Unrelatedly, I accidentally clicked Report comment on your comment, there is no undo and am very sorry. Somehow the web site reacted immediately, instead of waiting for minutes like on daily refresh. You’re not a terrorist in my book. Probably. Even if that Brown-ian motion race simulator game is vexing.
Don’t sweat it. Putting the two links that close together is an invitation for accidents, so you weren’t the first and won’t be the last. I’ve even done it once or twice myself. Good news is, I understand it takes five reports before a comment is flagged for moderation, and even if five people have the same accident Willis can just restore the comment if it isn’t actually offensive.
Of course, since the Bulmerian majority group are all born terrorists and have to be killed before they can do anything to challenge the minority rule, protesting against the university paying for the bombs to kill those children is terrorism, pure and simple.
No but really there was a group in blue uniforms who “terrorized” the protest. . .
Like I said, I want more info on Bulmeria in-universe versus trying to draw parallels to RL events or using it as a commentary on the RL events. Because it’s not a good 1:1 parallel and only is going to annoy fans when it remains a backdrop for Yuri disaster antics.
Yeah, terrorists. The people who peacefully protest and then have armed and armoured thugs chase them off. You know, the classical meaning of the word…
The length of Willis’ buffer means I’m pretty sure he can see the future for some of this stuff.
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television,
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
A sadly common tactic. Authoritarian governments often describe any dissent as terrorism or throw around vague, open ended charges such as “inciting civil unrest” to quash any opposition. I can remember a time when Americans were proud to think (however accurately or not) that only happened in “other” countries.
Yes I don’t think he’s deadnaming and misgendering Jocelyn on purpose to spite her, he’s only focused on the protest in of itself and Jocelyn is still closeted to him
I imagine jocelyne hasn’t had time to tell him, that said, interesting that the protesters are painted as the ‘terrorists’ when they’re very anti missles about bulmeria or so versus joce suddenly starting to work for Ruttech
Given the irl political comparisons, Bulmeria is using the excuse of fighting insurgency for their war crimes, which is presumably a defense being parroted uncritically by right-leaning news sources. Ergo, people protesting Bulmeria are “supporting terrorism”.
I would give Willis the entire internet if it turns out Hank knows Joyce and Dorothy kissed (and possibly Jocelyn is trans) but is more concerned about the Bulmerian activism thing.
yeah being the most progressive of the fundie parents isn’t saying much
it’s basically like being the tallest dwarf
and yeah @Serendipity I doubt “captured” is really the word I’d use, given how he and the rest of the cult basically already agreed with the militarists and colonists to begin with
It’s possible he’s just watching hte mainstream media that slants it a way versus actually doing all the info, b/c other than that one guy with a mustache and leslie/robin i imagine most of the protesters were college age/among the uyounger crowd than coloser to hanks age
I’m irritated by the double standard about reasonableness. People who call the protesters “terrorists” are expected to be considered “reasonable conservatives”, but if someone were to call out the police brutality at the protest, nobody on the right would call them a “reasonable liberal”.
The fact that they did grade on a curve is unrelated to the fact that you (and they) don’t have to grade on a curve. Especially when it comes to saying people “fell in with terrorists” because they . . . (checks notes) protested against an ongoing genocide. Even on a curve that still gets you an F.
Yes, and I’m sure that’s what Hank’s heard about the protests. Fox News and Friends came on and spent the entire episode talking about how these kids were just peacefully protesting a genocide, and now he’s decided that means these people have fallen in with terrorists.
Or, you know, news sources that he’s been using for most of his adult life, and has been thoroughly indoctrinated by, told him that Bulmeria is only trying to defend itself after a particularly heinous assault instigated for no reason whatsoever by the unnamed population of terrorists (seriously have we still not named the equally fictional group being genocided?). The fact that even the mainstream media talked about the incident in question, and the attack really was rather monstrous, muddies the waters even further.
I’d love to see a Jocelyn/Hank discussion about the issue. Hank’s shown he can be reasoned with, and even recognize something being wrong on his own (see his reaction to the comments about Becky in the church). He just needs context and patience to be guided along the path. THAT is the ‘curve’ on which he should be graded.
(The attitude that everyone should already be in the same starting point as the most aggressive progressives, or else they are irredeemable, is straight-up the reason I tend to cringe every time Roz speaks.)
A bunch of people in the last Prez election applied this reasoning, and didn’t show up to vote because they ‘refused to support Democrats who sponsored war crimes’. Ask the Palestinian people how that tactic worked for them.
For me, I absolutely refuse to make any associations about Bulmeria’s stance and RL. Because it sucks the humor out of the comic. Hank’s opinion is about a purely fictional event that has no relation the RL event.
Ideological capture is when people become convinced, by listening to the arguments of people who are not me, of systemic opinions that are different from mine.
Or he fell for the lies people are telling about why their actions are good actually. That does happen- sometimes perfectly decent folks get fooled into thinking that a person or group is doing something good/isn’t doing a particular bad thing, and that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be utterly horrified if they knew the truth about that person/group’s actions.
I disagree. I find people like Hank are usually not half bad at raising genuinely good people because the things they preach are good they simply for some odd fucking reason don’t listen to anything they preach and twist it in their own fucked up mind
Right, the centre/left is also ideologically aligned currently with IDF support. The narrative of mainstream offline media sources is almost exclusively support for Israel though empathy for civilians in the crossfire, with blame on the terrorist org/govt, as all propaganda is justifying bombing schools and hospitals because supposedly they’re being held as hostages.
I would suspect Raida more. She seems pretty annoyed at the two of them. Especially if she catches them keeping their mouth shut to their dad about how they feel about the entire thing she might go ‘Oh, you love making the protest all about you to the point of being the headliner, but don’t have the guts to talk to your dad? Since you love people who air dirty laundry to their parents, let me give you a taste’
Raidah does seem more likely. She’s kind of awful.
Jennifer’s restraint telling Walky about their literal dirty laundry says she would actively avoid it. But if she’s flanked by Alice, good fucking luck.
I don’t think Raidah would do that intentionally out of malice if she knew Joyce and Dorothy hadn’t actually intended to be out, but she’s working with incomplete information and I can see her confronting them about it while Hank is around.
Damn, At least it isn’t transphobia in this case, it is literally not knowing his family and still being in the bubble of thinking that protesting genocide is somehow terrorism. While that is still bad and makes me lose some respect points at least it is not out and out transphobia or I would have some serious beef with the better of Joyce’s parents.
as a trans woman, you 100% should still have beef with this guy, he just said opposing genocide makes you a terrorist. you under no circumstances gotta hand it to him
Dude listens to Fox News. All protests are terrorism, because they disrupt the civil order or whatever. Maybe I’m just too inured to casual bigotry from my own folks but this seems pretty normal to me. Not that it makes any of it better, but this is entirely within my expectations of Hank – his viewpoints come from conservative radio, but he can be reasoned with, and he’s not innately hateful.
Well, it isn’t transphobia *yet*. I think Jocelyn being Jocelyn and Joyce being unstraight is going to burst a lot of bubbles here. It’s like the last Pope was the “cool” Pope, but he was still the head of the Catholic Church and he didn’t light it on fire, so he was only slightly better by comparison.
As I said yesterday, just because he’s accepting of one thing doesnt mean hes immediately unearned all his hateful beliefs
Also the banner for me right is blowjob cat ominously peeking over the comic, that doesnt have anything to do with anything, I’m just amused by it and felt like pointing it out
You ARE aware that people don’t turn on a dime, right? Hank is likely misinformed about foreign politics, so he goes with what is being reported on the news.
And if this is like real life, then we know what is being reported on the news.
I wanna give Hank some leeway as he’s likely a well meaning guy but the place we’re at in conservative politics he likely aligns with doesn’t really give us much opportunity to for that. At the end of the day he isjust a character though so it’s up to the reader to figure out where they a]stand on him with the information given. What’s Hank’s opinion on Jan 6th? How’s he feel about trans rights, healthcare, critical race theory, DEI? Can we just lightning round some questions on him real quick?
Well, he could vote for both his daughters to have a coming out party?
I mean, that’s both unlikely and almost certainly not what you meant, but sometimes it’s nice to have a pleasant daydream.
Prejudice, racial and otherwise, is like lead poisoning; it takes time to get it out of your bones. You keep discovering things. Speaking from experience.
Ok I’m enjoying these two buffoons very much! can we please not have them talking about Bulmeria, though? You know, the fictional country where both Muslims automatically have a personal stake in it but none of the Jews do. We don’t also need another Western Christian point of view about it. Just please, please just stop with Bulmeria stuff.
(Note, this is not an invitation to talk about real-world politics with me. Please be kind about my ongoing trauma in this area. Thank you.)
I meant Hank’s Western Christian point of view.
I don’t think that Willis is Christian, nor that they agree with Hank.
(Hank’s pov is also definitely not well-informed or nuanced, what with calling them ‘that terrorist crowd’ right out of the gate, and immediately putting them as the opposites of good-hearted and moral. That is wack, and he’ll just continue to annoy me.)
I’m not bringing it up, it’s already brought.
But I know it’s weird. It’s a clumsy and triggered response. I can own the weird.
I’ll try to think of a response that avoids the specific type of comment that bothers me the very most. I’m concerned that if I’m like, “please don’t say super specific things such as…” it’s like an invitation for a certain kind of person to be like “SUPER SPECIFIC THING HAHAHA”. You know? I’ll try to work on my request sometime, but in the meantime, that’s what I’ve got.
I do repeat myself sometimes, because there are a lot of comments on this site, and many people only read comments occasionally. I don’t expect others to have seen or remembered my personal triggers and preferences.
Thank you for reading this long screed, I hope it helps clarify.
I find it weird how every time this topic comes up in a DoA strip, your comments are some strange concerns about how Willis isn’t depicting how American Jews might feel about the situation, and nothing about the actual people protesting against genocide or the people who are trying to survive the genocide. I’m not sure what your trauma about this is, but it’s odd that you post these comments and then don’t want anyone to reply.
I’m an American Jew.
My concerns aren’t strange to me.
Protesters and their supporters are already extremely well-represented in the comments here. Survivors probably don’t read this site.
like, I’m Jewish and have young cousins in “”Bulmeria”” who are now without a mother because of what’s happening, I worry sick about them every day
and NGL, I also resent the lack of depth with which the conflict has been explored in-comic so far since the heat of the protest, I really hope Willis takes the opportunity to introduce much needed nuance to this really sensitive issue affecting us
I hope that they and everyone else suffering in “Bulmeria” will be okay, though I know that will probably not and maybe will never be the case because of how awful the situation is. Everything really does feel like it is going to hell in a handbasket. I had former dormmates that were from “Bulmeria”, and while we weren’t close enough to stay in touch after college, I do really wish I could find out how they and their families are doing. I shudder just imagining what the desperation and despair that people with family over there must have.
As gently as I can: just based on other hanging threads in this storyline (Carla comes to mind immediately), I don’t think this is phasing out of relevance anytime soon, no matter how many times you ask.
Perhaps it’s silly, but Willis comics have literally been my one constant thing — even with everything else falling apart and getting knitted back in new ways, all the kinds of things that can happen in the decades that I’ve been enjoying the comic and comments. You know?
It’s hard and very sad for me to have to give them up.
If you don’t want to talk about real world politics, stop doing so.
“Do not interact” requests are for preventing people from initiating a particular conversation with you, not for shutting down public disagreement with you after you express your views.
Did Wills say that Bulmeria had any Jewish population at all? Did I miss that somewhere? I know everyone thinks Bulmeria is “secretly Gaza and Willis is a coward” but other than the protest location and the sign slogans (which could easily happen for any genocide/war on that scale) I’m not sure why it’s specifically Gaza?
Maybe I just haven’t been paying enough attention, but I was under the impression that Bulmeria was a stand-in for a lot of different situations all kind of mashed up into one. So it’s going to share similarities with Gaza as well as other situations, like what’s happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A genocide during a civil war where the USA and the UK are helping to fund violence between two ethnic groups. Where millions of people have died and millions more have been displaced in a war that has lasted decades.
What’s happening in Gaza is horrific, there’s absolutely no arguing with that if you’re a decent human being, but what you’re taking from Bulmeria (and what many others have taken from Bulmeria) is not necessarily “fact” so much as “personal reading” of the text. If I’m wrong and it has been confirmed by the author to be Gaza (rather than sharing things in common with protests against the genocide) then I would be happy to be proven incorrect.
Sadly, it’s not a unique situation, and there are other examples I just didn’t feel like making myself miserable looking up specific details on other real-world atrocities. If it’s triggering you to read the comic and to read comments that disagree with you, I invite you to take care of yourself and stop reading. I certainly have done so during topics in the comic where I either didn’t feel like watching a white person stumble through The Discourse, or where I was becoming upset at comments or the comic itself.
I mean. The fact that “everyone thinks Bulmeria is secretly Gaza and Willis is a coward” is causing the comment section to talk a lot about Gaza, and Willis did specifically respond to criticism of the handling of the protest by trying to bring more focus onto their Muslim characters, while continuing to not have their Jewish characters have any feelings about it, and that combination is, I think, what Leorale is being triggered by.
“Everyone” keeps talking about it like it IS Gaza, and Willis is treating those criticisms as fair but seemingly only trying to add more nuance to one part of their portrayal, and… yeah.
To put my feelings out there:
I think we should be able to criticize what Israel is doing AND acknowledge the rise of antisemitism. I think we can care about Islamophobia without pretending that Muslims are the only group getting scape goated and attacked overseas. I think the fact that the Trump administration is deliberately putting a fake Jewish face on some of their authoritarianism (targeting protestors and claiming it’s because of antisemitism, very loudly exempting Jewish people from their anti-DEI policies in some cases…) is bad for Jewish folks. We can remember that most self-proclaimed “Zionists” are evangelical Christians who believe Israel is necessary for the Christian apocalypse, antisemites who want to see all Jewish people “self-deported” from their countries, or both.
I absolutely didn’t say we couldn’t acknowledge the rise of antisemitism (though I question whether it ever receded enough to call it a rise, people are sincerely horrid to Jewish people). Literally didn’t even use the word antisemitism in my post, and I’d be super okay with watching the comic and the Jewish characters within the comic confront that (except I worry that trying to be funny about it would fall flat because it’s a very serious issue, and the upset comments would get worse very quickly – for good reason).
I also didn’t pretend any such thing about Muslims. I don’t actually think that Willis was responding to criticism about the protest specifically. I think they were responding to criticism about having ZERO muslim characters in the main cast and yet constantly using them as foils without allowing any real characterization of them outside “kind of a jerk”. Either way, it doesn’t mean Bulmeria is specifically and ONLY Gaza.
I don’t think anything I said is something Leorale needs defending from. I was making a point about the comic and the way people are reacting to it with personal biases (because that’s how people interact with art) and asking that we try to separate that from “truth” when we don’t actually know, and when there ARE other options.
I asked if we ever had any information to suggest that Bulmeria (not Gaza, Bulmeria) had any Jewish population at all. Because if it doesn’t, that might be why the two Jewish people didn’t seem to have much interest in the situation. I also suggested that Leorale take a break instead of running into the sharp end of something hurting them, repeatedly. Because I’ve found that taking breaks is helpful.
None of that was about you, and I’m sorry it seemed otherwise. I was just laying down my own feelings on the I/P issue generally.
The bits before “to put my feelings out there” were about the comment section / Willis more generally and what might lead Leorale to have had the reaction she’s saying she’s having to Bulmeria coming up again in the comic, bc yeah, the comic itself hasn’t said it’s Israel, but so many people are treating it that way, and I can definitely see the argument for, say, the strip where Asma put down the bolt cutters and looked anguished as indicating that she has a personal connection to Bulmeria, tying back into the idea that it’s either Israel or Palestine (though more likely Israel, if it has to be either, given the mentioned protest signs).
I sincerely apologize for the communication snafu here, bc yeah, that whole second half of my comment was me trying to put my cards down on the table for how I feel about the political issue, not accusing you of anything. Only one of my comments even really has to do with something I’ve seen HERE, and that was a commenter demanding in a rather snide tone to know whether another commenter’s mention of antisemitism in the US was “real” or “just people being anti-genocide”. Which sadly is absolutely not the first time I’ve seen someone take that stance, that because SOME bad faith actors are taking ALL criticism of Israel to be antisemitism, there must not be real antisemitism happening, especially in leftist movements. Which is of course sadly VERY untrue.
I cannot emphasize enough that you can BOTH speak out against antisemitism AND acknowledge that Israel is an ethnostate built by US Imperialists for the purpose of controlling the Middle East — white colonists for decades now continue to rob Jews and Muslims alike and let them blame each other
Israel’s government is more than happy to let hatred towards them spill unto Jews the world around, they are no democracy, the country is no safe haven for us, not in the slightest
but of course that don’t stop many white folk from falling back on supporting it on account that on some level they realize they have basically ZERO in terms of an actual pro-Jewish praxis
I don’t want this Jewish reservation I could be shoved into so the rest of the world can continue to be hateful of us, I want the world to be less hateful
I feel like John Oliver covered what was actually probably Trump’s motive when targeting universities, and it wasn’t antisemitism. I also think there is a vast difference between being frustrated with a country’s government vs racist/biased against its citizens (or the ethnicity or religion the citizens are). I remember being frustrated by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars when I was growing up, but I mostly didn’t blame the soldiers for just doing what they were told to do in a very stressful situation (there were some soldiers that did some very bad things). I also, unfortunately, have to realize that some people are not great at recognizing the difference themselves and can blame everyone for the fault of the few.
I also acknowledge that it is very easy for people to live in bubbles nowadays. It isn’t just that people need to go outside and touch grass, but they also need to leave their communties and areas full of people like them and have a general talk and peaceful interaction with people different than them. Even then, you can get some weird blips in someone’s mind, where they hate illegal immigrants as a generalization, but José who they meet on a regular basis is perfectly okay, even though he might be an illegal immigrant. People also act in odd ways when they are in a constant stressful situation that feels like (or actually is) life vs death. I think the goal should be preventing people from feeling like they are in that situation rather than dealing with it after the situation has already degraded to that point. That isn’t always possible, but I do wish that we would try more as a society.
@Nymph: He hasn’t said anything about Jews at all. Or I think about Muslims in Bulmeria. Certainly not in the comic itself, but possibly in comments about it?
Nonetheless, the protest was a very close parallel for the start of the Gaza protests at IU last year. The encampment, the last minute change in rules from the college board that tried to shut it down the first day. And obviously the demands and the talk of genocide. The thing they’re protesting might not be exactly the same, but the protest itself was drawn straight out of the headlines, as they say.
Yes, I acknowledged that there were parts that DID parallel Gaza. And then I gave an example of how other parts of the Bulmeria thing parallel a different civil war/genocide.
My point wasn’t “no part of this is Gaza” my point was “It isn’t supposed to be a 1-to-1 representation of a single crisis and I’m not sure why people are treating it like it is”.
Why does he think Jocelyne is on the side of the people who are using school money to fund bombs being made and used against foreigners? Y’know, the terrorists.
because when white fundies say “terrorist”, that’s shorthand for “non-white people who they afraid gonna blow up a plane or something”
imperialists and their supporters may be using the same English words and grammar, but mind you they are speaking a very different language than we are
It’s off-color and relies on stereotypes, but I’m reminded of a John Caparulo bit where he’s complaining about airport security being way too intense and he says “Black people are not gonna hijack the plane!😠 …They’re gonna talk through the whole fuckin’ movie 😒, but they’re not gonna kill anybody🙄.” I don’t know much about Caparulo’s personal politics, but I think about that quote a lot.
It takes a lot to unlearn all of this stuff. Joyce has the benefit of an environment conducive to that process. Hank doesn’t, so it’s going to take him longer if it’s to happen at all. I’m really pulling for it to happen.
Also this was written about a year ago, so the real-life equivalent still had more mainstream apologists and not as many publicized warcrimes to refute them yet
This. I feel like people are forgetting that while Hank is working on unlearning some of these things – accepting that Becky likes girls but still adjusting to her having a girlfriend, accepting that Joyce is friends with an atheist but still working on resisting the kneejerk responses on how to talk to one, going against the church telling everyone Toedad was right and should have their full support and empathy to the point of divorcing Carol – he’s got twice the years of indoctrination that Joyce has and none of the environment to push him towards it other than Joyce, and to some extent Jocelyne.
I do think there’s hope for him to come around, but someone who’s been a fundie for at least a good 40-50 years isn’t going to be able to drop their entire default worldview in a matter of months with only minimal pressure to do so. I’m hoping him realizing he has at least two queer kids – two kids whom he actively acknowledges as kind and intelligent – is going to motivate him even more towards it, but in the meantime, he’s going to have to work on a lot of biases and prejudices that come from decades in an incredibly hostile and manipulative environment designed around framing everyone else as the enemy.
If anything it’s amazing how much he’s grown in the six months of the strip. He isn’t even in the college environment that Joyce is. I presume he’s still regularly clocking in on his day job and being exposed to the same environment that promoted (or at least tolerated) his previous way of thinking.
Makes me wonder if he’s gotten help from some people from work who beforehand found it very awkward to talk to him.
I sort of picture him as Alador Blight after Odelia’s insufferability became, well, insufferable. He’d been accommodating her for years until the divorce, and now he’s looking for his own center.
Seriously. People are acting shocked that a grown man hasn’t just instantly accepted and unlearned a lifetime’s worth of beliefs in a month or two. Things take time and the more deeply ingrained beliefs are the longer it takes to unravel them. And demonizing people for not immediately becoming perfect just pushes them away
On the other hand, Hank seems laser focused on her involvement in the protest – now you could argue he’s maliciously deadnaming and misgendering her but I personally don’t get that from the way he’s emphasizing “falling in with terrorists”” in the context of the protest
Yeah, he’s focused on the protest, so I can’t imagine he’s got any idea about Jocelyne. That doesn’t mean he isn’t transphobic, just that this isn’t about transphobia.
Still not sure what to make of the “before you hear it from Dad” comment, but it’s looking less and less like he knows.
More than anything, Hank seems concerned about his child being at a protest because he doesn’t want his child hurt. There WAS a sniper at that very same protest. Keeping in mind also everything that happened to Joyce in the first semester alone…
Eh, that *was* my assumption, but this comic seems more like he’s concerned with the idea that his child is on the wrong *side* of the political issue, which is a bit disappointing.
He’s an old white straight man, I expect no more from him than I do my own old white relations who repeat awful, uninformed things on facebook. Not that it is okay, just that I’m realistic in what I expect to come from Hank.
Nah you know what, you’re right. Hank, a character who is shown to love his daughter Joyce, doesn’t love her or any of his kids at all. In fact, he wants to kill them with his own hands like Abraham to Isaac. There, is that better?
I mean, he certainly doesn’t want his kids hurt, but he hasn’t said anything that suggests he’s considered the possibility. He’s worried that they didn’t raise Jocelyne right and that’s she’s falling in with the wrong crowd, not about police violence.
At least judging by what he’s said. More may come in in the next few strips of course.
Disappointing, but sadly unsurprising. Unfortunately, it’d be more surprising if Hank didn’t consider the protesters terrorists; you don’t unlearn forty-plus years of bigotry and fearmongering in a matter of months. Not that that excuses anything.
He has, kind of, but it’s not something that’s going to happen all at once. Opening his heart to include gay people that are close to him is probably an easier ask than unlearning foreign policy positions spoon fed to him by Fox News for years.
I don’t know if this comment will make it through because the site is loading extremely slow again. But I guess I have a different reason to be disappointed in Hank than I expected. People protesting against genocide are not siding with terrorists, and the victims trying to survive a genocide are not terrorists as well.
Umm, if he isn’t going by pictures, where did he get the idea that his third child was at the protest? Does he have a locator trace on her phone or something?
Hank is going by pictures. The picture he texted to Joyce, not the new one with the kiss in today’s IDS (which he almost certainly hasn’t seen yet). The fact that he didn’t realize Jocelyne (in that texted photo) is presenting female is probably due to it being not the highest quality photo, and also her coat camouflaging her shape and female-presenting clothing. (Her hair is only a little bit longer than when she was still passing as male.)
Locator would still trace her phone to campus, though, right? Which would be a bit of a dead giveaway, especially if Joyce has no siblings with her when he shows up at her room.
She was staying with local friends, and left her phone presumably at their place, which could be a visit unrelated to the protest. She did have her phone when she visited Joyce in the dorm on Thursday.
I feel like a monkey paw finger curled for the people unhappy that the “Bulmeria” conflict got glossed past. I mean… We all know perfectly well that it’s Israel in a funny hat, and that works okay for a passing jab, but if we’re actually focusing on it, at some point you need to either drop the funny hat or make substantive changes. I don’t know how you drop the funny hat short of straight-up retconning the previous strips, and making substantive changes loses any teeth on the actual situation, so what are we doing here?
Despite Hank’s stance here, I kind of doubt we’re going to spend a lot of time with Jocelyne and him debating the origins and politics of the Bulmeria conflict.
Well as a transmasc Palestinian this plotline certainly… is. I mean I think Willis is handling both aspects respectfully and I’m gonna keep reading but I suspect this arc is gonna be high in my spoons quota.
This is kind of my concern. Willis is trying to desperately course-correct and make up for using the protest as a backdrop for dojo’s queer awakening, but the flailing may actually cause more collateral damage to vulnerable and/or demoralised readers, this sort of storyline really needs methodical plotting with a sense of clarity, or else it risks draining and alienating large swathes of the reader base.
Hank is still in the conservative right hemisphere so pulling him into the light was obviously not going to be easy….Still grinds my gears knowing that the prime minister of certain other countries can basically call the college students of our nation Hitler youth for not agreeing with the idea of using our resources to help them blow up civilian wemon & children and our government would just side against our own.
Fun fact, the UN icommission of inquiry declared that Israel’s has committed acts of genocide in Gaza so far under four of five definitions of genocidal actions. Mainstream media in the US and some parts of Europe may still treat this like a fringe take, but globally the attitude is very much in line with the protest depicted here.
Yeah those damn terrorists with their anti-bomb anti-genocide agenda. I can’t believe a good-hearted, moral, sensible person would fall in with a crowd like THAT. /s
I can’t guarantee it, but I will say even though I like and support this comic and this storyline, the panic energy on the girls seems to be directly correlating to the panic Willis is likely going through trying to ensure to give the “bulmeria” conflict the gravitas it is due, and likely we will see the effort to bolster the SWANA representation in the coming days and weeks, which I support though think this really needed more time and clarity to address, which I realise given the blowback, this may be the lesser of two evils, and that as much as this storyline feels like a series of awkward stumbles, it would probably have been much more contentious for the storyline to continue as planned and an effort to address feedback through a more clearly plotted subsequent storyline not taking place until several months to a year in the future.
I don’t envy the position and I don’t really know what could be done better, though I do think that this would have been a situation where Willis could simply point out that they are a white bread midwestern ex-fundie that lives newspaper comics, batman and transformers, and simply due not have the depth of experience and wider perspective to give the most correct and appropriate response in-comic to these global issues that are such a major part of the political moment.
Like, it needs to be pointed out that absence of a specific representation does not mean that there is bigotry in authorial intent against a specific real world subject or marginalised identity. Willis has absolutely the best of intentions and when told that someone or something isn’t being represented with the appropriate humanity and integrity, they will do their level best to ensure to correct this, but the fact of the matter is that there are plenty of stories that have a narrow focus and it is not bigoted for them to do so. Not every story needs to address every moment, this is very much a daily newspaper strip sort of philosophy, but genuinely this comic could simply focus on dumb Midwestern college students from various bqckgrounds and there would be nothing at all wrong with that.
I do think that a webcomic about college is probably going to need to brush up against the topic of campus protest in order to feel authentic, but I think the matter at hand for the protest was poorly chosen and beyond the scope of DOA. Inasmuch as it’s driven Willis to make their Arab and Muslim characters more prominent, I’d say there have definitely been some positive aspects to the whole boondoggle, but for the most part Willis has really written themself into a corner from which it will be difficult to satisfy many people for whom this is an important real-life topic. A for intention, certainly, but a C- at most for execution.
By my understanding, the comic protest was inspired by the one in our world’s version of Indiana University in April of last year (happening around the time the storyline was being drawn).
By the way, neither article seems to comment on how well the protest might serve as a backdrop for smooching. In fact, this distressing oversight appears to extend to every article I’ve yet found on the subject.
I think the better solution is to absolutely make it clear Bulmeria is NOT any RL nation and give it a fictional history with fictional groups. It is applicable but absolutely not a metaphor.
I think its an alternative to a handling of it in a dramedy superhero coming of age drama that is absolutely NOT about that subject. In THE STUDIO, they have the executives try to insert a message about medical disinformation in a movie called Zombie Apoocalypse.
It undermines the message having wacky romantic hijinks during the event.
And that’s what the comic is ABOUT. You can’t pivot.
Look, I don’t think the comic should have gone here either if it was going to handle the situation the way it so far has, but it is extremely funny to effectively say something with superheroes in it shouldn’t try to comment on politics? Superheroes have been political allegories this entire time.
I never said it shouldn’t comment on politics. It comments on them constantly but I don’t think it can comment on a genocide with humor. Some topics remain…unfunny even as a means of cope.
Come on, Hank, you were the GOOD parent of the bunch we’d met so far. I can give you a pass if Jocelyne didn’t come out to you yet – in which case, Joyce really shouldn’t be acting the way she’s acting and risking accidentally outing her to someone that Jocelyne isn’t comfortable with coming out to – but framing the protest as supporting terrorism? Come on, this is exactly the mentality that almost got Becky killed and directly lead to you getting divorced.
Hopefully lunch will involve them sitting down and Hank actually listening to Joyce and Dorothy without any extra drama popping up. Heck, Jocelyne showing up and walking Hank through being transgender wouldn’t be a bad thing. I have a feeling we’re going to be getting plenty of drama from Becky’s state of mind in the near future, I just want the one “cool” dad that we’ve met so far to actually prove that he’s a good person and not just someone that was just a bit better than most of the other dads we’ve met so far…
Straight up I am going to go out of my way to not read the comments today, so all i’m going to say is that if you find yourself spending a lot of time here re; the comments today you can also donate to The Sameer Project or Sudanfunds right now for $5. If there is a trusted charity, program or GFM that you personally trust, feel free to donate to them instead.
If you’re broke like me then I highly recommend you take some time out if your day to read some free online articles from Mizna and Tawahan (Jewish Currents is also very good as well). Maybe get around to watching some international cinema too (in whatever format you prefer).
So what did he actually come here to do? Not because of the kiss or because he found out Jocelyne was trans. Not because he was worried about them being hurt in the protest.
He wanted to talk Jocelyne out of protesting? Even though the protest has already been shut down? To just yell at her for doing this bad thing?
I think he’s just ranting that he wouldn’t have to worry and come out here if she didn’t get involved in protests that get tear gassed and he blames her for that rather than the authority for suppressing the protests
He saw Jocelyne protesting with “the terrorists” and got very concerned for her, and came to “talk reason” to her to try to get her to leave. Possibly he’s concerned about the organizers of the protest, or thinks that he needs to get away before the protesters start getting violent, which as violent terrorists, they’re almost certainly going to do, right?
He saw the news article, texted Joyce to be sure, she responded with “Nope!” and he was fine for probably a few minutes… until he realized that Joyce was probably covering for her, which would probably just heighten his concern more.
It is a little weird. I mean, Jocelyne is an adult, and not a financially dependent college age quasi-adult like Joyce, but a full, lives on her own, twenty-something adult. If Hank disapproves of her actions, can’t he just bring it up next time he sees her? Is he planning to drag her back to La Porte by the hair? Possibly this is some fundie thing that I don’t grasp, but actually showing up here seems like hugely overreacting.
He says she’s “fallen in with that terrorist crowd.” We don’t know just how toxic and crazy the media Hank’s been listening to is. Right wing media really leans into fearmongering, and keep in mind that to us, it seems like the police stepped way over the line to try to control and stop the protest with the use of force. It would stand to reason that the protest was being painted as something dangerous.
If Hank took a day to drive down to campus when he saw one of his kids taking up with “terrorists” then I’m sure the reason why he doesn’t plan to just have a face-to-face conversation with her next Thanksgiving is because he’s afraid for her safety, not just that she has different politics.
If this WASN’T invoking the RL events (and it probably was not meant to beyond being vaguely similar), then Hank being worried about Jocelyn being arrested and beaten was a legitimate fear.
With RL events, it seems like a scream of sanity in the void that she was trying to make a statement.
Hank’s an older conservative who isn’t really tuned in to politics except via the lense of conservative propaganda he has probably never seen an alternative to; who likely has some racist sentiments he hasn’t questioned because nobody’s ever asked him to since every human being he knows at all well is white.
But people can improve if they try to! Joyce is less evil than she was a semester ago, idk I’m holding out hope for her dad
I mean, I don’t think the Bulmerians want a totalitarian Christian state but that would get into the fact we don’t know anything about them. Again, a lot of this seems to be filling in holes with RL when that….only goes to the dark place.
Hank loses a lot of points for rushing down to the campus because he thought his child was involved with terrorists and not because he was worried they might have been hurt.
Worrying about their political views is about losing control and reputational damage. Was he a good parent? Maybe. But kids go their own way and make different mistakes.
We know he wasn’t a good parent. You just have to go back to when Dina had to ask Joyce about the ways Becky’s parents physically abused her where Joyce admits her parents did the same thing to their kids (less or not at all to her I don’t recall which because Joyce was incredibly obedient) to know he was a terrible parent.
The site wasn’t working properly from around 0030 until maybe 0400. My first comment, above, is timestamped 0038, and the site was kind of slow but working normally when I loaded the page, but when I posted the comment, it took about ten minutes for the page to reload, and even then it didn’t load completely. It was an interesting look at the structure of the page under the stylesheets, though.
In hindsight yeah it shouldve been obvious that this is what Hank, the 60 year old American evangelical who’s been glucking Zionist propaganda his whole life, in a world where being pro Palestine only became acceptable extremely recently, would be here about. Idk why it never occurred to me.
Anyway:
Free Palestine
Its not self defense if you’re the violent oppressor
Several Israeli officials have said multiple times that their goal is to eradicate Gaza
This is a genocide
The Israeli Occupying Force is a terrorist organization Boycott Israel!
I’m going to just say that whatever your reaction to this new revelation about hank is, it’s ok. If you’re feeling betrayed and angry with him, that is completely understandable. It is infuriating that people in real life believe opposing a genocide is terrorism, and seeing that reflected in fiction from a well liked character is hard. You don’t have to forgive Hank for that.
At the same time, it’s also ok if you do want to still like Hank and appreciate his good qualities while aknowledging that his views are still pretty fucked up. Willis comic like real life isn’t black and white. There is room in people and his characters for good and bad at the same time. Honestly this reminds me of my own dad, who has some extremely abhorrent views, but tries to be a good dad and I love him. I personally don’t want to give up on that relationship, even though many would, and both of those choices are valid. That doesn’t mean we condone these beliefs of course, please believe me when I say that.
I think people do need to remember that Joyce said and did some really horrible things at the start of the webcomic. Acknowledging that what Hank said is horrible but that he has the same capacity to grow and change his beliefs as Joyce did should not be construed as making excuses for him.
Hey Megan, are you gonna give me an apology for the time you casually dismissed my identity as a trans lesbian over shipping opinions? I haven’t interacted with any of your posts because I had no interest in relitigating what was a genuinely extremely upsetting moment for me but if you don’t wish to extend me the same courtesy I am absolutely happy to put you on blast.
Yes, I apologize for getting too caught up in my own desire to defend myself and my queer identity that I project more hostility onto you than there usually is, especially when doing so in the name of other people I do not speak for. Genuinely, I do not think you are as bad of a person as I made you out to be, and should have held myself back from making purposefully derogatory statements just to piss you off.
I would like an apology from *you* for the genuinely hurtful and low-key queerphobic rhetoric you have levied at me in particular. I don’t want to spew bile on someone else’s website day after day, but I also have a dear need to not foster people who treat me badly for my identity, and many of the things you’ve said in the past have been that. I will admit to taking things too far, but I am not going to act like our *shared* status as trans women prevents you from hurting others feelings and making other trans people feel less welcome, whether intentionally or not.
You know, many RPGs have rules for one character aiding another in, let’s just say for hypotheticals, a deception check. Few RPGs have rules to account for when both characters are so bad it that their combined effort is even worse than what their individual efforts would be. No idea what’s making me think about that at the moment. 😛
In an equally unrelated-to-anything note: the Fiasco RPG (“A game of powerful ambition and poor impulse control”) is specifically designed for characters who attempt a scheme or caper and then, when it almost inevitably goes wrong, struggle to dig themselves out of the situation in ways that frequently make matters worse.
Don’t know if anyone cares, but… you can make things more difficult by incompetently trying to help an ally in Pathfinder 2E (just a -1 for a critical failure, so not very bad in that d20 system), the Mongoose Publishing version of Traveller (trying to help can result in anything from -3 to +3 to the next person’s check, and it’s a 2d6 system) and Kult: Divinity Lost (GM adds a new complication as a result of any failed attempt to help, which may be entertainingly disastrous).
I’m sure there’re other systems too, but even this quick search took longer than it should’ve.
I wonder why Jocelyne is taking the heat for this when Joyce was also extremely visibly at the protest. What’s the actual situation Jocelyne and Hank? Is he lacking information cause he’s been traveling or something?
I’m gonna say that when it comes to Hank, I’ll be holding out SOME hope that he can come around on it. He’s on the wrong side of this issue to be sure, but like he’s proven he doesn’t uncritically drink the conservative kool-aid, he wouldn’t have divorced his wife if that was the case, and when the risk of losing his children over this comes up… I dunno, I feel like he may well be able to redeem himself on this. The odds are at least better than for his ex-wife.
It took the cult he was a member of bailing out a murderer who kidnapped his daughter and her friends for him to change his mind on that. Let’s hope it doesn’t take something that drastic this time.
I mean even that wasn’t enough for the vast majority of the members. He broke through some insanely potent social programming when he left it behind, and that’s not nothing.
Maybe you should trust your instinct that you raised your child right and that, like with the daughter you are speaking to right now, your offspring continues to challenge you to grow?
And then maybe you can rebuild your relationship with Jordan, too.
Quick question – how are all these non-students (like Hank) getting into the dorms at all? Last time I went anywhere near my college, I could not even get into the tiny little bookstore without a school-issued ID, much less into a dormitory.
Hank is an approved adult contact so he’d be allowed in the building. idk if the residence halls at IU require a card for access but we’ll assume they don’t for story convenience.
There’s never been any hint of controlled access to the dorms. People wander in and out regularly. Except they’re apparently locked so only students can access at night as we saw with Ryan.
I remember when I assumed that Bulmeria stood for Ukraine because Alex fled there and the Slavic sounding name. So I was really confused why Jocelyn was supporting the evil government trying to annex it as they absolutely did have a right to self-defense against Russia with NATO/US help. When someone pointed out Gaza was PROBABLY the more obvious parallel, I was like, “Oh. I did not read that correctly. At all.”
I mean, this being Joyce, chances were going to be pretty high of that happening anyways. She’s new to the whole idea of transgender people, and doesn’t know about things like not outing a transgender person without their explicit permission or the Egg Prime Directive (which… that would be a hilarious storyline for Joyce to go through, I think – but not one that I think any of the other current characters would be good fits for), so her screwing that up is kind of expected.
For those who are not familiar with it, the Egg Prime Directive states that you do not tell someone who hasn’t told you that they’re transgender that they’re transgender, since that is something that they’ll have to realize and work through on their own, since that is something that can be tremendously traumatic for the person to go through and can potentially set back their journey for years to come.
Can I just say how much I hate the Egg Prime Directive? Not having someone point things out to me and, instead of just accepting my kneejerk “No, definitely not trans,” go “seriously, here’s some stuff to read. Give it a thought” was what set me back from realizing things for over a decade.
Eh, better than what I went through… I tried coming out to a trans man who didn’t realize he was transgender, and that set my journey back by decades! I don’t blame him at all – he was just speaking honestly about how he felt trying to live as a woman, and this being the mid-90s, neither of us knew anything about what it meant to be transgender – but it’s still a fun little anecdote from my own history.
One response I’ve heard to the “original” Prime Directive goes something like:
“So for years, decades, generations, while we suffered and died, you just sat up there and … watched.”
the funny thing about the “egg prime directive” is that it’s the exact same thing. It’s well-meaning claptrap from holier-than-thou folks who have a privileged condition, and the kind of thing that’s only a good idea if you don’t think about it too hard.
turns out it can be really useful to have someone who’s been in a similar position to you point out that your strange feelings might indicate a form of queerness! turns out it’s really helpful for people to share experiences and ideas! turns out it’s really helpful for friends to say to friends, “I noticed this thing about you”!
you know, Joyce, there are times when refusing to misgender a person is a way of outing them. there are times when keeping them in the closet without their knowledge is genuinely the safest course of action. this is one of those times
Hence the two most important rules for dealing with transgender people (or people you think might be transgender): don’t out them without their explicit permission, and don’t tell someone that they’re transgender unsolicited.
“If This Goes On”, to steal from Heinlein, you may not have to worry about there being any trans persons in the US…they will have been defined out of existence by federal fiat. Hopefully the actual people will continue to exist.
Including my trans daughter, who will now have trouble getting a US passport. If I’d had the money and the foresight, she and her spouse’d be acclimating to Denmark or Holland by now. Canada is too close.
Not to be alarmist or anything. Just a history major who’s read the script.
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“””terrorist””” huh??? (9-9)
“what’s for lunch?”
“crackers and mayo, boi” (-_-)
and some fishbelly cuz why not
smh
Unrelatedly, I accidentally clicked Report comment on your comment, there is no undo and am very sorry. Somehow the web site reacted immediately, instead of waiting for minutes like on daily refresh. You’re not a terrorist in my book. Probably. Even if that Brown-ian motion race simulator game is vexing.
All my reports in tthe history of living here as all been accidental lol
well tbf I did release that game on 9/11 LOL XD
and yeah no worries i know ya chill
Don’t sweat it. Putting the two links that close together is an invitation for accidents, so you weren’t the first and won’t be the last. I’ve even done it once or twice myself. Good news is, I understand it takes five reports before a comment is flagged for moderation, and even if five people have the same accident Willis can just restore the comment if it isn’t actually offensive.
It takes five reports to bump a comment back into the moderation queue.
Of course, since the Bulmerian majority group are all born terrorists and have to be killed before they can do anything to challenge the minority rule, protesting against the university paying for the bombs to kill those children is terrorism, pure and simple.
No but really there was a group in blue uniforms who “terrorized” the protest. . .
Like I said, I want more info on Bulmeria in-universe versus trying to draw parallels to RL events or using it as a commentary on the RL events. Because it’s not a good 1:1 parallel and only is going to annoy fans when it remains a backdrop for Yuri disaster antics.
Maybe even shenanigans.
Yeah, terrorists. The people who peacefully protest and then have armed and armoured thugs chase them off. You know, the classical meaning of the word…
The length of Willis’ buffer means I’m pretty sure he can see the future for some of this stuff.
Even while it was being written that sort of thing was the past as well as the present. No future vision needed.
Is he referring to the Bulmerians or the protestors or both?
Because it’s not terribly clear to me.
Or is he assuming Ham…err, Bulmerian Liberation Front is manipulating the US protestors?
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television,
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
A sadly common tactic. Authoritarian governments often describe any dissent as terrorism or throw around vague, open ended charges such as “inciting civil unrest” to quash any opposition. I can remember a time when Americans were proud to think (however accurately or not) that only happened in “other” countries.
Okay so he just doesn’t know?
Yes I don’t think he’s deadnaming and misgendering Jocelyn on purpose to spite her, he’s only focused on the protest in of itself and Jocelyn is still closeted to him
Didn’t Jocelyn tell Joyce when she arrived, that she hadn’t come out to their parents yet? Or am I misremembering?
No, she didn’t. She hinted in the texts before that he might know (before you find out from dad), but didn’t talk about it again once she was here.
i felt it was more of “i’m going to tell you first so that when I tell dad you already know”
Or, as I think someone suggester earlier, “I’ve started HRT and it’s going to be obvious soon enough.”
I imagine jocelyne hasn’t had time to tell him, that said, interesting that the protesters are painted as the ‘terrorists’ when they’re very anti missles about bulmeria or so versus joce suddenly starting to work for Ruttech
Given the irl political comparisons, Bulmeria is using the excuse of fighting insurgency for their war crimes, which is presumably a defense being parroted uncritically by right-leaning news sources. Ergo, people protesting Bulmeria are “supporting terrorism”.
I always thought the more apt comparison was Syria (until recently (but also: still kind of recently just with a new dude in charge))
You can take your pick, really. It’s happened again and again and again…
I would give Willis the entire internet if it turns out Hank knows Joyce and Dorothy kissed (and possibly Jocelyn is trans) but is more concerned about the Bulmerian activism thing.
Oh damnit, he’s ideologically captured and on the side of genocide.
Shocker that just cuz he’s the better parent doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a lot of his old hateful beliefs still…
yeah being the most progressive of the fundie parents isn’t saying much
it’s basically like being the tallest dwarf
and yeah @Serendipity I doubt “captured” is really the word I’d use, given how he and the rest of the cult basically already agreed with the militarists and colonists to begin with
Fun Fact: The tallest person with dwarfism was actually 7ft 8in tall when he died despite having measured 4ft at age 18.
He had a pituitary tumor that gave him gigantism and is the only known person to have had both conditions.
I meant like Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs when i wrote that haha
but thanks for that interesting tid-bit!
Hey I’ll have you know as someone who is 5’1 I am very tall for a dwarf! I got the high constitution score to match!
Yep, like I said on the previous comic. Cooler than Carol is not a high bar to clear.
It’s possible he’s just watching hte mainstream media that slants it a way versus actually doing all the info, b/c other than that one guy with a mustache and leslie/robin i imagine most of the protesters were college age/among the uyounger crowd than coloser to hanks age
He’s a reasonable guy but he’s still a conservative. This isn’t shocking.
I’m irritated by the double standard about reasonableness. People who call the protesters “terrorists” are expected to be considered “reasonable conservatives”, but if someone were to call out the police brutality at the protest, nobody on the right would call them a “reasonable liberal”.
Sure but that’s just the reality of living with conservatives in your life. You kind of do need to grade on a curve.
It is, but it’s also a huge part of the problem and a deliberate media strategy.
Nah, I don’t grade on curves for human decency. Which is why, thankfully, I have none of these sorts of people in my life anymore.
That’s a valid approach, certainly, and I won’t fault you for it. It’s what I do now that I have the capability to do so. Not everyone does.
You absolutely do not have to do that.
Tell that to Joyce’s friends from day one of classes to basically the end of the first semester.
The fact that they did grade on a curve is unrelated to the fact that you (and they) don’t have to grade on a curve. Especially when it comes to saying people “fell in with terrorists” because they . . . (checks notes) protested against an ongoing genocide. Even on a curve that still gets you an F.
Yes, and I’m sure that’s what Hank’s heard about the protests. Fox News and Friends came on and spent the entire episode talking about how these kids were just peacefully protesting a genocide, and now he’s decided that means these people have fallen in with terrorists.
Or, you know, news sources that he’s been using for most of his adult life, and has been thoroughly indoctrinated by, told him that Bulmeria is only trying to defend itself after a particularly heinous assault instigated for no reason whatsoever by the unnamed population of terrorists (seriously have we still not named the equally fictional group being genocided?). The fact that even the mainstream media talked about the incident in question, and the attack really was rather monstrous, muddies the waters even further.
I’d love to see a Jocelyn/Hank discussion about the issue. Hank’s shown he can be reasoned with, and even recognize something being wrong on his own (see his reaction to the comments about Becky in the church). He just needs context and patience to be guided along the path. THAT is the ‘curve’ on which he should be graded.
(The attitude that everyone should already be in the same starting point as the most aggressive progressives, or else they are irredeemable, is straight-up the reason I tend to cringe every time Roz speaks.)
> You kind of need to grade on a curve
But why? Why not apply the same standard to everybody?
Glib answer: we live in a society
Seriously: not all of us live in places it societies where we can apply liberal standards and still function socially.
Because it’s still useful (and sometimes absolutely critical to your own safety) to be able to distinguish the Hanks from the Carols or the Rosses.
A bunch of people in the last Prez election applied this reasoning, and didn’t show up to vote because they ‘refused to support Democrats who sponsored war crimes’. Ask the Palestinian people how that tactic worked for them.
For me, I absolutely refuse to make any associations about Bulmeria’s stance and RL. Because it sucks the humor out of the comic. Hank’s opinion is about a purely fictional event that has no relation the RL event.
Because life is depressing enough.
This is a wise move.
You can be reasonable or conservitive (as defined in the current political climate). You can not be both.
“Ideologically captured”?
First —maybe he’s only seen one news article on it and hasn’t stopped to think about it yet.
Second what does Ideological Capture mean here or to you? Was it tongue-in-cheek, or well… so many questions. 😅
Ideological capture is when people become convinced, by listening to the arguments of people who are not me, of systemic opinions that are different from mine.
It’s not complicated.
Or he fell for the lies people are telling about why their actions are good actually. That does happen- sometimes perfectly decent folks get fooled into thinking that a person or group is doing something good/isn’t doing a particular bad thing, and that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be utterly horrified if they knew the truth about that person/group’s actions.
Hank you raised her perfectly.
If only people like you could see that
I disagree, I think Jocelyne is a good person despite how they raised her, not because of it.
Ding Ding Ding!
👍
I disagree. I find people like Hank are usually not half bad at raising genuinely good people because the things they preach are good they simply for some odd fucking reason don’t listen to anything they preach and twist it in their own fucked up mind
I realize sitcom-level silliness is a staple of this comic but girls you can in fact tone it down and still hit your metrics.
Yeahhhh, this is…about what I was realistically expecting from Hank, as a fundie dad
I’m amazed how he keeps the “fundies”, even after the kidnapping.
Support for the IDF is correlated to but not exclusive to fundies is it not?
Right, the centre/left is also ideologically aligned currently with IDF support. The narrative of mainstream offline media sources is almost exclusively support for Israel though empathy for civilians in the crossfire, with blame on the terrorist org/govt, as all propaganda is justifying bombing schools and hospitals because supposedly they’re being held as hostages.
Five comics from now, with an overheard conversation spiraling into heated debate, Asma considers outing these two idiots to own a boomer.
i don’t think asma would even care/ be that petty tho i can imagine billiefer accidentally blurting it out without realizing hank wasn’t aware
I would suspect Raida more. She seems pretty annoyed at the two of them. Especially if she catches them keeping their mouth shut to their dad about how they feel about the entire thing she might go ‘Oh, you love making the protest all about you to the point of being the headliner, but don’t have the guts to talk to your dad? Since you love people who air dirty laundry to their parents, let me give you a taste’
Raidah does seem more likely. She’s kind of awful.
Jennifer’s restraint telling Walky about their literal dirty laundry says she would actively avoid it. But if she’s flanked by Alice, good fucking luck.
I don’t think Raidah would do that intentionally out of malice if she knew Joyce and Dorothy hadn’t actually intended to be out, but she’s working with incomplete information and I can see her confronting them about it while Hank is around.
Hrmmmmm……….Don’t trust Hank. Yes, Hank specifically. Not yet.
BLOCKING!
Damn, At least it isn’t transphobia in this case, it is literally not knowing his family and still being in the bubble of thinking that protesting genocide is somehow terrorism. While that is still bad and makes me lose some respect points at least it is not out and out transphobia or I would have some serious beef with the better of Joyce’s parents.
as a trans woman, you 100% should still have beef with this guy, he just said opposing genocide makes you a terrorist. you under no circumstances gotta hand it to him
Dude listens to Fox News. All protests are terrorism, because they disrupt the civil order or whatever. Maybe I’m just too inured to casual bigotry from my own folks but this seems pretty normal to me. Not that it makes any of it better, but this is entirely within my expectations of Hank – his viewpoints come from conservative radio, but he can be reasoned with, and he’s not innately hateful.
“Normal” doesn’t mean “acceptable,” at least not in my house.
if “normal” means “accepts fascism on its face without any pushback” i think i’m glad I’m queer instead lmao
thinkking protesers are in teh wrong is also pretty bad but idk how much research hank has done on this
Well, it isn’t transphobia *yet*. I think Jocelyn being Jocelyn and Joyce being unstraight is going to burst a lot of bubbles here. It’s like the last Pope was the “cool” Pope, but he was still the head of the Catholic Church and he didn’t light it on fire, so he was only slightly better by comparison.
As I said yesterday, just because he’s accepting of one thing doesnt mean hes immediately unearned all his hateful beliefs
Also the banner for me right is blowjob cat ominously peeking over the comic, that doesnt have anything to do with anything, I’m just amused by it and felt like pointing it out
rest in peace everyone’s hopes for this guy lmao.
under better circumstances i’d be wanting joyce to tell him off for that, but she’s lucky if she’s getting out of this one alive regardless, so
You ARE aware that people don’t turn on a dime, right? Hank is likely misinformed about foreign politics, so he goes with what is being reported on the news.
And if this is like real life, then we know what is being reported on the news.
I wanna give Hank some leeway as he’s likely a well meaning guy but the place we’re at in conservative politics he likely aligns with doesn’t really give us much opportunity to for that. At the end of the day he isjust a character though so it’s up to the reader to figure out where they a]stand on him with the information given. What’s Hank’s opinion on Jan 6th? How’s he feel about trans rights, healthcare, critical race theory, DEI? Can we just lightning round some questions on him real quick?
Your first question to Hank should be, “which party do you vote for?”.
As I recall, some people went out of their way to not vote kamala with the excuse she supports Israel.
Yeah in a conversation starting with “you support the terrorists”, “Which party did you vote for?” is likely to get you condemned however you respond.
Well, he could vote for both his daughters to have a coming out party?
I mean, that’s both unlikely and almost certainly not what you meant, but sometimes it’s nice to have a pleasant daydream.
Yup. Might have even been enough to lose Michigan to Trump. Ask the Palestinians how much they appreciated that support.
Prejudice, racial and otherwise, is like lead poisoning; it takes time to get it out of your bones. You keep discovering things. Speaking from experience.
it sounds really hard to be a prejudiced person.
She’s in the crowd because she is good hearted and have morals.
Ok I’m enjoying these two buffoons very much! can we please not have them talking about Bulmeria, though? You know, the fictional country where both Muslims automatically have a personal stake in it but none of the Jews do. We don’t also need another Western Christian point of view about it. Just please, please just stop with Bulmeria stuff.
(Note, this is not an invitation to talk about real-world politics with me. Please be kind about my ongoing trauma in this area. Thank you.)
This isn’t a Christian point of view. The author is very very very openly not a christian.
Also if you hate real world politics, stop bringing them up and then ammending your political comments with (Don’t engage please!) its weird.
I meant Hank’s Western Christian point of view.
I don’t think that Willis is Christian, nor that they agree with Hank.
(Hank’s pov is also definitely not well-informed or nuanced, what with calling them ‘that terrorist crowd’ right out of the gate, and immediately putting them as the opposites of good-hearted and moral. That is wack, and he’ll just continue to annoy me.)
I’m not bringing it up, it’s already brought.
But I know it’s weird. It’s a clumsy and triggered response. I can own the weird.
I’ll try to think of a response that avoids the specific type of comment that bothers me the very most. I’m concerned that if I’m like, “please don’t say super specific things such as…” it’s like an invitation for a certain kind of person to be like “SUPER SPECIFIC THING HAHAHA”. You know? I’ll try to work on my request sometime, but in the meantime, that’s what I’ve got.
I do repeat myself sometimes, because there are a lot of comments on this site, and many people only read comments occasionally. I don’t expect others to have seen or remembered my personal triggers and preferences.
Thank you for reading this long screed, I hope it helps clarify.
I find it weird how every time this topic comes up in a DoA strip, your comments are some strange concerns about how Willis isn’t depicting how American Jews might feel about the situation, and nothing about the actual people protesting against genocide or the people who are trying to survive the genocide. I’m not sure what your trauma about this is, but it’s odd that you post these comments and then don’t want anyone to reply.
I’m an American Jew.
My concerns aren’t strange to me.
Protesters and their supporters are already extremely well-represented in the comments here. Survivors probably don’t read this site.
like, I’m Jewish and have young cousins in “”Bulmeria”” who are now without a mother because of what’s happening, I worry sick about them every day
and NGL, I also resent the lack of depth with which the conflict has been explored in-comic so far since the heat of the protest, I really hope Willis takes the opportunity to introduce much needed nuance to this really sensitive issue affecting us
I hope that they and everyone else suffering in “Bulmeria” will be okay, though I know that will probably not and maybe will never be the case because of how awful the situation is. Everything really does feel like it is going to hell in a handbasket. I had former dormmates that were from “Bulmeria”, and while we weren’t close enough to stay in touch after college, I do really wish I could find out how they and their families are doing. I shudder just imagining what the desperation and despair that people with family over there must have.
Seconded.
Thanks, NGPZ. You said it better than I can.
Also thanks Kimi & TTT for your kindness. It’s really tough, yo. ♡
As gently as I can: just based on other hanging threads in this storyline (Carla comes to mind immediately), I don’t think this is phasing out of relevance anytime soon, no matter how many times you ask.
Yeah, probably not, huh.
Perhaps it’s silly, but Willis comics have literally been my one constant thing — even with everything else falling apart and getting knitted back in new ways, all the kinds of things that can happen in the decades that I’ve been enjoying the comic and comments. You know?
It’s hard and very sad for me to have to give them up.
If you don’t want to talk about real world politics, stop doing so.
“Do not interact” requests are for preventing people from initiating a particular conversation with you, not for shutting down public disagreement with you after you express your views.
When did she express her views? I must have missed it.
I try hard to keep my views buttoned up here.
Did Wills say that Bulmeria had any Jewish population at all? Did I miss that somewhere? I know everyone thinks Bulmeria is “secretly Gaza and Willis is a coward” but other than the protest location and the sign slogans (which could easily happen for any genocide/war on that scale) I’m not sure why it’s specifically Gaza?
Maybe I just haven’t been paying enough attention, but I was under the impression that Bulmeria was a stand-in for a lot of different situations all kind of mashed up into one. So it’s going to share similarities with Gaza as well as other situations, like what’s happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A genocide during a civil war where the USA and the UK are helping to fund violence between two ethnic groups. Where millions of people have died and millions more have been displaced in a war that has lasted decades.
What’s happening in Gaza is horrific, there’s absolutely no arguing with that if you’re a decent human being, but what you’re taking from Bulmeria (and what many others have taken from Bulmeria) is not necessarily “fact” so much as “personal reading” of the text. If I’m wrong and it has been confirmed by the author to be Gaza (rather than sharing things in common with protests against the genocide) then I would be happy to be proven incorrect.
Sadly, it’s not a unique situation, and there are other examples I just didn’t feel like making myself miserable looking up specific details on other real-world atrocities. If it’s triggering you to read the comic and to read comments that disagree with you, I invite you to take care of yourself and stop reading. I certainly have done so during topics in the comic where I either didn’t feel like watching a white person stumble through The Discourse, or where I was becoming upset at comments or the comic itself.
How dare you be reasonable.
I mean. The fact that “everyone thinks Bulmeria is secretly Gaza and Willis is a coward” is causing the comment section to talk a lot about Gaza, and Willis did specifically respond to criticism of the handling of the protest by trying to bring more focus onto their Muslim characters, while continuing to not have their Jewish characters have any feelings about it, and that combination is, I think, what Leorale is being triggered by.
“Everyone” keeps talking about it like it IS Gaza, and Willis is treating those criticisms as fair but seemingly only trying to add more nuance to one part of their portrayal, and… yeah.
To put my feelings out there:
I think we should be able to criticize what Israel is doing AND acknowledge the rise of antisemitism. I think we can care about Islamophobia without pretending that Muslims are the only group getting scape goated and attacked overseas. I think the fact that the Trump administration is deliberately putting a fake Jewish face on some of their authoritarianism (targeting protestors and claiming it’s because of antisemitism, very loudly exempting Jewish people from their anti-DEI policies in some cases…) is bad for Jewish folks. We can remember that most self-proclaimed “Zionists” are evangelical Christians who believe Israel is necessary for the Christian apocalypse, antisemites who want to see all Jewish people “self-deported” from their countries, or both.
Also, sorry Leorale. Trying to defend you but also getting even more into the issue is probably not really what you wanted either orz
I absolutely didn’t say we couldn’t acknowledge the rise of antisemitism (though I question whether it ever receded enough to call it a rise, people are sincerely horrid to Jewish people). Literally didn’t even use the word antisemitism in my post, and I’d be super okay with watching the comic and the Jewish characters within the comic confront that (except I worry that trying to be funny about it would fall flat because it’s a very serious issue, and the upset comments would get worse very quickly – for good reason).
I also didn’t pretend any such thing about Muslims. I don’t actually think that Willis was responding to criticism about the protest specifically. I think they were responding to criticism about having ZERO muslim characters in the main cast and yet constantly using them as foils without allowing any real characterization of them outside “kind of a jerk”. Either way, it doesn’t mean Bulmeria is specifically and ONLY Gaza.
I don’t think anything I said is something Leorale needs defending from. I was making a point about the comic and the way people are reacting to it with personal biases (because that’s how people interact with art) and asking that we try to separate that from “truth” when we don’t actually know, and when there ARE other options.
I asked if we ever had any information to suggest that Bulmeria (not Gaza, Bulmeria) had any Jewish population at all. Because if it doesn’t, that might be why the two Jewish people didn’t seem to have much interest in the situation. I also suggested that Leorale take a break instead of running into the sharp end of something hurting them, repeatedly. Because I’ve found that taking breaks is helpful.
None of that was about you, and I’m sorry it seemed otherwise. I was just laying down my own feelings on the I/P issue generally.
The bits before “to put my feelings out there” were about the comment section / Willis more generally and what might lead Leorale to have had the reaction she’s saying she’s having to Bulmeria coming up again in the comic, bc yeah, the comic itself hasn’t said it’s Israel, but so many people are treating it that way, and I can definitely see the argument for, say, the strip where Asma put down the bolt cutters and looked anguished as indicating that she has a personal connection to Bulmeria, tying back into the idea that it’s either Israel or Palestine (though more likely Israel, if it has to be either, given the mentioned protest signs).
I sincerely apologize for the communication snafu here, bc yeah, that whole second half of my comment was me trying to put my cards down on the table for how I feel about the political issue, not accusing you of anything. Only one of my comments even really has to do with something I’ve seen HERE, and that was a commenter demanding in a rather snide tone to know whether another commenter’s mention of antisemitism in the US was “real” or “just people being anti-genocide”. Which sadly is absolutely not the first time I’ve seen someone take that stance, that because SOME bad faith actors are taking ALL criticism of Israel to be antisemitism, there must not be real antisemitism happening, especially in leftist movements. Which is of course sadly VERY untrue.
SO THIS 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽💯
I cannot emphasize enough that you can BOTH speak out against antisemitism AND acknowledge that Israel is an ethnostate built by US Imperialists for the purpose of controlling the Middle East — white colonists for decades now continue to rob Jews and Muslims alike and let them blame each other
Israel’s government is more than happy to let hatred towards them spill unto Jews the world around, they are no democracy, the country is no safe haven for us, not in the slightest
but of course that don’t stop many white folk from falling back on supporting it on account that on some level they realize they have basically ZERO in terms of an actual pro-Jewish praxis
I don’t want this Jewish reservation I could be shoved into so the rest of the world can continue to be hateful of us, I want the world to be less hateful
Thank you. And I’m sorry about, you know, the world.
I feel like John Oliver covered what was actually probably Trump’s motive when targeting universities, and it wasn’t antisemitism. I also think there is a vast difference between being frustrated with a country’s government vs racist/biased against its citizens (or the ethnicity or religion the citizens are). I remember being frustrated by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars when I was growing up, but I mostly didn’t blame the soldiers for just doing what they were told to do in a very stressful situation (there were some soldiers that did some very bad things). I also, unfortunately, have to realize that some people are not great at recognizing the difference themselves and can blame everyone for the fault of the few.
I also acknowledge that it is very easy for people to live in bubbles nowadays. It isn’t just that people need to go outside and touch grass, but they also need to leave their communties and areas full of people like them and have a general talk and peaceful interaction with people different than them. Even then, you can get some weird blips in someone’s mind, where they hate illegal immigrants as a generalization, but José who they meet on a regular basis is perfectly okay, even though he might be an illegal immigrant. People also act in odd ways when they are in a constant stressful situation that feels like (or actually is) life vs death. I think the goal should be preventing people from feeling like they are in that situation rather than dealing with it after the situation has already degraded to that point. That isn’t always possible, but I do wish that we would try more as a society.
@Nymph: He hasn’t said anything about Jews at all. Or I think about Muslims in Bulmeria. Certainly not in the comic itself, but possibly in comments about it?
Nonetheless, the protest was a very close parallel for the start of the Gaza protests at IU last year. The encampment, the last minute change in rules from the college board that tried to shut it down the first day. And obviously the demands and the talk of genocide. The thing they’re protesting might not be exactly the same, but the protest itself was drawn straight out of the headlines, as they say.
Yes, I acknowledged that there were parts that DID parallel Gaza. And then I gave an example of how other parts of the Bulmeria thing parallel a different civil war/genocide.
My point wasn’t “no part of this is Gaza” my point was “It isn’t supposed to be a 1-to-1 representation of a single crisis and I’m not sure why people are treating it like it is”.
Good cover for the newspapers in the room. Bets on who inadvertently outs Jorothy to Hank?
I could totally see Raidah doing it, given the level of upset she displayed upon seeing the front page.
huh? what literal pile of incriminating evidence are you talking about?
Why does he think Jocelyne is on the side of the people who are using school money to fund bombs being made and used against foreigners? Y’know, the terrorists.
because when white fundies say “terrorist”, that’s shorthand for “non-white people who they afraid gonna blow up a plane or something”
imperialists and their supporters may be using the same English words and grammar, but mind you they are speaking a very different language than we are
It’s off-color and relies on stereotypes, but I’m reminded of a John Caparulo bit where he’s complaining about airport security being way too intense and he says “Black people are not gonna hijack the plane!😠 …They’re gonna talk through the whole fuckin’ movie 😒, but they’re not gonna kill anybody🙄.” I don’t know much about Caparulo’s personal politics, but I think about that quote a lot.
It takes a lot to unlearn all of this stuff. Joyce has the benefit of an environment conducive to that process. Hank doesn’t, so it’s going to take him longer if it’s to happen at all. I’m really pulling for it to happen.
Also this was written about a year ago, so the real-life equivalent still had more mainstream apologists and not as many publicized warcrimes to refute them yet
This. I feel like people are forgetting that while Hank is working on unlearning some of these things – accepting that Becky likes girls but still adjusting to her having a girlfriend, accepting that Joyce is friends with an atheist but still working on resisting the kneejerk responses on how to talk to one, going against the church telling everyone Toedad was right and should have their full support and empathy to the point of divorcing Carol – he’s got twice the years of indoctrination that Joyce has and none of the environment to push him towards it other than Joyce, and to some extent Jocelyne.
I do think there’s hope for him to come around, but someone who’s been a fundie for at least a good 40-50 years isn’t going to be able to drop their entire default worldview in a matter of months with only minimal pressure to do so. I’m hoping him realizing he has at least two queer kids – two kids whom he actively acknowledges as kind and intelligent – is going to motivate him even more towards it, but in the meantime, he’s going to have to work on a lot of biases and prejudices that come from decades in an incredibly hostile and manipulative environment designed around framing everyone else as the enemy.
If anything it’s amazing how much he’s grown in the six months of the strip. He isn’t even in the college environment that Joyce is. I presume he’s still regularly clocking in on his day job and being exposed to the same environment that promoted (or at least tolerated) his previous way of thinking.
Makes me wonder if he’s gotten help from some people from work who beforehand found it very awkward to talk to him.
I sort of picture him as Alador Blight after Odelia’s insufferability became, well, insufferable. He’d been accommodating her for years until the divorce, and now he’s looking for his own center.
Seriously. People are acting shocked that a grown man hasn’t just instantly accepted and unlearned a lifetime’s worth of beliefs in a month or two. Things take time and the more deeply ingrained beliefs are the longer it takes to unravel them. And demonizing people for not immediately becoming perfect just pushes them away
To everyone saying “at least it’s not transphobia”: Remember Jocelyn’s comment about “before you hear it from Dad”.
also: both are terrible.
…oh dear. I hadn’t thought of that
On the other hand, Hank seems laser focused on her involvement in the protest – now you could argue he’s maliciously deadnaming and misgendering her but I personally don’t get that from the way he’s emphasizing “falling in with terrorists”” in the context of the protest
Yeah, he’s focused on the protest, so I can’t imagine he’s got any idea about Jocelyne. That doesn’t mean he isn’t transphobic, just that this isn’t about transphobia.
Still not sure what to make of the “before you hear it from Dad” comment, but it’s looking less and less like he knows.
I was thinking denial/blaming the “terrorist” group for convincing his “son” that “he” is female.
terrorist crowd, is it ? The unarmed people being brutally beaten up by over armoured and armed cops ?
Not to mention the snipers on the roof. Talk about terrorism.
More than anything, Hank seems concerned about his child being at a protest because he doesn’t want his child hurt. There WAS a sniper at that very same protest. Keeping in mind also everything that happened to Joyce in the first semester alone…
Eh, that *was* my assumption, but this comic seems more like he’s concerned with the idea that his child is on the wrong *side* of the political issue, which is a bit disappointing.
He’s an old white straight man, I expect no more from him than I do my own old white relations who repeat awful, uninformed things on facebook. Not that it is okay, just that I’m realistic in what I expect to come from Hank.
That’s certainly a thing you’re assuming that isn’t based on anything he’s said.
That’s certainly a very aggro comment for no reason.
Nah you know what, you’re right. Hank, a character who is shown to love his daughter Joyce, doesn’t love her or any of his kids at all. In fact, he wants to kill them with his own hands like Abraham to Isaac. There, is that better?
I mean, he certainly doesn’t want his kids hurt, but he hasn’t said anything that suggests he’s considered the possibility. He’s worried that they didn’t raise Jocelyne right and that’s she’s falling in with the wrong crowd, not about police violence.
At least judging by what he’s said. More may come in in the next few strips of course.
I’m… I’m too tired to do this kind of run around and explain my thought process. I’m just gonna pull an Amber and go thumb’s up emoji.
Disappointing, but sadly unsurprising. Unfortunately, it’d be more surprising if Hank didn’t consider the protesters terrorists; you don’t unlearn forty-plus years of bigotry and fearmongering in a matter of months. Not that that excuses anything.
Yeah, I was hoping he’s become more opened minded at this stage at his life.
He has, kind of, but it’s not something that’s going to happen all at once. Opening his heart to include gay people that are close to him is probably an easier ask than unlearning foreign policy positions spoon fed to him by Fox News for years.
A possibly relevant strip:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/humility/
Thanks for the reminder. May more humility comes his way.
Yeah, come on, Hank. Joyce and Dorothy have been trying to eat out all morning, and people keep interrupting them with stuff.
Exactly. So rude.
In fairness half of the people interrupting them have been Dorothy
Yeah, it’s weird. Usually it’s Joyce who’s reluctant to try new foods.
I don’t know if this comment will make it through because the site is loading extremely slow again. But I guess I have a different reason to be disappointed in Hank than I expected. People protesting against genocide are not siding with terrorists, and the victims trying to survive a genocide are not terrorists as well.
🤝
Umm, if he isn’t going by pictures, where did he get the idea that his third child was at the protest? Does he have a locator trace on her phone or something?
Hank is going by pictures. The picture he texted to Joyce, not the new one with the kiss in today’s IDS (which he almost certainly hasn’t seen yet). The fact that he didn’t realize Jocelyne (in that texted photo) is presenting female is probably due to it being not the highest quality photo, and also her coat camouflaging her shape and female-presenting clothing. (Her hair is only a little bit longer than when she was still passing as male.)
I think the news, he texted Joyce about it before she went to the protest iirc
She didn’t have her phone with her in any case. Which is why Joyce and Dorothy had to go to the protest in the first place.
Locator would still trace her phone to campus, though, right? Which would be a bit of a dead giveaway, especially if Joyce has no siblings with her when he shows up at her room.
She was staying with local friends, and left her phone presumably at their place, which could be a visit unrelated to the protest. She did have her phone when she visited Joyce in the dorm on Thursday.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/pervasively/
He knows from this
I feel like a monkey paw finger curled for the people unhappy that the “Bulmeria” conflict got glossed past. I mean… We all know perfectly well that it’s Israel in a funny hat, and that works okay for a passing jab, but if we’re actually focusing on it, at some point you need to either drop the funny hat or make substantive changes. I don’t know how you drop the funny hat short of straight-up retconning the previous strips, and making substantive changes loses any teeth on the actual situation, so what are we doing here?
Despite Hank’s stance here, I kind of doubt we’re going to spend a lot of time with Jocelyne and him debating the origins and politics of the Bulmeria conflict.
I am 100% for more Bulmeria content but only to differentiate it further from RL.
I say that as 100% “Yes, the RL version is a genocide and more attention.”
Just…not here. It’s a topic that doesn’t work for the story as the focus is absolutely on wacky lesbian hijinks.
You can’t pivot here.
Joyce is gonna be looking for a paper shredder.
I hope she keeps a few copies for posterity. How many people get a front-page newspaper photo of their first kiss with their girlfriend?
When they’re married in 20 years, they can have a framed copy on their wall.
This is going swell!
:[]
Fundiedad vs the Terrorgenders!
Well as a transmasc Palestinian this plotline certainly… is. I mean I think Willis is handling both aspects respectfully and I’m gonna keep reading but I suspect this arc is gonna be high in my spoons quota.
This is kind of my concern. Willis is trying to desperately course-correct and make up for using the protest as a backdrop for dojo’s queer awakening, but the flailing may actually cause more collateral damage to vulnerable and/or demoralised readers, this sort of storyline really needs methodical plotting with a sense of clarity, or else it risks draining and alienating large swathes of the reader base.
Is Dorothy and Joyce just the WORST lairs in the Walky universe? Is there anyone worse?
I dunno, I think their lairs look pretty reasonable, except maybe for the stack of newspapers on the floor.
Yeah, I think that if left to themselves, Walky and Becky would have the worst lairs.
Hank is still in the conservative right hemisphere so pulling him into the light was obviously not going to be easy….Still grinds my gears knowing that the prime minister of certain other countries can basically call the college students of our nation Hitler youth for not agreeing with the idea of using our resources to help them blow up civilian wemon & children and our government would just side against our own.
Fun fact, the UN icommission of inquiry declared that Israel’s has committed acts of genocide in Gaza so far under four of five definitions of genocidal actions. Mainstream media in the US and some parts of Europe may still treat this like a fringe take, but globally the attitude is very much in line with the protest depicted here.
Yeah those damn terrorists with their anti-bomb anti-genocide agenda. I can’t believe a good-hearted, moral, sensible person would fall in with a crowd like THAT. /s
I can’t guarantee it, but I will say even though I like and support this comic and this storyline, the panic energy on the girls seems to be directly correlating to the panic Willis is likely going through trying to ensure to give the “bulmeria” conflict the gravitas it is due, and likely we will see the effort to bolster the SWANA representation in the coming days and weeks, which I support though think this really needed more time and clarity to address, which I realise given the blowback, this may be the lesser of two evils, and that as much as this storyline feels like a series of awkward stumbles, it would probably have been much more contentious for the storyline to continue as planned and an effort to address feedback through a more clearly plotted subsequent storyline not taking place until several months to a year in the future.
I don’t envy the position and I don’t really know what could be done better, though I do think that this would have been a situation where Willis could simply point out that they are a white bread midwestern ex-fundie that lives newspaper comics, batman and transformers, and simply due not have the depth of experience and wider perspective to give the most correct and appropriate response in-comic to these global issues that are such a major part of the political moment.
Like, it needs to be pointed out that absence of a specific representation does not mean that there is bigotry in authorial intent against a specific real world subject or marginalised identity. Willis has absolutely the best of intentions and when told that someone or something isn’t being represented with the appropriate humanity and integrity, they will do their level best to ensure to correct this, but the fact of the matter is that there are plenty of stories that have a narrow focus and it is not bigoted for them to do so. Not every story needs to address every moment, this is very much a daily newspaper strip sort of philosophy, but genuinely this comic could simply focus on dumb Midwestern college students from various bqckgrounds and there would be nothing at all wrong with that.
I do think that a webcomic about college is probably going to need to brush up against the topic of campus protest in order to feel authentic, but I think the matter at hand for the protest was poorly chosen and beyond the scope of DOA. Inasmuch as it’s driven Willis to make their Arab and Muslim characters more prominent, I’d say there have definitely been some positive aspects to the whole boondoggle, but for the most part Willis has really written themself into a corner from which it will be difficult to satisfy many people for whom this is an important real-life topic. A for intention, certainly, but a C- at most for execution.
By my understanding, the comic protest was inspired by the one in our world’s version of Indiana University in April of last year (happening around the time the storyline was being drawn).
For what it’s worth, here are two different viewpoints on the event:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/1/how-a-gaza-protest-at-indiana-university-became-a-battle-for-free-speech
https://www.wrtv.com/news/local-news/independent-review-of-protests-on-iu-campus-provides-recommendations-to-school
By the way, neither article seems to comment on how well the protest might serve as a backdrop for smooching. In fact, this distressing oversight appears to extend to every article I’ve yet found on the subject.
I think the better solution is to absolutely make it clear Bulmeria is NOT any RL nation and give it a fictional history with fictional groups. It is applicable but absolutely not a metaphor.
Apparently a sizable number of people will not find that acceptable.
That would be cowardly, tbh.
I think its an alternative to a handling of it in a dramedy superhero coming of age drama that is absolutely NOT about that subject. In THE STUDIO, they have the executives try to insert a message about medical disinformation in a movie called Zombie Apoocalypse.
It undermines the message having wacky romantic hijinks during the event.
And that’s what the comic is ABOUT. You can’t pivot.
Look, I don’t think the comic should have gone here either if it was going to handle the situation the way it so far has, but it is extremely funny to effectively say something with superheroes in it shouldn’t try to comment on politics? Superheroes have been political allegories this entire time.
I never said it shouldn’t comment on politics. It comments on them constantly but I don’t think it can comment on a genocide with humor. Some topics remain…unfunny even as a means of cope.
Come on, Hank, you were the GOOD parent of the bunch we’d met so far. I can give you a pass if Jocelyne didn’t come out to you yet – in which case, Joyce really shouldn’t be acting the way she’s acting and risking accidentally outing her to someone that Jocelyne isn’t comfortable with coming out to – but framing the protest as supporting terrorism? Come on, this is exactly the mentality that almost got Becky killed and directly lead to you getting divorced.
Hopefully lunch will involve them sitting down and Hank actually listening to Joyce and Dorothy without any extra drama popping up. Heck, Jocelyne showing up and walking Hank through being transgender wouldn’t be a bad thing. I have a feeling we’re going to be getting plenty of drama from Becky’s state of mind in the near future, I just want the one “cool” dad that we’ve met so far to actually prove that he’s a good person and not just someone that was just a bit better than most of the other dads we’ve met so far…
Straight up I am going to go out of my way to not read the comments today, so all i’m going to say is that if you find yourself spending a lot of time here re; the comments today you can also donate to The Sameer Project or Sudanfunds right now for $5. If there is a trusted charity, program or GFM that you personally trust, feel free to donate to them instead.
If you’re broke like me then I highly recommend you take some time out if your day to read some free online articles from Mizna and Tawahan (Jewish Currents is also very good as well). Maybe get around to watching some international cinema too (in whatever format you prefer).
Peace ✌️
Yeah. That just cost Hank alot of goodwill from me. Teroiat for saying genocide is bad and universities maybe shouldn’t be doing weapons?
Joyce, yer so casual, yer a smooth criminal.
(but ‘terrorist’? wtf here.)
Wait, so he hasn’t seen the newspaper yet? Then how does he know about Jocelyne being at the protest at all?
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/pervasively/
Remember this?
So what did he actually come here to do? Not because of the kiss or because he found out Jocelyne was trans. Not because he was worried about them being hurt in the protest.
He wanted to talk Jocelyne out of protesting? Even though the protest has already been shut down? To just yell at her for doing this bad thing?
I think he’s just ranting that he wouldn’t have to worry and come out here if she didn’t get involved in protests that get tear gassed and he blames her for that rather than the authority for suppressing the protests
I think he’s just behind the times.
He saw Jocelyne protesting with “the terrorists” and got very concerned for her, and came to “talk reason” to her to try to get her to leave. Possibly he’s concerned about the organizers of the protest, or thinks that he needs to get away before the protesters start getting violent, which as violent terrorists, they’re almost certainly going to do, right?
He saw the news article, texted Joyce to be sure, she responded with “Nope!” and he was fine for probably a few minutes… until he realized that Joyce was probably covering for her, which would probably just heighten his concern more.
It is a little weird. I mean, Jocelyne is an adult, and not a financially dependent college age quasi-adult like Joyce, but a full, lives on her own, twenty-something adult. If Hank disapproves of her actions, can’t he just bring it up next time he sees her? Is he planning to drag her back to La Porte by the hair? Possibly this is some fundie thing that I don’t grasp, but actually showing up here seems like hugely overreacting.
He says she’s “fallen in with that terrorist crowd.” We don’t know just how toxic and crazy the media Hank’s been listening to is. Right wing media really leans into fearmongering, and keep in mind that to us, it seems like the police stepped way over the line to try to control and stop the protest with the use of force. It would stand to reason that the protest was being painted as something dangerous.
If Hank took a day to drive down to campus when he saw one of his kids taking up with “terrorists” then I’m sure the reason why he doesn’t plan to just have a face-to-face conversation with her next Thanksgiving is because he’s afraid for her safety, not just that she has different politics.
If this WASN’T invoking the RL events (and it probably was not meant to beyond being vaguely similar), then Hank being worried about Jocelyn being arrested and beaten was a legitimate fear.
With RL events, it seems like a scream of sanity in the void that she was trying to make a statement.
But will Jocelyn be renounced a third time before she rises again?
As long as she doesn’t ask Hank if she’s her sister’s keeper, I think we’ll be OK.
Hey, Joyce is the one who stole her name.
People who don’t want war are terrorists.
People who don’t want a totalitarian christian theocratic state are terrorists.
Welp.
Hank’s an older conservative who isn’t really tuned in to politics except via the lense of conservative propaganda he has probably never seen an alternative to; who likely has some racist sentiments he hasn’t questioned because nobody’s ever asked him to since every human being he knows at all well is white.
But people can improve if they try to! Joyce is less evil than she was a semester ago, idk I’m holding out hope for her dad
I mean, I don’t think the Bulmerians want a totalitarian Christian state but that would get into the fact we don’t know anything about them. Again, a lot of this seems to be filling in holes with RL when that….only goes to the dark place.
i think felian means America
Hank loses a lot of points for rushing down to the campus because he thought his child was involved with terrorists and not because he was worried they might have been hurt.
Worrying about their political views is about losing control and reputational damage. Was he a good parent? Maybe. But kids go their own way and make different mistakes.
We know he wasn’t a good parent. You just have to go back to when Dina had to ask Joyce about the ways Becky’s parents physically abused her where Joyce admits her parents did the same thing to their kids (less or not at all to her I don’t recall which because Joyce was incredibly obedient) to know he was a terrible parent.
only a hundred comments? either everyone’s real quiet or a lot of people done fucked up and got their shit deleted
also store your damn papers better joyce
The page did not load for me for a while, so I could not look it up or comment until now
The site wasn’t working properly from around 0030 until maybe 0400. My first comment, above, is timestamped 0038, and the site was kind of slow but working normally when I loaded the page, but when I posted the comment, it took about ten minutes for the page to reload, and even then it didn’t load completely. It was an interesting look at the structure of the page under the stylesheets, though.
Just standing around real casual
In hindsight yeah it shouldve been obvious that this is what Hank, the 60 year old American evangelical who’s been glucking Zionist propaganda his whole life, in a world where being pro Palestine only became acceptable extremely recently, would be here about. Idk why it never occurred to me.
Anyway:
Free Palestine
Its not self defense if you’re the violent oppressor
Several Israeli officials have said multiple times that their goal is to eradicate Gaza
This is a genocide
The Israeli Occupying Force is a terrorist organization
Boycott Israel!
A doomed plan. Wonder how many newspaper racks they will pass on the way to breakfast?
Also, a UN commission just found that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
UN Commissions, famously trusted by American conservatives…
Nice to see the UN finally catching up to what some of us have been saying for a long time. I doubt the people who support Israel will care though.
I’m going to just say that whatever your reaction to this new revelation about hank is, it’s ok. If you’re feeling betrayed and angry with him, that is completely understandable. It is infuriating that people in real life believe opposing a genocide is terrorism, and seeing that reflected in fiction from a well liked character is hard. You don’t have to forgive Hank for that.
At the same time, it’s also ok if you do want to still like Hank and appreciate his good qualities while aknowledging that his views are still pretty fucked up. Willis comic like real life isn’t black and white. There is room in people and his characters for good and bad at the same time. Honestly this reminds me of my own dad, who has some extremely abhorrent views, but tries to be a good dad and I love him. I personally don’t want to give up on that relationship, even though many would, and both of those choices are valid. That doesn’t mean we condone these beliefs of course, please believe me when I say that.
I think people do need to remember that Joyce said and did some really horrible things at the start of the webcomic. Acknowledging that what Hank said is horrible but that he has the same capacity to grow and change his beliefs as Joyce did should not be construed as making excuses for him.
They hated her because she spoke the truth smh
Realized to late how ambigous that read, by ‘her’ i meant Dot. I was making a joke.
Joyce is 18, Hank is over 60.
Hey Megan, are you gonna give me an apology for the time you casually dismissed my identity as a trans lesbian over shipping opinions? I haven’t interacted with any of your posts because I had no interest in relitigating what was a genuinely extremely upsetting moment for me but if you don’t wish to extend me the same courtesy I am absolutely happy to put you on blast.
They won’t
Actually *she probably
Yes, I apologize for getting too caught up in my own desire to defend myself and my queer identity that I project more hostility onto you than there usually is, especially when doing so in the name of other people I do not speak for. Genuinely, I do not think you are as bad of a person as I made you out to be, and should have held myself back from making purposefully derogatory statements just to piss you off.
I would like an apology from *you* for the genuinely hurtful and low-key queerphobic rhetoric you have levied at me in particular. I don’t want to spew bile on someone else’s website day after day, but I also have a dear need to not foster people who treat me badly for my identity, and many of the things you’ve said in the past have been that. I will admit to taking things too far, but I am not going to act like our *shared* status as trans women prevents you from hurting others feelings and making other trans people feel less welcome, whether intentionally or not.
You know, many RPGs have rules for one character aiding another in, let’s just say for hypotheticals, a deception check. Few RPGs have rules to account for when both characters are so bad it that their combined effort is even worse than what their individual efforts would be. No idea what’s making me think about that at the moment. 😛
In an equally unrelated-to-anything note: the Fiasco RPG (“A game of powerful ambition and poor impulse control”) is specifically designed for characters who attempt a scheme or caper and then, when it almost inevitably goes wrong, struggle to dig themselves out of the situation in ways that frequently make matters worse.
Don’t know if anyone cares, but… you can make things more difficult by incompetently trying to help an ally in Pathfinder 2E (just a -1 for a critical failure, so not very bad in that d20 system), the Mongoose Publishing version of Traveller (trying to help can result in anything from -3 to +3 to the next person’s check, and it’s a 2d6 system) and Kult: Divinity Lost (GM adds a new complication as a result of any failed attempt to help, which may be entertainingly disastrous).
I’m sure there’re other systems too, but even this quick search took longer than it should’ve.
Citing Lois Bujold’s “A Civil Campaign”:
Father: “You took my daughter to the ORB?” (Orb = orbital house of pleasure renowned among many star systems)
Panicked daughter: “It was part of his therapy!”
Even more panicked suitor: “We got a discount!”
EPIC FAIL
I wonder why Jocelyne is taking the heat for this when Joyce was also extremely visibly at the protest. What’s the actual situation Jocelyne and Hank? Is he lacking information cause he’s been traveling or something?
He probably hasn’t seen the newspaper because he’s been traveling, yeah. It’s a pretty long drive from La Porte to Bloomington.
I am ever so cautiously holding my breath with Hank here. I’ll wait for the shoe to fully drop.
Joyce: So, dad, after less than two semesters of college, I am now a gay atheist. Turns out you were kinda right to worry.
Please. Bisexual polyamorous atheist.
I’m gonna say that when it comes to Hank, I’ll be holding out SOME hope that he can come around on it. He’s on the wrong side of this issue to be sure, but like he’s proven he doesn’t uncritically drink the conservative kool-aid, he wouldn’t have divorced his wife if that was the case, and when the risk of losing his children over this comes up… I dunno, I feel like he may well be able to redeem himself on this. The odds are at least better than for his ex-wife.
It took the cult he was a member of bailing out a murderer who kidnapped his daughter and her friends for him to change his mind on that. Let’s hope it doesn’t take something that drastic this time.
I mean even that wasn’t enough for the vast majority of the members. He broke through some insanely potent social programming when he left it behind, and that’s not nothing.
Maybe you should trust your instinct that you raised your child right and that, like with the daughter you are speaking to right now, your offspring continues to challenge you to grow?
And then maybe you can rebuild your relationship with Jordan, too.
If most parents like Hank were capable of that much change and growth … I suspect I’d have spent a lot less on therapy over the years
too high for a casual pose, but decent enough for stretching. I wonder if there are more papers around…
Quick question – how are all these non-students (like Hank) getting into the dorms at all? Last time I went anywhere near my college, I could not even get into the tiny little bookstore without a school-issued ID, much less into a dormitory.
Hank is an approved adult contact so he’d be allowed in the building. idk if the residence halls at IU require a card for access but we’ll assume they don’t for story convenience.
How’d Becky get in last semester?
There’s never been any hint of controlled access to the dorms. People wander in and out regularly. Except they’re apparently locked so only students can access at night as we saw with Ryan.
I remember when I assumed that Bulmeria stood for Ukraine because Alex fled there and the Slavic sounding name. So I was really confused why Jocelyn was supporting the evil government trying to annex it as they absolutely did have a right to self-defense against Russia with NATO/US help. When someone pointed out Gaza was PROBABLY the more obvious parallel, I was like, “Oh. I did not read that correctly. At all.”
Joyce is so desperate to be a good ally that she gonna ends up outing Jocelyn
I mean, this being Joyce, chances were going to be pretty high of that happening anyways. She’s new to the whole idea of transgender people, and doesn’t know about things like not outing a transgender person without their explicit permission or the Egg Prime Directive (which… that would be a hilarious storyline for Joyce to go through, I think – but not one that I think any of the other current characters would be good fits for), so her screwing that up is kind of expected.
For those who are not familiar with it, the Egg Prime Directive states that you do not tell someone who hasn’t told you that they’re transgender that they’re transgender, since that is something that they’ll have to realize and work through on their own, since that is something that can be tremendously traumatic for the person to go through and can potentially set back their journey for years to come.
Can I just say how much I hate the Egg Prime Directive? Not having someone point things out to me and, instead of just accepting my kneejerk “No, definitely not trans,” go “seriously, here’s some stuff to read. Give it a thought” was what set me back from realizing things for over a decade.
Results may vary, the truth is either approach can hurt people, because people are…complicated and many-faceted
Eh, better than what I went through… I tried coming out to a trans man who didn’t realize he was transgender, and that set my journey back by decades! I don’t blame him at all – he was just speaking honestly about how he felt trying to live as a woman, and this being the mid-90s, neither of us knew anything about what it meant to be transgender – but it’s still a fun little anecdote from my own history.
One response I’ve heard to the “original” Prime Directive goes something like:
“So for years, decades, generations, while we suffered and died, you just sat up there and … watched.”
the funny thing about the “egg prime directive” is that it’s the exact same thing. It’s well-meaning claptrap from holier-than-thou folks who have a privileged condition, and the kind of thing that’s only a good idea if you don’t think about it too hard.
turns out it can be really useful to have someone who’s been in a similar position to you point out that your strange feelings might indicate a form of queerness! turns out it’s really helpful for people to share experiences and ideas! turns out it’s really helpful for friends to say to friends, “I noticed this thing about you”!
you know, Joyce, there are times when refusing to misgender a person is a way of outing them. there are times when keeping them in the closet without their knowledge is genuinely the safest course of action. this is one of those times
Hence the two most important rules for dealing with transgender people (or people you think might be transgender): don’t out them without their explicit permission, and don’t tell someone that they’re transgender unsolicited.
“If This Goes On”, to steal from Heinlein, you may not have to worry about there being any trans persons in the US…they will have been defined out of existence by federal fiat. Hopefully the actual people will continue to exist.
Including my trans daughter, who will now have trouble getting a US passport. If I’d had the money and the foresight, she and her spouse’d be acclimating to Denmark or Holland by now. Canada is too close.
Not to be alarmist or anything. Just a history major who’s read the script.
That is a terrifying book
Looks like Joyce has a little Captain Morgan in her.