Or the specific thing theyre commissioning, sometimes at great expense. Well, US$1000 anyway. And definately look up Furaffinity, just use the R18 filter. Disclaimer; I dont know if Furaffinity HAS an R18 filter.
There’s a reason I keep a separate DeviantArt account with a different name of only human things for when my family -insists- on knowing what I’m drawing.
Booster’s internship at Arkham Asylum will result in a lot of breakthroughs once they hand out the writing assignments, but they’re going to have to read a LOT of smutfic about Batman.
Some of it will be beautiful though. Joker’s will bring people to tears.
She was a bit desperate before. But now she seems really happy.
And as far as I can tell when Walky rubs her the wrong way it hasn’t made her worse but instead been an opportunity for growth. I feel like her reactions to Walky’s trashy moments have mostly shown her growing an appreciation for setting boundaries or enforcing her expectations.
That’s the thing. Booster making an analysis like this doesn’t necessarily mean Booster’s right. It’s a relationship. Factors are going to change over time. Walky and Lucy could grow from their issues or they could ruin each other. Only time will tell.
Otoh, I really dislike Booster. I don’t know what Willis’s intent with the character is, but I personally think Booster started out smugly obnoxious and has gotten worse – more smug, more disparaging – without Mike’s entertaining aspects to counterbalance it.
Started at smugly obnoxious and more than a wee bit narcissistic, convinced that Booster’s opinions were desired in the first place. Then Booster moved on to add in full-on creepster voyeur. And seems to have plot immunity about getting called out on it, in a way that even Mike never had. So, yeah, I’ve got very little use for Booster, as either a person I’d possibly meet, or as a character in the story.
I definitely get that. They’re really pushing the limit. Which leads me to believe it’ll blow up in their face at some point. They believe it’s acceptable to do so to Amber, but I can definitely see them doing it to someone else and uh… losing that winning smile via physical violence, so to speak.
Honestly I thought that Willis thought a lot more people would like Booster then did. Not that he thought he’d made Booster likable, but that we’d love to hate and all that. But more of us just hate the little shit then originally anticipated, so now that’s being leaned into.
Hopefully they remember when they were like Booster, long before meeting patients– wait, academic-track psychologists probably want to go straight to gradschool then thesis then research/books and then teaching. When do Booster’s psych professors learn that people are complicated and nobody has the rules? They do learn this, right? …right?
Honestly, I think if it hasn’t been knocked out of them by third year or so, it’s probably some ingrained smugness that’ll carry them way into their career or they get a harsh epiphany.
To be certified psychologist it appears you need thousands of hours of supervised practice hours it seems to vary on what type psychologist you want to be and what level of education you’re pursuing and where you’re being supervised and pyscharity also has the caveat of attending medical school or nursing school (in some places which requires you to be a Nurse practioner)
Booster is along way from actually being a proffesional
Right now Booster seems to be under the assumption that they can pyscho analyze people in a matter of hours they are likely a good student, but seems to lack the what is mark of a good therapist the ability to actually heal their patient they are pyscho anaylzing which makes sense beacuse they are a 2nd year pysch student in a bachelor’s program.
Psychologist =/= Psychology professor =/= therapist =/= psychiatrist.
A college professor of psychology doesn’t need to be a licensed clinician, and may well have never led therapy for anyone in their lives. (For example, they may have designed/led experients on rats, discovered something new, and defended a whole dissertation about it. Rats are neat!)
(Also, psychoanalysis doesn’t just mean to analyze somebody’s psychology, it refers to a specific subset of psychology — think Freud, with the unconscious mind and transference and your mom.)
This sentence is here so that I don’t end a reply with “your mom”.
…
darnit
Right. I think this is an interesting turn, but I also am eager to see Amber stick up for herself. If she finally comes to terms with NOT being garbage, that’d be nice, accepting she’s flawed without defining herself by those flaws like she has for a while.
If Booster was being presented as a foil NPC, rather than as an actual character, I might agree with this take. Put Booster alongside Mary, Liz, Raidah and the other demi-antagonists, I’d be merely indifferent towards Booster.
But unlike all those others, Booster is on the Cast page. Booster is a character I’m expected to care about. And my interest in Booster, as either a person or a character, manages to go down with each appearance.
We haven’t seen Booster in their first semester, when presumably they had First Semester Psychology Syndrome: read the textbook, diagnose yourself with Everything.
Booster really is just the smart ass psych student who thinks they can diagnose people easily because they’re in their 3rd year and hasn’t actually spent time training yet and as a result has zero friends but has their head too far up their own ass to realize this, aren’t they?
Absolutely. Though I’d assumed they were probably a 2nd semester freshman, like most of the main cast (except Ruth and Sarah). Most of Booster’s Psych 102 classmates are still diagnosing themselves, before they get to diagnosing everyone else. Booster’s a couple classes early; how advanced!
I hate HATE how well that would work as a relationship (assuming Entrapta is interested in girls, it is never stated but she is a SPOP character so the odds are statistically pretty high).
I don’t know Booster might be some sort of telepathic demon. The pieces are all there … They are androgenous, seem to revel in chaos, have little to no boundaries, keep trying to make only the most damaging relationships come into being, they collect photos – said by some cultures to contain the soul – and are weirdly fascinating by the girl with split personality.
Now let me tell you why Queen Elizabeth was a lizard person…
She is queen [consort] of the United Kingdom, not of England. Erasure of the Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish is offensive.
(By the way, I inadvertently touched “report” instead of “reply”, and it doesn’t come with a “confirm” requirement, so that was that. My apology to anyone who is inconvenienced.)
Booster, you are treading on thin ice here. People might not appreciate you dictating to them who they should be with. Especially when it comes to Amber, she still has some pent up anger.
Also while entertaining, I would avoid Booster like the fucking plague. Their constant analysis of people is wildly annoying and potentially rage inducing.
I mean yeah, I’d avoid most of this cast like the plague if they were real. They’re fictional characters so their shitty traits are to entertain us, but most of them irl would be the WORST people to be around. That’s the nature of most fiction imo.
I believe this might genuinely be the first time Booster’s whiffed one–Dororthy and Walky broke up because it was impacting Dorothy’s studies, at least on paper, and Walky agreed because Dorothy’s happiness was more important to him than their relationship. Does that mean he “lost himself” in Dorothy? Would a Walky who’s independent and non-dependent have insisted the relationship keep going?
Moreover, I’d dispute that Walky “lost himself” to begin with. He cleaned up his act a little, both in a literal hygiene sense and in a metaphorical “I want to be an emotionally mature and available friend/brother” sense, but I don’t think there’s any argument to be made that he remade his life around Dorothy or cast aside things that mattered to him.
And, like, Walky did confront his own shit while he was with Dorothy. It was in baby steps, sure, and was often less to do with his own trauma than approaching Billie and Sal about theirs, but we can’t forget that it was in part because of her that he finally confronted his executive dysfunction around studying and tried to get his act together in math. If he hadn’t done that, if he’d remained as-is, than he wouldn’t have added onto Dorothy’s workload, and they’d still be together until he got put on academic probation and/or dropped out.
My assumption is this is intended to be an end to Booster’s spotless record, because if we’re meant to take it at face value, I’m gonna need a little convincing.
It is also just occurring to me that hey, Amber seemed to be kinda passively discouraging Walky from engaging with his shit for swaths of their relationship by providing him a place where they could be garbage, and it ended in part the first time because Walky realized Garbage Roof was unhealthy for him!
So yeah, Booster’s way off base. I honestly think they took Walky/Lucy as a baseline and then worked their way backwards.
Yup, they are totally off here about Walky but that is exactly why Dorothy broke up with Danny. I think Walky and Lucy are mutually dorky together. If Walky continues to stay hot, changes his shirts often enough, and passes his classes Lucy won’t dump him when she gets a little confidence. He’s nice to her and enjoys her company. I hope he doesn’t throw her over for the evil social climbers when they smoother him with flattering lies at that dinner Raidah is planning though.
But Booster somehow hit right on the term “garbage” that Walky and Amber used to describe themselves! They’ve probably struck a nerve here, maybe Amber will defend Walky at least if not herself.
That’s a pretty good point, easy to see a character monologue a bunch of analysis about another character and assume it’s meant to be taken at face value without really interrogating what they’re saying, especially if they aren’t immediately shut down
A Walky that was mature in that relationship would not have been in it to begin with. He absolutely lost himself in her the whole time. It’s not about confronting things or not confronting things, it’s about why you’re confronting them and how. Even when Walky was engaging in growth, he was doing so because of Dorothy, not because he wanted to grow.
And I think you’re taking the diametrically opposed garbage thing the wrong way; Walky avoids trauma and feelings, but being forced to interact with Amber, especially as a romantic partner, makes doing that literally impossible. Walky realizing garbage roof was unhealthy *on his own* speaks toward, not against, Booster’s point. He has to confront himself to be with her. And her enabling is part of that as well. She isn’t giving him somewhere to hide from himself.
And, no, Booster didn’t take Walky/Lucy as a baseline and then worked their way backwards, Willis decided to have them say that because it moves the plot in the way Willis wants. There’s only ever narrative logic to character behavior, even if that logic is thought through enough by the author to seem like genuine decision making. The way Willis is using Booster, you should assume they are correct unless being incorrect is more useful to the story. Much like Mike they are basically omniscient until it’s valuable for them to not be.
Walky didn’t engage in growth solely because of Dorothy. In fact, he kept the torment he was feeling over Billie’s suffering from her and refused to talk to her about it for a long time! He also kept his issues with Sal very broad when discussing things with her. His emotional growth is, in a lot of ways, disconnected from his relationship with Dorothy.
And Amber literally gave Walky a place to hide from himself! That’s what Walky realized Garbage Roof was! Sure, he was thinking about his trauma while he was up there, but he wasn’t actually doing anything about it. (As opposed to now, where he doesn’t seem to be doing either, but I think that’s very consciously being depicted as him backsliding on account of Mike.)
And for the record, I am assuming Booster is incorrect because it’d be more useful to the story. Being wrong would give Booster a meaningful character flaw that’d make them more interesting. This is a character-driven, open-ended narrative. Characters in this story behave a certain way because it generates good drama, not because there’s a logical endpoint or steps to hit. No, they obviously don’t actually have agency, but this also doesn’t make them perfect assessors of what’s going on around them.
He hid things from Dorothy because he didn’t want to bother her with them. He seemed to think of himself as not good enough for Dorothy from what I saw. I’ll admit I don’t seem to remember the strips as well as you! But I did randomize pages and reread the time Wally was bombing math and was really really anxious when Dorothy found out.
I mean, yes, but just because Walky still had problems during that time doesn’t mean his growth was stifled or he had “lost himself” in the relationship.
Eh. Some of Mike’s assholishness was interesting, and some of it was pretty uninspired. Like I’m finding myself more invested in this than, “Will Mike say he’ll fuck their mom???”
I will say this though: Booster’s ‘psych evals’ are more interesting because some of them are off-the-mark, and also because we actually get some explanation for them – they’re a psych student. A first year psych student. And they’re being framed in a way that just makes them seem kinda smug and annoying. Mike was just really good at ‘Mike things’.
I’m not a huge fan of Booster. But in this regard, their writing is more grounded.
Given Lucy’s fandom tendencies, I’ve got to assume there’s some fic going on, even if she’s not as obvious and potentially not as sexual as Amber.
Really though, Booster, I’m not sure this is an issue of who’s better or worse so much as who’s good together.
Sure, if you averaged Amber and Walky’s respective amounts of caring about things, confronting trauma, and such you’d get a functional person who could chill out occasionally but it’s not like a relationship actually does that. Plus both of them are not great at social things in different ways.
Meh. I don’t buy the mutually assured garbage, justification. It feels a little too much like making excuses for bad behavior instead of trying to be better people, or even just people. Bad take from Booster here to me.
Except that’s not what happened when they were together at all. Admittedly we only saw the start and end and none of the middle but it didn’t really seem to me like Walky was confronting trauma to me. It kind of felt like he was avoiding it and then Amber decided to tap out because he was being a bit of a prick in that moment.
Or combust like matter and antimatter. the always surface-good times goofball and the always wallowing angry Eeyore. They did actually have a messy drama-explosion at Halloween.
They’d either become worse garbage or each try to become less garbage cuz they have someone they want to be less garbage for. To an extent I kinda agree. Like Walky with Dorothy kinda felt like he was dating a mom who was just sorta telling him the appropriate way to act. It didn’t feel equal. Walky’s the fuck up and Dorothy’s got her shit together. I think I liked Walky/Amber cuz they’re both fuck ups so neither feels…inferior to the other I guess? Dating Dorothy really fucked with Walky’s self worth.
Interesting that butts came up first since I’m actually more of a boob man. Though I also like butts. And legs and lips and hips and al the other stuff too.
Trying to answer if I’m a “boob” person or “ass” person is harder than asking me to choose my favorite child. I’m not sure where I fall on the “Kiney”(?) Scale but I can appreciate small boobs and small butts just as much as their larger versions.
And yes, the lips, legs, hips, etc. are important too, though first concern is always personality.
I think moreso than anything what someone could take away from my art is I’m really into dominant women/women taking the lead. 😛 I can’t think of any art I’ve drawn where that isn’t true.
I like dominant girls too, but in my experience with women who have wanted me (up until I opened my dumb mouth), none of them wanted to be “on top.” One girl straight up said, “I’ll be dominant everywhere else in life, just *not* with sex.”
Which, oddly, can be used to describe a lot of guys as well.
Booster, please, you don’t need to justify your shipping preferences. 😛
FR though. Oh, you painful little first year psych major. I’m thinking Booster struggles with relating to people and so is trying to fast track it with their cold reading skills. YOU CAN’T SHORTCUT PEOPLE BY STUDYING PSYCH.
In the most non insulting way possible, I think Booster just needs some friends to hang around with. They’ve been alone everytime we came across them, and they read as someone who’s never actually had anyone to talk to.
Lol that pride and confidence feels familiar. I was Booster as a freshman psych major, I was just quieter about it.
Interesting that they see all of Walky’s relationships as Walky-centric phenomena, though. Seems like they have a soft spot for him. Maybe trying to help dig him out of his post-Mike depression/grief?
Walky also has little to no impulse control and a history of needing to constantly affirm his hetero manhood, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he has drunk too much mountain dew and gone into significant depth of his dating exploits with a little encouragement from B. I’m also betting this is where Booster got their garbage conclusion from and that they’re just bluffing about how they got there
Also, it could not be overstated that Booster is way up their own ass about their perceived social genius, so of course they will speak as if they are the absolute factual authority on these matters whenever they choose to opine, which will be always.
I imagine they’ve probably glimpsed some of the post-breakup interactions, and they’ve added that to Walky’s own statements, then, as Wack’d said above, they basically extrapolated back from what they’ve cold-read about Walky and Lucy/Walky and Amber.
Booster pays a lot of attention to people, so they probably either asked Walky/some of the other friends about it or just kinda listened in whenever it was mentioned. The characters all probably have a bunch of minor interactions that we don’t see.
Lucy is good people and deserves the best. She deserves friends who see her worth as who she is and will appreciate her unlike the folke in her dorm and she deserves a decent good experience with what seems to be her first boyfriend or atleast the best Walky can give her.
It’s funny because it feels like she would make a good girlfriend for anyone. She was so thoughtful, emotionally intelligent, caring that she was able to tell quickly what was going on between Ruth and Billie immediately. Who doesn’t need someone like that in their life?
When all this started I debated with myself if them getting along well was really as good as being a good match for each other. It was also hard to see her Clamor over him for his attention just like it would have been hard to see him reject her and give her the idea she’s not interesting enough to get romantically involved with because that wouldn’t be true and I feel like she deserves better than that.
So I just went with it as they paired up and hoped for the best thinking “why not, theirs literally no reason to say no.”
I agree, and I think that’s my problem.
“There’s no reason to say no” doesn’t feel like a good enough or strong enough reason to get in a romantic relationship.
Maybe it should be as simple as that, and Lucy definitely deserves a good relationship. I’m just not sure Walky can give one to her, or if he’s too lackadaisical about it.
But I could just be assuming too much and underestimating how much he really cares about her.
I think “there’s no reason to say no” is a fine enough reason to begin a romantic relationship. (Many of my favourite life choices have started with “why not!” so I highly recommend this approach.)
You’d certainly need a better/stronger reason to marry somebody! But we’re at Taco Bells, not wedding bells. This is a great time for them to experiment and just see how much they both enjoy hanging out together. Later they can see if they’ll want to continue onwards and grow together as human beings and all that good stuff.
In conclusion, I strongly agree that Lucy is a delight and I likewise want all the good things for her.
No they didn’t, They seemed like genuinely decent people. but I didn’t see enough care from them to give the feeling to give off the feeling that they’re “Good friends” and not “people She just lives with.”
I agree! No Offense to Walky though, but Lucy DOES deserve better. She’s the ultimate sweetheart. I hope she gets an arc soon, regarding her confidence and idolization of people. Her major problems seems to be the fact that she gets trapped her ideals… Views the world with rose colored glasses, if you will?
I think what Lucy deserves is a better self-image so they don’t just wait around for months dropping hints to someone who doesn’t seem all that interested, and who openly admitted that her main redeeming feature is an interest in cartoons.
Right, I gotta agree with Booster.
This is sort of what I was talking about yesterday.
Walky was trying to better himself for Dorothy, yes, and was very supportive of her, but he was also pretty passive.
What she wanted was what he wanted, and when it wasn’t, he almost always tried anyway (the one time he didn’t was the pajama jeans, there might be others). And he definitely felt he wasn’t on her level.
With Lucy, the dynamic is reversed.
She gives the impression that she’ll support him in almost anything, but all he wants to do is get by.
He’s taking some steps to do better, like going to class and being slightly more honest with his feelings, but most of that could arguably be due to the changes in his friend group/dynamic over the time skip.
And again, I don’t really see what he does for the relationship.
I think they’re better friends.
But with Amber he seemed more dynamic, more active. Is that because he felt less pressure? Is it because he was more experienced? Both? Neither?
All I can say is that it looked like Walky connected with Amber in a way he hasn’t done with anyone else, and I liked what I saw when they were together.
It definitely wasn’t the Best Walky, but it may have been Peak Walky.
Yeah I feel like Walky and Amber both challenged each other in interesting ways, and would have been good as a couple. However someone else pointed out that after Mike’s death they both needed different things and it wouldn’t have worked anymore.
Wonder what their take away from an asexual would be then lol (even if they don’t do it themselves [depending on the person of course], i imagine there are a handful that write it for entertainment)
…now that i think about it, from a practical standpoint, a non sex repulsed asexual would be the perfect cameraperson for porn /shot
i mean idk how competitive it is but i suppose if it’s Not Weird or awkward , yo u could offer if you knew some friends that wanted to get into it in an amateur way or offer to help with someone’s potential only fans (tho unless tthey knew you were ace upfront it’d make it seem like you were making a pass at them lol)
But yeah it is interesting how one would get into the career as the ppl behind the scenes such as directing and editing ‘behind the scenes’ stuff lol (might depend ion the individual but given if your face is never shown it might be easier to be a ‘porn’ videographer and work on higher profile jobs later than a porn actress being a regular one b/c of the stigma/reputation and such)
As a person who writes fanfic and therefore follow a bunch of writers on twitter, there are PLENTY of ace people out there writing the hardest of hardcore smut fics. They just don’t want to participate in it themselves.
My ace sibling has written some of the *kinkiest* shit imaginable, and I know very well it doesn’t represent stuff they secretly wanna do and are just repressing.
A common theory amongst aces (myself included) is that non-sex-repulsed ace writers tend to find vanilla porn boring because just imagining the basic mechanics of sex isn’t interesting or stimulating by itself, so when they write porn, they have to really spice it up. (Or, if reading porn for fun sexy purposes, rather than writing it, look for kinkier fic.)
Mike always, at his core, made me feel like I was reading about Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. Like, that was the endpoint to all his grouchy-faced troll shit, was a guy who’d decided it was all PhOnEy so he was gonna fuck with people.
Booster, here, on the other hand, puts me in the mind of a non-binary, much more well-adjusted, non-cannibalistic Hannibal Lecter.
(I read Catcher once. Silence of the Lambs was a favorite novel for years. Problematic as hell, but still beloved.)
Booster has all the smugness of a soft science major who thinks they are in a hard science.
Put them in the same room as an Economics major who “knows how to fix the U.S.” and you’ll generate a Smug Cloud that would block out the sun for any major city.
Ehh. I’m personally not a fan of dismissing the validity of various sciences with the hard/soft labels (a practice which seems inherently unscientific in itself). Brilliant people in so-called ‘hard’ science fields get shit wrong all the time LOL
I do agree with you in Booster’s general ~vibes~ though haha!
I was wondering because Jacob said that Joyce ticked a few boxes for him, and Joyce and Lucy have some traits in common so I thought Lucy & Jacob might be good as a couple.
I think, and this is not meant to be a knock on Lucy, probably not. My read on Jacob’s attraction to Joyce was that it was based more than a little on what he perceived as her fearlessness. Like yes, obviously, Joyce is *very* much a stew of personal anxieties, but what Jacob seemed to see and admire in her, which I think she really responded to and tried to live up to, was her bravery—the courage to physically confront an adult man who’d tried to hurt her friend, the courage to *begin* to ask questions about her faith, even the courage to push her own boundaries about her habits and food aversions.
Lucy superficially has a bunch of traits in common with Joyce, including identifying strongly enough as a Christian Woman to vocally describe herself that way to people, and oh yes those nerd tendencies. But her anxieties (that we have seen so far) seem much milder and less debilitating; she also doesn’t doesn’t seem to have the same push to confront them. I’m a little doubtful Jacob would feel the same pull towards Lucy that he felt to Joyce. I know Lucy described Joyce as a “blonde, bisexual version of me”, but Lucy barely knows Joyce, and was describing surface-level perceived traits.
(Also, given the context that Jacob had been getting a bunch of “my roommate is SO weird and SO repressed” stories about Joyce from Sarah, I think some of his interest in her was also in meeting the real human being who’d generated those stories, and getting to know her a little better as a person.)
Okay, that’s it! Comparing Booster to Mike is getting really weird! They don’t feel like Mike at all, and that’s not a bad thing! Personally never liked the guy, and Booster’s creepy too (yet now, I find them a bit entertaining. It feels like there’s way more going on behind there!) but they aren’t a replacement anything! They’re pretty different tbh
I think there’s a ‘analytical manipulative antagonist’ vibe both of them share. They have different styles, but they both have the ‘I’m going to prove I’m the smartest person in the room’ pattern that manifests in different ways. Mike usually undercut his targets, Booster usually tries to put them in a box.
Yes, I feel the same. I wouldn’t want to know them in real life but they’re highly entertaining in a comic like this. Certain characters have always had unrealistic physical abilities, but someone with unrealistic powers of perception is far more interesting to me.
i lost my meagre smutfic to successive computer fuckies =(
One of them was about walking about in the rain,
One was about beating up a over-cocky uni student in the chem labs.
I don’t think you can tell anything about me from my erotic fanfiction (it’s so tempting to write “erotic friendfiction” but I do not do that), except my current turn ons. I do write long form multichaptered though, so there’s probably less influence from my life in each chapter, since it has to make sense with the previous and following ones.
Yeah. I feel like a lotta people tend to think I’m into certain stuff or am a certain way. It’s hard to explain that I’m not really self inserting as either character when I write (at least not sexually) so much as I just find the scenario hot. I don’t wanna BE the people I just find the situation sexy. In fact I prefer the characters to be super fleshed out and unique.
Wait… Booster is attracted by Amber too! What is the motivation they have? They say they just like problematic person, but they liked Amber instantly and after knowing more about her, they just liked her more and more. Maybe they analyse everyone else but are avoiding to confronting their own traumas too? Maybe they also have (or used to have) like two personality? Probably they too write smutfic. More we see Amber and Booster together, more I see how alike they are. The Ambooster become stronger and stronger.
I finally figured it out; Booster is that kid in your class that is waaay to open about their online fetishes, and wants it to be your business. . . against your will.
I agree with everything Booster is saying but also their relationship to these people is being classmates and my relationship to these people is that they are fictional characters?
Here’s the thing: Booster isn’t WRONG (in fact, they’re almost scarily right), but it’s like…really weird? To talk about your friends and classmates and roommates this way? Like, it’s one thing to analyze and understand fictional characters, but Booster is a character in this universe, so these are real people to them, and treating them like they’re a puzzle to be solved like this is off-putting, to say the least.
…Huh. You know, Mike kinda did the same thing: manipulating and belittling people in an attempt to make them face up to their bullshit, which works in a fictional context but not in the real life that this comic is supposed to be to the characters. Guess Booster really is “replacement Mike”.
Openly confronting other people that you’re not already on great terms with by presenting them with your psycho-analysis of them is certainly off-putting and a yellow flag if nothing else.
However I will defend the psycho-analyzing real people itself. Not everyone’s brains are wired so as to do this, but if someone who’s got the predisposition to do it ends up taking psychology or neuroscience, then it becomes a sort of automatic process. I say this as someone who also does it. I especially puzzle out my friends whenever the opportunity arises. The difference is that I don’t present my findings to them without asking them if they’re cool with me doing so first
Yeah, that one in particular seems wildly off-base. Booster and Dorothy don’t seem to have interacted that much, which makes me wonder how much of that reading is due to a very one-sided and incomplete account of the relationship from the person who was dumped, and is sad (although not bitter) about it.
It would be kind of funny if Booster’s thing was they’re right about this shit just often enough to convince them that they’re right ALL the time, and are consequently a little delusional about how often they’re whiffing it.
Although we do already have Jennifer in the cast, so that might be redundant.
I can’t even really see it as being based on anything Walky might have said about it, given what we’ve seen of his opinion.
It seems more based on his take on Walky and a more distant take on Dorothy – which suggests to me that he doesn’t even really have more than a surface read on Walky yet.
We’ve never seen Walky trash Dorothy, so that wasn’t what I was thinking—but, like, if you live with someone intimately enough to see them in their underwear, and that person is Walky—I’d bet that Walky would have dropped some mournful comments about his amazing ex-girlfriend (who was also his only-ever girlfriend; the Amber situation was Complicated), and Booster Therapized Walky based wholly on that.
For years I pondered the idea of making a smutfic, but I never got around to writing more than a few sentences. (Whereas years ago I wrote a whole-ass 250-page science fiction novel in a few months).
Mostly I’m afraid of writing something that someone else will read and respond, “Don’t show this to anyone you care about, this is pretty cringy.”
Hmm. Amber tends to reject people who have nice things to say to her that she doesn’t believe. Training from Blaine and Mike, I suppose. Is Booster being candid about her flaws to avoid that, or do they have any idea?
Mmmmm….. i like mine real spicy too, but with just yellow mustard (Heinz or Gulden’s), and optionally a little ketchup. Roast mine and sauce ’em like that, and imma happy camper! 😋😊
Classic choices! You could try soy sauce and sauteed mushrooms with ginger and garlic, if you’re feeling adventurous. But the best mustard, hands down, in all the planet, is Amora mustard. The only thing even slightly better than Amora is picking a wild-growing mustard flower and crunching it between your teeth.
Yeah I don’t care too much for French’s, Heinz and Gulden’s have just the right amount of spicy while not burning my nostrils, and the perfect amount of tart, like Wasabi and butter had a baby. 😋😊
I don’t think Dorothy needs any comeuppance in the form of someone she barely knows delivering their unasked-for, poorly-informed judgement on a romantic relationship that ended months ago and has absolutely nothing to do with the person doing that judging.
I also cannot imagine what “problems” that would solve.
That’s most of the cast. Dorothy ain’t special. She’s not worse than anyone else in this setting. I don’t think Dorothy deserves to be singled out for revenge fantasies for things she hasn’t actually done in this comic strip.
I don’t think this comic strip is going to give you the satisfaction you’re specifically looking for right now. It’s probably not going to become a manifesto about the societal mistreatment of people with autism. It’s probably not going punish fictional alter egos of people with bad ideas about autism for having those bad ideas, or take them to task for real allistic people’s horrible real-life crimes against real people with autism. This is a long-running comic strip with well-established characters and arcs and relationships that has recently started to explore the idea that one of its central characters has realized that they may possibly be autistic, after a childhood where “maybe I’m autistic” wasn’t on the menu at all. I really, truly (I REALLY DO) understand how much you want to see yourself represented in a work of fiction as vivid and thoughtfully-written as this one, especially when you’ve started to identify with a character.
But…this comic strip is probably not going to give you the thing exact things you’ve specifically said you want to see it do. The only useful thing I can recommend is what I’ve done, myself, when I realized a story someone else was telling wasn’t going to go the way I wanted: I accepted it. Sometimes I stuck around, and enjoyed the story anyway, even if wasn’t what I’d been hoping for. Sometimes, I walked away. It depended on how important it was to me, to see that thing happen, and how much I valued what it was, even if it wasn’t what I was hoping for.
You seem to assume that I have an all-or-nothing position when it comes to representation. However, that is incorrect.
DoA didn’t need to be a “social mistreatment manifesto” as you put it to have serious and honest exploration of systematic racism suffered by characters like Sal and Marcie, as well as systematic homophobia, so I don’t see why exploration of systematic ableism would be any less serious and honest.
In fact, the autism can of worms was only ever opened up in the first place because Willis is a responsible author who considers reader feedback, and he doesn’t seem to show any signs of stopping any time soon.
God, this character trope is exhausting.
And it always takes me out of a story whenever one of these near-psychics shows up, because it becomes so obvious I’m reading fiction.
The kind of people who act like this irl are just assholes who think they’re some sort of Psychology Sherlock because they string a few shallow observations together and fill in the gaps with presumptive speculation and massive logical leaps. And they’ll end up being wrong loads of the time, though often they’re not curious enough to find that out.
In fiction, however, they’re unerring in their unwanted analyses because they’re a kind of obvious author insert telling us explicitly how the author _wants_ us to interpret the people around them.
This “allergic to confronting his own trauma”… what does it look like to ‘confront your trauma’? Does it have to entail breaking down crying every time or it doesn’t count?
What if Walky has, or is, dealing with it but it’s just not in a way that people can outwardly see it? What if it’s being done in a “zen way” where he accepts it and tries to move on? Or is there a specific time frame one must do it in? Maybe he knows he’s going to “deal” with it for the rest of his life, as such traumas may cause, so he’s doing it slowly, little by little?
Yeah, I have to say, I’m not finding Booster very endearing. They’re more douchey than anything. Judging others probably to mask judging themselves.
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wow, what’s FurAffinity say about people =o
[maybe don’t look that up]
It says that for some people, inflation isn’t a bad thing?
blah blah big and round
I imagine a great variety of things depending on the specific content they’re looking at
Or the specific thing theyre commissioning, sometimes at great expense. Well, US$1000 anyway. And definately look up Furaffinity, just use the R18 filter. Disclaimer; I dont know if Furaffinity HAS an R18 filter.
It definitely filters out the good stuff if you aren’t logged in, but why would anyone ever want that?
i was a pure and innocent youth who made do with FurAffinity’s SFW fetishes imeanwut
It does!
Among other things, it says that sometimes people just want to be petted, and that’s okay
There’s a reason I keep a separate DeviantArt account with a different name of only human things for when my family -insists- on knowing what I’m drawing.
Booster’s internship at Arkham Asylum will result in a lot of breakthroughs once they hand out the writing assignments, but they’re going to have to read a LOT of smutfic about Batman.
Some of it will be beautiful though. Joker’s will bring people to tears.
Not because it’s particularly sad. He’s put something in the ink.
Booster is one of the ones that dies in an ironic echo of something they said to somebody when they though the somebody couldn’t get to them.
I dunno, I think Lucy’s been doing alright
She’s more than a little desperate, but I don’t see how she’d make Walky “worse”…
She doesn’t make him worsez he’s the one who makes her worse. According to Booster.
Yeah, I got that backwards.
Coffee then comment. Coffee then comment!
She was a bit desperate before. But now she seems really happy.
And as far as I can tell when Walky rubs her the wrong way it hasn’t made her worse but instead been an opportunity for growth. I feel like her reactions to Walky’s trashy moments have mostly shown her growing an appreciation for setting boundaries or enforcing her expectations.
That’s the thing. Booster making an analysis like this doesn’t necessarily mean Booster’s right. It’s a relationship. Factors are going to change over time. Walky and Lucy could grow from their issues or they could ruin each other. Only time will tell.
Yeah. There’s no reason to think he’s right about Walky and Dorothy, which makes me suspicious of his take on Walky and Lucy.
To be fair, he’d only have a superficial idea of what happened with Dorothy and he’s seen Walky and Lucy more closely.
Dammit. It’s early for me – should be they/their throughout that.
Yeah, pronouns are hard without prompts. My problem is actual names, though.
From what I’m gathering, Booster is just getting this from reading Amber’s smutfic… so I think that means that doesn’t mean Amber is right?
i love booster
Me too, I dearly love a catalyst
The true meaning of Booster’s name: they’re an Umami Booster for the cast!
Most umami foods aren’t something you’d eat by itself, but they enhance the other flavors.
Booster is basically my favorite character and I’d love to see more of them.
Agreed. I was hesitant about them to start, in part because they were replacing Mike. But after this strip? I can’t help but love them.
Otoh, I really dislike Booster. I don’t know what Willis’s intent with the character is, but I personally think Booster started out smugly obnoxious and has gotten worse – more smug, more disparaging – without Mike’s entertaining aspects to counterbalance it.
Same.
Started at smugly obnoxious and more than a wee bit narcissistic, convinced that Booster’s opinions were desired in the first place. Then Booster moved on to add in full-on creepster voyeur. And seems to have plot immunity about getting called out on it, in a way that even Mike never had. So, yeah, I’ve got very little use for Booster, as either a person I’d possibly meet, or as a character in the story.
I definitely get that. They’re really pushing the limit. Which leads me to believe it’ll blow up in their face at some point. They believe it’s acceptable to do so to Amber, but I can definitely see them doing it to someone else and uh… losing that winning smile via physical violence, so to speak.
oh fuck yes i got the best gravatar
Honestly I thought that Willis thought a lot more people would like Booster then did. Not that he thought he’d made Booster likable, but that we’d love to hate and all that. But more of us just hate the little shit then originally anticipated, so now that’s being leaned into.
me too
Booster needs to just not
Calling someone “garbage” is not a way to endear yourself.
Booster is long past the point of being endearing in any way.
And yet …
My crack theory that he’s Mike grows with every appearance!
Friendly reminder that Booster goes by They/Them! Also… This is weird… I’m, I’m starting to like them!
Worked pretty well for Walky
Last person who called Amber Garbage made it to second base. I don’t know if that’s great or awful.
I assume they’ve heard about “Garbage Roof” or that it’s at least a meta-reference to it. Makes it a little better.
It seems likely he’s aware of Walky and Amber both talking about being garbage. Consider: “garbage roof”
They, not he. Argh!
Ah, there’s our ‘I’ve got everyone figured out, EASY’ psych student smugface.
Assuming they’re in the second semester like most of the cast, they can’t be any further than Psych 102, right?
I’d love to see what Booster’s professors think of this.
“Every year. Every single year.“
Hopefully they remember when they were like Booster, long before meeting patients– wait, academic-track psychologists probably want to go straight to gradschool then thesis then research/books and then teaching. When do Booster’s psych professors learn that people are complicated and nobody has the rules? They do learn this, right? …right?
Honestly, I think if it hasn’t been knocked out of them by third year or so, it’s probably some ingrained smugness that’ll carry them way into their career or they get a harsh epiphany.
To be certified psychologist it appears you need thousands of hours of supervised practice hours it seems to vary on what type psychologist you want to be and what level of education you’re pursuing and where you’re being supervised and pyscharity also has the caveat of attending medical school or nursing school (in some places which requires you to be a Nurse practioner)
Booster is along way from actually being a proffesional
Right now Booster seems to be under the assumption that they can pyscho analyze people in a matter of hours they are likely a good student, but seems to lack the what is mark of a good therapist the ability to actually heal their patient they are pyscho anaylzing which makes sense beacuse they are a 2nd year pysch student in a bachelor’s program.
Psychologist =/= Psychology professor =/= therapist =/= psychiatrist.
A college professor of psychology doesn’t need to be a licensed clinician, and may well have never led therapy for anyone in their lives. (For example, they may have designed/led experients on rats, discovered something new, and defended a whole dissertation about it. Rats are neat!)
(Also, psychoanalysis doesn’t just mean to analyze somebody’s psychology, it refers to a specific subset of psychology — think Freud, with the unconscious mind and transference and your mom.)
This sentence is here so that I don’t end a reply with “your mom”.
…
darnit
Yeah they’re totallly replacement Mike
THANK YOU!
But less entertaining.
Oo, oo. Now do yourself, Booster! How are YOU messed up? You’re so good at this. Tell us, now.
very psych student feel
I was a neuro student, I have been there
I am decidedly not into Booster’s arrogance and I really hope Amber tears them a new one. >:(
I am decidedly enjoying Booster’s arrogance and I also really hope Amber tears them a new one. >:)
Right. I think this is an interesting turn, but I also am eager to see Amber stick up for herself. If she finally comes to terms with NOT being garbage, that’d be nice, accepting she’s flawed without defining herself by those flaws like she has for a while.
I do find their inflated ego to be an enjoyable break from the 90% “brooding trash” that is the rest of the cast. It provides a little balance.
This is true. I still have mixed feelings about Booster, but I agree with this take.
If Booster was being presented as a foil NPC, rather than as an actual character, I might agree with this take. Put Booster alongside Mary, Liz, Raidah and the other demi-antagonists, I’d be merely indifferent towards Booster.
But unlike all those others, Booster is on the Cast page. Booster is a character I’m expected to care about. And my interest in Booster, as either a person or a character, manages to go down with each appearance.
SAME
Hey now, for the time being this could be what you humans a blessing in disguise.
I want them to perform a psychic ray attack on Dorothy 😈
What are Booster’s thoughts on Amber with them, I wonder.
This intrigues me. I want to know what Booster thinks their own damage is.
We haven’t seen Booster in their first semester, when presumably they had First Semester Psychology Syndrome: read the textbook, diagnose yourself with Everything.
I can’t say I’ve ever written smut fic.
…there is the time I wrote fanfic for a class project when I was younger without knowing but we don’t talk about that
Fanfic for a class project?? Now I want to know how Tina Belcher got her start.
Pretty sure I got my start in fanfic with my elementary school assignments. Had to use vocab words to make a short story. Mew escaped from a volcano.
Back in … 8th? grade? I had an assignment to write what I think happened after the events of The Giver. So, literally. Assigned to write fanfic.
that last panel is half the reason my ao3 account has almost nothing on it. (crippling perfectionism is the other half)
pretty sure the julia gray / skyward crossover is never gonna be written now
Booster really is just the smart ass psych student who thinks they can diagnose people easily because they’re in their 3rd year and hasn’t actually spent time training yet and as a result has zero friends but has their head too far up their own ass to realize this, aren’t they?
Absolutely. Though I’d assumed they were probably a 2nd semester freshman, like most of the main cast (except Ruth and Sarah). Most of Booster’s Psych 102 classmates are still diagnosing themselves, before they get to diagnosing everyone else. Booster’s a couple classes early; how advanced!
Booster can’t diagnose Booster, when Booster knows Booster is totally perf.
And now he’s showing off for Amber. Are they trying to impress her, now? Maybe this counts as chatting her up.
Argh. *they’re
Lemme know when Amber’s written a Dina x Entrapta FanFic.
Meanwhile imma melt my brain with code. 🫠 Tootles!
I hate HATE how well that would work as a relationship (assuming Entrapta is interested in girls, it is never stated but she is a SPOP character so the odds are statistically pretty high).
Throw Becky in to make a climactic 3 way that’s Amber’s Magnum Opus
Give Dina enough cybernetics and Entrapta would be interested. I’m still not sure she didn’t fuck that spaceship.
Booster seems to be leaning into the whole “Replacement Mike” thing at the moment. A wordier, less entertaining Replacement Mike, but still.
Mike never entertained me. Neither has Booster tho.
To each their own.
Booster, honey, unless you’re a telepath, people are not that easy to read. So take some more psych classes and hush.
I don’t know Booster might be some sort of telepathic demon. The pieces are all there … They are androgenous, seem to revel in chaos, have little to no boundaries, keep trying to make only the most damaging relationships come into being, they collect photos – said by some cultures to contain the soul – and are weirdly fascinating by the girl with split personality.
Now let me tell you why Queen Elizabeth was a lizard person…
“There is no Easter Bunny, there is no Tooth Fairy, and there is no Queen of England!”
Not anymore there isn’t.
*That felt wrong, but I couldn’t resist.*
Not since 1707.
Agemegos is more right, but I’m pretty sure Camilla would take issue with your statement.
She is queen [consort] of the United Kingdom, not of England. Erasure of the Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish is offensive.
(By the way, I inadvertently touched “report” instead of “reply”, and it doesn’t come with a “confirm” requirement, so that was that. My apology to anyone who is inconvenienced.)
The secret to Booster’s success is the fic.
You would not believe how many people work through their traumas by creating OCs and having them suffer.
Walky needs to get Lucy and Amber to read his self-insert fanfic, is what I’m saying.
Booster, you are treading on thin ice here. People might not appreciate you dictating to them who they should be with. Especially when it comes to Amber, she still has some pent up anger.
Also while entertaining, I would avoid Booster like the fucking plague. Their constant analysis of people is wildly annoying and potentially rage inducing.
particularly when they’re right.
I mean yeah, I’d avoid most of this cast like the plague if they were real. They’re fictional characters so their shitty traits are to entertain us, but most of them irl would be the WORST people to be around. That’s the nature of most fiction imo.
I guess I should qualify it with, “I would avoid people who are Booster-esque, albeit toned down to real people, like the plague.”
Wait, wait, hold up.
So, Walkie wasn’t the super villain, and the fic wasn’t about Amber and Sal hooking up? That makes no sense.
And here I was hoping for a threesome.
Baby steps, Yoto, get a girlfriend first, then work on the threesome.
Damn, so never.
D’you think this counts as negging?
Mmmmm. I don’t know if I buy Booster’s prognosis.
And reading hastily written smutfic hardly seems like a solid basis for such claims.
I believe this might genuinely be the first time Booster’s whiffed one–Dororthy and Walky broke up because it was impacting Dorothy’s studies, at least on paper, and Walky agreed because Dorothy’s happiness was more important to him than their relationship. Does that mean he “lost himself” in Dorothy? Would a Walky who’s independent and non-dependent have insisted the relationship keep going?
Moreover, I’d dispute that Walky “lost himself” to begin with. He cleaned up his act a little, both in a literal hygiene sense and in a metaphorical “I want to be an emotionally mature and available friend/brother” sense, but I don’t think there’s any argument to be made that he remade his life around Dorothy or cast aside things that mattered to him.
And, like, Walky did confront his own shit while he was with Dorothy. It was in baby steps, sure, and was often less to do with his own trauma than approaching Billie and Sal about theirs, but we can’t forget that it was in part because of her that he finally confronted his executive dysfunction around studying and tried to get his act together in math. If he hadn’t done that, if he’d remained as-is, than he wouldn’t have added onto Dorothy’s workload, and they’d still be together
until he got put on academic probation and/or dropped out.My assumption is this is intended to be an end to Booster’s spotless record, because if we’re meant to take it at face value, I’m gonna need a little convincing.
It is also just occurring to me that hey, Amber seemed to be kinda passively discouraging Walky from engaging with his shit for swaths of their relationship by providing him a place where they could be garbage, and it ended in part the first time because Walky realized Garbage Roof was unhealthy for him!
So yeah, Booster’s way off base. I honestly think they took Walky/Lucy as a baseline and then worked their way backwards.
Yup, they are totally off here about Walky but that is exactly why Dorothy broke up with Danny. I think Walky and Lucy are mutually dorky together. If Walky continues to stay hot, changes his shirts often enough, and passes his classes Lucy won’t dump him when she gets a little confidence. He’s nice to her and enjoys her company. I hope he doesn’t throw her over for the evil social climbers when they smoother him with flattering lies at that dinner Raidah is planning though.
But Booster somehow hit right on the term “garbage” that Walky and Amber used to describe themselves! They’ve probably struck a nerve here, maybe Amber will defend Walky at least if not herself.
That’s a pretty good point, easy to see a character monologue a bunch of analysis about another character and assume it’s meant to be taken at face value without really interrogating what they’re saying, especially if they aren’t immediately shut down
A Walky that was mature in that relationship would not have been in it to begin with. He absolutely lost himself in her the whole time. It’s not about confronting things or not confronting things, it’s about why you’re confronting them and how. Even when Walky was engaging in growth, he was doing so because of Dorothy, not because he wanted to grow.
And I think you’re taking the diametrically opposed garbage thing the wrong way; Walky avoids trauma and feelings, but being forced to interact with Amber, especially as a romantic partner, makes doing that literally impossible. Walky realizing garbage roof was unhealthy *on his own* speaks toward, not against, Booster’s point. He has to confront himself to be with her. And her enabling is part of that as well. She isn’t giving him somewhere to hide from himself.
And, no, Booster didn’t take Walky/Lucy as a baseline and then worked their way backwards, Willis decided to have them say that because it moves the plot in the way Willis wants. There’s only ever narrative logic to character behavior, even if that logic is thought through enough by the author to seem like genuine decision making. The way Willis is using Booster, you should assume they are correct unless being incorrect is more useful to the story. Much like Mike they are basically omniscient until it’s valuable for them to not be.
Walky didn’t engage in growth solely because of Dorothy. In fact, he kept the torment he was feeling over Billie’s suffering from her and refused to talk to her about it for a long time! He also kept his issues with Sal very broad when discussing things with her. His emotional growth is, in a lot of ways, disconnected from his relationship with Dorothy.
And Amber literally gave Walky a place to hide from himself! That’s what Walky realized Garbage Roof was! Sure, he was thinking about his trauma while he was up there, but he wasn’t actually doing anything about it. (As opposed to now, where he doesn’t seem to be doing either, but I think that’s very consciously being depicted as him backsliding on account of Mike.)
And for the record, I am assuming Booster is incorrect because it’d be more useful to the story. Being wrong would give Booster a meaningful character flaw that’d make them more interesting. This is a character-driven, open-ended narrative. Characters in this story behave a certain way because it generates good drama, not because there’s a logical endpoint or steps to hit. No, they obviously don’t actually have agency, but this also doesn’t make them perfect assessors of what’s going on around them.
He hid things from Dorothy because he didn’t want to bother her with them. He seemed to think of himself as not good enough for Dorothy from what I saw. I’ll admit I don’t seem to remember the strips as well as you! But I did randomize pages and reread the time Wally was bombing math and was really really anxious when Dorothy found out.
I mean, yes, but just because Walky still had problems during that time doesn’t mean his growth was stifled or he had “lost himself” in the relationship.
Totally agree with you about Walky and Dorothy!
You’re doing your best Booster, but you will NEVER be as flawless of an asshole as Mike was. This is a poor replacement.
Eh. Some of Mike’s assholishness was interesting, and some of it was pretty uninspired. Like I’m finding myself more invested in this than, “Will Mike say he’ll fuck their mom???”
Idk, Mike’s more of a manipulate bastard. Booster is a smug jackass. He’s not actively planning anyone’s downfall. Mike….eeeeeh.
They.
Theey.
I will say this though: Booster’s ‘psych evals’ are more interesting because some of them are off-the-mark, and also because we actually get some explanation for them – they’re a psych student. A first year psych student. And they’re being framed in a way that just makes them seem kinda smug and annoying. Mike was just really good at ‘Mike things’.
I’m not a huge fan of Booster. But in this regard, their writing is more grounded.
So they know about Dorothy and Lucy but don’t know about Amber?
Well… I wouldn’t wanna tell my roommate about my dumbassness either…
Given Lucy’s fandom tendencies, I’ve got to assume there’s some fic going on, even if she’s not as obvious and potentially not as sexual as Amber.
Really though, Booster, I’m not sure this is an issue of who’s better or worse so much as who’s good together.
Sure, if you averaged Amber and Walky’s respective amounts of caring about things, confronting trauma, and such you’d get a functional person who could chill out occasionally but it’s not like a relationship actually does that. Plus both of them are not great at social things in different ways.
I mean, they’re not wrong.
Meh. I don’t buy the mutually assured garbage, justification. It feels a little too much like making excuses for bad behavior instead of trying to be better people, or even just people. Bad take from Booster here to me.
Booster is explicitly arguing that two garbage people who’re garbage in opposite ways would gradually make each other less garbage.
it worked for Billie and Ruth. It just wasn’t as strong as their depression.
Except that’s not what happened when they were together at all. Admittedly we only saw the start and end and none of the middle but it didn’t really seem to me like Walky was confronting trauma to me. It kind of felt like he was avoiding it and then Amber decided to tap out because he was being a bit of a prick in that moment.
You’re right that it’s not what happened. Booster is wrong!
Just not for the reasons you think they are.
Or combust like matter and antimatter. the always surface-good times goofball and the always wallowing angry Eeyore. They did actually have a messy drama-explosion at Halloween.
When they’re managed harmoniously, they go faster than light.
When containment fails though? Core breach. Kaboom. Half the ship crash-lands in the jungle.
They’d either become worse garbage or each try to become less garbage cuz they have someone they want to be less garbage for. To an extent I kinda agree. Like Walky with Dorothy kinda felt like he was dating a mom who was just sorta telling him the appropriate way to act. It didn’t feel equal. Walky’s the fuck up and Dorothy’s got her shit together. I think I liked Walky/Amber cuz they’re both fuck ups so neither feels…inferior to the other I guess? Dating Dorothy really fucked with Walky’s self worth.
Don’t call out fanfic writers like that
did they find out about garbage roof at some point?
They room with Walky so I’m inferring that 80% of their reading is informed by info from him
I didn’t make that connection but it makes sense
Booster the smutfic psychologist.
Damn, Booster is it? Sorry I don’t believe we’ve been acquainted. You and I are on the same page. Who’d a thunk I’d be team Booster.
I don’t write smutfics. I draw them instead. I wonder if I’d be good at writing them though.
Drawing is actually writing. I don’t know your comic making process, but it is writing even if it doesn’t feel like it.
From Yotomoe’s smutcomix, we know he… likes BUTTS.
Also boobies.
… :0
Interesting that butts came up first since I’m actually more of a boob man. Though I also like butts. And legs and lips and hips and al the other stuff too.
Trying to answer if I’m a “boob” person or “ass” person is harder than asking me to choose my favorite child. I’m not sure where I fall on the “Kiney”(?) Scale but I can appreciate small boobs and small butts just as much as their larger versions.
And yes, the lips, legs, hips, etc. are important too, though first concern is always personality.
The Kinsey scale has nothing to do with this that I can see.
I was simply pointing out that I can enjoy someone with or without boobs. As for butts, well everyone has one of those. Except for mermaids.
I wasn’t actually prioritizing them. I just said butts first because that way sounded funnier to me. 🙂
If liking those is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
I think moreso than anything what someone could take away from my art is I’m really into dominant women/women taking the lead. 😛 I can’t think of any art I’ve drawn where that isn’t true.
I like dominant girls too, but in my experience with women who have wanted me (up until I opened my dumb mouth), none of them wanted to be “on top.” One girl straight up said, “I’ll be dominant everywhere else in life, just *not* with sex.”
Which, oddly, can be used to describe a lot of guys as well.
Same. Granted I have very limited experience. Granted I dunno if I’m a top or bottom yet.
Booster, please, you don’t need to justify your shipping preferences. 😛
FR though. Oh, you painful little first year psych major. I’m thinking Booster struggles with relating to people and so is trying to fast track it with their cold reading skills. YOU CAN’T SHORTCUT PEOPLE BY STUDYING PSYCH.
Wait, you can’t?
Why even, then?
Oh, you totally can.
You’ll just usually come off like a total douche, even if you make good reads.
In the most non insulting way possible, I think Booster just needs some friends to hang around with. They’ve been alone everytime we came across them, and they read as someone who’s never actually had anyone to talk to.
It is called “DUMBING of Age” for a reason, not “Smarting of Age”
And not just because of the pun.
“On this roof we can be garbage!”
Haha, yes, Booster hits pay dirt with this part!
😊 aaaawwweee
Lol that pride and confidence feels familiar. I was Booster as a freshman psych major, I was just quieter about it.
Interesting that they see all of Walky’s relationships as Walky-centric phenomena, though. Seems like they have a soft spot for him. Maybe trying to help dig him out of his post-Mike depression/grief?
Smutfic… I can get behind that term.
I won’t link it, but there IS some weird smut on AO3 written by someone calling themself “Harmburger”.
there’s some weird smut on AO3 written by a lot of different people XD
Funny how the truth brings out anger and fury in people.
How do they know anything about Dorothy and Walky’s relationship?
Walky is Booster’s roommate, and may have mentioned some facts.
I mean, I guess.
Walky also has little to no impulse control and a history of needing to constantly affirm his hetero manhood, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he has drunk too much mountain dew and gone into significant depth of his dating exploits with a little encouragement from B. I’m also betting this is where Booster got their garbage conclusion from and that they’re just bluffing about how they got there
Also, it could not be overstated that Booster is way up their own ass about their perceived social genius, so of course they will speak as if they are the absolute factual authority on these matters whenever they choose to opine, which will be always.
I imagine they’ve probably glimpsed some of the post-breakup interactions, and they’ve added that to Walky’s own statements, then, as Wack’d said above, they basically extrapolated back from what they’ve cold-read about Walky and Lucy/Walky and Amber.
They’re close to the mark but definitely wrong.
Booster pays a lot of attention to people, so they probably either asked Walky/some of the other friends about it or just kinda listened in whenever it was mentioned. The characters all probably have a bunch of minor interactions that we don’t see.
Lucy is good people and deserves the best. She deserves friends who see her worth as who she is and will appreciate her unlike the folke in her dorm and she deserves a decent good experience with what seems to be her first boyfriend or atleast the best Walky can give her.
It’s funny because it feels like she would make a good girlfriend for anyone. She was so thoughtful, emotionally intelligent, caring that she was able to tell quickly what was going on between Ruth and Billie immediately. Who doesn’t need someone like that in their life?
When all this started I debated with myself if them getting along well was really as good as being a good match for each other. It was also hard to see her Clamor over him for his attention just like it would have been hard to see him reject her and give her the idea she’s not interesting enough to get romantically involved with because that wouldn’t be true and I feel like she deserves better than that.
So I just went with it as they paired up and hoped for the best thinking “why not, theirs literally no reason to say no.”
I agree, and I think that’s my problem.
“There’s no reason to say no” doesn’t feel like a good enough or strong enough reason to get in a romantic relationship.
Maybe it should be as simple as that, and Lucy definitely deserves a good relationship. I’m just not sure Walky can give one to her, or if he’s too lackadaisical about it.
But I could just be assuming too much and underestimating how much he really cares about her.
I think “there’s no reason to say no” is a fine enough reason to begin a romantic relationship. (Many of my favourite life choices have started with “why not!” so I highly recommend this approach.)
You’d certainly need a better/stronger reason to marry somebody! But we’re at Taco Bells, not wedding bells. This is a great time for them to experiment and just see how much they both enjoy hanging out together. Later they can see if they’ll want to continue onwards and grow together as human beings and all that good stuff.
In conclusion, I strongly agree that Lucy is a delight and I likewise want all the good things for her.
well billie/jen was a bit hyper-idolized but i don’t think anyone in her dorm room particularly disliked/exclded lucy to begin with
No they didn’t, They seemed like genuinely decent people. but I didn’t see enough care from them to give the feeling to give off the feeling that they’re “Good friends” and not “people She just lives with.”
I agree! No Offense to Walky though, but Lucy DOES deserve better. She’s the ultimate sweetheart. I hope she gets an arc soon, regarding her confidence and idolization of people. Her major problems seems to be the fact that she gets trapped her ideals… Views the world with rose colored glasses, if you will?
I think what Lucy deserves is a better self-image so they don’t just wait around for months dropping hints to someone who doesn’t seem all that interested, and who openly admitted that her main redeeming feature is an interest in cartoons.
Right, I gotta agree with Booster.
This is sort of what I was talking about yesterday.
Walky was trying to better himself for Dorothy, yes, and was very supportive of her, but he was also pretty passive.
What she wanted was what he wanted, and when it wasn’t, he almost always tried anyway (the one time he didn’t was the pajama jeans, there might be others). And he definitely felt he wasn’t on her level.
With Lucy, the dynamic is reversed.
She gives the impression that she’ll support him in almost anything, but all he wants to do is get by.
He’s taking some steps to do better, like going to class and being slightly more honest with his feelings, but most of that could arguably be due to the changes in his friend group/dynamic over the time skip.
And again, I don’t really see what he does for the relationship.
I think they’re better friends.
But with Amber he seemed more dynamic, more active. Is that because he felt less pressure? Is it because he was more experienced? Both? Neither?
All I can say is that it looked like Walky connected with Amber in a way he hasn’t done with anyone else, and I liked what I saw when they were together.
It definitely wasn’t the Best Walky, but it may have been Peak Walky.
I concur.
While we haven’t seen the Slipshine comic yet, I have to believe that what Walky and Lucy get out of their relationship is the sex.
Lucy has really mostly shown interest in his body.
Walky mostly has shown interest in not being alone.
They’re both in it for each others’ bodies.
But we gotta wait for the 3rd date. That’s when the lord Jesus said it’s ok to bang.
Don’t forget the time skip. They’ve been banging for a while.
They started dating after the time skip. Likely no sex yet. We usually see it – if not an actual Slipshine, some discussion or lead up.
Yeah I feel like Walky and Amber both challenged each other in interesting ways, and would have been good as a couple. However someone else pointed out that after Mike’s death they both needed different things and it wouldn’t have worked anymore.
Booster, actually making me miss Mike.
Wonder what their take away from an asexual would be then lol (even if they don’t do it themselves [depending on the person of course], i imagine there are a handful that write it for entertainment)
…now that i think about it, from a practical standpoint, a non sex repulsed asexual would be the perfect cameraperson for porn /shot
You say that like it’s a joke but I am a non sex repulsed ace and that sounds fuckin ideal to me.
i mean idk how competitive it is but i suppose if it’s Not Weird or awkward , yo u could offer if you knew some friends that wanted to get into it in an amateur way or offer to help with someone’s potential only fans (tho unless tthey knew you were ace upfront it’d make it seem like you were making a pass at them lol)
But yeah it is interesting how one would get into the career as the ppl behind the scenes such as directing and editing ‘behind the scenes’ stuff lol (might depend ion the individual but given if your face is never shown it might be easier to be a ‘porn’ videographer and work on higher profile jobs later than a porn actress being a regular one b/c of the stigma/reputation and such)
As a person who writes fanfic and therefore follow a bunch of writers on twitter, there are PLENTY of ace people out there writing the hardest of hardcore smut fics. They just don’t want to participate in it themselves.
My ace sibling has written some of the *kinkiest* shit imaginable, and I know very well it doesn’t represent stuff they secretly wanna do and are just repressing.
A common theory amongst aces (myself included) is that non-sex-repulsed ace writers tend to find vanilla porn boring because just imagining the basic mechanics of sex isn’t interesting or stimulating by itself, so when they write porn, they have to really spice it up. (Or, if reading porn for fun sexy purposes, rather than writing it, look for kinkier fic.)
Mike always, at his core, made me feel like I was reading about Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. Like, that was the endpoint to all his grouchy-faced troll shit, was a guy who’d decided it was all PhOnEy so he was gonna fuck with people.
Booster, here, on the other hand, puts me in the mind of a non-binary, much more well-adjusted, non-cannibalistic Hannibal Lecter.
(I read Catcher once. Silence of the Lambs was a favorite novel for years. Problematic as hell, but still beloved.)
speaking of ledes dropping, we finally have Booster confirming they are, indeed, a typical college psych student
Booster has all the smugness of a soft science major who thinks they are in a hard science.
Put them in the same room as an Economics major who “knows how to fix the U.S.” and you’ll generate a Smug Cloud that would block out the sun for any major city.
Ehh. I’m personally not a fan of dismissing the validity of various sciences with the hard/soft labels (a practice which seems inherently unscientific in itself). Brilliant people in so-called ‘hard’ science fields get shit wrong all the time LOL
I do agree with you in Booster’s general ~vibes~ though haha!
Have Jacob and Lucy met?
Only in Joyce’s fevered imagination.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/tag/lucy+jacob/
I was wondering because Jacob said that Joyce ticked a few boxes for him, and Joyce and Lucy have some traits in common so I thought Lucy & Jacob might be good as a couple.
I think, and this is not meant to be a knock on Lucy, probably not. My read on Jacob’s attraction to Joyce was that it was based more than a little on what he perceived as her fearlessness. Like yes, obviously, Joyce is *very* much a stew of personal anxieties, but what Jacob seemed to see and admire in her, which I think she really responded to and tried to live up to, was her bravery—the courage to physically confront an adult man who’d tried to hurt her friend, the courage to *begin* to ask questions about her faith, even the courage to push her own boundaries about her habits and food aversions.
Lucy superficially has a bunch of traits in common with Joyce, including identifying strongly enough as a Christian Woman to vocally describe herself that way to people, and oh yes those nerd tendencies. But her anxieties (that we have seen so far) seem much milder and less debilitating; she also doesn’t doesn’t seem to have the same push to confront them. I’m a little doubtful Jacob would feel the same pull towards Lucy that he felt to Joyce. I know Lucy described Joyce as a “blonde, bisexual version of me”, but Lucy barely knows Joyce, and was describing surface-level perceived traits.
(Also, given the context that Jacob had been getting a bunch of “my roommate is SO weird and SO repressed” stories about Joyce from Sarah, I think some of his interest in her was also in meeting the real human being who’d generated those stories, and getting to know her a little better as a person.)
Okay, that’s it! Comparing Booster to Mike is getting really weird! They don’t feel like Mike at all, and that’s not a bad thing! Personally never liked the guy, and Booster’s creepy too (yet now, I find them a bit entertaining. It feels like there’s way more going on behind there!) but they aren’t a replacement anything! They’re pretty different tbh
I think there’s a ‘analytical manipulative antagonist’ vibe both of them share. They have different styles, but they both have the ‘I’m going to prove I’m the smartest person in the room’ pattern that manifests in different ways. Mike usually undercut his targets, Booster usually tries to put them in a box.
Okay, Booster.
Don’t you mean Okay, Boomer.
wait
yeah ok.
I like Booster. I like them a lot, and enjoy the strips they appear in.
Yes, I feel the same. I wouldn’t want to know them in real life but they’re highly entertaining in a comic like this. Certain characters have always had unrealistic physical abilities, but someone with unrealistic powers of perception is far more interesting to me.
I like Booster. I hope we see more of them.
https://imgur.com/a/UDPV54F
I don’t ship it at all really but that’s never stopped me before.
I do like her reasoning though.
absolutely love this
Ha!
For you see, when you write the smutfic, what you’re really writing is yourself – Booster, 2022
i lost my meagre smutfic to successive computer fuckies =(
One of them was about walking about in the rain,
One was about beating up a over-cocky uni student in the chem labs.
I don’t think you can tell anything about me from my erotic fanfiction (it’s so tempting to write “erotic friendfiction” but I do not do that), except my current turn ons. I do write long form multichaptered though, so there’s probably less influence from my life in each chapter, since it has to make sense with the previous and following ones.
Same! What I’m looking for in erotic entertainment doesn’t necessarily reflect on me as a person.
Don’t get me wrong, it absolutely can? But it doesn’t always.
As usual, I think Booster simultaneously has a point and is way off base at the same time haha
Yeah. I feel like a lotta people tend to think I’m into certain stuff or am a certain way. It’s hard to explain that I’m not really self inserting as either character when I write (at least not sexually) so much as I just find the scenario hot. I don’t wanna BE the people I just find the situation sexy. In fact I prefer the characters to be super fleshed out and unique.
Oh yeah, absolutely! The kinks I’m into in fiction can depend wildly based on the characters.
That is what a psych student would say as if any of these dynamics are guaranteed to stay that way and couldn’t be improved, fixed or changed.
Kickstarter tier where Booster analyzes your horny Skyrim fanfic for psychological insights.
Why would Willis do that? It’s gotta be Transformers fanfic
Okay but that would unironically be an amazing Kickstarter perk OMG
I admit… I’m now curious as to what Booster’s read of me would be after reading my smutfics/personal fantasies. XD
Don’t call people garbage, Booster!
Wait… Booster is attracted by Amber too! What is the motivation they have? They say they just like problematic person, but they liked Amber instantly and after knowing more about her, they just liked her more and more. Maybe they analyse everyone else but are avoiding to confronting their own traumas too? Maybe they also have (or used to have) like two personality? Probably they too write smutfic. More we see Amber and Booster together, more I see how alike they are. The Ambooster become stronger and stronger.
I finally figured it out; Booster is that kid in your class that is waaay to open about their online fetishes, and wants it to be your business. . . against your will.
No wonder they gave me some horrible flashbacks.
I have this idea of an action-packed smutfic between Walky and Joyce, but I’ve got this feeling that it’s been done already.
I agree with everything Booster is saying but also their relationship to these people is being classmates and my relationship to these people is that they are fictional characters?
Booster just seems like a smug jerk.
Here’s the thing: Booster isn’t WRONG (in fact, they’re almost scarily right), but it’s like…really weird? To talk about your friends and classmates and roommates this way? Like, it’s one thing to analyze and understand fictional characters, but Booster is a character in this universe, so these are real people to them, and treating them like they’re a puzzle to be solved like this is off-putting, to say the least.
…Huh. You know, Mike kinda did the same thing: manipulating and belittling people in an attempt to make them face up to their bullshit, which works in a fictional context but not in the real life that this comic is supposed to be to the characters. Guess Booster really is “replacement Mike”.
Openly confronting other people that you’re not already on great terms with by presenting them with your psycho-analysis of them is certainly off-putting and a yellow flag if nothing else.
However I will defend the psycho-analyzing real people itself. Not everyone’s brains are wired so as to do this, but if someone who’s got the predisposition to do it ends up taking psychology or neuroscience, then it becomes a sort of automatic process. I say this as someone who also does it. I especially puzzle out my friends whenever the opportunity arises. The difference is that I don’t present my findings to them without asking them if they’re cool with me doing so first
Booster’s not really all that right. That’s absolutely not how Walky and Dorothy’s relationship ended, for the most obvious thing.
Yeah, that one in particular seems wildly off-base. Booster and Dorothy don’t seem to have interacted that much, which makes me wonder how much of that reading is due to a very one-sided and incomplete account of the relationship from the person who was dumped, and is sad (although not bitter) about it.
It would be kind of funny if Booster’s thing was they’re right about this shit just often enough to convince them that they’re right ALL the time, and are consequently a little delusional about how often they’re whiffing it.
Although we do already have Jennifer in the cast, so that might be redundant.
I can’t even really see it as being based on anything Walky might have said about it, given what we’ve seen of his opinion.
It seems more based on his take on Walky and a more distant take on Dorothy – which suggests to me that he doesn’t even really have more than a surface read on Walky yet.
We’ve never seen Walky trash Dorothy, so that wasn’t what I was thinking—but, like, if you live with someone intimately enough to see them in their underwear, and that person is Walky—I’d bet that Walky would have dropped some mournful comments about his amazing ex-girlfriend (who was also his only-ever girlfriend; the Amber situation was Complicated), and Booster Therapized Walky based wholly on that.
Spoken like a true psychology major
For years I pondered the idea of making a smutfic, but I never got around to writing more than a few sentences. (Whereas years ago I wrote a whole-ass 250-page science fiction novel in a few months).
Mostly I’m afraid of writing something that someone else will read and respond, “Don’t show this to anyone you care about, this is pretty cringy.”
I love Booster so much and I’m so glad they’re finally getting some panel time.
Love Booster what an arrogant little shit lol
Booster may have the analysis part down, but their bedside manner is so off putting I doubt they’ll get many patients.
Hmm. Amber tends to reject people who have nice things to say to her that she doesn’t believe. Training from Blaine and Mike, I suppose. Is Booster being candid about her flaws to avoid that, or do they have any idea?
I think they’re just being honest. I doubt they know THAT much about Amber.
uhhh now i kind of want booster to analyse my smutfic. diagnose my issues pls
never has my icon been less appropriate
For anyone who’s feeling anxious and stressed right now, I’m playing this virtual campfire on the hacked furnace:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz7wtTO7roQ
*puts TV in fireplace, streams*
Thank you so much Laura! Now I have something to listen to while I code a virtual campfire and roast hotdogs (brain’s gotta have protein)!! 😋
Speaking of which, what do you like on yours?
Sriracha Mayo!
And aioli garlic mustard.
Glad you 2 like it!
Mmmmm….. i like mine real spicy too, but with just yellow mustard (Heinz or Gulden’s), and optionally a little ketchup. Roast mine and sauce ’em like that, and imma happy camper! 😋😊
Classic choices! You could try soy sauce and sauteed mushrooms with ginger and garlic, if you’re feeling adventurous. But the best mustard, hands down, in all the planet, is Amora mustard. The only thing even slightly better than Amora is picking a wild-growing mustard flower and crunching it between your teeth.
Amora… sounds like something from She-Ra 😆
Yeah I don’t care too much for French’s, Heinz and Gulden’s have just the right amount of spicy while not burning my nostrils, and the perfect amount of tart, like Wasabi and butter had a baby. 😋😊
Is it weird that I like that Booster kind of sucks, but that he sucks in a different way than everyone else sucks? These are all flawed characters.
I will say that their comeuppance is overdue, though. Everyone gets their comeuppance.
*They
One particular aspect of their comeuppance may be just what we need to give Dorothy her comeuppance.
If all goes well, it should in one sense solve both those problems.
I don’t think Dorothy needs any comeuppance in the form of someone she barely knows delivering their unasked-for, poorly-informed judgement on a romantic relationship that ended months ago and has absolutely nothing to do with the person doing that judging.
I also cannot imagine what “problems” that would solve.
I was referring to Dorothy’s ableist bias and being condescending as hell to Joyce.
That’s most of the cast. Dorothy ain’t special. She’s not worse than anyone else in this setting. I don’t think Dorothy deserves to be singled out for revenge fantasies for things she hasn’t actually done in this comic strip.
I don’t think this comic strip is going to give you the satisfaction you’re specifically looking for right now. It’s probably not going to become a manifesto about the societal mistreatment of people with autism. It’s probably not going punish fictional alter egos of people with bad ideas about autism for having those bad ideas, or take them to task for real allistic people’s horrible real-life crimes against real people with autism. This is a long-running comic strip with well-established characters and arcs and relationships that has recently started to explore the idea that one of its central characters has realized that they may possibly be autistic, after a childhood where “maybe I’m autistic” wasn’t on the menu at all. I really, truly (I REALLY DO) understand how much you want to see yourself represented in a work of fiction as vivid and thoughtfully-written as this one, especially when you’ve started to identify with a character.
But…this comic strip is probably not going to give you the thing exact things you’ve specifically said you want to see it do. The only useful thing I can recommend is what I’ve done, myself, when I realized a story someone else was telling wasn’t going to go the way I wanted: I accepted it. Sometimes I stuck around, and enjoyed the story anyway, even if wasn’t what I’d been hoping for. Sometimes, I walked away. It depended on how important it was to me, to see that thing happen, and how much I valued what it was, even if it wasn’t what I was hoping for.
You seem to assume that I have an all-or-nothing position when it comes to representation. However, that is incorrect.
DoA didn’t need to be a “social mistreatment manifesto” as you put it to have serious and honest exploration of systematic racism suffered by characters like Sal and Marcie, as well as systematic homophobia, so I don’t see why exploration of systematic ableism would be any less serious and honest.
In fact, the autism can of worms was only ever opened up in the first place because Willis is a responsible author who considers reader feedback, and he doesn’t seem to show any signs of stopping any time soon.
You know what…this was probably a mistake on my part. I’m sorry if I came across as condescending.
Peace out.
No hard feelings 😊
God, this character trope is exhausting.
And it always takes me out of a story whenever one of these near-psychics shows up, because it becomes so obvious I’m reading fiction.
The kind of people who act like this irl are just assholes who think they’re some sort of Psychology Sherlock because they string a few shallow observations together and fill in the gaps with presumptive speculation and massive logical leaps. And they’ll end up being wrong loads of the time, though often they’re not curious enough to find that out.
In fiction, however, they’re unerring in their unwanted analyses because they’re a kind of obvious author insert telling us explicitly how the author _wants_ us to interpret the people around them.
COSIGNED.
In a lot of stuff, sure, but Booster honestly REALLY does not read as Willis to me like at all.
I mean … Booster seems more wrong than right here, but sure, when they’re always right, it does get annoying.
This “allergic to confronting his own trauma”… what does it look like to ‘confront your trauma’? Does it have to entail breaking down crying every time or it doesn’t count?
What if Walky has, or is, dealing with it but it’s just not in a way that people can outwardly see it? What if it’s being done in a “zen way” where he accepts it and tries to move on? Or is there a specific time frame one must do it in? Maybe he knows he’s going to “deal” with it for the rest of his life, as such traumas may cause, so he’s doing it slowly, little by little?
Yeah, I have to say, I’m not finding Booster very endearing. They’re more douchey than anything. Judging others probably to mask judging themselves.