Did they close as a response to specific comments or was it planned in advance to close for a specific strip that was judged to be too likely to be toxic discourse.
That sort of upsets me. Not the locking part, as that can be healthy at times. I am upset that people get that worked up about fictional characters that merely explore real life dynamics between people. These characters are capable of some nuance in personality, just like people in general are. I appreciate the fact that many characters have character flaws as well as positive traits. I don’t want Mary to show any positive traits, mind you, but Raidah being something other than a pure heat sink isn’t a negative thing. Once you start interacting with other people, life can fail to match your idealized version. There’s nothing wrong in that
Like I said on BSKY the other day: Raidah was being cruel and unfair, but she wasn’t WRONG. And Joyce needed to hear that directly from somebody, because the only other person who tried was Sarah, and she cared too much about Joyce’s feelings to be hard on her.
Raidah didn’t give a crap about Joyce’s feelings. Raidah ALSO doesn’t give a crap about Joyce actually improving, she just wanted to be mean for the sake of being mean, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t benefit from what she said.
I don’t think Raidah did, no. She was very judgmental of the protest’s effectiveness when she encountered Joyce and Dorothy. She seems to feel it’s entirely performative activism, so between that and the lack of tear gas/knowledge of the protest happenings until the IU issue was printed, I don’t think she was there.
I’m not sure I would assume that Raidah thinks the *entire* protest was performative activism. If she did think that, I don’t think she would have gotten so worked up at Daisy for reporting on the protest as two women kissing while other things also happened.
Also, looking back at the comic now, she specifically says “I’m not cynical about protests, I’m cynical about white Freshman.”
So I guess we definitely know that she thinks Joyce and Dorothy specifically were engaged in performative activism. But not necessarily everyone else who attended.
I agree with you that she almost certainly wasn’t there herself. But that could be for other reasons.
I saw they were gone yesterday by the time I got here. What did I miss? And feel free to completely ignore that if there’s any chance of something that can shut comments down kicking off again simply by talking about it.
I was told there’d be doughnuts. It was me. I said it. And then went and got some from the local Pop ‘n Pop. And so there are doughnuts. Sorry I can’t deliver y’all.
That sounds like an awesome band name, Villainously Bisexual could open for Kittie or maybe a re-formed Jack Off Jill! I’d pay for either of those shows!
With any luck we might actually find out details about Bulmeria!
I have a $5 bet that Raidah is going to be revealed to be Bulmerian American and that the reason she wasn’t at the protest is the not unreasonable belief she’d be deported if she was there.
The mention of RL politics makes me wonder…have these kids lived through an allegory of the Obama, Trump, Biden and Trump Again presidencies in like six months? I would kind of love of the DoA world had four US presidents in half a year and none of the cast commented on it. That’s just normal in DoA world. America has had 200 presidents so far.
Yes, but the conflict in Bulmeria is also a civil war (from what I remember it’s the government targeting it’s own citizens). Willis has very clearly mashed a bunch of different conflicts together in to one story.
Six months = ten years.
So for every year that passes in DoA, twenty pass for us.
Washington became the first President in 1789.
We have had 45 Presidents over 60 presidential terms, which gives us a ratio of 3:4 Presidents per term.
(2025-1789)*20/4*0.75
The Dumbing of Age America has had 885 Presidents. Maybe like 65 of which was in Joyce’s lifetime.
So yeah, Trump probably doesn’t get mentioned, because Presidents are just a blip. She probably doesn’t even know his name other than “that reality TV show guy.”
Congress, though… if Robin’s campaign is any indication, US senators have a 120-year term, at least according to our way of reckoning time.
Thing is – in Ukraine american bombs support opressed and attacked country. Syria status was… very unclear (because it was civil war). But Palestine is bombed by american bombs (dunno if still is, I’m treating my depression and I don’t follow news).
So you cannot protest both in favour of and against american weapon support.
Also, it’s much harder (once you realise that there are different cases) to judge american involvment in other wars. Yeah, Middle-East has no reason to love USA… unless you count Syria and Kurds. But Ukraine is putting up good fight because of american help. Not to mention Taiwan is in much better position just because USA says if something would happen they would react
Hey! That’s NUANCE! That shit’s illegal, get your conpulsory pithily-stated ideology back on! If I can’t sum up your political take in one swntence that’s BAD AND HARD TO UNDERSTAND why would you do this to me, specifically, in this vicious personal attack?!
Even the seemingly black and white Ukrainian situation is more complex than that in its genesis.
While without any doubt russia started an illegal war of agression with its invasion?
The fundamental conflict was at least strongly provoked and egged on by US foreign policy investing heavily in “flipping” ukraine.
By supporting the maidan protests against a legally (and rather fairly) elected governement that tried to straddle pro-western groups and 1/3rd of its population being ethnic russians and russia being its most important neighbour.
Provoke a violent-prone dictator like Putin by pushing his weak neighbour into a “us or them, no middle ground”-conflict? Some responsibility is due.
At this point the choice is clear. Help the invaded against the agressor.
But I still hold to the belief that this war could have been avoided by not supporting and financing a violent popular coup against the governement that tried to keep doors open on both sides.
I mean that’s not really more complicated. Ukraine doesn’t want to be part of the Russian Empire anymore and absolutely is more prosperous on its own. They accepted the weapons from NATO because they knew Russia was going to force the issue (and obviously had). There was a large portion that was pro-Russian.
And then Russia invaded and all those people now hate Russia for the atrocities done to them.
Eh.
You are arguing from the current state of affairs and “our side” war narrative. Instead of looking at the developing geopolitical situation since the nineties.
Possibly reversing cause and effect in your train of thought.
From the russian narrative, NATO arming ukraine was the main reason for the influence struggle peaking in the invasion. Rather than the result of it.
While in the west we get served the fearmongering message of an agressive russia wanting to re-establish its empire?
The russian public view has been the danger an ever-enclosing, overwhelmingly powerful NATO flipping and arming all of its former vassals and buffer states one after the other.
Breaking all of its promises to not expand east, not to arm the new eastern members, not to station first-strike capable weapons in striking distance of moscow.
They explain their demand for ukraine not to fully orient west as a security interest – which was ignored.
Still not a justification for an invasion, of course.
But then putin IS a dictator with no qualms about using military violence to enforce his interests.
Which was well known in Washington when they sent Nunes to the Maidan with heaps of money, promises of support, and a regime-change plan for after Janukovich was toppled.
Its all moot at this point, in that you are correct.
After hundreds of thousands of dead, rump-ukaine will not accept a strong russian influence or even neutrality for generations. If they can avoid it, that is. Neither will russia give back the lands it has taken at a dire cost.
Again: I´m not arguing the war was justified or somebody else but putin started it.
I´m arguing it could have been prevented by smart geopolitics respecting russias long-standing, incessantly communicated security interests.
The problem is that “Russias long-standing, incessantly communicated security interests” are a matter of dominance and control of the nations around it. We see this from the old Russian empire through the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact to more modern actions in places like Chechnya and Georgia before Ukraine.
Yes, I was wrong to doubt Raidah’s motives for being angry at the girls, I admit it. She is however still going to have to die mad about it as long as she doesn’t want to tell people what she’s angry about.
Also yes, this conversation should be enlightening no matter what direction it takes.
This is something i’ve been looking forward to. The parental figures of this series usually fall into certain groups. We have classic bad guys (Blaine, Toedad), systemically deranged bad guys (Joyce’s mom, Walky and Sal’s mom, Ruth’s grandfather), the enabling victims of the badguys (Joyce’s dad, Walky and Sal’s dad), ‘Karen-types’ (Ethan’s mom), good people that don’t really stir the pot (Dorothy’s parents, Dina’s parents, Amber’s mom), and Joe’s Dad.
Usually these parents fall into these groups kinda retroactively, since their children were created in the strip first, and then presumedly Willis worked backwards to think what kind of parents these characters would have. So most of them fall into expected groups. Amber’s insecurity is something that’s been majorly influenced by her asshole father. Joyce’s religious dogma mixed with strong ideals are a melting pot that in part comes from her mother’s dogma and her father’s desire to do ‘what’s right’ (however you may define that). Dina and Dorothy, while not being free of personal problems, are shown to have parents that clearly care for them and have brought them up to be able to handle problems (even if that has resulted in Dorothy burning the candle at every conceivable angle).
In comparison, Carla’s parents are not only mostly an unknown to us, but a bit of a dichotomy in what we do know. They’re tech billionaires who were okay with their daughter being trans (seemingly, i know there was a patreon strip, but i never saw it). They are one half part of the problem plaguing society and one half progressive and accepting in their thinking towards their daughter.
I feel i honestly don’t know how this conversation is going to go. Are they going to be casually dismissive, telling Carla not to worry about their business stuff with big smiles on their faces, as they generate excuses that they’ve used to justify themselves? Are they going to rip the mask off and confirm that they just don’t care? Are they going to realise that if they’re daughter is coming to them on this, that maybe they’re doing something wrong? Some other thing i haven’t considered?
I see two outcomes. Option 1 is Carla actually convinces them to divest and the is a sort of resolution to this protest background story. I think if Willis wants to keep the sort of status quo with Carla and her relationship to her parents that has to happen. Option 2 is they don’t divest and Carla has to reconcile with the fact her parents are not as great as she thinks and possibly change as a person.
I personally find it more interesting if they don’t divest. Perhaps they are even genuinely nice people with good excuses and justifications. But Carla changing slightly as a person, her actually having to confront and make a decision about the cost of her privilege is the more compelling story to me.
I would really like it if Carla’s parents turn out to be perfectly nice people who accept her concerns gracefully and address them in a manner that satisfies her. But unfortunately, that’s not the most narratively interesting option or the one that’s going to lead to character growth for Carla, so I suspect that’s not what’s going to happen.
Could be that they address her concerns in a way that satisfies her, but when she brings it up to Charlie, it’s immediately easy to see the problems behind their response, leading to Carla realizing her own viewpoint is quite privileged.
There’s a gonzo option that turns into basically the plot of Iron Man happening in the background, where Carla’s parents divest from military tech and abruptly Carla no longer has access to as much money or tech resources due to there being severe corporate infighting about it.
I’m actually kind of hoping for something like the moment from The Prince of Egypt when the Pharaoh Seti (Patrick Stewart), so wise and kind, tries to comfort his troubled son:
“Oh my son… they were only slaves.”
They look suspiciously like an older Joe and Rachel and the room they’re standing in looks suspiciously like a Tardis. They sent their daughter back in time so their younger selves could look after her.
Alternatively, it’s Joe and Rachel From Another World, who came to DoA after Soggies Ruled their home universe, and this finally ties DoA to the Shortpacked/it’s Walky!/Joyce and Walky/Roomies! multiverse as the comic takes a hard swing back into pure fantasy.
I swear every time someone tells me stuff that happened in the other comics it sounds like they just made it up. I did know Carla was a robot I didn’t know Joe and Rachel were her parents. That seems so random, but I guess to a Shortpacked reader it’s actually weirder they’re not an adult couple now?
uh i also reccomend shortpacked for the people here who prefer comedy
or miss amber or ethan or mike or leslie or robin or galasso
theres like 10 years of comics about all these people
I don’t find it weird that Joe and Rachel aren’t together here. I never liked them as a couple to begin with, and they were out of focus most of the time they were together. And due to plot stuff that will definitely sound like I just made it up if I explain it, a lot of what we did see wasn’t actually them anyway.
I do find it very weird that Carla has parents who aren’t Joe and Rachel, though.
Ultra Car was one of Willis’s first ever characters from childhood like Danny, Joe, and Sal. When Ultra Car decided to have an anthropomorphic body and stop being a car she was a girl! That eventually became the DoA character Carla. (very abbreviated explanation)
The corollary being, for prosopagnosics, dramatic unmasking reveals nothing at all. I was so puzzled in a Wolverine movie when his dead wife walked in. I mean, I knew it was a dramatically tense moment, but who was this woman, IDK! Clearly not his wife cos she’s dead, why would I even think of his dead wife???
Hollywood’s long tradition of insisting on a narrow set of aesthetic standards for its female actors just makes things more difficult. How are we supposed to know that this slender generically-attractive woman is or isn’t the same as that earlier slender generically-attractive woman?
Yeah, I’m grateful that Willis maintains a comment section for us insufferable grumblers, but there’s some characters that I do not feel like the broader comments section can be trusted to be normal about and Raidah’s probably top of the list.
Low key agree. Moderating the comment section ust be Hella draining, especially when people get super intense. I’d rather the comments get closed of for a bit than Willis burn out over it. (I fs don’t have the gumption required)
Well we could always post what we were gonna say yesterday today!
Personally, while people should conduct themselves better, I feel Willis should acknowledge their own failures as an writer that lead to these sorts of thing. Their attempt to address the criticism of the protest storyline has really been mishandled. Part of why the reaction to Raidah is so extreme is that it feels quite disproportionate to what actually happened. Like we criticize the protest for using the Gaza protests as window dressing, but years down the line if someone reads it with no context of the event then they’re gonna be real confused as to why Asma and Raidah suddenly got so much screen time and had such big opinions about Joyce and Dorothy kissing in the school newspaper (not even an online news site, a physical paper). Like, the internal critique can’t be towards Daisy, the person whose action actually reflect Willis’, but she’s not a main character so the story has to contort itself to direct it towards Jorothy.
It’s all just becoming a bunch a mixed metaphors and then it resulted in a Muslim woman being mad at Joyce for being publicly gay, which is just a bad look and Raidah isn’t a character who has been establish as anything other than hugely two faced. Again, not saying they deserve everything they get, but at some point they should really just cut their losses and end this whole Bulmeria plot and make up the Muslim representation in a new storyline.
sums up my feelings on the issues with it too. with less jokes, but yeah. I think we could do with Willis should hold off on doin Joyce/Dorothy related stuff till they can untangle the whole mess of a plotline that is this genocide being related to Palestine/Ukraine/Syria/Whatever he wants to avoid specifically bringing up. If only to simmer people’s tempers down for a while.
Probably my biggest issue with Willis is their many times of attempting to stir shit in the comments in order to generate engagement. The classic example I always remember is from way back in the day where there’s an escalating series of conflicts between Mary and Carla, and while Mary is written to be nearly completely unlikeable Carla acts nearly as unlikable where you almost start to get on Mary’s side until she starts being transphobic. And to me that was pretty much Willis going, “Oh you think Mary might have a point that Carla was being really dickish constantly roller skating up and down the hallway, well you’ve just sided with a transphobe!”
This kind of stuff is found all throughout the comic, Sickos vs Paladins being the latest, and it just makes it hard to have a non-heated discussion on thing, especially when it’s clear Willis favors one position over the other.
And it is a great way to create engagement, but then you’ve primed your commenters to be combative and that’s what leads to something like two days ago when you 1000+ comments fighter over whether Raidah is homophobic or if the other side is being Islamophobic/colorist for saying that.
And unless the comments get closed for good (or at least for every strip that might be controversial) then this is gonna keep happening.
I think we can definitely say Willis is responsible for a lot of the confusion and tempers flaring up in their comment section as of late. A lot of the choices could’ve done with maybe some more perspectives taken into account. Especially from women of color. And maybe next time, try not to tie your biggest arcs with real life stuff, if you can’t handle it with the seriousness it needs.
It’s so silly to speculate about how much they must be deliberately riling people up for “engagement” after two comment sections got locked in a row.
Like. If that’s what they were after, they wouldn’t be doing that, but by all means continue with the tinfoil hatting that not so coincidentally offloads all the responsibility for our crappy behavior from us onto an imaginary mustache-twirling villain.
Don’t believe me if you want, but I’ve been reading this comic for a very long time and following Willis just as long. This is something they do, they love to take potshots and rile up the fanbase, just look at their Bluesky. For the most part I get it, they come from that generation of internet where needling and lightly antagonizing people was common curtesy. But them posting that pie graph with 1% “Remembering Joe exists” in the “Next 10 months of Dumbing of Age buffer” might have been funny if you didn’t take it too seriously, but did not make the comment section any more civil. Willis is the writer and they hold a large position of power to influence the tenor of the fan reaction, they aren’t all powerful and yes people should learn to conduct themselves better But at some point you have to reckon with what you’ve done as a creator to make you comment section/whaever other fan space better or worse. Just look at Andrew “I don’t know why my fandom is so rabid and hostile when I literally use an anti-fan caricature as the main villain” Hussie.
I do look at their BlueSky and I also look at their Tumblr and I’ve also been reading their comics for decades, and if you think “pot shots” directed at very specific people, people that Willis has in fact clarified are not just “anyone who hates Joyce/Dorothy or who doesn’t like the current arc”, must be secretly about you… I guess that’s your right, but it certainly doesn’t reflect some objective truth.
I don’t know anything about Homestuck, but based on everything else you’ve said, I’m inclined to think I would strongly disagree about whether or not the villain you’re talking about is actually an anti-fan caricature?
Next you’ll be telling me you also think Buckets of Blood Guy was a joke at your expense.
@Cameron: that’s so funny because out of curiosity I asked my girlfriend who is a longtime deep Homestucker and she told me I’m entirely correct.
Genuine advice: take a step back on the parasocial relationship, most of your favorite creators have no idea who you are and would not bother creating characters based on you.
That’s sorta the weird parasocial conflict to being a relatively well known creative entity on the internet. Willis themselves is just a solitary person. They’re not famous or come from money. They don’t have handlers or coaches for social Interaction. They just post a webcomic and transformers toys.
But from an outsider perspective Willis is a highly influential person with followers in the tens of thousands if not hundreds. If Willis calls someone out on so I’ll media chances are it will result in several other people publicly dogpiling on that individual. Which can often start to feel like punching down or even bullying at times. Which seems ridiculous from Willis’ perspective since they’re just a person engaging in discourse. Of course willis themselves is also getting an unreasonable disproportionate amount of vitriol and hate so being defensive seems natural. It’s just their words and actions carry so muc more weight than a lot of ours do.
If people shit on Bruce timm I’m sure be gets his feelings hurt but also he co created one of the most iconic depictions of batman in history. If Bruce starts lashing out at people he’s gonna look like he’s punching down even if its justified. But willis is not Bruce time. So they’ve got all the feeling of a big time creator without the shielding and clout of one of a famous creator. It’s a conundrum of online popularity for sure.
I also think Willis is not unaware of that problem? If they’ve ever actually called anyone out by name, I haven’t seen it. They just subtweet people, which unfortunately lets folks like Cameron assume Willis is talking about them when they’re not.
An example i think of often is when Roz had a comic in short packed mocking people who didn’t understand what the little dangle sticking off a dildo was used for. Going so far as go say that if you don’t know what it is its YOUR fault women are unsatisfied securely.
Now you can say this is just Roz being in character. And that anyone genuinely getting their feelings hurt by that is just a dumb weak over emotional crybaby.
But that comment section genuinely made me cry. I felt like it wasn’t just a funny silly haha. It was an indictment on guys who lack knowledge. Where instead of being informative and patient it felt accusatory and mean. I was later told it was sott of a parody of Oh Joy Sex Toy and the joke is that instead of a gentle and kind explanation Roz gives a more scathing one. Personally I think it falls flat for the same reason I think “evil superman” does. Superman being kind IS the subversion. In the same way being dismissive and condescending about a lack of sexual knowledge is the norm OJST is subverting so by subverting that its just reinforcing the kinda uncomfortable and embarrassing.
My point is. Im sure a young 19 year old Virgin yoto was not the direct target of the mockery of that strip. But that strip and the comments agreeing with it and arguments that followed made me feel like shit. And I’m sure the guy bucket of blood guy is based on will never read the comic. But someone similar who identifies with that guy could still feel called out. Especially cuz regardless of intent commenters may take this opportunity to further mock them. And feel justified in this mockery cuz its what the comic is doing. It’s kinda like that old adage where if you mock one guy for being fat all the other fat people in your life take notice. Even if its “not about them”
@Yotomoe: I can understand that and even empathize with it to some degree, but I do think that assuming Roz’s opinion IS Willis’s opinion is a mistake. Especially when we know what Willis’s adolescence was like, they were definitely more like you (a virgin who wouldn’t have known) than like Roz at 18/19.
I also don’t think Roz would be dismissive and mean of a virgin for being confused by it, but I also don’t think she’s sensitive enough to that kind of thing to regulate her wording.
All of that said: it sucks that the comic hurt your feelings, and it sucks even more that the comment section reinforced it. The expectation that men know this kind of thing without being told IS actually a sort of subtype of toxic masculinity.
It’s like when Ben Shapiro was briefly the main character of Twitter for his reaction to WAP, and a lot of people took that opportunity to take pot shots at him for his sexual prowess.
Like. I’m not immune, I did also think it was very funny, but when you say so on social media, or worse, directly to male friends who might worry about their own performance in bed………… what are we doing here, folks. The shitty thing about Ben Shapiro is his political beliefs, not how good he is or isn’t at pleasing his wife in bed.
It’s still a few degrees removed (you can’t just click his name and go straight to his account), but I’ll admit I don’t think you should do this for comments that aren’t blatantly bigoted.
Yeah not necessarily the post I was thinking of but I don’t like this sorta thing. Like I dunno its not like he’s saying “go cyberbully this guy”. But its definitely putting them at risk of it. And even if they don’t often times in posts like this you’ll see so much vitriol and bad faith takes from the responses that if you assume the guy who posted this read the responses it definitely starts to feel like bullying. And I dunno I don’t like this practice. Not on public forums like Twitter and Blusky anyway. Maybe if it’s just a discord with your buddies you know aren’t gonna go rouge and start harassing or making up weird theories about. (People love to start throwing around neckbeard Intel and basement dweller.) And from personal experience its very hard to stop yourself from reading what people are saying about you.
My general rule is to try to act in a way where if I find out that person self harmed or something worse I don’t feel like I contributed to that. You never know what people are going through behind the screen. Of course that goes both ways which is why I try whenever possible to give Willis the benefit of the doubt.
I do also have just, tons of involuntary empathy for people with large followings who impulsively react to crappy comments with snark.
I know that I, personally, try to manicure my own responses to crappy comments in the few cases where I have any kind of platform, in a type of “enlightened self-interest”: I don’t want to trigger a dogpiling, either of the commenter or of myself, because there’s no guarantee that people riled up by a snarky comment are going to go after the person you snarked at instead of going after you.
At the same time, it’s hard, and I know I’m experiencing only a tiny fraction of what anyone with even like, 5000 followers deals with.
But yeah, I can definitely still agree: not a good practice. Better to block/report (depending on topic), in most cases.
No, what existed was a bunch of people with different opinions, not a divide between two groups. The joke was a joke. I think Cameron Stone is overstating things quite a bit, but I also think acting as if the polls (or at least specifically that one) had no impact on the comments is a little silly. I don’t think Willis is doing that on purpose though, just that they don’t always think shit through.
What existed was a deep divide that the joke was making fun of, and the joke came before the poll.
Having labels for the sides did make it easier to talk about the “other side”, and of course there are numerous studies observing the effect of telling people they belong to groups — but those effects don’t require there to be any “shit stirring”, and people were already accusing each other of having no morals for liking different fictional drama or being homophobic for disliking Joyce/Dororhy.
I remember putting a LOT of energy, repeatedly, into pointing out that the “two sides” had more nuanced takes than just “pro cheating” and “anti Joyce/Dorothy”, and I did that before there were labels for the sides.
This is also like the fourth time I’ve seen someone say “we were all just smol beans who got along before evil Willis’s evil poll” and I’m gonna keep pointing out that it’s not true. We are mostly adults and we are all responsible for our own actions.
I think the site poll brought it to the forefront. I remember cringing when I saw it and being like “oh no, this is not a good idea.” And then saying that with the other polls over the next several days/weeks lol
Pretty sure the main reaction to it was “lol” at the time. Because it was funny.
Most of the “I didn’t pick an option because these options don’t cover the full nuance of my opinion” complaints came from subsequent polls, and “Willis is trying to make us fight each other” didn’t start to be voiced until months later.
It was a clear outgrowth of “these labels were a mistake (neutral on the coining of them, addressing the usage by us to brand the ‘other side’ as all believing just one thing)”, and I deeply dislike the way the new manifestation of it as “actually this is all the polls’ fault” tries to absolve us of all responsibility for being assholes to each other.
I’ll filly cop to us all being assholes but that doesn’t mean the polls were blameless. Especially when you have tension between commenters rising. The polls felt dismissive or as if they misrepresented people’s positions at best. At worst they felt like deliberately antagonistic. It basically turned the people who didn’t like the story direction into the “opposition” and built into this false rhetoric of why they may be upset.
An oily rag itself does not start a fire. But it certainly doesn’t help.
@Yotomoe: See, that’s exactly the problem: they were NOT misrepresenting people’s opinions.
They just weren’t always restricting themselves to representing exactly the opinions of the majority of this comment section, and as a result a lot of people are assuming poll options are throwing shade at them by exaggerating their opinions, when in fact those poll options are accurate representations of a different opinion entirely, held by different people.
“Joyce and Dorothy deserve [disturbingly graphic descriptions of bodily harm]” was not an exaggeration of “I think cheating should have consequences”, it was an almost direct quote of one specific guy who was all up in Willis’s mentions.
I do not think it’s their fault that we keep assuming we are the only DoA readers in the universe.
Like, were the polls GOOD for the discourse, no. With the benefit of hindsight I think we can say “no”.
But the idea that they’ve ever been malicious attacks on reasonable people who ~dare~ to have problems with Willis’s storytelling is just absurd on its face.
@Clif
If you tell an offensive joke and everyone in the room laughs that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone found it funny.
@Li
They genuinely were though. Even the poll with the most options seemed to constantly miss the main reason people weren’t enjoying this story. And then you have stuff like evoking the scarlet letter and other stuff that definitely creates a vibe? Much like my issues with this arc the whole poll issue comes down to “the more you address it the worse it gets.” The polls could very well say anything. Or could say nothing. The fact that there are polls that seem to implicitly not understand why people are mad with backhanded framing of people who feel one way or the other was simply not healthy for the discourse.
Which I think is a major factor of the discourse. People feeling like they’re not being heard.
When you offer a binary choice people feel as if they’re being told “these are the two options. You are one of these”. Even if its just implicit. Like I said it didn’t cause discourse but it definitely, even if unintentionally, fed into it by choosing this time to make a poll that was this specific. At BEST it was just super bad timing. But that’s why I said “maybe he should have stopped when it was clear people were getting more at each other’s throats?” Even if it wasn’t meant as an insult people clearly were taking it as an insult.
@Yoto – Fair enough, and I hear what you are saying, but I have a real problem hearing Paladin and whatever the other term was as being offensive. At worst it was an exaggeration and exaggeration is the soul of humor.
When I didn’t think the poll options represented my opinions, I either picked the one that was the closest bc I still wanted to vote, or didn’t vote.
I just genuinely did not feel at all compelled to vote or like I was being told which opinions I was allowed to have, and I have trouble understanding folks who feel otherwise.
yeah, my strategy in those cases was to pick the funniest option and then post something like “man, I wish there was a ‘my actual opinion’ choice in this poll”.
I don’t think Willis was trying to say anything like that regarding Carla and Mary, I think the point was that while Carla was being annoying, you shouldn’t respond to an annoyance with hate. Imagine if every time someone got mad at a minority the gloves came off and they just started hurling slurs. Reveals more about that person than anything else, I feel.
Also, regarding Mary and Carla, reread those strips for the first time in a long time and I think it’s important to remember that Mary escalated things:
Like the sequence of events up to this point had been “Carla is skating in the hallways, Mary gets upset. Mary tries to block by laying in the hallway so Carla jumps over her. In retaliation, Mary sprays glue on the carpet and ruins Carla’s skates. In retaliation to that, Carla stomps loudly outside of Mary’s door”. Whether Mary has a point that Carla is being loud or not, she had a lot of choices she could make and she chose one that could have really hurt Carla and instead did property damage to not only the dorm’s carpet, but to Carla’s skates.
The problem I have with this argument is that the tone of the comic often falls into goofy, slapstick gags. So arguing “Carla could’ve gotten hurt and what about the property damage” just feels disingenuous especially when Carla can build a pie tossing machine and when the argument that could hurt someone comes up suddenly it’s not that serious. So either we’re having fun in wacky hijinx land or we’re not and they’re really hurting each other. The debate always becomes self serving toward whichever character you like.
I personally think that moment was meant to be fun gags and would’ve preferred that Tom and Jerry dynamic had stayed, but it didn’t and I do think it’s a flaw that we jumped from a fun moment to pure toxicity in the comic and the conversation.
I’m honestly going by the events as shone in the comic and what we’re shown when Carla reappears is ger being upset her skates were ruined. I think that’s meant to be the indicator that what has occurred is no longer a gag, before Mary even starts being transphobic.
However you are right that the comic clearly picks and chooses when something is meant to be slapstick or not. For recent examples we have Billifer literally kicking Walky out of his loft bed and the repeated gag of either Walky or Billifer being chucked out of rooms. I understand your point completely, just wanna make it clear I’m not trying to make the debate self serving towards a preferred character, I’m going by the comic which is yes, a bit flawed in its portrayal.
I think one of the things we’re seeing in that whole sequence is that it was all Mary being transphobic and we’re supposed to recontextualize the early slapstick part when that’s revealed.
@Clif I mean, yeah? I don’t come here to be bored either? However, I think Sirksome has a point that there’s something of a tone shift and that is difficult to juggle. Especially when something set up to be goofy such as a pratfall is suddenly meant to be taken seriously and especially when 9 times out of 10 this comic has slapstick. That 1 time out of 10 where the slapstick is no longer funny is always going to raise eyebrows because the audience has been trained that something like Carla faceplanting is meant to be a joke only for it to be meant as a showcase that Mary is in the wrong. It’s not about whether something is boring or not, it’s whether a tone shift like that is accepted by the reader.
Sorry. It really genuinely says more about you than it says about Willis, that you think Mary’s transphobia reveal was an orchestrated attempt to make you, personally, feel bad for having sided with her.
“And to me that was pretty much Willis going, “Oh you think Mary might have a point that Carla was being really dickish constantly roller skating up and down the hallway, well you’ve just sided with a transphobe!””
I mean if this isn’t what Cameron meant, they shouldn’t have said it.
So there’s this concept in English called a Syndecdoche. When a part is used to represent a whole. “You” in this context, does not always simply mean “you” the solitary 2nd person pronoun but “you” in a general sense. The royal “You” if you want. When they say “you” here they are not implying that willis personally singled out them. They meant “you” to imply a group. Your wording kinda implies you’re under the impression Cameron thinks they’re being specifically targeted but I’m pretty sure they more so meant “The audience that so far has enjoyed Mary”
That said I don’t even necessarily agree. I think Mary was always sorta being propped up to be the worst and Willis’ buffer makes it so that I doubt Mary was changed in any meaningful way from her trajectory. That said I can also commiserate with liking a character only to have them more or less spoiled by a story arc where now you can no longer admit to enjoying that character without people thinking you endorse their beliefs or actions. I would’ve definitely liked if Mary got to do more than show up and be the worst.
But within that context I don’t find it TOO absurd that Mary doubling down on being awful could’ve been willis wanting to solidify how we as an audience are meant to feel about her. In the same way I feel like Linda is more blatantly racist in subsequent appearances.
1. Yeah, that’s what my wording implies. It wasn’t unintentional, though.
I don’t think Cameron literally believes they’re the sole target of the malicious Willis they’re imagining, but I do think they think that Willis is maliciously targeting everyone in this comment section who has any complaints about the current storyline, and I think they’ve appointed themselves spokesperson for that entire group and are actively trying to further rile people up by convincing us that Willis is making fun of us, when in fact Willis is mostly not even talking about us at all.
I am attempting to drive home the latter point using hyperbole, but it’s honestly only a tiny bit more ridiculous of anyone to think Buckets of Blood was specifically about Cameron than it is to think that every single snarky skeet, alt text, or poll option is making fun of, like, EASILY half of the commenters here.
The latter argument is just so obviously absurd to me that I don’t know how to address it, other than saying “You’re not that special? None of us are that special? We do not live rent-free in Willis’s head? He doesn’t know who we are!”
2. I don’t think you and Cameron are making the same argument, though. I think you are making the argument you’re describing, but that Cameron has been making a different, less sympathetic argument.
3. For sure, sometimes characters get noticeably more blatant over time — sometimes just because they have more screen time, sometimes as a direct reaction to us… but I think there’s a difference between “Willis wants to make people feel stupid for liking Mary” and “Willis wants to make sure Mary’s bigotry is actually as clear as they always intended it to be”.
Like, they’ve talked openly about how the Walkertons being racist was never actually supposed to be in question, and how some readers picked up immediately on the early hints — but other readers didn’t, and then when it came up in-universe, there were arguments.
As a writer, that situation is a bit of a communication failure. You tried to convey something unambiguously, and a lot of people are arguing it’s ambiguous, and some of the people arguing it’s ambiguous are being really shitty about it.
Trying to correct for that is just… not the same thing as deliberately setting out to write a story where people who dared to like Mary look like assholes.
I think it might be wise to remember that, actually, none of us knows what goes on in Willis’ mind . But we do know what goes on in our own. And, as the ones writing the comments, no, it is entirely on us what we write. Relaaaax, don’t take jokes so seriously. If you don’t like 2-answer polls, don’t play. If you don’t like the game, don’t play. If you don’t like watching the game, don’t read the comments or the polls.
And… if you don’t like a comic that updates daily and can be read entirely for free, don’t read it.
What each of us does is entirely our own responsibility, it’s not Willis’ fault!
I do remember being very upset at the Carla and Mary story from back then. I was enjoying the small escalations in the prank war between them and thought it was leading to them forging a kind of mutual respect as the one-upped each other. Instead it just ended in transphobia and that was really the moment Mary changed as a character to me, from someone mildly annoying but maybe she just needed development to an actively, intentionally horrible person we should hate. I felt a little cheated for getting invested in her.
(What she’s calling “evil” is Dorothy pointing out that the sermon was offensive because it assumed Christians are better at reading Jewish scripture than Jewish people are, and then admitted to not being a Christian when Mary got confrontational about that.)
Nothing about Mary’s writing has ever really suggested that she was supposed to be sympathetic or that she just needed some development, because crucially, unlike Joyce, Mary has always, consistently, responded to new information like she did in that first link: by saying “Seriously? That’s stupid.” Or how she did in the second link, by calling it “evil”.
She is not willing to change, so she’s not gonna, until that itself changes.
I mean we can go back and do this for everyone. Early Joe and Ruth were especially bad. There’s a difference though between them and Mary in that Mary got worse over time. Other characters get to be developed while Mary becomes a flanderized version of herself with no nuance. But I’m over it at this point. I’ve had discussions about Mary’s characterization before. I only even brought it up because I remember being really invested in what was happening during that story. I thought it was the start of a Mary redemption arc. Lol. I was so wrong.
I want to respect your right to disengage, so you certainly don’t have to respond to this, but I don’t think Early Mary and Early Ruth looked anything alike, and I think a key difference with Joe is that he always had Danny beside him, rolling his eyes. That showed that even the earliest of Early Joe still hung out with someone who regularly told him he was wrong about stuff, and that in itself signals a more open mind than Mary, who has no friends on campus and has pushed people away for being Too Different.
I don’t think a Mary Redemption Arc is impossible, but it was never going to start with humanizing slapstick.
Just like Ruth and Joe’s redemption arcs didn’t start with humanizing slapstick.
@Li You kind of bring up exactly what I’m talking about to an extent. Joe had Danny to bounce off of that kind of tempered some of his obnoxious and problematic traits. Ruth had an entire romance that kinda serves as a redemption arc in retrospect if you believe Ruth was a villain early on. I might like that interpretation actually. Mary never really got those moments. I thought pairing her with Carla could do that, and even later there was something going on with Mary and Malaya and drawing I was getting invested in, but in both cases the opposite happened and it was either dropped or just doubled down on how awful Mary is or both.
Oh I really really really do not think Ruth’s romance was her redemption arc.
I think it wasn’t when she tried to kiss Billie that we first clued in that there was more going on with her, but when we heard that one-sided conversation with her and “Sir”.
And with Mary, we would absolutely get a moment like that before Willis tried to sell us on the idea that her antagonism with Carla was romantic, rather than having that idea brought up to specifically have Carla dismiss in disgust.
To be clear I’m not angling for some romance between Mary and Carla I just think having someone to interact with in a more positive way is the start to actual character development. That’s also why I really like when Mary and Becky interact. Perhaps “redemption” isn’t the right word but I do think ultimately Ruth’s relationship with Billie is what lead to Ruth developing beyond the horrible bully she was at the start of the comic. Those interaction are what motivated change in the same way Joe just interacting with Joyce before they were even dating was motivating change in him. I also think that’s why they were such popular couples. We got to see the their effects on each other in real time.
And if Mary is ever going to get a redemption arc, it will likewise start with something that hints there’s something under her self-righteous hatred of other people, not with a cute prank war with Carla.
Okay I think maybe I understand the point you’re making and we might be making two different points entirely. Cause to me it the strips you linked don’t contradict my point. My point is that Ruth was only motivated to change as a person not from literally kissing Billie but from all her interactions with Billie. The strips you linked reveal more insight into why Ruth acts the way she does but don’t imply that lead to any change within herself. That mostly came from Billie and even these strips show Billie was involved in this reveal by seeing it from her perspective.
But I also understand your point that you don’t really get moments like this in a cartoonish prank war side story. My desire was for Mary to actually have interactions with characters that weren’t so purely negative so that her character actually has a chance to develop.
But you also made a statement above that certain characters like the Walkerton parents were never meant to be sympathetic and were always meant to be overtly terrible or blatant like their racism. That’s likely what happened with Mary. She’s not a character we’re supposed to like so we’ll never get moments of insight into her actions or interactions where she can develop beyond her role. We almost had stuff like Malaya and the drawing classes but that never manifested and I’m not sure what the point of them was now years later.
Re: the last paragraph — I’d argue that it’s not necessarily that the Walkertons and Mary were never meant to be sympathetic, so much as that they were always meant to be prejudiced in the exact ways that eventually became so obvious, for a lot of readers, completely understandably, the prejudice becoming more obvious also made the characters impossible to sympathize with ever again.
(It’s easier to still find a prejudiced character sympathetic if that prejudice doesn’t impact you, but it’s not necessarily that simple. Some bi readers are going to find Jennifer’s internalized biphobia really relatable, for example. If you have bittersweet memories of someone like Mary that you used to be close with before you came out — there are a LOT of ways that might make you feel, and some of them are going to result in wanting to see more Mary, while others are going to result in wanting to see Mary catapulted into the sun.)
So: I don’t know, honestly, that I agree we’re never going to get a Mary redemption arc. I just think it would be hard for her to bond with other characters like Carla without something big happening first. :|a
Carla does make sense. She’s the classic example of pretending to be a narcissist so she can hide her own insecurities, fear and trauma and perhaps keep future potential bullies at bay.
My main takeaway from yesterday’s storyline is that everyone in this strip is absurdly over-invested in the front page photo of a *student newspaper* that doesn’t even exist anymore IRL. No one reads the school newspaper, who cares what’s on the front page.
Like seriously, they get mad about this picture, but if Joyce could have so easily hid it from her Dad by stealing all the physical papers then how big a deal was it? It didn’t even go viral!
I looked it up, and the Indiana Student newspaper has a circulation of ~9,000 in a school of ~110,000. So it’s bigger than like a high school student newspaper but the overwhelming majority of students don’t read it.
The only reason it matters at all is because DoA takes place in a weird liminal space where it’s simultaneously the modern day and the mid-90s when Willis was in college, so no one was streaming the protests.
Which Nintendo does Walky want to play with Amber? Is it a Switch or SNES or a Gamecube? Well thanks to Schrodinger’s time period it can be any of them or none of them at the same time. Brought to you by the same quality storytelling that gave us Bulmeria, aka not-Israel.
It doesn’t matter which Nintendo is being played at any given time. Nobody should care what Nintendo-brand video game console is in the cartoon character’s hands.
The world of Dumbing of Age isn’t exactly identical to ours. The real life Indiana Daily Student only publishes on Thursdays, whereas the one in the comic has been established to publish every day of the week (except possibly Saturday). The ability to sustain daily publication indicates significantly greater circulation than the real life IDS. This in turn means that your argument can be reversed. Instead of saying that the characters are overreacting because the newspaper is irrelevant, we could instead conclude that the character’s reactions indicate the newspaper is influential.
Sorry but for me “everyone is arguing who the morally correct person is in this piece of fiction because they’re both flawed and too much themselves” makes Willis a fantastic writer, not the opposite.
Police showed up to brutalize students. The protestors put their bodies and lives on the line. It’s reasonable to be invested in that coverage- it’s the ONLY way people will know the protest happened, and now the story isn’t ‘police force harms peaceful protestors’ like they kinda need it to be.
Also arguably, “No one should care about Teen Vogue,” yet Teen Vogue was the one place that wasn’t totally captured by capitalist and zionist interests and would just print reality as it exists and not frame it in some New York Times esque “some people say, we asked right wing ghouls to weigh in on it” both sidesism.
Daisy wasn’t wrong to humanize the protest but she pretty clearly led with her hormones.
There wasn’t any coverage on actually real news outlets? The most this protest got was a paper that apparently in real life was read by less than 10% of the student body and no longer exists? I’m pretty sure I remember seeing actual news coverage of the real Indiana University protest, the one in the comic must have been really ineffective.
It does not matter one bit if 5 people read that paper. The decision reflects the values of the editorial staff. It reflects the standards being taught to the journalism students. And I don’t care if it were as trivial as my neighbor handing out leaflets at the condo meeting, I’d be upset that my community had done those of us at the protest the disrespect of preferring to run the spiciest photo of the blandest couple. I don’t care that no historian will ever write about that day. She’s right to be mad.
I disagree. I feel that any piece of media that goes beyond ‘Bad guys Bad, Good guys good’ and tries to put even the slightest bit of nuance in, will have times when the discourse gets crazy, crazy heated.
And that is a lot less bad when it’s about something like the fate of Fodlan, but when it’s about some very Real Things, said discourse can become harmful to people.
For me the biggest failure was taking a character(Raidah) who is consistently presented in any strip where it’s just her and her friends as so terrible she’s basically a cartoon character as the one to call Joyce out
Looking at her whole history, it seems odd to decide “actually now this character is going to have depths bc I feel really guilty for my fuckups as a writer” and expecting that to disappear for the sake of the story
I wasn’t spending much energy focused on the failures of the protest storyline but the last two strips really made it all so much more apparent
(I haven’t actually commented in a while though so I wasn’t adding to the pile yesterday)
It also feels like the entirely wrong way to approach adding depth to your big major Muslim character if that’s the goal
Why aren’t we actually hanging out with Raidah away from the main cast where she isn’t a cartoon villain, getting her perspective with respect to why she is the way she is
Also having that major Muslim character weaponise homophobia is a choice
This isn’t the first time the comic has used Raidah to drop some unpleasant truths, she was also the one to call out the unpleasant implications of Dorothy’s presidential ambitions. I think she works very well in that roll actually, “Worst person you know made a great point” is a meme because it has resonance.
They are not actively hostile because of them being publicly gay. They are bothered by the fact that the story focused on them. It did not focus on what is being protested. It did not focus on how the police and the university reacted to the protest. It focused on them in the front page. Something some people feel strongly about has been undercut by the local press.
Conversely, it’s not like Joyce intended to be the focal point. She had no intention of being at the protests to begin with. Of course Joyce isn’t pressed about stealing the moment (which again, is Daisy’s call, not hers). Of course she thinks it is a big thing that she is going so strongly against the dogma she was raised under. It is the most important thing to have ever happened in her life.
Life is a collection of individuals undergoing their own life experiences simultaneously. Things that some find the most important thing in the world are background noise in the lives of others going through a completely different set of experiences. This is exploring that. Joyce will grow from this. Others will too.
I tried to reply, but accidentally hit “Report Comment” on this one, because it was so awesome and my damaged spine does that thing where it moves my hands on its own sometimes.
I am ashamed.
What “whole thing”? Carla’s parents are rich, but they’re not going to be able to order Bulmeria to stop committing genocide. They’re not even going to be able to order the US to stop exporting arms to Bulmeria. Or to have the real arms manufacturers they subcontract to stop selling to Bulmeria. The most they could possibly do is have Ruttech stop doing such work with arms companies – and probably even then only new contracts going forward, rather than getting sued into the ground for suddenly breaking existing contracts.
And in that best case, which is still unlikely, it’s good for Carla’s conscience and her relationship with her parents, but it doesn’t do anything for the victims in Bulmeria or even the next genocide.
So, now I’m wondering if they’re characters we’ve seen. Some nameless Shortpacked characters being retrofitted into family members like Ruth’s grandpa.
That’d be super weird because it would suggest that there may have actually been a non-Ultra-Car Walkyverse Carla this whole time, which is just a bizarre concept.
Although Carla meeting Ultra Car does sound like an idea for a fun storyline-that-never-was.
Fair, I was mostly thinking of last names, but I think Clint is Ruth’s maternal grandfather anyway so he wouldn’t be named Lessick (or Lesse, in the Walkyverse). There’s no one named Rutten but they don’t need to be.
Cattleprod is still right that an extremely minor Shortpacked character was retrofitted to be Ruth’s grandpa here, the “Clint” in that comic has nothing to do with Ruth.
Technically, we don’t know that either way. Maybe the grandfather of Amber’s husband’s former coworker’s former stalkee’s wife’s dead girlfriend just happened to wander into the store. Weirder coincidences have happened.
I guess, but my point was that Shortpacked!Clint was supposed to be a reasonably sympathetic one-off character. He was not supposed to “be” anything more than that, but I think his character design and name must have struck a chord with Willis.
then look forward to hearing salty rants from people who think biting Willis’ head off is a personality XD
for reals tho I miss the days of message boards and online forums being the primary modus operandi, nowadays is social media and walled gardens in this very healthy internet ecosystem :/
I wonder if this is where we’re going to get our Democrat criticism on the fact that both sides of the political divide were passionately pro-Isra…North Bulmeria.
And Carla’s parents are radically progressive everywhere…but there.
Considering all the real life tech oligarchs mostly abandoning rainbow capitalism and slouching towards fascism, I wouldn’t be surprised if Willis reflects this in comic.
Maybe with her parents wearing Red hats, union busting or whatever.
Considering the amount of money they’ve been said to put into trans rights, and that they donated heavily to Robin’s Democratic opponent just a few months ago in-universe, I don’t think it would be believable to go in that direction. Besides, it makes for a better story if they’re mostly good people with a blind spot than if they’re just mustache-twirling villains.
maga is unlikely but quiet union busting just makes sense. Providing weapons for a genocide (and y’know, all the other evil stuff that goes into becoming a tech billionaire) is a bit more than just a blindspot. I’m guessing they’re very nice people interpersonally, good parents, probably espouse themselves as socially liberal but fiscally conservative. They probably have a charitable foundation to feed the homeless or something, but wont throw their weight behind any policies that’ll actually prevent those people from reaching that kind of poverty. Because that’d probably mean higher taxes for them. And, I mean you just don’t become a tech billionaire if you actually care about people outside your immediate circle that much. Like you physically can’t, that is so much money and the tech industry especially is infamous for the amount of exploitation that goes on at different levels.
So basically I think they’re probably sweet people but not morally sound. Not mustache twirling but I just don’t think they care much about any potential harm to others because it’s “over there”. Far enough to disassociate, to people they don’t know or care about. Probably brush it off as just business.
But hey, that’s just a guess. This is fiction after all, grounded but fiction. Maybe these tech billionaires really are ignorant to the harm they cause and will stop once their daughter points it out to them. That’ll really test my suspension of disbelief tho
The other question is how much of their business is the arms industry.
This is kind of a new, if not particularly surprising twist, since we’ve mostly seen them being tied to consumer products.
Did something actually happen or did Willis just end the comments before they could get started? Because I checked the new update like ten minutes after it went up and they were already closed.
Is that a lot? I did comment, when I don’t usually, but that was fresh after it was posted and about gay Indiana teachers, so I’m guessing I missed the bad stuff. Unless maybe the bad stuff was in fact about the gay Indiana teachers? But I’m guessing racism. It’s so frequently racism.
I don’t think it’s uncommon if you know the signs it’s even pretty easy to see coming. Usually it’s an issue where a character is overtly mean to another, usually it’s a woman being criticized and a lot of times it’s for saying something mean to Joyce. Roz used to be the punching bag and that’s how we got the bongo filter. I forget which moment lead to comment flagging. I also remember the grea Walkerton racism debate. That’s ancient lore now. This comic also has uniquely amazing engagement. I read a ton of webcomics and for the ones that even allow comments getting 20 or so is a busy day.
One thing I did notice was a lot of “bongo” comments on Wednesday.
Which I found interesting as a parallel to the “It’s not really homophobia to use homophobic attacks if you’re mad at them for some other reason” argument that was going around.
Carla becoming a combination of absolute chaos gremlin and Tony Stark would be amazing. she and Amazi-Girl could start the Indiana branch of the Avengers.
I’m not sure it’s been directly stated but she seems to be at least interested in engineering. Drawing or modeling prototype designs could be something she does and she definitely has the money to afford a cintiq even just for a hobby.
I can’t believe carla is a 4D printed person. Of course her parents are AIs. That’s perfectly explain whatever nonsense is behind them endorsing whatever is going on.
I didn’t make it by until, like, 3:00 AM yesterday. Were the comments pre-emptively closed from the get-go, or did something hit the fan and cause them to be closed?
At any rate, I had already made my Saving Throw vs. Comment last night, only to discover that it was moot
1. Joyce supporters
2. Radiah supporters
3. People who believe Raidah is incapable of sincerely caring about Bulmeria
4. People who believe Willis doesn’t actually plan to have Joyce learn a lesson (ie. the story arc) and is wrong.
5. People who really don’t like the Bulmeria protest fallout and want to get back to queer shenanigans.
6. People who want to put aside the queer shenanigans and focus more on Bulmeria.
They’re usually better but Willis created a perfect storm where one side sees only homophobia and the other side sees only racism despite that this is, you know, a fictional comic strip about young people.
Well the racism is more about the commenters who, to quote Willis themself, were “Mysteriously Extra Aggro For Reasons I Can’t Imagine Anyone Can Imagine, I Bet/Hope/Pray There Are Other Reasons That Explain It, Phew.” like one particular comment that said raidah should die in a fire. That combined with the touchy subject matter was, again paraphrasing from Willis, not good for the well-being of many readers.
If the patreonistas are coughing up money to live in tommorow, I expect that they might be, on the average, more invested in the strip and therefor less chill about it’s topics.
Not that I choose to consider myself a complete freeloader. The new book, DOA 14, showed up in our PO box, so I went to collect it. Back out in the car I ripped open the packaging and checked out the magnet and the bookmark and had my eye caught by a page, and yeah that was funny, and I like Willis’s new comments between things, and hey, I had forgotten this part, oh and Dorothy’s finger movements when they were drunk are kind of interesting in retrospect, and I’ve always enjoyed this part, AND WHAT THE HECK, it’s almost an hour later and I’ve been siting out front here with the car running all this time.
I dont want to talk about yesterdays page too much but i will say my opinion involved being upset at both raidah and joyce while still cheering for the fact joyce finally got some emotional backlash from all of this….even if it was related to homophobia and not the fact she’s a cheating bongo
Really? It seemed pretty anonydyne.
Clueless yet proud.
She DOES deserve a medal for breaking away from a religious cult, that literally kidnapped her and her friends.
( Clueless because Amber Almost died for her again. But Ambers medal is Walky. )
I really don’t think it’s very controversial. In real life there were plenty Queers for Palestine. It just seems very anonydyne.
Newspapers and media barely covered the protests in Real life. ( Which made them easier to suppress)
Yes but in the context of this comic and prior reactions to things Joyce has said in this arc.
I truly believe yesterdays page would have led to arguments so extreme it would’ve surpassed the kiss to be the most commented on page from both people defending/hating both Joyce and Raidah
But imho from the readers viewpoints, to fault Joyce is ridiculous.
We see what Raidah doesnt
We know she never intended to protest, she was unexpectedly caught in the crossfire, and she was intending to stay with Dorothy ( if anything it was Dorothy who put people in danger) .
( Neither one should have been there but that’s the only way Willis was covering it )
I mean cool, she basically said her white ass kissing her white gf is more important than an ethnic cleansing. She doesn’t know she said that and I don’t think she meant it like that but she did say that. Sure she didn’t mean to be on the front page, but saying “I was heroically gay, nothing is more important than that” with the context of said “heroic” gayness was at a protest against a genocide. Girl. Think about the words that come out of your mouth. Just a tiny ounce of self awareness, please. She wasn’t heroically gay, she was gay with bad timing
I think the thing Joyce said that is the most ‘wrong’ is the fact that she said ‘nothing is more important than her being heroically gay’. Which is a self-centred thing to say when the whole thing happened in a protest against the University supporting a genocide.
Did you forget the /s tag here? I mean, I *guess* you could sorta say that “nothing is more important than me getting with Dorothy” “yes, you have correctly identified which of your opinions I hate you for the most (today, at least)” counts as “both characters essentially agree[ing]”, but…
Ugh. I accidentally reported you and I’m sorry. Tablet snafu
Sorry lee
/ s indicates irony
But I’m saying it’s literally true in that they agreed on the words ( if not the implications l
Raidah literally saying ‘yes that’s what’.
It amounts to agree to disagree. ( Agree Raidah should have used air quotes or an / s tag.
But I can’t add it for her )
Maybe I need to sign up for patreon why people were so bent out of shape.
It seemed like Joyce spoke her truth and the conflict fizzled out.
Maybe I’m underestimating readers homophobic reaction. I think around 70 percent of the characters are lgbtq by now. I don’t get why anyone homophobic would even still be reading. They are the villains of the comic.
I’m not looking forward to the reactions if Willis leans hard into a Queers against Bulmeria storyline.
Let ppl be mad I guess. It’s still better than what’s happening IRL every day for a year.
My expectations for Joyce’s grasp of the political situation were/are subterranean, but if Carla of all people comes out of this storyline with more awareness than her OH FUCKING BOY THE FUTURE COMMENTS SECTION
Dark horse Dorothy won the Kentucky Derby,
Favorite Robin won the Preakness Stakes,
and the Dina snuck the Belmont Stakes.
Notably, neither Dorothy nor Robin were in the top 6 in the race(s) after their wins. Only the Belmont stakes had any stallions, including the oldest racehorse in history.
Lol I would’ve closed the comments for THIS conversation, not Raidah being right while also continuing to the be the worst person you know, but what do I know.
Def think given the mismanagement and drama the comments section should have stayed in lockdown a lil longer. Tbh with the shoehorned in strips, I totally forgot the relevance of the cut to Carla until I read the comments… not well paced, and it’s gonna be another doozy of arguments, I can tell already. Also def a tough arc for me because again, queer and Palestinian \m/ see you on the flipside of this folks….
I think the lesson people need to learn from the comments getting disabled is not that they should all figure out the right things to be angry and hateful about, but to stop being angry and hateful in the first place. Let the characters be complex without attacking their identities, let the author write out a story without being attacked and shamed before they can even progress it, and stop encouraging one another to leave hateful comments in the first place.
We dont need to find a cause to get more pissed about, this comic does not need to continue to be a culture war.
I saw someone on Bluesky suggest having them open for one day a week for people to discuss the entire weeks comics and while I dont think thats a perfect solution I think it might be better than the current state of affairs (though I’d maybe do twice a week instead of once a week)
Alternative option: Enlist some trusted people (since Willis certainly doesn’t have the time) to moderate the comments and train the community to behave the way he wants. That’s the only way I’ve ever seen any creators build an audience they’re happy to have, but it can be done.
Well, ultimately it depends on how much you’re willing to cull your audience. If you quickly get rid of unwelcome people with aggressive, proactive moderation, over time you could hope to encourage more people you want to participate, to participate, and you end up needing very little moderation work. I’ve seen this happen. Communities where mods are happy to work for decades cause they’re welcomed and respected; and that also support the creators generously enough to offset their smaller numbers compared to those creators who just want the biggest audience they can get.
I love this comic but also I spend 30 seconds a day reading it and honestly I don’t think about it again until it shows up in my RSS feed. This comic is not worth spending hours a day being mad at people in comments about what a stranger thinks about one man’s plot decisions
I think people who are Very Online really don’t realise how much most people aren’t online at all. Sure, maybe they’re spending too much time looking at TikTok or insta but they’re not *posting* about stuff
considering joe and rachel are students here, i wonder what carla’s parents would look like. unless they look like an uncanny middle aged ver of them and no one notices lol
I mentioned this some months back, but I have a feeling that Carla’s parents smile and make sympathetic noises, but ultimately go “Sweetie, this money is how we’ve been able to protect you. Selling weapons to Bulmeria is what keeps you safe.” And then Carla has a very difficult decision to make.
From the few hints we’ve gotten, I don’t think they’re selling weapons to Bulmeria directly. It’s certainly not their only or probably even main source of revenue – they make phones, for example. And non-military drones.
What was said earlier was that some missiles use some Ruttech circuitry, which likely makes them a subcontractor to one of the big arms companies. They could get out of that business, though probably not too quickly, but that’s not going to have a huge effect on saving lives in Bulmeria.
Yeah, that’s something a lot of people don’t get, both in the strip and in reality. Sure, as a subcontractor you can find a way out of your contract – and while that might be good for your soul, it won’t change the end effect. Somebody else will provide the same items and/or services you were. If Ruttech doesn’t manufacture the circuit boards, Intel will, and people will still die.
Is it time for Carla to have an extremely awkward conversation with her billionaire parents about the weapons stuff their company makes and who their products go to? Is it time for her to learn that just because her wealthy parents were good to her when she was growing up, that doesn’t mean that they’re good people in general?
Love the symmetry. That down to her lap view, sandwiched and overlapped by screen inactive and screen active. And that flanked by a kind of – Oh God, gonna do this necessary bloody thing, and Hi, Hey.
Again, not a lot of words, but a lot ‘said’.
Got finished with episodes 5 and 6 of Dispatch and read up to the end of the second third of the 2006 Blue Beetle comic, anyone else do anything fun while we were free of this place?
Hey fun fact seeing this page on Patreon yesterday kept me from (temporarily) dropping the comic
Joyce’s choices caucasity re: her choice of words in her last panel were so deeply triggering (particularly with the whole survivors guilt thing the western side of my country has going on rn, myself included) that i was gonna have to take my first break in twelve years of reading if she didn’t get off my screen expeditiously. First time I’ve ever felt so personally upset by a doa character
Still might, if something else similar happens but for now this is good. I like Carla. I like this subplot. More of this plz
(This is not an invitation to come discuss yesterdays comic like a roundabout comment section, if you intend to do that kindly fuck off. I just wanted to express some feelings about something pretty major for me personally)
This is not to start a discussion about the previous strip and obviously as a white person I did not have the direct personal reaction you must have had to what Joyce said – and I sympathize with you for that, I get how rough that must have been – but I can to a certain extent commisserate with regard to how that strip really drove home for me that “damn, I just do not like anything about this character right now.”
She’ll realize she’s being awful and improve eventually, that’s basically the thesis statement of her character. But for the sake of my health I’d love to hit fast forward on her current character arc
In the case of Joyce, she’s simply not invested in the larger political worldscape the way her sister is. She’s almost been murdered multiple times on LGBTA issues that Bulmeria is just sort of an abstract. She doesn’t understand what Raidah is going on about and tried to apologize to Asma because she thinks of her as representative of all the protestors like it was a shindig she ruined.
Carla and she are both getting lessons in the larger world now outside of the campus and their personal journey’s.
Which is a lot to put on people.
(It also is complicated by the fact Raidah hates Joyce personally for reasons unrelated and Carla’s own struggles where her parents are fantastic allies)
So I see Carla and Joyce’s stories paralleling each other.
Joyce very pointedly did not want to apologize to Asma and went out of her way to emphasize that she was not apologizing to her for kissing Dorothy, unprompted.
OF course Bulmeria is abstract, it’s literally an abstraction of real life Israel. How can Joyce have an opinion on something when we don’t even really know the specifics?
I mean how people like Asma feel about the subject is very contingent on what group to being targeted by the genocide. It’d be really strange if it were like real life and Muslim people were being targeted and no one has brought that up in the many conversation about the genocide? Especially when the Muslim women are present? Bonus points if Bulmeria is suposed to be a “””Jewis State””” (big air quotes so you don’t think I agree with Israel) and Dorothy doesn’t seem to have anything to say on the matter being Jewish herself.
But Asma knows these things. She can have those opinions.
The OP’s point was that the situation is kind of abstract to Joyce who isn’t paying attention to foreign conflicts, but to whom domestic LGBTA issues are very personal, not that we haven’t been told the details, so no one in the comic can treat it as anything but an abstraction.
For what it’s worth, that doesn’t look like the expression I’d expect someone who wants to ask their parents a very awkward question about their complicity in genocide to have.
Hard agree! Too many people reach a judgement on others before asking the question. Carla knows the value of her parents, who not only supported her transition but changed society to let her live as she should. Raising a concern is the way to begin change.
That her parents are immediately available to her is a good sign. They’re not off dropping bombs personally or in different volcano lairs. They dropped what they were doing and answered when she called.
Unless this will be an AI that they programmed to respond. Then we’ll be headed for a Hannelore situation.
I’m a little surprised at the color palette of her bedding.
I would have thought she would go for Ultra-car (not necessarily a character-themed bed, like a little kid, but at least the same palette – red with black stripes to the left and right, white pillowcases)(although . . . why not an actual Ultra-car bed?)
I agree it might not be where you’d expect tech billionaires to be based, but I assume they own more than one home… maybe Indiana was a good middle ground between some of their major business locations.
Is Indiana a tax haven? I feel like there are other locations better known for being tax havens– that’s basically why we have Delaware (and also that living in Indiana wouldn’t mean that they had to have their business incorporated there).
Indiana is a good place for rich people to live if they don’t want to be taxed very much. It does not have a progressive tax scheme and instead imposes a 3% flat income tax, with individual counties imposing additional taxes. Flat taxes are regressive because the tax burden is lesser on richer people and greater on poorer people, so they’re most beneficial to the wealthy.
It’s actually not a huge surprise for a tech company to be in Indiana – Indianapolis is a growing regional tech hub and has a robust tech sector.
Also, a LOT of mid-sized tech and defense companies deliberately avoid the big tech hubs — my company actively tries to avoid hiring in the Bay Area and a couple other places because the salary expectations are so high. Especially if you are a mostly remote-work place you can get a lot more engineering talent for your dollar in Indiana vs. a major tech hub, unless you’re competing for the top 0.01% of workers in the hot field de jour.
I think it’s possible they have major company bases in multiple places, considering the range of products they seem to make. But anyway, I was focusing on where they/Carla lived, which doesn’t have to be the same as where their company is– though it could be. Just that Carla’s not “all the way in Indiana for school” when she’s just… from Indiana.
Autocorrect is ridiculous now.
“Oh, you probably meant this word that is only used occasionally and which you personally haven’t typed in months.”
No, I meant the very common word I actually typed.
“Mm, I’m not so sure. Also, you probably meant ‘glas’ here.”
That’s… that’s not even English…
“You’re welcome.”
The upside is that you can now blame so much on autocorrect, because it will mess up so wildly that a lot could be possible.
Maybe this will be a shocking reveal… where we find out her parents are both just computer avatars for advanced AIs. Then BOOM… crossover with Questionable Content, and both comics combine for a massive permanent entwined storyline.
Well this only ends poorly, so far our track record of the introduction of parents to the comic leading to anything good is…. not stellar
Dorothy’s parents were fine… I’m struggling to think of other positive examples though. I guess Amber’s mom was a bit of a mixed bag, can’t really blame the negative effect on Amber on her mom, that was just Amber being Amber.
But hey, it can’t be worse than Becky/Amber’s dads right? RIGHT?
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aaaaaaaaaaaand the comments are back (unfortunately) :/
and ooooh, goodie, looks like it’s time for that other shoe to drop
prepare for trouble, and make it double O3O
Why do you think the return of the comment board is ill fortune? Did you not miss us?
To protect the world from devastation
should have been closed for longer for a better *cool off* period
as much as I have fun here, Willis shouldn’t be too proud to just nuke comments in advance for lotta shit
in this political climate, the topic of these discussions is of some very real impact on peoples’ lives
they are in fact, NOT a game of BeyBlade
Hey, I’m just looking forward to seeing Walkyverse Joe and Rachael again.
Wait. Why would that happen?
Did they close as a response to specific comments or was it planned in advance to close for a specific strip that was judged to be too likely to be toxic discourse.
Willis posted this about it: https://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/799470320111239168/closed-comment-section-probably-a-safe-bet-for
Thank you, I was wondering about that also.
The scary part is that apparently the hater containment thread was reported away – Willis had to reinstate it manually.
Well, I must say these comments from Willis do not fill me with confidence.
That sort of upsets me. Not the locking part, as that can be healthy at times. I am upset that people get that worked up about fictional characters that merely explore real life dynamics between people. These characters are capable of some nuance in personality, just like people in general are. I appreciate the fact that many characters have character flaws as well as positive traits. I don’t want Mary to show any positive traits, mind you, but Raidah being something other than a pure heat sink isn’t a negative thing. Once you start interacting with other people, life can fail to match your idealized version. There’s nothing wrong in that
Yeah, I kind of enjoyed Raidah’s attempted reality check, and the rather crazy response from Joyce.
Like I said on BSKY the other day: Raidah was being cruel and unfair, but she wasn’t WRONG. And Joyce needed to hear that directly from somebody, because the only other person who tried was Sarah, and she cared too much about Joyce’s feelings to be hard on her.
Raidah didn’t give a crap about Joyce’s feelings. Raidah ALSO doesn’t give a crap about Joyce actually improving, she just wanted to be mean for the sake of being mean, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t benefit from what she said.
But she was also being homophobic, at least in the first strip, which probably fed into Joyce’s “heroically gay” thing yesterday.
Yeah, I honestly don’t know that I foresee GREAT discussion around “Carla’s Parents/Ruttech” given the whole circumstance.
Will it be a recent addition, or something that was there all along?
Just replying to compliment your gravitar (spelling?)!
I know asma went but did raidah even go to the protest?
Imagine how furious she’d be if all it took was one phone call from charlie to solve this bulmeria issue, at least as far as ruttech is concerned
yeah no, wishful thinking 9-9
I don’t think Raidah did, no. She was very judgmental of the protest’s effectiveness when she encountered Joyce and Dorothy. She seems to feel it’s entirely performative activism, so between that and the lack of tear gas/knowledge of the protest happenings until the IU issue was printed, I don’t think she was there.
I’m not sure I would assume that Raidah thinks the *entire* protest was performative activism. If she did think that, I don’t think she would have gotten so worked up at Daisy for reporting on the protest as two women kissing while other things also happened.
Also, looking back at the comic now, she specifically says “I’m not cynical about protests, I’m cynical about white Freshman.”
So I guess we definitely know that she thinks Joyce and Dorothy specifically were engaged in performative activism. But not necessarily everyone else who attended.
I agree with you that she almost certainly wasn’t there herself. But that could be for other reasons.
I saw they were gone yesterday by the time I got here. What did I miss? And feel free to completely ignore that if there’s any chance of something that can shut comments down kicking off again simply by talking about it.
They were pre-empted yesterday, which probably was wise.
Am I the only one disappointed that only your first responder and you know about Team Rocket?
I never realised I had accidentally used two versions of my nickname here
Wait… are you saying you’re not very adept at comment identities?
I was told there’d be doughnuts. It was me. I said it. And then went and got some from the local Pop ‘n Pop. And so there are doughnuts. Sorry I can’t deliver y’all.
Supremely disappointed the line villainously bisexual isn’t relevant today.
ugh PLEASE, they will wear the dunce hat when it is THEIR turn ):<
Villainous Bisexual sounds like either a conversion camp video, or a punk rock band name.
That sounds like an awesome band name, Villainously Bisexual could open for Kittie or maybe a re-formed Jack Off Jill! I’d pay for either of those shows!
The Ruttech logo looks a lot like the Team Rocket logo. And if anyone’s villainously bisexual, it’s Team Rocket!
so we’re gonna have this conversation now!
neat.
With any luck we might actually find out details about Bulmeria!
I have a $5 bet that Raidah is going to be revealed to be Bulmerian American and that the reason she wasn’t at the protest is the not unreasonable belief she’d be deported if she was there.
But her anger is 100% genuine.
Bulmeria: It’s Syria but if Westerners had paid attention to the civil war I guess???
I wouldn’t hate it if Bulmeria is Syria-Palestine-Ukraine rather than just Palestine.
Poster: Combining those makes it completely divorced from RL politics.
Yes.
Add a little Myanmar in there for good measure.
The mention of RL politics makes me wonder…have these kids lived through an allegory of the Obama, Trump, Biden and Trump Again presidencies in like six months? I would kind of love of the DoA world had four US presidents in half a year and none of the cast commented on it. That’s just normal in DoA world. America has had 200 presidents so far.
Plus Sudan, Yemen, and Congo.
The Myanmar conflict is a civil war, though – that makes it INCREDIBLY distinct from Ukraine or Palestine.
But Bulmeria appears to be some kind of civil war as well. At least the clues we’ve been given have the genocide being done by Bulmeria in Bulmeria.
Yes, but the conflict in Bulmeria is also a civil war (from what I remember it’s the government targeting it’s own citizens). Willis has very clearly mashed a bunch of different conflicts together in to one story.
Six months = ten years.
So for every year that passes in DoA, twenty pass for us.
Washington became the first President in 1789.
We have had 45 Presidents over 60 presidential terms, which gives us a ratio of 3:4 Presidents per term.
(2025-1789)*20/4*0.75
The Dumbing of Age America has had 885 Presidents. Maybe like 65 of which was in Joyce’s lifetime.
So yeah, Trump probably doesn’t get mentioned, because Presidents are just a blip. She probably doesn’t even know his name other than “that reality TV show guy.”
Congress, though… if Robin’s campaign is any indication, US senators have a 120-year term, at least according to our way of reckoning time.
And Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan, Crete, East Timor, Haiti, …
For future proofing, Venezuela, and any country that’s being prepped for US
destabilizationfreedom and democracy.Thing is – in Ukraine american bombs support opressed and attacked country. Syria status was… very unclear (because it was civil war). But Palestine is bombed by american bombs (dunno if still is, I’m treating my depression and I don’t follow news).
So you cannot protest both in favour of and against american weapon support.
Also, it’s much harder (once you realise that there are different cases) to judge american involvment in other wars. Yeah, Middle-East has no reason to love USA… unless you count Syria and Kurds. But Ukraine is putting up good fight because of american help. Not to mention Taiwan is in much better position just because USA says if something would happen they would react
Foreign policy is far more complex than just “America bad. Military bad.”
Even if America is bad and the military is bad. It’s still more complex.
Hey! That’s NUANCE! That shit’s illegal, get your conpulsory pithily-stated ideology back on! If I can’t sum up your political take in one swntence that’s BAD AND HARD TO UNDERSTAND why would you do this to me, specifically, in this vicious personal attack?!
Nuance in these comment boards would DESTROY REALITY.
Soggies would rule!
Even the seemingly black and white Ukrainian situation is more complex than that in its genesis.
While without any doubt russia started an illegal war of agression with its invasion?
The fundamental conflict was at least strongly provoked and egged on by US foreign policy investing heavily in “flipping” ukraine.
By supporting the maidan protests against a legally (and rather fairly) elected governement that tried to straddle pro-western groups and 1/3rd of its population being ethnic russians and russia being its most important neighbour.
Provoke a violent-prone dictator like Putin by pushing his weak neighbour into a “us or them, no middle ground”-conflict? Some responsibility is due.
At this point the choice is clear. Help the invaded against the agressor.
But I still hold to the belief that this war could have been avoided by not supporting and financing a violent popular coup against the governement that tried to keep doors open on both sides.
I mean that’s not really more complicated. Ukraine doesn’t want to be part of the Russian Empire anymore and absolutely is more prosperous on its own. They accepted the weapons from NATO because they knew Russia was going to force the issue (and obviously had). There was a large portion that was pro-Russian.
And then Russia invaded and all those people now hate Russia for the atrocities done to them.
Eh.
You are arguing from the current state of affairs and “our side” war narrative. Instead of looking at the developing geopolitical situation since the nineties.
Possibly reversing cause and effect in your train of thought.
From the russian narrative, NATO arming ukraine was the main reason for the influence struggle peaking in the invasion. Rather than the result of it.
While in the west we get served the fearmongering message of an agressive russia wanting to re-establish its empire?
The russian public view has been the danger an ever-enclosing, overwhelmingly powerful NATO flipping and arming all of its former vassals and buffer states one after the other.
Breaking all of its promises to not expand east, not to arm the new eastern members, not to station first-strike capable weapons in striking distance of moscow.
They explain their demand for ukraine not to fully orient west as a security interest – which was ignored.
Still not a justification for an invasion, of course.
But then putin IS a dictator with no qualms about using military violence to enforce his interests.
Which was well known in Washington when they sent Nunes to the Maidan with heaps of money, promises of support, and a regime-change plan for after Janukovich was toppled.
Its all moot at this point, in that you are correct.
After hundreds of thousands of dead, rump-ukaine will not accept a strong russian influence or even neutrality for generations. If they can avoid it, that is. Neither will russia give back the lands it has taken at a dire cost.
Again: I´m not arguing the war was justified or somebody else but putin started it.
I´m arguing it could have been prevented by smart geopolitics respecting russias long-standing, incessantly communicated security interests.
The problem is that “Russias long-standing, incessantly communicated security interests” are a matter of dominance and control of the nations around it. We see this from the old Russian empire through the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact to more modern actions in places like Chechnya and Georgia before Ukraine.
Yes, I was wrong to doubt Raidah’s motives for being angry at the girls, I admit it. She is however still going to have to die mad about it as long as she doesn’t want to tell people what she’s angry about.
Also yes, this conversation should be enlightening no matter what direction it takes.
Dear God, I forgot what started all this! XD
y’know, just from afar is all. I’m sure they are very busy with that whole supplying weapons stuff.
I’m interested to see if we get a super subdued Carla.
How’s my
Liddle brodudder
And now, a reading from… “Ulysses”.
Don’t go hiking with Joe Spivey.
What if I *like* poison ivy? Now, Leonard Skinner after dinner? He’s the one I avoid!
Has anyone seen Jeffrey Hardy?
Will Carla learn her parents aren’t as great as she thinks? Find out next time!
“My family has done some pretty awful things, but being a bad family was never one of them.” -Another Webcomic
This is something i’ve been looking forward to. The parental figures of this series usually fall into certain groups. We have classic bad guys (Blaine, Toedad), systemically deranged bad guys (Joyce’s mom, Walky and Sal’s mom, Ruth’s grandfather), the enabling victims of the badguys (Joyce’s dad, Walky and Sal’s dad), ‘Karen-types’ (Ethan’s mom), good people that don’t really stir the pot (Dorothy’s parents, Dina’s parents, Amber’s mom), and Joe’s Dad.
Usually these parents fall into these groups kinda retroactively, since their children were created in the strip first, and then presumedly Willis worked backwards to think what kind of parents these characters would have. So most of them fall into expected groups. Amber’s insecurity is something that’s been majorly influenced by her asshole father. Joyce’s religious dogma mixed with strong ideals are a melting pot that in part comes from her mother’s dogma and her father’s desire to do ‘what’s right’ (however you may define that). Dina and Dorothy, while not being free of personal problems, are shown to have parents that clearly care for them and have brought them up to be able to handle problems (even if that has resulted in Dorothy burning the candle at every conceivable angle).
In comparison, Carla’s parents are not only mostly an unknown to us, but a bit of a dichotomy in what we do know. They’re tech billionaires who were okay with their daughter being trans (seemingly, i know there was a patreon strip, but i never saw it). They are one half part of the problem plaguing society and one half progressive and accepting in their thinking towards their daughter.
I feel i honestly don’t know how this conversation is going to go. Are they going to be casually dismissive, telling Carla not to worry about their business stuff with big smiles on their faces, as they generate excuses that they’ve used to justify themselves? Are they going to rip the mask off and confirm that they just don’t care? Are they going to realise that if they’re daughter is coming to them on this, that maybe they’re doing something wrong? Some other thing i haven’t considered?
Looking forward to it.
I see two outcomes. Option 1 is Carla actually convinces them to divest and the is a sort of resolution to this protest background story. I think if Willis wants to keep the sort of status quo with Carla and her relationship to her parents that has to happen. Option 2 is they don’t divest and Carla has to reconcile with the fact her parents are not as great as she thinks and possibly change as a person.
I personally find it more interesting if they don’t divest. Perhaps they are even genuinely nice people with good excuses and justifications. But Carla changing slightly as a person, her actually having to confront and make a decision about the cost of her privilege is the more compelling story to me.
I would really like it if Carla’s parents turn out to be perfectly nice people who accept her concerns gracefully and address them in a manner that satisfies her. But unfortunately, that’s not the most narratively interesting option or the one that’s going to lead to character growth for Carla, so I suspect that’s not what’s going to happen.
Could be that they address her concerns in a way that satisfies her, but when she brings it up to Charlie, it’s immediately easy to see the problems behind their response, leading to Carla realizing her own viewpoint is quite privileged.
There’s also the more fundamental question of what a satisfactory response could or should be. Is it just drop any arms industry contracts whatsoever?
I wonder if any of their systems are being sent to Ukraine?
There’s a gonzo option that turns into basically the plot of Iron Man happening in the background, where Carla’s parents divest from military tech and abruptly Carla no longer has access to as much money or tech resources due to there being severe corporate infighting about it.
Power armor would give Carla even more ways to annoy her enemies. Stomping in the hallway might just go through the floor, though.
I’m actually kind of hoping for something like the moment from The Prince of Egypt when the Pharaoh Seti (Patrick Stewart), so wise and kind, tries to comfort his troubled son:
“Oh my son… they were only slaves.”
Oh, great, more parental problems.
Be so weird if it *is* Joe and Rachel
Josh and Rachelle.
Or genderswap them, Jo and Rafael.
They look suspiciously like an older Joe and Rachel and the room they’re standing in looks suspiciously like a Tardis. They sent their daughter back in time so their younger selves could look after her.
Spoilers.
Alternatively, it’s Joe and Rachel From Another World, who came to DoA after Soggies Ruled their home universe, and this finally ties DoA to the Shortpacked/it’s Walky!/Joyce and Walky/Roomies! multiverse as the comic takes a hard swing back into pure fantasy.
(this is a joke. Mostly.)
Joe and Rachel walk in and see Carla talking to their time-traveling alternate selves.
Walkyverse Joe and Rachel.
I don’t understand what this means. Why Joe and Rachel?
In the other universe, Carla is a robot (well, originally a sentient car, eventually rebuilt as a robot) who was created by Joe and Rachel.
I swear every time someone tells me stuff that happened in the other comics it sounds like they just made it up. I did know Carla was a robot I didn’t know Joe and Rachel were her parents. That seems so random, but I guess to a Shortpacked reader it’s actually weirder they’re not an adult couple now?
yeah the carla stuff was in shortpacked!
uh i also reccomend shortpacked for the people here who prefer comedy
or miss amber or ethan or mike or leslie or robin or galasso
theres like 10 years of comics about all these people
Though forewarning a lotta the humor is very “of its time”. Especially the earlier stuff.
Not that I personally mind a bit of edginess.
Also the r-slur. Friggin’ everywhere.
But there’s still some real gems in there, too.
TRUEEE
i got into it near the end and backread the early stuff all at once so i forgor…
in my mind the main characters is leslie
I don’t find it weird that Joe and Rachel aren’t together here. I never liked them as a couple to begin with, and they were out of focus most of the time they were together. And due to plot stuff that will definitely sound like I just made it up if I explain it, a lot of what we did see wasn’t actually them anyway.
I do find it very weird that Carla has parents who aren’t Joe and Rachel, though.
We didn’t make it up.
Willis made it up.
It was always burning since the world’s been turning
Ultra Car was one of Willis’s first ever characters from childhood like Danny, Joe, and Sal. When Ultra Car decided to have an anthropomorphic body and stop being a car she was a girl! That eventually became the DoA character Carla. (very abbreviated explanation)
I also feel slightly weird every time that Adult!Robin appears when she was one of the youngest people on the squad in ‘It’s Walky!’.
Wanna bet that we won’t get to *see* Carla’s parents?
What’s that old Sam & Fuzzy quote? “I’m just surprised every time a dramatic unmasking doesn’t reveal someone I already know.”
The corollary being, for prosopagnosics, dramatic unmasking reveals nothing at all. I was so puzzled in a Wolverine movie when his dead wife walked in. I mean, I knew it was a dramatically tense moment, but who was this woman, IDK! Clearly not his wife cos she’s dead, why would I even think of his dead wife???
Hollywood’s long tradition of insisting on a narrow set of aesthetic standards for its female actors just makes things more difficult. How are we supposed to know that this slender generically-attractive woman is or isn’t the same as that earlier slender generically-attractive woman?
Re ally good choice to close comments yesterday.
No containment thread today. Figure it’s gonna be a light comment section this time. Not much to comment on. Except that I’m jealous of Carla’s setup.
I concur, my only regret is that it wasn’t closed for longer hahaha XD
I think any strip with Raidah in it needs to have comments nuked as a precautionary measure.
the hater containment is actual canon every time Raidah is in a comic from now on.
Super meta lol
Yeah, I’m grateful that Willis maintains a comment section for us insufferable grumblers, but there’s some characters that I do not feel like the broader comments section can be trusted to be normal about and Raidah’s probably top of the list.
Low key agree. Moderating the comment section ust be Hella draining, especially when people get super intense. I’d rather the comments get closed of for a bit than Willis burn out over it. (I fs don’t have the gumption required)
Well we could always post what we were gonna say yesterday today!
Personally, while people should conduct themselves better, I feel Willis should acknowledge their own failures as an writer that lead to these sorts of thing. Their attempt to address the criticism of the protest storyline has really been mishandled. Part of why the reaction to Raidah is so extreme is that it feels quite disproportionate to what actually happened. Like we criticize the protest for using the Gaza protests as window dressing, but years down the line if someone reads it with no context of the event then they’re gonna be real confused as to why Asma and Raidah suddenly got so much screen time and had such big opinions about Joyce and Dorothy kissing in the school newspaper (not even an online news site, a physical paper). Like, the internal critique can’t be towards Daisy, the person whose action actually reflect Willis’, but she’s not a main character so the story has to contort itself to direct it towards Jorothy.
It’s all just becoming a bunch a mixed metaphors and then it resulted in a Muslim woman being mad at Joyce for being publicly gay, which is just a bad look and Raidah isn’t a character who has been establish as anything other than hugely two faced. Again, not saying they deserve everything they get, but at some point they should really just cut their losses and end this whole Bulmeria plot and make up the Muslim representation in a new storyline.
I think that’s why the Alice/Asma ship tease is a thing. Gives her something to do that’s not related to it.
That or it was a way for Willis to get ahead of the criticism by establishing Asma as gay and not homophobic, Raidah was not so lucky.
sums up my feelings on the issues with it too. with less jokes, but yeah. I think we could do with Willis should hold off on doin Joyce/Dorothy related stuff till they can untangle the whole mess of a plotline that is this genocide being related to Palestine/Ukraine/Syria/Whatever he wants to avoid specifically bringing up. If only to simmer people’s tempers down for a while.
That’s about where i’m at
I’m sure they have the best of intentions, but this just doesnt feel well handled.
Probably my biggest issue with Willis is their many times of attempting to stir shit in the comments in order to generate engagement. The classic example I always remember is from way back in the day where there’s an escalating series of conflicts between Mary and Carla, and while Mary is written to be nearly completely unlikeable Carla acts nearly as unlikable where you almost start to get on Mary’s side until she starts being transphobic. And to me that was pretty much Willis going, “Oh you think Mary might have a point that Carla was being really dickish constantly roller skating up and down the hallway, well you’ve just sided with a transphobe!”
This kind of stuff is found all throughout the comic, Sickos vs Paladins being the latest, and it just makes it hard to have a non-heated discussion on thing, especially when it’s clear Willis favors one position over the other.
And it is a great way to create engagement, but then you’ve primed your commenters to be combative and that’s what leads to something like two days ago when you 1000+ comments fighter over whether Raidah is homophobic or if the other side is being Islamophobic/colorist for saying that.
And unless the comments get closed for good (or at least for every strip that might be controversial) then this is gonna keep happening.
I think we can definitely say Willis is responsible for a lot of the confusion and tempers flaring up in their comment section as of late. A lot of the choices could’ve done with maybe some more perspectives taken into account. Especially from women of color. And maybe next time, try not to tie your biggest arcs with real life stuff, if you can’t handle it with the seriousness it needs.
It’s so silly to speculate about how much they must be deliberately riling people up for “engagement” after two comment sections got locked in a row.
Like. If that’s what they were after, they wouldn’t be doing that, but by all means continue with the tinfoil hatting that not so coincidentally offloads all the responsibility for our crappy behavior from us onto an imaginary mustache-twirling villain.
Don’t believe me if you want, but I’ve been reading this comic for a very long time and following Willis just as long. This is something they do, they love to take potshots and rile up the fanbase, just look at their Bluesky. For the most part I get it, they come from that generation of internet where needling and lightly antagonizing people was common curtesy. But them posting that pie graph with 1% “Remembering Joe exists” in the “Next 10 months of Dumbing of Age buffer” might have been funny if you didn’t take it too seriously, but did not make the comment section any more civil. Willis is the writer and they hold a large position of power to influence the tenor of the fan reaction, they aren’t all powerful and yes people should learn to conduct themselves better But at some point you have to reckon with what you’ve done as a creator to make you comment section/whaever other fan space better or worse. Just look at Andrew “I don’t know why my fandom is so rabid and hostile when I literally use an anti-fan caricature as the main villain” Hussie.
As much as I don’t wanna wade too much in the weeds, he even did it with yesterday’s alt-text.
I mean, it was objectively correct alt text. A lot of people WERE going to miss Joyce’s last word bubble in their rush to be angry about Raidah.
Why do you assume that must be directed at you.
I do look at their BlueSky and I also look at their Tumblr and I’ve also been reading their comics for decades, and if you think “pot shots” directed at very specific people, people that Willis has in fact clarified are not just “anyone who hates Joyce/Dorothy or who doesn’t like the current arc”, must be secretly about you… I guess that’s your right, but it certainly doesn’t reflect some objective truth.
I don’t know anything about Homestuck, but based on everything else you’ve said, I’m inclined to think I would strongly disagree about whether or not the villain you’re talking about is actually an anti-fan caricature?
Next you’ll be telling me you also think Buckets of Blood Guy was a joke at your expense.
I suppose it’s always possible that the real Buckets of Blood Guy found the comic.
He is, it’s not even subtle any Homestuck reader will tell you that’s what what it is.
@Cameron: that’s so funny because out of curiosity I asked my girlfriend who is a longtime deep Homestucker and she told me I’m entirely correct.
Genuine advice: take a step back on the parasocial relationship, most of your favorite creators have no idea who you are and would not bother creating characters based on you.
That’s sorta the weird parasocial conflict to being a relatively well known creative entity on the internet. Willis themselves is just a solitary person. They’re not famous or come from money. They don’t have handlers or coaches for social Interaction. They just post a webcomic and transformers toys.
But from an outsider perspective Willis is a highly influential person with followers in the tens of thousands if not hundreds. If Willis calls someone out on so I’ll media chances are it will result in several other people publicly dogpiling on that individual. Which can often start to feel like punching down or even bullying at times. Which seems ridiculous from Willis’ perspective since they’re just a person engaging in discourse. Of course willis themselves is also getting an unreasonable disproportionate amount of vitriol and hate so being defensive seems natural. It’s just their words and actions carry so muc more weight than a lot of ours do.
If people shit on Bruce timm I’m sure be gets his feelings hurt but also he co created one of the most iconic depictions of batman in history. If Bruce starts lashing out at people he’s gonna look like he’s punching down even if its justified. But willis is not Bruce time. So they’ve got all the feeling of a big time creator without the shielding and clout of one of a famous creator. It’s a conundrum of online popularity for sure.
I also think Willis is not unaware of that problem? If they’ve ever actually called anyone out by name, I haven’t seen it. They just subtweet people, which unfortunately lets folks like Cameron assume Willis is talking about them when they’re not.
An example i think of often is when Roz had a comic in short packed mocking people who didn’t understand what the little dangle sticking off a dildo was used for. Going so far as go say that if you don’t know what it is its YOUR fault women are unsatisfied securely.
Now you can say this is just Roz being in character. And that anyone genuinely getting their feelings hurt by that is just a dumb weak over emotional crybaby.
But that comment section genuinely made me cry. I felt like it wasn’t just a funny silly haha. It was an indictment on guys who lack knowledge. Where instead of being informative and patient it felt accusatory and mean. I was later told it was sott of a parody of Oh Joy Sex Toy and the joke is that instead of a gentle and kind explanation Roz gives a more scathing one. Personally I think it falls flat for the same reason I think “evil superman” does. Superman being kind IS the subversion. In the same way being dismissive and condescending about a lack of sexual knowledge is the norm OJST is subverting so by subverting that its just reinforcing the kinda uncomfortable and embarrassing.
My point is. Im sure a young 19 year old Virgin yoto was not the direct target of the mockery of that strip. But that strip and the comments agreeing with it and arguments that followed made me feel like shit. And I’m sure the guy bucket of blood guy is based on will never read the comic. But someone similar who identifies with that guy could still feel called out. Especially cuz regardless of intent commenters may take this opportunity to further mock them. And feel justified in this mockery cuz its what the comic is doing. It’s kinda like that old adage where if you mock one guy for being fat all the other fat people in your life take notice. Even if its “not about them”
@Li
I can think of at least one instance of them doing it fairly recently.
@Yotomoe: I can understand that and even empathize with it to some degree, but I do think that assuming Roz’s opinion IS Willis’s opinion is a mistake. Especially when we know what Willis’s adolescence was like, they were definitely more like you (a virgin who wouldn’t have known) than like Roz at 18/19.
I also don’t think Roz would be dismissive and mean of a virgin for being confused by it, but I also don’t think she’s sensitive enough to that kind of thing to regulate her wording.
All of that said: it sucks that the comic hurt your feelings, and it sucks even more that the comment section reinforced it. The expectation that men know this kind of thing without being told IS actually a sort of subtype of toxic masculinity.
It’s like when Ben Shapiro was briefly the main character of Twitter for his reaction to WAP, and a lot of people took that opportunity to take pot shots at him for his sexual prowess.
Like. I’m not immune, I did also think it was very funny, but when you say so on social media, or worse, directly to male friends who might worry about their own performance in bed………… what are we doing here, folks. The shitty thing about Ben Shapiro is his political beliefs, not how good he is or isn’t at pleasing his wife in bed.
@Yotomoe 2: my wording (“by name”) was very deliberate.
Just saying “there’s a weirdo all up in my replies” isn’t the same thing as calling someone out by name.
Im aware. But I’m also counting screencaps without name censoring.
https://bsky.app/profile/damnyouwillis.bsky.social/post/3m4qphphw4k24
This guy?
It’s still a few degrees removed (you can’t just click his name and go straight to his account), but I’ll admit I don’t think you should do this for comments that aren’t blatantly bigoted.
(The second screencap, tho.)
Yeah not necessarily the post I was thinking of but I don’t like this sorta thing. Like I dunno its not like he’s saying “go cyberbully this guy”. But its definitely putting them at risk of it. And even if they don’t often times in posts like this you’ll see so much vitriol and bad faith takes from the responses that if you assume the guy who posted this read the responses it definitely starts to feel like bullying. And I dunno I don’t like this practice. Not on public forums like Twitter and Blusky anyway. Maybe if it’s just a discord with your buddies you know aren’t gonna go rouge and start harassing or making up weird theories about. (People love to start throwing around neckbeard Intel and basement dweller.) And from personal experience its very hard to stop yourself from reading what people are saying about you.
My general rule is to try to act in a way where if I find out that person self harmed or something worse I don’t feel like I contributed to that. You never know what people are going through behind the screen. Of course that goes both ways which is why I try whenever possible to give Willis the benefit of the doubt.
I agree.
I do also have just, tons of involuntary empathy for people with large followings who impulsively react to crappy comments with snark.
I know that I, personally, try to manicure my own responses to crappy comments in the few cases where I have any kind of platform, in a type of “enlightened self-interest”: I don’t want to trigger a dogpiling, either of the commenter or of myself, because there’s no guarantee that people riled up by a snarky comment are going to go after the person you snarked at instead of going after you.
At the same time, it’s hard, and I know I’m experiencing only a tiny fraction of what anyone with even like, 5000 followers deals with.
But yeah, I can definitely still agree: not a good practice. Better to block/report (depending on topic), in most cases.
Oh also they didn’t create the sickos vs paladins divide, it was a joke made by a commenter after the divide already existed.
No, what existed was a bunch of people with different opinions, not a divide between two groups. The joke was a joke. I think Cameron Stone is overstating things quite a bit, but I also think acting as if the polls (or at least specifically that one) had no impact on the comments is a little silly. I don’t think Willis is doing that on purpose though, just that they don’t always think shit through.
What existed was a deep divide that the joke was making fun of, and the joke came before the poll.
Having labels for the sides did make it easier to talk about the “other side”, and of course there are numerous studies observing the effect of telling people they belong to groups — but those effects don’t require there to be any “shit stirring”, and people were already accusing each other of having no morals for liking different fictional drama or being homophobic for disliking Joyce/Dororhy.
I remember putting a LOT of energy, repeatedly, into pointing out that the “two sides” had more nuanced takes than just “pro cheating” and “anti Joyce/Dorothy”, and I did that before there were labels for the sides.
This is also like the fourth time I’ve seen someone say “we were all just smol beans who got along before evil Willis’s evil poll” and I’m gonna keep pointing out that it’s not true. We are mostly adults and we are all responsible for our own actions.
I think the site poll brought it to the forefront. I remember cringing when I saw it and being like “oh no, this is not a good idea.” And then saying that with the other polls over the next several days/weeks lol
Pretty sure the main reaction to it was “lol” at the time. Because it was funny.
Most of the “I didn’t pick an option because these options don’t cover the full nuance of my opinion” complaints came from subsequent polls, and “Willis is trying to make us fight each other” didn’t start to be voiced until months later.
It was a clear outgrowth of “these labels were a mistake (neutral on the coining of them, addressing the usage by us to brand the ‘other side’ as all believing just one thing)”, and I deeply dislike the way the new manifestation of it as “actually this is all the polls’ fault” tries to absolve us of all responsibility for being assholes to each other.
I’ll filly cop to us all being assholes but that doesn’t mean the polls were blameless. Especially when you have tension between commenters rising. The polls felt dismissive or as if they misrepresented people’s positions at best. At worst they felt like deliberately antagonistic. It basically turned the people who didn’t like the story direction into the “opposition” and built into this false rhetoric of why they may be upset.
An oily rag itself does not start a fire. But it certainly doesn’t help.
It was still funny.
@Yotomoe: See, that’s exactly the problem: they were NOT misrepresenting people’s opinions.
They just weren’t always restricting themselves to representing exactly the opinions of the majority of this comment section, and as a result a lot of people are assuming poll options are throwing shade at them by exaggerating their opinions, when in fact those poll options are accurate representations of a different opinion entirely, held by different people.
“Joyce and Dorothy deserve [disturbingly graphic descriptions of bodily harm]” was not an exaggeration of “I think cheating should have consequences”, it was an almost direct quote of one specific guy who was all up in Willis’s mentions.
I do not think it’s their fault that we keep assuming we are the only DoA readers in the universe.
Like, were the polls GOOD for the discourse, no. With the benefit of hindsight I think we can say “no”.
But the idea that they’ve ever been malicious attacks on reasonable people who ~dare~ to have problems with Willis’s storytelling is just absurd on its face.
@Clif
If you tell an offensive joke and everyone in the room laughs that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone found it funny.
@Li
They genuinely were though. Even the poll with the most options seemed to constantly miss the main reason people weren’t enjoying this story. And then you have stuff like evoking the scarlet letter and other stuff that definitely creates a vibe? Much like my issues with this arc the whole poll issue comes down to “the more you address it the worse it gets.” The polls could very well say anything. Or could say nothing. The fact that there are polls that seem to implicitly not understand why people are mad with backhanded framing of people who feel one way or the other was simply not healthy for the discourse.
Which I think is a major factor of the discourse. People feeling like they’re not being heard.
@Yotomoe: they genuinely weren’t.
People felt targeted, but were not the people Willis was talking about.
When you offer a binary choice people feel as if they’re being told “these are the two options. You are one of these”. Even if its just implicit. Like I said it didn’t cause discourse but it definitely, even if unintentionally, fed into it by choosing this time to make a poll that was this specific. At BEST it was just super bad timing. But that’s why I said “maybe he should have stopped when it was clear people were getting more at each other’s throats?” Even if it wasn’t meant as an insult people clearly were taking it as an insult.
@Yoto – Fair enough, and I hear what you are saying, but I have a real problem hearing Paladin and whatever the other term was as being offensive. At worst it was an exaggeration and exaggeration is the soul of humor.
When I didn’t think the poll options represented my opinions, I either picked the one that was the closest bc I still wanted to vote, or didn’t vote.
I just genuinely did not feel at all compelled to vote or like I was being told which opinions I was allowed to have, and I have trouble understanding folks who feel otherwise.
yeah, my strategy in those cases was to pick the funniest option and then post something like “man, I wish there was a ‘my actual opinion’ choice in this poll”.
Yep! I did that a couple of times for sure.
I don’t think Willis was trying to say anything like that regarding Carla and Mary, I think the point was that while Carla was being annoying, you shouldn’t respond to an annoyance with hate. Imagine if every time someone got mad at a minority the gloves came off and they just started hurling slurs. Reveals more about that person than anything else, I feel.
Also, regarding Mary and Carla, reread those strips for the first time in a long time and I think it’s important to remember that Mary escalated things:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/stomp/
Like the sequence of events up to this point had been “Carla is skating in the hallways, Mary gets upset. Mary tries to block by laying in the hallway so Carla jumps over her. In retaliation, Mary sprays glue on the carpet and ruins Carla’s skates. In retaliation to that, Carla stomps loudly outside of Mary’s door”. Whether Mary has a point that Carla is being loud or not, she had a lot of choices she could make and she chose one that could have really hurt Carla and instead did property damage to not only the dorm’s carpet, but to Carla’s skates.
The problem I have with this argument is that the tone of the comic often falls into goofy, slapstick gags. So arguing “Carla could’ve gotten hurt and what about the property damage” just feels disingenuous especially when Carla can build a pie tossing machine and when the argument that could hurt someone comes up suddenly it’s not that serious. So either we’re having fun in wacky hijinx land or we’re not and they’re really hurting each other. The debate always becomes self serving toward whichever character you like.
I personally think that moment was meant to be fun gags and would’ve preferred that Tom and Jerry dynamic had stayed, but it didn’t and I do think it’s a flaw that we jumped from a fun moment to pure toxicity in the comic and the conversation.
I’m honestly going by the events as shone in the comic and what we’re shown when Carla reappears is ger being upset her skates were ruined. I think that’s meant to be the indicator that what has occurred is no longer a gag, before Mary even starts being transphobic.
However you are right that the comic clearly picks and chooses when something is meant to be slapstick or not. For recent examples we have Billifer literally kicking Walky out of his loft bed and the repeated gag of either Walky or Billifer being chucked out of rooms. I understand your point completely, just wanna make it clear I’m not trying to make the debate self serving towards a preferred character, I’m going by the comic which is yes, a bit flawed in its portrayal.
You say bit flawed. I say brilliant.
I’m not sure about you, but I don’t come here to be bored.
I think one of the things we’re seeing in that whole sequence is that it was all Mary being transphobic and we’re supposed to recontextualize the early slapstick part when that’s revealed.
@Clif I mean, yeah? I don’t come here to be bored either? However, I think Sirksome has a point that there’s something of a tone shift and that is difficult to juggle. Especially when something set up to be goofy such as a pratfall is suddenly meant to be taken seriously and especially when 9 times out of 10 this comic has slapstick. That 1 time out of 10 where the slapstick is no longer funny is always going to raise eyebrows because the audience has been trained that something like Carla faceplanting is meant to be a joke only for it to be meant as a showcase that Mary is in the wrong. It’s not about whether something is boring or not, it’s whether a tone shift like that is accepted by the reader.
WOW I fully missed that whole tangent. Jeez, Cameron.
Whatever.
Sorry. It really genuinely says more about you than it says about Willis, that you think Mary’s transphobia reveal was an orchestrated attempt to make you, personally, feel bad for having sided with her.
That’s not what they’re saying, Li. You’re misrepresenting their argument with your word choice.
“And to me that was pretty much Willis going, “Oh you think Mary might have a point that Carla was being really dickish constantly roller skating up and down the hallway, well you’ve just sided with a transphobe!””
I mean if this isn’t what Cameron meant, they shouldn’t have said it.
So there’s this concept in English called a Syndecdoche. When a part is used to represent a whole. “You” in this context, does not always simply mean “you” the solitary 2nd person pronoun but “you” in a general sense. The royal “You” if you want. When they say “you” here they are not implying that willis personally singled out them. They meant “you” to imply a group. Your wording kinda implies you’re under the impression Cameron thinks they’re being specifically targeted but I’m pretty sure they more so meant “The audience that so far has enjoyed Mary”
That said I don’t even necessarily agree. I think Mary was always sorta being propped up to be the worst and Willis’ buffer makes it so that I doubt Mary was changed in any meaningful way from her trajectory. That said I can also commiserate with liking a character only to have them more or less spoiled by a story arc where now you can no longer admit to enjoying that character without people thinking you endorse their beliefs or actions. I would’ve definitely liked if Mary got to do more than show up and be the worst.
But within that context I don’t find it TOO absurd that Mary doubling down on being awful could’ve been willis wanting to solidify how we as an audience are meant to feel about her. In the same way I feel like Linda is more blatantly racist in subsequent appearances.
1. Yeah, that’s what my wording implies. It wasn’t unintentional, though.
I don’t think Cameron literally believes they’re the sole target of the malicious Willis they’re imagining, but I do think they think that Willis is maliciously targeting everyone in this comment section who has any complaints about the current storyline, and I think they’ve appointed themselves spokesperson for that entire group and are actively trying to further rile people up by convincing us that Willis is making fun of us, when in fact Willis is mostly not even talking about us at all.
I am attempting to drive home the latter point using hyperbole, but it’s honestly only a tiny bit more ridiculous of anyone to think Buckets of Blood was specifically about Cameron than it is to think that every single snarky skeet, alt text, or poll option is making fun of, like, EASILY half of the commenters here.
The latter argument is just so obviously absurd to me that I don’t know how to address it, other than saying “You’re not that special? None of us are that special? We do not live rent-free in Willis’s head? He doesn’t know who we are!”
2. I don’t think you and Cameron are making the same argument, though. I think you are making the argument you’re describing, but that Cameron has been making a different, less sympathetic argument.
3. For sure, sometimes characters get noticeably more blatant over time — sometimes just because they have more screen time, sometimes as a direct reaction to us… but I think there’s a difference between “Willis wants to make people feel stupid for liking Mary” and “Willis wants to make sure Mary’s bigotry is actually as clear as they always intended it to be”.
Like, they’ve talked openly about how the Walkertons being racist was never actually supposed to be in question, and how some readers picked up immediately on the early hints — but other readers didn’t, and then when it came up in-universe, there were arguments.
As a writer, that situation is a bit of a communication failure. You tried to convey something unambiguously, and a lot of people are arguing it’s ambiguous, and some of the people arguing it’s ambiguous are being really shitty about it.
Trying to correct for that is just… not the same thing as deliberately setting out to write a story where people who dared to like Mary look like assholes.
I think it might be wise to remember that, actually, none of us knows what goes on in Willis’ mind . But we do know what goes on in our own. And, as the ones writing the comments, no, it is entirely on us what we write. Relaaaax, don’t take jokes so seriously. If you don’t like 2-answer polls, don’t play. If you don’t like the game, don’t play. If you don’t like watching the game, don’t read the comments or the polls.
And… if you don’t like a comic that updates daily and can be read entirely for free, don’t read it.
What each of us does is entirely our own responsibility, it’s not Willis’ fault!
As long as it still lets me gripe, I’m with you 1,000%.
Sanest comment I’ve read in a while!
I do remember being very upset at the Carla and Mary story from back then. I was enjoying the small escalations in the prank war between them and thought it was leading to them forging a kind of mutual respect as the one-upped each other. Instead it just ended in transphobia and that was really the moment Mary changed as a character to me, from someone mildly annoying but maybe she just needed development to an actively, intentionally horrible person we should hate. I felt a little cheated for getting invested in her.
I mean.
Mary’s third strip with speaking lines:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/05-media-rumble/dumb/
The next time she showed up, it was to try to convince Joyce et al to go to her specific church, and included this scene:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/02-choosing-my-religion/avoid/
(What she’s calling “evil” is Dorothy pointing out that the sermon was offensive because it assumed Christians are better at reading Jewish scripture than Jewish people are, and then admitted to not being a Christian when Mary got confrontational about that.)
Nothing about Mary’s writing has ever really suggested that she was supposed to be sympathetic or that she just needed some development, because crucially, unlike Joyce, Mary has always, consistently, responded to new information like she did in that first link: by saying “Seriously? That’s stupid.” Or how she did in the second link, by calling it “evil”.
She is not willing to change, so she’s not gonna, until that itself changes.
I mean we can go back and do this for everyone. Early Joe and Ruth were especially bad. There’s a difference though between them and Mary in that Mary got worse over time. Other characters get to be developed while Mary becomes a flanderized version of herself with no nuance. But I’m over it at this point. I’ve had discussions about Mary’s characterization before. I only even brought it up because I remember being really invested in what was happening during that story. I thought it was the start of a Mary redemption arc. Lol. I was so wrong.
I want to respect your right to disengage, so you certainly don’t have to respond to this, but I don’t think Early Mary and Early Ruth looked anything alike, and I think a key difference with Joe is that he always had Danny beside him, rolling his eyes. That showed that even the earliest of Early Joe still hung out with someone who regularly told him he was wrong about stuff, and that in itself signals a more open mind than Mary, who has no friends on campus and has pushed people away for being Too Different.
I don’t think a Mary Redemption Arc is impossible, but it was never going to start with humanizing slapstick.
Just like Ruth and Joe’s redemption arcs didn’t start with humanizing slapstick.
@Li You kind of bring up exactly what I’m talking about to an extent. Joe had Danny to bounce off of that kind of tempered some of his obnoxious and problematic traits. Ruth had an entire romance that kinda serves as a redemption arc in retrospect if you believe Ruth was a villain early on. I might like that interpretation actually. Mary never really got those moments. I thought pairing her with Carla could do that, and even later there was something going on with Mary and Malaya and drawing I was getting invested in, but in both cases the opposite happened and it was either dropped or just doubled down on how awful Mary is or both.
Oh I really really really do not think Ruth’s romance was her redemption arc.
I think it wasn’t when she tried to kiss Billie that we first clued in that there was more going on with her, but when we heard that one-sided conversation with her and “Sir”.
And with Mary, we would absolutely get a moment like that before Willis tried to sell us on the idea that her antagonism with Carla was romantic, rather than having that idea brought up to specifically have Carla dismiss in disgust.
To be clear I’m not angling for some romance between Mary and Carla I just think having someone to interact with in a more positive way is the start to actual character development. That’s also why I really like when Mary and Becky interact. Perhaps “redemption” isn’t the right word but I do think ultimately Ruth’s relationship with Billie is what lead to Ruth developing beyond the horrible bully she was at the start of the comic. Those interaction are what motivated change in the same way Joe just interacting with Joyce before they were even dating was motivating change in him. I also think that’s why they were such popular couples. We got to see the their effects on each other in real time.
Right, but what I’m saying is:
Billie/Ruth was not the start of Ruth’s redemption arc.
Ruth’s redemption arc could not have started with her kissing Billie.
It started here:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/05-media-rumble/ringtone/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/05-media-rumble/sir/
And if Mary is ever going to get a redemption arc, it will likewise start with something that hints there’s something under her self-righteous hatred of other people, not with a cute prank war with Carla.
Okay I think maybe I understand the point you’re making and we might be making two different points entirely. Cause to me it the strips you linked don’t contradict my point. My point is that Ruth was only motivated to change as a person not from literally kissing Billie but from all her interactions with Billie. The strips you linked reveal more insight into why Ruth acts the way she does but don’t imply that lead to any change within herself. That mostly came from Billie and even these strips show Billie was involved in this reveal by seeing it from her perspective.
But I also understand your point that you don’t really get moments like this in a cartoonish prank war side story. My desire was for Mary to actually have interactions with characters that weren’t so purely negative so that her character actually has a chance to develop.
But you also made a statement above that certain characters like the Walkerton parents were never meant to be sympathetic and were always meant to be overtly terrible or blatant like their racism. That’s likely what happened with Mary. She’s not a character we’re supposed to like so we’ll never get moments of insight into her actions or interactions where she can develop beyond her role. We almost had stuff like Malaya and the drawing classes but that never manifested and I’m not sure what the point of them was now years later.
I am listening and nodding. 🙂
Re: the last paragraph — I’d argue that it’s not necessarily that the Walkertons and Mary were never meant to be sympathetic, so much as that they were always meant to be prejudiced in the exact ways that eventually became so obvious, for a lot of readers, completely understandably, the prejudice becoming more obvious also made the characters impossible to sympathize with ever again.
(It’s easier to still find a prejudiced character sympathetic if that prejudice doesn’t impact you, but it’s not necessarily that simple. Some bi readers are going to find Jennifer’s internalized biphobia really relatable, for example. If you have bittersweet memories of someone like Mary that you used to be close with before you came out — there are a LOT of ways that might make you feel, and some of them are going to result in wanting to see more Mary, while others are going to result in wanting to see Mary catapulted into the sun.)
So: I don’t know, honestly, that I agree we’re never going to get a Mary redemption arc. I just think it would be hard for her to bond with other characters like Carla without something big happening first. :|a
If that makes sense.
Carla does make sense. She’s the classic example of pretending to be a narcissist so she can hide her own insecurities, fear and trauma and perhaps keep future potential bullies at bay.
My main takeaway from yesterday’s storyline is that everyone in this strip is absurdly over-invested in the front page photo of a *student newspaper* that doesn’t even exist anymore IRL. No one reads the school newspaper, who cares what’s on the front page.
It would be about the same as putting that image on the commons bulleting board next to flyer about band practice or who’s looking for a D&D group.
Like seriously, they get mad about this picture, but if Joyce could have so easily hid it from her Dad by stealing all the physical papers then how big a deal was it? It didn’t even go viral!
I looked it up, and the Indiana Student newspaper has a circulation of ~9,000 in a school of ~110,000. So it’s bigger than like a high school student newspaper but the overwhelming majority of students don’t read it.
The only reason it matters at all is because DoA takes place in a weird liminal space where it’s simultaneously the modern day and the mid-90s when Willis was in college, so no one was streaming the protests.
Which Nintendo does Walky want to play with Amber? Is it a Switch or SNES or a Gamecube? Well thanks to Schrodinger’s time period it can be any of them or none of them at the same time. Brought to you by the same quality storytelling that gave us Bulmeria, aka not-Israel.
It doesn’t matter which Nintendo is being played at any given time. Nobody should care what Nintendo-brand video game console is in the cartoon character’s hands.
The world of Dumbing of Age isn’t exactly identical to ours. The real life Indiana Daily Student only publishes on Thursdays, whereas the one in the comic has been established to publish every day of the week (except possibly Saturday). The ability to sustain daily publication indicates significantly greater circulation than the real life IDS. This in turn means that your argument can be reversed. Instead of saying that the characters are overreacting because the newspaper is irrelevant, we could instead conclude that the character’s reactions indicate the newspaper is influential.
Sorry but for me “everyone is arguing who the morally correct person is in this piece of fiction because they’re both flawed and too much themselves” makes Willis a fantastic writer, not the opposite.
It’s not because they both believe they’re right it’s because the conflict is nonsensical. This is a school newspaper, nobody should care about this!
Police showed up to brutalize students. The protestors put their bodies and lives on the line. It’s reasonable to be invested in that coverage- it’s the ONLY way people will know the protest happened, and now the story isn’t ‘police force harms peaceful protestors’ like they kinda need it to be.
Also arguably, “No one should care about Teen Vogue,” yet Teen Vogue was the one place that wasn’t totally captured by capitalist and zionist interests and would just print reality as it exists and not frame it in some New York Times esque “some people say, we asked right wing ghouls to weigh in on it” both sidesism.
Daisy wasn’t wrong to humanize the protest but she pretty clearly led with her hormones.
There wasn’t any coverage on actually real news outlets? The most this protest got was a paper that apparently in real life was read by less than 10% of the student body and no longer exists? I’m pretty sure I remember seeing actual news coverage of the real Indiana University protest, the one in the comic must have been really ineffective.
“It’s reasonable to be invested in that coverage- it’s the ONLY way people will know the protest happened”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
It does not matter one bit if 5 people read that paper. The decision reflects the values of the editorial staff. It reflects the standards being taught to the journalism students. And I don’t care if it were as trivial as my neighbor handing out leaflets at the condo meeting, I’d be upset that my community had done those of us at the protest the disrespect of preferring to run the spiciest photo of the blandest couple. I don’t care that no historian will ever write about that day. She’s right to be mad.
I disagree. I feel that any piece of media that goes beyond ‘Bad guys Bad, Good guys good’ and tries to put even the slightest bit of nuance in, will have times when the discourse gets crazy, crazy heated.
And that is a lot less bad when it’s about something like the fate of Fodlan, but when it’s about some very Real Things, said discourse can become harmful to people.
For me the biggest failure was taking a character(Raidah) who is consistently presented in any strip where it’s just her and her friends as so terrible she’s basically a cartoon character as the one to call Joyce out
Looking at her whole history, it seems odd to decide “actually now this character is going to have depths bc I feel really guilty for my fuckups as a writer” and expecting that to disappear for the sake of the story
At best it is lazy
I wasn’t spending much energy focused on the failures of the protest storyline but the last two strips really made it all so much more apparent
(I haven’t actually commented in a while though so I wasn’t adding to the pile yesterday)
It also feels like the entirely wrong way to approach adding depth to your big major Muslim character if that’s the goal
Why aren’t we actually hanging out with Raidah away from the main cast where she isn’t a cartoon villain, getting her perspective with respect to why she is the way she is
Also having that major Muslim character weaponise homophobia is a choice
So many layers of frustrations
This isn’t the first time the comic has used Raidah to drop some unpleasant truths, she was also the one to call out the unpleasant implications of Dorothy’s presidential ambitions. I think she works very well in that roll actually, “Worst person you know made a great point” is a meme because it has resonance.
Don’t you know that a broken watch being right twice a day is lazy writing?
Sure, if the callout was right and wasn’t just cruel subtle homophobia
Instead the moment makes Joyce pretty justified in saying fuck you rather than self reflection
They are not actively hostile because of them being publicly gay. They are bothered by the fact that the story focused on them. It did not focus on what is being protested. It did not focus on how the police and the university reacted to the protest. It focused on them in the front page. Something some people feel strongly about has been undercut by the local press.
Conversely, it’s not like Joyce intended to be the focal point. She had no intention of being at the protests to begin with. Of course Joyce isn’t pressed about stealing the moment (which again, is Daisy’s call, not hers). Of course she thinks it is a big thing that she is going so strongly against the dogma she was raised under. It is the most important thing to have ever happened in her life.
Life is a collection of individuals undergoing their own life experiences simultaneously. Things that some find the most important thing in the world are background noise in the lives of others going through a completely different set of experiences. This is exploring that. Joyce will grow from this. Others will too.
Tomorrow tune in when it’s revealed that Carla’s parents are space captain Julia Grey and President Doris
Hello Muddah
Hello Faddah
Why did you help
Commit a slaughtah?
Bulmeria’s
Entertaining
And they say we’ll have some fun
When bombs stop raining
All the soldiers
Hate the people
And they blew up
A church steeple
And their army
Wants no sissies
So they make all of their recruits read “Ulysses”
Now I don’t want this to be sass
But my classmates got tear-gassed,
You remember, Amber O’Malley,
The cops are organizing a searching party.
Now this is why I love the comment section.
Not the song I imagined the comment section would get stuck in my head but I’m gonna be humming the original all night now XD
I tried to reply, but accidentally hit “Report Comment” on this one, because it was so awesome and my damaged spine does that thing where it moves my hands on its own sometimes.
I am ashamed.
And yes, also stuck in my head.
I think if this whole thing gets resolved by Carla appealing to her parents, Raidah’s head might actually explode.
I would bet money that this call is not a resolution to anything, it’s just a splash of cold water for carla
Roll credits. 80s movie message about overcoming prejudice with the power of love is now delivered.
What “whole thing”? Carla’s parents are rich, but they’re not going to be able to order Bulmeria to stop committing genocide. They’re not even going to be able to order the US to stop exporting arms to Bulmeria. Or to have the real arms manufacturers they subcontract to stop selling to Bulmeria. The most they could possibly do is have Ruttech stop doing such work with arms companies – and probably even then only new contracts going forward, rather than getting sued into the ground for suddenly breaking existing contracts.
And in that best case, which is still unlikely, it’s good for Carla’s conscience and her relationship with her parents, but it doesn’t do anything for the victims in Bulmeria or even the next genocide.
Her parents are a television?
no no no, they real tiny and they live *inside* the television
like those little aliens from Batteries Not Included XD
They got sent there by Willy Wonka’s teleportation ray and really didn’t want to be stretched back to normal size!
There’s a bunch of gay people living in my phone that I talk to often, so this tracks
Karen and Plankton.
Her Grandparents are CRTs.
Language
I though Joe and Rachel were her parents (or is it other Rachel I always get them confused).
It’s now time for our Feature Presentation: Feacher
Given the lore, it makes sense
So, now I’m wondering if they’re characters we’ve seen. Some nameless Shortpacked characters being retrofitted into family members like Ruth’s grandpa.
That’d be super weird because it would suggest that there may have actually been a non-Ultra-Car Walkyverse Carla this whole time, which is just a bizarre concept.
Although Carla meeting Ultra Car does sound like an idea for a fun storyline-that-never-was.
Also my pedantic side feels the need to note that Ruth’s gramps wasn’t actually unnamed in Shortpacked!, his name was always Clint
Fair, I was mostly thinking of last names, but I think Clint is Ruth’s maternal grandfather anyway so he wouldn’t be named Lessick (or Lesse, in the Walkyverse). There’s no one named Rutten but they don’t need to be.
Do we, strictly speaking, know his last name isn’t Lessick?
I mean, yes, but also decidedly no.
Cattleprod is still right that an extremely minor Shortpacked character was retrofitted to be Ruth’s grandpa here, the “Clint” in that comic has nothing to do with Ruth.
Technically, we don’t know that either way. Maybe the grandfather of Amber’s husband’s former coworker’s former stalkee’s wife’s dead girlfriend just happened to wander into the store. Weirder coincidences have happened.
I guess, but my point was that Shortpacked!Clint was supposed to be a reasonably sympathetic one-off character. He was not supposed to “be” anything more than that, but I think his character design and name must have struck a chord with Willis.
Maybe Joe and Rachel bought rights to her likeness when they were designing UC’s new body.
Genuinely is there anyone who would even fit the bill for that who hasn’t already been used?
I’m imagining a woman who looks like Joe, named Roe, and a man who looks like Rachel, named Jachel.
Random rant.
I wish commenters would stop trying to jam DOA feet into SP shoes.
End rant. We now return you to your regularly scheduled comments.
If the shoes don’t fit,
you must admit,
the agony of duh feet.
I’m going to admit I was so comment described yesterday, I went on Bluesky and…reddit.
*weeps*
I’m an addict!
hey at least ya got the first step down, admitting you have a problem
progress!
I….joined the discord….
So comment deprived I said comment described.
Ew.
then look forward to hearing salty rants from people who think biting Willis’ head off is a personality XD
for reals tho I miss the days of message boards and online forums being the primary modus operandi, nowadays is social media and walled gardens in this very healthy internet ecosystem :/
Sadly i missed peak forum days by a few years
Give the dude a chance to tell his story.
Jeez, I’m sorry to hear that.
😮 There’s a discord?
Its through the reddit so participants beware
Dang
Well howdy!
Absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong with this conversation, and I unreservedly endorse it.
I wonder if this is where we’re going to get our Democrat criticism on the fact that both sides of the political divide were passionately pro-Isra…North Bulmeria.
And Carla’s parents are radically progressive everywhere…but there.
Considering all the real life tech oligarchs mostly abandoning rainbow capitalism and slouching towards fascism, I wouldn’t be surprised if Willis reflects this in comic.
Maybe with her parents wearing Red hats, union busting or whatever.
Considering the amount of money they’ve been said to put into trans rights, and that they donated heavily to Robin’s Democratic opponent just a few months ago in-universe, I don’t think it would be believable to go in that direction. Besides, it makes for a better story if they’re mostly good people with a blind spot than if they’re just mustache-twirling villains.
maga is unlikely but quiet union busting just makes sense. Providing weapons for a genocide (and y’know, all the other evil stuff that goes into becoming a tech billionaire) is a bit more than just a blindspot. I’m guessing they’re very nice people interpersonally, good parents, probably espouse themselves as socially liberal but fiscally conservative. They probably have a charitable foundation to feed the homeless or something, but wont throw their weight behind any policies that’ll actually prevent those people from reaching that kind of poverty. Because that’d probably mean higher taxes for them. And, I mean you just don’t become a tech billionaire if you actually care about people outside your immediate circle that much. Like you physically can’t, that is so much money and the tech industry especially is infamous for the amount of exploitation that goes on at different levels.
So basically I think they’re probably sweet people but not morally sound. Not mustache twirling but I just don’t think they care much about any potential harm to others because it’s “over there”. Far enough to disassociate, to people they don’t know or care about. Probably brush it off as just business.
But hey, that’s just a guess. This is fiction after all, grounded but fiction. Maybe these tech billionaires really are ignorant to the harm they cause and will stop once their daughter points it out to them. That’ll really test my suspension of disbelief tho
The other question is how much of their business is the arms industry.
This is kind of a new, if not particularly surprising twist, since we’ve mostly seen them being tied to consumer products.
Twist: Carla’s parents are North Bulmerian
(Also sorry for reporting your post. I swear to god that happens 25% of the time I go to tap ‘reply’)
I am very glad i wasn’t around for whatever the hell happened the other day here
Did something actually happen or did Willis just end the comments before they could get started? Because I checked the new update like ten minutes after it went up and they were already closed.
There’s a lot commentary in the Patreon, Reddit, and Bluesky.
The Patreon is…yeah, it was everything.
Oof I can imagine. Comment section here is more than enough for me already, can’t imagine dealing with all that nonsense.
It’s usually better! But hooboy this was a storm.
All I know is that I showed up for my donuts and there weren’t any donuts.
I was promised donuts.
Clever, using Patreon comments as a bellwether for the main comic section. Webcomic managers, take note.
Not yesterday the day before
Just Willis preemptively shutting the comments down after the comic the day before got over a thousand comments.
Is that a lot? I did comment, when I don’t usually, but that was fresh after it was posted and about gay Indiana teachers, so I’m guessing I missed the bad stuff. Unless maybe the bad stuff was in fact about the gay Indiana teachers? But I’m guessing racism. It’s so frequently racism.
Racism, homophobia, and Joyce.
Thats a ton for this comic. We’ve been averaging just under 300 comments lately
I don’t think it’s uncommon if you know the signs it’s even pretty easy to see coming. Usually it’s an issue where a character is overtly mean to another, usually it’s a woman being criticized and a lot of times it’s for saying something mean to Joyce. Roz used to be the punching bag and that’s how we got the bongo filter. I forget which moment lead to comment flagging. I also remember the grea Walkerton racism debate. That’s ancient lore now. This comic also has uniquely amazing engagement. I read a ton of webcomics and for the ones that even allow comments getting 20 or so is a busy day.
One thing I did notice was a lot of “bongo” comments on Wednesday.
Which I found interesting as a parallel to the “It’s not really homophobia to use homophobic attacks if you’re mad at them for some other reason” argument that was going around.
Yesh those ones are what i was referring to, that is why i said “the other day” instead of yesterday.
Hello muddah,
hello fadduh,
Calling you to
Stop the slaughtah
Genocide is
Not a good thing
So I think it’s for the best if you stop funding!
Somebody has a grasp of the classics, at last.
Impressed this song came up twice 😂
check the alt-text
Oh HELL YEAH more Carla!!!
“anyway, that’s how I got disowned”
All it took was a basic greeting? Jeez.
Her parents are Obadiah Stane.
Carla becoming a combination of absolute chaos gremlin and Tony Stark would be amazing. she and Amazi-Girl could start the Indiana branch of the Avengers.
……
oh my god i can actually see it happening.
…oh wow… wow. I’d read all of that.
CARLA MY BELOVED!!!!!
Carla!!! Love her and I love seeing her have to confront this
When I saw this preview I thought Joyce and Dorothy were outed in Television.
That could be another monitor but that kinda looks like a cintiq on her desk. You think Carla dabbles in digital art?
Do we know Carlas major?
I’m not sure it’s been directly stated but she seems to be at least interested in engineering. Drawing or modeling prototype designs could be something she does and she definitely has the money to afford a cintiq even just for a hobby.
It’s probably something Engineering based.
Maybe she uses it for something like AutoCAD? Idk much about the program but I’d imagine a touch screen and stylus might be helpful
SmartCAD by Ruetech.
Thrilled to be back on this storyline
So… how’s everyone doing?
We chill? We chill.
I couldn’t tell at first but I see now that Carla is initiating this phone call. I do hope things stay chill with her, too.
aside from my leg being inflammed and in agonizing pain to the point to which I need my cane just to shower for the first time in YEARS,
eh, fine as I usually am
I have many many things to say, none involving todays strip.
So we chill.
WOO, CARLA!
This is where it’s revealed Carla’s parents are just an intelligent computer program.
I can’t believe carla is a 4D printed person. Of course her parents are AIs. That’s perfectly explain whatever nonsense is behind them endorsing whatever is going on.
How quickly can we pivot DoA into a Cyberpunk 2077 storyline?
That is the funniest possible outcome
I didn’t make it by until, like, 3:00 AM yesterday. Were the comments pre-emptively closed from the get-go, or did something hit the fan and cause them to be closed?
At any rate, I had already made my Saving Throw vs. Comment last night, only to discover that it was moot
They were pre-emptively closed, yes. I showed up at about 20 after 12
It was preemptively closed, probably due to the massive conflict in the Patreon forums.
Oh god was the patreon bad?
Basically:
1. Joyce supporters
2. Radiah supporters
3. People who believe Raidah is incapable of sincerely caring about Bulmeria
4. People who believe Willis doesn’t actually plan to have Joyce learn a lesson (ie. the story arc) and is wrong.
5. People who really don’t like the Bulmeria protest fallout and want to get back to queer shenanigans.
6. People who want to put aside the queer shenanigans and focus more on Bulmeria.
Oh so like the comments here, but paying for the privelege to argue early
For some reason I assumed the patreon comments would be more chill without us freeloaders
They’re usually better but Willis created a perfect storm where one side sees only homophobia and the other side sees only racism despite that this is, you know, a fictional comic strip about young people.
Well the racism is more about the commenters who, to quote Willis themself, were “Mysteriously Extra Aggro For Reasons I Can’t Imagine Anyone Can Imagine, I Bet/Hope/Pray There Are Other Reasons That Explain It, Phew.” like one particular comment that said raidah should die in a fire. That combined with the touchy subject matter was, again paraphrasing from Willis, not good for the well-being of many readers.
If the patreonistas are coughing up money to live in tommorow, I expect that they might be, on the average, more invested in the strip and therefor less chill about it’s topics.
Not that I choose to consider myself a complete freeloader. The new book, DOA 14, showed up in our PO box, so I went to collect it. Back out in the car I ripped open the packaging and checked out the magnet and the bookmark and had my eye caught by a page, and yeah that was funny, and I like Willis’s new comments between things, and hey, I had forgotten this part, oh and Dorothy’s finger movements when they were drunk are kind of interesting in retrospect, and I’ve always enjoyed this part, AND WHAT THE HECK, it’s almost an hour later and I’ve been siting out front here with the car running all this time.
Damn You Willis!
I don’t think money correlates with being chill.
Suppose that’s true enough.
I dont want to talk about yesterdays page too much but i will say my opinion involved being upset at both raidah and joyce while still cheering for the fact joyce finally got some emotional backlash from all of this….even if it was related to homophobia and not the fact she’s a cheating bongo
I agree with that point both Raidah and Joyce said some really dumb things but the are dumb at that age…
You can throw tomatoes at me if you wish.
People need to stop begging to pull the Extreme Drama tag
I just know something terrible is about to happen in comic. We don’t need to rush to it.
Can we get queer shenanigans in Bulmeria?
Well now im curious
Unsure but I think so.
I think even before midnight, someone at the end of of Wednesday requested Willis lock the comments, and both were.
I don’t think yesterday would have been that controversial as both characters essentially agreed.
I believe the initial reaction to joyce saying “im a hero and deserve a medal” would’ve been nuclear
Really? It seemed pretty anonydyne.
Clueless yet proud.
She DOES deserve a medal for breaking away from a religious cult, that literally kidnapped her and her friends.
( Clueless because Amber Almost died for her again. But Ambers medal is Walky. )
I really don’t think it’s very controversial. In real life there were plenty Queers for Palestine. It just seems very anonydyne.
Newspapers and media barely covered the protests in Real life. ( Which made them easier to suppress)
Yes but in the context of this comic and prior reactions to things Joyce has said in this arc.
I truly believe yesterdays page would have led to arguments so extreme it would’ve surpassed the kiss to be the most commented on page from both people defending/hating both Joyce and Raidah
I read it as a gentle denouement since both characters basically agreed and agreed to disagree.
Raidah leaned away from the homophobia. Joyce disagreed.
Both were essentially right from their point of view.
I think Willis should unlock yesterday and see.
That is a wild reading of yesterday’s strip.
+ 1
It’s Adam Black dawg what do you expect, they’ve been reading a whole other comic this whole time
I think the “nothing could matter more than that” would’ve been worse
Really i meant the whole page tbh
It was the sole controversial part
But imho from the readers viewpoints, to fault Joyce is ridiculous.
We see what Raidah doesnt
We know she never intended to protest, she was unexpectedly caught in the crossfire, and she was intending to stay with Dorothy ( if anything it was Dorothy who put people in danger) .
( Neither one should have been there but that’s the only way Willis was covering it )
But maybe I’m wrong. I’m not on patreon.
I mean cool, she basically said her white ass kissing her white gf is more important than an ethnic cleansing. She doesn’t know she said that and I don’t think she meant it like that but she did say that. Sure she didn’t mean to be on the front page, but saying “I was heroically gay, nothing is more important than that” with the context of said “heroic” gayness was at a protest against a genocide. Girl. Think about the words that come out of your mouth. Just a tiny ounce of self awareness, please. She wasn’t heroically gay, she was gay with bad timing
Yeah, I think that’s probably the story arc.
Joyce finds out that there’s bigger issues than just her own.
I agree that Raidah has bigger issues than Joyce.
But Joyce has bigger jugs.
Thanks to Carla.
I think the thing Joyce said that is the most ‘wrong’ is the fact that she said ‘nothing is more important than her being heroically gay’. Which is a self-centred thing to say when the whole thing happened in a protest against the University supporting a genocide.
Did you forget the /s tag here? I mean, I *guess* you could sorta say that “nothing is more important than me getting with Dorothy” “yes, you have correctly identified which of your opinions I hate you for the most (today, at least)” counts as “both characters essentially agree[ing]”, but…
Ugh. I accidentally reported you and I’m sorry. Tablet snafu
Sorry lee
/ s indicates irony
But I’m saying it’s literally true in that they agreed on the words ( if not the implications l
Raidah literally saying ‘yes that’s what’.
It amounts to agree to disagree. ( Agree Raidah should have used air quotes or an / s tag.
But I can’t add it for her )
Maybe I need to sign up for patreon why people were so bent out of shape.
It seemed like Joyce spoke her truth and the conflict fizzled out.
Maybe I’m underestimating readers homophobic reaction. I think around 70 percent of the characters are lgbtq by now. I don’t get why anyone homophobic would even still be reading. They are the villains of the comic.
I’m not looking forward to the reactions if Willis leans hard into a Queers against Bulmeria storyline.
Let ppl be mad I guess. It’s still better than what’s happening IRL every day for a year.
Hello Mother, Hello Father! Fleas, ticks, mosquitos really bother! Thanks for the package! That’s why I’m writing! Canine Advanttix fixed all the biting!
That’s the only version of the song I’ve ever heard.
IT’S STUCK IN MY HEAD TAFFY, HELP
THIRD MENTION
There ain’t no bugs on me! There ain’t no bugs on me! Well, there may be bugs on some of you mugs, but there ain’t no bugs on me!
k9 advantics had the best commercials
My expectations for Joyce’s grasp of the political situation were/are subterranean, but if Carla of all people comes out of this storyline with more awareness than her OH FUCKING BOY THE FUTURE COMMENTS SECTION
…I think I’m going to try to just not even scroll down at all going forward.
Ruttech: “I guess we doin videoconferencing apps now”
i know you’re tempted to plaster something on that TV
she gonna use it to play a game of Dumb Horse Race Test :p
oops i mean Dumbing of Horse Race Test
Dark horse Dorothy won the Kentucky Derby,
Favorite Robin won the Preakness Stakes,
and the Dina snuck the Belmont Stakes.
Notably, neither Dorothy nor Robin were in the top 6 in the race(s) after their wins. Only the Belmont stakes had any stallions, including the oldest racehorse in history.
Lol I would’ve closed the comments for THIS conversation, not Raidah being right while also continuing to the be the worst person you know, but what do I know.
Carla your parents’ company logo is the Team Rocket logo? How are you only now realizing they’re evil?
OMG and I thought I was the only one who noticed the similarity LMAO
There better be a faceless body petting a Pursian on the other end of that video call.
The things I miss out on by being that one kid whose parents didn’t let them watch Pokémon growing up.
(Not for any Satanic-panic or religious reasons in my case, I think they just thought that the fight scenes would be a bad influence on me)
I’m always surprised people accepted a cartoon that was thinly disguised cock-fighting.
*substitute ‘rooster fighting’, in case my original phrasing doesn’t get past the filters.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA CARLA STRIP TIME YES
Charlie’s going to be proud of you, girl (hopefully?)
I’m not sure how this conversation is going to go, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not going to involve Carla stripping.
I am sure this will go perfectly fine. Perrrrrfectly fiiiiine.
carla room reveal
These kids with private room privileges also have bigger tvs/monitors and setups. It’s super unfair. I’m filing a complaint with the school board.
With her Carsona sticker or possibly magnet in the backdrop.
I am happy to see Carla all though this is going to be an uncomfortable situation for her.
Wow, we are going from one frying pan straight into another.
This will not be a fun conversation… but I’m very proud of Carla being brave enough to have it. 😄
Def think given the mismanagement and drama the comments section should have stayed in lockdown a lil longer. Tbh with the shoehorned in strips, I totally forgot the relevance of the cut to Carla until I read the comments… not well paced, and it’s gonna be another doozy of arguments, I can tell already. Also def a tough arc for me because again, queer and Palestinian \m/ see you on the flipside of this folks….
I think the lesson people need to learn from the comments getting disabled is not that they should all figure out the right things to be angry and hateful about, but to stop being angry and hateful in the first place. Let the characters be complex without attacking their identities, let the author write out a story without being attacked and shamed before they can even progress it, and stop encouraging one another to leave hateful comments in the first place.
We dont need to find a cause to get more pissed about, this comic does not need to continue to be a culture war.
yeah and it honestly shoulda been shut down for longer
hell if Willis were any other webcomic author, he would have also burned his to the ground
I saw someone on Bluesky suggest having them open for one day a week for people to discuss the entire weeks comics and while I dont think thats a perfect solution I think it might be better than the current state of affairs (though I’d maybe do twice a week instead of once a week)
Alternative option: Enlist some trusted people (since Willis certainly doesn’t have the time) to moderate the comments and train the community to behave the way he wants. That’s the only way I’ve ever seen any creators build an audience they’re happy to have, but it can be done.
Mods would have to see with their own eyes all the comments that don’t make it to post.
It’s a very stressful job, dealing with that day in and day out. People burn out quickly.
Like, I would not be so quick to assume Willis hasn’t considered it.
Well, ultimately it depends on how much you’re willing to cull your audience. If you quickly get rid of unwelcome people with aggressive, proactive moderation, over time you could hope to encourage more people you want to participate, to participate, and you end up needing very little moderation work. I’ve seen this happen. Communities where mods are happy to work for decades cause they’re welcomed and respected; and that also support the creators generously enough to offset their smaller numbers compared to those creators who just want the biggest audience they can get.
I love this comic but also I spend 30 seconds a day reading it and honestly I don’t think about it again until it shows up in my RSS feed. This comic is not worth spending hours a day being mad at people in comments about what a stranger thinks about one man’s plot decisions
yeah like
I speak from experience when I say
spending a significant chunk of your time in the comments section of a webcomic of all places,
… isn’t exactly something you voluntarily do if your life is going so great 👀
I think people who are Very Online really don’t realise how much most people aren’t online at all. Sure, maybe they’re spending too much time looking at TikTok or insta but they’re not *posting* about stuff
Wait what???
For real? We are going to see them?
Awesome!!!
considering joe and rachel are students here, i wonder what carla’s parents would look like. unless they look like an uncanny middle aged ver of them and no one notices lol
Well theyre Billionaires so we already know theyre bad people even if they have been good to Carla specifically
I guess now we get to find out if their love of their daughter outweighs their love of money
I mentioned this some months back, but I have a feeling that Carla’s parents smile and make sympathetic noises, but ultimately go “Sweetie, this money is how we’ve been able to protect you. Selling weapons to Bulmeria is what keeps you safe.” And then Carla has a very difficult decision to make.
From the few hints we’ve gotten, I don’t think they’re selling weapons to Bulmeria directly. It’s certainly not their only or probably even main source of revenue – they make phones, for example. And non-military drones.
What was said earlier was that some missiles use some Ruttech circuitry, which likely makes them a subcontractor to one of the big arms companies. They could get out of that business, though probably not too quickly, but that’s not going to have a huge effect on saving lives in Bulmeria.
Yeah, that’s something a lot of people don’t get, both in the strip and in reality. Sure, as a subcontractor you can find a way out of your contract – and while that might be good for your soul, it won’t change the end effect. Somebody else will provide the same items and/or services you were. If Ruttech doesn’t manufacture the circuit boards, Intel will, and people will still die.
I didn’t even know the comments were closed down, but I’m happy to receive Carla content.
I’m suddenly befuddled because I just realized that Carla’s parents can’t be Joe and Rachel and I can’t picture her having any other parents.
Carlaaaaaaaaa<3
Is it time for Carla to have an extremely awkward conversation with her billionaire parents about the weapons stuff their company makes and who their products go to? Is it time for her to learn that just because her wealthy parents were good to her when she was growing up, that doesn’t mean that they’re good people in general?
Glad comments are back. Definitely understood why they weren’t open for yesterdays strip. No argument needed for that exchange.
… superstar DJ, here we go!
Love the symmetry. That down to her lap view, sandwiched and overlapped by screen inactive and screen active. And that flanked by a kind of – Oh God, gonna do this necessary bloody thing, and Hi, Hey.
Again, not a lot of words, but a lot ‘said’.
And on the screen appears… DOOFENSHMIRTZ!
Welcome back everyone
hope y’all had a pleasant break
Got finished with episodes 5 and 6 of Dispatch and read up to the end of the second third of the 2006 Blue Beetle comic, anyone else do anything fun while we were free of this place?
Can confirm, me and Jay also spent our time losing our minds over Dispatch (and Fionna and Cake)
My butch4femme ass has been so thoroughly hoodwinked by Blonde Blazer it’s not even funny
My only issue with Dispatch is I want to play the actual dispatch sections more
I’d probably pay another 30 bucks if they expanded that part into a full game tbh
If they add an infinite mode after the finale it will immediately enter my top five games for this year. The dispatching gameplay is so fun
I was thinking about Carla yesterday actually. I’m excited to see her potentially facing this emotional conflict head-on!
…Here I am at Camp Granada
Hey fun fact seeing this page on Patreon yesterday kept me from (temporarily) dropping the comic
Joyce’s choices caucasity re: her choice of words in her last panel were so deeply triggering (particularly with the whole survivors guilt thing the western side of my country has going on rn, myself included) that i was gonna have to take my first break in twelve years of reading if she didn’t get off my screen expeditiously. First time I’ve ever felt so personally upset by a doa character
Still might, if something else similar happens but for now this is good. I like Carla. I like this subplot. More of this plz
(This is not an invitation to come discuss yesterdays comic like a roundabout comment section, if you intend to do that kindly fuck off. I just wanted to express some feelings about something pretty major for me personally)
This is not to start a discussion about the previous strip and obviously as a white person I did not have the direct personal reaction you must have had to what Joyce said – and I sympathize with you for that, I get how rough that must have been – but I can to a certain extent commisserate with regard to how that strip really drove home for me that “damn, I just do not like anything about this character right now.”
She’ll realize she’s being awful and improve eventually, that’s basically the thesis statement of her character. But for the sake of my health I’d love to hit fast forward on her current character arc
thiiiiiis, so much, and thank you for saying it.
***eastern side, fuck why do i keep mixing those up lately
East and west are the same direction, if you really think about it.
Yes! Finally more Carla…and hopefully for more than just two strips.
here i am in, indianuh
Nuance is hard.
In the case of Joyce, she’s simply not invested in the larger political worldscape the way her sister is. She’s almost been murdered multiple times on LGBTA issues that Bulmeria is just sort of an abstract. She doesn’t understand what Raidah is going on about and tried to apologize to Asma because she thinks of her as representative of all the protestors like it was a shindig she ruined.
Carla and she are both getting lessons in the larger world now outside of the campus and their personal journey’s.
Which is a lot to put on people.
(It also is complicated by the fact Raidah hates Joyce personally for reasons unrelated and Carla’s own struggles where her parents are fantastic allies)
So I see Carla and Joyce’s stories paralleling each other.
Joyce very pointedly did not want to apologize to Asma and went out of her way to emphasize that she was not apologizing to her for kissing Dorothy, unprompted.
OF course Bulmeria is abstract, it’s literally an abstraction of real life Israel. How can Joyce have an opinion on something when we don’t even really know the specifics?
I mean that’s the story I’m arguing.
Mind you, she’s fictional so Bulmeria is as real as she is.
Joyce can have an opinion in the same way Asma and Jocelyne do. Just because we don’t know the specifics, doesn’t mean people in the comic don’t.
I mean how people like Asma feel about the subject is very contingent on what group to being targeted by the genocide. It’d be really strange if it were like real life and Muslim people were being targeted and no one has brought that up in the many conversation about the genocide? Especially when the Muslim women are present? Bonus points if Bulmeria is suposed to be a “””Jewis State””” (big air quotes so you don’t think I agree with Israel) and Dorothy doesn’t seem to have anything to say on the matter being Jewish herself.
I mean yes. I guess.
But Asma knows these things. She can have those opinions.
The OP’s point was that the situation is kind of abstract to Joyce who isn’t paying attention to foreign conflicts, but to whom domestic LGBTA issues are very personal, not that we haven’t been told the details, so no one in the comic can treat it as anything but an abstraction.
I really like that Carla smiles when she greets her parents. So many characters and people irl don’t.
It means she’s actually happy to talk to them. People shouldn’t pretend that kind of thing – it gets misunderstood.
It reads as a nervous smile to me. Not happy but not necessarily a lie either
For what it’s worth, that doesn’t look like the expression I’d expect someone who wants to ask their parents a very awkward question about their complicity in genocide to have.
Hard agree! Too many people reach a judgement on others before asking the question. Carla knows the value of her parents, who not only supported her transition but changed society to let her live as she should. Raising a concern is the way to begin change.
Gonna have _that_ discussion, are we?
(well, i hope she does, anyway)
“So, um… I heard things that… like… you might be shitty people?”
That her parents are immediately available to her is a good sign. They’re not off dropping bombs personally or in different volcano lairs. They dropped what they were doing and answered when she called.
Unless this will be an AI that they programmed to respond. Then we’ll be headed for a Hannelore situation.
Or maybe they had scheduled the call beforehand?
I’m a little surprised at the color palette of her bedding.
I would have thought she would go for Ultra-car (not necessarily a character-themed bed, like a little kid, but at least the same palette – red with black stripes to the left and right, white pillowcases)(although . . . why not an actual Ultra-car bed?)
She has a sticker underneath the TV instead.
Yay Carla! Great to see her again. I really hope she doesn’t get broken by this conversation.
You know, plot contrivance aside, I have to wonder… is there a reason Carla’s all the way in Indiana for school?
Generally not somewhere you’d think tech billionaires would be based. And you’d think she’d be at a more expensive get like MIT or something.
Maybe they recognize it’s healthy to know normal people and not just the ultra wealthy and the political class. That would be pretty grounded of them.
I think she’s from Indiana. When she interacted with Harrison, it came up that when she was younger, Carla was connected to the case where “he was part of the legal team that struck down those anti-transgender laws. In Indiana.”
I agree it might not be where you’d expect tech billionaires to be based, but I assume they own more than one home… maybe Indiana was a good middle ground between some of their major business locations.
Well, links got messed up– first one was supposed to be what the second one is, second one was supposed to be this: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/laws/
You say “good middle ground between some of their major business locations”, I say “tax haven”.
Is Indiana a tax haven? I feel like there are other locations better known for being tax havens– that’s basically why we have Delaware (and also that living in Indiana wouldn’t mean that they had to have their business incorporated there).
Indiana is a good place for rich people to live if they don’t want to be taxed very much. It does not have a progressive tax scheme and instead imposes a 3% flat income tax, with individual counties imposing additional taxes. Flat taxes are regressive because the tax burden is lesser on richer people and greater on poorer people, so they’re most beneficial to the wealthy.
It’s actually not a huge surprise for a tech company to be in Indiana – Indianapolis is a growing regional tech hub and has a robust tech sector.
Also, a LOT of mid-sized tech and defense companies deliberately avoid the big tech hubs — my company actively tries to avoid hiring in the Bay Area and a couple other places because the salary expectations are so high. Especially if you are a mostly remote-work place you can get a lot more engineering talent for your dollar in Indiana vs. a major tech hub, unless you’re competing for the top 0.01% of workers in the hot field de jour.
I think it’s possible they have major company bases in multiple places, considering the range of products they seem to make. But anyway, I was focusing on where they/Carla lived, which doesn’t have to be the same as where their company is– though it could be. Just that Carla’s not “all the way in Indiana for school” when she’s just… from Indiana.
I was also half-joking, but I was willing to bet Indiana was “business-friendly”, as they like to call it. 🙂
Willis! Is Carla at Camp Granada?
excited to find out what warcriminal!not!joe looks like in this universe
I could’ve sworn we’d seen Carla’s parents like in a flashback but damned if I can find them going through Carla’s (and Ultra Car’s) tags.
This ID going to be an uncomfortable conversation isn’t it?
*is not ID
Stupid autocorrect, why do you autocorrect That?
Autocorrect is ridiculous now.
“Oh, you probably meant this word that is only used occasionally and which you personally haven’t typed in months.”
No, I meant the very common word I actually typed.
“Mm, I’m not so sure. Also, you probably meant ‘glas’ here.”
That’s… that’s not even English…
“You’re welcome.”
The upside is that you can now blame so much on autocorrect, because it will mess up so wildly that a lot could be possible.
And it’s just gonna keep getting worse, because “AI” can’t tell whether it’s learning from accurate information or common mistakes.
people are gonna be really shocked when it turns out that both of ruths parents are mike, and also both of them are pregnant
I actually had 10K on that
Maybe this will be a shocking reveal… where we find out her parents are both just computer avatars for advanced AIs. Then BOOM… crossover with Questionable Content, and both comics combine for a massive permanent entwined storyline.
I do expect we won’t see their faces/disembodied voices but ai billionaires would be wild lol
Well this only ends poorly, so far our track record of the introduction of parents to the comic leading to anything good is…. not stellar
Dorothy’s parents were fine… I’m struggling to think of other positive examples though. I guess Amber’s mom was a bit of a mixed bag, can’t really blame the negative effect on Amber on her mom, that was just Amber being Amber.
But hey, it can’t be worse than Becky/Amber’s dads right? RIGHT?