And God’s Avatar of Divine Fatherhood in His Own Mind is conveniently too dead to ever have to return the favor after all the supposed excuses Carol has made for him all these years, so there’s no way to prove he wouldn’t just continue to play along and take take take like always.
A life devoted to being an enabler rarely ends well, and I thank Hank has just realized that applies to both him and Carol. John wasn’t worth it. Jordan wasn’t worth it. “Josh” wasn’t worth it. Bonnie wasn’t worth it. Becky wasn’t worth it. Joyce now seems to have lost desire to be worth it. But that insincere sponge Ross is worth everyone throwing themselves under a bus?!
Probably honest to God believed he was devoting he best years of his life to a bunch to would stand by their own beyond this human prawn-version of hardcore crew-gangbangery, too.
Helps if you see it as a precautionary tale….Can and does happen to any of us.
someone from her specific shitty church died. that means they all (everyone else) won, because anyone not in her shitty church is actively against it in her eyes
This is what happened when you not only build your entire religion around a savior who is a martyr, but also build your entire current culture around being martyrs, even when you are not actually being persecuted at all.
The ‘also’ is important in my assessment. It isn’t about Christ, it’s about certain sects keying in on only the martyrdom aspect and building their entire ethos around that while ignoring everything else he is supposed to have taught.
Yeah, it’s not really blaming Christ, but just one of the ways people interpret the message. It’s a pretty striking one though, at least in modern times. There’s a huge emphasis on Christians being persecuted for their faith today in parts of the world where Christianity is overwhelmingly dominant that doesn’t really make sense without some deeper motivation.
It’s not ubiquitous though. Catholicism, for example, puts a lot of emphasis on martyred saints and the like, but I don’t think it had the same kind of “you will be persecuted for your faith” concept throughout most of its history.
Maybe it’s because they already did that to found their faith, and have actually been persecuted since then too (various times/conflicts), so they do not feel the need to make up bs persecution stories today, to validate themselves with their identity.
But all of Christianity descends from that same persecutions at the founding and Protestants were persecuted after splitting from the dominant Catholic Church as well.
The belief that all evil stems from a single source is actually pretty common among conservative Christians–there’s even a Chick Tract that displays the Devil as a hydra, with heads all labeled different ‘evils’ including Communism, Homosexuality, Paganism, Islam and Atheism. Basically, anyone who is not in their particular sect of Christianity is part of the singular ‘you’ against whom they struggle.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be, but it is. If Toedad had his way and Becky got kidnapped to be “straightened out,” then we’d definitely say that she “lost,” ergo, that not happening means the kids won. Of course, Linda isn’t really on Team Joyce and Co, so saying “You won” probably lines up more with Axel’s comment.
Like, it paints a weird version of the story where Linda and the rest of the world are in some fight against him rather than one of Linda’s family having been the victim of unprovoked violence from the guy.
Nicely done, Hank!
Also, holy crap that logic there – “If you listen to the adults, then you don’t get hurt!” has to be right up there with “If you had my dinner cooked, I wouldn’t have had to hit you!” in terms of excusing and minimizing abusive behaviors.
The one who said love your neighbour, whose father dictated an entirely ambiguous book that suggests gays and lesbians are going to go straight to hell, at least in some interpretations?
Oh oh!
I recently read that the anti-gay stuff is actually a mistranslated of some anti-pedophilia stuff. As in “a man should not lay with a young boy”.
That said, I read this on the internet, so grain of salt at best, but still, if it’s true, that’s a pretty major fuck-up on someone’s part.
I remember one of my older sisters bringing the same thing up once in an in-person convo years back (she also mentioned, IIRC, how in the case of the Roman centurion who had that “male servant” that Jesus healed long-distance, said “servant” was actually the centurion’s lover).
But years ago I realized it doesn’t actually matter. Religion is more then the holy text (even if they claim it’s super-important), it’s also the teachings, values and culture. And regardless of what the text may or may not have meant in the original Hebrew over 2000 years ago, the current common interpretation has held steady for centuries.
You’re not going to undermine that by going “um, actually…” and trying to argue that their interpretation of the text is wrong. You can undermine it other ways, and they may eventually come around to the whole “their interpretation fo the text is wrong” bit, but that will always, 100% of the time, be a post hoc rationalization of their changing beliefs, not the impetus of their changing beliefs.
That’s fair. Still, as a non-Christian looking in, it’s interesting to see how some of these things might have worked.
Also, on that same point, I’ve also encountered a lot of modern churches that have simply chosen to be better. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but years ago, I dated both a Jewish lesbian and a Catholic lesbian* (years apart, not at the same time) both of whom came from denominations of their respective religion that fully embraced and accepted LGBT+ individuals. When I got introduced around, I got the “so when you two gonna get married?” shtick rather than any hate.
So yeah, I get what you mean about the text being less important than people just choosing to be better. And it’s super nice when it happens. ^^
* Technically she was bisexual, not lesbian, but the sentence flow and grammar worked better using lesbian. This note included for accuracy.
Pretty much. Despite all the theological arguments and Bible passage quoting, huge amounts of Christian belief aren’t particularly sourced in the Bible’s text.
There’s even a passage in one of the later books that says that God created lesbians to punish men for being unpious. So you go, girls–you’re doing the Lord’s work!
The problem is that the text, whichever version, is taken to be the god‘s one god’s true word without any individual and cultural bias in it.
As if, if god is all encompassing and so much greater than humans, any human would be able to understand all of it.
Hu, the text box is cut off. If the sentences have double words, that’s the reason.
I think the logic goes that if Ross’s daughter had listened to him, then he (the adult) would not have been sent to prison, bailed out, drafted into a kidnapping conspiracy and ultimately murdered.
He had no agency in these events: it was all Becky’s fault.
It gets worse, “if Eve hadn’t Fed the apple to Adam,…”
Other inside of the coin is, if she hadn’t, they’d still be the only two people on this planet. Without the knowledge of good and evil there’s no Hummenah-hummenah! Which leads to children, often.
Not quite. See the Jewish legend of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was banished from Eden because she refused to lay beneath him. So apparently, so long as they were doing missionary position, Adam and Eve could’ve been pumping out lots and lots of little kids.
Now, who THOSE kids were supposed to sleep with is a little dodgy…..
Well, he was doing his duty as a parent, in his world-view.
It’s the same mindset of anyone be who is overconfident in their own decision making framework.
No, Ross (and I’m speaking in Mrsbrown-ese here) is one of the adults to be listened to. And he, of course was listening to the version of Jesus that best excuses her attitude and that of the alleged church.
There’s an interesting point in here somewhere about how making right/wrong issues into problems of individual virtue instead of problems of like what’s actually happening is really useful for abuse, victim-blaming and rationalization, but I refuse to write comment section essays. Still, it’s definitely an interesting window into Carol’s terrible mind. It doesn’t matter that the kids were traumatized; just that Ross was a good person because he didn’t do anything she sees as capital W “wrong”
Not just excusing and minimizing abuse, but actively facilitating it too. This kind of phrase could be wielded directly by abusers in the way you mention, but it could also open the door for other abusers to take advantage more indirectly. Teaching children that some people are inherently trustworthy is a major way that pedophiles can get access.
And at the risk of a derail, I have to say that in today’s America, it also really brings to mind rhetoric used by and about the police. “If he had just complied with their instructions and not resisted, he’d still be alive.” (Which is, on top of everything, objectively false in multiple cases I can name.)
Yeah, kinda hard to “comply” when you’ve got two (or more) cops yelling mutually contradictory orders at the same time. Or some yahoo with no uniform or insignia kicking in your door in the middle of the night.
Damn, it must have cost Mr.Willis a PILE emotional capital to work through this page. Glad he did, it’s awesome, but dang! Having to draw a Mom run off her rails,… damn.
Tip o’ the hat, Dave.
Carol isn’t running off her rails. That is sort of the point, with the rails left hanging over an abyss into which the bridge had crumbled and Carol’s engine full on track.
It really depends on whether the adult is saying “Doing that thing has inherent consequences, and you could hurt yourself,” or “Doing that thing is something I don’t like, and I could hurt you.”
If you believe, as Ross did, that being gay has an inherent consequence of going to Hell for eternity, then you believe you are in the first category, and any threat you bring to that person is nothing compared to eternal damnation.
That’s not really what I meant by inherent consequences.
It’s part of a parent’s job to stop a child from doing dangerous things, for example. Do that thing and doing the thing will harm you.
“Listen to me and you won’t get hurt,” is a very different phrase if I’m an expert helping you do something dangerous than it is if you’re a hostage.
Maybe I did misunderstand – thinking about Carol and more “If Becky obeyed Ross, none of this would have happened”, rather than “Do what the kidnappers tell you because they’re adults”.
“Do what I say and nobody gets hurt,” is a threat, and is what she intended.
Her actual words, though, aren’t inherently wrong. Those same words mean something different if you’re a young kid “helping” make cookies with parents who don’t want you to handle knives or touch the oven. Or from staying up too late and being too tired for school the next day. Or in any other case where the adult (or perhaps the expert, if you are an adult) is helping to navigate things you haven’t internalized yet. Situations where doing the wrong thing is what hurts you, not any “punishment.”
Perhaps it wasn’t relevant, but that’s all I was musing on.
…because it has the word “consequences” in it? Otherwise that has nothing to do with what I said.
I also note that one of the examples on that page is very poor: “If there is objective morality, then good moral behavior will be rewarded after death.”
Those two things are unrelated. The fact that the example person used the fallacy to draw a faulty conclusion is undermined by the fact that their statement was already illogical.
Not to worry. As soon as it is pointed out that her arguments could apply to her telling her own kids what to do, she’ll start arguing against herself.
Phew. Okay, I was worried for a few seconds there.
It’s so horrible for some personal reasons. STORYTIME™: A long time ago, in high school, I had this advisor who I really grew to loathe. Much like Linda, she expressed whatever affection she had in a way that was so self-centered that it barely felt like affection. This was someone who repeatedly lied to my face and didn’t think I was smart enough to be able to cross the street. I should be hella mad at Linda all the time, because that’s just the kind of person she is.
Probably because Linda is an awful person, but Carol comes from an awful culture/religion. Carol might not have been an awful person if her church wasn’t awful.
It was mentioned a longer time ago, but Joyce’s parents did a lot of church-hopping before selecting their current one (and I assume that most of the search was driven by her since Hank seems more apt at fitting in). It is no accident Carol ended up where she is.
Let me fix that for you: Linda was using her past marriage to the Dean to try and get Amber kicked out of school for something her dad did, just at the beginning of last strip.
Carol may make Linda look good by comparison but that’s like saying a dog turd looks better than vomit. It might be true but both are disgusting.
I am now trying to work out which I would rather have to clean off the carpet. I am mainly making myself feel very thankful we have a carpet cleaner, mind.
Yeah, Carol actually has a point here with the “I suppose you let your kids do whatever they want” and Linda’s response isn’t really that honest. Sure, she probably wouldn’t go as far as supporting a kidnapper, but the big difference here isn’t that but that she doesn’t agree with why Carol supported him.
I suspect she’d take some pretty drastic actions of her own to shape her kids the way she wants them.
I want Walky out of that house and financially independent from Linda AS SOON AS FUCKING POSSIBLE, especially since we’ve SEEN Linda steal money from one child to leverage ‘proper’ behavior out of her. It didn’t work because Sal gets angry in response to this bullshit, but Walky’s a freeze and fawner.
I’d like to say that, having found his spine once, Walky will be fine, but he hasn’t had to hold his position against anything beyond stunned silence yet. And knowing Linda, that won’t happen again.
He’s also clearly terrified of Linda and her disapproval, and he’s not ready to cut her out of his life entirely (which: Fair.) Sal’s pretty much past the point of expecting anything from her parents, and she was still clearly hurt and disappointed when they so thoroughly brushed her off at Freshman Family Weekend. Walky’s only just starting to realize Linda’s got serious issues, and I don’t think he’s connected yet that if her issues with Sal were sometimes arbitrary and sometimes holding her to completely unreasonable standards, that issues she’d develop with Walky would be just as arbitrary and unreasonable.
I can see the path he’s headed on potentially leading to ‘no, you know what? I’m not subjecting myself to this anymore’ (wanting to expel your friend and fellow kidnapping victim for things her father did to hurt her is so clearly unreasonable that I can see both twins pointing to it later as one of those moments that led to them going no-contact,) but he’s not there yet. And I’d want them to have things in place when they do. (Paperwork, place to live, job, even a small amount of savings to cushion things would help.)
Yeah, that would be a bit traumatic for Joyce. But I want to see her delivering a total mic-drop moral bomb statement putting both mothers in their respective places simultaneously.
Carol is being openly very very evil.
Linda is essentially criticizing her own behavior. Is lying better?
In this case, probably! Linda might even learn something; unfortunately there are no witnesses knowledgeable enough to point out the contradiction. Except Charles.
Carol had third worst parent on lock the instant she let Ross out of jail, and easily takes 2nd now that Ross is dead. Linda is a turd sandwich but she never even came close to “release someone that pointed a gun at my kid.”
And if by “mildly interested” I meant “only barely gives a shit in any of the ways that matter as a parent as long as they succeed, and that’s the best we can hope for…” 😛
And at least with Walky, intends to make him succeed in the way she wants with no concern for what he wants. (He thinks he’s majoring in communications, but he’s really going to be a doctor.)
She is completely delusional if she thinks Walky can get into medical school. The average student accepted has shadowed a medical professional, done biology research, has a GPA of 3.7+, etc. etc. I’ve seen the stats when I was helping a friend apply – he had all of that and still wasn’t accepted.
I think her big flaw is that she cannot see that Sal has changed, and still treats her like that girl who was lashing out. Part of that is that Sal has given up on the relationship so she can’t see the change, a big part is that they basically cut the ability to see the growth by shipping her off to boarding school, but the biggest part is that I think Linda has those blinders that a lot of adults get where they can’t see their children as anything but what they were at their worst.
Anyway, because she can’t see the change, she keeps reacting like it’s 13-year-old Sal doing things when everybody else can see that that girl doesn’t exist anymore. Not in that way.
Carol, on the other hand, seems perfectly willing to sacrifice her children for her god. And to do so without even the remorse of Abraham. Which is way more scary to me.
Linda also doesn’t seem to realize that Sal’s lashing out was largely caused by how she treated her from the get go.
However, she acknowledges that kidnapping and threatening children is wrong, which is such an incredibly low bar that she really shouldn’t get points for it, but it’s still more than you can say for Carol, so…
i think this is the point that Carol starts losing people. Hank’s clearly reaching his breakpoint, if Hank reaches it Jocelyne will likely feel free to reach hers and come out…leaving Linda and John as the only stains.
I’m really, REALLY hoping that Hank has the strength to turn his back here. I’ve been worried that he might end up so entrenched in fundamentalism that… even if he does make the effort not to judge Becky, there’s only so much he’ll be able to change.
As for Joyce and Jocelyne…. well. Even if we don’t know if they know it, they’ve absolutely turned their back on Carol.
I think Hank’s going to be okay. Remember when he heard the whisper campaign at the church his reaction was to get the girls out of there asap, going so far as to ask someone to give Carol a ride home so they could leave immediately and be on the road before Carol got home.
He’s also left churches that he felt were intolerant before. We’ve never heard about that from Carol, but I get the sense that that has been a bone of contention with them in the past.
I was raised pretty liberal, and I still feel nervous around black people. I can’t imagine him ever getting over his conditioning, and that doesn’t make him a piece of shit! Calling Jocelyne ‘daughter’, because ‘his happiness is more important than being correct’, would still be good parenting. At some level, we each have to work with what we’ve got.
I’m not trans but I don’t think having my gender being treated like a delusion that is just being tolerated to make me happy would make me feel very good. I wouldn’t call that good parenting, though it might be the best Hank is capable of.
I have wondered sometimes if he hasn’t gone along with their current church because Carol said something about changing all the time. He’s looking for Christ, and she’s looking for an echo chamber, you know?
Just that he doesn’t get along with the rest of the family, that Hank thinks it was because they pressed too hard on him, and that Carol believes the opposite: the specifics haven’t really been clarified.
A friend of mine had a family with an old-style patriarch as his father. His younger brother, uh, what do you even call it? came out to himself? I mean, you don’t “discover” that you are gay since being gay is a journey, not a destination, even if there are no other roads open. This was kept under the radar because oh God. At some point the middle brother said that he did not want to have this “bad influence” on his children and that the younger brother should not visit home when he was around, or he’ll out them to their father and have him thrown out.
Well, that was the point of time when the oldest brother and the mother decided that this could not go on and sat down with the family patriarch. Guess who was not welcome to visit afterwards anymore. It wasn’t the youngest.
A different case and form of “we stand by our own”.
“He didn’t hurt anybody!” I think the teenager he helped put in a coma would disagree with you if he could.
Also if not for the rebellious actions of her own kids, your kid would be on the back of a milk carton right now and you wouldn’t know what condition she’s in.
Technically Blaine and Mike are responsible for Mike’s condition; Ross may be liable for helping kidnap the kids but he’s off the hook for Mike’s coma.
I now realize that that’s a typo for “liable,” but I had to do a double-take because at first I read “likable” D: (I mean, Mike isn’t the easiest character to like, but gosh!)
Ross was the one who chased Mike up the stairs putting him in a position where he could fall (if I remember correctly) while blaine was occupied with Amazigirl. So no, he is not off the hook (even if blaine was the one most responsible for the fall.
Also all the other victims. They were physically hurt, if not seriously (and that’s luck; throwing them down a flight of stairs with bound limbs could have killed someone, easily). And physically isn’t the only hurt.
Which gibes with the people thinking this is going to turn into a divorce because we know that Hank has walked away from institutions that present false morals (to his view) before.
Also, Hank suddenly realizing that Carol overtly and openly views their baby girl being kidnapped, threatened at gun point, and otherwise brutalized by someone she’d trusted as a child is Nothing Happened To Her.
I mean, the ‘I would die for you’ parallel post-first kidnapping was made pretty explicitly, but seeing the minimization on THIS level? Still big to see it stated outright.
Oh Carol thinks Joyce is her own, but she thinks her daughter is standing on the wrong side and should stand where Carol stands because she is where “her own” ought to stand, because her point of view is the only valid point of view to her.
I have to assume Charles is also at least a bit pissed about someone defending a guy who kidnapped his son. And helped facilitate said kidnapping by letting a guy who already kidnapped someone on this campus free to do it again.
Oooo, Hank is clearly not having any of this bullshit and has decided to piss off and go somewhere else. Carol is clearly surprised that he’s not helping defend Ross and I for one couldn’t be happier.
Is this the beginning of the end of their relationship?
Yes.
Alone.
With her only support system being the very people who also helped the man get out of jail after he shot up a school.
….. She’s never going to BE alone. She’ll always have her church standing by her.
Not to say Hank should stay, just understand that she isn’t going to be alone, even if he does leave.
She could easily make a mistake and have the same toxic behaviour she’s demonstrating end up being turned on her. And she’ll have nobody left to turn to.
I can’t wait for Carole to meet her Savior. That’s gonna be one of the best conversations where, “I know if you’re awake,…I know if you’ve been bad or good,” and Honey you have screwed the pooch.
And Joyce asked her father if her mother was a good person because she genuinely couldn’t work it out at that point, forcing him to seriously consider the question and also why his child couldn’t tell any more. Carol was her “perfect mother” and Joyce genuinely believed that and trusted and adored her wholeheartedly when she first went to college… It’s not really surprising Joyce can’t face seeing her at this point.
Aah – you’re right! That was the conversation where Joyce asked her that, she hmmed and hawed, and Joyce surprised her by telling her how Hank had accepted Becky, yes? For some reason I thought she had also asked Hank about Carol…
Guessing she and Joe are going to have to talk a lot of shop soon. She’s turned to him in the past for parent issue stuff, and he’s one of the only friends she has who has divorced parents, it’s just him and Amber, and she knows him way more for this purpose.
And Sarah. She has already started to talk to big sister about this a little bit…
But yeah, she seems to find it easiest to talk to Joe about this stuff in general. When he isn’t running away for an easy lay to avoid difficult questions, he is a really good friend to her.
Looks like we have something to distract Linda from Amber for a little bit.
The best leverage to get Linda to stop attacking Amber would likely be Walky threatening to drop out if Amber is expelled, considering how much spine it would take to stand up to his mother and that he was barely able to make the single comment to point out that she doesn’t treat Sal great, that is unlikely.
I honestly would like Linda to get a bit of self reflection after this, because sometimes parents who have made huge mistakes eventually figure it out and make attempts to get better!
Love Hank not having aaanythjng to do with that defense of Ross.
I vote for Carol to come back to her Church to find it has abandoned Ross’ actions as soon as he started to pair up with Blaine. Would make her have to reflect on that stuff.
Holy fluff sakes, Carol, your daughter is *actually* an adult too. Maybe it’s time to admit that she has some agency in her life to do things other than “Listen to this man who is WAVING A GUN IN YOUR FACE AND TYING YOU UP WITH DUCT TAPE”
Linda may be shitty but she’s nowhere near as shitty as Carol. And thank you for not being a Trash Parent Hank… and because that was excellent timing.
Now, who’s worse? The guy who kidnapped a bunch of kids to try and get his daughter out of school so he could force her to be straight, or the lady who enabled it, still thinks he did the right thing, and continues to defend him purely because he’s a “man of God”?
I’m going to go ahead and say Ross is still worse, if only because he’s actually comitted these actions rather than simply enabling them. That doesn’t mean Carol is much better, Ross is just slightly worse.
And hear we see contestant Carol Brown using flagrant disregard for dangerous behavior in favor of parroting doctrine and dismissiveness towards her own child’s trauma as her finishing move beating out Linda Walkerton for the Bad Parent Bronze medal. Up next we have Naomi performing her intolerant homophobia towards her son, although judges are skeptical it will compare to Ross McIntire’s over-the-top display.
I think (unpopular opinion incoming) Ross is a way less shitty parent than people give him credit for. He is terrible, without a doubt, for not understanding homosexuality is not a “mistake”, or even a choice for that matter, but he did listen to children, something neither Blaine, Linda norCarol has shown to do.
He was misguided by his belief and by Blaines sweet-talking, and he’s terrible for letting that warrant what he did, but in the end, what he planned to do was way less than what Carol is whole-heartedly defending.
Noooooo, he did not listen. We’ve seen multiple times how controlling he was (not allowing Becky a cell phone, ‘your hair is your womanhood’ and only allowing her to cut it as short as it was at the beginning of the strip when she ‘accidentally’ got something sticky in it, Becky knowing how to sneak out and back into her home and having done so regularly, Frozen isn’t allowed because it ‘promotes the idea parents aren’t infallible’, EVERY LINE in the car chase sequence,) and it was clearly his way or the highway. Further, we have seen him physically hit his daughter. (Right before he realized she had the 911 line open.) Linda and Carol are both emotionally abusive parents (including financial, in Linda’s case,) but to our knowledge neither of them have ever gotten physical yet. (Not that I think it’s any better just because it’s not physical, but: Ross hit Becky, at least once. Given how Becky has NEVER discussed this and had very little reaction, it’s entirely possible that was not the first time.)
Ross was every bit as much of an abusive shitbag as Blaine. The only difference was that Blaine could play a SLIGHTLY longer game in the name of a more elaborate plan, and Blaine was much quicker to jump to violence against his ‘allies’.
And I don’t think it can be stressed enough that Ross vocally declared that if he had to shoot someone to get Becky to obey him, that was on the table.
Pretty sure Becky herself was implied to be a possible target.
I do have to ask what exactly is Carol’s issue on this? Why is she so ride or die for Ross?! The guy kidnapped her daughter! I’m almost suspicious something was going on between them at this point. It make no sense for her to value him over the life of her own child. I doubt she would kidnap another person’s child to prove a point. Why is it okay for him to do that. Is this one of the church’s unwritten rules or something?
Because she’s an abusive parent. Because she supported him abusing Becky into compliance. Because she’d want the same support if she ever “had to” treat one of her kids the same way.
I think you’re onto it. I don’t want to call her abusive (I don’t know why, her attitude is pretty abusive) but she wants to know that he did the right thing trying to make Becky straight because she would do it too.
Carol’s behavior (and by extension Hank’s, though he’s at least realizing where he screwed up) is very much in line with religious abuse. Which can be traumatizing even if it’s well-intended (my parents were not at all controlling but I managed to absorb enough from the background radiation of life that I got a lot of the same anxiety tics Willis has admitted to until I became an atheist/any god worth worshipping understands I cannot healthily have an active relationship with Them around age twelve, and I only reached that BECAUSE my parents were good.) And we’ve seen that with Carol and Ross, that degree of control over their children and their fear of stepping out of line was very much intentional.
Ah, yes. This is exactly the way she’s abusive. Thanks, I hadn’t come across the term religious abuse before, and the “well intentioned” bit was throwing me for a loop.
100%. This has absolutely nothing to do with Ross as a person and everything to do with Ross as a symbol of her faith. Ross is a personification of her religion’s persecution complex.
Because Ross was trying to exercise absolute control over his daughter, and Carol wants to have absolute control over her daughter.
If she admits that Ross stepped over a line, there is a limit to her authority.
Perhaps more importantly, because her church backed Ross, and her identity is entirely invested in her church.
If Ross was wrong, then the church was wrong, and the church is never wrong.
You’d have thought they’d have thrown Ross under the bus as No True Christian, but I suspect that Carol will always defend something just because it was her “side.” Unlike Hank where the first thing he said was that Ross shouldn’t have done that.
I’m gonna venture a guess here, but I’m guessing it’s the same type of logic of parents who send their gay kids to conversion therapy or similar things. I think she saw him as a righteous man who truly believed God’s word and who was willing to go to any extreme to save his highly corrupted daughter who had strayed from God by way of homosexuality. I don’t think she had a thing for him, (though I’m down for that plot twist) but that she merely idolized him in some way. Which means that she can be willing to put her daughter’s welfare at risk for the sake of protecting or admiring her idol more.
Evangelicals (in my experience) also have the object permanence of a toddler when it comes to bad things done by fellow Christians.
Carol didn’t see what Ross did, so in her mind, every element of the story has to be overplayed, exaggerated, or just made up. Since nobody (she’s aware of) got hurt, in her mind that means nobody could possibly have been hurt. (And Becky being “converted” back to straight is a good outcome in her mind.)
I truly, truly envy that you have never encountered people who will bend their logic in this way to maintain their predefined definitions of good and bad (in this case, Fellow Church Member GOOD Homosexuality BAD so therefore [insert cognitive dissonance and ridiculous mental gymnastics here])
The thinking of the groups like this is Group And What It Stands For >>> Individual. Joyce’s life doesn’t actually matter if it is used to make the *right* point. They are perfectly willing to risk the lives of others for their group goals and to die for them.
It would be fun to see the look on her face if the rest of the church actually abandons Ross’ actions on this. Saying he was “misguided” and “blinded” by Blaine and God had to “take Ross in” to prevent him from sinning. That would be a nice hypothetical moment to witness.
Her beliefs are more important to her than the people they hurt. Becky did something she believes is wrong so she believes Ross was justified in his actions to correct that behavior. It’s why she ignored his actions the first time and then wanted him out on bail despite knowing he’d likely try again.
She even says it in those strips, she thinks if they let Ross get punished it’ll be like letting outsiders tell them how to raise their children.
I think that the missing son in Hank and Carol’s family is the key. No one really talks about him and I think that he was
outed somehow and is being shunned and Carol wishes that she had taken action like Ross did to ‘force him straight’.
Yup. The moment Joyce really, truly understood what her mom and her church stands for was the moment she understood that “our own” does not include Becky.
I am wondering if she’ll never really know. If Hank separates from Carol, Joyce & Jocelyne (and Jordan?) can go no-contact with Carol over Joyce’s kidnapping before Jocelyne’s identity even comes up
I’m not saying it’s probable, but I kind of would like it if Joss can come out without ever having to face Carol’s nastiness
By the time Jocelyne is ready to come out to Joyce, and perhaps eventually to Hank, none of them will be on speaking terms with Carol (or John, probably, as I see the family splitting up into Hank-Joyce-Jocelyne on one side, and John-Carol on the other).
I don’t know where Jordan falls in that split, and he may be off on his own regardless. Worst case scenario is that Jordan is not religious, but is also nevertheless an MRA/incel/PUA/other flavor of misogynist.
Carol and her church are evil. Not misguided or indoctrinated but plain evil. I hate her so much. She makes me hate Linda less, as if that’s possible. Linda will not realize her mistake as she is way too egoistic for that. Charles does not have nearly as much of a spine as Hank does. Now Hank, I’m so proud of him I’ve never seen him so angry. I hope this is the final straw. How can he stay with a woman who wouldn’t care about her ien daughter’s safety?
Right, they’re such adults they can’t even admit it when they’re in the wrong. Like fuck damn Carol if What Ross was trying to accomplish was to “do the right thing and keep his daughter safe” I think he failed the minute he decided to luer her to a house with a mobster and a bunch of frat boy thugs. I don’t blame Hank for walking away I’d be done to.
I got a Wonder, if that’s how she really feels why is she there? Did she come there to see if she was okay or did she come there to reassure Joyce that despite everything that happened everything she did was the right thing to do.
I think you’re onto something. Carol isn’t worried about Joyce The Real Person, she’s worried about Joyce-Carolsdaughter, who is an imaginary person that needs to be reaffirmed in her religious faith and obedience to their community’s rules right now
Carol may try to convince Joyce college isn’t safe again and ask her to drop out and come home so that she can try to reinforce the hold she used to have. You know, overlooking that Ross’s actions were the danger for two out of the three major traumas Joyce has been through whereas her friends have been there at every turn to offer advice or listen to her.
That was the tail end of a massive panic attack. I don’t know of any stretch of the imagination that having a panic attack so bad you black out isn’t counted as harmed.
Yes but to people like her mother, Mental and Emotional damage is all taken care of by returning to gods embrace because mental and emotional problems are all a product of associating with unbelievers.
The worrying thing is that Linda and Carol do have a common ground. If their kids did nothing and they took Amber and Becky away and let the others go, they’d have probably been fine with it. Linda less so obviously, but you know she’d berate Sal for “escalating” things
I think Joyce already knows it’s a strong possibility, if not probability. She knows/hopes her dad won’t blow off her being kidnapped and taken hostage, and that the inevitable result would be divorce.
You love to see it, though frankly I want Hank to actually say something else besides just going “They shouldn’t have done that.”
I don’t expect it to go this way, but the phrasing could be read by Linda as a tacit agreement with Carol, particularly if she knows they go to a fundie church, “I won’t accept talk like this from a woman.” and all that.
However, it’s more likely that Carol’s going to question him exiting the conversation.
It’s the drawback of having a system that degenerates into two parties. Eventually, those parties divide up all the causes and positions between them such that to be for one you must be against the other.
The problem is, “first past the post” voting, and our other hacked-together election elements (such as the electoral college, although I think pulling it out now might make things even worse), make any such system falling to two parties, formally or informally, almost inevitable. Personally, I suspect informal parties might be even worse than informal ones. At least with formal ones, you can see the strings, (or whips, and party support during primaries, as the case may be).
I believe a strong central government is also part of the problem, as it makes “winning” so critical. You can’t just let California be California, and Wyoming be Wyoming. One Federal Rule For All, or laws dictated by the federal government in exchange for a share of tax monies, means all the states have to have cookie-cutter policies.
Personally, I’d like to see a Condorcet system, modified to take into account the biasing intended by the electoral college, (to preserve the point that, no, the populated cities AREN’T supposed to dictate terms to everyone else,) replace our current system. Being able to rank candidates, and having the highest scoring candidate win, not the least bad of the two most familiar parties, would, I think, cause candidates to trend toward the center rather than the fringes of their respective parties.
Partially agree. If the electoral college works the way it’s supposed to, it’s of a piece with being a republic and a union of states. Ranking vote systems have their own problems where I’m incentivised to strategic voting like voting a second choice last to prevent it from beating my first choice. Instant runoff with low vote candidate removed each round eliminates the tyranny of the two party system eliminating choice and reduces motivation for strategic voting to almost nothing. Voting for what you honestly think is best is no longer throwing your vote away.
Single Transferable Vote looks great…provided the version I’m most familiar with isn’t applied to additional seats.
If the first winner gets a say in who gets their surplus votes, you get parties, or at least party like behavior, again.
You make a solid point, and some people have to live in certain places for their livelihood or strongly wish to for family continuity, but if the states were more varied than they are, the citizens would still be able to “vote with their feet”.
Of course, one problem with that is, a lot of people are “voting” no to California taxes and personal/commercial interference, and then “voting” yes to the same policies that necessitated California taxes, and that interference they agreed with, in places like Oregon, Colorado, and Texas.
Yeah sorry, not accepting “vote with their feet” as a substitute for basic human rights.
Or consider LGBTQ kids born in states that openly allow (require?) discrimination against them. They can’t even vote with their feet until they’re of age.
Why yes, as a liberal feminist nothing makes me happier than caged children and murdered black people!! My neighbors who I share cookies with monthly and cheered at Pride Parade desperately want to see teh Gheys individually napalmed! My family who I can’t talk about politics to and remain civil are right about everything because I’m a liberal who also hates poor people and thinks they should starve!
Whatever. Take your weird-ass straw man and buggrit.
I…*think*… that was supposed to be a dig at the centrist Democrats that the alt-right refers to as Liberals, but don’t actually represent actual progressives? Not positive, though.
Nah. His redemption arc began back during that argument with his wife that Joyce overheard. It got going strong when he drove them back to college, leaving his wife to take alternate transportation home from church.
Carol just admited that Ross kidnapped Joyce. Carol, you will burn in hell for believing kids being kidnapped is normal. Next you will say lesbians should be rapped to “convert” them to heterosexuality, or that white people are supreme.
I don’t think that’s true. Just from my experience in fundamentalism, they’re actually quite happy to let the majority of the world burn for not believing in their particular branch.
Is that seriously, truly what Carol deep down believes? That the kidnpping, the gun, the threat, the repeated attempts to remove her best friend and make he own choice in the matter irrelevant did not hurt Joyce?
In Carol’s mind, you avoid being hurt by listening to the adults. In her view, Joyce should have helped Ross ‘save’ Becky. By not doing so, she brought whatever followed on herself. Carol is telling herself that she has no moral responsibility for what Ross and Ross’s chosen accomplice did to Joyce because Joyce was ‘doing the wrong thing’.
Hank disagrees and, I suspect, will expand on that disagreement in the divorce petition.
Dear Carol: Please define what you accept counts as “hurt.” That way, we can figure out what grounds to debate with you on.
For instance, if you’re only accepting physical pain of some sort or another, I accept that Joyce only says “Oof” when being thrown onto a concrete floor and landing on her shoulder here (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/03-when-it-crumbles/kidnap/), but note that in the next strip, she says “Ouch” when Amber lands on her. So clearly there was some physical pain involved. Or does it not count because we can’t prove that Ross was the one who threw Amber in?
Logic has no place here. Carol’s thought process starts and ends with “church member good homosexuality bad” and the rest is just twisted noise to make her feel like she’s a good person.
Well, but… If she doesn’t side with Ross, then perhaps her daughter’s best friend’s mum killing herself wasn’t just brought on by, like, Satan or mental issues (which she probably passed on to her daughter; you know those are hereditary), but, like actual abuse. Which they maybe, as members of the same church and close friends, should have noticed and done something about.
Perhaps her death was less weakness or a lack of faith or whatever, and more indirect murder.
And then they left their daughter’s best friend alone in that house with him.
OoooOOOoorrr… Ross is just a very religious, faithful guy who has been handed the troubles of Job and is desperately trying to save his daughter’s soul after already losing his wife to Satan. And that makes her right to still support him.
And not responsible at all for anything that unbelievers and heathens who don’t see the very real harm that Satan does would probably, in their twisted, misguided way see as problematic.
She’s pretty deep in denial right now. She knows how badly this has turned out and how it is likely only going to get worse now. She knows that she and the congregation made this happen by a combination of naivete and blinkered focus on what they wanted, assuming that all their members wanted the same things. She’s very, very angry with herself but lashing out at Becky, Joyce and the entire world outside the Church is so much easier than dealing with that.
She may also be genuinely grieving for a friend who met a violent and unexpected end at this point… But yeeeaaaah… Those words actually came out of her mouth and she presumably heard them and thinks they sound reasonable…
They got out of this by not listening to the adults. Because the adults wanted to kill at least one of them. Also, they are hurt. All of them. It’s just not a physical wound.
And it’s kind of funny to hear Linda talk about a medium post, considering she’s struggling with said medium post, too.
1) He did hurt people. Even if you only count physical harm and not traumatizing people, Mike is kinda hanging by a thread here.
2) The answer to this is not ‘Well, at least he thought he was doing the right thing’ it’s ‘HOLY MOTHER OF FUCK, HE THOUGHT *THAT* WAS THE RIGHT THING?????’
3) “What more do you fucking want?” You and Linda to tear each other apart. Is that so much to ask?
4) Ah, “but did she die???” As if that makes it better. It didn’t work in PLL and it doesn’t work here.
5) “If you listen to the adults, you don’t get hurt” Well Jesus tap-dancing Christ, this explains a lot about the way Joyce thinks. Poor baby.
6) “I suppose you let YOUR kids do whatever they want?” Nah, Linda just couldn’t stop her.
7) Linda, you wouldn’t know that medium position between laissez-faire and fascist if it leapt up and slapped you like I want to every time you talk.
8) Apparently Joyce is no longer one of Carol’s own. I repeat – poor baby.
9) Neither is Hank and he’s not stopping. Good job, Hank.
10) Yes, Linda is more correct than Carol here. No, I don’t care, I’m still team kill each other.
8-9: I wonder how hard the cognitive dissonance is going to hit. I mean, she’s supposed to belong to Hank, right? But if he’s not using the same playbook anymore — if she’s actually thinking on her own and using her own opinions — what is she?
And if Carol ever realizes he’s the one who answered the phone with ‘Hail Satan’ as a prank the weekend Becky fled Anderson, she’d be pretty far in the ‘he got what he deserved’ camp.
Aaah, I was scrolling down looking for you after reading that third panel! Because yeah, point 7 is REAL FUCKING RICH coming from Linda ‘he just doesn’t know he’s going to be a doctor yet’, ‘I thought the accident would make you realize you should cut your losses, since you didn’t I’ll steal money from you and make its return dependent on you abandoning the best friend it is intended for,’ ‘of course you won’t hate me forever, you’re thirteen’ Walkerton. And that’s just the highlights reel.
Carol’s definitely the more ‘Jesus burgerflipping CHRIST you just said that’ one here, but god the cognitive dissonance on Linda’s still pretty staggering. (Because Carol’s not even dissonancing it, she’s just straight-up rejecting reality.)
I hope the Keeners take all the kids out for lunch and just do not bring them back until the mutually-assured destruction’s cleaned up. Hank can come once he’s done with his call to the divorce lawyer and a text to Joyce (and for that matter, Becky. Hell, Jocelyne will probably need to see it too, it impacts her life) about how he was not involved in the bail, he is horrified that it happened, and he is even more horrified it ended this way and people are STILL defending Ross, and as such will be cutting ties there.
If my legacy on Dumbing of Age is just ‘She really really really likes Sal and she really really really hates Linda’ I’ll be okay with that.
Also, because both these women need to be reminded, have a point 11) YOUR KIDS *ARE* ADULTS. They’re new to being adults and might still need pointers on it, but they are adults now.
Fundangelical Christians think of themselves as being the adults in the car and that’s why they’re driving. Everyone else seems them as road raging drunks speeding down the highway, waving a gun around to keep anyone else from driving.
The far right is in power and we see the consequences. The far left doesn’t even hold much power in the Democratic Party and the horrors they’d inflict on us seem centered around universal health care. In other words, bothsiderism is bullshit.
There is a small fraction of the left in the US that this could apply to, but since they seem most focused on tearing down the Democratic party I don’t think they’re really that significant.
Rock on, Hank!
WHY was he one of the choices in last week’s “Worst Parent” poll, again?
He’s flawed, sure, but, -and especially- juxtaposed next to his wife, he seems like a damn fine fellow!
“We stand by our own”.
Almost everyone does that – up to and UNTIL the point where they, cruelly and with forethought, endanger innocent lives!
Simplistic ‘this is good and this is bad’ morals fall flat because they don’t get into ‘why’. This scene is contrasting 2 characters, neither of which are particularly good. Here we get to see why they do what they do. Understanding may eventually come, but never moralizing unless a character needs something spelled out for them. Show, don’t tell.
I saw a lot of the kidnapping storyline as ammunition for the inevitable fallout. (It also was the unambiguous, black-and-white You Are Not This Bad that Amber ultimately needed to accept that she wasn’t doomed to turn out like Blaine, and the level of danger necessary to get Amber and AG talking again and recognize things had gotten FAR out of what was manageable on their own.) It was black and white because it NEEDED to be, to drive home the fact that Carol still stands by her actions even when they led to something THIS catastrophic. If she won’t budge now of all times, she cannot possibly be reasoned with.
Sal, Amber, the school itself… Why does Linda not aim her arrows at the people who actually did harm? Ahh, hitting Blaine and his goons will not make her feel powerful to her kids…
I’m pretty sure Linda’s motivation here is that she specifically wants to punish SOMEONE she deems responsible for this, personally. She’s on the right target right now, but before that it was Amber. Where her children are and how they’re doing and what they think of any of this (Walky as victim in particular) don’t matter when she can go aggro on someone she can blame.
I think Linda is still freaking out over the fact that her kid got *kidnapped*, and she’s desperately trying to do something to regain her sense of control of the situation. She’s lashing out from fear. It’s fight or flight, and Linda’s fighting, and in that situation the target doesn’t matter, just so long as you hit someone so you feel less afraid.
One of the kidnappers is dead and the other one’s been arrested, so they’re beyond her reach. Amber wasn’t beyond her reach, so she was a target. But now there’s a target *directly in front of her*, and by sheer luck, it’s someone who actually deserves to be a target.
Score one for Hank! Standing tall as a bastion of strength and reason in the face of science-denying quarter-wits (calling them Half-Wits would be giving them too much credit.
That reminds me of how her church and family reacted when she had her cast (“Oh, she’s faking”). So, women are too weak and frail, but when they actually get violent, they are “faking”? It also says a lot that Carol will defend Ross’ violence, but not her own daughter’s reactions. It still kills me that Carol’s only real reaction was literally telling Hank to buy a gun to shoot gophers.
While they were at church. It sounded like the continuation of a past discussion, not directly related to the kidnapping, but shockingly tone deaf and obviously intentionally so on Willis’s part.
Yeah, here’s where it happens. Hank can’t tolerate the fact that his wife approves of Ross’s actions and very clearly was enabling them for one second more.
Ross was Carol’s knight in a shining tee-shirt wasn’t he? He was the one who was going to bring her children ‘back to the faith’ by any means necessary. Damn, she’s a scary woman; even scarier when you consider the fact that she’s convinced that she’s one of the White Hats!
Hank
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANK
MY MAN HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANK!!!!!!!!!
OK so, first thing I’m noticing here. Hank is my man.
second thing I’m noticing here
“we stand by our own” Then hank walks away.
Hank does not consider Carol to be “one of his own”. Hank is finally saying “I’ve had enough of this lunatic. my baby girl almost died and she doesn’t even care.”
Yeah, Hank really strikes me as someone who has been trying to rationalize and be charitable towards the people around him as much as possible, but who has finally had enough.
Not to be Debbie Downer, but back when they were rescued, Becky said, “There’s No one left out there who can hurt me.” I hope that Carol and her evil don’t try to avenge Ross. Just that I’ve learned from Wilde Life studies that Momma Bears can eat their cubs at times. And hell, look what Chronos did to his kids!
Oh, I’m expecting Carol to try to cause harm in a passive-aggressive way. She doesn’t have the guts to do anything physical but she’ll be more than willing to set up a letter-writing campaign against Robin to ruin Becky’s new life. She’ll try to shut off Joyce’s tuition (which may be difficult because Hank isn’t playing ball) and she might even try to ‘encourage others to do the right thing’, which sounds awfully like advocating violence against Becky, Joyce and the Walkertons (the latter as revenge on Linda and her whole godless breed).
The next one likely to try something physical will be John with Joyce.
Honestly if she tries anything it might backfire quite spectacularly against her. Joyce is already estranged, Hank is starting to see her for the looney that she is and Jocelyne has all the reasons to bail out if she sees she has a chance. She’ll be left with only that other looney son that she has.
To me, John (her missionary oldest son) is Carol’s next likely source of trauma after the divorce. I’m sure that he’s her ‘perfect son’ and if (when) it turns out he is embezzling mission funds to afford luxuries like his car, I’m not sure if she’d be able to handle it.
Oh boi, that would be fun. Just imagine it, they are sitting at the table in their house, just the two of them and she pours her heart out over how everyone is evil and immoral… and then there is a knock at the door and a couple of cops come in and arrest John.
I hate that there’s a current real-life blueprint for this, but if the current horror show with the Johns Ortberg is anything to go by, she’ll do anything to make him appear “righteous” and say he’s done nothing wrong. Including throwing her other kids out the window.
They really shouldn’t be shouting into each-others faces like that, with this virus and all. Wait, that’s only on this side of wall #4. Man I miss being allowed to do that
But if I’m someone’s grandmother, I am also someone’s mother. Who’s to say I’m not YOUR mother? Because in that case, do NOT google 2 moms 1 dad! Because I’d be your mother and I say so!
Yeah, she was just kidnapped by someone she knew most of her life and saw him being murdered. Sure, no biggie.
OT: the Do Not Track setting in my browser is on. Why the hell to I have to deal with the allow cookies‘s screen every few days? If do not track is set, the damn dialogue shouldn’t appear and simply disable all tracking cookies.
I hereby freely acknowledge that my comment yesterday was totally in error, and that Carol has moved up into second place in the race for worst parent.
I think the most infuriating thing is that people like Carol will never admit that they were wrong. Every single word out of her mouth in this strip makes me want to scream and the worst part is that at no point will she ever be able to see things from anything other than her POV.
She will go to her grave offended that these people are upset that children were kidnapped because the kidnapper was a Christian fundamentalist homophobe and therefore right. Like, it’s clear that she understands that they don’t share her viewpoint with her “you won” comment, but she also clearly expects them to still see this as her and her church being objectively right.
That wouldn’t be fundamentalism but self-righteousness. “at no point will she ever be able to see things from anything other than her POV” implies that she has a point of view. Fundamentalism gives you a tool to fight and overcome your point of view and atone for your weakness by giving you a mission.
Without actually defending Carol here… in fact, I’d echo most people saying that in this strip it’s Linda being 100% reasonable… I’d point out two things that help me emphasize with her a LITTLE more.
1st, Carol isn’t talking in the abstract of a hypothetical man doing right or wrong and dying as part of it. She’s talking about someone she knew, who was perhaps a good friend of hers, someone she’s grieving for… and who got his skull viciously hammered in two days ago… and some Karen just marched up to her and started badmouthing him and attacking her for being his friend. This is an excellent formula for a shaken, raw, hurt, and combative emotional state, rather than steady, objective, and reasonable.
2nd, Linda has already framed this entire encounter, from the moment she came marching up to Carol, in condemning and combative terms aimed at Carol, her community, and her community’s destruction. “You won” regarding the death of someone in her community makes a bit more sense in this context, even if there weren’t any real winners from the whole sordid affair.
Again, Carol is extremely off base. Both of them are, and my opinion of both remains very low. But I also have a little bit of sympathy for both, because holy crap no parent should be expected to be totally rational in this sort of situation.
I think it’s that she doesn’t feel guilty. Joyce COULD have gotten really hurt and DID get pretty traumatized. And it was Carol’s fault. She doesn’t even feel bad for it.
Agreed. It’s WHY she’s triple-downing on “Ross didn’t hurt anyone”. Not just because she’d have to question her faith (“If my church can be wrong about this, what else is it wrong about?”) but also because it would mean SHE was directly responsible for freeing the man who put her daughter in danger.
Those are solid points. Carol is shocked and grieving and on the defensive and not inclined to be charitable or steady. I can’t say I sympathize with her, because it really seems like her reaction to Ross pointing a gun at and later kidnapping her child in order to gain access to his own kid is “well what would YOU have done?!” but…yeah, I can definitely see why she’s behaving/reacting this way.
I have zero sympathy for the person whom is defending- and aided- a violent authoritarian zealot whom had already assaulted not only her freakin daughter but discharged a firearm at a school while kidnapping his daughter from it.
She and every other person who donated to his bail is responsible for what has happened. Carol killed him as sure as worst dad did. They don’t get to play victim here.
At the critical moment Carol seems unable to prioritize her own children.
Linda in this conversation became the broken clock that is right twice a day I have to say.
I had my theories that her and Ross probably had an affair which is why Beckys mom offed herself, but others also theorize that she probably had a fling with Beckys mom instead and out of guilt Beckys mom took her own life.
Yeah but that’s like, logic or something. That’s not how you argue with Carol. The only thing you can do is try to get her to think a little bit about how utterly weird the things she says are. The thing that went wrong here, she says, is that the kids didn’t listen to the adults. The guy who killed her friend with a hammer was an adult, so clearly, she’s angry because they should have listened to him more. Especially because he was dressed in a cartoon costume and hitting people with a hammer.
Sarcasm aside I think Carol and Ross’s basic contention with, let’s see, maybe every person who understands that we live in a society with other people? Is the part where using intimidation, violence, murder and emotional blackmail to force your lesbian kid to act straight is “the right thing”. That’s an ethics discussion you could have with a therapist or a lawyer, but not a discussion you’re ready to have unless and until you can entertain the tiniest shred of doubt that your blind faith may/i> be wrong.
In reddit terms we’ve got a r/entitledparent versus a r/insaneparent. Hank’s got the right idea of not becoming involved and getting out of the blast radius.
I think at this point, Hank is moving towards a different stance than just “out of the blast radius”. I think he’s finally going to leave Carol. At least, I certainly hope so.
Minimally, I think he’s going to give Carol a big piece of his mind along the lines of “I can’t believe you think any of this is ok and that’s frankly disgusting”, which Carol will NOT take well. Hank definitely isn’t perfect, but I’m pretty pleased that he finally seems to be confronting the fact that his spouse isn’t someone he’s proud of right now.
Take that Carol! You’ve taken, at this point, multiple steps over the line and now even your own husband will stand by you! Even he’s sick of your shit 😀
In the immortal words of Nelson from the Simpsons, “Haha! Haha! Haha! Haha!”
‘Adults’ isn’t a reference to age. It’s a reference to something acting and thinking in line with what is broadly regarded by the subculture of the person speaking considers to be ‘seinsible’ and ‘mature’.
And that’s another difference between Carol and Hank. After the first Becky incident, Hank chose to trust Joyce’s judgement because he saw that she was now a woman. Carol still sees her as a child to be controlled.
As evidenced by Carol threatening to pull Joyce out of school, which… she can’t actually do. She can pull funding if they’re paying for it rather than Joyce having student loans, but she has no legal authority to make Joyce quit. And I’m pretty sure that Joyce has figured that out since.
Maybe (and I repeat, maybe) see how horrible Carol is will make Linda rethink about her own behavior with Sal and Walky, see her Hypocrisy and help her become a better person/parent? That’s seems to work for Hank.
Also I kind of feel like Carol is inevitably going to say something really phenomenally shitty to Becky at some point here, and that will not only be the final straw for her relationship with her husband but also with her daughter.
Actually, I’m expecting Carol to make some extraordinarly demands and issue an ultimatum to Jocye. When Joyce rejects them, Carol will start shouting at Dorothy, blaming her and accusing her of ‘seducing my little girl just to corrupt her’, which is pretty much the last straw for Joyce. Carol will then tell Joyce that, until she ‘comes to her senses’, she can consider herself without family. Then she’ll attempt to storm off in righteous fury, expecting Hank to follow her only to realise when she reaches the doors to the atrium that he isn’t following her. Instead, he’s hugging a crying Joyce and that is where things will get really interesting.
Oh, if Willis wants to make the entire comments section squeal in joy, Joyce will react to her mother’s tirade by kissing Dorothy in front of her (surprising everone, especially Dorothy and herself).
I think we’re about ten strips away from Joyce monologing for three panels, one panel of Carol absorbing it, and then a final panel of Carol responding with something *cosmically* shitty,
I think part of Carol knows to say those things in private when no one is around to defend Becky, like with her “can you REALLY know if you’re a lesbian at your age and is it worth your father being in prison” thing.
In the slightly modified words of Eric Cartman. (and censored so it actually posts)
Weeeeeeeeeellll
Joyce’s mom’s a *****, she’s a big *** *****,
She’s the biggest ***** in the whole wide world
She’s a stupid *****, if there ever was a *****
She’s a ***** to all the boys and girls.
Linda I’m glad you don’t advocate parents rights to point guns at their offspring and their offsprings friends. That’s is not and shouldn’t be a real right. That does not mean you found the middle position between laissez faire ans fascist.
Remember the enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend, sometimes they just like making enemies, sometimes they are fighting over who can eat you, and sometimes they only agree with you on that one point.
Thinking about it, I have realised something else disturbing about Carol’s statement: “We stand by our own!” That’s a very tribalist point of view. In essence, she’s calling everyone outside her subculture ‘others’; not endowed with the same intrinsic value or deserving of the same respect and consideration.
It’s a bit like saying “My country, right or wrong”. It’s a sentiment that was basically used to justify every atrocity in history. “It doesn’t matter what we do to them because they’re different from us.” Deserving of less consideration and certianly not really… ‘people’.
I mean yeah fundamentalists operate on an us vs them basis. Take Jehovah’s Witnesses, they’re trained to see everything outside the church as worldly and tainted. They’re trained to spread the word in the most annoying way possible so they get harshly rejected by the outside world and run back into the warm, loving arms of the church. It’s how these groups keep their members wrapped around their fingers
“My country right or wrong” is also a sadly misused statement. The entirety of the statement is, “My country, right or wrong. If right be kept right. If wrong, be SET RIGHT.”
Good for you Hank none of these are your people, I don’t know how you figured that out about Linda and her husband. God Carol would so be down with blaming Amber.
Hank and Carol sitting in a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
First comes the love, then comes the marriage
Then comes the baby in the baby carriage
Then the baby gets kidnapped and Carol don’t care
Hank’s heart broken beyond repair
Hank leaves Carol and takes the tree
D-I-V-O-R-C-E
Carol admires Ross for standing up to the sinful world, while Hank has been too soft on the “lost sheep” Jordan. Plus is probably to blame for Joyce’s sister, since if he was a better role model, this wouldn’t have happened. Yes, Carol know in the back of her mind.
Carol wants Hank to be like Charles, a potted plant to back her up.
But my main thought is how this must have been for DYW to write. Reliving pain isn’t fun or easy. Kudos for this.
Just for the record, when I first saw “to blame for Joyce’s sister,” it was not clear that you were speaking in Carol’s voice? So I was about to go off.
But also I disagree that Carol knows. She has the awareness of a pumice stone.
being a failed criminal doesn’t make you a good guy. In all truth, in his last moments it was revealed that he probably wasn’t THAT bad a guy, but the church had reinforced some rather dangerous beliefs that enabled negative behavior.
I bet Ross was more like Carol, before Bonnie passed. He was a deeply troubled man, raised with an abhorrent worldview, pushed beyond his breaking point by outside forces, desperately holding onto the scraps of normalcy as he knew it.
Contrast with Blaine, a manipulative sociopath who revels in the misery he inflicts upon others.
Yeah, the fucked up thing about Ross from an outside perspective, is that, in the right circumstances, he could have been The Joyce of his own story. We can see the kernels of good his beliefs smother and squash down. We can see there were still lines he refused to cross (actively torturing and killing teens). We can see the promise in him that his beliefs and the people around him actively warped by telling him ‘if you’re doing the right thing in your mind, it is okay to traumatise swathes of people!’
We can see the potential that he had to become a really great man if circumstances were different and yet he became a rather terrible one with a few moral lines instead because the people around him were all like that too.
I know Willis writes these comics three months ahead, and I know he’s been eerily prescient at times, but Carol condoning Ross kidnapping her daughter? Seems a bit too familiar.
I know this is controversial opinion but I don’t put Linda in the same category as bad parent as ToeDad, Blaine, or even Linda. I kinda put her in Richard Rosenthal or maybe Billy’s Parent’s territory. Maybe not the best influence/role model (He hit on a college student in front of Joe), has obvious flaws, but definitely loves her kids.
Stepping back from being an audience member with multiple views and has also spent more time with Hank and has seen his growth, She found out the same girl who permanently scarred her daughter (yeah she was a robbing a store but the stabbing happened once Sal was already detained) not only is living in the same dorm as Sal, but is also the daughter of the guy who kidnapped her son. She’s not trying to get Amber kicked out to save face, she’s doing it cause she’s legit worried and feels like this is something she actually can do to make her kids life safer.
Like, obviously I don’t agree on the favoritism at play that is def tainted by colorism nor do I think she made the right all with Sal trying to help Marcy, but she’s got a complicated relationship with her daughter who still still loves very much.
Honestly, i’d put her above Ethan’s parents and below Hank who while is the much much better of the two Walkerton parents, he still let Joyce be in that environment willingly. His passivity in that relationship doesn’t automatically make him a victim. He gets points for occasionally pushing back and growing but we didn’t particular like him at the start either ( He pulled that “we’re gonna passive aggressively pray over you having atheist friends instead of talking about it” crap).
Also an aside, we can lay off of Charles a bit. Obviously Linda is more a aggressive in the relationship so we see her interact with people more (plus her relationship with her kids is more highlighted) but we don’t really know what his relationship with his kids 1 on 1 are just like we didn’t know Hank’s with his until Willis gave us more of those scenes.
Maybe i’m a bit biased. Being black in an interracial black/white relationship (especially in the burbs) it can just be a lot easier/safer letting your white partner be the more aggressive one (especially in public)
That’s kind of ruined by the fact Linda didn’t give a FUCK about Sal’s hand (to the point Sal hid it from her last time she saw her) until she could use it as ammunition. And the fact Linda dumped her newly disabled 13 year old in another state and didn’t see her or speak to her (except to lecture her on how she’s a failure) for five years per Word of Walky. Until a couple weeks ago, she had never been in a strip where she spoke to Sal without yelling at her. Hell, her comment on Sal being ridiculously late was ‘she’s making us look like bad parents’. Linda does not care about Sal as Sal is. Linda cares about the way Sal makes her look and about looking like a good mother. Hell, she doesn’t even really care about Walky as Walky is. Remember her little ‘Oh, he THINKS he’s in telecommunications until he switches to med school’ crap earlier? Or Walky’s freaking out because he knows how his mom will react if he fails math because he’s SEEN how she treats Sal?
Linda is not a good mother. She is emotionally and financially abusive as well as emotionally negligent (which honestly is just another form of abuse) to Sal.
And Charles isn’t really better. Sal usually speaks about her parents plural when she talks about them lecturing her about how she’s a failure. Charles is the one who insulted her hair to her face (and we’ve seen how she feels about her hair when she’s alone). Just last storyline, Sal told Amber she envied Amber’s ability to reject her father’s claim over her. Charles isn’t Blaine or Toedad but he’s not a good father either. Heck, it’s one thing to be passive but when your partner is pulling emotionally abusive and financially abusive crap, I think it’s worth criticizing he does not intervene.
Loving your kids doesn’t make you automatically a good parent. It doesn’t even make you not an abusive parent. Even if we grant Linda loves her kids (which imo is a fairly big question mark), she is still an abusive mother. Her trying to punish another teenager for the actions of her dad isn’t a point in her favour even if it is out of love.
Also, I consider a prerequisite of loving someone (at least once they’re out of the ‘does not yet have personality, does not yet really have functioning senses yet’, since we’re talking about parent-child relationships) is understanding who they are and supporting them in that. You can fantasize all you want about the kids growing up and being doctors or presidents, but when you have a kid you’re committing to making and raising another person. You can’t control what they’ll take to or not. (You can give them a lot of options, you can encourage things, but you might be a statistician and they end up being competent at math but REALLY taking to agriculture of all things and that’s just how it is.) There’s a lot of things you ultimately can’t predict or control in a kid – basic physical details like bone structure or, say, hair texture (no idea why I’m bringing that up in a discussion of Walkertons!), sexuality, neurotype and able-bodiedness… even gender’s really just an educated guess until your child is old enough to make that decision. And your child, because they are a unique person in their own right, will inevitably have opinions that differ from yours about many, many things.
Linda does not recognize that Walky has a right to have ideas about his future she disagrees with. And Walky’s the one she’s NICE to. Linda refuses to recognize that Marcie has been nothing but a good and caring friend to Sal, and Sal to Marcie in return, because Linda refuses to see past Marcie being Latina and a very active, somewhat mischievous girl. (I think the former is more significant than the latter, but I’d bet the fact that she first saw Marcie when they were climbing a not-for-climbing playground fixture helped cement that first impression.)
Linda doesn’t actually see her kids as people with the capacity to exist outside her orbit and the roles she’s chosen for them, so any idea of them that she loves is fundamentally different from loving the kids as they are.
Actually while Ethan’s parents clearly have problems with homophobia until I learn more details I put them in the lesser parental evil catagory. Because all I know is they were not happy about it, but they still seem civil to him and didn’t cut him off.
Attenborough V.O.: And here we see the more reasonable member of the couple on the defensive separate himself from the conversation, as well as imply to his mate that he does not agree with her. The male of the couple I’m the offensive position looks on, surprised to discover after all this time that this is an option. Only time will tell what this will mean for the two males, though it is clear which of them has more of a spine.
Truly? Then I guess I won’t have to feel bad about beating you to death with this shovel. Because if you truly mean that you deserve to be put in the fucking ground.
I never thought I’d be on the side of Wally and Sal’s Mom here, but you know what they say about strange bedfellows. Meanwhile… sorry, Hank, but I’m not sure your wife is redeemable after this. (I have plenty of hope for you left, though.)
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“This is not an airport, you don’t have to announce your departure”
You do if it’s intended to be a passive-aggressive wordplay-based dunk on your evil wife!
*golf clap*
Hank would stand by his own, but she’s reluctant to come downstairs to see him.
And God’s Avatar of Divine Fatherhood in His Own Mind is conveniently too dead to ever have to return the favor after all the supposed excuses Carol has made for him all these years, so there’s no way to prove he wouldn’t just continue to play along and take take take like always.
A life devoted to being an enabler rarely ends well, and I thank Hank has just realized that applies to both him and Carol. John wasn’t worth it. Jordan wasn’t worth it. “Josh” wasn’t worth it. Bonnie wasn’t worth it. Becky wasn’t worth it. Joyce now seems to have lost desire to be worth it. But that insincere sponge Ross is worth everyone throwing themselves under a bus?!
Probably honest to God believed he was devoting he best years of his life to a bunch to would stand by their own beyond this human prawn-version of hardcore crew-gangbangery, too.
Helps if you see it as a precautionary tale….Can and does happen to any of us.
Mike drop.
… oh wait…
BAHAHAHAHAHA
I should feel bad about it but that made me laugh so much.
how dare…
https://wompampsupport.azureedge.net/fetchimage?siteId=7575&v=2&jpgQuality=100&width=700&url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.kym-cdn.com%2Fentries%2Ficons%2Ffacebook%2F000%2F026%2F618%2FZEBxqIA.jpg
https://media3.giphy.com/media/SuIDKboVhHgtLPG6zm/giphy.gif
… I’m too scared to check the links. Has anyone else braved them?
I have. Nothing to be scared about. Tom from Tom & Jerry, and the Greta Thunberg at the UN.
They are just meme reply images to express outrage. They are neither NSFW nor mentally/emotionally scarring.
Speak for yourself! That cat is an attempted mouse killer! D:
https://i.redd.it/tya8ycddg2t21.jpg
Too late!!! He already did!
“You won.”
This… isn’t about winning.
someone from her specific shitty church died. that means they all (everyone else) won, because anyone not in her shitty church is actively against it in her eyes
actively meaning they care about and feel accomplishment at the death, other than ‘thank goodness he can’t get my kids again’
This is what happened when you not only build your entire religion around a savior who is a martyr, but also build your entire current culture around being martyrs, even when you are not actually being persecuted at all.
Come on, now, let’s not blame her shitbaggery on Christ. If people at her church saw Historical Jesus from Shortpacked they’d crucify him again.
“oh no, not again”
That quote is from a bowl of petunias, not Historical Jesus.
It can be two things.
I suspect it has been said more than once.
Oh no, not again
I don’t know why I can’t reply directly to Ray Radlein’s joke but I just came here to say that I reaaaally like it.
Comments can only nest so far so that they don’t get squished too much. We’re at the limit, so there’s no “Reply” button on these comments.
This better?
“I died in the most painful and inhumane way trying to teach Judea how to get into the kingdom of Heaven, and this knowledge is mostly used to smuggle in some strange talking hedgehog.”
https://media.tenor.com/images/f92b83dd895c8b2f2ea7040e67f87d39/tenor.png
The ‘also’ is important in my assessment. It isn’t about Christ, it’s about certain sects keying in on only the martyrdom aspect and building their entire ethos around that while ignoring everything else he is supposed to have taught.
Ignoring the poor, the hungry, Yada yada, it so bad for society as a whole, if one religion focuses on death instead of focusing on life.
Yeah, it’s not really blaming Christ, but just one of the ways people interpret the message. It’s a pretty striking one though, at least in modern times. There’s a huge emphasis on Christians being persecuted for their faith today in parts of the world where Christianity is overwhelmingly dominant that doesn’t really make sense without some deeper motivation.
It’s not ubiquitous though. Catholicism, for example, puts a lot of emphasis on martyred saints and the like, but I don’t think it had the same kind of “you will be persecuted for your faith” concept throughout most of its history.
Maybe it’s because they already did that to found their faith, and have actually been persecuted since then too (various times/conflicts), so they do not feel the need to make up bs persecution stories today, to validate themselves with their identity.
But all of Christianity descends from that same persecutions at the founding and Protestants were persecuted after splitting from the dominant Catholic Church as well.
I feel that’s a weird way of saying. “I support my crappy neighbor because I’m a vicious homophobe and hate that he failed.”
The belief that all evil stems from a single source is actually pretty common among conservative Christians–there’s even a Chick Tract that displays the Devil as a hydra, with heads all labeled different ‘evils’ including Communism, Homosexuality, Paganism, Islam and Atheism. Basically, anyone who is not in their particular sect of Christianity is part of the singular ‘you’ against whom they struggle.
Don’t forget Catholics! Jack Chick sure hated those cats!
For some people, everything is about winning.
For others, it’s about everyone else losing.
Amen
And for some, in a weird messed up way, everything is about losing, and making sure everyone knows that you’re the victim.
Oh, so you’ve met my mother?
For others, everything is about whining. And yet for others, about winnying.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be, but it is. If Toedad had his way and Becky got kidnapped to be “straightened out,” then we’d definitely say that she “lost,” ergo, that not happening means the kids won. Of course, Linda isn’t really on Team Joyce and Co, so saying “You won” probably lines up more with Axel’s comment.
Like, it paints a weird version of the story where Linda and the rest of the world are in some fight against him rather than one of Linda’s family having been the victim of unprovoked violence from the guy.
Exactly. You have to be insane to try telling someone that they won, after their child was kidnapped. Like, couch jumping nuts.
But there’s the rub, “you’ve gotta be nuts, to argue with crazy people.”
Nicely done, Hank!
Also, holy crap that logic there – “If you listen to the adults, then you don’t get hurt!” has to be right up there with “If you had my dinner cooked, I wouldn’t have had to hit you!” in terms of excusing and minimizing abusive behaviors.
Which Adult was Ross supposed to listen to? I’m guessing it wasn’t any of the ones he did, or else he wouldn’t be dead,
“Which Adult was Ross supposed to listen to?”
Maybe the one who told him to love his neighbor?
Why would Christians listen to that brown fella in sandals?
Don’t forget the blue sash. Kind of important.
Never forget the blue sash 😛
(I believe that’s a Shortpacked! reference?)
For some reason 99.9% of all artist’s renderings of Jesus have him wearing a blue sash.
Why not? They made blue from dead snails!
The one who said love your neighbour, whose father dictated an entirely ambiguous book that suggests gays and lesbians are going to go straight to hell, at least in some interpretations?
Oh oh!
I recently read that the anti-gay stuff is actually a mistranslated of some anti-pedophilia stuff. As in “a man should not lay with a young boy”.
That said, I read this on the internet, so grain of salt at best, but still, if it’s true, that’s a pretty major fuck-up on someone’s part.
I remember one of my older sisters bringing the same thing up once in an in-person convo years back (she also mentioned, IIRC, how in the case of the Roman centurion who had that “male servant” that Jesus healed long-distance, said “servant” was actually the centurion’s lover).
Eh.
It’s arguable.
But years ago I realized it doesn’t actually matter. Religion is more then the holy text (even if they claim it’s super-important), it’s also the teachings, values and culture. And regardless of what the text may or may not have meant in the original Hebrew over 2000 years ago, the current common interpretation has held steady for centuries.
You’re not going to undermine that by going “um, actually…” and trying to argue that their interpretation of the text is wrong. You can undermine it other ways, and they may eventually come around to the whole “their interpretation fo the text is wrong” bit, but that will always, 100% of the time, be a post hoc rationalization of their changing beliefs, not the impetus of their changing beliefs.
That’s fair. Still, as a non-Christian looking in, it’s interesting to see how some of these things might have worked.
Also, on that same point, I’ve also encountered a lot of modern churches that have simply chosen to be better. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but years ago, I dated both a Jewish lesbian and a Catholic lesbian* (years apart, not at the same time) both of whom came from denominations of their respective religion that fully embraced and accepted LGBT+ individuals. When I got introduced around, I got the “so when you two gonna get married?” shtick rather than any hate.
So yeah, I get what you mean about the text being less important than people just choosing to be better. And it’s super nice when it happens. ^^
* Technically she was bisexual, not lesbian, but the sentence flow and grammar worked better using lesbian. This note included for accuracy.
Pretty much. Despite all the theological arguments and Bible passage quoting, huge amounts of Christian belief aren’t particularly sourced in the Bible’s text.
I’ve read that the quotation in Hebrew reads, “You shall not have the lyings of a man in the lyings of a woman.” Now you tell me what that means.
… women aren’t supposed to lie about a man lying?
Anal is reserved for males. Or “no strapons”.
I’ll go with Hellsing Ultimate Abridged’s interpretation: “So as long as I don’t fuck a man in the vagina, it’s fine.”
That the old testament only condemns homosexuality between
men and not between women.
There’s even a passage in one of the later books that says that God created lesbians to punish men for being unpious. So you go, girls–you’re doing the Lord’s work!
Men should not lie with women.
A bold stance against heterosexuality.
oh my god could you imagine a CHURCH OF THE GAYS
heterophobia
all love must be queer
I hope they don’t take a stance against in vitro fertilization, otherwise they’ll be a short-lived sect.
Were you not aware that gay is immortal?
The problem is that the text, whichever version, is taken to be the god‘s one god’s true word without any individual and cultural bias in it.
As if, if god is all encompassing and so much greater than humans, any human would be able to understand all of it.
Hu, the text box is cut off. If the sentences have double words, that’s the reason.
Blessed are the cheese makers
Well, yes, but obviously thats not meant to be taken literally – it refers to ANY manufacturers of dairy products.
I think the logic goes that if Ross’s daughter had listened to him, then he (the adult) would not have been sent to prison, bailed out, drafted into a kidnapping conspiracy and ultimately murdered.
He had no agency in these events: it was all Becky’s fault.
Blaming women is the fundamentalist MO. If Eve hadn’t eaten that apple, we’d still be in Eden.
Eve ate something…
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-06-17
I think my favourite SMBC version of this was when the Tree of Knowledge was a restaurant.
It gets worse, “if Eve hadn’t Fed the apple to Adam,…”
Other inside of the coin is, if she hadn’t, they’d still be the only two people on this planet. Without the knowledge of good and evil there’s no Hummenah-hummenah! Which leads to children, often.
Not quite. See the Jewish legend of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was banished from Eden because she refused to lay beneath him. So apparently, so long as they were doing missionary position, Adam and Eve could’ve been pumping out lots and lots of little kids.
Now, who THOSE kids were supposed to sleep with is a little dodgy…..
As god put a sign on Kain’s forehead for all to know, there must have been other people around to see than Adam and Eve.
Not eating the apple is like super-contraception.
The poor man. We must understand what he’s been through.
Well, he was doing his duty as a parent, in his world-view.
It’s the same mindset of anyone be who is overconfident in their own decision making framework.
Technically, you could say if he had listened to Blaine, then Blaine wouldn’t have had to kill him.
But all the victims would have died.
No, Ross (and I’m speaking in Mrsbrown-ese here) is one of the adults to be listened to. And he, of course was listening to the version of Jesus that best excuses her attitude and that of the alleged church.
There’s an interesting point in here somewhere about how making right/wrong issues into problems of individual virtue instead of problems of like what’s actually happening is really useful for abuse, victim-blaming and rationalization, but I refuse to write comment section essays. Still, it’s definitely an interesting window into Carol’s terrible mind. It doesn’t matter that the kids were traumatized; just that Ross was a good person because he didn’t do anything she sees as capital W “wrong”
See, this comment is why this comment section needs to have a “Tweet this” button, to go with the upvote button we still don’t have.
I think we’re better off without those buttons.
That would be welcome!
I don’t think the kids being traumatized has honestly occurred to her. Why would they be? NoNe Of ThEm WeRe HuRt.
Joyce is just practicing willful rebellion egged on by that red-headed pervert child of Satan; she’s not avoiding God and her own mother for a REASON.
Remember, the only hurt/damage that counts is physical!! If it doesn’t leave a bruise, it didn’t hurt, and tHeReFoRe dOeSn’T cOuNt.
Five bucks says they’d be cool with physical damage if it’s from an authority figure.
Not just excusing and minimizing abuse, but actively facilitating it too. This kind of phrase could be wielded directly by abusers in the way you mention, but it could also open the door for other abusers to take advantage more indirectly. Teaching children that some people are inherently trustworthy is a major way that pedophiles can get access.
And at the risk of a derail, I have to say that in today’s America, it also really brings to mind rhetoric used by and about the police. “If he had just complied with their instructions and not resisted, he’d still be alive.” (Which is, on top of everything, objectively false in multiple cases I can name.)
Relevant derail, considering that the Carols of the world are definitely among those who blame the victims in police brutality incidents!
I mean, Carol is basically proving “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and it wouldn’t matter”…
derail schmerail, this was a good thing to say here.
Yeah, kinda hard to “comply” when you’ve got two (or more) cops yelling mutually contradictory orders at the same time. Or some yahoo with no uniform or insignia kicking in your door in the middle of the night.
Or when you comply too quickly and they shoot you for making a sudden move.
“He was reaching for his waist. I thought he was going for a gun.” “You told him to show you his license.”
Well, doh. How much blunter does The Willis have to get? That was so obviously the reference he was making that I did not feel it needed pointing out.
Damn, it must have cost Mr.Willis a PILE emotional capital to work through this page. Glad he did, it’s awesome, but dang! Having to draw a Mom run off her rails,… damn.
Tip o’ the hat, Dave.
Carol isn’t running off her rails. That is sort of the point, with the rails left hanging over an abyss into which the bridge had crumbled and Carol’s engine full on track.
It really depends on whether the adult is saying “Doing that thing has inherent consequences, and you could hurt yourself,” or “Doing that thing is something I don’t like, and I could hurt you.”
It’s a phrase that can mean more than one thing.
If you believe, as Ross did, that being gay has an inherent consequence of going to Hell for eternity, then you believe you are in the first category, and any threat you bring to that person is nothing compared to eternal damnation.
That’s not really what I meant by inherent consequences.
It’s part of a parent’s job to stop a child from doing dangerous things, for example. Do that thing and doing the thing will harm you.
“Listen to me and you won’t get hurt,” is a very different phrase if I’m an expert helping you do something dangerous than it is if you’re a hostage.
But, in their ideology, that is exactly what she and Ross were doing.
It is their job to stop their kids from doing gay things because that will lead to eternal torment.
Yeah like thejeff said – Ross and Carol do see themselves as experts helping their kids through a dangerous life filled with temptation.
Are y’all actually having trouble with the idea I’m expressing here or is this just pedantry?
Maybe I did misunderstand – thinking about Carol and more “If Becky obeyed Ross, none of this would have happened”, rather than “Do what the kidnappers tell you because they’re adults”.
“Do what I say and nobody gets hurt,” is a threat, and is what she intended.
Her actual words, though, aren’t inherently wrong. Those same words mean something different if you’re a young kid “helping” make cookies with parents who don’t want you to handle knives or touch the oven. Or from staying up too late and being too tired for school the next day. Or in any other case where the adult (or perhaps the expert, if you are an adult) is helping to navigate things you haven’t internalized yet. Situations where doing the wrong thing is what hurts you, not any “punishment.”
Perhaps it wasn’t relevant, but that’s all I was musing on.
Appeal to consequences logical fallacy https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-to-Consequences
One of evangelicals favorite logical fallacies.
And of course, good old DARVO.
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender
…because it has the word “consequences” in it? Otherwise that has nothing to do with what I said.
I also note that one of the examples on that page is very poor: “If there is objective morality, then good moral behavior will be rewarded after death.”
Those two things are unrelated. The fact that the example person used the fallacy to draw a faulty conclusion is undermined by the fact that their statement was already illogical.
Carol made me feel a smidge of something that I generously consider appreciation for Linda.
I’M ANGRY ABOUT THIS
Yeah, it’s kind of amazing and horrible.
Not to worry. As soon as it is pointed out that her arguments could apply to her telling her own kids what to do, she’ll start arguing against herself.
Phew. Okay, I was worried for a few seconds there.
It’s so horrible for some personal reasons. STORYTIME™: A long time ago, in high school, I had this advisor who I really grew to loathe. Much like Linda, she expressed whatever affection she had in a way that was so self-centered that it barely felt like affection. This was someone who repeatedly lied to my face and didn’t think I was smart enough to be able to cross the street. I should be hella mad at Linda all the time, because that’s just the kind of person she is.
And I’m actually madder at Carol.
Huh.
Probably because Linda is an awful person, but Carol comes from an awful culture/religion. Carol might not have been an awful person if her church wasn’t awful.
It was mentioned a longer time ago, but Joyce’s parents did a lot of church-hopping before selecting their current one (and I assume that most of the search was driven by her since Hank seems more apt at fitting in). It is no accident Carol ended up where she is.
I had the impression it was driven more by Hank once he saw various church’s corruptions.
Same.
Let me fix that for you: Linda was using her past marriage to the Dean to try and get Amber kicked out of school for something her dad did, just at the beginning of last strip.
Carol may make Linda look good by comparison but that’s like saying a dog turd looks better than vomit. It might be true but both are disgusting.
I am now trying to work out which I would rather have to clean off the carpet. I am mainly making myself feel very thankful we have a carpet cleaner, mind.
Turds might leave a stain, but at least they’re solid so you can pick them up. Vomit soaks in.
Source: have always had cats.
We used to have a cat whose normal poop texture was rather soft… We are currently potty training a toddler…
Oh, shit…
Yeah, Carol actually has a point here with the “I suppose you let your kids do whatever they want” and Linda’s response isn’t really that honest. Sure, she probably wouldn’t go as far as supporting a kidnapper, but the big difference here isn’t that but that she doesn’t agree with why Carol supported him.
I suspect she’d take some pretty drastic actions of her own to shape her kids the way she wants them.
I want Walky out of that house and financially independent from Linda AS SOON AS FUCKING POSSIBLE, especially since we’ve SEEN Linda steal money from one child to leverage ‘proper’ behavior out of her. It didn’t work because Sal gets angry in response to this bullshit, but Walky’s a freeze and fawner.
I’d like to say that, having found his spine once, Walky will be fine, but he hasn’t had to hold his position against anything beyond stunned silence yet. And knowing Linda, that won’t happen again.
He’s also clearly terrified of Linda and her disapproval, and he’s not ready to cut her out of his life entirely (which: Fair.) Sal’s pretty much past the point of expecting anything from her parents, and she was still clearly hurt and disappointed when they so thoroughly brushed her off at Freshman Family Weekend. Walky’s only just starting to realize Linda’s got serious issues, and I don’t think he’s connected yet that if her issues with Sal were sometimes arbitrary and sometimes holding her to completely unreasonable standards, that issues she’d develop with Walky would be just as arbitrary and unreasonable.
I can see the path he’s headed on potentially leading to ‘no, you know what? I’m not subjecting myself to this anymore’ (wanting to expel your friend and fellow kidnapping victim for things her father did to hurt her is so clearly unreasonable that I can see both twins pointing to it later as one of those moments that led to them going no-contact,) but he’s not there yet. And I’d want them to have things in place when they do. (Paperwork, place to live, job, even a small amount of savings to cushion things would help.)
yes hank
Taking the first step to a long time coming divorce.
Divorce is looking real nice right about now.
He deserves to Ann Eiffel her.
[Captain America gets that reference dot gif]
And quickly. Because after more than 20 years of marriage with her, he looks even dumber that Tom Farrell.
Holy shit. Never expected Carol to swear like that. And holy fuck, just accepting her daughter got kidnapped, bending into pretzels to justify this.
Carol got an F-Bomb before Joyce
If Joyce finds out, I imagine she will either (A) never use it ever, or (B) use it every five words. Can’t tell which.
You assume Joyce isn’t standing right there.
Oh gods, Joyce bearing witness to this conversation… I don’t want that for her ever, but holy shit would I like to *see* it.
Yeah, that would be a bit traumatic for Joyce. But I want to see her delivering a total mic-drop moral bomb statement putting both mothers in their respective places simultaneously.
Well, Joyce got a “Goddamn” in first, at least.
And at least three “shits”
I would hope so, constipation is not healthy.
Hahahahahahaha!!!!!! I hate Carol more now! I kinda knew this would happen though.
Like there was a point where I was floundering between Carol and Linda for worst mom but it’s Carol. It’s Carol by a long shot. Congratulations.
Yep. Come up to the podium and accept your brown ribbon, Carol.
Carol is being openly very very evil.
Linda is essentially criticizing her own behavior. Is lying better?
In this case, probably! Linda might even learn something; unfortunately there are no witnesses knowledgeable enough to point out the contradiction. Except Charles.
Carol had third worst parent on lock the instant she let Ross out of jail, and easily takes 2nd now that Ross is dead. Linda is a turd sandwich but she never even came close to “release someone that pointed a gun at my kid.”
At least Linda can pretend to be concerned about her children.
Hey, Linda is concerned about her children!
….If, by “her children” you mean Walky and Billie…
….And, by “concerned,” you mean “mildly interested”…
And if by “mildly interested” I meant “only barely gives a shit in any of the ways that matter as a parent as long as they succeed, and that’s the best we can hope for…” 😛
And yet that somehow still beats Carol!
She hasn’t so much lowered the bar as buried it deep, deep underground.
And at least with Walky, intends to make him succeed in the way she wants with no concern for what he wants. (He thinks he’s majoring in communications, but he’s really going to be a doctor.)
Hmmm. Who does that remind me of?
She is completely delusional if she thinks Walky can get into medical school. The average student accepted has shadowed a medical professional, done biology research, has a GPA of 3.7+, etc. etc. I’ve seen the stats when I was helping a friend apply – he had all of that and still wasn’t accepted.
I’m trying to decide whether Carol outright shunning Jordan for ??? is better or worse than Linda’s treatment of Sal.
At least banishment offers closure, of a kind. Sal gets the wounds reopened on a regular basis.
Linda is lawful evil while Carol is neutral evil, I think. Blaine is your classic chaotic evil.
Toward was (religiously) Lawful Evil, Linda is Neutral Evil, Carol is Annoyingly Evil.
Toedad.
I like your breakdown better.
thats a big heckin oof buddy, also way to stand on your own
Hank is now standing alone.
In the classic children’s song “The Farmer In The Dell,” the cheese stands alone.
COULD HANK SECRETLY BE THE CHEESE???
Hank is cheesedad. It’s canon now.
mmm cheese
It’s Indiana not Wisconsin. Cheesedads are native to Wisconsin.
Look at Linda suddenly admitting that there exist middle grounds
Aye. It’s doubly weird because… well, she’s super lax with Walky, while being about as harsh on Sal as Toedad was towards Becky.
Definitely a case where she knows they exist, but god damn if she can’t find them with both hands and a map.
Look, super lax on one kid and super harsh on the other averages out to a happy medium, just minus the happy.
And we know Walky got the super lax due to his constant potty humor! (I’ll see myself out.)
No no you stay here that was hillarious
I think her big flaw is that she cannot see that Sal has changed, and still treats her like that girl who was lashing out. Part of that is that Sal has given up on the relationship so she can’t see the change, a big part is that they basically cut the ability to see the growth by shipping her off to boarding school, but the biggest part is that I think Linda has those blinders that a lot of adults get where they can’t see their children as anything but what they were at their worst.
Anyway, because she can’t see the change, she keeps reacting like it’s 13-year-old Sal doing things when everybody else can see that that girl doesn’t exist anymore. Not in that way.
Carol, on the other hand, seems perfectly willing to sacrifice her children for her god. And to do so without even the remorse of Abraham. Which is way more scary to me.
Linda also doesn’t seem to realize that Sal’s lashing out was largely caused by how she treated her from the get go.
However, she acknowledges that kidnapping and threatening children is wrong, which is such an incredibly low bar that she really shouldn’t get points for it, but it’s still more than you can say for Carol, so…
I think Carol gets negative points here? So we don’t need to give Linda points, but we do take some stickers off Carol’s good behaviour chart…
My mom demanded to know whether I got my tattoo in an effort to piss her off.
…I was thirty-six.
Ooooooh
Oooof, wow, Carol REALLY doesn’t know how much of a nerve she touched there with the “you let YOUR kids do whatever they want” comment.
Hank has the right idea for sure to NOPE out of this conversation. There are no winners here.
I think Hank is noping out of much more than the conversation.
I suspect this is the moment he Noped out on the marriage, and good for him.
I think he noped out last panel of last comic, but was trying to maintain appearances for Joyce’s sake. This is where he couldn’t do it anymore.
Linda won. Not sure what she won, but Carol said she did and would Carol every say something untrue?
i think this is the point that Carol starts losing people. Hank’s clearly reaching his breakpoint, if Hank reaches it Jocelyne will likely feel free to reach hers and come out…leaving Linda and John as the only stains.
She’s already started losing people when Joyce realized what she did.
Not to mention whatever happened with Joshua.
Jordan, I mean. Someone else mentioned him further on and I realized I had the wrong brother.
I’m really, REALLY hoping that Hank has the strength to turn his back here. I’ve been worried that he might end up so entrenched in fundamentalism that… even if he does make the effort not to judge Becky, there’s only so much he’ll be able to change.
As for Joyce and Jocelyne…. well. Even if we don’t know if they know it, they’ve absolutely turned their back on Carol.
I think Hank’s going to be okay. Remember when he heard the whisper campaign at the church his reaction was to get the girls out of there asap, going so far as to ask someone to give Carol a ride home so they could leave immediately and be on the road before Carol got home.
He’s also left churches that he felt were intolerant before. We’ve never heard about that from Carol, but I get the sense that that has been a bone of contention with them in the past.
I was raised pretty liberal, and I still feel nervous around black people. I can’t imagine him ever getting over his conditioning, and that doesn’t make him a piece of shit! Calling Jocelyne ‘daughter’, because ‘his happiness is more important than being correct’, would still be good parenting. At some level, we each have to work with what we’ve got.
Yes I like this
I’m not trans but I don’t think having my gender being treated like a delusion that is just being tolerated to make me happy would make me feel very good. I wouldn’t call that good parenting, though it might be the best Hank is capable of.
We know that Hank has changed churches a couple-a times, for dogma reasons. I worry about Carole’s Catma.
I have wondered sometimes if he hasn’t gone along with their current church because Carol said something about changing all the time. He’s looking for Christ, and she’s looking for an echo chamber, you know?
her karma is running over her dogma
I wonder a bit about Jordan, but we don’t know too much about him one way or another do we?
Just that he doesn’t get along with the rest of the family, that Hank thinks it was because they pressed too hard on him, and that Carol believes the opposite: the specifics haven’t really been clarified.
I’m starting to imagine Jordan is like, a super goth Satanist or something.
I really hope we’re going to see Jordan sometime, I’m curious about that story.
It’s coming at some point. He’s built up the mystery enough that he must be saving it for a big reveal.
All we know is when Joyce stood up to her parents about not hanging out with Dorothy, Hank said she took more after Jordan than they thought.
A friend of mine had a family with an old-style patriarch as his father. His younger brother, uh, what do you even call it? came out to himself? I mean, you don’t “discover” that you are gay since being gay is a journey, not a destination, even if there are no other roads open. This was kept under the radar because oh God. At some point the middle brother said that he did not want to have this “bad influence” on his children and that the younger brother should not visit home when he was around, or he’ll out them to their father and have him thrown out.
Well, that was the point of time when the oldest brother and the mother decided that this could not go on and sat down with the family patriarch. Guess who was not welcome to visit afterwards anymore. It wasn’t the youngest.
A different case and form of “we stand by our own”.
The misguided fundie stands alone.
Mic DROP, Hank. Nicely done.
Please don’t, the last Mike Drop causes so much drama…
Eeeeyyy!
Give yourself some fresh air, Hank. There will be hair pulling any second.
*plays “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” on the hacked Muzak*
“He didn’t hurt anybody!” I think the teenager he helped put in a coma would disagree with you if he could.
Also if not for the rebellious actions of her own kids, your kid would be on the back of a milk carton right now and you wouldn’t know what condition she’s in.
Technically Blaine and Mike are responsible for Mike’s condition; Ross may be liable for helping kidnap the kids but he’s off the hook for Mike’s coma.
He hit him with a car.
I must have forgotten about that, nevermind then he’s equally liabke for that too then.
I now realize that that’s a typo for “liable,” but I had to do a double-take because at first I read “likable” D: (I mean, Mike isn’t the easiest character to like, but gosh!)
Well it would still be as likable as Blaine, which is reasonable.
Ross was the one who chased Mike up the stairs putting him in a position where he could fall (if I remember correctly) while blaine was occupied with Amazigirl. So no, he is not off the hook (even if blaine was the one most responsible for the fall.
Also all the other victims. They were physically hurt, if not seriously (and that’s luck; throwing them down a flight of stairs with bound limbs could have killed someone, easily). And physically isn’t the only hurt.
Hank suddenly realizes that for Carol, this is not about right and wrong.
Exactly.
Rather, that Carol’s right and wrong are defined by authoritarianism, not by anything resembling morals.
Which gibes with the people thinking this is going to turn into a divorce because we know that Hank has walked away from institutions that present false morals (to his view) before.
Also, Hank suddenly realizing that Carol overtly and openly views their baby girl being kidnapped, threatened at gun point, and otherwise brutalized by someone she’d trusted as a child is Nothing Happened To Her.
He’s noping out of that one too.
Yup. It 10000% makes you re-read the strip in which she calls to see if Joyce is okay as something way more sinister and self-centered.
I mean, the ‘I would die for you’ parallel post-first kidnapping was made pretty explicitly, but seeing the minimization on THIS level? Still big to see it stated outright.
She’s also quite dramatically failing to stand by her own, assuming that should include her daughter.
I think when Joyce sided with Becky Carol made the decision that Joyce was no longer “her own.”
Oh Carol thinks Joyce is her own, but she thinks her daughter is standing on the wrong side and should stand where Carol stands because she is where “her own” ought to stand, because her point of view is the only valid point of view to her.
She thinks Joyce is “her own” as in “own her”.
Hell, it’s not even about their own childs safety.
Pretty sure this isn’t a sudden realization, it’s just Hank’s personal breaking point.
Charles: Wait, that’s an option?
Hank Brown, setting an example for husbands and fathers everywhere.
Maybe Chuck can also follow the example of his son, and find a vestigial spine somewhere. (At least for a few seconds.)
Dangit, I came in to point to the same thing.
Me too!
“you can stand up to your wife!?”
I have to assume Charles is also at least a bit pissed about someone defending a guy who kidnapped his son. And helped facilitate said kidnapping by letting a guy who already kidnapped someone on this campus free to do it again.
Oooo, Hank is clearly not having any of this bullshit and has decided to piss off and go somewhere else. Carol is clearly surprised that he’s not helping defend Ross and I for one couldn’t be happier.
Is this the beginning of the end of their relationship?
I don’t think she’s surprised that he’s not helping defend Ross.
I think she’s surprised that he’s not even willing to stand silently by while she does.
I hope so. Carol is a Toxic Waste dump and deserves to be ALONE.
Yes.
Alone.
With her only support system being the very people who also helped the man get out of jail after he shot up a school.
….. She’s never going to BE alone. She’ll always have her church standing by her.
Not to say Hank should stay, just understand that she isn’t going to be alone, even if he does leave.
Also the one kid who’s still sold on that worldview.
She could easily make a mistake and have the same toxic behaviour she’s demonstrating end up being turned on her. And she’ll have nobody left to turn to.
Would this be before or after Linda sues them into the Stone Age?
I can’t wait for Carole to meet her Savior. That’s gonna be one of the best conversations where, “I know if you’re awake,…I know if you’ve been bad or good,” and Honey you have screwed the pooch.
No Actual canines were abused in the Previous comment.
She might be confused why Heaven is a toy store in Denver, though.
I think the beginning of the end was when Toe Dead threatened Joyce with a gun and Carol endorsed it after.
And Joyce asked her father if her mother was a good person because she genuinely couldn’t work it out at that point, forcing him to seriously consider the question and also why his child couldn’t tell any more. Carol was her “perfect mother” and Joyce genuinely believed that and trusted and adored her wholeheartedly when she first went to college… It’s not really surprising Joyce can’t face seeing her at this point.
I thought she asked Jocelyn that?
Yeah, it was Jocelyne, not Hank.
Aah – you’re right! That was the conversation where Joyce asked her that, she hmmed and hawed, and Joyce surprised her by telling her how Hank had accepted Becky, yes? For some reason I thought she had also asked Hank about Carol…
She kind of did, earlier.
In reply, Hank took her back to college.
Go get ‘er, Linda. Your kids deserve better. Carol does not.
I have a feeling Joyce is gonna have to adjust to the realities of divorce fairly soon, because Hank looks beyond done with this shit.
Not much can beat “My wife was okay with our child getting kidnapped and kind of helped it happen” as a reason for a divorce.
Hey, it’s not like she was *hurt* you know!
Too bad Amber’s mom is taken, because “my ex-husband was abusive and has mob ties” would make for some solid commiseration.
“You used to be married to the guy who kidnapped my daughter? Hot damn, let’s get dinner, baby!”
“You raised the woman who saved my little girl?” is more where I think MM was going with that.
Guessing she and Joe are going to have to talk a lot of shop soon. She’s turned to him in the past for parent issue stuff, and he’s one of the only friends she has who has divorced parents, it’s just him and Amber, and she knows him way more for this purpose.
And Sarah. She has already started to talk to big sister about this a little bit…
But yeah, she seems to find it easiest to talk to Joe about this stuff in general. When he isn’t running away for an easy lay to avoid difficult questions, he is a really good friend to her.
Looks like we have something to distract Linda from Amber for a little bit.
The best leverage to get Linda to stop attacking Amber would likely be Walky threatening to drop out if Amber is expelled, considering how much spine it would take to stand up to his mother and that he was barely able to make the single comment to point out that she doesn’t treat Sal great, that is unlikely.
I honestly would like Linda to get a bit of self reflection after this, because sometimes parents who have made huge mistakes eventually figure it out and make attempts to get better!
Love Hank not having aaanythjng to do with that defense of Ross.
I feel like Linda could become a better parent (though still not great) but Carol could not.
Hank is the parent you are looking for with mistakes and figuring it out. Linda seems pretty entrenched.
Yeah, I can see that Hank is getting better but I’d like another, please.
Maybe we’ll get lucky with Ethan’s parents – they got over it in the Walkyverse, maybe they will here.
I vote for Carol to come back to her Church to find it has abandoned Ross’ actions as soon as he started to pair up with Blaine. Would make her have to reflect on that stuff.
Holy fluff sakes, Carol, your daughter is *actually* an adult too. Maybe it’s time to admit that she has some agency in her life to do things other than “Listen to this man who is WAVING A GUN IN YOUR FACE AND TYING YOU UP WITH DUCT TAPE”
To be honest, I’d give the words some thought too if someone were to wave a gun in my face and/or my hands were tied.
Linda may be shitty but she’s nowhere near as shitty as Carol. And thank you for not being a Trash Parent Hank… and because that was excellent timing.
Now, who’s worse? The guy who kidnapped a bunch of kids to try and get his daughter out of school so he could force her to be straight, or the lady who enabled it, still thinks he did the right thing, and continues to defend him purely because he’s a “man of God”?
I’m going to go ahead and say Ross is still worse, if only because he’s actually comitted these actions rather than simply enabling them. That doesn’t mean Carol is much better, Ross is just slightly worse.
If all this drama had centered on Jocelyne being outed instead of Becky, do you really think she wouldn’t have acted just like Ross?
She probably would have just cut her out of the family and pretended she doesn’t exist while clamping down harder on her other children.
Wasn’t that what happened with one of them? Jordan? Hard to keep tabs.
She thinks of Jocelyn as her “son”, and men are allowed to leave.
So… yeah, I’m going with “cutting all ties” over “kidnapped and tried to fix”.
And hear we see contestant Carol Brown using flagrant disregard for dangerous behavior in favor of parroting doctrine and dismissiveness towards her own child’s trauma as her finishing move beating out Linda Walkerton for the Bad Parent Bronze medal. Up next we have Naomi performing her intolerant homophobia towards her son, although judges are skeptical it will compare to Ross McIntire’s over-the-top display.
Naomi’s just going to embarrass herself if she tries to compete with Ross. Focus on the silver, Naomi.
Well, Ross gave his best shot already.
I think (unpopular opinion incoming) Ross is a way less shitty parent than people give him credit for. He is terrible, without a doubt, for not understanding homosexuality is not a “mistake”, or even a choice for that matter, but he did listen to children, something neither Blaine, Linda norCarol has shown to do.
He was misguided by his belief and by Blaines sweet-talking, and he’s terrible for letting that warrant what he did, but in the end, what he planned to do was way less than what Carol is whole-heartedly defending.
Noooooo, he did not listen. We’ve seen multiple times how controlling he was (not allowing Becky a cell phone, ‘your hair is your womanhood’ and only allowing her to cut it as short as it was at the beginning of the strip when she ‘accidentally’ got something sticky in it, Becky knowing how to sneak out and back into her home and having done so regularly, Frozen isn’t allowed because it ‘promotes the idea parents aren’t infallible’, EVERY LINE in the car chase sequence,) and it was clearly his way or the highway. Further, we have seen him physically hit his daughter. (Right before he realized she had the 911 line open.) Linda and Carol are both emotionally abusive parents (including financial, in Linda’s case,) but to our knowledge neither of them have ever gotten physical yet. (Not that I think it’s any better just because it’s not physical, but: Ross hit Becky, at least once. Given how Becky has NEVER discussed this and had very little reaction, it’s entirely possible that was not the first time.)
Ross was every bit as much of an abusive shitbag as Blaine. The only difference was that Blaine could play a SLIGHTLY longer game in the name of a more elaborate plan, and Blaine was much quicker to jump to violence against his ‘allies’.
And I don’t think it can be stressed enough that Ross vocally declared that if he had to shoot someone to get Becky to obey him, that was on the table.
Pretty sure Becky herself was implied to be a possible target.
Hank and Charles should head to the Winchester, have a pint and wait for this whole thing to blow over.
Better hurry, before they get red on them.
I do have to ask what exactly is Carol’s issue on this? Why is she so ride or die for Ross?! The guy kidnapped her daughter! I’m almost suspicious something was going on between them at this point. It make no sense for her to value him over the life of her own child. I doubt she would kidnap another person’s child to prove a point. Why is it okay for him to do that. Is this one of the church’s unwritten rules or something?
Because she’s an abusive parent. Because she supported him abusing Becky into compliance. Because she’d want the same support if she ever “had to” treat one of her kids the same way.
I think you’re onto it. I don’t want to call her abusive (I don’t know why, her attitude is pretty abusive) but she wants to know that he did the right thing trying to make Becky straight because she would do it too.
Carol’s behavior (and by extension Hank’s, though he’s at least realizing where he screwed up) is very much in line with religious abuse. Which can be traumatizing even if it’s well-intended (my parents were not at all controlling but I managed to absorb enough from the background radiation of life that I got a lot of the same anxiety tics Willis has admitted to until I became an atheist/any god worth worshipping understands I cannot healthily have an active relationship with Them around age twelve, and I only reached that BECAUSE my parents were good.) And we’ve seen that with Carol and Ross, that degree of control over their children and their fear of stepping out of line was very much intentional.
The Wikipedia rundown here is… unfortunately, quite resonant with Joyce’s upbringing, given Joyce is autobiographical. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_abuse
Ah, yes. This is exactly the way she’s abusive. Thanks, I hadn’t come across the term religious abuse before, and the “well intentioned” bit was throwing me for a loop.
Because if she’s wrong about Ross, then she really did endanger her own child.
Which is impossible. Unthinkable.
Therefore, ROSS PROTECTION SQUAD 4-EVER
I WANT to say it’s something about her beliefs and it’s more that she’s ride or die for her beliefs, but that’s…. an intriguing possibility you raise.
I think that, by attacking Ross and his motivations, Carol is seeing this as an attack on her faith and thus an attack on her.
100%. This has absolutely nothing to do with Ross as a person and everything to do with Ross as a symbol of her faith. Ross is a personification of her religion’s persecution complex.
Because Ross was trying to exercise absolute control over his daughter, and Carol wants to have absolute control over her daughter.
If she admits that Ross stepped over a line, there is a limit to her authority.
Perhaps more importantly, because her church backed Ross, and her identity is entirely invested in her church.
If Ross was wrong, then the church was wrong, and the church is never wrong.
You’d have thought they’d have thrown Ross under the bus as No True Christian, but I suspect that Carol will always defend something just because it was her “side.” Unlike Hank where the first thing he said was that Ross shouldn’t have done that.
Now I wonder if one of her thoughts is that she didn’t exercise absolute control over Jordan and look how that turned out.
Exactly. Remember the conversation about Jordan that Joyce overheard? Carol thought they didn’t squeeze hard enough.
I’m gonna venture a guess here, but I’m guessing it’s the same type of logic of parents who send their gay kids to conversion therapy or similar things. I think she saw him as a righteous man who truly believed God’s word and who was willing to go to any extreme to save his highly corrupted daughter who had strayed from God by way of homosexuality. I don’t think she had a thing for him, (though I’m down for that plot twist) but that she merely idolized him in some way. Which means that she can be willing to put her daughter’s welfare at risk for the sake of protecting or admiring her idol more.
Evangelicals (in my experience) also have the object permanence of a toddler when it comes to bad things done by fellow Christians.
Carol didn’t see what Ross did, so in her mind, every element of the story has to be overplayed, exaggerated, or just made up. Since nobody (she’s aware of) got hurt, in her mind that means nobody could possibly have been hurt. (And Becky being “converted” back to straight is a good outcome in her mind.)
I truly, truly envy that you have never encountered people who will bend their logic in this way to maintain their predefined definitions of good and bad (in this case, Fellow Church Member GOOD Homosexuality BAD so therefore [insert cognitive dissonance and ridiculous mental gymnastics here])
The thinking of the groups like this is Group And What It Stands For >>> Individual. Joyce’s life doesn’t actually matter if it is used to make the *right* point. They are perfectly willing to risk the lives of others for their group goals and to die for them.
It would be fun to see the look on her face if the rest of the church actually abandons Ross’ actions on this. Saying he was “misguided” and “blinded” by Blaine and God had to “take Ross in” to prevent him from sinning. That would be a nice hypothetical moment to witness.
For one second, maybe. Then it’d be “we have always been at war with Eastasia.”
Her beliefs are more important to her than the people they hurt. Becky did something she believes is wrong so she believes Ross was justified in his actions to correct that behavior. It’s why she ignored his actions the first time and then wanted him out on bail despite knowing he’d likely try again.
She even says it in those strips, she thinks if they let Ross get punished it’ll be like letting outsiders tell them how to raise their children.
I think that the missing son in Hank and Carol’s family is the key. No one really talks about him and I think that he was
outed somehow and is being shunned and Carol wishes that she had taken action like Ross did to ‘force him straight’.
Because she has to be right.
I think she feels she’d do the same in his position and she can’t be wrong.
“He only tried to do what he thought was right”
He only helped kidnap and threat six people.
Carol, your daughter won’t talk to you, won’t even look at you. You might want to reconsider whether or not she got hurt.
“We stand by our own.”
“Our own” being our fellow authoritarians, not our children.
Linda can stand down now. Carol has a much bloodier fight on her ticket.
Yup. The moment Joyce really, truly understood what her mom and her church stands for was the moment she understood that “our own” does not include Becky.
Heck, it doesn’t even include Jordan.
Damn, Hank!! Way to go!
Also this fight between two Karens is amazing. Honestly, I cannot wait to see what’ll happen when she finds out about Jocelyne.
I am wondering if she’ll never really know. If Hank separates from Carol, Joyce & Jocelyne (and Jordan?) can go no-contact with Carol over Joyce’s kidnapping before Jocelyne’s identity even comes up
I’m not saying it’s probable, but I kind of would like it if Joss can come out without ever having to face Carol’s nastiness
She may not ever find out about Jocelyne.
By the time Jocelyne is ready to come out to Joyce, and perhaps eventually to Hank, none of them will be on speaking terms with Carol (or John, probably, as I see the family splitting up into Hank-Joyce-Jocelyne on one side, and John-Carol on the other).
I don’t know where Jordan falls in that split, and he may be off on his own regardless. Worst case scenario is that Jordan is not religious, but is also nevertheless an MRA/incel/PUA/other flavor of misogynist.
by “we” I suppose she means “God and I”
I suspect that God would rather stand with Hank.
Oh.
Oh SHIT.
right?!?
Holy crow, Carol doubled down!
And tripled down!
And quadrupled down!
Wow, ok, so it seems Carol has no limits to how despicable she will be, Hank on the other hand, seems about ready to divorce this damned harpy
Must feel like her ears just popped.
Carol and her church are evil. Not misguided or indoctrinated but plain evil. I hate her so much. She makes me hate Linda less, as if that’s possible. Linda will not realize her mistake as she is way too egoistic for that. Charles does not have nearly as much of a spine as Hank does. Now Hank, I’m so proud of him I’ve never seen him so angry. I hope this is the final straw. How can he stay with a woman who wouldn’t care about her ien daughter’s safety?
Becky showed up. She tried to be nice. She was practicing their faith.
And they saw her as an enemy.
Vile.
Right, they’re such adults they can’t even admit it when they’re in the wrong. Like fuck damn Carol if What Ross was trying to accomplish was to “do the right thing and keep his daughter safe” I think he failed the minute he decided to luer her to a house with a mobster and a bunch of frat boy thugs. I don’t blame Hank for walking away I’d be done to.
And I hoped he died thinking about only that.
Did she get hurt? Physically no. But mentally and emotionally? It’s not a pleasant experience to get kidnapped.
I got a Wonder, if that’s how she really feels why is she there? Did she come there to see if she was okay or did she come there to reassure Joyce that despite everything that happened everything she did was the right thing to do.
Probably the latter 😔
I think you’re onto something. Carol isn’t worried about Joyce The Real Person, she’s worried about Joyce-Carolsdaughter, who is an imaginary person that needs to be reaffirmed in her religious faith and obedience to their community’s rules right now
Carol may try to convince Joyce college isn’t safe again and ask her to drop out and come home so that she can try to reinforce the hold she used to have. You know, overlooking that Ross’s actions were the danger for two out of the three major traumas Joyce has been through whereas her friends have been there at every turn to offer advice or listen to her.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/03-when-it-crumbles/huh/
Hopefully that link works. Judging by the daze and the bloody nose, she was hurt.
That was the tail end of a massive panic attack. I don’t know of any stretch of the imagination that having a panic attack so bad you black out isn’t counted as harmed.
Oh yes, she was hurt physically too.. poor Joyce, she has been dealing with so much trauma..
Yes but to people like her mother, Mental and Emotional damage is all taken care of by returning to gods embrace because mental and emotional problems are all a product of associating with unbelievers.
It’s a godpertunity.
The worrying thing is that Linda and Carol do have a common ground. If their kids did nothing and they took Amber and Becky away and let the others go, they’d have probably been fine with it. Linda less so obviously, but you know she’d berate Sal for “escalating” things
Oh yeah, that’s good stuff. GO LINDA! (I may never say that ever again.)
And Go Hank.
Time for the D-word.
Joyce is so screwed.
I think Joyce already knows it’s a strong possibility, if not probability. She knows/hopes her dad won’t blow off her being kidnapped and taken hostage, and that the inevitable result would be divorce.
She’ll be better off, in the long run. So will Jocelyn. And maybe even Jordan.
I let out an audible GASP at that last panel, holy shit
You love to see it, though frankly I want Hank to actually say something else besides just going “They shouldn’t have done that.”
I don’t expect it to go this way, but the phrasing could be read by Linda as a tacit agreement with Carol, particularly if she knows they go to a fundie church, “I won’t accept talk like this from a woman.” and all that.
However, it’s more likely that Carol’s going to question him exiting the conversation.
Still I am so hype for this, let’s go!!!!!!!!!!
Coincidentally, “there is a medium position between laissez-faire and fascist” is also great advice for the republican party right now
Dems too. Don’t forget, a liberal will choose fascism over socialism almost all of the time.
It’s the drawback of having a system that degenerates into two parties. Eventually, those parties divide up all the causes and positions between them such that to be for one you must be against the other.
The problem is, “first past the post” voting, and our other hacked-together election elements (such as the electoral college, although I think pulling it out now might make things even worse), make any such system falling to two parties, formally or informally, almost inevitable. Personally, I suspect informal parties might be even worse than informal ones. At least with formal ones, you can see the strings, (or whips, and party support during primaries, as the case may be).
I believe a strong central government is also part of the problem, as it makes “winning” so critical. You can’t just let California be California, and Wyoming be Wyoming. One Federal Rule For All, or laws dictated by the federal government in exchange for a share of tax monies, means all the states have to have cookie-cutter policies.
Personally, I’d like to see a Condorcet system, modified to take into account the biasing intended by the electoral college, (to preserve the point that, no, the populated cities AREN’T supposed to dictate terms to everyone else,) replace our current system. Being able to rank candidates, and having the highest scoring candidate win, not the least bad of the two most familiar parties, would, I think, cause candidates to trend toward the center rather than the fringes of their respective parties.
Partially agree. If the electoral college works the way it’s supposed to, it’s of a piece with being a republic and a union of states. Ranking vote systems have their own problems where I’m incentivised to strategic voting like voting a second choice last to prevent it from beating my first choice. Instant runoff with low vote candidate removed each round eliminates the tyranny of the two party system eliminating choice and reduces motivation for strategic voting to almost nothing. Voting for what you honestly think is best is no longer throwing your vote away.
Single Transferable Vote looks great…provided the version I’m most familiar with isn’t applied to additional seats.
If the first winner gets a say in who gets their surplus votes, you get parties, or at least party like behavior, again.
Here’s a video on that system, and the reason I don’t want it for deciding multiple seats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI
The US actually has a much weaker central government than most countries. Our states do have very different policies on many things.
And if we’d just let Mississippi be Mississippi, they’d still have Jim Crow. Not really a position I’d want to argue for.
You make a solid point, and some people have to live in certain places for their livelihood or strongly wish to for family continuity, but if the states were more varied than they are, the citizens would still be able to “vote with their feet”.
Of course, one problem with that is, a lot of people are “voting” no to California taxes and personal/commercial interference, and then “voting” yes to the same policies that necessitated California taxes, and that interference they agreed with, in places like Oregon, Colorado, and Texas.
Yeah sorry, not accepting “vote with their feet” as a substitute for basic human rights.
Or consider LGBTQ kids born in states that openly allow (require?) discrimination against them. They can’t even vote with their feet until they’re of age.
Why yes, as a liberal feminist nothing makes me happier than caged children and murdered black people!! My neighbors who I share cookies with monthly and cheered at Pride Parade desperately want to see teh Gheys individually napalmed! My family who I can’t talk about politics to and remain civil are right about everything because I’m a liberal who also hates poor people and thinks they should starve!
Whatever. Take your weird-ass straw man and buggrit.
I…*think*… that was supposed to be a dig at the centrist Democrats that the alt-right refers to as Liberals, but don’t actually represent actual progressives? Not positive, though.
Can I have “radical left” with my nonsensical collection of mostly unrelated buzzwords?
WAY TO GO HANK!
Looks to me like we could be seeing Hank’s redemption arc begin.
I hope. For Joyce’s sake.
Nah. His redemption arc began back during that argument with his wife that Joyce overheard. It got going strong when he drove them back to college, leaving his wife to take alternate transportation home from church.
Carol just admited that Ross kidnapped Joyce. Carol, you will burn in hell for believing kids being kidnapped is normal. Next you will say lesbians should be rapped to “convert” them to heterosexuality, or that white people are supreme.
There doesn’t seem to be a limit, no.
In this worldview, everything is secondary to saving souls from Satan. Everything.
I don’t think that’s true. Just from my experience in fundamentalism, they’re actually quite happy to let the majority of the world burn for not believing in their particular branch.
Hell, some welcome it.
He are the precious chosen few, let all the rest be damned. Let all the others go to hell, we can’t have heaven crammed.
Go Team Hank!
“…I’ll be standing over here”
The shot heard round the Dumbiverse
I hope it reached the third floor, all the way to Joyce’s room.
….”Joyce did not get hurt”?
Is that seriously, truly what Carol deep down believes? That the kidnpping, the gun, the threat, the repeated attempts to remove her best friend and make he own choice in the matter irrelevant did not hurt Joyce?
Wow. Just wow.
I think Carol is horrified that Joyce ASSOCIATED with Becky.
In Carol’s mind, you avoid being hurt by listening to the adults. In her view, Joyce should have helped Ross ‘save’ Becky. By not doing so, she brought whatever followed on herself. Carol is telling herself that she has no moral responsibility for what Ross and Ross’s chosen accomplice did to Joyce because Joyce was ‘doing the wrong thing’.
Hank disagrees and, I suspect, will expand on that disagreement in the divorce petition.
That “listen to the adults” might be giving us a glimpse into her own childhood…
Yeah, I thought so, too.
The last strip had me feel oddly sorry for her, even with her being so awful.
Of course, that’s no excuse :/
“Joyce is fine. She is. She HAS to be. Because if she isn’t… then I… no. No, she’s fine.”
/Carol
Dear Carol: Please define what you accept counts as “hurt.” That way, we can figure out what grounds to debate with you on.
For instance, if you’re only accepting physical pain of some sort or another, I accept that Joyce only says “Oof” when being thrown onto a concrete floor and landing on her shoulder here (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/03-when-it-crumbles/kidnap/), but note that in the next strip, she says “Ouch” when Amber lands on her. So clearly there was some physical pain involved. Or does it not count because we can’t prove that Ross was the one who threw Amber in?
Logic has no place here. Carol’s thought process starts and ends with “church member good homosexuality bad” and the rest is just twisted noise to make her feel like she’s a good person.
Carol’s though process start and end with “I’m right, and anyone who disagrees with me is obviously wrong. Right, Hank? Hank?”
It goes more than that since she utterly sides with Ross against Becky.
Well, but… If she doesn’t side with Ross, then perhaps her daughter’s best friend’s mum killing herself wasn’t just brought on by, like, Satan or mental issues (which she probably passed on to her daughter; you know those are hereditary), but, like actual abuse. Which they maybe, as members of the same church and close friends, should have noticed and done something about.
Perhaps her death was less weakness or a lack of faith or whatever, and more indirect murder.
And then they left their daughter’s best friend alone in that house with him.
OoooOOOoorrr… Ross is just a very religious, faithful guy who has been handed the troubles of Job and is desperately trying to save his daughter’s soul after already losing his wife to Satan. And that makes her right to still support him.
And not responsible at all for anything that unbelievers and heathens who don’t see the very real harm that Satan does would probably, in their twisted, misguided way see as problematic.
And that totally isn’t, you guys.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/03-when-it-crumbles/huh/
Judging by this page and the lead up of Blaine taking her hostage, she was unconscious from some kind of blow for a minute or two.
She was incapacitated by a panic attack due to Blaine grabbing her.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/03-when-it-crumbles/beats/
She’s pretty deep in denial right now. She knows how badly this has turned out and how it is likely only going to get worse now. She knows that she and the congregation made this happen by a combination of naivete and blinkered focus on what they wanted, assuming that all their members wanted the same things. She’s very, very angry with herself but lashing out at Becky, Joyce and the entire world outside the Church is so much easier than dealing with that.
She may also be genuinely grieving for a friend who met a violent and unexpected end at this point… But yeeeaaaah… Those words actually came out of her mouth and she presumably heard them and thinks they sound reasonable…
I think she is way too indoctrinated to even realize she is angry at herself.
Whelp. Made his move. Saw her roping him in.
Exxxxit staagee lefftttt.
If you wanted to known: (Stage right. The wings are labeled by what the actor sees, not by what the audience perceives.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snagglepuss – Exit, stage left is a Boomer (and Boomerang) reference. Updated with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Stage_Left!:_The_Snagglepuss_Chronicles.
RING THE BELLS OF DOOM
Wow Carol, you potty mouth. To quote Carla, “Do you suck Jesus’ wang with that mouth?”
They got out of this by not listening to the adults. Because the adults wanted to kill at least one of them. Also, they are hurt. All of them. It’s just not a physical wound.
And it’s kind of funny to hear Linda talk about a medium post, considering she’s struggling with said medium post, too.
Ryuji: “Effin rotten adults.”
Listening was important it helped them predict when they would be best able to run
1) He did hurt people. Even if you only count physical harm and not traumatizing people, Mike is kinda hanging by a thread here.
2) The answer to this is not ‘Well, at least he thought he was doing the right thing’ it’s ‘HOLY MOTHER OF FUCK, HE THOUGHT *THAT* WAS THE RIGHT THING?????’
3) “What more do you fucking want?” You and Linda to tear each other apart. Is that so much to ask?
4) Ah, “but did she die???” As if that makes it better. It didn’t work in PLL and it doesn’t work here.
5) “If you listen to the adults, you don’t get hurt” Well Jesus tap-dancing Christ, this explains a lot about the way Joyce thinks. Poor baby.
6) “I suppose you let YOUR kids do whatever they want?” Nah, Linda just couldn’t stop her.
7) Linda, you wouldn’t know that medium position between laissez-faire and fascist if it leapt up and slapped you like I want to every time you talk.
8) Apparently Joyce is no longer one of Carol’s own. I repeat – poor baby.
9) Neither is Hank and he’s not stopping. Good job, Hank.
10) Yes, Linda is more correct than Carol here. No, I don’t care, I’m still team kill each other.
Both Linda and Carol can be killed by Bettlejuice for all I care.
8-9: I wonder how hard the cognitive dissonance is going to hit. I mean, she’s supposed to belong to Hank, right? But if he’s not using the same playbook anymore — if she’s actually thinking on her own and using her own opinions — what is she?
I’m pretty sure the news about Mike hasn’t travelled very far yet. Also, I have a feeling that it is “his own fault because he jumped”
And if Carol ever realizes he’s the one who answered the phone with ‘Hail Satan’ as a prank the weekend Becky fled Anderson, she’d be pretty far in the ‘he got what he deserved’ camp.
Aaah, I was scrolling down looking for you after reading that third panel! Because yeah, point 7 is REAL FUCKING RICH coming from Linda ‘he just doesn’t know he’s going to be a doctor yet’, ‘I thought the accident would make you realize you should cut your losses, since you didn’t I’ll steal money from you and make its return dependent on you abandoning the best friend it is intended for,’ ‘of course you won’t hate me forever, you’re thirteen’ Walkerton. And that’s just the highlights reel.
Carol’s definitely the more ‘Jesus burgerflipping CHRIST you just said that’ one here, but god the cognitive dissonance on Linda’s still pretty staggering. (Because Carol’s not even dissonancing it, she’s just straight-up rejecting reality.)
I hope the Keeners take all the kids out for lunch and just do not bring them back until the mutually-assured destruction’s cleaned up. Hank can come once he’s done with his call to the divorce lawyer and a text to Joyce (and for that matter, Becky. Hell, Jocelyne will probably need to see it too, it impacts her life) about how he was not involved in the bail, he is horrified that it happened, and he is even more horrified it ended this way and people are STILL defending Ross, and as such will be cutting ties there.
If my legacy on Dumbing of Age is just ‘She really really really likes Sal and she really really really hates Linda’ I’ll be okay with that.
Also, because both these women need to be reminded, have a point 11) YOUR KIDS *ARE* ADULTS. They’re new to being adults and might still need pointers on it, but they are adults now.
It’s times like this that make it really hard for me to lewd characters.
But not impossibleWe trust in your creativity
Agreed.
I admire your resolve
Fundangelical Christians think of themselves as being the adults in the car and that’s why they’re driving. Everyone else seems them as road raging drunks speeding down the highway, waving a gun around to keep anyone else from driving.
I thought Jesus was supposed to take the wheel for them.
Only if Ultracar’s brain has been transferred to a fembot.
That’s why the pedal has been put to the metal but they aren’t watching the road or holding onto the steering wheel at all, I think?
Third panel is what I wish everyone on the far left and right wing could understand (the Linda bit of course)
Especially when talking about “the other party”, sheesh. Seeing american political debates at the highest level really takes my hopes away.
Far too much tribalism in politics all over the world. I don’t know when it transferred over from sports team but it certainly isn’t helpful
In the US? Late 1700s.
The far right is in power and we see the consequences. The far left doesn’t even hold much power in the Democratic Party and the horrors they’d inflict on us seem centered around universal health care. In other words, bothsiderism is bullshit.
There is a small fraction of the left in the US that this could apply to, but since they seem most focused on tearing down the Democratic party I don’t think they’re really that significant.
Oh man, I am adding “bothsiderism” to my personal lexicon. Love that.
Rock on, Hank!
WHY was he one of the choices in last week’s “Worst Parent” poll, again?
He’s flawed, sure, but, -and especially- juxtaposed next to his wife, he seems like a damn fine fellow!
“We stand by our own”.
Almost everyone does that – up to and UNTIL the point where they, cruelly and with forethought, endanger innocent lives!
Karens don’t say “Sorry”, other Karen!
As a Karen, you should know that!
I really don’t see why that particular label is being applied to Carol. Many other labels, sure.
Ok.
This is the storytelling I like, the kidnapping storyline was…not the best work but this is back to the moral ambiguity which is closer to real life
The morals here aren’t remotely ambiguous?
Simplistic ‘this is good and this is bad’ morals fall flat because they don’t get into ‘why’. This scene is contrasting 2 characters, neither of which are particularly good. Here we get to see why they do what they do. Understanding may eventually come, but never moralizing unless a character needs something spelled out for them. Show, don’t tell.
I saw a lot of the kidnapping storyline as ammunition for the inevitable fallout. (It also was the unambiguous, black-and-white You Are Not This Bad that Amber ultimately needed to accept that she wasn’t doomed to turn out like Blaine, and the level of danger necessary to get Amber and AG talking again and recognize things had gotten FAR out of what was manageable on their own.) It was black and white because it NEEDED to be, to drive home the fact that Carol still stands by her actions even when they led to something THIS catastrophic. If she won’t budge now of all times, she cannot possibly be reasoned with.
Carol: DONT YOU UNDERSTAND! THIS IS ALL BECKY’S FAULT!
Linda: NO! It’s SAL’s fault!
Take your upvote.
Sal, Amber, the school itself… Why does Linda not aim her arrows at the people who actually did harm? Ahh, hitting Blaine and his goons will not make her feel powerful to her kids…
Like Carol? She did actually focus on a reasonable target as soon as she spotted one.
I’m pretty sure Linda’s motivation here is that she specifically wants to punish SOMEONE she deems responsible for this, personally. She’s on the right target right now, but before that it was Amber. Where her children are and how they’re doing and what they think of any of this (Walky as victim in particular) don’t matter when she can go aggro on someone she can blame.
I think Linda is still freaking out over the fact that her kid got *kidnapped*, and she’s desperately trying to do something to regain her sense of control of the situation. She’s lashing out from fear. It’s fight or flight, and Linda’s fighting, and in that situation the target doesn’t matter, just so long as you hit someone so you feel less afraid.
One of the kidnappers is dead and the other one’s been arrested, so they’re beyond her reach. Amber wasn’t beyond her reach, so she was a target. But now there’s a target *directly in front of her*, and by sheer luck, it’s someone who actually deserves to be a target.
The thing is, if she’s freaking out that her kid got kidnapped she’s still expecting him to comfort her when he’s the one that was harmed.
I like how this mirrors Sal walking out on her parents from earlier in the storyline.
(It also mirrors Walky doing it, but I couldn’t find a way to keep from typing “Walky walking” and being confusing.)
Score one for Hank! Standing tall as a bastion of strength and reason in the face of science-denying quarter-wits (calling them Half-Wits would be giving them too much credit.
Let’s call it q-wits.
She did get hurt though… You just don’t care about emotional or mental wounds… Or know about her physical…
Hey she hurt her hand punching him the first time.
That reminds me of how her church and family reacted when she had her cast (“Oh, she’s faking”). So, women are too weak and frail, but when they actually get violent, they are “faking”? It also says a lot that Carol will defend Ross’ violence, but not her own daughter’s reactions. It still kills me that Carol’s only real reaction was literally telling Hank to buy a gun to shoot gophers.
When did she tell him to do that?
While they were at church. It sounded like the continuation of a past discussion, not directly related to the kidnapping, but shockingly tone deaf and obviously intentionally so on Willis’s part.
Yeah! Go Hank!
Yeah, here’s where it happens. Hank can’t tolerate the fact that his wife approves of Ross’s actions and very clearly was enabling them for one second more.
Ross was Carol’s knight in a shining tee-shirt wasn’t he? He was the one who was going to bring her children ‘back to the faith’ by any means necessary. Damn, she’s a scary woman; even scarier when you consider the fact that she’s convinced that she’s one of the White Hats!
To her, Ross was the only one in their church willing to actually “do the right thing”.
… she’s delusional.
Hank
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANK
MY MAN HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANK!!!!!!!!!
OK so, first thing I’m noticing here. Hank is my man.
second thing I’m noticing here
“we stand by our own” Then hank walks away.
Hank does not consider Carol to be “one of his own”. Hank is finally saying “I’ve had enough of this lunatic. my baby girl almost died and she doesn’t even care.”
I’m also expecting Hank to formally resign from the church. He really doesn’t want to have ‘we’ to include him any more.
Yeah, Hank really strikes me as someone who has been trying to rationalize and be charitable towards the people around him as much as possible, but who has finally had enough.
I sure hope Joyce is safely somewhere else from this.
Are you kidding? Joyce is probably right behind them.
That would be terrible D:
Not to be Debbie Downer, but back when they were rescued, Becky said, “There’s No one left out there who can hurt me.” I hope that Carol and her evil don’t try to avenge Ross. Just that I’ve learned from Wilde Life studies that Momma Bears can eat their cubs at times. And hell, look what Chronos did to his kids!
Oh, I’m expecting Carol to try to cause harm in a passive-aggressive way. She doesn’t have the guts to do anything physical but she’ll be more than willing to set up a letter-writing campaign against Robin to ruin Becky’s new life. She’ll try to shut off Joyce’s tuition (which may be difficult because Hank isn’t playing ball) and she might even try to ‘encourage others to do the right thing’, which sounds awfully like advocating violence against Becky, Joyce and the Walkertons (the latter as revenge on Linda and her whole godless breed).
The next one likely to try something physical will be John with Joyce.
A letter writing campaign against Robin would help Becky, since she doesn’t actually want Robin to win.
Honestly if she tries anything it might backfire quite spectacularly against her. Joyce is already estranged, Hank is starting to see her for the looney that she is and Jocelyne has all the reasons to bail out if she sees she has a chance. She’ll be left with only that other looney son that she has.
To me, John (her missionary oldest son) is Carol’s next likely source of trauma after the divorce. I’m sure that he’s her ‘perfect son’ and if (when) it turns out he is embezzling mission funds to afford luxuries like his car, I’m not sure if she’d be able to handle it.
Oh boi, that would be fun. Just imagine it, they are sitting at the table in their house, just the two of them and she pours her heart out over how everyone is evil and immoral… and then there is a knock at the door and a couple of cops come in and arrest John.
Hang on, I’ll get the popcorn!!!
I hate that there’s a current real-life blueprint for this, but if the current horror show with the Johns Ortberg is anything to go by, she’ll do anything to make him appear “righteous” and say he’s done nothing wrong. Including throwing her other kids out the window.
I thought Jocelynne was the stated favorite “son”.
Wasn’t that John? The missionary guy?
i dunno some days he’s more of a cowgirl guy
XD
Don’t mess with a missionary guy.
I understood that reference
Found it!
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/heated/
They really shouldn’t be shouting into each-others faces like that, with this virus and all. Wait, that’s only on this side of wall #4. Man I miss being allowed to do that
A lot of f bombs going around…
Do not google 2 moms 1 dad. Or, you know, google it, I don’t know what you’ll find, and also I am not your mom (m/f).
Apparently, you are someone’s grandmother (if you’re Dutch).
But if I’m someone’s grandmother, I am also someone’s mother. Who’s to say I’m not YOUR mother? Because in that case, do NOT google 2 moms 1 dad! Because I’d be your mother and I say so!
“And did she get hurt? No!”
Uh, Carol, given that Joyce has refused to answer your calls, how the heck do you know whether she is hurt or not?
Yeah, she was just kidnapped by someone she knew most of her life and saw him being murdered. Sure, no biggie.
OT: the Do Not Track setting in my browser is on. Why the hell to I have to deal with the allow cookies‘s screen every few days? If do not track is set, the damn dialogue shouldn’t appear and simply disable all tracking cookies.
I hereby freely acknowledge that my comment yesterday was totally in error, and that Carol has moved up into second place in the race for worst parent.
I think the most infuriating thing is that people like Carol will never admit that they were wrong. Every single word out of her mouth in this strip makes me want to scream and the worst part is that at no point will she ever be able to see things from anything other than her POV.
She will go to her grave offended that these people are upset that children were kidnapped because the kidnapper was a Christian fundamentalist homophobe and therefore right. Like, it’s clear that she understands that they don’t share her viewpoint with her “you won” comment, but she also clearly expects them to still see this as her and her church being objectively right.
That wouldn’t be fundamentalism but self-righteousness. “at no point will she ever be able to see things from anything other than her POV” implies that she has a point of view. Fundamentalism gives you a tool to fight and overcome your point of view and atone for your weakness by giving you a mission.
Attempting to process the cognitive dissonance would give her a stroke.
There it is, the expression of someone seriously considering divorce papers.
Unpopular opinion time.
Without actually defending Carol here… in fact, I’d echo most people saying that in this strip it’s Linda being 100% reasonable… I’d point out two things that help me emphasize with her a LITTLE more.
1st, Carol isn’t talking in the abstract of a hypothetical man doing right or wrong and dying as part of it. She’s talking about someone she knew, who was perhaps a good friend of hers, someone she’s grieving for… and who got his skull viciously hammered in two days ago… and some Karen just marched up to her and started badmouthing him and attacking her for being his friend. This is an excellent formula for a shaken, raw, hurt, and combative emotional state, rather than steady, objective, and reasonable.
2nd, Linda has already framed this entire encounter, from the moment she came marching up to Carol, in condemning and combative terms aimed at Carol, her community, and her community’s destruction. “You won” regarding the death of someone in her community makes a bit more sense in this context, even if there weren’t any real winners from the whole sordid affair.
Again, Carol is extremely off base. Both of them are, and my opinion of both remains very low. But I also have a little bit of sympathy for both, because holy crap no parent should be expected to be totally rational in this sort of situation.
I think it’s that she doesn’t feel guilty. Joyce COULD have gotten really hurt and DID get pretty traumatized. And it was Carol’s fault. She doesn’t even feel bad for it.
Oh yes, she does feel bad about it. That’s why she is so defensive. Religion gives her a reason to feel right, not good.
Agreed. It’s WHY she’s triple-downing on “Ross didn’t hurt anyone”. Not just because she’d have to question her faith (“If my church can be wrong about this, what else is it wrong about?”) but also because it would mean SHE was directly responsible for freeing the man who put her daughter in danger.
Yeah, Linda sucks.
But Linda’s framing only works because Carol’s community did enable this and that both of their children at risk.
Those are solid points. Carol is shocked and grieving and on the defensive and not inclined to be charitable or steady. I can’t say I sympathize with her, because it really seems like her reaction to Ross pointing a gun at and later kidnapping her child in order to gain access to his own kid is “well what would YOU have done?!” but…yeah, I can definitely see why she’s behaving/reacting this way.
I have zero sympathy for the person whom is defending- and aided- a violent authoritarian zealot whom had already assaulted not only her freakin daughter but discharged a firearm at a school while kidnapping his daughter from it.
She and every other person who donated to his bail is responsible for what has happened. Carol killed him as sure as worst dad did. They don’t get to play victim here.
At the critical moment Carol seems unable to prioritize her own children.
Linda in this conversation became the broken clock that is right twice a day I have to say.
I’m probably the only person that thought this, but after panel 1 the first thought was ‘…oh my gosh Carol loved Ross’.
I think I need to watch less soaps.
Yeah, that’s 100% reductive reasoning.
I’ve been saying for a while that Carol was having an affair with Ross. Possibly she was enamoured of his ‘strength’, which she doesn’t see in Hank.
…huh.
I had my theories that her and Ross probably had an affair which is why Beckys mom offed herself, but others also theorize that she probably had a fling with Beckys mom instead and out of guilt Beckys mom took her own life.
Man she really cannot accept being wrong. Not in getting him out, not in his actions which she agrees with.
I submit you have to listen to anyone who shoves a hammer in your face or you only have yourself to blame if you get hurt. Not just adults, Carol.
Pretty sure the person with the hammer gets all the blame.
Oh hey I’m Joyce again, huh
Yeah but that’s like, logic or something. That’s not how you argue with Carol. The only thing you can do is try to get her to think a little bit about how utterly weird the things she says are. The thing that went wrong here, she says, is that the kids didn’t listen to the adults. The guy who killed her friend with a hammer was an adult, so clearly, she’s angry because they should have listened to him more. Especially because he was dressed in a cartoon costume and hitting people with a hammer.
So, she would have cared ONLY if Joyce had been hurt. All others can literally just rot in Hell.
Oh, she cares that Ross is dead — because Ross was a “good Christian”. Obviously, his death was the fault of everyone else.
Sarcasm aside I think Carol and Ross’s basic contention with, let’s see, maybe every person who understands that we live in a society with other people? Is the part where using intimidation, violence, murder and emotional blackmail to force your lesbian kid to act straight is “the right thing”. That’s an ethics discussion you could have with a therapist or a lawyer, but not a discussion you’re ready to have unless and until you can entertain the tiniest shred of doubt that your blind faith may/i> be wrong.
I just had a Babylon 5 flashback. I’d love for Hank to have said: “If anyone wants me, I’ll be over there with all the other sinners.”
One of my favorite lines from that show!
This kidnapping seems to have caused an outbreak of chordatitis with several people growing a spine.
Finally he takes a stand. Better late than never, but rather sooner than later.
In reddit terms we’ve got a r/entitledparent versus a r/insaneparent. Hank’s got the right idea of not becoming involved and getting out of the blast radius.
I think at this point, Hank is moving towards a different stance than just “out of the blast radius”. I think he’s finally going to leave Carol. At least, I certainly hope so.
Minimally, I think he’s going to give Carol a big piece of his mind along the lines of “I can’t believe you think any of this is ok and that’s frankly disgusting”, which Carol will NOT take well. Hank definitely isn’t perfect, but I’m pretty pleased that he finally seems to be confronting the fact that his spouse isn’t someone he’s proud of right now.
I’m reasonably sure this will only make Carol question his allegiances, for she cannot be wrong.
Take that Carol! You’ve taken, at this point, multiple steps over the line and now even your own husband will stand by you! Even he’s sick of your shit 😀
In the immortal words of Nelson from the Simpsons, “Haha! Haha! Haha! Haha!”
*and now NOT even your own husband will stand by you!
Most of the cast is over 18 correct? Wouldn’t that make them adults as well?
‘Adults’ isn’t a reference to age. It’s a reference to something acting and thinking in line with what is broadly regarded by the subculture of the person speaking considers to be ‘seinsible’ and ‘mature’.
And that’s another difference between Carol and Hank. After the first Becky incident, Hank chose to trust Joyce’s judgement because he saw that she was now a woman. Carol still sees her as a child to be controlled.
As evidenced by Carol threatening to pull Joyce out of school, which… she can’t actually do. She can pull funding if they’re paying for it rather than Joyce having student loans, but she has no legal authority to make Joyce quit. And I’m pretty sure that Joyce has figured that out since.
I’m 33 and I’m pretty sure I’m not an adult.
Maybe (and I repeat, maybe) see how horrible Carol is will make Linda rethink about her own behavior with Sal and Walky, see her Hypocrisy and help her become a better person/parent? That’s seems to work for Hank.
Because that’s what Jesus taught: “WE STAND BY OUR OWN”
…just the worst kind of bull$hit hypocrite
God DAMN.
Also I kind of feel like Carol is inevitably going to say something really phenomenally shitty to Becky at some point here, and that will not only be the final straw for her relationship with her husband but also with her daughter.
Blaming Becky for her husband distancing himself from her possibly?
Actually, I’m expecting Carol to make some extraordinarly demands and issue an ultimatum to Jocye. When Joyce rejects them, Carol will start shouting at Dorothy, blaming her and accusing her of ‘seducing my little girl just to corrupt her’, which is pretty much the last straw for Joyce. Carol will then tell Joyce that, until she ‘comes to her senses’, she can consider herself without family. Then she’ll attempt to storm off in righteous fury, expecting Hank to follow her only to realise when she reaches the doors to the atrium that he isn’t following her. Instead, he’s hugging a crying Joyce and that is where things will get really interesting.
Oh, if Willis wants to make the entire comments section squeal in joy, Joyce will react to her mother’s tirade by kissing Dorothy in front of her (surprising everone, especially Dorothy and herself).
I think we’re about ten strips away from Joyce monologing for three panels, one panel of Carol absorbing it, and then a final panel of Carol responding with something *cosmically* shitty,
I wouldn’t put it past her to say “He died because of you.”
At this point, I think that is actually the tamest thing she could say.
Depends if we’re talking about Ross or Jesus. If she can tell one from the other…
I think part of Carol knows to say those things in private when no one is around to defend Becky, like with her “can you REALLY know if you’re a lesbian at your age and is it worth your father being in prison” thing.
Shots fired! Shots fired!
We have two armed Mom’s shooting it out in the lobby, everyone get down and avoid eye contact until further notice.
In the slightly modified words of Eric Cartman. (and censored so it actually posts)
Weeeeeeeeeellll
Joyce’s mom’s a *****, she’s a big *** *****,
She’s the biggest ***** in the whole wide world
She’s a stupid *****, if there ever was a *****
She’s a ***** to all the boys and girls.
I didn’t know you could spell b o n g o with asterisks.
Let’s have a contest; “what is Hank’s next Pop Culture quote?”
I’ll start with Bender: “Carole, you can bite my shiny metal…”
Any takers?
Susan Ivannova in Babylon 5: “If anyone wants me, I’ll be over there with the rest of the sinners.”
Ooooh, well done.
Wasn’t the line “getting drunk with the rest of the aliens?”
Linda I’m glad you don’t advocate parents rights to point guns at their offspring and their offsprings friends. That’s is not and shouldn’t be a real right. That does not mean you found the middle position between laissez faire ans fascist.
Remember the enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend, sometimes they just like making enemies, sometimes they are fighting over who can eat you, and sometimes they only agree with you on that one point.
I wonder if we’re about to see the clash between Carol’s “my children are possessions” and Hank’s “my children are people” beliefs.
2-1 ON for divorce talks soon….
Thinking about it, I have realised something else disturbing about Carol’s statement: “We stand by our own!” That’s a very tribalist point of view. In essence, she’s calling everyone outside her subculture ‘others’; not endowed with the same intrinsic value or deserving of the same respect and consideration.
It’s a bit like saying “My country, right or wrong”. It’s a sentiment that was basically used to justify every atrocity in history. “It doesn’t matter what we do to them because they’re different from us.” Deserving of less consideration and certianly not really… ‘people’.
I mean yeah fundamentalists operate on an us vs them basis. Take Jehovah’s Witnesses, they’re trained to see everything outside the church as worldly and tainted. They’re trained to spread the word in the most annoying way possible so they get harshly rejected by the outside world and run back into the warm, loving arms of the church. It’s how these groups keep their members wrapped around their fingers
I was wondering when someone was going to mention my religion!
“My country right or wrong” is also a sadly misused statement. The entirety of the statement is, “My country, right or wrong. If right be kept right. If wrong, be SET RIGHT.”
Good for you Hank none of these are your people, I don’t know how you figured that out about Linda and her husband. God Carol would so be down with blaming Amber.
Hank and Carol sitting in a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
First comes the love, then comes the marriage
Then comes the baby in the baby carriage
Then the baby gets kidnapped and Carol don’t care
Hank’s heart broken beyond repair
Hank leaves Carol and takes the tree
D-I-V-O-R-C-E
applause.gif
What? This deserves an up vote. Consider it lauded.
why can’t we have up votes? is it a crime?
are there… up laws?
i need to see a written record. so i can… hold your up laws, please.
That last panel is very nice.
I resemble that remark.
Carol admires Ross for standing up to the sinful world, while Hank has been too soft on the “lost sheep” Jordan. Plus is probably to blame for Joyce’s sister, since if he was a better role model, this wouldn’t have happened. Yes, Carol know in the back of her mind.
Carol wants Hank to be like Charles, a potted plant to back her up.
But my main thought is how this must have been for DYW to write. Reliving pain isn’t fun or easy. Kudos for this.
Just for the record, when I first saw “to blame for Joyce’s sister,” it was not clear that you were speaking in Carol’s voice? So I was about to go off.
But also I disagree that Carol knows. She has the awareness of a pumice stone.
being a failed criminal doesn’t make you a good guy. In all truth, in his last moments it was revealed that he probably wasn’t THAT bad a guy, but the church had reinforced some rather dangerous beliefs that enabled negative behavior.
I bet Ross was more like Carol, before Bonnie passed. He was a deeply troubled man, raised with an abhorrent worldview, pushed beyond his breaking point by outside forces, desperately holding onto the scraps of normalcy as he knew it.
Contrast with Blaine, a manipulative sociopath who revels in the misery he inflicts upon others.
Yeah, the fucked up thing about Ross from an outside perspective, is that, in the right circumstances, he could have been The Joyce of his own story. We can see the kernels of good his beliefs smother and squash down. We can see there were still lines he refused to cross (actively torturing and killing teens). We can see the promise in him that his beliefs and the people around him actively warped by telling him ‘if you’re doing the right thing in your mind, it is okay to traumatise swathes of people!’
We can see the potential that he had to become a really great man if circumstances were different and yet he became a rather terrible one with a few moral lines instead because the people around him were all like that too.
I know Willis writes these comics three months ahead, and I know he’s been eerily prescient at times, but Carol condoning Ross kidnapping her daughter? Seems a bit too familiar.
Moms soccer: Linda 1 – Carol 0 (1st half)
Also: judging by the number of comments, I was not the only one eagerly expecting more content about the Walkertons and the Browns.
I know this is controversial opinion but I don’t put Linda in the same category as bad parent as ToeDad, Blaine, or even Linda. I kinda put her in Richard Rosenthal or maybe Billy’s Parent’s territory. Maybe not the best influence/role model (He hit on a college student in front of Joe), has obvious flaws, but definitely loves her kids.
Stepping back from being an audience member with multiple views and has also spent more time with Hank and has seen his growth, She found out the same girl who permanently scarred her daughter (yeah she was a robbing a store but the stabbing happened once Sal was already detained) not only is living in the same dorm as Sal, but is also the daughter of the guy who kidnapped her son. She’s not trying to get Amber kicked out to save face, she’s doing it cause she’s legit worried and feels like this is something she actually can do to make her kids life safer.
Like, obviously I don’t agree on the favoritism at play that is def tainted by colorism nor do I think she made the right all with Sal trying to help Marcy, but she’s got a complicated relationship with her daughter who still still loves very much.
Honestly, i’d put her above Ethan’s parents and below Hank who while is the much much better of the two Walkerton parents, he still let Joyce be in that environment willingly. His passivity in that relationship doesn’t automatically make him a victim. He gets points for occasionally pushing back and growing but we didn’t particular like him at the start either ( He pulled that “we’re gonna passive aggressively pray over you having atheist friends instead of talking about it” crap).
Also an aside, we can lay off of Charles a bit. Obviously Linda is more a aggressive in the relationship so we see her interact with people more (plus her relationship with her kids is more highlighted) but we don’t really know what his relationship with his kids 1 on 1 are just like we didn’t know Hank’s with his until Willis gave us more of those scenes.
Maybe i’m a bit biased. Being black in an interracial black/white relationship (especially in the burbs) it can just be a lot easier/safer letting your white partner be the more aggressive one (especially in public)
That’s kind of ruined by the fact Linda didn’t give a FUCK about Sal’s hand (to the point Sal hid it from her last time she saw her) until she could use it as ammunition. And the fact Linda dumped her newly disabled 13 year old in another state and didn’t see her or speak to her (except to lecture her on how she’s a failure) for five years per Word of Walky. Until a couple weeks ago, she had never been in a strip where she spoke to Sal without yelling at her. Hell, her comment on Sal being ridiculously late was ‘she’s making us look like bad parents’. Linda does not care about Sal as Sal is. Linda cares about the way Sal makes her look and about looking like a good mother. Hell, she doesn’t even really care about Walky as Walky is. Remember her little ‘Oh, he THINKS he’s in telecommunications until he switches to med school’ crap earlier? Or Walky’s freaking out because he knows how his mom will react if he fails math because he’s SEEN how she treats Sal?
Linda is not a good mother. She is emotionally and financially abusive as well as emotionally negligent (which honestly is just another form of abuse) to Sal.
And Charles isn’t really better. Sal usually speaks about her parents plural when she talks about them lecturing her about how she’s a failure. Charles is the one who insulted her hair to her face (and we’ve seen how she feels about her hair when she’s alone). Just last storyline, Sal told Amber she envied Amber’s ability to reject her father’s claim over her. Charles isn’t Blaine or Toedad but he’s not a good father either. Heck, it’s one thing to be passive but when your partner is pulling emotionally abusive and financially abusive crap, I think it’s worth criticizing he does not intervene.
Loving your kids doesn’t make you automatically a good parent. It doesn’t even make you not an abusive parent. Even if we grant Linda loves her kids (which imo is a fairly big question mark), she is still an abusive mother. Her trying to punish another teenager for the actions of her dad isn’t a point in her favour even if it is out of love.
Also, I consider a prerequisite of loving someone (at least once they’re out of the ‘does not yet have personality, does not yet really have functioning senses yet’, since we’re talking about parent-child relationships) is understanding who they are and supporting them in that. You can fantasize all you want about the kids growing up and being doctors or presidents, but when you have a kid you’re committing to making and raising another person. You can’t control what they’ll take to or not. (You can give them a lot of options, you can encourage things, but you might be a statistician and they end up being competent at math but REALLY taking to agriculture of all things and that’s just how it is.) There’s a lot of things you ultimately can’t predict or control in a kid – basic physical details like bone structure or, say, hair texture (no idea why I’m bringing that up in a discussion of Walkertons!), sexuality, neurotype and able-bodiedness… even gender’s really just an educated guess until your child is old enough to make that decision. And your child, because they are a unique person in their own right, will inevitably have opinions that differ from yours about many, many things.
Linda does not recognize that Walky has a right to have ideas about his future she disagrees with. And Walky’s the one she’s NICE to. Linda refuses to recognize that Marcie has been nothing but a good and caring friend to Sal, and Sal to Marcie in return, because Linda refuses to see past Marcie being Latina and a very active, somewhat mischievous girl. (I think the former is more significant than the latter, but I’d bet the fact that she first saw Marcie when they were climbing a not-for-climbing playground fixture helped cement that first impression.)
Linda doesn’t actually see her kids as people with the capacity to exist outside her orbit and the roles she’s chosen for them, so any idea of them that she loves is fundamentally different from loving the kids as they are.
Actually while Ethan’s parents clearly have problems with homophobia until I learn more details I put them in the lesser parental evil catagory. Because all I know is they were not happy about it, but they still seem civil to him and didn’t cut him off.
…so I know this would be hard for Joyce but I’m so hoping she’s witnessing this to have further move away from her mother.
Slow clap for Hank.
Language, Carol.
“Attempted Murder!?!? It’s not like he killed someone!” – Carol, probably.
“Now honestly what is that?! Do they give a nobel prize for attempted chemistry?!
No but school will usually give you partial credit for attempted math.
Attenborough V.O.: And here we see the more reasonable member of the couple on the defensive separate himself from the conversation, as well as imply to his mate that he does not agree with her. The male of the couple I’m the offensive position looks on, surprised to discover after all this time that this is an option. Only time will tell what this will mean for the two males, though it is clear which of them has more of a spine.
Hank pulls a Romney. Good for you, Hank.
“We stand by our own”
Truly? Then I guess I won’t have to feel bad about beating you to death with this shovel. Because if you truly mean that you deserve to be put in the fucking ground.
I never thought I’d be on the side of Wally and Sal’s Mom here, but you know what they say about strange bedfellows. Meanwhile… sorry, Hank, but I’m not sure your wife is redeemable after this. (I have plenty of hope for you left, though.)
I usually have to read posts of articles on FB to getthis kind of rage. Which way is it to the kittens, again?
If they had listened to the adults they would have been dead too.
THANK 👏YOU👏HANK👏👏👏
Panel 2 Hank: Holy shit, Carol, REALLY?
Panel 5 Hank: (Mike)
Carol’s definitely angling for the second-worst DoA parent slot now that Ross is dead.
FINALLY!!
And now imagine that in the Walkyverse, these two sets of parents watched their children get married.
Hoo boy, what a wedding.
Would you invite them?