actually Amber is Smeagol
Amazi-girl is both Gollum and her precious.
she threw away Danny herself, when Danny
tried to get Amber to give up the persona of Amazi-girl
her obsession is so far gone in fact,
that she’s convinced that Sal saving her life from the truck,
robbed her of the last of her dignity.
Huh. You’re right. I initially read that strip as her getting busy with Mike after things failed with Ethan, but re-reading it, it’s Mike suggesting that Ethan’s mind was in two places at once that night.
GO HOME AMBER! ! ! your caught up in a melodramatic, clichéd, half-assed, yet still somehow completely lazy, misunderstanding plot-line that nobody ever liked in the first place. do yourself a favor and take my advice, go ask Danny if he loves you or amber, which ever side of you he chooses should have make-up sex with him. (p.s. we all know that’s how Willis would do it if he gets them back together – don’t believe me? go read shortpacked)
Um yeah except Willis’s plotting has changed a lot since Shortpacked!, it’s a completely different world & set of rules, the characters have developed in very different ways, and Danny’s not Mike.
But yeah just tell all of us exactly what the author of this comic is going to do next.
I’m not trying to whine, I’m just tired of the misunderstanding plot point because real people don’t do this crap, and before anyone says anything the point of this slice of life style story is to make you connect with the characters as if there real, I mean, throw an actual wrench in the works, have sal accidently kiss Danny (somehow), have Danny get into it with amber and in his concerned rage (brought on by sal) spill the beans on amazi-girls identity in front of sal, have what originally happened but sal come to console one of them, if Danny than they become a little closer and amber sees their hanging out as sal stealing him or a betrayal, or if she went after amber she could try and talk some sense into her only for amber to attack her making bitter anger a mutual, legitimate rivalry. Just don’t put two people in the same spot and say “whoa! you two are here at the same time, were breaking up and you tried to steal my boyfriend so I’m gonna fuck you up.” Now I love Willis’s stories I wouldn’t read them if I didn’t but, the misunderstanding plot line is so clichéd even days of our lives wouldn’t use it.
I don’t think that’s what happened. Amber saw Danny interacting with Sal and got upset, sure– not because she thought Sal was going “steal” Danny from her in that she was going to go after him romantically, but that she was going to/did “turn him against her.” She arrived at this conclusion because Danny was beginning to realize and try to address how unhealthy her behaviors are. She reacted very negatively to this because of progressing mental illness.
Basically, I don’t see this as some cliché misunderstanding plot line.
That’s how I saw it too. Sal is wise enough to know that this Amazagirl/Amber thing is unhealthy. Danny only wanted to help. This is Amber descending into madness. Worse of all, is she is becoming her father by being a bully. She’s focusing on everyone’s bullshit, but failing to see that she has bad elements in her as well.
Amber is fundamentally correct. Sal convinced Danny to tell Amber to stop being Amazi-Girl. There’s nuances and she missed, and definitely the concerned, caring tone, but she is fundamentally correct about this situation.
Yes, she hasn’t told Danny how Sal hurt her years ago. That’s a little frustrating. But it was a formative, humiliating experience for her and that’s understandable.
Oh man, I wonder if she’s gonna tell Dorothy. That would be interesting.
It’s not just a misunderstanding, it’s miscommunication, the destroyer of relationships.
This specific situation (vigilante superhero wrongly concerned that her unjustly titled “archnemesis” is turning her lover against her) is a hyperbole, but the emotions underlying it are all too real. The point is that Amber is self-destructive, which real people are. Jealousy is a real thing, and it comes from a place of insecurity. You don’t need to walk in on your boy making out with someone else to feel jealous. THAT would honestly be some Days of Our Lives shit.
Real people also don’t dress up in spandex and dissociate from their alter ego like this. So, the whole “real people” argument is pointless here. (Okay, I’ll admit at one point in my life I did do that whole dissociating thing between me and who I was online, but I’m far from normal).
idk about dressing up as a superhero, but real people definitely disassociate between personalities and realities. it’s a real issue that can really hurt people, including themselves. trust me on this one, i have some experience.
Okay, I speak in one of two ways A) in general as a comment on the current situation or topic, or B) for my self ony, I don’t presume to speak for others, never have. Never will. Finally, in my original comment I more or less making a banner full comment toward amber, however when I recited criticism on my comment, waranted at it is, I felt it a good idea to explain the reasoning behind my comment. I’m sorry if anyone thought this was directed toward willis or anyone else. That wasn’t and is NOT my intention.
Maybe, if you don’t want someone jumping down your throat over speaking for them without their OK, you should quit using universal language (“nobody ever liked…,” “we all know,” etc) to imply that everyone agrees with you when discussing your personal opinion.
I, for one, really resent it when someone tries to imply that I agree with them without asking my thoughts on the matter. As in, if you want to hit my rage button, do that. I am trying very hard to be civil in this comment since if I put my charitable hat on, I genuinely don’t think you realize exactly how not okay doing that is to some people (me being one). And with extra charitability, maybe you don’t realize that’s what using that sort of language does.
You don’t know what other people think unless you’ve asked them. Quit implying you do, and we’ll be cool.
Thank you for expressing this so well. I didn’t have the mental energy or focus to word it, but this is why I was so deeply bothered by that comment (and whenever people say similar things). It was good of you to spot that they might not be seeing how their message reads to other people.
My problem was what ischemgeek expressed. I don’t mind you feeling any way you want about this storyline, we can feel differently about it, but it makes me deeply uncomfortable whenever someone claims they are voicing everybody’s opinion.
One of the reasons I will love Ambush Bug forever is he did an entire miniseries in which ever issue ended with Darkseid turning up on the couch, or behind the register handing him his fast food, or whatever.
In the last issue, Bug reveals that it’s an inflatable Darkseid and he’s just been leaving him around to create drama.
To be fair, this is a thing Darkseid used to do even under Jack Kirby. He’d walk down a Metropolis street just chillin’, and allow muggers to accost him just for the experience. And, yes, turn up in Scott Free’s living room.
Before conversing with Sal, Danny was just fine with Amber/Amazi-girl. Afterwards, he wasn ‘t. And Danny was the one who plunged ahead with his new conversion message and didn’t listen to her or he would have found out what Sal meant to Amber and he would have had a broader perspective. Altogether I’d say Sal did a fine job of taking Danny from her, whether intentionally so or not.
It’s not a good thing that Danny’s fine with Amber/Amazi-Girl, though. That’s really bad because Amber and Ethan (unintentionally) convinced him that her nonchalantly talking about almost dying and that she’s two people was nothing to worry about.
And you’re being way too harsh on Danny. He tried to talk to her and Amber not only gave no context or reason for him to doubt Sal or even try to explain their shared history, she went in there posturing like a bully and screaming at him until she decided he had betrayed her and walked away from him. It might have helped had Amber not slipped into the Amazi-Girl alter to deal with seeing Sal, though. It probably wouldn’t have worked but Amber would at least hear him out.
In Amazi-Girl logic it makes perfect sense to say that Sal took Danny from her; in that she poisoned his mind with her evil and thus he can no longer be trusted to support her important mission, but that ain’t how it really went down.
That is an excellent pro-tip Willis, you can hide people under text bubbles.
Hold up, took her sanity? Your dignity? The Danny one isn’t true, but at least that actually makes sense, can someone explain the other ones to me, none of those happened at all
It’s the way Amazi-girl/Amber sees it. Sal’s sanity referencing what happened during the convenience store holdup, Amazi-girl’s dignity referencing her trauma, breaking down and her dad’s abuse possibly.
Thank you for explaining that, I was getting confused with all the hers, because their are three hers in this scene which her are you talking about…you her or her her or her her her…SHIT…*head explodes*
Her sanity would be Amber’s, due to the trauma she endured from Sal’s robbery attempt. Amber has a VERY bad self-image so by now she probably sees herself as being completely broken while Amazi-girl isn’t. (this is of course not the truth, but hey.)
Her dignity is Amazi-girl’s, because Sal saved her life. The only thing more embarrassing for a hero than being saved is being saved by her arch-nemesis. She views Sal’s help as a great insult to her status and ability as a hero since she shouldn’t NEED help. (again, debatable and not true, but Amber/Amazi-girl is…not in the right frame of mind right now).
She splits up Amber and Amazigirl in her head. She is currently Amazigirl, and is speaking to Amber as thought they were separate people. Amber’s sanity in the hold-up when they were 13. Amazigirl’s dignity when Sal saved her life. Amber is technically correct in saying that Sal took Danny, but only because of Amber’s psychosis.
Danny asked her to back off on being a vigilante and Amber took the nuclear option, but of course, in her head, Sal turned Danny against her as opposed to opening up Danny to the very real danger that Amber puts herself into.
“Her sanity” refers to Amber, who’s had anger issues ever since everything sort of broke when Sal robbed the convenience store and took Ethan hostage when they were teenagers.
“My dignity” I believe refers to the time that Amazi-girl tried to attack Sal, Malaya, Marcie (and possibly Carla, I don’t quite remember) when they were drinking one night outside Walmart and Sal sort of shot her down and refused to fight (plus Malaya kneed her in the stomach). So because Amazi-girl didn’t “win” I think she feels as though she lost instead, thus tarnishing the dignity of the superhero.
when she robbed the convienence store she left amber with permanant psychological scars, her father probably did a lot for that too but amber/amazigirl tend to put more blame on sal for that…
When Amazigirl tried to fight her in the walmart parking lot she had her friends hold her back and refused to fight her, amazigirl felt humiliated by that not getting the chance to rightously battle her greatest enemy or some such junk
and then she basically she is just projecting when it comes to danny she can’t stand the idea of someone she cares so much about associating with someone she hates so much to the extent that she feels it is a betrayal of loyalty or something
I’m pretty sure the dignaty thing is saving her life – she did refer to it earlier as “the second worst thing” she’s ever done to her, the first no doubt being the convenience store.
My guess for the sanity one is that according to her, Danny clouded her brain with the love stuff so she couldn’t think straight. And from that follows the dignity thing, which I assume means that because of the emotions she let a “traitor” like Danny so close to her and eventually “betray” her. Or something like that, I dunno. Someone just put that girl in a straitjacket already.
I would also add that “dignity” could also refer to Amber understandably being freaked out at the robbery and Blaine challenging and embarrassing her for being “weak”, and subsequently stabbing Sal in the hand to prove him otherwise.
She’s basically Batman. The psychotic version who instead of dealing with a traumatic event in some marginally rational fashion dresses up in a costume and beats the shit out of people. And no one is the villain in their own story.
yeah when you start actually treating your alter ego as your current self things get crazy and not in the happy way in the white coats and hauling you off way.
I am seriously wondering if this is the real split. If when Amber’s back in charge she isn’t going to remember anything after seeing Danny and Sal on the step.
At some point Amber’s going to wind up in a coma and end up fighting herself in order to come out of the coma and live a la Tommy in Dino Thunder unless Ethan, Danny or SOMEONE stages a full intervention involving a reputable psychologist.
That seems intentional. Amazi-Girl isn’t really Amber channeling her rage in a healthy manner anymore. Amazi-Girl is something else entirely, and it’s really, *really*, REALLY, *REALLY* not healthy.
She never was that. Amazi-Girl was always unhealthy. What she was was socially acceptable (to a certain portion of the public), but keeping Amber from actually dealing with her issues and triggers by turning her reactions toward other targets.
Yeah, I think the idea is that this was NEVER healthy, it’s just we as the audience are now being presented with the more uglier side of things rather than the more idealized presentation when Amazigirl first appeared.
I’m sensing hostility. You think that we shouldn’t dislike her? Sure it’s understandable, but if that doesn’t affect your outlook on her, then it doesn’t. Not sure what you’re hoping for out of this.
So much this! Thank you quietpeas! Every time I see her, I worry about her more. She is in a downward spiral and she needs help really bad. I really identify with a lot of things she goes through, because as frustrating as it is seeing her causing many of the problems in her life, it feels really real. I’ve had friends struggling with histories of trauma and abuse and seen some of these behaviors. Sometime people get triggered and believe that always means that the other person was doing something wrong (Danny in this case) and that is only true some of the time, other times the person that was part of the trigger didn’t do anything wrong. It is so difficult watching that because trauma can hijack a person’s brain in really difficult to deal with ways.
Telling someone with Amber/Amazi-Girl’s issues to “just go to therapy” is much like telling someone in a wheelchair to “just get up and walk”. It not a trivial matter. If it were, she would have done it years ago. She has probably had offers of therapy in school and from home. Avoiding and rejecting such therapy is part of the illness. Something she has doubled down on again and again. Yes, that is not a likable behavior.
Hit bottom and push off? Maybe. Hit bottom and drown is also a possibility.
This… is terrifying. Her clear distinctions between Amber and Amazi-Girl, coupled with her unhinged aggression, I mean, yikes. The fact that this is going on unchecked and undiagnosed and untreated is just making me really sad, because Amber could channel all her stuff in a really good, healthy way if somebody (a mental health professional) showed her the tools with which to do that and really just talked to her/listened to her.
Oh man. You make me sad, bb girl. Please get help.
Seriously. Amber is in such a bad place right now it’s completely terrifying, and I want her to get help like last Tuesday because the longer this goes the more Amazi-Girl’s escalating things and I don’t know how much further down this road she can go before hitting a point of no return.
yanno the scariest part here is that Sal is almost completely unaware of this vendetta that Amber has against her. Sal is obviously capable of defending herself but I’m still worried Amber could really hurt her by attacking her unprovoked.
Or maybe the scariest part of this all is that if there is a physical confrontation, the one who might end up expelled is Sal the (half) black kid with a criminal record 🙁
I still find it weird Amber doesn’t have a criminal record. That said I’m more worried that Amber is going to put Sal in a place she is always struggling to get out of. Bad enough Malaya is always pushing her buttons, now Amber might be the straw that broke the camels back.
The only incident we know of that could have landed her in legal trouble is stabbing Sal’s hand during the robbery. Assuming the cops even included what she did in their official report chances are the local prosecuting attorney wouldn’t take the risk of charging her. Charging a girl traumatised during a robbery, for causing what could be written off as minor injury to the would be robber, probably wouldn’t be a politically beneficial action for any elected officials involved. They might also reasonably guess that a jury would be unwilling to convict her for those reasons.
But then there’s the Toedad incident, and if I remember correctly she punched some other folks. Vigilantism is basically assault on another person because she isn’t a cop, so it’s not up to her to pass judgement on others in that way. She definitely did help save Becky, but she also endangered a ton of other people in doing so and was very lucky no one else got hurt.
Sure it’s criminal and illegal but the school can’t really press charges on Amber right now since she’s always in costume so they don’t really know it’s her. Once she’s unmasked, maybe they might.
But she hasn’t actually been arrested for anything she’s done as Amazi-girl. So far we haven’t seen any indication that the local cops are even making an effort to find her.
The local cops did not actually look bestest in the Toe-Dad accident and she has a Louis Lane promoting her in a university paper, so the police might decide that prosecuting her might be bad PR for the police.
You’d be surprised how easily universities turn on the students once there’s any possibility of a liability of any kind, especially if all the less heroic of Amber’s deeds come to light.
At the moment we have no idea what the official position of college administration is towards Amazi-girl. They may unofficially tolerate her. But if she makes too much of a spectacle of herself that may change very quickly.
At least we have the word of god that Amazigirl isn’t going to jump off the overhang, land on Sal, and break her neck thataway; because this buildup of a slight that’s been grown and festered is starting to boil over in a realllllyyyyy dark way.
Sal attempts to start up roller derby to get back in Marcie’s good graces. But what will happen when the new team of masked marvels, the Amazi-Rollers shows up to make trouble and try and bring Sal down? The Derby will be heated and Danny will swoon as we hit our pitched climax.
Be sure to return next week on the same Amazi-Channel at the same Amazi-Time for the Rinkside Showdown!
Watchmen springs to mind, Ambers losing her mind faster than Rorschach
It’s only a matter of time until something makes her snap and seriously injure or kill someone
Yeah, I’m worried that this arc is getting pushed too far and even when it inevitably resolves too many readers aren’t going to care what happens to Amber other than seeing her properly punished.
I don’t think that’s where Willis wants to go with the story, but the reaction here just keeps getting worse.
Blame Danny? No not at all because this was going to happen weather he got involved in it or not and as for Sal and Amber well I saw this hole thing as Amber not finding her being able to find her peace till she confronts a part of her past then she can start to give up on being obsessed with revenge before it consumes her and finally consider hanging up the mask…but unfortunately that part of her past just so happens to be Sal.
And as for Sal well, she’s not the same person that Rob that convenient store all those years back and I might be wrong here but I felt like when she eventually fights Amazi-girl she would find out who sheis, who she actually is. I thought that would be like her past catching up to her and she would haft to own up to some of the things she did and try to reason with Amazi-girl/Amber one more time. Then after the fight they would talk,come to understanding, and maybe the two of them can move past their issues.
Well, she kind of has to. They don’t need to become BFFs or anything, but Amber can barely conceptualize Sal as a human being and uses her as a focal point for all her self loathing.
Though at this point, I do think it’s likely that they strike up some kind of acquaintance. They’ve seen each other at their worst, they’ve been through dark periods in their lives caused by their parents, and they’ve grievously hurt one another. Plus, Sal has been through the same path Amber has. Not necessarily exactly, but Sal’s learned to accept that she’s done stupid shit, and that it’s unfair for her to spend the rest of her life being defined by it, the way Amber has spent the last five years obsessing over her failure to protect Ethan and losing control and stabbing Sal.
That, and there’s too much built up between the two for it to just kind of peter out once this storyline reaches its conclusion.
I think reconciliation is necessary. Without it the arc flops as “Here’s how the abused girl became a villain.” I really don’t think that’s the path Willis will go with Amber.
It just looks like the bottom she’s going to hit before recovery is lower than I expected. Or hoped.
Ignoring the imminent Amazi-girl for a moment the Marcie trying to get Sal to make friends subplot is a good example of Marcie’s maturity and love for Sal. She’s figured out that life is going to is going to put a bit of distance between them, and perhaps that Sal is a bit too reliant on her. So she’s hoping to get Sal to take some steps towards expanding her own life, just as Marcie is starting to do with her own.
Yeah, I don’t see any way this is going to end without Amber spending some amount of time hospitalized. She’s in a feedback loop of her own paranoid delusions, and I don’t think she’ll get out of it without outside help. And it probably needs to be a professional, since I don’t think Ethan or Danny realize JUST how bad she is and probably aren’t equipped to handle it.
Even if Danny and Ethan figure it out like, right in tomorrow’s strip, I don’t think Amazi-Girl will listen. Like even if Ethan confronts her alone, she’d probably ask if he’d been spending time with Danny recently and decide he’s been “poisoned” by proxy, too. This… really I don’t think it can end with anything short of major professional intervention by this point. MAYBE stall it for a bit longer if, say, Mike shows up and somehow talks some sense into her that’s completely void of Sal-traces, but I think even that’s going to be trying to cover up a gaping festering stab wound with a Hello Kitty band-aid.
Somehow I enjoy the notion of Mike finding out his potential involvement was practically compared to a hello kitty bandaid. I wonder if it would mess with his self-perception.
As for the rest, yeah, that sounds very likely. Haven’t had her specific condition or circumstances, but others, and when you’re that deep inside your own defenses, it’s almost impossible for other people to reach you. (Non professionals, I mean.)
i agree. you never really know what’s going on in someone’s mind. It’s very easy to mask, but here Amber can’t even distinguish between her selves anymore. If this doesn’t turn into an incident at this moment I wonder how else she would get there. Will she stop going to class? Won’t come out of her room? Flee the campus? Then more people would notice.
Jesus Christ Amber, you are one bad decision away from needing to be institutionalized for your own safety, not to mention the safety of those around you.
I’ve been institutionalized. It sucks, but it truly, truly helped me turn my life around. Amber needs immediate, emergency intervention.
I’m hoping we’ll see Amber snapping out of it just enough, just in time, to not make that necessary. But if she doesn’t, I hope someone does that for her one way or the other.
I’m so happy you were able to turn your life around from there! That’s awesome of you.
Was very close to requesting it for myself once because I wasn’t sure I could handle myself. Turns out I could, in the end, but yeah. Very real option.
I think it’s impossible that we not see her turn it around before being institutionalized. It’s not going to be as simple as Amber going “okay now to stop having DID and PTSD”, and Amber seeking medical help is probably going to play a huge part in it, on top of being supported by her loved ones and realizing on her own that there’s parts of her history that she needs to deal with.
And I think that’s really unlikely, unless it’s for maybe a week in-comic. Amber being confined to a hospital divorces her from the main cast in a way that can easily be worked around and still achieve the same results. There’s nothing specifically about involuntarily commitment that makes it necessary compared to voluntarily seeking therapy.
I agree, though I think it’s the “institutionalized” that would be the problem, rather than the “involuntary”. Even if she voluntarily checks herself in for a month, she’s out of the comic for years. Not going to happen.
Getting therapy while staying in school would fit – but at the same time I find it hard to think she wouldn’t be committed if she was honest with a therapist about what’s going on.
72 hour holds are pretty common. That might strike a balance between “institutionalized” and “not having her in the comic for years.” Also, patients in psych wards can (usually) have visitors.
Involuntary, emergency holds tend to be limited to a couple of days without running into the need for a hearing or consent to effect a longer commitment (’cause due process). So I can see it happening, Amber getting out on the condition that she follow up with out-patient therapy, and not causing undue departure from the rest of the cast for an unreasonable period of time.
Yeah I was never in for longer than four days. They make you get set up with a therapist and/or psychiatrist afterwards, etc. You get A LOT of doctors talking to you over and over about the exact same things. Hospital emergency mental wards are usually a day, two max, because they really aren’t equipped for long-term care and you don’t get visitors.
It seems scarier than it is, honestly. Mostly you’re bored. Very, very bored.
Re: Spencer
I really, really want to see Amber have a moment of clarity and turn around before she goes over that edge. I hope that she realizes it and makes a proactive choice.
I haven’t had her specific situation, but I’ve been there with not seeing how bad my mental state really was. When people said I needed help, I took it as… I don’t even know what I took it as. Everything got warped on the way in, everything looked like an attack.
I wonder if this is going to lead to an outright struggle between Amber and AmaziGirl. The real person vs the “ideal” person she created. Where Amber realizes that she doesn’t actually need AG, but needs other coping mechanisms and help. …that she’s worthy of help and accepting it doesn’t make her more broken, but is a chance to really patch herself up.
…there is just so much Amber could enjoy around herself right now, relationships that she’s building, but she’s still living back then in a way. (Again maybe I’m reading stuff in because of my own experiences…)
Also at least don’t think any longer hospitalization would happen.
(As you said somewhere below, it would fit narrative purposes better)
I think Amber deciding completely on her own that she needs help isn’t going to be the case, but that she will be driven to a point where she has to choose to confront her problems in a healthier way, with her loved ones supporting her. The way things are building up it will take at least until a confrontation with Sal for her to realize the path she’s on, and from then on it will be Amber’s decisions that shape her, and that’s a good thing. Amber can learn that she rules herself, and that she’s not beholden only to becoming her father or her mother. That thinking that she needs to box her emotions away is wrong, that it’s okay for her to be angry, and that she isn’t too shitty and too broken to deserve happiness.
As for a struggle between Amber and Amazi-Girl, I think eventually we will see Amber become wary of Amazi-Girl and what she represents because Amazi-Girl is basically everything she’s assumed that Amber always was doomed to be. Best Poster Cerberus has informed me a lot about DID and brought up how, if Amber starts to violently repress the Amazi-Girl alter, she could start to rebel against reintegrating into Amber’s personality, possibly on the grounds of the both of them feeling that Amazi-Girl is the one who deserves to exist.
And, yeah, Amber is definitely still timelocked to that robbery. She’s even admitted as much that she still views Amber as the weak little girl who couldn’t save Ethan, and who is also a festering pot of rage about to burst.
So I don’t actually think institutionalizing will occur, because unless it is a shortform, yearlong storyline for Amber, then dropping her into a completely isolated area away from the rest of the cast for years on end wouldn’t fly. Though now I’m concerned my belief that Amber wouldn’t be institutionalized also comes off as “being institutionalized means she’s coocoo bananas and a bad person.” I wasn’t myself, but what eventually proved to be the catalyst for seeking help was a moment that made it abundantly clear I needed it, while also, in hindsight, made me wonder how I went so far without realizing it, because it made so much perfect sense at the time (I was hitting myself at work to punish myself for not being good enough, and it was hitting myself at home without that justification that made me realize that I should get help).
I dunno. I think it’d probably be a pretty even fight. Sal might even win. Sal did Juvie time after all. That’s… not exactly softball. People think “oh kid prison, that’s nothing compared to the real thing.”
I’m worried that Sal would get seriously hurt, but on the other hand I’m afraid she’ll defend herself and somehow end up going to jail again. But Marcie is there, so she will probably witness it.
I am worried for Sal, I hope she gets out of this okay. And Marcie, too. I’m sure if anything happens she will try to help her friend. There are a lot of terrible things, and a mentally unstable individual with violently explosive fixations on you is pretty up there, speaking from experience.
Ah jeez, so AmaziGirl alter thinks that Amber is insane. This is not good news. Just really bad. And since AmaziGirl seems to have possibly taken permanent or at least long term control, this has to be terrifying for Amber as well. I’m just hoping against all hope that there will be some light for her at the end of the tunnel.
Yeah, this is a really significant and scary moment for Amber. Used to be she could voluntarily shift into Amazi-Girl when needed, but not only did she involuntarily become Amazi-Girl to deal with her PTSD over seeing Sal but Amazi-Girl autonomously made decisions for both alters and treated Danny in a way that Amber previously started self flagellating in guilt over, and she’s been in control for most of the day.
I’m thinking she’s prolly going to more imitate IW! Sal in South Carolina with a Segway. She’s going to still see herself as acting with integrity and have no immediate regrets either way…
Amazigirl and therefore amber are Hella hella wack. This probably should have been more apparent earlier, but she was so cool! And coolness negates mental crises
I still wish people would keep her actions as a mentally unstable person separate from her value as a person.
I still see no reason to run out of sympathy for her. Knowing how badly she’s fucked up–actually to the point of being delusional (which I had valiantly tried to argue against before) only makes me feel worse for her.
I don’t get why mental illnesses are the one thing that make people lose sympathy for people. Even when I had to let my cousin live on the street because she would refuse to get care, I never stopped having sympathy for her.
Even if I do have to kinda put it to the back of my mind because I can’t afford to help her anymore.
I think it’s possible to have sympathy for her. I think it’s a lot of people on here are coming from different perspectives. I hear yours, and I’m very sorry you went through that because it is very hard and very painful to watch someone you love go through that.
It’s not so much that I dislike her because she is mentally ill, it’s that she’s been hurting people because of it. Hurting others is definitely a thing that happens, we all hurt each other from time to time, but when violence in its many forms is involved people around the person are also affected negatively. I get the feeling that some folks (myself included) have been on the receiving end of it, so there’s that bias.
For example, Blaine is obviously ill, but he should still take responsibility for his actions because he’s hurt Amber in too many ways to count. abuse and sympathy can be a touchy subject for folks because it’s toeing the line between “i need you to understand why i’m like this and accept and love me” and “i do these shitty things to you and you must stick around and take it otherwise you don’t love and accept me”
“APD (Antisocial Personality Disorder) is a DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition), diagnosis assigned to individuals who habitually violate the rights of others without remorse (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). People with Antisocial Personality Disorder may be habitual criminals, or engage in behavior which would be grounds for criminal arrest and prosecution, or they may engage in behaviors which skirt the edges of the law, or manipulate and hurt others in non-criminal ways which are widely regarded as unethical, immoral, irresponsible, or in violation of social norms and expectations. The terms psychopathy or sociopathy are also used, in some contexts synonymously, in others, sociopath is differentiated from a psychopath, in that a sociopathy is rooted in environmental causes, while psychopathy is genetically based. ” from http://www.theravive.com/therapedia/Antisocial-Personality-Disorder-DSM–5-301.7-%28F60.2%29
The DSM is pretty extensive and covers a lot of behavior.
It also shouldn’t be used to definitively diagnose someone without a lot more material than we’re going to get for a minor character in a webcomic.
Blaine is, probably, sane. Just so thoroughly indoctrinated in his faith that he places salvation over the lives of his daughter or himself.
Also, I don’t like the claim that religious fundamentalists are, on the whole, mentally ill. It denies the agency, good or in this case very very bad, of individuals and tries to reduce a complex social and spiritual problem to a psychological diagnostic sheet.
Which now that I think of it may be another reason I disagree with people trying to separate Amber from her dissociation as Amazi-girl.
You can’t really take a person and say that ‘everything but this mental illness they have which forms a fundamental part of their identity is part of them’. It doesn’t work that way.
Mental illness sucks. But its part of the patients mind and refusing that is refusing to engage with problems which needed to be treated.
I mean, I would consider him suffering from something because honestly, how could someone who beats the ** out if their kid on a regular basis be “healthy”? I didn’t use a specific term because who knows what he has, but there’s definitely something wrong with him
It’s also not clear how much of his abuse was physical. We’ve seen the mental side and I think we’ve been told he hit her mother, but I don’t remember a reference to him beating her.
Not that that absolves him or anything. Just like to have the facts straight.
I have to deal with mentally ill people who are close to me on a regular basis. It is extremely unpleasant to be on the receiving end of violence. The fact that the violence happens to occur during depressive parts of a bi-polar cycle doesn’t make it any less awful.
It doesn’t make people less sympathetic to the person. It’s just that there are realities to dealing with an emotionally unstable, apparently very strong, and violence prone person.
My discomfort around her has nothing to do with her mental health, I’m mentally ill myself so are most of my friends, but she’s still being abusive, mentally ill or not.
Wanna know the worst thing about this? According to the Legends continuity, there were apparently a ton of Sith parents who were better parents than Blaine. And I mean on the levels of dark lords and Darths who were legitimately better parents. Sith Lords and Darths!! That is kinda the physical definition of evil!! And they were still better parents than Blaine!!
And then you had folks like Darth Jadus who, discovering that his daughter had a fondness for music and singing, arranged a concert for her in the Empire’s capital where he forced her to perform for hours on end until her throat was raw and any desire to sing again fully expunged. This was, she noted, the only time she ever saw her father smile.
Hell, you don’t even need to get into the EU; I think I’d rate Vader as better than Blaine. He did try to kill Luke, but… they were opposite sides of a war, and despite that, Vader sought Luke out as soon as he found out Luke existed, tried to reconcile with him, clearly respected Luke’s abilities, >and< ultimately sacrificed his own life to save Luke's.
Honestly, I like the robot chicken idea that Vader was super happy when he found out he actually had children. He actually has a little bit of a double take in Return of the Jedi when he finds out Luke has a sister. Plus he manages to crushingly sad in full body armor and face obscuring helmet when Luke says “Then I guess my father truly is dead.” Honestly the man really did try.
Poor Amber, poor, poor, poor Amber. She has a good thing going at college. Friends, studies, people who like her and admire the cool things she do… and the Blaine-voice in her head is about to take it from her.
To be honest, Danny hardly knows her and needs a break from crazy women right now. Not that I’m hoping that break is in Ethan’s arms or anything like that XD
I wonder if Ethan will realize that his staunch friendship isn’t up to the task of treating post-traumatic dissociation. And I wonder if the hospitals in their area have a halfway decent mental ward between them. This is not outpatient time, but on the other hand, some of those wards are really… unhelpful.
I feel like Ethan is probably going to double over in guilt when he realizes how bad she’s gotten, because so far his thought process is “I don’t like you being Amazi-Girl but also everything is fine and dandy and once you’re done freaking out you’ll come back to us.”
Unless we have a major time skip we’re not gonna see Amber get institutionalized or sent to prison, because that would cut her out of the comic for years, if not forever. Seeing her go to therapy is pretty likely, though.
Prison actually requires her to leave the comic. Minimum sentencing in the states is a year. And she can’t go to jail, because she’s committed multiple batteries (I’m pretty sure one gets you in the big house, not jail)
Almost all of which could be treated as self-defense or defense of others. Almost all of which have very shaky or hostile witnesses.
Can’t decide what the sentence will be until we know what she’d actually be charged with and convicted of.
None of which changes “not gonna see Amber … sent to prison”.
What about the act itself of being a vigilante? What kind of sentence would that get you? Does it depend on what exactly you’ve been doing? (Such as the car chase, or taking down the guy who was a thief)
As far as I know, being a vigilante is, in and of itself, not a crime, though many of the things commonly associated with vigilantism are. Even if the term is used legally, it’s going to be defined in the statute, possibly in ways that don’t match common usage.
Um. No. Straight up, actual, no. Beating a man into the dirt is not self defense, and she was hitting Blaine well after he was down*. Attacking kids who are drinking is not self defense. Seeking people out who are committing petty crimes is not self defense. Stopping robbers is, but vandals? UNDERAGE DRINKERS? No.
*I want to stress something here – the issue is she already neutralized Blaine. There’s a lot to be said for how abusers create an environment of terror that warps what people see as reasonable threat and fear. Danny’s presence is actually irrelevant to me whether this is self defense or not. I mean yeah, it’s more demonstrably self defense to most people, but in the case of an abuser in a long term relationship, things are actually and honestly different. Frankly, when you tend to talk about a long term abusive relationship without adding in familial/relationship modifiers, people can usually agree it’s self defense. She ALREADY finished punching blaine though. I would actually be cool with it as self defense even if Danny weren’t there, because Blaine is still in town to terrorize Amber.
Also, I already listed the probable charges. Battery, and a couple of Assault (Going by MPC, I’m way too lazy to look up which is which in Indiana). I mean, strictly speaking she probably ought to stand trial for some of her various /actual/ self defense cases too, on charges of Battery (Self defense is, in fact, a defense in court. Some of her’s aren’t murky, some of them are, including the beat down she gave ‘today’).
And no, of course she isn’t going to either prison or jail. And frankly, the only reason I wouldn’t say she should, is that she’s mentally ill in a way that diminishes her ability to tell right from wrong in this particular context. You know, an insanity plea, whatever they call it in Indiana. She should be getting help (And obviously, in narrative terms, she almost definitely will, and she will almost definitely never see court or similar). But I pointed out she can’t be in prison and stay in the comic, because the minimum term is a year for prison, and she’s done it enough that she’d see prison, for sure. Though I think I misremembered, battery’s not a felony at common law, at least.
“Minimum sentencing in the states is a year.”
What? No. That statement has annoyed me enough to do research ON THE WEEKEND.
I’m not a lawyer in Indiana, but the relevant portions of the Indiana Code provide:
(b) Except as provided in subsections (c) through (j), a person who
knowingly or intentionally:
(1) touches another person in a rude, insolent, or angry manner;
or
(2) in a rude, insolent, or angry manner places any bodily fluid
or waste on another person; commits battery, a Class B misdemeanor.
It becomes a Class A misdemeanor for bodily injury, a level 6 felony for “moderate bodily injury” and a level 5 felony for “Serious bodily injury”.
My issue wasn’t with battery and whether it’s a felony or misdemeanor. You’re right, it’s a misdemeanor at common law…but what she did to Blaine definitely had aggregating factors which might push it up. It was the assertion that there’s some kind of universal minimum of one year incarceration. Where did that come from?
The fact that prison was referred to in the first place. Felonies get you in prison, misdemeanors in local jails. Felonies usually have a minimum time of a year.
When it came to charges, I was mostly saying that they would almost all need to rely on the testimony of the person she beat up and in a couple cases the testimony of people she helped. You can’t rely on what we’ve seen in the comic pages. You’ve got to find “guy about to smash a car window” and “creepy guy chasing a girl” and get them on the stand.
And in most of those cases, she basically told them to stop in the middle of a crime and let them take a swing at her – which is where the self-defense comes in. Nor are they going to be very believable or willing witnesses.
Even with Sal’s gang in the parking lot. She came looking for a fight and certainly tried to provoke one, but she still only hit/threw the ones who actually came after her.
Blaine is the exception. In both directions – the actual amount of unnecessary violence and the level to which him being her long time abuser mitigates that.
‘in most cases’ is not in all cases. She tried to provoke Engineering Vandal into attacking her so she could ‘defend herself’. She outright threatened Cinder Block Guy. She visibly beat Backpack Thief into the dirt in front of a ton of witnesses, some of whom were visibly disturbed.
And again, I already said she’s not going to see the courts. It’s not going to happen for narrative reasons. I don’t have to worry about getting people ‘on the stand’. But uh, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
“Even with Sal’s gang in the parking lot. She came looking for a fight and certainly tried to provoke one, but she still only hit/threw the ones who actually came after her. ”
Uh. She threatened to attack them. *THEY* are the ones with the self defense claim that is actually valid – they have a reasonable belief in a threat to their persons, and they responded only with a reasonable level of violence, ceasing at restraining her, with absolutely no further action taken after this. The idea that she was ‘defending herself’ on a legal level is definitely invalid – on an ETHICAL one it’s even moreso. They ‘hit her first’, AFTER she jumped down to them persons, AFTER threatening them. This isn’t ‘stand your ground’ nonsense, this is straight up regular and ordinary self defense. THEY are the defendants in this action, and SHE is the aggressor. And the fact that they stopped at restraining her, while she’s put people into the fucking hospital (and one expressed reservations about RESTRAINT), kinda put more lies to this. That’s what ACTUAL self defense looks like.
I mean, I wouldnt’ be surprised if that ended with them on trial for battery anyway, and being found guilty, but it’s two non-white people, a trans girl, and Marcie. Doesn’t say much.
And no. Being a long-time abuse victim is generally the opposite of a mitigating circumstance legally. Although *I* accept the core concept behind what is termed ‘battered women’s syndrome’, and feel it /should/ be better accepted, the law likes to pretend that people can be reasonably expected to remain reasonable in cases of protracted, years-long terror, held aloft with the threat of violence. That would be used to spin it against Amber. Which I agree is fucked up. But I also think it’s absurdly fucked up what lengths you go to, to protect a fucking vigilante from ethical examination (Legal is ultimately not that important, because she will never see trial, because she is fictional)
Trauma isn’t always amusing. Sometimes it sucks. Self-hatred can get tedious to the person hating herself too. Why cut away when it becomes uncomfortable?
This is actually a rather detailed and involved question about the meta-level objectives of this webcomic as a whole.
Is the objective to portray reality as realistically as possible, or to provide an at least somewhat entertaining and well-written story for the audience? Because the two can easily conflict.
We know Willis is at least straddling this line somewhat, considering that he has stated that no characters will die during DoA, something that full realism would point and laugh at. If we were being completely realistic and true to life, this strip wouldn’t have been an issue, because Amber would be a smear on a highway.
Interesting how many people are like “ok fuck off Amber, who cares.” Come on guys, this is drama. This is super important emotional stuff here. Sure, it’s not healthy, but it’s pretty damn compelling, and just dismissing it feels really… dismissive. This is a comic strip, and this is someone going through some heavy shit.
I can sort of understand. Sometimes it feels like this storyline is dragging on. 🙁 That being said, I am looking forward to the climax of this tragedy.
Such is the drawback of webcomics as a medium: the update schedule, no matter how frequent, usually isn’t fast enough to keep up with a dramatic, multi-faceted story. Sam and Fuzzy had a similar issue, in which it took 6+ months to get out of a flashback covering events the readers already knew half of. It’s hard for webcomics to really find their stride, especially since the writer experiences the plot much faster than we do. It’s the same reason why archive binging feels so much better compared to daily updates. Hopefully as the medium grows, this problem will slowly be smoothed out.
There’s a fine line in Deana when it comes to this level of angst and uncomfortableness. You need to play the story out just long enough to get the full impact across, and short enough that it doesn’t drag. This arc is towing a fine line between the two, and I can understand why people are ready to see a conclusion. We’ve hit a breaking point. Amber’s issues are getting big enough to seriously impact other people, and that can make a character less sympathetic. Bottom line, people’s mileage will vary on this kind of thing and the longer this runs the more people will tire of it.
It’s in our nature to walk away when we feel uncomfortable. As pack animals we have two responses to when a pack member has strayed; the first is that we try and help, when our help is rejected we become hurt and no longer want to help. The second is that if helping seems too hard or may cause us to suffer outright we experience negative emotions and either walk away or we shun the straying pack member. Given Amber’s deep seeded mental distress many of us have become uncomfortable with the thought of helping her based on many of our own experiences and negative results. So though you are correct in your assessment of this being “super important emotional stuff,” it is also correct and realistic that many of us might feel that ““ok fuck off Amber, who cares.”” IS the correct response. Amber is acting in both a realistic and completely unrealistic way and it makes us uncomfortable. At some point you cannot be responsible for rejecting a person who causes you pain through unreasonable action as Amber is doing to the readers.
Part of why I’ve hated how Amber’s gotten in the last month was because she reminded me too much of myself, like I was seeing everything I hated about myself legitimized on page.
I’m very invested in seeing her conquer her demons and learn that she deserves to get better, that she doesn’t need to be beholden to her abusive upbringing, that it’s okay for Amber to be angry and that she’s not too shitty and too broken to deserve happiness, but the road there is painful as fuck.
What I was trying (and failing) to convey with this was that I do really understand why people are so harsh on Amber, because not only is Amber just being all sorts of awful, she is also displaying traits that many who have suffered abuse are all too familiar with. I can’t, reasonably, ask these people to listen to me when I try to explain why Amber is doing these things, or why this doesn’t make her a bad person, because at that point I feel like I’m justifying abusers and I got too much of that in my own life.
That said, it is still hugely frustrating, and to a degree actually hurtful, to see so much of how Amber being mentally ill and lashing out means that, to so many people here, Amber is just a total shithead who needs to fuck off. If this was something that sprouted only within the last month then I could understand, but this has been going on for years, villainizing Amber for lashing out like she hasn’t had over a decade of mental programming telling her that getting angry and flipping tables and yelling is how you deal with your problems, and when it takes her all of five seconds to double down in guilt and hate herself even more.
And that shit is real to me, because I do it all the time. I fucking hate getting angry. I don’t feel like I’m allowed to be angry. There are times where I feel genuine guilt and sickness for being angry. And so I see Amber acting terribly, and I get why people are harping on her, but I also understand where that rage comes from and it sucks to see people not want to understand it and instead just tar and feather her as damaged goods.
This arc has just been going on forever and I wasn’t terribly interested in it at the beginning so by now I am just full on “I do not care at all about this plotline I just want it to end already.” I don’t find it compelling at all I find it interminable and unpleasantly reminiscent of experiences I’d rather not be reminded of.
To me personally, it’s a plot tumor that keeps growing. Drama is great, it’s the lifeblood of a compelling story, but when there’s other more interesting storylines we could be focusing on, it’s kind of like… Hmm.. Finn’s love life in Adventure Time.
Well that – would have been exactly my complaint yesterday.
But check it:
Danny + Ethan: Temporary resolution, will need days if not weeks (in comic) before we see any progress.
Mary vs. Carla: Resolved so far.
So we have the “Joyce + Becky in La Porte” and the Amazi-Girl storyline.
I was not very much interested in the Sal/Marcie plot (because it was interfering with Joyce/Becky and was comparativly thin) but now with the addition of Amber/Amazi-Girl – it really gets interesting (i might be biased).
Honestly I’m not too big on the Sal/Marcie line either, ’cause I’ve gone through a friendship that played a lot like how it’s been, the conflict I mean.
Though honestly you got me there, I can’t think of any others that are currently able to happen during this time frame.
OK, comments are deep enough in that I’ll mention I find that phrasing of “…OUR Danny.” especially interesting considering how both Amber and Amazigirl have reacted to his feelings for Amber to date.
I now have to wonder what’d have happened with AG/Amber if Danny had answered her “No mask.”
He did want her without the mask. Amber was the one who wanted to keep it on because it made her more confident, and when it slipped off Amber expressed that she was concerned she’d screw something up or that she’d hurt Danny. And as much as Amber was insisting that Amazi-Girl was the one doing all the weird sex stuff, Amber was still around for their first time. This was before they started to heavily dissociate, so Amber immediately surfaced when she thought something had gone wrong.
As far as Danny’s been concerned, he was always dating Amber and Amazi-Girl was just a kinky bit of fun between them.
I still find a bit BS that for just seeing him talk for 5 second with her, (someone she has never tell Danny about, btw), she considers it a reason to break up and then consider it a “steal”.
I mean, there is being blindsided and jumping to conclisions, and then there is this. It’s borderline contrived and I am at least expecting a point where she goes “Amber, you are the stupidest girl on this planet”.
Amazi-Girl is always right and is morally inflexible. She can’t be wrong.
So Danny speaking to Sal despite knowing nothing about their shared history, and begging Amber to stop before she gets herself killed, then obviously he has betrayed her and been swayed by the evil one.
It doesn’t help at all that if Amber actually listened to Danny and stopped letting Amazi-Girl out, then that alter would die, and right now both Amber and Amazi-Girl believe that Amber is too shitty and too broken to deserve happiness.
Hoo boy. I am now firmly in the camp of “Beating up randos for jaywalking and costuming up as an emotional crutch is no longer amusing and she needs help”.
Amazi-Girl used to be an excuse for wacky action set pieces. Until this chapter none of the randoms she ever fought expressed any kind of personalty or humanity; they were basically just rough approximations of jerks doing jerk things, so Amber is morally vindicated in punching them.
Both the bag thief she punched and the guy she helped expressing fear of Amazi-Girl, as well as the only person unconditionally believing in her right now being overly idealistic and and automatically blaming Danny for their breakup, is hugely significant, because it used to be that the guys she punched were just cartoon evil and the people she helped were just cheering citizens, but now the veil’s been lifted and we can’t go back to stuff like Amazi-Girl rescuing cats from trees.
No, some of the jerks she punched were jerks that did not need punching, or the threat of punching, period. Cinder Block dude and Engineering Vandal dude, in particular, were nothing but non violent, petty vandals.
She beat Blaine into the hospital, well after he was down and stopped being a threat. This was not. Fucking. Justified. Danny stopped her, which is good, but it wasn’t. Okay.
She attacked Sal and Co. in the parking lot for /underage fucking drinking/. Which she was patently using as an excuse to fight her nemesis.
You keep insisting this started ‘this chapter’. It didn’t. It’s been fucked up for a while. It’s even more fucked up for those of us who know that what she’s doing is pretty normal for vigilantes. There’s a reason I didn’t approve /before/ she beat Blaine into the dirt. Great, you saved a kitten and stopped a purse snatcher. It’s not worth the nigh-inevitable, even if I didn’t think WIllis would ever PORTRAY the nigh-inevitable.
I’m honestly interesting in what vigilantes you’re comparing her to. If this is “pretty normal” (minus the costume, I’d assume), there should be plenty of example you could give.
It doesn’t match what I think of as vigilanteeism at all, but I could easily be misled.
Blaine was definitely out of line, but I’m not going to treat anyone too bad for losing control when they fight their abuser.
When I think of vigilantes, I think of arguably one of the most famous cases where an underage kid named Travon was killed (murdered, really) by George Zimmerman. An important piece of the case was the fact that Zimm. called 911 and they basically told him, “don’t go after him. let the police do it.” He didn’t listen. And the poor child wasn’t doing anything either way.
It could also be incidents where murderers are attacked by family members of the victims in court or otherwise.
BUT, when people are running around the neighborhood with guns/knives/whatever al a Amazigirl (as in taking it upon themselves to enact “justice”), it usually doesn’t end well. Basically a lot of those people can be very biased and doing it for basically being on an ego trip, or whatever hang up. It’s not really about justice. Even police officers have been documented to basically having knee-jerk, irrational, and racist reactions to people and escalating situations that never should have been escalated.
I for one have disagreed with Amber’s actions from the start. she is clearly not doing any of this for others. She’s being violent to feel power and control and feed her fragile ego and pick up her self esteem. So the worse she feels, the more she will escalate or insert herself into more dangerous situations. Toedad aside, punching people does not work and can land you in jail. I can definitely understand her wanting to attack Blaine, but it’s like, what the dude had just keeled over right there? Additionally, I’d disagree with a person suffering from delusions/a break in reality running around assaulting folks. It’s not justice, it’s a tragic situation.
OTOH, she’s not running around with a gun as her only means of offense/defense. She’s got no pattern of racism – possibly other than Sal and Sal’s a special case for her.
I certainly agree it’s problematic and not justice. At first however, she was careful to only use violence when the targets were violent, even if she did provoke that violence when she interrupted their crime. Nor did she drastically escalate – like by shooting people who took a swing at her.
Again, I’m looking for that “pretty normal for vigilantes”. I’m not aware of it. Most that I’m aware of either just started out as racist thugs beating their targets up for mostly imagined crimes. Or someone like Bernie Goetz who gets mugged a few times, starts carrying a gun and gets the chance to use it.
Maybe I’m way off target and there are plenty of cases of solo, unarmed petty crime-stopping vigilantes who escalate to ? I’m not even sure what Rutee thinks this normal pattern is going to lead to.
I’m not comparing the literal situations together, it’s more like I’m comparing the mindset of the vigilantes. Most of them THINK they’re enacting justice clean and cut, but the REALITY can be different and more complex, as a general. I guess by that I mean more people go out of their way for the justice, and it goes wrong because they are ill prepared, don’t have the proper mindset to begin with like you mentioned (they could be racist) (they could have over-inflated importance and therefore escalate and take more risks, i.e. “that person needed to die”), do not account for other factors in the confrontation (“what if the person i’m confronting has a gun or a knife? what if they’re stronger than me?”).
Amber thinks what’s she’s doing is correct, but obviously we can see that that is not the case and the reality is a lot more complicated. Sure, there are the run of the mill standing up for folks, but there are many cases where things go horribly wrong. Like the time the group of dudes were harrassing that kid and Amber found them. They were all assholes, but they also could have been the kind of assholes that would have left the kid alone and ganged up on her beat her up instead. Although I can’t speak for Rutee, so this is just my opinion.
And arguably provoking someone rather than walking away, or distracting them and then running away or calling the proper authorities is an escalating behaviour. People are responsible for their actions, but it’s a bad idea to provoke people into being physical, because they’re probably going to respond to you. No, Amber, doesn’t have a gun, but she has her fists, as we saw with Blaine.
Only you care about the ‘pattern of racism’ as if it was etched into her heart of fucking hearts. Those of us who deal with racism are more concerned with where she fits into the overall pattern of racism (or other -isms) in day to day life. Which she does, as a wannabe authority figure using selective enforcement of rules to attack a black girl, a mute girl, a filipino girl, and a trans girl. It doesn’t matter that her ‘goal’ wasn’t to do this. What mattered was her god damned effects.
And uh, besides the fucking escalating violence over increasingly less relevant crimes!? THE THING WE SAW ON CAMERA!? Given her grudge with Sal, MORE racist attempts at enforcement because of her fucking invented nemesis?
I mean for fuck’s fucking sake. She created a nemesis out of wholecloth out of a black woman and is targetting her for retribution. She’s creating a fucking justification for ‘defense’ of her person and her lifestyle that, given her previous modus operandi, involves attacking this woman physically – and what needs to be done to truly stop her? She’s gone to jail once, and she’s back, destroying her life again. Clearly, more drastic measures are necessary.
But no, you’ll keep doing this shit to the end, won’t you? Christ almighty. I mean, as a betting woman, she becomes horrified of what she’s about to do, and Sal, as the incredibly staunch anti-authoritarian that she is, DOESN’T report it, and Amber starts getting the help she needs (Possibly from Sal directly, probably by talking to someone else). But that’s the happy storybook ending. What actually happens is a death, and often, (if less now than in the past), a release. I mean, *I* wasn’t going to mention Martin, because although he died from vigilante ‘justice’, I’m not immediately familiar with any academic study of zimmerman, and black history isn’t mine so anything less is something I don’t need to touch, so I won’t… but are you just going to ignore that this shit STILL happens?
And no, I don’t even need ‘things go horribly wrong’, although they do (meriken police seem to have things ‘go horribly wrong’ disproportionately often, all told). My concern is twofold:
1: Let’s assume we have a unicorn. A vigilante who enacts the letter and spirit of the law, without unequal enforcement, and without prejudice – both in ‘spirit’ and in effect. This is perhaps a platonic ideal of the vigilante. Certainly, they don’t exist outside the cave, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume.
This person weakens the belief in the state monopoly of violence. And the overwhelming majority of people are NOT this unicorn. Encouraging vigilante justice will end with, at best, the average racist, average heterosexist, average cissexist, average sexist… enacting unfair enforcement – much of which will be unfairly targetted at people like me, and by extension, me.
“But Rutee, the police do this already!” Yes, for most of the same reasons (Average racism, average heterosexism, etc. Though there are some exacerbating factors in police training, it’s less important than the baseline -ism of society) and they are nominally easier to stop, as a smaller subset of the category of everyone, with nominal accountability to public organs. And even if they weren’t, if it was JUST as hard to make police and vigilantes stop, Police + Vigilantes = More Jackasses to stop than Just Police. All in return for, at best, a decrease in a few petty crimes. I’d rather be robbed or pickpocketed than murdered, thanks.
2: …and oh right, I hypothesized a fucking unicorn. People aren’t unicorns. They’re often bastard-coated bastards, with bastard filling. I want fewer bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling who feel like they might be justified in shooting me. Amber goes out of her WAY to find these situations. That’s why she was in that walmart parking lot. Why she found the vandals to threaten. And that’s part of the POINT of being a vigilante – it’s what seperates someone from some random person who acted in self defense in one case.
I agree with a lot of your points. I must clarify though, what I meant by run of the mill stuff was like, for example , verbally shutting down someone who’s being an ass to someone else or something, not like shooting anyone or physically attacking them.
When I mentioned the police I meant in the sense that in the idealized world, police are the intermediary between the accused and the court system. As a black American I am quite familiar with the fact that they perform otherwise. I did not mention them as if to say, “well they do the same thing so same difference.” Ideally, if I hear someone screaming for help or whatever, I call the police. i don’t necessarily jump into the fray and risk getting stabbed/shot/whatever.
And yeah, it’s been talked about in past that Amber might have racist fantasies, and she has said racially charged things to Sal (Remember, the comment about her having a record?) Racial justice clearly isn’t on Amber’s radar, but it doesn’t excuse her from saying shitty things and targeting Sal, who unlike her, has served her time for her transgressions. I mean, she thinks of Sal as the embodiment of criminals everywhere- she attributes a special kind of evil to her, more threatening than most she’s encountered – and we know why because we’re the readers, but shucks if it doesn’t look like that. People can get affected even if she doesn’t mean it like that. Say something happens now and they both get caught by security. who would get the worse punishment, Sal or Amber?
“attack a black girl, a mute girl, a filipino girl, and a trans girl”
Wait, what? When did that ever happen?
Amazi-Girl never attacked them, she was attacked by Malaya!
Amazi-Girl never attacked any girls, all of her targets (when she really attacks) are males and most of her targets are white males:
The thug in the background of the party (white male), the creep (white male), Toe-Dad (white male) and last but not least (in measurements of violence) the backpack thief.
And of course her father, but Amber was attacking, not Amazi-Girl.
She did not attack (but confront): The guy with alcohol on a dry campus (scenery lightning too dark to judge if he is white), the traffic-sign vandals (both white males), the bike-thief (white male), the Whiteboard-DingDong-Bandit (white female), the cinderblock man (white male), the cat (OK, yellow and of unknown sex) and of course Danny (for “turning against her”).
There is a disturbing pattern of almost all of the criminals in this webcomic being white males (exception: a bully, a “Whiteboard Dingding bandit” and possibly a guy with alcoholic beverage – not really criminals); even more so when there are quite a lot of them.
But maybe that is because we learn about them in the context of Amazi-Girls actions – which may be caused by her racism against white people.
I pretty much agree with Spencer below, so I’m going to leave most of that behind.
Two things, I still don’t see the “pretty normal for vigilantes” and haven’t really gotten any examples from you. Zimmerman was pretty clearly driven by racism – calling in random black guys to the police – but even beyond that I don’t see the similarity. He started out carrying a gun and in the only confrontation I know about, used it and killed a kid not doing anything wrong. He didn’t start out beating up people he found committing petty crimes and then escalate. Like I said, there may be examples of this that I’m not aware of.
I’m not giving in on racism for AG though. There’s been no noticable pattern in the random people she’s beaten. She’s got clear personal reasons for hating Sal – even though they’re fucked up and wrong, they’re personal, not racial. She fought Carla & Malaya & Marcie because they were with Sal, not because they were trans, filipino & mute. I doubt she even knew about the trans or mute.
I don’t see the racist component to her fantasy. Unless anything involving black people is automatically racist. Sure, the person she’s turned into her nemesis is black, but there’s no indication at all that’s why she’s done it. She’s done it because Sal was the one in the robbery that her father used to further traumatize her. Hating a particular black person for reasons grounded in your personal history, even unfairly, isn’t racist. You need patterns for that.
Rutee:
Meant to add, I’d assume you have the same problems with super-heroes in general. Or at least the street level versions? Maybe Superman’s okay, but Batman and Spider-man are just monstrous examples of racist vigilantes?
Or is that stuff unrealistic enough not to count, but Amazi-Girl somehow is?
I mean, it is pretty goddamned racist of Amber to blatantly be glad that Sal is going to suffer for the rest of her life over her criminal record. Yes there’s personal reasons, but she’s using those personal reasons to approve of Sal having to forever be scrutinized for being a black woman with a criminal record. Yes there’s reasons outside of it, but that’s how racism works. If Whitey McJorty was the one who committed the robbery he wouldn’t suffer as badly as Sal would over the existence of his criminal record and Amber being glad that he was wouldn’t be the reinforcement of racist institutions.
Mav: Nah, I didn’t meant os ay you were saying that, and Is hould have been more clear. I was pre-emptively raising an obvious point against what I’m saying. And it’s an important point, one I think is really worth considering. It’s a pretty real fear for me. You were fine.
Stool: “Amazi-Girl never attacked them, she was attacked by Malaya!”
Yes. After she threatened to attack them all, Malaya struck her. We call what Malaya did self defense in the real world. Actual, factual, self defense. Someone has made a clear, and unambiguous, threat against her person (and also that of her friend. Oh, and two jerks, but that I don’t think she cared about.) – a reasonable person would interpret this as a threat. You strike with the force necessary to stop her, and not a jot more. They did not, in fact, beat her into the ground. They restrained her, had words, then released her and skated away. This isn’t some silly notion of Stand Your Ground or similar either. If you threaten to beat someone, and position yourself menacingly, and come down to meet them and begin approaching them, with body language that says you’re looking for a fight, it is reasonable to think they will attack you. You are allowed to non-lethally defend yourself against nonlethal force, or its imminent threat.
Amazi-girl thinks that because she struck after Malaya moved, that she is in the clear. Guess what: that’s not how it fucking works. She struck first – by making an unambiguous threat of harm. As it happens, you’re not allowed to threaten people with bodily harm. The law takes that shit kinda seriously (As long as it isn’t on the internet, and especially to a girl; in that case, you’re on your own, because no ‘reasonable person’ would take that seriously). And while I certainly can understand an argument to not entirely be mired in legality in discussing ethics, I kinda think the law has a good idea here (not the part where it ignores internet threats, the rest). Even pacifism does not generally require you to stand totally immobile and wait, hoping against hope that someone who has threatened you directly isn’t actually serious. Had Amber stood still and allowed herself to be restrained, it’d merely be assault. By fighting, she escalates it to Battery.
“And of course her father, but Amber was attacking, not Amazi-Girl.”
I’d thought it was both, but the red panel at the end of the one telling Danny to get away, as well as tagging, means that it’s true. If I gave a fuck about alters in this context, this might be really fucking important. But you know, they’re not, and I don’t. If anything, that just hurts the idea that I shouldn’t be holding her responsible for what she did (Which is part of my stance on her – her alter has interfered with her ability to tell right from wrong, and she is not responsible for her actions’.)
“She did not attack (but confront): The guy with alcohol on a dry campus (scenery lightning too dark to judge if he is white), the traffic-sign vandals (both white males), the bike-thief (white male), the Whiteboard-DingDong-Bandit (white female), the cinderblock man (white male), the cat (OK, yellow and of unknown sex) and of course Danny (for “turning against her”).”
Do you not understand that you are not, in fact, permitted to threaten people with physical harm? Are you confused on the nature of Assault? You don’t get to threaten that you’re going to attack people. This is literally what the police are for. Let them handle it. The jackasses won’t see anything serious, but that’s not really the point (Nor, ultimately, should they, given the petty nature of their crimes).
TheJeff:
Spiderman’s racist when he disproportionately affects non-white people (I say when because there’s about a jillion writers, and I can say with almost complete certainty that he’s at least historically gone around beating a bunch of black dudes with only occasional white people outside of supervillains, seeing as he existed in the 70s,) and the ‘street sweeping’ shit is generally absurd (though he does sometimes catch supervillains out doing shit, because that sells more copy as the meat of the plot for some reason). As far as Batman, yeah, he’s absolutely been a racist bastard. He’s… sometimes less racist (And possibly not racist). And Batman is quite bluntly one of the largest bastards to me, regardless of whether he’s currently fucking up non-white dudes or not. The dude is a filthy rich fucker and white man. He’d do far more good to Gotham as a politician and philanthropist (And he occasionally at least gets to be a philanthropist). The man’s toys can often be repurposed into useful things. He has (or had) villains he could – and should, for numerous ethical reasons – defuse ENTIRELY by throwing money at them. Depending on origin story he’s sometimes made matters worse with his fights (I’m pretty sure, at least, that I’ve heard of Joker sometimes having just been a smart crook before being an omnicidal maniac because of being knocked into some sort of acid). Many of his actual PLOTS would still end up being things he can, and should, handle as a superhero, but the low level radiation of “Gotham is a broken city, and I must beat up street toughs who are apparently more endless than in City of Heroes” is not the province of Batman (Though I’m told that in at least one relatively recent iteration, Gotham being broken is because of literal magic. Ironically, this does make fixing it the province of Batman, but he still isn’t doing that by poking at the endless flood of toughs.)
But you know, you didn’t fucking hear me. At all. We don’t have to guess with Amber. She straight up told Sal that it’s a good thing that Sal fears the police would arrest her, at best, because she’s a black girl with a record in the vague vicinity of a crime, even though she has exactly nothing to do with it. She has made her nemesis, the ur-criminal and ur-evil, a black woman who has done less to wrong Amber, than Amber has done to Sal(Guess what’s a more serious crime than assault! It’s Battery. They even used the same weapons for it). Not only has she done more to harm Sal, but she walked away scot-fucking-free. She enjoys, and glories in, race privilege, and has rubbed it in Sal’s face (though she doesn’t know how much. Small blessing, that Sal doesn’t entirely know either, mitigating the harm somewhat). Even if the rest of her actions were totally squeaky clean on this regard (And I can certainly believe they are LARGELY clean, if not squeakily so), she has a rather large black mark. That she does not INTEND to be racist is completely irrelevant to her effect. Relatively rarely do racist police INTEND to foster a bad environment, instead they are quicker to assume bad things of non-white people, and more disproportionately use their powers to affect them (and Amber is building a justification to do this to Sal, in this exact comic). They twist the bounds of what is ‘reasonable’, or ‘probable’. They haunt places that are favored by YBM not because they want to screw over black people, but because that’s obviously where the criminals are – not because YBM are all criminals (If you ask them, they can normally tell you that), but because that just /happens/ to be where the criminals go, because it’s poor.
She is not /particularly/ racist relative to her environment. She is certainly not uniquely so. But I did not claim that vigilantes were, now did I? I don’t really care whether you give in or not. I am not exactly unused to people insisting on ignoring the obvious. I didn’t say she was as racist as zimmerman, nor does she need to be, to be racist. Racism does not begin only when we have a body on the floor. There are numerous paths, and people traverse several.
@Rutee:
You tell a really scrambled version of what actually happened:
“she threatened to attack them all”
“clear, and unambiguous, threat against her person”
“threaten to beat someone”
“making an unambiguous threat of harm”
“threaten people with bodily harm”
Here starts what actually happened:
Sal: “All ah wanted to do was have a beer an’ relax.”
Amazi-Girl: “Tonight? Not likely!
I’ve found you underaged drinking.
Breaking the law.
That makes this so much easier.”
Where is the threat of bodily harm? Where is the threat to beat someone?
This is announcing that she will interfere with them drinking, that they will not relax. This covers everything from shouting obscenities to actually call the police.
Next strip:
Carla: “Holy shit, is that Amazi-Girl?”
Sal: “Amazi-Who?
Marcie, of course ah don’t read the news!”
Malaya: “Oh c’mon, look at her.
Who’s she intimidatin’? She’s fuckin’ tiny and there’s four of us.”
It’s exactly Malaya who pulls this immediately on the level of physical confrontation!
Next panel:
Amazi-Girl: “Come at me, skates. Please.”
Still no thread of bodily harm at all. She does not attack, she asks for being attacked!
Next panel:
Malaya rushes at her: “Roller Derby says hello.”
Ehm, roller derby? Announcing that you are into a sport that involves regular heavy physical contact?
That is indeed a threat of bodily harm!
So this is absolutely the opposite of the story you are trying to tell here!
“We call what Malaya did self defense in the real world.”
Nope we don’t. Malaya had the same option that Sal chose later: Just walk away.
No thread of violence, of bodily harm was uttered by Amazi-Girl.
All she did was announcing that she will become an annoyance, that Sal will not relax.
It was Malaya who immediately chose physical confrontation.
“Had Amber stood still and allowed herself to be restrained, it’d merely be assault. By fighting, she escalates it to Battery.”
She did stand still. All she did was raise her arm so Malaya could use the force of her own attack to run inot her.
Malaya was the one to issue threads of bodily harm and Malaya was the one to start physical confrontation. The self-defense argument applies only to Amazi-Girl.
“If I gave a fuck about alters in this context (…)”
OK, i can accept that – it is something left up to the interpretation of the reader.
“Do you not understand that you are not, in fact, permitted to threaten people with physical harm? Are you confused on the nature of Assault?”
Pedantry kicks in: You protested against attacks – not assaults.
Also, for sake of completeness:
Beer-drinker:
AG: “Citizen, this is dry campus! Please dispose of your beverage or relocate!”
Not an assault!
The traffic-sign vandals:
AG: “Halt, vandals. Hope you brought soap and water.”
Assault?
AG: “Give me the paint can.”
TSV: “Yo, shortstuff. Stop botherin’ us.”
AG: “You wanna push it? Fine with me.
I’m having a bad day and i’d love an excuse to get my hands dirty.”
That’s actually close to an assault, but it’s in the context of stopping vandalism.
TSV: “You kiddin’ me? You’re not the cops. You don’t have no authority over me.
I’m not gonna fight some little girl over some paint, man.”
AG: Why? You afraid you might lose to a “little girl”?
TSV: “Y’know, that might incite stupid people to violence, but i’m actually in engineering!”
So this was not assault, it was a bait to start attacking her and TSV is clever enough to notice it.
TSV: “So here’s what’s gonna to happen: I’m gone keep taggin’ this sign and there’s nothing nonviolent you can do to stop me.”
Does that sound like a victim of assault? TSV knows that violence will not happen (and was right with that)!
The bike-thief:
AG: “Ahem.
Cease and desist, criminal filth.”
Well, insult, but definitely no assault!
The Whiteboard-DingDong-Bandit: No assault in that story-line!
Cinderblock-man:
AG: “Hey.”
CBM: “… can i set this down before i run like hell?”
AG: “Oooh, let’s find out.”
Where’s the assault?
The cat: Well, i guess putting on the white mask counts as assault, so we finally have an example!
…Yeah, okay, a vigilante who’s been attacking ‘criminals’ declares that you’re breaking the law and swoops down to you. Malaya can tell this is a threat. That’s why her immediate response is “Who does she think she’s intimidating?” Only two people don’t know what’s going on here – one of them is Sal, who barely knows about ‘Amazo’ (and may well be more confused about Amazi-girl than what Amazi-girl is trying to say, frankly), and apparently, you.
“Nope we don’t. Malaya had the same option that Sal chose later: Just walk away.”
The US does not generally compel retreat, especially not from using non-lethal force. It’s certainly the better option, and I would be happy with a duty to retreat, but being a better thing doesn’t change that what Malaya’s doing is self-defense. Besides, *YOU* can’t use this. *YOU* are the one claiming that Amazi-girl was defending herself. You can not impute a duty to retreat, then pretend she was defending herself. She could have not entered the vicinity in the first place, as well as retreated. SHE COULD HAVE CALLED THE POLICE.
” Pedantry kicks in: You protested against attacks – not assaults.”
Okay, so you’re going to pretend that assault – a threat of bodily harm – isn’t a form of attack – especially in regards to self defense, which you claimed is the only way Amazi-girl fights. Great for you. This notwithstanding that you identified it as pedantry, so I already know it’s irrelevant.
“I’m having a bad day and i’d love an excuse to get my hands dirty.”
Close to an assault? CLOSE!? She’s outright stating she will fight the dude if he doesn’t stop. And you don’t get to stop vandalism with fucking violence, because you’re a fucking private citizen. The *POLICE* can’t ‘get their hands dirty’ until you start resisting arrest (the extent to which they’re allowed to is pretty fucking limited given unarmed dudes, especially unarmed white dudes) and Amazi-girl, shockingly, doesn’t have fucking right to arrest them. That’s assault, no bones about it. I mean fuck, “I’ve had a bad day and would love to get my hands dirty” is the sort of thing a cop would have to claim he didn’t say, in spite of the additional protections (Both within and without) the law provides to officers of the law. Engineering Vandal doesn’t rise to the bait, but it’s not anything less than assault. Further, provoking people into an attack, if it can be demonstrated in a court of law, can (in some jurisdictions, likely not including Indiana) strip your right to defense – and legalities aside, this is completely sound ethically. Self-defense is a justification – ‘ordinarily, hitting people is wrong, but /in this case/, it is okay, because I /needed to/ to prevent myself from being hurt.’ And this is all well and good. But when you try to start the fight, you didn’t need to fight to prevent yourself from being hurt – you could have just not tried to start the fight. That was in your power – you are the one who took deliberate action for there to be a fight. A bongo and a half to prove in a court of law, but we don’t need to, to discuss what Amazi-girl was doing – you already say this to try to mitigate her assault. Not much for me to add there.
” Where’s the assault?”
AYFKM!?
“Ooo, let’s find out” strongly implies that she’s about to swoop down there and beat him *NOW*. There’s no other way the question makes god damned sense.
btw, “there wasn’t assault in The Whiteboard Ding Dong Bandit”
Yeah, she committed battery on Mike, on the vague suspicion he’d done it based on someone preliminarily saying he might have. Much better than just ‘assault’. That really establishes that vigilantes in the general, and amazi-girl in particular, is actually a good thing.
That’s not a binary choice: Me saying that she has the option to leave does not mean she has the duty to leave.
“*YOU* are the one claiming that Amazi-girl was defending herself. You can not impute a duty to retreat, then pretend she was defending herself. She could have not entered the vicinity in the first place, as well as retreated. SHE COULD HAVE CALLED THE POLICE.”
Yes, all well before Malaya started the physical confrontation. But at the moment Malaya rushed against her “Roller Derby says hello” there was no more ambiguity: Malaya started an attack!
“Okay, so you’re going to pretend that assault – a threat of bodily harm – isn’t a form of attack”
In the examples i originally listed – which you chose to reply to – there was only one example that could be interpreted as assault. And yes, we have these separate words because these have different meanings.
“which you claimed is the only way Amazi-girl fights”
I did not claim this – it may be correct for the Amazi-girl in the beginning of the comic, but in her current state she is “starting to become the villain”.
(and i listed examples of her actually attacking in my first comment in this thread).
“Close to an assault? CLOSE!? She’s outright stating she will fight the dude if he doesn’t stop.”
Nope, it could also meaning cleaning the traffic sign – which she later does!
“But when you try to start the fight, you didn’t need to fight to prevent yourself from being hurt – you could have just not tried to start the fight.”
Exactly what applies to Malaya!
““Ooo, let’s find out” strongly implies that she’s about to swoop down there and beat him *NOW*.”
Nope, it implies that she will follow him if he tries to leave the scene.
“Yeah, she committed battery on Mike, on the vague suspicion he’d done it based on someone preliminarily saying he might have. Much better than just ‘assault’.”
Oooh, sorry, i forgot that! Indeed, that was indeed a physical attack and while i normally not promote vigilante justice, Mike is an exception as the only one really deserving it (repeated sexual harassment of Joyce, playing psycho-tricks on her by switching her marker).
When she starts her attack she stands several meters away from Amazi-Girl (actually being farthest away from AG in her group).
Is it too much too ask to wait that AG actually moves in her direction before starting an attack that can be called “self-defense”?
(AG makes not a single move in her direction, just waits for her approach).
Cinder block dude ran away before Amber actually got around to hitting him for trying to break into someone’s car, Engineering dudes said that there was nothing non-violent she could do to stop them (like she clearly wanted to) so she didn’t and stole the sign to clean it up, she picked a fight with Sal’s friends and got her ass kicked like Sal did when she picked a fight with Malaya over something equally stupid, and I’m not gonna villainize Amber for stomping a mudhole into Blaine. And, y’know, the latter two cases were clearly presented as horrifying and wrong, which is why in her fight with Sal she never landed a hit on her and instead got kneed in the gut by Malaya, the same way Sal picked a fight, got hit a whole bunch while not even landing a scratch on her, and then it stopped before Sal could actually start fighting back. That’s, from a story telling perspective, fundamentally different. It’s the difference between seeing Ruth chuck Billie into a chair and then she gets up completely unscathed while nobody has any kind of reaction, and seeing Ruth slamming Billie into a wall and kissing her only for Billie to push her away and tell her to fuck off. One is inherently meant to be more dramatic and serious than the other.
…we’re not meant to be freaking out in horror that Amber is stomping on a dude. So, yeah, I’m fine saying “Amazi-Girl’s vigilantism only really got dark this chapter”, because this is literally the first time in the entire series any of the random jerks she fights have expressed any kind of humanity outside of being random jerks, and that it’s the first time the dark side of Amazi-Girl ever extended to anyone but herself, Blaine, and Sal. This is why the literal stated reason for Amazi-Girl’s inclusion in the series was “I like drawing punching so here’s a superhero.” This is why she was involved in the physics breaking, this-could-not-actually-happen-she-would-be-road-paste car chase, where the outright stated intent of the entire chapter was that physics were being bruised to illustrate a point and Sal leaps six feet in the air on a motorcycle in front of a speeding truck to catch Amber as she’s falling upwards. Until now there’s never been any real consequence to Amazi-Girl outside of the damage that Amber was causing herself. Now? Well it’s a helluva lot more real now, but there’s a reason I felt this way previously.
Also Amber is a spandex clad munchkin who can beat up five dudes who are all twice her size at once. That is, inherently, really easy for me to compartmentalize as wacky and fantastical.
…Yes. Cinder Block dude ran away. BECAUSE SHE THREATENED HIS PERSON FOR A PETTY CRIME. That is generally a fucking crime. For some god damn reason I can’t imagine, anyway, it’s probably not important, it’s not like threats to people’s person are ever acted on or a thing to ever take seriousl- WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Engineering Dude called her bluff. She threatened him, and he has a vested interest in not playing her game (Not escalating the minor misdemeanor that nobody would care about). But that doesn’t mean she didn’t threaten him. Threatening people, outside of attempting to use intimidation as self-defense (which this patently isn’t), is fucking wrong. It’s generally illegal. There are fucking reasons for that. Violence itself is wrong, except where it is needed to defend someone. It’s why we fucking handed t he sole proprietorship /of/ violence to a group of people who are supposed to be impartial and only use it when it is necessary. (They don’t. And yet, they’re still more trustworthy than the citizenry)
“we’re not meant to be freaking out in horror that Amber is stomping on a dude. So, yeah, I’m fine saying “Amazi-Girl’s vigilantism only really got dark this chapter”
Yeah, that’s self-defense (And while it’s probably going too far, I’m not going to immediately assume there’s a deeper message than ‘thief was stopped’, because it’d be a serious drag and a complete waste of time to find the ‘right’ way to restrain him when you can get the narrative message across without that. This isn’t about nitpicking even the tiniest detail). *I* was pretty pissed at Engineering Vandal and Cinder Block Dude to start with. Vigilantes are something I /barely/ tolerate within fiction that takes place with an actual state with a basically functioning police force, and then only because they are clearly dealing with superhuman threats that do pose threats of immediate harm before any kind of organized response can be carried out, assuming, wisely, that there are at least some super-human peace keepers (Actual ones) to assist with such things. The Americas have kinda higher tolerance for this kinda shit in fiction, and given that many South American countries were, at points, run by brutal regimes, I’m more forgiving of it there as well. But you know, I was completely fucking unsurprised when she, you know, attacked 4 girls in a fucking parking lot over a minor, petty crime literally nobody cared about, *herself included*, for her own god damned agenda. What a fucking shock from a vigilante.
I’m frankly impressed, on some tiny level, that you’re going to bat for her with Engineering Vandal and CBD. They weren’t named, but they no more deserved violence for a petty crime than Sal, Marcie, Malaya, and Carla. And in both cases, the same basic action was taken, just with even more physical posturing threatening imminent violence with the latter four.
Also, again: Just because you’re ignoring what it means, doesn’t make the damage of threatening four girls in a parking lot over fucking nothing, go away (Or, indeed, three boys, in two different sets of circumstances). A threat of bodily harm to your person is, itself, an emotional harm (and it’s also a, you know, threat of physical harm). There’s kind of a fucking reason why we ought to oppose harrassment campaigns and death threats – emotional harm *IS* actual harm (and also, it very well may become a threat of actual harm). Amber is clearly working on a one-woman campaign against Sal. And she started at least one book before, in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. And even if she WEREN’T, she would have been causing harm to other residents, or at least trying to (I’m glad Engineering Vandal wasn’t scared. If he’d seen what she just did earlier, he might be, though.)
I mean, she was planning on going in and fighting Sal and everyone there, the booze was just a convenient excuse. That just played out as “hey jerks fight me 1on1” and nobody wanted to, so most of them deescalated the situation (except Malaya, though I’ve previously argued that launching an attack on a noted masked nutjob who beats people up is probably something Malaya would remain morally in the clear for), and went home while Amber was the one who got her ass kicked. I’ve previously railed a lot about how much I’ve hated Ruth’s abuse of Billie, but if their encounters played off as Ruth starting shit and Billie kicking her ass every time, I’d be more willing to sympathize with Ruth.
I just don’t view this as seriously as you, I guess. Until a while back I’ve been more willing to view her non-Sal, non-Blaine related Amazi-Girl stuff through the veneer of wacky superhero fun (which very tellingly, we don’t see much of anymore since her fights with both of them), because that’s pretty much what it was. Like, if Amazi-Girl were real of course I’d be horrified by her existence, but she isn’t. She lives in a world where Carla can build and execute a perfectly timed laser light show and pie to the face, where Sarah can hammerspace a bat to repel super huggy moms, where Joyce and Mike can beat on Joe in public and not face any repercussions, and where Sal can summon a speedboat and a groupie to prove she is definitely as cool as everyone thinks she is.
Also I just really don’t feel bad for cinderblock guy because he was about to break into someone’s car. I’d be genuinely okay with someone stepping up and scaring away a cinderblock guy if he tried to bust open my car to steal all 30 cents I keep in there, though I also recognize there’s a difference between a random stranger helping out versus someone who wears a dumb costume and prowls the night looking for crimes to prevent.
tldr: It just hasn’t been that big a deal to me. It clearly is to you, though, so I don’t want to try and take that from you. This is just how I feel.
I’m not even really expecting anger, as such. I am okay with not caring. But the sheer effort people go to, to try to say this shit is okay in character, is not actually not caring. And most of the people try to use actual ethical claims to say ‘it’s fine’. If people were saying “yeah, it’s wrong, but I don’t care” or “Sure, it’s wrong, but she won’t see punishment because it’s fiction and we’re primed to accept this” or whatever, it’d be a different comment threat.
As far as not feeling bad for CBD, threaten him with the cops. Get in his way. You don’t need to hurt the guy, and you don’t need to threaten that you’ll hurt him. He can barely move the block.
“Yeah it’s wrong, but I don’t care” and “Sure it’s wrong, but she won’t see punishment because it’s fiction and we’re primed to accept this” is kind of what I’ve been trying to get at. I don’t care because Amazi-Girl is a fictional character who can’t and never will cause any real harm. This strip here is fucking horrifying, but it’s not like Sal’s in any real danger. At worst this ends with AG getting another ass kicking because we already know for a fact we’ll never see Amber hurt Sal, because the last time Amber tried to have a fiery climactic showdown to the death she was an ineffectual clown who got taken down with a knee to the gut while her nemesis told her she was a violent, authoritarian thug.
Like, unless I’m misreading you, you think I’m okay with Amazi-Girl existing as a vigilante, and that I think being an actual, real world vigilante would be an okay and acceptable thing to do, rather than me acknowledging that this is a work of fiction where a munchkin in spandex is able to surf on cars. I’m not going with an ‘ethical’ claim because why would I even bother. This isn’t even an actual ethical quandary; she’s a cartoon character.
I am a bit (what a lie) – no really i am seriously astonished/bewildered about your appeal to authorities here; did you read the comments in the recent Carla vs. Mary strips?
Especially this one, search for “ischemgeek”, second hit (can’t make a direct link, too deep in the thread.
Does that really sound like a convincing argument for “just leave it to the official authorities”?
There is seriously, seriously, seriously a huge difference between Carla v. Mary and Amber v. Sal. Like, so massive a chasm they can’t be compared at all.
Carla’s a trans lady going up against a cis, straight fundamentalist Christian woman. Carla would be endlessly scrutinized and browbeaten by authorities if she lodged an official complaint, if they ever even gave her the time of day because Carla is too trans for them to bother with.
Amber’s an 18-year old kid running around deciding that she’s morally justified in beating people up. Yes she’s beaten up a lot of straight up shitbags but she’s still deciding on her own merit that she’s allowed to do so, and that she knows well enough to decide when someone deserves an ass kicking. Amber has intervened and helped people, Danny, that one lady being harassed by a giant creep, and has stopped plenty of purse snatchers, and that’s good, but that doesn’t make a real life vigilante doing these things okay. It worked for Amber because Amber’s a cartoon character who’s never going to suffer lasting consequences for her actions.
The ‘official authorities’ are considerably less lethal to me than the general populace, and I say this as a trans woman of color. Considerably more likely to throw me in prison though. Thanks for trying to use my problems, which I understand far, far better than you, against me, though. Super thrilled to know what I’m worth to you.
Amenywhosits, in brief: “Authorities made it worse after ordinary people harrassed me” is rather missing my point neatly, don’t you think? Even when the authorities are HOSTILE, you’re better off dealing with them than letting the citizenry do it, right up until a certain level of hatred (Usually when the government actively organizes against you; at this point, you’d damned well better run. But an authority almost never gets that bad unless the citizenry actively despises you). The authorities come from the citizenry. The authorities don’t become hostile unless the citizenry is, generally. They don’t become helpful unless the citizenry is, generally.
But you know who far outnumbers the members of government, or the various minor authorities that go out in our lives? The citizenry. And when they’re unfettered, the worst will get even worse. It’s not. Fucking. Worth it.
see you’ve gone past the point of being reasonable here. you have a guy who has given you a well thought out explanation of “why it is what it is” and you pluck and pull at the flimsiest of straws. Sometimes you need to take a step back and go ” Okay. This is exaggerated for the sake of telling a story” or “oh this is hyperbole” or “hey. This could never happen in real life. I went to I-U and know for a fact that the administration would have knocked mary’s dick in the dirt for what she did to carla. ”
There is such a thing called suspension of disbelief, which loosely means that sometimes you have to accept that something a storyteller wants to to tell a story or mke a point but in order to do that makes something happen that would be incredibly rare in real life. you are at the point where you are hating for hate sake, and it could be argued that that’s exactly what amber/ag is doing in this arc.
I can’t see Amber attending classes in that state (assuming that the Blaine personality has taken over full time) I wonder how Willis will keep Amber part of the story-line once her breakdown becomes widely known?
Mental illness is not an excuse for hurting people, it’s an explanation. She’s still a toxic and dangerous influence on the people around her regardless of whether or not her being such is understandable.
It’s the literal definition of an excuse. Her behavior isn’t permissible, but because of her mental state we actually shouldn’t be hating her. She isn’t responsible as we define the term for her actions.
Yeah, sure Amber. And if it should happen that you trip while climbing down from your lookout post here and end up in crutches I’ll just bet that she will have “taken your foot” from you as well. Funny how this sort of thing works out.
If she’s Gollum, then Danny is her Precious and they’ll end up falling in a volcanic mountain. If she’s Vader, she’ll end up dismembered and getting a lava bath. Hmmm, both options include lava, interesting.
Random thought: I am not sure if I am right, but I think I remember there was a time when Amber and Amazi-Girl weren’t… split. Basically, the only pronoun used was “I/me”. Am I right? If yes, when did this split start?
I know it only happened really recently. About since the incident with Toe Dad, I think? Sal questioned her reasons, and the split started becoming really evident about that point, I think. Amber’s just gotten worse since.
Since her fights with Blaine and Sal, Amber has become much more stringent with compartmentalizing her identities. At first it was “I want Danny to date Amazi-Girl and not Amber because reasons” to Amber referring to both personae in third person to describe their actions, and now here with Amazi-Girl making decisions for Amber’s supposed benefit and referring to each other as completely separate identities. Previously it was just that Amber was using Amazi-Girl as a dumping ground to process one specific feeling, and she was insistent to Danny that Amazi-Girl was not a real person he could ever love. Heck, used to be Amber had her regular hair, voice, and cheek blush. She’s been pushing at the boundaries between Amber and Amazi-Girl since the start of the series.
I don’t know how true this is for anyone else, but in my case, I often find that when dealing with my diagnosed Bipolar Disorder NOS I tend to talk in these very dramatic, TV-show-esque statements, especially in mania.
Doesn’t it, though? It’s the conditioner, a Guild of Calamitous Intent exclusive. It even works on Medusa hair, so on ordinary hair – no matter how damaged – it works just a treat. Fantastic stuff.
Okay…bear with me for a sec, because I’m sort of free-streaming this from my head…
–We know that Sal has robbed convenience stores in the past. Or at least one, which got her sent to the school for delinquent southern belles.
–And we know that Amber believes Sal is the one that caused her trauma, because of all the flashbacks.
–But the flashbacks are all in Amber’s mind. And Ethan didn’t recognize Sal when she sat right next to him and talked to her.
Is it possible that Sal *isn’t* the one that Amber staked through the hand with her own knife? That AmaziGirl, in mid-panic mode, just superimposed Sal’s face into her own past traumatic event, a girl she literally just saw for a second coming out of the elevator?
I mean, sure, it seems like a mighty big coincidence, that a girl with a past like Sal’s fits so neatly into a past like Amber’s, but having said that, it seems like it would be an even bigger coincidence that the same delinquent girl from so many years ago just happens to go to the same school, and out of 48,500 students, happens to run into the one girl who went split-personality because of her.
Just based on what we know, isn’t the connection between Amber and Sal…kind of weak? Sal just happens to have a delinquent past (not incredibly rare), and just happened to moderately resemble a delinquent from Amber’s past?
Not solid proof, but other than that lack, there aren’t any clues otherwise. Would be really lousy storytelling for there to be no payoff there. Without dropping some better clues.
Sal in Amber’s flashbacks looks more like Sal in Sal’s flashback than like Sal today – hair mostly.
I can’t help but think of how these are “yes” types of answers, as in, answers to justify a “yes” conclusion, where the real test of a given theory is to ask the “no” questions, the questions that would disprove a given theory. I mean, is wearing gloves really something that has been historically linked to being stabbed in the hand, or is it just ‘likely’ because it provides another “yes” for the conclusion? If a person wears bike gloves to bed (and pretty much all hours of the day), and they are known to be bikers, wouldn’t the likely reason be that she simply likes wearing them? As opposed to something relatively far-fetched as having a knife injury to hide?
That said, I can’t really think of any “no” questions. As thejeff pointed out, there really isn’t much in the way of proof either way. I don’t completely agree that it would be lousy storytelling, as it seems to me that it would be a fairly dramatic realization for Amber that this entire revenge tale she has woven around Sal has no foundation at all, and Amazigirl is actually targeting an innocent (so to speak) person. However, as I mentally review the story from a Sal-centric viewpoint…it just seems kind of random.
Granted, this is mostly a thought exercise, and I sincerely doubt Sal is not the same person who was assaulted by Amber way back when, but in terms of actual probability…we are mostly assuming this is the case based on the accusation of a campus vigilante who has admitted anger and personality issues. I know we aren’t supposed to judge a person’s character based on their mental illness, but surely a mental illness can gives us reason to doubt a given person’s conclusions.
Part of the reason I think it would be lousy storytelling is that, as far as I remember, Amber hasn’t actually been told about Sal’s robberies. It’s not like she heard that Sal had robbed a convenience store and then decided Sal must be her robber. She recognized her. Which makes that robbery in this theory just there to screw with the readers.
Also, while Ethan didn’t recognizer her, he did think she was familiar – which was conveniently explained by her being Walky’s twin.
And on the meta level of course, the flashbacks are tagged with Sal. Which makes it really screwing with the readers if it wasn’t.
Sal’s robbery is significant to her. It was a result of, and a cause of, many of the issues she is dealing with. Her robbery is part of her own story. Whether or not it has a connection to Amber won’t change that. That’s kind of what I meant by looking at things from a Sal-centric viewpoint, instead of just seeing everything in terms of how it relates to Amber.
And Amazigirl is also guilty of feeling Walky was slightly dangerous, based on little more than a superficial resemblance to Sal. Even after accepting the cookies of peace he shared with I-Feel-Stabby girl. It’s not a reasoned and logical deduction. It’s just a gut feeling made while Amber was being triggered (which doesn’t mean it’s wrong).
But yeah, tagging it “Sal” would totally be screwing with the readers.
Even without the tags, he could have done something similar, equally significant to Sal, but not lining up so precisely with the robbery Amber and Ethan were involved with.
What precisely? All we know is that Sal robbed a convenience stores. Everything else we get from Amber’s flashbacks.
Anyhow, the topic’s run its course, I think.
Amber, no! This is EXACTLY why Danny asked you to take a break from Amazi-Girl. He didn’t ask you to quit, he asked you to take a break, for your mental and physical health. And this is why. You’re about to do something you can never take back…..and I’m sincerely hoping that Sal’s changed enough that she won’t hold it against you. (Since she’s already proven she has a pretty good idea of AG’s mindset that spurs her on to this stupid shit.)
I feel a great swell of pity for Amber, who after having discovered in Amazi-Girl a great power, a symbol bigger than herself that inspires people, has ignored the responsibility that comes with it. Instead, she’s abused the mask for selfish reasons, divorced herself from any credit for what makes Amazi-Girl work, and created a frightening alter-ego made of venom and rage that threatens to go full Mr. Hyde the more it’s used.
Spider-Man at least had the luxury of casting off his black costume and literally beating it up when it came back for revenge. Amber isn’t going to have that.
OH NO! She’s slowly becoming Batman from Batman vs. Superman! DON’T LOSE YOUR MORALS AND VALUES AMAZI-GIRL! IT’S NOT GONNA MAKE YOU COOOOOOOOLLLLLLLL!!!!
I’m sure this has been mentioned numerous times already, but nicely done Willis on the speech bubble placing! Just to show that Amazi-girl has been there the whole time, but only revealed when we needed her to be. Nice! I checked back to yesterdays strip too and saw that we wouldn’t have been able to see AG as the speech bubble neatly covered her up. That’s a pretty cool thing to add in there, you could’ve easily just not done a wide shot and had close ups of the two talking before we see AG, but this is definitely a cooler way of introducing AG to the scene.
Where’s Becky when you need her?
“Hey, Ambster the hamster! Whatcha doin’ down there?”
…oh gosh, I hope she doesn’t end up feeling guilty for helping Joyce if it turns out that her other savior Amazi-girl went nuclear while she was out of town…
I hope Sal and Amber and Amazi-Girl can get together at a slumber party or something and resolve their difficulties by comparing their stories and sharing their feelings in relaxed and earnest conversation!
Honestly the LEAST destructive outcome I can imagine for this is Amazigirl joining roller derby and gaslighting Marcie into thinking Sal is abusive to her and I just straight up don’t want to think about the worse ones
I think we can all agree that Amber’s DID is getting worse. I really hope Sal quickly realizes who Amber is or that Ethan recognizes Sal and informs her about Amber because I think the only way for Amber to start healing this rift in personalities is for Sal to confront her because Amber is too afraid and Amazi-Girl is too stubborn/angry to do it themselves.
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Ease the fuck up there, Gollum.
Amber’s gonna end up falling into a volcano.
On the darkest steppes of Mordor…
I met a girl so fair
But Gollum and the evil one
I guess I’ll keep on
RAM-BUL-LIN’!
sing my song
While shining that big
Joyce looks back on her army. As they stand in front of the black gates of Toe Dad.
Joyce: For Danny
Everyone charges
*slow clap*
but doesen’t danny represent the ring in this scenario… are they throwing danny into the lava?
Only if we are really lucky.
I’m sure some Ethan-lava metaphor can be established
Well it was the flames in which the ring was forged. So I guess they are throwing Danny back into his mum.
For a nickel.
If anyone’s getting thrown into anybody’s mum for a nickel, shouldn’t it be Mike?
…although that would make Mike the One Ring… >_>
…and Ethan *is* hot…
Yeah, but he’s not really flaming.
B(
So…. the corrupting power of Sauron’s evil is represented by Dannying things up?
actually Amber is Smeagol
Amazi-girl is both Gollum and her precious.
she threw away Danny herself, when Danny
tried to get Amber to give up the persona of Amazi-girl
her obsession is so far gone in fact,
that she’s convinced that Sal saving her life from the truck,
robbed her of the last of her dignity.
Oooooh. I was still thinking back to the parking lot fight scene. Good call on the truck. How the crap could i forget that?
Does that somehow make Sal and Marcie Frodo and Sam in this scenario? Cause, not gonna lie, I think Marcie would make an awesome Sam.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought that. Any bets on what is most likely to be her precious?
Either Danny or some really filthy Steve/Tony/Bucky slashfic.
Dont forget the blue and white transformer
She’s having a mental breakdown.
I think so. And it’s gonna be really messy
SHE TOOK THE PRECIOUS!!!
SAL WALKERTON WE HATES IT WE HATES IT FOREVER
…You’re not Jenna’s Side.
Perhaps Schpoonman is Jenny’s nemesis, a supervillian, who might yet become close to Jenny as time passes and they get to know one another?
That is, Jenny’s Talia?
Yet another comment to regret not being able to upvote.
Exactly!
That comment just made my day.
Oh shit…..
Clearly the only thing left to take is her mantle. Sal’s gotta become the new Amazi-Girl.
Once you’ve taken someone’s mantle, where can you display it?
The Hall of Justice?
Larger mantle.
So… waaay beneath the earth’s crust, then?
I think you’re supposed to put them on a sort of shelf over your fireplace.
You place their mantle on the mantel.
Or else you get the hose again?
It’s mantels all the way down.
+1 Internets all the way down.
I’m pretty sure at that point Amber’s brain would just pop.
“I also lost my virginity but I guess I can’t blame that on her or maybe this story’d be completely different”
Didn’t she lose her virginity to Mike on their high school prom night? Not sure that’s got any relevance where Sal’s concerned.
She didn’t, high school prom was a failed foray with Ethan.
Huh. You’re right. I initially read that strip as her getting busy with Mike after things failed with Ethan, but re-reading it, it’s Mike suggesting that Ethan’s mind was in two places at once that night.
Whoops.
I find TheStranger’s version more amusing.
GO HOME AMBER! ! ! your caught up in a melodramatic, clichéd, half-assed, yet still somehow completely lazy, misunderstanding plot-line that nobody ever liked in the first place. do yourself a favor and take my advice, go ask Danny if he loves you or amber, which ever side of you he chooses should have make-up sex with him. (p.s. we all know that’s how Willis would do it if he gets them back together – don’t believe me? go read shortpacked)
Um yeah except Willis’s plotting has changed a lot since Shortpacked!, it’s a completely different world & set of rules, the characters have developed in very different ways, and Danny’s not Mike.
But yeah just tell all of us exactly what the author of this comic is going to do next.
Wrong forum for entitled whining and demands about script and storyline; Questionable Content WCDT is over that way.
I’m not trying to whine, I’m just tired of the misunderstanding plot point because real people don’t do this crap, and before anyone says anything the point of this slice of life style story is to make you connect with the characters as if there real, I mean, throw an actual wrench in the works, have sal accidently kiss Danny (somehow), have Danny get into it with amber and in his concerned rage (brought on by sal) spill the beans on amazi-girls identity in front of sal, have what originally happened but sal come to console one of them, if Danny than they become a little closer and amber sees their hanging out as sal stealing him or a betrayal, or if she went after amber she could try and talk some sense into her only for amber to attack her making bitter anger a mutual, legitimate rivalry. Just don’t put two people in the same spot and say “whoa! you two are here at the same time, were breaking up and you tried to steal my boyfriend so I’m gonna fuck you up.” Now I love Willis’s stories I wouldn’t read them if I didn’t but, the misunderstanding plot line is so clichéd even days of our lives wouldn’t use it.
I don’t think that’s what happened. Amber saw Danny interacting with Sal and got upset, sure– not because she thought Sal was going “steal” Danny from her in that she was going to go after him romantically, but that she was going to/did “turn him against her.” She arrived at this conclusion because Danny was beginning to realize and try to address how unhealthy her behaviors are. She reacted very negatively to this because of progressing mental illness.
Basically, I don’t see this as some cliché misunderstanding plot line.
That’s how I saw it too. Sal is wise enough to know that this Amazagirl/Amber thing is unhealthy. Danny only wanted to help. This is Amber descending into madness. Worse of all, is she is becoming her father by being a bully. She’s focusing on everyone’s bullshit, but failing to see that she has bad elements in her as well.
Amber is fundamentally correct. Sal convinced Danny to tell Amber to stop being Amazi-Girl. There’s nuances and she missed, and definitely the concerned, caring tone, but she is fundamentally correct about this situation.
Yes, she hasn’t told Danny how Sal hurt her years ago. That’s a little frustrating. But it was a formative, humiliating experience for her and that’s understandable.
Oh man, I wonder if she’s gonna tell Dorothy. That would be interesting.
It’s not just a misunderstanding, it’s miscommunication, the destroyer of relationships.
This specific situation (vigilante superhero wrongly concerned that her unjustly titled “archnemesis” is turning her lover against her) is a hyperbole, but the emotions underlying it are all too real. The point is that Amber is self-destructive, which real people are. Jealousy is a real thing, and it comes from a place of insecurity. You don’t need to walk in on your boy making out with someone else to feel jealous. THAT would honestly be some Days of Our Lives shit.
Real people also don’t dress up in spandex and dissociate from their alter ego like this. So, the whole “real people” argument is pointless here. (Okay, I’ll admit at one point in my life I did do that whole dissociating thing between me and who I was online, but I’m far from normal).
idk about dressing up as a superhero, but real people definitely disassociate between personalities and realities. it’s a real issue that can really hurt people, including themselves. trust me on this one, i have some experience.
Stick to speaking for yourself in the future, yeah?
Okay, I speak in one of two ways A) in general as a comment on the current situation or topic, or B) for my self ony, I don’t presume to speak for others, never have. Never will. Finally, in my original comment I more or less making a banner full comment toward amber, however when I recited criticism on my comment, waranted at it is, I felt it a good idea to explain the reasoning behind my comment. I’m sorry if anyone thought this was directed toward willis or anyone else. That wasn’t and is NOT my intention.
Maybe, if you don’t want someone jumping down your throat over speaking for them without their OK, you should quit using universal language (“nobody ever liked…,” “we all know,” etc) to imply that everyone agrees with you when discussing your personal opinion.
I, for one, really resent it when someone tries to imply that I agree with them without asking my thoughts on the matter. As in, if you want to hit my rage button, do that. I am trying very hard to be civil in this comment since if I put my charitable hat on, I genuinely don’t think you realize exactly how not okay doing that is to some people (me being one). And with extra charitability, maybe you don’t realize that’s what using that sort of language does.
You don’t know what other people think unless you’ve asked them. Quit implying you do, and we’ll be cool.
Thank you for expressing this so well. I didn’t have the mental energy or focus to word it, but this is why I was so deeply bothered by that comment (and whenever people say similar things). It was good of you to spot that they might not be seeing how their message reads to other people.
My problem was what ischemgeek expressed. I don’t mind you feeling any way you want about this storyline, we can feel differently about it, but it makes me deeply uncomfortable whenever someone claims they are voicing everybody’s opinion.
Except I’m pretty sure Sal already is Amazi-girl!
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/hero/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-4/01-the-only-dope-for-me-is-you/scoop/
So, anyone else expecting Darkseid to turn up on Amber’s couch in the near-future?
Or Emperor Palpatine?
One of the reasons I will love Ambush Bug forever is he did an entire miniseries in which ever issue ended with Darkseid turning up on the couch, or behind the register handing him his fast food, or whatever.
In the last issue, Bug reveals that it’s an inflatable Darkseid and he’s just been leaving him around to create drama.
When Titans Clash!
To be fair, this is a thing Darkseid used to do even under Jack Kirby. He’d walk down a Metropolis street just chillin’, and allow muggers to accost him just for the experience. And, yes, turn up in Scott Free’s living room.
Ambush Bug may have been the greatest comic book DC ever produced.
oh dear
Jesus Christ Amber, Sal didn’t take Danny from you, you are the one that wouldn’t listen to him!
Before conversing with Sal, Danny was just fine with Amber/Amazi-girl. Afterwards, he wasn ‘t. And Danny was the one who plunged ahead with his new conversion message and didn’t listen to her or he would have found out what Sal meant to Amber and he would have had a broader perspective. Altogether I’d say Sal did a fine job of taking Danny from her, whether intentionally so or not.
It’s not a good thing that Danny’s fine with Amber/Amazi-Girl, though. That’s really bad because Amber and Ethan (unintentionally) convinced him that her nonchalantly talking about almost dying and that she’s two people was nothing to worry about.
And you’re being way too harsh on Danny. He tried to talk to her and Amber not only gave no context or reason for him to doubt Sal or even try to explain their shared history, she went in there posturing like a bully and screaming at him until she decided he had betrayed her and walked away from him. It might have helped had Amber not slipped into the Amazi-Girl alter to deal with seeing Sal, though. It probably wouldn’t have worked but Amber would at least hear him out.
In Amazi-Girl logic it makes perfect sense to say that Sal took Danny from her; in that she poisoned his mind with her evil and thus he can no longer be trusted to support her important mission, but that ain’t how it really went down.
Hmm.
She can’t beat Sal, so she’ll attack Marcie ?
Sure seems that way… and Marcie can’t alert people. This feels very wrong.
Oh, the only way I see that happening is Marcie solo-kicking Amber’s sorry arse.
maybe we’ll see marcie talk to yell out for help?? cause we know she can ((or, could’ve, at least))
or she’ll kick amazi-girl’s butt
That is an excellent pro-tip Willis, you can hide people under text bubbles.
Hold up, took her sanity? Your dignity? The Danny one isn’t true, but at least that actually makes sense, can someone explain the other ones to me, none of those happened at all
It’s the way Amazi-girl/Amber sees it. Sal’s sanity referencing what happened during the convenience store holdup, Amazi-girl’s dignity referencing her trauma, breaking down and her dad’s abuse possibly.
sal “took ambers sanity” when she robbed that store when they were kids, and “took amizigirls dignity” when she saved her life.
im amazigirls eyes, anyway
Thank you for explaining that, I was getting confused with all the hers, because their are three hers in this scene which her are you talking about…you her or her her or her her her…SHIT…*head explodes*
Don’t do that, please, it’s messy.
Amber’s sanity, and Amazi-Girl’s dignity, I think.
Sal is the girl from the flashbacks she’s been having, and she curbstomped her at Wal-Mart.
Sal didn’t touch Amazi-Girl in the Walmart scene at all.
As others already have noted:
Amazi-Girl lost her dignity when Sal saved her life in the car-chase.
I’m pretty sure sanity refers to the robbery. I’m really not sure how she thinks Sal took her dignity though.
By helping/saving her in the Toedad chase, I think?
Her refers to Amber, so Amber’s sanity(robbery), Amazi-girls dignity (Sal saving her) and our danny (belongs to both amber and Amazi-girl)
Ohhh yeah that makes more sense
Her sanity would be Amber’s, due to the trauma she endured from Sal’s robbery attempt. Amber has a VERY bad self-image so by now she probably sees herself as being completely broken while Amazi-girl isn’t. (this is of course not the truth, but hey.)
Her dignity is Amazi-girl’s, because Sal saved her life. The only thing more embarrassing for a hero than being saved is being saved by her arch-nemesis. She views Sal’s help as a great insult to her status and ability as a hero since she shouldn’t NEED help. (again, debatable and not true, but Amber/Amazi-girl is…not in the right frame of mind right now).
She splits up Amber and Amazigirl in her head. She is currently Amazigirl, and is speaking to Amber as thought they were separate people. Amber’s sanity in the hold-up when they were 13. Amazigirl’s dignity when Sal saved her life. Amber is technically correct in saying that Sal took Danny, but only because of Amber’s psychosis.
Danny asked her to back off on being a vigilante and Amber took the nuclear option, but of course, in her head, Sal turned Danny against her as opposed to opening up Danny to the very real danger that Amber puts herself into.
“Her sanity” refers to Amber, who’s had anger issues ever since everything sort of broke when Sal robbed the convenience store and took Ethan hostage when they were teenagers.
“My dignity” I believe refers to the time that Amazi-girl tried to attack Sal, Malaya, Marcie (and possibly Carla, I don’t quite remember) when they were drinking one night outside Walmart and Sal sort of shot her down and refused to fight (plus Malaya kneed her in the stomach). So because Amazi-girl didn’t “win” I think she feels as though she lost instead, thus tarnishing the dignity of the superhero.
‘Dignity’ refers to the time Amazi-Girl tried to pick a fight with Sal, right before the confrontation with her dad, and Sal blew her off.
when she robbed the convienence store she left amber with permanant psychological scars, her father probably did a lot for that too but amber/amazigirl tend to put more blame on sal for that…
When Amazigirl tried to fight her in the walmart parking lot she had her friends hold her back and refused to fight her, amazigirl felt humiliated by that not getting the chance to rightously battle her greatest enemy or some such junk
and then she basically she is just projecting when it comes to danny she can’t stand the idea of someone she cares so much about associating with someone she hates so much to the extent that she feels it is a betrayal of loyalty or something
dignity could also refer to the time that sal saved her life now i think about it…
I’m pretty sure the dignaty thing is saving her life – she did refer to it earlier as “the second worst thing” she’s ever done to her, the first no doubt being the convenience store.
My guess for the sanity one is that according to her, Danny clouded her brain with the love stuff so she couldn’t think straight. And from that follows the dignity thing, which I assume means that because of the emotions she let a “traitor” like Danny so close to her and eventually “betray” her. Or something like that, I dunno. Someone just put that girl in a straitjacket already.
Wait fuck, I read “he”. Sorry, apparently I can’t fucking read, nevermind.
I would also add that “dignity” could also refer to Amber understandably being freaked out at the robbery and Blaine challenging and embarrassing her for being “weak”, and subsequently stabbing Sal in the hand to prove him otherwise.
Quite a lot of people seem to have forgotten this strip!
starting to picture amazigirl as a villian now
I was just wondering if any had commented that Amazi-girl is no longer the hero of this story.
She’s basically Batman. The psychotic version who instead of dealing with a traumatic event in some marginally rational fashion dresses up in a costume and beats the shit out of people. And no one is the villain in their own story.
I am and I am finally starting to defeat him.
‘Our’? Well that’s not a good sign.
That would be one weird threeome
“Mask or no mask?” takes on a creepier and more worrisome undertone now, dunnit?
yeah when you start actually treating your alter ego as your current self things get crazy and not in the happy way in the white coats and hauling you off way.
Well, this seems perfectly healthy.
extremely perfectly healthy.
at least they’re still talking to each other. (I hope.)
in her head yes! or is it no? or maybe? fuck girls needs a psychologist stat!
It’s going to be a weird day when we see Amber vs. Amazi-girl. Is… that going to be considered self-harm?
I am seriously wondering if this is the real split. If when Amber’s back in charge she isn’t going to remember anything after seeing Danny and Sal on the step.
That came to my mind as well.
So she’ll be DoA’s Punch/Counterpunch.
At some point Amber’s going to wind up in a coma and end up fighting herself in order to come out of the coma and live a la Tommy in Dino Thunder unless Ethan, Danny or SOMEONE stages a full intervention involving a reputable psychologist.
Geez…is Amber going to be in an abusive relationship with herself?
YES! no! wait…
Can anyone else hear the splintering/snapping sound of that girl’s sanity?
So that’s what that noise was.
Funny, all I can hear is a cuckoo clock going off.
huh I heard a cuckoo clock and then saw a strange bird fly over a wall…I wonder…
its more of a tearing and ripping sound to me.
Oh that shattered LONG ago. What we’re hearing now is the shards of sanity being crushed underfoot, like when you step on a glass.
Oh, fuck off Amazi-Girl
Sanity was highly over-rated anyhow…
……………
WELP.
am i the only one who is starting to like amber/amazigirl a little bit less every time i see her lately…
That seems intentional. Amazi-Girl isn’t really Amber channeling her rage in a healthy manner anymore. Amazi-Girl is something else entirely, and it’s really, *really*, REALLY, *REALLY* not healthy.
She never was that. Amazi-Girl was always unhealthy. What she was was socially acceptable (to a certain portion of the public), but keeping Amber from actually dealing with her issues and triggers by turning her reactions toward other targets.
Yeah, I think the idea is that this was NEVER healthy, it’s just we as the audience are now being presented with the more uglier side of things rather than the more idealized presentation when Amazigirl first appeared.
Nope, you’re not. Amber/Amazi-Girl is quickly becoming the things she hates.
I wonder how long it will take before the die-hards cop to ‘yeah she’s nuts’.
I’d like one of the other characters in the comic to do so by making use of rebus.
NO AMBER, DON’T DO IT!
Amber, just fucking go to therapy already. You’re quickly becoming one of my least favorite characters.
Dealing with an undiagnosed, unmedicated mental illness at the age of 18 after years of abuse and trauma will fuck with your ability to “likeable.”
I’m sensing hostility. You think that we shouldn’t dislike her? Sure it’s understandable, but if that doesn’t affect your outlook on her, then it doesn’t. Not sure what you’re hoping for out of this.
So much this! Thank you quietpeas! Every time I see her, I worry about her more. She is in a downward spiral and she needs help really bad. I really identify with a lot of things she goes through, because as frustrating as it is seeing her causing many of the problems in her life, it feels really real. I’ve had friends struggling with histories of trauma and abuse and seen some of these behaviors. Sometime people get triggered and believe that always means that the other person was doing something wrong (Danny in this case) and that is only true some of the time, other times the person that was part of the trigger didn’t do anything wrong. It is so difficult watching that because trauma can hijack a person’s brain in really difficult to deal with ways.
Telling someone with Amber/Amazi-Girl’s issues to “just go to therapy” is much like telling someone in a wheelchair to “just get up and walk”. It not a trivial matter. If it were, she would have done it years ago. She has probably had offers of therapy in school and from home. Avoiding and rejecting such therapy is part of the illness. Something she has doubled down on again and again. Yes, that is not a likable behavior.
Hit bottom and push off? Maybe. Hit bottom and drown is also a possibility.
Everyone wanted Amber in therapy, but her dad refused. He wanted self defense classes.
So the real reason she is so broken now is her dad. Always was, and the robbery have him a chance to make it even worse.
Shit, only the first part was intented as a link!
Also it is a direct quotation, buit i forgot the Q-marks!
So at what point does a hero become a serial killer
After they kill three people using the same modus operandi.
That’s the textbook definition, anyway.
Amazigirl: “You turned him against me!”
Sal: “You have done that yourself!”
Lava battle ensues.
I’m just starting to expect any moment now for Amazi-Girl to start referring to Danny as “the Precious.”
I think Rob’s referring to a different lava battle.
But who was the Chosen One?
I think it’s Ethan?
It’s Rookie, right? We all know Atwood is a false idol.
I didn’t actually mean for this to be a reply, haha. Although that worked out weirdly well.
“Only the mentally ill deal in absolutes.”
“Isn’t that an absolute?”
“Well, you’re driving me crazy!”
Lava battle continues.
“It’s over Amber, I have the high ground”
“Something else you’ve taken from me”
Given how much Amazi-girl loves climbing and jumping off tall things I can totally see it happening
Headed for a nervous breakdown..
Already past that point.
Well this ain’t good at all. There’s not much that’ll take to push her to try and murder Sal in her sleep at this point I think.
I don’t think trying to attack Sal in her sleep would end well.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/wakeupcall/
Filthy motorcyclist took our Danny from us, precious. Wicked, tricksy, false!!
Deceptress!
Calling for an intervention with Danny, Dorothy, Dina, and Detha–no, Ethan.
And Mike! -Wait nonono bad idea
Oh good, she at least recognizes she’s batshit insane
Unfortunately that does not include seeking professional help
Yeah, she’s acknowledging it in a “Barry Dylan from Archer” kind of way.
This… is terrifying. Her clear distinctions between Amber and Amazi-Girl, coupled with her unhinged aggression, I mean, yikes. The fact that this is going on unchecked and undiagnosed and untreated is just making me really sad, because Amber could channel all her stuff in a really good, healthy way if somebody (a mental health professional) showed her the tools with which to do that and really just talked to her/listened to her.
Oh man. You make me sad, bb girl. Please get help.
Seriously. Amber is in such a bad place right now it’s completely terrifying, and I want her to get help like last Tuesday because the longer this goes the more Amazi-Girl’s escalating things and I don’t know how much further down this road she can go before hitting a point of no return.
oh my god amber who cares.
yanno the scariest part here is that Sal is almost completely unaware of this vendetta that Amber has against her. Sal is obviously capable of defending herself but I’m still worried Amber could really hurt her by attacking her unprovoked.
Or maybe the scariest part of this all is that if there is a physical confrontation, the one who might end up expelled is Sal the (half) black kid with a criminal record 🙁
I still find it weird Amber doesn’t have a criminal record. That said I’m more worried that Amber is going to put Sal in a place she is always struggling to get out of. Bad enough Malaya is always pushing her buttons, now Amber might be the straw that broke the camels back.
The only incident we know of that could have landed her in legal trouble is stabbing Sal’s hand during the robbery. Assuming the cops even included what she did in their official report chances are the local prosecuting attorney wouldn’t take the risk of charging her. Charging a girl traumatised during a robbery, for causing what could be written off as minor injury to the would be robber, probably wouldn’t be a politically beneficial action for any elected officials involved. They might also reasonably guess that a jury would be unwilling to convict her for those reasons.
But then there’s the Toedad incident, and if I remember correctly she punched some other folks. Vigilantism is basically assault on another person because she isn’t a cop, so it’s not up to her to pass judgement on others in that way. She definitely did help save Becky, but she also endangered a ton of other people in doing so and was very lucky no one else got hurt.
She also put her dad in the hospital, remember.
Yikes! yeah, that was pretty bad. And due to the nature of her persona, there are a lot of potential witnesses of Amazi-Girl.
Sure it’s criminal and illegal but the school can’t really press charges on Amber right now since she’s always in costume so they don’t really know it’s her. Once she’s unmasked, maybe they might.
But she hasn’t actually been arrested for anything she’s done as Amazi-girl. So far we haven’t seen any indication that the local cops are even making an effort to find her.
The police could come after her, though, if any of those people decide they want the police to come after her. They’re like loose threads.
The local cops did not actually look bestest in the Toe-Dad accident and she has a Louis Lane promoting her in a university paper, so the police might decide that prosecuting her might be bad PR for the police.
You’d be surprised how easily universities turn on the students once there’s any possibility of a liability of any kind, especially if all the less heroic of Amber’s deeds come to light.
At the moment we have no idea what the official position of college administration is towards Amazi-girl. They may unofficially tolerate her. But if she makes too much of a spectacle of herself that may change very quickly.
You can’t take something that never existed.
Danny’s not real?!?
Not for long…
Add “People aren’t possessions” to that then
Amazi-Girl: I can see dead Dannies!
Dorothy: I can see dumb Dannies!
damn. this isn’t gonna end well, is it?
For once I’m feeling like this isn’t nearly the right time for this. Not to mention the atmosphere just feels wrong.
At least we have the word of god that Amazigirl isn’t going to jump off the overhang, land on Sal, and break her neck thataway; because this buildup of a slight that’s been grown and festered is starting to boil over in a realllllyyyyy dark way.
It’s a fine line: Amazi-Girl already had two(!) truck incidents in this comic – she is tempting fate!
This comic sure has an ominous vibe…
will Sal really join the roller derby?
Lol the true question of the day
I think she will. She listens to the voice of reason when it’s Marcie’s.
Sal attempts to start up roller derby to get back in Marcie’s good graces. But what will happen when the new team of masked marvels, the Amazi-Rollers shows up to make trouble and try and bring Sal down? The Derby will be heated and Danny will swoon as we hit our pitched climax.
Be sure to return next week on the same Amazi-Channel at the same Amazi-Time for the Rinkside Showdown!
Wow Amber. Obsessed much? Follow the words of Elsa and Let It Go.
dude, the movie came out in 2013 you need to let it go. Also…HOLY CRAP! Frozen came out in 2013!?
Time sure flies, even if we don’t want it to.
So now we are all OLD! Y’hear me? OLD! >.>
Meh, I was middle aged then and I still am today. Three years means a lot less going from your mid-30s to your late 30s than it does earlier in life.
The last time Amber watched Frozen was exactly one week ago (in comic-time).
bongo needs therapy
Echoing all of the ‘oh dear’ sentiments.
There’s a fine, fine line between a superhero and a serial killer.
My takeaway from this is that in an alternate universe, Charles Manson is Batman.
Considering what real life vigilantism has a history of looking like, that line is generally just a matter of perspective.
Watchmen springs to mind, Ambers losing her mind faster than Rorschach
It’s only a matter of time until something makes her snap and seriously injure or kill someone
She walks the line between good and evil!
I think this arc is coming to a head, because a lot of people seem to be running out of sympathy for Amber’s actions. Something has to give, and soon.
Yeah, I’m worried that this arc is getting pushed too far and even when it inevitably resolves too many readers aren’t going to care what happens to Amber other than seeing her properly punished.
I don’t think that’s where Willis wants to go with the story, but the reaction here just keeps getting worse.
Show of hands, who’s still gonna defend Amber/blame Danny/blame Sal if Amber goes down this road?
Blame Danny? No not at all because this was going to happen weather he got involved in it or not and as for Sal and Amber well I saw this hole thing as Amber not finding her being able to find her peace till she confronts a part of her past then she can start to give up on being obsessed with revenge before it consumes her and finally consider hanging up the mask…but unfortunately that part of her past just so happens to be Sal.
And as for Sal well, she’s not the same person that Rob that convenient store all those years back and I might be wrong here but I felt like when she eventually fights Amazi-girl she would find out who sheis, who she actually is. I thought that would be like her past catching up to her and she would haft to own up to some of the things she did and try to reason with Amazi-girl/Amber one more time. Then after the fight they would talk,come to understanding, and maybe the two of them can move past their issues.
That’s how I thought it would work out.
Sal saved Amazigirl’s life. Amber has twisted that act of goodness into “she humiliated me”. I doubt reconciliation is in the cards.
Well, she kind of has to. They don’t need to become BFFs or anything, but Amber can barely conceptualize Sal as a human being and uses her as a focal point for all her self loathing.
Though at this point, I do think it’s likely that they strike up some kind of acquaintance. They’ve seen each other at their worst, they’ve been through dark periods in their lives caused by their parents, and they’ve grievously hurt one another. Plus, Sal has been through the same path Amber has. Not necessarily exactly, but Sal’s learned to accept that she’s done stupid shit, and that it’s unfair for her to spend the rest of her life being defined by it, the way Amber has spent the last five years obsessing over her failure to protect Ethan and losing control and stabbing Sal.
That, and there’s too much built up between the two for it to just kind of peter out once this storyline reaches its conclusion.
I think reconciliation is necessary. Without it the arc flops as “Here’s how the abused girl became a villain.” I really don’t think that’s the path Willis will go with Amber.
It just looks like the bottom she’s going to hit before recovery is lower than I expected. Or hoped.
Ignoring the imminent Amazi-girl for a moment the Marcie trying to get Sal to make friends subplot is a good example of Marcie’s maturity and love for Sal. She’s figured out that life is going to is going to put a bit of distance between them, and perhaps that Sal is a bit too reliant on her. So she’s hoping to get Sal to take some steps towards expanding her own life, just as Marcie is starting to do with her own.
Yes! Marcie seems really good at giving Sal the right balance of caring & tough love to help her be a functioning human being.
Holy fuck, is Amber gonna murder Sal?
Do you really want the answer to that? Because we do know the answer to that with 100% certainty.
The answer is not, because Willis said nobody’s gonna die in DoA.
Watch out if Sal ever says the words, “I’m nobody.”
lol
“You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
Beat me to it, yo.
Makes even more sense because she was denied her chance to die a hero by Sal.
“Chapter X, In Which Amazigirl Channels Gollum”
Yeah, I don’t see any way this is going to end without Amber spending some amount of time hospitalized. She’s in a feedback loop of her own paranoid delusions, and I don’t think she’ll get out of it without outside help. And it probably needs to be a professional, since I don’t think Ethan or Danny realize JUST how bad she is and probably aren’t equipped to handle it.
Even if Danny and Ethan figure it out like, right in tomorrow’s strip, I don’t think Amazi-Girl will listen. Like even if Ethan confronts her alone, she’d probably ask if he’d been spending time with Danny recently and decide he’s been “poisoned” by proxy, too. This… really I don’t think it can end with anything short of major professional intervention by this point. MAYBE stall it for a bit longer if, say, Mike shows up and somehow talks some sense into her that’s completely void of Sal-traces, but I think even that’s going to be trying to cover up a gaping festering stab wound with a Hello Kitty band-aid.
Best person I could think of at the moment to talk to Amber would be Dina.
That or Sarah, who’s not a huge fan of Sal but would be brutally honest that she’s not like a psychopath or anything.
Somehow I enjoy the notion of Mike finding out his potential involvement was practically compared to a hello kitty bandaid. I wonder if it would mess with his self-perception.
As for the rest, yeah, that sounds very likely. Haven’t had her specific condition or circumstances, but others, and when you’re that deep inside your own defenses, it’s almost impossible for other people to reach you. (Non professionals, I mean.)
Ah, yes Mike!
How angry were we commenters when Mike suggested that Amber follows her fathers’ lead and now it has turned out it was brutal but correct foreshadowing!
i agree. you never really know what’s going on in someone’s mind. It’s very easy to mask, but here Amber can’t even distinguish between her selves anymore. If this doesn’t turn into an incident at this moment I wonder how else she would get there. Will she stop going to class? Won’t come out of her room? Flee the campus? Then more people would notice.
“Will she stop going to class? Won’t come out of her room?”
Well let me put it this way: Willis is an expert in how long that can go on unnoticed…
Are we still doing the muzak thing? I nominate Frontier Psychiatrist.
Jesus Christ Amber, you are one bad decision away from needing to be institutionalized for your own safety, not to mention the safety of those around you.
I’ve been institutionalized. It sucks, but it truly, truly helped me turn my life around. Amber needs immediate, emergency intervention.
Ah, the two tried and true reasons for involuntary hospitalization. 🙁
I’m hoping we’ll see Amber snapping out of it just enough, just in time, to not make that necessary. But if she doesn’t, I hope someone does that for her one way or the other.
I’m so happy you were able to turn your life around from there! That’s awesome of you.
Was very close to requesting it for myself once because I wasn’t sure I could handle myself. Turns out I could, in the end, but yeah. Very real option.
I think it’s impossible that we not see her turn it around before being institutionalized. It’s not going to be as simple as Amber going “okay now to stop having DID and PTSD”, and Amber seeking medical help is probably going to play a huge part in it, on top of being supported by her loved ones and realizing on her own that there’s parts of her history that she needs to deal with.
I’ve had money on involuntary commitment for a while now.
And I think that’s really unlikely, unless it’s for maybe a week in-comic. Amber being confined to a hospital divorces her from the main cast in a way that can easily be worked around and still achieve the same results. There’s nothing specifically about involuntarily commitment that makes it necessary compared to voluntarily seeking therapy.
I agree, though I think it’s the “institutionalized” that would be the problem, rather than the “involuntary”. Even if she voluntarily checks herself in for a month, she’s out of the comic for years. Not going to happen.
Getting therapy while staying in school would fit – but at the same time I find it hard to think she wouldn’t be committed if she was honest with a therapist about what’s going on.
72 hour holds are pretty common. That might strike a balance between “institutionalized” and “not having her in the comic for years.” Also, patients in psych wards can (usually) have visitors.
Involuntary, emergency holds tend to be limited to a couple of days without running into the need for a hearing or consent to effect a longer commitment (’cause due process). So I can see it happening, Amber getting out on the condition that she follow up with out-patient therapy, and not causing undue departure from the rest of the cast for an unreasonable period of time.
Yeah I was never in for longer than four days. They make you get set up with a therapist and/or psychiatrist afterwards, etc. You get A LOT of doctors talking to you over and over about the exact same things. Hospital emergency mental wards are usually a day, two max, because they really aren’t equipped for long-term care and you don’t get visitors.
It seems scarier than it is, honestly. Mostly you’re bored. Very, very bored.
Re: Spencer
I really, really want to see Amber have a moment of clarity and turn around before she goes over that edge. I hope that she realizes it and makes a proactive choice.
I haven’t had her specific situation, but I’ve been there with not seeing how bad my mental state really was. When people said I needed help, I took it as… I don’t even know what I took it as. Everything got warped on the way in, everything looked like an attack.
I wonder if this is going to lead to an outright struggle between Amber and AmaziGirl. The real person vs the “ideal” person she created. Where Amber realizes that she doesn’t actually need AG, but needs other coping mechanisms and help. …that she’s worthy of help and accepting it doesn’t make her more broken, but is a chance to really patch herself up.
…there is just so much Amber could enjoy around herself right now, relationships that she’s building, but she’s still living back then in a way. (Again maybe I’m reading stuff in because of my own experiences…)
Also at least don’t think any longer hospitalization would happen.
(As you said somewhere below, it would fit narrative purposes better)
I think Amber deciding completely on her own that she needs help isn’t going to be the case, but that she will be driven to a point where she has to choose to confront her problems in a healthier way, with her loved ones supporting her. The way things are building up it will take at least until a confrontation with Sal for her to realize the path she’s on, and from then on it will be Amber’s decisions that shape her, and that’s a good thing. Amber can learn that she rules herself, and that she’s not beholden only to becoming her father or her mother. That thinking that she needs to box her emotions away is wrong, that it’s okay for her to be angry, and that she isn’t too shitty and too broken to deserve happiness.
As for a struggle between Amber and Amazi-Girl, I think eventually we will see Amber become wary of Amazi-Girl and what she represents because Amazi-Girl is basically everything she’s assumed that Amber always was doomed to be. Best Poster Cerberus has informed me a lot about DID and brought up how, if Amber starts to violently repress the Amazi-Girl alter, she could start to rebel against reintegrating into Amber’s personality, possibly on the grounds of the both of them feeling that Amazi-Girl is the one who deserves to exist.
And, yeah, Amber is definitely still timelocked to that robbery. She’s even admitted as much that she still views Amber as the weak little girl who couldn’t save Ethan, and who is also a festering pot of rage about to burst.
So I don’t actually think institutionalizing will occur, because unless it is a shortform, yearlong storyline for Amber, then dropping her into a completely isolated area away from the rest of the cast for years on end wouldn’t fly. Though now I’m concerned my belief that Amber wouldn’t be institutionalized also comes off as “being institutionalized means she’s coocoo bananas and a bad person.” I wasn’t myself, but what eventually proved to be the catalyst for seeking help was a moment that made it abundantly clear I needed it, while also, in hindsight, made me wonder how I went so far without realizing it, because it made so much perfect sense at the time (I was hitting myself at work to punish myself for not being good enough, and it was hitting myself at home without that justification that made me realize that I should get help).
NOPE
Amazi-Girl’s toes are hanging over the edge, a little slip forward will take her into the abyss, and Amber may never return.
That fall would suck, but unless she hit wrong on her neck or something it’s not likely to kill her.
This is unaccepatble. I am sad that there are real people that are unintentionally this horrible.
How about not being in jail, Amber, you still have that to lose.
I am very worried for Sal’s safety right now.
I dunno. I think it’d probably be a pretty even fight. Sal might even win. Sal did Juvie time after all. That’s… not exactly softball. People think “oh kid prison, that’s nothing compared to the real thing.”
This thought is incorrect.
On the other hand, Amber has, in her mind, nothing to lose.
She does have very little mind left to lose, true. But she does have a lot of fingers.
She did Catholic school.
Which is also not exactly softball. 🙂
I’m worried that Sal would get seriously hurt, but on the other hand I’m afraid she’ll defend herself and somehow end up going to jail again. But Marcie is there, so she will probably witness it.
Just wait until she finds out what “our Danny” and “our Ethan” are doing to each other, right now.
Talking about their feelings. Fully clothed.
Acknowledging attraction to each other and valuing their friendship with Amber over it.
Those bastards.
Danny’s already threatened Amazi-girl by valuing Amber over her.
Hey. Amber. Get a friggin’ shrink.
Then somehow Amber tripped, fell on them, and killed them both.
Amazigirl laughed and fled the scene.
Then Walky failed another math test.
SO begins DoA’s gritty 90’s era
Dark Amber Returns, By Frank Miller
With 10x more whores on campus.
Illustrated by Rob Liefield. Now with 1000% more unnecessary leg straps and pouches.
And teeth! Not to mention that many characters are never shown to have feet.
And all women can be snapped in half at the waist by a light breeze.
And of course the Pouchsword!
Welp, I think that was super villain speech #1. I hope she realizes it before she actually hurts somebody like Marcie or Walky to get to Sal.
That covering up Amazi-Girl behind the word balloon was brilliant. When I got to panel two and saw her sitting there I jumped!
I am worried for Sal, I hope she gets out of this okay. And Marcie, too. I’m sure if anything happens she will try to help her friend. There are a lot of terrible things, and a mentally unstable individual with violently explosive fixations on you is pretty up there, speaking from experience.
This is full on Gollum mode from AG. 🙁
Walkertonsss! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!
We wants it, we needs it. Must have the Denny. They stole it from us. Sneaky little Biker. Wicked, tricksy, false!
And Amazi-Girl is now becoming the villain… Harvey Dent was right.
Ah jeez, so AmaziGirl alter thinks that Amber is insane. This is not good news. Just really bad. And since AmaziGirl seems to have possibly taken permanent or at least long term control, this has to be terrifying for Amber as well. I’m just hoping against all hope that there will be some light for her at the end of the tunnel.
Certainly she’s had control for an afternoon/the better part of a day now. This is… really, really not good.
Seriously I am so concerned for her right now.
Yeah, this is a really significant and scary moment for Amber. Used to be she could voluntarily shift into Amazi-Girl when needed, but not only did she involuntarily become Amazi-Girl to deal with her PTSD over seeing Sal but Amazi-Girl autonomously made decisions for both alters and treated Danny in a way that Amber previously started self flagellating in guilt over, and she’s been in control for most of the day.
Yeah. I’m really interested in seeing what happens when we see Amber again.
How she reacts. If she remembers.
Amazi-Girl and Amber now share the sisterhood of the traveling crazy-pants.
I’m calling it today, Amber/Amazigirl is gonna pull an “Its Walky Ruth”
I’m thinking she’s prolly going to more imitate IW! Sal in South Carolina with a Segway. She’s going to still see herself as acting with integrity and have no immediate regrets either way…
Amazigirl and therefore amber are Hella hella wack. This probably should have been more apparent earlier, but she was so cool! And coolness negates mental crises
Seeing so much loss of faith in Amazi-girl at the moment.
Welp. Time to “kill” Amazigirl.
Okay so she’s insane, but at least\ she’s still sane enough to admit it!
I still wish people would keep her actions as a mentally unstable person separate from her value as a person.
I still see no reason to run out of sympathy for her. Knowing how badly she’s fucked up–actually to the point of being delusional (which I had valiantly tried to argue against before) only makes me feel worse for her.
I don’t get why mental illnesses are the one thing that make people lose sympathy for people. Even when I had to let my cousin live on the street because she would refuse to get care, I never stopped having sympathy for her.
Even if I do have to kinda put it to the back of my mind because I can’t afford to help her anymore.
I think it’s possible to have sympathy for her. I think it’s a lot of people on here are coming from different perspectives. I hear yours, and I’m very sorry you went through that because it is very hard and very painful to watch someone you love go through that.
It’s not so much that I dislike her because she is mentally ill, it’s that she’s been hurting people because of it. Hurting others is definitely a thing that happens, we all hurt each other from time to time, but when violence in its many forms is involved people around the person are also affected negatively. I get the feeling that some folks (myself included) have been on the receiving end of it, so there’s that bias.
For example, Blaine is obviously ill, but he should still take responsibility for his actions because he’s hurt Amber in too many ways to count. abuse and sympathy can be a touchy subject for folks because it’s toeing the line between “i need you to understand why i’m like this and accept and love me” and “i do these shitty things to you and you must stick around and take it otherwise you don’t love and accept me”
Blaine is perfectly sane, he’s just a scary and controlling man.
“APD (Antisocial Personality Disorder) is a DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition), diagnosis assigned to individuals who habitually violate the rights of others without remorse (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). People with Antisocial Personality Disorder may be habitual criminals, or engage in behavior which would be grounds for criminal arrest and prosecution, or they may engage in behaviors which skirt the edges of the law, or manipulate and hurt others in non-criminal ways which are widely regarded as unethical, immoral, irresponsible, or in violation of social norms and expectations. The terms psychopathy or sociopathy are also used, in some contexts synonymously, in others, sociopath is differentiated from a psychopath, in that a sociopathy is rooted in environmental causes, while psychopathy is genetically based. ” from http://www.theravive.com/therapedia/Antisocial-Personality-Disorder-DSM–5-301.7-%28F60.2%29
The DSM is pretty extensive and covers a lot of behavior.
It also shouldn’t be used to definitively diagnose someone without a lot more material than we’re going to get for a minor character in a webcomic.
Blaine is, probably, sane. Just so thoroughly indoctrinated in his faith that he places salvation over the lives of his daughter or himself.
Also, I don’t like the claim that religious fundamentalists are, on the whole, mentally ill. It denies the agency, good or in this case very very bad, of individuals and tries to reduce a complex social and spiritual problem to a psychological diagnostic sheet.
Which now that I think of it may be another reason I disagree with people trying to separate Amber from her dissociation as Amazi-girl.
You can’t really take a person and say that ‘everything but this mental illness they have which forms a fundamental part of their identity is part of them’. It doesn’t work that way.
Mental illness sucks. But its part of the patients mind and refusing that is refusing to engage with problems which needed to be treated.
You are the right kind of pedantic.
Are you the right kind of peanut? Only time will tell.
You’re talking about Toedad, whose name is Ross. Blaine is Amber’s father.
Who we still, really, don’t have enough for to assume is suffering from any clinical disorder.
Ah, Sorry, got them mixed up. Blaine is, a little more likely sure, but yeah, still not enough information.
I mean, I would consider him suffering from something because honestly, how could someone who beats the ** out if their kid on a regular basis be “healthy”? I didn’t use a specific term because who knows what he has, but there’s definitely something wrong with him
Evil is not always insane.
It’s also not clear how much of his abuse was physical. We’ve seen the mental side and I think we’ve been told he hit her mother, but I don’t remember a reference to him beating her.
Not that that absolves him or anything. Just like to have the facts straight.
I have to deal with mentally ill people who are close to me on a regular basis. It is extremely unpleasant to be on the receiving end of violence. The fact that the violence happens to occur during depressive parts of a bi-polar cycle doesn’t make it any less awful.
Amber is violent and hurts others.
It doesn’t make people less sympathetic to the person. It’s just that there are realities to dealing with an emotionally unstable, apparently very strong, and violence prone person.
My discomfort around her has nothing to do with her mental health, I’m mentally ill myself so are most of my friends, but she’s still being abusive, mentally ill or not.
OK, ‘fess up — how many of you clicked back to yesterday’s strip to see if the dialogue balloon was blocking out Amazi-Girl in that strip too.
100% me
I can neither confirm nor deny any such action.
palpatine would absolutely approve of amber’s actions right now
Palpatine: “The dark side is stroooong in this one. Gooood”
Blaine: “Daddy’s girl, all way through.”
Palpatine: “You are still a despicable creep.”
Wanna know the worst thing about this? According to the Legends continuity, there were apparently a ton of Sith parents who were better parents than Blaine. And I mean on the levels of dark lords and Darths who were legitimately better parents. Sith Lords and Darths!! That is kinda the physical definition of evil!! And they were still better parents than Blaine!!
And then you had folks like Darth Jadus who, discovering that his daughter had a fondness for music and singing, arranged a concert for her in the Empire’s capital where he forced her to perform for hours on end until her throat was raw and any desire to sing again fully expunged. This was, she noted, the only time she ever saw her father smile.
Kind of a mixed bag.
Hell, you don’t even need to get into the EU; I think I’d rate Vader as better than Blaine. He did try to kill Luke, but… they were opposite sides of a war, and despite that, Vader sought Luke out as soon as he found out Luke existed, tried to reconcile with him, clearly respected Luke’s abilities, >and< ultimately sacrificed his own life to save Luke's.
Honestly, I like the robot chicken idea that Vader was super happy when he found out he actually had children. He actually has a little bit of a double take in Return of the Jedi when he finds out Luke has a sister. Plus he manages to crushingly sad in full body armor and face obscuring helmet when Luke says “Then I guess my father truly is dead.” Honestly the man really did try.
Wasn’t Amazi-girl supposed to have an interview with Dorothy that night?
Maybe Dorothy will finally grasp how unhinged she is. But then that might convince Amber that yet another person’s turned against her.
Good catch! Yes, I really hope Dorothy will get up to speed….. But I’m afraid it will have exactly the effect you predict.
At least it might delay the horribleness.
Your dad took your sanity, hun, Sal was just the focus of the snap.
I swear, ar some point we need an actual costumed supervillain, besides who Amazi-girl is turning into.
She needs some professional help
Poor Amber, poor, poor, poor Amber. She has a good thing going at college. Friends, studies, people who like her and admire the cool things she do… and the Blaine-voice in her head is about to take it from her.
I’m sorry I don’t buy this heel turn at all.
What heel turn? This is the natural evolution of Amber’s mental condition and the only reasonable long-term direction for her arc.
So, have we gone full-on split personality, now? Is that what this is?
That happened a while ago. Danny is dating Amazi-Girl, not Amber.
God damn it, and here I was hoping that we’d have a quick, non-angsty, drama plot.
I’m going to have to remember that word balloon trick (you don’t mind if I totally steal that from you right?)
From now on I’m going to assume that Dina is always hiding behind a word balloon if she is not in the strip.
Much like I always assume Becky is hiding in a tree with autumn colors (mostly because she plays squirrel girl, but anyway)
So there’s a tiny Dina on Ambers head?
She’s trying to give her emotional support, but, alas, is too tiny for Amber to notice the attempt.
Tiny Dina: Sympathy via light touching.
Amber doesn’t notice
Tiny Dina: Sympathy via heavy touching
Amber doesn’t notice
Tiny Dina starts jumping on Ambers head.
That makes no sense. Dina hides behind doors.
Do you see those doors in panels 1 and 2? Dina is behind those.
Both of those. At once. She has quantum positioning.
“Dina hides behind doors.”
She does if she has to.
It has always been speculated that Dina is in every single strip of this webcomic.
We now know that she can hide behind word-balloons.
But sometimes there are no balloons.
I kinda hope that if someone ends up defeating Amber, its Danny.
Amazi-Girl: Amber is dead…she was weak…a failure….
Danny: I know she’s in there somewhere!
Amazi-Girl: What chance do you have. You’ve never been able to fight.
Danny: Maybe not before, but….
Amazi-Girl rushes at him and throws a punch only to be blocked.
Danny: I was trained by a man from another universe…and you know what his name was?
Amazi-Girl: WHAT!?
Danny: David Walkerton! He’s quite the badass in that other universe, and I think training with him has made us about even!
To be honest, Danny hardly knows her and needs a break from crazy women right now. Not that I’m hoping that break is in Ethan’s arms or anything like that XD
I would pay good money to see Danny reinact Xander’s “Yellow Crayon” speech from when Willow went all Spooky-eyes.
YES PLEASE
Okay, but can we sub Danny for Ethan? I love that scene. It’s just… Xander is to Willow as Amber is to Ethan, if you get the analogy.
I can get behind that substitution. It’s not as funny, but Ethan has the history to pull it of more realistically.
Well fuck. I think we’ve gone straight from “hero with compartmentalization issues” to “completely fucking insane.”
Amber is Venom confirmed. http://i.imgur.com/ZHPPOF1.png
Wait, are we sure the Amazi-Girl costume isn’t a symbiote? Because I’m getting some serious Venom vibes here.
Yeah Amazi-Girl, you should try monologueing… monologing… monologuieing… thinking out loud WHEN YOU’RE NOT WITHIN EARSHOT OF THEM.
Also, go see a goddamn therapist already. I’m starting to think you’re going to become the strip’s next villain.
… Oh.
Next comic: Sal & Marcie overhear Amazi-Girl’s rant, because that stuff was old when Shakespeare did it :v
sweetie no, you’re veering really close to Sin City territory.
Amazigirl: A Danny to kill for
I wonder if Ethan will realize that his staunch friendship isn’t up to the task of treating post-traumatic dissociation. And I wonder if the hospitals in their area have a halfway decent mental ward between them. This is not outpatient time, but on the other hand, some of those wards are really… unhelpful.
I feel like Ethan is probably going to double over in guilt when he realizes how bad she’s gotten, because so far his thought process is “I don’t like you being Amazi-Girl but also everything is fine and dandy and once you’re done freaking out you’ll come back to us.”
Unless we have a major time skip we’re not gonna see Amber get institutionalized or sent to prison, because that would cut her out of the comic for years, if not forever. Seeing her go to therapy is pretty likely, though.
Prison actually requires her to leave the comic. Minimum sentencing in the states is a year. And she can’t go to jail, because she’s committed multiple batteries (I’m pretty sure one gets you in the big house, not jail)
Almost all of which could be treated as self-defense or defense of others. Almost all of which have very shaky or hostile witnesses.
Can’t decide what the sentence will be until we know what she’d actually be charged with and convicted of.
None of which changes “not gonna see Amber … sent to prison”.
What about the act itself of being a vigilante? What kind of sentence would that get you? Does it depend on what exactly you’ve been doing? (Such as the car chase, or taking down the guy who was a thief)
As far as I know, being a vigilante is, in and of itself, not a crime, though many of the things commonly associated with vigilantism are. Even if the term is used legally, it’s going to be defined in the statute, possibly in ways that don’t match common usage.
Um. No. Straight up, actual, no. Beating a man into the dirt is not self defense, and she was hitting Blaine well after he was down*. Attacking kids who are drinking is not self defense. Seeking people out who are committing petty crimes is not self defense. Stopping robbers is, but vandals? UNDERAGE DRINKERS? No.
*I want to stress something here – the issue is she already neutralized Blaine. There’s a lot to be said for how abusers create an environment of terror that warps what people see as reasonable threat and fear. Danny’s presence is actually irrelevant to me whether this is self defense or not. I mean yeah, it’s more demonstrably self defense to most people, but in the case of an abuser in a long term relationship, things are actually and honestly different. Frankly, when you tend to talk about a long term abusive relationship without adding in familial/relationship modifiers, people can usually agree it’s self defense. She ALREADY finished punching blaine though. I would actually be cool with it as self defense even if Danny weren’t there, because Blaine is still in town to terrorize Amber.
Also, I already listed the probable charges. Battery, and a couple of Assault (Going by MPC, I’m way too lazy to look up which is which in Indiana). I mean, strictly speaking she probably ought to stand trial for some of her various /actual/ self defense cases too, on charges of Battery (Self defense is, in fact, a defense in court. Some of her’s aren’t murky, some of them are, including the beat down she gave ‘today’).
And no, of course she isn’t going to either prison or jail. And frankly, the only reason I wouldn’t say she should, is that she’s mentally ill in a way that diminishes her ability to tell right from wrong in this particular context. You know, an insanity plea, whatever they call it in Indiana. She should be getting help (And obviously, in narrative terms, she almost definitely will, and she will almost definitely never see court or similar). But I pointed out she can’t be in prison and stay in the comic, because the minimum term is a year for prison, and she’s done it enough that she’d see prison, for sure. Though I think I misremembered, battery’s not a felony at common law, at least.
“Minimum sentencing in the states is a year.”
What? No. That statement has annoyed me enough to do research ON THE WEEKEND.
I’m not a lawyer in Indiana, but the relevant portions of the Indiana Code provide:
(b) Except as provided in subsections (c) through (j), a person who
knowingly or intentionally:
(1) touches another person in a rude, insolent, or angry manner;
or
(2) in a rude, insolent, or angry manner places any bodily fluid
or waste on another person; commits battery, a Class B misdemeanor.
It becomes a Class A misdemeanor for bodily injury, a level 6 felony for “moderate bodily injury” and a level 5 felony for “Serious bodily injury”.
For a Misdemeanor up to (not minimum!) a year of incarceration.
(see: http://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/indiana-misdemeanor-crimes-class-and-sentences.htm)
For a level 6 felony minimum sentence is 6 mo, level 5 the minimum is indeed a year, but the Court would have the power to suspend some or all of that sentence. (see: http://banksbrower.com/2014/09/14/a-look-at-indianas-sentencing-guidelines/).
Yes, you’re correct. Hence why I pointed out she’s committed battery repeatedly.
“Though I think I misremembered, battery’s not a felony at common law, at least.”
My issue wasn’t with battery and whether it’s a felony or misdemeanor. You’re right, it’s a misdemeanor at common law…but what she did to Blaine definitely had aggregating factors which might push it up. It was the assertion that there’s some kind of universal minimum of one year incarceration. Where did that come from?
The fact that prison was referred to in the first place. Felonies get you in prison, misdemeanors in local jails. Felonies usually have a minimum time of a year.
When it came to charges, I was mostly saying that they would almost all need to rely on the testimony of the person she beat up and in a couple cases the testimony of people she helped. You can’t rely on what we’ve seen in the comic pages. You’ve got to find “guy about to smash a car window” and “creepy guy chasing a girl” and get them on the stand.
And in most of those cases, she basically told them to stop in the middle of a crime and let them take a swing at her – which is where the self-defense comes in. Nor are they going to be very believable or willing witnesses.
Even with Sal’s gang in the parking lot. She came looking for a fight and certainly tried to provoke one, but she still only hit/threw the ones who actually came after her.
Blaine is the exception. In both directions – the actual amount of unnecessary violence and the level to which him being her long time abuser mitigates that.
‘in most cases’ is not in all cases. She tried to provoke Engineering Vandal into attacking her so she could ‘defend herself’. She outright threatened Cinder Block Guy. She visibly beat Backpack Thief into the dirt in front of a ton of witnesses, some of whom were visibly disturbed.
And again, I already said she’s not going to see the courts. It’s not going to happen for narrative reasons. I don’t have to worry about getting people ‘on the stand’. But uh, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?
“Even with Sal’s gang in the parking lot. She came looking for a fight and certainly tried to provoke one, but she still only hit/threw the ones who actually came after her. ”
Uh. She threatened to attack them. *THEY* are the ones with the self defense claim that is actually valid – they have a reasonable belief in a threat to their persons, and they responded only with a reasonable level of violence, ceasing at restraining her, with absolutely no further action taken after this. The idea that she was ‘defending herself’ on a legal level is definitely invalid – on an ETHICAL one it’s even moreso. They ‘hit her first’, AFTER she jumped down to them persons, AFTER threatening them. This isn’t ‘stand your ground’ nonsense, this is straight up regular and ordinary self defense. THEY are the defendants in this action, and SHE is the aggressor. And the fact that they stopped at restraining her, while she’s put people into the fucking hospital (and one expressed reservations about RESTRAINT), kinda put more lies to this. That’s what ACTUAL self defense looks like.
I mean, I wouldnt’ be surprised if that ended with them on trial for battery anyway, and being found guilty, but it’s two non-white people, a trans girl, and Marcie. Doesn’t say much.
And no. Being a long-time abuse victim is generally the opposite of a mitigating circumstance legally. Although *I* accept the core concept behind what is termed ‘battered women’s syndrome’, and feel it /should/ be better accepted, the law likes to pretend that people can be reasonably expected to remain reasonable in cases of protracted, years-long terror, held aloft with the threat of violence. That would be used to spin it against Amber. Which I agree is fucked up. But I also think it’s absurdly fucked up what lengths you go to, to protect a fucking vigilante from ethical examination (Legal is ultimately not that important, because she will never see trial, because she is fictional)
In this arc you don’t want Amber to be treated in an off-the-mill hospital.
You want her to be put in a fully qualified Arkmazi-Asylum!
Really hoping this loon gets the hell over it, one way or another. It’s less amusing and more tedious, at this point.
Trauma isn’t always amusing. Sometimes it sucks. Self-hatred can get tedious to the person hating herself too. Why cut away when it becomes uncomfortable?
This is actually a rather detailed and involved question about the meta-level objectives of this webcomic as a whole.
Is the objective to portray reality as realistically as possible, or to provide an at least somewhat entertaining and well-written story for the audience? Because the two can easily conflict.
We know Willis is at least straddling this line somewhat, considering that he has stated that no characters will die during DoA, something that full realism would point and laugh at. If we were being completely realistic and true to life, this strip wouldn’t have been an issue, because Amber would be a smear on a highway.
If Sal develops smoker’s cough, she could “steal” Amazigirl’s Batman voice, too, and then where will we be?
In a batman movie, of course!
Interesting how many people are like “ok fuck off Amber, who cares.” Come on guys, this is drama. This is super important emotional stuff here. Sure, it’s not healthy, but it’s pretty damn compelling, and just dismissing it feels really… dismissive. This is a comic strip, and this is someone going through some heavy shit.
I can sort of understand. Sometimes it feels like this storyline is dragging on. 🙁 That being said, I am looking forward to the climax of this tragedy.
Such is the drawback of webcomics as a medium: the update schedule, no matter how frequent, usually isn’t fast enough to keep up with a dramatic, multi-faceted story. Sam and Fuzzy had a similar issue, in which it took 6+ months to get out of a flashback covering events the readers already knew half of. It’s hard for webcomics to really find their stride, especially since the writer experiences the plot much faster than we do. It’s the same reason why archive binging feels so much better compared to daily updates. Hopefully as the medium grows, this problem will slowly be smoothed out.
There’s a fine line in Deana when it comes to this level of angst and uncomfortableness. You need to play the story out just long enough to get the full impact across, and short enough that it doesn’t drag. This arc is towing a fine line between the two, and I can understand why people are ready to see a conclusion. We’ve hit a breaking point. Amber’s issues are getting big enough to seriously impact other people, and that can make a character less sympathetic. Bottom line, people’s mileage will vary on this kind of thing and the longer this runs the more people will tire of it.
It’s in our nature to walk away when we feel uncomfortable. As pack animals we have two responses to when a pack member has strayed; the first is that we try and help, when our help is rejected we become hurt and no longer want to help. The second is that if helping seems too hard or may cause us to suffer outright we experience negative emotions and either walk away or we shun the straying pack member. Given Amber’s deep seeded mental distress many of us have become uncomfortable with the thought of helping her based on many of our own experiences and negative results. So though you are correct in your assessment of this being “super important emotional stuff,” it is also correct and realistic that many of us might feel that ““ok fuck off Amber, who cares.”” IS the correct response. Amber is acting in both a realistic and completely unrealistic way and it makes us uncomfortable. At some point you cannot be responsible for rejecting a person who causes you pain through unreasonable action as Amber is doing to the readers.
I wish this site had upvoting, because you deserve at least one for this.
Very well said! A cookie and a miniature potted cactus named Ernesto to you!
I just wish we wouldn’t see Amber because while I sympathize with her, her behaviour remembers me way too much of my own abuser.
Part of why I’ve hated how Amber’s gotten in the last month was because she reminded me too much of myself, like I was seeing everything I hated about myself legitimized on page.
I’m very invested in seeing her conquer her demons and learn that she deserves to get better, that she doesn’t need to be beholden to her abusive upbringing, that it’s okay for Amber to be angry and that she’s not too shitty and too broken to deserve happiness, but the road there is painful as fuck.
Oh thank God, nobody responded to this.
What I was trying (and failing) to convey with this was that I do really understand why people are so harsh on Amber, because not only is Amber just being all sorts of awful, she is also displaying traits that many who have suffered abuse are all too familiar with. I can’t, reasonably, ask these people to listen to me when I try to explain why Amber is doing these things, or why this doesn’t make her a bad person, because at that point I feel like I’m justifying abusers and I got too much of that in my own life.
That said, it is still hugely frustrating, and to a degree actually hurtful, to see so much of how Amber being mentally ill and lashing out means that, to so many people here, Amber is just a total shithead who needs to fuck off. If this was something that sprouted only within the last month then I could understand, but this has been going on for years, villainizing Amber for lashing out like she hasn’t had over a decade of mental programming telling her that getting angry and flipping tables and yelling is how you deal with your problems, and when it takes her all of five seconds to double down in guilt and hate herself even more.
And that shit is real to me, because I do it all the time. I fucking hate getting angry. I don’t feel like I’m allowed to be angry. There are times where I feel genuine guilt and sickness for being angry. And so I see Amber acting terribly, and I get why people are harping on her, but I also understand where that rage comes from and it sucks to see people not want to understand it and instead just tar and feather her as damaged goods.
Sympathy via light virtual physical contact!
This arc has just been going on forever and I wasn’t terribly interested in it at the beginning so by now I am just full on “I do not care at all about this plotline I just want it to end already.” I don’t find it compelling at all I find it interminable and unpleasantly reminiscent of experiences I’d rather not be reminded of.
To me personally, it’s a plot tumor that keeps growing. Drama is great, it’s the lifeblood of a compelling story, but when there’s other more interesting storylines we could be focusing on, it’s kind of like… Hmm.. Finn’s love life in Adventure Time.
“other more interesting storylines”
Well that – would have been exactly my complaint yesterday.
But check it:
Danny + Ethan: Temporary resolution, will need days if not weeks (in comic) before we see any progress.
Mary vs. Carla: Resolved so far.
So we have the “Joyce + Becky in La Porte” and the Amazi-Girl storyline.
I was not very much interested in the Sal/Marcie plot (because it was interfering with Joyce/Becky and was comparativly thin) but now with the addition of Amber/Amazi-Girl – it really gets interesting (i might be biased).
Honestly I’m not too big on the Sal/Marcie line either, ’cause I’ve gone through a friendship that played a lot like how it’s been, the conflict I mean.
Though honestly you got me there, I can’t think of any others that are currently able to happen during this time frame.
The tragedy of Amber continues. 🙁
Marcie’s silhouette has red eyes.
And Amazi-Girl’s has glowing white ones.
They are both earthly relatives of the Jawas.
I can’t believe she’s gonna straight-up murder Sal.
Is Amber talking about Sal or AmaziGirl?
I’d say Amazi-Girl is talking about Sal and Amber.
Replacing all pronouns with names:
“First Sal took Amber’s sanity, then Sal took AmaziGirl’s dignity, and now Sal’s taken Amber and AmaziGirl’s Danny.”
“If Sal keeps taking things from Amber and AmaziGirl…”
“One day Sal may very quickly find Amber and AmaziGirl have nothing left to lose.”
yes, thank you.
She needs a stay at the Francis Farmer Hotel.
Not the “Overlook Hotel”?
A google search for “Francis Farmer Hotel” was not really giving insight.
honestly surprised that we haven’t seen her use my gravatar’s glare yet
Amber is the character with the rage issues!
Amazi-Girl is the character to deals with Amber’s rage issues.
Who amazes us by dealing with Amazi-Girl’s issues?
‘Just the two of us
Building castles in the sky
Just the two of us
You and I’
Nice. That works for both Sal-Marcie, and Blaine-Amazigirl-Amber. Or has Amber fully transitioned to the darkside?
She won’t attack tonight. it’s indicatedin her dialogue – plus, this can build up for months, our-time.
OK, comments are deep enough in that I’ll mention I find that phrasing of “…OUR Danny.” especially interesting considering how both Amber and Amazigirl have reacted to his feelings for Amber to date.
I now have to wonder what’d have happened with AG/Amber if Danny had answered her “No mask.”
He did want her without the mask. Amber was the one who wanted to keep it on because it made her more confident, and when it slipped off Amber expressed that she was concerned she’d screw something up or that she’d hurt Danny. And as much as Amber was insisting that Amazi-Girl was the one doing all the weird sex stuff, Amber was still around for their first time. This was before they started to heavily dissociate, so Amber immediately surfaced when she thought something had gone wrong.
As far as Danny’s been concerned, he was always dating Amber and Amazi-Girl was just a kinky bit of fun between them.
Amazi-girl , history’s greatest villain?
Wow, I guess it’s true: You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. And Amber was denied the chance to die a hero.
Yeah, Amazi-Girl has gone bye-bye. Sad.
Yup, can’t say it any better, Amber has “gone bye-bye”.
I’m fairly certain Sal didn’t just take Amber’s sanity…
I still find a bit BS that for just seeing him talk for 5 second with her, (someone she has never tell Danny about, btw), she considers it a reason to break up and then consider it a “steal”.
I mean, there is being blindsided and jumping to conclisions, and then there is this. It’s borderline contrived and I am at least expecting a point where she goes “Amber, you are the stupidest girl on this planet”.
Amazi-Girl is always right and is morally inflexible. She can’t be wrong.
So Danny speaking to Sal despite knowing nothing about their shared history, and begging Amber to stop before she gets herself killed, then obviously he has betrayed her and been swayed by the evil one.
It doesn’t help at all that if Amber actually listened to Danny and stopped letting Amazi-Girl out, then that alter would die, and right now both Amber and Amazi-Girl believe that Amber is too shitty and too broken to deserve happiness.
Hoo boy. I am now firmly in the camp of “Beating up randos for jaywalking and costuming up as an emotional crutch is no longer amusing and she needs help”.
Amazi-Girl used to be an excuse for wacky action set pieces. Until this chapter none of the randoms she ever fought expressed any kind of personalty or humanity; they were basically just rough approximations of jerks doing jerk things, so Amber is morally vindicated in punching them.
Both the bag thief she punched and the guy she helped expressing fear of Amazi-Girl, as well as the only person unconditionally believing in her right now being overly idealistic and and automatically blaming Danny for their breakup, is hugely significant, because it used to be that the guys she punched were just cartoon evil and the people she helped were just cheering citizens, but now the veil’s been lifted and we can’t go back to stuff like Amazi-Girl rescuing cats from trees.
So who do we call now for rescuing that squirrel in the tree if Amazi-Girl isn’t there?
No, some of the jerks she punched were jerks that did not need punching, or the threat of punching, period. Cinder Block dude and Engineering Vandal dude, in particular, were nothing but non violent, petty vandals.
She beat Blaine into the hospital, well after he was down and stopped being a threat. This was not. Fucking. Justified. Danny stopped her, which is good, but it wasn’t. Okay.
She attacked Sal and Co. in the parking lot for /underage fucking drinking/. Which she was patently using as an excuse to fight her nemesis.
You keep insisting this started ‘this chapter’. It didn’t. It’s been fucked up for a while. It’s even more fucked up for those of us who know that what she’s doing is pretty normal for vigilantes. There’s a reason I didn’t approve /before/ she beat Blaine into the dirt. Great, you saved a kitten and stopped a purse snatcher. It’s not worth the nigh-inevitable, even if I didn’t think WIllis would ever PORTRAY the nigh-inevitable.
I’m honestly interesting in what vigilantes you’re comparing her to. If this is “pretty normal” (minus the costume, I’d assume), there should be plenty of example you could give.
It doesn’t match what I think of as vigilanteeism at all, but I could easily be misled.
Blaine was definitely out of line, but I’m not going to treat anyone too bad for losing control when they fight their abuser.
…Like the folks who beat or kill trans women because they’re ‘breaking the rules’, such as here
http://jezebel.com/5840016/woman-sentenced-to-prison-for-beating-transgender-woman-in-mcdonalds
But more to the point, this is a thing we get to, you know, study.
A few of the papers, f’rex, are here:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Silke+1998+vigilante&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C11&as_ylo=2000
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2311.00167/abstract
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=312879
For instance. And, you know, two of the more famous god damned groups of them…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackshirts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
When I think of vigilantes, I think of arguably one of the most famous cases where an underage kid named Travon was killed (murdered, really) by George Zimmerman. An important piece of the case was the fact that Zimm. called 911 and they basically told him, “don’t go after him. let the police do it.” He didn’t listen. And the poor child wasn’t doing anything either way.
It could also be incidents where murderers are attacked by family members of the victims in court or otherwise.
BUT, when people are running around the neighborhood with guns/knives/whatever al a Amazigirl (as in taking it upon themselves to enact “justice”), it usually doesn’t end well. Basically a lot of those people can be very biased and doing it for basically being on an ego trip, or whatever hang up. It’s not really about justice. Even police officers have been documented to basically having knee-jerk, irrational, and racist reactions to people and escalating situations that never should have been escalated.
I for one have disagreed with Amber’s actions from the start. she is clearly not doing any of this for others. She’s being violent to feel power and control and feed her fragile ego and pick up her self esteem. So the worse she feels, the more she will escalate or insert herself into more dangerous situations. Toedad aside, punching people does not work and can land you in jail. I can definitely understand her wanting to attack Blaine, but it’s like, what the dude had just keeled over right there? Additionally, I’d disagree with a person suffering from delusions/a break in reality running around assaulting folks. It’s not justice, it’s a tragic situation.
OTOH, she’s not running around with a gun as her only means of offense/defense. She’s got no pattern of racism – possibly other than Sal and Sal’s a special case for her.
I certainly agree it’s problematic and not justice. At first however, she was careful to only use violence when the targets were violent, even if she did provoke that violence when she interrupted their crime. Nor did she drastically escalate – like by shooting people who took a swing at her.
Again, I’m looking for that “pretty normal for vigilantes”. I’m not aware of it. Most that I’m aware of either just started out as racist thugs beating their targets up for mostly imagined crimes. Or someone like Bernie Goetz who gets mugged a few times, starts carrying a gun and gets the chance to use it.
Maybe I’m way off target and there are plenty of cases of solo, unarmed petty crime-stopping vigilantes who escalate to ? I’m not even sure what Rutee thinks this normal pattern is going to lead to.
I’m not comparing the literal situations together, it’s more like I’m comparing the mindset of the vigilantes. Most of them THINK they’re enacting justice clean and cut, but the REALITY can be different and more complex, as a general. I guess by that I mean more people go out of their way for the justice, and it goes wrong because they are ill prepared, don’t have the proper mindset to begin with like you mentioned (they could be racist) (they could have over-inflated importance and therefore escalate and take more risks, i.e. “that person needed to die”), do not account for other factors in the confrontation (“what if the person i’m confronting has a gun or a knife? what if they’re stronger than me?”).
Amber thinks what’s she’s doing is correct, but obviously we can see that that is not the case and the reality is a lot more complicated. Sure, there are the run of the mill standing up for folks, but there are many cases where things go horribly wrong. Like the time the group of dudes were harrassing that kid and Amber found them. They were all assholes, but they also could have been the kind of assholes that would have left the kid alone and ganged up on her beat her up instead. Although I can’t speak for Rutee, so this is just my opinion.
And arguably provoking someone rather than walking away, or distracting them and then running away or calling the proper authorities is an escalating behaviour. People are responsible for their actions, but it’s a bad idea to provoke people into being physical, because they’re probably going to respond to you. No, Amber, doesn’t have a gun, but she has her fists, as we saw with Blaine.
Only you care about the ‘pattern of racism’ as if it was etched into her heart of fucking hearts. Those of us who deal with racism are more concerned with where she fits into the overall pattern of racism (or other -isms) in day to day life. Which she does, as a wannabe authority figure using selective enforcement of rules to attack a black girl, a mute girl, a filipino girl, and a trans girl. It doesn’t matter that her ‘goal’ wasn’t to do this. What mattered was her god damned effects.
And uh, besides the fucking escalating violence over increasingly less relevant crimes!? THE THING WE SAW ON CAMERA!? Given her grudge with Sal, MORE racist attempts at enforcement because of her fucking invented nemesis?
I mean for fuck’s fucking sake. She created a nemesis out of wholecloth out of a black woman and is targetting her for retribution. She’s creating a fucking justification for ‘defense’ of her person and her lifestyle that, given her previous modus operandi, involves attacking this woman physically – and what needs to be done to truly stop her? She’s gone to jail once, and she’s back, destroying her life again. Clearly, more drastic measures are necessary.
But no, you’ll keep doing this shit to the end, won’t you? Christ almighty. I mean, as a betting woman, she becomes horrified of what she’s about to do, and Sal, as the incredibly staunch anti-authoritarian that she is, DOESN’T report it, and Amber starts getting the help she needs (Possibly from Sal directly, probably by talking to someone else). But that’s the happy storybook ending. What actually happens is a death, and often, (if less now than in the past), a release. I mean, *I* wasn’t going to mention Martin, because although he died from vigilante ‘justice’, I’m not immediately familiar with any academic study of zimmerman, and black history isn’t mine so anything less is something I don’t need to touch, so I won’t… but are you just going to ignore that this shit STILL happens?
And no, I don’t even need ‘things go horribly wrong’, although they do (meriken police seem to have things ‘go horribly wrong’ disproportionately often, all told). My concern is twofold:
1: Let’s assume we have a unicorn. A vigilante who enacts the letter and spirit of the law, without unequal enforcement, and without prejudice – both in ‘spirit’ and in effect. This is perhaps a platonic ideal of the vigilante. Certainly, they don’t exist outside the cave, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume.
This person weakens the belief in the state monopoly of violence. And the overwhelming majority of people are NOT this unicorn. Encouraging vigilante justice will end with, at best, the average racist, average heterosexist, average cissexist, average sexist… enacting unfair enforcement – much of which will be unfairly targetted at people like me, and by extension, me.
“But Rutee, the police do this already!” Yes, for most of the same reasons (Average racism, average heterosexism, etc. Though there are some exacerbating factors in police training, it’s less important than the baseline -ism of society) and they are nominally easier to stop, as a smaller subset of the category of everyone, with nominal accountability to public organs. And even if they weren’t, if it was JUST as hard to make police and vigilantes stop, Police + Vigilantes = More Jackasses to stop than Just Police. All in return for, at best, a decrease in a few petty crimes. I’d rather be robbed or pickpocketed than murdered, thanks.
2: …and oh right, I hypothesized a fucking unicorn. People aren’t unicorns. They’re often bastard-coated bastards, with bastard filling. I want fewer bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling who feel like they might be justified in shooting me. Amber goes out of her WAY to find these situations. That’s why she was in that walmart parking lot. Why she found the vandals to threaten. And that’s part of the POINT of being a vigilante – it’s what seperates someone from some random person who acted in self defense in one case.
I agree with a lot of your points. I must clarify though, what I meant by run of the mill stuff was like, for example , verbally shutting down someone who’s being an ass to someone else or something, not like shooting anyone or physically attacking them.
When I mentioned the police I meant in the sense that in the idealized world, police are the intermediary between the accused and the court system. As a black American I am quite familiar with the fact that they perform otherwise. I did not mention them as if to say, “well they do the same thing so same difference.” Ideally, if I hear someone screaming for help or whatever, I call the police. i don’t necessarily jump into the fray and risk getting stabbed/shot/whatever.
And yeah, it’s been talked about in past that Amber might have racist fantasies, and she has said racially charged things to Sal (Remember, the comment about her having a record?) Racial justice clearly isn’t on Amber’s radar, but it doesn’t excuse her from saying shitty things and targeting Sal, who unlike her, has served her time for her transgressions. I mean, she thinks of Sal as the embodiment of criminals everywhere- she attributes a special kind of evil to her, more threatening than most she’s encountered – and we know why because we’re the readers, but shucks if it doesn’t look like that. People can get affected even if she doesn’t mean it like that. Say something happens now and they both get caught by security. who would get the worse punishment, Sal or Amber?
*Edit*: ..discussion that there might be racist components to her fantasies.
“attack a black girl, a mute girl, a filipino girl, and a trans girl”
Wait, what? When did that ever happen?
Amazi-Girl never attacked them, she was attacked by Malaya!
Amazi-Girl never attacked any girls, all of her targets (when she really attacks) are males and most of her targets are white males:
The thug in the background of the party (white male), the creep (white male), Toe-Dad (white male) and last but not least (in measurements of violence) the backpack thief.
And of course her father, but Amber was attacking, not Amazi-Girl.
One exception:
One of the bullies who kicked Danny appears to be “not-so-white” (but is male).
She did not attack (but confront): The guy with alcohol on a dry campus (scenery lightning too dark to judge if he is white), the traffic-sign vandals (both white males), the bike-thief (white male), the Whiteboard-DingDong-Bandit (white female), the cinderblock man (white male), the cat (OK, yellow and of unknown sex) and of course Danny (for “turning against her”).
There is a disturbing pattern of almost all of the criminals in this webcomic being white males (exception: a bully, a “Whiteboard Dingding bandit” and possibly a guy with alcoholic beverage – not really criminals); even more so when there are quite a lot of them.
But maybe that is because we learn about them in the context of Amazi-Girls actions – which may be caused by her racism against white people.
I pretty much agree with Spencer below, so I’m going to leave most of that behind.
Two things, I still don’t see the “pretty normal for vigilantes” and haven’t really gotten any examples from you. Zimmerman was pretty clearly driven by racism – calling in random black guys to the police – but even beyond that I don’t see the similarity. He started out carrying a gun and in the only confrontation I know about, used it and killed a kid not doing anything wrong. He didn’t start out beating up people he found committing petty crimes and then escalate. Like I said, there may be examples of this that I’m not aware of.
I’m not giving in on racism for AG though. There’s been no noticable pattern in the random people she’s beaten. She’s got clear personal reasons for hating Sal – even though they’re fucked up and wrong, they’re personal, not racial. She fought Carla & Malaya & Marcie because they were with Sal, not because they were trans, filipino & mute. I doubt she even knew about the trans or mute.
I don’t see the racist component to her fantasy. Unless anything involving black people is automatically racist. Sure, the person she’s turned into her nemesis is black, but there’s no indication at all that’s why she’s done it. She’s done it because Sal was the one in the robbery that her father used to further traumatize her. Hating a particular black person for reasons grounded in your personal history, even unfairly, isn’t racist. You need patterns for that.
Rutee:
Meant to add, I’d assume you have the same problems with super-heroes in general. Or at least the street level versions? Maybe Superman’s okay, but Batman and Spider-man are just monstrous examples of racist vigilantes?
Or is that stuff unrealistic enough not to count, but Amazi-Girl somehow is?
I mean, it is pretty goddamned racist of Amber to blatantly be glad that Sal is going to suffer for the rest of her life over her criminal record. Yes there’s personal reasons, but she’s using those personal reasons to approve of Sal having to forever be scrutinized for being a black woman with a criminal record. Yes there’s reasons outside of it, but that’s how racism works. If Whitey McJorty was the one who committed the robbery he wouldn’t suffer as badly as Sal would over the existence of his criminal record and Amber being glad that he was wouldn’t be the reinforcement of racist institutions.
Mav: Nah, I didn’t meant os ay you were saying that, and Is hould have been more clear. I was pre-emptively raising an obvious point against what I’m saying. And it’s an important point, one I think is really worth considering. It’s a pretty real fear for me. You were fine.
Stool: “Amazi-Girl never attacked them, she was attacked by Malaya!”
Yes. After she threatened to attack them all, Malaya struck her. We call what Malaya did self defense in the real world. Actual, factual, self defense. Someone has made a clear, and unambiguous, threat against her person (and also that of her friend. Oh, and two jerks, but that I don’t think she cared about.) – a reasonable person would interpret this as a threat. You strike with the force necessary to stop her, and not a jot more. They did not, in fact, beat her into the ground. They restrained her, had words, then released her and skated away. This isn’t some silly notion of Stand Your Ground or similar either. If you threaten to beat someone, and position yourself menacingly, and come down to meet them and begin approaching them, with body language that says you’re looking for a fight, it is reasonable to think they will attack you. You are allowed to non-lethally defend yourself against nonlethal force, or its imminent threat.
Amazi-girl thinks that because she struck after Malaya moved, that she is in the clear. Guess what: that’s not how it fucking works. She struck first – by making an unambiguous threat of harm. As it happens, you’re not allowed to threaten people with bodily harm. The law takes that shit kinda seriously (As long as it isn’t on the internet, and especially to a girl; in that case, you’re on your own, because no ‘reasonable person’ would take that seriously). And while I certainly can understand an argument to not entirely be mired in legality in discussing ethics, I kinda think the law has a good idea here (not the part where it ignores internet threats, the rest). Even pacifism does not generally require you to stand totally immobile and wait, hoping against hope that someone who has threatened you directly isn’t actually serious. Had Amber stood still and allowed herself to be restrained, it’d merely be assault. By fighting, she escalates it to Battery.
“And of course her father, but Amber was attacking, not Amazi-Girl.”
I’d thought it was both, but the red panel at the end of the one telling Danny to get away, as well as tagging, means that it’s true. If I gave a fuck about alters in this context, this might be really fucking important. But you know, they’re not, and I don’t. If anything, that just hurts the idea that I shouldn’t be holding her responsible for what she did (Which is part of my stance on her – her alter has interfered with her ability to tell right from wrong, and she is not responsible for her actions’.)
“She did not attack (but confront): The guy with alcohol on a dry campus (scenery lightning too dark to judge if he is white), the traffic-sign vandals (both white males), the bike-thief (white male), the Whiteboard-DingDong-Bandit (white female), the cinderblock man (white male), the cat (OK, yellow and of unknown sex) and of course Danny (for “turning against her”).”
Do you not understand that you are not, in fact, permitted to threaten people with physical harm? Are you confused on the nature of Assault? You don’t get to threaten that you’re going to attack people. This is literally what the police are for. Let them handle it. The jackasses won’t see anything serious, but that’s not really the point (Nor, ultimately, should they, given the petty nature of their crimes).
TheJeff:
Spiderman’s racist when he disproportionately affects non-white people (I say when because there’s about a jillion writers, and I can say with almost complete certainty that he’s at least historically gone around beating a bunch of black dudes with only occasional white people outside of supervillains, seeing as he existed in the 70s,) and the ‘street sweeping’ shit is generally absurd (though he does sometimes catch supervillains out doing shit, because that sells more copy as the meat of the plot for some reason). As far as Batman, yeah, he’s absolutely been a racist bastard. He’s… sometimes less racist (And possibly not racist). And Batman is quite bluntly one of the largest bastards to me, regardless of whether he’s currently fucking up non-white dudes or not. The dude is a filthy rich fucker and white man. He’d do far more good to Gotham as a politician and philanthropist (And he occasionally at least gets to be a philanthropist). The man’s toys can often be repurposed into useful things. He has (or had) villains he could – and should, for numerous ethical reasons – defuse ENTIRELY by throwing money at them. Depending on origin story he’s sometimes made matters worse with his fights (I’m pretty sure, at least, that I’ve heard of Joker sometimes having just been a smart crook before being an omnicidal maniac because of being knocked into some sort of acid). Many of his actual PLOTS would still end up being things he can, and should, handle as a superhero, but the low level radiation of “Gotham is a broken city, and I must beat up street toughs who are apparently more endless than in City of Heroes” is not the province of Batman (Though I’m told that in at least one relatively recent iteration, Gotham being broken is because of literal magic. Ironically, this does make fixing it the province of Batman, but he still isn’t doing that by poking at the endless flood of toughs.)
But you know, you didn’t fucking hear me. At all. We don’t have to guess with Amber. She straight up told Sal that it’s a good thing that Sal fears the police would arrest her, at best, because she’s a black girl with a record in the vague vicinity of a crime, even though she has exactly nothing to do with it. She has made her nemesis, the ur-criminal and ur-evil, a black woman who has done less to wrong Amber, than Amber has done to Sal(Guess what’s a more serious crime than assault! It’s Battery. They even used the same weapons for it). Not only has she done more to harm Sal, but she walked away scot-fucking-free. She enjoys, and glories in, race privilege, and has rubbed it in Sal’s face (though she doesn’t know how much. Small blessing, that Sal doesn’t entirely know either, mitigating the harm somewhat). Even if the rest of her actions were totally squeaky clean on this regard (And I can certainly believe they are LARGELY clean, if not squeakily so), she has a rather large black mark. That she does not INTEND to be racist is completely irrelevant to her effect. Relatively rarely do racist police INTEND to foster a bad environment, instead they are quicker to assume bad things of non-white people, and more disproportionately use their powers to affect them (and Amber is building a justification to do this to Sal, in this exact comic). They twist the bounds of what is ‘reasonable’, or ‘probable’. They haunt places that are favored by YBM not because they want to screw over black people, but because that’s obviously where the criminals are – not because YBM are all criminals (If you ask them, they can normally tell you that), but because that just /happens/ to be where the criminals go, because it’s poor.
She is not /particularly/ racist relative to her environment. She is certainly not uniquely so. But I did not claim that vigilantes were, now did I? I don’t really care whether you give in or not. I am not exactly unused to people insisting on ignoring the obvious. I didn’t say she was as racist as zimmerman, nor does she need to be, to be racist. Racism does not begin only when we have a body on the floor. There are numerous paths, and people traverse several.
@Rutee:
You tell a really scrambled version of what actually happened:
“she threatened to attack them all”
“clear, and unambiguous, threat against her person”
“threaten to beat someone”
“making an unambiguous threat of harm”
“threaten people with bodily harm”
Here starts what actually happened:
Sal: “All ah wanted to do was have a beer an’ relax.”
Amazi-Girl: “Tonight? Not likely!
I’ve found you underaged drinking.
Breaking the law.
That makes this so much easier.”
Where is the threat of bodily harm? Where is the threat to beat someone?
This is announcing that she will interfere with them drinking, that they will not relax. This covers everything from shouting obscenities to actually call the police.
Next strip:
Carla: “Holy shit, is that Amazi-Girl?”
Sal: “Amazi-Who?
Marcie, of course ah don’t read the news!”
Malaya: “Oh c’mon, look at her.
Who’s she intimidatin’? She’s fuckin’ tiny and there’s four of us.”
It’s exactly Malaya who pulls this immediately on the level of physical confrontation!
Next panel:
Amazi-Girl: “Come at me, skates. Please.”
Still no thread of bodily harm at all. She does not attack, she asks for being attacked!
Next panel:
Malaya rushes at her: “Roller Derby says hello.”
Ehm, roller derby? Announcing that you are into a sport that involves regular heavy physical contact?
That is indeed a threat of bodily harm!
So this is absolutely the opposite of the story you are trying to tell here!
“We call what Malaya did self defense in the real world.”
Nope we don’t. Malaya had the same option that Sal chose later: Just walk away.
No thread of violence, of bodily harm was uttered by Amazi-Girl.
All she did was announcing that she will become an annoyance, that Sal will not relax.
It was Malaya who immediately chose physical confrontation.
“Had Amber stood still and allowed herself to be restrained, it’d merely be assault. By fighting, she escalates it to Battery.”
She did stand still. All she did was raise her arm so Malaya could use the force of her own attack to run inot her.
Malaya was the one to issue threads of bodily harm and Malaya was the one to start physical confrontation. The self-defense argument applies only to Amazi-Girl.
“If I gave a fuck about alters in this context (…)”
OK, i can accept that – it is something left up to the interpretation of the reader.
“Do you not understand that you are not, in fact, permitted to threaten people with physical harm? Are you confused on the nature of Assault?”
Pedantry kicks in: You protested against attacks – not assaults.
Also, for sake of completeness:
Beer-drinker:
AG: “Citizen, this is dry campus! Please dispose of your beverage or relocate!”
Not an assault!
The traffic-sign vandals:
AG: “Halt, vandals. Hope you brought soap and water.”
Assault?
AG: “Give me the paint can.”
TSV: “Yo, shortstuff. Stop botherin’ us.”
AG: “You wanna push it? Fine with me.
I’m having a bad day and i’d love an excuse to get my hands dirty.”
That’s actually close to an assault, but it’s in the context of stopping vandalism.
TSV: “You kiddin’ me? You’re not the cops. You don’t have no authority over me.
I’m not gonna fight some little girl over some paint, man.”
AG: Why? You afraid you might lose to a “little girl”?
TSV: “Y’know, that might incite stupid people to violence, but i’m actually in engineering!”
So this was not assault, it was a bait to start attacking her and TSV is clever enough to notice it.
TSV: “So here’s what’s gonna to happen: I’m gone keep taggin’ this sign and there’s nothing nonviolent you can do to stop me.”
Does that sound like a victim of assault? TSV knows that violence will not happen (and was right with that)!
The bike-thief:
AG: “Ahem.
Cease and desist, criminal filth.”
Well, insult, but definitely no assault!
The Whiteboard-DingDong-Bandit: No assault in that story-line!
Cinderblock-man:
AG: “Hey.”
CBM: “… can i set this down before i run like hell?”
AG: “Oooh, let’s find out.”
Where’s the assault?
The cat: Well, i guess putting on the white mask counts as assault, so we finally have an example!
“Where’s the threat!?”
…Yeah, okay, a vigilante who’s been attacking ‘criminals’ declares that you’re breaking the law and swoops down to you. Malaya can tell this is a threat. That’s why her immediate response is “Who does she think she’s intimidating?” Only two people don’t know what’s going on here – one of them is Sal, who barely knows about ‘Amazo’ (and may well be more confused about Amazi-girl than what Amazi-girl is trying to say, frankly), and apparently, you.
“Nope we don’t. Malaya had the same option that Sal chose later: Just walk away.”
The US does not generally compel retreat, especially not from using non-lethal force. It’s certainly the better option, and I would be happy with a duty to retreat, but being a better thing doesn’t change that what Malaya’s doing is self-defense. Besides, *YOU* can’t use this. *YOU* are the one claiming that Amazi-girl was defending herself. You can not impute a duty to retreat, then pretend she was defending herself. She could have not entered the vicinity in the first place, as well as retreated. SHE COULD HAVE CALLED THE POLICE.
” Pedantry kicks in: You protested against attacks – not assaults.”
Okay, so you’re going to pretend that assault – a threat of bodily harm – isn’t a form of attack – especially in regards to self defense, which you claimed is the only way Amazi-girl fights. Great for you. This notwithstanding that you identified it as pedantry, so I already know it’s irrelevant.
“I’m having a bad day and i’d love an excuse to get my hands dirty.”
Close to an assault? CLOSE!? She’s outright stating she will fight the dude if he doesn’t stop. And you don’t get to stop vandalism with fucking violence, because you’re a fucking private citizen. The *POLICE* can’t ‘get their hands dirty’ until you start resisting arrest (the extent to which they’re allowed to is pretty fucking limited given unarmed dudes, especially unarmed white dudes) and Amazi-girl, shockingly, doesn’t have fucking right to arrest them. That’s assault, no bones about it. I mean fuck, “I’ve had a bad day and would love to get my hands dirty” is the sort of thing a cop would have to claim he didn’t say, in spite of the additional protections (Both within and without) the law provides to officers of the law. Engineering Vandal doesn’t rise to the bait, but it’s not anything less than assault. Further, provoking people into an attack, if it can be demonstrated in a court of law, can (in some jurisdictions, likely not including Indiana) strip your right to defense – and legalities aside, this is completely sound ethically. Self-defense is a justification – ‘ordinarily, hitting people is wrong, but /in this case/, it is okay, because I /needed to/ to prevent myself from being hurt.’ And this is all well and good. But when you try to start the fight, you didn’t need to fight to prevent yourself from being hurt – you could have just not tried to start the fight. That was in your power – you are the one who took deliberate action for there to be a fight. A bongo and a half to prove in a court of law, but we don’t need to, to discuss what Amazi-girl was doing – you already say this to try to mitigate her assault. Not much for me to add there.
” Where’s the assault?”
AYFKM!?
“Ooo, let’s find out” strongly implies that she’s about to swoop down there and beat him *NOW*. There’s no other way the question makes god damned sense.
btw, “there wasn’t assault in The Whiteboard Ding Dong Bandit”
Yeah, she committed battery on Mike, on the vague suspicion he’d done it based on someone preliminarily saying he might have. Much better than just ‘assault’. That really establishes that vigilantes in the general, and amazi-girl in particular, is actually a good thing.
“and I would be happy with a duty to retreat”
That’s not a binary choice: Me saying that she has the option to leave does not mean she has the duty to leave.
“*YOU* are the one claiming that Amazi-girl was defending herself. You can not impute a duty to retreat, then pretend she was defending herself. She could have not entered the vicinity in the first place, as well as retreated. SHE COULD HAVE CALLED THE POLICE.”
Yes, all well before Malaya started the physical confrontation. But at the moment Malaya rushed against her “Roller Derby says hello” there was no more ambiguity: Malaya started an attack!
“Okay, so you’re going to pretend that assault – a threat of bodily harm – isn’t a form of attack”
In the examples i originally listed – which you chose to reply to – there was only one example that could be interpreted as assault. And yes, we have these separate words because these have different meanings.
“which you claimed is the only way Amazi-girl fights”
I did not claim this – it may be correct for the Amazi-girl in the beginning of the comic, but in her current state she is “starting to become the villain”.
(and i listed examples of her actually attacking in my first comment in this thread).
“Close to an assault? CLOSE!? She’s outright stating she will fight the dude if he doesn’t stop.”
Nope, it could also meaning cleaning the traffic sign – which she later does!
“But when you try to start the fight, you didn’t need to fight to prevent yourself from being hurt – you could have just not tried to start the fight.”
Exactly what applies to Malaya!
““Ooo, let’s find out” strongly implies that she’s about to swoop down there and beat him *NOW*.”
Nope, it implies that she will follow him if he tries to leave the scene.
“Yeah, she committed battery on Mike, on the vague suspicion he’d done it based on someone preliminarily saying he might have. Much better than just ‘assault’.”
Oooh, sorry, i forgot that! Indeed, that was indeed a physical attack and while i normally not promote vigilante justice, Mike is an exception as the only one really deserving it (repeated sexual harassment of Joyce, playing psycho-tricks on her by switching her marker).
Gods almighty, fuck white people. “She can retreat, so it isn’t self defense, but I’M NOT SAYING SHE HAS A DUTY TO RETREAT”.
We’re done. Christ almighty, fuck White People.
When she starts her attack she stands several meters away from Amazi-Girl (actually being farthest away from AG in her group).
Is it too much too ask to wait that AG actually moves in her direction before starting an attack that can be called “self-defense”?
(AG makes not a single move in her direction, just waits for her approach).
P.S.: unfortunate choice of Gravatar then.
Cinder block dude ran away before Amber actually got around to hitting him for trying to break into someone’s car, Engineering dudes said that there was nothing non-violent she could do to stop them (like she clearly wanted to) so she didn’t and stole the sign to clean it up, she picked a fight with Sal’s friends and got her ass kicked like Sal did when she picked a fight with Malaya over something equally stupid, and I’m not gonna villainize Amber for stomping a mudhole into Blaine. And, y’know, the latter two cases were clearly presented as horrifying and wrong, which is why in her fight with Sal she never landed a hit on her and instead got kneed in the gut by Malaya, the same way Sal picked a fight, got hit a whole bunch while not even landing a scratch on her, and then it stopped before Sal could actually start fighting back. That’s, from a story telling perspective, fundamentally different. It’s the difference between seeing Ruth chuck Billie into a chair and then she gets up completely unscathed while nobody has any kind of reaction, and seeing Ruth slamming Billie into a wall and kissing her only for Billie to push her away and tell her to fuck off. One is inherently meant to be more dramatic and serious than the other.
I mean, I’m reasonably certain when we get a scene like this… http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/04-time-keeps-on-slippin/preoccupied/
…we’re not meant to be freaking out in horror that Amber is stomping on a dude. So, yeah, I’m fine saying “Amazi-Girl’s vigilantism only really got dark this chapter”, because this is literally the first time in the entire series any of the random jerks she fights have expressed any kind of humanity outside of being random jerks, and that it’s the first time the dark side of Amazi-Girl ever extended to anyone but herself, Blaine, and Sal. This is why the literal stated reason for Amazi-Girl’s inclusion in the series was “I like drawing punching so here’s a superhero.” This is why she was involved in the physics breaking, this-could-not-actually-happen-she-would-be-road-paste car chase, where the outright stated intent of the entire chapter was that physics were being bruised to illustrate a point and Sal leaps six feet in the air on a motorcycle in front of a speeding truck to catch Amber as she’s falling upwards. Until now there’s never been any real consequence to Amazi-Girl outside of the damage that Amber was causing herself. Now? Well it’s a helluva lot more real now, but there’s a reason I felt this way previously.
Also Amber is a spandex clad munchkin who can beat up five dudes who are all twice her size at once. That is, inherently, really easy for me to compartmentalize as wacky and fantastical.
…Yes. Cinder Block dude ran away. BECAUSE SHE THREATENED HIS PERSON FOR A PETTY CRIME. That is generally a fucking crime. For some god damn reason I can’t imagine, anyway, it’s probably not important, it’s not like threats to people’s person are ever acted on or a thing to ever take seriousl- WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Engineering Dude called her bluff. She threatened him, and he has a vested interest in not playing her game (Not escalating the minor misdemeanor that nobody would care about). But that doesn’t mean she didn’t threaten him. Threatening people, outside of attempting to use intimidation as self-defense (which this patently isn’t), is fucking wrong. It’s generally illegal. There are fucking reasons for that. Violence itself is wrong, except where it is needed to defend someone. It’s why we fucking handed t he sole proprietorship /of/ violence to a group of people who are supposed to be impartial and only use it when it is necessary. (They don’t. And yet, they’re still more trustworthy than the citizenry)
“we’re not meant to be freaking out in horror that Amber is stomping on a dude. So, yeah, I’m fine saying “Amazi-Girl’s vigilantism only really got dark this chapter”
Yeah, that’s self-defense (And while it’s probably going too far, I’m not going to immediately assume there’s a deeper message than ‘thief was stopped’, because it’d be a serious drag and a complete waste of time to find the ‘right’ way to restrain him when you can get the narrative message across without that. This isn’t about nitpicking even the tiniest detail). *I* was pretty pissed at Engineering Vandal and Cinder Block Dude to start with. Vigilantes are something I /barely/ tolerate within fiction that takes place with an actual state with a basically functioning police force, and then only because they are clearly dealing with superhuman threats that do pose threats of immediate harm before any kind of organized response can be carried out, assuming, wisely, that there are at least some super-human peace keepers (Actual ones) to assist with such things. The Americas have kinda higher tolerance for this kinda shit in fiction, and given that many South American countries were, at points, run by brutal regimes, I’m more forgiving of it there as well. But you know, I was completely fucking unsurprised when she, you know, attacked 4 girls in a fucking parking lot over a minor, petty crime literally nobody cared about, *herself included*, for her own god damned agenda. What a fucking shock from a vigilante.
I’m frankly impressed, on some tiny level, that you’re going to bat for her with Engineering Vandal and CBD. They weren’t named, but they no more deserved violence for a petty crime than Sal, Marcie, Malaya, and Carla. And in both cases, the same basic action was taken, just with even more physical posturing threatening imminent violence with the latter four.
Also, again: Just because you’re ignoring what it means, doesn’t make the damage of threatening four girls in a parking lot over fucking nothing, go away (Or, indeed, three boys, in two different sets of circumstances). A threat of bodily harm to your person is, itself, an emotional harm (and it’s also a, you know, threat of physical harm). There’s kind of a fucking reason why we ought to oppose harrassment campaigns and death threats – emotional harm *IS* actual harm (and also, it very well may become a threat of actual harm). Amber is clearly working on a one-woman campaign against Sal. And she started at least one book before, in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. And even if she WEREN’T, she would have been causing harm to other residents, or at least trying to (I’m glad Engineering Vandal wasn’t scared. If he’d seen what she just did earlier, he might be, though.)
I mean, she was planning on going in and fighting Sal and everyone there, the booze was just a convenient excuse. That just played out as “hey jerks fight me 1on1” and nobody wanted to, so most of them deescalated the situation (except Malaya, though I’ve previously argued that launching an attack on a noted masked nutjob who beats people up is probably something Malaya would remain morally in the clear for), and went home while Amber was the one who got her ass kicked. I’ve previously railed a lot about how much I’ve hated Ruth’s abuse of Billie, but if their encounters played off as Ruth starting shit and Billie kicking her ass every time, I’d be more willing to sympathize with Ruth.
I just don’t view this as seriously as you, I guess. Until a while back I’ve been more willing to view her non-Sal, non-Blaine related Amazi-Girl stuff through the veneer of wacky superhero fun (which very tellingly, we don’t see much of anymore since her fights with both of them), because that’s pretty much what it was. Like, if Amazi-Girl were real of course I’d be horrified by her existence, but she isn’t. She lives in a world where Carla can build and execute a perfectly timed laser light show and pie to the face, where Sarah can hammerspace a bat to repel super huggy moms, where Joyce and Mike can beat on Joe in public and not face any repercussions, and where Sal can summon a speedboat and a groupie to prove she is definitely as cool as everyone thinks she is.
Also I just really don’t feel bad for cinderblock guy because he was about to break into someone’s car. I’d be genuinely okay with someone stepping up and scaring away a cinderblock guy if he tried to bust open my car to steal all 30 cents I keep in there, though I also recognize there’s a difference between a random stranger helping out versus someone who wears a dumb costume and prowls the night looking for crimes to prevent.
tldr: It just hasn’t been that big a deal to me. It clearly is to you, though, so I don’t want to try and take that from you. This is just how I feel.
I’m not even really expecting anger, as such. I am okay with not caring. But the sheer effort people go to, to try to say this shit is okay in character, is not actually not caring. And most of the people try to use actual ethical claims to say ‘it’s fine’. If people were saying “yeah, it’s wrong, but I don’t care” or “Sure, it’s wrong, but she won’t see punishment because it’s fiction and we’re primed to accept this” or whatever, it’d be a different comment threat.
As far as not feeling bad for CBD, threaten him with the cops. Get in his way. You don’t need to hurt the guy, and you don’t need to threaten that you’ll hurt him. He can barely move the block.
“Yeah it’s wrong, but I don’t care” and “Sure it’s wrong, but she won’t see punishment because it’s fiction and we’re primed to accept this” is kind of what I’ve been trying to get at. I don’t care because Amazi-Girl is a fictional character who can’t and never will cause any real harm. This strip here is fucking horrifying, but it’s not like Sal’s in any real danger. At worst this ends with AG getting another ass kicking because we already know for a fact we’ll never see Amber hurt Sal, because the last time Amber tried to have a fiery climactic showdown to the death she was an ineffectual clown who got taken down with a knee to the gut while her nemesis told her she was a violent, authoritarian thug.
Like, unless I’m misreading you, you think I’m okay with Amazi-Girl existing as a vigilante, and that I think being an actual, real world vigilante would be an okay and acceptable thing to do, rather than me acknowledging that this is a work of fiction where a munchkin in spandex is able to surf on cars. I’m not going with an ‘ethical’ claim because why would I even bother. This isn’t even an actual ethical quandary; she’s a cartoon character.
I am a bit (what a lie) – no really i am seriously astonished/bewildered about your appeal to authorities here; did you read the comments in the recent Carla vs. Mary strips?
Especially this one, search for “ischemgeek”, second hit (can’t make a direct link, too deep in the thread.
Does that really sound like a convincing argument for “just leave it to the official authorities”?
There is seriously, seriously, seriously a huge difference between Carla v. Mary and Amber v. Sal. Like, so massive a chasm they can’t be compared at all.
Carla’s a trans lady going up against a cis, straight fundamentalist Christian woman. Carla would be endlessly scrutinized and browbeaten by authorities if she lodged an official complaint, if they ever even gave her the time of day because Carla is too trans for them to bother with.
Amber’s an 18-year old kid running around deciding that she’s morally justified in beating people up. Yes she’s beaten up a lot of straight up shitbags but she’s still deciding on her own merit that she’s allowed to do so, and that she knows well enough to decide when someone deserves an ass kicking. Amber has intervened and helped people, Danny, that one lady being harassed by a giant creep, and has stopped plenty of purse snatchers, and that’s good, but that doesn’t make a real life vigilante doing these things okay. It worked for Amber because Amber’s a cartoon character who’s never going to suffer lasting consequences for her actions.
The ‘official authorities’ are considerably less lethal to me than the general populace, and I say this as a trans woman of color. Considerably more likely to throw me in prison though. Thanks for trying to use my problems, which I understand far, far better than you, against me, though. Super thrilled to know what I’m worth to you.
Amenywhosits, in brief: “Authorities made it worse after ordinary people harrassed me” is rather missing my point neatly, don’t you think? Even when the authorities are HOSTILE, you’re better off dealing with them than letting the citizenry do it, right up until a certain level of hatred (Usually when the government actively organizes against you; at this point, you’d damned well better run. But an authority almost never gets that bad unless the citizenry actively despises you). The authorities come from the citizenry. The authorities don’t become hostile unless the citizenry is, generally. They don’t become helpful unless the citizenry is, generally.
But you know who far outnumbers the members of government, or the various minor authorities that go out in our lives? The citizenry. And when they’re unfettered, the worst will get even worse. It’s not. Fucking. Worth it.
see you’ve gone past the point of being reasonable here. you have a guy who has given you a well thought out explanation of “why it is what it is” and you pluck and pull at the flimsiest of straws. Sometimes you need to take a step back and go ” Okay. This is exaggerated for the sake of telling a story” or “oh this is hyperbole” or “hey. This could never happen in real life. I went to I-U and know for a fact that the administration would have knocked mary’s dick in the dirt for what she did to carla. ”
There is such a thing called suspension of disbelief, which loosely means that sometimes you have to accept that something a storyteller wants to to tell a story or mke a point but in order to do that makes something happen that would be incredibly rare in real life. you are at the point where you are hating for hate sake, and it could be argued that that’s exactly what amber/ag is doing in this arc.
“when we get a scene like this”
Oops, another one!
(other comment is awaiting moderation, two links are one too many).
Interesting.
I can’t see Amber attending classes in that state (assuming that the Blaine personality has taken over full time) I wonder how Willis will keep Amber part of the story-line once her breakdown becomes widely known?
Amazi-Girl is a master of stealth. She was hiding behind a dialogue balloon this whole time!
Oh fuck off Amber.
….ugh. She’s fucking sick. I *despise* Amazi-girl, and I’m not going to think of her like that.
Mental illness is not an excuse for hurting people, it’s an explanation. She’s still a toxic and dangerous influence on the people around her regardless of whether or not her being such is understandable.
It’s the literal definition of an excuse. Her behavior isn’t permissible, but because of her mental state we actually shouldn’t be hating her. She isn’t responsible as we define the term for her actions.
Yeah, sure Amber. And if it should happen that you trip while climbing down from your lookout post here and end up in crutches I’ll just bet that she will have “taken your foot” from you as well. Funny how this sort of thing works out.
Oh dear
I have a feeling Amazi-Girl is going to be getting Amber expelled due to a future action against Sal.
I’m starting to suspect Amazi-Girl is not a healthy person.
It took our precious!
So, Gollum or Vader?
If she’s Gollum, then Danny is her Precious and they’ll end up falling in a volcanic mountain. If she’s Vader, she’ll end up dismembered and getting a lava bath. Hmmm, both options include lava, interesting.
Geez Amber calm down.
I really enjoy the word baloon reveal
I find it a shame Danny thinks Amber is a real person. If Amazi-Girl just let her die then she could move on from the Sal stuff.
That’s not even remotely how that works.
Pretty sure he intentionally “flipped the script” there, so to speak.
Just because Amazi-Girl was born Amber doesn’t mean she has to be Amber for the rest of her life.
I do hope that sentence was meant sarcastically.
Sal’s robbery created Amazi-Girl so:
Sal: “Blaine never told you what happened to your father.”
Amazi-Girl: “He told me enough! He is my father!”
Sal: “No, I am your father.”
The mark of a good Superhero is knowing how to use your medium and hide behind word bubbles.
I hope Amber gets the help she needs. I hope that happens before any more people get hurt.
Amber v Sanity: Dawn of Amazi-Girl.
Written and directed by Zack Snyder.
Random thought: I am not sure if I am right, but I think I remember there was a time when Amber and Amazi-Girl weren’t… split. Basically, the only pronoun used was “I/me”. Am I right? If yes, when did this split start?
I know it only happened really recently. About since the incident with Toe Dad, I think? Sal questioned her reasons, and the split started becoming really evident about that point, I think. Amber’s just gotten worse since.
Since her fights with Blaine and Sal, Amber has become much more stringent with compartmentalizing her identities. At first it was “I want Danny to date Amazi-Girl and not Amber because reasons” to Amber referring to both personae in third person to describe their actions, and now here with Amazi-Girl making decisions for Amber’s supposed benefit and referring to each other as completely separate identities. Previously it was just that Amber was using Amazi-Girl as a dumping ground to process one specific feeling, and she was insistent to Danny that Amazi-Girl was not a real person he could ever love. Heck, used to be Amber had her regular hair, voice, and cheek blush. She’s been pushing at the boundaries between Amber and Amazi-Girl since the start of the series.
So, yeah, Amber’s gotten a lot worse.
I don’t know how true this is for anyone else, but in my case, I often find that when dealing with my diagnosed Bipolar Disorder NOS I tend to talk in these very dramatic, TV-show-esque statements, especially in mania.
So I can relate here.
Uh-oh. She’s gone from eccentric to nutter. I don’t like where this is heading.
On the plus side, her hair looks great.
Doesn’t it, though? It’s the conditioner, a Guild of Calamitous Intent exclusive. It even works on Medusa hair, so on ordinary hair – no matter how damaged – it works just a treat. Fantastic stuff.
Okay…bear with me for a sec, because I’m sort of free-streaming this from my head…
–We know that Sal has robbed convenience stores in the past. Or at least one, which got her sent to the school for delinquent southern belles.
–And we know that Amber believes Sal is the one that caused her trauma, because of all the flashbacks.
–But the flashbacks are all in Amber’s mind. And Ethan didn’t recognize Sal when she sat right next to him and talked to her.
Is it possible that Sal *isn’t* the one that Amber staked through the hand with her own knife? That AmaziGirl, in mid-panic mode, just superimposed Sal’s face into her own past traumatic event, a girl she literally just saw for a second coming out of the elevator?
I mean, sure, it seems like a mighty big coincidence, that a girl with a past like Sal’s fits so neatly into a past like Amber’s, but having said that, it seems like it would be an even bigger coincidence that the same delinquent girl from so many years ago just happens to go to the same school, and out of 48,500 students, happens to run into the one girl who went split-personality because of her.
Just based on what we know, isn’t the connection between Amber and Sal…kind of weak? Sal just happens to have a delinquent past (not incredibly rare), and just happened to moderately resemble a delinquent from Amber’s past?
Not solid proof, but other than that lack, there aren’t any clues otherwise. Would be really lousy storytelling for there to be no payoff there. Without dropping some better clues.
Sal in Amber’s flashbacks looks more like Sal in Sal’s flashback than like Sal today – hair mostly.
There’s also the fact that Sal wears gloves even while sleeping. It seems likely she’s covering up a scar from getting stabbed through the hand.
I can’t help but think of how these are “yes” types of answers, as in, answers to justify a “yes” conclusion, where the real test of a given theory is to ask the “no” questions, the questions that would disprove a given theory. I mean, is wearing gloves really something that has been historically linked to being stabbed in the hand, or is it just ‘likely’ because it provides another “yes” for the conclusion? If a person wears bike gloves to bed (and pretty much all hours of the day), and they are known to be bikers, wouldn’t the likely reason be that she simply likes wearing them? As opposed to something relatively far-fetched as having a knife injury to hide?
That said, I can’t really think of any “no” questions. As thejeff pointed out, there really isn’t much in the way of proof either way. I don’t completely agree that it would be lousy storytelling, as it seems to me that it would be a fairly dramatic realization for Amber that this entire revenge tale she has woven around Sal has no foundation at all, and Amazigirl is actually targeting an innocent (so to speak) person. However, as I mentally review the story from a Sal-centric viewpoint…it just seems kind of random.
Granted, this is mostly a thought exercise, and I sincerely doubt Sal is not the same person who was assaulted by Amber way back when, but in terms of actual probability…we are mostly assuming this is the case based on the accusation of a campus vigilante who has admitted anger and personality issues. I know we aren’t supposed to judge a person’s character based on their mental illness, but surely a mental illness can gives us reason to doubt a given person’s conclusions.
I think it would actually make for a much more interesting story if Amber has been obsessing over and begrudging the existence of the wrong person.
Part of the reason I think it would be lousy storytelling is that, as far as I remember, Amber hasn’t actually been told about Sal’s robberies. It’s not like she heard that Sal had robbed a convenience store and then decided Sal must be her robber. She recognized her. Which makes that robbery in this theory just there to screw with the readers.
Also, while Ethan didn’t recognizer her, he did think she was familiar – which was conveniently explained by her being Walky’s twin.
And on the meta level of course, the flashbacks are tagged with Sal. Which makes it really screwing with the readers if it wasn’t.
Sal’s robbery is significant to her. It was a result of, and a cause of, many of the issues she is dealing with. Her robbery is part of her own story. Whether or not it has a connection to Amber won’t change that. That’s kind of what I meant by looking at things from a Sal-centric viewpoint, instead of just seeing everything in terms of how it relates to Amber.
And Amazigirl is also guilty of feeling Walky was slightly dangerous, based on little more than a superficial resemblance to Sal. Even after accepting the cookies of peace he shared with I-Feel-Stabby girl. It’s not a reasoned and logical deduction. It’s just a gut feeling made while Amber was being triggered (which doesn’t mean it’s wrong).
But yeah, tagging it “Sal” would totally be screwing with the readers.
Even without the tags, he could have done something similar, equally significant to Sal, but not lining up so precisely with the robbery Amber and Ethan were involved with.
What precisely? All we know is that Sal robbed a convenience stores. Everything else we get from Amber’s flashbacks.
Anyhow, the topic’s run its course, I think.
Then fucking do it Amazi-girl. Realize just how low you’ll go. Maybe then you’ll realize just how much help you need.
I’m serious. Sometimes you need to be taken to that spot, just to see how it can be.
Amber needs some therapy.
Amber, no! This is EXACTLY why Danny asked you to take a break from Amazi-Girl. He didn’t ask you to quit, he asked you to take a break, for your mental and physical health. And this is why. You’re about to do something you can never take back…..and I’m sincerely hoping that Sal’s changed enough that she won’t hold it against you. (Since she’s already proven she has a pretty good idea of AG’s mindset that spurs her on to this stupid shit.)
I feel a great swell of pity for Amber, who after having discovered in Amazi-Girl a great power, a symbol bigger than herself that inspires people, has ignored the responsibility that comes with it. Instead, she’s abused the mask for selfish reasons, divorced herself from any credit for what makes Amazi-Girl work, and created a frightening alter-ego made of venom and rage that threatens to go full Mr. Hyde the more it’s used.
Spider-Man at least had the luxury of casting off his black costume and literally beating it up when it came back for revenge. Amber isn’t going to have that.
THIS. Amber for srs needs to watch Spectacular Spider-Man – possibly during therapy.
… There needs to be vigilante-specific therapy and counseling. It could exist in the real world!
Oh! What a wonderful development. 🙁
Amber is going to get a lot worse before she gets better isn’t she?
I really don’t think so. But then I didn’t actually think she’d get this bad.
Still, I’m not sure how much farther she can go without permanently losing the reader’s sympathy. For some people, that point already seems past.
amazi-girl is gonna end up in a cell next to toe dad if she doesnt quit while shes ahead
There are no therapists. So please, Willis, start drawing some. 🙁
OH NO! She’s slowly becoming Batman from Batman vs. Superman! DON’T LOSE YOUR MORALS AND VALUES AMAZI-GIRL! IT’S NOT GONNA MAKE YOU COOOOOOOOLLLLLLLL!!!!
Ohhhhhhh dear.
I’m sure this has been mentioned numerous times already, but nicely done Willis on the speech bubble placing! Just to show that Amazi-girl has been there the whole time, but only revealed when we needed her to be. Nice! I checked back to yesterdays strip too and saw that we wouldn’t have been able to see AG as the speech bubble neatly covered her up. That’s a pretty cool thing to add in there, you could’ve easily just not done a wide shot and had close ups of the two talking before we see AG, but this is definitely a cooler way of introducing AG to the scene.
Did you check the hover text for today?
(Also, god I love Korrasami.)
Haha no, literally the one time I didn’t check it and of course Willis would bring it up. Now I feel stupid!
Korrasami are greattt, I should really watch Korra again soon
Where’s Becky when you need her?
“Hey, Ambster the hamster! Whatcha doin’ down there?”
…oh gosh, I hope she doesn’t end up feeling guilty for helping Joyce if it turns out that her other savior Amazi-girl went nuclear while she was out of town…
I hope Sal and Amber and Amazi-Girl can get together at a slumber party or something and resolve their difficulties by comparing their stories and sharing their feelings in relaxed and earnest conversation!
Amber really needs to get a therapist or something.
And you’re just figuring this out now?
Amber is a super-villain now.
lets hope this leads Amber to join Rollerderby
Honestly the LEAST destructive outcome I can imagine for this is Amazigirl joining roller derby and gaslighting Marcie into thinking Sal is abusive to her and I just straight up don’t want to think about the worse ones
This looks like a supervillain origin story right here.
I think we can all agree that Amber’s DID is getting worse. I really hope Sal quickly realizes who Amber is or that Ethan recognizes Sal and informs her about Amber because I think the only way for Amber to start healing this rift in personalities is for Sal to confront her because Amber is too afraid and Amazi-Girl is too stubborn/angry to do it themselves.
With all this DID, the first thing that came to my mind was “PRECIOUS!”
Alt-text: did you seriously just refer to word bubbles as “word balloons”?
Hey, hey split-personality Gollum? You’re the one who told Danny to go. Nothing taken, only pushed.
Please move out of the fantasy life you’re living in your head, Amber you chuunibyou dork.