If Carla didn’t figure out some way to sync the climactic part of the 1812 Overture to the lights, it can only be because she assumed she’d still be whistling it herself. (Which honestly she probably still could be.)
There is no type of light, at all, that can be projected from the base to form words in the air upwards.
Its a sci-fi myth sadly.
Light cant just “stop in midair and change direction” (to reach your eye).
You need to project light onto a surface or off one. (or, arguably, directly into the eye…but that would take some complex eye-tracking and very precise aiming)
So, for me I am saying its both;
Its lights reflected off well timed ping-pong balls.
However, it seems that precisely focused laser beams can produce spot-ionization of the air, causing it to flash into plasma with a bright blue-white emission. (See various links below.)
Here it is, quarter to 1am, and I’m finally able to see it and comment. Been trying for like 30 minutes, poking around in the comments for the last two days for it to load. People really wanted to see the payoff.
That’s the magic of the machine! She won’t get in trouble for setting it up, and she never directly tried to get Mary to open the box, so Mary just pie’d herself!
Please, it is perfect, this way there is nothing Mary did not cause herself, so when she complains about it there is not enough noise for a noise violation, no damage Carla directly caused, and the only real issue is her grabbing the box from Carla. Heck, Carla could have even asked Roz about the door before hand, giving her permission for the trigger…
That wasn’t Plan B. The whole thing was Plan A. Some people can get inside other people’s heads and think the way they would. They look nearly clairvoyant if they pull it off properly. Carla is one of those people.
Yup, the Rube Goldberg machine was the distraction and the “fuck you” at the end. The pie in the box was the real trap. And it’s brilliant because the thing angry Mary would want to see least after having been pied like so many bigots before her is Carla’s beaming face, flipping her the double bird, in front of her actual proper name in flashing lights. The name and identity Mary so aggressively tries to dismiss to enforce her twisted idea of what is “proper”.
Okay, total tangent but did Mary misname Carla at some point? I’ve seen plenty of other douchebaggery- much gender based- but never that. Then again I’ve re-read archives before and then gone “holy shit there’s a page here I NEVER KNEW EXISTED” so…
I don’t think she’s actually respected her enough to even give her a name, much less the wrong one. One sec, lemme quickly archive binge…
Nope, she hasn’t once used a name to describe Carla, but has also not once referred to her by she and has called her a “misplaced freak” and said that she was “taking you back to the Boy’s wing, where you belong”.
I have no doubt that she’d use nothing but the wrong name if she did know Carla’s dead name because that’s what bigots tend to do with trans folks, see the hundred million deliberate misnamings of Caitlyn Jenner and Chelsea Manning.
In the case of a name where there’s a clear opposite-gendered option similar to their real name, I imagine such douchebags would take that even if they didn’t know the dead name. (By the way, I like that phrase, I just referred to it as a birth name before this.)
I mean, I’m okay with Jason- there’s no real female equivalent to that, but Carla? I wondered, when you said “her actual proper name”, if Mary had ever taken a dig specifically by calling her Carl. Wouldn’t put it past her.
Oh fuck yes on the douchebags being shits about feminized or masculinized forms of deadnames. When I tried rolling with that for my name, I got even more misgendered and misnamed than when I just gave my dead name. Part of the reason I abandoned that shit and just went with the name I always wanted.
The question in my mind is, is Mary smart enough to step back or is she going to angrily assault Carla in front of the witnesses that the device has no doubt attracted.
I suspect the box was always Plan A, and that the Rube-Goldberg Machine that spells Carla’s name in lights was always meant to be the salt jammed onto the fresh wound wrought by Plan A.
You may not have realized this, but Dina is in EVERY panel in EVERY comic EVER. We only see her in certain ones because she is only seen when she wishes to be seen.
Banana cream is statistically the funniest pie, over 15% funnier than the runner up, lemon meringue. Since Carla researched this project carefully, she should know this.
@Doctor Who: For some reason, I just read your comment in the voice of the guy from Cinema Sins. I do not know why, but the phrase “Banana cream is statistically” instantly sets me to his voice.
Carla-ex-machina! *ding*
Insert predictable cream pie joke here. *ding*
The machination of her revenge was cold, swift, and utterly ridiculous, as promised. *backwards ding*
“Damn that Carla. I’ve lost my study time, my control over dorm-mates,” *handed letter* “And my scholarship? You can’t kick me out! I’m the best at creating pictures! Not those stupid looking things she makes!”
I’m not sure that would actually be any more feasible… how do you get them to levitate at different heights from the same stream? LEDs can be pretty cheap and are shapable.
Actually, while phrased in a weird way, it IS how they work. Check out some youtube videos of 3d laser projections. In this strip, it’s possible that it was more readable to leave out the faint lights surrounding the full width of the images. Though, there are some modern versions that don’t have anything but the images you want shown.
Not vertically like that from lights at the base.
Lazer light will just go in a straight line – you wont see it at all from another angle unless it hits something.
(There is, however, a lot of funky things you can do if you do let it hit something.)
Balls, probably ping pong balls, reflecting the beams of light. I haven’t figured out how she made them hold station like that but I’m gonna assume jets of air and threads.
There is zero collateral damage. The only reason Mary is made a victim is because she goes out of her way to antagonize Carla. Otherwise this would just have been a stupid display, at most worthy of a “shoo, not in the dorm” from the RA.
And at the same time it’s so utterly effective. Carla shows that she is not powerless, she is not afraid and she doesn’t have any fucks to give. She also shows that she is in control and fully capable of keeping within the boundaries for what is acceptable, giving her the moral high ground vs Mary and disarming most of the things Mary can do in retaliation.
Yup. That’s what’s so beautiful about this plan. It’s perfectly weighted to who Mary is and relied on Mary being the horrible person Carla read her as. If she was nicer, if she was more respectful of other people’s things, if she wasn’t a curtain-twitcher? The whole plan would have collapsed and all this would have done would be display her name in the air all cool like.
But Mary is awful and Mary is a snoop and Mary is the type to rip a box from out of your hands just to find out what’s in it. And so she got pied and the RG machine served as a beautiful coda to the prank.
And at every moment, Carla ensured that it was Mary who screwed herself, all without rising to her bait, engaging in any form of violence, and without even insulting her so far.
And as you note, it shows Mary that Carla is not powerless and her tool, but a force that is terrifying to have the full attention of.
Plus, it’s a nice fuck you at the end. Like, not just the middle fingers, but the demonstration that Carla is a a hell of a lot better at understanding Mary on a deep and complex level than Mary is at understanding Carla even on the superficial level. Thus putting a big neon spotlight right on the bigotry at the heart of this whole conflict.
Also, like any good prank, it makes the pranker herself look silly. “You made all THAT just to pie me in the face”
There is an invitation there, even if rather slim, to stop this entire thing, laugh at each other and just go separate ways. This is such a mic drop move that another part of Carla’s message is “I don’t need to escalate this further. I’ve said everything I need to say.”
It’s not like it is an outstretched hand, or anything, but it IS a possibility.
Also, “I got myself that worked up over what in the end was just an elaborate pie to the face”. Cause at the end of the day, it was Mary’s aggressive paranoia that led her down the entire path of getting pied like Anita Bryant.
Also, I love so much that Carla kept within the dorm rules as much in solidarity with Ruth as to keep herself out of trouble.
Carla’s revenge is for herself first and foremost, but in a small way, it’s also for Billie and Ruth.
That’s a good observation, and very much in line with her “OBVIOUSLY I’m to cool to care about people… but I may help out a little anyway, not because I care or anything” persona.
It’s simultaneously a gift to Ruth (see, no muss, no fuss, no breaking the rules) as well as a fuck you to Mary’s initial attempt to collar her by appealing to the all-sainted rules. Like, oh, I’m sorry, was “breaking the rules” your literal excuse for breaking my skates? Well, then, let me not break a single goddamn rule or even show a spot of direct rudeness to you as I get my revenge.
Would you perhaps need a capable minion. I’m just not smart enough to plan world domination, but I am smart enough to be a competent number four or number three in such a plot.
Yes. This is exactly what will happen next, because Mary like a Cadbury egg has a sweet caramel filling of patience and decency under her hard chocolate outer shell.
Problem is, she’s a jerk and bigot, so others act like jerks to her, which makes her feel justified in begin a jerk. (cycle of revenge and shit) I like Carla and Ruth, but they are the worst possible people to deal with Mary. We need someone who can show unconditional kindness. Someone who was able to force Mary to compare her bigotry to the realities of life.
I’d maintain someone like Joyce would probably be best at that because they come from similar upbringings. But Joyce is currently filled with a hulk-like rage atm so that won’t happen.
Joyce already tried, when they went to church together ages ago. Mary rejected Joyce for hanging out with non-Christians; Joyce concluded that Mary was a b-word.
Roz’s sister Riley also tried to reach out and be nice and was smacked away because clearly as a pre-teen she was an evil hellbound slut simply because of who her sister was. That one was memorable because she refused to even be in the same room as her and thus spent the early morning outside the door glaring.
Mary could eventually be a decent person, but she’s got a lot of growing up to get there and the first step of it is having to deal with the existence of other people who are not exactly like her.
That’s not the end game with shithead bigots, because that isn’t a realistic goal outside of the very long term, or fortune. Which is to say, literal generations down the line. People this bigoted rarely change because of a stranger first contextualized as evil.
Wow… there’s a part of me that actually feels kinda bad for Mary reading that. Then I remember that she’s a transphobic, manipulative bigot and it goes away.
for me it goes one step further. After remembering she’s a bigot, I rememberer that I was willing to forgive Vegeta and that guy actually killed people! Some of which never get brought back!
This. I forgave Vegeta for that too, but if there’s anything TV is good at, it’s brushing characters’ horrible actions under the rug for the sake of a redemptive plotline.
…And now I remember that I also somehow forgave Spike because the writers wanted me to forget that he RAPED Buffy.
That’s just how heel turns work. It’s easier to forgive a character if they start as an asshole and then become nicer.
Heck, Ruth is introduced as a domineering bully with occasional glimpses of humanity, and nowadays there’s a significant number of people who aren’t me that like her and want the best for her and for her and Billie to get married and have secret lesbian babies.
I want every kid but Ryan to be happy. Mary and Faz inclusive. I just also want her to stop being horrible (unclear how Faz can be happy without being horrible, but it must be possible)
Mary never really did treat Carla like scum for being trans. She clearly had hang ups, but she was just kinda standoffish for the most part. She argued with her and said something transphobic but she wasn’t just out and out “All trans people are awful and I hate them and you’re less of a person because of that”. At least that’s not how I read it. It doesn’t help that the only time we’ve seen them interacting for the most part has been when they were mad at each other.
Because I know this site and I know my first sentence is going to be misinterpreted, What I’m saying is Mary wasn’t super open about her bigotry. She was a bit agressive and rude but she wasn’t preaching about what she does is wrong and how she’s awful or whatever. It didn’t come out until the end of their confrontation that she said something to that effect. My point was more, While dismissive, Mary seems to be a bit more withheld with how she treated Carla, and that’s how I tried to portray her.
I mean, she doesn’t throw out the level of say a Target protester ranting into a megaphone about how all trans people are child molesters, but that’s not precisely the same thing as not wearing her bigotry front and center and letting it color her interactions with Carla to Carla’s repeated detriment.
She kinda wears her anti-LGBT bigotry on her sleeve and she shows no restraint in her hostility to the existence of Carla in particular from moment one of their first encounter.
I mean, maybe the Mary in your comics and art is much more rounded and accepting person with some queerphobic baggage, but in this universe, she’s been pretty consistent as an openly homophobic and transphobic bully who sees it as her personal mission to purge her floor of “perverts and deviants”.
You seem to be confusing your headcanon with the canon of the character we have seen thus far. Possibly because you’re not clear on exactly how hurtful the shit she’s done really is.
You’re right, but I also disagree. The point of my comic is that Mary has reached the end of her rope and is fully aware that no one likes her. She doesn’t understand why everything she knows is wrong and why everyone at this school is a bunch of godless heathens doing the opposite of everything she’s learned. She’s upset about how now she’s the one in the wrong after a lifetime of being “correct” and it’s making her double down even harder. And because she’s not even specifically referring to Carla in this speech she uses the catch all term “hooligans”
Basically she just didn’t say “I hate trannies” for a consecutive 4 “panels” in so many words. I haven’t taken away that aspect of her character, but that’s not really the emotion she’s feeling at the moment.
(also I told myself I really didn’t want to have to explain this comic).
I dunno… as much as I wanted to see Mary get some kind of comeuppance, I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of Carla deliberately goading Mary into doing something that will get her in trouble or expelled (which seems to be what’s getting built up to here).
That’s a move right out of the Westboro Baptist Church playbook and I really don’t like the idea of Carla stooping to that level. 🙁
Eh, I don’t agree. Westboro Baptist aren’t really that subtle. If they hate someone, they shout it from the rooftops or, at worst, lie about them. They don’t trick people into incriminating themselves, at least to my knowledge.
They actually make most of their money suing people who try and assault them or tear down their signs and city governments who refuse to let them picket and harass whoever they so choose.
So, just when you thought you couldn’t hate them anymore than you already do. The current batch of Target protestors doing hate speech in Targets follow a similar playbook as do the vile pieces of shit who protest outside Planned Parenthoods (though those take it to an even worse degree by doxing anyone who goes inside in the hopes of riling up their followers to murder those seeking OB/GYN care or otherwise supporting those who are). Hell, there was a case recently of a hate preacher ranting outside of a high school who just got a kid locked up for a long damn time because he threw hate speech at her about how women deserve to be raped until she swung at him with a baseball bat.
I felt a little physically ill reading that last sentence. That just…there aren’t words to describe how horrible that is. None strong enough anyway. It’s just…not right.
The laws they are abusing really need to be re-written to protect people against things like that. If you deliberately taunt someone into a blind range, you should not be able to sue them for the damage they cause to you person or property since it is you fault.
There is freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but there is also stretching it to far, and those sickos are well beyond that point.
I’d have guessed situations like this would fall under “fighting words”? Like, I thought this kind of thing was exactly what that was for. But I guess it’s so subject to interpretation that it would come down to which judge or jury you get.
But if there’s already a provision for this, that isn’t working, rewriting wouldn’t be the needed fix; updating popular attitudes would. Unfortunately, I imagine that to be infinitely harder. But on the other hand, it does seem to sometimes somewhat happen, over time. I wish it were faster though.
i read that case yesterday.
I’m considering mailing that young lady
(1) a sternly worded letter,
explaining the obvious — that Violence against bigots with aluminum baseball bats is not appropriate or tasteful . right?
(2) A Gold-Painted **Wooden** Bat with the words: “Stop Homophobia” engraved on it.
She was only arrested Thursday.
I dont think there has been a sentence.
Westboro Baptist is a carefully calculated money making scheme, marketly nonviolnently antagonizing as many people as much as possible to bait any violent people into giving them money. I don’t think that’s the same thing as baiting Mary into escalating her ongoing hate crimes so that real world consequences happen faster.
It is not Carla’s fault if Mary decides to start damaging things because she got angry. Carla is not goading Mary into hurting her, like the WBC arguably does. She just stood up to a bully in a nonviolent manner. Mary chooses how she responds.
If this were the first such comment by you, I’d leave it there. But your comment yesterday also seemed to be about making Carla out to be bad for doing what she’s doing. This implies a bigger issue. So I will address things that have as much to do with what you said today as yesterday.
When people do horrible things, it is not your responsibility to be above them. It your responsibility to try and stop them. Sure, there are limits to what you can do, and sometimes you can’t actually stop them–and, yes, you’ll have to live with that. But that doesn’t mean you do nothing.
Carla has no obligation to just let Mary be a bigot and just try to avoid her. She has an obligation to everyone Mary would hurt in the future to try and teach her a lesson by providing consequences to her actions. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” after all.
Sure, there are ways of going too far. But those are mostly in the realm of physically hurting her. A non-violent response like this? In a context where she can’t get the authorities involved without hurting an ally (Ruth)? How in the world is that too far.
I mean, Mary did something pretty horrible, to the point that I would not mourn her death. Even Carol and John have shown good sides to them–both were shown being loving to Joyce to some extent, until Becky’s situation came up. Mary has not–she’s always been portrayed as a crappy person, to the point that even Joyce noticed. (“She says she’s a Christian, but I think it didn’t take.”)
It is not Carla’s fault if Mary decides to start damaging things because she got angry. Carla is not goading Mary into hurting her, like the WBC arguably does. She just stood up to a bully in a nonviolent manner. Mary chooses how she responds.
Don’t forget that she can’t very well get the authorities involved. She’d hurt an ally (Ruth). And, despite your optimistic claim yesterday that they merely talk it out, this has gone beyond that point–see Cerberus et al for more info.
I mean, Mary is the one character in this comic that has been shown to be consistently bad. Even John and Carol showed at least some love to Joyce–even if the lesbian thing shut it down. But Mary’s just been mean.
Even happy-go-lucky Joyce noticed quite early on: “She claims to be a Christian, but I don’t think it took.”
Yeah. And apparently omnisexual, as (s)he actually gets pregnant in order to give birth to the eight legged horse Odin rides. Which also means Odin technically rides around on his own grandkid. Honestly, if there where ever to be a god of gender-queerness I would nominate Loki…well except for how much evil (s)he does. And the unfortunate connotations of being “the trickster God”. Though maybe (s)he was the god mages and the Norse just used “trickster” because they didn’t have a word for “Mage”.
Also I’m using (s)he because, while Loki spends most of her/his time in myth as male, (s)he never actually states her/his gender preference, and if (s)he actually does exist, I have no wish to offend her/him.
I know this many days later maybe no one would see, but the way I heard it, it wasn’t just a bet. The “stake” if they’d “lost” was Freya forced into an unwanted marriage. And this isn’t even the only time Loki helps her out of a situation like that. There’s also the time Thor “misplaced” his hammer, and the giants who had it refused to give it back–unless Freya married their leader. She was so mad she yelled loud enough that her necklace fell off. And Loki was again instrumental to her not having to go. Sure Thor had the “leading role” in that little “play”, but he almost blew their cover several times over. It was Loki’s fast-talking that kept it from falling apart.
A lot of people refer to Loki as “evil” but he seems to be quite helpful, at least in most of the stories I’ve read so far. And after reading about Odin meeting Ymir, or the first time the Aesir met the Vanir, I’d feel reeeally hesitant to trust Odin very far at all. Sure, Loki ends up on the “wrong” side of Ragnarok, but after how Odin treats Loki’s children, is it really any surprise?
I see a lot of parallels between Loki and Carla, and among the many similarities is a good heart. And people who think themselves good and right often trying to step on them.
I am under the impression that Loki did not necessarily, uh, *intend* to get fucked by Slepnir’s sire. I was under the impression Loki merely intended to lure the horse away so that Loki and the other gods would win the bet, and Loki wasn’t quiiiteee fast enough?
We have to remember that a lot of what we know about norse mythology are stories intended to, as the poet puts it, “make a meed hall full of barbarians decide not to put an axe in the head of the storyteller.” – so “Whatever is funniest” is a pretty good canonical explanation for any plot hole.
Loki isn’t Odin’s son in the mythology. They are described once as blood brothers, but not actually related. Sohe’s not riding his own grandkid, just his best friend’s son. Nothing weird there.
Pretty sure he’s always identified as a dude, so not canon, but there’s a chance I’m mistaken.
I mean, Loki gets a bum rap because Tor is the useful Christ analogue and most of what we have is post christianization, and we don’t have much, so I get wanting him, but still.
Well, Loki played with gender like HELL. A trickster god, a shapeshifter, who takes the forms of men and women and more for shits and giggles. It’s actually kinda hard to read into the pronouns used in Loki’s myths, because, well, all the information we have on Loki is filtered through the records of christian monasteries and even if it wasn’t, it’s hardly like old viking lore is likely to treat transness with the same hand we do. Though maybe I should see if I still have my old norse myth books from uni . . .
You could make a case for Loki’s and Odin’s gender being “magician”. It COULD be seen as the same as trans- or gender fluid, but there were some strong cultural connections between transgressing the classical gender roles and accessing the spiritual realm that is simply not present in how gender is usually seen today.
Further complicated by the fact that everything we know about Loki and Odin has been filtered between a millennium of different gender roles. They were at least not cis, that’s for sure.
I remember reading an interview with a Native American (can’t remember which nation) who lamented how the young people nowadays were gay or trans rather than Two Spirit. Not quite the same thing, apparently.
You’re Scandanavian. On the question of what the original myths say, I’m pretty sure you speak from a much more knowledgable position than any of us. So not really the same thing as mansplaining or cissplaining.
I HAVE been taught a lot of viking stuff in school.
A depressingly large amount of it was made up between the 16th and 20th century, especially during the national romantic movement. (“MY country has cooler historical heroes than YOUR country”)
A hilariously large part of it was invented within a few centuries of the viking age as well by German, Arabic and – in one notable case – Icelandic scholars who had a very vague idea of what they were talking about.
And nowadays we have Marvel 🙂
Take home message: In any historical account someone is lying to you. Enjoy the stories but read with care.
No, Scandinavians don’t necessarily know better. There isn’t a secret Viking transmission method. Vikings were just the traders or raiders, yada yada yada (my wife is irate at the conflation of Nordic and Viking. She’s aware this isn’t like actual racism, but it’s me saying it, and other folks brought up the Norse).
The simple fact is, it’s hard to be totally sure. Vikings gave women waaaaaaay more leeway, and included them in raiding parties, but what we have of what we now call Asatru ultimately comes from Iceland:. Iceland was backwards, and even then, what we have is from post Christianization. Iceland subscribed more to gender roles like the Christians did (which was less than the modern era thinks, but still way worse than we sometimes have now), and Christianization made gender roles align more.
I said gender fluid Loki isn’t canon because, to the best of my knowledge, it isn’t. Canon is NOT everything, and I don’t usually say this (text interpretation matters way more than what an often dead dude thought). It’s a valid reading of what we have, though, and it’s possibly closer to what was originally sung outside of Iceland (or possibly even inside it). Christianity bastardized the myths, and barring something truly amazing, we’ll never know what they originally were. And that’s unfortunate, but ultimately fine.
It is worth noting, tho, that if Loki were to identify as nonbinary, it’d be under a different conception. Using modern white people terms for this can be fraught with problems in eras and with peoples with a different conception of the complexities of gender. This isn’t actually a problem with the Norse, what with the old religion being dead (yes I’m aware of the successor), and their current use of modern white conceptions, but it’s a problem elsewhere, where the other culture is in fact still alive.
Also just checked with wife, but while gender roles differed, gender itself didn’t. The Norse had the same concept of gender as the other honkies they bordered.
Old Norse culture is totally dead. It isn’t kept alive as a triple bird to stale-end pieces of white bread, the Japanese, or similar. They adopted the culture they envied to a large degree, while adapting it to themselves. You can trust the average Dane to have a better grasp of DANISH (not Icelandic, not Greenlanders, not Swedish, not Finnish….) history, but old Danish culture? They’ll tell you horned helmets are for silly things because they aren’t real, and not much else. (But Rutee, you ask your wife! Yes, but shes an actual historian). A hypothetical Congolese expert is more knowledgeable than Bagge (Heck, it’s not lovely wifey’s field, so her too), because it’s totally dead. It’s not the same situation with extant cultures, much of which teach how things were because fuck your cultural oppressors.
Curious note. What are your views of trans interpretations of history, looking back into history to try and uncover trans narratives in historical figures and offer trans interpretations of their life stories? And what should be the limitations of such an analysis?
Like obviously there are colonialist aspects in forcing modern white trans narratives on old dead native and non-white populations who may have had different concepts of gender, but I’m wondering if there is an appropriate means of noting or trying to uncover the trans individuals in history that have been buried by generations of cis authors rewriting the history books to block those interpretations.
Sure, being a Scandinavian does not guarantee you a sip in the well of Mimer, but it increases your chance of knowing historians who specialize in that time period. It IS a bit of a special interest around here 🙂
In a case where cultural appropriation is a legitimate concern? I’d be inclined to ask why you went with myths where appropriation is a real concern first. There’s some cause for this; white people in non-white scholarship can be a thorny subject, but it isn’t exactly automatically taboo. f’rex one of the leading scholars on IIRC 1600ish Korean history is wonderbread, and the Koreans seem to take cues from him most of the time. It’s within the bounds of possibility that they internally chafe at this, and think he’s full of shit… but it’s not like it’s impossible that he’s preventing hypernationalist ‘scholarship’ either (It’s not like THAT doesn’t exist, whatever modern nation we’re looking at.).
But having settled why you went for them first (and ‘I didn’t’ is definitely a plausible thing to come up), as far as readings go, my basic inclination is, its’ okay as literary analysis, but you have to point out that you’re looking at something through a modern lens that was absolutely not intended. This isn’t that unusual on its own, but given what I’ve seen, being prepared to stress that is key. It’s really easy to, even if you avoid it, have other readers of your work start using your work to insist that yours is more correct than the original view. It ain’t, and it ain’t the ‘true’ meaning. And while this would be true whether it’s “Quetzalcoatl’s birth from an emerald and subsequently being born male can be seen as a discussion on how gender can be constructed, and how gems have been used as a sign for queerness for centuries” or “Ulysses, from a different viewpoint, can be seen as a brilliant self-help book”, only one of these has the spectre of appropriation (Nobody besides the ghost of James Joyce wants Ulysses, including James Joyce scholars). Avoiding that is important, but with reasonable steps taken to avoid it, I do think scholarship benefits from it.
This is going to be far from the only opinion on the subject, and mine is somewhat preliminary. I always respected literature, but it’s not my field, and I’m not familiar with a ton of non-cis scholars of color weighing in (Although a non-scholar who presented a convincing argument why I shouldn’t be going to scholars would be acceptable. Difficult, though)
Not really, Bagge; Old nordic culture isn’t exactly an ignored topic in White academia, and there’s a ton of fiction that exalts y’all to drum up a layperson’s interest as well. This is in comparison to say, scholarship on the Ainu, or Native nations in the Americas or similar – Basically no 1 curr (and it’s far more aggressively taught than details about old Danish culture). Further, because popularized fields like old nordic culture are so well studied, many of your native historians specialize, yanno, elsewhere. It’ll come up in coursework still, but it’s pretty likely to not be your specialized field (More likely than say, a congolese historian, but that doesn’t matter much once you actually HAVE the congolese historian).
But mostly, because the first barrier is ‘most people don’t really talk to historians or anthopologists or similar in the first place.’ What Cerb was saying about ‘you’d know better’ is partially descended from responses to native tribes in the Americas and elsewhere. And I know for a fact they put far more effort into educating the average citizen on the details of their modern and premodern culture than their cultural hegemons put into it. I also know for a fact that it’s more than say, Denmark or Sweden puts into teaching about ITS cultural history. Because Denmark or Sweden doesn’t have to do it as a giant pair of raised middle fingers (And aren’t under threat of having their pasts wiped out, either in the popular culture or in academia). I mean, nobody is necessarily lax about it, but there isn’t an urgency backed by fear of extinction. Which makes laypeople’s claims drop down tot he same level I’d apply for most places – generally, poor. (I mean, not ‘meriken talking about the meriken revolution’ poor, but not particularly highly)
Sorry, I was being coy. I meant to say – I grew up with rune carvings in my backyard and now I see them on my way to work. I live a stones throw from the old burial mounds Adam von Bremen was so hilariously wrong about. I have close friends and colleges who are historians and archaeologists who specialize in iron age Scandinavia. I am an active reenactor of that time period. I know my shit 🙂
(for example, I know enough to recognize a cleaned up version of the poetic Edda when I see it, as linked above)
So yeah, I was wrong to suggest it comes automatically for a Scandinavian, but those of us who do want to learn that time period have a lot of material to work with. (Which sometimes can be a problem – there are a fair number of us who DO learn a lot, but not enough to separate the few scraps of facts that actually exist from the enormous pile of lies from the 19th century)
But you are right that it is NOT the same as living cultures, as the Native American nations, and it’s not comparable to cultural appropriation
I love this!!! Also, apparently everyone else did too, and even more people came, because I’ve been unable to get here for twenty minutes because of “maintenance or capacity” issues. Which in itself is awesome, that so many people loved this strip that server might have gotten overflowed!!!
So really, the little brat screwed herself over by forcibly taking something from Carla’s hands, whereas Carla’s little device was only meant to mock with her name in lights. Mary has not been physically harmed, only humiliated, at her own doing, and Carla will walk away scot-free.
Well, Carla’s device was meant in part to trick Mary into grabbing the box. But she still did it of her own volition, and certainly can’t blame Carla for the pie as a result.
Carla, that’s brilliant. If you were real, I’d kiss you. Guess I’ll just have to kiss Willis instead. You’re coming to Austin again this summer, aren’t you, Willis?
Yep, Mary will totally actually accept Carla’s existence as a trans person now that she’s been bested in a prank…
Nah, hell, I don’t even think Mary will be at all okay with this being the last word or being “bested” by some, to quote her directly, “misplaced freak”.
But Carla at least showed that she’s not some meek victim to be pushed around and who will calmly eat the bigotry she’s throwing.
They will never be friends, but perhaps, Carla has at least earned Mary’s respect for them to become foes.
Perhaps, but Mary had plenty of opportunities to walk away. Carla, too.
I don’t think I like where things seem to be heading with this arc, but the truth is that both Mary and Carla had plenty of opportunities to either find a better resolution, or even just stay out of each other’s hair, and we’re where we are now because they didn’t.
Just kind of done with false equivalences on the balance of power between Carla and Mary and the illusion that Carla could have done anything to save herself from being eventually bullied by Mary for existing.
If it’s cool for me to interject (and I think you’re new here, but I can be wrong on that), basically since we had this whole Mary/Carla feud thing happen we’ve been inundated with comments about how Carla totally had being misgendered coming, that because she was being kind of a butthole she deserves to have hate speech tossed at her.
Sure, Carla could walk away and be the bigger person. She could spend the rest of her time in that dorm knowing that little shits like Mary can get away with dehumanizing her unless she’s contrite and meek like all Queer people must be if they want basic human dignities. She can sit there and be angry that her RA is too busy to protect Carla from hate speech, because Carla is surrounded by that shit wherever she goes. Hell, I’d bet dollars to donuts that this isn’t the first time this has happened to her on this campus.
Or she can take that power back. She can refuse to allow the spectre of Mary to hover over her head. She can tell Mary to fuck off in the most Carla way possible, with a laser light show and a pie to the face. She can make it absolutely clear that she’s not going to stand for being dehumanized.
I think a lot of folks on the “do this thing instead, Carla” wagon are approaching this from the perspective of two equally powerful members of two equally powerful social classes coming to blows, rather than Mary attacking Carla over a slight using absolutely disproportionate means. Yes, Carla was deliberately annoying her and she shouldn’t have done that, but she shouldn’t have to earn a basic human dignity like not having hate speech tossed at her, that should just be something expected, no matter how much of an annoying butthole she can be. Like, Joe is a total cretin of a friend to Danny, but it would be super fucked up if Danny told Joe to fuck off and go count all his money. Invoking stereotypes to get back at someone you’re angry at (and even then, that wasn’t something Mary did when she misgendered Carla; that’s something she’s been thinking the entire time and let out when she had the right opportunity) is never okay.
Yes, so much yes. Human dignity is a right to all people. The bigots like mary just go to try and take that away and must be stopped. Carla is standing up for herself and for others that mary and her ilk will attack.
It’s really fucking easy, actually. You put on headphones like an adult in a shared living space who cares about her sanity. You CAN NOT escape from minor noise. CAN. NOT. You learn to deal. If that means noise cancelling headphones, okay. If that means bailing to a study area (which the campus has in spades if it’s modern), okay. What it doesn’t mean, is starting a fight over every noise, as Mary does. It can mean “Get the authorities”, but only if it’s actually warranted.
Any of these were an option if Mary legit wanted to study. In the comic that actually exists, she wanted to give that “misplaced freak” what for.
But realistically, you won’t acknowledge that. Bloody straights, bloody cis people. Can’t see past your bloody noses, and fall all over yourselves to ignore what is fucking obvious in the actuator text, because you’re sooooo rational.
Not to mention there’s a quiet study room literally on every floor of the dorm rooms specifically for students like people who actually are distracted and bothered by minor noises.
Like if that was the real reason, then for all that Mary is being “distracted”, she would have long since moved her study materials into there when it was time to get to work. But she doesn’t. Because she doesn’t actually care about the studying or the noise. She cares about the meddling in other people’s affairs and the judgment.
And there’s a lot of denialism at foot surrounding that among people who want a narrative where an uppity trans person did wrong to a scared cis girl who only resorted to abject bigotry and property destruction, because the big mean trans person was just so rude to her.
Even when the narrative is pulling out its yellow highlighter pen and making it not at all subtle that Mary fundamentally is a curtain-twitcher and the noise and disturbance is always the excuse to go spy on her fellow students and yell at them for not conforming to her rules.
Like, people forget, Mary’s first thing was not “I want to study”, it was “this is against school regulations” and “I could get you reported for this”. The power was what was important to her not the noise which was minimal. And it’s time for people to accept that and accept that they got suckered in to sympathizing with the bigot by their own cultural assumptions about how a trans story is supposed to go.
Since they obviously can’t be civil to each other, they should probably have a mediated conversation about this.
Their needs are massively clashing, so it needs to get resolved quickly and calmly. Mary wants to study. Carla wants to skate indoors. Is it quiet hours? If so, Carla should just go outside. She’s breaking the rules as it is, so doing this during quiet hours would just make things worse. She has no intention of listening to Mary anymore, so it’s definitely time for someone else to step in.
Anyone with thoughts on who the third party should be if this happens?
All day, every day. Because we have a queer victim, so that means queer victim blaming on every appearance of Carla from here on out. I’m pretty sure “noise in the hallway” is just going to be Carla’s “$20 haircut”.
You know I was just wondering if Willis was playing Wack-A-Mole with these comments or if they just hadn’t been posted. At least one has made it up. Time will tell if it lasts.
I actually blamed Ruth. Ruth is the reason her hall is out of control, Ruth’s behavior is the reason Mary was able to behave viciously in the first place, and Ruth is the reason Carla has to resort to contraptions to defend herself.
But, thanks for calling me a man. I would think someone like you would be above using gender as an insult. But hey, I guess bigotry can hide behind the most unsuspecting of faces.
You’re right. That was my bad. I’m sorry for doing that. In my experiences, people who pull the “if you were to observe objectively” gambit on me have typically been men, but that is no excuse for not checking in on pronouns to make sure that is not a hurtful bit of misgendering. And I deeply regret that I hurt you in that manner. I am sorry.
That’s nice and all, but, uh, that leaves “it’s okay to use ‘man’ as an insult if your target >is< a man" as a thing. You sure you meant to imply that?
If someone was a man and was actually doing the mansplaining pose of “well, see here little lady, you failed to be objective when you didn’t take into account (ignorant half-opinion)”, then no I would not have any problem identifying the problem in relation to the cultural oppression it is steeped in.
My power to injure a man by recognizing oppressive behavior frequently done by men against me does not carry the same weight or force as oppressive behaviors done against women or insults that imply that the identity of being a woman is somehow lesser than that of men, because they don’t have the same system of oppression adding weight to them.
It’s the reason why any gendered insult against men can never punch with the same force as gendered insults against women in our current societies.
Ruth is an RA, not an on-call Nanny. When Mary dropped her cissexist bomb, Ruth was banging her way down the hall to ram Carla through a wall for the hopping.
She’s an RA. It’s literally not her job to stop every dispute or action. She’s a student. She’s still expected to go to class. If instead you mean she should have done something about the hate speech, yeah. If she could. I somewhat doubt that’s her job, tho (low opinion of colleges and trans people)
It’s not always that hard to come up with a new name, I’m happy with mine, but I’ve come up with names I could also enjoy being referred to as. That could just be my D&D upbringing though.
It’s rude to ask an actual trans person, but Carla is fictional. Fictional characters have their innermost secrets known to all. There’s a lot of personal details we know about fictional characters that would be incredibly rude (not to mention weird) to know if they were real people, but they’re not.
I’d say asking personal questions about a character can be expected, but by the same token the author can choose to not reveal it ever.
it’s still transphobic, and i’ll tell you why! yes, fictional characters have more personal details revealed to the audience than people in real life. however, things like dead names or whether or not Carla is on HRT or other medical transition stuff are things you STILL would never find out or even consider asking a cisgender character. there’s an underlying assumption in that question that Carla is not a “legitimate” name for that character. no one is asking what Ruth’s real name is. we even have several characters with nicknames, Walky and Billie, and yet there are no fans or characters in the comic who are just dying to know Walky’s REAL name.
And yet you do routinely know such things about fictional characters. We know Walky’s real name. We know Billie’s real name. You often know secrets about characters no one else knows. Sometimes things they don’t even know.
And often we want to know more. Things you’d never ask people in real life. We speculate about histories of abuse. We speculate over sexuality.
In other cases we know or wonder whether characters might be in therapy or taking psychiatric medication. None of that is wrong. It’s character detail.
It’s not that Carla isn’t a legitimate name, it’s that we want to know more about her. About her history, about her transition, about where she’s coming from, where she is and where she’s going. We might someday get it. We might not. Depends on the story Willis wants to tell.
I get that and I respect that, but that question and that inquiry carries a different weight with trans folk and trans character, especially as knowledge of dead names is frequently wielded as a weapon against trans folk, as a means to wound or cause pain, not to mention as a means of delegitimizing the person or the character’s real identity in favor of this accident of birth.
For instance, do any of us have any doubt that if Carla’s dead name appeared in comic, we wouldn’t have asshole commenters spewing her dead name forth with misgendered pronouns from here on out? Hell, we get a bit of that already with Jocelyne, even on comics where her dead name hasn’t been used for awhile.
Which makes the question and the inquiry more complicated and delicate. Hence why it’s typically better to let dead names be dead if they are not narratively required (for instance, showing a tense interaction with a transphobic relative ala Nomi’s hospital scene with her mom in Sense8).
To be fair with Jocelyne, some folks may have genuinely forgotten she’s trans or never caught on to it because unlike Carla she only acknowledged it once directly and all the other characters in the comic call her by the wrong name and pronouns because she’s not out of the closet yet.
You’d have to be a superficial reader to skip both the author’s alt-text and the comments section, but yeah a person that only reads the comic might have missed it.
(not to deny that there are assholes who would misgender Jocelyne out and out, just saying her status is a lot more easy to miss than Carla’s)
In my headcannon she was born as,
“Lindsey Carlyle Ruttee” .
Her family is Dutch, rich WASP, and Carlyle is her mother’s maiden family name. She considered changing her to Ultra Carla ( cuz thats awesome ) , and her family offered her a sweet bribe to use Carla instead.
I dunno about “dying to know”, but Walky’s and Billie’s real names HAVE been subject to speculation by the readers…as well as their sexual history, past traumas and the state of their mental and physical well being.
I’m not saying that asking about a trans character’s pronouns or whether they’re taking hormones, etc ISN’T a delicate subject, but to me it’s on par with discussing Walky’s first sexual encounter. It’s really up to the author whether to reveal this information or even acknowledge the question at all.
B) Unlikely as it looks like Carla went the route I did of taking a name from a particularly inspirational figure from a beloved piece of cultural media. For me, that was a comic book. For Carla, it looks like it’s her beloved childhood cartoon “Ultracar”.
C) Feminizations of dead names seem to be falling out of style these days among trans women in general. I think it has to do with them having the potential to cause permanent reminders to one’s dead name, which can be massively dysphoric.
Yeah. I get the curious nature though. That drive to know everything, so you can understand everything, can be strong. Useful to have someone explain how asking a question can be a social faux pas. If it helps, I can give an example of a fairly big one I’ve done.
Yup, I like the dead names term too. It really encapsulates what those birth names are to trans folks. Something dead and gone that if it is to return, means something monstrous has occurred.
I once made this total n00b mistake with a transman (before I knew that it was super tiresome/rude to ask it). I was curious because I was on a date with him, and I like thinking about a date’s history/upbringing/childhood stories. He patiently explained that he’d rather I knew him solely as [his name], he didn’t want me to think of him as his previous name, which made perfect sense to me. I didn’t get another date, though. Sorry, that dude!
This was years ago; I know better now. Anyway, please learn from my microaggression / foolish dating mistake, o commenters, and refrain from asking this question of your trans* dates and pals. (If they want you to know for some reason, they’ll tell you.)
Yeahhh, similarly the other week when I was at work, we had a new company supplying our towels/floor mats, and since I was the person in charge there, I had to handle it. When it came time to sign for the stuff, the guy looked at me and my nametag and said, “Well, I know that your *real* name isn’t Amber.” Made me incredibly uncomfortable and pretty much ruined my night. It’s not the first time I’ve had people be shitty to me about that at my job, either. Of course, when my manager found out, both her and the district manager were fucking pissed (her words) and she called the company the next morning and yelled at them, and the guy got in trouble. She’s pretty much been a guardian angel regarding that stuff, but y’know, it still sucks to deal with it in the first place.
Incidentally, before I started dating my gf, I had a bad habit of using her dead name (since I knew it) and making excuses that it’s what I’d always known her as (plus this was before I knew that I was trans, back when I really didn’t understand that it was a thing at all). So, you know, people make mistakes, but they can still grow. I mean, we’ve been together for almost four years, so it wasn’t permanently damaging or anything.
I do hope that my mistake wasn’t too similar to the nametag guy.
For context, the fellow on this particular date did present himself as an “open book” about his trans experience, and invited me to ask questions. He wasn’t just doing his dang job and getting invalidated by incredibly presumptuous strangers. I’m glad your supervisors had your back, but I’m sorry that happened to you in the first place.
not to mention EVERYONE tries to guess your dead name. almost every non-trans-friendly person i meet will either guess at my dead name or deliberately feminize my name, assuming that i just masculinized my dead name to get my real name. thankfully i didn’t, otherwise being dead named would be a lot more emotionally draining every day. instead i chose a completely different name that felt right to me (although incidentally, i almost chose Carl as my name, wanting to name myself after my grandfather.)
but yes, i can concur with other trans people here that dead naming someone is transphobic violence. don’t do it. don’t even ask.
Also, like in the case of my wife, feminizations of the deadname are what kids would mock you with in school. Why on earth would someone CHOOSE that name for themselves?
Also also a 5 yro trans girl we know is keeping her birthname for NOW, because she’s 5, and because as soon as her mom suggested some names she might choose she immediately jumped to “I COULD NAME MYSELF ELSA LIKE IN FROZEN” and her mom was like “what have I done” 🙂
They were, and are, a thing. I’m not going to speculate why. It’s why I’m pretty chill about this when via people do it in fiction.
Like I can’t fathom doing it, but I keep seeing it. It’s a personal choice. People shouldn’t feel the need to, but shouldn’t feel pressured not to either.
Right, I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. I totally get that people do it and have no problem with it, this is pretty much specifically my wife’s feelings on it. Cis people have a tendency to expect that it’ll be what trans people do and this is the easiest way to explain why someone would have painful associations with that name.
It depends. Is Scrooge or Bill Gates richer? Cause I think Scrooge might be richer, as he seems to be able to afford technology to make gold coins about as dense as water.
Scrooge is certainly richer than Gates – after all, he has “607 tillion 386 zillion 947 trillion 522 billion dollars and 36 cents” per that one DuckTales episode.
It’s not that those coins are as dense as water: Scrooge just has a very peculiar connection with money that allows him to swim in it– and it alone– >as if< it were water. His trick doesn't work with, e.g., coal.
Also, Scrooge is ridiculously strong.
Citation: Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Part 11: The Empire-Builder from Calisoda
Bill Gates marrying Scrooge McDuck rich. Cause it sounds like both of Carla’s parents are cutting edge engineers who are heads of their shared company.
And apparently her parents fully support her, so that probably gives her a lot of the emotional strength to be as “fuck it” as she is. She’ll never have to worry about fearing discrimination, because worst case she can just go to work for her parents’ company.
It buys her out of some but not all and certainly not even most of the awfulness that gets heaped on trans folks. As Caitlyn Jenner is discovering first hand.
As an honest to god marvel fan, this may also be more awesome than anything in Captain America: Civil War. And I think that’s the best movie Marvel has ever made.
GLORIOUS. And while Carla’s big beaming face and the That which a box will not protect her from (because it’s her name, that’s all it does, but at the same time Mary will take it as a massive fuck you because Mary does not respect Carla’s existence whatsoever) are of course the highlights here, and Mary’s penultimate-panel face a close runner-up, I do want to take a moment to make sure we all appreciate the first panel’s pie-covered D# as well. Because it is almost as beautiful as the light show.
The glorious, Fuck Your Bigotry ‘Cause I Exist On My Own Terms light show. Mary can be as shitty as she wants, Carla doesn’t owe her shit to make her “comfortable”.
Yup, that face of pure impotent rage on Mary’s part and just slamming that name home as the mic drop to the whole thing. It’s all so fucking beautiful I want to frame it. Carla doesn’t owe Mary shit, certainly not her self to be used as a ping-pong ball of queerphobic abuse by Mary.
And it all brings it home to the issue at the heart of everything. That Mary targeted her. That Mary injured her and broke her skates. That Mary pursued and used her. Because she fundamentally does not respect Carla’s name and identity, seeing it as a personal affront against her religious sensibilities.
So Carla leaves it all on that point. That she exists, she’s not going away, and she’s a she named Carla. And nothing Mary does will ever change that or bully her away.
I would totally get a “CARLA (with bonus pied-in-the-face Mary)” print, yeah.
Also I am totally getting a Fame vibe off this (though I’m not sure how accurate it is since I’ve never actually seen Fame) because there is no chance in hell anyone in the hall’s gonna forget her name now.
Well, anyone who wasn’t away for the weekend breaking into their own house and shit.
Also:
“Well the word got around, they said ‘this kid is insane, man!’
Took a full collection just to send her to the mainland!
‘Get your education don’t forget from whence you came,
And the world’s gonna know your name, what’s your name ma’am?'”
Carla: *Final panel*
“Only 19, but my mind is older
These New York City streets get colder
I shoulder every burden, every disadvantage I have learned to manage
I don’t have a gun to brandish, I walk these streets famished
The plan is to fan this spark into a flame
But damn, it’s getting dark, so let me spell out the name
I am the—
What with the rgm rigged to start with Mary’s door being open, I fear she can say that the whole thing was intended to be to attack her (mind you, with a pie). Carla set it up, made noise outside her dorm, forcing Mary to open it up to ask/tell said noise maker to stop, since it was bothering her studying. This could come down to what mindset the person/group in charge of the Dorms/RAs has.
That only directly proves the RGM was aimed at her. What did that do? It spelled out Carla’s name in ping-pong balls. The box (which Carla was holding, did not give Mary permission to take, and has Billie’s name on it)? Mary had to take something that wasn’t hers from Carla for that to happen. The whistling? Carla’s been doing that for a while. Why hasn’t Mary asked her to stop before now?, a reasonable authority might ask.
How much do we want to bet that Carla got someone to bear witness to all of this so she has back-up in case Mary tries to invoke the authorities or attempts to commit violence. With a sympathetic RA on her side (it’s worth note that Ruth’s been making an effort to remove the sources of the blackmail Mary has on her), and the fact that Mary has made *no friends* with the rest of the hall, Carla’s set this up so that if Mary tries to escalate, she *should* have back-up, and Mary will be setting herself up either for further humiliation, or to get kicked out of the hall, if she attempts anything other than sit there and fume.
I think I said a lot of it above and on yesterday’s thing, so I’ll keep this one relatively light-ish… eh, I’m me, I’m sure I’ll rant forever. I’ve stated that this prank has been planned to the very inch to absolute perfection, relying entirely on Mary’s nature to work and ensure that there was no possibility of it befalling any innocent bystanders.
And it really has. Hell, she even did a damn fine estimate on when Mary would snatch away the box so that the big balloon pop would occur around the same time that the pie blew up in Mary’s face. And the pie, in addition to being a great callback to the Walkyverse counterpart and part of a great anti-bigot non-violent protest tradition, is also perfect because it strikes right at one of the last little pieces of their initial encounter. And that is how irrationally angry Mary gets when she is embarrassed by what she perceives as a lesser.
Strike her? That lets her play martyr to the evil anti-Christian hordes. Insult her? That lets her suck you into her game where she feeds off your anger to smugly blackmail you and make you feel small. But embarrass her? She loses her goddamn mind.
It’s why Carla calling her bluff on being told on and hopping over her when Mary tried to lay in her path incensed Mary to the point where she was perfectly comfortable immediately escalating to property destruction and violence. Because, she could barely stand Carla existing in her halls (hence the confrontation), but she cannot abide the notion of being “bested” by someone so beneath her or outsmarted by someone she can barely be bothered to consider a meaningless tool.
And it’s why Panel 3 Mary’s face is in that rictus of pure rage, fists raised to commit actual physical harm to Carla. Because once again, Carla has completely and utterly played Mary like a fool and this time got her to play herself absolutely perfectly.
And it’s what makes her name in bright lights the perfect coda to it all, the perfect payoff for that elaborate RG machine, because it’s a lovely piece of shade.
This entire time, Mary has hidden behind authoritarianism to police her personal animus. Mary hates Carla, like she hates Becky and she hates Ruth and hates Billie, so she wields the threat of official action to try and force them to behave the way she wants them to. And she hates them because they are queer and non-normative and not exactly like Mary. Because she views it as socially acceptable to look down on them.
It’s been demonstrated a billion ways by now that Mary confronted Carla in the halls because it was Carla and the rule-breaking was just the excuse. Hell, Mary clings to that flimsy excuse even after she had just finished committing vandalism and destruction of property and attempted to injure Carla because to do otherwise is to reveal her actual goal, the elimination of Carla (either from the floor or her life, either would be fine to Mary).
But Carla’s transness was always the focus, it’s why Mary drops that transphobia hammer down with a smirk on her face and reveals in her stunned expression of hurt afterwords. She savors the fact that Carla is pained by transphobic abuse because to Mary, all Carla is is a living affront to the Lord.
So Carla shows that in bright blinking lights blazoned across the sky in front of her door. The central bit of Mary’s issue with her and why Mary got on her case in the first place. And makes sure she has a front-row seat and that she can’t escape the inescapable fact of what Carla is and how she belongs here in these dorms. Carla is Carla. Is a woman. And she did not suffer through central Indiana HS system as a trans girl to casually accept this type of bullshit with a straight face.
This is her cutting through the bullshit and laying down the law where it matters. Carla exists and isn’t going away, so it’s time for Mary to adapt and get over it or get smacked down by Carla every time she tries and step to it.
Cause Carla just isn’t playing these bigot games anymore. Not in this political climate. Not in her own home.
I was going to make a food related joke here, but realized that within the scope of commenting here, it could have been taken the wrong way. I’ll just go with this instead:
The pure glee in Carla’s face as she flips Mary the double-bird (while doing a parkour somersault, I assume by the angle) is a joy to my heart. It says “THIS IS EVERYTHING I WANTED IT TO BE” and, indeed, it is also everything I wanted it to be.
(In further was-waiting-for-Cerberus’s-post news, I explicitly held this comment until it could be a reply to Cerb’s analysis, as I felt it was the best place for celebrating Carla being Carla to go)
Tsk-tsk Carla! FOR SHAME! Don’t you realize you exist only to be a prop in the drama of Ruth, Billie, and Mary? How dare you seize protagonist status for yourself!
Seriously! It’s just bad form. Doesn’t she realize her purpose is simply to provide a sounding board for Ruth to demonstrate her growth and development as a trans ally? It’s like she’s not even reading the Guide to Being a Trans Character in a Fiction Story Handbook at all!
What’s next, actually addressing the whole trans thing as HER problem and not Ruth’s? How will Ruth make it the source of her drama when Carla is dealing with it?
haha I miss that podcast. I have like hundred episodes to catch up on. and the novel. Also. Since the pie is all white isn’t it just whipped cream in a pie pan, not pie?
Ain’t it grand? I was so convinced Carla was just going to be a victim for Ruth’s narrative and we could all sit around and praise Ruth for basic human decency, and instead Carla tells her to shove her guilt up her own ass because she doesn’t have the time to be someone’s excuse to hate themselves, and then goes and personally deals with Mary in the most Carla way possible.
Lot of Queer characters get fridged, but Carla chucks that fucker into the horizon.
Carla doesn’t just avoid fridging, she disassembles the fridge, and then uses the parts to build a Rube-Goldberg Machine to facilitate her hilarious-and-humiliating-yet-basically-harmless revent.
when was it revealed that Carla was trans? i know there was a panel on it when she was talking to Ruth not too long ago, but I feel that was already prior knowledge to this community. Any links to past strips would be helpful.
Heavily implied in the comic itself when she called the dingdong on her whiteboard a hate crime (until she saw them on everyone else’s board too and declared them hilarious), there were also hints when she talked to Sal and when Joyce and Becky talked about her.
Stated in the comments those times as well.
And as you noted, directly stated in the comic when she talked to Ruth.
Some commenters had thought so as well before then, I believe. Transfers from Shortpacked, hence the (Fe)male/(Ma)chine comment that occurred farther up. I believe it was a short storyline over there (only a few pages) but the cast there was more accepting. Granted, their co-workers had a bit more diverse origins.
Uh-oh. Take a look at Mary’s face. This is the moment she attacks Carla physically for daring to stand up to her. Also remember that she thinks that she is the good guy. That will justify pretty extreme tactics, at least in her own mind.
So is Carla just leaning into Mary’s field of vision at an angle in the last panel, or is she doing some kinda awesome flip so she’s upside down while flipping her off?
Yes, of course, Mary is an innocent lamb who just wanted to study and hasn’t been proven again and again to be a curtain-twitcher who looks for any excuse to either spy on or angrily confront anyone within a 5 door radius of her door and we’ll just gloss right on by the transphobia that is the core root of their conflict cause if we ignore the elephant in the room, then maybe this won’t sound gross as fuck.
Though, admittedly, I’m curious to how you’ve come to the conclusion that Carla has done more to Mary physically and financially than vice versa seeing as how it was Mary who destroyed Carla’s skates and tried to injure her. Are you dinging Carla for the tube of glue or something?
Oops, ignore, this was connected to a disappeared comment.
On that note, I want to reiterate my deep apology to Choso that was on the deleted chain for my misgendering as that was not a cool move on my part and I should have checked pronouns before making an assumption like that.
Mary has the right to criticize loud obnoxious behavior outside her door. Mary could theoretically be motivated by loud obnoxious behavior outside her door. Mary…isn’t. Or, if she was, she turned it into an attack fueled by the fact it was behavior by a transgendered person which she not only destroyed the skates of but also tried to get removed. Even if I sympathize with people who want quiet in their dorm…seriously, screw Mary.
That one threadchain’s still there, Cerebus. Only got rid of the one post from the guy who’s really bad at not accidentally cluing me in that he’s stealing early comics from me.
Stealing early comics, not cool.
Pay for the patreon subscription like everyone else.
The amount of stupid excuses I have heard for piracy over the years from people trying to justify why they do not pay for anything is kind of sad.
They’re stealing the comics that are on Patreon, I think. So, that’d be the bonus comics, as well as the ones relative to the story that are released early for subscribers.
So, y’know, that’s kinda something to worry about,
You know the prank cans which contain false snakes that get launched when they are opened? It probably worked like that, but Carla probably calibrated the launch position so that Marry get hit right in the face.
Mary didn’t take the box from the other side, which I would have exacted by default. She especially took it the same way and same direction Carla was holding it.
That’s the thing, though. All Carla did was hold a box and set up a Rube Goldberg machine that spells out her name. Mary grabbed the box all on her own.
Not only did Mary grab the box all on her own, it’s not her box, that she saw Billie willingly give to Carla. So if anything, Mary’s taking other people’s stuff. In a strict sense, she had to commit theft in order to set herself up to be pied. CWAQ Mary has less than no legs to stand on.
…Although, I wouldn’t support sharing it on YouTube or something. I really dislike public humiliation, even for incredible horrible jerks, and I don’t want Mary painted as a victim. When I said ‘evidence’ I meant it could be useful if Mary tried to claim that Carla did something way worse (plausible), plus in case Mary will launch into another hateful tirade (exceedingly likely).
It would still be problematic if Mary saw Carla pointing a camera phone at her mid pie-attack. That would mean that Carla would have the video and risk of online humiliation hanging over her, and would reduce the “harmless” aspect of the prank.
Of course, it’s a thin line to walk to both MAKE a (kinda) harmless prank and be able to PROVE that is was (kinda) harmless, especially in a toxic conflict with someone who doesn’t care at all for that line herself. But I still think it’s for the best if Carla didn’t film it.
Plus, Carla has given up on the authorities (probably because growing up trans you learn really quickly that the authority figures do absolutely nothing and will blame you no matter what you do in response to bullying or attacks), so she’s probably not going to be caring whether or not the authorities know it was harmless.
Cause the important thing to Carla is that Carla didn’t cross her own moral boundaries and that Carla got a front row seat to Mary’s abject humiliation.
If anything, I’m guessing Carla felt a phone screen would just get in the way of her perfect view of this going down.
I really don’t think she did, because Carla actually takes care to keep this prank relatively harmless, even in such a toxic conflict as this. A viral video of Mary getting pied could potentially be hurtful and damaging in a way that the event itself is not.
Reminds me of some of my more elaborate revenge-pranks as a teen.
(Yeahhhhh, call me a dude* and call me a freak and use male pronouns on me* and tell me I’m going to hell and sucker-punch me when I’m not looking and trip me in the hallway and cut my hair in class and stab me with math set compasses and steal my books and shove my lunch into my face and etc long enough and I’ll figure out a way to booby-trap your bedroom such that when you open the door, everything non-fragile falls out onto your floor using nothing more than some twine and skipping rope, or to booby-trap your locker such that you get face-pied the moment you open it, or…)
Carla is AWESOME.
But, that said, because I am realistic: In the Real World, what will likely happen is that Carla is going to be the one who gets into more trouble than Mary… because Carla is trans and should’ve been that perfect victim.
*I am a cis-woman, but if you’re not gender-conforming enough, people like to misgender you as a “joke” because haha you’re a tomboy so I’m gonna call you a dude.
Man… Carla is probably the most annoying character ever. Reminds of someone in college that I really hated. I truly hope she gets something bad coming her way.
No, I honestly dislike her. She reminds me of several people I hated, who’d go around campus being annoying just for the sake of it and never cared about people who just wanted a quiet place to study and sleep.
Yup, that is totally her behavior in comic and not at all the projection you are throwing on her.
To be fair I also hate Walky because a guy who cheated on me once also liked chicken mcnuggets, so Walky is a filthy cheater and he reminds me too much of that and thus I’ll ignore any racism he ever suffers and hope bad things come his way because of this filthy cheater idea I have of him owing to a superficial misinterpretation of his base character.
The chicken nuggets aren’t related to why this (hypothetical?) person cheated on you. It’s the cheating that you wouldn’t like.
Carla’s behavior is similar to a type of behavior that many people don’t like. Arzarthanian has the right to not like that behavior.
I had an abusive ex who really liked football, and I did not like football, and I still don’t like football. But I didn’t like football before I met him. His abusive nature doesn’t affect how I feel about football. If he cheated on me to get tickets to a Packers game, then I would probably resent the Packers a little bit too, but the fact of the matter is that what someone likes is different from what someone DOES.
Liking Pokemon is fine. Mentioning Pokemon in every single conversation is annoying.
Carla being a prankster is annoying to certain people, because certain people don’t like pranksters. There’s no projection here on Arzarthanian’s part–just yours, by assuming he’s projecting when he’s simply saying Carla behaves similarly to some people he doesn’t like.
I mean, not to harp on you, but you admit and acknowledge that your dislike is based on projection of someone you dislike onto her. And to feed that dislike, you are actively ignoring major aspects of the story to cling to an inaccurate and disproven aspect of the initial encounter between Mary and Carla.
Like, you understand that this is irrational and based in a projection and yet you still want her to come to harm simply because of this irrational projection.
And that feels a bit… “off”, considering that facing violence because of the irrational projections of others is one of the major crises facing trans people today.
And that part is rather very relevant because there are people right now in Willis’s twitter mentions trying to do the usual “trans women are actually threatening abusers trying to prey on weak cis women” shtick that is used to justify violence against trans women in bathrooms and public spaces in order to argue that Carla is somehow “physically harassing and intimidating Mary with her larger size” and this is somehow a much bigger issue than the actually occurring transphobic abuse and harassment Mary has committed onto Carla.
So I hope you’ll forgive me being generally curt with all the Mary Denialists of late.
Carla is annoying as hell but in what world doesn’t Mary have it coming? This isn’t the skating incident. This is a direct response to hate speech and trying to get her kicked out of the dorm.
For a complete change in tone and partial change in topic, I was amused that I had to reread this a couple times. At first I was misparsing it as threatening the abusers, instead of being threatening abusers. I thought to myself “Wait, what? That’s almost the opposite of what Cerberus usually says. What’s going on? (rereads like twice) Ooohhh!” Then I was amused at syntactic ambiguity. The topic of ambiguity, and the different types of it, is frequently amusing to me.
While I’m responding to a Cerberus comment, I also want to mention I really like your comments, Cerberus! I really like learning things, even if it’s sad things I’m learning. Of course, reading these and the other comments makes it take a lot longer to catch up if I get a few days behind, but I consider it well worth every minute, in large part due to commenters like Cerberus and ischemgeek and trkly and several others whose names I’m forgetting at the moment.
Also of course the comic itself is awesome, and I am appreciative of Willis not only for creating the comic, which itself must be a lot of work, but also the often unseen work maintaining the comment section.
Her behavior, on several previous occasions, has led to my really, really disliking her. Not that Mary is an innocent, but Carla definitely hasn’t earned my sympathies. She might be a good friend to her friends, but that doesn’t immediately make her likable to me.
Basically, how would you feel if you had to sleep with someone like her next door?
OK, time for a new course in college… Convoluted Revenge 101, taught by Carla. Prerequisites; math, mechanical engineering, chemistry, probability mathematics and home EC.
I see two possible outcomes.
1. Mary walks away and tries to get to Carla through official channels.
2. She gets violent
3. She completely breaks down, because she feels treated unfairly and considers herself the victim.
I like your definition of “two”. I need to share it with the people who write my paychecks. =)
4: She tries another type of revenge at this level.
5: She goes into full on hate-preacher beast mode but does not get violent.
6: She starts to do any of those things, but gets interrupted by Stage 3 of Carla’s revenge.
… Also, I think I accidentally described a transformer that Willis wouldn’t buy.
She did that when she dared to exist as a trans woman on her floor. Roz is just the play to keep her hand in. Ruth, Carla, and Becky? Those are her real targets.
…but I can’t help wondering about the PoV. Mary isn’t in it, and the stuff Carla is doing only makes sense if the scene is from Mary’s PoV, but earlier in this very comic Mary is >standing< and the view of the machine and the perspective on the doors implies that this shot is coming from low to the ground.
So did Mary get hit with like, a shrink-pie or something…?
She is, but the machine ain’t and doors don’t have that kind of foreshortening unless you’re looking at them from a really weird angle.
Mary’s about shoulder-height on Carla and eye-level with the markerboards; the poles of the machine come up to Mary’s waist.
In that last frame, Carla’s face is obviously very close to the PoV, which is not only below the markerboards but also lower than the tops of the machine’s poles. It quite frankly looks like it’s coming from ground level.
That suggest’s she’s, I dunno, bending over a collapsed Mary to go “in your face”? Except Mary is, you know, standing upright and foaming at the mouth last we see of her.
I think I’ll just chalk it up to artistic license to get all the important parts of the scene together, with a dynamic look and at large scale, to enhance the impact.
Maybe, but that doesn’t really explain anything. Even if she’s in the middle of backflipping off a wall or whatever she (and the scene’s perspective) are way too low to be from Mary’s PoV but also make no sense as anything >but< from Mary's PoV. =/
Yeah, this may have bought Mary’s begrudging respect to the point of her being an evil demon instead of a useful tool and victim. But I have a bad feeling that Mary is going to be up to some awful mischief with her church tomorrow in a way that is going to unfortunately mirror a lot of the bullshit anti-trans stuff that has been going down of late.
I’m curious as to the potential reaction of campus authorities, who have been to all appearances ignoring Amazi-Girl’s string of assaults… but may not ignore this (much milder) one done by someone else.
Hmm, possible. While it is very difficult to try and spin a pieing as an assault in a way that courts and school authorities take seriously, it has definitely been used by those pied to try and play martyr and claim assault by the technical legal definition.
Additionally, things that are technically one thing have been used by authority figures of all stripes against marginalized group members who dare push back or fight back against dominant group members spreading hate speech about them.
So it would not be out of the realm of possibility for a transphobic school official to use this to ding Carla for “assault” especially if it is seen as a means of getting a transphobic hate group protesting the inclusion of a trans person in the dorms off his back.
Granted, I’m not 100% sure if this qualifies as assault under Indiana’s laws. I tried looking, but reading U.S. drafting is an absolute chore so I gave up.
But it would under Canada’s, which are very explicit on this point. There have been multiple convinctions, with jail time, that I can recall.
(If someone with more stomach for it than me were to look up Indiana’s laws on assault specifically that’d be wonderful.)
So from where I sit it isn’t so much as whether or not this is assault… it’s whether Carla’s single act with no bodily harm gets treated more seriously than Amazi-Girl’s string of attacks.
And, as far as I can recall, literally any action at all would qualify as treating it more seriously. It’d almost have to stem from something other than what the acts themselves would warrant.
I think the comment section today adequately proves the postulate that “she’s annoying” and “Mary was only trying to study, Carla provoked her” is the new “she’s annoying” and “$20 haircuts”.
If there’s a queer victim, there must be victim blaming looking for the reason it was all her fault. And all other facts surrounding said victimization must be ignored, diminished, or downplayed to justify the hatred.
This is a law iron forged and tempered. Never to be broken.
Well, I was behind Mary right up until the hate speech. Carla is incredibly annoying and I would find her incredibly tiresome in real-life. However, screw bigots.
Yeah, that’s why I feel it is very similar to the $20 haircut thing.
Like, maybe it’s possible that that could have felt compelling at one point in the narrative, but after awhile, it just becomes more and more obvious that those clinging to it are only doing so by ignoring huge portions of the storyline and its connotations and looking for something to hate the character for to justify not recognizing them as the victim and to make them somehow responsible for their own misfortune and queerphobic abuse.
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CARLA
In Lights!!!
Laser lights (i think, I think those are those projection laser lights that you can use to create images in the air, but I might be mistaken)!
my brain kept seeing them as well timed ping pong balls propelled through chutes for some reason. lights makes more sense though.
That’s EXACTLY what I saw: Ping Pong Cannons.
it took me a few extra moments to recognize those were
light emmitters)
Same here. It helped that they went ‘click’ instead of ‘pop’.
In my head there are also either firework sounds or the 1812 overture’s cannons being played from a speaker while Carla’s name is lit up.
If Carla didn’t figure out some way to sync the climactic part of the 1812 Overture to the lights, it can only be because she assumed she’d still be whistling it herself. (Which honestly she probably still could be.)
I think the ping ball is triggering something in the lights to spell out her name.
Oh, is that what they are? I haven’t seen or heard of them before, so I was also in the ‘air balanced ping pong ball’ crowd.
There is no type of light, at all, that can be projected from the base to form words in the air upwards.
Its a sci-fi myth sadly.
Light cant just “stop in midair and change direction” (to reach your eye).
You need to project light onto a surface or off one. (or, arguably, directly into the eye…but that would take some complex eye-tracking and very precise aiming)
So, for me I am saying its both;
Its lights reflected off well timed ping-pong balls.
However, it seems that precisely focused laser beams can produce spot-ionization of the air, causing it to flash into plasma with a bright blue-white emission. (See various links below.)
I am aware (and its awesome), but its still the intersection of a few
beams needed. (in other words “you cant time a photon to explode” :P)
I guess you could, sort of, have a two beams sort of like that : /\ angled from a cylinder base. Maybe.
Digger-mousie!
I’m so glad you pointed that out! I hadn’t spotted wombatprayers’ username or avatar. I have a “remember tunnel 17” magnet on my fridge.
Now if only we can immortalize this moment in the stars.
I suspect it will be immortalized on YouTube.
THIS IS CARLA!
true, the box DIDN’T protect her from THAT
now the hand in the box ALSO needs to extend its middle finger, and PERFECT REVENGEANCE
sheesh people, 12:07 before it even loads the comment box with all your hammering the site
I know, right? The refresh buttons must be tired by now
Can you blame us for wanting to see Mary pied in the face as fast as possible?
I accidentally read that as “peed in the face.”
Willis’ next Slipshine gonna be weeeeeeiiiiiiird…
Here it is, quarter to 1am, and I’m finally able to see it and comment. Been trying for like 30 minutes, poking around in the comments for the last two days for it to load. People really wanted to see the payoff.
As they say, you’re not in traffic, you are traffic
Not gonna lie, the Rube Goldberg Machine was kind of dissapointing. Very glad she brought Plan B with her.
I don’t think it’s over yet.
That’s the magic of the machine! She won’t get in trouble for setting it up, and she never directly tried to get Mary to open the box, so Mary just pie’d herself!
Please, it is perfect, this way there is nothing Mary did not cause herself, so when she complains about it there is not enough noise for a noise violation, no damage Carla directly caused, and the only real issue is her grabbing the box from Carla. Heck, Carla could have even asked Roz about the door before hand, giving her permission for the trigger…
That wasn’t Plan B. The whole thing was Plan A. Some people can get inside other people’s heads and think the way they would. They look nearly clairvoyant if they pull it off properly. Carla is one of those people.
Yup, the Rube Goldberg machine was the distraction and the “fuck you” at the end. The pie in the box was the real trap. And it’s brilliant because the thing angry Mary would want to see least after having been pied like so many bigots before her is Carla’s beaming face, flipping her the double bird, in front of her actual proper name in flashing lights. The name and identity Mary so aggressively tries to dismiss to enforce her twisted idea of what is “proper”.
It’s all so well-designed it makes me cry.
Okay, total tangent but did Mary misname Carla at some point? I’ve seen plenty of other douchebaggery- much gender based- but never that. Then again I’ve re-read archives before and then gone “holy shit there’s a page here I NEVER KNEW EXISTED” so…
I don’t think she’s actually respected her enough to even give her a name, much less the wrong one. One sec, lemme quickly archive binge…
Nope, she hasn’t once used a name to describe Carla, but has also not once referred to her by she and has called her a “misplaced freak” and said that she was “taking you back to the Boy’s wing, where you belong”.
I have no doubt that she’d use nothing but the wrong name if she did know Carla’s dead name because that’s what bigots tend to do with trans folks, see the hundred million deliberate misnamings of Caitlyn Jenner and Chelsea Manning.
In the case of a name where there’s a clear opposite-gendered option similar to their real name, I imagine such douchebags would take that even if they didn’t know the dead name. (By the way, I like that phrase, I just referred to it as a birth name before this.)
I mean, I’m okay with Jason- there’s no real female equivalent to that, but Carla? I wondered, when you said “her actual proper name”, if Mary had ever taken a dig specifically by calling her Carl. Wouldn’t put it past her.
Oh fuck yes on the douchebags being shits about feminized or masculinized forms of deadnames. When I tried rolling with that for my name, I got even more misgendered and misnamed than when I just gave my dead name. Part of the reason I abandoned that shit and just went with the name I always wanted.
I think a mate of mine got kinda lucky given his name now is ashley and his dead name was also ashley
The question in my mind is, is Mary smart enough to step back or is she going to angrily assault Carla in front of the witnesses that the device has no doubt attracted.
Honestly, it’s 50/50 at this point and could easily go either way.
There are always two, and only two, answers to the general question: “Is Mary smart enough?” They are: “She thinks so” and “No.”
If only it were a Ruth-Goldberg machine.
HOW HAS NO ONE ELSE MADE THIS JOKE YETI/
The “How-has-no-one-else-made-this-joke Yeti,” found in the icy climes of Xanth’s more mountainous regions, is rarely seen, but often expected.
I suspect the box was always Plan A, and that the Rube-Goldberg Machine that spells Carla’s name in lights was always meant to be the salt jammed onto the fresh wound wrought by Plan A.
Nobody expects Plan A. Amongst its chief weapon’s are fear, surprise and pies.
Here it is, folks. The greatest DoA strip ever. Of all time.
Can’t be, Dina’s not in it.
The again, there are two doors she could potentially be behind, so I guess it’s possible.
She’s Schrodinger’s Dina. She’s behind every door, and not behind any door at the smae time. You never know until you turn around and see her.
But is she alive or dead behind every door? You never know that either…
You may not have realized this, but Dina is in EVERY panel in EVERY comic EVER. We only see her in certain ones because she is only seen when she wishes to be seen.
Wait, you mean you don’t see her? Shit.
And that’s when the attack comes, not from the front, but from the side, from the other two Dinas you didn’t even know were there…
Clever girl.
So she’s the multiverse’s greatest smoke knight?
😀 <3 <3 <3
Made only better if you kept the music from the last strip open. 😀
Definitely near the top of the list, but I’d put Becky flipping off Toedad above it.
The real question is, what kind of pie was it?
Might be shaving cream.
Banana cream is statistically the funniest pie, over 15% funnier than the runner up, lemon meringue. Since Carla researched this project carefully, she should know this.
Banana Cream is the classic, but some people have suggested sweet pickle pie based on some early childhood comics of Ultra Car Willis did.
@Doctor Who: For some reason, I just read your comment in the voice of the guy from Cinema Sins. I do not know why, but the phrase “Banana cream is statistically” instantly sets me to his voice.
*ding*
Carla-ex-machina! *ding*
Insert predictable cream pie joke here. *ding*
The machination of her revenge was cold, swift, and utterly ridiculous, as promised. *backwards ding*
Roooooooll credits! *ding*
“backwards ding” = “gnid”
Oh thank goodness, I thought that was just me
maybe just a pie tin filled with whipped cream
Maybe Cool Whip.
That’s cruel.
Scorpion cream.
Mary: What kind of Pie was this?!?
Carla: PIE FLAVORED.
*Second Pie from the first pie splatters Mary’s face*
I still go back and watch ASDF Movies.
Cool Whip.
Dammit, didn’t scroll far enough, Sorry NinjaNick.
Say her name!
“I’ll fucking spell it out for ya!”
S-A-W-F–
Wait, shit.
You can’t teach that.
FRANCIS!
Heisenberg.
We have reached Ridicule factor three, approaching Humiliation level one.
There are people who’ve experienced less humiliation than this and become Spider-Man villains because of it.
“Damn that Carla. I’ve lost my study time, my control over dorm-mates,” *handed letter* “And my scholarship? You can’t kick me out! I’m the best at creating pictures! Not those stupid looking things she makes!”
Are those ping-pong balls or lights making up her name?
We will find out tomorrow, hopefully 😉
LIGHT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT BUT I AM COMPLETELY OKAY WITH THIS!!!
Those are levitating balls held up by jets of air.
I’m not sure that would actually be any more feasible… how do you get them to levitate at different heights from the same stream? LEDs can be pretty cheap and are shapable.
Jets of air also don’t work like that
The marble then hits a button on a stereo, and “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down” begins to play.
And she was Blinded By The Light/Cut loose like the Deuce/Another runner in the night…
Which version, Springsteen or Manfred Mann’s Earth Band?
The MMEB version is “revved up”, not “cut loose”, so Springsteen.
How bout the “Pac Man dies” fanfare?
Or the “Sorry, you lose” fanfare from “The Price is Right.”
There should have been some garlic in that pie
because, y’know
Mary’s a vampire
CaARlaAa?
You got served, Mary! Hahahahaha!
Okay, how are the letters made in the flashlight beams? Idgi.
I think they’re lasers, they can pulse in a way that they form shapes.
That’s… not really how lasers work.
Actually, while phrased in a weird way, it IS how they work. Check out some youtube videos of 3d laser projections. In this strip, it’s possible that it was more readable to leave out the faint lights surrounding the full width of the images. Though, there are some modern versions that don’t have anything but the images you want shown.
Not vertically like that from lights at the base.
Lazer light will just go in a straight line – you wont see it at all from another angle unless it hits something.
(There is, however, a lot of funky things you can do if you do let it hit something.)
You’re behind the times. 🙂
They can do this now.
I literally said to YouTube or google it. You are wrong, this can be done nowadays.
I’d kinda like to see tomorrow’s comic go a bit like this:
Mary: “YOU. STUPID. BI—-. Wait. How did you make the lights spell your name in the air?
Then they spend about an hour talking about the science behind Carla’s invention.
Lol, this is Mary that you’re talking about, science isn’t exactly something she cares for.
So many panels waiting……..worth it
CARLA, MOTHERFUCKER
Waaaaaaaait.
Those yellow bottles. What are they going to do? PLEASE TELL ME THEY’RE GOING TO SPRAY MARY WITH MUSTARD
How exactly is she getting the lights to do that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNoOiXkXmYQ
THIS ^^
Oh wow. That must be insanely inefficient.
Par for the course for Carla’s scheme, in other words.
More to the point.
Awesome!!!
Balls, probably ping pong balls, reflecting the beams of light. I haven’t figured out how she made them hold station like that but I’m gonna assume jets of air and threads.
PARKOUR
Again – the plan is friggin’ AWESOME.
There is zero collateral damage. The only reason Mary is made a victim is because she goes out of her way to antagonize Carla. Otherwise this would just have been a stupid display, at most worthy of a “shoo, not in the dorm” from the RA.
And at the same time it’s so utterly effective. Carla shows that she is not powerless, she is not afraid and she doesn’t have any fucks to give. She also shows that she is in control and fully capable of keeping within the boundaries for what is acceptable, giving her the moral high ground vs Mary and disarming most of the things Mary can do in retaliation.
Mary – you have been pranked.
YOU GO CARLA!!!!!!!!
Yup. That’s what’s so beautiful about this plan. It’s perfectly weighted to who Mary is and relied on Mary being the horrible person Carla read her as. If she was nicer, if she was more respectful of other people’s things, if she wasn’t a curtain-twitcher? The whole plan would have collapsed and all this would have done would be display her name in the air all cool like.
But Mary is awful and Mary is a snoop and Mary is the type to rip a box from out of your hands just to find out what’s in it. And so she got pied and the RG machine served as a beautiful coda to the prank.
And at every moment, Carla ensured that it was Mary who screwed herself, all without rising to her bait, engaging in any form of violence, and without even insulting her so far.
And as you note, it shows Mary that Carla is not powerless and her tool, but a force that is terrifying to have the full attention of.
Plus, it’s a nice fuck you at the end. Like, not just the middle fingers, but the demonstration that Carla is a a hell of a lot better at understanding Mary on a deep and complex level than Mary is at understanding Carla even on the superficial level. Thus putting a big neon spotlight right on the bigotry at the heart of this whole conflict.
Also, like any good prank, it makes the pranker herself look silly. “You made all THAT just to pie me in the face”
There is an invitation there, even if rather slim, to stop this entire thing, laugh at each other and just go separate ways. This is such a mic drop move that another part of Carla’s message is “I don’t need to escalate this further. I’ve said everything I need to say.”
It’s not like it is an outstretched hand, or anything, but it IS a possibility.
Also, “I got myself that worked up over what in the end was just an elaborate pie to the face”. Cause at the end of the day, it was Mary’s aggressive paranoia that led her down the entire path of getting pied like Anita Bryant.
Someone pied one of our former prime ministers. It was awesome.
I know. It’s beautiful.
Also, I love so much that Carla kept within the dorm rules as much in solidarity with Ruth as to keep herself out of trouble.
Carla’s revenge is for herself first and foremost, but in a small way, it’s also for Billie and Ruth.
That’s a good observation, and very much in line with her “OBVIOUSLY I’m to cool to care about people… but I may help out a little anyway, not because I care or anything” persona.
That’s a really good point.
It’s simultaneously a gift to Ruth (see, no muss, no fuss, no breaking the rules) as well as a fuck you to Mary’s initial attempt to collar her by appealing to the all-sainted rules. Like, oh, I’m sorry, was “breaking the rules” your literal excuse for breaking my skates? Well, then, let me not break a single goddamn rule or even show a spot of direct rudeness to you as I get my revenge.
and people laughed at Mary for wearing wrist bands…
See – they are PRACTICAL
I hope Carla and Becky become friends. Carla would be a decidedly bad influence on Becky, and it would be hilarious.
We would get so many great Joyce Reaction Faces™ from that pairing.
Yes. This pleases me. This pleases me to no end. This very idea is pure joy.
I want this to happen so badly, too. It would be GLORIOUS.
And Carla gets to see her name in lights.
It looks like she’s facing away from it, sort of like not turning back to look at an explosion.
I don’t think it’s over yet
I thought it was going to say pwned but this is still quite good 😀 well played Carla, well played
How are the lights spelling out her name?
Carla does not conform to this silly paradigm you call “reality”.
Well there are some lights that you can program to make messages and stuff, but not like these
more likely those tubes are actually shooting out air and little marble things and suspending them in midair to spell the name
Focused lasers.
Tops Becky’s flip off to her dad as the best flip off?
TOUGH competition.
I say Becky’s dad-flipping still wins because of just how much hinged on it, but Carla’s Mary-flipping comes in second because of the choreography.
Ooh, and there IS Amazi-Girl’s flip off to Dorothy after the chase with Walky, but I don’t think that compares to the other two.
That IS rather hilarious, but yeah, it doesn’t compete with the other two.
But I still hope someone puts together a bird-flipping montage.
And there are still the yellow tubes that need activation…which means that there is a third stage to this RG machine.
The more the merrier!
Depending on what exactly the mechanism for for the posts is, they may have already activated. (Could be a motion sensor to turn it on or something?)
This is amazing!!! She set up the Rube Goldberg machine just for the celebratory lights!!! Hahahahaha!!!!
Overly complex schemes are the best
My feelings for Carla Rutten are best described as “I have never so badly wanted to plan world domination with someone in my life.”
agreed
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Carla was based on a friend of mine from high school. This is exactly the kind of plan she’d come up with.
So, uh, your friend… is she by any chance into world domination?
Would you perhaps need a capable minion. I’m just not smart enough to plan world domination, but I am smart enough to be a competent number four or number three in such a plot.
Suck it Mary.
I love her.
The worst part is that Mary is sooooo open for a bunch of cream jokes now.
i guess you can say… *sunglasses* she just got creamed
I…don’t think that was what Kris meant. Either that, or I have and incredibly filthy mind. One of the two.
Yes?
http://i.imgur.com/dtxzn4S.jpg
Hoyoyo.
Yes. This is exactly what will happen next, because Mary like a Cadbury egg has a sweet caramel filling of patience and decency under her hard chocolate outer shell.
But Chocolate’s fuckin’ delicious yo’.
No Yotomoe!!! Her heel-face turn can’t begin (if it ever does) for another month comic time (about half a decade real time)!!!
Problem is, she’s a jerk and bigot, so others act like jerks to her, which makes her feel justified in begin a jerk. (cycle of revenge and shit) I like Carla and Ruth, but they are the worst possible people to deal with Mary. We need someone who can show unconditional kindness. Someone who was able to force Mary to compare her bigotry to the realities of life.
I’d maintain someone like Joyce would probably be best at that because they come from similar upbringings. But Joyce is currently filled with a hulk-like rage atm so that won’t happen.
It’s gotta be Jocelyne.
Either that or we could bank on a dimensional rift opening and Steven Universe falling through.
Joyce already tried, when they went to church together ages ago. Mary rejected Joyce for hanging out with non-Christians; Joyce concluded that Mary was a b-word.
Roz’s sister Riley also tried to reach out and be nice and was smacked away because clearly as a pre-teen she was an evil hellbound slut simply because of who her sister was. That one was memorable because she refused to even be in the same room as her and thus spent the early morning outside the door glaring.
Mary could eventually be a decent person, but she’s got a lot of growing up to get there and the first step of it is having to deal with the existence of other people who are not exactly like her.
Or, more to the point, having to stop enjoying feeling superior to everyone.
That’s not the end game with shithead bigots, because that isn’t a realistic goal outside of the very long term, or fortune. Which is to say, literal generations down the line. People this bigoted rarely change because of a stranger first contextualized as evil.
Wow… there’s a part of me that actually feels kinda bad for Mary reading that. Then I remember that she’s a transphobic, manipulative bigot and it goes away.
for me it goes one step further. After remembering she’s a bigot, I rememberer that I was willing to forgive Vegeta and that guy actually killed people! Some of which never get brought back!
You know, I did. On both forgiving him and forgetting that he killed people that stayed dead.
This. I forgave Vegeta for that too, but if there’s anything TV is good at, it’s brushing characters’ horrible actions under the rug for the sake of a redemptive plotline.
…And now I remember that I also somehow forgave Spike because the writers wanted me to forget that he RAPED Buffy.
I never forgave Spike, though IIRC he only attempted to rape her (I think). Still never liked him again after that though.
Personally I’m a bleeding heart. I will always feel sympathy for someone I don’t feel like anyone likes.
That’s just how heel turns work. It’s easier to forgive a character if they start as an asshole and then become nicer.
Heck, Ruth is introduced as a domineering bully with occasional glimpses of humanity, and nowadays there’s a significant number of people who aren’t me that like her and want the best for her and for her and Billie to get married and have secret lesbian babies.
I want every kid but Ryan to be happy. Mary and Faz inclusive. I just also want her to stop being horrible (unclear how Faz can be happy without being horrible, but it must be possible)
Yare Yare Daze
Opening for an AU Carla/Mary femslash?
Given Yotomoe’s previous work, maybe? Though usually Mary maintains some of her bigotry in what he does, unless that’s just role-playing?
Who says she didn’t. In fact she’s maintained all of it in that comic.
Good point. Also, just want to reiterate in case I haven’t before that I think your work is very good.
How? She’s not treating Carla like scum for being trans anymore.
Unless she’s completely lying and faking sincerity. But then that would still be an AU, where she actually understands it well enough to fake it.
Mary never really did treat Carla like scum for being trans. She clearly had hang ups, but she was just kinda standoffish for the most part. She argued with her and said something transphobic but she wasn’t just out and out “All trans people are awful and I hate them and you’re less of a person because of that”. At least that’s not how I read it. It doesn’t help that the only time we’ve seen them interacting for the most part has been when they were mad at each other.
Because I know this site and I know my first sentence is going to be misinterpreted, What I’m saying is Mary wasn’t super open about her bigotry. She was a bit agressive and rude but she wasn’t preaching about what she does is wrong and how she’s awful or whatever. It didn’t come out until the end of their confrontation that she said something to that effect. My point was more, While dismissive, Mary seems to be a bit more withheld with how she treated Carla, and that’s how I tried to portray her.
I mean, she doesn’t throw out the level of say a Target protester ranting into a megaphone about how all trans people are child molesters, but that’s not precisely the same thing as not wearing her bigotry front and center and letting it color her interactions with Carla to Carla’s repeated detriment.
I mean… she’s not exactly been subtle:
Calling Carla “that misplaced freak” and demanding her pet RA “put a stop” to said “misplaced freak”:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/misplaced/
Telling her that she was “escorting you to the boy’s wing, where you actually belong”:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/wrong-2/
And if we expand that to anti-queer bigotry in general, she’s even less transparent:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/leverage-2/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/charade/
She kinda wears her anti-LGBT bigotry on her sleeve and she shows no restraint in her hostility to the existence of Carla in particular from moment one of their first encounter.
I mean, maybe the Mary in your comics and art is much more rounded and accepting person with some queerphobic baggage, but in this universe, she’s been pretty consistent as an openly homophobic and transphobic bully who sees it as her personal mission to purge her floor of “perverts and deviants”.
You seem to be confusing your headcanon with the canon of the character we have seen thus far. Possibly because you’re not clear on exactly how hurtful the shit she’s done really is.
@ Both of you
You’re right, but I also disagree. The point of my comic is that Mary has reached the end of her rope and is fully aware that no one likes her. She doesn’t understand why everything she knows is wrong and why everyone at this school is a bunch of godless heathens doing the opposite of everything she’s learned. She’s upset about how now she’s the one in the wrong after a lifetime of being “correct” and it’s making her double down even harder. And because she’s not even specifically referring to Carla in this speech she uses the catch all term “hooligans”
Basically she just didn’t say “I hate trannies” for a consecutive 4 “panels” in so many words. I haven’t taken away that aspect of her character, but that’s not really the emotion she’s feeling at the moment.
(also I told myself I really didn’t want to have to explain this comic).
That’s an AU where everybody wins.
That wasn’t my intention but I could probably draw more if that’s whatcha want.
Hahahaha-
YES!
In which DoA becomes an anime.
inb4 the bigot gets properly violent and ruth is watching with a cameraphone in hand.
I dunno… as much as I wanted to see Mary get some kind of comeuppance, I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of Carla deliberately goading Mary into doing something that will get her in trouble or expelled (which seems to be what’s getting built up to here).
That’s a move right out of the Westboro Baptist Church playbook and I really don’t like the idea of Carla stooping to that level. 🙁
Guess we’ll have to see where this goes.
Eh, I don’t agree. Westboro Baptist aren’t really that subtle. If they hate someone, they shout it from the rooftops or, at worst, lie about them. They don’t trick people into incriminating themselves, at least to my knowledge.
No, that’s actually a thing:
http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-the-reviled-westboro-baptist-church-makes-money-2015-6
They actually make most of their money suing people who try and assault them or tear down their signs and city governments who refuse to let them picket and harass whoever they so choose.
So, just when you thought you couldn’t hate them anymore than you already do. The current batch of Target protestors doing hate speech in Targets follow a similar playbook as do the vile pieces of shit who protest outside Planned Parenthoods (though those take it to an even worse degree by doxing anyone who goes inside in the hopes of riling up their followers to murder those seeking OB/GYN care or otherwise supporting those who are). Hell, there was a case recently of a hate preacher ranting outside of a high school who just got a kid locked up for a long damn time because he threw hate speech at her about how women deserve to be raped until she swung at him with a baseball bat.
The last sentence: I think my face went ‘abject horror’.
Oh good, it’s not just me then.
I felt a little physically ill reading that last sentence. That just…there aren’t words to describe how horrible that is. None strong enough anyway. It’s just…not right.
The laws they are abusing really need to be re-written to protect people against things like that. If you deliberately taunt someone into a blind range, you should not be able to sue them for the damage they cause to you person or property since it is you fault.
There is freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but there is also stretching it to far, and those sickos are well beyond that point.
I’d have guessed situations like this would fall under “fighting words”? Like, I thought this kind of thing was exactly what that was for. But I guess it’s so subject to interpretation that it would come down to which judge or jury you get.
But if there’s already a provision for this, that isn’t working, rewriting wouldn’t be the needed fix; updating popular attitudes would. Unfortunately, I imagine that to be infinitely harder. But on the other hand, it does seem to sometimes somewhat happen, over time. I wish it were faster though.
i read that case yesterday.
I’m considering mailing that young lady
(1) a sternly worded letter,
explaining the obvious — that Violence against bigots with aluminum baseball bats is not appropriate or tasteful . right?
(2) A Gold-Painted **Wooden** Bat with the words: “Stop Homophobia” engraved on it.
She was only arrested Thursday.
I dont think there has been a sentence.
Westboro Baptist is a carefully calculated money making scheme, marketly nonviolnently antagonizing as many people as much as possible to bait any violent people into giving them money. I don’t think that’s the same thing as baiting Mary into escalating her ongoing hate crimes so that real world consequences happen faster.
Spellchecker, why must you let me down like this?
Carla is going to go to the funeral of someone from Mary’s family and shout that God killed them to punish America for being bigotted hate-mongers?
It is not Carla’s fault if Mary decides to start damaging things because she got angry. Carla is not goading Mary into hurting her, like the WBC arguably does. She just stood up to a bully in a nonviolent manner. Mary chooses how she responds.
If this were the first such comment by you, I’d leave it there. But your comment yesterday also seemed to be about making Carla out to be bad for doing what she’s doing. This implies a bigger issue. So I will address things that have as much to do with what you said today as yesterday.
When people do horrible things, it is not your responsibility to be above them. It your responsibility to try and stop them. Sure, there are limits to what you can do, and sometimes you can’t actually stop them–and, yes, you’ll have to live with that. But that doesn’t mean you do nothing.
Carla has no obligation to just let Mary be a bigot and just try to avoid her. She has an obligation to everyone Mary would hurt in the future to try and teach her a lesson by providing consequences to her actions. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” after all.
Sure, there are ways of going too far. But those are mostly in the realm of physically hurting her. A non-violent response like this? In a context where she can’t get the authorities involved without hurting an ally (Ruth)? How in the world is that too far.
I mean, Mary did something pretty horrible, to the point that I would not mourn her death. Even Carol and John have shown good sides to them–both were shown being loving to Joyce to some extent, until Becky’s situation came up. Mary has not–she’s always been portrayed as a crappy person, to the point that even Joyce noticed. (“She says she’s a Christian, but I think it didn’t take.”)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edmundburk377528.html
I cannot recall a single good thing Mary did in this comic. At least, not intentionally.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edmundburk377528.html
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edmundburk377528.html
Go ahead and delete that. A website hijacked my clipboard, and it didn’t look like those URLs posted.
It is not Carla’s fault if Mary decides to start damaging things because she got angry. Carla is not goading Mary into hurting her, like the WBC arguably does. She just stood up to a bully in a nonviolent manner. Mary chooses how she responds.
Don’t forget that she can’t very well get the authorities involved. She’d hurt an ally (Ruth). And, despite your optimistic claim yesterday that they merely talk it out, this has gone beyond that point–see Cerberus et al for more info.
I mean, Mary is the one character in this comic that has been shown to be consistently bad. Even John and Carol showed at least some love to Joyce–even if the lesbian thing shut it down. But Mary’s just been mean.
Even happy-go-lucky Joyce noticed quite early on: “She claims to be a Christian, but I don’t think it took.”
CARLAAAAAAA
well it’s not the triple bird flip but it’s still pretty damn great. 😀
Welp I know what my favorite individual panel is.
Okay, it’s official. Carla is a trickster god.
God-dess, no mis-gendering.
Interestingly enough, Loki in both the comics and the mythology is also trans as fuck.
Yeah. And apparently omnisexual, as (s)he actually gets pregnant in order to give birth to the eight legged horse Odin rides. Which also means Odin technically rides around on his own grandkid. Honestly, if there where ever to be a god of gender-queerness I would nominate Loki…well except for how much evil (s)he does. And the unfortunate connotations of being “the trickster God”. Though maybe (s)he was the god mages and the Norse just used “trickster” because they didn’t have a word for “Mage”.
Also I’m using (s)he because, while Loki spends most of her/his time in myth as male, (s)he never actually states her/his gender preference, and if (s)he actually does exist, I have no wish to offend her/him.
Well, yeah, it’s Loki. Fucked a horse to win a bet. You don’t want any part of that coming for you.
I know this many days later maybe no one would see, but the way I heard it, it wasn’t just a bet. The “stake” if they’d “lost” was Freya forced into an unwanted marriage. And this isn’t even the only time Loki helps her out of a situation like that. There’s also the time Thor “misplaced” his hammer, and the giants who had it refused to give it back–unless Freya married their leader. She was so mad she yelled loud enough that her necklace fell off. And Loki was again instrumental to her not having to go. Sure Thor had the “leading role” in that little “play”, but he almost blew their cover several times over. It was Loki’s fast-talking that kept it from falling apart.
A lot of people refer to Loki as “evil” but he seems to be quite helpful, at least in most of the stories I’ve read so far. And after reading about Odin meeting Ymir, or the first time the Aesir met the Vanir, I’d feel reeeally hesitant to trust Odin very far at all. Sure, Loki ends up on the “wrong” side of Ragnarok, but after how Odin treats Loki’s children, is it really any surprise?
I see a lot of parallels between Loki and Carla, and among the many similarities is a good heart. And people who think themselves good and right often trying to step on them.
I am under the impression that Loki did not necessarily, uh, *intend* to get fucked by Slepnir’s sire. I was under the impression Loki merely intended to lure the horse away so that Loki and the other gods would win the bet, and Loki wasn’t quiiiteee fast enough?
My headcanon says otherwise. Funnier that way. But you’re probably right.
We have to remember that a lot of what we know about norse mythology are stories intended to, as the poet puts it, “make a meed hall full of barbarians decide not to put an axe in the head of the storyteller.” – so “Whatever is funniest” is a pretty good canonical explanation for any plot hole.
See also: Loki tying his balls to a goat.
“Loki managed to make her laugh, by playing some diverting antics with a goat” – Pffft, THAT’s was glossing over the fun part if I ever saw it.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14726/14726-h/14726-h.htm
Loki isn’t Odin’s son in the mythology. They are described once as blood brothers, but not actually related. Sohe’s not riding his own grandkid, just his best friend’s son. Nothing weird there.
He Also gave birth to Hel, Fenrir and Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent don’t frget
Personally, I’m headcanoning Loki as genderfluid.
I’m pretty sure Loki is canon genderfluid.
Pretty sure he’s always identified as a dude, so not canon, but there’s a chance I’m mistaken.
I mean, Loki gets a bum rap because Tor is the useful Christ analogue and most of what we have is post christianization, and we don’t have much, so I get wanting him, but still.
I haven’t read the norse myths in the original norse, so that might be the case. I know that at least one version of comic Loki is canon genderfluid though:
http://thegeekiary.com/loki-agent-of-asgard-writer-confirms-loki-is-bisexual-and-genderfluid/4034
Yeah, no comment on the comic. Marvel’s gonna Marvel. This is good.
Well, Loki played with gender like HELL. A trickster god, a shapeshifter, who takes the forms of men and women and more for shits and giggles. It’s actually kinda hard to read into the pronouns used in Loki’s myths, because, well, all the information we have on Loki is filtered through the records of christian monasteries and even if it wasn’t, it’s hardly like old viking lore is likely to treat transness with the same hand we do. Though maybe I should see if I still have my old norse myth books from uni . . .
You could make a case for Loki’s and Odin’s gender being “magician”. It COULD be seen as the same as trans- or gender fluid, but there were some strong cultural connections between transgressing the classical gender roles and accessing the spiritual realm that is simply not present in how gender is usually seen today.
Further complicated by the fact that everything we know about Loki and Odin has been filtered between a millennium of different gender roles. They were at least not cis, that’s for sure.
I remember reading an interview with a Native American (can’t remember which nation) who lamented how the young people nowadays were gay or trans rather than Two Spirit. Not quite the same thing, apparently.
…did I just mansplain gender norms? I’m sure no one in this conversation knows more about that than me or anything…
As a Scandinavian I feel pretty confident talking about Loki and iron age schamanism though 🙂
You’re Scandanavian. On the question of what the original myths say, I’m pretty sure you speak from a much more knowledgable position than any of us. So not really the same thing as mansplaining or cissplaining.
I HAVE been taught a lot of viking stuff in school.
A depressingly large amount of it was made up between the 16th and 20th century, especially during the national romantic movement. (“MY country has cooler historical heroes than YOUR country”)
A hilariously large part of it was invented within a few centuries of the viking age as well by German, Arabic and – in one notable case – Icelandic scholars who had a very vague idea of what they were talking about.
And nowadays we have Marvel 🙂
Take home message: In any historical account someone is lying to you. Enjoy the stories but read with care.
#VikingSplaining
I hope you realize you just made vikingsplaining a thing.
No, Scandinavians don’t necessarily know better. There isn’t a secret Viking transmission method. Vikings were just the traders or raiders, yada yada yada (my wife is irate at the conflation of Nordic and Viking. She’s aware this isn’t like actual racism, but it’s me saying it, and other folks brought up the Norse).
The simple fact is, it’s hard to be totally sure. Vikings gave women waaaaaaay more leeway, and included them in raiding parties, but what we have of what we now call Asatru ultimately comes from Iceland:. Iceland was backwards, and even then, what we have is from post Christianization. Iceland subscribed more to gender roles like the Christians did (which was less than the modern era thinks, but still way worse than we sometimes have now), and Christianization made gender roles align more.
I said gender fluid Loki isn’t canon because, to the best of my knowledge, it isn’t. Canon is NOT everything, and I don’t usually say this (text interpretation matters way more than what an often dead dude thought). It’s a valid reading of what we have, though, and it’s possibly closer to what was originally sung outside of Iceland (or possibly even inside it). Christianity bastardized the myths, and barring something truly amazing, we’ll never know what they originally were. And that’s unfortunate, but ultimately fine.
It is worth noting, tho, that if Loki were to identify as nonbinary, it’d be under a different conception. Using modern white people terms for this can be fraught with problems in eras and with peoples with a different conception of the complexities of gender. This isn’t actually a problem with the Norse, what with the old religion being dead (yes I’m aware of the successor), and their current use of modern white conceptions, but it’s a problem elsewhere, where the other culture is in fact still alive.
…I’m OK with this outcome.
Also just checked with wife, but while gender roles differed, gender itself didn’t. The Norse had the same concept of gender as the other honkies they bordered.
Also, gah, what Cerb said is still bugging me.
Old Norse culture is totally dead. It isn’t kept alive as a triple bird to stale-end pieces of white bread, the Japanese, or similar. They adopted the culture they envied to a large degree, while adapting it to themselves. You can trust the average Dane to have a better grasp of DANISH (not Icelandic, not Greenlanders, not Swedish, not Finnish….) history, but old Danish culture? They’ll tell you horned helmets are for silly things because they aren’t real, and not much else. (But Rutee, you ask your wife! Yes, but shes an actual historian). A hypothetical Congolese expert is more knowledgeable than Bagge (Heck, it’s not lovely wifey’s field, so her too), because it’s totally dead. It’s not the same situation with extant cultures, much of which teach how things were because fuck your cultural oppressors.
My bad. I hadn’t considered that aspect of cultural appropriation and its relation to myth.
Thanks for the history lesson, that was really fascinating and awesome!
Curious note. What are your views of trans interpretations of history, looking back into history to try and uncover trans narratives in historical figures and offer trans interpretations of their life stories? And what should be the limitations of such an analysis?
Like obviously there are colonialist aspects in forcing modern white trans narratives on old dead native and non-white populations who may have had different concepts of gender, but I’m wondering if there is an appropriate means of noting or trying to uncover the trans individuals in history that have been buried by generations of cis authors rewriting the history books to block those interpretations.
Sure, being a Scandinavian does not guarantee you a sip in the well of Mimer, but it increases your chance of knowing historians who specialize in that time period. It IS a bit of a special interest around here 🙂
In a case where cultural appropriation is a legitimate concern? I’d be inclined to ask why you went with myths where appropriation is a real concern first. There’s some cause for this; white people in non-white scholarship can be a thorny subject, but it isn’t exactly automatically taboo. f’rex one of the leading scholars on IIRC 1600ish Korean history is wonderbread, and the Koreans seem to take cues from him most of the time. It’s within the bounds of possibility that they internally chafe at this, and think he’s full of shit… but it’s not like it’s impossible that he’s preventing hypernationalist ‘scholarship’ either (It’s not like THAT doesn’t exist, whatever modern nation we’re looking at.).
But having settled why you went for them first (and ‘I didn’t’ is definitely a plausible thing to come up), as far as readings go, my basic inclination is, its’ okay as literary analysis, but you have to point out that you’re looking at something through a modern lens that was absolutely not intended. This isn’t that unusual on its own, but given what I’ve seen, being prepared to stress that is key. It’s really easy to, even if you avoid it, have other readers of your work start using your work to insist that yours is more correct than the original view. It ain’t, and it ain’t the ‘true’ meaning. And while this would be true whether it’s “Quetzalcoatl’s birth from an emerald and subsequently being born male can be seen as a discussion on how gender can be constructed, and how gems have been used as a sign for queerness for centuries” or “Ulysses, from a different viewpoint, can be seen as a brilliant self-help book”, only one of these has the spectre of appropriation (Nobody besides the ghost of James Joyce wants Ulysses, including James Joyce scholars). Avoiding that is important, but with reasonable steps taken to avoid it, I do think scholarship benefits from it.
This is going to be far from the only opinion on the subject, and mine is somewhat preliminary. I always respected literature, but it’s not my field, and I’m not familiar with a ton of non-cis scholars of color weighing in (Although a non-scholar who presented a convincing argument why I shouldn’t be going to scholars would be acceptable. Difficult, though)
Not really, Bagge; Old nordic culture isn’t exactly an ignored topic in White academia, and there’s a ton of fiction that exalts y’all to drum up a layperson’s interest as well. This is in comparison to say, scholarship on the Ainu, or Native nations in the Americas or similar – Basically no 1 curr (and it’s far more aggressively taught than details about old Danish culture). Further, because popularized fields like old nordic culture are so well studied, many of your native historians specialize, yanno, elsewhere. It’ll come up in coursework still, but it’s pretty likely to not be your specialized field (More likely than say, a congolese historian, but that doesn’t matter much once you actually HAVE the congolese historian).
But mostly, because the first barrier is ‘most people don’t really talk to historians or anthopologists or similar in the first place.’ What Cerb was saying about ‘you’d know better’ is partially descended from responses to native tribes in the Americas and elsewhere. And I know for a fact they put far more effort into educating the average citizen on the details of their modern and premodern culture than their cultural hegemons put into it. I also know for a fact that it’s more than say, Denmark or Sweden puts into teaching about ITS cultural history. Because Denmark or Sweden doesn’t have to do it as a giant pair of raised middle fingers (And aren’t under threat of having their pasts wiped out, either in the popular culture or in academia). I mean, nobody is necessarily lax about it, but there isn’t an urgency backed by fear of extinction. Which makes laypeople’s claims drop down tot he same level I’d apply for most places – generally, poor. (I mean, not ‘meriken talking about the meriken revolution’ poor, but not particularly highly)
Sorry, I was being coy. I meant to say – I grew up with rune carvings in my backyard and now I see them on my way to work. I live a stones throw from the old burial mounds Adam von Bremen was so hilariously wrong about. I have close friends and colleges who are historians and archaeologists who specialize in iron age Scandinavia. I am an active reenactor of that time period. I know my shit 🙂
(for example, I know enough to recognize a cleaned up version of the poetic Edda when I see it, as linked above)
So yeah, I was wrong to suggest it comes automatically for a Scandinavian, but those of us who do want to learn that time period have a lot of material to work with. (Which sometimes can be a problem – there are a fair number of us who DO learn a lot, but not enough to separate the few scraps of facts that actually exist from the enormous pile of lies from the 19th century)
But you are right that it is NOT the same as living cultures, as the Native American nations, and it’s not comparable to cultural appropriation
I love this!!! Also, apparently everyone else did too, and even more people came, because I’ve been unable to get here for twenty minutes because of “maintenance or capacity” issues. Which in itself is awesome, that so many people loved this strip that server might have gotten overflowed!!!
Oh Carla, I’m just in love with you. *holds up ‘To me you are perfect’ sign*
I know, every comic I’m falling more and more in love with her. She’s just so fucking awesome!
That is the perfect comment for a Mary gravatar.
Almost enough for me to hope this plot line ends in hate sex, almost but that would mean Carla touching Mary’s lady parts.
So really, the little brat screwed herself over by forcibly taking something from Carla’s hands, whereas Carla’s little device was only meant to mock with her name in lights. Mary has not been physically harmed, only humiliated, at her own doing, and Carla will walk away scot-free.
Well-played, Carla.
Well, Carla’s device was meant in part to trick Mary into grabbing the box. But she still did it of her own volition, and certainly can’t blame Carla for the pie as a result.
Yup, it’s a beautiful little mistressminded revenge plan. And shows that Carla actually knows how to do pranks right.
Overall, I can say she has fully proved her ability to “show her dominance with sweet pranks”:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/03-up-all-night-to-get-vengeance/curbstompings/
My God! That comic was TWO FREAKING YEARS AGO!!
Willis had this moment in mind at least THAT FAR BACK!!!
there’s no winning for mary, and that’s wonderful
And with a middle finger to cap off the hate meant for a self-righteous bongo, Carla becomes a favorite character in my heart.
correction: two middle fingers for a self righteous bongo
Comment section provides the third.
Here’s two more.
╭∩╮(Ο_Ο)╭∩╮
So that’d be 5 total then? Or maybe more. I mean, there’s still the pie throwing arm there. It could probably flip the bird too.
Totally fantastic. I love it. The planning was perfect. Mary is gaffed.
Panel 6 appears it gave Mary a stroke or something, one pupil bigger than the other there. Rage does odd things to people.
Excellent planning Carla. Now…is it over?
My bet is that Mary wont let this go. Mary is self righteous and hateful. Shes mentioned how she thinks dehumanizes Carla for being Trans.
https://youtu.be/EjjMH_PdCvI
Poetry in Motion
Also, I’d say Mary’s rage face is one of the most hilarious rage faces I’ve ever seen. It looks like she’s just been possessed by a demon.
…
Wait a minute…
I think she’s about to start foaming at the mouth.
Honestly, I’m half expecting Mary to shout: “Blood for the Blood God!! Skulls for the Skull Throne!!!” with that face.
Why Mary, what large teeth you have…
Carla, that’s brilliant. If you were real, I’d kiss you. Guess I’ll just have to kiss Willis instead. You’re coming to Austin again this summer, aren’t you, Willis?
Totally unrelated- I just had a $cientology ad on my TV. Volunteer “ministers”. Blech.
I’ve been watching too much TV this weekend. Too much sad news.
She just wanted to study…
Maybe we can put all this behind us now and everyone can be friends then.
Yeah?
Yep, Mary will totally actually accept Carla’s existence as a trans person now that she’s been bested in a prank…
Nah, hell, I don’t even think Mary will be at all okay with this being the last word or being “bested” by some, to quote her directly, “misplaced freak”.
But Carla at least showed that she’s not some meek victim to be pushed around and who will calmly eat the bigotry she’s throwing.
They will never be friends, but perhaps, Carla has at least earned Mary’s respect for them to become foes.
I don’t know, nothing’s impossible as long as Willis is willing to put the effort into developing the relationship between these two more.
I’m definitely not biased and wanting to see them hook up or anything, nope.
I think Yotomoe can get you covered on that one.
Interesting dynamic. Mary’s ‘taking one for team’ with them, I believe.
That’d be nice, but it’s unlikely.
There will be no studying at this school.
Oh yeah I forgot they were at College.
Perhaps, but Mary had plenty of opportunities to walk away. Carla, too.
I don’t think I like where things seem to be heading with this arc, but the truth is that both Mary and Carla had plenty of opportunities to either find a better resolution, or even just stay out of each other’s hair, and we’re where we are now because they didn’t.
It’s pretty hard to walk away when someone is right infront of your door stomping on there skates.
Well, I mean, she could have just walked back into her room, but that wouldn’t have stopped the stomping.
Who knows how long Carla’s fabulous calves could work it.
….Thank’s for image.
I’m just gonna roll my eyes aggressively at the dewd and Janet and all the other Mary denialists.
Sure, dudes, roller skates can’t melt steel beams.
…My god, Jet Set Radio makes so much sense now!
What’d I do? 🙁
Just kind of done with false equivalences on the balance of power between Carla and Mary and the illusion that Carla could have done anything to save herself from being eventually bullied by Mary for existing.
Sorry for the brusqueness on that.
If it’s cool for me to interject (and I think you’re new here, but I can be wrong on that), basically since we had this whole Mary/Carla feud thing happen we’ve been inundated with comments about how Carla totally had being misgendered coming, that because she was being kind of a butthole she deserves to have hate speech tossed at her.
Sure, Carla could walk away and be the bigger person. She could spend the rest of her time in that dorm knowing that little shits like Mary can get away with dehumanizing her unless she’s contrite and meek like all Queer people must be if they want basic human dignities. She can sit there and be angry that her RA is too busy to protect Carla from hate speech, because Carla is surrounded by that shit wherever she goes. Hell, I’d bet dollars to donuts that this isn’t the first time this has happened to her on this campus.
Or she can take that power back. She can refuse to allow the spectre of Mary to hover over her head. She can tell Mary to fuck off in the most Carla way possible, with a laser light show and a pie to the face. She can make it absolutely clear that she’s not going to stand for being dehumanized.
I think a lot of folks on the “do this thing instead, Carla” wagon are approaching this from the perspective of two equally powerful members of two equally powerful social classes coming to blows, rather than Mary attacking Carla over a slight using absolutely disproportionate means. Yes, Carla was deliberately annoying her and she shouldn’t have done that, but she shouldn’t have to earn a basic human dignity like not having hate speech tossed at her, that should just be something expected, no matter how much of an annoying butthole she can be. Like, Joe is a total cretin of a friend to Danny, but it would be super fucked up if Danny told Joe to fuck off and go count all his money. Invoking stereotypes to get back at someone you’re angry at (and even then, that wasn’t something Mary did when she misgendered Carla; that’s something she’s been thinking the entire time and let out when she had the right opportunity) is never okay.
I hope this helps in some way.
Yes, so much yes. Human dignity is a right to all people. The bigots like mary just go to try and take that away and must be stopped. Carla is standing up for herself and for others that mary and her ilk will attack.
It’s really fucking easy, actually. You put on headphones like an adult in a shared living space who cares about her sanity. You CAN NOT escape from minor noise. CAN. NOT. You learn to deal. If that means noise cancelling headphones, okay. If that means bailing to a study area (which the campus has in spades if it’s modern), okay. What it doesn’t mean, is starting a fight over every noise, as Mary does. It can mean “Get the authorities”, but only if it’s actually warranted.
Any of these were an option if Mary legit wanted to study. In the comic that actually exists, she wanted to give that “misplaced freak” what for.
But realistically, you won’t acknowledge that. Bloody straights, bloody cis people. Can’t see past your bloody noses, and fall all over yourselves to ignore what is fucking obvious in the actuator text, because you’re sooooo rational.
Not to mention there’s a quiet study room literally on every floor of the dorm rooms specifically for students like people who actually are distracted and bothered by minor noises.
Like if that was the real reason, then for all that Mary is being “distracted”, she would have long since moved her study materials into there when it was time to get to work. But she doesn’t. Because she doesn’t actually care about the studying or the noise. She cares about the meddling in other people’s affairs and the judgment.
And there’s a lot of denialism at foot surrounding that among people who want a narrative where an uppity trans person did wrong to a scared cis girl who only resorted to abject bigotry and property destruction, because the big mean trans person was just so rude to her.
Even when the narrative is pulling out its yellow highlighter pen and making it not at all subtle that Mary fundamentally is a curtain-twitcher and the noise and disturbance is always the excuse to go spy on her fellow students and yell at them for not conforming to her rules.
Like, people forget, Mary’s first thing was not “I want to study”, it was “this is against school regulations” and “I could get you reported for this”. The power was what was important to her not the noise which was minimal. And it’s time for people to accept that and accept that they got suckered in to sympathizing with the bigot by their own cultural assumptions about how a trans story is supposed to go.
Good points.
Since they obviously can’t be civil to each other, they should probably have a mediated conversation about this.
Their needs are massively clashing, so it needs to get resolved quickly and calmly. Mary wants to study. Carla wants to skate indoors. Is it quiet hours? If so, Carla should just go outside. She’s breaking the rules as it is, so doing this during quiet hours would just make things worse. She has no intention of listening to Mary anymore, so it’s definitely time for someone else to step in.
Anyone with thoughts on who the third party should be if this happens?
OMG, were not going to have the “noise in the hallway TOTALLY justifies destruction of property, bigotry, and blackmail” argument again are we?
All day, every day. Because we have a queer victim, so that means queer victim blaming on every appearance of Carla from here on out. I’m pretty sure “noise in the hallway” is just going to be Carla’s “$20 haircut”.
You know I was just wondering if Willis was playing Wack-A-Mole with these comments or if they just hadn’t been posted. At least one has made it up. Time will tell if it lasts.
They’re both in the wrong. Though if you were to objectively analyse the sequence of events, it stems from Ruth not doing her job.
And point demonstrated, thank you.
Love the little bit of “if you were man-logic like me” flair to this variation and the slipping in of the “both sides are equally wrong” construction.
I actually blamed Ruth. Ruth is the reason her hall is out of control, Ruth’s behavior is the reason Mary was able to behave viciously in the first place, and Ruth is the reason Carla has to resort to contraptions to defend herself.
But, thanks for calling me a man. I would think someone like you would be above using gender as an insult. But hey, I guess bigotry can hide behind the most unsuspecting of faces.
Sorry about the bigot comment, you touched a nerve and I didn’t appreciate it.
Nah, that was a fair callout. I misgendered you and that was not cool.
You’re right. That was my bad. I’m sorry for doing that. In my experiences, people who pull the “if you were to observe objectively” gambit on me have typically been men, but that is no excuse for not checking in on pronouns to make sure that is not a hurtful bit of misgendering. And I deeply regret that I hurt you in that manner. I am sorry.
That’s nice and all, but, uh, that leaves “it’s okay to use ‘man’ as an insult if your target >is< a man" as a thing. You sure you meant to imply that?
If someone was a man and was actually doing the mansplaining pose of “well, see here little lady, you failed to be objective when you didn’t take into account (ignorant half-opinion)”, then no I would not have any problem identifying the problem in relation to the cultural oppression it is steeped in.
My power to injure a man by recognizing oppressive behavior frequently done by men against me does not carry the same weight or force as oppressive behaviors done against women or insults that imply that the identity of being a woman is somehow lesser than that of men, because they don’t have the same system of oppression adding weight to them.
It’s the reason why any gendered insult against men can never punch with the same force as gendered insults against women in our current societies.
So it was intentional. Huh.
Is that a problem?
It’s a data point.
….Yes, it is a datapoint. I’ll have to stop assuming I know you.
Ruth is an RA, not an on-call Nanny. When Mary dropped her cissexist bomb, Ruth was banging her way down the hall to ram Carla through a wall for the hopping.
She’s an RA. It’s literally not her job to stop every dispute or action. She’s a student. She’s still expected to go to class. If instead you mean she should have done something about the hate speech, yeah. If she could. I somewhat doubt that’s her job, tho (low opinion of colleges and trans people)
I know, right? So irritating having no one support you against bigots.
Was Carla’s name Carl before she transitioned?
I don’t even know why, I just, I just NEED to know.
Please, say it was Carl.
That’s actually a rude question to ask a transperson. She’s Carla now and that’s all that matters.
How hard must it be to come up with a whole new name though?
I mean you can’t even go online without seeing some idiot with xX420BlazeITXx” as their username anymore.
….
I’ll be right back I’m gonna’ go see if someone actually registered that as their real name.
I thought you were dead.
It is. Google first page shows both YouTube and deviantArt.
It’s not always that hard to come up with a new name, I’m happy with mine, but I’ve come up with names I could also enjoy being referred to as. That could just be my D&D upbringing though.
It’s rude to ask an actual trans person, but Carla is fictional. Fictional characters have their innermost secrets known to all. There’s a lot of personal details we know about fictional characters that would be incredibly rude (not to mention weird) to know if they were real people, but they’re not.
I’d say asking personal questions about a character can be expected, but by the same token the author can choose to not reveal it ever.
it’s still transphobic, and i’ll tell you why! yes, fictional characters have more personal details revealed to the audience than people in real life. however, things like dead names or whether or not Carla is on HRT or other medical transition stuff are things you STILL would never find out or even consider asking a cisgender character. there’s an underlying assumption in that question that Carla is not a “legitimate” name for that character. no one is asking what Ruth’s real name is. we even have several characters with nicknames, Walky and Billie, and yet there are no fans or characters in the comic who are just dying to know Walky’s REAL name.
And yet you do routinely know such things about fictional characters. We know Walky’s real name. We know Billie’s real name. You often know secrets about characters no one else knows. Sometimes things they don’t even know.
And often we want to know more. Things you’d never ask people in real life. We speculate about histories of abuse. We speculate over sexuality.
In other cases we know or wonder whether characters might be in therapy or taking psychiatric medication. None of that is wrong. It’s character detail.
It’s not that Carla isn’t a legitimate name, it’s that we want to know more about her. About her history, about her transition, about where she’s coming from, where she is and where she’s going. We might someday get it. We might not. Depends on the story Willis wants to tell.
I get that and I respect that, but that question and that inquiry carries a different weight with trans folk and trans character, especially as knowledge of dead names is frequently wielded as a weapon against trans folk, as a means to wound or cause pain, not to mention as a means of delegitimizing the person or the character’s real identity in favor of this accident of birth.
For instance, do any of us have any doubt that if Carla’s dead name appeared in comic, we wouldn’t have asshole commenters spewing her dead name forth with misgendered pronouns from here on out? Hell, we get a bit of that already with Jocelyne, even on comics where her dead name hasn’t been used for awhile.
Which makes the question and the inquiry more complicated and delicate. Hence why it’s typically better to let dead names be dead if they are not narratively required (for instance, showing a tense interaction with a transphobic relative ala Nomi’s hospital scene with her mom in Sense8).
To be fair with Jocelyne, some folks may have genuinely forgotten she’s trans or never caught on to it because unlike Carla she only acknowledged it once directly and all the other characters in the comic call her by the wrong name and pronouns because she’s not out of the closet yet.
You’d have to be a superficial reader to skip both the author’s alt-text and the comments section, but yeah a person that only reads the comic might have missed it.
(not to deny that there are assholes who would misgender Jocelyne out and out, just saying her status is a lot more easy to miss than Carla’s)
In my headcannon she was born as,
“Lindsey Carlyle Ruttee” .
Her family is Dutch, rich WASP, and Carlyle is her mother’s maiden family name. She considered changing her to Ultra Carla ( cuz thats awesome ) , and her family offered her a sweet bribe to use Carla instead.
I dunno about “dying to know”, but Walky’s and Billie’s real names HAVE been subject to speculation by the readers…as well as their sexual history, past traumas and the state of their mental and physical well being.
I’m not saying that asking about a trans character’s pronouns or whether they’re taking hormones, etc ISN’T a delicate subject, but to me it’s on par with discussing Walky’s first sexual encounter. It’s really up to the author whether to reveal this information or even acknowledge the question at all.
A) Dead names are dead for a reason.
B) Unlikely as it looks like Carla went the route I did of taking a name from a particularly inspirational figure from a beloved piece of cultural media. For me, that was a comic book. For Carla, it looks like it’s her beloved childhood cartoon “Ultracar”.
C) Feminizations of dead names seem to be falling out of style these days among trans women in general. I think it has to do with them having the potential to cause permanent reminders to one’s dead name, which can be massively dysphoric.
Oh there’s a word for it even, “dead names”, alright.
Yeah. I get the curious nature though. That drive to know everything, so you can understand everything, can be strong. Useful to have someone explain how asking a question can be a social faux pas. If it helps, I can give an example of a fairly big one I’ve done.
And now that I think on it, I may of had this conversation with Cerberus before.
Yup, I like the dead names term too. It really encapsulates what those birth names are to trans folks. Something dead and gone that if it is to return, means something monstrous has occurred.
I once made this total n00b mistake with a transman (before I knew that it was super tiresome/rude to ask it). I was curious because I was on a date with him, and I like thinking about a date’s history/upbringing/childhood stories. He patiently explained that he’d rather I knew him solely as [his name], he didn’t want me to think of him as his previous name, which made perfect sense to me. I didn’t get another date, though. Sorry, that dude!
This was years ago; I know better now. Anyway, please learn from my microaggression / foolish dating mistake, o commenters, and refrain from asking this question of your trans* dates and pals. (If they want you to know for some reason, they’ll tell you.)
Yeahhh, similarly the other week when I was at work, we had a new company supplying our towels/floor mats, and since I was the person in charge there, I had to handle it. When it came time to sign for the stuff, the guy looked at me and my nametag and said, “Well, I know that your *real* name isn’t Amber.” Made me incredibly uncomfortable and pretty much ruined my night. It’s not the first time I’ve had people be shitty to me about that at my job, either. Of course, when my manager found out, both her and the district manager were fucking pissed (her words) and she called the company the next morning and yelled at them, and the guy got in trouble. She’s pretty much been a guardian angel regarding that stuff, but y’know, it still sucks to deal with it in the first place.
Incidentally, before I started dating my gf, I had a bad habit of using her dead name (since I knew it) and making excuses that it’s what I’d always known her as (plus this was before I knew that I was trans, back when I really didn’t understand that it was a thing at all). So, you know, people make mistakes, but they can still grow. I mean, we’ve been together for almost four years, so it wasn’t permanently damaging or anything.
I do hope that my mistake wasn’t too similar to the nametag guy.
For context, the fellow on this particular date did present himself as an “open book” about his trans experience, and invited me to ask questions. He wasn’t just doing his dang job and getting invalidated by incredibly presumptuous strangers. I’m glad your supervisors had your back, but I’m sorry that happened to you in the first place.
Dead names return is monstrous = zombie name?
not to mention EVERYONE tries to guess your dead name. almost every non-trans-friendly person i meet will either guess at my dead name or deliberately feminize my name, assuming that i just masculinized my dead name to get my real name. thankfully i didn’t, otherwise being dead named would be a lot more emotionally draining every day. instead i chose a completely different name that felt right to me (although incidentally, i almost chose Carl as my name, wanting to name myself after my grandfather.)
but yes, i can concur with other trans people here that dead naming someone is transphobic violence. don’t do it. don’t even ask.
Also, like in the case of my wife, feminizations of the deadname are what kids would mock you with in school. Why on earth would someone CHOOSE that name for themselves?
Also also a 5 yro trans girl we know is keeping her birthname for NOW, because she’s 5, and because as soon as her mom suggested some names she might choose she immediately jumped to “I COULD NAME MYSELF ELSA LIKE IN FROZEN” and her mom was like “what have I done” 🙂
They were, and are, a thing. I’m not going to speculate why. It’s why I’m pretty chill about this when via people do it in fiction.
Like I can’t fathom doing it, but I keep seeing it. It’s a personal choice. People shouldn’t feel the need to, but shouldn’t feel pressured not to either.
Cis people do it in fiction. Bloody autocorrect
Right, I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. I totally get that people do it and have no problem with it, this is pretty much specifically my wife’s feelings on it. Cis people have a tendency to expect that it’ll be what trans people do and this is the easiest way to explain why someone would have painful associations with that name.
Maybe because I like my name; it’s the middle that’s the stinker.
Awesome!
So, how sure are we that she is M(ale) to Female trans, and not M(achine) to Female?
Because Carla’s going to be the one to bring the Singularity to the DoA universe in around 20 years*, which would mean she’d have to invent herself.
(*Not intentionally, she just wanted a real Ultra Car.)
I’m still hoping for that chest arm.
Panel 6: The Face of Madness.
XD
Something awful is about to happen.
Yo quick question, how filthy stinkin’ rich are Carla’s parents? Like Scrooge McDuck rich or Bill Gates rich?
It depends. Is Scrooge or Bill Gates richer? Cause I think Scrooge might be richer, as he seems to be able to afford technology to make gold coins about as dense as water.
Scrooge is certainly richer than Gates – after all, he has “607 tillion 386 zillion 947 trillion 522 billion dollars and 36 cents” per that one DuckTales episode.
It’s not that those coins are as dense as water: Scrooge just has a very peculiar connection with money that allows him to swim in it– and it alone– >as if< it were water. His trick doesn't work with, e.g., coal.
Also, Scrooge is ridiculously strong.
Citation: Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Part 11: The Empire-Builder from Calisoda
Bill Gates marrying Scrooge McDuck rich. Cause it sounds like both of Carla’s parents are cutting edge engineers who are heads of their shared company.
And apparently her parents fully support her, so that probably gives her a lot of the emotional strength to be as “fuck it” as she is. She’ll never have to worry about fearing discrimination, because worst case she can just go to work for her parents’ company.
Plus robots.
Gotta love that white privilege
I object to that. It’s WEALTH Privilege. Entirely different but often related.
It buys her out of some but not all and certainly not even most of the awfulness that gets heaped on trans folks. As Caitlyn Jenner is discovering first hand.
how fun would it be if one of Mary’s parents works for Carla’s parents. Just not close enough that they would hang out.
Carla was never my favourite character but…
JUSTICE IS SWEET AND CARLA DELIVERED IT
Well, I was right about the machine getting attention.
No one’s adopted this Carla face as a grav (yet)?!?!?
Give it time.
PIE BUKKAKE RAGEFACE
=band name. Go on, someone take it.
With their new hit single “Banana Split for your ASS!”
It’s good to see Carla acting almost exactly like the Walkyverse version of the character. I’ve been wondering when we’d get to see the pie.
And so justice has been served, with style.
Now she just needs to drop Mary somewhere deep in the Amazon rain forest.
We’re supposed to see the X-men movie later today. Nothing that happens in it will be as awesome as that last panel.
I saw it earlier today.
You’re right.
As an honest to god marvel fan, this may also be more awesome than anything in Captain America: Civil War. And I think that’s the best movie Marvel has ever made.
Actually, yeah. Not in terms of ‘awesome’ as in ‘cool’, which Civil War had in spades, but more awesome as in ‘so incredibly satisfying’.
I’m hijacking the PA sound system because this is the perfect accoutrement to Carla’s victory birds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0i2lIU7idQ
I JUST GOT THAT OUT OF MY HEAD!!!!!!
It will never leave. It will never leave!
pssst, I think you mean accompaniment. Accoutrement is something entirely different.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accoutrement
That would explain why everyone reacted like I was naked the last time I wore a song.
Is it bad that I could barely read what those lights were trying to read out?
GLORIOUS. And while Carla’s big beaming face and the That which a box will not protect her from (because it’s her name, that’s all it does, but at the same time Mary will take it as a massive fuck you because Mary does not respect Carla’s existence whatsoever) are of course the highlights here, and Mary’s penultimate-panel face a close runner-up, I do want to take a moment to make sure we all appreciate the first panel’s pie-covered D# as well. Because it is almost as beautiful as the light show.
The glorious, Fuck Your Bigotry ‘Cause I Exist On My Own Terms light show. Mary can be as shitty as she wants, Carla doesn’t owe her shit to make her “comfortable”.
Yup, that face of pure impotent rage on Mary’s part and just slamming that name home as the mic drop to the whole thing. It’s all so fucking beautiful I want to frame it. Carla doesn’t owe Mary shit, certainly not her self to be used as a ping-pong ball of queerphobic abuse by Mary.
And it all brings it home to the issue at the heart of everything. That Mary targeted her. That Mary injured her and broke her skates. That Mary pursued and used her. Because she fundamentally does not respect Carla’s name and identity, seeing it as a personal affront against her religious sensibilities.
So Carla leaves it all on that point. That she exists, she’s not going away, and she’s a she named Carla. And nothing Mary does will ever change that or bully her away.
I would totally get a “CARLA (with bonus pied-in-the-face Mary)” print, yeah.
Also I am totally getting a Fame vibe off this (though I’m not sure how accurate it is since I’ve never actually seen Fame) because there is no chance in hell anyone in the hall’s gonna forget her name now.
Well, anyone who wasn’t away for the weekend breaking into their own house and shit.
Also:
“Well the word got around, they said ‘this kid is insane, man!’
Took a full collection just to send her to the mainland!
‘Get your education don’t forget from whence you came,
And the world’s gonna know your name, what’s your name ma’am?'”
Carla: *Final panel*
Is this a “Hamilton” reference?
No one else was in the room when it happened…
YES.
There’s a million things she hasn’t done, but just you wait, Mary.
“Only 19, but my mind is older
These New York City streets get colder
I shoulder every burden, every disadvantage I have learned to manage
I don’t have a gun to brandish, I walk these streets famished
The plan is to fan this spark into a flame
But damn, it’s getting dark, so let me spell out the name
I am the—
C.A. R.L. A. R. U. T. T. E. N.”
😀
Permission to edit the second line to ‘These Bloomington streets get colder’?
Can we hope Mary will choke and die on her own bile?
Best part of that prank – Mary literally can’t do a THING about it in an official manner, as she swiped the box out of Carla’s hands.
Mary doesn’t subscribe to your RULES. Her RULES warp the situation to her benefit no matter what.
What with the rgm rigged to start with Mary’s door being open, I fear she can say that the whole thing was intended to be to attack her (mind you, with a pie). Carla set it up, made noise outside her dorm, forcing Mary to open it up to ask/tell said noise maker to stop, since it was bothering her studying. This could come down to what mindset the person/group in charge of the Dorms/RAs has.
I fear the upcoming drama.
That only directly proves the RGM was aimed at her. What did that do? It spelled out Carla’s name in ping-pong balls. The box (which Carla was holding, did not give Mary permission to take, and has Billie’s name on it)? Mary had to take something that wasn’t hers from Carla for that to happen. The whistling? Carla’s been doing that for a while. Why hasn’t Mary asked her to stop before now?, a reasonable authority might ask.
How much do we want to bet that Carla got someone to bear witness to all of this so she has back-up in case Mary tries to invoke the authorities or attempts to commit violence. With a sympathetic RA on her side (it’s worth note that Ruth’s been making an effort to remove the sources of the blackmail Mary has on her), and the fact that Mary has made *no friends* with the rest of the hall, Carla’s set this up so that if Mary tries to escalate, she *should* have back-up, and Mary will be setting herself up either for further humiliation, or to get kicked out of the hall, if she attempts anything other than sit there and fume.
The room is technically Mary’s and Roz’s both, so it’s possible Carla covered that base by getting Roz’s permission to set it up with the door.
I’m not sure how a roommate agreement would handle ‘giving permission for the room door to be used as the trigger for someone’s RG machine’ though.
I’m listening to a remix of Death by Glamour from Undertale and it fits this moment so much.
Dogsong at 2x speed also works here, coz Mary just got dunked on~~~
Dogsong *always* works for Carla’s hijinks.
Yeah, this is gonna get much, much uglier before it ends.
https://media.giphy.com/media/GjYjLvGErsggg/giphy.gif
I love seeing my name in lights!
Prank Analysis:
I think I said a lot of it above and on yesterday’s thing, so I’ll keep this one relatively light-ish… eh, I’m me, I’m sure I’ll rant forever. I’ve stated that this prank has been planned to the very inch to absolute perfection, relying entirely on Mary’s nature to work and ensure that there was no possibility of it befalling any innocent bystanders.
And it really has. Hell, she even did a damn fine estimate on when Mary would snatch away the box so that the big balloon pop would occur around the same time that the pie blew up in Mary’s face. And the pie, in addition to being a great callback to the Walkyverse counterpart and part of a great anti-bigot non-violent protest tradition, is also perfect because it strikes right at one of the last little pieces of their initial encounter. And that is how irrationally angry Mary gets when she is embarrassed by what she perceives as a lesser.
Strike her? That lets her play martyr to the evil anti-Christian hordes. Insult her? That lets her suck you into her game where she feeds off your anger to smugly blackmail you and make you feel small. But embarrass her? She loses her goddamn mind.
It’s why Carla calling her bluff on being told on and hopping over her when Mary tried to lay in her path incensed Mary to the point where she was perfectly comfortable immediately escalating to property destruction and violence. Because, she could barely stand Carla existing in her halls (hence the confrontation), but she cannot abide the notion of being “bested” by someone so beneath her or outsmarted by someone she can barely be bothered to consider a meaningless tool.
And it’s why Panel 3 Mary’s face is in that rictus of pure rage, fists raised to commit actual physical harm to Carla. Because once again, Carla has completely and utterly played Mary like a fool and this time got her to play herself absolutely perfectly.
And it’s what makes her name in bright lights the perfect coda to it all, the perfect payoff for that elaborate RG machine, because it’s a lovely piece of shade.
This entire time, Mary has hidden behind authoritarianism to police her personal animus. Mary hates Carla, like she hates Becky and she hates Ruth and hates Billie, so she wields the threat of official action to try and force them to behave the way she wants them to. And she hates them because they are queer and non-normative and not exactly like Mary. Because she views it as socially acceptable to look down on them.
It’s been demonstrated a billion ways by now that Mary confronted Carla in the halls because it was Carla and the rule-breaking was just the excuse. Hell, Mary clings to that flimsy excuse even after she had just finished committing vandalism and destruction of property and attempted to injure Carla because to do otherwise is to reveal her actual goal, the elimination of Carla (either from the floor or her life, either would be fine to Mary).
But Carla’s transness was always the focus, it’s why Mary drops that transphobia hammer down with a smirk on her face and reveals in her stunned expression of hurt afterwords. She savors the fact that Carla is pained by transphobic abuse because to Mary, all Carla is is a living affront to the Lord.
So Carla shows that in bright blinking lights blazoned across the sky in front of her door. The central bit of Mary’s issue with her and why Mary got on her case in the first place. And makes sure she has a front-row seat and that she can’t escape the inescapable fact of what Carla is and how she belongs here in these dorms. Carla is Carla. Is a woman. And she did not suffer through central Indiana HS system as a trans girl to casually accept this type of bullshit with a straight face.
This is her cutting through the bullshit and laying down the law where it matters. Carla exists and isn’t going away, so it’s time for Mary to adapt and get over it or get smacked down by Carla every time she tries and step to it.
Cause Carla just isn’t playing these bigot games anymore. Not in this political climate. Not in her own home.
Is it bad I waited for your analysis to sign off?
I would say no it is not. Because Cerberus’s analyses are always awesome and insightful, and a welcome addition to every strip.
Aww, thanks to both of you.
Are you a journalist? If not, have you considered journalism as a career? Because you are VERY good at it.
I was going to make a food related joke here, but realized that within the scope of commenting here, it could have been taken the wrong way. I’ll just go with this instead:
[Insert ‘Journalist Are Poor’ Joke Here]
Eh, I’m a teacher, we don’t exactly make much more money.
Just what I was going to say!
I come here for Cerberus analyses. Reading the comic is mostly just a formality at this point.
The pure glee in Carla’s face as she flips Mary the double-bird (while doing a parkour somersault, I assume by the angle) is a joy to my heart. It says “THIS IS EVERYTHING I WANTED IT TO BE” and, indeed, it is also everything I wanted it to be.
(In further was-waiting-for-Cerberus’s-post news, I explicitly held this comment until it could be a reply to Cerb’s analysis, as I felt it was the best place for celebrating Carla being Carla to go)
Yes and all the yes. This is such a perfect victory, among other things because they play by CARLA’s rules, not Mary’s, and Carla’s rules are better.
Violence, playing martyrs? Pffft, nah, PRANK COMING UP!!!
i wish i could hit a “Like” button on your comments. you are gold, Cerberus.
>”I’ll keep this light”
>types 12 paragraphs
That is keeping it light for Cerberus…
You have no idea how badly I wanted to extend it to 13 paragraphs… the cold sweats…
Tsk-tsk Carla! FOR SHAME! Don’t you realize you exist only to be a prop in the drama of Ruth, Billie, and Mary? How dare you seize protagonist status for yourself!
Seriously! It’s just bad form. Doesn’t she realize her purpose is simply to provide a sounding board for Ruth to demonstrate her growth and development as a trans ally? It’s like she’s not even reading the Guide to Being a Trans Character in a Fiction Story Handbook at all!
Most upsetting!
What’s next, actually addressing the whole trans thing as HER problem and not Ruth’s? How will Ruth make it the source of her drama when Carla is dealing with it?
He, I read that in Cecil’s voice (nightvale).
Yup. Carla was intended by Mary to be a prop, And Carla’s answer to that is… this.
haha I miss that podcast. I have like hundred episodes to catch up on. and the novel. Also. Since the pie is all white isn’t it just whipped cream in a pie pan, not pie?
Ain’t it grand? I was so convinced Carla was just going to be a victim for Ruth’s narrative and we could all sit around and praise Ruth for basic human decency, and instead Carla tells her to shove her guilt up her own ass because she doesn’t have the time to be someone’s excuse to hate themselves, and then goes and personally deals with Mary in the most Carla way possible.
Lot of Queer characters get fridged, but Carla chucks that fucker into the horizon.
Launched via nuke?
Carla doesn’t just avoid fridging, she disassembles the fridge, and then uses the parts to build a Rube-Goldberg Machine to facilitate her hilarious-and-humiliating-yet-basically-harmless revent.
when was it revealed that Carla was trans? i know there was a panel on it when she was talking to Ruth not too long ago, but I feel that was already prior knowledge to this community. Any links to past strips would be helpful.
It was stated via comments during the Ding Dong bandit arc.
Heavily implied in the comic itself when she called the dingdong on her whiteboard a hate crime (until she saw them on everyone else’s board too and declared them hilarious), there were also hints when she talked to Sal and when Joyce and Becky talked about her.
Stated in the comments those times as well.
And as you noted, directly stated in the comic when she talked to Ruth.
thanks for the clarification!
Some commenters had thought so as well before then, I believe. Transfers from Shortpacked, hence the (Fe)male/(Ma)chine comment that occurred farther up. I believe it was a short storyline over there (only a few pages) but the cast there was more accepting. Granted, their co-workers had a bit more diverse origins.
Uh-oh. Take a look at Mary’s face. This is the moment she attacks Carla physically for daring to stand up to her. Also remember that she thinks that she is the good guy. That will justify pretty extreme tactics, at least in her own mind.
Good luck to Mary. Carla does Roller Derby.
Good God Almighty! Mary’s be broken in half!
Carla doesn’t actually do roller derby.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/purpleandskates/
Pretty sure that’s the only time Carla actually shows something resembling insecurity, now that I think about it. That said, I’m also pretty sure Carla would still annihilate Mary in a fight.
Oh happy days! Happy Carla face!
Even the strip title joins in the celebration.
That’s right – Carla is awesome enough that she hijacks the fourth wall.
Double birdy!
So is Carla just leaning into Mary’s field of vision at an angle in the last panel, or is she doing some kinda awesome flip so she’s upside down while flipping her off?
OBIOUSLY flipping.
Parkour!!!
Well… she does have a good foot maybe even a foot and a half on Mary, so it could just be her looking down.
You can’t fool me, Willis. I’m prepared for the strip in which Mary becomes sympathetic.
I’m wondering how appropriate your avatar matches the comment.
We so need a Slipshine moment between Mary and Carla, and the cake.
…No. No we don’t. O_O
Yes, of course, Mary is an innocent lamb who just wanted to study and hasn’t been proven again and again to be a curtain-twitcher who looks for any excuse to either spy on or angrily confront anyone within a 5 door radius of her door and we’ll just gloss right on by the transphobia that is the core root of their conflict cause if we ignore the elephant in the room, then maybe this won’t sound gross as fuck.
Though, admittedly, I’m curious to how you’ve come to the conclusion that Carla has done more to Mary physically and financially than vice versa seeing as how it was Mary who destroyed Carla’s skates and tried to injure her. Are you dinging Carla for the tube of glue or something?
Oops, ignore, this was connected to a disappeared comment.
On that note, I want to reiterate my deep apology to Choso that was on the deleted chain for my misgendering as that was not a cool move on my part and I should have checked pronouns before making an assumption like that.
Mary has the right to criticize loud obnoxious behavior outside her door. Mary could theoretically be motivated by loud obnoxious behavior outside her door. Mary…isn’t. Or, if she was, she turned it into an attack fueled by the fact it was behavior by a transgendered person which she not only destroyed the skates of but also tried to get removed. Even if I sympathize with people who want quiet in their dorm…seriously, screw Mary.
That one threadchain’s still there, Cerebus. Only got rid of the one post from the guy who’s really bad at not accidentally cluing me in that he’s stealing early comics from me.
Just noticed that. Also, I got Chonos’s name wrong in my backup apology. I’m definitely not batting 1.000 tonight.
Also, ew to comic thief Mary-apologist.
Wait, what?
Stealing early comics, not cool.
Pay for the patreon subscription like everyone else.
The amount of stupid excuses I have heard for piracy over the years from people trying to justify why they do not pay for anything is kind of sad.
When God Closes the Door, Mary unwisely opens it!
Perfect comic to land on my birthday. Thanks Willis, and you go, Carla!
That’s a GOOD birthday gift. I remember some poor sod who had birthday the day ToeDad showed up.
Congratulations!
I can sympathize with them. Blaine and Faz both showed up for the first time in DoA on my birthday.
Happy birthday!
EVERYBODY PUT YER PENS AND PAINTS AWAY
THIS IS THE BEST COMIC
Okay.
When engineering students attack….
Impressive.
Also someone’s stealing the comics? That’s…. weird as hell.
They’re stealing the comics that are on Patreon, I think. So, that’d be the bonus comics, as well as the ones relative to the story that are released early for subscribers.
So, y’know, that’s kinda something to worry about,
They are a butt and everyone who downloads their reposted copies is also a butt.
Do not degrade butts by connecting them to such behaviour!
My thoughts exactly. Butts are useful and important.
I’m sensing a theme with this comic.
I think I like Carla more than I liked Ultra Car
I must admit that when I first saw that last panel, I thought those were beams opening a transdimensional portal or something >.>
Anyways now I see they’re spelling out Carla’s name. Not sure how that’s possible but it’s too awesome for me to question.
I just want to know how did she get the box to launch the pie in the correct direction.
By Science. Hilarious, hilarious science.
You know the prank cans which contain false snakes that get launched when they are opened? It probably worked like that, but Carla probably calibrated the launch position so that Marry get hit right in the face.
Mary didn’t take the box from the other side, which I would have exacted by default. She especially took it the same way and same direction Carla was holding it.
What I’m saying is that the box has a bigotry detector to know which side the Arm gotta extend toward.
I promise you she had a needlessly complex mechanism to detect which direction someone was holding the box. Because she’s awesome like that.
Yep.
I’m guessing her patented SODS*! Get yours now at Carla’s Pranking Innovations . DOA, for all your best-prank-ever needs!
*Suspension of Disbelief Springs
That was…SO BEAUTIFUL. *sheds a single tear*
So that’s what the cup/dish/RECEPTACLEWHATEVER at the end was for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIJS9XhIumI
*in Danny Sexbang voice*
CARLA WINS!
I hope she was recording that.
That’s probably not a good idea.
That’s the thing, though. All Carla did was hold a box and set up a Rube Goldberg machine that spells out her name. Mary grabbed the box all on her own.
Not only did Mary grab the box all on her own, it’s not her box, that she saw Billie willingly give to Carla. So if anything, Mary’s taking other people’s stuff. In a strict sense, she had to commit theft in order to set herself up to be pied. CWAQ Mary has less than no legs to stand on.
Yeah, even if Carla doesn’t want it as evidence, she might enjoy that Mary-face as her shiny new screensaver.
…Although, I wouldn’t support sharing it on YouTube or something. I really dislike public humiliation, even for incredible horrible jerks, and I don’t want Mary painted as a victim. When I said ‘evidence’ I meant it could be useful if Mary tried to claim that Carla did something way worse (plausible), plus in case Mary will launch into another hateful tirade (exceedingly likely).
It would still be problematic if Mary saw Carla pointing a camera phone at her mid pie-attack. That would mean that Carla would have the video and risk of online humiliation hanging over her, and would reduce the “harmless” aspect of the prank.
Of course, it’s a thin line to walk to both MAKE a (kinda) harmless prank and be able to PROVE that is was (kinda) harmless, especially in a toxic conflict with someone who doesn’t care at all for that line herself. But I still think it’s for the best if Carla didn’t film it.
Would agree.
Plus, Carla has given up on the authorities (probably because growing up trans you learn really quickly that the authority figures do absolutely nothing and will blame you no matter what you do in response to bullying or attacks), so she’s probably not going to be caring whether or not the authorities know it was harmless.
Cause the important thing to Carla is that Carla didn’t cross her own moral boundaries and that Carla got a front row seat to Mary’s abject humiliation.
If anything, I’m guessing Carla felt a phone screen would just get in the way of her perfect view of this going down.
True, didn’t think of these!
I really don’t think she did, because Carla actually takes care to keep this prank relatively harmless, even in such a toxic conflict as this. A viral video of Mary getting pied could potentially be hurtful and damaging in a way that the event itself is not.
Carla is many things, but she is not a bully.
For some reason, I am imaging the John Cena theme playing in my head
U CAN See Me.
We All can see you.
SUPER-EXUBERANCE!!!!
YEAH!!!
That last panel is the most exuberant panel to have ever paneled.
Reminds me of some of my more elaborate revenge-pranks as a teen.
(Yeahhhhh, call me a dude* and call me a freak and use male pronouns on me* and tell me I’m going to hell and sucker-punch me when I’m not looking and trip me in the hallway and cut my hair in class and stab me with math set compasses and steal my books and shove my lunch into my face and etc long enough and I’ll figure out a way to booby-trap your bedroom such that when you open the door, everything non-fragile falls out onto your floor using nothing more than some twine and skipping rope, or to booby-trap your locker such that you get face-pied the moment you open it, or…)
Carla is AWESOME.
But, that said, because I am realistic: In the Real World, what will likely happen is that Carla is going to be the one who gets into more trouble than Mary… because Carla is trans and should’ve been that perfect victim.
*I am a cis-woman, but if you’re not gender-conforming enough, people like to misgender you as a “joke” because haha you’re a tomboy so I’m gonna call you a dude.
…I think a strong case can be made for that YOU are awesome
So you didn’t post a “trigger warning” about opening the lockers (etc) that you booby trapped? 😉
(God I hope that joke works!)
XDDDD Thug Life. XDDD
Ahhh. Spectacular end to some top-class plotting… Prepare for the fallout!
Where can I get that last panel in wallpaper form?
Man… Carla is probably the most annoying character ever. Reminds of someone in college that I really hated. I truly hope she gets something bad coming her way.
Huh, apparently Future Mary can comment on the site.
Depending on what Mary does next, that may happen. Though I think you’ll be in the minority of liking/wanting it.
…You’re just trying to see what you can get away with, aren’t you?
No, I honestly dislike her. She reminds me of several people I hated, who’d go around campus being annoying just for the sake of it and never cared about people who just wanted a quiet place to study and sleep.
Yup, that is totally her behavior in comic and not at all the projection you are throwing on her.
To be fair I also hate Walky because a guy who cheated on me once also liked chicken mcnuggets, so Walky is a filthy cheater and he reminds me too much of that and thus I’ll ignore any racism he ever suffers and hope bad things come his way because of this filthy cheater idea I have of him owing to a superficial misinterpretation of his base character.
/s
The chicken nuggets aren’t related to why this (hypothetical?) person cheated on you. It’s the cheating that you wouldn’t like.
Carla’s behavior is similar to a type of behavior that many people don’t like. Arzarthanian has the right to not like that behavior.
I had an abusive ex who really liked football, and I did not like football, and I still don’t like football. But I didn’t like football before I met him. His abusive nature doesn’t affect how I feel about football. If he cheated on me to get tickets to a Packers game, then I would probably resent the Packers a little bit too, but the fact of the matter is that what someone likes is different from what someone DOES.
Liking Pokemon is fine. Mentioning Pokemon in every single conversation is annoying.
Carla being a prankster is annoying to certain people, because certain people don’t like pranksters. There’s no projection here on Arzarthanian’s part–just yours, by assuming he’s projecting when he’s simply saying Carla behaves similarly to some people he doesn’t like.
I mean, not to harp on you, but you admit and acknowledge that your dislike is based on projection of someone you dislike onto her. And to feed that dislike, you are actively ignoring major aspects of the story to cling to an inaccurate and disproven aspect of the initial encounter between Mary and Carla.
Like, you understand that this is irrational and based in a projection and yet you still want her to come to harm simply because of this irrational projection.
And that feels a bit… “off”, considering that facing violence because of the irrational projections of others is one of the major crises facing trans people today.
And that part is rather very relevant because there are people right now in Willis’s twitter mentions trying to do the usual “trans women are actually threatening abusers trying to prey on weak cis women” shtick that is used to justify violence against trans women in bathrooms and public spaces in order to argue that Carla is somehow “physically harassing and intimidating Mary with her larger size” and this is somehow a much bigger issue than the actually occurring transphobic abuse and harassment Mary has committed onto Carla.
So I hope you’ll forgive me being generally curt with all the Mary Denialists of late.
Carla is annoying as hell but in what world doesn’t Mary have it coming? This isn’t the skating incident. This is a direct response to hate speech and trying to get her kicked out of the dorm.
For a complete change in tone and partial change in topic, I was amused that I had to reread this a couple times. At first I was misparsing it as threatening the abusers, instead of being threatening abusers. I thought to myself “Wait, what? That’s almost the opposite of what Cerberus usually says. What’s going on? (rereads like twice) Ooohhh!” Then I was amused at syntactic ambiguity. The topic of ambiguity, and the different types of it, is frequently amusing to me.
While I’m responding to a Cerberus comment, I also want to mention I really like your comments, Cerberus! I really like learning things, even if it’s sad things I’m learning. Of course, reading these and the other comments makes it take a lot longer to catch up if I get a few days behind, but I consider it well worth every minute, in large part due to commenters like Cerberus and ischemgeek and trkly and several others whose names I’m forgetting at the moment.
Also of course the comic itself is awesome, and I am appreciative of Willis not only for creating the comic, which itself must be a lot of work, but also the often unseen work maintaining the comment section.
Her behavior, on several previous occasions, has led to my really, really disliking her. Not that Mary is an innocent, but Carla definitely hasn’t earned my sympathies. She might be a good friend to her friends, but that doesn’t immediately make her likable to me.
Basically, how would you feel if you had to sleep with someone like her next door?
Protected.
YAAS! Can I marry Carla?
I LOVE U CARLA
The award for Most Elaborate Away to Get Someone’s Goat, goes too…
And because it seems appropriate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q
AWESOME.
Well, I think we know Carla’s degree… industrial engineering.
this strip makes me so happy. i just love the cream pie and carla’s name in lights.
carla best character 20foreverteen
Calling it: Last panel is also the cover of book 6!
“To those that would keep me down…”
Definitely
Yep, called it. It didn’t do absolutely nothing, but it wasn’t actually supposed to cause damage, just look ominous.
Someone sure has played a lot of Super Mario World.
Yeah, at Yoshi’s expense.
KARMA!
OK, time for a new course in college… Convoluted Revenge 101, taught by Carla. Prerequisites; math, mechanical engineering, chemistry, probability mathematics and home EC.
“It’s a moral imperative.”
I would take that course just for the Rube Goldberg machines.
Willis, what the hell is Carla studying, besides baddassery?
Perfect.
This has got to be one of my favorite strips lmao
FUUUCKING HEEEEEEEELL :DDDDDDDDD
Carla is definitely the babyface of this whole situation.
The Steve Austin kind that kicks twelve tons of ass and flips you off while doing it.
I see two possible outcomes.
1. Mary walks away and tries to get to Carla through official channels.
2. She gets violent
3. She completely breaks down, because she feels treated unfairly and considers herself the victim.
I like your definition of “two”. I need to share it with the people who write my paychecks. =)
4: She tries another type of revenge at this level.
5: She goes into full on hate-preacher beast mode but does not get violent.
6: She starts to do any of those things, but gets interrupted by Stage 3 of Carla’s revenge.
… Also, I think I accidentally described a transformer that Willis wouldn’t buy.
Okay, here’s what I’m wondering. Did Carla just supplant Roz as Mary’s personal hate-monkey?
She did that when she dared to exist as a trans woman on her floor. Roz is just the play to keep her hand in. Ruth, Carla, and Becky? Those are her real targets.
Beautiful.
This strip pleases the art gods.
She blinded her with pie-ence! 😀
The last panel is glorious.
…but I can’t help wondering about the PoV. Mary isn’t in it, and the stuff Carla is doing only makes sense if the scene is from Mary’s PoV, but earlier in this very comic Mary is >standing< and the view of the machine and the perspective on the doors implies that this shot is coming from low to the ground.
So did Mary get hit with like, a shrink-pie or something…?
Carla is very tall.
She is, but the machine ain’t and doors don’t have that kind of foreshortening unless you’re looking at them from a really weird angle.
Mary’s about shoulder-height on Carla and eye-level with the markerboards; the poles of the machine come up to Mary’s waist.
In that last frame, Carla’s face is obviously very close to the PoV, which is not only below the markerboards but also lower than the tops of the machine’s poles. It quite frankly looks like it’s coming from ground level.
That suggest’s she’s, I dunno, bending over a collapsed Mary to go “in your face”? Except Mary is, you know, standing upright and foaming at the mouth last we see of her.
*actually the markerboards are >below< Mary's eye level, whoops! Further evidence for my point though.
Mary is now an inch tall and shall become Carla’s adorable shoulder pet!
Very true. It is a very odd perspective. I wonder if it’s meant to be more wide angle style thus skewing the perspectives or is otherwise stylized?
I think I’ll just chalk it up to artistic license to get all the important parts of the scene together, with a dynamic look and at large scale, to enhance the impact.
Carla has also been seen doing parkour-style stuff through the hallways. My impression was that she might have been airborne in the last panel.
Maybe, but that doesn’t really explain anything. Even if she’s in the middle of backflipping off a wall or whatever she (and the scene’s perspective) are way too low to be from Mary’s PoV but also make no sense as anything >but< from Mary's PoV. =/
Dang, I thought yesterday’s comic was the culmination, then this comic was all like BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE
Wow Carla you are the best. You win the prize of actual best character. If she doesn’t get a spin-off series I’m going to be HELLA pissed.
Dumbing Derby!(Working title) A webcomic spinning off into roller skate sports and sass!
Main cast includes: Carla, Marcie, Mayala and Sal.
I’d be more than okay with that.
*Tips hat.*
All I can see here, unfortunately, is that yelling Carla strip preview and a deadly certainty that Mary isn’t done yet by any means.
Yeah, this may have bought Mary’s begrudging respect to the point of her being an evil demon instead of a useful tool and victim. But I have a bad feeling that Mary is going to be up to some awful mischief with her church tomorrow in a way that is going to unfortunately mirror a lot of the bullshit anti-trans stuff that has been going down of late.
I’m curious as to the potential reaction of campus authorities, who have been to all appearances ignoring Amazi-Girl’s string of assaults… but may not ignore this (much milder) one done by someone else.
Hmm, possible. While it is very difficult to try and spin a pieing as an assault in a way that courts and school authorities take seriously, it has definitely been used by those pied to try and play martyr and claim assault by the technical legal definition.
Additionally, things that are technically one thing have been used by authority figures of all stripes against marginalized group members who dare push back or fight back against dominant group members spreading hate speech about them.
So it would not be out of the realm of possibility for a transphobic school official to use this to ding Carla for “assault” especially if it is seen as a means of getting a transphobic hate group protesting the inclusion of a trans person in the dorms off his back.
Granted, I’m not 100% sure if this qualifies as assault under Indiana’s laws. I tried looking, but reading U.S. drafting is an absolute chore so I gave up.
But it would under Canada’s, which are very explicit on this point. There have been multiple convinctions, with jail time, that I can recall.
(If someone with more stomach for it than me were to look up Indiana’s laws on assault specifically that’d be wonderful.)
So from where I sit it isn’t so much as whether or not this is assault… it’s whether Carla’s single act with no bodily harm gets treated more seriously than Amazi-Girl’s string of attacks.
And, as far as I can recall, literally any action at all would qualify as treating it more seriously. It’d almost have to stem from something other than what the acts themselves would warrant.
Carla may have just become my new favorite character.
You can’t get mad at Carla, Mary played herself here
DJ_Khaled.gif
Carla is the literal best
Mary just got owned, and it is glorious.
I think the comment section today adequately proves the postulate that “she’s annoying” and “Mary was only trying to study, Carla provoked her” is the new “she’s annoying” and “$20 haircuts”.
If there’s a queer victim, there must be victim blaming looking for the reason it was all her fault. And all other facts surrounding said victimization must be ignored, diminished, or downplayed to justify the hatred.
This is a law iron forged and tempered. Never to be broken.
Well, I was behind Mary right up until the hate speech. Carla is incredibly annoying and I would find her incredibly tiresome in real-life. However, screw bigots.
Yeah, that’s why I feel it is very similar to the $20 haircut thing.
Like, maybe it’s possible that that could have felt compelling at one point in the narrative, but after awhile, it just becomes more and more obvious that those clinging to it are only doing so by ignoring huge portions of the storyline and its connotations and looking for something to hate the character for to justify not recognizing them as the victim and to make them somehow responsible for their own misfortune and queerphobic abuse.
Humans, what you gonna do? Can’t kill ’em all, heard that there’s a law against that or somethin’.
well the last panel has sure improved my desktop background
I. Love. Carla.
I wish the click click click wasn’t there so I’d make it my back ground!
Sometimes Willis will post a wordless comic panel on his Tumblr if enough people ask.
This, Willis, is the greatest thing you have drawn. It even tops sexy Bats.