I lost my parents in 1984 and 1986. Today would have been my mom’s 99th birthday. I still miss them and think about them often. I’m pretty sure that’s true whether your relationship was good, bad, or indifferent; you can never escape from those early, formative connections.
Won’t offer you the usual platitudes or caring voyeurism (“So sorry, how did it happen”), but have been somewhere similar to where you are now (twice), and yes it sucks. Peace to you friend.
I mean, Radiah isn’t aware of the circumstances leading up to them smooching during a protest. To be fair, there really isn’t *any* good reason to have a big smoocheroo during a protest that isn’t about people not liking smooch’n.
So, her point is still incredibly valid. Those two made a big show of smooch’n (Inadvertently sure, but Dotty WAS on a Dramatic Hill in the middle of the camp) which took away from the actual thing being protested. Now the entire *reason* for the protest is being white washed (Actual term for a cover up, not the racial thing, but the double entendre is nice) to cover them smooching.
There are protesters in jail right now (one from the paper sent her story in from the protesting equivalent of the drunk tank) for trying to bring to light the issues, and the talk of the day is about two girls smooching it up.
But there isn’t any good reason _not_ to have a big smoocheroo during a protest, or almost any other time. They weren’t doing it to get attention. If they were opposite-gender-presenting they wouldn’t have gotten any, and there would have been nothing for Raidah to get upset about. So, what, straight people can express their love at protests, but lesbians can’t?
I mean the statement “straight people can express their love but lesbians can’t” implies that the issue is unfairness towards lesbian couples in lieu of straight couples when that’s like…not at all what Raidah’s mad about. Now maybe Daisy WOULDN’T have but Joyce and Joe on the front page. But what Raidah’s mad about is…y’know…that there’s a kiss on the front page distracting from the point/events of the protest.
Like she’s right to be mad at Daisy cuz Daisy decided to make the protest about them. Against the wishes of even the participants in the kiss!
I’m not saying that it’s not a valid reason to be mad at Daisy. Just that there are several dynamics that complicate being mad at Joyce and Dorothy. Which Raidah clearly is, even above Daisy.
No one, gay straight or other, should be doing anything at a protest that goes against the parameters and agreements of the organization of the protests and the people marshalling it when it’s underway.
Like the other comment or said, pride protest? Probably expected and fine, but even that’s contextual. Anti Genocide protest? Save that for when you’re back at home and not dodging a tear gas canister to the head.
It’s not about you, and you shouldn’t want the attention anyway. Even if they were dating before this and there wasn’t personal drama, this would still be a lame thing to do.
Raidah may be kinda lame on almost everything, but she hasn’t really said anything wrong about any of this specific plotline.
When the theme is ‘resisting the oppression of institutions’, the perspective
“No one[…]should be doing anything at a protest that goes against[…]the organization of the protests and the people marshalling it when it’s underway.”
comes across as comic irony.
“You may join us to protest against the Man, but only if you submit your wills in unwavering obedience to the Man who’s against the Man.”
(In other words, it sets off warning bells that they only want to take the place of the oppressors rather than than stop the oppression.)
I see it as “Don’t do things that will give ‘the man’ something that pulls the focus away from the intent of the protest.”
The whole thing is moot to begin with though. They weren’t there in solidarity with the protesters, they were there to warn Jocelyne, and got Hormone’ed.
Dottie in fact tried to use the protest as some kind of… who the hell knows, but her intent was apparently to get arrested for something she doesn’t even care about to get away from her gay thoughts… Maybe?
She wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders there, and it’s snowballed into a clusterkerfluffle that is probably going to be haunting them into at least our time July, if the preview was any indication.
That said, it takes nothing away from anyone who gets mad at them for “upstaging” the protest, or for the people who will think they were attempting to steal the spotlight, or get “the clouts.”
Because smooching at a war protest, let alone one for a genocide, is some tiktoc clout chasing antics without context clues, and even with the background, its still a bad scene.
I think Dorothy was trying to prove to herself that she cares.
This type of sword falling activism is not recommended unless you can figure out how it actually helps the cause or the people involved.
I mean, it’s not like they decided they were gonna deliberately be distracting. They were full of emotions and acted accordingly, they weren’t trying to make this the Look We’re Kissing Show.
Dorothy kinda did try to make it about herself when she grabbed a flag and walked into the center of the protest while everyone else was leaving, purely because it’s something she wouldn’t have done while trying to become President. She had no way of knowing that would end with her on the front page of the newspaper, but as Raidah said earlier without enough evidence to justify the claim, it was the wrong reason to be there.
Interesting question, is the purpose of the news to inform the public or to lead discussion? I maintain trying to get at least some people to read the article (written by a protester from jail) is the more important job of the front page; Raidah’s complaint is that the picture makes people “talk” about the wrong thing.
I suppose in the alternate world where the headline was “University sponsors mass murder, rewrites laws to silence protest mid-action; police cause riot” people who don’t read anything besides headlines would be properly upset. But I also suspect in the alternate reality where Raidah was more normal about people associating with Sarah she still wouldn’t give any sign that she thought the protest was important.
Y’know what? At least this ignorance of the more major issues by the news is because the editor was horny and not because, like, governmental pressure to not discuss certain issues in anything but a dismissive way.
I feel fairly confident that, as we’re not currently beset by gigantic militant toy stores, that they figured that living with the Soggies was better than living in our hellhole.
Gotta wonder if she actually gives a damn, or if she’s just using it as a pretext to be a source of grief in someone’s life to complain about people she doesn’t like.
Just because someone’s shooting in the same direction as you, doesn’t mean they’ll discriminate between your foe and your back. People seem awfully keen to forget Raidah’s past behavior. But it’s my experience, and that of many people wiser than I, that
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
–Maya Angelou
A literal dog whistle is not audible to humans but is to dogs.
A metaphorical dog whistle says something in a way only certain people will hear.
Like intentionally talking about your mom’s delicious cooking around someone who’s insecure about their cooking skills.
Or talking about how great the past was, in such a way that those groups who had it bad in the past, and those agree with you, know you mean you wish things still sucked for them.
Yeah, why would a Muslim character care about totally-not-Palestine, or the cops cracking down on activists rallying against the schools ties to the tech billionaires soaked in blood.
How are you getting that from this strip? As far as she knows, she has a legitimate grievance against Joyce and Dorothy for making the protest all about them via an extremely public kiss, which in her eyes was aided and abetted by Daisy making it the front page of the newspaper. More to the point, Raidah expresses frustration and anger that members of her community – a community facing genocide – were not consulted on the coverage of this extremely sensitive event. That’s an entirely different grievance, and it’s not connected to her hatred of Joyce at all – it comes from a place of frustration from being a brown Muslim women, and the genocide of people like her being covered without actually centering them. The newspaper photo is a distraction from the substantive issues of the protest, it is racist in its centering of white women in order to generate circulation, and Raidah has every right to be angry about it irrespective of the fact that she also happens to hate Joyce. I just don’t see how you can say she doesn’t give a damn when she’s here, in this strip, giving a damn.
Raidah is flat wrong about whether it’s OK for two lesbians to kiss in public, at a protest or anywhere else. They weren’t doing it for attention. If a straight couple kissed each other at the protest, no one would pay attention. It’s not OK to say that lesbians shouldn’t kiss in public because they might draw attention away from some issue.
Raidah’s getting real close to saying it I’m afraid:
“It’s a bad enough situation already without also having to deal with you wrapping it in tone deaf garbage.”
Right now there’s room for interpretation but what Raidah means by “bad enough situation” could be several things. It could be the cops tear gassing protestors, that’s certainly a bad situation. But it could also be gay kissing at a muslim organized protest causing discord between homophobic muslims and non-homophobic muslims.
She hasn’t said it yet, but I think she’s getting close
I would assume that the “bad enough situation” would be the situation in Bulmeria which seems to be war crimes and genocide. As in “the situation in Bulmeria (and this university funding it) is already bad enough without having to deal with you wrapping it in tone deaf garbage”.
I interpreted the “bad enough situation,” to be the, y’know, genocide and violent police intervention in a peaceful protest. Raidah’s character is similar to Mike’s- an asshole, but saying something correct. Dorothy dove back into that protest against protest leaders’ recommendations because she had to “self realize,” not because the subject material was important to her. Joyce dove back into the protest because of Dorothy. Those two kissing is obviously good/gay, but time and place matter. If I stood up at my brother’s funeral, grabbed the mic, and distracted from the funeral by kissing and proposing to my fiancé, it would be inappropriate for the time and place, regardless of being gay. It would probably show a lack of care for the dead. Especially if it wasn’t MY brother’s funeral. This is a part of a larger conversation about white gay people getting large amounts of the media’s protest-attention because their celebration of sexuality is interesting/sexy/fun and white, while glossing over the oppression of being queer, especially for POC and disabled queer people. Or, in the story’s case, overlooking the protests’ outcome almost entirely in favor of a less depressing, “sexier,” or more justice-satisfying and peaceful angle.
The love of queer people is often commodified to signal diversity, inclusion, and rebellion in the media, often against queer people’s wishes. But it’s just love. And college kids doing PDA should be considerate of the circumstances, Goddamn it.
A majority of American Muslims favour rights for LGBT people. In the pre-Trump era, their were similar to American protestants. Young Muslims, in particular, overwhelmingly favour LGBT rights.
This framing of Muslim vs LGBT is not present in the text of the comic. It is also an Islamophobic trope, used by European far-right parties.
They get a slightly different spell list and automatic perks, but nothing that would really make much of a difference in this scenario. There’s a lot of talk in build-centric forums about how, in this exact situation, a lesbian would probably have an easier time handling the scripted events, but those arguments typically rely on “optimal” builds that don’t account for a lot of bisexual contingencies.
What Raidah is doing is ripping Daisy for journalist malfeasance.
The title of a protest should be about the protest. She made it about her personal thirst.
Nothing to do with “banning lesbians from kissing in public”.
Talk aboutbiased personal google warping perception of reality.
…y’know, this specific blunder aside, I’m kinda getting the feeling Daisy is not equipped to edit a newspaper that deals with many diverse and serious topics by virtue of just like. Not knowing things. In general.
Oh hey, buffer watch is up to my birthday next year
i mean outside of the amazigirl sitings and maybe campus events like guest speakers i wonder how ‘important’ the news there is if they were also gonna let one of the students do a comic run
Dadly, I think Daisy has a more solid handle on American “news” media than Raidah does.
American media are advertising outlets above all else. This’ll sell way more metaphorical cheeseburgers than a full-color spread on the conflict itself.
Daisy is right that her picture would get a lot more attention and a lot more pickup in the mainstream, increasing the odds that its message would be distributed farther and wider.
Raidah is right that a ton of that doesn’t really matter because “the message” has been undercut. “Congrats, you’ve spread the word that blonde white girls should be allowed to kiss, what does this have to do with the genocide of brown poeple?”
I think Raidah is more correct here, spreading the message only matters if the message being spread is correct, but I do get Daisy’s instincts too, at the very least the door is wedged open more than a more accurate cover photo would’ve managed, its just that the job isn’t remotely done yet.
The most obvious “correct” thing for Daisy to have used as the picture is cops tear-gassing protestors but that ALSO wouldn’t be about Bulmeria at all and be replacing it with a culture war cops-vs-hippies kind of conversation. Like, nothing actually happened at the protest that’d make a good picture Raidah would be happy with. We didn’t even see any good signs.
Well that’s just wrong. The article was about the protest, which was about Bulmeria – pictures of said protestors would not be “replacing it with a culture war cops-vs-hippies kind of conversation” (where are you even getting the hippies from? or that police brutality is a “culture war” thing??) it would pay attention to, you know, the thing that happened, which is the police being used to suppress free speech about Bulmeria & the bombings. Which in turn should get the attention to said topic, if you can write a good article.
Hell, I think you could even get a good picture /without/ the protestors making the same point & that’d also be better than what Daisy went with.
It was a picture of protestors surrounded by a haze of tear gas. If the requirement is for the protestors in the image to be brown, they are showing too much of the protestors’ likeness (which the image run also did).
“Hell, I think you could even get a good picture /without/ the protestors making the same point & that’d also be better than what Daisy went with.”
And if protestors ARE shown, I do think the /focus/ (like, literal center of the picture, in the foreground, referenced in the headline) of the image should be protesting. This wasn’t the case, which is what people have been taking issue with. There’s also a difference between white protestors being in a picture vs being in the center of it (again, what people are taking issue with. Even Raidah in this comic that you’re commenting under!)
I think there’s a real argument that it’s very easy to shift the focus from “Stop the genocide” to free speech/police brutality. Which is a real issue that deserves attention, but doesn’t actually help stop the genocide.
Yeah, sure, but that’s on the article and framing, hence “if you can write a good article”. Sort of irrelevant here, since we can’t read the damn thing and it hasn’t come up as an issue. Nor is it something I need or want the comic to discuss. I don’t like the protest storyline, I don’t think it’s well done, I’ll be happy when we move past at least the immediate aftermath.
It really feels like the comic equivalent of when someone in a sitcoms says something rude and awkwardly trying to apologize while simultaneously making it worse.
i mean it’s also just a college newspaper, i wouldn’t be surprised if some student/person protesting there had like double the amount of followers online as there are students on campus to where a vid of the tear gassing would go viral
She’s right in that this is how “news” media works, but wrong in that this type of packaging serves a journalistic purpose. It gets eyeballs, but that doesn’t mean it informs or calls anyone to action.
Eh? Right that Daisy mishandled this, probably. Right about how? Very little of what she’s saying makes sense, and even if they were reasonable conclusions we already know they’re wrong.
Thats what I keep thinking with all the Raidah-hate.
Yeah, she is obviously feeling hostility towards Joyce/Dotty.
Doesnt make her complaint about Daisy as “the media” buying the lead any less valid.
Just because somebody is biased doesnt make them wrong or their grievances hypocritical.
She has a strong sense of justice and is generally pretty well attuned to what’s really important in a situation, but has a massive blind spot for her own personal life and relationships. Of course, that sense of justice applies across the board, so when it comes to her personal life, she feels just as strongly that the people she thinks are bad are bad, and the fights she thinks are worth fighting are worth fighting. And all the lessons she’s learned standing up to power and fighting the good fight she can erroneously extend to putting down personal rivals and social climbing.
Like, case and point here she’s conflating her personal beef with Joyce and Dorothy with her legitimate grievances about people not taking the protest seriously. In this case the two happen to largely overlap, but you can see in a few places that she’s losing focus on the noble political goal she’s pursuing in the interest of scoring whatever shots she can against people she doesn’t like, because to her those are the same thing.
Raidah is an interesting character because I believe she only comes off this bad (at least in her more recent appearances) because we see her from the perspective of the main cast we empathize with. In a vacuum Raidah’s probably not that bad a person. There must be something Jacob saw in her right? We just see her at her worst because she only holds ire and a arguably justified grudge against Joyce, even though we could debate Joyce has done worse than anything we’ve seen Raidah do.
I personally think Raidah just needs real (not Carl) friends and a life so she’s not constantly seen as such a hater and social climber. Maybe pull something together with Asma and Alice, they had good energy together. Throw Jen in there too. Get this DoA Team B going!
Sarah is kinda in that same perspective where we see Raidah as bad but in actuality Sarah has arguably done worse to her. As in Sarah actually punched Raidah once. Raidah has so far just been catty I guess? Is that really treating Sarah that bad when it’s very much a two way street of snark and passive aggression? Or are we really valuing Raidah stealing Jennifer, a friend Sarah doesn’t even like or hangout with, for a few months?
Actually in that regard I think another thing we haven’t seen comes into play, which is Sarah and Raidah’s freshman year. Whatever Sarah’s done since, this started with months of bullying, ostracism, and harassment on Raidah’s part
Yep, Sarah was absolutely in the wrong for that punch but it was not unprovoked. Raidah made the rest of her freshman year hell, and tried to cut her off from her newfound friends in sophomore year too. She wasn’t just ignoring Sarah, she was trying to go out and hurt her on purpose.
I would only be warning people away from someone if I knew they were literally dangerous or malicious. Sarah is “guilty” of ratting out her roommate to her dad out of concern for her mental health. Which, EVEN IF Sarah was in the wrong, is at best only a reason to avoid someone. Raidah didn’t just break off the friendship — she was trying to actively make Sarah suffer, months later.
I mean. Raidah & Sarah have a history. Raidah’s first few interactions with Sarah are essentially her walking up and insulting Sarah because she dislikes her that much. There’s a reason Sarah punched her! Raidah was actively trying to dissuade people from talking to Sarah (specifically Joyce, in that scene). That goes beyond “catty”. And I’m saying all that as someone who LIKES Raidah. I think she’s pretty interesting!
I don’t know if we can really quantify what’s worse between in actions between them but I personally think Raidah and Sarah kind of break even on grading scale of who was a bigger jerk. Sarah’s not in jail or out of a scholarship after all and after she apologized they kind of just avoided each other until fate forced them back together. In my opinion Raidah has been far worse to characters like Dina and Jennifer, and even Asher.
We might not be, because after this strip here where Raidah and Sarah kind of reconcile on the punch incident while agreeing to still hate each other over the Dana one
Raidah doesn’t see Sarah again until Jacob brings her along to visit Joyce for a party maybe? I think that was the dry party everyone drank at. Anyway they both seem equally surprised and put off to be in each other’s presence. Kinda like they were avoiding each other.
I think Raidah comes off as bad because we see her very comfortably lying and rewriting history to manipulate people to her side, and using language that suggests she truly sees friends only as assets to advance her status. That she turns her skills to ruining Sarah’s life over an incident she herself won’t give anything like a honest account of makes her a villain, but in my opinion she’s largely irredeemable anyway.
it was also daisy’s own bias, i’m sure ‘clickbait’ of a photo when joyce was attacked/about to be arrested despite not resisting also would’ve drawn eyes (unless the other students wouldn’t care/desensitized to authoritative violence by now)
Daisy, the ends of every pencil you own must be disgustingly rusted or tarnished or whatever tf happens to the metal eraser holding things when they get wet. They make teething toy things for non-babies (my daughter keeps asking for one so I’m pretty sure they exist), please god get one of those.
The entire joke of Daisy has been that she’s incompetent and the content of her newspaper is entirely dictated by what’s feeding her horniness on any given day. Raidah is entirely right, Daisy is bad at newspaper.
Also, with how much Raidah’s criticisms are echoing this comments section circa the protest arc, this in many ways feels like Willis turning to the camera and apologizing.
it’s not the main point of the protest but presumably bulmeria is also anti gay so them doing a kiss while surrounded by tear gas seems like it’d be good symbolically too like “make love not war” or so (surprised that wasn’t the headline)
It also has the secondary effect of making Raidah the commentariat’s mouthpiece. Considering how consistently shitty Raidah’s behaviour is, I find this endlessly funny.
ah a reminder why raidah is still the worst, even when she has good points. Love the idea that somehow Joyce and Dorothy nefariously planned this to distract from a genocide
They didn’t really “hijack” it. Daisy, on the other hand, has the keen journalistic instincts and ethics of a weekly tabloid writer, and grabbed the picture she thought was “hottest”, rather than one that would actually illustrate the story.
Are we surprised by those instincts? I’m pretty sure part of the joke with her is that she’s J Jonah Jameson if he were a horny lesbian college student. Hence why she’s so hung up on someone getting her photos of Spiderman Amazigirl. Those are the exact instincts I’d expect from him.
Apart from some of the most recent depictions, JJJ’s thing has always been that he is a good journalist with an incredibly strong sense of justice when it comes to anything other than Spider-Man, and a terrible boss. In my opinion he’d be appalled at Daisy’s handling of the protest.
There’s another recent story in which JJJ, who’s lost his job at the Bugle and wants to promote his website, manages to wangle an in-person interview with Spider-Man. It eventually breaks down into Jonah confessing that he hates anyone who wears a mask because masked thugs killed a girl he was engaged to. He collapses, telling Spidey to just go. Then Peter removes his mask and explains why he wears it, and why he does what he does…
In the sense that Dorothy charged back in to the protest as people were being told by the organizers to evacuate and she did more over her own internal conflicts than out of any real commitment to the cause, they kind of did hijack it.
A lot of it is pettiness, she hates Joyce for stealing her boyfriend even though that was ultimately Jacob’s fault, so this is another reason for her to hate Joyce.
Kissing at the protest was very heat of the moment.
Daisy, though? 100% deserves what Raidah is saying to her.
I don’t think it’s fair to excuse Joyce. She was consciously trying to break Raidah and Jacob up, first for Sarah’s sake and then her own. Jacob might have screwed up bit his intentions were much better than hers.
I don’t particularly like Raidah given how she’s treated characters like Dina and even Jennifer, but when it comes to her and Joyce, Joyce was very much the one being awful.
Jacob prevented Joyce from coming clean about lying that she was his girlfriend, prevented her from leaving the quasi-date they were at under false pretences, and then kissed her at the end of it. He deserves a lot more blame for what happened than he gets.
I really really really wish this was more of a conversation and not just a one-sided lecture that Daisy seems patently unphased by. It just kinda gets cut short right at the point where I’d want it to start.
oh believe me brotha, this conversation isn’t over
hardly
if not Raidah then certainly Asma will let Daisy know this was basically making birthday balloons brought to a funeral the front page picture of a story that was supposed to be about a funeral
at the very least, Raidah did NOT fuck around and got straight to the point, and as much as I hate her I commend her for doing this
it’s not always a walk in the park bringing this kinda stuff to people’s attention, even if thy mean well, believe me (-_-)
(okay peace for reals this time I gotta work on Asma’s bounce physics XD)
feels like a convo with daisy is the oposite of that bechedel test, can’t have a convo about her that has nothing to do with women/lesbians or she’ll implode
Raidah seems the type to keep going up the chain of command when it comes to something like this. Daisy could possibly get a reprimand or even be fired (assuming higher ups aren’t going to go, “Why would we get rid of her? She took fire off the school by making it not front page!”)
It just occured to me that Radiah has an idealist idea of what a newspaper should be, which is kinda wild/weird because that’s very different than what she usually is.
Although, if she’s just trying to get the newspaper to do it’s job, it doesn’t matter if she’s being idealistic if it gets the job done.
Yeah, Raidah suddenly getting SUPER principled is a swerve for sure. This is the same person we’ve seen be ruthlessly mercenary when it comes to her social life — cutting out or inviting people purely based on her (VERY transparent) perception of their value to her.
Maybe Willis decided to give her actually sympathetic traits, or maybe being “good person who regresses to pettiness around the main cast” was always the plan, but she just never had any scenes to demonstrate that until now.
It does strike me as kind of weird, though. We haven’t really SEEN Raidah be principled. In fact, she used both Joyce’s and Dorothy’s strongly held principles as ammunition to belittle and mock them both. Compared to how she is so deeply cynical about her social circle, it makes this earnest rant to Daisy kind of weird.
I mean, one thing doesn’t counter the other. Raidah can choose to only have people in her life that benefit her AND think that you should have at least a smidgen of professionalism when doing your job. That’s not a contradiction.
Raidah has a very absolute view of the world and it is extremely lame. For someone who thinks you need to throw away your high school friends, she sure is still stuck there.
She comes across as a bit naive here. Can you really expect a school newspaper to be a reliable source of information on an issue? I doubt this kind of cover image is anything new under Daisy’s editorship.
An idealized college newspaper would flatly report on the news of the college: That the school called in the cops to tear-gas pro-Bulmeria protestors. They’d be super critical of the school’s decision to do this and maybe even get some scoops on how that decision happened and who made the call.
But what Raidah wants is for the news to be about the fact that there’s an ongoing genocide in Bulmeria
I assume they just do their prayers and then continue with what they were doing. It doesn’t seem like much of a time sink, and it’s not a particularly strenuous accommodation for anyone around them.
In a lot of universities (note: in my experience, ymmv) there are prayer rooms for students to pray in undisturbed. Other than that, it just works like going to get food or going to the bathroom as far as university experience. They go to the place where that’s a thing people do (or back to their dorms) pray, and return to the rest of their day.
Maybe more a question of whether classes are organized around them? It would be awkward to have a class that you always had to leave, find a place to do the prayer and then come back. Even worse when it came to tests and the like.
My understanding is that even very devout Muslims have a window of time available for each of the five daily prayers, as they’re based on sun position, and there are also rules for forgetting/extenuating circumstances/travel that boil down to “do them as close to the correct time as possible, but it’s more important to do them than to do them exactly on time”.
I suspect for the majority of American Muslims, college class schedules count as “extenuating circumstances”.
At least at my school, you also get to pick your classes from a list of available options. So if you need to not be in class at a certain time of day, you have the freedom to pick an earlier or later class.
Yeah, that’s how I’d read it from the limited understanding I have — the expectation would be that you’d schedule classes around prayers, and if it wasn’t possible to do that (only one section of a required class is offered, etc) then you would be okay with doing prayers right after that class.
To circle back to the comic, my understanding is equally that if you ARE able to do so, the designated windows for specific prayers vary but not by much more than 15-20 minutes.
Uh, large-school student papers at major American universities are serious business, with advisory boards and advertising and editorial standards, etc.
IIRC, the IDS is one such paper, it’s part of their journalism school.
Before I make my comments on the actual strip itself, I just want to say I’m sorry the death of your father. Take care of yourself. I haven’t lost a parent, so I can’t really give any advice, but I think Becky said it well.
I may hate Raidah for a lot of reasons, but damn if she’s not 100% correct for everything related to this newspaper for this current day (& probably in general, this paper’s a crashout)
well even flawed charas make good points but don’t think willis would make her unlikeable for this particular part (tho i wonder if the students did actually read the news paper (other than ken) versus just seeing the two on teh front page
I’m surprised she prays at all. I genuinely thought she was an atheist or something because when she was pissed off at Joyce for trying to steal Jacob she wrote her off as, basically, “an idiot that thinks angels are real”.
i don’t know if her religion has the same kinda ‘angels’ but i wouldn’t be surprised if some ppl pray as a form of ‘meditation’ even if they don’t believe as strongly
or, maybe raidah found her faith recently again lately (tho idk if she’s gonna start wearing a hijab, i remember hearing it was for married women but asma has one too and all the muslim girls i knew wore them even in elementary school, i vaguely know it’s related to ‘modesty’ or so, but interesting that a lot of them still wear/are ‘allowed’ to use makeup as well [no offense inteneded to any muslims reading this])
Yeah – in my experience, it’s usually a matter of how strictly you interpret scripture. Some believe in very direct translation, and may decry any who do otherwise as innovators and lackluster believers. Others subscribe to less rigid interpretations, and may view the other party as stuck-up conservatives or stuffy extremists.
Mostly though, we just awkwardly talk around the issue. “Oh, that’s some nice makeup/perfume/piercings/jewelry/etc.”
In theory, since angels are mentioned in both the Tanakh/Old Testament and the Koran, most believers in any of the Abrahamic religions believe in them in a sense, but there’s a strain of US fundamentalists who take it much more seriously. Believing in guardian angels and other kinds of angels who are constantly active in the world today.
I’d assume that’s the kind of thing Raidah was referencing.
For plenty of people, religion is about culture and ritual. Christianity is the only major religion where “faith” is the most important tenet, i.e. the common attitude that you just have to accept Jesus as your personal lord and savior to be forgiven for every sin you’ve ever committed and to be “born again” and get into Heaven.
1) That’s true to an extent, but only to an extent. That’s more Christian rhetoric than common practice. In practice, Christian churches are full of culture and ritual and whatever they might say, most sects won’t accept your “faith” if you’re not also practicing the culture/ritual.
2) I don’t think that really has anything to do with Raidah mocking Joyce for believing in angels. Note that she didn’t mock her for believing in God. Even if Islam has a different emphasis on belief, I don’t think that’s something a Muslim would be likely to say.
If you reread my comment I think you will find that I didn’t say Christianity *doesn’t* have ritual or culture.
What I said was that it’s very unusual in treating faith as the most important thing, and my point was that other mainstream religions are often fine with not only agnosticism but atheism among their membership.
I don’t know enough about Islam to say it’s true of it, but Judaism and Shinto for example are both 100% compatible with not actually believing in any type of supernatural being.
While I hate Raidah with a passion, she isn’t entirely without a point here.
However, Joyce and Dorothy weren’t intending to hijack a movement. They probably didn’t even know they were being photographed at the moment. There’s a lot of wrong in what they did, but it’s not what Raidah is accusing them of.
Of course, when has Raidah missed an excuse to be a racist or make something about herself.
Raidah is such a twisted character, god damn. Like, if panel 3 wasn’t there, I could agree with her entirely, but the fact that she’s treating Joyce and Dorothy like they’re terrible people stealing all the attention from the protest and hoarding it for themselves is just… so goddamn telling. It’s a clear sign that she is just completely incapable of seeing anything outside of her perception of social currency and how that currency affects her.
Raidah’s angry here for the same reason she hates Sarah. Somebody’s getting attention in a way that doesn’t fit her agenda. That’s what pisses her off more than anything. She’s right in this case, because the attention being pulled away from the protest and onto a stupid tangent is bad for a whole lot of people, but the fact that she’s treating it like some kind of scheme with word choices like “allowed, hijack, assisted” is a good way to subtly reveal that her thoughts are still in the wrong place even if she’s arguing for the right people. It’s some really good subtle scripting work by Willis.
I remember Raidah once made fun of Joyce for believing in angels, so either she became religious since then or she has a very idiosyncratic theology where God is real but angels aren’t (very curious what that version of Islam looks like).
The idea of individual angels in the way that many evangelical Christians believe in is something that’s not at all in the Bible to my knowledge. Like, “Guardian Angels” are an entirely apocryphal thing.
Yeah, angels are messengers of God, not cute guys/gals that change your tire, which is how shallow a lot of takes on angels have gotten in English language Christianity at least.
To kinda amplify what the other two respondents said, “believes in angels” read to me as “making fun of Joyce for having a twee/childish understanding of faith”, not “making fun of Joyce for having faith at all”.
As I noted elsewhere, Christianity is the only major religion where “faith” is the most important tenet, e.g. you’re not in the club if you haven’t accepted Jesus as your personal lord and savior, and also if you have, everything else is just small potatoes.
Plenty of people experience religion and being religious as a matter of culture and ritual, where belief in the supernatural very much need not apply at all.
No, Islam is just like Christianity in that regard. It’s even had its own Protestant style movements of people reacting against religious ritual and tradition because they thought it corrupted pure faith.
Also, prayer is the opposite of codified ritual. It’s a direct communication between supplicant and deity; no one does it if they don’t think there’s a deity to supplicate.
Tell me you were not raised Roman Catholic without telling me, because if you were you’d have LONG experience with “prayer as codified ritual” — when a Catholic says “say your prayers before bed”, they mean “recite the words of the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Apostles Creed” or some such.
When Catholics (like me, btw) pray, they do it because they believe they’re praying to something that exists. There are lots of cultural Catholics who just see it as a heritage thing and don’t follow any rules, and those people don’t usually have active prayer lives.
Speaking as an ex-Catholic myself with a huge actively Catholic family, there are a lot of Catholics who THINK they have an active prayer life (in terms of “I am having a conversation with the Divine) but what they have instead is an active ritual life (I say the Rosary by rote on X occasions, that’s prayer).
Hell, in the Catholic culture I grew up in, extemporaneous prayer was a mockable offense compared to just reciting the accepted standard prayer for whatever the occasion was. My brother (who is the kind of guy who founds Knights of Columbus chapters) got a lot of ribbing for ad-libbing grace before meals while he was going to a Catholic college (and as such getting exposed to actual living monastic faith on the daily).
I quibble: There are a lot of people who experience Christianity as mere ritual/culture, INCLUDING the idea that the ritual of accepting Jesus as your lord and savior is something that boils down to a prescribed statement with the wording pre-selected for you.
Pretty sure that for a lot of folks who’d claim the label of “Christian”, the performance of faith is part of the culture and not any kind of statement of functional belief.
Another comic in which, like real life, people’s actions are less than perfect. Another load of analysis of the obvious from many of the fans. People are imperfect. The story would not work if they were, unless it was a humming hymnal or something.
High circulation + story about protest = more information spread. I call it a win, and Raidah and her shriveled black heart can go away.
Also. my surviving parent told me 11 years ago that parents should go before their children, but that does not make it easier to deal with. I still want to call my lost one on the phone more often than you would think, then I’m sad again.
While that was superrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr not the right word to use, let’s not report ppl for things just because we want to interpret it as evil.
I’m honestly really looking forward to Raidah getting fleshed out more as a character. I’ll make no secret that I (a white American) am inherently a poor judge, but she’s firmly in the right here. The fact that the most prominent Muslim character in the comic thus far has largely been viewed through the eyes of arch-rivals Joyce and Sarah is a genuine problem with the strip as it’s existed up to this point. And that problem really came to a head in that last story. Getting to see Raidah in another light has been a long time coming.
she’s a very performative person
and i doubt she actually believes anything she’s saying
she may be right in some regards but there’s always and angle to her critiques and attacks
I don’t have any problem with the most prominent Muslim character happening to be an antagonist…UNLESS the author decides to make their storyline focus on a real-world parallel to a situation that heavily impacts Muslims. Then it becomes a problem.
I get why Willis thought the protest was a good story backdrop. Finding a way to bring Jocelyne in conflict with Hank. Finding a way to injure Amazi-Girl. Finding a way to break Dorothy’s reverence for authority.
But at the end of the day, I just don’t want to read a story like this if it’s going to be filtered through the lens of a white homeschooled ex-Christian author.
I like Raidah as a character, I’m even deeply intrigued by her faith in context of how malicious she is as a person in general. She pisses me off but I want more of her for sure. But I still don’t think the comic is playing to its strengths when it tries to tackle this subject.
“If you don’t like it, stop reading” is one of those arguments that might look really clever and mature on the surface, but isn’t actually saying anything.
When I say “I don’t like this storyline and I don’t think it’s executed very well,” that’s coming from a place of *otherwise liking the story.*
I’m actually curious as to where this idea that “if you dislike one part of a decades-long serial, you should immediately stop reading and commenting on it”comes from.
Because from where I sit, it looks an awful lot like “shut up, go away, and stop disagreeing with me” cloaked in some sort of performative care for another person’s entertainment experience.
I mean in this case Jon did literally say they “don’t want to read a story” that tackles the subject they think Willis is going to tackle. I don’t think it’s much of a reach to note that Jon does have the option to not read that story.
If that was the only story on offer, sure. DoA keeps a bunch of plates spinning at any one time, though, so it’s not an easy comic to pick-and-choose my subplots or storylines. My options are either “wait two/six/twelve months for the story to move on” or read it all as it comes, even the clunky parts. The rest of the “juice” is still worth the squeeze, so to speak.
While true, given how often the storyline/subplot focus changes around here, it’s not really particularly possible to preemptively avoid a bit. It’s not like Willis tags these things with a subplot identifier.
As such, I don’t think it’s particularly fair to respond to “I don’t want to read a story about Topic X”, where Topic X is a minuscule fraction of Willis’ total work, with “stop reading” — it seems very throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Look, I’m not trying to tell anyone to stop reading myself. I do think some folks would be happier if they took a break for a while, but we’ve got way fewer comments now from people who sound actively DISTRESSED by continuing to read, so it’s at a point where that would be weird advice to give, I think.
The pedant in me still wants to note that Thing 2 just said, “if you don’t want to read a thing and you think the thing you’re reading is doing the thing… stop reading?” which does seem fair, to me, even if it’s unlikely to be productive.
Maybe Thing 2 did mean “stop reading forever”, or “stop complaining where I have to see it”, but the exact wording doesn’t seem super objectionable to me.
Though again: Jon also doesn’t seem distressed! So I don’t think it falls under the heading of well-intentioned advice, either. Just kind of morally neutral comment in isolation, which is really only annoying or problematic when it’s happening a lot.
I feel like Raidah has dealt with one or two assholes that do things intentionally, but hasn’t yet figured out that a vast majority of people only tacitly allow those powerstructures through ignorance or happenstance.
Daisy isn’t doing it maliciously, but yes, her libido is de-amplifying the VERY serious protest, and while it’s in part due to the picture, her only metric for feedback is the engagement metrics, which may not benefit an in-depth and nuanced take on the country nor the protest.
In other words… Raidah, is exemplifying her major character flaw. Expecting everyone to be as thoughtful and share her level of intelligence. And when they don’t, or have priorities that don’t mesh with them, she assumes malice first, and doesn’t really investigate further.
Well broken clocks and all that. I’m not convinced Raidah’s motivations are selfless. Everything in her life is measured in how she can gain from it. So while she’s on the right side of these protests and has a valid gripe about the girls kissing has stolen the spotlight from a much more important topic… it’s probably not completely altruistic either.
No? Karen isn’t just “anytime a woman complains”. Its a very specific entitled behaviour both men and women can get up to. Calling out a paper for whitewashing an important story with girls making out, isn’t the same as badgering minimum wage employees over an expired coupon.
I mean, Karen has absolutely evolved into “anytime a woman complains.” Most women saw that coming pretty early on, but internet people were too happy to have a mean nickname for women to listen.
“Karen” is inherently misogynistic, whether it’s “misused” as Brasca1 has, or “properly” used when women complain unjustifiably to service workers (as if white women *actually* complain more than white men do—please). Don’t act like the comment could have been reasonable if they had used “Karen” correctly.
The original correct use also had nothing to do with complaining to service workers.
The original use was by BIPOC to describe a particular kind of interaction we have with white women which is dangerous in a kind of insidious way. For Example: where they decide you don’t belong [wherever you happen to be] and they harass you about it/bongo at you about it. If they get in trouble for this in any way, they claim to be afraid (after harassing you) and appeal to people around them to help them with the “angry/scary” BIPOC they’ve been harassing.
It was never originally misogynistic, it was descriptive of a specific problem. It is NOW very misogynistic, because unfortunately the internet can’t be trusted with any nuance.
This part. For me a Karen is someone who weaponizes vsocial biases and seeks sympathy while lacking empathy. She’s the white woman you go to jail for whistling at.
yeah just like “woke”, it’s consensus definition became not so much about racism in particular after white people in our country started using it, go figure 9-9
Like I do understand the argument that it was inherently misogynistic, but I think that argument is coming from a frankly paternalistic viewpoint — kind of like what @thejeff was expressing, this incredulity that white women could actually be “worse” in any way than white men in terms of expressing bigotry and wielding power.
But like, as a white afab person, there definitely is a Thing that white women do, which I am also capable of, which is unique to the specific type of power they/we have access to.
I do think that there are very specifically some white men who uh. Were extremely eager to start calling people Karens when they shouldn’t have been. Big Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada saying “oh I see you think this has nothing to do with you” energy for those guys.
But yeah. White women as a class do in fact wield specific types of power, as they/we always have. Just as women are an often overlooked enforcer of patriarchy, white women tend to be overlooked as enforcers of white supremacy, but boy oh boy oh boy do they/we participate in both.
(Apologies for the awkward af language, I don’t want to disclaim my ability to be a Karen but I also don’t wanna misgender myself ffff.)
Hell, as an AMAB white guy, who grew up in a pretty racist place, there are a lot of white guys who have an internal view that boils down to “If I just go after that POC, I’m the bad guy… but if I wait until a white lady says she feels in danger, then I’m just protectin’ the wimmin, and that counteracts all accusations of racism forever.”
And as you note, these (often the same) guys will also use “Karen” in a carelessly misogynistic way, while also using Karen behavior as cover for their own racism, often while ignoring the exact same accusations against other white men.
It’s pretty much Raidah having a correct point with the entirely wrong read on the situation because she hates the photo’s subjects.
Like, she’s absolutely right the photo isn’t gonna help the protest or the cause but she still extends the blame to the photo’s subjects like they intentionally wanted to hijack the protest’s message, when this is entirely Daisy’s fault.
Yea, She’s acting like Joyce and Dorothy intentionally hijacked the cause, and Daisy is some ignorant tool of their’s. This is 100% Daisy putting her libito over the protests message all on her own.
I think it’s good writing on Willis’s part. It criticizes a lot of what people didn’t like about the previous storyline, without having one character be unequivocally right. Raidah has valid criticism sometimes but she also goes too far.
I’m sure the comment sections being really normal about this one, especially since it could not be clearer that Willis is critiquing this very comic, through Daisy, and even making fun of it in the alt text. And I’m sure we can all remember multiple things (Raidah hates these two people and is having a stronger reaction then she might otherwise, BUT ALSO: she’s literally correct.) at the same time. Right?
puts hand to earpeice. Hold on. Hold on. Im getting an update.
Nicely put. I too like Daisy’s subtle burn.
And also, True! Raidah tends to reveal too much in the face-to-face but makes sure she’ll look correct in the transcript.
I think she’s right to be upset at Daisy for this.
But she absolutely is letting her past experiences with Joyce paint her as some kinda villain who was there to hijack a movement. She was only there to protect her sister, and then this happened entirely unrelated to that.
It’s not as though Joyce (or Dorothy) called out to someone with a camera “Come get a picture of us smoochin! Love not War!”
Could they had smooched somewhere better? Yeah sure. Would it have been so freaking Yuri Coded? I dunno, maybe. But that’s just how things are.
Not….Really? I mean what does Raidah know about Joyce? That she tried to steal her boyfriend once and incidentally blew up Raidah and Jacob’s relationship. So as far as Raidah (not us the reader, mind you) would know—Joyce does things for attention, whether consciously or subconsciously.
1) She’s already decided that Joyce is a Thanos-level threat that deserves no happiness.
2) She views literally almost everything through a lens of status. People are not real to her.
I agree with both your points, and can only conclude that from them that Raidah 50/50 would have voted for Jill Stein in November. (*Tries desperately not to loathe a character based solely on headcanon.*)
Raidah uses a watch instead of her phone? Interesting. I wonder if that proves that she’s a great person, proves that she’s the worst person, or proves that it doesn’t matter because Willis messed up this storyline and should no longer be allowed to have Muslim characters. I understand there are no other options.
It proves she reads hentai any chance she gets. Raidah Lastname is addicted to hentai, but her pull list isn’t updating enough lately, so she’s acting out.
I’d like her more if she was legitimately addicted to hentai. I just want to know something about her that isn’t just her being mean. She must have hobbies.
Her hobbies are Hating Sarah, chasing connections in ways that aren’t likely to actually form those connections, cheating on Joyce, and at least 7 hours of hentai a day.
Yes, tell him to stop using muslim characters instead of letting him learn from his mistake, and having better muslim representation in the future.
I understand that he made a mistake, but it’s better for him to try, and do better than simply cut out a group of people from the story. If Willis said he would no longer include Muslim characters there would be far more backlash.
This. Lots of media would not exist if people weren’t allowed to write outside their experience. It can result in mistakes but it’s better to use that and learn than just say you can’t do it.
For real.
I’d love to see the “mistake” he made with a Muslim character.
The only mistake, is (as he said in social) that he realized that he didn’t have enough representation of Muslims in his comic, something that he seems to want to have.
Yeee. Let’s attack an artist for not having enough Muslims character, while he def wants to add more organically and do them justice.
That will show him.
It is only in the comments that there are “no other options” [except that all options can be and often are expressed in the comments}, but in the comments there are absolutely no other options.
There’s only My Opinion (correct, persecuted) and The World’s Opinion (violently oppressive, not in any way exaggerated to sound like I’m being persecuted). Everyone who disagrees with me on the slightest semantic quibble would gladly staple me to a wall and take a power drill to my organs for daring to say what I’ve said in their presence.
I hate Raidah, but she’s right. Putting Joyce/Dorothy kissing as the front page photo distracts people from the reason of the protest, and the unnecessary violence by the police.
I’m not going to start repeating all the “worst person you know” comments from yesterday, but I’m still bewildered that it’s Raidah, of all characters, making what is basically a 100% valid point O_o
This very interesting and raidahbis right. I also had no idea she was Muslim. This adds a new layer toher issues with Joyce as who i think she likely assumed was an Islamophobic fundie
Fair evough thats true I never hated raidah though she seems fine she just has specific beef with these peope and is a brutally ambitious but not that evil.
I think NGPZ is saying that for specifically Raidah, that interaction would make Joyce look like an Islamophobe to her, given she jumped back in surprise when Raidah said she goes to a mosque
I don’t know, the very next strip has Raidah seething at Joyce going after her man. Islamophobia was definitely not on her mind during that interaction.
Prev reply is like me trying to understand Raidah’s logic, which is admittedly a bit of extrapolation given the screentime she does use shows off her more cynical side
Funnily enough, I went two strips ahead and she is grumbling about “A girl who believes angels are real” which makes her own adherence to religion a bit confusing.
A lot of people in the comments section need to check yourselves on how you feel about black and brown women being angry at white women and it’s like. not even 4 hours past the comic publication.
Yeah the comments tonight have seemed particularly… unhinged. My personal “favorite” would have to be that one wacko who accused Raidah of “usury”. Bit of a self-report, that one
Said comment is gone now; as NGPZ has been saying, the report button works!
Hello, that was me! I’d never heard the word and took a stab in the dark guessing the context.
Now from this comment chain I’m finding out it’s maybe got anti-Semitic connotations? Yikes. Just to be clear, I’m definitely not defending that person. Was just guessing at what they meant.
While the comment section has his bsky feed next to it where a few of the recent posts are related to his newfound orphan status, I only checked there after I saw the condolences in these comments.
Meta commentary aside (where, yeah, the focus of this arc has been overwhelmingly on Joyce and Dorothy’s relationship – but a large part of it is because Joyce is the main character, and, well, the relationship and circumstances are rather directly of interest to her), do we actually have any evidence outside of Raidah’s word that the discussion around the protest is focused on the picture? We’ve seen a few students reading the paper, but we have no indication on what students outside of direct relationships with the main two have been talking about regarding the event. It could be that Raidah’s right and the picture has derailed the discussion on an incredibly serious issue, in which case she’s entirely in the right to be angry about the situation (as unfair and unwanted as we know the attention is for Joyce and Dorothy), but it could also be that Raidah is, once again, just angry and lashing out saying what she thinks will get the most emotional reaction.
Without more context and more looking at what others are saying (even a “splash” strip where you have snippets of conversation regarding what’s in the paper – which, at this point, REALLY should have opened up this part of the story, given how much of an impact it’s having), it’s impossible to say how fair Raidah’s being in this situation. Could be that she’s 100% right and the Joyce/Dorothy picture is pulling attention from a deadly serious issue, it could be that Daisy is right and the image is drawing in significantly more reader engagement and thus drawing more attention to the issue that fueled the protest, it could be somewhere in between those two extremes. But without actually seeing the article and the discussion around it, we don’t have any way of knowing where the truth lies.
To be fair we’ve seen several “congrats on making out we were rooting for you” and zero “Oh my god they used tear gas on students and Amazi-girl fought the cops. Goodness” Not even a “oh I saw the cover page of you two being shrouded in tear gas, are you ok?”
Just a “congrats for finally kissing you kooky kids!”
That’s true – but that’s also from a quite small portion of the readership. On a broader scale? Well, unless we can see some discussions without Joyce and/or Dorothy around, we really have no idea how much of a point that Raidah has in this discussion. She could be spot on, or she could be extremely off base. We just don’t have enough information to know one way or the other right now.
Orange peel Muslims. Superficial packaging. No fruit inside.
Uuugggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
I agreed with her yesterday and now you’re making Islam stupid again because you’re pretending a woman who practices prayer but doesn’t wear hijab would somehow care about praying THIS on time, when ACTUAL Islam allows a window for each prayer. Of course praying on time is important, but a character like THIS who doesn’t cover and doesn’t care about her MANNERS……. She’s not the muslima who would pray on time , because the window of allowance is totally normal , and it’s legit WEIRD for somebody to prioritize praying on time LIKE THIS.
It’s not good manners to use the prayer to end a conversation abruptly. It isn’t sensical for a Muslim to care about praying ON TIME when she doesn’t act like a Muslim to such detail other aspect of Islam . You somehow made her even more mean and low class by praying. You wrote a Muslim character who uses prayer to be badly mannered.
I am a revert. So my tongue is sharp and looser than it ought to be.
This character is allegedly born Muslim and training to be a lawyer?
Then why does she talk like she’s rebelling against Walky as a father?
I can’t claim to know anything about this, really, but I do have questions.
I’m from a very similar background to Willis (grew up in the same time frame, Christian family, exposed to a lot of fundamentalist BS, got out of it) and in my time there, my experience has led me to be frustrated with most Christian stereotypes. There are more flavors of Christian than Baskin Robbins, each which believe very different things and have different interpretations of scripture, and those are just the different faiths and denominations. And that doesn’t include the nondenominational grab-bag of “I’ll believe what makes sense to me, and if I can’t find a church, I’ll make one, goshdarnitall.”
My assumption – and for all I know, the assumption that Willis made – is that this isn’t just Christianity being wacky (which it is) – but that this is simply human nature, that we follow something as well as we can, but must make peace with integrating it our life and the world, and that there’s often a disconnect between what we’re told to do, what we feel like we should do, and what we actually do.
You call out that the fact that she believes she must pray at specific times contradicts the fact that she doesn’t wear a hijab and is outspoken. Could you elaborate on that? Are these all three things completely interconnected, and is it so hard to imagine that there are Muslim women who take their faith seriously, but interpret the Quran differently in relation to the hijab? When I (as a non-muslim using the power of Google) ask the void whether i should wear a hijab, the void responds that it’s down to my personal religious convictions and that there are many progressive Muslims who do not wear it for various reasons.
As a Christian, I very often think that other Christians are being hypocritical for being very very rigid for every rule that doesn’t really affect them, and having excuses to not stick to those that inconvenience them, but I acknowledge that this happens very often, especially with people whose faith is more of a societal thing than an internal thing. Is that not the same with Islam?
Could that not be the reason why, for the first time, she’s loudly announcing that she has to go “do a very spiritual Muslim thing” to the person she’s trying to shame? Not because she’s actually very spiritual, but because she’s Raidah, and she’s using this the way she uses everything in her life, like a manipulation tactic?
Sadly, I have to have these ‘crumbs’: As Raidah is “badly written”, I never found any character like her in webcomics. The other muslins characters I’ve found, they got like 1-3 pannels, or were full prejudice wrote. Full racism garbage.
For context, do Muslim’s think differently than everyone else? They may have different beliefs and customs than others, but in my experience people are people. If there were differences in the process by which Muslim’s think, I kind of think it would be known. For example there is evidence that learning Japanese as a primary language as a child causes some measurable differences in the way the brain organizes as opposed to western languages. But this is a neurolinguistic effect. To the best of my knowledge there is no comparable evidence that any religious belief has a similar effect.
My wife has medicine she takes twice a day. She takes it at 9AM and 9PM, with an alarm set. I have medicine I take twice a day. I take one close to breakfast, no matter how early or late that is on a particular day, and one between supper and going to bed. Again, in my experience, people vary a lot in how strictly they apply the rules they think should regulate their lives. And there doesn’t seem to be a lot of consistency in what they’re strict about and what they aren’t. Maybe Muslims are different, but I kind of doubt it.
Raidah can be a pretty unpleasant person, but this doesn’t seem to have much to do with her religion. She seems to follow a fairly Americanized version of her religion, but it being important to her to be seen to be strict in her observances of what she choses to practice seems to be consistent with what we know of her personality. Which is not to imply that she isn’t completely sincere.
Man, I don’t know about any of that. I was asking about one single word as a way to converse with a person, nothing to do with how someone’s religion affects the physical structure of their brain organ inside their body.
In Islamic terminology Islam is the default religion so everyone that accepts Islam (regardless of thier prior religions state) is said to be have reverted.
I think Willis SHOULD very well be talking to Muslims if he hasn’t already, in my experience my Muslim friends are real based and cool folk to hang with
for instance I met Lur (who’s Hijabi and auDHD) here in the comments, she’s a video game musician and electrical engineer and we talk about anime and make fun of France and stuff all the time, always a blast talking with her
(it’s kind of ironic in context cuz like most my Muslim friends aren’t exactly perfect about the traditions and practices either, for instance Lur drinks like 8+ cups of coffee a day lol)
but yeah I commend you greatly for taking the time to express your thoughts on how Willis is handling this, it’s not always easy being open about this kinda stuff
I think it would helpful for the critique if you try to clarify what is it about the character you think mean isn’t like a Muslim so Willis could actually try to improve on it.
I can’t speak to Raidah’s situation, but protests I’ve been in for the last several months, local corporate-owned media focused on distant pictures taken before the crowd reached full size, and emphasized traffic had to slow down a little bit because people were looking. Public radio sent someone to photo the crowd at full size, interviewed a bunch of people, and published a gallery of our signs.
I mean even then Taking picture of two particular protesters (who more than likely go to this school) and blowing it up for all to see seems pretty dangerous for those students involved, especially without asking permission.
The fact that Daisy did not approach Dorothy and Joyce for comment or permission to use them as the headline image is another concerning element of the coverage of the protest, and the way it was handwaved was kind of bullshit. Daisy really can’t recognize one of her own reporters?
And if the police arrest them due to her journalism that’s her fault for not protecting their identities. It’s not like the police weren’t violently assaulting people or something.
Ideally, there would be some professor whose job it is to explain the nitty gritties of newspaper formatting to Daisy. I’m assuming she’s working on some sort of journalism degree.
But she’s not acting like she made an informed call that differs from the one Raidah wanted. She’s acting like this is the first time she’s heard any of this. Like nobody’s ever broached the subject of how her choice of what information to make most visible effects the way the story is received.
I kind of agree with the others saying that even if Daisy wasn’t constantly distracted by being single and lonely, she might not actually be very good at her job.
Maybe she was destined to edit something other than a newspaper.
Lotta people in here telling the brown woman to shut up about a media outlet centering white women in a story about a protest against (presumably) brown Muslim people facing genocide, huh. Yeah yeah “it’s the most attention-grabbing image” now why! Do you suppose! That might be! What systemic forces might be at play in determining that people are going to care more about two white women than brown protesters being brutalized by police and is Raidah really so out of line in complaining about it!
It’s about as annoying as people who acknowledge that she’s completely right in this situation but feel the need to append a note that she’s normally an asshole and not a good person. As if that’s relevant or hidden knowledge.
“The original definition” holds very little weight to me, personally — I’m usually on the side of using “systemic racism” and “bigotry” to simply sidestep the whole argument (except with people who think “systemic racism” IS “individual bigotry times the number of people in power who are bigots” as opposed to “the system is built to be racist even when operated by well-meaning non-bigots”) but ultimately descriptivism always wins the definition wars.
This is a college paper too. If your movement can be entirely co-opted because an outlet that’s barely relevant in its own city, let alone nationwide, chose a bad photo for the front page, then it was probably on pretty shaky ground to start with.
Joyce’s dad lives off campus and he hadn’t even seen that photo. He saw an entirely different photo with Jocelyn in it.
“Now we’re only talking about them” probably means that like, Raidah’s immediate social circle is more interested in the part of the story that deals with an acquaintance. Not that Sinister Puppetmaster Joyce Brown has monopolized the national dialogue with her crack astroturf team.
But she’s not wrong that a better photo could’ve been chosen.
Hank has presumably not seen todays paper. They made a whole deal of Becky trying to hide it from him. He does however read it enough to see Jocelyne in a precious paper.
I feel like Raidah isnt wrong about Joyce and Dorothy hijacking the narrative. Not out of malice but definitely in action.
Like imagine if during the protest a stray dog showed up and shit on the American flag. And then they took a photo of that dog and made him the headline of the article. And then you know…you gotta go to page 18 to see police officers assaulted students. The story has now been hijacked through no malicious attempt by the dog but by the culture surrounding it now. Flag poop dog doesn’t care about bulmeria. He just had t poop!
And before ya say “there’s nothing wrong with kissing at a protest” let’s not forget that Dorothy crossed into the encampment simply to cope with her own disenfranchisement against the desires and wishes of literally everyone there. Raidah doesnt know that but she’s kinda got dorothy pegged since I’m not convinced she could point to bulmeria on a map, and made the whole issue about herself. (And was rewarded for it.)
Perhaps if Raidah felt this was something worth showing up for, she could have prevented the movement from being hijacked. Maybe planned a better photo.
No, she couldn’t??? This is a matter of media coverage??? She specifically points out that Muslim students were not consulted with regards to how this event was covered???
Ah yes the old “someone can’t disapprove of how a orotest js covered by local media if they didn’t literally attend it” gambit. God forbid someone have a political stance between none at all and open social activism.
People are out here absolutely and adamantly refusing to acknowledge that there are ways to support a social movement without literally putting your body directly in the street (a vulnerable position for a woman of color like Raidah to be in, one might add).
I mean, if it’s too dangerous for a vulnerable person of colour to attend a protest, then that’s valid, but it’s kind of hard to square with the indignation that a white woman ended up on the front page.
The people who get photographed are the people who attend.
It’s actually extremely easy to square! Just because Raidah might not feel like she is in a position to protest does not mean she isn’t allowed to be mad that news coverage is centering two white women kissing and not the actual substance of the protest.
Why shouldn’t she assume her unfounded assumption is incorrect? Is that a serious question?
It’s like people seeing someone exit a vehicle in an accessible parking spot and, if they don’t immediately need a wheelchair or walker, assume they’re “not really disabled.” People assuming without knowing is the origin of the “makes an a$$ out of u & me idiom.
She has no reason to believe that Joyce and Dorothy did not kiss, extremely publicly, in the middle of an embattled campus protest, in order to generate attention and make things about themselves. That’s why people usually kiss at protests! And it certainly isn’t helped by the newspaper, in her eyes, aiding and abetting their attention-seeking behavior. Why would that be a less reasonable assumption to be making in this case than “Joyce and Dorothy had a series of life changing personal relegations in short order that happened to coincide with the climax of the protest?” She can only work with the information she has.
I’d love to think this strip was one that was planned all along and not one of the ones that was added after readers [basically said about the kiss what Raidah is saying here about the kiss photo].
Either way, though, maybe unpopular opinion, I don’t think he should’ve changed the kiss strip. If you’re a Sicko under the “it’s not called Smarting of Age” defense, and don’t want consequences for the cheating, but you’re also expecting a couple of 18 year old white girls from Nowheretown, Indiana to be too smart to get swept up in the moment of new love and forget where they are…eh, tough sell. That moment didn’t really feel super out of character to me and I blamed the characters for it, not the author. Having them realize only later (or having Roz yell at them, since unfortunately they don’t know Asma or Raidah well enough for them to do it) would’ve felt more real to me than them being self-aware in the moment.
I don’t know what you mean by “changed the kiss strip.” It seems to be there exactly as it’s always been, replete with the extremely tasteless tear gas as Sakura motif.
I hate it too. Especially since it just amounts to “um… That just happened” type punchline. Its so awkwardly worded. Like
” oh uh maybe we should do this somewhere else” would have felt more natural than “oh jeez did we just kiss at a genocide protest?”. Doesn’t really add to the narrative or tone in a meaningful way other than having the acknowledge the controversy.
Well, also, Alice also legit just told her Joyce is a slut. Or rather, Alice couldn’t wait to gossip about shit she had absolutely no context for, and Raidah interpreted that through her lens of the world needing to know Joyce is bad.
Raidah continues to be a fantastic character, IMO. She’s very well-written in that she feels like a realistic portrayal of that person you know with more or less watertight politics AND a dreadful personality.
Hard agree. Honestly, I have also really appreciated that she’s also shown to have realistic motivations and background behind her personality; her manipulative and ambitious side looks both realistic, and driven by deep, painful insecurity. (Thinking of her reminding Jacob about his brother’s visit along with a side-insult at Joyce’s immature and uninformed religious views, along with her “befriending” Jennifer despite clearly finding her obnoxious, and the same with Walky.)
Her social-career-ambitious strategizing reminds me of some of the rich peoples’ kids in high school. They were bullies and I hated them; it’s only looking back now as an adult that I see they were desperately trying to earn their parents’ approval. So she makes me especially sad, because she does genuinely care about a lot of important issues, but since she also has a real mean streak and the readers primarily see her through her interactions with the main cast, most of whom she absolutely despises, we mostly see those beliefs and priorities filtered through personal insults. Like even this arc: her “Okay, what the entire fuck is this,” furious at Daisy’s choice to center two white girls making out and some cutesy wordplay over the cops breaking up a serious protest that she cares about (and might not have felt able to attend in person because of her career ambitions!)… clearly comes BEFORE she sees that it’s Joyce and Dorothy. Yeah, she hates Joyce and dislikes Dorothy, but she has a real reason to be angry about the photo aside from that, and I do think that’s her real motivation here, not just personal dislike.
I’m actually with Raidah on this, even though she is awful. But yeah, sadly this is what a lot of media does. Distraction. Not only do people need to be more Media-Literate… Media needs to be more People-Literate.
Daisy is letting her own tastes take over her responsibilities. I kinda hope she sees consequences for that.
well the comments are disaster but at least they made me think instead of making my brain shutting down entirely
if i may throw a suggestion out there like for authors in general: you will never please everyone in terms of representation but getting a couple sensitivity readers wont hurt
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I’m sorry for your loss, Willis. I wish you a very peaceful time as you process this loss.
Same.
My mom always says, you’re never old enough to lose your parents.
(Google decided to autocomplete that to, “You’re never old enough to lose your virginity.” Gee, thanks, MOM!) *SMDH*…
It’s so true. I’ve already lost my own mom and I dread the day I’ll lose my dad.
Well, it’s true…
Don’t have anything to add to that beyond seconding it. Losing a parent fucking sucks
I lost my parents in 1984 and 1986. Today would have been my mom’s 99th birthday. I still miss them and think about them often. I’m pretty sure that’s true whether your relationship was good, bad, or indifferent; you can never escape from those early, formative connections.
Oh, no. Sorry for your loss, Willis.
Won’t offer you the usual platitudes or caring voyeurism (“So sorry, how did it happen”), but have been somewhere similar to where you are now (twice), and yes it sucks. Peace to you friend.
Pressing F to pay respects. 🙁
F
We are all children once more before the loss of our parents.
Thoughts and prayers to you.
Where was this said? I feel like I missed something important…
On BlueSky.
So sorry to hear about your dad That is hard Just mourning with one who mourns
So sorry for your loss Willis. May his memory be a blessing.
Yeah my condolences. I don’t know what your relationship was with your dad but it can’t be easy losing both parents.
Condolences, Willis.
Oh Raidah, they could never make me hate you.
They could never make me hate her either, because I already did so of my own free will.
That said, in this instance she’s entirely correct.
I think she’s right to be mad at Daisy, but blaming Joyce and Dorothy for a photo they never wanted taken let alone published is deeply unfair.
Radiah doesn’t really care about being “fair” she cares more about causing harm and being right.
Right now she’s right, but it’s amazing how one can be right and yet still a big ol asshole
I mean, Radiah isn’t aware of the circumstances leading up to them smooching during a protest. To be fair, there really isn’t *any* good reason to have a big smoocheroo during a protest that isn’t about people not liking smooch’n.
So, her point is still incredibly valid. Those two made a big show of smooch’n (Inadvertently sure, but Dotty WAS on a Dramatic Hill in the middle of the camp) which took away from the actual thing being protested. Now the entire *reason* for the protest is being white washed (Actual term for a cover up, not the racial thing, but the double entendre is nice) to cover them smooching.
There are protesters in jail right now (one from the paper sent her story in from the protesting equivalent of the drunk tank) for trying to bring to light the issues, and the talk of the day is about two girls smooching it up.
But there isn’t any good reason _not_ to have a big smoocheroo during a protest, or almost any other time. They weren’t doing it to get attention. If they were opposite-gender-presenting they wouldn’t have gotten any, and there would have been nothing for Raidah to get upset about. So, what, straight people can express their love at protests, but lesbians can’t?
If Joyce and Joe made out at the protest and ended up on the front page I think Raidah would still probably be mad.
The point is that if Joyce and Joe made out on the protest they wouldn’t have ended up on the front page.
Like, even arguably on a newspaper not run by Daisy, but especially with her.
I mean the statement “straight people can express their love but lesbians can’t” implies that the issue is unfairness towards lesbian couples in lieu of straight couples when that’s like…not at all what Raidah’s mad about. Now maybe Daisy WOULDN’T have but Joyce and Joe on the front page. But what Raidah’s mad about is…y’know…that there’s a kiss on the front page distracting from the point/events of the protest.
Like she’s right to be mad at Daisy cuz Daisy decided to make the protest about them. Against the wishes of even the participants in the kiss!
I’m not saying that it’s not a valid reason to be mad at Daisy. Just that there are several dynamics that complicate being mad at Joyce and Dorothy. Which Raidah clearly is, even above Daisy.
I give you the international news front page from the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup riots. Complete with cops, riot gear, and tear gas.
And a kiss between a man and a woman.
No one, gay straight or other, should be doing anything at a protest that goes against the parameters and agreements of the organization of the protests and the people marshalling it when it’s underway.
Like the other comment or said, pride protest? Probably expected and fine, but even that’s contextual. Anti Genocide protest? Save that for when you’re back at home and not dodging a tear gas canister to the head.
It’s not about you, and you shouldn’t want the attention anyway. Even if they were dating before this and there wasn’t personal drama, this would still be a lame thing to do.
Raidah may be kinda lame on almost everything, but she hasn’t really said anything wrong about any of this specific plotline.
Nah, that’s going way too far. People can still be human at a protest. It’s not like they actually wanted the attention anyway.
Where they were out of line was not evacuating when that decision was made by the organizers, not by kissing.
When the theme is ‘resisting the oppression of institutions’, the perspective
“No one[…]should be doing anything at a protest that goes against[…]the organization of the protests and the people marshalling it when it’s underway.”
comes across as comic irony.
“You may join us to protest against the Man, but only if you submit your wills in unwavering obedience to the Man who’s against the Man.”
(In other words, it sets off warning bells that they only want to take the place of the oppressors rather than than stop the oppression.)
I see it as “Don’t do things that will give ‘the man’ something that pulls the focus away from the intent of the protest.”
The whole thing is moot to begin with though. They weren’t there in solidarity with the protesters, they were there to warn Jocelyne, and got Hormone’ed.
Dottie in fact tried to use the protest as some kind of… who the hell knows, but her intent was apparently to get arrested for something she doesn’t even care about to get away from her gay thoughts… Maybe?
She wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders there, and it’s snowballed into a clusterkerfluffle that is probably going to be haunting them into at least our time July, if the preview was any indication.
That said, it takes nothing away from anyone who gets mad at them for “upstaging” the protest, or for the people who will think they were attempting to steal the spotlight, or get “the clouts.”
Because smooching at a war protest, let alone one for a genocide, is some tiktoc clout chasing antics without context clues, and even with the background, its still a bad scene.
No, it means having some discipline and being aware of optics. Protests are not a free-for-all.
I think Dorothy was trying to prove to herself that she cares.
This type of sword falling activism is not recommended unless you can figure out how it actually helps the cause or the people involved.
I mean, it’s not like they decided they were gonna deliberately be distracting. They were full of emotions and acted accordingly, they weren’t trying to make this the Look We’re Kissing Show.
100% there with you. Raidah sucks, doesn’t mean she can’t be right. Or partly right – Dorothy and Joyce didn’t ask for it to be about them.
Dorothy kinda did try to make it about herself when she grabbed a flag and walked into the center of the protest while everyone else was leaving, purely because it’s something she wouldn’t have done while trying to become President. She had no way of knowing that would end with her on the front page of the newspaper, but as Raidah said earlier without enough evidence to justify the claim, it was the wrong reason to be there.
Yeah, Dorothy has a bad habit of trying to fit new ideals into her current personality.
Interesting question, is the purpose of the news to inform the public or to lead discussion? I maintain trying to get at least some people to read the article (written by a protester from jail) is the more important job of the front page; Raidah’s complaint is that the picture makes people “talk” about the wrong thing.
I suppose in the alternate world where the headline was “University sponsors mass murder, rewrites laws to silence protest mid-action; police cause riot” people who don’t read anything besides headlines would be properly upset. But I also suspect in the alternate reality where Raidah was more normal about people associating with Sarah she still wouldn’t give any sign that she thought the protest was important.
Hmmm. Maybe just don’t trust the IU paper specifically for as long as Daisy is in charge?
Don’t trust wristwatches, tbh.
What did wristwatches ever do to you
They made me late for my first ever job!
Should have stuck with the old reliable pocket watch.
Also not eaten your lunch in the park that day.
We need this like, 10 more times and then maybe we’ll be getting somewhere.
Somewhere incredibly tedious.
Y’know what? At least this ignorance of the more major issues by the news is because the editor was horny and not because, like, governmental pressure to not discuss certain issues in anything but a dismissive way.
Raidah’s right but she still sucks
Also oh my god I’m so sorry Willis, dads dying fucking sucks and I wish you the best with it <3
I think in this universe You Know Who wasn’t elected yet
You’re right. That universe – our universe – was briefly visited by the Shortpacked! crew in searching for a way to defeat the Soggies.
https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/it39s-the-biggest-toy-store-there-was
I feel fairly confident that, as we’re not currently beset by gigantic militant toy stores, that they figured that living with the Soggies was better than living in our hellhole.
The Soggies are probably gonna deal with the whole “The Martians Are Coming Back” thing
Then again, they may rule.
Raidah being someone who sucks but is right is when her character is most compelling
i wonder if the gov would’ve bothered but i half expect some kinda ‘rival’ newspaper to post about it
or hell, even roz (not that she went to the protest this particular time) to talk about it on her livestream to horny fans
Agent X, assigned to ruin Daisy’s chances with the ladies and thus keep her eternally horny: “good, they suspect nothing.”
Never thought I’d be cheering Raidah on but here we are
Also, Willis, condolences for your loss and strength to your family as the usual proceedings unfold
Gotta wonder if she actually gives a damn, or if she’s just using it as a pretext to be a source of grief in someone’s life to complain about people she doesn’t like.
The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy, no more, no less.
Just because someone’s shooting in the same direction as you, doesn’t mean they’ll discriminate between your foe and your back. People seem awfully keen to forget Raidah’s past behavior. But it’s my experience, and that of many people wiser than I, that
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
–Maya Angelou
“people seem awfully keen to forget X” is such a fucking dog whistle at this point
Dog whistle? What are the fascists using that for?
A literal dog whistle is not audible to humans but is to dogs.
A metaphorical dog whistle says something in a way only certain people will hear.
Like intentionally talking about your mom’s delicious cooking around someone who’s insecure about their cooking skills.
Or talking about how great the past was, in such a way that those groups who had it bad in the past, and those agree with you, know you mean you wish things still sucked for them.
“Just because someone’s shooting in the same direction as you, doesn’t mean they’ll discriminate between your foe and your back.”
This is a great line! I can’t find it elsewhere online with a search, did you just make it up?
Yeah, foe or back is me (if I’m not forgetting hearing it elsewhere.) Enemy of my enemy is Howard Taylor.
Yeah, why would a Muslim character care about totally-not-Palestine, or the cops cracking down on activists rallying against the schools ties to the tech billionaires soaked in blood.
I think it is fairly obvious at this point that Raidah cares about this issue. People who are assholes still do care about things.
She definitely doesn’t give a damn, she’s just pursuing her vendetta against Joyce.
How are you getting that from this strip? As far as she knows, she has a legitimate grievance against Joyce and Dorothy for making the protest all about them via an extremely public kiss, which in her eyes was aided and abetted by Daisy making it the front page of the newspaper. More to the point, Raidah expresses frustration and anger that members of her community – a community facing genocide – were not consulted on the coverage of this extremely sensitive event. That’s an entirely different grievance, and it’s not connected to her hatred of Joyce at all – it comes from a place of frustration from being a brown Muslim women, and the genocide of people like her being covered without actually centering them. The newspaper photo is a distraction from the substantive issues of the protest, it is racist in its centering of white women in order to generate circulation, and Raidah has every right to be angry about it irrespective of the fact that she also happens to hate Joyce. I just don’t see how you can say she doesn’t give a damn when she’s here, in this strip, giving a damn.
Raidah is flat wrong about whether it’s OK for two lesbians to kiss in public, at a protest or anywhere else. They weren’t doing it for attention. If a straight couple kissed each other at the protest, no one would pay attention. It’s not OK to say that lesbians shouldn’t kiss in public because they might draw attention away from some issue.
Raidah isn’t saying that and HASN’T said that.
Raidah’s getting real close to saying it I’m afraid:
“It’s a bad enough situation already without also having to deal with you wrapping it in tone deaf garbage.”
Right now there’s room for interpretation but what Raidah means by “bad enough situation” could be several things. It could be the cops tear gassing protestors, that’s certainly a bad situation. But it could also be gay kissing at a muslim organized protest causing discord between homophobic muslims and non-homophobic muslims.
She hasn’t said it yet, but I think she’s getting close
I would assume that the “bad enough situation” would be the situation in Bulmeria which seems to be war crimes and genocide. As in “the situation in Bulmeria (and this university funding it) is already bad enough without having to deal with you wrapping it in tone deaf garbage”.
I interpreted the “bad enough situation,” to be the, y’know, genocide and violent police intervention in a peaceful protest. Raidah’s character is similar to Mike’s- an asshole, but saying something correct. Dorothy dove back into that protest against protest leaders’ recommendations because she had to “self realize,” not because the subject material was important to her. Joyce dove back into the protest because of Dorothy. Those two kissing is obviously good/gay, but time and place matter. If I stood up at my brother’s funeral, grabbed the mic, and distracted from the funeral by kissing and proposing to my fiancé, it would be inappropriate for the time and place, regardless of being gay. It would probably show a lack of care for the dead. Especially if it wasn’t MY brother’s funeral. This is a part of a larger conversation about white gay people getting large amounts of the media’s protest-attention because their celebration of sexuality is interesting/sexy/fun and white, while glossing over the oppression of being queer, especially for POC and disabled queer people. Or, in the story’s case, overlooking the protests’ outcome almost entirely in favor of a less depressing, “sexier,” or more justice-satisfying and peaceful angle.
The love of queer people is often commodified to signal diversity, inclusion, and rebellion in the media, often against queer people’s wishes. But it’s just love. And college kids doing PDA should be considerate of the circumstances, Goddamn it.
A majority of American Muslims favour rights for LGBT people. In the pre-Trump era, their were similar to American protestants. Young Muslims, in particular, overwhelmingly favour LGBT rights.
This framing of Muslim vs LGBT is not present in the text of the comic. It is also an Islamophobic trope, used by European far-right parties.
They aren’t lesbians
Well, no. Does that make a difference?
It makes a difference to bisexuality who are sick and tired of bi-erasure.
They get a slightly different spell list and automatic perks, but nothing that would really make much of a difference in this scenario. There’s a lot of talk in build-centric forums about how, in this exact situation, a lesbian would probably have an easier time handling the scripted events, but those arguments typically rely on “optimal” builds that don’t account for a lot of bisexual contingencies.
Wow – leapfrog logic much?
What Raidah is doing is ripping Daisy for journalist malfeasance.
The title of a protest should be about the protest. She made it about her personal thirst.
Nothing to do with “banning lesbians from kissing in public”.
Talk aboutbiased personal google warping perception of reality.
The entire third panel is Raidah putting responsibility on Joyce and Dorothy.
….
And that does lend itself to homophobic “lesbians shouldn´t publicly kiss” – like Chris Phoenix seems to assume – how exactly?
…y’know, this specific blunder aside, I’m kinda getting the feeling Daisy is not equipped to edit a newspaper that deals with many diverse and serious topics by virtue of just like. Not knowing things. In general.
Oh hey, buffer watch is up to my birthday next year
Yeah she’s BuzzFeed material at best
Honestly if it wasn’t for the massive glaring flaw that is her entire running joke she’d probably be a pretty decent editor?
That last panel is pretty rough in what it tells us about Daisy’s basic knowledge of things, is what I mean
Yep, I facepalmed pretty hard at that.
i mean outside of the amazigirl sitings and maybe campus events like guest speakers i wonder how ‘important’ the news there is if they were also gonna let one of the students do a comic run
Does the term “comic run” have a meaning I’m not familiar with?
If you are talking about student created comics, that has a very long history in University papers, at least in the US.
oh i meant like the cartoons joyce wzas making/competting with wakly over
That was pretty much clear from the start.
I’d be more impressed about the buffer thing if people didn’t say “Happy Birthday Shiro” every single day.
But she’s gay! That means she’s an expert in complex social topics, right? /sarcastic
Dadly, I think Daisy has a more solid handle on American “news” media than Raidah does.
American media are advertising outlets above all else. This’ll sell way more metaphorical cheeseburgers than a full-color spread on the conflict itself.
*SADLY ffs 😑
JFC ‘dadly’…
Its kinda like they’re both right.
Daisy is right that her picture would get a lot more attention and a lot more pickup in the mainstream, increasing the odds that its message would be distributed farther and wider.
Raidah is right that a ton of that doesn’t really matter because “the message” has been undercut. “Congrats, you’ve spread the word that blonde white girls should be allowed to kiss, what does this have to do with the genocide of brown poeple?”
I think Raidah is more correct here, spreading the message only matters if the message being spread is correct, but I do get Daisy’s instincts too, at the very least the door is wedged open more than a more accurate cover photo would’ve managed, its just that the job isn’t remotely done yet.
The most obvious “correct” thing for Daisy to have used as the picture is cops tear-gassing protestors but that ALSO wouldn’t be about Bulmeria at all and be replacing it with a culture war cops-vs-hippies kind of conversation. Like, nothing actually happened at the protest that’d make a good picture Raidah would be happy with. We didn’t even see any good signs.
Well that’s just wrong. The article was about the protest, which was about Bulmeria – pictures of said protestors would not be “replacing it with a culture war cops-vs-hippies kind of conversation” (where are you even getting the hippies from? or that police brutality is a “culture war” thing??) it would pay attention to, you know, the thing that happened, which is the police being used to suppress free speech about Bulmeria & the bombings. Which in turn should get the attention to said topic, if you can write a good article.
Hell, I think you could even get a good picture /without/ the protestors making the same point & that’d also be better than what Daisy went with.
It was a picture of protestors surrounded by a haze of tear gas. If the requirement is for the protestors in the image to be brown, they are showing too much of the protestors’ likeness (which the image run also did).
“Hell, I think you could even get a good picture /without/ the protestors making the same point & that’d also be better than what Daisy went with.”
And if protestors ARE shown, I do think the /focus/ (like, literal center of the picture, in the foreground, referenced in the headline) of the image should be protesting. This wasn’t the case, which is what people have been taking issue with. There’s also a difference between white protestors being in a picture vs being in the center of it (again, what people are taking issue with. Even Raidah in this comic that you’re commenting under!)
Friendly reminder the header was
“Kiss bombings good-bi” which is…super tasteless
I think there’s a real argument that it’s very easy to shift the focus from “Stop the genocide” to free speech/police brutality. Which is a real issue that deserves attention, but doesn’t actually help stop the genocide.
Yeah, sure, but that’s on the article and framing, hence “if you can write a good article”. Sort of irrelevant here, since we can’t read the damn thing and it hasn’t come up as an issue. Nor is it something I need or want the comic to discuss. I don’t like the protest storyline, I don’t think it’s well done, I’ll be happy when we move past at least the immediate aftermath.
Gods, yes.
It really feels like the comic equivalent of when someone in a sitcoms says something rude and awkwardly trying to apologize while simultaneously making it worse.
i mean it’s also just a college newspaper, i wouldn’t be surprised if some student/person protesting there had like double the amount of followers online as there are students on campus to where a vid of the tear gassing would go viral
She’s right in that this is how “news” media works, but wrong in that this type of packaging serves a journalistic purpose. It gets eyeballs, but that doesn’t mean it informs or calls anyone to action.
Raidah has been terrible and spiteful for the whole comic.
But wow is she right about how Daisy mishandled this. Hoping she comes back to yell at Daisy some more after she prays.
Eh? Right that Daisy mishandled this, probably. Right about how? Very little of what she’s saying makes sense, and even if they were reasonable conclusions we already know they’re wrong.
Yup. She’s objectively right and her pain is valid, but she’s twisting it to make it about two people she’s already decided she hates.
Yeah… I mean how is this Joyce and Dorothy’s fault? They obviously didn’t ask to make the front page or even know about the photo well after the fact.
Thats what I keep thinking with all the Raidah-hate.
Yeah, she is obviously feeling hostility towards Joyce/Dotty.
Doesnt make her complaint about Daisy as “the media” buying the lead any less valid.
Just because somebody is biased doesnt make them wrong or their grievances hypocritical.
It is amusing that Raidah is very frequently entirely correct about everything…
…as long as it doesn’t directly impact the main cast.
…
I would never want to be her friend in real life.
But I could absolutely see myself voting for her for elected office. “GO GET THOSE OTHER ASSHOLES, RAIDAH!” says alt-universe-me.
She has a strong sense of justice and is generally pretty well attuned to what’s really important in a situation, but has a massive blind spot for her own personal life and relationships. Of course, that sense of justice applies across the board, so when it comes to her personal life, she feels just as strongly that the people she thinks are bad are bad, and the fights she thinks are worth fighting are worth fighting. And all the lessons she’s learned standing up to power and fighting the good fight she can erroneously extend to putting down personal rivals and social climbing.
Like, case and point here she’s conflating her personal beef with Joyce and Dorothy with her legitimate grievances about people not taking the protest seriously. In this case the two happen to largely overlap, but you can see in a few places that she’s losing focus on the noble political goal she’s pursuing in the interest of scoring whatever shots she can against people she doesn’t like, because to her those are the same thing.
Raidah is an interesting character because I believe she only comes off this bad (at least in her more recent appearances) because we see her from the perspective of the main cast we empathize with. In a vacuum Raidah’s probably not that bad a person. There must be something Jacob saw in her right? We just see her at her worst because she only holds ire and a arguably justified grudge against Joyce, even though we could debate Joyce has done worse than anything we’ve seen Raidah do.
I personally think Raidah just needs real (not Carl) friends and a life so she’s not constantly seen as such a hater and social climber. Maybe pull something together with Asma and Alice, they had good energy together. Throw Jen in there too. Get this DoA Team B going!
I mean people also hold the way she treated Sarah against her which is entirely fair.
Sarah is kinda in that same perspective where we see Raidah as bad but in actuality Sarah has arguably done worse to her. As in Sarah actually punched Raidah once. Raidah has so far just been catty I guess? Is that really treating Sarah that bad when it’s very much a two way street of snark and passive aggression? Or are we really valuing Raidah stealing Jennifer, a friend Sarah doesn’t even like or hangout with, for a few months?
Actually in that regard I think another thing we haven’t seen comes into play, which is Sarah and Raidah’s freshman year. Whatever Sarah’s done since, this started with months of bullying, ostracism, and harassment on Raidah’s part
Yep, Sarah was absolutely in the wrong for that punch but it was not unprovoked. Raidah made the rest of her freshman year hell, and tried to cut her off from her newfound friends in sophomore year too. She wasn’t just ignoring Sarah, she was trying to go out and hurt her on purpose.
I would only be warning people away from someone if I knew they were literally dangerous or malicious. Sarah is “guilty” of ratting out her roommate to her dad out of concern for her mental health. Which, EVEN IF Sarah was in the wrong, is at best only a reason to avoid someone. Raidah didn’t just break off the friendship — she was trying to actively make Sarah suffer, months later.
I mean. Raidah & Sarah have a history. Raidah’s first few interactions with Sarah are essentially her walking up and insulting Sarah because she dislikes her that much. There’s a reason Sarah punched her! Raidah was actively trying to dissuade people from talking to Sarah (specifically Joyce, in that scene). That goes beyond “catty”. And I’m saying all that as someone who LIKES Raidah. I think she’s pretty interesting!
I don’t know if we can really quantify what’s worse between in actions between them but I personally think Raidah and Sarah kind of break even on grading scale of who was a bigger jerk. Sarah’s not in jail or out of a scholarship after all and after she apologized they kind of just avoided each other until fate forced them back together. In my opinion Raidah has been far worse to characters like Dina and Jennifer, and even Asher.
I think if you think they kind of just avoided each other we did not read the same comic.
We might not be, because after this strip here where Raidah and Sarah kind of reconcile on the punch incident while agreeing to still hate each other over the Dana one
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/06-strange-beerfellows/absolve/
Raidah doesn’t see Sarah again until Jacob brings her along to visit Joyce for a party maybe? I think that was the dry party everyone drank at. Anyway they both seem equally surprised and put off to be in each other’s presence. Kinda like they were avoiding each other.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/03-the-butterflies-fly-away/welcome/
Only then does the feud rekindle.
I think Raidah comes off as bad because we see her very comfortably lying and rewriting history to manipulate people to her side, and using language that suggests she truly sees friends only as assets to advance her status. That she turns her skills to ruining Sarah’s life over an incident she herself won’t give anything like a honest account of makes her a villain, but in my opinion she’s largely irredeemable anyway.
What about the time she asked Walky to breakfast and then immediately called him “a stunted manchild” behind his back?
I’d vote for Raidah too, but I’d never trust her.
goodie, another day of hearing how clickbait is good journalism and not just for ad metrics.
I thought we as a society agree that was a bad thing.
😛 Me too. And then I read the comment section.
Guess it’s been going on for so long that people just kind of assume it’s a good idea… (like so many other godawful business decisions).
it was also daisy’s own bias, i’m sure ‘clickbait’ of a photo when joyce was attacked/about to be arrested despite not resisting also would’ve drawn eyes (unless the other students wouldn’t care/desensitized to authoritative violence by now)
I would’nt say it “assisted” them more like it made things more complicated…other than that still hard to argue with most of this.
But you better believe people here are going to try.
Daisy, the ends of every pencil you own must be disgustingly rusted or tarnished or whatever tf happens to the metal eraser holding things when they get wet. They make teething toy things for non-babies (my daughter keeps asking for one so I’m pretty sure they exist), please god get one of those.
Also, I’m so sorry for your loss Willis.
Little bit of projection in the middle there, but she’s right
Of all the “villain” characters to give some depth, thank god it was Raidah.
*looks directly into the camera*
Surely this won’t be misinterperated
Alas
my condolences Willis :(
The entire joke of Daisy has been that she’s incompetent and the content of her newspaper is entirely dictated by what’s feeding her horniness on any given day. Raidah is entirely right, Daisy is bad at newspaper.
Also, with how much Raidah’s criticisms are echoing this comments section circa the protest arc, this in many ways feels like Willis turning to the camera and apologizing.
it’s not the main point of the protest but presumably bulmeria is also anti gay so them doing a kiss while surrounded by tear gas seems like it’d be good symbolically too like “make love not war” or so (surprised that wasn’t the headline)
Though that gets complicated since to the extent it’s an Israel/Gaza analogy, it would be the targets of the genocide that are actually more anti-gay.
If Raidah’s meant to stand in for the comments in these retroactively-added strips, that just makes Daisy’s line about engagement even more damning.
It also has the secondary effect of making Raidah the commentariat’s mouthpiece. Considering how consistently shitty Raidah’s behaviour is, I find this endlessly funny.
There’s no way Willis wrote a ‘sorry’ strip’/arc, this has been in the buffer for like a year.
It’s a whole two strips long, unless the comic schedule is append-only it would be trivial to insert.
ah a reminder why raidah is still the worst, even when she has good points. Love the idea that somehow Joyce and Dorothy nefariously planned this to distract from a genocide
I mean she didn’t really say that they planned nefariously, just that they hijacked it. Which they kinda did albeit unintentionally.
They didn’t really “hijack” it. Daisy, on the other hand, has the keen journalistic instincts and ethics of a weekly tabloid writer, and grabbed the picture she thought was “hottest”, rather than one that would actually illustrate the story.
Are we surprised by those instincts? I’m pretty sure part of the joke with her is that she’s J Jonah Jameson if he were a horny lesbian college student. Hence why she’s so hung up on someone getting her photos of
SpidermanAmazigirl. Those are the exact instincts I’d expect from him.There should be a hyphen in both of those superhero names, you monster.
Taf-fy has a point.
I’ve never heard of SpiderHyphenMan.
Apart from some of the most recent depictions, JJJ’s thing has always been that he is a good journalist with an incredibly strong sense of justice when it comes to anything other than Spider-Man, and a terrible boss. In my opinion he’d be appalled at Daisy’s handling of the protest.
If I remember correctly at least one writer presenting JJJ as suspicious of Spider Man because of the KKK. Why wear a mask if you’re on the up and up?
There’s another recent story in which JJJ, who’s lost his job at the Bugle and wants to promote his website, manages to wangle an in-person interview with Spider-Man. It eventually breaks down into Jonah confessing that he hates anyone who wears a mask because masked thugs killed a girl he was engaged to. He collapses, telling Spidey to just go. Then Peter removes his mask and explains why he wears it, and why he does what he does…
In the sense that Dorothy charged back in to the protest as people were being told by the organizers to evacuate and she did more over her own internal conflicts than out of any real commitment to the cause, they kind of did hijack it.
They only hijacked it due to being in the paper. Her putting any blame on them is why off base and just based on personal pettiness
A lot of it is pettiness, she hates Joyce for stealing her boyfriend even though that was ultimately Jacob’s fault, so this is another reason for her to hate Joyce.
Kissing at the protest was very heat of the moment.
Daisy, though? 100% deserves what Raidah is saying to her.
I don’t think it’s fair to excuse Joyce. She was consciously trying to break Raidah and Jacob up, first for Sarah’s sake and then her own. Jacob might have screwed up bit his intentions were much better than hers.
I don’t particularly like Raidah given how she’s treated characters like Dina and even Jennifer, but when it comes to her and Joyce, Joyce was very much the one being awful.
Jacob had no agency in the matter.
Jacob had and exercised his agency in the matter. Joyce was still deliberately trying to break them up.
Jacob prevented Joyce from coming clean about lying that she was his girlfriend, prevented her from leaving the quasi-date they were at under false pretences, and then kissed her at the end of it. He deserves a lot more blame for what happened than he gets.
Not really fair to blame Joyce and Dorothy, even not knowing they really didn’t want that picture published, but boy did Daisy have that coming
Worst person you know makes a valid point.
mary is worse, wonder if raidah’s bumped into her yet
Condolences, Willis
When every character is being so awful that it makes raidah look reasonable
cept for mary
My condolences Mr. Willis. I hope you’re doing okay.
I really really really wish this was more of a conversation and not just a one-sided lecture that Daisy seems patently unphased by. It just kinda gets cut short right at the point where I’d want it to start.
oh believe me brotha, this conversation isn’t over
hardly
if not Raidah then certainly Asma will let Daisy know this was basically making birthday balloons brought to a funeral the front page picture of a story that was supposed to be about a funeral
at the very least, Raidah did NOT fuck around and got straight to the point, and as much as I hate her I commend her for doing this
it’s not always a walk in the park bringing this kinda stuff to people’s attention, even if thy mean well, believe me (-_-)
(okay peace for reals this time I gotta work on Asma’s bounce physics XD)
feels like a convo with daisy is the oposite of that bechedel test, can’t have a convo about her that has nothing to do with women/lesbians or she’ll implode
the secret third opposite. The first is most movies and the second is two named guys having a conversation about something other than women.
Yeah, Daisy is…. not the greatest.
Raidah seems the type to keep going up the chain of command when it comes to something like this. Daisy could possibly get a reprimand or even be fired (assuming higher ups aren’t going to go, “Why would we get rid of her? She took fire off the school by making it not front page!”)
Sorry for your loss.
It just occured to me that Radiah has an idealist idea of what a newspaper should be, which is kinda wild/weird because that’s very different than what she usually is.
Although, if she’s just trying to get the newspaper to do it’s job, it doesn’t matter if she’s being idealistic if it gets the job done.
even without raidah caring , joyce/dorothy was also upset since theyh dind’t intend for the pic to be taken/published as well
Yeah, Raidah suddenly getting SUPER principled is a swerve for sure. This is the same person we’ve seen be ruthlessly mercenary when it comes to her social life — cutting out or inviting people purely based on her (VERY transparent) perception of their value to her.
Maybe Willis decided to give her actually sympathetic traits, or maybe being “good person who regresses to pettiness around the main cast” was always the plan, but she just never had any scenes to demonstrate that until now.
It does strike me as kind of weird, though. We haven’t really SEEN Raidah be principled. In fact, she used both Joyce’s and Dorothy’s strongly held principles as ammunition to belittle and mock them both. Compared to how she is so deeply cynical about her social circle, it makes this earnest rant to Daisy kind of weird.
I mean, one thing doesn’t counter the other. Raidah can choose to only have people in her life that benefit her AND think that you should have at least a smidgen of professionalism when doing your job. That’s not a contradiction.
Raidah has a very absolute view of the world and it is extremely lame. For someone who thinks you need to throw away your high school friends, she sure is still stuck there.
She comes across as a bit naive here. Can you really expect a school newspaper to be a reliable source of information on an issue? I doubt this kind of cover image is anything new under Daisy’s editorship.
A reliable source of information as compared to what?
So what, we shouldn’t hold people to a moral journalistic standard because they’re an amateur?
I mean, “what [x] should be” is exactly where idealism belongs.
An idealized college newspaper would flatly report on the news of the college: That the school called in the cops to tear-gas pro-Bulmeria protestors. They’d be super critical of the school’s decision to do this and maybe even get some scoops on how that decision happened and who made the call.
But what Raidah wants is for the news to be about the fact that there’s an ongoing genocide in Bulmeria
Another day, another dozen repetitions of that “Worst person/good point” meme. Probably.
You could make it into a drinking game.
* I only drink Dr. Pepper, carbonated prune juice of the gods.
surprised raidah is still faithful (kinda rude of daisy to ask i guess) considering she mocked joyce behind her back for ‘thinking angels are real)
I suspect Daisy was being ignorant rather than intentionally rude, but who knows.
Other than Willis.
well, idk if muslims(?) pray for something specific but considering the timer went off it could’ve just been part of daily prayers in general
Finally, Raidah is right about something.
it does make me wonder how the “5 prayers a day” really works for university students
I assume they just do their prayers and then continue with what they were doing. It doesn’t seem like much of a time sink, and it’s not a particularly strenuous accommodation for anyone around them.
In a lot of universities (note: in my experience, ymmv) there are prayer rooms for students to pray in undisturbed. Other than that, it just works like going to get food or going to the bathroom as far as university experience. They go to the place where that’s a thing people do (or back to their dorms) pray, and return to the rest of their day.
Maybe more a question of whether classes are organized around them? It would be awkward to have a class that you always had to leave, find a place to do the prayer and then come back. Even worse when it came to tests and the like.
My understanding is that even very devout Muslims have a window of time available for each of the five daily prayers, as they’re based on sun position, and there are also rules for forgetting/extenuating circumstances/travel that boil down to “do them as close to the correct time as possible, but it’s more important to do them than to do them exactly on time”.
I suspect for the majority of American Muslims, college class schedules count as “extenuating circumstances”.
At least at my school, you also get to pick your classes from a list of available options. So if you need to not be in class at a certain time of day, you have the freedom to pick an earlier or later class.
Yeah, that’s how I’d read it from the limited understanding I have — the expectation would be that you’d schedule classes around prayers, and if it wasn’t possible to do that (only one section of a required class is offered, etc) then you would be okay with doing prayers right after that class.
To circle back to the comic, my understanding is equally that if you ARE able to do so, the designated windows for specific prayers vary but not by much more than 15-20 minutes.
Raidah sure places a lot of importance on an amateur college newspaper
because it’s a comic about a college. what the hell are you even saying
So weird for a character to be caring about the events of the story they’re in. Highly unusual.
Uh, large-school student papers at major American universities are serious business, with advisory boards and advertising and editorial standards, etc.
IIRC, the IDS is one such paper, it’s part of their journalism school.
Before I make my comments on the actual strip itself, I just want to say I’m sorry the death of your father. Take care of yourself. I haven’t lost a parent, so I can’t really give any advice, but I think Becky said it well.
Sorry about your Dad man.
Sorry for your loss, Willis. I’m in the Orphan Club too. Shit sucks.
I may hate Raidah for a lot of reasons, but damn if she’s not 100% correct for everything related to this newspaper for this current day (& probably in general, this paper’s a crashout)
well even flawed charas make good points but don’t think willis would make her unlikeable for this particular part (tho i wonder if the students did actually read the news paper (other than ken) versus just seeing the two on teh front page
Really don’t think it was Joyce and Dorothy’s fault
Sounds like something a friend of Joyce and Dorothy would say.
Ehh. It’s kind of a little bit Dorothy’s fault.
True, but Raidah hates them, so it must be their fault.
I’m surprised she prays at all. I genuinely thought she was an atheist or something because when she was pissed off at Joyce for trying to steal Jacob she wrote her off as, basically, “an idiot that thinks angels are real”.
i don’t know if her religion has the same kinda ‘angels’ but i wouldn’t be surprised if some ppl pray as a form of ‘meditation’ even if they don’t believe as strongly
or, maybe raidah found her faith recently again lately (tho idk if she’s gonna start wearing a hijab, i remember hearing it was for married women but asma has one too and all the muslim girls i knew wore them even in elementary school, i vaguely know it’s related to ‘modesty’ or so, but interesting that a lot of them still wear/are ‘allowed’ to use makeup as well [no offense inteneded to any muslims reading this])
Yeah – in my experience, it’s usually a matter of how strictly you interpret scripture. Some believe in very direct translation, and may decry any who do otherwise as innovators and lackluster believers. Others subscribe to less rigid interpretations, and may view the other party as stuck-up conservatives or stuffy extremists.
Mostly though, we just awkwardly talk around the issue. “Oh, that’s some nice makeup/perfume/piercings/jewelry/etc.”
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-8/01-face-the-strange/guzzle/ she mentioned attending a Mosque here.
Aha, thanks for the link! I was trying to remember if it had been mentioned before.
In theory, since angels are mentioned in both the Tanakh/Old Testament and the Koran, most believers in any of the Abrahamic religions believe in them in a sense, but there’s a strain of US fundamentalists who take it much more seriously. Believing in guardian angels and other kinds of angels who are constantly active in the world today.
I’d assume that’s the kind of thing Raidah was referencing.
Yeah, it very much read to me as an insult about CHILDISH/SUPERFICIAL faith, rather than an insult about faith qua faith.
For plenty of people, religion is about culture and ritual. Christianity is the only major religion where “faith” is the most important tenet, i.e. the common attitude that you just have to accept Jesus as your personal lord and savior to be forgiven for every sin you’ve ever committed and to be “born again” and get into Heaven.
1) That’s true to an extent, but only to an extent. That’s more Christian rhetoric than common practice. In practice, Christian churches are full of culture and ritual and whatever they might say, most sects won’t accept your “faith” if you’re not also practicing the culture/ritual.
2) I don’t think that really has anything to do with Raidah mocking Joyce for believing in angels. Note that she didn’t mock her for believing in God. Even if Islam has a different emphasis on belief, I don’t think that’s something a Muslim would be likely to say.
If you reread my comment I think you will find that I didn’t say Christianity *doesn’t* have ritual or culture.
What I said was that it’s very unusual in treating faith as the most important thing, and my point was that other mainstream religions are often fine with not only agnosticism but atheism among their membership.
I don’t know enough about Islam to say it’s true of it, but Judaism and Shinto for example are both 100% compatible with not actually believing in any type of supernatural being.
While I hate Raidah with a passion, she isn’t entirely without a point here.
However, Joyce and Dorothy weren’t intending to hijack a movement. They probably didn’t even know they were being photographed at the moment. There’s a lot of wrong in what they did, but it’s not what Raidah is accusing them of.
Of course, when has Raidah missed an excuse to be a racist or make something about herself.
Raidah isn’t being a racist, it’s not racist to point out that the relationship between two white girls should not be the face of this protest.
Raidah having an issue with a historical oppressor class is not racist.
i hope daisy gets into erotic fiction or something before becoming the brooke mceldowney of college newspaper editors
i mean i’m sure she fantasizes but it’s prolly not enough for her at this point, she either needs a toy or to download the lesbian ver of grinder XD
Raidah is such a twisted character, god damn. Like, if panel 3 wasn’t there, I could agree with her entirely, but the fact that she’s treating Joyce and Dorothy like they’re terrible people stealing all the attention from the protest and hoarding it for themselves is just… so goddamn telling. It’s a clear sign that she is just completely incapable of seeing anything outside of her perception of social currency and how that currency affects her.
Raidah’s angry here for the same reason she hates Sarah. Somebody’s getting attention in a way that doesn’t fit her agenda. That’s what pisses her off more than anything. She’s right in this case, because the attention being pulled away from the protest and onto a stupid tangent is bad for a whole lot of people, but the fact that she’s treating it like some kind of scheme with word choices like “allowed, hijack, assisted” is a good way to subtly reveal that her thoughts are still in the wrong place even if she’s arguing for the right people. It’s some really good subtle scripting work by Willis.
Exactly. Raidah doesn’t care anything but improving her own standing and hurting the people she hates.
I remember Raidah once made fun of Joyce for believing in angels, so either she became religious since then or she has a very idiosyncratic theology where God is real but angels aren’t (very curious what that version of Islam looks like).
The idea of individual angels in the way that many evangelical Christians believe in is something that’s not at all in the Bible to my knowledge. Like, “Guardian Angels” are an entirely apocryphal thing.
Yeah, angels are messengers of God, not cute guys/gals that change your tire, which is how shallow a lot of takes on angels have gotten in English language Christianity at least.
But her insult to Joyce was specifically that she “believed in angels”. I don’t think Raidah would say that if she also, y’know, believed in angels.
To kinda amplify what the other two respondents said, “believes in angels” read to me as “making fun of Joyce for having a twee/childish understanding of faith”, not “making fun of Joyce for having faith at all”.
As I noted elsewhere, Christianity is the only major religion where “faith” is the most important tenet, e.g. you’re not in the club if you haven’t accepted Jesus as your personal lord and savior, and also if you have, everything else is just small potatoes.
Plenty of people experience religion and being religious as a matter of culture and ritual, where belief in the supernatural very much need not apply at all.
No, Islam is just like Christianity in that regard. It’s even had its own Protestant style movements of people reacting against religious ritual and tradition because they thought it corrupted pure faith.
Also, prayer is the opposite of codified ritual. It’s a direct communication between supplicant and deity; no one does it if they don’t think there’s a deity to supplicate.
Tell me you were not raised Roman Catholic without telling me, because if you were you’d have LONG experience with “prayer as codified ritual” — when a Catholic says “say your prayers before bed”, they mean “recite the words of the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Apostles Creed” or some such.
When Catholics (like me, btw) pray, they do it because they believe they’re praying to something that exists. There are lots of cultural Catholics who just see it as a heritage thing and don’t follow any rules, and those people don’t usually have active prayer lives.
Speaking as an ex-Catholic myself with a huge actively Catholic family, there are a lot of Catholics who THINK they have an active prayer life (in terms of “I am having a conversation with the Divine) but what they have instead is an active ritual life (I say the Rosary by rote on X occasions, that’s prayer).
Hell, in the Catholic culture I grew up in, extemporaneous prayer was a mockable offense compared to just reciting the accepted standard prayer for whatever the occasion was. My brother (who is the kind of guy who founds Knights of Columbus chapters) got a lot of ribbing for ad-libbing grace before meals while he was going to a Catholic college (and as such getting exposed to actual living monastic faith on the daily).
I quibble: There are a lot of people who experience Christianity as mere ritual/culture, INCLUDING the idea that the ritual of accepting Jesus as your lord and savior is something that boils down to a prescribed statement with the wording pre-selected for you.
Pretty sure that for a lot of folks who’d claim the label of “Christian”, the performance of faith is part of the culture and not any kind of statement of functional belief.
Heh, plus lots of fully secular people who still do Christmas, ofc, tho I think that’s also unusual in how fully divorced it is from Jesus.
Another comic in which, like real life, people’s actions are less than perfect. Another load of analysis of the obvious from many of the fans. People are imperfect. The story would not work if they were, unless it was a humming hymnal or something.
I mean, honestly, Daisy has an A+ resume for modern news media….
High circulation + story about protest = more information spread. I call it a win, and Raidah and her shriveled black heart can go away.
Also. my surviving parent told me 11 years ago that parents should go before their children, but that does not make it easier to deal with. I still want to call my lost one on the phone more often than you would think, then I’m sad again.
“Shriveled *black* heart”. Right. Reported
While that was superrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr not the right word to use, let’s not report ppl for things just because we want to interpret it as evil.
I’m honestly really looking forward to Raidah getting fleshed out more as a character. I’ll make no secret that I (a white American) am inherently a poor judge, but she’s firmly in the right here. The fact that the most prominent Muslim character in the comic thus far has largely been viewed through the eyes of arch-rivals Joyce and Sarah is a genuine problem with the strip as it’s existed up to this point. And that problem really came to a head in that last story. Getting to see Raidah in another light has been a long time coming.
she’s a very performative person
and i doubt she actually believes anything she’s saying
she may be right in some regards but there’s always and angle to her critiques and attacks
I don’t have any problem with the most prominent Muslim character happening to be an antagonist…UNLESS the author decides to make their storyline focus on a real-world parallel to a situation that heavily impacts Muslims. Then it becomes a problem.
I get why Willis thought the protest was a good story backdrop. Finding a way to bring Jocelyne in conflict with Hank. Finding a way to injure Amazi-Girl. Finding a way to break Dorothy’s reverence for authority.
But at the end of the day, I just don’t want to read a story like this if it’s going to be filtered through the lens of a white homeschooled ex-Christian author.
I like Raidah as a character, I’m even deeply intrigued by her faith in context of how malicious she is as a person in general. She pisses me off but I want more of her for sure. But I still don’t think the comic is playing to its strengths when it tries to tackle this subject.
Well, as the saying goes, if you don’t want to read a thing and you think that what you are reading is doing that thing… stop reading?
“If you don’t like it, stop reading” is one of those arguments that might look really clever and mature on the surface, but isn’t actually saying anything.
When I say “I don’t like this storyline and I don’t think it’s executed very well,” that’s coming from a place of *otherwise liking the story.*
I’m actually curious as to where this idea that “if you dislike one part of a decades-long serial, you should immediately stop reading and commenting on it”comes from.
Because from where I sit, it looks an awful lot like “shut up, go away, and stop disagreeing with me” cloaked in some sort of performative care for another person’s entertainment experience.
I mean in this case Jon did literally say they “don’t want to read a story” that tackles the subject they think Willis is going to tackle. I don’t think it’s much of a reach to note that Jon does have the option to not read that story.
If that was the only story on offer, sure. DoA keeps a bunch of plates spinning at any one time, though, so it’s not an easy comic to pick-and-choose my subplots or storylines. My options are either “wait two/six/twelve months for the story to move on” or read it all as it comes, even the clunky parts. The rest of the “juice” is still worth the squeeze, so to speak.
Good! I feel terrible for folks who are still here but really only out of habit.
While true, given how often the storyline/subplot focus changes around here, it’s not really particularly possible to preemptively avoid a bit. It’s not like Willis tags these things with a subplot identifier.
As such, I don’t think it’s particularly fair to respond to “I don’t want to read a story about Topic X”, where Topic X is a minuscule fraction of Willis’ total work, with “stop reading” — it seems very throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Look, I’m not trying to tell anyone to stop reading myself. I do think some folks would be happier if they took a break for a while, but we’ve got way fewer comments now from people who sound actively DISTRESSED by continuing to read, so it’s at a point where that would be weird advice to give, I think.
The pedant in me still wants to note that Thing 2 just said, “if you don’t want to read a thing and you think the thing you’re reading is doing the thing… stop reading?” which does seem fair, to me, even if it’s unlikely to be productive.
Maybe Thing 2 did mean “stop reading forever”, or “stop complaining where I have to see it”, but the exact wording doesn’t seem super objectionable to me.
Though again: Jon also doesn’t seem distressed! So I don’t think it falls under the heading of well-intentioned advice, either. Just kind of morally neutral comment in isolation, which is really only annoying or problematic when it’s happening a lot.
I feel like Raidah has dealt with one or two assholes that do things intentionally, but hasn’t yet figured out that a vast majority of people only tacitly allow those powerstructures through ignorance or happenstance.
Daisy isn’t doing it maliciously, but yes, her libido is de-amplifying the VERY serious protest, and while it’s in part due to the picture, her only metric for feedback is the engagement metrics, which may not benefit an in-depth and nuanced take on the country nor the protest.
In other words… Raidah, is exemplifying her major character flaw. Expecting everyone to be as thoughtful and share her level of intelligence. And when they don’t, or have priorities that don’t mesh with them, she assumes malice first, and doesn’t really investigate further.
Well broken clocks and all that. I’m not convinced Raidah’s motivations are selfless. Everything in her life is measured in how she can gain from it. So while she’s on the right side of these protests and has a valid gripe about the girls kissing has stolen the spotlight from a much more important topic… it’s probably not completely altruistic either.
Can I get an “Okay Karen” in this house?
I don’t think taking issue with a newspaper editor being flippant about a serious political situation is Karen-like
No? Karen isn’t just “anytime a woman complains”. Its a very specific entitled behaviour both men and women can get up to. Calling out a paper for whitewashing an important story with girls making out, isn’t the same as badgering minimum wage employees over an expired coupon.
I mean, Karen has absolutely evolved into “anytime a woman complains.” Most women saw that coming pretty early on, but internet people were too happy to have a mean nickname for women to listen.
“Karen” is inherently misogynistic, whether it’s “misused” as Brasca1 has, or “properly” used when women complain unjustifiably to service workers (as if white women *actually* complain more than white men do—please). Don’t act like the comment could have been reasonable if they had used “Karen” correctly.
The original correct use also had nothing to do with complaining to service workers.
The original use was by BIPOC to describe a particular kind of interaction we have with white women which is dangerous in a kind of insidious way. For Example: where they decide you don’t belong [wherever you happen to be] and they harass you about it/bongo at you about it. If they get in trouble for this in any way, they claim to be afraid (after harassing you) and appeal to people around them to help them with the “angry/scary” BIPOC they’ve been harassing.
It was never originally misogynistic, it was descriptive of a specific problem. It is NOW very misogynistic, because unfortunately the internet can’t be trusted with any nuance.
This part. For me a Karen is someone who weaponizes vsocial biases and seeks sympathy while lacking empathy. She’s the white woman you go to jail for whistling at.
yeah just like “woke”, it’s consensus definition became not so much about racism in particular after white people in our country started using it, go figure 9-9
Like I do understand the argument that it was inherently misogynistic, but I think that argument is coming from a frankly paternalistic viewpoint — kind of like what @thejeff was expressing, this incredulity that white women could actually be “worse” in any way than white men in terms of expressing bigotry and wielding power.
But like, as a white afab person, there definitely is a Thing that white women do, which I am also capable of, which is unique to the specific type of power they/we have access to.
I do think that there are very specifically some white men who uh. Were extremely eager to start calling people Karens when they shouldn’t have been. Big Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada saying “oh I see you think this has nothing to do with you” energy for those guys.
But yeah. White women as a class do in fact wield specific types of power, as they/we always have. Just as women are an often overlooked enforcer of patriarchy, white women tend to be overlooked as enforcers of white supremacy, but boy oh boy oh boy do they/we participate in both.
(Apologies for the awkward af language, I don’t want to disclaim my ability to be a Karen but I also don’t wanna misgender myself ffff.)
Hell, as an AMAB white guy, who grew up in a pretty racist place, there are a lot of white guys who have an internal view that boils down to “If I just go after that POC, I’m the bad guy… but if I wait until a white lady says she feels in danger, then I’m just protectin’ the wimmin, and that counteracts all accusations of racism forever.”
And as you note, these (often the same) guys will also use “Karen” in a carelessly misogynistic way, while also using Karen behavior as cover for their own racism, often while ignoring the exact same accusations against other white men.
Yeeeeep. 🙁
It’s pretty much Raidah having a correct point with the entirely wrong read on the situation because she hates the photo’s subjects.
Like, she’s absolutely right the photo isn’t gonna help the protest or the cause but she still extends the blame to the photo’s subjects like they intentionally wanted to hijack the protest’s message, when this is entirely Daisy’s fault.
Yea, She’s acting like Joyce and Dorothy intentionally hijacked the cause, and Daisy is some ignorant tool of their’s. This is 100% Daisy putting her libito over the protests message all on her own.
Libido*
Whoops, sorry. I didn’t mean to report your comment.
Thanks part of me knew it didn’t sound right.
I think it’s good writing on Willis’s part. It criticizes a lot of what people didn’t like about the previous storyline, without having one character be unequivocally right. Raidah has valid criticism sometimes but she also goes too far.
Willis is superb at that.
And he did it a year ago, before any of the commnets.
There is only one explanation.
…
He is a time traveller!
I agree with Raidah:( Daisy is entirely to blame tho
I’m sure the comment sections being really normal about this one, especially since it could not be clearer that Willis is critiquing this very comic, through Daisy, and even making fun of it in the alt text. And I’m sure we can all remember multiple things (Raidah hates these two people and is having a stronger reaction then she might otherwise, BUT ALSO: she’s literally correct.) at the same time. Right?
puts hand to earpeice. Hold on. Hold on. Im getting an update.
Nicely put. I too like Daisy’s subtle burn.
And also, True! Raidah tends to reveal too much in the face-to-face but makes sure she’ll look correct in the transcript.
I think she’s right to be upset at Daisy for this.
But she absolutely is letting her past experiences with Joyce paint her as some kinda villain who was there to hijack a movement. She was only there to protect her sister, and then this happened entirely unrelated to that.
It’s not as though Joyce (or Dorothy) called out to someone with a camera “Come get a picture of us smoochin! Love not War!”
Could they had smooched somewhere better? Yeah sure. Would it have been so freaking Yuri Coded? I dunno, maybe. But that’s just how things are.
Thank you! Jorothy did absolutely nothing wrong, and Raidah throwing blame at them basically invalidates her whole criticism drama.
Not….Really? I mean what does Raidah know about Joyce? That she tried to steal her boyfriend once and incidentally blew up Raidah and Jacob’s relationship. So as far as Raidah (not us the reader, mind you) would know—Joyce does things for attention, whether consciously or subconsciously.
And also that she was cheating in that very photo. Or at least kissing someone else’s girlfriend.
Also, my condolences to Willis.
Raidah’s making some very good points here.
I’m not saying she is wrong…
but she is definitely not right.
Also, accusing Joyce and Dorothy is such a bad flag for her.
BOOOOOOOO!!!!!
And this is how Raidah started writing for IDS?
Condolences to Willis.
Anyway, Raidah went from being right to victim-blaming real fast.
Not for a second did she consider that Dorothy and Joyce didn’t want to be on the front page.
1) She’s already decided that Joyce is a Thanos-level threat that deserves no happiness.
2) She views literally almost everything through a lens of status. People are not real to her.
I agree with both your points, and can only conclude that from them that Raidah 50/50 would have voted for Jill Stein in November. (*Tries desperately not to loathe a character based solely on headcanon.*)
Raidah uses a watch instead of her phone? Interesting. I wonder if that proves that she’s a great person, proves that she’s the worst person, or proves that it doesn’t matter because Willis messed up this storyline and should no longer be allowed to have Muslim characters. I understand there are no other options.
It proves she reads hentai any chance she gets. Raidah Lastname is addicted to hentai, but her pull list isn’t updating enough lately, so she’s acting out.
I’d like her more if she was legitimately addicted to hentai. I just want to know something about her that isn’t just her being mean. She must have hobbies.
Her hobbies are Hating Sarah, chasing connections in ways that aren’t likely to actually form those connections, cheating on Joyce, and at least 7 hours of hentai a day.
Cheating on Joyce?
Can you explain that one?
No, I can’t.
Yes, tell him to stop using muslim characters instead of letting him learn from his mistake, and having better muslim representation in the future.
I understand that he made a mistake, but it’s better for him to try, and do better than simply cut out a group of people from the story. If Willis said he would no longer include Muslim characters there would be far more backlash.
This. Lots of media would not exist if people weren’t allowed to write outside their experience. It can result in mistakes but it’s better to use that and learn than just say you can’t do it.
For real.
I’d love to see the “mistake” he made with a Muslim character.
The only mistake, is (as he said in social) that he realized that he didn’t have enough representation of Muslims in his comic, something that he seems to want to have.
Yeee. Let’s attack an artist for not having enough Muslims character, while he def wants to add more organically and do them justice.
That will show him.
<.<
It is only in the comments that there are “no other options” [except that all options can be and often are expressed in the comments}, but in the comments there are absolutely no other options.
There’s only My Opinion (correct, persecuted) and The World’s Opinion (violently oppressive, not in any way exaggerated to sound like I’m being persecuted). Everyone who disagrees with me on the slightest semantic quibble would gladly staple me to a wall and take a power drill to my organs for daring to say what I’ve said in their presence.
You have my condolences too, Willis.
I hate Raidah, but she’s right. Putting Joyce/Dorothy kissing as the front page photo distracts people from the reason of the protest, and the unnecessary violence by the police.
Raidah is not arguing in good faith. This is her after the protest and before the newspaper.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/reek/
1. She doesn’t object to protest but doesn’t feel obliged.
2. Whites are racially disqualified from protesting for PoC.
This is itself a ridiculously bad-faith interpretation of what Raidah said here.
Perhaps, but Raidah is training to be a lawyer and probably understands the effect “previous bad acts” has on testimony.
I’m sorry, Willis.
I’m not going to start repeating all the “worst person you know” comments from yesterday, but I’m still bewildered that it’s Raidah, of all characters, making what is basically a 100% valid point O_o
This very interesting and raidahbis right. I also had no idea she was Muslim. This adds a new layer toher issues with Joyce as who i think she likely assumed was an Islamophobic fundie
well to be fair Joyce confirmed that assumption at least once XD
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-8/01-face-the-strange/guzzle/
Fair evough thats true I never hated raidah though she seems fine she just has specific beef with these peope and is a brutally ambitious but not that evil.
Oops, accidentally hit report on this while scrolling.
And yeah I also forgot this scene telling us raodah was Muslim
What?
Where was that assumption confirmed? The linked update does not read that way, like at all.
How does this confirm her an islamophobe? This is more her being awkward at being caught hunting for Jacob.
I think NGPZ is saying that for specifically Raidah, that interaction would make Joyce look like an Islamophobe to her, given she jumped back in surprise when Raidah said she goes to a mosque
I don’t know, the very next strip has Raidah seething at Joyce going after her man. Islamophobia was definitely not on her mind during that interaction.
Probably not the main thing, but I’d imagine it doesn’t help Joyce’s case in her eyes LOL
Well… that’s before Jacob and Raidah broke up, so Joyce reaalllly has no case to Raidah
Prev reply is like me trying to understand Raidah’s logic, which is admittedly a bit of extrapolation given the screentime she does use shows off her more cynical side
Funnily enough, I went two strips ahead and she is grumbling about “A girl who believes angels are real” which makes her own adherence to religion a bit confusing.
A lot of people in the comments section need to check yourselves on how you feel about black and brown women being angry at white women and it’s like. not even 4 hours past the comic publication.
gentle reminder that the report comment button WORKS
hint hint
Yeah the comments tonight have seemed particularly… unhinged. My personal “favorite” would have to be that one wacko who accused Raidah of “usury”. Bit of a self-report, that one
Said comment is gone now; as NGPZ has been saying, the report button works!
Usury? I’m not a big fan of Raidah, but how in the world could anyone get usury out of anything she’s ever done?
Her interest rates are pretty damn exorbitant.
Someone speculated that they misunderstood what it meant and was trying to say “she uses people”.
Hello, that was me! I’d never heard the word and took a stab in the dark guessing the context.
Now from this comment chain I’m finding out it’s maybe got anti-Semitic connotations? Yikes. Just to be clear, I’m definitely not defending that person. Was just guessing at what they meant.
Usery is the practice of lending money at ridiculously (and usually illegally) high rates of interest.
That comment is gone now, but using “usury” in respect to Raidah is about three layers of racism and an extra two of stupidity.
What is usury… [googles] the lending money one? Someone was really confused, isn’t this an accusation aimed mostly at Jews?
Bold of you to think racists care.
Yeah, y’know, those greedy money-grubbing… Muslims?
Bestie couldn’t even get the stereotype right. Just embarrassing at every stage.
Doesn’t Islam still hold to prohibitions against charging interest for lending money? Though I believe they have ways around it.
I’m sure I wouldn’t know. This is two people now asking a fully non-religious person about Islam.
The only context I have for this are other people’s comments here. Obviously there is something I should regularly read and don’t.
I’m sorry, Willis. Even when you know it’s coming, death sucks.
Virtual light physical contact.
While the comment section has his bsky feed next to it where a few of the recent posts are related to his newfound orphan status, I only checked there after I saw the condolences in these comments.
Meta commentary aside (where, yeah, the focus of this arc has been overwhelmingly on Joyce and Dorothy’s relationship – but a large part of it is because Joyce is the main character, and, well, the relationship and circumstances are rather directly of interest to her), do we actually have any evidence outside of Raidah’s word that the discussion around the protest is focused on the picture? We’ve seen a few students reading the paper, but we have no indication on what students outside of direct relationships with the main two have been talking about regarding the event. It could be that Raidah’s right and the picture has derailed the discussion on an incredibly serious issue, in which case she’s entirely in the right to be angry about the situation (as unfair and unwanted as we know the attention is for Joyce and Dorothy), but it could also be that Raidah is, once again, just angry and lashing out saying what she thinks will get the most emotional reaction.
Without more context and more looking at what others are saying (even a “splash” strip where you have snippets of conversation regarding what’s in the paper – which, at this point, REALLY should have opened up this part of the story, given how much of an impact it’s having), it’s impossible to say how fair Raidah’s being in this situation. Could be that she’s 100% right and the Joyce/Dorothy picture is pulling attention from a deadly serious issue, it could be that Daisy is right and the image is drawing in significantly more reader engagement and thus drawing more attention to the issue that fueled the protest, it could be somewhere in between those two extremes. But without actually seeing the article and the discussion around it, we don’t have any way of knowing where the truth lies.
To be fair we’ve seen several “congrats on making out we were rooting for you” and zero “Oh my god they used tear gas on students and Amazi-girl fought the cops. Goodness” Not even a “oh I saw the cover page of you two being shrouded in tear gas, are you ok?”
Just a “congrats for finally kissing you kooky kids!”
That’s true – but that’s also from a quite small portion of the readership. On a broader scale? Well, unless we can see some discussions without Joyce and/or Dorothy around, we really have no idea how much of a point that Raidah has in this discussion. She could be spot on, or she could be extremely off base. We just don’t have enough information to know one way or the other right now.
I really dislike how you present Muslims.
Said it before and I’ll continue saying it.
Orange peel Muslims. Superficial packaging. No fruit inside.
Uuugggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
I agreed with her yesterday and now you’re making Islam stupid again because you’re pretending a woman who practices prayer but doesn’t wear hijab would somehow care about praying THIS on time, when ACTUAL Islam allows a window for each prayer. Of course praying on time is important, but a character like THIS who doesn’t cover and doesn’t care about her MANNERS……. She’s not the muslima who would pray on time , because the window of allowance is totally normal , and it’s legit WEIRD for somebody to prioritize praying on time LIKE THIS.
It’s not good manners to use the prayer to end a conversation abruptly. It isn’t sensical for a Muslim to care about praying ON TIME when she doesn’t act like a Muslim to such detail other aspect of Islam . You somehow made her even more mean and low class by praying. You wrote a Muslim character who uses prayer to be badly mannered.
I am a revert. So my tongue is sharp and looser than it ought to be.
This character is allegedly born Muslim and training to be a lawyer?
Then why does she talk like she’s rebelling against Walky as a father?
😑😑🫤🫤🫤🫤
… why does she talk like she’s rebelling against Walky as a father?
What?
I mean I think I followed the rant up to the end, but then you lost me.
I can’t claim to know anything about this, really, but I do have questions.
I’m from a very similar background to Willis (grew up in the same time frame, Christian family, exposed to a lot of fundamentalist BS, got out of it) and in my time there, my experience has led me to be frustrated with most Christian stereotypes. There are more flavors of Christian than Baskin Robbins, each which believe very different things and have different interpretations of scripture, and those are just the different faiths and denominations. And that doesn’t include the nondenominational grab-bag of “I’ll believe what makes sense to me, and if I can’t find a church, I’ll make one, goshdarnitall.”
My assumption – and for all I know, the assumption that Willis made – is that this isn’t just Christianity being wacky (which it is) – but that this is simply human nature, that we follow something as well as we can, but must make peace with integrating it our life and the world, and that there’s often a disconnect between what we’re told to do, what we feel like we should do, and what we actually do.
You call out that the fact that she believes she must pray at specific times contradicts the fact that she doesn’t wear a hijab and is outspoken. Could you elaborate on that? Are these all three things completely interconnected, and is it so hard to imagine that there are Muslim women who take their faith seriously, but interpret the Quran differently in relation to the hijab? When I (as a non-muslim using the power of Google) ask the void whether i should wear a hijab, the void responds that it’s down to my personal religious convictions and that there are many progressive Muslims who do not wear it for various reasons.
As a Christian, I very often think that other Christians are being hypocritical for being very very rigid for every rule that doesn’t really affect them, and having excuses to not stick to those that inconvenience them, but I acknowledge that this happens very often, especially with people whose faith is more of a societal thing than an internal thing. Is that not the same with Islam?
Could that not be the reason why, for the first time, she’s loudly announcing that she has to go “do a very spiritual Muslim thing” to the person she’s trying to shame? Not because she’s actually very spiritual, but because she’s Raidah, and she’s using this the way she uses everything in her life, like a manipulation tactic?
>but because she’s Raidah, and she’s using this the way she uses everything
>in her life, like a manipulation tactic?
A bit higher someone posted this as proof that Joyce was Islamophobic
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-8/01-face-the-strange/guzzle/
I jumped two strips and saw this
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-8/01-face-the-strange/proud/
The way she is dismissing Joyce’s spirituality makes me suspect she does indeed treat religion very instrumentally.
You have good points.
Sadly, I have to have these ‘crumbs’: As Raidah is “badly written”, I never found any character like her in webcomics. The other muslins characters I’ve found, they got like 1-3 pannels, or were full prejudice wrote. Full racism garbage.
It does seem odd that she initiated this conversation apparently seconds before she knew she’d want to cut it off.
You characterization is amazing for everybody else but you don’t know how to THINK LIKE a Muslim.
Tbh, I suffered this issue when I reverted. I kept misjudging people because I tried assuming they thought like a westerner.
I’m so so sorry to critique you so roughly.
But legit, the manner of THINKING and even emoting…. I dunno how to express what I’m trying to.
Bah
Please talk to real Muslims. For your work or for yourself …
From context, is a revert someone who was in one religion, converted to another one (or left entirely) and then went back to their previous one?
For context, do Muslim’s think differently than everyone else? They may have different beliefs and customs than others, but in my experience people are people. If there were differences in the process by which Muslim’s think, I kind of think it would be known. For example there is evidence that learning Japanese as a primary language as a child causes some measurable differences in the way the brain organizes as opposed to western languages. But this is a neurolinguistic effect. To the best of my knowledge there is no comparable evidence that any religious belief has a similar effect.
My wife has medicine she takes twice a day. She takes it at 9AM and 9PM, with an alarm set. I have medicine I take twice a day. I take one close to breakfast, no matter how early or late that is on a particular day, and one between supper and going to bed. Again, in my experience, people vary a lot in how strictly they apply the rules they think should regulate their lives. And there doesn’t seem to be a lot of consistency in what they’re strict about and what they aren’t. Maybe Muslims are different, but I kind of doubt it.
Raidah can be a pretty unpleasant person, but this doesn’t seem to have much to do with her religion. She seems to follow a fairly Americanized version of her religion, but it being important to her to be seen to be strict in her observances of what she choses to practice seems to be consistent with what we know of her personality. Which is not to imply that she isn’t completely sincere.
Man, I don’t know about any of that. I was asking about one single word as a way to converse with a person, nothing to do with how someone’s religion affects the physical structure of their brain organ inside their body.
In Islamic terminology Islam is the default religion so everyone that accepts Islam (regardless of thier prior religions state) is said to be have reverted.
very valid!!!
and like
I think Willis SHOULD very well be talking to Muslims if he hasn’t already, in my experience my Muslim friends are real based and cool folk to hang with
for instance I met Lur (who’s Hijabi and auDHD) here in the comments, she’s a video game musician and electrical engineer and we talk about anime and make fun of France and stuff all the time, always a blast talking with her
(it’s kind of ironic in context cuz like most my Muslim friends aren’t exactly perfect about the traditions and practices either, for instance Lur drinks like 8+ cups of coffee a day lol)
but yeah I commend you greatly for taking the time to express your thoughts on how Willis is handling this, it’s not always easy being open about this kinda stuff
Making fun of France is always valid. 😀
I think it would helpful for the critique if you try to clarify what is it about the character you think mean isn’t like a Muslim so Willis could actually try to improve on it.
Sorry i didn’t see that you already did up there.
Okay Raida, you got the job. You’re our new photo editor and photographer. Your desk is over there and deadline is 2PM.
What? You can’t? Then SHADDAP.
Fuck off.
What a strange thing to say. Are you also a perfect practitioner of everything you critique
Sorry about your loss Mr Willis
Raidah’s right about Daisy but wrong about Dorothy and Joyce.
Sorry for your loss, Mr. Willis.
I can’t speak to Raidah’s situation, but protests I’ve been in for the last several months, local corporate-owned media focused on distant pictures taken before the crowd reached full size, and emphasized traffic had to slow down a little bit because people were looking. Public radio sent someone to photo the crowd at full size, interviewed a bunch of people, and published a gallery of our signs.
I mean even then Taking picture of two particular protesters (who more than likely go to this school) and blowing it up for all to see seems pretty dangerous for those students involved, especially without asking permission.
Yeah, there’s some violent people out there. Who might go after a couple college students.
The fact that Daisy did not approach Dorothy and Joyce for comment or permission to use them as the headline image is another concerning element of the coverage of the protest, and the way it was handwaved was kind of bullshit. Daisy really can’t recognize one of her own reporters?
Based on her behavior as of late daisy strikes me as the kinda person who doesn’t make a whole lotta eye contact when speaking to other women.
There is no expectation of privacy in a public setting. She did not have to approach them for permission or comment.
And if the police arrest them due to her journalism that’s her fault for not protecting their identities. It’s not like the police weren’t violently assaulting people or something.
When you make someone part of the story it’s generally best journalistic ethics to get a comment, especially when the people work for you.
Condolences to you, Willis. Take the time you need to grieve.
Huh, imagine that: very different priorities for getting out the news to people, and very different definitions for “successfully informing people”.
Ideally, there would be some professor whose job it is to explain the nitty gritties of newspaper formatting to Daisy. I’m assuming she’s working on some sort of journalism degree.
But she’s not acting like she made an informed call that differs from the one Raidah wanted. She’s acting like this is the first time she’s heard any of this. Like nobody’s ever broached the subject of how her choice of what information to make most visible effects the way the story is received.
I kind of agree with the others saying that even if Daisy wasn’t constantly distracted by being single and lonely, she might not actually be very good at her job.
Maybe she was destined to edit something other than a newspaper.
Petition to make Raidah full cast and not a lesser sidecast villian:
Oh, gods, no!
Please!
Can we get Asma instead? She can hang out with Sarah and they can look at everything with disapproval.
Sorry about your loss, Willis
Can Raidah volunteer to work on the magazine? Then she can make sure the “right” (ymmv) headlines are pumped out
From these comments, I can’t tell if I’m out of touch with reality, or out of touch with the internet. Maybe both.
Ugh, Raidah.
I’m so sorry for your loss, Willis. Welcome to the dead dad’s club. It’s a shitty club and I wish I weren’t a member, but here we are.
Lotta people in here telling the brown woman to shut up about a media outlet centering white women in a story about a protest against (presumably) brown Muslim people facing genocide, huh. Yeah yeah “it’s the most attention-grabbing image” now why! Do you suppose! That might be! What systemic forces might be at play in determining that people are going to care more about two white women than brown protesters being brutalized by police and is Raidah really so out of line in complaining about it!
Lotta implicit side debates about whether “racism” unmodified means “structural oppression” or “individual bigotry”, too.
The jump to accusing the brown woman of homophobia for criticising the white women was a…new one?
When people wanna justify disliking someone and/or what they’re saying they often try to find a moral reason why their feelings are valid.
It’s about as annoying as people who acknowledge that she’s completely right in this situation but feel the need to append a note that she’s normally an asshole and not a good person. As if that’s relevant or hidden knowledge.
Well that’s silly, modifiers such as “systemic” exist to describe when it’s structural, the original definition has always included individual bigotry
“The original definition” holds very little weight to me, personally — I’m usually on the side of using “systemic racism” and “bigotry” to simply sidestep the whole argument (except with people who think “systemic racism” IS “individual bigotry times the number of people in power who are bigots” as opposed to “the system is built to be racist even when operated by well-meaning non-bigots”) but ultimately descriptivism always wins the definition wars.
Oh, the Muslim prayer schedule… Raidah’s one weakness!
Sorry for your loss.
Raidah mostly right.
But blaming Joyce for taking over an entire movement, that neither one was a part of,
That’s unhinged conspiracy theory.
This is a college paper too. If your movement can be entirely co-opted because an outlet that’s barely relevant in its own city, let alone nationwide, chose a bad photo for the front page, then it was probably on pretty shaky ground to start with.
Joyce’s dad lives off campus and he hadn’t even seen that photo. He saw an entirely different photo with Jocelyn in it.
“Now we’re only talking about them” probably means that like, Raidah’s immediate social circle is more interested in the part of the story that deals with an acquaintance. Not that Sinister Puppetmaster Joyce Brown has monopolized the national dialogue with her crack astroturf team.
But she’s not wrong that a better photo could’ve been chosen.
Hank has presumably not seen todays paper. They made a whole deal of Becky trying to hide it from him. He does however read it enough to see Jocelyne in a precious paper.
Yeah this is a lot of what I was thinking. Maybe time for Raidah to start looking at the “we” who is only talking about the girlkissers.
Also maybe a temporal element here. Will they still be talking about the girlkissers in 3 days?
The “neither one was a part of” part is sorta why she’s mad.
The IDS front page would be a pretty sweet DoA poster!
I feel like Raidah isnt wrong about Joyce and Dorothy hijacking the narrative. Not out of malice but definitely in action.
Like imagine if during the protest a stray dog showed up and shit on the American flag. And then they took a photo of that dog and made him the headline of the article. And then you know…you gotta go to page 18 to see police officers assaulted students. The story has now been hijacked through no malicious attempt by the dog but by the culture surrounding it now. Flag poop dog doesn’t care about bulmeria. He just had t poop!
And before ya say “there’s nothing wrong with kissing at a protest” let’s not forget that Dorothy crossed into the encampment simply to cope with her own disenfranchisement against the desires and wishes of literally everyone there. Raidah doesnt know that but she’s kinda got dorothy pegged since I’m not convinced she could point to bulmeria on a map, and made the whole issue about herself. (And was rewarded for it.)
Perhaps if Raidah felt this was something worth showing up for, she could have prevented the movement from being hijacked. Maybe planned a better photo.
No, she couldn’t??? This is a matter of media coverage??? She specifically points out that Muslim students were not consulted with regards to how this event was covered???
Ah yes the old “someone can’t disapprove of how a orotest js covered by local media if they didn’t literally attend it” gambit. God forbid someone have a political stance between none at all and open social activism.
People are out here absolutely and adamantly refusing to acknowledge that there are ways to support a social movement without literally putting your body directly in the street (a vulnerable position for a woman of color like Raidah to be in, one might add).
I mean, if it’s too dangerous for a vulnerable person of colour to attend a protest, then that’s valid, but it’s kind of hard to square with the indignation that a white woman ended up on the front page.
The people who get photographed are the people who attend.
It’s actually extremely easy to square! Just because Raidah might not feel like she is in a position to protest does not mean she isn’t allowed to be mad that news coverage is centering two white women kissing and not the actual substance of the protest.
I would not enjoy the headline photo of a BLM. Protest being white women kissing. Despite me not attending.
How dare you
(Obligatory THIS IS FACETIOUS because the comments are a wild one today.)
I hate that I can picture the headline (I was a Mass Comm grad but washed out of the news industry fairly quickly)
‘No Bones About Bulmeria’
She has a point, but raidah is blaming the girls who did not consent to this photo being taken or posted in the newspaper
She does not have access to that information.
So then she shouldn’t assume.
Why shouldn’t she? Why is this an unreasonable assumption for her to make given the information she has access to?
Why shouldn’t she assume her unfounded assumption is incorrect? Is that a serious question?
It’s like people seeing someone exit a vehicle in an accessible parking spot and, if they don’t immediately need a wheelchair or walker, assume they’re “not really disabled.” People assuming without knowing is the origin of the “makes an a$$ out of u & me idiom.
She has no reason to believe that Joyce and Dorothy did not kiss, extremely publicly, in the middle of an embattled campus protest, in order to generate attention and make things about themselves. That’s why people usually kiss at protests! And it certainly isn’t helped by the newspaper, in her eyes, aiding and abetting their attention-seeking behavior. Why would that be a less reasonable assumption to be making in this case than “Joyce and Dorothy had a series of life changing personal relegations in short order that happened to coincide with the climax of the protest?” She can only work with the information she has.
I’d love to think this strip was one that was planned all along and not one of the ones that was added after readers [basically said about the kiss what Raidah is saying here about the kiss photo].
Either way, though, maybe unpopular opinion, I don’t think he should’ve changed the kiss strip. If you’re a Sicko under the “it’s not called Smarting of Age” defense, and don’t want consequences for the cheating, but you’re also expecting a couple of 18 year old white girls from Nowheretown, Indiana to be too smart to get swept up in the moment of new love and forget where they are…eh, tough sell. That moment didn’t really feel super out of character to me and I blamed the characters for it, not the author. Having them realize only later (or having Roz yell at them, since unfortunately they don’t know Asma or Raidah well enough for them to do it) would’ve felt more real to me than them being self-aware in the moment.
I don’t know what you mean by “changed the kiss strip.” It seems to be there exactly as it’s always been, replete with the extremely tasteless tear gas as Sakura motif.
There’s an added panel where Dorothy’s immediately like, hey maybe this wasn’t an appropriate place for us to kiss.
I’m neutral towards the addition of it.
I hate it too. Especially since it just amounts to “um… That just happened” type punchline. Its so awkwardly worded. Like
” oh uh maybe we should do this somewhere else” would have felt more natural than “oh jeez did we just kiss at a genocide protest?”. Doesn’t really add to the narrative or tone in a meaningful way other than having the acknowledge the controversy.
Classic Raidah, assuming Joyce and Dorothy were in cahoots with the newspaper when they’re actually struggling with being outed.
Well, also, Alice also legit just told her Joyce is a slut. Or rather, Alice couldn’t wait to gossip about shit she had absolutely no context for, and Raidah interpreted that through her lens of the world needing to know Joyce is bad.
Raidah continues to be a fantastic character, IMO. She’s very well-written in that she feels like a realistic portrayal of that person you know with more or less watertight politics AND a dreadful personality.
Hard agree. Honestly, I have also really appreciated that she’s also shown to have realistic motivations and background behind her personality; her manipulative and ambitious side looks both realistic, and driven by deep, painful insecurity. (Thinking of her reminding Jacob about his brother’s visit along with a side-insult at Joyce’s immature and uninformed religious views, along with her “befriending” Jennifer despite clearly finding her obnoxious, and the same with Walky.)
Her social-career-ambitious strategizing reminds me of some of the rich peoples’ kids in high school. They were bullies and I hated them; it’s only looking back now as an adult that I see they were desperately trying to earn their parents’ approval. So she makes me especially sad, because she does genuinely care about a lot of important issues, but since she also has a real mean streak and the readers primarily see her through her interactions with the main cast, most of whom she absolutely despises, we mostly see those beliefs and priorities filtered through personal insults. Like even this arc: her “Okay, what the entire fuck is this,” furious at Daisy’s choice to center two white girls making out and some cutesy wordplay over the cops breaking up a serious protest that she cares about (and might not have felt able to attend in person because of her career ambitions!)… clearly comes BEFORE she sees that it’s Joyce and Dorothy. Yeah, she hates Joyce and dislikes Dorothy, but she has a real reason to be angry about the photo aside from that, and I do think that’s her real motivation here, not just personal dislike.
She is more like Dorothy than she realizes.
I’m actually with Raidah on this, even though she is awful. But yeah, sadly this is what a lot of media does. Distraction. Not only do people need to be more Media-Literate… Media needs to be more People-Literate.
Daisy is letting her own tastes take over her responsibilities. I kinda hope she sees consequences for that.
not a single damn was given that day
well the comments are disaster but at least they made me think instead of making my brain shutting down entirely
if i may throw a suggestion out there like for authors in general: you will never please everyone in terms of representation but getting a couple sensitivity readers wont hurt
simulated light physical contact
why do I keep wanting to read “Bulmeria” as “Bulemia”?
My condolences, Willis.
We’re only talking about them! We don’t even talk what’s on page six!
the next forty-five minutes, however…
Offering condolences, Willis. I lost my mom two years ago. It was a difficult time.