So, it’s not often that the dad in one of these stories is the one to take a step back and ask important questions, cover for the kid, or anything like that
Carol “I AM THE MOM!!! I MUST BE OBEEEEYYYED!!!” Brown is clearly the head of the family. Hank’s responsible for cleaning up to make sure problems are resolved without his darling wife’s fragile one-note world falling apart, like Joyce’s has.
I still don’t think she IS the head of the household- not really. I get the impression that she feels she should defer to her husband even when she doesn’t like it- especially in front of others- so she’s excelled at manipulation instead. (Look at her reaction when Hank said Joyce could keep hanging out with Dorothy- Carol did NOT support that, but she stayed quiet and just glared.) Likewise, she clearly didn’t want Becky to come at all or to stay- but it appears she’s bowed to him in those as well.
She is definitely the lead in control and religious indoctrination- although it’s hard to be sure if that was always the case, from Hank’s earlier appearance at IU.
This, it is on her to enforce moral order and she’s allowed a lot of passive-aggressive means to try and argue her case, but if the man of the house argues that the sky is green and the floor is lava, she is supposed to not differ from that and instead follow his lead, because awful ideas of men’s and women’s roles in that sect of religion.
It’s also why she shut up but glared when Hank was like “we support you and think you are a good kid” after she stood up to them at the Fountain.
However, from my experience with moms like Carol in positions like Carol I think we can expect an increase in passive-aggression, reading any negative Joyce emotions as a personal defiance, and sniping at Joyce and Becky when they are alone with her.
Keeping in mind that I’ve probably never said my entire life, I sure as f*** will say amen to that. But you’re missing something: It’s CoolDad McCool, First of His Name, Breaker of Prejudice, Father of Progress (and hopefully dragons), of House Cool-Born.
Eh, doing the bare minimum of lying to protect vulnerable children from wifey’s self-righteous, inflexible, people-hating yet desperate to be respected ways is not exactly saintly I think. That would be if he loudly distanced himself from her only-there-to-be-something-to-escape style of parenting and the poisonous religion that led to it.
Not that he’s not doing good, but he’s still much overshadowed by the cartoonish evil he choose to associate himself with.
I disagree that this is the bare minimum he could be doing. According to his religious beliefs he didn’t have to do anything at all to support Joyce and Becky here. Instead of writing them off loke the Mother is trying to do, he did some serious soul searching and made a really difficult decision. He certainly isn’t a saint, but credit where it’s due. The man is stepping up in a way no other parent in this comic has yet.
Personally, I think what defines a great person isn’t what opinions they hold at any given moment, but rather their ability to reconsider those opinions when faced with opposing evidence.
And you’re good enough, and yur smart enough and gosh darnit– people like you!
I’m not sure what he meant, always seemed like a sentence fragment, people like him …what? People like him surf? People like him cavort? People like him aver?
I… I think he was more comparing Dorothy herself to Hitler?
But I honestly, earnestly believe that the moment someone tries to make up for their past mistakes and truly, genuinely become a better person than they were when they made them, we shouldn’t hold said mistakes against them any longer.
Erm, by which I also mean to say that we shouldn’t also forget those mistakes. If nothing else, they show an insight into a person, and we need to understand how those mistakes came to be made- and how far their attempts to improve as a person are likely to go.
But yeah, Hank is actively taking huge steps to overcome what he was taught and lived in order to become a better man. That should be respected at the least, if not admired.
Blaine seems to view his offspring as his literal possessions to fuck with and abuse as he pleases. Carole is at least less wrong in that she is genuinely concerned for the well being of her children. Of course the problem arises with how she judges ‘well being’.
And I mean, here is a point that I can sympathize with Hank and even Carole on. Joyce did take the family car and drive off for the entire day without telling anyone and apparently remained out of contact the entire time. I can think of plenty of entirely secular reasons for him to be stressing out about this even if Joyce is technically an adult.
Honestly, I don’t think that Carol doesn’t view her kids as possessions. I think she does, but to her kids, she wraps it up under the guise of concern for them.
My mom, when I was living with my folks, used to do it all the time. She did not view me as anything other than a possession to make her look good (“when you have a daughter you have her for life” type of thing), but to my face, she’d always pretend that she only wanted to control my every waking moment down to how much and how I fidgeted (no, really) because she was concerned for my well-being. I was so naive and sheltered, you see, I would get eaten alive in the real world (real world meaning if I joined clubs she didn’t approve of or volunteered for causes she didn’t like or etc) and it was her job to protect me from it – rather than giving me the tools to navigate it successfully.
This included wanting me to abide by a curfew when I went to uni, email all my assignments to her before I handed them in so my folks could proof-read them, and insisting on veto power over whatever I wanted to do.
And it’s further complicated by the sect they belong to wherein children are not only possessions of the parents, but it is on the parents to make sure those possessions get entered into the Kingdom of Heaven when the Rapture comes down any day now, by making sure they remain free of sin and any signs of disobedience of God’s authority.
Thus justifying that type of parent to even more thoroughly meddle and micromanage their childrens’ lives.
Also *massive hugs* for growing up with that shit.
Oooh yeah, this, did she micromanage how you carried objects, too? Mine had specific ideas about that, particularly books for some reason. (By your sides. Only. Extended arms, no bent elbows, never in front of the body. Yes. No. HELL no. Why? WHO THE FUCK CAN EVEN TELL.)
(Still better than the other one, mind you. He’d hit me in the head for looking in the same direction for too long. Not for looking at the wrong thing, just, you know, looking in the same direction. Because thinking too much, I guess? idek. For “floating” is what he called it. This is the first time I’ve talked about that outside of therapy, I think, and being hypervigilant as fuck, I am reaaaaaaaal nervous about it. But, yeah, why? Maybe not being involved enough in whatever he was doing? Fuck if I know.)
(and this is in category talking too much about this shit even in an opt-in filter because your friends freak out and decide you’re delusional and aren’t friends with you anymore, but well, it’s a comments section on a webcomic, right? and given this comic and this shit, maybe somebody else is going through this crap, in which caes HEY KID I MADE IT I’M NOT GONNA LIE IT WAS FUCKIN’ BRUTAL BUT I GOT OUT AND YOU CAN TOO, IT’S PROBABLY GONNA TAKE A WHILE AND I’M SORRY ABOUT THAT BUT GOOD LUCK.)
But yeah: objects to make them look good.
And the thing is, if you figure that out, you can use it. Like I told her the last time I ever talked to her, the very first thing I remember learning is never to let her know what I really thought about anything. The less they knew about me, the better, and if you can get good at avoidance and at acting, you can manoeuvre your way around all kinds of crap until you manage to work your way out of range.
Oh don’t be silly. Carol is doing a fairly good parenting job. Setting and firmly upholding boundaries is good parenting, and she’s only talked to the newer, more mature Joyce for all of half an hour so far, during which time Joyce pretended to be the younger, less mature Joyce. How is she supposed to accept Joyce as a grown woman? Joyce is her baby. My mother still treats me like I’m 5 sometimes and I’m a grown ass man a foot taller and 100 pounds heavier than her.
Carol is not a villain, or evil, or even a bad parent. She’s just intolerant. That’s it. She has not kicked Becky out of her house, she said a couple passive-aggressive comments at dinner and claimed that college was a bad influence on Joyce.
Calm the fuck down y’all smh Joyce is based off of Willis’ college days and I strongly doubt that he hates his parents. Carol may see the light, she may not, but she’s not going to fuck anything up and Hank is there to temper and block the decisions and reactions that would hurt Joyce.
I think that it is most likely to end up having something to do with what he knows will happen if his wife rejects his daughter’s position in their life. He failed to protect one of his beloved children from his wife, and now that kid is persona non grata. He probably loves Joyce more than any of his boys, because she’s the youngest and a girl. It’ll be interesting to see what lengths he’ll go to to avoid losing any more of his family; which is going to end up coming first, his children, or his religion?
I wasn’t in the camp I mentioned earlier, it just seems like some of the more disdainful comments about Hank (at least the ones without elaboration) gave the impression that things aren’t as they seem with regards to his helpfulness to Joyce.
My, we are exploring persona non grata from several perspectives in this comic of late. Ambermazing Girl and Danny and Sal’s perspectives, as well as Dorothy and Hank and Carol’s perspective on the eldest brother. I didn’t even realize it was a theme until your comment.
Yup, he’s a natural peacemaker so he’s trying to keep both, but I think that’s going to become harder and harder for him. Especially when he finds out he has two daughters.
I actually expect Hank to speak with Joyce privately to ask why she took the car without asking permission. I hope that will result in Joyce admitting she overheard their conversation about pulling her out of school.
I didn’t see it as wanting Joyce to “owe him one.” I saw it as him not thinking it was a big deal, and also recognizing that it would only add fuel to the already blazing “Joyce should stop going to the soulless college and go to a good, Christian college.”
He’s still a dad, so I’d expect him to sit her down in private and have a little talk about respect for the rules, for her parents, etc. But I think it’d be a fairly gentle talk, not an attempt at a guilt trip or mind control.
It really doesn’t look like that will be the case, but if it was would we be blindsided by that reveal as opposed to getting subtle hints leading up to it? Then again, I was just throwing it out that idea out right before going to sleep as opposed to coming from a place of suspicion. I’m not really skeptical of Hank.
Why would we need any kind of Chekhov’s Gun to provide hints of what any parent might do? After covering for your daughter’s gaff to prevent a huge blow-up, and it was a gaff since the dad would have probably just given them the keys, a little chat is well within reasonable expectations. Borrowing a car is nor something that any university age child, even if above the age of majority, should just assume is their right, especially if there are ground rules covering those things already.
And given the household, it’s a very fair expectation that there are rules about a great many things.
My impression is that he has a basic grasp of trauma and realizes that Joyce needs space and that her healing process may involve some erratic behavior.
“You GOT to start practice hunting. Your weird, magic foodbox won’t work forever, you know. Here, I’ll bring a mouse and you… DON’T CHASE IT OUT YOU IDIOT, I can’t believe you lost another one.”
The idea that cats view us as oversized kittens who rely on magic food sources for ourselves and them is now firmly implanted in my head and I love it.
My cat hugs my face every morning after we let him out of his room in the morning (still less than a year old and we’re afraid he might destroy something if left unsupervised).
See, I can’t let mine sleep in my room anymore. I got her one of those automatic feeding bowls so her breakfast arrives every day at six.
However, she can’t understand the concept of time, she just knows that it usually shows up around sunrise. As the seasons change, so does the time the sun comes up.
Now that it’s summer, the sun will rise before six, she notices that her food has not arrived, and she comes in to loudly inform me that she doesn’t think much of the service in this place and will not be leaving me a tip.
Here’s where he screwed up though. He didn’t mention anything ALL DAY until Joyce and Becky got back. You’d think at some point during the day Carol would’ve said something to him along the line of “Where are the girls? And wait, where’s the car?!” Covering up for them now seems like a bit too late to be credible…
They’ll probably been arguing all day about pulling Joyce out of school. Either that or Hank stayed away from Carol so he’d not have to hear her ranting about “that sinning lesbian” Becky.
I’m guessing this one. It’s a society that forbids women from being clear with their feelings and their displeasure. Fuming and passive aggression makes a lot of sense in that context… Although Carol is also aggressive-aggressive, so I may be being too generous with a known jerk.
That part doesn’t matter as much. If the patriarch of the house in that sect says something completely fictitious as a family decision, then Carol is bound by the weirdo rules of that sect to abide it though she may passively-aggressively snipe about it or do like she did this morning and angrily argue her case in private.
It’s a pretty horrendous system overall, but Hank is definitely exploiting it here to get her to back off from the kids. Which isn’t to say that this isn’t a positive use of that power, just noting the why of why it’s working here.
It’s said, when Joyce says to Becky that she wants to take the car and go out, that Joyce specifically didn’t say she was going to ask to take the car.
That’s what I was wondering. Like, did Carol reach her conclusion and then sit there brooding while Hank was like, “Well, I’m going to stay heck away from this”?
My money’s on Carol stewing on this all day without mentioning it to Hank at all. And it’s on Hank realizing that Joyce and Becky needed time out of the house and didn’t say/do anything to set his wife off earlier.
And I don’t think Carol tried calling Joyce to ask where she was either…guess she’d already come to a conclusion without any need for evidence or explanation.
Plus THIS way she can make it a power trip and try to pull Joyce out of school to “protect” her from “bad influences” that make her anything other than an easily cowed parent-worshipper.
Dina: Technically my parents are a combination of solids, liquids, and gases that appear primarily solid. On the other hand, since atoms are mostly empty space by percentage an argument could be made…
Sarah: Their personalities seem figuratively solid.
I dunno, Dina’s dad and Dorothy’s dad are pretty awesome-sauce. But Hank’s definitely been making a strong play for the top 5 DoA dads list after his initial fumble with his fucked-up beliefs about the Nazis.
I dunno, I suspect that Hank is just doing what he can to keep everyone from starting a row at three in the morning. Whether he’s upset with the girls or not remains to be seen.
Let’s review the important events so far:
If we think back to when Hank met up with them at the campus and Becky invited herself on the family trip, Hank seemed to express some concerns about Becky, but said that he trusted Joyce, and that if Joyce believed she wasn’t a bad influence that he would trust her judgement. As a sign of that good faith he even let Joyce drive the car home.
Early the next morning, after a tense dinner the night before, Joyce overheard her parents arguing and her mother expressing concerns about Joyce staying at a public school (of course most of Carol’s concerns boil down to ‘the atheists’ and ‘the gays’). Hank argued that college life wasn’t having a bad influence on Joyce and that they should trust their daughter’s judgement.
… then Joyce and Becky took the car without asking, we see Joyce explicitly tell Becky not to answer any calls from their parents, and after staying out of contact all day they get caught sneaking in the wee hours of the morning.
Now, while I don’t think Joyce and Becky have done anything seriously wrong (kids that age do stuff like that all the time) – I think it’s important to try and see things from Hank’s point of view.
After making a big deal of telling Joyce how much he trusts her to make good decisions and even sticking up for Joyce in the argument with Carol, Joyce and Becky went AWOL with the family car for the day. Even if he’s not outright mad at the girls, I suspect he’ll be disappointed in them at the least.
I’m imagining an awkward few hours where Hank pretended no to know why they were staying up late so he could drop his lie at the most dramatically opportune moment.
I imagine at least a few wouldn’t, if only in the interests of painting a thin veneer of civility over their bile so they can worm into folks who’d otherwise discard said fabrications out of hand.
Yes but if they’re using slurs, it’s entirely possible that Joyce would not recognize what those slurs are meant to describe in the first place, or even not connect those slurs to the concept of transgenderism immediately after learning about what that is.
Nope, I was referring to them using slurs instead of saying transgendered people. Because if they’re going to be bitter, why stop at making shit up about people they really know nothing about?
Having said that, my original post sucks for not clearly getting that point across.
I like Jossssssua. Because it takes me a moment to remember that her family doesn’t know her by her real name, so that’s how my mind imagines all the Browns referring to her.
Quotes have other purposes besides “scare quotes.” (See?) It can also be just a way to say that Joyce would say her brother while JessWitt acknowledges that they know otherwise.
I suggest using [sic] in the future. Because there’s nothing pedants like more than that word!
Thaaat depends a lot of personal opinion about Jesuits. They were seen as manipulative and two-faced during centuries, though that reputation seems to have mellowed in the laast decades.
Well, he changed his name to Snoop Lion because Snoop Dog was trapped in a very one-sided royalties deal while Snoop Lion isn’t. Prince did something similar, which goes a long way to explaining his rather bizarre change to a symbol.
I think this stems from the fact that despite what they did, Hank knows Joyce enough to know that even though she took the car she wouldn’t actually do anything bad and that she probably needed some distance from Carol. Carol is, well she’s having trouble adapting her world view. A lot of people are like that, humans like things that are easy to catagorize and sort, they want everything in their world to fit into nice neat boxes especially the people in their lives. Joyce is changing and Carol doesn’t like that because she doesn’t know how to classify her now, just like she doesn’t know how to classify Becky because in her mind the box Becky falls into is now exclusively the box of a sinner and she was raised and then raised people to never associate with sinners because she’s afraid the more you associate with them the more you change. Partially because that’s right, the more you understand why people might do what you disapprove of the more you begin to emphazise and change with them and in the case of homosexuality which isn’t a choice understand that just because you yourself do not fit into that catagory doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing that someone else does.
Short version: Joyce is changing, Carol doesn’t like it because that means she has to shift her world view accordingly and that is hard.
The problem with that is that’s the definition of bad parenting. Parenting is all about letting go and allowing your children to become adults. Joyce Mom wants to infantalize her daughter whenever possible and with adults, that can only lead to verbal and mental abuse.
As someone who had a similar mother (to the point where I haven’t had contact with her in a year, and don’t consider her as family anymore), I know that all too well…add in the fact that Jocelyn’s pretty much me from three years ago, and this is getting kinda eerie for me.
True, a big part of parenting is letting your children go and develop into the young men and women they’re going to become. But, setting clear boundaries for appropriate behavior and disciplining when those rules are broken is an important part too.
It’s all about moderation, not being too strict, but also not raising them to have no sense of what is acceptable behavior or character. It’s all about moderation – give and take. Carol is, obviously, WAY too strict and rigid, while Hank seems a little more flexible.
He’s covering for Joyce and Becky now, but I suspect they’re not out of the woods just yet. They did steal his car after all, and that’s a pretty big betrayal of a parent’s trust, especially when Hank’s been trying really hard to be in Joyce’s corner this whole trip.
Carol is an interesting case where she probably was a wonderful mother but she will double down and triple down on bad behavior whenever things challenge her worldview. Which will only get Joyce to do the same. As my preacher says, “He does not bend, can only break.”
Hank is clearly the ‘bender’ in their marriage – she’s the oak, he the willow. This doesn’t make him weak, merely flexible. When Carol breaks, he is there to support her. He sees Joyce is changing, and while he doesn’t agree with how she’s changing, he’s there to support her.
This is the best response ever. You are super smart and super observant. And also helped me sum up my own views on a few things with a couple thrifty words.
Hank is totally on Joyce’s side because, duh, they totally bonded in the revelry of being out of the mother’s grasp for a while. He learned more about her, and she learned more about him, which conveniently arrived at a juncture that allowed them to broaden their own horizons willingly.
Doubtful that Carol would even consider changing her world view. I mean how can she: she is RIGHT and really that is all she needs to know.
My parents were religious in a low key way. When I announced for Wicca, out loud, my mother was sure I would change my mind and accept baptism, however there were no fireworks, no threats.
My dad was like: whatever.
The point being I have never changed and my parents felt no need to change their world view. We all believed what we wanted, and co-existed. It worked. Wasn’t always smooth, but we lived with it.
Man you’re lucky. When I was contemplating Buddhism at an early age, my mother found out because my teachers told her. Then she sat me down, told me she was never going to accept such a thing, that I was doomed to hell and later, when I broke my arm, she… really didn’t care.
I don’t know why I just had verbal diarrhea, it just happened. Sorry.
Well, this is the comments section for it, gods know. DoA draws all the adult survivors of severe childhood abuse to the yard (and I am not an exception), so it’s not like it’s just you.
The issue is: To have trouble adapting your world view, you have to be trying to adapt your world view in the first place. Carol is like Toedad in that she will never try to change her world view in light of new information.
She does not genuinely want what’s best for Joyce, she wants what will make her feel the most powerful and like the best parent. In her community “best parent” is one who turns out the most obedient and God-fearing children, and children must honor their parents by God’s decree – thus, when Joyce defies her she’s not only defying her mother, she’s defying God Himself. Any twitch or sniff of rebellion is a one-way ticket to Hell – and, worse, it’s willingly walking to Hell, because all of her children know that defiance of parents is defiance of God.
Probably, a lot of people don’t like any change that challenges a position that puts them at an advantage or in any sort of authority. It may be something deeper though, since all the information we have about Carol is second hand observations based on key instances where she has reacted poorly.
My cat apparently just thinks I’m his oversized father or uncle who brings him food but needs help cleaning himself. If I start petting him after food he insists on cleaning my hair while doing that little kneading motion with his paws. The point: cats and dogs are both awesome and love unconditionally, cats are just a bit tsundere about it.
““Defied me”? When you seriously say that you have to look at yourself and wonder if youre the bad guy.”
Absolutely. The problem is that Carol almost certainly hasn’t consumed enough popular media to have that phrase associated with villainy. The other problem is that even if she had, she probably wouldn’t make the connection.
It wouldn’t bother me if she’d actually defied her–as in, done something that her mother explicitly told her not to do. Defiance is just another term for “deliberately refusing to obey.” But I don’t see that here.
(My mom is a Carol, only not quite as god-bothering, and is of that school of libertarians who call themselves libertarians but actually are fascist authoritarians who want to be the ones calling the shots and view “my way or the highway” as being equivalent to “liberty” because you have the “freedom” to choose whether to toe the line or go to jail. I am a bisexual, atheist socialist. It’s a fight whenever we talk politics).
Well, the comic can’t cover everything in a few panels. I think the underlying assumption is that there are standing rules for borrowing the car, going out, that sort of thing. There were in my home, and my father was a terrible parent.
I’m also not sure it is possible to ‘vehemently’ defy someone. Being vehement is to be outspoken and, as far as I can tell, Joyce has yet to raise her voice to her mother’s face!
I want to trust and like Hank. I really want to trust and like Hank. He’s given me a lot of reasons to do so. I want to believe that he’s a genuinely good man who cares about his children and the friends of his children.
But this comic has dropped so many “other shoes” on me that I can’t help but be suspicious.
I imagine Hank is basically Ned Flanders. He’s a naturally good guy but was raised with some beliefs which tell him to be bad to to Becky. The thing is, he was also raised with beliefs which tell him to be nice to Becky. It’s just way too many people go with the former and not the latter.
I’d really like to know some background on the senior Browns. I can imagine Hank having grown up in a very religious family, and Carol having converted to the conservative Christianity they follow, as converts are sometimes more conservative and doctrinaire than those who’ve followed a faith all their lives.
This is true. I know a fundamentalist Christian couple — or rather, am aware of them because I knew them in college. He was raised a hippy Quaker and she went through atheist and Catholic phases, and now they’re both scary fanatical. Even went creationist.
He’s trying, from what I’ve seen. It’s hard to unlearn a lifetime of conditioning. Bit by bit, he seems to be coming around. Trusting in his daughter to do right, and that she is doing right, does also seem to be a big part of it.
I don’t see much narrative value in Hank suddenly becoming not-cool again.
What I’ve been seeing ever since Hank showed up in B6Ch2 is an emphasis on the differences between Hank and Carol, how much more supportive he is than her.
Hank will continue to be a rad dad, but it will cause a schism between him and his wife.
I suspect that, at least in part, Hank is motivated by a desire for peace in his family. He doesn’t like strife and will compromise to avoid it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he is somewhat under Carol’s thumb himself because her personality is so much stronger. Oddly enough, this works against his desire for a peaceful family life because he doesn’t often have enough courage to face down her towering sense of rightness and moral direction.
I wonder if the Browns are like my parents in that they ostensibly still love each other but have made a quiet mutual decision to spend a little time around one another as humanly possible.
Willis Evil Thought 1#: Dad isn’t covering for Joyce but is in the early stages of premature dementia. He honestly doesn’t remember whether or not she asked for permission.
Doesn’t feel right for Willis’ writing. I mean, I’m not discounting the idea of him working in a parent dealing with something like that, but it doesn’t feel like he’d write it in here and now. My personal opinion.
…I just had the weirdest, fondest, flashback to my teenage years, where I was always being weird and disappearing and doing whatever (nothing bad, I was just in a bad place mentally and needed space/freedom/etc) and my dad consistently had my back against my mom. My mom thought controlling me even tighter was the answer, whereas my dad figured I was an overall good kid and if I needed to take a walk at midnight, I probably just needed to take a walk.
My mother imagined all these horrible scenarios about me meeting people for drugs or whatever, and my dad was naive.
It kind of showed which parent knew me better, because I really was just repeatedly walking around the parade field with my ipod blasting.
Weirdly, though my dad was highly controlling about damn near everything else, one thing he didn’t control me about and actually had my back on was fashion and hairdos.
My mom was highly traditional and completely in the girls-should-have-long-hair-and-I-don’t-care-if-you-have-horrible-fine-hair-that-is-frizzy-and-tangles-if-you-look-at-it-the-wrong-way camp. Thus my hair was mid-back length for most of elementary and middle school. I’d wanted to get it cut short since kindergarden, and was told no so often I gave up asking.
Until she made the mistake, when I was 13, of sending me to the hairdresser’s with money, alone, and instructions to get “whatever I want”.
I got my head shaved bald. As you do when 13 and you hate anything to do with long hair and need to stick up two middle fingers to hair policing.
I was fully expecting to get in huge shit for it. Mom wanted to ground me until my hair looked “respectable” again. Dad, surprisingly, had my back and pointed out (rightly) that it never would’ve come to that point if she’d just let me get it cut off back when I first started asking, and that making your kid spend an hour on her unruly tangly hair every morning isn’t fair if it’s not her choice.
Thus began a 5-year period where I typically looked like I’d gotten into a fight with a lawnmower and then fell into a vat of dye, because give a teenager who’s never had a real choice in anything complete control over something and they’re gonna go a little wild over it. 😛
Panel 2: Becky like cats because of course she does. (also, I really can see a kid Becky envy cats who have their own flap and can leave the house whenever they want… hm, if I leave my window open I might be able to climb over the garden shed…) Plus I really love her background banter.
Panel 3: Let it be officially noted, for all the talk of Becky’s lack of brain-mouth filter, self control and sense in general – she DOES shut up here. “Did you have a good time?” “I showed Joyce a good time all right. Hurr, hurr, hurr. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.”
Panel 4: Lying-to-parents-express-service(TM). Watch and learn, Joyce. This is how a PRO does it.
All of this! Becky may be a goofball lacking a filter but she knows how to traverse scary situations like this (probably from a lifetime of Toedad, since Carol seems so similar).
I have a feeling that Carol and Toedad were quite close. Hank has expressed not liking Toedad on the drive home the other day, and is clearly on Joyce’s side.
Worst case scenario: Carol divorces Hank for Hank not being “Christian enough” and marries Toedad!
Also, why is my chosen Gravatar not coming through, instead getting one of the more generic ones from the site? It comes through properly on other sites.
I don’t think Hank is a good father. He is weak. He will not stand up for his own beliefs, or his own children.
Carole is a tyrant. She listens to no other voice than her own. And Hank does not face her down.
Hank has only one thing going for him imo. He loves his kids and spends what little strength he has protecting them from Caroles outbursts – when he can. Other than that…..
You are absolutely correct, Hank should have been a real man and instructed his wife how to think when they first married. The only solution to a wife that disagrees with you is to shout her down and humiliate her in front of her children on a regular basis. For justice!!
In all probability, Hank is going to have to choose between being a good parent and being a good spouse. Whether he must choose or not, a conflict is coming. I’m reasonably okay with staving it off and buying his daughter some time so that she doesn’t suffer, come what may. That may, or may not, be a better parent than stepping in now and trying to advocate for her.
None of this requires that he dictate to her what she must do. Hopefully he doesn’t do that, and he doesn’t seem inclined.
I don’t know if I would call passively enabling your partner to be a bigoted asshole instead of encouraging them to grow into a better person and lead a more fulfilling life “being a good spouse.” Where oppression exists, ultimately everyone loses, including the oppressor.
Some people want to change the world. Some others are busy doing damage control. For some reason, the world-changers want to look down on the damage-controllers. I don’t know why that is, but sometimes I forget to not let it irritate me.
95% of engineers are doing maintenance related work. Only 5% get to make innovations. Hank is in the 95% just trying to keep things running. Its thankless work.
For the record, I wasn’t saying that this is what Hank is doing. I was saying that in the context of the dichotomy presented by the commenter above me, that is what choosing to be a good spouse would entail. My point was that going along with whatever Carol says would not make Hank a good spouse (but he’s not doing that, so go Hank!)
Agreed, Carol is the real leader of the Brown family (ironic, given how vehemently patriarchal their society is in general). What is more, she is also so thunderingly self-righteous, she won’t tolerate her children being anything other than exactly what she wants them to be. Like Ross, there is a voice in her head telling her what is good and right and, like Ross, she thinks that it’s God.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a divorce on the horizon simply because Hank has reached the end of his tether. He just isn’t willing to live with Carol’s controlling nature anymore. I suspect that Jocelyne will be the real tipping point but Joyce standing up to her mother will be the the first rattle of pebbles from the avalanche.
The Carol-Hank relationship is an example of an abusive relationship wherein the woman is the abuser. Carol abuses everyone in the house, and to large extent, Hank enables her, because she’s abused him to the point that he doesn’t feel he can defy her, either.
Now, is she as physically violent as Toedad? No, mainly because she was brought up with female gender roles so her violence is of the emotional and social varieties.
If you measure the success of “solve” by no longer wanting death on one party member, then yes the problem would be solved. Though the solution would most likely involve someone’s death, but that’s just semantics, right?
I don’t know if it’s really bad, just ultimately fruitless.
I mean, realistically, people in a closet can just coldly ignore each other. People only resolve conflicts when stuck in closets because writers decide that that’s a dramatic way to get two people to resolve their own conflicts.
I would be hoping that their hatred of me after locking them in a closet for a few hours would end up outdoing their hatred of each other. Of course, then I have at least to people pissed at me because I looked them in a closet, buts thats another issue.
I’ve been in such a situation. Only thing that happens is that you get used to politely tolerate each other. (Well, and sometimes you learn weird things about them).
I had to room with my worst enemy and his second-in-command once for a school trip.
Man, Hank that’s some manipulative timing. Surely you knew what Carol’d think. Did you just not know which side you’d come down on? Cos you could have brought it up earlier- hey Joyce and Becky took the car for the day, just fyi- and establish their alibi ahead of time. Instead, you waited until she started to make a scene, then made her look unreasonable because she failed to trust her daughter.
Now Carol IS unreasonable, but she was also right. And this subtle shut up will have more impact on her, it’s an action rather than just a patch.
And obviously I can’t NOT support it, it’s a good move I think, I’m just wondering about the timing. Was it deliberate? considered?
And I pick up on it more easily because I’m familiar with the gaslighting narrative, which I associate more with masculine abusiveness (entirely a personal permutation, not necessarily rooted in reality), so I recognise the pattern more readily in this gender configuration.
/thoughts. I just wonder at the timing, and feel ickier about it cos it’s covering mistruth. But then, that’s another element of the that perfect girl idea- actions taken to protect or support marginalised peoples are somehow less valid, less ethical, because the people being supported/protected aren’t perfect- regardless of the ethics or morality of their detractors.
subtle, noice.
If he had said it earlier Carol would have worked herself up over something else (“where have you been this late” “what have you been doing with a lesbian all day” “why were you so rude to poor John”…). Again, the problem is not anything Joyce and Becky DOES. The problem is that Becky IS.
I assume he had to spend the entire day arguing with Carol to not pull Joyce out of college. Probably wouldn’t have even had a chance to say anything else.
The thing is we can’t know any of this. She may have ranted the whole day through, they may have argued, or they could have kept quiet the whole time. People whose relationships are falling apart tend not speak to each other. They sit there in their chairs staring ahead into the middle distance, not talking.
I’m not sure Hank is an “abusive male”; it may be, from what we’ve seen, is the passive of the two and that this is something new – witness Joyce’s reaction.
If Hank is a big a Christian as Joyce or Carol, lying is surely a sin and he’s just damned his soul to hell to save his daughter from Carol’s abuse.
That’s a big step for anyone.
> but she was also right
Yeah, because being “right” is the validation for any kind of nonsensical abuse.
If Carol had started off saying, “what’s the matter, hon. Where have you been? You didn’t call.” I’d have a whole lot more sympathy with Carol and your interpretation. But no, in with the “you have wronged me” nonsense.
I don’t think hank is gaslighting. I’m just reflecting there on how the narratives I’m familiar with influence the patterns I’m most able to identify.
It wasn’t really a judgement post, just a collection of reflections. I didn’t bother reflecting on carol’s actions and motivations, because hank’s were less obvious and more interesting to me and I didn’t see anything else about the timing.
Being on the sharp end of an abusive relationship ends up making you a more manipulative person just to survive. Your entire life becomes about obsessing over the other person, trying to read their thoughts and figure out ahead of time how to dodge and defuse– or in some situations, how to push their buttons and draw fire from someone else. Whether said manipulation is unethical is kind of a wobbly relative thing. Imo, you do what you need to do to survive, but you don’t just unlearn all that once you get out of danger. If Hank continues those patterns when he’s outside Carol’s influence… yeah, that’s shitty. But I don’t expect anyone to be a great person when they’re under fire for 20 years.
Yes, Hank lies here.
But he does not tell to Carol that she totally should have remembered that, that their memory of events is wrong; that would be gaslighting, but that is not what is happening.
The problem with two horrible parents/guardians with one meaningfully less horrible is that while you can lever one off the other, that only goes so far, and the other one is still horrible, so you’ve got to be super ready to expect the other knife (one hopes metaphorically) and be able to dodge and roll from that too.
It’s a little like being Finland in World War II. Nazis or Stalin? Nazis or Stalin? Let’s pivot mid-war and dance like crazy to maintain independence until we can find some way to get the fuck out of this mess, at least, until the next mess.
Which is to say: Mr. Brown is the Less Bad Parent, as far as we can tell, but that should not translate to “trust.”
Yeah, any “trust” I’d put on Hank is completely dependent on “Okay, do I really think he’d not entirely disown Jocelyne when she comes out?” And my answer to that is “Sincerely doubtful, at least not in any time to mitigate the damage that’s gonna be done when that happens.”
Fortunately, Jocelyne’s clearly been preparing herself for that one both in terms of “trying to get essentials like paperwork so she won’t have to worry about that when they throw her out” and “steeling herself for what’s likely to be complete loss of family, with maybe now two exceptions once they get through the awkward tripping over themselves phase,” but the fact remains that she shouldn’t have to plan for it in the first place.
I kinda hope that eventually Sal and Amber are gonna have an epic battle, only for an annoyed Joyce to show up and defeat them both with a single punch in each hand.
Hmmm, since the Whitaker family exist in the DoAverse, I’ll make a prediction about Carol. We will eventually learn that, long ago, she was a friend of Veronica Vance’s, since they worked in the same business.
It’s quite telling that Carol’s anger here isn’t even tempered with concern which one might have if their child went awol all day. Hell, we haven’t been given any indication that she even bothered to try to get a hold of Joyce at any point throughout the day. Instead her anger is just tempered with passive aggressive bullshit.
I know I’ve heard a story about “My parents didn’t let me watch Tangled, and after seeing it now I think it’s because they realized I’d realize Gothel’s treatment is too close to home and she’s the villain.” or something to that saddening extent.
So I get the sense Carol might have some idea, or someone higher up, and thus have a vested interest in keeping the kids from watching it. Because challenging authority figures is Bad, after all.
Perhaps from before the Disney boycott after they started supporting gay people–the 90s one, not the 2000s.
I’ve never been quite clear how strict Carol was with TV. If she allowed Twilight, she could have allowed the earlier Disney stuff. And that’s for her family–we don’t know how she herself was raised.
Twilight normalizes Patriarchal abusive relationships, while remaking Vampires formerly a metaphor of unchained sexual desire —to one of tamed sparkly Abstinence.
I suspect John thinks that more than anyone else, since Joyce established to him that Becky was family, and he didn’t distinguish between them when saying that LGBblahblah acronym.
What I find interesting here is Hank’s shirt. Last we saw/heard from the Brown parents, Carol was advocating yanking Joyce out of school because of the ‘bad influences’. Now Hank is wearing a shirt from said school.
I thiiiink Carol may still be annoyed that she lost that argument.
That’s how they say they roll, yes, but I think it’s pretty clear that in any matters of importance, it’s Carol’s way or the highway. People who really believe they are and should be like dogs don’t say things like ‘never have you do vehemently defied me’. And look at their positioning, too – Carol front and center, authoritative, with Hank behind and to the side.
Carol’s not used to losing anything in the Brown household.
Its on purpose.
Hes being passive-aggressive. Or not exactly.
He’s being passive-assertive, ( with the shirt ) and undermining Carol’s undermining of Joyce.
Quite Brilliant.
I really want to say Un-kind things about carol , but I wont, since i think she is now based on Willis mom.
Well, since Joyce is in near-critical-failure mode, I guess it’s up to Becky to tell the truth (but not the whole truth, obvs)(well, except for agreeing with Hank’s lie)
“Hi Mr Brown, Mrs Brown! We got a call from John about meeting him and Josh for lunch, and we did, and then John went home, and we hung out and chatted with Josh about all kinds of stuff, but a lot of it was about establishing identity and stuff like that that is important to me since I don’t have a whole lot of official documents with my name and picture on them. Did you know that the more official documents you have, the easier it is to get more? Anyway, we hung out for a while brainstorming things that I could do, and then we dropped Josh off at his place. And, wow, it sure is late, and I am so sorry we didn’t call. Hey, how come you didn’t try to call us?”
Nothing in there is a lie, but I suspect that Joyce’s body language would be screaming “There are things you are not being told!”. OTOH, I suspect that Becky has mad skillz at making her body language say “I am cheerful and peppy and not hiding anything at all, no sir!”
Ooh, and I just realized that that final question — which I threw in there because it’s the sort of deflection that a semi-guilty kid might use — would be a great opportunity for Hank to respond with something like: “Well, I didn’t call because I figured that you’re adults and I generally trust your judgment. I trust Joyce when she’s miles away at the university dorm; why should I trust her less when she’s just driving around in town?”
And maybe following that with: “Carol? Why didn’t you call them if you were so concerned?”
In a previous update when Becky’s phone starts buzzing she explicitly tells Becky she’s not answering the phone if it’s her parents calling (it turns out to be her brothers, this was just before the scene at the restaurant).
We don’t know whether Carol or Hank tried calling, and it’s a safe bet Joyce wouldn’t have answered even if they did.
I just checked back at that comic, and Joyce specifically says: “If it’s my mom, don’t answer it”. So presumably, she would have talked to her dad, if he’d called.
Also, I notice that John says that “Mom and Dad told you about [meeting up for lunch]?”. So . . . Wasn’t it already known to her parents that Joyce would be going out to meet her responsible elder siblings?
I’m wondering if some telephone shenanigans were occurring that were not shown in the comic, like Carol texting repeatedly/leaving multiple voicemails on Joyce’s phone (but if those were failing, then why did she not try to reach Josh?).
Wouldn’t he have mentioned that to his stewing, angry wife before now? If he was going to make the lie in the first place, shouldn’t it have been when she talked to him about it? Seems like they have been home together for awhile, and may have noticed joyce and becky were gone together that morning.
Carol was already set on the idea that Joyce was being corrupted. I think that on some level, she wanted to wait a little bit longer to make their supposed infraction more severe.
My partner had to deal with this recently. They helped me move out of my college dorm, came to my house with me, and spent the night, then spent the day with me. At about 8pm they get a call from their father, who’s steaming mad because she should have left my house by 6pm.
From there, he yells at her for about 33 minutes, blaming her from everything from lying about the reason she left home (she went to take a final for university band, which was just manual labor and was cancelled), getting mad at her for spending the day with me and helping me pack things up, the works. A lot of cussing and yelling.
I think it’s the same thing here. Taking the car out for a spin is something little, as is going to lunch with John and Joss. If there was a practical concern, she would have told Hank, or called Joyce much earlier, but that wouldn’t give her as much ammunition.
This. I’m sorry your partner had to go through that. The fact of the matter is, when people get it in their minds that they want to fight, they’re gonna find a way to fight no matter what the other party does and doesn’t do.
No, that sucks I get that. I mean, the dad and mom were home together, and the mom must have been steamed and talking about how she felt what joyce was doing. Shouldn’t he have come up with his lie then? By lying now he opens himself up to the question of why he didn’t say anything to the angry and waiting mom earlier.
RE: Alt-text: Lies. Cats are evil little bastards. I guess it should be obvious I’m more of a dog person myself >.>
Anyways, it’s nice to see Hank covering for Joyce and Becky. Seems he realized that they needed some space. Unlike Carol who’s just a horrible person in general.
If you can stand a friendly social cat, that looks you in the face, listens when you talk , comes when you call, knows their name, cuddles when you want , strongly attaches to owner, likes to be pet EVERYWHERE,
( even backwards )
—basically acts like a Dog-lite , get a Norwegian Forrest Cat.
They arent “small” either. 3 feet long from nose to tail. 20 plus pounds.
triple waterproof coat , and they can walk down trees.
Yeah, as I thought, Hank is trying to be a peacemaker and find some kind of compromise to save his family without anyone having to back down too much, even if it means taking the blame on himself. It’s obvious to me that his family is terrifically important to him and he’s going to fight hard to keep it together. I just wonder if he’s going to make it clear to Joyce that he expects her to play the game too?
Maybe I’m missing something but surely Carol knew Joyce was going out that day? It seems that the meeting with John and ‘Josh’ was something arranged well in advance!
We don’t know much about Amber’s mom other than that she managed to get out of her marriage with Blaine, and unfortunately doesn’t realise the true state of Amber’s mental health. I attribute the latter to Amber being very good at hiding her problems, since it seems no one else in her life figured out how really troubled she’s been.
I wonder if Joyce is used to seeing her dad roll over when her mother tries this on? Hence the “what is happening.”
I think Hank is delaying the inevitable crisis – or making it worse – because I suspect Carol will try and have her way regardless of any reasonable defence.
Okay, in this strip, MR. Brown gets like, eleventy million points in my book. It shows more than ever that he is willing to cover for Joyce, to give her some support that she really does have the option of making her own independent decisions as an adult, in spite of Mrs. Brown’s overbearing attempts to keep Joyce as “her precious little girl”, which wind up doing more to prevent Joyce’s growth into a self-determinant adult. Good move, Sir. We, the readership salute you.
Also, I share Becky’s affinity for cats. Dogs are nice, but I much prefer how cats are a more selective judge of character, rather than loud, indiscriminate fawning… well… lapdogs. Basically, dogs will love you if you’re human. Cats will love you if you’re a human *worthy* of their love.
Really though, anyone who uses the phrase “defied me” unironically immediately goes in my asshole file. Maybe if they are a fantasy king being murdered by their evil vizier they get a pass, but even then it’s shaky.
I’m voting on the side of “Hank just wants to avoid a scene right now”.
But then, in my household, it was always me and my dad covering for each other with my “workaholic 10 hours a day, seven days a week, the job description says 8-5 M-F” mom. Not that my dad didn’t come down on me when I deserved it, but this looks very much like a “Leila and Dad vs the world” situation to me.
Hank is a lot more secularized than we think. I honestly think he might be trusting Joyce that she did it for a good reason.
That doesn’t mean he’s not, y’know, fundamentalist – Just that in this situation, he’s trusting Joyce. They also shared a car ride without Carol. That tends to help in building trust not based on who your religion tells you to hate.
Doesn’t mean he won’t be insisting on other things we’d be not happy with him for later down the line, but right now, he Did A Good and I’m smiling about it.
The unfortunate thought comes to mind that Carol figures that Hank favours Joyce, and that he goes “too easy” on her and lets her “get away with misbehaviour,” so she was hoping to catch Joyce in such a way her husband couldn’t deny the “crime.”
Dorothy and Sarah are written as such pragmatists and great planners who both love Joyce dearly. My fantasy storyline would be both or wither of them finding Joyce scholarship money that cuts off that harridan from threatening Joyce through her tuition…
Mr.Brown is doing an okay job as far as we’ve seen of protecting Joyce from her domineering mother. Here’s to hoping he takes them to the side and talks to Joyce and Becky with respect to their recent trauma and that Hank dows everything in his power to make sure they get back to the University in one piece.
Dad was in his late 70s and he used to do the shopping – ostensibly Mum was the more disabled of the two – going to the next town to do it.
My brother found Dad – in continuous pain at this stage of his life – in the next town having been sent back by Mum because he’d gotten the wrong thing the first time around.
Carol has none of my sympathy, and I really can’t wait until she explodes.
This does beg the question of how the dad hadn’t already invented his permission asking story long before they got home. Because you know the mom has been bongoing to the dad about it for hours, just waiting for them to get home so she could lay into them.
She should turn to him now and say something like “Well, why didn’t you mention that to me hours ago?” And she’d be right. And it would probably be one of the few times in her life she’s been ‘right’ as opposed to ‘self-righteous.’
They’re still out quite late, so it’s still an offense, just less of one. So that’s justification for staying up and waiting for them, and I’d imagine he’ll go with that next. “…But I did not give you permission to be out this late.” And then they talk about hanging out and eating with Joss and so on, which defuses the next trigger.
I love love love how Becky moves from behind Joyce in “barking dog hesitation” to immediately in front of her with “Protect Joyce from Angry Parent”. Becky has Joyce’s best interests in heart, even if it takes her a while to understandably sort through her emotions about it. She’s got such a good heart and she’s trying so hard.
Loading ...
“We’ve secretly switched Carol’s husband Hank Brown for CoolDad™. Let’s see if she totally flips her shit.”
ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF
Oh, thank goodness. I thought we had switched comic strips.
If we had the fluffed pillow trick might have worked, in this comic it either hides a truck or triggers a flashback.
Fluffed pillow trick? Also, what’s this other comic you guys are talking about?
Ana didn’t post the first comment yesterday.
This. I started coughing.
Bang.
https://twitter.com/janez_langus124/status/692097881746976768
When did 9gag watermarks start appearing on everything?
Ana stahp, you are doing me a frighten.
So it was all your work…!
So, it’s not often that the dad in one of these stories is the one to take a step back and ask important questions, cover for the kid, or anything like that
There are many varieties of CoolDad™: Ask your doctor which one is right for YOU!
Carol “I AM THE MOM!!! I MUST BE OBEEEEYYYED!!!” Brown is clearly the head of the family. Hank’s responsible for cleaning up to make sure problems are resolved without his darling wife’s fragile one-note world falling apart, like Joyce’s has.
YOU BETRAYED THE MOM!
I laughed way too hard.
I still don’t think she IS the head of the household- not really. I get the impression that she feels she should defer to her husband even when she doesn’t like it- especially in front of others- so she’s excelled at manipulation instead. (Look at her reaction when Hank said Joyce could keep hanging out with Dorothy- Carol did NOT support that, but she stayed quiet and just glared.) Likewise, she clearly didn’t want Becky to come at all or to stay- but it appears she’s bowed to him in those as well.
She is definitely the lead in control and religious indoctrination- although it’s hard to be sure if that was always the case, from Hank’s earlier appearance at IU.
This, it is on her to enforce moral order and she’s allowed a lot of passive-aggressive means to try and argue her case, but if the man of the house argues that the sky is green and the floor is lava, she is supposed to not differ from that and instead follow his lead, because awful ideas of men’s and women’s roles in that sect of religion.
It’s also why she shut up but glared when Hank was like “we support you and think you are a good kid” after she stood up to them at the Fountain.
However, from my experience with moms like Carol in positions like Carol I think we can expect an increase in passive-aggression, reading any negative Joyce emotions as a personal defiance, and sniping at Joyce and Becky when they are alone with her.
Does that involve cleaning up the blood?
Keeping in mind that I’ve probably never said my entire life, I sure as f*** will say amen to that. But you’re missing something: It’s CoolDad McCool, First of His Name, Breaker of Prejudice, Father of Progress (and hopefully dragons), of House Cool-Born.
Eh, doing the bare minimum of lying to protect vulnerable children from wifey’s self-righteous, inflexible, people-hating yet desperate to be respected ways is not exactly saintly I think. That would be if he loudly distanced himself from her only-there-to-be-something-to-escape style of parenting and the poisonous religion that led to it.
Not that he’s not doing good, but he’s still much overshadowed by the cartoonish evil he choose to associate himself with.
I disagree that this is the bare minimum he could be doing. According to his religious beliefs he didn’t have to do anything at all to support Joyce and Becky here. Instead of writing them off loke the Mother is trying to do, he did some serious soul searching and made a really difficult decision. He certainly isn’t a saint, but credit where it’s due. The man is stepping up in a way no other parent in this comic has yet.
Hank is a gosh darn SAINT.
Quite the savior, isn’t he?
Wait for the other shoe to drop.
I’d like to think he wouldn’t bail on Joyce if Carol called bullshit.
I’mma keep repeating “People can be good people even if they have shitty opinions” until someone acknowledges it, or I go blue in the face.
Personally, I think what defines a great person isn’t what opinions they hold at any given moment, but rather their ability to reconsider those opinions when faced with opposing evidence.
*whispers ironically* this.
You’re a good person, and you should feel good.
And you’re good enough, and yur smart enough and gosh darnit– people like you!
I’m not sure what he meant, always seemed like a sentence fragment, people like him …what? People like him surf? People like him cavort? People like him aver?
He is liked by people. People do the verb of liking to him.
Well I don’t know how to tell you this but… seems your Decepticon insignia is starting to turn blue…
He once compared Dorothy’s parents to Adolf Hitler.
I love how much he’s inproving, but let’s not kid ourselves.
See previous comment.
I… I think he was more comparing Dorothy herself to Hitler?
But I honestly, earnestly believe that the moment someone tries to make up for their past mistakes and truly, genuinely become a better person than they were when they made them, we shouldn’t hold said mistakes against them any longer.
Erm, by which I also mean to say that we shouldn’t also forget those mistakes. If nothing else, they show an insight into a person, and we need to understand how those mistakes came to be made- and how far their attempts to improve as a person are likely to go.
But yeah, Hank is actively taking huge steps to overcome what he was taught and lived in order to become a better man. That should be respected at the least, if not admired.
Love him.
Go Hank!!!
YAAAAAY LESS DOOM!
Ok, we can all agree that Hank is the best parent ever!
Well…
He’s better than Carol!
It’s a low bar, but he clears it by a mile.
You’d literally have to commit a crime to be worse of a parent than Carol.
so… ToeDad ?
Well, also Blaine.
Blaine seems to view his offspring as his literal possessions to fuck with and abuse as he pleases. Carole is at least less wrong in that she is genuinely concerned for the well being of her children. Of course the problem arises with how she judges ‘well being’.
And I mean, here is a point that I can sympathize with Hank and even Carole on. Joyce did take the family car and drive off for the entire day without telling anyone and apparently remained out of contact the entire time. I can think of plenty of entirely secular reasons for him to be stressing out about this even if Joyce is technically an adult.
“Out of contact” if you don’t count seeing her brother and sister for lunch as she had apparently planned to do that day.
The “brother” bit threw me for a moment. I wonder if John has been in contact- either before lunch or after?
Honestly, I don’t think that Carol doesn’t view her kids as possessions. I think she does, but to her kids, she wraps it up under the guise of concern for them.
My mom, when I was living with my folks, used to do it all the time. She did not view me as anything other than a possession to make her look good (“when you have a daughter you have her for life” type of thing), but to my face, she’d always pretend that she only wanted to control my every waking moment down to how much and how I fidgeted (no, really) because she was concerned for my well-being. I was so naive and sheltered, you see, I would get eaten alive in the real world (real world meaning if I joined clubs she didn’t approve of or volunteered for causes she didn’t like or etc) and it was her job to protect me from it – rather than giving me the tools to navigate it successfully.
This included wanting me to abide by a curfew when I went to uni, email all my assignments to her before I handed them in so my folks could proof-read them, and insisting on veto power over whatever I wanted to do.
This.
And it’s further complicated by the sect they belong to wherein children are not only possessions of the parents, but it is on the parents to make sure those possessions get entered into the Kingdom of Heaven when the Rapture comes down any day now, by making sure they remain free of sin and any signs of disobedience of God’s authority.
Thus justifying that type of parent to even more thoroughly meddle and micromanage their childrens’ lives.
Also *massive hugs* for growing up with that shit.
Oooh yeah, this, did she micromanage how you carried objects, too? Mine had specific ideas about that, particularly books for some reason. (By your sides. Only. Extended arms, no bent elbows, never in front of the body. Yes. No. HELL no. Why? WHO THE FUCK CAN EVEN TELL.)
(Still better than the other one, mind you. He’d hit me in the head for looking in the same direction for too long. Not for looking at the wrong thing, just, you know, looking in the same direction. Because thinking too much, I guess? idek. For “floating” is what he called it. This is the first time I’ve talked about that outside of therapy, I think, and being hypervigilant as fuck, I am reaaaaaaaal nervous about it. But, yeah, why? Maybe not being involved enough in whatever he was doing? Fuck if I know.)
(and this is in category talking too much about this shit even in an opt-in filter because your friends freak out and decide you’re delusional and aren’t friends with you anymore, but well, it’s a comments section on a webcomic, right? and given this comic and this shit, maybe somebody else is going through this crap, in which caes HEY KID I MADE IT I’M NOT GONNA LIE IT WAS FUCKIN’ BRUTAL BUT I GOT OUT AND YOU CAN TOO, IT’S PROBABLY GONNA TAKE A WHILE AND I’M SORRY ABOUT THAT BUT GOOD LUCK.)
But yeah: objects to make them look good.
And the thing is, if you figure that out, you can use it. Like I told her the last time I ever talked to her, the very first thing I remember learning is never to let her know what I really thought about anything. The less they knew about me, the better, and if you can get good at avoidance and at acting, you can manoeuvre your way around all kinds of crap until you manage to work your way out of range.
And a *giant hug* to Dara as well.
@Dara
No, but she did micromanage the shit out of how I walked and where I was looking.
Oh don’t be silly. Carol is doing a fairly good parenting job. Setting and firmly upholding boundaries is good parenting, and she’s only talked to the newer, more mature Joyce for all of half an hour so far, during which time Joyce pretended to be the younger, less mature Joyce. How is she supposed to accept Joyce as a grown woman? Joyce is her baby. My mother still treats me like I’m 5 sometimes and I’m a grown ass man a foot taller and 100 pounds heavier than her.
Carol is not a villain, or evil, or even a bad parent. She’s just intolerant. That’s it. She has not kicked Becky out of her house, she said a couple passive-aggressive comments at dinner and claimed that college was a bad influence on Joyce.
Calm the fuck down y’all smh Joyce is based off of Willis’ college days and I strongly doubt that he hates his parents. Carol may see the light, she may not, but she’s not going to fuck anything up and Hank is there to temper and block the decisions and reactions that would hurt Joyce.
I might put him ahead of alienate Walkerton, at this point.
Whoa, Auto-correct!!
That is: I might put him above Linda Walkerton, at this point. 😀
First post describes her better. 😉
I dunno, kind of hard to beat the ‘here’s 200 bucks for a nice first date’ Sarauyamas. But he’s officially above average by DoA standards.
He might be testing Joyce to see if she’ll lie
Some people seem to be waiting for a reveal that the only reason why he did that is because Joyce would “owe him one.”
I think that it is most likely to end up having something to do with what he knows will happen if his wife rejects his daughter’s position in their life. He failed to protect one of his beloved children from his wife, and now that kid is persona non grata. He probably loves Joyce more than any of his boys, because she’s the youngest and a girl. It’ll be interesting to see what lengths he’ll go to to avoid losing any more of his family; which is going to end up coming first, his children, or his religion?
or his wife*
I wasn’t in the camp I mentioned earlier, it just seems like some of the more disdainful comments about Hank (at least the ones without elaboration) gave the impression that things aren’t as they seem with regards to his helpfulness to Joyce.
My, we are exploring persona non grata from several perspectives in this comic of late. Ambermazing Girl and Danny and Sal’s perspectives, as well as Dorothy and Hank and Carol’s perspective on the eldest brother. I didn’t even realize it was a theme until your comment.
Yup, he’s a natural peacemaker so he’s trying to keep both, but I think that’s going to become harder and harder for him. Especially when he finds out he has two daughters.
I actually expect Hank to speak with Joyce privately to ask why she took the car without asking permission. I hope that will result in Joyce admitting she overheard their conversation about pulling her out of school.
I didn’t see it as wanting Joyce to “owe him one.” I saw it as him not thinking it was a big deal, and also recognizing that it would only add fuel to the already blazing “Joyce should stop going to the soulless college and go to a good, Christian college.”
He’s still a dad, so I’d expect him to sit her down in private and have a little talk about respect for the rules, for her parents, etc. But I think it’d be a fairly gentle talk, not an attempt at a guilt trip or mind control.
It really doesn’t look like that will be the case, but if it was would we be blindsided by that reveal as opposed to getting subtle hints leading up to it? Then again, I was just throwing it out that idea out right before going to sleep as opposed to coming from a place of suspicion. I’m not really skeptical of Hank.
Why would we need any kind of Chekhov’s Gun to provide hints of what any parent might do? After covering for your daughter’s gaff to prevent a huge blow-up, and it was a gaff since the dad would have probably just given them the keys, a little chat is well within reasonable expectations. Borrowing a car is nor something that any university age child, even if above the age of majority, should just assume is their right, especially if there are ground rules covering those things already.
And given the household, it’s a very fair expectation that there are rules about a great many things.
My impression is that he has a basic grasp of trauma and realizes that Joyce needs space and that her healing process may involve some erratic behavior.
The dude is, in this specific instance, not being an ass. That’s good, but he doesn’t get a cookie for it.
In the DOA universe, that’s a sadly low bar.
I like Hank, Carol not so much.
Book 6 in a nutshell.
Well, that and “Holy shit, Ross”.
When I read that I was like “Ross? Who’s that? …Oh, it’s Toedad!”
A Dog Named Snoop
I doubt they watched Bones.
It’s the family feud!
We asked 100 Joyce’s why they were out late! Top 5 answers are on the board!
I guess ‘Incoherent Stammering ‘!
That’s no fair! In Joyce Feud incoherent stammering is always in the top 5 answers!
Poor man just wants to hold his family together.
My cat licks me on a regular basis. I think he wants to make sure I still taste good.
So does mine. I always got the feeling she noticed that I don’t seem to know how to groom myself.
“No you idiot, like THIS. Now tomorrow we’ll work on pooping in a box.”
They are just checking to see if your dead yet.
“You GOT to start practice hunting. Your weird, magic foodbox won’t work forever, you know. Here, I’ll bring a mouse and you… DON’T CHASE IT OUT YOU IDIOT, I can’t believe you lost another one.”
The idea that cats view us as oversized kittens who rely on magic food sources for ourselves and them is now firmly implanted in my head and I love it.
Welcome to the world of cat people, and remember:
https://xkcd.com/231/
This needs to be a comic or something a la Simon’s Cat.
Heehee! So awesome.
Doctor_Who and Bagge, I laughed so hard.
It’s a sign of affection. I have two cats and they occasionally groom each other. And me.
It’s also an odd form of dominance, since the momma cat grooms the kittens. Neither of my cats allows the other to groom them for more than a minute.
My cat hugs my face every morning after we let him out of his room in the morning (still less than a year old and we’re afraid he might destroy something if left unsupervised).
See, I can’t let mine sleep in my room anymore. I got her one of those automatic feeding bowls so her breakfast arrives every day at six.
However, she can’t understand the concept of time, she just knows that it usually shows up around sunrise. As the seasons change, so does the time the sun comes up.
Now that it’s summer, the sun will rise before six, she notices that her food has not arrived, and she comes in to loudly inform me that she doesn’t think much of the service in this place and will not be leaving me a tip.
Reset the bowl to feed her at the new sunrise.
You’d thinkt he Doctor would know who’s in charge around here.
It keeps changing! It’s hard enough to remember whether or not I need to fill it without having to look up what time sunrise will be tomorrow.
I just close the bedroom door. She can jolly well wait for her food.
Get a programmable one.
Sorry, they don’t sell programmable cats, I checked.
what about tighter shirts
Damn you Willis! Now I know I accidentally paraphrased a Michael Bay Transformers movie!
We just make sure there is always food in the bowl, so the cats can eat whenever they are hungry.
I didn’t even realize she hadn’t asked for permission. Cool moment for Dad though. I wonder how late it is here?
Maybe she didn’t.
Here’s where he screwed up though. He didn’t mention anything ALL DAY until Joyce and Becky got back. You’d think at some point during the day Carol would’ve said something to him along the line of “Where are the girls? And wait, where’s the car?!” Covering up for them now seems like a bit too late to be credible…
They’ll probably been arguing all day about pulling Joyce out of school. Either that or Hank stayed away from Carol so he’d not have to hear her ranting about “that sinning lesbian” Becky.
Or Carol’s been “quietly” fuming all day without once mentioning it explicitly, just tch-ing, and rattling pots, and slamming doors.
I’m guessing this one. It’s a society that forbids women from being clear with their feelings and their displeasure. Fuming and passive aggression makes a lot of sense in that context… Although Carol is also aggressive-aggressive, so I may be being too generous with a known jerk.
That part doesn’t matter as much. If the patriarch of the house in that sect says something completely fictitious as a family decision, then Carol is bound by the weirdo rules of that sect to abide it though she may passively-aggressively snipe about it or do like she did this morning and angrily argue her case in private.
It’s a pretty horrendous system overall, but Hank is definitely exploiting it here to get her to back off from the kids. Which isn’t to say that this isn’t a positive use of that power, just noting the why of why it’s working here.
It’s said, when Joyce says to Becky that she wants to take the car and go out, that Joyce specifically didn’t say she was going to ask to take the car.
I get the feeling that Becky would probably be better at poker than Joyce…
Ha! Do you truly believe a mere mortal can stand up to THIS face in a game of poker?
…yes?
Wait so did they not talk to each other all day?
That’s what I was wondering. Like, did Carol reach her conclusion and then sit there brooding while Hank was like, “Well, I’m going to stay heck away from this”?
It doesn’t exactly sound implausible, even put that way.
My money’s on Carol stewing on this all day without mentioning it to Hank at all. And it’s on Hank realizing that Joyce and Becky needed time out of the house and didn’t say/do anything to set his wife off earlier.
Can you just imagine these two, waiting in a room, standing, in the dark, waiting for the 2 to come back.
Well… now I’m imagining it.
And I don’t think Carol tried calling Joyce to ask where she was either…guess she’d already come to a conclusion without any need for evidence or explanation.
Jumping to conclusions without any need for evidence or explanation is what Carol does best. Hell, that’s what her entire worldview is based on.
This is one reason why people like Carol scare me.
They should scare you more than people like Ed Gein or Dick Cheney. They sure do scare me.
Plus THIS way she can make it a power trip and try to pull Joyce out of school to “protect” her from “bad influences” that make her anything other than an easily cowed parent-worshipper.
Carol probably spent the whole day ranting about Becky’s poisonous homosexual influence.
Mmhm, and Hank has probably thought his plausible deniability through.
“Oh, I thought you were being more general. She didn’t ask you for permission too? I thought you knew where she was.”
OK, Hank is officially the best dad in the strip!
(Except for maybe Joe’s dad!) 😉
Dina’s parents are solid.
Dina: Technically my parents are a combination of solids, liquids, and gases that appear primarily solid. On the other hand, since atoms are mostly empty space by percentage an argument could be made…
Sarah: Their personalities seem figuratively solid.
I chuckled out loud.
Science trivia for the win!
Isn’t Joe’s dad just a Joe from an alternate dimension where the time line is about 2 decades ahead of this one?
Joe with a beard.
I dunno, Dina’s dad and Dorothy’s dad are pretty awesome-sauce. But Hank’s definitely been making a strong play for the top 5 DoA dads list after his initial fumble with his fucked-up beliefs about the Nazis.
Sierra’s dad for the win! He tried to deescalate Blaine.
I dunno, I suspect that Hank is just doing what he can to keep everyone from starting a row at three in the morning. Whether he’s upset with the girls or not remains to be seen.
Let’s review the important events so far:
If we think back to when Hank met up with them at the campus and Becky invited herself on the family trip, Hank seemed to express some concerns about Becky, but said that he trusted Joyce, and that if Joyce believed she wasn’t a bad influence that he would trust her judgement. As a sign of that good faith he even let Joyce drive the car home.
Early the next morning, after a tense dinner the night before, Joyce overheard her parents arguing and her mother expressing concerns about Joyce staying at a public school (of course most of Carol’s concerns boil down to ‘the atheists’ and ‘the gays’). Hank argued that college life wasn’t having a bad influence on Joyce and that they should trust their daughter’s judgement.
… then Joyce and Becky took the car without asking, we see Joyce explicitly tell Becky not to answer any calls from their parents, and after staying out of contact all day they get caught sneaking in the wee hours of the morning.
Now, while I don’t think Joyce and Becky have done anything seriously wrong (kids that age do stuff like that all the time) – I think it’s important to try and see things from Hank’s point of view.
After making a big deal of telling Joyce how much he trusts her to make good decisions and even sticking up for Joyce in the argument with Carol, Joyce and Becky went AWOL with the family car for the day. Even if he’s not outright mad at the girls, I suspect he’ll be disappointed in them at the least.
I guess we’ll find out tonight.
BRO BRO BRO!
Is Hank the cool parent in this family? How cool a parent will be determined later.
There’s a conversation coming later.
Hank is *definitely* the cool parent. The only question is how cool, because Carol sets the bar so dang low.
Hank is certainly showing himself to be one of the better parents in this comic.
Joyce isn’t going to get off completely free, but Hank will make sure she doesn’t hate her parents forever. Hank gets two thumbs up.
Yeah, Joyce is going to get a stern reprimand, but more of the “don’t get your mother worried like that” rather than … whatever her mom would say.
I’m imagining an awkward few hours where Hank pretended no to know why they were staying up late so he could drop his lie at the most dramatically opportune moment.
I love you Hank!
Phew. Way to save the night, Hank.
Also Joyce, mention that you were with your “brother”, too.
Joyce wouldn’t use scare quotes, she doesn’t know about the transgender thing. Actually, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know what transgender even IS.
If she’s even heard the term it’s probably in the context of idiots claiming trans people are all a bunch of would be child abusers.
If they’re going to use malicious fabrications then they’re going with slurs instead.
I imagine at least a few wouldn’t, if only in the interests of painting a thin veneer of civility over their bile so they can worm into folks who’d otherwise discard said fabrications out of hand.
Yes but if they’re using slurs, it’s entirely possible that Joyce would not recognize what those slurs are meant to describe in the first place, or even not connect those slurs to the concept of transgenderism immediately after learning about what that is.
Slurs instead of malicious fabrications? Your thinking is so two dimensional! They would use slurs in addition to malicious fabrications.
Nope, I was referring to them using slurs instead of saying transgendered people. Because if they’re going to be bitter, why stop at making shit up about people they really know nothing about?
Having said that, my original post sucks for not clearly getting that point across.
Maybe I should have used Joss instead. Little less confusing.
I like Jossssssua. Because it takes me a moment to remember that her family doesn’t know her by her real name, so that’s how my mind imagines all the Browns referring to her.
Quotes have other purposes besides “scare quotes.” (See?) It can also be just a way to say that Joyce would say her brother while JessWitt acknowledges that they know otherwise.
I suggest using [sic] in the future. Because there’s nothing pedants like more than that word!
The best transition between the word “sic” and the word “pedants” is the phrase “a dog on”
What trikly said is what I meant.
on another note, I should use [sic] more often.
Oh, well put, trlkly! That is much briefer than what I could phrase after just getting up.
Hank is the best! AROUND! NOTHIN’S EVER GONNA KEEP HIM DOWWWWNNNNNNN
I haven’t seen the word “vehemently” so vehemently used since prepping for the SAT
Well now we know who the Toedad of this family is, you go Hank, keep up the good damage control work
So all day long, Mrs. Brown never asked Mr. Brown if he had any idea about what happened to their daughter and their car? Wow.
Well, she just KNEW.
is joyce’s mom self centered?
Joyce’s mom is a raging homophobe and condescending bigot who intends to control her daughter until she’s dead.
I thought it was the dad’s job ?
The dad in this situation seems to have reneged from his role in lieu of trying to be a decent human being.
Clearly he has “been lax in his duties”.
In my family mom is the controlling one, my dad generally couldn’t be buggered what any of us did. He largely stayed out of any discipline situations.
Is the Pope Catholic?
He’s a Jesuit, so he’s cool.
Thaaat depends a lot of personal opinion about Jesuits. They were seen as manipulative and two-faced during centuries, though that reputation seems to have mellowed in the laast decades.
Jesuits were originally a heretical order that agreed to submit to Church doctrine, and gradually became a heterodoxy.
So, yeah, they’re cool.
So question, does Mrs. Brown think her daughter is being seduced by the lesbianism?
Lesbians??? What’s next, Catholics?
There’s Mormons on her floor as well!
LESBIMORMONS.
Is that worse than lesbiatheists?
“Theres a storm coming. A big, gay storm!”
Atheists of course
Hehehe. Their dog is named Snoop. Jocelyn named the dog as a backhanded joke, didn’t she?
Eh? Backhanded joke? A Snoopy reference is a backhanded joke?
snoop dogg, perhaps?
and who let him out?
Is he back to that? I don’t really pay attention but last I heard, he changed his name to Snoop Lion because…. I don’t know…
I think he is back to Dogg now. Not sure though
It’s Snoop Dogg for rap, Snoop Lion for reggae, and DJ Snoopadelic for electronic.
why don’t more musicians do this? Different names for different genres
Well, he changed his name to Snoop Lion because Snoop Dog was trapped in a very one-sided royalties deal while Snoop Lion isn’t. Prince did something similar, which goes a long way to explaining his rather bizarre change to a symbol.
dont forget that he was snoopzilla for a funk album
Snoopy is probably who the mom and dad think it references. Jocy would know it’s for the rapper.
Eh, ‘Snoopy’ is a surprisingly common name for dogs in America. I blame Schultz.
Yes, but I find it much more interesting to assume it’s a prank on the parents. Also, he’s named Snoop, not Snoopy.
Hank Brown, you have Done a Good.
“Yes, that is definitely what happened. On a totally unrelated note, I swear, I’m in the mood for a heist film.”
Holy shit Hank you’re actually being more awesome right now WHAT
Side note,i suspect Hank might act this way because he actually learnt his lesson from raising Jordan… while Carol didn’t
Overhugging = Smothering.
Joyce’s words on Parent Day seemed to really have swayed him as well.
yeah, he probably thought something like “she’s becoming more jordan… but jordan’s a good kid, i don’t want to lose her like i did jordan.”
I think this stems from the fact that despite what they did, Hank knows Joyce enough to know that even though she took the car she wouldn’t actually do anything bad and that she probably needed some distance from Carol. Carol is, well she’s having trouble adapting her world view. A lot of people are like that, humans like things that are easy to catagorize and sort, they want everything in their world to fit into nice neat boxes especially the people in their lives. Joyce is changing and Carol doesn’t like that because she doesn’t know how to classify her now, just like she doesn’t know how to classify Becky because in her mind the box Becky falls into is now exclusively the box of a sinner and she was raised and then raised people to never associate with sinners because she’s afraid the more you associate with them the more you change. Partially because that’s right, the more you understand why people might do what you disapprove of the more you begin to emphazise and change with them and in the case of homosexuality which isn’t a choice understand that just because you yourself do not fit into that catagory doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing that someone else does.
Short version: Joyce is changing, Carol doesn’t like it because that means she has to shift her world view accordingly and that is hard.
The problem with that is that’s the definition of bad parenting. Parenting is all about letting go and allowing your children to become adults. Joyce Mom wants to infantalize her daughter whenever possible and with adults, that can only lead to verbal and mental abuse.
No one ever said Joyce’s mother was a good parent. 🙂
As someone who had a similar mother (to the point where I haven’t had contact with her in a year, and don’t consider her as family anymore), I know that all too well…add in the fact that Jocelyn’s pretty much me from three years ago, and this is getting kinda eerie for me.
Be strong, bucky.
True, a big part of parenting is letting your children go and develop into the young men and women they’re going to become. But, setting clear boundaries for appropriate behavior and disciplining when those rules are broken is an important part too.
It’s all about moderation, not being too strict, but also not raising them to have no sense of what is acceptable behavior or character. It’s all about moderation – give and take. Carol is, obviously, WAY too strict and rigid, while Hank seems a little more flexible.
He’s covering for Joyce and Becky now, but I suspect they’re not out of the woods just yet. They did steal his car after all, and that’s a pretty big betrayal of a parent’s trust, especially when Hank’s been trying really hard to be in Joyce’s corner this whole trip.
A really good comment. I prefer that over “omg Carol is Satan and she sucks !”
Carol is an interesting case where she probably was a wonderful mother but she will double down and triple down on bad behavior whenever things challenge her worldview. Which will only get Joyce to do the same. As my preacher says, “He does not bend, can only break.”
Hank is clearly the ‘bender’ in their marriage – she’s the oak, he the willow. This doesn’t make him weak, merely flexible. When Carol breaks, he is there to support her. He sees Joyce is changing, and while he doesn’t agree with how she’s changing, he’s there to support her.
This is the best response ever. You are super smart and super observant. And also helped me sum up my own views on a few things with a couple thrifty words.
Hank is totally on Joyce’s side because, duh, they totally bonded in the revelry of being out of the mother’s grasp for a while. He learned more about her, and she learned more about him, which conveniently arrived at a juncture that allowed them to broaden their own horizons willingly.
I love it.
Doubtful that Carol would even consider changing her world view. I mean how can she: she is RIGHT and really that is all she needs to know.
My parents were religious in a low key way. When I announced for Wicca, out loud, my mother was sure I would change my mind and accept baptism, however there were no fireworks, no threats.
My dad was like: whatever.
The point being I have never changed and my parents felt no need to change their world view. We all believed what we wanted, and co-existed. It worked. Wasn’t always smooth, but we lived with it.
Man you’re lucky. When I was contemplating Buddhism at an early age, my mother found out because my teachers told her. Then she sat me down, told me she was never going to accept such a thing, that I was doomed to hell and later, when I broke my arm, she… really didn’t care.
I don’t know why I just had verbal diarrhea, it just happened. Sorry.
That’s…. horrifying.
Hugs if you want them.
Well, this is the comments section for it, gods know. DoA draws all the adult survivors of severe childhood abuse to the yard (and I am not an exception), so it’s not like it’s just you.
Wisely put, BloodPlum.
The issue is: To have trouble adapting your world view, you have to be trying to adapt your world view in the first place. Carol is like Toedad in that she will never try to change her world view in light of new information.
She does not genuinely want what’s best for Joyce, she wants what will make her feel the most powerful and like the best parent. In her community “best parent” is one who turns out the most obedient and God-fearing children, and children must honor their parents by God’s decree – thus, when Joyce defies her she’s not only defying her mother, she’s defying God Himself. Any twitch or sniff of rebellion is a one-way ticket to Hell – and, worse, it’s willingly walking to Hell, because all of her children know that defiance of parents is defiance of God.
Probably, a lot of people don’t like any change that challenges a position that puts them at an advantage or in any sort of authority. It may be something deeper though, since all the information we have about Carol is second hand observations based on key instances where she has reacted poorly.
So, whose side is Snoop on? “Haha, I’m going to stop Joyce hanging out with that horrible lesbian with a mere bark!”
Snoop is a dog. He has no sides, only unconditional love. He just so happens to express said love in happy barks.
Unconditional love? That’s what those scheming dogs want you to believe.
And that’s why I like cats. I always know where I stand with cats.
Yes. So do. My cat stands firmly on her side, and I am expected to live with it.
I’m partial to the Dog/Cat Meme:
Dog: They feed and take care of me, they must be Gods.
Cat: They feed and take care of me, I must be a God.
My cat apparently just thinks I’m his oversized father or uncle who brings him food but needs help cleaning himself. If I start petting him after food he insists on cleaning my hair while doing that little kneading motion with his paws. The point: cats and dogs are both awesome and love unconditionally, cats are just a bit tsundere about it.
Dogs have owners, cats have staff.
Infections?
Dogs have pack leaders.
Cats are parasites.
This sort of thing always makes me wonder how ants think of their social parasites.
I don’t think my dog is smart enough to understand conditional love, or keep track of who meets said conditions.
Joyce had better get a grip or her mother might smell a fib and a cover up.
Yes. Cats are good. Dog are bad. know the difference, it could save you from a mom sermon 😀
GNU Terry Pratchett
Hank: Steadily becoming a better person.
“Defied me”? When you seriously say that you have to look at yourself and wonder if youre the bad guy.
Some mothers consider parenthood a form of property ownership.
I mean, so does the Bible.
Part of the bible is pretty much just the protagonist telling someone to commit child sacrifice for the sake of his ego, if I remember correctly.
Depends on the area. The Bible is wonderfully schizophrenic in that subject. Isaac is like the worst son ever.
Very true.
And when did she say they couldn’t go out? Without that, they really didn’t defy her. Irritated, yeah, maybe she needed to run errands or something…
““Defied me”? When you seriously say that you have to look at yourself and wonder if youre the bad guy.”
Absolutely. The problem is that Carol almost certainly hasn’t consumed enough popular media to have that phrase associated with villainy. The other problem is that even if she had, she probably wouldn’t make the connection.
It wouldn’t bother me if she’d actually defied her–as in, done something that her mother explicitly told her not to do. Defiance is just another term for “deliberately refusing to obey.” But I don’t see that here.
With Carol, I’d bet “Spending time with that godless sinner” and “Not waiting for my direct instructions on how to spend your time” count.
Certainly it does with my mother.
(My mom is a Carol, only not quite as god-bothering, and is of that school of libertarians who call themselves libertarians but actually are fascist authoritarians who want to be the ones calling the shots and view “my way or the highway” as being equivalent to “liberty” because you have the “freedom” to choose whether to toe the line or go to jail. I am a bisexual, atheist socialist. It’s a fight whenever we talk politics).
Well, the comic can’t cover everything in a few panels. I think the underlying assumption is that there are standing rules for borrowing the car, going out, that sort of thing. There were in my home, and my father was a terrible parent.
I’m also not sure it is possible to ‘vehemently’ defy someone. Being vehement is to be outspoken and, as far as I can tell, Joyce has yet to raise her voice to her mother’s face!
Because correcting your parent’s grammar is always a winning strategy in an argument.
Copied and adapted from yesterdays comments:
“You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a serial mom.”
honestly I think Hank just wanted to prevent the nuclear meltdown that was about to happen, but this works for Joyce
Ok, good job covering for them Hank. I think this qualifies you as a B parent on a scale of school grades. Probably a B-.
In the subject of communicating with your spouse, both get an F.
I want to trust and like Hank. I really want to trust and like Hank. He’s given me a lot of reasons to do so. I want to believe that he’s a genuinely good man who cares about his children and the friends of his children.
But this comic has dropped so many “other shoes” on me that I can’t help but be suspicious.
Damn you, Willis. Just… damn you.
I imagine Hank is basically Ned Flanders. He’s a naturally good guy but was raised with some beliefs which tell him to be bad to to Becky. The thing is, he was also raised with beliefs which tell him to be nice to Becky. It’s just way too many people go with the former and not the latter.
I’d really like to know some background on the senior Browns. I can imagine Hank having grown up in a very religious family, and Carol having converted to the conservative Christianity they follow, as converts are sometimes more conservative and doctrinaire than those who’ve followed a faith all their lives.
This is true. I know a fundamentalist Christian couple — or rather, am aware of them because I knew them in college. He was raised a hippy Quaker and she went through atheist and Catholic phases, and now they’re both scary fanatical. Even went creationist.
He’s trying, from what I’ve seen. It’s hard to unlearn a lifetime of conditioning. Bit by bit, he seems to be coming around. Trusting in his daughter to do right, and that she is doing right, does also seem to be a big part of it.
I don’t see much narrative value in Hank suddenly becoming not-cool again.
What I’ve been seeing ever since Hank showed up in B6Ch2 is an emphasis on the differences between Hank and Carol, how much more supportive he is than her.
Hank will continue to be a rad dad, but it will cause a schism between him and his wife.
I suspect that, at least in part, Hank is motivated by a desire for peace in his family. He doesn’t like strife and will compromise to avoid it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he is somewhat under Carol’s thumb himself because her personality is so much stronger. Oddly enough, this works against his desire for a peaceful family life because he doesn’t often have enough courage to face down her towering sense of rightness and moral direction.
…okay, Dad Brown, you get a few more points back.
The spinning beach ball of doom is juuuust visible in Joyce’s eyes. Might need a hard reboot very soon.
Excuse you Becky, dogs are awesome.
Ok the doggie is adorable.
And you’re alright too, I guess, Hank. For now. (because you never know in this here comic strip)
I wonder if the Browns are like my parents in that they ostensibly still love each other but have made a quiet mutual decision to spend a little time around one another as humanly possible.
Hank with the save!
Willis Evil Thought 1#: Dad isn’t covering for Joyce but is in the early stages of premature dementia. He honestly doesn’t remember whether or not she asked for permission.
Doesn’t feel right for Willis’ writing. I mean, I’m not discounting the idea of him working in a parent dealing with something like that, but it doesn’t feel like he’d write it in here and now. My personal opinion.
Oh good, that occurred to someone else.
Re: the alt text, no, cats are evil incarnate.
…I just had the weirdest, fondest, flashback to my teenage years, where I was always being weird and disappearing and doing whatever (nothing bad, I was just in a bad place mentally and needed space/freedom/etc) and my dad consistently had my back against my mom. My mom thought controlling me even tighter was the answer, whereas my dad figured I was an overall good kid and if I needed to take a walk at midnight, I probably just needed to take a walk.
My mother imagined all these horrible scenarios about me meeting people for drugs or whatever, and my dad was naive.
It kind of showed which parent knew me better, because I really was just repeatedly walking around the parade field with my ipod blasting.
Weirdly, though my dad was highly controlling about damn near everything else, one thing he didn’t control me about and actually had my back on was fashion and hairdos.
My mom was highly traditional and completely in the girls-should-have-long-hair-and-I-don’t-care-if-you-have-horrible-fine-hair-that-is-frizzy-and-tangles-if-you-look-at-it-the-wrong-way camp. Thus my hair was mid-back length for most of elementary and middle school. I’d wanted to get it cut short since kindergarden, and was told no so often I gave up asking.
Until she made the mistake, when I was 13, of sending me to the hairdresser’s with money, alone, and instructions to get “whatever I want”.
I got my head shaved bald. As you do when 13 and you hate anything to do with long hair and need to stick up two middle fingers to hair policing.
I was fully expecting to get in huge shit for it. Mom wanted to ground me until my hair looked “respectable” again. Dad, surprisingly, had my back and pointed out (rightly) that it never would’ve come to that point if she’d just let me get it cut off back when I first started asking, and that making your kid spend an hour on her unruly tangly hair every morning isn’t fair if it’s not her choice.
Thus began a 5-year period where I typically looked like I’d gotten into a fight with a lawnmower and then fell into a vat of dye, because give a teenager who’s never had a real choice in anything complete control over something and they’re gonna go a little wild over it. 😛
SO MUCH BECKY GOLD IN THIS ONE.
Panel 1: Joyce and Becky, all sneaky like.
Panel 2: Becky like cats because of course she does. (also, I really can see a kid Becky envy cats who have their own flap and can leave the house whenever they want… hm, if I leave my window open I might be able to climb over the garden shed…) Plus I really love her background banter.
Panel 3: Let it be officially noted, for all the talk of Becky’s lack of brain-mouth filter, self control and sense in general – she DOES shut up here. “Did you have a good time?” “I showed Joyce a good time all right. Hurr, hurr, hurr. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.”
Panel 4: Lying-to-parents-express-service(TM). Watch and learn, Joyce. This is how a PRO does it.
Oh, and Hank is awesome too.
All of this! Becky may be a goofball lacking a filter but she knows how to traverse scary situations like this (probably from a lifetime of Toedad, since Carol seems so similar).
Mrs.Brown is starting to sound like toedad.
Starting?
I have a feeling that Carol and Toedad were quite close. Hank has expressed not liking Toedad on the drive home the other day, and is clearly on Joyce’s side.
Worst case scenario: Carol divorces Hank for Hank not being “Christian enough” and marries Toedad!
Also, why is my chosen Gravatar not coming through, instead getting one of the more generic ones from the site? It comes through properly on other sites.
Perhaps an error in the name/email address?
http://i.imgur.com/nkKUkbJ.png
Poor Hank.
A lot of guys would love the last requirement. Not that they’d actually be able to pull it off.
Even if they could, it would quickly start causing physical pain in the brain.
I… I really don’t think they would. They’d like the sound of it for maybe a few seconds, until they thought about it.
If they tried that many times, they wouldn’t have to pull it off, it would fall off on it’s own.
Can’t argue with God
7 times?! I don’t think there’s sombedoy with enough stamina to pull that off.
Carol will find a way.
What, like B12 injections?
I don’t think she stated a participant limit…
You doubt Joe? Well, maybe with the same woman in his case, but still…
I don’t think Hank is a good father. He is weak. He will not stand up for his own beliefs, or his own children.
Carole is a tyrant. She listens to no other voice than her own. And Hank does not face her down.
Hank has only one thing going for him imo. He loves his kids and spends what little strength he has protecting them from Caroles outbursts – when he can. Other than that…..
You are absolutely correct, Hank should have been a real man and instructed his wife how to think when they first married. The only solution to a wife that disagrees with you is to shout her down and humiliate her in front of her children on a regular basis. For justice!!
…
In all probability, Hank is going to have to choose between being a good parent and being a good spouse. Whether he must choose or not, a conflict is coming. I’m reasonably okay with staving it off and buying his daughter some time so that she doesn’t suffer, come what may. That may, or may not, be a better parent than stepping in now and trying to advocate for her.
None of this requires that he dictate to her what she must do. Hopefully he doesn’t do that, and he doesn’t seem inclined.
I don’t know if I would call passively enabling your partner to be a bigoted asshole instead of encouraging them to grow into a better person and lead a more fulfilling life “being a good spouse.” Where oppression exists, ultimately everyone loses, including the oppressor.
Everyone’s a little bigoted. You just change what they’re bigoted against so it matches what you’re against.
If we all could just admit
That we are racist a little bit
Even though we all know that it’s wrong
Maybe it would help us get along
Some people want to change the world. Some others are busy doing damage control. For some reason, the world-changers want to look down on the damage-controllers. I don’t know why that is, but sometimes I forget to not let it irritate me.
Some other just want to watch the world buuuurrrrrn.
95% of engineers are doing maintenance related work. Only 5% get to make innovations. Hank is in the 95% just trying to keep things running. Its thankless work.
Being a good spouse has at minimum the requirement that you remain that person’s spouse.
But, more importantly, we’ve seen them fighting about this. So the idea that he’s just sitting back and letting Carol do whatever is false.
I definitely get the feeling they’ve been arguing all week about this–at least as long as they knew that Joyce was actually supporting Becky.
I think this whole line of thinking that he’s just passively allowing Carol do her thing is false.
Heck, while I love Joss and understand why she isn’t involved, he’s done more than she has. And she’s been aware of the issue for a lot longer.
For the record, I wasn’t saying that this is what Hank is doing. I was saying that in the context of the dichotomy presented by the commenter above me, that is what choosing to be a good spouse would entail. My point was that going along with whatever Carol says would not make Hank a good spouse (but he’s not doing that, so go Hank!)
yes!!
Agreed, Carol is the real leader of the Brown family (ironic, given how vehemently patriarchal their society is in general). What is more, she is also so thunderingly self-righteous, she won’t tolerate her children being anything other than exactly what she wants them to be. Like Ross, there is a voice in her head telling her what is good and right and, like Ross, she thinks that it’s God.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a divorce on the horizon simply because Hank has reached the end of his tether. He just isn’t willing to live with Carol’s controlling nature anymore. I suspect that Jocelyne will be the real tipping point but Joyce standing up to her mother will be the the first rattle of pebbles from the avalanche.
this sounds horribly sexist of you
The Carol-Hank relationship is an example of an abusive relationship wherein the woman is the abuser. Carol abuses everyone in the house, and to large extent, Hank enables her, because she’s abused him to the point that he doesn’t feel he can defy her, either.
Now, is she as physically violent as Toedad? No, mainly because she was brought up with female gender roles so her violence is of the emotional and social varieties.
Is it bad that I would solve half of the conflict in this comic by tricking the characters into going into a closet together and locking the door.
Hey Carla, can you do me a favor and stand here for a few minutes? It’s for an experiment.
Quick Mary, theres a new bible in that closet! ‘
Locks door
If movies have taught me anything, the best way to make people friends is to lock them up somewhere with each other.
It could also work for Sal and Amber!
If you measure the success of “solve” by no longer wanting death on one party member, then yes the problem would be solved. Though the solution would most likely involve someone’s death, but that’s just semantics, right?
I don’t know if it’s really bad, just ultimately fruitless.
I mean, realistically, people in a closet can just coldly ignore each other. People only resolve conflicts when stuck in closets because writers decide that that’s a dramatic way to get two people to resolve their own conflicts.
I would be hoping that their hatred of me after locking them in a closet for a few hours would end up outdoing their hatred of each other. Of course, then I have at least to people pissed at me because I looked them in a closet, buts thats another issue.
I’ve been in such a situation. Only thing that happens is that you get used to politely tolerate each other. (Well, and sometimes you learn weird things about them).
I had to room with my worst enemy and his second-in-command once for a school trip.
Man, Hank that’s some manipulative timing. Surely you knew what Carol’d think. Did you just not know which side you’d come down on? Cos you could have brought it up earlier- hey Joyce and Becky took the car for the day, just fyi- and establish their alibi ahead of time. Instead, you waited until she started to make a scene, then made her look unreasonable because she failed to trust her daughter.
Now Carol IS unreasonable, but she was also right. And this subtle shut up will have more impact on her, it’s an action rather than just a patch.
And obviously I can’t NOT support it, it’s a good move I think, I’m just wondering about the timing. Was it deliberate? considered?
And I pick up on it more easily because I’m familiar with the gaslighting narrative, which I associate more with masculine abusiveness (entirely a personal permutation, not necessarily rooted in reality), so I recognise the pattern more readily in this gender configuration.
/thoughts. I just wonder at the timing, and feel ickier about it cos it’s covering mistruth. But then, that’s another element of the that perfect girl idea- actions taken to protect or support marginalised peoples are somehow less valid, less ethical, because the people being supported/protected aren’t perfect- regardless of the ethics or morality of their detractors.
subtle, noice.
If he had said it earlier Carol would have worked herself up over something else (“where have you been this late” “what have you been doing with a lesbian all day” “why were you so rude to poor John”…). Again, the problem is not anything Joyce and Becky DOES. The problem is that Becky IS.
I assume he had to spend the entire day arguing with Carol to not pull Joyce out of college. Probably wouldn’t have even had a chance to say anything else.
I doubt that he even thought of lying to Carol until he saw Joyce and realised that he didn’t want her to suffer her verbal lash.
The thing is we can’t know any of this. She may have ranted the whole day through, they may have argued, or they could have kept quiet the whole time. People whose relationships are falling apart tend not speak to each other. They sit there in their chairs staring ahead into the middle distance, not talking.
I’m not sure Hank is an “abusive male”; it may be, from what we’ve seen, is the passive of the two and that this is something new – witness Joyce’s reaction.
If Hank is a big a Christian as Joyce or Carol, lying is surely a sin and he’s just damned his soul to hell to save his daughter from Carol’s abuse.
That’s a big step for anyone.
> but she was also right
Yeah, because being “right” is the validation for any kind of nonsensical abuse.
If Carol had started off saying, “what’s the matter, hon. Where have you been? You didn’t call.” I’d have a whole lot more sympathy with Carol and your interpretation. But no, in with the “you have wronged me” nonsense.
I don’t think hank is gaslighting. I’m just reflecting there on how the narratives I’m familiar with influence the patterns I’m most able to identify.
It wasn’t really a judgement post, just a collection of reflections. I didn’t bother reflecting on carol’s actions and motivations, because hank’s were less obvious and more interesting to me and I didn’t see anything else about the timing.
Being on the sharp end of an abusive relationship ends up making you a more manipulative person just to survive. Your entire life becomes about obsessing over the other person, trying to read their thoughts and figure out ahead of time how to dodge and defuse– or in some situations, how to push their buttons and draw fire from someone else. Whether said manipulation is unethical is kind of a wobbly relative thing. Imo, you do what you need to do to survive, but you don’t just unlearn all that once you get out of danger. If Hank continues those patterns when he’s outside Carol’s influence… yeah, that’s shitty. But I don’t expect anyone to be a great person when they’re under fire for 20 years.
Again, we have no idea how abusive Carol is to Hank.
The manipulation narrative depends on how what went on in a period we know little about. They may have said loads in that period … they may not.
What we do know is that this behaviour from Hank is *new*, witness Joyce’s reaction: “What is happening.”
Uuuuh, wait: “gaslighting”
Yes, Hank lies here.
But he does not tell to Carol that she totally should have remembered that, that their memory of events is wrong; that would be gaslighting, but that is not what is happening.
Is it bad that I prefer this storyline than to where Amber currently is?
This is DoA, you have several ongoing emotionnal train wrecks story treads to choose from
I’unno, I guess it depends on your reason.
Personally, while I guess Amber’s character arc isn’t really repeating itself anywhere, it does feel like it’s moving at a much slower pace.
Resolution, or lack thereof? Yeah, I get that.
Your dad is covering because your mom is horrible.
Good to know there’s one parent you can trust?
You can trust Carol as well. As to what, well, I’ll just leave this here:
[Insert Bigoted Worldview Here]
The problem with two horrible parents/guardians with one meaningfully less horrible is that while you can lever one off the other, that only goes so far, and the other one is still horrible, so you’ve got to be super ready to expect the other knife (one hopes metaphorically) and be able to dodge and roll from that too.
It’s a little like being Finland in World War II. Nazis or Stalin? Nazis or Stalin? Let’s pivot mid-war and dance like crazy to maintain independence until we can find some way to get the fuck out of this mess, at least, until the next mess.
Which is to say: Mr. Brown is the Less Bad Parent, as far as we can tell, but that should not translate to “trust.”
Yeah, any “trust” I’d put on Hank is completely dependent on “Okay, do I really think he’d not entirely disown Jocelyne when she comes out?” And my answer to that is “Sincerely doubtful, at least not in any time to mitigate the damage that’s gonna be done when that happens.”
Fortunately, Jocelyne’s clearly been preparing herself for that one both in terms of “trying to get essentials like paperwork so she won’t have to worry about that when they throw her out” and “steeling herself for what’s likely to be complete loss of family, with maybe now two exceptions once they get through the awkward tripping over themselves phase,” but the fact remains that she shouldn’t have to plan for it in the first place.
Best dad in the comic.
I dunno, Sierra’s dad is pretty chill.
I dunno, Sierra’s dad has had literally one line.
Does being relatively inoffensive outweigh having some screw ups but also some really good moments?
Not a high bar, but worth repeating.
Only until/unless Carla’s dad makes an appearance I bet.
Dina has a dad. And also aDaD.
I kinda hope that eventually Sal and Amber are gonna have an epic battle, only for an annoyed Joyce to show up and defeat them both with a single punch in each hand.
With Joyce it’s more likely to be a nunchaku made out of a pair of crosses.
The Hank that covers for Joyce comes from the same bizarro universe as the Joyce that steals the car.
I almost took today off.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udp8ozkrym4
Almost. Four years ago today on Shortpacked!
Hmmm, since the Whitaker family exist in the DoAverse, I’ll make a prediction about Carol. We will eventually learn that, long ago, she was a friend of Veronica Vance’s, since they worked in the same business.
that will make an interesting plot thread… although i can’t unsee imagining this bigoted asshole mom being a dominatrix. e_e
I feel like both of you are being immensely, horribly judgmental of dominatrixes. What have they done to deserve comparison to Carol Brown?
Lmao xD
well, if there is real life evidence of bigoted assholes watching gay and/or trans porn… I don’t see how that scenario isn’t possible. 😛
I don’t assume Carol was a dom, just that she and Veronica worked for the same employers.
It’s quite telling that Carol’s anger here isn’t even tempered with concern which one might have if their child went awol all day. Hell, we haven’t been given any indication that she even bothered to try to get a hold of Joyce at any point throughout the day. Instead her anger is just tempered with passive aggressive bullshit.
Ah thank god Hank is making an intervention, as it was really needed D:
Dad to the rescue. I’m sure for Hank, Joyce is daddys little girl.
I would ask if Carol realizes she sounds like a Disney villain, but I doubt she knows what those sound like.
I mean, we already know Frozen is disallowed, and Hans is pretty much the Disneyest Disney villain to ever villainize.
I know I’ve heard a story about “My parents didn’t let me watch Tangled, and after seeing it now I think it’s because they realized I’d realize Gothel’s treatment is too close to home and she’s the villain.” or something to that saddening extent.
So I get the sense Carol might have some idea, or someone higher up, and thus have a vested interest in keeping the kids from watching it. Because challenging authority figures is Bad, after all.
Perhaps from before the Disney boycott after they started supporting gay people–the 90s one, not the 2000s.
I’ve never been quite clear how strict Carol was with TV. If she allowed Twilight, she could have allowed the earlier Disney stuff. And that’s for her family–we don’t know how she herself was raised.
Twilight normalizes Patriarchal abusive relationships, while remaking Vampires formerly a metaphor of unchained sexual desire —to one of tamed sparkly Abstinence.
I wonder if Twilight would have been less acceptable or more acceptable if Carol knew how super Mormon said tamed sparkly abstinence is.
I was thinking more Delores Umbrdige.
Hank is rocketing up my list of favorite characters.
I’m seriously wondering if Carol is thinking that Joyce and Becky are … involved.
But not as much as I want to know if Hank is thinking that.
Uh, Hank knows about Dina.
I suspect John thinks that more than anyone else, since Joyce established to him that Becky was family, and he didn’t distinguish between them when saying that LGBblahblah acronym.
What I find interesting here is Hank’s shirt. Last we saw/heard from the Brown parents, Carol was advocating yanking Joyce out of school because of the ‘bad influences’. Now Hank is wearing a shirt from said school.
I thiiiink Carol may still be annoyed that she lost that argument.
As a christian fundamentalist, she should be used to it. The husband is the head of the household. Her status is about equal to that of the dog.
That’s how they say they roll, yes, but I think it’s pretty clear that in any matters of importance, it’s Carol’s way or the highway. People who really believe they are and should be like dogs don’t say things like ‘never have you do vehemently defied me’. And look at their positioning, too – Carol front and center, authoritative, with Hank behind and to the side.
Carol’s not used to losing anything in the Brown household.
Its on purpose.
Hes being passive-aggressive. Or not exactly.
He’s being passive-assertive, ( with the shirt ) and undermining Carol’s undermining of Joyce.
Quite Brilliant.
I really want to say Un-kind things about carol , but I wont, since i think she is now based on Willis mom.
Cats rule and dogs drool.
Can’t disagree with that. 🙂
Still not buying it, Mr. Brown!
Well, since Joyce is in near-critical-failure mode, I guess it’s up to Becky to tell the truth (but not the whole truth, obvs)(well, except for agreeing with Hank’s lie)
“Hi Mr Brown, Mrs Brown! We got a call from John about meeting him and Josh for lunch, and we did, and then John went home, and we hung out and chatted with Josh about all kinds of stuff, but a lot of it was about establishing identity and stuff like that that is important to me since I don’t have a whole lot of official documents with my name and picture on them. Did you know that the more official documents you have, the easier it is to get more? Anyway, we hung out for a while brainstorming things that I could do, and then we dropped Josh off at his place. And, wow, it sure is late, and I am so sorry we didn’t call. Hey, how come you didn’t try to call us?”
Nothing in there is a lie, but I suspect that Joyce’s body language would be screaming “There are things you are not being told!”. OTOH, I suspect that Becky has mad skillz at making her body language say “I am cheerful and peppy and not hiding anything at all, no sir!”
Ooh, and I just realized that that final question — which I threw in there because it’s the sort of deflection that a semi-guilty kid might use — would be a great opportunity for Hank to respond with something like: “Well, I didn’t call because I figured that you’re adults and I generally trust your judgment. I trust Joyce when she’s miles away at the university dorm; why should I trust her less when she’s just driving around in town?”
And maybe following that with: “Carol? Why didn’t you call them if you were so concerned?”
Too confrontational. Hank still wants peace in his house.
“Phones work both ways.” People trying to claim a higher moral ground when they’re the salt of the earth don’t like hearing that, in my experience.
In a previous update when Becky’s phone starts buzzing she explicitly tells Becky she’s not answering the phone if it’s her parents calling (it turns out to be her brothers, this was just before the scene at the restaurant).
We don’t know whether Carol or Hank tried calling, and it’s a safe bet Joyce wouldn’t have answered even if they did.
I just checked back at that comic, and Joyce specifically says: “If it’s my mom, don’t answer it”. So presumably, she would have talked to her dad, if he’d called.
Also, I notice that John says that “Mom and Dad told you about [meeting up for lunch]?”. So . . . Wasn’t it already known to her parents that Joyce would be going out to meet her responsible elder siblings?
I’m wondering if some telephone shenanigans were occurring that were not shown in the comic, like Carol texting repeatedly/leaving multiple voicemails on Joyce’s phone (but if those were failing, then why did she not try to reach Josh?).
Doubt she could tell the difference. I suspect they have a house phone and would use it at home.
What a hero
I feel like this is the start of a fight leading to divorce. What is the mom’s problem? Defied her? Is she a queen now?
Wouldn’t he have mentioned that to his stewing, angry wife before now? If he was going to make the lie in the first place, shouldn’t it have been when she talked to him about it? Seems like they have been home together for awhile, and may have noticed joyce and becky were gone together that morning.
Carol was already set on the idea that Joyce was being corrupted. I think that on some level, she wanted to wait a little bit longer to make their supposed infraction more severe.
My partner had to deal with this recently. They helped me move out of my college dorm, came to my house with me, and spent the night, then spent the day with me. At about 8pm they get a call from their father, who’s steaming mad because she should have left my house by 6pm.
From there, he yells at her for about 33 minutes, blaming her from everything from lying about the reason she left home (she went to take a final for university band, which was just manual labor and was cancelled), getting mad at her for spending the day with me and helping me pack things up, the works. A lot of cussing and yelling.
I think it’s the same thing here. Taking the car out for a spin is something little, as is going to lunch with John and Joss. If there was a practical concern, she would have told Hank, or called Joyce much earlier, but that wouldn’t give her as much ammunition.
This. I’m sorry your partner had to go through that. The fact of the matter is, when people get it in their minds that they want to fight, they’re gonna find a way to fight no matter what the other party does and doesn’t do.
No, that sucks I get that. I mean, the dad and mom were home together, and the mom must have been steamed and talking about how she felt what joyce was doing. Shouldn’t he have come up with his lie then? By lying now he opens himself up to the question of why he didn’t say anything to the angry and waiting mom earlier.
Hank is the reasonable one.
RE: Alt-text: Lies. Cats are evil little bastards. I guess it should be obvious I’m more of a dog person myself >.>
Anyways, it’s nice to see Hank covering for Joyce and Becky. Seems he realized that they needed some space. Unlike Carol who’s just a horrible person in general.
If you can stand a friendly social cat, that looks you in the face, listens when you talk , comes when you call, knows their name, cuddles when you want , strongly attaches to owner, likes to be pet EVERYWHERE,
( even backwards )
—basically acts like a Dog-lite , get a Norwegian Forrest Cat.
They arent “small” either. 3 feet long from nose to tail. 20 plus pounds.
triple waterproof coat , and they can walk down trees.
Cats are nice. Especially the sweet mostly-black one lying on my arm making it hard to type.
Hank’s actions are a good way to ingratiate yourself with your underlings. Smart.
*Starscream smirks in the background, getting ideas about a new leader of the Decepticons, again.*
Joyce’s parents are nicer than mine.
*Jealous*
Yeah, as I thought, Hank is trying to be a peacemaker and find some kind of compromise to save his family without anyone having to back down too much, even if it means taking the blame on himself. It’s obvious to me that his family is terrifically important to him and he’s going to fight hard to keep it together. I just wonder if he’s going to make it clear to Joyce that he expects her to play the game too?
Maybe I’m missing something but surely Carol knew Joyce was going out that day? It seems that the meeting with John and ‘Josh’ was something arranged well in advance!
Divorce is brewing.
Separation is fermenting?
Hiring a lawyer is distilling
It seems to me that the mothers are worse than the fathers. This is not the first time Joyce’s mom has busted her ass.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/sweetie/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/squeezing-2/
And of course, there’s always Ethan’s mom Naomi —
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/placate/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/easy/
OTOH, there’s Toedad & Blaine.
We don’t know much about Amber’s mom other than that she managed to get out of her marriage with Blaine, and unfortunately doesn’t realise the true state of Amber’s mental health. I attribute the latter to Amber being very good at hiding her problems, since it seems no one else in her life figured out how really troubled she’s been.
i could never love someone who owns a cat. cause i have allergies and i dont want them to choose me over the cat
Or you are afraid they would choose the cat over you?
Aww, the dog’s so cute, though!
World’s Greatest Dad
I wonder if Joyce is used to seeing her dad roll over when her mother tries this on? Hence the “what is happening.”
I think Hank is delaying the inevitable crisis – or making it worse – because I suspect Carol will try and have her way regardless of any reasonable defence.
Okay, in this strip, MR. Brown gets like, eleventy million points in my book. It shows more than ever that he is willing to cover for Joyce, to give her some support that she really does have the option of making her own independent decisions as an adult, in spite of Mrs. Brown’s overbearing attempts to keep Joyce as “her precious little girl”, which wind up doing more to prevent Joyce’s growth into a self-determinant adult. Good move, Sir. We, the readership salute you.
Also, I share Becky’s affinity for cats. Dogs are nice, but I much prefer how cats are a more selective judge of character, rather than loud, indiscriminate fawning… well… lapdogs. Basically, dogs will love you if you’re human. Cats will love you if you’re a human *worthy* of their love.
“Having a good time is strictly forbidden! That’s why we moved to this town!”
So the mom is the zealot in this family.
Hank has just earned my respect. Lets see if he can keep it.
I thought this has already been established.
Really though, anyone who uses the phrase “defied me” unironically immediately goes in my asshole file. Maybe if they are a fantasy king being murdered by their evil vizier they get a pass, but even then it’s shaky.
Only one documented case of “defy” has ever been suitable by these stipulations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkPOvRHsrqM
And alone it shall remain…
I’m voting on the side of “Hank just wants to avoid a scene right now”.
But then, in my household, it was always me and my dad covering for each other with my “workaholic 10 hours a day, seven days a week, the job description says 8-5 M-F” mom. Not that my dad didn’t come down on me when I deserved it, but this looks very much like a “Leila and Dad vs the world” situation to me.
Joyce is probably still thinking about prison food touching.
Hank is a lot more secularized than we think. I honestly think he might be trusting Joyce that she did it for a good reason.
That doesn’t mean he’s not, y’know, fundamentalist – Just that in this situation, he’s trusting Joyce. They also shared a car ride without Carol. That tends to help in building trust not based on who your religion tells you to hate.
Doesn’t mean he won’t be insisting on other things we’d be not happy with him for later down the line, but right now, he Did A Good and I’m smiling about it.
What I want to know is why Carol and Hank hadn’t talked about whether they asked for permission before this scene.
The unfortunate thought comes to mind that Carol figures that Hank favours Joyce, and that he goes “too easy” on her and lets her “get away with misbehaviour,” so she was hoping to catch Joyce in such a way her husband couldn’t deny the “crime.”
Dorothy and Sarah are written as such pragmatists and great planners who both love Joyce dearly. My fantasy storyline would be both or wither of them finding Joyce scholarship money that cuts off that harridan from threatening Joyce through her tuition…
I feel really bad for Hank, being in a relationship with a person he has to lie to to protect his daughter and family friend.
But “cool dad” saves the day. Maybe he’ll yell at them for staying out too late to give it some plausibility though.
Also Snoop (the) Dog hahaha. I didn’t catch that before.
Mr.Brown is doing an okay job as far as we’ve seen of protecting Joyce from her domineering mother. Here’s to hoping he takes them to the side and talks to Joyce and Becky with respect to their recent trauma and that Hank dows everything in his power to make sure they get back to the University in one piece.
Carol is a variation of my mother.
Dad was in his late 70s and he used to do the shopping – ostensibly Mum was the more disabled of the two – going to the next town to do it.
My brother found Dad – in continuous pain at this stage of his life – in the next town having been sent back by Mum because he’d gotten the wrong thing the first time around.
Carol has none of my sympathy, and I really can’t wait until she explodes.
This does beg the question of how the dad hadn’t already invented his permission asking story long before they got home. Because you know the mom has been bongoing to the dad about it for hours, just waiting for them to get home so she could lay into them.
She should turn to him now and say something like “Well, why didn’t you mention that to me hours ago?” And she’d be right. And it would probably be one of the few times in her life she’s been ‘right’ as opposed to ‘self-righteous.’
And by ‘bongoing’ I mean female dogging. Quite the interesting swear filter you’ve got here. 😛
I think “female dogging” should be a coined phrase now.
They’re still out quite late, so it’s still an offense, just less of one. So that’s justification for staying up and waiting for them, and I’d imagine he’ll go with that next. “…But I did not give you permission to be out this late.” And then they talk about hanging out and eating with Joss and so on, which defuses the next trigger.
Even with the “itch” filter in place “Begging the Question” does not mean what you think it means.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why there is no dumber detective story than “The Dog That Didn’t Bark”.
I love love love how Becky moves from behind Joyce in “barking dog hesitation” to immediately in front of her with “Protect Joyce from Angry Parent”. Becky has Joyce’s best interests in heart, even if it takes her a while to understandably sort through her emotions about it. She’s got such a good heart and she’s trying so hard.
Snoop, you fucking narc.
*Ctrl-Fs to see how many commenters have made the obvious joke about pussies*
None? õ_ô
*checks Willis’ Twitter and Tumblr to see if so many made the same joke that he created another word filter*
Hmm, no, not that either.
Was it too obvious?
Oh well. You know the joke.
*wanders off*
Damnit dog! That loose mouthed skank!
When did Joyce’s mom become Frollo?