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It's a pretty rigid format but we keep the content loose, you know?
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Haha, I was like, “oh new people. Wonder why that one guy is giving Danny the stink-eye about him trying to get comfy? Maybe he was engrossed in his homework? Odd route for DoA to take. Let’s check the tags. Bryan and DinoBot? Which one is DinoBot/why are they tagged as tha–oh, wait, Ethan, it says. Huh. Interesting Mike-hair.”
A perennial secondary character who mostly rode shotgun in other peoples’ stories last semester. Hopefully he’ll get more to do on his own for Season 2.
Ethan is a childhood friend to Amber and Mike. He is obsessed with Transformers and he is gay. He dated Joyce for a while, until Joyce came around to homosexuality not being sinful and gently breaking up with him, and encouraging him to be himself. Danny and Ethan had a mutual attraction, but they decided not to act on it because they both dated Amber before and thought it would hurt her. Ethan and Mike became make-out buddies until Mike died. It was looking like Danny and Ethan might actually get together after all, but Danny messed it up by being insensitive over Mike’s death (because, admittedly, Mike WAS an asshole, and Danny wasn’t willing to get him off the hook for that just because he died). Ethan and Danny had a falling out, and we haven’t see Ethan in a while, and now he has a new haircut. I honestly wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t been tagged.
Mike and Ethan weren’t just make-out buddies though – they fucked, which seemed to free Ethan from some of his hang-ups and start him dating/banging a bunch of other guys.
He had a falling out with Amber as well, at least partly over her not dealing with her mental problems leading to Mike’s death.
And quite frankly, there hasn’t been a whole lot of reader sensitivity to Ethan’s grief over one of his longest-term friends dying. Idk about y’all but if I have had friends in my life for over half of my life, they become something closer to family. They can get weird, distance themselves and come back as friends later, they can have a difficult phase where no one else really likes them or worries about them except the friends who’ve been there for a long time– but just like family, there’s room for return. So Ethan kind of lost one of the most significant people in his life, especially since his biological family is neither very accepting of nor a source of emotional security for him. In a harsh way that Ethan understood to be coming from a place of care, Mike DID care for Ethan. He, Ethan, and Amber were a trio of weird kids who kind of got each other, and who all had emotionally maladaptive ways of dealing with life. But they got that about each other. Now one of the trio is dead. That’s hard.
I wouldn’t ever deny that Ethan is grieving deeply, nor try to invalidate that grief. I think you highlight some good points in that comment. I think that the audience has an easier time identifying with Danny because for however long we’ve been reading the comic we really only saw Mike act pretty unkindly toward most people. We saw some flashbacks later in the story that show where Ethan developed a soft spot for Mike and showed where/why Mike really shoved his softer emotions down, but overall we really just saw mean Mike. Danny really only ever experienced mean Mike, and he never got the benefit of seeing those softer flashbacks. I think what makes it hard to be entirely respectful of Ethan’s grief is that he was never willing to accept that Mike only made people like Danny feel bad, and death doesn’t erase the pain you’ve caused on Earth. Admittedly, Danny 100% handled that situation with Ethan terribly, but I hesitate to forgive Ethan for downplaying the pain Mike caused to those around him.
And the pain Mike caused Ethan (and even more Amber), which was what really bothered Danny more than anything Mike did to him. I tend to think of Mike and Ethan as more like an abusive relationship, where the victim is emotionally dependent on the abuser, making excuses and grasping at any good signs. This was made pretty explicit for Mike and Amber in Mike’s revelation in the fight scene that led to his sacrifice, but I think it applies to Ethan as well, if less strongly.
We’re also less sensitive to Ethan’s grief because we haven’t seen him in a year. If we’re now going to dig into it, that may change.
Its promised on the tin on the comic. specifically. Because of the slow time presentation and sliding timescale.
Willis killing off the bad dads is one thing. Killing someone a character was banging to keep in permeant grief is something else.
The Danny x Ethan ship was on the masthead for over 6 years! Thats Queerbaiting. Now we’ve gone a year w/out seeing him.
How are we supposed to be respectful ( when the comic itself isnt to Baited teased storyline )
The fictional characters arent real ( quoting Danny ) its our feelings that are.
The Readers are not to blame. I’ve read this in good faith. We dont literally an owe an emotional investment of our souls. No one needs to be sensitive to a fictional characters feelings. Thats manipulation.
Author chose queerbaiting. Fridging. Bury Your Gays. Shipteasing. only to Danny it up, and mash up the Greatest hits of Danny x Sal .
and that really sucks as it was the only M-M pairing in the whole comic written with any emotional investment.
The author had his chance to write one that mattered and Dannyied it up.
I dont even want them, together anymore
Waiting a whole year to put them in same room is such an FU to fans.
Whats next, Willis gives up Transformers and joins a fundamentalist church ?
Just because one relationship doesn’t happen doesn’t make it queerbaiting. If this was the only teased same-sex relationship I might agree with you, or if this was a patern, but DU isn’t queerbaity. I also haven’t totally written the Danny×Ethan ship off yet. They’re still freshmen, and have a lot of time yet to make that a thing. Its only been 6 years our time, for them its been a semester. A very emotionally turbulent semester. I don’t think queerbaiting is a fair accusation here.
I couldn’t possibly disagree more. I’m loving Ethanatos, it’s snappier than it looks, rolls of the tongue nicely, has a good rise and fall to it …I love it.
I thought it was Ken, too!! I wondered why the last panel had him staring so prominently…took me awhile and a journey to the tags to puzzle it all out!
Anyway, he and Danny definitely argued further after Mike died. Or maybe Danny’s words about how Mike’s an asshole were the last thing they discussed before Ethan took the rest of the semester off.
I suspect it’s the latter, that they just did not talk after that conversation. Honestly wouldn’t be surprised if Ethan ghosted Amber, etc, too, since it doesn’t really come across like anyone’s been in contact with him.
I also thought it was Ken for a minute, I was like, “Wow, Ken looks different!” Then I glanced at the tag and went, “Oh, wow, Ethan looks *really* different!”
Danny: *loosens necktie* Has someone got a space heater pointed at me or something? It’s like the right side of my face feels… really warm… for some reason…
Not gonna lie, I actually did think it was Ken for a split second before I took a closer look at his face… and realized just who I was actually seeing.
Danny, it’s very simple. When your roommate kicks you out to have sex, you show up to your SO’s room. Then you kick her roommate out, and the cycle continues.
He must have had a rough 3 months. Ethan was in considerably good shape and losing muscle mass takes longer than that if you’re well conditioned which I assume he was. Like not only would he have to had quit working out but he also must have been eating significantly less.
Hrmmm. Only reading like the first 10 pages of Shortpacked from that link and Robin is way more likeable in that comic than she is in this one. What happened?
I think it’s because Shortpacked was a silly comic, while DoA is much more serious. Shortpacked-Robin was (sometimes) allowed to be manic with no consequences. In DoA, there are consequences all over the place.
Honestly this is why I was confused back when i was like 13 why people were getting mad about Robin in DOA and not finding her antics funny like in shortpacked. Same with Mike, or amber flipping a table. Took me a while to get it and start taking things seriously
Perspective shift from ‘look at this wackiness’ where people barely cared to ‘real life lite’ where it turns out people actually feel things when you do stuff.
That just makes me think of “Welcome to the Black Parade”, which besides being one of my favorite songs, has lyrics that seem rather likely to foreshadow Ethan’s new demeanor.
Well, yeah. I still do think what he said was 100 percent right, that Mike had been nothing but terrible to him their entire time knowing each other, so he had nothing to mourn. Certainly could have and should have articulated that better, though.
What else is there to articulate? Mike is an abusive asshole who constantly makes life worse for everyone, and did for both Ethan and Amber before moving onto everyone else he knew. He would, actually, laugh at Danny for being in a coma, he’s like that. He does think laughing at horrible trauma in front of other people is funny.
Danny asserted to himself that he mattered enough not to slavishly devote himself to a guy who said in no uncertain terms that he’d let Mike laugh his ass off were Danny in a coma. That’s not being an absolute shitbag, that’s the punctuation on Danny’s unhealthy romance narrative where he’d stop having any value other than what he’d give to his partner.
I mean, generally speaking when an asshole who your friend for some reason cares about is dying, you shelf the ‘I really don’t like how he treats you’ conversation (or at least more than a passing allusion immediately followed with ‘but I obviously hope he gets better soon, even if I don’t like him personally’) for some time that’s not, y’know, immediately after said friend left asshole’s hospital room because his parents wanted time alone with their comatose son. You also don’t start that conversation with ‘Would it really be so bad (if he stayed in a coma)?’ Like, the blowout fight had Ethan being a traumatized asshole defending Mike, but it started with Danny making a comment he really should not have said out loud and then doubling down on it.
(Again, you don’t have to pretend the asshole wasn’t an asshole. You can say ‘we never got along’ attached to the ‘I obviously hope he doesn’t die.’ Hell, even if the person is, like, Ross levels of terrible and you aren’t actually sad at all they’re dead, you can still say ‘I’m sorry you’re in pain, my sympathies, I know this is difficult’ and just… not bring up the ‘but also he can rot in hell, FUCKING FINALLY.’ Even if they know you think that. Because when they’re going through messy complicated grief is the WORST POSSIBLE TIME to start presenting your case as to why, in fact, that person you’re sad about sucks actually. Like I understand every step of the way and Danny was not in any way wrong about Mike, but his failure to recognize time and place and that Ethan was in fact actively grieving did make him an asshole there, and Ethan’s assholery in turn was in part because Danny’s comments put him on the defensive.)
I mean yeah it was the worst possible time and place to say it.
Would it ever not be? Is Danny even emotionally mature enough to parse through that kind of complexity when he blurted it out loud, apologized immediately, and only started saying anything when Ethan started lionizing Mike?
I think of that conversation the same way you think of Ethan and Amber having Mike live rent-free in their heads for all eternity; he piled fucked up bullshit onto them, did one good thing, and now he’s good forever.
I mean yes, Danny’s 18-19, but also it doesn’t take much self-awareness or basic tact to recognize you don’t say that shit to someone when everything’s THAT FRESH. (It’s an amount of self-awareness Danny has consistently lacked, but go back to Becky’s comments to Amber after Blaine’s death and notice how, even though neither she nor Amber are sad and Becky has every right to be saying, ‘good riddance,’ she prioritizes supporting Amber and giving her advice that amounts to ‘you don’t have to be sad he’s dead but Dead Parent Feelings can get weird so know that if they do change, that’s not invalidating the hatred you feel for him now but it’s not any less real either.’ Which Amber realizes and acknowledges is genuine advice. Becky has way above average experience in that department, but the immediate ‘support Amber and Faz, celebrate later’ was picked up on there.)
I mean, it’s not like he said it on purpose. For all I talk about Danny asserting himself that was a bug, not a feature. He didn’t dunk on Mike to stand up for himself, it just kind of happened in the heat of the moment, and the real meat of that conversation is that Mike was the kind of person you could say that about. Yeah Amber Feels are of concern with Blaine dead, but it’s not like anyone’d tell her “oh he was a great man.”
He said it, he apologized, Ethan started gussying Mike up, and Danny just went in again because, well, it mattered to him to say it and he has no filter. For narrative reasons it had to be said, and it had to be said in a way that’d make it painful af when Ethan returned and that also came with Danny in a scenario with a crush on someone and then not just slavishly submitting to their wants.
Bah! I scoff at that idea! Timing, tact, those are all excuses. Danny might be a scumbag for what he said and when he said it but he spoke his truth. Mike was an asshole, he’d be the first to admit it and would probably respect Daniel way more for talking shit about him while he was on his death bed. Mike would if the situation was reversed and Dan was in the coma, and Ethan would’ve been okay with that because he’s a hypocrite who held a double standard for Mike’s bullshit.
That conversation wasn’t just about Mike being an asshole, it was Danny realizing that Ethan valued him so little that he’d let, or at least he say he would let, Mike mock him for being in a coma.
And, you know what, I believe it. At most he’d roll his eyes and go “hey come on, now” and then instantly fold when Mike fired some sarcastic asshole line back.
OK it’s so bad, I mean I expected him to be dressed up in leather with piercings and maybe a bit of eyeliner but this ain’t bad he just has a new haircut that could work and he looks like he hasn’t seen a bed in days but…it ain’t that bad.
i meant leather jacket.
…also apparently his hair was always black?
i still think he looks better like this than before. but i thought he’d dyed it, which would’ve signalled a conscious effort to change his appearance, instead of just (quite possibly) neglect. which is less sexy, more concerning
I think this is an optical illusion from the way he is sitting on the couch and the viewing angle. If he stood up next to Danny he would be as tall and broad of shoulders as he ever was. His other proportions might be different.
Ethan and Danny actually reconciled from the fight they had, they actually stopped talking to each other because on Halloween, Danny revealed he hated Beast Wars because the CGI was so outdated.
I had to check the tagged to make sure it wasn’t Ethan at the pool table and some guy with the unfortunate name “Dinobot” sitting in the sofa.
What can make a young man four inches shorter, two inches narrower across the shoulders, and lost twenty pounds of muscle? If Ethan has AIDS I’m out of here.
I’m with Thag. Ethan’s slouching and has almost certainly been eating poorly (and, given his eyes, sleeping poorly, and likely in general just not been taking care of himself, much like Amber) since Mike’s death. Amber’s likely in better physical condition because she shares a body with AG, whose roller derby time means exercise and requires adequate calorie consumption, and probably some habits built up for physical activity and conditioning while barely hanging on mentally. I’m calling Depression Makeover.
Also, because given Ethan pre-skip was getting into Casual Sex To Avoid Telling His Mom About How He’s Still Gay, him getting HIV (and apparently just… not treating it at all, to be in such rough shape in three months given what treatments are available now?) would be beyond ‘poor taste’ to ‘holy fucking fuckballs offensive,’ and I’m pretty sure Willis is at least slightly more aware of these things than that. Fumbles sometimes, yes. Sudden grotesquely homophobic 90s throwback, I doubt.
Yeah seriously. Willis would never write an HIV story about a gay dude catching it from sleeping around a whole lot. That flies from any tasteful or nuanced depiction of living with HIV into “Dumbing of Age welcomes new co-writer Ronald Reagan.”
Willis has been pretty damn consistently good with his queer dudes even as far back as Shortpacked, and it’s not even that I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, I don’t think he’s capable of writing something like that period.
As for Ethan himself, not just being an angry goth but actually getting physically ill from his depression strikes me as a really interesting take on him now, where isolating himself this hard from the rest of the cast meant no one was around to catch him get worse. I think it adds a tangible weight to how messed up he was by Mike’s death and does a lot to make “Ethan goes goth!” less inherently funny.
Like I’m still laughing at his silly emo fringe, but I’m also feeling bad about it at the same time because of where it came from. Kinda taps into that Ruth energy where I’m doing both whenever I see her.
Right? It’s hilarious but then you see the bags under his eyes and realize it’s not just distance/perspective making him look smaller, he clearly actually lost weight and go ‘oooh, dear, nothing good can come of this.’
Now, everyone in the comments doesn’t recognize Ethan here, because he looks so wildly different
What if Danny doesn’t recognize Ethan either? It’s entirely plausible if they stopped talking to each other and having contact since either pre-timeskip or halloween arc, given how different he looks.
I think that’s somewhat unlikely, if only because they’re still living in the same hall, Ethan’s clearly still going to the common areas from time to time (which is good, because at least he’s not isolating himself like Amber,) and thus Danny’s likely to have seen him at least occasionally mid-Depression Makeover. Stopped talking to each other, probably, but if Ethan was in the common areas there’s decent odds they awkwardly avoided each other in passing.
I think this is a point some of the comments are forgetting. We haven’t seen Ethan in several months worth of in-story time, but the rest of the characters still saw him at least occasionally. He still lives in Read Hall on the same floor as Walky, Joe, and Danny. To us, he’s suddenly a gaunt emo kid. They saw his degradation in real time.
He’s not reacting at all, but it’s also possible he just didn’t notice him. Did walk in from behind Ethan, so he just would have seen black hair and hoodie sticking up above the couch.
So what happens next here? If they’ve awkwardly avoiding each other in passing, it seems like that should continue and this becomes a weird way to reintroduce Ethan, since he’ll just leave or they’ll ignore each other.
I could easily imagine Danny not recognizing Ethan when he’s changed so much. Remember Danny took quite a while to realize Amber was Amazi-Girl, even though he saw both of them almost daily.
Although I agree that, living in the same hall, Danny would have seen him at least a few times since Mike’s death, and seen the deterioration in progress.
Obligatory: Like everyone else who didn’t realize Amber was Amazi-Girl (except Dina), including her own father. In that sequence, even when she was saying she was. Danny did see both of them more often, but in world it clearly is an effective disguise.
Unwarranted hot take time! Ethan is the worst character in the series, and I’m very happy to have him back.
When I say deliberately annoying things like “of the two dozen major characters in the series I only hate 2.5 of them” Ethan never factored into it because to hate him would be to acknowledge him. He Exists, he has no real interesting stories of his own where he takes center stage, he’s about as vanilla as Dorothy, except Dorothy goes out and does things and throws herself into stuff so even if Dorothy’s a little too unrelentingly kind for my tastes she’s still an active character, and Ethan sure wasn’t. He’s just a mess of problems and anxieties except none of those problems are his fault so they don’t really feel engaging to watch him work through, I just really feel bad for him because he just kind of stares wide-eyed at the latest thing gone wrong. He started asserting himself by finding the confidence to start sleeping around and yeah that was fun, but it didn’t mean anything either. It was always in isolation with exceedingly minor characters where another cast member would go “dude, you’re getting laid” and then Mike and Danny would start making moony eyes. That was like the first time he ever did anything of his own volition and it still had to involve those two. This guy seriously had nothing to himself.
So right here, that one panel of Ethan shooting Danny a glare? That is actually the first time I’ve been excited to see him because it’s the first time he’s at all capable of providing any kind of interesting or dynamic conflict with another cast member, the punctuation of a terrible argument these two had that became magnitudes worse because of unfortunate circumstance, where I still have zero compulsion to blame Danny for what he said but I sure as hell get why Ethan himself would, and that’s legitimately interesting to me now. He’s been gone long enough that it became a deliberate build-up, there was meaning to his reappearance, and that his reappearance took so damn long kinda highlights how totally useless he’s been as a character while still making his return with an entirely new look a huge deal.
It’s exciting! The prospect of Ethan returning was something I’d never find worth looking forward to until he stopped showing up and I started wondering oh jeez, what’s his deal now? What’s going on there? What does he think not just about Danny, but the rest of the cast? Did his falling out with Amber hit hard when he realized he had been doing that the entire run of the series? Is he gonna start hanging out with Walky to process the idea of someone being able to miss Mike? He’s probably horribly angry at Danny, is that something he’s going to express at all or does he just want to be left the fuck alone? What’s it mean to be the one member of the cast who didn’t think it was worth heading off to Garbage Roof with everyone else?
I can finally start friggin’ caring about this guy, and that rocks.
Also it’s, like, viscerally funny to me that these two were shaping up to be annoyingly perfect in that cringe-inducing Adorable Gay Babies way and then the last thing they do is have a big fucking fight and now Ethan’s this really angry, broken-looking dude, except he’s angry and broken-looking in a way that makes me laugh at him and feel really bad before I laugh again and then feel worse. It’s a curious feeling.
Making a prediction now: he’s gonna continue to be a foil for Joyce. Pre-timeskip, they showed two different paths of casual rebellion; now they’ve both lost something big from their lives and Ethan’s grief manifesting physically contrasts with Joyce’s grief turning her bitter and angry
You’re not wrong. Ethan was mostly there as a supporting character for Amber and Joyce’s stories for the first semester. He started coming into his own in the lead-up to the kidnapping, but then he was back to being Amber’s support again.
I hope the time skip put enough distance between him and the rest of the cast so that he has to be able to stand on his own, story-wise.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I pretty much agree with this. I was always frustrated that Ethan took so little control of his life and hadn’t really come into his own as a character. It’s nice to see takes from others about it.
The new cut does look nice but he looks like he’d pass out half way through sex from how sleep deprived he is I can see the bags under his eyes from here.
I didn’t even recognize him! I thought Ken was going through an Emo phase all of a sudden.
Goodness, he’s taking Mike’s passing hard There a counsellor or therapist on campus? A bad haircut (or hat) is not the answer D’:
I think I see an angry brow (hair makes it hard to tell); I’m guessing Ethan is still angry at Danny? I wonder if now we’re gonna have a conflict between these two again in the common area.
I mean, he has a right to still be angry at Danny, Danny told him would it REALLY be that bad if his best friend died…Stuff like that sticks to people, even if other people don’t think it’s that big a deal apparently.
Ethan? Thought the tag was a typo but Dinobots don’t lie.
He’s just so sad, and younger (?), and Asian (?) and thinner. And not holed up in his room.
With that hair I thought he was Ken.
Ethan seems full of problems, rage and way, way hotter than before. I wonder if he will talk with Danny or his kinda menacing presence will stay. in the background. I just hope that, now that Danny and Sal are happy, Danny’s old feelings for Ethan will not return destroying everything.
Nah, Danny’s a serial monogamist. Back when he was into Ethan and Sal responded positively to his incredibly terrible flirting overture, he stammered out that he’s only really able to like one person at a time, and Sal was currently not that person. Now that Sal put a ring hat on it, she’s is.
Also there’s zero circumstance where Danny’s feelings for someone other than his current romantic partner could destroy everything, actually!
He looks like he abandoned self-care since the last time we saw him. Probably hasn’t been eating right, sleeping enough, or getting any exercise, so he looks gaunt and tired.
Mike was one of his oldest friends, and Amaziber didn’t tell him about his accident when it happened, so he took that loss a lot harder than the rest of the cast.
Yeah like, if Mike had lived I think Ethan would have just processed it as “I banged Mike, had a good time, never doing that again!” but with him dead, and not only so soon after having sex but also learning he died saving Amber, I think that’s gonna really mess him up to the point where he’s in love with a ghost.
Well one, Ruth wasn’t friggin’ bi in 1998. Roomies isn’t retroactively the first webcomic about a bi dude.
Otherwise, I fundamentally disagree with your objections, I respect them anyway because you wouldn’t be feeling them if all of mass media didn’t constantly let us down.
But I don’t think Mike dying because he’s a borderline static and immutable character with no interesting capacity for drama or character growth, because he’s already caused too much harm and redeeming him from that would make him not really Mike anymore the way Shortpacked Mike remained an asshole but was an asshole who could love his wife and daughter and be meaningfully supportive to Amber in ways no one really could, is a bad move for the series just because it came at the cost of a queer dude character. Danny being bisexual is a Honking Big Deal for why he’s such an important character to me, but that importance was rooted in him, y’know, actually being a character who did things and had feelings and character development.
I get it, hell, I felt the same when Mike’s death was confirmed to have actually happened, but I was only able to care about Mike in the slightest because he liked dudes and then liking dudes became a textual element to some burgeoning character development. Yeah sure, I’d probably like a Mike Redemption Arc, except a Mike Redemption Arc would just Ruth vs. Rachel except the Rachel in this circumstance is everyone in the whole cast he constantly wronged and made miserable.
Respectfully, I don’t think Ruth’s death counts as a fridging. It was at least as much about her own arc as it was about Danny’s. There’s plenty of issues with it but that’s not really one of them.
Yeah like, it’s only a fridging in the sense that a woman dies for a man’s character development, except Ruth heroically sacrifices herself to save Danny from the consequences of driving drunk on a single beer and it’s supposed to be the sendoff to Ruth actualizing her own character arc.
Which, you can actually kill a person doing that in a story.
Honestly, I know that starting with DoA (and, therefore, its version of Ruth) has probably biased me, but Roomies!Ruth’s death reads a hell of a lot like a suicide to me. The moments of calm in her conversation with Billie before she drives off feel to me less like “I’ve got it all figured out now” and more like “I’m at peace with the fact that I’m about to end my life.” I think she wanted to die all along, but couldn’t bring herself to actually end it without framing it in her mind as dying for something else. “Worth dying for” and all that. I’m guessing this probably wasn’t 1999!Willis’ intent, but it’s not like the original run of Roomies! hasn’t been drastically re-contextualized by later additions over the years anyway.
Interpreting it as a suicide makes Ruth’s death a culmination, albeit a horrifying one, to her own character arc rather than merely a casualty of Danny’s. And also explains why the hell any of Ruth’s friends tolerated Danny’s presence afterwards, especially Billie.
(Still woulda been a better comic if she’d lived though, she was like the only likeable character in it except Billie)
Not necessarily. Bryan recognizes that Danny has been sexiled, but it’s unclear if this because this spot is where everyone goes when they get sexiled or just becauee Bryan is familiar with Danny’s current roommate circumstances
Ethan may have also been sexiled, but he may also just be hanging out in the common area
I don’t know why nobody is excited about the return of Dinobot. Can’t they see the huge implications for Becky/Dina? The emo guy is a decoy sent by Galasso, you fools!
For me the wrinkle is that Joe may have been having sex a lot more than I thought if Bryan and Danny treat this as a casual and frequent thing, because I assumed Malaya was his last time.
Yeah, agreed. With all the fuss over Ethan I almost missed it, but it does kind of put to rest my theory that Joe was always mostly talk and especially that he’d basically given up since his various revelations and Malaya.
We really haven’t seen him hitting on anyone in a long time though – other than obvious non-serious things like his pass at Ruth. The last couple of times he started to, he caught himself and stopped. How is this working? Has he gone back to making passes off-screen with no indication in the story? Is he really just hot enough that random girls regularly proposition him for one-night stands?
Maybe, but if that’s the intent, we really need to see him doing it not in front of Joyce. One of the things that’s long frustrated me about the way Joe is written is that we’ve never seen him actually successfully pick someone up. Either it’s a girl making a pass at him with no effort on his part (Malaya and Liz), we only see the aftermath and it’s at least as likely she made the first move (Roz and Penny) or he gets shot down in flames.
Well, he picked up Joyce at the start. He probably did/does adapt himself to what makes for the most appealing casual partner, though if we’re trying to read a pattern: maybe Joe does only score when he’s approached, if how he hit on Sarah that one time is any indication of his usual actions.
We just assumed he had totally stopped after Malaya because we never saw otherwise, but given that he was acting like his old self with some transparent deliberateness it’s not out there to think he went back to boning, just without the Do List. The women who slept with him only wanted him for a casual lay in the first place.
But, that’s a read I’m making now that we know Joe’s still been sleeping around since he had sex with Malaya. For all we know, further developments will shed more light.
Picked up for a date then failed to turn it into sex, which was his real goal. (Partly thanks to all the punching.) Doesn’t really count as a success on his part, since his goal wasn’t a date.
It just makes it really hard to get a read on him. We used to see him approach women fairly regularly and we saw him make at least one decision to stop that (after his talk with Joyce about objectification.) We never saw him start up again – other than what got called out as not even trying.
Well, that’s what I’m trying to say. Joe successfully wooed Joyce into a date so that’s how he starts before ruining it somehow (and, y’know, the whole thing with Mike being there and Joyce being weird too), but maybe it’s deliberate that we’ve always seen him be approached instead of succeeding by approaching someone. Maybe Joyce and Sarah depict his usual success rate when he takes the initiative, but with Ruth even Joyce could tell he wasn’t trying at all, whereas he actually was with her and Sarah.
Though oddly enough that ‘not as comfortable as I remember’ makes it seem like he hasn’t been sexiled to the lounge in a while even as Bryan and Danny are nonplussed by it. Though I guess this could be the first time since monthlong winter break.
Oh yeah, that’s true too. It might just be for setting up the punchline of Ethan glaring at him, but it could also mean it’s been a while since he was sent to the couch.
Maybe it’s just less frequent between the outing of the Do List and Joe trying to slide back into his old self post-Malaya.
I was just telling my roommate that we wouldn’t be seeing this gay boy for a while. I’ve been trying to get her to read this cause she grew up Catholic and in a small town. And she then went to a liberal college (where I met her). Her upbringing reminds me of Joyce. But also, I can convince her to try most anything if I point out that it is gay (she is gay), so I talked about Danny and Ethan but also warned it didn’t work out for them and that we dont see Ethan anymore. Welp, NOT EVEN 12 HOURS LATER, THERE HE IS!
Though alas, I’m pretty sure Alice is enjoying her life safely far, far away from Jennifer’s self-destructive tendencies and Main Character Starus causing Hijinks.
Danny’s not gay but he can have Gay Romances, except calling it that feels weird since I wouldn’t call dating Sal a Straight Romance. At that point I feel like I’m putting conditions on his romantic relationships.
Just kinda depends on what context it’s being employed in. Gay rolls off the tongue a lot easier than MLM, except Gay is both an identity and a descriptor of a kind of romantic and/or sexual relationship, and it’s a real-ass problem when Gay becomes this all-encompassing umbrella term even though two other Queer identities exist that also include same-sex attraction.
I subscribe to the Erika Moen school of just going with Queer. Danny dating Sal is a Queer Romance, in that he’s a queer man in a relationship with someone else.
Yeah, I am also bi and much prefer queer as an umbrella term. For men/masc people, if you say you are gay, people are going to assume that you are exclusively interested in men. Which is not great when combined with the “bi men are going to end up gay, they just aren’t ready to admit it yet” stereotype. Plus, queer includes people (like straight trans people and ace/aro people) who don’t necessarily have same gender attraction.
I ain’t gay, nothing about me is gay. My love for men ain’t gay either ’cause it’s next to other kinds of love too, but it would be gay if those other kinds weren’t there.
I can intellectually understand using ‘gay’ to mean ‘same-sex romance’, like, come on, that’s pretty effin’ clinical, but personally that’s not my score, more broadly I think it reinforces stuffing other identities under that one label (this isn’t commentary on zee’s post I responded to, if it reads as such), so I gravitate to queer for relationships involving queer folks, though an important fact of that is that queer folks get to dictate the terms and words they use to define and identify themselves and their lives however they see fit.
Oh for the record i definitely prefer queer generally, just in my personal experience as a bisexual (amongst other things, my capability to experience attraction is a jumbled mess I’ve recently found out) gay feels just as natural as a descriptor. Like…
“Oh i had to pause that episode of squid game because sae byeok is so pretty and I’m gay”
I have a boyfriend (who is also queer) and I’ve only been able to date men due to both chance and the fact that my country is so homophobic we still have buggery laws but people can pry the word gay from my cold dead hands.
At the same time i understand why others might feel apprehensive towards it
Yeah I kinda realized halfway through I was starting to sound lecturing so I tried to tear it up a bit to get my perspective across while still acknowledging the importance of defining our own labels.
Ultimately the most important part is that we use the words that have the most meaning to us, and that’s something we individually decide. I’d actually get kinda… not mad I guess if someone just said “oh you’re gay” to me out of the blue so much as I resent it more in the broader context of bisexual marginalization from within and outside the Queer community, and it’s that resentment that’s modified how I express myself about my identity.
I’m sorry, I totally didn’t mean to imply that I thought Danny was gay. I was talking about Ethan with my roomie. However, as queer people, we do also sometimes use gay as an umbrella term. Like I was watching The Good Witch and was waiting for this bi girl’s future girlfriend to show up and when she did, I texted my roomie saying “I found the gays!”.
Oh, no,I didn’t think you were calling Danny gay, don’t worry about that. That’d be nettling for sure, but you’re completely correct that the reins of our terms and language belong to us all even if we approach it from different angles.
Just depends on the context, really. It’s not something I could blanketly decide for myself anyway.
Yeah, odd timing. I’d read through and commented on today’s stuff, then gone back to see if there were any new replies to me from yesterday and I was a different person there. I guess it was adding Liz and Ethan?
Change the capitalization of your email address. The approval system isn’t case sensitive (so your posts still go through), but the Gravatar algorithm is.
Huh, you got the one I used to have, I thought they were only randomized when there was a totally new batch. Although I guess replacing the characters who didn’t get big makeovers isn’t really necessary.
I know everyone’s talking about Ethan right now, but I don’t have anything to contribute to that conversation.
I DO feel the need to point out that Danny has become part of the “lounge sexile” community, where students sexiled by their roomies gather for commiseration and community. Danny is, apparently, a fixture.
I am here to say Ethan is emo as fuck, and find out what my current default grav is now, since I forgot what my original is. Man, I hope this is the Leslie email, I like Leslie.
On a more serious note, as I forgot my original reasoning because “what’s my grav again?” I hope this means that Danny got over Ethan real quick when he started to go down hill, because sure, Danny was a jerk for the hospital thing, but Ethan wasn’t too much better by playing it off that it would be okay if Mike said it about Danny (if they had been swapped), but it wasn’t okay Danny said it.
Given Danny’s comments on how he processes his romantic attraction, he’s probably over Ethan enough that he’s fine dating Sal.
I imagine any residual awkwardness is in Danny feeling guilty for how that last argument went down. If Mike had survived there was room for some healthy talk, Danny getting his venting on Mike out to no real consequence and Ethan recognizing he probably totally would have let Mike be an asshole to a comatose Danny, like if Mike had lived they could actually talk about what both of them wanted to say, but that chance is gone forever.
Oh shit, we haven’t seen Ethan since the timeskip, have we?
*checks tag* yep, not since th- /the timeskip was a year ago already???/
okay, still cool. Looks like he’s been doing unwell. Wonder what the discourse is like?
*checks comments* wait…people don’t recognize him as ethan? I guess over a year apart can do that to one’s memories
Mark me down as another ‘thought it was Ken, extremely worried now that I know it’s Ethan’. I’m not surprised he was hit hardest by Mike’s death, but it’s sure painful to see.
In second semester of my freshman year I had a bout of depression and lost fifteen pounds. I went from burly to thin, but I was still 5’10” and 24 inches across the shoulders.
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 ⋅ 19h
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
www.ebay.com/itm/23609767...
selling my netflix war for cybertron megatron -- the walmart exclusive one that came with pinpointer and lionizer (but being sold here without pinpointer and lionizer)
Gran... IS ALIVE?
okay, juliette still has brown hair, so this is probably definitely a flashback
i'm just surprised that the comic has remembered her, at all
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 19h
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 10d
The New York Times @nytimes.com ⋅ 5d
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 3d
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resurrected Mike’s hair?
DoA rn be like
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Mood
What do I copy-paste this into to see the (I assume) shadow pic?
I used Notepad ++.
Notepad worked for me.
I used Vim
I used View Source.
Hacker.
Good to see someone still uses VIM.
MS Notepad for font use Terminal, Font style regular and size 2
k here’s a legible version: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ub0addXFWGUsBEQC4jdOu8A_qVs-jsOb/view?usp=sharing
Can someone post a screenshot of this? It’s not loading on mobile.
it’s just Liz standing akimbo (and smiling I think).
oh i guess the grav roulette has spun again
Indeed.
I just assumed you were REALLY excited to see somebody named Liz
I didn’t even notice it says LIZ and thought the return of Ethan had short-circuited Ana
prob could have gone better had it not been literally 5 minutes before posting when I came up with that
I was actually expecting it to reflect the change in strip by being an image of Ethan made up of the repeated “LIZ”
That seems oddly specific.
I read the beginning of your comment in a normal human voice, but once the ASCII art started it was just modem noises.
modem talking?
Sorry, the pun is awful and the band even worse.
A sollution for non-image chat.
I thought it was spam or some shit.
Nice.
Oh no he kind of did copy Mike’s hair oh no
I knew that wouldn’t work
shit
Might try
LIZLIZLIZLIZ<code>
Gasp!It was more that it’s too many characters wide I think
You can never have too much Liz.
Right, Joe?
Is Ethan now Blanka?
He’s emo Peter Parker
I was thinking emo Barry Allen.
My first thought was Virgil/Anxiety from Sanders’ Sides
Definitely the same feel
No, he actually looks good
The gravs have changed again?? Noooooo!
it seems so
I think I’ll miss having Asher, but ultimately I look more like Booster anyway
Hmmm, what do I have now? Wasn’t the biggest fan of Roz, tbh.
DOROTHY IS PERFECT
Wha…?
**checks tags**
HOLY FUCKING SHIT!
To say the least. Triangle incoming?
Haha, I was like, “oh new people. Wonder why that one guy is giving Danny the stink-eye about him trying to get comfy? Maybe he was engrossed in his homework? Odd route for DoA to take. Let’s check the tags. Bryan and DinoBot? Which one is DinoBot/why are they tagged as tha–oh, wait, Ethan, it says. Huh. Interesting Mike-hair.”
Dinobot is on the table in the first panel.
Yes, I know.
Fuck off Emothan. Danny is happy. Sal is happy. Don’t go danning things up for them.
“Emothan”
Yoink!
You’ve got me feeling Emothans
Deeper than I ever dreamed of
I second that Emothan.
I second that Emothan.
Nobody getting my Shortpacked! reference, I’m sad now.
Aha, now I got it.
There was a Blanka in Shortpack? I forget.
How could you forget Guile?
I didn’t even realize that was Ethan in this strip. Holy shit, he looks like emo Peter Parker in Spiderman 3 now.
I thought that was Ken
Understandable, but you’d have no problem if you saw them together.
Is that bully Maguire?
“An’ now he’s started lookin’ like Peter Parker from the first Spider-Man 3.“
Finally
w/ Thor’s Hammer.
He returns…
Who was he?
“A pupil of Mike, before he turned to Emo…”
+1 Interweb.
It’s Ethan, who’s been mysteriously absent since the timeskip
Emothan? No, that sounds like in trying to say “emotion” with an exaggerated lisp.
A perennial secondary character who mostly rode shotgun in other peoples’ stories last semester. Hopefully he’ll get more to do on his own for Season 2.
Ethan is a childhood friend to Amber and Mike. He is obsessed with Transformers and he is gay. He dated Joyce for a while, until Joyce came around to homosexuality not being sinful and gently breaking up with him, and encouraging him to be himself. Danny and Ethan had a mutual attraction, but they decided not to act on it because they both dated Amber before and thought it would hurt her. Ethan and Mike became make-out buddies until Mike died. It was looking like Danny and Ethan might actually get together after all, but Danny messed it up by being insensitive over Mike’s death (because, admittedly, Mike WAS an asshole, and Danny wasn’t willing to get him off the hook for that just because he died). Ethan and Danny had a falling out, and we haven’t see Ethan in a while, and now he has a new haircut. I honestly wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t been tagged.
I wouldn’t have recognized him either.
Mike and Ethan weren’t just make-out buddies though – they fucked, which seemed to free Ethan from some of his hang-ups and start him dating/banging a bunch of other guys.
He had a falling out with Amber as well, at least partly over her not dealing with her mental problems leading to Mike’s death.
And quite frankly, there hasn’t been a whole lot of reader sensitivity to Ethan’s grief over one of his longest-term friends dying. Idk about y’all but if I have had friends in my life for over half of my life, they become something closer to family. They can get weird, distance themselves and come back as friends later, they can have a difficult phase where no one else really likes them or worries about them except the friends who’ve been there for a long time– but just like family, there’s room for return. So Ethan kind of lost one of the most significant people in his life, especially since his biological family is neither very accepting of nor a source of emotional security for him. In a harsh way that Ethan understood to be coming from a place of care, Mike DID care for Ethan. He, Ethan, and Amber were a trio of weird kids who kind of got each other, and who all had emotionally maladaptive ways of dealing with life. But they got that about each other. Now one of the trio is dead. That’s hard.
I wouldn’t ever deny that Ethan is grieving deeply, nor try to invalidate that grief. I think you highlight some good points in that comment. I think that the audience has an easier time identifying with Danny because for however long we’ve been reading the comic we really only saw Mike act pretty unkindly toward most people. We saw some flashbacks later in the story that show where Ethan developed a soft spot for Mike and showed where/why Mike really shoved his softer emotions down, but overall we really just saw mean Mike. Danny really only ever experienced mean Mike, and he never got the benefit of seeing those softer flashbacks. I think what makes it hard to be entirely respectful of Ethan’s grief is that he was never willing to accept that Mike only made people like Danny feel bad, and death doesn’t erase the pain you’ve caused on Earth. Admittedly, Danny 100% handled that situation with Ethan terribly, but I hesitate to forgive Ethan for downplaying the pain Mike caused to those around him.
And the pain Mike caused Ethan (and even more Amber), which was what really bothered Danny more than anything Mike did to him. I tend to think of Mike and Ethan as more like an abusive relationship, where the victim is emotionally dependent on the abuser, making excuses and grasping at any good signs. This was made pretty explicit for Mike and Amber in Mike’s revelation in the fight scene that led to his sacrifice, but I think it applies to Ethan as well, if less strongly.
We’re also less sensitive to Ethan’s grief because we haven’t seen him in a year. If we’re now going to dig into it, that may change.
Because we shouldnt HAVE.
Its promised on the tin on the comic. specifically. Because of the slow time presentation and sliding timescale.
Willis killing off the bad dads is one thing. Killing someone a character was banging to keep in permeant grief is something else.
The Danny x Ethan ship was on the masthead for over 6 years! Thats Queerbaiting. Now we’ve gone a year w/out seeing him.
How are we supposed to be respectful ( when the comic itself isnt to Baited teased storyline )
The fictional characters arent real ( quoting Danny ) its our feelings that are.
The Readers are not to blame. I’ve read this in good faith. We dont literally an owe an emotional investment of our souls. No one needs to be sensitive to a fictional characters feelings. Thats manipulation.
Author chose queerbaiting. Fridging. Bury Your Gays. Shipteasing. only to Danny it up, and mash up the Greatest hits of Danny x Sal .
and that really sucks as it was the only M-M pairing in the whole comic written with any emotional investment.
The author had his chance to write one that mattered and Dannyied it up.
I dont even want them, together anymore
Waiting a whole year to put them in same room is such an FU to fans.
Whats next, Willis gives up Transformers and joins a fundamentalist church ?
Soggies take them all
Just because one relationship doesn’t happen doesn’t make it queerbaiting. If this was the only teased same-sex relationship I might agree with you, or if this was a patern, but DU isn’t queerbaity. I also haven’t totally written the Danny×Ethan ship off yet. They’re still freshmen, and have a lot of time yet to make that a thing. Its only been 6 years our time, for them its been a semester. A very emotionally turbulent semester. I don’t think queerbaiting is a fair accusation here.
Emo-than.
Well said
Ethan is no more.
You may call him Ethanathos.
the Second Ethan
Ethanathos isn’t very snappy though.
I couldn’t possibly disagree more. I’m loving Ethanatos, it’s snappier than it looks, rolls of the tongue nicely, has a good rise and fall to it …I love it.
Doesn’t exactly wipe out half of all living things though.
I was too slow.
SNAP.
GUESS WHO’S BACK
BACK AGAIN
Dinobot!
Who we haven’t seen since before Jacob’s brother visited last semester.
In the words of some role played by a guy named Lawrence…
WHOA.
*kindly borrows Hacked Muzak and plays Guess Who is Back” by Koda Kumi*
Guy int the back seems to be really standing out, seems familiar for some reason.
*Sees tags*
Ethan!?
after Mike’s tragic death, he left
GothamBloomington to go train to be the best at … okay, one or two things.Mostly the best at Transofrmers related trivia and sullen brooding. Sadly neither of those skills have helped him fight crime.
There is no justice.
Yeah, hell of a makeover. He definitely looks thinner to me, but maybe the hair or hoodie are throwing me off
Looks like he hasn’t eaten or slept well.
mood
It may also be the angle. Sitting partly but not fully sideways, being slightly hunched over. Before we usually see Ethan standing straight upright.
Though I do think there’s some level of shrinkage, at minimum.
I think he has been recast, like Darrin in “Bewitched”, and everyone has to pretend they don’t notice.
That … makes sense.
haha
See… I thought it was Ken until I read comments.
I thought it was Ken until I checked the tags for a chance to see where we last saw Ken.
Same
I didn’t even recognize him until I noticed he was in the tags.
Ohhhh no. Nope nope nope.
Yep, Yep, Yep.
Huh. Has it really been over a year since we’ve seen Ethan?
He last appeared in a strip on August 16 of last year: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/04-is-a-song-forever/into/
Something I’m wondering but I’m sure nobody cares about but do you think Ethan’s cast page photo will update to his new look?
Assuming this isn’t just a short-term funk, I’m sure it will be. Everybody else got updated art as they appeared for Season 2.
Update: it has updated!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/cast/attachment/2014castethan/
Sorry, that’s a joke.
Not sorry.
I thought that was Ken, at first. What’s he glarin’ about, I wonder?
I thought it was Ken, too!! I wondered why the last panel had him staring so prominently…took me awhile and a journey to the tags to puzzle it all out!
Anyway, he and Danny definitely argued further after Mike died. Or maybe Danny’s words about how Mike’s an asshole were the last thing they discussed before Ethan took the rest of the semester off.
I suspect it’s the latter, that they just did not talk after that conversation. Honestly wouldn’t be surprised if Ethan ghosted Amber, etc, too, since it doesn’t really come across like anyone’s been in contact with him.
We know she at least knows what he looks like now:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/03-see-you-in-the-funny-page/icebreaker-2/
So she’s at least seen him around even if they don’t talk.
It’s Walky who’s reporting what Emothan looks like now. Amber just says they’re mostly not friends any more.
I also thought it was Ken for a minute, I was like, “Wow, Ken looks different!” Then I glanced at the tag and went, “Oh, wow, Ethan looks *really* different!”
Me too! My people.
It’s ironic, because the first time I saw Ken in Shortpacked!, I thought he was Ethan trying to disguise himself … for some reason.
Danny: *loosens necktie* Has someone got a space heater pointed at me or something? It’s like the right side of my face feels… really warm… for some reason…
Same. I don’t remember if I figured it out before I looked at the tags or not. Oh my.
WHAT THE FUCK?? ETHAN???
Ethan is tagged? I don’t think so! That’s obviously Ken/Ryu hiding from Galasso!
Not gonna lie, I actually did think it was Ken for a split second before I took a closer look at his face… and realized just who I was actually seeing.
i would prefer ken. less of a downer plus i just miss him.
Danny, it’s very simple. When your roommate kicks you out to have sex, you show up to your SO’s room. Then you kick her roommate out, and the cycle continues.
…now I want to see Danny attempt to kick Malaya out of a room. That sounds hilarious.
It would be interesting anyway.
I doubt Sal would even try to throw her out though. Instead she’d take Dan up to the rooftops.
“Time t’ show me if sex at tha’ height was true or not”
I feel like it’d work, like when tiny birds chase off eagles because the eagle is just not prepared to deal with sparrows up in their space.
I still say this custom of making pairs of people share bedrooms in student dorms is weird and awkward.
At some Universities and dorms it’s four to a (larger) room.
He could certainly visit, but I don’t think they’re at the sex stage yet and they did just spend a bunch of the day together.
Hiii, Ethan! Loving the Spider Man look.
Do I recall Jason looking quite so spiffy?
Yes
YES
The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out
WHERE’S THE TIGER NOW, WHERE’S THE TIGER NOW-ow-ow-ow-ow-OW
Uh oh, Ethan’s gone feral.
Hell yeah, he’s rude now!
He’s turned to the Emo side of the Force.
I just wanted to thank Willis for the tag. I had no clue.
Well then. I don’t think I’ve ever needed the tags to identify a main character before.
Oh no…he looks so skinny
Yeah he’s definitely shrunk, even in the shoulders.
Emo Ethan. This is wild. My worldview is shaken to its core.
“I hunch”
Now if you see a unicorn you’ll drop dead from terminal world view collapse. (A Questionable Content reference.)
He must have had a rough 3 months. Ethan was in considerably good shape and losing muscle mass takes longer than that if you’re well conditioned which I assume he was. Like not only would he have to had quit working out but he also must have been eating significantly less.
I don’t think he ever actually worked out. He’s almost certainly eating less, probably barely leaves his room too.
I’m reminded of early-Shortpacked! Ethan.
Hrmmm. Only reading like the first 10 pages of Shortpacked from that link and Robin is way more likeable in that comic than she is in this one. What happened?
Lost main character privileges.
Well, uh, she wasn’t primarily defined by being a republican politician. That’s a big one
I think it’s because Shortpacked was a silly comic, while DoA is much more serious. Shortpacked-Robin was (sometimes) allowed to be manic with no consequences. In DoA, there are consequences all over the place.
Honestly this is why I was confused back when i was like 13 why people were getting mad about Robin in DOA and not finding her antics funny like in shortpacked. Same with Mike, or amber flipping a table. Took me a while to get it and start taking things seriously
Perspective shift from ‘look at this wackiness’ where people barely cared to ‘real life lite’ where it turns out people actually feel things when you do stuff.
I’m reminded of pre-puberty Ethan.
I dunno. I think he looks sleeker and more attractive like this!
Wow, that’s a face we haven’t seen in a while.
what the fuck is Marten doing here?
Okay, that got a chuckle out of me.
Got lost on his way to the library.
I was thinking the same thing
I guess Danny’s been having too good of a run lately.
Yep, neckties are the worst.
Ahahaha oh right, I forgot about the Sword of Dannycles.
We’re at the start of a pretty big downer.
“I’ll leave you a phantom” isn’t exactly a title that implies a cheerful story
It might have been le petit mort.
la petite mort
“I’ll leave you a phantom”…
That just makes me think of “Welcome to the Black Parade”, which besides being one of my favorite songs, has lyrics that seem rather likely to foreshadow Ethan’s new demeanor.
TO LEAD YOU IN THE SUMMER
(sorry, couldn’t help myself, it’s such a good song)
I’m assuming the phantom is Mike and we are getting an Amber and ghost-Mike story which makes Ethan relevant again.
I’ve been rooting for Danny a lot lately; it’s good to be reminded of that time he acted like an absolute shitbag.
Well, yeah. I still do think what he said was 100 percent right, that Mike had been nothing but terrible to him their entire time knowing each other, so he had nothing to mourn. Certainly could have and should have articulated that better, though.
What else is there to articulate? Mike is an abusive asshole who constantly makes life worse for everyone, and did for both Ethan and Amber before moving onto everyone else he knew. He would, actually, laugh at Danny for being in a coma, he’s like that. He does think laughing at horrible trauma in front of other people is funny.
Danny asserted to himself that he mattered enough not to slavishly devote himself to a guy who said in no uncertain terms that he’d let Mike laugh his ass off were Danny in a coma. That’s not being an absolute shitbag, that’s the punctuation on Danny’s unhealthy romance narrative where he’d stop having any value other than what he’d give to his partner.
I mean, generally speaking when an asshole who your friend for some reason cares about is dying, you shelf the ‘I really don’t like how he treats you’ conversation (or at least more than a passing allusion immediately followed with ‘but I obviously hope he gets better soon, even if I don’t like him personally’) for some time that’s not, y’know, immediately after said friend left asshole’s hospital room because his parents wanted time alone with their comatose son. You also don’t start that conversation with ‘Would it really be so bad (if he stayed in a coma)?’ Like, the blowout fight had Ethan being a traumatized asshole defending Mike, but it started with Danny making a comment he really should not have said out loud and then doubling down on it.
(Again, you don’t have to pretend the asshole wasn’t an asshole. You can say ‘we never got along’ attached to the ‘I obviously hope he doesn’t die.’ Hell, even if the person is, like, Ross levels of terrible and you aren’t actually sad at all they’re dead, you can still say ‘I’m sorry you’re in pain, my sympathies, I know this is difficult’ and just… not bring up the ‘but also he can rot in hell, FUCKING FINALLY.’ Even if they know you think that. Because when they’re going through messy complicated grief is the WORST POSSIBLE TIME to start presenting your case as to why, in fact, that person you’re sad about sucks actually. Like I understand every step of the way and Danny was not in any way wrong about Mike, but his failure to recognize time and place and that Ethan was in fact actively grieving did make him an asshole there, and Ethan’s assholery in turn was in part because Danny’s comments put him on the defensive.)
I mean yeah it was the worst possible time and place to say it.
Would it ever not be? Is Danny even emotionally mature enough to parse through that kind of complexity when he blurted it out loud, apologized immediately, and only started saying anything when Ethan started lionizing Mike?
I think of that conversation the same way you think of Ethan and Amber having Mike live rent-free in their heads for all eternity; he piled fucked up bullshit onto them, did one good thing, and now he’s good forever.
I mean yes, Danny’s 18-19, but also it doesn’t take much self-awareness or basic tact to recognize you don’t say that shit to someone when everything’s THAT FRESH. (It’s an amount of self-awareness Danny has consistently lacked, but go back to Becky’s comments to Amber after Blaine’s death and notice how, even though neither she nor Amber are sad and Becky has every right to be saying, ‘good riddance,’ she prioritizes supporting Amber and giving her advice that amounts to ‘you don’t have to be sad he’s dead but Dead Parent Feelings can get weird so know that if they do change, that’s not invalidating the hatred you feel for him now but it’s not any less real either.’ Which Amber realizes and acknowledges is genuine advice. Becky has way above average experience in that department, but the immediate ‘support Amber and Faz, celebrate later’ was picked up on there.)
I mean, it’s not like he said it on purpose. For all I talk about Danny asserting himself that was a bug, not a feature. He didn’t dunk on Mike to stand up for himself, it just kind of happened in the heat of the moment, and the real meat of that conversation is that Mike was the kind of person you could say that about. Yeah Amber Feels are of concern with Blaine dead, but it’s not like anyone’d tell her “oh he was a great man.”
He said it, he apologized, Ethan started gussying Mike up, and Danny just went in again because, well, it mattered to him to say it and he has no filter. For narrative reasons it had to be said, and it had to be said in a way that’d make it painful af when Ethan returned and that also came with Danny in a scenario with a crush on someone and then not just slavishly submitting to their wants.
Bah! I scoff at that idea! Timing, tact, those are all excuses. Danny might be a scumbag for what he said and when he said it but he spoke his truth. Mike was an asshole, he’d be the first to admit it and would probably respect Daniel way more for talking shit about him while he was on his death bed. Mike would if the situation was reversed and Dan was in the coma, and Ethan would’ve been okay with that because he’s a hypocrite who held a double standard for Mike’s bullshit.
I mean yeah, that too.
That conversation wasn’t just about Mike being an asshole, it was Danny realizing that Ethan valued him so little that he’d let, or at least he say he would let, Mike mock him for being in a coma.
And, you know what, I believe it. At most he’d roll his eyes and go “hey come on, now” and then instantly fold when Mike fired some sarcastic asshole line back.
Danny was insensitive, a far far cry from being an absolute shitbag.
“We’re at the start of a pretty big downer” feels like it could make a great DoA book title.
………………..welp
I’M BLOWJOB CAT??????????
If the hedge fits.
Who am I?
YES… HA HA HA… YES!
“sickos”
Are we perverts, sadistic, or mentally or morally deficient? Are we disturbed, repugnant, or strange or unpleasant in a sexual way?
I mean, I’m not arguing; I just want to clarify.
I was gonna be like “wtf willis why would you do this to my boi Ethan” but then I realized that no, this was the only natural path for him to take.
I somehow feel that if Ethan had taken the au naturale path it would have caused even more comment.
OK it’s so bad, I mean I expected him to be dressed up in leather with piercings and maybe a bit of eyeliner but this ain’t bad he just has a new haircut that could work and he looks like he hasn’t seen a bed in days but…it ain’t that bad.
*audibly gulped thinking about ethan in a black jacket with lots of piercings*
…he’s still a hottie with just the black hair though
i meant leather jacket.
…also apparently his hair was always black?
i still think he looks better like this than before. but i thought he’d dyed it, which would’ve signalled a conscious effort to change his appearance, instead of just (quite possibly) neglect. which is less sexy, more concerning
Yes, his hair is naturally black.
Ethan and Dinobot emerge from the shadows
eep
that’s ETHAN?!
That’s Dinobot. Ethan’s soul has been captured in the small figurine on the table.
Did somebody say captured?!?!
Ethan: The power…it feels good.
Me: The Venom symbiote actually made Peter Parker weaker in the original comics.
Ethan: *starts dancing*
“And I, uh… I did this!
We don’t talk about this.”
I honestly kinda hope that Ethan will spend the next year just showing up in the background staring at Danny.
That would be hilarious, but loose effectiveness over time.
*lose
Not as fast as Lawsome.
For some reason I thought that was Ken.
Ethan has definitely become more Ken-like since we saw him last
Have we ever seen Ken and Ethan in the same place (at least in DOA)?
https://www.dumbingofage.com/tag/ethan+ken/
Nope.
Knick-knack, Ethan is back!!!
VICTORY SCREECH!!!!
Never blame the tie Danny. It’s stylish and you know it!
Stylish and comfortable aren’t the same thing
Plate and Mail is stylish, but you’d never call it comfy
But you know comfy plate and mail would have been a hot item back in the day.
Hell I’d kill for plate mail let alone comfy plate mail!
It is the expression of his bisexual no fashion sense energy.
That’s right, Ethan. You give him the evil eye!
oh my god, it IS Ethan!?
Wtf? I know the hair changed but even aside from that I feel like that looks nothing like Ethan. He’s not as broad as he used to be?
I think this is an optical illusion from the way he is sitting on the couch and the viewing angle. If he stood up next to Danny he would be as tall and broad of shoulders as he ever was. His other proportions might be different.
… holy shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.
That Halloween arc cannot come soon enough.
Are you assuming Ethan went Emo before Halloween?
Ethan and Danny actually reconciled from the fight they had, they actually stopped talking to each other because on Halloween, Danny revealed he hated Beast Wars because the CGI was so outdated.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear…
who is that guy in the fourth panel
I think I should know him
is that Asher?
lemme check the tags
hmmm
oh that’s not asher that’s ethan okay
…
…
…
…ETHAN?!?
Whoa. I thought that was Ken for a moment.
Ethan looks skinnier… oh god he has barely been eating hasn’t he? D:
Ethan shrank?
I had to check the tagged to make sure it wasn’t Ethan at the pool table and some guy with the unfortunate name “Dinobot” sitting in the sofa.
What can make a young man four inches shorter, two inches narrower across the shoulders, and lost twenty pounds of muscle? If Ethan has AIDS I’m out of here.
Probably just bad posture and poor nutrition
I’m with Thag. Ethan’s slouching and has almost certainly been eating poorly (and, given his eyes, sleeping poorly, and likely in general just not been taking care of himself, much like Amber) since Mike’s death. Amber’s likely in better physical condition because she shares a body with AG, whose roller derby time means exercise and requires adequate calorie consumption, and probably some habits built up for physical activity and conditioning while barely hanging on mentally. I’m calling Depression Makeover.
Also, because given Ethan pre-skip was getting into Casual Sex To Avoid Telling His Mom About How He’s Still Gay, him getting HIV (and apparently just… not treating it at all, to be in such rough shape in three months given what treatments are available now?) would be beyond ‘poor taste’ to ‘holy fucking fuckballs offensive,’ and I’m pretty sure Willis is at least slightly more aware of these things than that. Fumbles sometimes, yes. Sudden grotesquely homophobic 90s throwback, I doubt.
Yeah seriously. Willis would never write an HIV story about a gay dude catching it from sleeping around a whole lot. That flies from any tasteful or nuanced depiction of living with HIV into “Dumbing of Age welcomes new co-writer Ronald Reagan.”
Willis has been pretty damn consistently good with his queer dudes even as far back as Shortpacked, and it’s not even that I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, I don’t think he’s capable of writing something like that period.
As for Ethan himself, not just being an angry goth but actually getting physically ill from his depression strikes me as a really interesting take on him now, where isolating himself this hard from the rest of the cast meant no one was around to catch him get worse. I think it adds a tangible weight to how messed up he was by Mike’s death and does a lot to make “Ethan goes goth!” less inherently funny.
Like I’m still laughing at his silly emo fringe, but I’m also feeling bad about it at the same time because of where it came from. Kinda taps into that Ruth energy where I’m doing both whenever I see her.
Right? It’s hilarious but then you see the bags under his eyes and realize it’s not just distance/perspective making him look smaller, he clearly actually lost weight and go ‘oooh, dear, nothing good can come of this.’
It certainly would.
Now, everyone in the comments doesn’t recognize Ethan here, because he looks so wildly different
What if Danny doesn’t recognize Ethan either? It’s entirely plausible if they stopped talking to each other and having contact since either pre-timeskip or halloween arc, given how different he looks.
I think that’s somewhat unlikely, if only because they’re still living in the same hall, Ethan’s clearly still going to the common areas from time to time (which is good, because at least he’s not isolating himself like Amber,) and thus Danny’s likely to have seen him at least occasionally mid-Depression Makeover. Stopped talking to each other, probably, but if Ethan was in the common areas there’s decent odds they awkwardly avoided each other in passing.
I would assume they have mostly kept their distance, especially once Mike actually did die
Yeah, but Danny doesn’t have to see Ethan in more than passing to recognize him in the early stages of this and recognize him along the way.
I think this is a point some of the comments are forgetting. We haven’t seen Ethan in several months worth of in-story time, but the rest of the characters still saw him at least occasionally. He still lives in Read Hall on the same floor as Walky, Joe, and Danny. To us, he’s suddenly a gaunt emo kid. They saw his degradation in real time.
Yeah this is jarring to us, but they saw it all in real time.
He’s probably been deliberately isolating himself from everyone except Jacob, and he can’t avoid Jacob if he wanted to.
Does emo = degradation now? I didn’t think Ethan looked all that bad.
He’s not reacting at all, but it’s also possible he just didn’t notice him. Did walk in from behind Ethan, so he just would have seen black hair and hoodie sticking up above the couch.
So what happens next here? If they’ve awkwardly avoiding each other in passing, it seems like that should continue and this becomes a weird way to reintroduce Ethan, since he’ll just leave or they’ll ignore each other.
I could easily imagine Danny not recognizing Ethan when he’s changed so much. Remember Danny took quite a while to realize Amber was Amazi-Girl, even though he saw both of them almost daily.
Although I agree that, living in the same hall, Danny would have seen him at least a few times since Mike’s death, and seen the deterioration in progress.
Obligatory: Like everyone else who didn’t realize Amber was Amazi-Girl (except Dina), including her own father. In that sequence, even when she was saying she was. Danny did see both of them more often, but in world it clearly is an effective disguise.
True. But Amber was pretty much a shut-in other than going to her classes, so I’m not sure if anyone other than Dina and Danny saw that much of her.
ETHAN?!?!
…it’s about damn time i’ve been waiting for his return.
Looks like bags under Ethan’s eyes, too.
Aaaah, depression makeovers. Good for literally no one, ever.
Spider-Man 3 was apt, Walky. Wow.
Unwarranted hot take time! Ethan is the worst character in the series, and I’m very happy to have him back.
When I say deliberately annoying things like “of the two dozen major characters in the series I only hate 2.5 of them” Ethan never factored into it because to hate him would be to acknowledge him. He Exists, he has no real interesting stories of his own where he takes center stage, he’s about as vanilla as Dorothy, except Dorothy goes out and does things and throws herself into stuff so even if Dorothy’s a little too unrelentingly kind for my tastes she’s still an active character, and Ethan sure wasn’t. He’s just a mess of problems and anxieties except none of those problems are his fault so they don’t really feel engaging to watch him work through, I just really feel bad for him because he just kind of stares wide-eyed at the latest thing gone wrong. He started asserting himself by finding the confidence to start sleeping around and yeah that was fun, but it didn’t mean anything either. It was always in isolation with exceedingly minor characters where another cast member would go “dude, you’re getting laid” and then Mike and Danny would start making moony eyes. That was like the first time he ever did anything of his own volition and it still had to involve those two. This guy seriously had nothing to himself.
So right here, that one panel of Ethan shooting Danny a glare? That is actually the first time I’ve been excited to see him because it’s the first time he’s at all capable of providing any kind of interesting or dynamic conflict with another cast member, the punctuation of a terrible argument these two had that became magnitudes worse because of unfortunate circumstance, where I still have zero compulsion to blame Danny for what he said but I sure as hell get why Ethan himself would, and that’s legitimately interesting to me now. He’s been gone long enough that it became a deliberate build-up, there was meaning to his reappearance, and that his reappearance took so damn long kinda highlights how totally useless he’s been as a character while still making his return with an entirely new look a huge deal.
It’s exciting! The prospect of Ethan returning was something I’d never find worth looking forward to until he stopped showing up and I started wondering oh jeez, what’s his deal now? What’s going on there? What does he think not just about Danny, but the rest of the cast? Did his falling out with Amber hit hard when he realized he had been doing that the entire run of the series? Is he gonna start hanging out with Walky to process the idea of someone being able to miss Mike? He’s probably horribly angry at Danny, is that something he’s going to express at all or does he just want to be left the fuck alone? What’s it mean to be the one member of the cast who didn’t think it was worth heading off to Garbage Roof with everyone else?
I can finally start friggin’ caring about this guy, and that rocks.
Also it’s, like, viscerally funny to me that these two were shaping up to be annoyingly perfect in that cringe-inducing Adorable Gay Babies way and then the last thing they do is have a big fucking fight and now Ethan’s this really angry, broken-looking dude, except he’s angry and broken-looking in a way that makes me laugh at him and feel really bad before I laugh again and then feel worse. It’s a curious feeling.
That’s an interesting take, and I think I basically agree with it.
On the other hand, that’s Dinobot on the table. The new Ethan is the old Ethan.
This take is undoubtedly refreshing. Used to want danny and ethan to get together but honestly? This Ethan is more interesting.
Making a prediction now: he’s gonna continue to be a foil for Joyce. Pre-timeskip, they showed two different paths of casual rebellion; now they’ve both lost something big from their lives and Ethan’s grief manifesting physically contrasts with Joyce’s grief turning her bitter and angry
You’re not wrong. Ethan was mostly there as a supporting character for Amber and Joyce’s stories for the first semester. He started coming into his own in the lead-up to the kidnapping, but then he was back to being Amber’s support again.
I hope the time skip put enough distance between him and the rest of the cast so that he has to be able to stand on his own, story-wise.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I pretty much agree with this. I was always frustrated that Ethan took so little control of his life and hadn’t really come into his own as a character. It’s nice to see takes from others about it.
I was just thinking today about where in the world Ethan is now.
Amber’s right, his new broody look is hot.
The new cut does look nice but he looks like he’d pass out half way through sex from how sleep deprived he is I can see the bags under his eyes from here.
Yeah I can make out a bit of the eye-bags. And on second glance he’s clearly in a dark place.
I’m sure some people out there find terminal depression sexy.
anything that makes you unhealthily skinny is sexy.
You said it!
Remember “heroin chic”? UGH!
Two words: Rule 34
So it begins.
Man, I’m not too sure about Ken’s redesign…
/j
He looks hot with that hair.
Oh, Ethan. He’s not eating well, is he?
Holy shit! Ethan???
No sexy comic from me tonight. And maybe not tomorrow. Wanna work on my own thing.
Good for you Yotomoe!
Also, I may have just discovered yesterday that your avatar name links to your entire collection of DoA fan art.
And I may have spent many hours procrastinating on other things while I thoroughly enjoyed that fan art.
Thanks for all this fantastic work!
The way I see it, WE can do whatever WE want!
Sorry I just couldn’t help myself.
oh hey, Ethan! how’s the friend? still dead?
“You know he’s possessing Jennifer now.”
THE COMMENT THING CHANGED MY PROFILE PIC TO THE BEST POSSIBLE ONE XD
*Insert Tiffany Pollard “Beyonce?” meme here* ETHAN?
I didn’t even recognize him! I thought Ken was going through an Emo phase all of a sudden.
Goodness, he’s taking Mike’s passing hard
There a counsellor or therapist on campus? A bad haircut (or hat) is not the answer D’:
I think I see an angry brow (hair makes it hard to tell); I’m guessing Ethan is still angry at Danny? I wonder if now we’re gonna have a conflict between these two again in the common area.
I mean, he has a right to still be angry at Danny, Danny told him would it REALLY be that bad if his best friend died…Stuff like that sticks to people, even if other people don’t think it’s that big a deal apparently.
Ethan? Thought the tag was a typo but Dinobots don’t lie.
He’s just so sad, and younger (?), and Asian (?) and thinner. And not holed up in his room.
With that hair I thought he was Ken.
is Ethan a chosen
Actually this is Mike in disguise.
OK, but are neckties cool or is it just bowties?
Neckties are only cool when you wear them on your head.
Ethan seems full of problems, rage and way, way hotter than before. I wonder if he will talk with Danny or his kinda menacing presence will stay. in the background. I just hope that, now that Danny and Sal are happy, Danny’s old feelings for Ethan will not return destroying everything.
Nah, Danny’s a serial monogamist. Back when he was into Ethan and Sal responded positively to his incredibly terrible flirting overture, he stammered out that he’s only really able to like one person at a time, and Sal was currently not that person. Now that Sal put a
ringhat on it, she’s is.Also there’s zero circumstance where Danny’s feelings for someone other than his current romantic partner could destroy everything, actually!
omygod danny your neck/back is gonna hurt so much from lying like that
Not until he’s forty, though.
til I am 40
It comes at you fast.
No?
It’s only gonna be for like what an hour max. He’s got a pillow.
Is this what being old is like?
yeah, when you’re old, being uncomfortable for even 5 minutes is killer
[laughs]
my original gravatar was jason, and now it’s jason again
return to jason
it’s JASON time from July to November
(and then it’s DJFMAMJ time)
First I read Ryan instead of Bryan, and I was even more confused than all of you are because of Ethan
I guess Ethan’s promiscuous behavior caused him to get shaggy?
*flees for dear punning life*
Ethan needs more hair spray if he’s going to replicate Mike’s dimension-warping hair.
Or maybe he should skip right to starch from the laundry aisle.
He’s trying to uphold Mike’s legacy, but he failed to unlock how to make his hair 2D.
That dark secret is now lost to the mists of time.
Why is that guy staring at Danny?
New character perhaps, let’s check the tags- ETHAN?!?
Did Mike’s death hitted so hard on Ethan? Not only his hair, his face is totally changed.
He looks like he abandoned self-care since the last time we saw him. Probably hasn’t been eating right, sleeping enough, or getting any exercise, so he looks gaunt and tired.
Mike was one of his oldest friends, and Amaziber didn’t tell him about his accident when it happened, so he took that loss a lot harder than the rest of the cast.
Second Oldest friend and first gay crush turned lover. It’s hard to say he wasn’t attached to him.
Yeah like, if Mike had lived I think Ethan would have just processed it as “I banged Mike, had a good time, never doing that again!” but with him dead, and not only so soon after having sex but also learning he died saving Amber, I think that’s gonna really mess him up to the point where he’s in love with a ghost.
Mike got Gwen Stacy’d.
Yeah its almost like Willis knew that and made an specific rule NOT to,
Especially after killing off a misanthropic Queer Person in roomies ( Bury YOur Gays, Fridging )
and then did it anyways.
Well one, Ruth wasn’t friggin’ bi in 1998. Roomies isn’t retroactively the first webcomic about a bi dude.
Otherwise, I fundamentally disagree with your objections, I respect them anyway because you wouldn’t be feeling them if all of mass media didn’t constantly let us down.
But I don’t think Mike dying because he’s a borderline static and immutable character with no interesting capacity for drama or character growth, because he’s already caused too much harm and redeeming him from that would make him not really Mike anymore the way Shortpacked Mike remained an asshole but was an asshole who could love his wife and daughter and be meaningfully supportive to Amber in ways no one really could, is a bad move for the series just because it came at the cost of a queer dude character. Danny being bisexual is a Honking Big Deal for why he’s such an important character to me, but that importance was rooted in him, y’know, actually being a character who did things and had feelings and character development.
I get it, hell, I felt the same when Mike’s death was confirmed to have actually happened, but I was only able to care about Mike in the slightest because he liked dudes and then liking dudes became a textual element to some burgeoning character development. Yeah sure, I’d probably like a Mike Redemption Arc, except a Mike Redemption Arc would just Ruth vs. Rachel except the Rachel in this circumstance is everyone in the whole cast he constantly wronged and made miserable.
Respectfully, I don’t think Ruth’s death counts as a fridging. It was at least as much about her own arc as it was about Danny’s. There’s plenty of issues with it but that’s not really one of them.
FUCK. I guess I’m back to gravitar roulette tomorrow.
Yeah like, it’s only a fridging in the sense that a woman dies for a man’s character development, except Ruth heroically sacrifices herself to save Danny from the consequences of driving drunk on a single beer and it’s supposed to be the sendoff to Ruth actualizing her own character arc.
Which, you can actually kill a person doing that in a story.
Honestly, I know that starting with DoA (and, therefore, its version of Ruth) has probably biased me, but Roomies!Ruth’s death reads a hell of a lot like a suicide to me. The moments of calm in her conversation with Billie before she drives off feel to me less like “I’ve got it all figured out now” and more like “I’m at peace with the fact that I’m about to end my life.” I think she wanted to die all along, but couldn’t bring herself to actually end it without framing it in her mind as dying for something else. “Worth dying for” and all that. I’m guessing this probably wasn’t 1999!Willis’ intent, but it’s not like the original run of Roomies! hasn’t been drastically re-contextualized by later additions over the years anyway.
Interpreting it as a suicide makes Ruth’s death a culmination, albeit a horrifying one, to her own character arc rather than merely a casualty of Danny’s. And also explains why the hell any of Ruth’s friends tolerated Danny’s presence afterwards, especially Billie.
(Still woulda been a better comic if she’d lived though, she was like the only likeable character in it except Billie)
Does Ethan’s presence in this place of sexile imply that Jacob is getting laid?
Not necessarily. Bryan recognizes that Danny has been sexiled, but it’s unclear if this because this spot is where everyone goes when they get sexiled or just becauee Bryan is familiar with Danny’s current roommate circumstances
Ethan may have also been sexiled, but he may also just be hanging out in the common area
Ethan!!!
Jeeze where has he been this whole time?
I don’t know why nobody is excited about the return of Dinobot. Can’t they see the huge implications for Becky/Dina? The emo guy is a decoy sent by Galasso, you fools!
Honestly, bringing Dinobot back feels like a total cop-out.
I mean, c’mon. He “lived like a warrior ans died to an hero.”
The Beast Wars comic is getting pretty good, but I kinda hate how it’s writing Dinobot.
He’s all his noble aspects without any of his raging narcissism in being a heroic Starscream.
I suppose this strip lays to rest all those doubts on “Does Joe REALLY get laid all that much or is it mostly talk?”.
Also, hey, Ethan, eat something, you’re looking mighty thin in the face, there.
For me the wrinkle is that Joe may have been having sex a lot more than I thought if Bryan and Danny treat this as a casual and frequent thing, because I assumed Malaya was his last time.
Yeap, that’s exactly what I meant. Bryan just goes “oh hey man, here you are again, AS USUAL”.
Yeah, agreed. With all the fuss over Ethan I almost missed it, but it does kind of put to rest my theory that Joe was always mostly talk and especially that he’d basically given up since his various revelations and Malaya.
We really haven’t seen him hitting on anyone in a long time though – other than obvious non-serious things like his pass at Ruth. The last couple of times he started to, he caught himself and stopped. How is this working? Has he gone back to making passes off-screen with no indication in the story? Is he really just hot enough that random girls regularly proposition him for one-night stands?
That pass at Ruth got me thinking, now that you mentioned it.
Do you think it’s only transparently performative when he does it in front of Joyce?
Maybe, but if that’s the intent, we really need to see him doing it not in front of Joyce. One of the things that’s long frustrated me about the way Joe is written is that we’ve never seen him actually successfully pick someone up. Either it’s a girl making a pass at him with no effort on his part (Malaya and Liz), we only see the aftermath and it’s at least as likely she made the first move (Roz and Penny) or he gets shot down in flames.
Well, he picked up Joyce at the start. He probably did/does adapt himself to what makes for the most appealing casual partner, though if we’re trying to read a pattern: maybe Joe does only score when he’s approached, if how he hit on Sarah that one time is any indication of his usual actions.
We just assumed he had totally stopped after Malaya because we never saw otherwise, but given that he was acting like his old self with some transparent deliberateness it’s not out there to think he went back to boning, just without the Do List. The women who slept with him only wanted him for a casual lay in the first place.
But, that’s a read I’m making now that we know Joe’s still been sleeping around since he had sex with Malaya. For all we know, further developments will shed more light.
Picked up for a date then failed to turn it into sex, which was his real goal. (Partly thanks to all the punching.) Doesn’t really count as a success on his part, since his goal wasn’t a date.
It just makes it really hard to get a read on him. We used to see him approach women fairly regularly and we saw him make at least one decision to stop that (after his talk with Joyce about objectification.) We never saw him start up again – other than what got called out as not even trying.
Well, that’s what I’m trying to say. Joe successfully wooed Joyce into a date so that’s how he starts before ruining it somehow (and, y’know, the whole thing with Mike being there and Joyce being weird too), but maybe it’s deliberate that we’ve always seen him be approached instead of succeeding by approaching someone. Maybe Joyce and Sarah depict his usual success rate when he takes the initiative, but with Ruth even Joyce could tell he wasn’t trying at all, whereas he actually was with her and Sarah.
Don’t forget the timeskip, though…
In an ironic twist, Joe only started getting laid all the time when he stopped showing us he’s trying to get laid all the time.
Though oddly enough that ‘not as comfortable as I remember’ makes it seem like he hasn’t been sexiled to the lounge in a while even as Bryan and Danny are nonplussed by it. Though I guess this could be the first time since monthlong winter break.
Oh yeah, that’s true too. It might just be for setting up the punchline of Ethan glaring at him, but it could also mean it’s been a while since he was sent to the couch.
Maybe it’s just less frequent between the outing of the Do List and Joe trying to slide back into his old self post-Malaya.
I wondered how bad Mike’s death had hit Ethan; didn’t realize he’d turned into Ken
Oh my, we hadn’t seen him since mid 2020
I was just telling my roommate that we wouldn’t be seeing this gay boy for a while. I’ve been trying to get her to read this cause she grew up Catholic and in a small town. And she then went to a liberal college (where I met her). Her upbringing reminds me of Joyce. But also, I can convince her to try most anything if I point out that it is gay (she is gay), so I talked about Danny and Ethan but also warned it didn’t work out for them and that we dont see Ethan anymore. Welp, NOT EVEN 12 HOURS LATER, THERE HE IS!
There’s also Billie and Ruth.
Well, they’re both bi.
… and also broken up.
But there’s still Becky/Dina! And Daisy spontaneously became a character for the first time ever!
True on all accounts! And I do think I convinced her, only time will tell. I think she’ll really enjoy Becky!
Daisy’s gonna hook up with Ruth for the most fucked up Poly V ever.
This terrible misanthrope who has to weigh the pros and cons of being alive dating a broken water fountain and a lamp in a bowtie.
I very badly want Daisy to wind up dating Alice as a direct but unintended consequence of one of Jennifer’s no good very bad plans.
That would be amazing.
Though alas, I’m pretty sure Alice is enjoying her life safely far, far away from Jennifer’s self-destructive tendencies and Main Character Starus causing Hijinks.
As a bi i firmly believe bi is gay. Gay is any same sex attraction
Also Danny’s bi but he was mentioned int he original comic
Eeeeeeehhhh it’s complicated.
Danny’s not gay but he can have Gay Romances, except calling it that feels weird since I wouldn’t call dating Sal a Straight Romance. At that point I feel like I’m putting conditions on his romantic relationships.
Just kinda depends on what context it’s being employed in. Gay rolls off the tongue a lot easier than MLM, except Gay is both an identity and a descriptor of a kind of romantic and/or sexual relationship, and it’s a real-ass problem when Gay becomes this all-encompassing umbrella term even though two other Queer identities exist that also include same-sex attraction.
I subscribe to the Erika Moen school of just going with Queer. Danny dating Sal is a Queer Romance, in that he’s a queer man in a relationship with someone else.
Yeah, I am also bi and much prefer queer as an umbrella term. For men/masc people, if you say you are gay, people are going to assume that you are exclusively interested in men. Which is not great when combined with the “bi men are going to end up gay, they just aren’t ready to admit it yet” stereotype. Plus, queer includes people (like straight trans people and ace/aro people) who don’t necessarily have same gender attraction.
Yeah pretty much.
I ain’t gay, nothing about me is gay. My love for men ain’t gay either ’cause it’s next to other kinds of love too, but it would be gay if those other kinds weren’t there.
I can intellectually understand using ‘gay’ to mean ‘same-sex romance’, like, come on, that’s pretty effin’ clinical, but personally that’s not my score, more broadly I think it reinforces stuffing other identities under that one label (this isn’t commentary on zee’s post I responded to, if it reads as such), so I gravitate to queer for relationships involving queer folks, though an important fact of that is that queer folks get to dictate the terms and words they use to define and identify themselves and their lives however they see fit.
Oh for the record i definitely prefer queer generally, just in my personal experience as a bisexual (amongst other things, my capability to experience attraction is a jumbled mess I’ve recently found out) gay feels just as natural as a descriptor. Like…
but people can pry the word gay from my cold dead hands.
“Oh i had to pause that episode of squid game because sae byeok is so pretty and I’m gay”
I have a boyfriend (who is also queer) and I’ve only been able to date men due to both chance and the fact that my country is so homophobic we still have buggery laws
At the same time i understand why others might feel apprehensive towards it
Yeah I kinda realized halfway through I was starting to sound lecturing so I tried to tear it up a bit to get my perspective across while still acknowledging the importance of defining our own labels.
Ultimately the most important part is that we use the words that have the most meaning to us, and that’s something we individually decide. I’d actually get kinda… not mad I guess if someone just said “oh you’re gay” to me out of the blue so much as I resent it more in the broader context of bisexual marginalization from within and outside the Queer community, and it’s that resentment that’s modified how I express myself about my identity.
****comment, damn my refusal to proof read
I’m sorry, I totally didn’t mean to imply that I thought Danny was gay. I was talking about Ethan with my roomie. However, as queer people, we do also sometimes use gay as an umbrella term. Like I was watching The Good Witch and was waiting for this bi girl’s future girlfriend to show up and when she did, I texted my roomie saying “I found the gays!”.
Oh, no,I didn’t think you were calling Danny gay, don’t worry about that. That’d be nettling for sure, but you’re completely correct that the reins of our terms and language belong to us all even if we approach it from different angles.
Just depends on the context, really. It’s not something I could blanketly decide for myself anyway.
Of course when things are working out for Danny and Sal we get sexy emo Ethan. This should be good.
Heh, after reading the comments i feel kinda proud that i recognized Ethan from the back of his head in panel 1
tbh I thought it was Faz
I actually thought that too for a split second. Then I saw his face and thought he was Ken.
Then it dawned on me, and I had to check the tags to make sure I wasn’t crazy.
Ew i don’t wanna be Billie. Reroll
Oh that’s worse
Hmmm
I’ll come back to this
Oh hey, the Gravatars got re-rolled. Emothan must be in the rotation now.
I guess I got Ruth again. Should I spin the roulette wheel and see who else I get?
Let’s see who capitalizing that letter gets me…
Not bad, not bad. How about this one?
Yeah, odd timing. I’d read through and commented on today’s stuff, then gone back to see if there were any new replies to me from yesterday and I was a different person there. I guess it was adding Liz and Ethan?
I’ll take Carla though.
I suppose I should play at least once though.
Amusing, but I’ll stick with Carla. Time to work some performative assholery into my posts, along with hidden support.
Really just posting so I don’t forget to change the email back.
I think it’s those two (Liz and Ethan) plus Jason and Agatha that have been added.
Rolling…
Re-rolling
I’m noticing a theme here.
How could you give up Space Force Captain Julia Gray???
Lettuce try anew.
Hrrm.
Last try for today?
Two different capitalizations produce the same grav, boo
Lettuce accept this for today.
Say, how do you change those anyway without waiting for mod approval?
Site ones, I mean.
Just change the capitalization in your email.
Change the capitalization of your email address. The approval system isn’t case sensitive (so your posts still go through), but the Gravatar algorithm is.
remember when someone got Julia Grey three times in a row?
Huh, you got the one I used to have, I thought they were only randomized when there was a totally new batch. Although I guess replacing the characters who didn’t get big makeovers isn’t really necessary.
wow, we havent seen ….. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0X3CLJVMJU
Ken for a while.
Someone ask Ninja Rick
wait, THAT’s Ethan ? he sure seems cranky for one
I know everyone’s talking about Ethan right now, but I don’t have anything to contribute to that conversation.
I DO feel the need to point out that Danny has become part of the “lounge sexile” community, where students sexiled by their roomies gather for commiseration and community. Danny is, apparently, a fixture.
Reject Grav Roulette
Embrace Gravatars and the Sneaky Crime Man getting bonked on the head by a tree branch
Where’s the fun in that?
I only have horrible gravatars when facing my own hubris.
Sneaky Crime Man the Third
Go see Sneaky Crime Man the Third in his first CG film, Sneaky Crime Man the Third the First
Smug Joe will live forever!
I am here to say Ethan is emo as fuck, and find out what my current default grav is now, since I forgot what my original is. Man, I hope this is the Leslie email, I like Leslie.
OH HELL NO
On a more serious note, as I forgot my original reasoning because “what’s my grav again?” I hope this means that Danny got over Ethan real quick when he started to go down hill, because sure, Danny was a jerk for the hospital thing, but Ethan wasn’t too much better by playing it off that it would be okay if Mike said it about Danny (if they had been swapped), but it wasn’t okay Danny said it.
Given Danny’s comments on how he processes his romantic attraction, he’s probably over Ethan enough that he’s fine dating Sal.
I imagine any residual awkwardness is in Danny feeling guilty for how that last argument went down. If Mike had survived there was room for some healthy talk, Danny getting his venting on Mike out to no real consequence and Ethan recognizing he probably totally would have let Mike be an asshole to a comatose Danny, like if Mike had lived they could actually talk about what both of them wanted to say, but that chance is gone forever.
Is it bad that I forgot about Ethan entirely until this point
of course Willis waits just long enough until people stop wondering about Ethan to reintroduce him
RICK HUNTER.
From Macross/Robotech. That’s who Ethan looks like now.
Christ that took me forever.
Ooh, Gravs have been re-rolled. I’m Sal now! (was Dina before).
*glares enviously*
huh, and I’m Dina now.
IS THAT ETHAN?? HE LOOKS LIKE A HIGHSCHOOLER
So he looks like an 18-year old instead of a 29 year old beefcake fashion model in Dinobot jammies.
…
That’s gotta be someone’s kink.
I remember the last time the icons rolled I got blowjob cat and then recapitalised and got Sarah so now who do I….
Hmm could be worse but I’ll try again.
Nah, Amber stays. I love you Joe in my own way but I’ll go with your stepsis for now.
oh no he’s hot
Oh jeez Ethan you look… not great. ):
ETHANS BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! : D
*insert comment on emo ethan*
I’m really here to check my gravatar
Still Roz, huh
OMG!
I didn’t even understand that was Ethan till I checked the tags.
Things are chAnging!!!
Oh shit, we haven’t seen Ethan since the timeskip, have we?
*checks tag* yep, not since th- /the timeskip was a year ago already???/
okay, still cool. Looks like he’s been doing unwell. Wonder what the discourse is like?
*checks comments* wait…people don’t recognize him as ethan? I guess over a year apart can do that to one’s memories
What’s my new grav??? I was just starting to get used to Robin…
Ehhhh IDK about Daisy. Reroll grav?
Ok Joe is fine but maybe one more try.
JESUS. NO. BLOWJOBCAT.
JOE TWICE????
Ok yes Joyce good thank god. Stickin with this one.
Mark me down as another ‘thought it was Ken, extremely worried now that I know it’s Ethan’.
I’m not surprised he was hit hardest by Mike’s death, but it’s sure painful to see.
We reset gravs?
Ooh, yes. Amber is nice.
I am Fuckface! This is peak gravatar roulette.
Congrats on your grav roulette win!
Yep.
Yes indeedy.
So it would seem.
OR AM I?
I mean, you never know.
It could be all in your head.
Or all in mine!
checking mine with the default capitalization, rather than what I was using.
huh, Dina either way.
guess I’ll check mine too.
hmmm.
one more go
ooh heck yeah. one of my favorites
Looks like grav rerolls. lets see who I got.
I’ll take it!
Almost everybody gets scruffier post-timeskip
Entropy always wins.
Whoa! Ethan! Where ya been?! You got Mike’s haircut?!
Okay this is driving me crazy, I hope this isn’t a weird question.
Are you the same Nalem who did Lighter than Heir? I swear I’ve seen that name before.
Ooh, who’s THAT?
*checks tag*
*Spits out drink*
Did Ken and Mike both possess Ethan?
Kind of just noticec the gravs got reshuffled. BBCC ain’t gonna ba happy about that. And I am just typing this to test what my mobile device grav is.
T.T DAMN YOU WILLIS.
Better late then never.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/hair-2/
Did he lose weight?
Looks like.
In second semester of my freshman year I had a bout of depression and lost fifteen pounds. I went from burly to thin, but I was still 5’10” and 24 inches across the shoulders.
Dang, I didn’t realize it’d been so long since we’ve seen Ethan. Poor guy. But at least grav roulette is fun!
… Wow, it’s hard to believe this is the first time we’ve seen Ethan in over a year, in a real-time.
Today I learned that it’s been over a year since Ethan last appeared.
Imagine if this was Ava’s Demon. We probably won’t see Ethan till a decade later
What’s Ava’s Demon?
This.
Wondering what it says about Joe’s stamina that Danny didn’t bother to bring his laptop cord
well actually the first panel does kind of look like maybe he brought the cord