Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Paint the Town Red
Windy, Winter Jay Kiakas
Winona runs a werewolf shelter with partner in crime, Odile in the Gothic city of Merlot. One day they take in an injured vampire, and soon unravels many of the dark secrets of Merlot.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Shaderunners
Alex Assan, Lin Darrow
A ragtag band of bootleggers open a speakeasy for bottled colour in the greyscale city of Ironwell.
Hemlock
Josceline Fenton
A witch accidentally marries a monster, and now she and her familiar has to navigate life around her monstrous husband and her even more terrifying in-laws.
No End
Erli, Kromi
A queer romance about people attempting to build lives in a cold, post-apocalyptic world ravaged by hordes of undead.
All Known Alternatives
Karolina 'Kajotko' Jankiewicz
Akane has only one way to get back home: collect the 42 keys to parallel worlds. Eri and Ben are just trying to get through the summer before university. When a magical key turns up in an old spare set, all three are forced to change their plans and fast.
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Actually, I would have said, there is no butt but Butt’s butt and Becky is it’s profit, but then I would have probably ended up on an infant-tata list somewhere and been debutticated to make a point.
There are actually extra seats just off screen, but Sal and Carla don’t sit because they are too cool, and Carnotauruses can’t use chairs. Because they are too cool.
I mean there definitely are extra seats offscreen, since Roz, Walky, Booster, Lucy, the Rachels and Bloodrose aren’t accounted for in the group shot, despite this meeting being attended by everyone + 3
No one was elected since Robin dropped out. Her opponent would then have won by acclamation.
Argh. Except that I just learned that’s a Canadianism. Not sure what it’d be called in Indianna. But if it’s uncontested it can hardly be called an election.
I never heard of acclamation being Canadian, and it has certainly been used in business meetings my entire life. But acclamation doesn’t mean elected running unnopposed, it means a decision was made on which everybody agreed. Seldom the case in selecting a political officeholder, but frequently the case in organizations dedicated to a particular purpose.
According to the wikis-pedia, in the canada it’s an officially recognized term for an uncontested electoral position. Certainly other areas use the term, but in the more common sense that a decision is made by verbal vote (ayes & nays).
In a lot of places in the US elections are uncontested. The vast majority of my ballot options for example have only one person running and only a 2 of those uncontested options have write in options.
So the positions I can vote for that have multiple picks are President, Congress, County Commissioner, and three others dealing with our state courts. The other 13 races are all uncontested. I just don’t bother filling those in. No point voting for an uncontested race.
Likely too late for her to officially drop out. Her name would still have been on the ballot. Her withdrawal announcement certainly would have cut into her support though.
I’m more inclined to believe this. And I also believe she got votes anyway. There are several instances where a candidate who died prior to the election still ended up winning the vote (and just as an aside, how would you like to be the candidate who lost to a dead guy?)
However, to address Garrulous above, even for the work-a-day positions like clerk of court, registrar of deeds, or animal control office (dog-catcher) on the lower end of my ballot here in Wisconsin, there is still room for a write-in vote.
Probably one or more of those minor parties that won’t ever win ran a counter-candidate, so the election probably wasn’t even unconstested even if the result was obvious to everyone paying attention ahead of time.
Yeah, not really a thing in the US. If she dropped out after the ballot was finalized, she’d still be on it. If she dropped out before they were finalized, her party could probably replace her, if not it would just be an uncontested election.
In either case, the election would go on. The only way someone wouldn’t be elected to office would be if zero votes were cast.
No, Dorothy was approached for advice after Becky got the job. The job was open because Roz set up a meet-cute for Robin and Leslie and it worked in the weirdest way possible, because Robin. Robin met Becky in Leslie’s apartment, and Becky acquired Robin’s phone because of said proximity.
So yeah. Roz can take credit for pushing the boulder off the cliff. The collateral damage is mostly Robin’s fault. Actually threading the needle in any kind of way is to Becky’s credit.
Robin chose to withdraw on her own. Becky created a scenario which led to Robin growing as a person, but it is not Becky’s responsibility or fault that Robin did so.
The one person in the room personally responsible for the outcome of the election was Joyce. Without Joyce being there, Becky never shows up to become Robin’s campaign manager and so Robin never drops out to prove to Becky that she cares about her as a person.
Without Roz making the connection between Leslie and Robin, Becky never gets the chance to hack Robin’s social media and thus get hired and make that personal connection.
Without Walky and Sal, their mother would have never left the Dean, and so he would have never become the Dean, and so he would never have hired Lesley.
Obie’s Trike
Booster-name’s no gimmick
…
Now this looks like a job for Mike
So every tike, just follow Mike
‘Cause we need not another useless like
‘Cause it feels so empty without Mike
Does Roz really get to rub it in if Robin dropped out of the race of her own accord, for totally understandable reasons that even Roz can’t really disapprove of?
I kind of discovered this kinda line of thinking after I became a dirty liberal, and it’s kinda gross. All these fuckin “big picture” folk that want so badly for progress in society and they just… ignore whatever would taint the “big picture.” Roz’s classmate died, her relationship with her sister is FUBAR, other classmates kidnapped, an abusive parent beating the shit out of his daughter, fuggin using her professor as a fucking tool to torpedo her sister’s career.
But we got another progressive candidate in the fucking *House*. Because *that* should be our takeaway, and absolutely should be used to counter a statement about how shitty the previous semester was in front of their classmates that did all the suffering just a handful of weeks ago.
Roz has got a blind spot the size of Jupiter’s GRS, and I’m getting really tired of her not getting the karma for it. She, what, got dunked on by earlier stated professor once?
Not to mention classmates attempting suicide, a classmate getting roofied, an attack on a classmate by a knife wielding attempted rapist, two classmates getting involved in a rumble and to top it off, the defacement of doors by the Ding Dong bandit.
Does Roz know about Joyce getting roofied, though? I mean, she’s being shitty either way and I’m not saying otherwise, but it’s hard to blame her for ignoring something she doesn’t know about.
Yes, a lot of people in the dorm had the worst days of their lives happen in that semester. But things for the entire congressional district and, arguably, nation improved a small amount as well.
Because today is the worst day of a lot of people’s lives.
So was yesterday.
And the day before that. And the day before that.
And even every single day that didn’t happen during a complete dumpster fire of a year too.
Individual tragedies happen all the time. My thought is that Roz is just taking this massively macro view on it, where the good that a better representative in congress will do would outweigh the handful of individual tragedies.
This, of course, is not to say that those tragedies were any less horrific. Of course they were awful and vile and should never have ever fucking happened (……as inevitable as some of them may have been ), but just that the world is bigger than this one dorm, and it’s not an awful thing to acknowledge that.
………..that said, Roz is being a complete fucking ass here by rolling a fucking 1 on her diplomacy check. That sorta crap isn’t the thing you say in front of those that are maybe still fucking traumatized by that crap.
Yeah, it’s that last one that’s the sticking point. Especially when Ruth’s talking more about their wing, in particular, where the micro view’s more relevant to the conversation. And in this case the micro view is ‘kidnapping at gunpoint; rapist with a knife attempted to invade our dorm and was only stopped by our hallmate stabbing the shit out of him; almost immediately after the Creepy Dude the next wing over’s list of sexual objectification leaked and hey, THAT’S not remotely triggering or anything!; fire alarm got pulled at like 3 AM during midterms week and that was actually the Least Bad Thing to happen to our hall that day because a shitload of people got kidnapped and witnessed a murder; by the way, another person in the building died due to the kidnappers.’
On the macro level, it was just a random semester. For that hall in particular, holy fuckcakes the drama there.
Oh, right, and also ‘our RA was blackmailed by a homophobic hallmate until she was suicidal and despite her being transparently not up for the job, she kept it somehow.’ Sure, it’s easy enough to shun Mary after that, but at the same time holy fuck that’s terrible, plus they still had to deal with Ruth.
Ruth was transparently terrible at her job due to being physically abusive, but they already knew her boss didn’t care about that. (Well, the upperclassmen knew but word spreads fast.)
Ruth keeping her job even once it was abundantly clear she couldn’t even perform it TERRIBLY was new.
Seems like everyone hadda be in garbage roof, but not to be garbage, but kinda like a podium, with 1st semester printed in comic sans ms in the background or something…
I’ve hated Roz as long as I remember but I do think there’s an interesting examination of performative allyship in her character that could be explored if given the time.
Until then I’m comfortable with her chosen role as The Actual Worst.
Yeah, one’s mean and wants to take away peoples’ rights, and one’s mean and need to be constantly praised for not wanting to take away peoples’ rights.
I wouldn’t want to share a long car ride with either one, though.
I think a lot of her attitude is about sticking it to her conservative family who forcibly dragged her into everything, far over actually caring about rights and work safety and all the other obviously useful stuff that magically became endemic to a single party in the US for some reason.
I just swapped out Bongo for another type of antelope. Honestly probably should have picked like Addax or Kudu instead, ‘Nyala’ doesn’t really make a good curse, ‘s too pretty a word
I’m kinda hoping that’s the point of like. Basically any interaction between Roz and Becky, honestly.
Also seriously I’m pretty sure that if the other candidate hadn’t been her sister who was using her as a prop and she therefore loathes, Roz would absolutely be That Holier Than Thou Progressive who refuses to vote for a candidate who is not Absolutely, 100% Perfect because she doesn’t buy into the whole ‘lesser of two evils’ concept, so she just won’t vote at all (or votes third party in a race where that’s performative and useless – so uh, 85% of all elections using parties in this country? Lowballing?) and then complains when the Leopards Eating Faces Party wins over someone who wasn’t great, but also wasn’t a literal hungry leopard and will at least acknowledge public pressure.
… GOD I want this election to be over so I at least KNOW if I’m going to spend the next four years or more in a hopeless depressive haze again.
I don’t know if there’s a non-despair-inducing outcome for this election at this point. Best case scenario, things go smoothly and swap out the rabid face eating leopard for a normal face eating leopard. And since we live in hell, there’s a decent chance of some fucking shenanigans going down with the election results and things do not wind up going smoothly
Personally, I am looking forward to the next four to eight years of the orange one campaigning non-stop at rallies to get his job back while the news media continues to amplify his every stupid tweet. So basically, not as different as you’d think.
Sorry. Shit’s just extremely bleak right now and even once this election is over and even if the best case scenario comes to pass, things aren’t going to clear up. It’s going to be a rough goddamn decade.
Absolutely. And the foreseeable future past that. But damn do I want someone in office who can actually simulate the human emotion of shame. You can work with shitty politicians who can simulate shame, because if you yell at them enough they will actually consider what you’re saying. (Hell, we know Biden has on several points.) You can’t work with the guy who openly wants to be a fascist dictator.
Also, like, the comparative pandemic response should make it abundantly clear one is objectively less terrible than the other. Over 200,000 people are dead due to mismanagement. That number could have been exponentially lower.
Yeah – I’ve got real policy differences with Biden (and with Harris. Or Clinton. Or Obama for that matter). But all of them seem capable of something beyond pure greed and revenge – which seems to all that motivates Trump. They are capable of joy and empathy – or at least of understanding it well enough to fake it.
Nor are any of them an existential threat to democracy, like Trump and at this point the entire Republican party.
Yeah, but part of the thing that worries me is that this needs to be a two-step project. Remove Trump from power, and make sure that nobody manages to fill the vacuum he left behind.
The thought of someone with Trump’s fascist ambitions but with the competence to actually see those ambitions through terrifies me, and I don’t have faith in the modern Democratic party to be able to stop someone like that, considering how pitiful their resistance to Trump has been.
Oh, they will likely burn that bridge when they cross it if we let them. Still. Situation in front of us. Trying to make it even marginally less shitty. Breathe. Plan protests hoping by the time they occur the people in power will be inclined to listen. Donate or volunteer where you can to electing more progressive (and for that matter aggressive) candidates next cycle. Worry about the next crisis after starting to address the current one. It won’t make facing that next crisis easy, but it will stop it from getting even harder than it currently is.
I don’t think that anyone more competent than Trump would be able to skate through anywhere near as easily as Trump has. Trump sort of exploits a psychological and political edge condition where having zero redeeming qualities makes him basically immune to being criticized by the media.
Yeah, last semester wasn’t all bad but the halfway point was…rough. It’s hard to call two kidnappings and another student dying anything but. I recognize that the student dying wasn’t really part of this wing’s semester (though it did affect several residents) but yeah, the first half of last semester was…not great.
That said, I think there IS nuance to that statement – things weren’t all bad. Ruth and Billie got treatment and Ruth at least is doing better. Nobody who was kidnapped got severely physically injured. Lots of people went through lots of maturation and emotional growth. There are relationships still going strong. Becky’s in school on a scholarship now. Robin is no longer in office and has become less of a garbage person. Good things happened. Whether or not they balanced out the bad depends who you ask (and what happened in the missing back half of that semester) but I don’t think it’s true to say last semester was uniformly bad.
If Roz had said any or all of this I think her statement would’ve been taken better instead of it sounding like she took the opportunity to dunk on her sister.
Yeah, Roz is taking the chance to dunk on her sister. Which, frankly, I’m not really feeling the need to criticize her for – her sister’s political machine massively impacted Roz’s life and she wanted out. Through circumstances that at least partially resulted from Roz’s actions (Roz brings Robin to class -> Robin invited Leslie for drinks -> someone takes a picture of them -> Robin hides out in Leslie’s house, during which most of her staff leave -> Robin fires the rest of her staff because they wanted to side with Ryan (who Robin learned about from Leslie) -> Robin hiring Becky -> Robin being less of a dickhole and dropping out of the race.) And even if she weren’t responsible for kicking off that chain of events, Roz is allowed to be happy that her dickhole sister is no longer in power and can no longer make shitty laws or have a political machine Roz disagrees with massively impacting her life. Roz, personally, had a fairly decent semester. I don’t think her pointing out there is nuance to the statement the wing had a bad semester (which is not universally true for either an individual level – not everyone had a bad semester – or an overall level – good things happened too) is as awful as some people are making it out to be. I get it, for us the kidnapping was very very recent, but for them it was still pre-Halloween in the semester. There was lots of room after that. And while it is sad Becky and Amber lost her dad, both of them seem to be dealing with that as well as can be expected (though it helps that there wasn’t much connection to lose at that point) and that some of them lost a friend (though, again, only Amber and Ethan were super close to him – Amber isn’t well known amongst most of her floor mates and Ethan’s not in the wing), but again, lots of good things also happened. I get the comment section is touchy about Mike, but there is perspective here.
And of course Roz didn’t say all that. She’s here to be a lead in for Ruth’s punchline. I’m here to be a chatty bongo in the comment section.
Again totally fair and valid takeaways. Roz might even have a made a good point in theory, but saying stuff like “last semester went well” because of subjective (to some as I’m pretty sure Mary isn’t a fan of Manly) political gains in the same room as people who lost loved ones last semester is at least a small yikes. People (me included) are probably overreacting to it. Especially since the comment is meant to piss people off.
That’s not what she said though – she said there was some nuance to the idea last semester was bad, which is true. Individually, Roz’s was good. On a group level, while it’s hard to say the semester went well because, yeah, people lost loved ones, there was also lots of good stuff that happened.
I do think that once you’ve reached the second armed kidnapping incident for your wing in a semester, that’s so statistically unusual that I’m still giving Ruth the ‘yeah last semester was unbelievably shitty for our hall in particular’ point.
Like, I can see a real campus having, say, the Ryan incident and it being a ‘so that was traumatic but it could have been a WAY worse semester’ point. Or ‘okay, there was an attempted school shooter who pointed a gun at one of our residents and kidnapped someone who is now, also, a resident here, but honestly I’m relieved no one died.’ Hell, even ‘the good news about this kidnapping is that while, yes, people died, they were only the kidnappers’ would work… but another student in the hall (even if not the wing) dying related to that incident kind of negates things. Taken in conjunction, the entire wing could’ve gotten sympathy As on all their midterms by association and it would STILL be an improbably shitty semester for the wing as a whole, because… well, half a dozen of them got kidnapped. Plus the brother of another wingmate who’s basically an honorary member. And it was not the only kidnapping related to the hall that semester. And uh, they may still not know who pulled that fire alarm to facilitate the kidnapping, so… that’s fun and not dread-inducing whatsoever.
… Seriously it honestly didn’t occur to me until now but the way people were snatched so quickly during the drill, Ruth at least probably realizes it was planned. Not a huge stretch for anyone else, either. For everyone’s peace of mind, I’m hoping one of the Nameless Meatheads ended up taking the fall for that one. (Asher getting caught for it seems unlikely, to say the least.) We know the odds of him repeating are low, but I would NOT want to contemplate whether anyone in my hall was a co-conspirator to an ultimately deadly kidnapping, and we still don’t know why they did it or if they’d do so again. That’s just a recipe for anxiety.
I think these kids definitely had, on balance, a super shitty semester, but I don’t think saying there’s some nuance there is wrong when lots of good things did happen.
Sure. Still do not blame Ruth in the slightest for struggling to imagine a worse one, because… yeah it REALLY wrecked the bell curve of Shitty Semesters for the hall as a whole. Willis will need to try to top it.
You know your stripper from your paint
You know your sinner from your saint
Whenever Heaven’s doors are shut
You kick them open but
I know you
Give me Steam
And how you feel to make it real
Real as any place you’ve been
Get a life with the dreamer’s dream–Peter Gabriel
Yeah Roz, say that last semester was pretty good in front of all the kids who witnessed a violent murder and lost one of their classmates. That’s a great idea.
Not to mention the Ryan thing, and if she doesn’t know the details of that by now, I think we can fairly say that’s her own fault. I understand she’s a little monofocused on her sister’s political career or lack thereof, but Jesus CHRIST.
I’m starting to think Roz, despite how her campaign for RA went, might not be as much of a “natural at politics” as she thinks.
I think Roz serves as a caricature of the “shush, oppressed person, and let me be offended for you” college liberal stereotype. She lets perfect be the enemy of better, always thinks she knows best, and is more concerned with performative activism than actually listening to the people she says she’s standing up for. (As an example, there was that time she ranted about queer people being minimized and ignored, in the middle of Leslie’s class, while she ignored Leslie repeatedly telling her to shut up and stop interrupting.)
I would actually like to see more of Roz’s activism. In her earliest appearances she was focused on safe sex and reproductive rights, as well as sexual liberation in general.Areas where she is herself part of the oppressed group, not merely an ally.
She’s clearly an ally on queer issues, if as you say often a performative one, but I think it does her a disservice to focus only on that.
One of which died violently in front of several of the kids in that room, emotionally scarring them and despite his horrible actions was still loved by Becky.
Rip the bandaid off. The dread just makes it worse in the end, and at this moment we’ve got about a dozen of Mary’s peers on-hand to administer a beatdown.
Before she dyed it blue, her hair was about the same color as Becky’s. Now it looks more strawberry-blonde. It’s actually closer to her Walkyverse incarnation now, but we don’t know if it’s dyed again or if it’s art style evolution.
I like it, but honestly unnatural colors aren’t really my thing anyway.
Roz isn’t a liberal Mary because a liberal equivalent to Mary doesn’t exist until we get, like, violent proletarian uprisings, and when we do I know what side off those that I’m on.
Roz can be a shithead without needing to be the equal and opposite to the Republican scum of the earth. She’s already lame enough a person as is.
I do understand the comparison between Roz and Mary. As characters they are similar or serve the same purpose. Both characters say and do things that provoke negative responses just for opposite reasons. Like two sides of the same coin. The only real difference I see is that Mary has kind of become a caricature of what a highly religious conservative would be *at least based on her last appearance* While Roz is depicted with slightly more “nuance”.
At least how I see it, Mary and Roz are only political opposites in the sense that their alignments are (assuredly in the case of Mary and seemingly for Roz) more about self aggrandizement. Roz wants to be known and showered with praise for her views even, especially, when she does reprehensible things like parading her sister’s forced outing around her dorm so they’ll make her RA. It’s performative allyship.
So… annoying but not as annoying, judgemental but not as judgemental, far less likely to strip anyone of their rights or human dignity, and nowhere near as malevolent or vicious.
…. yup, checks out. That’s the liberal/conservative dichotomy.
Roz would ignore all the bad shit that happened to people she knows close to her and focus just in political stuff that happens in the background. The Democrats can defeat Trump, but unless they decide to actually help people we will see a new asshole trying to get power. If there’s no actual intent to choose to help people elections will continue to be between two idiots.
Considering Robin was almost a direct comparison to Trump when she was reintroduced It feels fitting that Manley would be the same for Biden. A democratic centrist beating a republican clown just to get them out of office before they do more damage. Let’s hope life imitates art in a few days.
…Robin’s reelection campaign slogan was literally “Make Indiana Congressional District Nine Great Again”, complete with the red hat. She also had several other Trump-esque moments pre-Nov. 2016, such as insulting the families of dead veterans over Twitter and complaining about how she definitely did not have “tiny hands”.
Don’t get me wrong her character did develop past the point of the Trump comparisons but that it was very blatant when she first reappeared back in the comic after freshman family weekend.
So you mean “reintroduced after being out of the story for a while” rather than “reintroduced after Shortpacked!”. Yeah, that timeline checks out a bit better.
Robin was whatever politician was big on the internet. First Sarah Palin, then she kinda did a brief stint as a Ted Cruz/Marco Rubio mix and then she was Trump for a horrifying amount of time….and then Trump got elected and that went from ‘funny’ to ‘endless screaming’ real quick and once Becky took over her social media, she slowly became an AOC reference.
Even better than that, AOC canonically exists as a Representative in the Dumbiverse. Robin has a one-sided rivalry with her, called her out in her concession speech, and she even appears in a bonus strip. Even in-universe Robin is an AOC wannabe!
She’s saying that the nightmare that some of her dorm-mates have lived through is less significant than her entirely tangential role in getting her older sister to give up her political career. FWIW, I’m starting to think that toxic excess of self-importance is a congenital defect in the girls of her family.
Roz is living with folks who have been freakin’ kidnapped and threatened with violence and death. She may as well be banned from using “nuance” as a counterargument ever again since she doesn’t know the meaning of the word.
It’s not uncommon for someone to bring a game console to the common room for pickup Mario Kart or the like, yeah. Depends on how much you use the common room as a hall, of course, but not uncommon.
Halloween is gone and we didn’t find out who lives in the forbidden rooms at the end of the hall, we still don’t know if Bloodrose is a vampire, and we did not even get to see Mike’s ghost. Oh well. Maybe next year.
If you drag select over the comics (so the whole thing get highlighted blue) you can see Mike’s ghost is hidden in some of the panels. But it’s only really noticeable if you play with the image like that.
Becky, there is cutely mischievous and then there is just plain abusively annoying and you’ve passed that line. Not as far as Roz but she’s Roz and, as a deSanto, probably has a natural advantage.
Yeah thinkin’ on it, for the folks who weren’t the targets of abuse, kidnapping, microaggressions (or just plain ol’ aggressions), suicide attempts, blackmail, or traumatic events in general, the first semester probably felt rather noisy, but didn’t directly involve them so they didn’t really hafta worry about it. This didn’t stop some folks from helping chip in on some of the worse affairs, but if one weren’t acutely aware of everything that had happened like we, as readers, were, they’d find it easier to look for the positives in the first few months of college.
Roz’s way of wording it coulda been better, but this the same person who was decidedly flippant about, iirc, some “buzzkill” at a party she’d thrown, to the person who almost got taken advantage of at said party. She at least offered an apology afterwards, but this chatter tracks for her, based on how she’s acted in the past.
Becky’s random childish quip doesn’t seem so random, at the least.
To be fair to Roz for the party thing, she pretty clearly didn’t know what had actually happened, much less that it had happened to Joyce. Just that the party had ended early due to a fight.
Yeah, that was less malicious and more ignorant, in the formal manner. She didn’t look into what broke the funk of the party, just that there was a fight. Only the immediate witnesses knew that the guy had tried to roofie Joyce; everyone else probably just heard a commotion and opted not to ask about what was going on, which led to no info being shared about the incident. You’d think word would’ve spread from there, but I guess people were too irked-out by what happened to go into detail. Which then leads to Roz not knowing what went down. So I can’t really hold the “foot-in-mouth” incident against her in that specific case.
But it does tie back to her somewhat self-centred behaviour, where if something has happened and hasn’t affected her directly, she’s probably not gonna pay it much mind. Like how she wanted to be R.A. specifically because it’d get her a single room away from Mary. An understandable reason given Mary, but still selfish.
So what? Nobody would’ve been hurt if she’d gotten the RA job (Dorothy not getting the job she wanted is not hurt, that’s life). I’d say Roz being selfish there is fine.
Becky’s retort is definitely not random, but even though Roz wasn’t directly involved, it’s doubtful that she didn’t at least know that Becky was, and calling that distinction “nuance” goes beyond wording that just could have been better. That’s more foot-in-mouth territory even when giving the benefit of the doubt, and it came off as extremely condescending.
It’s one thing to look for positives when discussing your first semester with people who weren’t directly involved with actual tragedies that happened, quite another to use a flipped seat in the House to suggest that someone isn’t looking at nuance when assessing a semester that included people under her charge being kidnapped and losing parents. Especially when said people are in the room.
Roz, your idea of nuance is ignoring literally every part of last semester except that election. There were two kidnappings, a student died, Ruth wanted to die, a serial rapist tried to break in and knife people, Becky’s dad died. Maybe just take Ruth’s word that it was bad and keep your mouth shut instead of minimising the traumatic events that took place.
After analyzing Roz’s comment and thinking on it for a bit I actually kind of feel bad for her. The only reason I can think of for her even thinking saying something like this is okay is from a lack of perspective. The events of last semester didn’t really have an impact on her so she really has no context for any of it. To her it is no big deal.
That’s kind of sad because she has no connection to the events or really to anyone involved in it. It’s only a connection through Robin. Roz doesn’t hangout with any of the main cast, she wasn’t kidnapped because she wasn’t a friend to any of them. She still isn’t. I don’t think she has any friends at all or at least we don’t see her hanging out with anybody. This is a comic where even the background characters are in a polycule romantic relationship. Even Mary who is also pretty isolated from the main cast at least has a boyfriend last time we saw.
It’s a little tragic. The closest relationship Roz has is maybe with Joe the guy she banged once to film a sex tape meant to sabotage her sister’s career. She mentions politics as a win because that’s kind of all she has. Kind of a downer if you think about it.
It’s absolutely sad, and there’s ample reason to feel bad for her, but she does also seem to be actively antagonistic, which sabotages the level to which she’s sympathetic.
We don’t know the details on her situation before DoA started, so it’s hard to get a really cohesive picture of her, but her actions in the comic so far have been remarkable in a lack of empathy towards other characters to further what she feels is a righteous cause.
My feelings about her definitely have a little bit of a tinge of pity, but until she manages some self-reflection and/or a little more empathy, I’m unlikely to feel very sympathetic towards her.
Or she just doesn’t have close relationships with people on this floor and since she’s a background character, we don’t see much of her life outside that.
For example, in the background of the kidnapping scenes when they were all outside after the fire alarm was pulled, we see her heading off with some guy we haven’t seen before. I’d guess she’s into the party and casual hookup scene and that doesn’t really crossover much with the rest of the floor. An active social life, even if we haven’t seen close friends.
Yeah I saw that guy. I scrolled through her tag history to check and see if she had any friends before my comment and I can’t rectify who he is. I’d feel more confident if she had even one scene of dialogue with him or anyone to imply she had a friend group outside the social circles of the main cast, but it’s not really there yet for me.
Other background characters (which I don’t really think Roz is. She’s more of a side character to me which is a significant distinction in my mind) are actually shown interacting with people more than Roz. Exceptions being like Agatha who I don’t really think has a character beyond *likes to help*, Meredith *whose best friend is a joint* and Other Rachel *who I’m not sure even still attends IU* (Other Rachel is also kind of a sad character in that her existence was literally a joke about how she wasn’t as memorable as another person)
Anyway I went on kind of a tangent. I can believe Roz is a party girl and maybe has a different group of friends but 90 percent of her interactions in the comic are with people she doesn’t really like or that don’t like her and it’s sad that her character mostly revolves around her political opinions and her adversarial relationship with her sister. I’d like to see more to her than showing up to say something provocative or being antagonistic to other characters.
Yes, Roz. Your congressional seat flipped to Democrat. And more liberal government means things get better (per her worldview, please don’t bring politics in here).
BUT, you flipped one seat in the House of Representatives. Taken on its own (we don’t know how the election went in the rest of the country)… that is literally nothing but performative.
It also completely dusmisses the importance of the Wing’s personal experiences in comparison to potential future legislation of unknown worth.
Two murders, two kidnappings (armed), breaking and entering, illegal squatting, attempted rape (with roofies), countless instances of reckless driving, gangs on campus …
Grace and Sierra are on the outboard side of the couch, Mandy (with a new hair color) is between them. (I used to get Grace and Agatha confused more often than I’d ought to.)
Went to IU in 64 – 68 and stayed in dorms the first two years. Never once did we have a dorm meeting that I recall. Plenty of parties on the roof, tho. I lived at Wright Quad. Only saw the floor boss once.
The rules were quite strict…sex segregated dorm buildings, no car until you were a Junior, no liquor or drugs allowed, no distaff visitors.
Honestly, i Hope Roz does something really stupid again and can’t get help from her sister this time…the one that got her into college and the one that avoided her getting her expelled for recording porn on school property.
I dont care about USA politics, but for a Mexican like me Family loyalty..oh thats important.
it's fucked up that we know the names of so many genociders and tyrants and im thinking about how we don't know who invented al pastor and maybe that's why the great man theory of history is horse shit
I was panicked that my 7-year-old might freak out during the face melting scene in Indiana Jones but she said "I guess he shouldn't have opened that" as seriously as possible and I've been crying laughing for 10 minutes
look i have a lot to say about this beetle bailey strip okay
anyway, nobody's hands reach their own crotches while their arms are fully extended, so plato only has to bend his elbows like 10 degrees to put his hands on his hips
not a lot to say about this mary worth other than i was curious how you make vegan lasagna and i looked it up and received psychic damage from three-to-four different revulsions/phobias
today in #9chickweedlane i learned that despite being ostensibly new yorkers, the characters in this strip sure like to talk about british royalty all the time
Bill Corbett @billcorbett.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
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“YOUR butt is a FACE”
“whut”
“FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE”
Stop the faces.
don’t stop the butts
Your butt is a butt!
There is no butt but Butts butt, but Butt’s butt’s butter be the Butte butt stopper.
They pronounce it “BYE-yoot”
I thought that BYE-yoots was what they called all the cricks in Louisianeer.
Maybe, but, butt, Butte, I’m just talking a-boot Montana.
Montana? Does Montana abutt Indiana?
All those states in the frozen wastelands north of Oklahoma look the same.
Actually, I would have said, there is no butt but Butt’s butt and Becky is it’s profit, but then I would have probably ended up on an infant-tata list somewhere and been debutticated to make a point.
I mean, some of those Masonic Druidic Hindu groups have no sense of humor.
I WAS BEBUTTICATED AND ALL I HAVE TO SHOW FOR IT ARE THESE BLOODY PREPRINTED GYMN SHORTS.
I’m not certain if I hear that as the closing song from; “You Can’t Stop The Music.” (Trust me, you don’t want to see it.)
Or the last song from “Hairspray.” (A much better musical.)
Oh, here;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajU1H_X1MfE
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZnt-0fEiT0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pURJDToKA0k
This is what I hear.
You can’t stop the butts, nobody can stop the butts!
better faces then feces
There are actually extra seats just off screen, but Sal and Carla don’t sit because they are too cool, and Carnotauruses can’t use chairs. Because they are too cool.
I mean there definitely are extra seats offscreen, since Roz, Walky, Booster, Lucy, the Rachels and Bloodrose aren’t accounted for in the group shot, despite this meeting being attended by everyone + 3
I get the impression from panel 4 that the +3 are just standing against the wall and observing.
And I’ve decided that the reason we can’t ever see Bloodrose is the same reason we can’t see Cambot in MST3K. This is all her POV.
Eh, we’ve seen her in the background. So unless she has weird vampire powers that’s not it.
As they are your avatar, I must accept both that they have weird vampire powers AND that this is their POV.
Not to mention Amber and Malaya.
If you think about it, if Carla sat down, she wouldn’t be rollerskating, which is unacceptable.
So who DID we elect?
The candidate that wasn’t Robin. Robin dropped out.
I believe it was Jacob Manley, the guy Robin had a fling with back in SP. Don’t think he’s appeared in person, but he’s been named.
No one was elected since Robin dropped out. Her opponent would then have won by
acclamation.
Argh. Except that I just learned that’s a Canadianism. Not sure what it’d be called in Indianna. But if it’s uncontested it can hardly be called an election.
I never heard of acclamation being Canadian, and it has certainly been used in business meetings my entire life. But acclamation doesn’t mean elected running unnopposed, it means a decision was made on which everybody agreed. Seldom the case in selecting a political officeholder, but frequently the case in organizations dedicated to a particular purpose.
Maybe Canadians use it differently.
According to the wikis-pedia, in the canada it’s an officially recognized term for an uncontested electoral position. Certainly other areas use the term, but in the more common sense that a decision is made by verbal vote (ayes & nays).
In a lot of places in the US elections are uncontested. The vast majority of my ballot options for example have only one person running and only a 2 of those uncontested options have write in options.
So the positions I can vote for that have multiple picks are President, Congress, County Commissioner, and three others dealing with our state courts. The other 13 races are all uncontested. I just don’t bother filling those in. No point voting for an uncontested race.
Likely too late for her to officially drop out. Her name would still have been on the ballot. Her withdrawal announcement certainly would have cut into her support though.
It was still an election.
I’m more inclined to believe this. And I also believe she got votes anyway. There are several instances where a candidate who died prior to the election still ended up winning the vote (and just as an aside, how would you like to be the candidate who lost to a dead guy?)
However, to address Garrulous above, even for the work-a-day positions like clerk of court, registrar of deeds, or animal control office (dog-catcher) on the lower end of my ballot here in Wisconsin, there is still room for a write-in vote.
Probably one or more of those minor parties that won’t ever win ran a counter-candidate, so the election probably wasn’t even unconstested even if the result was obvious to everyone paying attention ahead of time.
Yeah, not really a thing in the US. If she dropped out after the ballot was finalized, she’d still be on it. If she dropped out before they were finalized, her party could probably replace her, if not it would just be an uncontested election.
In either case, the election would go on. The only way someone wouldn’t be elected to office would be if zero votes were cast.
What’s this “we”? There is one person in this room who is personally responsible for the outcome of that election.
Hey, Roz got Becky hired by ruining all of Robin’s other professional relationships. A team effort.
Wasn’t that Dorothy?
No, Dorothy was approached for advice after Becky got the job. The job was open because Roz set up a meet-cute for Robin and Leslie and it worked in the weirdest way possible, because Robin. Robin met Becky in Leslie’s apartment, and Becky acquired Robin’s phone because of said proximity.
So yeah. Roz can take credit for pushing the boulder off the cliff. The collateral damage is mostly Robin’s fault. Actually threading the needle in any kind of way is to Becky’s credit.
You could justifiably be talking about either Roz *or* Becky here
Robin chose to withdraw on her own. Becky created a scenario which led to Robin growing as a person, but it is not Becky’s responsibility or fault that Robin did so.
The one person in the room personally responsible for the outcome of the election was Joyce. Without Joyce being there, Becky never shows up to become Robin’s campaign manager and so Robin never drops out to prove to Becky that she cares about her as a person.
Without Roz making the connection between Leslie and Robin, Becky never gets the chance to hack Robin’s social media and thus get hired and make that personal connection.
Without Walky and Sal, their mother would have never left the Dean, and so he would have never become the Dean, and so he would never have hired Lesley.
Without Mike …
Obie’s Trike
Booster-name’s no gimmick
…
Now this looks like a job for Mike
So every tike, just follow Mike
‘Cause we need not another useless like
‘Cause it feels so empty without Mike
I name you poet lariat.
If I have spit further it’s because I rapped off the shoulders of giants.
Without Toe-Dad, Becky would never have been born….
Roz: I know a bunch of my dormmates got kidnapped, and two of their dads died in the same day, but at least my sister is out of office.
Yeah, I feel like Roz might not be the most unbiased source about Robin. No one else can throw losing her job in her face at family gatherings.
Does Roz really get to rub it in if Robin dropped out of the race of her own accord, for totally understandable reasons that even Roz can’t really disapprove of?
Aw, who am I kidding, like that would stop her.
I mean, Riley could, but she would never.
I mean there are more than three DeSantos
They’re apparently quite numerous
Riley is the best DeSanto we’ve met so far. Even in the Walkyverse she was the most even-keeled.
Yep. Roz has a seriously selfish point of view here. “Oh sure, it sucked for YOU guys, but for me, I’d call it a Win.”
I kind of discovered this kinda line of thinking after I became a dirty liberal, and it’s kinda gross. All these fuckin “big picture” folk that want so badly for progress in society and they just… ignore whatever would taint the “big picture.” Roz’s classmate died, her relationship with her sister is FUBAR, other classmates kidnapped, an abusive parent beating the shit out of his daughter, fuggin using her professor as a fucking tool to torpedo her sister’s career.
But we got another progressive candidate in the fucking *House*. Because *that* should be our takeaway, and absolutely should be used to counter a statement about how shitty the previous semester was in front of their classmates that did all the suffering just a handful of weeks ago.
Roz has got a blind spot the size of Jupiter’s GRS, and I’m getting really tired of her not getting the karma for it. She, what, got dunked on by earlier stated professor once?
Not to mention classmates attempting suicide, a classmate getting roofied, an attack on a classmate by a knife wielding attempted rapist, two classmates getting involved in a rumble and to top it off, the defacement of doors by the Ding Dong bandit.
Does Roz know about Joyce getting roofied, though? I mean, she’s being shitty either way and I’m not saying otherwise, but it’s hard to blame her for ignoring something she doesn’t know about.
My very failable memory suggests it was explained to her in gender studies class after she was complaining about the party being ruined.
I don’t think it was explained. Just enough that she got the idea something bad had happened, but not the details.
But is it a selfish point of view?
Yes, a lot of people in the dorm had the worst days of their lives happen in that semester. But things for the entire congressional district and, arguably, nation improved a small amount as well.
Because today is the worst day of a lot of people’s lives.
So was yesterday.
And the day before that. And the day before that.
And even every single day that didn’t happen during a complete dumpster fire of a year too.
Individual tragedies happen all the time. My thought is that Roz is just taking this massively macro view on it, where the good that a better representative in congress will do would outweigh the handful of individual tragedies.
This, of course, is not to say that those tragedies were any less horrific. Of course they were awful and vile and should never have ever fucking happened (……as inevitable as some of them may have been
), but just that the world is bigger than this one dorm, and it’s not an awful thing to acknowledge that.
………..that said, Roz is being a complete fucking ass here by rolling a fucking 1 on her diplomacy check. That sorta crap isn’t the thing you say in front of those that are maybe still fucking traumatized by that crap.
Yeah, it’s that last one that’s the sticking point. Especially when Ruth’s talking more about their wing, in particular, where the micro view’s more relevant to the conversation. And in this case the micro view is ‘kidnapping at gunpoint; rapist with a knife attempted to invade our dorm and was only stopped by our hallmate stabbing the shit out of him; almost immediately after the Creepy Dude the next wing over’s list of sexual objectification leaked and hey, THAT’S not remotely triggering or anything!; fire alarm got pulled at like 3 AM during midterms week and that was actually the Least Bad Thing to happen to our hall that day because a shitload of people got kidnapped and witnessed a murder; by the way, another person in the building died due to the kidnappers.’
On the macro level, it was just a random semester. For that hall in particular, holy fuckcakes the drama there.
Oh, right, and also ‘our RA was blackmailed by a homophobic hallmate until she was suicidal and despite her being transparently not up for the job, she kept it somehow.’ Sure, it’s easy enough to shun Mary after that, but at the same time holy fuck that’s terrible, plus they still had to deal with Ruth.
‘our RA body-slammed a coupla jerks but kept her job’
FTFY
Ruth was transparently terrible at her job due to being physically abusive, but they already knew her boss didn’t care about that. (Well, the upperclassmen knew but word spreads fast.)
Ruth keeping her job even once it was abundantly clear she couldn’t even perform it TERRIBLY was new.
It’s a really tone deaf take. I’m a little surprised she even said it.
It’s Roz. I’m not.
OH I FORGOT: ALSO, MIKE DIED!
Followed shortly thereafter by Ethan, Jacob, Jason, Joyce.s mom and most recently Billie.
Plot twist: Mike’s alive and in witness protection. The cover story is that he’s dead but his best friends know better.
And everyone pretends that Booster doesn’t look exactly like Mike except for the glasses.
Let’s face it, we could rewrite We Didn’t Start the Fire with all the shit that went down last semester/season/decade.
Nuance? Like half the main characters got kidnapped and one of them died!! I think that outweighs Robin no longer being a congresswoman.
To the school yes on a large scale maybe not.
But they aren’t even talking about the whole school, just the folks Ruth is responsible for. The scale here is very, very small.
Roz isintent on not becoming any more sympathetic or likeable.
And Becky is headed the other way from likeable.
It all depends on what you like.
Seems like everyone hadda be in garbage roof, but not to be garbage, but kinda like a podium, with 1st semester printed in comic sans ms in the background or something…
I’ve hated Roz as long as I remember but I do think there’s an interesting examination of performative allyship in her character that could be explored if given the time.
Until then I’m comfortable with her chosen role as The Actual Worst.
i want to call her The Worst but like… Mary still lives here
Mary is a bad person by design. If her every waking moment makes me want to throw her into the sun then she’s doing her job.
Yeah, one’s mean and wants to take away peoples’ rights, and one’s mean and need to be constantly praised for not wanting to take away peoples’ rights.
I wouldn’t want to share a long car ride with either one, though.
Roz does want to make things better for people, in theory at least
She’s just a real Nyala about it
So like the opposite of early Joyce.
I think a lot of her attitude is about sticking it to her conservative family who forcibly dragged her into everything, far over actually caring about rights and work safety and all the other obviously useful stuff that magically became endemic to a single party in the US for some reason.
Who’s Nyala? Or do you mean the animal and this is a metaphor I’m not familiar with?
I just swapped out Bongo for another type of antelope. Honestly probably should have picked like Addax or Kudu instead, ‘Nyala’ doesn’t really make a good curse, ‘s too pretty a word
I just replaced Bongo with a different type of antelope.
Always thought of bongo in the drum context, not the antelope one, so it didn’t make a connection.
My take-away from this is that bongos are made from antelope skins.
I’m kinda hoping that’s the point of like. Basically any interaction between Roz and Becky, honestly.
Also seriously I’m pretty sure that if the other candidate hadn’t been her sister who was using her as a prop and she therefore loathes, Roz would absolutely be That Holier Than Thou Progressive who refuses to vote for a candidate who is not Absolutely, 100% Perfect because she doesn’t buy into the whole ‘lesser of two evils’ concept, so she just won’t vote at all (or votes third party in a race where that’s performative and useless – so uh, 85% of all elections using parties in this country? Lowballing?) and then complains when the Leopards Eating Faces Party wins over someone who wasn’t great, but also wasn’t a literal hungry leopard and will at least acknowledge public pressure.
… GOD I want this election to be over so I at least KNOW if I’m going to spend the next four years or more in a hopeless depressive haze again.
I don’t know if there’s a non-despair-inducing outcome for this election at this point. Best case scenario, things go smoothly and swap out the rabid face eating leopard for a normal face eating leopard. And since we live in hell, there’s a decent chance of some fucking shenanigans going down with the election results and things do not wind up going smoothly
Well, thanks for providing an example of what Regalli was describing.
Personally, I am looking forward to the next four to eight years of the orange one campaigning non-stop at rallies to get his job back while the news media continues to amplify his every stupid tweet. So basically, not as different as you’d think.
Sorry. Shit’s just extremely bleak right now and even once this election is over and even if the best case scenario comes to pass, things aren’t going to clear up. It’s going to be a rough goddamn decade.
Absolutely. And the foreseeable future past that. But damn do I want someone in office who can actually simulate the human emotion of shame. You can work with shitty politicians who can simulate shame, because if you yell at them enough they will actually consider what you’re saying. (Hell, we know Biden has on several points.) You can’t work with the guy who openly wants to be a fascist dictator.
Also, like, the comparative pandemic response should make it abundantly clear one is objectively less terrible than the other. Over 200,000 people are dead due to mismanagement. That number could have been exponentially lower.
Yeah – I’ve got real policy differences with Biden (and with Harris. Or Clinton. Or Obama for that matter). But all of them seem capable of something beyond pure greed and revenge – which seems to all that motivates Trump. They are capable of joy and empathy – or at least of understanding it well enough to fake it.
Nor are any of them an existential threat to democracy, like Trump and at this point the entire Republican party.
Yeah, but part of the thing that worries me is that this needs to be a two-step project. Remove Trump from power, and make sure that nobody manages to fill the vacuum he left behind.
The thought of someone with Trump’s fascist ambitions but with the competence to actually see those ambitions through terrifies me, and I don’t have faith in the modern Democratic party to be able to stop someone like that, considering how pitiful their resistance to Trump has been.
Oh, they will likely burn that bridge when they cross it if we let them. Still. Situation in front of us. Trying to make it even marginally less shitty. Breathe. Plan protests hoping by the time they occur the people in power will be inclined to listen. Donate or volunteer where you can to electing more progressive (and for that matter aggressive) candidates next cycle. Worry about the next crisis after starting to address the current one. It won’t make facing that next crisis easy, but it will stop it from getting even harder than it currently is.
I don’t think that anyone more competent than Trump would be able to skate through anywhere near as easily as Trump has. Trump sort of exploits a psychological and political edge condition where having zero redeeming qualities makes him basically immune to being criticized by the media.
HEY ROZ SHUT THE FUCK UP
I know, right? Read the room.
Yeah, last semester wasn’t all bad but the halfway point was…rough. It’s hard to call two kidnappings and another student dying anything but. I recognize that the student dying wasn’t really part of this wing’s semester (though it did affect several residents) but yeah, the first half of last semester was…not great.
That said, I think there IS nuance to that statement – things weren’t all bad. Ruth and Billie got treatment and Ruth at least is doing better. Nobody who was kidnapped got severely physically injured. Lots of people went through lots of maturation and emotional growth. There are relationships still going strong. Becky’s in school on a scholarship now. Robin is no longer in office and has become less of a garbage person. Good things happened. Whether or not they balanced out the bad depends who you ask (and what happened in the missing back half of that semester) but I don’t think it’s true to say last semester was uniformly bad.
If Roz had said any or all of this I think her statement would’ve been taken better instead of it sounding like she took the opportunity to dunk on her sister.
Ditto
Yeah, Roz is taking the chance to dunk on her sister. Which, frankly, I’m not really feeling the need to criticize her for – her sister’s political machine massively impacted Roz’s life and she wanted out. Through circumstances that at least partially resulted from Roz’s actions (Roz brings Robin to class -> Robin invited Leslie for drinks -> someone takes a picture of them -> Robin hides out in Leslie’s house, during which most of her staff leave -> Robin fires the rest of her staff because they wanted to side with Ryan (who Robin learned about from Leslie) -> Robin hiring Becky -> Robin being less of a dickhole and dropping out of the race.) And even if she weren’t responsible for kicking off that chain of events, Roz is allowed to be happy that her dickhole sister is no longer in power and can no longer make shitty laws or have a political machine Roz disagrees with massively impacting her life. Roz, personally, had a fairly decent semester. I don’t think her pointing out there is nuance to the statement the wing had a bad semester (which is not universally true for either an individual level – not everyone had a bad semester – or an overall level – good things happened too) is as awful as some people are making it out to be. I get it, for us the kidnapping was very very recent, but for them it was still pre-Halloween in the semester. There was lots of room after that. And while it is sad Becky and Amber lost her dad, both of them seem to be dealing with that as well as can be expected (though it helps that there wasn’t much connection to lose at that point) and that some of them lost a friend (though, again, only Amber and Ethan were super close to him – Amber isn’t well known amongst most of her floor mates and Ethan’s not in the wing), but again, lots of good things also happened. I get the comment section is touchy about Mike, but there is perspective here.
And of course Roz didn’t say all that. She’s here to be a lead in for Ruth’s punchline. I’m here to be a chatty bongo in the comment section.
Again totally fair and valid takeaways. Roz might even have a made a good point in theory, but saying stuff like “last semester went well” because of subjective (to some as I’m pretty sure Mary isn’t a fan of Manly) political gains in the same room as people who lost loved ones last semester is at least a small yikes. People (me included) are probably overreacting to it. Especially since the comment is meant to piss people off.
Also the implication that the difference between seeing that and not is the ability to see nuance is condescending as all get out.
That’s not what she said though – she said there was some nuance to the idea last semester was bad, which is true. Individually, Roz’s was good. On a group level, while it’s hard to say the semester went well because, yeah, people lost loved ones, there was also lots of good stuff that happened.
Good point BBCC, but have you considered that your face is a butt?
I do think that once you’ve reached the second armed kidnapping incident for your wing in a semester, that’s so statistically unusual that I’m still giving Ruth the ‘yeah last semester was unbelievably shitty for our hall in particular’ point.
Like, I can see a real campus having, say, the Ryan incident and it being a ‘so that was traumatic but it could have been a WAY worse semester’ point. Or ‘okay, there was an attempted school shooter who pointed a gun at one of our residents and kidnapped someone who is now, also, a resident here, but honestly I’m relieved no one died.’ Hell, even ‘the good news about this kidnapping is that while, yes, people died, they were only the kidnappers’ would work… but another student in the hall (even if not the wing) dying related to that incident kind of negates things. Taken in conjunction, the entire wing could’ve gotten sympathy As on all their midterms by association and it would STILL be an improbably shitty semester for the wing as a whole, because… well, half a dozen of them got kidnapped. Plus the brother of another wingmate who’s basically an honorary member. And it was not the only kidnapping related to the hall that semester. And uh, they may still not know who pulled that fire alarm to facilitate the kidnapping, so… that’s fun and not dread-inducing whatsoever.
… Seriously it honestly didn’t occur to me until now but the way people were snatched so quickly during the drill, Ruth at least probably realizes it was planned. Not a huge stretch for anyone else, either. For everyone’s peace of mind, I’m hoping one of the Nameless Meatheads ended up taking the fall for that one. (Asher getting caught for it seems unlikely, to say the least.) We know the odds of him repeating are low, but I would NOT want to contemplate whether anyone in my hall was a co-conspirator to an ultimately deadly kidnapping, and we still don’t know why they did it or if they’d do so again. That’s just a recipe for anxiety.
The whole kidnapping plot has worked its way through the ews cycle by now, so she’s bound to know.
I think these kids definitely had, on balance, a super shitty semester, but I don’t think saying there’s some nuance there is wrong when lots of good things did happen.
Sure. Still do not blame Ruth in the slightest for struggling to imagine a worse one, because… yeah it REALLY wrecked the bell curve of Shitty Semesters for the hall as a whole. Willis will need to try to top it.
And I for one welcome their attempt! ^^
Yeah, no, I think last semester was as shitty as it’s gotten for a long, long time. I just think there’s room to acknowledge good things happened too.
You know your stripper from your paint
You know your sinner from your saint
Whenever Heaven’s doors are shut
You kick them open but
I know you
Give me Steam
And how you feel to make it real
Real as any place you’ve been
Get a life with the dreamer’s dream–Peter Gabriel
Yeah Roz, say that last semester was pretty good in front of all the kids who witnessed a violent murder and lost one of their classmates. That’s a great idea.
Not to mention the Ryan thing, and if she doesn’t know the details of that by now, I think we can fairly say that’s her own fault. I understand she’s a little monofocused on her sister’s political career or lack thereof, but Jesus CHRIST.
I’m starting to think Roz, despite how her campaign for RA went, might not be as much of a “natural at politics” as she thinks.
(After all, Ryan’s return affected the entire building in terms of security measures and making it a crime scene.)
I think Roz serves as a caricature of the “shush, oppressed person, and let me be offended for you” college liberal stereotype. She lets perfect be the enemy of better, always thinks she knows best, and is more concerned with performative activism than actually listening to the people she says she’s standing up for. (As an example, there was that time she ranted about queer people being minimized and ignored, in the middle of Leslie’s class, while she ignored Leslie repeatedly telling her to shut up and stop interrupting.)
I would actually like to see more of Roz’s activism. In her earliest appearances she was focused on safe sex and reproductive rights, as well as sexual liberation in general.Areas where she is herself part of the oppressed group, not merely an ally.
She’s clearly an ally on queer issues, if as you say often a performative one, but I think it does her a disservice to focus only on that.
Also, Blaine and Ross both died, and Mary got a pie in her FAAACE, so some things went well.
One of which died violently in front of several of the kids in that room, emotionally scarring them and despite his horrible actions was still loved by Becky.
Does it count as an election if Robin dropped out from the race and resigned? Like… That was all on Becky and Robin, not on the electorate…
Ahahaha! NO U
♥
FacesX2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xd-MIv9uew
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlXuBNuMtBU
Man, what did poor Agatha do to deserve sitting next to Mary?
At least she can horrify her into submission by trying to pray with her.
She’s so nice she offered to act as a buffer between Mary and Roz.
You know.
I *can really wait* to hear Mary’s take on the kidnapping.
Rip the bandaid off. The dread just makes it worse in the end, and at this moment we’ve got about a dozen of Mary’s peers on-hand to administer a beatdown.
It happened during the time skip. Just before Ethan died.
Aw, Mandy’s not dying her hair anymore.
Boo.
She looks good in orange and she looks good in blue.
It’s a different shade of orange.
I think she’s been dying her hair all along.
Are we sure that’s her real color?
Before she dyed it blue, her hair was about the same color as Becky’s. Now it looks more strawberry-blonde. It’s actually closer to her Walkyverse incarnation now, but we don’t know if it’s dyed again or if it’s art style evolution.
I like it, but honestly unnatural colors aren’t really my thing anyway.
Dumbing of Age Book 11: I Want to Think We Can Do Better
Dumbing of Age Book 11: Your Face is a Butt
Hard decision there, but I think Keulen has the upper hand.
But it’s too bad
Dumbing of Age Book 11: Becky Uses Nuance From Orbit – It’s Mildly Effective
isn’t eligible.
Yet.
I don’t think you mean “nuance,” Roz. I think you mean “big picture.”
YOUR MOM is a butt!
Your butt is a mom!
Mike was involved.
A nickel was involved.
Of several THOUSAND brown babies.
Roz is really the liberal version of Mary.
Even if you agree with her on the big things, in theory, you somehow disagree with everything little she says.
Roz isn’t a liberal Mary because a liberal equivalent to Mary doesn’t exist until we get, like, violent proletarian uprisings, and when we do I know what side off those that I’m on.
Roz can be a shithead without needing to be the equal and opposite to the Republican scum of the earth. She’s already lame enough a person as is.
I do understand the comparison between Roz and Mary. As characters they are similar or serve the same purpose. Both characters say and do things that provoke negative responses just for opposite reasons. Like two sides of the same coin. The only real difference I see is that Mary has kind of become a caricature of what a highly religious conservative would be *at least based on her last appearance* While Roz is depicted with slightly more “nuance”.
Honestly Mary isn’t unrealistic. IRL these sorts of people are basically caricatures
At least how I see it, Mary and Roz are only political opposites in the sense that their alignments are (assuredly in the case of Mary and seemingly for Roz) more about self aggrandizement. Roz wants to be known and showered with praise for her views even, especially, when she does reprehensible things like parading her sister’s forced outing around her dorm so they’ll make her RA. It’s performative allyship.
Sadly, there are plenty of real-life people who act like Mary. And also plenty who act like Roz.
I don’t know what specific flavour of leftist Roz is, but my guess is she would probably be mildly offended if you called her a liberal.
Roz is the *hot* liberal version of Mary. Quick edit. Easy to miss.
Roz is merely annoying and judgemental. She’s more like the liberal version of Mike.
When did Mike become a conservative?
Mike was an edgelord internet troll. He wasn’t conservative but sure as hell wasn’t liberal.
More like South Park.
So… annoying but not as annoying, judgemental but not as judgemental, far less likely to strip anyone of their rights or human dignity, and nowhere near as malevolent or vicious.
…. yup, checks out. That’s the liberal/conservative dichotomy.
Often hated worse and blamed for every minor infraction while the conservatives get a pass.
Roz would ignore all the bad shit that happened to people she knows close to her and focus just in political stuff that happens in the background. The Democrats can defeat Trump, but unless they decide to actually help people we will see a new asshole trying to get power. If there’s no actual intent to choose to help people elections will continue to be between two idiots.
I weirdly hope that Roz is deeply disillusioned with her candidate and somehow Robin ends up in Congress again.
We need her there as a progressive.
Roz’ opinion of Manley was ‘yeah, (he’s) kind of a centrist’. She doesn’t seem to like him much, just prefers him to Robin.
Considering Robin was almost a direct comparison to Trump when she was reintroduced It feels fitting that Manley would be the same for Biden. A democratic centrist beating a republican clown just to get them out of office before they do more damage. Let’s hope life imitates art in a few days.
I really don’t think Robin has ever been characterized as a Trump-comparison, outside of some one-off jokes
…Robin’s reelection campaign slogan was literally “Make Indiana Congressional District Nine Great Again”, complete with the red hat. She also had several other Trump-esque moments pre-Nov. 2016, such as insulting the families of dead veterans over Twitter and complaining about how she definitely did not have “tiny hands”.
There’s a reason I said ‘outside of one-off jokes’
Don’t get me wrong her character did develop past the point of the Trump comparisons but that it was very blatant when she first reappeared back in the comic after freshman family weekend.
I feel poor Willis wanted Robin to be a joke as a politician but she got linked to someone who isn’t a joke but a monster.
So you mean “reintroduced after being out of the story for a while” rather than “reintroduced after Shortpacked!”. Yeah, that timeline checks out a bit better.
Robin lways struck me as more of a Sarah Palin than a Donald Trump.
She was a surrogate Palin for that part of Shortpacked!, but the real Palin thankfully faded from the limelight after not getting elected VP.
I think Willis started with the Trump gags when he could still possibly be a joke candidate, but got stuck with it when, well…
The same thing happened to Matt Stone and Trey Parker when they made Mr. Garrison their Trump surrogate.
As the old political joke goes, the problem with political jokes is that they keep getting elected.
Trey and Matt also have noted its hard to do jokes about both sides when one side is caging kids.
“BoTh SiDeS” is a farce anyway.
Robin was whatever politician was big on the internet. First Sarah Palin, then she kinda did a brief stint as a Ted Cruz/Marco Rubio mix and then she was Trump for a horrifying amount of time….and then Trump got elected and that went from ‘funny’ to ‘endless screaming’ real quick and once Becky took over her social media, she slowly became an AOC reference.
Even better than that, AOC canonically exists as a Representative in the Dumbiverse. Robin has a one-sided rivalry with her, called her out in her concession speech, and she even appears in a bonus strip. Even in-universe Robin is an AOC wannabe!
I really despise Roz right now…
…for what? She’s not saying anything particularly objectionable.
She’s saying that the nightmare that some of her dorm-mates have lived through is less significant than her entirely tangential role in getting her older sister to give up her political career. FWIW, I’m starting to think that toxic excess of self-importance is a congenital defect in the girls of her family.
Oh yeah. That.
To be fair, Riley just wants to eat cereal.
Just wait until she’s tempted by the Soggie side of the Force.
Roz is a total buttface.
Does the What In The Hell Is Wrong With You Dance, complete with little top hat and tap shoes.
For whatever reason I keep laughing at Walky in this strip. much more thsn the rest of it.
0_
Yeah, his comment from off screen in the last panel was a strip stopper.
And Walky is an expert on butts.
Roz is living with folks who have been freakin’ kidnapped and threatened with violence and death. She may as well be banned from using “nuance” as a counterargument ever again since she doesn’t know the meaning of the word.
They have a pool table, nice. What are the yellow and pink things on the table? Leftover Halloween candy?
Um, happy Halloween, everyone
*squints* Nintendo joycons? Next to a tv remote? Do they have games in the student lounge?
It’s not uncommon for someone to bring a game console to the common room for pickup Mario Kart or the like, yeah. Depends on how much you use the common room as a hall, of course, but not uncommon.
While we are considering nuance, that pool table is ridiculously small. Is it a pool table for ants?!
It’s not small, it’s faaar awaaay.
There’s a better shot of the table a couple strips ago. They’re Nintendo Switch controllers and a TV clicker.
I hope it’s not leftover Halloween candy, that stuff must be getting stale.
*Shoves bags of discount Halloween candy he bought last November back in the cupboard*
Nice one Becky.
Halloween is gone and we didn’t find out who lives in the forbidden rooms at the end of the hall, we still don’t know if Bloodrose is a vampire, and we did not even get to see Mike’s ghost. Oh well. Maybe next year.
If you drag select over the comics (so the whole thing get highlighted blue) you can see Mike’s ghost is hidden in some of the panels. But it’s only really noticeable if you play with the image like that.
I know full well you’re putting me on, but I’m going to try it anyway. So well done.
I mean the girl looks like Marceline the Vampire Queen, I think that one is a solved question
Becky, there is cutely mischievous and then there is just plain abusively annoying and you’ve passed that line. Not as far as Roz but she’s Roz and, as a deSanto, probably has a natural advantage.
I mean, Roz did basically just say “good trade” on the kidnapping and parent death, etc.
Yeah thinkin’ on it, for the folks who weren’t the targets of abuse, kidnapping, microaggressions (or just plain ol’ aggressions), suicide attempts, blackmail, or traumatic events in general, the first semester probably felt rather noisy, but didn’t directly involve them so they didn’t really hafta worry about it. This didn’t stop some folks from helping chip in on some of the worse affairs, but if one weren’t acutely aware of everything that had happened like we, as readers, were, they’d find it easier to look for the positives in the first few months of college.
Roz’s way of wording it coulda been better, but this the same person who was decidedly flippant about, iirc, some “buzzkill” at a party she’d thrown, to the person who almost got taken advantage of at said party. She at least offered an apology afterwards, but this chatter tracks for her, based on how she’s acted in the past.
Becky’s random childish quip doesn’t seem so random, at the least.
To be fair to Roz for the party thing, she pretty clearly didn’t know what had actually happened, much less that it had happened to Joyce. Just that the party had ended early due to a fight.
Yeah, that was less malicious and more ignorant, in the formal manner. She didn’t look into what broke the funk of the party, just that there was a fight. Only the immediate witnesses knew that the guy had tried to roofie Joyce; everyone else probably just heard a commotion and opted not to ask about what was going on, which led to no info being shared about the incident. You’d think word would’ve spread from there, but I guess people were too irked-out by what happened to go into detail. Which then leads to Roz not knowing what went down. So I can’t really hold the “foot-in-mouth” incident against her in that specific case.
But it does tie back to her somewhat self-centred behaviour, where if something has happened and hasn’t affected her directly, she’s probably not gonna pay it much mind. Like how she wanted to be R.A. specifically because it’d get her a single room away from Mary. An understandable reason given Mary, but still selfish.
So what? Nobody would’ve been hurt if she’d gotten the RA job (Dorothy not getting the job she wanted is not hurt, that’s life). I’d say Roz being selfish there is fine.
Becky’s retort is definitely not random, but even though Roz wasn’t directly involved, it’s doubtful that she didn’t at least know that Becky was, and calling that distinction “nuance” goes beyond wording that just could have been better. That’s more foot-in-mouth territory even when giving the benefit of the doubt, and it came off as extremely condescending.
It’s one thing to look for positives when discussing your first semester with people who weren’t directly involved with actual tragedies that happened, quite another to use a flipped seat in the House to suggest that someone isn’t looking at nuance when assessing a semester that included people under her charge being kidnapped and losing parents. Especially when said people are in the room.
The rapist with a knife incident on their literal doorstep almost certainly impacted everyone in that BUILDING on some level or other.
. . . Ruth didn’t react to the Billie allusion at all
(and Carla is standing next to Sal, because of course :3)
man roz you coulda just said “on the bright side” and been like 95% less of jerk.
I think she knows.
They have a pool table….
I know! I don’t remember seeing it–has it been established, or will it be retconned in somehow?
It could be a new pool table. There can be improvements between semesters. Particularly when taking pictures for brochures.
Roz, your idea of nuance is ignoring literally every part of last semester except that election. There were two kidnappings, a student died, Ruth wanted to die, a serial rapist tried to break in and knife people, Becky’s dad died. Maybe just take Ruth’s word that it was bad and keep your mouth shut instead of minimising the traumatic events that took place.
yeah but roz got what she wanted soooo….. nuance
sure, she got it because of all the trauma and pain and her sister stepping down but, you know, she’s happy to ignore all that.
Is this optimism I hear, from Ruth?
“I’m not saying some horrible things didn’t happen last year. But we have to consider the fact that they all happened to people who weren’t me.”
When you say it like that, it makes sense.
After analyzing Roz’s comment and thinking on it for a bit I actually kind of feel bad for her. The only reason I can think of for her even thinking saying something like this is okay is from a lack of perspective. The events of last semester didn’t really have an impact on her so she really has no context for any of it. To her it is no big deal.
That’s kind of sad because she has no connection to the events or really to anyone involved in it. It’s only a connection through Robin. Roz doesn’t hangout with any of the main cast, she wasn’t kidnapped because she wasn’t a friend to any of them. She still isn’t. I don’t think she has any friends at all or at least we don’t see her hanging out with anybody. This is a comic where even the background characters are in a polycule romantic relationship. Even Mary who is also pretty isolated from the main cast at least has a boyfriend last time we saw.
It’s a little tragic. The closest relationship Roz has is maybe with Joe the guy she banged once to film a sex tape meant to sabotage her sister’s career. She mentions politics as a win because that’s kind of all she has. Kind of a downer if you think about it.
It’s absolutely sad, and there’s ample reason to feel bad for her, but she does also seem to be actively antagonistic, which sabotages the level to which she’s sympathetic.
We don’t know the details on her situation before DoA started, so it’s hard to get a really cohesive picture of her, but her actions in the comic so far have been remarkable in a lack of empathy towards other characters to further what she feels is a righteous cause.
My feelings about her definitely have a little bit of a tinge of pity, but until she manages some self-reflection and/or a little more empathy, I’m unlikely to feel very sympathetic towards her.
Or she just doesn’t have close relationships with people on this floor and since she’s a background character, we don’t see much of her life outside that.
For example, in the background of the kidnapping scenes when they were all outside after the fire alarm was pulled, we see her heading off with some guy we haven’t seen before. I’d guess she’s into the party and casual hookup scene and that doesn’t really crossover much with the rest of the floor. An active social life, even if we haven’t seen close friends.
Yeah I saw that guy. I scrolled through her tag history to check and see if she had any friends before my comment and I can’t rectify who he is. I’d feel more confident if she had even one scene of dialogue with him or anyone to imply she had a friend group outside the social circles of the main cast, but it’s not really there yet for me.
Other background characters (which I don’t really think Roz is. She’s more of a side character to me which is a significant distinction in my mind) are actually shown interacting with people more than Roz. Exceptions being like Agatha who I don’t really think has a character beyond *likes to help*, Meredith *whose best friend is a joint* and Other Rachel *who I’m not sure even still attends IU* (Other Rachel is also kind of a sad character in that her existence was literally a joke about how she wasn’t as memorable as another person)
Anyway I went on kind of a tangent. I can believe Roz is a party girl and maybe has a different group of friends but 90 percent of her interactions in the comic are with people she doesn’t really like or that don’t like her and it’s sad that her character mostly revolves around her political opinions and her adversarial relationship with her sister. I’d like to see more to her than showing up to say something provocative or being antagonistic to other characters.
Hell, let’s take Roz’s commrnt at face value.
Yes, Roz. Your congressional seat flipped to Democrat. And more liberal government means things get better (per her worldview, please don’t bring politics in here).
BUT, you flipped one seat in the House of Representatives. Taken on its own (we don’t know how the election went in the rest of the country)… that is literally nothing but performative.
It also completely dusmisses the importance of the Wing’s personal experiences in comparison to potential future legislation of unknown worth.
And she calls that “nuance”.
Yeah, specifically calling that nuance is what really ticked me off. It was condescending as all get out.
Two murders, two kidnappings (armed), breaking and entering, illegal squatting, attempted rape (with roofies), countless instances of reckless driving, gangs on campus …
Things can only get better …
Another plus side, Ruth is nicer.
Who is that in between Sierra and Mandy (that they seem to be holding hands behind)?
Left to right on that sofa is Sierra, Mandy, and Grace.
Grace and Sierra are on the outboard side of the couch, Mandy (with a new hair color) is between them. (I used to get Grace and Agatha confused more often than I’d ought to.)
Holy smokes, they have a billiard table?
Went to IU in 64 – 68 and stayed in dorms the first two years. Never once did we have a dorm meeting that I recall. Plenty of parties on the roof, tho. I lived at Wright Quad. Only saw the floor boss once.
The rules were quite strict…sex segregated dorm buildings, no car until you were a Junior, no liquor or drugs allowed, no distaff visitors.
Clandestine Vagrant would make a decent band name, don’t you think?
Progress!
Honestly, i Hope Roz does something really stupid again and can’t get help from her sister this time…the one that got her into college and the one that avoided her getting her expelled for recording porn on school property.
I dont care about USA politics, but for a Mexican like me Family loyalty..oh thats important.
Robin didn’t get Roz into college and frankly, family loyalty cuts both ways. If Robin wanted it, she shouldn’t have treated Roz like shit.
I want “Clandestine Vagrant” on my business cards.