I’m about the same. I’ve never been able to bring up divisive or confrontational topics, so I fully get it. Maybe I’m just a pushover, or maybe i have some amount of anxiety,, but it can be really difficult to broach topics that might cause disagreement or disappointment. Regardless of their actual expectations or beliefs, my assumption of their expectations makes it nigh impossible to say anything.
If you’ve ever had (or witnessed) a bad reaction to discussing a difficult topic, then it’s not cowardice, it’s a learned behaviour and instinct. The survival instinct is the toughest one to overcome, even when reason tells us we’ll be fine. Conversely, if you’ve ever — even once — managed to have such a conversation while also afraid, then you’re not a push-over,
you’re courageous.
n.b. Bravery isn’t an absence of fear, it is taking action despite being afraid.
Heh, back when I was in high school I used to joke all the time about being craven. I guess I never really got over that assessment of myself. Thank you, your words are making me feel all sorts of ways.
Yeah but it is VERY understandable and relatable reason to do so.
They do honestly seem like the best Parents we have seen in the comic, atleast at being parents. They seem to 100% support her for who she is and who she wants to be with, and thats a lot to ask for A LOT of parents these days, both in comic and out of it.
If she has that good of a relationship with her parents and she truly loves them with all her heart, having this conversation would probably be the hardest and most scary thing she could do during this part of her life. They have given her full support, but she can’t do the same for them thanks to what the company is doing. A Company that has given her everything in life thanks to the wealth it has given her family.
If you have that good of a relationship with family, it can feel impossible to do ANYTHING that could hurt that relationship (there are a lot of relatives that I used to be super close to that I really should cut ties with… but the most I have gotten the backbone to do is unfriend them on Facebook… Hell I could only Hide the content my father posts because I didn’t have the nerve to unfriend or block him like I probably should for my own mental health).
…we haven’t seen that much of them yet though. Maybe they’re just good at seeming?
(Although the law of averages suggests we ought to run into some good parents by now.)
Also, probably Dorothy’s parents, although admittedly there’s been so little drama there we don’t really know how they’ll react now there is.
(I will continue to refer back to the Paetron strip where Dorothy’s dad “complains” that having a perfect daughter means he’s got nothing to be understanding and supportive about.)
Absolutely, but i kinda get it. If my pareblnts were *half* as supportive about me being trans, especially at that age, i’m pretty sure my convictions might wobble a little.
The siren song of ‘parents who love and support you’ is stronk.
I can’t help wondering how many of these people calling Carla a coward have actually stood up for anything in their entire life where they had a lot to lose.
Okay I kind of don’t understand anymore where people are coming from. Like whether Dot is serious or joking about calling Carla a chicken or a coward I don’t think that or any of the following comments are big indictments of their character or indicators of life experience. Like what are we doing here? We are just now getting a break from weeks of toxic discussion and debate over the Joyce and Dorothy/protest story. Carla’s a fictional character, she’ll be fine whether some call her a chicken or not. Some comments are just meant to be silly or fun, or even if not are inoffensive enough in content to be ignored.
No, see, you misunderstand. The whole point of human connection, is to use every available opportunity to ensure that the community knows that you know what it means to be ethically pure, and that all the characters are deficient! If you don’t aggressively and obsessively point out every fault in every character, and summarily judge them, the other commenters might think that you are impure of heart or soul! The only purpose of human connection is to constantly judge and castigate every action! Even if the person you’re castigating, literally isn’t real!
Like, shit. If you ever just enjoy things, you’re no better than the fascists, after all. Every moment of every day must be constrained by the inherent responsibility of omni-judgement, so that everybody around you can know that You Have The Correct Opinions. Anyone who acts otherwise, is inherently suspect! Why would they ever choose not to loudly tell everyone how moral they are? If somebody doesn’t do that, ever, then it’s direct and obvious proof that they’re a terrible person!
“Some comments are just meant to be silly or fun,” pshaw. Nothing is ever less than the maximum amount of serious. If you aren’t letting everybody around you know every time you score on the Morality High Score Table, do you even really care about being a good person?
Obviously, it goes without saying, anyone who takes issue with this post, kicks puppies and kills people. But I had to say it anyway. Just in case people didn’t know how super serious I was. But it would have gone without saying! But, of course, it also had to be said.
You’re welcome. You’d think switching to REALLY OBVIOUSLY AND FAMOUS LADY CHARACTER gravitars would help. Wishing again that we had a pronoun field in the comments here because I do sympathize a lot with memory issues.
My apologies. I’m not entirely sure where I messed up but I’ll strive to do better in the future. For sake of clarity my use of “their” was meant in reference to all the comments and not just Dot’s specifically. I perhaps made a grammatical mistake as well.
I was hoping maybe the name field could accommodate (saw some other users with non-alphanumeric symbols in their names), but apparently parentheses trigger comment moderation. I suppose that’s fair, still disappointing though.
I’m not surprised, nor do I blame her. That was not a coversation to have over zoom/skype/discord. Asking why her parents are contributing to war crimes, for financial gain, is a conversation where everybody needs to be in the same room. Carla is going to be asking some uncomfortable questions, and her parents con’t get away from her by clicking on, “disconnect”.
i mean even if carla doesn’t specifically confront them about it, other than a pr team or any assistants filtering it, surely they’re aware about hte criticisms of their company
Implying that people aren’t perfect, and situations are nuanced not black, and white? Definitely new, or perhaps just hidden by all the hate from the last few weeks.
“Obnoxious” “Problems” I can see I’ve worn out my welcome here. I guess I’ll go back to not trusting Asher exclusively. Can’t do running gags in this town anymore.
Nah, don’t get me wrong, I dig the comic, but those problems are very, very far from *special* to this fandom. I was just poking fun at the idea that this one encounter means Carla isn’t to be trusted, for some of the reasons just mentioned.
Yeah, confronting the people you love and respect more than anything about anything is painful. And I bet Carla has basically never had cause to do it before. It’s disappointing, but not surprising, that she couldn’t bring herself to do it. I hope she gets there sooner rather than later.
I hope that Carla has that discussion with her parents before they meet Charlie, and I /really/ hope that meeting Charlie doesn’t cause problems between any of them. I’ve got family that is far from perfect, but I still have a hard time confronting them on it because they pay for everything I need due to my inability to work. If not for them I would literally be dead.
That’s not what I said, and you know it. I am specifically hoping that meeting Charlie doesn’t cause drama. I said I want Carla to have that discussion before then which will still cause conflict, but won’t cause problems between Charlie, and Carla.
I do want problems between Charlie and Carla, this is a melodrama comic and the core of that is relationship drama. People didn’t want any thing to happen between Becky and Dina, but I knew that would never last. Kill your darlings people.
Notably the phrase “Kill Your Darlings” doesn’t mean “If you have anything in any story you’re writing that you like, you MUST destroy it”. It just means not to be afraid of doing so.
I mean, the inverse snark would be “I too enjoy reading stories with no nuance and zero sense of investment in the characters”.
Killing your darlings isn’t a blanket prescriptive statement. Melodrama doesn’t just come in just “soap opera” or “reality show” flavors. Lots of people enjoy drama by getting invested in characters and feeling FEELINGS as they undergo crisis. If horror fans watch a movie and say “oh shit RUN GIRL, he about to axe murder you” or “oh no, I hope the cosmic voidcreature doesn’t kill that adorable old couple”, it doesn’t mean they hate the risk and terror. I’m more doubtful of a “horror fan” who just impassively watches meat-grinder films and gets upset if any characters survive at the end, but that’s just me I guess.
Do you play D&D? A lot of players work hard in game to avoid fights or conflict, but if they actually didn’t want the risk of drama, they wouldn’t play. The dice and the DM are there to make sure that drama still happens.
Willis takes that role here. We get invested and eat our popcorn, they kill their darlings sometimes, or they don’t (and people in the comments do it for them, sometimes vividly).
I wouldn’t say I love my parents all that much. But… it is a bit hard to be nice to them while they support right-wing ideologies. Especially since they were so against me transitioning and now acting supportive.
This is absolutely the best way to have handled this issue and no problems will arise from allowing it to silently rankle and fester. I fully and unreservedly endorse this course of inaction.
Janneke: And now that the Torment Nexus has learned to recognize generational wealth’s effects on DNA, we don’t have to worry about it sparing the unworthy!
Prediction: In six months when Charlie shows up at dinner with the parents, she casually calls them monsters abetting a genocide. Because Charlie don’t mince words.
Well I sure hope it’s not six in-universe months from now; that would yield an in-universe date of August 1, which will almost certainly fall in the middle of a time skip.
If she does this with out making the possibility clear to Carla before going there, that would be an asshole thing to do. Or a clueless thing thing if you blame it on her poor social skills.
Maybe it’s from growing up with abusive parents, but I don’t think there’s a level of poor social skills that would excuse blowing up my family lol. Like, maybe in a cosmic way, but on a personal level I’d be very cross
What was Carla’s plan? Have them quit the tech business entirely for moral reasons? I don’t think anything she could’ve said would cause them to up and quit in a single day.
Also like, they could retire today and never work a day in their life again and still have more than enough money for any potential descendants to found a country. Quitting for a billionaire is not a real problem.
Stockholders assumes the company isn’t solely owned by them which is not information we have. It’s called Ruttech, I’d assume they own most if not all of it. The real moral conundrum assuming they have a conscience would be the sudden termination of all their employees.
Could be both – Zuckerberg personally owns a majority of voting shares in Meta despite it being publicly traded. (Granted that’s uncommon, but uncommon arrangements are more common in these apex corps which Ruttech seems to be.)
Do we know (that is, has the comic stated) whether Ruttech is publicly traded? Because if there are stockholders involved, then the Drs Rutten probably don’t actually have the power to do that (unless they somehow manage to convince said stockholders, which, no they won’t). But if it’s wholly owned by the Rutten family, then yeah they could AFAIK stop anytime.
They could probably quit selling weapons parts to the military, which is the issue as far as we know, at least with some effort. The question I think is if Carla is scared to ask because she doesn’t know if they would.
I don’t think Carla had a plan beyond asking them about the computer systems they’re making for weapons used for genocide. And now that’s delayed until at least the next she time talks with her parents.
I wrote an essay once where I pointed out Bruce is actually a pretty good critique of billionaire activism because he can’t actually change the systemic problems of Gotham on his own. The government can but Batman even with his vast wealth can’t get the government to change when it’s only designed to funnel wealth to people like him.
I think part of the problem with Bruce Wayne is that either the writers or editorial don’t really want to tackle the idea of Bruce Wayne being part of the system that enables Gotham’s poverty/high violent crime which is why you end up with this: He can’t do anything, the government is only a presence on the federal level (Amanda Waller, that time Lex Luthor became president) or municipal level (the countless mayorship campaigns), and nobody really mentions how, well, WayneTech’s jobs simply aren’t helping all that much since they’re all high-tech jobs which most of Gotham’s impoverished wouldn’t even be able to sniff.
It’s not the fictional character’s fault is what I’m saying.
The other thing is that while billionaire wealth is incomprehensible by normal people’s standards, a billion is really not that much when it comes to big city funding.
Even Bruce’s vast wealth can’t just cover all the problems on that scale.
The Tick does not cut down rainforests. The Tick does not brood like some billionaire who may have disasosative idenity disorder, and an obsession with flying radar birds of the night.The Tick is justice in its purest naturally occurring form. He is the mighty blue avalanche of fate itself. Justicey fate. Thundering forward on a pair of righteous blue muscles that answer only to destiny.
I’m with you on this one. Uncomfortable conversations, especially with a parent you love and respect, has the potential to be devastating and that’s just emotionally. If you’re financially dependent on them and they control aspects of your life for you, that’s even harder.
I’m not sure that her parents actually are good people just yet. We haven’t actually met them.
We’ve seen how they act towards Carla. This can’t be how they act normally. Maybe it’s a faint version of it, but this is 100% how they relate to her daughter. No entrepreneur – no billionaire CEO – is THIS soft, gushy, toothless.
Meaning, they’re not treating her here like an adult. They’re certainly not talking to her like a peer. And for Carla to question or criticize them on morally questionable areas, to get an honest response, they would have to speak to her on that level.
The persona we see here that is all hugs and kisses and uwu and sparkles, is not the persona who would be designing, say, drones with infrared tracking and targeting capability for more effectively gunning down people from the safety of an office a thousand miles away.
At some point, these people would have had to, at the very least rationalize and make peace with those projects. Assuming they would have been against them to begin with, which again, we don’t know.
I didn’t say they were good, I said they weren’t inherently bad. Which is a fair assessment of people that support their daughter being trans, are happy to know she has found an SO regardless of gender, and want her to be happy. Does that make them good? Not necessarily, but it’s a start.
I dunno. Personally, I don’t believe that you get to be the billionaire CEO of a company by being a good person. I’d go so far as to say you’d have to actively show me evidence that you aren’t actually scum.
Not disowning or shaming your child for their own existence and identity doesn’t make you a good person. It’s baseline for not being a monster. I can’t imagine doing that to my own child, regardless of pretty much anything. Doesn’t make me good; makes me a dad. Plenty of people treat their children wonderfully because they’re *their* children but couldn’t care less about others.
And yeah I know the standard is set pretty low in DOA but can we all agree that there’s a gray area between “evil” and “good” that is just “things.” Choosing to eat a bologna sandwich isn’t evil or good, it’s just lunch.
Carla is their love and joy and everything that makes them happy in the world. And as we’ve seen, she can be a bit of a narcissistic terror at times and believes she’s the center of the world. Doesn’t seem to have helped her all that much. I’d have hated to be one of her teachers. Ever try to tell one of *those* parents that their darling baby is actually being a bully to someone else, or mouthing off, or disturbing the class? Well, you must be wrong, because *my* little angel would *never* do that, and they say they didn’t, and they would *never* lie to me.
Not saying that’s what Carla’s parents are like. But we really don’t know. All we know is their position, their company, their wealth, the fact that they made huge publicized headlines about how they were accepting their trans daughter, and how Carla turned out, behaviorally. And this is honestly the first time in like forever that Carla *hasn’t* been an insufferable self-absorbed narcissist.
None of that screams “good person.” At the very least, there’s at least more bad than good.
I’ll go so far as to argue against both this AND (kinda) BorkBorkBork — you can’t be a billionaire without being inherently bad except in the EXTREMELY limited case of “inherited/won that much, divesting/spending as fast as plausible to get back to a sane amount of money”. By definition, becoming a billion-dollar company requires some amount of exploitation of your workers unless you’ve managed to somehow make a company where literally every employee shares in the proceeds enough that everyone down to the janitor is also a multimillionaire.
They can not be ENTIRELY evil by the definition that says “they support their trans daughter, that’s good”, but as they say even Hitler loved dogs. By a definition of evil that loose, everyone’s got some good in them.
How many people have inherited billionaire wealth and given most of it away? I’m guessing not very many. Does that make the children of billionaires all “inherently bad”? What makes it ‘inherent’? Is it genetic — self-made billionaires having genetically bad children?
If you want to take that road, I’d say that there’s nothing unique about billionaires. That the vast majority of people would do the same thing if they somehow stumbled into that kind of wealth. Or even lesser levels.
It’s also easy for even the well-intentioned to talk themselves into something like a foundation that invests the money and gives away (most of) the proceeds. You can do more in the long run that way, right?
Yeah, lots of people denouncing landlords, who I suspect would happily be a landlord if they inherited rental property from an uncle or something… People’s morality rarely runs against their economic self-interest. Sometimes, but rarely.
If you replace money with cocaine/heroin/any addictive drug that’s more akin to the situation that rich kids are raised in. Only they have to take the drugs at least a little in order to survive.
Like, the kids can be okay from it, but they’re being brought up in a severely warped mindset, around warped people, around warped things to survive. I don’t see many people who forgo clothes, most people here aren’t vegetarian/vegan, and anyone who drinks coffee or eats chocolate participates actively in slavery. No ethical consumption in capitalism indeed, but those little concessions we make to ourselves are the same ones billionaires make on larger scales. “If it weren’t me, it’d be someone else.” “They’d just oust me if I tried to change anything, I can do harm reduction here.” “This is my parent’s legacy, they did the worst stuff, not me.” “I mean, I don’t fly as often as Taylor Swift.”
It’s a gradual corruption of the soul, but people born into even moderate wealth receive it at an extremely young age. The only way to receive love from your parents is to think like they do, and if you don’t then you aren’t worth the dirt they walk on. The only way a billionaire kid would be able to keep their soul would be to donate/reject all of it. And every single one of them would argue that’s an unreasonable ask and a squander of their parent’s efforts (and by reject it, I’m including the investments and networking that comes with it). Hell, when I was 6 I used to sneer at people I considered lesser than me by stating that my parents could buy and sell their entire family. It’s an incredibly fucked mindset that takes either a lot of good luck to outgrow or a lot of bad luck.
I think you can, in the absence of data, look at using lottery winners as a proxy — MOST people, who are not fucked up in the way billionaires are, will eventually spend down or donate money like that. For most people, money is a thing you use to get what you want, as opposed to a thing you hoard because money is your score.
“will eventually spend down or donate money like that”
I think that’s usually portrayed as a bad thing: jackpot winners frittering away the wealth on stuff they don’t need, like fancy cars. But my impression is that it’s actually a myth, fueled by a few visible cases, with typical cases being some amount of generosity and spending, but keeping at least half in investment.
So it’s okay to design “say, drones with infrared tracking and targeting capability for more effectively gunning down people from the safety of an office a thousand miles away”, if you’re not a billionaire?
Who are the thousands of people that Dolly Parton exploited?
Blanket statements can be difficult to defend, as it takes only a single counterexample to disprove them. I know, folks don’t like nuance, but there it is.
They’re billionaires (always bad!)
They support their trans child (always good!)
They make weapons that are plausibly used to both commit genocide and defend against imperialist/genocidal aggression (highly difficult to say especially since in the real world there are a LOT of governments supplying weapons in exactly that way)
They’re good people towards their trans daughter, but that doesn’t make them good people in general. And considering they’re billionaires who own a company that makes computer systems for weapons, I’m leaning heavily towards Emil and Janneke not being good people, despite how supportive they’ve been of Carla.
I’m not surprised that you’re bracing yourself for backlash. It’s an ugly situation that’s really easy to take a moral stance on when we’re not involved. And it doesn’t help her any that Carla is several steps removed from the violence. It’s easier to detach yourself from violence being done far away by someone else. If her parents had made their fortune doing something obviously evil line stomping babies to death, that would be a super easy line to draw. But they don’t do the killing, they sell the boots. And those boots have legitimate defensive applications and civilian applications. So how responsible are they really that some of their customers also happen to kill babies?
For what it’s worth, I do think that there’s a morally correct answer, but I sympathize with Carla for not getting there on her first attempt.
The Tick does not cut down rainforests. The Tick does not brood like some billionaire who may have disasosative idenity disorder, and an obsession with flying radar birds of the night.The Tick is justice in its purest naturally occurring form. He is the mighty blue avalanche of fate itself. Justicey fate. Thundering forward on a pair of righteous blue muscles that answer only to destiny
This was suppsoed to be written in another comment, thread but got posted on its own. So if you’re wondering why this comment feels out of place that’s the reason.
It’ll never happen, and probably shouldn’t, but I kind of want the subversion of Carla going like “Please divest from Israel” and her parents just being entirely cool with it because they’re so rich they don’t know or care what they’re investing in.
I’ll sign up on the people being happy about it. We have superheroes and supervillains, we can have fantasy billionaire loving parents. Billie’s got shitty Rich dad to fill the gap
God forbid a farcical romp ever stray from the cold realism of life for FUN reasons, instead of just traumatizing the characters over and over and over with comic book insanity.
This isn’t actually all that different from what Joyce went through.
Thought her parents were the best ever. That they supported her in everything. Went out into the world, broadened your world view, and learned a little later that actually, they might be very different, and that you’re just seeing one part.
I’ve heard this a long time ago, and while it doesn’t apply to everyone (because some people are literally monsters) it did to me, and many others.
Being a child is knowing that your parents can do no wrong.
Being an adolescent is realizing that your parents are actually horrible.
Being an adult is realizing that your parents are human.
We’re all human. We all fuck up. We make the best decisions that we can, with the information given to us, with the environments we exist in, while dealing with the baggage we have from others.
We will ALL hurt people. We will ALL do shit we regret; things we realize were wrong. Life is far, far too complex for anyone to have all their shit figured out from the get-go.
The main difference between Hank and Carol, or Joyce and Mary, or Sarah and Raidah, or Charles and Walky, or Joe and Gashface, is not that one is conservative and the other is liberal, or that one is kind and the other is mean, or that one is religious and the other is atheist, or that one loves and the other hates.
It’s that one is capable of humility, self-reflection, and change, and one is not.
Even worse, it turns out everyone is capable of change. If we’re going to judge people, we need to judge them on a sliding scale – how much wrong they have to do before they’re willing to change. Like we’ve seen most obviously with Amber, you’ll reach a point where you look at what you’ve done and realize something has gone wrong and try to fix it.
Which is why it annoys me half the commenters want to dismiss the Doctors Rutten out of hand, before seeing the slightest indication of what they have done wrong, how much they know about how wrong it is, what resistance they might put up before trying to change, or what they might be willing to change. So very Rachel.
It’s almost as if, being good in SOME areas, does not make you necessarily a good person.
… he said, while explaining to people that just because the billionaire CEOs of a company creating tech that helps kill people accept their trans teenage daughter, they MIGHT not actually be the best people in the world.
And sometimes your parents really are just horrible people. Becoming an adult in that situation can be about learning how to break that cycle in your own life instead.
One thing that’s a little more subtle is that Emil and Janneke are not being perfect parents here. Not saying they did anything bad, but the way they participated in the conversation put more pressure on Carla to be the one to push discussion.
They learn the important thing, express excitement and support about it, then push her to wrap it up with a “was there anything else or can I move on back to my workday” – to be fair she can probably call outside work hours if she had a big discussion to bring up (I think it’s morning but idk). Then panels two and three would be kind of a weird way to say “no, there’s nothing else” but they assumed that and cut off her opportunity to say “…but”, perhaps in part because they never really took their focus off their work.
They may be supportive without limit, but that doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily established great communication with their daughter, nor taught her great communication skills. (Maybe they’re the type that thought the most important things to teach her were engineering skills – and no fault for wanting to share the things they loved and valued). Maybe they don’t have them themselves – perhaps otherwise they’d have noticed what panels 2 and 3 really meant. Maybe being ultra-supportive in both words and deeds, but only for a limited time because work came first was more than just today, maybe it was a pattern throughout Carla’s childhood.
So the whole “I don’t know my parents as well as I think I do” thing is just about who they are, it’s potentially also about how connected they are. They’re Carla’s closest friends, but that’s not saying much if she never had any others.
I wonder how long they had to argue to decide who will have the webcam facing them and who would need to make an half turn so that they can both face it whenever they must do a joint face-tine.
That’s a perceptive question because I see it worked out in so many offices. It was probably Dad’s suggestion. Both Carla and her dad are manic engineer types and successful engineers learn early on to put virtual meetings ports away from any work surface. Carla is using the same technique. She switches to the big monitor up and away from the laptop.
I feel for that, her parents seem genuinely loving, caring and supportive toward her. Which makes it so much harder for her to even ask if the whole thing of trying to call them out for something all the harder.
I can see why she struggled to believe it, since Mary is Mary and they seem like genuinely nice people….
Also thank god I’ve been wanting something like this for carla, there’s only so many times I can tolerate “asshole but it’s fine because it’s funny” for characters, and this gives her more . I was the same with Mike until we started seeing the flashbacks with him ethan and Amber, giving us an actual insight into the kind of guy he actually is, this too gives us more of carla in a good way.
As much as I get Carla not wanting to rock the boat, I feel like she should maybe do it before they DO meet Charlie because Charlie does NOT have the social wherewithal to not bring it up while meeting them…
Oof. I can’t blame Carla for not bringing it up. I wouldn’t have been able to do it either, in her position. I just hope it doesn’t cost her her girlfriend.
I was hoping Carla wouldn’t chicken out, but I guess it’s not surprising. Avoiding a likely very difficult conversation with her parents who have always supported her is much easier than confronting them. But she’s gonna have to ask them about the computer systems they make for weapons eventually, and if she doesn’t ask, I’m sure Charlie will if she gets the chance.
This is difficult because i assume she relies on them to support herself, if i was going to confront people who are in a position of power over me like this i would do my best to prepare for the worst, the worst being them cutting support.
There wouldn’t be any shame in preparing before she talks to them about this subject
in carla’s place i would have a separate bank account and ask for money or find some way to get a decent amount of money from them as a fallback and anything else she can get
of course my parents are not supportive of my being trans so maybe she hasn’t been conditioned to think about these things, but idk, being a trans woman would probably help.
” i assume she relies on them to support herself,”
She might, might not. She might already have accounts and stock portfolios in her name, enough to be richer than the rest of the cast combined. I have no idea what’s typical for rich families, but a friend from a far less wealthy real estate family has her own stocks, originally picked by her father. (And due to those stocks doing well, she’s actually richer than her relatives, individually.)
Billiefer might also already be independently wealthy. Her parents seem more like assholes, but obviously also not very concerned with her, and she doesn’t seem hurting for money.
But pre-planning like that, accounting for the possibility, gives weight to the idea that is *is* a possibility that her supportive parents’ love and care could be conditional like that, and that’s something she really really doesn’t want to consider.
And honestly, even beyond not wanting to consider the possibility, I don’t think her main hang-up is material like that. (Perhaps that’s something she *should* consider more in this situation, but I don’t think that’s her main motivation). I think for her its more emotional- she doesn’t want to confront the reality that her supportive parents who she loves a lot might actually be very bad people. That’s very hard
It could be conditional, but Carla would know better than we do and we haven’t seen any signs of it.
If she gets cut off over this, I think it’ll be a renunciation on her part, not them punishing her. In which case, relying on a small fortune based on their ill-gotten wealth seems hypocritical.
Everyone is talking about reasonable and in depth things like how it can be difficult to be critical to people who have supported you your whole life, especially when they are part of your support network and youre a minority, when what i wanna know more about that ultracar sticker/magnet in the last panel!
Is jaw orthopedics just not a thing in America? I mean, with Dorothy it could be a money problem (again, America), but Carla doesn’t have money problems.
This isn’t cosmetic or anything. It’s an actual quality-of-life issue if you can’t chew properly or if your front teeth dry out and become brittle because you can’t close your mouth.
As someone who had to do some things, there’s a certain point where the only option left would be surgery and many people, regardless of money, will lean away from facial surgery unless it is a life saving operation because your face will never quite be what it was before. That can be very scary and daunting, and was indeed so for me. Also my orthodontist was insisting I could totally recover from jaw breaking surgeries within spring break and go back to school easily and I was like “fuck that man it’s gonna take way longer than a week to recover from my jaws being broken”.
Also I truly do mean jaw breaking surgeries. The way it was pitched to me, my bottom jaw would be broken and realigned, while a chunk of bone would be removed from my top jaw. I was kinda fuzzy on how exactly they were gonna… stitch together my top jaw from that, all I could imagine was my mouth looking like a deflated balloon.
You might as well attempt to analyze why some humans in-comic appear to possess sclera (“eye whites”) while others do not.
With at least one character (Ruth) somehow growing/acquiring them within the span of a day.
Braces and such are common if you have the money. Teeth are a big indicator of money in the US. As for jaw breaking, it’s rare because insurance rarely covers it. Been there. Six weeks with my jaw wired shut. Worth it in my case but also six weeks off work.
Insurance is a great point. I remember a family friend who was a nurse trying to help by suggesting to insurance that it was quality of life but insurance wasn’t going for it. As far as they were concerned, I could chew my food as is, ergo the surgery wasn’t necessary.
I’m curious what people actually would like from this discussion, when Carla eventually has it.
It’s hard for me to see any outcome that’s both vaguely realistic and narratively satisfying. Should Carla disown them unless they stop arming Bulmeria? Ignoring that that probably isn’t how it could work and they’d probably have to shut down (or just sell off) entire sections of the company to get out the defense business entirely. Would even that be enough, since they’d still be evil billionaires?
Honestly, if what we’ve been told of the Ruttens involvement so far is accurate, and there’s certainly been enough ambiguity that it might not be, it’s hard for me to feel that they have a lot of guilt. What we’ve been told is that they sell computer systems to the government, some of which get put into weapons, some of which the government gives/sells to Bulmeria. That seems like a pretty distant degree of responsibility to me. (Contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe, we have not been told that Ruttech makes weapons or that they sell anything to Bulmeria directly.) So I’m not sure, realistically, what they could do about it. I guess they could stop selling to the government entirely? But that’s assuming that whatever they make can’t be bought off the shelf or through a third party. Are they morally obligated to stop making computers because of how the government uses them? That seems extreme to me.
That’s what I kept saying in the previous few days threads: there are an astounding number of companies that “sell computers to the government, some of which get military use” in some capacity or another, and depending a lot on the specifics of the part being sold, that could mean anything from communications equipment to rocketry guidance systems to smart battery chargers.
And almost anything that’s not a very bespoke component of a specific weapon system (which this doesn’t sound like it is) is going to be a generic part with a National Stock Number and probably CAN be manufactured by more than one vendor.
Here is a fun fact. Some companies might not know they are selling to the military. It’s a bit of a unique example but Russia is buying a lot so-called “dual-use” items and components in roundabout ways. Because of sanctions they are cut off from official markets so they use middle-man and fake companies to order stuff to one of their non-sanctioned neighbours which they then bring to Russia, gut and reuse the necessary parts like cameras for drones or electronics for pretty much anything. Though I imagine that these days they just most of their stuff from China.
While that is possible: I wont believe it for a second.
There was a small-ish scandal in germany decades back about iraqui chemical weapons. Turned out, many top german firms had delivered machinery, raw materials, even how-to literature to Saddams regime. They claimed exactly what you describe here – “We knew nothing. We where duped.” It got mildly adjudicated, people forgot.
After the US invasion, suddenly one of the former iraqui officials who managed the project turned up in an interview and told the world “Nahhh, of course the knew. We came asking for mustard gas, they told us which àgricultural parts ” and `paint precursor chemicals” to buy, which shady greek shipping firm and croatian engineering service to use to get around german laws. They knew their own rules much better than we did, after all.”
A company, any company, has no morals.
Its a logical machine designed for the primary and – often sole – goal of multiplying investment money.
While I don’t believe Carla’s parents are THAT complicit, I too am of the opinion that, deep down, they KNOW what their computer chips are being used for (what other need would a weapons manufacturer or even just “the government” have for such chips? They don’t make the kinds of consumer gadgets or devices that would require such components, and I highly doubt the govt decided to jump through enough loopholes like buying through shell companies. Most companies are usually MORE than happy to openly count the government as one of their clients.) They just adopted a “we just make the parts, it’s not our decision how the final product is being used. We just focus on the tech and the R&D. Clear conscience!” stance.
Which is a decent nuanced take, but I think falls flat narratively. This has been set up as a confrontation. Just having her parents explain (and Carla (and Charlie?) accept) that while they’ve very sad about Bulmeria, they’re really just too distant from it to be responsible and can’t really have any effect on it anyway might be realistic, but it also seems hardly worth setting up the confrontation in the first place.
I want Carla to have a chance to begin developing and honing her own personal empathy and ethics outside her role as adorably sassy daughter of tech billionaires. I want to see her grow in confidence (real confidence) and sometimes that means healthily pushing back against things your parents do that you disagree with. Maybe she’ll even get super into politics she wasn’t forced into by virtue of being born the way she was born. I just think there’s a lot of room for interesting conflict and growth in a character I love.
Well, now, I think this little arc might be rather interesting. It’s a rare day indeed that we see Carla being unsure about herself, and it’s a bit of character development that she’s been sorely needing. I’m glad that this is something that she’s growing into naturally and not her having to go through a trauma dump to work through it – but it is a side that I feel like we’ve been sorely needing to see from her for quite a while.
Hopefully this little brush with her not being so sure of herself and her place in the world will help mellow her out a bit – and we’ll get to see her being a more well-rounded character going forward.
Idk what this confusion is about whether Carla’s parents are war profiteers. They profit from war, therefore they are war profiteers. Whether they can easily divest their involvement and whether they’re fully cognizant of all the pies Ruttech has their thumb in is yet to be determined, but let’s be honest about what we’re dealing with here.
Sorry if I don’t make much distinction with the broader military-industrial complex. I don’t think the children murdered by American bombs care about the nuance.
It’s a very valid point that with the amount of political influence the military-industrial complex has in the modern era that “war profiteering” is probably applicable to their activities.
I don’t know what definition thejeff is using, but by the usual definition I’m familiar with (“profits excessively or unethically from selling weapons or materiel”), you could argue most military tech vendors fit (even if they’re a bit far from the original Civil War connotation of “selling shoddy/overpriced/not-fit-for-purpose equipment to militaries”)
Another awkward conversation avoided, victory Carla!
I wonder if her parents actually have enough control over the company to get out of the conflict even if they wanted to. Like, they could just be founders who sold a ton of shares and now there’s a board of directors who make the business decisions.
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CHICKENED OUT
CHICKENED OUT
Bwak bwak BWAAAAK!
Cowardla arc begins.
CACO
The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak.
I’m about the same. I’ve never been able to bring up divisive or confrontational topics, so I fully get it. Maybe I’m just a pushover, or maybe i have some amount of anxiety,, but it can be really difficult to broach topics that might cause disagreement or disappointment. Regardless of their actual expectations or beliefs, my assumption of their expectations makes it nigh impossible to say anything.
If you’ve ever had (or witnessed) a bad reaction to discussing a difficult topic, then it’s not cowardice, it’s a learned behaviour and instinct. The survival instinct is the toughest one to overcome, even when reason tells us we’ll be fine. Conversely, if you’ve ever — even once — managed to have such a conversation while also afraid, then you’re not a push-over,
you’re courageous.
n.b. Bravery isn’t an absence of fear, it is taking action despite being afraid.
Heh, back when I was in high school I used to joke all the time about being craven. I guess I never really got over that assessment of myself. Thank you, your words are making me feel all sorts of ways.
CHOCKEE CHOCKEE CHOCKEE CHOCK!
A Koodle doodle do A Koodle doodle do
What does the fox say?
Has anyone in this thread even seen a chicken?
Only in the bathroom mirror before we tell the world how it is from our keyboards.
how dare the fictional character chicken out of something I probably wouldn’t have the courage to do
Cookoo ka CHA. Cookoo ka CHA!
Yeah but it is VERY understandable and relatable reason to do so.
They do honestly seem like the best Parents we have seen in the comic, atleast at being parents. They seem to 100% support her for who she is and who she wants to be with, and thats a lot to ask for A LOT of parents these days, both in comic and out of it.
If she has that good of a relationship with her parents and she truly loves them with all her heart, having this conversation would probably be the hardest and most scary thing she could do during this part of her life. They have given her full support, but she can’t do the same for them thanks to what the company is doing. A Company that has given her everything in life thanks to the wealth it has given her family.
If you have that good of a relationship with family, it can feel impossible to do ANYTHING that could hurt that relationship (there are a lot of relatives that I used to be super close to that I really should cut ties with… but the most I have gotten the backbone to do is unfriend them on Facebook… Hell I could only Hide the content my father posts because I didn’t have the nerve to unfriend or block him like I probably should for my own mental health).
…we haven’t seen that much of them yet though. Maybe they’re just good at seeming?
(Although the law of averages suggests we ought to run into some good parents by now.)
Dina’s parents, as little as we saw them, have been unequivocally good and supportive.
We tend to forget them because they appear very shortly, and since there’s no drama around them, there’s no reason to remember them…
Also, probably Dorothy’s parents, although admittedly there’s been so little drama there we don’t really know how they’ll react now there is.
(I will continue to refer back to the Paetron strip where Dorothy’s dad “complains” that having a perfect daughter means he’s got nothing to be understanding and supportive about.)
He’ll blurt out something horribly insensitive about how Dorothy used to be such a good girl, I’m sure.
There is no law of averages… IRL. There might be in storytelling.
This entire mini-arc reminds me of a line from another webcomic I read:
“My family has done some pretty awful things, but being a bad family was not one of them.”
Can I ask you about that webcomic? It rings a bell, but I cannot find it
Absolutely, but i kinda get it. If my pareblnts were *half* as supportive about me being trans, especially at that age, i’m pretty sure my convictions might wobble a little.
The siren song of ‘parents who love and support you’ is stronk.
I can’t help wondering how many of these people calling Carla a coward have actually stood up for anything in their entire life where they had a lot to lose.
I’m pretty sure most are joking
Wait you mean this isn’t the “I hate Genocidin’ Carla” containment thread?
Not obvious to me that they’re joking.
Okay I kind of don’t understand anymore where people are coming from. Like whether Dot is serious or joking about calling Carla a chicken or a coward I don’t think that or any of the following comments are big indictments of their character or indicators of life experience. Like what are we doing here? We are just now getting a break from weeks of toxic discussion and debate over the Joyce and Dorothy/protest story. Carla’s a fictional character, she’ll be fine whether some call her a chicken or not. Some comments are just meant to be silly or fun, or even if not are inoffensive enough in content to be ignored.
No, see, you misunderstand. The whole point of human connection, is to use every available opportunity to ensure that the community knows that you know what it means to be ethically pure, and that all the characters are deficient! If you don’t aggressively and obsessively point out every fault in every character, and summarily judge them, the other commenters might think that you are impure of heart or soul! The only purpose of human connection is to constantly judge and castigate every action! Even if the person you’re castigating, literally isn’t real!
Like, shit. If you ever just enjoy things, you’re no better than the fascists, after all. Every moment of every day must be constrained by the inherent responsibility of omni-judgement, so that everybody around you can know that You Have The Correct Opinions. Anyone who acts otherwise, is inherently suspect! Why would they ever choose not to loudly tell everyone how moral they are? If somebody doesn’t do that, ever, then it’s direct and obvious proof that they’re a terrible person!
“Some comments are just meant to be silly or fun,” pshaw. Nothing is ever less than the maximum amount of serious. If you aren’t letting everybody around you know every time you score on the Morality High Score Table, do you even really care about being a good person?
Obviously, it goes without saying, anyone who takes issue with this post, kicks puppies and kills people. But I had to say it anyway. Just in case people didn’t know how super serious I was. But it would have gone without saying! But, of course, it also had to be said.
*her
*Dot has been v clear about wanting to be referred to exclusively with she/her
Thanks
You’re welcome. You’d think switching to REALLY OBVIOUSLY AND FAMOUS LADY CHARACTER gravitars would help. Wishing again that we had a pronoun field in the comments here because I do sympathize a lot with memory issues.
My apologies. I’m not entirely sure where I messed up but I’ll strive to do better in the future. For sake of clarity my use of “their” was meant in reference to all the comments and not just Dot’s specifically. I perhaps made a grammatical mistake as well.
I was hoping maybe the name field could accommodate (saw some other users with non-alphanumeric symbols in their names), but apparently parentheses trigger comment moderation. I suppose that’s fair, still disappointing though.
Really fucking presumptuous thing to say, especially when I’ve been very open about the fact that I am a trans woman
I have to stand up for myself when I have a lot to lose every single day, including sometimes to my family
CHEEP CHEEPCHEEP CHEEP CHEEEEEP~~
– Tommy Wiseau
I’m disappointed, but not surprised.
PÓ PÓ PÓ PÓ!
I’m not surprised, nor do I blame her. That was not a coversation to have over zoom/skype/discord. Asking why her parents are contributing to war crimes, for financial gain, is a conversation where everybody needs to be in the same room. Carla is going to be asking some uncomfortable questions, and her parents con’t get away from her by clicking on, “disconnect”.
i mean even if carla doesn’t specifically confront them about it, other than a pr team or any assistants filtering it, surely they’re aware about hte criticisms of their company
Ko-Ko-Ko-O!!!!
i dont wanna fight mommy and daddy 🙁
Wonder if Charlie’s gonna fight them instead…
Man, I don’t know who would be scarier to fight, Charlie or Dina.
Either of them could be anywhere, but with Dina you don’t know where she is, and with Charlie neither of you do.
Dina can target you, Charlie’s more of a random encounter.
Booster probably would. Or at least snark about it.
Poor Carla.
Perhaps the only time in history that being too supportive and loving of a parent has been the problem.
“Man, if only they would suck in other ways, then telling them off would be more cathartic.”
They’re not the only pro-trans billionaires lobbying the government for my rights but they’re like one of three.
Wait who are the other ones?
I assume some hypothetical David Willis ones lobbying for Carla.
Maybe Galasso’s wife.
Whoops, totally forgot Pamela existed in this universe! That would be awesome and fitting if that was her off-panel background.
There’s also the Keeners to consider.
And Dina’s folks seem awesome too
Definitely not poor
Kappa
No, very very rich Carla.
Honestly the children of wealthy parents aren’t automatically also wealthy. They’re sometimes victims of financial abuse.
Don’t trust Carla……..😢
Remember: if someone fails to measure up on a really intense, difficult challenge their first time at it, don’t trust `em!
You must be new here
Implying that people aren’t perfect, and situations are nuanced not black, and white? Definitely new, or perhaps just hidden by all the hate from the last few weeks.
Nah, see, Sirksome just has this obnoxious running gag of going “Don’t trust [something relevant to today’s strip]”.
Yes this has caused problems before.
Huh. Aren’t running gags typically funny? That sounds *potentially* funny the first time, maybe, but to make a running gag of it?
Humor is subjective and I find it funny. Maybe it’s just not For You!
“Obnoxious” “Problems” I can see I’ve worn out my welcome here. I guess I’ll go back to not trusting Asher exclusively. Can’t do running gags in this town anymore.
I trust asher unconditionally. Its fine we balance out.
The running gag is funny. Some folks just don’t like absurdist humor.
A running gag? In this economy?
well you’d better go catch it!!
What exactly is Asher running for?
my heart
I think it’s funny. Some people just get their shit in a pinch over being mistaken once.
The solution to that is you double down and insist you’re correct, no matter what that pesky “rEaLiTy” says.
/s
Don’t trust running gags
ur gr8 sirk, don’t let the haters win by believing otherwise
Don’t trust… running gags? Yeah, it’s looped back on itself, time to quit.
Name one problem irs caused. One. A single one. One single problem.
*it’s, wtf I typed it with the apostrophe and everything
if not for the running gag, you wouldn’t have made this post, and thus, this typo!
Nah, don’t get me wrong, I dig the comic, but those problems are very, very far from *special* to this fandom. I was just poking fun at the idea that this one encounter means Carla isn’t to be trusted, for some of the reasons just mentioned.
Oof 🙁
Yeah, confronting the people you love and respect more than anything about anything is painful. And I bet Carla has basically never had cause to do it before. It’s disappointing, but not surprising, that she couldn’t bring herself to do it. I hope she gets there sooner rather than later.
I hope that Carla has that discussion with her parents before they meet Charlie, and I /really/ hope that meeting Charlie doesn’t cause problems between any of them. I’ve got family that is far from perfect, but I still have a hard time confronting them on it because they pay for everything I need due to my inability to work. If not for them I would literally be dead.
Yes I too enjoy reading stories with no drama or conflict.
That’s not what I said, and you know it. I am specifically hoping that meeting Charlie doesn’t cause drama. I said I want Carla to have that discussion before then which will still cause conflict, but won’t cause problems between Charlie, and Carla.
I do want problems between Charlie and Carla, this is a melodrama comic and the core of that is relationship drama. People didn’t want any thing to happen between Becky and Dina, but I knew that would never last. Kill your darlings people.
So you admit Mike was a Darling?
oh yes. Michael Darling, youngest brother of Wendy and John.
I mean…the author killed him, that’s a pretty good Exhibit A.
Notably the phrase “Kill Your Darlings” doesn’t mean “If you have anything in any story you’re writing that you like, you MUST destroy it”. It just means not to be afraid of doing so.
And I agree, MORE CONFLICT WOOOOOOO!
I mean, the inverse snark would be “I too enjoy reading stories with no nuance and zero sense of investment in the characters”.
Killing your darlings isn’t a blanket prescriptive statement. Melodrama doesn’t just come in just “soap opera” or “reality show” flavors. Lots of people enjoy drama by getting invested in characters and feeling FEELINGS as they undergo crisis. If horror fans watch a movie and say “oh shit RUN GIRL, he about to axe murder you” or “oh no, I hope the cosmic voidcreature doesn’t kill that adorable old couple”, it doesn’t mean they hate the risk and terror. I’m more doubtful of a “horror fan” who just impassively watches meat-grinder films and gets upset if any characters survive at the end, but that’s just me I guess.
Do you play D&D? A lot of players work hard in game to avoid fights or conflict, but if they actually didn’t want the risk of drama, they wouldn’t play. The dice and the DM are there to make sure that drama still happens.
Willis takes that role here. We get invested and eat our popcorn, they kill their darlings sometimes, or they don’t (and people in the comments do it for them, sometimes vividly).
Naw I play D&D to kill Orcs.
That had to be the most bad faith take to Clifs comment you could have made. Good job.
Zombiekyrik I mean, yall both have sal as a pfo and I got confused
That’s okay. We started out confused.
I wouldn’t say I love my parents all that much. But… it is a bit hard to be nice to them while they support right-wing ideologies. Especially since they were so against me transitioning and now acting supportive.
That dinner is going to be awkward.
Yup. I forget if Charlie is super anti-them or not.
I mean, she’s the reason Carla’s thinking about it at all.. Because Charlie brought it up
This is absolutely the best way to have handled this issue and no problems will arise from allowing it to silently rankle and fester. I fully and unreservedly endorse this course of inaction.
Emil at dinner: Yes, we’re building our T-virus to achieve COMPLETE GLOBAL SATURATION.
Carla: What?
Emil: How did you two meet!?
Janneke: And now that the Torment Nexus has learned to recognize generational wealth’s effects on DNA, we don’t have to worry about it sparing the unworthy!
Carla: Huh?
Janneke: Charlie, what’s your major?!
Hank Scorpio and Homer’s relationship basically, except now with parenthood.
Janneke leans over and locks eyes with Charlie, whispers, “One word…Plastics.”
Prediction: In six months when Charlie shows up at dinner with the parents, she casually calls them monsters abetting a genocide. Because Charlie don’t mince words.
Well I sure hope it’s not six in-universe months from now; that would yield an in-universe date of August 1, which will almost certainly fall in the middle of a time skip.
I think DW said he doesn’t plan on continuing the comic past freshman year? Don’t quote me on that tho
Six months our time. Six months in universe would be around DoA’s 20th anniversary, at the rate we’re going.
If she does this with out making the possibility clear to Carla before going there, that would be an asshole thing to do. Or a clueless thing thing if you blame it on her poor social skills.
Maybe it’s from growing up with abusive parents, but I don’t think there’s a level of poor social skills that would excuse blowing up my family lol. Like, maybe in a cosmic way, but on a personal level I’d be very cross
Like, *you* can go home, I have to live with it
What was Carla’s plan? Have them quit the tech business entirely for moral reasons? I don’t think anything she could’ve said would cause them to up and quit in a single day.
I think the plan was asking them if they were making military contracts to Bulmeria’s genocide and if so, why.
I don’t think she was prepared for any answer other than, “Oh no, that’s a mistake.”
Why do people always leap to extremes? “Mom and dad can our company please divest from involvement in an ongoing genocide” is not a big ask
Weirdly, that was actually a plot in the recent Iron Man comic.
Tony has to undergo extreme frustration because he wants to divest Stark Tech from building Sentinels due to the previous mutant-hating owner.
All of his board members hate this and vote him down as do the workers unions because genocide is in the contracts, dammit!
Also like, they could retire today and never work a day in their life again and still have more than enough money for any potential descendants to found a country. Quitting for a billionaire is not a real problem.
I mean leaving their business to, say, stockholders also okay with genocide doesn’t really help anyone.
Stockholders assumes the company isn’t solely owned by them which is not information we have. It’s called Ruttech, I’d assume they own most if not all of it. The real moral conundrum assuming they have a conscience would be the sudden termination of all their employees.
What Charlie said about “Ruttech is indeed one of the contractors everyone wants the university to divest from” seems to imply that the university owns Ruttech stock. So I’m guessing the company isn’t only owned by the Ruttens. But I could be wrong.
Could be both – Zuckerberg personally owns a majority of voting shares in Meta despite it being publicly traded. (Granted that’s uncommon, but uncommon arrangements are more common in these apex corps which Ruttech seems to be.)
Do we know (that is, has the comic stated) whether Ruttech is publicly traded? Because if there are stockholders involved, then the Drs Rutten probably don’t actually have the power to do that (unless they somehow manage to convince said stockholders, which, no they won’t). But if it’s wholly owned by the Rutten family, then yeah they could AFAIK stop anytime.
I feel like the answer is yes, because Charlie said “Ruttech is indeed one of the contractors everyone wants the university to divest from” — That implies that the university owns Ruttech stock, right? Which implies that Ruttech DOES have shareholders and is a publicly traded company, right?
They could probably quit selling weapons parts to the military, which is the issue as far as we know, at least with some effort. The question I think is if Carla is scared to ask because she doesn’t know if they would.
Bold of you to assume she had a plan.
Mmm.
I don’t think Carla had a plan beyond asking them about the computer systems they’re making for weapons used for genocide. And now that’s delayed until at least the next she time talks with her parents.
She can’t lose them. She can’t.
Not againShe’s not strong enough.
I feel bad for Carla here; she clearly wants to do the right thing, but it’s hard to confront people you love with uncomfortable truths.
Do I think her parents are inherently bad people? No.
Do I think her parents’ fortune is potentially built on the suffering of others? Yes.
Does it make it wrong for her to love them? No.
Does it make it wrong to want to continue supporting them? No.
Now let’s see how many people attack me over this.
Maybe Carla expected it to be like that episode where Poison Ivy was turning billionaires into trees.
Bruce Wayne finding out that he cut down a rain forest? FIRE EVERYONE INVOLVED AND CANCEL IT!
If only everyone could be like Batman.
Don’t actually; he has lots of problems, and his wealth has not solved them.
I wrote an essay once where I pointed out Bruce is actually a pretty good critique of billionaire activism because he can’t actually change the systemic problems of Gotham on his own. The government can but Batman even with his vast wealth can’t get the government to change when it’s only designed to funnel wealth to people like him.
I think part of the problem with Bruce Wayne is that either the writers or editorial don’t really want to tackle the idea of Bruce Wayne being part of the system that enables Gotham’s poverty/high violent crime which is why you end up with this: He can’t do anything, the government is only a presence on the federal level (Amanda Waller, that time Lex Luthor became president) or municipal level (the countless mayorship campaigns), and nobody really mentions how, well, WayneTech’s jobs simply aren’t helping all that much since they’re all high-tech jobs which most of Gotham’s impoverished wouldn’t even be able to sniff.
It’s not the fictional character’s fault is what I’m saying.
Gotham City isn’t Detroit but New York.
So Bruce is doing something…right?
Metropolis is New York I thought.
The other thing is that while billionaire wealth is incomprehensible by normal people’s standards, a billion is really not that much when it comes to big city funding.
Even Bruce’s vast wealth can’t just cover all the problems on that scale.
Nor has punching people.
(*looks at Amber*)
Maybe they weren’t punched hard enough.
The Tick does not cut down rainforests. The Tick does not brood like some billionaire who may have disasosative idenity disorder, and an obsession with flying radar birds of the night.The Tick is justice in its purest naturally occurring form. He is the mighty blue avalanche of fate itself. Justicey fate. Thundering forward on a pair of righteous blue muscles that answer only to destiny.
Destiny has a lot to answer for.
I’m with you on this one. Uncomfortable conversations, especially with a parent you love and respect, has the potential to be devastating and that’s just emotionally. If you’re financially dependent on them and they control aspects of your life for you, that’s even harder.
I’m not sure that her parents actually are good people just yet. We haven’t actually met them.
We’ve seen how they act towards Carla. This can’t be how they act normally. Maybe it’s a faint version of it, but this is 100% how they relate to her daughter. No entrepreneur – no billionaire CEO – is THIS soft, gushy, toothless.
Meaning, they’re not treating her here like an adult. They’re certainly not talking to her like a peer. And for Carla to question or criticize them on morally questionable areas, to get an honest response, they would have to speak to her on that level.
The persona we see here that is all hugs and kisses and uwu and sparkles, is not the persona who would be designing, say, drones with infrared tracking and targeting capability for more effectively gunning down people from the safety of an office a thousand miles away.
At some point, these people would have had to, at the very least rationalize and make peace with those projects. Assuming they would have been against them to begin with, which again, we don’t know.
I didn’t say they were good, I said they weren’t inherently bad. Which is a fair assessment of people that support their daughter being trans, are happy to know she has found an SO regardless of gender, and want her to be happy. Does that make them good? Not necessarily, but it’s a start.
I dunno. Personally, I don’t believe that you get to be the billionaire CEO of a company by being a good person. I’d go so far as to say you’d have to actively show me evidence that you aren’t actually scum.
Not disowning or shaming your child for their own existence and identity doesn’t make you a good person. It’s baseline for not being a monster. I can’t imagine doing that to my own child, regardless of pretty much anything. Doesn’t make me good; makes me a dad. Plenty of people treat their children wonderfully because they’re *their* children but couldn’t care less about others.
And yeah I know the standard is set pretty low in DOA but can we all agree that there’s a gray area between “evil” and “good” that is just “things.” Choosing to eat a bologna sandwich isn’t evil or good, it’s just lunch.
Carla is their love and joy and everything that makes them happy in the world. And as we’ve seen, she can be a bit of a narcissistic terror at times and believes she’s the center of the world. Doesn’t seem to have helped her all that much. I’d have hated to be one of her teachers. Ever try to tell one of *those* parents that their darling baby is actually being a bully to someone else, or mouthing off, or disturbing the class? Well, you must be wrong, because *my* little angel would *never* do that, and they say they didn’t, and they would *never* lie to me.
Not saying that’s what Carla’s parents are like. But we really don’t know. All we know is their position, their company, their wealth, the fact that they made huge publicized headlines about how they were accepting their trans daughter, and how Carla turned out, behaviorally. And this is honestly the first time in like forever that Carla *hasn’t* been an insufferable self-absorbed narcissist.
None of that screams “good person.” At the very least, there’s at least more bad than good.
I’ll go so far as to argue against both this AND (kinda) BorkBorkBork — you can’t be a billionaire without being inherently bad except in the EXTREMELY limited case of “inherited/won that much, divesting/spending as fast as plausible to get back to a sane amount of money”. By definition, becoming a billion-dollar company requires some amount of exploitation of your workers unless you’ve managed to somehow make a company where literally every employee shares in the proceeds enough that everyone down to the janitor is also a multimillionaire.
They can not be ENTIRELY evil by the definition that says “they support their trans daughter, that’s good”, but as they say even Hitler loved dogs. By a definition of evil that loose, everyone’s got some good in them.
How many people have inherited billionaire wealth and given most of it away? I’m guessing not very many. Does that make the children of billionaires all “inherently bad”? What makes it ‘inherent’? Is it genetic — self-made billionaires having genetically bad children?
If you want to take that road, I’d say that there’s nothing unique about billionaires. That the vast majority of people would do the same thing if they somehow stumbled into that kind of wealth. Or even lesser levels.
It’s also easy for even the well-intentioned to talk themselves into something like a foundation that invests the money and gives away (most of) the proceeds. You can do more in the long run that way, right?
“Or even lesser levels.”
Yeah, lots of people denouncing landlords, who I suspect would happily be a landlord if they inherited rental property from an uncle or something… People’s morality rarely runs against their economic self-interest. Sometimes, but rarely.
If you replace money with cocaine/heroin/any addictive drug that’s more akin to the situation that rich kids are raised in. Only they have to take the drugs at least a little in order to survive.
Like, the kids can be okay from it, but they’re being brought up in a severely warped mindset, around warped people, around warped things to survive. I don’t see many people who forgo clothes, most people here aren’t vegetarian/vegan, and anyone who drinks coffee or eats chocolate participates actively in slavery. No ethical consumption in capitalism indeed, but those little concessions we make to ourselves are the same ones billionaires make on larger scales. “If it weren’t me, it’d be someone else.” “They’d just oust me if I tried to change anything, I can do harm reduction here.” “This is my parent’s legacy, they did the worst stuff, not me.” “I mean, I don’t fly as often as Taylor Swift.”
It’s a gradual corruption of the soul, but people born into even moderate wealth receive it at an extremely young age. The only way to receive love from your parents is to think like they do, and if you don’t then you aren’t worth the dirt they walk on. The only way a billionaire kid would be able to keep their soul would be to donate/reject all of it. And every single one of them would argue that’s an unreasonable ask and a squander of their parent’s efforts (and by reject it, I’m including the investments and networking that comes with it). Hell, when I was 6 I used to sneer at people I considered lesser than me by stating that my parents could buy and sell their entire family. It’s an incredibly fucked mindset that takes either a lot of good luck to outgrow or a lot of bad luck.
I think you can, in the absence of data, look at using lottery winners as a proxy — MOST people, who are not fucked up in the way billionaires are, will eventually spend down or donate money like that. For most people, money is a thing you use to get what you want, as opposed to a thing you hoard because money is your score.
“will eventually spend down or donate money like that”
I think that’s usually portrayed as a bad thing: jackpot winners frittering away the wealth on stuff they don’t need, like fancy cars. But my impression is that it’s actually a myth, fueled by a few visible cases, with typical cases being some amount of generosity and spending, but keeping at least half in investment.
Ah, drone tech like Ukrainians are innovating to defend their country. Those monsters.
They’re billionaires. You don’t get there without at minimum exploiting thousands of people.
Goalposts moving.
So it’s okay to design “say, drones with infrared tracking and targeting capability for more effectively gunning down people from the safety of an office a thousand miles away”, if you’re not a billionaire?
Both of those things are bad.
Who are the thousands of people that Dolly Parton exploited?
Blanket statements can be difficult to defend, as it takes only a single counterexample to disprove them. I know, folks don’t like nuance, but there it is.
This really just shows it’s a multi-axis problem!
They’re billionaires (always bad!)
They support their trans child (always good!)
They make weapons that are plausibly used to both commit genocide and defend against imperialist/genocidal aggression (highly difficult to say especially since in the real world there are a LOT of governments supplying weapons in exactly that way)
They’re good people towards their trans daughter, but that doesn’t make them good people in general. And considering they’re billionaires who own a company that makes computer systems for weapons, I’m leaning heavily towards Emil and Janneke not being good people, despite how supportive they’ve been of Carla.
I’m not surprised that you’re bracing yourself for backlash. It’s an ugly situation that’s really easy to take a moral stance on when we’re not involved. And it doesn’t help her any that Carla is several steps removed from the violence. It’s easier to detach yourself from violence being done far away by someone else. If her parents had made their fortune doing something obviously evil line stomping babies to death, that would be a super easy line to draw. But they don’t do the killing, they sell the boots. And those boots have legitimate defensive applications and civilian applications. So how responsible are they really that some of their customers also happen to kill babies?
For what it’s worth, I do think that there’s a morally correct answer, but I sympathize with Carla for not getting there on her first attempt.
Charlie’s going to be disappointed in you, Carla. I don’t think she’s going to be upset, but she’ll be disappointed, and that’s almost worse.
But I still wish you luck navigating your first actually challenging moral/social situation not directly related to your gender!
Lunch is over! FEED ENDED
🐔🐔🐔🐔🐔🐔
Boi, sure cannot wait for Carla to invite Charlie over for family dinners only to have Booster’s call out manifest.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-14/01-everybodys-looking-for-nothing/namedrop/
The Tick does not cut down rainforests. The Tick does not brood like some billionaire who may have disasosative idenity disorder, and an obsession with flying radar birds of the night.The Tick is justice in its purest naturally occurring form. He is the mighty blue avalanche of fate itself. Justicey fate. Thundering forward on a pair of righteous blue muscles that answer only to destiny
This was suppsoed to be written in another comment, thread but got posted on its own. So if you’re wondering why this comment feels out of place that’s the reason.
It was destiny.
Honestly it’s even better when read as an independent post.
I dunno, maybe someone in Manitowoc right now is videocalling that their parents are the best mom and dad in the world
you’ve always had my back. no wonder, now please give it back
YES GIMME THAT GOOD EMOTIONALLY VULNERABLE CARLA, RIGHT INTO MY VEINS.
I’ve always liked Carla but she’s always been a little too one dimensional. This is so welcome and I’m so ready to go from liking her to loving her.
+1
like 4 panels of sincere Carla facial expressions across 2 strips have given me so much life
It’ll never happen, and probably shouldn’t, but I kind of want the subversion of Carla going like “Please divest from Israel” and her parents just being entirely cool with it because they’re so rich they don’t know or care what they’re investing in.
The funny thing is, if this is how it turns out, more readers will be mad about it than happy about it.
I’ll sign up on the people being happy about it. We have superheroes and supervillains, we can have fantasy billionaire loving parents. Billie’s got shitty Rich dad to fill the gap
God forbid a farcical romp ever stray from the cold realism of life for FUN reasons, instead of just traumatizing the characters over and over and over with comic book insanity.
This isn’t actually all that different from what Joyce went through.
Thought her parents were the best ever. That they supported her in everything. Went out into the world, broadened your world view, and learned a little later that actually, they might be very different, and that you’re just seeing one part.
I’ve heard this a long time ago, and while it doesn’t apply to everyone (because some people are literally monsters) it did to me, and many others.
Being a child is knowing that your parents can do no wrong.
Being an adolescent is realizing that your parents are actually horrible.
Being an adult is realizing that your parents are human.
We’re all human. We all fuck up. We make the best decisions that we can, with the information given to us, with the environments we exist in, while dealing with the baggage we have from others.
We will ALL hurt people. We will ALL do shit we regret; things we realize were wrong. Life is far, far too complex for anyone to have all their shit figured out from the get-go.
The main difference between Hank and Carol, or Joyce and Mary, or Sarah and Raidah, or Charles and Walky, or Joe and Gashface, is not that one is conservative and the other is liberal, or that one is kind and the other is mean, or that one is religious and the other is atheist, or that one loves and the other hates.
It’s that one is capable of humility, self-reflection, and change, and one is not.
That’s it. That’s all, when it comes down to it.
Take THAT, Rachel.
Very well said.
See, Rachel, somebody gets the central theme of this work.
Even worse, it turns out everyone is capable of change. If we’re going to judge people, we need to judge them on a sliding scale – how much wrong they have to do before they’re willing to change. Like we’ve seen most obviously with Amber, you’ll reach a point where you look at what you’ve done and realize something has gone wrong and try to fix it.
Which is why it annoys me half the commenters want to dismiss the Doctors Rutten out of hand, before seeing the slightest indication of what they have done wrong, how much they know about how wrong it is, what resistance they might put up before trying to change, or what they might be willing to change. So very Rachel.
It’s almost as if, being good in SOME areas, does not make you necessarily a good person.
… he said, while explaining to people that just because the billionaire CEOs of a company creating tech that helps kill people accept their trans teenage daughter, they MIGHT not actually be the best people in the world.
Quick, over here! I’ll try to sneak you out the back door before the haters wake up and do their rounds.
And sometimes your parents really are just horrible people. Becoming an adult in that situation can be about learning how to break that cycle in your own life instead.
One thing that’s a little more subtle is that Emil and Janneke are not being perfect parents here. Not saying they did anything bad, but the way they participated in the conversation put more pressure on Carla to be the one to push discussion.
They learn the important thing, express excitement and support about it, then push her to wrap it up with a “was there anything else or can I move on back to my workday” – to be fair she can probably call outside work hours if she had a big discussion to bring up (I think it’s morning but idk). Then panels two and three would be kind of a weird way to say “no, there’s nothing else” but they assumed that and cut off her opportunity to say “…but”, perhaps in part because they never really took their focus off their work.
They may be supportive without limit, but that doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily established great communication with their daughter, nor taught her great communication skills. (Maybe they’re the type that thought the most important things to teach her were engineering skills – and no fault for wanting to share the things they loved and valued). Maybe they don’t have them themselves – perhaps otherwise they’d have noticed what panels 2 and 3 really meant. Maybe being ultra-supportive in both words and deeds, but only for a limited time because work came first was more than just today, maybe it was a pattern throughout Carla’s childhood.
So the whole “I don’t know my parents as well as I think I do” thing is just about who they are, it’s potentially also about how connected they are. They’re Carla’s closest friends, but that’s not saying much if she never had any others.
I wonder how long they had to argue to decide who will have the webcam facing them and who would need to make an half turn so that they can both face it whenever they must do a joint face-tine.
That’s a perceptive question because I see it worked out in so many offices. It was probably Dad’s suggestion. Both Carla and her dad are manic engineer types and successful engineers learn early on to put virtual meetings ports away from any work surface. Carla is using the same technique. She switches to the big monitor up and away from the laptop.
You’ll get there, Carla. It’s hard to ask questions of people you’ve always seen in a positive light.
tbf, at least this unsuccessful attempt at an awkward conversation didn’t end in a blowjob
As far as we know.
…that we know of
Oh damn it…. 🙁
I guess the next week, in-universe, will be ok for some talking.
(So that’s….Next year?… that’s swell. :P)
Rebelling against your parents is, in fact, extremely fucking hard. Especially when they’re actually wonderful to you personally.
OOF
I feel for that, her parents seem genuinely loving, caring and supportive toward her. Which makes it so much harder for her to even ask if the whole thing of trying to call them out for something all the harder.
I can see why she struggled to believe it, since Mary is Mary and they seem like genuinely nice people….
Also thank god I’ve been wanting something like this for carla, there’s only so many times I can tolerate “asshole but it’s fine because it’s funny” for characters, and this gives her more . I was the same with Mike until we started seeing the flashbacks with him ethan and Amber, giving us an actual insight into the kind of guy he actually is, this too gives us more of carla in a good way.
As much as I get Carla not wanting to rock the boat, I feel like she should maybe do it before they DO meet Charlie because Charlie does NOT have the social wherewithal to not bring it up while meeting them…
Oof. I can’t blame Carla for not bringing it up. I wouldn’t have been able to do it either, in her position. I just hope it doesn’t cost her her girlfriend.
I was hoping Carla wouldn’t chicken out, but I guess it’s not surprising. Avoiding a likely very difficult conversation with her parents who have always supported her is much easier than confronting them. But she’s gonna have to ask them about the computer systems they make for weapons eventually, and if she doesn’t ask, I’m sure Charlie will if she gets the chance.
Meep.
Awww shucks. Don’t worry Carla, there will be other chances. You’re still doing great. 🙂
Armsmerchantssaywhat
A flawless method.
Cowabummer.
Or, as her mother would say: Koeiejammer.
“You’re so good to me that I’m afraid to tell you when you’re wrong.”
This is difficult because i assume she relies on them to support herself, if i was going to confront people who are in a position of power over me like this i would do my best to prepare for the worst, the worst being them cutting support.
There wouldn’t be any shame in preparing before she talks to them about this subject
in carla’s place i would have a separate bank account and ask for money or find some way to get a decent amount of money from them as a fallback and anything else she can get
of course my parents are not supportive of my being trans so maybe she hasn’t been conditioned to think about these things, but idk, being a trans woman would probably help.
” i assume she relies on them to support herself,”
She might, might not. She might already have accounts and stock portfolios in her name, enough to be richer than the rest of the cast combined. I have no idea what’s typical for rich families, but a friend from a far less wealthy real estate family has her own stocks, originally picked by her father. (And due to those stocks doing well, she’s actually richer than her relatives, individually.)
Billiefer might also already be independently wealthy. Her parents seem more like assholes, but obviously also not very concerned with her, and she doesn’t seem hurting for money.
But pre-planning like that, accounting for the possibility, gives weight to the idea that is *is* a possibility that her supportive parents’ love and care could be conditional like that, and that’s something she really really doesn’t want to consider.
And honestly, even beyond not wanting to consider the possibility, I don’t think her main hang-up is material like that. (Perhaps that’s something she *should* consider more in this situation, but I don’t think that’s her main motivation). I think for her its more emotional- she doesn’t want to confront the reality that her supportive parents who she loves a lot might actually be very bad people. That’s very hard
it probably says a bit about me that i didnt consider the emotional aspect as much as the material physical wellbeing aspect<
this would be cause ive already gone through the emotional aspect decades ago lmao
but yea you are right
It could be conditional, but Carla would know better than we do and we haven’t seen any signs of it.
If she gets cut off over this, I think it’ll be a renunciation on her part, not them punishing her. In which case, relying on a small fortune based on their ill-gotten wealth seems hypocritical.
Everyone is talking about reasonable and in depth things like how it can be difficult to be critical to people who have supported you your whole life, especially when they are part of your support network and youre a minority, when what i wanna know more about that ultracar sticker/magnet in the last panel!
Its the season for chickening out, it seems.
How does Willis time this stuff?!
Sympathies, Carla. I often pull back from talking with the parent about terrible opinions and damage done. A difficult thing to change.
Is jaw orthopedics just not a thing in America? I mean, with Dorothy it could be a money problem (again, America), but Carla doesn’t have money problems.
This isn’t cosmetic or anything. It’s an actual quality-of-life issue if you can’t chew properly or if your front teeth dry out and become brittle because you can’t close your mouth.
As someone who had to do some things, there’s a certain point where the only option left would be surgery and many people, regardless of money, will lean away from facial surgery unless it is a life saving operation because your face will never quite be what it was before. That can be very scary and daunting, and was indeed so for me. Also my orthodontist was insisting I could totally recover from jaw breaking surgeries within spring break and go back to school easily and I was like “fuck that man it’s gonna take way longer than a week to recover from my jaws being broken”.
Also pretty sure Carla’s just biting her lip.
Also I truly do mean jaw breaking surgeries. The way it was pitched to me, my bottom jaw would be broken and realigned, while a chunk of bone would be removed from my top jaw. I was kinda fuzzy on how exactly they were gonna… stitch together my top jaw from that, all I could imagine was my mouth looking like a deflated balloon.
It’s an art style thing.
(“Have you been drawing nostrils again?”)
You might as well attempt to analyze why some humans in-comic appear to possess sclera (“eye whites”) while others do not.
With at least one character (Ruth) somehow growing/acquiring them within the span of a day.
Braces and such are common if you have the money. Teeth are a big indicator of money in the US. As for jaw breaking, it’s rare because insurance rarely covers it. Been there. Six weeks with my jaw wired shut. Worth it in my case but also six weeks off work.
Insurance is a great point. I remember a family friend who was a nurse trying to help by suggesting to insurance that it was quality of life but insurance wasn’t going for it. As far as they were concerned, I could chew my food as is, ergo the surgery wasn’t necessary.
I think Carla is about to hit the news again.
I’m curious what people actually would like from this discussion, when Carla eventually has it.
It’s hard for me to see any outcome that’s both vaguely realistic and narratively satisfying. Should Carla disown them unless they stop arming Bulmeria? Ignoring that that probably isn’t how it could work and they’d probably have to shut down (or just sell off) entire sections of the company to get out the defense business entirely. Would even that be enough, since they’d still be evil billionaires?
Honestly, if what we’ve been told of the Ruttens involvement so far is accurate, and there’s certainly been enough ambiguity that it might not be, it’s hard for me to feel that they have a lot of guilt. What we’ve been told is that they sell computer systems to the government, some of which get put into weapons, some of which the government gives/sells to Bulmeria. That seems like a pretty distant degree of responsibility to me. (Contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe, we have not been told that Ruttech makes weapons or that they sell anything to Bulmeria directly.) So I’m not sure, realistically, what they could do about it. I guess they could stop selling to the government entirely? But that’s assuming that whatever they make can’t be bought off the shelf or through a third party. Are they morally obligated to stop making computers because of how the government uses them? That seems extreme to me.
oh no, nuance and ambiguity
That’s what I kept saying in the previous few days threads: there are an astounding number of companies that “sell computers to the government, some of which get military use” in some capacity or another, and depending a lot on the specifics of the part being sold, that could mean anything from communications equipment to rocketry guidance systems to smart battery chargers.
And almost anything that’s not a very bespoke component of a specific weapon system (which this doesn’t sound like it is) is going to be a generic part with a National Stock Number and probably CAN be manufactured by more than one vendor.
Here is a fun fact. Some companies might not know they are selling to the military. It’s a bit of a unique example but Russia is buying a lot so-called “dual-use” items and components in roundabout ways. Because of sanctions they are cut off from official markets so they use middle-man and fake companies to order stuff to one of their non-sanctioned neighbours which they then bring to Russia, gut and reuse the necessary parts like cameras for drones or electronics for pretty much anything. Though I imagine that these days they just most of their stuff from China.
While that is possible: I wont believe it for a second.
There was a small-ish scandal in germany decades back about iraqui chemical weapons. Turned out, many top german firms had delivered machinery, raw materials, even how-to literature to Saddams regime. They claimed exactly what you describe here – “We knew nothing. We where duped.” It got mildly adjudicated, people forgot.
After the US invasion, suddenly one of the former iraqui officials who managed the project turned up in an interview and told the world “Nahhh, of course the knew. We came asking for mustard gas, they told us which àgricultural parts ” and `paint precursor chemicals” to buy, which shady greek shipping firm and croatian engineering service to use to get around german laws. They knew their own rules much better than we did, after all.”
A company, any company, has no morals.
Its a logical machine designed for the primary and – often sole – goal of multiplying investment money.
While I don’t believe Carla’s parents are THAT complicit, I too am of the opinion that, deep down, they KNOW what their computer chips are being used for (what other need would a weapons manufacturer or even just “the government” have for such chips? They don’t make the kinds of consumer gadgets or devices that would require such components, and I highly doubt the govt decided to jump through enough loopholes like buying through shell companies. Most companies are usually MORE than happy to openly count the government as one of their clients.) They just adopted a “we just make the parts, it’s not our decision how the final product is being used. We just focus on the tech and the R&D. Clear conscience!” stance.
Which is a decent nuanced take, but I think falls flat narratively. This has been set up as a confrontation. Just having her parents explain (and Carla (and Charlie?) accept) that while they’ve very sad about Bulmeria, they’re really just too distant from it to be responsible and can’t really have any effect on it anyway might be realistic, but it also seems hardly worth setting up the confrontation in the first place.
I want Carla to have a chance to begin developing and honing her own personal empathy and ethics outside her role as adorably sassy daughter of tech billionaires. I want to see her grow in confidence (real confidence) and sometimes that means healthily pushing back against things your parents do that you disagree with. Maybe she’ll even get super into politics she wasn’t forced into by virtue of being born the way she was born. I just think there’s a lot of room for interesting conflict and growth in a character I love.
Plot twist: It’s “feed ended” and it was an AI video made by Carla to check if she could talk to her parents about the subject.
She failed. :/
Well, now, I think this little arc might be rather interesting. It’s a rare day indeed that we see Carla being unsure about herself, and it’s a bit of character development that she’s been sorely needing. I’m glad that this is something that she’s growing into naturally and not her having to go through a trauma dump to work through it – but it is a side that I feel like we’ve been sorely needing to see from her for quite a while.
Hopefully this little brush with her not being so sure of herself and her place in the world will help mellow her out a bit – and we’ll get to see her being a more well-rounded character going forward.
Idk what this confusion is about whether Carla’s parents are war profiteers. They profit from war, therefore they are war profiteers. Whether they can easily divest their involvement and whether they’re fully cognizant of all the pies Ruttech has their thumb in is yet to be determined, but let’s be honest about what we’re dealing with here.
“War profiteer” actually has a definition and it’s not “defense companies under capitalism”.
Sorry if I don’t make much distinction with the broader military-industrial complex. I don’t think the children murdered by American bombs care about the nuance.
It’s a very valid point that with the amount of political influence the military-industrial complex has in the modern era that “war profiteering” is probably applicable to their activities.
I don’t know what definition thejeff is using, but by the usual definition I’m familiar with (“profits excessively or unethically from selling weapons or materiel”), you could argue most military tech vendors fit (even if they’re a bit far from the original Civil War connotation of “selling shoddy/overpriced/not-fit-for-purpose equipment to militaries”)
Yeah this is “the card says moops” bullshit straight outta Seinfeld 🙄
Because all less than 10 panels we’ve seen of them they seem like nice people
People dont like the idea that someone can be nice to certain people and still be absolute monsters in other areas
Another awkward conversation avoided, victory Carla!
I wonder if her parents actually have enough control over the company to get out of the conflict even if they wanted to. Like, they could just be founders who sold a ton of shares and now there’s a board of directors who make the business decisions.
Without their engineering genius, there is no Ruttech.
that’s what the fanboys say about Musk. I bet there’s a hundred qualified engineers under ’em.
The usual answer to “why do you sell weapons” is “if we don’t do it, someone else will”
Testing something, ignore me