Ethan, everybody, getting support to help deal with emotions, is not a weakness one needs to avoid falling back into. It’s human. It’s ok to be comforted when you hurt.
‘You deserve to be loved, and to feel loved, just for being you.’ –Mr Rogers mashup with my meditation teacher
Amazi-Girl is still around, she just plays roller derby instead of super-heroing. So Amb-pathy would just have to be the 3rd split personality in her complex, which IMHO is way more interesting anyway!
I almost feel like Amber’s born too late to have enjoyed Freaky Friday, but on the other hand, it’s such a fun movie I want to call it a classic at this point.
Well, the book’s from 1972, and there were movie adaptations in 1976, 1995, 2003, and 2018.
It’s like the perfect pop culture reference for a sliding timeline, because there’ll be another rendition every few years!
Near as I can tell, none of the movies include the scene where the daughter in the mom’s body hears the housekeeper go on a racist rant and immediately fire her for it.
As long as there’s generational strife, we’ll keep getting new Freaky Fridays, because it’s become one of the perennial story archetypes.
I get Ethan’s issue, but I am also SERIOUSLY CONCERNED that he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of social support right now, even if he wants distance from the people who remind him of Mike.
I might challenge the idea that Amber counts as support here. She ghosted him for months, then appeared at his door and peeves at him, then said ‘I’m ready to talk about Batman again’ like that’s the issue. Ethan’s not really rejecting a support here so much as rejecting to allow part of the problem to reestablish itself.
Yeah, they were on some dangerous codependency fr. Even if he doesn’t actually recognize it and is just being emo bc #depression and #grief, he’s walking away from a really unhealthy relationship, not a support system
Yeah, it’s the fact that we’ve only seen him here with Amber, in his and Jacob’s dorm room (and not, crucially, WITH Jacob,) and sitting around in the lounge but not seeming to interact with anyone there that worries me. Not wanting anything to do with Amber or Danny is fine and valid. This apparent isolation… that is not good, either, and could get REALLY bad if he doesn’t have SOMEONE who can check in on him.
(I don’t… ACTIVELY think he’s a suicide risk right now. But I consider that a ‘right now’, or more accurately a ‘yet,’ because this is not a good mental space to stew in and that really does seem like what he’s doing.)
I mean, he’s definitely interacted with Jacob since the skip, and they’ve been in the same room, but we have no indication they hung out even before Mike died. Maybe he’s concerned. Maybe all on his mind is pizza. Maybe he doesn’t really have a good sense of Ethan’s mental state to be sure, and is getting brushed off if he asks. But regardless, Ethan doesn’t seem to be leaning on him, either, from what little we know. And again, I find it worrying.
While neither of them feel great, I think this conversation was actually productive. Not in a big way but baby steps are important.
Ethan showed that he was mad at her for her prior self-destructive behaviour but also that he still cared about her at least a little. Amber put her foot in her mouth but also told him that while she wasn’t at 100%, she was working on being a good friend and was going to continue to reach out to him.
I’m really happy with this exchange!
It sucks but the right person for when your feeling so low is not always the close friend. Don’t know who that could be for Ethan but sucks to be in that state. Don’t want to speculate too much but that state can get very dangerous if you’re not careful and don’t have a good support network.
Booster wouldn’t be a completely terrible person for Ethan to get support from.
I personally really want Joyce to step up here – I think it would be good for both of them. Ethan because he’d have a support that’s less emotionally/historically fraught than Amber and Joyce because she might Re-experience the love and kindness for others that was always HER and nothing to do with her previous beliefs in God and/or church.
I just realized what was so off to me about the new Ethan design. He’s lost a lot of weight. I assume he must have been working out a lot with his roomie until that messed up day.
You don’t need to be a superhero to be a committed friend Ethan, that’s unless you watched the Deadpool movie and you took Colossuses bs “Take a moment to be a hero” speech to heart.
Fair reaction from Ethan, I think. It seems to me like Ethan feels he’s the frog in the frog and scorpion story, and this is Amber the scorpion promising For Reals Yo that she’s not going to sting him halfway across the river.
Definitely a fair reaction from Ethan, though I feel like he’s mellowing out on Amber here- he’s denying her offer on personal grounds (I can’t keep relying on you like I did withmy previous coping methods) instead of lashing out.
Yeah. Like, he’s not refusing to have anything to do with her, he’s just saying ‘no, I’m not going to rely on you or believe you because historically that does not work out for me, and My life currently has enough that isn’t working for me’. Which is, I think, at least somewhat kinder than Amber has earned for herself in at least her recent (past six months or so) dealings with Ethan. Certainly ‘hard pass but thanks, bye’ feels comparatively gentle to me.
The last time they spoke she was a big ol creep about him and Danny, I dont blame him for wanting to handle her emotional drama right now when she’s not been there for MONTHS.
Right like she’s tacitly admitting that she hasn’t been a good friend but not actually making an effort to stop doing the things that are making her not a good friend (i.e. being a creep or responding with snark when Ethan’s opening up to her)
What exactly is she in the wrong about here? If you don’t mind me asking because if seems like she’s putting in an effort to try to be there for Ethan emotionally (granted he has no obligation to accept her emotional support
I think people forget that Amber has legitimately been ghosting this kid for like four or five months, and up until that point, they two of them and Mike were 100% co-dependent. People are perceiving Ethan being fucking awful, and he is being fucking awful; but, also, his and Amber’s friendship was deeply unhealthy, and needs legitimate repair, but maybe the guy who has zero support network, zero friends to help him, and zero professional support, is having more trouble with the fact that his remaining former co-dependent, is finally back to slide into their prior unhealthy relationship pattern as if nothing happened, after she practically abandoned him in his time of greatest need for literally months, and only returned once she was ready for him to start validating her needs again; and, right now, she narcissisticly needs to be a martyr for her friend, and make him feel better, to soothe and validate her anxieties about the justified fear that she has recently been a shitty friend to him.
It is not inaccurate to say that Amber has plenty of justified reasons for not being there for Ethan the past few months. But it is an accurate piece of context to highlight, that the general pattern of their relationship is centrally fixated on their mutual presence around their obsessive interest in comics and toys, and that both of them use this as a coping mechanism to escape their intense trauma; well, Amber wants Ethan to go back to performing that, for her sake. She wants her desire to help him, to be purer, more sincere, but it simply isn’t, at least not 100%. She’s not a psycho, but she is 100% making Ethan’s recovery and Ethan’s trauma, surrogate to her own needs around those issues; she is ready to go “back to normal,” because she went and did the work to heal her own trauma, and now she wants Ethan to go back to being the dumping ground for her obsessive rants so that she can feel socially fulfilled without having to put any effort or attention towards Ethan’s emotional and psychological needs; after all, the comic books are supposed to do that, and she doesn’t put in the effort to manage his shit, whereas Ethan was constantly being her guardian and handler, much the same way Joyce and Becky co-dependently manage one another around their traumas. Shockingly, when she shut Ethan out and left him to fend for himself with the worst trauma of his entire life, alone, he took it kind of personally, not because it was so unexpected, but because it was the last straw with his relationship with Amber.
From his perspective, Amber’s relationship with him, from her perspective, is fully about him being a dumping ground for her needs. Her going full-blown incommunicado during the worst period of Ethan’s entire life, and then wanting him back instantly as soon as it’s convenient for her, and holding him accountable to perform the identity he always performed for her, without remotely considering his emotional needs or wants? That is full-blown narcissist behavior. Period. Full stop. It is not defensible. That doesn’t mean Ethan is responding in good faith, or, arguably, proportionally to this hurt; he super isn’t. But people are being absolutely blind if they can’t see the fact that Amber has horribly, horribly fucked him over emotionally and psychologically in this case, and him being immensely angry over the way she is currently treating him right now, is not socially unwarranted.
Of all the characters in this comic, I have a bit of a blind spot for the ways in which Amber can be awful, so I appreciate when it’s spelled out for me like this. Thanks.
It’s rough because all these poor kids are all so poorly socialized and traumatized and riddled with awful coping mechanisms, most of their parents and home lives were some flavor of awful…of course they’re all constantly being terrible to each other, all the time! Being a healthy person and having a healthy social circle is actually a really difficult adult skill, and everybody had to pretend it isn’t, and that’s the weird reality of society. I’m only particularly critical of Amber, because frankly? I’ve been an Amber’s Ethan, and it’s a uniquely soul-draining experience that you can’t really grasp your own experience of, without some distance from it. But you say stuff like that, and people who are very sympathetic to Amber (this applies for every character in this strip, mind) ultimately deem that you are validating all her worst fears about her being the monster she believes she is.
Yeah, those sorts of people do, in fact, tend to sincerely feel that way about themselves; however, the other half that often goes unappreciated by those who don’t have close experience with such folks, is they love to revel, consciously and subconsciously both, in the mental freedom which accepting that identity within themselves, gives them. If you approach your worst impulses from a state of learned helplessness, if they’re just “something that’s wrong with you,” it sort of ceases to be something you actually have to deal with, and becomes the responsibility of those in your support network, to either just put up with that, or police you on it for you, as opposed to you putting your own persistent mental energy into changing. Them doing that, is not cool.
Now I want to clarify, I’ve said I’ve been the Ethan to an Amber, but I only feel so confident coming at this with such authority, ’cause I’ve also had my fair share of relationships where I’m sure, in retrospect, I was the Amber. The reality is, these are wounds that you have within you, and its your responsibility to heal them, because you will hurt others with them, as well as continue to hurt yourself as you pick and pick and pick at the gangrenous rot. That super does not mean that Amber isn’t also hugely traumatized, hugely justified in her trauma, absolutely the victim, and naturally justified in going to her friend for help and emotional support, devoid of the additional context of this specific situation. It doesn’t mean that Ethan hasn’t been weapons-grade abusive and inappropriate in expressing his own justified anger and victim-hood. But while this particular episode of their long-term friendship is squarely an example of Ethan being full-blown abusive with zero actual defensible arguments to make otherwise, it’s hard for me to analyze that in isolation of the fact, that Ethan was pretty much alone for months while Amber didn’t want or need him, up until she waltzed back into his life the other day, immediately said some shit that was insensitive to his feelings and his trauma, and then immediately tried to “pick up the friendship where we left off,” with absolutely zero thought to the fact that maybe Ethan has wants or needs which are independent to satisfying the repetitive pattern of behavior which will current comfort Amber, now that she feels ready to Have Emotions and Be A Friend, again. The reality is, even in the process of getting pushy about Being A Good Friend to Ethan, right now, it’s about assuaging her own certainty that she has let Ethan down. In this case, she has, in a more profound way than usual; but, this is the pattern of all of Amber’s years of being Ethan’s friend, anyway, because the way she forms relationships is literally a result of her trauma. The fact that she is the way she is, because she was seriously hurt, has very limited bearing on the fact that Ethan has to deal with the outcome of that trauma when it leads to Amber not treating him fairly.
The reality is, if you do something shitty to somebody, on the most stressful day of your life, with a pretty reasonable excuse for doing so, and any unbiased, rational human being would give you a pass on that shitty thing, because the scale of it was far less bad than the totality of what happened to you, to lead to you behaving that way, on that day…the person it happened to, you still did it to. They are under no actual obligation to forgive you, or give you absolution. Generally, most people will, but if you already hurt that person, you don’t get to make them suffer more taking your apology and performing forgiving you, just as a social nicety. If you fuck up, people are allowed to be mad at you. It doesn’t excuse them abusing you back, or escalating, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re making them accepting your apology, more about your feelings, than theirs. By all metrics, an apology like that, is not a very high-quality apology.
Even more so when you consider that either she was so absent as to not even realize that Ethan has Issues with Danny before perking out OR she knew, ignored it, and verbalized anyway because Teh Hawt.
Given that Danny and Ethan’s fight happened at around the same time Amber withdrew from Ethan for the purpose of giving him space, whereupon Mike died and everything went to hell, it’s possible she doesn’t know about the fight, if not likely; she’s probably not enough of a dumbass to talk to Ethan about Danny at that point.
Because his only other emotional support literally died, and from his perspective, she completely abandoned him and his needs, up until it was convenient for her to deal with them again, and now it’s become his responsibility to perform his own recovery just to make her feel better about that.
Its not like Amber didnt have her own gigantic issues to deal with.
You know, like her abusive father kidnapping her friends, then him being killed after murdering her friend. After a whole childhood filled with trauma and repression.
Right? How selfish of him, to be concerned with his own lifetime of pain and trauma. He should absolutely be laser focused on what Amber has had to deal with, because he has suffered nothing at all. He should absolutely be okay with her taking from the should-be-unlimited pool of fucks he has to give without offering him any in return.
Hasn’t he learned that only Amber’s suffering matters? (Well, Amber’s and Becky’s. Fortunately they haven’t fought yet so we haven’t had to decide which of them is the Sole Valid Trauma, so they both get to be up on that awful pedestal.)
Comments are weird here. Like people rage at the idea of forgiveness until tears come out or motivations spelled out explicitly in the text. And then they get mad at other characters not being instantly forgiving.
Granted that happens a lot in fandom in general. But people fail to realise that characters who react like someone who is a mind reader and acts physically removed from the action and all the time in the world to think about what they’d do wouldn’t make for interesting stories.
I think the only way to really track who’s actually reacting severely to which character, would be to obsessively take screenshots and keep a wiki of who said what and when. That way when somebody says something contrary to what they’ve said before, you can wave it in their face with links and receipts and righteously judge them for their wretched hypocrisy.
“And then they get mad at other characters not being instantly forgiving.” god this also gets to me. I’m really curious if the readers who comment remember how awkward and terrible and clunky we all were socially in COLLEGE. It’s like they expect these characters to act like perfect well developed adults and balk when an ounce of flawed humanity shows that isn’t just a tragic backstory. I side with Ethan here but also see Amber’s side, and ultimately it reminds me of how yes, sometimes very close friends can very quickly become strangers due to shit like what they went through. I said it earlier but does NOBODY here seriously remember what it was like in college??? Were any of y’all the saints you want these characters to be back then?
A term usually used to quantify how much mental and emotional energy and agency someone with mental health (and/or chronic health) issues has left. All tasks/triggers/problems require a number of spoons and reserve/use them up, and once youve run out of spoons, you cant handle anymore tasks till you recharge/recover.
IIRC Its based on placing spoons out to set places at a table, no more spoons, no more places for anymore dinner guests (tasks/situations).
It refers to “spoon” theory of disability, which has to do with the idea of using “spoons” as a unit to measure your ability to do certain things, where “spoons” are an inherently limited resource. i.e. when you wake up in the morning you have 5 spoons, doing your morning routine takes up one spoon, getting groceries takes three, and then somebody asks you to go do an errand that will cost you two spoons, but you only have one left, and if you try to do that errand you will almost certainly hurt yourself, so you literally cannot do it. Even if earlier in the day you did something that was technically harder, it took enough out of you to make this new thing now impossible for you to do.
Why spoons? Because they happened to be the physical object on hand used to explain the idea by the person who popularized it.
But basically “spoons” here is a stand in for the emotional and physical capacity to be an emotionally available friend to Ethan. Whereas before, Amber very much did NOT have that capacity, as she was very limited before due to her mental illness. And she is still limited, but thanks to some recovery she’s been able to do, she is now ever-so-slightly less limited.
The way I heard it was imagine you work in an ice cream store. With every sundae you give the customer a spoon. The store only has so many spoons. Throughout the day you have to wash spoons so you have enough. Normally, you have time to wash the spoons between customers. On very busy days, you don’t have time to wash spoons because washing spoons means customers are not served. Unserved customers walk out and you lose business. Yet, without spoons, you can’t serve customers their sundaes and you lose business. At some point you run out of spoons and have to stop to wash them because either way you lose.
Spoons, as noted above, is a metaphor for the energy one has to do tasks.
Started out by someone trying to explain what it’s like to live with lupus, and then was found to be a useful metaphor in other chronic conditions and in general.
I know i haven’t really spoken to you at all these last few months, and that while i have had friends by my side you were kinda left alone, but NOW im ready to be there for you, months later, after you’ve been left to stew in depression and lose a bunch of weight because you probably haven’t been working out or eating much.
You guys are very heartless with what Ethan just done. She didn’t just snarked. Ethan literally invalidated people’s feelings. That’s a very horrible thing to say to someone. Especially when it’s about how people process a DEATH of mutual friends. Ethan’s the one dannying it up
I feel like this is a great look at the messy complicated reality of friendships that sometimes no one person is at fault, sometimes both people are dealing with issues and they grow apart because of it, and sometimes it’s healthiest for both to go their separate ways because neither can be what the other needs.
This page is very close to personal experience. It needs to be said that people are allowed to end or continue their friendships for any reason. No matter their history together. We have free will and boundaries that we can define them however we wish.
This is not a critique of Amber, because she has to make these mistakes. It’s a critique of the attitude seen here, because that attitude taken to the extreme can be dangerous and make stalkers out of normal but hurt folk, and thus is an attitude that needs to be challenged everywhere it’s seen. “I will never give up on you” towards someone who doesn’t want you around can be dangerous out here in the real world. That’s all.
Copy pasting my thoughts from patreon for this from yesterday instead of rewriting them:
I think Amber here has been better than Ethan has been in the past as the Support Friend.
Ethan loves Amber, but he has never been able to constructively deal with her enormous amounts of self-loathing because he doesn’t let her feel it. Whenever she flared up he’d start cooing reassurance and warm feelings and never just let her *feel* bad about herself, and when you’re in an emotional state of rigid Black and White thinking it doesn’t really help to tell someone who feels Black that actually they’re White.
Walky got this and he did it on accident. “Up here, we can be garbage” was the first time Amber got to hear “it’s okay to feel bad” between Ethan, Danny and her mom.
And here we are, Amber taking responsibility for her past mistakes, and tanking a cruel barb from Ethan. She’s not breaking down, she’s not ruining her progress, she’s acknowledging it as such and that’s like the first time ever that Amber hasn’t affixed her mental state to her problems. Really, I feel kinda good that Amber’s not just gonna let herself be Ethan’s punching bag, the way Ethan was hers. Ethan needs support, a grieving person is still your friend even if their grief inconveniences you, but I hope and am hopeful that Amber will know how to pull back when the pain gets too much.
As a person with chronic illness it kind of gives me joy to see more and more people developing awareness of spoon theory because it makes it so much easier to explain a very particular complex topic if folks know what “spoons” means.
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“Help me solve my problems? PASS”
Second panel is such a precious moment.
Also Amber looks adorable!!! 😍
Too bad you’re gonna change your avatar eventually….
Ana Chronistic can travel in time and has retroactively always used that avatar. Even back in October of 2010 when she was using the name Jen Aside, she was using that avatar. As you can see here: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/identity-2/#comment-2118
Ethan has his own superpower to help him cope.
And by that I mean Transformers.
I don’t know. Robots in disguise are super cool, but that doesn’t mean you should hide your true feelings.
You gotta connect with people and share. That’s why its ‘You’ve got the Touch, you’ve got the Power.”
I’ve been wondering where your avatar came from, turns out it’s from time travel
I mean its right in her name.
But seriously how did you do that?
Must be a special tier in Patreon. Like: “read the one year beyond page”.
Willis posts preview of future strips on Tumblr and Twitter now and then =)
yeah, but it was a while, huh?
can’t have been longer than his buffer, so a few months tops!
Ethan, everybody, getting support to help deal with emotions, is not a weakness one needs to avoid falling back into. It’s human. It’s ok to be comforted when you hurt.
‘You deserve to be loved, and to feel loved, just for being you.’ –Mr Rogers mashup with my meditation teacher
I think Ethan’s problem isn’t with getting support. It’s with getting support from Amber.
… Unfortunately, she seems to pretty much be the only person who cares enough to bother.
I take that back. Danny seemed to care too. But he burned the fuck out of that bridge.
Well that’s heartbreaking.
Amazi-Girl is no more.
Her new superhero moniker: Amb-Pathy!
Amazi-Girl is still around, she just plays roller derby instead of super-heroing. So Amb-pathy would just have to be the 3rd split personality in her complex, which IMHO is way more interesting anyway!
There’s always a superpower somewhere
Aw shucks, now I’m reminded of the…. second time Joyce and Becky interacted
I almost feel like Amber’s born too late to have enjoyed Freaky Friday, but on the other hand, it’s such a fun movie I want to call it a classic at this point.
It’s got a frequently-trafficked tvtropes page, so Amber’s probably memorized it.
Well, the book’s from 1972, and there were movie adaptations in 1976, 1995, 2003, and 2018.
It’s like the perfect pop culture reference for a sliding timeline, because there’ll be another rendition every few years!
Near as I can tell, none of the movies include the scene where the daughter in the mom’s body hears the housekeeper go on a racist rant and immediately fire her for it.
As long as there’s generational strife, we’ll keep getting new Freaky Fridays, because it’s become one of the perennial story archetypes.
With that many versions, there’s a good chance she might have seen (or at least heard the plot about) one of them.
Oof.
I get Ethan’s issue, but I am also SERIOUSLY CONCERNED that he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of social support right now, even if he wants distance from the people who remind him of Mike.
Maybe we’ll finally get to see what Jacob’s been up to.
To top things off, he doesn’t even have an alien parasite to go with his Spider Man 3 Peter Parker look! Talk about adding insult to injury…
Also great to see you here Regs!
That and he’s actively rejecting the support he does have.
I might challenge the idea that Amber counts as support here. She ghosted him for months, then appeared at his door and peeves at him, then said ‘I’m ready to talk about Batman again’ like that’s the issue. Ethan’s not really rejecting a support here so much as rejecting to allow part of the problem to reestablish itself.
Yeah, they were on some dangerous codependency fr. Even if he doesn’t actually recognize it and is just being emo bc #depression and #grief, he’s walking away from a really unhealthy relationship, not a support system
I feel like that’s what the superhero line in the last panel was meant to imply
Yeah, it’s the fact that we’ve only seen him here with Amber, in his and Jacob’s dorm room (and not, crucially, WITH Jacob,) and sitting around in the lounge but not seeming to interact with anyone there that worries me. Not wanting anything to do with Amber or Danny is fine and valid. This apparent isolation… that is not good, either, and could get REALLY bad if he doesn’t have SOMEONE who can check in on him.
(I don’t… ACTIVELY think he’s a suicide risk right now. But I consider that a ‘right now’, or more accurately a ‘yet,’ because this is not a good mental space to stew in and that really does seem like what he’s doing.)
I mean, he’s definitely interacted with Jacob since the skip, and they’ve been in the same room, but we have no indication they hung out even before Mike died. Maybe he’s concerned. Maybe all on his mind is pizza. Maybe he doesn’t really have a good sense of Ethan’s mental state to be sure, and is getting brushed off if he asks. But regardless, Ethan doesn’t seem to be leaning on him, either, from what little we know. And again, I find it worrying.
I Remember When This One Was a Hit…
Meh, this could’ve gone better, but also could’ve gone worse, so I guess ultimately this breaks even for both of them. Progress?
While neither of them feel great, I think this conversation was actually productive. Not in a big way but baby steps are important.
Ethan showed that he was mad at her for her prior self-destructive behaviour but also that he still cared about her at least a little. Amber put her foot in her mouth but also told him that while she wasn’t at 100%, she was working on being a good friend and was going to continue to reach out to him.
I’m really happy with this exchange!
Goshdammit, I accidentally replied instead of posting a comment again!
Eh, it still works.
I DO kinda want to see the slideshow.
It sucks but the right person for when your feeling so low is not always the close friend. Don’t know who that could be for Ethan but sucks to be in that state. Don’t want to speculate too much but that state can get very dangerous if you’re not careful and don’t have a good support network.
“… close friend. Don’t know who that could be for Ethan …”
Logically, Booster.
Finger guns guy. I forget his name.
Eric.
He was also at the apartment party the night Mike was killed; Ethan might not want anything to do with him, either.
Booster wouldn’t be a completely terrible person for Ethan to get support from.
I personally really want Joyce to step up here – I think it would be good for both of them. Ethan because he’d have a support that’s less emotionally/historically fraught than Amber and Joyce because she might Re-experience the love and kindness for others that was always HER and nothing to do with her previous beliefs in God and/or church.
I just realized what was so off to me about the new Ethan design. He’s lost a lot of weight. I assume he must have been working out a lot with his roomie until that messed up day.
He’s lost a lot of weight very fast. Depression can suppress appetite, and he’s actively isolating himself.
I look forward to he and Joyce catching up.
I have the tiniest suspicion that it’d lead to goth Joyce, which could be interesting.
I would agree, but I’ve looked forward to atheist Joyce since the comic started, so… I’m afraid of getting burned again
Goth Joyce you say?
Quick, someone help me figure out how the Yoto-Signal works.
Pull the giant lever switch on the wall, and a projection of a curvaceous backside flickers to life in the clouds above the city.
Whenever the Delewder strikes, Commissioner Gordon goes to the roof of the precinct and turns on… the Buttsignal.
Good pun! Very appropriate to our fake times.
Also, a great name for an evil super! Someone tell Brad Guigar.
Honestly I’m thinking of drawing it. lol But Yoto is awesome and I always enjoy looking at his stuff.
His weight loss was the first thing I noticed about him. That and how, even with weight loss into account, how gaunt he is.
You don’t need to be a superhero to be a committed friend Ethan, that’s unless you watched the Deadpool movie and you took Colossuses bs “Take a moment to be a hero” speech to heart.
What was wrong with that speech?
A bit to preachy and dragged on too long to convey the simple message of “It’s doesn’t take much to do the right thing.”
Panel 3 Ethan reminds me of Female Gaze Batman.
Yay, emotional honesty from Amber! It didn’t pay off here, but hopefully one day they can work it out. Overall, I’d say this is progress.
Wait, if she made a slideshow about a superhero, did she use SuperpowerPoint?
That made me smile. 10 Points to Hufflepuff!!
But she’s Ravenclaw.
SAUCE?? 🤪
The fuck does that mean Ethan?
Fair reaction from Ethan, I think. It seems to me like Ethan feels he’s the frog in the frog and scorpion story, and this is Amber the scorpion promising For Reals Yo that she’s not going to sting him halfway across the river.
Amber is never gonna give you up
never gonna let you down
never gonna run around …and hurt you
Amber gonna do all those things, probably.
Definitely a fair reaction from Ethan, though I feel like he’s mellowing out on Amber here- he’s denying her offer on personal grounds (I can’t keep relying on you like I did withmy previous coping methods) instead of lashing out.
Yeah. Like, he’s not refusing to have anything to do with her, he’s just saying ‘no, I’m not going to rely on you or believe you because historically that does not work out for me, and My life currently has enough that isn’t working for me’. Which is, I think, at least somewhat kinder than Amber has earned for herself in at least her recent (past six months or so) dealings with Ethan. Certainly ‘hard pass but thanks, bye’ feels comparatively gentle to me.
ETHAN CAN YOU STOP BEING A conga FOR FIVE SECONDS
The man is allowed to grieve, and not be okay, just because Amber cries doesn’t mean she’s in the right here my guy…
Yeah because the appropriate reaction to your long term friend crying over the grief you both share is to walk off and say fuck you
After implying Mike’s death is Amber’s fault (which is what caused her to start crying in the first place)
People lash out when they’re neck deep in grief yes
Shock horror
The last time they spoke she was a big ol creep about him and Danny, I dont blame him for wanting to handle her emotional drama right now when she’s not been there for MONTHS.
Right like she’s tacitly admitting that she hasn’t been a good friend but not actually making an effort to stop doing the things that are making her not a good friend (i.e. being a creep or responding with snark when Ethan’s opening up to her)
Thank you for putting it more succinctly than I ever could. I have a serious problem with brevity.
What exactly is she in the wrong about here? If you don’t mind me asking because if seems like she’s putting in an effort to try to be there for Ethan emotionally (granted he has no obligation to accept her emotional support
I think people forget that Amber has legitimately been ghosting this kid for like four or five months, and up until that point, they two of them and Mike were 100% co-dependent. People are perceiving Ethan being fucking awful, and he is being fucking awful; but, also, his and Amber’s friendship was deeply unhealthy, and needs legitimate repair, but maybe the guy who has zero support network, zero friends to help him, and zero professional support, is having more trouble with the fact that his remaining former co-dependent, is finally back to slide into their prior unhealthy relationship pattern as if nothing happened, after she practically abandoned him in his time of greatest need for literally months, and only returned once she was ready for him to start validating her needs again; and, right now, she narcissisticly needs to be a martyr for her friend, and make him feel better, to soothe and validate her anxieties about the justified fear that she has recently been a shitty friend to him.
It is not inaccurate to say that Amber has plenty of justified reasons for not being there for Ethan the past few months. But it is an accurate piece of context to highlight, that the general pattern of their relationship is centrally fixated on their mutual presence around their obsessive interest in comics and toys, and that both of them use this as a coping mechanism to escape their intense trauma; well, Amber wants Ethan to go back to performing that, for her sake. She wants her desire to help him, to be purer, more sincere, but it simply isn’t, at least not 100%. She’s not a psycho, but she is 100% making Ethan’s recovery and Ethan’s trauma, surrogate to her own needs around those issues; she is ready to go “back to normal,” because she went and did the work to heal her own trauma, and now she wants Ethan to go back to being the dumping ground for her obsessive rants so that she can feel socially fulfilled without having to put any effort or attention towards Ethan’s emotional and psychological needs; after all, the comic books are supposed to do that, and she doesn’t put in the effort to manage his shit, whereas Ethan was constantly being her guardian and handler, much the same way Joyce and Becky co-dependently manage one another around their traumas. Shockingly, when she shut Ethan out and left him to fend for himself with the worst trauma of his entire life, alone, he took it kind of personally, not because it was so unexpected, but because it was the last straw with his relationship with Amber.
From his perspective, Amber’s relationship with him, from her perspective, is fully about him being a dumping ground for her needs. Her going full-blown incommunicado during the worst period of Ethan’s entire life, and then wanting him back instantly as soon as it’s convenient for her, and holding him accountable to perform the identity he always performed for her, without remotely considering his emotional needs or wants? That is full-blown narcissist behavior. Period. Full stop. It is not defensible. That doesn’t mean Ethan is responding in good faith, or, arguably, proportionally to this hurt; he super isn’t. But people are being absolutely blind if they can’t see the fact that Amber has horribly, horribly fucked him over emotionally and psychologically in this case, and him being immensely angry over the way she is currently treating him right now, is not socially unwarranted.
There might be a few uncharitable assumptions in there, maybe.
Of all the characters in this comic, I have a bit of a blind spot for the ways in which Amber can be awful, so I appreciate when it’s spelled out for me like this. Thanks.
It’s rough because all these poor kids are all so poorly socialized and traumatized and riddled with awful coping mechanisms, most of their parents and home lives were some flavor of awful…of course they’re all constantly being terrible to each other, all the time! Being a healthy person and having a healthy social circle is actually a really difficult adult skill, and everybody had to pretend it isn’t, and that’s the weird reality of society. I’m only particularly critical of Amber, because frankly? I’ve been an Amber’s Ethan, and it’s a uniquely soul-draining experience that you can’t really grasp your own experience of, without some distance from it. But you say stuff like that, and people who are very sympathetic to Amber (this applies for every character in this strip, mind) ultimately deem that you are validating all her worst fears about her being the monster she believes she is.
Yeah, those sorts of people do, in fact, tend to sincerely feel that way about themselves; however, the other half that often goes unappreciated by those who don’t have close experience with such folks, is they love to revel, consciously and subconsciously both, in the mental freedom which accepting that identity within themselves, gives them. If you approach your worst impulses from a state of learned helplessness, if they’re just “something that’s wrong with you,” it sort of ceases to be something you actually have to deal with, and becomes the responsibility of those in your support network, to either just put up with that, or police you on it for you, as opposed to you putting your own persistent mental energy into changing. Them doing that, is not cool.
Now I want to clarify, I’ve said I’ve been the Ethan to an Amber, but I only feel so confident coming at this with such authority, ’cause I’ve also had my fair share of relationships where I’m sure, in retrospect, I was the Amber. The reality is, these are wounds that you have within you, and its your responsibility to heal them, because you will hurt others with them, as well as continue to hurt yourself as you pick and pick and pick at the gangrenous rot. That super does not mean that Amber isn’t also hugely traumatized, hugely justified in her trauma, absolutely the victim, and naturally justified in going to her friend for help and emotional support, devoid of the additional context of this specific situation. It doesn’t mean that Ethan hasn’t been weapons-grade abusive and inappropriate in expressing his own justified anger and victim-hood. But while this particular episode of their long-term friendship is squarely an example of Ethan being full-blown abusive with zero actual defensible arguments to make otherwise, it’s hard for me to analyze that in isolation of the fact, that Ethan was pretty much alone for months while Amber didn’t want or need him, up until she waltzed back into his life the other day, immediately said some shit that was insensitive to his feelings and his trauma, and then immediately tried to “pick up the friendship where we left off,” with absolutely zero thought to the fact that maybe Ethan has wants or needs which are independent to satisfying the repetitive pattern of behavior which will current comfort Amber, now that she feels ready to Have Emotions and Be A Friend, again. The reality is, even in the process of getting pushy about Being A Good Friend to Ethan, right now, it’s about assuaging her own certainty that she has let Ethan down. In this case, she has, in a more profound way than usual; but, this is the pattern of all of Amber’s years of being Ethan’s friend, anyway, because the way she forms relationships is literally a result of her trauma. The fact that she is the way she is, because she was seriously hurt, has very limited bearing on the fact that Ethan has to deal with the outcome of that trauma when it leads to Amber not treating him fairly.
The reality is, if you do something shitty to somebody, on the most stressful day of your life, with a pretty reasonable excuse for doing so, and any unbiased, rational human being would give you a pass on that shitty thing, because the scale of it was far less bad than the totality of what happened to you, to lead to you behaving that way, on that day…the person it happened to, you still did it to. They are under no actual obligation to forgive you, or give you absolution. Generally, most people will, but if you already hurt that person, you don’t get to make them suffer more taking your apology and performing forgiving you, just as a social nicety. If you fuck up, people are allowed to be mad at you. It doesn’t excuse them abusing you back, or escalating, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re making them accepting your apology, more about your feelings, than theirs. By all metrics, an apology like that, is not a very high-quality apology.
Is conga the new bongo?
They are both a type of drum. So imma say, “yes?” Tentatively?
“Bongo” is Willis’ way to stop people saying, “bit” and “ch,” while “Conga” is his way of stopping people from saying “cu” and “nt.”
Hopefully that answers your question without Willis deleting the message.
Thank you.
Ethan is very much in the right to walk away from the woman who prioritizes her sexual fantasies of him over concern of his mental health
Even more so when you consider that either she was so absent as to not even realize that Ethan has Issues with Danny before perking out OR she knew, ignored it, and verbalized anyway because Teh Hawt.
NEITHER of those is/was good look.
Given that Danny and Ethan’s fight happened at around the same time Amber withdrew from Ethan for the purpose of giving him space, whereupon Mike died and everything went to hell, it’s possible she doesn’t know about the fight, if not likely; she’s probably not enough of a dumbass to talk to Ethan about Danny at that point.
..did he just call Mike a superhero ?
Probably not, he was relying on comic books and Transformers to cope with his life, something he admitted isn’t working.
oh.
Im confused, why is Ethan being such a sick to Amber again?
Because his only other emotional support literally died, and from his perspective, she completely abandoned him and his needs, up until it was convenient for her to deal with them again, and now it’s become his responsibility to perform his own recovery just to make her feel better about that.
Its not like Amber didnt have her own gigantic issues to deal with.
You know, like her abusive father kidnapping her friends, then him being killed after murdering her friend. After a whole childhood filled with trauma and repression.
And thats not counting all the physical trauma from being Amazigirl. All the wounds she suffered while trying to help those in need.
Right? How selfish of him, to be concerned with his own lifetime of pain and trauma. He should absolutely be laser focused on what Amber has had to deal with, because he has suffered nothing at all. He should absolutely be okay with her taking from the should-be-unlimited pool of fucks he has to give without offering him any in return.
Hasn’t he learned that only Amber’s suffering matters? (Well, Amber’s and Becky’s. Fortunately they haven’t fought yet so we haven’t had to decide which of them is the Sole Valid Trauma, so they both get to be up on that awful pedestal.)
he’s kinda like Amber was until recently. number and angry
yyyeeeeep
Comments are weird here. Like people rage at the idea of forgiveness until tears come out or motivations spelled out explicitly in the text. And then they get mad at other characters not being instantly forgiving.
Granted that happens a lot in fandom in general. But people fail to realise that characters who react like someone who is a mind reader and acts physically removed from the action and all the time in the world to think about what they’d do wouldn’t make for interesting stories.
Yeeeep (now in the right area)
Well, there’s lots of people here so that extreme binary can manifest in either direction depending on what’s going on.
Be like me. Be an obsessive nut who thrives on the characters making horrible, disastrous choices.
I think the only way to really track who’s actually reacting severely to which character, would be to obsessively take screenshots and keep a wiki of who said what and when. That way when somebody says something contrary to what they’ve said before, you can wave it in their face with links and receipts and righteously judge them for their wretched hypocrisy.
“And then they get mad at other characters not being instantly forgiving.” god this also gets to me. I’m really curious if the readers who comment remember how awkward and terrible and clunky we all were socially in COLLEGE. It’s like they expect these characters to act like perfect well developed adults and balk when an ounce of flawed humanity shows that isn’t just a tragic backstory. I side with Ethan here but also see Amber’s side, and ultimately it reminds me of how yes, sometimes very close friends can very quickly become strangers due to shit like what they went through. I said it earlier but does NOBODY here seriously remember what it was like in college??? Were any of y’all the saints you want these characters to be back then?
“Spoons”?
A term usually used to quantify how much mental and emotional energy and agency someone with mental health (and/or chronic health) issues has left. All tasks/triggers/problems require a number of spoons and reserve/use them up, and once youve run out of spoons, you cant handle anymore tasks till you recharge/recover.
IIRC Its based on placing spoons out to set places at a table, no more spoons, no more places for anymore dinner guests (tasks/situations).
It refers to “spoon” theory of disability, which has to do with the idea of using “spoons” as a unit to measure your ability to do certain things, where “spoons” are an inherently limited resource. i.e. when you wake up in the morning you have 5 spoons, doing your morning routine takes up one spoon, getting groceries takes three, and then somebody asks you to go do an errand that will cost you two spoons, but you only have one left, and if you try to do that errand you will almost certainly hurt yourself, so you literally cannot do it. Even if earlier in the day you did something that was technically harder, it took enough out of you to make this new thing now impossible for you to do.
Why spoons? Because they happened to be the physical object on hand used to explain the idea by the person who popularized it.
But basically “spoons” here is a stand in for the emotional and physical capacity to be an emotionally available friend to Ethan. Whereas before, Amber very much did NOT have that capacity, as she was very limited before due to her mental illness. And she is still limited, but thanks to some recovery she’s been able to do, she is now ever-so-slightly less limited.
The Joyce Gravitar brigade here to tell everyone about spoons *high five*
High -6 if you’re polydactyl.
The way I heard it was imagine you work in an ice cream store. With every sundae you give the customer a spoon. The store only has so many spoons. Throughout the day you have to wash spoons so you have enough. Normally, you have time to wash the spoons between customers. On very busy days, you don’t have time to wash spoons because washing spoons means customers are not served. Unserved customers walk out and you lose business. Yet, without spoons, you can’t serve customers their sundaes and you lose business. At some point you run out of spoons and have to stop to wash them because either way you lose.
Spoons, as noted above, is a metaphor for the energy one has to do tasks.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191117210039/https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/
Started out by someone trying to explain what it’s like to live with lupus, and then was found to be a useful metaphor in other chronic conditions and in general.
Thank you for the link. I had never known the origin. Much more powerful than the way I heard it.
Sigh… It’s so good to know that Joe has become such a positive brother to Amber and he’s helping her so much ♡♡♡.
This series needs an emotional support himbo.
I nominate Joe.
Joe’s character development journey into a himbo is something I am here for.
Or even into just emotional support Joe. I just want more Joe!
I know i haven’t really spoken to you at all these last few months, and that while i have had friends by my side you were kinda left alone, but NOW im ready to be there for you, months later, after you’ve been left to stew in depression and lose a bunch of weight because you probably haven’t been working out or eating much.
hmm, i wonder why he’s pissy…
Hey don’t forget this cringeworthy interaction:
And when you open up to me and share how you’re doing I’m going to respond with snark and make it about myself
Hey wait why are you walking away
You guys are very heartless with what Ethan just done. She didn’t just snarked. Ethan literally invalidated people’s feelings. That’s a very horrible thing to say to someone. Especially when it’s about how people process a DEATH of mutual friends. Ethan’s the one dannying it up
Amber has also been stewing in depression the past couple of months. Which is not to say that either of them has handled this particularly well.
Amber cry which mean Ethan evil now
Gonna make the bold and daring assertion that Ethan and Amber probably shouldn’t stay friends
I feel like this is a great look at the messy complicated reality of friendships that sometimes no one person is at fault, sometimes both people are dealing with issues and they grow apart because of it, and sometimes it’s healthiest for both to go their separate ways because neither can be what the other needs.
god I wish I could upvote/boost your comment to the top of this page
Have I been using spoons the wrong way? What does Amber know that I don’t (specifically about spoons)?
It’s a metaphor for mental/physical energy/ability to deal with things, often used in reference to chronic physical or mental illness. Here’s the origin: https://web.archive.org/web/20191117210039/https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/
Kinda like saying “stamina” “energy levels” “mana” “hp” etc.
amber developed an entire second personality specifically not to be the super hero
This page is very close to personal experience. It needs to be said that people are allowed to end or continue their friendships for any reason. No matter their history together. We have free will and boundaries that we can define them however we wish.
This is not a critique of Amber, because she has to make these mistakes. It’s a critique of the attitude seen here, because that attitude taken to the extreme can be dangerous and make stalkers out of normal but hurt folk, and thus is an attitude that needs to be challenged everywhere it’s seen. “I will never give up on you” towards someone who doesn’t want you around can be dangerous out here in the real world. That’s all.
Copy pasting my thoughts from patreon for this from yesterday instead of rewriting them:
I think Amber here has been better than Ethan has been in the past as the Support Friend.
Ethan loves Amber, but he has never been able to constructively deal with her enormous amounts of self-loathing because he doesn’t let her feel it. Whenever she flared up he’d start cooing reassurance and warm feelings and never just let her *feel* bad about herself, and when you’re in an emotional state of rigid Black and White thinking it doesn’t really help to tell someone who feels Black that actually they’re White.
Walky got this and he did it on accident. “Up here, we can be garbage” was the first time Amber got to hear “it’s okay to feel bad” between Ethan, Danny and her mom.
And here we are, Amber taking responsibility for her past mistakes, and tanking a cruel barb from Ethan. She’s not breaking down, she’s not ruining her progress, she’s acknowledging it as such and that’s like the first time ever that Amber hasn’t affixed her mental state to her problems. Really, I feel kinda good that Amber’s not just gonna let herself be Ethan’s punching bag, the way Ethan was hers. Ethan needs support, a grieving person is still your friend even if their grief inconveniences you, but I hope and am hopeful that Amber will know how to pull back when the pain gets too much.
As a person with chronic illness it kind of gives me joy to see more and more people developing awareness of spoon theory because it makes it so much easier to explain a very particular complex topic if folks know what “spoons” means.