“Technically, we’re saying she’s secretly one of ours.”
Okay, this bugs me. Not for metatextual reasons–not faulting Willis for anything–but in terms of 1. the text itself and 2. how I expect (and have seen, on Patreon) the commentariat react to it.
Now, it’s possible Ruth means “ours” as in “all three of us”, but her body language makes me doubt that. Which means she means “one of mine and Billie’s, as opposed to one of yours.”
So let’s run through this real quick. Carla is transgender, asexual, and heteromantic.
1) Are Billie and Ruth claiming they think Mary is trans? No.
2) Are Billie and Ruth claiming they think Mary is asexual? No.
3) Are Billie and Ruth claiming they think Mary has a romantic crush on a woman? Yes.
4) Is having romantic feelings for women part of Ruth, Billie, and Carla’s orientation? Yes.
Therefore, are Billie and Ruth arguing Mary is “one of” a group that includes Carla? Yes.
Now, look. If Ruth and Billie think that Mary just wants to fuck Carla, no romantic feelings included, then fine, Ruth’s not saying anything wrong. But Ruth and Billie have not disambiguated whether they think Mary’s feelings are sexual or romantic, likely because for them, sexual and romantic feelings generally overlap.
So. How much of Carla’s whole deal does Ruth know? Ruth knows that Carla is trans, obviously. Is Ruth just saying “she’s one of ours” because, to her, Carla is accusing them of thinking Mary’s transgender? Possibly.
But if Ruth knows that Carla’s asexual, that changes things drastically. Because the broader queer community has a lot bound up in shuffling aces out of queer spaces, and adds some real unintended bite to the phrasing there.
And if Ruth knows that Carla’s homoromantic, than making Carla part of an outgroup is just an unambigiously mean thing to do, and I don’t know why on earth Ruth regards it as any kind of defense of her and Billie’s little thought experiment.
—
Now, I’d like to take a moment to point out that a lot of folks in the Patreon comments used “Carla’s ace!” as a defense. Which, hey, funny, Carla’s asexuality hasn’t come up in Dumbing of Age yet. You could only possibly know that from reading Shortpacked!–which, oh, hey, lookie here, put Ultra Car in a long-term relationship with a woman and had her outright say she’s homoromantic. So yeah.
I think she Ruth meant they were calling Mary a lesbian. Since Carla hasn’t had her orientation outed, as far as I’m aware, they likely assume her to be straight. At least, that’s my interpretation of the whole thing.
It’s also possible that Ruth is assuming Carla is trans but heterosexual; if she isn’t aware of Carla being asexual (and homoromantic), then it’s not unusual for people to assume otherwise since society tends to be heteronormative. Thus, to Ruth, ‘one of yours’ would be that Mary is trans, ‘one of ours’ would be that Mary is attracted to women.
If Ruth does know that Carla is asexual, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was unaware of the distinction between -sexual and -romantic.
Ruth might actually be assuming Carla is straight.
I think the closest Carla has come to saying anything about her own orientation is when she told Ruth that she gets her and Billie because “Girls are super cute. And I should know, cuz I am one.” Which really doesn’t say anything about her own orientation at all.
Personally I think Ruth thought Carla meant ‘transgender’ and that by ‘ours’, Ruth was referring to bisexuals because Mary likely still has an interest in guys as well in this hypothetical which Carla does NOT.
“I think she meant he threatened in public to kill her.”
“Oh.”
In this case, I believe the simplest answer is Ruth and Billie presumed Carla was part of the larger GBTL community. Unfortunately, that’s a bit presumptuous as you should never presume solidarity.
yeah, that would make sense: “we’re not claiming she’s homoromantic; we’re claiming she’s biromantic.”
although has Mary actually shown any sign of romantic interest in DoA, even in regard to guys? otherwise there’s no reason to think she couldn’t be homoromantic.
Sexualities have been said by David Willis to carry over from the past universes and I think she was involved with a guy in one before. I can’t remember if she has ever specifically said so in this universe but her general negative response to queer people previously could have indicated to people that she was attracted to guys so it may be that they are just assuming she is interested in guys to start with and has added to that by being interested in females now too. They’re still assuming to start with though so the reasoning doesn’t have to be perfect anyway.
While I appreciate the depth here and agree that you can find a lot wrong with what Ruth is saying here, I’d also put forth that Ruth is allowed to be wrong. Ruth has a lot of wrong notions and bad ways to deal with things that she’s still working through and if anything this strip is once again reminding us that what Ruth and Billie have hasn’t been healthy since the word “go.”
And just to elaborate here a little, I think this is a big part of why representation beyond tokenism matters. The more queer characters there are in a work, the less burden there is for all of them to express these things in ideal terms. A token character has all the burden of representation placed on them and that’s an impossible standard. When you’ve got such a spectrum of queerness expressed in a work like Dumbing of Age you’ve got room for people to be wrong, to have mistaken ideas, unhealthy notions, and for them to learn by seeing what other people have that works.
Personally I think it’s realistic to say that gay people aren’t always the best trans allies. That they don’t always understand trans issues, and that what they think they know can cause more subtle harm than people who are more overtly transphobic.
Y’know, I didn’t say she wasn’t! I’m totally okay with this strip as it exists, I just wanted to deconstruct it a little. Other folks talk about how and why behavior in this strip is unhealthy all the time and no one’s ever like “why are you saying characters can’t be flawed” so frankly I’m a little taken aback by this reaction.
I don’t know if you mean just the comment you’re replying to or all of the replies you’re getting so I wanted to clarify that my comment was just floating another possibility, not me insisting that you’re wrong.
I took Ruth’s ‘ours’ to mean just Ruth and Billie’s, or in other words, toxic to those she cares about… but on a second read I’m having trouble pinning down an interpretation.
I think I’m misunderstanding you somehow, but I’m stumped as to how, so I’ll just say: I think Ruth is saying “ours” as in “we’re all into girls”, rather than referencing specific labels. She’s just reminding Carla, “We aren’t straights trying to foist bigotry off on closeted gays. We’re gay, too.”
I’m not saying she’s cool for doing this. She and Billie have the bad shipping goggles on.
I think that Carla’s rant was about people often stating to her that transphobic Bogota are just closeted trans people, and Ruth is saying “technically we think she’s a closeted homo/no/pansexual”, for the sake of that argument. That “ours” assumes Carla is not attracted to females which is while still wrong, somewhat more understandable especially given the ambiguity of the pronoun “ours” and the context.
> Now, it’s possible Ruth means “ours” as in “all three of us”
I am strongly of the opinion that this is the case. In panel 2 where she has her finger up, I am picturing that that finger is going in a circle (albeit there are no action lines to indicate that, but that is nonetheless how I read the action). She’s saying that they’re not disclaiming Mary as Carla’s people, but in fact claiming Mary as Carla’s+Billie’s+Ruth’s people.
She could be saying ‘ours’ as 1 assuming all girls in this onvo are lesbians, 2 knowing or guessing carla isnt a lesbian referring to billie and herself, or 3 being canadian and not knowing exactly why a phrase might be not pc making someone upset for a bullshit reason. Quite likely 1 & 3. Or even more reasons
knowing or guessing carla isnt a lesbian referring to billie and herself
Neither she nor Billie are lesbians, and both of them know it (though Billie prefers eschewing labels, and Ruth isn’t sure where she fits, last she spoke on it, both are bi by word of god, and Walkyverse precedent).
” If Ruth and Billie think that Mary just wants to fuck Carla, no romantic feelings included, then fine, Ruth’s not saying anything wrong. But Ruth and Billie have not disambiguated whether they think Mary’s feelings are sexual or romantic, likely because for them, sexual and romantic feelings generally overlap.”
so if it’s just a physical thing with no emotions involved it’s fine but if it isn’t… what?
… Was that a pun? With, like, a German accent? Because I agree either way, but I can’t help but chuckle at the idea of German Carla just getting exasperated at these losers.
She’s of Dutch lineage, one of the more festive nothern European cultures (I am told).
But, yeah, a flustered German is funny. It still is a decent go-to for laughs, also. And I wish I’d learned enough of the tongue from my great grandma to do it for lulz.
To be fair, I once did the “mean to someone because I like them” thing.
I was six, she was my neighbor’s babysitter, she was pretty, my insides felt all twisty and I didn’t know what to do.
Clearly the answer was be a little tambourine.
Yeah, how would that work? Are we talking, like…Frankenstein-ing puppies into one kitten? Or like gluing a bunch of puppies into the shape of a giant kitten?
You like monkeys, you like ponies,
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much?
Maybe I used too many monkeys…
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?
I’d pay to watch Carla watch and react to Glee.
(I thought of this in response to a specific Glee storyline, but really the whole eventual mess that was Glee, with Carla’s commentary? Yes please.)
I love Glee with all the passion of someone who would hate every single member of that group in real life. Ironically, making me exactly the kind of person who would be in that group.
As a show, I love Glee. It’s campy, it’s unintentionally surreal, it’s a trashfire, it’s great. One of the “lessons” of a season 1 show was unambiguously, “binge drinking is fun and hilarious!” and “it’s ridiculous to expect teens to not drink at parties.”
Also, in regards to bullying, the show shifted from “tossing other students in a dumpster is something students do here sometimes and nobody is fazed” to “insults are so awful a student will transfer schools over them.” Which would be valid if the first thing hadn’t happened. After that, it’s like, hey, writers, pick a tone and stick with it please? But then tonal dissonance became part of its’ charm too…
But, er, in real life? All of those students would be terrible and all of the teachers would be fired. I really hope no irl teens found the teens of Glee to be good role models, because, holy frig.
The reality is that Mary has been like this to everyone. Carla is describing what SHE is seeing of it, in terms that are a bit self centered. And, as with a game of telephone, it’s being interpreted differently from how it was meant to be. This gives way to conclusion jumping, etc.
Shit, we can’t let word of the secret wars get out. Containment agents are needed here for all people who have viewed this webpage, followed by a deletion of this specific comment thread.
Just another way of putting the old cliche (that isn’t even true, a lot of the time) that every homophobe is actually deep in the closet. (No, some people are just terrible.)
Oh but by insisting all the awful legislation comes from people who are closeted, folks get to pretend that GLBTIA+ are all just oppressing themselves!
(I wish I remembered where I read that because I didn’t put that together myself.)
Mind you, there’s also the benefit of pointing out that many homophobes are massive-massive awful hypocrites. It’s just unfortunate that did more to destroy their credibility than the fact they were hate preaching bigots.
Well the theory that homophobes are closet cases seemed to explain the one totally inexplicable thing about homophobes: Why they invest so much energy into something that’s none of their fucking business and are so worked up about something that has no relation to them.
But when you look at other instances of people going out of their way to make someone know they hate them the theory doesn’t seem to hold water.
Sorry no, all those guys sending death threats to Anita Saskeesian are not secretly in love with her. They feel threatened by her poking holes in the narratives of their favorite games and asking them to be accountable for what they play at.
I still use the argument sometimes to make slight homophobes uncomfortable.
Hm, maybe someone pointed out to Mary that people will think she’s queer if she keeps harassing queer people?
Yup, and hell there a lot of homophobes who are closet cases to one degree or another, because well a lot more people are some flavor of queer than they’d care to admit. So for folks who haven’t thought much about the unspoken exceptions in their attractions or the blurry edges of their gender identity, there can be a lot of pressure to angrily deny it and get invested in shutting up the people that make you unsure about things.
And there’s certainly a lot that resonates in much of the anti-gay rhetoric – recruitment narratives, resisting temptation, etc.
It all makes much more sense if the people coming up with those ideas are struggling with temptation themselves. It’s certainly not everyone who’s homophobic – many have just absorbed the cultural prejudices.
There’s enough out there for it to make sense though.
Not so much on the individual attraction level maybe – at least once you’re past the middle school level of romance.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s okay to use the argument even to make homophobes uncomfortable. The “Haha homophobes are all secretly gay!” is still a homophobic joke.
I’m not jumping on you here, as I don’t know the context of your use of the joke. I’m just voicing my thoughts on the conversation, and you made a good person to reply to.
I’m not sure which way your thought turn here. I don’t see the joke anywhere in it. If people I have reason to have contact with show homophobic attitudes I might toss the argument around to make them think about why there are so invested in expressing disapproval about something that shouldn’t be any of their business.
And I think some gay guy I once knew proposed it as a distraction tactic when being hounded by a group of homophobes, to pick out the leader and say “hey you liked it last week at (specific place)”.
Don’t know if that was an actual event or hyperbole, though.
Gay bashing is less widespread in Germany than in the US and was even in the 90ties
Yes, there’s no joke with the closeted homophobic man gunning down a bunch of other gay men. It’s still someone destroyed by society and working against society’s narrative.
And plenty of hateful bigots just invest their time and energy into fighting “The other” because society tells them they are evil. I was a fundamentalist homophobe before my “not an asshole” religious conversion. I devoted a lot of energy before God told me to knock it off and I realized I was the only one doing evil.
I agree with Carla, but I can’t help but be distracted by how frigging cute she looks here. The facial expressions, the outfit, and I kinda like how she’s tall.
Put it another way: just because a boy pulls on a girl’s pigtails, it does not indicate automatically he is in love with her. Acts of malice and violence are sure as hell not acceptable forms of courting.
Honestly? I think it can be a thing that happens. I experienced it. What needs to happen then is for kids to be taught that that’s not an acceptable way to express their feelings, rather than telling the kids who experience the meanness that it’s because the other party likes them, like that makes it a good thing.
I concur. If kids act this way, sit them down and say that’s not right. Telling the recipients it’s because the initiators like them is just setting them up for worse things later in life.
Mind you, I met my wife because we had passionate and long arguments over the Anita Blake forum. She was horrified to discover that I became attracted to her because she was such a good arguer. The idea someone viewed arguments as a good thing was alien to her worldview.
I mean boys don’t get the best socialization vis a vis feelings and the healthy expression thereof so it’s not super surprising they end up expressing them in unhealthy ways. Attention from your crush is attention from your crush when you’re 8 and nobody teaches you otherwise.
Maybe Mary has a crush on Joe? He’s demonstrated her preferred type of alpha masculinity, and she might have been rated highly on the list. If he wrote a few insults she approved of (“We both hate the same people!”), especially if he didn’t include Carla, she may think she’s found The One (after he converts).
And her crush just gave her a doughnut. Remember how intoxicating that feels?
The dough’s a bit tougher – about like a baguette.
And it sometimes has stuff either sprinkled over, and baked into, the top, or mixed in all the way through.
They’re denser than white bread, and even plain bagels have some flavor to them. Most of the time you’ll find them with other grains or dried onion mixed in the dough, or they’ll be topped with something like poppy seed. They’re typically served with cream cheese.You can even find some that taste like french toast, with veins of spice running through them (but skip the cheese).
My favorite are sourdough topped with pretzel salt. They taste like the giant, doughy baked pretzels they have in malls and movie theaters.
Even while the exception is right there with her… I do agree with Carla. Generally speaking, if someone is hurting you… they don’t love you. And if they do… that is still NOT how you want to learn to accept “love”. And that is not behavior to allow or encourage… because the shover will continue to “show their love” that way, forever. Billie and Ruth’s relationship was not exactly healthy there at the start, but thankfully they’ve gotten more openly caring about each other… as they thankfully learned. But it will never change the fact that their abusive behavior towards one another was and is 10,000 ways of wrong.
Besides, we’re talking about Mary. She’s got something going on that she’s about to hold over someone’s head, or at least feel superior to them all.
Carla has the big problem of dealing with people who do not live in the same universe as her. Also, Ruth and Billie are a weird sort of exception where their toxic suicide love became nurturing.
Ruth and Billie’s relationship STILL isn’t healthy, I’d say. They’re both deeply messed up people, and I have never been convinced that they’re better off together than they would be apart.
Nah, she’s just being snappy and irritated because this kind of assumption is irritating as hell and having the one example of it being true in front of her is even more annoying as it undermines her points even though they are all valid and 99% of the time true and even in the exceedingly rare case that ‘the shoves are loves’ that does not mean that is an acceptable way to express affection or love to somebody.
I think it also makes her look foolish because spoke her argument without considering the audience. The floor being a pile of examples of bad relationship behavior that has somehow worked out.
Expensive, you say? I… uh, wouldn’t know that. Nope! Nosireebob!
(but by “tabletop”, the first thing I think of is board games… which often come with their own type of minis included, now that I think about it. All those years of Milton Bradley wargames with my Dad (Hit The Beach, Axis & Allies, Fortress America, Shogun, etc) and never really considered that those are a type of minis game.)
I mainly responded to Cholma to ask what game(s) those corner minis are for, but I’ll also just add the rest of my comments on this line here to save time.
How expensive minis are/were really depends what you buy/bought and when. For example the pewter D&D ones I have from the ’80s were really expensive when you consider their cost adjusted for inflation and everything GW has always been massively expensive in the US (not sure about elsewhere) meanwhile the Bones line from Reaper is really cheap for their value (nice quality white resin minis). Now printed books are a massive expense anymore regardless.
Board games, good ones anyway, are not usually all that cheap either (A Feast for Odin is down to around $80 from the about $100 when it came out).
That said, there is no gaming hobby that costs quite like the old CCG cycle. Around 20 years ago I spent about $400 in a year on MtG just to get a couple casually competitive decks running, that’s about $600 in todays money and the cards themselves were worth around that last I checked their valuation.
And this is why shipping real life people is abhorrent. It ignores all the horrible factors and only includes the ones the shippers find cute, with no concern for how the actual people themselves are affected.
Yeah, and it can get really nasty and presumptive as people’s tastes go in directions the shippers didn’t have in mind. The webcomic Rain had a really good plotline about how folks at the school were shipping the ace character Chanel with a random tall guy and how much their teasing was hurting her and making her feel unsafe.
Isn’t shipping fictional by definition? Even literal RPF (real person fiction), as I understand, doesn’t presume to actually get its subjects together as part of its definition.
The thing that happens in real life is called “matchmaking”. Unwanted matchmaking has been happening since the dawn of time and wasn’t invented by fangirls on the internet.
I want to +1 this because while I enjoy the “calling every hobby or interest a fandom, because it helps normalize fandom as a concept” (the sports fandom, for example), I really dislike calling matchmaking and interfering in real people’s lives “shipping”, because it really feels like it’s shifting the blame to fangirls for something they almost never do.
All the people who ever teased me about feelings they were sure I had for boys were also people who would never have been caught dead shipping fictional characters. It feels like there’s really very little crossover here.
Sorry if this is too tangential, but what is your opinion on Real Person Fic regarding celebrities? I only recently learned about it because I guess a One Direction fic is being published by Random House or something, and one of the band members and his irl fiancee are (were?) vocally upset about it, but they don’t have grounds for a defamation suit.
I’ve heard a lot of people say they’re over-reacting and over-sensitive, and it’s akin to being angry and wanting to sue over a negative album review, but it feels different to me. But, also, I’m not very involved in fan fiction communities, so maybe there’s an element that I’m missing.
I’m not the person to ask, because I find RPF kinda Squick. As do the majority of shippers. They’re a bit of an ostracized sub-group of shipping.
I will say that I’m not completely sure how it differs from historians publishing histories that INSIST real people were in _fill in the blank_ relationship or of _fill it in again_ sexuality, which includes straight; I kinda think that people would feel differently about that fic if it were pairing the band member with a random woman instead of a band mate, when I don’t think there is a material difference between those things.
I think it’s kind of rude and weird, and I would never do it, but also he’s going to marry that woman and no amount of weird published slash fic will change that.
(See also: Tom Cruise being hounded by rumors that he’s gay through the 80s and 90s. IS the fanfic actually different from that, or is it just being treated differently?)
Also, as was said above me, RPFers still almost never actually attempt to pressure the people into actually dating, which is where the difference still lies in this situation.
People can be EXTREMELY weird and invasive about celebrities; it’s only gotten worse since Twitter gave us an unfiltered way to talk to them directly. You see obsessed fans being creepy, and they get a lot more notice than all but the most violent obsessed fans did back before Twitter, so I think it seems like it’s getting worse but I don’t think it actually IS.
Just more public.
Whether published RPF is any materially different from a tell-all unauthorized biography full of defamatory rumors, I don’t know. I feel like the RPF probably has a standard disclaimer on it about being a work of fiction, and that might actually make it LESS libelous than the biography.
*you can see my wires crossing up there about whether or not people are getting “worse” about celebrities. I meant that I don’t think there are more people who would attack a celebrity in RL, or who would kidnap them because “we’re in love”. But Twitter definitely gives the average slightly creepy fan an opportunity to be creepy where the celebrity can see them, instead of having to send letters that get screened.
Shipping is supporting the idea of a couple, matchmaking is trying to get that couple to actually be a couple. So you can absolutely ship two violently homophobic murderers of gay teens as a gay couple, but trying to actually get them to date each other would likely get you violently murdered.
Don’t know why I said “maybe maybe” (sounds like an early 90’s song or a shitty 80’s band), but all the same, there certainly isn’t any maybe maybe about it.
We may not want to assume all homophobes are secretly queer…come on…I know these two aren’t up to date on lgbt history and culture…but as queer women don’t support that old LGBT homophobe in the closet trope.
I’m glad Carla is smarter then that
Having unfortunately known plenty of people who fit either that bigot because closeted trope or that of being out, proud and still a homophobic shit stain* I can’t just simply write the possibility off out of hand. That said, from my second hand experience, having had to watch friends deal with relationships with such people, it’s never a good thing for the people they end up with and such relationships rarely seem stable and even more rarely last any really significant time.
*Also, by the by, people who are this flavor of out and proud member of the LGBT community yet also raging homophobic bigots are about the worst experience to deal with as a straight cis person who supports the LGBT community (only thing I find worse is LGBT people who are als racist and try to use their gender and/or sexuality as a shield from repercussions from being racist) because whether you call them out on shit they spew or no you’re leaving yourself open to an avalanche of BS.
This isn’t relevant to the strip, but can somebody tell me if getting a Slipshine account is worth it please? I really want to see the extra strips but the amount of money needed is extortionate. Would the number of strips available on it for DoA make it worthwhile, or would it be quite a short reading? Because I’m unlikely to go back to reading Slipshine once I’ve finished the DoA bits, so it would be great if I could know how long I’d be kept reading.
Also, just so this comment is at least partly related to today’s strip, I have to admit I like the idea of Mary and Carla. Please don’t get me wrong, I know that would be super effed up in numerous ways and on an intellectual level I would have been disappointed in Willis if he had gone down that road, but my base instincts can’t help themselves. For some inexplicable reason I find the Slap-slap-kiss dynamic to be adorable, at least on an emotional level.
I don’t have slip shine, but there are several DoA stories up, Welcome to the Fuck Zone is weekly, and he’s working on a new one currently. I’d wait for the new one to be up, take a look at what else is available, and then decide if I wanted to stay.
It’s definitely a YMMV kinda situation, but personally I found myself disinclined after seeing their price until Willis has quite a bit more on there or they just have more stuff I’m more than merely passingly interested in. Funny enough if Willis were to publish a book containing all of his currently extant Slip Shine comics for the same price I’d bite, but that’s more because someone whose work I’m deeply invested in would get all the profits.
There’s probably close to 200 Willis pages on there by now, mostly DoA but a couple of Shortpacked stories too. I’ve bought in for a month every year or so, but haven’t kept the subscription up.
No, it’s just poor Carla does not understand how true love works. It is an expression of hate born of anger, violence, and despair. Only when you want them to die do you know you can’t live without them.
-Billie, Taylor Swift, and Anakin Skywalker.
Mary is being nice for completely unrelated reasons to everything that’s going on st the moment. Whatever has her in good spirits will likely have zero impact on the story. Like, a sibling is getting married or she got a new Bible or something.
Unless I’m wrong and she’s still a cliche, so she’s plotting on reveling on something awful.
Personally I’d prefer if Mary was just showing other side of her. Doesn’t male her less of a beeyatch but it gives her depth, kinda.
Certainly not a crush on anyone ever, though. Please.
I like this and I think this is probably accurate. The whole Mary/Joe thing is the explanation that makes the most sense out of all the speculations I’ve seen… and it still doesn’t make sense to me. She is SO annoyingly, restrictively Christian; I can’t imagine her being happy to be on a “do” list. If she’s running around spreading queerphobia like she has, it seems to me that she would probably also condemn Joe’s promiscuity.
I like the idea that this is genuine and feel that this theory is supported by the fact that her facial expressions look genuinely, well, genuine, to me. She isn’t drawn with that sinister twinkle in her eye, like she has something up her sleeve. I think that if she has decided to be nicer/had a revelation of some sort, that would be cool character development. It also might be realistic that she hasn’t quite gotten it all together enough to realize that apologizing for past behavior is crucial for wiping the slate clean and starting fresh with people.
Unrelated, but it will have an impact. Mary is wearing Chekov’s clothes. It matters, but not in the way we think it does. DYW is too good at narrative for it not to matter and he knows us to well to give is what we want or expect.
IT IS TIME AGAIN FOR ONE OF MY AWKWARD QUESTIONS :TOOT:
Isn’t Billie and Ruth’s relationship kinda-sorta-not-healthy? Sure, they are co-dependant on each other but on the other hand the relationship has a LOT of violence.
The way it started was absolutely not healthy, but all except the pre-relationship violence has been entirely consensual. Plus, they’re getting healthier all the time, and are really open and supportive of each other.
Not awkward at all. You’re right, it wasn’t healthy at all. I think . . . I think it started getting healthier when Ruth asked Billie not to let her die.
I know I’m in the minority, but I’ve never been behind Ruth and Billie as a couple. I’d be relieved if they broke up. I think they make each other’s issues worse.
I’m calling it. Mary’s happy because she also put in for a room transfer and will now be rooming with Billie, thereby leaving this dorm and gaining further ability to make Billie’s life hell outside Ruth’s jurisdiction.
…I really hope I’m wrong.
As interesting as that twist would be, I highly doubt that Mary could get a room transfer that quickly. Billie only got moved to the top of the waiting list out of urgency.
Panel 1: It is a tale as old as time. As I noted in my comments yesterday, there’s a strong romantic comedy narrative surrounding the bitter rival enemies to strong romantic lovers arc.
That common narrative that the more two characters hate each other, the more likely it is that those characters are going to be the strongest couple in the end where they fight all the time but “truly love each other”. And a lot of the works it shows up the most in are children’s stories and cartoons.
How many cartoons for younger kids have the fighting couple be the ending couple? How few are like Steven Universe’s Steven and Connie where the relationship mostly arises through kindness and mutual support?
We’re very literally trained to read narratives of hate turning to something else as narratives of love blooming and a larger connection. And I’ve noted in the previous day deconstruction how this is a very dangerous narrative for trans women and ace women in how hateful attraction to us can go very very fatally badly for us.
So it’s understandable why Carla has no time for this shit, but it’s also understandable why Billie would be enamored with said narrative. Because well, her and Ruth’s origins were horrible. I’d argue they’ve built a relatively healthy relationship, but the origins were awful and they still have a lot of crap they are working through.
And those origins definitely followed the mold of the abusive authority figure terrorizing you because she secretly loved you and couldn’t deal with those feelings and so for Billie, she’s likely remembering that and romanticizing it.
Billie is much more of a romantic than she lets on.
I think another reason to tend to want to see conflict as budding romance is that it neatly solves a messy problem. Of course, the majority of times it IS a conflict all it does is to move the responsibility of solving the conflict to the victim.
Actual conflict is messy and often needs the involvement of an authority figure of some kind and in a bigoted system, often times there is no justice for abused marginalized groups if that abuse comes from someone with greater social power.
But if it’s all a courtship dance, if it all resolves naturally as they realize their mutual chemistry then there’s no need for actual intervention or all that effort, because it’s just two people flirting before settling in for love.
Thanks for pointing it out! I had strong feelings for someone who was abusive and growing up around the narrative of “conflict turns into love” resulted in me taking a REALLY long time to figure out how awful they were to me.
I think the tsundere archetype (especially in anime) also has its toots in wish fulfillment. Of course there’s a kind of person who thinks girls who hate them secretly love them. Othwrwise why would every single girl hate them?
Like, this is a beautiful rant and gets at like nine different important things. First is the obvious. The tale-as-old-as-time narrative that someone hurts you because they like you. And that if that violence is coming from boys when you are a girl, that you should accept that violence because it’s just “how they show their love”.
The second is the undermining of queer pain, especially when you are heavily marginalized by way of being trans and ace. The idea that our life experiences of suffering bullying are like an exaggeration or something to dismiss and that hurts queer kids a lot. I grew up a kid who was told a lot that I was being targeted because I was “making myself a good target” (by being queer) and so on.
Based on a lot of the clues Carla has dripped so far, it definitely sounds like she had a comparatively shitty time growing up and dealing with shit from her peers.
There’s also the way we never see any real response to people overtly harassing us. Like, content warning sexual harassment, but…
Being ace and trans on top of being a girl, I get a lot of apologetics and weird defenses of sexual harassment towards me. Like, women in general and especially non-normatively attractive women in general are expected to react positively to harassment and treat it like the compliment it isn’t because “who else would compliment you”.
But when you are trans and ace, it gets an extra edge, where not only are you expected to be grateful and smile and never react poorly, but both reacting poorly or positively can get you beaten or killed. Because why is a “freak” like you daring to not treat this as someone deigning to pay you a compliment.
And then that last piece. “Oh, they must secretly be one of yours”.
Like, holy shit does this get to a big thing, especially of late. So there’s a long standing line of joking about homophobes being secretly gay and so on. Now, here’s the thing, the origin of it is much more benign than how it often gets used today.
Where this really got going, there were a lot of closet cases who were running homophobic institutions and campaigning publicly against queer rights and this is when outing as a political tactic kind of exploded for awhile. Folks like Roy Cohn, George Rekers, Larry Craig.
And their exposure actually did weaken a lot of homophobic narratives at the time and it becoming a topic for the late night comedy shows did end up playing a role in shifting public opinion as it undermined a lot of narratives about how one could “fix” that “life style” with hard work and focus and a lot of the claimed “morality” of the bigot brigade.
And it made bigots a little less willing to be all-in less they be seen as a little “too invested” as it were.
Now that this was effective in its time was a thing, but it was very easy to go wrong and we’ve seen that in the years since. Jokes about bigots being queer ended up becoming ways for straight folks to let themselves off the hook for anti-queer violence. Now it wasn’t just a percentage of the bigots were queer just like a percentage of everyone else. Now, it was all of them.
And it allowed a lot of non-queer narratives to surround the idea that homophobia was just a factor of intra-community violence between closeted folks and out folks.
And it’s led to a lot of nastiness where figures whose views and actions are horrific are only mocked as “secretly being gay” instead of the real world awfulness of their actions, as if being gay would be worse than being a rapist or a child molester, or a murderous tyrant.
And so yeah, there’s a lot of growing queer pushback against these jokes nowadays because the inherent comedy in these has become a lot less “look at these fucking hypocrites being assholes” and a lot more “X is bad because they are secretly gay and that is unmanly”.
*Now all this history being said, it’s probably probable that this narrative has always been toxic as fuck. I can only speak to it as I grew up to it and my interactions with it, flawed as they likely were.
Also, I want to echo Wack’d’s take on Ruth’s line not sitting right. Like, Carla is very unlikely using “one of you” in its term of “they’re secretly trans” or “they’re secretly ace”, but rather as the more common “they’re secretly queer”.
And well… all three of them are queer. So Ruth’s correction I don’t think was meant as anything other than “we’re saying she’s figured out she’s gay or bi rather than ace or trans”, but given what Carla was likely trying to communicate it definitely comes out as having an unfortunate connotation of “you Carla, being ace and trans and homoromantic are not queer” which does sit a little poorly.
Gonna chime in here to say that as a Dumbing of Age only reader (have not ready other Willis comics), it doesn’t read that way to me, because of Carla’s sexuality or romanticism not being discussed in this strip. The comment is a little confusing, and did read to me as Ruth saying “one of mine and Billie’s” but I’m not sure what she intended by that. Maybe that she thinks Carla is hetero, while Mary might be in the bi club?
I could see that interpretation, but Carla’s already come out to Ruth as being homoromantic herself, noting that she also finds girls super cute and favors them as romantic partners.
So Ruth knows that Carla is sapphicly inclined.
And again, i don’t think Ruth is meaning anything negative. I’m pretty sure she’s thinking bi/gay vs trans in her constructing not noticing that Carla is definitely using it more in the general queer sense.
Like, it’s actually a very human response to be like “no, we don’t see her as trans or ace, we see her as bi or gay like us”. But yeah, a bit fucked up and unfortunate in context.
I was thinking myself that Carla meant trans or only interested in women while Ruth meant bi because Carla is the only one out of them that would have no interest in guys in such a scenario where Mary is interested in women (as I think in previous worlds she has show an interest in guys at least).
That’s my reading too: Carla says people who say that are assuming, “Oh, they’re secretly homoromantic like you”, whereas Ruth is saying she and Billie are actually assuming Mary is secretly bi-romantic like themselves.
Also, I want to echo Wack’d’s take on Ruth’s line not sitting right. Like, Carla is very unlikely using “one of you” in its term of “they’re secretly trans” or “they’re secretly ace”, but rather as the more common “they’re secretly queer”.
And well… all three of them are queer. So Ruth’s correction I don’t think was meant as anything other than “we’re saying she’s figured out she’s gay or bi rather than ace or trans”, but given what Carla was likely trying to communicate it definitely comes out as having an unfortunate connotation of “you Carla, being ace and trans and homoromantic are not queer” which does sit a little poorly.
Meanwhile, I read that line from Ruth as being more like, “Billie and I are also queer, so we’re not saying ‘one of yours’ (a group that would only include Carla), but ‘one of ours’ (a group that would include all three of us).”
I saw that line as Ruth pointing out that she and Billie are not straight people assuming Mary is secretly gay for the reason that Carla is reacting to here. I saw it as Ruth saying, “W, well, we were seeing ourselves in Mary, not seeing Otherness.”
(And of course, Billie and Ruth WERE very much… seeing specifically themselves in the fantasy version of Mary that’s romantically interested in Carla and expressing it horrifically.)
This is just my read.
I also don’t think it at all invalidates anything Carla was saying, and that the correction might also not be helpful because Carla wasn’t necessarily calling Ruth and Billie straight — Carla was reacting to the reinforcing of nasty crap that she’s tired of hearing, and being very specific about the ways in which it hurt her. I don’t think she actually meant “one of yours” to not include Ruth and Billie to begin with. Carla’s follow-up (“Maybe you two are new to this”) further emphasizes that for me.
That Carla is, brusquely, acknowledging that Billie and Ruth might not have been out long enough to have run into the dark side of what they were suggesting yet.
…does any of this make sense? I loved this strip on all cylinders, but I saw this one little bit and I thought maybe this alternate interpretation (where Carla and Ruth/Billie had a miscommunication on the use of “yours”) might be useful.
This rant is beautiful and pure, because yeah, it gets to the point of the matter. Even if there are bigots with lots to lose and are heavily entrenched in systems like “pray away the gay” reparative therapy camps and have a lot materially to lose coming out who work at cross-properties to liberty, that has little to do with the individual level.
That bigot smashing your face against the cobblestone walls isn’t doing it because they secretly lust after you. And if they are doing it because they lust after you, it usually goes way worse, because that often comes with them overtly blaming you for “turning them” and requiring an act of violence to be “made right”.
They’re rarely people who are going to recognize their flaws peacefully and come to a calm and rational awareness of themselves and their attractions that they are going to approach in a civil and respectful manner.
And for trans women like Carla, that gets an extra layer, because there are straight women that like us, there are lesbian women who like us. Because we are women. But damn do those groups when they are bigots get nasty about it. Because they read it as an assault on their sexuality, poisoning their “gold medals” or their vaunted straightness and even the ones who are willing to love us on the down-low can be one teasing session with their friends away from trying to publicly hurt us, sometimes fatally.
And I love that Carla calls that out and also calls out this whole toxic narrative, that violence is abuse not signs of love and shouldn’t be overlooked or treated as an innocent crush rather than a dangerous sign. And I love that she’s approaching it from the perspective of a learned queer elder, because in some ways she is. It’s been hinted that she’s been out for awhile and Billie and Ruth only recently figured out stuff.
Panel 4: But of course it falls apart to this audience. Because well, between the two of them, yeah, their relationship began in abuse and horrific circumstances and it turned out the violent bully really did have a crush and was reacting abysmally to it and calmed down over time.
And that’s another piece of the puzzle here that Carla is learning. As bad as any stereotype is, there is going to be someone that it is going to fit for better or for worse. There are some bisexuals who cheat regularly on their partners, some rapists who happen to be trans (I’ve had an unfortunate encounter with one), some relationships with utterly horrific origins that turned out okay in the end.
The problem is in assuming that those are or should be the majority rather than a rare minority that is often more a minority than it is for the dominant group holding that stereotype against them.
Panel 5: Seriously, all the heart eyes for Carla, because yeah, she recognizes exactly why her rant falls short and she’s pissed off about this, because yeah, this is serious to her, this line of thinking can be actively dangerous to her, but at the same time, we know this isn’t her writing them off, because at the end of the day, she likes bonding with them as fellow queers and likes being the older queer mentor to their fledgling relationship.
But yeah, I suspect she’s going to split off for a bit now to cool off and duck out of any further fucked up romantic speculation about her (which is another thing ace people tend to get a lot of), people trying to figure out which person will be a good partner to “fix” us and get us to “love right”.
Shoves is not Loves seem like an amazing slogan for some sort of Anti-Domestic Violence movement as well.
I mean a lot of this does speak of her experience with being openly trans, but even beyond that a lot of it seems like it can be applied to most relationships.
Just uh, not the one involving people who have been literally shoving each other around as a cover story to hide their relationship even after they moved beyond it being due to a secret attraction, I suppose.
‘The problem is in assuming that those are or should be the majority rather than a rare minority that is often more a minority than it is for the dominant group holding that stereotype against them.’ SO MUCH THIS.
In nothing else would you assume something extremely rare is likely to apply to every single case where it is remotely possible. Because like if you look at childhood diseases for instance, 99% of people that get chickenpox or croup or colds are fine. There aren’t people running about pointing at every instance of these things saying ‘that child is going to die!’ because they COULD be the very rare one that develops worse symptoms.
It doesn’t make it an impossible occurrence because there is me who managed to get such severe croup that I could have literally died as a child (I barked like a sea lion instead of saying ‘I love you’, like can you even imagine). But not even 1% of children get it that badly, I wouldn’t expect people to be looking at every instance of croup and going ‘IT IS GOING TO KILL THEM!’ when more than 99% of them literally just get a bad cough that goes away within a couple of weeks.
And this specific problem isn’t even just with queer people though it is a big problem for them especially, but the hatred women feel may not be taken seriously, especially when directed at a man because toxic masculinity nonsense about how females literally can’t understand their own emotions and must love them or the harassment done by males may not be treated seriously at times because ‘maybe he just likes you’. Like do some people forget NOT REMOTELY liking someone is an option???
Carla is literally a Queen on this page tbh, I definitely agree with all your Carla love here.
Yeah, let’s put it this way, Carla: The vast majority of people don’t have romantic relationships that began with antagonism. The real world isn’t a romcom. Of course, there is no way in which Ruth and Billie’s relationship is ‘normal’; to them, having a relationship start with antagonism is something that’s possible and has led to an at least semi-happy ending for them. Because of that, I would argue that Carla is probably talking to entirely the wrong pair about ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ relationships!
It will be interesting to see what happens if Willis does decide to give Carla a SO. ‘Asexual’ is not ‘aromantic’ but the other partner (if they’re not ace themselves) have to make allowances. Even so, Carla’s relationship with Malaya in the Walkyverse was pretty passionate and intimate in its own unique way.
Absolutely true, but it’s more extreme if the other person never wants sex. Even among allosexuals, big differences in sex drive can be a major source of relationship conflict.
This is fair, I just… I don’t like the phrasing, I guess. “Make allowances” bothers me a lot more than noting that differences in sex drive can be a source of relationship conflict.
So, the wording bothers me but, I want to stress here that I’m sure the intent wasn’t anything awful. We’re all pretty good eggs here, I think.
It’s Fictional. People do a lot of fictional tampering that would be horrifying in real life but is just weird fun. It’s like all those “professionals” who keep claiming that video games make us do evil shit.
Fricken Billie and Ruth, you two are obviously a special case! Mary was not just being mean, what she did was 100x meaner and hateful than what Ruth did!
So uh, do you actually remember what Ruth did? Because fuck. I’ve reread recently and it hit me all over like a ton of bricks, because here’s the thing: while Mary was actively trying to create an unsafe and terrifying environment for Carla, all she succeeded in was pissing her off. Ruth? Ruth succeeded with flying colors, and the only reason it got better for Billie was because Sal proved willing to help.
Just, no. Let’s not compare transphobia with bullying from an authority figure (complete with stealing and defacing precious possessions) (like yeah Mary broke Carla’s new skates but it’s nowhere near the fuckery Ruth was pulling)
It all depends on perspective. For example getting punched may seem thoroughly traumatic for an average person but for someone who’s been in a bunch of fights? Just an excuse to punch back.
I’m positive that calling taking the time to call a transgender woman a man is terrible independent of the situation, and that this approach depends on the idea that oppressive social structures exist arbitrarily rather than to take away the human rights of specific groups of people, and thereby incite violence upon them. Like, even in just this situation, I’m positive that Carla did not want to be misgendered and that her immediate response was not to attack Mary, let alone anyone!!!
I’m not saying it’s not terrible. I’m just pointing out that there is a difference in perception.
Like Liliet pointed out there is a big difference between Carla and Billie’s situation.
Billie was abused by an authority figure who caused her genuine pain, grief and distress.
Carla on the other hand treats Mary as a petty little annoyance not worth getting emotionally invested in. She probably experienced this and Worse stuff and it just doesn’t phase her anymore. Billie by comparison is a sheltered little princess who always had everything her way.
The point is that the “scale and intensity” of the threat depends heavily on the observer. From Billie’s perspective Ruth was a far more threatening presence than Mary was for Carla.
Carla treats it as a petty annoyance because she HAS to, not because it doesn’t affect her. If she lets it show it just gives more incentive to treat her like that That shit is why she closes herself off from everyone.
I’m with Liliet on not comparing the two. Both were fucking awful, just in different ways, for different reasons. That Carla is used to getting that kind of hateful treatment is inconsequential. That Billie forgave Ruth and things are much different now doesn’t make it less fucked up that their relationship started that way.
I think this is one of those that’s funnier without a punch line – drop the last panel, do the panel with Billie and Ruth’s expression looking at each other after Carla’s comment, then a panel with Carla’s expression as a reaction to them. Her expression says it all….
Why is Mary acting this way? Somebody spiked her donut, clearly.
Given how Mary seems to be hugely anime obsessed, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was attracted to Carla… more as a fetish and a ‘project’ than as anything else, though.
I like to use the definition of love in Frozen. Shoves can sometimes be an indicator of romantic feelings, or feelings of attachment, but those feelings do not always cause love.
Eeeh, Honestly, generally speaking, when someone is shovey, you should just steer way clear and don’t give them the time of day. A person(Over the age of, like, twelve) that thinks shoves are love usually ends up being an abusive asshole.
The deeper truth behind this strips is that Billie and Ruth’s relationship is -weird- and not to be emulated. They really have -become- good for each other, from what we’ve seen lately, but the way their relationship started was toxic and destructive. But just because they crossed a minefield safely by accident doesn’t mean other people should go walking into it.
very different, though both worked out.
Walky was the cute, immature version – throwing a toy at her head because he liked her and couldn’t express it. Once.
Ruth was the abusive version.
Walky threw the toy at Dorothy’s head to give her. His brain short circuited and he didn’t have the mental capacity at the time to give it to her in a better way but the intend was always to make her happy.
One of my biggest problems with Mary as a character is that she completely lacked humanity, so I actually really like that Billie and Ruth are taking their own messed up romantic history and wistfully hoping that Mary’s evil can be explained the way Ruth’s was.
What did she do that was so evil though, other than getting into a fight with Carla that escalated into her threatening to use the blackmail material she had on Ruth? Sorry if I have a short memory or missed something.
Sure, she’s religious and very judgemental due to her background. The same thing was true about Joyce, but since she’s the MC we’ve seen her have much more character development.
Mary looks evil because we’re seeing everything from the perspective of those who don’t like her. If we saw things from the perspective of Sarah’s old “friends” we could perfectly have ended up thinking that Sarah was evil. If Mary is written to be an actual three-dimensional person she’s perfectly capable of having a change of heart.
Well there was that whole “getting blackmail material and saving it up to use to her advantage thing.” Along with the whole trans and homophobic thing – in a far different and nastier way than Joyce, even in the beginning when Joyce was at her worst. Even at Joyce’s worst she cared about other people and wanted to help them – often in completely wrong and toxic ways. Mary dismisses them as “perverts” or saves up the revelation until she can twist the knife deeper like she did with Carla.
Even when it was all falling apart and Ruth was suicidal she tried to salvage the situation by keeping anyone from calling for help and then by passing the blame to Walky. Afterwards, she tried to get Billie to give her free reign to torment Carla.
She’s a foil to Joyce. That’s what those parallels are for. She’s not on the same path. She’s not a nice person with a bad background. We’re not misjudging her because we don’t have perspective.
She wasn’t just trying to study.
I honestly hope she doesn’t. At least not in the confines of the story. She’ll have decades to live and change afterwards.
She’s a good villain. Let her stay that way. Not everyone gets redeemed. Not everyone learns the right lessons.
Beyond that, Mary’s problem isn’t her bigoted past. It’s herself. She’d be a nasty piece of work if she’d been brought up with the homophobic religion. Just with different targets. Willis basically said as much, saying her parents weren’t that bad.
Be that as it may, I still like the acknowledgement that there may be something deeper coming from Billie and Ruth (two people with an extremely messed up history of abuse and violence and basically doing everything to each other what Mary did to them),
Will this end up with Mary turning a new leaf? Most likely not, but it’s that hope coming from the characters that I enjoy, because it means Mary’s being treated as an actual human being rather than the swirling vortex of evil she’s been thus far.
I’d be perfectly fine with Mary getting some humanizing traits, but that doesn’t necessarily mean having her turn over a new leaf.
Three dimensional, relatable villains are cool.
Thank you at the beginning Joyce didn’t know how to respond to life outside of her bubble but tried to be a good/nice person. Sometimes she sort of failed but she honestly tried. The flower analogy, her concern for Dorothy, her half way stance against bigotry which ended up convincing Ethan the opposite of what she meant (I know its definitely better than lying which people tend to not think too much of), her belief that she can honestly change Ethan. But she got better because she wanted to be better. She struggled with that but ultimately she chose to translate scripture the way she did, because she entered school wanting to be a good/nice person. Mary ultimately translated scripture the way she did because she did because she wanted an excuse to be a bigot.
It’s not just changes in her interpretation of scripture though. Even her crappy behavior was generally motivated by actual concern for people – even when it was toxic, damaging behavior. Mary’s never shown that
Meh, no. The perspective of Sarah’s former friends is that Sarah should have been OK with Dana doing drugs in their room. There’s no getting around that part of the story.
Either Raidah’s version of the story downplays that Dana’s drug use getting worse or her version pretends her drug use didn’t change at all. In each case the question is, “If it wasn’t that serious, why didn’t Dana just not do drugs in the room?”
Raidah and her friends can’t make Sarah look evil in that situation without flat out lying about what happened. At worst they can leave information out and make it look like Sarah overreacted.
I think everyone else has why Mary is evil covered.
I have a theory why Mary is so happy. I think she may have been sexually assaulted by Ryan. She knew he was the son of a pastor. And Joyce said three other girls came forward about him. Mary’s the kind who would fall for the son of a pastor thing, and she may be so happy the past few days because he got what was coming for him.
So then…um…yeah. Having a bit of difficulty coming up with a lighthearted post in the vein that I’ve been doing lately. But life isn’t always about jokes. I wonder if that theory’s been floated to Carla before.
I think Billy and Ruth are overlooking one huge problem with their theory: even if it’s true, it doesn’t really change anything. Even if Mary realized she WUUUVS Carla, Mary is still a toxic dumpster fire of a person. I honestly can’t imagine that being in a relationship with Mary would be a more enjoyable experience than being hated by her.
Thank you, Carla. As a gay dude I’m starting to find it insulting that the first reaction to homophobia or transphobia is that the person spewing the hate is secretly gay, lesbian or trans. Please straight people, this is not a comfort nor does it make me happy about the situation, and frankly, it’s kind of demeaning.
I’m getting scared, because Mary has clearly been cemented as one of the villains of this comic, and Willis doesn’t really do redemption arcs for villains.
Panel three Carla sees her rocketing up my favourite character list, I love her telling Ruth and Billie that its not healthy and, by extension, their whole relationship is unhealthy
Carla is right. Shoves is not loves. If someone treats you like crap, it’s not because they like you. They want to destroy or control you. That “Oh, s/he’s doing bad things to you because s/he likes you.” Believing that is how one finds themselves in an abusive relationship.
If popular media has taught us anything, its that hateful straight characters who openly despise queer people are secretly raging queers themselves. Instead of, you know, hateful characters. Shippers gonna ship though.
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maybe it’s actually Nega-Mary
see if she’s wearing a weird palette-swapped outfit and talking with a different voice or something
Let’s not get dangerous, now.
I see what you did, there.
Shouldn’t she have some facial hair, or at least a radically different hairstyle, if she came from Negative Universe?
Or sunglasses and a leather jacket? Or inhuman eyes?
Wait… Demon of Fear wore black, Demon of Hope wore white… maybe her world’s like Charmed’s mirror world???
Now I know that if I ever get a shot at a commission, it’s going to be Mary with an alternate Spock goatee.
And gold sash.
Why not a wide brimmed hat and a cape?
If she is Nega-Mary that’s probably an improvement. Lets not look a gift horse in the mouth.
Who’s to say Evil Mary isn’t the actual Nega-Mary? That the nice one’s finally free? Poasibility…?
Anti-Mary. Sooner or later Anti-Joyce shows up and we have a good old-fashioned It’s Walky showdown.
I can dream.
“Technically, we’re saying she’s secretly one of ours.”
Okay, this bugs me. Not for metatextual reasons–not faulting Willis for anything–but in terms of 1. the text itself and 2. how I expect (and have seen, on Patreon) the commentariat react to it.
Now, it’s possible Ruth means “ours” as in “all three of us”, but her body language makes me doubt that. Which means she means “one of mine and Billie’s, as opposed to one of yours.”
So let’s run through this real quick. Carla is transgender, asexual, and heteromantic.
1) Are Billie and Ruth claiming they think Mary is trans? No.
2) Are Billie and Ruth claiming they think Mary is asexual? No.
3) Are Billie and Ruth claiming they think Mary has a romantic crush on a woman? Yes.
4) Is having romantic feelings for women part of Ruth, Billie, and Carla’s orientation? Yes.
Therefore, are Billie and Ruth arguing Mary is “one of” a group that includes Carla? Yes.
Now, look. If Ruth and Billie think that Mary just wants to fuck Carla, no romantic feelings included, then fine, Ruth’s not saying anything wrong. But Ruth and Billie have not disambiguated whether they think Mary’s feelings are sexual or romantic, likely because for them, sexual and romantic feelings generally overlap.
So. How much of Carla’s whole deal does Ruth know? Ruth knows that Carla is trans, obviously. Is Ruth just saying “she’s one of ours” because, to her, Carla is accusing them of thinking Mary’s transgender? Possibly.
But if Ruth knows that Carla’s asexual, that changes things drastically. Because the broader queer community has a lot bound up in shuffling aces out of queer spaces, and adds some real unintended bite to the phrasing there.
And if Ruth knows that Carla’s homoromantic, than making Carla part of an outgroup is just an unambigiously mean thing to do, and I don’t know why on earth Ruth regards it as any kind of defense of her and Billie’s little thought experiment.
—
Now, I’d like to take a moment to point out that a lot of folks in the Patreon comments used “Carla’s ace!” as a defense. Which, hey, funny, Carla’s asexuality hasn’t come up in Dumbing of Age yet. You could only possibly know that from reading Shortpacked!–which, oh, hey, lookie here, put Ultra Car in a long-term relationship with a woman and had her outright say she’s homoromantic. So yeah.
I think she Ruth meant they were calling Mary a lesbian. Since Carla hasn’t had her orientation outed, as far as I’m aware, they likely assume her to be straight. At least, that’s my interpretation of the whole thing.
It’s also possible that Ruth is assuming Carla is trans but heterosexual; if she isn’t aware of Carla being asexual (and homoromantic), then it’s not unusual for people to assume otherwise since society tends to be heteronormative. Thus, to Ruth, ‘one of yours’ would be that Mary is trans, ‘one of ours’ would be that Mary is attracted to women.
If Ruth does know that Carla is asexual, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was unaware of the distinction between -sexual and -romantic.
Ruth might actually be assuming Carla is straight.
I think the closest Carla has come to saying anything about her own orientation is when she told Ruth that she gets her and Billie because “Girls are super cute. And I should know, cuz I am one.” Which really doesn’t say anything about her own orientation at all.
Personally I think Ruth thought Carla meant ‘transgender’ and that by ‘ours’, Ruth was referring to bisexuals because Mary likely still has an interest in guys as well in this hypothetical which Carla does NOT.
“Why would he want to kill her in public.”
“I think she meant he threatened in public to kill her.”
“Oh.”
In this case, I believe the simplest answer is Ruth and Billie presumed Carla was part of the larger GBTL community. Unfortunately, that’s a bit presumptuous as you should never presume solidarity.
Have a jar of cookies, a cat, and the sweetest hay ever for that reference.
*hat
Scheiße.
My wife doesn’t love Clue. I do not understand how anyone could not.
I’m so sorry to hear that. I can recommend a good divorce lawyer if you’d like.
I prefer the cat to the hat.
So how about that?
At least someone understood that.
Sam, that’s how I read it too.
yeah, that would make sense: “we’re not claiming she’s homoromantic; we’re claiming she’s biromantic.”
although has Mary actually shown any sign of romantic interest in DoA, even in regard to guys? otherwise there’s no reason to think she couldn’t be homoromantic.
Sexualities have been said by David Willis to carry over from the past universes and I think she was involved with a guy in one before. I can’t remember if she has ever specifically said so in this universe but her general negative response to queer people previously could have indicated to people that she was attracted to guys so it may be that they are just assuming she is interested in guys to start with and has added to that by being interested in females now too. They’re still assuming to start with though so the reasoning doesn’t have to be perfect anyway.
Sometimes banter is just banter.
While I appreciate the depth here and agree that you can find a lot wrong with what Ruth is saying here, I’d also put forth that Ruth is allowed to be wrong. Ruth has a lot of wrong notions and bad ways to deal with things that she’s still working through and if anything this strip is once again reminding us that what Ruth and Billie have hasn’t been healthy since the word “go.”
And just to elaborate here a little, I think this is a big part of why representation beyond tokenism matters. The more queer characters there are in a work, the less burden there is for all of them to express these things in ideal terms. A token character has all the burden of representation placed on them and that’s an impossible standard. When you’ve got such a spectrum of queerness expressed in a work like Dumbing of Age you’ve got room for people to be wrong, to have mistaken ideas, unhealthy notions, and for them to learn by seeing what other people have that works.
Personally I think it’s realistic to say that gay people aren’t always the best trans allies. That they don’t always understand trans issues, and that what they think they know can cause more subtle harm than people who are more overtly transphobic.
Yes to this!
Especially as Carla is calling Billie and Ruth out on it /in this very strip/.
Y’know, I didn’t say she wasn’t! I’m totally okay with this strip as it exists, I just wanted to deconstruct it a little. Other folks talk about how and why behavior in this strip is unhealthy all the time and no one’s ever like “why are you saying characters can’t be flawed” so frankly I’m a little taken aback by this reaction.
I don’t know if you mean just the comment you’re replying to or all of the replies you’re getting so I wanted to clarify that my comment was just floating another possibility, not me insisting that you’re wrong.
I took Carla’s comment as “She must be secretly be one of you LGBTIQ people” basically personally.
I took Ruth’s ‘ours’ to mean just Ruth and Billie’s, or in other words, toxic to those she cares about… but on a second read I’m having trouble pinning down an interpretation.
After reading it a second time I’m actually pretty sure that’s what they meant and it’s not a sexuality thing at all.
yeah, I took “ours” to mean something like “people who act on their attraction by fighting / bullying”.
but I am a little uncertain.
That’s also how I read it. I took “secretly one of ours” as “someone who gets off on conflict,” which is actually a fair description for Mary.
Wait, I’m confused. Carla’s not heteromantic. She’s homoromantic, isn’t she?
I think I’m misunderstanding you somehow, but I’m stumped as to how, so I’ll just say: I think Ruth is saying “ours” as in “we’re all into girls”, rather than referencing specific labels. She’s just reminding Carla, “We aren’t straights trying to foist bigotry off on closeted gays. We’re gay, too.”
I’m not saying she’s cool for doing this. She and Billie have the bad shipping goggles on.
This is also how I read it!
That’s how it came off to me, too.
Yeah, this is how I read it as Ruth clarifying that she and Billie aren’t straight, and are therefore not talking about LGBTQA from the outside.
I think that Carla’s rant was about people often stating to her that transphobic Bogota are just closeted trans people, and Ruth is saying “technically we think she’s a closeted homo/no/pansexual”, for the sake of that argument. That “ours” assumes Carla is not attracted to females which is while still wrong, somewhat more understandable especially given the ambiguity of the pronoun “ours” and the context.
That’s how I read it. Carla’s citing past experience, and in that context “yours” sounds like a singular possessive to me.
> Now, it’s possible Ruth means “ours” as in “all three of us”
I am strongly of the opinion that this is the case. In panel 2 where she has her finger up, I am picturing that that finger is going in a circle (albeit there are no action lines to indicate that, but that is nonetheless how I read the action). She’s saying that they’re not disclaiming Mary as Carla’s people, but in fact claiming Mary as Carla’s+Billie’s+Ruth’s people.
I even more strongly disagree with all responses here that suggest that Ruth thinks Carla’s straight, on the basis that Carla has been -super- up-front about being on Team Girl-Love. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/03-when-god-closes-the-door/spilled/
Perhaps “ours” referred to her, Billie and us forumites and meant people who love Carla.
I read that body language as “hey, uh, also queer here, hello?”
I did too, especially since Carla responds to that with saying they’re new and so they don’t understand some things.
She could be saying ‘ours’ as 1 assuming all girls in this onvo are lesbians, 2 knowing or guessing carla isnt a lesbian referring to billie and herself, or 3 being canadian and not knowing exactly why a phrase might be not pc making someone upset for a bullshit reason. Quite likely 1 & 3. Or even more reasons
Neither she nor Billie are lesbians, and both of them know it (though Billie prefers eschewing labels, and Ruth isn’t sure where she fits, last she spoke on it, both are bi by word of god, and Walkyverse precedent).
” If Ruth and Billie think that Mary just wants to fuck Carla, no romantic feelings included, then fine, Ruth’s not saying anything wrong. But Ruth and Billie have not disambiguated whether they think Mary’s feelings are sexual or romantic, likely because for them, sexual and romantic feelings generally overlap.”
so if it’s just a physical thing with no emotions involved it’s fine but if it isn’t… what?
You tell ’em, Carla.
yeah im so dang tired of cis nonsense,
… Was that a pun? With, like, a German accent? Because I agree either way, but I can’t help but chuckle at the idea of German Carla just getting exasperated at these losers.
She’s of Dutch lineage, one of the more festive nothern European cultures (I am told).
But, yeah, a flustered German is funny. It still is a decent go-to for laughs, also. And I wish I’d learned enough of the tongue from my great grandma to do it for lulz.
if it wasn’t a pun, i guess it is now :p
Carla is an honored sister and speaks for all of us. Also rollerskates. She speaks for rollerskates, too.
carla is the rolax, she speaks for the wheels!
this is interesting.
Ohh, about that Carla…..
Carla continues to be the angry awesome voice of wisdom
Does Mary know about Carla? That could make a difference.
Mary definitely knows Carla’s trans. Jury’s out on the asexuality and homoromanticism.
Mary definitely knows about Carla. There was a whole storyline about Mary being shitty to her about it.
Mary even said she was leading Carla “to the boys’ wing where [she] belong[s]”, which is some MAJORLY douchey hate speech. >:(
She also dropped a bit of a hint to a lot of the dorm during the ding dong bandit story line.
To be fair, I once did the “mean to someone because I like them” thing.
I was six, she was my neighbor’s babysitter, she was pretty, my insides felt all twisty and I didn’t know what to do.
Clearly the answer was be a little tambourine.
Did the website filter do that? Is it now replacing curse words with different instruments, not just the one. Lemme try.
*ahem*. Glockenspiel!
…Huh.
See I assumed it was tambourine because you usually hit them against your body for sounds.
It was tambourine just to get even further away from the gendered connotations.
Shit doesn’t have a gendered connotation. You could have used shit.
I think the lgbt poo people would call you homophobic
*sad trombone*
Watch your language!
See, now I’m just imagining tambourines being replaced with shit in general, and that’s not a good plan.
It’s an excellent plan. Just imagine them suddenly replacing tambourines in those those terrible late 1960s bubblegum pop novelty bands.
“Mr Tambourine Man”
All three faces in panel 4 are a goddamn work of art
I would buy an album with that cover.
But you wouldn’t know what music was on it…
Oh.
Wait.
Right.
Never mind…
Along with all of Carla’s faces this strip
+1
Honestly I love everything about that panel. It should be a book cover.
All the best faces today
yes
I want to change this gravatar to all 3 for that reason
‘OK, sometimes, but you ladies ain’t healthy. … Cute as a kitten made out of puppies, but not healthy.’
A kitten made out of puppies sound terrifying if I’m honest.
Yeah, how would that work? Are we talking, like…Frankenstein-ing puppies into one kitten? Or like gluing a bunch of puppies into the shape of a giant kitten?
MicroPuppies conglomerating into a kittenforme. Obviously.
You have the perfect avatar for this.
Let’s be real…KittyTedd is the perfect avatar for any situation.
Much like when Transformers combine to form a really big robot.
The toyline for this featuring the Cutiebots fighting against the Adorbicons.
I was picturing something like the Pokémon Wishiwashi.
My army of tiny imaginary friends I had as a kid did things like that, so I can accept this.
I’m picturing the Colossus of Ylourgne, only with puppies.
You like monkeys, you like ponies,
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much?
Maybe I used too many monkeys…
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?
I was *just* singing that in my head! JoCo FTW!
Would it spend all its time chasing itself up trees?
What would Dr. Venkman think of this puppy-cat being?
Panel four is full of wonderful glances and grimaces.
I’d pay to watch Carla watch and react to Glee.
(I thought of this in response to a specific Glee storyline, but really the whole eventual mess that was Glee, with Carla’s commentary? Yes please.)
Oh lord, she’d have an unholy fit as all the relationships sank further and further into toxicity.
I think it would be hilarious if she actually loves Glee, and sings along with every song.
Even the people who love Glee hate Glee.
Speaking as someone who once loved Glee, no-one is capable of hating Glee quite like someone who once loved Glee.
Though the creators of Community make an attempt:
https://youtu.be/Pn9JAWH2jcM
I love Glee with all the passion of someone who would hate every single member of that group in real life. Ironically, making me exactly the kind of person who would be in that group.
^^^SAME.
As a show, I love Glee. It’s campy, it’s unintentionally surreal, it’s a trashfire, it’s great. One of the “lessons” of a season 1 show was unambiguously, “binge drinking is fun and hilarious!” and “it’s ridiculous to expect teens to not drink at parties.”
Also, in regards to bullying, the show shifted from “tossing other students in a dumpster is something students do here sometimes and nobody is fazed” to “insults are so awful a student will transfer schools over them.” Which would be valid if the first thing hadn’t happened. After that, it’s like, hey, writers, pick a tone and stick with it please? But then tonal dissonance became part of its’ charm too…
But, er, in real life? All of those students would be terrible and all of the teachers would be fired. I really hope no irl teens found the teens of Glee to be good role models, because, holy frig.
I still hope that isn’t the reason Mary’s being nice, because Carla deserves someone better than Mary.
People change, people grow….people get drunk while watching the food network.
Well, even if Mary does like Carla it certainly doesn’t mean Carla has to like Mary back.
Thank god this isn’t a mainstream straight romance story because then it totally would.
Lord, ain’t that the truth! :/
The reality is that Mary has been like this to everyone. Carla is describing what SHE is seeing of it, in terms that are a bit self centered. And, as with a game of telephone, it’s being interpreted differently from how it was meant to be. This gives way to conclusion jumping, etc.
*plays “Nice To Be With You” on the hacked Muzak*
every time I read “sleeper agents,” the test sequence in the matrix with agent smith and the lady in the red dress plays in my head. XD
“Freeze it.”
Shoves is not loves. That’s some 1990’s psa shit there.
“Remember kids, there’s nothing cooler than being shoved by someone you like!”
I just heard that in my head as a Sonic Says PSA.
That was what the refrance, yes
Oh, for a moment there I was almost worried.
Oh and what is this “sleeper agents” stuff? Is there some sexuality cold war I’m not cool enough to be privy to?
Shit, we can’t let word of the secret wars get out. Containment agents are needed here for all people who have viewed this webpage, followed by a deletion of this specific comment thread.
Object Class: Keter
I suppose it’s time to use [REDACTED] as agreed.
Activate fifty-five.
[The first verse of ‘London Bridge’ plays via simple beeps]
6 1 7 8 8. 6 1 7 8 8. 6 1 7 8 8. 6 1 7 8 8.
OK, I’ll send in some D-class assets to keep it busy while you fire up the tachyon grid. Poor bastards.
Just another way of putting the old cliche (that isn’t even true, a lot of the time) that every homophobe is actually deep in the closet. (No, some people are just terrible.)
Oh but by insisting all the awful legislation comes from people who are closeted, folks get to pretend that GLBTIA+ are all just oppressing themselves!
(I wish I remembered where I read that because I didn’t put that together myself.)
Mind you, there’s also the benefit of pointing out that many homophobes are massive-massive awful hypocrites. It’s just unfortunate that did more to destroy their credibility than the fact they were hate preaching bigots.
Well the theory that homophobes are closet cases seemed to explain the one totally inexplicable thing about homophobes: Why they invest so much energy into something that’s none of their fucking business and are so worked up about something that has no relation to them.
But when you look at other instances of people going out of their way to make someone know they hate them the theory doesn’t seem to hold water.
Sorry no, all those guys sending death threats to Anita Saskeesian are not secretly in love with her. They feel threatened by her poking holes in the narratives of their favorite games and asking them to be accountable for what they play at.
I still use the argument sometimes to make slight homophobes uncomfortable.
Hm, maybe someone pointed out to Mary that people will think she’s queer if she keeps harassing queer people?
Yup, and hell there a lot of homophobes who are closet cases to one degree or another, because well a lot more people are some flavor of queer than they’d care to admit. So for folks who haven’t thought much about the unspoken exceptions in their attractions or the blurry edges of their gender identity, there can be a lot of pressure to angrily deny it and get invested in shutting up the people that make you unsure about things.
And there’s certainly a lot that resonates in much of the anti-gay rhetoric – recruitment narratives, resisting temptation, etc.
It all makes much more sense if the people coming up with those ideas are struggling with temptation themselves. It’s certainly not everyone who’s homophobic – many have just absorbed the cultural prejudices.
There’s enough out there for it to make sense though.
Not so much on the individual attraction level maybe – at least once you’re past the middle school level of romance.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s okay to use the argument even to make homophobes uncomfortable. The “Haha homophobes are all secretly gay!” is still a homophobic joke.
I’m not jumping on you here, as I don’t know the context of your use of the joke. I’m just voicing my thoughts on the conversation, and you made a good person to reply to.
I’m not sure which way your thought turn here. I don’t see the joke anywhere in it. If people I have reason to have contact with show homophobic attitudes I might toss the argument around to make them think about why there are so invested in expressing disapproval about something that shouldn’t be any of their business.
And I think some gay guy I once knew proposed it as a distraction tactic when being hounded by a group of homophobes, to pick out the leader and say “hey you liked it last week at (specific place)”.
Don’t know if that was an actual event or hyperbole, though.
Gay bashing is less widespread in Germany than in the US and was even in the 90ties
Yes, there’s no joke with the closeted homophobic man gunning down a bunch of other gay men. It’s still someone destroyed by society and working against society’s narrative.
And plenty of hateful bigots just invest their time and energy into fighting “The other” because society tells them they are evil. I was a fundamentalist homophobe before my “not an asshole” religious conversion. I devoted a lot of energy before God told me to knock it off and I realized I was the only one doing evil.
Reading that suggested statement (which I agree comes off as a joke) makes me uncomfortable in a “this is not the way I want to die” kind of way.
well, according to Pat Benatar, love *is* a battlefield…
(…I’ll see myself out…)
WE ARE STRONG!
I agree with Carla, but I can’t help but be distracted by how frigging cute she looks here. The facial expressions, the outfit, and I kinda like how she’s tall.
Carla is always cute though.
I agree, but even more than usual here.
god i love her
Put it another way: just because a boy pulls on a girl’s pigtails, it does not indicate automatically he is in love with her. Acts of malice and violence are sure as hell not acceptable forms of courting.
I’m wondering how this thing that a boy/girl acts mean towards you it because he/she likes you started. That always sounded like bs to me.
Honestly? I think it can be a thing that happens. I experienced it. What needs to happen then is for kids to be taught that that’s not an acceptable way to express their feelings, rather than telling the kids who experience the meanness that it’s because the other party likes them, like that makes it a good thing.
I concur. If kids act this way, sit them down and say that’s not right. Telling the recipients it’s because the initiators like them is just setting them up for worse things later in life.
Mind you, I met my wife because we had passionate and long arguments over the Anita Blake forum. She was horrified to discover that I became attracted to her because she was such a good arguer. The idea someone viewed arguments as a good thing was alien to her worldview.
Arguments are a fine meet-cute so long as there’s no berating involved.
I mean boys don’t get the best socialization vis a vis feelings and the healthy expression thereof so it’s not super surprising they end up expressing them in unhealthy ways. Attention from your crush is attention from your crush when you’re 8 and nobody teaches you otherwise.
Lol, good point Willis, I can see why Billie and Ruth would think Mary is suddenly in love with Carla now
Just when I think someone else might be my favorite, Carla skates back to her throne!
Maybe Mary has a crush on Joe? He’s demonstrated her preferred type of alpha masculinity, and she might have been rated highly on the list. If he wrote a few insults she approved of (“We both hate the same people!”), especially if he didn’t include Carla, she may think she’s found The One (after he converts).
And her crush just gave her a doughnut. Remember how intoxicating that feels?
I think we have a winner.
Ooh, this would be a really interesting development. I don’t know if we’ve seen any interaction between Mary and Joe yet, but this fits really well.
Carla is just trying to advocate for healthy relationship interactions.
So. Cake donuts are apparently ahead, despite being nigh-inedible. Great.
This is a comic about folks assuming an anti-trans bigot has a crush on their target and you’re still the wrongest person on this webpage.
Are you getting yours from Casey’s? If not, get yours from Casey’s. Is Casey’s even a thing outside my region?
I’m almost positive Casey’s is an exclusively upper midwest (maybe Iowa specific?) chain.
Got one here in Minnesota
Then upper midwest in general it is!
Also Illinois. Centralia in particular has three of them.
Got it in Arkansas
Better yet, get a bagel! Bagels are love. (I prefer Onion, but others are good as well)
My American friends mention bagels, and I’m just like… “Is that a plain white bread donut? What’s the point?”
That is not an accurate description of a bagel.
Especially the kind I like.
What region are you in?
Reads ‘region’ as ‘religion.’
“Wait, has there been a bagel religion this whole time? How have I not heard of this?”
Hope you can read this, but uh, Mexico.
The dough’s a bit tougher – about like a baguette.
And it sometimes has stuff either sprinkled over, and baked into, the top, or mixed in all the way through.
(wish I could edit, ah well)
tougher or chewier
They’re denser than white bread, and even plain bagels have some flavor to them. Most of the time you’ll find them with other grains or dried onion mixed in the dough, or they’ll be topped with something like poppy seed. They’re typically served with cream cheese.You can even find some that taste like french toast, with veins of spice running through them (but skip the cheese).
My favorite are sourdough topped with pretzel salt. They taste like the giant, doughy baked pretzels they have in malls and movie theaters.
You’re basically describing something like a kind of bread we use for thick sandwiches, but in a donut shape.
I’m so confused right now.
Onion…..bagels.
WHY.
Great for sandwiches!
WHY.
Because onions are YUMMY.
Cholma confirmed as a Bizarro!
Breakfast sandwich on an onion bagel is yum.
Even while the exception is right there with her… I do agree with Carla. Generally speaking, if someone is hurting you… they don’t love you. And if they do… that is still NOT how you want to learn to accept “love”. And that is not behavior to allow or encourage… because the shover will continue to “show their love” that way, forever. Billie and Ruth’s relationship was not exactly healthy there at the start, but thankfully they’ve gotten more openly caring about each other… as they thankfully learned. But it will never change the fact that their abusive behavior towards one another was and is 10,000 ways of wrong.
Besides, we’re talking about Mary. She’s got something going on that she’s about to hold over someone’s head, or at least feel superior to them all.
Carla has the big problem of dealing with people who do not live in the same universe as her. Also, Ruth and Billie are a weird sort of exception where their toxic suicide love became nurturing.
Do any people live in the same universe as Carla?
Of course, a goddess needs subjects and worshippers after all.
And Carla is a goddess. Her “To Do List” even said so, which makes it officially canon right? ;3
So, you know, everything checks out.
Yup, and there’s a lot of pressure on folks to accept abuse as love and that often ends really badly more often than not.
Ruth and Billie’s relationship STILL isn’t healthy, I’d say. They’re both deeply messed up people, and I have never been convinced that they’re better off together than they would be apart.
Doesn’t explain why she’s being nice to everyone else.
Poly!Mary
(no)
Is Carla subtly foreshadowing that Billie and Ruth are going to break up?!
:'(
Nah, she’s just being snappy and irritated because this kind of assumption is irritating as hell and having the one example of it being true in front of her is even more annoying as it undermines her points even though they are all valid and 99% of the time true and even in the exceedingly rare case that ‘the shoves are loves’ that does not mean that is an acceptable way to express affection or love to somebody.
I think it also makes her look foolish because spoke her argument without considering the audience. The floor being a pile of examples of bad relationship behavior that has somehow worked out.
The fact that she is surrounded by statistical outliers doesn’t make her any less right it just makes them extremely improbably people.
Join the Tsundering herd.
Last time I tried to “join the herd”, it led to me picking up tabletop gaming.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. (it’s not)
Depends on what kind of tabletop it is. If it’s miniatures, then it’s a bad thing for your wallet.
WoD is life. 0.0
*Glances at boxes in corner filled with minis*
Expensive, you say? I… uh, wouldn’t know that. Nope! Nosireebob!
(but by “tabletop”, the first thing I think of is board games… which often come with their own type of minis included, now that I think about it. All those years of Milton Bradley wargames with my Dad (Hit The Beach, Axis & Allies, Fortress America, Shogun, etc) and never really considered that those are a type of minis game.)
I mainly responded to Cholma to ask what game(s) those corner minis are for, but I’ll also just add the rest of my comments on this line here to save time.
How expensive minis are/were really depends what you buy/bought and when. For example the pewter D&D ones I have from the ’80s were really expensive when you consider their cost adjusted for inflation and everything GW has always been massively expensive in the US (not sure about elsewhere) meanwhile the Bones line from Reaper is really cheap for their value (nice quality white resin minis). Now printed books are a massive expense anymore regardless.
Board games, good ones anyway, are not usually all that cheap either (A Feast for Odin is down to around $80 from the about $100 when it came out).
That said, there is no gaming hobby that costs quite like the old CCG cycle. Around 20 years ago I spent about $400 in a year on MtG just to get a couple casually competitive decks running, that’s about $600 in todays money and the cards themselves were worth around that last I checked their valuation.
Roll 3d6, if any of the individual dice say 7, you’re allowed to regret that.
This is railroading, and I’ll have none of it. I’m not about to roll for regrets I never wanted.
Unless you’re Cohen the Barbarian, it’s an impossible roll, so stop building dice towers and let’s get on with the campaign.
Panel 4 is my favorite panel in a while. Everyone’s face is great in it.
I like Billie, but she and Ruth being really annoying and insensitive here, and I’m glad Carla’s shutting them down.
*are being.
Well, she tried but it didn’t work because she neglected to realize Billie’s past is influencing her beliefs.
And this is why shipping real life people is abhorrent. It ignores all the horrible factors and only includes the ones the shippers find cute, with no concern for how the actual people themselves are affected.
Someone once shipped me with a toaster…
Well… If this was the toaster, it would make slightly more sense to me:
http://www.marecomic.com/comic/ch3-page-26/
Yeah, and it can get really nasty and presumptive as people’s tastes go in directions the shippers didn’t have in mind. The webcomic Rain had a really good plotline about how folks at the school were shipping the ace character Chanel with a random tall guy and how much their teasing was hurting her and making her feel unsafe.
Isn’t shipping fictional by definition? Even literal RPF (real person fiction), as I understand, doesn’t presume to actually get its subjects together as part of its definition.
The thing that happens in real life is called “matchmaking”. Unwanted matchmaking has been happening since the dawn of time and wasn’t invented by fangirls on the internet.
I want to +1 this because while I enjoy the “calling every hobby or interest a fandom, because it helps normalize fandom as a concept” (the sports fandom, for example), I really dislike calling matchmaking and interfering in real people’s lives “shipping”, because it really feels like it’s shifting the blame to fangirls for something they almost never do.
All the people who ever teased me about feelings they were sure I had for boys were also people who would never have been caught dead shipping fictional characters. It feels like there’s really very little crossover here.
Sorry if this is too tangential, but what is your opinion on Real Person Fic regarding celebrities? I only recently learned about it because I guess a One Direction fic is being published by Random House or something, and one of the band members and his irl fiancee are (were?) vocally upset about it, but they don’t have grounds for a defamation suit.
I’ve heard a lot of people say they’re over-reacting and over-sensitive, and it’s akin to being angry and wanting to sue over a negative album review, but it feels different to me. But, also, I’m not very involved in fan fiction communities, so maybe there’s an element that I’m missing.
I’m not the person to ask, because I find RPF kinda Squick. As do the majority of shippers. They’re a bit of an ostracized sub-group of shipping.
I will say that I’m not completely sure how it differs from historians publishing histories that INSIST real people were in _fill in the blank_ relationship or of _fill it in again_ sexuality, which includes straight; I kinda think that people would feel differently about that fic if it were pairing the band member with a random woman instead of a band mate, when I don’t think there is a material difference between those things.
I think it’s kind of rude and weird, and I would never do it, but also he’s going to marry that woman and no amount of weird published slash fic will change that.
(See also: Tom Cruise being hounded by rumors that he’s gay through the 80s and 90s. IS the fanfic actually different from that, or is it just being treated differently?)
Also, as was said above me, RPFers still almost never actually attempt to pressure the people into actually dating, which is where the difference still lies in this situation.
People can be EXTREMELY weird and invasive about celebrities; it’s only gotten worse since Twitter gave us an unfiltered way to talk to them directly. You see obsessed fans being creepy, and they get a lot more notice than all but the most violent obsessed fans did back before Twitter, so I think it seems like it’s getting worse but I don’t think it actually IS.
Just more public.
Whether published RPF is any materially different from a tell-all unauthorized biography full of defamatory rumors, I don’t know. I feel like the RPF probably has a standard disclaimer on it about being a work of fiction, and that might actually make it LESS libelous than the biography.
*you can see my wires crossing up there about whether or not people are getting “worse” about celebrities. I meant that I don’t think there are more people who would attack a celebrity in RL, or who would kidnap them because “we’re in love”. But Twitter definitely gives the average slightly creepy fan an opportunity to be creepy where the celebrity can see them, instead of having to send letters that get screened.
That’s actually a really good point.
Shipping is supporting the idea of a couple, matchmaking is trying to get that couple to actually be a couple. So you can absolutely ship two violently homophobic murderers of gay teens as a gay couple, but trying to actually get them to date each other would likely get you violently murdered.
That’s actually a valid question.
That being said: Mary’s raised in the world where “if he’s picking on you he likes you.”
Well guess what, maybe maybe Mary might be a shitlord, but if that’s what she knows, that’s what she does.
Don’t know why I said “maybe maybe” (sounds like an early 90’s song or a shitty 80’s band), but all the same, there certainly isn’t any maybe maybe about it.
We may not want to assume all homophobes are secretly queer…come on…I know these two aren’t up to date on lgbt history and culture…but as queer women don’t support that old LGBT homophobe in the closet trope.
I’m glad Carla is smarter then that
There are many queer homophobes but there’s many queer everything because there’s more than homophobes want to admit exist.
Having unfortunately known plenty of people who fit either that bigot because closeted trope or that of being out, proud and still a homophobic shit stain* I can’t just simply write the possibility off out of hand. That said, from my second hand experience, having had to watch friends deal with relationships with such people, it’s never a good thing for the people they end up with and such relationships rarely seem stable and even more rarely last any really significant time.
*Also, by the by, people who are this flavor of out and proud member of the LGBT community yet also raging homophobic bigots are about the worst experience to deal with as a straight cis person who supports the LGBT community (only thing I find worse is LGBT people who are als racist and try to use their gender and/or sexuality as a shield from repercussions from being racist) because whether you call them out on shit they spew or no you’re leaving yourself open to an avalanche of BS.
This isn’t relevant to the strip, but can somebody tell me if getting a Slipshine account is worth it please? I really want to see the extra strips but the amount of money needed is extortionate. Would the number of strips available on it for DoA make it worthwhile, or would it be quite a short reading? Because I’m unlikely to go back to reading Slipshine once I’ve finished the DoA bits, so it would be great if I could know how long I’d be kept reading.
Also, just so this comment is at least partly related to today’s strip, I have to admit I like the idea of Mary and Carla. Please don’t get me wrong, I know that would be super effed up in numerous ways and on an intellectual level I would have been disappointed in Willis if he had gone down that road, but my base instincts can’t help themselves. For some inexplicable reason I find the Slap-slap-kiss dynamic to be adorable, at least on an emotional level.
I don’t have slip shine, but there are several DoA stories up, Welcome to the Fuck Zone is weekly, and he’s working on a new one currently. I’d wait for the new one to be up, take a look at what else is available, and then decide if I wanted to stay.
It’s definitely a YMMV kinda situation, but personally I found myself disinclined after seeing their price until Willis has quite a bit more on there or they just have more stuff I’m more than merely passingly interested in. Funny enough if Willis were to publish a book containing all of his currently extant Slip Shine comics for the same price I’d bite, but that’s more because someone whose work I’m deeply invested in would get all the profits.
Silpshine owns the strips outright, so he can’t do that.
There’s probably close to 200 Willis pages on there by now, mostly DoA but a couple of Shortpacked stories too. I’ve bought in for a month every year or so, but haven’t kept the subscription up.
Billie and Ruth in Panel 4:
“Is it possible we were projecting a bit?”
No, it’s just poor Carla does not understand how true love works. It is an expression of hate born of anger, violence, and despair. Only when you want them to die do you know you can’t live without them.
-Billie, Taylor Swift, and Anakin Skywalker.
Maybe Mary’s secretly a Trekkie?
“Rule of Acquisition 76: Every once in a while, declare peace. It confuses the hell out of your enemies.”
Mark my words.
Mary is being nice for completely unrelated reasons to everything that’s going on st the moment. Whatever has her in good spirits will likely have zero impact on the story. Like, a sibling is getting married or she got a new Bible or something.
Unless I’m wrong and she’s still a cliche, so she’s plotting on reveling on something awful.
Personally I’d prefer if Mary was just showing other side of her. Doesn’t male her less of a beeyatch but it gives her depth, kinda.
Certainly not a crush on anyone ever, though. Please.
I like this and I think this is probably accurate. The whole Mary/Joe thing is the explanation that makes the most sense out of all the speculations I’ve seen… and it still doesn’t make sense to me. She is SO annoyingly, restrictively Christian; I can’t imagine her being happy to be on a “do” list. If she’s running around spreading queerphobia like she has, it seems to me that she would probably also condemn Joe’s promiscuity.
I like the idea that this is genuine and feel that this theory is supported by the fact that her facial expressions look genuinely, well, genuine, to me. She isn’t drawn with that sinister twinkle in her eye, like she has something up her sleeve. I think that if she has decided to be nicer/had a revelation of some sort, that would be cool character development. It also might be realistic that she hasn’t quite gotten it all together enough to realize that apologizing for past behavior is crucial for wiping the slate clean and starting fresh with people.
Under the “things one does when it’s real late at night”:
I read that word in your next to last paragraph as “Beefsquatch”.
To be fair, Beefsquatch is a bit.of a boingo.
Unrelated, but it will have an impact. Mary is wearing Chekov’s clothes. It matters, but not in the way we think it does. DYW is too good at narrative for it not to matter and he knows us to well to give is what we want or expect.
Remember Optimus Prime’s method of flirting. “GIVE ME YOUR FACCCCCE!”
I just realized Billie has a TriangleGrin® in the first panel.
Is no one safe?
I vote for “They then punched each other and made love,” to be the new “And then they did it.”
All in agreement say aye.
aye
Carla, you need to watch it with that Dreamworks Face in panel four there.
IT IS TIME AGAIN FOR ONE OF MY AWKWARD QUESTIONS :TOOT:
Isn’t Billie and Ruth’s relationship kinda-sorta-not-healthy? Sure, they are co-dependant on each other but on the other hand the relationship has a LOT of violence.
I’d say it’s a lot more healthy now, but the origins of the relationship were super not good.
The way it started was absolutely not healthy, but all except the pre-relationship violence has been entirely consensual. Plus, they’re getting healthier all the time, and are really open and supportive of each other.
Not awkward at all. You’re right, it wasn’t healthy at all. I think . . . I think it started getting healthier when Ruth asked Billie not to let her die.
I genuinely have no idea how I’m supposed to think of their relationship.
I know I’m in the minority, but I’ve never been behind Ruth and Billie as a couple. I’d be relieved if they broke up. I think they make each other’s issues worse.
I’m calling it. Mary’s happy because she also put in for a room transfer and will now be rooming with Billie, thereby leaving this dorm and gaining further ability to make Billie’s life hell outside Ruth’s jurisdiction.
…I really hope I’m wrong.
As interesting as that twist would be, I highly doubt that Mary could get a room transfer that quickly. Billie only got moved to the top of the waiting list out of urgency.
Mary probably has a family friend in the housing office, knowing her.
But yeah, that’s a really good point.
Comic Reactions:
Panel 1: It is a tale as old as time. As I noted in my comments yesterday, there’s a strong romantic comedy narrative surrounding the bitter rival enemies to strong romantic lovers arc.
That common narrative that the more two characters hate each other, the more likely it is that those characters are going to be the strongest couple in the end where they fight all the time but “truly love each other”. And a lot of the works it shows up the most in are children’s stories and cartoons.
How many cartoons for younger kids have the fighting couple be the ending couple? How few are like Steven Universe’s Steven and Connie where the relationship mostly arises through kindness and mutual support?
We’re very literally trained to read narratives of hate turning to something else as narratives of love blooming and a larger connection. And I’ve noted in the previous day deconstruction how this is a very dangerous narrative for trans women and ace women in how hateful attraction to us can go very very fatally badly for us.
So it’s understandable why Carla has no time for this shit, but it’s also understandable why Billie would be enamored with said narrative. Because well, her and Ruth’s origins were horrible. I’d argue they’ve built a relatively healthy relationship, but the origins were awful and they still have a lot of crap they are working through.
And those origins definitely followed the mold of the abusive authority figure terrorizing you because she secretly loved you and couldn’t deal with those feelings and so for Billie, she’s likely remembering that and romanticizing it.
Billie is much more of a romantic than she lets on.
I think another reason to tend to want to see conflict as budding romance is that it neatly solves a messy problem. Of course, the majority of times it IS a conflict all it does is to move the responsibility of solving the conflict to the victim.
I think you’re right on there.
Actual conflict is messy and often needs the involvement of an authority figure of some kind and in a bigoted system, often times there is no justice for abused marginalized groups if that abuse comes from someone with greater social power.
But if it’s all a courtship dance, if it all resolves naturally as they realize their mutual chemistry then there’s no need for actual intervention or all that effort, because it’s just two people flirting before settling in for love.
I bet Chloe is in favor of it all just being a lovers spat.
After all, she didn’t have to do anything about the whole Ruth/Billie thing, even if she would know about it.
Thanks for pointing it out! I had strong feelings for someone who was abusive and growing up around the narrative of “conflict turns into love” resulted in me taking a REALLY long time to figure out how awful they were to me.
I think the tsundere archetype (especially in anime) also has its toots in wish fulfillment. Of course there’s a kind of person who thinks girls who hate them secretly love them. Othwrwise why would every single girl hate them?
moral of the story if you have beef, f*ck it out until your better
Panel 2: I love Carla.
Like, this is a beautiful rant and gets at like nine different important things. First is the obvious. The tale-as-old-as-time narrative that someone hurts you because they like you. And that if that violence is coming from boys when you are a girl, that you should accept that violence because it’s just “how they show their love”.
The second is the undermining of queer pain, especially when you are heavily marginalized by way of being trans and ace. The idea that our life experiences of suffering bullying are like an exaggeration or something to dismiss and that hurts queer kids a lot. I grew up a kid who was told a lot that I was being targeted because I was “making myself a good target” (by being queer) and so on.
Based on a lot of the clues Carla has dripped so far, it definitely sounds like she had a comparatively shitty time growing up and dealing with shit from her peers.
There’s also the way we never see any real response to people overtly harassing us. Like, content warning sexual harassment, but…
Being ace and trans on top of being a girl, I get a lot of apologetics and weird defenses of sexual harassment towards me. Like, women in general and especially non-normatively attractive women in general are expected to react positively to harassment and treat it like the compliment it isn’t because “who else would compliment you”.
But when you are trans and ace, it gets an extra edge, where not only are you expected to be grateful and smile and never react poorly, but both reacting poorly or positively can get you beaten or killed. Because why is a “freak” like you daring to not treat this as someone deigning to pay you a compliment.
And then that last piece. “Oh, they must secretly be one of yours”.
Like, holy shit does this get to a big thing, especially of late. So there’s a long standing line of joking about homophobes being secretly gay and so on. Now, here’s the thing, the origin of it is much more benign than how it often gets used today.
Where this really got going, there were a lot of closet cases who were running homophobic institutions and campaigning publicly against queer rights and this is when outing as a political tactic kind of exploded for awhile. Folks like Roy Cohn, George Rekers, Larry Craig.
And their exposure actually did weaken a lot of homophobic narratives at the time and it becoming a topic for the late night comedy shows did end up playing a role in shifting public opinion as it undermined a lot of narratives about how one could “fix” that “life style” with hard work and focus and a lot of the claimed “morality” of the bigot brigade.
And it made bigots a little less willing to be all-in less they be seen as a little “too invested” as it were.
Now that this was effective in its time was a thing, but it was very easy to go wrong and we’ve seen that in the years since. Jokes about bigots being queer ended up becoming ways for straight folks to let themselves off the hook for anti-queer violence. Now it wasn’t just a percentage of the bigots were queer just like a percentage of everyone else. Now, it was all of them.
And it allowed a lot of non-queer narratives to surround the idea that homophobia was just a factor of intra-community violence between closeted folks and out folks.
And it’s led to a lot of nastiness where figures whose views and actions are horrific are only mocked as “secretly being gay” instead of the real world awfulness of their actions, as if being gay would be worse than being a rapist or a child molester, or a murderous tyrant.
And so yeah, there’s a lot of growing queer pushback against these jokes nowadays because the inherent comedy in these has become a lot less “look at these fucking hypocrites being assholes” and a lot more “X is bad because they are secretly gay and that is unmanly”.
*Now all this history being said, it’s probably probable that this narrative has always been toxic as fuck. I can only speak to it as I grew up to it and my interactions with it, flawed as they likely were.
Also, I want to echo Wack’d’s take on Ruth’s line not sitting right. Like, Carla is very unlikely using “one of you” in its term of “they’re secretly trans” or “they’re secretly ace”, but rather as the more common “they’re secretly queer”.
And well… all three of them are queer. So Ruth’s correction I don’t think was meant as anything other than “we’re saying she’s figured out she’s gay or bi rather than ace or trans”, but given what Carla was likely trying to communicate it definitely comes out as having an unfortunate connotation of “you Carla, being ace and trans and homoromantic are not queer” which does sit a little poorly.
Gonna chime in here to say that as a Dumbing of Age only reader (have not ready other Willis comics), it doesn’t read that way to me, because of Carla’s sexuality or romanticism not being discussed in this strip. The comment is a little confusing, and did read to me as Ruth saying “one of mine and Billie’s” but I’m not sure what she intended by that. Maybe that she thinks Carla is hetero, while Mary might be in the bi club?
I could see that interpretation, but Carla’s already come out to Ruth as being homoromantic herself, noting that she also finds girls super cute and favors them as romantic partners.
So Ruth knows that Carla is sapphicly inclined.
And again, i don’t think Ruth is meaning anything negative. I’m pretty sure she’s thinking bi/gay vs trans in her constructing not noticing that Carla is definitely using it more in the general queer sense.
Like, it’s actually a very human response to be like “no, we don’t see her as trans or ace, we see her as bi or gay like us”. But yeah, a bit fucked up and unfortunate in context.
I was thinking myself that Carla meant trans or only interested in women while Ruth meant bi because Carla is the only one out of them that would have no interest in guys in such a scenario where Mary is interested in women (as I think in previous worlds she has show an interest in guys at least).
That’s my reading too: Carla says people who say that are assuming, “Oh, they’re secretly homoromantic like you”, whereas Ruth is saying she and Billie are actually assuming Mary is secretly bi-romantic like themselves.
Also, I want to echo Wack’d’s take on Ruth’s line not sitting right. Like, Carla is very unlikely using “one of you” in its term of “they’re secretly trans” or “they’re secretly ace”, but rather as the more common “they’re secretly queer”.
And well… all three of them are queer. So Ruth’s correction I don’t think was meant as anything other than “we’re saying she’s figured out she’s gay or bi rather than ace or trans”, but given what Carla was likely trying to communicate it definitely comes out as having an unfortunate connotation of “you Carla, being ace and trans and homoromantic are not queer” which does sit a little poorly.
Meanwhile, I read that line from Ruth as being more like, “Billie and I are also queer, so we’re not saying ‘one of yours’ (a group that would only include Carla), but ‘one of ours’ (a group that would include all three of us).”
I saw that line as Ruth pointing out that she and Billie are not straight people assuming Mary is secretly gay for the reason that Carla is reacting to here. I saw it as Ruth saying, “W, well, we were seeing ourselves in Mary, not seeing Otherness.”
(And of course, Billie and Ruth WERE very much… seeing specifically themselves in the fantasy version of Mary that’s romantically interested in Carla and expressing it horrifically.)
This is just my read.
I also don’t think it at all invalidates anything Carla was saying, and that the correction might also not be helpful because Carla wasn’t necessarily calling Ruth and Billie straight — Carla was reacting to the reinforcing of nasty crap that she’s tired of hearing, and being very specific about the ways in which it hurt her. I don’t think she actually meant “one of yours” to not include Ruth and Billie to begin with. Carla’s follow-up (“Maybe you two are new to this”) further emphasizes that for me.
That Carla is, brusquely, acknowledging that Billie and Ruth might not have been out long enough to have run into the dark side of what they were suggesting yet.
…does any of this make sense? I loved this strip on all cylinders, but I saw this one little bit and I thought maybe this alternate interpretation (where Carla and Ruth/Billie had a miscommunication on the use of “yours”) might be useful.
Oh. Oh that is a good shout I hadn’t thought of but would make sense.
<3 /little heartflurry for you
I hope I'm right. I also just want to hug Carla a lot, with her permission of course.
Yeah, I’m not ruling out the puppy thing
Panel 3: I LOVE CARLA!!!
This rant is beautiful and pure, because yeah, it gets to the point of the matter. Even if there are bigots with lots to lose and are heavily entrenched in systems like “pray away the gay” reparative therapy camps and have a lot materially to lose coming out who work at cross-properties to liberty, that has little to do with the individual level.
That bigot smashing your face against the cobblestone walls isn’t doing it because they secretly lust after you. And if they are doing it because they lust after you, it usually goes way worse, because that often comes with them overtly blaming you for “turning them” and requiring an act of violence to be “made right”.
They’re rarely people who are going to recognize their flaws peacefully and come to a calm and rational awareness of themselves and their attractions that they are going to approach in a civil and respectful manner.
And for trans women like Carla, that gets an extra layer, because there are straight women that like us, there are lesbian women who like us. Because we are women. But damn do those groups when they are bigots get nasty about it. Because they read it as an assault on their sexuality, poisoning their “gold medals” or their vaunted straightness and even the ones who are willing to love us on the down-low can be one teasing session with their friends away from trying to publicly hurt us, sometimes fatally.
And I love that Carla calls that out and also calls out this whole toxic narrative, that violence is abuse not signs of love and shouldn’t be overlooked or treated as an innocent crush rather than a dangerous sign. And I love that she’s approaching it from the perspective of a learned queer elder, because in some ways she is. It’s been hinted that she’s been out for awhile and Billie and Ruth only recently figured out stuff.
Panel 4: But of course it falls apart to this audience. Because well, between the two of them, yeah, their relationship began in abuse and horrific circumstances and it turned out the violent bully really did have a crush and was reacting abysmally to it and calmed down over time.
And that’s another piece of the puzzle here that Carla is learning. As bad as any stereotype is, there is going to be someone that it is going to fit for better or for worse. There are some bisexuals who cheat regularly on their partners, some rapists who happen to be trans (I’ve had an unfortunate encounter with one), some relationships with utterly horrific origins that turned out okay in the end.
The problem is in assuming that those are or should be the majority rather than a rare minority that is often more a minority than it is for the dominant group holding that stereotype against them.
Panel 5: Seriously, all the heart eyes for Carla, because yeah, she recognizes exactly why her rant falls short and she’s pissed off about this, because yeah, this is serious to her, this line of thinking can be actively dangerous to her, but at the same time, we know this isn’t her writing them off, because at the end of the day, she likes bonding with them as fellow queers and likes being the older queer mentor to their fledgling relationship.
But yeah, I suspect she’s going to split off for a bit now to cool off and duck out of any further fucked up romantic speculation about her (which is another thing ace people tend to get a lot of), people trying to figure out which person will be a good partner to “fix” us and get us to “love right”.
Shoves is not Loves seem like an amazing slogan for some sort of Anti-Domestic Violence movement as well.
I mean a lot of this does speak of her experience with being openly trans, but even beyond that a lot of it seems like it can be applied to most relationships.
Just uh, not the one involving people who have been literally shoving each other around as a cover story to hide their relationship even after they moved beyond it being due to a secret attraction, I suppose.
‘The problem is in assuming that those are or should be the majority rather than a rare minority that is often more a minority than it is for the dominant group holding that stereotype against them.’ SO MUCH THIS.
In nothing else would you assume something extremely rare is likely to apply to every single case where it is remotely possible. Because like if you look at childhood diseases for instance, 99% of people that get chickenpox or croup or colds are fine. There aren’t people running about pointing at every instance of these things saying ‘that child is going to die!’ because they COULD be the very rare one that develops worse symptoms.
It doesn’t make it an impossible occurrence because there is me who managed to get such severe croup that I could have literally died as a child (I barked like a sea lion instead of saying ‘I love you’, like can you even imagine). But not even 1% of children get it that badly, I wouldn’t expect people to be looking at every instance of croup and going ‘IT IS GOING TO KILL THEM!’ when more than 99% of them literally just get a bad cough that goes away within a couple of weeks.
And this specific problem isn’t even just with queer people though it is a big problem for them especially, but the hatred women feel may not be taken seriously, especially when directed at a man because toxic masculinity nonsense about how females literally can’t understand their own emotions and must love them or the harassment done by males may not be treated seriously at times because ‘maybe he just likes you’. Like do some people forget NOT REMOTELY liking someone is an option???
Carla is literally a Queen on this page tbh, I definitely agree with all your Carla love here.
Yeah, let’s put it this way, Carla: The vast majority of people don’t have romantic relationships that began with antagonism. The real world isn’t a romcom. Of course, there is no way in which Ruth and Billie’s relationship is ‘normal’; to them, having a relationship start with antagonism is something that’s possible and has led to an at least semi-happy ending for them. Because of that, I would argue that Carla is probably talking to entirely the wrong pair about ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ relationships!
i wonder which of them likes to be shoved?
Carla smashing the shipper goggles with a warhammer XD
It will be interesting to see what happens if Willis does decide to give Carla a SO. ‘Asexual’ is not ‘aromantic’ but the other partner (if they’re not ace themselves) have to make allowances. Even so, Carla’s relationship with Malaya in the Walkyverse was pretty passionate and intimate in its own unique way.
Still it will be a hilarious trainwreck if Mary of all people turns out to be her partner…
…every partner has to “make allowances”. Not being asexual does not mean you always want sex when the other person does. Just sayin’.
Absolutely true, but it’s more extreme if the other person never wants sex. Even among allosexuals, big differences in sex drive can be a major source of relationship conflict.
This is fair, I just… I don’t like the phrasing, I guess. “Make allowances” bothers me a lot more than noting that differences in sex drive can be a source of relationship conflict.
So, the wording bothers me but, I want to stress here that I’m sure the intent wasn’t anything awful. We’re all pretty good eggs here, I think.
It seemed to work out okay for Super-Carla.
And good, people shipping Mary with Carla is super creepy.
But still harmless. If they want to, well it’s their creepy hobby. Not my problem.
Is it harmless? Is people doing the whole “boy violates girl’s boundaries, oh he just has a crush on you sweetie” harmless?
It’s Fictional. People do a lot of fictional tampering that would be horrifying in real life but is just weird fun. It’s like all those “professionals” who keep claiming that video games make us do evil shit.
I think we missed each other. My point was that shipping Carla and Mary, while seemingly creepy, is just harmless fun.
Shippers gonna ship.
As far as shipping goes, this doesn’t rate on the creepy scale.
Out of sheer “Curiosity traumatized the cat” what Does rate as creepy shipping?
Harry/Snape?
Hermione/voldemort?
Fricken Billie and Ruth, you two are obviously a special case! Mary was not just being mean, what she did was 100x meaner and hateful than what Ruth did!
So uh, do you actually remember what Ruth did? Because fuck. I’ve reread recently and it hit me all over like a ton of bricks, because here’s the thing: while Mary was actively trying to create an unsafe and terrifying environment for Carla, all she succeeded in was pissing her off. Ruth? Ruth succeeded with flying colors, and the only reason it got better for Billie was because Sal proved willing to help.
Just, no. Let’s not compare transphobia with bullying from an authority figure (complete with stealing and defacing precious possessions) (like yeah Mary broke Carla’s new skates but it’s nowhere near the fuckery Ruth was pulling)
Point. Mary was little more than a little annoyance for Carla while Ruth was a genuine threat to Billie.
Misgendering, destruction of property, and risking serious injury is a fuck ton worse than “a little annoyance”
It all depends on perspective. For example getting punched may seem thoroughly traumatic for an average person but for someone who’s been in a bunch of fights? Just an excuse to punch back.
I’m positive that calling taking the time to call a transgender woman a man is terrible independent of the situation, and that this approach depends on the idea that oppressive social structures exist arbitrarily rather than to take away the human rights of specific groups of people, and thereby incite violence upon them. Like, even in just this situation, I’m positive that Carla did not want to be misgendered and that her immediate response was not to attack Mary, let alone anyone!!!
I’m not saying it’s not terrible. I’m just pointing out that there is a difference in perception.
Like Liliet pointed out there is a big difference between Carla and Billie’s situation.
Billie was abused by an authority figure who caused her genuine pain, grief and distress.
Carla on the other hand treats Mary as a petty little annoyance not worth getting emotionally invested in. She probably experienced this and Worse stuff and it just doesn’t phase her anymore. Billie by comparison is a sheltered little princess who always had everything her way.
The point is that the “scale and intensity” of the threat depends heavily on the observer. From Billie’s perspective Ruth was a far more threatening presence than Mary was for Carla.
Carla treats it as a petty annoyance because she HAS to, not because it doesn’t affect her. If she lets it show it just gives more incentive to treat her like that That shit is why she closes herself off from everyone.
I’m with Liliet on not comparing the two. Both were fucking awful, just in different ways, for different reasons. That Carla is used to getting that kind of hateful treatment is inconsequential. That Billie forgave Ruth and things are much different now doesn’t make it less fucked up that their relationship started that way.
I think this is one of those that’s funnier without a punch line – drop the last panel, do the panel with Billie and Ruth’s expression looking at each other after Carla’s comment, then a panel with Carla’s expression as a reaction to them. Her expression says it all….
Why is Mary acting this way? Somebody spiked her donut, clearly.
PHRASING
Given how Mary seems to be hugely anime obsessed, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was attracted to Carla… more as a fetish and a ‘project’ than as anything else, though.
Mary seems to be the what now?
oh fucks god no, i reeeeally hope not
I think this is one of the first times I have ever truly genuinely appreciated Carla.
Huh…
Both taking absolute positions! No! C’mon Carla, sometimes the shoves is loves, and sometimes it isn’t:)
Well if you are Zaraki Kenpachi…
I like to use the definition of love in Frozen. Shoves can sometimes be an indicator of romantic feelings, or feelings of attachment, but those feelings do not always cause love.
Eeeh, Honestly, generally speaking, when someone is shovey, you should just steer way clear and don’t give them the time of day. A person(Over the age of, like, twelve) that thinks shoves are love usually ends up being an abusive asshole.
The deeper truth behind this strips is that Billie and Ruth’s relationship is -weird- and not to be emulated. They really have -become- good for each other, from what we’ve seen lately, but the way their relationship started was toxic and destructive. But just because they crossed a minefield safely by accident doesn’t mean other people should go walking into it.
Dorothy & Walky are at one end of Shovey, Ruth and Billie at the other?
very different, though both worked out.
Walky was the cute, immature version – throwing a toy at her head because he liked her and couldn’t express it. Once.
Ruth was the abusive version.
Walky threw the toy at Dorothy’s head to give her. His brain short circuited and he didn’t have the mental capacity at the time to give it to her in a better way but the intend was always to make her happy.
One of my biggest problems with Mary as a character is that she completely lacked humanity, so I actually really like that Billie and Ruth are taking their own messed up romantic history and wistfully hoping that Mary’s evil can be explained the way Ruth’s was.
What did she do that was so evil though, other than getting into a fight with Carla that escalated into her threatening to use the blackmail material she had on Ruth? Sorry if I have a short memory or missed something.
Sure, she’s religious and very judgemental due to her background. The same thing was true about Joyce, but since she’s the MC we’ve seen her have much more character development.
Mary looks evil because we’re seeing everything from the perspective of those who don’t like her. If we saw things from the perspective of Sarah’s old “friends” we could perfectly have ended up thinking that Sarah was evil. If Mary is written to be an actual three-dimensional person she’s perfectly capable of having a change of heart.
Well there was that whole “getting blackmail material and saving it up to use to her advantage thing.” Along with the whole trans and homophobic thing – in a far different and nastier way than Joyce, even in the beginning when Joyce was at her worst. Even at Joyce’s worst she cared about other people and wanted to help them – often in completely wrong and toxic ways. Mary dismisses them as “perverts” or saves up the revelation until she can twist the knife deeper like she did with Carla.
Even when it was all falling apart and Ruth was suicidal she tried to salvage the situation by keeping anyone from calling for help and then by passing the blame to Walky. Afterwards, she tried to get Billie to give her free reign to torment Carla.
She’s a foil to Joyce. That’s what those parallels are for. She’s not on the same path. She’s not a nice person with a bad background. We’re not misjudging her because we don’t have perspective.
She wasn’t just trying to study.
I hope Mary outgrows her bigoted past but it would not be a straight arrow.
I honestly hope she doesn’t. At least not in the confines of the story. She’ll have decades to live and change afterwards.
She’s a good villain. Let her stay that way. Not everyone gets redeemed. Not everyone learns the right lessons.
Beyond that, Mary’s problem isn’t her bigoted past. It’s herself. She’d be a nasty piece of work if she’d been brought up with the homophobic religion. Just with different targets. Willis basically said as much, saying her parents weren’t that bad.
Be that as it may, I still like the acknowledgement that there may be something deeper coming from Billie and Ruth (two people with an extremely messed up history of abuse and violence and basically doing everything to each other what Mary did to them),
Will this end up with Mary turning a new leaf? Most likely not, but it’s that hope coming from the characters that I enjoy, because it means Mary’s being treated as an actual human being rather than the swirling vortex of evil she’s been thus far.
I’d be perfectly fine with Mary getting some humanizing traits, but that doesn’t necessarily mean having her turn over a new leaf.
Three dimensional, relatable villains are cool.
Thank you at the beginning Joyce didn’t know how to respond to life outside of her bubble but tried to be a good/nice person. Sometimes she sort of failed but she honestly tried. The flower analogy, her concern for Dorothy, her half way stance against bigotry which ended up convincing Ethan the opposite of what she meant (I know its definitely better than lying which people tend to not think too much of), her belief that she can honestly change Ethan. But she got better because she wanted to be better. She struggled with that but ultimately she chose to translate scripture the way she did, because she entered school wanting to be a good/nice person. Mary ultimately translated scripture the way she did because she did because she wanted an excuse to be a bigot.
It’s not just changes in her interpretation of scripture though. Even her crappy behavior was generally motivated by actual concern for people – even when it was toxic, damaging behavior. Mary’s never shown that
Yea I know Joyce had genuinely good intentions from day one of college. Mary was a bully from day one of college.
Mary is evil because she was openly gloating about driving Ruth to suicide
Meh, no. The perspective of Sarah’s former friends is that Sarah should have been OK with Dana doing drugs in their room. There’s no getting around that part of the story.
Either Raidah’s version of the story downplays that Dana’s drug use getting worse or her version pretends her drug use didn’t change at all. In each case the question is, “If it wasn’t that serious, why didn’t Dana just not do drugs in the room?”
Raidah and her friends can’t make Sarah look evil in that situation without flat out lying about what happened. At worst they can leave information out and make it look like Sarah overreacted.
I think everyone else has why Mary is evil covered.
Y’know if this does turn out to be some weird Mary revenge scheme it’s actually working perfectly.
“And then she realized with whom she was talking. The End.” 😀
Shoves is not loves.
Slugs is not hugs.
Beats is not sweets.
Trips is not ships?
A pasting is not a chasing.
Thumps is not humps?
Bruises is not chooses.
Fistses ain’t kisses
Carla is my favorite
That alt text was, like, “In before someone answers Carla by saying, ‘You looOOOoove them.'”
I have a theory why Mary is so happy. I think she may have been sexually assaulted by Ryan. She knew he was the son of a pastor. And Joyce said three other girls came forward about him. Mary’s the kind who would fall for the son of a pastor thing, and she may be so happy the past few days because he got what was coming for him.
So then…um…yeah. Having a bit of difficulty coming up with a lighthearted post in the vein that I’ve been doing lately. But life isn’t always about jokes. I wonder if that theory’s been floated to Carla before.
I think Billy and Ruth are overlooking one huge problem with their theory: even if it’s true, it doesn’t really change anything. Even if Mary realized she WUUUVS Carla, Mary is still a toxic dumpster fire of a person. I honestly can’t imagine that being in a relationship with Mary would be a more enjoyable experience than being hated by her.
Thank you, Carla. As a gay dude I’m starting to find it insulting that the first reaction to homophobia or transphobia is that the person spewing the hate is secretly gay, lesbian or trans. Please straight people, this is not a comfort nor does it make me happy about the situation, and frankly, it’s kind of demeaning.
Well, panel three is a sneak peak of my new gravatar is I can relearn how my cropping function on photo editing works.
I’m getting scared, because Mary has clearly been cemented as one of the villains of this comic, and Willis doesn’t really do redemption arcs for villains.
Panel three Carla sees her rocketing up my favourite character list, I love her telling Ruth and Billie that its not healthy and, by extension, their whole relationship is unhealthy
Carla is right. Shoves is not loves. If someone treats you like crap, it’s not because they like you. They want to destroy or control you. That “Oh, s/he’s doing bad things to you because s/he likes you.” Believing that is how one finds themselves in an abusive relationship.
Yeah agreed and Billies look in panel one is both cute and endearing but also…I’m not sure of the correct words…naïve and potentially dangerous maybe?
This is one of the funniest strips in a while.
If popular media has taught us anything, its that hateful straight characters who openly despise queer people are secretly raging queers themselves. Instead of, you know, hateful characters. Shippers gonna ship though.