but sometimes she hits the nail on the head
This is one of those times where I’m reminded that this entire comic takes place in literally days, and that means that, for Blaine, this wasn’t simply him deciding one day to stop paying tuiton. No. Blaine couldn’t stand the idea of his daughter GOING TO SCHOOL. So, in that sense, he’s exactly like Ross.
The difference was always pretty near hair-splitting. Ross justified things to himself for reasons that weren’t unveiled selfishness and a need to control, and some moments of (conditional) warmth and genuine grief at his wife’s death… but apart from those and ‘one of these men has some suggestion of being a statutory rapist, which is one too many’ they’re basically the same brand of terrible. (Comes in religious and mob stooge with inflated sense of self-importance flavors!) Blaine’s second plan that we can tell (I’m being generous here and calling ‘show up in Amber’s dorm room, yell at her in front of witnesses until she drops out of college, bring stepson to see this as well so he doesn’t Get Ideas’ a ‘plan’,) was another ‘kidnap her friend’ scheme, so neither of them were all that imaginative ultimately, either.
There’s a reason that Dina, lacking any real context on meeting Ross the first time, flashed back to Blaine and sent him off on a goose chase.
Oh, there is one difference: I don’t think Blaine would have given a shit about the gender anyone Amber or Faz would bring home, he’d hate them on principle so long as they represented a gap in his ability to control them. (So, always.)
God I love that Dinosaur Lesbian.
Minor detail…
Has it been established that dina is a lesbian? I thought perhaps maybe she was bisexual (or otherwise just unconcerned about gender) until she met Becky and established a relationship with her.
My personal headcanon is that she’s demisexual.
Word of God is that her shirt a few storylines back (the gray one with the black, white and purple stripes) was an intentional reference to asexuality, and specifically gray-ace IIRC. Where her attraction primarily is, romantic and existent-but-rare sexual, isn’t entirely clear.
We know sexualities are consistent across verses, so it’s notable that Dina’s three relationships in the Walkyverse were two guys (Walky and Mike,) one gal (Becky, after a lot of Complicated Events happened leading to the Soggies May Rule-pocalypse,) which would suggest she’s bi or pan… but that’s still ambiguous, as the lines before the Soggies poured into reality (‘I suggest we try to shoo away anymore non-white, non-heteronormative, neurodivergent people (from this reality anomaly.) Even just one more could be the metaphorical straw.’ ‘And what are you?’ ‘Uh oh.’) indicated that she’d had time to contemplate a few things while she was indisposed. (DOA!Dina hadn’t hooked up with Becky yet – I think it was before Becky’s reentry to the story – but there might have been hints she was queer, I don’t remember the timing, but Walkyverse Dina never had any indication.) And given both her relationships with men were… messy, even by IW! standards, there’s a case to be made it was compulsory heterosexuality and insecurity at play there rather than attraction.
So it’s not 100% clear but I think Dina’s talk with Amber suggested she was at least open to the idea of dating across the gender spectrum.
Though even if SP!Dina had been straight (or had still thought she was), she was still non-white and neurodivergent, so the “Uh oh” would still apply.
I believe Dina has said that gender isn’t a factor she cares about that much when it comes to her romantic partners, so lesbian is not an accurate label for her.
If Leslie thought Becky was being irreverent, she’d probably flip out at Amber’s advanced irreverence.
Yeah, that was Amber’s big fear, wasn’t it? That, before the end, Blaine would have made a murderer of her.
Getting some Borat vibes from Dina here, not gonna lie.
Wait… Amber’s mother still cares about her horrible ex?
Amber, being Amber, is sure that her mother would be disappointed in her for not mourning Blaine. In reality, I think that Stacey would feel that Blaine earned the fact that Amber really can’t bring herself to feel anything for him or even care that he is gone by his own misdeeds.
He will probably return on Amber’s nightmares.
Dina: Has clearly not had RA training. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/02-i-was-a-teenage-churchmouse/spot/ (Or actually remained in the room during that interaction, and thus heard Ruth’s options, which is where she’s getting these options from.)
Huh. Is it weird to totally relate to amber in this? She feels the same way about her dad that I do my mom. maybe parents should stop abusing their kids?
Well, in my day they use-ta say, “quitcher complaining, it builds character!” Of course now we know what every child knew then; it doesn’t build character, it tears you down in so many ways.
tfw your abusive father who made you who you are passes away.
So, as next-of-kin, does Amber still have money to pay her own tuition now?
Depends on if Blaine had a testament or not. And if he re-married.
But… probably?
Funeral? Body will be tied up as evidence for a while. Then I don’t see a funeral at all. Unless Yuri wants one and she doesn’t seem religious. Blaine would think religion is for suckers. So finish the autopsy and find a convenient hole for him. Amber and Stacey have no need to deal with any of this.
I think that something needs to be arranged for Faz’s sake.
That aside, the mob tends to get all hypocritically generous in these circumstances. I’m sure that Asher’s grandpa will want to put on a big spread for a ‘fallen soldier’.
Keelhauling his corpse through the streets could be arranged for Faz’s sake.
? What does being religious have to do with funerals? No one in my immediate family is religious, we still had a funeral for my dad. It’s just a way to be together with friends and family as a final farewell to someone who meant something to them.
What autopsy? There was no foul play involved. The police report agrees.
Standard procedure, I’m fairly certain his death can’t even be officially ruled suicide until they have an autopsy. Now maybe his body will be “accidentally” sent to be cremated before an autopsy can be performed.
But guy steals a cops gun and shoots himself with no witnesses but a cop? You can bet there’s be an autopsy especially on a guy laying in a hospital bed who might have been incapable of taking the gun away.
The fact a cop was involved means an autopsy is REQUIRED. Which is why the cop should have said. He tried to take my gun and escape and was killed in the struggle.
Speaking of which I wonder if any of Becky’s estranged relatives will show up for Ross’s funeral, or just Carol & and others from the church?
Of course, we don’t know if Becky will show up either.
[It will be years before it is time for her to deface his tombstone with a copy of her Biology PhD diploma.]
Yeah, if people, especially your kin, are high fiving after your death, odds are that you’ve been a shitty person.
Or you’re a member of Monty Python, and you don’t want people to be sad.
Is it just me, or does Becky seem somewhat disappointed that Amber is not mourning her father’s death at all, or even has conflicting feelings over it? It’s not that I think Becky disapproves, but I think she’s feeling even more alone now.
That’s a possibility. She was internalizing her grief and perhaps saw Blaine’s death as an opportunity to share the grief with Amber, to feel better quickly.
Except she didn’t know Amber has no fucks left for her father for a long time.
SolemnLowFive.gif