Because he’s Becky’s last remaining parental figure who might not totally disappoint her.
ALSO because this is a distraction tactic to stall him, and it’s working great.
He kinda seems like he’s trying to be gentle around the terms at least. I’m hopeful that he’ll learn and grow if he’s given space to do so. I personally am not good at giving people that space, but I know some people do change if you manage it.
‘Cept Beckster wasn’t raised around Leslie. She _was_ raised around Hank a lot. His is the longest-duration parent-adjacent relationship she still has. Les’s a total newcomer.
Well, Hank is her dad and Leslie is her mom. But yeah, I don’t think Becky should give up. He’s shown himself capable of learning and growing. He has also been in a cult most of his life. Deprogramming TAKES TIME, and he’s a lot older and more set in his views than Joyce. His views suck but I don’t think he’s irredeemable at all.
That’s actually part of why I don’t think Joyce is retconning or even being particularly hyperbolic when she says she fell in love with Dorothy at first sight. Like, within 72 hours of their first conversation, Joyce was literally throwing out cult programming in order to get this atheist girl she barely knew and was self-admittedly afraid of to go out to dinner with her. And ever since then, every time she’s been made to choose between Dorothy and her cult, Dorothy has won. Becky also wins without question, as does Jocelyne, but they’re a different kind of love, a family love that’s built up over years. It took her a lot longer to accept that it was okay for Ethan to be gay, that he didn’t need fixing, and a large part of that was that she knew that Dorothy would be disappointed with her for it.
So clearly we just need to get Hank to fall for an atheist man, and we’re good to go.
there’s a difference between giving up, and knowing your limits
Becky’s no therapist or councilor, keeping Hank away for Joyce’s and Jocelyne’s sake is one thing, but she should first and foremost focus on her own development, already stunted by the fact she has yet to work through issues arising from that she just got out of a cult HERSELF only recently
Also the comments really, really like to assume the worst about people for maximum drama and shallow emotions. Fortunately Willis knows better.
Hank, so far, has shown willingness to improve himself, listen, and learn. He’s humble and doesn’t like to piss people off – which is part of why he was so susceptible to the cult, unfortunately. But now that he’s out, *gently* explaining things to him is likely to be effective.
But that requires faith in humanity, and in flawed people, and unfortunately a lot of people who have suffered don’t have the emotional capacity to grant that response. Or they’ve been emotionally compromised by their own participation in cult mentalities, and trade in for a new one that feels more comfortable.
There can be a strong urge in queer circles to throw out a relationship if things aren’t perfect. Sometimes cutting someone off is the right move; other times, maybe that person would’ve grown if someone took the time to try to teach them. It’s frequently exhausting either way, dealing with loss & regret or (on the flip side) having to constantly be a walking educational exhibit for your parents and having your friends question why you even bother.
I don’t blame anyone who didn’t want to be a teacher, but I’m not giving up on my dad just yet.
until very very recently Hank has spent his entire life in a cult, a highly separatist, toxic belief system which informed his EVERYTHING,
ideally someone like him would have like, exit counseling, Becky is barely equipped to handle this kind of delicate, time-consuming work, (in no small part because she’s a former cult member who still has a lot to work through HERSELF)
Because sometimes you’re dad is real shit about you being trans and sometimes after some months get ok about it (sometimes you need to give your mum a trans biography so they get it first (obviously this is not an option for these fictional characters)) and they still use the wrong name and pronouns a lot but at least they’re trying
Because this isn’t him being completely and unrepentently terrible? You’ll notice he’s talking politely with 1 local lesbian and is trying to be polite about what words to use, not screaming slurs at her and telling her she’s going to Hell for being gay. This is someone who’s shown himself to be willing to learn, he’s just got a whole bunch of bullshit from the past sticking to him.
I am still open to the possibility that Hank is mostly a captive of his social network bubble (the divorce did not change it that much). To a disturbingly extensive degree we all are. Judging from the past Hank may, at least, be redeemable.
May be I’m an optimist? But I teach vector calculus and abstract algebra for living, so i kinda have to optimist about the possibility of remapping some of the connections in peoples’ brains.
I’m a bit torn because on the one hand Hank is basically the only non-evil parent in the entire universe and thus legitimately interesting but on the other I’d really like to see a character in Dumbing of Age actually go from “evil” to “good” (or vice versa), and if Hank’s starting point is “confused but basically decent” then we already saw this arc when Joyce did it.
Honestly not sure you’ll get this here. I love this comic, but the characters are usually either good-natured, good-natured but dumb, ‘the bad guys’ or Mike. Hank is good but dumb, and hopefully on the path to becoming, good after being educated.
Blaine, Toe-dad, Joyce’s mom, Ruth’s grandfather, Walky/Sal’s mother, Mary. You ain”t seeing redemption arcs out of these people. At best maybe Raidah is slowly softening up. (I guess Joe kind of counts, but he was a bit of an exception.)
It would be great to see Willis do an evil to good story arc with one of the still living bad guys i listed above, but i don’t see it happening.
If Hank’s arc is from “evil” to “good”, he’s in the middle of it, not at the start. He was pretty awful in his first appearances, particularly family weekend. There’s only so bad someone can be and still come back in fiction.
I’m not really sure how you get an actual evil to good arc with a truly abusive parent, like a Ross, Blaine or even Carol/Clint/Linda, within a single year of their kid’s college. I’ve seen some truly awful parents come around and rebuild relationship with their adult children, but it usually requires years or decades of minimal contact to realize that they really need to change.
It is, and yet he’s already come quite a way from the start of the comic. This is a guy who wasn’t comfortable with people even associating with atheists. Now he’s able to honestly ask Becky questions about what terms are and aren’t offensive. He’s still a Republican, but like… There’s a chance that won’t stay the case forever, and that’s nice to see.
yeah, because the bad parents make the better ones feel uncomfortable at best and unsafe at the worst, thus prompting them to consciously avoid those encounters 👀
Also that he seems to be using it in a reasonably appropriate way (as a not-really-all-that-judgemental variable for some form of not-straight-cis-ness).
And even with the assumption that his child is a communist, it still seems to be a fairly understanding version of that. It’s that that his child is “evil”, it doesn’t even seem to be all that close to “misguided” or “corrupted”. Its about how he feels his child is being cagey and distant and disconnected.
He’s no doubt leaning into simple explanations to the problem because, well, simple explanations are nice, but he’s not trying to bring down the thunder.
My read is that he is looking for a reason why his kid would be distant, not “what’s wrong” with his kid.
With their family’s history, it’s pretty fair that Hank assumes his son is not talking to him because he is gay, or because he is a communist.
He’s probably going to be okay with the queerness and the communism. Remember that he told Joyce something along the lines of “I am wrong about a lot of things”. He is willing to learn as he realises that what he thought was right is harmful to others.
I wouldn’t go that far in this storyline. He can maybe become better. But it all depends on whether or not he’s willing to accept new facts about both his daughters and learn
Hank has always shown himself to be willing to grow and accept the changes in people in this comic. I cannot think of a single time where he was presented with people challenging his beliefs and him NOT being understanding.
At his core, I think Hank really cares about his kids, in fact in his own way that is why he is here. My prediction is that he will ultimately be okay* with Joyceline once he has time to process it.
*okay meaning likely very weird and awkward about it for the foreseeable future and (mostly) accidentally misgendering her a bunch. Grading on a curve here.
ike, family/friend or not, this is why we tend not to talk to conservatives like Hank if we can help it, even when there no immediate outward malice intended
basically their entire world is built on a wall made of FEAR and paranoid conspiracy theories, treading that’s like walking a tightrope and it’s hella exhausting and not even worth it a majority of the time
as much as Becky means well, she’s likely not well equipped to be helping Hank — however much he wants to get better, he still barely climbed out of a toxic belief system which informed him his entire LIFE, and is in a very fearful headspace where he’s gonna remain deeply suspicious of ANY ideology or agenda
I’ve been slowly deprogramming my mom with urban planning videos.
“Why can businesses just build worthless buildings? There should be laws forcing them to tear it down. They shouldn’t get tax breaks for their buildings being worthless!”
Good, good old Boomer woman. Let’s watch videos from other countries now and show off the cool things we could have. I need some very subtle barely related things to show her for social matters. It’s an extraordinarily slow process, but she’s gotta think it’s her idea and that she’s brilliant for coming up with it.
Hank is Joyce though, just several decades behind.
It’s perfectly valid to find people too exhausting to help deprogram, but yeah. I try to give him SOME benefit of the doubt even if it’s tiring (a lot).
Carol would be way too exhausting to try to deprogram, and after choosing her cult over her own daughter, I’d say she’s irredeemable and not worth the time. But yeah, Hank is basically an older Joyce who has been brainwashed for longer. He’s made SIGNIFICANT progress in the same time as Joyce has. He basically adopted Becky and iirc is helping her pay tuition, and did a whole 180 on his opinion of Dorothy, and has been very respectful of Joyce’s judgement.
The difference is that Carol doesn’t WANT to be better. When shown the difference between love and hate, she has repeatedly chosen to throw her lot in with hate.
in a perfect world, people who care about Hank would build for him what rehabilitation and therapy communities would call a holding space — a private space, online or in-person, where he could safely work out his issues, where he’d be expected (and encouraged) to get better, but is, in the moment, not currently judged.
in any case, reforming members of political/religious cults is very delicate, time consuming work that shouldn’t really be done in public, especially not by someone like Becky who barely knows what she’s doing
it’s okay to admit to yourself that you can’t realistically handle that kind of responsibility (especially if like me you have communication disorders or social anxiety to begin with)
if I must say it out loud — your value as an ally does not hinge upon how well you can change Hank’s mind
she also has yet to work through a lot of issues resulting from the fact that she only recently came out of a cult HERSELF
her goal here should ideally be to buy time to distract Hank and keep him away for however long possible
trying to actually change the mind of someone like him with a reactionary fundamentalist background can be REALLY tricky, and unless you actually know what you’re doing you can very well run the risk of fucking somebody else’s life up 👀
But being serious, we do have to step back and accept that, however those feelings came to exist, a whole fuckton of people born before, I dunno, 1975 or so have really entrenched trauma stemming from the Cold War.
It was a couple generations of people where “we are a handful of bad decisions away from extinction” was a fact of everyday life, and the framing of that was very much “capitalism vs communism”, with communism being represented by a terrible, corrupt, incompetent, and pretty fascist version of it.
I figure most of us were, ya know, *people* when 9/11 happened, and remember how bad the islamophobia got then. Try to picture something that traumatic, but as a constant background radiation spanning decades.
(none of this is to absolve capitalism or damn communism. I do think the USSR was worse than the USA was during the cold war, and we all know how competitive that limbo contest was, but its mostly just to try to explore that sense of collective trauma. The expressions of that are still, indeed, very very bad)
There’s also the fact that the most prominent examples of countries that called themselves communist were pretty horrific themselves. That doesn’t prove Communism Bad and Capitalism Good, but the atrocities of Stalinism and Maoism did a lot to undermine the appeal of communism in the west even without the Cold War propaganda.
The main problem with communism is that it would work only if human greed and thirst for power did not exist. The moment one guy with enough influence and/or military power doesn’t want to relinquish it (or want more), it is almost inevitable that after a communist revolution, it devolves into a dictatorship giving lip service to the idea of being communist… After all, communism according to Marx should not have a government or political leaders, people would just do what’s required of them for the good of all…
So it is basically impossible to have a “real communist” country, unless you somehow remove human greed. On paper, it could work and perhaps be good, but in practice it’s shit.
Capitalism has a similar problem, on paper the offer and demand and yadda yadda would make fair prices and fair pay, but instead we’re already half a step in a cyberpunk corporate dystopia, where a handful of companies own the world. If at least there were the cool implants already…
I’m never sure what people expect as a reaction when they say something like this: “Wow, I never thought about US atrocities, I guess we should give Stalinism a try.”?
Back in the day, even a lot of US communists got very disillusioned and left the movement when they got a look at what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. Or later when the tanks rolled into Hungary or Prague. That doesn’t mean they ignored US atrocities. They just lost faith in the idea of communism as a solution.
I’d make a joke about how conservatives think a communist is anyone to the left of Hitler, but these days they claim he was a communist too. (At least when they aren’t busy idolizing him.)
I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I really don’t want to hate Hank until someone actually engages him in a conversation about this stuff and confronts him about it. Then depending on how he reacts I’d like to draw a conclusion. Like of COURSE he still says stuff like this, everyone is too busy dodging him to correct him.
But if he is being corrected and refuses to actually have a conversation about it? Ya then break out the pitchforks. Just hard to hate the guy until he has been challenged first.
Nah, I think that’s valid of you! I feel like he IS trying, he just has some shitty preconceived notions to let go of. Only time – and more strips – will see if he’s willing to put in that effort or if he’s going to cling to the bullshit.
100% this. The fact that he asks “Can I say queer?” Is also really telling imo. Like, he is AWARE to some degree that he doesn’t know everything/has Some Learning to do. I think he’s WILLING to do the work, he just doesn’t know how much Work there is to do; all of this fundie shit is still normalized to him.
That’s not clear at all. It might be true, but he recognizes that his child (whose gender he doesn’t even know) is being cagey around him for understandable reasons. It might even be the case that he would say it’s okay for his child to be gay but they never got around to having an open conversation about it.
Whether he’ll react to trans differently is also a jump. Lots of people are okay with gay but less okay with trans.
That he clearly think Jocelyne being “communist” is bad, but also says “not queer, just communist” is not a great sign.
I read that as implying gay would be worse.
People are messy, start with respect. I try to remember how shitty I was when I got sucked into the evangelical world for a decade. I also remember some genuinely good people. I don’t know one of them who hasn’t left. But it’s important to respect people and respect the journey. Not excuse shit behavior, but respect people. We can’t reprogram people, they are not computers. “Reeducation” carries some pretty fucked up baggage itself.
That, and I don’t see any path to better for people who have the need above all else to be “right”. To improve you have to admit you could be wrong. (He says, self-righteously)
Warms my heart to see so many comments both in this thread and in general sharing this sentiment. Something about today’s comic seems to resonate with people to hold out hope.
Although, flashback to last week when my MIL simultaneously told me it wasn’t “PC” to say queer, and then three days later hit me with so much transphobic vitriol after cornering me into coming out. It’s weird what parts some generations hold onto, huh
Have another supportive comment.
That sucks. I hope the situation improves.
Also, since Lee if a nonbinary name, I don’t know whether to call you a good boy or a good girl, but whichever one you identify as, you are, and anyone who says otherwise can fuck right off.
It also sounds exactly like the general TERF-led psyop against queer. Lots of “call me x not queer” people are vehemently anti-trans, and they’re against queer because it’s broadly inclusive, not because it actually has a uniquely problematic history as a slur (all our words are former slurs).
One of the worst things about TERFs is their particular fixation on “weaponizing existing vocabulary and other differences into attempts to drive a wedge between trans folk and the rest of queer folk”.
Yep. Currently they seem to be targeting trans men and transmasc folks to even further the wedge. Before this it was ace folks. Sometimes it’s intersex folks. Sometimes it’s kinky queer folks! They just attack whichever part of the community seems weakest at a given moment, trying to fracture the community.
Hank being accepting of Becky but seeming unsure about how he’d feel if his own kid was LGBT reminds me that my mother was always very kind and accepting of my friends who were gay, never said anything to the contrary about them, but was definitely perturbed when I came out to her as bi.
In contrast, I appreciated that every step of me coming out to my father (first as bi, then ace, then non-binary, because sometimes we discover these things over time and in small steps rather than all at once) my father has predominantly been supportive. The only thing he said that made me upset is when I first brought up being ace, and he suggested I just needed “vitamins”. But, that was the only time he said anything like that and he’s otherwise been incredibly supportive and willing to learn.
The “best” part about the situation with my mom is that for reasons I will never know, she would always… forget I came out to her as bi. So on about three different occasions we would have the same conversation, she’d have the same unsettled reaction, so eventually I just gave up on coming out to her. She’d make comments about how ‘one day you’ll find a man and get married’ and just do a little thumb’s up like ‘yes indeedy that’s gonna happen’.
I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh at you sharing a real moment in your life that upset you, but your father suggesting vitamins would somehow cure you being ace or something is genuinely funny and made me chuckle. I do wish you the best in life and it’s great your dad was supportive.
It was rather silly though, I understand that there are some medical reasons for a person’s sex drive fluctuating (for example, anti-depressants can inhibit one’s drive) but I don’t recall vitamins ever doing anything…
I expect it’s that vitamin deficiencies might do something related to libido. Indirectly some vitamin deficiencies effect mood changes or depression. I don’t know if there’s anything more direct, it’s not something you can really ask the internet without getting a firehose of nonsense.
That’s how it worked for me – it was one of the first noticeable things after my doctor got me on a high dose of vitamin D for the deficiency we found by bloodwork after I was complaining of low energy. But one anecdote doesn’t make data and also everyone’s different.
I’m glad to hear that was able to help you, and I appreciate your response that although more vitamin D affected you, that you understand that doesn’t mean it’d be the same for everyone.
I… actually don’t knowbwhat Jocyeline’s political leanings are. Though given the fact she was at the protest and writes for a living, I’m assuming it’s fairly anti-establishment.
… though that still has a VERY wide margin.
I get the feeling a lot of people with some degree of memory of, say, the Cold War, tend to equate anti-fascism and socialism as communism; I guess because it’s “the other” that they were warned about and they think about it too black and white? It’s exhausting sometimes to explain that those are 3 separate political idealogies that while occupying a venn diagram, are not the same.
This reminds me of knowing someone who believed the Nazis were socialist because of the name and thus Leftists. It was such an insane take that I had to actually stop to figure out how to even argue with him about it.
I eventually went, “I don’t think the people who are fanboys of the Nazis today are interested in Hitler’s state owned business model versus his white supremacy.”
Mind you, how he defined Right and left bore no resemblance to what I understood it to be either.
Heh, I like that. Especially with the weirdos who have taken to saying “this ISN’T a democracy it’s a REPUBLIC” because they’re anti democrat and think the argument makes their party name better.
i never finished the communist manifesto cause i kept falling asleep (also it was really wordy and i was too lazy too break out a dictionary). i’m genuinely curious what marx’s take on gay people was
Marx and Engels didn’t write much about LGBTQIA2S+ stuff (by any name), but did argue that the nuclear family evolved to control inheritance, tying sexuality and reproduction into the subject. IIRC Marx made some homophobic comments privately but I couldn’t tell you what precisely and that doesn’t inform the movement.
I found it pretty easy to read, but there are probably readings of it and other things Marx wrote on YouTube for people who have trouble reading it. But considering they lived in the 1800s, I doubt Marx and Engels had the best views of gay people. Most people didn’t back then. But their ideas on capitalism still seem pretty accurate even now.
“Considering they lived in the 1800s” is a linear progress fallacy. The present is much more transphobic than the 1950s were in America, and one of the first things the Nazis did was burn down an institute for what we would now call gender-affirming care in Germany.
Not everyone was homophobic in the 1800s, certainly not globally. While it’s a mistake to apply our very specific modern political lens to people of the past to declare them “good” or “bad”, it is equally a mistake to shrug off racism, queerphobia, etc as just “part of the times”.
Like, there have always been abolitionists. There have always been those who recognize injustice for what it is, regardless of the law at the time. Dismissing Marx’s homophobia as inconsequential isn’t the way to get more gay people to read Marx and take him seriously.
There’s a lot of gray area between “let’s cancel Marx for being problematic” and “I mean I guess maybe he hated gay people but like so what, it was the 1800s”.
See my comment, but I think Li was trying to say that there’s nothing unique to communism that mandates such mistreatment because it happens under capitalism too.
Well the thing is that Communism is much more controlling of people’s lives. It’s a totalitarian system much like Fascism so Every aspect of humans life is controlled there. If the system doesn’t like you for whatever reason the WHOLE system is against you, not just individuals with certain opinions.
You’re thinking of Soviet totalitarianism (or possibly the Chinese system, which is basically the old Chinese Empire but with Marxist-Maoist terms for all the old offices). They pay lip service to Marx, but he’d never recognize their systems as being anything like his philosophy.
Like I said, Soviet totalitarianism, which bears even less resemblance to Marxist communism than the modern-day Libertarian party does to the writings of John Stuart Mill.
I believe that people are capable of changing and improving over time, even bad people, even people who hate me. I believe that people are capable of being better than they are.
At the same time, no marginalized person owes their oppressors the time, courtesy, or grace required to generate that kind of change. For some people, it is a bridge too far to ask that of them. Often, it is a bridge too far to ask of me.
To give you a better picture. State controls Everything and State keeps Notes of who you are. If you get on the State’s bad side you can’t get a good job, can’t get good education, can’t get a house, a car, goods. You get shoved to the very edge of society as the Entirety of it is controlled by the State.
Yeah, this is going to get down to that age-old definitional debate — it’s 100% clear that “Communism” as practiced by the Soviet/Chinese states and their respective clients were a centralized totalitarian/authoritarian project.
There’s always, I think, going to be a debate regarding how much those states were practicing “Communism” as defined by Marx/Engels — the broad historical consensus mostly seems to be “not much”, but that doesn’t change the damage done to the “Communism” brand or offer any comfort to the people oppressed under those systems.
Replying to myself because I forgot the other half of this — there’s a similar issue but less immediately relevant to most on the other side, where there’s been a very successful campaign to brand “Capitalism” and “free market economy” as synonymous when they’re really not, and it’s also true that the damage a capitalist state does to its LGBTQ+ population is often distributed between the state and society uncoordinated by the state.
That all said, I do maintain my thesis — the oppression of LGBTQ+ folks is more often proportional to the authoritarian-ness of a government, rather than the economic system it practices and/or pays lip service to.
Communism is impossible for one simple reason, people have different ideas, beliefs, goals. You can’t just create a unified system where everyone cooperates, it will never work because people just can’t agree on everything. It only works small scale where you have small enough number of people that they can come to an agreement. Closest we’ve ever come is Democracy and even there there are constant clashes of differing opinions between different parties.
To create Communism you need force and violence because no one in their right mind will give up their freedom, possessions, privileges etc. But when your main tool is violence it will uplift violent psychopaths like Mao or Stalin and those will NEVER give up the power that violence gives them. Creating the totalitarian systems we are familiar with.
The thing that bothers me the most with American love for Communism is that… there are FUCKING ALTERNATIVES. Why go for the provable failure like the Communism when there are proven working systems like the Social Democracies of Western Europe. Democratic, Capitalistic Systems with Extensive Social Programs. It’s like Americans want to kill a fly but instead of reaching for a swatter, they pull out the nuclear bomb.
IMO: Many Americans sincerely believe that socialism and communism are the same thing. That’s what someone told them and they’ve never thought about it beyond that.
And really, that first paragraph I agree with totally — frankly, I’m a longtime proponent of free-market socialism in a democratically organized state. (I personally believe unconstrained capitalism is just a slower-burn version of the communism problem — at some point, the system so organized either falls apart under its own disagreements or it becomes totalitarian, and if you’re going to constrain capitalism you might as well go all the way and figure out how to apportion ownership of production to the workers directly instead of to a nebulous owner/boss class anyway, especially in a world where many business startups take loans and government grants anyway.)
Americans “loving Communism” is a capitalist propaganda side effect — when you hear things like “universal health care” and “a living minimum wage” and “proper welfare and support for the indigent” are all “Communism!”, then “Communism” stops being a scare word and starts sounding pretty nice, actually. Hence the endless debates on whether it can be detached from the totalitarian component.
Mistreatment of LGBTQ+ folks is historically unconnected with economic system but highly correlated with authoritarianism, “hilariously” of both the religious and non-religious varieties.
So most notionally “Communist” nations did persecute LGBTQ+ folks, but they most likely did it for authoritarian reasons rather than Marxist ones.
Also I told Da Boy to ignore my reply after I saw more of what they’ve got to say on this topic because it was obviously just not gonna be productive but what can you do, heh.
Given my college experiences, I actually enjoy the hell out of discussing the minutiae of political and economic systems. 😀
And given half my family is Slavic as hell, I feel like I fully understood exactly where he’s coming from once he said he was Polish. If he’s our age, he was in elementary school during martial law, the economic changeover, and the last gasp of the Communist dictators until the first free elections in decades in 1990, after all — that’s gonna justifiably leave a mark on your worldview.
Honestly most notionally “Communist” nations persecuted LGBTQ+ folks for the same basic reasons capitalist nations did. Long standing prejudices generally directed at any breaking with established gender roles, and the ability to use those prejudices to gain or maintain power, either on the nationals scale or just on the community/institutional scale.
The better argument I think is that broad challenges to such prejudices largely appeared and were more successful in democracies (which tended to be capitalist.) Not without backlash and often such challenges bring the conflict into sharper focus and lead to explicit laws where social pressures were sufficient before.
That one comment completely re-conceptualized Hank. Not the “terrorist” comment from a few strips ago. That was bad. But today’s strip really hits home for me that, were it not for the kidnapping, Hank would probably still be with Carol.
I mean that’s a very good reason to get a divorce. Your wife funded a terrorist kidnapping after said terrorist already threatened your daughter and daughter’s close friend.
The point is that he didn’t leave because their morals were incompatible, he left because things got bad enough that the lives of his daughter and her friends were threatened.
I mean that’s a pretty big example of their morals being incompatible. That Carol would rather her daughter be dead than friends with a gay person or at least willing to risk kidnapping her to brainwash her.
Speaking from experience, very few marriages last after one of the spouses throws their lot in with a group that tries to kidnap any of the children. Like, at the very least one party moves very far away and only visits once or twice a month for brunch dates.
But of course they would still be together lol. Part of why Joyce and Joe bonded and why she was so rattled before everything happened was that her parents had been happily in love with each other all her life.
I’ll just note that it’s extremely unlikely that Carol and Hank were In Love, more that they felt they had compatible views and marriage is a sacred ceremony. Hank was known to do a lot of noting certain features of women while they were out, if I remember right – not that this means they weren’t in love, but more that they never seemed particularly close, and neither of them seem to actually miss *each other* after their divorce.
We’ve barely seen either of them since the divorce and only in public spaces where they had other things to deal with.
I don’t remember Hank really noticing other women?
The only thing I can remember is his comment on the bear with the great rack that Galasso’s replaced. There was a bonus strip that showed Hank and Carol first meeting when they were in college, and he seemed pretty taken with her right away.
Part of what makes me want Bulmeria to be divorced from existing issues is I’d love to be able to make jokes about the fictional nation but Hank’s opinion reflecting the RL disaster is just…sad. He thinks they’re a bunch of terrorists supported by the Soviet Union when the Russians are probably funding Hank’s favorite politicians these days.
Don’t worry, modern conservatives love Russia these days, who they hate are the communist Chinese/North Koreans/I guess Palestine is communist to them now?
So does this mean Hank has seen the same photo everyone else has? And managed not to notice anything notable other than his middle child being present? Because if so, that inability of a conservative mind to recognize queerness is so true to life that I adore seeing it here.
Yes, Jocelyn came to reveal she’d joined the Bulmerian Communist Liberation Front. The trans thing was secondary. She’s going off to fight in the war afterward for the cause of EVIL free medicine, food, and housing.
dunno if it’s a stylistic choice but interesting it seems to be black and white, i guess she could be covering some pink colors or so with a coat or so but i guess hairstyle wise it hasn’t grown too long
Years ago, there was some stuff that came out about a local City official posting homophobic stuff on Facebook, including posts referring to “queers,” and then (part of) her defense was “they call themselves queer.” This whole thing was extra frustrating to me because, at 17, I had just started to identify with the term “queer” after going to an LGBTQIA+ summer camp. And then it being treated as something ugly back home.
honestly, i respect this fella thus far. there’s so much he doesn’t know but it’s clear he has the capacity to at least understand stuff and accept that it’s real :T
I am so hopeful for Hank. His world and understanding is changing so much. It’s a lot to adjust to on the fly and over time. I’m frustrated at the tendency to write him off as Hopelessly Clueless Bad Person. Oh, he doesn’t immediately accept all these things? Cut him off!
But in real life, people can learn and adjust attitudes (e.g. my parents). In the real life, some people are too exhausting to educate (my in-laws)
I hope when Hank actually finds out why “Joshua” has been cagey lately, he tries to learn and understand her and why she’s not been telling her dad about stuff. He seemed to be trying to understand these things last couple times we saw him in DoA.
I hold out hope that Hank knows that Jocelyn is trans but assumed they were straight and liked men because he binged a bunch of research. He’ll be shocked she’s bisexual and likes women.
But is still mostly worried about their bulmerian beliefs that Dorothy, Joyce, and everyone else are so divided on.
Did anyone else start reading him as Hank Hill in the last panel? Just something about “So he’s not queer or whatever, he’s just communist” sounded very Hank Hill to me.
Good analogue, frankly. Hank Hill is also very much a “he’s a lil confused but he’s got the spirit” type these days. It took work to get him there tho.
maybe controversial but i personally don’t like it when people who are cis and straight default to calling people queer instead of lgbt+ bc of the word’s history. esp if they’re using it as a noun. i don’t think it’s more inclusive of trans people even, bc in my experience people just use it as a synonym for not straight. and straight trans people exist and could id as queer but its so often phrased like “queer or trans”, if that makes sense. i know some like to be called that, which is fine, i just personally am uncomfortable with some uses of the term.
Thing is, as an umbrella term ‘Queer’ is a hecka lot easier and quicker to say out loud then ‘lgbt+’ is, and is in the position of being seen by most people as reclaimed by the community.
I’ll be real, Hank is definitely not using it the right way here, but he also isn’t meaning to be overtly malicious about it. His basis for reference of the term queer is derogatory and disparaging of the whole umbrella, but he is unlearning that. The next step of allyship would indeed be using the acronym over the reclaimed slur, but I think he is really just starting down that road (if he chooses to continue walking it, of course.)
All the words for LGBT+ people have history. “Gay” has been used as a slur at least as much as queer.
It’s also definitely more inclusive of trans people, if only because Terfs/GCs have taken to opposing “queer” as slur, because they want to exclude the “bad” trans people from the “good” gays and lesbians
I know some people have legitimate trauma around the word but I have legitimate trauma around “lesbian”, and I’m sure as heck not going around telling people not to use that word for other people. I am instead working on unpacking it and desensitizing myself, because it’s an important identity for other people, and I want to stop flinching when I hear it out loud.
gay means “happy”, not “weird”, at least. and in my experience as a nonbinary person, i’ve both seen it used in cis centric ways and used by “gay not queer” terfs; it’s a complicated matter. i definitely don’t want anyone to feel bad for liking the word for themself ofc! i even like it as in “genderqueer.” i just personally feel uncomfortable with it in many but not all contexts and know some who feel similar, i hope that makes sense.
Having seen Soviet artwork, there is nothing they love more than ripping off their shirt and flexing. So masculine but in a not gay way guys like for real.
I mean, still do, at least part of the last decade or two of tensions between Russia and the West has been founded on growing LGBTQIA+ acceptance in the West.
I’m not even getting a lot of judgment from Hank here – he just wants to know why his eldest child has felt distant for a while and is looking for answers and finding some pretty good ones for why his child might have pulled away. Being queer and/or left-leaning are both things that make a lot of sense for why they’d pull away from the family that technically helped fund Becky’s homophobic dad, after all. I don’t think he’s upset so much as trying to understand and figure out how to get his kid to talk to him normally again, and Joyce dodging and avoiding him as well makes him even more concerned.
Considering he went through a whole divorce to side with Joyce and Becky over Carol, I genuinely do think he’s just trying his best to hold onto them and understand them better, but he does have a lot of work ahead of him before he can fully understand. I’m glad he’s making the attempt, though, even if he’s still at the stage of figuring out which words in his vocabulary are normal, non-fundie words to use and which ones will actually hurt the people he cares about. Him checking in about queer is a great sign, and definitely makes me think he’s not trying to use it an an insult towards Jocelyne here at all. If Jocelyne confirms to him that she is queer, I think he’ll try his best to understand, even if he’ll probably take a while to fully adjust and use the right words without messing it up a little along the way. I mean, we can tell pretty well just from this strip where Joyce gets it from, after all.
Becky is absolutely being the MVP here. And Mr B knows she’s not straight laced (see), and so he assumes she’s a good person to ask about these things. He trusts her to give him the not so straight dope. He’s trying. Becky meanwhile is juggling all the things.
I think the art upgrade over the years kinda makes him look older, he always was pretty thin and haggard because Joyce was the last child and she’s 18. Hank has to be pretty up there with Carol.
I mean, nothing stops workers from getting together, pooling their money, starting a business and sharing the profits amongst themselves in capitalism.
For reference, I’m from Poland so my idea of Communism is more… personal you’d say?
On the topic of gays and Communism from the other reply. Look up Operation Hyacinth
Where in Poland, out of curiosity? My ancestors on one side fled what would become Slovakia from what we think MIGHT have been somewhere near Zilina (small town names being pretty malleable there this century) right before World War I.
Because Communism is not an Economic system, it’s a whole System that controls all aspects of human life.
And yeah Capitalist systems did but that was more out of malice/greed of the government rather than stupidity and incompetence like in the case of Russia or China. Look up the War on Sparrows or Lysenkoism.
I am also sorry for how you have personally suffered. That’s terrible. And I have sympathy for how seeing young online leftists self-describe as communist when what they mean is something more like “utopian-ist” must be very frustrating.
I am still not going to cede that every person who self-describes as communist must be a proponent of genocide, which is what you argued above when you said Jocelyne can’t be one because she’s anti-genocide. I just think that’s a very unproductive way of approaching the real world, where you know perfectly well that none of the leftists who say they’re anti-capitalist mean they’re in favor of bloody dictatorships.
And it’s especially frustrating when, you know, I am in real time living through my own country potentially becoming a bloody dictatorship while still being extremely capitalist.
(And also, part of how the party that’s turning us into a bloody dictatorship was very much them fearmongering all the time about socialism and communism and “”””cultural Marxism””””.)
Yeah you have my condolences as well regarding what the Annoying Orange is up to.
The sad thing is that while Communists might have good intentions there is no way to introduce this system Without forcing it and that always uplifts the most terrifying of people while the idealists get purged.
I genuinely think that’s just too dim a view of human nature for me to subscribe to. (By which I mean not that it’s a foolish view, but a dark view.) I also feel like you could say the same thing about monarchism, if you limited your sample size to certain revolutions that went really badly, like a few in France and a few in Russia. There have been periods throughout history where it would make complete sense to say “monarchism is the worst system in the world, except for all the other ones we’ve tried,” the same way that sometimes gets said about capitalism.
We haven’t had a country that called itself communist and succeeded in living up to the ideals yet, but I don’t think that means it’s necessarily impossible that one ever will. I think so far the evidence suggests that it’s much easier to get to a capitalist society with stronger workers’ rights and certain tenets of socialism implemented (like universal healthcare), but that eventually those societies could certainly take it further?
But, you know. I’m talking about whether or not I think it’s ever possible for us to reach the future posited in specifically Star Trek: The Next Generation. And I think that, even if we don’t get there in the next thousand years, it’s important to, at the very least, believe that it’s possible to get somewhere better than we are right now.
And there is very much a limit on how far we can get via capitalism, so it’s gonna have to be something else, even if that something else is something no one’s come up with yet.
(Side note: I’m so incredibly tired of post-TNG Star Trek going “but what if humanity still fundamentally sucks”. You fucked up my perfectly good monkey and now it’s got anxiety, Nu Trek writers.)
Distrust makes sense, but I think Hank is showing some green flags here.
He’s already noticed Jocelyne’s queerness in some capacity and was giving her space to figure it out. He’s not making the situation about himself or how he feels. He’s actively trying not to offend Becky and asking questions so he can learn how to avoid doing so in the future (which is basic decency but we were expecting much worse). He rushed down to the school to address Jocelyne’s radical communism™, something he would not have done if he thought she was just gay and not hurting anybody. Plus, his intent in rushing to the school seems to be to have a serious in-person conversation, not to threaten Jocelyne with violence or financial harm etc. I can be mad that his politics are wrong, but he hasn’t actually behaved badly here. His actions so far are pretty fair given his perspective.
Don’t wanna be too defensive of him cause of, you know, all of the harm. But also this guy feels like he’s one or two good heart-to-heart/ultimatums away from showing up in an “I love my trans daughter” t-shirt. Or rather he seems to come from a place of care and concern rather than authority and entitlement. Plus he seems flexible enough that if Jocelyne has something to say, he will probably hear her out.
Anyway, just noting that his vibe is very different from Carol who is rightfully getting tossed in the no-contact dumpster.
Agreed. I’m not giving Hank a free pass entirely, but… he would have grown up in the generation with the Red Scares, McCarthyism, and the looming threat of the Cold War when Mutually Assured Destruction was a very real and present danger. It can be hard to shake off the kinds of deeply ingrained “So-and-so is The Enemy” indoctrination if you’ve seen it firsthand, especially if you suffered under it. I’m reminded of my grandmother, who lived through the Japanese occupation of Singapore and saw firsthand the atrocities the IJA perpetrated on POWs and the civilian population. She has never, ever forgiven the Japanese people until the day she died, and although she’s wrong to see all Japanese with the same brush, I also can’t really blame her.
Wasn’t MaCarthyism the 50s? If Hank is 60 (which, honestly, seems too old?) he’d be born in 60 and would have had his formative teen years in the 70s. Hell, if he’s in his 50s then he was a teen in the 80s. That’s well past taking Red Menace stuff seriously.
I can only assume from the generalisations of this comment that you’re fairly young, or from a different country from the US? I’m nearly 40 and raised in a staunchly left wing household, and communism was -still- a dirty word in the 80s and 90s. Remember that the cold war lasted until the mid-80s, that pol pot was in power for the latter half of the seventies, that the viet Cong were communists trying to “liberate” vietnam, and that China and North Korea have been self-proclaimed communist for the entirety of Hank’s likely frame of political awareness. Even if none of these events had happened outside of McCarthyism, Hank is likely to have come from similarly conservative Christian parents and will have been raised with McCarthyist values and perspective on political ideologies.
I’m also 40 and grew up in Australia. All that Red Scare, evil commies thing was not a thing here, that was just nonsense in American movies and shows.
Yeah, the Cold War didn’t die until the USSR did in 1991. And while the excesses of McCarthyism were generally mocked, there was still enough anti-communist (and generally anti-Russian) sentiment that I really worried my Air Force recruiter in ’86 when I told him I was born in Moscow. (Moscow, ID, but still Moscow, right?) Of course, it probably didn’t help when he asked if I’d ever been a member of the Communist Party and I responded, “Nyet, tovarisch.”
Indeed, Hank was almost certainly “formed,” so to speak, in a world essentially without communism, with only Cuba and North Korea really carrying it on (with varying degrees of success).
Which might explain why he wouldn’t really have any conception of communism beyond being a funny noise that Fox News pundits make to indicate that they don’t like something: Once communism ceased being an actual thing in the actual world, then anything could safely be called “communism.”
“Formed” is a strong term here. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. If Hank is 60, as I believe we’ve been told, he would have been 26 in 1991.
You can of course argue that by the end the Soviet Union wasn’t really communist (or that it never really was, I suppose), but it was the prime representation of Communism to the rest of the world even so.
Floating timeline. DoA started in 2010; a 60 year old then would have been born in 1950, and adolescent during the Vietnam War and China’s Cultural Revolution. In his 30s for Reagan’s presidency.
Just to add that I hadn’t read the reply you were replying to after I sent this, so my context is slightly different but I still stand by that Hank can absolutely be consumed by red scare rhetoric without having been an older child our young adult during the beginning of McCarthyism. Keep in mind John Lennon was surveiller in the 70s by the FBI for supposed communist sympathies and opposition to the Vietnam war.
Hi, if he’s 60 in the current timeliness, that’s more 1965. That’s the atomic fears. The movie The Day After traumatized a bunch of us. So less commie-takeover fears and more bombed-back-into-atoms fears.
McCarthyism was in the ’50s, but the Cold War was at one of its most intense points in the early ’80s. Reagan was elected partly on a platform of anti-Communism and called the USSR “an evil empire.” Hollywood was turning out stuff like Red Dawn and that Rambo movie where he goes to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen against the Soviets. We probably came closer to nuclear war in 1983 than any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis and a lot of people thought WWIII was inevitable. Things didn’t start to relax again until Gorbachev took power in 1985 and especially after Chernobyl in 1986.
We can reflect on how George Takei was a small child during the Japanese internment and has campaigned tirelessly for awareness of how wrong this sort of treatment is since the establishment of the “kids in cages” in the mid-2010s. Hank is definitely not from the 50s due to the sliding scale, though we can reasonably assume that his character was made to be born somewhere in the 40s to 50s due to his character originally appearing in roomies over 20 years ago, when he would’ve more reasonably represented college-going Willis’s own father.
Hank not from the 50’s
He may have had generational contact, as I did, that made him aware of and affected by the political frames of previous decades. The Great Depression, WW II, and the ’50’s were etched into my young mind by the books in our house, and the people in our family.
I grew up in the cold war (60’s) and firmly did and still do regard the Russians as enemies. But it always bothered me that people use ‘communist’ as a warning or insult without understanding the first thing about it. Or to distinguish it from Democratic Socialism. Or to recognize that Russia’s major problem had been Stalinism. Political threads get woven into the reality of a country.
And of course I didn’t relish an atomic attack. When I was a kid, you couldn’t eat snow because of radionucleotides from atmospheric tests.
I agree with your assessment for the most part, I will just caveat that Hank is going through a lot right now and part of his reaction to this will depend on whatever support network or coping system he has in place to deal with the fallout with the church, divorce, loss of friends, child kidnapped by his church with full knowledge and permission of his wife, etc.
What I mean by that is he could slide further right as a means of shoring up parts of his identity, similarly to how Becky still clings really hard to Christianity, despite the extent of the damage the church she was raised in has caused her directly.
Yeah, that’s a really good point. Seeing it from outside his daughters’ perspectives, Hank’s actually in a pretty vulnerable position right now. I think there’s signals pointing towards him improving in the future, but he could very easily go either way.
For the protest, he’s talking about this image: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/pervasively/ Jocelyne is presenting ambiguously, and Hank has not picked up/realized that Jocelyne is a woman. What he’s saying is that ever since Jocelyne started to get more distant, he has wondered if Jocelyne was “gay”, citing that Jocelyne was never a very masculine child (basically basing his assumption off of stereotypes about gay men), and then he’s concluding that Jocelyne didn’t distance from him because of being “gay”, but seemingly because of being a communist.
Yes, Jocelyne definitely has details such as a narrowed jawline, narrow wrists, and perhaps even a hint of a bust, but that’s the difference between we as the readers vs Hank as a character in the comic. Along with the picture not being the most clear, Hank’s first thought on seeing a more narrow jawline would probably be less “I see, my child is trans” and more “that kid needs to eat more food”.
Well, the good news is that he’s not being actively hostile and does appear to genuinely be making an effort – and despite having a ways to go, this does go a long way towards assuring me that he’ll get there. In time.
But it’s all going to come down to him getting the story straight and seeing how his prejudices have been affecting – and are continuing to affect – his immediate family. Joyce feeling that she needed to hide the fact that she’s on birth control (even given the fact that she’s on them not because of sexual proclivity but because of her severe periods) and the fact that she’s just started a relationship with Dorothy, Jocelyne hiding the fact that she’s transgender and is primarily interested in guys, not to mention feeling she had to hide the fact that she was coming to the protest from him. It’s all piling up – and all because his children don’t feel like they can trust him with this information. That they feel like they’ll lose quite a lot if he finds out.
To be fair, Joyce and Becky have VERY good reason to think that. Not from Hank directly (though we are still seeing some good reason why even he isn’t as accepting as would be ideal), but from his association with the church that actively condoned and supported someone that was actively kidnapping his own daughter to send her to a conversion camp against her will. That would cast quite a pall over everything, and it makes sense why they would try keeping Hank in the dark like that.
But he needs to learn about all of this stuff, and they can’t hide all this from him forever – and there’s going to be plenty of drama from this story just being a multiple coming out story. I truly hope that we subvert expectations here and Hank comes out with some more understanding. Not perfect, no – but enough to accept that this is who his kids are, and be willing to make an effort to be supportive of them.
Hank asking “can I say ‘queer’?” reminds me of Joyce doing similar check-ins. Like when she broke up with Ethan. Still cringeworthy at the time, no doubt, and yet it really is a small indication of trying to grow beyond their previous programming.
Yup, that’s the comparison I keep making and thinking of. The main difference, besides gender roles, is that Hank’s had another 20-30 years immersed in that culture. He’s got a deeper well/steeper hill to climb.
My prediction and hope for this Hank showed up development is that Joyce will intentionally out herself in an attempt to protect Jocelyne who will then out herself as well intentionally or accidentally whichever is funnier at the same time.
Oh, yeah, total far lefty in handedness, politics, XOR sexuality. Can’t ever be two or more of those at the same time; nope; only ONE of those. That’s just how it is. Humans like to keep identity simple, yessir, totally, absolootly that’s it.
lmfao. Hank. He’s trying. Not really succeeding (yet) but he’s trying!! He will get there, I believe in him!!
In earnestness, I have a couple of friends who are trans and/or gay with parents who were very conservative as they were raising them. But are now really supportive and have changed their politics, because at the end of the day they loved their kids enough to do what was right. I know this isn’t the case for a lot of people, but Hank strikes me as that type of guy and I hope I’m right.
One key question here. Is Hank there because they were worried about their child’s safety at the protest? Or because Hank was upset they were protesting?
Based on my own very religious and very Republican mother, it can EASILY be both, but it’ll only verbally come out as the latter. “How could you be out there supporting those hooligans? You could have been SHOT or ARRESTED.”
to be worried about Jocelyne’s safety, he’d have to admit that protesting is not a right of the american citizen and that police will violently oppose anyone attempting to do that. Given he thinks being anti-genocide makes you a terrorist and a communist, he’s just mad, not concerned.
Huh, so he DOESN’T know. Gonna be honest, I was firmly in the camp that Joss had come out to him and it went bad, not “he was sorta sniffing at the trail but hadn’t confronted her”.
I’m afraid Hank IS falling for that old classic “Gay? OK! (Unless you are MY boy!) trap. My own dad was FINE with queer folk his whole life until his nephew son turned out to be a very feminine-presenting gay man. From then on, he was afraid I might turn out the same, and became quite anti-gay for years and years. (Joke is on him, he was only half right, as it DID turn out that I am low-key bi.)
As in the tale of the Fisher King, it is a matter of asking the right question. Someone should ask Hank, “Why does your child not trust you with the truth?”
The answer is often very revealing. Parents, especially those of bigoted backgrounds, often assume that their child is not entitled to a private life. They believe they are entitled to know everything. This continues into adulthood.
Fundies don’t like to verbalise the possibility that one of their children might be LBGTQ+, because when you’re fueled by belief, and that belief is largely stuff people made up out of whole cloth rather than anything in the Bible, you’re very open to the possibility that saying something makes it true.
Hank is both struggling with that and coming to terms with the possibility that maybe Joss being queer wouldn’t be terrible, or at least that it would be rude to say so in front of Becky.
Idk everyone else’s read today (don’t feel like scrolling through lots of comments), but “everything sadly started to click” sounds to ME like he’d prefer her being queer to being a communist. So that’s. Nice? The thing he has more experience with (via Becky) and has had more time to think about (because of his suspicions) isn’t crazy scary to him any more.
Hank! You’re like, one of the handful of parents we like, I know you can be better than this.
Also love how he did check about queer(also Becky’s 100% accurate response)
Yeah he seems to also be in the mindset that being polite to relatives is the more important thing. Everyone’s coming at this in good faith, so far. Great starting point.
These comments are weird. I don’t understand how you can read this as “Hank came over here because he’s freaking out that his son is gay”? He was pretty clearly chill enough with the idea of Joss being a gay man that he was willing to give her space, and only intervened when it turned out she held political beliefs that were opposed to his?
Not being ready to force a confrontation isn’t necessarily “chill”. Especially when it’s just suspicions he hasn’t even said out loud before. Even the “just” a communist bit implies to me that’s not as bad.
Isn’t even necessarily intervening, he could just be worried about what might have happened to Jocelyn at the *dangerous political rally where people were hurt and arrested.*
even though she annoys me at times as anyone her age going thru her age-appropriate things would, i love how smart & brave becky is UGH . !!! knowing that joyce & dorothy are NOT equipped to maintain jocelyn’s privacy/safety in the event of a surprise hank visit, and jumping in to navigate that (even though queer parental approval is a veryyyyy personal subject to her) immediately after having a deep part of her heart crushed, even if unintentionally, by joyce & dorothy… becky ur strengths will carve out a wonderful future for u :-]
I get it, I really do – but the longer this goes on the more I’m convinced that he doesn’t actually know that Jocelyn is trans. Heck, he all but confirms it here, where he says that he suspected she is gay (which, from what he knows, is technically true – but actually only kinda). I mean, it’s still possible that she came out to him and he hard rejected that (hence why she said she had something to tell Joyce before Joyce heard it from Hank) – but based on todays strip, I think that’s rather less likely than I did in previous updates.
I mean, maybe when he finds out, he won’t be cool about it! That’s very possible, because he IS still very right-wing and has been in that media bubble for a long time.
But he has to *find out* before he even has a chance to disappoint us on that issue.
He’s not misgendering her maliciously, but on the other hand, it’s not like his past character and actions aren’t the reason Jocelyne hasn’t come out to him. The reason it’s not safe for her to come out to him.
Sure, and I’m not saying she’s wrong for that. I am specifically addressing the people in the comments that keep insisting that he’s already in the wrong for misgendering somebody who hasn’t come out to him. He doesn’t have a choice, nobody’s told him Jocelyn is a girl.
In this era of vice signaling, where the President directly states over and over that he only values anyone as long as serve his desires, family included, and other people imitate him, it’s easy to forget that evil people can be genial, self-aware, can genuinely love their family while hurting them.
It used to be more common than the vice signallers – maybe still is, in fact. Works a lot better if you’re not a billionaire with toadies. Hence all the old complaints about how unrealistic comic-style supervillains were.
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aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa why even botherrrrr? @-@
Because he’s Becky’s last remaining parental figure who might not totally disappoint her.
ALSO because this is a distraction tactic to stall him, and it’s working great.
He kinda seems like he’s trying to be gentle around the terms at least. I’m hopeful that he’ll learn and grow if he’s given space to do so. I personally am not good at giving people that space, but I know some people do change if you manage it.
“last remaining parental figure”
like what about Leslie? :0
(no, Leslie, you are not going to beat those allegations XD)
‘Cept Beckster wasn’t raised around Leslie. She _was_ raised around Hank a lot. His is the longest-duration parent-adjacent relationship she still has. Les’s a total newcomer.
Leslie is also like, 24-28. She’ll do what she can but. Yeah.
Well, Hank is her dad and Leslie is her mom. But yeah, I don’t think Becky should give up. He’s shown himself capable of learning and growing. He has also been in a cult most of his life. Deprogramming TAKES TIME, and he’s a lot older and more set in his views than Joyce. His views suck but I don’t think he’s irredeemable at all.
And Robin her wacky aunt who cares about her but is low-key exhausting at Thanksgiving.
Robin is high key exhausting
For Leslie yes, but Becky doesn’t seem to mind as much.
Honestly, even Joyce deprogranmed surprisingly quickly
Hormones helped.
That’s actually part of why I don’t think Joyce is retconning or even being particularly hyperbolic when she says she fell in love with Dorothy at first sight. Like, within 72 hours of their first conversation, Joyce was literally throwing out cult programming in order to get this atheist girl she barely knew and was self-admittedly afraid of to go out to dinner with her. And ever since then, every time she’s been made to choose between Dorothy and her cult, Dorothy has won. Becky also wins without question, as does Jocelyne, but they’re a different kind of love, a family love that’s built up over years. It took her a lot longer to accept that it was okay for Ethan to be gay, that he didn’t need fixing, and a large part of that was that she knew that Dorothy would be disappointed with her for it.
So clearly we just need to get Hank to fall for an atheist man, and we’re good to go.
God’s no.
He’ll just tease it for 5 years with horny blushing.
Put it on the masthead, keep him gay chaste till he finds another churchlady.
That’s just heterosexuality with extra steps
Plot twist: after a sudden realization, Joe’s dad cheats on Amber’s mum with Hank. Now who’d be the mist hilarious to find out?
*most hilarious
Dorothy & Becky, together, are the first to find out
there’s a difference between giving up, and knowing your limits
Becky’s no therapist or councilor, keeping Hank away for Joyce’s and Jocelyne’s sake is one thing, but she should first and foremost focus on her own development, already stunted by the fact she has yet to work through issues arising from that she just got out of a cult HERSELF only recently
Hank’s also leaving the same cult, in part because of *her* experiences with that cult
Because sometimes people care about family members who aren’t perfect?
And because having conversations is the only way to educate people?
Also the comments really, really like to assume the worst about people for maximum drama and shallow emotions. Fortunately Willis knows better.
Hank, so far, has shown willingness to improve himself, listen, and learn. He’s humble and doesn’t like to piss people off – which is part of why he was so susceptible to the cult, unfortunately. But now that he’s out, *gently* explaining things to him is likely to be effective.
But that requires faith in humanity, and in flawed people, and unfortunately a lot of people who have suffered don’t have the emotional capacity to grant that response. Or they’ve been emotionally compromised by their own participation in cult mentalities, and trade in for a new one that feels more comfortable.
Absolutely bang on analysis, with empathy no less.
🏆
There can be a strong urge in queer circles to throw out a relationship if things aren’t perfect. Sometimes cutting someone off is the right move; other times, maybe that person would’ve grown if someone took the time to try to teach them. It’s frequently exhausting either way, dealing with loss & regret or (on the flip side) having to constantly be a walking educational exhibit for your parents and having your friends question why you even bother.
I don’t blame anyone who didn’t want to be a teacher, but I’m not giving up on my dad just yet.
yeah and like
until very very recently Hank has spent his entire life in a cult, a highly separatist, toxic belief system which informed his EVERYTHING,
ideally someone like him would have like, exit counseling, Becky is barely equipped to handle this kind of delicate, time-consuming work, (in no small part because she’s a former cult member who still has a lot to work through HERSELF)
like my greatest hope for her atm is to somehow send Hank away from Jocelyne and Dorothy X Joyce, if only temporarily
(but if im being realistic here, good decision making ain’t exactly these freshmens’ forte 👀)
Because sometimes you’re dad is real shit about you being trans and sometimes after some months get ok about it (sometimes you need to give your mum a trans biography so they get it first (obviously this is not an option for these fictional characters)) and they still use the wrong name and pronouns a lot but at least they’re trying
what’s a ‘trans biography’ in this context?
inquiring estranged-from-her-fambly mind wants to know
Yes You Are Trans Enough by Mia Violet. It’s her trans journey and giving it to my mum really helped her with understand what being trans feels like.
Because we literally just learned that the commentariat’s assumption that Hank knew made an ass out of us.
And Ming is really not happy about the whole thing.
Because this isn’t him being completely and unrepentently terrible? You’ll notice he’s talking politely with 1 local lesbian and is trying to be polite about what words to use, not screaming slurs at her and telling her she’s going to Hell for being gay. This is someone who’s shown himself to be willing to learn, he’s just got a whole bunch of bullshit from the past sticking to him.
“Can you even BE two things? Is there even a word for that??”
Comnuqueersm
Queermunism.
Well, now I gotta use that. Proud comnuqueerist?
OUR queermunism friend~
Ooh yes, queermunism is catchier.
Damn queermunists! Always trying to seize the heteronormative means of production!
The jokes on you, they don’t produce anything!
Money trickles down from the rich straights into the pockets of the homosexians! It’s simple gayganomics!
Does it shorten to “queermie”?
“Conseqisses of Commuqueerism” would be an awesome band name.
Until they try to get printed merch. Or a customized birthday cake.
Depends on the state. At least until the federal govt takes over that state.
I can either be a human, or I can be a biped, but I cannot be both.
I’ve heard sometimes people can be even 3 or 4 things, maybe 5.
holy shit
guys
people are complicated!
Pinko.
I don’t know. It’s now my third coming out to my parents and I feel like they are getting real tired with me lol
Bi visibility day was YESTERDAY, they can’t see us today!
Wow I can’t believe Hank is an irredeemable fascist and must be removed.
you better believe it!
He’s not fascist! He’s just capital-straight. Which is the diametric opposite of queermunism, and therefore must be destroyed.
Heterocapitalist?
I am still open to the possibility that Hank is mostly a captive of his social network bubble (the divorce did not change it that much). To a disturbingly extensive degree we all are. Judging from the past Hank may, at least, be redeemable.
May be I’m an optimist? But I teach vector calculus and abstract algebra for living, so i kinda have to optimist about the possibility of remapping some of the connections in peoples’ brains.
Abstract Algebra on the graduate or undergraduate level?
I’m a bit torn because on the one hand Hank is basically the only non-evil parent in the entire universe and thus legitimately interesting but on the other I’d really like to see a character in Dumbing of Age actually go from “evil” to “good” (or vice versa), and if Hank’s starting point is “confused but basically decent” then we already saw this arc when Joyce did it.
Honestly not sure you’ll get this here. I love this comic, but the characters are usually either good-natured, good-natured but dumb, ‘the bad guys’ or Mike. Hank is good but dumb, and hopefully on the path to becoming, good after being educated.
Blaine, Toe-dad, Joyce’s mom, Ruth’s grandfather, Walky/Sal’s mother, Mary. You ain”t seeing redemption arcs out of these people. At best maybe Raidah is slowly softening up. (I guess Joe kind of counts, but he was a bit of an exception.)
It would be great to see Willis do an evil to good story arc with one of the still living bad guys i listed above, but i don’t see it happening.
If Hank’s arc is from “evil” to “good”, he’s in the middle of it, not at the start. He was pretty awful in his first appearances, particularly family weekend. There’s only so bad someone can be and still come back in fiction.
I’m not really sure how you get an actual evil to good arc with a truly abusive parent, like a Ross, Blaine or even Carol/Clint/Linda, within a single year of their kid’s college. I’ve seen some truly awful parents come around and rebuild relationship with their adult children, but it usually requires years or decades of minimal contact to realize that they really need to change.
It’s a work in progress.
It is, and yet he’s already come quite a way from the start of the comic. This is a guy who wasn’t comfortable with people even associating with atheists. Now he’s able to honestly ask Becky questions about what terms are and aren’t offensive. He’s still a Republican, but like… There’s a chance that won’t stay the case forever, and that’s nice to see.
I mean, give the guy a break. It’s been…six months(???) since uni even started
And he’s not been immersed in this stuff the way Joyce has. He’s been back home with the community that raised Joyce. This is honestly fantastic.
they still in january, 4 months
Yeah, this is the “You know who else was maybe partly Jewish? Hitler!” guy.
He’s headed in the right direction, but he’s got a long way to go.
“Can I say queer?”
That’s what makes Hank one of the better parents in this strip.
That’s where the bar is.
The better parents are smart enough now to show up that often in the strip.
yeah, because the bad parents make the better ones feel uncomfortable at best and unsafe at the worst, thus prompting them to consciously avoid those encounters 👀
Dina’s parents just quietly send money for a date and let their daughter live her life.
*Trying to remember when we saw mr and mrs Keener last* Okay yeah checks out.
The fact that he’s actually thinking to ask that question seems like a step in the right direction.
Also that he seems to be using it in a reasonably appropriate way (as a not-really-all-that-judgemental variable for some form of not-straight-cis-ness).
And even with the assumption that his child is a communist, it still seems to be a fairly understanding version of that. It’s that that his child is “evil”, it doesn’t even seem to be all that close to “misguided” or “corrupted”. Its about how he feels his child is being cagey and distant and disconnected.
He’s no doubt leaning into simple explanations to the problem because, well, simple explanations are nice, but he’s not trying to bring down the thunder.
The fact that he said “queer” instead of “a queer” already kinda shows he’s probably on the right side of things tbh
Though “not queer or whatever, just some sort of communist” is going to take some unpacking?
He’s okay with Becky, is upset enough to rush right out because he thinks his kid is communist, but also seems to think that’s better than being gay?
My read is that he is looking for a reason why his kid would be distant, not “what’s wrong” with his kid.
With their family’s history, it’s pretty fair that Hank assumes his son is not talking to him because he is gay, or because he is a communist.
He’s probably going to be okay with the queerness and the communism. Remember that he told Joyce something along the lines of “I am wrong about a lot of things”. He is willing to learn as he realises that what he thought was right is harmful to others.
I wouldn’t go that far in this storyline. He can maybe become better. But it all depends on whether or not he’s willing to accept new facts about both his daughters and learn
Hank has always shown himself to be willing to grow and accept the changes in people in this comic. I cannot think of a single time where he was presented with people challenging his beliefs and him NOT being understanding.
I also think that that’s where the storyline is going, I’m just saying let’s not call an acorn an oak quite yet
At his core, I think Hank really cares about his kids, in fact in his own way that is why he is here. My prediction is that he will ultimately be okay* with Joyceline once he has time to process it.
*okay meaning likely very weird and awkward about it for the foreseeable future and (mostly) accidentally misgendering her a bunch. Grading on a curve here.
Nah you can’t Hank. Not yet.
ike, family/friend or not, this is why we tend not to talk to conservatives like Hank if we can help it, even when there no immediate outward malice intended
basically their entire world is built on a wall made of FEAR and paranoid conspiracy theories, treading that’s like walking a tightrope and it’s hella exhausting and not even worth it a majority of the time
as much as Becky means well, she’s likely not well equipped to be helping Hank — however much he wants to get better, he still barely climbed out of a toxic belief system which informed him his entire LIFE, and is in a very fearful headspace where he’s gonna remain deeply suspicious of ANY ideology or agenda
This…
I’ve been slowly deprogramming my mom with urban planning videos.
“Why can businesses just build worthless buildings? There should be laws forcing them to tear it down. They shouldn’t get tax breaks for their buildings being worthless!”
Good, good old Boomer woman. Let’s watch videos from other countries now and show off the cool things we could have. I need some very subtle barely related things to show her for social matters. It’s an extraordinarily slow process, but she’s gotta think it’s her idea and that she’s brilliant for coming up with it.
Hank is Joyce though, just several decades behind.
It’s perfectly valid to find people too exhausting to help deprogram, but yeah. I try to give him SOME benefit of the doubt even if it’s tiring (a lot).
Carol would be way too exhausting to try to deprogram, and after choosing her cult over her own daughter, I’d say she’s irredeemable and not worth the time. But yeah, Hank is basically an older Joyce who has been brainwashed for longer. He’s made SIGNIFICANT progress in the same time as Joyce has. He basically adopted Becky and iirc is helping her pay tuition, and did a whole 180 on his opinion of Dorothy, and has been very respectful of Joyce’s judgement.
The difference is that Carol doesn’t WANT to be better. When shown the difference between love and hate, she has repeatedly chosen to throw her lot in with hate.
i mean, you’re not wrong on some level here?
in a perfect world, people who care about Hank would build for him what rehabilitation and therapy communities would call a holding space — a private space, online or in-person, where he could safely work out his issues, where he’d be expected (and encouraged) to get better, but is, in the moment, not currently judged.
in any case, reforming members of political/religious cults is very delicate, time consuming work that shouldn’t really be done in public, especially not by someone like Becky who barely knows what she’s doing
it’s okay to admit to yourself that you can’t realistically handle that kind of responsibility (especially if like me you have communication disorders or social anxiety to begin with)
if I must say it out loud — your value as an ally does not hinge upon how well you can change Hank’s mind
Becky is brave and has a good heart. That’s about the only two things that can help with any challenge.
she also has yet to work through a lot of issues resulting from the fact that she only recently came out of a cult HERSELF
her goal here should ideally be to buy time to distract Hank and keep him away for however long possible
trying to actually change the mind of someone like him with a reactionary fundamentalist background can be REALLY tricky, and unless you actually know what you’re doing you can very well run the risk of fucking somebody else’s life up 👀
At the same time, I suspect she probably stands a better chance of getting him out of that hole than almost anyone else in the comic.
Would Hank actually be able to define communism?
No lmao
“I shall not attempt to further define communism today, but I know it when I see it”
“a box I can use to compartmentalize any worldview even slighly challenging the establishment and capitalist status quo”“uuuuuuuh just listen to these 17 sermons on YouTube and it’ll all make sense.
actually I don’t quite know myself, but golly to these figureheads not sound so sure of themselves” (-_-)
*sound so sure of themselves
aaaaaaaaaaaah cannot tyyyype
seeing as how he thinks protesting genocide makes you a terrorist AND a communist, no, he can’t.
Delighted by the Jax icon saying this 😂
Jax knows a thing or two about terrorism.
CORN GRAVATAR. Y’all are killing me here…
COME ON DON’T SCARE ME LIKE THAT
I suspect he’d define it as anyone not a Republican, and a lot of Republicans too.
In the US for a very long time “communist” meant anything vague political or economic that wasn’t US right wing.
Obviously: As something Anti-American!
But being serious, we do have to step back and accept that, however those feelings came to exist, a whole fuckton of people born before, I dunno, 1975 or so have really entrenched trauma stemming from the Cold War.
It was a couple generations of people where “we are a handful of bad decisions away from extinction” was a fact of everyday life, and the framing of that was very much “capitalism vs communism”, with communism being represented by a terrible, corrupt, incompetent, and pretty fascist version of it.
I figure most of us were, ya know, *people* when 9/11 happened, and remember how bad the islamophobia got then. Try to picture something that traumatic, but as a constant background radiation spanning decades.
(none of this is to absolve capitalism or damn communism. I do think the USSR was worse than the USA was during the cold war, and we all know how competitive that limbo contest was, but its mostly just to try to explore that sense of collective trauma. The expressions of that are still, indeed, very very bad)
My father in law half jokingly uses communist as a curse.
USA is following in USSRs footsteps 50-60 years later.
*Liberty Prime voice*
GODLESS. COMMUNISTS!!
Most Americans don’t seem to know what communism means. It’s just a boogeyman for them due to decades of Cold War era propaganda.
There’s also the fact that the most prominent examples of countries that called themselves communist were pretty horrific themselves. That doesn’t prove Communism Bad and Capitalism Good, but the atrocities of Stalinism and Maoism did a lot to undermine the appeal of communism in the west even without the Cold War propaganda.
The main problem with communism is that it would work only if human greed and thirst for power did not exist. The moment one guy with enough influence and/or military power doesn’t want to relinquish it (or want more), it is almost inevitable that after a communist revolution, it devolves into a dictatorship giving lip service to the idea of being communist… After all, communism according to Marx should not have a government or political leaders, people would just do what’s required of them for the good of all…
So it is basically impossible to have a “real communist” country, unless you somehow remove human greed. On paper, it could work and perhaps be good, but in practice it’s shit.
Capitalism has a similar problem, on paper the offer and demand and yadda yadda would make fair prices and fair pay, but instead we’re already half a step in a cyberpunk corporate dystopia, where a handful of companies own the world. If at least there were the cool implants already…
Yet somehow this doesn’t apply to US attrocities
I’m never sure what people expect as a reaction when they say something like this: “Wow, I never thought about US atrocities, I guess we should give Stalinism a try.”?
Back in the day, even a lot of US communists got very disillusioned and left the movement when they got a look at what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. Or later when the tanks rolled into Hungary or Prague. That doesn’t mean they ignored US atrocities. They just lost faith in the idea of communism as a solution.
I’d make a joke about how conservatives think a communist is anyone to the left of Hitler, but these days they claim he was a communist too. (At least when they aren’t busy idolizing him.)
A Commie?! Does Jocelyne know that Joshua is a Commie?! ;p
Thank God there’s no such thing as a queer communist!
I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I really don’t want to hate Hank until someone actually engages him in a conversation about this stuff and confronts him about it. Then depending on how he reacts I’d like to draw a conclusion. Like of COURSE he still says stuff like this, everyone is too busy dodging him to correct him.
But if he is being corrected and refuses to actually have a conversation about it? Ya then break out the pitchforks. Just hard to hate the guy until he has been challenged first.
Nah, I think that’s valid of you! I feel like he IS trying, he just has some shitty preconceived notions to let go of. Only time – and more strips – will see if he’s willing to put in that effort or if he’s going to cling to the bullshit.
I mean yeah, Joyce used the word “evilutionist” once.
People can show him the grace they gave Joyce. Even if I understand why they wouldn’t.
Hank isn’t a manic pixie cute girl. No grace for him!
100% this. The fact that he asks “Can I say queer?” Is also really telling imo. Like, he is AWARE to some degree that he doesn’t know everything/has Some Learning to do. I think he’s WILLING to do the work, he just doesn’t know how much Work there is to do; all of this fundie shit is still normalized to him.
Yup. This.
But the fact that he clearly views Becky being gay as okay because she’s not HIS kid…. is fucking troubling.
That’s not clear at all. It might be true, but he recognizes that his child (whose gender he doesn’t even know) is being cagey around him for understandable reasons. It might even be the case that he would say it’s okay for his child to be gay but they never got around to having an open conversation about it.
Whether he’ll react to trans differently is also a jump. Lots of people are okay with gay but less okay with trans.
That he clearly think Jocelyne being “communist” is bad, but also says “not queer, just communist” is not a great sign.
I read that as implying gay would be worse.
I mean Hitler called his party Socialist specifically to appeal to socialists. It doesn’t mean the Nazis were in any way actually socialists.
Yeah for sure.
People are messy, start with respect. I try to remember how shitty I was when I got sucked into the evangelical world for a decade. I also remember some genuinely good people. I don’t know one of them who hasn’t left. But it’s important to respect people and respect the journey. Not excuse shit behavior, but respect people. We can’t reprogram people, they are not computers. “Reeducation” carries some pretty fucked up baggage itself.
That, and I don’t see any path to better for people who have the need above all else to be “right”. To improve you have to admit you could be wrong. (He says, self-righteously)
Even if Hank does react badly there’s still a chance (from personal experience) he can come around later.
It’s just that in Comic Time it will take seven years of strips for him to come around
Warms my heart to see so many comments both in this thread and in general sharing this sentiment. Something about today’s comic seems to resonate with people to hold out hope.
Bernie sanders has entered the chat
Compare to where Joyce herself was, back in September…
Hoh boy… Hank, this is a rollercoaster.
Although, flashback to last week when my MIL simultaneously told me it wasn’t “PC” to say queer, and then three days later hit me with so much transphobic vitriol after cornering me into coming out. It’s weird what parts some generations hold onto, huh
Lee… yikes. I’m so sorry. That’s so shitty.
Thank you, I appreciate the comment. Mostly mentioned it to give an example of the dichotomy 😅
Have another supportive comment.
That sucks. I hope the situation improves.
Also, since Lee if a nonbinary name, I don’t know whether to call you a good boy or a good girl, but whichever one you identify as, you are, and anyone who says otherwise can fuck right off.
I’m really sorry.
It also sounds exactly like the general TERF-led psyop against queer. Lots of “call me x not queer” people are vehemently anti-trans, and they’re against queer because it’s broadly inclusive, not because it actually has a uniquely problematic history as a slur (all our words are former slurs).
inb4 anyone gets mad at me for something I didn’t say: “LOTS OF”, not “all”. “TERF-led psyop”, not “TERF-exclusive rhetoric”.
One of the worst things about TERFs is their particular fixation on “weaponizing existing vocabulary and other differences into attempts to drive a wedge between trans folk and the rest of queer folk”.
Yep. Currently they seem to be targeting trans men and transmasc folks to even further the wedge. Before this it was ace folks. Sometimes it’s intersex folks. Sometimes it’s kinky queer folks! They just attack whichever part of the community seems weakest at a given moment, trying to fracture the community.
Don’t trust uh….communists? I guess?
Don’t trust Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Dutch angle for the banal part of the conversation.
Never heard of that phrase before — Dutch angle?
It means the “camera” is tilted in the first panel.
A movie phrase. It involves rolling the camera to get shots like the first frame above. You can find examples on the net.
Ooh, cheers to you both for explaining.
The intent is often to make the audience feel unsettled or off-balance.
Ja. The Dutch angle gives a cool feeling of movement. Walkin’ and talkin’.
So close but so far….
Hank being accepting of Becky but seeming unsure about how he’d feel if his own kid was LGBT reminds me that my mother was always very kind and accepting of my friends who were gay, never said anything to the contrary about them, but was definitely perturbed when I came out to her as bi.
In contrast, I appreciated that every step of me coming out to my father (first as bi, then ace, then non-binary, because sometimes we discover these things over time and in small steps rather than all at once) my father has predominantly been supportive. The only thing he said that made me upset is when I first brought up being ace, and he suggested I just needed “vitamins”. But, that was the only time he said anything like that and he’s otherwise been incredibly supportive and willing to learn.
I’m glad you had the support of one parent! It’s rough to experience the situation you had with your mother, condolences.
The “best” part about the situation with my mom is that for reasons I will never know, she would always… forget I came out to her as bi. So on about three different occasions we would have the same conversation, she’d have the same unsettled reaction, so eventually I just gave up on coming out to her. She’d make comments about how ‘one day you’ll find a man and get married’ and just do a little thumb’s up like ‘yes indeedy that’s gonna happen’.
I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh at you sharing a real moment in your life that upset you, but your father suggesting vitamins would somehow cure you being ace or something is genuinely funny and made me chuckle. I do wish you the best in life and it’s great your dad was supportive.
I imagine the allo-inducing vitamins would be a lot like Joe’s “weed gummy” male vitamins. Damn, if only I had some of those, smh…
What…what was vitamins gonna do? Make you like..feel the horn or something…?”
They call it Vitamin D for vitamin DICK.
It was rather silly though, I understand that there are some medical reasons for a person’s sex drive fluctuating (for example, anti-depressants can inhibit one’s drive) but I don’t recall vitamins ever doing anything…
I expect it’s that vitamin deficiencies might do something related to libido. Indirectly some vitamin deficiencies effect mood changes or depression. I don’t know if there’s anything more direct, it’s not something you can really ask the internet without getting a firehose of nonsense.
That’s how it worked for me – it was one of the first noticeable things after my doctor got me on a high dose of vitamin D for the deficiency we found by bloodwork after I was complaining of low energy. But one anecdote doesn’t make data and also everyone’s different.
I’m glad to hear that was able to help you, and I appreciate your response that although more vitamin D affected you, that you understand that doesn’t mean it’d be the same for everyone.
Vitamin B12 has been shown to increase sex drive for low-energy people, but that’s the only thing zi have heard/read on the subject.
That’s because it increases energy and also lowers depression for people with a deficiency.
If your sex drive isn’t suppressed by those factors, it’s not gonna raise it.
I am so mad I didn’t think of the Vitamin D and Vitamin C joke first….
So fucking mad….
Vitamin Cease & Desist
Vitamin Booby.
Vagitamins
When Becky is done here she’s going to need some vitamin Dina.
Well I heard Men’s One a Day is a great Edible.
It’s like watching a baby duck dive head first into a trainwreck-
FINALLY, someone who gets it 👏🏽
A fully automated gay space communist.
I… actually don’t knowbwhat Jocyeline’s political leanings are. Though given the fact she was at the protest and writes for a living, I’m assuming it’s fairly anti-establishment.
… though that still has a VERY wide margin.
I get the feeling a lot of people with some degree of memory of, say, the Cold War, tend to equate anti-fascism and socialism as communism; I guess because it’s “the other” that they were warned about and they think about it too black and white? It’s exhausting sometimes to explain that those are 3 separate political idealogies that while occupying a venn diagram, are not the same.
This reminds me of knowing someone who believed the Nazis were socialist because of the name and thus Leftists. It was such an insane take that I had to actually stop to figure out how to even argue with him about it.
I eventually went, “I don’t think the people who are fanboys of the Nazis today are interested in Hitler’s state owned business model versus his white supremacy.”
Mind you, how he defined Right and left bore no resemblance to what I understood it to be either.
I commend your ability to keep going with that conversation because I low key think I’d be struck speechless by their logic. Oh boy.
It’s a pretty common talking point among white nationalist circles.
“So, you think the problem with the Nazis was that they were socialist?”
If having the word “socialist” in their name meant they were socialists, clearly the People’s Republic of China is run by Republicans.
(I mean, obviously not, but it might be a fun response to give.)
Heh, I like that. Especially with the weirdos who have taken to saying “this ISN’T a democracy it’s a REPUBLIC” because they’re anti democrat and think the argument makes their party name better.
For that one, I go, “We’re democratic republic nitwit.”
I usually go with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a name in which only one word is accurate.
Also, if the other person is in a listening mood, one could go into how the Nazis saw communism as The Enemy, right up there with Jews and Romani.
Then there’s the semi-old history geek joke about the Holy Roman Empire: “Three lies in one!”
Today’s democratic politicians tend to support ethnic cleansing in “Bulmeria”, so I’d say she’s safely on the left.
ACCIDENTAL REPORT SORRY!
I meant to say you’re very right.
As in correct, not politically 🤦♂️
Considering she was at an anti-genocide protest, I suspect Jocelyne’s political views might be to the left of both major political parties in the US.
Probably, but opposing the genocide doesn’t necessarily mean being left on economic issues.
Well he’s definitely Joyce’s dad alright.
i never finished the communist manifesto cause i kept falling asleep (also it was really wordy and i was too lazy too break out a dictionary). i’m genuinely curious what marx’s take on gay people was
Marx and Engels didn’t write much about LGBTQIA2S+ stuff (by any name), but did argue that the nuclear family evolved to control inheritance, tying sexuality and reproduction into the subject. IIRC Marx made some homophobic comments privately but I couldn’t tell you what precisely and that doesn’t inform the movement.
I found it pretty easy to read, but there are probably readings of it and other things Marx wrote on YouTube for people who have trouble reading it. But considering they lived in the 1800s, I doubt Marx and Engels had the best views of gay people. Most people didn’t back then. But their ideas on capitalism still seem pretty accurate even now.
Wait, so those lovingly rendered Marx x Engels fanarts I see on tumblr aren’t based in reality? Fuuuuuck…
Well, they could be. Maybe they just weren’t out.
“Considering they lived in the 1800s” is a linear progress fallacy. The present is much more transphobic than the 1950s were in America, and one of the first things the Nazis did was burn down an institute for what we would now call gender-affirming care in Germany.
Not everyone was homophobic in the 1800s, certainly not globally. While it’s a mistake to apply our very specific modern political lens to people of the past to declare them “good” or “bad”, it is equally a mistake to shrug off racism, queerphobia, etc as just “part of the times”.
Like, there have always been abolitionists. There have always been those who recognize injustice for what it is, regardless of the law at the time. Dismissing Marx’s homophobia as inconsequential isn’t the way to get more gay people to read Marx and take him seriously.
There’s a lot of gray area between “let’s cancel Marx for being problematic” and “I mean I guess maybe he hated gay people but like so what, it was the 1800s”.
Judging by the oppressive treatment of gays in the commie states. Probably not very good.
As opposed to the oppressive treatment of “gays” in every capitalist state for the last like 200 years?
They were straight up making blackmail lists for gays in my country before the Communism fell but go off I guess.
See my comment, but I think Li was trying to say that there’s nothing unique to communism that mandates such mistreatment because it happens under capitalism too.
Well the thing is that Communism is much more controlling of people’s lives. It’s a totalitarian system much like Fascism so Every aspect of humans life is controlled there. If the system doesn’t like you for whatever reason the WHOLE system is against you, not just individuals with certain opinions.
You’re thinking of Soviet totalitarianism (or possibly the Chinese system, which is basically the old Chinese Empire but with Marxist-Maoist terms for all the old offices). They pay lip service to Marx, but he’d never recognize their systems as being anything like his philosophy.
I’m thinking the Communism that spanned most of Eurasia and oppressed my country for a half a century. Yeah.
Like I said, Soviet totalitarianism, which bears even less resemblance to Marxist communism than the modern-day Libertarian party does to the writings of John Stuart Mill.
This is all I will say on this matter:
I believe that people are capable of changing and improving over time, even bad people, even people who hate me. I believe that people are capable of being better than they are.
At the same time, no marginalized person owes their oppressors the time, courtesy, or grace required to generate that kind of change. For some people, it is a bridge too far to ask that of them. Often, it is a bridge too far to ask of me.
Two things can be true.
This was not intended to be a reply, my apologies.
To give you a better picture. State controls Everything and State keeps Notes of who you are. If you get on the State’s bad side you can’t get a good job, can’t get good education, can’t get a house, a car, goods. You get shoved to the very edge of society as the Entirety of it is controlled by the State.
Yeah, this is going to get down to that age-old definitional debate — it’s 100% clear that “Communism” as practiced by the Soviet/Chinese states and their respective clients were a centralized totalitarian/authoritarian project.
There’s always, I think, going to be a debate regarding how much those states were practicing “Communism” as defined by Marx/Engels — the broad historical consensus mostly seems to be “not much”, but that doesn’t change the damage done to the “Communism” brand or offer any comfort to the people oppressed under those systems.
Replying to myself because I forgot the other half of this — there’s a similar issue but less immediately relevant to most on the other side, where there’s been a very successful campaign to brand “Capitalism” and “free market economy” as synonymous when they’re really not, and it’s also true that the damage a capitalist state does to its LGBTQ+ population is often distributed between the state and society uncoordinated by the state.
That all said, I do maintain my thesis — the oppression of LGBTQ+ folks is more often proportional to the authoritarian-ness of a government, rather than the economic system it practices and/or pays lip service to.
So let me break down my perspective.
Communism is impossible for one simple reason, people have different ideas, beliefs, goals. You can’t just create a unified system where everyone cooperates, it will never work because people just can’t agree on everything. It only works small scale where you have small enough number of people that they can come to an agreement. Closest we’ve ever come is Democracy and even there there are constant clashes of differing opinions between different parties.
To create Communism you need force and violence because no one in their right mind will give up their freedom, possessions, privileges etc. But when your main tool is violence it will uplift violent psychopaths like Mao or Stalin and those will NEVER give up the power that violence gives them. Creating the totalitarian systems we are familiar with.
The thing that bothers me the most with American love for Communism is that… there are FUCKING ALTERNATIVES. Why go for the provable failure like the Communism when there are proven working systems like the Social Democracies of Western Europe. Democratic, Capitalistic Systems with Extensive Social Programs. It’s like Americans want to kill a fly but instead of reaching for a swatter, they pull out the nuclear bomb.
IMO: Many Americans sincerely believe that socialism and communism are the same thing. That’s what someone told them and they’ve never thought about it beyond that.
And really, that first paragraph I agree with totally — frankly, I’m a longtime proponent of free-market socialism in a democratically organized state. (I personally believe unconstrained capitalism is just a slower-burn version of the communism problem — at some point, the system so organized either falls apart under its own disagreements or it becomes totalitarian, and if you’re going to constrain capitalism you might as well go all the way and figure out how to apportion ownership of production to the workers directly instead of to a nebulous owner/boss class anyway, especially in a world where many business startups take loans and government grants anyway.)
Americans “loving Communism” is a capitalist propaganda side effect — when you hear things like “universal health care” and “a living minimum wage” and “proper welfare and support for the indigent” are all “Communism!”, then “Communism” stops being a scare word and starts sounding pretty nice, actually. Hence the endless debates on whether it can be detached from the totalitarian component.
Mistreatment of LGBTQ+ folks is historically unconnected with economic system but highly correlated with authoritarianism, “hilariously” of both the religious and non-religious varieties.
So most notionally “Communist” nations did persecute LGBTQ+ folks, but they most likely did it for authoritarian reasons rather than Marxist ones.
This.
Also I told Da Boy to ignore my reply after I saw more of what they’ve got to say on this topic because it was obviously just not gonna be productive but what can you do, heh.
Given my college experiences, I actually enjoy the hell out of discussing the minutiae of political and economic systems. 😀
And given half my family is Slavic as hell, I feel like I fully understood exactly where he’s coming from once he said he was Polish. If he’s our age, he was in elementary school during martial law, the economic changeover, and the last gasp of the Communist dictators until the first free elections in decades in 1990, after all — that’s gonna justifiably leave a mark on your worldview.
Oh, absolutely, nothing wrong with discussing for the sake of discussing! It can be really interesting…
Honestly most notionally “Communist” nations persecuted LGBTQ+ folks for the same basic reasons capitalist nations did. Long standing prejudices generally directed at any breaking with established gender roles, and the ability to use those prejudices to gain or maintain power, either on the nationals scale or just on the community/institutional scale.
The better argument I think is that broad challenges to such prejudices largely appeared and were more successful in democracies (which tended to be capitalist.) Not without backlash and often such challenges bring the conflict into sharper focus and lead to explicit laws where social pressures were sufficient before.
Not to mention the fact that if there’s one thing authoritarians like as much as conformity, it’s “lots of babies of the correct phenotype”.
When you think about it, Pansexual is the true communism! What do you mean just one? No comerade OUR genders! All of them must kiss.
Pansexual polyamory, in fact!
pandapolymonium!
yeeeesssss
polylylylylylylylylyyyy >:D
Oh, Becky is *good* at this.
Some Right Wing people are genuinely misguided by propaganda.
Some are using the propaganda as an excuse to act on what they already want to believe.
And some people may be completely flexible on one issue or even progressive and others they’re completely not.
I’m sure this is part of why she stays with Christianity, hoping to gently guide fellow Christians to a more accepting and loving form of the faith.
He’s trying so hard to be a good person, he just has to cut through so many layers of indoctrination to do it.
That one comment completely re-conceptualized Hank. Not the “terrorist” comment from a few strips ago. That was bad. But today’s strip really hits home for me that, were it not for the kidnapping, Hank would probably still be with Carol.
Holy fuck.
I mean that’s a very good reason to get a divorce. Your wife funded a terrorist kidnapping after said terrorist already threatened your daughter and daughter’s close friend.
The point is that he didn’t leave because their morals were incompatible, he left because things got bad enough that the lives of his daughter and her friends were threatened.
I mean that’s a pretty big example of their morals being incompatible. That Carol would rather her daughter be dead than friends with a gay person or at least willing to risk kidnapping her to brainwash her.
I would argue that IS their morals being incompatible. They just never had a situation that brought that incompatibility to light until then.
Well yea, the fundieism runs deep
Speaking from experience, very few marriages last after one of the spouses throws their lot in with a group that tries to kidnap any of the children. Like, at the very least one party moves very far away and only visits once or twice a month for brunch dates.
But of course they would still be together lol. Part of why Joyce and Joe bonded and why she was so rattled before everything happened was that her parents had been happily in love with each other all her life.
I’ll just note that it’s extremely unlikely that Carol and Hank were In Love, more that they felt they had compatible views and marriage is a sacred ceremony. Hank was known to do a lot of noting certain features of women while they were out, if I remember right – not that this means they weren’t in love, but more that they never seemed particularly close, and neither of them seem to actually miss *each other* after their divorce.
We’ve barely seen either of them since the divorce and only in public spaces where they had other things to deal with.
I don’t remember Hank really noticing other women?
The only thing I can remember is his comment on the bear with the great rack that Galasso’s replaced. There was a bonus strip that showed Hank and Carol first meeting when they were in college, and he seemed pretty taken with her right away.
And that comment about the Bear seemed more nostalgic than anything else. A college days story.
Shout out to becky for enduring this to help out friends who just really hurt her. She may be hurt but she’s still being a good sister to her bestie
Part of what makes me want Bulmeria to be divorced from existing issues is I’d love to be able to make jokes about the fictional nation but Hank’s opinion reflecting the RL disaster is just…sad. He thinks they’re a bunch of terrorists supported by the Soviet Union when the Russians are probably funding Hank’s favorite politicians these days.
You don’t have to make jokes about every strip. Some subjects are more serious and probably should be treated in a more serious way.
Humor is my way to escape life so I suppose I’m a bit like Walkerton.
Don’t worry, modern conservatives love Russia these days, who they hate are the communist Chinese/North Koreans/I guess Palestine is communist to them now?
I say queer because I’m a trans woman and “LGBTQ2SIA+” is a mouthful
You say queer because your language around this stuff is from homophobic pastors in the 50s
We are not the same
100%
Verrrry good point.
So does this mean Hank has seen the same photo everyone else has? And managed not to notice anything notable other than his middle child being present? Because if so, that inability of a conservative mind to recognize queerness is so true to life that I adore seeing it here.
Hank saw a different picture that he texted Joyce before she and Dorothy went to the protest, that’s the reason they went in the first place.
Yes, Jocelyn came to reveal she’d joined the Bulmerian Communist Liberation Front. The trans thing was secondary. She’s going off to fight in the war afterward for the cause of EVIL free medicine, food, and housing.
here’s a link
Thanks! I’d completely forgotten about that!
dunno if it’s a stylistic choice but interesting it seems to be black and white, i guess she could be covering some pink colors or so with a coat or so but i guess hairstyle wise it hasn’t grown too long
…I can fix him.
I could make him worse!
I can alter him in a morally in neutral way.
I can turn him into a newt!
Well, if that’s what it takes for him to get better, I approve.
Yes, but they always revert back to human if they survive being a newt. Hardly seems worth the effort.
Years ago, there was some stuff that came out about a local City official posting homophobic stuff on Facebook, including posts referring to “queers,” and then (part of) her defense was “they call themselves queer.” This whole thing was extra frustrating to me because, at 17, I had just started to identify with the term “queer” after going to an LGBTQIA+ summer camp. And then it being treated as something ugly back home.
So, yeah, depends on how you say it!
Also, thanks for the birthday wishes yesterday!
Oh I missed out! Happy belated birthday 🙂
honestly, i respect this fella thus far. there’s so much he doesn’t know but it’s clear he has the capacity to at least understand stuff and accept that it’s real :T
I am so hopeful for Hank. His world and understanding is changing so much. It’s a lot to adjust to on the fly and over time. I’m frustrated at the tendency to write him off as Hopelessly Clueless Bad Person. Oh, he doesn’t immediately accept all these things? Cut him off!
But in real life, people can learn and adjust attitudes (e.g. my parents). In the real life, some people are too exhausting to educate (my in-laws)
I hope when Hank actually finds out why “Joshua” has been cagey lately, he tries to learn and understand her and why she’s not been telling her dad about stuff. He seemed to be trying to understand these things last couple times we saw him in DoA.
No hank. You definitely do not have the pass.
I hold out hope that Hank knows that Jocelyn is trans but assumed they were straight and liked men because he binged a bunch of research. He’ll be shocked she’s bisexual and likes women.
But is still mostly worried about their bulmerian beliefs that Dorothy, Joyce, and everyone else are so divided on.
Did anyone else start reading him as Hank Hill in the last panel? Just something about “So he’s not queer or whatever, he’s just communist” sounded very Hank Hill to me.
Holy hamburger, you’re right; I just re-read this whole strip with Hank Hill’s voice for Hank and it makes SO MUCH SENSE
anyway I will now be reading all of Hank’s dialogue in Hank Hill’s voice in past and future strips; thanks
Seriously, I want to go back and re-read all of his dialog as Hank Hill
Good analogue, frankly. Hank Hill is also very much a “he’s a lil confused but he’s got the spirit” type these days. It took work to get him there tho.
oof , this is rough/awkward
Okay, we’re eventually going to get some sort of explanation as to how he looked right past Joyce and Dorothy and focused on Jocelyne, right?
RIGHT?
Previous day’s paper. He’s not up to speed yet.
Today’s headline is a ticking time bomb.
Dad, you are technically not incorrect!
Becky lives in genuine actual hell.
maybe controversial but i personally don’t like it when people who are cis and straight default to calling people queer instead of lgbt+ bc of the word’s history. esp if they’re using it as a noun. i don’t think it’s more inclusive of trans people even, bc in my experience people just use it as a synonym for not straight. and straight trans people exist and could id as queer but its so often phrased like “queer or trans”, if that makes sense. i know some like to be called that, which is fine, i just personally am uncomfortable with some uses of the term.
I’m sending you to prison for having thoughts
Thing is, as an umbrella term ‘Queer’ is a hecka lot easier and quicker to say out loud then ‘lgbt+’ is, and is in the position of being seen by most people as reclaimed by the community.
I’ll be real, Hank is definitely not using it the right way here, but he also isn’t meaning to be overtly malicious about it. His basis for reference of the term queer is derogatory and disparaging of the whole umbrella, but he is unlearning that. The next step of allyship would indeed be using the acronym over the reclaimed slur, but I think he is really just starting down that road (if he chooses to continue walking it, of course.)
*singing* …Startin’ down the road to allyship…🎶
All the words for LGBT+ people have history. “Gay” has been used as a slur at least as much as queer.
It’s also definitely more inclusive of trans people, if only because Terfs/GCs have taken to opposing “queer” as slur, because they want to exclude the “bad” trans people from the “good” gays and lesbians
This.
I know some people have legitimate trauma around the word but I have legitimate trauma around “lesbian”, and I’m sure as heck not going around telling people not to use that word for other people. I am instead working on unpacking it and desensitizing myself, because it’s an important identity for other people, and I want to stop flinching when I hear it out loud.
gay means “happy”, not “weird”, at least. and in my experience as a nonbinary person, i’ve both seen it used in cis centric ways and used by “gay not queer” terfs; it’s a complicated matter. i definitely don’t want anyone to feel bad for liking the word for themself ofc! i even like it as in “genderqueer.” i just personally feel uncomfortable with it in many but not all contexts and know some who feel similar, i hope that makes sense.
1.) That is not what the word meant when it was being applied to us; it meant “slutty” and “immoral”. Scroll down to the 1890s portion.
2.) There was a whole campaign in the late 2000s that was BEGGING people to stop using the word gay as a synonym for bad and shitty.
So again: literally true of all our words.
Having seen Soviet artwork, there is nothing they love more than ripping off their shirt and flexing. So masculine but in a not gay way guys like for real.
They also loved hating the gays.
I mean, still do, at least part of the last decade or two of tensions between Russia and the West has been founded on growing LGBTQIA+ acceptance in the West.
I’m not sure how much that’s true. A good part of the Western right wing liking Russia comes from them sharing a hatred for queer people though.
“Look, son, I don’t care if you like dicks or not, I just want to make sure you’re not some sort of communist.”
“Actually… pstpstpst…”
“Oh, so sorry. As I was saying, no daughter of mine is going to throw her lot in with these…. socialists!”
“Hey, dad, is it OK if I make out with Dorothy for a bit while you and Joss chat?”
“Is she an anti-war hippie?”
“Not… technically?”
“Fine, fine, whatever.”
That would be hilarious and now I hope it’s the case just for how confused everybody else would be
Becky murdering Hank would be so funny right now. Like “Problem solved, Joyce!” and they all go to class.
Amazi-girl could help them dispose of the body.
Assuming she’s recovered enough from the beating/shooting she got at the protest.
I’m not even getting a lot of judgment from Hank here – he just wants to know why his eldest child has felt distant for a while and is looking for answers and finding some pretty good ones for why his child might have pulled away. Being queer and/or left-leaning are both things that make a lot of sense for why they’d pull away from the family that technically helped fund Becky’s homophobic dad, after all. I don’t think he’s upset so much as trying to understand and figure out how to get his kid to talk to him normally again, and Joyce dodging and avoiding him as well makes him even more concerned.
Considering he went through a whole divorce to side with Joyce and Becky over Carol, I genuinely do think he’s just trying his best to hold onto them and understand them better, but he does have a lot of work ahead of him before he can fully understand. I’m glad he’s making the attempt, though, even if he’s still at the stage of figuring out which words in his vocabulary are normal, non-fundie words to use and which ones will actually hurt the people he cares about. Him checking in about queer is a great sign, and definitely makes me think he’s not trying to use it an an insult towards Jocelyne here at all. If Jocelyne confirms to him that she is queer, I think he’ll try his best to understand, even if he’ll probably take a while to fully adjust and use the right words without messing it up a little along the way. I mean, we can tell pretty well just from this strip where Joyce gets it from, after all.
Is Jocelyn the oldest? I thought they had another older brother.
John is the oldest.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/trendy/ Just in case anyone needs a reminder of what kind of person John is. He’s a real treat.
Brown siblings in birth order:
John
Jocelyne
Jordan
Joyce
High concern for his children. He wants to go find out. Go, Hank!
I blame the chemicals in the water myself
I heard it’s trendy to blame tylenol right now
Is it in the water?
People frequently wash it down with water.
Personally, I like to heat the water and filter it through crushed beans first.
It will be when I’m done with the place.
Becky doing the hard carry here, absolute MVP
Becky is absolutely being the MVP here. And Mr B knows she’s not straight laced (see), and so he assumes she’s a good person to ask about these things. He trusts her to give him the not so straight dope. He’s trying. Becky meanwhile is juggling all the things.
Awww, he is trying.
Hank is adorable!
“I don’t care if you’re trans, but a fu*king commie, really ?” — Hank probably
My mom shares that sentiment, somehow.
For my birthday I get Hank trying his best. I’ll take it.
It makes me think of one of the slogans of Reed College: “Communism, Atheism, Free Love”. That’s three things.
Maybe it’s just the art style evolving but does Hank look older? Like the divorce really did a number on him, but it’s low key working?
He got an extra line on his neck defining his Adam’s apple, that’s about it.
He does look great though
Yes. Plus, he’s wearing glasses now.
I think the art upgrade over the years kinda makes him look older, he always was pretty thin and haggard because Joyce was the last child and she’s 18. Hank has to be pretty up there with Carol.
Naah, not a communist. Joycelyn wants to prevent genocide, not cause it.
All political positions that want workers to own the means of production are communist, not just the authoritarian ones.
I mean, nothing stops workers from getting together, pooling their money, starting a business and sharing the profits amongst themselves in capitalism.
Wow okay I see I wasted my breath replying to you earlier, feel free to disregard lol
For reference, I’m from Poland so my idea of Communism is more… personal you’d say?
On the topic of gays and Communism from the other reply. Look up Operation Hyacinth
Where in Poland, out of curiosity? My ancestors on one side fled what would become Slovakia from what we think MIGHT have been somewhere near Zilina (small town names being pretty malleable there this century) right before World War I.
Oh that’s not far from Polish southern border. I’m more from the Eastern side of Poland.
Capitalist countries have also been responsible for many genocides. One might even say most genocides!
I just do not think this is a distinguishing feature of either economic system.
Because Communism is not an Economic system, it’s a whole System that controls all aspects of human life.
And yeah Capitalist systems did but that was more out of malice/greed of the government rather than stupidity and incompetence like in the case of Russia or China. Look up the War on Sparrows or Lysenkoism.
I’m sorry, I just do not agree.
I am also sorry for how you have personally suffered. That’s terrible. And I have sympathy for how seeing young online leftists self-describe as communist when what they mean is something more like “utopian-ist” must be very frustrating.
I am still not going to cede that every person who self-describes as communist must be a proponent of genocide, which is what you argued above when you said Jocelyne can’t be one because she’s anti-genocide. I just think that’s a very unproductive way of approaching the real world, where you know perfectly well that none of the leftists who say they’re anti-capitalist mean they’re in favor of bloody dictatorships.
And it’s especially frustrating when, you know, I am in real time living through my own country potentially becoming a bloody dictatorship while still being extremely capitalist.
(And also, part of how the party that’s turning us into a bloody dictatorship was very much them fearmongering all the time about socialism and communism and “”””cultural Marxism””””.)
Yeah you have my condolences as well regarding what the Annoying Orange is up to.
The sad thing is that while Communists might have good intentions there is no way to introduce this system Without forcing it and that always uplifts the most terrifying of people while the idealists get purged.
Thank you.
I genuinely think that’s just too dim a view of human nature for me to subscribe to. (By which I mean not that it’s a foolish view, but a dark view.) I also feel like you could say the same thing about monarchism, if you limited your sample size to certain revolutions that went really badly, like a few in France and a few in Russia. There have been periods throughout history where it would make complete sense to say “monarchism is the worst system in the world, except for all the other ones we’ve tried,” the same way that sometimes gets said about capitalism.
We haven’t had a country that called itself communist and succeeded in living up to the ideals yet, but I don’t think that means it’s necessarily impossible that one ever will. I think so far the evidence suggests that it’s much easier to get to a capitalist society with stronger workers’ rights and certain tenets of socialism implemented (like universal healthcare), but that eventually those societies could certainly take it further?
But, you know. I’m talking about whether or not I think it’s ever possible for us to reach the future posited in specifically Star Trek: The Next Generation. And I think that, even if we don’t get there in the next thousand years, it’s important to, at the very least, believe that it’s possible to get somewhere better than we are right now.
And there is very much a limit on how far we can get via capitalism, so it’s gonna have to be something else, even if that something else is something no one’s come up with yet.
(Side note: I’m so incredibly tired of post-TNG Star Trek going “but what if humanity still fundamentally sucks”. You fucked up my perfectly good monkey and now it’s got anxiety, Nu Trek writers.)
Distrust makes sense, but I think Hank is showing some green flags here.
He’s already noticed Jocelyne’s queerness in some capacity and was giving her space to figure it out. He’s not making the situation about himself or how he feels. He’s actively trying not to offend Becky and asking questions so he can learn how to avoid doing so in the future (which is basic decency but we were expecting much worse). He rushed down to the school to address Jocelyne’s radical communism™, something he would not have done if he thought she was just gay and not hurting anybody. Plus, his intent in rushing to the school seems to be to have a serious in-person conversation, not to threaten Jocelyne with violence or financial harm etc. I can be mad that his politics are wrong, but he hasn’t actually behaved badly here. His actions so far are pretty fair given his perspective.
Don’t wanna be too defensive of him cause of, you know, all of the harm. But also this guy feels like he’s one or two good heart-to-heart/ultimatums away from showing up in an “I love my trans daughter” t-shirt. Or rather he seems to come from a place of care and concern rather than authority and entitlement. Plus he seems flexible enough that if Jocelyne has something to say, he will probably hear her out.
Anyway, just noting that his vibe is very different from Carol who is rightfully getting tossed in the no-contact dumpster.
Yeah agreed. We already know he can come around on stuff.
Agreed. I’m not giving Hank a free pass entirely, but… he would have grown up in the generation with the Red Scares, McCarthyism, and the looming threat of the Cold War when Mutually Assured Destruction was a very real and present danger. It can be hard to shake off the kinds of deeply ingrained “So-and-so is The Enemy” indoctrination if you’ve seen it firsthand, especially if you suffered under it. I’m reminded of my grandmother, who lived through the Japanese occupation of Singapore and saw firsthand the atrocities the IJA perpetrated on POWs and the civilian population. She has never, ever forgiven the Japanese people until the day she died, and although she’s wrong to see all Japanese with the same brush, I also can’t really blame her.
Wasn’t MaCarthyism the 50s? If Hank is 60 (which, honestly, seems too old?) he’d be born in 60 and would have had his formative teen years in the 70s. Hell, if he’s in his 50s then he was a teen in the 80s. That’s well past taking Red Menace stuff seriously.
I can only assume from the generalisations of this comment that you’re fairly young, or from a different country from the US? I’m nearly 40 and raised in a staunchly left wing household, and communism was -still- a dirty word in the 80s and 90s. Remember that the cold war lasted until the mid-80s, that pol pot was in power for the latter half of the seventies, that the viet Cong were communists trying to “liberate” vietnam, and that China and North Korea have been self-proclaimed communist for the entirety of Hank’s likely frame of political awareness. Even if none of these events had happened outside of McCarthyism, Hank is likely to have come from similarly conservative Christian parents and will have been raised with McCarthyist values and perspective on political ideologies.
I’m also 40 and grew up in Australia. All that Red Scare, evil commies thing was not a thing here, that was just nonsense in American movies and shows.
Yeah, the Cold War didn’t die until the USSR did in 1991. And while the excesses of McCarthyism were generally mocked, there was still enough anti-communist (and generally anti-Russian) sentiment that I really worried my Air Force recruiter in ’86 when I told him I was born in Moscow. (Moscow, ID, but still Moscow, right?) Of course, it probably didn’t help when he asked if I’d ever been a member of the Communist Party and I responded, “Nyet, tovarisch.”
Indeed, Hank was almost certainly “formed,” so to speak, in a world essentially without communism, with only Cuba and North Korea really carrying it on (with varying degrees of success).
Which might explain why he wouldn’t really have any conception of communism beyond being a funny noise that Fox News pundits make to indicate that they don’t like something: Once communism ceased being an actual thing in the actual world, then anything could safely be called “communism.”
“Formed” is a strong term here. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. If Hank is 60, as I believe we’ve been told, he would have been 26 in 1991.
You can of course argue that by the end the Soviet Union wasn’t really communist (or that it never really was, I suppose), but it was the prime representation of Communism to the rest of the world even so.
Floating timeline. DoA started in 2010; a 60 year old then would have been born in 1950, and adolescent during the Vietnam War and China’s Cultural Revolution. In his 30s for Reagan’s presidency.
Just to add that I hadn’t read the reply you were replying to after I sent this, so my context is slightly different but I still stand by that Hank can absolutely be consumed by red scare rhetoric without having been an older child our young adult during the beginning of McCarthyism. Keep in mind John Lennon was surveiller in the 70s by the FBI for supposed communist sympathies and opposition to the Vietnam war.
Hi, if he’s 60 in the current timeliness, that’s more 1965. That’s the atomic fears. The movie The Day After traumatized a bunch of us. So less commie-takeover fears and more bombed-back-into-atoms fears.
McCarthyism was in the ’50s, but the Cold War was at one of its most intense points in the early ’80s. Reagan was elected partly on a platform of anti-Communism and called the USSR “an evil empire.” Hollywood was turning out stuff like Red Dawn and that Rambo movie where he goes to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen against the Soviets. We probably came closer to nuclear war in 1983 than any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis and a lot of people thought WWIII was inevitable. Things didn’t start to relax again until Gorbachev took power in 1985 and especially after Chernobyl in 1986.
We can reflect on how George Takei was a small child during the Japanese internment and has campaigned tirelessly for awareness of how wrong this sort of treatment is since the establishment of the “kids in cages” in the mid-2010s. Hank is definitely not from the 50s due to the sliding scale, though we can reasonably assume that his character was made to be born somewhere in the 40s to 50s due to his character originally appearing in roomies over 20 years ago, when he would’ve more reasonably represented college-going Willis’s own father.
Hank is, at best, the babiest of Baby Boomer and is very likely an elder Gen Xer.
Isn’t Carol like 60?
Being 60 would make Carol born in ’65, exactly one year after the common cut off point for Baby Boomers of ’64.
Carol is Gen X
Hank not from the 50’s
He may have had generational contact, as I did, that made him aware of and affected by the political frames of previous decades. The Great Depression, WW II, and the ’50’s were etched into my young mind by the books in our house, and the people in our family.
I grew up in the cold war (60’s) and firmly did and still do regard the Russians as enemies. But it always bothered me that people use ‘communist’ as a warning or insult without understanding the first thing about it. Or to distinguish it from Democratic Socialism. Or to recognize that Russia’s major problem had been Stalinism. Political threads get woven into the reality of a country.
And of course I didn’t relish an atomic attack. When I was a kid, you couldn’t eat snow because of radionucleotides from atmospheric tests.
I agree with your assessment for the most part, I will just caveat that Hank is going through a lot right now and part of his reaction to this will depend on whatever support network or coping system he has in place to deal with the fallout with the church, divorce, loss of friends, child kidnapped by his church with full knowledge and permission of his wife, etc.
What I mean by that is he could slide further right as a means of shoring up parts of his identity, similarly to how Becky still clings really hard to Christianity, despite the extent of the damage the church she was raised in has caused her directly.
Yeah, that’s a really good point. Seeing it from outside his daughters’ perspectives, Hank’s actually in a pretty vulnerable position right now. I think there’s signals pointing towards him improving in the future, but he could very easily go either way.
Ok I am actively confused about what he’s saying.
He saw Jocelyn at the protest? Presenting as a female?
And he thinks she is a Not Queer Communist Man instead?
I mean what?
Are we sure he’s talking about the right son/ child?
Was Jordan there too?
Does he think all communists wear Dresses. Was she wearing a hammer and sickle poncho?
For the protest, he’s talking about this image: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/pervasively/ Jocelyne is presenting ambiguously, and Hank has not picked up/realized that Jocelyne is a woman. What he’s saying is that ever since Jocelyne started to get more distant, he has wondered if Jocelyne was “gay”, citing that Jocelyne was never a very masculine child (basically basing his assumption off of stereotypes about gay men), and then he’s concluding that Jocelyne didn’t distance from him because of being “gay”, but seemingly because of being a communist.
Maybe we’ve red this wrong and Hank is a communist Bulmeria spy.
It’s gonna get awkward when Joycelyne is the secret homeland security agent and she has to arrest her own dad
I thought we as readers were supposed to notice a narrower jawline and read into the images months of effects on srs.
Thx for image
Yes, Jocelyne definitely has details such as a narrowed jawline, narrow wrists, and perhaps even a hint of a bust, but that’s the difference between we as the readers vs Hank as a character in the comic. Along with the picture not being the most clear, Hank’s first thought on seeing a more narrow jawline would probably be less “I see, my child is trans” and more “that kid needs to eat more food”.
Jocelyne was wearing pants and a coat at the protest: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/riotpolice/
But super communist pants? Red field gold ⭐?
Well, the good news is that he’s not being actively hostile and does appear to genuinely be making an effort – and despite having a ways to go, this does go a long way towards assuring me that he’ll get there. In time.
But it’s all going to come down to him getting the story straight and seeing how his prejudices have been affecting – and are continuing to affect – his immediate family. Joyce feeling that she needed to hide the fact that she’s on birth control (even given the fact that she’s on them not because of sexual proclivity but because of her severe periods) and the fact that she’s just started a relationship with Dorothy, Jocelyne hiding the fact that she’s transgender and is primarily interested in guys, not to mention feeling she had to hide the fact that she was coming to the protest from him. It’s all piling up – and all because his children don’t feel like they can trust him with this information. That they feel like they’ll lose quite a lot if he finds out.
To be fair, Joyce and Becky have VERY good reason to think that. Not from Hank directly (though we are still seeing some good reason why even he isn’t as accepting as would be ideal), but from his association with the church that actively condoned and supported someone that was actively kidnapping his own daughter to send her to a conversion camp against her will. That would cast quite a pall over everything, and it makes sense why they would try keeping Hank in the dark like that.
But he needs to learn about all of this stuff, and they can’t hide all this from him forever – and there’s going to be plenty of drama from this story just being a multiple coming out story. I truly hope that we subvert expectations here and Hank comes out with some more understanding. Not perfect, no – but enough to accept that this is who his kids are, and be willing to make an effort to be supportive of them.
Hank asking “can I say ‘queer’?” reminds me of Joyce doing similar check-ins. Like when she broke up with Ethan. Still cringeworthy at the time, no doubt, and yet it really is a small indication of trying to grow beyond their previous programming.
Yup, that’s the comparison I keep making and thinking of. The main difference, besides gender roles, is that Hank’s had another 20-30 years immersed in that culture. He’s got a deeper well/steeper hill to climb.
lol New Dorothy Project Incoming.
Operation: Fix your dad’s politics via compassionate but spirited and challenging e-mail correspondence
My prediction and hope for this Hank showed up development is that Joyce will intentionally out herself in an attempt to protect Jocelyne who will then out herself as well intentionally or accidentally whichever is funnier at the same time.
Oh, yeah, total far lefty in handedness, politics, XOR sexuality. Can’t ever be two or more of those at the same time; nope; only ONE of those. That’s just how it is. Humans like to keep identity simple, yessir, totally, absolootly that’s it.
Cagey?
baaawk bawk bawk bawk bawk
No queer person has ever been a commie.
lmfao. Hank. He’s trying. Not really succeeding (yet) but he’s trying!! He will get there, I believe in him!!
In earnestness, I have a couple of friends who are trans and/or gay with parents who were very conservative as they were raising them. But are now really supportive and have changed their politics, because at the end of the day they loved their kids enough to do what was right. I know this isn’t the case for a lot of people, but Hank strikes me as that type of guy and I hope I’m right.
My partner has really forced my parents through this, but continues to be the favorite something-in-law since their transition to enby.
Mom does forget pronouns sometimes, but frankly mom stumbles on MY name sometimes, age is unkind.
One key question here. Is Hank there because they were worried about their child’s safety at the protest? Or because Hank was upset they were protesting?
Based on my own very religious and very Republican mother, it can EASILY be both, but it’ll only verbally come out as the latter. “How could you be out there supporting those hooligans? You could have been SHOT or ARRESTED.”
to be worried about Jocelyne’s safety, he’d have to admit that protesting is not a right of the american citizen and that police will violently oppose anyone attempting to do that. Given he thinks being anti-genocide makes you a terrorist and a communist, he’s just mad, not concerned.
Huh, so he DOESN’T know. Gonna be honest, I was firmly in the camp that Joss had come out to him and it went bad, not “he was sorta sniffing at the trail but hadn’t confronted her”.
I’m afraid Hank IS falling for that old classic “Gay? OK! (Unless you are MY boy!) trap. My own dad was FINE with queer folk his whole life until his nephew son turned out to be a very feminine-presenting gay man. From then on, he was afraid I might turn out the same, and became quite anti-gay for years and years. (Joke is on him, he was only half right, as it DID turn out that I am low-key bi.)
As in the tale of the Fisher King, it is a matter of asking the right question. Someone should ask Hank, “Why does your child not trust you with the truth?”
The answer is often very revealing. Parents, especially those of bigoted backgrounds, often assume that their child is not entitled to a private life. They believe they are entitled to know everything. This continues into adulthood.
Can someone explain to me what he means in panel 2 with the whole parentheses. (Saying this out loud) What is that????
He’s speaking under his breath there
Pretty sure the implication is he’s commenting to himself basically “gosh, it feels weird saying this out loud instead of just thinking it.”
Yeah, gotta be this.
This. It’s like “okay saying this out loud for the first time”.
Fundies don’t like to verbalise the possibility that one of their children might be LBGTQ+, because when you’re fueled by belief, and that belief is largely stuff people made up out of whole cloth rather than anything in the Bible, you’re very open to the possibility that saying something makes it true.
Hank is both struggling with that and coming to terms with the possibility that maybe Joss being queer wouldn’t be terrible, or at least that it would be rude to say so in front of Becky.
Idk everyone else’s read today (don’t feel like scrolling through lots of comments), but “everything sadly started to click” sounds to ME like he’d prefer her being queer to being a communist. So that’s. Nice? The thing he has more experience with (via Becky) and has had more time to think about (because of his suspicions) isn’t crazy scary to him any more.
It’s a shame he’s had to live in unjustified fear his entire life. He could have actually been experiencing life, instead.
Becky is a champion. She deserves a medal for taking this on.
Wait until Hank learns it can be THREE things!
Love, a queer Communist ATHEIST
Going to need at least one more (and the free space) to get a bingo, though.
Trans queer communist atheist.
Hank! You’re like, one of the handful of parents we like, I know you can be better than this.
Also love how he did check about queer(also Becky’s 100% accurate response)
IMO: he can, but it’s gonna take him some time to get there.
Ah yes, the ol’ “being polite to your bigoted relatives because you have to” dance.
On the bright side, he’s not belligerent.
My continued hope is that this indicates he can be taught, much like his treatment of Becky has thus far seemed to demonstrate.
Yeah he seems to also be in the mindset that being polite to relatives is the more important thing. Everyone’s coming at this in good faith, so far. Great starting point.
I guess this means the Rapture didn’t happen in DoA because Becky’s the only character who’d be affected.
I like to think Hank said “Saying this out loud” out loud in the second panel.
I assume he did, otherwise it wouldn’t be part of his speech bubble.
He’s bigot but he’s at least kind of trying.
fingers crossed that he can figure out how to overcome his predjudices for the sake of his daughters.
My thoughts exactly.
Trying counts for a lot. At least in this era of so much hostility.
These comments are weird. I don’t understand how you can read this as “Hank came over here because he’s freaking out that his son is gay”? He was pretty clearly chill enough with the idea of Joss being a gay man that he was willing to give her space, and only intervened when it turned out she held political beliefs that were opposed to his?
Not being ready to force a confrontation isn’t necessarily “chill”. Especially when it’s just suspicions he hasn’t even said out loud before. Even the “just” a communist bit implies to me that’s not as bad.
Isn’t even necessarily intervening, he could just be worried about what might have happened to Jocelyn at the *dangerous political rally where people were hurt and arrested.*
even though she annoys me at times as anyone her age going thru her age-appropriate things would, i love how smart & brave becky is UGH . !!! knowing that joyce & dorothy are NOT equipped to maintain jocelyn’s privacy/safety in the event of a surprise hank visit, and jumping in to navigate that (even though queer parental approval is a veryyyyy personal subject to her) immediately after having a deep part of her heart crushed, even if unintentionally, by joyce & dorothy… becky ur strengths will carve out a wonderful future for u :-]
Maybe my bar is super low right now but I really appreciate that Hank said suspect rather than worry.
man the misgendering of Jocelyn got me wishing death upon that man.
I get it, I really do – but the longer this goes on the more I’m convinced that he doesn’t actually know that Jocelyn is trans. Heck, he all but confirms it here, where he says that he suspected she is gay (which, from what he knows, is technically true – but actually only kinda). I mean, it’s still possible that she came out to him and he hard rejected that (hence why she said she had something to tell Joyce before Joyce heard it from Hank) – but based on todays strip, I think that’s rather less likely than I did in previous updates.
He absolutely *does not know*, I genuinely don’t know how anybody who is paying *any* attention to the story thinks that he is doing this maliciously.
HE DOESN’T F—IN KNOW, PEOPLE. YOU CAN’T HOLD MISGENDERING AGAINST SOMEBODY WHEN THEIR KID IS IN THE F—IN’ CLOSET.
I mean, maybe when he finds out, he won’t be cool about it! That’s very possible, because he IS still very right-wing and has been in that media bubble for a long time.
But he has to *find out* before he even has a chance to disappoint us on that issue.
He’s not misgendering her maliciously, but on the other hand, it’s not like his past character and actions aren’t the reason Jocelyne hasn’t come out to him. The reason it’s not safe for her to come out to him.
Sure, and I’m not saying she’s wrong for that. I am specifically addressing the people in the comments that keep insisting that he’s already in the wrong for misgendering somebody who hasn’t come out to him. He doesn’t have a choice, nobody’s told him Jocelyn is a girl.
And I’m just adding the follow up that it’s his own fault no one has told him.
aah, so the “grumble” thing is from family, rigth?
In this era of vice signaling, where the President directly states over and over that he only values anyone as long as serve his desires, family included, and other people imitate him, it’s easy to forget that evil people can be genial, self-aware, can genuinely love their family while hurting them.
It used to be more common than the vice signallers – maybe still is, in fact. Works a lot better if you’re not a billionaire with toadies. Hence all the old complaints about how unrealistic comic-style supervillains were.