Oh, my… Kevin and Kell was my very first webcomic, and I don’t think I’ve been back there in ten, fifteen years… can’t remember why, and hope I won’t be reminded when I go back to visit…
Once you get a few posts deep, they actually stop going any further to the right, which in turn can make it a bit confusing to know who’s replying to who.
Couldn’t we all. That said I’d find it easier to deal with a more traditional flavor of the far right than the “Alt-Right” movement represents, if only because it’s harder for them to get a mainstream foothold with anyone actually paying any kind of positive attention to their message.
Over on Dreamwidth I’ve been coming up with what I think is a fairly elegant solution to nested comments for mobile use. Which I guess bears very little relationship to this topic really except I just released a public alpha ‘style’ overlay that implements proper mobile support and am getting initial feedback and it’s very positive. And that part of it could be applied here if it was actually a big deal. Which I don’t really think it is. But still.)
That’s why if I ever need to reply in that context I’ll start with a twitter style @. IIRC it’s a four or five deep reply nesting before that happens though.
If Leslie has rice or certain beans, that can be ground into flour. Applesauce or mashed bananas are options for egg substitute.
Stuff made with wheat flour substitutes tend to be denser than more traditional muffins, so even if Robin knows what she’s doing, those muffins are likely to be bricks. Best eaten dipped in something liquid. Coffee or Milk depending on inclination.
(the flour knowledge comes from knowing two people with wheat allergies. The egg substitutes from google).
It is – or should be. She might not have it at home because she doesn’t bake (no talent, not having the time), because she ran out and didn’t came around to buy it, or because she considers it to be unhealthy because she avoids food that’s too processed (because she deems it unhealthy). There may be other explanations, but these are the ones I could think of.
Coeliac Disease is commonly thought of as a wheat allergy as gluten sets it off , but its a lot more complex than that. Basically it’s an autoimmune condition caused by gluten, resulting in long term damage to the small intestine. This reduces the bodies ability to absorb nutrienta and in the long term realusts in various things like osteoporosis and anaemia
This is Robin, she probably just ground up breakfast cereal. Cheerios are close to pure oats, but she probably just mixed everything that was available from Cocoa Puffs to Froot Loops.
That reference. I get it.
that said, whatever they’re made of, they at least look right, smell okay, and don’t feel too far off-weightwise for Becky to be willing to try to eat them.
or Becky is less picking about food than I am, which would be totally understandable, given how recently she got a job.
Because Robin doesn’t care about Leslie. She cares about what Leslie does for Robin. It’s a weird position because I really-really like the new Robin in a thoroughly, “I hate this person as the embodiment of evil” way. I liked old Robin but I don’t want new Robin to be redeemable–she’s too interesting as a causal monster.
It may be a joke but she’s trying to disincentive a homeless girl from having a place two stay when she just admitted she had two homes. Damn! I don’t like using this to descibe people but that’s pretty monstrous.
Old Robin was just as bad, she just worked ona smaller scale because she was afraid of responsibility. Hell, the whole reason leslie even became a character was because the rest of the cast was so sick of her they refused to interact with her anymore.
honestly i’ve had to deal with so many dude characters being this kind of asshole that it’s kind of refreshing to see a woman pulling this kind of gleeful obliviousness on for size
i mean like if i had to deal with her in person, i would lose my temper pretty quickly; but safe behind the fourth wall i can just nom popcorn
Did I mention that ‘muffin’ was (one of) the forum nickname for regulars on soc.bi circa 1994? Dunno if that’s relevant here, but you might want to mention that to Robin.
I don’t like Twizzlers, Red vines, real licorice or “Americanized” licorice, so I have no opinion. Wonder if licorice fans like them.
That said, I do bake lots, and I’ll try anything once, so a candy in cupcakes or cookies? Why not? Hey, someone had to be the first to put Reese’s peanut butter cups in bread pudding.
Wait… you mean the public display of abandoning a class, attempting to seduce a random stranger, and gushing over someone (again publicly) who isn’t legally allowed to be there isn’t “full shitty”. This is what takes the cake? Either my standards are too low or I should abandon this place all together.
Okay I think abandoning her class was shitty (as I made clear in several previous comments) but I’m failing to see the issue in her gushing over Becky. After everything that kid has been through and being told she should hate herself by adult after adult she deserved that moment of someone just looking at her with nothing but pride and affection.
I’m really not sure why trying to guilt a home invader she used to have a crush on out of her home is “full shitty” or any more so than the aforementioned ditching her own class thing.
I mean I can maybe halfways see it is if the issue is either her potentially putting Becky in potential harms way, or perhaps even just using Becky as an object lesson aimed at freeing up Leslie’s home and couch from a bigotted politician who seems to have less and less mental and emotional maturity than her youngest sibling everytime she’s shown on panel.
Pretty sure this doesn’t even begin to come close to the level of shitty a lot of the other adults in this comic tend to sit at.
Regardless of whether she did or not, or just where she crossed that line (hint: it was a while ago), I suspect that going full shitty is exactly what Leslie is concerned about in regards to the muffins. My gut is clenching just from imagining what they must be like.
Probably something like the ones Kitty baked in an episode of X-Men: Evolution (one batch bounced when dropped, another cracked the pavement; Kurt, who ate one from an even earlier batch, was complaining of stomach pain days later and worried that it might never go away).
I literally have no idea what you are talking about, either. I even read this as “Robin” at first, because at least that makes sense.
I don’t mean this in a “I disagree with you” way. I mean I literally cannot figure out what it is that you think she’s doing that is shitty.
While I disagreed with people before, I actually got what they were saying. (It helps that they actually said what they meant.) But here I genuinely have no clue.
Robin is violating Leslie. She is trespassing. She was breaking and entering. She is playing mind games. She is intruding upon her. She is sending the press after Leslie. She’s using her power as a congresswoman, so she can’t really call the police.
So of course Leslie is going to try something else. She takes in the girl she was already going to take in, and tries to use her to guilt Robin–guilt Robin should already feel.
I don’t get it at all. I got it when Roz was around. Because the people saying bad things about Leslie were all people who have defended Roz for various reasons. But surely there is no reason to defend Robin.
I’ve taken is as Robin is discovering a new side of her, and combined with the stressors of being a representative and what she’s had to do to get the position, has cause a realization in her life that she wishes to explore in what she views as a safe environment. To which Leslie seeming wanted, but doesn’t now (currently, at least, possibly forever), and thus doesn’t want to offend her, but still wants her out, and thus has latched onto an idea as to get Robin out of the house without being the bad guy (thus also explaining the deus ex machina of Becky now having a place).
Though full disclosure, I’ve been with these characters for 15+ years, and as such I’m emotionally invested in their happiness, and will excuse shitty behavior if I see the reasoning behind it, and a willingness to wait for it to become better. Probably why I still like Mike.
It’s not cultural context. Robin is a weirdo.
Her reason(s) haven’t been explained outright, but so far it’s probably some combination of:
unhealthy-stalker-crush on Leslie
self-destruction of her political career
avoidance of her real life
+ ???
Yeah. It’s been a little while for us but it hasn’t even been a full day since Robin came over and even less time since the story broke. Look back to yesterday and you can see the news vans and a reporter trying to talk to the girls as they enter.
Autocorrect gets more right than wrong when you’re thumb-typing quickly, but sometimes it misses obvious things and sometimes it replaces perfectly good words with other perfectly good words.
Or mysteriously capitalizes words for no reason.
Or replaces perfectly good words with incomprehensible gibberish.
Oh yeah! They spent a day watching SU! For some reason I thought that was at night. Still not that much time has past. Two days does make it that much more annoying though.
leslie is nicer than most of the other people in robin’s life
also she validates her interest in women, which is also something nobody else in robin’s life does. or at least that’s it’s possible to take a romantic interest in women
but mostly robin just does not know how to take a hint
listen. we’re going to get a 2 by 4. we’re going to write on it “CLUE” in giant glittery marker. then we’re going to use it to SCOOP ROBIN OUT and throw her into the Mississippi
Joyce, internally: “And Leslie used our Savior’s name! SHE STILL BELIEVES! SHE STILL BELIEVES! ….. now to just get her to stop taking His name in vain…”
It’s not what I think. But the conceit of the comic is that Robin is so hot that Leslie crushed on her even knowing how awful she was. So, in-story, she’s clearly supposed to be mega-hot.
She is the person I’d expect to set the oven for 900 degrees for an hour to bake whatever-that-was (rocks? bread? posters?) reasoning it’s equal to baking it twice as long at 450. 😛
DAMN YOU WILLIS, Robin’s coming up with excuses and lacking empathy but I’m laughing at how hard she’s trying to be a houseguest (probs more of a houseiintruder) and failing. XD
I’d say rice flour, flax, or some other wheat substitute and possibly applesauce or banana instead of eggs, but I don’t think Robin’s likely to be in to the food substitution crowd and Leslie not bringing up alternative flour makes me think she doesn’t have those either.
If you grind it to a fine dust in a blender, food processor or coffee grinder cereal can make an adequate flour alternative in a pinch. Banana or some other fruit or veg with high viscosity when pureed can sub for eggs. They won’t rise as much but it’ll work out ok-ish. However, if Leslie doesn’t have eggs or flour, she also likely hasn’t got any leavening agents (unless she uses baking soda for cleaning or some such) which means to get any rise at all these muffins need to have been whipped hard (well, whatever the egg substitution is) or else they’ll be as dense as hockey pucks.
In short my guess would be, if I had any reason to expect Robin knows how to cook/bake reasonably well, they’re made from ground cereal, pureed banana, milk, sugar and some kind of candy or fruit as filling. Maybe with some variety of liquor (rum maybe) as an additional flavoring agent, though that nor the vanilla or other extract it substitutes for is absolutely needed.
I’m kinda surprised Robin knows how to bake things. I’m assuming she normally has aides who get food for her or something. Then again, we don’t really know what’s in those muffins so maybe she doesn’t really know how to bake things.
“That you know of.” Oh my god and any and all other spiritual beings that may exist Robin actually put out a fire she started while Leslie was gone!! She actually started an electrical fire and is trying to hide the fact!!! Fifteen more minutes and Leslie wouldn’t even have a house anymore!!
I kinda hope that Leslie ends up having like five people living in her apartment. However Howard is the only other person I can think of who may need a place to live depending on how things go.
fun fact: in college, someone left a pepsi behind in a math class(this was around the time swine flu was a thing people worried about) and i said i would drink it. everyone around me was saying ‘what if it has swine flu?’ and i said ‘then i wont make it to the next class’ and drank it.
They make packing peanuts out of cornstarch now, too. They look and taste like off-brand cheese curls (Jax, puffed Cheetos) without the cheese coating.
even if you’re just a single person and it doesn’t make sense to buy a full carton of eggs, you can always buy one of those Containers of Egg that have a bunch in a pourable form. im sure there’s a better name for this but i can’t think of it at the moment.
or! maybe she ran out overnight, because shenanigans.
People who only like them scrambled, and who have never figured out how to cook scrambled eggs properly? Not that I know anyone like that, Tualha says, looking sideways …
I don’t make eggs by themselves often (not really an omelet fan), so eggs are mostly required by bigger recipes, and if you live alone you don’t often make those recipes.
I’d guess she either doesn’t eat breakfast, or eats out. (Maybe she grabs something from the vending machine at work–you can get good stuff like that.) And she doesn’t bake. Without those two, there’s not a lot of reason to always have eggs around.
Okay. So. My long running question is this: Why are all the bisexual people in denial? Or, if not all the bisexual people, but at least the ones the comic focuses on. Like… heavy denial. This is again something that really breaks my suspension of disbelief.
This may actually just be a me thing though. I’m straight, but I have a number of friends in the LGBT community and most of my bi friends sorta figured things out by college. I’m not trying to suggest Robin should know she’s bi, I understand that growing up in a conservative environment would have this affects on people. But I suppose my main focus is Danny then?
Maybe it’s a cultural thing. Americans due have a different culture than Canadians, believe it or not. For one thing, Americans, generally tend to be more reserved due to the more religiously influenced foundation of their nation. Anyway, I’m going to stop rambling before I bring hellfire upon myself.
when i id’d as bi, it took me til about college to figure out the bi label worked for me at the time. before then, i didnt have a word for it, just that i was ‘not straight’
Not everybody. Ruth and Billie don’t seem so much ‘in denial’ as not knowing the real meaning to the word ‘bisexual’ (not uncommon in Indiana).
Marcie is DEFINITELY not in denial, that girl’s so thirsty you’d think she lived in the desert.
Sierra, Grace, and Mandy are definitely not in denial, they’re making out in hallways.
Mike’s not in denial – he’s not bi but is likewise Not Straight.
Danny doesn’t seem so much in denial anymore either. He wasn’t sure of himself because he didn’t have the words for it. Now that he’s told Ethan, he seems much more comfortable with it, even if he doesn’t have a specific crush at the moment (at least, not one he’s willing to pursue, since Amber broke up with him and he’s not willing to pursue Ethan since she’s not over him and she only just dumped him).
Perhaps denial was the wrong word. However I was getting more at Danny and Robin as I view the other characters (aside from Mike, Billie and Ruth) as secondary characters. I just find in really odd that, given this is a modern day setting, so few people have encountered the term bisexual. Again, a me thing, but I knew of the term and had friends who used the term by grades 10 or 11 in highschool. I realize anecdotes are pretty meaningless, but I’m legitimately curious how such discrepancies arise.
It might be because Indiana is more conservative in some parts? I had friends using the term as well by grade 10, but I live in Canada so. I also knew of people who didn’t learn the term until they were in their 30s or 40s. Plus, while a lot of people learn it at college, these kids only just GOT to college.
Even by cutting down the sample to main characters, that’s only 1 out of 2 (Danny vs. Ruth, Billie, Mike, Marcie, since Marcie’s listed on the cast page and Robin isn’t).
It is true though that of the bi (or at least polysexual) characters we know of, none of them have used a label on screen the way Ethan or Becky have.
Well, I’d say it’s mostly a quirk of the story. Like, there are a number of bi people in comic who are fully aware of the identity and proudly affix it to themselves (Sierra, Mandy, Grace, Marcie).
The denial aspect I think comes because a) it’s a common part of college, figuring out who you are and what words apply to you. Most of the folks I knew in college figured out what flavor of queer they were in college rather than before it. It’s been improving since, but that’s still a common thing.
And b) there’s good meat in a story of figuring out what your identity is and by story quirk, Danny and Billie ended up being the recipients of that, because we’ve already explored Carla’s analogue and Ethan’s analogue being in denial and figuring themselves out in Shortpacked! And Becky was in denial early on in the strip, but now has confidence from finding her identity and Dina still doesn’t have the words for her orientation nor knows yet if words would matter to her.
And Robin is in denial because this is the politician in denial figures out her feelings for a queer person of less power storyline done more horrifyingly.
Though in SP!, Robin was mostly a toy store worker who sidelined as a politician, so it’s easy not to think of her as “politician”.
I do think the big difference between Robin and either that AG case or the more common closeted gay pol cruising men’s rooms is that this arc is about Robin discovering she’s queer and how that changes her, not about long term hidden predatory behavior.
Mind you, whether that stereotype is “closeted bigot being exposed as a hypocrite” or “righteous man unjustly accused by someone with an agenda” (and you can guess which agenda it is implied to be) seems to depend on one’s own political views.
Certainly the real life cases which have gone so far in generating the stereotype and cementing it in the public mind also tend to create that kind of divisiveness (e.g., Larry Craig still has many supporters who claim that he was being smeared, and Haggard was quickly ‘forgiven’ for doing what he said others would burn in Hell for).
Interesting, though, how so many of those who assume that conservative politicians like Craig were being smeared, were nonetheless oh-so-willing to accept that a liberal Democrat like Franks was actually gay when he was outed by an ex-lover… though he never actually denied it once he was outed, so maybe that’s not a fair comparison (interestingly, it was Craig who led the charge to get Franks removed from office in 1987 when the story broke). Perhaps the way derided Ed Koch is a better example, given that he asserted publicly that he was straight (and may well have been, though my personal guess based on nothing of substance is he was ace) and there is no real answer on the topic even now. Eh, both of those were in the 1980s, so times weren’t really the same – though I am not sure if that really would be different now or not.
*”… the way some Republicans derided…”, I mean. In one 1970s election, Mario Cuomo had to publicly denounce the use of the slogan “Vote Cuomo, Not Homo” because even with the attitudes of the time it looked like a dirty trick and was hurting Cuomo’s campaign – and despite his distancing himself from the ones using it, several continued to do so.
See, I’m not really even sure how people are supposed to figure that sort of thing out in college. Seeing as my first time through gave me no insights and all my second attempt is teaching me is IT stuff.
I guess not living in dorms might be part of it, and or not even knowing if my college offers a Human Sexualities class….or probably being some sort of ace spectrum.
Cerebus, my issue with you comment is that you’re implying that everyone needs to read the creator’s previous work. I’m only drawing on this story. I don’t have the past knowledge you do.
Eh, Ethan is still learning how to handle the shit he gets for being gay and realizing that coming into his own isn’t a thing to be ashamed of. It’s still here.
Also – Ethan and Carla weren’t bi characters learning this in the creator’s previous works, so your point stands regardless. Ethan was gay and Carla was a homoromantic ace.
Oh no, I don’t think anyone should have to read his other works as this is a stand-alone universe rather intentionally. I was more noting the author reasons for why I think Carla and Ethan haven’t shown the same sort of discovering themselves plotline as Billie or Danny.
Like, Willis’s stated intention for a reboot universe is to do a lot of things differently and only repeat himself where he feels there is new ground to explore. So I think that ended up affecting who had a “discovering themselves” plotline.
While I think Cerberus mostly has the right of it, I’ll add that not everyone has the experiences to give them cause to actually think about what various terms mean and/or whether or not they apply to oneself so early in life. Using my own familiar ground of the BDSM community, I know and know of many people who never grasped that their preferences in terms of relationship style and/or sexual practices fit within the spectra of BDSM until they were in their thirties, forties or fifties because their only inkling of what is part of that started and stopped at a very stereotypical level. Billie in particular strikes me as being in a similar place so far as being bi is concerned (hence the “only existed in porn”) and Danny seems to have never met a guy who interested him in such a way before Ethan.
Robin is a special case because of the very problematic possessiveness and boundary transitivenesses she has always displayed with Leslie in both universes, here being explored through a vastly different lens than it was in Shortpacked! where Leslie seemed to tacitly accept (and at times welcome) it and occasionally even find it somewhat endearing.
True. I shouldn’t have implied that college is the only time of discovery. Plenty of folks figure out in middle school and high school and many folks don’t discover key parts of themselves until well into their adulthood.
Hmmn, I probably shouldn’t have used ‘Mr’ there, though, come to think of it. But then again – and I say this as someone whose own gender identity is less than precise – I have no idea what the correct salutation for the gender ‘noncommittal shrug’ might be. (Dan’s words, not mine.)
But yes, if the idea of bisexuality isn’t exactly in the working lexicon of the people you grew up around, I expect that the ideas of having a trans or non-binary gender would be even less visible. I grew up in New England in the 1970s (though Stamford, CT is only about 45 miles north of NYC, so it is not exactly in the Lovecraft Country part of New England), and the ideas of both bisexuality and transsexuality were present – mainly as punchlines, but I knew at least about them by my early teens and knew that they were real things. The concept of non-binary genders wasn’t, not really, but I’m not sure that it was around anywhere in that era – I am pretty sure that even Kate Borenstein, who would go on to pretty much codify the idea, didn’t get it about herself until the early to mid 1980s, long after she had transitioned.
You’re misunderstanding. Danny and Ethan want to pursue one another they just can’t because Amber is a psychotic piece of shit and getting in the way of them being happy as she always does, because she’s human garbage.
WTF?
Amber hasn’t done or said anything to indicate they shouldn’t. They came to that decision entirely on their own, because they both care about her and don’t want to hurt her. She’s done nothing here, no matter how much you hate her.
Yes they’re so humble and chaste and uninterested that Mike (who’s role in the story is plot device) was able to instantly deduce that they’re super crushing on each other and Ethan being with another man would drive Danny into a jealous frenzy.
If Amber weren’t there they’d be together, but they can’t because the worthless sack of abusive dog shit might have hurt feelings that her previous victims would be happy. She is poisoning them just by being there.
She’s acted crappy, but she’s gotten better over time. Her recent outbursts have been milder than the ones before. She has apologies to make, but she isn’t worthless or abusive.
She certainly isn’t to blame for keeping Danny and Ethan apart. They care about her completely out of their own free will, because despite her flaws she is a good person and they trust her to make amends when she messes up.
She threw a table at Ethan and gaslighted Danny for hanging around Sal and then tried to sic Dorothy onto him. She is assuredly both of these things.
they trust her to make amends
You’ll notice she hasn’t once apologized to Danny for her abusive behaviour. Because she’s selfish trash who doesn’t give a fuck about him.
It’s plain and simple. If Amber weren’t there then everyone around her would be better off. She is a burden on them or are we forgetting that she’s literally tried to kill people before.
Without Amber, Ethan would’ve been left alone with Mike’s manipulative garbage, and might still be in the closet.
Danny would likely still be moping about getting dumped by Dorothy, and would never even have met Ethan.
Dina might never have hooked up with Becky if Amber hadn’t come along to the party as moral support.
Becky sure as heck wouldn’t be better off. She’d either be in conversion “therapy” or living under a bridge somewhere afraid to ever risk seeing her friends again
Joyce would have even less piece of mind, because without Amber/AG, nobody gets that picture or Ryan’s name.
Blaine is about the only person who would actually be better off, and he deserved everything that he got.
Ryan fucking got away because of her. It’s entirely her fault he’s not in prison.
It’s nice, though, that the only good thing you can think she did for Danny was giving him an in with Ethan. Y’know, because you’re totally fucking right because the world is a better place without people like Amber.
You know, for someone who’s expressed dread at coming into these comments and finding shitty stuff said about Amber, you sure are the primary source of it these days.
*hugs* Spencer. You have worth. Amber has worth. You were not wrong.
I get the frustration, but ouch. Like I get that you’re distancing yourself from identifying with her, but you’re not the only one who identified with her and who has been told their relatable mental condition to Amber makes them inherently a monster. So that… that really hurt to read.
It’s okay, though and I hope you take care of yourself. You are awesome and deserve love. You don’t need to shame spiral on this.
No human being is worthless. The language you are using is the language of actual abusers. You’re saying the shit that Blaine could have said to Amber. Or Clint to Ruth.
Amber has always been portrayed as a good person with a mental illness that sometimes causes her to hurt others. She has never been shown to actually be evil.
I know many people who are like Amber. I’ve even hurt people because of my mental illness. If they are not worthless–and none of us are–then neither is Amber.
The one time Amber even implied someone was worthless, she immediately apologized, and forbade Danny from calling himself worthless. Think about that.
from what i can tell, if there’s a part of your bisexual orientation that makes you look ‘straight’ you don’t tend to look too deeply beyond that. like ‘see i like girls i’m fine.’ conservativeness and lack of knowledge about bisexuality being a thing add to it. however, this is coming from an american perspective.
Is it an education thing then? The more I read this comic, the more I feel like there’s an incredibly wide gap between America and Canada. Hell… the whole grading system is different.
Wait, what? Words like “bisexual” turn up in your education in Canada!?
Yeah, uh, I’d say there’s a gap.
I’d never heard a word like that in a class before college. And then I was lucky. I went to a religious-affiliated college with an extremely conservative administration… and professors and staff who were like “Yeah, we’re gonna say true stuff anyway screw you.”
Heh. Yeah, I have to fight like hell just to have permission to mention in high school classes that things like bisexuality, asexuality, or non-binary identities exist and what that means. And that’s in a fairly “liberal” area.
Whereas growing up, they didn’t even say gay out loud. Gay was just something you saw on TV if you had “permissive parents” and was something to be aggressively stamped out.
From Willis’s description of Indiana, I feel it has more in common with my raising environment than my current teaching environment. And yeah, hard to put words to experiences when you’ve never had exposure to the words. Hell, even modern bisexual representation in TV and movies actually uses the word so young folks can google it.
So yeah, it’s a lot of just stumbling onto these terms by the type of online media one consumes.
I don’t recall if anybody brought it up in any of my classes, but things that did happen:
– We learned about Alexander and Hephaestion in my Ancient History class.
– We learned about trans kids and that they were valid in my Psychology class.
– The religion teachers would crack down on homophobic bullying like the angry hand of the god they were teaching about (it was a Catholic school).
– The student counsellors office had an LGBT+ safe space sticker on one of the counsellor’s doors.
– I THINK we talked a little in sociology about this.
– I wanna say law or politics brought this up, probably in some sort of religious freedom discussion (which, tbf, was usually in the context of charter challenges and why that argument often didn’t work well).
I don’t think any of the words other than gay or trans came up, but I’d not be like SUPER shocked if they did.
I dunno. In highschool the term came up maybe a few times? Not until later grades, but even so, I had been introduced to the concept of bisexuality since grade 10. Some guy in my Math class was pretty open about it.
However, I remember in University a friend of mine came out as bisexual and the group of people I hung around with started questioning him like crazy. I just sat there and ate my lunch. So he ask me why I wasn’t asking questions and I said that his sexuality had no impact on my opinion of him as a person, so why should I make a big deal about it? You’re a person, I’m going to treat you like a person, based on how you treat others and myself.
And, of course, the Internet and the LGBTQ+ movement has made such tremendous progress – as an older Millenial, I didn’t know hardly anything about such things til Dan Savage and wikipedia in college, but I know at least three highschool-age Millenials who identify as bi, and another who posted that he’s a switch on facebook without batting an eyelash, they know what asexuality is, and so on.
–oh wait, that’s not true, I knew that gay and transpeople existed in middle school, which was pre-Internet, surrounded by Orthodox Jews.
Possibly from a TV news story about parents rejecting gay or trans kids, to the kids’ detriment — I specifically remember asking my parents whether they’d ever do that, like how the parents on the TV had done. They said of course they wouldn’t reject me for anything. It was so reassuring, and I want every kid to have that. T.T
I don’t remember how I first heard about LGBT+ stuff. Might’ve been grade six? And I definitely knew people online who were by the time I was in grade 6 or 7. By the time grade 10 rolled around, my RL friends are now mostly LGBT+.
Before 6th grade, the info may well have been available, but nobody expected me to understand or really care about it. IIRC, it was more like, “I’m a girl because adults reward me for saying so. I want to marry my best friend(s) so we can live in the same house and have lots of doggies and TVs.” Kids are practical like that.
When I talk to kids nowadays, they know that people can be gay, as related to marriage. They’ve inherited an opinion about that (generally a happily accepting one, since I live in NYC). However, kids are quite certain that there are exactly two genders, since their gender rules, whereas the other gender drools. Room for improvement, there.
…Your catholic high school experience was VERY different from mine. (And I graduated in 2011 in a state neighboring Indiana, so there might have been some change recently, but I would doubt much – I’d say Willis’ portrayal is fairly accurate for a lot of people). There were a couple of teachers who would maybe dare to mention “gayness” in an even slightly positive light. The archdiocese has the right to fire any teacher who in their personal or professional life doesn’t follow the Catholic rules exactly, so it’s not like they were all necessarily in agreement with the school policies, but still.
Generally, our sex ed consisted of people coming into our religion class and teaching strictly abstinence. Our health teacher managed to get permission to have a women’s studies professor from a nearby college come in and talk to us; all of the (fortunately for whomever asked) anonymous notecard questions had to be screened and she wasn’t allowed to answer one about how a condom worked.
In one of my religion classes, we literally had a true/false question on a test about whether marriage had to be between an man and a woman. My family isn’t even slightly religious (was at the school for the academics) and I was completely flummoxed. I had read a handful of books about gay/bi/trans people from my (public) middle school library and successfully got a few on the shelf in high school because I was friendly with the librarian (and may have misrepresented the content sometimes – Running with Scissors was totally only about mental illness, right?), but it’s not like many people would have found them.
Well, I live in the liberal wasteland of Canada, where the Catholic schools are run by an actual school board not an archdiocese (at least, as far as I could tell).
Our sex ed was fairly comprehensive now that I recall – we learned about body image, consent, drugs and alcohol and their abuse, all kinds of protection, and how adoption and birth worked, with a refresher from elementary school ‘this is puberty, these are the parts, their functions, and how they work’) and a bunch about STIs. They kinda skimmed over abortion (basically ‘Yeah, it exists and it’s covered by insurance so you COULD, but church says no, so hey how about we watch another adoption video where the person is SO GRATEFUL they weren’t aborted even though their mother was raped, yeah?’) and they didn’t mention LGBT+ sex, but most of what they taught was transferrable. I recall dental dams being brought up, which wlw can use. As well as female condoms. So……yay, my school?
I liked how we had abstinence-only education as our only sex-ed. They basically talked about only abstinence. Abstention from what? No idea! They only explained why it was a bad idea to do… something.
It can be like that, definitely, at least for some people. That gave me a lot of trouble when I was in my teens, as I knew how confused I was, but since I wasn’t sexually active I kept thinking, “naah, that can’t be right – I mean, sure I like the looks of some guys, but sex? Be serious, that’s not me. I must be just imagining that part.” It wasn’t until much later that I turned around and realized that it could just as easily have applied to my attraction to women, by which time I had already realized that both sets of attraction were real and was trying to understand why I had been so confused in the first place.
There are a few possible reason for bi erasure/denial.
First is, unfortunately, terrible opinions on both side of the spectrum. The straight people think it’s just a phase (or if you’re female, dudes fetishize that you’re into girls). On the gay side, they say you’re just in denial and you should just go gay all the way.
There’s also potential jealousy issues. Some people (usually with a bunch of control/jealousy/trust problems) get nervous knowing that there’s potential of their partner showing attraction to both sexes.
Also ‘committing’ to bisexuality can be very difficult. Even realizing that you’re attracted to people of your own gender can be confusing to some people. Bisexuality being such a gray area is an even less stable foundation to stand on.
There are a lot of nuances. It’s getting better, but there’s still a way to go.
i kind of wonder if like. having the option to have straight partners makes it a little harder to identify as a separate orientation? idk for a while people were really stuck in “you can only ever be one or the other!!” and that sort of thing can be fluid and pretty confusing
Definitely yes on the idea that you have to ‘pick’.
(For me, liking all genders is more like, I’m capable of digging redheads and blondes and brunettes. Nobody says that I have to choose to date only one haircolour forever, so why do they think I have to pick just one gender?)
There is also the uncomfortable concept that bi people have the option to fade into bi-invisibility, in case we ever want to run like hell from being LGBTQ+. I would consider the closet an incredibly sucky non-option, but I imagine that this possibility led to a lot of jealous distrust from gay folks (particularly early on, or in places where it’s unsafe to have happy, socially-accepted, gay-looking relationships). Like, do the bi people really have skin in the game? They could run off and look straight at any moment!
I’d like to think that we’ve disproven that, as we haven’t run off, and as we don’t like closets or invisibility any more than anyone else does.
and like. choosing the heteronormative option is generally a lot easier than choosing the gay option? lot less risk, lot more options. but also like…doesn’t invalidate your gay options/history, or make them less meaningful.
TBF, Mike and Dina are not officially bi. Mike described himself as ‘Whatever you don’t want me to be’ and Dina is uncertain if gender matters to her.
I wouldn’t even say Danny or Ruth are in denial. Danny was for a bit, but has come to terms with it and Ruth just isn’t sure about labels and finding one has dropped down her priority list.
Was Danny ever really in denial? Confused and unfamiliar with the word “bisexual,” but his first reaction to seeing a boy he thought was cute was to tell somebody about it.
And what about Daisy? (Everyone forgets about Daisy) She may not be bi, but she definitely suffers a form of erasure. Nobody seems to consider her a sexual being.
Okay so what happens now is Robin gives Becky the keys to her house and the directions and hires her as an impromptu housesitter as to raise the stakes in this zany game of ‘how goofily horrible can Robin be?’
I’ve actually been learning a lot of good vegan recipes for muffins as this comment becomes a quick reference for flour and egg replacement recipes. People seem to give Robin a lot of credit in the cooking department.
Panel 1: This is a horror scenario. The unwanted visitor who in response to every attempt to regain one’s life just entrenches themself further, performing a fake normality and by doing so attempt to force others to go along with it.
Like, I’m suddenly getting why Robin’s actions have felt particularly horrifying, because this performed normality when everything is breaking is shit my mom and some of my old work places have done.
Especially my mom, where every attempt to confront the horror that was happening and bring it out into the open so it could be addressed was responded to with an even more aggressive enforcement of everything is fine, aren’t we a happy family. To the point where it was an extreme form of gaslighting where you’re fully aware you’re being fucked with but feel powerless to do anything.
Making that connection, I feel so much for Leslie’s panic and fear. That type of scenario is monstrous and absolutely designed to fuck with your head and Robin keeps escalating things so there’s no polite or civil means of solving it.
Like, cops will be on Robin’s side, not Leslie’s, because Robin is an elected official. Landlord clearly is not on Leslie’s side given he let her in. Even attempts to physically remove her have been stymied by her breaking back in and play-acting ever more that everything is fine and domestic.
And Robin trying to perform this “dutiful wife” role, insert herself into a narrative of Leslie’s life is terrifying. And dehumanizing, because Robin is inserting herself into this role without even admitting any actual attraction or consideration for who Leslie is as a person.
And expects Leslie to eventually buckle and accept it because the only other options are being limited to violence (which will land Leslie in jail for pretty much ever, cause the government really frowns on beating up elected officials even when they are actively ruining your life) or a complete surrender of her privacy (inviting the media into her home and thus surrendering the private life she has fought for so long to build and basically sacrificing her ability to stay in her home (which may already be fucked)).
So yeah, this is legitimately terrifying and I feel so badly for how fucked Leslie is right now and understand why she’s fucking up so much of late in panic.
Oh dear Mithras you’re right. Now I’m sad. Whelp, time to watch the latest episode of Samurai Jack on Demand to cheer myself up and fool myself into thinking the world isn’t spiraling out of control.
Panel 2: Ugh, that smug smile, believing this superficial act somehow makes them even and what she’s been doing to basically move herself in and remove all hope and options from Leslie. As if her actually being polite and a great roommate would in any way make up for how she has fucked over Leslie in so many ways.
She really is incapable/unwilling to see her actions in any real light and like Trump is entirely living in her own fictional reality she is trying to impose on the rest of us by force.
Also, meep on the electrical fire line. Again, I’m seeing why Leslie jumped on the first excuse to sprint home and didn’t feel like she could wait until the end of Becky’s shift, even while I can not support or abide her abandoning of class. It really was a realistic possibility she would have come home to a smoking wreckage and it sounds like she nearly did in the brief time she was gone.
Panel 3: So I get the desperation, but this. Meh, this is a not great moment of Leslie’s. Like we know that her actual initial motivation is a really positive one. Give a homeless queer youth a safe home and connection to her community.
But she’s still using that real genuine honest motivation like a club to beat a clue into Robin that Robin will not get because she still sees it in her best interest of avoiding a thing she doesn’t want to do to continue to buckle down and resist.
Like, I get her intention. Trying to be firm, set an ultimatum, show a proof of the new person coming in, show how the situation is no longer tenable, but I doubt Robin is going to accept it, because that’s still only words and Robin is the type of wealthy person who really does believe the universe bends to their whims and desires and that things work out for them because they deserve it.
Like, fuck, her response is so heartless and just tone-deaf that it’s clear she’s absorbed nothing about this in any meaningful way.
Leslie could have just canceled class if she was afraid of leaving Robin unattended. Then she wouldn’t have been in a position to run out on them in the first place.
This. Robin was gaslighting her hard and when alone was heavily taking advantage of Leslie’s sexual attraction to her to manipulate her into giving in to Leslie’s psychological detriment.
Her staying in the house would have been tragically awful for Leslie and I get why she really didn’t want to return to the house alone. But yeah, she still should have cancelled class and I dunno, talked to a lawyer maybe? Have an open interview on her front step about the representative’s repeated boundary violations? Just gone somewhere for an hour or two (say down the road where she can see any fire trucks rushing to her house) just to get her head straight?
Like it would have sucked for Becky, but it would definitely have been the better decision professionally.
*thinks* My interaction with the police has been minimal. Aside from being in car accidents. Also I think one scream at me when I was like 7 or something?
Given Robin’s political status, any legal authorities can be assumed to be on her side by default. That’s not guaranteed, but something I’d be hesitant to test.
Frankly, I’d be tempted to either bodily throw Robin out again, but this time straight out the door to the media. Either that or just invite the media in – if anything will send Robin running, that’ll be it.
It’d work, but it’d be a nuclear solution as it would completely destroy any hope of privacy Leslie might have had, including having every part of her home life documented on if not national, certainly state level television to the point where it’ll be necessary to move.
I think Leslie is trying to exhaust any option that doesn’t require her to abandon the home she has carefully built for herself.
No, she’s not trying to beat a clue into Robin. She’s trying to get rid of her. She gave up on her getting a clue before. She already kicked her out, but she came back.
She did learn there’s some decency in Robin, so she’s trying to use that to get her to leave.
But, even if she were trying to try and hammer a clue into Robin, why would that be wrong? Sure, she might not listen. But that doesn’t make it wrong. And Becky chose to come along even after Joyce voiced the obvious objection to her Becky being used.
Leslie is trying to get rid of the abusive trespasser with power, and she’s trying to give a homeless person a place to stay. I cannot see how there is anything wrong with what she is doing.
Are you sure it’s not that you’re still upset from how she treated Roz? Because I will continue to note that you say things differently when Roz is involved. I honestly don’t recognize you.
I’m pretty sure what Cerberus is objecting to is holding up Becky as a prop for Robin to understand and leave because hopefully she has empathy (which did not pan out). That’s, I’m pretty sure, what she’s objecting to – using Becky. Yes, Becky agreed to be used, but that doesn’t mean others can’t think this is iffy given Robin’s propensity to be a huge asshole.
It also puts Becky more in Robin’s sights, which could go…really ugly places.
Okay, ouch. I’m sorry if I’m disappointing you, but ouch.
But yeah, I think her motivation and goals are noble and good and I don’t blame her that much for what she’s trying to do and I have a ton of sympathy for the really shitty situation she is in. Cause it’s really shitty and abusive and she’s not going to be at her best because no one is at their best when they are being gaslit and stalked.
And yeah, the consent given by Becky makes this a hell of a lot better than it would be otherwise. I’m just noticing a single panel offness that she quickly corrects by the very next panel.
I suspect that your assumptions about what being grown-up does and does not entail may be a bit broken. There are just as many reasons to not have either on hand without special need as there are to have them.
I am also a real grownup, who (like Leslie, until recently) lives alone. Eggs and flour are not on the list of ingredients for food I regularly prepare for myself (rice and pasta with sauce, mostly)
Panel 4: Now this is a better turn of Leslie’s. Less using the kid, more explaining the kid’s situation, trying to reach out to her empathy one last time in one last way to try and get through.
And that’s Leslie’s central tragedy. Part of her still so very much wants to reach through to Robin, to save her and help her become someone worth the massive crush she has on her. Still believes that there is some empathy deep within her that she needs to dig deeper to find.
And it breaks my heart, because no, Leslie, Robin very much lacks empathy for Becky’s situation or at the very least views it as beneath her immediate creature comforts and whims.
And I recognize it because I’ve been there. Begging for the love of my family, that our shared history would somehow, some way get through, that I could appeal to their empathy enough by bearing my scars so they would see me finally and acknowledge who I was. Getting hurt again and again because I kept wanting to get through.
It’s abusive. It’s an abusive relationship in many different ways, made all the more horrifying, because there is no easy escape for Leslie. Like, she can’t do what I did and what she did of just closing off communication and accepting disownment. Because Robin is a stalker and in her house.
And by being this immovable force, Leslie is forced into a situation usually only seen in domestic violence/abusive partner scenarios. Where Leslie may be forced to abandon her home, just to try and hide and get away from the representative who has no interest in letting her just have her private life now that she’s developed feelings for her.
So yeah, it’s a shit show and I can see why she’s clinging longer than she should to the hope that there is some extreme way to get through to her.
Also, I love momma Leslie making sure Becky doesn’t poison herself on Robin’s death muffins. She’s going to be such a good guardian for Becky if/when Leslie is able to extricate herself from her current nightmare.
Panel 5: And yeah, all the risks she took, the ways in which she has definitely fucked herself morally, professionally, and so on, have all failed to pay off, because Robin has no intention on surrendering her position of perceived comfort for anything and certainly not for the needs of another.
Becky’s situation is just added to her internal narrative and now Leslie has to be careful lest Becky be abused as well as the surrogate “daughter” to their “family”.
Also, Becky’s face in that last panel is amazing. Like “I’m disturbed and slightly aroused and definitely am not imagining sexy scalp-licking with my dino girlfriend right now”.
But yeah, the only thing this scenario might break is Leslie’s illusions that there is any peaceful resolution to this clusterfuck and I think we’ll see sooner rather than later her regretting dragging so many students into the mess of her current life.
Like, I have empathy for trying to teach when your life is collapsing around you, but that’s the breaks when you’re a teacher. You keep it more or less quiet and you push through when you can and take off personal days when you can’t.
I get her panic, but she’s going to have to make some firm and tough decisions tonight with regards to her next actions and how she’s going to make some of her mistakes right.
At the rate this is going, I don’t know what will stop Robin and give her a cold smack of reality. I’m also wondering with we’re going to find out if Joyce is ambidextrous with how dead towards Becky Robin is being. And honestly, maybe the DeSanto mother is going to have to get involved in order to get Robin to snap back to reality and out of “Robin Space”.
So, am I alone in seeing Robin tottering on the edge? About to fall into a viciously destructive mental/emotional breakdown?
I think its unarguable that Robin is not coping, to put it mildly – she must have dealt with attacks from the press before, but this time (tellingly) she has been utterly shattered by it.
Robin is mentally, emotionally and (literally) physically hiding out from reality here, casting aside her normal support groups and everything existing outside Leslie’s flat; clinging to the fantasy of Leslie’s affection like a drowning man to a rope.
Now that Leslie’s affection is withdrawn, that rope will vanish, and Robin will drown – and every recent action/inaction from Robin has only dug her in deeper and deeper, so the damage can get only get worse.
Of course, I get all the Robin hatred (in her time Robin’s been so callously egocentric she can probably generate her own gravity field) and I might be wrong; Cerberus is better at spotting these things. If I am right, though, its a bitter sight to see Robin punching down so hard on the self-destruct button. Schadenfreude only goes so far, and I’d guerss Robin’s collapse will hurt more than just herself.
Mm, I dunno maybe, but I see Robin as more just trying to impose her reality by fiat and by refusing to accept any information outside of that. So less woman on the edge, more Trump.
Like there’s sympathetic properties to it. She’s completely fucked her career and doesn’t want to face the consequences of that even though being a former representative means she’ll never have to want for easy high-paying work ever again in her life. She’s realizing she’s developing strong feelings for this college professor, but is in deep denial that that’s what this is and thinks that being the best wife will get her to overlook all her flaws and the fact that she broke into her house.
And there’s signs that some small things do bother her, like her reaction to Scarface working for her was strong and unequivocal. But overall, the intensity of her bad behavior and the weakness of her reasons for avoiding dealing with the reality of the situation make it hard to sympathize too much, at least for me.
And I see it as less of a mental breakdown of losing reality, because she’s not just insisting on a false reality, she’s actively trying to make a false reality where she gets what she wants without having to do anything she doesn’t want to do happen. And retains enough of her faculties to say know that she has multiple other homes she could be staying at to hide from the world and that she needs to come up with an excuse to discourage this new kid from occupying her space.
Like if anything we’re seeing the downfall of a pathological narcissist. Whether something decent or not can be salvaged from the ashes remains in doubt, but it’ll require real growth from Robin to occur.
Honestly this scenario reminds me a lot of a scenario that my girlfriend got trapped by recently. She has decided to move to a new apartment which was a very big deal for her that she was excited by and let her mom know about it so she could get her cat from her.
Her mom then decided that she needed a place and so decided to move in with my gf and so basically strong-armed her way into signing the lease with her and heavily leaning on guilt-trips and absolute refusal to accept any attempted boundaries all while abusing her the entire time.
My gf eventually had to find another new place in secret a year and a half later including securing roommates so there was no means by which her mom could force her way on the lease. Like Leslie, my gf tried a lot of tactics to get through to her mom that her mom needed to leave, all of which failed by her refusal to do anything she didn’t want to do.
So yeah… Leslie is not in a good safe place right now.
Damn, that sounds rough — please send, to your girlfriend, this internet stranger’s admiration for creating two spaces of her own, within two years. I hope she got to keep the cat.
I agree with you 100%. Leslie’s right here in that Becky’s situation is more dire, and some assertion is appropriate here because Robin’s a rich entitled jerk with no grasp on the reality of the problems facing homeless kids, but I’m seeing people here rushing again to attribute the worst possible motives to Robin. Personally, I’m seeing less Evil Gaslighter and more realising that her presence here is imposing and wanting to do something as a thanks, but also being too used to lying for cameras to come out and say that, and also not really being in an emotional state to break down any walls vis a vis emotional vulnerability.
Which doesn’t actually mandate any action on Leslie’s part, but like, I feel for Robin in this situation a lot.
I think that’s her intention, but she’s really not checking in that she’s actually wanted and is sort of assuming consent that has been explicitly made clear.
Like I get that this is her attempt at a peace-offering/apology, but it’s like breaking into someone’s house to apologize to them after they told you to stay away.
“Luke, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but he severed your hand. From your arm. He cut it off.”
“Dueling to the death is just how we relate. You wouldn’t understand it. Now that we both have prosthetic robot limbs, it’s only brought us closer together.”
“Luke, he lured your friends into a trap so that he could murder them in front of you. We had to be rescued by Ewoks. It was embarrassing.”
“Yeah, that was pretty bad, I admit! But there’s good in him! I’ve felt it!”
And then Luke is risking his own life to carry Darth Vader out of the Death Star before it explodes so he can look up on that swollen purple face and experience one shining moment of real connection that would justify everything he’s invested in this completely dysfunctional relationship and he’s like “See? IT WAS ALL TOTALLY WORTH IT!” and even R2D2 is like “Whatever, the Ewoks are having a dance party, and I just can’t talk about this with you even one more time. Have fun with your collection of Ghostly Jedi Father Figures.”
——————————-
I mean, Leslie’s a Star Wars fan and everything, she’d totally get this analogy. I hope she figures it out better than Luke did.
(The analogy falls apart on Leslie’s end, because she isn’t falling for or excusing Robin’s BS, she’s trying to kick Robin out. But Robin totally wants their relationship to happen this way.)
Cerebus, I just want to say, I like you. 🙂 You are a really cool person with fascinating insights into this comic generally as well as specific incidents like this that I have been lucky enough to not have experienced in the same depths or at all, and I have learned a lot from reading your comments and I always look forward to them. It’s a shame we’re not in the same country because I’d love to buy you a coffee sometime.
Here, have some Internet muffins. They’re gluten-free, are awesome, and are not made from ground-up Froot Loops or whatever the hell Robin used. 😀
Leslie’s doing something rather shitty here too, using Becky as a kind of prop to hopefully remove this home invader. That being said, if I was in here situation, I would be trying everything to get his home invader out of my house.
I mean, I would have also actually tried to call the police to get this home invader who broke back into my place after being forcefully evicted. I’m also still surprised we haven’t seen anything on the news about a local representative being thrown out of a house, then breaking into it shortly thereafter in full view of the media.
welp! calling the police is a definite escalation of the situation, and one that Leslie is not one hundred percent prepared for. like. she is a lesbian, and while she can count on more protections than a lot of other people, there’s a certain…level of distrust that is not unmerited. calling the police makes this a public thing, and robin is a person with a lot more power than leslie and who would probably win in court given that she has more money and better lawyers.
in addition to which there are a lot of cases of people being abused and just…not being believed, or of people reporting and then the stalker Upping the Ante because of *course* they’re not doing anything wrong, the victim is just overreacting. like. it’s that escalation thing. you escalating can lead to them escalating when the point is to kick the person out of your life as much as possible.
Yup, and that especially becomes more fraught when the person you are calling the cops on is a sitting politician with likely backers throughout the police department or who could lean on the folks funding the police department.
Like, just see some of the horror shows folks have been through just trying to prosecute the family of politicians who have wronged them and then think of how hard and rare it is for a sitting politician to actually be arrested during their time for cause.
Leslie has very good reason to believe involving the cops in this matter will go very poorly for her. It might still be necessary, but it’s definitely a nuclear step like inviting in the media or fully abandoning her home.
Not to mention that she is in tricky legal ground here. Her landlord gave permission for Robin to basically come in and move in, so now she’d have to sue her landlord regarding the fact that she did not consent to that, but that takes a lot of time and a lot of money.
Although, sh could argue that her landlord only let her in the first time – she had no further right to be in the house after Leslie threw her out the first time.
That said, again, that’d be something to argue to the police. Good luck, Leslie.
Oh she could argue that and honestly, precedent would mean she’d likely win that, but the police would likely punt it to the civil courts because less paperwork for them so it’d be a long time to prove that and settle that in court.
yeah like Gavin de Becker recommends calling the police literally as a last resort, but mostly as not effective for this reason!! What you have to do is either make sure that the person does not and cannot get what they are getting out of the exchange, or give them what they’re looking for (if it’s just like a one time thing) and then get them out of dodge. but that’s all just, like, with an average person.
like: if this gets too bad, Leslie is going to have to move out of her home, change her phone number, and maybe change her job so that Robin can’t find her. and even then that’s depending on whether or not Robin’s going to sink resources into finding her again. because what Robin wants, apparently, is to be Leslie’s fulltime roommate. and that’s neither fair or realistic or even a little considerate.
Becky, Leslie’s right. I don’t think that it’s possible to know in advance whether those muffins are safe for human consumption without the university’s chemistry department doing a whole sequence on them first!
Leslie’s learned an important lesson here: Yes, Robin can lack empathy to that point. That said… I still desperately want to know what Robin is hiding from. Because that really seems to be what’s happening here: She’s hiding from something or running away from something.
And then because Robin’s metabolism handling something doesn’t really prove that it’s in any way safe for normal human beings to eat, make Mary eat one too.
<q cite="<what Robin is hiding from“>
From where I’m sitting, she’s desperately trying to avoid admitting to the media that she kissed a girl and she liked it. Ruining her chances of re-election. Heck, a few months ago our time, she outright said the media is going to assume she slept with Leslie, so they might as well actually do the horizontal mambo.
I suppose, but it would seem as though that was a given. I feel like you’d be so hard-pressed to find an apologist for her behavior you might as well just dive straight into details.
But then, I’m probably being way too optimistic about those chances.
Many still have residual affection for her from SP! We also assume that Willis is not actually making her into a full-scale villain. There’ve been enough sympathetic moments that it’s very likely this is a growth and redemption arc for Robin, not just a “Leslie beats the bad Representative” arc.
Because he’s also trying to make her a goofball punchline machine. It’s amazing how the quality of the script takes a nosedive the second she starts talking, because the rest of the strip is wonderful. It’s really hard to reconcile the disparate voices that join in Robin’s character, that of gaslighting selfish villian and A-HYUK hijinks.
I don’t see the problem. Sure, she’s an exaggeration, but I’ve met many people who do what Robin is doing. Rather than admitting her own awfulness, she tries to make everyone like her with humor and be wacky.
The way she tries to make everything into wacky hijinks only serves to make her seem more awful.
Does anybody who has experience with it think that Robin might have Histrionic Personality Disorder?
You need five of the following 8 symptoms to be possibly diagnosed:
1) Is uncomfortable in situations in which hither are not the centre of attention (Check. Robin always has to make things about Robin).
2) Interactions with others is characterized by inappropriate sexually seductive or provocative behaviour (Not really, unless we’re counting her subconsciously flirting with Leslie and the dick sucking pantomime earlier. I don’t think we should – she has a CRUSH on Leslie, I’m not surprised she’s flirting with her)
3) Displays rapidly shifting and shallow expressions of emotion (oh my lord, yes, you’d think she was allergic to depth of any kind).
4) Consistently uses her appearance to attract attention (I’d say we need to see more and maybe a tentative yes, as we know she uses glasses to get attention as a ‘smart person’ and ‘good first impression’, and her boob size to distract from her opponent’s mention).
5) Has a style of speech that is excessively impressionistic and lacking in detail (again, you’d think she was allergic to depth or detail).
6) Shows self-dramatization, theatricality, and exaggerated impression of emotion (holy shit, this is her MO).
7) Is suggestible i.e. easily influenced by others or circumstances (“Which real me do you want?” anyone?)
8) Considers relationships to be more intimate than they actually are (her and the Dean, her and Leslie, I’m sure we’d see more if given the opportunity).
So yeah, I’m seeing potential for 5 out of 8 of these and maybe tentatively 6 out of 8. What does everyone else think?
Here is the thing though: Are we yet ready to contemplate this possibility: “Being a national-level politician in the modern world is in itself symptomatic of a serious mental or behavioural disorder”?
Pointing out people have mental disorders is not excusing them, so I don’t agree with JBento’s sentiments.
I actually believe that psychiatrists were derelict in their duty in choosing to not point out that Trump very obviously has a personality disorder–primarily Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Far from excusing him, pointing this out (including the symptoms) would show he was not mentally fit enough for the job. If he can’t admit his disorder, he cannot be trusted to think rationally.
I’m not trying to excuse her, I was reading about PD’s and this one sounded familiar. Hence why I was asking if anyone with experience with it thought so or if there’s more to this disorder I was not getting. Even if she did have it, she’d still be an asshole.
mm, I think that you’re right in that diagnosing assholes with mental disorders is not really an excuse for the assholery, but like. it depends on whether or not you’re trying to find an excuse.
FOR EXAMPLE: a few months ago I was on twitter, and there was legislation coming through that was going to make it easier for mentally disabled people to get guns, and the resulting discourse was pretty much essentially “WOW WHY ARE YOU GIVING PEOPLE WITH MENTAL DISORDERS GUNS” in a…slightly more ableist way, that implied that people with mental disorders were more likely to shoot up places than people without. And, like, stuff like autism isn’t really a precursor for shootings? Probably depression; but mostly entitlement, or at least that’s the impression I’ve gotten.
So like – I think being more specific with mental disorders can only be a good thing, because it makes it easier to distinguish people with mental disorders from an overall umbrella of crazy. looking at the specific traits makes it easier to see a trend over time.
and, i mean, a lot of treatment for mental disorders is going to therapy, coupled with some medication, but mostly just strategizing around what you’ve already got going on. idk. I think that this kind of discussion makes it easier to identify what exactly Robin’s got going on, so that we can understand her better.
Lumping in all mentally ill people is bad, yes. But making it easier for mentally ill people to get guns suggests the same lumping. It shouldn’t be easier for mentally ill people in general to get guns, just for those who are not a threat.
And I say this as someone who has a mental disorder. But I also know I could never own a gun (other than as a keepsake sans bullets). And I know people like me who are not that self-aware.
honestly like – at this point everyone who can get a gun should have a full mental screening as well as education and limited access to bullets and specific kinds of hardware like. there is no purpose for an AK-47 in peacetime.
but like the ongoing narrative of shootings has been mentally troubled person with a gun and like – that’s not…a complete story……..
damn now i want to go do some more research on this, there’s a podcast with Sue Klebold that i’ve been meaning to listen to
Assuming that’s the legislation I’m thinking of it wasn’t generic “mental disorders”, but Social Security disability recipients who have been deemed unable to manage their own affairs due to “marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease”.
They are not necessarily any more violent, but not competent.
I think there’s a difference between people diagnosing characters with PDs and the like because they see themselves in that character’s behavior and would also like representation,
and people diagnosing characters (and public figures) with PDs because that character is just too much of an asshole to possibly be neurotypical.
And on a meta level, Willis doesn’t even want to confirm that Amber has DID in part because he doesn’t want to imply that people with DID are violent, and Amber is a _protagonist_. So I seriously doubt that he wrote DoA Robin here with a copy of the DSM open.
I doubt that he did as well, especially upon further reading about it. Robin’s got some of the more common behaviours and is missing others. I was reading about PDs, and this one kind of reminded me of Robin, so I was wondering if anyone with more knowledge about it thought they were similar or not.
I guess the way that I look at it is as a reading. Like, reading Robin as someone with Histrionic Personality Disorder brings different aspects of her out into the light, and parallels it differently with real-world things. Robin herself isn’t going to change, because she’s a character in a narrative; but our understanding of Robin could get deeper and more profound with the added knowledge that that kind of psychological analysis brings to the table.
lol mostly I just like it because it explains so much about Robin, tho, and it makes me want to research Histrionic Personality Disorder
As mentioned in your list, the most significant trait I see in Robin is her lack – fear? – of depth. I don’t disagree that she doesn’t seem average but nor do I necessarily agree that she has a cleanly diagnosable mental illness. More like maybe she has some old psychological wounds she’s compensating for by trying to keep everything the greatest for herself.
I doubt anything like that is intentional. She’s more like a parody of politicians mixed up with some SP! Robin’s worst traits, taken a bit more seriously.
I don’t think she’s “crazy” in any kind of real mental illness way, but I can’t actually take her seriously as a character.
I think she’s got similarities, but doesn’t as many of the behaviours common in HPD people as I thought. Regardless, I’m fairly sure you’re right and those similarities are unintentional.
Like her sense of entitlement roughly the size of Russia? Yeah, agreed. Folks with HPD also tend to be more seductive in their attention grabbing, so it’s probably not a good fit for Robin anyways.
Well, gee, who do I know who displayed most of those symptoms throughout most of his adult life (and presumably earlier, but I have no way to know)… I wonder…
I found this really interesting, because I’d say that all of these traits are a constant in Robin throughout her time in Shortpacked to here! idk, nobody writes in a vacuum, and whether or not this is intentional on Willis’ part it’s still a good perspective. like: I don’t think you’d have to know that you were writing someone with a mental disorder in order to write someone with a mental disorder, you’d just have to do that in order to do it purposefully.
And I mean! A lot of people walk around thinking that they don’t have mental disorders just because they can cope, or because they’ve found ways on their own to make it work for them. And that’s pretty valid, usually – if your experience of your own brain is nontraumatic and nonproblematic, you might not need therapy for it. Or maybe just want it, depends.
idk I think I’m more just taking it as a bunch of co-related traits that can be grouped into a thing, which is basically what it is. like. a lot of mental “disorders” are things that seem scary but aren’t that scary up-close – they’re just different means of processing and relating to the world.
How is it that in a comic with the likes of Mary, Ross, whatever-the-fuck-Ruth’s-grandfather-name-is-’cause-I’ve-forgotten-again, Blaine, and Ryan, I’ve never wanted to punch anyone more than 2nd panel Robin?
Because she’s trying to pretend she’s just wacky and perfect.
There’s something worse about someone who is awful but then tries to pretend the exact opposite. Even people who defend their actions are less infuriating than people who just ignore the criticism.
That said, I’ve wanted to punch all of them except Robin. With Robin, I more want to have her entire worldview crash down around her.
TIL: Real Adults™ have flour and eggs at all times. AT ALL TIMES. If you run out of either of them, you temporarily regress to teenagerhood until you can hit the store for more. I can’t have gluten, so I suppose I’m stuck in a weird limbo for the rest of my life.
real adulthood isn’t about having flour and eggs in your kitchen at all times; it’s about being able to deal with the fact that you don’t have flour or eggs and either sucking it up or getting some more
Has Willis ever given us examples of voices? I mean, I’m imagining Leslie as some…I can’t explain it, but yea, any pointers on how the characters are supposed to sound in our heads?
Is it me or am I not the only one to notice that Willis’ art today is partially channeling “Archie Comics”? Especially Panel 2 of Robin (and Panel 3, but less so).
So, if Robin licked the entire couch, does that mean that anyone that sits on the couch also has been licked by robin? And does this mean that robin plans to geaduate from the couch to the bedroom? Will there be more licking involved?
honestly: at this point: I think that Robin should buy Leslie a new couch. ideally, if Leslie got her to do it, but I would take just about anything so that that woman doesn’t have to own a couch that Robin licked
i mean, yeah??? i could see Robin lying about this? but on the other hand she’s bratty enough of a sibling/potential romancer that she would actually. do it. i would not put it past her. the licking zone has commenced. get. licked.
and, i mean, buying her a couch could equally just be a sign of compensation for infringing on leslie’s time and space. as an apology, or something!! but also because couches cost money, money leslie would have to spend, and it is literally the least robin could do if she actually did this thing
to wit:
when les is gone,
my sweetest bean,
i gaz at whate
we might have been
while cameras schoot
and newsmen sware
i mak my peaz
i linger there
i du not hyde
i du not crouch
i mak my mind
i lik the couch.
Nah, see, Les, it’s genius! She took all the non-marshmallow bits of the Lucky Charms and blended them into dust, because -they- have flour in them, right? It’s brilliant and economical use of the worthless part of the cereal!
Finding eggs was tricky, though. By the way, if you go outside, watch out for the sparrows. They’re in a foul mood.
I have a dilemma. I enjoy this web comic, but I get very uncomfortable with Willis’ promotions of his other works. These promotions seem to be getting more obvious then they have been in the past.
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“is one of them in Mar-a-Lago”
“y–”
“SAY NO MORE”
I only go *sarcastic* there *end sarcastic* every weekend.
You know, I was confused by your use of asterisks there, then I realized it was for tags.
Let’s see: I only go <sarcastic>there</sarcastic> every weekend.
Now I’m just confused by the emphasis on ‘there’.
I’m just emphasizing how he only goes to Maralago every weekend, not every single day. He does go there a lot though
Ah, thanks.
While I appreciate that Robin’s trying, she really needs to do some googling to figure out this whole “lesbian” thing.
It’s not “couches“, Robin, you’re one letter off…
conches?
https://tinyurl.com/m6uvg8e
Pouches?
Drat, didn’t see this, and you ninja’d me.
cruches?
Couchez?
Pouches? “I like your new sexuality.” “Thanks! It has pockets!”
Aah. practisexuality.
Pouches? That sounds more like marsupial sex. Should you be over on Kevin and Kell?
Oh, my… Kevin and Kell was my very first webcomic, and I don’t think I’ve been back there in ten, fifteen years… can’t remember why, and hope I won’t be reminded when I go back to visit…
Ouches?
Coochie?
Douches?
An amuse-bouche?
MAGIC!!!!!!!!!
More like…
Same place Oswin Oswald gets the milk and eggs for her souffles.
A recent question I’ve had: Every reply goes further to the right a bit, so just how far right can we get the replies?
Once you get a few posts deep, they actually stop going any further to the right, which in turn can make it a bit confusing to know who’s replying to who.
Idk, let’s find out
I’m game
Honestly I could use a lot less of the far right these days.
Couldn’t we all. That said I’d find it easier to deal with a more traditional flavor of the far right than the “Alt-Right” movement represents, if only because it’s harder for them to get a mainstream foothold with anyone actually paying any kind of positive attention to their message.
Not that far rigt, how far to the right of the screen can we get the replys to go
Is this how far right it’ll go???
Looks like there’s at least one more.
I wanna play!!
Oh. That’s it.
@Krys Brynhildr
I’ve counted 8 levels before. Then the Reply disappears and you use one above but put in the @name of the one you’re replying to.
Over on Dreamwidth I’ve been coming up with what I think is a fairly elegant solution to nested comments for mobile use. Which I guess bears very little relationship to this topic really except I just released a public alpha ‘style’ overlay that implements proper mobile support and am getting initial feedback and it’s very positive. And that part of it could be applied here if it was actually a big deal. Which I don’t really think it is. But still.)
That’s why if I ever need to reply in that context I’ll start with a twitter style @. IIRC it’s a four or five deep reply nesting before that happens though.
Hopefully not all the way to Mike Pence. That would be bad. Though potentially amusing if it puts him in the same position Robin is in right now.
Isn’t magic just unexplained science. We thought fire was magic and math was witchcraft until science explained it
Exactly! Now we know that fire *comes* from magic and only warlocks of numbers use this evil art know as “math”
“Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!”
Who said that?
Ponder Stibbons, and more recently, Agatha Heterodyne.
No! ME!!!
Yes, you too, Chris.
I was just reciting the quote
Robin makes what she wants. Whatever she wants.
They are flourless vegan muffins, obviously
Don’t you need flour to make muffins? I know in some cases you can grind oats into flour.
If Leslie has rice or certain beans, that can be ground into flour. Applesauce or mashed bananas are options for egg substitute.
Stuff made with wheat flour substitutes tend to be denser than more traditional muffins, so even if Robin knows what she’s doing, those muffins are likely to be bricks. Best eaten dipped in something liquid. Coffee or Milk depending on inclination.
(the flour knowledge comes from knowing two people with wheat allergies. The egg substitutes from google).
That, or they’re made of butter, cocoa powder, and dirt. Hard to tell for sure.
Only way to know is to take a bite.
I’d advise you to stay out of chemistry labs and garden sheds. Or keep the poison hotline on speeddial. 🙂
I come from a moderately length’d line of Chemists. I know how to handle a chemistry lab. 😛
CRUNCH! Ow, I thwink I bwoke a toowth
is flour not vegan?
It is – or should be. She might not have it at home because she doesn’t bake (no talent, not having the time), because she ran out and didn’t came around to buy it, or because she considers it to be unhealthy because she avoids food that’s too processed (because she deems it unhealthy). There may be other explanations, but these are the ones I could think of.
She could also legit have celiac disease (wheat allergy).
Coeliac Disease is commonly thought of as a wheat allergy as gluten sets it off , but its a lot more complex than that. Basically it’s an autoimmune condition caused by gluten, resulting in long term damage to the small intestine. This reduces the bodies ability to absorb nutrienta and in the long term realusts in various things like osteoporosis and anaemia
And I forgot to mention the agonizing pain, risk of malnutrition & increased risk of cancer
Depends on how many bug bits are in it.
This is Robin, she probably just ground up breakfast cereal. Cheerios are close to pure oats, but she probably just mixed everything that was available from Cocoa Puffs to Froot Loops.
At least she can give them to Riley?
Chia seeds are a pretty awesome vegan binding substitute for eggs.
“Beans? In a muffin? EW. I found some wood glue, that thickened the batter up nicely.”
You can use pancake mix in a pinch, but I strongly doubt Robin knows that trick
You can make a batter with just eggs and banana, but most people make pancakes, not muffins.
Can’t work out a replacement for eggs though. Milk and banana, while going nicely together, wouldn’t work.
Aquafaba? But this is Robyn we’re talking about.
maybe just order groceries? i’m sure that’s what people rich enough to be a representative do.
Shhhh, no logical, considered solutions, it just messes up the flow.
lololol my bad
I USED TO WORK IN A GROCERY STORE, I KNOW THINGS
Why would you want to grind cats into flour? It wouldn’t be vegan, for one thing.
I bet the ingredients in these alleged muffins are probably potato chips, some variety of pop, lemon juice, and earthworms.
That reference. I get it.
that said, whatever they’re made of, they at least look right, smell okay, and don’t feel too far off-weightwise for Becky to be willing to try to eat them.
or Becky is less picking about food than I am, which would be totally understandable, given how recently she got a job.
I’m sorry but this is really hard to swallow. Robin is soooo unlikable right now!
Because Robin doesn’t care about Leslie. She cares about what Leslie does for Robin. It’s a weird position because I really-really like the new Robin in a thoroughly, “I hate this person as the embodiment of evil” way. I liked old Robin but I don’t want new Robin to be redeemable–she’s too interesting as a causal monster.
Just like those muffins.
It may be a joke but she’s trying to disincentive a homeless girl from having a place two stay when she just admitted she had two homes. Damn! I don’t like using this to descibe people but that’s pretty monstrous.
Robyn could give one of her houses to Becky. Everyone wins!
But she can’t have a lesbian living in one of her homes, what would the voters think?
Just tell them that she’s an undocumented immigrant working as a domestic and everything will be fine.
Next she needs to give Leslie her other home.
Old Robin was just as bad, she just worked ona smaller scale because she was afraid of responsibility. Hell, the whole reason leslie even became a character was because the rest of the cast was so sick of her they refused to interact with her anymore.
I thought it was because Robin had a plan to trick/guilt/convince a gay man to have sex with her.
Just like those muffins.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
I need for Robin to just disappear forever. Like, every time I think she’s reached Peak Selfish Jackass she finds something new to prove I’m wrong.
honestly i’ve had to deal with so many dude characters being this kind of asshole that it’s kind of refreshing to see a woman pulling this kind of gleeful obliviousness on for size
i mean like if i had to deal with her in person, i would lose my temper pretty quickly; but safe behind the fourth wall i can just nom popcorn
They’re muffins.
specifically, chinese fighting muffins
Oh Gods, you made me remember that…
oh my god, they’re muffins
There’s Muffins in them.
earth, air, fire, water, muffins?
air, water, earth, fire muffins
Fire muffins?
My God, it’s full of muffins!
Did I mention that ‘muffin’ was (one of) the forum nickname for regulars on soc.bi circa 1994? Dunno if that’s relevant here, but you might want to mention that to Robin.
I laughed much too hard at this
It’s muffins all the way down!
Dust bunnies, sugar, butter and a big dose of water from DENIAL.
The only way to find out Leslie is to eat them…
Or try to.
A+ avatar you got there!
Just in case anyone doesn’t know, that’s Claire from QuestionableContent.net. (And one of my mentors.)
Why is there a strange filter over every panel after the first? Is that supposed to be smoke? Is the house on fire?
I am wondering that too.
Is Joyce about to pass out?
(Things start to look washed out like that when I’m about to pass out.)
Either Willis fixed whatever it was that you were seeing, or it’s just you and your computer. Everything looks just fine to me.
He fixed it. I saw it too and it is changed now.
Yeah, the filter was in the Patreon preview too and is gone now.
What was fixed? The later panels still look washed out to me.
Ctrl-F5
Odd. I did that before and got the old version. Now it’s different. Oh well.
Now I want to see the messed-up version…
pretend panel 2 and after look somewhat washed out
oh I guess Patreon still has the old version
eh, don’t feel like resharing it
Well it was most certainly not an electrical fire.
Robin: I guess you have the couch. I’ll just take the bed.
Leslie: WHAT!? I AM NOT BEING KICKED OUT OF MY OWN BED.
Robin: Who said you’d be kicked out.
Leslie: Uhmm…
I was thinking along those lines too:
“Heh, well then Leslie, is there anywhere else in this apartment that you’d like me to sleep???”
Your version sounds more in character, though.
My brain went to a similar place, with Leslie finding Robin in her bed twenty strips later…
“I said I wouldn’t sleep on the couch. This isn’t the couch.” 😛
I knew they weren’t burnt, but Mystery Muffins? I have the feeling Twizzlers are a key component.
Turns out Twizzlers cupcakes are an actual thing.
And now I must try one.
I don’t like Twizzlers, Red vines, real licorice or “Americanized” licorice, so I have no opinion. Wonder if licorice fans like them.
That said, I do bake lots, and I’ll try anything once, so a candy in cupcakes or cookies? Why not? Hey, someone had to be the first to put Reese’s peanut butter cups in bread pudding.
I think that last panel is the weirdest panel I’ve ever seen on this comic.
That includes Darth Dildo.
It’s hard to draw fear combined with disgust.
It looks like Willis put Leslie’s face through the old-person FaceApp.
I just like how Becky’s eyes don’t care about her hair location
Poor Becky, she feels like she’s been totally thrown in a breakup storyline instead of a Lesbian quest to destroy Patriarchy.
It’s easy to get those confused.
It’s just not working out between us. I want to move to New York, you want to enforce society-wide othering of feminity. It’s over.
Even worse, Leslie took her muffin!
They’re rocks. Slightly fluffy rocks.
She made them with cocoa mix, and dirt from Leslie’s houseplants.
Aaand Leslie went full shitty. Goddammit.
Wait… you mean the public display of abandoning a class, attempting to seduce a random stranger, and gushing over someone (again publicly) who isn’t legally allowed to be there isn’t “full shitty”. This is what takes the cake? Either my standards are too low or I should abandon this place all together.
Okay I think abandoning her class was shitty (as I made clear in several previous comments) but I’m failing to see the issue in her gushing over Becky. After everything that kid has been through and being told she should hate herself by adult after adult she deserved that moment of someone just looking at her with nothing but pride and affection.
Also, nobody brought up her living in the dorms during said gushing, nor would anybody in that class be able to prove it, so I fail to see the issue.
I also don’t see the issue with her gushing over Becky. If anything, it’s weird other people do not.
I’m really not sure why trying to guilt a home invader she used to have a crush on out of her home is “full shitty” or any more so than the aforementioned ditching her own class thing.
I mean I can maybe halfways see it is if the issue is either her potentially putting Becky in potential harms way, or perhaps even just using Becky as an object lesson aimed at freeing up Leslie’s home and couch from a bigotted politician who seems to have less and less mental and emotional maturity than her youngest sibling everytime she’s shown on panel.
Pretty sure this doesn’t even begin to come close to the level of shitty a lot of the other adults in this comic tend to sit at.
I don’t see it.
Regardless of whether she did or not, or just where she crossed that line (hint: it was a while ago), I suspect that going full shitty is exactly what Leslie is concerned about in regards to the muffins. My gut is clenching just from imagining what they must be like.
Probably something like the ones Kitty baked in an episode of X-Men: Evolution (one batch bounced when dropped, another cracked the pavement; Kurt, who ate one from an even earlier batch, was complaining of stomach pain days later and worried that it might never go away).
I literally have no idea what you are talking about, either. I even read this as “Robin” at first, because at least that makes sense.
I don’t mean this in a “I disagree with you” way. I mean I literally cannot figure out what it is that you think she’s doing that is shitty.
While I disagreed with people before, I actually got what they were saying. (It helps that they actually said what they meant.) But here I genuinely have no clue.
Robin is violating Leslie. She is trespassing. She was breaking and entering. She is playing mind games. She is intruding upon her. She is sending the press after Leslie. She’s using her power as a congresswoman, so she can’t really call the police.
So of course Leslie is going to try something else. She takes in the girl she was already going to take in, and tries to use her to guilt Robin–guilt Robin should already feel.
I don’t get it at all. I got it when Roz was around. Because the people saying bad things about Leslie were all people who have defended Roz for various reasons. But surely there is no reason to defend Robin.
I feel like I’m missing something, probably cultural context, cos I do not understand why Robin so very wants to stay.
There’s no reason. She’s a shitty person but apparently Willis thinks this is ‘wacky’ or something. Don’t look at me.
Noonononono, the point is that ROBIN thinks she’s being wacky and cute.
I’ve taken is as Robin is discovering a new side of her, and combined with the stressors of being a representative and what she’s had to do to get the position, has cause a realization in her life that she wishes to explore in what she views as a safe environment. To which Leslie seeming wanted, but doesn’t now (currently, at least, possibly forever), and thus doesn’t want to offend her, but still wants her out, and thus has latched onto an idea as to get Robin out of the house without being the bad guy (thus also explaining the deus ex machina of Becky now having a place).
Though full disclosure, I’ve been with these characters for 15+ years, and as such I’m emotionally invested in their happiness, and will excuse shitty behavior if I see the reasoning behind it, and a willingness to wait for it to become better. Probably why I still like Mike.
It’s not cultural context. Robin is a weirdo.
Her reason(s) haven’t been explained outright, but so far it’s probably some combination of:
unhealthy-stalker-crush on Leslie
self-destruction of her political career
avoidance of her real life
+ ???
And because I do believe it’s now legally required:
+ Profit
Because outside there are ,edit waiting to crucify her for being bi.
Yeah. It’s been a little while for us but it hasn’t even been a full day since Robin came over and even less time since the story broke. Look back to yesterday and you can see the news vans and a reporter trying to talk to the girls as they enter.
Yeah. Also, how the hell did ‘media’ get changed to ‘,edit’. That is…..something, autocorrect, wow.
The m key and the comma key are right next to each other on a qwerty board. You probably typed “,edia”, which became “,edit”.
Also, why don’t iPhones show you the autocorrect before you post? It would be much less aggravating!
That is distinctly possible, but my computer’s been known to be a dick about such things.
Autocorrect gets more right than wrong when you’re thumb-typing quickly, but sometimes it misses obvious things and sometimes it replaces perfectly good words with other perfectly good words.
Or mysteriously capitalizes words for no reason.
Or replaces perfectly good words with incomprehensible gibberish.
My tablet autocorrects Walky to Sally!
Is this machine reading webcomics while I think it’s off, and thinks that Sal looks like a Sally?
It’s been at least two whole days, mind you.
Oh yeah! They spent a day watching SU! For some reason I thought that was at night. Still not that much time has past. Two days does make it that much more annoying though.
leslie is nicer than most of the other people in robin’s life
also she validates her interest in women, which is also something nobody else in robin’s life does. or at least that’s it’s possible to take a romantic interest in women
but mostly robin just does not know how to take a hint
No hint necessary. Leslie actually threw her out. She came back.
listen. we’re going to get a 2 by 4. we’re going to write on it “CLUE” in giant glittery marker. then we’re going to use it to SCOOP ROBIN OUT and throw her into the Mississippi
Bet she just bought the muffins and put them in a baking pan 😛
Given that the entire problem is that she won’t leave the house, that seems unlikely.
Maybe she convinced a minion to bring them.
I just hope she didn’t get them from Marsha.
Joyce, internally: “And Leslie used our Savior’s name! SHE STILL BELIEVES! SHE STILL BELIEVES! ….. now to just get her to stop taking His name in vain…”
LOL, I forgot Joyce was here. She’s only visible in panel 1, and easy to miss there.
How exactly is a hot lady licking things supposed to scare the lesbian away…?
What?
you think robin’s hot?
She’s a lesbian, isn’t she? Or at least equally dickly-chickly?
I think Robin’s physical attractiveness has been well established. Leslie certainly did not develop a crush on Robin’s mind or personality.
But, even assuming teenager-Becky digs women in their 30s, licking a couch is not attractive, nor is sleeping in politician-spit.
On the other hand, Becky is not stupid enough to believe her.
Really? Cause I believe that Robin did lick the couch. You know, crumbs and such.
Never considered for a second that Becky would be attracted to Robin anyway. She seems all about that Cretaceous lovin’
It’s not what I think. But the conceit of the comic is that Robin is so hot that Leslie crushed on her even knowing how awful she was. So, in-story, she’s clearly supposed to be mega-hot.
She is the person I’d expect to set the oven for 900 degrees for an hour to bake whatever-that-was (rocks? bread? posters?) reasoning it’s equal to baking it twice as long at 450. 😛
DAMN YOU WILLIS, Robin’s coming up with excuses and lacking empathy but I’m laughing at how hard she’s trying to be a houseguest (probs more of a houseiintruder) and failing. XD
Damn what I wouldn’t give for an oven that goes to 900!
She also munched all the carpet
*rimshot*
Thanks folks – i’ll be here all week. Try the steak, and make sure to tip the waitress!
I… kinda want to know what the hell those muffins are made of if they have no flour or eggs.
Leslie doesn’t strike me as the type to have food substitutes and there’s no way Robin went to the store to buy some.
I’d say rice flour, flax, or some other wheat substitute and possibly applesauce or banana instead of eggs, but I don’t think Robin’s likely to be in to the food substitution crowd and Leslie not bringing up alternative flour makes me think she doesn’t have those either.
I’d guess it’s less likely that it’s flax or something, and more likely that it’s something far more disgusting that you’d never want to eat.
….Flax.
The thing you describe is flax.
(I don’t like flax, clearly. XD)
Wallpaper paste, the posters she ruined with the vacuum cleaner, and the contents of said vacuum.
If you grind it to a fine dust in a blender, food processor or coffee grinder cereal can make an adequate flour alternative in a pinch. Banana or some other fruit or veg with high viscosity when pureed can sub for eggs. They won’t rise as much but it’ll work out ok-ish. However, if Leslie doesn’t have eggs or flour, she also likely hasn’t got any leavening agents (unless she uses baking soda for cleaning or some such) which means to get any rise at all these muffins need to have been whipped hard (well, whatever the egg substitution is) or else they’ll be as dense as hockey pucks.
In short my guess would be, if I had any reason to expect Robin knows how to cook/bake reasonably well, they’re made from ground cereal, pureed banana, milk, sugar and some kind of candy or fruit as filling. Maybe with some variety of liquor (rum maybe) as an additional flavoring agent, though that nor the vanilla or other extract it substitutes for is absolutely needed.
This situation does indeed call for liquor. Not to help the muffins, just, in general.
I was about to make a joke, then I realized how bad said joke would have been.
I’m kinda surprised Robin knows how to bake things. I’m assuming she normally has aides who get food for her or something. Then again, we don’t really know what’s in those muffins so maybe she doesn’t really know how to bake things.
im surprised they came out looking mostly normal
“That you know of.” Oh my god and any and all other spiritual beings that may exist Robin actually put out a fire she started while Leslie was gone!! She actually started an electrical fire and is trying to hide the fact!!! Fifteen more minutes and Leslie wouldn’t even have a house anymore!!
I kinda hope that Leslie ends up having like five people living in her apartment. However Howard is the only other person I can think of who may need a place to live depending on how things go.
and Billie! and Roz!!!
that sounds like the worst roommates fic of all time
Ah yes. Howard. Just the person two women want living with them. How long before he offers Becky fifty dollars to flash him?
Granted, if anyone can educate that little fugghead out of his pathetic pornography obsession, it’s probably Leslie.
I really love how casually Leslie stops Becky from eating the muffin.
“Becky no, those cannot possibly be edible. Don’t be reckless”
I, on the other hand, will gladly eat mysterious muffins!
It was nice knowing you.
fun fact: in college, someone left a pepsi behind in a math class(this was around the time swine flu was a thing people worried about) and i said i would drink it. everyone around me was saying ‘what if it has swine flu?’ and i said ‘then i wont make it to the next class’ and drank it.
Why?
eh, free pepsi
One time in college I ate a styrofoam packing peanut. Just to mess with someone who didn’t believe I would do it.
I kept burping styrofoam flavor for the rest of the day.
your story wins
They make packing peanuts out of cornstarch now, too. They look and taste like off-brand cheese curls (Jax, puffed Cheetos) without the cheese coating.
cronch
Goodbye brother. “We shall all bring your heroic story with us, and share it with The Republic.” -Colonel Gascon
Who the hell doesn’t own eggs?
People who are allergic or vegan?
People that don’t like eggs and don’t bake often.
People who buy eggs, run out of them, and haven’t bought new eggs yet.
People who don’t get groceries because they’re commenting and replying to people like you on DoA
hell if i know.
even if you’re just a single person and it doesn’t make sense to buy a full carton of eggs, you can always buy one of those Containers of Egg that have a bunch in a pourable form. im sure there’s a better name for this but i can’t think of it at the moment.
or! maybe she ran out overnight, because shenanigans.
She might have run out because she was staying in hiding from the press the previous day.
that does put a damper on your single-person grocery shopping lifestyle
idk maybe she just doesn’t use flour enough to keep it around in case it goes bad
People who only like them scrambled, and who have never figured out how to cook scrambled eggs properly? Not that I know anyone like that, Tualha says, looking sideways …
Oooh ooh! I know this one. Its a trick question, sort of.
The answer is “People who don’t buy eggs”!
Me! I don’t bake and only like them in McMuffin form, so I don’t keep any around.
If I need eggs I’ll just go down the street and buy a half dozen.
“own eggs” is sounding like “own a fridge”. “Who the hell hasn’t gone to IKEA to buy a set of Okokt Äggs? Peasants!”
I don’t make eggs by themselves often (not really an omelet fan), so eggs are mostly required by bigger recipes, and if you live alone you don’t often make those recipes.
Heathens. It’s Heathens, right?
I’d guess she either doesn’t eat breakfast, or eats out. (Maybe she grabs something from the vending machine at work–you can get good stuff like that.) And she doesn’t bake. Without those two, there’s not a lot of reason to always have eggs around.
There are other things one could eat for breakfast too. I rarely eat eggs for breakfast, even though I almost always eat breakfast at home.
*noms muffins* *10 teeth break* kinda tough…….
My grandmother once knocked out a rooster with a muffin.
That’s nothing. Victor Hugo once got so mad he threw a baseball through a dog.
Okay. So. My long running question is this: Why are all the bisexual people in denial? Or, if not all the bisexual people, but at least the ones the comic focuses on. Like… heavy denial. This is again something that really breaks my suspension of disbelief.
This may actually just be a me thing though. I’m straight, but I have a number of friends in the LGBT community and most of my bi friends sorta figured things out by college. I’m not trying to suggest Robin should know she’s bi, I understand that growing up in a conservative environment would have this affects on people. But I suppose my main focus is Danny then?
Maybe it’s a cultural thing. Americans due have a different culture than Canadians, believe it or not. For one thing, Americans, generally tend to be more reserved due to the more religiously influenced foundation of their nation. Anyway, I’m going to stop rambling before I bring hellfire upon myself.
when i id’d as bi, it took me til about college to figure out the bi label worked for me at the time. before then, i didnt have a word for it, just that i was ‘not straight’
Not everybody. Ruth and Billie don’t seem so much ‘in denial’ as not knowing the real meaning to the word ‘bisexual’ (not uncommon in Indiana).
Marcie is DEFINITELY not in denial, that girl’s so thirsty you’d think she lived in the desert.
Sierra, Grace, and Mandy are definitely not in denial, they’re making out in hallways.
Mike’s not in denial – he’s not bi but is likewise Not Straight.
Danny doesn’t seem so much in denial anymore either. He wasn’t sure of himself because he didn’t have the words for it. Now that he’s told Ethan, he seems much more comfortable with it, even if he doesn’t have a specific crush at the moment (at least, not one he’s willing to pursue, since Amber broke up with him and he’s not willing to pursue Ethan since she’s not over him and she only just dumped him).
Ruth seems to know what bisexuality is actually – it is Billie that has the weird notion that bisexuals only exist in porn for some reason?
Perhaps denial was the wrong word. However I was getting more at Danny and Robin as I view the other characters (aside from Mike, Billie and Ruth) as secondary characters. I just find in really odd that, given this is a modern day setting, so few people have encountered the term bisexual. Again, a me thing, but I knew of the term and had friends who used the term by grades 10 or 11 in highschool. I realize anecdotes are pretty meaningless, but I’m legitimately curious how such discrepancies arise.
It might be because Indiana is more conservative in some parts? I had friends using the term as well by grade 10, but I live in Canada so. I also knew of people who didn’t learn the term until they were in their 30s or 40s. Plus, while a lot of people learn it at college, these kids only just GOT to college.
Even by cutting down the sample to main characters, that’s only 1 out of 2 (Danny vs. Ruth, Billie, Mike, Marcie, since Marcie’s listed on the cast page and Robin isn’t).
It is true though that of the bi (or at least polysexual) characters we know of, none of them have used a label on screen the way Ethan or Becky have.
Well, I’d say it’s mostly a quirk of the story. Like, there are a number of bi people in comic who are fully aware of the identity and proudly affix it to themselves (Sierra, Mandy, Grace, Marcie).
The denial aspect I think comes because a) it’s a common part of college, figuring out who you are and what words apply to you. Most of the folks I knew in college figured out what flavor of queer they were in college rather than before it. It’s been improving since, but that’s still a common thing.
And b) there’s good meat in a story of figuring out what your identity is and by story quirk, Danny and Billie ended up being the recipients of that, because we’ve already explored Carla’s analogue and Ethan’s analogue being in denial and figuring themselves out in Shortpacked! And Becky was in denial early on in the strip, but now has confidence from finding her identity and Dina still doesn’t have the words for her orientation nor knows yet if words would matter to her.
And Robin is in denial because this is the politician in denial figures out her feelings for a queer person of less power storyline done more horrifyingly.
Is that a story trope? “The politician in power figure out their feelings for a queer person of less power”. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that done.
It was the Robin arc in Shortpacked! but done much zanier and centered on Robin’s perspective.
This is it more realistic and terrifying. Basically a cross between an aggressive stalker and this:
https://wonkette.com/574797/creepy-michigan-ag-who-stalked-gay-kid-gets-to-pay-3-5-million
Though in SP!, Robin was mostly a toy store worker who sidelined as a politician, so it’s easy not to think of her as “politician”.
I do think the big difference between Robin and either that AG case or the more common closeted gay pol cruising men’s rooms is that this arc is about Robin discovering she’s queer and how that changes her, not about long term hidden predatory behavior.
There’s a stereotype about repressed male politicians cruising the men’s room.
Mind you, whether that stereotype is “closeted bigot being exposed as a hypocrite” or “righteous man unjustly accused by someone with an agenda” (and you can guess which agenda it is implied to be) seems to depend on one’s own political views.
Certainly the real life cases which have gone so far in generating the stereotype and cementing it in the public mind also tend to create that kind of divisiveness (e.g., Larry Craig still has many supporters who claim that he was being smeared, and Haggard was quickly ‘forgiven’ for doing what he said others would burn in Hell for).
Interesting, though, how so many of those who assume that conservative politicians like Craig were being smeared, were nonetheless oh-so-willing to accept that a liberal Democrat like Franks was actually gay when he was outed by an ex-lover… though he never actually denied it once he was outed, so maybe that’s not a fair comparison (interestingly, it was Craig who led the charge to get Franks removed from office in 1987 when the story broke). Perhaps the way derided Ed Koch is a better example, given that he asserted publicly that he was straight (and may well have been, though my personal guess based on nothing of substance is he was ace) and there is no real answer on the topic even now. Eh, both of those were in the 1980s, so times weren’t really the same – though I am not sure if that really would be different now or not.
*”… the way some Republicans derided…”, I mean. In one 1970s election, Mario Cuomo had to publicly denounce the use of the slogan “Vote Cuomo, Not Homo” because even with the attitudes of the time it looked like a dirty trick and was hurting Cuomo’s campaign – and despite his distancing himself from the ones using it, several continued to do so.
See, I’m not really even sure how people are supposed to figure that sort of thing out in college. Seeing as my first time through gave me no insights and all my second attempt is teaching me is IT stuff.
I guess not living in dorms might be part of it, and or not even knowing if my college offers a Human Sexualities class….or probably being some sort of ace spectrum.
Cerebus, my issue with you comment is that you’re implying that everyone needs to read the creator’s previous work. I’m only drawing on this story. I don’t have the past knowledge you do.
Eh, Ethan is still learning how to handle the shit he gets for being gay and realizing that coming into his own isn’t a thing to be ashamed of. It’s still here.
Also – Ethan and Carla weren’t bi characters learning this in the creator’s previous works, so your point stands regardless. Ethan was gay and Carla was a homoromantic ace.
Oh no, I don’t think anyone should have to read his other works as this is a stand-alone universe rather intentionally. I was more noting the author reasons for why I think Carla and Ethan haven’t shown the same sort of discovering themselves plotline as Billie or Danny.
Like, Willis’s stated intention for a reboot universe is to do a lot of things differently and only repeat himself where he feels there is new ground to explore. So I think that ended up affecting who had a “discovering themselves” plotline.
While I think Cerberus mostly has the right of it, I’ll add that not everyone has the experiences to give them cause to actually think about what various terms mean and/or whether or not they apply to oneself so early in life. Using my own familiar ground of the BDSM community, I know and know of many people who never grasped that their preferences in terms of relationship style and/or sexual practices fit within the spectra of BDSM until they were in their thirties, forties or fifties because their only inkling of what is part of that started and stopped at a very stereotypical level. Billie in particular strikes me as being in a similar place so far as being bi is concerned (hence the “only existed in porn”) and Danny seems to have never met a guy who interested him in such a way before Ethan.
Robin is a special case because of the very problematic possessiveness and boundary transitivenesses she has always displayed with Leslie in both universes, here being explored through a vastly different lens than it was in Shortpacked! where Leslie seemed to tacitly accept (and at times welcome) it and occasionally even find it somewhat endearing.
True. I shouldn’t have implied that college is the only time of discovery. Plenty of folks figure out in middle school and high school and many folks don’t discover key parts of themselves until well into their adulthood.
So it’s a “That’s A Thing? There’s a name for it?” scenario? Yeah, I can see that.
Come to think of it… isn’t
MopervilleNaperville, IL, sort of near the Indiana border? That might just explain some things about Mr. Shive…Hmmn, I probably shouldn’t have used ‘Mr’ there, though, come to think of it. But then again – and I say this as someone whose own gender identity is less than precise – I have no idea what the correct salutation for the gender ‘noncommittal shrug’ might be. (Dan’s words, not mine.)
But yes, if the idea of bisexuality isn’t exactly in the working lexicon of the people you grew up around, I expect that the ideas of having a trans or non-binary gender would be even less visible. I grew up in New England in the 1970s (though Stamford, CT is only about 45 miles north of NYC, so it is not exactly in the Lovecraft Country part of New England), and the ideas of both bisexuality and transsexuality were present – mainly as punchlines, but I knew at least about them by my early teens and knew that they were real things. The concept of non-binary genders wasn’t, not really, but I’m not sure that it was around anywhere in that era – I am pretty sure that even Kate Borenstein, who would go on to pretty much codify the idea, didn’t get it about herself until the early to mid 1980s, long after she had transitioned.
(I’ve heard the honorific ‘Mx’ applied in such situations before, as in ‘Mx Shive’.)
You’re misunderstanding. Danny and Ethan want to pursue one another they just can’t because Amber is a psychotic piece of shit and getting in the way of them being happy as she always does, because she’s human garbage.
WTF?
Amber hasn’t done or said anything to indicate they shouldn’t. They came to that decision entirely on their own, because they both care about her and don’t want to hurt her. She’s done nothing here, no matter how much you hate her.
Yes they’re so humble and chaste and uninterested that Mike (who’s role in the story is plot device) was able to instantly deduce that they’re super crushing on each other and Ethan being with another man would drive Danny into a jealous frenzy.
If Amber weren’t there they’d be together, but they can’t because the worthless sack of abusive dog shit might have hurt feelings that her previous victims would be happy. She is poisoning them just by being there.
She’s acted crappy, but she’s gotten better over time. Her recent outbursts have been milder than the ones before. She has apologies to make, but she isn’t worthless or abusive.
She certainly isn’t to blame for keeping Danny and Ethan apart. They care about her completely out of their own free will, because despite her flaws she is a good person and they trust her to make amends when she messes up.
but she isn’t worthless or abusive.
She threw a table at Ethan and gaslighted Danny for hanging around Sal and then tried to sic Dorothy onto him. She is assuredly both of these things.
they trust her to make amends
You’ll notice she hasn’t once apologized to Danny for her abusive behaviour. Because she’s selfish trash who doesn’t give a fuck about him.
It’s plain and simple. If Amber weren’t there then everyone around her would be better off. She is a burden on them or are we forgetting that she’s literally tried to kill people before.
Without Amber, Ethan would’ve been left alone with Mike’s manipulative garbage, and might still be in the closet.
Danny would likely still be moping about getting dumped by Dorothy, and would never even have met Ethan.
Dina might never have hooked up with Becky if Amber hadn’t come along to the party as moral support.
Becky sure as heck wouldn’t be better off. She’d either be in conversion “therapy” or living under a bridge somewhere afraid to ever risk seeing her friends again
Joyce would have even less piece of mind, because without Amber/AG, nobody gets that picture or Ryan’s name.
Blaine is about the only person who would actually be better off, and he deserved everything that he got.
Ryan fucking got away because of her. It’s entirely her fault he’s not in prison.
It’s nice, though, that the only good thing you can think she did for Danny was giving him an in with Ethan. Y’know, because you’re totally fucking right because the world is a better place without people like Amber.
You know, for someone who’s expressed dread at coming into these comments and finding shitty stuff said about Amber, you sure are the primary source of it these days.
They were right and I was a fucking idiot for disagreeing with them.
Depression lies, Spencer. Always remember that.
Spencer: they were not right and you were not an idiot 🙁
im sorry im so sorry for everything
It’s cool, Spencer.
*hugs* Spencer. You have worth. Amber has worth. You were not wrong.
I get the frustration, but ouch. Like I get that you’re distancing yourself from identifying with her, but you’re not the only one who identified with her and who has been told their relatable mental condition to Amber makes them inherently a monster. So that… that really hurt to read.
It’s okay, though and I hope you take care of yourself. You are awesome and deserve love. You don’t need to shame spiral on this.
No human being is worthless. The language you are using is the language of actual abusers. You’re saying the shit that Blaine could have said to Amber. Or Clint to Ruth.
Amber has always been portrayed as a good person with a mental illness that sometimes causes her to hurt others. She has never been shown to actually be evil.
I know many people who are like Amber. I’ve even hurt people because of my mental illness. If they are not worthless–and none of us are–then neither is Amber.
The one time Amber even implied someone was worthless, she immediately apologized, and forbade Danny from calling himself worthless. Think about that.
And then she called him a traitor, forbade Ethan from seeing him, tried to sic Dorothy onto him, and then went about stalking Sal.
Because she’s a good person.
from what i can tell, if there’s a part of your bisexual orientation that makes you look ‘straight’ you don’t tend to look too deeply beyond that. like ‘see i like girls i’m fine.’ conservativeness and lack of knowledge about bisexuality being a thing add to it. however, this is coming from an american perspective.
Is it an education thing then? The more I read this comic, the more I feel like there’s an incredibly wide gap between America and Canada. Hell… the whole grading system is different.
Wait, what? Words like “bisexual” turn up in your education in Canada!?
Yeah, uh, I’d say there’s a gap.
I’d never heard a word like that in a class before college. And then I was lucky. I went to a religious-affiliated college with an extremely conservative administration… and professors and staff who were like “Yeah, we’re gonna say true stuff anyway screw you.”
Heh. Yeah, I have to fight like hell just to have permission to mention in high school classes that things like bisexuality, asexuality, or non-binary identities exist and what that means. And that’s in a fairly “liberal” area.
Whereas growing up, they didn’t even say gay out loud. Gay was just something you saw on TV if you had “permissive parents” and was something to be aggressively stamped out.
From Willis’s description of Indiana, I feel it has more in common with my raising environment than my current teaching environment. And yeah, hard to put words to experiences when you’ve never had exposure to the words. Hell, even modern bisexual representation in TV and movies actually uses the word so young folks can google it.
So yeah, it’s a lot of just stumbling onto these terms by the type of online media one consumes.
I don’t recall if anybody brought it up in any of my classes, but things that did happen:
– We learned about Alexander and Hephaestion in my Ancient History class.
– We learned about trans kids and that they were valid in my Psychology class.
– The religion teachers would crack down on homophobic bullying like the angry hand of the god they were teaching about (it was a Catholic school).
– The student counsellors office had an LGBT+ safe space sticker on one of the counsellor’s doors.
– I THINK we talked a little in sociology about this.
– I wanna say law or politics brought this up, probably in some sort of religious freedom discussion (which, tbf, was usually in the context of charter challenges and why that argument often didn’t work well).
I don’t think any of the words other than gay or trans came up, but I’d not be like SUPER shocked if they did.
I was first introduced to a lot of identities, sexualities, and kinks by staying up late on wikipedia in like 2004.
I dunno. In highschool the term came up maybe a few times? Not until later grades, but even so, I had been introduced to the concept of bisexuality since grade 10. Some guy in my Math class was pretty open about it.
However, I remember in University a friend of mine came out as bisexual and the group of people I hung around with started questioning him like crazy. I just sat there and ate my lunch. So he ask me why I wasn’t asking questions and I said that his sexuality had no impact on my opinion of him as a person, so why should I make a big deal about it? You’re a person, I’m going to treat you like a person, based on how you treat others and myself.
I knew PEOPLE who were bi by grade 10, but I don’t think it was taught about. Mind, I went to a Catholic high school.
And, of course, the Internet and the LGBTQ+ movement has made such tremendous progress – as an older Millenial, I didn’t know hardly anything about such things til Dan Savage and wikipedia in college, but I know at least three highschool-age Millenials who identify as bi, and another who posted that he’s a switch on facebook without batting an eyelash, they know what asexuality is, and so on.
–oh wait, that’s not true, I knew that gay and transpeople existed in middle school, which was pre-Internet, surrounded by Orthodox Jews.
Possibly from a TV news story about parents rejecting gay or trans kids, to the kids’ detriment — I specifically remember asking my parents whether they’d ever do that, like how the parents on the TV had done. They said of course they wouldn’t reject me for anything. It was so reassuring, and I want every kid to have that. T.T
I don’t remember how I first heard about LGBT+ stuff. Might’ve been grade six? And I definitely knew people online who were by the time I was in grade 6 or 7. By the time grade 10 rolled around, my RL friends are now mostly LGBT+.
Before 6th grade, the info may well have been available, but nobody expected me to understand or really care about it. IIRC, it was more like, “I’m a girl because adults reward me for saying so. I want to marry my best friend(s) so we can live in the same house and have lots of doggies and TVs.” Kids are practical like that.
When I talk to kids nowadays, they know that people can be gay, as related to marriage. They’ve inherited an opinion about that (generally a happily accepting one, since I live in NYC). However, kids are quite certain that there are exactly two genders, since their gender rules, whereas the other gender drools. Room for improvement, there.
…Your catholic high school experience was VERY different from mine. (And I graduated in 2011 in a state neighboring Indiana, so there might have been some change recently, but I would doubt much – I’d say Willis’ portrayal is fairly accurate for a lot of people). There were a couple of teachers who would maybe dare to mention “gayness” in an even slightly positive light. The archdiocese has the right to fire any teacher who in their personal or professional life doesn’t follow the Catholic rules exactly, so it’s not like they were all necessarily in agreement with the school policies, but still.
Generally, our sex ed consisted of people coming into our religion class and teaching strictly abstinence. Our health teacher managed to get permission to have a women’s studies professor from a nearby college come in and talk to us; all of the (fortunately for whomever asked) anonymous notecard questions had to be screened and she wasn’t allowed to answer one about how a condom worked.
In one of my religion classes, we literally had a true/false question on a test about whether marriage had to be between an man and a woman. My family isn’t even slightly religious (was at the school for the academics) and I was completely flummoxed. I had read a handful of books about gay/bi/trans people from my (public) middle school library and successfully got a few on the shelf in high school because I was friendly with the librarian (and may have misrepresented the content sometimes – Running with Scissors was totally only about mental illness, right?), but it’s not like many people would have found them.
Well, I live in the liberal wasteland of Canada, where the Catholic schools are run by an actual school board not an archdiocese (at least, as far as I could tell).
Our sex ed was fairly comprehensive now that I recall – we learned about body image, consent, drugs and alcohol and their abuse, all kinds of protection, and how adoption and birth worked, with a refresher from elementary school ‘this is puberty, these are the parts, their functions, and how they work’) and a bunch about STIs. They kinda skimmed over abortion (basically ‘Yeah, it exists and it’s covered by insurance so you COULD, but church says no, so hey how about we watch another adoption video where the person is SO GRATEFUL they weren’t aborted even though their mother was raped, yeah?’) and they didn’t mention LGBT+ sex, but most of what they taught was transferrable. I recall dental dams being brought up, which wlw can use. As well as female condoms. So……yay, my school?
I liked how we had abstinence-only education as our only sex-ed. They basically talked about only abstinence. Abstention from what? No idea! They only explained why it was a bad idea to do… something.
Short answer? Yes. (IMO.)
It can be like that, definitely, at least for some people. That gave me a lot of trouble when I was in my teens, as I knew how confused I was, but since I wasn’t sexually active I kept thinking, “naah, that can’t be right – I mean, sure I like the looks of some guys, but sex? Be serious, that’s not me. I must be just imagining that part.” It wasn’t until much later that I turned around and realized that it could just as easily have applied to my attraction to women, by which time I had already realized that both sets of attraction were real and was trying to understand why I had been so confused in the first place.
There are a few possible reason for bi erasure/denial.
First is, unfortunately, terrible opinions on both side of the spectrum. The straight people think it’s just a phase (or if you’re female, dudes fetishize that you’re into girls). On the gay side, they say you’re just in denial and you should just go gay all the way.
There’s also potential jealousy issues. Some people (usually with a bunch of control/jealousy/trust problems) get nervous knowing that there’s potential of their partner showing attraction to both sexes.
Also ‘committing’ to bisexuality can be very difficult. Even realizing that you’re attracted to people of your own gender can be confusing to some people. Bisexuality being such a gray area is an even less stable foundation to stand on.
There are a lot of nuances. It’s getting better, but there’s still a way to go.
i kind of wonder if like. having the option to have straight partners makes it a little harder to identify as a separate orientation? idk for a while people were really stuck in “you can only ever be one or the other!!” and that sort of thing can be fluid and pretty confusing
Definitely yes on the idea that you have to ‘pick’.
(For me, liking all genders is more like, I’m capable of digging redheads and blondes and brunettes. Nobody says that I have to choose to date only one haircolour forever, so why do they think I have to pick just one gender?)
There is also the uncomfortable concept that bi people have the option to fade into bi-invisibility, in case we ever want to run like hell from being LGBTQ+. I would consider the closet an incredibly sucky non-option, but I imagine that this possibility led to a lot of jealous distrust from gay folks (particularly early on, or in places where it’s unsafe to have happy, socially-accepted, gay-looking relationships). Like, do the bi people really have skin in the game? They could run off and look straight at any moment!
I’d like to think that we’ve disproven that, as we haven’t run off, and as we don’t like closets or invisibility any more than anyone else does.
yeee
and like. choosing the heteronormative option is generally a lot easier than choosing the gay option? lot less risk, lot more options. but also like…doesn’t invalidate your gay options/history, or make them less meaningful.
nuance!!
Being casually perceived as straight is definitely a privilege. (Way less targeting from violent bigots, for example.)
But, it’s still a closet.
I’m with Becky, closets suck, let’s nuke all of ours from space.
we aim for the gender and sexuality norms at dawn, sir.
…are they really? Danny, Robin, maybe Ruth… but then you have Billie (not in denial – cf. Alice), Dina, Mandy, Grace, Sierra, Marcie, Mike…
TBF, Mike and Dina are not officially bi. Mike described himself as ‘Whatever you don’t want me to be’ and Dina is uncertain if gender matters to her.
I wouldn’t even say Danny or Ruth are in denial. Danny was for a bit, but has come to terms with it and Ruth just isn’t sure about labels and finding one has dropped down her priority list.
Was Danny ever really in denial? Confused and unfamiliar with the word “bisexual,” but his first reaction to seeing a boy he thought was cute was to tell somebody about it.
And what about Daisy? (Everyone forgets about Daisy) She may not be bi, but she definitely suffers a form of erasure. Nobody seems to consider her a sexual being.
Leslie shouldn’t make out with her any time soon, she probably taste like lent.
Want does Lent taste like? I’m being a jackass. Lent is a Catholic holiday, just so you know.
lent TASTES LIKE SADNESS AND HEARTBREAK
I was told Lent should taste like unnecessary quilt.
Nah, Lent tastes like unnecessary guilt. Especially when 13 year old you has given up on the notion of “god” but everyone expects you to care.
*guilt
(Now why does my autocorrect chose Quilt over Guilt? Maybe IT has guilt issues?)
To be fair I read quilt as guilt. Also, unnecessary quilt is probably equivalent as unnecessary guilt.
And tastes the same!
Since the original “lent” was a pun on “lint” from licking the couch, I thought your “quilt” was a rather clever pun.
*takes unnecessary quilt, makes quiltbag*
Fish.
Obviously she got the flour and eggs the same place Dalek!Clara got the milk for the souffles.
You’re my new favourite person.
Maybe you should have thought of that before you BROKE IN Robin.
There is something incredibly… off… about Leslie’s face in that last panel.
Look! It’s Sailor Chibi-Moon!
If you do not end up selling the “gaypron” in a store somewhere I will stop reading your comic.
This is awkward…
Okay so what happens now is Robin gives Becky the keys to her house and the directions and hires her as an impromptu housesitter as to raise the stakes in this zany game of ‘how goofily horrible can Robin be?’
Being covered in senator-spit does not take a couch off the market, it merely makes the market niche.
Eh, it’s only representative spit.
So it has a quarter of the value and has to be refreshed three times as often, big deal.
It’s so satisfying to me that Becky’s eyes and other facial details show through her hair
I’ve actually been learning a lot of good vegan recipes for muffins as this comment becomes a quick reference for flour and egg replacement recipes. People seem to give Robin a lot of credit in the cooking department.
More than she deserves. I think she just poured any mostly edible material in and somehow made presentable muffins
I’d be more likely to give her credit in the using the internet department. Finding substitutions isn’t hard.
But… probably still more credit than she deserves.
Game of Muffins. Challenge accepted.
Comic Reactions:
Panel 1: This is a horror scenario. The unwanted visitor who in response to every attempt to regain one’s life just entrenches themself further, performing a fake normality and by doing so attempt to force others to go along with it.
Like, I’m suddenly getting why Robin’s actions have felt particularly horrifying, because this performed normality when everything is breaking is shit my mom and some of my old work places have done.
Especially my mom, where every attempt to confront the horror that was happening and bring it out into the open so it could be addressed was responded to with an even more aggressive enforcement of everything is fine, aren’t we a happy family. To the point where it was an extreme form of gaslighting where you’re fully aware you’re being fucked with but feel powerless to do anything.
Making that connection, I feel so much for Leslie’s panic and fear. That type of scenario is monstrous and absolutely designed to fuck with your head and Robin keeps escalating things so there’s no polite or civil means of solving it.
Like, cops will be on Robin’s side, not Leslie’s, because Robin is an elected official. Landlord clearly is not on Leslie’s side given he let her in. Even attempts to physically remove her have been stymied by her breaking back in and play-acting ever more that everything is fine and domestic.
And Robin trying to perform this “dutiful wife” role, insert herself into a narrative of Leslie’s life is terrifying. And dehumanizing, because Robin is inserting herself into this role without even admitting any actual attraction or consideration for who Leslie is as a person.
And expects Leslie to eventually buckle and accept it because the only other options are being limited to violence (which will land Leslie in jail for pretty much ever, cause the government really frowns on beating up elected officials even when they are actively ruining your life) or a complete surrender of her privacy (inviting the media into her home and thus surrendering the private life she has fought for so long to build and basically sacrificing her ability to stay in her home (which may already be fucked)).
So yeah, this is legitimately terrifying and I feel so badly for how fucked Leslie is right now and understand why she’s fucking up so much of late in panic.
That all said, heh, muff-ins.
Muffins is a bit of a generous and loose term. We prefer “Brick of Sugary Baked Shit” as the term for one
muff is slang for vagina
Good news! Performed normality when everything is breaking is now standard.
… yay…
Oh dear Mithras you’re right. Now I’m sad. Whelp, time to watch the latest episode of Samurai Jack on Demand to cheer myself up and fool myself into thinking the world isn’t spiraling out of control.
Either I’m more optimistic, more uninformed, or more in denial than I thought.
If it’s the first or last one, I can work with that.
‘Everything is fine.’
They’re baked kitchen sponges, Leslie. Robin thought they were bran.
Panel 2: Ugh, that smug smile, believing this superficial act somehow makes them even and what she’s been doing to basically move herself in and remove all hope and options from Leslie. As if her actually being polite and a great roommate would in any way make up for how she has fucked over Leslie in so many ways.
She really is incapable/unwilling to see her actions in any real light and like Trump is entirely living in her own fictional reality she is trying to impose on the rest of us by force.
Also, meep on the electrical fire line. Again, I’m seeing why Leslie jumped on the first excuse to sprint home and didn’t feel like she could wait until the end of Becky’s shift, even while I can not support or abide her abandoning of class. It really was a realistic possibility she would have come home to a smoking wreckage and it sounds like she nearly did in the brief time she was gone.
Panel 3: So I get the desperation, but this. Meh, this is a not great moment of Leslie’s. Like we know that her actual initial motivation is a really positive one. Give a homeless queer youth a safe home and connection to her community.
But she’s still using that real genuine honest motivation like a club to beat a clue into Robin that Robin will not get because she still sees it in her best interest of avoiding a thing she doesn’t want to do to continue to buckle down and resist.
Like, I get her intention. Trying to be firm, set an ultimatum, show a proof of the new person coming in, show how the situation is no longer tenable, but I doubt Robin is going to accept it, because that’s still only words and Robin is the type of wealthy person who really does believe the universe bends to their whims and desires and that things work out for them because they deserve it.
Like, fuck, her response is so heartless and just tone-deaf that it’s clear she’s absorbed nothing about this in any meaningful way.
Leslie could have just canceled class if she was afraid of leaving Robin unattended. Then she wouldn’t have been in a position to run out on them in the first place.
She probably needed a Robin break, being near her is taxing, especially when she’s being horrible.
This. Robin was gaslighting her hard and when alone was heavily taking advantage of Leslie’s sexual attraction to her to manipulate her into giving in to Leslie’s psychological detriment.
Her staying in the house would have been tragically awful for Leslie and I get why she really didn’t want to return to the house alone. But yeah, she still should have cancelled class and I dunno, talked to a lawyer maybe? Have an open interview on her front step about the representative’s repeated boundary violations? Just gone somewhere for an hour or two (say down the road where she can see any fire trucks rushing to her house) just to get her head straight?
Like it would have sucked for Becky, but it would definitely have been the better decision professionally.
From what I’ve seen legal authorities don’t exist in this world. Which, bothers me. Just a hint of their existence would be cool.
They’re probably still searching for AG for questioning and I seem to recall sirens were heard when Ryan escaped Sal and AG.
Okay… but like… actual cops. Like Batman style.
We saw them during Toedad and now they’re looking for AG. Probably with a warrant for her arrest or for questioning.
From what I’ve seen, depending on where you live unless you’re a straight cis white man legal authorities might as well not exist.
*thinks* My interaction with the police has been minimal. Aside from being in car accidents. Also I think one scream at me when I was like 7 or something?
There’s a book about this!
(actually there are probably several books about this, but I only know about this one.)
A Colony in a Nation, by Chris Hayes.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2017/0321/A-Colony-in-a-Nation-describes-a-colony-of-the-unfree-within-the-US
Given Robin’s political status, any legal authorities can be assumed to be on her side by default. That’s not guaranteed, but something I’d be hesitant to test.
Frankly, I’d be tempted to either bodily throw Robin out again, but this time straight out the door to the media. Either that or just invite the media in – if anything will send Robin running, that’ll be it.
It’d work, but it’d be a nuclear solution as it would completely destroy any hope of privacy Leslie might have had, including having every part of her home life documented on if not national, certainly state level television to the point where it’ll be necessary to move.
I think Leslie is trying to exhaust any option that doesn’t require her to abandon the home she has carefully built for herself.
yeah no that is….exactly what has been going on here
robin overexcitedly enforcing her reality to the exclusion of all else
No, she’s not trying to beat a clue into Robin. She’s trying to get rid of her. She gave up on her getting a clue before. She already kicked her out, but she came back.
She did learn there’s some decency in Robin, so she’s trying to use that to get her to leave.
But, even if she were trying to try and hammer a clue into Robin, why would that be wrong? Sure, she might not listen. But that doesn’t make it wrong. And Becky chose to come along even after Joyce voiced the obvious objection to her Becky being used.
Leslie is trying to get rid of the abusive trespasser with power, and she’s trying to give a homeless person a place to stay. I cannot see how there is anything wrong with what she is doing.
Are you sure it’s not that you’re still upset from how she treated Roz? Because I will continue to note that you say things differently when Roz is involved. I honestly don’t recognize you.
I’m pretty sure what Cerberus is objecting to is holding up Becky as a prop for Robin to understand and leave because hopefully she has empathy (which did not pan out). That’s, I’m pretty sure, what she’s objecting to – using Becky. Yes, Becky agreed to be used, but that doesn’t mean others can’t think this is iffy given Robin’s propensity to be a huge asshole.
It also puts Becky more in Robin’s sights, which could go…really ugly places.
Okay, ouch. I’m sorry if I’m disappointing you, but ouch.
But yeah, I think her motivation and goals are noble and good and I don’t blame her that much for what she’s trying to do and I have a ton of sympathy for the really shitty situation she is in. Cause it’s really shitty and abusive and she’s not going to be at her best because no one is at their best when they are being gaslit and stalked.
And yeah, the consent given by Becky makes this a hell of a lot better than it would be otherwise. I’m just noticing a single panel offness that she quickly corrects by the very next panel.
Also, ouch.
Becky in the last panel tries to figure out if she is supposed to be turned on by that.
Also, I’m pretty sure Becky would accept “First licker” as a juridically binding case of DIBS, as ratified by 9 year olds everyehwere.
“I can’t sleep on your couch anymore? Oh, well, guess it’ll have to be the bed…”
Leslie you should probably go pick up some eggs and flour. You are a real grown-up, with a house and everything.
Or she either hasn’t picked up eggs yet or doesn’t like them. And maybe she doesn’t bake often, so there’s no mad scramble for flour.
When you live alone, you don’t really have hard and fast rules for when to get groceries.
I suspect that your assumptions about what being grown-up does and does not entail may be a bit broken. There are just as many reasons to not have either on hand without special need as there are to have them.
I am also a real grownup, who (like Leslie, until recently) lives alone. Eggs and flour are not on the list of ingredients for food I regularly prepare for myself (rice and pasta with sauce, mostly)
Having some flour is good for some sauces. Lot of things start with a roux.
I never realized people could have such strong opinions about egg ownership.
I mean non human eggs.
It’s not particularly strong, but how does she bake cookies!?
Panel 4: Now this is a better turn of Leslie’s. Less using the kid, more explaining the kid’s situation, trying to reach out to her empathy one last time in one last way to try and get through.
And that’s Leslie’s central tragedy. Part of her still so very much wants to reach through to Robin, to save her and help her become someone worth the massive crush she has on her. Still believes that there is some empathy deep within her that she needs to dig deeper to find.
And it breaks my heart, because no, Leslie, Robin very much lacks empathy for Becky’s situation or at the very least views it as beneath her immediate creature comforts and whims.
And I recognize it because I’ve been there. Begging for the love of my family, that our shared history would somehow, some way get through, that I could appeal to their empathy enough by bearing my scars so they would see me finally and acknowledge who I was. Getting hurt again and again because I kept wanting to get through.
It’s abusive. It’s an abusive relationship in many different ways, made all the more horrifying, because there is no easy escape for Leslie. Like, she can’t do what I did and what she did of just closing off communication and accepting disownment. Because Robin is a stalker and in her house.
And by being this immovable force, Leslie is forced into a situation usually only seen in domestic violence/abusive partner scenarios. Where Leslie may be forced to abandon her home, just to try and hide and get away from the representative who has no interest in letting her just have her private life now that she’s developed feelings for her.
So yeah, it’s a shit show and I can see why she’s clinging longer than she should to the hope that there is some extreme way to get through to her.
Also, I love momma Leslie making sure Becky doesn’t poison herself on Robin’s death muffins. She’s going to be such a good guardian for Becky if/when Leslie is able to extricate herself from her current nightmare.
Panel 5: And yeah, all the risks she took, the ways in which she has definitely fucked herself morally, professionally, and so on, have all failed to pay off, because Robin has no intention on surrendering her position of perceived comfort for anything and certainly not for the needs of another.
Becky’s situation is just added to her internal narrative and now Leslie has to be careful lest Becky be abused as well as the surrogate “daughter” to their “family”.
Also, Becky’s face in that last panel is amazing. Like “I’m disturbed and slightly aroused and definitely am not imagining sexy scalp-licking with my dino girlfriend right now”.
But yeah, the only thing this scenario might break is Leslie’s illusions that there is any peaceful resolution to this clusterfuck and I think we’ll see sooner rather than later her regretting dragging so many students into the mess of her current life.
Like, I have empathy for trying to teach when your life is collapsing around you, but that’s the breaks when you’re a teacher. You keep it more or less quiet and you push through when you can and take off personal days when you can’t.
I get her panic, but she’s going to have to make some firm and tough decisions tonight with regards to her next actions and how she’s going to make some of her mistakes right.
At the rate this is going, I don’t know what will stop Robin and give her a cold smack of reality. I’m also wondering with we’re going to find out if Joyce is ambidextrous with how dead towards Becky Robin is being. And honestly, maybe the DeSanto mother is going to have to get involved in order to get Robin to snap back to reality and out of “Robin Space”.
So, am I alone in seeing Robin tottering on the edge? About to fall into a viciously destructive mental/emotional breakdown?
I think its unarguable that Robin is not coping, to put it mildly – she must have dealt with attacks from the press before, but this time (tellingly) she has been utterly shattered by it.
Robin is mentally, emotionally and (literally) physically hiding out from reality here, casting aside her normal support groups and everything existing outside Leslie’s flat; clinging to the fantasy of Leslie’s affection like a drowning man to a rope.
Now that Leslie’s affection is withdrawn, that rope will vanish, and Robin will drown – and every recent action/inaction from Robin has only dug her in deeper and deeper, so the damage can get only get worse.
Of course, I get all the Robin hatred (in her time Robin’s been so callously egocentric she can probably generate her own gravity field) and I might be wrong; Cerberus is better at spotting these things. If I am right, though, its a bitter sight to see Robin punching down so hard on the self-destruct button. Schadenfreude only goes so far, and I’d guerss Robin’s collapse will hurt more than just herself.
*guess
Not alone. Robin is definitely going (or more accurately trying to push off) some serious changes.
Explains, but does not excuse, her behavior and her fixation on Leslie.
It’s all on top of her normal baseline near delusional grasp of reality and other people’s reactions.
Mm, I dunno maybe, but I see Robin as more just trying to impose her reality by fiat and by refusing to accept any information outside of that. So less woman on the edge, more Trump.
Like there’s sympathetic properties to it. She’s completely fucked her career and doesn’t want to face the consequences of that even though being a former representative means she’ll never have to want for easy high-paying work ever again in her life. She’s realizing she’s developing strong feelings for this college professor, but is in deep denial that that’s what this is and thinks that being the best wife will get her to overlook all her flaws and the fact that she broke into her house.
And there’s signs that some small things do bother her, like her reaction to Scarface working for her was strong and unequivocal. But overall, the intensity of her bad behavior and the weakness of her reasons for avoiding dealing with the reality of the situation make it hard to sympathize too much, at least for me.
And I see it as less of a mental breakdown of losing reality, because she’s not just insisting on a false reality, she’s actively trying to make a false reality where she gets what she wants without having to do anything she doesn’t want to do happen. And retains enough of her faculties to say know that she has multiple other homes she could be staying at to hide from the world and that she needs to come up with an excuse to discourage this new kid from occupying her space.
Like if anything we’re seeing the downfall of a pathological narcissist. Whether something decent or not can be salvaged from the ashes remains in doubt, but it’ll require real growth from Robin to occur.
Honestly this scenario reminds me a lot of a scenario that my girlfriend got trapped by recently. She has decided to move to a new apartment which was a very big deal for her that she was excited by and let her mom know about it so she could get her cat from her.
Her mom then decided that she needed a place and so decided to move in with my gf and so basically strong-armed her way into signing the lease with her and heavily leaning on guilt-trips and absolute refusal to accept any attempted boundaries all while abusing her the entire time.
My gf eventually had to find another new place in secret a year and a half later including securing roommates so there was no means by which her mom could force her way on the lease. Like Leslie, my gf tried a lot of tactics to get through to her mom that her mom needed to leave, all of which failed by her refusal to do anything she didn’t want to do.
So yeah… Leslie is not in a good safe place right now.
Damn, that sounds rough — please send, to your girlfriend, this internet stranger’s admiration for creating two spaces of her own, within two years. I hope she got to keep the cat.
Yup, and she’s way happier in her new place. I’m really proud of her for getting through and out of that hell.
Yay!
I agree with you 100%. Leslie’s right here in that Becky’s situation is more dire, and some assertion is appropriate here because Robin’s a rich entitled jerk with no grasp on the reality of the problems facing homeless kids, but I’m seeing people here rushing again to attribute the worst possible motives to Robin. Personally, I’m seeing less Evil Gaslighter and more realising that her presence here is imposing and wanting to do something as a thanks, but also being too used to lying for cameras to come out and say that, and also not really being in an emotional state to break down any walls vis a vis emotional vulnerability.
Which doesn’t actually mandate any action on Leslie’s part, but like, I feel for Robin in this situation a lot.
I think that’s her intention, but she’s really not checking in that she’s actually wanted and is sort of assuming consent that has been explicitly made clear.
Like I get that this is her attempt at a peace-offering/apology, but it’s like breaking into someone’s house to apologize to them after they told you to stay away.
Regarding Leslie’s central tragedy:
Robin reminds me very much of a Darth Vader Boyfriend, as described by Captain Awkward: ( https://captainawkward.com/2011/01/17/reader-question-4-my-friend-is-dating-someone-terrible-or-secrets-of-the-darth-vader-boyfriend/ )
“Luke, your dad is totally evil.”
“There’s good in him. I’ve felt it.”
“Luke, he blew up a planet just to make a point.”
“There’s good in him! I’ve felt it!”
“Luke, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but he severed your hand. From your arm. He cut it off.”
“Dueling to the death is just how we relate. You wouldn’t understand it. Now that we both have prosthetic robot limbs, it’s only brought us closer together.”
“Luke, he lured your friends into a trap so that he could murder them in front of you. We had to be rescued by Ewoks. It was embarrassing.”
“Yeah, that was pretty bad, I admit! But there’s good in him! I’ve felt it!”
And then Luke is risking his own life to carry Darth Vader out of the Death Star before it explodes so he can look up on that swollen purple face and experience one shining moment of real connection that would justify everything he’s invested in this completely dysfunctional relationship and he’s like “See? IT WAS ALL TOTALLY WORTH IT!” and even R2D2 is like “Whatever, the Ewoks are having a dance party, and I just can’t talk about this with you even one more time. Have fun with your collection of Ghostly Jedi Father Figures.”
——————————-
I mean, Leslie’s a Star Wars fan and everything, she’d totally get this analogy. I hope she figures it out better than Luke did.
(The analogy falls apart on Leslie’s end, because she isn’t falling for or excusing Robin’s BS, she’s trying to kick Robin out. But Robin totally wants their relationship to happen this way.)
Cerebus, I just want to say, I like you. 🙂 You are a really cool person with fascinating insights into this comic generally as well as specific incidents like this that I have been lucky enough to not have experienced in the same depths or at all, and I have learned a lot from reading your comments and I always look forward to them. It’s a shame we’re not in the same country because I’d love to buy you a coffee sometime.
Here, have some Internet muffins. They’re gluten-free, are awesome, and are not made from ground-up Froot Loops or whatever the hell Robin used. 😀
Ugh, more Robin being “wacky”…
Leslie’s doing something rather shitty here too, using Becky as a kind of prop to hopefully remove this home invader. That being said, if I was in here situation, I would be trying everything to get his home invader out of my house.
I mean, I would have also actually tried to call the police to get this home invader who broke back into my place after being forcefully evicted. I’m also still surprised we haven’t seen anything on the news about a local representative being thrown out of a house, then breaking into it shortly thereafter in full view of the media.
The police don’t exist in this world.
welp! calling the police is a definite escalation of the situation, and one that Leslie is not one hundred percent prepared for. like. she is a lesbian, and while she can count on more protections than a lot of other people, there’s a certain…level of distrust that is not unmerited. calling the police makes this a public thing, and robin is a person with a lot more power than leslie and who would probably win in court given that she has more money and better lawyers.
in addition to which there are a lot of cases of people being abused and just…not being believed, or of people reporting and then the stalker Upping the Ante because of *course* they’re not doing anything wrong, the victim is just overreacting. like. it’s that escalation thing. you escalating can lead to them escalating when the point is to kick the person out of your life as much as possible.
idk. complicated.
Yup, and that especially becomes more fraught when the person you are calling the cops on is a sitting politician with likely backers throughout the police department or who could lean on the folks funding the police department.
Like, just see some of the horror shows folks have been through just trying to prosecute the family of politicians who have wronged them and then think of how hard and rare it is for a sitting politician to actually be arrested during their time for cause.
Leslie has very good reason to believe involving the cops in this matter will go very poorly for her. It might still be necessary, but it’s definitely a nuclear step like inviting in the media or fully abandoning her home.
Not to mention that she is in tricky legal ground here. Her landlord gave permission for Robin to basically come in and move in, so now she’d have to sue her landlord regarding the fact that she did not consent to that, but that takes a lot of time and a lot of money.
Although, sh could argue that her landlord only let her in the first time – she had no further right to be in the house after Leslie threw her out the first time.
That said, again, that’d be something to argue to the police. Good luck, Leslie.
Oh she could argue that and honestly, precedent would mean she’d likely win that, but the police would likely punt it to the civil courts because less paperwork for them so it’d be a long time to prove that and settle that in court.
yeah like Gavin de Becker recommends calling the police literally as a last resort, but mostly as not effective for this reason!! What you have to do is either make sure that the person does not and cannot get what they are getting out of the exchange, or give them what they’re looking for (if it’s just like a one time thing) and then get them out of dodge. but that’s all just, like, with an average person.
like: if this gets too bad, Leslie is going to have to move out of her home, change her phone number, and maybe change her job so that Robin can’t find her. and even then that’s depending on whether or not Robin’s going to sink resources into finding her again. because what Robin wants, apparently, is to be Leslie’s fulltime roommate. and that’s neither fair or realistic or even a little considerate.
yechhh Robin is so nasty
The muffins are made out of Cadbury Eggs.
Pray they are made of potatoes.
(that would actually be pretty good)
(which is why it can’t be potatoes)
maybe this is just me but like
i don’t think that robin is wearing pants
…are we talking American pants or British pants
Yes.
im american but given the strong motif of muffins in this arc…i’m going to say yes
“– and not even you, Robin, lack enough empathy to take my couch from her.”
Wanna bet?
(Sorry to break it to you, Leslie, since you were clearly counting on this, but — you’re wrong.)
‘Here, hold my muffin tray and watch this.’
I hate Robin.
Becky, Leslie’s right. I don’t think that it’s possible to know in advance whether those muffins are safe for human consumption without the university’s chemistry department doing a whole sequence on them first!
Leslie’s learned an important lesson here: Yes, Robin can lack empathy to that point. That said… I still desperately want to know what Robin is hiding from. Because that really seems to be what’s happening here: She’s hiding from something or running away from something.
I vote for making Robin eat one first.
And then because Robin’s metabolism handling something doesn’t really prove that it’s in any way safe for normal human beings to eat, make Mary eat one too.
<q cite="<what Robin is hiding from“>
From where I’m sitting, she’s desperately trying to avoid admitting to the media that she kissed a girl and she liked it. Ruining her chances of re-election. Heck, a few months ago our time, she outright said the media is going to assume she slept with Leslie, so they might as well actually do the horizontal mambo.
And then they watched Steven Universe all night.
Why is anyone saying they hate Robin as though painstaking effort did not go into making her as unlikable as physically possible?
Her god-awfulness is not a bug, it’s a feature.
And her god awfulness makes her hated. Seems like a logical next step.
I suppose, but it would seem as though that was a given. I feel like you’d be so hard-pressed to find an apologist for her behavior you might as well just dive straight into details.
But then, I’m probably being way too optimistic about those chances.
Many still have residual affection for her from SP! We also assume that Willis is not actually making her into a full-scale villain. There’ve been enough sympathetic moments that it’s very likely this is a growth and redemption arc for Robin, not just a “Leslie beats the bad Representative” arc.
Because he’s also trying to make her a goofball punchline machine. It’s amazing how the quality of the script takes a nosedive the second she starts talking, because the rest of the strip is wonderful. It’s really hard to reconcile the disparate voices that join in Robin’s character, that of gaslighting selfish villian and A-HYUK hijinks.
I don’t see the problem. Sure, she’s an exaggeration, but I’ve met many people who do what Robin is doing. Rather than admitting her own awfulness, she tries to make everyone like her with humor and be wacky.
The way she tries to make everything into wacky hijinks only serves to make her seem more awful.
I would like Leslie in the final panel to be my gravatar forever plz kthx.
Ooooooh I love Robin and Leslie^^ I just want more of them every time, all the time!
obviously there HAD to have been muffin mix that you just add water to. Obviously. Must be.
So does President Bellthronk get co-author credit for Robin’s dialogue – great, GREAT! dialogue; BEAUTIFUL dialogue! – or what?
Does anybody who has experience with it think that Robin might have Histrionic Personality Disorder?
You need five of the following 8 symptoms to be possibly diagnosed:
1) Is uncomfortable in situations in which hither are not the centre of attention (Check. Robin always has to make things about Robin).
2) Interactions with others is characterized by inappropriate sexually seductive or provocative behaviour (Not really, unless we’re counting her subconsciously flirting with Leslie and the dick sucking pantomime earlier. I don’t think we should – she has a CRUSH on Leslie, I’m not surprised she’s flirting with her)
3) Displays rapidly shifting and shallow expressions of emotion (oh my lord, yes, you’d think she was allergic to depth of any kind).
4) Consistently uses her appearance to attract attention (I’d say we need to see more and maybe a tentative yes, as we know she uses glasses to get attention as a ‘smart person’ and ‘good first impression’, and her boob size to distract from her opponent’s mention).
5) Has a style of speech that is excessively impressionistic and lacking in detail (again, you’d think she was allergic to depth or detail).
6) Shows self-dramatization, theatricality, and exaggerated impression of emotion (holy shit, this is her MO).
7) Is suggestible i.e. easily influenced by others or circumstances (“Which real me do you want?” anyone?)
8) Considers relationships to be more intimate than they actually are (her and the Dean, her and Leslie, I’m sure we’d see more if given the opportunity).
So yeah, I’m seeing potential for 5 out of 8 of these and maybe tentatively 6 out of 8. What does everyone else think?
At least 6 of those are applicable to 99 of 100 politicians, and the 100th one is dead.
Can we please stop trying to excuse people who are colossal assholes by going “but maybe some of that is a mental disorder?”
Here is the thing though: Are we yet ready to contemplate this possibility: “Being a national-level politician in the modern world is in itself symptomatic of a serious mental or behavioural disorder”?
That is the exact opposite of what JBento asked for. C’mon, don’t be a jerk.
Pointing out people have mental disorders is not excusing them, so I don’t agree with JBento’s sentiments.
I actually believe that psychiatrists were derelict in their duty in choosing to not point out that Trump very obviously has a personality disorder–primarily Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Far from excusing him, pointing this out (including the symptoms) would show he was not mentally fit enough for the job. If he can’t admit his disorder, he cannot be trusted to think rationally.
No. No we’re not. Some people are just assholes, no PD or other MI required.
I’m not trying to excuse her, I was reading about PD’s and this one sounded familiar. Hence why I was asking if anyone with experience with it thought so or if there’s more to this disorder I was not getting. Even if she did have it, she’d still be an asshole.
mm, I think that you’re right in that diagnosing assholes with mental disorders is not really an excuse for the assholery, but like. it depends on whether or not you’re trying to find an excuse.
FOR EXAMPLE: a few months ago I was on twitter, and there was legislation coming through that was going to make it easier for mentally disabled people to get guns, and the resulting discourse was pretty much essentially “WOW WHY ARE YOU GIVING PEOPLE WITH MENTAL DISORDERS GUNS” in a…slightly more ableist way, that implied that people with mental disorders were more likely to shoot up places than people without. And, like, stuff like autism isn’t really a precursor for shootings? Probably depression; but mostly entitlement, or at least that’s the impression I’ve gotten.
So like – I think being more specific with mental disorders can only be a good thing, because it makes it easier to distinguish people with mental disorders from an overall umbrella of crazy. looking at the specific traits makes it easier to see a trend over time.
and, i mean, a lot of treatment for mental disorders is going to therapy, coupled with some medication, but mostly just strategizing around what you’ve already got going on. idk. I think that this kind of discussion makes it easier to identify what exactly Robin’s got going on, so that we can understand her better.
Lumping in all mentally ill people is bad, yes. But making it easier for mentally ill people to get guns suggests the same lumping. It shouldn’t be easier for mentally ill people in general to get guns, just for those who are not a threat.
And I say this as someone who has a mental disorder. But I also know I could never own a gun (other than as a keepsake sans bullets). And I know people like me who are not that self-aware.
honestly like – at this point everyone who can get a gun should have a full mental screening as well as education and limited access to bullets and specific kinds of hardware like. there is no purpose for an AK-47 in peacetime.
but like the ongoing narrative of shootings has been mentally troubled person with a gun and like – that’s not…a complete story……..
damn now i want to go do some more research on this, there’s a podcast with Sue Klebold that i’ve been meaning to listen to
Assuming that’s the legislation I’m thinking of it wasn’t generic “mental disorders”, but Social Security disability recipients who have been deemed unable to manage their own affairs due to “marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease”.
They are not necessarily any more violent, but not competent.
Not to worry though, Trump and the NRA killed it.
entirely possible!! my complaint here isn’t about the bill itself since i know basically nothing about it, but about the response to it.
which, ok, granted, twitter isn’t the most nuance-able site in existence, but it was still real grating, u know
I think there’s a difference between people diagnosing characters with PDs and the like because they see themselves in that character’s behavior and would also like representation,
and people diagnosing characters (and public figures) with PDs because that character is just too much of an asshole to possibly be neurotypical.
And on a meta level, Willis doesn’t even want to confirm that Amber has DID in part because he doesn’t want to imply that people with DID are violent, and Amber is a _protagonist_. So I seriously doubt that he wrote DoA Robin here with a copy of the DSM open.
I doubt that he did as well, especially upon further reading about it. Robin’s got some of the more common behaviours and is missing others. I was reading about PDs, and this one kind of reminded me of Robin, so I was wondering if anyone with more knowledge about it thought they were similar or not.
I guess the way that I look at it is as a reading. Like, reading Robin as someone with Histrionic Personality Disorder brings different aspects of her out into the light, and parallels it differently with real-world things. Robin herself isn’t going to change, because she’s a character in a narrative; but our understanding of Robin could get deeper and more profound with the added knowledge that that kind of psychological analysis brings to the table.
lol mostly I just like it because it explains so much about Robin, tho, and it makes me want to research Histrionic Personality Disorder
As mentioned in your list, the most significant trait I see in Robin is her lack – fear? – of depth. I don’t disagree that she doesn’t seem average but nor do I necessarily agree that she has a cleanly diagnosable mental illness. More like maybe she has some old psychological wounds she’s compensating for by trying to keep everything the greatest for herself.
I think that’s more likely upon further research about HPD, yeah.
I doubt anything like that is intentional. She’s more like a parody of politicians mixed up with some SP! Robin’s worst traits, taken a bit more seriously.
I don’t think she’s “crazy” in any kind of real mental illness way, but I can’t actually take her seriously as a character.
I think she’s got similarities, but doesn’t as many of the behaviours common in HPD people as I thought. Regardless, I’m fairly sure you’re right and those similarities are unintentional.
Possibly, but I’m pretty sure her douchery stems from other factors than her potential neuroatypicality.
Like her sense of entitlement roughly the size of Russia? Yeah, agreed. Folks with HPD also tend to be more seductive in their attention grabbing, so it’s probably not a good fit for Robin anyways.
Well, gee, who do I know who displayed most of those symptoms throughout most of his adult life (and presumably earlier, but I have no way to know)… I wonder…
sigh
I found this really interesting, because I’d say that all of these traits are a constant in Robin throughout her time in Shortpacked to here! idk, nobody writes in a vacuum, and whether or not this is intentional on Willis’ part it’s still a good perspective. like: I don’t think you’d have to know that you were writing someone with a mental disorder in order to write someone with a mental disorder, you’d just have to do that in order to do it purposefully.
And I mean! A lot of people walk around thinking that they don’t have mental disorders just because they can cope, or because they’ve found ways on their own to make it work for them. And that’s pretty valid, usually – if your experience of your own brain is nontraumatic and nonproblematic, you might not need therapy for it. Or maybe just want it, depends.
idk I think I’m more just taking it as a bunch of co-related traits that can be grouped into a thing, which is basically what it is. like. a lot of mental “disorders” are things that seem scary but aren’t that scary up-close – they’re just different means of processing and relating to the world.
They are actually a paste of crushed cocoa pops and butter baked until they are hard enough to hold in your hand.
This sounds like the most likely recipe thus far.
Next on Slipshine! Robin licks Leslie’s couch until it begs for mercy!
Notice the subtle Trump reference in panel 2 🙂
LESLIE’S FACE
Heheheheheh…. okay this is pretty satisfying, admittedly.
How is it that in a comic with the likes of Mary, Ross, whatever-the-fuck-Ruth’s-grandfather-name-is-’cause-I’ve-forgotten-again, Blaine, and Ryan, I’ve never wanted to punch anyone more than 2nd panel Robin?
Yes, this. Blaine is a close second, but ugh, second-panel Robin…
Oh, it’s because she’s reminding me of Trump. That might do it.
Because she’s trying to pretend she’s just wacky and perfect.
There’s something worse about someone who is awful but then tries to pretend the exact opposite. Even people who defend their actions are less infuriating than people who just ignore the criticism.
That said, I’ve wanted to punch all of them except Robin. With Robin, I more want to have her entire worldview crash down around her.
Got them in the neighbour fridge.
Robin: ‘I made them with my love nectar!’
Rest In Peace Miyu Matsuki aka Anna from Shimoneta.
TIL: Real Adults™ have flour and eggs at all times. AT ALL TIMES. If you run out of either of them, you temporarily regress to teenagerhood until you can hit the store for more. I can’t have gluten, so I suppose I’m stuck in a weird limbo for the rest of my life.
Yeah, I’m about to scramble up my last three eggs for breakfast, so I guess I’m locked out of any 18+ sites until I go get some more.
“Welcome to the Brewhaus website! You must answer the following question to prove you’re of age: How many eggs do you have in your fridge right now?”
real adulthood isn’t about having flour and eggs in your kitchen at all times; it’s about being able to deal with the fact that you don’t have flour or eggs and either sucking it up or getting some more
maybe real adulthood is the friends we made along the way
Has Willis ever given us examples of voices? I mean, I’m imagining Leslie as some…I can’t explain it, but yea, any pointers on how the characters are supposed to sound in our heads?
>Licked the couch
Now I know robin has some of Leslie’s dirty panties in her pockets. Fucking ew.
Yes. In her ‘pocket’. Yes. That’s exactly where. *cough*
For some reason (can’t imagine why) I am reminded of this Onion parody from 2012.
Crushed and broken beneath an unconscious, naked child…
The perfect end to a GOP Congressional Caucus play party.
Oh, and in case that wasn’t clear enough, I should mention that Dragonball Z Abridged has been restored on YouTube.
Is it me or am I not the only one to notice that Willis’ art today is partially channeling “Archie Comics”? Especially Panel 2 of Robin (and Panel 3, but less so).
So, if Robin licked the entire couch, does that mean that anyone that sits on the couch also has been licked by robin? And does this mean that robin plans to geaduate from the couch to the bedroom? Will there be more licking involved?
“licked” is not a transitive property.
She ain’t bluffin with that muffin
And I don’t know what she’s stuffin’
I like Robin in panel 2.
honestly: at this point: I think that Robin should buy Leslie a new couch. ideally, if Leslie got her to do it, but I would take just about anything so that that woman doesn’t have to own a couch that Robin licked
wtf robin how long did that even take
Buying her a couch suggests forgiveness. Just get rid of her.
Also, I could easily believe she didn’t lick it at all, and is just saying that the way a bratty sibling might.
That’s the vibe she’s going for.
i mean, yeah??? i could see Robin lying about this? but on the other hand she’s bratty enough of a sibling/potential romancer that she would actually. do it. i would not put it past her. the licking zone has commenced. get. licked.
and, i mean, buying her a couch could equally just be a sign of compensation for infringing on leslie’s time and space. as an apology, or something!! but also because couches cost money, money leslie would have to spend, and it is literally the least robin could do if she actually did this thing
to wit:
when les is gone,
my sweetest bean,
i gaz at whate
we might have been
while cameras schoot
and newsmen sware
i mak my peaz
i linger there
i du not hyde
i du not crouch
i mak my mind
i lik the couch.
Nah, see, Les, it’s genius! She took all the non-marshmallow bits of the Lucky Charms and blended them into dust, because -they- have flour in them, right? It’s brilliant and economical use of the worthless part of the cereal!
Finding eggs was tricky, though. By the way, if you go outside, watch out for the sparrows. They’re in a foul mood.
I have a dilemma. I enjoy this web comic, but I get very uncomfortable with Willis’ promotions of his other works. These promotions seem to be getting more obvious then they have been in the past.
I like my kids to eat.
Fair enough. I won’t say anymore about it.
in the walyverse robins superpower is super speed. here, she has the power to summon flour and eggs
I have headcanon that Robin is an Olympic gold medalist in this world which helped brought her to office in the first place
Sorry to disappoint you, Leslie, but Robin really is that much of a fucking conga.
I am genuinely surprised we have never seen this side of Becky’s face before…. that or I never noticed the transparent hair..
My immediate thought was “does Leslie *have* baking supplies running around the house?”