I’ll defend Mike’s actions in that he does them for reasons, even if those reasons are horrible and he tries to be as hurtful as possible, but what the fuck is he accomplishing here? There’s nothing but him rubbing salt in Dorothy’s and Walky’s wounds.
Okay, sometimes he does them for reasons. I still don’t know what the hell he was thinking when he told Amber she was destined to become her father. A lot of his other awful terrible things are (academically) for others’ benefits. They’re just, you know, never that practically.
Best thing I can think of is to evoke an emotion. Somebody getting depressed? Induce anger. Because they can do something about that anger. At the very least, it gives them a target they can focus on.
I think that some of it is people clinging to Walkyverse Mike and his actually purposeful mind games that were meant to make people feel like crap about stupid stuff they’ve been deluding themselves into being okay with.
I like him because I enjoy a decent antagonist and he does a good job being something for the cast to be on their toes about.
By making her aware of how she was behaving so she could stop the behaviour? It’s not in any way the way such a thing should have been handled. He was also poking a hole in her logic.
Well of course it was a horrible thing to say, nobody has ever said it was the right approach or a job well done.
And she absolutely did end up in the abusive zone as she went on. She recognised it, was horrified by it, and hopefully can pull herself in a better direction but her relationship with Danny was very quickly failing into a very empty place.
Mike did not say Amber was destined to be like Blaine.
SHE had said she was worried that her relationships would be like her parents, but that the guys she dated were never like Blaine.
What Mike then said was IF her relationship was destined to follow the pattern of her parents’ relationship, and IF they guys were never like Blaine, then she didn’t have to worry about it because she was the Blaine figure.
That’s two conditional statements that followed her own premise of her relationships being like her parents’ relationship.
He didn’t say her relationships had to be like that and he didn’t say the guys she dated would always take her mom’s role in such a relationship, thereby putting her in Blaine’s role.
He was showing her the end result of her own logical premise, but at no point did he say that her premise was correct or unchanging if correct.
Was it the best way to go about allaying her fears? Hell no. But it was distinctly different than telling her she was destined to be like her father.
Saying she’s the Blaine figure is pretty damn similar to saying she’s destined to be like Blaine. Also – Amber never said she was destined to be like her mom, but she was afraid she would be. MIKE made up the logic that if she was destined to be like her parents. He made up his own premise as well as offered the false idea that the only alternative to dating abusive jerks was to date pushovers.
No. She said she was worried she would be like her mom, but the guys she dated were never like that. She was the one who said she keeps picking decent guys/”pushovers” and Mike just went along with the idea that she chooses them; not that she SHOULD choose them. He was establishing a pattern of her past dates, not suggesting a modus of operandi for future ones.
He said she shouldn’t worry about that because IF her relationships were like theirs and IF the guys she dated were never like Blaine, then by default of her relationship being like her parents’ and the guys not being like dad, the guys must then be like mom. Leaving her to be like dad.
That leaves two options: quit worrying about it because your relationship isn’t destined to follow theirs, or quit worrying about it because it your relationship does follow theirs, but not in the dynamic you’re worried about. Either way, quit worrying about it.
Amber said she was afraid of being abused like her mother was, she never expressed a belief she was destined to be like her parents. If I’m afraid of the possibility someone else burning down my home, that doesn’t mean I believe it’s destined to happen. That is what MIKE said.
Also, Amber never used the word ‘pushover’ to describe Danny. She said he was king, honest, loyal and nothing like her dad. MIKE, again, is the one who said he was a pushover and MIKE is the one who said the only alternative to an abusive jerk was a pushover.
Again, Mike is the one who made the premise Amber was destined to be like her parents and that she was the one dating pushovers (not people like Amber described) then she would end up like Blaine. Both premises are bs.
I know Amber never called them pushovers. That’s why I put them in quotation marks.
And Mike didn’t suggest she continue dating what he called pushovers to avoid her parents’ fate.
Again, he was pointing out the pattern of her past relationships, not suggesting what she should do for her future ones.
But I’m repeating myself now and want to avoid my bad habit over overexplaining stuff, especially when neither side will come to a consensus.
Mike’s entire statement was based on the idea that if Amber’s always dating pushovers (which, again, he positions as the only alternative to abusive tools) then she’s not doomed to be like her mom, she’s doomed to be like her dad. Which is, again, a position HE is forwarding. That wasn’t what Amber said. Amber said she was afraid she’d be abused like her mom was. He said if she was destined to follow her parents pattern (again, HE is asserting that) then she’s destined to be like her dad based on her dating choices (again, using qualities he is asserting as part of an idea he is stating – that her only options are jerks who will abuse her and pushovers. Neither is a thing Amber said).
Playing devil’s advocate — Mike is trying to make Walky and Dorothy realize that they are both being extremely dumb about something they both want, and in so doing, are only hurting themselves now over something that might hurt later.
Nope. He’s being an asshole in the hopes that he will receive lhysical retaliation, which is his major turn-on.
His entire life is Becky’s storyline with Dina’s hat, except replace the hat with masochistic pleasure and the schenanigans with inflicting pain on others.
I’m pretty sure we should just treat Mike as a walking plot device rather than a person. Sometimes you just need a total asshole to say something terrible to some other character for plot/character development reasons, and no one else in the ‘verse is quite enough of an asshole to do it, and that is how you get characters like Mike.
Mike nets us a lot of useful insight on other characters via what he says/does and how they react to it. I like Mike for that reason. But I don’t like him as a character. He has always seemed less multi-faceted than Willis’ other characters. Again, that is why I think he is a walking plot device.
Mike can give the other characters the verbal dope slap they need, but we can only scream into the comments. He just does it in the most dickish way possible.
I don’t really think he does these things for reasons beyond his own satisfaction.
I think he’s just a troll trying to provoke negative emotional responses. Having “reasons” is just a routine part of his M.O. to make his target feel even worse.
This universe’ Mike is an anomaly. He’s still the biggest asshole in the world, but somehow he’ll actually help people, usually by making them confront what they don’t want to
He may often THINK he has a point, but he’s just a smug-ass teenager who thinks he’s figured everything out. His methods are awful and his points are bad.
Yeah, I kinda don’t understand the Mike tolerance, when, it seems,more people get sick of other jerk characters.
I hope it’s that people find him so cartoonish that they don’t consider him a real person, but more of a walking plot device. Mike is terrible.
Or make things worse by telling an abuse victim that she’ll become her father, perpetuating a harmful stereotype and attempting to needle her about her WORSE FEAR
Amber does a lot of things that aren’t justified. I’m not saying she’s a bad person. And I’m not saying that abuse victims in real life should be treated that way. But everything Mike said was true.
It wasn’t logic, it was a prediction. “You’ll end up like your dad.” And he was right. Even Amber thinks so. “I got saddled with your petty rage.” Now she can finally do something about it.
Amber knew that before Mike said anything. Again, best case scenario, he made no impact and at worst he made a bad situation worse. Also, he absolutely did offer his own logic on the situation – faulty logic, sure, but ‘If you’re destined to be like your parents and if you’re never the one dating jerks because you’re dating pushovers, which are you’ is definitely him trying for a logical take. Again, it’s BS logic because ‘if you’re destined to be like your parents’ and ‘the only alternative to jerks is pushovers’ are both faulty premises, but that’s what Mike said.
No, she was not. She said she was worried about ending up in an abusive relationship. Nowhere did she say she was destined to do so. MIKE is the one who brought that up.
And the fact that Amber believes that her anger makes her a Blaine waiting to happen is exactly why it’s fucking harmful for Mike to say shit like that. Anger issues can be managed! Tons of people have them and don’t abuse anyone! Amber’s fatalistic view that she’s doomed to become her father is why she puts on a mask and beats up criminals instead of actually finding a healthy outlet! If she’s doomed to become her abuser, there’s no point seeking mundane ways to deal with her issues, because if those had any chance of working, she wouldn’t be doomed.
Yes, like her mother did. That doesn’t mean she feels she’s destined to end up like them, it means she’s afraid of the possibility of being abused. MIKE is the one who presented it as an inevitability, and in the present tense, as FC said.
Amber should be in prison or a psychiatric institution if this comic were even remotely realistic. Her issues go FAR beyond ‘anger problems’ and into the territory of criminal vigilantism and assault that serves no actual purpose besides giving her someone to vent her rage onto while convincing herself it’s alright because her victims are petty criminals.
In prison?
What exactly for? She violently interfered in some guy trying to rape a girl. Twice, I think.
She cut up a known rapist coming after her and her friend with the knife he brought to the scene.
She went after a guy stealing handbags as he was in the act of stealing a handbag.
These are all legal acts (though someone with less reason to hate abusers might have manger with keeping the rapist within the knife more intact but he was the one who brought the knife and upped the ante all by himself).
Going to pick a fight with Sal’s and company was not, put getting in a senseless fight with someone is not a prison-worthy offence as long as all you end up with are some bruises.
So, what exactly did she do that should be penalized by jail time?
He was pointing out the flaw in her own logic. If she’s so afraid of becoming like her mother than she ends up becoming the one seeking out partners she can walk all over and treat however she wants then she ends up in just as much an unwanted place as the thing she’s trying to avoid.
Except she never said anything about picking pushovers. She said she didn’t want to date anybody like her dad and end up like her mom. Mike said if she was doomed to repeat their behaviour and never dated jerks (to avoid ending up like Mom) she’d become just like her dad. Which presupposes she IS doomed to repeat her parent’s pattern AND that the only alternative to dating jerks is to date pushovers, both of which are absolute hogwash. The right thing to do is point out ‘Amber, you’re not doomed to repeat your parent’s pattern.’ not whatever the fuck Mike was doing.
That had nothing to do with Mike except maybe that Mike made her feel worse and more insecure about those things and less likely to seek help. Mike was the exact opposite of helpful and whatever he thought he was doing, he certainly was not pointing out the flaw in her logic, he was pointing out the flaw in the logic he made up.
That doesn’t really have anything to do with whether Mike was helpful. At best, he made no impact and at worst, actively made a bad mental health situation worse.
Yeah, and we can all thank Blaine for that. He’s the one who treated like she was broken, and burden because of her social anxiety, and said she was weak for not being able to protect her friend from a knife-wielding robber, and then insisted she take self-defense classes instead of getting therapy afterwards.
Mike’s not fucking helping. Walky, on the other hand, has actually been helping her. You know, by listening to her and being appropriately supportive in a way that can actually reach her, instead of being a fucking trash monster and needling her at every opportunity.
When? When did she hit Danny? She’s shouted at him and said mean things a couple times, in bursts of anger, then she dumped him.
Calling that “repeating her parents’ pattern” is utter bullshit. Other characters who weren’t ever abused have done the same kind of things, and nobody bats an eye.
This idea that someone who has been abused is “repeating the cycle” if they ever lose their temper or act like a jerk no matter how however briefly it lasts, or however much other stress they were under, or how quickly they reign it in and apologize, is damaging to real people. They shouldn’t have to be superhumanly calm, collected, and gentle at all times just to avoid being compared to their abusers.
Go ahead and criticize Amber’s behavior all you want – plenty of it has been shitty, unhealthy, or both – but knock that “cycle of abuse” bullshit the fuck off.
If she was like Blaine she wouldn’t be beating up criminals.
She’d still be going after Sal and her friends. That’s literally the only time she’s come AT ALL close to being like him.
Blaine woudn’t have risked her life to save Becky. Or helped Joyce clean the white boards to apologize for blowing up at her. Or apologize to Danny, EVER.
Losing her temper and getting a bit mean IS NOT THE SAME THING AS VIOLENTLY ABUSING YOUR OWN FAMILY.
Her fear regarding her mother was “That I’ll be like my mom and end up ensnared by some jerk”. How the fuck does “being afraid of ending up stuck in an abusive relationship” cause HER to become abusive?
Avoiding angry, domineering men and seeking more gentle, even submissive men is not “looking for someone she can walk all over”, and sure as hell isn’t causing her to become abusive.
She has a problem with bursts of extreme anger that she actually does a decent job of reigning in (not counting the unhealthy venting via masked vigilantism). She also has PTSD, anxiety issues, and some kind of dissociative disorder that are all teaming up to make that harder to manage.
Her taste in boyfriends is not and was never the problem.
His qualifier ‘IF you really ARE doomed to follow in your parents footsteps’ is the important part. The tone and phrasing implies that he doesn’t really believe that’s true, and neither should she. Mike should know, his parents are sweet enough to give you diabetes through skin contact and he’s MIKE.
People keep forgetting/ignoring that “IF” part. I don’t know why.
She’s the one worrying about following in the footsteps of that relationship. He just pointed out how that would work if everything else she said was correct. Not that she was actually correct in saying it.
Because that “IF” part is bullshit. He’s using the past tense, because it’s not a prediction.
He’s using the Socratic method to walk her through his own train of thought to the intended conclusion. Suggesting he’s not making a clear statement about what Amber IS, CURRENTLY, because of that “IF” is like suggesting that I don’t have a specific answer in mind if I were to ask “If I had 3 apples, but I gave 2 of them away, how many apples do I have…?” I know exactly how many apples I fucking have when I start talking. Only in this case, leading you to think that I have 1 apple is not going to be more cruel than simply saying it outright, because nobody will fucking argue that I may actually have 5 apples now.
Except that is not what Amber said and its a bullshit premise in the first place. MIKE brought that premise up. ‘I am scared I will get into an abusive relationship like my mom’ is not the same as ‘I think I’m destined to be like my parents’. MIKE brought that up and it is 100% utter garbage, which is exactly what he should have told Amber if he was remotely interested in helping.
No. You’re forgetting that Amber also said that Ethan and then Danny were not like Blaine and that she actually said it right before she said she feared being in an abusive relationship like her mother.
So she was not only worried about being like her mom, but that her significant others would be like her dad. She is therefore worrying and comparing her relationships to her parents.
Mike didn’t pull that out of thin air. She brought it up and he just flipped it around with the caveat that IF the guys were never like Blaine, but following the pattern of her parents was a LEGITIMATE worry, then Blaine role falls to her.
As long as her taste in men remains constant and she also doesn’t believe her relationship has to follow theirs, then the idea of her being like Blaine in the relationship holds no water. But comparing her relationships to her parents did in fact come from her in that she compared the guys to Blaine and herself to her mom.
*Apologies if I’m repeating myself within the same comment. I tend to overexplain myself, even when I know it won’t change anyone’s opinion. And I feel like I’m reaching that point, so I’ll just agree to disagree from here.*
I’m not forgetting anything. I’m well aware she said they’re nothing like Blaine and that she’s afraid of being abused like her mom was. That’s not the same thing as saying she believes she’s destined to repeat her parent’s pattern. MIKE is the one who is discussing it as an inevitability when that is not something Amber said.
Mike also did not use the qualities Amber used to describe her boyfriends – king, loyal, and honest. HE is the one who asserted that she was looking for pushovers because they aren’t like her dad, as if the only choice is between abusive jerks and pushovers. That isn’t something Amber was arguing. That’s not logic flipping, that’s bald faced making stuff up.
And regardless of whether or not what Mike said was actually what Amber was saying (it wasn’t), comparing someone to their abuser is always going to strike a nerve. Especially considering Mike’s ‘logic’ was framing it as an inevitability.
Comparing the two is something Amber did, but she never said she believed following their pattern was an inevitability. That was all on Mike.
Strangely, this might be the first assholish thing Mike has done that I find not justified. If he had gone up to her while Dorothy and Walky were “on break” and tormented her for that, that would be fair, but Dorothy breaking it off was her realizing it wasn’t fair to Walky to just put them on indefinite hiatus. Usually his assholishness is used to point out people’s flaws when they need them pointed out, but right now it just looks like he’s pouring salt in the wound.
She’s right that she couldn’t handle both a relationship AND her workload without burning out. She made a judgment call. The fact that she’s STILL over working herself is not healthy, but choosing to focus on long term goals and not including “staying with this boyfriend forever” in those goals is by itself a perfect valid decision.
Hopefully Mike will go fuck himself and someone who actually knows and cares about Dorothy enough to have any standing whatsoever to question that choice will talk to her about it and she’ll either change her mind or confirm that she still thinks she can’t handle a relationship right now.
She was right that she can’t handle what she was doing without burning out. It remains to be seen whether the relationship was a net loss there or whether the stress relief and other support it provided more than made up for the time spent.
Personally, I think it’s going to turn out to be a mistake, for both character and meta reasons. If she was breaking up with him over problems in the relationship itself, that would be a different story – not “staying with this boyfriend forever” is perfectly valid, but this is far more: “I can’t afford any relationships because I’m ambitious” and I don’t think that’s where this is going.
And yeah, Mike can go fuck himself. No pretense he’s trying to help here, when he’s been sniping at their relationship from day one. (Though as usual, I’m sure there’s someone willing to explain everything he’s done as actually helping.)
But who is Mike to meddle in their affairs and be an asshole to them just because he thinks he knows whats best for them? We as commenters have the benefit of seeing everything, and thus understand the characters enough to see what’s best for them. Mike doesn’t have that, it’s just that his intentions sometimes line up with what actually will help them, but even so he has no right to interfere with the lives of people he doesn’t know very well.
I’d call the attempt at being “on break” as a well-meaning idea that didn’t work because it just turned them being together from something that they could choose to not do into something that they wanted but was supposed to be forbidden.
Them breaking up was Dorothy recognizing the flaws of the previous approach, but then deciding to double down on them.
She’s been setting these emotional boundaries for herself all along and failing to meet them. I doubt she’ll stick to this one either, though it’ll be rougher than the “pause” to break.
I fucking love mike. Even though he’s a fucking piece of horseshit who would probably relish at the opportunity to kill me and my family.
God that may or may not exist why am I like this?
Why do I love the assholes so much? Is it because they are yummy? Yummy? Mmmmnnn ass. Donkey’s taste gr8.
I don’t think you can?
Normally Willis is the one to see these kinds of things pretty fast and act accordingly – maybe this is…
this…ehm….yeah, maybe this doesn’t qualify as “should be deleted”…? (It’s not endangering anyone…it’s just strange and weird)
Or maybe Willis didn’t find the time.
I’d call knowing your priorities and sticking to your goals qualities of a good person. Dorothy knows what matters to her. Yes, she loves Walky and he loves her. That does not make him more important than her other goals and she’s allowed to decide other things matter more to her.
Sure, she’s allowed. But the man currently in the white house is an excellent example of what can happen when ambition is more important to you than love.
Trump’s problem isn’t too much ambition, its too little compassion and too little knowledge or maturity. You don’t need to prioritize a romantic relationship over your work to have those three things, and Dorothy has them in spades.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Compassion is just love on a large scale. And both Walky and Dorothy have a long way to go in terms of knowledge and maturity.
Compassion and romantic love are two different things. I feel compassion for starving children, but it is definitely not the same kind of love I feel for my boyfriend, or even the same kind I feel towards my parents or siblings or friends.
Yes, Dorothy has a long way to go in knowledge and maturity but considering she’s 18-19, I’d say she’s very knowledgeable and mature and that goes quadruple when you compare her with the evil dorito in the white house.
Dorothy does care about other human beings and yes, she’s done so at the expense of her work (see: Her going to the beach with Joyce instead of staying home to study, her burying the Amazi-Girl’s identity which would have been huge, etc.) but she doesn’t prioritize romance above her work and there’s no good reason she should.
That’s not what you were arguing. You were arguing love (in this case romantic love) was more important than being the president.
Dorothy and Walky’s relationship was beneficial in many ways, but again, that does not mean she has to or even should be prioritizing it over her other goals and wants.
Compassion is more important. Romantic love is not. Dorothy can be a compassionate person and still refuse to prioritize Walky over being president. Those are not mutually exclusive.
@Irredentist – you seem to be saying that romantic love is more important than other loves and that if you don’t have romantic love you don’t have love. I’m aromantic – are you telling me I don’t have any love at all? Because that is very very untrue.
Or she could learn balance, and have both!
At this point, I think Dorothy giving up on her ambitions would be like a self-betrayal. They’re super important to her from the start.
Sorry, that’s excacly what you are saying. If something else is more important that your goals in life, you won’t get there. Then the other thing is your goal in life.
If your goal in life is having a romantic relationship then go for it.
If your goal in life is reaching a position of power no women reached before then developed a good strategy to get there.
Dorothy is not much of a strategist yet, all of us who are a bit older can point to flaws in her strategy and reasoning. Knowing and understanding everything sadly is not a prerequisite to becoming president of the USA.
Wait. If women want to achieve they have to give up everything else, including any romantic relationships? Or if they want the relationship, they have to give up any ambitions?
Alright, there’s some evidence of that in the real world, but this is fiction and I’m pretty damn sure that’s not where Willis is going with this.
That was not what I was trying to say.
People can have several goals in life that might go well together. People may have several goals in life and a some point, they have to decide between some of them, because life doesn’t allow to follow them all, be it because of time, money, ability, fucked-up environment, physics, ethics, other people having the power to deny a goal if you don’t follow their rules, …
In spite of what self-help books tell you, it’s not in any individual’s power to change everything in the world. There are things stronger than an individual. Resilience is about how you deal with that.
I don’t remember Dorothy ever saying that a relationship was among her goals in life. As it’s her life, it’s her decision.
And, yes, sadly, being happily married and the first female president of the United States sounds about as unlikely to me as being a multi-megabucks earning film star who actually has a private life that’s private.
The whole idea that romantic love is required to be a compassionate leader is ridicules. People who love other people do bad things ALL THE TIME.
And I really hate to play this card especially in our current circumstance, but there were plenty of Nazis who felt a great deal of romantic love on an individual level. Didn’t stop them from being pitiless monsters on a large scale.
This reminds me that one short clip of Hitler flirting adorably with Eva Braun. One must always remember that villains believe they are the heroes of their own stories.
A few points: 1- in this country, not having a “romantic” relationship actually probably will hinder her goal to become the first female president. Americans are not yet open minded enough to vote in a non-married woman as the first female president. Americans don’t even want an unmarried male to be president. There are just too many people who believe that to be a good president you need to have a family.
2- I believe that irredentist may be positing that Dorothy is starting down a path of placing too low of a value on love and that this pattern may lead her to lose compassion as she is working toward the “greater good.” This is a legitimate concern as when people distance themselves from attachments, they tend to consider emotional factors less important than observable facts, which can lead to decisions that are good on the surface, but less good from an emotions standpoint (the point that most people will be viewing her actions from).
3- Women aren’t the only ones to give things up in favor of pursuit of goals. Men with families are expected to devote all their time to their jobs and let their wives handle the family stuff. That’s why the expectation is that women have to give up family life to get ahead in the business world. Because men already do it. It’s just that it’s not as shocking to ask it of them because we’ve been doing it for so long that it’s normal. It’s only recently that men have started pushing to have availability of things like paternity leave when they are new fathers. This is one of the reasons that feminism gets a bad reputation. Many feminists focus on the damage that patriarchal society does to women and ignore the damage that it does to men. Just because men have power and control, doesn’t actually mean it’s good for them. Ironically, men have suffered under their own leadership.
That was precisely the clip I was thinking of when I entered this discussion.
Terry: (sorry if I come off as a bit short with you here.)
1. irelevant. that wasn’t what Irredentist was talking about.
2. You can go ahead and think that but you’re wrong. Irredentist very specifically says “Compassion is just love on a large scale. ” they are specifically linking having a romantic relationship with being a good ruler. Which….No, Just no.
3. Okay so this is completely unrelated to everything we’ve been talking about but….I agree up to a point. Yes I do think there are some ways that men trying to live up to the patriarchal ideal. HOWEVER, comparing it to the damage done to women by patriarchy is frankly a tad insulting.
In addition the thing that gives feminism a bad name is honestly more men smearing it. Plenty of Feminists are willing to engage in the ways patriarchy hurts men. They just don’t think that should be the central focus of a movement designed to help women.
From the tactical point: married yes, I can see the point. Though a business relationship with the guy she’s married to is much more likel to be stable than anything based on romance. And Walky is not a likely candidate one way or the other. Can you see him filling the role of presidential spouse?
People worship intelligence as if it were a virtue, and Mike is the kind of person who goes out of his way to convince people of how intelligent he is. Mike is the kind of person that people are reluctant to call out on their awful behavior, because they know that person will try to twist it around and has no real scruples about attacking someone they want to destroy.
Joe is almost the opposite, largely unassuming (despite his great intelligence,) not very egotistical (outside of the lame ladies’ man persona he puts on as a front to avoid confronting his real emotions,) and generally live-and-let-live.
Obviously these are fictitious characters but it’s not surprising that by habit and instinct people hone in on criticizing minor bullshit Joe does while excusing Mike’s rampant destructive sociopathy.
I dunno. Because Joe is a more realistic and therefore criticizeable character, while mike is always a cartoonishlymover the top asshole to people that it’s hard to take him seriously?
One is realistic and fleshed out enough that his actions get considered more seriously as a what-if, real-life scenario. Joe gets more realistically judged.
IMO, Mike comes off more like, well, a comic strip character. He messes with people, and it comes off as comic relief, or even as a plot device to force other characters to confront something about themselves they would rather ignore. He’s someone I’d probably hate in real life, and if he were a more developed character, people would probably hate him more, even if he did the exact same things.
I hope that all came across okay. I really need some sleep…
See, Maybe if I had read some of the other comic strips I would know, but I can never feel certain whether or not Mike is actually terrible, or if he just intentionally makes people face up to their own self-denial and faults. It seems like a lot of the time, Mike ends up forcing characters to grow up and confront something they’ve been avoiding.
The trick is, I can’t tell if Mike is doing it intentionally, or if he’s just a complete asshole that happens to help Willis move the plot along.
Same, but I think it’s both.
If his parents are anything like they are in Shortpacked! Then they embody ‘kill them with kindness’. He probably grew up resenting others for that same type of ‘hiding’. But out of the many ways to go about ‘helping people, he chooses the assume route.
He keeps a list of weaknesses and vulnerabilities of everyone he knows and he pokes at them at every opportunity.
I’m not sure that’s quite the same as “force feeds you the ugly truth”.
While I enjoy Mike as a character, I don’t see where people are getting this idea that he’s intentionally helping anybody.
As far as I can tell he just loves schadenfreude and prefers inflicting psychological pain on others.
Whether or not his freshman psychoanalysis makes others take a good hard look at their faults is irrelevant. He’s in it for the pain.
He’s gone on the record before as doing it for others’ benefit, and no one in-universe so far has called him on that, so I’ll take it at face value (while still hating Mike) until such a time that he admits otherwise or somebody calls him out on it (fingers crossed Dorothy does it right now. She’s more than well-enough equipped to shut down everything he says).
He has? When?
He’s also gone on record as to less altruistic motivations. I’m thinking particularly of his aside to the audience about his plans for Ethan and Danny, since that can’t be taken as misleading any other characters.
No, he’s tormenting Dorothy by ripping open the wound of her and Walky and rubbing salt into it as hard as possible. Whether he has any motive beyond that is only speculation.
Strange when I see the look on Dorothy’s face in panel 5 I see imagine hearing a clip of Dark from “Batman/Superman Apocalypse” where Dark side screaming “You dare, YOU DARE!”
I think Mike sees most social constructs as basically bullshit. He seeks to tear down harmful social facades in the most destructive way possible with no regards to how painful it can be. He offers no justification for this so we can only speculate to his motives, but usually his actions have forced people to be either more emotionally honest with others or themselves. This action follows the pattern, either forcing Dorothy to admit she isn’t willing to pretend none of this happened, or prove too Walky that she is. There is a hypocrisy in that however much effort he puts into stripping others of their emotional defenses, he never lowers his own.
Why does the relationship have to be retconned, for lack of a better word? Mike KNOWS Dorothy and Walky were happy together, were better for being together. How is this helping them?
Does he even know that? He’s interacted with Dorothy maybe twice. If he knows anything it’s that Walky’s hygiene improved somewhat when he had a girlfriend. *If* he were to actually try to get them back together, THAT would be more likely be his motive than any “hard truth”/”exposing hypocrisy” fever dream people keep projecting onto him
He’s actually targeted the relationship more than once, starting with his visit to the gender studies class to reveal that Dorothy’d kissed Walky, to the pajama jeans incident, to taking photos of them in bed claimed to be for an October Surprise.
It’s really hard for me to reconcile all of that as “trying to help them get/stay together”. Much easier as just general opportunistic harassment.
I don’t think Mike has ever supported the relationship. He’s gone out of his way to hurt it, supposedly for Dorothy’s benefit: “Congratulations on your ‘find’,” he said after that early Gender Studies class.
I don’t think Mike has ever supported a relationship in his life. He probably finds the term infantile. What he doesn’t stand for is social niceties or what one he might call social deception. He wants the world to be as brutally honest as he is. One of the first thing we see him do is shut down Billie’s attempt as social jockeying. He ensured Joyce and Joe’s first date was the utter disaster it should have been. As for the whole pajama thing, he actually ordered them for Walky before he and Dorothy started going out. The stunt he pulled with Danny during the shoe incident forced Dorothy to be honest with Danny. Later we see him proclaim his evil plan to seduce either Ethan or Danny and reduce the other to a gibbering mess, which he seems to be right on track for. These aren’t the actions of someone who supports relationships. These are the actions of someone who has no truck in emotional deception, self or otherwise. It does make him an asshole (they are called social “niceties” for a reason) but it also makes him a compelling character
When I was a college freshman a divinity student lived across the hall, and we became friends. He told me; “People have their defenses because they need them.” He was saying it isn’t my job to go around straightening other people out.
Guys, people can like a character without thinking they are a good person and are right in everything they do. I hate people like mike in real life, but as a character it sometimes amuses me. Hes a complete ass and I dont think hes doing it for good reasons, and when he finally gets whats coming to him I’ll probably enjoy that too.
Same. I’m a big fan of the “love to hate” character.
I liked Walkyverse Mike a lot more before he and Amber got pregnant. At that point, I had been able to sort of enjoy in an abstract way the dysfunctional but kind of sweet garbage fire of their love. Put a baby in their arms, and suddenly the situation exceeds the power of my suspension of disbelief. Even if we believe Mike would never touch his child (I do believe it) and never do horrible mind games designed to impart an important life lesson (I believe that if I believed it, I would be happier), she’s still going to grow up watching and hearing him do those things to people. And she’ll grow up thinking that nickel jokes in response to random scraps of conversation are an approrpriate way to talk about women.
Where was I? Oh yeah, I still liked Mike. Just found it hard to like him as a character who was a good person (and especially a good father) underneath.
As for DoA Mike. I like him. I would feel weird about him making out with Ethan except that I’m really hoping his act of creulty will backfire, causing him to fall for Ethan for real just as Amber finds out about Ethan and Danny and gives them her blessing to run off and be together in a gay sex way, then she records it and shows it to Mike to crush him even more, leading Mike and Sodomuffin to go on a quest of friendship and self-discovery, until Mike marries Conquest and becomes the evil son Galasso always wanted. But then it backfires in a King Lear kind of way, with Learlasso dying alone and sad, and Mike rules the pizza retaurant with an even more evil tryanny.
I feel like that is all a reasonable extrapolation of the facts as we’ve been presented them. I hope that answers your question. Wait, you didn’t ask a question, did you? In conclusion, I hope this answers your statement about you being able to like Mike.
I like Mike as a character too. He brings the drama and I have a fairly sadistic sense of humour, so I often find him pretty funny. That said, while I like him as a character, I’m not going to say he’s some sort of good ‘person’ in an in-universe sense.
To quote my friend who also reads this comic
“The amount of unholy screeching the comments section devolves into whenever Mike shows up for more than one panel is one of the many reasons I will forever side with him as a character I enjoy.”
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fighting over who has to take custody, sounds legit
‘Getting’ Mike. Does that mean that one has WON the custody battle, or LOST it?
Alternating days means mutually assured annihilation.
Mike cannot be returned*
*without a virgin sacrifice
Mike can only be returned to your mom for a nickel.
She overpaid.
The Malaya icon makes your comment even better
JOYCE!
Fuck off, Mike.
But Mike is the best 😀
I’ll defend Mike’s actions in that he does them for reasons, even if those reasons are horrible and he tries to be as hurtful as possible, but what the fuck is he accomplishing here? There’s nothing but him rubbing salt in Dorothy’s and Walky’s wounds.
Okay, sometimes he does them for reasons. I still don’t know what the hell he was thinking when he told Amber she was destined to become her father. A lot of his other awful terrible things are (academically) for others’ benefits. They’re just, you know, never that practically.
Best thing I can think of is to evoke an emotion. Somebody getting depressed? Induce anger. Because they can do something about that anger. At the very least, it gives them a target they can focus on.
I still don’t like Mike, though.
I don’t think you’re *supposed* to like Mike
And yet some people do.
I think that some of it is people clinging to Walkyverse Mike and his actually purposeful mind games that were meant to make people feel like crap about stupid stuff they’ve been deluding themselves into being okay with.
I like him because I enjoy a decent antagonist and he does a good job being something for the cast to be on their toes about.
By making her aware of how she was behaving so she could stop the behaviour? It’s not in any way the way such a thing should have been handled. He was also poking a hole in her logic.
Yeah, no. She was not acting like Blaine. She was occasionally having outbursts of rage and snapping at people, but that is not the same thing.
That’s beyond “not how that should be done” and well into “a fucking horrible thing to say to someone even if you DO mean well”
Well of course it was a horrible thing to say, nobody has ever said it was the right approach or a job well done.
And she absolutely did end up in the abusive zone as she went on. She recognised it, was horrified by it, and hopefully can pull herself in a better direction but her relationship with Danny was very quickly failing into a very empty place.
‘As time went on’ is not the same thing as Mike being right at the time.
Mike did not say Amber was destined to be like Blaine.
SHE had said she was worried that her relationships would be like her parents, but that the guys she dated were never like Blaine.
What Mike then said was IF her relationship was destined to follow the pattern of her parents’ relationship, and IF they guys were never like Blaine, then she didn’t have to worry about it because she was the Blaine figure.
That’s two conditional statements that followed her own premise of her relationships being like her parents’ relationship.
He didn’t say her relationships had to be like that and he didn’t say the guys she dated would always take her mom’s role in such a relationship, thereby putting her in Blaine’s role.
He was showing her the end result of her own logical premise, but at no point did he say that her premise was correct or unchanging if correct.
Was it the best way to go about allaying her fears? Hell no. But it was distinctly different than telling her she was destined to be like her father.
Saying she’s the Blaine figure is pretty damn similar to saying she’s destined to be like Blaine. Also – Amber never said she was destined to be like her mom, but she was afraid she would be. MIKE made up the logic that if she was destined to be like her parents. He made up his own premise as well as offered the false idea that the only alternative to dating abusive jerks was to date pushovers.
No. She said she was worried she would be like her mom, but the guys she dated were never like that. She was the one who said she keeps picking decent guys/”pushovers” and Mike just went along with the idea that she chooses them; not that she SHOULD choose them. He was establishing a pattern of her past dates, not suggesting a modus of operandi for future ones.
He said she shouldn’t worry about that because IF her relationships were like theirs and IF the guys she dated were never like Blaine, then by default of her relationship being like her parents’ and the guys not being like dad, the guys must then be like mom. Leaving her to be like dad.
That leaves two options: quit worrying about it because your relationship isn’t destined to follow theirs, or quit worrying about it because it your relationship does follow theirs, but not in the dynamic you’re worried about. Either way, quit worrying about it.
Amber said she was afraid of being abused like her mother was, she never expressed a belief she was destined to be like her parents. If I’m afraid of the possibility someone else burning down my home, that doesn’t mean I believe it’s destined to happen. That is what MIKE said.
Also, Amber never used the word ‘pushover’ to describe Danny. She said he was king, honest, loyal and nothing like her dad. MIKE, again, is the one who said he was a pushover and MIKE is the one who said the only alternative to an abusive jerk was a pushover.
Again, Mike is the one who made the premise Amber was destined to be like her parents and that she was the one dating pushovers (not people like Amber described) then she would end up like Blaine. Both premises are bs.
I know Amber never called them pushovers. That’s why I put them in quotation marks.
And Mike didn’t suggest she continue dating what he called pushovers to avoid her parents’ fate.
Again, he was pointing out the pattern of her past relationships, not suggesting what she should do for her future ones.
But I’m repeating myself now and want to avoid my bad habit over overexplaining stuff, especially when neither side will come to a consensus.
Mike’s entire statement was based on the idea that if Amber’s always dating pushovers (which, again, he positions as the only alternative to abusive tools) then she’s not doomed to be like her mom, she’s doomed to be like her dad. Which is, again, a position HE is forwarding. That wasn’t what Amber said. Amber said she was afraid she’d be abused like her mom was. He said if she was destined to follow her parents pattern (again, HE is asserting that) then she’s destined to be like her dad based on her dating choices (again, using qualities he is asserting as part of an idea he is stating – that her only options are jerks who will abuse her and pushovers. Neither is a thing Amber said).
Playing devil’s advocate — Mike is trying to make Walky and Dorothy realize that they are both being extremely dumb about something they both want, and in so doing, are only hurting themselves now over something that might hurt later.
Nope. He’s being an asshole in the hopes that he will receive lhysical retaliation, which is his major turn-on.
His entire life is Becky’s storyline with Dina’s hat, except replace the hat with masochistic pleasure and the schenanigans with inflicting pain on others.
I’m so hyped for semi-daily Mike/Dorothy interactions! I don’t think they’ve gotten enough.
I’m pretty sure we should just treat Mike as a walking plot device rather than a person. Sometimes you just need a total asshole to say something terrible to some other character for plot/character development reasons, and no one else in the ‘verse is quite enough of an asshole to do it, and that is how you get characters like Mike.
Mike nets us a lot of useful insight on other characters via what he says/does and how they react to it. I like Mike for that reason. But I don’t like him as a character. He has always seemed less multi-faceted than Willis’ other characters. Again, that is why I think he is a walking plot device.
Yeah, Mike really needs to be better fleshed out.
Which is why I like to imagine the possibility of him developing feelings for his mark, Ethan. It would certainly make him more human.
Mike can give the other characters the verbal dope slap they need, but we can only scream into the comments. He just does it in the most dickish way possible.
I think the point here is that Dorothy might not be making the right decision, and deep down, she knows this.
But Mike is just a comic relief jackass. Maybe he’s just being a jackass today.
I don’t really think he does these things for reasons beyond his own satisfaction.
I think he’s just a troll trying to provoke negative emotional responses. Having “reasons” is just a routine part of his M.O. to make his target feel even worse.
I feel no need to defend Mike’s actions. He’s an asshole. That’s why he’s the best. Because he’s funny.
Mike is Best at being Worst.
That takes TALENT!
Agreed.
This universe’ Mike is an anomaly. He’s still the biggest asshole in the world, but somehow he’ll actually help people, usually by making them confront what they don’t want to
In a universe featuring Blaine, Sir, Toedad, and Ryan, he’s far from the biggest asshole.
He’s just the one who’s working at it, instead of it coming naturally.
no, in this universe he usually just makes things worse.
That’s because his methods are awful. He often has a point but he makes it in such a way that it almost never actually gets across.
He may often THINK he has a point, but he’s just a smug-ass teenager who thinks he’s figured everything out. His methods are awful and his points are bad.
Yeah, I kinda don’t understand the Mike tolerance, when, it seems,more people get sick of other jerk characters.
I hope it’s that people find him so cartoonish that they don’t consider him a real person, but more of a walking plot device. Mike is terrible.
Or make things worse by telling an abuse victim that she’ll become her father, perpetuating a harmful stereotype and attempting to needle her about her WORSE FEAR
Amber isn’t an innocent victim anymore. She’s all grown up and made victims of her own. She has to face that.
Eat my entire ass. Amber’s anger problems do not justify that shit.
Amber does a lot of things that aren’t justified. I’m not saying she’s a bad person. And I’m not saying that abuse victims in real life should be treated that way. But everything Mike said was true.
Bull. Mike’s logic was completely irrelevant to what Amber said.
It wasn’t logic, it was a prediction. “You’ll end up like your dad.” And he was right. Even Amber thinks so. “I got saddled with your petty rage.” Now she can finally do something about it.
Amber knew that before Mike said anything. Again, best case scenario, he made no impact and at worst he made a bad situation worse. Also, he absolutely did offer his own logic on the situation – faulty logic, sure, but ‘If you’re destined to be like your parents and if you’re never the one dating jerks because you’re dating pushovers, which are you’ is definitely him trying for a logical take. Again, it’s BS logic because ‘if you’re destined to be like your parents’ and ‘the only alternative to jerks is pushovers’ are both faulty premises, but that’s what Mike said.
It wasn’t Mike’s logic. Amber was the one worried she’d end up like her parents.
No, she was not. She said she was worried about ending up in an abusive relationship. Nowhere did she say she was destined to do so. MIKE is the one who brought that up.
She said she was worried about falling for a jerk LIKE HER MOM DID
That is not what Mike said. He used the present tense. He was saying she already was like her dad.
And the fact that Amber believes that her anger makes her a Blaine waiting to happen is exactly why it’s fucking harmful for Mike to say shit like that. Anger issues can be managed! Tons of people have them and don’t abuse anyone! Amber’s fatalistic view that she’s doomed to become her father is why she puts on a mask and beats up criminals instead of actually finding a healthy outlet! If she’s doomed to become her abuser, there’s no point seeking mundane ways to deal with her issues, because if those had any chance of working, she wouldn’t be doomed.
Yes, like her mother did. That doesn’t mean she feels she’s destined to end up like them, it means she’s afraid of the possibility of being abused. MIKE is the one who presented it as an inevitability, and in the present tense, as FC said.
Amber should be in prison or a psychiatric institution if this comic were even remotely realistic. Her issues go FAR beyond ‘anger problems’ and into the territory of criminal vigilantism and assault that serves no actual purpose besides giving her someone to vent her rage onto while convincing herself it’s alright because her victims are petty criminals.
In prison?
What exactly for? She violently interfered in some guy trying to rape a girl. Twice, I think.
She cut up a known rapist coming after her and her friend with the knife he brought to the scene.
She went after a guy stealing handbags as he was in the act of stealing a handbag.
These are all legal acts (though someone with less reason to hate abusers might have manger with keeping the rapist within the knife more intact but he was the one who brought the knife and upped the ante all by himself).
Going to pick a fight with Sal’s and company was not, put getting in a senseless fight with someone is not a prison-worthy offence as long as all you end up with are some bruises.
So, what exactly did she do that should be penalized by jail time?
He was pointing out the flaw in her own logic. If she’s so afraid of becoming like her mother than she ends up becoming the one seeking out partners she can walk all over and treat however she wants then she ends up in just as much an unwanted place as the thing she’s trying to avoid.
Except she never said anything about picking pushovers. She said she didn’t want to date anybody like her dad and end up like her mom. Mike said if she was doomed to repeat their behaviour and never dated jerks (to avoid ending up like Mom) she’d become just like her dad. Which presupposes she IS doomed to repeat her parent’s pattern AND that the only alternative to dating jerks is to date pushovers, both of which are absolute hogwash. The right thing to do is point out ‘Amber, you’re not doomed to repeat your parent’s pattern.’ not whatever the fuck Mike was doing.
And yet she DID repeat her parents pattern, at least partially.
That had nothing to do with Mike except maybe that Mike made her feel worse and more insecure about those things and less likely to seek help. Mike was the exact opposite of helpful and whatever he thought he was doing, he certainly was not pointing out the flaw in her logic, he was pointing out the flaw in the logic he made up.
Amber doesn’t really seem like the type to seek help on her own. Mike or no Mike.
That doesn’t really have anything to do with whether Mike was helpful. At best, he made no impact and at worst, actively made a bad mental health situation worse.
Yeah, and we can all thank Blaine for that. He’s the one who treated like she was broken, and burden because of her social anxiety, and said she was weak for not being able to protect her friend from a knife-wielding robber, and then insisted she take self-defense classes instead of getting therapy afterwards.
Mike’s not fucking helping. Walky, on the other hand, has actually been helping her. You know, by listening to her and being appropriately supportive in a way that can actually reach her, instead of being a fucking trash monster and needling her at every opportunity.
When? When did she hit Danny? She’s shouted at him and said mean things a couple times, in bursts of anger, then she dumped him.
Calling that “repeating her parents’ pattern” is utter bullshit. Other characters who weren’t ever abused have done the same kind of things, and nobody bats an eye.
This idea that someone who has been abused is “repeating the cycle” if they ever lose their temper or act like a jerk no matter how however briefly it lasts, or however much other stress they were under, or how quickly they reign it in and apologize, is damaging to real people. They shouldn’t have to be superhumanly calm, collected, and gentle at all times just to avoid being compared to their abusers.
Go ahead and criticize Amber’s behavior all you want – plenty of it has been shitty, unhealthy, or both – but knock that “cycle of abuse” bullshit the fuck off.
Amber literally beats up criminals to run away from her problems. AND she’s an asshole to her boyfriend.
If she was like Blaine she wouldn’t be beating up criminals.
She’d still be going after Sal and her friends. That’s literally the only time she’s come AT ALL close to being like him.
Blaine woudn’t have risked her life to save Becky. Or helped Joyce clean the white boards to apologize for blowing up at her. Or apologize to Danny, EVER.
Losing her temper and getting a bit mean IS NOT THE SAME THING AS VIOLENTLY ABUSING YOUR OWN FAMILY.
Ok fine she’s not as bad as Blaine, hell she’s a hero in many ways. Are you happy now?
I’d be happier if you dropped the comparison to Blaine entirely, but yes.
No, he told her she already WAS like her father.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/ensnared/
Her fear regarding her mother was “That I’ll be like my mom and end up ensnared by some jerk”. How the fuck does “being afraid of ending up stuck in an abusive relationship” cause HER to become abusive?
Avoiding angry, domineering men and seeking more gentle, even submissive men is not “looking for someone she can walk all over”, and sure as hell isn’t causing her to become abusive.
She has a problem with bursts of extreme anger that she actually does a decent job of reigning in (not counting the unhealthy venting via masked vigilantism). She also has PTSD, anxiety issues, and some kind of dissociative disorder that are all teaming up to make that harder to manage.
Her taste in boyfriends is not and was never the problem.
His qualifier ‘IF you really ARE doomed to follow in your parents footsteps’ is the important part. The tone and phrasing implies that he doesn’t really believe that’s true, and neither should she. Mike should know, his parents are sweet enough to give you diabetes through skin contact and he’s MIKE.
People keep forgetting/ignoring that “IF” part. I don’t know why.
She’s the one worrying about following in the footsteps of that relationship. He just pointed out how that would work if everything else she said was correct. Not that she was actually correct in saying it.
Because that “IF” part is bullshit. He’s using the past tense, because it’s not a prediction.
He’s using the Socratic method to walk her through his own train of thought to the intended conclusion. Suggesting he’s not making a clear statement about what Amber IS, CURRENTLY, because of that “IF” is like suggesting that I don’t have a specific answer in mind if I were to ask “If I had 3 apples, but I gave 2 of them away, how many apples do I have…?” I know exactly how many apples I fucking have when I start talking. Only in this case, leading you to think that I have 1 apple is not going to be more cruel than simply saying it outright, because nobody will fucking argue that I may actually have 5 apples now.
I respectfully disagree. But can see your point.
Except that is not what Amber said and its a bullshit premise in the first place. MIKE brought that premise up. ‘I am scared I will get into an abusive relationship like my mom’ is not the same as ‘I think I’m destined to be like my parents’. MIKE brought that up and it is 100% utter garbage, which is exactly what he should have told Amber if he was remotely interested in helping.
No. You’re forgetting that Amber also said that Ethan and then Danny were not like Blaine and that she actually said it right before she said she feared being in an abusive relationship like her mother.
So she was not only worried about being like her mom, but that her significant others would be like her dad. She is therefore worrying and comparing her relationships to her parents.
Mike didn’t pull that out of thin air. She brought it up and he just flipped it around with the caveat that IF the guys were never like Blaine, but following the pattern of her parents was a LEGITIMATE worry, then Blaine role falls to her.
As long as her taste in men remains constant and she also doesn’t believe her relationship has to follow theirs, then the idea of her being like Blaine in the relationship holds no water. But comparing her relationships to her parents did in fact come from her in that she compared the guys to Blaine and herself to her mom.
*Apologies if I’m repeating myself within the same comment. I tend to overexplain myself, even when I know it won’t change anyone’s opinion. And I feel like I’m reaching that point, so I’ll just agree to disagree from here.*
I’m not forgetting anything. I’m well aware she said they’re nothing like Blaine and that she’s afraid of being abused like her mom was. That’s not the same thing as saying she believes she’s destined to repeat her parent’s pattern. MIKE is the one who is discussing it as an inevitability when that is not something Amber said.
Mike also did not use the qualities Amber used to describe her boyfriends – king, loyal, and honest. HE is the one who asserted that she was looking for pushovers because they aren’t like her dad, as if the only choice is between abusive jerks and pushovers. That isn’t something Amber was arguing. That’s not logic flipping, that’s bald faced making stuff up.
And regardless of whether or not what Mike said was actually what Amber was saying (it wasn’t), comparing someone to their abuser is always going to strike a nerve. Especially considering Mike’s ‘logic’ was framing it as an inevitability.
Comparing the two is something Amber did, but she never said she believed following their pattern was an inevitability. That was all on Mike.
Maybe they should have joint custody of the toy, too. It can visit Walky on Wednesdays and alternating weekends.
warning: this strip contains 50% mike
may cause headaches, nausea, and your mother becoming five cents richer
Five cents poorer. He’s supposed to be getting paid the nickel. At least that’s how I always understood it.
It’s really very unclear to whom the nickel is paid.
My mind has been opened to the non-specificness of “I did your mom for a nickel”
deserved….
Mike is still the worst.
(of the regular cast)
Honestly I think Mike is the worst person in the comic, excluding only the out-and-out straight up villains like Toe-Dad and Not-Ryan.
Mary’s worse.
I could see Mary counting as one of the “out-and-out straight-up villains”. She tried to bully people into committing suicide.
*plays Elvis Presley’s “Return To Sender” on the hacked Muzak*
She only keeps toys with hair that work in 3D timespace.
Strangely, this might be the first assholish thing Mike has done that I find not justified. If he had gone up to her while Dorothy and Walky were “on break” and tormented her for that, that would be fair, but Dorothy breaking it off was her realizing it wasn’t fair to Walky to just put them on indefinite hiatus. Usually his assholishness is used to point out people’s flaws when they need them pointed out, but right now it just looks like he’s pouring salt in the wound.
Pouring salt in wounds is not a new thing for him
http://www.dumbingofage.com/comics-archive/2013-09-30-ensnared.png
I’m genuinely surprised that Mike hasn’t received a proper hiding from…well anyone
You’ve not been reading the “It’s Walky” pages recently have you?
If you don’t call that a proper beating, then… !!
Not quite the same thing I’d have thought what with the Dumbing Mike to the best of my knowledge not being an abductee or having super powers
Meh… two characters with superpowers – one beats the other up – is a fair equivalent. 🙂
She shouldn’t have broken up with him at all. She loves him. Hopefully Mike can make her remember.
She’s right that she couldn’t handle both a relationship AND her workload without burning out. She made a judgment call. The fact that she’s STILL over working herself is not healthy, but choosing to focus on long term goals and not including “staying with this boyfriend forever” in those goals is by itself a perfect valid decision.
Hopefully Mike will go fuck himself and someone who actually knows and cares about Dorothy enough to have any standing whatsoever to question that choice will talk to her about it and she’ll either change her mind or confirm that she still thinks she can’t handle a relationship right now.
She was right that she can’t handle what she was doing without burning out. It remains to be seen whether the relationship was a net loss there or whether the stress relief and other support it provided more than made up for the time spent.
Personally, I think it’s going to turn out to be a mistake, for both character and meta reasons. If she was breaking up with him over problems in the relationship itself, that would be a different story – not “staying with this boyfriend forever” is perfectly valid, but this is far more: “I can’t afford any relationships because I’m ambitious” and I don’t think that’s where this is going.
And yeah, Mike can go fuck himself. No pretense he’s trying to help here, when he’s been sniping at their relationship from day one. (Though as usual, I’m sure there’s someone willing to explain everything he’s done as actually helping.)
She ‘loved’ Danny..
She broke up with him too…
She had a high school romance with Danny. Those always last forever?
Few teen romances last forever.
But who is Mike to meddle in their affairs and be an asshole to them just because he thinks he knows whats best for them? We as commenters have the benefit of seeing everything, and thus understand the characters enough to see what’s best for them. Mike doesn’t have that, it’s just that his intentions sometimes line up with what actually will help them, but even so he has no right to interfere with the lives of people he doesn’t know very well.
I’d call the attempt at being “on break” as a well-meaning idea that didn’t work because it just turned them being together from something that they could choose to not do into something that they wanted but was supposed to be forbidden.
Them breaking up was Dorothy recognizing the flaws of the previous approach, but then deciding to double down on them.
All of it is a sign of Dorothy’s struggle to deny that she needs anything outside her neat little schedule. All the way back to them starting to date: I don’t have time to waste on this. It’s self-sabotage. A distraction.
She’s been setting these emotional boundaries for herself all along and failing to meet them. I doubt she’ll stick to this one either, though it’ll be rougher than the “pause” to break.
*Mike*, how much misery are you causing today.
oh god, he can smell weakness
Mike…You God damn monster.
There are no refunds, returns are for in-store credit only and valid only 30 days after purchase
Has Dorothy always had that tracheostomy hole and I just never noticed?
Now “Somebody That I Used To Know” is stuck in my head.
Butcha didn’t have to call us now
Savin’ $14.99 wasn’t that important
You don’t even need this stuff
Now you have a dozen stain-resistant towel gloves
I fucking love mike. Even though he’s a fucking piece of horseshit who would probably relish at the opportunity to kill me and my family.
God that may or may not exist why am I like this?
Why do I love the assholes so much? Is it because they are yummy? Yummy? Mmmmnnn ass. Donkey’s taste gr8.
Dude, what on God’s grey Earth are you on about?
How do I report comments?
I don’t think you can?
Normally Willis is the one to see these kinds of things pretty fast and act accordingly – maybe this is…
this…ehm….yeah, maybe this doesn’t qualify as “should be deleted”…? (It’s not endangering anyone…it’s just strange and weird)
Or maybe Willis didn’t find the time.
Why would you report it? It’s not hateful or insulting or anything.
Tbh I’d probably pay Mike to punch me
I have a since pf humor. I as morso talking about cooking and eating a donkies butt…but now I saw an alternative more disturbing take on it
Wait…not there butt but..I misread my own comment
Is this the part where she realizes that love is more important than becoming president? Stay tuned.
God I hope not.
I hope so. You need to learn how to be a good human being before you can be a good president.
I’d call knowing your priorities and sticking to your goals qualities of a good person. Dorothy knows what matters to her. Yes, she loves Walky and he loves her. That does not make him more important than her other goals and she’s allowed to decide other things matter more to her.
Sure, she’s allowed. But the man currently in the white house is an excellent example of what can happen when ambition is more important to you than love.
Trump’s problem isn’t too much ambition, its too little compassion and too little knowledge or maturity. You don’t need to prioritize a romantic relationship over your work to have those three things, and Dorothy has them in spades.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Compassion is just love on a large scale. And both Walky and Dorothy have a long way to go in terms of knowledge and maturity.
Compassion and romantic love are two different things. I feel compassion for starving children, but it is definitely not the same kind of love I feel for my boyfriend, or even the same kind I feel towards my parents or siblings or friends.
Yes, Dorothy has a long way to go in knowledge and maturity but considering she’s 18-19, I’d say she’s very knowledgeable and mature and that goes quadruple when you compare her with the evil dorito in the white house.
Different kind of love, but still love. It’s all based around the same principle, caring for other human beings.
Dorothy does care about other human beings and yes, she’s done so at the expense of her work (see: Her going to the beach with Joyce instead of staying home to study, her burying the Amazi-Girl’s identity which would have been huge, etc.) but she doesn’t prioritize romance above her work and there’s no good reason she should.
It’s not about just the romance. She needs Walky just to stay sane. Sierra said it best in that one strip.
That’s not what you were arguing. You were arguing love (in this case romantic love) was more important than being the president.
Dorothy and Walky’s relationship was beneficial in many ways, but again, that does not mean she has to or even should be prioritizing it over her other goals and wants.
Love is more important than being president, because you need love to be a good president! That includes Dorothy, and it starts with Walky.
Compassion is more important. Romantic love is not. Dorothy can be a compassionate person and still refuse to prioritize Walky over being president. Those are not mutually exclusive.
@Irredentist – you seem to be saying that romantic love is more important than other loves and that if you don’t have romantic love you don’t have love. I’m aromantic – are you telling me I don’t have any love at all? Because that is very very untrue.
Or she could learn balance, and have both!
At this point, I think Dorothy giving up on her ambitions would be like a self-betrayal. They’re super important to her from the start.
I didn’t say give up on them. Just realize that some things are more important.
Sorry, that’s excacly what you are saying. If something else is more important that your goals in life, you won’t get there. Then the other thing is your goal in life.
If your goal in life is having a romantic relationship then go for it.
If your goal in life is reaching a position of power no women reached before then developed a good strategy to get there.
Dorothy is not much of a strategist yet, all of us who are a bit older can point to flaws in her strategy and reasoning. Knowing and understanding everything sadly is not a prerequisite to becoming president of the USA.
Wait. If women want to achieve they have to give up everything else, including any romantic relationships? Or if they want the relationship, they have to give up any ambitions?
Alright, there’s some evidence of that in the real world, but this is fiction and I’m pretty damn sure that’s not where Willis is going with this.
That was not what I was trying to say.
People can have several goals in life that might go well together. People may have several goals in life and a some point, they have to decide between some of them, because life doesn’t allow to follow them all, be it because of time, money, ability, fucked-up environment, physics, ethics, other people having the power to deny a goal if you don’t follow their rules, …
In spite of what self-help books tell you, it’s not in any individual’s power to change everything in the world. There are things stronger than an individual. Resilience is about how you deal with that.
I don’t remember Dorothy ever saying that a relationship was among her goals in life. As it’s her life, it’s her decision.
And, yes, sadly, being happily married and the first female president of the United States sounds about as unlikely to me as being a multi-megabucks earning film star who actually has a private life that’s private.
The whole idea that romantic love is required to be a compassionate leader is ridicules. People who love other people do bad things ALL THE TIME.
And I really hate to play this card especially in our current circumstance, but there were plenty of Nazis who felt a great deal of romantic love on an individual level. Didn’t stop them from being pitiless monsters on a large scale.
This reminds me that one short clip of Hitler flirting adorably with Eva Braun. One must always remember that villains believe they are the heroes of their own stories.
A few points: 1- in this country, not having a “romantic” relationship actually probably will hinder her goal to become the first female president. Americans are not yet open minded enough to vote in a non-married woman as the first female president. Americans don’t even want an unmarried male to be president. There are just too many people who believe that to be a good president you need to have a family.
2- I believe that irredentist may be positing that Dorothy is starting down a path of placing too low of a value on love and that this pattern may lead her to lose compassion as she is working toward the “greater good.” This is a legitimate concern as when people distance themselves from attachments, they tend to consider emotional factors less important than observable facts, which can lead to decisions that are good on the surface, but less good from an emotions standpoint (the point that most people will be viewing her actions from).
3- Women aren’t the only ones to give things up in favor of pursuit of goals. Men with families are expected to devote all their time to their jobs and let their wives handle the family stuff. That’s why the expectation is that women have to give up family life to get ahead in the business world. Because men already do it. It’s just that it’s not as shocking to ask it of them because we’ve been doing it for so long that it’s normal. It’s only recently that men have started pushing to have availability of things like paternity leave when they are new fathers. This is one of the reasons that feminism gets a bad reputation. Many feminists focus on the damage that patriarchal society does to women and ignore the damage that it does to men. Just because men have power and control, doesn’t actually mean it’s good for them. Ironically, men have suffered under their own leadership.
Eldritch Gentleman (love the name by the way):
That was precisely the clip I was thinking of when I entered this discussion.
Terry: (sorry if I come off as a bit short with you here.)
1. irelevant. that wasn’t what Irredentist was talking about.
2. You can go ahead and think that but you’re wrong. Irredentist very specifically says “Compassion is just love on a large scale. ” they are specifically linking having a romantic relationship with being a good ruler. Which….No, Just no.
3. Okay so this is completely unrelated to everything we’ve been talking about but….I agree up to a point. Yes I do think there are some ways that men trying to live up to the patriarchal ideal. HOWEVER, comparing it to the damage done to women by patriarchy is frankly a tad insulting.
In addition the thing that gives feminism a bad name is honestly more men smearing it. Plenty of Feminists are willing to engage in the ways patriarchy hurts men. They just don’t think that should be the central focus of a movement designed to help women.
And it shouldn’t.
1) See the bit earlier about Mary assuming that Robin was a lesbian because 30ish and not married.
From the tactical point: married yes, I can see the point. Though a business relationship with the guy she’s married to is much more likel to be stable than anything based on romance. And Walky is not a likely candidate one way or the other. Can you see him filling the role of presidential spouse?
Remind why people like mike more than joe again please
People is stupid?
Mike doesn’t stab you, he just twists the knife you put there yourself.
People worship intelligence as if it were a virtue, and Mike is the kind of person who goes out of his way to convince people of how intelligent he is. Mike is the kind of person that people are reluctant to call out on their awful behavior, because they know that person will try to twist it around and has no real scruples about attacking someone they want to destroy.
Joe is almost the opposite, largely unassuming (despite his great intelligence,) not very egotistical (outside of the lame ladies’ man persona he puts on as a front to avoid confronting his real emotions,) and generally live-and-let-live.
Obviously these are fictitious characters but it’s not surprising that by habit and instinct people hone in on criticizing minor bullshit Joe does while excusing Mike’s rampant destructive sociopathy.
dw u can also hate them both i do it quite well
Or you can love them both like me
I dunno. Because Joe is a more realistic and therefore criticizeable character, while mike is always a cartoonishlymover the top asshole to people that it’s hard to take him seriously?
One is realistic and fleshed out enough that his actions get considered more seriously as a what-if, real-life scenario. Joe gets more realistically judged.
IMO, Mike comes off more like, well, a comic strip character. He messes with people, and it comes off as comic relief, or even as a plot device to force other characters to confront something about themselves they would rather ignore. He’s someone I’d probably hate in real life, and if he were a more developed character, people would probably hate him more, even if he did the exact same things.
I hope that all came across okay. I really need some sleep…
I’ve known way too many people like Mike. He’s just a mildly witty narcissist.
The same reason it was easier to laugh off Ruth punching people in Roomies! Versus her torment of Billie early on on this strip.
They’re both awful in their own ways though Joe has a lot more redeeming qualities then Mike who hides whatever redeeming qualities he has.
Mike is why you should lock your door, Dorothy. Though it wouldn’t surprise me if he knew how to pick a lock.
If Dorothy and Walky both sign away parental rights for Mike, are we still gonna have to deal with his bullshit?
JESUS MIKE…sad part is he’s right.
See, Maybe if I had read some of the other comic strips I would know, but I can never feel certain whether or not Mike is actually terrible, or if he just intentionally makes people face up to their own self-denial and faults. It seems like a lot of the time, Mike ends up forcing characters to grow up and confront something they’ve been avoiding.
The trick is, I can’t tell if Mike is doing it intentionally, or if he’s just a complete asshole that happens to help Willis move the plot along.
Same, but I think it’s both.
If his parents are anything like they are in Shortpacked! Then they embody ‘kill them with kindness’. He probably grew up resenting others for that same type of ‘hiding’. But out of the many ways to go about ‘helping people, he chooses the assume route.
Asshole. But I mean… you know what they say about the assume path.
They are. I think they showed up on Freshman Family Weekend, and they were featured in a bonus comic.
He force feeds you the ugly truth in the most unpleasant way possible whenever he has the opportunity.
He keeps a list of weaknesses and vulnerabilities of everyone he knows and he pokes at them at every opportunity.
I’m not sure that’s quite the same as “force feeds you the ugly truth”.
God I love Mike. Every time he pops up it’s like a surprise visit from an old friend. (Probably this means I really need to reread Shortpacked)
While I enjoy Mike as a character, I don’t see where people are getting this idea that he’s intentionally helping anybody.
As far as I can tell he just loves schadenfreude and prefers inflicting psychological pain on others.
Whether or not his freshman psychoanalysis makes others take a good hard look at their faults is irrelevant. He’s in it for the pain.
He’s gone on the record before as doing it for others’ benefit, and no one in-universe so far has called him on that, so I’ll take it at face value (while still hating Mike) until such a time that he admits otherwise or somebody calls him out on it (fingers crossed Dorothy does it right now. She’s more than well-enough equipped to shut down everything he says).
He has? When?
He’s also gone on record as to less altruistic motivations. I’m thinking particularly of his aside to the audience about his plans for Ethan and Danny, since that can’t be taken as misleading any other characters.
So Mike is trying to get Dorothy and Walky to meet one last time, to formally end things for good?
No, he’s tormenting Dorothy by ripping open the wound of her and Walky and rubbing salt into it as hard as possible. Whether he has any motive beyond that is only speculation.
Mike did absolutely nothing wrong in this situation and is 100% in the right.
thisisbait dot jpg
Mike seems to have an eye and low tolerance for the lies people tell themselves.
I’ve long suspected that the mask of civilisation and the blinders of self-deceit are the things that he really hates more than anything else.
So, since Mike is here and brought the usual argument with him, I thought maybe we could talk about something less controversial as well.
Who’s cuter, Becky or Dina?
It’s Becky. It would be a tie, but Dina doesn’t have freckles
Freckles are a big deciding factor for cuteness.
Dina, it’s all her dino-wear.
Well, for those of us struggling to hold in SU spoilers, there is now http://markwatches.net/reviews/2018/05/mark-watches-steven-universe-s05e18-a-single-pale-rose/ 🙂 but read the rules before commenting there, they’re stricter than most iirc.
Steven Universe spoilers technically qualify as a less controversial topic than Mike, I think. They’re a little draconian in scope, though.
Something tells me that Mike is a frustrated writer of regency-era melodramas.
Strange when I see the look on Dorothy’s face in panel 5 I see imagine hearing a clip of Dark from “Batman/Superman Apocalypse” where Dark side screaming “You dare, YOU DARE!”
I think Mike sees most social constructs as basically bullshit. He seeks to tear down harmful social facades in the most destructive way possible with no regards to how painful it can be. He offers no justification for this so we can only speculate to his motives, but usually his actions have forced people to be either more emotionally honest with others or themselves. This action follows the pattern, either forcing Dorothy to admit she isn’t willing to pretend none of this happened, or prove too Walky that she is. There is a hypocrisy in that however much effort he puts into stripping others of their emotional defenses, he never lowers his own.
Why does the relationship have to be retconned, for lack of a better word? Mike KNOWS Dorothy and Walky were happy together, were better for being together. How is this helping them?
Does he even know that? He’s interacted with Dorothy maybe twice. If he knows anything it’s that Walky’s hygiene improved somewhat when he had a girlfriend. *If* he were to actually try to get them back together, THAT would be more likely be his motive than any “hard truth”/”exposing hypocrisy” fever dream people keep projecting onto him
He’s actually targeted the relationship more than once, starting with his visit to the gender studies class to reveal that Dorothy’d kissed Walky, to the pajama jeans incident, to taking photos of them in bed claimed to be for an October Surprise.
It’s really hard for me to reconcile all of that as “trying to help them get/stay together”. Much easier as just general opportunistic harassment.
I don’t think Mike has ever supported the relationship. He’s gone out of his way to hurt it, supposedly for Dorothy’s benefit: “Congratulations on your ‘find’,” he said after that early Gender Studies class.
How is it less emotionally honest to keep tokens of a past relationship than it is to get rid of them and pretend it never happened?
Nah, Mike’s just a narcissistic twerp who hates seeing people happy.
I don’t think Mike has ever supported a relationship in his life. He probably finds the term infantile. What he doesn’t stand for is social niceties or what one he might call social deception. He wants the world to be as brutally honest as he is. One of the first thing we see him do is shut down Billie’s attempt as social jockeying. He ensured Joyce and Joe’s first date was the utter disaster it should have been. As for the whole pajama thing, he actually ordered them for Walky before he and Dorothy started going out. The stunt he pulled with Danny during the shoe incident forced Dorothy to be honest with Danny. Later we see him proclaim his evil plan to seduce either Ethan or Danny and reduce the other to a gibbering mess, which he seems to be right on track for. These aren’t the actions of someone who supports relationships. These are the actions of someone who has no truck in emotional deception, self or otherwise. It does make him an asshole (they are called social “niceties” for a reason) but it also makes him a compelling character
what an arse.
When I was a college freshman a divinity student lived across the hall, and we became friends. He told me; “People have their defenses because they need them.” He was saying it isn’t my job to go around straightening other people out.
Dorothy, Walky and Mike Perform a Relationship Through Proxy.
The thing I love about Mike is that he will inevitably cause arguing in the comment section of the strips he appears in
Guys, people can like a character without thinking they are a good person and are right in everything they do. I hate people like mike in real life, but as a character it sometimes amuses me. Hes a complete ass and I dont think hes doing it for good reasons, and when he finally gets whats coming to him I’ll probably enjoy that too.
Same. I’m a big fan of the “love to hate” character.
I liked Walkyverse Mike a lot more before he and Amber got pregnant. At that point, I had been able to sort of enjoy in an abstract way the dysfunctional but kind of sweet garbage fire of their love. Put a baby in their arms, and suddenly the situation exceeds the power of my suspension of disbelief. Even if we believe Mike would never touch his child (I do believe it) and never do horrible mind games designed to impart an important life lesson (I believe that if I believed it, I would be happier), she’s still going to grow up watching and hearing him do those things to people. And she’ll grow up thinking that nickel jokes in response to random scraps of conversation are an approrpriate way to talk about women.
Where was I? Oh yeah, I still liked Mike. Just found it hard to like him as a character who was a good person (and especially a good father) underneath.
As for DoA Mike. I like him. I would feel weird about him making out with Ethan except that I’m really hoping his act of creulty will backfire, causing him to fall for Ethan for real just as Amber finds out about Ethan and Danny and gives them her blessing to run off and be together in a gay sex way, then she records it and shows it to Mike to crush him even more, leading Mike and Sodomuffin to go on a quest of friendship and self-discovery, until Mike marries Conquest and becomes the evil son Galasso always wanted. But then it backfires in a King Lear kind of way, with Learlasso dying alone and sad, and Mike rules the pizza retaurant with an even more evil tryanny.
I feel like that is all a reasonable extrapolation of the facts as we’ve been presented them. I hope that answers your question. Wait, you didn’t ask a question, did you? In conclusion, I hope this answers your statement about you being able to like Mike.
It’s perfectly reasonable to like Mike as a character. To enjoy the jokes and drama he causes.
It’s the people who insist he’s some kind of asshole sage, intentionally teaching people needed lessons with his edgelord nonsense, that get annoying.
I like Mike as a character too. He brings the drama and I have a fairly sadistic sense of humour, so I often find him pretty funny. That said, while I like him as a character, I’m not going to say he’s some sort of good ‘person’ in an in-universe sense.
Mike has a point here even if he is just being a jerk. Does Dorothy really needed to break up with Walky like he was just a toy distracting her?
Except for the parts where that’s not why she did it and that isn’t even remotely what Mike is saying, sure.
Mike is the worst. His be an asshole all the time schtick just doesn’t work in a non-cartoony comic universe. And it barely worked there.
To quote my friend who also reads this comic
“The amount of unholy screeching the comments section devolves into whenever Mike shows up for more than one panel is one of the many reasons I will forever side with him as a character I enjoy.”
I look forward to Mike getting an ass beating.
Thought he just finished doing that.
I mean, has anybody actually confronted Mike about his actions and ways? Most of the cast he confronts just.. take it.
Joyce kicks him in the shins. It seems to work.
Amber thankfully doesn’t take his shit
Though it still works on her.
Atta girl, Dots!
I think the author misspelled “Get the fuck out of my room NOW and do not even THINK of ever talking with me again!”
Ah yes I almost forgot how fucking awful Mike was.