Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
Mac Hall
Matt Boyd
The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
Blindsprings
Kadi Fedoruk
Tamaura, wrested into a world 300 years in the future, must find a way to save the magic fading from her country.
Paint the Town Red
Windy, Winter Jay Kiakas
Winona runs a werewolf shelter with partner in crime, Odile in the Gothic city of Merlot. One day they take in an injured vampire, and soon unravels many of the dark secrets of Merlot.
Beeserker
TJ Cordes
This comic is about a robot powered by bees, but it's also about the kind of people who think filling a robot with bees is a good idea, and why they're wrong.
2 Slices
RJ Morel
After a case of mistaken identity, will awkward Daisuke find help from excitable Mamo, or will his love life be thrown completely off track?
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
Countdown to Countdown
Velinxi
Iris Black is a self-proclaimed inventor with the curious ability to bring his drawings to life, and yearns to find a space where he can use his powers freely.
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Fantomestein
Beka Duke
Desperate for companionship, Frankenstein's Monster pretends to be the Opera Ghost. A grave mistake.
The Otherknown
Lorian Merriman
Chandra is a 12-year-old accidental time traveler with a reluctant new dad, who happens to be a member of a feared galactic crime syndicate.
Slightly Damned
Chu
Rhea Snaketail returns from the dead, befriending a Demon who falls in love with an Angel. The afterlife ain't what it used to be!
BOOKMARK Click "Tag Page" to bookmark a page. When you return to the site, click "Goto Tag" to continue where you left off.
BUFFER WATCH
Comics are currently drawn and uploaded through:
I would imagine so that any time a commenter tries to convince someone to vote for that guy, it comes out as a plea to vote for Clinton instead. A+ use of comments section filter.
The only President Johnsons there have been in this country rose to power by assassination, which is why Johnson’s campaign is doomed to failure. Johnson should try running for VICE president.
Also, if Johnson gets into a scandal for sending nude photos a la Anthony Weiner, it will be evidence that God has a sense of humor, albeit an immature one.
(of course, I can’t say much for my own sense of humor if I’m writing a post trying to make a fool out of a censor
also I won’t say that I haven’t shared pictures of my Johnson with other 18+ males >.> ain’t never gonna be president now, that’s one less thing to worry about)
Also, according to Merriam Webster, there actually IS such a thing as a snow mouse outside the realm of ambigrams and it’s a synonym of “pied lemming”, so now I just need to get an avatar of a lemon pie and my DoA commenter identity will be cemented in stone.
I love that you object to the comparison, but its their economic policies you feel distinguish them from the alt right, and not their fascist authoritarianism or the horrific genocide
Jesus Fucking Christ, we actually got someone who actually bought the stinking pile of revisionist history hogswallop that is Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”?
And the idea that Nazis are actually socialist because it’s in the name makes about as much sense as arguing that the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” is actually Democratic or a Republic because it’s in the name.
Fascism in general and Nazism in particular were reactions to the threat of communism. Attempts by the elites to use racism and nationalism to distract the masses from their oppression and focus their anger against scapegoats rather than the elites.
As for the KKK being left-wing? I don’t even know where that comes from. The first incarnations of the Klan were Democrats, that I’ll freely agree with. Post Civil War, the Democrats, particularly in the South, were the party of slavery and segregation. The white South was solidly Democratic and segregationist until the Civil Rights era. Dixiecrats they were called. After the 60s, the parties realigned. Blacks completed an already in progress move to the Democratic Party and southern whites by and large switched to Republican – which we can see in voting patterns today. Some former Dixiecrat politicians switched parties (Strom Thurmond, for example), some were voted out and a few actually repented and supported Civil Rights and stayed on as Democrats. Senator Byrd most notably.
The Nazis exterminated communists, dude, with a fervor not matched for any other political alignment (I mean, I’m not even familiar with them executing anyone else purely for their politics. ‘left wing’ only to foolish Meriken right wingers.
The idea that the KKK is left wing is an extra barrel of laughs. They were aligned with the democrats before the Southern Strategy. Their current iteration, and their successors, throw in with the Republican party or the Libertarian party.
^^ Lailah’s point about the KKK is further driven home by fucking David Duke live-tweeting one of Trump’s recent rallies. After endorsing him a while back.
Haha, wow, such funny, I love just not ever posting anything online ever due to anxiety, let alone online public. Just imagine the fun when going outside in the real world! Could that meme just die, please.
“Did you just assume my gender?!” and other permutations thereof (like the “I identify as an Attack Helicopter”) are jokes directed at Trans communities to paint them as oversensitive and bizarre.
People don’t realize the damage they do when they turn an entire group of people into a walking joke. They don’t realize (I hope) that they are contributing to the violence those people face, nor do they think for a second about the fact that their stupid little joke is actually tied to the very first words out of someone’s mouth when they come out about wanting to transition.
I cannot apologize for the actions of others, but maybe they will read one of our posts and think for more than half a second about the damage they are doing to an already drowning minority. For whatever it is worth, I am glad you exist. And I hope things get easier and less frightening for you sooner rather than later. Stay safe and sane, and good luck!
Thank you, YourPartnerInScience. So well said. I’ve recently started killing jokes about marginalized groups around the office. Also squashing the ‘B-‘ word. Not much they can say since we all had that training.
unless her real plan is to get him to attack her first in front of an audience giving her a legitimate reason to kick his butt without being seen as a bongo that randomly attacks people for, as far as the npc like characters would know, no real reason.
Not really. You’ll get dentures once, and keep going to a dentist of some flavor for the rest of your life because the inside of your mouth changes over time so you may have to have new dentures, or at least have your existing ones refit every decade or so. Then you add to this that most people are going to have partials or implants for a long time before they have a full plate…
Nah… sure, dentists want most people to keep their teeth. But.. I bet 9 out of 10 dentists don’t mind seeing rapists lose theirs. On the other hand.. that 10th dentist.. he has access to NOx and stuff. Scary!
I think it always was Plan A. AG has always been a “solve things with punching” sort of person more often than not and provoking Ryan into taking a swing at her gives her an excuse to attack someone.
IIRC, Amazigirl doesn’t START the fights. She FINISHES them. If Ryan attacks her he’s fair game for an asswhuppin’, but AG loses the moral high ground if she just goes around beating up bad guys out of the blue.
This makes me think that her real goal is simply to beat the shit out of him and she’s not super interested in him actually facing justice.
But then based on her conversation with Sal she’s pretty sure he won’t face justice, and after a month with no charges filed the case is pretty dead tbh. Especially since the only permanent physical damage is proof that someone attacked him and not the other way around.
Pasting his photo over social media is a form of justice, one he’s obviously very very unhappy about, and one that’s likely to lead to other justice as well.
That only works if there’s actual proof and a conviction, and a lot of times it doesn’t even work then. There are people who have grown up with the idea that women are at fault for their own rapes and so would trust him while thinking privately, perhaps even unknowingly, that they were safe because they don’t fit the “profile” for a rape victim according to misogynist dickheads.
But without proof or a witness, with nothing to go on but a smear campaign? There are even fewer people who would believe “such a nice boy” could have done anything wrong. If anything, AG will open herself up to a nice slander lawsuit requiring an unmasking.
I think this is less about Ryan getting harassed by random people and thus be subject to mob justice, than just making it harder for him to find marks. If girls know that this pretty guy with a gash on his face got the scar by (allegedly) trying to roofie a girl at a party, do you think they’re gonna take the chance to chat him up?
Ryan right now is a missing stair on campus. Some people know about him (former victims, a couple of party hosts, and so on), but the majority don’t, so he’s free to work with a lot of freedom to “ply his craft” as it were.
Outing him more publicly means he’s still a missing stair (folks can still miss that warning by not being on social media or by not believing it or not remembering it), but one with more signs around him, more people who are going to remember and recognize him and that reduces the freedom he has in a community to exploit and harm it.
I’m thinking of outing of rapists or serial sexual harassers within movements that got outed more publicly and it was awful for the whistleblowers and the survivors who got sussed out, but it also made the unspoken whispers about the missing stairs much more public and much more known and gave more of their survivors the freedom to speak because they could see they were no longer alone in their victimization.
Forget justice this time. Remember why Joyce didn’t want to call the police? It would be pretty hard for her to go testify in court and get him put away without informing her parents. She is growing up fast but i doubt she is ready to do that all alone. This would more than likely give her mother all the ammo she needs to win the argument in favor of pulling Joyce out of school. I also doubt that she is ready to put herself through college without parental support.
One thing posting his face to social media might accomplish is alerting other girls to who/what he is so they can better protect themselves from him. That goal is more important than justice anyway.
Unfortunately there is no way she can ensure that every girl out there knows his face. There is really only one way his story ends… he keeps doing it until he eventually gets caught scarring some number of girls lives along the way.
Though the publicity may also push him to back off by raising the apparent risk level.
If, as is pretty likely, Joyce wasn’t his first target, it might also alert other girls he has targeted that they weren’t the only victims and that boosts the chance they’ll report it. Multiple reports raised the chance of successful prosecution – even if it’s only from “none” to “slim”.
…I’m not sure she agrees. Aside from the factt hat she doesn’t take Sal seriously, she seems to disagree and be mad that Joyce didn’t report. “That’s what someone convinced Joyce of”, not “Yeah, Joyce was thinking the same thing.” I can’t say with certainty what her endgame is, but I did think it pretty likely she wants to apprehend him herself.
They’re in a large building with several dozen other people, whose cell phones are all fighting for a piece of whatever amount of signal is making it through the masonry. She’s not going to break any speed records.
If IU is anything like the last college I worked for, you have to log in with your student ID when you connect to the campus WiFi. This installs a security certificate identifying the device as yours. You can’t get online without logging in, unless you create a guest account tied to a name and email address.
Anything she does on the school WiFi could be traced back to her.
She already has a copy of the photo sent to Dorothy, so, yes, she is just baiting him here. She could easily have done this without baiting him, but where would be the fun in that. If she attacks him, she can respond with absolute justice. Absolute is her right fist and justice is her left.
Unless the crowd backs him up and well… as the crowd realizes she’s not going to go after the black woman they want her to go after and is instead antagonizing a white man volunteer for the campaign, I think the odds of that happening are going to increase by the second.
The crowd didn’t back him at the frat party, so it’s not impossible he’ll find himself as short of friends this time too. His panel-6-ready-for-violence says he hasn’t learned a damned thing though.
I wonder if Ron’s at the rally? Ron’s face would be welcome about now.
In Roomies he had sex with Ruth and then she found him being lovey-dovey with another chick. It was all in a flashback Ruth had when talking to Danny.
Urgh, thinking about it makes me think of the line “Ryan was a gift from heaven”, which makes me want to throw up.
And about twenty thousand followers. It’s actually mostly about stuff like Mario Kart, and half those followers aren’t sure why they’re still there… until this night, that is.
Around here the big ones are quite friendly. It’s the little brown ones that can kill you if you don’t get help immediately. And it’s far from my mountaintop to help.
There hasn’t been a (confirmed) death by spider in over 30 years in the US. A lot of misdiagnosed skin diseases, though. Spiders, even if they are being harassed by humans, will only bite 50% of the time, and even then only rarely inject venom. Spider venom is adaptedto insects, not vertebrates.
And anyway, spiders have 300% more soulful eyes than most dogs.
To be fair there are a select few NA spiders you don’t want to risk even if death is unlikely. The black widow, brown recluse, wolf spider and sac spider all can pierce human skin and carry dangers relating to skin necrosis, infection (including MRSA) and allergic reactions. Of those only the widow has any real potential to be lethal, and only if you don’t seek proper medical treatment.
“Of course the World Wide Web is an ACTUAL spider web covering the planet. What did you think it was? A magical network of invisible information hurtling through space?”
…hm. Is she posting it on Amber’s Facebook page? Or does she have her own? Because well, I can’t see the two of them being sloppy enough to make that slip-up, but logging out of Amber’s Facebook and into her own would take precious seconds she doesn’t have right now, and…am I overthinking this?
Probably overthinking a little.
She could even just email the picture to herself, the point is just to get it stored elsewhere, in case he smashes her phone in the impending brawl.
She is certainly baiting him to hit her, so I think it’s safe to assume that she’s already got what she wanted from the conversation portion of our evening.
If her plan is to get Ryan to attack her and get him in legal trouble for it, she’d have to expose her real name anyway
If she’s just going to destroy his reputation, she could just send the photo to herself for now, then wait to post it until later when he’s already known as “That Asshole Who Attacked Amazi-Girl”
I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the places she posts it (as amazi-girl I guess????) would be IU’s Facebook page/group. That would get a bit of mileage, methinks… unless/until an admin takes down the post because of various reasons.
I was about to say that Amazi-girl doesn’t do that, only Amber.
But WHAT IF Amazi-girl writes fanfic too? If that’s a shared interested between them? What genera would Amber consider perfect enough for Amazi-girl to write, and what is flawed enough that only Amber dares debase herself with it?
Sherlock Holmes teams up with Batman to discover the mysterious villain behind a devious series of crimes, and along the way, they end up discovering something about each other ;-*
“My name is, uh… Arbuckle! That’s right, June Arbuckle. You can’t send me to jail, see. Who else is going to feed coffee and pizza to Andrew Jackson, my morbidly obese cat that I assure you I own?”
I’m just so happy that the Amazi-Girl I remember enjoying so much at the start is still here! I mean, the storyline where she’s spiralling out of control has been a hell of a ride, but I’ve missed these moments of… I don’t know, it’s like Alfred Pennyworth doing an impression of Spiderman.
Oh that’s actually smarter than what I expected of AG. I figured she’d just attack him which would probably turn everybody at the center against her but if this asshole attacks first then she can just say that she was acting in self-defense.
Does she have an Amazi-Girl account on twitter or facebook or something? Because otherwise that pictures’ going to go through a regular person’s account. Who Ryan will be able to find. And I fear that won’t end well.
I’m not sure it was her plan to make her physically attack her first so she can legally retaliate (like she was doing with Sal but justified this time?) but dang it’s working
Funny story: With sal, she actually couldn’t legally retaliate – Sal didn’t start the fight, Amazi-girl did. See, threatening people with bodily harm is kind of a crime, and when you posture yourself as though you’re going to carry out the threat, and loom intimidatingly and the like… the law doesn’t give a fuck if you wait for them to swing first. They’re defending themselves from your assault – a reasonable person would assume that you’re going to make good on your threat, not that you’re just trying to play fake-out for this very reason. So even though she physically struck second, the law says she started the fight. Cases like Amazi-girl’s, in the general, are EXACTLY why it works that way.
Here, with Ryan, if he swings first, he has genuinely started the fight. Amazi-girl isn’t threatening him with bodily harm. Now, he could try to argue he’s threatening her with defamation (Libel, specifically), and that what she’s saying isn’t true. Good chance he could win, because the USA hates actually sticking sexual assault on people in the first place, and he isn’t a public figure, but even if he did, he actually still wouldn’t be allowed to attack Amazigirl. You can’t generally hit people for saying shit, even illegal shit.
That generally only makes it constitutional to censor what you have to say, though I wouldn’t be surprised if one state decided it counts as starting a fight.
I think it’s less about what’s legal, and more about what’s according to Amazi-Girl’s moral code. She feels that if the other person hits first, then it’s still virtuous for AG to beat them up. She’s a vigilante, not a litigator.
Yes, she thinks if she starts the fight, but hits second, she’s in the ethical clear, I know. She’s not, but she thinks that. She’s a vigilante, not an ethical person.
I am preeetty sure this is blatantly illegal. I mean, we – the omniscient viewers – know the guy is a scumbag rapist, but if nothing’s been demonstrated in court, this is blatant criminal harassment and defamation. I’m willing to bet Amber’s phone is registered and wouldn’t be hard to track. If this guy wanted to press charges, she’d pretty much inevitably end up expelled from school, possibly arrested, and vulnerable to lawsuit. Not to mention that, if he does try and assault her for it, he’s covered. She isn’t. The fighting words doctrine covers someone who responds to violence under threat and she is most certainly threatening him.
I mean, she’s also a vigilante, which is also illegal. And sent Blaine to the hospital. He’s awful, but the law doesn’t necessarily care (unless self-defense, which it wasn’t really).
It would be the very definition of libel (which is not ILLEGAL) and it would be up to him to prove he was not a person who tried to rape someone. Notably, social media has been used to identify rapists and they have often brought up how it hurt their reputation.
Actually, all he has to demonstrate is that she made imputations of criminal conduct. That’s sufficient to bring the case. Both sides then need to present their arguments and, unless she has some form of defense for her claim, she would likely be found responsible.
And while this would certainly be libelous, it is also criminal. She’s threatening him, which is at the very minimum Provocation and illegal under Indiana law.
She has a defense. The fact that it’s true. The ‘defamatory’ statement being true (and not put in a misleading light) is an absolute defense against defamation, and even a reasonable good faith belief that it’s true is generally sufficient. You don’t even need Joyce to testify, just put the texts with Dorothy into evidence with Dorothy on the stand to verify their validity, maybe grab Ron (http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/ron/) as a third party to testify to what he saw and heard at the party, and it’s pretty thoroughly settled.
But this isn’t going to court, so it’s a moot point. But seriously, it’s not defamation, and it’s actually PROVABLY not defamation. The definition of defamation requires it be a false statement.
And note that the standards are different. She doesn’t have to get him convicted of attempted rape, which as has been discussed at great length over the last few days is hard.
Reasonable good faith is sufficient for public figures, but I’m pretty sure the standards are higher with private ones. Your right to privacy is supposed to give you more defense, it’s just that public figures don’t have one.
You’re correct that public figures vs private figures have a different standard, but the distinction is that for public figures, all you have to prove is that there was no “actual malice” (i.e. knowing for a fact that it was false), whereas for private individuals the standard is negligence (i.e. a reasonable person would’ve looked into this before making unfounded statements). But Amazi-Girl DID look into it (she texted Dorothy a picture and waited for a reply), and they ARE founded.
More importantly, as the plaintiff, Ryan is the one with the burden to actually prove the statement is false in the first place. Which he can’t. Because, besides the difficulty of proving a negative, the statement is true. But even if Ryan somehow did prove the statement false (which it isn’t), Amazi-Girl can absolutely prove that she took reasonable care and thus is STILL not responsible for defamation.
I really worry that it isn’t ‘reasonable care’t o not ask someone besides the victim (Or that it will become that with rape, given how much else changes in practical terms). But if the standard is to prove a negative, I’m honestly kind of terrified for folks. I’m leaving soon, but I have folks at risk here I still actually like. Folks who have to worry about this shit, b/c harrassment campaigns are fun for the whole family.
The fact that he isn’t a public figure is the relevant thing for defamation. If he were, Amazi-girl’s genuine belief that she is telling the truth nearly completely protects her from any ‘factual error’ in her statements (She is, of course, completely correct, but proving it in a court of law is… um, well…) Truth is an absolute defense, of course, but with public figures, the expectation of privacy is basically gone. However, Ryan, unless he’s a celebrity in some unmentioned capacity, is not a public figure. You still can’t knowingly slander them, but a genuine belief in what you’re saying is basically enough (It’s been a minute and I don’t remember the specifics)…. but that’s all for public figures. Private figures require more, though I’m not clear off the top of my head what that more is.
As far as Fighting Words go, what she’s said… miiiiiiight qualify. The only ironclad ones left are ‘impugning the chastity of one’s mother’, so it’d be a tricky sell (And it actually STILL would not justify his hitting her, it would only make her saying it illegal).
Justify hitting her, maybe not, but it would, say, justify him grabbing her camera. Likewise, it’d make any retaliatory assault on her part illegal, since she would have deliberately provoked him. He, meanwhile, could plead provocation and temporary insanity.
…Pretty sure it wouldn’t, no. Fighting Words are just a thing you can make illegal, they don’t generally expand your rights. It might mitigate your actions, but not generally justify or excuse them.
Please tell me you’re exaggerating and that accusing someone of attempted rape would NOT get the accuser in MORE trouble than the person accused of rape because that would be the most depressing thing I’ve heard all day
If you do so publicly, to a private citizen? Yeah, probably. That isn’t nominally possible if you do it through the police, but if you do so through public shame, to a private citizen, then you have to prove what you’re saying is true. Now, if I’m not misremembering, you only have to prove it within the civil standard (a preponderance of the evidence), but you DO have to prove it. And that’s… I mean it’s easier than a criminal trial (A preponderance of the evidence is a considerably lower standard than ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’), but it’s not necessarily easier for… you know, Joyce.
If it’s done to a public figure, things change to an amazing degree. At that point, the reporter only has to genuinely believe that something is true. If, in principle, it were Ryan DeSanto, the republican congressman… then there’d be no question, you could legally publicly accuse him of rape and not get in trouble for it so long as you believe it’s true. Mere factual inaccuracy is insufficient for that to be defamatory, it must be a malicious statement.
It only gets them in trouble if they spread it around on social media and publicly. It wouldn’t if they, say, went to the police. Is that so unreasonable, though? Otherwise, you could spread any malicious rumour you wanted without consequence.
Harassment requires much more of a pattern of behavior than a single conversation and a photo-snap, and there’s very, very few laws governing online accusations like this.
Defamation, libel, and slander are civil offenses, not criminal. Ryan can sue her but he can’t have her charged. Also, the burden of proof would be on him in court to show that she either didn’t think he was a rapist or that her grounds for thinking it were unreasonable.
As for fighting words? …. maybe she’s crossing the line there, but I don’t think so. The problem is that she is not that the particular words are vulgar and profane in such a way that provokes an immediate visceral response, but rather the content of the words do so. Furthermore, what she is threatening to do is not something that, legally, Ryan is entitled to defend himself against with violence, the way an immediate and credible threat to cause him physical harm might justify violent self-defense. This does not seem to fall into the legal bounds of the “fighting words” doctrine… and in any case, that exception is mostly used for words that piss off the police into making an arrest, rather than someone else into physical violence.
If saying “this guy drugged and attempted to rape my friend” online will get you in more trouble than posting death threats in detail against a person, including schematics of their house and encouraging others en masse to harass and commit violence against them, then the system is irrevocably broken.
(Guess who just finished reading an article about gamergate)
The system is broken, but try not to think of it as irrevocably so. That just encourages apathy. The system has changed before and it will keep changing, as long as people fight for it to do so.
Of course, this assumes that Amazi-Girl isn’t just bluffing to get a reaction from Ryan. It’s enough for him to believe that she is going to post his picture online and tie him to charges of being a sexual predator.
All AG needs is for him to be tricked into confessing or attempt to assault her in public.
Ok, so this is two days in a row in which my big comment didn’t post. I guess I’ll just put it in a bunch of chunks replying to this ‘un. (And if, like, big posts need moderation and they’re just not being approved… sorry Willis?)
OK, this is off-topic and random and stuff. Sorry ’bout dat.
As a few of you know from the last few days, I’m an aspiring author. An aspiring author of webcomics, actually, but I have negative artistic skill.
THAT’S RIGHT.
NEGATIVE SKILL.
IT’S THAT BAD.
I’m in the market for an artist so that I can actually be a webcomic author, but failing that I’ll just do prose work instead.
NOT THE POINT, however.
I recently realized, in no small part because of THIS (er… I don’t know how to do them fancy-dancy word-links so here: MAYBE THIS LINK IS THE PROBLEM), that in my current work I’ve got a grand total of one token gay couple in the main cast and everyone’s white.
Despite the fact that my absolute favorite webcomics are, in order- Dumbing of Age, Questionable Content, It’s Walky! (and Roomies and Joyce and Walky), and Shortpacked!, my actual genre of choice most of the time is high fantasy action/adventure.
Um, spoilers I guess? If I ever manage to get my shit together, and you happen to read it? Not even big ones, so…
So, homosexual characters- I can easily add more, edit characters, do stuff like that. Once upon a time it was hard to write them, because I thought I didn’t have the emotional connection to gay couples that I do towards straight ones.
Then I started writing for Eli and Alain, currently the only gay characters in the story. I threw them together because Alain was (and is) a joke-slash-serious-take on the “gay vampire” thing and I was like “um… Eli seems like he could be gay I guess, let’s go with that”. Over time, though, it developed into one of my favorite relationships in the series- second only to the two who are arguably the main characters. I, one day, suddenly realized that writing gay couples- when ignoring any social/political/non-lovey-dovey shit- is just like writing straight couples, except they BOTH HAVE DICKS. (I have yet to write a lesbian couple, but I’m assuming it’ll feel similar but with less penis.)
So yeah, I can add more homosexual characters pretty easily. I tend to jump at any chance to reuse and abuse (and edit the hell outta) any of my ideas from when I was a lowly single-digits-aged writer on that once-great crappy fanfic and roleplay site, Max-Dan-Wiz. Too bad the mods got a power trip and eventually the whole thing shut down. Oh god, the nostalgia. I’ve got no shortage of old characters who I’d like to rewrite, no shortage of new ideas.
So yeah, if I really feel the need to add more I can. There are plenty of important side characters who either don’t exist yet or need a ton of development. That’s all fine and dandy.
My issue is with race. My first reaction, when I realized that literally everyone I’d as much as conceptualized was either white or a supernatural entity, was to take a paint bucket to my visualizations. That’s kind of always been my view of race anyway- it’s an aesthetic. A feature, neither positive nor negative. White, black, who gives a crap.
There are several issues with this idea, though.
For one, the scientific part of my mind is all like “WELL, race comes from where your ancestors lived, what they adapted to, as well as simple genetic traits that became widespread in certain regions. Sure, several of your characters can throw shit with their minds. Sure, that one dude just conjured the air out of that other dude’s lungs. With magic. BUT YOU NEED TO BE REALISTIC, LIPKE.” I doubt I’d be able to get over this fact, although in the end it’d just be one more worldbuilding thing I’d need to write out. Not too bad, could even add some flavor to character backgrounds.
Another, more politically conscious, part of my brain is like “Yo dawg race has some serious societal thingamajiggers.” If I did add different races to the world, wouldn’t it be plainly ignorant to not also add racists, supremacist groups, HISTORIES about conflicts over superficial qualities? It’s not like I’ve got an issue with writing such conflicts- I already deal with homophobic and fictional-magic-bullshit-phobic issues, especially with characters like Alain. Vampirism falls into a whole category of things that affect people and make them objectively different while leaving them with human minds within my series, and all of those (termed “blights” to differentiate them from both curses and diseases) are strongly controversial in the world that the story takes place in. Would “blightophobia” devalue racism, or the other way around? After all, “he has to drink human blood, enough to kill a person, to survive” is kind of a stronger case for hating someone than “I’d look like him if I were SIGNIFICANTLY tanner” and blighted-people-aren’t-inherently-evil is a pretty big theme in the story.
I mean, could I get away with saying that race isn’t an issue in their world? It seems pretty clear to me that it’s a rather unrealistic idea, but who knows how humans would act with the common enemy of LIKE WYVERNS AND SHIT, ya know?
Another, albeit fairly minor, problem with the “paint bucket solution” is that I just can’t see most of my main characters as anything but white. A couple of the girls could be Asian or Latino, but out of ~seven major male protagonists MAYBE one of them could be black. The issue is just that I’ve cemented their images in my mind, and I’d have to break those down to change their features. So not a major issue, I guess. And plenty of major and minor side-characters would easily slide into not being white, because very few of them have any sort of big visual ideas in my mind.
I think my biggest issue with just plopping some other races into the middle of my story is that it really wouldn’t make sense. Tied into the science-based issue, the setting is a basic-fantasy-kinda-medieval-England-and-France. Sure, there’d very likely be foreigners here and there- but it’d be relatively rare. And a big part of me is saying that I’m trying to fill a quota, which kind of goes against my grain.
I value many of your opinions, and seeing as I have seen few-to-no trolls in these comments any of you whose opinions I don’t specifically value I still want to take into consideration. One thing I know for sure is that plenty of you are more… sensitive? Conscious? Towards these issues, and that’s something I need here.
What do y’all think I should do?
Should I just say fuck it and completely diversify my cast and the world as a whole, ignoring racial issues because it’s fantasy?
Should I say fuck it and diversify, but pay careful attention to those issues because they’re important?
Should I say fuck it, but throw those issues into the background because they’re realistic but not relevant to the story?
Should I carefully disperse a few foreigners here and there, like the fantasy-medieval-England it’s supposed to be?
Or should I just make everyone white? <- /sarcasm
Sorry, lord and savior Willis, for putting my crap in your comments. Feel free to ELIMINATE THE VERY EXISTENCE OF THIS POST if you don't like how un-DoA it is.
Or chip in, because I have a great deal of respect for the author of three of my all-time favorite stories. Either way is fine with me.
Hmm. Well, let’s talk about medieval France and England, then. In a world where it’s very unlikely you’d ever travel more than about five miles from your home unless you were pretty dang rich, and if you made it much farther than that, you might not understand the language spoken there, it’s a lot trickier to have a concept of foreign. This is before nationalism came along and tried to give everyone a standardized language, and it was hundreds of years after Rome had collapsed with theirs, standardized mostly by how quickly it spread. Here’s a list of the language families standard in the U.K. and France from about 500-1200: Germanic, including Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Scots, Middle English and Middle Scots, Danish (lots of invaders spoke this), and in France Frankish, and then the Celtic languages including Pictish, old Irish, Brittonic, maybe some old Gaulish if it’s still hanging on, far to the south of France there’s the Basque, which is still around yet unrelated to any other language. There’s the Latin-derived lengues d’oil, including Occitan and a whole host of languages, the variety of which spoken near Paris eventually became modern French.
It’s a huge linguistic mess, and I still haven’t gotten into the eventual crossovers like the Frankish giving way to the d’oils which where then picked up by the Nordish speaking Normans as they built up influence in England and struck in 1066, creating Anglo-Norman and eventually Middle English…
So in this mess of languages, you’re pretty likely to consider anybody from a not-so-distant fishing village who eats seafood instead of farming and going good old hunting rather foreign. They sound too much like the odd people farther south who you can’t even understand.
Oh, I specifically meant fantasy medieval England and France. You know, where it’s all centuries-old kingdoms ‘n shit and everyone either speaks English or Japanese?
In all seriousness, though, the setting is a single, powerful kingdom with little fear of invasion. All of the towns and villages in the kingdom follow the same laws, bow to the same king- not totally Dark Ages, ya know? More King Arthur-esque.
People have always travelled and have always migrated. There are traders, there are refugees, there are all kinds of ways someone with an ethnicity from a different part of the world can end up in a major civilizational center.
I can’t answer the ‘should i add racism’ question coz I’m white and have barely a clue myself, but it’s NOT realistic to make everyone white. People have ALWAYS TRAVELLED. Which means, your characters can be descendants of someone who moved from their homeland several generations ago, and the only difference left is the genetic whim of the skin color.
It’s… a thing. It can be. It happens.
(War prisoners / slaves captured in wars generations ago whose descendants became naturalized citizens)
(Sages and experts who were invited overseas to teach the locals to build ships/houses/tools)
(seriously traders literally just traders)
I /sarcasm’d for a reason, lol. Yeah, that’s basically what I’m leaning towards so far- the kingdom of Wayom is mostly made up of white people, and here and there you’ll find other skin tones because travelers and stuff.
Well, if it is a fantasy world you are building, you can make them any colour, or mixture thereof, that you want. That being said, from what you have said of your setting, predominantly white, with a few, rare, others here and there, would be realistic, particularly if they were seen as exotic and mysterious, as they are rarely seen in this part of the world. As for getting an artist, you should maybe talk to Yotomoe, he is quite talented.
It’s perfectly realistic to have everyone in a psuedo-medieval story white. Especially if you’re not focused on travel or a big trading center or something. It’s also perfectly realistic to have characters who aren’t. These statements aren’t contradictory.
Racism also seems to differ in place and time – when the minority is small and rare enough they’re likely to be seen as exotic rather than be actually discriminated against. Prejudices tend to grow against minorities large and common enough to be known and either exploited or threatening. They might not be what we commonly think of as racial, but more ethnic or religious.
Okay, on the subject of gay relationships, I just want to note: Don’t forget bisexuality. Characters don’t have to be ‘homosexual’ to be in a same-sex relationship, and they don’t have to be in a same-sex relationship to be attracted to their own gender.
On the subject of race and racism, I’m not an expert, but going off of what I know…
While tribalism is an inherent part of human nature, defining it on the basis of race – and, in fact, the concept of race itself – comes from a specific social and economic context. If an ethnic group is formally enslaved, conquered or displaced, there’ll be intense, constant prejudice against them; if they form a permanent underclass – or traveling merchant class – there’ll be variable prejudice against them, with occasional outbreaks of violence (often whipped up from above).
But maybe they’re just ‘from somewhere else’, with small communities in port cities, but not falling into a specific economic role, and not big enough to provoke prejudice. The might be seen as exotic and different (especially by people not from port cities) and they may meet occasional hostility, but not the kind of structural racism that we’re accustomed to.
Or maybe they’ve been a part of the same kingdom/empire for so long that people don’t really make a distinction. There was a black Roman Emperor, and his race wasn’t seen as particularly noteworthy at the time; while the empire generally viewed Celtic Britons as exotic noble savages. On that note, ethnicity isn’t always drawn on the same lines – remember the persecution of Irish and Italian immigrants to America, with neither group being seen as truly ‘white’ until they were fully embedded in America society.
So yeah. It’s all about the social and economic context. If there are divisions, they generally come from something more than melanin – class, culture, religion; warfare, conquest, slavery, mass immigration of refugees. And these divisions can persist, century after century, or they can fade away over time.
Yeah, Eli isn’t actually homosexual. He’s bi. I was just kinda quickly going over the fact that I didn’t need to worry about that side of things so I didn’t stop to mention it.
Thanks to all of you who responded. I’ve got a pretty clear idea in my mind of how to handle this now, and it works perfectly with the already established socio-political issues and history I have written for my story.
Stuff like this is why I kinda hate that I was always taught the “write what you know” thing. Now every main character I want to write is basically a variation of myself who reacts the way I do to things, and everyone defaults to white, and even though I’ve learned I’m pan and in a queer trans relationship all my relationships default to cis straight….
I really need to work on characterization is what I’m saying. And dialog. @.@
I have no advice to give, just saying I can relate I guess. Haha.
If you’re willing to put a ton of time into researching racism, maybe add it. Otherwise, honestly just… just let the fictional people there be less terrible. Not every setting needs it. At all.
Ok, a link was the issue. Not sure how to give you guys said link without just posting it, because as I said, I don’t know how them fancy-schmancy word links work.
Word links fail too often, getting captured by the filter, leaving you with no link at all. But officially you do it with the HTML tag >a href=”url”<word>/a<
And, yes, links can get your comment held for moderation. It happened to me. At first, even links to dumbingofage.com got held. Now they don’t seem to. But other sites sometimes do.
That aside, while I don’t specifically have answers to your questions I would love to get in touch with you outside of this comment section.
On the race thing: I haven’t exactly taken the time to look at potential bias in my view here (and I’ve been thinking a lot about basically the same issues with what I’m working on right now), but I think if you are writing a completely fantasy world with made up races your approach to including racism might want to be based on something like people wanting to rationalize systematic slavery. “We can enslave this group for these reasons.” (This is loosely based on things that permeated my mind years ago and could be totally wrong in regards to it’s relation to our history).
Once upon a time I went the Tolkien/D&D route, and a while after that I made up names for different human races, but nowadays there are humans and then there’s everything else. The only other sentient race in the mortal world is the dragons, and they don’t even have that big of a role. Slavery is more culture-based, rather than ethnicity- enemies of the Church and the kingdom tend to be put to work as punishment, and killed if they refuse.
We definitely should! Although I’m not sure how to discreetly slip you my email and I’ve got no social media ties…
Thanks to both of y’all for explaining the link thing btw. I know the basics of HTML tagging from GameFAQs (ugh, so glad I don’t use it anymore) but all the tags in the NOTE confuse the hell outta me.
“Thanks to both of y’all for explaining the link thing btw. I know the basics of HTML tagging from GameFAQs (ugh, so glad I don’t use it anymore) but all the tags in the NOTE confuse the hell outta me.”
Ahh, yeah, I’ve done some web design and development work (recently), and specifically have worked with html and css since 2004 (which is insane, as far as I’m concerned), so I barely think twice about what the tags actually mean, haha.
I remember the Newsroom lost me as a viewer when they had the white straight male lecture a woman about why it was wrong for her to identify rapists on social media as it might lead to accidentally getting an innocent white guy in trouble.
This isn’t about this strip specifically, but is it midnight yet? Sorry if this has been answered previously, but I don’t really know how political rallies work – has it officially begun, or is the crowd just gathering beforehand to wait for Robin to come onstage right at midnight?
Personally, I think if you absolutely know someone is a rapist/attempted rapist, it is useful and helpful to inform the rest of us, so we can make an informed choice about spending time around that person/letting them have access to our drinks. This isn’t finding out someone online’s real life info and spreading it. This is warning about a confirmed predator to other people who are in the same environment.
Ryan is a missing stair that few people know about. More people need to know about that so he can’t as easily exploit the spaces to prey on the newbies.
I understand wanting to avoid anymore victims to this guy but putting up his information on social media and saying he’s an attempted rapist would draw up a mix of reactions with not all being good. Some would be skeptical about the accusation because they its natural to doubt. While others might start to form a lynch mob against him. I prefer the law getting involved over letting it up to the people.
So would we all, if the law would actually do its job in such cases.
It’s actually one of the big problems when the law systematically fails – in addition to the obvious harm to the victims, people look for alternatives. Which is definitely not good in the long term, but neither is the current state.
I just really don’t want those solutions to end up screwing us. And while I haven’t heard of it doing so, there’s always a bit of an information blackout as to whether non-white people are being screwed.
Don’t know why anyone thought this guy would play it cool. He’s a short term schemer which is why he got angry when Joyce started to resist his advances which is good for Amazi-Girl since he’s easier to trap.
Nah. It took a lot of things going wrong before he reacted. It wasn’t just her resisting. It was that his plan to get her alone failed. Then she kept on having some innocent excuse not to go along with it.
Y’know, I think given the way Amber/Amazi-Girl’s mental status was going, it’s pretty darn convenient that the crowd turning on Sal snapped her out of her vengeance tunnel vision. I feel like in her state, that reaction would’ve vindicated her actions in her own mind. Moreover, the fact that she goes from practically foaming at the mouth to assuming the same confident, snarky persona she had before she started going off the rails… Also awfully convenient.
I get it, we’re finally getting that confrontation with Joyce’s attacker, and that scene sorta needs Amazi-Girl at her best to be as cool as it can possibly be, but I really hope her very dramatically declining mental state doesn’t just get glossed over after this. But at the same time, I think her reaction to the crowd turning on Sal has already glossed over it a bit.
That’s how it happens in real world. You have this big mental thing going on, with epiphanies and dramatic confrontations… and then ANOTHER thing happens that for the moment, completely overshadows it, and you put on your best game face and delay that previous thing for when you’re winding down alone and can crash freely.
I think it’s gonna be slightly harder than that if only because of the whole “Amber can’t even look at Sal without having a panic attack” and “Sal is probably willing to let AG go if she never STALKS HER AGAIN but like, they’re not friends” bits, but no more actively seeking her out and giving her shit and a “Okay yeah, I DEFINITELY fucked up breaking up with you” to Danny is good in my book even if they decide to stay friends for the time being. (And maybe Danny goes “It’s clear you have very little value on your own life and maybe this might be time to talk about that? With me or Ethan at least?” and she’ll be in a state where she can consider not everything Sal says automatically evil this time.)
Still, I will gladly take Amber firmly on the path to recovery, yes PLEASE.
Oh I know, that was just an extreme I would be okay with.
And I would very much enjoy Amber acknowledging that she screwed up with Danny and them being friends again, since I have a hard time believing that their nearly 6 years of panel time together is just totally going to get flushed down the toilet over a misunderstanding and they’re just totes 100% done.
As for Sal, I am genuinely convinced by the end of this event that Amber starts punching holes into her perception of Sal as a monster. Not completely, obviously, it’d be too easy if by the end of this everything was perfectly fine, but I think we’re starting to see Amber come out of it because she had the worst of her own hatred towards Sal reflected back at her by the crowd, and she was forced to acknowledge that Sal had done nothing wrong even though by Amazi-Girl logic, Sal striking first because she was stalking her made it A-OK.
With you, Spencer. Burrying the hatchet with Sal will be the hard part, as it requires enough conversation to give both sides perspective. But it’s started. From my point of view it’s Danny who should apologize, but it doesn’t really matter which one starts the process .
Like, I get that to Amber it felt like a calculated betrayal, because she goes to meet him at their usual hangout and finds with talking to Sal, whereupon Danny says that she should stop being Amazi-Girl because Sal said so, but Danny didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not Amber’s fault either, it’s a tragic misunderstanding brought about by her untreated trauma, but it’s really unfair to blame Danny.
Seriously I’m basically the biggest Amber cheerleader here and just oh my god.
Danny was right. He’s terrified that Amber will get herself killed. There is, flatly, no place here that Danny is actually wrong; his only is not having the clairvoyant space brain necessary to pick out that Sal is a fixture for Amber’s traumas.
I can write an essay about why Amber felt betrayed by him but that doesn’t somehow mean he has anything to own up to.
He does have a point, at least as far as relationships go. But in fairness I can’t think ofa nything as important to have a fight over as ‘this thing is literally going to kill you’, and even if I did I wouldn’t remember the exact specifics.
IDK, I can see “I should have found a better time to say this”, at least, because maybe he does think he could have. But not “I shouldn’t have said this”, no.
Danny knows he’s right. If he was going to buckle he would have done it then.
I dunno, I feel it’d be out of character for Amber to expect an apology (also she literally was not herself when that happened and I feel the need to constantly hammer on that), but I could probably see her try to explain her history with Sal and get mad when Danny still wants her to not jump off of cars, though that presumes Amber has any interest at all in ever speaking to him again.
He won’t necessarily buckle. But he would apologize for hurting her, even unintentionally.
Amber wouldn’t expect an apology, because Amber is a horrible person and doesn’t deserve one.
There’s also another point in there that’s easy to miss, tied to the “literally not herself”: Danny thought he was telling Amber that she needed not to take so many risks, but he was actually talking to Amazi-Girl and she had to have heard “You need to go away. I like Amber better than you.”
Not how you help someone with DID. Not his fault, but still …
You know, I have just realized that we still haven’t gotten Amber’s feelings on their breakup yet. She’s been shifted to Amazi-Girl nearly for the entirety of the last two days and her only reaction so far was “I don’t want to deal with it.”
I’m hoping that proves important and that when she sees him again she’s willing to talk to him.
Yeah, actually, I kinda forgot in all this rush, but I’d expected Amber to remand what AG had said at the time, though I think we’re at the point where Danny’s been wronged enough that it’d feel weird for him to re-enter a relationship with her? Maybe not.
I mean, there’s no chance they’re actually getting back together, Danny/Ethan is being pretty blatantly telegraphed, so chances are Amber just ends up thinking “I can’t do a relationship right now” or something and they just be friends. I think it’s something worth being acknowledged, at least.
Like, it’s a pretty extraneous situation that motivated their breakup, but I dunno. I don’t think Amber has caused him any significant amount of pain outside of being a jerk during their breakup because her alter felt betrayed, but it feels unfair to punish Amber for freaking out as a result of untreated, years long built trauma.
It wasn’t just the crowd. She also was taken out of her element when Sal pulled her down.
And Amazi-Girl is only delusional in regards to Sal. (Amber is less delusional and more phobic.) She got angry at Danny and Sal, and that bothered her.
But I know from experience that you can be pulled out of anger by something unexpected. It doesn’t mean it won’t come back. But intense anger requires stewing.
Of course, it’s also completely possible that the adrenaline from being pulled down would make her even more angry, so don’t go shocking people when they’re angry. It can work. But it might not.
Not at all what I was expecting but still comes with plenty of that good old schadenfreude filling, so I’ll relish it all the same. Schadenfreude; when it’s directed against bad people, it’s like chocolate for the soul.
Hell of a first semester for Joyce.
Assuming AG follows through on social media threat, and assuming it becomes a big deal, Joyce’ll have to see Ryan again and again on her phone/computer. Can’t see a way around it but… It just sucks for her.
My personal interpretation of her messaging with Joe is that it’s happening over FB messaging or some other social media messaging platform, since them being connected on social media seems more likely than having exchanged and then kept each other’s numbers.
Lots of comments on AG doing illegal things: threatening him, provoking a fight etc.
I don’t see all of that at all. She said “one month ago, you were at a party and put something in a girls drink’. He was and he did.
Note that he wouldn’t be so upset if there wasn’t truth in the statement.
Perhaps it can’t be proved he roofied Joyce, but it can be proved he was there. That’s step one.
She said she wants to put his face on social media. So: she may not have done it, or she may have. We have to see it first. He thinks she is.
She is provoking a fight with him for sure. She would like nothing better than for him to hit her or grab or phone and run. Then she has him on theft and assault. She is also smart enough to know this goes beyond vigilating a jay-walker or sign stealer.
He will have as hard a time proving she provoked him, as she will have proving the roofie charge. Sounds like a draw to me.
But hopefully she kicks the shit out of him, just on general principal, and then gets him arrested for assult.
As to her ‘sudden’ about face on her backing down from attacking Sal, I don’t think she is so far gone as to not recognize that she had to do just that. What she has with Sal is personal. She dosen’t want crowd interference.
“Note that he wouldn’t be so upset if there wasn’t truth in the statement.”
I imagine anyone would be upset about being accused of a crime. Especially when the threat isn’t going to the police, who, at least in theory, require evidence to punish you, but going to social media where evidence isn’t required at all.
Of course, we know he is upset by the accusation because it’s true, but only since we know the accusation is true.
Putting him in jail for assault sounds good, that might have a chance of getting Joyce some solace.
The thing is that he isn’t upset. He’s showing rage, which wouldn’t make sense unless you assume he’s done something and is still doing something upon which gaining Internet Notoriety would negatively impact.
Well, pretty much anything you do is going to be negatively impacted if you gain Internet Notoriety as a rapist. Even (or especially) if it was entirely false.
While i want that guy to get everything he deserves. Do want to point out.
anyone would be angry at the situation. Whether they did something or not, she was already stating they did. Which means if they were bad, she’s caught them, if they aren’t. then she; a very public figure with a lot of public backing and internet connections, is proclaiming them a bad guy. So, if he was someone who hadn’t done anything, his life just got ruined.
So anyone would be angry, can’t use his anger as evidence for truth in the situation. Sadly their emotional reaction does little to prove either way. Which is why i’m glad/why she sent a pic to ask for identity verification.
Yakno before she drops his newly eunich’d body in some alley way
—–
Second detail. yeah hard to prove she provoked him and she could easily prove that she defended herself (and curb stomped his shitty ass), but that situation requires her to show up in front of the legal authorities, and publically. So she’d be outed on who she is; she got lucky…somehow? with the last event and not having public reveal on it–though im 99% sure cops, and teachers know who amazigirl is.
So she’d have to show up in court, likely in front of him.
Meaning, i doubt she cares if she has self defense or not, I think her only goal is to make him feel what Joyce feels. Fear of the world at large. Wounds heals, as she’s recently found out, but emotional wounds are much slower, and public ones much more vicious.
Amazigirl is choose the perfect poison for him. I really think she might have been considering his case for the whole month.
Amazigirl has no plans to show up in court. The reason for not hitting first is not to avoid legal problems. The reason is that Amazigirl follows strictly a well defined moral code which makes her a safe outlet for Amber’s violent tendencies. If he attacks first then Amazigirl is free to engage in controlled violence. The police and witnesses really have little to do with it.
If she can’t prove it in a court of law, it’s defamatory and illegal. And while it’s easier to prove in a civil court htan a criminal one, it’d still put Joyce through hell.
She’s totally right, and as omniscient viewers, we know she’s justified (and know she’s correct because we saw the incident. I don’t know that anybody’s disagreed with that. What I’m saying is that she is actually putting herself at risk. You know, in the real world. It’s not like there’s going to /be/ a courtroom scene. It’s also been implied that you can just /do/ that. Which, not so much.
No. That’s not how it works. There is no way that a regular citizen is required to know something beyond a reasonable doubt before saying it.
What you have to prove is that you did due diligence in trying to uncover this truth. That you weren’t “negligent” or showing a “blatant disregard for the truth.” The difference between this and with public figures is that, for public figures, you also have to prove actual malice.
When you have the corroboration of many witnesses, as AG does, you will not be successfully sued for defamation (well, assuming a non-corrupt court). She has every reason to believe what she said is true.
“Preponderance of the Evidence” is the civil standard, malice quite pointedly includes negligence (“She only got one side!”) for private individuals.
And she doesn’t actually have the corroboration of many witnesses, for the central claim. She has one witness. And the law generally does not give a fuck about what women have to say about rape, because the Star Court were a bunch of old white dudes. What she’s saying is risky to herself (In the real world).
Since the thought hadn’t occured to me to clarify this as well sooner, ti’s also fucking great she’s doing it, given that mistaken identity isn’t a plausible issue thanks to that wonderful scar.
Ohhh, heroic dive to save AG’s life for the second time? That’d mess with her “justice” in regards to Sal wouldn’t it. (She may be realizing that isn’t so clear cut anyway, but yeah)
Basically. Well I feel like its more likely the guy pulls a guy and sal jump kicks him, but it goes off anyway.
Sal won’t admit it. but she is a serious softy.
The other possibility I see is Sal’s friend’s death as a result of AG’s actions. but that one is harder to story plot, simply because Sal likely would murder the guy and AG as a result.
Even without Willis’ “No Deaths” thing I keep hearing about, I can’t see Marcie’s death as a result of this, it just feels like a contrived way to create “drama” and I think Willis is a better writer than that.
At this point, I think Amazigirl is in for a penny/in for a pound , with Sal’s help.
She just de- escalated with her when she realized how racist it looked
( and was whipping up racist mob ) , They had a normal conversation, and Amazigirl collaborated with Sal.
Still something like a 0% chance AG figured out what she was doing is racist. But she did realize it was wrong, which for most purposes is good enough.
No, I’m pretty sure she realized how racist it looked. The crowd was being blatantly racist, and doing so in support of her. If not for that, I can’t figure out any reason why she would have been so hesitant to go after the girl she’s been stalking who had just assaulted her (albeit for an understandable reason).
Seriously, regardless of what Amber is trying to do, telling a black woman she’s super happy she’ll spend the rest of her life suffering for her criminal actions as a child, actions she faced legal punishment for, is inherently a racist thing to say.
Mmhm. But I don’t exactly expect a young white kid to recognize it, and I’ve had no real evidence that she has. Given what else she’s done, I am reasonably confident Amber hasn’t recognized that this is seriously a problem for Sal.
But whether she understands the gravity of the situation or not, she still understood that the crowd wanted her hurt, and that wasn’t honestly justifiable, so she’s at least tried to calm them a bit. That makes me happy. If she picked it up that fast, that’s honestly hilariously unrealistic to me, but at least it means watching less racism from a fictional character I like, so on the other hand, there’s that XD
Reminds me that I was initially dismissive of Overwatch using robot racism to paint Torb, Zarya, the Aussie Boyfriends, and Reaper as assholes, then realized that the absolute last thing I needed to hear was 5 edgelords each other match saying ‘beaner’ because idk Grandad called Reaper that. Sometimes realism is overrated. XD
I think trlkly is right that AG has realized how racist her actions looked. Realizing how racist some of her actions actually were will probably take a bit longer.
No, if he’s got a gun, he’s going to draw, Amazi-Girl will disarm him but he’ll get a shot off and it will hit a random bystander. The press will laud Amazi-Girl for stopping the ‘mass shooting’ before it can start. However, Sal will know the truth and so will Amazi-Girl. It will not be an easy thing for her to deal with, what with Amber’s need for Amazi-Girl to be the ‘perfect hero’, that by not predicting this outcome, she got someone hurt.
This does seem to be Amazi-Girl’s MO, doesn’t it? Still, it really is amazing how a little pressure rips off people’s mask. Most people would be shocked and deny the did anything wrong. Ryan just gets angry to the point of violence demonstrating that he is, indeed, the one she’s been looking for.
Of course, him taking a swing is what Amazi-Girl wants.
Actually at the end of this strip I was worried like IS THIS DEFINITELY THE GUY coz like… this is exactly how an innocent person who was just randomly accused by a superhero and without them waiting for any proof or talking to them is about to be publicly shamed… yeah that’s how an innocent person would react, too.
As someone who has empathized and identified with Joyce way too much for parts of this particular ongoing plotline, the reappearance of Ryan in this way both fills me with joy and nausea. It would have been entirely possible and have rung true if none of them ever ran into him again – it is a big campus, with a ton of students. But it’s also entirely possible and rings true that someone does and recognizes him – college communities are like small towns that way.
Never seeing or hearing of him again, but seeing his face in every stranger’s is a story I know best, but I’m very hopeful that Joyce will get more closure and a better chance at justice.
My college had 20,000+ (at least according to the “undergraduate student body” number) and I can’t imagine not running into someone like that again, but after looking it up apparently IU is 30,000+, so what do I know.
I love willis’ character expressions. Amazi-girl is acting like she could not care less what ryan does right now, and that her phone is more important and it is hilarious.
Normal Ryan Face -> Hurt Ryan Face -> Mad Amazi-Girl Face -> Quite Mad Amazi-Girl Face -> Shiiiiiiiit… Ryan Face -> I Don’t Care Amazi-Girl Face -> Furious Ryan Fa-> Still Don’t Care Amazi-Girl Face
You could say that her attitude is amazing, eh? Eh?
Ok so for some reason every time I check back on my comments to see if there are responses, I forget that your comment exists and my mind decides to act as if your comment was in response to mine and I’m all like “aw jeez are puns hated THAT much?”
My internal alarm bells are going off.
By the psychic powers of “this sounds familiar”, I predict Ryan will now assault Amazi-Girl successfully and Sal will have to rescue her.
I really hope I’m wrong. Please prove me wrong. Ryan deserves 0 seconds of victory.
I’ve known guys like Ryan, and they are almost always complete junk in a fight. The kinda punk who pulls a gun to get their masculinity back when he gets his ass handed to him.
If this goes through, the one I’m worried about is Joyce – I mean, she has panic attacks from going outside and imagining him. Having his face plastered all over the place can’t help, can it?
I think that Joyce will be determined to follow through with her decision to ‘make things better’. That will include facing down her fear of Ryan and what he did (although she may choose to do so in a quixotic or unusual way).
So no signs of remorse then. Good. I was thinking that his experience may have convinced Ryan that what he was doing was wrong and, if not making amends, at least trying to move on with his life and lay low. But he seems unrepentant, which means I have no misgivings about Amazigirl kicking his ass now.
Even if he DID feel guilty or were trying to make ”amends”, that would at best warrant giving him a chance to turn himself in before she finished beating the crap out of him.
There is no way to make amends for what he’s done. If he were lying low he would have transferred to another school in another state so his victims would never have to see his face again. I don’t care if he just saved a bus full of puppies, orphans and war heroes, he’s still getting off easy
Seriously. He roofied her. He roofied her SPRITE because she was proving to be too difficult to isolate with things like playing games with other people at a party. It was an entirely calculated act and there was literally no way he did this and not be aware of the fact that he was taking consent away from her because she was, in his words, a “fucking tease” so he had the right to do this.
This is not a person who made a mistake. This is not a person who will gain self-reflection any time soon. This was an entirely calculated act.
No. More calculated even than that. He brought that roofied Sprite to the room where he expected her to be alone, only to be temporarily foiled by her actually recruiting other people to play board games.
There was no “proving to be too difficult” or “because she was a tease”, the plan was drug and rape from the start. Hell, even if he’d found someone who would have been happy to have sex, he still would have raped her. He never even gave her the chance to consent.
It’s honestly easy to miss quite how bad it was until you go back and reread it. When you first see the Sprite, you don’t know it’s roofied (though you might guess), but if you go back and trace what happens it’s even uglier than the first glance.
I have been on pins and needles since Amazi-Girl first spotted Ryan last week! The plotting is spot-on.
I’m glad she didn’t just start whaling on him (yet), so matter how much he may deserve it. This could be a dangerous place and time for Amazi-Girl (and particularly for Sal, if she gets involved), and I’d hate to see one of them get in trouble while Ryan gets away with it yet again (no matter how realistic that would be – oh god, that’s what’s going to happen, isn’t it?)
Further to my comment up-thread about Ryan drawing a gun and maybe shooting someone by accident as Amazi-Girl is struggling to disarm him, I wonder if that’s how Joyce is going to avoid having to deal with her trauma by facing him again – She won’t even be involved in his trial for assault with a deadly weapon.
Erm, if you’re implying that Joyce will get a gun for self-defense, I rather doubt it, on account of toedad. You know, another source of trauma for her, the guy who held her and Becky at gunpoint? That hasn’t stopped being a thing that happened.
Ugh, first, let’s get this out of the way. This arc is rough for me as a survivor. Not gonna lie. And it’s rough to see all the talks in the comments talking about this as a simple matter of doxxing and empathizing with Ryan (I know why, the shadow of how doxxing has been used to harass, defame, and attempt to destroy close friends of mine and women/trans people on the internet still looms across a lot of our mutual fandoms).
So let’s tackle that first.
Panel 5: The thing about doxxing that makes it terrifying is the implied threat of harassment. Oh, here’s your information, so innocent, what are you upset about? Sure, the people I gave it to are well known for harassing people to the point of suicide, calling in SWAT threats, trying to get them fired from employment, stalking on all forms of social media, calling home addresses, and taking photos of your house. And some have been arrested for violence in the real world, but hey, take your chances speaking out now, I’m sure it’ll go great.
It’s silencing terrorism in a similar way as a burning cross on the lawn is. It’s a “we hate you, we know where you live or can find it soon, and we may very well hurt you if you ‘upset’ us enough by existing”.
This. This isn’t doxxing.
I’ve mentioned that the system is really broken when it comes to rape and that’s really true. Few rapists actually meet jail time, most jail time for rapes is vanishingly small, most cop investigations are retraumatizing, most folks disbelieve you or harass you for rape accusations, and rape apologia is rampant. And even institutions seem to treat rape accusations as a greater problem than a serial rapist in their midst.
Most organizations are notoriously slow to throw out a serial rapist targeting folks in a community, even when dozens of survivors come out and speak about their experiences. Often hiding behind things like a lack of police conviction and worries that a “false accusation” somehow ruins more lives than being raped (it doesn’t. I’ve seen folks accused of rape, it tends to go away in their lives within a year or two, even when it’s true, and during that year or two, there’s no shortage of rape denialists to get their back and attack their victims for them.).
Cause, I mean, survivors talk, warn friends about certain folks, word slowly gets around. But speaking out publicly, declaratively can be personally very dangerous (you get a swarm of rape apologists attacking you for any accusation, see all the shit Cosby’s accusers have gotten or all the shit Mia Farrow has gotten over the years for simply believing her daughter). However, it can be super useful, because it’s a much bigger sign for the missing stair.
And it allows the survivors to stop feeling alone and unsupported in their community. They can see others who have been victimized and speak with them, feel like they can be believed if they mention what happened to them, stop feeling gaslighted by a community pretending stuff like this doesn’t happen or only happens to “bad girls” or “weak guys” or “freaks”.
I’ve seen cultures where no one speaks out about the rape epidemic and it’s heartbreaking and people keep getting hurt over and over again because there’s no public shine of light on the problem. Every survivor is alone and hating themselves and thinking they must have fucked something up and the serial abuser continues to ruin lives.
Outing them publicly in the community doesn’t stop their predations, but can remove their protections a bit, can remove the system they are exploiting, the pool of targets they can affect and most of all, can support survivors to know that they are not crazy, they are not alone, they are not to blame. It wasn’t just them.
We talk about the lack of justice. There is no justice. This isn’t justice. This is just making it harder for him to continue to hurt people.
His “image”, unfortunately, will remain fairly clean, rape culture will ensure that, but maybe he won’t be able to hurt as many people as he has so far.
It really is just another variant of “People without power doing something to stop being trod on is JUST AS BAD as people with power doing something similar for the express purpose of stomping on other people.”
Panel 1: Just like with his assault on Joyce, he’s really good at playing smooth until he feels no longer in control of his little game and even then, he can fake it for a bit until he feels the girl has gotten too “uppity”.
If AG had doubts, was a regular type of cop, this is probably where the interaction would end. A “sorry to bother you, sir, we must have been mistaken, enjoy the rally” sort of thing. Luckily for the story, AG isn’t the type to do that and she got confirmation that this is the guy.
And happily, she’s shaken off her bad path and is back to doing what made Amber believe AG was the “golden alter” in the first place.
Panels 2-3: Confronting with crimes, getting a better picture… goodish. But now Ryan knows exactly who spoke and my experience observing serial rapists is they frequently will dance around with public accusations trying to find which of their victims spoke first so they can harass and gaslight them.
Ryan won’t even need to do that. He knows which (slur for women) told on him and if he bothered to remember her name, it’ll be child’s play for him to look up a lot of information up about her or at least access her email account to harass her through or have proxies harass her through.
This might backfire by putting Joyce more at risk. Though knowing she has a superhero who has her back may make him think twice about it, especially if she ends up kicking his teeth in here.
He remembers alright. He remembers every time he looks in the mirror (which, good going on that by the way Joyce. I wish I had given my rapist something similar to remember me by).
Panel 6: But hey, let’s be frank here, outing him as a rapist to the campus was never Plan A. Kicking his ass was always Plan A. Cause that’s how AG works. It won’t do much systematically, but it’ll be momentarily satisfying. Though I’m still convinced the crowd will not like that she’s picking a fight with a white guy instead of the black girl they wanted her to beat up for them.
Panels 2-3: you’re assuming he only roofied one girl in the week or so that would commonly be refferred to as “one month ago”. I find that to be a risky assumption
I’m guessing he made himself scarce at any parties on Saturday, potentially Sunday too given the whole bleeding thing, but… college campuses do sometimes have parties on Thursdays too, augh. Yeah. That can’t be ruled out, can it.
Yeah he’s about to punch her and she’s been waiting to punch him. Unfortunately yeah, no way the crowd’s gonna like this. (Probably they’re going to believe him when he says she must have been mistaken as soon as the fight’s over, which you know he’s gonna do, probably with a new innocent story behind this awful nasty scar about like a tragic camping incident or something for maximum effect, and isn’t it awful how Amazi-Girl jumped straight to posting that? *Gags a bit because augh, rapist brain is not a good place to be in*)
Nice she did get him on social media though at least. Hopefully at least a couple people on campus see it and have a moment of doubt they wouldn’t have otherwise if they see him at a party.
As I recall, the frat guy who drove them home said “I’ve seen his ass lurking around here” – that infers that Joyce may not have been his only target. It’s possible that she was his first, but he’s been ideating for a while now.
Hell, if the whole busted-face issue hasn’t put him off trying again, he might have even succeeded in the month since he drugged Joyce.
‘Lurking’ isn’t a positive word, so at least one person is suspicious of Ryan’s actions. If there’s one, there’s bound to be more. Perhaps events happening that don’t add up. If he’s [ trigger ] women with drugs, perhaps they don’t remember it, but still feel that something was done to them?
People should be afforded some amount of privacy; doxxing shouldn’t be a thing. People should be able to better themselves; prison shouldn’t be a thing. People should be able to be themselves; being assaulted, raped, and/or murdered for doing so shouldn’t be a thing.
Ryan, almost certainly knows who the “victim involved” is, but I’m not completely convinced of “But now Ryan knows exactly who spoke” or its implications. I’m certain it’s a thing and a problem in most cases (I know it is), but AG showed up at the party and even if Ryan doesn’t know that, Joyce wasn’t the only person involved this time. He was attacked and, at least temporarily, surrounded by people. Maybe he’ll assume Joyce spoke out about it anyway, but there isn’t an actual reason for him to assume that.
Now I picture a montage of Amber and Carla hacking Joyce’s phone, and Ethan, Dorothy, Becky, et al furiously running around so they can just happen to be leaning up against a bulletin board as Joyce walks by, etc.
Aside from the fact we know it’s Ryan and he’s guilty (Wouldn’t it be nice, DSL asked sarcastically, if everyone had tags following them around) — too damn many of you seem to be comfortable with the level of risk in social-media-accusing an innocent party. I’ve dealt IRL with too many people who think that with some crimes on their political radar, any accusation must be followed by a guilty verdict or the system is “broken.” Damage done to an innocent party is seen as “acceptable collateral damage,” if it’s acknowledged at all.
AG isn’t working from uncorroborated hearsay. She wasn’t there for the attack itself, but she saw the fallout firsthand, and personally spoke to the victim and several witnesses who DID see it happen, and she even sent a photo of Ryan to one of them to verify she had the right guy. What more would you have her do?
If the percentage of rapists who the system actually convicted wasn’t in the single digits, and the rapists who DID get convicted actually received sentences fitting their crimes more often than not, I might share your concern.
But the system really, really sucks at treating rape like a serious issue, and rapists like the pieces of shit they are.
I will happily brave the extremely overblown ”risk” of being falsely accused and having my life ruined briefly inconvenienced rather than risk scum like Ryan going completely unpunished
I’m just going to leave this here as a general response to this sort of sentiment which I’ve seen a lot on this comment thread and in general life. And I’m gonna bury my emotions as much as possible so that I don’t just respond with a flippant “fuck you”.
General society tends to have a disproportionate view of how seriously accusations of rape are taken by the general public. Because people view rape as a “bad thing”, they feel that accusations of rape must ruin lives, cost employment, destroy marriages, etc…
But the reality of rape accusations are such that the impact is actually very small. People tend to respond to rape accusations with anger and violence… towards the one making the accusation and its very common for the majority of support in a rape accusation to go behind the one accused of rape. Someone making a public accusation tends to put themselves at extreme personal risk of harassment and negative response, loss of friends, loss of support, and being viewed as permanently broken (we tend to view rape victims as being permanently damaged goods).
And the person they are accusing tends to suffer very little in terms of social consequences absent other social factors (most famously black men being accused of raping white women in order to justify lynching them). Even accurate accusations don’t really hamper one’s reputation all that much. Look at the large number of defenders Roman Polanski or Woody Allen draw and they raped children.
Now compare that to the vitriol Dylan Farrow still gets to this day simply for being raped and Mia Farrow gets simply for believing her. Hell, Mia Farrow was essentially blacklisted from Hollywood for supporting her daughter.
And if you think this is just famous folks, well, not really, no one remembers the names of rapists, even one’s with famous trials. Within a handful of years, their names are cleared even while their accusers suffer years and years of harassment from rape apologists and defenders. Hell, even rapists who go to jail for it tend to be publicly redeemed rather quickly.
Y’know Brock Turner? Yeah, right now his name is on everyone’s lips and his driveway is being vandalized with his crime and it seems like that might linger for another year maybe. But he’s also being redeemed by his university and invited to his old hunting ground for paid speeches talking about how the evils of excessive drinking can lead to folks getting raped.
Everyone wants to view the best of rapists, to believe that “my nigel” couldn’t have done it, and that is reflected in the quick way we turn on their accusers. And we want to believe that women are liars, that those who accuse folks of rape are just dirty sluts trying to cover up bad sex or ruin a person’s life for fun.
We, as a society, want to believe that so bad that its the reason so few rape accusations go to trial, so few are convicted, and so many survivors who speak up and name names are harassed for doing so. It’s the reason rape culture is so awful.
And the reality is, despite our beliefs that false rape accusations occur all the time, the reality is that they occur less frequently than false accusations of any other crime. Literally someone saying “this person stole from me” or “this person hit me” is more likely to be lying than someone saying “this person raped me”.
And the percentages of all of these are vanishingly small and typically more a result of mistaken identity rather than the crime not actually occurring. Things like the Duke case are rare and we as a society love to latch onto that to justify our rape mythologies and believe that accusers are full of shit.
And yet they disprove the whining. For all the attention that trial got, do any of you remember a single name of a single one of the accused off the top of your head?
No?
Exactly. So please, knock it off with this parallel universe assumptions that believing survivors is somehow negative and that a rape accusation ruins half the life of those accused as it ruins the one making the accusation.
I wish could offer more than sympathy to everyone who has to deal with this kind of bullshit in their daily lives. I find it incredible that they are still able to communicate by means other than an unbroken stream of profanity.
DSL, I know what you’re trying to say is that it’s an accusation that should be taken seriously, and you’re right, but the fact is we don’t live in that world. We don’t live in a world where victims are trusted and rapists are punished. False rape accusations, plainly, do not happen to any real tendency that they should play any significant factor in how we judge cases.
The fuck is wrong with you, though? “False accusations should not play any significant factor in the judgement of cases”. Yes, actually, they should, because that’s the cornerstone of american justice? The entire innocent until proven guilty makes crimes that don’t have any way of proving guilt is the weakness of the system, but there’s no better system, and operating under the assumption the accused is guilty is a terrible premise. Think about it, I think you’ll understand.
Rape accusations tend not to be falsified, but we treat those who come forth as lying skanks for it, and that’s on top of all the other bullshit rape victims have to put up with in the justice system
False accusations WOULD be bad, jackass. The problem is that the system is so damned worried about something that almost NEVER happens that when a rape is reported, far too often the victim isn’t taken seriously, and their claims aren’t investigated. Evidence such as rape kits — when they bother to collect them — can and do sit, unexamined for DECADES because the police won’t bother to investigate the evidence THEY ALREADY HAVE.
If this shit happened when someone reported that they’d been robbed or shot, eads
Damn it, I’m so mad I fat-fingered the submit button.
If this shit happened when someone tried to report that they’d been robbed or shot, someone at the police department would lose their badge immediately.
Failure to take accusations seriously is just as much a miscarriage of justice, if not more.
Also, as an addendum, I’m so fucking done with the sad disingenuous “but the rule of law” poses that discussion of rape bring out.
And here’s why:
1) People are not a court of law.
A court of law has consequences, jail time, sometimes even loss of rights such as the right to vote (which I think is messed up in the extreme, but that’s neither here nor there) and the right to a minimum wage (equally fucked up). As such, it makes sense for their to be an “innocent until proven guilty” standard even though in practice it tends to work as a “guilty until proven straight and white and/or rich” standard.
However, people are people, them thinking, gosh, I better not invite John to this party, he’s been accused of rape and I trust that Cindy isn’t lying about that doesn’t strip him of any rights or have major consequences for his freedom.
People are allowed to make judgments about accused rapists, especially in the context of how few rapes end in prosecution. Often times, telling a community about a rapist is the only way a survivor can warn their community so that it’s harder for others to get hurt the same way they got hurt. And folks being willing to believe rape survivors rather than assuming they are lying for a reason that is “… (something that’s totally not, ‘percussion instruments be lyin’)”, is key for that and for supporting survivors in the one small way we can.
2) These disingenuous arguments never go out for any other crime. We don’t go, oh, we can’t call that boy a thief until the court of law has proven he stole something or we can’t call that girl a murderer until the court of law proves she murdered someone.
Not only that, but the same people who tend to throw out these arguments tend to be the exact same people throwing out garbage like Mike Brown may have stolen something or Trayvon Martin may have smoked a blunt once in order to distract from the fact that they were murdered in cold blood and their killers got away with it.
3) This garbage exploits the fact that this crime rarely gets punished by the law and is a dehumanizing experience to try and handle the “right” way. And so it’s used to disbelieve our narratives, undermine our experiences, and paint us all as liars for not engaging in a doomed process and being one of the lucky few to prevail.
Assholes only cite the iron law of the “law’s majesty” when they know it is broken in their favor. See also harassers citing “oh call the police on us if it’s so bad” knowing that cops are ignorant and unmotivated to investigate internet-based crimes.
Stop the bullshit. He didn’t say that anyone should be presumed guilty. He said that false accusations don’t happen often enough that you should presume they are the case. That’s YOU presuming guilt on the part of the victim.
You just decided to attack someone who was being nice to a rape victim. Do you really think this will go well for you?
In context, which you’re either missing or ignoring, this is about how both jackasses and the law both go out of their way to assume that rape, in particular, is all about false accusations. That women were just waiting for a chance to lie about this, so of course we shouldn’t take rape accusations seriously. This is written into the common law, in as many words. Spencer is saying this isn’t the case, and as individuals, we shouldn’t think that (I mean, the law shouldn’t either, but).
So, DSL. You admit that we know the guy is a rapist. But you decide to chastise the comments section anyways for wanting him punished. You have more empathy for the fictional rapist than the fictional victim.
This shit is 100% why rapist Brock Turner is out today. The judge was like you. He felt sorry for the rapist, and tried to give him the easiest sentence he could.
I know why it happens. You are a guy, so you feel more empathy for the guy. You would never rape someone, so you project that onto anyone you feel empathy for.
But that is a huge, huge problem. It is a large part of why rapists get away. At least rapist Brock Turner was convicted. Many others aren’t, because people will jump to assuming the victim is lying or the victim did something that made happen.
Of course we’re okay with the guy being outed on social media. This is a rapist, not your friend or whatever. For as big as social media is, few people have been harmed in the way you mention.
This isn’t a false accusation. If it were, then maybe there’d be something to get upset about. But there’s not.
Ummm, no.
I’m drawing a distinction _between_ Ryan and people who are falsely accused. And please note I said I met too many people IRL (that means “in real life,” right?) who insist all accused must be guilty.
And while I’m at it, I notice most of the responses to me start off with a variation of “What you’re REALLY saying is … ” which can be accurately translated as “I can’t answer what you said, so I’ll recast what you said into some BS statement I can more easily rebut.” I’ve met a more-than-sufficient number of you in real life, as well.
So I see we’re taking the ironic route to our response.
Who here has been equating accusations with guilt? I can completely understand being uncomfortable with people doing that, but everybody here has been talking either about getting the accusation taken seriously as a criminal complaint rather than as a crime itself, or else what to do when someone is known to be guilty and the legal system has utterly failed.
Many of the people saying these things are themselves rape survivors, who know damn well that their accusations are true.
You said: “too damn many of you seem to be comfortable with the level of risk in social-media-accusing an innocent party.”
And what have people been discussing? Outing Ryan, or some hypothetical real life rapist. Not a single person has talked about outing the falsely accused.
Not a single person has accused you of saying something you didn’t. You apparently did not think about what you said actually meant.
Which is fine. People mess up. But the best response is to apologize and clarify, not make it all about you and attack everyone else.
That only makes it look like you intended to offend.
When literally everyone is giving you grief, chances are you are the one who messed up. At least one of us would have defended you if there was a way to do so.
Also I thought about putting possible up there, but decided against it. Regardless as to the devil advocates comments, to which a couple of mine may have crossed into, he’s going to at minimum try again, assuming he’s not been successful before, or do so again, if he’s successfully hurt others (more so than Joyce was, that is).
Me if I ever see Tony Hawk: Hey you’re Tony Hawk the famous skateboarder. That’s right I recognise you. Won’t be able to get any content out of this will you, you piece of shit
How to read all 28 issues of my Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane run on Marvel Unlimited:
1: The first four issues were published as the miniseries "Mary Jane."
www.marvel.com/comics/serie...
today in #9chickweedlane i learned we have to be shown children learning and relearning what sex is, for Reasons, even though they already clearly know and have prepared nuanced questions about it!
also that Gran must hate, if she's still alive, how Old Juliette is the same but with gray hair
one of my favorite things is when a commenter explodes WHEN DO THESE CHARACTERS GET THERAPY but directed towards a character who canonically has a regular therapist
Hot Toys Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith 1/6 Scale Darth Vader Deluxe ($495) & Standard ($315) is up for preorder at Sideshow - shrsl.com/4wcx6 #ad
If you preorder make sure to hit the Exclusive versions since they include a commemorative plaque and cost the same.
btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 3d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 2d
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 3d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 3d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 12d
Loading ...
“YOU’D BETTER NOT TURN ME TO A DOG ON INSTAGRAM”
hold on, I gotta tweet about this.
I’d hope that there are no Nazis at the rally.
Well, there’s already a rapist.
Keep in mind how toxic American politics has become. Many people may care more that he’s a neo-con than that he’s a rapist.
I would imagine so that any time a commenter tries to convince someone to vote for that guy, it comes out as a plea to vote for Clinton instead. A+ use of comments section filter.
The only President Johnsons there have been in this country rose to power by assassination, which is why Johnson’s campaign is doomed to failure. Johnson should try running for VICE president.
Also, if Johnson gets into a scandal for sending nude photos a la Anthony Weiner, it will be evidence that God has a sense of humor, albeit an immature one.
(of course, I can’t say much for my own sense of humor if I’m writing a post trying to make a fool out of a censor
also I won’t say that I haven’t shared pictures of my Johnson with other 18+ males >.> ain’t never gonna be president now, that’s one less thing to worry about)
Why the lowercase c, though…
Also, according to Merriam Webster, there actually IS such a thing as a snow mouse outside the realm of ambigrams and it’s a synonym of “pied lemming”, so now I just need to get an avatar of a lemon pie and my DoA commenter identity will be cemented in stone.
or, ah, in cement
Wait, so there’s a filter changing Johnson to Clinton?
So, like, my friend Tyler Johnson…
Or “Hey, Ladies, wanna see the Johnson I have in my pants?”?
The name is also used to refer to a penis. So it would probably be auto censored in some software.
It’s really sad that no nazis is not a guaranteed thing and may even be the unlikelier answer.
At least we can say that they’d be neo-nazis, but we be confident in saying there aren’t any super-old original blend Nazis in attendance?
…
Nope, that’s not actually comforting at all
Please. They’re alt-right white nationalists. Totally different.
Nazi’s are National Socialists
SOCIALIST being the key word
Left – Wing
same as Democrats
and the KKK
AHHAHAHAHA OH MY GOD
I love that you object to the comparison, but its their economic policies you feel distinguish them from the alt right, and not their fascist authoritarianism or the horrific genocide
”Sure, the alt-right is full of violent, goose-stepping white-supremacists, but we believe in capitalism, damn it! Get it right!”
Jesus Fucking Christ, we actually got someone who actually bought the stinking pile of revisionist history hogswallop that is Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism”?
Damn, son. I almost pity you.
And the idea that Nazis are actually socialist because it’s in the name makes about as much sense as arguing that the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” is actually Democratic or a Republic because it’s in the name.
Fascism in general and Nazism in particular were reactions to the threat of communism. Attempts by the elites to use racism and nationalism to distract the masses from their oppression and focus their anger against scapegoats rather than the elites.
As for the KKK being left-wing? I don’t even know where that comes from. The first incarnations of the Klan were Democrats, that I’ll freely agree with. Post Civil War, the Democrats, particularly in the South, were the party of slavery and segregation. The white South was solidly Democratic and segregationist until the Civil Rights era. Dixiecrats they were called. After the 60s, the parties realigned. Blacks completed an already in progress move to the Democratic Party and southern whites by and large switched to Republican – which we can see in voting patterns today. Some former Dixiecrat politicians switched parties (Strom Thurmond, for example), some were voted out and a few actually repented and supported Civil Rights and stayed on as Democrats. Senator Byrd most notably.
The Nazis exterminated communists, dude, with a fervor not matched for any other political alignment (I mean, I’m not even familiar with them executing anyone else purely for their politics. ‘left wing’ only to foolish Meriken right wingers.
The idea that the KKK is left wing is an extra barrel of laughs. They were aligned with the democrats before the Southern Strategy. Their current iteration, and their successors, throw in with the Republican party or the Libertarian party.
^^ Lailah’s point about the KKK is further driven home by fucking David Duke live-tweeting one of Trump’s recent rallies. After endorsing him a while back.
“That would be retarded”
Meanwhile….
Illinois Nazis. I HATE Illinois Nazis.
I’m going to bet half the people who see his photo will just assume his gender
Haha, wow, such funny, I love just not ever posting anything online ever due to anxiety, let alone online public. Just imagine the fun when going outside in the real world! Could that meme just die, please.
I am so confused by this subthread…
I’m not totally sure but I see dog faces in Grindr waaaaaaaay too often
That is weird.
( But are they good lays? We need a scientific study )
“Did you just assume my gender?!” and other permutations thereof (like the “I identify as an Attack Helicopter”) are jokes directed at Trans communities to paint them as oversensitive and bizarre.
I had feared as such. *sigh*
People don’t realize the damage they do when they turn an entire group of people into a walking joke. They don’t realize (I hope) that they are contributing to the violence those people face, nor do they think for a second about the fact that their stupid little joke is actually tied to the very first words out of someone’s mouth when they come out about wanting to transition.
I cannot apologize for the actions of others, but maybe they will read one of our posts and think for more than half a second about the damage they are doing to an already drowning minority. For whatever it is worth, I am glad you exist. And I hope things get easier and less frightening for you sooner rather than later. Stay safe and sane, and good luck!
Thank you.
…damnit, back to this gravatar. What controls these?
Testing something. Posting from my phone.
Damnit. Nope.
You need to change email to get a different generic avatar. Or just bite the bullet and pick a picture.
If you change the capitalization of a letter in your email, you’ll get a different grav.
One guy did that for like a month.
huh.
Well, that’s interesting.
Is the association with a particular capitalization retained?
Apparently, so.
Yes, but not forever. At some future time Willis will update the default avatar library and everything changes. And he is damned for it, ‘natch.
Testing to see if different name still lines up with email-connected gravatar. (I decided dinosaur in honor of Dina)
Thank you, YourPartnerInScience. So well said. I’ve recently started killing jokes about marginalized groups around the office. Also squashing the ‘B-‘ word. Not much they can say since we all had that training.
Oh, please. I’ve got too much love for dogs to do that.
I thought on Instagram no one knows you’re a dog…
ah good she is being smarter about it than just attacking him with her fists
That was my reaction too; she’s actually handling this in a somewhat intelligent way. I… am surprised.
though, maybe name before telling her plan (and hopefully covering for the hostile look in the last panel yesterday) would have been an idea
unless her real plan is to get him to attack her first in front of an audience giving her a legitimate reason to kick his butt without being seen as a bongo that randomly attacks people for, as far as the npc like characters would know, no real reason.
That’s what I interpreted her plan to be. Seems to be working, too; he looks about to attack her in the last panel.
It’s a good plan. Nine out of ten dentists would agree.
(not really. For inexplicable reasons they prefer people to keep their teeth.)
I think they profit regardless.
It’s almost as if people go into healthcare to care for patients’ health! :O
thats one job i couldn’t really study/get into. i can’t deal with squishy gooey oozy bodily things.
That’s why I got into IT. All the time sensitive, delicate finesse but with with far less gore! (There’s still some gore, metal cases are sharp!)
Doctoring is important! One needs to protect and conserve one’s Precious Bodily Fluids.
Say it with me now:
PRECIOUS. BODILY. FLUIDS.
Precious bodily fluids!
You buy dentures once and then you buy stuff from the pharmacy to maintain them and keep them in place.
But if you have teeth, you keep coming back to your dentist for the rest of your life.
Not really. You’ll get dentures once, and keep going to a dentist of some flavor for the rest of your life because the inside of your mouth changes over time so you may have to have new dentures, or at least have your existing ones refit every decade or so. Then you add to this that most people are going to have partials or implants for a long time before they have a full plate…
Nah… sure, dentists want most people to keep their teeth. But.. I bet 9 out of 10 dentists don’t mind seeing rapists lose theirs. On the other hand.. that 10th dentist.. he has access to NOx and stuff. Scary!
Always wondered about that tenth dentist. Is he really that incompetent, or is he just a dick?
I think it always was Plan A. AG has always been a “solve things with punching” sort of person more often than not and provoking Ryan into taking a swing at her gives her an excuse to attack someone.
I am happy to see that the filter is still working.
Maybe? I find the word ‘bongo’ has entered the zeitgeist around here – I just use it directly.
I prefer the slightly classier “percussion instrument.”
Alright yes true makes sense
Besides, if she’s putting his photo all over social media, she might just get the name there.
oh that fits! That’s why she latched on to him because the girl she really wants to fight ain’t attacking her.
IIRC, Amazigirl doesn’t START the fights. She FINISHES them. If Ryan attacks her he’s fair game for an asswhuppin’, but AG loses the moral high ground if she just goes around beating up bad guys out of the blue.
Yeah, looks like he may take a swing at her in the last panel. If he does so in front of a crowd of Amazi-Girl supporters, he’s in for trouble.
This makes me think that her real goal is simply to beat the shit out of him and she’s not super interested in him actually facing justice.
But then based on her conversation with Sal she’s pretty sure he won’t face justice, and after a month with no charges filed the case is pretty dead tbh. Especially since the only permanent physical damage is proof that someone attacked him and not the other way around.
Pasting his photo over social media is a form of justice, one he’s obviously very very unhappy about, and one that’s likely to lead to other justice as well.
Good work. Keep it up.
Pfft. Justice for a campus rapist? You seen the news lately?
… I did say form, and I didn’t say complete.
But, crap, I hope Willis isn’t leading us down that road, life’s shitty enough as it is.
That said — I had the unusual satisfaction of being present at a sentencing once. There was no Brock Turner bullshit that day.
It becomes incredibly difficult to further commit crimes when the world knows your face and what you did. THAT is what he’s worried/furious about.
That only works if there’s actual proof and a conviction, and a lot of times it doesn’t even work then. There are people who have grown up with the idea that women are at fault for their own rapes and so would trust him while thinking privately, perhaps even unknowingly, that they were safe because they don’t fit the “profile” for a rape victim according to misogynist dickheads.
But without proof or a witness, with nothing to go on but a smear campaign? There are even fewer people who would believe “such a nice boy” could have done anything wrong. If anything, AG will open herself up to a nice slander lawsuit requiring an unmasking.
I think this is less about Ryan getting harassed by random people and thus be subject to mob justice, than just making it harder for him to find marks. If girls know that this pretty guy with a gash on his face got the scar by (allegedly) trying to roofie a girl at a party, do you think they’re gonna take the chance to chat him up?
They have to catch her before they can unmask her. You have to serve someone before you can sue them.
It’s about his existence as a missing stair:
http://pervocracy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/missing-stair.html
Ryan right now is a missing stair on campus. Some people know about him (former victims, a couple of party hosts, and so on), but the majority don’t, so he’s free to work with a lot of freedom to “ply his craft” as it were.
Outing him more publicly means he’s still a missing stair (folks can still miss that warning by not being on social media or by not believing it or not remembering it), but one with more signs around him, more people who are going to remember and recognize him and that reduces the freedom he has in a community to exploit and harm it.
I’m thinking of outing of rapists or serial sexual harassers within movements that got outed more publicly and it was awful for the whistleblowers and the survivors who got sussed out, but it also made the unspoken whispers about the missing stairs much more public and much more known and gave more of their survivors the freedom to speak because they could see they were no longer alone in their victimization.
Forget justice this time. Remember why Joyce didn’t want to call the police? It would be pretty hard for her to go testify in court and get him put away without informing her parents. She is growing up fast but i doubt she is ready to do that all alone. This would more than likely give her mother all the ammo she needs to win the argument in favor of pulling Joyce out of school. I also doubt that she is ready to put herself through college without parental support.
One thing posting his face to social media might accomplish is alerting other girls to who/what he is so they can better protect themselves from him. That goal is more important than justice anyway.
Unfortunately there is no way she can ensure that every girl out there knows his face. There is really only one way his story ends… he keeps doing it until he eventually gets caught scarring some number of girls lives along the way.
Though the publicity may also push him to back off by raising the apparent risk level.
If, as is pretty likely, Joyce wasn’t his first target, it might also alert other girls he has targeted that they weren’t the only victims and that boosts the chance they’ll report it. Multiple reports raised the chance of successful prosecution – even if it’s only from “none” to “slim”.
…I’m not sure she agrees. Aside from the factt hat she doesn’t take Sal seriously, she seems to disagree and be mad that Joyce didn’t report. “That’s what someone convinced Joyce of”, not “Yeah, Joyce was thinking the same thing.” I can’t say with certainty what her endgame is, but I did think it pretty likely she wants to apprehend him herself.
This is Amazi-Girl, not Amber, so thinking, following rules, achieving justice. Amber would have gone to town on him and left him with new scars.
Must be using Australian Internet if it’s taking that long
Maybe she just has a shitty data plan, or crappy coverage in Indiana.
The Amazi-data-plan kinda sucks.
The Amazi-Plan.
They’re in a large building with several dozen other people, whose cell phones are all fighting for a piece of whatever amount of signal is making it through the masonry. She’s not going to break any speed records.
Can confirm, just moved back to Indiana, had to switch cell providers just to get decent coverage and it still kinda sucks in Bloomington.
Nah, they’re in a convention center. Probably not getting good reception. She should really connect to the wifi.
They’re in an auditorium on the IU campus, so she probably has campus wifi. (My small college had that so I’m assuming IU does)
Everyone in that auditorium is probably using the wifi to upload their Amazi-Girl photos. No wonder it’s slow.
If IU is anything like the last college I worked for, you have to log in with your student ID when you connect to the campus WiFi. This installs a security certificate identifying the device as yours. You can’t get online without logging in, unless you create a guest account tied to a name and email address.
Anything she does on the school WiFi could be traced back to her.
Pfff. Do you think their pitiful attempts at security is going to stop Amber?
Filipino internet is the slowest of the slow.
We know the rally was at midnight, so obviously the campus cell site is swamped with people frantically refreshing the DoA website.
Oh, that was GOLD!
and then hitting refresh every minute or two to see if any new comments have been posted
Damn, nothing yet.
I find the fact that these are nearly an hour apart, hilarious.
She’s not waiting for the upload, she’s waiting for the comments. Ana musta been slow or something.
Clearly you guys haven’t heard of Malcolm Turnbull The King of the internet and his brilliant NBN
Maybe the longer it takes to upload, the more Amazi-Girl can provoke Ryan like a cat sitting on a window sill provokes a dog.
She already has a copy of the photo sent to Dorothy, so, yes, she is just baiting him here. She could easily have done this without baiting him, but where would be the fun in that. If she attacks him, she can respond with absolute justice. Absolute is her right fist and justice is her left.
She had to select filters first and crop it just right
Upload the photo and a name will be forthcoming anyway.
I say Bob that’s just a good name to give anyone
My boyfriend’s name legitimately is Bob and apparently he has the hardest time getting people to believe it when he introduces himself.
I don’t why it just sounds like a joke name I have a good laugh every time i hear it my personal favourite is Bob Bobson
Just think about hat the real Bob Dobbs has to go through…
No, look at his hair. That hair is definitely not a bob.
Just how many of those do you have?
An exact count is hard to pin down, off the top of my head.
This is a plannnn. Good job, Amber.
Dat finger tho
Indeed xD
…Social media! Of course! That’s even BETTER than the school’s property! ugh damn Amazi-girl, you are smart.
Ooohhh it’s a coming!
Epic fight scene is a go!
I hope it’s less of an epic fight scene and more of a “he crumples like a wet tissue after a broken orbital bone from one punch.”
Unless the crowd backs him up and well… as the crowd realizes she’s not going to go after the black woman they want her to go after and is instead antagonizing a white man volunteer for the campaign, I think the odds of that happening are going to increase by the second.
The crowd didn’t back him at the frat party, so it’s not impossible he’ll find himself as short of friends this time too. His panel-6-ready-for-violence says he hasn’t learned a damned thing though.
I wonder if Ron’s at the rally? Ron’s face would be welcome about now.
WAPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWNNNCH!
Well BANG! BANG! BANG! and down they go
It’s Just A Job You Do…
Wait does Amazi-Girl have a specific social media account, or does she share hers with Amber?
Probably has her own. It’s not exactly difficult to make
Well, she’s got an Amazigirl account for her DS, so it stands to reason.
She actively deletes and re-types her name before connecting with Danny on her DS.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/03-the-first-step-towards-recovery/deletedelete/
I remember that strip but i completely missed that part the first time i read it.
I only noticed it recently in the process of going back and trying to find things for reference.
I totally forgot about that too. I was going off the alt text that Danny should check his streetpass more often.
And Amber probably has the computer chops to make sure Amazi-girl’s online activity can’t be traced back to her.
Who was this guy in the original ‘verse again? I forget.
Asshole from Ruth’s backstory. Though he was more of a pickup artist than a rapist in that one.
You can check out the walkypedia for him. He was pretty terrible then too.
In Roomies he had sex with Ruth and then she found him being lovey-dovey with another chick. It was all in a flashback Ruth had when talking to Danny.
Urgh, thinking about it makes me think of the line “Ryan was a gift from heaven”, which makes me want to throw up.
This is where Ryan came to visit her when she was babysitting
And here’s the strip in which Ruth sleeps with him, which has some major red flags in it:
http://www.itswalky.com/comic/one-day-part-2-page-6/
It’s right there in the tags, Amber!
shes amazigirl not deadpool she cant see those.
Perhaps there would be advatages to her going totally off the deep end after all.
It’s all advantages once you’re on this side, I swear! *Offers a plate of cookies.*
Get wrecked, asshat
#rekt
Oh look, Ryan is starting to show his true colours. I’ll be surprised if he tries to take on AG, he’ll most likely end up pike Blaine.
I know it’s just a typo, but I read as “he’ll most likely end up on a pike” and was like DAMN
No worries, I’m sure AG is not a fan of Vlad the Impaler.
Even she would admit that Vlad had his good points.
Kinky.
Orderliness and good manners enforced by brutal, pointy violence? I’d be surprised if she weren’t a fan.
I think they were referring to the points on the ends of his pikes…
No doubt Dellaran was. I certainly was, but my post was a reply to inqntrol.
I am not sure if i am being silly or if it has been discussed but isnt the scar on the wrong cheek?
The scar is on the right cheek, it’s only on the left during that one weird dream sequence.
Haha, I’m so relishing Ryan’s reactions.
Try something asshole.
*processing*
*comparing comment to gravatar*
…..
*system crash*
Hahaha
So Amazi-Girl has, what, a Twitter?
Probably all of the socoal media available
Even MySpace.
Even Geocities.
Don’t forget AOL and Compuserve.
Even Prodigy!
And Tripod — or is that the same as Geocities?
No, no, no – Those were the ones before the Jurrasic period!
I believe that’s Therapod.
and considering amber is an introverted nerd, she might have even create a system of programs to save time posting across them
There will be a dozen YTMNDs by the end of the day.
And about twenty thousand followers. It’s actually mostly about stuff like Mario Kart, and half those followers aren’t sure why they’re still there… until this night, that is.
As if, most people are there for the Mario Kart stuff, and then are shocked when they realize that there’s serious stuff to be seen.
Nothing like a facial scar to tell on a guy.
Oh man oh man he’s gonna try to fight her oh man I’m so happy!
My reaction was: isn’t that cute, he thinks he’s going to fight her.
Looks like her plan is to trick Ryan into hitting her first.
So she really doesn’t throw the first punch, this time either.
Okay, now wait for the djembe to hit first… in front of all those people…
Is djembe the new bongo?
I wonder what other percussion instruments are lurking in the system.
I want to type in everything I can think of to see what it turns into… but I also don’t. Especially, if some things don’t get filtered.
I suspect not many. Djembe seems to be reader creativity.
I’m a little surprised the “glistening phallus” filter seems to be gone.
Sort of. I couldn’t think of a decent insult for this guy other than douchenozzle or something, so hey, why not let people fill in the blanks?
Could djembe be “dick”, another name for for Rick?
Nope. Or, at least, not yet.
One sec, killing spiders…
HERE, take an internet!
There may be some spiders in it.
i never understood the thing about spiders. they’re not scary for the most part. either squash them or cup and fling then outside.
Not scary? You ever heard of a place called Australia?
and i said for the most part. most people seem to want to burn their house down for one the size of a pea.
Around here the big ones are quite friendly. It’s the little brown ones that can kill you if you don’t get help immediately. And it’s far from my mountaintop to help.
Everything is deadly in Australia and wants to kill you. Damn murderous Drop Bears.
so if aliens try to invade australia first they will die from the nature not the people?
Honestly, the people aren’t much less dangerous than the wildlife. Check out Aussies with Artillery on TVTropes
maybe but thats stuff they would study from watching military and such and prep for if they invaded. animals probably not as much.
I don’t know about you, but you can bet, if I’m planning on invading anywhere, I’m studying the local flora and fauna first.
Drop Bears….where did I hear that before….was it a Terry Prachette book. One with Rincewind in it?
Yeah, The Last Continent.
In this case, it’s a callback to Amber playing WoW. “One sec, killing spiders” was what she said while she was too busy doing that to talk.
There hasn’t been a (confirmed) death by spider in over 30 years in the US. A lot of misdiagnosed skin diseases, though. Spiders, even if they are being harassed by humans, will only bite 50% of the time, and even then only rarely inject venom. Spider venom is adaptedto insects, not vertebrates.
And anyway, spiders have 300% more soulful eyes than most dogs.
As a lover of spiders, I approve of this comment!
I love spiders too. Particularly the vicious giant man-eating ones that are knee-high and can outrun you.
Oh, and that can spit venum. They’re the best.
What’s the problem? They’re just being friendly lol.
Ant swarms freak me out. A lot.
To be fair there are a select few NA spiders you don’t want to risk even if death is unlikely. The black widow, brown recluse, wolf spider and sac spider all can pierce human skin and carry dangers relating to skin necrosis, infection (including MRSA) and allergic reactions. Of those only the widow has any real potential to be lethal, and only if you don’t seek proper medical treatment.
I have a buddy who was on a job site where a guy died from Brown recluse bites. He was in the port-a-potty, lets just look before you sit.
I will admit that jumping spiders can be pretty cute, but the rest of them are terrifying nightmare abominations with ENTIRELY TOO MANY LEGS
I will be honest: I did not anticipate the direction of this conversation.
I am in favor of the direction of this conversation.
WHAT DO THEY EVEN NEED THAT MANY LEGS FOR, HUH?
One of my friends reckons I’ve got a regressive gene. Humans developed to fear spiders, supposedly. I like watching them sit there in their webs.
Ant swarms, otoh, now they do freak me out.
I know for a fact that it has webcrawlers.
“Of course the World Wide Web is an ACTUAL spider web covering the planet. What did you think it was? A magical network of invisible information hurtling through space?”
Get ‘im, internet
“WHERE DID ALL OF THESE CATS COME FRO-ARHGHHGH”
Come on Amazi-girl. At this point it would be rude to not a sign.
So instead of Frank Miller Amazi-Girl we’re somewhere between Jim Aparo Amazi-Girl and Grant Morrison Amazi-Girl.
“Nah nah nah nahhh nah-nahhhhh nahhhhh, we’re gonna start a fight” – P!NK
I see Joyce is not the only one who wants to forget about what happened that night.
Amazi-girl making sure she comes within the bounds to retaliate in three, two one…
I’d like to request Sympathy For The Devil on tonight’s hacked muzak.
I’ve noticed that it’s when she’s taking on men that she seems to hold her own. When she tries Sal, she gets REKT. Even broke the original word, see?
When she tried to fight Sal, she was distracted by traumatic flashbacks, she wasn’t focused at all.
Sal is connected to the original traumatic experience. Men she takes on are not. Except for her father.
Anger at terrible dads only gives her greater strength!
Actually, with Blaine, it broke down the boundaries and put Amber in the driver’s seat. That… wasn’t pretty.
I found the gratuitous violence rather pretty. But then again to parrot an old quote, “I encourage violence”
Hopefully she lets him take the first shot, which I suspect she can avoid pretty easily.
Amazi-Girl versus Rapin’ Ryan.
*grabs popcorn*
“Rapin’ Ryan” sounds like a rodeo guy’s name.
I first read this as “Rappin’ Ryan” and expected the ensuing conflict so look something like
Once again, with the html maybe working: Something like THIS.
…hm. Is she posting it on Amber’s Facebook page? Or does she have her own? Because well, I can’t see the two of them being sloppy enough to make that slip-up, but logging out of Amber’s Facebook and into her own would take precious seconds she doesn’t have right now, and…am I overthinking this?
swap out before being hero like or thats why the wait in the last panel.
Probably overthinking a little.
She could even just email the picture to herself, the point is just to get it stored elsewhere, in case he smashes her phone in the impending brawl.
She is certainly baiting him to hit her, so I think it’s safe to assume that she’s already got what she wanted from the conversation portion of our evening.
If her plan is to get Ryan to attack her and get him in legal trouble for it, she’d have to expose her real name anyway
If she’s just going to destroy his reputation, she could just send the photo to herself for now, then wait to post it until later when he’s already known as “That Asshole Who Attacked Amazi-Girl”
She’s probably posting it everywhere through backdoors that she’s been busily hacking into the sites probably from the day she arrived at IU.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the places she posts it (as amazi-girl I guess????) would be IU’s Facebook page/group. That would get a bit of mileage, methinks… unless/until an admin takes down the post because of various reasons.
MARRY !!! ME !!! AMAZI-GIRL !!!
Her only love is for justice….and writing fanfiction in her free time.
I was about to say that Amazi-girl doesn’t do that, only Amber.
But WHAT IF Amazi-girl writes fanfic too? If that’s a shared interested between them? What genera would Amber consider perfect enough for Amazi-girl to write, and what is flawed enough that only Amber dares debase herself with it?
Hmmmm. Meta-fanfic as a concept has promises
Amazi-Girl: Mystery and buddy-cop dramas.
Amber: Slashfics. Lots of slashfics.
…and sometimes they collaborate to do Buddy Cop Mystery Slashfics
Truly the greatest genre.
That takes “Lethal Weapon” in a whole new direction.
Sherlock Holmes teams up with Batman to discover the mysterious villain behind a devious series of crimes, and along the way, they end up discovering something about each other ;-*
o-only for justice…
Yes Ryan.. get angry.. make a bad move and maybe you could have two gashes on your face then. You buttrash
“My name is, uh… Arbuckle! That’s right, June Arbuckle. You can’t send me to jail, see. Who else is going to feed coffee and pizza to Andrew Jackson, my morbidly obese cat that I assure you I own?”
(I looked at his hair and I can’t unsee it)
Hey look it’s Scarface Claw……. why’s he not a cat anymore? (99.9% of people won’t get this)
So AG should show him a mirror?
I’m just so happy that the Amazi-Girl I remember enjoying so much at the start is still here! I mean, the storyline where she’s spiralling out of control has been a hell of a ride, but I’ve missed these moments of… I don’t know, it’s like Alfred Pennyworth doing an impression of Spiderman.
Oh that’s actually smarter than what I expected of AG. I figured she’d just attack him which would probably turn everybody at the center against her but if this asshole attacks first then she can just say that she was acting in self-defense.
I read that as “cap it off with a meme.” My mind went places again.
That’s the best thing to cap something off with.
has anyone ever noticed that Ryan kinda looks like Ethan with his old hairstyle?
Willis has a couple of “trademark” hairstyles, and that’s one of them. Leslie also sports a similar hairstyle.
It could go horribly, and it’s certainly not perfect, BUT SO FAR I’M DIGGING THIS!
Does she have an Amazi-Girl account on twitter or facebook or something? Because otherwise that pictures’ going to go through a regular person’s account. Who Ryan will be able to find. And I fear that won’t end well.
She she makes operating systems for fun, I think she’ll be fine at covering her tracks.
Or it could be a bluff. She might not be sending it, or just sending it to a ftp site.
I’m not sure it was her plan to make her physically attack her first so she can legally retaliate (like she was doing with Sal but justified this time?) but dang it’s working
Making them hit first is her favourite thing!
Funny story: With sal, she actually couldn’t legally retaliate – Sal didn’t start the fight, Amazi-girl did. See, threatening people with bodily harm is kind of a crime, and when you posture yourself as though you’re going to carry out the threat, and loom intimidatingly and the like… the law doesn’t give a fuck if you wait for them to swing first. They’re defending themselves from your assault – a reasonable person would assume that you’re going to make good on your threat, not that you’re just trying to play fake-out for this very reason. So even though she physically struck second, the law says she started the fight. Cases like Amazi-girl’s, in the general, are EXACTLY why it works that way.
Here, with Ryan, if he swings first, he has genuinely started the fight. Amazi-girl isn’t threatening him with bodily harm. Now, he could try to argue he’s threatening her with defamation (Libel, specifically), and that what she’s saying isn’t true. Good chance he could win, because the USA hates actually sticking sexual assault on people in the first place, and he isn’t a public figure, but even if he did, he actually still wouldn’t be allowed to attack Amazigirl. You can’t generally hit people for saying shit, even illegal shit.
Is provocation a defence or partial defence in the US? Inquiring minds want to know.
It can be a mitigation, and doing it can nullify your right to self defense, though the latter is rarer.
Varies somewhat state by state. There’s a concept of fighting-words in some states.
That generally only makes it constitutional to censor what you have to say, though I wouldn’t be surprised if one state decided it counts as starting a fight.
I think it’s less about what’s legal, and more about what’s according to Amazi-Girl’s moral code. She feels that if the other person hits first, then it’s still virtuous for AG to beat them up. She’s a vigilante, not a litigator.
Basically this.
“They hit first” is something that only really matters to Amazi-Girl herself. It’s why she goaded Sal into attacking her.
Yes, she thinks if she starts the fight, but hits second, she’s in the ethical clear, I know. She’s not, but she thinks that. She’s a vigilante, not an ethical person.
The OP, who I was responding to, did specify this was ‘legal’ though, so.
that’s it
THAT’S THE LOOK
Work the camera.
Cue justification for Amazi-girl beatdown in 3… 2…
I could see him go for the phone and smash it before the upload is complete.
“OK, I will see you later.”
(you are awesome if you get it)
I am preeetty sure this is blatantly illegal. I mean, we – the omniscient viewers – know the guy is a scumbag rapist, but if nothing’s been demonstrated in court, this is blatant criminal harassment and defamation. I’m willing to bet Amber’s phone is registered and wouldn’t be hard to track. If this guy wanted to press charges, she’d pretty much inevitably end up expelled from school, possibly arrested, and vulnerable to lawsuit. Not to mention that, if he does try and assault her for it, he’s covered. She isn’t. The fighting words doctrine covers someone who responds to violence under threat and she is most certainly threatening him.
Guess we’ll see how it goes.
I mean, she’s also a vigilante, which is also illegal. And sent Blaine to the hospital. He’s awful, but the law doesn’t necessarily care (unless self-defense, which it wasn’t really).
It would be the very definition of libel (which is not ILLEGAL) and it would be up to him to prove he was not a person who tried to rape someone. Notably, social media has been used to identify rapists and they have often brought up how it hurt their reputation.
In other words, he could sue Amazi-Girl but I don’t think it’s against the law.
Actually, all he has to demonstrate is that she made imputations of criminal conduct. That’s sufficient to bring the case. Both sides then need to present their arguments and, unless she has some form of defense for her claim, she would likely be found responsible.
And while this would certainly be libelous, it is also criminal. She’s threatening him, which is at the very minimum Provocation and illegal under Indiana law.
She has a defense. The fact that it’s true. The ‘defamatory’ statement being true (and not put in a misleading light) is an absolute defense against defamation, and even a reasonable good faith belief that it’s true is generally sufficient. You don’t even need Joyce to testify, just put the texts with Dorothy into evidence with Dorothy on the stand to verify their validity, maybe grab Ron (http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/ron/) as a third party to testify to what he saw and heard at the party, and it’s pretty thoroughly settled.
But this isn’t going to court, so it’s a moot point. But seriously, it’s not defamation, and it’s actually PROVABLY not defamation. The definition of defamation requires it be a false statement.
And note that the standards are different. She doesn’t have to get him convicted of attempted rape, which as has been discussed at great length over the last few days is hard.
Reasonable good faith is sufficient for public figures, but I’m pretty sure the standards are higher with private ones. Your right to privacy is supposed to give you more defense, it’s just that public figures don’t have one.
You’re correct that public figures vs private figures have a different standard, but the distinction is that for public figures, all you have to prove is that there was no “actual malice” (i.e. knowing for a fact that it was false), whereas for private individuals the standard is negligence (i.e. a reasonable person would’ve looked into this before making unfounded statements). But Amazi-Girl DID look into it (she texted Dorothy a picture and waited for a reply), and they ARE founded.
More importantly, as the plaintiff, Ryan is the one with the burden to actually prove the statement is false in the first place. Which he can’t. Because, besides the difficulty of proving a negative, the statement is true. But even if Ryan somehow did prove the statement false (which it isn’t), Amazi-Girl can absolutely prove that she took reasonable care and thus is STILL not responsible for defamation.
I really worry that it isn’t ‘reasonable care’t o not ask someone besides the victim (Or that it will become that with rape, given how much else changes in practical terms). But if the standard is to prove a negative, I’m honestly kind of terrified for folks. I’m leaving soon, but I have folks at risk here I still actually like. Folks who have to worry about this shit, b/c harrassment campaigns are fun for the whole family.
No, she’s not threatening him with bodily harm. It’s not assault. It’s just defamation (I mean it’s true, but I doubt she can prove it).
She doesn’t have do, she just has to demonstrate that she believed it to be true.
The fact that he isn’t a public figure is the relevant thing for defamation. If he were, Amazi-girl’s genuine belief that she is telling the truth nearly completely protects her from any ‘factual error’ in her statements (She is, of course, completely correct, but proving it in a court of law is… um, well…) Truth is an absolute defense, of course, but with public figures, the expectation of privacy is basically gone. However, Ryan, unless he’s a celebrity in some unmentioned capacity, is not a public figure. You still can’t knowingly slander them, but a genuine belief in what you’re saying is basically enough (It’s been a minute and I don’t remember the specifics)…. but that’s all for public figures. Private figures require more, though I’m not clear off the top of my head what that more is.
As far as Fighting Words go, what she’s said… miiiiiiight qualify. The only ironclad ones left are ‘impugning the chastity of one’s mother’, so it’d be a tricky sell (And it actually STILL would not justify his hitting her, it would only make her saying it illegal).
Well, there are some jurisdictions that would actually make it legal to strike at Fighting Words, I think. Which certainly makes at least some sense.
Justify hitting her, maybe not, but it would, say, justify him grabbing her camera. Likewise, it’d make any retaliatory assault on her part illegal, since she would have deliberately provoked him. He, meanwhile, could plead provocation and temporary insanity.
…Pretty sure it wouldn’t, no. Fighting Words are just a thing you can make illegal, they don’t generally expand your rights. It might mitigate your actions, but not generally justify or excuse them.
Please tell me you’re exaggerating and that accusing someone of attempted rape would NOT get the accuser in MORE trouble than the person accused of rape because that would be the most depressing thing I’ve heard all day
If you do so publicly, to a private citizen? Yeah, probably. That isn’t nominally possible if you do it through the police, but if you do so through public shame, to a private citizen, then you have to prove what you’re saying is true. Now, if I’m not misremembering, you only have to prove it within the civil standard (a preponderance of the evidence), but you DO have to prove it. And that’s… I mean it’s easier than a criminal trial (A preponderance of the evidence is a considerably lower standard than ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’), but it’s not necessarily easier for… you know, Joyce.
If it’s done to a public figure, things change to an amazing degree. At that point, the reporter only has to genuinely believe that something is true. If, in principle, it were Ryan DeSanto, the republican congressman… then there’d be no question, you could legally publicly accuse him of rape and not get in trouble for it so long as you believe it’s true. Mere factual inaccuracy is insufficient for that to be defamatory, it must be a malicious statement.
It only gets them in trouble if they spread it around on social media and publicly. It wouldn’t if they, say, went to the police. Is that so unreasonable, though? Otherwise, you could spread any malicious rumour you wanted without consequence.
*sympathy through appropriate physical contact*
Harassment requires much more of a pattern of behavior than a single conversation and a photo-snap, and there’s very, very few laws governing online accusations like this.
Defamation, libel, and slander are civil offenses, not criminal. Ryan can sue her but he can’t have her charged. Also, the burden of proof would be on him in court to show that she either didn’t think he was a rapist or that her grounds for thinking it were unreasonable.
As for fighting words? …. maybe she’s crossing the line there, but I don’t think so. The problem is that she is not that the particular words are vulgar and profane in such a way that provokes an immediate visceral response, but rather the content of the words do so. Furthermore, what she is threatening to do is not something that, legally, Ryan is entitled to defend himself against with violence, the way an immediate and credible threat to cause him physical harm might justify violent self-defense. This does not seem to fall into the legal bounds of the “fighting words” doctrine… and in any case, that exception is mostly used for words that piss off the police into making an arrest, rather than someone else into physical violence.
If saying “this guy drugged and attempted to rape my friend” online will get you in more trouble than posting death threats in detail against a person, including schematics of their house and encouraging others en masse to harass and commit violence against them, then the system is irrevocably broken.
(Guess who just finished reading an article about gamergate)
I mean yeah. It is.
The system is broken, but try not to think of it as irrevocably so. That just encourages apathy. The system has changed before and it will keep changing, as long as people fight for it to do so.
So long as we as a collective people keep having the “this is wrong and broken” conversation there will be hope for change and improvement.
Of course, this assumes that Amazi-Girl isn’t just bluffing to get a reaction from Ryan. It’s enough for him to believe that she is going to post his picture online and tie him to charges of being a sexual predator.
All AG needs is for him to be tricked into confessing or attempt to assault her in public.
I never considered it before, but Amazi-Girl must have touchscreen friendly gloves. She really is prepared for anything.
Oh my god panel 4 is literally the best thing
I know! right? I think 6 is almost as good, though.
Yeah, but in 4 he’s lost his composure, and in my headcanon he just peed a little
4 is definitely the best.
whoops I forgot I left that letter capitalized in my email…
The avatar change was absolutely perfect, though
It really really was. I’m quite happy that I forgot in retrospect.
“Someone get Amazi-Girl the wifi password!”
“I heard it’s ‘desantohugehonkers’ “
“Someone changed it to tinyhands”
“Sabotage!!!!”
Ok, so this is two days in a row in which my big comment didn’t post. I guess I’ll just put it in a bunch of chunks replying to this ‘un. (And if, like, big posts need moderation and they’re just not being approved… sorry Willis?)
OK, this is off-topic and random and stuff. Sorry ’bout dat.
As a few of you know from the last few days, I’m an aspiring author. An aspiring author of webcomics, actually, but I have negative artistic skill.
THAT’S RIGHT.
NEGATIVE SKILL.
IT’S THAT BAD.
I’m in the market for an artist so that I can actually be a webcomic author, but failing that I’ll just do prose work instead.
NOT THE POINT, however.
I recently realized, in no small part because of THIS (er… I don’t know how to do them fancy-dancy word-links so here: MAYBE THIS LINK IS THE PROBLEM), that in my current work I’ve got a grand total of one token gay couple in the main cast and everyone’s white.
Despite the fact that my absolute favorite webcomics are, in order- Dumbing of Age, Questionable Content, It’s Walky! (and Roomies and Joyce and Walky), and Shortpacked!, my actual genre of choice most of the time is high fantasy action/adventure.
Um, spoilers I guess? If I ever manage to get my shit together, and you happen to read it? Not even big ones, so…
So, homosexual characters- I can easily add more, edit characters, do stuff like that. Once upon a time it was hard to write them, because I thought I didn’t have the emotional connection to gay couples that I do towards straight ones.
Then I started writing for Eli and Alain, currently the only gay characters in the story. I threw them together because Alain was (and is) a joke-slash-serious-take on the “gay vampire” thing and I was like “um… Eli seems like he could be gay I guess, let’s go with that”. Over time, though, it developed into one of my favorite relationships in the series- second only to the two who are arguably the main characters. I, one day, suddenly realized that writing gay couples- when ignoring any social/political/non-lovey-dovey shit- is just like writing straight couples, except they BOTH HAVE DICKS. (I have yet to write a lesbian couple, but I’m assuming it’ll feel similar but with less penis.)
So yeah, I can add more homosexual characters pretty easily. I tend to jump at any chance to reuse and abuse (and edit the hell outta) any of my ideas from when I was a lowly single-digits-aged writer on that once-great crappy fanfic and roleplay site, Max-Dan-Wiz. Too bad the mods got a power trip and eventually the whole thing shut down. Oh god, the nostalgia. I’ve got no shortage of old characters who I’d like to rewrite, no shortage of new ideas.
So yeah, if I really feel the need to add more I can. There are plenty of important side characters who either don’t exist yet or need a ton of development. That’s all fine and dandy.
My issue is with race. My first reaction, when I realized that literally everyone I’d as much as conceptualized was either white or a supernatural entity, was to take a paint bucket to my visualizations. That’s kind of always been my view of race anyway- it’s an aesthetic. A feature, neither positive nor negative. White, black, who gives a crap.
There are several issues with this idea, though.
For one, the scientific part of my mind is all like “WELL, race comes from where your ancestors lived, what they adapted to, as well as simple genetic traits that became widespread in certain regions. Sure, several of your characters can throw shit with their minds. Sure, that one dude just conjured the air out of that other dude’s lungs. With magic. BUT YOU NEED TO BE REALISTIC, LIPKE.” I doubt I’d be able to get over this fact, although in the end it’d just be one more worldbuilding thing I’d need to write out. Not too bad, could even add some flavor to character backgrounds.
Another, more politically conscious, part of my brain is like “Yo dawg race has some serious societal thingamajiggers.” If I did add different races to the world, wouldn’t it be plainly ignorant to not also add racists, supremacist groups, HISTORIES about conflicts over superficial qualities? It’s not like I’ve got an issue with writing such conflicts- I already deal with homophobic and fictional-magic-bullshit-phobic issues, especially with characters like Alain. Vampirism falls into a whole category of things that affect people and make them objectively different while leaving them with human minds within my series, and all of those (termed “blights” to differentiate them from both curses and diseases) are strongly controversial in the world that the story takes place in. Would “blightophobia” devalue racism, or the other way around? After all, “he has to drink human blood, enough to kill a person, to survive” is kind of a stronger case for hating someone than “I’d look like him if I were SIGNIFICANTLY tanner” and blighted-people-aren’t-inherently-evil is a pretty big theme in the story.
I mean, could I get away with saying that race isn’t an issue in their world? It seems pretty clear to me that it’s a rather unrealistic idea, but who knows how humans would act with the common enemy of LIKE WYVERNS AND SHIT, ya know?
Another, albeit fairly minor, problem with the “paint bucket solution” is that I just can’t see most of my main characters as anything but white. A couple of the girls could be Asian or Latino, but out of ~seven major male protagonists MAYBE one of them could be black. The issue is just that I’ve cemented their images in my mind, and I’d have to break those down to change their features. So not a major issue, I guess. And plenty of major and minor side-characters would easily slide into not being white, because very few of them have any sort of big visual ideas in my mind.
I think my biggest issue with just plopping some other races into the middle of my story is that it really wouldn’t make sense. Tied into the science-based issue, the setting is a basic-fantasy-kinda-medieval-England-and-France. Sure, there’d very likely be foreigners here and there- but it’d be relatively rare. And a big part of me is saying that I’m trying to fill a quota, which kind of goes against my grain.
I value many of your opinions, and seeing as I have seen few-to-no trolls in these comments any of you whose opinions I don’t specifically value I still want to take into consideration. One thing I know for sure is that plenty of you are more… sensitive? Conscious? Towards these issues, and that’s something I need here.
What do y’all think I should do?
Should I just say fuck it and completely diversify my cast and the world as a whole, ignoring racial issues because it’s fantasy?
Should I say fuck it and diversify, but pay careful attention to those issues because they’re important?
Should I say fuck it, but throw those issues into the background because they’re realistic but not relevant to the story?
Should I carefully disperse a few foreigners here and there, like the fantasy-medieval-England it’s supposed to be?
Or should I just make everyone white? <- /sarcasm
Sorry, lord and savior Willis, for putting my crap in your comments. Feel free to ELIMINATE THE VERY EXISTENCE OF THIS POST if you don't like how un-DoA it is.
Or chip in, because I have a great deal of respect for the author of three of my all-time favorite stories. Either way is fine with me.
Hmm. Well, let’s talk about medieval France and England, then. In a world where it’s very unlikely you’d ever travel more than about five miles from your home unless you were pretty dang rich, and if you made it much farther than that, you might not understand the language spoken there, it’s a lot trickier to have a concept of foreign. This is before nationalism came along and tried to give everyone a standardized language, and it was hundreds of years after Rome had collapsed with theirs, standardized mostly by how quickly it spread. Here’s a list of the language families standard in the U.K. and France from about 500-1200: Germanic, including Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Scots, Middle English and Middle Scots, Danish (lots of invaders spoke this), and in France Frankish, and then the Celtic languages including Pictish, old Irish, Brittonic, maybe some old Gaulish if it’s still hanging on, far to the south of France there’s the Basque, which is still around yet unrelated to any other language. There’s the Latin-derived lengues d’oil, including Occitan and a whole host of languages, the variety of which spoken near Paris eventually became modern French.
It’s a huge linguistic mess, and I still haven’t gotten into the eventual crossovers like the Frankish giving way to the d’oils which where then picked up by the Nordish speaking Normans as they built up influence in England and struck in 1066, creating Anglo-Norman and eventually Middle English…
So in this mess of languages, you’re pretty likely to consider anybody from a not-so-distant fishing village who eats seafood instead of farming and going good old hunting rather foreign. They sound too much like the odd people farther south who you can’t even understand.
Oh, I specifically meant fantasy medieval England and France. You know, where it’s all centuries-old kingdoms ‘n shit and everyone either speaks English or Japanese?
In all seriousness, though, the setting is a single, powerful kingdom with little fear of invasion. All of the towns and villages in the kingdom follow the same laws, bow to the same king- not totally Dark Ages, ya know? More King Arthur-esque.
Moors and Morish knights were a thing and totally in keeping with Arthurian legends.
http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/10/07/when-black-men-ruled-the-world-moors/
Thanks for the article! I knew a little bit about Moorish knights and the like but that was informative.
People have always travelled and have always migrated. There are traders, there are refugees, there are all kinds of ways someone with an ethnicity from a different part of the world can end up in a major civilizational center.
I can’t answer the ‘should i add racism’ question coz I’m white and have barely a clue myself, but it’s NOT realistic to make everyone white. People have ALWAYS TRAVELLED. Which means, your characters can be descendants of someone who moved from their homeland several generations ago, and the only difference left is the genetic whim of the skin color.
It’s… a thing. It can be. It happens.
(War prisoners / slaves captured in wars generations ago whose descendants became naturalized citizens)
(Sages and experts who were invited overseas to teach the locals to build ships/houses/tools)
(seriously traders literally just traders)
I /sarcasm’d for a reason, lol. Yeah, that’s basically what I’m leaning towards so far- the kingdom of Wayom is mostly made up of white people, and here and there you’ll find other skin tones because travelers and stuff.
Well, if it is a fantasy world you are building, you can make them any colour, or mixture thereof, that you want. That being said, from what you have said of your setting, predominantly white, with a few, rare, others here and there, would be realistic, particularly if they were seen as exotic and mysterious, as they are rarely seen in this part of the world. As for getting an artist, you should maybe talk to Yotomoe, he is quite talented.
It’s perfectly realistic to have everyone in a psuedo-medieval story white. Especially if you’re not focused on travel or a big trading center or something. It’s also perfectly realistic to have characters who aren’t. These statements aren’t contradictory.
Racism also seems to differ in place and time – when the minority is small and rare enough they’re likely to be seen as exotic rather than be actually discriminated against. Prejudices tend to grow against minorities large and common enough to be known and either exploited or threatening. They might not be what we commonly think of as racial, but more ethnic or religious.
Okay, on the subject of gay relationships, I just want to note: Don’t forget bisexuality. Characters don’t have to be ‘homosexual’ to be in a same-sex relationship, and they don’t have to be in a same-sex relationship to be attracted to their own gender.
On the subject of race and racism, I’m not an expert, but going off of what I know…
While tribalism is an inherent part of human nature, defining it on the basis of race – and, in fact, the concept of race itself – comes from a specific social and economic context. If an ethnic group is formally enslaved, conquered or displaced, there’ll be intense, constant prejudice against them; if they form a permanent underclass – or traveling merchant class – there’ll be variable prejudice against them, with occasional outbreaks of violence (often whipped up from above).
But maybe they’re just ‘from somewhere else’, with small communities in port cities, but not falling into a specific economic role, and not big enough to provoke prejudice. The might be seen as exotic and different (especially by people not from port cities) and they may meet occasional hostility, but not the kind of structural racism that we’re accustomed to.
Or maybe they’ve been a part of the same kingdom/empire for so long that people don’t really make a distinction. There was a black Roman Emperor, and his race wasn’t seen as particularly noteworthy at the time; while the empire generally viewed Celtic Britons as exotic noble savages. On that note, ethnicity isn’t always drawn on the same lines – remember the persecution of Irish and Italian immigrants to America, with neither group being seen as truly ‘white’ until they were fully embedded in America society.
So yeah. It’s all about the social and economic context. If there are divisions, they generally come from something more than melanin – class, culture, religion; warfare, conquest, slavery, mass immigration of refugees. And these divisions can persist, century after century, or they can fade away over time.
Hope that helps.
Language has classically been a dividing line, even when race isn’t.
Yeah, Eli isn’t actually homosexual. He’s bi. I was just kinda quickly going over the fact that I didn’t need to worry about that side of things so I didn’t stop to mention it.
Thanks to all of you who responded. I’ve got a pretty clear idea in my mind of how to handle this now, and it works perfectly with the already established socio-political issues and history I have written for my story.
Stuff like this is why I kinda hate that I was always taught the “write what you know” thing. Now every main character I want to write is basically a variation of myself who reacts the way I do to things, and everyone defaults to white, and even though I’ve learned I’m pan and in a queer trans relationship all my relationships default to cis straight….
I really need to work on characterization is what I’m saying. And dialog. @.@
I have no advice to give, just saying I can relate I guess. Haha.
I’ll totally be your artist.
You don’t mind things being drawn in pencil, like Tamuran, do you?
Also, just send me character descriptions, I’ll draw them, and just tell me if you like them.
My email:
(plural my name) (10457-4774) @ (google mail) .com
Ok, I think I sent it to the right address.
If you’re willing to put a ton of time into researching racism, maybe add it. Otherwise, honestly just… just let the fictional people there be less terrible. Not every setting needs it. At all.
Ok, a link was the issue. Not sure how to give you guys said link without just posting it, because as I said, I don’t know how them fancy-schmancy word links work.
Word links fail too often, getting captured by the filter, leaving you with no link at all. But officially you do it with the HTML tag >a href=”url”<word>/a<
And, yes, links can get your comment held for moderation. It happened to me. At first, even links to dumbingofage.com got held. Now they don’t seem to. But other sites sometimes do.
ah, crap. I got my < and > mixed up.
Switch ’em around in what I said above.
In that case, here’s the link!
One link per comment is OK.
Have two or more links and your comment is doubtlessly
destined for purgatoryawaiting moderation.<a href=”link goes here”>words go here</a>
That aside, while I don’t specifically have answers to your questions I would love to get in touch with you outside of this comment section.
On the race thing: I haven’t exactly taken the time to look at potential bias in my view here (and I’ve been thinking a lot about basically the same issues with what I’m working on right now), but I think if you are writing a completely fantasy world with made up races your approach to including racism might want to be based on something like people wanting to rationalize systematic slavery. “We can enslave this group for these reasons.” (This is loosely based on things that permeated my mind years ago and could be totally wrong in regards to it’s relation to our history).
ah whoops, got beaten to the link thing.
You know what, that’s a pretty narrow and limiting in scope view of racism isn’t it.
Once upon a time I went the Tolkien/D&D route, and a while after that I made up names for different human races, but nowadays there are humans and then there’s everything else. The only other sentient race in the mortal world is the dragons, and they don’t even have that big of a role. Slavery is more culture-based, rather than ethnicity- enemies of the Church and the kingdom tend to be put to work as punishment, and killed if they refuse.
We definitely should! Although I’m not sure how to discreetly slip you my email and I’ve got no social media ties…
Thanks to both of y’all for explaining the link thing btw. I know the basics of HTML tagging from GameFAQs (ugh, so glad I don’t use it anymore) but all the tags in the NOTE confuse the hell outta me.
“Although I’m not sure how to discreetly slip you my email and I’ve got no social media ties…”
That’s an interesting challenge, isn’t it. I’ll create or dig up a spam email maybe?
broken up just in case
try this:
“spam [dot] mee [dot] herere [at] gmail [dot] com”
Simply genius! I’ll title the email with my illustrious title, but if ya look closely at the email address it’ll be clear who sent it anyway
awesome!
I cannot believe that username was not taken! I’m quite jealous.
I had to try a couple of the obvious variations first.
“Thanks to both of y’all for explaining the link thing btw. I know the basics of HTML tagging from GameFAQs (ugh, so glad I don’t use it anymore) but all the tags in the NOTE confuse the hell outta me.”
Ahh, yeah, I’ve done some web design and development work (recently), and specifically have worked with html and css since 2004 (which is insane, as far as I’m concerned), so I barely think twice about what the tags actually mean, haha.
People have expressed what I was thinking along the race lines far better than I, above. Abomination-Senpai in particular.
I remember the Newsroom lost me as a viewer when they had the white straight male lecture a woman about why it was wrong for her to identify rapists on social media as it might lead to accidentally getting an innocent white guy in trouble.
This isn’t about this strip specifically, but is it midnight yet? Sorry if this has been answered previously, but I don’t really know how political rallies work – has it officially begun, or is the crowd just gathering beforehand to wait for Robin to come onstage right at midnight?
I’m think it struck midnight when the last book ended
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vJVRSYmlwqg/hqdefault.jpg
… And I bet it’s not Amazi-girl.
Panel six has my vote for best panel ever.
It’s up there, but I have to say it’s clearly behind Becky’s double-birds to Toedad.
Or Joyce punching said ToeDad.
I know I was saying yesterday how Ryan’s a smooth operator and has a lot of patience.
And he is.
But throw him out of his comfort zone, get him derailed, and he loses his temper and goes berserk FAST.
….
Mission accomplished, AG.
Mmm. And last time he was distracted by being all ragey-privilege he caught a baseball bat to the head from behind courtesy of Sarah.
So… Marcie and Sal must be nearly behind him by now, right?
This could turn out in a number of ways, good and bad. I wonder what’s it gonna be.
I really hope she isn’t actually doxxing the guy. Even if he deserves it I don’t like the idea. Send that photo to the police not social media.
Personally, I think if you absolutely know someone is a rapist/attempted rapist, it is useful and helpful to inform the rest of us, so we can make an informed choice about spending time around that person/letting them have access to our drinks. This isn’t finding out someone online’s real life info and spreading it. This is warning about a confirmed predator to other people who are in the same environment.
This.
Ryan is a missing stair that few people know about. More people need to know about that so he can’t as easily exploit the spaces to prey on the newbies.
I understand wanting to avoid anymore victims to this guy but putting up his information on social media and saying he’s an attempted rapist would draw up a mix of reactions with not all being good. Some would be skeptical about the accusation because they its natural to doubt. While others might start to form a lynch mob against him. I prefer the law getting involved over letting it up to the people.
So would we all, if the law would actually do its job in such cases.
It’s actually one of the big problems when the law systematically fails – in addition to the obvious harm to the victims, people look for alternatives. Which is definitely not good in the long term, but neither is the current state.
I just really don’t want those solutions to end up screwing us. And while I haven’t heard of it doing so, there’s always a bit of an information blackout as to whether non-white people are being screwed.
Still, for now I choose to be cautiously optimistic so as to avoid breaking down crying.
Don’t know why anyone thought this guy would play it cool. He’s a short term schemer which is why he got angry when Joyce started to resist his advances which is good for Amazi-Girl since he’s easier to trap.
Nah. It took a lot of things going wrong before he reacted. It wasn’t just her resisting. It was that his plan to get her alone failed. Then she kept on having some innocent excuse not to go along with it.
He lasted at least an hour.
Actual literal reaction just now:
(High-pitched squeak and kickylegs of joy) “Eeeeeeeee JUSTICE!”
Really shoulda gotten that name first
She may be in the process of getting that via social media.
She realized she wasn’t going to get it and moved forward with the plan.
How Amber Got Her Groove Back
How Ryan Got Several Grooves in is Skull
Y’know, I think given the way Amber/Amazi-Girl’s mental status was going, it’s pretty darn convenient that the crowd turning on Sal snapped her out of her vengeance tunnel vision. I feel like in her state, that reaction would’ve vindicated her actions in her own mind. Moreover, the fact that she goes from practically foaming at the mouth to assuming the same confident, snarky persona she had before she started going off the rails… Also awfully convenient.
I get it, we’re finally getting that confrontation with Joyce’s attacker, and that scene sorta needs Amazi-Girl at her best to be as cool as it can possibly be, but I really hope her very dramatically declining mental state doesn’t just get glossed over after this. But at the same time, I think her reaction to the crowd turning on Sal has already glossed over it a bit.
That’s how it happens in real world. You have this big mental thing going on, with epiphanies and dramatic confrontations… and then ANOTHER thing happens that for the moment, completely overshadows it, and you put on your best game face and delay that previous thing for when you’re winding down alone and can crash freely.
Yup… delay the breakdown, get shit done, cry later.
I am fine with Amber just being a good person again tbh.
Like I’d genuinely be okay if by the end of the month Amber had kicked Ryan’s teeth in, buried the hatchet with Sal and apologized to Danny.
I think it’s gonna be slightly harder than that if only because of the whole “Amber can’t even look at Sal without having a panic attack” and “Sal is probably willing to let AG go if she never STALKS HER AGAIN but like, they’re not friends” bits, but no more actively seeking her out and giving her shit and a “Okay yeah, I DEFINITELY fucked up breaking up with you” to Danny is good in my book even if they decide to stay friends for the time being. (And maybe Danny goes “It’s clear you have very little value on your own life and maybe this might be time to talk about that? With me or Ethan at least?” and she’ll be in a state where she can consider not everything Sal says automatically evil this time.)
Still, I will gladly take Amber firmly on the path to recovery, yes PLEASE.
Oh I know, that was just an extreme I would be okay with.
And I would very much enjoy Amber acknowledging that she screwed up with Danny and them being friends again, since I have a hard time believing that their nearly 6 years of panel time together is just totally going to get flushed down the toilet over a misunderstanding and they’re just totes 100% done.
As for Sal, I am genuinely convinced by the end of this event that Amber starts punching holes into her perception of Sal as a monster. Not completely, obviously, it’d be too easy if by the end of this everything was perfectly fine, but I think we’re starting to see Amber come out of it because she had the worst of her own hatred towards Sal reflected back at her by the crowd, and she was forced to acknowledge that Sal had done nothing wrong even though by Amazi-Girl logic, Sal striking first because she was stalking her made it A-OK.
With you, Spencer. Burrying the hatchet with Sal will be the hard part, as it requires enough conversation to give both sides perspective. But it’s started. From my point of view it’s Danny who should apologize, but it doesn’t really matter which one starts the process .
Danny didn’t do anything wrong.
Like, I get that to Amber it felt like a calculated betrayal, because she goes to meet him at their usual hangout and finds with talking to Sal, whereupon Danny says that she should stop being Amazi-Girl because Sal said so, but Danny didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not Amber’s fault either, it’s a tragic misunderstanding brought about by her untreated trauma, but it’s really unfair to blame Danny.
What the hell should Danny apologize for?
I mean, he didn’t handle the whole disassociated persona thing as well as possible, but that’s hardly something you could expect him to.
Because, whether he was right or wrong, his actions hurt her. You don’t always apologize because you were wrong.
Seriously I’m basically the biggest Amber cheerleader here and just oh my god.
Danny was right. He’s terrified that Amber will get herself killed. There is, flatly, no place here that Danny is actually wrong; his only is not having the clairvoyant space brain necessary to pick out that Sal is a fixture for Amber’s traumas.
I can write an essay about why Amber felt betrayed by him but that doesn’t somehow mean he has anything to own up to.
He does have a point, at least as far as relationships go. But in fairness I can’t think ofa nything as important to have a fight over as ‘this thing is literally going to kill you’, and even if I did I wouldn’t remember the exact specifics.
IDK, I can see “I should have found a better time to say this”, at least, because maybe he does think he could have. But not “I shouldn’t have said this”, no.
Of course, the flip side here is that Danny will apologize. Because he’s Danny.
Danny knows he’s right. If he was going to buckle he would have done it then.
I dunno, I feel it’d be out of character for Amber to expect an apology (also she literally was not herself when that happened and I feel the need to constantly hammer on that), but I could probably see her try to explain her history with Sal and get mad when Danny still wants her to not jump off of cars, though that presumes Amber has any interest at all in ever speaking to him again.
He won’t necessarily buckle. But he would apologize for hurting her, even unintentionally.
Amber wouldn’t expect an apology, because Amber is a horrible person and doesn’t deserve one.
There’s also another point in there that’s easy to miss, tied to the “literally not herself”: Danny thought he was telling Amber that she needed not to take so many risks, but he was actually talking to Amazi-Girl and she had to have heard “You need to go away. I like Amber better than you.”
Not how you help someone with DID. Not his fault, but still …
You know, I have just realized that we still haven’t gotten Amber’s feelings on their breakup yet. She’s been shifted to Amazi-Girl nearly for the entirety of the last two days and her only reaction so far was “I don’t want to deal with it.”
I’m hoping that proves important and that when she sees him again she’s willing to talk to him.
Yeah, actually, I kinda forgot in all this rush, but I’d expected Amber to remand what AG had said at the time, though I think we’re at the point where Danny’s been wronged enough that it’d feel weird for him to re-enter a relationship with her? Maybe not.
I mean, there’s no chance they’re actually getting back together, Danny/Ethan is being pretty blatantly telegraphed, so chances are Amber just ends up thinking “I can’t do a relationship right now” or something and they just be friends. I think it’s something worth being acknowledged, at least.
Like, it’s a pretty extraneous situation that motivated their breakup, but I dunno. I don’t think Amber has caused him any significant amount of pain outside of being a jerk during their breakup because her alter felt betrayed, but it feels unfair to punish Amber for freaking out as a result of untreated, years long built trauma.
It wasn’t just the crowd. She also was taken out of her element when Sal pulled her down.
And Amazi-Girl is only delusional in regards to Sal. (Amber is less delusional and more phobic.) She got angry at Danny and Sal, and that bothered her.
But I know from experience that you can be pulled out of anger by something unexpected. It doesn’t mean it won’t come back. But intense anger requires stewing.
Of course, it’s also completely possible that the adrenaline from being pulled down would make her even more angry, so don’t go shocking people when they’re angry. It can work. But it might not.
Jeeze, it’s been a month already?
It feels like it’s only been about five years.
Time really flies doesn’t it
The time really flies, doesn’t it?
That’s, that’s an actual good action, isn’t it?
Amazi-Girl uses a Windows phone. We know it’s true, Willis.
People who work at Microsoft don’t even use Windows phones
It’s obviously a Samsung Galaxy…..but wait didn’t it previously have a keyboard? /joking
That might explain her Internet speed.
Not at all what I was expecting but still comes with plenty of that good old schadenfreude filling, so I’ll relish it all the same. Schadenfreude; when it’s directed against bad people, it’s like chocolate for the soul.
I’d ask what kind but it’d probably devolve into racist comments/jokes.
Shit slow upload speeds. Reminds me of shopping at meijer and seeing weird things and needing to report it to family.
Hell of a first semester for Joyce.
Assuming AG follows through on social media threat, and assuming it becomes a big deal, Joyce’ll have to see Ryan again and again on her phone/computer. Can’t see a way around it but… It just sucks for her.
I’m not convinced Joyce actually has Social Media, yet.
It’s entirely possible I’m forgetting something in comic that said she does.
She has seen the internet.
Ah, okay. Also, that is a brilliant comic, in hindsight.
My personal interpretation of her messaging with Joe is that it’s happening over FB messaging or some other social media messaging platform, since them being connected on social media seems more likely than having exchanged and then kept each other’s numbers.
She has a twitter account at a minimum
Some years ago (real time, not comic time) Willis maintained DoA character’s twitter feeds and Joyce Brown was one of them.
Maybe the videos of amazi-girl kicking the stuffing out of him will give her some catharsis.
http://screenanarchy.com/assets_c/2016/02/dam-negasonic-thumb-860xauto-59893.jpg
Okay, if this is the route AG is taking, please PLEASE let her warn Joyce so she can get off social media if she chooses.
She texted Dorothy first for confirmation, pretty sure she already got a heads up.
Lots of comments on AG doing illegal things: threatening him, provoking a fight etc.
I don’t see all of that at all. She said “one month ago, you were at a party and put something in a girls drink’. He was and he did.
Note that he wouldn’t be so upset if there wasn’t truth in the statement.
Perhaps it can’t be proved he roofied Joyce, but it can be proved he was there. That’s step one.
She said she wants to put his face on social media. So: she may not have done it, or she may have. We have to see it first. He thinks she is.
She is provoking a fight with him for sure. She would like nothing better than for him to hit her or grab or phone and run. Then she has him on theft and assault. She is also smart enough to know this goes beyond vigilating a jay-walker or sign stealer.
He will have as hard a time proving she provoked him, as she will have proving the roofie charge. Sounds like a draw to me.
But hopefully she kicks the shit out of him, just on general principal, and then gets him arrested for assult.
As to her ‘sudden’ about face on her backing down from attacking Sal, I don’t think she is so far gone as to not recognize that she had to do just that. What she has with Sal is personal. She dosen’t want crowd interference.
“Note that he wouldn’t be so upset if there wasn’t truth in the statement.”
I imagine anyone would be upset about being accused of a crime. Especially when the threat isn’t going to the police, who, at least in theory, require evidence to punish you, but going to social media where evidence isn’t required at all.
Of course, we know he is upset by the accusation because it’s true, but only since we know the accusation is true.
Putting him in jail for assault sounds good, that might have a chance of getting Joyce some solace.
The thing is that he isn’t upset. He’s showing rage, which wouldn’t make sense unless you assume he’s done something and is still doing something upon which gaining Internet Notoriety would negatively impact.
Well, pretty much anything you do is going to be negatively impacted if you gain Internet Notoriety as a rapist. Even (or especially) if it was entirely false.
While i want that guy to get everything he deserves. Do want to point out.
anyone would be angry at the situation. Whether they did something or not, she was already stating they did. Which means if they were bad, she’s caught them, if they aren’t. then she; a very public figure with a lot of public backing and internet connections, is proclaiming them a bad guy. So, if he was someone who hadn’t done anything, his life just got ruined.
So anyone would be angry, can’t use his anger as evidence for truth in the situation. Sadly their emotional reaction does little to prove either way. Which is why i’m glad/why she sent a pic to ask for identity verification.
Yakno before she drops his newly eunich’d body in some alley way
—–
Second detail. yeah hard to prove she provoked him and she could easily prove that she defended herself (and curb stomped his shitty ass), but that situation requires her to show up in front of the legal authorities, and publically. So she’d be outed on who she is; she got lucky…somehow? with the last event and not having public reveal on it–though im 99% sure cops, and teachers know who amazigirl is.
So she’d have to show up in court, likely in front of him.
Meaning, i doubt she cares if she has self defense or not, I think her only goal is to make him feel what Joyce feels. Fear of the world at large. Wounds heals, as she’s recently found out, but emotional wounds are much slower, and public ones much more vicious.
Amazigirl is choose the perfect poison for him. I really think she might have been considering his case for the whole month.
Amazigirl has no plans to show up in court. The reason for not hitting first is not to avoid legal problems. The reason is that Amazigirl follows strictly a well defined moral code which makes her a safe outlet for Amber’s violent tendencies. If he attacks first then Amazigirl is free to engage in controlled violence. The police and witnesses really have little to do with it.
If she can’t prove it in a court of law, it’s defamatory and illegal. And while it’s easier to prove in a civil court htan a criminal one, it’d still put Joyce through hell.
She’s totally right, and as omniscient viewers, we know she’s justified (and know she’s correct because we saw the incident. I don’t know that anybody’s disagreed with that. What I’m saying is that she is actually putting herself at risk. You know, in the real world. It’s not like there’s going to /be/ a courtroom scene. It’s also been implied that you can just /do/ that. Which, not so much.
No. That’s not how it works. There is no way that a regular citizen is required to know something beyond a reasonable doubt before saying it.
What you have to prove is that you did due diligence in trying to uncover this truth. That you weren’t “negligent” or showing a “blatant disregard for the truth.” The difference between this and with public figures is that, for public figures, you also have to prove actual malice.
When you have the corroboration of many witnesses, as AG does, you will not be successfully sued for defamation (well, assuming a non-corrupt court). She has every reason to believe what she said is true.
And that’s just federal law. Indiana law has the malice provision. So, it’s exactly the same for public and private individuals.
“Preponderance of the Evidence” is the civil standard, malice quite pointedly includes negligence (“She only got one side!”) for private individuals.
And she doesn’t actually have the corroboration of many witnesses, for the central claim. She has one witness. And the law generally does not give a fuck about what women have to say about rape, because the Star Court were a bunch of old white dudes. What she’s saying is risky to herself (In the real world).
Since the thought hadn’t occured to me to clarify this as well sooner, ti’s also fucking great she’s doing it, given that mistaken identity isn’t a plausible issue thanks to that wonderful scar.
Doess she have her own seperate social media stuff? either wa that is one hell of an open security poitn of her.
i still think that guy is gonna end up pulling a gun, and Sal is gonna end up taking the bullet instead
Ohhh, heroic dive to save AG’s life for the second time? That’d mess with her “justice” in regards to Sal wouldn’t it. (She may be realizing that isn’t so clear cut anyway, but yeah)
Basically. Well I feel like its more likely the guy pulls a guy and sal jump kicks him, but it goes off anyway.
Sal won’t admit it. but she is a serious softy.
The other possibility I see is Sal’s friend’s death as a result of AG’s actions. but that one is harder to story plot, simply because Sal likely would murder the guy and AG as a result.
Even without Willis’ “No Deaths” thing I keep hearing about, I can’t see Marcie’s death as a result of this, it just feels like a contrived way to create “drama” and I think Willis is a better writer than that.
“The guy pulls a guy”
He has a Targetmaster?!
At this point, I think Amazigirl is in for a penny/in for a pound , with Sal’s help.
She just de- escalated with her when she realized how racist it looked
( and was whipping up racist mob ) , They had a normal conversation, and Amazigirl collaborated with Sal.
Still something like a 0% chance AG figured out what she was doing is racist. But she did realize it was wrong, which for most purposes is good enough.
No, I’m pretty sure she realized how racist it looked. The crowd was being blatantly racist, and doing so in support of her. If not for that, I can’t figure out any reason why she would have been so hesitant to go after the girl she’s been stalking who had just assaulted her (albeit for an understandable reason).
You know what else looked really racist? “Sounds tough to live with. Good.”
Yet so many insisted “Naw that wasn’t racist”. They even stuck to using dog-whistles. Plenty of college aged white kids don’t know what ‘thug’ means.
Seriously, regardless of what Amber is trying to do, telling a black woman she’s super happy she’ll spend the rest of her life suffering for her criminal actions as a child, actions she faced legal punishment for, is inherently a racist thing to say.
Mmhm. But I don’t exactly expect a young white kid to recognize it, and I’ve had no real evidence that she has. Given what else she’s done, I am reasonably confident Amber hasn’t recognized that this is seriously a problem for Sal.
But whether she understands the gravity of the situation or not, she still understood that the crowd wanted her hurt, and that wasn’t honestly justifiable, so she’s at least tried to calm them a bit. That makes me happy. If she picked it up that fast, that’s honestly hilariously unrealistic to me, but at least it means watching less racism from a fictional character I like, so on the other hand, there’s that XD
Reminds me that I was initially dismissive of Overwatch using robot racism to paint Torb, Zarya, the Aussie Boyfriends, and Reaper as assholes, then realized that the absolute last thing I needed to hear was 5 edgelords each other match saying ‘beaner’ because idk Grandad called Reaper that. Sometimes realism is overrated. XD
I think trlkly is right that AG has realized how racist her actions looked. Realizing how racist some of her actions actually were will probably take a bit longer.
No, if he’s got a gun, he’s going to draw, Amazi-Girl will disarm him but he’ll get a shot off and it will hit a random bystander. The press will laud Amazi-Girl for stopping the ‘mass shooting’ before it can start. However, Sal will know the truth and so will Amazi-Girl. It will not be an easy thing for her to deal with, what with Amber’s need for Amazi-Girl to be the ‘perfect hero’, that by not predicting this outcome, she got someone hurt.
This does seem to be Amazi-Girl’s MO, doesn’t it? Still, it really is amazing how a little pressure rips off people’s mask. Most people would be shocked and deny the did anything wrong. Ryan just gets angry to the point of violence demonstrating that he is, indeed, the one she’s been looking for.
Of course, him taking a swing is what Amazi-Girl wants.
Actually at the end of this strip I was worried like IS THIS DEFINITELY THE GUY coz like… this is exactly how an innocent person who was just randomly accused by a superhero and without them waiting for any proof or talking to them is about to be publicly shamed… yeah that’s how an innocent person would react, too.
really? I’d think an innocent person would actually take an extra moment to make the connection that they’re being accused of being attempted rapists
As someone who has empathized and identified with Joyce way too much for parts of this particular ongoing plotline, the reappearance of Ryan in this way both fills me with joy and nausea. It would have been entirely possible and have rung true if none of them ever ran into him again – it is a big campus, with a ton of students. But it’s also entirely possible and rings true that someone does and recognizes him – college communities are like small towns that way.
Never seeing or hearing of him again, but seeing his face in every stranger’s is a story I know best, but I’m very hopeful that Joyce will get more closure and a better chance at justice.
My college had 20,000+ (at least according to the “undergraduate student body” number) and I can’t imagine not running into someone like that again, but after looking it up apparently IU is 30,000+, so what do I know.
Also Joyce asked Amazigirl to catch him so she could feel safe.
Unless my memory is way off.
Well, maybe not in so many words.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/04-the-whiteboard-dong-bandit/somewhere/
And the comic before.
I love willis’ character expressions. Amazi-girl is acting like she could not care less what ryan does right now, and that her phone is more important and it is hilarious.
Normal Ryan Face -> Hurt Ryan Face -> Mad Amazi-Girl Face -> Quite Mad Amazi-Girl Face -> Shiiiiiiiit… Ryan Face -> I Don’t Care Amazi-Girl Face -> Furious Ryan Fa-> Still Don’t Care Amazi-Girl Face
You could say that her attitude is amazing, eh? Eh?
Rip his fucking lungs out.
I too favour the blood eagle.
Ok so for some reason every time I check back on my comments to see if there are responses, I forget that your comment exists and my mind decides to act as if your comment was in response to mine and I’m all like “aw jeez are puns hated THAT much?”
That’s an interesting choice of name for this particular comment.
Crack his face, Amazi-girl. This can’t wait.
My internal alarm bells are going off.
By the psychic powers of “this sounds familiar”, I predict Ryan will now assault Amazi-Girl successfully and Sal will have to rescue her.
I really hope I’m wrong. Please prove me wrong. Ryan deserves 0 seconds of victory.
Marcie too the rescue?
Amazi-Girl has taken on serveral people twice her size, I don’t think Ryan is going to pose much of a threat to her.
I don’t think its Ryan she’s going to have a problem with, but the angry pro-Desanto mob that comes to his aid.
It all depends on what the mob values more, hero worship of amazi-girl or their own internal bigotry
I’ve known guys like Ryan, and they are almost always complete junk in a fight. The kinda punk who pulls a gun to get their masculinity back when he gets his ass handed to him.
Ryan’s life is gonna get destroyed here, yes, but I also still think this will end badly for Amazi-Girl.
Yes, on both points but I’m hoping it’s the start of a healing process for Amber.
Willis has certainly set up an interesting narrative.
If this goes through, the one I’m worried about is Joyce – I mean, she has panic attacks from going outside and imagining him. Having his face plastered all over the place can’t help, can it?
I think that Joyce will be determined to follow through with her decision to ‘make things better’. That will include facing down her fear of Ryan and what he did (although she may choose to do so in a quixotic or unusual way).
I’m guessing that attacking a Christian Good Ol’ Boy, coupled with her involvement in Becky’s kidnapping, gets the cops after her in full force.
rekt
Oh, this is gonna be good.
Aww damn. I remembered the page, but forgot I already checked tonight for the new one. Oh well, only 20 more hours.
I approve of where this is going.
So no signs of remorse then. Good. I was thinking that his experience may have convinced Ryan that what he was doing was wrong and, if not making amends, at least trying to move on with his life and lay low. But he seems unrepentant, which means I have no misgivings about Amazigirl kicking his ass now.
That was never going to happen.
Even if he DID feel guilty or were trying to make ”amends”, that would at best warrant giving him a chance to turn himself in before she finished beating the crap out of him.
There is no way to make amends for what he’s done. If he were lying low he would have transferred to another school in another state so his victims would never have to see his face again. I don’t care if he just saved a bus full of puppies, orphans and war heroes, he’s still getting off easy
Seriously. He roofied her. He roofied her SPRITE because she was proving to be too difficult to isolate with things like playing games with other people at a party. It was an entirely calculated act and there was literally no way he did this and not be aware of the fact that he was taking consent away from her because she was, in his words, a “fucking tease” so he had the right to do this.
This is not a person who made a mistake. This is not a person who will gain self-reflection any time soon. This was an entirely calculated act.
No. More calculated even than that. He brought that roofied Sprite to the room where he expected her to be alone, only to be temporarily foiled by her actually recruiting other people to play board games.
There was no “proving to be too difficult” or “because she was a tease”, the plan was drug and rape from the start. Hell, even if he’d found someone who would have been happy to have sex, he still would have raped her. He never even gave her the chance to consent.
I think I blocked out a lot of unpleasantness from years ago.
It’s honestly easy to miss quite how bad it was until you go back and reread it. When you first see the Sprite, you don’t know it’s roofied (though you might guess), but if you go back and trace what happens it’s even uglier than the first glance.
And if you put his current art skill with those stories? You’d probably be able to make out the specific brand used. Not like that’s a good thing…
If he’s really an official intern with the campaign, then Robin has an opportunity to say, “You’re fired.”, with the cobra gesture.
Maybe I just love that movie too much, but that last panel reminds me of Deadpool’s Negasonic Teenage Warhead when he tells her to handle ANgel.
I have been on pins and needles since Amazi-Girl first spotted Ryan last week! The plotting is spot-on.
I’m glad she didn’t just start whaling on him (yet), so matter how much he may deserve it. This could be a dangerous place and time for Amazi-Girl (and particularly for Sal, if she gets involved), and I’d hate to see one of them get in trouble while Ryan gets away with it yet again (no matter how realistic that would be – oh god, that’s what’s going to happen, isn’t it?)
Last panel makes it look like Ryan’s scar opened back up lol.
Well, when I say “a nose”, it was really just a hole in the face. But it was a nose to us.
Looks like Ryan blew his nose more than other characters, though.
“The Smart Phone is mightier than the sword?”
Not sure if that phrase will catch on.
Further to my comment up-thread about Ryan drawing a gun and maybe shooting someone by accident as Amazi-Girl is struggling to disarm him, I wonder if that’s how Joyce is going to avoid having to deal with her trauma by facing him again – She won’t even be involved in his trial for assault with a deadly weapon.
Erm, if you’re implying that Joyce will get a gun for self-defense, I rather doubt it, on account of toedad. You know, another source of trauma for her, the guy who held her and Becky at gunpoint? That hasn’t stopped being a thing that happened.
No, I’m not and I’m not sure from where you may have got that idea!
My bad, it’s been a long night.
Whoop, there it is.
Ooh, looks like Captain Daterape is losing his temper.
Yeah. That’ll go well for him.
So… does AmaziGirl actually have her own social media account?
Or did Amber just slip up in the heat of the moment and out herself?
No.
Comic Reactions:
Ugh, first, let’s get this out of the way. This arc is rough for me as a survivor. Not gonna lie. And it’s rough to see all the talks in the comments talking about this as a simple matter of doxxing and empathizing with Ryan (I know why, the shadow of how doxxing has been used to harass, defame, and attempt to destroy close friends of mine and women/trans people on the internet still looms across a lot of our mutual fandoms).
So let’s tackle that first.
Panel 5: The thing about doxxing that makes it terrifying is the implied threat of harassment. Oh, here’s your information, so innocent, what are you upset about? Sure, the people I gave it to are well known for harassing people to the point of suicide, calling in SWAT threats, trying to get them fired from employment, stalking on all forms of social media, calling home addresses, and taking photos of your house. And some have been arrested for violence in the real world, but hey, take your chances speaking out now, I’m sure it’ll go great.
It’s silencing terrorism in a similar way as a burning cross on the lawn is. It’s a “we hate you, we know where you live or can find it soon, and we may very well hurt you if you ‘upset’ us enough by existing”.
This. This isn’t doxxing.
I’ve mentioned that the system is really broken when it comes to rape and that’s really true. Few rapists actually meet jail time, most jail time for rapes is vanishingly small, most cop investigations are retraumatizing, most folks disbelieve you or harass you for rape accusations, and rape apologia is rampant. And even institutions seem to treat rape accusations as a greater problem than a serial rapist in their midst.
Most organizations are notoriously slow to throw out a serial rapist targeting folks in a community, even when dozens of survivors come out and speak about their experiences. Often hiding behind things like a lack of police conviction and worries that a “false accusation” somehow ruins more lives than being raped (it doesn’t. I’ve seen folks accused of rape, it tends to go away in their lives within a year or two, even when it’s true, and during that year or two, there’s no shortage of rape denialists to get their back and attack their victims for them.).
As such, there’s very little folks on the bottom can do to protect themselves other than publicize the missing stair:
http://pervocracy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/missing-stair.html
Cause, I mean, survivors talk, warn friends about certain folks, word slowly gets around. But speaking out publicly, declaratively can be personally very dangerous (you get a swarm of rape apologists attacking you for any accusation, see all the shit Cosby’s accusers have gotten or all the shit Mia Farrow has gotten over the years for simply believing her daughter). However, it can be super useful, because it’s a much bigger sign for the missing stair.
And it allows the survivors to stop feeling alone and unsupported in their community. They can see others who have been victimized and speak with them, feel like they can be believed if they mention what happened to them, stop feeling gaslighted by a community pretending stuff like this doesn’t happen or only happens to “bad girls” or “weak guys” or “freaks”.
I’ve seen cultures where no one speaks out about the rape epidemic and it’s heartbreaking and people keep getting hurt over and over again because there’s no public shine of light on the problem. Every survivor is alone and hating themselves and thinking they must have fucked something up and the serial abuser continues to ruin lives.
Outing them publicly in the community doesn’t stop their predations, but can remove their protections a bit, can remove the system they are exploiting, the pool of targets they can affect and most of all, can support survivors to know that they are not crazy, they are not alone, they are not to blame. It wasn’t just them.
We talk about the lack of justice. There is no justice. This isn’t justice. This is just making it harder for him to continue to hurt people.
His “image”, unfortunately, will remain fairly clean, rape culture will ensure that, but maybe he won’t be able to hurt as many people as he has so far.
It really is just another variant of “People without power doing something to stop being trod on is JUST AS BAD as people with power doing something similar for the express purpose of stomping on other people.”
Pretty much, unfortunately.
I’ve never made that connection before, but it’s a good one.
Two words that should never be together, ‘rape’ and ‘culture’.
And now the rest of the analysis:
Panel 1: Just like with his assault on Joyce, he’s really good at playing smooth until he feels no longer in control of his little game and even then, he can fake it for a bit until he feels the girl has gotten too “uppity”.
If AG had doubts, was a regular type of cop, this is probably where the interaction would end. A “sorry to bother you, sir, we must have been mistaken, enjoy the rally” sort of thing. Luckily for the story, AG isn’t the type to do that and she got confirmation that this is the guy.
And happily, she’s shaken off her bad path and is back to doing what made Amber believe AG was the “golden alter” in the first place.
Panels 2-3: Confronting with crimes, getting a better picture… goodish. But now Ryan knows exactly who spoke and my experience observing serial rapists is they frequently will dance around with public accusations trying to find which of their victims spoke first so they can harass and gaslight them.
Ryan won’t even need to do that. He knows which (slur for women) told on him and if he bothered to remember her name, it’ll be child’s play for him to look up a lot of information up about her or at least access her email account to harass her through or have proxies harass her through.
This might backfire by putting Joyce more at risk. Though knowing she has a superhero who has her back may make him think twice about it, especially if she ends up kicking his teeth in here.
Panel 4: Similar aggressive neutral face to Panel 2 here:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/smash/
He remembers alright. He remembers every time he looks in the mirror (which, good going on that by the way Joyce. I wish I had given my rapist something similar to remember me by).
Panel 6: But hey, let’s be frank here, outing him as a rapist to the campus was never Plan A. Kicking his ass was always Plan A. Cause that’s how AG works. It won’t do much systematically, but it’ll be momentarily satisfying. Though I’m still convinced the crowd will not like that she’s picking a fight with a white guy instead of the black girl they wanted her to beat up for them.
Panels 2-3: you’re assuming he only roofied one girl in the week or so that would commonly be refferred to as “one month ago”. I find that to be a risky assumption
I’m guessing he made himself scarce at any parties on Saturday, potentially Sunday too given the whole bleeding thing, but… college campuses do sometimes have parties on Thursdays too, augh. Yeah. That can’t be ruled out, can it.
Man I hate this guy.
Yeah he’s about to punch her and she’s been waiting to punch him. Unfortunately yeah, no way the crowd’s gonna like this. (Probably they’re going to believe him when he says she must have been mistaken as soon as the fight’s over, which you know he’s gonna do, probably with a new innocent story behind this awful nasty scar about like a tragic camping incident or something for maximum effect, and isn’t it awful how Amazi-Girl jumped straight to posting that? *Gags a bit because augh, rapist brain is not a good place to be in*)
Nice she did get him on social media though at least. Hopefully at least a couple people on campus see it and have a moment of doubt they wouldn’t have otherwise if they see him at a party.
As I recall, the frat guy who drove them home said “I’ve seen his ass lurking around here” – that infers that Joyce may not have been his only target. It’s possible that she was his first, but he’s been ideating for a while now.
Hell, if the whole busted-face issue hasn’t put him off trying again, he might have even succeeded in the month since he drugged Joyce.
‘Lurking’ isn’t a positive word, so at least one person is suspicious of Ryan’s actions. If there’s one, there’s bound to be more. Perhaps events happening that don’t add up. If he’s [ trigger ] women with drugs, perhaps they don’t remember it, but still feel that something was done to them?
People should be afforded some amount of privacy; doxxing shouldn’t be a thing. People should be able to better themselves; prison shouldn’t be a thing. People should be able to be themselves; being assaulted, raped, and/or murdered for doing so shouldn’t be a thing.
So much pain, just so much.
Ryan, almost certainly knows who the “victim involved” is, but I’m not completely convinced of “But now Ryan knows exactly who spoke” or its implications. I’m certain it’s a thing and a problem in most cases (I know it is), but AG showed up at the party and even if Ryan doesn’t know that, Joyce wasn’t the only person involved this time. He was attacked and, at least temporarily, surrounded by people. Maybe he’ll assume Joyce spoke out about it anyway, but there isn’t an actual reason for him to assume that.
Honestly, that’s not even a distinction worth trying to make. You can safely ignore me.
Huh… Hard to believe the many years its been since we last saw Ryan has only been a month.
OMG it’s only been a month. OMG now Joyce is going to see his face everywhere on FB and printed out on the bulletin boards.
…eek
Oh god I hope not.
Now I picture a montage of Amber and Carla hacking Joyce’s phone, and Ethan, Dorothy, Becky, et al furiously running around so they can just happen to be leaning up against a bulletin board as Joyce walks by, etc.
Someone needs to pull the ‘wacky sitcom’ tag?
That be fun. Just don’t touch the “Benny Hill” tag.
Holy. Crap.
He’s gonna die.
If not here, then by social media’s hands.
I think he remembers.
Remembers, I think he does.
Aside from the fact we know it’s Ryan and he’s guilty (Wouldn’t it be nice, DSL asked sarcastically, if everyone had tags following them around) — too damn many of you seem to be comfortable with the level of risk in social-media-accusing an innocent party. I’ve dealt IRL with too many people who think that with some crimes on their political radar, any accusation must be followed by a guilty verdict or the system is “broken.” Damage done to an innocent party is seen as “acceptable collateral damage,” if it’s acknowledged at all.
Well, remember that we do know that Ryan is completely guilty. We wouldn’t feel bad for him if he got mauled by a bear.
AG isn’t working from uncorroborated hearsay. She wasn’t there for the attack itself, but she saw the fallout firsthand, and personally spoke to the victim and several witnesses who DID see it happen, and she even sent a photo of Ryan to one of them to verify she had the right guy. What more would you have her do?
If the percentage of rapists who the system actually convicted wasn’t in the single digits, and the rapists who DID get convicted actually received sentences fitting their crimes more often than not, I might share your concern.
But the system really, really sucks at treating rape like a serious issue, and rapists like the pieces of shit they are.
I will happily brave the extremely overblown ”risk” of being falsely accused and having my life
ruinedbriefly inconvenienced rather than risk scum like Ryan going completely unpunishedI’m just going to leave this here as a general response to this sort of sentiment which I’ve seen a lot on this comment thread and in general life. And I’m gonna bury my emotions as much as possible so that I don’t just respond with a flippant “fuck you”.
General society tends to have a disproportionate view of how seriously accusations of rape are taken by the general public. Because people view rape as a “bad thing”, they feel that accusations of rape must ruin lives, cost employment, destroy marriages, etc…
But the reality of rape accusations are such that the impact is actually very small. People tend to respond to rape accusations with anger and violence… towards the one making the accusation and its very common for the majority of support in a rape accusation to go behind the one accused of rape. Someone making a public accusation tends to put themselves at extreme personal risk of harassment and negative response, loss of friends, loss of support, and being viewed as permanently broken (we tend to view rape victims as being permanently damaged goods).
And the person they are accusing tends to suffer very little in terms of social consequences absent other social factors (most famously black men being accused of raping white women in order to justify lynching them). Even accurate accusations don’t really hamper one’s reputation all that much. Look at the large number of defenders Roman Polanski or Woody Allen draw and they raped children.
Now compare that to the vitriol Dylan Farrow still gets to this day simply for being raped and Mia Farrow gets simply for believing her. Hell, Mia Farrow was essentially blacklisted from Hollywood for supporting her daughter.
And if you think this is just famous folks, well, not really, no one remembers the names of rapists, even one’s with famous trials. Within a handful of years, their names are cleared even while their accusers suffer years and years of harassment from rape apologists and defenders. Hell, even rapists who go to jail for it tend to be publicly redeemed rather quickly.
Y’know Brock Turner? Yeah, right now his name is on everyone’s lips and his driveway is being vandalized with his crime and it seems like that might linger for another year maybe. But he’s also being redeemed by his university and invited to his old hunting ground for paid speeches talking about how the evils of excessive drinking can lead to folks getting raped.
Everyone wants to view the best of rapists, to believe that “my nigel” couldn’t have done it, and that is reflected in the quick way we turn on their accusers. And we want to believe that women are liars, that those who accuse folks of rape are just dirty sluts trying to cover up bad sex or ruin a person’s life for fun.
We, as a society, want to believe that so bad that its the reason so few rape accusations go to trial, so few are convicted, and so many survivors who speak up and name names are harassed for doing so. It’s the reason rape culture is so awful.
And the reality is, despite our beliefs that false rape accusations occur all the time, the reality is that they occur less frequently than false accusations of any other crime. Literally someone saying “this person stole from me” or “this person hit me” is more likely to be lying than someone saying “this person raped me”.
And the percentages of all of these are vanishingly small and typically more a result of mistaken identity rather than the crime not actually occurring. Things like the Duke case are rare and we as a society love to latch onto that to justify our rape mythologies and believe that accusers are full of shit.
And yet they disprove the whining. For all the attention that trial got, do any of you remember a single name of a single one of the accused off the top of your head?
No?
Exactly. So please, knock it off with this parallel universe assumptions that believing survivors is somehow negative and that a rape accusation ruins half the life of those accused as it ruins the one making the accusation.
*pat pat*
You want some cookies? You need some cookies. And a hug.
I… I do like cookies…
Are there still lonely ginger snaps in Ruth’s room?
Do you like homemade cocoa muffins? Because I’ll make some for you if you want. They’re pretty good.
If I could ship you boxes of homemade cookies right now, I actually would.
Seconded.
I wish could offer more than sympathy to everyone who has to deal with this kind of bullshit in their daily lives. I find it incredible that they are still able to communicate by means other than an unbroken stream of profanity.
All of this.
DSL, I know what you’re trying to say is that it’s an accusation that should be taken seriously, and you’re right, but the fact is we don’t live in that world. We don’t live in a world where victims are trusted and rapists are punished. False rape accusations, plainly, do not happen to any real tendency that they should play any significant factor in how we judge cases.
And all the hugs to you, Cerberus. Y
The fuck is wrong with you, though? “False accusations should not play any significant factor in the judgement of cases”. Yes, actually, they should, because that’s the cornerstone of american justice? The entire innocent until proven guilty makes crimes that don’t have any way of proving guilt is the weakness of the system, but there’s no better system, and operating under the assumption the accused is guilty is a terrible premise. Think about it, I think you’ll understand.
False rape accusations, dude.
Rape accusations tend not to be falsified, but we treat those who come forth as lying skanks for it, and that’s on top of all the other bullshit rape victims have to put up with in the justice system
False accusations WOULD be bad, jackass. The problem is that the system is so damned worried about something that almost NEVER happens that when a rape is reported, far too often the victim isn’t taken seriously, and their claims aren’t investigated. Evidence such as rape kits — when they bother to collect them — can and do sit, unexamined for DECADES because the police won’t bother to investigate the evidence THEY ALREADY HAVE.
If this shit happened when someone reported that they’d been robbed or shot, eads
Damn it, I’m so mad I fat-fingered the submit button.
If this shit happened when someone tried to report that they’d been robbed or shot, someone at the police department would lose their badge immediately.
Failure to take accusations seriously is just as much a miscarriage of justice, if not more.
What Fart Captor said.
Also, as an addendum, I’m so fucking done with the sad disingenuous “but the rule of law” poses that discussion of rape bring out.
And here’s why:
1) People are not a court of law.
A court of law has consequences, jail time, sometimes even loss of rights such as the right to vote (which I think is messed up in the extreme, but that’s neither here nor there) and the right to a minimum wage (equally fucked up). As such, it makes sense for their to be an “innocent until proven guilty” standard even though in practice it tends to work as a “guilty until proven straight and white and/or rich” standard.
However, people are people, them thinking, gosh, I better not invite John to this party, he’s been accused of rape and I trust that Cindy isn’t lying about that doesn’t strip him of any rights or have major consequences for his freedom.
People are allowed to make judgments about accused rapists, especially in the context of how few rapes end in prosecution. Often times, telling a community about a rapist is the only way a survivor can warn their community so that it’s harder for others to get hurt the same way they got hurt. And folks being willing to believe rape survivors rather than assuming they are lying for a reason that is “… (something that’s totally not, ‘percussion instruments be lyin’)”, is key for that and for supporting survivors in the one small way we can.
2) These disingenuous arguments never go out for any other crime. We don’t go, oh, we can’t call that boy a thief until the court of law has proven he stole something or we can’t call that girl a murderer until the court of law proves she murdered someone.
Not only that, but the same people who tend to throw out these arguments tend to be the exact same people throwing out garbage like Mike Brown may have stolen something or Trayvon Martin may have smoked a blunt once in order to distract from the fact that they were murdered in cold blood and their killers got away with it.
3) This garbage exploits the fact that this crime rarely gets punished by the law and is a dehumanizing experience to try and handle the “right” way. And so it’s used to disbelieve our narratives, undermine our experiences, and paint us all as liars for not engaging in a doomed process and being one of the lucky few to prevail.
Assholes only cite the iron law of the “law’s majesty” when they know it is broken in their favor. See also harassers citing “oh call the police on us if it’s so bad” knowing that cops are ignorant and unmotivated to investigate internet-based crimes.
And that’s upsetting.
Stop the bullshit. He didn’t say that anyone should be presumed guilty. He said that false accusations don’t happen often enough that you should presume they are the case. That’s YOU presuming guilt on the part of the victim.
You just decided to attack someone who was being nice to a rape victim. Do you really think this will go well for you?
In context, which you’re either missing or ignoring, this is about how both jackasses and the law both go out of their way to assume that rape, in particular, is all about false accusations. That women were just waiting for a chance to lie about this, so of course we shouldn’t take rape accusations seriously. This is written into the common law, in as many words. Spencer is saying this isn’t the case, and as individuals, we shouldn’t think that (I mean, the law shouldn’t either, but).
Probably because we fucking shouldn’t.
So, DSL. You admit that we know the guy is a rapist. But you decide to chastise the comments section anyways for wanting him punished. You have more empathy for the fictional rapist than the fictional victim.
This shit is 100% why rapist Brock Turner is out today. The judge was like you. He felt sorry for the rapist, and tried to give him the easiest sentence he could.
I know why it happens. You are a guy, so you feel more empathy for the guy. You would never rape someone, so you project that onto anyone you feel empathy for.
But that is a huge, huge problem. It is a large part of why rapists get away. At least rapist Brock Turner was convicted. Many others aren’t, because people will jump to assuming the victim is lying or the victim did something that made happen.
Of course we’re okay with the guy being outed on social media. This is a rapist, not your friend or whatever. For as big as social media is, few people have been harmed in the way you mention.
This isn’t a false accusation. If it were, then maybe there’d be something to get upset about. But there’s not.
Ummm, no.
I’m drawing a distinction _between_ Ryan and people who are falsely accused. And please note I said I met too many people IRL (that means “in real life,” right?) who insist all accused must be guilty.
And while I’m at it, I notice most of the responses to me start off with a variation of “What you’re REALLY saying is … ” which can be accurately translated as “I can’t answer what you said, so I’ll recast what you said into some BS statement I can more easily rebut.” I’ve met a more-than-sufficient number of you in real life, as well.
So I see we’re taking the ironic route to our response.
Who here has been equating accusations with guilt? I can completely understand being uncomfortable with people doing that, but everybody here has been talking either about getting the accusation taken seriously as a criminal complaint rather than as a crime itself, or else what to do when someone is known to be guilty and the legal system has utterly failed.
Many of the people saying these things are themselves rape survivors, who know damn well that their accusations are true.
TL;DR: Shut up.
Just shut up.
You said: “too damn many of you seem to be comfortable with the level of risk in social-media-accusing an innocent party.”
And what have people been discussing? Outing Ryan, or some hypothetical real life rapist. Not a single person has talked about outing the falsely accused.
Not a single person has accused you of saying something you didn’t. You apparently did not think about what you said actually meant.
Which is fine. People mess up. But the best response is to apologize and clarify, not make it all about you and attack everyone else.
That only makes it look like you intended to offend.
When literally everyone is giving you grief, chances are you are the one who messed up. At least one of us would have defended you if there was a way to do so.
One grab, and I do believe that Rian will get a sign.
Jeez, it’s only been a month, comic time?
My reaction too
Yep.
The party was Friday of Week One (Day 6). It’s currently early Monday morning of Week Six (Day 37).
Careful Ryan or Amazi-Girl will shove her amazi-foot up your shitty ass!
Seriously, he needs to wipe more often
She’s gonna need new boots when she’s done
To be fair, if I’d gotten any part of that creep on any of my clothes, I’d burn them and replace them.
She already has one photo of him, and it’s already been seen by Dorothy, which means she has it. She doesn’t even need this photo.
I’m pretty sure it’s all about provoking him.
Needed a better picture, one with that close up at a slight angle to the side.
DO IT RYAN. MAKE MY MILLENNIUM.
Ryan was just trying to study.
/s
The lay of the land for his next target?
Also I thought about putting possible up there, but decided against it. Regardless as to the devil advocates comments, to which a couple of mine may have crossed into, he’s going to at minimum try again, assuming he’s not been successful before, or do so again, if he’s successfully hurt others (more so than Joyce was, that is).
I disagree with Amazi Girl on many counts but you cannot deny she’s got style.
It’s not bigotry, it’s Justice™ with style?
Does anyone else smell the scent of brimstone?