Eh.
So – when I find her a ennervating narcissist nepobaby who fled into egotism so deelyp Its doubtful wether she will ever find out of it again. Especially with all that insulating unearned wealth?
I´m probably just an envy-riddled transphobe, huh?
idk, as a non-transphobe, i don’t actually spend any of my time of day going around shadowboxing with theoretical people i made up in my head, hoping to convince them i’m not a transphobe. the fact that you’re so scared, and so certain, about the inevitability of people calling you a transphobe, is the most sus thing about the entire comment. my brain didn’t go there at all until you brought it up…and i kinda have to assume there’s some reason you brought it up, ya know?
The type of Christians that Joyce’s family were/are also tend to feel that even outlining what makes a person a sinner is spreading their “corruptive influences”. Since Joyce wasn’t too big on inconvenient questions, it’s likely it wasn’t really said at the time.
I think Carla’s only a sophmore, so joyce can’t have been *that* young when Carla came out. Though I think it’s been implied that happened pretty young? At the very least she said she’s pretty much always known
plus, never underestimate how isolated and sheltered fundie parents can keep their kids. you’d be amazed (and horrified) at some interactions i had with my classmates, back when i was still in that bubble.
Astariel
I’d expect that Carol would make a big point of her protest, and would want her kids to know exactly how virtuous she was being and what the evil thing she was protesting was. As Joyce pointed out once, this is a woman who kept a letter to the editor she wrote complaining about a gay kid in a newspaper strip pinned to their refridgerator.
Joyce is selectively oblivious to the point of active denial. I fully believe she didn’t even know trans people existed until college. Mind you, I found out gay people existed when I was 17 when I watched a TV show called Soap. Somehow, my parents had kept the context from me entirely.
i didn’t know around high school either, there were some openly gay ppl among our group of friends but i imagine as a higher schooler in the south it’d be hard to be ‘out’ even among friends whether or not you could get access to hormones if not a skirt/more neutral/feminine leaning clothing
tho other than knowing ‘sex change surgery’ maybe joyce would’ve heard the term trans but not know specifics (despite having ‘internet access’ but i can assume that might’ve been filtered/limited too)
Makkabee
In junior high I knew gay people existed, but didn’t know Freddy Mercury was among them. Somebody asked me about it and I just kind of shrugged and said “maybe? It was the 70s, rock stars dressed like that back then.”
I was big on concepts but kind of clueless about actual people. As opposed to now when I’m still clueless about actual people but not at all confident about concepts either.
Well, Carol told Joyce the last time she showed up that she’d been corrupted by “the transgenders” and she clearly expected that Joyce would recognize the term, which she did.
I love Soap! Surprisingly well handled queer representation for the time it came out.
I definitely knew about “gay” as a word(and growing up in Texas, that it “was bad” for some reason) but I didn’t really know what it meant.
It’s also possible that her mother referred to Carla as “[deadname], a boy who insists he’s transgender” which would be harder for Joyce to untangle once she started learning information about actual trans people.
Nura Calise
She probably wouldn’t have used the word “transgender” maybe “transsexual” or most likely “he’s a boy who thinks he’s a girl.”
In addition to everyone else’s points about deadnaming:
.
I think another factor to consider is that Joyce was the youngest sibling and definitely babied to some extent. It wasnt just obliviousness that made her think her parents didn’t have a problem with Halloween — it was that her parents didn’t have the harsher parts of that argument in front of her, so there was a lot less to be oblivious to. (She did fail to put together what she HAD witnessed until Sarah actively asked her about it, but what she witnessed wasn’t that much).
.
Similarly, her main reaction when she realized Ethan was gay wasn’t horror or disgust, it was: “…but you seem so normal”.
.
I’m sure the picture that Carol especially painted for Joyce of trans people was similarly… cartoonish. Joyce’s parents wouldn’t have let her see the actual magazine spread of Carla, looking like a completely “normal” girl. It would’ve been considered too dangerous, and Joyce too young and impressionable.
It very much is not boycotting and this is the joke
NGPZ
if you could even call it a “joke” at this point 👀
this shit is what these conservative personality cults do to their members:
one way or another, every emotion is primed to be turned into OUTRAGE and ANGER
where fear, sadness, anxiety, confusion and despair are all emotions which paralyze, anger on the other hand, motivates. It’s only natural to feel less helpless when angry, and no matter what their problems are there’s always someone or something they can scape-goat for them.
Remember when a bunch of “conservatives” bought Keurigs for the specific purpose of throwing them out of windows to express their displeasure with the company being “politically correct” about something? Yeah, that’s what they think a boycott is. I figure that’s why they think we’re all suddenly going to go to Target because some “leader” said it was okay now.
it wouldn’t be the first ti meppl bought something specifically to burn XP
altho other than being ‘cancelled’ or mom&pop shops idk if boycotts ever work, everyone knows walmart/amazon/etc is terrible but those ‘blackout days’ where ppl strike /refuse to shop there idk would’ve made much of a diff anyways
I guess that confirms my theory that the Browns deadnamed Carla to such an extent Joyce didn’t make the connection, which is not a theory I particularly wanted confirmed
Either that or trans folk simply ‘were not to be discussed’ with young Joyce. Or were called some pejorative but unrelated word that went right over Joyce’s head.
I presume there was a lot that was “not to be discussed with” the children of the Brown household, and especially Joyce. (At least not until they’re “old enough to understand”, which means either unquestioningly adopting Carol’s opinions as their own, or “never” because that’s just an excuse.)
To the extent that the Brown parents discussed Carla at all this is almost certainly true, though IDK how often the subject of Carla specifically would have come up.
It would have come up when Carol was buying copies of the magazine with Carla on the cover to burn. And I doubt that was “not to be discussed”, but a family activity.
We don’t know how long ago that magazine came out though.
Um, Dorothy, I don’t think money is the reason she has a single room. More likely the school required her to have a single room so as “not to make any of the ‘girls’ feel uncomfortable.”
(I know that justification *very* well, having encountered it many times over.)
Gary Gygax said that Dungeons and Dragons went from a board game for nerds to the nationally selling phenomenon because of the Satanic Panic. It made a bunch of gamers into millionaires overnight as all the free advertising that the books were full of sex and violence got them way more attention than they normally would have. His successor in Lorraine Williams said things took a dramatic downturn when the mothers stopped buying stuff to burn and instead petitioned the K-marts and department stores to no longer carry them. Which is why she massively toned D&D down and appealed to kids instead of college students–which did not help sales.
Dorothy is beautiful and wonderful to everyone who is Joyce and not so much to everyone else. I fully believe Dorothy trying to convince Carla to convince her parents not to bomb civilians will somehow lead to more civilian bombing. Like if she gave the big rousing speech at the start of the Martian invasion, the armies would side with the Head Alien.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/comic/magazines/ Being the daughter of billionaires, when Carla came out it was national news. The implication of Jocelyne’s line is that Carla’s coming out was covered in a magazine and when her mother saw it, Carol bought multiple copies of it to boycott it. Doesn’t really matter which magazine it was, just that it was advertising the EEEEVILS of a positive story (presumably) about a trans woman.
“When she (Carla) came out (as trans), my mom bought 30 copies of that magazine (that printed the article about Carla coming out as trans) and set them on fire (burned them to ashes).
off topic but I am like 5% done with the 100 Days/Trials of Physical Therapy
found out that my game dev client/friend who lives really close to me may very well go to the SAME UNIVERSITY I did before 2020, just 15 minutes away!
he’s this awesome trans dude who’s currently surrounded by some very awful people,
and LIKE HELL if I ain’t gonna be there for him!!!! TT~TT *plays “I Will Go The Distance” from Hercules on hacked muzak*
I went through the archives looking for Carla doing Joyce’s make-up and it was April 6, 2024, the two year anniversary was yesterday.
Naturally, I think of that as a ‘recent’ story.
Hm, interesting. Single room because money, in this convo… but I’m pretty sure that’s not the only reason the administration’s treating Carla differently than the other girls on their floor.
157 thoughts on “Carla Rutten”
IntangibleMatter
Carla my fucking GOAT. She has never done anything wrong ever and anything that she has done wrong may soon be rectified.
Carla’s the best.
nadamás
She is god and we are bugs.
ResRam
Eh.
So – when I find her a ennervating narcissist nepobaby who fled into egotism so deelyp Its doubtful wether she will ever find out of it again. Especially with all that insulating unearned wealth?
I´m probably just an envy-riddled transphobe, huh?
KtBear
Your words, not mine.
Li
Well, you’re badly misreading her character, and misusing “narcissist”! Won’t claim to know your motivations, though. 🙂
Taffy
Nobody said any of that, except you. Guilty conscience?
Throwatron
idk, as a non-transphobe, i don’t actually spend any of my time of day going around shadowboxing with theoretical people i made up in my head, hoping to convince them i’m not a transphobe. the fact that you’re so scared, and so certain, about the inevitability of people calling you a transphobe, is the most sus thing about the entire comment. my brain didn’t go there at all until you brought it up…and i kinda have to assume there’s some reason you brought it up, ya know?
Redcat
Yes.
Astariel
Interesting that Carol burned all those magazines and Joyce still had no idea that Carla was trans. I wonder how old she was when that happened.
Love Jocelyne’s look of surprise in panel 4.
Mel
I feel like Joyce didn’t absorb a lot of the specifics of who were “sinners”, just that she shouldn’t be one
EmperorGreed
The type of Christians that Joyce’s family were/are also tend to feel that even outlining what makes a person a sinner is spreading their “corruptive influences”. Since Joyce wasn’t too big on inconvenient questions, it’s likely it wasn’t really said at the time.
Stormtide Leviathan
I think Carla’s only a sophmore, so joyce can’t have been *that* young when Carla came out. Though I think it’s been implied that happened pretty young? At the very least she said she’s pretty much always known
Tequila Mockingbird
plus, never underestimate how isolated and sheltered fundie parents can keep their kids. you’d be amazed (and horrified) at some interactions i had with my classmates, back when i was still in that bubble.
Astariel
I’d expect that Carol would make a big point of her protest, and would want her kids to know exactly how virtuous she was being and what the evil thing she was protesting was. As Joyce pointed out once, this is a woman who kept a letter to the editor she wrote complaining about a gay kid in a newspaper strip pinned to their refridgerator.
CT Phipps
Joyce is selectively oblivious to the point of active denial. I fully believe she didn’t even know trans people existed until college. Mind you, I found out gay people existed when I was 17 when I watched a TV show called Soap. Somehow, my parents had kept the context from me entirely.
anon
i didn’t know around high school either, there were some openly gay ppl among our group of friends but i imagine as a higher schooler in the south it’d be hard to be ‘out’ even among friends whether or not you could get access to hormones if not a skirt/more neutral/feminine leaning clothing
tho other than knowing ‘sex change surgery’ maybe joyce would’ve heard the term trans but not know specifics (despite having ‘internet access’ but i can assume that might’ve been filtered/limited too)
Makkabee
In junior high I knew gay people existed, but didn’t know Freddy Mercury was among them. Somebody asked me about it and I just kind of shrugged and said “maybe? It was the 70s, rock stars dressed like that back then.”
I was big on concepts but kind of clueless about actual people. As opposed to now when I’m still clueless about actual people but not at all confident about concepts either.
Astariel
Well, Carol told Joyce the last time she showed up that she’d been corrupted by “the transgenders” and she clearly expected that Joyce would recognize the term, which she did.
DePesciMode
I love Soap! Surprisingly well handled queer representation for the time it came out.
I definitely knew about “gay” as a word(and growing up in Texas, that it “was bad” for some reason) but I didn’t really know what it meant.
Thag Simmons
It seems unlikely that Joyce would have ever heard the name “Carla” from her parents
tim gueguen
Yeah, they would have deadnamed Carla, and it’s possible her AMAB name wasn’t Carl.
General Tekno
Beyond probable, I’d say, given Carla presumably named herself after Ultra Car.
Mollyscribbles
It’s also possible that her mother referred to Carla as “[deadname], a boy who insists he’s transgender” which would be harder for Joyce to untangle once she started learning information about actual trans people.
Nura Calise
She probably wouldn’t have used the word “transgender” maybe “transsexual” or most likely “he’s a boy who thinks he’s a girl.”
Amós Batista
Maybe I’m slow like Joyce, because I thought that, too.
Arianod
I wouldn’t assume that she let the kids read the magazines before setting them on fire.
Li
In addition to everyone else’s points about deadnaming:
.
I think another factor to consider is that Joyce was the youngest sibling and definitely babied to some extent. It wasnt just obliviousness that made her think her parents didn’t have a problem with Halloween — it was that her parents didn’t have the harsher parts of that argument in front of her, so there was a lot less to be oblivious to. (She did fail to put together what she HAD witnessed until Sarah actively asked her about it, but what she witnessed wasn’t that much).
.
Similarly, her main reaction when she realized Ethan was gay wasn’t horror or disgust, it was: “…but you seem so normal”.
.
I’m sure the picture that Carol especially painted for Joyce of trans people was similarly… cartoonish. Joyce’s parents wouldn’t have let her see the actual magazine spread of Carla, looking like a completely “normal” girl. It would’ve been considered too dangerous, and Joyce too young and impressionable.
beth
Could just be she didn’t tell Joyce, and Jocelyn only knows because she was snooping around where she wasn’t allowed.
Bill Erak
You need to tell ur mom precisely that so she can know how far her kid has ‘fallen’.
NGPZ
I mean is it even “boycotting”???
Or just the usual toxic recurrence of self-outrage prevalent in US far-right conservatives? (-_-)
Pinkie
Is it boycotting if you give the magazine a bunch of money? They don’t care what you do with it afterwards
Thag Simmons
It very much is not boycotting and this is the joke
NGPZ
if you could even call it a “joke” at this point 👀
this shit is what these conservative personality cults do to their members:
one way or another, every emotion is primed to be turned into OUTRAGE and ANGER
where fear, sadness, anxiety, confusion and despair are all emotions which paralyze, anger on the other hand, motivates. It’s only natural to feel less helpless when angry, and no matter what their problems are there’s always someone or something they can scape-goat for them.
Jon
Remember when a bunch of “conservatives” bought Keurigs for the specific purpose of throwing them out of windows to express their displeasure with the company being “politically correct” about something? Yeah, that’s what they think a boycott is. I figure that’s why they think we’re all suddenly going to go to Target because some “leader” said it was okay now.
anon
it wouldn’t be the first ti meppl bought something specifically to burn XP
altho other than being ‘cancelled’ or mom&pop shops idk if boycotts ever work, everyone knows walmart/amazon/etc is terrible but those ‘blackout days’ where ppl strike /refuse to shop there idk would’ve made much of a diff anyways
Li
Carol called it boycotting and was trying to boycott the magazine, is the thing. She’s just bad at it, like Jocelyne said, heh.
Thag Simmons
I guess that confirms my theory that the Browns deadnamed Carla to such an extent Joyce didn’t make the connection, which is not a theory I particularly wanted confirmed
Laura
Either that or trans folk simply ‘were not to be discussed’ with young Joyce. Or were called some pejorative but unrelated word that went right over Joyce’s head.
Needfuldoer
I presume there was a lot that was “not to be discussed with” the children of the Brown household, and especially Joyce. (At least not until they’re “old enough to understand”, which means either unquestioningly adopting Carol’s opinions as their own, or “never” because that’s just an excuse.)
RassilonTDavros
To the extent that the Brown parents discussed Carla at all this is almost certainly true, though IDK how often the subject of Carla specifically would have come up.
thejeff
It would have come up when Carol was buying copies of the magazine with Carla on the cover to burn. And I doubt that was “not to be discussed”, but a family activity.
We don’t know how long ago that magazine came out though.
Bryy
It’s also not a very good point in Hank’s favor.
From everything we know of Hank, he turned a blind eye to a lot of stuff. And recently, we’ve learned that he’s very ignorant and intolerant.
drs
‘Recently learned’? He entered comic that way. What we see recently is him improving somewhat.
Laura
Um, Dorothy, I don’t think money is the reason she has a single room. More likely the school required her to have a single room so as “not to make any of the ‘girls’ feel uncomfortable.”
(I know that justification *very* well, having encountered it many times over.)
Nono
I think Dorothy is wisely not outing the real reason Carla has a single room despite her being a high profile trans person.
But also the Ruttechs DO have money, part of the reason Carla could get a single room.
CT Phipps
Gary Gygax said that Dungeons and Dragons went from a board game for nerds to the nationally selling phenomenon because of the Satanic Panic. It made a bunch of gamers into millionaires overnight as all the free advertising that the books were full of sex and violence got them way more attention than they normally would have. His successor in Lorraine Williams said things took a dramatic downturn when the mothers stopped buying stuff to burn and instead petitioned the K-marts and department stores to no longer carry them. Which is why she massively toned D&D down and appealed to kids instead of college students–which did not help sales.
Bryy
I would not put much stock in what Gary Gygax says.
CT Phipps
Well he’s not saying much now.
shanunu
I dunno if Dorothy gets along with Carla as well as she presents here. Can’t Carla still not tell her apart from Joyce I think it was?
CT Phipps
Dorothy is beautiful and wonderful to everyone who is Joyce and not so much to everyone else. I fully believe Dorothy trying to convince Carla to convince her parents not to bomb civilians will somehow lead to more civilian bombing. Like if she gave the big rousing speech at the start of the Martian invasion, the armies would side with the Head Alien.
3oranges
Carla can tell people apart from Joyce. Joyce is the one with the jugs.
Steamweed
That were custom-made for her by Carla Rutten.
Karla Jean
What magazine? Is there some dialogue missing?
Nono
Carla was a high profile trans rights case, likely due to her parents’ fame. Jacob’s brother helped with that.
Good chances are the case was covered in newspapers and magazines.
Astariel
Specifically, she was on the cover of Newsweek.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/comic/cleareyed/
Doopyboop
https://www.dumbingofage.com/comic/magazines/ Being the daughter of billionaires, when Carla came out it was national news. The implication of Jocelyne’s line is that Carla’s coming out was covered in a magazine and when her mother saw it, Carol bought multiple copies of it to boycott it. Doesn’t really matter which magazine it was, just that it was advertising the EEEEVILS of a positive story (presumably) about a trans woman.
Dedlok
“When she (Carla) came out (as trans), my mom bought 30 copies of that magazine (that printed the article about Carla coming out as trans) and set them on fire (burned them to ashes).
NGPZ
off topic but I am like 5% done with the 100 Days/Trials of Physical Therapy
found out that my game dev client/friend who lives really close to me may very well go to the SAME UNIVERSITY I did before 2020, just 15 minutes away!
he’s this awesome trans dude who’s currently surrounded by some very awful people,
and LIKE HELL if I ain’t gonna be there for him!!!! TT~TT
*plays “I Will Go The Distance” from Hercules on hacked muzak*
Bryy
Congrats!
Rectilinear Propagation
That’s freaking awesome!
clif
Yay! What are you planning to celebrate day 100?
…
Or maybe to celebrate the day after.
Cattleprod
I went through the archives looking for Carla doing Joyce’s make-up and it was April 6, 2024, the two year anniversary was yesterday.
Naturally, I think of that as a ‘recent’ story.
Icalasari
Rereading that arc and *man* Willis was NOT subtle with Joyce’s lust for Dorothy
It’s great :D
The Rev
Best alt text possible for this one.
Amós Batista
Today is Carla’s Day
Pizzasgood
That doesn’t narrow it down any.
clif
Fair. Fair.
AntithesisConundrum
Hm, interesting. Single room because money, in this convo… but I’m pretty sure that’s not the only reason the administration’s treating Carla differently than the other girls on their floor.
Dandi Andi
If it weren’t for the money, she wouldn’t be in the women’s wing at all.
Rimwalker55