Unfortunately, in her emotionally hightened state she forgets all her training and ends up in a full-body cast. Sal, feeling bad, visits her every day and mistakes her constant paralysis for the effects of the cast.
And wrap it around a brick. And throw it through a window. Of a store with a display of televisions you fancy.
And…wait no, now you’re looting. Nevermind, ignore all that. Though as a way of firmly rejecting your identity as a superhero it would be pretty effective.
Gotta remember to scream out “AMAZIGIRL IS DEAD. LONG LIVE LOOTERGIRL.”. Then, later on, you reveal that you were actually the evil twin, and the real Amazigirl was just trapped in your Lootcave. But then, it’s revealed that you were actually the real one after all, and you were just trying to trick the third duplicate of yourself.. and then your first duplicate sacrifices themself for you, but later on it’s revealed that was also a trick.. but then it’s revealed that the third duplicate was the real one all along, and we were just being presented the narrative through an unreliable narrator!
Anyway, meanwhile the real Lootergirl has already stolen everyone’s hearts…and the entire city. Way to let us down, Amazigirl(s).
Nope. No one but Dorothy and Ruth has, and Ruth was basically forced into it.
Speaking from experience, there are a lot of dumb, wrong reasons to not get treatment when you’re ill, especially with brain issues which people somehow think is different than, say, kidney failure or lung cancer.
and has anyone even reminded her therapy is a thing that exists? given her dad’s attitude towards it, I wouldn’t expect her to think of it… or be willing to go without a friend bribing her into it, really.
Doesn’t seem like anyone around her has quite grasped how bad the dissociation and PTSD is, and thinks that she’s just choosing to play a role rather than having a serious mental disorder. We, the audience, know perfectly well how bad this is, but we’ve seen more than anyone else.
Danny could have maybe identified it, but…Danny…not the most observant.
Yeah, I was actually thinking last night about who knows what, and basically no one has a full set of facts.
Ethan knows about the holdup and stabbing, the abuse, that Amber is AG, that Sal is on campus, and he probably has as good an idea of there being a dissociative split or PTSD as anyone. He doesn’t actually know and recognize Sal, at least as of Joyce’s party.
Danny knows there was A Backstory with a holdup, the abuse, the inexplicable-to-him enmity with Sal, and was in a conversation where Amber detailed the car chase from her perspective and was correcting herself on whether things were her actions and thoughts or AG’s, including her saying she basically didn’t have control of her body. He didn’t seem to have fully connected that Amber meant that literally she is not AG, at least pre-breakup. He doesn’t know what’s up with Sal, and doesn’t know Amber stabbed her.
All the rest might know AG’s identity and/or Blaine being bad news, if that, but even when Amber or AG talk about dissociating or ‘I told you I didn’t beat him up, but Amber did,’ they still don’t realize that’s actually what’s going on. (Though actually that’s happened a couple times. I can’t remember whether or not Joe was present at the time, but Amber flat stated to Stacey and Richard that she dissociates.)
Oh and Mike knows some degree of this shit, but from past experience anything he offers will make matters worse and that might be his intent.
Interestingly enough, NO ONE has connected Sal’s role in this, and Amber hasn’t shared with anyone that she doesn’t remember things when AG comes out anymore or that she’s trying to get rid of her.
I know, right? Ethan doesn’t really have a relationship with Sal, and if I remember right he said something when AG told him she was on campus like ‘okay, but I’m not worried and it doesn’t haunt me anymore.’ But Danny and Walky? No idea how that would go for either, except that I could see Walky taking sides and I don’t know for sure which one he’d pick.
Ethan said “It’s definitely crazy we’re all going to school together but it was a very long time ago and she was a kid. We were ALL kids. I mean, she’s probably changed or she’d be in jail instead of college, right?’
In other words, Ethan has the forgiveness potential of a saint. He may feel differently if confronted with Sal in the flesh but who knows?
Danny’s picked up a few more big hints since they broke up. There was a conversation about Sal and about who actually broke up with him and another later one where Amber talked about “sharing this 5’2″ meat vehicle”.
I don’t think we’ve really gotten to see how he’s reacted to those or what conclusions he’s drawn.
I suspect Ethan knows even less. Amber’s disassociation has been progressing and most of Ethan’s experience was before school started. He knows about Amazi-girl, but as a secret id thing, not as an alter. Obviously he does know about all the backstory.
And you can’t really blame them. It’s not an easy thing to grasp. Hardly the first conclusion anyone is going to jump to, especially with the super-hero secret id bit as an excuse to talk about the two as separate without really letting on.
Absolutely. Even when she’s talking frankly about it, it’s so difficult to grasp some psychologists don’t believe it actually exists. Much less a bunch of college freshmen who haven’t taken a psych class in their lives. (I would be a bit more leery of Stacey and Richard, because if I angrily responded to adults in my life that I dissociate after something traumatic like that they would freak out… but then all the adults in my life probably have an above-average vocabulary with regards to psychology and mental illnesses.)
It certainly doesn’t help that there were many much-publicized cases of people being misdiagnosed with Multiple-Personality Disorder (as it was known at the time), resulting in people sometimes denying the existence of legitimate cases even when faced with the evidence.
Yeah, she started with “I stab people who piss me off” and ended with “I disassociate and fight criminals”. I might be worried, but it wouldn’t really be the disassociate part I was concerned about – more the threats of violence.
Of course, they both know about Ryan, so it can all be taken as a reference to that.
It can takes months to years before something as common as depression is recognized as an issue for someone, and that can be by trained professionals. I mean, shoot, it took almost 15lbs of unintentional weight loss and sleep disturbances for me to recognize how big a problem my mental health was giving me, and I was a college educated, licensed healthcare professional the entire time it was happening. It would be frankly amazing to see a college freshmen string together something as complex as complete disassociation and an entirely separate personality in a person they’ve known for less than a semester.
Maybe we could expect Ethan to recognize the severity of her struggles before anyone else, simply because they’ve been close for so long, but he’s making some huge life adjustments himself right now. I will say though, that between Ruth, Dorothy, and Ethan, I’m surprised that no one has pushed her strongly toward a counselor.
Even without it being the result of a dissociative split Amazi-girl should really stand out as a big enough crisis point to try to get her to get help.
College freshmen, though? Honestly, most of them are just bemused by the idea of a ‘caped superhero’ on campus. A few have some insights into the idea that this is symptomatic of deeper troubles, but as noted, most of them don’t grok the idea of ‘therapy’, either.
Because she’s a superhero. And that’s apparently kind of just accepted. Like the way no one recognizes her and she can skirt the laws of physics – like the stunt choreographer is in her corner.
Yeah, I’ve had friends with parents who…well, they suck, but maybe not as much as Blaine?…and anyway, I’ve had to basically aggressively support them into considering therapy.
My dad was very against therapy, seemed to think it was all pill pushing. Several of my friends pushed me towards it saying that it was unreasonable not to get treatment with the symptoms I had. Getting treatment, and medication for a little while, was pivotal in rebuilding my life over the last 6 years. Now I am a mostly functional adult!
Amber is honestly far enough down the abused-kid rabbit hole that I’m not convinced she understands that anything she’s experiencing is a problem rather than her just deserts for being a terrible human being. Even the blatantly not-normal shit like flashbacks and losing time.
She is suffering from toxic shame from her abusive upbringing. That means she can’t let go of the shame from the mistakes she has made- or even things that just felt like mistakes to her. All the things she thinks she has done wrong are still hanging around in her head, making her feel worthless- hence the flashbacks. But I doubt she has heard of toxic shame- I’ve suffered from it most of my life, and didn’t know what it was till recently- so she probably does think all her negative feelings toward herself are legitimate. She feels ashamed of things Blaine would have criticized her for, like social awkwardness or lack of control over her feelings; but she also hates him and is even more ashamed of anything he might praise her for, like solving problems with violence.
I mean, she knows it EXISTS, since she’s the source on the ‘Blaine negotiated self-defense classes rather than therapy after the incident’ bit. But any ideas she has about it are probably pop culture Freudian shit rather than, say, CBT or something else that could actually help her.
Billie is technically supposed to be going to something as well, but has never actually went. Pretty sure Sal had experience with therapy but it ended poorly because Sal’s life. And of course Joyce has the business card for someone Roz gave her after the party.
I actually wonder what IU Counseling’s like. I know some big campuses don’t have the staff to support the student population, so there’s either obscene wait lists, a limit to how many times you can come in a semester, or both. (The worst horror story I heard was students with suicidal impulses getting thirty day waits.) Or maybe it’s one of the ones that also offers/outsources students to online therapy appointments. There’s a chance that might actually work better for Amber, though I can’t report on it without firsthand knowledge and it probably varies depending on service.
And of course any benefit is dependent on the therapist and your rapport with them. Especially in a case like Amber’s- probably an IU psychologist could easily diagnose and treat the anxiety disorder and PTSD, but even if she felt able to confess that she’s the campus vigilante, except that that’s an alter… DID’s a lot more hit and miss with professionals, and it’s pretty clear that anything threatening AG’s existence isn’t gonna work. She might actually do best on some kind of support forum.
Yeah, makes sense. We just don’t know if there is a limit per term, but a few years ago looking at things IU at least seemed to have a student-run counseling group for depression with a page on the official Counseling Center site, so I’m pretty hopeful they have their shit together there. Still, I cede to anyone with actual experience.
Can she afford therapy? The university probably doesn’t have much in the way of free mental health and her Mom was just barely getting by before Ryan’s parents sued her.
Campus will have a counseling center free to students. Like I said upthread, how good that is is wildly variable even without Amber’s particular difficulties in play, but I don’t know IU’s specifics enough to say whether there’s any chance in hell of it working well. And that probably wouldn’t cover summer either way, and Amber’s issues are clearly the kind that are going to take years of working with someone.
Possible Stacey has health insurance that could cover it, but I don’t have much hope.
Useless. That’s not how you successfully deal with ptsd. Speaking from experience. As long as you think you can win this fight with pure force, you’ll lose.
Also, I’m kind of afraid of what she is capable of if ag’s codex doesn’t hold her back anymore and her condition gets worse and she loses what little stability she has. Ag is a horribly unhealthy way to deal with this but at least this way, the harm she did to others was limited.
Like, she’s not been stabbing everyone, but she did go joker on a guy. Even if he deserved (which he very much did) she still has been doing pretty violent stuff.
Also she tried to beat up people who weren’t commiting violent crimes at least four times.
Stabbing was Amber rather than AG – one of the reasons she’s so deeply self-loathing now. But AG definitely has violence problems of her own, yes, hence the bad coping mechanism.
Really they need to not vent their problems through violence, but I’ll take ‘everyone is aware and cooperating and not taking the body out to vigilante when it needs sleep’ as a first step. Sleep deprivation will only make AG worse.
Yes. But ag had enough control over herself to not run havoc. Her actions are violent and often not in the appropriate scale of reaction to what happened, but at least controlled enough not to harm bystanders.
I’m not saying that ag was a good thing. She’s way too prone to violence for my liking. I’m just afraid that things could get much worse. Ptsd does this thing where you kind of black out and purely act on instinct when it gets too overwhelming. I don’t remember much from what I did when that happens (usually after a trigger), it’s just some random pictures that usually don’t make much sense. I’m not violent though, I’m just becoming some kind of mindless doll who agrees to everything. Not sure what happens if you add violence to that.. I don’t know any morals or consideration for anyone (including myself) in that state. It’s a pure survival mode, nothing else matters, even though I’m not in danger anymore.
She’s not really fighting the ptsd here I think. She’s fighting the urge to run away and let Amazi-Girl take control, which has been her general reaction to encounters with Sal.
Which is also not healthy, but healthy at the same time. From my limited understanding of DID, the alters really need to come to some kind of working arrangement. Fighting among them isn’t good. OTOH, being able to deal with a trigger like Sal without resorting to another alter should be a good step.
Frankly, I’m not sure she has multiple personalities. Ptsd alone could be responsible for that, including the “not remembering anything” part and dissociations.
That’s your perogative. It’s pretty clear by now that’s the intent. They talk to each other. Amber now doesn’t share memories.
I’m not sure how much clearer it could be without a formal diagnosis.
Yeah, the strip where she describes the car chase from her perspective, saying it wasn’t really her body but AG’s and that she was terrified but AG wouldn’t allow herself to stop, and Amber is clearly making distinctions between what she experienced and who was acting throughout… that one’s fairly explicit, especially taken with the implications of lost time and the strip where she takes the costume to ruin AG’s reputation and AG as costume responds.
Sorry for the off-topic comment, but I could use some advice:
Last week, I started seeing a new psychiatric provider (DNP). During our session, she gave information that absolutely could be identifying about another patient of hers, especially since the patient and I share some overlap in identities & potentially communities. Basically, I don’t know him, but I could, and either way should not have been told this information.
I’ve been grappling with how I should address it since then. I’m not sure how much I even can do, since it wasn’t my privacy being violated. I’m not scheduled to see the clinician in person for about three months (and have a whole mess of other things to address with her about our first meeting then), and I feel like I should do something…but I’m not sure what. Any insight on people might have on rights around this situation or general ideas are appreciated.
I don’t really give a shit if she talks about me, so while I may consider seeing someone else, that’s not really the issue for me.
She said other things and made assumptions I kind of want to address, because while they weren’t great, and may in fact be another reason to keep looking, it seems like she’s trying to ally and just isn’t great at it, so I want to see if I can support that– basically I’ll probably see her at least once more.
I’ve not been in this situation, so this is only general advice.
1) Dump them. If they betray their ethical oath that much in the first session, plus it sounds like you had other issues with them, they’re not going to be a good therapist. And you have no guarantees they won’t discuss you elsewhere as well.
2) Report them to their licensing board. This is absolutely something they ought to know. Be as specific as possible.
3) These two things may not be possible for you for reasons I don’t know about. Do your best, do what you need, and be kind to yourself.
if you think it was a well-intentioned brain fart, point out the problem to her? hopefully they take emails?
if you feel like you don’t know this person well enough, well, the world won’t end if you just keep observing for a while. definitely write something to yourself so you don’t start wondering if you imagined it later on.
I don’t know any of the legal stuff around hippa(sp?) violations or reporting them.
Contact your state’s Board of Psychology and inform them of a breach of confidentiality. Find out who your psychiatrist’s boss is and report it to them as well when you request a new psychiatrist. Don’t let this go unaddressed. This is a major ethical violation as well as a breach of HIPAA. Best of luck to you.
If someone is willing to breach a federal law they beat into you as hard as possible during any medical training, during the first goddamn session, you can bet your hiney they don’t understand any more subtle professional ethics.
Like, I want to be clear here, OP: it does not matter whether this is malice or incompetence. This is the type of incompetence that can hurt people really bad really fast, and it needs to be on record in case there’s a pattern of it. It sounds like you really want to be nice and not make waves here, and I get that, but you should tell that impulse to sit down for a bit.
even if you still see the DNP or talk personally you should report her. i dont know if its illegal to talk about other patients without naming but it should never happen…
First step would be to address it with the professional concerned, perhaps saying – if you feel OK doing so – that you do not have confidence in her as a result, and would like a referral to someone else. Or if you don’t trust her to give a good referral, talk to whoever referred you to her.
You have been placed in a difficult position. This is likely to affect your future working relationship(s) with other professionals. She definitely needs to be told this is not OK, but I can’t tell from here if this justifies a professional conduct review. It probably does, though. Do you have a communication path to her supervisor? If you are willing to go that route, it would be preferable to tell her you are doing that before you do it, though it doesn’t have to be face-to-face. If you think it was simply thoughtlessness on her part, dealing with it in person with her alone, and not taking it further may be sufficient to ensure she never repeats this mistake. This is more likely if she is inexperienced.
It is unfortunate that she has violated this boundary, as it places you in the position of deciding how far you want to go in policing her behaviour. This is not what you went to her for, and it is a burden she has placed on you. This does not help the therapy. It is unprofessional toward the other patient and to you.
I cannot tell you what you should do – that depends on your ability to cope with this unwanted additional stress. It is important that she be informed that this is unacceptable behaviour, but it is not necessarily your responsibility to do that. If you have other ways of getting the message to her, through her colleagues, her supervisor, or the person who referred you to her, that is worth considering . . . But this is not likely to keep your identity as whistleblower confidential.
You did not ask to have this burden dumped on you, and you are not obligated to carry it. That said, if there is some way to point out her error to her in a way that you can handle the likely consequence (at a minimum that the therapeutic relationship will be uncomfortable) I would encourage you to do so.
“For questions about the Ethics Code and non-complaint-related issues, we request that you phone the Ethics Office directly at (202) 336-5930 or use APA’s toll free number (800) 374-2721 and follow the oral directions to reach extension 5930.”
Also – A) That flashback is making me really wonder whether we’ll get the robbery in Sal’s POV next storyline. If so *Squeeeeeeee*
B) According to the book PDFs (not sure about the physical copies) the knife went THROUGH Sal’s hand and here it looks like it was either through her knuckles or just below them. I’m not a doctor but I know there’s important shit in that area like bone, nerves, muscles, blood vessels, etc. So, would I be right in guessing she’s damn lucky she can still use that hand at all?
Middle of the hand is fine. You only really need index, another finger, and a thumb. It’s better if it is the first two but any will do. The rest make it easier to grip. Saying that there’s always a hook.
But the knuckles have bones and nerves that connect to those fingers you need. I’m guessing there was some sort of serious damage there since Sal told Danny that she still doesn’t have full use of her hand.
It could have hit in such a way only the ring and middle fingers were damaged, or just one of them? I’d have to ask my brother what’s needed to play a guitar specifically, since that was context, but I also don’t know how everything connects and we don’t know precisely where it hit. (And frankly I don’t want to, pretty please Willis.) I’m pretty sure we’ve seen enough to know it went parallel to the bones, so that might be a good sign?
Just from looking at where she’s pulling the knife out from and a few pictures of the inside of a hand, it looks like it would’ve hit bone, not parallel to them. Regardless, it seems like it’s going to be nasty, especially if it went all the way through her hand.
I don’t think Amber could have manage to put the knife though bone, though pushing in all the way in may have broken bones. So it’s likely in went in more or less vertically between the bones, which is likely to affect muscles and tendons used for moving fingers. I would expect something like that to heal in a way that gives back full usability of the hand.
That Sal wears a mitten might be because the scar really look bad or because she doesn’t want to see and be reminded of it. We never got any indication the hand hurts or that there are things she cannot do with it.
PDFs say it went through and we saw the angle she pulled the knife out. It doesn’t look vertical.
Also – we do know Sal doesn’t have full usability, even accounting for the fact she’s a southpaw. She told Danny her right hand doesn’t work very well when she was helping him with his ukulele.
Given she’s a lefty, she could have learned on a left-handed bass, which then her right hand would have been the fretboard hand. The fretboard hand is usually the one that does the more intricate work.
If she really wanted to play bass again, she could learn a right-handed bass. The left hand then would be the fretboard hand, and shed only need 2 fingers (or a pick) to pluck the strings.
That being said, she can use her right hand well enough for it to be safe for her to drive a motorcycle. And, for that matter, to waterski while only holding on with her right (http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/friends/). So she’s definitely got some grip (and is able to make a fist, judging by her punching tendencies). It’s probably the more delicate sorts of thing that her fingers aren’t good at.
ah real life, you expect it to fly down and away in a dramatic but then it floats like some gentle butterfly, mocking your moment of dramatic tension. CURSE YE REAL LIFE!
this is the part where the mask somehow attaches to a wandering spirit and gains a form, tells Amber that they no longer need her weak, human side and go off trying to bring justice in there own way. (which is probably not the best way)
I had a weird Filmation thought that AMBER was an anagram of five goddess names, and if this were a Filmation series we’d have a scene of them showing up to give her advice.
I’m so much a child of the thrice-damned 1970s.
For everything else I did a google search of “goddess that starts with [x]”
I grew up with the Sierra Pharoah games, and they have implanted in me way too strong an Egyptology bent to be swayed by Greco-Roman/Norse-type mythos.
Hey let’s take a moment to back track to last four strips. I kind of realized earlier that I think a lot of us including me got carried away with the shipping and assumptions that Walky and Amber were for sure going to have a full on hook up now that they made out one time even though one of these two could change their minds tomorrow.
Like the topic everyone was arguing about was pretty much “Is it ok he’s pursuing a relationship with her even though he just got out of a different one and he kind of still thinks of her as another Dorothy plus there’s all the this baggage she has.” But none of us actually stopped to realize that one make out session does not equal immediat serouse relationship, hell they didn’t even have a first date yet to test out the waters and even if they did that doesn’t mean there an official item. We don’t even know the scale of how much they’re into each other, Do they want to be friend’s with benefits, do they just want to date a couple times to see where this goes,or is this hole thing going to be called the next time they see each other because of this? Who knows, for now we’ll just haft to wait and find out. This entire pairing dynamic is still new and they just hit their first rough patch, if they spent more time together and actually learn more about each other maybe it won’t take that long for Walky to see her more than a more Thicc look alike of Dorothy and Amber won’t be caught off gaurd by Bullshit like finding out her new cute crush is related to her arch frenemy.
As for us we should probably work on not jumping gun like that again. We were all acting no better than Joyce with her romantic headcannons.
Except Joyce is in-universe, we’re out of universe. What we say doesn’t actually have an impact on the characters. Sometimes people get excited about fiction, and sometimes that excitement expands from what’s present in the work itself, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
I guess it’s more about the idea “What would you do if you were in this situation and would whatever you’d end up doing be okay with you?” Is what makes conversation interesting.
Walky doesn’t see her as just “thicc Dorothy”. He only agreed with Sal’s comparison of their looks. He specifically talked about liking Amber herself.
There’s potential for them to hurt each other or end up enabling bad behaviors, but there’s a lot more potential for them to be really good for each other.
A bittersweet mix bag of potentially good and bad. But every actual relationship will have his fair share of ups and downs. I’d say go for it, honestly I want to see where this goes too.
A) We had about 4 days to think about an event that happened in the space of a few minutes, in comic.
B) This is the internet, shipping is what we do.
C) Some of us correctly identified right away that the biggest impact of Sal showing up isn’t about her and Walky, but the various flavors of trauma that Amber gets, from the immediate shock of just seeing Sal to digesting that she was making out with her twin brother.
Actually, I expected this to be a one time thing since Sal showed up. I expect amber to barely be able to face him now. I don’t think she’ll be as relaxed around him as before and she probably won’t make out with him again. (And walky will feel left left alone by “Dorothy” a second time within a few days, and I doubt Amber will tell him the reason she keeps distance).
She either has just hit rock bottom and will seek help or is on her way deeper down the spiral. Either way, walky should better keep distance, for his own sake. With ptsd, “getting help” means “slowly getting better over the next years”. She neither is a good rebound, too many issues to deal with, nor should she be used as one. She needs dependable, stable people, not someone who just doesn’t want to face his own pain.
honestly; I think that some form of the walky-amber dynamic is going to persist in-story, since a lot of time and scenes were used to build it up and narratively speaking there’s a lot more that can be done besides just punching Amber in the feels and producing really good art; although there’s also Dorothy and Sal who will naturally be effected by this plotline somehow; as well as individual development for Amber in particular (she’s coping with this Sal Attack radically differently from last instances) I still think Willis is going to have Amber and walky interact a bit more in general than they have previously just because even if they’re platonic AF there’s still narrative potential there
yeah, like the best way to test the questions raised earlier about mourning periods in relationships and stuff is for Dorothy to hear Walky trying to ask Amber out in the half-bath. (well it’d be terrible but like… awesome terrible)
The other times when Sal has triggered a full blown panic attack, Amazi-Girl has taken control from Amber.
The trauma from the robbery (and her dad goading her into stabbing Sal) is probably what caused the dissociation that ended up creating Amazi-Girl in the first place
With AG currently being denied control at all and only getting out when Amber’s asleep, I’m guessing it’s more automatic this time because Amber is on mental lockdown and AG is looking for cracks in the wall.
She’s LITERALLY telling Amazi-Girl to go away here. That implies she was trying to take the wheel
Between Amazi-Girl hiding memories from Amber and Amber trying to make her look bad in retaliation, it’s explicitly been established that they are not on good terms right now.
I guess. They’re definitely not on good terms.
I’d be a little surprised if it was just Amazi-Girl hiding memories or if it was even as intentional as that implies. I’d assumed they weren’t sharing memories at all. If it’s one-sided, I’m not sure what that means.
Or it could be as simple as Amazi-Girl only being able to take over when Amber’s sleeping and Amber not remembering because she was asleep?
Not sure how DID works with sleep like this, but I’ve been guessing based off very basic knowledge of brains that AG coming out means they’re not getting the physical effects of sleeping. (That will probably be a problem eventually.) My guess is they aren’t sharing memories, it goes both ways, and AG can just tell when control is weaker and tries to seize control then without context. But I dunno how the memory separation works, can it be initiated by one alter trying to push the other out or something?
That’s my (very limited) understanding. If they’re not sharing memories that’s a really bad sign. One alter trying to get rid of another tends not to go over well
That last panel reminds me of a joke where people were able to angrily slam down their phones before all dramatically but now they can’t be dramatic and can only boop the Call End button on their smartphones.
interesting that amazi-girl’s mask just happened to be in her pocket. and it looks like she pulled it out without even consciously thinking about it. automatic trigger -> amazi-girl time, except amber interrupted it and shoved her back down?
that seems like… good in some ways, bad in others. good that amber isn’t running away (dissociatively, not literally) but bad that she’s still suppressing amazi-girl as if the problem will just, well, go away.
Notice how Sal isn’t tagged in this strip. That means it wasn’t Sal, Amber stabbed! This also explains why Sal doesn’t recognize Amber. It never happened to Sal but some other random girl that looks uncannily similar to Sal and also robbed a convenience store! This is a one hundred percent confimed fact that can’t be refuted with past evidence! #NotagNotSal
Shhhh. Don’t use evidence to easily disprove this 100% correct and canon fact! That’s not Sal. The girl in the flashback never actually said her name was Sal Walkerton. Obviously someone else.
huh. if you go back a few pages from that, amazi-girl stops being tagged when the red panels start. it’s red-eyes-amber beating up blaine. but she doesn’t get her own tag.
Red eyes of rage/red panel Amber is still Amber, far as I can tell. AG seems to have started after that as ‘an outlet’ but with the code keeping her from actually letting loose (and was probably useful in self-defense classes) and to cope with the PTSD. It was the inciting incident, but AG didn’t really become distinct until afterwards, is my guess. (Of course, both Amber and AG have a shitload of anger and pain and a tendency to redirect that into violence, but they haven’t figured out yet that the hero/monster dichotomy is crap and that AG beating up random people because she thinks they committed petty crimes and deserve it is not okay either. But that one’s gonna take a while. Willis needs his periodic superheroics fix.)
But yeah, Amber beat Blaine, not AG. That’s actually why AG could tell Dorothy she wasn’t responsible for it. (Dorothy thinks she was lying, last I think they interacted? But the dissociation certainly did get worse after that weekend.)
What are some cinematic moments life’s ruined for you
One time in middle school, I tried to walk off sadly to display my dejection after having my heart broken only to be stopped by a hall monitor yelling at me for doing something I wasn’t doing.
One time, I slipped on some ice while I was walking to the school bus, cracked my head on the ground, and couldn’t move for a couple of minutes. Nobody came to see if I was okay, they just waited five seconds for me to get up, lost patience immediately, and left me there in the cold with a potential head injury.
Amber, don’t you dare jump over the bannister and try to catch that thing!
I think that the long-awaited critical breakdown has arrived. I just wonder how much splash damage there will be before Amber realises that this is beyond her ability to handle and she seeks help. Or, worse, before she’s institutionalised.
Huh, looks like AG wanted to take over and Amber’s not letting her. This could mean that Amber may got back on the roof in this hot rage and actually attack Sal which AG wouldn’t do.
I don’t think AG should be above suspicion. She’s the one who’s stalked and attacked her before. All Amber’s done this semester is run from her (and once challenge her to Mario Kart). I know Sal and AG have more respect for each other now but if one of them were to attack Sal, I’d think it’d be AG.
Did you get to the part where Sadie eats a bad corn dog goes on a vigilante spree, yet? I liked the gag with Ronaldo shouting about pencils in the distance.
So far I got to where they rescued Greg from the Space Zoo and found out that Blue and Yellow Diamond both missed the Pink Diamond that Rose shattered thousands of years ago but there is something about that bugged me, since according to Bismuth, Rose refused to use the gem smasher and her pink sword cannot shatter the gem itself, only the gem’s body.
I believe Pink Diamond was just bubbled and kept in a secret place, that or she’s hiding on Earth somewhere.
Cool, I have tried to avoid spoilers so I can watch it without outside bias.
As for Steven Universe, I was a bit wary about watching it, in part because I heard how toxic the fan base can be, but I felt like trying it out and to my surprise, I ended up liking it.
The Cat Fingers episode was disturbing to say the least and when I saw Garnet poofed and two gems fell down, my thoughts were “Was she a fusion?” but when Steven found Ruby but acted like she had no idea who he was, I thought maybe I was wrong but when they fused, talk about plot swerves.
The Opal reveal was pretty awesome, especially how they animated her movements in that “Giant Woman” episode.
I was almost as shocked as Pearl was when Smokey Quartz first appeared, and that later episode when Sardonyx did that Talk Show did a lot to ‘humanize’ her.
The thing that bothered me was how inconsistent the characters were drawn with Connie and Peridot seem to be suffering from it the most height wise.
You can thank the fact there are several different animation studios for that. They all have different character sheets – hence why Peridot is sometimes taller and sometimes barely taller than Amethyst.
… This reminds me of the time when I was a kid I tried to angrily throw something away.
And forgot how inept I was physically.
And instead of throwing it forward, I threw it straight up.
Whereupon it then fell back down.
On my head.
And gave me a scalp cut.
Which then made me bleed like crazy because scalp cut.
And then I freaked out.
… annnnd tl;dr that was how my lack of throwing skills became legend in my school two days after moving to a new place.
Thankfully nobody new me yet and we were 2 weeks from summer break.
But I still occasionally hear other people reminisce about “that time a kid freaked out and threw something in the air and hit themself in the head with it and then had to go to the hospital.” And they don’t remember it was me, and I don’t tell them because yeah that was embarrassing enough he first time, thanks.
I don’t know if it’s the mood whiplash, but this may be the funniest last-panel gag yet.
Unrelated: I’ve been trying out the Transformers: Forged to Fight game, anyone got any “things I wish I knew when I started playing it” advice? Also, I just hit level 5, anyone knows a casual-friendly Alliance they recommend there?
As a reminder: “FUCK YOU, BLAINE!”. With that said, getting rid of her amazi girl persona would free amber to be fully herself, but without help she is going to be ticking bomb worse than Joyce. Her self hatred is going to doom her like some self fulfilled prophecy
Very likely, there is no “getting rid of the amazi girl persona” and trying like she’s doing now is not healthy.
As she said at one point, “they both have to share this 5’2″ meat puppet”, so they’re really going to have to find a way to get along.
Trying to ‘get rid’ of alters doesn’t work. When you take an aggressive distancing stance against them, you simply increase how separated you are from each other. She needs help, but the help needs to get her cooperating with AG, not lashing out at that part of herself.
Honestly, I’m not sure how she could become attracted to Walky without noticing SOME similarities between him and his twin. If Joyce is seeing that asshat everywhere she walks, you think Amber of all people would start seeing Sal in her interactions with Walky.
She definitely noticed something about him (set her brain on fire and so on), but there’s also the fact that Walky’s a guy, which may make it harder for her to work out the link (short hair vs. long hair, for instance). Plus, Walky is goofy, which Sal Very Definitely Is Not, even outside of Amber’s PTSD-inflicted inability to see anything good in her (broadly speaking). Possibly evil stress-inducing girl =/= brainless male cartoon addict who shares cookies. Does not compute. Especially since just seeing Sal tends to break Amber, while talking with Walky destressed her.
Still, I wouldn’t be surprised at some regression. Amber’s been in worse shape since the knifing.
This is also more intimate – not only confronting her, but finding you were kissing your Nemesis’s twin.
And recovery isn’t linear regardless, even when you have all the tools and support you need – Amber has neither.
I also think it’s a huge difference between initiating contact and being surprised by it, especially in an intimate moment and with huge revelations attached.
did they have any interaction with sal in the robbery ? cause from what I seen they just hid in the back near the fridges and sal didn’t know they were even there …….
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GRAVITY, MY NEMESIS
(air resistance?)
Yeah, the gravity part seems to be on her side in this.
And then Amber realizes how important Amazigirl is to her and leaps after it.
nah, she just keeps walking down the stairs, and it lands on her head 🙂
Unfortunately, in her emotionally hightened state she forgets all her training and ends up in a full-body cast. Sal, feeling bad, visits her every day and mistakes her constant paralysis for the effects of the cast.
Gravity? ON HER SIDE? Clearly she’s actually a supervillain, then, since gravity’s whole shtick is keeping people down. 😐
CURSE YOU AIR RESISTANCE!!!
“It’s time to try defying gravity
I think I’ll try defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye, I’m defying gravity
And you won’t bring me down”
Huh, I never realized that song was supposed to be from the point of view of air resistance…
you gotta tie a knot in it first
And wrap it around a brick. And throw it through a window. Of a store with a display of televisions you fancy.
And…wait no, now you’re looting. Nevermind, ignore all that. Though as a way of firmly rejecting your identity as a superhero it would be pretty effective.
Gotta remember to scream out “AMAZIGIRL IS DEAD. LONG LIVE LOOTERGIRL.”. Then, later on, you reveal that you were actually the evil twin, and the real Amazigirl was just trapped in your Lootcave. But then, it’s revealed that you were actually the real one after all, and you were just trying to trick the third duplicate of yourself.. and then your first duplicate sacrifices themself for you, but later on it’s revealed that was also a trick.. but then it’s revealed that the third duplicate was the real one all along, and we were just being presented the narrative through an unreliable narrator!
Anyway, meanwhile the real Lootergirl has already stolen everyone’s hearts…and the entire city. Way to let us down, Amazigirl(s).
Someone reads a lot of Spider-Man… and is very bitter about it…
So is Amber actually getting professional help at this point, or…?
Guess
She gets occasional advice from Mike. Does that count?
Yes, but he’s the wrong kind of “professional.”
For a nickle.
lol u funy
hah yeah right
and if you pull the other one it plays yankee doodle
Or.
Nope. No one but Dorothy and Ruth has, and Ruth was basically forced into it.
Speaking from experience, there are a lot of dumb, wrong reasons to not get treatment when you’re ill, especially with brain issues which people somehow think is different than, say, kidney failure or lung cancer.
and has anyone even reminded her therapy is a thing that exists? given her dad’s attitude towards it, I wouldn’t expect her to think of it… or be willing to go without a friend bribing her into it, really.
Doesn’t seem like anyone around her has quite grasped how bad the dissociation and PTSD is, and thinks that she’s just choosing to play a role rather than having a serious mental disorder. We, the audience, know perfectly well how bad this is, but we’ve seen more than anyone else.
Danny could have maybe identified it, but…Danny…not the most observant.
well, dorothy did see enough to ask ruth to keep an eye on her, iirc.
two people who are seeing therapists, but somehow they didn’t mention it to amber. at least, not that we saw.
Yeah, I was actually thinking last night about who knows what, and basically no one has a full set of facts.
Ethan knows about the holdup and stabbing, the abuse, that Amber is AG, that Sal is on campus, and he probably has as good an idea of there being a dissociative split or PTSD as anyone. He doesn’t actually know and recognize Sal, at least as of Joyce’s party.
Danny knows there was A Backstory with a holdup, the abuse, the inexplicable-to-him enmity with Sal, and was in a conversation where Amber detailed the car chase from her perspective and was correcting herself on whether things were her actions and thoughts or AG’s, including her saying she basically didn’t have control of her body. He didn’t seem to have fully connected that Amber meant that literally she is not AG, at least pre-breakup. He doesn’t know what’s up with Sal, and doesn’t know Amber stabbed her.
All the rest might know AG’s identity and/or Blaine being bad news, if that, but even when Amber or AG talk about dissociating or ‘I told you I didn’t beat him up, but Amber did,’ they still don’t realize that’s actually what’s going on. (Though actually that’s happened a couple times. I can’t remember whether or not Joe was present at the time, but Amber flat stated to Stacey and Richard that she dissociates.)
Oh and Mike knows some degree of this shit, but from past experience anything he offers will make matters worse and that might be his intent.
Interestingly enough, NO ONE has connected Sal’s role in this, and Amber hasn’t shared with anyone that she doesn’t remember things when AG comes out anymore or that she’s trying to get rid of her.
I wonder how Ethan, Danny and/or Walky would react to Sal’s role in this?
I know, right? Ethan doesn’t really have a relationship with Sal, and if I remember right he said something when AG told him she was on campus like ‘okay, but I’m not worried and it doesn’t haunt me anymore.’ But Danny and Walky? No idea how that would go for either, except that I could see Walky taking sides and I don’t know for sure which one he’d pick.
Ethan said “It’s definitely crazy we’re all going to school together but it was a very long time ago and she was a kid. We were ALL kids. I mean, she’s probably changed or she’d be in jail instead of college, right?’
In other words, Ethan has the forgiveness potential of a saint. He may feel differently if confronted with Sal in the flesh but who knows?
Danny’s picked up a few more big hints since they broke up. There was a conversation about Sal and about who actually broke up with him and another later one where Amber talked about “sharing this 5’2″ meat vehicle”.
I don’t think we’ve really gotten to see how he’s reacted to those or what conclusions he’s drawn.
I suspect Ethan knows even less. Amber’s disassociation has been progressing and most of Ethan’s experience was before school started. He knows about Amazi-girl, but as a secret id thing, not as an alter. Obviously he does know about all the backstory.
And you can’t really blame them. It’s not an easy thing to grasp. Hardly the first conclusion anyone is going to jump to, especially with the super-hero secret id bit as an excuse to talk about the two as separate without really letting on.
Absolutely. Even when she’s talking frankly about it, it’s so difficult to grasp some psychologists don’t believe it actually exists. Much less a bunch of college freshmen who haven’t taken a psych class in their lives. (I would be a bit more leery of Stacey and Richard, because if I angrily responded to adults in my life that I dissociate after something traumatic like that they would freak out… but then all the adults in my life probably have an above-average vocabulary with regards to psychology and mental illnesses.)
It certainly doesn’t help that there were many much-publicized cases of people being misdiagnosed with Multiple-Personality Disorder (as it was known at the time), resulting in people sometimes denying the existence of legitimate cases even when faced with the evidence.
She framed it as a joke with Stacey and Richard.
Yeah, she started with “I stab people who piss me off” and ended with “I disassociate and fight criminals”. I might be worried, but it wouldn’t really be the disassociate part I was concerned about – more the threats of violence.
Of course, they both know about Ryan, so it can all be taken as a reference to that.
It can takes months to years before something as common as depression is recognized as an issue for someone, and that can be by trained professionals. I mean, shoot, it took almost 15lbs of unintentional weight loss and sleep disturbances for me to recognize how big a problem my mental health was giving me, and I was a college educated, licensed healthcare professional the entire time it was happening. It would be frankly amazing to see a college freshmen string together something as complex as complete disassociation and an entirely separate personality in a person they’ve known for less than a semester.
Maybe we could expect Ethan to recognize the severity of her struggles before anyone else, simply because they’ve been close for so long, but he’s making some huge life adjustments himself right now. I will say though, that between Ruth, Dorothy, and Ethan, I’m surprised that no one has pushed her strongly toward a counselor.
Including Sal.
Even without it being the result of a dissociative split Amazi-girl should really stand out as a big enough crisis point to try to get her to get help.
College freshmen, though? Honestly, most of them are just bemused by the idea of a ‘caped superhero’ on campus. A few have some insights into the idea that this is symptomatic of deeper troubles, but as noted, most of them don’t grok the idea of ‘therapy’, either.
Because she’s a superhero. And that’s apparently kind of just accepted. Like the way no one recognizes her and she can skirt the laws of physics – like the stunt choreographer is in her corner.
Yeah, I’ve had friends with parents who…well, they suck, but maybe not as much as Blaine?…and anyway, I’ve had to basically aggressively support them into considering therapy.
My dad was very against therapy, seemed to think it was all pill pushing. Several of my friends pushed me towards it saying that it was unreasonable not to get treatment with the symptoms I had. Getting treatment, and medication for a little while, was pivotal in rebuilding my life over the last 6 years. Now I am a mostly functional adult!
I don’t take my dad’s advice anymore.
Amber is honestly far enough down the abused-kid rabbit hole that I’m not convinced she understands that anything she’s experiencing is a problem rather than her just deserts for being a terrible human being. Even the blatantly not-normal shit like flashbacks and losing time.
She is suffering from toxic shame from her abusive upbringing. That means she can’t let go of the shame from the mistakes she has made- or even things that just felt like mistakes to her. All the things she thinks she has done wrong are still hanging around in her head, making her feel worthless- hence the flashbacks. But I doubt she has heard of toxic shame- I’ve suffered from it most of my life, and didn’t know what it was till recently- so she probably does think all her negative feelings toward herself are legitimate. She feels ashamed of things Blaine would have criticized her for, like social awkwardness or lack of control over her feelings; but she also hates him and is even more ashamed of anything he might praise her for, like solving problems with violence.
I mean, she knows it EXISTS, since she’s the source on the ‘Blaine negotiated self-defense classes rather than therapy after the incident’ bit. But any ideas she has about it are probably pop culture Freudian shit rather than, say, CBT or something else that could actually help her.
Billie is technically supposed to be going to something as well, but has never actually went. Pretty sure Sal had experience with therapy but it ended poorly because Sal’s life. And of course Joyce has the business card for someone Roz gave her after the party.
I actually wonder what IU Counseling’s like. I know some big campuses don’t have the staff to support the student population, so there’s either obscene wait lists, a limit to how many times you can come in a semester, or both. (The worst horror story I heard was students with suicidal impulses getting thirty day waits.) Or maybe it’s one of the ones that also offers/outsources students to online therapy appointments. There’s a chance that might actually work better for Amber, though I can’t report on it without firsthand knowledge and it probably varies depending on service.
And of course any benefit is dependent on the therapist and your rapport with them. Especially in a case like Amber’s- probably an IU psychologist could easily diagnose and treat the anxiety disorder and PTSD, but even if she felt able to confess that she’s the campus vigilante, except that that’s an alter… DID’s a lot more hit and miss with professionals, and it’s pretty clear that anything threatening AG’s existence isn’t gonna work. She might actually do best on some kind of support forum.
Dorothy was able to get an appointment after the incident with Ryan, so I think Amber would be able to, as well.
Darn it, the link didn’t work. It’s the strip “Shrink,” from July 2, 2017.
Yeah, makes sense. We just don’t know if there is a limit per term, but a few years ago looking at things IU at least seemed to have a student-run counseling group for depression with a page on the official Counseling Center site, so I’m pretty hopeful they have their shit together there. Still, I cede to anyone with actual experience.
Can she afford therapy? The university probably doesn’t have much in the way of free mental health and her Mom was just barely getting by before Ryan’s parents sued her.
Campus will have a counseling center free to students. Like I said upthread, how good that is is wildly variable even without Amber’s particular difficulties in play, but I don’t know IU’s specifics enough to say whether there’s any chance in hell of it working well. And that probably wouldn’t cover summer either way, and Amber’s issues are clearly the kind that are going to take years of working with someone.
Possible Stacey has health insurance that could cover it, but I don’t have much hope.
ohhhhh there’s the red panels
probably not the best time, but I’m not known for tact or timing
https://imgur.com/a/YRmGcRb
smoosh boobsh
🖒
No, no. I needed that.
This pleases me.
Looks like it pleases Walky too.
I need to have “I’m not known for tact or timing” translated into Latin so I can use it for my heraldic motto.
Google: Quia non notum mihi leo vel apto
Sometimes, a finger is just a finger. Sometimes.
I disagree, the timing was perfect.
I hate when things refuse to be as dramatic as you demand.
Anyone know if there’s an app that simulates the sound of dramatically slamming the receiver of an old phone down?
I feel like “I HATE YOU AND IT’S NOT YOUR BABY ANYWAY!!!” – *deet* lacks dramatic flair.
Just try to yell and replicate the sound right as you go to hang up.
Not as Dramatic as leaving it in the Dumpster on a rainy day like in Spider-Man 2 but you get the point.
Oh.
Oh GOD.
Did JJJ get the Spiderman suit cleaned before he got into it?
Did Peter Parker clean it before he got back into it again?
The expression of your Gravattar really makes this comment.
I wonder how many Spider-man related works have homaged that “Spider-man no more” cover cause there has been a few
No no, Amber, this is, uh, this is good! Drama negated, r-right?
Oh geez… : (
Physics, how dare you.
The sworn enemy of every superhero.
Except Batman…because, well he’s Batman
After all, he can breathe in space solely by glaring space into submission.
Sucks when you try to be dramatic but physics gets in the way.
Well, at least she’s fighting back now.
Useless. That’s not how you successfully deal with ptsd. Speaking from experience. As long as you think you can win this fight with pure force, you’ll lose.
Also, I’m kind of afraid of what she is capable of if ag’s codex doesn’t hold her back anymore and her condition gets worse and she loses what little stability she has. Ag is a horribly unhealthy way to deal with this but at least this way, the harm she did to others was limited.
Limited to violence.
Like, she’s not been stabbing everyone, but she did go joker on a guy. Even if he deserved (which he very much did) she still has been doing pretty violent stuff.
Also she tried to beat up people who weren’t commiting violent crimes at least four times.
Stabbing was Amber rather than AG – one of the reasons she’s so deeply self-loathing now. But AG definitely has violence problems of her own, yes, hence the bad coping mechanism.
Really they need to not vent their problems through violence, but I’ll take ‘everyone is aware and cooperating and not taking the body out to vigilante when it needs sleep’ as a first step. Sleep deprivation will only make AG worse.
Yes. But ag had enough control over herself to not run havoc. Her actions are violent and often not in the appropriate scale of reaction to what happened, but at least controlled enough not to harm bystanders.
I’m not saying that ag was a good thing. She’s way too prone to violence for my liking. I’m just afraid that things could get much worse. Ptsd does this thing where you kind of black out and purely act on instinct when it gets too overwhelming. I don’t remember much from what I did when that happens (usually after a trigger), it’s just some random pictures that usually don’t make much sense. I’m not violent though, I’m just becoming some kind of mindless doll who agrees to everything. Not sure what happens if you add violence to that.. I don’t know any morals or consideration for anyone (including myself) in that state. It’s a pure survival mode, nothing else matters, even though I’m not in danger anymore.
She’s not really fighting the ptsd here I think. She’s fighting the urge to run away and let Amazi-Girl take control, which has been her general reaction to encounters with Sal.
Which is also not healthy, but healthy at the same time. From my limited understanding of DID, the alters really need to come to some kind of working arrangement. Fighting among them isn’t good. OTOH, being able to deal with a trigger like Sal without resorting to another alter should be a good step.
Frankly, I’m not sure she has multiple personalities. Ptsd alone could be responsible for that, including the “not remembering anything” part and dissociations.
That’s your perogative. It’s pretty clear by now that’s the intent. They talk to each other. Amber now doesn’t share memories.
I’m not sure how much clearer it could be without a formal diagnosis.
Yeah, the strip where she describes the car chase from her perspective, saying it wasn’t really her body but AG’s and that she was terrified but AG wouldn’t allow herself to stop, and Amber is clearly making distinctions between what she experienced and who was acting throughout… that one’s fairly explicit, especially taken with the implications of lost time and the strip where she takes the costume to ruin AG’s reputation and AG as costume responds.
Gob had not mailed the letter, but rather, as an act of defiance, dramatically threw the letter into the ocean.
I love that scene.
Sorry for the off-topic comment, but I could use some advice:
Last week, I started seeing a new psychiatric provider (DNP). During our session, she gave information that absolutely could be identifying about another patient of hers, especially since the patient and I share some overlap in identities & potentially communities. Basically, I don’t know him, but I could, and either way should not have been told this information.
I’ve been grappling with how I should address it since then. I’m not sure how much I even can do, since it wasn’t my privacy being violated. I’m not scheduled to see the clinician in person for about three months (and have a whole mess of other things to address with her about our first meeting then), and I feel like I should do something…but I’m not sure what. Any insight on people might have on rights around this situation or general ideas are appreciated.
Honestly I’d get a new person if I could. If she talks about someone else that easily, she could just as easily be sharing about you to others.
I don’t really give a shit if she talks about me, so while I may consider seeing someone else, that’s not really the issue for me.
She said other things and made assumptions I kind of want to address, because while they weren’t great, and may in fact be another reason to keep looking, it seems like she’s trying to ally and just isn’t great at it, so I want to see if I can support that– basically I’ll probably see her at least once more.
This.
I’ve not been in this situation, so this is only general advice.
1) Dump them. If they betray their ethical oath that much in the first session, plus it sounds like you had other issues with them, they’re not going to be a good therapist. And you have no guarantees they won’t discuss you elsewhere as well.
2) Report them to their licensing board. This is absolutely something they ought to know. Be as specific as possible.
3) These two things may not be possible for you for reasons I don’t know about. Do your best, do what you need, and be kind to yourself.
She’s not my therapist, for what it’s worth, but someone I may see once every three months to get my prescriptions refilled.
I think I’m going to call the practice tomorrow to at least try to inform someone there, if I can.
if you think it was a well-intentioned brain fart, point out the problem to her? hopefully they take emails?
if you feel like you don’t know this person well enough, well, the world won’t end if you just keep observing for a while. definitely write something to yourself so you don’t start wondering if you imagined it later on.
I don’t know any of the legal stuff around hippa(sp?) violations or reporting them.
Contact your state’s Board of Psychology and inform them of a breach of confidentiality. Find out who your psychiatrist’s boss is and report it to them as well when you request a new psychiatrist. Don’t let this go unaddressed. This is a major ethical violation as well as a breach of HIPAA. Best of luck to you.
+1000
If someone is willing to breach a federal law they beat into you as hard as possible during any medical training, during the first goddamn session, you can bet your hiney they don’t understand any more subtle professional ethics.
Like, I want to be clear here, OP: it does not matter whether this is malice or incompetence. This is the type of incompetence that can hurt people really bad really fast, and it needs to be on record in case there’s a pattern of it. It sounds like you really want to be nice and not make waves here, and I get that, but you should tell that impulse to sit down for a bit.
even if you still see the DNP or talk personally you should report her. i dont know if its illegal to talk about other patients without naming but it should never happen…
First step would be to address it with the professional concerned, perhaps saying – if you feel OK doing so – that you do not have confidence in her as a result, and would like a referral to someone else. Or if you don’t trust her to give a good referral, talk to whoever referred you to her.
You have been placed in a difficult position. This is likely to affect your future working relationship(s) with other professionals. She definitely needs to be told this is not OK, but I can’t tell from here if this justifies a professional conduct review. It probably does, though. Do you have a communication path to her supervisor? If you are willing to go that route, it would be preferable to tell her you are doing that before you do it, though it doesn’t have to be face-to-face. If you think it was simply thoughtlessness on her part, dealing with it in person with her alone, and not taking it further may be sufficient to ensure she never repeats this mistake. This is more likely if she is inexperienced.
It is unfortunate that she has violated this boundary, as it places you in the position of deciding how far you want to go in policing her behaviour. This is not what you went to her for, and it is a burden she has placed on you. This does not help the therapy. It is unprofessional toward the other patient and to you.
I cannot tell you what you should do – that depends on your ability to cope with this unwanted additional stress. It is important that she be informed that this is unacceptable behaviour, but it is not necessarily your responsibility to do that. If you have other ways of getting the message to her, through her colleagues, her supervisor, or the person who referred you to her, that is worth considering . . . But this is not likely to keep your identity as whistleblower confidential.
You did not ask to have this burden dumped on you, and you are not obligated to carry it. That said, if there is some way to point out her error to her in a way that you can handle the likely consequence (at a minimum that the therapeutic relationship will be uncomfortable) I would encourage you to do so.
I hope you can work this out.
From the Amerocan Psychology Association:
“For questions about the Ethics Code and non-complaint-related issues, we request that you phone the Ethics Office directly at (202) 336-5930 or use APA’s toll free number (800) 374-2721 and follow the oral directions to reach extension 5930.”
You can also contact your state psychology board. Numbers can be found here:
https://www.asppb.net/page/BdContactNewPG
American* Psychological Association
Sadly, DID and PTSD don’t work that way, honey.
Also – A) That flashback is making me really wonder whether we’ll get the robbery in Sal’s POV next storyline. If so *Squeeeeeeee*
B) According to the book PDFs (not sure about the physical copies) the knife went THROUGH Sal’s hand and here it looks like it was either through her knuckles or just below them. I’m not a doctor but I know there’s important shit in that area like bone, nerves, muscles, blood vessels, etc. So, would I be right in guessing she’s damn lucky she can still use that hand at all?
Middle of the hand is fine. You only really need index, another finger, and a thumb. It’s better if it is the first two but any will do. The rest make it easier to grip. Saying that there’s always a hook.
But the knuckles have bones and nerves that connect to those fingers you need. I’m guessing there was some sort of serious damage there since Sal told Danny that she still doesn’t have full use of her hand.
It could have hit in such a way only the ring and middle fingers were damaged, or just one of them? I’d have to ask my brother what’s needed to play a guitar specifically, since that was context, but I also don’t know how everything connects and we don’t know precisely where it hit. (And frankly I don’t want to, pretty please Willis.) I’m pretty sure we’ve seen enough to know it went parallel to the bones, so that might be a good sign?
Just from looking at where she’s pulling the knife out from and a few pictures of the inside of a hand, it looks like it would’ve hit bone, not parallel to them. Regardless, it seems like it’s going to be nasty, especially if it went all the way through her hand.
I don’t think Amber could have manage to put the knife though bone, though pushing in all the way in may have broken bones. So it’s likely in went in more or less vertically between the bones, which is likely to affect muscles and tendons used for moving fingers. I would expect something like that to heal in a way that gives back full usability of the hand.
That Sal wears a mitten might be because the scar really look bad or because she doesn’t want to see and be reminded of it. We never got any indication the hand hurts or that there are things she cannot do with it.
PDFs say it went through and we saw the angle she pulled the knife out. It doesn’t look vertical.
Also – we do know Sal doesn’t have full usability, even accounting for the fact she’s a southpaw. She told Danny her right hand doesn’t work very well when she was helping him with his ukulele.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/02-this-is-the-way-that-we-love/tuned/
Given she’s a lefty, she could have learned on a left-handed bass, which then her right hand would have been the fretboard hand. The fretboard hand is usually the one that does the more intricate work.
If she really wanted to play bass again, she could learn a right-handed bass. The left hand then would be the fretboard hand, and shed only need 2 fingers (or a pick) to pluck the strings.
That being said, she can use her right hand well enough for it to be safe for her to drive a motorcycle. And, for that matter, to waterski while only holding on with her right (http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/friends/). So she’s definitely got some grip (and is able to make a fist, judging by her punching tendencies). It’s probably the more delicate sorts of thing that her fingers aren’t good at.
Yeah, she definitely has some use of it back but not 100%.
Heavy knife like that would chop right through the small bones of the hand. But bones can heal; tendons not so much. She would have needed surgery.
Not to mention possible nerve damage.
Yeah, what little I’ve found on these specific injuries are ‘yeah, almost certainly at least one surgery and then physiotherapy.’
🙁
:C
ah real life, you expect it to fly down and away in a dramatic but then it floats like some gentle butterfly, mocking your moment of dramatic tension. CURSE YE REAL LIFE!
this is the part where the mask somehow attaches to a wandering spirit and gains a form, tells Amber that they no longer need her weak, human side and go off trying to bring justice in there own way. (which is probably not the best way)
Or it’s where someone else finds the mask and takes up the mantle of Amazi-Girl. But who? Dina, Dorothy, Danny, Carla, Lucy?
Joe.
Oh wow, imagine Amber’s freakout when she tries to get rid of AG, and next day meets her.
Fortunately, some elf kid will appear out of nowhere and destroy it in a duel.
I had a weird Filmation thought that AMBER was an anagram of five goddess names, and if this were a Filmation series we’d have a scene of them showing up to give her advice.
I’m so much a child of the thrice-damned 1970s.
Athena, Morpheus, Bastet, Eostre, and Ra?
Anubis, Ma’at, Bastet, Esna and/or the Ennead, and Ra
Geez there are practically no Kemetic god/desses that start with “E”
Amaterasu, Minerva, Bastet, Eos, Rhea?
It doesn’t help that Wikipedia’s entry is divided by geography and no alphabetic cross-referencing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Egyptian_deities
For everything else I did a google search of “goddess that starts with [x]”
I grew up with the Sierra Pharoah games, and they have implanted in me way too strong an Egyptology bent to be swayed by Greco-Roman/Norse-type mythos.
That’s an interesting list. Why go for the Titans, if I might ask?
Personally I prefer the British goddess behind the easter bunnies over the titan Eos, but that’s just me.
wait, goddess names. Okay, I can do this.
Anput, Ma’at, still, Bastet, Esna, and….hmmm….Rekhit I think, because it sounds/looks cool.
For the first one, gonna have to swap out the dudes for Minerva and Rhea.
Athena and Minerva are the same character. Most would choose Aphrodite.
Right. Then swap out Athena for Artemis. derp.
That’s what I get for never being interested at all in Roman mythology, and only passingly acquainted with the Greeks.
Hey let’s take a moment to back track to last four strips. I kind of realized earlier that I think a lot of us including me got carried away with the shipping and assumptions that Walky and Amber were for sure going to have a full on hook up now that they made out one time even though one of these two could change their minds tomorrow.
Like the topic everyone was arguing about was pretty much “Is it ok he’s pursuing a relationship with her even though he just got out of a different one and he kind of still thinks of her as another Dorothy plus there’s all the this baggage she has.” But none of us actually stopped to realize that one make out session does not equal immediat serouse relationship, hell they didn’t even have a first date yet to test out the waters and even if they did that doesn’t mean there an official item. We don’t even know the scale of how much they’re into each other, Do they want to be friend’s with benefits, do they just want to date a couple times to see where this goes,or is this hole thing going to be called the next time they see each other because of this? Who knows, for now we’ll just haft to wait and find out. This entire pairing dynamic is still new and they just hit their first rough patch, if they spent more time together and actually learn more about each other maybe it won’t take that long for Walky to see her more than a more Thicc look alike of Dorothy and Amber won’t be caught off gaurd by Bullshit like finding out her new cute crush is related to her arch frenemy.
As for us we should probably work on not jumping gun like that again. We were all acting no better than Joyce with her romantic headcannons.
Except Joyce is in-universe, we’re out of universe. What we say doesn’t actually have an impact on the characters. Sometimes people get excited about fiction, and sometimes that excitement expands from what’s present in the work itself, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
I guess it’s more about the idea “What would you do if you were in this situation and would whatever you’d end up doing be okay with you?” Is what makes conversation interesting.
Walky doesn’t see her as just “thicc Dorothy”. He only agreed with Sal’s comparison of their looks. He specifically talked about liking Amber herself.
There’s potential for them to hurt each other or end up enabling bad behaviors, but there’s a lot more potential for them to be really good for each other.
I’m shipping it and nothing will stand in my way
A bittersweet mix bag of potentially good and bad. But every actual relationship will have his fair share of ups and downs. I’d say go for it, honestly I want to see where this goes too.
A) We had about 4 days to think about an event that happened in the space of a few minutes, in comic.
B) This is the internet, shipping is what we do.
C) Some of us correctly identified right away that the biggest impact of Sal showing up isn’t about her and Walky, but the various flavors of trauma that Amber gets, from the immediate shock of just seeing Sal to digesting that she was making out with her twin brother.
Actually, I expected this to be a one time thing since Sal showed up. I expect amber to barely be able to face him now. I don’t think she’ll be as relaxed around him as before and she probably won’t make out with him again. (And walky will feel left left alone by “Dorothy” a second time within a few days, and I doubt Amber will tell him the reason she keeps distance).
She either has just hit rock bottom and will seek help or is on her way deeper down the spiral. Either way, walky should better keep distance, for his own sake. With ptsd, “getting help” means “slowly getting better over the next years”. She neither is a good rebound, too many issues to deal with, nor should she be used as one. She needs dependable, stable people, not someone who just doesn’t want to face his own pain.
honestly; I think that some form of the walky-amber dynamic is going to persist in-story, since a lot of time and scenes were used to build it up and narratively speaking there’s a lot more that can be done besides just punching Amber in the feels and producing really good art; although there’s also Dorothy and Sal who will naturally be effected by this plotline somehow; as well as individual development for Amber in particular (she’s coping with this Sal Attack radically differently from last instances) I still think Willis is going to have Amber and walky interact a bit more in general than they have previously just because even if they’re platonic AF there’s still narrative potential there
At some point we really should get a Dorothy reaction before this plays out, even if Walky/Amber doesn’t become a real thing.
yeah, like the best way to test the questions raised earlier about mourning periods in relationships and stuff is for Dorothy to hear Walky trying to ask Amber out in the half-bath. (well it’d be terrible but like… awesome terrible)
Yeah…If Amazi Girl comes out tonight- DO NOT piss her off.
Ooohhh shit this isn’t gonna end well
Amazi-Girl is immune to gravity……Also, Amber get help.
I honestly hope walky and sal saw this.
Door is closed
I don’t understand, does Amber associate the knife incident with Amazigirl, even though she wasn’t Amazigirl at the time?
I think it’s Amazi-girl trying to fight her way out. As if it’s the same as The Hulk fighting Bruce Banner for control of their body.
The other times when Sal has triggered a full blown panic attack, Amazi-Girl has taken control from Amber.
The trauma from the robbery (and her dad goading her into stabbing Sal) is probably what caused the dissociation that ended up creating Amazi-Girl in the first place
I don’t think it’s so much Amazi Girl taking control as Amber going to her AG persona to get away from stress she can’t handle.
That makes more sense than my theory.
in Rotunda’s link below, it looks like amber running away and shoving amazi-girl to the front, yeah.
although this time it looks kinda like a more automatic switch was almost triggered and amber stopped it.
With AG currently being denied control at all and only getting out when Amber’s asleep, I’m guessing it’s more automatic this time because Amber is on mental lockdown and AG is looking for cracks in the wall.
I think it’s more “I can handle this. I don’t have to turn to her.” Not so much AG trying to get out as Amber trying not to hide behind her.
whynotboth
She’s LITERALLY telling Amazi-Girl to go away here. That implies she was trying to take the wheel
Between Amazi-Girl hiding memories from Amber and Amber trying to make her look bad in retaliation, it’s explicitly been established that they are not on good terms right now.
I guess. They’re definitely not on good terms.
I’d be a little surprised if it was just Amazi-Girl hiding memories or if it was even as intentional as that implies. I’d assumed they weren’t sharing memories at all. If it’s one-sided, I’m not sure what that means.
Or it could be as simple as Amazi-Girl only being able to take over when Amber’s sleeping and Amber not remembering because she was asleep?
Not sure how DID works with sleep like this, but I’ve been guessing based off very basic knowledge of brains that AG coming out means they’re not getting the physical effects of sleeping. (That will probably be a problem eventually.) My guess is they aren’t sharing memories, it goes both ways, and AG can just tell when control is weaker and tries to seize control then without context. But I dunno how the memory separation works, can it be initiated by one alter trying to push the other out or something?
That’s my (very limited) understanding. If they’re not sharing memories that’s a really bad sign. One alter trying to get rid of another tends not to go over well
Well, Amber’s very definitely trying to get rid of Amazi-girl, so we’re deep in bad sign territory.
That’s when Amazi Girl was born. Regardless of when she showed up.
That last panel reminds me of a joke where people were able to angrily slam down their phones before all dramatically but now they can’t be dramatic and can only boop the Call End button on their smartphones.
as a flip-phone owner I can still dramatically snap it shut.
Also I don’t have to deal with emoticon nonsense like on d20monkey today.
or with the fact that emoticons are actually decepticons in disguise.
Because anything that ends in -icon is decepticon. true story.
which implicates a lot of words in our lexicon, as well as silicon.
Wait.
No. according to tfwiki Transformers don’t have silicon-based brains. it’s “Living Metal”
The theory stands.
……in before an annoyed Willis comes in to correct me.
interesting that amazi-girl’s mask just happened to be in her pocket. and it looks like she pulled it out without even consciously thinking about it. automatic trigger -> amazi-girl time, except amber interrupted it and shoved her back down?
that seems like… good in some ways, bad in others. good that amber isn’t running away (dissociatively, not literally) but bad that she’s still suppressing amazi-girl as if the problem will just, well, go away.
Yes. Compare http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/shockingreveal/
Notice how Sal isn’t tagged in this strip. That means it wasn’t Sal, Amber stabbed! This also explains why Sal doesn’t recognize Amber. It never happened to Sal but some other random girl that looks uncannily similar to Sal and also robbed a convenience store! This is a one hundred percent confimed fact that can’t be refuted with past evidence! #NotagNotSal
I noticed the lack of tag and had pretty much the same train of thought myself.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/01-the-only-dope-for-me-is-you/freezeup/ She’s been tagged in earlier red panels.
That’s because it was all a set up for THIS lack of tag, the dramatic reveal.
Turns out, 13-year-old Sal ALSO had an alter ego, who will soon be named and retroactively tagged.
Shhhh. Don’t use evidence to easily disprove this 100% correct and canon fact! That’s not Sal. The girl in the flashback never actually said her name was Sal Walkerton. Obviously someone else.
Also just want to say after looking back at that strip. That cop with the stache sucked at his job.
huh. if you go back a few pages from that, amazi-girl stops being tagged when the red panels start. it’s red-eyes-amber beating up blaine. but she doesn’t get her own tag.
Red eyes of rage/red panel Amber is still Amber, far as I can tell. AG seems to have started after that as ‘an outlet’ but with the code keeping her from actually letting loose (and was probably useful in self-defense classes) and to cope with the PTSD. It was the inciting incident, but AG didn’t really become distinct until afterwards, is my guess. (Of course, both Amber and AG have a shitload of anger and pain and a tendency to redirect that into violence, but they haven’t figured out yet that the hero/monster dichotomy is crap and that AG beating up random people because she thinks they committed petty crimes and deserve it is not okay either. But that one’s gonna take a while. Willis needs his periodic superheroics fix.)
But yeah, Amber beat Blaine, not AG. That’s actually why AG could tell Dorothy she wasn’t responsible for it. (Dorothy thinks she was lying, last I think they interacted? But the dissociation certainly did get worse after that weekend.)
consider: it was a joke
feels bad for laughing
Well damn. Amber v. Amazi-Girl?
Spiderman 2 reference earlier tonight.
Spiderman 1 Gobbo references tomorrow?
Maybe she should’ve tied it around a rock first?
The real killer was Dorothy!
In the ballroom, with the knife.
Now I’m going to go home and …
I suspect that at the end of this, Sal will take up the Amazi-Girl identity, and Billie will finally be right.
+1
Why can’t real life be more cinematic
What are some cinematic moments life’s ruined for you
One time in middle school, I tried to walk off sadly to display my dejection after having my heart broken only to be stopped by a hall monitor yelling at me for doing something I wasn’t doing.
Tried to walk off stoically in a downpour after lending someone my jacket and slid in a mud puddle, regained my balance but still looked lame as hell
One time, I slipped on some ice while I was walking to the school bus, cracked my head on the ground, and couldn’t move for a couple of minutes. Nobody came to see if I was okay, they just waited five seconds for me to get up, lost patience immediately, and left me there in the cold with a potential head injury.
Because real life doesn’t have jump cuts, zooms, orchestral sound tracks (most of the time), or time jumps.
It’s always just you.
Anyone who can’t create their own internal orchestral sound tracks really isn’t trying. Jump cuts and time jumps are a little harder.
The ability to hear the soundtrack is one of my favorite superpowers.
Cut scenes would be nice too.
Because cinema would have to up its game, and then we would be right back where we started from.
Ho man, I love this call-back scenery
Me too, even though I am stressed
Amber, don’t you dare jump over the bannister and try to catch that thing!
I think that the long-awaited critical breakdown has arrived. I just wonder how much splash damage there will be before Amber realises that this is beyond her ability to handle and she seeks help. Or, worse, before she’s institutionalised.
It’s starting to look like the only way Amber is going to get help is if it’s forced upon her.
Ooooooooooooooooh noooooooo. Oooooooh fuck. It’s coming. What ever it is it’s fucking coming.
I AM STRESSED. I DON’T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO ADD BUT THAT I THINK MY STRESS FROM THE LAST One is well warranted!
Huh, looks like AG wanted to take over and Amber’s not letting her. This could mean that Amber may got back on the roof in this hot rage and actually attack Sal which AG wouldn’t do.
I’m not sure why Sal’s not tagged. Could it be that this is more phantasy than flashback? No, it’s the same panel as here: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-4/01-the-only-dope-for-me-is-you/down/
Or did Willis just forget?
Most likely forgot.
She’s not going to go attack Sal in a rage.
Interesting that it hasn’t been updated with a Sal tag. I’d thought it was a mistake, but …
I don’t think AG should be above suspicion. She’s the one who’s stalked and attacked her before. All Amber’s done this semester is run from her (and once challenge her to Mario Kart). I know Sal and AG have more respect for each other now but if one of them were to attack Sal, I’d think it’d be AG.
Spend a few days binge watching a show about female presenting asexual space jewels and this stuff like this happens.
Did you get to the part where Sadie eats a bad corn dog goes on a vigilante spree, yet? I liked the gag with Ronaldo shouting about pencils in the distance.
So far I got to where they rescued Greg from the Space Zoo and found out that Blue and Yellow Diamond both missed the Pink Diamond that Rose shattered thousands of years ago but there is something about that bugged me, since according to Bismuth, Rose refused to use the gem smasher and her pink sword cannot shatter the gem itself, only the gem’s body.
I believe Pink Diamond was just bubbled and kept in a secret place, that or she’s hiding on Earth somewhere.
Not to give details away, but you might be onto something huge, if you’re suggesting what I think you are.
Cool, I have tried to avoid spoilers so I can watch it without outside bias.
As for Steven Universe, I was a bit wary about watching it, in part because I heard how toxic the fan base can be, but I felt like trying it out and to my surprise, I ended up liking it.
The Cat Fingers episode was disturbing to say the least and when I saw Garnet poofed and two gems fell down, my thoughts were “Was she a fusion?” but when Steven found Ruby but acted like she had no idea who he was, I thought maybe I was wrong but when they fused, talk about plot swerves.
The Garnet is a fusion reveal was one of my favorite moments of of the series.
The Opal reveal was pretty awesome, especially how they animated her movements in that “Giant Woman” episode.
I was almost as shocked as Pearl was when Smokey Quartz first appeared, and that later episode when Sardonyx did that Talk Show did a lot to ‘humanize’ her.
The thing that bothered me was how inconsistent the characters were drawn with Connie and Peridot seem to be suffering from it the most height wise.
You can thank the fact there are several different animation studios for that. They all have different character sheets – hence why Peridot is sometimes taller and sometimes barely taller than Amethyst.
yeah, there are some really fucked up stories of things fans did, but the show itself is *amazing*. 🙂
I believe I am almost caught up to where Lars is a Space Pirate and Stevonnie had to do that survival thing on that planet they crashed on.
I plan on watching the rest soon.
Also that Paddy Sapphire is adorable as heck.
EAT SHIT AND DIE STUPID FIDGET SCARF!
BEGONE, THOUGHTS
Now all she needs is laser eyes and the ability to rotate her head 180°.
She did not get the desired impact.
*Ba Dum Tsh*
It’s unlikely to happen but I can hope Amber and Walky repair their friendship at least (never mind a romantic relationship).
… This reminds me of the time when I was a kid I tried to angrily throw something away.
And forgot how inept I was physically.
And instead of throwing it forward, I threw it straight up.
Whereupon it then fell back down.
On my head.
And gave me a scalp cut.
Which then made me bleed like crazy because scalp cut.
And then I freaked out.
… annnnd tl;dr that was how my lack of throwing skills became legend in my school two days after moving to a new place.
Thankfully nobody new me yet and we were 2 weeks from summer break.
But I still occasionally hear other people reminisce about “that time a kid freaked out and threw something in the air and hit themself in the head with it and then had to go to the hospital.” And they don’t remember it was me, and I don’t tell them because yeah that was embarrassing enough he first time, thanks.
*offers hugs*
I don’t know if it’s the mood whiplash, but this may be the funniest last-panel gag yet.
Unrelated: I’ve been trying out the Transformers: Forged to Fight game, anyone got any “things I wish I knew when I started playing it” advice? Also, I just hit level 5, anyone knows a casual-friendly Alliance they recommend there?
As a reminder: “FUCK YOU, BLAINE!”. With that said, getting rid of her amazi girl persona would free amber to be fully herself, but without help she is going to be ticking bomb worse than Joyce. Her self hatred is going to doom her like some self fulfilled prophecy
Very likely, there is no “getting rid of the amazi girl persona” and trying like she’s doing now is not healthy.
As she said at one point, “they both have to share this 5’2″ meat puppet”, so they’re really going to have to find a way to get along.
That makes it sound as creepy as Split by Shyamalan. Horde Amber is a scary possibility.
Trying to ‘get rid’ of alters doesn’t work. When you take an aggressive distancing stance against them, you simply increase how separated you are from each other. She needs help, but the help needs to get her cooperating with AG, not lashing out at that part of herself.
Honestly, I’m not sure how she could become attracted to Walky without noticing SOME similarities between him and his twin. If Joyce is seeing that asshat everywhere she walks, you think Amber of all people would start seeing Sal in her interactions with Walky.
Possible explanation: Amber/AG see Sal as dangerous, whereas to Joyce every unknown dude was a potential Ryan.
Remember that Joyce was roofied at the time, so that may have hampered her brain’s ability to process Ryan as an individual assailant.
She definitely noticed something about him (set her brain on fire and so on), but there’s also the fact that Walky’s a guy, which may make it harder for her to work out the link (short hair vs. long hair, for instance). Plus, Walky is goofy, which Sal Very Definitely Is Not, even outside of Amber’s PTSD-inflicted inability to see anything good in her (broadly speaking). Possibly evil stress-inducing girl =/= brainless male cartoon addict who shares cookies. Does not compute. Especially since just seeing Sal tends to break Amber, while talking with Walky destressed her.
Good analysis, also should remember this later on.
Goes to show… Amazi-Girl had spent some time processing and coming to grips with Sal’s presence in her life, and developed some coping mechanisms…
…but Amber hasn’t.
Hadn’t Amber started interacting with Sal somewhat positively already? Like with MarioKart? This feels like a regression…
well, she could only handle that so long as sal was at the other end of the room. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/03-the-thing-i-was-before/ravine/
Still, I wouldn’t be surprised at some regression. Amber’s been in worse shape since the knifing.
This is also more intimate – not only confronting her, but finding you were kissing your Nemesis’s twin.
And recovery isn’t linear regardless, even when you have all the tools and support you need – Amber has neither.
I also think it’s a huge difference between initiating contact and being surprised by it, especially in an intimate moment and with huge revelations attached.
All my dramatic outbursts come out like this too.
did they have any interaction with sal in the robbery ? cause from what I seen they just hid in the back near the fridges and sal didn’t know they were even there …….
sal held ethan hostage
wait whoops i read “they” as “ethan and amber”, idk if you meant “amber and AG”
Amber stabbed Sal with the knife afterwards. I’d call that interaction.
Danny has his least favorite stairs.
Amber now has hers.