I LOVED (and still love) Mike and Amber’s Shortpacked relationship. Honestly one of my favorite, favorite things about the comic. I thought they worked great together.
A chill wind blew on my way home on this, a summers eve. A dozen crows circle counter-clockwise outside. My bowl of Alpha Bits cereal this morn spelled only the word D O O M. My cat has taken up knitting.
Signs and portents, a warning of dark things to come.
Sure enough, I open my browser, and here’s Blaine.
I’m just saying, would bringing him into some kind of time distortion event that causes him to never have been but nonetheless his offspring remain intact really be so bad?
… I think that was a Doctor Who plot, actually. We can make it happen, folks!
As time is wibbly wobbly, there can be a possibilty for him to simply…let’s say “disappear” after fathering Amber – unless it causes too much of a time continuum disruption (similar to a situation with Rose, her father, and the Ninth Doctor).
And he’ll fuck every one of them to convince them to come if he has to.
actually he’ll probably do it anyway but he’ll also fuck them over if they behave worse than “awkwardly polite to someone I don’t really know” toward Amber.
“Know her? I’m married to her!”
“Wha-”
“Well, in another dimension.”
“… Like, on the computer?”
“No, a legit alternate universe. Where time runs differently from ours, and all of us are at least a decade older than we are here.”
“The hell are you talking abou-”
“You’re dead in that universe, just throwing that out there.”
He also wore a bright orange floral shirt, and brought a party blower and confetti. None of which is on display in the strip I’m linking here, really, but it will always be my favorite snippet there and even with all of DOA Amber’s trauma, I still have hope we’ll someday get that unambiguous catharsis of ‘I am everything without you’ here.
Mike banged your daughter in another universe, and he will bang your wife and ex-wife in this universe, and then he will bang your own mother… for a nickel.
“Glasses she barely needs”? It’s already been established that at this age, she needs her glasses to read (and if Shortpacked! is an indication, her glasses will only become more important as she ages even into her twenties), so…
The assholery here is that he’s turning a positive into a negative.
instead of being proud of what she can do without them, he treats her basic needs as needless burdens. ( we have seen the athletics she is capable of without them )
This just shows what an asshole he is under all circumstances: No matter what level her eyesight was he would turn it into something ugly and hateful.
In Shortpacked! – in which we see Amber in her twenties, at least as of the beginning of the comic (it ran for a full decade and comic-time there progressed roughly in real-time, unlike Dumbing of Age) – Amber mentions at one point that she needs her glasses to be able to see most things clearly at all; she’s a little beyond “these glasses are just for reading” by that age.
This isn’t the Shortpacked universe. It’s possible in her 20s she’ll be near sighted like Walkyverse Amber but we’re probably never going to see her 20s, so we don’t know. For now, Adam is correct. They’re reading glasses.
Yes, but as we said, Amber’s in her 20s in Shortpacked when she’s nearsighted. She still has time for that to happen. She’s 18 here and she’s already told Danny she can see without them.
Vision absolutely changes as you get older. I first needed glasses about 25 years ago, and until it stabilized in my mid-twenties my nearsightedness gradually got worse and astigmatism came and went twice. I still have an old pair from high school and can’t wear them for more than a couple minutes without getting a headache.
Well, ages have change, places of origins have changed, some ethnicities have been changed (Billie wasn’t Half-Chinese in the Walkyverse); some stuff is constant, some other stuff isn’t.
(Also, like, Jacob wears glasses in one universe and not the other so who knows)
And “Non-prom-queen-material”. Like, which kind of excuse-for-a-father does that in front of person of Ambers age at her school. Who might very well know Amber.
But in Blaine’s reality that is not even a slight possibility that someone at her effing school even knew Amber, much less a boy, and I’m freaking scared of how Blaine will either physically or verbally abuse Amber for first of all being remembered by a class colleague who was also invited to a ‘party’ which in his opinion would probably be very undeserved.
…
But seriously, I feel like Mike’s just gonna keep getting his worldview darkened. And whenever he tries to help by throwing down for someone in a nice but assertive way, he’ll get his ass handed to him from someone in a position of authority…
Yet he’s still Ethan and Amber’s friend.
There’s still that glimmer of idealism in the cynic.
I have a feeling you’re right. I keep remembering Mike’s brief moments of kindness. Empathizing with Sal about the broken system when he learns about her and Jason. Pointing out to Walky about the TA honestly trying to help. It’s like he’s been broken down so often, he has a “them or me” attitude.
All the same, kudos to Baby Mike for wanting to be there for Amber when he sees Blaine.
It’s very hard for me to think of either of those as “moments of kindness”. I mean, he agrees with Sal it’s a broken system, but it’s not clear what he wants her to take from that agreement and his expressions doesn’t really show any empathy.
Ugh, Blaine is such a dick. Good on Mike for…[something positive] for Amber.
Is Mike motivated here by a tiny spark of goodness or does he just hate abusers so much he counters them automatically?
I have to admit, the thought of Mike’s fully weaponized assholery directed at Blaine does have a certain appeal. Obviously not going to happen in this story line, though.
Do we know how tall everyone is? The most concrete figure I’ve found on the wiki is that Walkyverse Joyce is 5’4”. Assuming she’s the same height here, and you usually don’t get any taller once you’re college-age, that gives us a benchmark.
I’m 4 foot 8 and an adult. Admittedly I am unusually short for an adult but if Amber isn’t much taller as a fully grown adult I could believe she isn’t 5 foot yet (probably a bit over 4 foot still though!)
Okay, that makes sense. I was pretty sure they were in middle school, but then the “star quarterback” and cut off sign happened and I didn’t know anymore.
I want so badly for Mike to be a hero here… but my dread feeling is that Amber is the reason why he’s such a jerk to everyone. And that we’re going to find out why.
I’m hoping in the end Mike is just a bad person. I’d like to avoid the Twilight apologia and go with the idea he’s a nasty person because he likes putting people down rather than he’s some Heathcliffian tragic hero.
Willis can obviously go any direction he likes but that’s my thoughts.
I think it’s pretty clear already that Mike wasn’t always as nasty as he is now (unless you can come up with a good reason why, for instance, he confronted Ms. Phillips about Amber’s grades on the latter’s behalf – that would be for the purpose of “being nasty”). Something made Mike the way he was.
The issue is that jerks being jerks because they’re jerks aren’t really compelling characters, while character with a reason for their douchiness are much more fun to write.
It’s less about what’s realistic or not realistic. More about how, if a character is going to be a semi-major one with regular appearances (and an easy source of punchlines in a strip-a-day comic, that’s always going to be a factor), they need to be multi-dimensional, otherwise they just end up, well, flat.
As a bonus, it just occurred to me that having a character who is a jerk, especially on the level Mike typically is, around as a character that the rest of the cast tolerates or even treats as acceptable could send a message that acting like that is somehow acceptable in real life. That it’s as okay for you to be a Mike as it is okay to be a Joyce or an Amber or a Walky or a whoever.
Of course, this is Dumbing of Age, so it’s more like “acceptable as long as you’re trying to get better”, but hopefully that’s part of what this Mike arc is setting up!
It’s not super realistic either. Most people have a reason to be an assface even if its not a super sympathetic one – like believing they’re better than someone else, or because of a sense of entitlement or a sense of boredom and lack of compassion.
Everyone thinks they’re right, and are behaving in a perfectly logical and reasonable manner. That whole “Everyone is the hero of their own movie,” thing.
Jerks who are just jerks because the storyline demands it, or for the sake of a punchline, without any internal consistency or reasoning for it (even if it’s never shown to the audience) just play (as mentioned above) flat and boring and unrealistic, because everyone has reasonably consistent internal motivation (usually based upon “I am right in this and this is a reasonable way for me to react in this moment”), whether or not the author chooses to show or share that motivation or not.
OTOH, certain characters aren’t particularly realistic and their behavior patterns weren’t ever designed that way. In this comic in particular where many characters originate in a much less serious genre, delving into realistic backgrounds to provide motivation for behavior that was originally intended for wacky hijinks can easily fall flat.
That doesn’t mean Mike’s behavior can’t be internally consistent, but I’m not sure there’s a point in digging into the motivations for it, unless that’s going to form the basis for character growth away from it. But the behavior is the point of Mike and if he changes he won’t be Mike anymore.
Nor am I sure I’d actually believe any origin story for Mike. Or care, really. He’s an unusually perceptive real-life Internet Edgelord. On the one hand, there’s plenty of people who want to be like that around, so no real origin is needed. On the other, the cartoon aspect lies in how absurdly good at it he is, the lengths he goes to and how he doesn’t suffer the consequences that make most such people keep it to the Internet.
Well, that’s not ENTIRELY true. There are people who think its funny to mess with people for shits and giggles. That’s hardly ‘hero of their own movie’ material, even if most of them have a reason the other person ‘deserved’ it. Plus people do things they know are wrong all the time because they don’t believe there will be consequences or because they believe they’re superior. There’s a fine line between ‘everyone has to be a person with motives, goals, and a general reason for what they do’ and ‘everyone’s the hero of their own story’ imo.
Basically, because I think a lot of fiction goes out of its way to make excuses for saying, “He had a rough time of it and became a bad person.” We’re living in a time of Alt-Right douchebags who grew up in loving homes with caring families but they became misogynists, bullies, and racists just because they liked it. I think it’d be appropriate for Mike to simply enjoy being mean to people and not have him be some tragic Don Quixote figure who was disillusioned by life.
Hey, it could be both. Baby Mike almost always looks stressed as hell in these flashbacks (from the small extra lines he keeps having by his eyes and eyebrows), it could be that his natural personality is to be an asshole but at this point in his life he was trying to always hide his real reactions and playact friendliness and something is going to make him go ‘Fuck it,’ and stop bothering.
My bet is that he’ll turn out to be someone who *chooses* to be a bad person most of the time, but we’ll find out why he decided that was a good idea and why he’s not-outright-evil enough to be friends with good people, if that makes sense? Like, Raidah and Malaya are also pretty much bad people, but they’re a specific type of bad people and we have a little more idea why they do that than we do Mike. Part of the reason some people don’t see Mike as a bad person is he’s kind of simplistic comic relief and I think changing that might be the goal.
How is Malaya a bad person? Because she didn’t like the roommate that wouldn’t leave her alone or respect her boundries? Because she fights with the woman who was rude to her, threatened her, assaulted her all because she didn’t like that Malaya was spending time with her friend?
It is unclear why Malaya treats Sal like shit. It’s unclear which way that started and who first treated the other badly. Malaya seems to treat Sal badly because she thinks Sal’s a poser who pretends not to care about anyone’s opinion but is really out to seem so cool – when in fact that’s a far more apt description of Malaya.
But that wasn’t my point. Malaya might treat Sal worse, but she doesn’t seem to be nice to anyone. Marcie is the only exception I can think of.
Who is Malaya nice to, aside Marcie, kind of, and also Joe prior to their Slipshine?
I can remember her being rude to Carla and Lucy, but I can’t remember her being nice, or even polite.
Ok. I was confused, wondering why Mike said he was going to Amber’s party when he declined before. But some people have interpreted it as him changing his mind due to Blaine’s asshole aura, and I can get behind that.
I’m just throwing out one of several guesses at his motivation here, but if Mike doesn’t show up, Blaine and Amber can get into a spat over the reason, and Mike gets to be the reason for the argument, and therefore important to them. It’s egocentric, inconsiderate, and therefore pointlessly spiteful? That’s Mike to a T.
Alternatively, he is doing his best to be a good person here, but is also interacting with Blaine deliberately to learn Amber’s weaknesses and problems, so that he has a “defense” against her if she becomes a problem for him, and can help her out if it suits him, respectively.
If Mike is complicated in his own way, it’s most likely because his default survival method is to play people’s expectations and then play them off each other, in the most effective and straightforward way – without changing anyone’s opinions of him.
2: I’m thinking this might be the day that broke Mike. Good odds that he’s going to do something similar to what Danny did, not realize that Amber’s dad is a sociopathic fucking bastard… and he’s going to get Amber hurt.
Since we know Blaine is still alive in the future the only positive thing I can see coming out of this is exposing his philandering in such a way that Stacey begins divorce proceedings.
I thought it was “not long after” the knife incident and I’m not sure how much later that was. They were 13 then – which tends to be around 8th grade.
They’re currently in middle school/junior high, which is annoyingly broad, but puts them somewhere from 5-8th grade, probably towards the top end.
The lower end of that would make the sexual overtones of some of the strips increasingly creepy.
I’d guess the robbery is next year, but this could be Amber’s 13th birthday and it could be anytime after that – potentially just weeks away.
If Stacey had left Blaine shortly after the hold-up, he wouldn’t have had the chance to sabotage therapy for Amber as thoroughly as he did. So I’d expect Stacey to divorce him after Amber turned 15 or so.
Oh no. I can only imagine Blaine won’t be happy about the possibility of having to pay for ambers party.
Also, is Mike planning to crash the party with the football team? Maybe thinking it would make Amber happy to have more people there?
I’m…
It’s going to be a while before we see the conclusion, isn’t it.
Amber is not the child that Blaine wants. This disappointment makes him feel entitled to demean her to total strangers and assume that her every personal characteristic is negative.
From personal experience, abusive people use stuff like that because they believe you want to be attractive, or other people want you to be attractive. It’s not about wanting the person to be attractive, just attacking something they’re probably already self conscious about it. Calling someone weak or ugly or fat etc, is not about wishing they hadn’t been. It’s about putting them down because you like them being down.
Okay… first off, Ethan didn’t say it was a party, just that it was her birthday, and that he was invited over. I point that out, because old ScumDad most likely isn’t expecting a “party”, and Mike is saying that to get a rise out of him, and see where it goes. Which will be (or was, as it’s a flashback) probably very bad for Amber and her mother.
I’m pretty sure he said he was going because of the way Blaine was talking about amber, not to “see where it goes”
Remember, no one was born an asshole
No, Mike is not the least naive, and he just spotted an ass in need of correcting and stepped in to bolster Amber. And now he understands Amber a whole lot better.
i never really hated mike, i find him kind of endearing most of the time, and this “redemption flashback” already makes me like him more, hehe. spite him good, mikey.
Just something to point out here. Notice how he goes from angry at his daughter to smiling and pleasant to this random new student, despite his rather disparaging comments towards Amber. It’s not the most on point portrayal of this kind of thing, but this is a pretty common thing among abusers in a variety of situations– outwardly, to other people, they’ll appear quite pleasant and normal, and who would ever believe such a nice person would be abusive? Surely those rumors are just silly, and the abused one’s making it up! It’s quite common, and very disturbing– gaslighting like this can be quite detrimental and ensure the abused one can’t reach out to anyone nearby, as their abuser has already convinced the world around them that there’s nothing going on. Chances are, a good number of people he might interact with at school will go in on the insults towards Amber, thinking it’s disparaging humor or good natured fun-poking and not a serious display of disdain.
If every absuive person was this obvious, and it’s really obvious how shitty he is, it would be way easier to spot them. Nobody is naive enough not to be weirded out by how he insults his own daughter.
That’s the thing about abuse; like, they make you feel that they’re just short-tempered or such and if you’d just be more careful and were better it wouldn’t happen, but they’re perfectly fine of behaving in other situations or around others.
Yeah. Blaine is not the most socially savvy abuser. Most I have known wouldn’t openly insult you. They’ll tell “funny stories” that make you look bad or five backhanded compliments or what have you.
He’s talking to a middle-schooler. Most kids that age aren’t known to be particularly subtle about such thing.
He’s using things he’d expect them to pick up on and probably spread as gossip.
He’d very likely be much more savvy with an adult.
Yeah, making sure your public persona is seen as a nice person is a common way for abusers to isolate their spouse and weakening their case if they ever do try to get help. A lot of people have dangerous preconceptions of what abusive spouses are supposed to act like but the reality is that it could be the friendliest person you know.
I made a longer post about this earlier, but it got removed? Unsure what happened there or if this one will stick.
Not always. There was that time Mike compared Amber to her dad. And the time he bought Walky pajama pants knowing it would make him break up with Dorothy. He apparently just randomly records Walky crying. Oh and there is his currently get close to Ethan to make Danny jealous plan. Sometimes Mike just does cruel things.
Mike a few times arguably could have been trying to help people in his own twisted way (like with Ethan about being gay), but he goes about it the most painful way possible which sends them running straight into denial first.
Yeah, and even considering those few times where he DOES end up having a positive effect on those he “helps”, are the methods he uses justified at all? Unless you’re the type of person who thinks “ends justifies means”, if Mike IS trying to be helpful, then there’s no reason for him to act like that.
JFC, Blaine, can you ever make me not want to hit you with my chair? He’s like an invasion monster in an old movie; even when he pretends to be human he can’t quite swing it.
To paraphrase Roger Zelazny, Mike is that evil which exists to destroy other evils. And on that bright day of which the prophets speak, but do not truly believe, on that day that all evil is destroyed forever, then he, too, will be hurled into the abyss, spitting curses… But until that day, he will not rest, or be turned from his path.
But Mike really hasn’t done a lot of destroying other evils. If that’s his purpose, he’d better get on the ball.
He seems to spend more of his time practicing on his “friends” and his roommate.
Forget Robin, BLAINE is the most accurate metaphor of the Trump “administration” (I use that word loosely): every time you think it can’t go lower, the shit rents heavy machinery (and doesn’t pay for it) and digs a deeper hole.
He could’ve finished that with “Basically,she looks just like me, only female. Goddamn, I’m ugly. Oh why couldn’t my &*#t mother just strangle me to death when I was born? Any idiot could tell I would eventually marry someone who looks like me, only female, and reproduce my hideous visage, hell or high water?”
Enough with the person you’re picking on. Let’s hear about YOU….
I’ve yet to see Kirk and Luann be that level of ‘professional scumbag’ or Milhouse have Amber level of both down-to-earth sex appeal and capability.
Blaine could still beat Kirk in a beauty contest, I’m sad to say….Unless it was an INNER beauty contest, which Kirk could win practically unopposed, even if the judges wouldn’t let him borrow a feeling!
Blaine, your motherfucker!!!!! Your expectations and abuse of Amber have caused her to have self esteem issues and a dual personality disorder that is ruining her life. Also, if you care more about the cost of her glasses than her life, then you deserve to burn in hell! I hope Amber becomes the Horde from Split and breaks your spine, leaving you a paraplegic jerk that requires constant maintenance, which will make your wife hate you more for wasting the family money.
Wow. I was in the airport and had some time before my flight. Went to a bookstore, and saw a book titled “Manangement Secrets of Attilla the Hun”. The first lines of the book were
“Every Hun serves a purpose. Sometimes the purpose is to be an example of a bad Hun.”
Don’t let them collide, that would cause the excessively high Asshole gradient to cause them to collapse into singularity of Assholery. An assblackhole, if you will.
Also, birthday party? Not if Blaine has anything to say about it. I’m guessing this is the first he’s heard of it, and he will make sure it doesn’t happen.
At least Mike’s behavior is justified. He’s an asshole because he’s responding to the idiocy around him.
Blaine’s an asshole because he thinks his daughter is too ugly to fuck.
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“I hope we play Pin the Tail on the Ass
hole Dad“Ah, Mike and Blaine in a comic, together at last
“hey, you got your asshole dad in my blond dickhead”
“well you got your blond dickhead in my asshole dad”wait fuckI’m sure even Mike has standards…
“You take that back!” — Mike (probably)
Oh, Mike and Blaine have been shown together before, in Shortpacked! Best meeting imo. http://www.shortpacked.com/comics/2012-04-13-lastrespects.png
Oh man, I’d forgotten how hard I shipped Mike/Amber in the Walkyverse. I should go reread Shortpacked!.
Right?! I need to as well! They worked so well together- they shouldn’t have but they really really did.
I LOVED (and still love) Mike and Amber’s Shortpacked relationship. Honestly one of my favorite, favorite things about the comic. I thought they worked great together.
A chill wind blew on my way home on this, a summers eve. A dozen crows circle counter-clockwise outside. My bowl of Alpha Bits cereal this morn spelled only the word D O O M. My cat has taken up knitting.
Signs and portents, a warning of dark things to come.
Sure enough, I open my browser, and here’s Blaine.
*”The Sound of silence” plays in the distance.*
The version by Disturbed!
…well you got the Summer’s Eve part right, Blaine’s the biggest douchebag around
Finish him, Mike. Finish him.
If only. Unless he’s playing the long, long, long game.
not until he gets his nickel
He will bang Blaine’s current wife… for a nickel.
Oh no….
why
This is so cute. It’s nice to see him change his mind.
Blaine, go die in a fire.
Technically he can’t, as this is a flashback. Fingers crossed on the future!
Any point in time is fine.
I’m just saying, would bringing him into some kind of time distortion event that causes him to never have been but nonetheless his offspring remain intact really be so bad?
… I think that was a Doctor Who plot, actually. We can make it happen, folks!
Well, we DO apparently have a “Dr Who” wandering around here…
As time is wibbly wobbly, there can be a possibilty for him to simply…let’s say “disappear” after fathering Amber – unless it causes too much of a time continuum disruption (similar to a situation with Rose, her father, and the Ninth Doctor).
I am okay with Blaine dying more than once, even.
Oh dear. Ethan only invited Mike over. He never said it was a party.
Misunderstandings abound.
mike said he knows they have no other friends.
*piglet voice* oh d-dear
Mike brings fifty other people to show Blaine that Amber has friends.
And he’ll fuck every one of them to convince them to come if he has to.
actually he’ll probably do it anyway but he’ll also fuck them over if they behave worse than “awkwardly polite to someone I don’t really know” toward Amber.
We do love to hate him.
“Know her? I’m married to her!”
“Wha-”
“Well, in another dimension.”
“… Like, on the computer?”
“No, a legit alternate universe. Where time runs differently from ours, and all of us are at least a decade older than we are here.”
“The hell are you talking abou-”
“You’re dead in that universe, just throwing that out there.”
It is on the computer, though.
“I wore a party hat to your funeral.”
I forgot about the party hat!! Thankee, I get to smile at that all over again.
He also wore a bright orange floral shirt, and brought a party blower and confetti. None of which is on display in the strip I’m linking here, really, but it will always be my favorite snippet there and even with all of DOA Amber’s trauma, I still have hope we’ll someday get that unambiguous catharsis of ‘I am everything without you’ here.
You know, after the twins go to college.
Here’s the strip referenced at the start of the above post:
http://www.shortpacked.com/comic/great
Ahhh, the funeral makes this strip hurt less. So nice to remember he is ultimately mortal.
Such a good sequence.
Just for reminders:
http://www.shortpacked.com/comic/visitation
Mike banged your daughter in another universe, and he will bang your wife and ex-wife in this universe, and then he will bang your own mother… for a nickel.
“Glasses she barely needs”? It’s already been established that at this age, she needs her glasses to read (and if Shortpacked! is an indication, her glasses will only become more important as she ages even into her twenties), so…
…fuck you Blaine.
I was just about to comment on that. Like, what a dick. He wears glasses, too. But I guess since it’s HIM, they’re an acceptable expense.
Well, that’s DIFFERENT. He actually NEEDS his glasses.
Blaine can suck 20 raw lemons in rapid succession.
Nah, grind them into his eyes.
Its half True.
She only needs glasses to read per Amber.
The assholery here is that he’s turning a positive into a negative.
instead of being proud of what she can do without them, he treats her basic needs as needless burdens. ( we have seen the athletics she is capable of without them )
This just shows what an asshole he is under all circumstances: No matter what level her eyesight was he would turn it into something ugly and hateful.
In Shortpacked! – in which we see Amber in her twenties, at least as of the beginning of the comic (it ran for a full decade and comic-time there progressed roughly in real-time, unlike Dumbing of Age) – Amber mentions at one point that she needs her glasses to be able to see most things clearly at all; she’s a little beyond “these glasses are just for reading” by that age.
This isn’t the Shortpacked universe. It’s possible in her 20s she’ll be near sighted like Walkyverse Amber but we’re probably never going to see her 20s, so we don’t know. For now, Adam is correct. They’re reading glasses.
And nothing I said contradicted that her glasses are, currently, reading glasses. 😛
Yeah, I just explaining things. 😛
If sexual orientations are the same here, I can’t imagine why vision ability would be different.
Yes, but as we said, Amber’s in her 20s in Shortpacked when she’s nearsighted. She still has time for that to happen. She’s 18 here and she’s already told Danny she can see without them.
Vision absolutely changes as you get older. I first needed glasses about 25 years ago, and until it stabilized in my mid-twenties my nearsightedness gradually got worse and astigmatism came and went twice. I still have an old pair from high school and can’t wear them for more than a couple minutes without getting a headache.
Well, ages have change, places of origins have changed, some ethnicities have been changed (Billie wasn’t Half-Chinese in the Walkyverse); some stuff is constant, some other stuff isn’t.
(Also, like, Jacob wears glasses in one universe and not the other so who knows)
Well, Billie changed half her genetics and family so anything is possible.
Also, Carla doesn’t have windshield wipers in this universe.
I mean he did call her a potato
And “Non-prom-queen-material”. Like, which kind of excuse-for-a-father does that in front of person of Ambers age at her school. Who might very well know Amber.
But in Blaine’s reality that is not even a slight possibility that someone at her effing school even knew Amber, much less a boy, and I’m freaking scared of how Blaine will either physically or verbally abuse Amber for first of all being remembered by a class colleague who was also invited to a ‘party’ which in his opinion would probably be very undeserved.
…
Today’s strip is brought to you by Ore-Ida’s TATER TOTS. When it’s Ore-Ida, it’s ALL RIGHTA.
SPITE FRIENDSHIP
Spite is a totally unacknowledged virtue.
I feel like I should do something about that…
I believe it falls more into the spectrum of a vice, but one never knows
aaand now that ominous feeling is pure terror
*runs over to bunker, jumps inside, and closes the door*
But seriously, I feel like Mike’s just gonna keep getting his worldview darkened. And whenever he tries to help by throwing down for someone in a nice but assertive way, he’ll get his ass handed to him from someone in a position of authority…
Yet he’s still Ethan and Amber’s friend.
There’s still that glimmer of idealism in the cynic.
I have a feeling you’re right. I keep remembering Mike’s brief moments of kindness. Empathizing with Sal about the broken system when he learns about her and Jason. Pointing out to Walky about the TA honestly trying to help. It’s like he’s been broken down so often, he has a “them or me” attitude.
All the same, kudos to Baby Mike for wanting to be there for Amber when he sees Blaine.
It’s very hard for me to think of either of those as “moments of kindness”. I mean, he agrees with Sal it’s a broken system, but it’s not clear what he wants her to take from that agreement and his expressions doesn’t really show any empathy.
It may not be that he has a motive or reasoning he wants her to take away.
Maybe he just wanted to express agreement.
This is Mike. He always has a motive.
And the facial expression isn’t really “agreement”.
Aaand shitstain dad at 6 o clock
Ugh, Blaine is such a dick. Good on Mike for…[something positive] for Amber.
Is Mike motivated here by a tiny spark of goodness or does he just hate abusers so much he counters them automatically?
I have to admit, the thought of Mike’s fully weaponized assholery directed at Blaine does have a certain appeal. Obviously not going to happen in this story line, though.
Never know.
Anyway, guess they are in high school? So that puts these flashbacks after the convenience store hold-up? Or maybe their school is, like, grades 7-12.
I mean if Amber’s 4 feet tall at the time they’d have to be in elementary school. Unless that’s an exaggeration.
See the sign in the first panel
She’s not much more than 5 feet tall in the present.
Remember, half the cast is really short.
Do we know how tall everyone is? The most concrete figure I’ve found on the wiki is that Walkyverse Joyce is 5’4”. Assuming she’s the same height here, and you usually don’t get any taller once you’re college-age, that gives us a benchmark.
I’m 4 foot 8 and an adult. Admittedly I am unusually short for an adult but if Amber isn’t much taller as a fully grown adult I could believe she isn’t 5 foot yet (probably a bit over 4 foot still though!)
Patreon says they’re in junior high school, it’s just the framing of the shot that cuts off the word ‘junior’.
From what their appearance I’d say Ethan and Amber are both some years younger than at the hold-up.
It looks like, at her very oldest, this upcoming birthday might be Amber turning 13 (which is how old she was at the robbery).
Okay, that makes sense. I was pretty sure they were in middle school, but then the “star quarterback” and cut off sign happened and I didn’t know anymore.
I want so badly for Mike to be a hero here… but my dread feeling is that Amber is the reason why he’s such a jerk to everyone. And that we’re going to find out why.
Or Blaine is responsible for Mike’s whatever you want to call it.
I’m hoping in the end Mike is just a bad person. I’d like to avoid the Twilight apologia and go with the idea he’s a nasty person because he likes putting people down rather than he’s some Heathcliffian tragic hero.
Willis can obviously go any direction he likes but that’s my thoughts.
Why, though? In what sense is making him a bad person for absolutely no reason better than giving a sensible explanation for what soured him?
I think it’s pretty clear already that Mike wasn’t always as nasty as he is now (unless you can come up with a good reason why, for instance, he confronted Ms. Phillips about Amber’s grades on the latter’s behalf – that would be for the purpose of “being nasty”). Something made Mike the way he was.
The issue is that jerks being jerks because they’re jerks aren’t really compelling characters, while character with a reason for their douchiness are much more fun to write.
It’s less about what’s realistic or not realistic. More about how, if a character is going to be a semi-major one with regular appearances (and an easy source of punchlines in a strip-a-day comic, that’s always going to be a factor), they need to be multi-dimensional, otherwise they just end up, well, flat.
Very much this!
As a bonus, it just occurred to me that having a character who is a jerk, especially on the level Mike typically is, around as a character that the rest of the cast tolerates or even treats as acceptable could send a message that acting like that is somehow acceptable in real life. That it’s as okay for you to be a Mike as it is okay to be a Joyce or an Amber or a Walky or a whoever.
Of course, this is Dumbing of Age, so it’s more like “acceptable as long as you’re trying to get better”, but hopefully that’s part of what this Mike arc is setting up!
It’s not super realistic either. Most people have a reason to be an assface even if its not a super sympathetic one – like believing they’re better than someone else, or because of a sense of entitlement or a sense of boredom and lack of compassion.
Everyone thinks they’re right, and are behaving in a perfectly logical and reasonable manner. That whole “Everyone is the hero of their own movie,” thing.
Jerks who are just jerks because the storyline demands it, or for the sake of a punchline, without any internal consistency or reasoning for it (even if it’s never shown to the audience) just play (as mentioned above) flat and boring and unrealistic, because everyone has reasonably consistent internal motivation (usually based upon “I am right in this and this is a reasonable way for me to react in this moment”), whether or not the author chooses to show or share that motivation or not.
OTOH, certain characters aren’t particularly realistic and their behavior patterns weren’t ever designed that way. In this comic in particular where many characters originate in a much less serious genre, delving into realistic backgrounds to provide motivation for behavior that was originally intended for wacky hijinks can easily fall flat.
That doesn’t mean Mike’s behavior can’t be internally consistent, but I’m not sure there’s a point in digging into the motivations for it, unless that’s going to form the basis for character growth away from it. But the behavior is the point of Mike and if he changes he won’t be Mike anymore.
Nor am I sure I’d actually believe any origin story for Mike. Or care, really. He’s an unusually perceptive real-life Internet Edgelord. On the one hand, there’s plenty of people who want to be like that around, so no real origin is needed. On the other, the cartoon aspect lies in how absurdly good at it he is, the lengths he goes to and how he doesn’t suffer the consequences that make most such people keep it to the Internet.
Well, that’s not ENTIRELY true. There are people who think its funny to mess with people for shits and giggles. That’s hardly ‘hero of their own movie’ material, even if most of them have a reason the other person ‘deserved’ it. Plus people do things they know are wrong all the time because they don’t believe there will be consequences or because they believe they’re superior. There’s a fine line between ‘everyone has to be a person with motives, goals, and a general reason for what they do’ and ‘everyone’s the hero of their own story’ imo.
Basically, because I think a lot of fiction goes out of its way to make excuses for saying, “He had a rough time of it and became a bad person.” We’re living in a time of Alt-Right douchebags who grew up in loving homes with caring families but they became misogynists, bullies, and racists just because they liked it. I think it’d be appropriate for Mike to simply enjoy being mean to people and not have him be some tragic Don Quixote figure who was disillusioned by life.
Hey, it could be both. Baby Mike almost always looks stressed as hell in these flashbacks (from the small extra lines he keeps having by his eyes and eyebrows), it could be that his natural personality is to be an asshole but at this point in his life he was trying to always hide his real reactions and playact friendliness and something is going to make him go ‘Fuck it,’ and stop bothering.
My bet is that he’ll turn out to be someone who *chooses* to be a bad person most of the time, but we’ll find out why he decided that was a good idea and why he’s not-outright-evil enough to be friends with good people, if that makes sense? Like, Raidah and Malaya are also pretty much bad people, but they’re a specific type of bad people and we have a little more idea why they do that than we do Mike. Part of the reason some people don’t see Mike as a bad person is he’s kind of simplistic comic relief and I think changing that might be the goal.
How is Malaya a bad person? Because she didn’t like the roommate that wouldn’t leave her alone or respect her boundries? Because she fights with the woman who was rude to her, threatened her, assaulted her all because she didn’t like that Malaya was spending time with her friend?
She’s a jerk almost all the time. She’s rude, she’s egocentric, she’s judgemental and she only acts sort-of-nice when she wants something.
She does seem to be generally nice to Marcie. For reasons that are unclear.
Malaya treats Sal like shit because Sal hates her. That’s really not her being a bad person.
It is unclear why Malaya treats Sal like shit. It’s unclear which way that started and who first treated the other badly. Malaya seems to treat Sal badly because she thinks Sal’s a poser who pretends not to care about anyone’s opinion but is really out to seem so cool – when in fact that’s a far more apt description of Malaya.
But that wasn’t my point. Malaya might treat Sal worse, but she doesn’t seem to be nice to anyone. Marcie is the only exception I can think of.
Who is Malaya nice to, aside Marcie, kind of, and also Joe prior to their Slipshine?
I can remember her being rude to Carla and Lucy, but I can’t remember her being nice, or even polite.
Oh no non nein nun neit na mi hai Aí O’hi new nee Iie nahi voch
Oh good, I’d thought today had been going too well.
I don’t like where this is going. I don’t know where this is going. I don’t like where this is going.
I don’t like where this is going.
oh no
Blaine is awful, but I also really dislike this attitude toward prison rape.
+1 to this.
Ok. I was confused, wondering why Mike said he was going to Amber’s party when he declined before. But some people have interpreted it as him changing his mind due to Blaine’s asshole aura, and I can get behind that.
Alternatively, he just changed his mind on his own, or he wanted to be a surprise.
Although the latter is kind of dickish.
“Spite.”
I’m just throwing out one of several guesses at his motivation here, but if Mike doesn’t show up, Blaine and Amber can get into a spat over the reason, and Mike gets to be the reason for the argument, and therefore important to them. It’s egocentric, inconsiderate, and therefore pointlessly spiteful? That’s Mike to a T.
Alternatively, he is doing his best to be a good person here, but is also interacting with Blaine deliberately to learn Amber’s weaknesses and problems, so that he has a “defense” against her if she becomes a problem for him, and can help her out if it suits him, respectively.
If Mike is complicated in his own way, it’s most likely because his default survival method is to play people’s expectations and then play them off each other, in the most effective and straightforward way – without changing anyone’s opinions of him.
I don’t think Mike has gotten that awful or calculating, yet.
And that shitstain is back.
So looks like we’re continuing the Breaking of Mike.
please let mike get to punch blaine in this universe (http://www.shortpacked.com/comic/big-sister)
*nostalgic sigh* Ah, these two.
Thank you for reminding me of how much I love that pair. And how badly I want a comic about the warners
“Come join the Warner brothers
(and the Warner sister Dot).
Just for fun we run around
the Warner movie lot…”
I feel dirty agreeing with Blaine, but Amber kind of does look like a potato.
She grows into a hot potato, though.
If you would like to stop agreeing with Blaine, may I recommend re-contextualizing her as a a gosh-danged hamster?
*deliberating*……….*Accepted!*……I am purified!
….Thank you.
Glad I could help!
And just like that, I’m rooting for Mike.
1: Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper fuck Blaine.
2: I’m thinking this might be the day that broke Mike. Good odds that he’s going to do something similar to what Danny did, not realize that Amber’s dad is a sociopathic fucking bastard… and he’s going to get Amber hurt.
3: Then again… he did say he wasn’t going…
…oof…
*grabs the popcorn*
Awwwwww, that’s sweet
Oh hey, a Blaine flashback, surely the thing everyone has been hoping for…… not.
And Mike is being so cute here. I don’t trust it.
Oh shit.
Since we know Blaine is still alive in the future the only positive thing I can see coming out of this is exposing his philandering in such a way that Stacey begins divorce proceedings.
We do know that Stacy divorced him long after the knife incident which was obviously much later.
So this flashback is gonna go way down the rabbit hole of Amber’s and Mike’s back stories and we can’t stop Blaine because it all already happened.
I thought it was “not long after” the knife incident and I’m not sure how much later that was. They were 13 then – which tends to be around 8th grade.
They’re currently in middle school/junior high, which is annoyingly broad, but puts them somewhere from 5-8th grade, probably towards the top end.
The lower end of that would make the sexual overtones of some of the strips increasingly creepy.
I’d guess the robbery is next year, but this could be Amber’s 13th birthday and it could be anytime after that – potentially just weeks away.
If Stacey had left Blaine shortly after the hold-up, he wouldn’t have had the chance to sabotage therapy for Amber as thoroughly as he did. So I’d expect Stacey to divorce him after Amber turned 15 or so.
That’s what I’d kind of thought too, but there was a comment somewhere about the divorce finalizing soon afterwards.
I just can’t find it now.
Blaine resembles a six-foot sack of crap with a larynx he barely needs.
Oh no. I can only imagine Blaine won’t be happy about the possibility of having to pay for ambers party.
Also, is Mike planning to crash the party with the football team? Maybe thinking it would make Amber happy to have more people there?
I’m…
It’s going to be a while before we see the conclusion, isn’t it.
Mike of the triangular smile
*twitches*
So hey, prison rape isn’t a joke and it isn’t okay, no matter what those folks did to end up there.
Why are words like potato always used to describe body types that some scumbag dickfuck doesn’t find sexually appealing.
Does he want her to be sexually appealing.
He wants her to be attractive to him, is that it.
He is fucking disgusting.
Potato would definitely be in Trumps vocabulary.
Of course not. It’s a vegetable.
Agreed. Add to that, why would you say such things about your own daughter to a stranger? He really is an irredeemable piece of crap, isn’t he?
Amber is not the child that Blaine wants. This disappointment makes him feel entitled to demean her to total strangers and assume that her every personal characteristic is negative.
Agreed. She would be a string bean to Blaine if she were a 5’9″ middle schooler with the grace of an Audrey Hepburn.
Blaine is an ass who will make up something out of thin air, if need be, to insult her.
From personal experience, abusive people use stuff like that because they believe you want to be attractive, or other people want you to be attractive. It’s not about wanting the person to be attractive, just attacking something they’re probably already self conscious about it. Calling someone weak or ugly or fat etc, is not about wishing they hadn’t been. It’s about putting them down because you like them being down.
Okay… first off, Ethan didn’t say it was a party, just that it was her birthday, and that he was invited over. I point that out, because old ScumDad most likely isn’t expecting a “party”, and Mike is saying that to get a rise out of him, and see where it goes. Which will be (or was, as it’s a flashback) probably very bad for Amber and her mother.
Mike was always an a-hole, wasn’t he?
I’m pretty sure he said he was going because of the way Blaine was talking about amber, not to “see where it goes”
Remember, no one was born an asshole
No.
No.
Is this why he is an ass? He was Naively nice to Amber’s abuser? He hurt Amber indirectly?
Jesus.
He’s not being naively nice, he’s going when he said he wouldn’t out of spite toward Blaine.
This. It also shows Blaine that his daughter has more friends than just Ethan.
Mike is a lot of things, but not naive.
No, Mike is not the least naive, and he just spotted an ass in need of correcting and stepped in to bolster Amber. And now he understands Amber a whole lot better.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this!
Dum-dum-dum what a beautiful da… FUDGE THIS FUDGING FUDGER!!!!
i never really hated mike, i find him kind of endearing most of the time, and this “redemption flashback” already makes me like him more, hehe. spite him good, mikey.
Just something to point out here. Notice how he goes from angry at his daughter to smiling and pleasant to this random new student, despite his rather disparaging comments towards Amber. It’s not the most on point portrayal of this kind of thing, but this is a pretty common thing among abusers in a variety of situations– outwardly, to other people, they’ll appear quite pleasant and normal, and who would ever believe such a nice person would be abusive? Surely those rumors are just silly, and the abused one’s making it up! It’s quite common, and very disturbing– gaslighting like this can be quite detrimental and ensure the abused one can’t reach out to anyone nearby, as their abuser has already convinced the world around them that there’s nothing going on. Chances are, a good number of people he might interact with at school will go in on the insults towards Amber, thinking it’s disparaging humor or good natured fun-poking and not a serious display of disdain.
If every absuive person was this obvious, and it’s really obvious how shitty he is, it would be way easier to spot them. Nobody is naive enough not to be weirded out by how he insults his own daughter.
That’s the thing about abuse; like, they make you feel that they’re just short-tempered or such and if you’d just be more careful and were better it wouldn’t happen, but they’re perfectly fine of behaving in other situations or around others.
Yeah. Blaine is not the most socially savvy abuser. Most I have known wouldn’t openly insult you. They’ll tell “funny stories” that make you look bad or five backhanded compliments or what have you.
He’s talking to a middle-schooler. Most kids that age aren’t known to be particularly subtle about such thing.
He’s using things he’d expect them to pick up on and probably spread as gossip.
He’d very likely be much more savvy with an adult.
Yeah, making sure your public persona is seen as a nice person is a common way for abusers to isolate their spouse and weakening their case if they ever do try to get help. A lot of people have dangerous preconceptions of what abusive spouses are supposed to act like but the reality is that it could be the friendliest person you know.
I made a longer post about this earlier, but it got removed? Unsure what happened there or if this one will stick.
you commented on an older comic a few hours ago, was that it? http://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/rhetorical/#comment-1336617
Hah, yeah. Doy!
And my brain had inflated it a bit as well, I guess I didn’t actually post quite the rant I thought.
Feelin’ _clever_.
Never forget Blaine. Never forgive Blaine.
Blaine is a pain and that is the truth.
Blaine, be gone!
Except Amber’s dad is about power and control. Mike usually is pushing people out of their comfort zone and ultimately it helps them.
Not always. There was that time Mike compared Amber to her dad. And the time he bought Walky pajama pants knowing it would make him break up with Dorothy. He apparently just randomly records Walky crying. Oh and there is his currently get close to Ethan to make Danny jealous plan. Sometimes Mike just does cruel things.
Mike a few times arguably could have been trying to help people in his own twisted way (like with Ethan about being gay), but he goes about it the most painful way possible which sends them running straight into denial first.
Yeah, and even considering those few times where he DOES end up having a positive effect on those he “helps”, are the methods he uses justified at all? Unless you’re the type of person who thinks “ends justifies means”, if Mike IS trying to be helpful, then there’s no reason for him to act like that.
I see how Young Mike acts and I’m angry because I’m like, who broke Mike? Maybe it was Blaine.
I’m wincing wondering exactly what Mike did undercover all those years.
I love Mike’s hair in the last panel
JFC, Blaine, can you ever make me not want to hit you with my chair? He’s like an invasion monster in an old movie; even when he pretends to be human he can’t quite swing it.
Oh. Oh no.
To paraphrase Roger Zelazny, Mike is that evil which exists to destroy other evils. And on that bright day of which the prophets speak, but do not truly believe, on that day that all evil is destroyed forever, then he, too, will be hurled into the abyss, spitting curses… But until that day, he will not rest, or be turned from his path.
…
… I am in awe. That is beautiful.
Indeed. Mike has a mission of which I approve.
Zelazny’s great.
But Mike really hasn’t done a lot of destroying other evils. If that’s his purpose, he’d better get on the ball.
He seems to spend more of his time practicing on his “friends” and his roommate.
Forget Robin, BLAINE is the most accurate metaphor of the Trump “administration” (I use that word loosely): every time you think it can’t go lower, the shit rents heavy machinery (and doesn’t pay for it) and digs a deeper hole.
And now we find out how Mike became such an asshole…
Mike, next to Blaine, isn’t so bad, is he?
Sorta like considering Malaya alone v. Malaya next to Mary.
He could’ve finished that with “Basically,she looks just like me, only female. Goddamn, I’m ugly. Oh why couldn’t my &*#t mother just strangle me to death when I was born? Any idiot could tell I would eventually marry someone who looks like me, only female, and reproduce my hideous visage, hell or high water?”
Enough with the person you’re picking on. Let’s hear about YOU….
So Amber’s parents are like Milhouse’s parents?
Milhouse had parents? I thought he just kinda showed up one day and befriended Bart.
I’ve yet to see Kirk and Luann be that level of ‘professional scumbag’ or Milhouse have Amber level of both down-to-earth sex appeal and capability.
Blaine could still beat Kirk in a beauty contest, I’m sad to say….Unless it was an INNER beauty contest, which Kirk could win practically unopposed, even if the judges wouldn’t let him borrow a feeling!
Blaine, your motherfucker!!!!! Your expectations and abuse of Amber have caused her to have self esteem issues and a dual personality disorder that is ruining her life. Also, if you care more about the cost of her glasses than her life, then you deserve to burn in hell! I hope Amber becomes the Horde from Split and breaks your spine, leaving you a paraplegic jerk that requires constant maintenance, which will make your wife hate you more for wasting the family money.
Wow. I was in the airport and had some time before my flight. Went to a bookstore, and saw a book titled “Manangement Secrets of Attilla the Hun”. The first lines of the book were
“Every Hun serves a purpose. Sometimes the purpose is to be an example of a bad Hun.”
That’s Blaine as a father in a nutshell.
Don’t let them collide, that would cause the excessively high Asshole gradient to cause them to collapse into singularity of Assholery. An assblackhole, if you will.
Also, birthday party? Not if Blaine has anything to say about it. I’m guessing this is the first he’s heard of it, and he will make sure it doesn’t happen.
At least Mike’s behavior is justified. He’s an asshole because he’s responding to the idiocy around him.
Blaine’s an asshole because he thinks his daughter is too ugly to fuck.
Nah, he’d be an asshole anyway. There’d be another excuse if Amber were tall and thin.
Blaine is exactly how my father was. I probably relate to Amber the most in this comic.
I’m sorry.
Mike barely knows Brent Fruth and was winding Ethan up confirmed. This is going to be good. Or very very bad.
Birthday party? I’m getting a Carrie-esqe “everything going wrong with pigs blood” vibe, despite what I assume are good intentions by Mike.