Desperate for companionship, Frankenstein's Monster pretends to be the Opera Ghost. A grave mistake.
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.
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!
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
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.
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.
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
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.
Mac Hall
Matt Boyd
The legendary early-aughts webcomic that inspired a wave of webcomic creators.
Namesake
Isa, Meg
There's ghosts at your heels and fairy tale worlds ahead. What do you do? Jump down the rabbit hole!
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.
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.
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?
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Not that there’s anything wrong with having a non-WASPy nose, but man, fans of Adam Driver are the last people that ought to be criticizing anyone’s schnoz.
Given that Robin’s run in politics in the other webcomic is before the current political climate, can I say as a foreigner it’s scary how your current president reminds me of a fictional unpredictable sugar-rush speedster created by a self-admitted man-child?
The biggest difference between Robin and Trump, as evidenced by their slogans. Trump is actually the successor to Robin.
Proof:
Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again” presumes it was previously great. When was it great before? When Robin was in charge!
Robin’s slogan, “Be Great America”.
I’m not convinced Robin’s an actual politician. I think she just comes from a rich family and pays for people to follow her around and act like she’s important.
Here’s the thing. Wealthy people become politicians by using enough of their own money (and other resources) to surround themselves with enough of the right people who will do that until nonassociated people are willing to give them money to keep doing that at which point they start using that money instead of their own.
Ross Perot is a good case study here with his history of not trusting the people he surrounded himself with to do their job of making him a more attractive investment to the people who actually fund political campaigns.
1. Panel One: Leslie is trying to talk to Robin like she’s a friend they just had a bender with who wants them to go drinking again or smoke some weed. This is not good. Robin is an intruder in your house and has already resisted being physically thrown out. Call the cops, call some friends, or go to the media yourself and tell them she’s INSANE.
2. I find it incongruous Ruth and Amber both have their mental illnesses dealt with seriously while Robin is speaking from a perspective that strikes me as a complete break with reality. Is she in a psychotic fugue state or just literally a psychopath? I’m actually amused by this in the comic way but this feels totally like Shortpacked rather than Dumbing of Age.
3. Leslie, why would you WANT her to go back to her campaign? The campaign which is about destroying gay rights? I mean, yes, it gets her out of your house but you know that’s a bad thing as well. I know love is blind but this is a crazy person in your house.
4. I wonder if Robin just repeats what she wants and assumes it will eventually work and people will do what she says. It’s like she’s got a Solar Exalted charm or is a Ventrue with Presence and Dominate. Why yes, I played a lot of White Wolf games in the past.
I do wonder what her staff are doing, though. Also, I point out Robin may actually not be in any danger because of her lesbian “scandal.” It’s not like they have any actual story to report so far and the public isn’t exactly going to vote Democrat because of it. They may not vote but that’s not a guarantee anyway.
5. I note Robin doesn’t look for anyone tweeting her beforehand and I can’t help but imagine she’s ignored all of her messages.
6. Kylo Ren dislikes her? Well, that increases my life of him except for the fact I’ve just discovered from the comments threat the Alt-Right likes the First Order and Kylo Ren. That makes me feel unclean by association. I’m also a fan of the Principality of Zeon and Imperium of Mankind but I’m aware I’m not SUPPOSED TO BE. Do I have to disassociate myself from the bad guys I love to hate because people actually love them?
I also think Robin’s polls will go up the more hate she spews on the net.
I always just figured that DoA was just an offshoot of Shortpacked. Galasso decided to clone everyone and send them to college as part of a plan to take over the education system.
My best guess is it died with LBJ. The two parties started becoming parodies of themselves in the 70s, and the Republicans really kicked it into high gear when Ronnie came to town.
(At least in this 90s kid’s opinion. Somebody who was actually there will probably disagree. I know this ignores the Vietnam protests; I’m referring to the politicians themselves.)
The cross-party social scene in DC used to keep things civil, and make it possible for the work to get done. That’s only recently broken down. The parties did used to call each other names in public, but they didn’t actually hate or fear each other. The kids who’ve come in during the last decade often believe that hype. Pre-jerrymandering, most districts were very mixed, so most politicians expected to get cross party line votes if they did a good job. So, vilifying the other side was a game sometimes, but one that they might not play constantly.
As many house members stopped moving their wives to town, and stopped going to the picnics and parties that included both parties, the old ties of outside of work friendships that allowed negotiations to get done started to vanish.
As politicians pushed to gerrymander their districts, things also got worse. It seemed like a good way to avoid getting fired… but they didn’t have to appeal to cross party voters, and they started fearing party purists taking their seats instead. So, they started talking in more party purist styles.
You can see the volume of work that congress does dropping drastically as the people who did have across the aisle friends and allies retire, and their replacements fail to build the cross aisle ties, and make the reasonable deals.
The funny thing is that it’s all reversible at this point.
That balance could easily slide back the other way. Many of the older congresspeople still know how things used to get done.
Many of the younger ones do love to talk and build friendships, so they could make cross party friends again.
Ordinary citizens can also decide their single issue is gerrymandered districts, and just poke local public servants into fixing the silliest extremes. That would allow congress to stop the parody.
Well, there was the one congressman who beat another congressman in the middle of congress with his cane in like the 1830s.
Then there was the smear campaign that someone had fathered an illegitimate child with a slave, and that was like the 3rd or 4th presidential campaign to ever happen.
I’m just going off my vague memories of US History, but national discourse hasn’t always been Lincoln vs Douglas.
actually, that’s exactly how a Smear campaign works-blowing out of proportion some thing or act that really did happen. (Smear campaigns that rely on absolute fiction tend to be failures).
I mean TJ had a kid with someone who literally had no ability to consent since she had a lack of freedom (slavery), I don’t think that specifically counts has a smear campaign. That’s just like “look at this horribly unethical thing that happened” and then he got elected anyway. American politics is stupid.
just no more leftist riots please. Also before anyone says anything i’m a more political neutralist, I look at who has a good idea not which side there on.
I’m afraid I don’t actually have a source for that. But I’ve only heard of one or two protests recently were more than a handful of people were arrested out of thousands of protesters. Even going by numbers from police, the majority of protestors have been peaceful for the majority of recent protests.
Like, I literally can’t find any credible, hard data, or even articles that show both the number of people arrested at a recent protest and even an estimate of the total number of protesters. One person smashes a window and suddenly you stop hearing about any of the rest.
I suppose I should elaborate further. Depending on what views one already holds, one tends to focus on either the best or worst of the tactics of a movement, to the exclusion of things that are inconvenient for one’s preconceived views.
For example: all talk of representation aside, the American Revolution was fueled by chafing against British mercantilism and a desire to kick the native population off yet more land. But history remembers the people who burned down tax collectors’ houses fondly.
Your criticism of tactics is a feint for hating the aims.
And where are your numbers showing the opposite is true?
Sure, my 95% estimate is a guess. I don’t know the exact percentage. It’s common enough knowledge that nobody was arrested during the Women’s March, despite its historic size.
For other protests, the problem I ran into is that while I’ve seen plenty of live coverage showing peaceful protests, most articles only mention the number of arrests – if any – and fail to specify how many protesters were there, so it doesn’t give you that context.
There’s plenty where you can work that out for individual protests, such as the inauguration protests where police had prepared for 10,000+ protesters, and reported around 200 arrests.
But what I couldn’t find was a good source that lists total protesters vs total arrests which is the kind of thing you’d need to get an exact number either way. And make a claim about whether liberal or conservative protests are more likely to get violent, you’d need that data as well.
But it’s easy enough from a few minutes of googling that there have been a LOT of protests lately, and not a substantial amount of violence.
Unless you actually READ all the fox news and breitbart articles for some reason, even though they’ve repeatedly been caught trying to use pictures and video of past riots as though they were of the protest they were reporting on.
Would this be the one where some anarchists used the protest as an excuse to pull some shit, the protesters and the cops worked together to keep it contained, and then that weekend was full of volunteer groups helping clean up the damage?
“Some anarchists” is a simplistic, flawed explanation that serves only to emphasize the “us versus them” attitude that got us all into the mess in the first place by suggesting that one side is actually incapable of wrong. Also, you clearly haven’t heard much about how the loudest voices of the protests talk about the police activities during the protests if you think they were happily working together.
As a guy from england I wanna point out the tea you guys threw in the harbour cost 1.7 million dollars, adjusting for inflation. You wanna talk about violence against the state? How about when you overthrew the english? That was property damage and a half. Over what? Taxes?? We tend to blanket history, but you cant take the moral highground over fighting police activities when your police have nothing stopping them from using “reasonable and justified force” like ours do. Your bars way way higher than ours. Saying the BLM movement and stuff like that is milking it a bit when in london in like 2011 a black guy getting wrongly shot by police resulted in a week of violent riots, after a peaceful protest. I have police family and them and their friends agree the american police have normalised brutality
If you’re worried about simplistic, us vs. them narratives why are you insisting on simplifying a bunch of different events protesting multiple things by thousands of people, plus police in different cities, some joker with a talk show, his supporters, the federal government, possibly more depending on what events you’re referring vaguely to, into two groups?
@AndroidDreams: over “taxation without representation,” which is not just about the taxation (resulting from the cost of the English Revolution) but also about the lack of representation in Parliament. Empires are cruel. It’s the same reason Gandhi rebelled with civil disobedience; of course, the fact that the European immigrants used to have rights certainly helped us feel like we had the right to revolt. Ironic that eurocentrism gave us the arrogance and outrage to actually stage war against the British Empire. I appreciate you taking the GOP nuts down a peg but let’s not impose that moral majority of the UK against the trigger-happy Yanks either.
The people in masks self-identify as anarchists, so this is not some mere speculation. They call themselves the Black Bloc, and they tend toward violent protest wherever they show up. Personally, I think its just an excuse for these normally violence-prone people to have an excuse to break shit, but they’d disagree. What’s clear is that they are not part of the groups that peacefully protest.
In politics – regardless of the scope or the topics at hand – ‘moral high ground’ is a molehill at the bottom of a ravine deeper than Valles Marinieris.
right but when you see people firing fireworks at building, attacking people with differing opinions, smashing windows and burning cars that’s not a riot?
Did I say “riots never happen”? One riot at Berkeley which was – according to the police – started by an outside group, not the students who organized the protest, does not make a trend
You can’t just point to one or two incidents involving a hundred people at most, and simply ignore literally millions of peaceful, law-abiding protesters like they don’t count.
TheAnonymousGuy’s comment made it clear which he thinks is more prevalent, despite 3 million people marching nationwide in the Women’s March, despite the many thousands who showed up at airports to oppose the immigration ban. Despite the many ongoing and peaceful protests and town halls that don’t get much attention because nothing terrible happened.
I’m not saying it’s prevalent, I know it’s not the most prevalent thing. I’m just pointing out that it’s often done during protest. I’m not stupid, if your going to say set a car on fire your best chance of getting away with it is in a crowd where you can vanish quick.
You’re not saying, you just acted like that’s the case, like violence and looting are the main event. Your initial comment doesn’t makes sense otherwise.
You are feeding a skewed, biased narrative, focusing on the bad actions of a tiny minority.
True enough, though the point of a representative democracy was to be able to have revolutions without murdering each other. I don’t know if avoiding smashing windows was in there or not.
Just want to point out, when Lincoln was in the Illinois state legislature they routinely got into brawls, brought Bowie knives and revolvers in under their coats to session meetings, and on at least one occasion did break a window in order to escape the building when things got to wild. Andrew Jackson’s inauguration party nearly turned into the “Project X” of the 1830s, Summers got his head practically bashed in with a walking stick/cane during the 1850s, Pinkerton “detectives” and labor unions routinely fought each other in the streets in what was practically urban warfare throughout the 1870s to the 1890s, the March on Selma and other actions of the civil rights movement were met with school bombings and bus burnings in the case of the freedom riders, and police brutality and poor race relations in addition to a worsening economic situation led to a series of riots throughout major American cities throughout the 1980s. The list goes on. The idea that our relatively stable representative democracy is actually peaceful is patently false. We’ve simply somehow avoided the excessive purges of most other revolutions, mainly because the loyalists left with the British and we didn’t need to institute a purge to seize their property.
The fact is, that whenever the group not in power looks to stop being oppressed, they’re met with violence even if the oppressed people are being peaceful. When they meet that violence with other violence, the established oppressive group can dismiss the oppressed’s movement to further oppress them. When we then learn about these movements in school, we hear about a few bad people doing bad things to the oppressed people, not that the very government we’re brought up to praise too tried to crush them or actually did. The black panthers were seen as dangerous when they were feeding thousands of starving people. A group called MOVE was also seen as dangerous and the police used automatic weapons and breaching explosives that started a fire leaving about 250 people homeless and between the explosives and the fire killed about 11 people. The firefighters, which had used water canons on the people earlier stood still as the fires burned.
But you don’t learn about injustices in school or on the news because it doesn’t match the “best country on earth, we value freedom, peace, and democracy” message.
The Republicans can’t complain about liberal “riots” when they’re trying to silence a woman criticizing a candidate of theirs who used terror tactics to suppress Civil Rights.
dude…yes, they did happen. Downtown Seattle was a mess for most of the rest of November 2016. (not that it wasn’t a mess before then-I only drive in Seattle under duress on the best of times.) and that’s nothing compared to a friend in Portland who was actively afraid to leave her house for several days after experiencing the ones there. It HAPPENED. Not a thing to be proud of, but denying it doesn’t address the core problem.
No; both sides are AWFFFFFUL. (It’s not really clear which letter to stretch there.) The sides are not the saaaaaaaame though, because one merely doesn’t care about the people or good governance, and one is full of awful racist bigots who are actively trying to destroy some of the people and who think that governemental positions are something you sell for cash money.
Fun fact: The sides you’re referring to aren’t really sides at all. The Democratic party is Center-Right, this means they’re right of center in terms of global politics. The Republican party sits to the right of that either close to or the end of the right side of the political compass with some party members leaning more towards far-right ideology.
Bernie Sanders was labeled a socialist or communist, when he really was what’s referred to as a “Social Democrat”, which is to say he still wants to work within a Capitalist system, which socialism and communism do not. Bernie Sanders is a centrist. Social Democracy is not far-left like communism. Communism is a buzz word for the American Right.
I just wanted to point out that when people “both sides are bad” or “we should be in between” they’re looking at a very small picture, a picture that paints a centrist as being far left.
I was talking about the political parties, responding to StClair, who I certainly hope was talking about political parties since it would be pretty wild to believe that capitalism and true communism are the same. And yeah, I’m well aware that in America we’re not given much choice. A decade or so ago I would have said that there was only the barest illusion of choice, but the Republicans have been diving so far off the end of sociopathy that I think there’s a choice again, if only for the lefter of two rights.
As someone whose grandmother fought in a literal civil war against literal Fascists supported by the literal god-damn Nazis and until recently still had separatist bombings:
America, really, suck it up. Protests, Riots? Your nation was founded on that. Crying about a burnt starbucks (most likely insured) and a damn limo and some angry people punching each other is damn near innocent. If anything if the left finally arms itself and organizes – AGAIN, because it USED to – that would at the least reach equal parity with the right who damn sure went around with literal guns for the last eight years and the government basically said ‘noooo, please, stop….’
I am very well aware that what I’m about to say is a trivial point, as it focuses on one thing you said separate from the meaning of your post as a whole, but my OCD compels me to speak. You bring up burnt starbucks as a subject of ridiculous complaints, and I’m guessing you’re refering to the story of the woman who sued Starbucks for millions because her coffee was hot. Thing is that the design of the cup was so flimsy that the lid fell off as soon as she had sat down in the passenger seat of her son’s car, which was not moving at the time, and caused third degree burns across her entire lap and the money she received was barely enough to cover her hospital bills and lawyer fees, leaving her with no more money than before she bought her coffee. I’m sorry for being so obsessed with this, but it just seems like a perfect example of peoples’ real tragedy being turned to internet myth and ridiculed as trivial and spreading misinformation.
As for your post as a whole, I find myself agreeing with a lot of it, at least in peoples’ obsessive compulsion to use the word facist all the time about people they don’t agree with simply because it’s the trendy word for ‘objectively evil state’ so they can portray themselves as righteous freedom fighters, effectively diminishing the efforts of people who actually risked life and sanity to oppose actual facist regimes.
As someone whose grandfather joined the resistance against Nazi occupation when everything suggested the Nazis would win the war, that is something I can sympathize with.
Uh no.
The coffee story was a McDonald’s coffee, first of all.
Second of all, Ferdinand was talking about an actual Starbucks store that was set on fire during the riots in Berkeley that broke out when some Black Block folks decided to usurp a protest against Milo.
Ugh…thank you for correcting me. I really need to stop commenting early in the morning. Now I really wish I could edit my posts. In truth, a lot of the News coverage regarding the protests got so onesided that I stopped looking into the details which evidently was a mistake.
a) “And I contend that the cry of ‘black power’ is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the (outdated term for black folks). I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the (outdated term for black folks) poor has worsened over the last few years.” – MLK Jr.
Violence against the marginalized, especially when it is institutional tends to be erased and the marginalized are often held to an impossible standard of politeness and then find themselves dismissed at that politeness and still accused of riots.
MLK’s protests of non-violence were a tactic not a bar for all protests to meet. The whole reason for a lot of his protests were to show how even non-violence was met with violent resistance by police and even then, a number of white papers dismissed his protests as unruly violent riots on behalf of the protestors.
And just like now, there was a portion of “moderates” who found regularly a means to dismiss the causes and reality surrounding protests by the marginalized by crying crocodile tears at whatever the excuse can be. A tipped over trash can to try and prevent cops literally running over protestors. A torn down street lamp because cops were using those to aim for the eyes of protestors with their rubber bullets. Hell, I remember the Bush years and seeing protests deliberately dismissed because some people protested with puppets.
There is always an excuse, because well, riots work. They show a collapse in public order and how the status quo is not conducive to the survival of the group rioting. It shows that the marginalized can’t be quietly slaughtered without repercussion for the city.
And so, it becomes more important to preserve order than seek justice, because the injustice isn’t happening to you and so easily ignorable in favor of faux concerns over inanimate objects.
And that all becomes laughable of a pose when we remember that we literally celebrate yearly festivals based on successful riots in history (4th of July, Pride).
b) The overinflation of the morality and value of the moderate is what got us into this mess. Turning everything into a horse race with two equal sides where the reasonable, intelligent viewpoint is directly in the middle is something the far right and other conspiracy theorists have exploited for years. Because, everyone wants to be the impartial undecided voter, wise and reasoned and so will gladly follow the center even if that shifts to include “agrees with nazis on a number of issues” or “let’s only torture some of the people”.
And so the right has realized that simply by being awful and trusting the narrative to follow them and treat their new awful stance as “one side” in an equal debate, that their abhorrent ideas will be normalized. And that’s exactly what’s happened. See also conspiracy theorists and hate groups using the “two sides” delusion to basically set up their afactual denial of reality or their open intentional harm towards marginalized group as just another opinion, equally as “extreme” as a marginalized person saying “I would rather not like to be murdered” or a scientist saying “that isn’t true, here’s what all of science and information say”.
c) The moderate pose is somewhat offensive in the time of Trump. Like, look at all that has been normalized and is happening under Trump. The lives ruined, the literal nazis who have high positions of power in the government, the complete theft of our democracy on behalf of a foreign puppet who rose to power literally promising his fanbase of angry nationalists that he’d hurt people they hate and whose rise has massively increased the amount of hate crimes and literal nazis roaming the streets to attack people and threaten houses of worship.
But oh, we’re to respect “both sides” to that. Who will follow this poisoned frame to the point where we’re acting like the most dangerous constitutional crisis our nation has ever faced, a state that will kill people by the millions is somehow just another side equally framed by the “more shameful” action of protestors not being a hundred percent peaceful so they can be filed and locked away without attention, dismissed as people who will never ever be a threat to power.
No, sorry, screw that. The glory of the “moderate” was always an advertising campaign based in how our nation fixates on swing states and swing voters to the detriment of all others and its time we recognize that not all actions are proportionate just because we desperately want them to be.
If you are “neutral” about oppression, you have fundamentally chosen the side of the oppressor, because doing nothing means allowing the oppressor to carry on.
I see it as the mating call of overcompensating manchildren. Time to whip their dicks out and determine who’s alpha!
Also, just like some plants and animals have visual markers to signal “I have tasty nectar, come get some” or “I’m poisonous, don’t eat me”, the word c**k (it’s such a stupid word, I’m not even going to type it) signals “I’m a delusional asshat, don’t waste your time trying to reason with me”. That’s useful, at least.
Cuck is short for cuckold, an insult that Trump’s BFF Bannon brought back into the contemporary lexicon via Brietbart. It has the added bonus these days of being racist, too (yay!) since Bannon liked to use it to imply your wife was having sex with a black man.
Worse, cuck, as opposed to cuckold, means you are so in love with, and have given superiority, members of a different “race” that you get sexual pleasure just from the knowledge you wife is performing sexual acts with a black man. The right wing interpretation is racist and demeaning. Some people think actual cucks (a self applied term) are also racist and misogynistic. Personally, if a couple’s dynamic includes that and both are happy and all parties are satisfied by it, I have bigger issues to worry about.
Yup, it’s basically “race traitor” for a modern age.
Something for the white supremacists to throw around at anyone who dares stand up for the marginalized they target and bully in order to try and make them think twice about risking the social regard to do what is right.
Though “cuck” tends to be thrown mostly at insufficiently regressive conservatives not attacking the marginalized enough, not at more liberal types who might actually stand up for them.
The first time I saw the word, I guess would have been about a year and a half ago now, the context of the other insults being thrown at the target led me to believe it was a portmanteau word of two other four-letter c-words–that it was a transphobic slur. (among other related and tangentially-related things, but that’s the most succinct word I know to *approximately* describe it)
I have since read that the “real” etymology is different than I initially guessed, but that doesn’t stop it from rolling around in my head at the worst times.
I don’t think its use originates with the US alt-right. I am pretty certain it started in Europe and was adopted more recently here in the US. There are a lot of “racial purity” trolls over there. Most of them have dyed blonde hair with very dark roots, or brown eyes so they wear shades etc. That much self loathing is sad, in the most nauseating way possible.
Somewhat in that the entire thing is unhealthy, Robin doesn’t know how to approach this remotely, and Leslie doesn’t know how to get her to stop.
Kind of like how Ruth and Billie started off but worse because Robin’s able to hide that her actions are pretty bad to a degree behind what she seems to honestly believe is kindness when she’s doing more serious illegal things than underage drinking.
I’ve been meaning to ask for the longest time. Is “cuck” even an actual word? I’ve never heard the term before people started using it to describe BB-8 from Force Awakens and it just sounds like something some idiot word write because they can’t spell “cock” or “cuckold”.
According to Urban Dictionary: it’s either a word for a person who is turned on by the idea of their significant other cheating on the, or a ‘weak, feckless, spineless, and decidedly pathetic specimen of manliness.’ I am going to assume it is the latter, given the context.
It’s not a “real” word, technically. It’s just an abbreviation of “cuckold”, which is silly when you use it as an insult, since you’re mostly just kink-shaming the target.
Also, who the hell is using it to describe a tiny little ball-bot with no spouse?
The angry MRA nazis’ “logic” for that was that because Rey is a white woman and Finn is a black man, this was somehow part of a Hollywood attempt to normalize “miscegenation” i.e. mixed race relationships and thus commit genocide against the white race (cause you see, in their eyes, since they consider every child with non-white direct relatives, non-white, this means that precious “white DNA” is being taken out of the gene pool. And this is tantamount to genocide because it’s all a secret plot by the Jews or the Muslims to destroy white western culture and render it unable to “fight back”).
Thus BB-8 was a “cuck” because he offered no objection to this platonic friendship raising the spectre of racist fears about black men getting into relationships with white women and thus represented non-racist liberal white society standing aside as “whiteness” was “polluted”.
Yeah. It’s a leaning tower of stupid and bigoted. And now a worldview heavily supported by the most powerful members of our country.*
*This racist shit especially infuriates me because my aunt and uncle who are the piece of my family that has supported me through everything are an interracial couple who’ve been attacked by this racist garbage for decades now.
Yeah, but the meta-meaning (with the /pol/ channers, particularly on infinite) is that you’re not racist and misogynist enough – particularly when applied to conservatives.
I’m being very serious here, I’ve been following this horribleness for a long time. This specific word came in via cuckold porn, true – and as such does indeed carry a lot of vicious racist undertones – but it’s nonetheless a very short encapsulation of the old American Nazi line about how “the [racial epithet here] has stolen/is fucking the white women who are rightfully your property, white man, shaming and humiliating you, and you’re a weakling who is going to sit there and take it.”
Which is why it was being applied to conservatives who weren’t white supremacist and misogynist enough, and are therefore weak/pathetic. And even now that it’s being watered down by greater use, the underlying meaning is carried along.
Actually, thinking of the American Nazi Party, I can’t help but wonder if the alt-right will start (or already have started) bringing back serious anti-Irish sentiment. Just how far do they want this world to regress?
Aw man the poll thing is crazy. I don’t want Robin to die, I just want her out of Leslie’s house. She’s being a creep. She wasn’t invited and she refuses to leave. She doesn’t even know Leslie personally. If nothing else, she is at LEAST being rude.
i figure she can get hit by a truck and only suffer minor injuries that put her in the hospital long enough for Leslie to get some sleep and a restraining order
I voted “get hit by a truck” because it’s possible Robin will survive getting hit by a truck, depending on what type of truck and how fast it’s going. I’d rather she just leave Leslie’s house because her behavior is creepy and obnoxious, but that wasn’t one of the poll options.
Honestly, with the base she is pursuing, I think her first tweet would be seen as the more objectionable one by them. What? “Best self”? Implying we aren’t already perfect? RINO!
Yeah, the Sith and the First Order are fast becoming shorthand code for Nazis in posts by both sides. I blame that pratt Godwin. If it goosesteps like a Nazi and oppresses like a Nazi, just call it a damn Nazi already.
Can I use the term “attempted Fourth Reich” as a shorthand code or is that too long or on the nose to be used as such? How about “Brownshirts” or “Blackshirts” to be more historical? I mean, there are just such better names if one is creative enough or historically inclined. Besides, just because the Galactic Empire’s officers wear Nazi dress uniforms without the eagles, crosses, thunderbolts, or swatztikas doesn’t mean they’re Nazis. They’re nowhere near racist enough or as obsessed with creating a superior human race as the Nazis were. Oh, if we want to be really historical, we could call them the Silver Eagle Legion, the real life 1930s American pro-Nazi movement. It seems to have survived in hiding for far too long.
Depends what Star Wars material you look at. In the old EU, they absolutely were trying to do those things, right down to attempted genocide and sticking various ‘alien’ species into slavery of various forms. I believe they called it Humanocentrism.
It’s annoying because I really like the First Order and was banned from a forum because they assumed I was a secret Nazi. No, I think they’re FICTIONAL bad guys, I’m not talking in code. Then again, knowing Alt-Righters like the First Order makes me feel unclean. Next I’ll have to support the Archduchy of Zeon and Britainnia.
Edmond Rostand wrote “Cyrano de Bergerac“. It’d be like to write Bootsy Collins “Guillaume Colin” or Jack London ‘Jacques Londres”. Sorry to nitpick but I’m sure it’s a common error.
It’s even worse. She’s a caricature of current politicians in the US, and from the tone of the storyline so far, we’re supposed to consider her a loveable scamp.
If everyone could collectively stop making Orange Cheeto Goblin Monster jokes and Hyuk Hyuk you won’t believe what Trump did today goofball statements and call the Right what they actually are which is sub-human monsters, that would be fantastic. We’ve got two years to stay mad until we can have major elections to turn this thing around, and turning this shitshow into a thing where you shake your head and go “crazy, right?” doesn’t help anyone.
I’m going to go with: “One of the big problems with the neo-nazi ‘alt-right’ is the idea they push of people being sub-human. They can be bad people without using ‘sub-human’ level discourse to describe them..
One traditional characteristic of humanity is empathy. It’s not only humans that have it, but you’re not entirely human if you don’t have it. The Right is an entire political party that not only doesn’t have it, but revels in not having it.
But, you’re right. Humans that have no empathy exist, and they’re called sociopaths. So tell you what, you decide the appropriate level label for accurate discourse: Sociopath or subhuman.
It isn’t quite that Right and alt-right lack empathy. It’s just that they focus on that empathy on their own group and exclude everyone else. Basically a tribal attitude “I care for my own tribe/group and everyone else can go to hell for all I care”.
Comedy is how we cope. The ability to laugh at what is going on is why many of us are even remotely functional.
Humor also gets through barriers. Just attacking people is reflectively dismissed. If I can make you laugh about something, I can get you to consider the message in what I’m saying.
I mean, Trump never got insulted by people just saying how bad he is. He gets insulted by how completely irreverent we are to him. It’s shows like SNL making fun of him and his administration that have gotten through to him.
There’s a reason why the people mocking us make us so angry, rather than the people just arguing with us. The mockery actually gets through.
So humor is helpful to our mental health, as we need to laugh, and a useful way to challenge those in power.
Oh, and FYI, the Right does not lack empathy. The alt-right, maybe (excluding tribal empathy). But the Right itself has empathy–it just gets overridden by other concerns.
Trying to say everyone on the Right are sociopaths will only give the other side ammunition. They can disprove it by showing just one charitable conservative.
If not for the empathy of conservatives, I wouldn’t be alive today.
Trump wasn’t elected by people who found him funny. Trump was elected by people who found him serious and the fact the politicians ignored how much people genuinely hated them for the Recession and war politics of the past 16 years. Humor helps establish he is a RIDICULOUS figure and no one should take him seriously.
AND ALSO by people who found him funny. Laughing at him can be cathartic, but laughing at him and not taking him seriously is also one of the things that got us into this mess.
Yeah, I’m a bit tired of hearing that the problem was underestimating Trump. He lost the popular vote by 3 million in a year when the number of people who voted at all was at a 20 year low, but the responsibility for getting us into this mess rests squarely on the people who voted for him.
Most of whom did NOT do it because they thought it would be a funny gag.
We don’t need to take Trump seriously.
We need to take racism seriously. We need to take islamophobia and antisemitism and the rise of nazism (“the alt-right”) seriously, because they’re still around and these forces brought him into power.
The minority of people who voted for him despite not being white are easily swallowed by the majority of white folks who voted for him, and that’s the thing we should be worried about.
Many of the people who voted for him thought that ALL of our concerns about Trump were hilarious. We should be concerned about how our worries about racism, sexism, and xenophobia are really goddamn funny to a lot of people.
I would also make a distinction between the people who voted for him and the army of online trolls who got his “movement” off the ground. Many of them definitely think what he is doing to this country is very very funny.
Work as a moderator or admin on several wikis, including Walkypedia, can confirm, there was a palpable amount of racist trolls or transphobic ones during and immediately post election.
I think you are being entirely too generous in believing that people who find racism, sexism, etc funny aren’t themselves bigots. Like, just because they use “I was just trolling” as a shield from criticism doesn’t mean you should believe them that they don’t actually hold the believes they “joke” about holding.
Great, now Leslie has to barricade the doors and windows to keep the bricks/lightsabers from flying in. Or trick Robin to go outside and then barricade the house.
I’m 31, but I don’t have a computer (just a phone), my house doesn’t have internet (phone again which runs out of high speed fast), I don’t have twitter or the like, I only check Willis’ twitter because it’s right there, and I have so few friends on Facebook (which I check once or twice a month) that a passing observer would think I was a catfish. You might as well double my age and give me my senior on the Internet discount
I’m 36, and everything you just said is pretty much the opposite of me. And in many ways, I’m still nowhere near as mature as I should be, so you can cut my age in half and give me my student discount.
It’s not that he has to pay for it. He actually expects you to give him the money he would have saved had he paid for it. The only time he spends money is on specialty items like imported chocolate and laser sharks.
He’s not paying for his internet, he has an understanding with the company. They never charge him anything, and he magnanimously gives them a donation that just happens to be of equal value to what he would have payed.
Speaking logistically though, most noses in the DoA universe are a dot or thick line loosely connected to a thinner line, or in some cases such as Sarah: one curved line. So from a strictly objective stance Kylo2007’s claim is completely unsubstantiated.
I’ve been doing a Shortpacked! archive binge, and just came upon the perfect illustration of the sort of universe Robin belongs in. http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=2112
Well . . . *counts off fingers* . . . we still have Luke and Leia, and (depending on which pieces of fan speculation turn out to be right) maybe some other characters as well.
IIRC, Lucasfilm made an official statement on the Star Wars website shortly after the news broke about Carrie Fisher that they have no further plans for a CGI Leia.
Jesus this strip is clumsy. A Donald Trump analog…being attacked by an alt-right shithead? It reads like someone who had the current political climate explained to them badly through a game of telephone.
Also, let me be the first to point this out: Death threats on twitter by Gamergaters? Unacceptable harassment. Death threats on twitter by Robin? Hilarious punchline!
And of course, let’s not forget the ongoing EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE relationship between Robin and Leslie that should be terrifying but somehow isn’t because of Robin’s Wacky Reality Distortion Looney Tunes Field By Acme.
Not to mention the poll on the side that basically says that all of the fundamentally inhuman monsters being put into the highest positions in the land right now is a situation RIPE for hilarious comedy! Those scamps at the GOP! Somehow their trampling of rights and human decency somehow always works out for them! WONK WONK.
Mixing wacky, cartoonish antic comedy with current horrifying political turmoil is NOT something that is working out for Willis AT ALL. If it doesn’t hit just right, it ends up with jokes that fall flat and alienate a lot of readers, and quite frankly he doesn’t have the chops to pull it off.
Please GOD let this storyline end soon so we can get back to good characters and stories.
I’ve misunderstood nothing, and this isn’t the first strip I’ve commented on. There are a ton of commenters and readers who have very big problems with this storyline, and they’re not unfounded.
Before, Robin was a tonally incongruous minor element in the strip. Now she’s a tonally incongruous element that sends normalizing messages about harassment and the far right.
Like I know Willis doesn’t INTEND for this to read the way it does to me (as an attempt to pass off horrific behaviour as wacky antics) because he’s clearly a socially aware dude but god damn has he fumbled the tone here pretty badly at least for me.
Yeah I am sadly at the point of not knowing where this is going and being vaguely afraid of it. :\ I don’t want to see Robin rewarded for this behavior.
Good political satire is great. Having a cartoon goofball say a parody of a madman’s campaign slogan is not that. I would LOVE for Robin to be to the GOP as Joyce currently is to evangelical Christians.
Why would you want Robin to be that? Robin should be the WORST person and it would be awesome. She’s an alternate version of an existing character anyway so why not make her a psychopath?
Yes, a Trumalogy.
Taking into account that this strip was conceived two months ago,
Dave’s prophetic abilities are impressive!
What would he (be able to) predict without the time-delay buffer?
I’m also a first time poster and I also don’t really understand how this makes so many people uncomfortable. Remember, no other character in this strip is even aware of this situation’s existence. If they knew about it and treated the situation as normal or funny, that would be weird, but that’s not happening.
1: Robin is not Donald Trump. Robin is a Hispanic woman who’s currently in the middle of a lesbian “scandal”. Reexamine through that lens and see why she’s being targeted by alt righters.
2: This is not a hilarious punchline. This is Robin off the leash. This is going to have political consequences for her.
3: Occasionally, the narrative takes a good minute to work itself out. I myself have been dissatisfied before with the way Joe takes a minute to get consequences for his actions, but that’s the hazard of serial reading. Robin will get her comeuppance for this.
1. Robin is a Hispanic woman with a lesbian “scandal” who has broken into a lesbian woman’s home, gaslighted her, and is known for voting against lesbian rights. She’s not Donald Trump yet (small hands jokes aside) but she’s Edwards and that’s every bit as bad.
2. Death threats from Trump only increased his popularity. He’s a man who told the media they had to beg off. I see no reason why Robin wouldn’t win the election.
I think you’re overestimating Republican loyalty here. This is a swing district – Robin’s not especially likely to win on party loyalty. The middle is likely to be turned off by hypocrisy and some won’t vote for her because lesbian.
1. Robin is a character who is emotionally manipulating someone who has feelings for her in order to invade and stay in their home and is part of a political movement who is the greatest threat to the country in the last twenty years. To position her character in such a way that she’s a sympathetic victim in order to take potshots at another vile group for no reason is… problematic.
It would not be so had Willis written Robin as a villain so far a-la Toedad, but he has not. She is instead a loveable scamp, and that says a whole shitload of uncomfortable things.
2. This storyline will be saved if she ends up ruined and in jail. If she doesn’t, she has thicker plot armor than Batman.
3. I’m not anxious for Willis to get through the story, i’m anxious for him to end this story because Robin is not a good character, he’s not doing good political satire, and for all the world it looks like he tried to do a wacky Odd Couple sitcom situation but stumbled ass first into putting someone who has already been emotionally abused into an emotionally abusive situation and then playing the whole thing for laughs. It’s not a good look and I don’t have faith Willis has the stomach necessary to put one of his darlings in jail right next to Toedad where she belongs.
4. We do not need to laugh at the Right. We need to do exactly one thing, and that’s be furious until the next major election.
1.) What part of this comes off as sympathetic to you?? And honestly, I think people are reading her as loveable scamp because of Shortpacked, and because that’s clearly how Robin sees herself. Leslie doesn’t. If the narrative were painting Robin as charmingly wacky, Leslie would not be reacting as she is now.
3.) Then my advice to you is, take a break from serial reading. Come back in a month or so, when this storyline has hopefully worked itself out, and catch up. Like I said, serial reading is not the best when you’re waiting for something specific to happen.
4.) Some people use humor as a coping mechanism. It’s a thing. Also, humor and anger are not in any way mutually exclusive.
I don’t ageee with your response to point 1, and your response to point 3 is a bit condescending, but I do agree with point 4.
I am perfectly capable of both laughing at Trump and being angry about the encroaching nazism in my country.
The idea that we should strive to maintain constant anger for the next two years is completely unreasonable. Emotional exhaustion will set in. Don’t worry about people laughing at Trump unless you see them encouraging people not to bother voting.
I’m sorry David Willis, you are the internet’s foremost cartoon-drawing expert on life as a Joyce, but this arc has firmly cemented the fact that you have done the literary equivalent of what she’s famous for: Playfully committing a serious faux pas that casts doubt on your sincerity as someone hoping to understand and do right by good and often vulnerable people.
4 is completely right, and the fact that folks are so busy making dumb cheeto jokes is a symptom of how badly liberals have retreated into fart-huffing ass-vanishment.
Isn’t it kind of hilariously presumptuous to claim that “a lot of readers” agree with you? It’s actually pretty Trumpian – “a lot of people are saying…”
You also must be from some other dimension wherein the actions of GOP officials are not mocked 24/7 by a wide range of comedic talent. In such a scenario… welcome! We have and have had Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, Bill Maher, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, and many others for years! The bizarre and oft-inhumane actions of the Grand Old Party are *indeed* ripe for comedy, just like everything that has ever been bad has been, because comedy is an excellent mechanism by which to counter the otherwise bleak circumstances one finds themselves in.
A not-insignificant number of comments in the past strips with Robin are by people who have experienced emotionally manipulative/gaslighting relationships and are squicked out by this storyline. You are welcome to go back and decide if i’m right or not when I use the general term “A lot”.
And you’re right. The greatest comedic minds of our time all took every single shot they could at Trump and the Right, cutting them down to size with the power of comedy and they did such a good job that Trump sailed right into office where he will cause damage that will last for the rest of our young lives. So yeah, yuk yuk times are done. It’s not funny anymore.
Comedy is relative. It’s not funny to you, but others may disagree.
I don’t see too many people laughing here, though. If there’s a punchline, it’s Robin shooting herself in the metaphorical foot.
Wow. I had to look twice to be sure we were reading the same comic. Clearly, we are reading Willie’s tone in two very different ways. Perhaps it’s because I long ago stopped expecting DoA to be a comedy. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have personal experience with gaslighting so I don’t feel it’s being made light of. I don’t know. I would offer my reading of this arc by way of contrast.
To me, Robin has always been a villain. From the first time we met her, she routinely dehumanized Kyle by refusing to acknowledge that he has a name. She demonstrated that, to her, politics is a game where the objective is simply to stay in Congress and enjoy the perks of her office and the attention as long as possible. She confirmed this when she told Joyce that the religious liberty bill she supported was all about placating her base. She also defended herself by claiming that nothing had would probably happen… Probably. She doesn’t see her actions as having real consequences for herself or others.
She’s completely divorced herself from consequences in her mind. I get the impression that she’s never had to face any. Her “zany manic pixie” persona defends that barrier. To her, any disastrous, damaging thing she does is just a harmless goof. People will look the other way when she does something horrible because, to them, she’s just a loveable weirdo who doesn’t mean any harm. When horrible things happen to someone because of her actions, she and her supporters assume that it COULDN’T be her fault, because she isn’t really evil.
And that’s the importance to me of depicting a villain like Robin. She won’t burn your house down because she hates you, she’ll burn it down because she was playing with fireworks in the basement. It was all innocent, really. And who keeps fireworks in their basement anyway? You should have been more careful. And by the time the fire department comes, she’s long gone. You’ll be fine. I mean, you must have insurance, right?
Now robin is finally going to face some consequences and she knows it. Members of both parties will be all over her now that they’ve smelled blood in the water. She’s desperately getting to avoid those consequences by hiding in Leslie’s apartment forever. She’s doubling down on her manic pixie routine in a frantic effort to make the problem go away because it always worked before.
Leslie’s reaction here is to show just how thin that routine has worn. Her absurdly disproportionate response to Kylo2007 shows is just how afraid she is. All the hate and bigotry she’s pretended wasn’t really there is about to bite her in the ass and bite her hard.
That’s how I read this arc. That’s why I love it even though I’m not laughing one bit.
It looks like Robin is going to destroy something else: her political career! Some politicians just don’t have the instincts to be allowed direct contact with their potential voters.
You know, Willis, it’s hilarious you did that scene where Robin completely broke down and demanded softball questions from Leslie’s class because that was a PERFECT parody of Trump dealing with his first press conference. It just happened before Trump when no one assumed he’d bomb that badly.
So… what IS going on with Robin? This shows all the signs to be a distraction from a level of denial even larger than Walky with the math score. And I don’t think it only has to do with wanting to kiss ladies or craving more Steven Universe.
My best guess is that she wants out of politics but the whole thing is to big for her, so she self sabotages instead. Most likely she has not come clean to herself about it yet.
Either way, she uses Leslie as a prop and she hurts her tremendously.
Yeah, that’s my feeling too. I wouldn’t be surprised if Leslie and Joyce have something to do with it too. I suspect that Robin has had a Road to Damascus moment about the effect of her actions. Combined with how much she’s coming to hate the pressures of campaigning and being a pretty face reading pre-written lines, she’s trying to throw the election (if only on a subconscious level).
Robin is still engaged in a home invasion and destruction of Leslie’s property. Her total disregard for Leslie as an actual human being means she hasn’t turned any corners at all.
The deepest problems being depicted in this arc are detached from any gender or identity issues — what Robin is doing would be wrong regardless. At most, she’s getting some slack from some people — if Robin were a male character engaged in this level of stalkerism and violation, the number of people who would find this funny would be even lower.
Maybe, though gender swaps usually fail to be useful analogies.
To be a true parallel, you’d have to gender swap both characters, not just Robin, to preserve both parity and the whole “denial about being gay” thing.
Honestly, I’d expect all 4 gender combinations to produce very different reactions.
That would be Sayyid, Becky’s coworker at Galasso’s Pizza (and Subs) and the guy who gave AmaziGirl his skateboard for her to use during the chase scene with Toedad like a year back, and I believe his boyfriend because if I remember correctly from one of the times he briefly appeared in a Slipshine ad before he’s either gay (or bisexual currently in a relationship with another male, I don’t know which and I want to be inclusive). Sayyid himself is this kind of sleeper hit character I would say, in that every time he shows up most of the comments section wants more of him. Partly because he’s a gay Muslim, partly because he’s more serious and deadpan than most other characters and his reactions provide a decent amount of humor whenever he does show up, especially in comparison to some of the more outrageous characters.
Bryan is name of the other guy. I remember a one-off panel where one of them was drumming and the other was looking on, behind perhaps an electric piano.
I’d like to know more about their “how we met” story.
I really kinda do wonder how this whole thing would have come off during a Clinton Presidency. Obviously there’s still the tone shift issue, especially coming right after/between the thing with Ruth and the thing with Joyce and Ryan, but how much of the refuge in audacity we’re missing comes from which bit?
I think the uncomfortable levels might not be as high. Don’t get me wrong, they’d still be up there due to this kind of humor clashing with the framing and tone that DoA tends to have, making it feel awkward and the fact that Leslie (who we’ve had more time with, therefore have more stakes in) seems to be rather miserable & exasperated by Robin’s refusal to even register her discomfort with this situation and how much she wants her to just leave her alone doubling that. Doing this kind of story under a Clinton Presidency would just erase the troubling connections to the actions of a President who seems to be less mature than a 12 year old.
I think Robin was always going to be a minefield since family values candidates are monstrous in Indiana thanks to the efforts of Pence making their danger real as well as immediate. Also, reality caught up to the “all hat, no cattle” candidates like Robin was in Shortpacked. I trust Willis to be planning something but I do suspect the anger Robin gets is probably a lot deeper than planned.
I’ve said it before but I will say it again: Robin is hiding from something; what she’s hiding from is still guesswork but she is hiding. I think that Leslie realises this and is trying to work out what and why too. If only because, if she solves Robin’s problem for her, she’ll probably get her out of her apartment.
1. Panel One: Leslie is trying to talk to Robin like she’s a friend they just had a bender with who wants them to go drinking again or smoke some weed. This is not good. Robin is an intruder in your house and has already resisted being physically thrown out. Call the cops, call some friends, or go to the media yourself and tell them she’s INSANE.
2. I find it incongruous Ruth and Amber both have their mental illnesses dealt with seriously while Robin is speaking from a perspective that strikes me as a complete break with reality. Is she in a psychotic fugue state or just literally a psychopath? I’m actually amused by this in the comic way but this feels totally like Shortpacked rather than Dumbing of Age.
3. Leslie, why would you WANT her to go back to her campaign? The campaign which is about destroying gay rights? I mean, yes, it gets her out of your house but you know that’s a bad thing as well. I know love is blind but this is a crazy person in your house.
4. I wonder if Robin just repeats what she wants and assumes it will eventually work and people will do what she says. It’s like she’s got a Solar Exalted charm or is a Ventrue with Presence and Dominate. Why yes, I played a lot of White Wolf games in the past.
I do wonder what her staff are doing, though. Also, I point out Robin may actually not be in any danger because of her lesbian “scandal.” It’s not like they have any actual story to report so far and the public isn’t exactly going to vote Democrat because of it. They may not vote but that’s not a guarantee anyway.
5. I note Robin doesn’t look for anyone tweeting her beforehand and I can’t help but imagine she’s ignored all of her messages.
6. Kylo Ren dislikes her? Well, that increases my life of him except for the fact I’ve just discovered from the comments threat the Alt-Right likes the First Order and Kylo Ren. That makes me feel unclean by association. I’m also a fan of the Principality of Zeon and Imperium of Mankind but I’m aware I’m not SUPPOSED TO BE. Do I have to disassociate myself from the bad guys I love to hate because people actually love them?
I also think Robin’s polls will go up the more hate she spews on the net.
To be fair, aside from the Tau everyone wants to wipe everybody else out for various reasons in 40k, so it’s not so bad to be pro-Imperium of Mankind when the other options are: sentient humanoid space fungus that exists only to brutally kill and be killed, a horde of alien locusts from a different galaxy that strips whole planets of all organic material, space elves who view humans as a mix between monkeys and rodents, evil space elves who view humans as toys to satisfy their various decadent kinks and sense freakyness including flaying people alive for shits and giggles, a race of undead machines who got their souls stolen from them and want to wipe out bio-organic life in an attempt to get them back, and literal demons who want nothing more than to devour people’s souls. So yeah, compared to that the corrupt feudal theocratic police state that worships a corpse on life support isn’t that bad. Except for the Tau, cause the Tau are awesome, and the only ones smart enough to recognize you don’t need melee when you have goddamn handheld plasma weapons and rail guns. What’s a monofilament chainsaw sword going to do for you when I can just blow off half your head and leave the other half a crispy residue from half a mile away?
There is a sense I’m getting that the Tau are regarded with a sort of startled resentment by the other races in the WH40k universe for not defaulting to xenophobia and genocide as their primary form of collective social expression.
The Tau are still utterly totalitarian and the only reason they seem remotely moral is because they’re in 40k where every other faction is characterized by omnicidal bloodlust or genocidal racism. By real world standards they’re still deeply horrifying.
To be fair, a lot of their totalitarian tendencies were added later because GW decided that a technologically advanced species doomed by their own optimism and denial of the supernatural in a galaxy inherently hostile to both approaches wasn’t grimdark enough.
Eh, the closest thing to a ‘chill’ god is Isha, the Eldar Goddess of Healing who Papa Nurgle keeps locked in a cage because the insane eldritch abomination of stagnation and plague thinks trying out his new diseases on her and seeing how long it takes her to heal them is foreplay.
…the Laughing God is pretty chill, if you’re not Ahriman or Slaanesh.
Well, I suppose that could refer to grandfather Nurgle, as he represents the stagnant cycle of life and death, who infects the galaxy with pandemic plagues to show his affection and is the only god who doesn’t completely betray those who die in his service by devouring their souls. Or his “wife” whom he kidnapped so his sister/brother couldn’t eat her when she/he devoured 95% of the galactic empire that worshipped her. And that’s the PG version without divine torture porn. So pretty chill compared to his sibling gods.
What I’m saying is that, to reconcile the nice to minions, uses doom puppies with faces like coral stitched to an Anurognathus aspect with the grimdark aspect, I consider the latter part to be in-universe propaganda.
The Tau, in that setting, are kinda the poster children for “least bad option”. They’re still horrible dicks, they’re just not horrible genocidal xenophobic murder-hobo gibbering-insane dicks.
You know, Robin isn’t actually mentally ill. Most abusers aren’t. Lundy Bancroft talks in his book (“Why Does He Do That: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men*”) about how treating abusiveness like a mental illness is actually actively detrimental to getting abusers to change their behavior.
So I would not expect to ever see Robin get treatment for this. She could talk to a therapist about the stress of being in the closet, for sure, but willfully disregarding someone else’s boundaries is about entitlement and self-absorption, both things that neurotypical people excel at.
* he apologizes in his foreword for the gendered language and includes chapters on abuse in same-gender relationships, noting that he finds abuse to be strongly but not exclusively gendered, and also talking some about what changes with an abusive woman and a male victim.
As far as we know, she hasn’t been diagnosed. I’ll agree with that.
Just ignoring Leslie’s boundaries wouldn’t be enough to make me think she is. It’s possibly this is all more willful than I’m reading it and that she’s basically gaslighting the readers, but I think it’s more than that. She really seems to not even recognize the existence of boundaries or of any kind of social norms, not just with Leslie, but as a politician too. We’ve never seen her break out of that character. We’ve never seen her even pretend to be anything but a nut. I mean, she panders, but she tells the people she’s pandering to that she’s faking it? That’s not political. That’s not normal.
The real problem is that the narrative doesn’t take her seriously either. But also doesn’t treat her as crazy. So far it seems to warp itself around her so that it works for her.
No, none of this behavior even suggests mental illness. People who have difficulty with social norms (autistic people, people with APD, etc) are no more likely to be assholes, and in fact? WOULD HAVE ALREADY LEFT THE APARTMENT.
Let me explain why:
People who have difficulty with social norms know they have difficulty with social norms, and tend to be hyper-responsive to direct instructions (like Leslie telling Robin to get out, as she has done many times now). Because they do not rely on their own judgment where social norms are concerned, and rely instead on scripts and what they are told.
Robin on the other hand is insisting that she can psychically tell that Leslie really wants her to stay and doesn’t mean it when she says GTFO.
It’s the complete opposite of how the people you’re accidentally stigmatizing would respond to this situation, and is in fact extremely neurotypical.
And I don’t know which politicians you’re thinking of, but walking back her support of bills when questioned on the morality of them is actually pretty normal, especially if a politician is in a room full of people who are angry about the bill and no cameras are pointed at her? Like, do you also think it was a sign of mental illness when Romney told a bunch of supporters that he was only pretending to be in favor of things they didn’t like in what he thought was a private meeting? People do this shit all the time.
Yeah, I don’t really think it maps to any real mental illness here. It maps to wacky cartoon character hijinks, honestly.
That’s why it seems so unrealistic to me that I can’t take her seriously. If it’s mental illness it’s a kind she’s been able to function with all along without being aware of at all. If it’s not, then it really is all deliberate and she really is a scheming manipulative mastermind playing the role of a wacky incompetent.
As for the politics, I wasn’t talking about walking back her support of a bill, but of the less panderingish/more panderingish/”which me would you like? I’ve already blown through two, but I’ve still got slutty librarian and hyperpatriotic cowboy?”
That’s not normal, even for politicians. They may well put on those poses for different audiences, but not so openly? Lying, sure. Telling the audience you’re lying to them, not so much.
Being more honest about what they’re all doing still isn’t grounds for diagnosing her with anything. If anything I think it could be seen as part of her Trump Analogue schtick, since a lot of the call-outs for Trump from conservative politicians were very frequently satirized as boiling down to “hey stop saying the racist subtext of our campaign speeches as TEXT!”
I don’t necessarily think it IS part of the parody. Being more honest than is strictly wise definitely seems characteristic of Robin. But not every poor decision points is indicative of executive dysfunction.
I don’t think you’re doing this on purpose; I don’t think most of the comment section is. But the impulse to say that Bad People Doing Bad Things must have mental illnesses or personality disorders not only flies in the face of the statistics we have on violent crime, it also lets us comfortably distance ourselves from Bad People Doing Bad Things, and ultimately makes it harder to prevent Bad Things from happening because we’re too busy scrutinizing people with mental illness to address the root cause of things like say gun violence.
Again, I’m grasping at straws to find some way to read her as something other than wacky cartoon parody. Or SP! Robin strung out on Cadbury Creme Egg cereal.
I see the Trump Analogue, but Robin’s so much more extreme. Not in her bigotry and general evil, but in how she approaches it. It’s not “saying the racist subtext of our campaign speeches as TEXT!”, it’s going up on stage and asking the crowd if they want the racist persona tonight.
I’m not disagreeing that she’s a bit cartoonish, though, so as long as we’re not still arguing about whether Robin asking if they want “the racist persona” is evidence of a mental illness, I think we’re good. Robin’s wacky-hijinks mode of operation and how strongly it resembles her SP! version, is part of why I think we’re still getting the occasional Robin/Leslie shipper who doesn’t understand why people are calling Robin scary.
(Though the pedant in me wishes to point out that being a parody of Trump kinda necessitates exaggeration. If she were just supposed to BE him it’d be different, but she’s Robin with a dollop of Trump parody.)
Yeah, I’m beginning to see the point people are making. Trump is awful, and yes, we make fun of him. We do so while acknowledging how awful he is.
Robin is not Trump. But she has shown herself to be quite awful. But the strip does not seem to acknowledge this. It focuses on her not wanting to face reality, as if that’s the problem.
The problem is that she’s a stalker who broke into someone’s house, was thrown out, and still came right back. She refuses to accept Leslie’s rejection. Even the stalkers in movies that glorify that sort of thing aren’t as bad as Robin is here.
Her politics aren’t the issue. She could be the perfect anti-bigotry liberal and what she’s doing would still be horrible. And the strip needs to treat it as horrible.
So considering how many months in advance Willis writes each strip before posting them, I’m kind of getting the feeling this was written back when everybody were still convinced there was no way someone like Trump would win the election and we’d be able to make wacky jokes if we’d gotten someone like this in the White House. Or something. Every strip with Robin as a parody recently feels like they’re written for a less depressing mood than we currently are in is what I’m trying to say.
I shit you not, I am an author of superhero fiction (among other things) and the primary villain of my third book (THE SECRETS OF SUPERVILLAINY) was President Omega. I wrote him as a gleefully over the top caricature which was Handsome Jack meets the aliens from They Live. Now everyone says I wrote him as a Trump parody despite it being written two years ago.
I just checked Tumblr. Willis was talking about the election already having happened right before a preview of the February 10 strip. So this is definitely post-election.
Panel 1: Leslie in this panel is heartbreaking. Look at her posture, partially curled up into herself, with her head in her hands, She’s just broken down here, fully surrendered to the situation she has become entrapped by.
And her plea is downright plaintive. Begging Robin to recognize that she has a real life and that she needs to be in it rather than held hostage to her delusion, knowing that won’t be heard and fearing that this will precipitate some greater bit of awfulness, maybe even the full destruction of her life as she knows it.
And it’s a surrender on another boundary she tried to set. Having Robin leave first and handle the media scrum, so that it didn’t all fall on Leslie and put her in the position of opening up herself to violent attack if she tries to tell the truth. She’s leaving to teach today, cause Robin successfully ran out the clock on her, leaving her alone to deal with the consequences of Robin’s mess… again.
Panel 2: And Robin continues to ignore that, instead continuing to try and reinforce this weird “cohabiting couple” sort of delusion and envisioning herself as the wacky stay-at-home wife. And this echoes a terrifying part of society right now. What do you do when a person openly refuses to interact with reality and instead follows this fantasy world of their own making? And what do you do especially when that hurts real people who are being eliminated or run over to make the world fit into this broken frame?
Panel 3: And again, another tortured face from Leslie, and one sad last attempt to set a boundary, but all the anger is gone and left with just hurt. She states it outright. That she’s not going to be held hostage forever by Robin’s refusal to deal with consequences for her actions. That she’s not going to be run roughshod into a “relationship” that makes her feel this miserable and makes her despise herself for betraying her moral values.
And it makes Robin’s line all the more painful. Leslie is begging here. Begging for even an approximation of her life and agency back, to be let off of this dangerous ride where she knows that any attempt to force her out by cops or violence is much more likely to end poorly for her than for Robin. And Robin doesn’t even do her the courtesy of hearing her, instantly dismissing it for the latest scheme du jour that will override it.
And that this has happened repeatedly for what has now nearly been two days for Leslie, just makes it all the more heartbreaking.
Panel 4: And once again, Robin runs roughshod over Leslie’s attempt at setting a boundary. Escalating the situation another step up where now her home is going to be the headquarters of a vile anti-gay politician’s re-election campaign and where Robin is a permanent fixture in her house rather than a temporary horror-show.
Panel 5: And Leslie’s posture, shoulders slightly hunched, face sad and defeated, just slowly shuffling away. She’s broken by all of this and like a lot of people under relentless assault of a fictional narrative, has found it easier to just roll with it and go numb rather than trying to continue fighting a losing battle.
Her last boundary abandoned before she even states it. “Try not to destroy anything else”. Not “don’t destroy anything else”, just “try not to”. She knows that Robin will destroy more things of her life and is learning to make her peace with that to survive. And seeing her this broken is just brutal, because she doesn’t deserve to be held hostage by a dangerous stalker who refuses to acknowledge reality.
Panel 6: And Robin here, is still firmly in her delusions. In her mind, there’s been some chattering and some sitcom shenanigans, but she’s in a new notarelationship with an exciting new gal-pal who’s putting her up and while she might occasionally make noise with her mouth hole, probably said something about being a better you, which sounds like an awesome catch-phrase, so vomit that out there as an upbeat slogan*.
After all, everything is great, right?
*And yeah, let’s just acknowledge the elephant in the room that is Robin being incredibly Trump like in a lot of ways, right down to including half-remembered explanations by staff members in his rambling statements and that fucking bigoted slogan that has become a rallying cry for all the worst people in the world. Like, her actions would be vile no matter what, but the fact that she keeps evoking a literal fascist who is destroying my country and whose actions directly threat the life of many of my friends and family members, not to mention myself just makes it all a little harder to bear.
Panel 7: That the people who think shouting “cuck” in angry racist fashion to literally everything now hold real institutional power fills me with existential dread every day. I swear this country feels like Leslie, held hostage to an angry narcissist who will gleefully destroy everything to get some fictional idea of what reality should be to well… still be a pipe dream.
But that’s depressing, so instead let me end by saying I’m very excited to see Leslie at school, away from the relentless enforcement of a fictional reality and open dismissal and where she’ll have time to be alone with her thoughts a little bit and process… or at least would if I wasn’t suspecting a long line of students and queer groups on campus will be wanting a word with her about the rumors.
At least her class will probably have a lot of questions – az Roz is in that class. (it’s probably the gender studies class she has to teach right now)
The pragmatic solution would be to talk to Roz and tell her that she can (nad has to) have her sister back. (and she needs to go to Leslies home and fetch her personally)
The pragmatic solution would’ve been to call the cops some 5 strips of this shitshow ago.
Let me say this right now, as clearly as I can: Roz doesn’t HAVE to do anything. Robin isn’t her responsibility. Leslie should have called the cops as soon as she found Robin in her bed, and her coming back through the window after LITERALLY being thrown out the door is cause for throatpunching; but NONE of that is on Roz.
And even if it was on Roz, what’s Robin’s teenage sister supposed to do to get her out of a place she doesn’t want to leave? Threaten to tell Mom on her? Even Robin’s campaign staff is a better option.
I do want to see Roz’s reaction to all this, though; last time we saw her she only had about a quarter of the story.
That’s true, and also, nobody else has…
But I nevertheless think that if you have created an (illusionary) bubble and try to live in it (like Robin does here), the moment when somebody whom you know, and who knows you very well turns up, and you suddenly have to see yourself with the eyes of the other person, the bubble will burst.
It might not work on Robin, though…
and the pragmatic/pessimistic response, as made by several commenters over the last bunch of strips in this plot thread, is that the cops probably won’t/can’t do shit.
…well, Robin’s clearly having a mental breakdown at this point.
I mean, that twitter exchange in particular. The response to a fairly pathetic insult (“nose is a funny shape” combined with “cuck”, an insult so weak that I’m amazed it’s still being used) is a death threat? To someone who’s screen name seems to imply he’s 9-10 (hence why he’s using cuck, an insult that’s generally aimed at men, to a woman)?
Sure, comedic exagerration, getting a gag in because it’s a daily strip, but still… yeeesh.
Also: $5 says that Robin’s going to make a surprise appearance in the class. Because right now she sees Robin as her safety net, and not having her around for even an hour would be too much for her to stand >_<.
So Robin is Trump in this universe?
She can do anything she likes and they vote for her anyway and Leslie will just give up and let her live ehre jsut cause Robin wants?
Call the police or something.
Given her membership in the LGBT community, her location smack dab in the middle of Red America, and the fact that she was once homeless, I’m thinking Leslie has might have some trust issues where the police are concerned.
Also, Congresswoman. She technically doesn’t have the RIGHT to give orders to the police, but what are the odds that she’ll be able to anyway?
Not even a little, Robin isn’t doing anything, Trump is doing excactly what he was elected to do.
Also people in DoA arn’t trying to overthrow democracy like they are in the u.s (Protesting election results is effectivly the same as wanting to get rid of democracy)
what?! no! protesting election results is absolutely NOT the same as wanting to get rid of democracy! Ok, I’m not gonna get into comment-section debates but this sentence just made me cringe. Democracy is much greater and more complex than just presidential elections, and blind faith in election results is dangerous. It’s important to question if the system is working properly, otherwise we can end up supporting a broken, corrupted system with blind faith that it’s the right thing.
The system isn’t working as Hillary won the popular vote, yet the people where over ruled. (Even though I agree more with Trump, the system needs to change)
Just because I have a diffrent political stance dosn’t make me a troll. (Liberterian fyi)
Fart captor: I don’t really think this is the place for “honest discussion”. (If you have a / know of / partake in a political board where we can discuss the issue I will be more then happy to.)
CrockedCop:
So you’re willing to participate in a honest discussion without hyperbole and ridiculous fact-twisting, but just not HERE, because this isn’t a forum exclusively dedicated to politics?
Now I feel bad I didn’t see this sooner when there was a chance you’d see me not take you up on that offer.
Not saying the police don’t suck in the u.s, just trying to point out burning down lokal shops might not be the best way to complain.
Also this is my first response comment and I’m sorry for the spam(ish) effect this will have….but you people started draging real politics into a web comic.
Robin’s behavior to me reads very much like someone who has mental health difficulties – specifically, someone who has a naturally impaired ability to reflexively understand what other people are thinking and feeling, and who, on top of that, has had some sort of interpersonal trauma, likely in the family. She reads like someone who’s had her own boundaries eroded over the years, and who because of that, and because of being naturally bad at it, now has difficulty understanding that other people’s boundaries are serious. She’s also having a very obvious personal crisis and dealing with it through refusing to admit that her own emotions are serious.
I don’t do the thing where I behave like a wacky cartoon character, but the rest of Robin’s behavior feels extremely familiar. I never broke into someone’s house and refused to leave while having a personal crisis, but before I knew that other people were not like this, I did fuck up a lot of friendships by completely failing to understand when another person needed personal space, especially when having a personal crisis. I still sometimes annoy the people I care about when I don’t anticipate their needs. It’s my responsibility to try not to behave in ways that hurt people, and other people have the right to be hurt if I fuck that up (and to do whatever they need to do to protect themselves), but I am not evil for having these difficulties, and I was not evil for not being aware that my behavior was inappropriate before I reasonably could’ve become aware that my behavior was inappropriate.
It may be that Robin is not intended to be mentally ill – perhaps it’s not that she has difficulty telling what other people are feeling and when it’s serious, but that she simply doesn’t care – and whether or not Robin is intended to be mentally ill, it’s okay for people not to like her. She has many, many unlikable qualities, regardless of what’s going on in her head, and she’s sort of been used as a parallel to a real life very unpleasant individual, so obviously many people will dislike her, and I don’t have an issue with that at all.
However, it would be really, really great if people stopped talking about Robin like having difficulty with knowing how other people feel, especially about boundaries, makes you evil. Everyone seems to be talking about Leslie’s reactions like Robin should very obviously know that Leslie is seriously upset and not just exasperated, and that’s starting to cross over into some territory that harms real people who have trouble with emotional recognition or reflexive empathy. I would NOT know that someone behaving like Leslie is seriously upset and not just exasperated. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t care if that person was seriously upset – I just wouldn’t know! Personally, I would ask, because I know I have difficulty telling, because my issues have been brought to my attention… but someone who does not know they need to ask is not evil for not knowing, even if they are someone most people would not want to be around.
It’s making it REALLY hard to read the comments. I don’t know how Cerberus deals with this with Amber, but I admire her greatly for it.
I started out giving Robin the benefit of the doubt along these lines.
However, IMO, she’s gone from what you describe, to very actively disregarding Leslie as a human being and showing an absolute lack of care for what Leslie might be thinking or feeling. It’s not just that she doesn’t know, it’s that she obviously doesn’t give even half a fuck.
I can understand why it would feel familiar and I can especially understand why the comment section would be a crappy place for you right now because a lot of people are calling Robin mentally ill and evil in the same breath.
But Robin’s behavior isn’t really consistent with difficulty understanding boundaries, so much as pointedly refused to accept them. Leslie has been extremely clear that she doesn’t want Robin here, using plain language that leaves no room for ambiguity or misunderstanding, and Robin is insisting that she knows what Leslie wants better than Leslie does, and that Leslie secretly means the opposite of what she’s saying.
That’s why I don’t think Robin is intended to have any kind of mental illness, or developmental disorder, or personality disorder. But even if she were, it wouldn’t be what’s causing this behavior.
Because it’s not that she doesn’t know she needs to ask, it’s that she has literally told Leslie that Leslie is lying about what she wants.
That makes you a jerk, not lacking reflexive empathy.
Basically, you can be both an asshole and have a personality disorder, but not every asshole has a PD and people with PDs are no more likely to be assholes (and tend to be less likely, because they think more about other people’s feelings and viewpoints and those of us to whom that kind of understanding comes more “naturally”).
The issue isn’t that Robin can’t read Leslie’s subtext – there is no more subtext. That ship sailed when Leslie LITERALLY threw her out the door. It’s all text now, and has been for a bit.
The problem is that Robin doesn’t CARE about what Leslie (or anyone else, so far) wants, as long as she, Robin, gets what she wants.
I think finding resonance with characters is a good thing, even if they also have traits that are not so great. I’m glad you are able to do with Robin!
Other universe spoilers: the other incarnation of Dina had a tendency towards clingy insecurity, which may well show up again someday here. Nothing remotely to this level, however.
It’s great to see Dina with somebody who is happy about all her traits. Becky seems to like reassuring Dina’s insecurities whenever they come up. Moreover, Becky experiences Dina’s potential clinginess as devotion, and returns it, and they’re very happy about that. They’re good for each other. ^^
Evidently, in states that passed same-sex-marriage statutes or where courts strike down prohibitions on same-sex-marriage, the suicide rate among LGB teens dropped significantly, and the drop occurred almost immediately.
“All told, the researchers estimated, from 1999 to 2015, same-sex marriage policies would be associated each year with 134,000 fewer adolescents attempting suicide.”
It’s almost as if often persecuted demographics feel more hopeful and less fatally depressed when the state says they are, in fact, people, and they have the same rights as everyone else.
Whaaaaaaaat? People don’t develop proper self worth and self esteem if you constantly shit on them and treat them like they aren’t human? THE DEVIL YOU SAY.
First person to talk to the press controls the narrative!
“Why yes, congresswoman DeSanto is inside. She arrived late last night and she’s having some sort of… personal crisis. I’m trying to give her space to deal with it and I’d appreciate if you members of the press do the same.”
“Why yes, she’s inside. Uninvited. Seriously, she got my landlord to illegally let her in, and now she refuses to leave. Even climbed back in the window when I forced her out, and now she’s destroying my stuff.
“… so anyhow, I’m looking for three reporters with one camera operator each to come in to my home and start barraging her with questions until she leaves. The more hard-hitting the questions, the better.”
I’d like to see Robin actually revealed as not being ignorant of boundaries at all and knowing exactly what she was doing. Remember how she handled Roz’s business with the sex tape? It wasn’t a person who was acting all wacky or unaware but fully aware of the politics up and down. This is a cover and she’s not innocent or naive but just aware she can bully Leslie this way.
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
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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 ...
Someone took twitter tips from our president…
Coming soon, a strip where “Robin” pulls off her disguise and reveals she is Donald Trump. What happened to the real Robin? Stay tuned.
Nah, that’s a clear statement of intent. You’re thinking of something along the lines of:
“I have the Greatest Nose. It’s fantastic. Other people attack it, someone should stop them. So sad!”
No no no, the “Trump Sad” is just 1 word and an exclamation point. It really drives home the point. Sad!
This thread makes me so happy inside.
Is that what he’s doing? I thought he’d lost a bet and had to serve his first term as Sloth from the Goonies.
Either that or he’s an Elcor. *mournful addition*
“Lying Kylo wouldn’t know a great nose if he saw one. No wonder Star Wars is a failure. Sad!”
That’s perfect!
Not that there’s anything wrong with having a non-WASPy nose, but man, fans of Adam Driver are the last people that ought to be criticizing anyone’s schnoz.
Given that Robin’s run in politics in the other webcomic is before the current political climate, can I say as a foreigner it’s scary how your current president reminds me of a fictional unpredictable sugar-rush speedster created by a self-admitted man-child?
You can say it even if you’re not a foreigner. Most of us detest everything about him.
Robin’s always been like that. For all we know, Trump might have taken twitter tips from her.
Now I’m imagining Trump publishing a book of Tweeting Tips.
…. while still president.
… On Twitter itself, one or two sentences at a time.
The biggest difference between Robin and Trump, as evidenced by their slogans. Trump is actually the successor to Robin.
Proof:
Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again” presumes it was previously great. When was it great before? When Robin was in charge!
Robin’s slogan, “Be Great America”.
I’m not convinced Robin’s an actual politician. I think she just comes from a rich family and pays for people to follow her around and act like she’s important.
Uhh…
Isn’t that what a politician is?
Not if she’s using her own money. A real politician uses your money to do the same thing.
Here’s the thing. Wealthy people become politicians by using enough of their own money (and other resources) to surround themselves with enough of the right people who will do that until nonassociated people are willing to give them money to keep doing that at which point they start using that money instead of their own.
Ross Perot is a good case study here with his history of not trusting the people he surrounded himself with to do their job of making him a more attractive investment to the people who actually fund political campaigns.
I mean, she’s not a politician. She works at a toy store, politics is a hobby.
In the old continuity.
Over here she’s a Representative up for re-election, so she won her seat 2 in-comic years ago.
comic reactions.
1. Panel One: Leslie is trying to talk to Robin like she’s a friend they just had a bender with who wants them to go drinking again or smoke some weed. This is not good. Robin is an intruder in your house and has already resisted being physically thrown out. Call the cops, call some friends, or go to the media yourself and tell them she’s INSANE.
2. I find it incongruous Ruth and Amber both have their mental illnesses dealt with seriously while Robin is speaking from a perspective that strikes me as a complete break with reality. Is she in a psychotic fugue state or just literally a psychopath? I’m actually amused by this in the comic way but this feels totally like Shortpacked rather than Dumbing of Age.
3. Leslie, why would you WANT her to go back to her campaign? The campaign which is about destroying gay rights? I mean, yes, it gets her out of your house but you know that’s a bad thing as well. I know love is blind but this is a crazy person in your house.
4. I wonder if Robin just repeats what she wants and assumes it will eventually work and people will do what she says. It’s like she’s got a Solar Exalted charm or is a Ventrue with Presence and Dominate. Why yes, I played a lot of White Wolf games in the past.
I do wonder what her staff are doing, though. Also, I point out Robin may actually not be in any danger because of her lesbian “scandal.” It’s not like they have any actual story to report so far and the public isn’t exactly going to vote Democrat because of it. They may not vote but that’s not a guarantee anyway.
5. I note Robin doesn’t look for anyone tweeting her beforehand and I can’t help but imagine she’s ignored all of her messages.
6. Kylo Ren dislikes her? Well, that increases my life of him except for the fact I’ve just discovered from the comments threat the Alt-Right likes the First Order and Kylo Ren. That makes me feel unclean by association. I’m also a fan of the Principality of Zeon and Imperium of Mankind but I’m aware I’m not SUPPOSED TO BE. Do I have to disassociate myself from the bad guys I love to hate because people actually love them?
I also think Robin’s polls will go up the more hate she spews on the net.
I always just figured that DoA was just an offshoot of Shortpacked. Galasso decided to clone everyone and send them to college as part of a plan to take over the education system.
National discourse was already dead!
Before this strip even went into the buffer.
new national discourse: jalapenos on pizza
#jalapenogate
Jalepeno-and-pineapple pizza is awesome.
that is bad pizza!
I don” even remember when it was properly alive.
The 1800’s?
My best guess is it died with LBJ. The two parties started becoming parodies of themselves in the 70s, and the Republicans really kicked it into high gear when Ronnie came to town.
(At least in this 90s kid’s opinion. Somebody who was actually there will probably disagree. I know this ignores the Vietnam protests; I’m referring to the politicians themselves.)
The cross-party social scene in DC used to keep things civil, and make it possible for the work to get done. That’s only recently broken down. The parties did used to call each other names in public, but they didn’t actually hate or fear each other. The kids who’ve come in during the last decade often believe that hype. Pre-jerrymandering, most districts were very mixed, so most politicians expected to get cross party line votes if they did a good job. So, vilifying the other side was a game sometimes, but one that they might not play constantly.
As many house members stopped moving their wives to town, and stopped going to the picnics and parties that included both parties, the old ties of outside of work friendships that allowed negotiations to get done started to vanish.
As politicians pushed to gerrymander their districts, things also got worse. It seemed like a good way to avoid getting fired… but they didn’t have to appeal to cross party voters, and they started fearing party purists taking their seats instead. So, they started talking in more party purist styles.
You can see the volume of work that congress does dropping drastically as the people who did have across the aisle friends and allies retire, and their replacements fail to build the cross aisle ties, and make the reasonable deals.
The funny thing is that it’s all reversible at this point.
That balance could easily slide back the other way. Many of the older congresspeople still know how things used to get done.
Many of the younger ones do love to talk and build friendships, so they could make cross party friends again.
Ordinary citizens can also decide their single issue is gerrymandered districts, and just poke local public servants into fixing the silliest extremes. That would allow congress to stop the parody.
Well, there was the one congressman who beat another congressman in the middle of congress with his cane in like the 1830s.
Then there was the smear campaign that someone had fathered an illegitimate child with a slave, and that was like the 3rd or 4th presidential campaign to ever happen.
I’m just going off my vague memories of US History, but national discourse hasn’t always been Lincoln vs Douglas.
But Thomas Jefferson did have children with (one of?) his slaves. Is not really a smear campaign of its truth, is it?
Ugh. *It’s not really a smear campaign if it’s the truth, is it?
actually, that’s exactly how a Smear campaign works-blowing out of proportion some thing or act that really did happen. (Smear campaigns that rely on absolute fiction tend to be failures).
I mean TJ had a kid with someone who literally had no ability to consent since she had a lack of freedom (slavery), I don’t think that specifically counts has a smear campaign. That’s just like “look at this horribly unethical thing that happened” and then he got elected anyway. American politics is stupid.
Well, it worked for the bloated Cheeto.
The Adams camp said Jefferson was going to sell American women into French sex slavery. The Jefferson camp said Adams was a hermaphrodite.
This was literally the first Presidential election where the debate went past “so I’m George Washington.”
Teeeccchnically it is still a smear campaign if it’s the truth. But it’s not as skeezy of a smear campaign.
FEEL the alt-right trolls
Let the hate flow through you
just no more leftist riots please. Also before anyone says anything i’m a more political neutralist, I look at who has a good idea not which side there on.
And yet you’ve swallowed the riots narrative.
Yeah, we’ve seen protests that are historic in size, scope and frequency, and 95% of those participating have been peaceful and law-abiding.
Acting like “riots” are what’s happening is utter bullshit.
Oooh, can I get link to the 95% number?
I’m afraid I don’t actually have a source for that. But I’ve only heard of one or two protests recently were more than a handful of people were arrested out of thousands of protesters. Even going by numbers from police, the majority of protestors have been peaceful for the majority of recent protests.
Like, I literally can’t find any credible, hard data, or even articles that show both the number of people arrested at a recent protest and even an estimate of the total number of protesters. One person smashes a window and suddenly you stop hearing about any of the rest.
Ofc you can’t, it’s a made up number to make the regressive left look better.
Or because the media suddenly stops caring about reporting the statistics once there’s a spectacle to report on, no matter how many are responsible.
Not that actual statistics would be likely to convince you of anything if you’re already someone who uses phrases like “regressive left”.
I suppose I should elaborate further. Depending on what views one already holds, one tends to focus on either the best or worst of the tactics of a movement, to the exclusion of things that are inconvenient for one’s preconceived views.
For example: all talk of representation aside, the American Revolution was fueled by chafing against British mercantilism and a desire to kick the native population off yet more land. But history remembers the people who burned down tax collectors’ houses fondly.
Your criticism of tactics is a feint for hating the aims.
I didn’t ask you.
And where are your numbers showing the opposite is true?
Sure, my 95% estimate is a guess. I don’t know the exact percentage. It’s common enough knowledge that nobody was arrested during the Women’s March, despite its historic size.
For other protests, the problem I ran into is that while I’ve seen plenty of live coverage showing peaceful protests, most articles only mention the number of arrests – if any – and fail to specify how many protesters were there, so it doesn’t give you that context.
There’s plenty where you can work that out for individual protests, such as the inauguration protests where police had prepared for 10,000+ protesters, and reported around 200 arrests.
But what I couldn’t find was a good source that lists total protesters vs total arrests which is the kind of thing you’d need to get an exact number either way. And make a claim about whether liberal or conservative protests are more likely to get violent, you’d need that data as well.
But it’s easy enough from a few minutes of googling that there have been a LOT of protests lately, and not a substantial amount of violence.
Unless you actually READ all the fox news and breitbart articles for some reason, even though they’ve repeatedly been caught trying to use pictures and video of past riots as though they were of the protest they were reporting on.
Take it from a guy forty miles north of portland. Not entirely.
The entire narrative is skewered, but the moral high ground is a lot sparser than one should hope for.
Would this be the one where some anarchists used the protest as an excuse to pull some shit, the protesters and the cops worked together to keep it contained, and then that weekend was full of volunteer groups helping clean up the damage?
“Some anarchists” is a simplistic, flawed explanation that serves only to emphasize the “us versus them” attitude that got us all into the mess in the first place by suggesting that one side is actually incapable of wrong. Also, you clearly haven’t heard much about how the loudest voices of the protests talk about the police activities during the protests if you think they were happily working together.
Both the university and the police seem to think violence was instigated by a separate, outside group:
https://www.policeone.com/Crowd-Control/articles/289136006-FBI-investigating-identities-of-masked-rioters-at-UC-Berkeley-protest/
As a guy from england I wanna point out the tea you guys threw in the harbour cost 1.7 million dollars, adjusting for inflation. You wanna talk about violence against the state? How about when you overthrew the english? That was property damage and a half. Over what? Taxes?? We tend to blanket history, but you cant take the moral highground over fighting police activities when your police have nothing stopping them from using “reasonable and justified force” like ours do. Your bars way way higher than ours. Saying the BLM movement and stuff like that is milking it a bit when in london in like 2011 a black guy getting wrongly shot by police resulted in a week of violent riots, after a peaceful protest. I have police family and them and their friends agree the american police have normalised brutality
I meant that ours have to justify any amount of force used as rsasonable*** sorry if i got a bit ranty
If you’re worried about simplistic, us vs. them narratives why are you insisting on simplifying a bunch of different events protesting multiple things by thousands of people, plus police in different cities, some joker with a talk show, his supporters, the federal government, possibly more depending on what events you’re referring vaguely to, into two groups?
@AndroidDreams: over “taxation without representation,” which is not just about the taxation (resulting from the cost of the English Revolution) but also about the lack of representation in Parliament. Empires are cruel. It’s the same reason Gandhi rebelled with civil disobedience; of course, the fact that the European immigrants used to have rights certainly helped us feel like we had the right to revolt. Ironic that eurocentrism gave us the arrogance and outrage to actually stage war against the British Empire. I appreciate you taking the GOP nuts down a peg but let’s not impose that moral majority of the UK against the trigger-happy Yanks either.
The people in masks self-identify as anarchists, so this is not some mere speculation. They call themselves the Black Bloc, and they tend toward violent protest wherever they show up. Personally, I think its just an excuse for these normally violence-prone people to have an excuse to break shit, but they’d disagree. What’s clear is that they are not part of the groups that peacefully protest.
In politics – regardless of the scope or the topics at hand – ‘moral high ground’ is a molehill at the bottom of a ravine deeper than Valles Marinieris.
right but when you see people firing fireworks at building, attacking people with differing opinions, smashing windows and burning cars that’s not a riot?
Did I say “riots never happen”? One riot at Berkeley which was – according to the police – started by an outside group, not the students who organized the protest, does not make a trend
You can’t just point to one or two incidents involving a hundred people at most, and simply ignore literally millions of peaceful, law-abiding protesters like they don’t count.
Who’s ignoring the peaceful protesters? Pointing out Riots happened doesn’t diminish the activities of peaceful protesters.
TheAnonymousGuy’s comment made it clear which he thinks is more prevalent, despite 3 million people marching nationwide in the Women’s March, despite the many thousands who showed up at airports to oppose the immigration ban. Despite the many ongoing and peaceful protests and town halls that don’t get much attention because nothing terrible happened.
I’m not saying it’s prevalent, I know it’s not the most prevalent thing. I’m just pointing out that it’s often done during protest. I’m not stupid, if your going to say set a car on fire your best chance of getting away with it is in a crowd where you can vanish quick.
You’re not saying, you just acted like that’s the case, like violence and looting are the main event. Your initial comment doesn’t makes sense otherwise.
You are feeding a skewed, biased narrative, focusing on the bad actions of a tiny minority.
Nah, that’s just over-excited sports fans.
*lives in a world where personal liberty was won by literally murdering each other*
okay but nobody smash a window please
True enough, though the point of a representative democracy was to be able to have revolutions without murdering each other. I don’t know if avoiding smashing windows was in there or not.
Just want to point out, when Lincoln was in the Illinois state legislature they routinely got into brawls, brought Bowie knives and revolvers in under their coats to session meetings, and on at least one occasion did break a window in order to escape the building when things got to wild. Andrew Jackson’s inauguration party nearly turned into the “Project X” of the 1830s, Summers got his head practically bashed in with a walking stick/cane during the 1850s, Pinkerton “detectives” and labor unions routinely fought each other in the streets in what was practically urban warfare throughout the 1870s to the 1890s, the March on Selma and other actions of the civil rights movement were met with school bombings and bus burnings in the case of the freedom riders, and police brutality and poor race relations in addition to a worsening economic situation led to a series of riots throughout major American cities throughout the 1980s. The list goes on. The idea that our relatively stable representative democracy is actually peaceful is patently false. We’ve simply somehow avoided the excessive purges of most other revolutions, mainly because the loyalists left with the British and we didn’t need to institute a purge to seize their property.
The fact is, that whenever the group not in power looks to stop being oppressed, they’re met with violence even if the oppressed people are being peaceful. When they meet that violence with other violence, the established oppressive group can dismiss the oppressed’s movement to further oppress them. When we then learn about these movements in school, we hear about a few bad people doing bad things to the oppressed people, not that the very government we’re brought up to praise too tried to crush them or actually did. The black panthers were seen as dangerous when they were feeding thousands of starving people. A group called MOVE was also seen as dangerous and the police used automatic weapons and breaching explosives that started a fire leaving about 250 people homeless and between the explosives and the fire killed about 11 people. The firefighters, which had used water canons on the people earlier stood still as the fires burned.
But you don’t learn about injustices in school or on the news because it doesn’t match the “best country on earth, we value freedom, peace, and democracy” message.
The Republicans can’t complain about liberal “riots” when they’re trying to silence a woman criticizing a candidate of theirs who used terror tactics to suppress Civil Rights.
Of course they can. Since when did politicians care about hypocrisy?
Since the other side is full of hypocrites, obviously.
Nope, that is a successful Trump rally. Just ask him.
dude…yes, they did happen. Downtown Seattle was a mess for most of the rest of November 2016. (not that it wasn’t a mess before then-I only drive in Seattle under duress on the best of times.) and that’s nothing compared to a friend in Portland who was actively afraid to leave her house for several days after experiencing the ones there. It HAPPENED. Not a thing to be proud of, but denying it doesn’t address the core problem.
No it wasn’t. I went through there daily in the bus and also waited at bus stops. I work in Pioneer Square.
both sides are the SAAAAAAAME
No; both sides are AWFFFFFUL. (It’s not really clear which letter to stretch there.) The sides are not the saaaaaaaame though, because one merely doesn’t care about the people or good governance, and one is full of awful racist bigots who are actively trying to destroy some of the people and who think that governemental positions are something you sell for cash money.
Fun fact: The sides you’re referring to aren’t really sides at all. The Democratic party is Center-Right, this means they’re right of center in terms of global politics. The Republican party sits to the right of that either close to or the end of the right side of the political compass with some party members leaning more towards far-right ideology.
Bernie Sanders was labeled a socialist or communist, when he really was what’s referred to as a “Social Democrat”, which is to say he still wants to work within a Capitalist system, which socialism and communism do not. Bernie Sanders is a centrist. Social Democracy is not far-left like communism. Communism is a buzz word for the American Right.
I just wanted to point out that when people “both sides are bad” or “we should be in between” they’re looking at a very small picture, a picture that paints a centrist as being far left.
I was talking about the political parties, responding to StClair, who I certainly hope was talking about political parties since it would be pretty wild to believe that capitalism and true communism are the same. And yeah, I’m well aware that in America we’re not given much choice. A decade or so ago I would have said that there was only the barest illusion of choice, but the Republicans have been diving so far off the end of sociopathy that I think there’s a choice again, if only for the lefter of two rights.
Remember, folks.
If it’s people protesting against the threat of losing civil liberties and fascists that want minorities dead or deported, it’s a riot.
If it’s white people excited about sporting events causing the millions in damages, though, it’s just ‘unruly fans’.
And if it’s literal neo-Nazis, it’s “economic anxiety”.
sweet zombie jesus people are actually saying that?
As someone whose grandmother fought in a literal civil war against literal Fascists supported by the literal god-damn Nazis and until recently still had separatist bombings:
America, really, suck it up. Protests, Riots? Your nation was founded on that. Crying about a burnt starbucks (most likely insured) and a damn limo and some angry people punching each other is damn near innocent. If anything if the left finally arms itself and organizes – AGAIN, because it USED to – that would at the least reach equal parity with the right who damn sure went around with literal guns for the last eight years and the government basically said ‘noooo, please, stop….’
I am very well aware that what I’m about to say is a trivial point, as it focuses on one thing you said separate from the meaning of your post as a whole, but my OCD compels me to speak. You bring up burnt starbucks as a subject of ridiculous complaints, and I’m guessing you’re refering to the story of the woman who sued Starbucks for millions because her coffee was hot. Thing is that the design of the cup was so flimsy that the lid fell off as soon as she had sat down in the passenger seat of her son’s car, which was not moving at the time, and caused third degree burns across her entire lap and the money she received was barely enough to cover her hospital bills and lawyer fees, leaving her with no more money than before she bought her coffee. I’m sorry for being so obsessed with this, but it just seems like a perfect example of peoples’ real tragedy being turned to internet myth and ridiculed as trivial and spreading misinformation.
As for your post as a whole, I find myself agreeing with a lot of it, at least in peoples’ obsessive compulsion to use the word facist all the time about people they don’t agree with simply because it’s the trendy word for ‘objectively evil state’ so they can portray themselves as righteous freedom fighters, effectively diminishing the efforts of people who actually risked life and sanity to oppose actual facist regimes.
As someone whose grandfather joined the resistance against Nazi occupation when everything suggested the Nazis would win the war, that is something I can sympathize with.
Uh no.
The coffee story was a McDonald’s coffee, first of all.
Second of all, Ferdinand was talking about an actual Starbucks store that was set on fire during the riots in Berkeley that broke out when some Black Block folks decided to usurp a protest against Milo.
Ugh…thank you for correcting me. I really need to stop commenting early in the morning. Now I really wish I could edit my posts. In truth, a lot of the News coverage regarding the protests got so onesided that I stopped looking into the details which evidently was a mistake.
a) “And I contend that the cry of ‘black power’ is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the (outdated term for black folks). I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the (outdated term for black folks) poor has worsened over the last few years.” – MLK Jr.
Violence against the marginalized, especially when it is institutional tends to be erased and the marginalized are often held to an impossible standard of politeness and then find themselves dismissed at that politeness and still accused of riots.
MLK’s protests of non-violence were a tactic not a bar for all protests to meet. The whole reason for a lot of his protests were to show how even non-violence was met with violent resistance by police and even then, a number of white papers dismissed his protests as unruly violent riots on behalf of the protestors.
And just like now, there was a portion of “moderates” who found regularly a means to dismiss the causes and reality surrounding protests by the marginalized by crying crocodile tears at whatever the excuse can be. A tipped over trash can to try and prevent cops literally running over protestors. A torn down street lamp because cops were using those to aim for the eyes of protestors with their rubber bullets. Hell, I remember the Bush years and seeing protests deliberately dismissed because some people protested with puppets.
There is always an excuse, because well, riots work. They show a collapse in public order and how the status quo is not conducive to the survival of the group rioting. It shows that the marginalized can’t be quietly slaughtered without repercussion for the city.
And so, it becomes more important to preserve order than seek justice, because the injustice isn’t happening to you and so easily ignorable in favor of faux concerns over inanimate objects.
And that all becomes laughable of a pose when we remember that we literally celebrate yearly festivals based on successful riots in history (4th of July, Pride).
b) The overinflation of the morality and value of the moderate is what got us into this mess. Turning everything into a horse race with two equal sides where the reasonable, intelligent viewpoint is directly in the middle is something the far right and other conspiracy theorists have exploited for years. Because, everyone wants to be the impartial undecided voter, wise and reasoned and so will gladly follow the center even if that shifts to include “agrees with nazis on a number of issues” or “let’s only torture some of the people”.
And so the right has realized that simply by being awful and trusting the narrative to follow them and treat their new awful stance as “one side” in an equal debate, that their abhorrent ideas will be normalized. And that’s exactly what’s happened. See also conspiracy theorists and hate groups using the “two sides” delusion to basically set up their afactual denial of reality or their open intentional harm towards marginalized group as just another opinion, equally as “extreme” as a marginalized person saying “I would rather not like to be murdered” or a scientist saying “that isn’t true, here’s what all of science and information say”.
c) The moderate pose is somewhat offensive in the time of Trump. Like, look at all that has been normalized and is happening under Trump. The lives ruined, the literal nazis who have high positions of power in the government, the complete theft of our democracy on behalf of a foreign puppet who rose to power literally promising his fanbase of angry nationalists that he’d hurt people they hate and whose rise has massively increased the amount of hate crimes and literal nazis roaming the streets to attack people and threaten houses of worship.
But oh, we’re to respect “both sides” to that. Who will follow this poisoned frame to the point where we’re acting like the most dangerous constitutional crisis our nation has ever faced, a state that will kill people by the millions is somehow just another side equally framed by the “more shameful” action of protestors not being a hundred percent peaceful so they can be filed and locked away without attention, dismissed as people who will never ever be a threat to power.
No, sorry, screw that. The glory of the “moderate” was always an advertising campaign based in how our nation fixates on swing states and swing voters to the detriment of all others and its time we recognize that not all actions are proportionate just because we desperately want them to be.
A-fucking-men
Alllllll of this.
If you are “neutral” about oppression, you have fundamentally chosen the side of the oppressor, because doing nothing means allowing the oppressor to carry on.
The fact that I had to scroll down this far to see an MLK Jr. quote [used in the correct context]…
KYLO2007: “NOT IF I DO IT FIRST” *lightsaber noise*
oh yeah I just noticed that, huh
It WOULD be a Kylo Ren fan.
They typed this in between reading the next chapter of their fav Kylo/Rey fanfiction~ :b
fun fact, KYLO2007 is actually just Kylo Ren, Emotionally Maladjusted Twitter Troll of the Sith
Kylo/Poe fanfic. Be inclusive.
Finn/Poe OTP.
Let’s be honest. Kylo/Hux fanfic.
Nah, Kylo/Snoke.
you see, it’s funny because SPOILERS
#megacuck
I had to google it to figure out what that even was. Is that even something a person even calls a woman?
I thought that was a term for really pathetic men.
It was, but now it means “anyone with whom I disagree to any extent”.
I see it as the mating call of overcompensating manchildren. Time to whip their dicks out and determine who’s alpha!
Also, just like some plants and animals have visual markers to signal “I have tasty nectar, come get some” or “I’m poisonous, don’t eat me”, the word c**k (it’s such a stupid word, I’m not even going to type it) signals “I’m a delusional asshat, don’t waste your time trying to reason with me”. That’s useful, at least.
Cuck is short for cuckold, an insult that Trump’s BFF Bannon brought back into the contemporary lexicon via Brietbart. It has the added bonus these days of being racist, too (yay!) since Bannon liked to use it to imply your wife was having sex with a black man.
Worse, cuck, as opposed to cuckold, means you are so in love with, and have given superiority, members of a different “race” that you get sexual pleasure just from the knowledge you wife is performing sexual acts with a black man. The right wing interpretation is racist and demeaning. Some people think actual cucks (a self applied term) are also racist and misogynistic. Personally, if a couple’s dynamic includes that and both are happy and all parties are satisfied by it, I have bigger issues to worry about.
Yup, it’s basically “race traitor” for a modern age.
Something for the white supremacists to throw around at anyone who dares stand up for the marginalized they target and bully in order to try and make them think twice about risking the social regard to do what is right.
Though “cuck” tends to be thrown mostly at insufficiently regressive conservatives not attacking the marginalized enough, not at more liberal types who might actually stand up for them.
Unless usage is changing faster than I’ve seen.
The first time I saw the word, I guess would have been about a year and a half ago now, the context of the other insults being thrown at the target led me to believe it was a portmanteau word of two other four-letter c-words–that it was a transphobic slur. (among other related and tangentially-related things, but that’s the most succinct word I know to *approximately* describe it)
I have since read that the “real” etymology is different than I initially guessed, but that doesn’t stop it from rolling around in my head at the worst times.
I’ve actually heard it from people on the *chans before Trump’s candidacy, and seeing as a huge portion of the nazis came from there…
I don’t think its use originates with the US alt-right. I am pretty certain it started in Europe and was adopted more recently here in the US. There are a lot of “racial purity” trolls over there. Most of them have dyed blonde hair with very dark roots, or brown eyes so they wear shades etc. That much self loathing is sad, in the most nauseating way possible.
is robin and leslie’s situation comparable to ruth and billie’s?
Ruth has psychological problems combined with a substance abuse problem. Robin is apparently just an idiot.
No, because it’s not consensual.
my question was stupid
To be fair, Billie wasn’t consenting to Ruth initially either.
Well, Ruth’s treatment of Billie was initially very non-consensual.
Somewhat in that the entire thing is unhealthy, Robin doesn’t know how to approach this remotely, and Leslie doesn’t know how to get her to stop.
Kind of like how Ruth and Billie started off but worse because Robin’s able to hide that her actions are pretty bad to a degree behind what she seems to honestly believe is kindness when she’s doing more serious illegal things than underage drinking.
Who actually hashtags megacuck?
Someone who wants to talk about gigantic chickens?
That would be #megacluck.
What the cluck?
oh cluck this
That sounds like the title of a SyFy Channel original movie.
But see then they would’ve hashtagged megacock….autocorrect! Duh. *facepalm*
megacock: the male variant of megacluck!
Which woulda been funny because lesbians
Robin’s staff have permanently disabled her phone’s autocorrect feature with a soldering iron. Because noodle incident.
You really don’t want to know.
Obviously a strong alpha red-pilled Christian Warrior!
*barfs*
I’ve been meaning to ask for the longest time. Is “cuck” even an actual word? I’ve never heard the term before people started using it to describe BB-8 from Force Awakens and it just sounds like something some idiot word write because they can’t spell “cock” or “cuckold”.
According to Urban Dictionary: it’s either a word for a person who is turned on by the idea of their significant other cheating on the, or a ‘weak, feckless, spineless, and decidedly pathetic specimen of manliness.’ I am going to assume it is the latter, given the context.
It’s not a “real” word, technically. It’s just an abbreviation of “cuckold”, which is silly when you use it as an insult, since you’re mostly just kink-shaming the target.
Also, who the hell is using it to describe a tiny little ball-bot with no spouse?
Stupid people. That’s who used the term to describe BB-8. Something along the lines of “cuck-ball” and no, I don’t know how that even works.
Content Warning for white supremacy “logic”
I remember that white supremacist meltdown.
The angry MRA nazis’ “logic” for that was that because Rey is a white woman and Finn is a black man, this was somehow part of a Hollywood attempt to normalize “miscegenation” i.e. mixed race relationships and thus commit genocide against the white race (cause you see, in their eyes, since they consider every child with non-white direct relatives, non-white, this means that precious “white DNA” is being taken out of the gene pool. And this is tantamount to genocide because it’s all a secret plot by the Jews or the Muslims to destroy white western culture and render it unable to “fight back”).
Thus BB-8 was a “cuck” because he offered no objection to this platonic friendship raising the spectre of racist fears about black men getting into relationships with white women and thus represented non-racist liberal white society standing aside as “whiteness” was “polluted”.
Yeah. It’s a leaning tower of stupid and bigoted. And now a worldview heavily supported by the most powerful members of our country.*
*This racist shit especially infuriates me because my aunt and uncle who are the piece of my family that has supported me through everything are an interracial couple who’ve been attacked by this racist garbage for decades now.
THAT’S what “white genocide” means? jfc, that’s even stupider than I thought
Frankly, if their version of ‘genocide’ is a loving and consensual relationship between two adults, they have a very rosy view of it.
Yeah, but the meta-meaning (with the /pol/ channers, particularly on infinite) is that you’re not racist and misogynist enough – particularly when applied to conservatives.
I’m being very serious here, I’ve been following this horribleness for a long time. This specific word came in via cuckold porn, true – and as such does indeed carry a lot of vicious racist undertones – but it’s nonetheless a very short encapsulation of the old American Nazi line about how “the [racial epithet here] has stolen/is fucking the white women who are rightfully your property, white man, shaming and humiliating you, and you’re a weakling who is going to sit there and take it.”
Which is why it was being applied to conservatives who weren’t white supremacist and misogynist enough, and are therefore weak/pathetic. And even now that it’s being watered down by greater use, the underlying meaning is carried along.
bingo.
Actually, thinking of the American Nazi Party, I can’t help but wonder if the alt-right will start (or already have started) bringing back serious anti-Irish sentiment. Just how far do they want this world to regress?
Aw man the poll thing is crazy. I don’t want Robin to die, I just want her out of Leslie’s house. She’s being a creep. She wasn’t invited and she refuses to leave. She doesn’t even know Leslie personally. If nothing else, she is at LEAST being rude.
i figure she can get hit by a truck and only suffer minor injuries that put her in the hospital long enough for Leslie to get some sleep and a restraining order
I agree. If there were a “Quit Politics Forever” or even a “Become a Lobbyist” option I’d go with those.
I just choose to believe the cabinet position is in the actual, real-world cabinet. Fictional nominees would be a dramatic improvement.
My thinking as well.
I voted “get hit by a truck” because it’s possible Robin will survive getting hit by a truck, depending on what type of truck and how fast it’s going. I’d rather she just leave Leslie’s house because her behavior is creepy and obnoxious, but that wasn’t one of the poll options.
I chose hit by a truck because I want to see what the “totally the same truck” guy is up to now.
Not that he didn’t do anything to deserve it. But I do feel sorry for his family, for having him.
Bet you ten bucks that once she’s re-elected, she won’t murder Kylo2007’s family at all! Typical politicians and their campaign promises.
You’re supposed to take her seriously, not literally.
And she is a kilochuck at most. #DishonestMedia
Noooooooooo Robin, rein in that impulse, girl.
That will sure win her lots of votes.
It actually will though. o_O
DeSanto is a no-nonsense, take no prisoners kind of politician! She tells it like it is!
“Give her a chance!”
“she really says what’s on her mind”
Honestly, with the base she is pursuing, I think her first tweet would be seen as the more objectionable one by them. What? “Best self”? Implying we aren’t already perfect? RINO!
So…has Robin already gotten to the bargaining stage? Does she even follow the five stages? Also really, a Kylo Ren fanboy?
Yeah, the Sith and the First Order are fast becoming shorthand code for Nazis in posts by both sides. I blame that pratt Godwin. If it goosesteps like a Nazi and oppresses like a Nazi, just call it a damn Nazi already.
Can I use the term “attempted Fourth Reich” as a shorthand code or is that too long or on the nose to be used as such? How about “Brownshirts” or “Blackshirts” to be more historical? I mean, there are just such better names if one is creative enough or historically inclined. Besides, just because the Galactic Empire’s officers wear Nazi dress uniforms without the eagles, crosses, thunderbolts, or swatztikas doesn’t mean they’re Nazis. They’re nowhere near racist enough or as obsessed with creating a superior human race as the Nazis were. Oh, if we want to be really historical, we could call them the Silver Eagle Legion, the real life 1930s American pro-Nazi movement. It seems to have survived in hiding for far too long.
Depends what Star Wars material you look at. In the old EU, they absolutely were trying to do those things, right down to attempted genocide and sticking various ‘alien’ species into slavery of various forms. I believe they called it Humanocentrism.
It’s annoying because I really like the First Order and was banned from a forum because they assumed I was a secret Nazi. No, I think they’re FICTIONAL bad guys, I’m not talking in code. Then again, knowing Alt-Righters like the First Order makes me feel unclean. Next I’ll have to support the Archduchy of Zeon and Britainnia.
Stop supporting. Grrr.
I turn to fiction to take a break from Trump’s perpetual outrages. Here, I see a mirror of it. Exit stage right, Robin.
Well that escalated quickly.
Why won’t Robin leave? She could call someone to come get her after midnight on a New Moon night while she’s wearing a disguise.
So Robin’s at the Twitter meltdown stage?
She’s running for the wrong office.
#DesantoForPresident
There is a speech from Bertrand Russell’s Cyrano DeBergerac that I wish I had time to quote.
Bertrand Russel didn’t write Cyrano DeBergerac, that was Edmund Rostand…
Well, Russel would have written it first, but – as we all know – it was too large to fit in the margin of this other book.
Edmond Rostand wrote “Cyrano de Bergerac“. It’d be like to write Bootsy Collins “Guillaume Colin” or Jack London ‘Jacques Londres”. Sorry to nitpick but I’m sure it’s a common error.
Two years ago, I would’ve thought Robin is too much of a caricature and exaggeration of politicians in the US. Now looking at Robin just makes me sad.
Poor Leslie D:
It’s even worse. She’s a caricature of current politicians in the US, and from the tone of the storyline so far, we’re supposed to consider her a loveable scamp.
If everyone could collectively stop making Orange Cheeto Goblin Monster jokes and Hyuk Hyuk you won’t believe what Trump did today goofball statements and call the Right what they actually are which is sub-human monsters, that would be fantastic. We’ve got two years to stay mad until we can have major elections to turn this thing around, and turning this shitshow into a thing where you shake your head and go “crazy, right?” doesn’t help anyone.
I’m going to go with: “One of the big problems with the neo-nazi ‘alt-right’ is the idea they push of people being sub-human. They can be bad people without using ‘sub-human’ level discourse to describe them..
One traditional characteristic of humanity is empathy. It’s not only humans that have it, but you’re not entirely human if you don’t have it. The Right is an entire political party that not only doesn’t have it, but revels in not having it.
But, you’re right. Humans that have no empathy exist, and they’re called sociopaths. So tell you what, you decide the appropriate level label for accurate discourse: Sociopath or subhuman.
It isn’t quite that Right and alt-right lack empathy. It’s just that they focus on that empathy on their own group and exclude everyone else. Basically a tribal attitude “I care for my own tribe/group and everyone else can go to hell for all I care”.
I’ve been hearing similar complaints of a lack of empathy from moderate members of the right about liberals.
At first, I thought they were really off base, but sometimes, they’re right.
Live and let live has been replaced with lawsuits, twitter mobs and public shaming in the minds of many people.
Comedy is how we cope. The ability to laugh at what is going on is why many of us are even remotely functional.
Humor also gets through barriers. Just attacking people is reflectively dismissed. If I can make you laugh about something, I can get you to consider the message in what I’m saying.
I mean, Trump never got insulted by people just saying how bad he is. He gets insulted by how completely irreverent we are to him. It’s shows like SNL making fun of him and his administration that have gotten through to him.
There’s a reason why the people mocking us make us so angry, rather than the people just arguing with us. The mockery actually gets through.
So humor is helpful to our mental health, as we need to laugh, and a useful way to challenge those in power.
Oh, and FYI, the Right does not lack empathy. The alt-right, maybe (excluding tribal empathy). But the Right itself has empathy–it just gets overridden by other concerns.
Trying to say everyone on the Right are sociopaths will only give the other side ammunition. They can disprove it by showing just one charitable conservative.
If not for the empathy of conservatives, I wouldn’t be alive today.
Trump wasn’t elected by people who found him funny. Trump was elected by people who found him serious and the fact the politicians ignored how much people genuinely hated them for the Recession and war politics of the past 16 years. Humor helps establish he is a RIDICULOUS figure and no one should take him seriously.
AND ALSO by people who found him funny. Laughing at him can be cathartic, but laughing at him and not taking him seriously is also one of the things that got us into this mess.
Yeah, I’m a bit tired of hearing that the problem was underestimating Trump. He lost the popular vote by 3 million in a year when the number of people who voted at all was at a 20 year low, but the responsibility for getting us into this mess rests squarely on the people who voted for him.
Most of whom did NOT do it because they thought it would be a funny gag.
We don’t need to take Trump seriously.
We need to take racism seriously. We need to take islamophobia and antisemitism and the rise of nazism (“the alt-right”) seriously, because they’re still around and these forces brought him into power.
The minority of people who voted for him despite not being white are easily swallowed by the majority of white folks who voted for him, and that’s the thing we should be worried about.
Many of the people who voted for him thought that ALL of our concerns about Trump were hilarious. We should be concerned about how our worries about racism, sexism, and xenophobia are really goddamn funny to a lot of people.
I would also make a distinction between the people who voted for him and the army of online trolls who got his “movement” off the ground. Many of them definitely think what he is doing to this country is very very funny.
Work as a moderator or admin on several wikis, including Walkypedia, can confirm, there was a palpable amount of racist trolls or transphobic ones during and immediately post election.
Praise god for ban hammers.
I think you are being entirely too generous in believing that people who find racism, sexism, etc funny aren’t themselves bigots. Like, just because they use “I was just trolling” as a shield from criticism doesn’t mean you should believe them that they don’t actually hold the believes they “joke” about holding.
Great, now Leslie has to barricade the doors and windows to keep the bricks/lightsabers from flying in. Or trick Robin to go outside and then barricade the house.
Ha! Jokes on you Robin. Kylo2007 is already halfway done with that.
On a more serious note: Get the hell out Robin. Jeez.
That first panel breaks my heart. Leslie looks both frustrated and defeated. It just makes the “wackiness” of Robin even worse :/
Kylo Ren is murdering his family all by himself, Robin, he doesn’t need your help.
I have nothing to add except I had to Google that word, facepalmed at its existence, and then felt old.
In this day and age, it’s easy enough to feel old once you hit 24.
I’m 31, but I don’t have a computer (just a phone), my house doesn’t have internet (phone again which runs out of high speed fast), I don’t have twitter or the like, I only check Willis’ twitter because it’s right there, and I have so few friends on Facebook (which I check once or twice a month) that a passing observer would think I was a catfish. You might as well double my age and give me my senior on the Internet discount
I’m 36, and everything you just said is pretty much the opposite of me. And in many ways, I’m still nowhere near as mature as I should be, so you can cut my age in half and give me my student discount.
Discounts for both of us!
Wait, the almighty Emperor of the Internets has to pay for it?
Interesting.
It’s not that he has to pay for it. He actually expects you to give him the money he would have saved had he paid for it. The only time he spends money is on specialty items like imported chocolate and laser sharks.
He’s not paying for his internet, he has an understanding with the company. They never charge him anything, and he magnanimously gives them a donation that just happens to be of equal value to what he would have payed.
Woo!
Poor Leslie. She looks so tired and so beaten down. Heartbreaking.
Yeah, she’s so defeated in these panels. Just giving up the fight entirely.
That hashtag rhymes with Negaduck.
Robin’s away from her minders…welp, this’ll end well.
Speaking logistically though, most noses in the DoA universe are a dot or thick line loosely connected to a thinner line, or in some cases such as Sarah: one curved line. So from a strictly objective stance Kylo2007’s claim is completely unsubstantiated.
But it’s not murder if it’s an alt-righter. They’re just a buncha nazis.
It’s murder if the “alt-righter” is the black sheep of his family and none of them share his political affiliations.
Also, Robin is kind of awful and he could simply be a fangirl or fanboy of Adam Driver.
Robin are you… really this oblivious. I… can’t tell if that is worse than the idea that she is doing this on purpose.
Poor Leslie
Still wearing no pants :v
I’ve been doing a Shortpacked! archive binge, and just came upon the perfect illustration of the sort of universe Robin belongs in. http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=2112
this is hilarious and sad at the same time
mostly sad
Nope, it is pretty damn funny. If it was real, it would be sad. Very sad, indeed.
“If it was real”
…people like this are real. This is a fictional depiction, true, but there are far, far too many Robins running about these days.
Still Not real.
Even her PHONE is Cheeto Orange!
Yeah, I’m not interested in this story line any more. :l
I get it but I’m out of ways to feel it. Empathy fatigue?
Oh well its not about me, I’ll just wait it out.
jesus willis what is your endgame
Something something redemption?
From what little I know of the movie… too late, Robin.
Well . . . *counts off fingers* . . . we still have Luke and Leia, and (depending on which pieces of fan speculation turn out to be right) maybe some other characters as well.
I wish we ‘did’ still have Leia…
She’ll be in one more movie.
…. plus, you know, CGI Leia. Because that’s a thing now.
IIRC, Lucasfilm made an official statement on the Star Wars website shortly after the news broke about Carrie Fisher that they have no further plans for a CGI Leia.
Jesus this strip is clumsy. A Donald Trump analog…being attacked by an alt-right shithead? It reads like someone who had the current political climate explained to them badly through a game of telephone.
Also, let me be the first to point this out: Death threats on twitter by Gamergaters? Unacceptable harassment. Death threats on twitter by Robin? Hilarious punchline!
And of course, let’s not forget the ongoing EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE relationship between Robin and Leslie that should be terrifying but somehow isn’t because of Robin’s Wacky Reality Distortion Looney Tunes Field By Acme.
Not to mention the poll on the side that basically says that all of the fundamentally inhuman monsters being put into the highest positions in the land right now is a situation RIPE for hilarious comedy! Those scamps at the GOP! Somehow their trampling of rights and human decency somehow always works out for them! WONK WONK.
Mixing wacky, cartoonish antic comedy with current horrifying political turmoil is NOT something that is working out for Willis AT ALL. If it doesn’t hit just right, it ends up with jokes that fall flat and alienate a lot of readers, and quite frankly he doesn’t have the chops to pull it off.
Please GOD let this storyline end soon so we can get back to good characters and stories.
Well here’s a post from someone we’ve never heard of before.
You’ve misunderstood a lot. Including how many readers agree with you.
I’ve misunderstood nothing, and this isn’t the first strip I’ve commented on. There are a ton of commenters and readers who have very big problems with this storyline, and they’re not unfounded.
Before, Robin was a tonally incongruous minor element in the strip. Now she’s a tonally incongruous element that sends normalizing messages about harassment and the far right.
Like I know Willis doesn’t INTEND for this to read the way it does to me (as an attempt to pass off horrific behaviour as wacky antics) because he’s clearly a socially aware dude but god damn has he fumbled the tone here pretty badly at least for me.
Same here.
Yeah I am sadly at the point of not knowing where this is going and being vaguely afraid of it. :\ I don’t want to see Robin rewarded for this behavior.
Soooo, how do you feel about political satire in a webcomic? You seem unsure. I will check back, Last Week Tonight is on.
Good political satire is great. Having a cartoon goofball say a parody of a madman’s campaign slogan is not that. I would LOVE for Robin to be to the GOP as Joyce currently is to evangelical Christians.
He did not do that and now it’s too late.
You underestimate Willis.
Why would you want Robin to be that? Robin should be the WORST person and it would be awesome. She’s an alternate version of an existing character anyway so why not make her a psychopath?
Because Willis does not have the stomach to do that to his lovable magical girl pixie lesbian goofball.
Yes, a Trumalogy.
Taking into account that this strip was conceived two months ago,
Dave’s prophetic abilities are impressive!
What would he (be able to) predict without the time-delay buffer?
I’m also a first time poster and I also don’t really understand how this makes so many people uncomfortable. Remember, no other character in this strip is even aware of this situation’s existence. If they knew about it and treated the situation as normal or funny, that would be weird, but that’s not happening.
….okay, wow.
1: Robin is not Donald Trump. Robin is a Hispanic woman who’s currently in the middle of a lesbian “scandal”. Reexamine through that lens and see why she’s being targeted by alt righters.
2: This is not a hilarious punchline. This is Robin off the leash. This is going to have political consequences for her.
3: Occasionally, the narrative takes a good minute to work itself out. I myself have been dissatisfied before with the way Joe takes a minute to get consequences for his actions, but that’s the hazard of serial reading. Robin will get her comeuppance for this.
4: Gallows humor. It’s a thing.
1. Robin is a Hispanic woman with a lesbian “scandal” who has broken into a lesbian woman’s home, gaslighted her, and is known for voting against lesbian rights. She’s not Donald Trump yet (small hands jokes aside) but she’s Edwards and that’s every bit as bad.
2. Death threats from Trump only increased his popularity. He’s a man who told the media they had to beg off. I see no reason why Robin wouldn’t win the election.
Right. I’m not saying Robin is a hero, as should be made abundantly clear by the rest of my comment. I’m addressing their specific concerns.
I have no opinion about the election. I’m just saying the narrative will punish Robin for her actions in some way.
*also, I should clarify, I mean the fictional election Robin’s taking part in.
What gaslighting has Robin done? Seems to me her infringements and general fucked-up behavior have been pretty open.
I think you’re overestimating Republican loyalty here. This is a swing district – Robin’s not especially likely to win on party loyalty. The middle is likely to be turned off by hypocrisy and some won’t vote for her because lesbian.
She’s not a lesbian, but folks who won’t vote for a lesbian rarely make distinctions between the LGBT+ community.
1. Robin is a character who is emotionally manipulating someone who has feelings for her in order to invade and stay in their home and is part of a political movement who is the greatest threat to the country in the last twenty years. To position her character in such a way that she’s a sympathetic victim in order to take potshots at another vile group for no reason is… problematic.
It would not be so had Willis written Robin as a villain so far a-la Toedad, but he has not. She is instead a loveable scamp, and that says a whole shitload of uncomfortable things.
2. This storyline will be saved if she ends up ruined and in jail. If she doesn’t, she has thicker plot armor than Batman.
3. I’m not anxious for Willis to get through the story, i’m anxious for him to end this story because Robin is not a good character, he’s not doing good political satire, and for all the world it looks like he tried to do a wacky Odd Couple sitcom situation but stumbled ass first into putting someone who has already been emotionally abused into an emotionally abusive situation and then playing the whole thing for laughs. It’s not a good look and I don’t have faith Willis has the stomach necessary to put one of his darlings in jail right next to Toedad where she belongs.
4. We do not need to laugh at the Right. We need to do exactly one thing, and that’s be furious until the next major election.
1.) What part of this comes off as sympathetic to you?? And honestly, I think people are reading her as loveable scamp because of Shortpacked, and because that’s clearly how Robin sees herself. Leslie doesn’t. If the narrative were painting Robin as charmingly wacky, Leslie would not be reacting as she is now.
3.) Then my advice to you is, take a break from serial reading. Come back in a month or so, when this storyline has hopefully worked itself out, and catch up. Like I said, serial reading is not the best when you’re waiting for something specific to happen.
4.) Some people use humor as a coping mechanism. It’s a thing. Also, humor and anger are not in any way mutually exclusive.
I don’t ageee with your response to point 1, and your response to point 3 is a bit condescending, but I do agree with point 4.
I am perfectly capable of both laughing at Trump and being angry about the encroaching nazism in my country.
The idea that we should strive to maintain constant anger for the next two years is completely unreasonable. Emotional exhaustion will set in. Don’t worry about people laughing at Trump unless you see them encouraging people not to bother voting.
I fully agree with NoOneLikesRobin’s opinion.
I’m sorry David Willis, you are the internet’s foremost cartoon-drawing expert on life as a Joyce, but this arc has firmly cemented the fact that you have done the literary equivalent of what she’s famous for: Playfully committing a serious faux pas that casts doubt on your sincerity as someone hoping to understand and do right by good and often vulnerable people.
4 is completely right, and the fact that folks are so busy making dumb cheeto jokes is a symptom of how badly liberals have retreated into fart-huffing ass-vanishment.
Isn’t it kind of hilariously presumptuous to claim that “a lot of readers” agree with you? It’s actually pretty Trumpian – “a lot of people are saying…”
You also must be from some other dimension wherein the actions of GOP officials are not mocked 24/7 by a wide range of comedic talent. In such a scenario… welcome! We have and have had Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, Bill Maher, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, and many others for years! The bizarre and oft-inhumane actions of the Grand Old Party are *indeed* ripe for comedy, just like everything that has ever been bad has been, because comedy is an excellent mechanism by which to counter the otherwise bleak circumstances one finds themselves in.
A not-insignificant number of comments in the past strips with Robin are by people who have experienced emotionally manipulative/gaslighting relationships and are squicked out by this storyline. You are welcome to go back and decide if i’m right or not when I use the general term “A lot”.
And you’re right. The greatest comedic minds of our time all took every single shot they could at Trump and the Right, cutting them down to size with the power of comedy and they did such a good job that Trump sailed right into office where he will cause damage that will last for the rest of our young lives. So yeah, yuk yuk times are done. It’s not funny anymore.
Comedy is relative. It’s not funny to you, but others may disagree.
I don’t see too many people laughing here, though. If there’s a punchline, it’s Robin shooting herself in the metaphorical foot.
Wow. I had to look twice to be sure we were reading the same comic. Clearly, we are reading Willie’s tone in two very different ways. Perhaps it’s because I long ago stopped expecting DoA to be a comedy. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have personal experience with gaslighting so I don’t feel it’s being made light of. I don’t know. I would offer my reading of this arc by way of contrast.
To me, Robin has always been a villain. From the first time we met her, she routinely dehumanized Kyle by refusing to acknowledge that he has a name. She demonstrated that, to her, politics is a game where the objective is simply to stay in Congress and enjoy the perks of her office and the attention as long as possible. She confirmed this when she told Joyce that the religious liberty bill she supported was all about placating her base. She also defended herself by claiming that nothing had would probably happen… Probably. She doesn’t see her actions as having real consequences for herself or others.
She’s completely divorced herself from consequences in her mind. I get the impression that she’s never had to face any. Her “zany manic pixie” persona defends that barrier. To her, any disastrous, damaging thing she does is just a harmless goof. People will look the other way when she does something horrible because, to them, she’s just a loveable weirdo who doesn’t mean any harm. When horrible things happen to someone because of her actions, she and her supporters assume that it COULDN’T be her fault, because she isn’t really evil.
And that’s the importance to me of depicting a villain like Robin. She won’t burn your house down because she hates you, she’ll burn it down because she was playing with fireworks in the basement. It was all innocent, really. And who keeps fireworks in their basement anyway? You should have been more careful. And by the time the fire department comes, she’s long gone. You’ll be fine. I mean, you must have insurance, right?
Now robin is finally going to face some consequences and she knows it. Members of both parties will be all over her now that they’ve smelled blood in the water. She’s desperately getting to avoid those consequences by hiding in Leslie’s apartment forever. She’s doubling down on her manic pixie routine in a frantic effort to make the problem go away because it always worked before.
Leslie’s reaction here is to show just how thin that routine has worn. Her absurdly disproportionate response to Kylo2007 shows is just how afraid she is. All the hate and bigotry she’s pretended wasn’t really there is about to bite her in the ass and bite her hard.
That’s how I read this arc. That’s why I love it even though I’m not laughing one bit.
That’s a good take on it and puts her actions in a new light
Leslie looks like shes going to cry in the third, wouldn’t blame her if she did in the current situation
It looks like Robin is going to destroy something else: her political career! Some politicians just don’t have the instincts to be allowed direct contact with their potential voters.
If you aren’t following current politics, I have bad news.
Like I said, some politicians know how to make it work for them. Robin clearly doesn’t.
Robin probably got a bunch more votes for this.
And that’s the news from 2017.
You know, Willis, it’s hilarious you did that scene where Robin completely broke down and demanded softball questions from Leslie’s class because that was a PERFECT parody of Trump dealing with his first press conference. It just happened before Trump when no one assumed he’d bomb that badly.
Trump just called them fake news (Which they are) and then ignored them.
Trump’s definition of fake news is ‘anyone who disagrees with him or writes an unflattering story’.
This is not me being facetious – this is a thing he has said. Even FOX NEWS had a field day with that one.
I don’t know who I’m more disappointed in – Leslie, for not casting Summon Law Enforcement, or Robin, for dignifying nose criticism with any response.
So… what IS going on with Robin? This shows all the signs to be a distraction from a level of denial even larger than Walky with the math score. And I don’t think it only has to do with wanting to kiss ladies or craving more Steven Universe.
My best guess is that she wants out of politics but the whole thing is to big for her, so she self sabotages instead. Most likely she has not come clean to herself about it yet.
Either way, she uses Leslie as a prop and she hurts her tremendously.
Yeah, that’s my feeling too. I wouldn’t be surprised if Leslie and Joyce have something to do with it too. I suspect that Robin has had a Road to Damascus moment about the effect of her actions. Combined with how much she’s coming to hate the pressures of campaigning and being a pretty face reading pre-written lines, she’s trying to throw the election (if only on a subconscious level).
Robin is still engaged in a home invasion and destruction of Leslie’s property. Her total disregard for Leslie as an actual human being means she hasn’t turned any corners at all.
The deepest problems being depicted in this arc are detached from any gender or identity issues — what Robin is doing would be wrong regardless. At most, she’s getting some slack from some people — if Robin were a male character engaged in this level of stalkerism and violation, the number of people who would find this funny would be even lower.
Maybe, though gender swaps usually fail to be useful analogies.
To be a true parallel, you’d have to gender swap both characters, not just Robin, to preserve both parity and the whole “denial about being gay” thing.
Honestly, I’d expect all 4 gender combinations to produce very different reactions.
ok no wat who are the ppl in the fuckzone sneak peek?
That would be Sayyid, Becky’s coworker at Galasso’s Pizza (and Subs) and the guy who gave AmaziGirl his skateboard for her to use during the chase scene with Toedad like a year back, and I believe his boyfriend because if I remember correctly from one of the times he briefly appeared in a Slipshine ad before he’s either gay (or bisexual currently in a relationship with another male, I don’t know which and I want to be inclusive). Sayyid himself is this kind of sleeper hit character I would say, in that every time he shows up most of the comments section wants more of him. Partly because he’s a gay Muslim, partly because he’s more serious and deadpan than most other characters and his reactions provide a decent amount of humor whenever he does show up, especially in comparison to some of the more outrageous characters.
Bryan is name of the other guy. I remember a one-off panel where one of them was drumming and the other was looking on, behind perhaps an electric piano.
I’d like to know more about their “how we met” story.
Bryan’s the guy who Joyce talks to at the LGBTQ meetup thing, as well
I’m sorry to say it but I’m getting a little bored here. These one-off gags never interest me as much as the ongoing story-lines.
Her her!
…This is part of an ongoing storyline though.
I really kinda do wonder how this whole thing would have come off during a Clinton Presidency. Obviously there’s still the tone shift issue, especially coming right after/between the thing with Ruth and the thing with Joyce and Ryan, but how much of the refuge in audacity we’re missing comes from which bit?
I think the uncomfortable levels might not be as high. Don’t get me wrong, they’d still be up there due to this kind of humor clashing with the framing and tone that DoA tends to have, making it feel awkward and the fact that Leslie (who we’ve had more time with, therefore have more stakes in) seems to be rather miserable & exasperated by Robin’s refusal to even register her discomfort with this situation and how much she wants her to just leave her alone doubling that. Doing this kind of story under a Clinton Presidency would just erase the troubling connections to the actions of a President who seems to be less mature than a 12 year old.
I think Robin was always going to be a minefield since family values candidates are monstrous in Indiana thanks to the efforts of Pence making their danger real as well as immediate. Also, reality caught up to the “all hat, no cattle” candidates like Robin was in Shortpacked. I trust Willis to be planning something but I do suspect the anger Robin gets is probably a lot deeper than planned.
Leslie, get a stun gun on the way back home and some mace. Maybe that will get Robin’s attention.
Get a firearm, too, and find the local chapter of the Pink Pistols.
They do good work
If Leslie’s worried about the consequences of calling the cops on a Congresswoman, shooting (or threatening to shoot) one would far riskier.
At some point, one has to to start raising the black flag and slitting throats; also, lunatic robinites are a risk for the future.
It’s why I recommended the stun gun and mace. Yeah, it’d be bad but not as bad as killing her.
I’ve said it before but I will say it again: Robin is hiding from something; what she’s hiding from is still guesswork but she is hiding. I think that Leslie realises this and is trying to work out what and why too. If only because, if she solves Robin’s problem for her, she’ll probably get her out of her apartment.
omic reactions.
1. Panel One: Leslie is trying to talk to Robin like she’s a friend they just had a bender with who wants them to go drinking again or smoke some weed. This is not good. Robin is an intruder in your house and has already resisted being physically thrown out. Call the cops, call some friends, or go to the media yourself and tell them she’s INSANE.
2. I find it incongruous Ruth and Amber both have their mental illnesses dealt with seriously while Robin is speaking from a perspective that strikes me as a complete break with reality. Is she in a psychotic fugue state or just literally a psychopath? I’m actually amused by this in the comic way but this feels totally like Shortpacked rather than Dumbing of Age.
3. Leslie, why would you WANT her to go back to her campaign? The campaign which is about destroying gay rights? I mean, yes, it gets her out of your house but you know that’s a bad thing as well. I know love is blind but this is a crazy person in your house.
4. I wonder if Robin just repeats what she wants and assumes it will eventually work and people will do what she says. It’s like she’s got a Solar Exalted charm or is a Ventrue with Presence and Dominate. Why yes, I played a lot of White Wolf games in the past.
I do wonder what her staff are doing, though. Also, I point out Robin may actually not be in any danger because of her lesbian “scandal.” It’s not like they have any actual story to report so far and the public isn’t exactly going to vote Democrat because of it. They may not vote but that’s not a guarantee anyway.
5. I note Robin doesn’t look for anyone tweeting her beforehand and I can’t help but imagine she’s ignored all of her messages.
6. Kylo Ren dislikes her? Well, that increases my life of him except for the fact I’ve just discovered from the comments threat the Alt-Right likes the First Order and Kylo Ren. That makes me feel unclean by association. I’m also a fan of the Principality of Zeon and Imperium of Mankind but I’m aware I’m not SUPPOSED TO BE. Do I have to disassociate myself from the bad guys I love to hate because people actually love them?
I also think Robin’s polls will go up the more hate she spews on the net.
To be fair, aside from the Tau everyone wants to wipe everybody else out for various reasons in 40k, so it’s not so bad to be pro-Imperium of Mankind when the other options are: sentient humanoid space fungus that exists only to brutally kill and be killed, a horde of alien locusts from a different galaxy that strips whole planets of all organic material, space elves who view humans as a mix between monkeys and rodents, evil space elves who view humans as toys to satisfy their various decadent kinks and sense freakyness including flaying people alive for shits and giggles, a race of undead machines who got their souls stolen from them and want to wipe out bio-organic life in an attempt to get them back, and literal demons who want nothing more than to devour people’s souls. So yeah, compared to that the corrupt feudal theocratic police state that worships a corpse on life support isn’t that bad. Except for the Tau, cause the Tau are awesome, and the only ones smart enough to recognize you don’t need melee when you have goddamn handheld plasma weapons and rail guns. What’s a monofilament chainsaw sword going to do for you when I can just blow off half your head and leave the other half a crispy residue from half a mile away?
There is a sense I’m getting that the Tau are regarded with a sort of startled resentment by the other races in the WH40k universe for not defaulting to xenophobia and genocide as their primary form of collective social expression.
The Tau are still utterly totalitarian and the only reason they seem remotely moral is because they’re in 40k where every other faction is characterized by omnicidal bloodlust or genocidal racism. By real world standards they’re still deeply horrifying.
Farsight Enclaves: What happens when a Tau realizes that the main empire is that fucked.
To be fair, a lot of their totalitarian tendencies were added later because GW decided that a technologically advanced species doomed by their own optimism and denial of the supernatural in a galaxy inherently hostile to both approaches wasn’t grimdark enough.
Well it’s not grimdark enough for 40K where the whole point is being comically grimdark.
Don’t forget the god of life and therefore also parasites. I don’t know much about 40k, but he seems to be pretty chill from what I know.
Eh, the closest thing to a ‘chill’ god is Isha, the Eldar Goddess of Healing who Papa Nurgle keeps locked in a cage because the insane eldritch abomination of stagnation and plague thinks trying out his new diseases on her and seeing how long it takes her to heal them is foreplay.
…the Laughing God is pretty chill, if you’re not Ahriman or Slaanesh.
Well, I suppose that could refer to grandfather Nurgle, as he represents the stagnant cycle of life and death, who infects the galaxy with pandemic plagues to show his affection and is the only god who doesn’t completely betray those who die in his service by devouring their souls. Or his “wife” whom he kidnapped so his sister/brother couldn’t eat her when she/he devoured 95% of the galactic empire that worshipped her. And that’s the PG version without divine torture porn. So pretty chill compared to his sibling gods.
The one other thing I know about him is that one of his troops types is basically just an over excited puppy with a thousand diseases.
What I’m saying is that, to reconcile the nice to minions, uses doom puppies with faces like coral stitched to an Anurognathus aspect with the grimdark aspect, I consider the latter part to be in-universe propaganda.
The Tau, in that setting, are kinda the poster children for “least bad option”. They’re still horrible dicks, they’re just not horrible genocidal xenophobic murder-hobo gibbering-insane dicks.
You know, Robin isn’t actually mentally ill. Most abusers aren’t. Lundy Bancroft talks in his book (“Why Does He Do That: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men*”) about how treating abusiveness like a mental illness is actually actively detrimental to getting abusers to change their behavior.
So I would not expect to ever see Robin get treatment for this. She could talk to a therapist about the stress of being in the closet, for sure, but willfully disregarding someone else’s boundaries is about entitlement and self-absorption, both things that neurotypical people excel at.
* he apologizes in his foreword for the gendered language and includes chapters on abuse in same-gender relationships, noting that he finds abuse to be strongly but not exclusively gendered, and also talking some about what changes with an abusive woman and a male victim.
As far as we know, she hasn’t been diagnosed. I’ll agree with that.
Just ignoring Leslie’s boundaries wouldn’t be enough to make me think she is. It’s possibly this is all more willful than I’m reading it and that she’s basically gaslighting the readers, but I think it’s more than that. She really seems to not even recognize the existence of boundaries or of any kind of social norms, not just with Leslie, but as a politician too. We’ve never seen her break out of that character. We’ve never seen her even pretend to be anything but a nut. I mean, she panders, but she tells the people she’s pandering to that she’s faking it? That’s not political. That’s not normal.
The real problem is that the narrative doesn’t take her seriously either. But also doesn’t treat her as crazy. So far it seems to warp itself around her so that it works for her.
No, none of this behavior even suggests mental illness. People who have difficulty with social norms (autistic people, people with APD, etc) are no more likely to be assholes, and in fact? WOULD HAVE ALREADY LEFT THE APARTMENT.
Let me explain why:
People who have difficulty with social norms know they have difficulty with social norms, and tend to be hyper-responsive to direct instructions (like Leslie telling Robin to get out, as she has done many times now). Because they do not rely on their own judgment where social norms are concerned, and rely instead on scripts and what they are told.
Robin on the other hand is insisting that she can psychically tell that Leslie really wants her to stay and doesn’t mean it when she says GTFO.
It’s the complete opposite of how the people you’re accidentally stigmatizing would respond to this situation, and is in fact extremely neurotypical.
And I don’t know which politicians you’re thinking of, but walking back her support of bills when questioned on the morality of them is actually pretty normal, especially if a politician is in a room full of people who are angry about the bill and no cameras are pointed at her? Like, do you also think it was a sign of mental illness when Romney told a bunch of supporters that he was only pretending to be in favor of things they didn’t like in what he thought was a private meeting? People do this shit all the time.
Yeah, I don’t really think it maps to any real mental illness here. It maps to wacky cartoon character hijinks, honestly.
That’s why it seems so unrealistic to me that I can’t take her seriously. If it’s mental illness it’s a kind she’s been able to function with all along without being aware of at all. If it’s not, then it really is all deliberate and she really is a scheming manipulative mastermind playing the role of a wacky incompetent.
As for the politics, I wasn’t talking about walking back her support of a bill, but of the less panderingish/more panderingish/”which me would you like? I’ve already blown through two, but I’ve still got slutty librarian and hyperpatriotic cowboy?”
That’s not normal, even for politicians. They may well put on those poses for different audiences, but not so openly? Lying, sure. Telling the audience you’re lying to them, not so much.
Being more honest about what they’re all doing still isn’t grounds for diagnosing her with anything. If anything I think it could be seen as part of her Trump Analogue schtick, since a lot of the call-outs for Trump from conservative politicians were very frequently satirized as boiling down to “hey stop saying the racist subtext of our campaign speeches as TEXT!”
I don’t necessarily think it IS part of the parody. Being more honest than is strictly wise definitely seems characteristic of Robin. But not every poor decision points is indicative of executive dysfunction.
I don’t think you’re doing this on purpose; I don’t think most of the comment section is. But the impulse to say that Bad People Doing Bad Things must have mental illnesses or personality disorders not only flies in the face of the statistics we have on violent crime, it also lets us comfortably distance ourselves from Bad People Doing Bad Things, and ultimately makes it harder to prevent Bad Things from happening because we’re too busy scrutinizing people with mental illness to address the root cause of things like say gun violence.
Again, I’m grasping at straws to find some way to read her as something other than wacky cartoon parody. Or SP! Robin strung out on Cadbury Creme Egg cereal.
I see the Trump Analogue, but Robin’s so much more extreme. Not in her bigotry and general evil, but in how she approaches it. It’s not “saying the racist subtext of our campaign speeches as TEXT!”, it’s going up on stage and asking the crowd if they want the racist persona tonight.
I’m not disagreeing that she’s a bit cartoonish, though, so as long as we’re not still arguing about whether Robin asking if they want “the racist persona” is evidence of a mental illness, I think we’re good. Robin’s wacky-hijinks mode of operation and how strongly it resembles her SP! version, is part of why I think we’re still getting the occasional Robin/Leslie shipper who doesn’t understand why people are calling Robin scary.
(Though the pedant in me wishes to point out that being a parody of Trump kinda necessitates exaggeration. If she were just supposed to BE him it’d be different, but she’s Robin with a dollop of Trump parody.)
She’s not crazy. She’s an incredible asshole.
Yikes, that poll is… unpleasant.
“Sorry Lady. Already did 1/3 of that. Now if only I can find my uncle…”
This early Shortpacked comic perfectly sums up Robin’s DOA character.
http://www.shortpacked.com/index.php?id=172
Am I the only that thought panel 1 Leslie was saying ‘Congrats’ at first instead of ‘Congresswoman’?
Yeah, I’m beginning to see the point people are making. Trump is awful, and yes, we make fun of him. We do so while acknowledging how awful he is.
Robin is not Trump. But she has shown herself to be quite awful. But the strip does not seem to acknowledge this. It focuses on her not wanting to face reality, as if that’s the problem.
The problem is that she’s a stalker who broke into someone’s house, was thrown out, and still came right back. She refuses to accept Leslie’s rejection. Even the stalkers in movies that glorify that sort of thing aren’t as bad as Robin is here.
Her politics aren’t the issue. She could be the perfect anti-bigotry liberal and what she’s doing would still be horrible. And the strip needs to treat it as horrible.
Though if she were “the perfect anti-bigotry liberal” this whole mess probably wouldn’t have happened.
Why can’t Robin be Trump? It’d be fine if she really was just an irredeemable monstrous ditz.
Trump is doing excactly what people voted for him to do.
A) Those are not good things.
B) People don’t get to vote on policy.
So considering how many months in advance Willis writes each strip before posting them, I’m kind of getting the feeling this was written back when everybody were still convinced there was no way someone like Trump would win the election and we’d be able to make wacky jokes if we’d gotten someone like this in the White House. Or something. Every strip with Robin as a parody recently feels like they’re written for a less depressing mood than we currently are in is what I’m trying to say.
It’s a symptom of the hubristic liberalism that got us into this shitshow.
I shit you not, I am an author of superhero fiction (among other things) and the primary villain of my third book (THE SECRETS OF SUPERVILLAINY) was President Omega. I wrote him as a gleefully over the top caricature which was Handsome Jack meets the aliens from They Live. Now everyone says I wrote him as a Trump parody despite it being written two years ago.
I just checked Tumblr. Willis was talking about the election already having happened right before a preview of the February 10 strip. So this is definitely post-election.
So…
Is anyone expecting #begreatamerica to actually become an active and trending hashtag?
Comic Reactions:
Panel 1: Leslie in this panel is heartbreaking. Look at her posture, partially curled up into herself, with her head in her hands, She’s just broken down here, fully surrendered to the situation she has become entrapped by.
And her plea is downright plaintive. Begging Robin to recognize that she has a real life and that she needs to be in it rather than held hostage to her delusion, knowing that won’t be heard and fearing that this will precipitate some greater bit of awfulness, maybe even the full destruction of her life as she knows it.
And it’s a surrender on another boundary she tried to set. Having Robin leave first and handle the media scrum, so that it didn’t all fall on Leslie and put her in the position of opening up herself to violent attack if she tries to tell the truth. She’s leaving to teach today, cause Robin successfully ran out the clock on her, leaving her alone to deal with the consequences of Robin’s mess… again.
Panel 2: And Robin continues to ignore that, instead continuing to try and reinforce this weird “cohabiting couple” sort of delusion and envisioning herself as the wacky stay-at-home wife. And this echoes a terrifying part of society right now. What do you do when a person openly refuses to interact with reality and instead follows this fantasy world of their own making? And what do you do especially when that hurts real people who are being eliminated or run over to make the world fit into this broken frame?
Panel 3: And again, another tortured face from Leslie, and one sad last attempt to set a boundary, but all the anger is gone and left with just hurt. She states it outright. That she’s not going to be held hostage forever by Robin’s refusal to deal with consequences for her actions. That she’s not going to be run roughshod into a “relationship” that makes her feel this miserable and makes her despise herself for betraying her moral values.
And it makes Robin’s line all the more painful. Leslie is begging here. Begging for even an approximation of her life and agency back, to be let off of this dangerous ride where she knows that any attempt to force her out by cops or violence is much more likely to end poorly for her than for Robin. And Robin doesn’t even do her the courtesy of hearing her, instantly dismissing it for the latest scheme du jour that will override it.
And that this has happened repeatedly for what has now nearly been two days for Leslie, just makes it all the more heartbreaking.
How are we EVER supposed to view Robin as anything other than one of the antagonists of this fiction, at this point?
Panel 4: And once again, Robin runs roughshod over Leslie’s attempt at setting a boundary. Escalating the situation another step up where now her home is going to be the headquarters of a vile anti-gay politician’s re-election campaign and where Robin is a permanent fixture in her house rather than a temporary horror-show.
Panel 5: And Leslie’s posture, shoulders slightly hunched, face sad and defeated, just slowly shuffling away. She’s broken by all of this and like a lot of people under relentless assault of a fictional narrative, has found it easier to just roll with it and go numb rather than trying to continue fighting a losing battle.
Her last boundary abandoned before she even states it. “Try not to destroy anything else”. Not “don’t destroy anything else”, just “try not to”. She knows that Robin will destroy more things of her life and is learning to make her peace with that to survive. And seeing her this broken is just brutal, because she doesn’t deserve to be held hostage by a dangerous stalker who refuses to acknowledge reality.
Panel 6: And Robin here, is still firmly in her delusions. In her mind, there’s been some chattering and some sitcom shenanigans, but she’s in a new notarelationship with an exciting new gal-pal who’s putting her up and while she might occasionally make noise with her mouth hole, probably said something about being a better you, which sounds like an awesome catch-phrase, so vomit that out there as an upbeat slogan*.
After all, everything is great, right?
*And yeah, let’s just acknowledge the elephant in the room that is Robin being incredibly Trump like in a lot of ways, right down to including half-remembered explanations by staff members in his rambling statements and that fucking bigoted slogan that has become a rallying cry for all the worst people in the world. Like, her actions would be vile no matter what, but the fact that she keeps evoking a literal fascist who is destroying my country and whose actions directly threat the life of many of my friends and family members, not to mention myself just makes it all a little harder to bear.
Panel 7: That the people who think shouting “cuck” in angry racist fashion to literally everything now hold real institutional power fills me with existential dread every day. I swear this country feels like Leslie, held hostage to an angry narcissist who will gleefully destroy everything to get some fictional idea of what reality should be to well… still be a pipe dream.
But that’s depressing, so instead let me end by saying I’m very excited to see Leslie at school, away from the relentless enforcement of a fictional reality and open dismissal and where she’ll have time to be alone with her thoughts a little bit and process… or at least would if I wasn’t suspecting a long line of students and queer groups on campus will be wanting a word with her about the rumors.
At least her class will probably have a lot of questions – az Roz is in that class. (it’s probably the gender studies class she has to teach right now)
The pragmatic solution would be to talk to Roz and tell her that she can (nad has to) have her sister back. (and she needs to go to Leslies home and fetch her personally)
The pragmatic solution would’ve been to call the cops some 5 strips of this shitshow ago.
Let me say this right now, as clearly as I can: Roz doesn’t HAVE to do anything. Robin isn’t her responsibility. Leslie should have called the cops as soon as she found Robin in her bed, and her coming back through the window after LITERALLY being thrown out the door is cause for throatpunching; but NONE of that is on Roz.
And even if it was on Roz, what’s Robin’s teenage sister supposed to do to get her out of a place she doesn’t want to leave? Threaten to tell Mom on her? Even Robin’s campaign staff is a better option.
I do want to see Roz’s reaction to all this, though; last time we saw her she only had about a quarter of the story.
Yeah, we already know Roz has no control and little to know influence over Robin.
That’s true, and also, nobody else has…
But I nevertheless think that if you have created an (illusionary) bubble and try to live in it (like Robin does here), the moment when somebody whom you know, and who knows you very well turns up, and you suddenly have to see yourself with the eyes of the other person, the bubble will burst.
It might not work on Robin, though…
and the pragmatic/pessimistic response, as made by several commenters over the last bunch of strips in this plot thread, is that the cops probably won’t/can’t do shit.
…well, Robin’s clearly having a mental breakdown at this point.
I mean, that twitter exchange in particular. The response to a fairly pathetic insult (“nose is a funny shape” combined with “cuck”, an insult so weak that I’m amazed it’s still being used) is a death threat? To someone who’s screen name seems to imply he’s 9-10 (hence why he’s using cuck, an insult that’s generally aimed at men, to a woman)?
Sure, comedic exagerration, getting a gag in because it’s a daily strip, but still… yeeesh.
Also: $5 says that Robin’s going to make a surprise appearance in the class. Because right now she sees Robin as her safety net, and not having her around for even an hour would be too much for her to stand >_<.
So Robin is Trump in this universe?
She can do anything she likes and they vote for her anyway and Leslie will just give up and let her live ehre jsut cause Robin wants?
Call the police or something.
Given her membership in the LGBT community, her location smack dab in the middle of Red America, and the fact that she was once homeless, I’m thinking Leslie has might have some trust issues where the police are concerned.
Also, Congresswoman. She technically doesn’t have the RIGHT to give orders to the police, but what are the odds that she’ll be able to anyway?
Not even a little, Robin isn’t doing anything, Trump is doing excactly what he was elected to do.
Also people in DoA arn’t trying to overthrow democracy like they are in the u.s (Protesting election results is effectivly the same as wanting to get rid of democracy)
“Protesting election results is effectively the same as wanting to get rid of democracy”
…run that by me again?
Protesting a vote where the general public is involved is effectively the same as protesting against the mjority, hence my comment.
…but the majority of the votes went to Clinton. By an unprecedented three million.
what?! no! protesting election results is absolutely NOT the same as wanting to get rid of democracy! Ok, I’m not gonna get into comment-section debates but this sentence just made me cringe. Democracy is much greater and more complex than just presidential elections, and blind faith in election results is dangerous. It’s important to question if the system is working properly, otherwise we can end up supporting a broken, corrupted system with blind faith that it’s the right thing.
The system isn’t working as Hillary won the popular vote, yet the people where over ruled. (Even though I agree more with Trump, the system needs to change)
Protests are free speech, enshrined in the constitution, but sure keep on drinkin that kook-aid.
I don’t know if “kook-aid” was a typo or purposeful, but I love it!
Totally accidental /shakes fist at autocorrect for never fixing actual typos
But I’m glad it amused at least
Agreed, people have a right to complain, but not a right to vandalizm.
Nobody said vandalism. They said protest. Those are not the same thing.
For the record, considering their comments on the past few strips, I’m half convinced CrockedCop is a troll of the lowest order.
I’ve only noticed them today, but yeah, seems likely.
I’ve certainly never seen anyone refer to “the regressive left” who was at all interested in an intellectually honest discussion.
Just because I have a diffrent political stance dosn’t make me a troll. (Liberterian fyi)
Fart captor: I don’t really think this is the place for “honest discussion”. (If you have a / know of / partake in a political board where we can discuss the issue I will be more then happy to.)
CrockedCop:
So you’re willing to participate in a honest discussion without hyperbole and ridiculous fact-twisting, but just not HERE, because this isn’t a forum exclusively dedicated to politics?
Now I feel bad I didn’t see this sooner when there was a chance you’d see me not take you up on that offer.
Yeah, see how sympathetic the police are to her situation. See how much they’re willing to do.
Not saying the police don’t suck in the u.s, just trying to point out burning down lokal shops might not be the best way to complain.
Also this is my first response comment and I’m sorry for the spam(ish) effect this will have….but you people started draging real politics into a web comic.
A) Again, people said protest. Not burning down local shops.
B) If nobody listens to peaceful protests, yeah, riots happen. Always have. People need to be heard somehow.
Or at least I sort of relate to Robin?
Robin’s behavior to me reads very much like someone who has mental health difficulties – specifically, someone who has a naturally impaired ability to reflexively understand what other people are thinking and feeling, and who, on top of that, has had some sort of interpersonal trauma, likely in the family. She reads like someone who’s had her own boundaries eroded over the years, and who because of that, and because of being naturally bad at it, now has difficulty understanding that other people’s boundaries are serious. She’s also having a very obvious personal crisis and dealing with it through refusing to admit that her own emotions are serious.
I don’t do the thing where I behave like a wacky cartoon character, but the rest of Robin’s behavior feels extremely familiar. I never broke into someone’s house and refused to leave while having a personal crisis, but before I knew that other people were not like this, I did fuck up a lot of friendships by completely failing to understand when another person needed personal space, especially when having a personal crisis. I still sometimes annoy the people I care about when I don’t anticipate their needs. It’s my responsibility to try not to behave in ways that hurt people, and other people have the right to be hurt if I fuck that up (and to do whatever they need to do to protect themselves), but I am not evil for having these difficulties, and I was not evil for not being aware that my behavior was inappropriate before I reasonably could’ve become aware that my behavior was inappropriate.
It may be that Robin is not intended to be mentally ill – perhaps it’s not that she has difficulty telling what other people are feeling and when it’s serious, but that she simply doesn’t care – and whether or not Robin is intended to be mentally ill, it’s okay for people not to like her. She has many, many unlikable qualities, regardless of what’s going on in her head, and she’s sort of been used as a parallel to a real life very unpleasant individual, so obviously many people will dislike her, and I don’t have an issue with that at all.
However, it would be really, really great if people stopped talking about Robin like having difficulty with knowing how other people feel, especially about boundaries, makes you evil. Everyone seems to be talking about Leslie’s reactions like Robin should very obviously know that Leslie is seriously upset and not just exasperated, and that’s starting to cross over into some territory that harms real people who have trouble with emotional recognition or reflexive empathy. I would NOT know that someone behaving like Leslie is seriously upset and not just exasperated. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t care if that person was seriously upset – I just wouldn’t know! Personally, I would ask, because I know I have difficulty telling, because my issues have been brought to my attention… but someone who does not know they need to ask is not evil for not knowing, even if they are someone most people would not want to be around.
It’s making it REALLY hard to read the comments. I don’t know how Cerberus deals with this with Amber, but I admire her greatly for it.
I started out giving Robin the benefit of the doubt along these lines.
However, IMO, she’s gone from what you describe, to very actively disregarding Leslie as a human being and showing an absolute lack of care for what Leslie might be thinking or feeling. It’s not just that she doesn’t know, it’s that she obviously doesn’t give even half a fuck.
I can understand why it would feel familiar and I can especially understand why the comment section would be a crappy place for you right now because a lot of people are calling Robin mentally ill and evil in the same breath.
But Robin’s behavior isn’t really consistent with difficulty understanding boundaries, so much as pointedly refused to accept them. Leslie has been extremely clear that she doesn’t want Robin here, using plain language that leaves no room for ambiguity or misunderstanding, and Robin is insisting that she knows what Leslie wants better than Leslie does, and that Leslie secretly means the opposite of what she’s saying.
That’s why I don’t think Robin is intended to have any kind of mental illness, or developmental disorder, or personality disorder. But even if she were, it wouldn’t be what’s causing this behavior.
Because it’s not that she doesn’t know she needs to ask, it’s that she has literally told Leslie that Leslie is lying about what she wants.
That makes you a jerk, not lacking reflexive empathy.
Being disabled doesn’t mean she can’t also be an asshole who sucks at boundaries, but you’re right, that’s not actually inherent in the disorder.
Basically, you can be both an asshole and have a personality disorder, but not every asshole has a PD and people with PDs are no more likely to be assholes (and tend to be less likely, because they think more about other people’s feelings and viewpoints and those of us to whom that kind of understanding comes more “naturally”).
The issue isn’t that Robin can’t read Leslie’s subtext – there is no more subtext. That ship sailed when Leslie LITERALLY threw her out the door. It’s all text now, and has been for a bit.
The problem is that Robin doesn’t CARE about what Leslie (or anyone else, so far) wants, as long as she, Robin, gets what she wants.
Agreed.
I think finding resonance with characters is a good thing, even if they also have traits that are not so great. I’m glad you are able to do with Robin!
Robin is still here?? Call the cops Leslie, for your own sanity
How do you like real Robin, Leslie? Do you still want her to be that way?
You didn’t consider that maybe there was a good reason to started to pretend to be somebody else, didn’t you?
Its interesting going back over the whole interactions, seeing it all unfold, how Leslie stopped Dorothy from questioning Robin
The sad thing is Leslie might use those memories to mean she “deserves” what shes getting from Robin
Geez Willis, are all your lesbian relationships going to involve one of them being ultra clingy and never wanting to leave their lover’s room?
Becky/Dina?
Other universe spoilers: the other incarnation of Dina had a tendency towards clingy insecurity, which may well show up again someday here. Nothing remotely to this level, however.
I think that insecurity already showed up, only to blasted away:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/superglue/
True! Also here: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vacuum/relief/
It’s great to see Dina with somebody who is happy about all her traits. Becky seems to like reassuring Dina’s insecurities whenever they come up. Moreover, Becky experiences Dina’s potential clinginess as devotion, and returns it, and they’re very happy about that. They’re good for each other. ^^
— May we all find people who like us just the way we are. ^.^
Hopefully this is an acceptable post, I thought some who would be interested in seeing this, might not have come across it yet.
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-gay-marriage-suicide-20170221-story.html
Evidently, in states that passed same-sex-marriage statutes or where courts strike down prohibitions on same-sex-marriage, the suicide rate among LGB teens dropped significantly, and the drop occurred almost immediately.
“All told, the researchers estimated, from 1999 to 2015, same-sex marriage policies would be associated each year with 134,000 fewer adolescents attempting suicide.”
I’m not surprised, but this is neat!
It’s almost as if often persecuted demographics feel more hopeful and less fatally depressed when the state says they are, in fact, people, and they have the same rights as everyone else.
Who knew?
Whaaaaaaaat? People don’t develop proper self worth and self esteem if you constantly shit on them and treat them like they aren’t human? THE DEVIL YOU SAY.
First person to talk to the press controls the narrative!
“Why yes, congresswoman DeSanto is inside. She arrived late last night and she’s having some sort of… personal crisis. I’m trying to give her space to deal with it and I’d appreciate if you members of the press do the same.”
(Then obtain popcorn)
“Why yes, she’s inside. Uninvited. Seriously, she got my landlord to illegally let her in, and now she refuses to leave. Even climbed back in the window when I forced her out, and now she’s destroying my stuff.
“… so anyhow, I’m looking for three reporters with one camera operator each to come in to my home and start barraging her with questions until she leaves. The more hard-hitting the questions, the better.”
Just open the door, yell “THE CONGRESSWOMAN IS GIVING INTERVIEWS NOW” and run.
I was reading http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/i39m-quirky today, and went – “holy crap, that’s Robin’s entire thought process”.
She’ll probably get more votes for that.
I’d like to see Robin actually revealed as not being ignorant of boundaries at all and knowing exactly what she was doing. Remember how she handled Roz’s business with the sex tape? It wasn’t a person who was acting all wacky or unaware but fully aware of the politics up and down. This is a cover and she’s not innocent or naive but just aware she can bully Leslie this way.
Robin didn’t handle anything. That was the dean:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/obfuscate/
Now THAT’S what it looks like when someone just wants to study. See the difference?
Re: Murdering Kylo Ren’s parents:
Too soon.
the proper response from Kylo is “LOL e;fb”