Many modern DSLRs do have WiFi! Some can dump to the cloud on their own, some can do it by piggybacking on a cell phone’s Access Point.
They also make special SD cards that have built-in WiFi as well! I bought one a while back, but it was only 16GB and I was kind of “meh” on the whole thing. However, that was several years ago; easy to imagine they’ve made better ones since then.
So Booster is a psychology major who is more attracted to someone based on how fucked up they are?
Let’s hope and pray they never take a job at Arkham Asylum. Though if the staff there are smart, they’ve since added exactly that as a question on the application.
I’m not liking Booster much now, unless they’re joking about keeping them on the cloud. They should remove the pics ASAP because it’s kinda creepy to keep any pictures of someone without their consent.
Good, decent behavior is rarely funny, Tulipkitten. Showing class and respecting boundaries is the smart move, (*pointing at the title of the comic to illustrate).
Booster behaving immaturely? failing to understand, grasp, or respect boundaries? What are they, Eighteen year old or something?
Oh…RIGHT…
While DW started this back in 2010, the fact is, it’s been a handful of months-in-character (including the timeskips) and these are immature, childish people because they’re CHILDREN.
Children in adult bodies, with minimal supervision, but mentally and psychologically they’re CHILDREN. Expecting Booster to have the discretion of a 40 year old with extensive life experience is a no-go at this station, so maybe cut them a little slack before you judge them? THEY don’t even know who they are yet.
Did you know it because you KNEW IT or because you were TOLD? Did you start off with boundary issues, or did you learn them? Lemme put it this-a-way, Freemage. Most of the asshats you run into think of themselves as ‘pretty good guys’, They don’t GET that some of the shit they see in the media is WRONG until it blows up in their face. (Points to the “Joe’s Do-List” storyline for an example.) Booster is in a pretty unusual condition, because Booster’s got this whole ‘thing’ going on with their identity, which ‘thing’ tends to alter their own peception, just like every other Kid trying to stand out.
IOW it’s completely credible that a person who’s already pushing boundaries might fail to take into account other people’s boundaries, especially when the subject in question is atypical. Doesn’t mean they mean any harm, it means they don’t recognize what they’re doing is wrong, because they really don’t GRASP the other person’s perspective with a normal level of empathy…because they really don’t grasp the other person’s perspective, because they haven’t built up enough life-experience dealing with others in the real world to do so.
Which is not unusual for immature people in their late teens who do NOT have a background that includes ‘Behaviors that get you sent to Juvie, or Expelled’.
Empathy can be present without understanding. (see: lots of Christian Fundamentalists who AREN’T homicidal lunatics), and understanding can be present without Empathy (see manipulative psychopathic assholes that thrive in political or corporate settings).
Booster’s choice to upload it to the Cloud reflects lack of one of those two-either a lack of Empathy, or a lack of Understanding. It also reflects the kind of thing a kid whose major exposures to other people comes from Media and on-line interactions instead of in-person risks and failures. I’m going with lack of UNDERSTANDING, in hopes DW didn’t just drop a psychopath (excuse me, “Antisocial personality disorder”) into the cast.
APD’s are surface-charming and narcissistic. IOW not what most people think at all. They are GREAT at selling things, including the idea that they’re good people. Most people confuse that with someone who is ‘unsociable’-which is the person who avoids personal contact and huddles away from social situations where they might be highlighted.
You talking about Joe’s “Do List” is actually pretty illustrative of the problem. No one in the comments defended Joe’s list–not the attitudes behind it, nor the fact of it. And the story itself called it out, first with comments from other characters, then with an up-front incident showing Joe the problem–and letting him grow, albeit fitfully.
If Booster changes to be a better person? Awesome. I’m all about that. My dislike of Roz, in particular, is her insistence that a person is always to be judged by their worst behavior, even when they try to change.
But thus far, I’ve seen nothing in the character for that better person to be built upon. This differs from Joe (and most of the rest of the cast, for that matter, at least those who aren’t largely two-dimensional foils, like Mary)–his genuine affection for Danny has been obvious since day one, showing that he HAS empathy, even if he likes to pretend he doesn’t. Likewise, even at his worst, he expresses a belief in consent and choice. Those traits played very heavily, I would argue, into him being able to understand about the issues around the “Do List”, leading to both him abandoning it and apologizing for it publicly.
Booster, OTOH, has never once shown any awareness of anyone else’s boundaries. And there’s never been any in-world consequences for these transgressions.
“good behavior isn’t funny” is a defense for WILLIS, not the characters.
Especially here in the Dumbing Of Age Comments, prosecution of character is a full time sport. While we accept youth and inexperience as a…let’s say reason for the behavior to occur, it’s not a reason to cease discussion for it being bad behavior.
I think there’s a spectrum of how much grace we as a comments section give characters for their inexperience and being in their learning process. Sometimes things are talked about more on principle, but other times it does get into more of a character attack.
I don’t have an issue with characters, even “good” characters, acting problematically. In fact, while Booster’s refusal to delete the photos makes THEM creepier, it makes this scene a bit less creepy, because the framing is not on Booster’s side here.
With that said, it *is* creepy in a way that’s unusual for DoA (In which characters who are being assholes like to go “I am an asshole now! It is me!”), which is interesting and worth talking about.
18-year-olds are not children, they’re adults with (unless something went incredibly wrong) very little experience living as adults. None of these characters are “children in adult bodies”. They’re young adults in young adult bodies. If they were a couple years younger, they would be adolescents in adolescent bodies. None of this changes that Booster’s inexperience at life plays into how they’re treating Amber – I’m guessing they think they’re seeing her say she’s ugly and they think that continuing to assert that they think she’s hot will help her feel more attractive, and time will tell how if that plays out negatively but probably yeah – but this is absolutely the kind of mistake that a young adult, or a not-young adult with poor social skills (related to neurodivergence or otherwise) or from a cultural/familial background where pushing against someone’s boundaries if you think it’s for their own good is in some situations considered the right thing to do, would make. There are 40-year-olds with extensive life experience who do this.
I’m not defending treating young adults like more experienced adults (including re: really fucked up age gaps in dating, which I hate having to specify but if I don’t then some shithead is absolutely going to think that’s what this is about) or holding people to standards they’re incapable of meeting in general, but infantalizing people is rude and cruel and there are people these characters’ age in the comments. There are ways to talk about age and development and behavior without implying that an undergrad is more similar to an 8-year-old than to someone who’s already graduated and has a job.
Ari, your brain doesn’t stop forming its basic structure before 25 or so in most humans. For kids who GO to college instead of out into the work-force or into the Service, they’re very much still KIDS mentally, and most of the time, they’re not just kids, but SHELTERED kids in that demographic. Maturity is built off of experience, and for the vast majority of kids who go straight from High School to College?
They’re still mentally and emotionally children-that is, they lack maturity, experience, and judgment beyond the purely theoretical. VERY few of your college friends at 18 to 21 have much at all in the way of experience or maturity. Their identity is still FORMING. (this is also why armies like ’em young for enlistment-because they’re moldable.)
Booster’s got it extra-bad, because They haven’t figured out WHO they are yet, just that it isn’t someone who conforms to traditional roles or rules. Remember Joe’s “Do List”? That whole storyline is just exactly what a kid with little life experience and plenty of childish arrogance would come up with-that’s what made it a funny storyline.
Booster has issues with respecting boundaries, and little understanding or Empathy beyond the theoretical, because Booster hasn’t got the experience base to grasp those things fully yet. If Booster were a 27 year old Grad Student, it would go well past the horizon of ‘Creepy as fuck’, because mature mentalities don’t DO that kind of shit.
But kids? Kids do that kind of shit without thinking about it-and even worse, Stalker/creep behavior is LIONIZED in media. Every ‘romance’ show you’ve ever watched, slow it down and analyzed it, every ‘Love Song’ since the 1950s at LEAST is stock full of creepy, stalker sentiment. The maturity to separate “this is fiction, you don’t do this in real life” from “this is so cool” comes with EXPERIENCE and observation of the real world. You can’t get that from Tumblr or Facebook or whatever-the-god-botherers-are-using.
I don’t really care if the brain keeps forming because what you’re describing is a very small part of brain development associated with risk-taking specifically, which is really variable across individuals, and in fact, it might actually be a useful adaptation for young adults to be more likely to take risks rather than something that young adults are lacking. The brain also continues to change throughout an individual’s life. Are 40-year-olds children because their brains are generally different than the average 60-year-old’s? Also, the 25-years-old figure is based on cis men, and the corresponding figure for cis women is more like 20-years-old (there aren’t studies I know of on anyone else.) The brain is really plastic and changes based on experience and expectations – there are brain differences from culture to culture that are almost certainly not related to genetics – and cis girls are generally encouraged to be more cautious than cis boys, so I’m guessing most of this is social. If people are imitating their peer groups, don’t you think it’s likely that the young men in these studies are settling down as their friends do, too?
Identity is not something that conveniently crystallizes within a specific age range. Many things about a person shift and evolve as time passes and they experience new things. 80-year-olds are out there developing new interests, losing old ones, changing their outlooks on life based on their continued experience.
None of this even requires knowledge of neuroscience to understand. Nearly everything I am describing can be understood by observing the lives of actual people, which I can only assume is something you either don’t do, or are spectacularly bad at doing.
Even aside from that, if you want to talk science, you should probably make sure you actually know the science you’re talking about. You’re categorically infantilizing and dehumanizing all LEGAL ADULTS who have yet to meet your vague, scientifically and logically bankrupt threshold.
Also, I’m old enough that my brain should be fully cooked, and due to my combination of mental illnesses, I have trouble with impulse control and risk-taking, as well as zero natural understanding of boundaries. Am I a fake adult because I don’t suit your oversimplified misunderstanding of neuroscience? Should I be treated like a child because the life I’ve lived means that my personality has developed in a way that doesn’t suit the nebulous mythological standard you seem to be talking about? Does the answer change based on whether I’m trying to understand boundaries because I care about boundaries, or because I’ll be rejected if I don’t? Does it change based on whether I see my differences as completely detrimental, or as a mixed bag?
I’m not saying these characters aren’t specifically young adults and should be cut some slack. I feel like I pretty clearly articulated that I think these characters are specifically young adults and should be cut some slack. They are in a different developmental stage than other adults, who also make up several different developmental stages. The thing I was annoyed about is that you are saying a group of adults are literal children for being different than other adults. But that doesn’t make them children. That makes them young adults. I’m now also annoyed that you’re describing a nonbinary character who seems to be pretty solid in their personality and interests as someone who hasn’t figured out who they are yet, and that you’re bringing up The Media and inability to tell fiction from reality, when like, studies show that kids can tell fiction from reality at around 4. The art isn’t producing the culture, it’s reflecting it.
Your bizarre tangent about romantic media “lionizing” whatever it is that you personally consider “stalker” behavior (including apparently all or most romantic music released in the last 70 years, a statement that is so extreme and blatantly false that you are frankly lucky I even bothered addressing it) is not particularly relevant or accurate, and I don’t really appreciate that you wasted even more of my time with it. Everything about your post only tells me that YOU have very little actual life experience, regardless of your age, and are most likely regurgitating inaccurate information you essentially cannot have meaningfully researched yourself (because if you had, you would already know most of this) AND have approached with a gruesomely minimal amount of critical thinking.
Helicoptering and robbing young-ish people of reasonable amounts of personal agency is already destructive enough when we’re applying it to actual minors. Attempting to enforce similar standards on LEGAL ADULTS is vile enough that even statements that would typically be hyperbolic seem insufficient.
You legitimately have no idea what the hell you’re talking about and your opinions are gross, cruel, disturbing, and frankly outright dangerous. The condescending, demonstrably inaccurate posts you’ve made about this are actively corrosive toward both society in general and a large amount of actual human lives.
And you said it all, applying the same logic to REAL people, about someone who doesn’t even exist. You are the person who struggles to differentiate between fiction and reality.
This reminds me of the song by The Police, “Every Step You Take”, which at the time it came out was a love anthem, but these days it sounds like a stalker’s manifesto.
There’s some interesting cultural context there. Currently, it reads super rapey, but in its original context it kind of wasn’t? There was a really good essay about this a while back. For example, when she asks what’s in her drink, that sounds really bad! But at the time the song was written, it was a stock joke that a character behaving foolishly or uninhibitedly (or wanting to) would ask what was in their drink, and the answer would always be that it was either not a significant enough amount of alcohol to alter their decision-making ability, or no alcohol at all. The girl wants to stay over and get her bone on, but she’s worried about social disapproval (see: all the lines referencing social disapproval! purity culture and rape culture can both be bad) and he’s giving her excuses for ways to justify this as being not about boning at all. They wouldn’t be singing in harmony at the end if they weren’t meant to be on the same page.
The same essayist pointed out that this is also a really good illustration of one of the ways rape culture manifested at the time. If you can’t agree to sex without people thinking you’re a slut, then you kind of have to put up an intentionally weak fight and hope your boyfriend understands what you’re doing – but not everyone’s capable of being assertive enough that they don’t look like they’re putting up an intentionally weak fight, and not everybody cares if their partner is trying to say yes or trying to say no. So yeah, art reflects the culture, babeyyy
Actually, Sting was intentionally writing from the perspective of a stalker and didn’t find it romantic at all, and he’s been annoyed that people seem to take the song as portraying something more consensual than it is. It’s one of those songs that gets misinterpreted all the time, like people playing “Lips of an Angel” at their wedding when it’s about cheating, or, like, so many different kinds of reaction to that Decemberists double suicide song. In this case, it’s probably because it has a bit of a deceptive sound to it (also intentional).
The attitude that an 18 year old is still a kid contributes directly to the number of people that can excuse a father traveling to the campus and shoving his daughter who at her age is an adult and not a kid into his car against her will so he can bring her back home where she “belongs”. After all, she’s a kid.
Parents have the right to make their kids get in the car and go home, by necessity they have to have that right in order to keep their kids safe from situations their kid doesn’t understand are dangerous.
Parents do not have the right to do that to adult children but insisting that their adult children are just kids makes it seem more acceptable to bystanders and churches willing to pay that dad’s bail.
What I’m saying is that calling an 18 year old adult a kid is practically Toe Dad apologia.
I heard a way of explaining this that makes sense to me: teenagers are not children and they are not adults; they are *teenagers* and their strengths and weaknesses are not the same as those of children *or* adults.
That’s great when you’re dealing with the ages 13-17, but 18 year old people are adults. They aren’t neither, they’re one of those things and that thing is adults. Saying anything else is saying that Toe Dad had a right to shove Becky in his car and drive away with her. Stop being creepy and admit that adults are adults.
I can’t keep up with this double standard. Are 18-year-olds adults who can be reasonably expected to function societally the same as a 36-year-old with a stable income and good mental health, or are they literal children who can’t be trusted to know their own gender? We need to pick one and stick with it.
All he has done so far is point out that they have already been backed up to the cloud; he hasn’t given any indication that he won’t subsequently delete them.
The cloud backup is automatic; deleting the backups takes effort, and, possibly, devices like a computer or tablet which he doesn’t have with him at the moment.
If he had taken the pics with his phone, deleting them would be trivial; but doing so from the original camera is probably near-impossible.
Booster could have said, “They’re still on the cloud, you know, but don’t worry, I’ll delete them.” Or any number of other ways of assuring Amber that Booster was not, in fact, going to be creepy about this. Booster chose not to take any of those options, and is being judged accordingly.
There’s a difference between taking a picture of general area with people in it and taking pictures of someone without their consent 3 feet away from them, which booster was doing and yes it is creepy.
Really disliking booster
“Enforceable”? No, there’s no Photo Police about to burst in and take Booster down. But rude, creepy behavior shouldn’t need police to be called out as such, either.
They handed over the memory card (which has monetary value if nothing else) promptly when asked; I think it’s jumping to conclusions to assume they will now hoard the pictures like a sleezy dragon rather then removing them later just because they pointed out they’re already clouded.
I’m assuming that if you answer “Yes”, you’re handed a machine gun, immediate citizenship, and a $50 Walmart gift card to buy some blue jeans and a white tank top.
Well yeah, naturally. Gotta keep the horrible horrible status quo, otherwise we might have to examine our own culture, and then we might find flaws.
Incidentally, this is why Hawkeye’s Endgamecrusade against the Yakuza and cartels was probably at least slightly a little bit very racist. Dude’s already from a place with plenty of horrible unchecked terrorism, why’s he gotta go abroad for that?
I’ve been told they actually refuse you entry if you say yes, and this is actually because if you get caught doing terrorist acts on US soil, it means you lied to a federal agency (or entered the US illegally, either, or) which allows them to do all sort of crazy stuff.
well, we don’t know if they’ll succeed in getting a phd but i’d hope even an ‘intro to psychology’ would have some kinda brief talk about ‘ethics’ and like ‘don’t armchair diagnose strangers’ or so
Tho i wouldn’t be surprised if there was reddit posts of psych majors admitting they’re taking those kinda classes to learn to manipulate others
Maybe “Intro to Psychology” is a 200-level class. At my school the Computer Science curriculum didn’t have any CS classes the first year; 100-level CS is for Business majors.
Remembering the comments from the last couple days, I just can’t help but think of this scene from the Fairly Odd Parents about an incriminating tape that keeps getting paused and played over and over again:
Omg I was really unclear how this was related for the first bit, but I see it now. We are basically seeing these characters’ stories this way, or even slower. We don’t know how it is going to play out. Like that Buddhist parable about the man whose son finds a horse, and then breaks his leg, and then there’s a war…etc.
I was thinking more for outdoors photography, really. Also, I definitely wouldn’t be using a magical auto-uploading camera on (semi?)public WiFi, where it can get hijacked and used without my knowledge, for things I didn’t want it to photograph.
That is a Rabbit Hole. It is a Paradox because the more it gets mentioned, the deeper the Rabbit Hole goes. Because you noticed, Willis noticed that you noticed, and will takes extra measures to hide his SEMME ambitions for DoA.
Depends on her main. Does Amber strike you more as a player who mains the best character or the kinda person who just uses her personal favorite character and gets good. I feel like a lot of the best characters are swordies so if it’s the former it’s iffy.
Based on a random tier list I looked at
S-tier
Steve (can punch but don’t really want to be punching with him.) Pyra/Mythra use swords, Rob swings his robot arms…I dunno if you can call what he does a punch, Joker mostly kicks and uses a blade, and pikachu mostly uses electricity and headbutts.
Now A+ tier has quite a few punchers (Sonic, fox, Squirtle from pokemon trainer, Wario, Olimar (though again you don’t wanna be doing it) and most notably Kazuya and Min-min. So y’know…if she’s only into playing high tiers those are her options.
In fact, for no reason at all here’s all the smash ultimate punch characters off the top of my head.
Does Punch:
-Mario
-Luigi
-Bowser
-Dr. Mario
-Bowser Jr. (technically the clown car punches you)
-Donkey Kong
-Diddy Kong
-Ganondorf
-Samus
-Dark Samus
-Kirby
-Fox
-Jigglypuff
-Squirtle
-Captain falcon (Falcoooooon Punch)
-Ness
-Wario
-Olimar
-Villager
-Little Mac
-Snake
-Sonic
-Pac-man
-Ryu
-Bayonetta
-Mii Brawler
-King K.Rool
-Incineroar? (honestly i’m iffy about that)
-Min Min
-Ken
-Banjo Kazooie
-Terry
-Steve (technically?)
-Kazuya
So a lot of punch choices. But a surprising amount of characters who cannot punch. Either because they use a sword, or their design just doesn’t lend itself to punching. Also not many of the female characters punch, which is a shame.
So yeah, if she uses any of these characters the answer is yes.
Yeah, actually. Like I know we tend to fixate on tiny moments in the comic and render our harsh judgments of the characters, but in this case, liking somebody specifically/solely because of their damage (and telling them so) just seems harmful.
Also, now I *know* I’m blowing up one moment excessively, but… way to neg her, Booster.
Booster could’ve said “are you kidding, you’re lovely/gorgeous” and not doubled down that her life-complicating brain-weasels are the only source of her hotness.
Guess Amber had better get with them, because she’s too damaged for people who don’t eroticize her anguish.
Mixed feelings about this one. If someone feels physically unattractive, sometimes arguing about it can feel alienating or like the person is lying to you. There’s something to be said for respecting or at least accepting someone’s self-perception.
And it’s not like Booster said “You’re hot because you’re f-ed up, *despite* being a potato.” They said, “You’re hot, potato or no.” Which to me implies they think potatos (chubby people, I’m pretty sure it was meant, in case the metaphor is getting out of hand) are not excluded from being hot generally.
Amber asked Booster to befriend Ethan counting on the same motivation, I find extremely hypocritical the way she’s reacting and extremely wrong to ask for the whole card and not just to erase the photos.
Yeah I’m not loving this situation either. Sure, Amber was maybe not at her best when she asked Booster to befriend Ethan, but at least that came from a place of “my friend needs help, I am not he person to give that help, let me see if I can find someone who can.” Booster took that and just judo-flipped that into something unsettling. Like…Amber is coming to you trying to help a friend, in part because her own mental health is not robust right now (A fact she acknowledges, even), and you decide to follow her around observing her like a wild animal, taking pictures for God knows what end? No, Booster, that’s not okay in a few ways.
Amber doesn’t realize that a lot of crazy and/or fucked up people are hot. Them being fucked up is often a deterrent to those less daring people to balance out the hotness.
Booster, c’mon. Get that shit off of there, ASAP. I love you, I’m pulling for you and Ambs to get together, but she laid down her boundaries there and you gotta respect them, chief. Trying to find loopholes is a bad look.
Amber setting boundaries is great! Amber tearing down her attractiveness is not. Fucking Blaine.
Mentioning the cloud might not be about “lol, loophole” but more about bringing it up now as part of complying with the request, rather than have Amber walk off to purge the memory card and then have, “hey wait…” moment later
That said bringing it up as an open ended this exists rather than saying, “ok I’ll also uncloud them, do you need to see me delete them” is more of their provocative mind games. Booster wanted to see how she’d react to that dangling and probably enjoyed the response. The Mike like bit of their personality is definitely that they like to see what people do when they are pushed on in some way.
Y’know, you’re right on both counts. Hm. Definitely food for thought!
I liked some aspects of Shortpacked! Mike x Amber and really really didn’t like others, and I feel like Boost here could be a healthier partner in mind games than Mike, if Amber remains into that cross-canons (not necessarily true).
This kinda feels like further evidence for the theory a while back that Booster is somehow Mike in disguise. I know most people have accepted that Mike really died (or it seems that way), but I am still agnostic on the issue.
I think “This Was Halloween” decisively closed any lingering possibility that Mike survived, which was already scant. The red flashback and the “Ethan was with him when he died” seems pretty definitive
And the idea that Booster is Mike somehow has always been kind of a joke
I don’t consider any death definitive in a work of fiction where the author has brought characters back to life before, and where the laws of physics have been suspended for action scenes. Yeah, Mike is probably really dead, but there’s still the First Law of Resurrection. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FirstLawOfResurrection
(There’s a lot of Death tropes that could be relevant here but that one seemed the most appropriate.)
I think Booster just was reminding Amber that her dramatic moment (demanding the card) doesn’t really solve the problem. Drama isn’t the best way to live a life – though it’s a great premise for a web comic.
Yeah Booster’s probably saying that because Amber Absconded with their memory card, a physical thing that they own. Booster may be mentioning that so that maybe Amber might give them back their property and trust them to delete it themselves.
I mean, they could have just NOT given her the memory card and showed her that deleting the pictures. She made a demand and they acquiesced. I dont think they could actually claim she took it. They gave it to her.
Seems like it’d being an unhealthy cycle if they admit they’re into “hot fucked up ppl” like, if Amber gets better it could be a situation like “Oh, i’m bored now” which could lead to a breakdown and over and over
lol i think i remember seeing a screenshot of like “straight ppl texting” and there was something like “for some reason i’m attracted to girls with mental issues” or something like that, first thing that popped in my head
That said I totally agree (at least in fiction). 2 of my first anime crushes were Samejima Mamimi and Haruhara Haruko (btw say their names out loud. It’s really fun) so my taste in women does tend to involve them being kinda fucked up.
Also there’s a hot potato joke there I haven’t seen anyone point out.
…I want to say something about sour cream but I can’t figure out anything that’s not so far outside the boundaries of good taste it’s not even in the same solar system.
If I was Amber, I might not be so annoyed at the pictures but I’d still be super annoyed that somebody is attracted to my least favorite thing about myself. Really makes ya feel icky to be exotified and pedestalled for the exact qualities that you dislike about yourself / the qualities that often mess up your life. What is she even supposed to do with this info?
Full disclosure: I was in a 5-yr relationship (during/after college) where I was his Manic Pixie Dream Girl. He liked saying that I was a “Jewess” and had “an artistic temperment”.
It was wack. He was wack.
…And I think I also get where Booster is. I’ve been tempted towards emotional vampirism, too, where I’m enthralled by intriguing mental problems, but I realized this and cut it the heck out before I attempted going into mental health. You’re supposed to be helping people, not feeding off of them like they’re delicious novels.
Yeah, I don’t know what “artistic temperament” is supposed to mean, but “He liked saying I was a jewess” is… uh… I’m not saying it’s a warning sign, but every bull in Spain just lowered its head and started huffing and pawing at the ground.
Ok cool, managed to separate myself from my own experience a little and read the past couple days of strips (in which Booster was clumsy but playful, and in which Booster quickly backed off when Amber didn’t like it / when Amber put up a boundary). I don’t think we know Booster is a capital-C Creep at this time.
However, I do think they have a tendency towards objectifying moments and people*. I’d love to see Booster care about somebody’s feelings because feelings are important, and not just because it piques their intellectual/sexual curiosity. That would put me entirely onto Team Booster.
*side note, I love the writerly choice of making them a photographer. A person who may have an issue with objectifying people is literally turning moments and people into objects (photographs). Really clever.
People who seem to have a better read on you than maybe even you do are creepy. there’s so much predicated on the idea that a person needs to be assumed to be the utmost expert on themselves. If someone else can know you better than you do, it poses questions about coercion and control- if it’s For Your Own good, then…?
But also whatever, they’re still beholden to the ethics, same as a professional and highly skilled river still has to obey speed limits. And Booster has skills, Mike had skills, that enable them to navigate social situations to Much Better outcomes- for themselves, and for others. But they don’t OWE others the benefit of their skills, any more than you OWE people your height, or strength, or smokin hot bod. fuck off. You finding them creepy isn’t any different from any other mistrust of intelligence.
I can’t follow. Booster takes photos of people, tells them they’re hot, and tells them they’re hot because, in Booster’s words, they’re “fucked up”. What’s not creepy about this?
But they don’t OWE others the benefit of their skills
They do owe others a minimum of decency, and Booster isn’t providing it here.
As do I, and modern cameras are so slow to connect to any kind of network (it’s part of the reason why smartphones have killed off 80% of the camera industry).
I do not like Booster I do not like Booster I do not like Booster I do not like Booster I do not like Booster I do not like Booster
I don’t want to hear any more comparisons to Mike anymore. I had my issues with Mike, but he was always written as, and treated as, a comic relief asshole who nobody much liked or trusted, except in an “evil we know comic relief jerkass” kind of way. The few moments in which Mike was treated as something other than that (like Ethan and Amber having crushes on him in Shortpacked) were often the most uncomfortable in their comics. And now we have a character who’s “Oops! All Those Moments!”.
I get what you mean. I didn’t really think Mike fit in this comic too much because he was solely for comic relief, and when they tried treating him seriously it just didn’t really hit me. I haven’t read Willis’ past works so I guess I simply don’t have the insight to him.
In any case, Booster…. Noooo. At the very least, since they don’t seem like they’re just comedic relief, I think they’ll develope? I’ve got faith.
It’s okay to be an asshole if you blow up planets like Darth Vader or concoct ludicrous and petty schemes like Mike or even just dedicate your life to a religious devotion to annoying people like Carla. Real people don’t do any of those things.
There’s a million things Mike has done that’s worse than the way Walky’s treating Lucy or Booster’s treating Amber, both Walky and Booster aren’t being cartoon characters about it, so it’s uncomfortable.
Which, to be clear, is not *bad*. Uncomfortable things are interesting, but I think that’s the reason people react more to Walky/Booster than the objectively much worse things Mike or Asher did.
Exactly. Booster is a million times more unpleasant than Mike because I feel like I’m supposed to take them seriously, and yeah, if I take a character like Mike or Booster seriously, it’s pretty gross.
Mike was fine as comic relief–like Galasso, it’s okay for some characters in Dumbing of Age to be a little absurd. People take this goofy-ass comic too seriously sometimes. The trouble was when Willis tried to use Mike in serious plotlines and he just didn’t have a chassis for it.
I never liked Mike, and I don’t like Booster rn. Mike just kinda pissed me off, but Booster makes me deeply uncomfortable. I have faith in them to improve, they seem like they can and will, but AGHHH. It’s probably gonna take a while, so whenever their scenes come up I’mma just wait a few days so I can at least have time with another character after.
Also, I don’t think they’re a replacement Mike, but since that’s what people have been saying- I mentioned him. Feel bad that they’d have to be addressed like that.
Amber’s a very attractive person, one of the most attractive in the cast, up there with Carla or Joyce or Lucy or Dorothy or- wow, I like girls in glasses. I digress.
Amber’s a very attractive person, but it has little of anything to do with her baggage or damage, so to speak. I don’t think having either is a disqualifying factor, but her determination, her knack for rising to the occasion, and her quirks are parts of her that’d exist with or without it, same as I wouldn’t give Blaine credit for Amber being strong. Amber’s why Amber is strong.
Anyway who wants to bet that this was mining Amber for reactions so add to his Ethan knowledge. It’s ok to beg Booster to befriend (cough) Ethan on the assumption they like fucked up people, but not to have that attraction expressed towards Amber. They see Amber lay down a boundary about it. They see a number of different things. I seriously doubt it was the *photography* Booster was trying to do here.. just more mind games.
Of course, it’s fucked-up messed-up to say that to someone. But I’d be the billionth person to say that about Booster this strip so idk why it’d need repeating.
I do think Booster was likely prodding her with the camera thing, yeah. Booster has earnestly asked them out for pizza before, something Amber did not appear to recognize as an explicit date request, but we haven’t really seen Booster just, taking pics of people they expressed attraction to, like Ruth or Ethan. (I thiiink they complimented Joe’s looks, too, but it’s been a while.)
I am curious what the angle is here. Like, if Booster just wanted Amber pics, that wouldn’t be very difficult to do.
Okay, Amber is demanding Booster get rid of photos of her because they creep her out, and they’re refusing. I said yesterday that a lot of characters in DoA do things that would be super problematic IRL but are excused by cartoon logic, and now I think that excuse has worn thin.
Obviously, Mike did much much worse than this, but Mike was a much cartoonier character. Booster is realistic.
In real life there would be nothing Amber could do about being photographed in a public space. If she was in her room then she would have an expectation of privacy and her demands would have some legal weight to them, but I don’t think a common area of the resident hall counts.
I mean there are perhaps unrealistic aspects of Booster’s character, but being a creep whose actions are legally protected isn’t one of them.
Even more technically, Booster has done exactly what Amber asked them to, and is pointing out that this hasn’t achieved what Amber wanted it to. We don’t know what their reaction would have been if Amber had said “then I want you to delete those as well”, rather than stalking off to punch the cloud.
I honestly took the last panel as them pointing out Amber knows full well the memory card isn’t really solving the problem, not that Booster was saying they were going to keep the pictures. That said, they’re not saying they’re deleting them, either, so you’re potentially right.
I think the “I know you know” part is telling. She asked for the memory card because it gives her the illusion of control over the situation, not because it actually gets rid of the photos.
Hacking a Website is one thing. A Cloud Company, however, like Amazon’s AWS, is akin to pointing a knife at a Mafia Don. Amazon will warmly chuckle and Amber will be “transferred”
Do they? Amber thinks it’s less acceptable if you think they’re hot. AFAIK Booster has not indicated that they believe it affects the acceptability in either direction.
So, Amber first ask Booster to befriending Ethan counting on the fact that them like “hot people who are fucked up in their mind” and now is doing this scene of being offese because them find her that way and they onestly said that to her? Yep, Amber has all the right to react like that, showing how incredibly hypocritical she is. But this don’t change the fact that she and Booster could be a great couple and that Booster was able to make her doing something instead of just passing her time doing research on Internet. Also, asking for the whole card is atrocious!
I dont think anyone is arguing how hypocritical Amber is. This doesnt validate Boosters actions either though, and i feel people are reacting more because of how little we know of Booster. This is a new level of creep for them, while Amber being hypocritical isnt exactly new.
You used “them like” to talk about Booster. A long while back, I encountered a situation where a student in a classroom I taught was trying to explain a friend’s pronoun usage, and the way I understood it was that his friend used “them” as them’s preferred subject pronoun.
I asked around what few queer spaces I’m tangent to, and no one there said they’d encountered that specific pronoun usage before. Is it something you’ve seen before?
I can understand the diffidence toward the new contract and find Booster odd because they find hot people with messed up minds. But honestly, the fascination/attraction for mental problems is what drives almost all psychology students to study psychology. Here I saw a person who pretended to hide to take pictures, knowing to be actually clearly visible to the person them wanted to photograph. Later them awkwardly confessed to said person that they like her and attempted to talk to her. They didn’t even protest when she made the theatrical request to give her the card but advised her the photos are already in the cluod! Just for this, there are comments here that are disgusted as if Booster is a perverse, murderous stalker!? Seriously? I also think that if Booster had tried to photograph Ethan, Amber not only would have had no complaints, but she would have helped them and asked for copies of the photos. (About the pronoun, hem… I’m not a native English speaker and I have huge problems writing in English, I’m always afraid who that I write is actually incomprehensible or very wrong).
I’ve never seen somebody who uses “them/them/them’s”.
(Doesn’t necessarily mean that you or your student misunderstood the friend — the world is big! But this usage would be pretty unique. If the person was my friend, I’d ask to make sure.)
Typically the pronouns that sound like this are they/them/their — such as: they helpfully told me what pronouns to use for them, so now I’m practicing their pronouns.
The way the student explained it, his friend purposefully chose to use what’s normally an object pronoun as a subject pronoun in order to call attention to the fact that them is nonbinary, as I understand- that since many folks use “they” to refer to someone whose gender identity is *unknown*, them wanted to use something different to call attention to the fact that them’s gender is *void* (Or something to that effect. It was a brief conversation, and the person I was coteaching with got hung up on singular “they” anyways, so things were pretty muddled on top of it being in an ESL classroom)
I’m not going to lie, it’s a pretty significant cognitive load to use (especially since I never learned them’s name and can’t just substitute that in), but so it goes.
New theory: Booster is an idiot. The same sort of idiot like that woman who dated, married and had a child with Ted Bundy while he was publicly on trial for all the women that he murdered.
I hope Booster grows out of this before he gets to the point of writing fan letters to serial killers on death row.
An Idiot wouldn’t be able to form such an Abstract Concept as Mental Illness being Hot in isolation from Physical Beauty. They specialize in Psychology, but that may have been to the detriment of everything else. Einstein was really great at Physics, but as he put all his energy into that, all his other skill sets suffered. If judged on any one of those skill sets in isolation, one might see him as an idiot. Nobody is generally an Idiot. Everyone specializes in something. It’s not something one can avoid. You will be diciplined at something, based on repetitive habits. It could be that Booster is green at Psychology even while specializing via a lack of Productive Experience as an Undergrad, or it may be that they are so well versed in Psychology that everyone else’s perspective is tragically enfeebled. Booster could be the most healthy Character in the story, which puts everyone else in such a deep pit by comparison that Booster is the only hope for the lot of them.
Booster showed us who they were lomg ago regarding rheir disrespect of boundaries. The hall meeting, Sarah having to brush them off. This isnt new but they are certainly cementing themselves as “replacement mike”.
Amber is imagining the prospect of Booster fapping to her Photos. She’ll have none of that. They are going to fap to the Cloud Photos anyway. Amber will find the Cloud Photos and hack her way into Booster’s Account to delete them. She did not, however, find the Encrypted Mirror Server…
I usually hate it when people talk about fetishizing/romanticizing mental illness because usually they are just yelling at a mentally ill person for not using the recovery model, not consenting to some medical thing, or like, enjoying the wrong fanfiction or something (sometimes they are also yelling at a sane person for accepting their friend or partner). This… is a little uncomfortable, though. I think my issues are hot, and I wish more people thought they at least weren’t off-putting, but there’s getting to be a person who other people might find interesting, and there’s getting to be an object of study. I don’t really blame Booster because I think they’re trying to help Amber feel less insecure, but I really wish they would do anything I ever liked.
I liked old Mike because it felt like we were supposed to understand that this character was a jerk and sometimes enjoy him being a jerk and sometimes root against him being a jerk, and maybe also want him to evolve in a way where he didn’t lose all his edges but he could also be capable of expressing a wider range of emotion and not just constantly lashing out. I have no idea what we’re supposed to think about Booster at any time because I can’t remember having seen them drop the facade of intellectual curiosity but I can’t remember having seen them treat people like anything other than intellectual curiosities, either. I don’t mind nonbinary jerks because I am nonbinary and also a jerk, but what are we even doing here?
Semirelatedly, has anyone else noticed that Amber’s got some pretty big nonbinary vibes?
I really don’t like the idea that Booster is being seen as a Creep here. They are showing Positive Emotions about Mental Illness. If I think your Mental Illness has Beauty to it, are you going to think I’m creepy for not doubling down in agreement about your own negative frame about it? Am I supposed to always feed your Self Depreciation? “Hot” is a Positive Frame. “Hot” is “I worship you for the glory of your Being.” Booster is backpedaling because they know they fucked up a social convention, but the sentiment was Positive.
It’s the framing Booster uses, intentionally or not. Various shades of “Ooh, what a fascinating specimen this is!”- presumptuous and insulting. Being a mere undergraduate with very little expertise certainly doesn’t justify this condescension.
Given. That being said, Booster is a new character at the start of their Character Arc. Every Character needs a Weakness. They need a flaw to overcome. Look at Joe’s flaw. Look what it did to his Character Arc. If this is the Flaw that defines Booster’s Path of Growth, then the Game is Set to put Booster through Hell in order to cleanse them.
That’s fair, but if that’s the plan, then we still get to acknowledge it as a flaw. It makes no sense to claim both that this behavior is a flaw they’re going to overcome in their Arc and that it’s not currently a problem.
I gotta say that “if I think your mental illness has beauty to it” is an…odd statement. There’s a difference between saying positive things about mental illness, and thinking that illness is beautiful or attractive. And quite frankly, the entire idea of framing a person’s mental illness as attractive….IS extremely weird! And kind of creepy! You wouldn’t say that about literally any other type of illness. If you told someone that you think their asthma or their cancer or whatever is ‘beautiful’, they’d rightfully be creeped out.
Now this obviously gets more complicated when you add disability into the equation, since the intersection there and many people’s varying feelings about it can get extremely complicated very fast.
But overall, no, actually, “hot” isn’t always a positive framework, and it doesn’t always mean that, actually. “Hot” can also mean “you exist purely for my gratification and consumption”.
Booster is being a lil creepy here. But it is generally not to a degree that is any worse than anyone else in the cast has been in the past (Amber herself chief among them!!) It’s not particularly egregious, especially if they back off, but like. It IS creepy!
Tuberculosis (“consumption”) leaves many of its victims thin and pale. Some people go for that. (A lot more, I believe, than when it was more common and recognized as an actual illness.)
The difference is that there really aren’t any upsides to the physical conditions you’re talking about. I guess something good might happen to a person that wouldn’t have happened if they didn’t have cancer, but they also would have cancer, and any random thing can be what causes something good to happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. It’s pretty common for mental illnesses or neurodivergences that used to be considered illnesses to have legitimate upsides, or to be so inextricable from the rest of the person that it doesn’t make sense to consider them separate. If I think my partner’s way of thinking is beautiful, then I think her autism is beautiful, because that’s a natural part of how her brain works that informs her way of thinking. If I think her personality is beautiful, then for similar reasons I think her BPD is beautiful. Mental illness is a broad range of things, and people affected by it have a broad range of reactions to it, including, for some of us, not wanting our differences to be pathologized.
(Just to be clear, my partner is someone who doesn’t want to be cured and is happy to be seen in this light.)
I cant really speak for the rest of your comment but i have to agree rhat i cant think of many Booster interactions where they didnt treat the other characters as subjects to analyze and then prod.
That’s fair, and one person getting a vibe doesn’t mean there’s anything necessarily tellingly nonbinary there, it’s just that some of the things Amber does remind me of my own nonbinary experiences? Specifically, Amber seems to identify really strongly with male/male romance and sexuality in a way that other characters who are into that (like Lucy) are a lot more chill and… personally distanced from, I guess? I’ve always projected really intensely onto that kind of thing too – I didn’t really know much about being nonbinary at the time, but there was definitely an element of feeling like in some way this thing was about me but also only really being able to experience it via fiction because I had the body I did. And she took Ethan rejecting her because he wasn’t into girls really hard even after she didn’t seem to be in love with him anymore, and a lot of that was definitely about investing so much effort into trying to help someone who meant a lot to her and then seeing that person backslide, but this read like how it felt to be rejected for something that wasn’t even true but not even being able to understand how it wasn’t even true (obviously my friend at the time had no obligation to date me or be interested in my body type or whatever, it just fucking hurt in a really specific way.)
It also feels like Amber only doesn’t read as androgynous because she’s curvy. Her clothes probably come from the women’s section but don’t feel particularly gendered, and this is the kind of haircut an artist would draw on a character they were trying to make look androgynous, so this isn’t like, someone who’s putting in effort to perform femininity pretty much at all (this does not make someone nonbinary of course, and you don’t have to perform jack shit in order to identify as a woman, but I’m bringing this up as part of a constellation of relatable traits.)
In a less relatable sense but one that stuck out to me personally: if I’m remembering right, Amazi-Girl was originally created to be a better version of Amber who would be a good person and way less crazy and able to channel her aggression into something beneficial rather than pointlessly destructive… in short, everything Amber wants to be but isn’t, and being the “correct” gender is right there in her fucking name.
You make some interesting points, and I enjoyed reading them! It’s really cool that you can see stuff about this character that I hadn’t thought of before, and now I’m thinking back to try and come up with anything Amber’s ever done that’d be classified as “performing femininity”.
Closest I can think of is that her original hairdo was something she got done for prom, which she laments when she’s talking about Amazi-Girl’s much sexier hairdo and how it’s not fair she’s stuck with it. Even that feels kinda like a stretch though?
You may be onto something. Maybe not, but it’s fun to think about.
Yeah, again, I’m not saying I think this is definitely gonna be a thing, and I don’t necessarily think that even the vibe was intentional. Most likely that is not where her story is headed. I just think that if it did end up going there someday, I definitely wouldn’t feel like it came entirely out of left field.
So irrelevant to Booster’s Bad At Flirting-ness (seriously friendo Walky’s smoother than you are) I was going through the Dumbing of Age Tumblr’s preview panels (as you do) and I noticed that the panels posted for the 14th and the 15th (this past scene) were of Billie. I’m curious as to whether that Billie scene got scrapped for this scene or just moved down the line to make room, and if it’s the latter, how far ahead it impacted the accuracy of dates the preview panels were posted with (as AFAIK Willis posts the panels as they finish that strip/load it in the buffer).
So in my hometown is very common than in taco grills besides the meat potatoes get cooked inside aluminum paper and once they are done they are mixed with cream, some cheese and the grilled meat… a hot potato of those is a VERY TASTY THING.
Okay yeah too bold, I feel Booster is a lot dumber than they present themselves to be. Like, their clearly more emotional intelligent than most of the main cast but still.
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https://sgpsketch.tumblr.com/post/695521259895783424/doa-cloud
and it ends up the photos are of the back of her head or a stain on the table anyway
(alternately, they are AWESOME PHOTOS and maybe clue Amber in to she’s pretty damn hot)
**slowclap.gif**
That is awesome. Great Job!!
:-O
When did Booster have an opportunity to dump that SD card, anyway? Does that DSLR have WiFi and an independent connection to DropBox?
Many modern DSLRs do have WiFi! Some can dump to the cloud on their own, some can do it by piggybacking on a cell phone’s Access Point.
They also make special SD cards that have built-in WiFi as well! I bought one a while back, but it was only 16GB and I was kind of “meh” on the whole thing. However, that was several years ago; easy to imagine they’ve made better ones since then.
It’s comic book land; things work how ever they need to work.
Also we never actually heard any clicks
The photos both on the card and in the cloud are of the Switch and snow angels from before lolololol
(I’d link but WiFi went out and I hate burning data)
ok there:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/03-see-you-in-the-funny-page/nintendo/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/03-see-you-in-the-funny-page/angels/
Maybe it is just a cell phone in a fancy dlsr case, probably not, but interesting to me.
She’s a Hot Potato.
Beautiful, no notes.
So Booster is a psychology major who is more attracted to someone based on how fucked up they are?
Let’s hope and pray they never take a job at Arkham Asylum. Though if the staff there are smart, they’ve since added exactly that as a question on the application.
What’s the worst that could happen?
Non-Binary Harley Qunn.
I said “worst”.
Binary Joker.
Enby Penguin.
I’m not liking Booster much now, unless they’re joking about keeping them on the cloud. They should remove the pics ASAP because it’s kinda creepy to keep any pictures of someone without their consent.
Good, decent behavior is rarely funny, Tulipkitten. Showing class and respecting boundaries is the smart move, (*pointing at the title of the comic to illustrate).
Booster behaving immaturely? failing to understand, grasp, or respect boundaries? What are they, Eighteen year old or something?
Oh…RIGHT…
While DW started this back in 2010, the fact is, it’s been a handful of months-in-character (including the timeskips) and these are immature, childish people because they’re CHILDREN.
Children in adult bodies, with minimal supervision, but mentally and psychologically they’re CHILDREN. Expecting Booster to have the discretion of a 40 year old with extensive life experience is a no-go at this station, so maybe cut them a little slack before you judge them? THEY don’t even know who they are yet.
Pretty sure I knew at 18 that voyeurism and stalking were wrong and creepy.
Did you know it because you KNEW IT or because you were TOLD? Did you start off with boundary issues, or did you learn them? Lemme put it this-a-way, Freemage. Most of the asshats you run into think of themselves as ‘pretty good guys’, They don’t GET that some of the shit they see in the media is WRONG until it blows up in their face. (Points to the “Joe’s Do-List” storyline for an example.) Booster is in a pretty unusual condition, because Booster’s got this whole ‘thing’ going on with their identity, which ‘thing’ tends to alter their own peception, just like every other Kid trying to stand out.
IOW it’s completely credible that a person who’s already pushing boundaries might fail to take into account other people’s boundaries, especially when the subject in question is atypical. Doesn’t mean they mean any harm, it means they don’t recognize what they’re doing is wrong, because they really don’t GRASP the other person’s perspective with a normal level of empathy…because they really don’t grasp the other person’s perspective, because they haven’t built up enough life-experience dealing with others in the real world to do so.
Which is not unusual for immature people in their late teens who do NOT have a background that includes ‘Behaviors that get you sent to Juvie, or Expelled’.
Empathy can be present without understanding. (see: lots of Christian Fundamentalists who AREN’T homicidal lunatics), and understanding can be present without Empathy (see manipulative psychopathic assholes that thrive in political or corporate settings).
Booster’s choice to upload it to the Cloud reflects lack of one of those two-either a lack of Empathy, or a lack of Understanding. It also reflects the kind of thing a kid whose major exposures to other people comes from Media and on-line interactions instead of in-person risks and failures. I’m going with lack of UNDERSTANDING, in hopes DW didn’t just drop a psychopath (excuse me, “Antisocial personality disorder”) into the cast.
APD’s are surface-charming and narcissistic. IOW not what most people think at all. They are GREAT at selling things, including the idea that they’re good people. Most people confuse that with someone who is ‘unsociable’-which is the person who avoids personal contact and huddles away from social situations where they might be highlighted.
You talking about Joe’s “Do List” is actually pretty illustrative of the problem. No one in the comments defended Joe’s list–not the attitudes behind it, nor the fact of it. And the story itself called it out, first with comments from other characters, then with an up-front incident showing Joe the problem–and letting him grow, albeit fitfully.
If Booster changes to be a better person? Awesome. I’m all about that. My dislike of Roz, in particular, is her insistence that a person is always to be judged by their worst behavior, even when they try to change.
But thus far, I’ve seen nothing in the character for that better person to be built upon. This differs from Joe (and most of the rest of the cast, for that matter, at least those who aren’t largely two-dimensional foils, like Mary)–his genuine affection for Danny has been obvious since day one, showing that he HAS empathy, even if he likes to pretend he doesn’t. Likewise, even at his worst, he expresses a belief in consent and choice. Those traits played very heavily, I would argue, into him being able to understand about the issues around the “Do List”, leading to both him abandoning it and apologizing for it publicly.
Booster, OTOH, has never once shown any awareness of anyone else’s boundaries. And there’s never been any in-world consequences for these transgressions.
“good behavior isn’t funny” is a defense for WILLIS, not the characters.
Especially here in the Dumbing Of Age Comments, prosecution of character is a full time sport. While we accept youth and inexperience as a…let’s say reason for the behavior to occur, it’s not a reason to cease discussion for it being bad behavior.
I think there’s a spectrum of how much grace we as a comments section give characters for their inexperience and being in their learning process. Sometimes things are talked about more on principle, but other times it does get into more of a character attack.
I don’t have an issue with characters, even “good” characters, acting problematically. In fact, while Booster’s refusal to delete the photos makes THEM creepier, it makes this scene a bit less creepy, because the framing is not on Booster’s side here.
With that said, it *is* creepy in a way that’s unusual for DoA (In which characters who are being assholes like to go “I am an asshole now! It is me!”), which is interesting and worth talking about.
18-year-olds are not children, they’re adults with (unless something went incredibly wrong) very little experience living as adults. None of these characters are “children in adult bodies”. They’re young adults in young adult bodies. If they were a couple years younger, they would be adolescents in adolescent bodies. None of this changes that Booster’s inexperience at life plays into how they’re treating Amber – I’m guessing they think they’re seeing her say she’s ugly and they think that continuing to assert that they think she’s hot will help her feel more attractive, and time will tell how if that plays out negatively but probably yeah – but this is absolutely the kind of mistake that a young adult, or a not-young adult with poor social skills (related to neurodivergence or otherwise) or from a cultural/familial background where pushing against someone’s boundaries if you think it’s for their own good is in some situations considered the right thing to do, would make. There are 40-year-olds with extensive life experience who do this.
I’m not defending treating young adults like more experienced adults (including re: really fucked up age gaps in dating, which I hate having to specify but if I don’t then some shithead is absolutely going to think that’s what this is about) or holding people to standards they’re incapable of meeting in general, but infantalizing people is rude and cruel and there are people these characters’ age in the comments. There are ways to talk about age and development and behavior without implying that an undergrad is more similar to an 8-year-old than to someone who’s already graduated and has a job.
Ari, your brain doesn’t stop forming its basic structure before 25 or so in most humans. For kids who GO to college instead of out into the work-force or into the Service, they’re very much still KIDS mentally, and most of the time, they’re not just kids, but SHELTERED kids in that demographic. Maturity is built off of experience, and for the vast majority of kids who go straight from High School to College?
They’re still mentally and emotionally children-that is, they lack maturity, experience, and judgment beyond the purely theoretical. VERY few of your college friends at 18 to 21 have much at all in the way of experience or maturity. Their identity is still FORMING. (this is also why armies like ’em young for enlistment-because they’re moldable.)
Booster’s got it extra-bad, because They haven’t figured out WHO they are yet, just that it isn’t someone who conforms to traditional roles or rules. Remember Joe’s “Do List”? That whole storyline is just exactly what a kid with little life experience and plenty of childish arrogance would come up with-that’s what made it a funny storyline.
Booster has issues with respecting boundaries, and little understanding or Empathy beyond the theoretical, because Booster hasn’t got the experience base to grasp those things fully yet. If Booster were a 27 year old Grad Student, it would go well past the horizon of ‘Creepy as fuck’, because mature mentalities don’t DO that kind of shit.
But kids? Kids do that kind of shit without thinking about it-and even worse, Stalker/creep behavior is LIONIZED in media. Every ‘romance’ show you’ve ever watched, slow it down and analyzed it, every ‘Love Song’ since the 1950s at LEAST is stock full of creepy, stalker sentiment. The maturity to separate “this is fiction, you don’t do this in real life” from “this is so cool” comes with EXPERIENCE and observation of the real world. You can’t get that from Tumblr or Facebook or whatever-the-god-botherers-are-using.
I don’t really care if the brain keeps forming because what you’re describing is a very small part of brain development associated with risk-taking specifically, which is really variable across individuals, and in fact, it might actually be a useful adaptation for young adults to be more likely to take risks rather than something that young adults are lacking. The brain also continues to change throughout an individual’s life. Are 40-year-olds children because their brains are generally different than the average 60-year-old’s? Also, the 25-years-old figure is based on cis men, and the corresponding figure for cis women is more like 20-years-old (there aren’t studies I know of on anyone else.) The brain is really plastic and changes based on experience and expectations – there are brain differences from culture to culture that are almost certainly not related to genetics – and cis girls are generally encouraged to be more cautious than cis boys, so I’m guessing most of this is social. If people are imitating their peer groups, don’t you think it’s likely that the young men in these studies are settling down as their friends do, too?
Identity is not something that conveniently crystallizes within a specific age range. Many things about a person shift and evolve as time passes and they experience new things. 80-year-olds are out there developing new interests, losing old ones, changing their outlooks on life based on their continued experience.
None of this even requires knowledge of neuroscience to understand. Nearly everything I am describing can be understood by observing the lives of actual people, which I can only assume is something you either don’t do, or are spectacularly bad at doing.
Even aside from that, if you want to talk science, you should probably make sure you actually know the science you’re talking about. You’re categorically infantilizing and dehumanizing all LEGAL ADULTS who have yet to meet your vague, scientifically and logically bankrupt threshold.
Also, I’m old enough that my brain should be fully cooked, and due to my combination of mental illnesses, I have trouble with impulse control and risk-taking, as well as zero natural understanding of boundaries. Am I a fake adult because I don’t suit your oversimplified misunderstanding of neuroscience? Should I be treated like a child because the life I’ve lived means that my personality has developed in a way that doesn’t suit the nebulous mythological standard you seem to be talking about? Does the answer change based on whether I’m trying to understand boundaries because I care about boundaries, or because I’ll be rejected if I don’t? Does it change based on whether I see my differences as completely detrimental, or as a mixed bag?
I’m not saying these characters aren’t specifically young adults and should be cut some slack. I feel like I pretty clearly articulated that I think these characters are specifically young adults and should be cut some slack. They are in a different developmental stage than other adults, who also make up several different developmental stages. The thing I was annoyed about is that you are saying a group of adults are literal children for being different than other adults. But that doesn’t make them children. That makes them young adults. I’m now also annoyed that you’re describing a nonbinary character who seems to be pretty solid in their personality and interests as someone who hasn’t figured out who they are yet, and that you’re bringing up The Media and inability to tell fiction from reality, when like, studies show that kids can tell fiction from reality at around 4. The art isn’t producing the culture, it’s reflecting it.
Your bizarre tangent about romantic media “lionizing” whatever it is that you personally consider “stalker” behavior (including apparently all or most romantic music released in the last 70 years, a statement that is so extreme and blatantly false that you are frankly lucky I even bothered addressing it) is not particularly relevant or accurate, and I don’t really appreciate that you wasted even more of my time with it. Everything about your post only tells me that YOU have very little actual life experience, regardless of your age, and are most likely regurgitating inaccurate information you essentially cannot have meaningfully researched yourself (because if you had, you would already know most of this) AND have approached with a gruesomely minimal amount of critical thinking.
Helicoptering and robbing young-ish people of reasonable amounts of personal agency is already destructive enough when we’re applying it to actual minors. Attempting to enforce similar standards on LEGAL ADULTS is vile enough that even statements that would typically be hyperbolic seem insufficient.
You legitimately have no idea what the hell you’re talking about and your opinions are gross, cruel, disturbing, and frankly outright dangerous. The condescending, demonstrably inaccurate posts you’ve made about this are actively corrosive toward both society in general and a large amount of actual human lives.
And you said it all, applying the same logic to REAL people, about someone who doesn’t even exist. You are the person who struggles to differentiate between fiction and reality.
This reminds me of the song by The Police, “Every Step You Take”, which at the time it came out was a love anthem, but these days it sounds like a stalker’s manifesto.
See also: Baby It’s Cold Outside.
There’s some interesting cultural context there. Currently, it reads super rapey, but in its original context it kind of wasn’t? There was a really good essay about this a while back. For example, when she asks what’s in her drink, that sounds really bad! But at the time the song was written, it was a stock joke that a character behaving foolishly or uninhibitedly (or wanting to) would ask what was in their drink, and the answer would always be that it was either not a significant enough amount of alcohol to alter their decision-making ability, or no alcohol at all. The girl wants to stay over and get her bone on, but she’s worried about social disapproval (see: all the lines referencing social disapproval! purity culture and rape culture can both be bad) and he’s giving her excuses for ways to justify this as being not about boning at all. They wouldn’t be singing in harmony at the end if they weren’t meant to be on the same page.
The same essayist pointed out that this is also a really good illustration of one of the ways rape culture manifested at the time. If you can’t agree to sex without people thinking you’re a slut, then you kind of have to put up an intentionally weak fight and hope your boyfriend understands what you’re doing – but not everyone’s capable of being assertive enough that they don’t look like they’re putting up an intentionally weak fight, and not everybody cares if their partner is trying to say yes or trying to say no. So yeah, art reflects the culture, babeyyy
Actually, Sting was intentionally writing from the perspective of a stalker and didn’t find it romantic at all, and he’s been annoyed that people seem to take the song as portraying something more consensual than it is. It’s one of those songs that gets misinterpreted all the time, like people playing “Lips of an Angel” at their wedding when it’s about cheating, or, like, so many different kinds of reaction to that Decemberists double suicide song. In this case, it’s probably because it has a bit of a deceptive sound to it (also intentional).
The attitude that an 18 year old is still a kid contributes directly to the number of people that can excuse a father traveling to the campus and shoving his daughter who at her age is an adult and not a kid into his car against her will so he can bring her back home where she “belongs”. After all, she’s a kid.
Parents have the right to make their kids get in the car and go home, by necessity they have to have that right in order to keep their kids safe from situations their kid doesn’t understand are dangerous.
Parents do not have the right to do that to adult children but insisting that their adult children are just kids makes it seem more acceptable to bystanders and churches willing to pay that dad’s bail.
What I’m saying is that calling an 18 year old adult a kid is practically Toe Dad apologia.
I heard a way of explaining this that makes sense to me: teenagers are not children and they are not adults; they are *teenagers* and their strengths and weaknesses are not the same as those of children *or* adults.
That’s great when you’re dealing with the ages 13-17, but 18 year old people are adults. They aren’t neither, they’re one of those things and that thing is adults. Saying anything else is saying that Toe Dad had a right to shove Becky in his car and drive away with her. Stop being creepy and admit that adults are adults.
I can’t keep up with this double standard. Are 18-year-olds adults who can be reasonably expected to function societally the same as a 36-year-old with a stable income and good mental health, or are they literal children who can’t be trusted to know their own gender? We need to pick one and stick with it.
That’s how Mike is, an asshole
All he has done so far is point out that they have already been backed up to the cloud; he hasn’t given any indication that he won’t subsequently delete them.
The cloud backup is automatic; deleting the backups takes effort, and, possibly, devices like a computer or tablet which he doesn’t have with him at the moment.
If he had taken the pics with his phone, deleting them would be trivial; but doing so from the original camera is probably near-impossible.
THIS!!!
Booster’s pronouns are They/Them, just so you know.
DAMMIT.
Sorry, Booster.
Booster could have said, “They’re still on the cloud, you know, but don’t worry, I’ll delete them.” Or any number of other ways of assuring Amber that Booster was not, in fact, going to be creepy about this. Booster chose not to take any of those options, and is being judged accordingly.
Tulipkitten,
I might point out that the pictures were taken in the common area. Is there an enforceable expectation of privacy?
There’s a difference between taking a picture of general area with people in it and taking pictures of someone without their consent 3 feet away from them, which booster was doing and yes it is creepy.
Really disliking booster
“Enforceable”? No, there’s no Photo Police about to burst in and take Booster down. But rude, creepy behavior shouldn’t need police to be called out as such, either.
They handed over the memory card (which has monetary value if nothing else) promptly when asked; I think it’s jumping to conclusions to assume they will now hoard the pictures like a sleezy dragon rather then removing them later just because they pointed out they’re already clouded.
It’s been on the application ever since the incident with Doctor Harleen Quinzel, now one of their most frequent patients.
It’s fortunate that everyone answers the application honestly.
When you travel to the USA, there’s a form where they ask you if you are a terrorist.
I’m assuming that if you answer “Yes”, you’re handed a machine gun, immediate citizenship, and a $50 Walmart gift card to buy some blue jeans and a white tank top.
They have to check against the convenient color coded chart though.
Well yeah, naturally. Gotta keep the horrible horrible status quo, otherwise we might have to examine our own culture, and then we might find flaws.
Incidentally, this is why Hawkeye’s Endgamecrusade against the Yakuza and cartels was probably at least slightly a little bit very racist. Dude’s already from a place with plenty of horrible unchecked terrorism, why’s he gotta go abroad for that?
For the record, Hawkeye also went after some Mexican cartels. That was off-screen, though. So he spread it around.
“Yakuza and cartels”
only if they’d consider you white
I’ve been told they actually refuse you entry if you say yes, and this is actually because if you get caught doing terrorist acts on US soil, it means you lied to a federal agency (or entered the US illegally, either, or) which allows them to do all sort of crazy stuff.
well, we don’t know if they’ll succeed in getting a phd but i’d hope even an ‘intro to psychology’ would have some kinda brief talk about ‘ethics’ and like ‘don’t armchair diagnose strangers’ or so
Tho i wouldn’t be surprised if there was reddit posts of psych majors admitting they’re taking those kinda classes to learn to manipulate others
Maybe “Intro to Psychology” is a 200-level class. At my school the Computer Science curriculum didn’t have any CS classes the first year; 100-level CS is for Business majors.
They really are replacement Mike
old man punches cloud
It had it coming.
Old man yells at cloud.
Tells it to keep off his lawn.
Remembering the comments from the last couple days, I just can’t help but think of this scene from the Fairly Odd Parents about an incriminating tape that keeps getting paused and played over and over again:
https://m.facebook.com/RememberWhenNick/videos/cosmos-mother/844914279226936/
It’s really funny when you think about it 😂😂😂
Some of the auto-generated closed captions on this video are really funny – and surprisingly profane.
Omg I was really unclear how this was related for the first bit, but I see it now. We are basically seeing these characters’ stories this way, or even slower. We don’t know how it is going to play out. Like that Buddhist parable about the man whose son finds a horse, and then breaks his leg, and then there’s a war…etc.
Hey! (Hey) You! (You)
Get Me Off Of Your Cloud!
I don’t want to be in your files!
Good for you, Amber!
Except for the “calling herself a ‘potato'” part. That’s internalized Blaine abuse poking though. 🙁
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/potato/
Their camera uploads things immediately? What if there’s no WiFi?
By this point most university dorms will have WiFi.
I was thinking more for outdoors photography, really. Also, I definitely wouldn’t be using a magical auto-uploading camera on (semi?)public WiFi, where it can get hijacked and used without my knowledge, for things I didn’t want it to photograph.
Booster’s camera is an alien artifact and this is Willis’ way of reintroducing SEMME as a concept.
That is a Rabbit Hole. It is a Paradox because the more it gets mentioned, the deeper the Rabbit Hole goes. Because you noticed, Willis noticed that you noticed, and will takes extra measures to hide his SEMME ambitions for DoA.
He can’t hide the truth from me! I see the hidden yellow stripes!!
Amber the Lalafell.
She would, too.
People who are good at Smash Ultimate: what are the odds that Amber, at some point, has punched Cloud while playing it?
Entirely possible, plent of characters throw punches and Cloud isn’t that difficult to get around.
Depends on her main. Does Amber strike you more as a player who mains the best character or the kinda person who just uses her personal favorite character and gets good. I feel like a lot of the best characters are swordies so if it’s the former it’s iffy.
Based on a random tier list I looked at
S-tier
Steve (can punch but don’t really want to be punching with him.) Pyra/Mythra use swords, Rob swings his robot arms…I dunno if you can call what he does a punch, Joker mostly kicks and uses a blade, and pikachu mostly uses electricity and headbutts.
Now A+ tier has quite a few punchers (Sonic, fox, Squirtle from pokemon trainer, Wario, Olimar (though again you don’t wanna be doing it) and most notably Kazuya and Min-min. So y’know…if she’s only into playing high tiers those are her options.
In fact, for no reason at all here’s all the smash ultimate punch characters off the top of my head.
Does Punch:
-Mario
-Luigi
-Bowser
-Dr. Mario
-Bowser Jr. (technically the clown car punches you)
-Donkey Kong
-Diddy Kong
-Ganondorf
-Samus
-Dark Samus
-Kirby
-Fox
-Jigglypuff
-Squirtle
-Captain falcon (Falcoooooon Punch)
-Ness
-Wario
-Olimar
-Villager
-Little Mac
-Snake
-Sonic
-Pac-man
-Ryu
-Bayonetta
-Mii Brawler
-King K.Rool
-Incineroar? (honestly i’m iffy about that)
-Min Min
-Ken
-Banjo Kazooie
-Terry
-Steve (technically?)
-Kazuya
So a lot of punch choices. But a surprising amount of characters who cannot punch. Either because they use a sword, or their design just doesn’t lend itself to punching. Also not many of the female characters punch, which is a shame.
So yeah, if she uses any of these characters the answer is yes.
Amber strikes me as the kind of person who’ll play a random selection just to prove she can pwn you with anything.
Yesterday I was wondering, now I know for sure; Booster is creepy and not fun. I don’t like having my picture taken and I would be just as annoyed.
So Booster wants to date Amber because of her mental health. That raises all kinds of red flags in my mind. Anyone else seeing the red flgs.
Yeah, actually. Like I know we tend to fixate on tiny moments in the comic and render our harsh judgments of the characters, but in this case, liking somebody specifically/solely because of their damage (and telling them so) just seems harmful.
Also, now I *know* I’m blowing up one moment excessively, but… way to neg her, Booster.
Booster could’ve said “are you kidding, you’re lovely/gorgeous” and not doubled down that her life-complicating brain-weasels are the only source of her hotness.
Guess Amber had better get with them, because she’s too damaged for people who don’t eroticize her anguish.
Fuck. Y’know, I’m into the Booster x Ambs ship and all but that really isn’t great. Hmmm. Hmmmm.
Mixed feelings about this one. If someone feels physically unattractive, sometimes arguing about it can feel alienating or like the person is lying to you. There’s something to be said for respecting or at least accepting someone’s self-perception.
And it’s not like Booster said “You’re hot because you’re f-ed up, *despite* being a potato.” They said, “You’re hot, potato or no.” Which to me implies they think potatos (chubby people, I’m pretty sure it was meant, in case the metaphor is getting out of hand) are not excluded from being hot generally.
Oh, I would like this better.
Still wack to fetishize somebody’s trauma, but at least it wouldn’t be a neg.
Amber asked Booster to befriend Ethan counting on the same motivation, I find extremely hypocritical the way she’s reacting and extremely wrong to ask for the whole card and not just to erase the photos.
Asking for the SIM card makes for better visual drama tho.
Yeah I’m not loving this situation either. Sure, Amber was maybe not at her best when she asked Booster to befriend Ethan, but at least that came from a place of “my friend needs help, I am not he person to give that help, let me see if I can find someone who can.” Booster took that and just judo-flipped that into something unsettling. Like…Amber is coming to you trying to help a friend, in part because her own mental health is not robust right now (A fact she acknowledges, even), and you decide to follow her around observing her like a wild animal, taking pictures for God knows what end? No, Booster, that’s not okay in a few ways.
I’m reading Booster as “I want to be close to someone but I don’t know how.” I could be wrong.
Amber doesn’t realize that a lot of crazy and/or fucked up people are hot. Them being fucked up is often a deterrent to those less daring people to balance out the hotness.
Potatoes are freaking delicious, Amber.
Shirts are always starched.
Their shirts are always starched.
Sorry.
Amazigirl’s shirts eventually wind up in tators.
I see your pun and I like it. Thought you should know.
Wait, am I supposed to respond with my own pun? That’s how these threads work, huh?
Sorry, got nothing.
Shoulda said, “eye got nothing.” Fail.
If she were a dude I’d call her a spudpuppy.
Maybe Booster could write her a *mash* note?
Sorry… I yam what I yam.
Is a twitter # tag for brunettes a side of hash browns?
If she had kids would they be tater tots?
She’s had a latke going on recently…
But…
“You say, ‘potato’. I say, ‘tomato’! Let’s call the whole thing off!”
Save some puns for the rest of us, we’re rooting around for the leftovers here.
And then Amber will rate those pics for quality control.
Yeah, spray iodine crystals to that cloud!
“Potato” is what Blaine used to call her. UGH.
Let’s get her to replace “potato” into “Lalafell.” Same thing but less blaine attachments.
It sucks that even after his death she’ll never be rid of him.
I know, that’s really sad. I know Booster sucks at boundaries but maybe that can be beneficial in getting through to her a bit.
Just delete the fucking photos on request, Booster
Amber Yells at Cloud.
I mean… that’d probably be linked to their personal server, so… Guugle tm?
Booster, c’mon. Get that shit off of there, ASAP. I love you, I’m pulling for you and Ambs to get together, but she laid down her boundaries there and you gotta respect them, chief. Trying to find loopholes is a bad look.
Amber setting boundaries is great! Amber tearing down her attractiveness is not. Fucking Blaine.
Mentioning the cloud might not be about “lol, loophole” but more about bringing it up now as part of complying with the request, rather than have Amber walk off to purge the memory card and then have, “hey wait…” moment later
That said bringing it up as an open ended this exists rather than saying, “ok I’ll also uncloud them, do you need to see me delete them” is more of their provocative mind games. Booster wanted to see how she’d react to that dangling and probably enjoyed the response. The Mike like bit of their personality is definitely that they like to see what people do when they are pushed on in some way.
Y’know, you’re right on both counts. Hm. Definitely food for thought!
I liked some aspects of Shortpacked! Mike x Amber and really really didn’t like others, and I feel like Boost here could be a healthier partner in mind games than Mike, if Amber remains into that cross-canons (not necessarily true).
This kinda feels like further evidence for the theory a while back that Booster is somehow Mike in disguise. I know most people have accepted that Mike really died (or it seems that way), but I am still agnostic on the issue.
I think “This Was Halloween” decisively closed any lingering possibility that Mike survived, which was already scant. The red flashback and the “Ethan was with him when he died” seems pretty definitive
And the idea that Booster is Mike somehow has always been kind of a joke
I don’t consider any death definitive in a work of fiction where the author has brought characters back to life before, and where the laws of physics have been suspended for action scenes. Yeah, Mike is probably really dead, but there’s still the First Law of Resurrection. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FirstLawOfResurrection
(There’s a lot of Death tropes that could be relevant here but that one seemed the most appropriate.)
I think Booster just was reminding Amber that her dramatic moment (demanding the card) doesn’t really solve the problem. Drama isn’t the best way to live a life – though it’s a great premise for a web comic.
That’s very true, and it also keeps Amber engaged with the mind game/incredibly awkward, badly conducted flirtation.
Yeah Booster’s probably saying that because Amber Absconded with their memory card, a physical thing that they own. Booster may be mentioning that so that maybe Amber might give them back their property and trust them to delete it themselves.
I mean, they could have just NOT given her the memory card and showed her that deleting the pictures. She made a demand and they acquiesced. I dont think they could actually claim she took it. They gave it to her.
Seems like it’d being an unhealthy cycle if they admit they’re into “hot fucked up ppl” like, if Amber gets better it could be a situation like “Oh, i’m bored now” which could lead to a breakdown and over and over
lol i think i remember seeing a screenshot of like “straight ppl texting” and there was something like “for some reason i’m attracted to girls with mental issues” or something like that, first thing that popped in my head
Y’know, that’s a weird thing to say, Booster.
That said I totally agree (at least in fiction). 2 of my first anime crushes were Samejima Mamimi and Haruhara Haruko (btw say their names out loud. It’s really fun) so my taste in women does tend to involve them being kinda fucked up.
Also there’s a hot potato joke there I haven’t seen anyone point out.
Ambers a hot potato who will she land on next.
Amber’s a hot potato, she needs a good topping?
What a *cheesy* joke. 😉
Chive never seen so many potato jokes in one place.
…I want to say something about sour cream but I can’t figure out anything that’s not so far outside the boundaries of good taste it’s not even in the same solar system.
If Amber tried some of Carla’s weed she’d get so baked she’d be fried the next day.
Hey now, I gotta try some weed baked potatoes sometime soon, I hear they’re good 😋
All baked potatoes are excellent. Adding quotation marks to “baked” just makes the rest of the movie more fun.
Uh Booster… Amber withdrew photograph consent (not that she was really giving it to begin with), it’s on you to delete those photos now.
If I was Amber, I might not be so annoyed at the pictures but I’d still be super annoyed that somebody is attracted to my least favorite thing about myself. Really makes ya feel icky to be exotified and pedestalled for the exact qualities that you dislike about yourself / the qualities that often mess up your life. What is she even supposed to do with this info?
Full disclosure: I was in a 5-yr relationship (during/after college) where I was his Manic Pixie Dream Girl. He liked saying that I was a “Jewess” and had “an artistic temperment”.
It was wack. He was wack.
…And I think I also get where Booster is. I’ve been tempted towards emotional vampirism, too, where I’m enthralled by intriguing mental problems, but I realized this and cut it the heck out before I attempted going into mental health. You’re supposed to be helping people, not feeding off of them like they’re delicious novels.
Don’t be wack, Booster.
That’s awful, Leorale. I’m so sorry you went through that. 🙁
“Jewess”????
Yeah, I don’t know what “artistic temperament” is supposed to mean, but “He liked saying I was a jewess” is… uh… I’m not saying it’s a warning sign, but every bull in Spain just lowered its head and started huffing and pawing at the ground.
Pretty much, yeah!
In retrospect I’d really rounded him up to being a good boyfriend.
There were some good things for me about him (mainly that he also needed to move glacially slowly in our sexual adventures).
But yeah, he was not the fellow!
Ok cool, managed to separate myself from my own experience a little and read the past couple days of strips (in which Booster was clumsy but playful, and in which Booster quickly backed off when Amber didn’t like it / when Amber put up a boundary). I don’t think we know Booster is a capital-C Creep at this time.
However, I do think they have a tendency towards objectifying moments and people*. I’d love to see Booster care about somebody’s feelings because feelings are important, and not just because it piques their intellectual/sexual curiosity. That would put me entirely onto Team Booster.
*side note, I love the writerly choice of making them a photographer. A person who may have an issue with objectifying people is literally turning moments and people into objects (photographs). Really clever.
This is a cool analysis and I am glad to read it.
Also, I am sorry you had that experience with a gross dude, ick ick ick.
Heh, no worries, I’m married now to a rad Jewish person, who gets it. 👍
People who seem to have a better read on you than maybe even you do are creepy. there’s so much predicated on the idea that a person needs to be assumed to be the utmost expert on themselves. If someone else can know you better than you do, it poses questions about coercion and control- if it’s For Your Own good, then…?
But also whatever, they’re still beholden to the ethics, same as a professional and highly skilled river still has to obey speed limits. And Booster has skills, Mike had skills, that enable them to navigate social situations to Much Better outcomes- for themselves, and for others. But they don’t OWE others the benefit of their skills, any more than you OWE people your height, or strength, or smokin hot bod. fuck off. You finding them creepy isn’t any different from any other mistrust of intelligence.
A little bit this, but not much.
I can’t follow. Booster takes photos of people, tells them they’re hot, and tells them they’re hot because, in Booster’s words, they’re “fucked up”. What’s not creepy about this?
They do owe others a minimum of decency, and Booster isn’t providing it here.
oh btw updated this thing
https://imgur.com/a/MRolX25 (NSFW)
I’m thinking after I get to a certain point I’ll go back and “finalize” some of the earlier comics.
Hooray! 🥳
Your Porn Lord Power is skyrocketing!!!
Holy Kit and Kaboodle, I love this so f0cking much!
Awesome, I need to make sure I’ve got the full comic saved for future research.
I’d like to know what camera Booster is using, because for sure it’s 100x faster than what I’ve got. xD
Booster is a serious photography enthusiast and has equipment to match.
As do I, and modern cameras are so slow to connect to any kind of network (it’s part of the reason why smartphones have killed off 80% of the camera industry).
I do not like Booster I do not like Booster I do not like Booster I do not like Booster I do not like Booster I do not like Booster
I don’t want to hear any more comparisons to Mike anymore. I had my issues with Mike, but he was always written as, and treated as, a comic relief asshole who nobody much liked or trusted, except in an “evil we know comic relief jerkass” kind of way. The few moments in which Mike was treated as something other than that (like Ethan and Amber having crushes on him in Shortpacked) were often the most uncomfortable in their comics. And now we have a character who’s “Oops! All Those Moments!”.
I get what you mean. I didn’t really think Mike fit in this comic too much because he was solely for comic relief, and when they tried treating him seriously it just didn’t really hit me. I haven’t read Willis’ past works so I guess I simply don’t have the insight to him.
In any case, Booster…. Noooo. At the very least, since they don’t seem like they’re just comedic relief, I think they’ll develope? I’ve got faith.
It’s okay to be an asshole if you blow up planets like Darth Vader or concoct ludicrous and petty schemes like Mike or even just dedicate your life to a religious devotion to annoying people like Carla. Real people don’t do any of those things.
There’s a million things Mike has done that’s worse than the way Walky’s treating Lucy or Booster’s treating Amber, both Walky and Booster aren’t being cartoon characters about it, so it’s uncomfortable.
Which, to be clear, is not *bad*. Uncomfortable things are interesting, but I think that’s the reason people react more to Walky/Booster than the objectively much worse things Mike or Asher did.
Exactly. Booster is a million times more unpleasant than Mike because I feel like I’m supposed to take them seriously, and yeah, if I take a character like Mike or Booster seriously, it’s pretty gross.
Mike was fine as comic relief–like Galasso, it’s okay for some characters in Dumbing of Age to be a little absurd. People take this goofy-ass comic too seriously sometimes. The trouble was when Willis tried to use Mike in serious plotlines and he just didn’t have a chassis for it.
“You’re hot because of your trauma” yeah Booster thanks but NO
Shit like this is what gives psych majors a bad name.
Booster ain’t Mike 2.0
Booster is who Mike would have went, “Yep, you’re now my new target”
I never liked Mike, and I don’t like Booster rn. Mike just kinda pissed me off, but Booster makes me deeply uncomfortable. I have faith in them to improve, they seem like they can and will, but AGHHH. It’s probably gonna take a while, so whenever their scenes come up I’mma just wait a few days so I can at least have time with another character after.
Also, I don’t think they’re a replacement Mike, but since that’s what people have been saying- I mentioned him. Feel bad that they’d have to be addressed like that.
Unrelated to their actions, that is a really cute outfit on Booster.
Amber’s a very attractive person, one of the most attractive in the cast, up there with Carla or Joyce or Lucy or Dorothy or- wow, I like girls in glasses. I digress.
Amber’s a very attractive person, but it has little of anything to do with her baggage or damage, so to speak. I don’t think having either is a disqualifying factor, but her determination, her knack for rising to the occasion, and her quirks are parts of her that’d exist with or without it, same as I wouldn’t give Blaine credit for Amber being strong. Amber’s why Amber is strong.
Here’s how I figure it works:
Amazi-Girl can be fit and hot.
Amber can only ever be a gross mess.
That’s
bullshitlogic.(yes, even though it’s exactly the same body.)
Anyway who wants to bet that this was mining Amber for reactions so add to his Ethan knowledge. It’s ok to beg Booster to befriend (cough) Ethan on the assumption they like fucked up people, but not to have that attraction expressed towards Amber. They see Amber lay down a boundary about it. They see a number of different things. I seriously doubt it was the *photography* Booster was trying to do here.. just more mind games.
Of course, it’s fucked-up messed-up to say that to someone. But I’d be the billionth person to say that about Booster this strip so idk why it’d need repeating.
Extra evidence: it’s just a Mike thing to do, really: subterfuge. And it’s laid out that Booster is “replacement Mike.”
I do think Booster was likely prodding her with the camera thing, yeah. Booster has earnestly asked them out for pizza before, something Amber did not appear to recognize as an explicit date request, but we haven’t really seen Booster just, taking pics of people they expressed attraction to, like Ruth or Ethan. (I thiiink they complimented Joe’s looks, too, but it’s been a while.)
I am curious what the angle is here. Like, if Booster just wanted Amber pics, that wouldn’t be very difficult to do.
Okay, Amber is demanding Booster get rid of photos of her because they creep her out, and they’re refusing. I said yesterday that a lot of characters in DoA do things that would be super problematic IRL but are excused by cartoon logic, and now I think that excuse has worn thin.
Obviously, Mike did much much worse than this, but Mike was a much cartoonier character. Booster is realistic.
In real life there would be nothing Amber could do about being photographed in a public space. If she was in her room then she would have an expectation of privacy and her demands would have some legal weight to them, but I don’t think a common area of the resident hall counts.
I mean there are perhaps unrealistic aspects of Booster’s character, but being a creep whose actions are legally protected isn’t one of them.
Technically, sure.
Even more technically, Booster has done exactly what Amber asked them to, and is pointing out that this hasn’t achieved what Amber wanted it to. We don’t know what their reaction would have been if Amber had said “then I want you to delete those as well”, rather than stalking off to punch the cloud.
But still absolutely problematic.
I honestly took the last panel as them pointing out Amber knows full well the memory card isn’t really solving the problem, not that Booster was saying they were going to keep the pictures. That said, they’re not saying they’re deleting them, either, so you’re potentially right.
But cartoon logic is the point of the strip. Get rid of that, and we might as well just read the DSM-5.
Yeah, exactly. Even if this is cartoon exaggeration, it’s cartoon exaggeration of something that’s basically creepy at any level.
I think the “I know you know” part is telling. She asked for the memory card because it gives her the illusion of control over the situation, not because it actually gets rid of the photos.
Correct. If the point was just “haha, I shall keep these”, Booster wouldn’t have said anything, I feel.
“By the way, I also find self-loathing hot!”
“RRRRGH!“
Young woman yells at cloud
Hacking a Website is one thing. A Cloud Company, however, like Amazon’s AWS, is akin to pointing a knife at a Mafia Don. Amazon will warmly chuckle and Amber will be “transferred”
They decided to study psychology just to increase their chances of meeting hot fucked up singles in their area
Punching the cloud seems more on brand
Booster has the ol mouth vomit problem, just can’t help themselves. Might be autistic honestly
Definitely deserved the response from amber
I really hope that they do turn out to be autistic and have a nuanced position on it too! 😃
We really need more rep.
Represent!
Young teenager yells at the cloud
… so does Booster have this kink because they’re a psych major, or are they a psych major because they have this kink?
More likely the later. From what I’ve heard a good portion of pysch majors are in the program to diagnosis themselves.
I wonder why Booster thinks taking pictures of another person is more acceptable if you think they’re “hot/f*cked up”?
Again; Booster ain’t got no boundaries.
Do they? Amber thinks it’s less acceptable if you think they’re hot. AFAIK Booster has not indicated that they believe it affects the acceptability in either direction.
Wow! I kinda hate Booster now!
I’m seeing a whole lot of people upset at being reminded what “replacement Mike” actually means.
So, Amber first ask Booster to befriending Ethan counting on the fact that them like “hot people who are fucked up in their mind” and now is doing this scene of being offese because them find her that way and they onestly said that to her? Yep, Amber has all the right to react like that, showing how incredibly hypocritical she is. But this don’t change the fact that she and Booster could be a great couple and that Booster was able to make her doing something instead of just passing her time doing research on Internet. Also, asking for the whole card is atrocious!
I dont think anyone is arguing how hypocritical Amber is. This doesnt validate Boosters actions either though, and i feel people are reacting more because of how little we know of Booster. This is a new level of creep for them, while Amber being hypocritical isnt exactly new.
Hey, can I ask something?
You used “them like” to talk about Booster. A long while back, I encountered a situation where a student in a classroom I taught was trying to explain a friend’s pronoun usage, and the way I understood it was that his friend used “them” as them’s preferred subject pronoun.
I asked around what few queer spaces I’m tangent to, and no one there said they’d encountered that specific pronoun usage before. Is it something you’ve seen before?
I can understand the diffidence toward the new contract and find Booster odd because they find hot people with messed up minds. But honestly, the fascination/attraction for mental problems is what drives almost all psychology students to study psychology. Here I saw a person who pretended to hide to take pictures, knowing to be actually clearly visible to the person them wanted to photograph. Later them awkwardly confessed to said person that they like her and attempted to talk to her. They didn’t even protest when she made the theatrical request to give her the card but advised her the photos are already in the cluod! Just for this, there are comments here that are disgusted as if Booster is a perverse, murderous stalker!? Seriously? I also think that if Booster had tried to photograph Ethan, Amber not only would have had no complaints, but she would have helped them and asked for copies of the photos. (About the pronoun, hem… I’m not a native English speaker and I have huge problems writing in English, I’m always afraid who that I write is actually incomprehensible or very wrong).
OK, cool, no worries! Typos happen, no big deal!
I’ve never seen somebody who uses “them/them/them’s”.
(Doesn’t necessarily mean that you or your student misunderstood the friend — the world is big! But this usage would be pretty unique. If the person was my friend, I’d ask to make sure.)
Typically the pronouns that sound like this are they/them/their — such as: they helpfully told me what pronouns to use for them, so now I’m practicing their pronouns.
This matches my lived experience, yeah.
The way the student explained it, his friend purposefully chose to use what’s normally an object pronoun as a subject pronoun in order to call attention to the fact that them is nonbinary, as I understand- that since many folks use “they” to refer to someone whose gender identity is *unknown*, them wanted to use something different to call attention to the fact that them’s gender is *void* (Or something to that effect. It was a brief conversation, and the person I was coteaching with got hung up on singular “they” anyways, so things were pretty muddled on top of it being in an ESL classroom)
I’m not going to lie, it’s a pretty significant cognitive load to use (especially since I never learned them’s name and can’t just substitute that in), but so it goes.
Additionally: if I recall correctly, the person in question used “them” as them’s subject pronoun and “they” as them’s object pronoun.
I never talked directly to they about this, it was all filtered through a third party. I hope them is doing well.
That’s some next-level pronounery. Gotta respect it.
New theory: Booster is an idiot. The same sort of idiot like that woman who dated, married and had a child with Ted Bundy while he was publicly on trial for all the women that he murdered.
I hope Booster grows out of this before he gets to the point of writing fan letters to serial killers on death row.
They, not he. Booster doesn’t lose their pronouns just because people are mad at them.
(Maybe an honest mistake, but worth pointing out in case it’s not.)
Hold on, are you trying to tell me pronouns don’t work like rings in a Sonic the Hedgehog game?
I can’t stop envisioning someone hitting spikes and a bunch of pronouns scatter out of them with that sound.
“Ah fuck, there goes my he/him pronouns! It’s gonna take me forever to get that back.”
Booster’s pronouns are They/Them, just so you know.
An Idiot wouldn’t be able to form such an Abstract Concept as Mental Illness being Hot in isolation from Physical Beauty. They specialize in Psychology, but that may have been to the detriment of everything else. Einstein was really great at Physics, but as he put all his energy into that, all his other skill sets suffered. If judged on any one of those skill sets in isolation, one might see him as an idiot. Nobody is generally an Idiot. Everyone specializes in something. It’s not something one can avoid. You will be diciplined at something, based on repetitive habits. It could be that Booster is green at Psychology even while specializing via a lack of Productive Experience as an Undergrad, or it may be that they are so well versed in Psychology that everyone else’s perspective is tragically enfeebled. Booster could be the most healthy Character in the story, which puts everyone else in such a deep pit by comparison that Booster is the only hope for the lot of them.
I’m trying to pin down a pattern with your capitalisation. It’s kinda neat to read.
I am an Agent of Chaos. You will never find a Pattern. HAHAHAHAHA!!!!
but you might find a Logrus.
Booster showed us who they were lomg ago regarding rheir disrespect of boundaries. The hall meeting, Sarah having to brush them off. This isnt new but they are certainly cementing themselves as “replacement mike”.
Angry Teen Yells At Cloud, more at 11.
Man, if Booster thinks being fucked up makes you hot, they must spend a lot of time masturbating in front of a mirror, because holy hell.
Fetishisation of mental problems from a psych major, I see no way in which this is a problem.
Amber is imagining the prospect of Booster fapping to her Photos. She’ll have none of that. They are going to fap to the Cloud Photos anyway. Amber will find the Cloud Photos and hack her way into Booster’s Account to delete them. She did not, however, find the Encrypted Mirror Server…
Ambster Is The New Billieth.
Ew, not into Booster fetishizing trauma
So Booster’s silhouette looked a lot like Mike’s to us as readers… I’m wondering how much other characters think they look like him, though?
I usually hate it when people talk about fetishizing/romanticizing mental illness because usually they are just yelling at a mentally ill person for not using the recovery model, not consenting to some medical thing, or like, enjoying the wrong fanfiction or something (sometimes they are also yelling at a sane person for accepting their friend or partner). This… is a little uncomfortable, though. I think my issues are hot, and I wish more people thought they at least weren’t off-putting, but there’s getting to be a person who other people might find interesting, and there’s getting to be an object of study. I don’t really blame Booster because I think they’re trying to help Amber feel less insecure, but I really wish they would do anything I ever liked.
I liked old Mike because it felt like we were supposed to understand that this character was a jerk and sometimes enjoy him being a jerk and sometimes root against him being a jerk, and maybe also want him to evolve in a way where he didn’t lose all his edges but he could also be capable of expressing a wider range of emotion and not just constantly lashing out. I have no idea what we’re supposed to think about Booster at any time because I can’t remember having seen them drop the facade of intellectual curiosity but I can’t remember having seen them treat people like anything other than intellectual curiosities, either. I don’t mind nonbinary jerks because I am nonbinary and also a jerk, but what are we even doing here?
Semirelatedly, has anyone else noticed that Amber’s got some pretty big nonbinary vibes?
No.
If this is about the Amber bit, then cool, are you enby?
I really don’t like the idea that Booster is being seen as a Creep here. They are showing Positive Emotions about Mental Illness. If I think your Mental Illness has Beauty to it, are you going to think I’m creepy for not doubling down in agreement about your own negative frame about it? Am I supposed to always feed your Self Depreciation? “Hot” is a Positive Frame. “Hot” is “I worship you for the glory of your Being.” Booster is backpedaling because they know they fucked up a social convention, but the sentiment was Positive.
It’s the framing Booster uses, intentionally or not. Various shades of “Ooh, what a fascinating specimen this is!”- presumptuous and insulting. Being a mere undergraduate with very little expertise certainly doesn’t justify this condescension.
Given. That being said, Booster is a new character at the start of their Character Arc. Every Character needs a Weakness. They need a flaw to overcome. Look at Joe’s flaw. Look what it did to his Character Arc. If this is the Flaw that defines Booster’s Path of Growth, then the Game is Set to put Booster through Hell in order to cleanse them.
That’s fair, but if that’s the plan, then we still get to acknowledge it as a flaw. It makes no sense to claim both that this behavior is a flaw they’re going to overcome in their Arc and that it’s not currently a problem.
I gotta say that “if I think your mental illness has beauty to it” is an…odd statement. There’s a difference between saying positive things about mental illness, and thinking that illness is beautiful or attractive. And quite frankly, the entire idea of framing a person’s mental illness as attractive….IS extremely weird! And kind of creepy! You wouldn’t say that about literally any other type of illness. If you told someone that you think their asthma or their cancer or whatever is ‘beautiful’, they’d rightfully be creeped out.
Now this obviously gets more complicated when you add disability into the equation, since the intersection there and many people’s varying feelings about it can get extremely complicated very fast.
But overall, no, actually, “hot” isn’t always a positive framework, and it doesn’t always mean that, actually. “Hot” can also mean “you exist purely for my gratification and consumption”.
Booster is being a lil creepy here. But it is generally not to a degree that is any worse than anyone else in the cast has been in the past (Amber herself chief among them!!) It’s not particularly egregious, especially if they back off, but like. It IS creepy!
Tuberculosis (“consumption”) leaves many of its victims thin and pale. Some people go for that. (A lot more, I believe, than when it was more common and recognized as an actual illness.)
The difference is that there really aren’t any upsides to the physical conditions you’re talking about. I guess something good might happen to a person that wouldn’t have happened if they didn’t have cancer, but they also would have cancer, and any random thing can be what causes something good to happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. It’s pretty common for mental illnesses or neurodivergences that used to be considered illnesses to have legitimate upsides, or to be so inextricable from the rest of the person that it doesn’t make sense to consider them separate. If I think my partner’s way of thinking is beautiful, then I think her autism is beautiful, because that’s a natural part of how her brain works that informs her way of thinking. If I think her personality is beautiful, then for similar reasons I think her BPD is beautiful. Mental illness is a broad range of things, and people affected by it have a broad range of reactions to it, including, for some of us, not wanting our differences to be pathologized.
(Just to be clear, my partner is someone who doesn’t want to be cured and is happy to be seen in this light.)
I cant really speak for the rest of your comment but i have to agree rhat i cant think of many Booster interactions where they didnt treat the other characters as subjects to analyze and then prod.
Not qualified to speak for everyone, but I really haven’t noticed anything Tellingly Nonbinary about Amber.
That’s fair, and one person getting a vibe doesn’t mean there’s anything necessarily tellingly nonbinary there, it’s just that some of the things Amber does remind me of my own nonbinary experiences? Specifically, Amber seems to identify really strongly with male/male romance and sexuality in a way that other characters who are into that (like Lucy) are a lot more chill and… personally distanced from, I guess? I’ve always projected really intensely onto that kind of thing too – I didn’t really know much about being nonbinary at the time, but there was definitely an element of feeling like in some way this thing was about me but also only really being able to experience it via fiction because I had the body I did. And she took Ethan rejecting her because he wasn’t into girls really hard even after she didn’t seem to be in love with him anymore, and a lot of that was definitely about investing so much effort into trying to help someone who meant a lot to her and then seeing that person backslide, but this read like how it felt to be rejected for something that wasn’t even true but not even being able to understand how it wasn’t even true (obviously my friend at the time had no obligation to date me or be interested in my body type or whatever, it just fucking hurt in a really specific way.)
It also feels like Amber only doesn’t read as androgynous because she’s curvy. Her clothes probably come from the women’s section but don’t feel particularly gendered, and this is the kind of haircut an artist would draw on a character they were trying to make look androgynous, so this isn’t like, someone who’s putting in effort to perform femininity pretty much at all (this does not make someone nonbinary of course, and you don’t have to perform jack shit in order to identify as a woman, but I’m bringing this up as part of a constellation of relatable traits.)
In a less relatable sense but one that stuck out to me personally: if I’m remembering right, Amazi-Girl was originally created to be a better version of Amber who would be a good person and way less crazy and able to channel her aggression into something beneficial rather than pointlessly destructive… in short, everything Amber wants to be but isn’t, and being the “correct” gender is right there in her fucking name.
You make some interesting points, and I enjoyed reading them! It’s really cool that you can see stuff about this character that I hadn’t thought of before, and now I’m thinking back to try and come up with anything Amber’s ever done that’d be classified as “performing femininity”.
Closest I can think of is that her original hairdo was something she got done for prom, which she laments when she’s talking about Amazi-Girl’s much sexier hairdo and how it’s not fair she’s stuck with it. Even that feels kinda like a stretch though?
You may be onto something. Maybe not, but it’s fun to think about.
Yeah, again, I’m not saying I think this is definitely gonna be a thing, and I don’t necessarily think that even the vibe was intentional. Most likely that is not where her story is headed. I just think that if it did end up going there someday, I definitely wouldn’t feel like it came entirely out of left field.
Someone who takes Joy in the Aesthetics of their Trade is not going to become a Quiet Quitter.
So irrelevant to Booster’s Bad At Flirting-ness (seriously friendo Walky’s smoother than you are) I was going through the Dumbing of Age Tumblr’s preview panels (as you do) and I noticed that the panels posted for the 14th and the 15th (this past scene) were of Billie. I’m curious as to whether that Billie scene got scrapped for this scene or just moved down the line to make room, and if it’s the latter, how far ahead it impacted the accuracy of dates the preview panels were posted with (as AFAIK Willis posts the panels as they finish that strip/load it in the buffer).
This is problematic but I love it.
…said every RWBYfan?
The memory card looks like a tiny floppy disk.
How would you like it if a memory card called you a floppy disk?
At least it’s not calling me a Clik.
I CAN’T UNSEE IT NOW~!
Horribly tempted to search for the meme generator and take out a “hot potato yells at cloud” XD
So in my hometown is very common than in taco grills besides the meat potatoes get cooked inside aluminum paper and once they are done they are mixed with cream, some cheese and the grilled meat… a hot potato of those is a VERY TASTY THING.
If Booster’s so into fucked up people why don’t they just fuck themself?
booster needs to fucking stop
Hot potato.
Amber is a potato in a jacket- er vest?
Her outfit looks super cute, more Amber in Plaid (Rip Willis for deciding to keep doing plaid)
Now all I’m thinking about is potatoes / lotus root fried, stacked, and dipped in bold yellow mustard. 🤤
Sorry I’m really hungry after coding all day LOL 😆
DON’T MAKE IT WEIRD, BOOSTER!!!!
Okay yeah too bold, I feel Booster is a lot dumber than they present themselves to be. Like, their clearly more emotional intelligent than most of the main cast but still.