FYI, C.W. McCall was the same guy who did truck-drivin’, CB-rappin’ hit “Convoy” back in the early 1970s. And his back-up band from those days were the nucleus of the group we now know as “Mannheim Steamroller”.
There’s not much he can do about it. Abusers get away with what they do because they don’t let people outside their victims know what they’re really like. Lashing back at Mike would break his cover, he’s more likely to take out his frustration on Amber or her mom later.
This. Also, I have a feeling that if he hit Mike, Mike would retaliate to the point where Blaine would be in prison in the present day. I mean, Young!Mike is *13* and he already knows how to comb through business receipts for irregularities. I can’t see him getting hit by Blaine and then just letting that slide for five years.
And the problem is, I’m almost POSITIVE Mike doesn’t know this is going to get back to Amber in a painful way. I genuinely believe he’s trying to help and do right by her because he doesn’t like how her dad treats her, from what he’s seen. He doesn’t know.
I don’t think Mike really cares that much about Amber. He’s not interested in her nerd stuff, he originally turned down the party invite — and when he did show up, he brought a pretty cursory present, the Amazon gift card.
What Mike does seem to care about, is manipulating Blaine. He met Blaine and immediately decided that this was a person in a position of power, that he wanted to stick it to. It has less to do with helping Amber, and more to do with Mike practicing his budding skills as a master manipulator capable of screwing someone over.
That’s possible. OTOH, the two things we’ve seen him try to do so far were both apparently for Amber’s benefit – confronting the teacher and blackmailing Blaine here.
He seems to be trying to help Amber, even if he wasn’t aware of how little he’d like the actual party.
Willis’ twitter has indicated that next strip is going to be Sal heavy, so I’d not be surprised if the extended flashback is either Marcie losing her voice OR we finally get the robbery from her point of view.
Btw, Willis, I’ve been having issues with the comments rss feed again the last couple of days. Or at least the version of it my android app uses. If I check it from Firefox in Windows, it still works.
I am told by smarter people that the “description” tag stuff is doing weird things, which means some readers read it wrong, but I’m not sure what steps I would need to take to fix it, if any exist.
Stacey and Blaine are already separated. Ethan only said the divorce finalized after the robbery, around the time Blaine insisted on self defence over therapy, so they’ve probably already begun proceedings.
Yep i forgot those details. Its hard for me to keep track of these things sometimes. Where others have guessed this is heading makes a lot more sense and is somehow more depressing.
The entirety of Mike in these flashbacks is him observing and making connections. He’s clearly going to make the connection the second he finds out about it. And presumably that’s how we get the Mike of current-time.
Ooh! A Leverage reference!
Ok. If you were going to make a Leverage team (Hitter, Grifter, Hacker, Thief, Brains) using Dumbing of Age characters, who would you choose?
For Grifter, tho’, I’m going to go with Billie–she actually IS pretty charming and good at lying when she wants to be. And in an improv fashion, at that.
For Mastermind (I REFUSE to use “Brains”–season one opening forever!), I’m going to take Joyce over Sarah. I agree the latter is a better match to Nate’s personality, but Joyce is actually the better instigator, IMNSHO. Sarah lacks the determination to see a scheme through–Joyce, OTOH, will decide on the right course of action, and then become an unstoppable juggernaut, and any and all people around her are acceptable tools to be used to achieve her goals.
(I should note that part of the reason for this is that she’s essentially blind to what she’s doing–she feels that she wouldn’t be successful unless it was all part of God’s Plan, after all. Since she views herself as nothing more than a tool of a Higher Power, it’s hardly surprising that she views others that way, too.)
I agree with all your choices! Though, I’d probably trade out Ruth for Sarah, and Amazi-Girl for Sal as the hitter, making for a REALLY complicated relationship with Amber as hacker. Also, now, because of your comment, from now on, if Sal is ever annoyed with Amber, I’m gonna hear her voice in my head (Meghan Black as Rogue from X-Men Evolution, btw) going “Dammit, Hardison!!”
Ironic I brought up the store incident yesterday and I was wondering what Amber and Mike’s interaction was like after it though I made a mistake and said Ethan instead of Mike.
I am going to say that I really do not like this arc. Mike is an abusive and gross sociopathic jerk. Not out of ineptitude or damage but just because he likes hurting people. Giving him a backstory of him acting heroic just rings false to me. If I could see him acting this way to another sociopath at all it wouldn’t be for good reasons, just for “staking-his-territory” reasons.
And I’m on here routinely defending like, Malaya, Raidah, Joe. But Mike is just a mean-spirited asshole and I don’t like a contrived flashback narrative to try to make me like him. Like at best he’s better than Blaine, which is such a ridiculously low bar that it’s not worth paying any attention to.
I dont think this arc is for you to like him.. i think its for us to understand him, you can understand someone and still not like them.
More importantly i think this arc is going to become more relevant as we see where the ethan/mike story line goes. And also how it may tie in to other characters on the whole. Like how our actions can sometimes lead to inadvertently hurt people even if you were only trying to help.
Most people aren’t born assholes, dude. I’m glad that in the more realistic Dumbing of Age universe Mike actually has some backstory to his being an asshole.
Even people without empathy are capable of decency. In fact it’s apparently a good trait for surgeons because you don’t want to be too afraid of screwing up. And Mike’s clearly perceptive of people’s emotions, which doesn’t tend to go with born lack of empathy. I don’t want Mike to have the Sad Backstory That Immediately Made Him A Jerk either, but I think what’s being set up is still potentially gradual – he can go from ‘blunt perceptive kid who tries to help new friends’ to ‘blunt perceptive kid’ and from there to total asshat. At a guess the aftermath of the holdup may have left Mike more isolated from Amber and Ethan, distanced from other friends because Amber’s reputation is about to take another hit, possibly feeling guilty about it, and going online and being ripe for recruitment by the kind of internet scumbags present Mike acts like. A lot of that behavior is learned, not innate, and a lot of our current crop of cesspit dwellers were attracted to it because it made them feel less vulnerable.
(Also, sociopath’s been removed from the DSM. There exist abusive creep stains in this world, but many of them are non-pathological and those that are tend to be a bad combination of nature and nurture. Throwing the term around’s a sticking point for me.)
Thank you. Sociopath (and psychopath for that matter) is not generally considered a thing. I believe the current term is Anti-Social Personality Disorder. And as Regalli said, lack of empathy does not equal lack of morals, lack of decency or lack of compassion.
Also consider that there’s multiple types of empathy. Emotional empathy is the ability to feel the emotions others feel – the ability to feel bad for others who feel bad. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what’s motivating or driving another’s behavior or to read social cues. And compassionate empathy is doing things to make stuff better for others.
Surgeons (those without ASPD) train to suppress their emotional empathy to let them focus on the surgery. Folks with ASPD also tend to struggle with emotional empathy (but are often gifted at cognitive empathy). Autistics like myself generally suck at cognitive empathy (not always but talking in generalities here) but we tend to be very strong in emotional and compassionate empathy. I could go on.
Unfortunately “lacks empathy” has become shorthand to demonize those with a variety of mental health and developmental disorders (including ASPD and autism) and the well is so poisoned at this point that it’s hard to have a conversation about it.
I’d argue Kid!Mike has good cognitive and compassionate empathy and probably decent emotional empathy – and as he’s gotten older, he’s suppressed his emotional and compassionate empathy, possibly because as a 13YO, his fumbling 13YO’s attempts to make things better wound up blowing up in his face and he’s decided not to even try anymore. Given that the teacher situation ended with him getting beat up and tossed out of the classroom, showing up to Amber’s b-day party has led to him being ignored while Amber and Ethan, and somehow I feel like Blaine is going to figure out a way to punish Mike for this, I think we’re starting to see what led up to Mike’s fuck-it moment.
Doesn’t excuse his current behavior, but perhaps helps to explain it a bit. Certainly I wasn’t my best self at 17 (when I got to uni), in large part because my attempts to do social up to that point typically blew up in my face, so I was an angry, bitter person and couldn’t get that me being an angry, bitter person had a lot to do with new people not liking me much. It wasn’t until I moved to a new place and decided to get my brave on and try socializing again as part of a lifestyle overhaul (Everyone in my extended family has lifestyle-related chronic health conditions by 30. I didn’t want that) when I realized not everyone is a bullying asshole and de-cactusified my personality.
(seriously most of my first year at uni was weirding out my new friends by gushing over how nice they all were when they were just treating me with basic human decency. Thankfully my friends were Good People and taught me how to establish and enforce boundaries rather than taking advantage of how starved for positive interactions I was. If most people have high school experiences like my uni experience, I suddenly get high school reunions even if I’d rather fracture-dislocate my ankle again than go to mine). Somehow I am guessing Mike wound up in a similar place to where I wound up, except that he’s more socially savvy and therefore better able to asshole.
As much as I loathe Mike, it’s all going to depend on how he gets from point A to point B. So far, all we’re seeing is that he USED to be alright, and became shittier by the time he got to college. Baby Mike might be sympathetic, but that doesn’t mean we’re meant to extend that to adult Mike
Agreed. And it’s possible to take past trauma and not become a scumbag who delights in the misery of others. That’s all on Mike. Thinking on it, it seems really intentional that all the scenes we have so far of Mike trying to help and failing have been on AMBER’S behalf – she went through all of this as well, and more that we didn’t see and as the direct target, and has never made someone cry for the sake of having it on video. She has her issues, but she clearly tries to be a Good Person in spite of and with them. (Or at least, did before the Ryan thing confirmed to her she was A Monster, and even now is unable to perform that role entirely.)
Though I wonder if the angle Willis is aiming for is less “scumbag who delights in misery of others” (to be fair to Mike, he doesn’t seem to enjoy being a dick to people) and more, “angry bitter asshole who feels the world in general can fuck off.”
Which if the latter, a lot of Mike’s behavior makes sense, if you view it through the lens of trying to push others away from him and get isolated. Personality-wise, he’s a more socially savvy and pissed-off Sarah. I don’t think he’s genuinely sadistic, if only because truely sadistic social manipulaters tend to be more polished in their interactions – they don’t want people to realize they’re an asshole so they can keep them hooked and continue to torment them. Mike has the skill to manipulate people without them knowing, but he doesn’t even try to. Why? The only possible answer is that he wants people to realize he’s an asshole and to reject him.
Not to say that it excuses his behavior at all – it doesn’t in the least. More that a lot of Mike’s past behavior (and a lot of Amber and Ethan’s tolerance for Mike’s dumpster fire of a personality) makes more sense when viewed through the lens of intentional self-sabotage (and Amber and Ethan remembering when Mike wasn’t a walking dumpster fire), given Mike’s known skill set and what we’re seeing so far.
Having at one point been the angry bitter asshole who feels the world in general can fuck off, I may be projecting here. Plus I’m autistic and so the idea of being socially savvy enough to pick up on the dynamic at Amber’s place with just a few interactions with Blaine is completely alien to me – buuut I do know that if you hit your fuck-it-I-give-up-the-world-can-burn-for-all-I-care point, your behavior can come off sadistic or cruel, when you’re really just trying to isolate yourself.
None of which is to say that Mike is somehow not an asshole (he totally is. What decides that is your actions, not your motivations behind those actions). But more that maybe he’s not a totally irredeemable asshole. He could get better. I did.
Amber is definitely a bad example of how the whole “cycle of abuse” mentality is bullshit because like she spends her free time finding justifications to violently attack people. Which is another reason I am completely not here in any way for Mike having some tragic backstory.
Wait, wouldn’t that be a good example? Like violence breeds violence, and people will lash out if they’re treated badly, but not always at the people who deserve it?
No, because the “cycle of abuse” myth is that survivors of abuse are doomed to become abusers themselves, and as Emily said, it’s complete bullshit. It’s not true, and it ends up making abuse survivors feel even more afraid to show negative emotions or make mistakes.
I don’t feel that Amber falls into that trope because her vigilantism is a completely different animal from her dad’s emotional and physical abuse, but it still means she’s a LOT more violent than other characters, so she also isn’t a clear, unambiguous example of the trope being bullshit.
She’s more of an example of how harmful that trope is for abuse survivors because it leads people to look at ANY anger or bad behavior from them as a sign that they’re becoming their own abuser and/or are irreparably damaged
This arc isn’t really redeeming mike for me. He meddles and manipulates. He also clearly thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. He doesn’t seem that engaged in actually being friends with Ethan and Amber.
I get the impression that he enjoys getting one over an adult more than trying to fully understand a situation and help people.
This definitely feels like Willis trying to salvage the completely flat and uninteresting non-character that is Mike into someone with a semblance of depth but honestly it’s too little too late I’ve had like a decade to cement my complete disdain and disinterest in anything to do with Mike. Mike is just a plot device that gets trotted out when either a cheap punchline is needed or a stalled character needs to be shoved to get the plot moving again.
You mean about how much I hate every one of his appearances because he’s a boring edgelord asshole with no depth who never faces consequences ever? Yeah, he annoys me it doesn’t mean I find him interesting or worthwhile as a character.
Mike, again your heart is in the right place but you’re causing more problems than you’re solving. Granted I’m explaining this to past Mike so that ship sailed 6(?) years ago. Maybe Willis or someone else can confirm the exact number of years ago these flashbacks take place.
Also I know it won’t end well but I’m interested to see more of young Sal and what she was like. She’s one of my favorites so more of her backstory is always welcome.
The worst part to me is how he’s trying to pass ‘potato’ off as a term of endearment, and how Stacey and Amber are so deep in this shit Stacey doesn’t comment.
(I mean, I can see it as one from someone quirky and Not Blaine, emphasizing how valuable and delicious potatoes are rather than it being appearance-based, but we know it’s not because he already brought it up as a dig at her appearance before and also it’s Blaine.)
Because he’s supposed to be makin their marriage work?
Assuming he’s sleeping with Yuri right now, and has been prior to the separation, that would be the opposite of making it work.
But that’s assuming the bill is a reference to Yuri and not some other shady stuff.
I doubt it, but she could have worked there and the receipt showed he was tipping too much.
Or he could have taken her there to eat all he time and the receipt showed him paying for two meals, possibly with suggestive romantic names.
I have no idea what the receipt showed, though I assume that’s the what made Jamie mention Yuri.
We also have a strip where Richard said something about how bad Blaine was including ‘literal mob’ as one of the phrases used. So there’s probably some tie there, but not a very direct or provable one.
Yup, Blaine is a mob stooge, so probably his business is owned by the mob and he’s paid generously to look the other way (and he seems to frequent other mob establishments, based on that receipt).
I’m guessing that he either had to break from them (or claim to) during the divorce proceedings or aftermath of the holdup (since Richard knows and Blaine is conspicuously not in jail,) or that his supplemental income would be too closely scrutinized for him to use it for child support or college. At the very least he’s claiming that to Yuri. A Faz in college is a Faz with options, who probably knows things and could talk, and who certainly isn’t totally under Blaine’s thumb.
Additionally to cbwroses’s input, the divorce hasn’t been finalised, and if Blaine were to be found cheating on top of it all, that might get Stacey something extra in the divorce settlement.
No, seriously. Mike had nothing to do with it. He didn’t even know Sal. Sal just had all she could take and she just finally snapped due to a random comment from some kid with the unlikely name of Brent Fruth or something like that.
Ya know, life can really sour a person, but sometimes I wonder if being around Amber and Ethan more than anything else made Mike the kind of guy he is today, (In this universe).
Not so much blaming them, just an observation based on these flashbacks, and the fact it seemed he used to be more friendly when he was younger… then life with those two happened.
Yeah, lets blame abusive asshole on his favorite targets. That’s cool.
I think what this flashback is likely showing is that the early, already perceptive and manipulative, Mike’s attempts to help Amber in particular either failed or backfired horribly. With the teacher, where he didn’t help, got slapped and Amber had already run off. Here with Blaine, he’s just done the ‘good deed’ of not quite blackmailing Blaine into driving them on the field trip, which leads directly to all the trauma of the robbery.
Woah.. I think you misunderstood my meaning of my post. As I mentioned “life can really sour a person”, as in how Mike looked like he was a lot more friendly while he was younger but as one dude once said, “life finds a way” (different context I know, but interesting results in the end)
My thoughts were, if Mike didn’t know Amber and Ethan, would he have become such a jerk later in life? Not their faults it happened, just life and it’s direction for those two kind of happened, not just now, but other events we have seen and probably not seen.
It was an interesting thought of an Ethan/Amber-less Mike that was not meant to offend anyone.
I’m hoping that this act of kindness Mike has extorted Blaine into doesn’t lead to the convenience store incident. Perhaps knowing he inadvertently caused that might be what changes him.
I mean, I suppose it could be a completely different field trip the same year to which Blaine drives them and on which absolutely nothing bad happens, but that seems like a huge fake out.
He thinks his wife and daughter are stupid.
Also, he’s an abuser so probably doesn’t fear or even consider that one or both of them would use the recipes against him.
‘Work-related expenses,’ perhaps. Blaine is about that smug and audacious. (Given the Patreon strip proves I was wrong and he did send his daughter to watch his mistress’s kid, who may be his own kid, possibly while he was on a date with said mistress? Super audacious.)
Seriously, “I tried to be nice but it didn’t really help so I decided to be irredeemably evil instead” is not just wildly unsympathetic it’s also fucking idiotic.
That’s where I think this goes. Mike tries to be a force for good against the adult world – Amber’s grade as an example. Helping Amber here by getting her a ride to the field trip. But it all backfires and makes it worse.
So that is how the arrangement works. I’m sure that Blaine will remember this; the question is whether he’ll remember his anger or his fear.
I’m honestly thinking that, once, there was sweet music between Blaine and Stacey before time, employment choices and a culturally-reinforced attitude towards women got in the way.
It’s still only in implications and possibility, but: Yuri is probably much younger than Blaine. Amber thinks Faz was born when Yuri was a teenager. Amber also thinks it’s a possibility Blaine is Faz’s father. If this is true, Blaine was with Yuri in secret for a solid decade, or she took him back after a break but still during his marriage, either of which seems worrisome.
It might not be true, and we may see Faz’s biological father at some point. But right now the fact that this sequence of thoughts was even suggested reflects reeeeally badly on Blaine. (Especially because Willis originally said Amber was his only biological child but has since apparently said he forgot that he said it once.)
Yeah, it’s pretty clear now that Faz is Blaine’s kid. Not explicitly shown, but clear enough.
Yuri may be older than she looks, but that still puts the relationship back to when Amber was a toddler. Any “sweet music” was a long time ago and quite possible a lie even then.
Not necessarily forgot. Word of God is not immutable or unchanging in Dumbing of Age, so Willis will sometimes change his mind if he thinks it makes a better story.
Ah, I guess Mike is only human after all, since sometime after this he turned his Sadistic Good attentions away from Blaine and let him get away with stuff. It can happen! At least off panel.
I joke, but I think I understand how hard it must be to turn Shortpacked! Mike into a human character with limitations and dimensions who still chooses to act like Mike, and as a writer it’s fascinating to watch this.
I asked for this Mike a long time ago – one who uses his assholery on people who deserves it. One who punches upwards rather than downwards. It would be an interesting parallel to Amazi-girl and lead to interesting debates.
It’s an interesting extra wrinkle that the Mike I’m asking for is a teenager, and that he somewhere down the line stopped being that Mike.
I know! It’s very interesting because at the moment it’s a reverse redemption story. Someone who hit a point and a moment that made them drop being a good guy and fully embrace being a villain.
And that’s so real and so sad in an era where so many dudes are getting sucked into perpetuating harassment campaigns and supporting literal nazis out of insecurity and misplaced angst.
Yeah, that I do like about this. It’s a thing that’s hard to do.
To humanize and explain a villain, make the reader understand and feel for them, while still leaving them as the bad guy.
Better in this case than the more common redemption of the villain, because I’m not sure what would be left of Mike once he wasn’t an edgelord.
So I went back and reviewed the flashback of Sal’s robbery. (SO MANY red panels.) And in the aftermath, Blaine says of Ethan that he’s the only kid who halfway tolerates Amber.
…. and that means he’s not counting Mike.
If speculation is accurate and this sequence is a prequel to that (and it definitely feels that way)… what do we make of Mike being not classified as Amber’s friend by the time it all goes down?
Is it that Blaine figured, hey, he’d rather go through receipts than spend time with her so she doesn’t count?
Is it Blaine being somehow even shittier than we’d realized and drowning Amber in messaging that Mike doesn’t like her as a way to drive them apart and get Mike out of her life?
Is there a major Amber/Mike feud and unfriending coming up between now and then? (Then and then?)
BBCC noted above that next storyline is pretty Sal-centric, and red is associated with traumatic flashbacks, so maybe its about Marcie losing her voice? Or maybe its just cause her motorcycle is red.
I think that Blaine, like many readers, is having difficulty analysing Mike’s motivations. As far as Blaine can tell, Mike doesn’t really seem to like Amber as much as have an agenda concerning her that involves making Blaine play nice with her.
I think that it’s probably no more than this: that the only other kid that went to his daughter’s party expressed openly that he wasn’t interested in hanging out with her, and that it would be painful to do so. Also, IF the field trip is the same instance in which Sal’s robbery takes place, then clearly Mike chose not to ride with them.
It’s not uncommon at all for kids that age to be forced to go to a party by their parents when they don’t like the kid in question. On the surface, I’m sure that’s exactly what this looks like to Blaine.
Well, with all due respect to Mike (the little bastard), Blaine’s encounter with him shows him actively avoiding spending time with Amber and Ethan during her birthday party. So, classifying him as someone who doesn’t tolerate Amber is reasonable.
Depends on the reason for the meal. If it’s a work trip, it can be expensed, or if you’re for example treating a client you can expense it.
What you can’t expense is routine living expenses. So you eat out because you feel like eating out – that can’t be expensed. Treating the teenage mom of your bastard lovechild would be right out.
OK. I’ve said bits and pieces of this elsewhere in other comments but here it is: I think I was wrong about Mike.
Not entirely. I still think he’s an asshole. But I think I was wrong about why he’s an asshole.
He’s got a lot to make amends for before he’d ever be a character I’d want to know on an interpersonal level, buuuut on the other hand, I had been attributing his cruel behavior to a personal sense of sadism, like those internet trolls who try to bully women to suicide or SWAT people for the lulz.
I don’t think that anymore. Here’s the thing: Him being sadistic doesn’t make sense, because we know the guy is a genius social manipulator. His cognitive empathy is through the roof and he knows what to say and do to get those around him to dance to his tune. If he was sadistic, it doesn’t make sense for him to be this transparent, because it would (and does) drive people away.
But what if driving people away is actually what he wants? Suddenly it makes sense.
Based on what we’ve seen here, and looking back on my past, I see a bit of me-at-17 in him.
Me at 17 was an angry, bitter jackass. I was an asshole. A total jerk. Not a socially savvy one (autistic), but one who’s literal first words to a new person on first meeting was an insult or rude comment on purpose. People would go out of their way to avoid me, and I was often written off as just an asshole. And that was intentional on my part. Because I was afraid.
See, prior to 17, for literally all of my schooling since halfway through 2nd grade, I’d been bullied by far more socially savvy people than me. Literally every time someone new had been nice to me since I was 6, it had been a cruel prank. I’d lost my faith in other people, and didn’t want to interact with anyone. Being lonely was preferable to being with people, because my books never tried to gain my trust, only to exploit that trust for cruel pranks. People did. Always.
When I got to university, I wanted a lifestyle change to avoid chronic health conditions that run in the extended family. I don’t know why. I was miserable, I hated myself, I hated the world, I hated people, I hated life, I pretty much hated everything. So why I made the choice to try to be healthy, I don’t know. I didn’t really understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. At the time, I justified it to myself by telling myself I was spiting Fate itself (well, the genetics that put me at risk for literally every single common lifestyle-related health ailment), and to be fair, spite was basically the only emotion I had access to and it drove most of my actions. Good grades through high school? Spiting the 3rd grade teacher who told me I’d never amount to anything. Going to university away from home? Spiting my parents who were convinced I couldn’t manage on my won. Joining an actual fitness club instead of going to the gym? Spiting the folks in school who said nobody ever wanted me anywhere and I’d die alone. I’ll show them! I’ll join a club, get healthy and make friends! Fuck them! (it seems funny now, but it’s really disturbing to think back on how much of my decisions and actions at the time were driven by a desire to give the one-fingered salute to everyone in the world and certain people in particular). At the time, I was planning to die by 25 if shit didn’t change, and that fatalism brought with it a release from the anxiety that had kept me froze most of school. I guess I figured I’d give it one last go, and joined a martial arts club (in addition to giving my diet a total overhaul).
And there I met my people. My chosen family. People who taught me that I deserve respect, and how to command it. People who taught me – and encouraged me – to stand up for myself. People who didn’t assume a faux pas was me intentionally being obtuse, and took the time to explain the social rule I’d just violated. People who treated me kindly, with decency and respect. People who, by knowing them, made life worth living. I hadn’t realized how desperately lonely I was before I had my first real friends since preschool. And for the first time in my life that I can remember, I was actually happy.
I had other benefits (fitness, weight loss, making it to 30 as the only cousin 30 or older who doesn’t have T2 diabetes, ideal blood pressure, etc), but the single best thing that came out of my decision to try to come out of my shell a little bit was finding my people. That saved my life.
And I see Mike where I was before I found my people. Lost, alone, and hopeless. And blaming everyone else for his situation. And while others started him on the path to where he is now, his decision to stay there is on him, and ultimately he needs to be the one to make the decision to try to leave.
Mike needs to be given hope in humanity back. I’m not sure how that’s going to happen, but I think that’s what he needs to start his redemption arc (assuming he wants to be redeemed, anyway).
True, but unlike genuine sadistic assholes I have met, Mike doesn’t go out of his way to endear himself to strangers, nor does he try the abuser’s playbook of honeymoon period. If his goal is to torment people for its own sake he is nowhere near as good at it as he has the capability to be.
Amber is a mentally ill and anxious child, yeah? I think the theme here is the parent who’s ableist and can’t be arsed to help their child through these things and instead just tells them to get the fuck over it and stop being garbage, which doesn’t help at all
Just for the record, I know Blaine is abusive and so it’s not benign, but from anyone else it wouldn’t occur to me “potato” is anything wrong. It sounds like a variant of a cute name like “spud” or “tater tot”. Not obviously worse than things like “monkey” that kind parents do use, and way better than “little shit”, which is far from unheard of.
It’s contextual. If Stacy had referred to Amber that way, it would’ve come across as clearly being an affectionate nickname, like “pumpkin” would.
Coming from Blaine though, “potato” is definitely meant to sound affectionate, but it’s unlikely there’s any actual affection there. He’s just playing the part of a dad who isn’t just dysentery in human form, because there are witnesses around.
It *might* not be intended as a sneaky jab at Amber’s appearance, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. He’d probably enjoy how people who don’t know how he treats Amber in private would interpret it completely the opposite of how he meant it
I agree with 3oranges; to an outsider this would seem like an innocent if unusual pet name. WE are privy to the knowledge that Blaine is a waste of oxygen, but Stacy’s in too deep and though we haven’t seen Amber react to it yet it’s safe to say that she can guess what he means.
Still, in my experience this can work the other way too. I once had a classmate give me a funny look when I told her that my dad used to call me and my brothers “[his] little monsters”, and that nickname really WAS born of innocent affection. So maybe an outsider could guess, but I’m not sure.
I haven’t read all the comments, but I feel rather alone in liking Mike. He confronts people with their BS. Puts a light on the lies and hypocrisy and calls them on it. He is being a friend to Amber by trying to give her something she wants – her dad to be kind to her. It doesn’t work out, but that’s what I see him trying to do. He called Walky and Billie on wanting the ‘old Joyce’ they’d been dissing back. He got Amber out from behind the tree. He’s helping. Not gently or kindly, but for those-labeled-friend, he seems to be moving them toward a more honest place.
I wonder if it’s a societal thing. I’m thinking of like the House, MD thing where we as a culture consistently model emotionally abusive “smart” guy as nonetheless a positive role model because it’s edgy, manly, and smart.
Even though the reality of these assholes is harassment campaigns and making the environments they are in toxic as fuck, bleeding good workers that could do a much better job without the emotional cost.
Also the cultural belief that “tough love” is a form of love instead of a form of abuse.
When the reality is, I’ve never once seen a form of “tough love” that wasn’t either abusive or highly toxic and damaging to a person. Because a true friend, guardian, or lover knows that harming someone to “help” them is emotionally manipulative and unnecessarily cruel.
YES. Same here. It makes him harder to enjoy as a character knowing how people will not only rationalize his every abusive action, but even give him credit for his targets’ character development later on
To put it another way, I think he sees himself as someone who “confronts people with their BS”, but somewhere down the line he forgot how to tell the difference between “very cleverly helping people” and “very helpfully bullying people”.
…is…the Korean restaurant where he met the now-wife otherwise known as a potential child herself (given what Amber said about their age differences) because that’s even more sinister…
I don’t imagine that he would be keeping BBQ receipts for more than a year. Supposedly you should keep receipts for 7 years, but they wouldn’t be atop the pile. So, assuming the receipt was from THIS (flashback) year, and assuming that this IS where he met Yuri, and assuming that Sarah’s estimate of Yuri’s age at 25 was accurate, that would make her about 19 years old. So, technically an adult.
I’m really going to stick with the assumption Yuri is at least a few years older than that, because Faz is 15 and there’s only so much I’m willing to contemplate. Give her 5 years and I can be properly pissed at Blaine without actually being sick.
Look, people, yes it’s likely that it’s a sign that Blaine’s cheating with a Korean woman aka Faz’s mother, but come on, Korean BBQ is fucking off the chart delicious. In the real world, this could just be a sign that Blaine just loves meat, meat and more meat, freshly grilled and with tasty stuff to dip it into!
Okay, I might have an idea of the shape of this. Mike has had a knack for figuring out people at a younger age and seemed to have some good intentions as well as some red flags on who he could become.
So he initially tried to use this for good, helping someone who was being harmed from multiple sources, believing he was smart enough to meddle in a positive way and would be regarded as the hero.
But some of his meddling made things so much worse, because a 13 year old has no real concept of the dynamics of abuse or the raw amount of power an adult can wield to make being found out meaningless or how confronting power can sometimes put victims in more danger.
And this is speculation, but this feels like where he slipped from at least good intentions into the edgelord kid in a bad place we see today. And it’s… heavy if I’m right.
Basically my theory seems to be he internalizes not being able to help Amber a second time and how things got worse after his intervention and being an empathetic kid, it weighed on him a lot and so in a pique of frustration vowed to never care or involve himself positively again.
But it twisted inside him. Instead of simply trying to project apathy like say a Carla, he began to resent in a way the friends who remind him of the empathetic kid he was and how powerless he felt and so began to torment and abuse them, manipulating their emotions to hurt them.
Which is unbelievably awful and his actions in the comic are bad, like really bad and unfortunately typical for a certain phase of edgelordery guys can get sucked into.
But I feel like there’s a sadness to it as well. He also abuses them because he doesn’t want to lose them. He always doubles down and tears down their self-esteem right when it feels like they’re finally ready to cut him loose. But in doing so, he becomes the monsters he initially wanted to save them from. Someone who abuses to maintain control over the life of another.
Can he be saved or redeemed? I think so, but it’s not going to be easy and he will have to accept a huge amount of humility and the vulnerability of the empathy he is trying to drown and Amber and Ethan will probably need to be away from him for a bit.
And he’ll have to extra vigilant to make sure those horrible actions of his never happen again. And it seems for Mike in the present day, he doesn’t have the impetus to change and so sticks to the easiness of his casual emotional abuse.
Someone said some time ago that Mike was going into teaching – what would be your prediction for currentMike’s handling of that? And does his comment on the teacher-student power dynamics when they were leaving the last Math class influence your opinion?
If Mike continues with the same attitude, that… should… be… funnnn? No, fun isn’t the world I’m looking for. Ah, “unmitigated disaster”, that’s the one.
Yeah, he’d have to radically change his outlook and level of vulnerability to do that job positively. People seeking social work have a lot of vulnerability inherent to the situation, so yeah, his current outlook would be retraumatizing for them when they are at their lowest and discourage them from looking for further help.
Blackmail is only temporary if you do it like Mike is doing here, getting rid of the blackmail material after one demand. Otherwise, blackmail is the gift that keeps on giving.
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Oh well that sure leads into nothing bad at all
Nope. Not at all. Smooth sailing.
A real pleasant day of father daughter bonding
And twinkies. You have to have twinkies.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-4/01-the-only-dope-for-me-is-you/twinkies/
Beat me to it.
“be nice or I’LL TELL HER YOU ATE AT HONEY PIG“
At least it isn’t “LONG PIG”.
“He died so that his friends would live–”
“–and so his enemies would have something to go with their potatoes!”
You mean they put him in the pot?
I have heard of Paul Pot, but Mike Pot is a new one for me.
I have no idea how to feel about that video. That was something different.
FYI, C.W. McCall was the same guy who did truck-drivin’, CB-rappin’ hit “Convoy” back in the early 1970s. And his back-up band from those days were the nucleus of the group we now know as “Mannheim Steamroller”.
Suddenly I’m getting Dark Tower flashbacks…
it prolly is tho
No, that’s at the DIXIE PIG. Is this the year of ‘99?
Oh my god.
Oh SHIT.
Knuckles
Yeah, that was pretty much my thinking. Every expletive possible. Oh man is this gonna be bad. OH JEEZ OH JEEZ OH JEEZ
So, we now have complete confirmation of where this is in the timeline.
In the worst possible way, because of course.
Amber is broken and Mike will empower her beyond her wildest imaginings.
awwww he’s such a cute widdle extortionist
Isn’t he though?
He really is. Young Mike is the best Mike.
and as we all know, nothing traumatizing or life-changing happened on that trip, and everyone had a great time, the end
Dear god.
Oh hey. That’ll do it. Can’t see how a 13 year old boy would blame himself for this one and leave scarring.
my thoughts exactly and I’m gonna cry
(side note: stacey has always called mike ‘michael’ which leads me to wonder how long this has been planned for http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/omalley/)
Honestly surprised Blaine conceded this much. He’s gonna hit Mike harder when he does strike back.
Mike’s probably not the one who’ll pay for this.
I know how it goes, but I’m worried Blaine won’t let him get away with it, even with how things went.
There’s not much he can do about it. Abusers get away with what they do because they don’t let people outside their victims know what they’re really like. Lashing back at Mike would break his cover, he’s more likely to take out his frustration on Amber or her mom later.
This. Also, I have a feeling that if he hit Mike, Mike would retaliate to the point where Blaine would be in prison in the present day. I mean, Young!Mike is *13* and he already knows how to comb through business receipts for irregularities. I can’t see him getting hit by Blaine and then just letting that slide for five years.
And the problem is, I’m almost POSITIVE Mike doesn’t know this is going to get back to Amber in a painful way. I genuinely believe he’s trying to help and do right by her because he doesn’t like how her dad treats her, from what he’s seen. He doesn’t know.
I don’t think Mike really cares that much about Amber. He’s not interested in her nerd stuff, he originally turned down the party invite — and when he did show up, he brought a pretty cursory present, the Amazon gift card.
What Mike does seem to care about, is manipulating Blaine. He met Blaine and immediately decided that this was a person in a position of power, that he wanted to stick it to. It has less to do with helping Amber, and more to do with Mike practicing his budding skills as a master manipulator capable of screwing someone over.
That’s possible. OTOH, the two things we’ve seen him try to do so far were both apparently for Amber’s benefit – confronting the teacher and blackmailing Blaine here.
He seems to be trying to help Amber, even if he wasn’t aware of how little he’d like the actual party.
To clarify — I mean in a non-physical way. In Shortpacked, Amber mentioned that he only hit her once. I’d say 95% of his abuse isn’t physical.
Well, to her at least. Pretty sure her mom took a few beatings.
Repeatedly calling your daughter “potato” is abuse.
It just is.
God, can Amber’s family and life be MORE fucked up?
13 year old Mike is pretty boss, not gonna lie
I wholeheartedly agree. You go, little dude.
Absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan, and I unreservedly endorse it.
Flashback to Blaine mocking Amber for being paralyzed during Sal’s assault and Amber snapping into a murderous rage.
Oh is this when she stabs Sal?
And that’s how mental disassociation started.
Yes.
Okay, yeah, confirmed.
Oh boy, we’ll probably get to see the days following the field trip. I’m gonna cry, Amber is going to be a wreck.
And fuck Blaine. Can’t forget to express that.
Willis’ twitter has indicated that next strip is going to be Sal heavy, so I’d not be surprised if the extended flashback is either Marcie losing her voice OR we finally get the robbery from her point of view.
Great. I’ll use this advance notice to stock up on tissues and prepare my voice for an extended damning.
Way ahead of you. *offers tissues*
Excellent, thank you.
*ahem*
aaaaaaaaah
oooooooooh
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiih
aaaaaaaaah
oooooooooh
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiih
daaaaaaaaah
yoooooooooh
wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiih
liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis
right, I’m ready
* Next storyline, not next strip.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-4/01-the-only-dope-for-me-is-you/gasstation/
OH GOD THIS IS LEADING UP TO THE INCIDENT D:
Aw geez…. that’s no good. . ;:/
I’m hopeful that this all leads up to present-day Mike defeating Blaine’s current misbehavior, and possibly getting him sent to jail.
i was hoping next up was the flashforward where Mike was the guy combing through Drumpf’s tax records. Yours is good, too.
Oh. Shit. Shiiiiiit.
Btw, Willis, I’ve been having issues with the comments rss feed again the last couple of days. Or at least the version of it my android app uses. If I check it from Firefox in Windows, it still works.
I am told by smarter people that the “description” tag stuff is doing weird things, which means some readers read it wrong, but I’m not sure what steps I would need to take to fix it, if any exist.
Damn. It’s been a long time since I’ve had the spoons for such debugging.
…but hey, if you tell us what the “weird things” are, maybe someone here knows the answer!
Oh shit I didn’t expect that.
Jesus fuck
Very.
So am i not too far off into mike being a very small side catalyst for the divorce? And amber taking that about as well as any child of divorce might?
Stacey and Blaine are already separated. Ethan only said the divorce finalized after the robbery, around the time Blaine insisted on self defence over therapy, so they’ve probably already begun proceedings.
Yep i forgot those details. Its hard for me to keep track of these things sometimes. Where others have guessed this is heading makes a lot more sense and is somehow more depressing.
It’s okay, I forget stuff all the time too.
At the very least, he’s clearly become a contributing factor to Amber, Ethan, and Blaine being at the gas station during the holdup.
I really, really hope Mike never makes that connection. Or has Blaine make it for him. No 13-year-old deserves that guilt from trying to be nice.
The entirety of Mike in these flashbacks is him observing and making connections. He’s clearly going to make the connection the second he finds out about it. And presumably that’s how we get the Mike of current-time.
I know it’s futile. Doesn’t mean I’m not dreading it.
I will be here with hugs and/or tissues and/or chocolate/sweet food if anybody needs me.
“Sometimes bad guys make the best good guys.” – Nathan Ford
Ooh! A Leverage reference!
Ok. If you were going to make a Leverage team (Hitter, Grifter, Hacker, Thief, Brains) using Dumbing of Age characters, who would you choose?
Hitter would be Sal because she just wants to fight and Marcie won’t let her.
Hacker would be Amber, not only because of her abilities but because of her complicated relationship with Sal.
Grifter would be Walky, not because he’s smooth, but because he acts so stupid that he’d be underestimated.
Thief would be Dina because of her ability to go unnoticed.
And Brains would be Sarah because she’s smart, mean, and antisocial just like Nate at the begi…throughout most of the series.
I agree with most of these.
For Grifter, tho’, I’m going to go with Billie–she actually IS pretty charming and good at lying when she wants to be. And in an improv fashion, at that.
For Mastermind (I REFUSE to use “Brains”–season one opening forever!), I’m going to take Joyce over Sarah. I agree the latter is a better match to Nate’s personality, but Joyce is actually the better instigator, IMNSHO. Sarah lacks the determination to see a scheme through–Joyce, OTOH, will decide on the right course of action, and then become an unstoppable juggernaut, and any and all people around her are acceptable tools to be used to achieve her goals.
(I should note that part of the reason for this is that she’s essentially blind to what she’s doing–she feels that she wouldn’t be successful unless it was all part of God’s Plan, after all. Since she views herself as nothing more than a tool of a Higher Power, it’s hardly surprising that she views others that way, too.)
I agree with all your choices! Though, I’d probably trade out Ruth for Sarah, and Amazi-Girl for Sal as the hitter, making for a REALLY complicated relationship with Amber as hacker. Also, now, because of your comment, from now on, if Sal is ever annoyed with Amber, I’m gonna hear her voice in my head (Meghan Black as Rogue from X-Men Evolution, btw) going “Dammit, Hardison!!”
Damn. No takers? No Leverage fans?
send you a virtual hi-five!
Damn, I would but I can’t improve on that lineup. Dina is perfect. Sal’s glorious hair proves her worth as hitter.
Ironic I brought up the store incident yesterday and I was wondering what Amber and Mike’s interaction was like after it though I made a mistake and said Ethan instead of Mike.
noooooooooooooo
He’s not gonna actually take is he? Or take her but then strand her there.
It looks like this trip is the time he brings her to the store that Sal is robbing.
I am going to say that I really do not like this arc. Mike is an abusive and gross sociopathic jerk. Not out of ineptitude or damage but just because he likes hurting people. Giving him a backstory of him acting heroic just rings false to me. If I could see him acting this way to another sociopath at all it wouldn’t be for good reasons, just for “staking-his-territory” reasons.
And I’m on here routinely defending like, Malaya, Raidah, Joe. But Mike is just a mean-spirited asshole and I don’t like a contrived flashback narrative to try to make me like him. Like at best he’s better than Blaine, which is such a ridiculously low bar that it’s not worth paying any attention to.
I dont think this arc is for you to like him.. i think its for us to understand him, you can understand someone and still not like them.
More importantly i think this arc is going to become more relevant as we see where the ethan/mike story line goes. And also how it may tie in to other characters on the whole. Like how our actions can sometimes lead to inadvertently hurt people even if you were only trying to help.
Maybe me were even supposed to pity mike.
Idk.
Good job me adding an unnecessary “me” to that last part.
Mike isn’t being heroic here. He’s identified Blaine’s weakness and is enjoying the heck out of making him do his bidding. Mike is being Mike.
Most people aren’t born assholes, dude. I’m glad that in the more realistic Dumbing of Age universe Mike actually has some backstory to his being an asshole.
Even people without empathy are capable of decency. In fact it’s apparently a good trait for surgeons because you don’t want to be too afraid of screwing up. And Mike’s clearly perceptive of people’s emotions, which doesn’t tend to go with born lack of empathy. I don’t want Mike to have the Sad Backstory That Immediately Made Him A Jerk either, but I think what’s being set up is still potentially gradual – he can go from ‘blunt perceptive kid who tries to help new friends’ to ‘blunt perceptive kid’ and from there to total asshat. At a guess the aftermath of the holdup may have left Mike more isolated from Amber and Ethan, distanced from other friends because Amber’s reputation is about to take another hit, possibly feeling guilty about it, and going online and being ripe for recruitment by the kind of internet scumbags present Mike acts like. A lot of that behavior is learned, not innate, and a lot of our current crop of cesspit dwellers were attracted to it because it made them feel less vulnerable.
(Also, sociopath’s been removed from the DSM. There exist abusive creep stains in this world, but many of them are non-pathological and those that are tend to be a bad combination of nature and nurture. Throwing the term around’s a sticking point for me.)
Thank you. Sociopath (and psychopath for that matter) is not generally considered a thing. I believe the current term is Anti-Social Personality Disorder. And as Regalli said, lack of empathy does not equal lack of morals, lack of decency or lack of compassion.
Also consider that there’s multiple types of empathy. Emotional empathy is the ability to feel the emotions others feel – the ability to feel bad for others who feel bad. Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand what’s motivating or driving another’s behavior or to read social cues. And compassionate empathy is doing things to make stuff better for others.
Surgeons (those without ASPD) train to suppress their emotional empathy to let them focus on the surgery. Folks with ASPD also tend to struggle with emotional empathy (but are often gifted at cognitive empathy). Autistics like myself generally suck at cognitive empathy (not always but talking in generalities here) but we tend to be very strong in emotional and compassionate empathy. I could go on.
Unfortunately “lacks empathy” has become shorthand to demonize those with a variety of mental health and developmental disorders (including ASPD and autism) and the well is so poisoned at this point that it’s hard to have a conversation about it.
I’d argue Kid!Mike has good cognitive and compassionate empathy and probably decent emotional empathy – and as he’s gotten older, he’s suppressed his emotional and compassionate empathy, possibly because as a 13YO, his fumbling 13YO’s attempts to make things better wound up blowing up in his face and he’s decided not to even try anymore. Given that the teacher situation ended with him getting beat up and tossed out of the classroom, showing up to Amber’s b-day party has led to him being ignored while Amber and Ethan, and somehow I feel like Blaine is going to figure out a way to punish Mike for this, I think we’re starting to see what led up to Mike’s fuck-it moment.
Doesn’t excuse his current behavior, but perhaps helps to explain it a bit. Certainly I wasn’t my best self at 17 (when I got to uni), in large part because my attempts to do social up to that point typically blew up in my face, so I was an angry, bitter person and couldn’t get that me being an angry, bitter person had a lot to do with new people not liking me much. It wasn’t until I moved to a new place and decided to get my brave on and try socializing again as part of a lifestyle overhaul (Everyone in my extended family has lifestyle-related chronic health conditions by 30. I didn’t want that) when I realized not everyone is a bullying asshole and de-cactusified my personality.
(seriously most of my first year at uni was weirding out my new friends by gushing over how nice they all were when they were just treating me with basic human decency. Thankfully my friends were Good People and taught me how to establish and enforce boundaries rather than taking advantage of how starved for positive interactions I was. If most people have high school experiences like my uni experience, I suddenly get high school reunions even if I’d rather fracture-dislocate my ankle again than go to mine). Somehow I am guessing Mike wound up in a similar place to where I wound up, except that he’s more socially savvy and therefore better able to asshole.
As much as I loathe Mike, it’s all going to depend on how he gets from point A to point B. So far, all we’re seeing is that he USED to be alright, and became shittier by the time he got to college. Baby Mike might be sympathetic, but that doesn’t mean we’re meant to extend that to adult Mike
Agreed. And it’s possible to take past trauma and not become a scumbag who delights in the misery of others. That’s all on Mike. Thinking on it, it seems really intentional that all the scenes we have so far of Mike trying to help and failing have been on AMBER’S behalf – she went through all of this as well, and more that we didn’t see and as the direct target, and has never made someone cry for the sake of having it on video. She has her issues, but she clearly tries to be a Good Person in spite of and with them. (Or at least, did before the Ryan thing confirmed to her she was A Monster, and even now is unable to perform that role entirely.)
Yeah this.
Though I wonder if the angle Willis is aiming for is less “scumbag who delights in misery of others” (to be fair to Mike, he doesn’t seem to enjoy being a dick to people) and more, “angry bitter asshole who feels the world in general can fuck off.”
Which if the latter, a lot of Mike’s behavior makes sense, if you view it through the lens of trying to push others away from him and get isolated. Personality-wise, he’s a more socially savvy and pissed-off Sarah. I don’t think he’s genuinely sadistic, if only because truely sadistic social manipulaters tend to be more polished in their interactions – they don’t want people to realize they’re an asshole so they can keep them hooked and continue to torment them. Mike has the skill to manipulate people without them knowing, but he doesn’t even try to. Why? The only possible answer is that he wants people to realize he’s an asshole and to reject him.
Not to say that it excuses his behavior at all – it doesn’t in the least. More that a lot of Mike’s past behavior (and a lot of Amber and Ethan’s tolerance for Mike’s dumpster fire of a personality) makes more sense when viewed through the lens of intentional self-sabotage (and Amber and Ethan remembering when Mike wasn’t a walking dumpster fire), given Mike’s known skill set and what we’re seeing so far.
Having at one point been the angry bitter asshole who feels the world in general can fuck off, I may be projecting here. Plus I’m autistic and so the idea of being socially savvy enough to pick up on the dynamic at Amber’s place with just a few interactions with Blaine is completely alien to me – buuut I do know that if you hit your fuck-it-I-give-up-the-world-can-burn-for-all-I-care point, your behavior can come off sadistic or cruel, when you’re really just trying to isolate yourself.
None of which is to say that Mike is somehow not an asshole (he totally is. What decides that is your actions, not your motivations behind those actions). But more that maybe he’s not a totally irredeemable asshole. He could get better. I did.
I’ve said for a long time now, Mike doesn’t smile, I don’t think he’s actually getting enjoyment out of being a jerk.
Amber is definitely a bad example of how the whole “cycle of abuse” mentality is bullshit because like she spends her free time finding justifications to violently attack people. Which is another reason I am completely not here in any way for Mike having some tragic backstory.
Wait, wouldn’t that be a good example? Like violence breeds violence, and people will lash out if they’re treated badly, but not always at the people who deserve it?
No, because the “cycle of abuse” myth is that survivors of abuse are doomed to become abusers themselves, and as Emily said, it’s complete bullshit. It’s not true, and it ends up making abuse survivors feel even more afraid to show negative emotions or make mistakes.
I don’t feel that Amber falls into that trope because her vigilantism is a completely different animal from her dad’s emotional and physical abuse, but it still means she’s a LOT more violent than other characters, so she also isn’t a clear, unambiguous example of the trope being bullshit.
She’s more of an example of how harmful that trope is for abuse survivors because it leads people to look at ANY anger or bad behavior from them as a sign that they’re becoming their own abuser and/or are irreparably damaged
You fundamentally misunderstand Mike. He sees through facades people make and forces them to deal with the shit they repress and hide. That’s why he never lies.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/01-to-those-whod-ground-me/underhanded/
With Walky, it’s immaturity.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/05-saturdays-all-right-for-slighting/thank/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/03-faz-is-great/given/
With Joyce, it’s naivete.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/03-the-first-step-towards-recovery/liberals/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/answer-2/
To others, hypocrisy.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-6/02-that-perfect-girl/profane/
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/06-strange-beerfellows/nonsequitur/
And with amber, her insecurities.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/04-the-do-list/omalley/
This arc isn’t really redeeming mike for me. He meddles and manipulates. He also clearly thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. He doesn’t seem that engaged in actually being friends with Ethan and Amber.
I get the impression that he enjoys getting one over an adult more than trying to fully understand a situation and help people.
This definitely feels like Willis trying to salvage the completely flat and uninteresting non-character that is Mike into someone with a semblance of depth but honestly it’s too little too late I’ve had like a decade to cement my complete disdain and disinterest in anything to do with Mike. Mike is just a plot device that gets trotted out when either a cheap punchline is needed or a stalled character needs to be shoved to get the plot moving again.
I understand completely. It’s why you never post about Mike.
Beware! If you turn to the snark side, it is very difficult to turn back.
You mean about how much I hate every one of his appearances because he’s a boring edgelord asshole with no depth who never faces consequences ever? Yeah, he annoys me it doesn’t mean I find him interesting or worthwhile as a character.
Mike, again your heart is in the right place but you’re causing more problems than you’re solving. Granted I’m explaining this to past Mike so that ship sailed 6(?) years ago. Maybe Willis or someone else can confirm the exact number of years ago these flashbacks take place.
Also I know it won’t end well but I’m interested to see more of young Sal and what she was like. She’s one of my favorites so more of her backstory is always welcome.
Four years. They’re 17 now and 13 in the flashbacks.
All the undergraduates are at least 18. They have to be, ’cause David Willis draws porn of them.
Five. They’re currently 18, and Sal was sent away for five years, per her first interaction with Walky.
“The girl”? “Potato”? Blaine doesn’t call Amber by her name very often, huh.
No he doesn’t, and I really wish someone could put him through a wall.
…with a potato gun!
The worst part to me is how he’s trying to pass ‘potato’ off as a term of endearment, and how Stacey and Amber are so deep in this shit Stacey doesn’t comment.
(I mean, I can see it as one from someone quirky and Not Blaine, emphasizing how valuable and delicious potatoes are rather than it being appearance-based, but we know it’s not because he already brought it up as a dig at her appearance before and also it’s Blaine.)
I’m confused. Why is he hiding Yuri at this point?
Because he’s supposed to be makin their marriage work?
Assuming he’s sleeping with Yuri right now, and has been prior to the separation, that would be the opposite of making it work.
But that’s assuming the bill is a reference to Yuri and not some other shady stuff.
So Yuri is a Korean mobster?
I doubt it, but she could have worked there and the receipt showed he was tipping too much.
Or he could have taken her there to eat all he time and the receipt showed him paying for two meals, possibly with suggestive romantic names.
I have no idea what the receipt showed, though I assume that’s the what made Jamie mention Yuri.
Don’t know about this universe, but she was the daughter of a Korean mobster in the other one – that may have held true here too.
We also have a strip where Richard said something about how bad Blaine was including ‘literal mob’ as one of the phrases used. So there’s probably some tie there, but not a very direct or provable one.
Yup, Blaine is a mob stooge, so probably his business is owned by the mob and he’s paid generously to look the other way (and he seems to frequent other mob establishments, based on that receipt).
I’m guessing that he either had to break from them (or claim to) during the divorce proceedings or aftermath of the holdup (since Richard knows and Blaine is conspicuously not in jail,) or that his supplemental income would be too closely scrutinized for him to use it for child support or college. At the very least he’s claiming that to Yuri. A Faz in college is a Faz with options, who probably knows things and could talk, and who certainly isn’t totally under Blaine’s thumb.
As for Richard, I think Stacey told him. She probably found out at some point.
Additionally to cbwroses’s input, the divorce hasn’t been finalised, and if Blaine were to be found cheating on top of it all, that might get Stacey something extra in the divorce settlement.
Tomorrow: We find out that Mike was responsible for Sal being there, too.
You’ll never be able to prove it.
No, seriously. Mike had nothing to do with it. He didn’t even know Sal. Sal just had all she could take and she just finally snapped due to a random comment from some kid with the unlikely name of Brent Fruth or something like that.
Ya know, life can really sour a person, but sometimes I wonder if being around Amber and Ethan more than anything else made Mike the kind of guy he is today, (In this universe).
Not so much blaming them, just an observation based on these flashbacks, and the fact it seemed he used to be more friendly when he was younger… then life with those two happened.
Yeah, lets blame abusive asshole on his favorite targets. That’s cool.
I think what this flashback is likely showing is that the early, already perceptive and manipulative, Mike’s attempts to help Amber in particular either failed or backfired horribly. With the teacher, where he didn’t help, got slapped and Amber had already run off. Here with Blaine, he’s just done the ‘good deed’ of not quite blackmailing Blaine into driving them on the field trip, which leads directly to all the trauma of the robbery.
Woah.. I think you misunderstood my meaning of my post. As I mentioned “life can really sour a person”, as in how Mike looked like he was a lot more friendly while he was younger but as one dude once said, “life finds a way” (different context I know, but interesting results in the end)
My thoughts were, if Mike didn’t know Amber and Ethan, would he have become such a jerk later in life? Not their faults it happened, just life and it’s direction for those two kind of happened, not just now, but other events we have seen and probably not seen.
It was an interesting thought of an Ethan/Amber-less Mike that was not meant to offend anyone.
Mike is the hero we don’t need, but the one we deserve. He also trolls evil clowns like Blaine.
Young Mike does.
Current Mike seems to restrict himself to safer targets.
I’m hoping that this act of kindness Mike has extorted Blaine into doesn’t lead to the convenience store incident. Perhaps knowing he inadvertently caused that might be what changes him.
Mike with green make up: “No good deed goes unpunished. Fuck you, Blaine.”
Can’t really see how it doesn’t at this point.
I mean, I suppose it could be a completely different field trip the same year to which Blaine drives them and on which absolutely nothing bad happens, but that seems like a huge fake out.
I’m actually really surprised that Mike’s blackmail effort didn’t result in Blaine beating him up or something.
Because Blaine is evil but not stupid, he recognizes the consequences of beating up someone else’s kid
I dunno, he was plenty willing to try and tackle Ruth in a hallway full of witnesses.
Ruth’s an adult. Mike’s 13 and still under the custody of his parents.
He was also in the middle of a rage from Amber defying him and refusing to let him have power over her. It was a moment of weakness.
Why the hell has Blaine been keeping all those receipts when they can be used against him so easily? Wouldn’t it have been smarter to throw them away?
You’d be surprised how often things like this do in criminals in real life.
i guess like 60% of the time?
60% of all criminals or 60% of all criminals that get caught out?
He thinks his wife and daughter are stupid.
Also, he’s an abuser so probably doesn’t fear or even consider that one or both of them would use the recipes against him.
Tax reasons maybe?
‘Work-related expenses,’ perhaps. Blaine is about that smug and audacious. (Given the Patreon strip proves I was wrong and he did send his daughter to watch his mistress’s kid, who may be his own kid, possibly while he was on a date with said mistress? Super audacious.)
This is a common thing among successful criminals. They keep getting away with it, so they get less cautious because it’s always been fine before.
Oh fuck, this is THE trip isn’t it?
A class field trip interrupted only by a stop at a convenience store. Step 2 of Mike’s master plan to create Amazigirl is now complete.
Well shoot, there are repercussions of that incident on Mike as well, embittering him against the world.
If Mike became a cruel piece of shit because his attempts to actually be NICE all backfired I think I would actually hate him even more
Seriously, “I tried to be nice but it didn’t really help so I decided to be irredeemably evil instead” is not just wildly unsympathetic it’s also fucking idiotic.
That’s where I think this goes. Mike tries to be a force for good against the adult world – Amber’s grade as an example. Helping Amber here by getting her a ride to the field trip. But it all backfires and makes it worse.
He becomes Irredeemable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irredeemable
oh this is delicious
Appropriate avatar is, well, creepy.
So that is how the arrangement works. I’m sure that Blaine will remember this; the question is whether he’ll remember his anger or his fear.
I’m honestly thinking that, once, there was sweet music between Blaine and Stacey before time, employment choices and a culturally-reinforced attitude towards women got in the way.
Honeymoon phase, maybe. But if he was potentially grooming and screwing teenagers when Amber was a toddler, he’s been like this for a long, long time.
Wait, what’s this about Blaine grooming teenagers? What did I miss?
Faz’s mother was a teenager when he was born, and Amber’s not 100% sure Faz isn’t Blaine’s.
It’s still only in implications and possibility, but: Yuri is probably much younger than Blaine. Amber thinks Faz was born when Yuri was a teenager. Amber also thinks it’s a possibility Blaine is Faz’s father. If this is true, Blaine was with Yuri in secret for a solid decade, or she took him back after a break but still during his marriage, either of which seems worrisome.
It might not be true, and we may see Faz’s biological father at some point. But right now the fact that this sequence of thoughts was even suggested reflects reeeeally badly on Blaine. (Especially because Willis originally said Amber was his only biological child but has since apparently said he forgot that he said it once.)
Yeah, it’s pretty clear now that Faz is Blaine’s kid. Not explicitly shown, but clear enough.
Yuri may be older than she looks, but that still puts the relationship back to when Amber was a toddler. Any “sweet music” was a long time ago and quite possible a lie even then.
All of Blaine’s kids seem to look like their mothers, which I guess helps if you’re a serial cheater/impregnator.
Not necessarily forgot. Word of God is not immutable or unchanging in Dumbing of Age, so Willis will sometimes change his mind if he thinks it makes a better story.
I’m not sure at all why you think “time, employment choices and a culturally-reinforced attitude towards women got in the way”.
Such things rarely turn decent people into abusive assholes.
Korean barbecue place..? Hm, could Yuri be Korean..?
Very likely, yes.
In Shortpacked! Blaine had problems with the Korean mafia.
…….look, it’s almost certainly meaning that, but if you think that Korean BBQ is only awesome for Koreans, you’re missing out, buddy!
Wait, Korean BBQ is FOR Koreans? I thought it was WITH Kor- er, I mean, nevermind. *cough*
Hm, do you think she’ll freak out more about being in a closed car with Blaine?
As mentioned above, we’ve likely already seen what comes of Blaine driving Amber to her field trip.
OH NO
Ah, I guess Mike is only human after all, since sometime after this he turned his Sadistic Good attentions away from Blaine and let him get away with stuff. It can happen! At least off panel.
I joke, but I think I understand how hard it must be to turn Shortpacked! Mike into a human character with limitations and dimensions who still chooses to act like Mike, and as a writer it’s fascinating to watch this.
I asked for this Mike a long time ago – one who uses his assholery on people who deserves it. One who punches upwards rather than downwards. It would be an interesting parallel to Amazi-girl and lead to interesting debates.
It’s an interesting extra wrinkle that the Mike I’m asking for is a teenager, and that he somewhere down the line stopped being that Mike.
Also, fudge you Blaine.
Somewhere, a monkey with a bandage wrapped around the stump of his arm is thinking, “Serves you right, Bagge.”
In my defense, that monkey was a bit of a jerk.
It kept giving you the finger, so you made it give you all five?
Heh, I can’t top that one. Good job, JBento.
You were a worthy adversary, and I look forward to crossing japes with again.
I know! It’s very interesting because at the moment it’s a reverse redemption story. Someone who hit a point and a moment that made them drop being a good guy and fully embrace being a villain.
And that’s so real and so sad in an era where so many dudes are getting sucked into perpetuating harassment campaigns and supporting literal nazis out of insecurity and misplaced angst.
Yeah, that I do like about this. It’s a thing that’s hard to do.
To humanize and explain a villain, make the reader understand and feel for them, while still leaving them as the bad guy.
Better in this case than the more common redemption of the villain, because I’m not sure what would be left of Mike once he wasn’t an edgelord.
good guy mike, what happened to you?
I suspect that he is only a good guy for certain persons. Everyone else he just crusades against.
that’s a whole lotta crusading he’s doing, now
So I went back and reviewed the flashback of Sal’s robbery. (SO MANY red panels.) And in the aftermath, Blaine says of Ethan that he’s the only kid who halfway tolerates Amber.
…. and that means he’s not counting Mike.
If speculation is accurate and this sequence is a prequel to that (and it definitely feels that way)… what do we make of Mike being not classified as Amber’s friend by the time it all goes down?
Is it that Blaine figured, hey, he’d rather go through receipts than spend time with her so she doesn’t count?
Is it Blaine being somehow even shittier than we’d realized and drowning Amber in messaging that Mike doesn’t like her as a way to drive them apart and get Mike out of her life?
Is there a major Amber/Mike feud and unfriending coming up between now and then? (Then and then?)
TUNE IN TOMORROW forsomeDannyandJoetimeinstead.
Also, just noticed. Next chapter is titled “Flying to the red”. Let’s have a panel discussion about what that might mean.
BBCC noted above that next storyline is pretty Sal-centric, and red is associated with traumatic flashbacks, so maybe its about Marcie losing her voice? Or maybe its just cause her motorcycle is red.
I think that Blaine, like many readers, is having difficulty analysing Mike’s motivations. As far as Blaine can tell, Mike doesn’t really seem to like Amber as much as have an agenda concerning her that involves making Blaine play nice with her.
I think that it’s probably no more than this: that the only other kid that went to his daughter’s party expressed openly that he wasn’t interested in hanging out with her, and that it would be painful to do so. Also, IF the field trip is the same instance in which Sal’s robbery takes place, then clearly Mike chose not to ride with them.
It’s not uncommon at all for kids that age to be forced to go to a party by their parents when they don’t like the kid in question. On the surface, I’m sure that’s exactly what this looks like to Blaine.
Well, with all due respect to Mike (the little bastard), Blaine’s encounter with him shows him actively avoiding spending time with Amber and Ethan during her birthday party. So, classifying him as someone who doesn’t tolerate Amber is reasonable.
korean BBQ place, so that’d be that guy’s mom ?
Tho usually, hotel receipts seems more compromising.
For tax purposes, IIRC, it’s a lot easier to deduct lodging than it is to deduct meals.
Depends on the reason for the meal. If it’s a work trip, it can be expensed, or if you’re for example treating a client you can expense it.
What you can’t expense is routine living expenses. So you eat out because you feel like eating out – that can’t be expensed. Treating the teenage mom of your bastard lovechild would be right out.
OK. I’ve said bits and pieces of this elsewhere in other comments but here it is: I think I was wrong about Mike.
Not entirely. I still think he’s an asshole. But I think I was wrong about why he’s an asshole.
He’s got a lot to make amends for before he’d ever be a character I’d want to know on an interpersonal level, buuuut on the other hand, I had been attributing his cruel behavior to a personal sense of sadism, like those internet trolls who try to bully women to suicide or SWAT people for the lulz.
I don’t think that anymore. Here’s the thing: Him being sadistic doesn’t make sense, because we know the guy is a genius social manipulator. His cognitive empathy is through the roof and he knows what to say and do to get those around him to dance to his tune. If he was sadistic, it doesn’t make sense for him to be this transparent, because it would (and does) drive people away.
But what if driving people away is actually what he wants? Suddenly it makes sense.
Based on what we’ve seen here, and looking back on my past, I see a bit of me-at-17 in him.
Me at 17 was an angry, bitter jackass. I was an asshole. A total jerk. Not a socially savvy one (autistic), but one who’s literal first words to a new person on first meeting was an insult or rude comment on purpose. People would go out of their way to avoid me, and I was often written off as just an asshole. And that was intentional on my part. Because I was afraid.
See, prior to 17, for literally all of my schooling since halfway through 2nd grade, I’d been bullied by far more socially savvy people than me. Literally every time someone new had been nice to me since I was 6, it had been a cruel prank. I’d lost my faith in other people, and didn’t want to interact with anyone. Being lonely was preferable to being with people, because my books never tried to gain my trust, only to exploit that trust for cruel pranks. People did. Always.
When I got to university, I wanted a lifestyle change to avoid chronic health conditions that run in the extended family. I don’t know why. I was miserable, I hated myself, I hated the world, I hated people, I hated life, I pretty much hated everything. So why I made the choice to try to be healthy, I don’t know. I didn’t really understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. At the time, I justified it to myself by telling myself I was spiting Fate itself (well, the genetics that put me at risk for literally every single common lifestyle-related health ailment), and to be fair, spite was basically the only emotion I had access to and it drove most of my actions. Good grades through high school? Spiting the 3rd grade teacher who told me I’d never amount to anything. Going to university away from home? Spiting my parents who were convinced I couldn’t manage on my won. Joining an actual fitness club instead of going to the gym? Spiting the folks in school who said nobody ever wanted me anywhere and I’d die alone. I’ll show them! I’ll join a club, get healthy and make friends! Fuck them! (it seems funny now, but it’s really disturbing to think back on how much of my decisions and actions at the time were driven by a desire to give the one-fingered salute to everyone in the world and certain people in particular). At the time, I was planning to die by 25 if shit didn’t change, and that fatalism brought with it a release from the anxiety that had kept me froze most of school. I guess I figured I’d give it one last go, and joined a martial arts club (in addition to giving my diet a total overhaul).
And there I met my people. My chosen family. People who taught me that I deserve respect, and how to command it. People who taught me – and encouraged me – to stand up for myself. People who didn’t assume a faux pas was me intentionally being obtuse, and took the time to explain the social rule I’d just violated. People who treated me kindly, with decency and respect. People who, by knowing them, made life worth living. I hadn’t realized how desperately lonely I was before I had my first real friends since preschool. And for the first time in my life that I can remember, I was actually happy.
I had other benefits (fitness, weight loss, making it to 30 as the only cousin 30 or older who doesn’t have T2 diabetes, ideal blood pressure, etc), but the single best thing that came out of my decision to try to come out of my shell a little bit was finding my people. That saved my life.
And I see Mike where I was before I found my people. Lost, alone, and hopeless. And blaming everyone else for his situation. And while others started him on the path to where he is now, his decision to stay there is on him, and ultimately he needs to be the one to make the decision to try to leave.
Mike needs to be given hope in humanity back. I’m not sure how that’s going to happen, but I think that’s what he needs to start his redemption arc (assuming he wants to be redeemed, anyway).
Except that Mike doesn’t just push people away – he *goes out of his way* to fuck shit up for others.
Also I’m glad that you overcame all that bullshit <3
True, but unlike genuine sadistic assholes I have met, Mike doesn’t go out of his way to endear himself to strangers, nor does he try the abuser’s playbook of honeymoon period. If his goal is to torment people for its own sake he is nowhere near as good at it as he has the capability to be.
It’s a good thing Blaine is such a huge asshole, because otherwise I’d sympathize with him. Just sit with Ethan and play Pokemon, Amber! Sheesh.
Oh. Oh no.
Amber is a mentally ill and anxious child, yeah? I think the theme here is the parent who’s ableist and can’t be arsed to help their child through these things and instead just tells them to get the fuck over it and stop being garbage, which doesn’t help at all
Or maybe Amber is a mentally ill and anxious child because she has an abusive father.
Blaine seems to go well being not helping. Even in this sequence “looks like a potato”?
Just for the record, I know Blaine is abusive and so it’s not benign, but from anyone else it wouldn’t occur to me “potato” is anything wrong. It sounds like a variant of a cute name like “spud” or “tater tot”. Not obviously worse than things like “monkey” that kind parents do use, and way better than “little shit”, which is far from unheard of.
It’s contextual. If Stacy had referred to Amber that way, it would’ve come across as clearly being an affectionate nickname, like “pumpkin” would.
Coming from Blaine though, “potato” is definitely meant to sound affectionate, but it’s unlikely there’s any actual affection there. He’s just playing the part of a dad who isn’t just dysentery in human form, because there are witnesses around.
It *might* not be intended as a sneaky jab at Amber’s appearance, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. He’d probably enjoy how people who don’t know how he treats Amber in private would interpret it completely the opposite of how he meant it
Oh, it’s TOTALLY a jab at her appearance: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/waiting/
As a cute nickname only applying here, I could see that. Since he just used it as “looks like a potato” to Mike a few strips back, not a chance.
I agree with 3oranges; to an outsider this would seem like an innocent if unusual pet name. WE are privy to the knowledge that Blaine is a waste of oxygen, but Stacy’s in too deep and though we haven’t seen Amber react to it yet it’s safe to say that she can guess what he means.
Still, in my experience this can work the other way too. I once had a classmate give me a funny look when I told her that my dad used to call me and my brothers “[his] little monsters”, and that nickname really WAS born of innocent affection. So maybe an outsider could guess, but I’m not sure.
I haven’t read all the comments, but I feel rather alone in liking Mike. He confronts people with their BS. Puts a light on the lies and hypocrisy and calls them on it. He is being a friend to Amber by trying to give her something she wants – her dad to be kind to her. It doesn’t work out, but that’s what I see him trying to do. He called Walky and Billie on wanting the ‘old Joyce’ they’d been dissing back. He got Amber out from behind the tree. He’s helping. Not gently or kindly, but for those-labeled-friend, he seems to be moving them toward a more honest place.
Yes, Mike does that. It may not be WHY Mike does that, but he does that.
Oh you’re not alone.
Plenty of people are willing to twist everything Mike does to somehow be to the advantage of his target.
I wouldn’t hate Mike half as much as I do if people weren’t falling all over themselves to justify his behaviour as good.
I feel that.
I wonder if it’s a societal thing. I’m thinking of like the House, MD thing where we as a culture consistently model emotionally abusive “smart” guy as nonetheless a positive role model because it’s edgy, manly, and smart.
Even though the reality of these assholes is harassment campaigns and making the environments they are in toxic as fuck, bleeding good workers that could do a much better job without the emotional cost.
Also the cultural belief that “tough love” is a form of love instead of a form of abuse.
When the reality is, I’ve never once seen a form of “tough love” that wasn’t either abusive or highly toxic and damaging to a person. Because a true friend, guardian, or lover knows that harming someone to “help” them is emotionally manipulative and unnecessarily cruel.
I think mike himself said it pretty well: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/recording/
Being smart and emotionally intuitive is only acceptably macho if you use it to be a dickbag to everyone.
YES. Same here. It makes him harder to enjoy as a character knowing how people will not only rationalize his every abusive action, but even give him credit for his targets’ character development later on
I like him as a character. Wouldn’t like him as a person.
I think Mike sees himself the way his fans do.
To put it another way, I think he sees himself as someone who “confronts people with their BS”, but somewhere down the line he forgot how to tell the difference between “very cleverly helping people” and “very helpfully bullying people”.
Cue Saw theme while erratically edited montage replays rest of storyline and previous ones fifty bajillion times.
…is…the Korean restaurant where he met the now-wife otherwise known as a potential child herself (given what Amber said about their age differences) because that’s even more sinister…
Well….
I don’t imagine that he would be keeping BBQ receipts for more than a year. Supposedly you should keep receipts for 7 years, but they wouldn’t be atop the pile. So, assuming the receipt was from THIS (flashback) year, and assuming that this IS where he met Yuri, and assuming that Sarah’s estimate of Yuri’s age at 25 was accurate, that would make her about 19 years old. So, technically an adult.
I’m really going to stick with the assumption Yuri is at least a few years older than that, because Faz is 15 and there’s only so much I’m willing to contemplate. Give her 5 years and I can be properly pissed at Blaine without actually being sick.
Look, people, yes it’s likely that it’s a sign that Blaine’s cheating with a Korean woman aka Faz’s mother, but come on, Korean BBQ is fucking off the chart delicious. In the real world, this could just be a sign that Blaine just loves meat, meat and more meat, freshly grilled and with tasty stuff to dip it into!
So what would you think of someone who couldn’t be bothered to share such delicious Korean BBQ with his wife and daughter?
THAT MONSTER.
Okay, I might have an idea of the shape of this. Mike has had a knack for figuring out people at a younger age and seemed to have some good intentions as well as some red flags on who he could become.
So he initially tried to use this for good, helping someone who was being harmed from multiple sources, believing he was smart enough to meddle in a positive way and would be regarded as the hero.
But some of his meddling made things so much worse, because a 13 year old has no real concept of the dynamics of abuse or the raw amount of power an adult can wield to make being found out meaningless or how confronting power can sometimes put victims in more danger.
And this is speculation, but this feels like where he slipped from at least good intentions into the edgelord kid in a bad place we see today. And it’s… heavy if I’m right.
Basically my theory seems to be he internalizes not being able to help Amber a second time and how things got worse after his intervention and being an empathetic kid, it weighed on him a lot and so in a pique of frustration vowed to never care or involve himself positively again.
But it twisted inside him. Instead of simply trying to project apathy like say a Carla, he began to resent in a way the friends who remind him of the empathetic kid he was and how powerless he felt and so began to torment and abuse them, manipulating their emotions to hurt them.
Which is unbelievably awful and his actions in the comic are bad, like really bad and unfortunately typical for a certain phase of edgelordery guys can get sucked into.
But I feel like there’s a sadness to it as well. He also abuses them because he doesn’t want to lose them. He always doubles down and tears down their self-esteem right when it feels like they’re finally ready to cut him loose. But in doing so, he becomes the monsters he initially wanted to save them from. Someone who abuses to maintain control over the life of another.
Can he be saved or redeemed? I think so, but it’s not going to be easy and he will have to accept a huge amount of humility and the vulnerability of the empathy he is trying to drown and Amber and Ethan will probably need to be away from him for a bit.
And he’ll have to extra vigilant to make sure those horrible actions of his never happen again. And it seems for Mike in the present day, he doesn’t have the impetus to change and so sticks to the easiness of his casual emotional abuse.
Hey Cerberus! Hope everything’s alright with you!
Someone said some time ago that Mike was going into teaching – what would be your prediction for currentMike’s handling of that? And does his comment on the teacher-student power dynamics when they were leaving the last Math class influence your opinion?
Oh, it’s worse than teaching.
He’s a social work major.
If Mike continues with the same attitude, that… should… be… funnnn? No, fun isn’t the world I’m looking for. Ah, “unmitigated disaster”, that’s the one.
Yeah, he’d have to radically change his outlook and level of vulnerability to do that job positively. People seeking social work have a lot of vulnerability inherent to the situation, so yeah, his current outlook would be retraumatizing for them when they are at their lowest and discourage them from looking for further help.
Got a mobility disability I had to adjust to. Still doing so. We’ll see how it goes.
aww. *jedi hugs* good luck!
my muscles are being awful again, but it’s still nice to be off all the painkillers.
Oh, boo. 8( I hope it improves. 8(
Hi Cerberus! You’ve been missed. And yeah I think that’s the shape of it.
“Fine. Then I’m the bad guy.”
Blackmail is temporary Mikey.
Unless you have 2 pieces that each affect 3-4 aspects of a person’s 6 aspects of life.
Blackmail is only temporary if you do it like Mike is doing here, getting rid of the blackmail material after one demand. Otherwise, blackmail is the gift that keeps on giving.
Ideally, you get the blackmail victim to do something that provides further blackmail material and strengthens your hold on him.
oh shit I know where this is going!
oh shi
grav roulette please stop trolling me
oooooooh shit
young mike is probably one of the best characters tbh