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Who should be the default doodle for Book 14?
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preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 10h
David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 1d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
wish MY roommates would’ve had the consideration to drop the pretenses that quickly
or at least PAID me to (badly) forge their documents as promised
[ahahaha my sweet revenge when that one got caught… look, I followed the instructions to the letter to the best of my ability, not my fault the plan was trash]
Oh my, there is a story here. You probably can’t tell it because legal reasons, but that’s okay because we can fill in the blanks with something maybe half as good as what actually happened.
You can tell us. There’s nobody here but the Internet.
Roommate wanted to fake to the parents having been accepted to a program after basically flunking out, nbd ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[sigh]
lying as a problem-solving tool.
That always works.
I told my parents I graduated a year before I actually did (I still had one English course to finish). Luckily — or maybe they knew me too well, and anyway I was putting myself through college at that point — at any rate, they never asked to see the diploma.
So I guess lying really did work that time. But it helped that there was nothing really on the line.
Always was a bit of sunshine wasn’t she.
Not defending Ruth’s attitude but the aforementioned trauma plus living with her equally ray-of-sunshine grandfather certainly didn’t help.
Honestly, the way she describes it, she sounds like a pretty easy roommate. Worst is having to put up with yelling during Hockey season.
That does sound pretty bad.
Also I had a roommate who barely spoke to me for a year; it wasn’t particularly pleasant.
Oh god, someone help, I can’t stop the bleeding, there’s just TOO MUCH EDGE.
Can we save it for when someone actually edgy comes along?
There seems to be a confusion there between snark and edgyness.
Edgy is when you act “dark” or “cool” to the point where it becomes cringey.
Not when you’re snappish and happen to be covering bleak topics.
Well, to put it in more detail: Originally, edgy meant “at the edge of [eg, of fashion]; avant-garde”. Then, people tried too hard to be edgy, and edgy became associated with.. well, the hipster approach to edgy. A lot of fakeness, a lot of absurdity, a lot of cringe.
So, basically, if someone isn’t acting like a hipster (or, more appropriately, a hipster variation of a goth [See: Emo] ), then “edgy” just wouldn’t apply. Moreover, “edge” has an association with “Look at how badass this thing I’m doing is”, so you’re not going to see it associated with hipsters or cringey rich-person attitudes or the like, either.
Which makes sense- you could cut an artery and shower strangers in a restaurant while quoting bad poetry, and I’m sure the sprayed individuals would be less cringed out than if they had to deal with a nose-in-the-air sort [like a Hipster]. So y’know, edgy people don’t deserve to be confused with those other sorts.
These days, Emos and Chunnis are [to my experiences] usually where you see the most “edge” associations. Just think of it as someone trying too hard to be cool in just about the most baffling, out-of-touch way possible, and you should have the right idea.
Or these days, edgy just means using decades old racial and misogynist stereotypes and pretending that’s somehow daring and cool.
Fair point.
The edginess I’ve heard all my life predates emos, goths, and whatnot, though maybe not beatniks. It refers to being on the edge of what’s acceptable.
Too bad. It’s a buzzword, now. A four-letter shutdown used solely to diminish and dismiss. Those are the rules. That’s how language works, today.
Well. Aren’t you edgy.
See, this one gets it.
Except when it’s used to boast about unconventional and un-PC you are. Which is what leads to it being used to diminish and dismiss. Every edgelord I’ve seen proclaim his edginess has turned out to be a sexist and most often racist jerk.
Except that Ruth is absolutely being edgy here, in the purest sense of its more modern connotation, and your dismissal of it as applicable to absolutely anything merely because its meaning has changed over time doesn’t change that. There’s nothing “snarky,” for example, about trying to shut down any and all social interaction with a person you just met – in front of their family, mind you – in the most obnoxious conceivable way, with the most glowering possible face. She’s got a good reason not to be sociable, but this? She’s behaving like a caricature of people who’ve actually gone through what she has.
Ruth’s being a cantankerous dick for absolutely no reason, immediately after demonstrating the active ability to be cordial, and that, my friend, is edgy. I don’t like Rachel, but attempting to defend *this* as a first interaction with anyone is a lost cause.
Well at least this is more accurate to what I expected from Ruth, although I don’t yet see how this leads to tragedy.
Given what we know…probably booze.
I actually doubt it. Rachel would, 100%, call campus on Ruth if she was obviously boozing and get her expelled. Unless there was emotional manipulation involved.
The read I got was just Rachel is kind of a crusader who wanted to denounce Ruth.
Could be she gets in a pattern of acting like this, tryign to get better, failing. Or she had another ‘bully someone you like’ thing and got away with it and so to Rachel it’s just that Ruth keeps doing the same bad things over and over.
Puh, she had me worried for a moment there.
Yup. This is the Ruth we know and love.
…know, at least
and have feelings about.
*speaks to intercom* Stand down, stand down. Not a doppelganger after all. I repeat, not a doppelganger.
*plays Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans” on the hacked Muzak*
*Sings it to the tune of “We’re the Kids of America” (whoa-oa)….*
That’s more like it
Ruth basically talking to the audience in panel 1: “Wouldn’t it be weird if I were happy and well-adjusted after dead parents and abusive grandparent?”
I feel that in my soul.
Ruth as a freshman: Surprisingly kind of an antisocial jerk?
Did you just start reading yesterday or something?
“Unsurprisingly kind of an antisocial jerk.” FTFY!
I was more surprised by how cheerful and friendly freshman Ruth was acting in yesterday’s strip. This is more like the Ruth I expected.
I can just see Willis chortling: “Hey, hey. Remember that Mike flashback- huh, huh? Yeah, you remember it, right? Look, look, this is like that, right, right? YEAH, NO IT ISN’T. I FOOLED YOU. JAHAHAHA.”
That.. that’s a thing Willis does, y’know. True Story.
Hmm. I would say its exactly what he did with the Mike flashback; it was just much shorter.
Nah, Mike’s flashbacks were all about showing a kinder Mike and how the world let him down. It invoked some sympathetic responses in the comics. Ruth’s flashbacks are still at the post-world-let-me-down stage, with Ruth still as sandpaper-y as ever. The comments pretty much treat the flashback as a quick laugh.
Not quite exactly the same, I think.
I like it. “Leave me the fuck alone, and you get to pretend you have no roomie!”. How the fuck did she screw up such a great deal?! Probably by Ruth drinking… Yeah…
exactly, it sounds like the almost perfect roommate.
Lucy and freshman Ruth would have been perfect.
Lucy would have been dead within the week. All of it, up to the moment she died of lack of femurs spent trying to make friends with Ruth.
Now Malaya and Ruth would have been interesting. I can just hear Malaya making fun of Ruth for posing as depressed just to be interesting.
I want to apologize for my spoiler yesterday. I totally forgot it hadn’t been revealed here yet, only on Patreon.
Ah, so that’s how it was.
50 State Murder resort? Uh….I’m not following…..
she’s canadian & now she lives in america & she hates it
Thanks! I’d forgotten she was from Canada.
She grew up in Kaladar, Ontario, an unincorporated rural town. Grandpa Dickwad moved her and Howard to Carmel, Indiana, a wealthy suburb of Indianapolis.
Kaladar. I thought you were joshing there by doing some “this is actually a fantasy village and she’s the lone hero” thing. But there actually is a place with that name, and it isnt from a Robert Jordan book. Thats neat!
“and it isn’t from a Robert Jordan book” made my day
Apparently it’s pronounced Kale-adur, rather than Kal-adar.
Also:
Kaladar : township in Addington county, Ontario, erected
in 1820.
The origin of this name is uncertain. Some writers think the
word may be derived from an East Indian word, Killahdar or
Killedar, meaning “the Governor of a Fort”. Kalandar is a term
applied to a vagrant saint in India. There is a tradition in the
township that its name is a corruption of “kill a deer”.
Mind you I’m 40 minutes away, not a local, but I’ve never hear anyone say anything but “KAL-uh-dar.”
I’ll go off your accounting, then; I was basing that on a news article I found discussing the region, with the individual stating that they’d been saying it wrong all along and realized that after visiting and talking to the locals.
Compared to a random article, I’ll take a (semi)local’s viewpoint as being the more reliable source.
Here’s where Kaladar is mentioned in-strip.
Apparently Kaladar is the real-world foundation for the fictional city of Avalon, the site of Josh Phillips’s “Avalon High” webcomic. Avalon High and It’s Walky! were sort of webcomic littermates, and you’ll occasionally find Avalon High references sprinkled throughout the Willisverses.
The USA has 50 states and a lot of murder
I’m guessing it’s a reference to the number of mass shootings by various nutjobs in the US compared to Canada and just about any other civilized country in the world.
It’s 230 days into the year, we’ve had 320 mass shootings, and our political leaders are taking money from the gun lobby and blaming video games and a lack of compulsory religion in schools instead.
I question your use of the word “other”.
Perhaps “other” was referring to Canada.
Oh.
Okay, that makes sense. Objection withdrawn.
We’re up to 320? Damn, just a hundred more and we get the weed number. That’s not funny. People are getting shot left and right, and nobody is doing anything about it.
It’s alarming that it’s closer to the weed number than the sex number.
Most of the world is closer to the sex number.
Most of the world doesn’t have a specific “person” and cult leading their government.
Well, the ones that do at least have the dignity to have the military, secret police, or hit squads do the shootings, rather than outsourcing it to rednecks and the mentally ill. Saves on budget, I suppose, but seems a bit less beneficially focused.
Well, not like they’ve dragged anyone out of their homes in the middle of the night yet, either. Yet.
actually keeping ICE in mind, they already have.
During Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Era? I’m sure some of those “rednecks” did their share of yanking people out of their homes in the middle of the night and killing them.
“People are doing nothing about it”?
Thoughts and prayers count as doing something, right? Right?
Oh shit, I forgot about those. Of course those work, of course.
Amnesty International has issued a travel advisory about travelling to the US. :/
I’m sure the usual suspects are bleating about how that advisory is just exaggerated scaremongering.
OOF, well, these two will clearly end up BFF.
Let me some it up…
HAH!!
We now return to our regular comment section.
So if you could rewrite your comment, what would you change?
Oh, are you handing out change? Excellent, let me in on that. I mean, I was just thinking, “Hey, I wonder if anyone here has got any change to spare?”. Superb timing on your part, really.
I really love that eye twitch from Adinah in the last panel.
Seconded. A great little detail.
For a hot minute there I thought we were getting Mike 2: The Ruthening
I predict Ruth and Rachel will hide a body together by the end of their story together.
TRUE FRIENDSHIP!
I knew Ruth was snarky, but this is taking it to another level… o_0
It’s the depression talking tho.
It’s entirely possible even if she was able to enjoy life that she’d hate people.
I mean, have you MET people? They suck.
Ruth is being pretty fair, here. I bet if she had Dina as a roomie back then, things would have gone a lot more smoothly.
Now, let’s sit back and wait to see where it all went sour.
Damn! A bongX since the beginning
You’re being really unfair to Rachel, though. She’s just thrown off by Ruth’s sudden shift in demeanor.
I think this is a fair assessment of Ruth in a vacuum, and given this cold cynicism is Rachel’s first impression of her. We know Ruth’s mindset because we’re the all-seeing audience, but all Rachel has to go on is the last two comics.
Unfortunately, we already know first impressions are all that seem to matter to Rachel in the present. I bet she keeps extending olive branches over the course of their freshman year, but Ruth’s repeated rejection wears her down to that point.
I’m not sure 2 years of Ruth can really be written off as “first impressions”. More like “when someone shows you what they are, believe them.”
I was actually referring to Ruth in this situation
No, you weren’t.
Wow, I didn’t know you could read minds!
Shut up
You’re not my real dad, Sporky.
Are…. you kidding? Rude!
#pwned
Rachel’s mom makes me think of the characters from the French Il etait une fois animated franchise. Most of them were educational, presenting things like the history of humanity and how the body works. Il etait une fois…espace had some educational content, but was mostly a sci fi adventure series.
Crap, borked the tags.
So what happened to the roommate agreement? Did it just slide to the floor, limp and unsigned, after Ruth slapped it against Rachel?
Rachel absorbed it into her boob. That’s how she finally got them to be symmetrical.
…… that will make it awkward to submit to the RA.
Maybe for the RA, but Rachel is used to it by now.
At the time, the RA was the [current head of the school newspaper, forget her name]. She was entirely fine with having to work the information out from Rachel’s chest.
Daisy
Well that’s. Surprisingly honest? And I don’t think anyone would be a ball of sunshine after the death of both parents, which Ruth was immediately upfront about. A folding screen might’ve done both of them good.
I expect the booze to be one of the factors leading to Rachel hating Ruth so badly she’d stomp on her right out of suicide watch two years later.
Goddammit, Ruth! I know your grandpa is a sociopath, but why take out your frustrations on total strangers?! Don’t you know the strangers of today are the friends or enemies of tomorrow? It’s now wonder Rachel evolved into a jaded asshole that has no hope for other people and ignores your crying. Of course, Rachel is responsible too for perpetuating the vicious cycle of being a jerk to others she doesn’t know well yet.
I don’t think this is her taking out her frustrations, this is just straightforwardly going ‘I would rather not be friends with you, I’m mostly quiet and you can ignore me, but when hockey starts I will be loud and I am forewarning you’.
Straightforwardly in a somewhat aggressive way, though, and I don’t get a “doing it deliberately to make sure the point gets across” vibe from Ruth here so much as a “Christ, I suppose I have to put up with a person” one.
Of course, this does give some interesting extra flavor to Ruth’s first appearance and her emphasis on roommate agreements and how you’ll end up wanting to kill each other. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/agreements/
I’m predicting we’ll find out that the cause of this doesn’t actually have to do with booze, but probably because Rachel is very confrontational but not particularly good at it. Pushy too many buttons and something happens.
Like none of what we’ve seen of rachel has made me like her much.
I read it more as flat-toned rather than outright aggressive because her expression is more depression-tired than anything else to me here. I don’t see this as a particularly hostile interaction just not a particularly friendly one either because Ruth would rather disengage as soon as possible.
I think that this just reminds us how utterly Clint’s anger-transference to Ruth crushed and unbalanced her psyche.
Ruth, Rachel and Adinah. Is this this second all-freckle combo in DofA?
(See Ruth and Dorothy here http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/03-faz-is-great/but/ and in the one that follows.)
That hope was short-lived.
Ok, Ruth was extremely abrasive even before she got the job of RA and would definitely have preferred to live alone.
As it is unknown in Germany, what are the reasons doors rooms usually house two?
Americans are pathologically obsessed with forcing social interaction on everyone, regardless of whether you want it or not.
that checks out
Also cost. Doubling up means fewer rooms need to be built.
Oh, yeah. God forbid we spend too much money on anything education-adjacent.
Rooms in the US — dorm, hotel, you name it — are generally much bigger than their European counterparts. I’m pretty sure that the dorm room I shared as a freshman could easily have been split into two rooms, with an increase in privacy at no extra cost. Cost is often given as a justification, but I don’t think that holds up under scrutiny.
Not the ones I lived in. ~150 sq ft. Cut that in half and you’ve barely got space for a bed and a desk.
I think rooms in newer dorms tend to be larger, though.
Sounds like my dorm
I never understood it either, and I’m an American. I got along ok with my roommates in my first two years of college, but they were both massive slobs while I’m a neat freak, so I was glad I managed to get single rooms in my last two years of college.
Simple! More people per room = more profit per room.
Our dorms housed up to six people, and I know some independent dorms have rooms with as many as twelve people. Two is basically normal mode (easy mode is four, where you don’t have to deal with one-on-one time with your roommate and can hoist them on the other two).
In order to prevent privacy.
We have it too in Austria in some “Studentenheime “. Especially in the costly university cities like Vienna or Innsbruck. It is cheaper than a single room and some houses only offer doubles. I guess this is also due to socialising reasons. But the rooms are tiny even when shared, especially in Vienna.
Bets on how long Adinah remains an unsullied parent figure on-screen?
I’ll bet…as long as Dina’s parents?
Dina’s parents have even managed to remain unsullied off-screen!
And by that I do not mean unbeatable castrated warriors.
More than two weeks, but less than three.
I feel like Rachel and Sarah should sit down and have a nice, cathartic conversation about their roomie experiences. Might be good for them both.
Also Adinah is cute!!
Maybe, I guess they would see eye to eye on s few things….or maybe not.
There should be a murder mystery series called “The United States of Murder” where, of course, a detective and his partner solve a mystery in each state.
DC and territories can be included after the 50th book.
There was a true-crime TV series with a similar premise called “City Confidential.” Every episode examined a crime in one particular city.
The neat thing was, the cities chosen were from all over the US, small cities as well as big ones, and usually the first fifteen minutes or so were spent showing the town’s history and people and culture.
Also, the voice-over narrator for most of the series was the great Paul Winfield.
That sure sounds close enough to my idea. And it’s good they showcased smaller cities as well.
DoA Book 9 or 10 or whatever: 50-State Murder Resort
“Tonight I’ll dream while in my bed
When silly thoughts go through my head
About the bugs and alphabet
And when I wake tomorrow I’ll bet
That you and I will walk together again
I can tell that we are going to be friends”
Dream a dream, you little bleep.
“Birds singing in the sycamore tree
Dream a little dream of bleep”
Wow! Freshman Ruth reminds me a lot of Malaya!
I feel like Malaya would be even more aggressive about it
Laidlaw’s Rule version of this strip:
“Wouldn’t it be weird if I were like that?” And then the murders began.
Egg there we go right as rain. At least Ruth is upfront, doesn’t make interaction with her always pleasant but I appreciate the real talk.
Though I got to admit though this entire interaction felt like she had it 8n her head to try to make a good first impression but after the first few moments she was “who the hell am I kidding,” and then just gave up.
I actually think that Ruth is saying in panel 1 that she doesn’t consider it plausible that she can be nice or even a pleasantly neutral experience to know.
She is. She might have been trying to fake it last strip and then just gave up.
Well, she fails at listening, but she’s open about her issues and lays down what seems to be a honest retelling of her boundaries and two of her sore points.
Honestly, better than any roommate I’ve ever had.
I mean…
At least there’s no 3rd heart breaking event in her life for us to see?
We’re not THAT murder-y!
::multiple mass shootings immediately prove this statement wrong::
SIGH!
There probably was one while you were typing your comment.
I’m wondering. If Ruth had a similar “bully someone because I’m attracted to them” thing and to Rachel it just looks like Ruth repeating patterns. Also I wonder if we’ll see Ruth talk about the boyfriend her grandfather forced her to leave.
I think that we’re seeing Ruth simply responding to her grandfather’s programming her to believe that she is worthless and no-one could like her, so she’s putting up a wall to protect herself from being hurt by rejection well in advance.
It’s possible that we might see a duplicate of Joyce’s relationship with Sarah in some ways, with Rachel in Joyce’s position and Ruth hurting her because she’d rather hurt people than let them hurt her or be hurt even worse by associating with her. Sarah never has been sufficiently messaged up to cause Joyce harm in an attempt to keep her at arm’s length but I can see Ruth doing that to Rachel and adding it to her list of reasons why she is a monster who needs to be shuffled off this mortal coil as soon as Howie is safe from Sir.
There’s the other shoe. I was wondering when it was going to drop.
Everyone thinks university is a new fresh start but you still bring all the rotting baggage from your old life with you.
Or something like that.
I’m pretty sure that Ruth needs a 60-foot shipping container to carry all her baggage!
or a 40 yard dumpster. That she can set on fire later
Ah, no, nevermind, she’s given up on fitting in already.
This is the way Ruth say “Good morning”. Rwally a bag full of happiness.
So… who else wants a Ruth/Rachel road trip miniseries?
I’d like Ruth to do something really selfless for Rachel and, when asked why, reply: “Because I believe in redemption.”
Ah, so Ruth’s first interaction with Rachel boils down to “here’s how things are going to be, whether you like it or not, and also in 5 weeks I’ll be making your stay miserable.”
Good to know that in 2 years she’s changed to making people’s stay miserable right off the bat. Her increased efficiency is laudable.
This Ruth doesn’t look like she’s gonna apologize for anything any time soon, so I would be surprised if Rachel’s “redemption is a story” philosophy grew from this living situation.
I’m sure it added to it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were earlier sources.
Apropos of nothing, I wonder why it’s apparently only her mother who came with her college.
It may be that her father couldn’t get time off work!
I’m not sure it could be that he had work or a very important meeting, he could be dead, its possible that he didn’t want to crowd Rachel or make it make Rachel look too dependent on her parents, maybe he felt it would be weird being in the woman’s dorm. What really sticks out to me is the speech the mother gave last comic, it sounds like Rachel has a past she’s running away from.
Hmmm, can’t say I see it. The “blank slate” bit? I took it just as a reference to the room.
The father thing is no more than a hint and there are certainly other explanations, but in light of speculation about Rachel’s past experiences it’s interesting. It could also just have been a relatively amicable divorce.
You couldn’t possibly be implying that her father is a bad person, could you? That would be so unexpected for this comic!
I agree. Very unlike what we’ve seen so far.
No one likes hockey fans, right?
Unless you’re at a school where hockey is really big. Like, lining up outside the Student Union for season tickets big!
Big Ten has some real hockey schools – Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan. Indiana isn’t one of them.
Don’t think Indiana even HAS a hockey team. Notre Dame does, though. Most of the rest of the big hockey schools seem to be clustered in the Northeast (including Yale)
Which us weird, because hockey lets you slide around on knife shoes and whack people with a big stick. I remember having a PS1 hockey game that let you pick fights with the other players, complete with a spotlight and head punches. It was the coolest thing tiny me had seen in a game, at that point.
I think I’d have been cool with Ruth as a roommate tbh
So, I just had a thought: with Ruth and Rachel living together, isn’t it entirely possible that Rachel became aware somewhere along the way that Ruth has an abusive guardian? Hell, she could even know that Ruth was strong-armed into taking the RA position. I’m not particularly looking for my opinion of Rachel to sink any lower, but those possibilities…are concerning.
Probably Rachel see only what she wants to see.
I guess it’s possible, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason to think so. Ruth is unlikely to open up about it and it makes Rachel’s position even worse.
I am reading into the use of the term “resort” the implication that the person(s) who murdered Ruth’s parents were not caught.
Do we actually know anything about their deaths?
They died in a car crash with a drunk driver, iirc.
I think it’s more that, to someone from Canada used to their levels of gun (and other, but mostly gun) violence, America is just constant murder. Literally every day, somewhere in the country.
Appropriate avatar.
As a Canadian myself, I am indeed appalled by the level of gun violence in the U.S. We do have some here, but even allowing for the smaller population, it is less.
[rant:]
I was in the U.S. in the mid 60’s (yes, I’m old) and I remember hearing the phrase “love it or leave it”. I was young and white, so although I was aware of racism, I didn’t understand how that phrase was connected to it, nor just how bad the oppression was for black people.
I find it deeply disturbing that the twit-in-chief is using that phrase, quite literally to tell American citizens that if they don’t like being oppressed, they should leave.
[/rant(for now)]
I know Canada’s murder rate is lower than ours, but I’m pretty sure they make one a day; (Googles) just under two a day, it looks like.