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I know I would. Not everyone is happy to indulge a ‘free spirit.’
Pity that probably isn’t the sole reasons for Liz’s actions since she arrived.
Sarah may have to suffer through playing the good big sister here, to add insult on to injury….
I mean, does Sarah actually think that Liz has someone in a car outside who’s been sitting there overnight? “Gonna give her fifteen more minutes, then I’m gonna seriously start debating the merits of deciding whether or not to leave.”
Fun fact, there is not a shuttle bus between IU and Ball State. One would need to purchase tickets to a greyhound or similar bus service, and it would be annoyingly expensive. Also, IIRC the bus station here in Bloomington doesn’t take card, you have to pay in cash (or possibly the card reader was just down that day, I dunno). Granted, she could pay electronically if she purchased the tickets online, but who knows if they’d think of that.
Just curious — the “killing spiders” phrase must refer to the game she’s playing (on what looks like a laptop), but what game would that be to fit the original 2010 drawing date?
It could be just about any video game that lets you kill things. Very few of them lack spiders of some description. No really, name me a few games with enemies, in which there are no spiders for the player to slaughter in droves.
The Taffalien is actually a result of somebody in an old Discord server asking for an art prompt to get them started. I said “Draw me screaming at a burger” and they asked if I had a ‘sona or a photo, so I said “Well, I use an alien head as my avatar everywhere and I usually wear a pink hoodie”, so they drew that image. I colored it in and added shading, and then a couple days later somebody else was like “Yo Taffy, I drew your ‘sona real cool” and made the more detailed version that’s doing a peace sign.
Fallout, actually, has never had spiders. Not sure why – they have giant mutated rats, dogs, lizards, frogs, cockroaches, crickets, scorpions, but no spiders. Seems a gross oversight, to me.
Wait, holy shit you’re right. Of all the nasty critters in those games, there’s no spiders. Unless you count the giant spider enemies in a minigame specific to Fallout 76.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup – she’s clearing the Spiders’ Nest lair branch. This makes the ‘one minute’ request extra ironic, because dcss is turn-based and she could leave the game as-is indefinitely.
I thought “I brought the crowbar” might be a reference to the game, in which case; Half Life” or Half Life 2,” both of which use crowbars. But I saw I was wrong.
Sarah does not know much about what has happened over the past day or 2. She may be assuming Liz had gone to Ball state, but then returned back to visit for some reason.
(by the way Willis, please let me know if you want me to stop doing this. I certainty DON’T wan’t to be annoying about it, but at the same time I want a lot of your readers to experience what is perhaps the very first game based on one of your comics!)
If it’s a 16-bit executable, it won’t run on 64-bit Windows. (They dropped that backward compatibility layer.) It might run on Windows 3.1 inside DOSbox.
If it’s 32-bit, it probably needs to run on either Windows 9x or XP. For that you’d need a full virtual machine or actual legacy hardware.
I mean, if nothing else it’s certainly not the very first—Willis himself made a couple of Walkyverse games back in the ‘90s, some of the contents of which later went on to inform certain plot points and set dressings for It’s Walky! itself.
The explanation is that you don’t need to attend classes at Ball State or for that matter even need a ride to said state of Ball if you never actually enrolled. Also despite Google and college football telling me that Ball State and to a greater extent Muncie do indeed exist that location may also just be a figment of Liz’s imagination.
yep, mostly used in muscle cars. I assume Muncie was where GM had the factory. I had a Cosworth Vega several years ago that had a Saginaw transmission in it, from a different GM plant.
Honestly I was being purposefully hyperbolic. If I was to really theorize a guess the drop out theory holds the most water. She does talk like she’s been to Ball State and had a group of “friends” that condescend to her enough she’d try hooking up with Joe just to validate herself. My guess is she dropped out after the first semester and is to scared to go back home. And if I were to guess further I think she’ll be sticking around maybe even transfering to IU just because it’s become more interesting with her being here and she’s planted seeds of intrigue with multiple characters.
The strongest evidence in it’s favour is that something similar happened to Willis in real life, and that’s the sort of insane autobiographical detail you’d to include in a story that heavily draws on your own life experiences.
Yeah, ‘had a depressive/anxious breakdown and didn’t enroll for classes next semester’ has been on my mind since it’s become formally Suspicious Liz hasn’t left yet given that particular story.
Or, alternatively, she HAD a ride lined up (that she was going to take after the initial meeting with Sarah/Joyce the previous afternoon), but Liz ditched the ride to visit Joe that evening, and now she either doesn’t have an alternative way to get back to Ball State, or she decided for whatever reason she didn’t WANT to go back.
Pretty sure it’s a ‘ride never existed’ (and possibly a ‘place to ride back to never existed’).
If she had any (now cancelled) plans to go back, she’d have used them by now. If some planned ride (which she repeatedly changed the time for) got cancelled, she already had plenty of opportunities to either mention it and get help, or secure alternative transportation.
Makes me wonder how she got there, if she didn’t have a ride to begin with. I can’t imagine she walked the entire way there.
So how bad do we think this is? On a scale of Dorothy sending Dan to talk with Billie, against being anywhere near the rapist who got sliced up, where do you think we are?
Given what little we can glean it’s possible. They condescend and it’s possible, given comparisons to Joyce, that they like to pull a Becky in a more malicious way and get a reaction from her for their own amusement. Like the poor sheltered Christian girl would have an aneurysm if she had to take a bus or something or had no plan to get back.
Personally I’m still leaning towards her choosing not to go back because she has had an emotional time and doesn’t want to see them myself though. Could even be both though honestly.
If a “friend” does that to you and it’s not already a pre-established dynamic in a mutually consenting relationship, then that “friend” deserves to be tied to a rock and have a giant eagle eat their ever-regenerating liver every day. Or if you wanna be less extreme, they can be smacked in the face with a sack of oranges over and over until they stop being such a shit.
the second solution will have the added benefit of a) smelling really good; b) you can tell everyone you’ve beat them to a pulp and it would be sort of true
She could have taken the bus. Or, since she was coming from wherever she lives, she could have got a ride with a hometown friend or even a relative, telling them she wanted to visit Sarah before going to her school, since her classes start later.
I’m guessing the bus. She had atleast a little money to buy a coke so probably enough for the ride over but not much else. Probably why the first thing she suggested was breakfast when she came to visit .
Public areas, I bet. Common areas. At least when I was in college the undergrad library never closed, and pretty much neither did the student union building. It wasn’t uncommon to see asleep folk in either place.
In addition to that, aren’t there like 30,000+ people swarming around the IU campus at all hours of the day? No way is everyone constantly accounted for.
Large enough campuses often have libraries, lounges or other spots in buildings that are open 24/7. In fact since she appears to have access to the dorms she could just sleep in the same area that all the students who get sexiled go.
Either way it’s interesting that she did in fact bring a change of clothes, so she was never planning on going back. Not sure how she expected this conversation with Sarah to go though…
wow, after literal years of my occasional commentary being too boring to ever get past “awaiting moderation” it sure is bizarre to actually see it out there.
She was carrying a duffel bag last night at the convenience store and sitting by the fountain in the megastrip. Could easily be she has a change of clothes in there.
I mean, presumably she’s been sleeping SOMEWHERE not the fountain the last two nights (or at least, I sure hope so, it’s fucking January,) so it could be she’s stowing the bag and/or outerwear there?
I have concerns about Liz in general at the moment.
Sure, she wasn’t wearing her Jacket when the girls appeared at Joe’s door and it couldn’t be seen anywhere in his room until she put it on later. But it’s totally possible (and Willis will probably claim to have planned it thus) that she was holding it in her hand (obscured by either Joyce or the door frame) and threw it on one of the boy’s beds (which we never saw from above) before settling on the floor.
As for why she didn’t wear her jacket when visiting Joe or doesn’t now: probably found a coat rack on the way.
Even assuming the worst about this storyline, Sarah+Liz is a ridiculously different dynamic from Joyce+Becky, so I’d expect things to play out at least a little differently.
Yeah, a lot of similarities here. Intrigued to see if this will be written as a parallel story or things will quickly start to be different, like e.g. the explanation of why Liz is staying at IU.
Don’t ever miss the first day of class. If you must, contact professors as soon as you’re able/know you’re going to miss. If there’s a waiting list and you don’t show up, you might not be able to take a class that is essential to you.
I’m conflicted, Liz did such a good enough job stirring the pot around here that Part of me wouldn’t mind her staying but I’m curious on how that would actually play out.
Invading armies will often look for opportunities to destroy an enemy’s bridges prior to seizing the territory they’re in, and I can ALMOST make that into a metaphor that’s ALMOST applicable.
um, so, i’m very bad at military strategy having barely ever organized any territorial conquest whatsoever, but isn’t burning bridges the defensive army’s business usually?
so… Liz is being invaded… by… Christians? yeah that’s plausible. so, she’s burnt all her bridges: ok, that tracks. i think at this point she would be appealing to the UN for intervention (Sarah?) and frantically making shady arms deals with Russia (Joe???)… we’re on to something here Reltzik
Burning bridges is the business of the people who are less likely to use the bridges in the near future for critical purposes like troop movements or logistics. So if you’re mostly worried about the enemy moving troops or materiel across the bridges, you try to destroy them, and if you’re mostly worried about moving your own troops or materiel across the bridges, you secure them.
Prior to breaking through the front lines (or seizing an amphibious foothold, like happened in D-Day), the bridges are a liability to the invaders, because they allow the defenders to supply and reinforce threatened defenses and make it either impossible or at least far more difficult to break through in the first place. But once they’ve broken through the defensive lines, having SOME bridges in place are an advantage to the invader, and destroying bridges tend to be a bigger advantage for the defender.
But even then, the positions of the bridges and their uses can reverse that question. It can be worthwhile for invaders to use long-range artillery, air bombings, etc to destroy bridges that are more helpful to the enemy than themselves, such as those which would allow the defenders to combine forces that are otherwise isolated or which allow those forces to be supplied from logistics bases.
Finally, invading generals planning to live off the land (taking food and needed supplies either from seized logistic centers or the invaded population) have sometimes burned bridges (or ships, or whatever they would use to get back home) behind them. This is meant to express confidence in their own victory, prevent desertion by their soldiers, and force their units to fight to the last man, simply because retreat is no longer an option. But it also cuts off reinforcements, resupply, support, and even communications, and is thus almost always a Bad, Bad, Bad Idea. Since Liz is completely rational and not-at-all self-defeating in how she burns bridges, we can assume that her burnt bridges are not at all like this in any way, and we can ignore this type of bridge-burning for purposes of the analogy.
(Disclaimer: I’m not an expert. I simply have amateur interest and a well-established penchant for talking out of my ass.)
My guess is that Liz is homeless and lost her school funding because her parents kicked her out because she’s an atheist now. Liz is a substitute for Joyce (in my opinion), starting with her trying to have sex with Joe and still having to deal with the purity culture baggage from her upbringing, and is now substituting for Joyce becoming homeless and being abandoned by her family for being an atheist because 1)her dad is a decent human being and wouldn’t abandon his child, and 2)it would ruin the comic if Joyce had to leave university.
Basically, Liz is there to show what can happen to outed atheist children of very religious families. They don’t get made homeless as often as outed gay children, but it DOES happen.
IN MY OPINION, that’s the reason Liz was introduced. I suspected it with the ‘failure to lose virginity with Joe’ incident but i think it’s more likely now. And i admit i was annoyed that it wasn’t Joyce having the fail to sex/purity culture baggage incident at first, but now i realize that you can’t have Joyce become homeless without destroying the comic, so i’m ok with it.
I think your right, it feels narratively meaningful to for the current main conflict. There’s other possibilities but as you said, while not as often, it does happen. Plus we’ll get more of Sarah’s background and vibe, adds to why Sarah is so committed to her degree and can’t go back home.
Liz getting kicked out for being an Atheist is possible. Although I thought Sarah would have gotten some word of it over christmas. (I think she did spend at least some time with family over the holidays, didn’t she?)
I feel like another case of parents kicking their child out over religious matters might be a little…uh, repetitive. While I’m not saying it can’t happen multiple times, we’ve already got Becky, Jordan, Leslie, and probably more.
I think with having it be specific to atheism would add to the current storyline as at least 2 of those relate to homophobia. That doesn’t mean it will be atheism as we barely even know if it’s getting kicked out but it would add
Jordan is purely speculative. All we know is that he’s estranged from his parents — we don’t know if he got kicked out, or if whatever-it-was happened after he was already out of the house and supporting himself, or if it was because of atheism or GRSM status or liberal political leanings or anything else. Getting kicked out for atheism plausible speculation, but still speculation. (Unless there was a big Patreon-comic reveal I missed?)
I’m still hoping for the Jordaning to be over something completely ridiculous, like “He once said mum’s favourite vase would look better two inches to the right”.
Out of all the songs in that movie, I wasn’t expecting the Bruno-centric one to be the Big Popular Breakout Song. At least it wasn’t the droning, overly long introduction, though.
In Jordan’s case, Hank/Carol made a comment about “losing” him… hard to tell from context, but it could mean that he was the one that decided to sever ties with the family (maybe he recognized to toxic environment?) rather than him getting “kicked out”.
Could be, but even if he cut ties that doesn’t mean he wasn’t pushed.
Like if her mom had demanded Joyce abandon Becky and she severed ties with Carol instead, Carol would see that as “losing her”, but she could rightly see it as “kicked out”.
The kinda misunderstandings Hank makes are “thinking godlessness and being a good person are the same thing, as expressed to Dorothy’s parents” and “marries Carol.”
His son who ran away and became a taboo subject for what Hank admitted came about because he squeezed too hard is probably not one of those.
Eh, “losing him” could still mean they kicked him out. Many super religious families and groups and organizations (looking at you, JWs) engage in passive agressive victim blaming and gaslighting by accusing the victim of abandoning them by their choice, even while they’re throwing the victim’s possessions on the lawn. Claiming that being thrown out of the house is their fault, not the abusers’ beliefs and intentions and actions.
Incidentally, many christians try to rationalize hell this way, claiming that nonchristians ‘choose to go there’ instead of being thrown into it by the mad blood god of the desert. Gaslighting victims is a millennia-old practice.
Gender, Romantic, and Sexual Minorities. (I’ve also seen it with the R and S swapped around.) It’s essentially a near-synonym of LGBT+ that’s been catching on fairly recently as a more-inclusive alternative without the need to either add a whole bunch of additional unwieldy letters for queer, asexual-spectrum, nonbinary, or intersex people, etc. or grouping them all under a single “+” at the end of the acronym.
Actually i think Willis originally set this up waaaay back in the beginning when Joyce went on her date with Joe (chaperoned by Mike). So she could revisit the sex thing when she needed a place to stay, having been made homeless.
But then as the comic went on, developments developed and he realized that it wouldn’t work or make sense in the comic anymore (Curses! Foiled by Joyce’s father, who turned out to be a decent human being!). Therefore Liz was invented to pursue this arc.
Be prepared for more about Liz, with Joyce nearby.
I’m going to place a bet here and say Liz ran away from her persona not was kicked out of her home. She wants to be with Sarah and live with her in what she imagines is a free and wild fun party place. So she never signed up for classes.
Uhmm… if data about College Dropout Rates is true, then we should have a third of the casting missing by sophomore year. That makes for a terrible narrative if anyone that has some drama just dissappears… But seriously, Walky should have been a dropout a long time ago if not by some computer magics… same for Amber because of the financial cost of judicial trial alone, if not for her new dad. So to be closer to reality, we can have lots of homeless students droping out of other universities and hanging around this one https://educationdata.org/college-dropout-rates
Dropouts are probably not randomly distributed. Certainly my college didn’t lose 30% of its freshmen.
Dropping out also makes it less likely for a character to interact with those still enrolled and living in dorms, so has a narrative strike against it, until you want to get rid of characters. Ethan going on leave could have made sense.
I dunno IU’s rules, but if Walky failed a course, that would probably just mea not getting the credit and maybe having to take it again later, not dropping out. He’s got well-off parents, so losing scholarship money probably isn’t an issue.
Also, whatever kept Walky here wasn’t computer magics – Amber did that before midterms, so it would have had minimal effect on his final grade. It likely made him feel like he still had a chance and he apparently learned at least a bit about coping with his ADHD.
Actually it would depend on the university and the particulars of the class.
Depending on how they calculate the grades, it might be possible that Walky continued to do poorly for the remainder of the year, but bumping up his grades on the mid-terms made his marks overall just barely enough to pass.
The other question is… how many classes was he struggling in? I suspect he was a poor student in general, but its possible that he did ok in some classes (like Gender Studies) because the teachers were better/he was more interested/tests were easier.
Now, in my experience realism of high school and college romance means a lot of churn, which we’ve seen, but also some couples who broke up getting back together. Sometimes multiple times. Despite teasing with Dorothy and Walky, and Ruth and Jennifer, we’ve set to see that.
One failed class doesn’t turn you into a dropout. Have you … done college?
Generally speaking, college is time-sensitive but additive. You pass classes to gain credits. Credits contribute to your certification or degree. There might be an additional hurdle or two, like required volunteering stints or dissertation defenses or residencies, but those are specific to stuff. Credits are good for a number of years, after which they no longer count and you have to retake stuff if you want the cert.
Specific things have minimum requirements. Like, you can’t live at the dorm if you’re not taking a certain number of credits per semester. You’d probably get assigned a guidance counselor to push you along if you go too slow. But the real problem is that you become a social pariah: the old person who failed out of last year’s cohort and has to sit with the kids to redo everything.
But most likely, it’s your parents who are, y’know, paying for everything who’ll pull you out. Or your scholarship, which demands a high GPA, drops you and you can’t afford to retake. Because if a student can afford tuition on their own, they can go at whatever pace they want.
Dropping out is mostly an economic decision, not an academic one.
i guess every country has its own rules… in my country you can only fail a class two times. They kick you out if you fail the same class a third time. Private and public universities have the same rule. Also, you have to pass each and every sophomore class to be allowed into third year. Some classes are pre-requisite for another…. and some sophomore classes are done only once each year. So, you fail that one class, you are one full year behind. We used to have that system based only in credits, like until the early 90’s. It was a shock when it ended abruptly. Loads of dropouts even in a country where you can have free five years of university in a public institution…
In your country, are the colleges run almost entirely with profit in mind, are they designed to funnel a disproportionate and unreasonable amount of funds into their mediocre sports programs, and are the degrees they award worth less than the paper they’re printed on?
If they’re not like that, then I guess I can understand the stricter guidelines for grades and such. If they’re about as worthless as the debt factories here in the USA, then somethin’ screwy is goin’ on.
Just compare how many people get in trouble for driving without a license, vs how many get in trouble for killing someone and eating their corpse. Clearly law enforcement is far more interested in catching the former than the latter, so that makes it more dangerous.
I’m not actually your sister, I’m a shapeshifting alien from Altair, my mission is to infiltrate humans to evaluate their potential for domestication. now i have a few questions, number 1, how long do humans live in captivity?
Hmm, I’m coming around to “Liz dropped out” as what’s going on, but I think it’ll still be resolved unless Liz flat out joins the cast like Becky did.
Like she was having trouble in her first semester, went back home for break, and then didn’t re-enroll but didn’t tell her mom, so come move-in day she went to visit Sarah. That or she just really does not want to go back and telling her mom isn’t going to go swimmingly.
Her wanting to sleep with Joe came off to me as wanting to prove herself to her friends at Ball State, like she’d walk back in there and put up with the same crap but thinking to herself “they don’t know me, I banged a hot boy and did weed drugs,” but “this is wrong, I should be with my friends” could also mean that she sees her running away as wrong on top of her ingrained sexual puritan fears.
(and while I’m still pushing my “Sarah didn’t help Dana as much as she thought she did” theory, it’d sure be something if she was very insistent on calling her mom over Liz’s protests, to Liz’s own detriment)
I like this theory, especially given that ‘I was thrown out of home and kicked out of school because I stopped god-bothering’ feels a lot like a lower-stakes version of the story already done with Becky. ‘I didn’t do well enough in school to keep my scholarship and I’m too scared to admit to pressure-y stepmom that I’m a failure’ or something similar feels like a better option to me. (Especially since we don’t actually know how intensely Christian Sarah and Liz’s family is; there’s been a lot of assumption made that it’s Joyce’s level of death-cult as a matter of course, but to me Sarah herself refutes that. If only because there’s been no indication that she’s ever recognized Joyce’s pile of stuff that personally. As she would, if it had ever been her life too.)
We do know for sure that the only reason Sarah can afford college is scholarships. We know they’re grade-dependent, that even one bad semester means she’s done for good. That ‘mediocre grades’ might well mean the same as ‘bad grades’. That’s an assumption I have no problem applying to Liz: her Ball State attendance was dependent on stellar grades, and she didn’t manage it, didn’t tell anyone about it for shame, and is now in a serious pickle.
In short, I really want this story to be about Sarah and Liz, not ‘Joyce is so lucky her dad’s not that terrible’.
Yeah I don’t think Liz’s folks are on the level of “hurt my daughter for leaving Christ,” though it’s certainly possible Sarah wouldn’t know either way since they don’t live together, Liz probably didn’t grow up a full-on fundie even if she’s meant to be strikingly similar to Joyce vis a vis her relationship with Sarah.
I wrote this below, but I wonder if Liz is actually still a Christian and she’s rejecting it because of how she’s treated at Ball State. Her views on sex defiling her are pretty darn Christian-brand puritanism, its possible the stepmom in this case is her dad’s new wife (since she and Sarah just share a mother) and that’s who she feels she has to capitulate to, where her and Sarah’s biomom is just not living with either of her kids. I have a hard time believing Liz’s mom married another woman but then they’d be ultra harsh to their daughter for not sticking to Christ, but I dunno, maybe openly queer religious fundies exist.
Soooo yeah, could be a lot of things. Bullying so she doesn’t want to go back, losing a scholarship so she can’t, being afraid of her stepmom finding out and her home not being safe.
I think the biggest evidence that Liz is probably not someone kicked out for atheism is the fact that Sarah seems pretty indifferent to religion and on seemingly fine terms with her parents.
Liz isn’t pretending to be Christian for either of her parents, it’s her stepmother. Liz and Sarah only share a mom, so whoever Liz’s dad and stepmom are we don’t know their deal and Sarah’s got nothing to do with them.
Wait hold up, Liz pretends to be still be Christian to “get her stepmoms off her case”(which the comments section informed that this plural is a thing in AAVE), and she and Sarah are half-sisters through their mom.
So did her mom marry another woman? Maybe the stepmom in this case is the wife of Liz’s dad? She wouldn’t have to perform for her stepmom if that was just Sarah’s dad’s wife, a guy she is totally unrelated to.
You think maybe she’s still Christian and rebelling against her peer group more than she is that? With that in mind and the heavy parallels between her and Joyce, where Joyce broke because it was all bullshit, maybe the idea is kinda like “Liz is Joyce if she still kept her faith where much like Joyce, her friends keep treating her like a punching bag for being a naive weirdo.”
Yeeeep, this is going where folks expected it to go. The only question now is if “I don’t have a ride” means she got ditched or if she never had one in the first place.
I see that Liz probably sneaked off to her sisters college to get away from her family/college/expectations?? But her character is very obnoxious to me (no offense). I get that she’s young and immature and berating Christianity. Being against Christianity isn’t bad if but it was written was very childish and I couldn’t take her seriously. Then after planting the seeds of doubt and drama in Joyce and Becky she doesn’t even apologize for her behavior. Then she constantly pops around lying that she’s going to her ride soon and that got really annoying. I’m sorry if I’m bashing her character but I hope she eventually matures bit by bit because I see her involuntarily sowing more chaos without reprimanding.
Assuming that Liz’s situation is the same as Becky’s, the big difference in the end is that Sarah hates her sister, and will not put up with that BS for longer than it takes to make the phone call to their parent.
Nothing bad ever happened when Sarah called someone’s parent to come pick them up over any objections.
It’s funny that you write that Sarah hates her as I wanna go “noooo she loves her deep down” and nowadays I just think that’s still hate. If you love someone and you’re just actively incapable of being there for them unless you’re in a crisis, that’s actually just hate.
Motherfuckers walking around like their Han Solo. Just be as huge a dick as you want all the time, be as aggressively spiteful and unwilling to engage with the slightest emotional labour, but then as long as you help out one time you’re actually a cool badass rogue and you’ve earned sufficient points to continue being terrible forever.
Today in #9ChickweedLane I learned I can be thrown long enough over POLLY'S FIANCE IS *SIXTEEN YEARS OLDER THAN HER DAD?????* to momentarily forget to wonder HOW IS SISTER STEVEN STILL ALIVE
still thinking of that time jerry seinfeld guest starred in the season 2 premiere of 30 rock just so he could stare directly into the camera and plug Bee Movie
was working in the yard when the pizza delivery guy pulled up. handed me the pizzas, joked about whether i actually lived there or was trying to scam free pizza. laughed
carried the pizza up to the door, i'd been locked out of my own house, so i stood there awkwardly as the delivery guy stared
My belief is that a lot of people worship a pantheon of death gods, whether they realize it or not, and my intent is to live long enough to see their gods' heads put up on pikes. That's where I'm at. I'll warm my bones by the glow of these cathedrals of rot when they're all razed to the ground.
People hate being told "if you wanna make a comic, just make a comic" but also I come from The Land of 2000s Webcomics, where a LOT of people just made a comic. And it was harder! We all had to own scanners and buy paper!
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coming in 10 days and 22 hours: a Dina plushie campaign on Makeship!
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coming in 10 days and 22 hours: a Dina plushie campaign on Makeship!
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Blue sky nice guy @rajandelman.bsky.social ⋅ 10d
Maggie Westrum @maggiewestrum.bsky.social ⋅ 19h
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“NO PROBLEM”
*grabs Sydney*
I thought you were talking about Sydney Scoville Jr., for a moment and wondered what she was doing here.
http://grrlpowercomic.com/
She could fly her to Ball State pretty easily, tbh
Sarah was about to throw her most of the way there.
Sarah-pult.
I know I would. Not everyone is happy to indulge a ‘free spirit.’
Pity that probably isn’t the sole reasons for Liz’s actions since she arrived.
Sarah may have to suffer through playing the good big sister here, to add insult on to injury….
Is it Monday and/or Thursday already?
I mean, does Sarah actually think that Liz has someone in a car outside who’s been sitting there overnight? “Gonna give her fifteen more minutes, then I’m gonna seriously start debating the merits of deciding whether or not to leave.”
she may be assuming Liz took the bus or something
I could’ve sworn that a bus was specifically mentioned early on but I’m not going back to check.
Yeah, the bus was mentioned. So was “a ride”.
She might have been being disingenuous.
Fun fact, there is not a shuttle bus between IU and Ball State. One would need to purchase tickets to a greyhound or similar bus service, and it would be annoyingly expensive. Also, IIRC the bus station here in Bloomington doesn’t take card, you have to pay in cash (or possibly the card reader was just down that day, I dunno). Granted, she could pay electronically if she purchased the tickets online, but who knows if they’d think of that.
“I brought the crowbar.”
Just curious — the “killing spiders” phrase must refer to the game she’s playing (on what looks like a laptop), but what game would that be to fit the original 2010 drawing date?
It could be just about any video game that lets you kill things. Very few of them lack spiders of some description. No really, name me a few games with enemies, in which there are no spiders for the player to slaughter in droves.
Civilization. That’s six games with enemies, lacking spiders
That series has got British people in it, right? That’s close enough. /s
But in all seriousness, well-played.
I remember playing at least one modded scenario of a Civilization game that had giant spiders as an enemy you could fight.
If mods counted, Skyrim would be hailed as the ultimate motorcycle simulator and dating sim.
if that’s one single mod i think i need you to point me at it pretty please
The civ series has mindworms, wasps, and floating colonies of primitive organisms but you know, I think you’re right. I can’t remember any spiders.
They’re psychic spiders that make you forget they existed, like those one guys from that one show.
The Silence from Dr. Who? Say is that what inspired your alien avatar from way back?
The Taffalien is actually a result of somebody in an old Discord server asking for an art prompt to get them started. I said “Draw me screaming at a burger” and they asked if I had a ‘sona or a photo, so I said “Well, I use an alien head as my avatar everywhere and I usually wear a pink hoodie”, so they drew that image. I colored it in and added shading, and then a couple days later somebody else was like “Yo Taffy, I drew your ‘sona real cool” and made the more detailed version that’s doing a peace sign.
Weren’t those in the not-officially-Civ Alpha Centauri? Or did they get pulled back into the main series at some point?
to me it’s that:
https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/rerun
(well this one as well, duh
https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/forsaken )
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1851390/Spiders_Everywhere/
Not my game, but I hang out on the same forums that this developer does.
Seems like a good fit, though a decade late perhaps.
Fallout, actually, has never had spiders. Not sure why – they have giant mutated rats, dogs, lizards, frogs, cockroaches, crickets, scorpions, but no spiders. Seems a gross oversight, to me.
Emphasis on the gross.
Wait, holy shit you’re right. Of all the nasty critters in those games, there’s no spiders. Unless you count the giant spider enemies in a minigame specific to Fallout 76.
Tyranny, Dishonored, any shooter aiming for realism, most strategy games, Halo and probably some others.
I was going to include Destiny, but they have spider-people with spider tanks.
I’m gonna be a bongo and count “every single other player” as a spider, when it comes to any FPS with multiplayer.
That’s mean to the spiders
Halo definitely had spiders, they were just also tanks that shot giant ass plasma guns.
Every flight sim ever made?
Spider Solitaire?
Or it’s a stock phrase she used to brush people off while gaming, in hopes that nobody would check if she was actually killing spiders.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup – she’s clearing the Spiders’ Nest lair branch. This makes the ‘one minute’ request extra ironic, because dcss is turn-based and she could leave the game as-is indefinitely.
World of Warcraft. Its third expansion was released near the end of 2010. And there are always, always spiders to kill.
I always figured it was definitely WoW.
So many spiders.
Minecraft would work.
I thought “I brought the crowbar” might be a reference to the game, in which case; Half Life” or Half Life 2,” both of which use crowbars. But I saw I was wrong.
Sarah does not know much about what has happened over the past day or 2. She may be assuming Liz had gone to Ball state, but then returned back to visit for some reason.
“Well, I’ll give her another twenty minutes. But that’s it!”
I understood that reference dot gif.
Dealing with relatives sure is something, isn’t it Sarah? But sometimes ya gotta learn to chill, right?
Forget life — play Joyce’s Nightmare!
It’s a mobile game where you Joyce kills toys and eats herself out in her dreams!
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/830313
(by the way Willis, please let me know if you want me to stop doing this. I certainty DON’T wan’t to be annoying about it, but at the same time I want a lot of your readers to experience what is perhaps the very first game based on one of your comics!)
First fan game I’m aware of, but Willis did a few computer games themself back in the early It’s Walky days!
Hey you’re right!!!!
It’s Walky! fans, how about a blast from the past?!?!
http://www.caiman.us/scripts/fw/f3856.html
Doesn’t appear to run on modern hardware, sadly. Anyone know an emulator for games of that era?
If it’s a 16-bit executable, it won’t run on 64-bit Windows. (They dropped that backward compatibility layer.) It might run on Windows 3.1 inside DOSbox.
If it’s 32-bit, it probably needs to run on either Windows 9x or XP. For that you’d need a full virtual machine or actual legacy hardware.
I mean, if nothing else it’s certainly not the very first—Willis himself made a couple of Walkyverse games back in the ‘90s, some of the contents of which later went on to inform certain plot points and set dressings for It’s Walky! itself.
Oooo! Did he make any games for DOA?
Not that I’m aware of, no.
I know you said it works on mobile devices, but it doesn’t work on my Samsung phone – I can only see the top left corner of the playing area.
Try another browser, maybe?
I have an s10e and it worked on mine.
How do we get to that second part?
Hey bruh, if ya want a DOA hentai game, why didn’t you just ask?
If you’re serious about that, I have some ideas. For unrelated reasons, my name seems to be suspiciously red.
Wellerman, tell me: Have you read or played cosmic horror, like Lovecraft?
That Lovecraft had some weird fuckin’ ideas about a whole lot of things, but he sure could write a neat monster.
Also I played Terraria and this horror game called Monstrum.
Really anything that involves scary alien parasite things totally puts me in my element!
Alright, guessing this is explaining time.
The explanation is that you don’t need to attend classes at Ball State or for that matter even need a ride to said state of Ball if you never actually enrolled. Also despite Google and college football telling me that Ball State and to a greater extent Muncie do indeed exist that location may also just be a figment of Liz’s imagination.
Muncie does kinda sound like the name of some magical imaginary friend in a 90s cartoon.
Munchy Muncie.
Of course Muncie is a real place, that’s where Lasagna Cat lives!
Wasn’t a Muncie a 4-speed GM transmission of the late 50s-early 60s?
yep, mostly used in muscle cars. I assume Muncie was where GM had the factory. I had a Cosworth Vega several years ago that had a Saginaw transmission in it, from a different GM plant.
The Muncie Rock Crusher.
Yeah that’s the theory I’m leaning towards, but things are still up the air!
Honestly I was being purposefully hyperbolic. If I was to really theorize a guess the drop out theory holds the most water. She does talk like she’s been to Ball State and had a group of “friends” that condescend to her enough she’d try hooking up with Joe just to validate herself. My guess is she dropped out after the first semester and is to scared to go back home. And if I were to guess further I think she’ll be sticking around maybe even transfering to IU just because it’s become more interesting with her being here and she’s planted seeds of intrigue with multiple characters.
The strongest evidence in it’s favour is that something similar happened to Willis in real life, and that’s the sort of insane autobiographical detail you’d to include in a story that heavily draws on your own life experiences.
Yeah, ‘had a depressive/anxious breakdown and didn’t enroll for classes next semester’ has been on my mind since it’s become formally Suspicious Liz hasn’t left yet given that particular story.
The ride was a gimmick. I thought that was understood from the start.
Now is this a “the ride never existed” situation or a “the person who was supposed to be my ride ditched me and left me stranded” situation
I’m going to hazard a guess that the ride never existed, otherwise she would have just asked Sarah to get someone to drive her.
maybe the person never existed
Seems like she took a Bus, and while American public transit is bad they do generally have Buses.
Or, alternatively, she HAD a ride lined up (that she was going to take after the initial meeting with Sarah/Joyce the previous afternoon), but Liz ditched the ride to visit Joe that evening, and now she either doesn’t have an alternative way to get back to Ball State, or she decided for whatever reason she didn’t WANT to go back.
I’m voting for “ran away from college”.
That’s where I’m putting my money, too.
Pretty sure it’s a ‘ride never existed’ (and possibly a ‘place to ride back to never existed’).
If she had any (now cancelled) plans to go back, she’d have used them by now. If some planned ride (which she repeatedly changed the time for) got cancelled, she already had plenty of opportunities to either mention it and get help, or secure alternative transportation.
If it was the latter, we’d have to ask which time, since she’s left a scene saying “I’ve got to go, my ride’s outside” at least three times now.
Plot twist is that it’s actually true. She’s ready to leave, but her ride’s dropped out of Ball and is staying up here without explaining that to Liz.
I’m guessing the ride never existed at this point.
The comic is titled “get back”; JoJo is endgame confirmed
“Get back to where you once belonged!”
We’ve already seen a rooftop concert, with Mike doing a stage dive
You’ve cracked the code.
Makes me wonder how she got there, if she didn’t have a ride to begin with. I can’t imagine she walked the entire way there.
So how bad do we think this is? On a scale of Dorothy sending Dan to talk with Billie, against being anywhere near the rapist who got sliced up, where do you think we are?
My current theory is she had a ride there but her “friends” thought it’d be funny to ditch her and leave her stranded
Given what little we can glean it’s possible. They condescend and it’s possible, given comparisons to Joyce, that they like to pull a Becky in a more malicious way and get a reaction from her for their own amusement. Like the poor sheltered Christian girl would have an aneurysm if she had to take a bus or something or had no plan to get back.
Personally I’m still leaning towards her choosing not to go back because she has had an emotional time and doesn’t want to see them myself though. Could even be both though honestly.
If a “friend” does that to you and it’s not already a pre-established dynamic in a mutually consenting relationship, then that “friend” deserves to be tied to a rock and have a giant eagle eat their ever-regenerating liver every day. Or if you wanna be less extreme, they can be smacked in the face with a sack of oranges over and over until they stop being such a shit.
I Understood That Reference Dot gif
the second solution will have the added benefit of a) smelling really good; b) you can tell everyone you’ve beat them to a pulp and it would be sort of true
Liz’s friends just treat her like her closest friends treat Joyce.
Or at least, that’s what the parallel between the two of them reads as.
I don’t think there’s any mortal peril here, so it’s not quite as bad as it could be.
Well, there is some peril.
She could have taken the bus. Or, since she was coming from wherever she lives, she could have got a ride with a hometown friend or even a relative, telling them she wanted to visit Sarah before going to her school, since her classes start later.
I’m guessing the bus. She had atleast a little money to buy a coke so probably enough for the ride over but not much else. Probably why the first thing she suggested was breakfast when she came to visit .
She just materialized out of nothing in t-pose.
Its a power move.
The?— ah.
Nobody here exclusively has a car, so… bus pass?
Yep, Liz definitely dropped out.
Or was kicked out for some reason.
I’m going with, she didn’t enroll for the new semester.
Same. We know an anxiety snowball can lead to that happening, and applying that piece of history to Joyce would cut her story short.
good point!
It’s been like 2 or 3 days I think. Where has Liz been sleeping this whole time?
Public areas, I bet. Common areas. At least when I was in college the undergrad library never closed, and pretty much neither did the student union building. It wasn’t uncommon to see asleep folk in either place.
In addition to that, aren’t there like 30,000+ people swarming around the IU campus at all hours of the day? No way is everyone constantly accounted for.
It’s closer to 50,000 as I recall, but yeah. IU is basically a town in itself, not even counting adjoining Bloomington.
Large enough campuses often have libraries, lounges or other spots in buildings that are open 24/7. In fact since she appears to have access to the dorms she could just sleep in the same area that all the students who get sexiled go.
Either way it’s interesting that she did in fact bring a change of clothes, so she was never planning on going back. Not sure how she expected this conversation with Sarah to go though…
curly haired cat’s finally out of the bag
Well you HAD a chance a ride earlier, but then you asked Joe to stop.
Wait, no, sorry, not that kind of ride.
That was bad, and you should feel bad.
I smell a transferring student…..
everyone wants to know about why Liz hasn’t gone back to ball state, i personally want to know where she got her new duds from.
wow, after literal years of my occasional commentary being too boring to ever get past “awaiting moderation” it sure is bizarre to actually see it out there.
Willis must be in the pocket of Big Lawn
Well, I learned today that six links to previous strips is apparently to much to dodge moderation – or it was Willis’ name – who knows?
Apparently it was the links
She was carrying a duffel bag last night at the convenience store and sitting by the fountain in the megastrip. Could easily be she has a change of clothes in there.
oh wow i didn’t notice that before. good eye!
You can see the best image of the bag in the strip where she says Bye to joe while he was being subdued by Dina.
although admittedly the comic does seem to have a frustrating trend of Liz’s belongings (jacket and bag) disappearing and reappearing between strips.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/02-ill-leave-you-a-phantom/subdued/
I mean, presumably she’s been sleeping SOMEWHERE not the fountain the last two nights (or at least, I sure hope so, it’s fucking January,) so it could be she’s stowing the bag and/or outerwear there?
I have concerns about Liz in general at the moment.
There is an logical explanation for all of this:
Liz was probably holding the bag in her hand when she approached Joe and Dina, dropped it to the floor before both of her hands entered the panel and picked it up again before leaving.
Sure, she wasn’t wearing her Jacket when the girls appeared at Joe’s door and it couldn’t be seen anywhere in his room until she put it on later. But it’s totally possible (and Willis will probably claim to have planned it thus) that she was holding it in her hand (obscured by either Joyce or the door frame) and threw it on one of the boy’s beds (which we never saw from above) before settling on the floor.
As for why she didn’t wear her jacket when visiting Joe or doesn’t now: probably found a coat rack on the way.
And why isn’t she carrying a backpack or purse?
I feel like we’ve already done this story with Becky, but I’m still interested to see where this is going.
Yeah, and how is this new Juanita character involved, if at all?
Juanita?
https://dumbingofage.tumblr.com/post/666073854468308992/juanita#notes
Beg pardon…?
Even assuming the worst about this storyline, Sarah+Liz is a ridiculously different dynamic from Joyce+Becky, so I’d expect things to play out at least a little differently.
Yeah, a lot of similarities here. Intrigued to see if this will be written as a parallel story or things will quickly start to be different, like e.g. the explanation of why Liz is staying at IU.
Sarah was a girl who thought she’d be a loner
But we knew it wouldn’t last
Lizzie left her school in Muncie, Indiana
Almost tried to tap Joe’s ass…
Very good.
*snerk*
Don’t ever miss the first day of class. If you must, contact professors as soon as you’re able/know you’re going to miss. If there’s a waiting list and you don’t show up, you might not be able to take a class that is essential to you.
Not even a Greyhound?
I’m conflicted, Liz did such a good enough job stirring the pot around here that Part of me wouldn’t mind her staying but I’m curious on how that would actually play out.
I mean. I wouldn’t call it “stirring the pot”. She was explicitly burning bridges.
Which is an incredibly weird thing to do in the new place you just arrived at and plan on staying in for a bit.
Invading armies will often look for opportunities to destroy an enemy’s bridges prior to seizing the territory they’re in, and I can ALMOST make that into a metaphor that’s ALMOST applicable.
um, so, i’m very bad at military strategy having barely ever organized any territorial conquest whatsoever, but isn’t burning bridges the defensive army’s business usually?
so… Liz is being invaded… by… Christians? yeah that’s plausible. so, she’s burnt all her bridges: ok, that tracks. i think at this point she would be appealing to the UN for intervention (Sarah?) and frantically making shady arms deals with Russia (Joe???)… we’re on to something here Reltzik
Burning bridges is the business of the people who are less likely to use the bridges in the near future for critical purposes like troop movements or logistics. So if you’re mostly worried about the enemy moving troops or materiel across the bridges, you try to destroy them, and if you’re mostly worried about moving your own troops or materiel across the bridges, you secure them.
Prior to breaking through the front lines (or seizing an amphibious foothold, like happened in D-Day), the bridges are a liability to the invaders, because they allow the defenders to supply and reinforce threatened defenses and make it either impossible or at least far more difficult to break through in the first place. But once they’ve broken through the defensive lines, having SOME bridges in place are an advantage to the invader, and destroying bridges tend to be a bigger advantage for the defender.
But even then, the positions of the bridges and their uses can reverse that question. It can be worthwhile for invaders to use long-range artillery, air bombings, etc to destroy bridges that are more helpful to the enemy than themselves, such as those which would allow the defenders to combine forces that are otherwise isolated or which allow those forces to be supplied from logistics bases.
Finally, invading generals planning to live off the land (taking food and needed supplies either from seized logistic centers or the invaded population) have sometimes burned bridges (or ships, or whatever they would use to get back home) behind them. This is meant to express confidence in their own victory, prevent desertion by their soldiers, and force their units to fight to the last man, simply because retreat is no longer an option. But it also cuts off reinforcements, resupply, support, and even communications, and is thus almost always a Bad, Bad, Bad Idea. Since Liz is completely rational and not-at-all self-defeating in how she burns bridges, we can assume that her burnt bridges are not at all like this in any way, and we can ignore this type of bridge-burning for purposes of the analogy.
(Disclaimer: I’m not an expert. I simply have amateur interest and a well-established penchant for talking out of my ass.)
My guess is that Liz is homeless and lost her school funding because her parents kicked her out because she’s an atheist now. Liz is a substitute for Joyce (in my opinion), starting with her trying to have sex with Joe and still having to deal with the purity culture baggage from her upbringing, and is now substituting for Joyce becoming homeless and being abandoned by her family for being an atheist because 1)her dad is a decent human being and wouldn’t abandon his child, and 2)it would ruin the comic if Joyce had to leave university.
Basically, Liz is there to show what can happen to outed atheist children of very religious families. They don’t get made homeless as often as outed gay children, but it DOES happen.
IN MY OPINION, that’s the reason Liz was introduced. I suspected it with the ‘failure to lose virginity with Joe’ incident but i think it’s more likely now. And i admit i was annoyed that it wasn’t Joyce having the fail to sex/purity culture baggage incident at first, but now i realize that you can’t have Joyce become homeless without destroying the comic, so i’m ok with it.
I think your right, it feels narratively meaningful to for the current main conflict. There’s other possibilities but as you said, while not as often, it does happen. Plus we’ll get more of Sarah’s background and vibe, adds to why Sarah is so committed to her degree and can’t go back home.
Liz getting kicked out for being an Atheist is possible. Although I thought Sarah would have gotten some word of it over christmas. (I think she did spend at least some time with family over the holidays, didn’t she?)
I feel like another case of parents kicking their child out over religious matters might be a little…uh, repetitive. While I’m not saying it can’t happen multiple times, we’ve already got Becky, Jordan, Leslie, and probably more.
I think with having it be specific to atheism would add to the current storyline as at least 2 of those relate to homophobia. That doesn’t mean it will be atheism as we barely even know if it’s getting kicked out but it would add
Yes, it IS getting a little repetitive.
… oh, you mean in the comic. ;p
Jordan is purely speculative. All we know is that he’s estranged from his parents — we don’t know if he got kicked out, or if whatever-it-was happened after he was already out of the house and supporting himself, or if it was because of atheism or GRSM status or liberal political leanings or anything else. Getting kicked out for atheism plausible speculation, but still speculation. (Unless there was a big Patreon-comic reveal I missed?)
I’m still hoping for the Jordaning to be over something completely ridiculous, like “He once said mum’s favourite vase would look better two inches to the right”.
“He talked with his mouth full”
He told Joyce her fish would die. The next day? Dead!
Out of all the songs in that movie, I wasn’t expecting the Bruno-centric one to be the Big Popular Breakout Song. At least it wasn’t the droning, overly long introduction, though.
Ok, but that’s just witchcraft, obviously Carol would throw him out or try to have him exorcised.
In Jordan’s case, Hank/Carol made a comment about “losing” him… hard to tell from context, but it could mean that he was the one that decided to sever ties with the family (maybe he recognized to toxic environment?) rather than him getting “kicked out”.
That’s been my read too.
Could be, but even if he cut ties that doesn’t mean he wasn’t pushed.
Like if her mom had demanded Joyce abandon Becky and she severed ties with Carol instead, Carol would see that as “losing her”, but she could rightly see it as “kicked out”.
I’m admittedly hoping Jordan ISNT a good kid and that we’ll find out something terrible about him that Hank misunderstands.
The kinda misunderstandings Hank makes are “thinking godlessness and being a good person are the same thing, as expressed to Dorothy’s parents” and “marries Carol.”
His son who ran away and became a taboo subject for what Hank admitted came about because he squeezed too hard is probably not one of those.
being a bad* person
Like my brain, which comes up with two sentences when writing a post and then just kinda mashes them together however it feels like.
Eh, “losing him” could still mean they kicked him out. Many super religious families and groups and organizations (looking at you, JWs) engage in passive agressive victim blaming and gaslighting by accusing the victim of abandoning them by their choice, even while they’re throwing the victim’s possessions on the lawn. Claiming that being thrown out of the house is their fault, not the abusers’ beliefs and intentions and actions.
Incidentally, many christians try to rationalize hell this way, claiming that nonchristians ‘choose to go there’ instead of being thrown into it by the mad blood god of the desert. Gaslighting victims is a millennia-old practice.
Yeah, we definitely wouldn’t want to over-represent this real thing that happens with one major character and one minor supporting character.
Folks might get the wrong idea or something.
Agreed.
*pretends not to understand sarcasm*
Yeah, there’s too many possibilities with Jordan. Need more data.
GRSM? What’s that?
Gender, Romantic, and Sexual Minorities. (I’ve also seen it with the R and S swapped around.) It’s essentially a near-synonym of LGBT+ that’s been catching on fairly recently as a more-inclusive alternative without the need to either add a whole bunch of additional unwieldy letters for queer, asexual-spectrum, nonbinary, or intersex people, etc. or grouping them all under a single “+” at the end of the acronym.
I feel like Joyce already had a big trauma related to sex and isn’t trying to explore that very much right now.
Actually i think Willis originally set this up waaaay back in the beginning when Joyce went on her date with Joe (chaperoned by Mike). So she could revisit the sex thing when she needed a place to stay, having been made homeless.
But then as the comic went on, developments developed and he realized that it wouldn’t work or make sense in the comic anymore (Curses! Foiled by Joyce’s father, who turned out to be a decent human being!). Therefore Liz was invented to pursue this arc.
Be prepared for more about Liz, with Joyce nearby.
Yes, we figured, but WHY.
I’m going to place a bet here and say Liz ran away from her persona not was kicked out of her home. She wants to be with Sarah and live with her in what she imagines is a free and wild fun party place. So she never signed up for classes.
But it’s not easy to escape that.
Also a possibility. There’s still room for Liz’s arc to be many things.
Heck, she could just idolize her older sister and want to hang around her. Time will tell.
Sarah thinks Liz’ ride is to the southeast.
It’s okay, Sarah can probably just throw her all the way there.
Uhmm… if data about College Dropout Rates is true, then we should have a third of the casting missing by sophomore year. That makes for a terrible narrative if anyone that has some drama just dissappears… But seriously, Walky should have been a dropout a long time ago if not by some computer magics… same for Amber because of the financial cost of judicial trial alone, if not for her new dad. So to be closer to reality, we can have lots of homeless students droping out of other universities and hanging around this one
https://educationdata.org/college-dropout-rates
Eh, I dunno. If I were craving something 100% realistic, I wouldn’t be looking at web comics of all things.
Dropouts are probably not randomly distributed. Certainly my college didn’t lose 30% of its freshmen.
Dropping out also makes it less likely for a character to interact with those still enrolled and living in dorms, so has a narrative strike against it, until you want to get rid of characters. Ethan going on leave could have made sense.
I dunno IU’s rules, but if Walky failed a course, that would probably just mea not getting the credit and maybe having to take it again later, not dropping out. He’s got well-off parents, so losing scholarship money probably isn’t an issue.
Also, whatever kept Walky here wasn’t computer magics – Amber did that before midterms, so it would have had minimal effect on his final grade. It likely made him feel like he still had a chance and he apparently learned at least a bit about coping with his ADHD.
Actually it would depend on the university and the particulars of the class.
Depending on how they calculate the grades, it might be possible that Walky continued to do poorly for the remainder of the year, but bumping up his grades on the mid-terms made his marks overall just barely enough to pass.
The other question is… how many classes was he struggling in? I suspect he was a poor student in general, but its possible that he did ok in some classes (like Gender Studies) because the teachers were better/he was more interested/tests were easier.
It was before the midterms. Quizzes and homework for the first month and a half or so. He went and took the midterm after the kidnapping.
Now, in my experience realism of high school and college romance means a lot of churn, which we’ve seen, but also some couples who broke up getting back together. Sometimes multiple times. Despite teasing with Dorothy and Walky, and Ruth and Jennifer, we’ve set to see that.
One failed class doesn’t turn you into a dropout. Have you … done college?
Generally speaking, college is time-sensitive but additive. You pass classes to gain credits. Credits contribute to your certification or degree. There might be an additional hurdle or two, like required volunteering stints or dissertation defenses or residencies, but those are specific to stuff. Credits are good for a number of years, after which they no longer count and you have to retake stuff if you want the cert.
Specific things have minimum requirements. Like, you can’t live at the dorm if you’re not taking a certain number of credits per semester. You’d probably get assigned a guidance counselor to push you along if you go too slow. But the real problem is that you become a social pariah: the old person who failed out of last year’s cohort and has to sit with the kids to redo everything.
But most likely, it’s your parents who are, y’know, paying for everything who’ll pull you out. Or your scholarship, which demands a high GPA, drops you and you can’t afford to retake. Because if a student can afford tuition on their own, they can go at whatever pace they want.
Dropping out is mostly an economic decision, not an academic one.
In your country, are the colleges run almost entirely with profit in mind, are they designed to funnel a disproportionate and unreasonable amount of funds into their mediocre sports programs, and are the degrees they award worth less than the paper they’re printed on?
If they’re not like that, then I guess I can understand the stricter guidelines for grades and such. If they’re about as worthless as the debt factories here in the USA, then somethin’ screwy is goin’ on.
A story about college students doesn’t work if they all drop out.
‘I killed and ate him when he dropped me off, here. I’d just take the car, but I have no license, so it’s not legal to drive.’
At least she’s got her priorities right.
Just compare how many people get in trouble for driving without a license, vs how many get in trouble for killing someone and eating their corpse. Clearly law enforcement is far more interested in catching the former than the latter, so that makes it more dangerous.
I see absolutely no flaws in this line of thought. Clearly you and I understand the intricacies of crime, the both of us.
I’m not actually your sister, I’m a shapeshifting alien from Altair, my mission is to infiltrate humans to evaluate their potential for domestication. now i have a few questions, number 1, how long do humans live in captivity?
She doesn’t have any friends left, does she? oh
Seems like the “friends” she left at Sphere Province weren’t the sort of friends one wants to keep, really.
Well, only if you’re a square.
In the words of Huey Lewis, “It’s hip to be a square.“
Aren’t hips more triangular though?
Maybe if you’re after fuckin’ Lara Croft.
Which, yeah. Fair.
Hmm, I’m coming around to “Liz dropped out” as what’s going on, but I think it’ll still be resolved unless Liz flat out joins the cast like Becky did.
Like she was having trouble in her first semester, went back home for break, and then didn’t re-enroll but didn’t tell her mom, so come move-in day she went to visit Sarah. That or she just really does not want to go back and telling her mom isn’t going to go swimmingly.
Her wanting to sleep with Joe came off to me as wanting to prove herself to her friends at Ball State, like she’d walk back in there and put up with the same crap but thinking to herself “they don’t know me, I banged a hot boy and did weed drugs,” but “this is wrong, I should be with my friends” could also mean that she sees her running away as wrong on top of her ingrained sexual puritan fears.
(and while I’m still pushing my “Sarah didn’t help Dana as much as she thought she did” theory, it’d sure be something if she was very insistent on calling her mom over Liz’s protests, to Liz’s own detriment)
I like this theory, especially given that ‘I was thrown out of home and kicked out of school because I stopped god-bothering’ feels a lot like a lower-stakes version of the story already done with Becky. ‘I didn’t do well enough in school to keep my scholarship and I’m too scared to admit to pressure-y stepmom that I’m a failure’ or something similar feels like a better option to me. (Especially since we don’t actually know how intensely Christian Sarah and Liz’s family is; there’s been a lot of assumption made that it’s Joyce’s level of death-cult as a matter of course, but to me Sarah herself refutes that. If only because there’s been no indication that she’s ever recognized Joyce’s pile of stuff that personally. As she would, if it had ever been her life too.)
We do know for sure that the only reason Sarah can afford college is scholarships. We know they’re grade-dependent, that even one bad semester means she’s done for good. That ‘mediocre grades’ might well mean the same as ‘bad grades’. That’s an assumption I have no problem applying to Liz: her Ball State attendance was dependent on stellar grades, and she didn’t manage it, didn’t tell anyone about it for shame, and is now in a serious pickle.
In short, I really want this story to be about Sarah and Liz, not ‘Joyce is so lucky her dad’s not that terrible’.
Yeah I don’t think Liz’s folks are on the level of “hurt my daughter for leaving Christ,” though it’s certainly possible Sarah wouldn’t know either way since they don’t live together, Liz probably didn’t grow up a full-on fundie even if she’s meant to be strikingly similar to Joyce vis a vis her relationship with Sarah.
I wrote this below, but I wonder if Liz is actually still a Christian and she’s rejecting it because of how she’s treated at Ball State. Her views on sex defiling her are pretty darn Christian-brand puritanism, its possible the stepmom in this case is her dad’s new wife (since she and Sarah just share a mother) and that’s who she feels she has to capitulate to, where her and Sarah’s biomom is just not living with either of her kids. I have a hard time believing Liz’s mom married another woman but then they’d be ultra harsh to their daughter for not sticking to Christ, but I dunno, maybe openly queer religious fundies exist.
Soooo yeah, could be a lot of things. Bullying so she doesn’t want to go back, losing a scholarship so she can’t, being afraid of her stepmom finding out and her home not being safe.
I think the biggest evidence that Liz is probably not someone kicked out for atheism is the fact that Sarah seems pretty indifferent to religion and on seemingly fine terms with her parents.
Liz isn’t pretending to be Christian for either of her parents, it’s her stepmother. Liz and Sarah only share a mom, so whoever Liz’s dad and stepmom are we don’t know their deal and Sarah’s got nothing to do with them.
Get back to where you once belonged
Well, that was that for Mediocre Sunday. Hello, Intense Sunday!
Wait hold up, Liz pretends to be still be Christian to “get her stepmoms off her case”(which the comments section informed that this plural is a thing in AAVE), and she and Sarah are half-sisters through their mom.
So did her mom marry another woman? Maybe the stepmom in this case is the wife of Liz’s dad? She wouldn’t have to perform for her stepmom if that was just Sarah’s dad’s wife, a guy she is totally unrelated to.
You think maybe she’s still Christian and rebelling against her peer group more than she is that? With that in mind and the heavy parallels between her and Joyce, where Joyce broke because it was all bullshit, maybe the idea is kinda like “Liz is Joyce if she still kept her faith where much like Joyce, her friends keep treating her like a punching bag for being a naive weirdo.”
I’m thinking the family tree is like this:
manA and womanA have sarah
manA and womanA divorce
womanA marries manB and has liz
womanA and manB divorce
manB marries womanB and womanB is the one being weird about enforcing christianity
Yeah, I’m wondering that too.
Maybe Sarah and Liz’s mom isn’t living with either of herk ids.
both are surnamed Clinton, which suggest they both took their mother’s name.
Who was the ride anyway
He never showed up, his car was found abandoned in the woods with no one inside.
man door hand hook car door
Joe, almost.
^^ Underrated,
Do you want smartass/thirsty answers? Or do you want the real answer, which is “Probably nobody”?
Finally she admitted it!
If I didn’t know they were sisters, that last panel would have me thinking we were at the start of a beautiful lesbian romance.
I guarantee you that their sibling status is about as much of a deterrent for some folks as “but Castiel has never even interacted with The Doctor!”.
Here, if you called it, you can say so here:
Called it! XD
The line’s been busy for days because everybody called it.
Sarah desperately tries to stop the drama. No such luck
Knew it
Getting some early “Becky” vibes from Liz here.
Yeeeep, this is going where folks expected it to go. The only question now is if “I don’t have a ride” means she got ditched or if she never had one in the first place.
I’m thinking this is going to be a confession about how she has no friends.
If she has no friends, at least she knows there’s people at IU who are down to make out on occasion.
A part of me is always shocked when a sitcom esk premise isn’t drawn out forever.
I see that Liz probably sneaked off to her sisters college to get away from her family/college/expectations?? But her character is very obnoxious to me (no offense). I get that she’s young and immature and berating Christianity. Being against Christianity isn’t bad if but it was written was very childish and I couldn’t take her seriously. Then after planting the seeds of doubt and drama in Joyce and Becky she doesn’t even apologize for her behavior. Then she constantly pops around lying that she’s going to her ride soon and that got really annoying. I’m sorry if I’m bashing her character but I hope she eventually matures bit by bit because I see her involuntarily sowing more chaos without reprimanding.
Assuming that Liz’s situation is the same as Becky’s, the big difference in the end is that Sarah hates her sister, and will not put up with that BS for longer than it takes to make the phone call to their parent.
It’ll be fine.
Nothing bad ever happened when Sarah called someone’s parent to come pick them up over any objections.
It’s funny that you write that Sarah hates her as I wanna go “noooo she loves her deep down” and nowadays I just think that’s still hate. If you love someone and you’re just actively incapable of being there for them unless you’re in a crisis, that’s actually just hate.
Motherfuckers walking around like their Han Solo. Just be as huge a dick as you want all the time, be as aggressively spiteful and unwilling to engage with the slightest emotional labour, but then as long as you help out one time you’re actually a cool badass rogue and you’ve earned sufficient points to continue being terrible forever.
Yeah. Definitely see that happen.
Sarah does not hate her sister: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-12/01-sister-christian/edible/
“Nope, I’m staying here just like Becky!”
Yeah, this reveal does not surprise me at all.