Lysander's aimless and carefree life is turned upside down when he accidentally discovers that the cute boy next door, Simon, is a literal monster
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The Golden Boar
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A young woman joins a group of summoners who call forth Guardian Beasts to protect their isolated magical island. Unfortunately, her Guardian Beast is nothing like she'd imagined, and he's about to change her life, and everything she thought she knew about herself...
The Messenger
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In a ruin-abound town cursed with bad luck, Kai and Kalla--a young boy and a fledgling dragonbird spirit--take on a quest in hopes the reward will solve all of their problems.
Not Drunk Enough
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Logan Ibarra is possibly the unluckiest repairman in the world. A late night job should not have landed him in the middle of a mad scientist's squabble, but he soon finds himself surrounded by monsters and further madness with little tools to get out.
Little Tiny Things
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What are the little things that move us? The simple joys that warm our bodies and hearts? The micro life of insects that influence our world more than we think? The tiny steps we make everyday to have a happier tomorrow?
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
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Namesake
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Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
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A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Barbarous
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A crummy wizard and an anxious monster have to get over themselves and bring order to an apartment building full of misfits.
The Weave
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Dumbing of Age
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Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Edison Rex
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The adventures of the world’s greatest villain who, after defeating his superheroic nemesis, decides that he’s the only one left to defend the world.
Darkling Bright
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Kieran Bright is a college student home for the summer and roped into an online reunion with his old neighborhood friends in the most recent update of their favorite childhood MMORPG.
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Join Kieran and his friends as they are pulled into another reality that may or may not be real and are forced to confront their own identities, the nature of simulated universes and reality itself.
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A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
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It's a pretty rigid format but we keep the content loose, you know?
BOOKMARK Click "Tag Page" to bookmark a page. When you return to the site, click "Goto Tag" to continue where you left off.
BUFFER WATCH
Comics are currently drawn and uploaded through:
That’s just because the people who posted them obviously don’t
have the technical skeeells to upload clean audio – if they had ripped
256K audio from a CD, then it would sound fine.
Actually, Stephen is correct here. The production quality on Shout at the Devil is crap, even for the early 80s on an up and coming hair metal budget. Other contemporaries had far superior production (Def Leppard’s Pyromania, Van Halen’s 1984, and Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell, for example), but Crue did better with Theatre of Pain and Girls, Girls, Girls. But yeah, lots of the uploaded videos were compressed into crap before they were uploaded.
This whole storyline seems to be demonstrating the difference between crimes of passion and calculated crimes. Ross is your stereotypical crime of passion person – he thinks he is doing the right thing, but acts emotionally based on his biblical framework.
Blaine on the other hand, while he is certainly acting based on emotions (resentment about paying tuition and getting beat up, anger/outrage at being forced to spend money in a way he does not want to), does so in a way that is very calculated and he *wants to hurt people.* He has NO illusions that he is doing this for anyone’s good but his own.
While people in the first category certainly can cause a lot of harm, the redeeming thing about them is that IF you can get through to them emotionally and/or rationally, they will potentially change their actions. Like Joyce when she looked up ways to reconcile homosexuality and the Bible! (After first dating Ethan, who she thought she was helping.)
For people in the second category, it is a lot less likely.
I am not sure how much of it is concern, and how much of it is guilt. Like, in Ross’s mind, I could see him thinking this is a whole other magnitude than what he did last time. At “least” then, he was kidnapping one girl, and not a half dozen kids in his eyes to lean on for information.
Then again, who knows. Ross has demonstrated himself to not be a particularly good dude, to put it mildly.
Yeah, he’s not a ‘hurts people just to see them suffer and with his own selfish desires as the only reason for his actions’ type of person. He might not be a great, good or even decent person, but like, if God came down to Earth and said to him ‘this is not right’, he would skew towards being the type of person who would listen. And like, he has shown reservations towards hurting Mike and while he hit him with a car, we didn’t see him actually injure Mike or involve himself in the fight afterwards in any meaningful way.
Hurting teenagers is a clear moral line for him that Blaine finds easy to cross and he… doesn’t find it nearly as easy to do so.
No, he’s a “My daughter is my possession and I will threaten her and abuse her to shape her into what I think she should be, even if I have to hurt her friends or get us both killed” type of person.
No if God came to earth and told him he was wrong he would likely either accuse him of being Satan, blatently choose to misunderstand him or think God was a hippy destioned for hell.
Let’s not go too far here. He’s not Blaine. He’s not a cartoon supervillain. He’s a different type of evil.
He’s not fully on board with this part of the plan as much because it doesn’t lead to directly to getting control of Becky again as anything. That lets him wonder about the methods.
Probably guilt of hurting people and also that fact her knew and loved Joyce since she was young and really being brain washed into thinking he’s saving his daughter by doing this.
He’s an asshole but he’s also a bit tragic. He has strong convictions but man are they shitty.
His injuries probably were from Mike. Sure, he grabbed the rope to prevent himself from taking the same fall Mike did, but his momentum would have resulted in him getting smacked HARD into the building, which probably would have resulted in him taking a somewhat less impactful fall than Mike did.
I dunno, Doc. Amazi-Girl’s got some muscle on her, and a scooter to the chest swung by a strong person can do some serious harm. I think most of this may be her.
I broke my rib once and don’t remember it hurting nearly as bad as Blaine is selling this, but then again I was also on painkillers and not wearing a mask and kidnapping people so maybe the situation is different.
A simple fracture of one rib usually doesn’t get displaced, and is painful but not too bad. Ross got curb-stomped by Amber and is implied to have broken ribs from that. Then Amazi-Girl said “Keep reminding me about the ribs” and hit him in the ribs with a scooter, besides kicking him in the ribs at least twice, Then he fell off a building (though he caught a rope and we didn’t see what he hit).
He likely has multiple fractures of several ribs, which is a lot worse than an undisplaced simple fracture of one rib. He might even have an injury to his lung.
Well, that would be nice. But having his chest fill up with air from a tension pneumothorax, collapse his lungs, and make him slowly asphyxiate is a tempting alternative.
And when presented with such a pair of alternatives I like to ask “why not both?”
I had a hairline crack in a rib once. It was manageable with lots of painkillers but I couldn’t do anything too active for quite a while. I’m betting Blaine has sustained a *lot* more damage than one barely-cracked rib.
I’ve read that, if you break your ribs badly enough, the broken bones can poke into your lungs. That is the point at which you need serious medical care to not die, and it’s excruciatingly painful. I’m guessing that is the case with Blaine, especially since he is gasping like he can barely breathe.
Let’s hope his injuries catch up to him before Amazi-Girl/the police/anyone else needs to…
If he’s wheezing (he is), who knows, maybe there’s even some bleeding in his lungs. Punctures in the lining of the lungs can get infected and go to sepsis.
Yeah, I cracked a rib playing football (Rugby league, in the school playground at lunchtime) when I was fourteen, and it wasn’t too bad, except if I coughed or laughed. I had to sleep on my back and give up clarinet practice, running, and swimming-training for a few weeks, but I got through it without pain relief. Which goes to show that there are broken ribs and broken ribs depending on which are broken, where, how badly, and whether the break is simple or multiple. Because most people get a lot more pain than I did.
Part of me is thinking right now, that if Blaine really does have the kind of mob connections to have agents positioned in the hospital that can have Mike assassinated “with a phone call”, then he’s extremely stupid to do something like this that will draw attention to them. There’s no business benefit to any of this to make the risk of acting so openly worth taking. Any connections he does have will probably bail.
At no point in all this has Blaine demonstrated any sense of intelligence. For one thing, consider the fact that he allegedly has these mob connections but still teamed up with an uncooperative brick like Ross. And spent CONSIDERABLE money to do so.
I’m like 60% sure he’s lying, and the next 30% is ‘he called in the other stooges/had Asher call in contacts who are similarly low-tier’. No way he has actual clearance for this escapade.
Also, you know. A 13-year-old boy took one look at his receipts, realized they were rotten, and could yell he was committing tax fraud (With some degree of ‘how’) five years later on the fly. Sure, said kid was Mike, but he’s not supernaturally smart or anything so Blaine cannot possibly be cooking his books all that well.
As a psychopath(or at the very least antisocial disorder) Blaine has above average intelligence. However, he has poor impulse control and An inability to learn from past mistakes.
He also seems to think lowly of others, likely making him see Ross as an easy mark that can be manipulated with no trouble. See also him refusing to believe Amber was Amazi-Girl just a couple strips ago.
Not really. It’s part of the “sexy psychopath” syndrome: people write up psychopaths who seem intelligent and charming (a) mostly because dull and charmless people with otherwise psychopathic traits tend to lose hard before they are twenty-five (a survival bias) and (b) because a lot of the people who are interested enough in psychopaths to make a special study are a bit englamoured.
On the other hand, that investment in Ross might be pretty smart of Blaine. If his plan is to set it up to make Ross look like the fall guy for all the bodies Blaine seems to be planning on piling up.
He’s probably lying. Blaine’s a mob stooge not a mob boss. It’s kind of implied he’s the accountant. Asher’s grandpa “owns” him. At best he paid a few hundred bucks to some idiots who probably don’t even carry guns. He can’t hire assassins. Any guy Blaine could hire probably couldn’t even get into the same room Mike’s in, plus his parents are probably there too if Mike’s in a coma. It was a line of bullshit to try and motivate the hostages.
It’s implied that he is the owner-of-record for a building supplies firm that Asher’s gramps launders money through. He is described as a “stooge”: one who knowingly allows himself or herself to be used for another’s profit, a dupe.
Actually I’m kind of wondering where he’s getting the cash for all this in the first place? This whole thing is motivated in part by not wanting to pay Amber’s tuition but he also paid for the rest of Ross’ bail and has “hires” of unknown quantity he paid to kidnap the group. Plus also someone to kill Mike in the hospital. Slumming at a motel with Ross for a couple days. Buying a mask and body armor. I know college tuition is a LOT of money but this scheme to save money seems to be getting exspensive.
He probably has quite a bit of cash that the lawyers for his ex-wife have no clue about; since it’s not declared income, it’s the product of any crimes he’s committed or been involved in (or payment for whatever he does for his bosses.) Also isn’t his current wife (Faz’s mom) loaded?
The money to bail out Ross came from Joyce and Ross’s church.
(So, Joyce’s mom probably helped, which is also a problem.)
It’s a pretty big church, they might have had some money left over, and Blaine seems to be in charge of how it’s spent.
You’re assuming Mike was positively identified. The hospital would have to know who he is to call his parents. If someone happened to take his wallet off him while hr was unconscious, he’s just a John Doe.
Yeah, he’s got internal injuries and just pulled an all nighter, he’s not thinking straight.
Before he could have done it and maybe even gotten away with it.
NOW, if Mike does, anyone who survives can tell the cops “And oh by the way he said he could have this guy in the hospital killed, which is conspiracy to premeditated murder.” If Mike did die, they’re going to super duper investigate everyone who had access to his room. He just confessed to a whole bunch of witnesses, at least one of which is a law student.
And it’s implausible they’ll mass murder anyone, let alone everyone. And even if they did, that would bring so much heat down on everyone that he’s not get away from the law now.
Well, he keeps notes on the vulnerabilities of his friends and neighbours. And his emotional abuse of Walky has involved extensive and rather elaborate set-up. So maybe.
On the other hand, there’s not much point setting up such a thing and then not telling anyone about it. Remember the doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove.
I’m betting it’s serious abdominal injuries rather than the broken ribs others are speculating about. Blaine doesn’t seem the type to show that he’s in pain if he can ever help it, so for him to have to STOP torturing people because he’s in too much pain means he’s REALLY suffering. *grumpy cat GOOD*
If he has broken ribs poking into his lungs he might not be able to disguise that’s he is in pain. From what I’ve read, that situation is basically “pass out from pain level” excruciating.
Broken ribs can get pretty bad. Especially if a displaced one starts poking directly into a lung… exaggerated pained breathing sounds, that’s my bet. A well placed hit very well might puncture something.
You say that but that all but guarantees it’s gonna be Amber, she’s gonna kill him, and it’s going to continue her trauma spiral, y’know? (God, if THAT’S the rule Willis broke, that’s gonna be awful.)
No, do not punch the face without gloves: it is bony and you will hurt, perhaps break, your hand. Use fists on soft bits, boots on bony bits.
My father told me once that whenever you had someone with a broken jaw in the emergency department there was always someone with a broken wrist in the next bed.
Training in bare-knuckle boxing or other martial arts might make a difference to that; Joyce doesn’t have any.
You can also punch with an open palm. You lose a little reach but greatly reduce the chance of injuring your wrist and/or hand since you hit with the fleshy part near the thumb. It also means if you hit someone in the face your fingers are in a great position for poking them in the eye or grabbing an ear and applying torsional force.
Last time we saw that look on her face she kicked a window out of its frame. I don’t like Ross’s chances.
I still don’t get Blaine’s plan. I can only guess that his goal is to traumatize Amber enough that she drops out and expect Ross to take the fall, but it’s not as though Ross won’t know who helped him. It’s not as though his name isn’t attached to Ross as the guy who bailed him out. It’s not as though his name isn’t going to be attached to the house they are using here.
Maybe Blaine used a false name when he lent mob money to the church group, and then Carol or the pastor took the money to the court to lodge bail, so that their name, not Blaines, appears as bailor in the court records. And maybe he gave a false name to Ross, or plans for Ross to die, or both. And maybe he used a burner phone and a credit card in a false name to rent the Abusi-Scooter.
It’s still a dumb plan, because his/Yuri’s limo’s licence plate is still going to show up on traffic cameras etc.
You introduced an interesting idea that I never considered. I always assumed that Blaine was stiffing Yuri and Faz, while lying about how much money he had on hand. After all, if paying Amber’s tuition is really bleeding him dry as Yuri suggested, how did he have enough money to pay for a bail payment that a large group of fundies could not come with collectively?
I had never considered the possibility that he took some of the money he was laundering for the mob for these purposes. If he did that, then he is MUCH dumber than I originally thought. There is little chance they won’t notice this and their solution for dealing with such theft would likely be……quite severe.
Yeah, it would be better to let Stacy get one over on you by actually being forced to contribute to your child’s welfare, Blaine.
I think he’s arrogant enough to think he can get away with it – either by making the church group responsible for paying him back when the bail money is lost (although they didn’t have the money without him so not sure quite how he expects that to work, unless he figures “so by the way, the guy you bailed out killed a bunch of kids – including your daughter, Carol – and you owe the mafia a lot of money. They want it back now.” might encourage them to dig deeper (remortgage houses etc)…) or by cooking the mob’s books too and just skimming off the amount as an undeclared bonus…
Remember, aim for the squishy bits! Stomach, solar plexus, and groin are all good ones, but eyes, ears, nose, the back of the knees if you can reach, and the throat if you’re cool going lethal are good too.
Also – they’re not squishy, but shins, fingers and toes are quite painful!
I’m kinda feeling like writing a long detailed “fudge-you” post on ther myriad ways Toedad suck, but I think Joyce in the last panels very effectively communicates everything I would want to say.
Her face is PERFECT, and I hope that look on his face is the pants-shitting terror it absolutely should be.
Cause yeah, I don’t think he’s gonna feel a guilt he can’t justify or cognitive dissonance away. If he could turn Bonnie’s suicide attempt (which it sounds like she did survive, at least short-term, so it’s possible she could have tried to express WHY she was despondent enough to attempt it,) into ‘Satan took her from me’, I’m pretty damn sure NOTHING is going to actually break him. This is not a man prone to self-reflection. At BEST, I can see him hesitating long enough to leave an opening, but I don’t think these twinges of whatever are going to amount to anything more because he’s STILL HERE as Blaine says he has organized crime connections and threatens an out-of-commission teenager’s life to the six other teenagers they’ve kidnapped. (Even if Blaine’s bluffing – and I do think he is – when your co-conspirator was just accused of mob ties and then turns around and claims to have them, that should at least raise questions about WHY that’s the bluff he picks. Just, look at your life, man. Look at your choices. You’d never be redeemable in my eyes but you could at least give me the impression you have even half a brain cell.)
With the whole suicide/”Satan took her from me” thing it’s not all that long ago that attempting suicide was illegal (if you failed you would go to jail) and I believe it’s really recently that e.g. Catholics allowed people who died by suicide to be buried in consecrated ground. Stigma around suicide/mental health is reducing but him taking that stance does make sense for the character.
‘Really recently’ for the Catholic church still means ‘Ross’s entire life,’ though. (They were allowed to be buried in consecrated ground starting in the 60s, and it was considered a mental illness in catechism in the 90s – Ross is probably in his forties, but it was changing.) Also, Protestant churches have always had an at least slightly different stance – it was one of the points that drove Martin Luther’s reformation – and they are DEFINITELY a Protestant denomination, one that REALLY dislikes Catholics.
Most of them don’t look kindly on mental illness either, of course, but that’s why I pointed out it’s an attempt Willis has implied she survived, at least initially. (I think it’s VERY likely the stifling nature of her life with Ross was a serious contributing factor to Bonnie’s attempt.) There was, possibly, a chance for Bonnie to say in words ‘I am unbelievably miserable with my life’ and him to listen, and we know that if it was offered, he still didn’t listen.
I believe humans are naturally good since we evolved to be social animals that survive through cooperation, though that cooperation becomes difficult when meeting other humans that are different than us, and sometimes we kill those we see as too different by telling lies to ourselves.
Ross and Carol have told lies to themselves to the point that they believed them, and even if they think they are doing the right thing, they close their hearts to seeing things from the perspective of others.
People like Blaine on the other hand are complete monsters that got to the conclusion of ignoring human nature to be stronger. That is what we call psychopaths, antisocial people, sociopaths. This rejection of what makes one human is either a willful act, or the result of a mental illness they don’t want to get treated.
Maybe Ross will have a moment of self doubt that can be exploited by Joyce and the others to escape, or maybe he will get paralyzed with fear and Blaine will try to do the dirty work himself. These are a man doing evil for a delusional cause, and a man doing evil for his own satisfaction. Almost indistinguishibale.
We evolved to be social in small groups that would often cooperate for competing with other small groups. Chimps have similar behavior which can end in the total extermination of another group (or of its males and incorporation of its females, maybe.)
Humans have natural impulses toward cooperation and competition, fairness and selfishness. A mother typically wants to split resources evenly among her children; the children have their own idea, and are much more concerned with not getting less than with not getting more than siblings.
We also evolved to be social in small groups and to compete for advantage within those groups. Dominant individuals got better access to resources and mates within the group. That’s what much of our big brains are for.
I’ve been enjoying this storyline so I hope it doesn’t end with some made up, unrealistic, Joyce knocking out someone more than twice her size kind of thing but instead focuses more on Ross.
Ross turning on Blaine ala Return of the Jedi could be an interesting ending if it goes that way
Abuse victims can have issues that lead them to abuse as well, but they don’t always and those issues can be overcome. Some people also abuse without having been abused themselves.
It’s a tendency worth being aware of, not a law of nature.
I see the look of Ross finally clicking in his brain that this might have gone too far. From kidnapping ahalf dozen people, putting a kid in a comaqnd allying himself with a mental case dressing and acting like a cartoony supervillain. Even Ross has to be able to see at some point that it’s gone too far.
Or am I just grasping at straws?
Last night a kid claimed his co-conspirator had mob ties. At some point in the last twenty-four hours, Blaine clearly demonstrated he has the planning and (very possibly) personnel for an elaborate kidnapping, and has just now threatened a bunch of kids with the same mob ties the kid claimed he had. Ross is STILL HERE. Either he’s still more or less on board with all this, in the same ‘ends justify the means’ manner he was with SHOOTING UP A SCHOOL, or he is so terminally stupid he can’t put mob + mob together and get ‘holy shit he’s in with the mob’.
I do think you have a point, but as Ross gradually finds out what he has been doing is wrong, he won’t stop. Even though if someone had told Ross at the start that Blaine would be willing to kill an innocent bystander just to keep their cover, he would likely not have went along. Small steps go a long way.
Well, if that’s the case then Willis definitely draws a cuter Anti-Joyce than Regular Joyce nowadays. She was definitely made more adorable when vying for Jacob’s attention.
I’m hoping Blaine’s injuries have finally caught up to him, and Ross is going to have trouble sticking to Blaine’s plan without him there. Which gives this group of kidnapped students a chance to escape, hopefully.
That’s part of what drives him. Ross is deeply invested in caring for his daughter and is clearly willing to go to great lengths over her… but it’s all predicated on faulty and extreme logic and a skewed morality that only results in him hurting her and others close to him.
It really is sad to see that kind of love twisted into something that in the end can only harm the people he cares about.
I have little intellectual empathy for anger. Oh, there might be emotional give. But anger has little relationship to a well thought out moral code or even a rational thought process. I both love Joyce and actively find myself fact-checking her more intensively than normal. Ross is in the wrong, and there’s a rock-solid path to proving that.
And yes, Ross is feeling sympathy from an utterly filthy, piece of shit place. He’s practically destined to be judged harshly by history and will be consigned to the dustbin of history. That doesn’t mean I’m gonna give Joyce, Amber or any other angry person a free pass because they’re angry. Hell, I’m pretty sure it means I need to factcheck them harder because I’m ideologically inclined to agree with them and they’re not showing any sign they’re checking their own biases.
Such is the difference in treatment between the utterly hopeless and the people who have the slightest bit of hope. Maybe some kind of transition is warranted. I’m drunk.
Anger is just a “defense of territory and rights” at its core. It’s pretty basic to agree that “I have the right not to be kidnapped and tied up in a basement by you” is a valid right. And “I’m angry that you violated my right to not be kidnapped and so much more” is a completely justified response.
Frankly not being angry ventures into codependence at this point.
The “so much more” includes, but is not limited to:
-I trusted you
-You were supposed to be a good dad, this isn’t that
-You know or should know what Christian morals look like, this isn’t that
-You know or should know what basic human decency looks like, this isn’t that
“Factchecking” what? In what way is Joyce wrong to be angry here? What’s so bad about anger that you can’t empathise with it? She’s right to be angry, she’s been kidnapped by someone she grew up with and trusted (after also being held at gunpoint by him before that).
I was making a general statement about anger in others and its effect on me. Joyce happens to be the one who’s angry more often lately. Whether she’s actually right is irrelevant to the point. Angry people have less room for hyperbole and figures of speech because they either really mean what they say or they’re pulling stuff out of their ass. The middle ground of witty banter is much less of an option.
1) A religious zealot tried to shoot up her friends.
2) Said religious zealot just kidnapped seven people.
3) She just found out that her mother is evil.
4) She just lost her faith because she realized she was in a religious cult.
5) One of her friends may be dead because of Ross.
6) Becky is safer without Ross in her life.
Yeah, anger itself isn’t any proof that you’re right, but the facts here are pretty simple and apparent. Joyce is angry because she’s been kidnapped and her friends are being threatened.
This isn’t some abstract intellectual debate she’s winning because she’s angry, but we really should be concentrating on proving Ross wrong with cold hard logic and facts, this is the middle of an ongoing crime.
Anger is at its core your emotions telling you and others that you or someone you care about has been wronged and you should do something about it.
It can have false positives. You don’t usually decide when you feel it. You do have control of what you do with it. Feeling comfortable expressing it in certain situations can reveal a sense of entitlement or a generally screwed up moral framework.
In Steven Universe the first time I felt sympathy for Jasper is when he was being corrupted and yelling at Steven in anger. I also knew I would feel more sympathy for Navy if she was angry instead of simply sadistic. ON the other hand despite the fact that your sister being killed is a reasonable reason to get angry I felt little sympathy for Blue Diamond because she didn’t see anything wrong with shattering gems for petty reasons.
Congrats on apparently being both callous and insufferable. What the actual fuck kind of “bias” do you think Joyce could be displaying here in her anger about being fucking kidnapped
Jesus what the fuck is wrong with yer brain that yer like. WELLLLLLLL I would be inclined to side with Joyce the girl who’s friends have now been kidnapped twice by Toehead one of which involved a gun being aimed at her. BUT because she’s angry I’m inclined to say that SHE is in the wrong because I have brain worms.
She wasn’t challenged to a debate, she was fucking kidnapped and thrown in a basement. What the hell is there to “factcheck”. The entire school of “you expressed an emotion, therefore you lose” needs to die in a fire.
OMG, if you need to “factcheck” them it means YOU dont have a “well thought out moral code” on all the reasons its wrong to assault and kidnap college students, while blackmailing them and threatening murder.
They are wholly in the right to kill right now to survive. its basic self defense and right to life.
The concept you are suggesting here is called tone policing. It is a favored tactic of those with the privilege to not be personally affected by something to dismiss anything said by those who are. See for example Joyce’s last interaction with her brother John: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/settledown/
Yes, Joyce is angry. Is her anger justified? Well, it is directed at a man who has committed and in fact is -right now in the middle of ongoing- multiple felonies, specifically causing injury to both herself and her friends, with the intent to deprive her best friend of freedom. I am really not seeing wiggle room on how this needs ‘fact checking’. If you would like to give some sort of evidence otherwise, feel free, else it turns out you’re actually the one making an irrational argument from emotion here.
Turns out judging… Let’s call it ‘a disagreement’ based on who sounds/looks ‘more rational’ rather than the content of the issue isn’t actually rational? Who’da thunk. (besides every angry reply to you already here, who already have to deal with tone policing in their everyday lives for issues that actually affect them, let alone their fictional entertainment)
Thank you for at least addressing the topic instead of assuming it has anything to do with whether Joyce is actually totally right and justified in her anger here. It is indeed a detached perspective, which is a position of privilege. Anger is like…noise. It crowds out the point being made.
I was making an observation about myself. Perhaps because I happened to make that realization on this particular moment in the comic, it was taken as some criticism of Joyce being angry here. That’s plainly outside of what I talked about though.
One of the regular players in my RPGs once commented that the problem with my adventures was that they always depended on the villains or criminals making a fatal mistake. I replied that if the villains never made any mistakes the heroes would never win.
I’m not gonna lie, as someone who grew up with emotionally abusive, hyper conservative, evangelical parents… I feel a lot of catharsis through Joyce.
Like, yeah, I’ve already long-since dealt with the realizations and the heartbreak and the leaving that Becky did. But Becky seemed to not have fully bought in to everything anyway. Joyce did. And so did I. And no matter how this shakes out, seeing someone write a character who is so very much like I was once upon a time, and seeing her angry and hurt and betrayed, and having those emotions validated by the narrative?
Seriously, Willis, this is something very very precious to me, and I’m so beyond glad that you’ve shared it with us and that I found it.
I think that Blaine is now on a timer before the rib Amazi-Girl re-broke tears open a lung and finishes him off. As for Ross? He’s always struck me as stupid but I think that he doesn’t understand why Joyce hates him and also is very, very scared of the woman she’s becoming.
Yeah, I’m wondering if that’s a heel-face turn expression from Toedad? An “oh my god, what have I become that Joyce can look at me like that?” moment? It’s hard to tell, as Toedads facial expressions cover the gamut of emotions from a to b. (“constipated”, “annoyed because someone else has asked if he’s constipated”, and “angry at still being constipated” cover most of what we’ve seen)
I am very afraid that the look on Joyce’s face is reflecting Toe-Dad’s memory of the look on the face that he got from his wife at some point shortly before she self-terminated. Joyce’s face has the “somebuddy’s gonna Die!” Look about it, and imma scared.
Prove there’s even the tinest speck of what Christian goodness actually supposedly should be in you and free those children now that you’re being left alone with them, Ross.
Or at least the one who can beat the shit out of her father, if there’s a time crunch.
There’s no Christian goodness in Ross. He is so sheltered from the world that he felt that the only response to Becky running away was to threaten her friends with a shotgun. His idea of getting Becky back was to kidnap seven people and put another in the hospital.
The next few strips are probably going to be him telling Joyce that she’s been led by Satan. Every single time that Blaine brought God up, it brought Ross to heel.
Ross is a bad person. He’s not doing any of this for the reasons that Blaine is, but he’s still a bad person. And unfortunately, he’s too far gone to be reasoned with.
Okay, so just imagine for a moment that hell is real. Now imagine someone you love more dearly than anyone else in the entire world, including yourself. Next, imagine God has said that what that person is doing is going to send them to hell where they’re going to suffer for all eternity. Imagine all of that is actually real and not just some messed up stuff some religion you don’t believe in and generally despise has pulled out of fresh air. Now ask yourself, how far would you go to save that person from such a fate? To me, I wouldn’t give a toss what happens to me in this life if it meant I could save them from eternal torment in the next. And that is where I see Ross coming from in all of this.
The only thing leading him to doubt is Joyce, the girl that was always an example of good, being enraged at him. She has always been a good Christian so either she is misguided or Ross is. In this situation, having nearly murdered a kid, having kidnapped a group of ’em and slowly starting to realize the person with you might not be that good of a Christian, it’s possible he will actually start considering the second.
In that situation, I’d be willing to go at least as far enough as asking “what’s the most effective WAY of saving them”, which would lead to questions like “what is the verifiable success/failure rate of reparative therapy” and “why does this lead to so many deconversions?” and “holy crap isn’t there a better option than this?” and “why are all my religious friends still endorsing it?” and “if they’re so wrong about this, what else could they be wrong about?”
Asking those questions is the what Ross isn’t willing to do for Becky.
But kidnapping five teenagers, terroristic death threats, complicity in aggravated assault, extortion… he’s willing to do that. Because apparently that’s not as bad as questioning.
Questioning is really not a thing in Ross’s skill-set. He’s not bright to begin with, plus “questioning my faith” has been firmly taught as a very bad thing.
He believes that conversion therapy is the best method because his church says so. He believes his church is right, likewise, because the church says so, and has told him this since he was a tiny, not-so-bright child.
He’s definitely not supposed to independently verify things that his church says, he’s supposed to believe them. Not asking questions – or discarding the questions that pop into his mind unbidden – means that his ‘faith is strong’ and he can succeed.
Has Ross ever actually mentioned conversion therapy? Or is it just an assumption that it was the end goal behind the earlier kidnapping?
He just needs to get his property back properly under his control again until she can be passed along to a good husband who will keep her under control. No need for any of this therapy stuff.
Personally, I’d consider keeping a gay teen under your control until you can marry them off to someone ‘proper’ an attempt, minimum, at forcibly converting them. (We’ve seen from at least Walkyverse Leslie how that turns out, and I think the Sad Schmuck she married there still exists here?) Becky also said when she was recounting her escape from Anderson that he was talking about ‘fixing’ things, which at least brings to mind the possibility.
It’s gonna be deeply traumatic in very similar ways regardless, is my point, and has the same chances of working long-term.
*Brief tag trawl back to his first appearance* Yeah, Becky’s line is that ‘He’d find a way to discipline me. To fix me.’ I’m not sure he had a particular strategy in mind, no, but all of them are gonna fucking suck if THAT’S your framework.
Oh it’s certainly all going to suck. Not claiming his intent wasn’t awful.
Just responding to Reltzik’s bit about questioning “what is the verifiable success/failure rate of reparative therapy” and “why does this lead to so many deconversions?” and Leorale’s “He believes that conversion therapy is the best method because his church says so.”
Unless he’s specifically talked about reparative therapy, I don’t think he’s focused so much on finding a way to change Becky so she’s not gay, as just to put her back into the proper woman’s role. End this rebellious phase, get her married off and she’ll be saved, since that’s God’s role for women.
Again, this is horrible, but it’s not really addressable by a mindset of “let’s look at the results of reparative therapy”.
Oh, yeah, I said reparative therapy because I was responding to somebody who said it, and I just assumed they were right in what Ross was planning.
(Come to think of it, Ross might not even have a specific plan — perhaps he just figures that he can’t “fix” Becky when she’s off at college kissing ladies, so he wants to get her home, by any means necessary, and then maybe he’ll ask his pastor what to do with her. Maybe he’ll pray on it, and arrive at some terrible new strategy of his very own. Who knows!)
Whether he’s signing her up for an established horrible shame-therapy, or whether he’s locking her up in his own house, or something else, the point remains: questioning and verifying things independently is specifically, purposely not in his skill set.
Ross is not a researcher. He thinks that having enough faith will determine his success.
I went with reparative therapy because that’s been the popular speculation here of what he has in mind, but you could cut-and-paste whatever his actual plans are into that question and it would make the same point.
Yeah, it is VERY MUCH a core facet of the thing that makes Ross a villain – and a deeply dangerous one – that he’s not a reflective, inquisitive person, he’s been told any questions are signs of weakness of faith, and so any tendencies he MIGHT have had have been stomped out.
He did not hesitate to pull a gun on a college campus, and was damn clear he was willing to hurt bystanders or himself if it got Becky back under his control. The only thing that’s really all that different here is that it’s slow and calculated where Ross is very short-term, and it involves the mob. MAYBE that’s bad enough to make him reassess his choices, but the gun thing DIDN’T.
There is that fun passage in the bible where the Jews capture a heathen city and convert the population. Of course this means all the men have to be circumcised and, while they’re recovering from that, the Jews kill them all. No backsliding, straight to heaven. Just saying, sometimes you have to go to extreme measures to save someone immortal soul.
I always wonder if this stuff ever got to me when I was a kid and pushed me in my current direction or if all the hypocrisy and evil in the Bible didn’t stick out to me until after I had stopped caring about converting at all.
I’m not. Too easy and too dismissive of how bad he really has been.
Now, Ross deciding that Blaine isn’t actually righteous and thus disrupting Blaine’s plan (by helping the kids out) before going back to trying to kidnap Becky. That might be an interesting twist. Set us up to think we’ve got a redemption, but then leave us with Ross’s real threat.
Joice has wants to learn Hate, Do you want to Forget a move to learn Hate?
Do you want to Forget Forgiveness?
Forgiveness Have Been Forgiven
Hate has Been Learned
This is a serious comic and big things are happening … but I can’t help but laugh at the title. Out of the words in this, ‘Hnnnk’ is a great pick for a title.
oooo looks like blaine is nursing something of a sucking chest wound (ie one or more of them broken ribs seems to have very seriously punctured one or both of his lungs). 5$ SES AMBER AND/OR AMAZIGIRL GET TO DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT TO LET HIM DIE WHEN HE KEELS OVER LATER ON!
also: toedad is gonna break first, and joyce is gonna break him.
Amber and Mazie likely won’t get a choice. It will be a fight and life-or-death. Blaine’s arrogance will be the ultimate cause of his death although it will be hard for either of the girls in the body of Amber O’Malley to entirely accept that.
honestly someone with a rib(s) in their lung(s) is in no shape to fight no matter how you spin it. they might adrenaline up and get a few good swings but at this stage i doubt he’d even get that. he could pass out just trying to punch at someone, let alone fighting them.
Everybody suggesting this seems to have forgotten that Ross and Blaine aren’t the only people there. Blaine’s hired goons are still around, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Blaine hadn’t already given them orders to cover this exact possibility.
Anyone want to take bets on whether ThumbDad is going to have an epiphany about kidnapping and torturing a group of kids in order to get information about the location of a superhero who will, uh… Does Ross still think this is about getting his daughter back? He’s already gone full henchman. He’s taking orders from a guy in a supervillian costume who’s already attempted one murder and is threatening half-a-dozen more. That’s not the best way to get one’s daughter to return to the church.
Theory: Joyce, the meek, unquestioning, non-challenging kid was the daughter Ross always kinda wished Becky could be more like. Having her look at him the way she is now, and having seen Blaine revel in trying to scare her and the other kids, might hit home just a bit…
@temperaryobsessor: IDK about the “control over what you do with it” part. Anger pretty much robs you of control. That’s what a crime of passion is; an act driven by an emotion that hijacks a person’s reason and values. That was clearly part of Pink Diamond’s character arc, her losing control and hurting people. Then that pattern was repeated by Steven in SU Future.
There is a real full-circle quality to our bringing up Steven Universe. This fandom introduced me to SU, otherwise I never would have watched it. Old guys who don’t have a TV don’t generally watch Cartoon Network. So, thanks, Dumbiverse fandom, for leading me to the most meaningful media experience I’ve ever had. It’s been a wild, emotional ride these last six months.
I mean don’t post the one stamped 5:58 aunless you can change the name to Old Fart, and PRETTY PLEASE just delete these last two. You really need an ‘undo post’ or ‘delete post’ function. THANK YOU
I see those tears in the last panel as indicative of the feelings of betrayal she mentioned in the March 26th. strip. Yes, she’s angry, but she is also torn up because an adult she looked up to as a child has destroyed what little faith she had left in him.
This is of course part of her loss of faith in the church, but has reached overwhelming levels at the enormity of the current situation.
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 21h
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 1d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
confirming that the reason there's been no Galaxy Version female characters in Blokees until now is that they felt they needed to make Round Lady Thighs For Ladies
It's #webcomicday? We have a special day???
Well, my name is Pat McHoarney and I draw 69 Mouse-Ear Blvd, a multigenerational story about women who all have sexy legs and probably other features. There was a grandmother, but she wasn't hot and so she died off-panel.
Elizabeth Holmes is in prison for defrauding investors through her blood-testing company, Theranos. Her partner, Billy Evans, is now trying to raise money for a company that describes itself as “the future of diagnostics.” nyti.ms/3FbtZm9
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 21h
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 1d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 10d
The New York Times @nytimes.com ⋅ 5d
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 3d
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if looks could kill
…well, I’m sure even Joyce would be fine with that
She got the Looks That Kill
That Ki~i~ill…
Motley Crue content has NOT aged well. The music videos on YouTube have terrible audio.
crushed
That’s just because the people who posted them obviously don’t
have the technical skeeells to upload clean audio – if they had ripped
256K audio from a CD, then it would sound fine.
Actually, Stephen is correct here. The production quality on Shout at the Devil is crap, even for the early 80s on an up and coming hair metal budget. Other contemporaries had far superior production (Def Leppard’s Pyromania, Van Halen’s 1984, and Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell, for example), but Crue did better with Theatre of Pain and Girls, Girls, Girls. But yeah, lots of the uploaded videos were compressed into crap before they were uploaded.
I don’t know about kill, but that’s certainly some nightmare fuel.
If looks could kill they probably will in games without frontiers, war without tears
Please consider yourself upvoted.
Seconded!
Do we really want to see Ross lying on the floor, begging Joyce “Please, please baby don’t hurt me no more?”
JOYCE SMASH
(I hope.)
Eyebite
That’s a hell of a spell.
Joyce has leveled up quickly.
So judging from the April 19th preview (https://dumbingofage.tumblr.com/post/190407425082/april-19-2020), we’re gonna jump back to the campus soon.
Well, Joyce CAN teleport…
Only while she has Fuckface on her head, though.
Or to Dorothy.
Or to Potential New Friends!
Cue Carol, right?
Like, right as she is beating him, right?
My wife, reading this over my shoulder: “It’s murder Joyce!”
Huh. Mine just asked “So, who’s gonna die first?”
Joyce has already decked him once, and her wrist has healed enough for round 2 to be fatal. Even bound in duct tape she’s dangerous.
Toedad looks… concerned… almost as if he is thinking
It’s counterintuitive to me, as a hardheaded atheist, but maybe Toedad isn’t completely an asshole.
I think Ross has realized at this point that he’s in way over his head, and that a lot of this is way fucked up, but he can’t back out now.
The hell he can’t.
Not without LoSInG BecKY’S SOUl to THE dEvIL.
This whole storyline seems to be demonstrating the difference between crimes of passion and calculated crimes. Ross is your stereotypical crime of passion person – he thinks he is doing the right thing, but acts emotionally based on his biblical framework.
Blaine on the other hand, while he is certainly acting based on emotions (resentment about paying tuition and getting beat up, anger/outrage at being forced to spend money in a way he does not want to), does so in a way that is very calculated and he *wants to hurt people.* He has NO illusions that he is doing this for anyone’s good but his own.
While people in the first category certainly can cause a lot of harm, the redeeming thing about them is that IF you can get through to them emotionally and/or rationally, they will potentially change their actions. Like Joyce when she looked up ways to reconcile homosexuality and the Bible! (After first dating Ethan, who she thought she was helping.)
For people in the second category, it is a lot less likely.
I am not sure how much of it is concern, and how much of it is guilt. Like, in Ross’s mind, I could see him thinking this is a whole other magnitude than what he did last time. At “least” then, he was kidnapping one girl, and not a half dozen kids in his eyes to lean on for information.
Then again, who knows. Ross has demonstrated himself to not be a particularly good dude, to put it mildly.
I’ve seen enough of Ross to understand he’s not evil.
Just stupid and single-minded enough that he might as well be.
Don’t forget ‘easily manipulated’, that’s been a key factor to his indoctrination and to Blaine’s control over him.
Yeah, he’s not a ‘hurts people just to see them suffer and with his own selfish desires as the only reason for his actions’ type of person. He might not be a great, good or even decent person, but like, if God came down to Earth and said to him ‘this is not right’, he would skew towards being the type of person who would listen. And like, he has shown reservations towards hurting Mike and while he hit him with a car, we didn’t see him actually injure Mike or involve himself in the fight afterwards in any meaningful way.
Hurting teenagers is a clear moral line for him that Blaine finds easy to cross and he… doesn’t find it nearly as easy to do so.
No, he’s a “My daughter is my possession and I will threaten her and abuse her to shape her into what I think she should be, even if I have to hurt her friends or get us both killed” type of person.
No if God came to earth and told him he was wrong he would likely either accuse him of being Satan, blatently choose to misunderstand him or think God was a hippy destioned for hell.
Let’s not go too far here. He’s not Blaine. He’s not a cartoon supervillain. He’s a different type of evil.
He’s not fully on board with this part of the plan as much because it doesn’t lead to directly to getting control of Becky again as anything. That lets him wonder about the methods.
That look is just what Ross looks like when he is constipated. He’s still trying to work prison food out of his system.
Best answer
Probably guilt of hurting people and also that fact her knew and loved Joyce since she was young and really being brain washed into thinking he’s saving his daughter by doing this.
He’s an asshole but he’s also a bit tragic. He has strong convictions but man are they shitty.
I think ‘feeling’ is more accurate. Feeling confusing feelings that he does not know how to reconcile with this thoughts, which are mostly biblical.
*And that was when Toedad bursted into flames*
I’m really starting to think Blaine’s dying.
He ain’t dying but he’s severely wounded (probably inflicted by Amazi-girl after Mike fell) and hasn’t gotten medical help yet.
His injuries probably were from Mike. Sure, he grabbed the rope to prevent himself from taking the same fall Mike did, but his momentum would have resulted in him getting smacked HARD into the building, which probably would have resulted in him taking a somewhat less impactful fall than Mike did.
I dunno, Doc. Amazi-Girl’s got some muscle on her, and a scooter to the chest swung by a strong person can do some serious harm. I think most of this may be her.
Don’t forget, Blaine is wearing a flak jacket.
But he also had cracked ribs from the first fight that probably have not fully healed
I doubt it. Looks like he might have a broken rib tho.
I broke my rib once and don’t remember it hurting nearly as bad as Blaine is selling this, but then again I was also on painkillers and not wearing a mask and kidnapping people so maybe the situation is different.
A simple fracture of one rib usually doesn’t get displaced, and is painful but not too bad. Ross got curb-stomped by Amber and is implied to have broken ribs from that. Then Amazi-Girl said “Keep reminding me about the ribs” and hit him in the ribs with a scooter, besides kicking him in the ribs at least twice, Then he fell off a building (though he caught a rope and we didn’t see what he hit).
He likely has multiple fractures of several ribs, which is a lot worse than an undisplaced simple fracture of one rib. He might even have an injury to his lung.
You mean Blaine, not Ross.
Indeed I do.
> He might even have an injury to his lung.
We can only hope it is causing him to slowly and painfully bleed out internally
Well, that would be nice. But having his chest fill up with air from a tension pneumothorax, collapse his lungs, and make him slowly asphyxiate is a tempting alternative.
And when presented with such a pair of alternatives I like to ask “why not both?”
I had a hairline crack in a rib once. It was manageable with lots of painkillers but I couldn’t do anything too active for quite a while. I’m betting Blaine has sustained a *lot* more damage than one barely-cracked rib.
I’ve read that, if you break your ribs badly enough, the broken bones can poke into your lungs. That is the point at which you need serious medical care to not die, and it’s excruciatingly painful. I’m guessing that is the case with Blaine, especially since he is gasping like he can barely breathe.
Let’s hope his injuries catch up to him before Amazi-Girl/the police/anyone else needs to…
If he’s wheezing (he is), who knows, maybe there’s even some bleeding in his lungs. Punctures in the lining of the lungs can get infected and go to sepsis.
It uncommon without a penetration from the outside. Blaine has more to fear from a tension pneumothorax leading to a lung collapsing.
I broke a rib once, didn’t have opiates, it hurt to take a deep breath.
Yeah, I cracked a rib playing football (Rugby league, in the school playground at lunchtime) when I was fourteen, and it wasn’t too bad, except if I coughed or laughed. I had to sleep on my back and give up clarinet practice, running, and swimming-training for a few weeks, but I got through it without pain relief. Which goes to show that there are broken ribs and broken ribs depending on which are broken, where, how badly, and whether the break is simple or multiple. Because most people get a lot more pain than I did.
Part of me is thinking right now, that if Blaine really does have the kind of mob connections to have agents positioned in the hospital that can have Mike assassinated “with a phone call”, then he’s extremely stupid to do something like this that will draw attention to them. There’s no business benefit to any of this to make the risk of acting so openly worth taking. Any connections he does have will probably bail.
Plot twist: Blaine is extremely stupid.
At no point in all this has Blaine demonstrated any sense of intelligence. For one thing, consider the fact that he allegedly has these mob connections but still teamed up with an uncooperative brick like Ross. And spent CONSIDERABLE money to do so.
I’m like 60% sure he’s lying, and the next 30% is ‘he called in the other stooges/had Asher call in contacts who are similarly low-tier’. No way he has actual clearance for this escapade.
Also, you know. A 13-year-old boy took one look at his receipts, realized they were rotten, and could yell he was committing tax fraud (With some degree of ‘how’) five years later on the fly. Sure, said kid was Mike, but he’s not supernaturally smart or anything so Blaine cannot possibly be cooking his books all that well.
As a psychopath(or at the very least antisocial disorder) Blaine has above average intelligence. However, he has poor impulse control and An inability to learn from past mistakes.
He also seems to think lowly of others, likely making him see Ross as an easy mark that can be manipulated with no trouble. See also him refusing to believe Amber was Amazi-Girl just a couple strips ago.
Is the above average intelligence actually guaranteed?
Not really. It’s part of the “sexy psychopath” syndrome: people write up psychopaths who seem intelligent and charming (a) mostly because dull and charmless people with otherwise psychopathic traits tend to lose hard before they are twenty-five (a survival bias) and (b) because a lot of the people who are interested enough in psychopaths to make a special study are a bit englamoured.
On the other hand, that investment in Ross might be pretty smart of Blaine. If his plan is to set it up to make Ross look like the fall guy for all the bodies Blaine seems to be planning on piling up.
And a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
He’s probably lying. Blaine’s a mob stooge not a mob boss. It’s kind of implied he’s the accountant. Asher’s grandpa “owns” him. At best he paid a few hundred bucks to some idiots who probably don’t even carry guns. He can’t hire assassins. Any guy Blaine could hire probably couldn’t even get into the same room Mike’s in, plus his parents are probably there too if Mike’s in a coma. It was a line of bullshit to try and motivate the hostages.
It’s implied that he is the owner-of-record for a building supplies firm that Asher’s gramps launders money through. He is described as a “stooge”: one who knowingly allows himself or herself to be used for another’s profit, a dupe.
Yeah, he’s not even the accountant, he’s just a shell.
Actually I’m kind of wondering where he’s getting the cash for all this in the first place? This whole thing is motivated in part by not wanting to pay Amber’s tuition but he also paid for the rest of Ross’ bail and has “hires” of unknown quantity he paid to kidnap the group. Plus also someone to kill Mike in the hospital. Slumming at a motel with Ross for a couple days. Buying a mask and body armor. I know college tuition is a LOT of money but this scheme to save money seems to be getting exspensive.
He probably has quite a bit of cash that the lawyers for his ex-wife have no clue about; since it’s not declared income, it’s the product of any crimes he’s committed or been involved in (or payment for whatever he does for his bosses.) Also isn’t his current wife (Faz’s mom) loaded?
My guess is that he is “borrowing” money from his business that Asher’s gramps is expecting to receive at the end of the month.
This is not a smart plan.
The money to bail out Ross came from Joyce and Ross’s church.
(So, Joyce’s mom probably helped, which is also a problem.)
It’s a pretty big church, they might have had some money left over, and Blaine seems to be in charge of how it’s spent.
–oh whoops, I think I misremembered, others are mentioning that Blaine lent money to the church, not the other way around.
It’s not really a scheme to save money on college tuition. It’s about control of Amber – and revenge of Amazi-Girl.
I thought it was a phony carpentry business.
You’re doubtless right.
You’re assuming Mike was positively identified. The hospital would have to know who he is to call his parents. If someone happened to take his wallet off him while hr was unconscious, he’s just a John Doe.
Yeah, he’s got internal injuries and just pulled an all nighter, he’s not thinking straight.
Before he could have done it and maybe even gotten away with it.
NOW, if Mike does, anyone who survives can tell the cops “And oh by the way he said he could have this guy in the hospital killed, which is conspiracy to premeditated murder.” If Mike did die, they’re going to super duper investigate everyone who had access to his room. He just confessed to a whole bunch of witnesses, at least one of which is a law student.
And it’s implausible they’ll mass murder anyone, let alone everyone. And even if they did, that would bring so much heat down on everyone that he’s not get away from the law now.
What’s the odds that Mike has a ‘In the event of my death’ letter left with a lawyer somewhere, that details everything he knows about Blaine?
Well, he keeps notes on the vulnerabilities of his friends and neighbours. And his emotional abuse of Walky has involved extensive and rather elaborate set-up. So maybe.
On the other hand, there’s not much point setting up such a thing and then not telling anyone about it. Remember the doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove.
Active your jetpack-vest, Joyce!
On the bright side, B(l)ane appears to be ignoring a significant abdominal injury and will probably encounter long-term complications because of that
I’m betting it’s serious abdominal injuries rather than the broken ribs others are speculating about. Blaine doesn’t seem the type to show that he’s in pain if he can ever help it, so for him to have to STOP torturing people because he’s in too much pain means he’s REALLY suffering. *grumpy cat GOOD*
If he has broken ribs poking into his lungs he might not be able to disguise that’s he is in pain. From what I’ve read, that situation is basically “pass out from pain level” excruciating.
One reason that we’re speculating about broken ribs is that Blaine and Amazi-Girl explicitly mentioned them during their fight.
Broken ribs can get pretty bad. Especially if a displaced one starts poking directly into a lung… exaggerated pained breathing sounds, that’s my bet. A well placed hit very well might puncture something.
Hopefully someone attacks his weak point for massive damage.
You say that but that all but guarantees it’s gonna be Amber, she’s gonna kill him, and it’s going to continue her trauma spiral, y’know? (God, if THAT’S the rule Willis broke, that’s gonna be awful.)
Don’t break your wrist this time! I recommend aiming for the bridge of the nose. I would say there’s some pressure points under his chin, but…
No, do not punch the face without gloves: it is bony and you will hurt, perhaps break, your hand. Use fists on soft bits, boots on bony bits.
My father told me once that whenever you had someone with a broken jaw in the emergency department there was always someone with a broken wrist in the next bed.
Training in bare-knuckle boxing or other martial arts might make a difference to that; Joyce doesn’t have any.
And Joyce still has a broken toe, so she should be careful with the kickin, too.
That’s why you kick with the heel or side of the foot, soccer-style. It saves the toes.
You can also punch with an open palm. You lose a little reach but greatly reduce the chance of injuring your wrist and/or hand since you hit with the fleshy part near the thumb. It also means if you hit someone in the face your fingers are in a great position for poking them in the eye or grabbing an ear and applying torsional force.
Last time we saw that look on her face she kicked a window out of its frame. I don’t like Ross’s chances.
I still don’t get Blaine’s plan. I can only guess that his goal is to traumatize Amber enough that she drops out and expect Ross to take the fall, but it’s not as though Ross won’t know who helped him. It’s not as though his name isn’t attached to Ross as the guy who bailed him out. It’s not as though his name isn’t going to be attached to the house they are using here.
Sure, Blaine is stupid, but still.
Blaine might not need Ross to be alive to be his patsy, honestly.
A dead patsy has so many advantages.
Lee Harvey Oswald was unavailable for comment.
(which is kinda the point being made)
Maybe Blaine used a false name when he lent mob money to the church group, and then Carol or the pastor took the money to the court to lodge bail, so that their name, not Blaines, appears as bailor in the court records. And maybe he gave a false name to Ross, or plans for Ross to die, or both. And maybe he used a burner phone and a credit card in a false name to rent the Abusi-Scooter.
It’s still a dumb plan, because his/Yuri’s limo’s licence plate is still going to show up on traffic cameras etc.
You introduced an interesting idea that I never considered. I always assumed that Blaine was stiffing Yuri and Faz, while lying about how much money he had on hand. After all, if paying Amber’s tuition is really bleeding him dry as Yuri suggested, how did he have enough money to pay for a bail payment that a large group of fundies could not come with collectively?
I had never considered the possibility that he took some of the money he was laundering for the mob for these purposes. If he did that, then he is MUCH dumber than I originally thought. There is little chance they won’t notice this and their solution for dealing with such theft would likely be……quite severe.
Yeah, it would be better to let Stacy get one over on you by actually being forced to contribute to your child’s welfare, Blaine.
I think he’s arrogant enough to think he can get away with it – either by making the church group responsible for paying him back when the bail money is lost (although they didn’t have the money without him so not sure quite how he expects that to work, unless he figures “so by the way, the guy you bailed out killed a bunch of kids – including your daughter, Carol – and you owe the mafia a lot of money. They want it back now.” might encourage them to dig deeper (remortgage houses etc)…) or by cooking the mob’s books too and just skimming off the amount as an undeclared bonus…
and here I thought only Ghost Rider could do the Penance Stare.
Ah yes, that’s exactly it. I was trying to think of what this reminded me of.
Yesssssss. Destroy, Joyce!
Remember, aim for the squishy bits! Stomach, solar plexus, and groin are all good ones, but eyes, ears, nose, the back of the knees if you can reach, and the throat if you’re cool going lethal are good too.
Also – they’re not squishy, but shins, fingers and toes are quite painful!
He has no throat, only toe.
EFF THAT MOTHEREFFER UP!!
I’m kinda feeling like writing a long detailed “fudge-you” post on ther myriad ways Toedad suck, but I think Joyce in the last panels very effectively communicates everything I would want to say.
Her face is PERFECT, and I hope that look on his face is the pants-shitting terror it absolutely should be.
Cause yeah, I don’t think he’s gonna feel a guilt he can’t justify or cognitive dissonance away. If he could turn Bonnie’s suicide attempt (which it sounds like she did survive, at least short-term, so it’s possible she could have tried to express WHY she was despondent enough to attempt it,) into ‘Satan took her from me’, I’m pretty damn sure NOTHING is going to actually break him. This is not a man prone to self-reflection. At BEST, I can see him hesitating long enough to leave an opening, but I don’t think these twinges of whatever are going to amount to anything more because he’s STILL HERE as Blaine says he has organized crime connections and threatens an out-of-commission teenager’s life to the six other teenagers they’ve kidnapped. (Even if Blaine’s bluffing – and I do think he is – when your co-conspirator was just accused of mob ties and then turns around and claims to have them, that should at least raise questions about WHY that’s the bluff he picks. Just, look at your life, man. Look at your choices. You’d never be redeemable in my eyes but you could at least give me the impression you have even half a brain cell.)
With the whole suicide/”Satan took her from me” thing it’s not all that long ago that attempting suicide was illegal (if you failed you would go to jail) and I believe it’s really recently that e.g. Catholics allowed people who died by suicide to be buried in consecrated ground. Stigma around suicide/mental health is reducing but him taking that stance does make sense for the character.
‘Really recently’ for the Catholic church still means ‘Ross’s entire life,’ though. (They were allowed to be buried in consecrated ground starting in the 60s, and it was considered a mental illness in catechism in the 90s – Ross is probably in his forties, but it was changing.) Also, Protestant churches have always had an at least slightly different stance – it was one of the points that drove Martin Luther’s reformation – and they are DEFINITELY a Protestant denomination, one that REALLY dislikes Catholics.
Most of them don’t look kindly on mental illness either, of course, but that’s why I pointed out it’s an attempt Willis has implied she survived, at least initially. (I think it’s VERY likely the stifling nature of her life with Ross was a serious contributing factor to Bonnie’s attempt.) There was, possibly, a chance for Bonnie to say in words ‘I am unbelievably miserable with my life’ and him to listen, and we know that if it was offered, he still didn’t listen.
I believe humans are naturally good since we evolved to be social animals that survive through cooperation, though that cooperation becomes difficult when meeting other humans that are different than us, and sometimes we kill those we see as too different by telling lies to ourselves.
Ross and Carol have told lies to themselves to the point that they believed them, and even if they think they are doing the right thing, they close their hearts to seeing things from the perspective of others.
People like Blaine on the other hand are complete monsters that got to the conclusion of ignoring human nature to be stronger. That is what we call psychopaths, antisocial people, sociopaths. This rejection of what makes one human is either a willful act, or the result of a mental illness they don’t want to get treated.
Maybe Ross will have a moment of self doubt that can be exploited by Joyce and the others to escape, or maybe he will get paralyzed with fear and Blaine will try to do the dirty work himself. These are a man doing evil for a delusional cause, and a man doing evil for his own satisfaction. Almost indistinguishibale.
We evolved to be social in small groups that would often cooperate for competing with other small groups. Chimps have similar behavior which can end in the total extermination of another group (or of its males and incorporation of its females, maybe.)
Humans have natural impulses toward cooperation and competition, fairness and selfishness. A mother typically wants to split resources evenly among her children; the children have their own idea, and are much more concerned with not getting less than with not getting more than siblings.
We also evolved to be social in small groups and to compete for advantage within those groups. Dominant individuals got better access to resources and mates within the group. That’s what much of our big brains are for.
I’ve been enjoying this storyline so I hope it doesn’t end with some made up, unrealistic, Joyce knocking out someone more than twice her size kind of thing but instead focuses more on Ross.
Ross turning on Blaine ala Return of the Jedi could be an interesting ending if it goes that way
Telling Ross to threaten Dorothy :
Joyce Thought she couldn’t be angrier at Becky threatened.
I think NegaJoyce gets born next page
Last time, Becky was there to hold Joyce back.
The toe can only hope he will be so lucky Dorothy will be able to do the same this time.
Scientists finally learn the answer to the question: Can a toe feel shame?
Plot twist: Blaine’s words in panel one are describing himself. Amber’s also inherited her insecurity issues from her dad!
abused kids abuse kids
Except when they don’t, of course.
Abuse victims can have issues that lead them to abuse as well, but they don’t always and those issues can be overcome. Some people also abuse without having been abused themselves.
It’s a tendency worth being aware of, not a law of nature.
I see the look of Ross finally clicking in his brain that this might have gone too far. From kidnapping ahalf dozen people, putting a kid in a comaqnd allying himself with a mental case dressing and acting like a cartoony supervillain. Even Ross has to be able to see at some point that it’s gone too far.
Or am I just grasping at straws?
Last night a kid claimed his co-conspirator had mob ties. At some point in the last twenty-four hours, Blaine clearly demonstrated he has the planning and (very possibly) personnel for an elaborate kidnapping, and has just now threatened a bunch of kids with the same mob ties the kid claimed he had. Ross is STILL HERE. Either he’s still more or less on board with all this, in the same ‘ends justify the means’ manner he was with SHOOTING UP A SCHOOL, or he is so terminally stupid he can’t put mob + mob together and get ‘holy shit he’s in with the mob’.
I do think you have a point, but as Ross gradually finds out what he has been doing is wrong, he won’t stop. Even though if someone had told Ross at the start that Blaine would be willing to kill an innocent bystander just to keep their cover, he would likely not have went along. Small steps go a long way.
There’s probably also a little “I’m in this deep, I can’t back out now or I’ll be targeted too” mixed in there.
The birth of dumbiverse Anti-Joyce?
I think we started seeing Anti-Joyce when she was around Jacob.
And maybe when she and Becky took the car for a drive around La Porte all day last time they were back home.
Well, if that’s the case then Willis definitely draws a cuter Anti-Joyce than Regular Joyce nowadays. She was definitely made more adorable when vying for Jacob’s attention.
Is Ross smart enough to play “good cop”?
Is Ross smart enough to run back to jail before Joyce gets him?
Is Ross smart enough to let them go and then leave Becky be? (I’m probably asking too much)
I’m hoping Blaine’s injuries have finally caught up to him, and Ross is going to have trouble sticking to Blaine’s plan without him there. Which gives this group of kidnapped students a chance to escape, hopefully.
Tears of Enrampagement.
While I still think Ross is a bad person, he is different from Blaine in that he has the capacity to care about others
That’s part of what drives him. Ross is deeply invested in caring for his daughter and is clearly willing to go to great lengths over her… but it’s all predicated on faulty and extreme logic and a skewed morality that only results in him hurting her and others close to him.
It really is sad to see that kind of love twisted into something that in the end can only harm the people he cares about.
I have little intellectual empathy for anger. Oh, there might be emotional give. But anger has little relationship to a well thought out moral code or even a rational thought process. I both love Joyce and actively find myself fact-checking her more intensively than normal. Ross is in the wrong, and there’s a rock-solid path to proving that.
And yes, Ross is feeling sympathy from an utterly filthy, piece of shit place. He’s practically destined to be judged harshly by history and will be consigned to the dustbin of history. That doesn’t mean I’m gonna give Joyce, Amber or any other angry person a free pass because they’re angry. Hell, I’m pretty sure it means I need to factcheck them harder because I’m ideologically inclined to agree with them and they’re not showing any sign they’re checking their own biases.
Such is the difference in treatment between the utterly hopeless and the people who have the slightest bit of hope. Maybe some kind of transition is warranted. I’m drunk.
Anger is just a “defense of territory and rights” at its core. It’s pretty basic to agree that “I have the right not to be kidnapped and tied up in a basement by you” is a valid right. And “I’m angry that you violated my right to not be kidnapped and so much more” is a completely justified response.
Frankly not being angry ventures into codependence at this point.
The “so much more” includes, but is not limited to:
-I trusted you
-You were supposed to be a good dad, this isn’t that
-You know or should know what Christian morals look like, this isn’t that
-You know or should know what basic human decency looks like, this isn’t that
Fact checking what? Whether they’re allowed to be angry they’ve been kidnapped? This comment makes no sense.
“Factchecking” what? In what way is Joyce wrong to be angry here? What’s so bad about anger that you can’t empathise with it? She’s right to be angry, she’s been kidnapped by someone she grew up with and trusted (after also being held at gunpoint by him before that).
I was making a general statement about anger in others and its effect on me. Joyce happens to be the one who’s angry more often lately. Whether she’s actually right is irrelevant to the point. Angry people have less room for hyperbole and figures of speech because they either really mean what they say or they’re pulling stuff out of their ass. The middle ground of witty banter is much less of an option.
The facts:
1) A religious zealot tried to shoot up her friends.
2) Said religious zealot just kidnapped seven people.
3) She just found out that her mother is evil.
4) She just lost her faith because she realized she was in a religious cult.
5) One of her friends may be dead because of Ross.
6) Becky is safer without Ross in her life.
^^ never been a victim of a violent crime
Yeah, anger itself isn’t any proof that you’re right, but the facts here are pretty simple and apparent. Joyce is angry because she’s been kidnapped and her friends are being threatened.
This isn’t some abstract intellectual debate she’s winning because she’s angry, but we really should be concentrating on proving Ross wrong with cold hard logic and facts, this is the middle of an ongoing crime.
Anger is at its core your emotions telling you and others that you or someone you care about has been wronged and you should do something about it.
It can have false positives. You don’t usually decide when you feel it. You do have control of what you do with it. Feeling comfortable expressing it in certain situations can reveal a sense of entitlement or a generally screwed up moral framework.
In Steven Universe the first time I felt sympathy for Jasper is when he was being corrupted and yelling at Steven in anger. I also knew I would feel more sympathy for Navy if she was angry instead of simply sadistic. ON the other hand despite the fact that your sister being killed is a reasonable reason to get angry I felt little sympathy for Blue Diamond because she didn’t see anything wrong with shattering gems for petty reasons.
Congrats on apparently being both callous and insufferable. What the actual fuck kind of “bias” do you think Joyce could be displaying here in her anger about being fucking kidnapped
Jesus what the fuck is wrong with yer brain that yer like. WELLLLLLLL I would be inclined to side with Joyce the girl who’s friends have now been kidnapped twice by Toehead one of which involved a gun being aimed at her. BUT because she’s angry I’m inclined to say that SHE is in the wrong because I have brain worms.
She wasn’t challenged to a debate, she was fucking kidnapped and thrown in a basement. What the hell is there to “factcheck”. The entire school of “you expressed an emotion, therefore you lose” needs to die in a fire.
Yes, the kidnappers who are threatening to murder them have the moral high ground, good job figuring that out. Jesus tapdancing Christ.
See a professional before you get yourself or someone else hurt, dear lord.
OMG, if you need to “factcheck” them it means YOU dont have a “well thought out moral code” on all the reasons its wrong to assault and kidnap college students, while blackmailing them and threatening murder.
They are wholly in the right to kill right now to survive. its basic self defense and right to life.
Somebody learned a new term! And by “learned” I mean “heard,” ‘cuz you obviously don’t have any idea what it means.
The concept you are suggesting here is called tone policing. It is a favored tactic of those with the privilege to not be personally affected by something to dismiss anything said by those who are. See for example Joyce’s last interaction with her brother John: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/settledown/
Yes, Joyce is angry. Is her anger justified? Well, it is directed at a man who has committed and in fact is -right now in the middle of ongoing- multiple felonies, specifically causing injury to both herself and her friends, with the intent to deprive her best friend of freedom. I am really not seeing wiggle room on how this needs ‘fact checking’. If you would like to give some sort of evidence otherwise, feel free, else it turns out you’re actually the one making an irrational argument from emotion here.
Turns out judging… Let’s call it ‘a disagreement’ based on who sounds/looks ‘more rational’ rather than the content of the issue isn’t actually rational? Who’da thunk. (besides every angry reply to you already here, who already have to deal with tone policing in their everyday lives for issues that actually affect them, let alone their fictional entertainment)
Thank you for at least addressing the topic instead of assuming it has anything to do with whether Joyce is actually totally right and justified in her anger here. It is indeed a detached perspective, which is a position of privilege. Anger is like…noise. It crowds out the point being made.
I was making an observation about myself. Perhaps because I happened to make that realization on this particular moment in the comic, it was taken as some criticism of Joyce being angry here. That’s plainly outside of what I talked about though.
Without her sweatervest restricting her powers, Joyce’s true power will reveal itself!
Why is it that every villain makes that one fatal mistake?
One of the regular players in my RPGs once commented that the problem with my adventures was that they always depended on the villains or criminals making a fatal mistake. I replied that if the villains never made any mistakes the heroes would never win.
Well stated.
Oh noes, that’s chess all over again!
Something tells me this is a staring contest for Ross to lose.
I’m not gonna lie, as someone who grew up with emotionally abusive, hyper conservative, evangelical parents… I feel a lot of catharsis through Joyce.
Like, yeah, I’ve already long-since dealt with the realizations and the heartbreak and the leaving that Becky did. But Becky seemed to not have fully bought in to everything anyway. Joyce did. And so did I. And no matter how this shakes out, seeing someone write a character who is so very much like I was once upon a time, and seeing her angry and hurt and betrayed, and having those emotions validated by the narrative?
Seriously, Willis, this is something very very precious to me, and I’m so beyond glad that you’ve shared it with us and that I found it.
HUGGLES
I think that Blaine is now on a timer before the rib Amazi-Girl re-broke tears open a lung and finishes him off. As for Ross? He’s always struck me as stupid but I think that he doesn’t understand why Joyce hates him and also is very, very scared of the woman she’s becoming.
Agreed on the rib, and I think Ross has at least SOME idea that what he is doing is becoming increasingly Not OK.
Yeah, I’m wondering if that’s a heel-face turn expression from Toedad? An “oh my god, what have I become that Joyce can look at me like that?” moment? It’s hard to tell, as Toedads facial expressions cover the gamut of emotions from a to b. (“constipated”, “annoyed because someone else has asked if he’s constipated”, and “angry at still being constipated” cover most of what we’ve seen)
I am very afraid that the look on Joyce’s face is reflecting Toe-Dad’s memory of the look on the face that he got from his wife at some point shortly before she self-terminated. Joyce’s face has the “somebuddy’s gonna Die!” Look about it, and imma scared.
Could all this clearly illegal and morel shit be what finally gets Ross to realize he’s the immoral ass hole.
I mean immoral
Prove there’s even the tinest speck of what Christian goodness actually supposedly should be in you and free those children now that you’re being left alone with them, Ross.
Or at least the one who can beat the shit out of her father, if there’s a time crunch.
There’s no Christian goodness in Ross. He is so sheltered from the world that he felt that the only response to Becky running away was to threaten her friends with a shotgun. His idea of getting Becky back was to kidnap seven people and put another in the hospital.
The next few strips are probably going to be him telling Joyce that she’s been led by Satan. Every single time that Blaine brought God up, it brought Ross to heel.
Ross is a bad person. He’s not doing any of this for the reasons that Blaine is, but he’s still a bad person. And unfortunately, he’s too far gone to be reasoned with.
And because no one has said it (as of the time of this posting)
“Joyce Intensifies”
The crowd erupts into applause!
Okay, so just imagine for a moment that hell is real. Now imagine someone you love more dearly than anyone else in the entire world, including yourself. Next, imagine God has said that what that person is doing is going to send them to hell where they’re going to suffer for all eternity. Imagine all of that is actually real and not just some messed up stuff some religion you don’t believe in and generally despise has pulled out of fresh air. Now ask yourself, how far would you go to save that person from such a fate? To me, I wouldn’t give a toss what happens to me in this life if it meant I could save them from eternal torment in the next. And that is where I see Ross coming from in all of this.
Exactly.
The only thing leading him to doubt is Joyce, the girl that was always an example of good, being enraged at him. She has always been a good Christian so either she is misguided or Ross is. In this situation, having nearly murdered a kid, having kidnapped a group of ’em and slowly starting to realize the person with you might not be that good of a Christian, it’s possible he will actually start considering the second.
In that situation, I’d be willing to go at least as far enough as asking “what’s the most effective WAY of saving them”, which would lead to questions like “what is the verifiable success/failure rate of reparative therapy” and “why does this lead to so many deconversions?” and “holy crap isn’t there a better option than this?” and “why are all my religious friends still endorsing it?” and “if they’re so wrong about this, what else could they be wrong about?”
Asking those questions is the what Ross isn’t willing to do for Becky.
But kidnapping five teenagers, terroristic death threats, complicity in aggravated assault, extortion… he’s willing to do that. Because apparently that’s not as bad as questioning.
*willing to go at least as far as
*questions is the thing that Ross
wtb comment-preview feature
Questioning is really not a thing in Ross’s skill-set. He’s not bright to begin with, plus “questioning my faith” has been firmly taught as a very bad thing.
He believes that conversion therapy is the best method because his church says so. He believes his church is right, likewise, because the church says so, and has told him this since he was a tiny, not-so-bright child.
He’s definitely not supposed to independently verify things that his church says, he’s supposed to believe them. Not asking questions – or discarding the questions that pop into his mind unbidden – means that his ‘faith is strong’ and he can succeed.
Has Ross ever actually mentioned conversion therapy? Or is it just an assumption that it was the end goal behind the earlier kidnapping?
He just needs to get his property back properly under his control again until she can be passed along to a good husband who will keep her under control. No need for any of this therapy stuff.
Personally, I’d consider keeping a gay teen under your control until you can marry them off to someone ‘proper’ an attempt, minimum, at forcibly converting them. (We’ve seen from at least Walkyverse Leslie how that turns out, and I think the Sad Schmuck she married there still exists here?) Becky also said when she was recounting her escape from Anderson that he was talking about ‘fixing’ things, which at least brings to mind the possibility.
It’s gonna be deeply traumatic in very similar ways regardless, is my point, and has the same chances of working long-term.
*Brief tag trawl back to his first appearance* Yeah, Becky’s line is that ‘He’d find a way to discipline me. To fix me.’ I’m not sure he had a particular strategy in mind, no, but all of them are gonna fucking suck if THAT’S your framework.
Oh it’s certainly all going to suck. Not claiming his intent wasn’t awful.
Just responding to Reltzik’s bit about questioning “what is the verifiable success/failure rate of reparative therapy” and “why does this lead to so many deconversions?” and Leorale’s “He believes that conversion therapy is the best method because his church says so.”
Unless he’s specifically talked about reparative therapy, I don’t think he’s focused so much on finding a way to change Becky so she’s not gay, as just to put her back into the proper woman’s role. End this rebellious phase, get her married off and she’ll be saved, since that’s God’s role for women.
Again, this is horrible, but it’s not really addressable by a mindset of “let’s look at the results of reparative therapy”.
Oh, yeah, I said reparative therapy because I was responding to somebody who said it, and I just assumed they were right in what Ross was planning.
(Come to think of it, Ross might not even have a specific plan — perhaps he just figures that he can’t “fix” Becky when she’s off at college kissing ladies, so he wants to get her home, by any means necessary, and then maybe he’ll ask his pastor what to do with her. Maybe he’ll pray on it, and arrive at some terrible new strategy of his very own. Who knows!)
Whether he’s signing her up for an established horrible shame-therapy, or whether he’s locking her up in his own house, or something else, the point remains: questioning and verifying things independently is specifically, purposely not in his skill set.
Ross is not a researcher. He thinks that having enough faith will determine his success.
I went with reparative therapy because that’s been the popular speculation here of what he has in mind, but you could cut-and-paste whatever his actual plans are into that question and it would make the same point.
Yeah, it is VERY MUCH a core facet of the thing that makes Ross a villain – and a deeply dangerous one – that he’s not a reflective, inquisitive person, he’s been told any questions are signs of weakness of faith, and so any tendencies he MIGHT have had have been stomped out.
He did not hesitate to pull a gun on a college campus, and was damn clear he was willing to hurt bystanders or himself if it got Becky back under his control. The only thing that’s really all that different here is that it’s slow and calculated where Ross is very short-term, and it involves the mob. MAYBE that’s bad enough to make him reassess his choices, but the gun thing DIDN’T.
There is that fun passage in the bible where the Jews capture a heathen city and convert the population. Of course this means all the men have to be circumcised and, while they’re recovering from that, the Jews kill them all. No backsliding, straight to heaven. Just saying, sometimes you have to go to extreme measures to save someone immortal soul.
I always wonder if this stuff ever got to me when I was a kid and pushed me in my current direction or if all the hypocrisy and evil in the Bible didn’t stick out to me until after I had stopped caring about converting at all.
I’d be here for a potential Toedad redemption.
I’m not. Too easy and too dismissive of how bad he really has been.
Now, Ross deciding that Blaine isn’t actually righteous and thus disrupting Blaine’s plan (by helping the kids out) before going back to trying to kidnap Becky. That might be an interesting twist. Set us up to think we’ve got a redemption, but then leave us with Ross’s real threat.
Joice has wants to learn Hate, Do you want to Forget a move to learn Hate?
Do you want to Forget Forgiveness?
Forgiveness Have Been Forgiven
Hate has Been Learned
Remember, whoever breaks down laughing first loses the staring contest.
Then we’re gonna be here for a while…
“I don’t think she wants me to, Mr. Luthor!”
This is a serious comic and big things are happening … but I can’t help but laugh at the title. Out of the words in this, ‘Hnnnk’ is a great pick for a title.
what do you suppose Blaine is taking to keep going? Oxycodone and meth, perhaps?
Arrogance and hate.
oooo looks like blaine is nursing something of a sucking chest wound (ie one or more of them broken ribs seems to have very seriously punctured one or both of his lungs). 5$ SES AMBER AND/OR AMAZIGIRL GET TO DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT TO LET HIM DIE WHEN HE KEELS OVER LATER ON!
also: toedad is gonna break first, and joyce is gonna break him.
Amber and Mazie likely won’t get a choice. It will be a fight and life-or-death. Blaine’s arrogance will be the ultimate cause of his death although it will be hard for either of the girls in the body of Amber O’Malley to entirely accept that.
honestly someone with a rib(s) in their lung(s) is in no shape to fight no matter how you spin it. they might adrenaline up and get a few good swings but at this stage i doubt he’d even get that. he could pass out just trying to punch at someone, let alone fighting them.
“You’ve made my shiit liiiist!”
Is still possible that Ross will change his mind and free them..
Maybe. Let’s dream.
Everybody suggesting this seems to have forgotten that Ross and Blaine aren’t the only people there. Blaine’s hired goons are still around, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Blaine hadn’t already given them orders to cover this exact possibility.
If you lay a word or a finger on Dorothy I stg
Moments later, Ross burst into flames
OK, but why is Blaine glitching like a Westworld host who just started questioning the nature of their reality?
The going theory is he has bruised and/or cracked ribs, making breathing painful.
Hopefully more. Am I a bad person for hoping for more than just bruised ribs? Maybe.
Anyone want to take bets on whether ThumbDad is going to have an epiphany about kidnapping and torturing a group of kids in order to get information about the location of a superhero who will, uh… Does Ross still think this is about getting his daughter back? He’s already gone full henchman. He’s taking orders from a guy in a supervillian costume who’s already attempted one murder and is threatening half-a-dozen more. That’s not the best way to get one’s daughter to return to the church.
This may just be my favourite DoA comic ever.
Hg
I honestly think that Ross here is questioning himself, but maybe I’m wrong.
Either way, Joyce? Feel free to re-sprain that wrist on his face as soon as you get free.
Joyce really needs some punching lessons if she’s going to keep getting into these situations. Cuts down on the self-injury if you do it correctly.
Theory: Joyce, the meek, unquestioning, non-challenging kid was the daughter Ross always kinda wished Becky could be more like. Having her look at him the way she is now, and having seen Blaine revel in trying to scare her and the other kids, might hit home just a bit…
If ever there was a time for the “Are we the bad guys..?” meme
@temperaryobsessor: IDK about the “control over what you do with it” part. Anger pretty much robs you of control. That’s what a crime of passion is; an act driven by an emotion that hijacks a person’s reason and values. That was clearly part of Pink Diamond’s character arc, her losing control and hurting people. Then that pattern was repeated by Steven in SU Future.
There is a real full-circle quality to our bringing up Steven Universe. This fandom introduced me to SU, otherwise I never would have watched it. Old guys who don’t have a TV don’t generally watch Cartoon Network. So, thanks, Dumbiverse fandom, for leading me to the most meaningful media experience I’ve ever had. It’s been a wild, emotional ride these last six months.
WILLIS, SIR, Please don’t post this, i put my real name in by mistake. Or post it with the name Old Fart that I usually use–pauldeshaw
I mean don’t post the one stamped 5:58 aunless you can change the name to Old Fart, and PRETTY PLEASE just delete these last two. You really need an ‘undo post’ or ‘delete post’ function. THANK YOU
Ross. Is. Doomed.
His mouth twitched just now. I’m sure that’s deeply significant.
I see those tears in the last panel as indicative of the feelings of betrayal she mentioned in the March 26th. strip. Yes, she’s angry, but she is also torn up because an adult she looked up to as a child has destroyed what little faith she had left in him.
This is of course part of her loss of faith in the church, but has reached overwhelming levels at the enormity of the current situation.