I’m still waiting for a “pop” auto-correct because there’s always someone wanting to be an ass about that being the word for soft drinks in the Midwest, and I haven’t used that term since leaving Detroit.
Yup, it’s like. Hi, you look like you’re stewing in impotent rage and anger. I would like to volunteer to be the red hot focus of your righteous wrath.
She left a urine sample in the half-bath, then Dina picked it up for a second, vanished into the shadows, and left them where she ended up. Sometimes it’s hard to be a shadow being.
Also, her powers are controlled by her hat, which is why she will never take it off, lest some unfortunate soul try on the ShadowHat and be lost for eternity in the Domain of Shadows.
I don’t know why, but for some reason I’m imagining Agatha reacting to this by taking a picture with a purple camera and saying “neat” like Bender would sometimes do on Futurama.
and transgender people might not like that episode where they had all sorts of transphobic jokes where Bender transitioned in order to use his “unfair male strength” to win the women’s robo-olympics
Can we get one of those awesome moments where everyone on the floor teams up using each of their quirks and/or special skills to get revenge on Mary in an ultra complex multi-step plan?
Everyone works together, everyone provides an alibi for everyone else (alibi being there was a floor meeting and there had been a rumor there’d be free pizza so everyone showed), everyone agrees they have no idea what exactly happened to her (and if they weren’t filled in on all the other steps, they probably don’t, so it’s not even lying on that point).
And after months of planning, what happens is that one of them says “Look over there!” while someone else uses an electric hair clipper to shave a patch on the back of her head.
My best guess comes from various bigoted christian sites I’ve come across that referred to same-sex couples as “pretending to be in love”. From her point of view, any same-sex relationship is rooted in sin and since you’re clearly going against god’s will then you can’t feel positive emotions like love for each other.
Actually, I’ll be generous. She probably thinks that about het relationships too, if the people involved have any interest in doing more than holding hands before having a family-approved wedding in a church.
This. She doesn’t view Billie’s relationship with Ruth as real. Just as a means by which they can personally attack Mary’s faith with wickedness. Certainly nothing with real emotional connection, with real love, with real giving a fuck whether the other person lives or dies.
It’s part of a whole nasty flavor of Pre-Millennial Dispensationalist Rapturist Christianity that views everyone else’s lives as not really real, more just a sideshow for the central conflict for your soul.
The suffering of individuals mattering so much less than whether or not Team Jesus or Team Satan is racking up the point in this particular encounter.
I honestly think she may really be that bad at understanding people, she reads as autism spectrum to me. Not the being a horrible bongo to people bit but myself and the majority of my immediate family are autism spectrum to one degree or another and a lot of her behaviors are very familiar.
Autism is a good excuse for a lot of careless seeming behavior. However, I do not think Mary is at all autistic, of any sort of ‘ic’.
People don’t have to be medically/mentally ill to be assholes.
A lot of times it just takes the right flavor of genetics and environment. And being sure that your religion is the only ‘right’ religion in the world of course. If you don’t believe the way she believes: well you simply do not count, not for anything, you can’t possibly be on the same level as she is.
Okay first the idea that being autistic makes you less culpable for your choices is ablest as fuck and seriously condescending. And second a lot of autism spectrum people take offense to the mentally ill label just because I think differently then you doesn’t mean I think worse.
“Everyone is on the spectrum” is a false statement. If someone has any of the disorders that fall under the ASD umbrella, they’re on the autism spectrum. If they don’t have autism, they aren’t on the autism spectrum.
Seconding A Friendly Trash Can. I mean there’s people in my family who I think are allistic but have a lot of autistic-related traits, but I’m pretty sure most of them are not in fact actually on the spectrum.
They didn’t say it did. But it does change how we interpret what you do. Behaviors that would indicate a lack of caring in a neurotyypical person can be a social deficit in a person with autism.
Or it can indicate a misunfderstanding. For example, it completely changed how I interpreted your post. I can see why you are upset, and that you probably didn’t intend any rudeness.
I mean I’m an autistic person who is also mentally ill, but yeah to me it’s a disability (and I do class it as a disability because like: I cannot open certain kinds of doors because of my low muscle tone) and not a mental illness. Neurodivergence, yes. Disability, yes. Mental illness, no.
Mary is not autistic. Speaking as an autistic here’s a few reasons why:
1, Autistic people (like me) are generally good at emotional empathy. We are good at feeling what others feel when they feel it, and at feeling for others when we know they’re hurting. Many autistic people (me included) have a tendency to be emotion sponges (by which I mean we kind of feel whatever the crows around us is feeling) but can’t really identify what we’re feeling or where it’s coming from (alexithymia is heavily comorbid with autism). So, for me, in a room with someone who is anxious, I will begin to feel anxious, but at the time, I will have a hard time identifying that I am anxious, or that my anxiety is sympathetic. Mary shows no such tendency to feel what others feel.
2, Autistic people are bad at cognitive empathy – that is, the ability to read social situations, figure out what others want, and act accordingly. Autistic people (especially young ones who haven’t figured out functional scripts yet) can have a hard time with routine politeness like what greeting to use when, asking for permission to do stuff, etc. An autistic person often can’t pick up on social subtext at all: I can’t read sarcasm, I can’t pick it up if people are hinting at something to me (like one of my friends is in the habit of going “HINT HINT” to cue a social hint at me, and I still only pick up on what he’s hinting at about 1/2 of the time – and that’s with him cueing in so many words that he’s hinting at something he doesn’t want to say outright), and I have only picked up “unspoken” rules of social interaction by accessing resources like realsocialskills which discards social convention and comes out and states those social rules. Case in point: I genuinely did not know that as a guest in someone else’s place, if they offer something to drink, it is expected to accept even if you are not thirsty. Mary shows no such indications. She is pretty average at cognitive empathy – if she was better at it, she would be able to manipulate Ruth without the entire floor finding out about it. But she’s not bad at it in the way an autistic person is bad at it. Dina is bad at it in that way (Dina’s good emotional empathy coupled with her bad cognitive empathy are a big part of why I read her as autistic – and why a lot of others I know who are autistic also read her as autistic. Dina feels the emotions of those around her and gets overwhelmed by them, without really understanding what’s going on in the social mechanics of a situation – see why she got pulled along with the beach trip without intending to be).
3, Autistic people generally have very narrow passions. For Dina, it’s dinosaurs. For me, it is now heat transfer and calorimetry. We have stuff we care about outside our narrow passions (I quite like role-playing games and martial arts, frex), but the other stuff will usually take a second fiddle to our passion (see also why I tend to work too many hours a week). Mary does not have this narrow passion. She enjoys being nasty to people – but she doesn’t obsess over perfecting nastiness the way an autistic person with a special interest in nastiness would (or the way Dina obsesses over perfecting her knowledge of dinosaurs, or how I obsess over heat transfer and calorimetry applications).
4, Autistic people have trouble with communication to the level it rises to a disability. Some people are unable to speak. Some are able to speak, but they speak in an unusual or stilted way (Dina and me). Some are able to speak inconsistently (me). Some have comorbid speech disorders (me). All of us have a hard time communicating and interacting with others in a way deemed “typical” or “normal.” Mary does not have that difficulty. She is nasty, yes, but she is well within the bounds of normal for her age peers in terms of communication effectiveness (by which I mean, her ability to convey to others what she means and to get what she wants out of an interaction in a reasonable amount of time) – and in her previous subculture, she was probably very effective at it. Part of her wrath here has been that, like Billie, she used to be the big fish of a very small pond and she’s been dropped in the motherfucking ocean and hey look sharks.
5, Autistic people have sensory issues, which sometimes renders us incapable of dressing like our age-peers (I would suspect this is a big part of why Dina always wears track pants, soft-looking sweaters and a hat or a hood) or behaving in other ways like our age peers. See when Dina got overwhelmed by people at the party – too much visual stimulation led to a pretty textbook sensory overload and meltdown. Me, I can’t wear skirts (partly because trans but mainly because the swooshy feeling on my skin is just awful to me). I also like wearing heavy things like pleather coats because the pressure is good. Stereotypical as fuck, but I can’t handle tags on my skin. When I find clothing I like wearing, I buy as many of that article as I can. I’ve gotten better at dealing with visual stimulation but at one point, my wardrobe was black and blue and that’s it because I couldn’t handle wearing other colors. Even now, I don’t do patterns aside from subtle pinstripes. High pitched noises get me yelling and covering my ears as if I’m a fucking toddler (no matter where or when the high-pitched noise happens. Imagine being about to give a talk at a professional conference and then there’s feedback and you yell and cover your ears and a room full of hundreds laughs at you. That’s a fairly regular occurrence for me as a part of my disability). Certain visual patterns are physically painful for me to see, and I will yelp and avert my eyes. I don’t do eye contact because eye contact gets my brain stuck so I feel like a bug on a pin – eye contact is a very helpless feeling for me and if I do it with you I either trust you implicitly or I feel coerced into eye contact. Note that in general, the response to sensory overload as an autistic person is both immediate and involuntary. Dina crouched and covered her face. I yell and cover my ears and squeeze my eyes shut, or yelp and cover my eyes, or pull off the offending article of clothing as a few examples. Mary has not exhibited this on screen. She was annoyed by a sound, yes – but that’s not the same as autistic sensory overload. Dina’s meltdown at the party was autistic overload. Mary’s freak out over Carla’s skating was just Mary being a holier-than-thou asshole.
6, Autistic people have deficits in executive function (often called autistic inertia) which makes it hard for us to manage transitions, budget time, and remember to get stuff done. Dina is in the habit of neglecting her other classwork to study more about dinosaurs. She also forgets what she was intending to do during transitions and gets pulled along with the flow (the beach party). Finally, she has a tendency to forget important-to-her commitments (like forgetting to wake up Amber). For me, I have huge difficulty with transitions – to the point I need to wake up at six thirty if I’m gonna be at work in time for 9 and I have a 10 minute commute. It takes about two hours for me to triple S and have breakfast. I also need my phone’s calendar app – if it’s not in the app, I will forget about it no matter how important it is. I could go on with examples – but basically, executive function is a catch-all brain term for your ability to initiate, stay on task with, and finish actions, remember things, and keep your shit together, and autistic people in general have a hard time with this. Mary shows no sign of such difficulty.
Can autistic-coded characters be assholes? Most certainly. Take a look at BBC’s Sherlock, for example. Sherlock is a royal fucking asshole, and he’s also coded autistic as hell (and arguably is canon autistic because they’ve mentioned him having Asperger’s). They can also be between the extremes of perfect cinnamon roll (Dina) and asshole (Sherlock) – look at Saga from the Scandinavian show The Bridge (Saga can be an asshole and she can be nice at times, but she is always very autistic – and canon autistic representation!). I haven’t seen the USian version (my auditory processing is shite anyway as part of my sensory problems so I usually watch stuff with subtitles regardless of the language so I watched the Scandinavian version and it was amazing).
A manipulative autistic person would look more like BBC’s Sherlock than a Mary. Sherlock has studied the hell out of social interactions – how people work and why they do crime is his special interest. He’s gotten good at getting others to do what he wants – but at no point is his interaction something you’d call “typical”. He’s a weird guy, and you see that from pretty much the first episode. He also has difficulty with EF to the point he can’t live alone (that’s why he needs to live with Watson), like I do (yes, I can work and travel alone, but I can’t live alone. Last time I did, I nearly burned down my place 3 times in a month. Yay asymmetric ability distribution, another hallmark of autism! Imagine trying to explain to someone that yeah, I can travel to the conference, give a speech and make my way home but holy fuck no I can’t do small talk at the social after the conference. Not even “don’t want to” more “literal can’t unless you want me to piss off strangers and make a bad first impression for our group”). People think if you’re disabled, you’re equally disabled everywhere with everything and that’s really not the case for a lot of autistic people – me included. I can’t live alone, but I can travel internationally on my own – which is something most adults find harder than living on their own. I have a hard time remembering to pay those bills I have that don’t allow automatic billing, but I have a successful relationship. I can’t remember any appointment not written down but I’ve always been the first effective responder at any workplace accident I’ve been on-hand for. Autism is characterized by a “spiky” ability profile – I’m not really average at anything, I’m either very good or very bad at it. Dina shows this, BBC’s Sherlock shows this. Saga of the Bridge shows this. Mary doesn’t. She’s very average in a lot of ways.
Mary is not autistic. Her deficit (if it rises to a deficit level – jury’s still out in my book) is in emotional empathy, not cognitive empathy. She does not show signs of difficulty understanding social interaction rules (she does have difficulty with social situations, but it’s not due to a lack of social understanding, it’s due to culture shock). She does not show signs of having a special interest. She does not show signs of being vulnerable to sensory overload. She is not unusual in her dress or speech. She doesn’t have a “spiky” ability profile. I could go on – but long story short, Mary shows none of the major signs that would code someone as autistic.
… Also, for the record: Someone being as malevolently nasty as Mary, even if they are autistic, is doing it intentionally. Autistic =/= asshole.
If I am an asshole to someone, I own that. That’s on me, autism or otherwise.
Hell, even if I’m accidentally rude to someone because of my autism, I still fucking well apologize. Because I caused another person pain and that it was unintentional pain doesn’t mean it wasn’t pain. I might include an explanation as a mitigating factor, but I still apologize. “I’m sorry – it’s noisy in here and I couldn’t make out that you were trying to get my attention. I didn’t mean to ignore you – sorry for that.”
Because I try not to be an asshole. I don’t always succeed at not being an asshole (I’m human after all), but I try not to be.
But yeah, I say this as an autistic: Autism is not a “get out of asshole behavior free” card. Autism does not excuse any form of harassment. It might take me a little longer to perceive a boundary if I’m not told about it explicitly, but once I know the boundary is there, it’s on me to respect it.
Thank you so much for this, it was informative and thoughtful. It answered a lot of questions that I’ve been too shy to ask differently abled people. Internet-hugs to you.
Just FYI: I prefer disabled to various euphemisms. Other people prefer different language, but yeah given my druthers, I’d druther someone come out and say the d-word rather than hop on the euphemism treadmill, if that makes sense.
From one autistic person to another, thank you so much for writing this up! I feel that while autism is starting to become more recognized and represented, most people still don’t have a great picture of what autistic people actually act like. Also agreed, whether or not someone has ASD doesn’t excuse them for being an asshole.
Ah I’m legitimately terrible at both emotional empathy and emotional cognitive empathy so that might have created a false correlation for me, Good point about Marry not being spiky I can participate in a discussion just fine if no is supposed to be paying me particular attention but the instant people are supposed to be paying attention to me my ability to communicate falls apart. Honestly the thing that got me thinking about it was her being naked in the middle of the day I generally find clothes uncomfortable so if I’m in a private place where I feel comfortable off they go. That and the fact that Marry is seemingly always in her room, crowds freak me out so I spent a ton of time in my room because I needed a relatively private place where I could decompress.
I’ve met people with autism that act like assholes without meaning to (and who’ve apologized later – well, most of ’em have), and Mary does -not- fit in with them.
Oh yeah – I totally act like an asshole without meaning to on a fairly-regular basis. Mostly minor things like it not occurring to me to offer someone a drive when they don’t have a way home or not recognizing someone I’ve known for years because they’re out-of-context (part of my autism is face-blindness so I recognize people more by voice and context and common clothing than their faces, but people feel snubbed if you walk right by them in the mall when they’re waving at you because you don’t understand why this weird person is waving at you because genuinely speaking, to you at that moment this person you’ve known for years seems like a complete stranger because you don’t recognize them), I could go on. I’ll apologize if I find out later that I screwed up.
don’t forget that gasoline pollutes the atmosphere. Just like overusing spite pollutes the emotional atmosphere of a space. (It made sense in my head, but I’m not sure how to explain what I mean here)
Spite is like Nitrus. It is powerful and volatile. It can give you that needed kick to get you out of a bad situation…but it will melt down your engine if used too much, and even small uses will still cause damage. Plus when using it, you’re never in as much control as you’d like.
spite is like oxygen. It burns and breaks everything inside us, but it also keeps us alive. It is our spite against the inevitability of death that drives us to actually live instead of skipping to the end of the film that is our life
Oh, Hell yes! I even became a bicycle advocate out of spite. Don’t like me riding a bicycle on the same street on the other side going the opposite direction? Then I will take a chunk of street away for exclusive use by bicycles.
It’s very telling that Mary can’t understand why anyone would care about another person. Im finding it easy to believe that Mary is incapable of caring about anyone.
Actually (and this was a surprise to me too), sociopaths are capable of the barest empathy, but have a hard time keeping their violent tendencies in check, or at least a secret, while psychopaths are perfectly incapable of empathy and are very good at hiding what crimes they do commit (*usually* on the order of corruption, not serial violence). In other words, sociopaths are the obvious villains (think Joker) while psychopaths are the more subtle ones who can fake it (think Hannibal Lecter).
I have a feeling it’ll be a long time, if ever, that I can say something that’ll make him say anything remotely like that. For now, I’m happy with tolerate.
Seems like a waste of heart and soul. Hmm . . . maybe take Mary, Faz, Blaine, Todad, and Leland, then distill every ounce of heart and soul and other positive traits from them, and stick ’em in Joyce’s mom. Which . . . wouldn’t be a lot, but make things a little easier on Joyce and Becky.
Nah, we run the distillation through a negativity filter before pouring it in. We’re looking at a few drops per gallon of raw material making it through, but it’d be worth it.
Mostly because the negativity goes into waste disposal instead of continuing to blackmail or threaten people.
This makes me happy. Rather than just let Mary be or trying to immediately raise hell without a backup plan, Billie came up with a great way to control Mary and protect everyone on the floor from her at the same time! It’s amazing that she was able to think so logically with her still trying to find her bearings after all hell broke lose. I hope it works.
On one hand, I want to take the high road and say that Mary needs help in some form. On the other, I want to tell her that there is a job opening at Circus Baby’s Rentals and Entertainment.
I think because she doesn’t fully trust that this will fall back on Mary as much as it should and doesn’t want Mary to feel empowered by getting only a slap on the wrist from the overworked Residence Manager.
Because sometimes the worry of looming doom could be worse than the doom itself.
It’s possible that, should Billie go to the residence manager, Mary will get a slap on the wrist-or perhaps no punishment at all. It’s not fair, it sucks, but that is life.
But it’s also possible that she *would* get in serious trouble.
By simply threatening, rather than *outright going* to the residence manager, Billie has suspended Shcroedinger’s Sword of Damocles (yes, I am mixing metaphors) above Mary’s head. Is it a sharp sword? Is it a replica? YOU DON’T KNOW! Dare you spin the wheel and find out?
Have we even had a Joyce-Mary conversation at all? We’ve never seen how Mary has handled the attempted school shooting, let alone Joyce in her new attitude.
If I remember correctly, they once spoke briefly, only Mary’s unpleasantness put Joyce off talking to her further. Something about Mary not thinking that Joyce was a “real Christian” or something?
And if the sword can’t talk?
“I have no mouth, and I must scream.”
Granted, sapient weapons usually have some means of elementary communication, even if it’s as basic as suppressing their more powerful abilities at will or dimming/intensifying any glow effect.
Harlen Ellison aside :), I wish I could remember the sword that housed a demon within it, which attached itself to the arm of the warrior stupid enough to pick it up. As if that wasn’t bad enough, yes, it talked, a lot.
What’s number 3 referencing? The only thing I know involving a former evil punk going on a journey of repentance with a talking sword is “Dust: An Elysian Tail”.
And now Mary is left with a single haunting question: “Which dormmate will pounce first?” Also, I’d guess Billy is saving the best (i.e. Roz and Joyce) for last, because she hasn’t been able to yet. And when that happens, to quote Inigo Montoya “There will be blood tonight!”
It really irks me that Mary apparently cannot comprehend the idea of a person caring about the well being of another person. Like holy shit Mary, what kind of emotions do you even feel?
Mollyscribbles and Cerberus talks about this in a comment tree above. The short version is: To a fundie bigot, gay relationships aren’t real. So they obviously don’t actually care for each other.
Err, … Cancer can get fixed pretty well these days. Laparoscopy! (Which I thought was related to rabbits and hares-but isn’t). But there’s no fix for Mary short of a Road to Tarsus style conversion. You know, extreme conversion, with life changing stuff, special headers, vinyl seat covers, lake pipes, air -brush of a knight on a horse, …
I see! You mean Fix, as in “It’s o.k., Lou. Vinny said he’d “Fix” da problem fer ya’. He’ll make Mary some new shoes, an’ see if she wants t’ go swimmin’ in the East Bay.”
I meant “fix” as in ‘surgical strike,’ as with minimal invasion, or involvement.
“…and we have told Chloe about it so she can prevent the conflict from getting out of hand” … Right? … no? OK…. I’m sure there will be no collateral damage this time
I may be currently biased for reasons, but it seems like far too often a college official’s idea of “preventing things from getting out of hand” is to hush things up.
Panel 1: Sometimes when me or my friends are discussing the missing stairs in various communities and their latest round of bullshit, we’ll utter the following phrase: “That is entirely in keeping with what I know of them”.
I feel that phrase gets uttered a lot about Mary when someone relates their latest noxious interaction with her.
Panels 2-4: There’s that Mary face again as she faces genuine consequences. Immediately followed by sly Mary in Panel 3 and weaseling out of responsibility face in Panel 4. And the thing is that facial pattern is so frickin’ common among bullies. The amount of times I’ve had to intervene with a young kid tormenting the other kids or doing something wildly inappropriate only to have them attempt that half eye-roll in panel 4 and diminishment of their actions.
And that’s the most interesting thing about Mary. She’s been so devoid of genuine real consequences for her actions for so long, that she’s still stuck in the standard weasel practices of a kindergarten bully. Absent any teacher that could sit her down and make her own the consequences of her actions and the harm it causes.
And that’s the part that resonates strongly with me as a teacher. Of why it’s important to intervene early and consistently with this behavior before it metastasizes. Cause otherwise, they grow up still thinking that horseshit will get them out of “being in trouble” even when the thing they are “getting in trouble for” is trying to drive someone to suicide because they’re not straight.
I’m just here to say thanks for saving me the trouble of having to write up thoughts about this strip. In other words, your full analysis (yes, I’ve read all the posts) says it all already. I have nothing to add to all of that.
I like to imagine they make ‘camping out in the hall just talking’ right outside Mary’s room their new favourite date night activity. And if Mary ever complains she can hear them inside her room, Roz innocently goes ‘I didn’t hear anything’.
Panel 2: I don’t remember who brought this up, but someone made a really good point yesterday that the reason Billie doesn’t go straight to the RM is because she doesn’t trust that Mary will face the consequences she needs to face for such a heinous action.
I mean, Billie is “alpha percussion instrument, problem solver”. Except the only problems anyone is going to entrust a 15 year old with are those that adults are untrustworthy about. Things like sexual assault or stalking that are frequently mishandled by officials when reported or turned against the accuser as a detriment of character. Things like abuse at home or needing to sneak a kid to Planned Parenthood under the nose of hyper anti-choice parents.
And we see that in her interactions with Ruth. Everything tight to the chest, kept in shadows, only reaching out on a small level and not at all trusting the machine of the university to do the right thing on Ruth’s behalf.
And I realize that this is also why we saw that Leland flashback. That’s not just about Sal. Billie is right there as Leland nearly murdered Marcie. Is right there watching as Sal took the main fall for it. From an early age, just like Sal, she has learned that reporting something like you’re supposed to can empower the bully if those reported to turn a blind eye.
So she’s not giving Mary that potential out. Instead hoping to use the language that Mary understands, fear, to constrain and contain her and prevent her from ever again doing something as monstrous as this again.
Panel 3: Speak the language the bully understands. It’s not the path I tend to like very much, but my path tends to mean eating a lot of bullshit from the bullies of the world, so what do I know? I’m not going to begrudge Billie some pettiness given…
When I was growing up, I was taught that if I ran from the school bully I would be running the rest of my life. I believe that today, as an adult.
I fought, as did Sal, with bully’s in my school yard: back when we had recess outside, and teachers didn’t see everything that went on.
Sometimes I won, and sometimes I did not. I was a very small female. I did not fight ‘fair’. I used whatever I could get my hands on to defend myself.
And no this was not big city, or slums. This was a nice little town, with regular people. And a few not so nice. It was a different era.
The scene in the yearly Christmas Story where Ralphie has had all he can take and pounds the piss out of the bully: the many scenes in Stephen King’s stories, are not fiction. My generation lived through them.
I do believe that telling out kids not to fight back is wrong. I raised my daughter to fight back, and she is able to do so. I worry about her kids though, the cyberbully era is upon us. And they are in social media at such a young age.
So yes, speak the language the bully understands. If words don’t work, a nice board does. I don’t think Billie is being petty, anything but. She is defending herself. And her friends.
PPS sorry no edit.
Going to the teacher or any adult was not encouraged. Not by parents or anyone else.
‘No one likes a tattle-tale” is what my brother and I were taught. That, and “solve your own battles.”
A difficult thing to understand, because at the same time, we knew that our parents were there for us if the circumstances were truly beyond our ability to handle them.
in the cyberbully era its best to just not use public social media. shouting loudly in a public place attracts assholes. I avoid anything that does not have solid privacy features or strong anonymity.
know it’s a few days late (busy earning that money stuff), but a few wanted modified versions of Joyce’s cunning smile? Well, got a couple done, 2nd used a Joyce-Triangle Smile which looks a bit evil, but the 1st I made, using a smile I got off a Becky pic, well, didn’t turn out…right…
I’m starting to wonder if Mary has had issues for a while, but rather than make sure that she got help or saw a psychologist, her parents sent her to bible study.
She fits scarily well into someone with antisocial personality disorder.
Panel 4: Let’s address the elephant in the room, because Billie is being remarkably polite given the circumstances. Billie’s girlfriend is hospitalized under literal suicide watch because she can no longer be trusted to be allowed to be alone without killing herself.
And the reason for that is Mary actively decided to take advantage of existing depression to openly try and make that worse in exchange for a paltry handful of bullshit power-plays relating mostly to Mary being given a free reign to bully anyone not her very particular flavor of Christian and especially anyone queer.
Mary is minimizing in standard bigot form, never wanting to own the vileness of her actions when the harsh light of day falls upon it. But the truth of the matter is that Mary played a dangerous game trying to push a suicidally depressed woman deeper into said suicidal ideation, separating her from what little of a support network and coping resources she had in the hopes that she would kill herself and thus mean one fewer queer woman “polluting” “her” floor.
And so, when she rolls her eyes back dismissively, wondering why anyone would even care, why it would matter to anyone, that’s just one vile layer of the context of her action.
The other layers?
A) The other elephant in the room that is Ruth is Billie’s girlfriend. And thus that statement is a reveal of just how twisted Mary’s worldview of queer relationships are.
She not only doesn’t remotely value them as real relationships, she doesn’t even view them as couplings in which love or even base level empathy can exist in.
In her mind, Ruth and Billie have been dating not because they fell in love or make each others feel things. But entirely to shove “immorality” in Mary’s face as a direct attack on Mary’s soul.
And she believes this so thoroughly that she doesn’t even think twice about doing this smarmy “why would you even care” style attempt to eel away from responsibility for her vile actions to the person who loves Ruth more than anyone else on the planet. Certainly way more than Ruth loves herself.
And that is just another whole level of awful.
B) The other side of that arrogant theology is that not only are queer relationships entirely about scoring points for Satan, but a belief that everyone secretly knows the bigot is right.
And that’s not just a religious bigot thing. Bigots and abusers of all stripes tend to believe that everyone is just as hateful or short-sighted or prejudiced as they are, they’re just being more “honest” about it. See all the creepy rapist Trump supporters who’ve been out in force acting like everyone else is just as creepily predatory as they are or all the super racist assholes who believe everyone believes that Obama is a secret muslim Kenyan and is just being coy about it.
And the result of that is that Mary can’t even begin to think of why a queer woman suffering from depression might take issue with Mary’s plan to blackmail and attempt to drive a depressed queer woman to suicide. Why that might matter to her.
To the point where she doesn’t even own up to the fact that she tried to do the exact same shit to Billie as part of this whole blackmail thing.
Just… this panel is the perfect distillation of everything that is wrong about Mary. Of what is so poisonous of her particular way of interacting with the world. Of how vile what she did was and how little she wants to own what she did.
And sadly, how common this shit is in the world. If only Mary was the only one who ever acted like this. Ever did this. If only she was a cartoon villain instead of a very very common type of person.
I agree with about all the rest, but I don’t think Mary actually wanted to drive Ruth to suicide. She actually wanted the blackmail to work. What it did to Ruth was mostly irrelevant, but suicide would have ended it, so that’s not helpful.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if she sees the suicide as a real threat, rather than a plea for attention or whatever excuse people use to dismiss it. “We all know Ruthless will be fine”
Not to excuse her, I’m sure she wouldn’t really care, other than about losing her hold.
Seriously. With Mary I’d be asking “What the FUCK is your problem?” except we know precisely what the fuck her problem is – cultural insulation and a diet of hate being treated as “just a difference of opinions” and growing up in a power system where the kind of power she can wield is this queen bee moral compass thing like Carol and she wants in.
It’s probably just because I just finished reading Invisible Man, but the way I visualize her upbringing is someone, be it the Internet, her pastors or her parents, slowing plastering a paper-mache shell of bigotry and fundamentalist Christian rhetoric over her over the course of her childhood. Gluing it with the glues of authority, pain and the emptiness and loniliness we all fight in different ways. And then they wait and wait until they take a peek inside the shell that they made, the horrible sculpture of hate, the sneering, praying vessel. And they see nothing, except a pool of rotten flesh soup at the heels. The last remnants of the wonderful person she could have been if they had just let her breathe instead of smothering her in favor of the monster they wanted. They smile, because they don’t see it. They see a young godly woman ready to bring light to a poisoned, sick world. They praise their god.
im like the complete opposite of mary like yeah everybodies done something wrong but a lot of ppl just made mistakes or didnt know it was wrong and they deserve forgiveness and a lot of ppl like they cant control it like i love my girlfriend soooo much and i know when shes upset she doesnt mean to be hurtful i know its just her brain dealing w/ past pain and like she deserves forgiveness and love imo also a owl landed on my hand today and that was super cool and i love that owl and im her mom now
I’m still goggling a little bit at the sheer chutzpah on display from Mary.
Like it’s one thing to be unrepentant about trying to drive someone to suicide without remorse. Quite another thing to assume their girlfriend would be totally okay with said plan.
Like, holy fuck is Billie being way more polite than is frickin’ reasonable given that context. Fuck, if someone was this cavalier of driving one of my partners out of stability and into hospitalization, well, let’s just say I would not nearly be as restrained and reasonable as Billie is here.
I think Billy is so restrained because she’s currently filled with rage. Not a hot fighting rage, but a cold, calculating rage. Also known as the single most dangerous type of fury where you’re so absolutely livid at someone that you realize that blind, directionless anger will get you nowhere and you need to logically plan and execute a proper operation of personal destruction against the offending person, with just perhaps the slightest hint of emotion while said operation is being carried out.
And this is why the Greeks had two gods of war, the Spartan Ares and the Athenian, well, Athena. Athena could get just as blood thirsty as her cowardly bully of a half-brother, but she always retained her intellect. Remember Medusa? or Arachne?
Seriously. Holy FUCK Mary. Are you seriously so unable to grasp other viewpoints you think Ruth’s GIRLFRIEND would agree with you on this point and auuuuuuuuugh.
remember, homophobe fundie. She doesn’t even acknowledge the idea that two people of the same gender could feel love. Hell, I would not be surprised if she just believes monogamous hetero marriage as ordained by a priest she approves of and between a man and a woman she finds to be godly=love and anything other than that (including het love before marriage or between atheists) is just a false show set up to spit in her god’s face.
Not priests, pastors. Priests are probably ‘too Catholic’. The fact some denominations outside Catholicism use priests means those denominations are, likewise, ‘too Catholic’.
Most likely. Jack Chick did believe Catholics created Islam, and that Islam worships some sort of moon deity (I don’t get it either) and that they’re all pagans or… something? Admittedly it’s been a long time since I subjected myself to a Chick Tract even out of bile fascination and they don’t exactly offer a coherent and consistent version of theology.
Basically it’s some weird stuff as a result of Christianity’s fracturing and how Protestantism was built on cutting away the excessive trimmings and “idolatry” of Catholics and then the US embedding Puritanism into its cultural strictures. (Puritanism being the people who thought Protestants weren’t going far enough, because they still allowed things like dancing and observing holy days with things other than fasting and also they believe this thing called predestination where from birth everyone is either one of the Good and Pure Elect who will go to heaven or the damned, they’re basically the forerunners to fundamentalists like this and they may actually have been even more poorly-adjusted to the world at large but you can feel still their cultural underpinnings in fundamentalism.)
It’s… it’s really, really weird. I grew up with associations to a fairly offbeat little sect and yet STILL I find fundamentalism incomprehensible.
Yeah, priests = either “Catholic” or “Pagan” to Mary. Which, of course, is terrible. Pagans deny the existence of God and Catholics are idol worshipping, cannibalistic whores of babylon, don’tcha know?
Is it safe to say that this is understating things to such a degree, we might need a whole new level of understatement ranking to understand how understated this comment was?
I can only think of one example that might beat it: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”- Emperor Hirohito, 15th of August 1945.
You’re the sort of person who would read Dumbing of Age, so the feeling would likely be mutual if she met you. I’d love for Mary to somehow realize she depends on people like us (and of course DYW) for her very existence.
I wouldn’t say her existence, but at least her mask
People like Mary have worn the shell of bigotry and zealotry for so long that the body and soul underneath is rotten and decaying while the shell marches on with a life of its own. She is her mask.
She wouldn’t even need to die! It wouldn’t be breaking the “no character deaths” promise if she, oh I dunno, ended up paralyzed from the neck down with serious head trauma.
It’s worth noting that Willis made the “no character deaths” promise because of the slow pacing of the comic, and how the mourning would utterly dominate the comic for an absurdly long time.
Mary is clearly longform storytelling. This being a Willis Strip, she’ll get hers eventually. Whether she changes is another question entirely, but since this IS a Willis Strip, I can see her at least start to question.
It’s probably wrong of me or whatever, but I really hope she doesn’t change. I don’t like that kind of narrative when it comes to people like Mary, because in my experience they rarely, if ever change — and any change is often superficial and temporary.
Eh, if Mary were hit by a truck, it would pollute the whole ‘act with integrity’ meme we’ve got floating around Ruth and the semi. Find another way to kill her.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall set me free.
There is always the hope that, as Bryy says, Mary being a long form storytelling effort here: Willis will either begin a character development loop with her, OR she will get her payback.
I’m actually fine with either because:
Getting her comeuppance is fine: that means she will suffer for what she has done. But, somehow I just don’t think anything would really faze her, short of being run over by said truck.
A character development will mean that she will have to face the fact of just how rotten she truly is. That should be enough to put her in a room next to Ruth.
I am…. interested in what Roz will do with this information.
Also I’m wondering if with this comic the joyful!mary panel which was a preview on tumblr (I’m not sure when it’s for) makes sense. Is it a mask? Will she start to ‘act’? Will she eventually get a taste of how exhausting it is to act opposed to your actual nature/how you’re feeling like Ruth did for a bit before it came crashing down? (Honestly though the smile reaches the eyes for Mary unlike for Ruth, so if so maybe /Mary/ should major in theatre.
oh please. Mary has been acting for far longer than that. She’s placed herself in the role of “good Christian fighting for morality and opposed on all sides” for years.
That, IMO, is the saddest part of this. Mary can’t see why anyone would care. A young woman, allegedly bought up in a religion based on the most unselfish act of love in human history can’t work out why anyone would care that she ruined someone’s life. I doubt that Mary has sufficient self-awareness for this but I think that she would benefit from a long, hard look in the mirror.
By the way, Mary, that’s a nasty eyelid twitch that you’ve got going for you there!
I was just reading Invisible Man, and that made me think that Mary is so far gone that she’s invisible even to herself. She could look in the mirror for hours and only see the image of the tortured Christian martyred saint that she thinks she is.
I take back what I said before. Lofwyr would do well to not eat Mary. Some sort of horrid intestinal problems would certainly follow. Mary’s still a massive conga, though.
even if she knew, she’d probably think it made her like Batman at the end of the Dark Knight. I don’t think she likes anyone on the floor anyway. Even Joyce is fallen in her eyes for fraternizing with atheists and heretics and attending parties.
“Why do I care that you tried to get the woman I love killed so that you could get away with being mean to people for not being like you? Let me think. Because I hate you and want to condemn your soul to Hell for you by being gay near you. Because taking all your power away will keep everyone safe from any more of your bullshit power plays. Because your gross prejudices make me want to puke, and I want you to see how alone you are in having them. Because I can. Because fuck you. Pick your favorite.”
Alternatively, hold Mary down and vomit on her. Some physical evidence of how repulsive you think she is might convince her she’s not actually saying what everyone thinks
Mary’s type don’t believe that gay people actually love each other. They probably are just entirely sure they’re doing it to make fundamentalists and G-d angry
huh? I wasn’t excusing her or doing anything but applauding you for your awesome comment. Just talking about how bongos like her justify their bongoness
I’ve seen the comments where people are trying to diagnose Mary, but I would actually lean toward her having Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She doesn’t hit every single criteria in the DSM 5 for it, but she does hit a LOT of them, including the lack of empathy, the entitlement, belittling and looking down on people she perceives as inferior, getting impatient/angry when not receiving special treatment, difficulty accepting criticism, responds with rage & contempt, tries to behave in a superior manner…
All of these things fit Mary quite well, especially when you add in the nasty sense of moral superiority and being judgemental that’s very common for religious fundies. As opposed to psychopaths and sociopaths, where breaking the law is a lot more common, a narcissist will be a bully in a way that can get them reprimanded, but very seldom charged with a criminal offense. It would take a good prosecution lawyer and a very bad defense lawyer for Mary to be successfully convicted of anything with what she’s done. Booted out of residence seems to be a much more likely consequence, but Mary is a spiteful and mean bongo and might be more trouble than even that is worth.
how about we just stop trying to diagnose her and just accept that neurotypicals are just as capable, and statistically more likely, of being abusive and bigoted than the mentally ill
“Billie, why do you even care that I literally blackmailed you and your partner and it ended in her being deeply depressed because you guys couldn’t see each other and you were the only one that knew how bad it was? Don’t you know homosexual feelings aren’t REAL feelings.”
After reading through this comment section, I wish that more people connected mental illness with the drive to achieve good in the world, rather than being an awful jerk. I know most of you aren’t even thinking about it, but what does it say to the mentally ill when anytime someone in the media is a jerk or a villain that someone immediately starts calling them mentally ill. You’re acting like it’s our destiny to be the eternal villain to your well-balanced neurotypical heroes.
We’re not your villains. We’re all suffering in different ways.
Like seriously our world is difficult enough WITHOUT being jerks to people we’re ALREADY being treated like crap by others if we’re well behaved and keeping our mental illness and neurodivergence cooties somewhere you can hardly see them.
Sometimes I find this comments section a good and healing place. Sometimes I just want to angrily flap at people.
i know. Want to help me reshape society by connecting neurotypicality with being a jerk and mental illness with the kind of single-minded drive to improve the world and create great art shown by people like Abe Lincoln and Van Gogh?
And clarification, when I say everyone is suffering and destroying themselves, I’m including neurotypicals. I just think the only way to help it is to help others instead of sitting on their heads to get a few more minutes of air before you suffocate
To be fair, what Mary displays is not neurotypical behavior either. I understand what you’re saying, and I agree – mental illness is too often likened to some horrible demon that magically transforms otherwise perfectly nice people into face-eating monsters, and that has serious real world repercussions for people. There is a serious need for positive representations to combat this. On the other hand, for villains who are at the point of face-eating villainy, I’m not really sure how they could have gotten to that point without some level of disordered thinking.
Mary is a religious zealot and a horrible person, that doesn’t mean she is disordered. You can be neurotypical and be an awful person, no disorder is required for that.
Mary also displays several antisocial and naricisstic traits. There’s being a dick and there’s being a cartoon villain. Which I guess she literally is, but still.
Except there are numerous people on this board who have known people like Mary. You can’t dismiss a character as ‘cartoonish’ if there are people like her in real life.
I didn’t mean to say they aren’t. I’ve known people like that too. “Cartoon villain” is something I call real people too, in a “how are you a real person” sense.
newsflash, being a jerl is not a mental illness. she uthinks she’s fighting a crusade and acting in many of the ways that neurotypical soldiers do bu justify due to their circumstances (and they are sometimes right)
let me ask you something. Would you have any empathy for a suicidal serial killer? No, because the general belief is that they gave up their right to sympathy when they preyed on their fellow humans. They’re something less than human now.
And what do we think Mary thinks about ungodly homosexuals who support trans people and are even -mean- to her, class?
That is why she has no empathy. It’s all in a frame of mind. It’s the same reason why no one cries their eyes out at the destruction of the Death Star.
let me ask you something. Would you have any empathy for a suicidal serial killer? No, because the general belief is that they gave up their right to sympathy when they preyed on their fellow humans. They’re something less than human now.
And what do we think Mary thinks about ungodly homosexuals who support trans people and are even -mean- to her, class?
That is why she has no empathy. It’s all in a frame of mind. It’s the same reason why no one cries their eyes out at the destruction of the Death Star.
But in my case, the serial killer is someone who only exists as a concept. Mary is directly pushing someone to kill themselves and doesn’t understand why that’s wrong.
No, it’s being monstrous jerk. Reinforced by her warped religious beliefs. Neurotypical people are capable of being as awful as Mary is.
I understand why you want to there to be some sort of disorder, some label for the way she is that can take away at least some of her agency so she isn’t really choosing to be so horrible.
Sorry, but the issue with her is software, not hardware.
I think it’s less her actions and more the fact that she honestly seems to have no empathy that I’m hung up on. Like I may not feel bad for the suicidal murderer, but I’m aware of the reasons I should feel bad and why. It genuinely doesn’t feel like Mary is capable of that.
we have not looked inside her head. For all we know, every time she does something awful, she has to smother the little thought that says this is wrong with the all-purpose “I’m doing the Lord’s work”
Hey, to all the people who want to talk about mental illness, you have two possibly clinically Depressed alcoholics, one of them suicidal, to discuss. No need to bring Mary in and feed the cultural demonization of the mentally ill
If everyone who’s a horrible person about anything is mentally ill, then we might as well just say everyone is mentally ill and it’s just a matter of degrees. Why is it so hard for people to accept that neurotypical people are capable of doing awful things and being awful people? What, is it really so hard to acknowledge that people like you can be awful? Mental illness is not the cause of all the bad in the world, people making the choice to do bad things is the cause and their choice isn’t caused by mental illness, it’s caused by selfishness, entitlement, greed, jealousy, badly handled anger, etc. EVERYONE is capable of doing or being bad and it doesn’t take an illness to make that happen, it takes a choice.
As someone who spent most of their life up to the middle of high school thinking I was largely neurotypical, I know why. When I was a kid, I once said that I thought you’d have to be “crazy” to kill someone. Ever since I got diagnosed, that memory has haunted me. Neurotypical people and those who are largely neurotypical don’t want to believe that someone like them can be a bad person. The dark side of a culture of positivity is the feeling that you’re either a good person or a monster who should die for even having negative thoughts. Any time a well-meaning person diagnoses a supervillain with schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder or psychopathy, they are at the core just repeating my childhood belief that “normal people” wouldn’t even have the ability to kill people.
That, and we don’t like to believe anyone is capable of hurting people knowingly, so attributing their behavior to a disorder is a way of saying that they are doing it unknowingly or missing something that keeps most people from doing that thing.
There are lots of jerks in this comic. There are only a handful I think are mentally ill due to fitting standards set forth by the psychiatric field. I understand people attribute too much to mental illness, and not enough to the fact that plenty of terrible behaviors are within the scope of normal human behavior. Lacking empathy to the point of not even understanding why it’s bad to basically nearly blackmail someone to death is not within the scope of neurotypical behavior.
That’s only true if you see the person you targeted as a human being worthy of empathy. Mary, like many bigots before her, doesn’t see her prey as truly human.
I think you grossly underestimate the power of dehumanizing a group of people due to belief. She doesn’t view homosexual people as people so she feels no empathy, it’s the same logic people use to commit genocide and the same way people rationalize killing other people in war. In war the enemy is painted as inhuman monsters and so they are acceptable to kill. Racists and other bigots do the same thing, you can rationalize literally anything if you stop viewing the other group as people. Neurotypical people do this all the time and have throughout history or do you think everyone who condoned slavery, the internment of Japanese Americans, or any of the literally thousands of acts of horrible dehumanization in history were mentally ill?
I saw someone say that they do that irl earlier in the comments. Makes me glad that my parents were open about how petty and snide they could be when they were pissed off. Lovely people, but such a treat to see them talking about relatives when they weren’t around.
Yeah, it’s the same for me as my theory for Mike, but opposite, my parents were abusive and horrible and I do everything in my power to be a nice and decent person.
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Spiteful bongos (yes I did type that myself) are the best type of bongos
Haha, I’ve taken to using “bongo” in place of the word that it replaces as well.
It’s only a matter of time before I accidentally do that in real life and people stare at me.
For like a week after seeing Fantastic Mr. Fox I kept accidentally saying “What the cuss”.
I tried to remove the expression “son of a bongo” from my vocabulary, but somehow it just got replaced by “son of a whore.” Which miiiight be worse.
I already do that, and I know a guy who just didn’t stop saying ‘cuss’ in place of every curse word in his vocabulary. For six years and counting.
Yep, I’ve found myself using bongo as a replacement too.
I’m still waiting for a “pop” auto-correct because there’s always someone wanting to be an ass about that being the word for soft drinks in the Midwest, and I haven’t used that term since leaving Detroit.
As do I.
I prefer casual bongos myself. With some exotic butters.
Don’t be silly. Exotic butters is a contradiction in terms. Butters could never become exotic, his parents would ground him!
Seriously, Mary, you’re not just playing with fire, you’re dancing in it.
*plays Duran Duran’s them song to A View To A Kill on the hacked Muzak*
*THEME*
Bleh.
Goodness I needed that bass riffing.
I’ve got Esquire channel on the TV for background noise … and the movie they’re showing right now is “View to a Kill”.
Hm, his phrasing put me in mind of Ring of Fire. (The Krewella one, not Johnny Cash.) Seems appropriate to Billie’s mindset.
Or this given timemonkeys avatar;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_903744xh8
Like Dean Venture in the video for Shallow Gravy’s “Jacket.”
Yup, it’s like. Hi, you look like you’re stewing in impotent rage and anger. I would like to volunteer to be the red hot focus of your righteous wrath.
Billie might see that as a perk, not a drawback. She is self destructive sometimes, and she may kinda want somebody to fight.
Her religion believes in the power of dying for a cause. Billie could literally stab her and she would die certain that she was doing the Lord’s work
Let her pay out enough of her own disembowelled intestines, and she’ll hang herself with them.
There’s always Spite, children, there’s always Spite.
I hate Spite. Can’t I have Dr. Rancor or Crystal Enmity instead?
I’ll accept a diet Contempt-a-Cola if it’s all you’ve got.
THIS … THIS is why I need a Like/Love button 🙂
Blech. This is Sierra Pissed!
She left a urine sample in the half-bath, then Dina picked it up for a second, vanished into the shadows, and left them where she ended up. Sometimes it’s hard to be a shadow being.
Also, her powers are controlled by her hat, which is why she will never take it off, lest some unfortunate soul try on the ShadowHat and be lost for eternity in the Domain of Shadows.
Does Sierra ever GET pissed? We’ve never seen her display such. She seems so laid-back and mellow.
Maybe she does, she’s just afraid of the consequences if she shows how she really feels. Not mello but yellow
I didn’t think their post could be improved anymore. You proved me wrong.
Sorry, but we do have Dr. Peever and CheezedWine.
I’m usually good with an IBC (I’m Beyond Caring) Cream Soda.
I am more a Mountain Screw You kinda soda drinker
+1
Spite – Obey your thirst…for vengeance.
your profile pic makes this go from a +1 to a +5
So many flavours, but I’ll stick with old fashioned Choke.
Make 7, Up Yours?
I don’t know why, but for some reason I’m imagining Agatha reacting to this by taking a picture with a purple camera and saying “neat” like Bender would sometimes do on Futurama.
Brain goes some weird places at 12 AM.
It could happen. Maybe Agatha likes Futurama.
Who doesn’t like Futurama?
*raises hand*
People like Joyce’s parents probably wouldn’t approve of the ‘immorality’ of some parts, too.
and transgender people might not like that episode where they had all sorts of transphobic jokes where Bender transitioned in order to use his “unfair male strength” to win the women’s robo-olympics
Can we get one of those awesome moments where everyone on the floor teams up using each of their quirks and/or special skills to get revenge on Mary in an ultra complex multi-step plan?
Those always make me tear up with joy.
Everyone works together, everyone provides an alibi for everyone else (alibi being there was a floor meeting and there had been a rumor there’d be free pizza so everyone showed), everyone agrees they have no idea what exactly happened to her (and if they weren’t filled in on all the other steps, they probably don’t, so it’s not even lying on that point).
Galasso’s Pizza (and subs!) is happy to assist in your mysterious vengeance ritual!
They’ll go there after; claiming it’s because there wasn’t free pizza as promised and everyone still wanted pizza, but really to celebrate.
And if all the plans somehow involves pie, then we have… perfection.
But they all do.
Pizza pie.
And after months of planning, what happens is that one of them says “Look over there!” while someone else uses an electric hair clipper to shave a patch on the back of her head.
Oho, and the mask slips.
Also, as great as spite is…maybe she cares because it was her fucking girlfriend you destroyed?! How is that even a question
We’ve yet to see any evidence of Mary caring about anyone but herself. It’s possible the very concept is foreign to her.
My best guess comes from various bigoted christian sites I’ve come across that referred to same-sex couples as “pretending to be in love”. From her point of view, any same-sex relationship is rooted in sin and since you’re clearly going against god’s will then you can’t feel positive emotions like love for each other.
Actually, I’ll be generous. She probably thinks that about het relationships too, if the people involved have any interest in doing more than holding hands before having a family-approved wedding in a church.
This. She doesn’t view Billie’s relationship with Ruth as real. Just as a means by which they can personally attack Mary’s faith with wickedness. Certainly nothing with real emotional connection, with real love, with real giving a fuck whether the other person lives or dies.
It’s part of a whole nasty flavor of Pre-Millennial Dispensationalist Rapturist Christianity that views everyone else’s lives as not really real, more just a sideshow for the central conflict for your soul.
The suffering of individuals mattering so much less than whether or not Team Jesus or Team Satan is racking up the point in this particular encounter.
I honestly think she may really be that bad at understanding people, she reads as autism spectrum to me. Not the being a horrible bongo to people bit but myself and the majority of my immediate family are autism spectrum to one degree or another and a lot of her behaviors are very familiar.
Autism is a good excuse for a lot of careless seeming behavior. However, I do not think Mary is at all autistic, of any sort of ‘ic’.
People don’t have to be medically/mentally ill to be assholes.
A lot of times it just takes the right flavor of genetics and environment. And being sure that your religion is the only ‘right’ religion in the world of course. If you don’t believe the way she believes: well you simply do not count, not for anything, you can’t possibly be on the same level as she is.
Okay first the idea that being autistic makes you less culpable for your choices is ablest as fuck and seriously condescending. And second a lot of autism spectrum people take offense to the mentally ill label just because I think differently then you doesn’t mean I think worse.
Also, everyone is on the spectrum, but people at the more densely populated end get to pretend they aren’t. (I think?)
I think y’all put way more psychoanalysis into a comic character than Willis himself has.
“Everyone is on the spectrum” is a false statement. If someone has any of the disorders that fall under the ASD umbrella, they’re on the autism spectrum. If they don’t have autism, they aren’t on the autism spectrum.
Seconding A Friendly Trash Can. I mean there’s people in my family who I think are allistic but have a lot of autistic-related traits, but I’m pretty sure most of them are not in fact actually on the spectrum.
They didn’t say it did. But it does change how we interpret what you do. Behaviors that would indicate a lack of caring in a neurotyypical person can be a social deficit in a person with autism.
Or it can indicate a misunfderstanding. For example, it completely changed how I interpreted your post. I can see why you are upset, and that you probably didn’t intend any rudeness.
I mean I’m an autistic person who is also mentally ill, but yeah to me it’s a disability (and I do class it as a disability because like: I cannot open certain kinds of doors because of my low muscle tone) and not a mental illness. Neurodivergence, yes. Disability, yes. Mental illness, no.
She’s not autistic. It just doesn’t fit.
Oh, Mary is an ‘ic’ all right. Hello, she’s the trickiest.
Dang you autocorrect for ruining my joke. “ickiest”.
Mary is not autistic. Speaking as an autistic here’s a few reasons why:
1, Autistic people (like me) are generally good at emotional empathy. We are good at feeling what others feel when they feel it, and at feeling for others when we know they’re hurting. Many autistic people (me included) have a tendency to be emotion sponges (by which I mean we kind of feel whatever the crows around us is feeling) but can’t really identify what we’re feeling or where it’s coming from (alexithymia is heavily comorbid with autism). So, for me, in a room with someone who is anxious, I will begin to feel anxious, but at the time, I will have a hard time identifying that I am anxious, or that my anxiety is sympathetic. Mary shows no such tendency to feel what others feel.
2, Autistic people are bad at cognitive empathy – that is, the ability to read social situations, figure out what others want, and act accordingly. Autistic people (especially young ones who haven’t figured out functional scripts yet) can have a hard time with routine politeness like what greeting to use when, asking for permission to do stuff, etc. An autistic person often can’t pick up on social subtext at all: I can’t read sarcasm, I can’t pick it up if people are hinting at something to me (like one of my friends is in the habit of going “HINT HINT” to cue a social hint at me, and I still only pick up on what he’s hinting at about 1/2 of the time – and that’s with him cueing in so many words that he’s hinting at something he doesn’t want to say outright), and I have only picked up “unspoken” rules of social interaction by accessing resources like realsocialskills which discards social convention and comes out and states those social rules. Case in point: I genuinely did not know that as a guest in someone else’s place, if they offer something to drink, it is expected to accept even if you are not thirsty. Mary shows no such indications. She is pretty average at cognitive empathy – if she was better at it, she would be able to manipulate Ruth without the entire floor finding out about it. But she’s not bad at it in the way an autistic person is bad at it. Dina is bad at it in that way (Dina’s good emotional empathy coupled with her bad cognitive empathy are a big part of why I read her as autistic – and why a lot of others I know who are autistic also read her as autistic. Dina feels the emotions of those around her and gets overwhelmed by them, without really understanding what’s going on in the social mechanics of a situation – see why she got pulled along with the beach trip without intending to be).
3, Autistic people generally have very narrow passions. For Dina, it’s dinosaurs. For me, it is now heat transfer and calorimetry. We have stuff we care about outside our narrow passions (I quite like role-playing games and martial arts, frex), but the other stuff will usually take a second fiddle to our passion (see also why I tend to work too many hours a week). Mary does not have this narrow passion. She enjoys being nasty to people – but she doesn’t obsess over perfecting nastiness the way an autistic person with a special interest in nastiness would (or the way Dina obsesses over perfecting her knowledge of dinosaurs, or how I obsess over heat transfer and calorimetry applications).
4, Autistic people have trouble with communication to the level it rises to a disability. Some people are unable to speak. Some are able to speak, but they speak in an unusual or stilted way (Dina and me). Some are able to speak inconsistently (me). Some have comorbid speech disorders (me). All of us have a hard time communicating and interacting with others in a way deemed “typical” or “normal.” Mary does not have that difficulty. She is nasty, yes, but she is well within the bounds of normal for her age peers in terms of communication effectiveness (by which I mean, her ability to convey to others what she means and to get what she wants out of an interaction in a reasonable amount of time) – and in her previous subculture, she was probably very effective at it. Part of her wrath here has been that, like Billie, she used to be the big fish of a very small pond and she’s been dropped in the motherfucking ocean and hey look sharks.
5, Autistic people have sensory issues, which sometimes renders us incapable of dressing like our age-peers (I would suspect this is a big part of why Dina always wears track pants, soft-looking sweaters and a hat or a hood) or behaving in other ways like our age peers. See when Dina got overwhelmed by people at the party – too much visual stimulation led to a pretty textbook sensory overload and meltdown. Me, I can’t wear skirts (partly because trans but mainly because the swooshy feeling on my skin is just awful to me). I also like wearing heavy things like pleather coats because the pressure is good. Stereotypical as fuck, but I can’t handle tags on my skin. When I find clothing I like wearing, I buy as many of that article as I can. I’ve gotten better at dealing with visual stimulation but at one point, my wardrobe was black and blue and that’s it because I couldn’t handle wearing other colors. Even now, I don’t do patterns aside from subtle pinstripes. High pitched noises get me yelling and covering my ears as if I’m a fucking toddler (no matter where or when the high-pitched noise happens. Imagine being about to give a talk at a professional conference and then there’s feedback and you yell and cover your ears and a room full of hundreds laughs at you. That’s a fairly regular occurrence for me as a part of my disability). Certain visual patterns are physically painful for me to see, and I will yelp and avert my eyes. I don’t do eye contact because eye contact gets my brain stuck so I feel like a bug on a pin – eye contact is a very helpless feeling for me and if I do it with you I either trust you implicitly or I feel coerced into eye contact. Note that in general, the response to sensory overload as an autistic person is both immediate and involuntary. Dina crouched and covered her face. I yell and cover my ears and squeeze my eyes shut, or yelp and cover my eyes, or pull off the offending article of clothing as a few examples. Mary has not exhibited this on screen. She was annoyed by a sound, yes – but that’s not the same as autistic sensory overload. Dina’s meltdown at the party was autistic overload. Mary’s freak out over Carla’s skating was just Mary being a holier-than-thou asshole.
6, Autistic people have deficits in executive function (often called autistic inertia) which makes it hard for us to manage transitions, budget time, and remember to get stuff done. Dina is in the habit of neglecting her other classwork to study more about dinosaurs. She also forgets what she was intending to do during transitions and gets pulled along with the flow (the beach party). Finally, she has a tendency to forget important-to-her commitments (like forgetting to wake up Amber). For me, I have huge difficulty with transitions – to the point I need to wake up at six thirty if I’m gonna be at work in time for 9 and I have a 10 minute commute. It takes about two hours for me to triple S and have breakfast. I also need my phone’s calendar app – if it’s not in the app, I will forget about it no matter how important it is. I could go on with examples – but basically, executive function is a catch-all brain term for your ability to initiate, stay on task with, and finish actions, remember things, and keep your shit together, and autistic people in general have a hard time with this. Mary shows no sign of such difficulty.
Can autistic-coded characters be assholes? Most certainly. Take a look at BBC’s Sherlock, for example. Sherlock is a royal fucking asshole, and he’s also coded autistic as hell (and arguably is canon autistic because they’ve mentioned him having Asperger’s). They can also be between the extremes of perfect cinnamon roll (Dina) and asshole (Sherlock) – look at Saga from the Scandinavian show The Bridge (Saga can be an asshole and she can be nice at times, but she is always very autistic – and canon autistic representation!). I haven’t seen the USian version (my auditory processing is shite anyway as part of my sensory problems so I usually watch stuff with subtitles regardless of the language so I watched the Scandinavian version and it was amazing).
A manipulative autistic person would look more like BBC’s Sherlock than a Mary. Sherlock has studied the hell out of social interactions – how people work and why they do crime is his special interest. He’s gotten good at getting others to do what he wants – but at no point is his interaction something you’d call “typical”. He’s a weird guy, and you see that from pretty much the first episode. He also has difficulty with EF to the point he can’t live alone (that’s why he needs to live with Watson), like I do (yes, I can work and travel alone, but I can’t live alone. Last time I did, I nearly burned down my place 3 times in a month. Yay asymmetric ability distribution, another hallmark of autism! Imagine trying to explain to someone that yeah, I can travel to the conference, give a speech and make my way home but holy fuck no I can’t do small talk at the social after the conference. Not even “don’t want to” more “literal can’t unless you want me to piss off strangers and make a bad first impression for our group”). People think if you’re disabled, you’re equally disabled everywhere with everything and that’s really not the case for a lot of autistic people – me included. I can’t live alone, but I can travel internationally on my own – which is something most adults find harder than living on their own. I have a hard time remembering to pay those bills I have that don’t allow automatic billing, but I have a successful relationship. I can’t remember any appointment not written down but I’ve always been the first effective responder at any workplace accident I’ve been on-hand for. Autism is characterized by a “spiky” ability profile – I’m not really average at anything, I’m either very good or very bad at it. Dina shows this, BBC’s Sherlock shows this. Saga of the Bridge shows this. Mary doesn’t. She’s very average in a lot of ways.
Mary is not autistic. Her deficit (if it rises to a deficit level – jury’s still out in my book) is in emotional empathy, not cognitive empathy. She does not show signs of difficulty understanding social interaction rules (she does have difficulty with social situations, but it’s not due to a lack of social understanding, it’s due to culture shock). She does not show signs of having a special interest. She does not show signs of being vulnerable to sensory overload. She is not unusual in her dress or speech. She doesn’t have a “spiky” ability profile. I could go on – but long story short, Mary shows none of the major signs that would code someone as autistic.
… Also, for the record: Someone being as malevolently nasty as Mary, even if they are autistic, is doing it intentionally. Autistic =/= asshole.
If I am an asshole to someone, I own that. That’s on me, autism or otherwise.
Hell, even if I’m accidentally rude to someone because of my autism, I still fucking well apologize. Because I caused another person pain and that it was unintentional pain doesn’t mean it wasn’t pain. I might include an explanation as a mitigating factor, but I still apologize. “I’m sorry – it’s noisy in here and I couldn’t make out that you were trying to get my attention. I didn’t mean to ignore you – sorry for that.”
Because I try not to be an asshole. I don’t always succeed at not being an asshole (I’m human after all), but I try not to be.
But yeah, I say this as an autistic: Autism is not a “get out of asshole behavior free” card. Autism does not excuse any form of harassment. It might take me a little longer to perceive a boundary if I’m not told about it explicitly, but once I know the boundary is there, it’s on me to respect it.
+100
That was very interesting and informative – Thanks for writing it up!
Thank you so much for this, it was informative and thoughtful. It answered a lot of questions that I’ve been too shy to ask differently abled people. Internet-hugs to you.
NP.
Just FYI: I prefer disabled to various euphemisms. Other people prefer different language, but yeah given my druthers, I’d druther someone come out and say the d-word rather than hop on the euphemism treadmill, if that makes sense.
(But that’s me. Others’ mileage may vary)
From one autistic person to another, thank you so much for writing this up! I feel that while autism is starting to become more recognized and represented, most people still don’t have a great picture of what autistic people actually act like. Also agreed, whether or not someone has ASD doesn’t excuse them for being an asshole.
Thank you for this. As another autistic person and the parent of an autistic child, I agree 1000%.
Ah I’m legitimately terrible at both emotional empathy and emotional cognitive empathy so that might have created a false correlation for me, Good point about Marry not being spiky I can participate in a discussion just fine if no is supposed to be paying me particular attention but the instant people are supposed to be paying attention to me my ability to communicate falls apart. Honestly the thing that got me thinking about it was her being naked in the middle of the day I generally find clothes uncomfortable so if I’m in a private place where I feel comfortable off they go. That and the fact that Marry is seemingly always in her room, crowds freak me out so I spent a ton of time in my room because I needed a relatively private place where I could decompress.
Another autistic saying noooooo that is very much not Mary and it does not excuse her being an asshole even if it was.
I’ve met people with autism that act like assholes without meaning to (and who’ve apologized later – well, most of ’em have), and Mary does -not- fit in with them.
Mary is pure, concentrated assholery.
Oh yeah – I totally act like an asshole without meaning to on a fairly-regular basis. Mostly minor things like it not occurring to me to offer someone a drive when they don’t have a way home or not recognizing someone I’ve known for years because they’re out-of-context (part of my autism is face-blindness so I recognize people more by voice and context and common clothing than their faces, but people feel snubbed if you walk right by them in the mall when they’re waving at you because you don’t understand why this weird person is waving at you because genuinely speaking, to you at that moment this person you’ve known for years seems like a complete stranger because you don’t recognize them), I could go on. I’ll apologize if I find out later that I screwed up.
Spite is the most powerful force in the universe, more powerful than Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satan, even MARY can’t defeat spite.
Spite has kept me alive, has gotten me out of toxic situations, has allowed me to reclaim my dignity when I needed to.
Spite can be really toxic in many ways, but it can be so so important in so many others.
To mix metaphors a little…. Spite is a dangerous and volatile fuel, but any port in a storm.
I like it. It’s volatile and dangerous like gasoline. Unchecked, it can lead to a building on fire, explosions, injury and death.
But in a container, when you have nothing else in the tank. It can be what you need to chug that last mile home.
don’t forget that gasoline pollutes the atmosphere. Just like overusing spite pollutes the emotional atmosphere of a space. (It made sense in my head, but I’m not sure how to explain what I mean here)
Spite is like Nitrus. It is powerful and volatile. It can give you that needed kick to get you out of a bad situation…but it will melt down your engine if used too much, and even small uses will still cause damage. Plus when using it, you’re never in as much control as you’d like.
spite is like oxygen. It burns and breaks everything inside us, but it also keeps us alive. It is our spite against the inevitability of death that drives us to actually live instead of skipping to the end of the film that is our life
Spite literally brought me back from the dead, so yeah.
I thought that was Coke in China.
It gives a wonderful sense of meaning and purpose afterwards too.
Oh, Hell yes! I even became a bicycle advocate out of spite. Don’t like me riding a bicycle on the same street on the other side going the opposite direction? Then I will take a chunk of street away for exclusive use by bicycles.
It’s very telling that Mary can’t understand why anyone would care about another person. Im finding it easy to believe that Mary is incapable of caring about anyone.
Wasn’t the definition of psychopath total lack of empathy?
I think that’s sociopathy, not psychopathy.
Actually (and this was a surprise to me too), sociopaths are capable of the barest empathy, but have a hard time keeping their violent tendencies in check, or at least a secret, while psychopaths are perfectly incapable of empathy and are very good at hiding what crimes they do commit (*usually* on the order of corruption, not serial violence). In other words, sociopaths are the obvious villains (think Joker) while psychopaths are the more subtle ones who can fake it (think Hannibal Lecter).
Unstoppable spite meets an immovable Christian
Immovable Christian? No, Mary is just another incredible asshole.
Commenters are the winners?
Willis: Orion Fury is right. This victory belongs to the commenters. We lose. We always lose.
I have a feeling it’ll be a long time, if ever, that I can say something that’ll make him say anything remotely like that. For now, I’m happy with tolerate.
Billie, I really like this plan.
I was kinda hoping for “tear Mary’s head off with your bare hands and mount it on a pike in the hallway”, but we can save that for Plan B.
That’s Billie’s long-term plan, but short-term she just wants Mary out of her hair.
The alt text only confirms my decision yesterday that Agatha was now my favorite character.
Spite can actually be a powerful force. To make things so much worse for people.
Yaaaaaaaaay!
I swear, one day Billie and Ruth will be motivated by something OTHER than spite.
Today is not that day and I am super happy for it.
Mary needs a heart and soul transplant, stat!
Her body would instantly reject the transplants.
Then clearly she needs an entire-body transplant.
Seems like a waste of heart and soul. Hmm . . . maybe take Mary, Faz, Blaine, Todad, and Leland, then distill every ounce of heart and soul and other positive traits from them, and stick ’em in Joyce’s mom. Which . . . wouldn’t be a lot, but make things a little easier on Joyce and Becky.
I think that might end up distilling the wrong things. All the negative traits instead.
Nah, we run the distillation through a negativity filter before pouring it in. We’re looking at a few drops per gallon of raw material making it through, but it’d be worth it.
Mostly because the negativity goes into waste disposal instead of continuing to blackmail or threaten people.
Clearly you never did a distillation of an extract. The negative stuff forms the gooey residue that is nigh impossible to remove from the still pot.
Don’t use filters – they clog up in no time short. Especially with structural negativity like in Mary’s build-up.
This makes me happy. Rather than just let Mary be or trying to immediately raise hell without a backup plan, Billie came up with a great way to control Mary and protect everyone on the floor from her at the same time! It’s amazing that she was able to think so logically with her still trying to find her bearings after all hell broke lose. I hope it works.
I think Billie just asked “What would frustrate Mary the most?” and came up with “the inability to ever control anyone else” as her answer.
Oh yeah. No doubt about that!
On one hand, I want to take the high road and say that Mary needs help in some form. On the other, I want to tell her that there is a job opening at Circus Baby’s Rentals and Entertainment.
Oh crap. I just made an obscure reference to a game that nobody got! I must hide in shame.
PS: the ending of Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location
Can’t think of any fitting lyrics again, so here’s the next best thing…
*plays Mexican standoff music*
Duh na na na naaaaaa…
Ah ah ahhhhhh….
Serendipitous tumbleweed!
Sounds a carrion bird makes!
*creaks of old hanging signs*
*the crunch of leather boots against sand and the jingle of spurs*
billie is such a good antihero
Agatha’s my new favorite character
*Agatha’s off-camera, looking at us, like that dude from Parks & Rec*
While this is a good short-term thing, I really, really hope that Mary slips up.
Call me traditional, but I love it when the bile-spewing villain gets their deserved comeuppance.
…Why doesn’t she just tell right now? What’s the point of blackmailing her exactly?
Because Billie WANTS her to fuck up. She wants her to dig her own hole. She’s goading her into making it worse for her.
She knows Mary won’t be able to resist her ways, and when she screws up, SHE’LL BE GONE FOR GOOD.
The relief would be so great it could almost feel like an orgasm. If it weren’t for the profound disgust.
I think because she doesn’t fully trust that this will fall back on Mary as much as it should and doesn’t want Mary to feel empowered by getting only a slap on the wrist from the overworked Residence Manager.
Because sometimes the worry of looming doom could be worse than the doom itself.
It’s possible that, should Billie go to the residence manager, Mary will get a slap on the wrist-or perhaps no punishment at all. It’s not fair, it sucks, but that is life.
But it’s also possible that she *would* get in serious trouble.
By simply threatening, rather than *outright going* to the residence manager, Billie has suspended Shcroedinger’s Sword of Damocles (yes, I am mixing metaphors) above Mary’s head. Is it a sharp sword? Is it a replica? YOU DON’T KNOW! Dare you spin the wheel and find out?
Billie’s hung the sword. Now she’s gonna see if Mary sharpens it and rachets it higher until it doesn’t make a difference if it’s a replica or not 🙂
That ain’t no criiiiiiiiime~…
Panel 3 Mary is the most punchable her face has ever been. Billie’s restraint is incredible
“Everyone” includes Joyce, right? Mary should count herself lucky she still has her femurs.
Have we even had a Joyce-Mary conversation at all? We’ve never seen how Mary has handled the attempted school shooting, let alone Joyce in her new attitude.
Choice of the church when Joyce meandered about doctrine until Mary mentioned electric guitars…
If I remember correctly, they once spoke briefly, only Mary’s unpleasantness put Joyce off talking to her further. Something about Mary not thinking that Joyce was a “real Christian” or something?
That first trip to church, when Joyce brought Dorothy.
“If evil weren’t nice, nobody’d bother with it.”
It’s like how Saiyans care about her pride, but instead with spite.
So… Vegeta then?
especially Abridged Vegeta
Some possibilities for how Mary will be dealt with
1. Mary trips and whacks her head conveniently forgetting that she is awful
2. Mary somehow shrinks to an inch tall
3. Mary’s soul ends up in a magical sword and she goes on a grand adventure with Joyce
3 seems *grossly unfair* to Joyce, assuming the sword has the ability to talk.
And if the sword can’t talk?
“I have no mouth, and I must scream.”
Granted, sapient weapons usually have some means of elementary communication, even if it’s as basic as suppressing their more powerful abilities at will or dimming/intensifying any glow effect.
Harlen Ellison aside :), I wish I could remember the sword that housed a demon within it, which attached itself to the arm of the warrior stupid enough to pick it up. As if that wasn’t bad enough, yes, it talked, a lot.
Glirendree, in the Larry Niven “magic goes away” stories.
She’d be just Morse’ing insults at Joyce.
Inch tall Xylitol?
since when does Mary have a soul?
What’s number 3 referencing? The only thing I know involving a former evil punk going on a journey of repentance with a talking sword is “Dust: An Elysian Tail”.
And now Mary is left with a single haunting question: “Which dormmate will pounce first?” Also, I’d guess Billy is saving the best (i.e. Roz and Joyce) for last, because she hasn’t been able to yet. And when that happens, to quote Inigo Montoya “There will be blood tonight!”
“You killed my father, prepare to-”
Oh, wait, wrong quote.
“Hello. My name is Jennifer Billingsworth. You blackmailed my girlfriend. Prepare to hurt.”
“To the death!” “No! To the pain.”
“I want my
fathergirlfriend back, youson of abongo.”Hm, well she’s already made several unpleasant comments about Becky. Chances are she says something horrible to her and/or Dina at some point.
It really irks me that Mary apparently cannot comprehend the idea of a person caring about the well being of another person. Like holy shit Mary, what kind of emotions do you even feel?
I’m going to go with “hate”, “contempt”, and “smug”.
She’s done “fear” too, but she probably needs more practice
Mollyscribbles and Cerberus talks about this in a comment tree above. The short version is: To a fundie bigot, gay relationships aren’t real. So they obviously don’t actually care for each other.
“Why do you care?”
Because she’s capable of human emotions, you fucking cancerous tumor.
Err, … Cancer can get fixed pretty well these days. Laparoscopy! (Which I thought was related to rabbits and hares-but isn’t). But there’s no fix for Mary short of a Road to Tarsus style conversion. You know, extreme conversion, with life changing stuff, special headers, vinyl seat covers, lake pipes, air -brush of a knight on a horse, …
You don’t “fix” cancer, you get rid of it. Hopefully before its presence destroys everything around it.
I see! You mean Fix, as in “It’s o.k., Lou. Vinny said he’d “Fix” da problem fer ya’. He’ll make Mary some new shoes, an’ see if she wants t’ go swimmin’ in the East Bay.”
I meant “fix” as in ‘surgical strike,’ as with minimal invasion, or involvement.
Yo Dawg, I heard you like blackmail, so I put some blackmail in your blackmail so you can blackmail while you blackmail.
“…and we have told Chloe about it so she can prevent the conflict from getting out of hand” … Right? … no? OK…. I’m sure there will be no collateral damage this time
I may be currently biased for reasons, but it seems like far too often a college official’s idea of “preventing things from getting out of hand” is to hush things up.
yep. For evidence, see the current state of sexual assault investigations on college campuses
Blackmail doesn’t work very well if you report the crime to the authorities first.
Also, it’s… it’s a little out of hand.
Oh Bagge… Willis is going to treasure it extra much when he shows the inevitable collateral damage and you get all the feels from it.
He is evil that way.
So vengeance it is…so be it.
Comic Reactions:
Panel 1: Sometimes when me or my friends are discussing the missing stairs in various communities and their latest round of bullshit, we’ll utter the following phrase: “That is entirely in keeping with what I know of them”.
I feel that phrase gets uttered a lot about Mary when someone relates their latest noxious interaction with her.
Panels 2-4: There’s that Mary face again as she faces genuine consequences. Immediately followed by sly Mary in Panel 3 and weaseling out of responsibility face in Panel 4. And the thing is that facial pattern is so frickin’ common among bullies. The amount of times I’ve had to intervene with a young kid tormenting the other kids or doing something wildly inappropriate only to have them attempt that half eye-roll in panel 4 and diminishment of their actions.
And that’s the most interesting thing about Mary. She’s been so devoid of genuine real consequences for her actions for so long, that she’s still stuck in the standard weasel practices of a kindergarten bully. Absent any teacher that could sit her down and make her own the consequences of her actions and the harm it causes.
And that’s the part that resonates strongly with me as a teacher. Of why it’s important to intervene early and consistently with this behavior before it metastasizes. Cause otherwise, they grow up still thinking that horseshit will get them out of “being in trouble” even when the thing they are “getting in trouble for” is trying to drive someone to suicide because they’re not straight.
I’m just here to say thanks for saving me the trouble of having to write up thoughts about this strip. In other words, your full analysis (yes, I’ve read all the posts) says it all already. I have nothing to add to all of that.
Well said.
The image dominating my mind is of taking a look inside Mary and finding nothing there, as it all rotted away because no one took care to cultivate it
I hope the whole floor takes turns messing with Mary now.
Also, I want “immediately outside of Mary’s room” to be the hot new spot for girl-on-girl make-outs. Just, all hours of the day.
Psst, Mandy, Grace, do the thing.
Finally their chance to be the heroes they always knew themselves to be.
I like to imagine they make ‘camping out in the hall just talking’ right outside Mary’s room their new favourite date night activity. And if Mary ever complains she can hear them inside her room, Roz innocently goes ‘I didn’t hear anything’.
I have a confession, I was Mary the whole time, and this whole thing was a secret plan to get hot girls to make out outside of my dorm room.
You’ll never take me alive Cerberus!
“Flies away on helicopter while laughing manically”
Cerberus, our imperial satellite lasers are locked in on Some1’s helicopter…
(Shouldn’t have bragged you’d never be captured alive, Some1.)
Pff, alive? Do we really care that Some1 gets taken alive?
Didn’t I already see that
pornomovie?Panel 2: I don’t remember who brought this up, but someone made a really good point yesterday that the reason Billie doesn’t go straight to the RM is because she doesn’t trust that Mary will face the consequences she needs to face for such a heinous action.
I mean, Billie is “alpha percussion instrument, problem solver”. Except the only problems anyone is going to entrust a 15 year old with are those that adults are untrustworthy about. Things like sexual assault or stalking that are frequently mishandled by officials when reported or turned against the accuser as a detriment of character. Things like abuse at home or needing to sneak a kid to Planned Parenthood under the nose of hyper anti-choice parents.
And we see that in her interactions with Ruth. Everything tight to the chest, kept in shadows, only reaching out on a small level and not at all trusting the machine of the university to do the right thing on Ruth’s behalf.
And I realize that this is also why we saw that Leland flashback. That’s not just about Sal. Billie is right there as Leland nearly murdered Marcie. Is right there watching as Sal took the main fall for it. From an early age, just like Sal, she has learned that reporting something like you’re supposed to can empower the bully if those reported to turn a blind eye.
So she’s not giving Mary that potential out. Instead hoping to use the language that Mary understands, fear, to constrain and contain her and prevent her from ever again doing something as monstrous as this again.
Panel 3: Speak the language the bully understands. It’s not the path I tend to like very much, but my path tends to mean eating a lot of bullshit from the bullies of the world, so what do I know? I’m not going to begrudge Billie some pettiness given…
When I was growing up, I was taught that if I ran from the school bully I would be running the rest of my life. I believe that today, as an adult.
I fought, as did Sal, with bully’s in my school yard: back when we had recess outside, and teachers didn’t see everything that went on.
Sometimes I won, and sometimes I did not. I was a very small female. I did not fight ‘fair’. I used whatever I could get my hands on to defend myself.
And no this was not big city, or slums. This was a nice little town, with regular people. And a few not so nice. It was a different era.
The scene in the yearly Christmas Story where Ralphie has had all he can take and pounds the piss out of the bully: the many scenes in Stephen King’s stories, are not fiction. My generation lived through them.
I do believe that telling out kids not to fight back is wrong. I raised my daughter to fight back, and she is able to do so. I worry about her kids though, the cyberbully era is upon us. And they are in social media at such a young age.
So yes, speak the language the bully understands. If words don’t work, a nice board does. I don’t think Billie is being petty, anything but. She is defending herself. And her friends.
PPS sorry no edit.
Going to the teacher or any adult was not encouraged. Not by parents or anyone else.
‘No one likes a tattle-tale” is what my brother and I were taught. That, and “solve your own battles.”
A difficult thing to understand, because at the same time, we knew that our parents were there for us if the circumstances were truly beyond our ability to handle them.
in the cyberbully era its best to just not use public social media. shouting loudly in a public place attracts assholes. I avoid anything that does not have solid privacy features or strong anonymity.
know it’s a few days late (busy earning that money stuff), but a few wanted modified versions of Joyce’s cunning smile? Well, got a couple done, 2nd used a Joyce-Triangle Smile which looks a bit evil, but the 1st I made, using a smile I got off a Becky pic, well, didn’t turn out…right…
It depends on what your definition of “right” is.
Sometimes, I define “right” as “just that exact combination of horribly, horribly wrong.”
I’m starting to wonder if Mary has had issues for a while, but rather than make sure that she got help or saw a psychologist, her parents sent her to bible study.
She fits scarily well into someone with antisocial personality disorder.
“That’s your plan. Blackmail me with my blackmail.”
“Yes, because the last thing I wanted to do was resort to violence. But it’s still on the list.”
Because if violence isn’t your last resort, you didn’t use enough of it.
Panel 4: Let’s address the elephant in the room, because Billie is being remarkably polite given the circumstances. Billie’s girlfriend is hospitalized under literal suicide watch because she can no longer be trusted to be allowed to be alone without killing herself.
And the reason for that is Mary actively decided to take advantage of existing depression to openly try and make that worse in exchange for a paltry handful of bullshit power-plays relating mostly to Mary being given a free reign to bully anyone not her very particular flavor of Christian and especially anyone queer.
Mary is minimizing in standard bigot form, never wanting to own the vileness of her actions when the harsh light of day falls upon it. But the truth of the matter is that Mary played a dangerous game trying to push a suicidally depressed woman deeper into said suicidal ideation, separating her from what little of a support network and coping resources she had in the hopes that she would kill herself and thus mean one fewer queer woman “polluting” “her” floor.
And so, when she rolls her eyes back dismissively, wondering why anyone would even care, why it would matter to anyone, that’s just one vile layer of the context of her action.
The other layers?
A) The other elephant in the room that is Ruth is Billie’s girlfriend. And thus that statement is a reveal of just how twisted Mary’s worldview of queer relationships are.
She not only doesn’t remotely value them as real relationships, she doesn’t even view them as couplings in which love or even base level empathy can exist in.
In her mind, Ruth and Billie have been dating not because they fell in love or make each others feel things. But entirely to shove “immorality” in Mary’s face as a direct attack on Mary’s soul.
And she believes this so thoroughly that she doesn’t even think twice about doing this smarmy “why would you even care” style attempt to eel away from responsibility for her vile actions to the person who loves Ruth more than anyone else on the planet. Certainly way more than Ruth loves herself.
And that is just another whole level of awful.
B) The other side of that arrogant theology is that not only are queer relationships entirely about scoring points for Satan, but a belief that everyone secretly knows the bigot is right.
And that’s not just a religious bigot thing. Bigots and abusers of all stripes tend to believe that everyone is just as hateful or short-sighted or prejudiced as they are, they’re just being more “honest” about it. See all the creepy rapist Trump supporters who’ve been out in force acting like everyone else is just as creepily predatory as they are or all the super racist assholes who believe everyone believes that Obama is a secret muslim Kenyan and is just being coy about it.
And the result of that is that Mary can’t even begin to think of why a queer woman suffering from depression might take issue with Mary’s plan to blackmail and attempt to drive a depressed queer woman to suicide. Why that might matter to her.
To the point where she doesn’t even own up to the fact that she tried to do the exact same shit to Billie as part of this whole blackmail thing.
Just… this panel is the perfect distillation of everything that is wrong about Mary. Of what is so poisonous of her particular way of interacting with the world. Of how vile what she did was and how little she wants to own what she did.
And sadly, how common this shit is in the world. If only Mary was the only one who ever acted like this. Ever did this. If only she was a cartoon villain instead of a very very common type of person.
Fair bit of a rant there, but yeah, sounds about right on the mark… 🙁
I agree with about all the rest, but I don’t think Mary actually wanted to drive Ruth to suicide. She actually wanted the blackmail to work. What it did to Ruth was mostly irrelevant, but suicide would have ended it, so that’s not helpful.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if she sees the suicide as a real threat, rather than a plea for attention or whatever excuse people use to dismiss it. “We all know Ruthless will be fine”
Not to excuse her, I’m sure she wouldn’t really care, other than about losing her hold.
Seriously. With Mary I’d be asking “What the FUCK is your problem?” except we know precisely what the fuck her problem is – cultural insulation and a diet of hate being treated as “just a difference of opinions” and growing up in a power system where the kind of power she can wield is this queen bee moral compass thing like Carol and she wants in.
And yet still. What the FUCK Mary. What the fuck.
It’s probably just because I just finished reading Invisible Man, but the way I visualize her upbringing is someone, be it the Internet, her pastors or her parents, slowing plastering a paper-mache shell of bigotry and fundamentalist Christian rhetoric over her over the course of her childhood. Gluing it with the glues of authority, pain and the emptiness and loniliness we all fight in different ways. And then they wait and wait until they take a peek inside the shell that they made, the horrible sculpture of hate, the sneering, praying vessel. And they see nothing, except a pool of rotten flesh soup at the heels. The last remnants of the wonderful person she could have been if they had just let her breathe instead of smothering her in favor of the monster they wanted. They smile, because they don’t see it. They see a young godly woman ready to bring light to a poisoned, sick world. They praise their god.
im like the complete opposite of mary like yeah everybodies done something wrong but a lot of ppl just made mistakes or didnt know it was wrong and they deserve forgiveness and a lot of ppl like they cant control it like i love my girlfriend soooo much and i know when shes upset she doesnt mean to be hurtful i know its just her brain dealing w/ past pain and like she deserves forgiveness and love imo also a owl landed on my hand today and that was super cool and i love that owl and im her mom now
“The complete opposite of Mary” sounds like a good way to be. Well done.
We, the Emperor of the Internet, hereby bestow upon you our newly fledged honour: The Anti-Mary Award.
It is an award for people so fantastically anti-Mary, owls will land on their arms (or something similarly marvelous).
Do we have secret societies for all these Imperial Orders?
You have to ask?!?
(Honestly, We have no idea. If there are, nobody’s told Us.)
Hail Discordia!
I’m imagining Agatha also humming a pleasant tune (anyone else would be humming something dramatic).
1812 overture?
I’m still goggling a little bit at the sheer chutzpah on display from Mary.
Like it’s one thing to be unrepentant about trying to drive someone to suicide without remorse. Quite another thing to assume their girlfriend would be totally okay with said plan.
Like, holy fuck is Billie being way more polite than is frickin’ reasonable given that context. Fuck, if someone was this cavalier of driving one of my partners out of stability and into hospitalization, well, let’s just say I would not nearly be as restrained and reasonable as Billie is here.
I’m with you there. Hell, if someone as much as looks at one of my friends funny I get pissy- hospitalizing them? Mary wouldn’t survive the week.
I think Billy is so restrained because she’s currently filled with rage. Not a hot fighting rage, but a cold, calculating rage. Also known as the single most dangerous type of fury where you’re so absolutely livid at someone that you realize that blind, directionless anger will get you nowhere and you need to logically plan and execute a proper operation of personal destruction against the offending person, with just perhaps the slightest hint of emotion while said operation is being carried out.
Revenge is a dish best served cold, after all.
And this is why the Greeks had two gods of war, the Spartan Ares and the Athenian, well, Athena. Athena could get just as blood thirsty as her cowardly bully of a half-brother, but she always retained her intellect. Remember Medusa? or Arachne?
+1
Seriously. Holy FUCK Mary. Are you seriously so unable to grasp other viewpoints you think Ruth’s GIRLFRIEND would agree with you on this point and auuuuuuuuugh.
remember, homophobe fundie. She doesn’t even acknowledge the idea that two people of the same gender could feel love. Hell, I would not be surprised if she just believes monogamous hetero marriage as ordained by a priest she approves of and between a man and a woman she finds to be godly=love and anything other than that (including het love before marriage or between atheists) is just a false show set up to spit in her god’s face.
Not priests, pastors. Priests are probably ‘too Catholic’. The fact some denominations outside Catholicism use priests means those denominations are, likewise, ‘too Catholic’.
ah Thank you. Did not know the difference myself as I’m Jewish.
Also, perhaps priest sounds too pagan, which is probably part of her argument against the Catholics
Most likely. Jack Chick did believe Catholics created Islam, and that Islam worships some sort of moon deity (I don’t get it either) and that they’re all pagans or… something? Admittedly it’s been a long time since I subjected myself to a Chick Tract even out of bile fascination and they don’t exactly offer a coherent and consistent version of theology.
Basically it’s some weird stuff as a result of Christianity’s fracturing and how Protestantism was built on cutting away the excessive trimmings and “idolatry” of Catholics and then the US embedding Puritanism into its cultural strictures. (Puritanism being the people who thought Protestants weren’t going far enough, because they still allowed things like dancing and observing holy days with things other than fasting and also they believe this thing called predestination where from birth everyone is either one of the Good and Pure Elect who will go to heaven or the damned, they’re basically the forerunners to fundamentalists like this and they may actually have been even more poorly-adjusted to the world at large but you can feel still their cultural underpinnings in fundamentalism.)
It’s… it’s really, really weird. I grew up with associations to a fairly offbeat little sect and yet STILL I find fundamentalism incomprehensible.
Yeah, priests = either “Catholic” or “Pagan” to Mary. Which, of course, is terrible. Pagans deny the existence of God and Catholics are idol worshipping, cannibalistic whores of babylon, don’tcha know?
aren’t pagans largely idolaters in her worldview too?
I do not like you, Mary.
Is it safe to say that this is understating things to such a degree, we might need a whole new level of understatement ranking to understand how understated this comment was?
I can only think of one example that might beat it: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”- Emperor Hirohito, 15th of August 1945.
Uh… thanks. I think.
You’re the sort of person who would read Dumbing of Age, so the feeling would likely be mutual if she met you. I’d love for Mary to somehow realize she depends on people like us (and of course DYW) for her very existence.
I wouldn’t say her existence, but at least her mask
People like Mary have worn the shell of bigotry and zealotry for so long that the body and soul underneath is rotten and decaying while the shell marches on with a life of its own. She is her mask.
Seriously, Willis. Can we please have Mary get hit by a truck?
Like, say, a Kenworth K100 cab over, circa 1984 model?
She wouldn’t even need to die! It wouldn’t be breaking the “no character deaths” promise if she, oh I dunno, ended up paralyzed from the neck down with serious head trauma.
It’s worth noting that Willis made the “no character deaths” promise because of the slow pacing of the comic, and how the mourning would utterly dominate the comic for an absurdly long time.
But what if mourning is off the table?
Mary is clearly longform storytelling. This being a Willis Strip, she’ll get hers eventually. Whether she changes is another question entirely, but since this IS a Willis Strip, I can see her at least start to question.
It’s probably wrong of me or whatever, but I really hope she doesn’t change. I don’t like that kind of narrative when it comes to people like Mary, because in my experience they rarely, if ever change — and any change is often superficial and temporary.
Eh, if Mary were hit by a truck, it would pollute the whole ‘act with integrity’ meme we’ve got floating around Ruth and the semi. Find another way to kill her.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall set me free.
Is… is that the Sith creed…?
sounds like it
Spite: Problem Solver!
When Life Gets You Down, Depend on Spite!
Spite: Doin’ Allright!
There is always the hope that, as Bryy says, Mary being a long form storytelling effort here: Willis will either begin a character development loop with her, OR she will get her payback.
I’m actually fine with either because:
Getting her comeuppance is fine: that means she will suffer for what she has done. But, somehow I just don’t think anything would really faze her, short of being run over by said truck.
A character development will mean that she will have to face the fact of just how rotten she truly is. That should be enough to put her in a room next to Ruth.
/Steeples fingers/
I am…. interested in what Roz will do with this information.
Also I’m wondering if with this comic the joyful!mary panel which was a preview on tumblr (I’m not sure when it’s for) makes sense. Is it a mask? Will she start to ‘act’? Will she eventually get a taste of how exhausting it is to act opposed to your actual nature/how you’re feeling like Ruth did for a bit before it came crashing down? (Honestly though the smile reaches the eyes for Mary unlike for Ruth, so if so maybe /Mary/ should major in theatre.
oh please. Mary has been acting for far longer than that. She’s placed herself in the role of “good Christian fighting for morality and opposed on all sides” for years.
That, IMO, is the saddest part of this. Mary can’t see why anyone would care. A young woman, allegedly bought up in a religion based on the most unselfish act of love in human history can’t work out why anyone would care that she ruined someone’s life. I doubt that Mary has sufficient self-awareness for this but I think that she would benefit from a long, hard look in the mirror.
By the way, Mary, that’s a nasty eyelid twitch that you’ve got going for you there!
I was just reading Invisible Man, and that made me think that Mary is so far gone that she’s invisible even to herself. She could look in the mirror for hours and only see the image of the tortured Christian martyred saint that she thinks she is.
I take back what I said before. Lofwyr would do well to not eat Mary. Some sort of horrid intestinal problems would certainly follow. Mary’s still a massive conga, though.
I’m surprised Mary hasn’t figured out yet that nobody on her floor likes or agrees with her.
That just proves how far Ruth let the corruption spread.
even if she knew, she’d probably think it made her like Batman at the end of the Dark Knight. I don’t think she likes anyone on the floor anyway. Even Joyce is fallen in her eyes for fraternizing with atheists and heretics and attending parties.
Sounds like Ruth and Malaya would get along real well.
Go Billie, spite & vindictiveness are the best emotions
My thought after reading this one: Ruth just got wet and she has no idea why.
“Why do I care that you tried to get the woman I love killed so that you could get away with being mean to people for not being like you? Let me think. Because I hate you and want to condemn your soul to Hell for you by being gay near you. Because taking all your power away will keep everyone safe from any more of your bullshit power plays. Because your gross prejudices make me want to puke, and I want you to see how alone you are in having them. Because I can. Because fuck you. Pick your favorite.”
Alternatively, hold Mary down and vomit on her. Some physical evidence of how repulsive you think she is might convince her she’s not actually saying what everyone thinks
Mary’s type don’t believe that gay people actually love each other. They probably are just entirely sure they’re doing it to make fundamentalists and G-d angry
That’s why you sneak it in in the form of a self-evident detail that’s not only not debatable but entirely beside the point.
huh? I wasn’t excusing her or doing anything but applauding you for your awesome comment. Just talking about how bongos like her justify their bongoness
The entire floor just needs to have an “intervention” for Mary, so everyone, one at a time, can tell her what an asshole she is.
that will just vindicate her delusion that she’s the one true godly person on a floor of vile sinners.
Danger danger Will Robinson!
mary..you awful lil raccoon of a person
Hey! That comparison’s offensive to raccoons! And people!
I’ve seen the comments where people are trying to diagnose Mary, but I would actually lean toward her having Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She doesn’t hit every single criteria in the DSM 5 for it, but she does hit a LOT of them, including the lack of empathy, the entitlement, belittling and looking down on people she perceives as inferior, getting impatient/angry when not receiving special treatment, difficulty accepting criticism, responds with rage & contempt, tries to behave in a superior manner…
All of these things fit Mary quite well, especially when you add in the nasty sense of moral superiority and being judgemental that’s very common for religious fundies. As opposed to psychopaths and sociopaths, where breaking the law is a lot more common, a narcissist will be a bully in a way that can get them reprimanded, but very seldom charged with a criminal offense. It would take a good prosecution lawyer and a very bad defense lawyer for Mary to be successfully convicted of anything with what she’s done. Booted out of residence seems to be a much more likely consequence, but Mary is a spiteful and mean bongo and might be more trouble than even that is worth.
how about we just stop trying to diagnose her and just accept that neurotypicals are just as capable, and statistically more likely, of being abusive and bigoted than the mentally ill
Exactly.
“Billie, why do you even care that I literally blackmailed you and your partner and it ended in her being deeply depressed because you guys couldn’t see each other and you were the only one that knew how bad it was? Don’t you know homosexual feelings aren’t REAL feelings.”
After reading through this comment section, I wish that more people connected mental illness with the drive to achieve good in the world, rather than being an awful jerk. I know most of you aren’t even thinking about it, but what does it say to the mentally ill when anytime someone in the media is a jerk or a villain that someone immediately starts calling them mentally ill. You’re acting like it’s our destiny to be the eternal villain to your well-balanced neurotypical heroes.
We’re not your villains. We’re all suffering in different ways.
Like seriously our world is difficult enough WITHOUT being jerks to people we’re ALREADY being treated like crap by others if we’re well behaved and keeping our mental illness and neurodivergence cooties somewhere you can hardly see them.
Sometimes I find this comments section a good and healing place. Sometimes I just want to angrily flap at people.
i know. Want to help me reshape society by connecting neurotypicality with being a jerk and mental illness with the kind of single-minded drive to improve the world and create great art shown by people like Abe Lincoln and Van Gogh?
And clarification, when I say everyone is suffering and destroying themselves, I’m including neurotypicals. I just think the only way to help it is to help others instead of sitting on their heads to get a few more minutes of air before you suffocate
To be fair, what Mary displays is not neurotypical behavior either. I understand what you’re saying, and I agree – mental illness is too often likened to some horrible demon that magically transforms otherwise perfectly nice people into face-eating monsters, and that has serious real world repercussions for people. There is a serious need for positive representations to combat this. On the other hand, for villains who are at the point of face-eating villainy, I’m not really sure how they could have gotten to that point without some level of disordered thinking.
Mary is a religious zealot and a horrible person, that doesn’t mean she is disordered. You can be neurotypical and be an awful person, no disorder is required for that.
Mary also displays several antisocial and naricisstic traits. There’s being a dick and there’s being a cartoon villain. Which I guess she literally is, but still.
Except there are numerous people on this board who have known people like Mary. You can’t dismiss a character as ‘cartoonish’ if there are people like her in real life.
I didn’t mean to say they aren’t. I’ve known people like that too. “Cartoon villain” is something I call real people too, in a “how are you a real person” sense.
Outliers in a population of billions – the mentally ill
As I’ve learned in stat class, outliers can get pretty weird
I meant to say “minus” if that was unclear
This.
newsflash, being a jerl is not a mental illness. she uthinks she’s fighting a crusade and acting in many of the ways that neurotypical soldiers do bu justify due to their circumstances (and they are sometimes right)
A lack of empathy to the point of figuratively dancing on Ruth’s grave is not just being a jerk.
let me ask you something. Would you have any empathy for a suicidal serial killer? No, because the general belief is that they gave up their right to sympathy when they preyed on their fellow humans. They’re something less than human now.
And what do we think Mary thinks about ungodly homosexuals who support trans people and are even -mean- to her, class?
That is why she has no empathy. It’s all in a frame of mind. It’s the same reason why no one cries their eyes out at the destruction of the Death Star.
let me ask you something. Would you have any empathy for a suicidal serial killer? No, because the general belief is that they gave up their right to sympathy when they preyed on their fellow humans. They’re something less than human now.
And what do we think Mary thinks about ungodly homosexuals who support trans people and are even -mean- to her, class?
That is why she has no empathy. It’s all in a frame of mind. It’s the same reason why no one cries their eyes out at the destruction of the Death Star.
damn it, double posted
But in my case, the serial killer is someone who only exists as a concept. Mary is directly pushing someone to kill themselves and doesn’t understand why that’s wrong.
These characters are fictional and no more real than my example, but let’s go with what you’re saying anyway.
Would you care if Trump was suicidal? Or if the Son of Sam was suicidal?
No, it’s being monstrous jerk. Reinforced by her warped religious beliefs. Neurotypical people are capable of being as awful as Mary is.
I understand why you want to there to be some sort of disorder, some label for the way she is that can take away at least some of her agency so she isn’t really choosing to be so horrible.
Sorry, but the issue with her is software, not hardware.
I think it’s less her actions and more the fact that she honestly seems to have no empathy that I’m hung up on. Like I may not feel bad for the suicidal murderer, but I’m aware of the reasons I should feel bad and why. It genuinely doesn’t feel like Mary is capable of that.
we have not looked inside her head. For all we know, every time she does something awful, she has to smother the little thought that says this is wrong with the all-purpose “I’m doing the Lord’s work”
Hey, to all the people who want to talk about mental illness, you have two possibly clinically Depressed alcoholics, one of them suicidal, to discuss. No need to bring Mary in and feed the cultural demonization of the mentally ill
If everyone who’s a horrible person about anything is mentally ill, then we might as well just say everyone is mentally ill and it’s just a matter of degrees. Why is it so hard for people to accept that neurotypical people are capable of doing awful things and being awful people? What, is it really so hard to acknowledge that people like you can be awful? Mental illness is not the cause of all the bad in the world, people making the choice to do bad things is the cause and their choice isn’t caused by mental illness, it’s caused by selfishness, entitlement, greed, jealousy, badly handled anger, etc. EVERYONE is capable of doing or being bad and it doesn’t take an illness to make that happen, it takes a choice.
As someone who spent most of their life up to the middle of high school thinking I was largely neurotypical, I know why. When I was a kid, I once said that I thought you’d have to be “crazy” to kill someone. Ever since I got diagnosed, that memory has haunted me. Neurotypical people and those who are largely neurotypical don’t want to believe that someone like them can be a bad person. The dark side of a culture of positivity is the feeling that you’re either a good person or a monster who should die for even having negative thoughts. Any time a well-meaning person diagnoses a supervillain with schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder or psychopathy, they are at the core just repeating my childhood belief that “normal people” wouldn’t even have the ability to kill people.
That, and we don’t like to believe anyone is capable of hurting people knowingly, so attributing their behavior to a disorder is a way of saying that they are doing it unknowingly or missing something that keeps most people from doing that thing.
Very well said.
There are lots of jerks in this comic. There are only a handful I think are mentally ill due to fitting standards set forth by the psychiatric field. I understand people attribute too much to mental illness, and not enough to the fact that plenty of terrible behaviors are within the scope of normal human behavior. Lacking empathy to the point of not even understanding why it’s bad to basically nearly blackmail someone to death is not within the scope of neurotypical behavior.
That’s only true if you see the person you targeted as a human being worthy of empathy. Mary, like many bigots before her, doesn’t see her prey as truly human.
I think you grossly underestimate the power of dehumanizing a group of people due to belief. She doesn’t view homosexual people as people so she feels no empathy, it’s the same logic people use to commit genocide and the same way people rationalize killing other people in war. In war the enemy is painted as inhuman monsters and so they are acceptable to kill. Racists and other bigots do the same thing, you can rationalize literally anything if you stop viewing the other group as people. Neurotypical people do this all the time and have throughout history or do you think everyone who condoned slavery, the internment of Japanese Americans, or any of the literally thousands of acts of horrible dehumanization in history were mentally ill?
honestly, the only jerk who I’ve wondered if he was mentally ill in this comic is Mike. Either that, or his parents aren’t as perfect as they act
Another possibility is that Mike is purposefully a jerk as a method of rebellion against his parents and their perfect image.
I saw someone say that they do that irl earlier in the comments. Makes me glad that my parents were open about how petty and snide they could be when they were pissed off. Lovely people, but such a treat to see them talking about relatives when they weren’t around.
the only problem was that kid me did not know when to shut up and got them in trouble by repeating private conversations at family gatherings
So you were basically Wikileaks.
Yeah, it’s the same for me as my theory for Mike, but opposite, my parents were abusive and horrible and I do everything in my power to be a nice and decent person.